Between Us
2022
Durational public artwork: moving head searchlights, custom software, publicly sourced messages, live video stream
Art Gallery of Western Australia, 3-6 March 2023
Lead artist: Michaela Gleave
Lighting designer: Bosco Shaw
Programmer: Warren Armstrong
Video live stream: Perth Video
Photography: Michaela Gleave
This project builds upon elements of the previous work Messages of Hope, Messages of Love created in collaboration with Fausto Brusamolino.
Between us is a public art and community engagement project that considers ‘the space between’. Encompassing the micro and macro, personal and public, local and universal, the project engages audiences in a poetic consideration of the spaces that exist between the structures and systems that shape our lives: the space between neighbourhoods, neighbours, cities, countries, lives; words, letters, phrases, heartbeats, breaths; day, night, seasons, tides, epochs; galaxies, stars, atoms, quantum particles; knowledge, belief, history, understanding; the space between ideas that art ultimately inhabits.
Between us begins with the intimacy of this proposition and projects it out into the universe, text generated by the community translated into Morse code signals that will travel through space and time forever. Responding to the prompt ‘Between us…’ audiences are asked to consider that which exists in a singular or plural interpretation of this phrase, addressing the intimacy and complexity of the space between 'you and I', or 'us'. There is implied romance, but also questions of inclusion and exclusion, the context of ‘us’ remaining fluid. Executed as a moderated exquisite corps, a web portal collects the growing archive of responses, text accumulating and building over time to form the collaborated poem at the centre of the work.
This collaborative poem is then be translated into the Morse code language of pulses and pause, and beamed up into the sky as light signals over four consecutive nights, the coded text leaving Earth to continue its conversation across space, time, light and distance. Operating from the roof top of the Art Gallery of Western Australia the light installation comprised 35 individual beams of light, pulsing up into the night sky in unison in a powerful and evocative expression of community; audiences coming together to create the work and then witness it beam out into the universe.
Visible within 5km of the site (weather dependant) the Morse code is transmitted through physical and digital space, the light installation streamed as live video with and Morse code text subtitles, allowing audiences to share and access the work across locations, time zones, and via multiple translations and media.
Between us continues artist Michaela Gleave’s interest in connecting intimate experience with cosmological expression. It builds on previous works involving light and messaging in public space and references in particular Messages of hope, messages of love, a public art project conceived in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that invited audiences to share messages of hope and love via Morse code and live video stream. Messages of hope, messages of love was presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a live lighting installation with accompanying live stream and as part of Illuminate Adelaide in conversation with the band The Avalanches as a Morse code audio and live stream. Messages of hope, messages of love was supported by the City of Sydney and the New South Wales Government through Create NSW.