Art, Not Apart – Q & A
Art, Not Apart was a free arts festival that was held on March 14 2015 in New Acton. The festival featured different forms of artwork from exhibitions to performances. Parallax was a piece done by Rohan Jolly, Sebastian Chan and Tara Smith. The piece was an exhibition in a shipping container.
In order to fully participate in the exhibition you need to download a smartphone app called Layar in order to view the content. The smartphone equipped with the app, would scan one of the four images that were inside the shipping container and transform the image into a video. The exhibition was open from 1pm until 7pm. Sebestian Chan describes his experience working on Parallax.
Q: Tell me a little bit about Parallax
A: So basically Parallax is a collaboration between a photographer, a coder and a filmmaker. The filmmaker being myself, it’s an ornamented reality exhibition using smartphones to experience the combination of a photo and film.
Q: Why did you decide to make it?
A: So, basically we were a brief for Westside surrounding the theme of the singularity, so whether that means like technological singularity or humanity singularity. So we decided to go for the technology tact and look at basically what kind of social media technology benefits us, and how does it disadvantage us. And we decided to look at how sometimes it always doesn’t work out for us.
Q: Did anything inspire you to make this?
A: The whole Selfie-stick and Instagram genre culture, which involves people over sharing, and that’s what pretty much inspired it.
Q: Why did you choose the app Layar to show your work?
A: We chose Layar because it’s quite user friendly, it’s free to download and it’s quite easy to integrate with video and photo media. All we really needed to do was provide the app with our material and kind of sync it up and it would do the rest for us. Maybe if we had more time we would have developed from scratch.
Q: How long did Parallax take to make?
A: We had maybe two months or so from when the initial announcement to installation but most of the filming took place like two weeks before. We took the photos when we did the filming and then it was basically a matter of testing the media and making sure it worked all right. So it probably took two and a half weeks or so all up.
Q: When was the deadline?
A: We were given a bump in deadline the day before; the exhibition was on the 14th. We had to have everything installed on the 13th, but really we were in there until an hour beforehand doing last minute stuff and preparations and that kind of thing. Which is kind of normal for artists and there were a lot of people around the shipping containers doing the same thing.
Q: How did you come across the Art, Not Apart festival?
A: This was my first Art, Not Apart that I’ve participated in, this year they had a new area called Westside. My friend Nat was the organiser of that and she brought together a whole bunch of artists, about 30 to collaborate with each other. So she got me involved, there was only about two or three filmmakers involved, so I was lucky to be one of those.
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