A project of Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses, Lumens is an installation of lamps networked across three spaces: Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence.org. Scores of personal lamps that usually inhabit and illuminate the interiors of homes and shops have been borrowed from the residents of Adams and North Adams, Massachusetts, filling two gallery spaces: Greylock Arts in Adams and MCLA Gallery 51 Annex in North Adams. In addition, their images and stories are represented on turbulence.org, which also serves to connect the two locations telematically.

Clusters of lamps have been outfitted with proximity sensors and arduino microcontrollers. Lamps illuminate in response to a visitor’s presence and simultaneously illuminate lamps in the counterpart spaces. Thus, an individual in Adams can communicate his/her presence to an individual in North Adams, and vice versa. Additionally, as visitors investigate the history of a particular lamp online it will also illuminate in the physical gallery space.

Lumens (re)connects North Adams and Adams — originally a single community — through an exploration of location, influence, history, and the present.

Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses is a collaboration of Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence. Lumens has been made possible through the generous support of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Physical interaction consultant Tom Igoe.
Special thanks to: Larry Alice, Michael Chapman, Abbi Hermosa.

Located in downtown Florence outside the Fortezza da Basso, The Cloud is part of the “Redesigning Fashion Trade Shows” project that Pitti Immagine launched with MIT Mobile Experience Lab in January 2007. It is a long-term project that will creatively rethink the trade show concept and will propose innovative technologies, perspectives and sensory experiences for fashion trade shows.

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses (iPak) is a playful, inter-active and participatory art work, that integrates your creativity, the random generation of works by a computer, and art engendered by Ajaykumar. iPak synthesises conceptual innovation, social engagement and therapeutic process: generative art as re-generative force; art-making as a medicine; inspiration emerging from tragedy; and the notion that social factors — such as marginalisation and racism — cause mental illness. Ajaykumar has created the foundation for a ‘polyphonic’ narrative, one created by many stories — yours essentially. You can upload still images, movies, texts, music, sounds, and ideas, to create a dynamic, evolving, relational entity in cyberspace. iPak fully comes into ‘being’ through your participation.

iPak - 10,000 songs, 10,000 images, 10,000 abuses is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Its production has also been funded by Arts Council England. “iPak” has been researched, developed, and realised through a digital media bursary and support from Artsadmin (UK), funded by Arts Council England; as well as through collaboration with Re-Active (Italy). “iPak” - is a research project of Goldsmiths University of London, curated and engendered by Ajaykumar.

BIOGRAPHY

Ajaykumar’s art and research focuses on ‘being’: interrogating notions of ‘relational being’, ‘the being of a space’, and ‘non-anthropocentric being’. It is concerned with engendering new epistemologies in ontological art practice: through reappraising Buddhist, Tantric, and Animistic processes; through investigating the contemporary pertinence of a hypothesis of ‘dependent origination’ beyond its original Buddhist cultural and religious significance, particularly with regard spectatorship, ludic, performative, and pedagogic processes.

Ajaykumar teaches at Goldsmith’s College, London. His current courses include: Technology, Art, and Being; Narrative Construction in Film; Notions of void, emptiness, and ‘an art of spectatorship’ in Japanese Art and Culture; Multi-Media and Site-Specific Art. He is a member of the University of Arts London Research Centre, Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN); and a co-director of the Shapes Design Studio where he is collaborating with an architect and product designer to engender furniture, lighting and gardens that come into ‘being’ through the play of others.

Ajaykumar studied fine art, film, and performance at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London; the Institute of Education, University of London; and at the Royal College of Art.

Mary Flanagan Interview: Social Change, Video Games and the Visual Arts by Eduardo Navas: Mary Flanagan is an artist and media theorist invested in developing games for social change and performance/action installations. Based on her interests Flanagan produced [giantJoystick] in 2006, and gallery@calit2 is proud to present this working large-scale game-interface from February 4 to March 17 of 2008. [giantJoystick] brings together Flanagan’s diverse interests as a cultural producer.The oversize custom-made playstation is evidence that Flanagan’s production borrows not only from the visual arts and video games culture, but also popular culture. [giantJoystick] is the result of a new form of critical practice which does not fit neatly into previous models. For this reason, gallery@calit2 is excited to present the following interview with Mary Flanagan in which she shares her experiences as a young girl who played video games, and as an artist invested in social change. gallery@calit2 publishes it with the aim to shed light on the creative process of the artist.

The following interview is an important source for the above text. gallery@calit2 publishes it with the aim to shed light on the creative process of the artist.

Eduardo Navas: You use the term Social Sculpture to describe [giantJoystick]. Could you elaborate how you see your work in relation to Joseph Beuys’ aesthetic and political views?

Mary Flanagan: I use the term Social Sculpture to suggest the alignment of [giantJoystick] (which we will refer to as [gJ] from here on) not only to my other projects (particularly my social activist research lab) but also to the larger idea of creativity being applied to all human endeavors. Play, to me, can be instrumental in realizing some of the goals of both Beuys and Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), whose Anthroposophical Society advocated holistic medicine and even organic farming in addition to pursuing social ideas in human freedom, democracy, and sustainable economic forms. I use the concept of social sculpture to consider how an object or artifact can work to structure, on the small scale, interesting and progressive social interaction, and on the large scale, contribute to the reshaping of larger social and political organizations — literally shaping and molding the world we live in. Beuys’ project was ultimately very political, and so is mine.

In contemporary US culture, there is little dialogue about serious issues: class differences between rich and poor are the highest since the troubled Gilded Age of the 1920s, with increased, dire ecological consequences. Corporate culture has continued to conquer global production, consumption, and consciousness, disempowering citizens, and unhinging much of the social fabric and traditional means of living. Then we have corporate driven violence and war.

The response to make a play object in the fact of such a grim framework may appear frivolous. But note that games are popular right now for a reason — they present fun, but of course, escapist scenarios in which we are faced with quantifiable enemies and concrete goals. We might be onto something if we can use this model for real social change. And, if people are meeting physically with this joystick, breaking down communication barriers and playing together, this may be the start of an interactive dialog which might be transformative, even healing.

EN: Based on your answer you do see [gJ], contributing in some way to a model of real social change; would you then consider your critical investment linked to activism? I think of the great interest in the work of Guy Debord and other Situationists, which now is being revisited to talk about play as a form of critical intervention in the real world. Do you see [gJ] or other projects you have developed contributing to this dialogue?

MF: I do see many of my play-related projects linked to political and social activism. That said, I don’t think just because something is playful it is automatically subversive or progressive. Not everyone has the same permission to play. For example, a group of primarily white college students playing a mobile media game in a cemetery or on the streets of New York would be read very differently than, say, a group of non-English speaking Latino players or young African Americans congregating en masse to play a game. So this must pervade a designers consciousness: how can we expand the permission set of who is allowed to play? This is also the same cautionary approach I have with the current revival in Situationist thinking… who is allowed to drift? Under what conditions would it be possible to propose larger, universal play paradigms? What would have to change?

And of course these questions lead to one doing design work that calls into question and reformulates, for example, the role of technologist (who is the maker, and how can more people be in this position?), and the role of spectator (who is the artist, and how can more people be in this position?).

EN: How do you contextualize [gJ] in your critical interest of play and locative media? Are there any links, or do you see it as a completely separate research endeavor?

MF: I have multiple tracks in my research project, and this work and locative media have in common my interest in participatory culture. [gJ] does not claim to represent the space in which it is housed, and is a rather obvious intervention, so its quite the opposite of most locative media projects. This work falls more in line with inquiries into collaborative play and alternate reward systems in game design research. Sometimes, my research erupts as artwork; at other times, it finds its home in collaboratively produced research projects at my laboratory.

EN: [gJ] can be read as a subversive work of art. By this I mean that it puts in question some general assumptions about sculpture. For instance, it demands to be not only touched but also played; it’s designed to withstand heavy physical abuse. Do you see [gianJoystick] in line with the work of Felix Gonzalez Torres, for example, who often created, shall we say, interactive artworks that demanded certain actions and destruction of the work from the viewer? I think of his candy installation “Untitled, Public Opinion,” (1991) which was completed when the museum visitor took away a piece of candy. Or other artists from his generation, who were definitely influenced by conceptual art, but were also heavily invested in making objects that somehow questioned themselves.

MF: Both my work and the work of Gonzalez Torres move the attention from the object to the object’s relationship. As Nicholas Bourriaud wrote, “the aura of artworks has shifted to their public” (Relational Aesthetics (1998) 2002, 58). This also is, for me, informed by software art and the lack of “true object” so highly prevalent in art history. Dialog with software art, however, stops at the form: the form of the joystick itself functions as a fetish or totem as well, constantly referring to game culture. [gJ] formulates an interaction by posing questions about play, touch, embodiment. It does so primarily through its scale: after all, if the work were smaller, one player can play on his or her own, and the sense of participatory play and collaboration would be lost.

EN: The fact that [gJ] demands that gallery visitors become heavily invested in the work with their bodies and actually sweat after playing for a few minutes may open a door for critics skeptical of New Media and art games to claim that the usual critical distance necessary for a work of art to be reflexive about its context may be lost. How do you respond to such criticism, which in part has separated New Media art from the work of art usually found in more commercial art galleries?

MF: I think the disquiet that commercial art galleries display towards new media art is not about critical distance but about the financial conservatism they carry forward (or imagine) from their audience, collectors. We are in a cycle of quite conservative investment practices in the arts. In addition, many new media artists have not wished to sell their work in more traditional ways, because it may be against the ideas the work is investigating.

EN: [giantJoystick] is a phallus. It should be safe to say that many gallery visitors give it such reading, yes? If so, how do you see your work in line with feminism: the fact that you, a woman, has created a sculpture, which you also explain could be seen as nostalgic, making reference to a gaming past ruled by mainly boys? You also explained in one of your videos that you were the only kid in your neighborhood who played video games, how does this relate to the stereotypes that have defined video games?

MF: I’ve discovered at openings and public events that many visitors new to the work initially assume that it is created by a male artist! Which is very fun for me, because I have been significantly involved with feminist art — this poses a challenge that involves gender assumptions in popular gaming culture, and in art practice as well. [gJ] is definitely nostalgic for a significant number of players / viewers, and this can be useful of course, because ultimately, nostalgia may end up being a great tool if used for particular ends… The fact is, male gaming culture is appropriated through this work for play, yes, but also for a kind of reconfiguration of who can play and how we play.

I had a rather lengthy, extended childhood where I played and read far longer than most children I encountered, male or female. This involved computer play, but also dollplay and building fantasy structures. I also busied myself with Rube Goldberg style contraptions, telepathy, elaborate costumes, etc.

EN: You consider [gJ] to be in a “public space.” But how public is this space really? Is the art gallery really a public space? Do you see your gaming installation opening the door to a new type of audience, perhaps? If so what kind?

MF: This work has not only functioned within a gallery space. It was in residence at the London Games Festival and seems to go to venues with a lot of unusual ‘gallery’ traffic, such as the Beall Center and Laboral in Spain. Ideally, it would be housed in a space where a wide range of players and viewers could encounter the work. The initial plan was for a public artwork, linking several joysticks in various global cities, so collaborations could take place between a group in, say, Berlin, and a group in Taipei. This is still on the burner.

That said, this work does attract groups to art spaces that might not normally visit them. This too is a wonderful opportunity to bridge those interested in the art scene with, well, everyone else. By the way, I didn’t enter a formal Western art gallery or museum until I was of college age. So, I’m interested in those kinds of radical transformations we can imagine which cross cultural, economic, and linguistic barriers.

EN: [gJ] is definitely about the aesthetics of video games. But how do you see your intervention of the Atari 2600 when considering the concept of play, or gameplay? The often cited “magic circle” comes to mind. How do you see [giantJoystick] relating to the concept of the magic circle and playing by the rules? Are there any similarities between the rules of play that make the magic circle special, and the gallery space?

MF: Huizinga be praised! The sheer absurd scale of [gJ] creates a kind of magic circle all on its own, whether it is set within a gallery or not. Actually, I would say the gallery atmosphere tends to have its own, competing magic circle, where, as you have noted in your questions, the rules are “don’t touch,” or “behave quietly.” Involving the body is a risky proposition, reminiscent of happenings and other participatory events. By using games that many people might be familiar with (or that are simple enough to parse on one’s own due to common game conventions), participants seem more willing to take on play in this embodied way. Sometimes groups get to shouting and yelling as well.

gallery@calit2 would like to thank Center for Research and Computing in the Arts for their support in the realization of this exhibition.

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Definitions: What do we mean by place and region? What constitutes these often taken-for-granted identities? Furthermore what sort of entity is a place? A long standing assumption is that there is something natural or essential about the identities of regions and places. Despite this naturalistic tendency, we are all aware that regions and places have historical identities, while others, such as ‘The City of Edmonton’ are juridical, legislated into being, and have identities which have accreted on the basis of some political-administrative status.

In our references to places, we might invoke a ’sense of place’, the title of numerous texts. The geographer, Anssi Passi, points out that a place is a location or context manifesting itself in the social negotiation of spatial identities (2003:141). They are inevitably political even in the context of everyday life. Doreen Massey notes that region is not inevitably strictly bounded nor exclusive but is rather a context where the particular and the universal intersect (Massey 1995).

Socialness of Space

Even if a site on the globe is already remarkable, the topology is also over-written with often-contradictory ‘place-images’ (Shields 1991a; 1991b) to create a general ‘place-myth’. Before we encounter a specific place or region, we generally have some information and preconception about them. We can elaborate on this cultural or informational spatial sensibility by distinguishing between the identity of a place or region itself consisting of distinguishing ‘natural’ features, histories of habitation, meaning-making and development. But a consciousness of the particularity of a region is different: it is not solely a result of individual perception of its distinguishing features but also a result of the ongoing and public pedagogy including all of the mechanisms of the production of collective identity and interpellation of individuals to social worlds through imagined communities (Anderson 1991) and learned, prosthetic memories [] Cohen []).

This sense of place is something that must be continually reproduced through practice and discourse, and through institutional activities. We find this in, for example, touristic and promotional ‘place-myths’. Topography is only one component of geographical identities. What might merely be notable or strategically advantageous land is only the geological foundation of a mythic landscape of historic national events, memory nationalist history, not to mention advertising images. Visual Representations, literature and folk tales, small and tall-, are aspects of the spatialisation of a site or region.

The sense of place I am delineating transcends the purely ‘natural’ and material, and we must look beyond the environment of the site - and even beyond the site itself to properly understand a ’sense of place’. Any site is obviously interconnected with other places. However we can go further to say that it is part of a overall, relational network or landscape of similarly mythified sites and regions in which each place is distinguished not only by its proper place-myth but by its distinctiveness and contrasts with other sites. This geography of difference is socially-constructed over the long term and constitutes a spatialisation of places and regions as ‘places-for-this’ and places-for-that’. That is, each site or area is construed as appropriate for certain social activities and behaviours - and this is central to its identity. Places and regions are cast - or spatialised - as certain types of place: romantic, harsh, warm, boring, polluted, foreign and so on. The ‘first nature’ of topology is reconstructed as a ‘second nature’ (Lefebvre 1976).

Place is not just a matter of real estate or landed property; it is intellectual property, cultural property. This is hardly a fixed system of coordinates, rather it is a relational network of differences which provides the principle and rationale for movement between places and regions. Rather than a fixed structure, the process of spatialisation is a fluid and contested horizon of meanings.

Geopolitics

This understanding is social and anchored in performative practices which range from discourses through to the activities of bodies, organizations and machines. But it is also relational: In contrast with much research on places, which refers primarily to the elements and crowds assembled at a site to create its ambiance, I argue that one must be equally attentive to what is excluded and also to those elements of a place’s identity that lie elsewhere, and which inflect both the material and social elements of the sight itself. What remains elsewhere includes the contrasts and distant places in relation to which an experience of a place is constructed. A place might be said to realize or to embody a regional character, but these statements are always made with a view to contrasting some quality of the place (or region) with the qualities of other places (or regions).

What and who are missing can be counter-intuitive questions but they reveal regional, geopolitical struggles over what is present. Spatialisation can be a vehicle of repression in subtle ways. Constituting regions is closely related to constructing hierarchical relations of centre and periphery. The framework of regions is not only put in place as an act of geopolitical power but is part and parcel of the consolidation and reproduction of power relations. Spatialisations are the subjects of struggle because of their power to influence social reproduction in a manner in which it is difficult to trace the authorship of its normative arrangement of places, regions and entire states. Hence the battle for spatialisation is not just a question of perpetuating memories but of framing the future.

Much of North America is an ‘erased space’ where doctrines of Terra nullis turned a blind eye to not only histories but ongoing realities of indigenous occupation. This goes beyond, for example, renaming features on maps. It is the foundation for subsequent occupation and land use which erases previous rights. Of the many cultural forms of rights to place, ‘private property’ - the spatialisation of the land as a gridded mosaic of alienated, commodified ‘lots’ is only one relatively recent geopolitical form.

Each place-myth is the locus of intense struggle over its meaning. Places are taken up from the raw topological diversity of the land and integrated into a meaningful human geography which is contested by individuals and different cultural groups. This differential social spatialisation is the basis of our geographical sense of the world as a space of distinctions, difference and distance (Shields 1991b). Yet it is not unified system, merely a regime of spacings with pretensions to hegemonic status.

Spatialisation ties together the cultural conception of the environment with individual bodies to sediment, in a practical and physical manner, social reproduction in line with place-myths (however contested or only pretending to the status of the hegemonic). It embraces not only spatial patterns but temporal rhythms. Place is a memory-bank for societies inscribed and read in ways which are sometimes ritualized but always much more embodied than merely visual. Place takes on this memory-function by virtue of retaining and displaying the inscribed traces of rhythmic repetition of routines in time and space in a manner which is relatively difficult for a single individual to erase or for a small group to change in a short time without the investment of a great deal of effort (the wholesale and total destruction of a city, for example).

Spatialisation and Bodies

In the process of social spatialisation, places are not only overcoded, but inter-related via classification schemes and reifying divisions into, for example, locals’ and tourists’ parts of a city, safe and dangerous areas, ours’ and theirs’, work and leisure places. More than mere function is at issue. This ‘production of space’ concerns social and cultural reproduction and interaction. People learn the comportment associated with a place as well as with their social status and gender. Spatialisation is thus not only a matter of sites and networks of space but exists at all levels to tie the micro scale of the body to the macro scale of the region. Bodies are ‘spaced’: the performative carriage of the body, the gestures, actions and rhythms of everyday routines deemed socially appropriate to a particular site are etched onto place and into the somatic memory of individual inhabitants. This ’spacing’ of bodies is central to the causative power of such places, as their status or the need to act in accordance with the norms of the site in order to accomplish a collective spatial performance of a place (getting on an off of a bus) or an occasion (laying a commemorative wreath), is directly manifested in peoples’ actions. In this manner, cultural abstractions such as values or memories become embodied and material interactions. Seen in this light, place, and ore importantly ’spatialisation’ is causative.

Yet such a practical, somatic hexis is usually not recalled except with an awkward self-consciousness when one finds oneself ‘out of place’, as the idiomatic expression puts it. Spatialisation is thus both written and read practically by bodies as much as metaphorically through the conceptual operations of discourse.

Goffman has referred to these as ‘meaning frames’ (1974). Others have referred to habitual routines (Bourdieu 1982) and to ‘scripts’ for everyday interaction — however contested or renegotiated ‘on the fly’ (Smith 1987). Fuelled by sentiments of inclusion, belonging, and connectedness to the past, sense of place roots individuals in the social and cultural soils from which they have sprung together, holding them there in the grip of a shared identity, a localized version of selfhood. (Basso 1996:85). At the core of spatialisation is a process of simplifying for cognitive purposes, and of stereotyping as a pragmatic strategy for everyday life. If place is the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of spatialisations, it is a prosthesis of perception, presenting a rich source of ‘metaphors we live by’ but also smuggling in stereotypes which are a form of cultural anaesthesia to the diversity and detail of everyday experience (Feldman in Seremetakis 1994).

We talk about a “sense of place”,. Where does this sense reside? In people as a sense or tacit form of knowledge or in geography? What if the sense of place was a form of sensation (exteroceptive) like a sense of balance? Turns of phrase such as ’sense of place’ blur the physical sensorium into cultural forms of awareness and attunement.

As a cognitive and practical habitus, social spatialisation is a source not only of social algorithms (cf. Bourdieu 1972) but of allegorical solutions (attempting to solve new problems or cultural conundrums by metaphorically assimilating them to established routines or to the implied nexus of behavioural codings implicit in a place-myth), differentiating categories (for example, ‘right’ versus ‘left’ and ‘near’ versus ‘far’, and conceptual shortcuts including stereotypes and ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1979). Spatialisation is an integral part of our sense of the good life, a cultural sense of how we compose ourselves within the events of everyday life. On this basis alone it is easy to tie a sense of place to health and well-being.

Ineffable Places and Regions

Social spatialisations are social formations which connect the here and now, the ‘near’, or the face-to-face and present-at-hand, to the ‘distant’, the future and the possible. They connect what could be called the ‘real’ in a place which is nominally present at hand with its intangible or ‘virtual’ qualities, its potentialities: What a place can be, what its good for, who might belong to it and how, and what people can become there.

Any local place has this virtual complement of spatial and temporal excess. At places specifically arranged for it - spatialised as sites of commemoration - or where ‘virtual’ elements are invoked by memory work a form of virtual proximity brings everything close-up (Murdock 1993: 535; compare my analysis of classically ‘modernist’ constructions of the local and distant in Shields 1992a). Some places have no materiality at all: these non-space places are virtual sites of desire and fear - utopia, heaven, hell - and regions of the unknown or unknowable.

Rather than fixed, self-referential and inwardly-oriented, place-myths are even more in-circulation within an increasingly globalized flow of cultural information, commodities and people. Place-images are ‘sampled’ and overdubbed, becoming carriers for new sentiments and values. Their specificity is diffused. ‘Flow’ is crucial for it is in the in-between moment of indexical referentiality and counterpoint between places that spatialisation takes on its importance (Shields 1997b). Thus spatialisation is even less a fixed structure, but constitutes a virtual space of possible movements and anticipations of what follows from a given action in a given site, and what alternative courses of action are possible. Even as boundary-marking and the construction of spatial identities becomes more fragile, more fraught and obviously artificial, the importance of local place-images and myths increases as a counterpoint to the received images of other places and spaces is increased, along with the role of the physical environment as an anchor for the spatialisation of the place as a certain kind or character of site:

The sense of interconnectedness imposed on us by the mass media, by rapid travel, and by long-distance communication obscures this more than a little. So does the featurelessness and interchangeability of so many of our public spaces, the standardization of so many of our products, and the routinization of so much of our daily existence. The banalities and distractions of the way we live now lead us, often enough, to lose sight of how much it matters just where we are and what it is like to be there. (Geertz 1996: 261-2)

A ‘critical regionalism’ (Frampton []) which recognizes and celebrates place and region while attending to the operations of power and the spatial and historical exclusions and xenophobias which accompany hegemonic spatialisations could make a useful contribution to a renewed sense of place. [blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

1. Is an emergent mode of “relational” art developing that is more receptive to public anxieties and concerns about climate and atmospheric pollution?

Our project description for Talking about the Weather, which involves social encounters in public places, directly addresses this, so hope you don’t mind if we just repeat it here:

“Talking About the Weather” is an ongoing cross media project sparked by our response to the terrifying spectre of global climate change. Sheer terror at the possibilities that are being talked about led us to talking about the weather. In this project weathertalk is no longer a banal exchange of local weather conditions, but instead we ask people to donate their breath - the breath, which they would normally use to talk about the weather and the same breath that is spread far and wide as described by Tim Flannery. Working with breath emphasises the dynamic nature of the atmosphere and our part in its creation and destruction. As Tim Flannery says, every breath you take makes you part of a dynamic system called the atmosphere, or the aerial ocean.

2. Does climate science need art? Is the collaboration between artists and scientists useful for both parties and for society-at-large?

There are various ways this collaboration takes place. In our exhibition, “The Trouble with the Weather” we sought the collaboration of University of Technology, Sydney scientists in the exhibition catalogue where Stuart White and Jade Herriman, from the Institute for Sustainable Futures and Tally Palmer from the Institute for Water and Environmental Resource Management. They wrote catalogue essays and, among other things, suggested the importance of art in bringing issues of climate science to society-at-large. As Tally wrote: “This exhibition challenges us. The images and sounds break into our senses, perhaps more clearly than other, more linear ways of understanding. These luminous works call out for adventure, courage and a willingness to learn new ways of thinking. New ways of tackling this trouble with the weather….”

3. Does the ambidextrous figure of the “artist-scientist” or “scientist-artist” become more relevant at a point of crisis like climate change?

This does not relate to our own work nor particularly to our exhibition. Our focus was more on artists engaging with the issue and on opening new ways for the public to engage. What made it all the trickier was that one minute climate change was not on the agenda and then suddenly it was so ubiquitous in the media that people were talking about climate change fatigue. In both instances, there was also a fear factor that we saw art as enabling people to bypass.

4. What expectations do curators and artist-participants have for the audiences of current group exhibitions such as Eco-Media, (Madrid, 2007), Weather Report (Boulder, 2007), and The Trouble with the Weather (Sydney, 2007)? Are new audiences expected?

Here’s what we said in our curatorial statement: “The Trouble with the Weather: a southern response brings together artists from the South Pacific, Australia and South America, working across media, to respond to global warming. Using humour and the absurd, displays of excess, sensual environments, intense imagination, and personal and emotional responses, the artists offer us new ways to engage with this politically overloaded and emotionally charged subject.” It’s not so much that we wanted new audiences, though we did actually get some, but to offer new ways in to the concerns at a time of overload and fear.

5. How do art projects and exhibitions function in relation to climate activism? Are aesthetic experience and political consciousness diametrically opposed?

Not at all, we see aesthetic experience as opening up to political consciousness –in an open ended and non-didactic way. Re this, we agree with Roger Malina’s recent post about art’s developing new senses.

6. Can art influence public policy on climate change? Is there a social imperative for artists to act politically?

Talking about imperatives seems somewhat tricky… And it’s hard to know these days what influences public policy, living in Australia where massive public mobilisations, eg, against the war in Iraq went nowhere. We see it as important to keep a place alive where art can also disturb social rules and regulations – so there can be an artistic climate of diversity and multiplicity.

7. Roger Malina proposes in the introduction to the Eco-media catalogue (2007), “The arts, as all other forms of human activity, must be contributors to the new cultural vision of a different kind of techno-scientific society. Currently artistic interactions with science and technology are “homeopathic”; they need to become systemic.” How can this call for a systemic reconfiguration of science-technology-art interactions be actioned?

Your question here seems to raise a wider question, beyond climate science, about new media art and its relation to technology. Steve Dietz has argued that we’re now at a point where “new media art” needs no longer to focus on technology per se. This seems important to us, to be able to move beyond a formalist attention to technology (which sometimes fell into beta testing for industry) to explorations where as artists we can explore what’s happening in techno-scientific society with any technology or media.

Best
Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda
www.out-of-sync.com

Unveiled by Alex Beard, Deputy Director of the Tate Modern, this permanent work is the culmination of many years of effort for greyworld, and we are very excited to finally be letting him live outside. Commissioned by Land Securities for the property companys Bankside 123 development, the public-activated sculpture will be unveiled on a busy site behind Tate Modern. Lots of pictures of the work in progress are available here. Check our website for this and other information.

This is the first show for a newly created Boston-based art project, Into.Inter.Tech Project, founded in September 2007 by Rebecca Scheckman to create a live art forum for artists working with new technologies. This specific show is dedicated to communication technology and how we relate to one another through it/because of it. These shows are to be hosted in alternative spaces that are unclaimed by a specific group and open to the public asking only for donation.

Area artists were invited to submit work focused on communication technology, broadly defined as any method of communicating and all the technology that enables or prevents communication, or that develops for and with it. The works examine the evolution, future, history, and presence of such devices and our reliance on them, as well as topics like the effect of communication technology on community, intimacy, trust and love.

Artists and Works: Rebecca Scheckman, Sexual tensions, the Fear of touch, and fear of intimacy run deep in my culture. We build units for the individual and create technological devices that act as an extension of our bodies and create spatial distance. As communication technology develops, the physical distance between us is able to grow, and our cognitive intimacy capabilities are explored. How has and will our society adapt to these recent developments in communication and what new devices will emerge? In addition how are the relationships and connections in our immediate life affected by the changing technology?

ECOARTTECH: Cary Peppermint & Christine Nadir - Untitled Landscapes For Portable Media Players, 2007, 2007: influenced by a class we have both recently been teaching called “Challenge of Modernity.” We almost titled these untitled landscapes “Industrial Revolution.” They are intended to be downloaded as a series of four, shuffled on the play list of your personal media player, and viewed at random. MP4, WMV, and AVI file formats are all available.

Hanna Hart: Our current society is the construct of a new breed of communication technology. This technology has facilitated the widespread acceptance of a global economy and in doing so expanded our definition of community. This shift can be viewed in both a positive and negative light. The impact that the global marketplace has had on the processing and distribution of food is riddled with negative consequences. Fruits and vegetables are cardboard cut outs of what they should be, having traveled exorbitant distances and genetically modified to accommodate such journeys. The way we eat is no longer structured by what is in season, but rather by the convenience of processed food and unnatural diversity. In my piece I will initiate a relationship between the viewer and the food they are consuming. By highlighting the food’s origins and giving the viewer ability to choose where there food is coming from, I hope to spur both an external and internal dialogue over the notion of food, community and the power of what it means to eat locally.

Shane Butler and Annie Newlin: This piece was conceived out of the context of performance art, even though it was a performance in it’s own. We had been fighting late at night, and I told her to be quiet and placed a rubber band in my mouth, she grabbed and pulled it towards her mouth, and we kept putting more and more into our mouths to re-connect something, that something can only be figured out in time. As we move, the rubber bands stretch back and forth creating a tension that is only released when one of the bands snap, representing the way that we constantly try to connect and reconnect to one another. This is also about the pain and relief involved in these connections and relationships. Sometimes, in the end, you are just left with a bloody mouth. The meaning is open for interpretation, but these are just some of the things we have thought about in the process.

Ben McCoy: A bulletin posted on Myspace that summarized our culture and the InterWEB, the following is a only a segment from it: Meanwhile, the small handful of individuals who arrived alone and without plan of meeting anyone that they already know and instead lie in hopeful anticipation of meeting someone new… Well, these individuals can be found either at the bar clutching their Blackberry, or what have-u, texting their brains out (letting you know that, though they may be ALONE in a bar or club, they certainly are not without FRIENDS somewhere), or they can be found outside said establishment smoking a cigarette (one of the last surviving social scenarios that lend itself to meeting new people, and the reason I am still a smoker). There certainly are those individuals who are still shocked at the idea or concept of ‘meeting someone off the Internet,’ as though meeting someone you’ve previously not known in a bar or club is safer.

Elizabeth Owuor: Me and a CD I made of recordings my mom has left me, and her letters recorded, while I mouth her words and some verbiage on mental health from a letter from one of her hospitals.

Deerhead and Dreams: A passionate conversation that has been passed via e-mail, between two lovers living across the country from one another. The e-mails will be printed out and revealed to an audience for the first time ever, keeping the anonymity of the two people safe through the aliases created.

Mephista and Drm4ea at] gmail.com: A demo of teledlidonics. Just add the two vibrators themselves, a small network hub and all the wires necessary to glue it all together. As a demo we’ll have a PS2 set up with a game driving the vibrator.

Maria Miklowski will seek phone numbers, be verbally unavailable and get back to you later.

Matt Gaetner: A box will sit with headphones attached for the individual to listen. Knobs on the box allow the participant to control the sound waves resonating from the box.

Sara Schoemann: Situated in a box located where the box is unobtrusive with a single channel video broadcasting live feed to a remote TV.

Siri Gossman: I want to turn my body and mind into an automated sorting machine to deal with the problems and issues that I can’t really deal with perhaps emotionally or as a real human. I have a very large stack of paper (Documents, fliers, letters, receipts, notes, garbage) that has been accumulating for the past 6 months. I want to organize this meticulously to rediscover what I did, where I went, who I saw and how much money I spent.

Jessica Goehner: The Internet - a drawing using images traced from the Craigslist personal adds.

Ian Colan: i want the objects to serve as a temple which observers must change their actions around because of the imagined precariousness, yet because of the secured nature of the object they gain omnipotence and are aware of their own effect of their presence i feel that this is the relationship between people and sports/technology.