Crits and Exhibitions

I finished the installation project with an installation that I was mostly happy with. There was a crit of the work followed by an exhibition. From the crit it seemed apparent that a lot of the considerations of the work were evident in the final piece though it fell down in believability. People said that they didnt feel they were under the influence of laughing gas because of the size of the room and lack of sealing of the air in the space. An aspect that I hadnt realised was that people considered it an attempt to make the innanimate cow sculpture happy, despite his frown being painted on. So inevitably the understanding that people could be under an influential force like a gas was pretty quickly dismissed by the audience. What did work well though was the use of object, sound, light and space to lead you and to reveal aspects of the work in parts.
So from this I was left with two aims: 1: to create a more convincingly manipulative context and 2: to continue exploring how to make people fall in love with the cow. After all, it proved quite popular even without the later conviction that you maybe only liked it because you had taken in some laughing gas. I was even told that some people were having photographs taken with it.