Wallace Heim is an independent curator, most recently curating the online Exhibition, 'Enter Change: performance and nature', for greenmuseum.org. She co-edited 'Nature Performed. Environment, culture and performance' (2003. Oxford: Blackwell), contributing a chapter on 'Slow Activism' and the work of PLATFORM. She has also written on conversation in the work of Shelley Sacks and Basia Irland for 'Performing Nature. Explorations in ecology and performance' (2005. Bern, Peter Lang). She co-curated the conference/event 'BETWEEN NATURE: explorations in ecology and performance', at Lancaster University, 2000. She is completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Lancaster University, researching the dramaturgies of nature and the ethics of performance. She has also exhibited sculpture internationally, initiated social practice actions and designed for theatre, and television/film.
Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance
Edited By: BRONISLAW SZERSZYNSKI, Lancaster University
Wallace Heim, Lancaster University
Claire Waterton, Lancaster University
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=1405114649&site=1
http://www.bath.ac.uk/arts/speculative-strategies.shtml
http://greenmuseum.org/c/enterchange/index.html
http://www.ashdendirectory.org.uk/default.asp
http://domino.lancs.ac.uk/csec/bn.NSF/
Deborah Stratman is an award-winning filmmaker and artist based in Chicago. She received her M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts and her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1990 she has completed more than a dozen film projects, both on sixteen-millimeter film and on video. These works have been shown at international film festivals—including the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, and the Vienna International Film Festival in Austria—and at art institutions such as the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
http://www.pythagorasfilm.com/
http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/11/
http://www.glasstire.com/features/inset.htm
http://www.atopiaprojects.org/inset_ds.html
http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/v26/v26e.html
http://www.temporaryservices.org/parkmap1.html
PARK / ARCHITECTURE AS FRAUD
PARK is a relocatable, portable parking booth which will migrate to numerous sites around Chicago over a one year period, from April 2000 to April 2001. By 'parking' at these sites, the booth implicates the land it sits on. It implies that you may park. It implies that you should pay. It implies surveillance, that your car is being monitored, that it will be safe. And it implies ownership of space.
http://www.newyorkcitywalk.com/
Between May 2002 and December 2004, I walked every street on the island of Manhattan. Every darn street.
http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?050103ta_talk_mcgrath
SHOE LEATHER / WALK ON
By Ben McGrath / The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town
Issue of 2005-01-03 / Posted 2004-12-27
Last summer, Caleb Smith, a thirty-four-year-old librarian at Columbia, came across an ol Times story with the headline “navy officer near the end of 4-year project of walking in every street on manhattan.” The article, from December, 1954, was about an eccentric sixty-five-year-old named Thomas J. Keane, who, in the course of taking carefully planned weekend strolls, had managed to traverse some three thousand blocks and five hundred miles of Manhattan terrain. Smith, himself an inveterate walker, was then a little more than two years into his own all-encompassing Manhattan project—and, he estimated, about three-quarters of the way done. Why not pick up the pace and aim at finishing on the fiftieth anniversary of his predecessor’s achievement?
http://socialfiction.org/blog/index.html
http://web.pitas.com/psychogeo/archive.html
Nathan Martin is a new media artist, collective experimenter, technologist, designer, writer, and programmer currently living in Pittsburgh, PA. He is a Research Fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Adjunct Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Nathan is a founding member of the media arts collective Carbon Defense League (CDL). Past CDL projects include Nintendo GameBoy hacking, disposable camera reverse engineering, barcode switching (re-code.com) and a 'sex for votes' scam (fthevote.com). CDL has shown work, participated in panels, and led workshops throughout North America and Europe and has received awards from media art festivals and organizations such as Memefest in Slovenia, and Transmediale in Germany. Nathan is currently working on the CDL project MapHub and writing a book titled Critical Deviant Practice.
http://www.maphub.com
http://www.hactivist.com/
http://www.carbondefense.org
The Carbon Defense League is a collective of media artists, technologists, activists and critical theorists working to explore the intersection between radical theory, traditional activism, and technology subversion through the creation of tactical media projects utilizing communication system technologies.
Human Mobility Administration / September 2003
In current "safety and security" practices of governments, corporations, and communities, many restrictions are being placed on individual and group behavior including thought and movement. These restrictions are at times done through arguably discriminatory profiling procedures. In situations where individuals are not willing to self-police, organizations have been created to aid in the management of mobility. The Human Mobility Administration (HMA) presents itself as one such organization. The control of space and movement at the Paradiso during part of the Next 5 Minutes event makes highly visible some of the more restrictive and discriminatory practices of its' legitimate brethren.
You Are Here :: 11 April 2003 :: The South Place Ethical Society, Red Lion Square, London
An informal unguided walk which explored local Bloomsbury architecture and culture. Commissioned by Performance Architecture Location for the 7-day international symposium CIVICCentre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance.
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/artshum/arts/performance/forster_heighes/youarehere/youarehere.htm
http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/artshum/arts/performance/Forster&Heighes.html
Ewan Forster and Christopher Heighes have been making performance events and installations over the last twelve years in and beyond London. Their work is finely attuned to questions of site and the historical accretions that occur in architectural locations. Their commissioned performances include Inquiry into the Loss of the Mary Ward House Story from the London International Festival of Theatre, The Glossary at the Union Chapel, London and The Curriculum, Froebel College, London. The Curriculum formed part of a long term engagement with the architecture and landscape of the University of Surrey Roehampton site. As part of this work and their interest in the Ruskinian origins of Whitelands College they produced Middle English at the Art Worker’s Guild to considerable acclaim last year.
http://www.civiccentre.org/SPEAKERS/Artists/Forster_Heighes.html
http://www.forster-heighes.org.uk/
http://www.civiccentre.org/Home.html
http://www.juliachristensen.com/
Julia Christensen began investigating how Communities are Re-Using the Big Box in January of 2004. Throughout the spring and summer of 2004, she traveled over 17,000 miles around the country in her car, visiting the sites and meeting the people who are making these transformations possible. She has been collecting a growing collection of photographs, interviews, stories, and documents relating to the renovations, and has been giving presentations
in communities about how towns are dealing with this common situation.
She continues to travel around the country, visiting towns and giving lectures about the reuse of big box buildings in the United States. Julia is also exhibiting photography, installing video and sound work from field recordings collected throughout her travels, and creating a book of her research.
http://www.arts.rpi.edu/people/chrisj3/
http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/v27/c.html
journal of nomadic and popular culture
nov-dec 2004 / recent writings:
urban videos: tokyo > gurgles, paris/berlin > continuous cities, atlanta > thin cities
building typology: quonset hut, airplane hangar, gas stations, communist era housing, prefabricated buildings, parking garages, imbiss, los angeles apts
urban graphics: berlin street graphics, mexicali mexico signage, kuala lumpur signage, supergraphics, untitled project
landscapes: saltworks, playas, copper landscapes
Rene Gabri, born in Tehran, moved to Athens, then Los Angeles, now based in New York. His solo projects, are largely based around the mediums of film, video, audio and text. He has been exploring a broad range of topics including cities, memory, confession, popular culture, television, music and issues related to in-between-ness and drifting in general. In addition, to his solo projects, he has been involved with and initiated a broad range of collaborative situations and frameworks.
At the conclusion of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1999, Rene initiated 16Beaver (16beavergroup.org). Since that time he has been actively involved in maintaining an ongoing platform and space for independent critical, cultural, political inquiry and friendship. His projects with Ayreen Anastas have evolved a great deal through their work at 16Beaver. Their Radioactive Discussion series was a physical counterpart to their fictional Homeland Security Cultural Bureau (hscb.org) project. Together with Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, he also works with the name e-Xplo (e-Xplo.org). Creating projects which often involve mapping, exploring, and developing a vocabulary for particular sites.
Most recently he has taught at University of Architecture in Venice and the City University of New York in Staten Island.
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/000522.php
Embodied interaction and social computing, wireless and wearable computing, tangible interfaces, history and theory of interactive art and technology.
Rueb's large-scale responsive spaces and location-aware installations explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body, and sonic and acoustic space. She is currently working on an interactive sound installation that explores the urban landscape and psychosocial geography of Baltimore, Maryland.
In 1999 she launched her first interactive sound installation, Trace, set along a network of hiking trails in the Canadian Rockies Banff Centre for the Arts).Her most recent work, Drift, was installed along the Wadden Sea for the exhibition "Ohne Schnur: Art and Wireless Communication"
Open City: public space and civic identity
DRIFT - The ubiquity of GPS (global positioning satellite) and other tracking technologies suggests that "being lost" may itself be an experience that is being lost. However, simply knowing one's geographical location as expressed in longitude and latitude coordinates has little bearing on one's personal sense of place or direction. "Drift" poses the age-old question "Where am I and where am I going?" in a contemporary moment in which geographic information systems provide evermore precise, yet limited, answers to this question. The installation embraces the flow of wandering, the pleasure of disorientation, and the playful unpredictability of drifting as it relates to movement and translation. Sounds blend ambient textures with spoken word in different languages. Spoken word passages are drawn from poetry and literature dealing with the theme of wandering, being lost, and drifting -Rousseau, Joyce, Mann, Dante, and Woolf among others. The Watten Sea becomes a metaphor for hertzian space as visitors are invited to wander among layered currents of sand, sea and interactive sounds that drift with the tides.
http://movinginplace.net/beingthereinfo/being.html
beingthere.1.squat an intra-disciplinary project about being there | by laurie halsey brown | surrounding a developing relationship to place and a psychological, experiential relationship to space | first project in the beingthere series is based from a squat in Rotterdam and focuses on the squatting policies in the Netherlands as a form of adaptive re-use | interrelated responses take form simultaneously in private | public | virtual | physical locations | an integration of responses and [dis]locations: local/global/physical/virtual/private/public in relation to time [simultaniety] are made visible in the public realm to [re]create an experience of being there | launched september 2003 | key words: location, dislocation, space, place, hyper-place |
LAURIE HALSEY BROWN: is an artist from New York presently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands | she creates architecturally focused projects about being there that investigate place and a psychological, experiential relationship to space | these projects articulate a developing relationship to an environment through a set of intra-disciplinary responses shown simultaneously such as a net.art piece, an installation and a curated exhibition | her architecturally focused projects have been shown both in the U.S. including the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC and internationally | as an aspect of her intra-disciplinary practice, she has created numerous public interventions and media-based curatorial projects from 1997-2003 | 5 site-responsive installations and architectural interventions from 1999-2002 | 4 single-channel videos made between 1999-2003 have been screened at international festivals such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2004 and articulate psychological movements of time | her studio is:http://www.movinginplace.net | lhb@movinginplace.net
N° 43
http://www.smba.nl/shows/43/43.htm
The Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui (1972) also searches for insights, sometimes in order to enrich the audience with an experience and sometimes to fathom the space that surrounds her. When Almarcegui was given a space at De Ateliers in 1996, she began to ask herself what it actually was: that big, white studio that she couldn't describe as being any more than 'big' and 'white', no matter how long she looked at it. A bare space, ready for use, void of character. And like an exhibition space, she realized, it was ready to swallow up and leave no trace of all the impressions, stories and events of previous users.
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/fama/programme2/archive/2003-2004/RotterdamInvestigation/view
Rotterdam Investigation / or / The Artist as a Site Researcher
a project with Lara Almarcegui / October-December 2003
Researching a location is the first step necessary in the development of a project. Such an investigation opens up many questions that inevitably produce a critical attitude towards a city. Most of the questions that will be generated are related to how the city is displayed and how this display affects citizens: What possibilities have inhabitants of a city to escape this urban display? Can they transform it? Is there any site available? Which actions may citizens take to resists the given space?
This project was based on the idea of Guided Tour. Each participant carried out an investigation of a location in Rotterdam, finding a way to present this site and explain what is happening there. The site could be presented with a guided tour, but also with an event, a tourist folder, a guide or a map, etc.
Lara Almarcegui (Spain) is an artist based in Rotterdam. Central to her work is a fascination for the inventive ways in which inhabitants do not conform to a given space but are critical and active towards urban spaces while building their own. Almarcegui has engaged with wastelands, empty lots, demolition sites and self-constructed places such as allotment gardens, all are spaces that escape the design of architects and urban planners and that do not correspond with the official organisation of urban planning. For her these places are exemplary social spaces that challenge our thinking about how we look at our living environment. In the same way, each participant’s selection of a location involved taking a position towards the city.
Parallel to the individual research projects, the project looked at the work of other artists that are related with the idea of carefully studying a specific location and the guided tour: from the surrealists, the situationist ‘derive’, and Robert Smithson’s tour to Passaic Monuments to more contemporary psychogeographic practices. Invited guest presentations included Lorenzo Romito from Stalker, an initiative of a group of students who, tired of being enclosed in their architectural school, started walks around the periphery of Rome; Boris Sieverts, who initiated ‘Büro fur Stadtreisen’ dedicated to organize excursions through the industrial sites surrounding Cologne; and Spanish film maker Jose Luis Guerin whose films capture a building or village and its memory and future.
http://www.ub.es/escult/papers/rendell.htm
‘Places between’: three tactics in critical spatial arts.
Dr. Jane Rendell
Bartlett School of Architecture
University College London
Despite current enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity and collaboration in art and architecture, I argue that there is still a deep-seated anxiety concerning the edges and crossing-points of disciplines. This anxiety is expressed through a tendency to make separations between different disciplines rather than connections. Making connections is necessarily a difficult business because it demands a questioning of terminologies and methodologies normally taken for granted, and a willingness to let go and to allow transformation. . .
Theoretical debates concerning urban culture have reformulated the ways in which we might understand the anxieties around the boundaries of disciplines as well as the potential places in which connections might be made. From cultural geography, for example, we have the notion of the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ which suggests an inter-active relation between people and places, allowing us to consider the city as multiple sites of desire and flux. From feminist theory, we can understand the ‘internal’ space of individual subjectivity and the ‘external’ space of the urban realm to be a series of overlapping and intersecting boundaries and thresholds between private and public, inner and outer, subject and object, the personal and the social.
It is at these thresholds that many of the current debates about public art practice are located. On the oone hand, often considered to focus on their own 'private' worlds and the personal interests, artists who work in public spaces are often thought of as self- indulgent and arrogant. On the other hand, art works that attempt to relate to the ‘public’ as a particular social group or number of individuals who identify with one another, have often been criticised as simplistic and patronising. These kinds of ambivalent attitudes that respond to the placing of 'private' art outside the gallery in 'public' urban sites, raise important questions about the definitions, inter-relations and boundaries of the term public art.
The paper goes on to look at three modes of contemporary critical public art that help us to explore places between spatial theory and practice and between public and private. These are:
1. walking ‘as’ if
2. spatial dialectics
3. animate objects