Adventure Tune - Elise Reitze

Image Credit: O Photography

When I think what experimental art installation means, I think of weird sculptures or common household objects blended in with architectural oddities and shapes that don’t look very rad or engaging. It seems local WA artist Elise Reitze aims to challenge such a view on experimental art with her latest interactive art installation, created during her residency at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) over the last few months.

Elise is a young West Australian artist and electronic composer fresh out of UWA, who has united her love for electronic music composition and experimental interactive art to create a piece called ‘Adventure Tune’. Think of it like your own ‘Adventure Time’, with satisfying minimalist house beats and instead of Jake and Finn you get a cute little robot voice to guide you through the journey. Elise’s installation is something of a ‘choose your own adventure’, encouraging you to step inside and be engaged with riddles in the colourful darkness and a soundscape of electronica ticking away in the background. Definitely an unusual experience, you solve the quest with a sequence of buttons and by following the robot's instructions, but you can just dance to Elise’s unique sounds too.

Inspired by futuristic adventure video games, such as Portal, and her personal interest in electrical engineering, Elise has laboured away for months and months with an engineer, building a piece of art that is accessible, challenging and above all, quite fun. The installation, despite it's small-ish size, has over 400 metres of cable in it, which given the room is relatively mind-blowing. There’s also a bunch of different sensors that you’ll use to finish the adventure – for example inside the colour station you can hold any object up to the sensor and it will change the whole platform into the colour of that object. Technology is so bloody amazing!

If you’re passing by PICA or just into unconventional artistic expression, you should give Adventure Tune a go. The cute robot will guide you through the puzzle and you score a sweet couple of minutes of dance party if you complete the quest correctly.

You can find Elise’s installation upstairs at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in Northbridge, and it will run until Sunday August 16.

Elise's project was supported by the DCA and the Australian Council for the Arts.