Front Room is a networked telepresence installation that builds on an earlier practice-based research project ‘Telematic Vision’ which I produced at the ZKM Centre for Art & Media Karlsruhe in Germany, and was presented in their recent 20 year anniversary exhibition IMAGINING MEDIA@ZKM from 2009 to 2010, as well as becoming a permanent exhibit in the Experimenta Science Museum Heilbronn in 2009. The further developments found in Front Room were drawn from ‘On the Couch – Capturing Audience Experience’ by Rolf Wolfensburg (2009), ‘A Case Study on Paul Sermon’s Telematic Vision’, held by the Daniel Langlois Foundation Collection, Montreal.
Front Room presented a mixed-reality that merged space, time and culture in a Manchester/Sao Paulo domestic encounter or soap opera drama, where audience participants across the Atlantic sat down on a sofa together with an uncanny sense of being at home, yet in a foreign place. This converged Front Room was a vacant space of potentiality; it was nothing without the presence of a viewer and the interactions of a user who create their own television program by becoming the voyeurs of their own spectacle. The concept and structure of Front Room is an open framework, where the artwork itself emerges only through the participation of users and through their lived experience at a given moment in space and time. Bluntly put, the experience is the artwork. Therefore, sources representing such phenomenological information, whether textual, oral or visual, become the pivotal points of interest in the research.
Front Room was a world premiere created for the FutureEverything festival and ran between Contact Theatre Manchester and Sao Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art (MASP) in Brazil on 15th May 2010, involving both programmed and ad hoc audience interaction, supported by the University of Salford, British Council, Northern Net and Arts Council England. A localised version of Front Room was exhibited again for the opening of MediaCityUK Salford in November 2011.
Project Web Site: http://www.paulsermon.org/frontroom
Exhibition Web Site: http://2010.futureeverything.org/festival2010
Daniel Langlois Foundation Collection: http://www.fondation-langlois.org
