Hi Andy,
This sounds a truly rich and exciting experience. The fluid and improvised nature of the experimentation sounds like it really worked too. It seems to reflect an integrated approach to making using whatever materials necessary (reminds me of the art school breaking down media specific art disciplines to just be Art). But did the project also rely on some in-depth subject-specific knowledge too?
But do feel free to put those rehearsed debates aside. Were there over-arching lines of enquiry that emerged? Ideas, concepts, critical frameworks that worked across the board?
I've just been to a talk by Boris Groys on the contemporary nature of the contemporary art musuem based on the questions of time based art similar to those discussed on this list over the last ten years (the loop, the original, hot and cold media etc). And I was reminded of McLuhans claim that every new media investigates the aesthetics of it's preceding media (or something like that). Perhaps this can be apparent in art exhibition making too. In that each generation of curators adopts the curatorial critique of the artists before them(?) Groys argued that the truly contemporary work emerges at the point of exhibition. And your description of the provisional nature of the 'workshop lab in public' or 'lab as exhibition' seems to keep the contemporaneity of the work alive in a particularly strong way.
It would be interesting to hear of other examples of this involving different kinds of making?
Best
Ele
Sent from my iPhone
On 2 Mar 2011, at 17:52, andy gracie <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> hi all
>
> I'm Andy Gracie, and i'm excited to be invited to join in with this discussion.
>
> I'm just nearing the end of a thrilling two weeks in Brighton, where I was leading the 'laboratory life' project with Lighthouse and The Arts Catalyst. This project was based on the Interactivos model devised by Media-Lab Prado in Madrid and featured 5 lead artists whose practice engages with science, and 17 collaborators drawn from various artistic and scientific fields.
>
> I think that the things that have been going on here reflect pretty much all of the themes that have been outlined for this discussion. We have had home made performative human centrifuges, challenging probes into the legality of our own bodies and those of the people being used as human test beds, dressmaking with micro-biological dyes, realtime scientific interpretations through automatic drawing, the construction of a functioning and operative sterile laboratory using items from hardware and gardening stores, and hacker/craft constructions of astrobiological simulators with custom bred fruit flies. The fact that all this was being carried out under the intense scrutiny of the public eye ensured that the performative and challenging aspects of each project were to the fore.
>
> One of the beautiful qualities of all this inter-disciplinary, hybrid, analogue meets digital, craft meets bioart, function meets theatre process was that it was completely and utterly fluid and improvised. And all completely complimentary. I like to see it as evidence that it is when we decide to push the analysis of media and approach to one side we can really begin to let our hair down and generate ideas, projects and collaborations that produce results that are always fresh, always innovative and always thought provoking.
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> best
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> andy
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