3rd August - Dion Hitchens

This week Dion Hitchens spoke to us about his work involving interaction and kinetic technology. Hitchens says his art isn't art without an audience, I think it is this relationship between the work and audience that inspires and interests him. In order to create a close relationship between the two his work has to engage the audience physically, so he doesn't just take into account the appearance of the work but also its site and placement. A great example of placement comes from one of his works of large woven sculptures made from weeping willows. The name of the work means the God of the forest and the work addresses the irony of this plant being an ecological hazard in New Zealand, its history of being used to mark land for farmers and saying can he be god of a colonized tree?

The objects are placed in a doorway and it is here where the audience is confronted by the work, they are engaged by it and therefore are forced to move around it. Also the objects are larger than the human body and so are rather imposing, this kind of relates to the god-like symbolism.

Some of his larger scale work is also interactive but in a less confrontational way, the sculptures take up space but as a viewer you can choose to move through it or around it, its much more free than his gallery work though its still sharing. This idea of choosing to interact is actually present in one of his works called Seek where figures made from bronze and copper stand on a perplex base and the audience is allowed to move them around.

Hitchens' work with kinetic sculpture is where I can see the joy in creating interactive art. After he told us about his artwork of ghost-like figures all made from one 3m long Totara log I became very interested. The figures in the room are very eerie and their stillness really adds to that. So because the viewer truly doesn't expect any of them to move they scream and jump pretty high when one of them suddenly does a dance-like movement after its motion sensor has been triggered. He told us about how once somebody got such a large fright they actually knocked over one of the other figures. Hitchens said he didn't mind repairing it and I understand that, its a fair enough price to pay when you get such a great reaction from an audience member and that's really what the work is their to achieve; its the best interactive experience a maker could hope for.

Another really good example of his work with motion sensors is his piece entitled: From Iron Bird which to me looks like a giant white porcelain American football though it more appropriately resembles an egg. Once the motion sensors are triggered by someone the work starts to rock like a pendulum and a tapping sound begins from inside like something is trying to hatch from it. Again my imagination jumps to a baby dinosaur considering the scale of the object, an idea which according to Hitchens apparently seriously frightened a young boy. The title of the piece however relates directly to what Hitchens said about placing the work in a site where the trees can be like power poles or the birds can be like aeroplanes, and this brings in humor to the work by joking that it is an egg laid by a plane.

Hitchens' work seems to incorporate a lot of humour, it can be in the context of the work but its most obvious in these uses of kinetic technology, his work really creates a close relationship to its audience and inspires strong reactions. The reactions his work gets makes his art extremely effective, and its not just appealing to people who can relate to the concepts he addresses because they physically engage you. I have never really been interested in sculpture of any kind and I most likely wouldn't prefer to work in this field but I now find it very interesting, especially kinetic sculpture because the reactions it can make are much larger or much more intense than a lot of other mediums.