tête-à-tête

'tête-à-tête' was a collaborative artwork developed for the exhibition 'Digital Responses', held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2002. Barbara Rauch collaborated with Liz Chandler (art director at TwoWay Television).

The piece centred on the idea of the V&A as a meeting place and took the imagined personas of Rachel and Pandora as characters that discussed their iconic status as if in a chatroom. Physically the piece was two large acetates with digitally manipulated images of Rachel and Pandora suspended away from the wall to create a sense of an apparition. Concealed behind the supporting structure were speakers which admitted the sound of the conversation between the two characters.

In addition Rauch presented a cabinet of images gleaned from the V&A collection as if they were specimens which provided an imagined route through the V&A to source material that had been used as reference. In this way Rauch’s practice was opened up for scrutiny. The work was displayed in the V&A Gallery for one month but information on the piece could be referenced in the gallery through the on-line kiosk for the duration of the year.

Barbara Rauch was also a co-curator of the exhibition 'Digital Responses'.

• http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/digitalres...