Dark Places Bus Tour, Autonomous Infrastructures, Deviant Toads

08/03/2010

Bike Power at the Energy Cafe

Muddy green wellies  have a place in all our recent activities. They were mandatory on our Dark places Bus tour of secret sites on Southern England. The New Scientist came along for the ride: 'The sun has barely risen and every seat on the overheated bus is taken. I look around at the other passengers. Together we're a motley crew - historians, academics, a few artists and a couple of hungover students, people united by curiosity and the promise of being shown the secret side of England. None of us are sure what to expect. The promotional blurb was deliberately vague: "...a fascinating bus tour of critical sites of advanced technological development...sites that emerged during the tensions and paranoias of the Cold War". Hopefully worth getting out of bed for'. Read more here.

The Energy Cafe, pictured above, is one of the 30 or so artists, technologists, utopians and thinkers meeting at the Baltic in Newcastle/Gateshead this week as part of Autonomous Infrastructures and the public event Planetary Breakdown organised by us, Intersections at Newcastle University and the AV festival. AV10 is already underway and generating an impressive number of tweets at #AV10. You can still sign up for Planetary Breakdown on the Intersections website here. You can sign up for the Autonomous Infrastructures group if you are on Facebook and follow on #aut_in if you tweet.

Brandon Ballengee spends most of his time splashing around in ponds in wellies investigating amphibians for deformity and trying to understand why this occurs. The Case of the Deviant Toad starts on March 15 at the Royal Institution''s impressively refurbished premises with a Cafe Scientifique. Sign up here. You can leave your wellies at the door.

Futurologies

13/01/2010

Artificial Moon by Wang Yuyang

Futurology, futurity, back to the future...with the Mayan calendar supposedly due to end in 2012 (and the UK arts budget in an Olympic-sized splash) the future is on everyone's mind in the first few days of a new decade. Transmediale 10, Berlin, is on the subject of 'Futurity' and I am moderating a panel on the nearest possibility for living off the planet, the Moon, in a Salon presentation. Destination Moon. Featuring Pavel Medvedev, whose 'On the Third Planet of the Sun' was blogged here by us, Wang Yuyang whose 'artificial moon' is featured above, curator Li Zenhua and Agnes Meyer Brandis featured here, who will also be showing her Cloud Core Scanner and a performance Making Clouds at Schering Stiftung in Berlin. The Futurity Long Conversation will also take place at Transmediale inspired by Jem Finer's longplayer and the Long Now Foundation. My colleague Nicola Triscott will take part along with a number of other luminaries and visionaries.

Featuring another proposed future, Star City - the Future under Communism at Nottingham Contemporary opens February 12 and I am speaking about the present day Star City at The Futurological Congress, inspired by Stanislaw Lem along with participating artists Aleksandra Mir (who will show the Arts Catalyst-commissioned Gravity), Pavel Althamer, The Otolith Group and others.

With the breakdown of Copenhagen, artistic strategies for intervention in radically re-thinking infrastructure become increasingly important. Taking place on March 10 at the Baltic, part of AV 2010 (theme - Energy) Newcastle and curated and organised by The Arts Catalyst and Intersections, Newcastle University, the apocalyptically-titled Planetary Breakdown- Automomous Infrastructures for a Sustainable Future explores the possibility of creating new autonomous infrastructures across energy, trade and transport, offering a space for everyone to contribute to an active dialogue about our futures. Confirmed speakers include: writer on Utopian Futures Malcolm Miles and international artists Lise Autogena, HeHe, Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, Kate Rich, Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand.  Following the symposium there will be a free lecture by artist Gustav Metzger, whom I understand will be talking about 'extinction'...

Curator, Rob La Frenais

Welcome to the new look website (blog)

22/12/2009

www.artscatalyst.org our new homepage

We're pleased to announce our new website. We've redesigned it with a new look, improved navigation and integrated access to our social networking sites.

Today we're officially launching our new website - we hope by now the web servers across the globe will have the new site fully functional, because we're itching to share some of the new features with you:

Archive:

You'll now find a visual and - when possible - audio-visual archive of our past Projects and Experience & Learning activities, which we hope you will enjoy browsing. You can search these in a variety of ways, by year, title, artists' name, theme and even location. Each project is now fully linked to blog entries, media downloads etc which we hope will bring you easy and fun browsing. We've uploaded lots of projects already, but we thought we'd like to share them with you while we add more over the coming weeks and as future projects are added.

Search function:

Hurrah! No more wondering where we’ve hidden key information on that symposium you missed! Give it a try - we're really thrilled with this feature.

Over to you:

We'd like to know what you think about our work and the ideas we explore. Our new Network & Blog section is open for your comments, contributions and feedback. It also includes integrated access to our Twitter feeds (from Director, Nicola Triscott and Curator, Rob La Frenais), and links to our other social networking sites: Facebook, Youtube and Blip TV.

What do you think? Let us know your thoughts on what we have done - and still have to do.  We know every website needs to evolve. (For technical queries, please specify your operating system and browser version.)

We're trying to make sure we link with artists' and partners' websites, so please email any links you think appropriate to us and please put a link to us (http://www.artscatalyst.org) on your websites, blogs and social networks too.

Access:

Our new site has been designed to enable greatly improved use by people of all abilities and disabilities. It is designed to help those using screenreader software. Text and images are enlargable. Links are underlined.

Our website has been designed by COG Design.

Finally - I'd like to wish you all best wishes for the season - on behalf of The Arts Catalyst.

Jo Fells, Head of Marketing & PR

Two chairs for Innovation (blog)

25/11/2009

Members of the public carry Simon Faithfull's Escape vehicle No. 6 to the launch

Simon Faithfull's Escape Vehicle No 6, Toshiba - the tale of a remake and the power of social networking

It is a truism that the number of people becoming aware of a significant performance or live event greatly exceeds the number of people who first witnessed it. Thus I Like America and America Likes Me, in which Joseph Beuys arrived in New York blindfolded and performed a durational work with a coyote, was seen by very few people; but through extensive amplification through documentation and art-historical analysis, and now YouTube, millions are aware of this work.

Around 250 people stood in a windy field in Farnborough at the first Artists Airshow in September 2004 and saw Simon Faithfull successfully launch an apparently domestic chair and a camera (after an initial failure when the balloon detached from the apparatus). Following the ascent of the chair via live transmission, the audience experienced a delerious and uneasy sense of unreality, vicarious vertigo and finally amazement as the chair reached the edge of space - the circumference of the earth visible and the sky black. Simon Faithfull said to us that day 'This is the best thing I have ever done'. Over the last five years, a few more people at our lectures and looking at Simon's and our websites have been made aware of Escape Vehicle No 6, and this year the footage featured in Simon's one-person show Gravity Sucks at the BFI gallery.

Simon was interested in re-creating this piece over the Thames. Working with a film company, Toshiba was approached for sponsorship. But discussions broke down and that seemed to be the end of it. However, Toshiba and Grey, its UK advertising company, were, unbeknownst to us, (the commissioners of the original artwork) developing the idea into an advertising campaign budgeted at around £3m, and last week the ad - shot at considerable expense in Nevada - was launched.

Decide for yourself - by watching this and then this - how similar they are. All well and good, but when Toshiba claimed this was the first time that this had been done here, the whiff of scorching underpants proved too great for many of Simon's supporters, as well as ordinary, outraged YouTube-watchers, and a storm of protest broke out on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and a growing number of dedicated blogs. As a result, the number of people made aware for the first time of this extraordinary work grew to the tens of thousands and is now rising. Good result or bad result? Time will tell.

Rob La Frenais, Curator

Postscript:

Another innovative idea by artists commissioned by The Arts Catalyst, Jem Finer and Ansuman Biswas' Zero Genies, made on our microgravity flight campaign in Russia, is showing at the Quad in Derby as part of the Hayward Touring exhibition The Magic Show, curated by Sally O'Reilly. One for Allied Carpets?

Arctic Perspective Initiative (blog)

28/10/2009

Giuseppe Mecca, 2009

The winners of the open architecture competition are announced

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

Downloads

• Arctive Perspective Initiative - winners press release

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