Inflatable Museum

www.kissmachine.org/inflated.html

The Inflatable Museum was created in 2001 as a gathering place for objects, performances and environments that were resigned to instability. Artists explored the structural parameters of a virtual exhibition space by contrasting flat "cyber" space with images of inflatability. My project essay and thoughts about this inflated chicken are on the website. Contributors included Shinobu Akimoto, Craig Buckley, Sheila Butler, Lucia Cipriano, Angela Hajdu, Paul Hong, Human Faux Pas, Michelle Kasprzak, Sandra Kasturi, Jake Kennedy, Karen McElrea, Flora Mcgarrell, Ana Rewakowicz, Gregory White, Jon Sasaki, Sherwin Tjia, and Inflatable Systems Ltd. This was an offshoot project of Kiss Machine. Original, killer, web design mimicked a then current cellphone company campaign, and was soberly replaced by an open-source model by the brilliant Emily Pohl-Weary.  

The eye of the realist is inflatable. 
- Michael Benedikt in "Motions after Man Ray" 

We are reminded of the smell of our own putrid, plasticized breath when we struggle with the nozzle of an inflatable object. The air shoots forth from the object's mouth; and the parameters of inflatability remain poetically out of bounds. 

The Inflatable Museum gathers objects, performances and situations that articulate a resignation to instability. The forum developed out of my intrigue for the poetics of simulative objects and environments: it is a poetry that negotiates parameters. As an adjective, the inflatable in Inflatable Museum grants the museum the overt ability to become inflated by its content. 

The museum is a deposit for art. It is also a structure for inflating or increasing, deflating or decreasing art -- both in currency and in circulation. 

The aim of the Inflatable Museum is to explore its own structural parameter when it consists of a virtual exhibiting space, given that, its content has the intrinsic ability to outperform the structure it is housed in, the structure of the Inflatable Museum itself. 

- Excerpt from curatorial statement by Paola Poletto