Reflections in an Empty Dish: Artist Matthew Shanley

I didn't find new things in the topics discussed, so much as in how they applied to, and were dealt with by these individuals and groups. The details of what people were working on, and how they were approaching these issues was what I found most novel and interesting.

I was surprised and delighted by the group dynamics over the course of the evening. There was only a short period of awkwardness as participants felt their way into the discussion. After that, people seemed to fall naturally into conversation, and the talk flowed multiple times from involving the whole group, to breaking into small, fluid sections, and back together again.

One thought I've been left with is the observation that the Berwick group has set these dinners up as an initial gathering of many different people. But you don't seem to have created a system or pathway for people to continue to build these new connections afterward. I'm not sure you need to be involved with that at all - the initiation component is a very different task, and at least as important. People are quite able to continue developing the connections they find useful on their own. I was just curious if you would ever be interested in getting more involved with that area.

I don't remember this occurring to me while helping to plan the dinner, but I was just thinking about what might have been added to the conversation by including someone who was a bit more of a man-on-the-street. Someone who might have an interest in the art scene, and who might have some involvement in their neighborhood, but who isn't as actively involved in the actual day-to-day, behind the scenes activity of these things, in a way that everyone at this dinner was. Perhaps the Union Square event might bring more of this point of view.

The conversation that has stuck in my mind most from the dinner was one about failures and their positive aspects. It seemed to do the most to challenge my normal modes of thinking, and provoke questions and uncertainties to muse on for quite some time.

Reflections in an Empty Dish: Guest Perspectives

“[It was new to discuss] the broader definition of 'public art' as something encompassing not only site-specific installations but also things as diverse as internet communities and dinner parties.” - Brian Knep

“In the week after the dinner I ran into other dinner participants on two occasions and though both encounters were brief, it felt like the kinds of paths crossing and re-crossing that end up creating community. So in this sense the dinner provided a first meeting and an establishment that there is something in common that might be explored further in the future.” - Judith Leemann

“What sort of outcome do you want to catalyze?  As I do not
make my money working as an artist in the Berwick sense of that word,
I am not sure what sorts of goals your community is reaching for?
Fame and glory for big shows?  For inventing First Night?  Clearly
nobody wants to be an art groupie.” - Jock Gill

“I enjoyed the food and the formal presentation of that. The passing of food around a large table does something nice – calls to mind special occasions and familiar settings. The boards in the food didn’t have so much of an impact on me though I appreciated the impulse of interruption/disruption within a context that was oriented towards connecting. The sound work I appreciated even more after hearing its concept described – this strengthened my sense of it being intended/used to envelop us and to keep feeding us back into ourselves. Having a private space to write was also nice – that there was something we could go away to do – that even being away from the table had a participatory component.” - Judith Leemann

“I thought the visual component [cardboard ‘spacers’ attached to the dinner dishes that blocked guests’ views of each other as they moved around the table] served its function and made me think about who to talk to and when. I enjoyed being able to zone out of conversation entirely to focus on the ambient sounds as well.” - Neil Coletta

Reflections in an Empty Dish: Susan Sakash

When thinking about how new media has been incorporated into public art projects around Boston, including at least one—the Virtual Street Corners project by John Ewing—that has come thru the Berwick PAI program, I keep returning to this feeling that technology is a tool with mixed potentials. Not only does new media provide a way to reach people who are not as easily drawn to traditional art materials as well as providing new modes of interaction. However, there also exists the potential for these same technologies to close down communication as much as it can open it up.  Often this happens when the artist of the project becomes so enraptured with the technology itself, that they are unable to connect to the individuals and various publics interacting with the art work. Or vice versa. Somewhere the conceptual dimension of the project—why these forms of communication are interesting—get lost by the coolness factor of the object.

It is interesting then that one of the first projects discussed at the dinner was a peer-to-peer game by James Buckhouse in which Blackberry users choreographed tap dances that could then be traded with other Blackberry users. This project, included in Boston Cyberarts 2003, seemed to reflect all that I feel is alienating about new media art. My question, “Why tap dance?” was met with the response that it could have been any kind of learning exercise; the importance of the project was the peer-to-peer trading. The way that the project spread virally was amongst Cyber Arts participants and their friends.  No one at the table, myself included, questions the exclusivity of the Blackberry as a mode of communication or whether this project succeeded in exposing new audiences to the artist’s interest in the overlap of “digital public space, physical public space, and the more personal network of person-to-person exchange.”  

Neil Colletta chose to represent this challenge of connecting to new audiences and the opening/closing of communication avenues by building brightly-colored spacers that sat in the serving trays which were passed family-style during the main course. In the build-up to the dinner, we expected that these would challenge and probably frustrate the conversations around the table. In order to provide a counter-point to the spacers, Neil served a cold potato-pea soup as the first course, the openness of the bowls reflecting what we hoped would be a candid conversation amongst the whole group before the spacers were introduced.

Surprisingly, the actual conversation flow seemed reversed from last dinner. Over soup – the open dish – conversation was slow to start. I posed the question “What projects do you know of in which technology has opened up new ways of thinking about public or alternatively have shut down these avenues?” right before the course was served. Perhaps people were mulling over a reply or maybe initially posing a question so early on threw people off?

As people slurped their thin soup with too small spoons, Phaedra asked Brian to describe one of the projects he has been working on for the Minneapolis show that George Fifield was curating, a revisiting of a video projection piece he did in Harvard back in 2006. http://www.blep.com/deepWounds/index.htm

The soup was cleared.  Neil and Matt introduced the spacer trays with the buffet of main course options and asked that they be were passed around the table family-style.  People seemed alleviated by this tasks and the table broke out in a number of smaller conversations, dictated by the divisions created by the spacers. Unfortunately, due to space constraints on the table, the options of where these trays could be set was somewhat limited, but in general seemed to break the long table into three or four distinct  conversations.  

This was one interesting outcome, quite different from that of the first dinner. Though we had all entered the main course from a similar point of reference, the threads of conversations reflected the ways each person was interpreting the things discussed during the first course. For instance, at my end of the table, Kenny Bailey of the Design Studio for Social Innovation launched into a conversation with artist Judith Leeman about how great it would be if social justice organizers and artists could share forms and strategies to find ways to build awareness around their particular areas of interest. At the other end of the table, Jock Gill was explaining how his company is trying to reach new… It was quite impossible to get an overall grasp of the topics being discussed and connections being made, which the Berwick team had somewhat anticipated and therefore spaced ourselves out around the table to be privy to at least most of these conversations.

This in itself is an interesting way to think about how the public, when interacting with any public art work, but particularly those which incorporate new technologies actually fractures into any number of publics based on previous access of or knowledge to that technology. Thus another unexamined public, in the example of the tap dance choreography, would be those who had never used a Blackberry before, but looked on while the person sitting next to them laughed into their handheld on lunch-break. Does the artist or collaborative group behind such projects have a responsibility to acknowledge this many-faceted public? Or is it fine to just create for a predetermined group of individuals, while remaining open to the possibility that there will be others who interact with the work in unanticipated, tangential ways that are still very real?


I ended up getting into a conversation with George Fifield, of Cyber Arts, about these very questions about responsibility and measures of success.  I was suggesting that the Berwick is only as strong as the projects we support, which puts a lot of pressure on the resident artists and staff, especially given the fact that we work with so few projects in a year, and encourage our artists to value process over product.  Feeding off of the snippets of conversation we could hear from across the table, George and I spoke to how artists and social justice organizers might benefit from thinking about the work they do as a kind of experiment, in which they can step outside and take risks without fear of losing funding, reputation. People are often limited by their fear of failure, while developments in the fields of new media and technology are defined by failure. These fields move forward in fits and starts, yet the public only really hears about the advances which can sometimes give the appearance of a seamless motion forward.

 The same misconception also applies to past social movements—people forgetting the amount of time and persistence required to make change happen on a larger scale. This then led to a comment by George suggesting that the Berwick rethink what defines success for our projects. When asked why we choose to stay involved with the artists and projects that come through our residency programs, I responded that the Berwick, or PAI at least, is most interested in what happens once these projects are launched into social spaces and the interactions that arise. Since most of the projects that have come thru our program are in the R&D stage, we are interested in making sure or helping them reach that next level.

With dessert, a rich ricotta pie!, the spacers were cleared and the conversation returned to a full table affair.  Peoples’ reflections about the presentation of the dinner, including Matt Shanley’s ambient sound installation led to an interesting discussion about food’s ability to bring people together around art. Phaedra talked a bit about Axiom’s most successful gallery exhibition, the Cake Project, which drew submissions from people who had never before made a single piece of art! Neil treated everyone to a brief history on restaurant culture and the evolution of eating in public spaces.

This was a wonderful way to end the night, as the Berwick itself has intuitively fallen into this practice of employing food as a vehicle of engaging people around art.  Events such as MMT, the Revolving Dinner fundraisers and “Tag & Release”, were inspired by participatory food-based art projects in the vein of collectives such as Red 76 (Portland, OR) and Rirkrit Tiravanija   Somewhere along the way, we recognized that the art we are most interested in supporting is art that activates us as social beings, whether it be interactive, dialogic or interventionist performance. And dinner—the act of getting together to enjoy a delicious meal—is its own kind of social art, one that engages people who might not typically consider themselves “art patrons.” There is value, I think, in making art in this way.  Food carries such strong associations with place, memory and family, thus food-based art works offer many different avenues for people to engage with a given project

Thoughts on the sound installation

I conceived of the initial idea for this sound installation after hearing descriptions of the artwork made for the previous dinner. The artists for that event seemed interested in the artwork being a focus of attention. They had the guests interacting with the work based on elements of the ongoing conversation.

In the spirit of experimentation, I thought it might be interesting to move the work to the periphery, with the conversation and the food occupying the center of attention. I'd let the conversation feed my installation, which would in turn create an ambient soundscape, adding a tint to the environment. This atmosphere would affect the guests at the table, even though they probably wouldn't be paying conscious attention most of the time.

Triggered by sound levels and textures in the room, the completed installation recorded chunks of live sound from each end of the table, processed it with software-controlled filters and delays, and played it back at the other end of the table. The idea being that the audio environment at one end was controlled by the activity at the other end, while using the actual sounds from the other end as source material.

I knew going into the dinner that the quality of the soundscape would be different than anything I had heard while developing the piece, because of the quality of sound created by this large group of people, in tandem with new microphones and new room acoustics. I built a bank of controls into the software to give myself the ability to adjust the audio we heard, but there was still a large element of uncertainty. There were two things in particular which stood out as unpredicted. The first was that, although the volume of the sound varied, there was an upper limit to this, such that when the conversation got lively and spread out around the table, it tended to drown out the installation's audio. I thought this was great, since the conversation was the most important part of the evening. The second surprise was that the audio tended toward the higher frequencies, sounding more like chirps than the beeps and boops I'd been hearing while programming. Others commented that these sounds seemed bird-like and natural, as if the external world was being pumped into the gallery.

Neil had a great idea for dividers to place on the table, attached to the platters of food. These could be moved, but would restrict your view across the table. I think the dividers served as an effective counterpoint to my audio piece. They focused the diners' attention on the immediate interactions with those around them, and drew attention to the physical space between participants at the table. In contrast, the sound installation seemed to work as a sort of wormhole - bridging the different sections of the table by traveling outside of the intervening area.

In the end, I think that these two pieces combined to create a balance between working with conscious and unconscious attention. If I were to expand the sound work for a future event, I would concentrate on creating more complex and interesting ways for the installation system to listen and respond to the activity at the table. If I were placing it in conjunction with the dividers again, I might try to rig up a video system to allow the installation to monitor the current state of the dividers, using that as another source of input.

-- Matthew Shanley