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Lab 6.5: The Fortress of History, Ian Birse & Laura Kavanaugh

For their LAB project, Ian Birse and Laura Kavanagh collaborate in discovering what is underfoot. Walking the streets of Victoria, they documented the discovery of discarded objects, photographing them on-site as well and recording a sonic snapshot of sounds at each location. In the process, the artists present performances for accidental audiences.

Kavanagh and Birse state, Through our work we investigate the way events are framed in consciousness. While activity in a gallery space is important, we want the gallery to function as a transparent box, and our collaboration includes street actions and online communication as vital components.

The documentation of these various actions and events is digitally stored to create an interactive mutli-media installation. Visitors to The Fortress of History can manipulate the audio and video material, zooming into images and making remixes of sound files. At intervals during the exhibition the artists replace the original images and sounds with the ones reworked by Gallery visitors. By the end of the exhibition the original images and sounds have been almost completely replaced by the artifacts of this re-compression process creating a hybrid of human action and digital process.