“Melbourne Fringe Festival: Circuit”
Matthew Gingold, Ben Milbourne and Nicole Breedon
25 Sept → 10 Oct 2009

Circuit is a project made for the 2009 Melbourne Fringe Festival, which brings together some of the most exciting young artists working with analogue and digital technologies, to create a unique interactive art project that spans eight independent and artist-run galleries across Victoria.

In this disposable Internet age of the iGeneration, personal technology is wrapped up in designer packaging and marketed to us as a vital and integral extension of our personal and professional selves.

Circuit playfully critiques personalised technologies and adaptive marketing strategies, which are often used to manipulate our desires — and wallets — into believing that some product, site or service has been tailored just for us. In particular the project examines cultural surveillance — the process of gathering information about cultural consumption, choices and inquiries. This data is then marketed back to us as personally beneficial, providing us with bespoke products to enrich or further our individuality.

The swift emergence of these interactive technologies now give us better searches, more relevant results, and personalised suggestions for other items of interest; the promise of iTunes Genius to ‘create perfect playlists’, Google cookies providing ‘more relevant results’, Amazon suggesting books we might like based on ‘customers who bought this item also bought…’ While these phenomena all demonstrate the ingenuity of technology, they also raise questions about incursions into privacy through the seemingly innocuous gathering of information (or data mining) of our cultural consumption.

Circuit responds to these issues through the creation of a custom-programmed interactive artwork by Matthew Gingold contained inside eight bespoke booths designed by Ben Milbourne. The work inside the booth combines the viewer’s portrait with randomly generated product information from the Internet and immediately projects this onto a sculptural consumer object by Nicole Breedon. It is this random content shift, of not only the appearance of the work but of your own image, that reflects the context and meaning of supposedly personalised technologies. This is the critical entry point for us as consumers of ‘art product’. Circuit itself is a simulacrum of everyday consumerism: the displacement of an ordinary consumer object wrapped in imitation designer packaging with the promise of a personalised experience. This inversion of conscious consumption allows us to question not only the nature of consumer objects and desire, but also the way they are sold to us in an attempt to redefine our sense of self.

As each of the eight Circuit booths has a slightly different internal appearance and functionality, this project allows you a unique experience with the work regardless of which venue you may be visiting, whether it’s in the CBD, the inner north, Bendigo or Yinnar. Circuit is also a perfect opportunity to explore other contemporary works on show in the participating galleries from Australian visual artists, and to experience first hand the tremendous talent and energy of our independent arts scene.