Glasgow-based artist Alan Currall’s new interactive work Encyclopædia used reality television, with its fly on the wall format, as its point of departure to create a kind of social experiment or observation with participants who analysed the everyday and ordinary. Currall asked his friends and relations what they knew about a broad range of topics. Their responses were videotaped, compiled and indexed in a kind of personalised CD-ROM Encarta; the sum total of knowledge held within Currall’s immediate social network.
In another work Rules for Paradise on Earth Currall repeated deadpan to the camera the kind of advice that we have heard from friends and families on how to be happy and content and get along with others, the phrases actually taken from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (an obvious point-source for goodwill dispersed throughout Western cultures). Similarly, Currall’s earnestness in Message to My Best Friend revealed the cloying, suffocating truth of our affection for others.
Publication
Encyclopædia and other works
