Mala Kumar: Leaving a Mark
Humans have left their mark wherever they’ve gone since the beginning of time. It’s a way of reaffirming ourselves and our bodies; place-making in its most elemental form. Mark-making is a natural impulse even for non-artists that can take myriad forms: from ancient cave paintings to modern-day smartphone apps that allow users to leave reviews of places they’ve been. Mark-making within the interactive installation and public art domains can usually be placed in at least one of three categories: intentional mark-making, unintentional mark-making, and uncertain mark-making.
Intentional mark-making: A simple, powerful project that involves little more than a piece of chalk, spray paint, and an empty wall, Candy Chang’s project Before I Die asks residents of a city to share their hopes and dreams as part of a public mural that anyone can contribute to.
Unintentional/unsuspecting mark-making: Jonathan Chomko and Matthew Rosier’s project Shadowing uses an infrared sensor system and a series of projectors to record pedestrians’ shadows as they pass under a street lamp. The projection-mapped shadows are then played back and re-recorded with new pedestrian shadows, creating an on-going dialogue.
Uncertain mark-making: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation Please Empty Your Pockets, invites participants to place any small item they might have in their bags or pockets on a conveyer belt that are then recorded by an overhead scanner and stored in a database. When the participant removes their item from the belt, a projected image of the object is left behind alongside images from past objects, and is used to accompany future objects. Participants are left unsure about where the scan of their object is going, and when it would reappear.
In all three examples, the awareness level of the participants and the ambiguity of the outcome of the marks they left behind are variables that the artists modified in some way. In Chang’s project, the participants is provided the tools and a prompt along with all the marks that previous people left in the space, whereas in Shadowing the participant is mostly unaware of the mark they are leaving behind - until there’s a moment of realization that their shadows are being recorded and played back alongside those from past pedestrians. In Hemmer’s piece, participants are aware of the mark-making functionality of the conveyer belt, but the outcome still feels ambiguous.
