Latent Spectators
Type: Art Exhibition
Area: 400 sqm
Location: Shanghai, China
Stage: Completed
Curating = Misreading
All design is the design of information – Patrik Schumacher’s bold assertions seem to be particularly appropriate in the context of designing for contemporary art exhibition. The art exhibition is a “misreading” carefully choreographed: in the dialogue between the artist, the curator and the venue, information from the art works, curators and the venue conflicts and resonates. If curation is a re-creation of artistic interpretation, then space is one of the important production tools to create context for interpretation of works. In the multimedia exhibition design of “LATENT SPECTORS”, 1DL participated in such a “tampering” of art.
The Essentiality of Misinterpretation
The humanistic theme that “LATENT SPECTORS” focuses on leaves room for our “tampering”: Does science and data help us better describe the world, or do they limit the way we perceive and interpret the world? Can we allow humans and data to collaborate to reveal the other side of the “objectivity” of data, and discover hidden landscapes that can be accurately described but cannot be absolutely defined?
One of the common characteristics of the four invited artists is that their works are composed of discrete components such as screens, speakers, and mechanical props. And the information delivered through each part is relatively abstract. This gives visitors more freedom to participate in the interpretation of the exhibits: they need to imagine the connections between the different parts of the exhibition.
From the perspective of space design, 1DL believes that this kind of freedom also constitutes an inevitable misinterpretation in visitors: the subjectivity of the interpretation of abstract information and the contingency of the sequence of appearance of the exhibits are exactly what produces the subject’s reflection on “objectivity”. In other words, it is the presence of visitors that establishes the logic of dialogue between the exhibits and at the same time guarantees and challenges the integrity of the exhibits. This fits well with the theme of the exhibition—the collaboration between human and data, and the multiple ways to interpret the world that can be unearthed!
Tempering Art with Space
The venue is set up in a 400 square meter room, and the established column grid and walls imply the separation of space. How to let the artwork maintain its own boundaries and logic, while breaking through the restrictions of the grid by infiltrating each other, and then continuously reconstructing the reading order of visitors, is the key to this design.
We decided not to divide the space and determine the boundaries with each art work as a complete unit, and instead used the screens as the basic element to occupy the exhibition space. While giving priority to ensuring the viewing angle and distance of each screen, through existing site elements such as columns and walls, the direct connection between the screens in the same exhibit is selectively blocked, emphasizing the uncertainty of the internal logic of the exhibition.
Meanwhile, we used the column-free area in the site to establish a fuzzy correspondence between the screen sequences between the art works, create visual similarity and continuity between the works, so that the works constitute the context of each other, and even encourage visitors to repeatedly compare the arts from varied viewing angles, thus breaking the established rules of interpretation.
