New life up north...

The past few days have been filled with preparing presentations for the talks I will be giving next week, looking at flats, looking at studios and following up job leads.


The lightning paper at the INTERFACE conference is very short, so I have put together a short narrative, trying to use my drawings as illustrations to the ideas I am very quickly talking about. I have also been following up the reference that Chris Connery, the signologist I met in China, told me about - the theorist Geert Lovink. I have been reading his PhD paper which he has made available online-some very interesting ideas relating to the politics and the hierarchy of the physical city reflecting the supposed utopian libertarian space of the international internet.

I am also preparing my presentation for the Artists Practice Day at the Camden Arts Centre. The presentation is about how you document and disseminate your practice. I am trying not to make the visuals too much like a lecture, with text, bullet points (or as people say power pointless!)but I think it comes down to feeling my words feeling supported by visuals,thinking visually, and also if someone does not wholly get what your saying, they may get what they are seeing. I have also found some excellent chart making tools in power point. I would like to try and use these in my artwork.

It has been interesting thinking about how I do document and disseminate my practice - and how I can develop these approaches. Most of my dissemination is by the internet, social networking, but my physical face to face dissemination feels a lot more limited to an existing group of people, that does grow but not very quickly.
I decided this afternoon to take a studio at Rouge Studios in Manchester. It is cheap and a big space, and we will hopefully get a flat city centre near Piccadilly so the location is good. It seems like a very occupied block, with some interesting artists, and a few people I have met before are there so it is an exciting step. I am pleased also that I got past the selection committee! I need the space for upcoming exhibitions.

Next steps is a home and more paid work!

Images from the installation 'Attempts to enter the Forbidden City', 501 Other Space, Chongqing, China

FabLab Challenge 2010

As part of the FutureEverything Conference (Manchester, May, 2010) I was selected to take part in the FabLab Challenge at the UK's first MIT FabLab at the Manchester Manufacturing Institute in Ancoats.  The Challenge for twelve artists was to produce an artwork to a digitally related theme within a restricted time using the laboratories up to date fabrication facilities.  The artist's range of outputs were exhibited at the Conference's Finissage event at The Palace Hotel.  An indepth summary of my experience will be published in my perspectives paper, 'The D Factor' in the BodySpaceTechnology Journal (Brunel University) in the coming month.  Images used within the paper (a few of which please see below) are with great thanks to Richard Hooper, of Liverpool Hope University.

MIT FabLab Manchester

FabLab

Finissage Event, The Palace Hotel, Manchester