Art After Dark: Realness by Wesley Dowling
Realness is an interactive, participatory digital artwork that samples pixels and recorded audio from the webcams of audiences’ devices. The interactive generative work accumulates, fragments and overlays the captured data and audiences’ interactions to create an ever-changing generative audio-visual experience.
Wesley Dowling is an early-career queer identifying artist who has crafted his practice in creating web based works that examine and queers the normative structures that are embedded in digital imaging and computing.
"My work is really about disrupting the visual recognition of the photographic image through fragmentation", he says, "I like to use this method in my work to confuse how we interpret images. We are all recognised and categorised through photography. My work distorts the photographic image to disrupt essentialised notions of identity and allows queer readings and forms of being to emerge".
Dowling’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and public spaces such as The Wrong Biennale (2019), No Vacancy (Melbourne 2019), Site Eight Gallery (2019) and West Projections Festival (2018). He was a finalist in the 2020 Midsumma and Australia Post Art Award. He was also an artist in residence in the Centre for Projection Art Residency Summer 2020 Program and is currently working towards presenting new work for the Gertrude Street Projection Festival.
Accompanied with vibrating sound design by Liam Power, Realness is a mesmerising and absorbing interactive installation that captivates audiences through participatory abstraction.
Realness is part of the 2021 MidSumma Festival and will be presented on the Bunjil Place Outdoor Screen at the following times:
Realness
Wednesday 21 April – Sunday 23 May - Outdoor Screen
10.00 am – 12.00 pm and 6.00 pm – 8.00 pm (with the exception of other Plaza events)
Panel Discussion: The Queer Lens
Bunjil Place Studio
Wednesday 28 April, 6.00 pm – 8.00 pm
Learn more and register here
Co-hosted by Melbourne Media Lab
