Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production Through Exhibition

AHRC funded Collaborative Research

Location: Culture Lab, Space 4/5
Time/Date: 9th March 2010 - 10th March 2010, 09:00 - 17:00

The event runs 9:30am 9th to 4:30pm on the 10th, including a social event on Tuesday evening. Full schedule will be sent after booking.

This event is free of charge, but must be fully booked online.

We present the second 2 day symposium in a 2 year series, in an AHRC funded Collaborative Research Training project on research training, digital media art and curating. This training initiative is a collaboration between Culture Lab, Newcastle University, and CRUMB University of Sunderland.

The aim of the series is to bring together post-graduate students of digital media art practice and curating with specialists in the field in order to share research methodologies and enhance the level of cross disciplinary understanding. We seek to integrate the specialist methodologies of digital media into the wider fields of arts and design.

We bring to the table the complete lifecycle of digital media art, from education to production to dissemination, exhibition and interpretation. This holistic approach is of fundamental importance now that digital media art is increasingly accepted in a broader range of traditional cultural, institutional, and gallery contexts. Outreach will focus on bringing students, practitioners, and curators into dialogue to share methodologies, knowledge, and experience.

The event includes 4 sessions on:

  • Curating Methods
  • Negotiating ‘Community’ Participation In Creative Practice
  • Questions vs. Problems : Design Methods
  • DIY Methods

Speakers include in alphabetical order:

Tatiana Bazzichelli (IT/DK) is a communication sociologist, researching on network culture, hacktivism and net art. She is a PhD candidate at the Department of Information and Media Studies, Aarhus University (DK) and Visiting Researcher at the Stanford Humanities Lab, Stanford University (California). In 2001, she founded the networking project AHA:Activism-Hacking-Artivism (www.ecn.org/aha), which won the Honorary Mention for the Digital Communities category at the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz, 2007). In 2002, she initiated the aha.list, the most popular in Italian art and hacktivism according to Neural online. She wrote the book Networking. The Net as Artwork published in English by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center, Aarhus, 2008. www.networkingart.eu/english.html

Clive Gillman (UK) works as an artist and is also Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), an arts and media centre which also hosts The Visual Research Centre dedicated to practice-led research, part of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, the University of Dundee. In Liverpool from 1992 he set up a number of national initiatives, such as MITES (the national exhibition technology resource), the New Tools workshop programme, and advised on the new FACT media building. www.dca.org.uk

Sabine Himmelsbach (DE) is Artistic Director of Edith Russ Site for Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany, where recent exhibitions include "Landscape 2.0 - reality and artificiality of the landscape" and "My Own Private Reality". She studied Art History, Medieval History and Cultural Anthropology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany and graduated with an MA in 1992. From 1993 to 1996 she worked for galleries in Munich and Vienna, and later became the Project Manager for exhibitions and symposia at the Steirischer Herbst Festival (Styrian Autumn Festival) in Graz, Austria. In 1999, Sabine Himmelsbach took up the position of Exhibition Director at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, and worked on exhibitions including "Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science Religion and Art" (2002) and "FUTURE CINEMA. Cinematic Imaginary after Film".
www.edith-russ-haus.de

Brandon LaBelle (DE/US)is an artist and writer working with sound and the specifics of location. His work explores the space between sound and sociality, using performance and on-site constructions as creative supplements to existing conditions. Through his work with Errant Bodies Press he has co-edited a series of anthologies. He initiated and curated the Beyond Music series and festivals from 1997 – 2002 at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Los Angeles, and in 2001 he organized “Social Music”, a radio series for Kunstradio ORF, Vienna. His ongoing project to build a library of radio memories, “Phantom Radio”, was presented at Radio Revolten, Halle in 2006 and at Casa Vecina, Mexico City in 2008. He is the author of “Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art” (Continuum 2006) and "Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life" (Continuum 2010). He lives in Berlin.
www.brandonlabelle.net

Shintaro Miyazaki (DE) is a mediatheorist, curator and artist, born 1980 in Berlin. He has spent his youth in Basel (Switzerland) and has studied Media Theory, Musicology and Philosophy at the University of Basel (M.A.) under G.C. Tholen, Wolfgang Hagen, Verena Kuni, Annemarie Pieper, Emil Angehrn, Byung-Chul Han, Anne C. Shreffler, Peter Gülke, Wulf Arlt, Max Haas, Jürg Stenzl and others. Since 2007 he lives and works in Berlin. Miyazaki is interested in the Epistemology and Archeology of everyday technologies, which store, transmit and calculate/manipulate informations. In general he is interested in the hidden relations between sound/music and the cutting edge of knowledge, technology, science and culture. He is currently a PhD Researcher at Humboldt University Berlin under Prof. Wolfgang Ernst. In 2008 he founded “Institute of Algorhythmics” his latest art, research and design project.
www.algorhythmics.com

Jon Rogers (UK) is a product designer working on the Innovative Product Design programme at the University of Dundee. Originally trained as an electronic engineer (PhD Imperial), Jon has been working between the fields of Interaction and Product Design for a decade, working closely with students, practitioners and academics. His particular specialism is the integration of electronics within products/services. Alongside this electronics-in-design approach, Jon is researching and developing the field of art/design and visual perception – taking theories/process from visual perception sciences and applying them to art/design practice. Recent projects include the Design for the 21st Century’s 'Spatial Imagination' and Culture and Creativity’s 'Art and Science in Visual Motion Perception'. Presently, Jon is involved with setting up a network of Scottish product designers taking an audit of current best-practice and exploring the role of product design in the future.
www.dundee.ac.uk/design

Kate Southworth (UK) is an artist and also leads the iRes Research Group in Network Art at University College Falmouth. Her current research interests focus on the use of distributed protocol in contemporary art and curatorial practices, the genealogy of protocol in art, and the historical relation between protocol and the feminine across different media and art forms. In 2007 she organised the Disrupting Narratives conference at Tate Modern that brought together some of the world’s leading media theorists, artists and researchers to explore narrative and protocol in contemporary art. Together with Patrick Simons she is a founding member of the art collective Glorious Ninth. As well as making audio-visual generative art, they devise DIY installations and everyday performances that are disseminated through distributed social networks. Their work has been exhibited in academic, gallery and online contexts. With a background in Fine Art Kate received an MSc in Multimedia Systems in 1997. She has taught media arts at universities in London and Dublin, and from 2002-2007 was Course Leader of MA Interactive Art & Design at University College Falmouth.
www.ires.org.uk
www.gloriousninth.net

Tom Schofield is an artist who works with technology. He studies and works at Culture Lab in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Until recently he lived and worked in Japan and previously Nepal. His practice centres around the use of technology as a tool for articulating hidden knowledge in a socio-political context. As access to programming skills, through projects such as processing.org and openframeworks.cc, becomes more open we, as artists and citizens, have the opportunity to re-appropriate or re-purpose media for activism in various forms. This is particularly true as it relates to access to data. Non-specialists now have unprecedented access to raw statistical data and a range of free tools to investigate it. He suggests that this represents a paradigm shift in the possibilities for artistic and political enquiry. 
 

There will also be contributions from Newcastle and Sunderland Universities staff: Jamie Allen, Sarah Cook, Areti Galani, Verina Gfader, Beryl Graham, Lalya Gaye, Jo Kazuhiro, and Atau Tanaka.

PhD researchers from London Southbank University, University of Newcastle and University of Sunderland have been invited to report on and participate in these workshops.

Published: 24th February 2010