TOTAL INTERVENTION
When I first saw the World Wide Web in 1994
my immediate thought was...
This changes everything.
Art can be everywhere at once.
The following year I was invited to exhibit in the
Detroit Institute of Arts [DIA] 1995 Interventions exhibition.
Artists were asked to place, or intervene, their art in a gallery appropriate to their style.
I was immediately driven to express my newfound discovery that indeed
"Art could be everywhere at once."
Art is no longer bound by museum and gallery walls.
Artists can interact directly with a global audience.
The concept of a "Total Intervention" at the DIA arose in my mind.
I would
not simply hang my paintings in some gallery,
I would virtually take over the total museum and replace the DIA collection
with those of mine and my friends.
To that end I designed a virtual walkabout of the DIA
in Macromedia Director.
To conceal computer monitor and create a post-industrial irony
I invited the gifted sculptor Matt Blake
to
create the display unit from industrial castoff,
as seen with me seated at it above.
For those unable to view it at the DIA
I create this website emulation of the Total Intervention walkabout.
The website was connected live from the display computer to the Internet allowing
me to evolve it throughout the exhibition.
This website was first created in 1995. It has been updated slightly,
by addition of this explanatory page,
but kept in its original appearance and coding.
The aged site demonstrates the bandwidth constraints necessitated
by the slow phone modem connections of those days,
made visible by the small .gif images
and the simple html coding required to conform
to the primitive and buggy browsers of 1995.
Does the experience of visual art require the audience to be present before its physical entity?
Can art escape its physical presence and brighten the lives of the physically confined and those
who time, distance, and ability would never experience?
Welcome to Total Intervention
"The Web Unites" digital painting by Lowell Boileau 1995
INTRODUCTION - DENOUEMENT
