The Workshop as Art: Insight Into the Subjective Experience of Perceptual Illusion Through an Expanded Art Practice
Exhibition of works submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
This virtual exhibition presents a new body of work exploring perceptual illusion and the workshop as a form of art. The workshops explore the effects of simulating illusory experience through combinations of sound, light and touch, as well as sensory deprivation. The workshops highlight the extreme subjectivity of everyday experience and raise some more unusual questions: What is it like to be invisible? What is it like to be outside of our bodies? Or to embody an and entirely unfeasible object? And what is the role of imagination and sensory suggestibility in perceptual illusion? The work is a fusion of scientific experiments, art, and mindful practice, exhibited through documentation, instructional scores, and drawings.
In thinking about the workshop as art, a new significance is rendered beyond its function as a ‘research’ or ‘engagement’ tool. Attention is drawn to the workshop as an experiential laboratory as reflective spaces in which ideas are developed and tested with others. These interactions generate feedback and new ideas that inform the practice. The workshop’s function within the practice can be understood similarly to any artwork; as a process of exploration and meaning-making. They are iterations of a continuing cycle of experiential research, interactions that ask questions of the world, provoke, and in doing so, necessitate interaction, sustaining the practice.
The documentation used in the exhibition is taken from workshops and other workshop-like experiences that took place between 2017-21 as part of a practice-based PhD*, some of which were shown during the exhibition STOATA in October 2019. The following exhibition key can be used as a guide to navigate the exhibition: Central to the exhibition is a series of three limited-edition workshops, embodied within a set of workshop resources [1], which will occur throughout the course of the exhibition.
Exhibition instructions: To explore the exhibition, roll over the gallery plan and click on the links; this will take you through a series of pages that constitutes the exhibition each page will contain this same gallery plan. If you get lost in the blog, you can return to the exhibition via the ‘PhD EXHIBITION’ link in the main menu at the top of the page.
PhD Exhibition instructions: Roll over the gallery plan above and click on the links; this will take you through a series of pages that constitutes the online exhibition, each page contains this same gallery plan. If you get lost in the blog, you can return to the exhibition via the ‘PHD EXHIBITION’ link in the main menu at the top of the page. [ See the exhibition press release here >>>]
