Week 5
This week our guest speaker was Emma Wade. Emma is a visual artist she works with installation, Digital Media and Performance arts.
She got her degree from the Institute of Art and Design and Dun Laoghaire, then worked for 2 years in a design company. After this she went to a print company in Dublin while in Dublin she went to the museum of modern art and this made her want to become an artist. Shes not the type of artist that you first think of she builds pieces and has different projects they are not drawn or made but interacted with.
Emma also has a master degree from the Fine Art Department of NCAD, this is where she learned about technologies for creating interactive art.
Her end of year project for first year was called “Cheer up”, people walked on a mat between two speakers and when pressure was applied clapping would come from the speakers, it was designed to cheer people up by having people cheer for them just for being them.
For her masters project Emma created an exhibition, it wasn’t really interactive but to get to it you had to crawl like a dog to get into the room to view it.
She attached mike’s and camera’s to her dog and took him on walks so she could see what it was like to see the world from a dogs point of view since they always seem to be so happy. She called the project “Rexotrek”.
Next Emma went on an internship in the states at the Guggenheim museum for 3 months.And after this she went to Limerick to do an artist residency for a month.
Emma’s next big project was the “Human Utopian Generation System” aka H.U.G.S.
Its a coat that when you put it on it inflates or applies pressure to the body as if you were getting a hug, she got the idea from the free hugs movement that started off a fee years back.
While creating the project Emma found it hard to get the design right as in how to fill the jacket to make it feel like a hug so she ended up having 4 different versions of the jacket each with a different intensity.
I really liked the work that Emma did and wouldn’t mind doing some of it myself but I don’t think i would be able to handle the artist ideas of how to come up with what to do. I found this lecture to be quite interesting and payed attention to every bit of it.
