Writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud wrote in his seminal textRelational Aesthetics, that art was a ‘state of encounter’ (1998). I have been researching the impermanent nature of such ‘encounters’. This research has now become part of an on-going investigation into impermanence and how impermanent encounters might be experienced.
In the /bubbles/ collaboration and installation, the dialogic exchange that comes from being with others in the space becomes part of the artwork. This is embodied in the experience the participants have when making bubbles. This may result in the experience having a lasting effect, despite the fact that the bubbles themselves will perish. In using bubbles as a signifier for the occurring dialogic encounter the work hopes to question the interrelationship of dialogical and aesthetic encounters.
