Review | A Beacon lights up ‘Friends of the Divided Mind’
Friends of the Divided Mind was the title of this years Post Graduate exhibition from the Royal College of Art curating programme.
Like many of these platforms, the maturity of exhibitions produced by students varied. I personally felt that curators had been given a little too much license to ‘indulge in intellectualism,’ when coming up with their ‘concepts,’ this year. For me, curator ego was definitely the dish of the day. Having said that (and to be fair to those involved), if you can’t indulge in some ego driven intellectualism within the freedom of an MA programme, then when can you. So I hold no grudge.
Beacon by Thomson & Craighead
For me, the particular highlight of this collection of RCA exhibitions was the inclusion of Beacon by Thomson & Craighead in The Office of Real Time Activity. Taking the form of a mechanical railway flap sign [tick-flip-tick-flip], Beacon offers a minute by minute snapshot of live web searches as they are made around the world. Sourcing data directly from dogpile.com (the worlds favourite search engine aggregator), Beacon randomly presents one search query from the fifty it collects each minute via the signs display.
One of my favourite things about Beacon is that there are so many elements to it. And each one helps to stir the imagination some more, urging you to view the world anew. The first of these ‘things’ is the combination of analogue and digital technologies at play in the work. Thomson and Craighead have crafted a work that shows analogue and digital technologies working together intrinsically, a familiar public sign that encompasses issues of the future, feeds from the present and a form from our recent past. In Beacon, the traditional public information and manual aesthetic of the railway flap-sign is modded to display personalised data live from the intangible and digitised web. Truly delicious.
Another element of Beacon that works well is the tension it evokes between the predictable rhythm of public information hardware (the railway flap which changes its message precisely each minute), and the captivating and voyeuristic quality experienced when a new search query is revealed. When I checked Beacon out, I genuinely struggled to divert my eyes from the sign. The hardware is big, it’s bold and it’s located up high. It uses that familiar public information space, just above eye level to draw your eyes toward the display. The kind of space and displays you find at airports, tube platforms, cinemas and train stations. On top of this the accompanying manual click-click of the plastic sign panels as they flip over is wonderfully familiar and reminiscent of days gone by – bringing a piece of technological history into the visual vacuum of the gallery space.
Compelled to watch and wait for the next search term reveal, when viewing Beacon you become acutely aware of the frequency, volume, range and richness of search online. Presented exactly as they are typed into the search box, people’s search queries provide a jumping off point for reflecting upon your own search behaviour. You also quickly start to imagine the kind of narratives, people and personalities that lie behind the searches displayed…I wonder where they live in the world? Are they a girl or a boy? Are they wasting time at work? What’s going on in their life right now? What time might it be? What would their mum say if they knew they searching for that!..?
[tick-flip-tick-flip] … Mini Dresses | Asian Girls Fucking | Movado Mens Watches | Black Lesbian Porn | Wamart | Skin Tan Pill | Spamalot | 71 Truck Ford Parts | usb headset with mic driver | squeezed to submission | killer hair | Plywood dimensions … [tick-flip-tick-flip
Both an intensely global and human experience, the longer I spent with Beacon, the more I got out of it. I felt an augmented awkwardness and excitement around eavesdropping someone else’s life online. An experience and dynamic that is becoming increasingly familiar as the up-take of online social networks, media sharing services and social recommendation platforms grows each day. Although the ID of ‘each search maker,’ remains hidden in Beacon (preserving their anonymity), the sense of invading someones private activity certainly raises its head, and your role in the work (as a viewer) starts to feel more and more intrusive the longer you stick around. The problem is, like with many places on the internet it’s really hard to move on… you get consumed in the journey. I wonder what will turn up next….
Check out the live search feed at Automated Beacon.
Office of Real Time Activity was organised by Sepake Angiama, Harriet Godwin, Pamela Prado and Lisa Schmidt
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