Butterfly Searchin for a Relax

HILDE & BÅRDTØRDAL | 2000 | INSTALLATION, MODEL TANKS, ELECTRONICS, ELECTROMECHANICS

Butterfly Searchin’ for a Relax is an installation with a stage set room and two remote-controlled models of WW2 tanks. The audience entered the exhibition space with the two tanks running on the floor, and at the far end stood a large wooden construction with two black cones protruding from each side. After the initial confusion a cat and mouse game usually ensued, the audience being chased by the tanks until they discovered the hidden door into the control room at the back of the exhibition space. Inside this room there were two chairs, two remote-control stations with video monitors, two opposing windows with a view of landscape flying past far below the room, the sound of wind, a lamp and a painting. When seated at the controls the visitors could choose either the blue or red monitor and control one of the tanks.

We let this installation borrow it’s title from the first line in the Digable Planets song Pacifics (NY is Red Hot) from their 1993 album, Reachin’ (a new refutation of time and space). The song is about singer Ishmael Butler’s (aka Butterfly) New York lazy Sunday search for jazz, friends, cold drinks and art:

“Who me? I’m coolin’ in New York, I’m chillin’ in New York
The hoods is on my block and the brothers at the court
The baseball hats is on and the projects is calm
Dream time’s extended and highly recommended”

In our installation we made two distinct, mirrored worlds. A fake room with a fake view and a real computer game affecting real people. The “butterfly searching for a relax in our installation” was the gamer, shutting out a complicated world for a few hours, diving into the other world – the computer game. In our installation the title hides a darker theme: In the world of Lepidopterists relaxing a butterfly has a different meaning: the dead butterfly needs to be “relaxed” using chemicals to let the wings be opened so the specimen can be pinned in it’s display box.

Is our relaxing of the mind, playing, inventing and dreaming the way for us to spread our wings – or does the modern world of screens have a more sinister sedative effect on us…

“Butterfly Searchin for a Relax” was our first installation in which we made the audience an active part of the exhibition room. Without the audience the installation simply didn’t work – so for us this was an experiment just as much as a work of art. We had seen various attempts at getting the audience to participate in art exhibitions and one of the things we discussed was the necessity for the audience to have some anonymity. The entrance to the control room was hidden from view at the far end of the exhibition space, and most visitors became entangled in the moving tanks long before before they found the door. The visitors that did make it into the control room, quickly understood how to control the tanks.

Having experienced what it was like to be in the room with the tanks they built on their experience, and slowly the audience participation evolved: each new visitor adapting the behaviour of the previous visitor and refining the possibilities the tanks, exhibition space and the anonymity gave.

The game became more and more brutal, and after a week we started getting the first injuries. The collectively mind of the generations of operators had now mapped the possibilities of the exhibition space and discovered where to hide, where to set up ambush points and how to lure unsuspecting visitors into a trap. Two of the last tank operators were especially brutal. One of the tanks enticed an unsuspecting visitor into a trap, the other tank ramming its weight of seven kilos of combined aluminum, steel and batteries into the achilles heel of the victim at full speed.