Remote connections is a project I am currently developing that explores connectivity in remote locations.
It is in the early stages of production and I am very keen to find some people in remote Indigenous communities to work with – to collaboratively design online tools for flexible delivery.
If you would like to participate, or know some people who would be interested, please email me at bytetime at gemail dot com
For more information and updates go to the Geokult blog.
One of the things I find eternally interesting in discussions around art and technology is the question of what drives the production of the work. For some artists it is about the slick use of new technologies and the concept is either invisible or of secondary importance. For other artists, it is the process of discovery and using the technology to work through conceptual issues within their work. There is value in both approaches undoubtedly, but this value often does not translate to an equal representation in art exhibitions and art funding. There is also the additional issue of gender representation, which has recently been a hot topic on the faces list.
When I was at the recent ISEA2011 in Istanbul, I had a great time meeting up with old friends, making some new friends and sharing ideas about where electronic arts is and where it is going.
In a forthcoming post I will review some of my highlights of ISEA and show some of the projects that I personally found inspiring.
In this post I would like to unravel a notion of high and low fidelity in the space of media arts and online communications. Low and high fidelity is often a phrase used in UX design to describe ways of prototyping design. Low fidelity ranges from post-it notes and sketches to other basic forms of media to work through design and Information Architecture challenges, whereas high fidelity can mean anything from a fully marked up website in HTML and CSS to the use of Photoshop and Fireworks and other software to mockup designs (see my post on User Experience Fundamentals for more info).
High fidelity, low fidelity and Electronic Arts
So where is the value proposition in electronic arts (digital arts, art/sci, new media, and so on)? Is slicker, more tech reliant work *better* than work that explores the process not necessarily the outcome? Also, what constitutes as ‘art’ in this space. For example, I had a great conversation with Di Ball about Van Gogh’s chair and the relationship between blogging as a form of art and the notion of invention in electronic art (see her blog at http://thebeautyandthegeeks.blogspot.com/). Interestingly when I first met Di, we were both experimenting with web and back in the mid nineties it was a tres cool to even have a website, let alone one with animated gifs:-)
Di Ball - The beauty and the geeks
Anyway, I digress. I have seen some amazing work – some of which could be described as high fidelity and some equally great work which is comparatively low fidelity. I guess it comes back to what you are into – for me concept wins every time and I especially enjoy work that considers the implications of the technology being used. ( For example, I get quite annoyed with work that has the environment or climate change as its theme and is a power hungry, consuming beast that undermines the concept).
Also artists work in different ways – much of the high fidelity work relies on teams of image and sound renderers, programmers, etc, etc. What disappoints me is when those people are not recognised. Yes – the concept is important, but the work could not be realised without the support of many others.
High fidelity artwork is also more vulnerable to technical failure – I saw many potentially interesting works, that did not *work*.
Also, wrapped in this dynamic of high and low fidelity is the question of funding – many works do not have the benefit of large buckets of research money. To be honest, I prefer to see work that is inventive and manages to exist despite a lack of institutional support.
To conclude, I hope that curators take the time to consider more than just the slick end result and consider the value of work made via experimentation, innovation which may not have all the bells and whistles. It is worth remembering that when he was alive Vincent van Gogh had very little support for his work and the arts establishment were very dismissive of his experimental, investigative approach. Let us not go down the same path with electronic arts.
Perhaps we need more of this sentiment:
QR Code - Old Age Anarchy
Mediakult is very pleased to be publishing the first of a series of interviews with women working in the digital media space. the project is titled All about X, 0 and 1 and will be featuring a broad range of women artists, thinkers and cultural workers who have had a long association with arts and technology.
The first guest is Erica Seccombe, a Canberra based artist, who coincidentally also spent many formative years in Darwin (Northern Australia), and who also did some of her visual arts training in Darwin. Ironically, although we have many mutual friends in Darwin our paths never crossed until I came to Canberra in 2001.
I trust you will enjoy this interview with Erica Seccombe.
Nanoplastica - installation view at CCAS
I am very interested in how your digital work has evolved over time and would love to know more about your early background as an artist and how you were led to working with digital media and new technologies. Could you give me a bit of background to your work?
After high school I started at the Darwin Institute of Art and became interested in photography. I became fascinated with pinhole photography and how to get special effects by using filters and other dark-room developing methods; influenced by Man Ray and surrealists etc. Printmaking satisfied my other need to draw and really liked the idea of multiples and using technology and chemical processes – as with photography. I like the combination of photography and print processes, so to me it was natural that they all work nicely together alongside computer graphic programs and digital mediums.
I started using computers as soon as they became available to me. I left Darwin in ’87 to complete my undergraduate degree at Sydney College of the Arts in Printmaking. At this time they had just introduced a few of the early Mac models into the library. I was determined to learn how to use them but also felt a little intimidated and was not convinced they were any good for art. I have always typed so what won me over was the word processing functions which were so liberating. At the time photocopying also became more readily available so there were all these quick, new ways of making. Exciting times the 80s! Because I wanted to introduce text into my work, I started screenprinting and working out how to combine all these processes with colour – remembering that most of the outputs for technology back then were in black and white.
At the same time my best friends were researching AI and advanced computer programing at Sydney University. They would give me access to the labs overnight, so I could use more powerful computers with colour monitors and printers. They also took me to philosophy lectures at Sydney Uni. Hanging out with scientists and philosophers had a big influence on how my work developed. It started me thinking about the whole thing, the way we see and how technology was opening up new ways of seeing. I was only in my early twenties, and while I had a lot of ideas, I lacked confidence. I hadn’t yet realised I could link the science and philosophy knowledge to art theory and history and then to technology and my creative practice. But I began to educate myself and started asking questions through my practice and through research.
Up until I started a Diploma in Visual Art at SCA in ’96, my work had been mainly illustrative of things that happened to me, or people I knew, places I’d been, stories I’d heard, the emotions I felt etc. I really love the work of artists like Joy Hester and Barbara Hanrahan, and they had a big influence on me. I believe the need to reveal my life through images was a process I had go through as a young person. Sometimes people tell me that they preferred the work I used to do, and say the work I do now doesn’t embody a personal narrative and that only reflects the technology I use. I disagree – my work is still autobiographical and my work plays with notions of our understanding of contemporary technology.
My introduction to and use of computer technology forced me to think more critically about the intersection between science, technology and art. So my work very much reflects the journey I’m on, that we are all on, in this high tech era. For example, alongside my art practice I also started working in graphic design and publishing and also experienced there the change in these industries as computers were introduced. It is my concern and fascination for how far technology can go that drives my practice. Emergent technologies have also has changed the way I make work, although I still draw and screenprint when I can.
Completing a Master of Philosophy at the ANU helped solidify many of my ideas and it gave me an opportunity to write about research. I started to look at performance art and sculpture in context of new technologies, rather than just print based mediums, and that’s informed my new work a lot. I wrote a thesis on Chris Burden’s When robots rule, the two minute airplane factory and explored the performative qualities of this work, as part of Burden’s oeuvre, and then looked at the expectations of the technology as a social enquiry. Burden’s work was an automated production line that was supposed to produce balsa wood airplanes every two minutes that would shoot out into the Duveen Galleries at the Tate. The work is interesting because it was installed in 1999 on the wave of the Y2K hysteria, and as it happens the technology of the airplane factory never worked. This research helped to think about my own work, not as prints or online, but how it could be something else. The result of my Masters was having the confidence to approach the Department of Applied Mathematics at the ANU in 2005 and ask if it would be OK to apply for an artistic residency in their labs.
Seven individual screenprints on Canson paper; image: 20.4hx 115.3w cm; paper: 28h x 19.5w cm; each editioned in eight; signed Erica 07
Your recent series of work “Grow” is a result of a residency project, could you detail how it all came together?
My new project GROW ‘grew’ out of my Nanoplastica project which developed from my first residency with Professor Tim Senden at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the ANU. I started this work with a three month artist-in-residence in 2006 funded by artsACT. I had the opportunity to X-ray a selection of miniature plastic animals at the XCT facility. This is 3D Microcomputed Tomography X-ray technology which gives you full data-set of a static object. This means the data is in volumetric pixels with x,y & z coordinates. The plastic toys I used perfectly illustrated all the questions I have about our relationship with science, nature and technology. But to create Nanoplastica I had to go through a kind of baptism of fire – in that I had to learn how to use a scientific volume rendering program called Drishti in order to animate the data. It means I spend a lot of time in Vizlab at the ANU Super Computer Centre.
Drishti has been created by Dr Ajay Limaye and he named it so because ‘drishti’ means insight in Sanskrit. He built the program from scratch and has developed it as a much more user-friendly program from the one I started with in 2006, but I still have to keep using it to keep up. It gives you a completely different way of seeing or understanding an object – let alone trying to animate it for artistic purposes. The whole process really challenged me but I persevered. I really enjoy working with this research group, and they give me a lot of space to explore my ideas. I’m pleased that they have been happy for me to keep coming back. I am very lucky.
Since my first introduction to XCT in 2006, the technology has rapidly advanced and Prof Senden’s group have built some new XTC machines that scan faster and with larger objects. They have also been looking into 3D X-raying of dynamic systems such as water seeping through sand, or crushing of bone. This got me thinking about what kind of dynamic system I would be interested in. While creating Nanoplastica I had started to think really hard about the natural environment and how we define nature as either ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’ – particularly the debate about GM food crops and food security. I’m interested in understanding the GM food debate better. I’m not convinced that it is as bad as everyone makes it out to be – while mass production and monoculture crops for processed food is very concerning. I spent some time at the CSIRO where the research they are doing into crops is vital for biodiversity and resource management. Therefore I came to the idea to experiment with sprouting seeds and see if I could capture the germination process in 3D – hense the working title GROW. Hopefully I will be able to create work that allows and audience to experience the moment a seed begins to grow well beyond the scale of the original process.
Your project has been supported by a Synapse Residency. How did this work out for you?
I applied for so many grants and scholarships to keep going once my artsACT residency ended in 2006. I actually recorded in my 2008 and 2009 diary how much time it took to write applications and I spent a nearly third of the year applying for money. I worked full-time and look after my partner’s two children, so any time at the lab was always grabbed on days off or at night. I had dark moments hanging out washing where I wondered if I would have to give up thinking of getting back in the lab. I didn’t want to reapply for artsACT again but out of desperation I did and thankfully they funded my 2010 residency in Applied Maths as a Visiting Fellow. This has really opened a lot of doors for me. This is the only organisation at the time prepared to take the risk with my project. The down side was my employer at the time wouldn’t give me three months without pay, so I had to leave the security of a permanent position and find part time employment. That’s a scary decision when you contributing to the running of a family.
But this grant gave me the leverage to apply and be successful recipient of the 2010 Synapse Residency from ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology. This residency has been very important to me. I was unsuccessful in my first application a few years earlier, but I hadn’t really considered what the collaborative process with my host organisation really meant. But as my relationship with the Department developed my project became more involved with their processes, rather than just being for the sake of an artistic outcome. This residency really forced me to think more about some of the ideas in my work and how they fit together, or not as the case may be. I kept a project blog as part of the residency agreement, and this helped to sort out my thoughts and ideas that inform this new work. My project blog can be accessed at http://seccombe2010.anat.org.au.
I’ve also had a paper I gave about my project at a conference last year published and this can be found at http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/files/2011/03/finalforwebsite.pdf
There are some really interesting projects in this publication.
Still image from "Grow"
Why do you think that securing a grant was difficult for your project? Do you think there is a divider between digital work that gets collected and work that is not supported by the establishment? Or do you think curators and galleries are applying old aesthetic sensibilities to digital work?
I suppose there are a lot of factors. Luck being the draw card and how much you get the work out there. But I think it is also who you know, and how close you get into the radar of collecting institutions or galleries. I had a look at the new John Kaldor Gallery at AGNSW, and there are some really beautiful digital works on display, none of whom are by women I might add. In fact there were only two women in the whole hang, Not that I went in counting, but it did occur to me when I left the room. But if you didn’t know, you would leave that exhibition thinking that women don’t make digital art worthy of collecting. But I did read a pretty interesting book recently by Stephen Jones called ‘Synthetics’, which looks at emergence of new technologies in art in Australia from the 1950s to the mid 70s, and he does point out that while major galleries were excepting experimental work overseas, Australia was very late to catch on. But when you look at what OzCo are doing with supporting grants etc, and ANAT, you can see how there are an increasing number of opportunities to develop projects. I think the universities need to realise that there could be big business in looking at collaborate projects without expecting a final result, or major outcome, that the collaboration itself will breed innovative ideas that can be assessed or valued differently. They need to work out a framework were they can justify experimental and interdisciplinary projects.
You are now a candidate for a PhD in Photography and Digital Media at the ANU School of Art, can you describe this research project?
Essentially I’ve rolled my project GROW into a PhD research project. Last year I was talking to Associate Professor Helen Ennis who suggested to me that this would be a good way to progress the work after the Synapse residency. I’m glad I took her advice. I’ve been awarded a APA scholarship which will help keep the project going for a few years. It means I only have to work part time to earn money. But since I started the PhD this year I’ve really enjoyed taking this project to another level. I’m still looking at dynamic systems in 3D X-ray but it has forced me to read and write more and I’m enjoying the challenge of linking contemporary ideas of nature to sprouting agricultural seeds. I’m also starting to contemplate how this work will eventually be shown and in what medium. Perhaps this time I should look at making it interactive. I am currently writing a paper for conference at the end of September for a symposium in NZ called Animating Space Time, so I’m having to consider this work a bit differently in the way the images come together, rather than explain the project as a whole, but its good to look at it from different angle.
I noticed on your website that you were recently involved in a discussion as part of http://www.genartsys.com/ titled “Conversations in Digital Strategies 1.0 | Convergence of Funding and Platforms”. Could you share with me some of the key issues raised?
I wasn’t part of the discussion, but part of the exhibition curated and exhibited at OzCo headquarters in Sydney by Kathryn Gray, Fee Plumley and Deborah Turnbull. The brief was to showcase projects specifically where artists incorporated digital media into their traditional practice in order to augment experience or accessibility. It included 19 artists who had been on Synapse residencies and received other project grants. I found out that this group was short listed from 931 other successful grant applicants. So it shows there is a lot of work happening out there. I was a bit worried as the work I exhibited there is very unresolved so I doubt anyone would have had any idea what they were looking at. I gave them a digital animation that shows a 3D mung bean rotating and that shows about four stages of germination. I don’t think the work really gives an idea of the experience I had making the work, or working with AppMaths. So I feel weird about having to show unfinished work, but it was really nice to be asked. I got to see the show and there were some very interesting interactive digital works with new media and portable technologies.
I did take part in an interesting discussion this year as part of the pubic program around an exhibition Natural Digression I was in at UTS Gallery. It was with UTS academics Katrina Schlunke & Lian Loke and we talked about ideas surrounding fact and fiction in art, and the role science, technology and art play in the discovery of truth, and how notions of fact and fiction come into being. Katrina and Lian were great and really interesting. It was an opportunity for me to describe what it is like working with science and technology and the challenges of not creating didactic work, and going beyond the ‘truth’ of the data.
The exhibition Natural Digression is a product of a really nice relationship I have with six other artists who use a whole range of mediums. Even though they don’t necessarily use technology to make work all the time, but they are very much influenced by science, technology and nature as a subject. We have great conversations about our work, so exhibiting with them I don’t feel like I have to be labeled solely as a digital artist. They are Penelope Cain, Waratah Lahy, Al Monro, Ellis Hutch and Rose Montebello. This iteration of the show was curated by Yolande Norris.
I’m also on a discussion panel as part of the 5th World summit of Art and Culture in Melbourne this October with Professor Tim Senden and Gavin Artz from ANAT.
Lastly, where do you think the future of digital arts is headed – what are the threats and opportunities?
As long as we still have access to computers and equipment there will be digital arts. The more accessible it is the more digital art we will see. It doesn’t mean it will be good, or original or groundbreaking, but that is the challenge for digital artists and audiences, to be critical and observant. I think its important for digital artists to look at all forms of art, and ideas, and not be limited to one style or method. Probably the creative process will become linked to program writing, and the innovation will surface with interactive and virtual systems. Anyway, I’m more interested in ideas. I think if an idea works better as a painting, print or sculpture, then why make it digital.
On a more practical level, I’ve come to realise that most galleries are only just catching up with equipment to display audio and visual digital art in interesting ways. While you might have the most original and ambitious ideas for installing digital work it still depends on your budget or accessibility. Exhibiting this medium as large-scale projections also requires new skills for designing spaces for installations. However, technology is changing so rapidly. Our kids now have interactive touch screens in all the classes at school and technology is definitely becoming more accessible and portable. There was some government survey released last month that predicted that most individuals will have their own electronic tablet in some short amount of time. Can’t recall the exact statistics.
However, it is trickier for any artist to establish an interdisciplinary project with science or industry. It takes a lot of time and work to learn and gain skills with new technologies. As an artist it is also hard to work out what the potential is for these new technologies within an art practice. I think it is important that our community recognizes the potential for inter-arts projects, or accepts that some projects might not have outcomes in the traditional artistic sense.
Thanks Erica for your thoughtful responses to my questions. If you would like to find out more about Erica’s work go to her website at http://www.ericaseccombe.com.au/
Lost at the Spice Bazzar or 'Leeches at the Pet Market'
One of the biggest challenges we have experienced in Istanbul is actually working out where we are on the map. It is relatively easy to identity significant sites like the Hagia Sofia, The Blue Mosque and Taksim Square, but to try and find small galleries, restaurants and hotels off the main streets is somewhat difficult. We have four different tourist maps of the Sultanahmet and Taksim areas of the city and none of them are the same. That said, we have now been here nearly a week and have worked out how to get to most places that we want to go to.
We have also experienced other issues with access, primarily around accessing the Internet. At our hotel the WiFi connection changes with the wind, despite a wireless transmitter being on every floor. At the moment we are sitting on the rooftop terrace and the wind seems to be holding thankfully. Besides, there could be a lot worse places to sit and wait to the WiFi to blow in.
Navigating the ISEA2011 festival is also somewhat challenging, both physically and virtually as there is so much happening at many locations around the city.
Nicholas Knouf made these incisive comments about accessing the main ISEA2011 venue on the -empyre- list:
This requires being checked off of a list and then traveling through a metal detector with your belongings x-rayed. You find yourself in front of two gleaming towers of uncountable numbers of floors that reflect the blue sky. You realize that this is not the university, but rather the headquarters for Sabanci Holding (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sabanci_Group), which appears to be the largest industrial and financial conglomerate in Turkey, while also the organization behind the founding of Sabanci University. Once you make your way through men and women in perfectly tailored business suits and executives being escorted into Mercedes to be driven to power lunches, you find yourself in front of another metal detector and x-ray machine which may or may not be used (I didn’t have to go through it when I entered). Inside is bland corporate decor not unlike anything else in the globalized world. Hacker or DIY space this certainly is not, and the internet seems to block anything that doesn’t travel on ports 80 or 443 (meaning any local e-mail clients on computers or smartphones won’t work; Blackberries won’t work; and seemingly only web traffic will go through).
Language is also proving a challenge at times. Many people do not understand English and when we have attempted to speak Turkish quite often we just get shrugged shoulders. What we have found effective however, especially in cafes and on the tram is to use French. This is quite hilarious as our French is very rudimentary, though expressions like ‘Pardon?’ and ‘Bon chance’ seem to be working well.
As we finish writing this blog, we now are at the Karakoy campus of the Sabanci University, because there is no WiFi access at our hotel. Apparently (according to the hotel manager), the entire area of Sultanahmet is without Wifi. Hmmm, I don’t think so.
Despite the challenges in access and language, we are still enjoying Istanbul and ISEA2011. We have seen some wonderful exhibitions as part of ISEA2011 and the Istanbul Biennial, which we will report on later.
This post has also been published in Geokult.
On 24 August 2011, I participated in a workshop titled “User Experience Fundamentals” as part of the UX Australia conference, facilitated by Cennydd Bowles (@cennydd) and James Box (@boxman).
UX Design
I am a little confused to the exact difference between User Experience Design (UXD, UX Design) and User Centered Design (UCD). To be honest, I don’t think it really matters. What does matter is that this approach to design is about making things better and easier for humans.
Anyway, for those new to the field, UXD has evolved primarily through consideration of human factors and ergonomics also incorporating aspects of psychology, anthropology, sociology, computer science, graphic design, industrial design and cognitive science. UXD may also involve other content design disciplines such as communication design, instructional design, or game design.
The scope of the UCD process is directed at affecting “all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.”
This was an excellent workshop for people new to UX design as well as more experienced designers. James and Cennydd went through the essential steps of the UX design process and added in some great ways to get user information easily and cheaply.
We started off by looking at the juggling relationship between client and user by mapping strategies such as stakeholder interviews, defining organizational culture and goals to user needs to help a mutually beneficial outcome.
Some good “Red Flags”:
I really liked their hybrid approach to designing for usability - in particular their emphasis on finding the gap between business requirements and user needs.
It was great to also go through the UXD process with James and Cennydd to note that in almost all areas described, these approaches have already been applied to livinggreener.gov.au. Throughout the project we have evidenced positive results after three releases and a series of usability, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), accessibility and content reviews. The results can be demonstrated in the Google Analytics over time – increased number of page views with each visit, longer times spent on the website and a decreasing bounce rate (which means people leave as soon as they land on the home page).
A range of methods were discussed and evaluated in the workshop including:
There was a strong distinction made between the role of personas and market research segments, as good UX design is for people. Personas are archetypes that are discovered via the process of market research but are identified and people and have names. Market research segments are grouped under categories like “grey nomads” or some such collective identity. The major drawback of using personas is that they ‘freeze time’ to the moment when the initial research was undertaken. A solution would be to go through another round of market research and a revision of personas at strategic times in the life of a project.
Sketching and prototyping
The practical part of the workshop focused on creating a design for a mobile application with a bus company as the client. In groups we brainstormed using empathy maps, then individually we made six-up and single designs.
This led into more of a discussion on the best ways to rapid prototype (Agile) vs conventional functional specifications documents. James and Cennydd discussed prototyping as having a number of fidelities – low, medium and high. Low fidelity is using paper, pens, sticky notes (to create “pop-ups”), and collage. Medium fidelity includes Omnigraffle, Visio, Fireworks, Illustrator, Keynote, Powerpoint, Balsamiq Mockups, Mockingbird and HTML image maps. High fidelity tools cover Flash, Dreamweaver, Axure and HTML/CSS and Javascript.
Basically the best approach is to incorporate at least two methods and each from different level of fidelity. It is important to also use the tools you feel most comfortable with. Be mindful if you are prototyping in HTML/CSS and other high fidelity tools that it is not enough to remodel the prototype for the final design – i.e. it is not a short cut.
There was also a useful discussion on how to work effectively with developers and other key stakeholders by understanding their language, challenges and constraints.
The other good take home message was that “good designers are usually good users”, which I think is key especially when designing for web and social media platforms. The fundamental role of creating user-friendly online spaces is to provide a product or service in a way that easy and accessible . It is also important to encourage a conversation at a human level, to discover other needs and to build relationships.
At the end of the day all the participants received a copy of James an Cennydd’s new book “Undercover User Experience Design” (New Riders 2011), which provides a great summary of the workshop themes and strategies.
Reference
Donald Norman Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex and Information Appliances Are the Solution. MIT Press, 1999
Mediakult is very happy to announce that over the coming months there will be a series of interviews with women artists, writers, curators and innovators. All about X, 0 and 1 is the title of the project, and is deliberately broad to explore a wide range of issues across the field of digital media and technology - arts creation, curatorship, collaboration and discourse.
I often think of the digital media arts environment as a place that I used to call home but is now primarily an after hours pursuit. My technical skills and research background has led from creative practice to e-government – focusing on open source, web usability, accessibility and Gov 2.0 advocacy.
What I started to notice from the fringes is how many other people’s careers have shifted in terms of focus over the years. When I think back to when I started to experiment with digital media in the mid 1990s there was some amazing work being done by women artists, thinkers and commentators – exploring space, identity, the body, activism, software and hardware. Many of these women continue to innovate within the context of digital arts and culture, while just as many have shifted focus to other areas where they continue to innovate.
The invited participants are all pioneers in their own right – pushing the boundaries of thinking and practice about different forms of media and technology and it’s place in contemporary society. These women have all made significant contributions over many years to the broad genre of ‘new’ media art in a diverse range of ways.
Confirmed participants include Deborah Kelly, Mez Breeze, Renee Turner, Sarah Jane Pell, Erica Seccombe, Linda Carroli, Julianne Pierce, Jo-Anne Green, Helen Thorington, Renate Ferro, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Alexandra Gillespie, Di Ball and more.
The theme ‘All about X, 0 and 1′ is deliberately vague to allow the conversations to take their own form though a process of collaboration.
All about X, 0 and 1 is also looking for interviewees – if you think you would like to participate please email me at bytetime at gmail dot com.
The recent series of essays from long time collaborator and dear friend Linda Carroli on the -empyre- discussion list offers some very interesting perspectives on the social and cultural implications of the ‘Biennial’, or more broadly, arts and cultural festivals. For the full versions of the essays, see Linda’s blog placeblog.
Here is a copy of my response to her postings:
Hi Linda,
Thanks for your insightful views considering the role of the biennial.
Your three key themes of ‘Recovery and Regeneration’, ‘From Emergency to Emergence’, and ‘The Commons’ all have serious implications for artistic and cultural development in a world that needs a sustainable integration of issues related to arts, environment and humanity. Cultural tourism may have economic benefits on a local level and on an organisational level but at what cost? I have certainly not felt all that comfortable attending festivals interstate and overseas because of my carbon footprint and I think this is a crucial issue to consider as part of designing the biennial/festival model.
The example of the Prospect Biennial in New Orleans, is inspiring example for cultural regeneration and I think the dialogue between artists and community needs to flow not just through the spectacle of the ‘biennial’ but in a way that can inspire and invigorate culture on a day-to-day level.
Also agree about how the typical hieracrchical strucutre of the curated structure of festivals does not allow for much innovation and ‘risk’, which is why I prefer the ‘unconference’ model used by fo.am and THATcamp as it is more inclusive and representative as well as a great way of brainstorming ideas.
I look forward to following this discussion on -empyre- and seeing more of Linda’s writing.
Geokult is a collaboration between cartographer Marty Drury and researcher/artist Tracey Meziane Benson, which seeks to explore a range of topics that relate to geographical, technical, historical and social forms of mapping.
Over the coming months, they will be building a database of resources – open source mapping tools, links to geo-location, GIS and GPS based creative projects and tools.
Later this year they will be traveling to Turkey to undertake a residency at the Babayan Culture House in Cappadocia, where they will explore ways of mapping the landscape as well as the multi-layered culture and history of Turkey from the perspective of cultural strangers, seeking to learn and understand.
We are also interested in building networks with other individuals and groups who have similar interests in mapping. If you have any suggestions for topics for Geokult or have project you would like promoted, please let us know by subscribing to the Geokult blog or posting comments.
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