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Gallery Guide

   Gallery Guide is a virtual performance that could not exist without computer technology however in the ways that it operates in the time and place of its own performance it can be linked to earlier pre-computer work in the nineteen seventies and the eighties, in film and film/performance works, video and video performance pieces, and more recently in site specific public sculptures. All of these art forms can be used so that they require the viewer to re-negotiate their relationship with the work.
In the case of the performance "Gallery Guide" this re-negotiating is carried out through the performer in the role of a gallery guide who performs the task of taking an audience around an exhibition.
The exhibition has been three dimensionally produced as a computer model and is simultaneously projected behind the performer who talks us through the show. As the "tour" progresses provides us with animated explanations of what we see before us, the absurdity is that he is explaining the computer generated gallery and the works in it as if they were real and is consequently stretched to make sense of the phenomena that he encounters.

By having to resort to physical reality for answers to what is found in the virtual gallery the performance inevitably makes references to existing paradigms and aestetics for art practise. It is within these references that a lot of the humour in the piece lies as the conceit of much contemporary art is made apparent and the role of "The Gallery" in sustaining this staus quo is observed.