Well, first of all, the data stream here comes out of quite a long association with working
in Oxford and in particular with what used to be the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford.
Right back in the 70s, I initiated a project here called the Oxford Insight Development
Project. The idea of that was to demonstrate another model of culture, another model of
art practice, which was based on people instead of objects. It was a process involving people
in remodeling, transforming the reality that they lived in to a reality of how they imagined
the world could be around them. We have there the macro to micro work, which is a kind of
precedence for the Oxford Community Data Stream, in the sense that it's a work that
is made by a group of some 24 artists and a group of actors, and it's a work that expresses
the ideas very important, I think. Current ideas for culture, the idea of transience
and fluidity, the idea of complexity, the idea of relativity, and also important the
idea of authorship, that within the work there's no particular authorship. Well, the films
are very simple. I mean, they are films of people in pairs, and as I indicated, and you'll
see from some of the works upstairs, they're quite often the representation of two people
in a pairing. This is what I consider to be a fundamental state of society. You have
to have two people. This sort of interpersonal dynamic is a representation of their society
between them, which is kind of very informal in the sense that they're usually walking.
The idea of that is that this informality is to express the transience and fluidity
of these relationships, as they're sort of moving in and out of different scenarios really.
Then imposing on them is the diagram. These are representations of formal interpersonal
structures between people. The fabric of reality is ideological, so whether something's created
out of concrete or straw or wood, expresses different ideologies and states of society.
For me, there's a sort of background conditioning by the physicality of the world you live in,
the environment you live in. All the works that are presented in the gallery upstairs
are intended to function as the idea of symbolic worlds. This is a world that's familiar to
people, but it's not actually theirs. The idea is that you can engage in a transformative
process, cognitive transformative process. This symbolic world is created from an actual
situation so that the references are consistent. Like, for instance, the work, Studying Again
from a blank canvas, was an actual situation of a woman finding herself under a state trying
to start a game. All the references there come from that place, but the situation she
was in was symbolic of anyone trying to recreate themselves or studying a game, if you follow
me. So these are all polemics that are sort of familiar, so people can sort of engage
with it. They're tools. I see these works operating as tools.
