a line of best fit part II, 2021

A mixed media installation, ANU School of Art & Design and various digital platforms.

The installation included a reconstruction of the artist’s studio space filled with a black ‘line of best fit’ attempting to establish the relations between agents that are non-participants of, and/or only partially perceptible to, networked computational systems. Incomplete art works, food grown in the back yard, unsharable human interiority and the COVID-19 virus too.

The installation played with the idea of ‘frames of reference’, ‘windows’, ‘graph’ and ‘drawing’, ‘data point’ and ‘mark making’, where these were ways of viewing or visualising what was happening inside the studio and the mind of the artist. Quantitative data, such as produced by purchasing the materials used in the installation, were given equal weight to other kinds of windows, including the ever-present Zoom window, the studio windows, and the window formed by the physical presence of the installation in the gallery.

Besides the line and the shadows it cast across the installation and gallery walls, the space also included a screen showing fragments of video captured while working in the studio, such as using the Zoom recording function, and the computer’s desktop recording function. On the other side of the wall, a second screen showed a rotating display of other windows into the space, including receipts, google maps data and social media interactions with a variety of audiences.

The installation was part of a research project which used ideas from drawing to imagine participation in global networked computational systems sometimes known as the ‘cognisphere‘. The research led to a series of installations exploring the possibilities which emerge when thinking about non-participating yet influential agents as forms of ‘negative space’. In particular, this installation embodied the experience of ‘working from home’ as an artist during the COVID-19 pandemic, offering partial windows into the experience, and questioning the nature of audiences and exhibitions under such conditions.

Photographs Brenton McGeachie, unless otherwise indicated.