Incredible Witness is a public laboratory that asks: how can people ever be “credible witnesses” when even the most basic perceptions, such as color vision or spatial awareness, differ drastically from person to person? We live in a historical period where many traditional binaries are breaking down. Some of the most basic assumptions about social life and hierarchies are fragmenting--ideas around gender, race, sexuality, and ability are being questioned and re-framed. Incredible Witness seeks to encourage this disintegration, and find ways of learning to accept each other fully, beyond the categories. In the Incredible Witness laboratory, we invite people into unusual perceptual worlds to bring home viscerally how different each person’s experience of the world can be, using games and game-based environments. Our talk will review the results of our participatory experiments and point to future activities.
Speaker
Lauren Bierly
Lauren Bierly is an arts professional and artist living / working in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Manager of Special Exhibitions and Projects for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bierly's experience in New York City's non-profit arts scene includes exhibition management and administrative support to artists and curators through the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA), the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Eyebeam: Art and Technology Center, Christie’s New York and other organizations. Since 2009, she's produced more than twenty-five independently curated exhibitions, nearly 100 exhibition-related events, and co-directed an artists-administrators residency serving New York City’s five boroughs. Bierly balances her arts profession with an art practice in perception-based theory—predominantly synesthesia. Her installations have most recently been exhibited at Tagore Center: Indian Center for Cultural Relations (Kolkata, India), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Feldenheimer Gallery (Portland, OR), and Emergent Art Space (San Francisco, CA). Incredible Witness is Bierly's first community engagement project, adding tremendous value to her research and understanding of all walks of life and the artwork she produces.
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