Recognition
A record of what others have made of the work — in scholarship, in criticism, and in the institutions that showed it.
Voices
Our original attraction to working with KMA was the pioneering approach of the artists to interaction in the public realm, particularly the combination of technical competency around responsive systems and their understanding of human behaviour with such systems. When combined with large outdoor projection, KMA demonstrated a new approach to engagement and audience participation we had seen little of outside the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
In the work of KMA we continually see a desire and belief in what might be termed vernacular interaction combined with an understanding of the performative. We witness mass participation and play. Multiple entry points offer a range of experiences from the visceral to the ontological.
We are made of our relationships to other people and our very own bodies. KMA’s work invites us to think further on where one body starts and another finishes, significant and topical questions for a society coming to terms with virtuality and digital embodiment.
But that sincerity is what makes People We Love so magical. It is not simply an entirely original form of story and storytelling, although those endeavours are undoubtedly part of the project. It is about that different way of communicating about our lives, which is what stories are ultimately all about. That different way of reaching out to another. That different way of being human together. That different way of understanding what understanding can be.
In linking us together by light, and in patterns controlled by us as us, KMA has created something that is both hugely simple and endlessly complex.
Flock was a large-scale installation that saw the audience become performer. The ability to respond, be impressed upon and impress back offered a whole new realm for ‘live’ artistic experience.
Bibliography
McConaghy, Kieran Patrick (2023). Space, Imagination, and Story: Understanding how contemporary interactive stories are told. MA by research thesis, University of York.
Nedelkopoulou, E. (2015). ‘The In-common of Phenomenology: Performing KMA's Congregation’, in Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman & Eirini Nedelkopoulou. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138805514.
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