Dejha Ti and Ania Catherine [Audience as Subject]

CADAF Artist Spotlight

Dejha Ti and Ania Catherine are experiential artists and producers based in Los Angeles. Spanning fine art, nightlife, and commercial realms, their collaborative practice brings together environments, bodies, and creative technology to design immersive experiences that draw audiences into their idiosyncratic worlds.

Rooted in the understanding that immersion is not only a physical state, but also an emotional and psychological one, their work is defined by nuance within scale, producing a feeling instead of a spectacle.

The production arm to the duo’s art practice, Operator, is an experiential art house that executes their large-scale multifaceted works and selectively that of like-minded organizations. They have partnered with cultural institutions and companies internationally including Adidas, LACMA, Harry Potter, Art Basel Hong Kong, SCAD Museum of Art, CICA Museum, and Amazon Audible.

What is the role of the ‘artist aura’ in the era of selfie museums? How many times have we created a work under the impression that it would be viewed from a distance, only to find that people really wanted to touch it, be inside it, or photographed with their backs to it? Experiential marketing and Instagrammable selfie stages (e.g. Museum of Ice Cream, 29 Rooms) have undeniably influenced the way people experience going to a gallery or museum.

We see a new generational desire in audiences to not just be the viewer, but the subject of an artwork. ‘On View’ incorporates this phenomenon into the creation of the work itself—it is intentionally incomplete without the audience-as-subject.

The audience-reactive exhibition by Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti, commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art, grapples with the reality that some attend not to see what is on view, but instead to see themselves on view. The exhibition photographs the audience-participants and puts them literally ‘On View’ via a custom engineered system that integrates TouchDesigner, real-time facial recognition, machine learning, kinetics and capacitive sensors. While ‘On View’ is a seemingly non-digital environment, technology is embedded into the atmospheric backdrop at every facet of the experience—a nod to ubiquitous computing. (‘On View’ is on view at SCAD Museum of Art, Feb 26 - Aug 25, 2019)

Learn more about CADAF and this project spotlight [here].

CADAF Homepage: https://cadaf.art/
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