Mat Laibowitz
The List Visual Arts Center Experiential Enhancement Project

The project that we created and installed in the List center is quite related to my personal philosophies with regards to art and my creative endeavors.

All of my work is intended to create exciting and engaging experiences for myself and for the audience. Lately, I have been taking a step back and trying to figure out what makes an experience engaging and exciting. One of the attributes that I consider to be important for engagement is a feeling of exclusivity for each participant. This is the idea that an individual walks away from an experience feeling like they experienced it in a way that was unique to them; it triggers in them reactions based on their past experiences and current perspective. Furthermore, the competitive feelings of knowing that you understood something that other people might not have is pleasurable (if sometimes subconscious) and is present in engaging experiences. As a filmmaker I feel that I did something wrong if everyone likes a film or a story that I have created. In this case, it feels too much like an advertisement, the goal of which is to create something that seems personal to everyone. This is an oxymoron. I prefer to create expert experiences even if they potentially alienate people who don't push the envelope with their interactions. There are plenty of people who create for the masses, just go to a Hollywood film. I just find that when I work in this way, I work too incrementally, not revolutionarily, and I am not excited by what I am doing, and the product suffers. Essentially, the process needs to build upon my own exclusive interests, and this leads to engaging experiences.

Our installation space was not the physical gallery, but the experiential space of the museum visitor. By putting the museum participant at the forefront of the installation, it opens up the doors for personally engaging experiences. The person is handed an object that travels with them through their journey amongst the gallery exhibitions. They form a personal bond with it, as they do with the artwork they are witnessing, and are ultimately faced with a decision about what the object means to them as they leave the exhibit. The subtlety of the donation box, as well as the subtlety of the gallery attendants who distribute the objects adds to the individuality of the experience by leaving it all up to the participant. This is the art, it is completely experiential. The actual object, while it is essential that it is compelling to build up the relationship, becomes a symbol of the experience and its shape is a matter of design that can be abstracted away from the conceptual art of the project.

I am also very interested in the narrative structures that form (or are intentionally formed) in my work. I am interested in the organic stories that form as objects become involved in the world and as people become involved in experiences. When I create something, I try to envision it as part of a larger story, and I create this story around the audience being a part of the story. However, I find it essential that the story is just a conceptually entity and not really a set narrative. This part should be up to the participant to fill in. Well... that is not entirely true, on occasion I do like to create complex and detailed stories that draw the participant in into my world, but that is a topic unrelated to this project. My work with parasitic mobility, my proposed project with the cubes, my dna helix sculpture, my badge project, and many other installations I have work on try to hint at a deep organic narrative unfolding just beneath the surface of the experience, and provide tools and viewpoints into that narrative for the audience to experience through their own eyes. The List project is all about this type of narrative. We will see the artifacts of this narrative after all the objects have been on their journey. But much of the narrative will remain with the participants who discovered their own personal part to play in the project.

Another interest of mine is the concept of an experience being distributed over many parts. I have done a lot of work with sensor networks. Sensor networks are large systems containing large quantities of relatively simple sensors that can communicate and work together to form an overall picture of an environment. By distributing the sensors you can gather information that you could not gather with just one large complicated sensor. The agents can be quickly distributed to cover a large area and can be redistributed if the area of interest changes. This adds new abilities to the system and allows for many different types of areas to be analyzed. Since each particular sensor is simple and cheap, there can be redundancy and if some of them don't work or are lost the system still functions perfectly.

I incorporate the thoughts involved in distributed sensor networks in my artwork and creation of interactive experiences. This is sometimes done by creating a large quantity of simple interactions that when experienced together form new and exciting complex experiences. The List project has an element of this when view from above, each object and participant is a single, simple entity adding to the overall installation that exists in the participatory space and beyond. This idea was even more at the foundation of the cube project that I proposed.

These ideas, exclusivity of experience, organic narratives, and distributed complexity, are foundations to my work and were the reason that I was drawn to Allan McCollum's artwork and his class, and were where the ideas for the List project came from.