The Arts Catalyst

Arctic Perspective Initiative announces the winners of its open architecture competition

Giuseppe Mecca, 2009

Three architects – Richard Carbonnier (Canada), Giuseppe Mecca (Italy), and Catherine Rannou (France) – have been selected as the joint winners of the Arctic Perspective Initiative open architecture competition. The challenge of this international competition was to design a zero-footprint mobile research unit for use by local populations in the Arctic. The unit is intended to facilitate a diverse range of technological research opportunities, such as remote sensing, environmental monitoring, video editing and streaming, and communications systems.

The three winning entries, each awarded €1500, were selected by an expert jury from 103 submissions from architects and engineers in more than 30 countries. The competition was the first phase of a design process, the next phase of which will involve working with the winning submissions through a collaborative design effort with local community members from Nunavut, Canada. A prototype unit will be tested in the field next year in Igloolik, Nunavut, by local media workers, hunters, youth and elders of the community.

API is committed to the empowerment and sustainable development of Northern communities through the collaboration and combination of science, arts, engineering and culture. The unit aims to serve as a model for mobile research in the north, incorporating proven local expertise, sustainable resources, and high tech solutions, while promoting open source data sharing strategies and management. All required power will come from green sources.

The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a transnational art, science, and culture work group composed of HMKV (Germany), The Arts Catalyst (UK), Projekt Atol (Slovenia), Lorna (Iceland) and C-TASC (Canada), API is the brainchild of Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman, who met and worked together for the first time as crewmembers of the Makrolab in Blair Atholl, Scotland in 2002, a project produced by The Arts Catalyst.

For more information:
Download PRESS RELEASE of full announcement of the winners

Nicola Triscott, Director



Catherine Rannou, 2009


Richard Carbonnier, 2009

Soundings and transitions

 
Lider de Opinion, Ivan Puig, 2008
 
I returned last week from the Transitio_mx, a festival of electronic and media art in Mexico City, in which I gave a presentation at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, a fascinating and impressive arts centre in the centre of the city, one of the hosting venues of the festival.

The festival demonstrated that there is some really exciting work and ideas originating from this country. Deservedly winning the overall festival prize was Ivan Puig's Lider de Opinion (Opinion Leader). Behind a TV news broadcast, the viewer entered a back room to discover that all the news items' supporting video images were drawn from a series of tiny dioramas. Puig's latest project is to design a 2-person vehicle to run on, and conduct research from, the disused railways of Mexico. I was also intrigued by the work of Ariel Guzik - an installation of his “spectral harmonic resonator”, which he has developed to communicate with cetaceans - and made a visit to his studio to learn more about his work.

Sound was an extremely important component of the festival. The evening programme of sound performances – taking place in the historic gardens of the very beautiful Fonoteca Nacional - were really impressive. Sound art in Mexico, in its many forms, is clearly extremely strong. Other good exhibitions in the city included an highly absorbing and relevant 'Presumed Guilty' at the Museum of Modern, which included work by the prisoner group Colectivo Los Rashes and a piece by Santiago Sierra comprising a small room in the gallery in which you could opt to be locked (for an indefinite time) by the guard. As one of life's habitual volunteers, I was disappointed to decide I couldn't afford the time (maybe). Not sure I made the right decision there, what do you think?

I found there to be a great deal of interest in the potential to work across the disciplines of art and science, particularly among the younger artists. My great thanks to all the artists and curators for their warm welcome and enthusiasm about our work, and particularly to Tania Aedo and the staff at the very inspiring Laboratorio, and to Nahum Mantra, who first suggested I visit the country and put me in touch with people there.

As my first visit to Mexico, I was on a steep learning curve about the country. I made a visit to the astonishing National Museum of Anthropology - truly one of the world's great museum collections! Many conversations about the current state of science, art, the environment and the impact of climate change, as well as the situation for women, the drug wars and the minority who cause the violence. Views and thoughts welcome, suggested reading, etc, to enhance my knowledge base. 

Longing to return. A la proxima ... 

 Nicola Triscott, Director

Interspecies in pictures - A Foundation, London 1-4 October 2009

Kira O'Reilly - Falling Asleep With A Pig (left) Antony Hall - Enki Experiment 4 (right)

video pieces by Nicolas Primat (foreground) Ruth Maclennan (distance)

Rachel Mayeri's Primate Cinema (and Ruth Maclennan's in distance)

The family day on Sunday attracted lots of local families with children who enjoyed Sally Hampson's Bowerbird workshops (below) and Shamim Azad's Interspecies Tales.

 

With over 700 visitors across the three day event, Interspecies - artists collaborating with animals gave lots of visitors plenty to think about.  If you've thoughts prompted by the exhibition or symposia you'd like to exchange why not post your thoughts here?

You can find out more about Antony Hall's work www.enkitechnology.net, or hear some of the interviews with Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson at http://www.radioanimal.org/radioanimal/?p=611.  We hope to have some of the video up on YouTube and BlipTV in the next week.

If you've blogged about your visit to Interspecies, taken pictures or recordings please share the links here too.

Jo Fells, Head of Marketing, The Arts Catalyst

All pictures by Kristian Buus

 

 

Genterra, Critical Art Ensemble, 2002

Click to Play

Just posted to our BlipTV site, this is a documentation film of the Genterra performance by Critical Art Ensemble, presented by Arts Catalyst at Gallery Oldham on the 5 October 2002. It was presented again at the Natural History Museum, London, 20 - 21 June 2003.

An essay on Critical Art Ensemble's work by The Arts Catalyst's director Nicola Triscott is included in a new book, Interfaces of Performance, edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Janis Jefferies of Goldsmiths and Rachel Zerihan of Queen Mary, University of London, published by the Ashgate Press. This collection of essays and interviews investigates current practices that expand our understanding and experience of performance through the use of state-of-the-art technologies.

More information on the Genterra project is at: http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/biotech/genterra.html

Open sourcing the Arctic

I returned last week from a week in Iceland, where I was judging the architecture competition for an Arctic mobile media-centric work and living unit, and meeting with the other partners of the Arctic Perspectives Initiative (API) - HMKV, Germany, Projekt Atol, Slovenia, The Arts Catalyst, UK, C-TASC, Canada, and Lorna, Iceland.

Marko Peljhan (Projekt Atol) and Matthew Biederman (C-TASC) had made a working trip to Igloolik, Nunavuk, in the far north of Canada, during July and August, traveling with a group of Inuit elders and their families in small boats to different islands around Baffin Island and Foxe Basin, revisiting places where the elders had lived before they were moved to the settlement. The journey was being made for a film by Izuma TV, and Marko and Matthew were invited along by Paul Quassa. They reported that it was a very emotional trip for the participants. For the artists, it was a real experience of what it’s like to "live on the land": arguments over the best routes through sea-ice, fog-bound on barren islands for days, running short of food. The artists tested communications equipment, environmental monitoring equipment and aerial photography from a U.A.V., which proved useful for collecting aerial images of the sea ice (pictures from the trip are below). As the artists told the story of their trip, we began to get a clear sense of what this 'mobile media-centric unit' might contribute to local people's lives.

The jury selection process went well. We had a fantastic expert jury, including Johan Berte, designer of the Belgian Antarctic station, Michael Bravo from the Scott Polar Research Institute, architect Andreas Muller, and architecture curator Francesca Ferguson. We had received 103 entries from 30 countries. It was a little deflating at first to realise how little research many entrants had made into conditions in the Arctic. There were frequent assumptions about flat, smooth stable ice sheets (more appropriate to Antarctica) rather than the softening tundra and melting sea ice that characterises much of the Arctic today. But in the end we found three deserving prize-winners. Our next steps are to announce the winners to the international media, take the winning designs (and shortlist) back to Igloolik to consult with the people there, and then begin the design process in earnest. 

The partners are planning a series of exhibitions and publications in 2010 to share the process – and the wider cultural, environmental and geopolitical context for the project - with a broad public audience. More at the Arts Catalyst's website and the Arctic Perspective Initiative website

Nicola Triscott, Director  

Expedition track

Prototype mobile media unit! 

Media unit in situ

U.A.V being prepared for launch

Composite aerial image from U.A.V.

Expedition members study the U.A.V. images

Escaping the Overcode

VORTEX 3 IN Sextans (Inactive Signals Intelligence Spacecraft) by Trevor Paglen

The overland train trek to Istanbul via Linz now completed (see full account by Furtherfield here) few highlights could be mentioned. Eduardo Kac, who won the Golden Nica, is still trying to work out how to import the genetically engineered Edunia (part Eduardo part Petunia) plant to Europe. Some interesting work in Ars Electronica, notably the android sitting in the cafe by Hiroshi Ishiguro, Red Psi Donkey by Jens Brand and video works by Sergei Tishkov, but overall a disappointing year, eclipsed by the big sound art restrospective See This Sound at the Lentos Museum. The UK group Open Sailing got the Voeastalpine next idea award, lets hope that vast steel works can help them build their highly ambitious floating marine habitat. 

On the way to Istanbul met the people from Interspace, Sofia, currently hosting the Transitland project. At Istanbul, the best biennal of the season, heavily dominated by the Balkan countries, some intensely thought-provoking work, including a powerful piece, Territory 1995,  about the Sebrenica massacre by our long-time colleague and collaborator Marko Peljhan, a cardboard constructed missile bunker by Lisi Raskin, even bigger miniature future Gaza cities by Wafa Hourani, real-time tracking of US, Chinese, Russian and Japanese spy satellites both active and inactive by Istanbul astronomers by Trevor Paglen, provocations by Bureau D' Etudes' wall chart claiming that democracy movements in the East and elsewhere are all a CIA-inspired strategy and the centrepiece of the whole event at the Tobacco Factory : What Is To Be Done, the Brecht-inspired 'songspiel' depicting the events surrounding Peretroika. Brian Holmes launched his new book:

Escape The Overcode which included among many other things, descriptions of the Arts Catalyst-organised Makrolab Scotland. A great atmosphere, a great city, many people gathering with war stories and anecdotes on the roof of the Hemingway hangout Hotel Londra every night.

Rob La Frenais, Curator

 

INTERSPECIES - artists collaborating with animals

still from Portrait de Famille, Nicolas Primat/ Patrick Munck

How do humans and animals relate to each other? In The Arts Catalyst’s forthcoming Interspecies exhibition and event, seven international artists have created a range of work that explores this complex relationship. From live experiments that allow visitors to communicate with fish to a video work that explores the age-old affiliation between falconer and falcon, Interspecies will bring together a number of artists working with animals and explores the boundaries of our interaction. 

Artists involved include: Kira O’Reilly, Antony Hall, Nicholas Primat, Ruth Maclennan, Rachel Mayeri, Beatriz da Costa, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson.  The exhibition and live event is organised by The Arts Catalyst in partnership with A Foundation and will take place at A Foundation London, Rochelle School, Shoreditch from 2-4 October (with a private view on Thursday 1 October).  

Interspecies will include a series of free events including two symposia, tours, workshops and a family day. Full details and booking at www.artscatalyst.org

Transport of Delight

There are a lot of people on the road this Autumn. First up is ISEA 2009 on the Island of Ireland, starting from Belfast and shipping out to Dublin, Derry, Dundalk and other places. We'll be blogging from there next week. Then there is the project to transport an artwork from London to Bejing, via Istanbul, organised by Miranda Pope, Arts Catalyst associate curator, among others. The caravan moves on to  Ars Electronica, Linz, Istanbul Biennale, Interdependence Day, also in Istanbul (where I will speak on autonomous infrastructures by artists) Transitland Europa Sofia and the Lyon Biennale. But while it is acknowledged that personal face-to-face high bandwidth networking is what keeps the art, media and science worlds vital and fluid, what about all this short-haul flying? Furtherfield, following Gustav Metzger's RAF (Reduce Art Flights) campaign , instituted a pledge to abstain from flying for art for six months.  I too have been trying to stop short haul where possible and (bar a visit to Brazil)  have succeeded in not flying for art since February this year, taking the train to Transmediale in Berlin, for example. Next month I will join Furtherfield for a train trek to Istanbul via Linz and Sofia, and back again. We are hoping others on that trail will join us, (contact Furtherfield for more info.).

But what  are we actually against here? Surely a few people not flying for art counts for nothing against emissions from the whole world's infrastructure? What we are doing in fact is what art does best, which is to try and force a paradigm shift. It's so easy to book a budget flight, but difficult and much more expensive to book train tickets. The world is geared to mass, grindingly mundane air travel. Let's fly only for fun, to celebrate the joys of swooping like a bird! This is one of the reasons why, every three years we have an Artists Airshow, or have organised microgravity flights. In a future project with the Arts Catalyst, Furtherfield are taking their ideas on flight one stage further, by proposing an Airship Network, an alternative public transport system by artists, where the airship will itself be a networking space, like that train to Istanbul.

Rob La Frenais, Curator

 

Escaping the pull of Earth

One of The Arts Catalyst's most exciting commissions, Simon Faithfull's Escape Vehicle No. 6 is now showing at the BFI gallery.

A highlight of Arts Catalyst's first International Artists Airshow in Farnborough in 2004, Faithfull's No.6 consists of a full-scale chair suspended beneath a weather balloon with a camera and transmitter positioned so that the lens frames the chair dangling in mid-shot. This apparatus was released from a launch pad and rapidly rose above the earth ultimately into the blackness of the stratosphere on the edge of space. With the naked eye, the audience on earth at Farnborough watched the balloon and chair recede and disappear into the sky, but they were then immediately able to follow the rest of the journey on a giant screen via a live video downlink from the escape vehicle. The chair is seen precariously swaying beneath the balloon on its desperate journey into the void. The faltering image of the empty chair, transmitted increasingly weakly back to earth, asks the viewer to imagine occupancy, offering a conceptual escape but ultimately presenting a chilling vision of a kind of death.

The BFI exhibition Gravity Sucks brings together the complete series of Simon Faithfull's escape vehicle works, seven artworks that utilise aballoons, insects and rockets from which to imagine defying gravity.

On until the 20 September 2009.

Nicola Triscott, Director

Biorama 2: troglodites to thrombolites

Peak Cavern, setting for Biorama 2

Having thoroughly decompressed from Eye of the Storm * in my own way, I proceeded to Huddersfield, and thence by swinging careering coach drive across the Pennines to Castleton for the marvelous Biorama 2, a media art event in a cavern, organised by the University of Huddersfield (Derek Hales) and artist Andy Gracie.

* podcasts and documentation of the whole Eye of the Storm event on the way!

Biorama 2 took place in the vast Peak Cavern, the entrance to a 30 km cave system. The event explored the biology of the underground through the notion of ‘umwelt’ through a series of talks, discussions, workshops and expeditions into the cave system. I couldn’t make the workshops which took place in Huddersfield on the Wednesday and Friday, but I joined the group for the outing to Peak Cavern and a terrific day of presentations, performance and cave exploration.

The meeting took place inside the cave,  an AV system set up in this most unlikely setting. The speakers were artists Oron Catts, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Antony Hall and Andy Gracie, curator Ulla Taipale, and microbiologist Paul Humphreys who started the day with a fascinating talk on extremophile bacteria.

Artist Andy Gracie gave the rundown on some historical (and barking mad) theories about the structure of the Earth, as well as Admiral Byrd's speculated 1947 discovery of the entrance at the north poles into the hollow earth. He also explained Jakob von Uexkull's theory of 'umwelt', an organism's perception of its environment, and its influence on the development of biosemiotics by Thomas Sebeok.

Agnes Meyer Brandis introduced some of her recent work. Agnes inhabits a world of enchantment, weaving tales of magic and myth from her journeys and explorations. In her Moon Goose Experiment (2008), Agnes traveled to Siberia for a total solar eclipse to recreate Francis Goodwin’s story of a man who flies to the moon attached to a flock of moon geese. She also spoke about her glacier studies in Argentina and recent meteorite watching event in Russia.

 

Agnes Meyer Brandis, Moon Goose Experiment, 2008

After a short trip from the chilly cave down into the village for coffee and cake and to warm our bones, Oron Catts gave a talk about SymbioticA’s latest project ‘Adaptation’, a developing programme of artist residencies and events opening up discussion around the competing interests surrounding Lake Clifton, home to the largest lake-bound thrombolite reef in the southern hemisphere. Thrombolites, or ‘living rocks’, are built by micro-organisms.

The day finished with a great sound installation by Joe Gilmore in a deep cavern, echoing frequencies bouncing off the cave walls. Left to our own devices by the people who usually police the cavern most contientiously to ensure the safety of visitors, we scrambled up the cavern sides and down tunnels, in unsuitable shoes, trying to avoid the sheer drops.

Nicola Triscott, Director