The Collective Collage
A collective artwork at DEAF94 (1994)
fragment from DEAF94 programme booklet
Within this collage the visitors of the DEAF festival will get the possibility to get involved actively with this festival. This experiment will investigate the possibilities to communicate not only with traditional media but also with new media. Beside written messages, you can also communicate with imagery and sound. The visitor of Lantaren/Venster can influence the contribution of the participating artists using a touchscreen. Besides WDS dynamic media design, KMT in Hilversum, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and the Art Academy of Rotterdam, anyone can participate in the collage using the World Wide Web server of the VPRO broadcast organisation.
The components will be interactive movies, stills, Quicktime movies and sound samples. The artists in Lantaren/Venster will work separately in different spaces sending their 'material/results/contributions' to a server. They also will be able to keep up directly with the changes of the collage. The other participants can examine the changes of the collage. The other participants can examine the changes in their material caused by the artists in Lantaren/Venster using the World Wide Web of the VPRO. To prevent that the collage will end in chaos the artists provide their work with a number of limitations. Each day a subtheme within the context of "Digital Nature" will be set. This should prevent the collage to end in a state of relative standstill. The use of a daily theme makes it interesting to visit the collage each day. Each hour the participants in the collage have to update their work, so the collage stays dynamic and therefore interesting to watch. The artist makes updates of his work as a reaction on the outcome of the collage, which is a result of his or her work and that of other artists as well as DEAF visitors. The goal of the collage is to set a development of visual communication in motion, which will also evolve on the World Wide Web server of the VPRO when the festival is over.
