Staff Research Profiles

Exhibition

Focal Point Gallery, Essex

Babel is a multiuser interactive artwork that inquires into how the viewer experience can be augmented through the use of virtual reality and remote sensing technologies. The work exists as a gallery based installation, a large scale public artwork and as an internet based networked artwork. Commissioned by Essex Libraries through competitive submission, the work takes as its theme the notion of taxonomies, their innate contingency and the impossible task of seeking to index and thus navigate the internet. The artwork employs multi-user interactive technologies, familiar from multi-player computer games such as Quake, integrated with a unique search engine system and immersive remote sensory interactive technologies to allow multiple people, whether online, in a gallery or in a public space, to navigate the internet through a 3D interface based on the Dewey Decimal numbering system. The result is rendered as a 3D graphical dataspace where each user is able to see all the other users interaction with the 3D data. This artwork is regularly cited internationally as one of the most influential web based artworks produced to date. It continues to be exhibited, written about widely and is included as curriculum content in the UK, USA, Germany, Brazil from primary school level to university, across disciplines as diverse as art, literary theory, computing and library studies. This work has been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions along with numerous well known artists. Funders: Arts Council England and Eastern Arts.

14/07/2001

11/08/2001

Leslie Farrell

Kibla Gallery, Slovenia; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; Total Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Cameraworks, San Francisco; Macau Art Museum, China.

Media: New York Times, 6.8.2001; The Guardian, 30.8.2001; Descriptions in academic literature: Literatur in Electronischen Raum, Heibach, C, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany 2003; Webfictions, Fassler, Wiener and Hentschlager, Springer, Vienna Austria 2003.