Experiment No.1 is one of the student-led Art Lab’s first exploratory projects, which aims to set out the premise for what it means to make art and consume art at Fulbright. It is currently displayed in the Art Alley at our Crescent Campus.
Counterintuitively, the exhibition does not intend to be a static showcase of artistry, art forms, or artistic content. The idea behind it is meant to be contingent, and its forms and content indeterminate.
On Tuesday November 27 the artworks were first shown on the white walls in clusters, each of which is labeled under an art form category and suggests an individual and subjective storyline related to being a Co-Designer at Fulbright.
Through time, they are displaced, scrambled, altered, eliminated and replaced by other works piece by piece.
Frequent observers on campus cannot help but speculate about the directionality—or perhaps a lack thereof—of how the works are curated in relation to their own arbitrary time scales; they may ask if the time and date in which the changes are made reflect any happening in real life, what exactly are such happenings, and whether they correspond with the collective dynamics of every Co-Designers, those of the artists or just that within one art consumer.
In fact, you also cannot take photos of those changes everyday without changing your posture and feeling a bit uncomfortable: on the first day of exhibition, you have to kneel down and walk along an alley to look at some works, then you need to literally look up to the artists’ name displayed a head higher than you.
Within the scale of the Experiment No.1, Art Lab initially ventures into just a handful of art disciplines, like photography, conceptual art, digital art and installation.
Their coalescence, however, represents Fulbright students’ transdisciplinary (and sometimes even anti-disciplinary) approaches to questions, perspectives and creations.
If you visit the Art Alley once every month, you will behold the project’s dramatic metamorphoses of forms and content: you never know if next month there’s a whole 3D mural of participatory art, or an on-site avant-garde performance in the mise-en scène of a Netflix TV show!
And you may never distinguish when the Experiment No.1 terminates, or whether it perpetually adapts, transforms and matures—just like Fulbright University Vietnam.
Nguyen Cao Nghi, President of Art Lab and Co-Design Student
“The Enterprise of Making Sense of Art (Prototype)”, 2018
Conceptual art with brain EEG
