The Emergency Room Art Format
When an art institution has agreed to host the Emergency Room format it is given the license to produce and exhibit a local version of the art format. This allows Emergency Room to be actualized several places across the world at the same time, intensifying the community and its effect. Other formats by Thierry Geoffroy include Awareness Muscle, Protest Fashion and Biennalist. These are all derived from Emergency Room and are available as smaller and more mobile alternatives to the core format.
Part of the Emergency Room format is a certain perfected system and savoir faire executed and taught to the collaborating artists by the ER staff. Punctuality is a keystone when the artwork of yesterday daily at 12.30 p.m. is removed from the Emergency Room to give space to the artwork of today. This ritual is called “The Passage” and is the central element of the constant changing Emergency Room. Some days 20 artist will turn up for the Passage, other days only 10. On rare occasions the alerting apathy of people is proven by nobody showing up. Other days the news of the day will start a storm of reactions from outraged or thrilled artists, creating a creative explosion of awareness to be witnessed by all the lucky visitors and media present at the time of the Passage. Here the true energetic symbiosis of the artist as representative of the public opinion is revealed and fed back into the media channels.
Emergency Room can be combined with the Delay Museum where yesterday’s artwork is archived. This museum is no longer contemporary in the sense of the word used by Emergency Room but will be delayed (“retard” in French). This “delay” of opinions, where past reactive interpretations are preserved, is a critical way of thinking about contemporary art even though it is still extremely contemporary compared to the customary use of the word. The Delay Museum is a place for studying the aesthetics of the emergency. The fast moving Emergency Room is kept under constant observation in order to document events and changes in artistic aesthetics. Documentation is both external in the form of media stories and internal in the form of blogs, webcasting and artist interviews collected by the ER Staff for use in future ER Publications. The documentation ensures a constant high level of activity, people engagement and inclusion. Emergency Room is a carefully prepared environment for hectic bursts of creation.
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