UpsideDown Chandelier
Code Interactive #2 Collaborative ( Christine Wilks, Jeneen Naji, Zuzana Husárová and María Mencía)
Installation at DIG Gallery, as part of the Repurposing in Electronic Literature Exhibition, DIG Gallery, Košice, Slovakia, Nov 2013.
This multiplatform digital work references an event connected with the history of Košice and its tobacco factory from 1851 which employed mostly women workers. Some decades later, when St. Elizabeth's Cathedral was being renovated, the women workers donated a candle chandelier. The chandelier itself was repurposed twice – from the original candles, to gas lighting and with the advent of electricity, was turned upside down. In the installation, images of the chandelier from the cathedral are randomly generated and projected onto a screen in a flux of forms. Simultaneously the words connected with this story appear projected on the walls of the room, and phonetic sounds from Slovakian, Hungarian and German are generatively mixed in to create the soundscape of languages that were once spoken in the very same place by women workers.
PLAY Web version- UpsideDown Chandelier
This project in Košice, Slovakia developed from the Code Interactive Workshop # 1 lead by Mencía at Kingston University and Watermans Art Centre in June (14th-16th 2013) with the aim of investigating the possibilities of code and collaborative practices to explore digital poetics in New Media ArtLanguage. Through roundtables discussions, technical presentations and hands on projects
all the participants had the opportunity of exchanging programming skills, open source software and find free online tools in order to explore computational possibilities to create interactive design, interactive installations and data visualisation.
Participants were invited to follow up this meeting in the Code Interactive # 2. This time with the aim of collaborating in the making of a piece based on the notion of repurposing, in the period of a week and as part of the exhibition 'Repurposing in Electonic Literature' curated by Zuzana Husárová and María Mencía.
Link to Code Interactive #1 London programme.
Links to Repurposing in Electronic Literature Exhibition, DIG Gallery, Košice, Slovakia- Poster 1, Poster 2 and Works exhibited.