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Realness is an interactive artwork that samples pixels and recorded audio from your webcam and requires access to function.

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Realness is an interactive, participatory web browser-based artwork that samples pixels and recorded audio from the webcams of user's devices. The artwork is an accumulated browser history of captured data and user interactions. The data is fragmented and overlaid with other user's data to create an ever-changing generative audiovisual experience.

The artwork is part of a series of works that queers the digital photographic medium by harnessing the malleability of the electronic image. Queering is used as an approach in the work to undermine visual recognition to find a more open and variable mode of rendering that disrupts societal norms and essentialized notions of identity. The artwork transforms photographic representation into abstraction as a form of revolt against normativity, and to allow room to imagine other forms of being.

The sound component builds upon the central concepts of the visual work, in conversation with the growing ubiquity of technology and its effect on users. It provides the opportunity for users to ‘interact’ with an algorithm in real-time, encouraging discussion surrounding the monolithic ‘Algorithm’ pervasive in today’s society. The sound work forms a live ‘stream’ similar to a social media feed where non-contextual snippets of user’s lives are recomposed and connected.

Realness was developed and presented by Wesley Dowling with sound design by Liam Power in partnership with Bunjil Place for the 2021 Midsumma Festival.

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