Bystander is a multichannel interactive video, sound and interactive installation by Australian artists Kate Richards and Ross Gibson. Bystander is one of the Life After Wartime suite which includes works; Crime Scene, LAW Live, Darkness Loiters, and the LAW CD-ROM. Bystander is the final work of the suite all of which is based on an unsorted and poorly documented archive of post-war crime scene and police photographs. Richards and Gibson have used these evocative images as the basis for a fictional narrative . That narrative unfolds according to the participants movement within the installation space and their interaction. A ‘kinaesthetic particle animation’ responds, reflects and feeds back on the relation between body and archive. The development of the narrative is keyed to the quality of movements of bodies in the space. A still and attentive participant unlocks a deeper and more focussed narrative unfolding while the hyperactive participant realise a more fragmented and playful experience.
The work establishes a complex play between a societal perception and response to a diffuse, arbitrary, and perhaps ambient criminality and violence and the more complex and highly contextual set of relations that have produced such an archive. In the process Bystander posits intriguing questions about the nature of the archive, narrative, technology (perhaps including the former two but extending to the institution, interaction, photography), and affect.