backRealTime issue #57 Oct-Nov 2003 pg. 44
© Bec Dean; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]
When Experimenta director Liz Hughes and House of Tomorrow executive producer, Serafina Maiorano, visited the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in June this year, Tan Teck Weng’s work was showing as part of the Hatched National Graduate show. After some hasty negotiations, Teck’s gaming consoles, collectively titled Panopticon, have been included in the recently launched House of Tomorrow touring exhibition. Teck’s work deals with user interface and interactivity in both art and gaming culture. It is cleverly simple— constructing internal environments with some moving parts in tiny boxes that are recorded by an in-built camera and projected large, or connected to monitors with gallery environments. His boxes have an entirely functional aesthetic: they can be approached and picked up by viewers in many different ways, from gleeful abandon by enthusiastic children, to cautious and almost frightened anticipation by others. The ‘user’ in this case is able to “play God” (an apt description by critic Robert Cook) with the almost primal and childish motion of shaking the box. A recent graduate from School of Art, Curtin University of Technology, Teck is presently the web-master for the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth as well as working on some of his own web-based artworks.
