The Saarijärvi Museum / April 8 – June 5, 2011 Please participate!

The main exhibition of the Live Herring ’11 event, Please participate!, is hosted by The Saarijärvi Museum. The exhibition focuses specifically on recent, Finnish, new media art with an emphasize on interaction and participation. The museum visitor becomes an active participant in the interactive artworks.

The Please Participate! exhibition presents the work of just over 10 young artists for which public involvement is a crucial aspect.  In the fields of contemporary art and performance art the use of new media is already quite common; the line between media-art and other art is no longer obvious. However art, which engages the public beyond questioning its relevance to artsy postmodernism, is quite rare. That is to say artwork, which requires more than just observation and thought: artwork which only functions with the participation of the viewer. Participation is rewarded when the artwork comes to life, through the transformation of the space and the momentary experience.

At its best, interactive art can captivate the viewer and induce a dialogue; giving way to a network of casual connections. Of course, the artwork chosen for this exhibition carry more than just the joy of participation (or perhaps also the difficulty, for those used to wandering through art exhibitions merely looking, listening, and thinking).

The strongest themes represented in this exhibition are natural sciences, the interconnection of art and technology, along with the combination of memory, furniture and space. I would argue, that the information transmitted through interactive art, be it the state of Finland’s water sources or endangered birds, who lend their songs to mobile phones in order to make themselves heard, can become a strong experience which can carry enough strength and power to change people. On the other hand, a flickering encounter with memory as well as the space and objects attached to memory, can revive the public’s own personal memories and these exhibition sites can help consolidate fragments of memory. What sound would you choose when you have just fallen in love or when someone leaves you? What memories, and of whom, are aroused when you sit in a rocking chair?

And what happens when there are nine Lulus? Or when the typography caste or text block changes into a Pong game? Does the Mechanical Man live forever?

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The Please Participate! exhibition  is curated by Tomi Knuutila.