LabCulture
Symposium at Tate Modern
Art,
Lifestyle and Globalisation
Saturday 7 April
This symposium focused
on the growing complexity of the art business and its relationship
to globalisation. At a time when huge lifestyle changes
are taking place, how is the art community responding?
Can artists retain a critical perspective on global issues?
Why are so many corporations rebranding themselves around
lifestyle? How are artists working within the globalised
economy and how are they perceived by corporations?
Speakers’ Biographies and Abstracts
Anne Nigten
Co-authoring electronic art
Anne Nigten
outlined some of the key issues affecting today’s art practice in a technology driven age.
In this short presentation Nigten brought to the surface
hypothetic parallels of sharing and team-working in today’s
art and technology practice and collaboration in the open
source and free software community. Is collaboration the
ground which hackers, cultural activists and artists working
with technology share? Is this in line with MacLuhan’s
predictions in the 1960’s? How does this collaborative
attitude relate to the so called ‘established’ art
world?
Nigten is the manager of V2_Lab, the aRt&D department
of V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam,
the Netherlands. ANne is lecturing on research and development
in the interdisciplinary field from an art perspective. She
is advisor for several media art and science initiatives
in Europe and board member of ISEA. She completed her
PhD at the University of the Arts London (UK), and frequently
publishes papers on art, engineering and (computer) science
collaboration and software development. Before her current
position at V2_ she has been working as an independent
media artist, and simultaneously fulfilled several management
jobs for the media art sector in the Netherlands.
John Jordan
Radical Aesthetics at the end of the world
Ecological
systems around the world are collapsing, the chasm between
rich and poor expands daily, and our climate could tip
into catastrophic runaway collapse within our lifetime...
What a time to be alive. What is the role of art faced
with such global crisis? Perhaps it is time for art to
shift from being an end to being a means, from holding
out a promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating
a way of living meaningfully in this one? Perhaps its time
for the artists to walk away from the prisons of the art
world, the glamour of corporate lifestyles and the annihilating
logic of global capitalism? Perhaps its time for
artists to disobey again…
Jordan's work merges the imagination of art and the social
engagement of politics. Co-director of social practice
art group Platform (1987-1995), he then went on to be a
co-founder of the infamous cultural resistance collective
Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000). He has written
and lectured extensively about the space between art and
activism, ecological thinking and aesthetics, including
at the Tate Modern and Museum of Modern Art Barcelona.
In 2003 he co-edited the Verso book "We Are Everywhere:
the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism" which
has been translated in 6 languages.
He was Senior lecturer
in fine art at Sheffield Hallam University for 8 years,
until he gave up the relative safety of academia to go
to Argentina during the popular uprising, to work on the
documentary film "The Take" with
Naomi Klein.
Obsessed with developing new methodologies of
direct action and civil disobedience that bring pleasure,
the Carnivalesque, fantasy and the body into radical politics,
he set up the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army which
went on a national tour, with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination, (www.llabofii.net), leading up to the G8 mobilizations
in 2005.
He has just finished co-writing an operatic
downloadable guided walk "And while London Burns" that
explores London's Square Mile and its role in climate change.
(www.andwhilelondonburns.com)
Jemima Rellie
Tate
5th Gallery
Using Tate
as a focus, this presentation will explore how digital
technologies act as both a catalyst and a support for the
ongoing transformation of culture and museums. Tate
Online's core functions will be presented, as well
as well how the site impacts on visitors, activities, distribution
channels and the organization's competition.
Rellie has worked
at the interface of new media and contemporary art for
over 10 years, gaining extensive experience in cross-platform
commissioning in both commercial and not-for-profit sectors.
In 2001, she was hired as Tate’s first Head
of Digital Programmes, with responsibility for public-facing
digital content, including a bespoke online programme crucial
to establishing Tate Online as the fifth Tate gallery and
a destination in its own right. Jemima speaks and consults
internationally on issues facing museums in the digital
age. She is the co-curator of Feedback: art responsive
to instructions, input, or its environment at Laboral (Gíjon,
Spain 2007). She sits on the steering group for Ofcom’s
Creative Forum on the Public Service Publisher; the editorial
board for CHArt (Computers and the History of Art); the
programme committee for Museums and the Web and is a trustee
of the 24 Hour Museum. Prior to Tate Jemima worked in interactive
TV (EC1 Media), internet development (Saltmine Creative),
and art book publishing (Phaidon and Macmillans).
Tim Kindberg
Digital City
The city is increasingly a digital system, as well as a built environment. Thanks
to wireless communication, and the phones and other small devices we carry
with us, digital phenomena are no longer confined to our desks and personal
players, they are becoming embedded out on the streets and in public places.
The cityscape has become not only a locus for new types of digital creativity,
but also a place where unexpected digital phenomena are emerging. Kindberg
will first describe a collaboration with artist Simon Poulter: I Can Read
You, a physical-digital puzzle embedded in Millennium Square, Bristol, via
barcodes. Secondly, he will outline Bluefish, an application in development
for the cities of Bath and Bristol, based on the sub-culture his team has
discovered of naming Bluetooth-equipped mobile phones.
Tim Kindberg's research interests are in ubiquitous and nomadic
computing, particularly in urban settings. He has been a
senior researcher at HP Labs since 1999, first in Palo Alto
then in Bristol.
He is a visiting professor of Computer Science at the
University of Bath. Previously he was senior lecturer in
Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London,
and principal software engineer at start-up
Zebra Parallel. He is co-author of the textbook Distributed
Systems - Concepts and Design. He holds a PhD in Computer
Science from the University of Westminster and a BA in Mathematics
from the University of Cambridge.
Bella Dicks
Culture on Display: a cultural economy of visitability.
Bella Dicks will be talking about
the difficulties and implications of putting culture
on display in a cultural-economic context that insists
on interactivity and accesibility. Display-oriented
settings for cultural consumption are proliferating, whether
in web-mediated or physically-embodied
form. Two technologies are of particular interest in the
cultural economy of visitability:
interpretation and interactivity. Both interactivity and
interpretation claim to narrow the gap
between consumer and cultural artefact. The talk will assess
this claim and consider the various
ways in which culture is transformed in the process of
being brought into alignment with 'users'.
Dicks is senior lecturer in Sociology at the Cardiff School
of Social Sciences. She has
published and researched in the areas of heritage, regeneration,
cultural display, placed identities
and digital methodologies. She has written or co-written
a number of books, including: Heritage,
Place and Community (University of Wales Press, 2000); Out of the Ashes
(with David Waddington,
Chas Critcher and David Parry: Routledge, 2001); Culture on Display (Open University
Press, 2004);
Children, Place and Identity (with Jonathan Scourfield, Mark Drakeford and Andrew
Davies: Routledge,
2006) and Hypermedia and Qualitative Research (with
Bruce Mason, Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson:
Sage 2005).
Organised by PVA
MediaLab
Supported by alias, London
College of Communications and Arts
Council England
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