The alt.SPACE Festival 2007
THE alt.SPACE FESTIVAL 2007
The alt.SPACE Festival 2007, the third annual alt.SPACE Festival, took place in July 2007 in and around London, in host venues as well as in public space. Within the context of an overall engagement with the notion of ‘the revolutionary & the radical’ the festival was an attempt to highlight the increasing number of self-organized collaborative structures that operate within the field of cultural production, particularly those that explicitly address issues of collectivity and collective learning as an alternative to institutional research and educational structures.
More concretely, the project drew upon the different practices, friends and allies of those involved, in different capacities, in the alt.SPACE Network and sought to bring these people and practices together, physically within a specific local context and terrain, to work collaboratively, converse, and interact with others involved in similar practices and activities, through participatory, often discursive, events and programs that experiment with alternative models for research and learning. Four themes gave the month a loose organizing structure: Sound, Cartography, Illegalities, and Dissemination. A variety of tools and formats, including reading groups, presentations, discussion sessions, skype dinner parties, and group walks, provide specific points of entry into each of these broad concerns.
See below for photographs and more detailed descriptions of each theme. At the bottom of this page you can find bionotes of contributors to the festival. The Festival Reader - a collection of text used as a basis for the festival reading groups - can be downloaded here.
EVENTS
Opening Event – A Peripatetic Disco & alt.SPACE: hard.COPY launch party: July 2, 2007, 4pm, meet outside the main gates of Buckingham Palace.
The 2nd of July sees the opening event of the festival and the launch party of the journal alt.SPACE: hard.COPY. This event take the form of a peripatetic disco traveling between different public sites with a number of DJs joining both physically and over Skype to present and play pieces of music and sound art. Contributors to this part of the program includes: Sam Gould, Frans Gillberg, Dan Wang, Tom Richards, Zefrey Throwell and Johannes Grenzfurthner.
Sound: July 4-5, 2007, 12noon – 8pm, South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Road, LONDON SE5 8UH.
What are the possibilities and radical points of departure that lie behind the intentional production of sound waves? This theme attempts to engage with sound on a number of different levels, through theoretical discourse in the form of presentations and reading groups, but also through many practical examples of improvisation and listening events where an emphasis still lies on the discussion/theorisation of the production of audio and sound work.
On the 2nd of July the alt.SPACE group will be hosting a public space launch party for the journal alt.SPACE: hardcopy. This event will take the form of a peripatetic disco travelling between different public sites with a number of DJs joining both physically and over Skype to present and play pieces of music and sound art.
On the 4th and 5th of July South London Gallery will host a series of sound events starting with an informal breakfast on the 4th where we meet, eat and talk about sound in relation to revolutionary or radical practices. In the evening we’ll continue with a series of papers and presentations, including contributions from Marcel Swiboda, Ola Stahl, and Åsa Ståhl, followed by a performance by free improv trio The Mighty Maltsters and participation in Red76’s Bring the War Back Home project.
The following day we will start with a reading group based on Reza Negarestani’s text ‘The Genealogy of Barbarity: Music, Tongue and Writing’. We ask those wishing to take part to bring in sound pieces to share and discuss. In the evening there will be a listening session and discussion of La Monte Young’s A Well Tuned Piano and two pieces by Japanese doom metal band Corrupted.
Cartography: various dates and locations in Bracknell and London, see detailed information below.
What forms a border? What interiorities and exteriorities does a particular border imply? Can a micro-cartographical practice move beyond the dominant narratives that shape a region? Through walking and engaging with existing material (maps, myths, history, literature…) we hope to produce a new kind of map, a multi-textured, multi-layered web of maps and minor narratives that transect existing borders and form linkages across existing systems of cartography.
Readings will offer points of reference along the way, including: Foucault & Deleuze in conversation, DeCertau’s ‘Walking in the City’, Andrea Phillips’ ‘Cultural Geographies in Practice – Walking and Looking’, and sections from Daniel Stern’s ‘The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life’.
Join us walking at the following times/places:
7 & 8 July: A Bracknell Walk. 2.30pm (both days). South Hill Park Arts Centre, Ringmead, Bracknell, RG12 7PA.
11 July: A South-East London Walk. We meet 4pm at South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH and improvise our way across South-East London. As a basis for our discussion, we look at Andrea Phillips’ text Cultural Geographies in Practice: Walking and Looking.
18 July: A North-East London Walk. We meet 4pm outside gallery:space, McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ and base our discussion on DeCerteau’s text Walking in the City.
25 July: A South-West London Walk. We meet 4pm outside Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London, SE11 5RH and improvise our way across South-West London. As a basis for our discussion, we look at a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
26 July: An East London Walk. We meet 4pm outside by the Olympics 2012 countdown clock at Stratford Station. As a basis for our discussion, we look at Daniel Stern’s The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. [Canceled due to heavy rain, reading group at the Approach Tavern.]
Illegalities: July 14-15, 2007, 12noon – 8pm, gallery:space, Mackenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park.
This theme sets out to explore notions of illegality specifically in relation to the expanded field of literatures and literary practice, but also in relation to a wider cultural, historical and socio-political field. Attempting to explore various forms of distributions of exclusion - exclusions through law, institutional practice, editing, etc. - the theme will engage not primarily with excluded or illegal practices themselves but with the notion and practice of exclusion as a form of knowledge construction/dissemination/control.
On the July 14th we’ll start with a breakfast and a screening of Godard’s film La Chinoise, followed by a discussion of the film with Berlin-based artist and musician Dominic Hislop. The evening session includes presentations by C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent] and London-based artist John Russell, followed by an open discussion on the general theme of ‘illegalities and cultural practice’.
The following day starts off with a reading group based on the text ‘What is a Minor Literature’ by Deleuze and Guattari, and concludes with project presentations by Lee Simmons and Helena Walsh.
Dissemination: July 21-22, 2007, 12noon – 8pm, at Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London, SE11 5RH.
This theme engages with both recent and historical tendencies to expand the notion of practices (artistic or otherwise) to the point where production becomes inseparable from dissemination, and where channels of distribution and communication are themselves the subject of active and critical engagement. Invited guests who take up this concern in their practice, exploring critical models and ways of producing and curating, will guide these events. Collectively, we will attempt to investigate and localise alternative forms of dissemination that are based on local initiatives and specific struggles. We will consider potential linkages across such practices without succumbing to generalization, universalization and meta-networking. Our hope is that through these discussions, we can begin to map out a set of relations based on notions of nomadism, peripatetics and minor forms of dissemination rather than the totalizing figures that tend to dictate the ways in which sociality, alliance and alignment emerge and are sustained.
A two day event will take place at Gasworks, starting on the 21st with a breakfast and informal discussion of issues relating to dissemination, the revolutionary and the radical. This will be followed, in the evening, by a series of papers and presentations, including contributions from Neil Chapman & Lise Autogena, Sonya Dyer, Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, Steven Duval, and Susan Kelly. The following day begins with a reading group based on an interview of Jean Oury followed by skype presentations by Dominic Hislop, UNWETTER, Zefrey Throwell, and Signal.
Closing event – A 24 hour Peripatetic Round-table Symposium: July 28, 2007, 6am – 6am, contact us for details.
July 28 sees the closing event of the festival, a 24h long reflection session that moves between different venues in the city. We start the day in a domestic setting, having breakfast whilst watching Nicholas Philibert’s film Every Little Thing. Certain themes and bits of text will then be revisited at various venues, including Beaconsfield near Vauxhall, through the day. We’ll end in a domestic setting with a Skype based conversation with Philadelphia based project space Basekamp.
CONTRIBUTORS
Lise Autogena is an artist currently living in London and Rotterdam. Her work often involves lengthy and complex processes of development, and the forming of diverse communities made up of artists, business people, scientists, children. In 2004 Lise Autogena received a NESTA fellowship to work with scientists, to explore “a different approach to the investigation of the ocean and atmospheric phenomena”. (http://www.nesta.org.uk/) See http://www.autogena.org for more info.
For the alt.SPACE Festival Lise Autogena will engage in a conversation with Neil Chapman.
Neil Chapman is an artist and writer. He studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of art in Dundee, and Critical Fine Art Practice at Central Saint Martins, London. His work takes various forms, deriving momentum from shifts between disciplines. Current projects explore the materiality of writing; how with the delivery of ideas though live presentation, unsure spaces can be exposed between performance and certain conventions of the public meeting.
Collaboratively, Neil Chapman has worked with Anna Best at W139 gallery, Amsterdam, and as co-editor of her book ‘Occasional Sites’, published by The Photographer’s Gallery, London. He has worked with artist Steven Claydon, making sculpture and installation, exhibiting at Hoxton Distillery, Greengrassi, and the ICA, London. In 2005, Neil Chapman was artist in residence with Martin Wooster at the Researcher’s House, CRIR, Copenhagen, Denmark. Work made as a result of this residency in the form of recorded conversations is published at www.slashseconds.org. Neil Chapman’s book, The Ring Mechanism (2004) is published by Book Works. He has recently begun a research scholarship at Reading University.
For the alt.SPACE Festival Neil Chapman will engage in a conversation with Lise Autogena.
Basekamp is a non commercial studio and exhibition space whose primary focus is to participate in the creation, facilitation and promotion of large scale collaborative projects by contemporary artists. Philadelphia is an example of a city whose visual art-world is currently in the process of self-definition. We have seen this as an opportunity to use the city as a home base to invite domestic and international collaborative groups in a joint experiment to develop new models of relations within overlapping art communities.
During the alt.SPACE Festival, Basekamp has organized parallel public space events in Philadelphia exploring some similar issues to those explored in London. Towards the end of our respective events series, we will hook up over Skype and exchange stories, reflections, observations, ideas and notions.
C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent] was a collaborative framework for cultural practice set up by Carl Lindh and Ola Stahl in 2000. In 2002 Kajsa Thelin became a member of the group, and in 2005 Vas Oikonomopoulos joined the collective. According to one of the initial manifestos of the group, it was set up as ‘a rather nomadic artist collective and members-run platform for the development of collaborative structures, projects, interventions and other initiatives seeking to link art and aesthetic practice to a wider socio-political context’. Throughout its lifespan the focal point of the group was the collective desire to make explicit and engage critically with the necessarily collaborative and collective nature of artistic and other practice, seeking to engender forms of self-reflection as well as prototypes for other, future forms of collective production, collective learning, and interventions into the field of cultural production as well as wider socio-political contexts.
For the alt.SPACE Festival, C.CRED will revisit their Permanent Ignition: Turin project. Dating back to 2001-2002, this project was a collaboration between C.CRED, Simon O’Sullivan, and a number of militants involved in the various local students and workers movements of the 1960s and 70s, including Marco Scavino and Pierfranco Milanese. The presentation will draw upon the archive of texts and photographic material generated as part of the project.
Steven Duval is an artist currently living in Oxford. He is one of the original members of the Protoacademy; an experimental educational group started by Charles Esche in 1998 and was its co-ordinator from 2003-5. He has shown work in the Turin Biennale of Young Artists, The Gwangju Biennale, “Presence: Emerging Artists from Scotland” at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh and at KHOJ in New Delhi. His works deal with issues of food politics, mental ecology and the psychology of the built environment. He is currently doing a practice-based research PhD at Oxford Brookes University.
For the alt.SPACE Festival he is going to talk about “Privacy: a programme of symposia” a project that protoacademy did in 2004 with the Henry Moore Foundation’s Contemporary Projects and Olaf Nicolai. He is also going to talk about how dissemination takes form in his own work. If you like to know more go to www.stevenduval.com
Sonya Dyer is a London based artist and arts consultant and author of ‘Boxed In: How Cultural Diversity Policies Constrict Black Artists,’ published online - http://www.manifestoclub.com/hubs/artistic-autonomy - and by a-n The Artists Information Company in July, as the fourth in the Research papers series - http://www.a-n.co.uk. She is involved with a number of self-initaited artist-let projects, including Comment peer critique group and the Manifesto Club Artistic Autonomy Hub. Her text, ‘Some thoughts on what ‘autonomy’ and ‘freedom’ might mean for visual artists in the present day’ will be published in Printed Project this autumn - http://www.visualartists.ie/AP_printed_project.html
She is also involved in the MCAA hub:
”We are a network of artists, arts administrators, researchers and students who want to defend artistic autonomy in all its forms. A vibrant artistic culture is founded upon artistic freedom. The only limits for artists should be the limits of the discipline and limits that they choose for themselves. We criticise and oppose pressure on artists to work towards the targets of politicians. We also oppose restrictions on freedom of expression, which ultimately affect all artists who seek to address the experience of contemporary life. We seek to encourage an experimental artistic culture, which is not afraid to make mistakes in the search for truthful forms of expression.”
For the alt.SPACE Festival Sonya Dyer will present some of her work related to the manifesto club.
Frans Gillberg is a producer, soundartist and co-manager of the electronic music label Komplott in paralell to studies in landscape architecture. Between 2001 and 2006 he has produced some 30 concerts (Starfield Simulation #1–#30) at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art and the Scania Park in Malmö. For 2006–2008 he was invited by the city of Malmö to create a music program for the permanent sound/ music installation in the Scania Park in the western harbour of Malmö.
For the alt.SPACE Festival he has put together a program of audio work to be presented at in public spaces within the London housing project the Barbican.
Sam Gould is the lead instigator of the Portland, Oregon based art collaborative, Red76 (http://www.red76.com). He is a founding key-holder of MessHall, an experiment social space based out of Chicago, Illinois’s Roger’s Park neighborhood. Along with John Vitale he edits the free publication “…….”. In 2006 Gould was nominated for the de Menil Collection’s Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.
For the alt.SPACE Festival Sam Gould have put together a program of songs that he will play from his Portland living room. Additionally, the alt.SPACE Festival will participate in a Fourth of July version of Red76’s Bring the War Back Home project, which is described as follows:
Since the war in Iraq began in March of 2003 the US media has given the American public nothing but sugar coated versions of the reality of the situation on the ground in that country, as well as here at home in America. The glossing over of the realities of this conflict have led the general America public, even those who are (seemingly) informed, engaged, and upset, into a state of numbness and detachment.
With this in mind we encourage you, on this upcoming Fourth of July (2006), to Bring The War Home. Since we don’t get much from the American media these days we went and looked over the internet and downloaded video and audio, shot and recorded by US Soldiers in the field, which they uploaded onto personal blogs and sites like YouTube; footage chronicling their life in combat in Iraq. We’ve taken this material and turned it into a sound collage of the gunfire, explosions, and voices the public at large is not hearing here at home, but that they, and the citizens of Iraq, hear day in, and day out.
We encourage you to download this MP3 and, along with any fireworks you may be lighting off on the Fourth, play it outdoors at your barbecue - LOUD: play it to remember, and help your neighbors remember, what those fireworks are meant to symbolize each Fourth of July, and so we can begin to discuss what we want those fireworks to symbolize on Fourth of Julys to come.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist and member of the Veinna based art-technology-philosophy group Monochrom (http://www.monochrom.at). For the alt.SPACE Festival he’s put together a program of corporate anthems and a presentation entitled The Innermost Unifier: Today it’s the Corporate Anthem which he describes as follows:
The advancement of pre-capitalism (ie. the form of organisation for the social production of goods and of its distribution) to post-capitalism (ie. the form of organisation for all social relations in a particular economical ideology) is seldomly as apparent as in a modern company or enterprise, the most dominant type of organisation of the post-capitalist endeavor. The company has taken the place once inhibited by the factory. The factory thrived on the opposites of worker and owner. The modern company, however, is built around the core-idea of the post-antagonostic concept of work itself. The employees have become co- and sub-entrepreneurs. Yet of course they are not, which becomes evident when looking at who actually owns the means of production within the company. The employees however are being turned onto the illusion of being an active part, even a decision-making part of the “big family” (I love this company!).
The modern company wants to return to the pre-capitalist crisis of class-struggle. That means: Contradictions within, and indeed clashes of interest take a step back behind the curtain of the “community”. (A visit at the Google Campus in Silicon Valley illustrates this concept drastically). The return to old ideas of community also brings with it certain forms of rituals, like the usage of a corporate anthem. But there is no right feel-good in something that is wrong.
Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), I will give a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.
Come and sing along. Power napping is welcome, too.
Dominic Hislop is an artist based in Berlin and has since 1998 been involved with the art group ‘Big Hope’, which he formed together with Miklós Erhardt, based on a mutual interest in discussing strategies of engaging with social issues and communicating with a broader public in art. Together they have worked on a number of internationally exhibited, collaborative photographic, video and mapping projects - often involving certain marginalised social groups, as both project participants and audience. For their recent series of exhibitions under the title ‘Talking about Economy/ies’ Elske Rosenfeld - artist / anthropologist from Halle, Germany - has joined Big Hope.
For the alt.SPACE Festival he will talk about his recent project in Aberdeen where he documented some visual impressions of the shifts in urban retail and discussed the impact of changes with surviving shopkeepers and knowledgeable locals. Intrigued by the decline in the number of local independent retailers and growing monocultural dominance of large national chainstores and supermarket giants in Aberdeen’s streets and market stalls he put together an assemblage of information and images in the form of an installation located in the shopfront of an empty television repair shop on King Street.
Susan Kelly is an artist and writer based in London. Her work is concerned with the relationship between art, rhetoric and the micro-political and has been included in exhibitions at the NCCA, St. Petersburg; The Lenin Museum, Finland; Art in General, New York; Krasnoyarsk Museum Siberia; the Prague Biennial; pm Gallery Zagreb. She has published in Public Culture, the Journal of Visual Cultures, Chto Delat?, Social and Cultural Geography and is a graduate of the Whitney ISP NY. She is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London.
For the alt.SPACE Festival, Kelly will talk about her work in relation with the notion of micro-politics.
Tom Richards is a London-based artist and musician working with minimalism. For the alt.SPACE Festival he will give examples of his own working practice.
Tom Roberts is a writer and digital technician with an interest in class, autodidact history and knowledge production (among other things).
Anthony Iles is a cultural engineer and writer researching and making experiments in the disappearing public sphere. He is Assistant Editor of Mute magazine.
For the Alt.Space Festival 2007 Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts will set up a meeting in Kennington Park to give a short talk and distribute the pamphlet: ‘All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal’ a collection of extracts and commentaries on the making of ‘history from below’. The phrase ‘history from below’ is the product of a group of French historians known as the Annales school. It is their description of an approach to subjects and areas previously considered historically unimportant. In England this approach was taken up by a group of Marxist historians who developed a set of methodologies and a world view at odds with existing Marxist and historiographical orthodoxies. In 1946 a group consisting of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Roger Hilton and Dona Torr among others formed the Communist Party Historians Group. Their aim was to draw out forms of agency that had been hidden by traditional approaches to history. Along with Raphael Samuel, CLR James and Peter Linebaugh we take this loose grouping as the starting point for the making and study of history as a contested field in which ‘the below’ plays an active role. Kennington Park has been the scene of radical debate, publishing and political organisation (public speaking, meetings, protests) as well as the enactment of the powers of the State (hangings, enclosure, policing). The pamphlet looks at the methodologies of the historians from below as they worked to change their own contemporary system of knowledge production in relation to the self-produced, self-distributed knowledge of their subjects. More info and resources: http://caughtlearning.org/all_knees_and_elbows/
John Russell is a London based artist and editor of the book series Frozen Tears. For the alt.SPACE Festival he will talk about “Distributions of inclusion’, the institutionalisation of critical art, and the Frozen Tears publications www.frozentears.co.uk.
Signal is a non-profit organisation Malmö, Sweden, founded in 1998 focusing on the production, presentation, discourse and promotion of contemporary art, run by a group of artists and curators exploring the possibilities of a collaborative curatorial praxis and the various functions of the exhibition venue. Signal is run by Carl Lindh (artist), Emma Reichert (curator), Fredrik Strid (artist) and Elena Tzotzi (curator).
For the alt.SPACE Festival, three members of the curatorial collective of Signal will meet up in Malmo and hook up with the London event through Skype. The evening’s discussion will focus on a series of statements and questions to do with the politics of dissemination.
Lee Simmons is a freelance artist and has worked on several large-scale commissions and self-initiated projects. She also has extensive experience of arts management, consultations and facilitation. She received her BA (Hons) in Fine Art from John Moore’s University, Liverpool, and her MA in Design for Environment from Chelsea College, London. For the alt.SPACE Festival Lee Simmons will present some of her recent work including the public space intervention Pink Marble Arch.
Åsa Ståhl was born 1976 in Sweden. She is a sound artist who received her Masters in Radio at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2001 and previously studied political science, ethnology and comparative literature at Lund University, Sweden. Åsa currently works as an artist, journalist, lecturer and researcher surrounding issues of storytelling and participatory situations. Her sound based art has grown out of her radio journalism practice. She has participated and exhibited her work at the Wanakio Art Center, Japan, the gallery Sparwasser HQ in Berlin, the Pixelazo festival in Colombia and the gallery seisporseis in Mexico. Åsa has been the recipient of IASPIS grants, NIFCA Research Residency, Finland, and group residency at NKD, Norway. She has been course manager for Experimental radio production at Malmö university together with her collaborator Kristina Lindström. Another long-term collaboration is the sound art group Laika. Tape Salads is an on-going work since 2001. For more: http://www.misplay.se or http://aok.el-ljud.se
Åsa Ståhl will present her Tape Salad project, a collection of thrown-away cassette tape that began in 2001 between Hackney and New Cross in eastern London and has since absorbed audio from locations across Europe.
Ola Stahl is an artist, writer and lecturer, and a founding member of artist collective C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent]. He received his BA (Hons) from the School of Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University and his MA in The Social History of Art with Distinction from the Department of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds where he also went on to write his doctoral thesis on an aesthetics of dissention in contemporary collaborative artistic practice. For two years he was part of the editorial collective of parallax, an international journal of cultural studies. He has published several articles, catalogue essays and reviews in international publications and edited volumes, and as an artist he has shown widely, both individually and as part of various collaborations, including biennales and festivals such as BIG Torino 2002: BIG Social Game (Turin: 2002), ISEA (Tallinn/Helsinki: 2004), and Urban Festival (Zagreb: 2005). Since 2003 he has been lecturing on the Fine Art program at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Apart from being a founding member of the alt.SPACE Network of Artist Research Group, he is currently working on common poetics, a artistic/theoretical/writing project exploring notions of aesthetics as synchronic movements of dissention within specific practices and formations of power.
For the alt.SPACE Festival, Stahl will be presenting a research paper entitled: ‘to blow into the freezing night’: John Coltrane’s ‘Sheets of Sound’ and the Actualization of a Dissentient Potential. The paper engages with the mode of improvisation, which Coltrane developed in the late 1950’s for a short period with his own band into the early 1960s, and that comprised a particular technique where scales are played very fast, over rapid chord changes and advanced substitutions, so that it appears as if entire scales, all possible combinations and variations, are played simultaneously, in a ferocious tempo, rupturing, opening up, both harmonic and rhythmic lines and patterns to a wider field of potential. The paper takes this mode of improvisation – what Ira Girtler once referred to as Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ – as its point of departure and attempts to explore it in terms of the actualization of virtual potentials within the context both of Coltrane’s later developments in modal and free form jazz, and the historical and socio-political situation in the USA at the time, which saw the emergence of more radical and militant forms of left-wing and civil rights activism. Drawing upon the writing of Spinoza, in particular the relation between the two notions of substantia and potentia, and some of the ideas around virtuality and actualization put forth by Deleuze and Guattari, the paper attempts to link Coltrane’s music to this socio-political terrain not by means of interpretation or historical determination, but by delineating the site of an expanded aesthetics, operating through the virtual, through the actualization of virtual potentials, which is inexorably, albeit at times not obviously, linked also to a radical ethical and political program.
David Stent (The Mighty Maltsters). An artist, writer and musician, David Stent is a contributing editor of Dispatx (http://www.dispatx.com). His previous work has included prose and poetry projects, video and sound installations, series of drawings and musical performances. He has recently been awarded with a three-year research scholarship at the University of Reading. David also maintains an ongoing interest in free improvisation and is a member of Oxford Improvisers (http://www.oxfordimprovisers.com), a collective group of musicians performing both as individuals and as an improvising orchestra. He hopes to continue incorporating aspects of this interest into the work of Dispatx.
For the alt.SPACE Festival David Stent has put together a performance with two collaborators, performing at the alt.SPACE Festival as The Mighty Maltsters.
Marcel Swiboda teaches in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is a former editor and current reviews editor of the cultural studies journal parallax and the co-editor of Deleuze and Music, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2004. Additionally, he is assistant editor of the Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. His current research interests are primarily oriented towards a re-figuring of some of the key conceptual developments in post-structuralism in relation to music and sound-based practices. Inspired by the neo-materialist philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, his work seeks in particular to explore a number of the aesthetic, ethical and political implications deriving from their work in relation to African-American vernacular musical cultures, with the main focus on jazz, as well as ‘free’ or ‘non-idiomatic’ musical approaches. His future research will further develop these ideas in relation to practices of improvisation, in an attempt to pragmatically ‘sound’ some of the ethical and political claims of contemporary Cultural Studies.
For the alt.SPACE Festival Marcel Swiboda will take part in a themed conversation with members from the alt.SPACE organizers group. Although based on examples and case studies, the conversation will breech issues to do with the link between musical practice, ethico-aesthetics and political engagement.
Zefrey Throwell is a San Francisco based artist who describes himself and his work as follows:
I am a self-taught artist who learned from looking over the shoulders of friends. I am attempting to be as honest as I can possibly be. This is what I think about when people ask me, What is it all about?
I do not think that my paintings or projects depict anything half as twisted, beautiful, macabre, or hilarious as what the average person walking down the street thinks about on an hourly basis. We are murderous folk in our minds! We are loving people in our minds! We are completely embarrassed and ashamed and we are also proud and generous! We have these thoughts! Is it not better to get them on paper and start talking about them and foster a human connection concerning the dark secrets that we tend to carry? I have personal experience with trying to bottle this up and it is not pretty. To expect real violence, frothing emotion, and genuine passion not to make it into the holy wings of art is worse than naive, it is dishonest. That is no longer the life that I want to choose.
I make things directly from my heart and without malice. This is the source. It comes out of me as though I am a channel. I am seeking the human connection that comes from sharing experiences of one of the more tender moments of my life with another person. I realize this may contradict what people are used to seeing when someone says they are having a spiritual experience when they make art, but I assure you, this is the true me. Non-ironic and to flying to the heart of the matter, like a dagger from the best man at your wedding…
My name is Zefrey Throwell. See www.zefrey.com. I am in 4 collectives as well: Thin Ice Collective, Neighborhood Public Radio, Red 76, Social Record.
Zefrey Throwell is currently traveling around Eastern Europe. For the alt.SPACE Festival, we’ll hook up over Skype for a program of songs mixed in with Throwell’s comments.
UNWETTER is a group of people – artists, cultural critics, historians of art and others –, which is based in Berlin. Like Unwetter (German for stormy and turbulent weather) radical global transformations reshuffle conventional knowledge systems and hierarchies, opening new spaces to be explored. UNWETTER’s basic format is the Discursive Picnic that connects different contexts in an ongoing process of reciprocal exchange. The Discursive Picnic is an improvised event, ready to be modified and changed. Time and place are announced for the public to join. It works as a potluck, where everybody is both guest and host at the same time. In the UNWETTER thermos-box, “where ideas are kept cool”, theory and practice fall together. We find, collect, exchange, alter, pack up and move on. www.un-wetter.net
Helena Walsh graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art in 2001. Continuing her studies in London she completed her Masters in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. Since completing her studies Helena has continued her live art practice in London. Inspired by her lived and embodied knowledge, her work strongly intertwines the personal with the political. Helena has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, showing at events such as Bodily Functions, Cork, The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, The East End Collaborations, London and The Wormhole Saloon at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Upcoming projects this year will include the showcasing of her performance work in the ZAZ Festival, Israel and also in Dubrovnik, this September.
My live art practice mixes a variety of medias, often involving sound and video projection and the creation of live environments. Strongly based within a socio-political context my work investigates the extent to which social ideologies regulate individual identity and construct gender. I am consistently concerned with critiquing the gendered experiences of the female body, inspired by both my personal experience and my observations of how femininity is promoted and perceived within political and social contexts. Linking these personal observations to broader political situations, in order to question the fears that drive human difference and the affections that dissolve it. My performances are inspired by the conflicting elements of our existence such as love and loss, closeness and separation, pain and pleasure, hope and tragedy, birth and death. Integral to my practice is my resolve to make work that is open to interpretation, work that raises questions rather than dominating with conclusive answers or opinions.
For the alt.SPACE Festival, Helena Walsh will show examples of her work alongside a written performative presentation dealing with the illegalites associated with the female body and the politics involved in contemporary practices of torture such such as the work based on Abu Ghraib.
Dan S. Wang is a Chicago-based artist and writer. Previous writings have appeared in Art Journal, ART asiapacific, Ten by Ten, and New Art Examiner. His work is included in the Baltimore/Chicago exhibition, currently on display at the Decker Gallery of the Maryland Institute College of Art. Wang is also involved with Mess Hall, a performance and exhibition space/neighborhood center in Chicago’s Rogers Park.
Wang’s contribution to the alt.SPACE Festival coincides with an event he’s organizing at Hyde Park Art Centre in Chicago. As a return of the long dormant Selections series, the Chicago event incorporates a series of songs and presentations having to do with politics and feelings, including feelings of Anxiety, Depression, Apathy, Impatience, Irritation, Sorrow, Paranoia, Righteousness, Confusion, Inspiration, Ecstasy, and maybe even a little Outrage. This will be a listening party/presentation of recorded music mixed in with Wang’s commentary. Some of the material will be well-known, some remains utterly obscure. The alt.SPACE Festival will include a parallel event to the one in Chicago. Wang’s program will be played live mixed in discussion following the themes outlined for the Chicago presentation.