Flaxton's Dinner Party is a video installation with a difference. On entering the room the audience is confronted with a real table, laid with plates and cutlery. Suddenly, virtual hands reach out and begin to eat and conversations start. The audience can sit and participate alongside these virtual presences and construct whatever group interaction they choose.
This release of fantasy is very different from that of earlier works exploiting the same situation. I am thinking of Judy Chicago's formal feminist feast 'The Dinner Party' (1979), which highlighted women's history with a mixed media depiction of famous women, and Diller and Scofidio's 'Indigestion' (1996), an interactive video installation where two characters met across a dinner table and only their animated hands appear on screen, their witty dialogue gradually revealing a murder mystery.
By creating a more open situation, where they can participate on equal terms, Flaxton invites the audience into a deeper imaginative engagement with the installation, and people feel they have the permission and playful freedom to comment on and react to the oblivious guests. As such it has far more in common with constructed narratised play encouraged by a media artist like Paul Sermon in installations such as 'Telematic Dreaming'. Flaxton has created a minor masterpiece in the clarity of his vision and the exploitation of the disconnect between two competing realities occupying the same space.
In a world where artist's video installations can all too often be either obscurely portenteous or mundanely repetitive, it is refreshing to encounter a slice of the everyday and an invitation to join in or observe, without pressure or humiliation. When shown previously in the UK, whole families have enjoyed the experience and left feeling enriched and enlivened.
Professor Martin Rieser, Digital Imaging, Bath Spa University, July 2005
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