Remote / Control : Interactive and Multimedia Art (2007)

'Art is a game between all people of all periods' - Marcel Duchamp.

In the lexicon of art, you have been given many names. As soon as you enter the sactified space of the museum, you are known as the voyeuristic viewer, the awe-struck beholder, a phantom spectator, the receptive audience, or even the alienating public. This terminology not only predicates the visual, the import of which cannot easily be ignored in any discourse of art, but also relates to an assumptive passivity; the plaint receptivity of 'merely looking' at art objects. Technological and idealogical developments to social and cultural systems necessarily precede the ways in which art is practiced, apprehended, displayed, and processed, and this has afforded us a new identity. We have evolved from the passive, wandering eye of the viewer into the empowered user and active participant, a fully-embodied and sensorially-engaged agent of the creative enterprise. Today's multi-medial spectator demands to be engaged by and in the artwork. The panoply of lived experience digitalized and interactive media affords is unerringly seductive; computers, LED screens, sensors, projectors all become galvanized by our presence and receptive to our manipulation, and as we boldly navigate the intricate and fantastic topographies of the technological aesthetic, it becomes possible to believe that we, as user and participant, are indeed in control.

Extract from 'Remote/Control Interactive and Multimedia Art' Curatorial Statement by Wenny Teo.