Emoticon at The Old Royal Naval College
Posted by Tom Estes on Saturday, August 22, 2015
Live Art Performance EMOTICON by Tom Estes for Communication Futures at The Old Royal Naval College during DRHA 2014. Monday September 1sthttp://www.drha2014.co.uk/
You’ve definitely seen it at some point. Maybe it was in a lecture in college. Maybe it was in a TED talk you watched recently. Someone is trying to explain some important historical connection, drawing up a grand theory of art or science or human progress, and there it is, as if by reflex: the hand lifts in front of them like an upturned claw, the fingers slowly turning an invisible dial. That’s “The Dialectic,” one of the hand gestures you’ll need to master to become a genuine thought leader.
As much as 90% of human communication is done without words. Gestures, facial expressions, and posture provide information about a person's emotions and relationships with others. People often hold their hands near their faces as a gesture in natural conversation.
Built between 1696 and 1712 ORNC is Wren's twin-domed Baroque riverside masterpiece and the architectural centrepiece of a World Heritage Site in Greenwich, London. Described by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as being of "outstanding universal value" it is reckoned to be the "finest and most dramatically sited architectural and landscape ensemble in the British Isles"
The ORNC site is the home of The Prime Meridian and the home of world time. It also includes The Royal Observatory, commissioned in 1675 by King Charles as the first purpose-built scientific research facility in Britain. Today the buildings include a museum of astronomical and navigational tools.
http://www.drha2014.co.uk/
As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
