themetropolitancomplex.com

2004, 2008
Website / Performance / Collaboration (With Sarah Pierce)

In 2004 I designed a website for Sarah Pierce documenting her working practice, The Metropolitan Complex. The original design developed from a series of conversations in which we agreed that the site would be something between a functioning website (documenting Pierce's work) and a net-artwork. The result was a Flash-based site that forced the audience to navigate through Pierce's projects in a claustrophobic window, with flickering visual transitions between slides of text that hinted at the complex experienced by the artist working simultaneously between the roles of artist, writer, curator, and project administrator.

In 2008 www.themetroplitancomplex.com was updated to a more traditional site documenting Pierce's work, based on a simple home-made content management system that allowed the work to be easily updated via XML files.

The site is currently active - please visit www.themetropolitancomplex.com.

This collaboration also resulted in a temporary installation / performance, the first event to take place in the Broadstone XL exhibition space at Broadstone Studios in Dublin.

The event marked the launch of the original Metropolitan Complex website in 2004. The source material for the installation was both the audio and text transcribed from the first issue of the Metropolitan Complex Papers (Pierce publishes "A series of papers based on roundtable discussions and interviews, as well as defined by once-off, self-published editions").

The spoken dialog was scattered between six speakers set up in the large exhibition space while single statements were isolated from their context and displayed (without reference to who had spoken them) on a large projection in the middle of the room. The projected excerpts (as well as the clips of audio) were chosen at random, mixing the linear flow of the paper into a series of thematically related fragments which provoked a sense of curiosity in the audience, most of whom would be invested in the identities of the artists whose conversation was being reconfigured.

During this event I performed a 15 minute improvisation, feeding the spoken dialogue through a software system that further transformed and displaced the audio from its original source and context.