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Archive for January, 2012

Jan 28

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Terra Infirma: finding the ‘geo’ in geopolitics

a smoke-filled domestic living room with a model volcano in the centre

Nelly Ben Hayoun, The Other Volcano

‘Terra Infirma – experimenting with geo-political practices
’ was an academic workshop which was held in The Arts Catalyst’s Clerkenwell space. The organisers (UCL Department of Geography) proposed the question: What does the ‘geo’ in ‘geo-politics’ actually do? to spark an enquiry around the interplay between human politics and physical geography in a time of climate change and resource shortages.

The philosopher Michel Serres, wrote workshop convenor Angela Last in her introduction to the workshop, has proposed to rethink geo-political relations through the term ‘Biogée’ (from Greek ‘bios’ – life; ‘gē’ – earth), attempting to re-connect the separated spheres of ‘life’ and ‘earth’ to form a ‘contemporary global state’. One of the areas that the workshop sought to explore were links or parallels between the ‘biopolitical’ and the ‘geopolitical’. The day opened with some theoretical provocations by Nigel Clark, whose recent work looks at ethical and political responses to the disasters of abrupt climate change, Kathryn Yusoff, who introduced the deep time perspective that, as humans, we’re only one step away from being fossils (a strata in the landscape), and Joanne Sharp, whose paper attempted to reconnect the ‘bio’ and ‘geo’ in the geopolitics of Africa.

In the following session, “experience designer” Nelly Ben Hayoun, in a presentation with disaster management geographer Carina Fearnly, livened things up by setting off a volcano in the Arts Catalyst space. Not wishing to trigger the smoke alarms in the space, the volcano preparation was placed on an outside windowsill. We naively hoped the eruption would be small and disperse quickly outside. Great clouds of smoke promptly filled the room, and Rob and I raced around fanning the smoke clouds and desperately sticking plastic bags over the smoke alarms. It was certainly an effective demonstration of the unpredictability and potential for devastation of geophysical events.

cross section diagram of land and sea showing geoengineering proposals

Hack the Planet. Image: Kathleen Smith/LLNL

After that interlude, I confess I did not take in much of Angela Last’s presentation, as we were cleaning up, but I tuned in again for Bron Szerszynski’s fascinating presentation on ‘Making Climates’, a theoretical discussion around geoengineering, in which he discussed the question “What is a ‘made’ climate?” by considering different notions of ‘making’: producing (trying to recreate existing forms), educing (bringing out latent forms from nature) and creating (designing new forms), and how we might apply these concepts to the approaches to the architecture of climate.

Remains of a bombed car in an art gallery

Jeremy Deller, Iraq car bomb remains

The final session covered experimental geopolitics with presentations by Andrew Barry and Alan Ingram. Ingram’s current research surveys artists whose work addresses the Iraq War, spanning contemporary artists such as Jeremy Deller and Mark Wallinger, official war artists, and artists and curators from Iraq and the surrounding region.

The day felt incredibly broad in its topics, but it certainly opened up some interesting ideas and avenues of enquiry (as well as potential arguments that clearly were to be continued in the pub afterwards).

It is interesting to me – both as a cultural producer who initiates investigational art projects to open up new exchanges between disciplines and publics, and as a former student of geography - how popular contemporary art has suddenly become with geographers these days. This interest is in art both as an area of research, and as alternative modes of geographical knowledge-making and dissemination for a more ‘public’ geography.

Jan 22

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Why I loved the Wikipedia blackout


Postscript (29.1.2012): Grateful thanks to those kind people who have revised our wikpedia entry so that it is no longer quite so cringingly awful!

Because it was one day when no one looking for information on the Arts Catalyst would be able to read the barely-researched, ill-informed, error-ridden, unsubstantiated misrepresentation of my organization, written by a 20-year old dance student, who I’m sure “meant well”. I’m totally with Jonathan Jones on this one: “I detest the way this site claims to offer the world’s knowledge when all it often contains is a half-baked distillation of third-hand information”.

I am not allowed to take down this piece of nonsense or even to edit it by the Wikipedia police (always ready with the delete button for “conflict of interests” but not for poor scholarship), but it can sit there for anyone to read, masquerading as an informed, fact-checked account of our organization.

You would think, given that the original author’s only reference source was our own website, that it would at least be correct, but it’s all been bizarrely rewritten. Beyond the first sentence – my only correction that’s survived the censors – almost every single sentence is either wrong or simply misses the point. The largest part of the supposed “history” of the organization is devoted to a minor schools project that we did fifteen years ago – it says it continued to 2007 but this, as with practically everything in this article, is wrong.

In the list of artists, the writer randomly singles out four artists we’ve worked with, but clearly doesn’t have the arts knowledge to consider Tomas Saraceno, Aleksandra Mir, Beatriz da Costa, the Otolith Group, Aaron Williamson, Kira O’Reilly, Jan Fabre, Helen Chadwick, Anne Bean, Donald Rodney, or Jem Finer – to name just a few – worthy of special mention. Even the name of the article is wrong. Our name is “The Arts Catalyst” not “Arts Catalyst”.

It’s so bonkers I have wondered if it’s an artist’s project (let me know if so, and I’ll get the funny side).

And we have to live with this as the ‘authoritative’ version of our company? I’ve worked for 18 years to build this organization with integrity and care. I could weep.

Jan 21

Fringe technology and grey science (thoughts on the Samsung Art+ Prize)

Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work (still) by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard

The UK might be thought rather tardy in recognising the digital arts, given that the Samsung Art+ prize claims to be the UK’s first digital media art competition. But perhaps it’s simply that the appeal of certain media or thematics in the arts naturally ebbs and wanes over periods of five to ten years. (There’s a parallel revival of interest in ‘art and science’ at the moment.) What sparks these periodic surges of fascination – for media art, or art that engages with science – is never entirely clear. A European colleague thinks it’s purely the search for funds that is making arts organisations chase after science and technology. UK and US colleagues in academia have suggested the arts are searching for research legitimacy by association. Obviously, in general I have a far less cynical take on it. But it’s true that culture minister Ed Vaizey’s call for arts organisations to exploit “the possibilities and revenue streams that new technologies offer” met with a swift response from the Arts Council, which teamed up with the BBC and NESTA to launch various digital funds. And now we have Samsung’s initiative.

Anyway, the show at the BFI is welcome mainstream recognition for a very broad field of work that’s been around for a long time. And the show has some really good work in it. There were some old favourites, beautifully installed in the BFI’s gallery, as well as some treats new to me.

I’ve long been a fan of Semiconductor’s skill and vision as artists working with moving image. Joe Gerhardt and Ruth Jarman’s work is represented here by a 3D version of ‘20HZ’ (2011) and the spectacular three-screen ‘Worlds in the Making’ (2011), made after a visit by the artists to the Galapagos Islands.

Worlds in the Making – preview by Semiconductor

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead beautifully crafted their ‘A Short Film about War’  (2009) from material found online and uploaded under Creative Commons license. The 2-screen film takes the viewer around the globe to war zones captured through Flickr photos and testimony from both military and civilian bloggers. The images appear on one screen, while the other logs the sources of the sourced images, blogs and GPS locations.

A Short Film About War (still) by Thomson & Craighead

I was also fascinated by Doug Fishbone’s ‘Hypno Project’ (2009), another two-screen work, which demonstrates how people react to stimuli under hypnosis and examines how we form our beliefs. On the right screen, an entertaining cynical narrative about the nature of belief and cultural conditioning is set to a fast succession of almost subliminal images, while on the left, twelve people watching the video have been hypnotized to respond in specific ways to certain images, fascinating as we don’t know exactly what they’re responding too as they shout, clap, wave or make noises. A neat juxtaposition of ideas.

Hypno Project by Doug Fishbone

It was also great to see the recent work of Hiraki Sawa, as I remember being incredibly impressed by his work ‘Dwelling’ (2002), when I believe he was barely out of art college.

Dwelling by Hiraki Sawa

The standout work for my visit was Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s remarkable and utterly absorbing ‘Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work’ (2009), which I hadn’t caught in its earlier showing at BFI. It’s a 3D video installation inspired by The Man from M.A.R.S. – one of the earliest 3D films ever produced (in 1922) – which transports the viewer into the centre of a rehearsal for an adaptation of a film. Because of the 3D and the small screen, it gives the weird sense that one is watching the Borrowers. And the 3D sound had me taking my headphones off to see if it was coming from somewhere else. Delightful.

Forsyth and Pollard have long experimented widely with re-enactments of cultural works, but a fascination for fringe technology and grey science has been apparent in recent works. Last year, I greatly enjoyed their sound project/radio play, ROMEO ECHO DELTA, at AND Festival. It was broadcast by BBC Radio Merseyside on Halloween, accompanied by an ominous red light in the night sky above Birkenhead. The transmission began with the arrival of a studio guest, their interview then being interrupted with the breaking news of the unexplained red light. It recalled Orson Welles’ radio play of H.G Well’s science fiction novel War of the Worlds broadcast for Halloween in 1938, which sparked panic, and in fact the BBC rejected the first version of Pollard & Forsyth’s play for being “too realistic and likely to induce panic in their listeners”. The artists produced a revised version which was then aired.

Other artists in the show are Torsten Laschmann, Neil Cummings, Aura Satz, Erika Tan, and LuckyPDF, all showing interesting works.

The Samsung Art+ prize exhibition is well worth an hour or two (two if you want to watch it all, as I did). It’s only on to the 29 January. I only hope the artists in it get as much profile as the sponsoring company in this heavily-branded show.

Jan 6

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Human specimens: a labyrinth of morality, science and law

Aaron Williamson, Specimen Mirror, performance, with the skeleton of Charles Byrne, Hunterian Museum, 2011

I was interested to see this debate come up in the media just before Christmas:

Royal College of Surgeons rejects call to bury skeleton of ‘Irish giant’

The authors of a paper in the British Medical Journal called for the skeletal remains of a man called Charles Byrne, the so-called ‘Irish Giant’, on display in the Royal College of Surgeon’s Hunterian Museum in London, to be buried at sea. Byrne, who lived in the 18th century and was 7′ 7″ tall, was an object of curiosity for the  famous surgeon and anatomist Sir John Hunter. Byrne became so afraid that doctors would dissect his corpse after his death that he left specific instructions for his body to be buried at sea. But when he died, aged just 22, Hunter bribed a member of the funeral party and stole the body. Byrne’s skeleton has been on public display ever since. The BMJ paper’s authors claimed that all possible medical insights from the skeleton have now been gleaned and Byrne’s remains should be buried according to his wishes, but the Hunterian Museum rejected this call, saying that it considers that the educational and research benefits merit retaining Byrne’s remains.

This story has a particular interest for me because, in May last year, we co-organised an event with the disability arts group Shape at the Hunterian Museum. Titled ‘Labyrinth of Living Exhibits’, the event addressed the issue of human specimens in such collections.

The Hunterian is little known, central yet tucked away upstairs at the Royal College of Surgeons on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There are thousands of specimens on display, the remains of the once vast collection made by Hunter. Many still carry his classification as either ‘morbid’ or ‘normal’. The unsettling collection contains many human parts, including whole skeletons and human foetuses. The focus of Hunter’s collecting was clearly biased towards ‘the different’ – extreme cases of growth, “abnormality” and disease.

In the Labyrinth of Living Exhibits, artist Aaron Williamson curated four simultaneous, specially commissioned, site-specific performances, which infiltrated and responded to the collection, performed simultaneously by disabled artists Aaron Williamson, Sinéad O’Donnell, Brian Catling and Katherine Araniello.

Katherine Araniello, BiPAP 1 (Living Experiment), photo Royal College of Surgeons, 2011

In Araniello’s work, she took on the guise of a guinea pig escaped from a laboratory in a dark, slow and subversive performance. Brian Catling’s performance Out of Its Depth, in fact, began at the Hunterian in 1979 in response to a “specimen” which the Museum housed until recently: the body of a one-eyed child (now locked away out of public view). Wearing a latex, one-eyed mask, Catling walked through the collections or stood by a pillar, peering through his fingers and making faces, mirroring the audience’s curiosity. In Williamson’s own performance, Specimen Mirror, he distorted his own facial features by pressing them against the glass cases of the collections, in response to the flattened suspended specimens.

Brian Catling, Out Of Its Depth, photo Royal College of Surgeons, 2011

A lively panel discussion followed the performances. Aaron Williamson opened the discussion by describing the impetus for each of the performances, explaining his curatorial interest in the responses of artists who are “set apart from the norm” through illness or medical prognosis.

The museum’s director, Sam Alberti, then gave an honest exposition of the Hunterian’s collections of “disabled people as objects”. He explained that the museum was set up in the 18th and developed in the 19th century, and that in those centuries museums were in the business of “classifying” difference. Human remains that came into museums were classified against the “norm”, which at that time, he said, was male, heterosexual, white and European. Anyone else was pathologised. The Hunterian Museum, Alberti explained, is not a medical museum, but a medical history museum, and what it displays are the legacies of prejudice. Alberti said that he felt very passionately that it was important to understand and show to the public the representation and construction of difference, and that the display had to be seen through this historical lens. Araniello disagreed with Alberti and said she didn’t feel that it was helpful at all to have such images and specimens on display for the public, and that it did more harm than good in continuing to objectify and pathologies people.

You can watch video recordings of the full panel discussion here.

Panel discussion of Labyrinth Living Exhibits, photo Royal College of Surgeons, 2011

So I found it fascinating to see the debate about Charles Byrne’s remains raised again in the media, quoting Alberti saying “The Royal College of Surgeons believes that the value of Charles Byrne’s remains, to living and future communities, currently outweighs the benefits of carrying out Byrne’s apparent request to dispose of his remains at sea.”

It is a complex debate between science, education and morality, complicated by a man’s dying wishes and a nasty case of corpse robbing.

But there is also a wider context for this debate in the claims on human remains in all other museum collections. Since the late 1970s, human remains in museum collections have been subject to claims and controversies, such as demands for repatriation by indigenous groups who suffered under colonization. These requests have often been contested by the museums and by scientists who research the material and consider it unique evidence, echoing the Hunterian’s arguments over Byrne’s remains.

This is a topic that has interested me for several years. At one point, I was involved in some very early stage discussions with another London museum about an exhibition on such a theme. Whilst the exhibition never developed, there has been much progress in this area over the last decade. Increasingly, many museums are removing human remains from their collections, sometimes returning them to their countries of origin, often for reburial. One sticking point was legislation that prevented most national museums from removing items from their collections, but this changed in 2004 (under Section 47 of the Human Tissue Act), and nine national museums now have the power to deaccession human remains under 1000 years old held in their collections. In 2011, for example, the Natural History Museum returned 19 ancestral remains to the Torres Strait Island community. There is an interesting video about the return on the museum’s site.

But in a book published last year, Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections, the sociologist Tiffany Jenkins argued that museums were being “over-sensitive” to demands for greater “respect” for human remains, and removing specimens from public display that were valued by museum-goers.

It is an interesting and ongoing debate. Do you have examples of other art projects or exhibitions that have explored these issues? I’d be interested to hear.

Jan 3

A new art-science renaissance – in Texas?

The remarkable Roger Malina is – unsurprisingly – already shaking things up in his new role at the University of Texas at Dallas. As Distinguished Chair of Arts and Technology and Professor of Physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, where he is developing art-science R&D and experimental publishing research.

He has just announced a PhD in Art-Science. This new PhD at the University of Texas, Dallas, “seeks to enable research and education that couples the Arts and Humanities with the Sciences and Engineering”. Students with backgrounds in science, engineering or arts and humanities may enroll in the PhD. in fact, they are specifically seeking candidates from diverse backgrounds, including “academia, private industry, non governmental organizations, make and hacker collectives”.

There’s more info at: http://www.utdallas.edu/admissions/graduate/degrees/detail.php?d=1641.

Roger Malina has a remarkable track record of initiatives in the area of art and science, as well as a distinguished career as an astronomer. Malina was the former Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence, France. He was the Principal Investigator for the NASA Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer Satellite at the University of California, Berkeley, US. He also has been involved for 25 years with the Leonardo organisation, based in the US, whose mission is to promote work that explores the interaction of the arts and sciences and the arts and new technologies. Since 1982 he has been the Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. More recently he has helped set up the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMERA) and is co chair of the ASIL ( Arts, Sciences, Instrumentation and Language) Initiative of IMERA which hosts artists in residence in scientific research laboratories of the Marseille region.

Jan 2

2012: autonomous infrastructures, uneasy energies, and the machine wilderness …

Yahoo. 2012! What’s coming up this year in the art/science world? Here’s a highly subjective list of things I’m looking forward to.

Melanie Jackson, still from new work (in progress), 2012

Arts Catalyst’s Republic of the Moon exhibition is currently running at FACT, Liverpool, to 26 February, and there’ll also be a Kosmica event at FACT at the end of the month. In March, Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ Moon Goose Analogue tours to the Great North Museum, Newcastle, as part of AV Festival.

Later this month, we’ll announce a call for an exciting artist’s fellowship at a major science facility in Europe (details to come). We’ll also be launching a new series of workshops and commissions in our Autonomous Artists’ Infrastructures strand, following on from the Planetary Breakdown event at BALTIC, including new work by Hehe.

We’ll be busy all year round in our Clerkenwell space in London with a new series of Kosmicas and other events, exhibitions and workshops, beginning with ‘Trust Me, I’m an Artist’, exploring the ethics of art/science collaborations. Later this Spring, I’m greatly looking forward to showing our new commission from Melanie Jackson, a new essay film that takes us from the botanical garden to the synthetic biology laboratory in the artist’s ongoing investigation into the impulse for form, informed by her participation in our Synthesis workshop last year.

Throughout the year, we’ll unveil a number of other artists’ projects currently in development at different venues across the UK. I’m also planning to trail Alec Finlay when I can around the northernmost parts of Scotland for his investigations into small-scale wind power. And we’ll continue our involvement in the Arctic Perspective Initiative.

Illustration from E. W. Golding's The Generation of Electricity by Wind Power (1955). From Alec Finlay’s http://skying-blog.blogspot.com/

Beyond Arts Catalyst, Berlin’s wintry transmediale is always a good get-together for people inhabiting the art-tech-politics end of the art and science spectrum. This year, the festival takes the theme of ‘in/compatible’. Its exhibition ‘Dark Drives – Uneasy Energies in technological times’ promises “works of art and artefacts of everyday culture that direct our attention to the dark side of our technologised lives”, including a series of photographs by environmental scientists Vibek Raj Maurya and Jack Caravanos of the overwhelming amounts of electronic waste deposited in developing world.

Vibek Raj Maurya, e-waste series, Accra, Ghana

In June, back to Germany as documenta finally rolls around again. Will there be much engagement with science in this 5-yearly massive survey of contemporary art?  How could there not be, if it plans at all to consider art in relationship to contemporary existence, given the currency of environmental issues and 2011′s scientific excitements, which have included glimpses of the Higg’s boson, Einstein-defying neutrinos, and the discovery of Earth’s “twin”? We know, at least, that Amy Balkin’s ongoing Public Smog project will be part of documenta (13), relocating her park in the atmosphere and intelligent discourse over governance of the skies to Kassel.

Amy Balkin, Public Smog (2004 ongoing). Part of documenta (13)

Of the UK’s Cultural Olympiad offerings this year, I’m keen to see Owl Project’s FLOW, an environmentally sustainable watermill on the River Tyne, come to fruition after all their hard work, and I’d like to hop onto Alex Hartley’s Arctic nowhereisland, navigating the South-West of England coast. Meanwhile, Film and Video Umbrella is commissioning a series of moving image artworks that reflect that transient period when an athlete attains a heightened state of performance, generated by four artist-scientist partnerships: Dryden Goodwin and Elsa Bradley; Cornford and Cross and Dr Richard Ramsey; Susan Pui San, Tali Sharot and Nicky Clayton; and Roderick Buchanan and Dr David Shearer. All four new works will be shown at De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, in summer 2012.

Come Autumn/Fall, I’m already very excited about ISEA 2012, taking place this year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, and glorying in the title ‘Machine Wilderness’. The themes are very much up our street: The Cosmos, Wildlife, Transportation, Power. New Mexico: it’s got deserts, it’s got mountains, it’s got art, and it’s even got a dropzone. What’s not to love?

Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, SEFT-1, Sonda de Exploración Ferroviaria Tripulada, Manned Railway Exploration Probe. Showing at ISEA 2012.

Back from ISEA in September, I may pay a visit to the small market town of Grantham in Lincolnshire, birthplace of Isaac Newton, where they’re planning a “major art and science festival”. (It’s also the birthplace of Maggie Thatcher, but let’s not go there)

What have I left out? Let me know your art and science highlights for 2012, particularly in other parts of the globe.