Haptic Spectre
Ceramic and audio. 2016
A momentary reflection in one of the cavernous rooms of No. 9 Briana Street in Riga caught a mental map relating to past tenses. We think of Survival in terms of an activity in the present or a reflex protecting us from future calamity, and yet we are also prone to previous influences as they extend forwards through time. Can we put a finger on this influence from the past? Is it real enough to be tangible?
We seized this fleeting will-o’-the-wisp and materialised it to make it accessible to visitors in a series of inductive séances.
We plumb it for the traces of previous moments. It’s a tactile road map that infuses knowledge through the fingertips, a workout for intuitive sensing across temporal planes. A prototype for Survival: forwards and backwards in time. Artwork was created with the help of ceramist Esmeralda Purviske.
Artist's Bio:
Marcos Lutyens (1964, London) lives and works in Los Angeles. His practice has centred on the investigation of consciousness to engage the visitor’s embodied experience of art. Exhibitions of infinite scale and nature have been installed in the minds of visitors. Lutyens’ investigations have included research with social groups such as the third-gender Muxhe, Raelians, synaesthetes, border migrants, space engineers and mental architects to explore how unconscious mind-sets shift across cultures and backgrounds. He has developed interactions with pedestrian flows, social media dialogue, air quality levels, animal and biological intercommunication.