ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Art and society are imminently linked. As the world shifts and morphs in front of us, so too does the art we produce.
Pandemonium is a collection of eight interactive media art pieces that are created in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition attempts to show that in the midst of chaos and disorder, with a lack of normalcy, there also exists space for art-making and creating spaces of reflection and exposure to new information — perhaps having prolonged periods of isolation is one of the best environments for this to happen. The artworks in Pandemonium also seek to bring forward the question of “what is art?” and most importantly, “what is interactive art?”.
Merging the Physical and the Digital
The exhibition consists of a physical 3D model of an exhibition room and a connected screen display. As an audience member uses the figurine in the model to move around the exhibit to look at the miniature artworks, information about the artwork and the artist will show up virtually on a screen next to the model. While information on artists and artworks are also stored on the exhibit’s website — in which audience members can directly access as well — the only way to replicate the process of walking through the curated exhibition, as you would do pre-COVID, is to interact with the physical 3D model.
KNOWLEDGE MEETS CURIOSITY
This system is intentionally designed and serves two main purposes:
To bring the audience back into the real-world environment while simultaneously giving them physical space for reflection,
To reimagine what a physical exhibition using these eight interactive pieces would look like, their methods of display, and its overall nature.
The exhibition is split into three galleries: Art as Awareness, Art as Reflection, and Art as Entertainment which can fall under the following sub-genres of art: (1) environmental art, (2) interactive story art, and (3) internet art. The exhibition’s walking path is curated so that it most represents the different stages and trends during the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins first with the works from Vince Ngyuen and Alex Markova to metaphorically highlight the chaos and pandemonium during the early months of the pandemic and its subsequent bombardment of new data and information. It then moves to the pieces by Gabi Branche, Alia Ghobash Almarri, and Ivory Lee to address the mental and emotional effects of the pandemic, its stress and uncertainty, the inability to be with family and friends, and the disengagement of individuals from everyday life and even themselves. The exhibition route ends with the works of Aleksandra Medina and Hatim Benhsain with their artworks that bring back ideas of humanity and life — while the pandemic has shifted the ways in which our everyday lives function, it has created a space of reflection at the same time. The artwork by Steven Wyks is not curated into a specific path of the exhibition, rather, it exists in the whole space of the exhibition. This piece’s purpose is to underline that creativity and human connection that still exist in the world despite the pandemic, especially made possible through technology.
