A view from within Signal, the city as glazed over from a faulty iGlass window.
Backlit on a Thursday afternoon, our Specific to Site class met at Signal to discuss and brainstorm ideas and potential approaches for our final project brief.
Seated upstairs around a (fittingly) art making workshop table, we broke into small groups to generate concepts and flesh out creative responses to the site. What struck me first about Signal (as I was absent for the first meeting there) was the transparent quality, and resulting aesthetic experience of the space. For instance, the way sound and light pervade the area so thoroughly brings to mind the tensions of the interior vs the exterior.
It is nearly impossible to ignore the world around Signal. Auditorially, there is the percussive, throbbing pulsation of the trains passing through, and the guttural croons of gulls swooping low and heavy. Visually, there is on one side the towering metropolis of Melbourne CBD skyscrapers; and on the other: the gentrified natural landscape of a polluted Yarra river and the calculated flourishings of the Botanical garden.
Surround the space is this idea of opposing bodies, interacting and informing each other’s qualities. This idea is furthered by Signal itself, as it was once a communications towers directing trains in and out of Flinders St. Now serving as an accessible, government funded art space for youths, it calls for a new reading of what it means to communicate, to send a signal, to direct bodies of people.
Our class discussion brought up several notable points including the need for an overarching theme to unite all our works, the possibility of utilising the corner as a wider canvas for projecting our works, and the idea of voyeurism and the grotesque as a way to challenge and subvert the paradigm of public art exhibitions catering to align with social milieus.
Rose and I also discussed our collective interest in exploring the idea of human bodies. This interest stems largely from the consideration of Signal’s style of video exhibition, which occurs at night, overlooking the Yarra, towering above Southbank passerbys and commuters. It is a very publicly visible canvas, and thus, a deliberate consideration of the audiences we want to (or by incidence of site) engage, and the manner in which we do is a significant point. Having said this, I plan to continue brainstorming further conceptual approaches which make use of Signal’s specific temporal / spatial exhibition qualities, as well as my own creative interests in aesthetically abstracting the human body and embodying ephemera.
