Images are everywhere. It is thought that they make up around one-fifth of the content on the world wide web, not to mention their infiltration of magazines, newspapers, billboards, shops, cafés, restaurants and clothing. Images are used by advertisers, broadcasters, politicians, teachers, and of course artists, to document, record, inform and persuade.

But, in a world obsessed and some might say, overpopulated, by imagery, who is looking at image making itself? Referencing theatre, fashion and advertising AIRImages are looking to blur the boundaries between the different outlets of images. They are a London-based collective concerned with the process of image making and the environment, invisible to the finished image, that nevertheless fostered the making of it. Their multi-disciplinary work spans mediums including photography video and animation, and habitations including the street, the stage and the studio.

The trio have recently taken part in London Design Festival, where they were invited to conduct an interactive photo shoot as part of the project, PopUpHOUSE. They also travelled to Sweden to take part in Stockholm Fringe Festival 2010. The next event on the agenda is Fishtank Festival, a two-day event taking part just off Brick Lane, in East London. I caught up with two-thirds of the collective, Betinna Johna and Jaime Leme, to ask them about their plans for the festival and to find out more about their work in general.

This is your second time at the Fishtank Festival, having been at FishBowl at Queen of Hoxton earlier this year, how important are festivals and pop-up shows to you? And how important do you think they are to the art scene in general?

Bettina:
As artists working in both the applied and fine art environment it has been rather difficult for us as organisers often don’t know how to perceive our work. Festivals and pop-up events have been the most open to new art forms and a much-needed platform, particularly for live-art and interventions.

Referencing theatre, fashion and advertising hasn’t made it easy to get heard by galleries and curators. The most interesting outlet for us, therefore, has been these sorts of experimental events that aim to blur those boundaries, asking questions of what art can be and how much it is dependent on a product an/or an object. We were invited to an exhibition earlier this year with the heme ‘Holding time’, It was curated by Darshana Vora and was dealing with exactly those questions.
My perception of Fishtank is very similar in that it blurs the boundaries between high and mainstream culture. Lewis and Lee (the organizers) don’t make a clear distinction between fine art, performing art and applied arts, which makes it much more accessible for a wide range of people.

With pop-up shops it is very similar; the boundaries are not that clear. I refer that back to the sheer essence of the idea, which is not institutionalized, ephemeral and aims to be an alternative to permanent spaces, without etiquette. Pop-up spaces are much more about shopping, looking and mingling than they are about purchasing expensive art. Particularly students or emerging artists and designers organize pop-up spaces, probably because of exactly the situations with galleries, curators and institutionalized art.

On your website there are examples of your work on the street, in the studio and on stage. What space do you most like to work in?

Bettina:
That is a really good question. All of these spaces are interesting in their own right. In the studio one has much fewer chance situations and more control over the image. You have to invite people, have to think about the set or the backdrop, the light, simply everything. The only thing that is open is the reaction of the people you work with. For studio works, we tend to invite people and see what happens and by doing this we increase the moments of chance. Of course in the street it is very different. Everything is open. That can be very liberating….

With the stage it is much more complex. It would be worth explaining what I mean by this: the stage can be everywhere and is therefore more a mental space than a geographic one. The stage can happen spontaneously on the street, or in a gallery, festival, studio or at home. In front of the camera there is always the underlying idea of the stage, with the camera being the audience. This circumstance evokes a much more expressive and performative notion of posing in front of the camera. In essence that was the notion of our work when we started.

Dependent on what we want one space is better than the other. I really like situations like the Fishtank Festival in the Rag Factory; lots of people, lots of stuff hanging around, music and obscure hidden corners.

Can you tell us a bit about the project you have planned for the Fishtank Festival?

Bettina:
A mentioned this is the second time with Fishtank and so we have a better idea of what to expect in terms of the kind of audience and space. We want to develop our work, as of course we do with each show. We realized the last time we had a show, which was in Stockholm at the Theatre Fringe Festival, that we didn’t want to have our participants feel exposed. So this time we will have a black box and lots of surprises, disclosed to the audience until they decide to come in and play. We will play with the ideas of Q&A sessions, the photo-booth and Facebook.

A lot of your projects rely on and require engagement with the audience or with the wider general public, how do people typically respond to your work?

Jaime:
There are all sorts of different responses to our work, and that’s exactly what we are looking for: to create a platform where the participants have a say, and where they decide and direct what their image should look like. By doing so we try to avoid the tendency of media to control the images that are going to be published and exhibited to the public. We see ourselves more as facilitators to help each one to find the best way to express and play around with images and props (photography and fashion).

Bettina:
There is no general response. Each audience is different dependent on the context . Art’s people are different from festival visitors from passers-by from, you name it. Some people are more experimental and open than others. Fashion, for example, tends to be more uptight than the theatre. Some people love to perform and try new things, some people are much more shy and need a different approach, which is much more sensitive and less exposing. On the other hand some love the exposure.

In our society we are bombarded with imagery and often it has a commercial or political motive, what message do you hope that your images convey?

Jaime:
First of all we try explicitly to avoid any motive, and find a way to use images in such a way that they represent a free interaction between participants, without super imposing or having a layout behind to produce a “fake” understanding of reality. We are aware that the general public has an understanding of art and media, and that everyone is aware of the possible manipulations of photography. But in a society where celebrities and fashion manipulate the images we see in the “real” world, sometimes it is easy to get caught in the idea that one should dress up in a certain way or that images should look like that as well: that’s when the commercial and political use of images takes one’s freedom away!

Aesthetics are fundamental for the understanding that mediated images (photography or video) and performance, live images are the same: images used to communicate something, and this can be obscure and hidden if there’s a commercial or political reason behind. Ideally our images express what the participants want, they decide how they should look like and they behave like they want to behave. We would like that our images are the result of a free interaction.

Bettina:
But generally I think images are always political whatever you do and how much you try to subvert that.

To see AIRImages in action visit Fishtank Festival, which is taking place from 27th – 28th November. For more information and to book tickets, see the Fishtank Festival website.

For more information about AIRImages visit the AIRImages website or the AIRImages blog.