A Moment of Silence
Coinciding with Israel’s 70th anniversary, the CCA presents a new commission in the “Captive Portal” series, which consists of artworks made specifically to be viewed on mobile devices before they access the gallery’s Wi-Fi. Ziv Schneider and Shirin Anlen’s A Moment of Silence is an interactive project that can only be experienced by two or more participants. Each person places their thumbs on their smartphone for 60 seconds while their phones sound a “siren” composed of one device playing the word “Yes” while the other plays “No”. If one of the participants releases their grip, they will need to start the ceremony all over again in order to access the Wi-Fi network.
About the Artists: Shirin Anlen and Ziv Schneider are multidisciplinary artists working at the intersection of video games, storytelling and experimental making. Together they work as Raycaster, an experience design studio focused on the use of emerging technology in documentary storytelling and cultural preservation.
Project Developer: Avner Peled
About Captive Portal “Captive Portal” is a digital “fifth wall,” a gallery wall accessed by visitors on their mobile wireless devices during their visit to the CCA, where the Wi-Fi platform is available throughout the building. We constantly navigate Wi-Fi spaces in our daily lives, and connect with them through “captive portals” that are usually used for commercial advertising by large corporations, but it can also serve as an invisible “canvas.”
The CCA takes advantage of the constant obsessive search for WiFi, by both humans and cellular machines, to “captivate” or trap audiences into viewing a temporary, site-specific work of art before continuing to surf the net or use their mobile device. The project manipulates the very moment when visitors disconnect from the gallery space and enter an immaterial “space” rife with possibility.
“Captive Portal” is curated by Yoav Lifshitz, Tal Messing, and CCA Curator Chen Tamir.
Image: Still from video documentation, Eyal Agivayev