hi all,

apologies that the CRUMB list has been so scattershot during this
shortest month of the year with a few too many general announcements
for our liking. everyone seems quite busy and some great
opportunities abound!

it's now March but we haven't heard from all of the peeps we invited
to talk about the process of curating lab and time-based residencies,
and also about the theme of how artists are responding to the
pressing concerns of the environment. so i'd like to summarize the
chit-chat so far and allow this discussion to continue into March,
and mutate however it like.

i initially asked three (long-winded) questions:

1. "what are the necessary conditions for weaving people together
(technological or otherwise)... [during] a time-limited residency in
a specific environmental and geographic place?"

2. "how do you manage the successful delivery of projects if the
artist can only be onsite 8 days before the project launch or has to
leave the day after, or you only get access to the presenting venue
two days before the opening? How do you bring people up to speed,
both those local and those coming in from afar?"

3. "how can you respond to place when you are in a new place, with
new people, seeking to work together in a limited time-period,
mindful of existing relationships and histories and geographical
constraints to create something meaningful and lasting?"

Artist Dominic Smith commented that his public engagement project
depended on "the temperament of the local people" and indicated that
a receptive audience can change the pace or speed at which a project
can develop in its specific site. convincing people to participate
takes longer in some social sites than others i suppose. Curator
Mercedes Vicente added that often in "big hubs" "everyone is too busy
and overwhelmed" implying that siting work in smaller communities
garners more rapid and open participation.

curator/artist Melinda Rackham noted that she had deliberately placed
herself "as an awkward novice in an environment where people are
making highly resolved work for exhibition and publishing outcomes"
but that she was enjoying making her project social, playful, and
online, as it was a refreshing change from "the usual road blocks [of
a gallery installation] like connectivity, noise, light,
misinformation etc." Her caveat however: "two weeks is not long
enough in a self directed and self organsied residency, especially
when you come from another country and must do both the physical,
time, and cultural acclimatizing as well as gather materials and set
up spaces be they physical or virtual."

Theorist and artist Sally Jane Norman noted the importance in a
residency situation of local 'guides' of sorts to "carefully open up
spaces where difference can be articulated and perhaps resolved, of
creating social protocols in which we can develop trust and
interaction." While at times for us at SCANZ this was a part of the
Maori welcome ceremonies, at other times, as Sally Jane pointed out,
it was more about people taking on particular roles: the curator at
the gallery, the artist with the students in their workshop, "A kind
of unspoken maieutics or midwifery."

SCANZ organiser Ian Clothier wrote that being "involved at important
boundary moments such as beginnings [provides] an important space of
acknowledgement and inclusion, from which to build further interaction."

Writer Danny Butt wrote that it was a struggle to balance the
'autonomy of the artist' in a residency situation with the pre-
existing commitments to local partners, collaborators, and
participants from the previous residency, a bit like being the eldest
in the family: "it is to be spoilt, but also to be especially
obligated." Danny also wrote of the "indigenous cultural perspective
that sees the geography of the place one is in as an ancestor and the
future simultaneously" which has special resonance when working with
new media art which is somehow always seeking out the future of
practice.

Danny also pointed to something which I have described as a
'sourdough model' for curating new media art (see the chapter in the
book just out from Univ California Press edited by Christiane Paul),
when curators are involved in the artistic production and
dissemination of the work: the possibility within collaborations (or
indeed residencies) to adopt time-scales for the realisation of a
single work, which can then be used later, in a different time-scale
for the propagation of other works: "The success of this ... might
then become the basis for another ... project which could be
replicated or extended elsewhere." Danny cleverly pointed out the
tensions this model evokes in the location in which it is situated,
and i'd urge you to (re)read his post to get at that.

Since asking those questions and receiving these posts in reply, i
have paddled/floated down the Whanganui River in NZ aboard an
enormously long waka (canoe), designed for 25+ paddlers, staying at
maraes and other sites of interest, completely unplugged and off-
grid. my companions were artists (photographers, videographers,
writers, painters, technologists, educators) and we took the occasion
of getting to know one another (and one another's paddling styles and
snoring habits) to discuss, in a slow-flow way, questions of
collaboration, technology, and the good, the bad and the ugly of each
day. we often had no choice but to respond to our environment
(pouring rain, sloshing mud, sandflies, rapids), which evened us all
out somehow, and were both glad and sad at the journey's time-limited
nature. so far the "results" are a photo album on a server, and
extended email chatter about future collaborations, possible outputs,
and the next time. Angus Leech, from the Banff New Media Institute,
also has a treasure trove of audio recordings and photographs, geo-
tagged with GPS coordinates, for later use. however, for me, i think
the slow-flow journey proved that you don't need a lab, you don't
need a lot of tools and technology to foster collaboration and to get
people thinking about place. (you do need a teapot, a warm
comfortable place to sleep at night, lots of sourdough bread or
gluten free alternative and flapjack, or what we called 'liquid
biscuits' to keep everyone going.)

i was reminded of the joint residency that artists Saul Albert and i
had in newcastle at ISIS arts some summers ago. i think we had a
month's time together founding the Faculty of Taxonomy and still now
Saul is working on the results of that productive time spent thinking
and talking (the idea for his project with "The People Speak" called
"Who Wants To Be..." was sparked from some of our word-game playing
and voting systems held around a table with nothing more
technological than visitors to the studio, paper, pencil, pots of tea).

i welcome posts from others about the necessary conditions for
weaving people together (technological or otherwise)... [during] a
time-limited residency in a specific environmental and geographic
place, and the stories of the successes and failures - what has
worked and what hasn't - which could be useful to other media arts
curators developing residencies and geographically-specific
commissions and projects.

sarah