DRHA
DRHA Student Bursary Awards Conference Report
Sebastian Lexer, Goldsmith's College, University of London
Following the successful application for the AHRC ICT Methods Network bursary I was able to participate in DRHA 2006 at Dartington College of Arts in Devon. Admitting that the initial idea to participate came through my role as the programmer of the video installation VINST by Emmanuelle Waeckerle, I greatly enjoyed the whole conference as a very inspiring platform.
Over the past years VINST has been shown on various occasions, however the participation at DRHA has been invaluable, not only because it provided the chance to show the installation to a new audience, but also because of the intelligent and interesting responses we were able to experience. Such responses were revealed actively in conversations, as well as more passively by observing people approaching, investigating and playing the installation. The latter particularly was immensely interesting to me, as in my role as programmer I have to take decisions which will allow the implementation of practicalities ensuring that these will not detract from the original concept of the work. It was interesting and encouraging for me to observe that VINST has retained various levels of unexpected behaviour, despite the continuous planning and conceptualizations during the programming stages.
The appreciative and interested audience at this conference has enabled me to collect and experience confirmation of the work completed so far, as well as indicating shortcomings which will be addressed in future versions of this installation.
The conference as a whole had various inspiring and valuable contributions broadly related to my own work. These were mainly from art practice. I thought the conference encompassed a very interesting mixture of disciplines and I will certainly consider attending DRHA again in future.