WeakForce1
Anna Leonowens Gallery, NASCAD Halifax Nova Scotia, November 15-26 2011
WeakForce is possibly the sixth collaborative enterprise associated with the UFT project. The conceptual emphasis of this project was to locate and represent the social and relational as the internal generative dynamic of a collaborative creative work. The material manifestation of the collaborative research process was premised on the construction and exhibition of a ‘universal gravitational field’ The weak interaction affects all the fermions of the Standard Model, as well as the hypothetical Higgs boson; neutrinos interact through gravity and the weak interaction only, and these were the original reason for the name
WeakForce – represented as a relatively slowly revolving platform that created interlocutorial relationship and explored the sculptural dimensions of distance, place time and gravity.
The initial idea for a collaborative work was co-ordinated by Paul Cullen (NZ), and Andy Thomson (NZ) the rest of the collaboration team consisted the Nova Scotia College of the Arts colleagues and artists, Bruce Barber, Kim Morgan (Canada) Laresa Kosloff (Aust), Andrew Burton (UK). The Melbourne artist Laresa Kosloff became the orchestrator of a web based conversation between us all using email and Skype, together we formed a concept for the work that developed in conversation over many months. The final work was realsed in Nova Scotia, at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, as a first iteration of an installation being tested as an initial work in the public domain Consisting of a moving platform, built within the gallery that was able to be mounted by gallery interlocutors, enabling them to read and observe data from computer/Video screens whilst at the same time exercising and playing together. This data included DNA information about some of the participating artists,The Green Text, an insulated wall, with pink batts, a specially programmed led sign and access to a computer and the work of many other artists via this UFT website. We propose as a group to develop this idea of the play of the viewer in the unrelenting field of gravity on a much larger scale outside the confines of a gallery later this year, two thousand and twelve.
