The Arts Catalyst

Bats

On Tuesday, I went to listen to Jeremy Deller in conversation with Front Row’s John Wilson at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). Deller’s Bat House Project – a competition to design a home for bats in London’s Wetlands Centre - is one of the RSA/ACE Arts and Ecology commissions.

In his presentation, Deller talked about his fascination with bats (illustrated by an image of a bat skeleton that looked convincingly human) and showed images from work that informed the Arts and Ecology project. This included Memory Bucket (2003) a sort of socio-political mapping of Texas, taking in the Waco siege, Willie Nelson and a café that members of the Bush administration have courted local support in. The film ends with a beautiful drama of 300,000+ bats leaving their caves at dusk to hunt for food in the high air streams. The cultural perception of bats as apocalyptic and sinister could not be avoided, yet Deller undermines this, positing them as some kind of ‘natural cleansing’ for the film in contrast to the human 'stupidness' that had gone before.

His respect for bats is mirrored in the Bat House Project. The configuration of interests in this project – it’s artist initiated, built by architects, for a non-human client and funded by a property developer – make it a complex mediation on notions of home, nature and land. I look forward to my first visit.

Miranda Pope, Associate Curator

NANO

Eric Drexler

Bangalore is becoming an essential stopover for both politicians and major figures in science and technology. It is not unusual to have several nobel laureates in town at once. Craig Venter breezed through last month (Bangalore's NCBS is a frontier outpost for pioneering work in synthetic biology) and last week we had Eric Drexler, the 'father' of nanotechnology. He was speaking at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, an extraordinary, almost monastic, oasis of learning in the centre of Bangalore, which hosted our Space and Culture Symposium last year.

Drexler was here to espouse engineering solutions for productive nanosystems, which, he claimed, could be the solution to climate change and the world's coming energy crisis. He also threw in some innovative concepts such as building roads out of photovoltaic material. The bad new is although we are beginning to be able to manipulate precise atomic structures and develop interesting new materials through nanothechnology, we have still not yet arrived at building 'molecular machines'. This breakthough technology, as demonstrated in Drexler's visuals, will involve tiny cogs and gears, almost a backward industrial revolution in which the factories of the Victorian era will be reproduced at the molecular level. For those who know the history of nanotechnology it is difficult to hear Drexler's name without recalling media reports of dire predictions of out-of-control 'nanobugs'  - a result of Drexler's warnings in 1992 of the dangers of 'grey goo' . He now takes responsibility for initiating this paranoia, but says that a routine focus on health and safety was misinterpreted. Rightly he points out that with the engineering still being worked on, 'the future will be different to what we expect.'

Rob La Frenais, Curator

Grey Goo

Human futures

The Royal College of Art held a day-long symposium on Human Enhancement Technologies: The Role of Art and Design, of which I sadly only attended the first part. Andy Miah, reader in new media and bioethics at the University of the West of Scotland, unpicked some of the debates around human enhancement, explaining that we all already use many human "enhancements" in our daily lives and that on the micro-level this is entirely justified, but that on a macro level it raises many issues including whether there are ethical limits to medicine. Jon Turney spoke about the history of writing on human enhancement, including HG Wells and Hermann Muller. Antony Dunne, head of design interactions at the RCA talked of students' work on the implications of SymbioticA's art project Victimless Meat. Other speakers were Jens Hauser, Sandra Kemp, Noam Toran and Onkar Kular.

Also this week, the opening of the ICA's entertaining and thought-provoking Double Agent exhibition, which turns the focus onto artists who use other people as a medium: artists curating artists, artists slapping curators, artists filming people making art, artists filming people arguing about art, artists filming themselves watching actors playing the artist commenting on actors playing the artist.And the opening of Cornelia Parker's Chomskian Abstract at the Whitechapel (that I mentioned below), which more than lived up to the promise of the extract I saw earlier. I urge you to see it.

Nicola Triscott, Director

Space futures

LESS REMOTE
The Futures of Space Exploration: an Arts & Humanities Symposium

30 September - 1 October 2008
International Astronautical Congress, SEC, Glasgow

There's almost a month still left to submit abstracts for this international interdisciplinary symposium, which is being co-organised by The Arts Catalyst to run parallel to the 2008 International Astronautical Congress, the major human space exploration meeting in the world, this year taking place in Glasgow.  We invite artists, cultural analysts, historians, scientists and others to submit abstracts (deadline 11 March) for papers that examine the wider cultural and societal implications of the scientific exploration of space.

Check here for more details

Troubadors and truth drugs

Cracking conference accompanying the Sk-interfaces exhibition at FACT, Liverpool, on Friday and Saturday, which managed to subvert my expectations nicely. Frankly, I'd expected some pretty dry media theory. Instead, media theorist Richard Cavell played his presentation as a stand-up act and had us all laughing, scientist Denis Noble said he was going to demolish some cherished beliefs of biology but first he would sing us a troubadour's love song, which he did, beautifully, with highly-accomplished guitar-playing, and there was a succession of terrific presentations from the sk-interfaces artists, including Maurice Benayoun's powerful media art practice, artist Kira O'Reilly's provocative live art, Marion Laval-Jeantet of the intriguing Art Oriente Object, and Neal White (Office of Experiments) with Nicolas Langlitz from the Max Plank Institute who slapped 'truth serum' patches onto their necks and proceeded to recruit volunteers for self-experimentation. Other speakers included artists Stelarc, Orlan, Jill Scott and Oron Catts of SymbioticA.

Nicola Triscott, Director

Who thought up consumerism?

I attended the first in a series of Arts & Ecology Exchanges at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) on Wednesday. Artist Cornelia Parker was the highlight of the evening, speaking with honesty and thoughtfulness and showing a clip of her recent work: a video interview with Noam Chomsky, in which he explains that it was a conscious decision, taken in the 1920s, to marginalise people by directing them to consumerism, diffusing the threat of a fully politically-engaged citizenship. Director of Kew Gardens, Stephen Hopper, really should have talked about the extraordinary and vitally important Millennium Seed Bank project at Kew; instead, bewilderingly, he talked about art (about which he knows little). Ed Vaizey MP (Con), a last minute replacement for the recently promoted James Purnell, was inconsequential. A slightly disappointing evening, though Parker's film made it worthwhile. But I do recommend the RSA's events, generally excellent (and free), and if the downside to the increasing number of politicians in the programme these days (new RSA Director Matthew Taylor is a former Blair advisor) is a few dull speakers, the upside is the RSA's attempt to place art in direct conversation with the decision-making forces in society.

Cornelia Parker's filmed interview with Chomsky is at the Whitechapel, London, 13 Feb - 30 March 2008

Nicola Triscott, Director

Photo: Chomskian Abstract, 2007, DVD, Cornelia Parker

Vile Earth

The opening of Kyp Kyprianou and Simon Hollington's exhibition 'Goodbye Vile Earth' at South Hill Park, Bracknell, on Saturday. The show was the result of the artists' residency at the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust (FAST), which preserves and promotes the heritage of the Royal Aeronautical Engineering Workshops at Farnborough, the foremost location for British aviation research and development, the site of Arts Catalyst's 2004 International Artists Airshow, and now a business park.

The exhibition presents objects, photographs and films from the FAST archives, almost in the style of a small museum but deliciously twisting the idea of the museum and the dry presentation of carefully-selected facts, transforming it into a human tale with its foibles, contradictions and questionable truths. The objects - missiles, pressure suits, crash helmets, aviation paraphanalia - are appealing, but it's the stories that the artists unfold through photographs and texts along the gallery walls that held my complete attention. Here, in chronological order, are tales, snippets, insights and anecdotes from Farnborough's history of aircraft experimentation and war - recollections from FAST engineers (also told on a video in an adjacent gallery space), reflections from the artists' conversations at Farnborough, small anecdotes from the artists' own lives - juxtaposed with rare and fascinating photographs. "Drop that and you'd have to run to Reading" comments an engineer of the artists' request to include a nuclear device in the exhibition. Discretely interlaced with this unfolding story of aviation are quotes from artists of the time and postcard-sized pictures of artworks of the period. "Painters were always good at getting out of wars. It was the writers who went to the front" notes Kyprianou wryly.  (the show runs to 16 March)

Nicola Triscott, Director

Photo: Goodbye Vile Earth (installation shot) by Mattlox

Blue secretions

Last night I attended the opening of sk-interfaces, curator Jen Hauser's exhibition at FACT in Liverpool. It worked well in FACT's spaces and suited well the new director Mike Stubbs' thematic programme Human Futures. The gallery downstairs showed the more literally biological skin-based artworks which are Hauser's particular interest: Tissue Culture and Art Project’s Victimless Leather, made by the Australian research group SymbioticA, Stelarc's third ear project - familiar, but nicely presented, Orlan and Art Orienté Objet's skin coats, Jun Takita's moss-covered skull (not the transgenic moss originally planned) and Julia Reodica’s designer hymen.  In the upstairs gallery, a more virtual, political take on skin was presented by Maurice Benayoun interactive installation World Skin - a photo safari into a landscape of war, Neal White's slightly incomprehensible but atmospheric recruitment installation for his upcoming Truth Serum experiment, and Critical Art Ensemble's look at the effect of incendiary weapons on human skin.

Highlight of the evening was the performance by Yann Marussich, Bleu Remix, a re-performance of his 2001 Bleu Provisoire (see the video here), who let blue liquids seep through his skin and from his orifices, interior to exterior, first trickling deep blue from his nose, then weeping from his eyes, tinging blue under his arms and finally gradually oozing through the pores of his body. It was extraordinary to witness. More photos (by Andy Miah) of the performance are here.

I'll be in Liverpool again for the sk-interfaces conference and for Truth Serum.

Our February ebulletin is out now, listing our upcoming projects and a range of others across the globe.

Nicola Triscott, Director