Hi All,
This is the first time for me posting on this list, so excuse my
naivity. I think for me the Laboratory Life project/exhibition/
residency/laboratory/workshop/experiment is really interesting.
Unfortunately I didn't get to make it down but friends and
collaborators of mine did. I feel that there is a disconnect between
the realms of the digital and the analogue in the way that so called
'digital art' is viewed by institutions and funders and therefore
framed to the viewer or audience.
I think a lot of artists and curators don't necessarily work with
digital technologies but possibly more with the lexicon and protocol
of digital technologies, the language of network culture as the basis
for their work. With laboratory life, this blurring of disciplines
and egos relates in a way to the ways in which digital technologies
are changing the ways of making. Closer to our biology, closer to the
language of the internet and of the media used to make work.
Last year during the premiere of the British Art Show in Nottingham
(UK), I was involved in a similar project commissioned by Sideshow
(the fringe to BAS7) titled LAB (as was the moniker under which we
worked) http://wearelab.org/ it reflected a desire to borrow from
hacking culture and open-source dynamics to explore new models of the
'making' you describe. What might laboratory practice look like
across a range of media? How might a lab be different from a studio
or a residency? What does this collaborative process or online
processes like the wiki look like in real world scenarios? We are
currently attempting to archive the various conversations, experiments
and micro-projects that emerged from this messy process.
There have been various projects both individual and collaborative
that formed as a result of this cataclysmic process. What was called
LAB is now called The Institute for Boundary Interactions Andy I
would really like to speak with you more about your practice and
furthermore about Laboratory Life.
What space is there within 'digital art' structures for projects or
artists who utilise this language of networks in the real world or
across worlds? What happens when the media is human and not digital
at all but more about connecting things? Connecting people, sharing
knowledge and creating structures for sharing knowledge borrowing from
the successes and failures of the 'many minds create knowledge' adage?
There is one question that I am really interested in, in my personal
practice currently of how might we understand vernacular or heriditary
knowledge in the connected world? So relating back to the topic...how
might analogue knowledge be digitised or conversely how might digital
knowledge (semiotics) be humanised? How might 'networked' knowledge
be generational?
Mathew 'Newbie' Trivett
On 2 Mar 2011, at 22:44, Ele wrote:
> 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.
>>
>>
>> best
>>
>>
>>
>> andy
>>
>>
>>
>> ||||<web>|||||::: hostprods dot net
>> ||||<blog>|||||::: hostdev dot wordpress dot com
>
Mat Trivett
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Mob: +447738879173
Skype: mathewtrivett
http://trampoline.org.uk
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