The Narrator Is Present (2017)
performance, audio, live-stream online, duration variable

The Narrator is Present is an immersive audio work, with narrative ambiguity and a sinister underbelly. It explores visibility and surveillance in public spaces, social politics, and the ways rhetoric and storytelling can be manipulated by others. It considers the ambiguity between fiction and reality, the real and the unreal, the known and the imagined. How can we distinguish fictional narrative from truth among the multitude of disembodied voices on the Internet? Who is it that is speaking to us and what do they want?

As visitors enter the gallery, an unknown narrator describes their actions within the gallery. The narrative may be an accurate documentary of real-life events or the narrator may stray into fiction - sometimes playful, sometimes troublingly divisive in nature.

Derived from the artists interest in the dislocated relationship of image, sound, and phenomenology, Ballard seeks to question our relationships with people, places, and objects, and the shifting meanings of time, presence, and liveness in a technology mediated world.

Existing simultaneously in the gallery and online, the work exploresthe dualistic experiences of the virtual and the physical, and the ways in which these two spaces contribute to a single reality. Audiences are being watched, potentially around the world. Will audiences choose to protest, play along, or simply observe?

Streamed every day of the show during opening hours.

Please note: this is a live artwork. Neither Furtherfield nor the artist (Alison Ballard) are responsible for the events that unfold during this live event.