French artist Valéry Grancher has conceived an original interactive
artwork for the museum's Web site which will be launched
on-line October 4.
Twenty-four UC Berkeley students from a variety of departments-from Art
Practice and Art History to Molecular and Cell
Biology-are working with the artist, the curator, and the museum's
Information Systems Manager, Rick Rinehart, to realize the
work. Every hour of one entire day, the students will make a
photographic portrait according to their own criteria for subject,
composition, setting, and lighting, asking the subjects to describe in
one word their state of mind at that precise moment. All of
the images will be scanned into the computer's memory and represented on
the screen by a grid of numbers from 1 to 24, each
number corresponding to a photograph in the order it was taken. Above
each number will be the time the image was taken and
a word corresponding to each subject.
The site navigator (the viewer) will be able to participate via a
computer terminal in the museum or by accessing the museum's
Web site. There will also be a computer
terminal in the Practice of Art Department's Worth
Ryder Gallery from October 19 to 29. The viewer will randomly choose one
of the twenty-four horizontal lines that correspond
to a single photographer's twenty-four portraits. The navigator may
nextclick on a vertical column to view all the photographs
that were taken at a given hour of the day. Or, by mixing and matching,
the navigator can create a personal story or sequence.
Grancher has devised an elegant structure in which the creative role of
the student collaborators is matched by that of the site
visitors. The site promises to be engaging and amusing but also touches
on several significant issues, including how one defines
fiction and truth and how one operates in a space that is simultaneously
virtual and real.
An on-line catalog featuring an interview with Valéry Grancher will
accompany 24h00. Grancher will describe the interactive
Web project created for Berkeley as well as other works he has created
using digital technology in UC Berkeley's Art,
Technology, and Culture Colloquium on Wednesday, October 27, at 7:15
p.m. in 160 Kroeber Hall. Admission is free.
During the week of October 25, Grancher will be in residence at UC
Berkeley, participating in a number of student-focused
activities, including working with the museum's New Media Team andgiving
classroom presentations in library information
technology and engineering. This artist's residency is a project of The
Time of Your Life: Enhancing Student Engagement with
the Arts.
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