Hi Simon,
Yes indeed a lot to cover and agreed its not really worth in this
discussion voicing ongoing the ongoing relationship between contemporary
art and new media based practice.
Just as a quick adjunct to my previous post, we wrote this article
http://www.nottinghamvisualarts.net/articles/dec08/1317/open-laboratory
With Nottingham based critical writer Will McCrory to unfurl some of these
discussions and attempt to gain some critical distance on the laboratory
project in Sideshow. I think also it may well resonate with Andy Gracie's
Laboratory Life.
Possibly?
Mat
> Thanks for the post Mat. So many issues to address...
>
> I don't want to go into the debate concerning the relationship between
> mainstream contemporary art and new media practice other than to observe
> that artists can choose their domain in order to actively seek
> disconnects.
> Their motivations can be highly varied but there will always be those who,
> when they see their domain becoming mainstream, choose to move on before
> the
> crowd arrives.
>
> The lab-life activity you mention sounds very interesting. I assume you
> have
> read Latour, Biagioli, Ingold and others on lab culture and will be aware
> that there are many initiatives around the world, over the past few
> decades,
> where artists have been able to work in lab environments for extended
> periods, sometimes for years. Some of these activities have been studied
> and
> written up.
>
> Is your lab independent or is it part of a larger infrastructure? If it is
> independent I would be curious to know how you sustain its activities. If
> it
> is part of a larger organisation I would be equally interested to know how
> you justify its existence to those who hold the purse strings.
>
> What activities do you undertake in the lab? Do you work with scientists
> (of
> various disciplines) or are you seeking to appropriate lab methods to
> artistic activities? Or do you see the lab as something distinct from
> scientific practices?
>
> The crowd-sourcing dimension of what you are discussing is also of
> interest,
> particularly as we are undertaking a research project that is looking at
> some closely related areas (www.elmcip.net). I am sure you are aware of
> how
> Furtherfield are setting up their activities as an open lab or studio,
> extending from real space into network space. Are there connections with
> your initiative or is what you are doing quite different?
>
> Best
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 03/03/2011 00:45, "Mat Trivett" <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>> [log in to unmask]
>> Mob: +447738879173
>> Skype: mathewtrivett
>>
>> http://trampoline.org.uk
>> http://trampoline.org.uk/tracingmobility
>> http://www.radiator-festival.org
>>
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
>
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.elmcip.net/
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
>
>
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