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Lab/Time-based residencies and Environmental Response This month CRUMB celebrates it being summertime in the Southern Hemisphere with the help of the artists, curators and theorists taking part in SCANZ 2009. Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand (SCANZ) is a two week residency organised by Intercreate.org for artists, producers, writers, theorists and curators set in New Plymouth New Zealand (January 26th to February 8th 2009). One of the residency themes is Environmental Response. Occurring alongside the residency are a two day symposium (February 7 and 8), performance evening & exhibition (opens February 7), and curatorial workshop, all held at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The Puke Ariki Museum and Library are also partners in the production of new projects for Pukekura Park as part of their 60 Springs Project with local school groups. There is a lot going on! This month we thought we would start with the underlying idea of the SCANZ residency, that of "Raranga Tangata" - the weaving together of people. Raranga Tangata is a Polynesian expression proposed by Charlie Tawhiao and adopted by Sally Jane Norman and Sylvia Nagl to describe the Internet. Contained within the expression is the fundamental question of what are the necessary conditions for weaving people together (technological or otherwise), and in particular in this context - a time-limited residency in a specific environmental and geographic place. In the past the CRUMB list has discussed issues of lab-based models of production and exhibition (how do you turn a lab into a show?), and the question of time-based collaboration and residencies (how long does it take to make it work?). See for instance the discussions on Art and Science Collaborations (August 2002) and Open Source, Residencies and Labs (June 2008). Further comments on these topics from practical experience are always welcome. However this month we'd like to discuss the conditions necessary for a successful weaving together of artists and curators, set within a specific locality. CRUMB has not, as yet, specifically discussed how new media artists respond to place and local environmental concerns when invited to participate in a residency (something which is often presumed or hoped for within international exchanges but not always made explicit as SCANZ is trying to do here). The CRUMB list did talk about Locative Media Art in April and May 2004, but that's not exactly what I mean here. Site-specific production of new media art, for instance as Brett Stallbaum is doing with his mobile storytelling project for Pukekura Park here, has particular challenges for both curators and artists. 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? You are invited to chime in with your thoughts on how to 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. No small order then! We'll start with a manageable chunk, with each of the participants here describing their projects in relation to the topic. This month's respondents (no doubt there will be more) include (and bios follow) Ian Clothier Nina Czegledy Trudy Lane Local Time Caro McCaw Sally Jane Norman Andrew Gryf Paterson The Polytechnic Melinda Rackham Jacques Sirot Brett Stallbaum Mercedes Vicente Addie Wagenknecht With thanks for your input, Sarah References: http://www.intercreate.org http://www.govettbrewster.com http://www.taranakiwiki.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Puke%20Ariki http://www.pukeariki.com/en/stories/entertainmentAndLeisure/ parktimeline.htm Bios: Ian M Clothier is a Senior Academic at Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki (WITT), Director of Intercreate Research Centre (intercreate.org) and founding Director of SCANZ (Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand). He has been selected three times for ISEA (Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) and exhibited projects with organisations based in nine countries. Thematically his projects involve notions around cultural hybridity and nonlinearity, more recently integrated systems. His written work has been published in Leonardo, Convergence and Digital Creativity and he has given many conference presentations. Nina Czegledy, media artist, curator and writer works internationally on collaborative art & science & technology projects. She has produced time based and digital works, won awards for her artwork, exhibited widely, lead and participated in workshops, forums and festivals and published worldwide. She is president of Critical Media a Canadian based Knowledge initiative, is a Senior Fellow, KMDI, University of Toronto, Associate Adjunct Professor Concordia University, Montreal, Honorary Fellow, Moholy Nagy University of Design, Budapest, co-chair of the Leonardo Education Forum (LEF) and ex-officio chair of ISEA. Trudy Lane is currently a masters research student, studying ways to develop a contextualisation of art online in a socially and politically conscious way. She works with Ian Clothier as part of Intercreate.org. She is also the much loved graphic designer of CRUMB's identity. Local Time is a NZ art collective consisting of Danny Butt, Jon Bywater, Natalie Robertson and Alex Monteith. Danny Butt is an educator, writer and consultant on culture and technology, based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jon Bywater is Programme Leader for Critical Studies and Programme Leader for Studio One at the Elam School of Fine Arts, The University of Auckland. He is also active as a curator, and as a writer on art, music, and theory. Caro McCaw is a Senior Lecturer and Academic Leader in Communication Design at Otago Polytechnic. Her research interests include examining situated creative practices, participatory art and design, and particularly the relationship between material location and networked culture drawing from examples in the fields of both art and design. Caroline is studying extramurally towards a PhD in Brisbane, Australia. Sally Jane Norman Born in Napier, Aotearoa, Sally Jane’s background and interests are in live performance, art & technology, and interdisciplinary research. She followed a Master of Arts from Canterbury with a Doctorat de 3ème cycle (PhD) and Doctorat d’état at the Institut d’Etudes théâtrales, Université de Paris III, funding her research as a scientific translator. Commissioned papers include publications for the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture; she has led art and technology events including the New Images Conference at the Louvre (992) and performance research at the International Institute of Puppetry in Charleville-Mézières, Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam (as artistic co-director), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, and IRCAM in Paris. Sally Jane worked on EU Framework projects at the ZKM before becoming Director General of the Ecole supérieure de l’image in France (Angoulême/ Poitiers), where she launched a pioneering practice-based Digital Arts doctorate with Poitiers University. Since 2004, as founding director of Newcastle University’s Culture Lab, a digital laboratory working with Newcastle’s three faculties (Humanities, Science, Medicine), her role is to seed and host a wide range of interdisciplinary research projects. Sally Jane ensures consultancy for numerous international research and policy bodies; as a stubborn believer in the power of collaborative, interdisciplinary energies to spearhead innovative cultural and technological processes, she tends to work naturally in unclassifiable discomfort zones. http:// www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/people/profile/s.j.norman Andrew Gryf Paterson is a Scottish artist-organiser, cultural producer and doctoral candidate, based in Helsinki, Finland. His work involves variable roles of initiator, participant, author and curator, according to different collaborative and cross-disciplinary processes. Andrew works across the fields of media/ network/ environmental activism, pursuing a participatory arts practice through workshops, performative events, and storytelling. The Polytechnic is an Arts organization based in the North east of England which has an emphasis on hand-on and distributed approaches to working with technology. Dominic Smith is an artist, programmer, musician and currently studying towards his PhD with CRUMB at Sunderland University. Sneha Solanki communicates her practice through art which interrogates science and technology. Solanki often works in process-based environments; producing events and projects which utilise low-tech, open and collaborative methods. Her practice extends to sound, web, broadcast, and time-based temporal works. Will Scrimshaw works with and writes about sound, performance and interaction. His work often makes use of interactive technologies and is focused around theories of resonance, noise, feedback, embodiment and materialism. He is currently pursuing PhD research into theories of sonorous individuation in relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Melinda Rackham writes regularly on the intertwining cultural issues and aesthetic, technological and conceptual shifts in networked, distributed, multi-user, game and mobile environments. She worked for over a decade with emergent practices and innovative technologies as a pioneering net artist, writer, curator, media consultant and cultural producer. She was the first Curator of Networked Media at the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and in 2002 she established the -empyre- online critical theory forum. Currently she is the Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) - Australia's leading cultural organisation working at the intersection of art, research, science and emerging technologies to generate new creativities. Jacques Sirot is an independent French film-maker whose creations over the past thirty years range from art works including graphic, photographic and multimedia installation pieces as founding member of CAIRN artists’ cooperative in Paris, to films on live performance and creative technologies events, and documentaries commissioned by local bodies and industrial organisations. Jacques has taught video and multimedia in a variety of professional development and art school contexts. His New Zealand productions include Tane’s Revenge, a film on forest destruction by opossums which premiered on NZTV in 1992 with an ecological “possum rap” music video (co-production with The Pauas), and a documentary on Tapu Te Ranga Marae and its founder, Bruce Stewart (Island Bay, Wellington). Recent Aotearoa inspired work includes audiovisual meditations on Raranga tangata, screened as part of Sally Jane Norman and Sylvia Nagl’s joint conference presentations at Duke University, US (2007) and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin (2008). Video works can be viewed at http:// www.dailymotion.com/user/keoracobus and http://idisk.mac.com/ mirlitant-Public. Jacques’ blog as an alien discoverer of Newcastle upon Tyne is at http://vendredi.blog.lemonde.fr/ Brett Stalbaum is a full time faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he coordinates the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts Major. He is a founding member of Electronic Disturbance Theater, C5 and paintersflat.net. Current research involves generative locative algorithms, the development of mobile software platforms for walking, and their applications in art, activism and education. He lives with his partner Paula Poole in an unincorporated area of Eastern San Diego County, USA. Mercedes Vicente is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Plymouth. Prior to moving to NZ, Mercedes was an independent curator and art critic living in New York City where she held curatorial positions in several art institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art. Vicente earned masters’ degrees in Film and the Arts at New York University and in Curatorial Studies at Bard College and was Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program. Addie Wagenknecht is an artist and former fellow at Eyebeam. Her 'Shadow Project' which is a kinetic responsive system for creating environmentally aware architectural spaces, is a collaboration with Stefan Hechenberger under the name Nor_/d.