Dear Crumbsters,

as people are getting ready for MAH Rewnew, I would like to invite you 
to a special 'participatory session' called Playing Fields. This will be 
a live exercise of collaborative tagging, of naming and evaluating 
practices; processes which usually happen in non-public settings are 
getting socialised.

Looking forward to seeing you in Riga
best
Armin


Playing FIELDS - participatory session
MAH Renew 2013 conference, 10 October 18:00 - 20:00
http://renew.rixc.lv/days/october10.php

In this participatory session Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits 
invite MAH Renew 2013 participants to join a collaborative curating and 
tagging exercise. In preparation for the exhibition Fields, May 15 - Aug 
03 2014, at Arsenals, Riga, participants are invited to name and 
annotate projects which they think answer the research question. Fields 
understands the exhibition as a participatory research project, whose 
central research question is:

Which Fields act as catalysts and underpin those artistic practices 
which offer the greatest potential for social change towards more 
imaginative and sustainable ways of living? Which pre-cursors in the 
last 30-40 years did exist and what can we learn from those often untold 
stories?

Join to nominate a project and discuss it with world leading experts on 
media art. The Playing Fields session invites for a collective 
brainstorming. If you have an art or artistic-research project, or a 
project which is more about social change but has a creative and 
cultural dimension, please come along and present your idea in a short 
statement. In order to do so please drop me a line: armin at easynet dot 
co dot uk

Note: Fields, jointly curated by Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite and Raitis 
Smits, will present an inquiry into transdisciplinary artworks on issues 
such as sustainability, ecology, tactical biopolitics, transgender, 
social art practice and related areas. Fields will be part of Culture 
Capital 2014 Riga.

A premise behind this research question is that practices which were 
once subsumed under terms such as media art, digital art, 
art-and-technology, art-and-science, have become so diversified that no 
single term can work as a signpost any more. The assumption is also that 
typically those practices are  transdisciplinary and socially engaged, 
combining imaginative use of technologies old and new with participatory 
processes and interventions in the social fabric. The changing role of 
art in society is one where it does not just create a new aesthetics but 
gets involved in patterns of social, scientific, and technological 
transformations. Fields is about mapping those expanded fields of 
artistic practices which are contextual seedbeds for ideas and practices 
aiming at overcoming the crisis of the present and developing new models 
of techno-social evolution.