Artists
Field Broadcast (London, UK)
featuring: Nomadi (Riga, Lavtia), Rob Smith (London, UK) and Séan Maltby (Newcastle, UK)
Over the duration of DISTANCE, Field Broadcast will bring three artists live to your computer desktop, direct from the remote landscapes in which they are broadcasting. Unannounced, these broadcasts create a playful interruption to your daily life, allowing you to take a field trip to a place somewhere else.
Field Broadcast is a live broadcasting network and platform that enables artists to make artworks that forge a direct link between the place they are broadcasting from and your computer desktop. To catch these broadcasts over the duration of DISTANCE, download the Field Broadcast software below or at www.fieldbroadcast.org, which will ‘ping’ and display the broadcasts from Nomadi, Rob Smith and Séan Maltby as they go live.
Field Broadcast is developed and produced by artists Rebecca Birch and Rob Smith. They launched the project in 2010 as part of Wysing Arts Contemporary: Presents at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge, and have recently presented a new series of broadcasts with University of Bournemouth. Field Broadcast has featured over forty artists including Ed Atkins, Susan Collins, Juan Cruz, Sean Edwards, Simon Faithfull and Laura Wilson.
www.fieldbroadcast.org
www.robsmith.me.uk
www.rebeccabirch.net
Rob Smith (London) competed a post graduate diploma in Fine art at the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2002. Since then he has gone on to develop a digitally based practice that uses technology to engage with environments in a live time frame. Smith is one of the artist led duo that produces Field Broadcast and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include, What if at Ha Gamle Prestegard in Norway, Beacon at The Agency, London and a commission for Art Review’s Digital project space. www.robsmith.me.uk
Séan Maltby (Newcastle) Currently undertaking the MFA Master of Fine Art course at Newcastle University, Séan Maltby has exhibited throughout the UK including the Jerwood Drawing Prize Exhibitions in 2008 and 2009. His practice utilises various media such as video, kinetic installation and drawing. Current concerns include how the distinction between ‘canned’ or recorded time and ‘live time’ might be blurred. http://seanmaltbyartist.com/
Nomadi (Riga) is a creative association led by theatre director, Mārtiņš Eihe and cultural activist, Krista Burāne. Nomadi creates wanderings in the cultural fields: performances, films, exhibitions and events, promoting both the role of professional children and youth theater as well interdisciplinary and innovative art performance. Every second year Nomadi organize an International Theater Festival for Children and Youth “NoMadI” that every time takes place in a different city of Latvia, where different generations can meet and create common thoughts for discussions that are important for everyone irrespective of one’s age. http://nomadi.lv/
Peter J Evans (Newcastle, UK)
THE CARTOGRAPHIES OF TRAVELLING WITHOUT MOVING
Hold a pencil just resting into the paper’s surface as the journey starts, once again at the end. Do the marks mirror the other passengers? It’s never happening the same there as it is here, no matter how small the distance, how similar the surroundings.
There are numerous comings and goings, take offs and landings, arrivals and departures, constantly occurring. On the surface one journey resembles another, but each movement is individual, each cellular twitch unique and even in stillness we travel.
In this work, visitors who are flying to or from the festival are invited to take the airline disposal bag from the seat in front of them and, in graphite, map the rush of g-force and drop of altitude through their own muscular system. These drawings are then gifted to a growing and ongoing collection that displays not only the geographical distances we all travel but the gaps and similarities within our shared experiences.
Fascinated by systems and patterns, Peter J Evans explores how such structures can be found even in supposed chaos. Ideas about movement, memory, time, the un-quantifiable and aesthetic beauty inform his practice, which finds an affinity with Russell Hoban’s writings concerning ‘the moment under the moment’. He seeks to create metaphorical maps of the visible and invisible links between objects and sensations, combining the concrete and the philosophical.
www.peterjevans.net
www.workplacegallery.co.uk/artists/_Peter%20J.%20Evans
Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir (Extraterritoriality)
TRESPASSING
Ruti and Maayan will be arriving in Riga, London and Newcastle as visitors and as strangers. While in each of the towns, they will navigate their way into and around public and private events to which they haven’t been invited, making a film of their encounters and experiences as they go. TRESPASSING provokes questions around the thin lines, mostly outcomes of cultural constructions, between hospitality and trespassing.
In 2009 Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir initiated The Exterritory Project for which they won a UNESCO award for young artists in 2011. The Exterritory Project aims to articulate the notion of Extraterritoriality, a term coined in the end of the 18th century with two classic definitions: the first referring to being outside of the borders and laws of a state, and the second to being within the state but beyond its jurisdiction. Through experiments that take different forms and varied manifestations, they ask questions related to issues that the concept of Extraterritoriality evokes, such as nationalism, law, language, protest and what is being beyond jurisdiction.
Sorrel Muggridge and Laura Nanni (Norwich, UK and Toronto, Canada)
2360 MILES TRAVELLED HAND TO HEART
An attempt to erode the distance between Riga, London and Newcastle, one mile at a time.
As our sense of the scale of the world has shrunk, 2360 MILES explores how to make the enormity of global distances something we can physically comprehend. Sorrel and Laura will represent the 2360 miles between the three cities with a scaled length of rope. They invite you to help in their attempt to erode this scaled distance by walking the streets of each city, guided by knowledge of the borders, water, rises and falls found in distance between Riga, London and Newcastle.
Sorrel Muggridge and Laura Nanni have been collaborating long-distance, usually with an ocean between them, for over four years. Individually, their practices have responded to their preoccupations with human geography and site specificity. Collaboratively, their works embrace the unusual and inspiring consequences of the distance between them. They create site-specific artworks that articulate the value in wandering and being curious, and investigating how people understand and connect with their surroundings.
www.sorrelandlaura.blogspot.com
Steve Levon Ounanian (Los Angeles, USA)
PEAK ANXIETY
The unknowable and the uncertain seem to be taking up more and more space in everyday cognitive reality. Politics, science, technology, and religion propagate beliefs and promises which are at odds with the realities of everyday living. Namely, that we can remake the world and generally become happy and healthy indefinitely.
It’s a source of anxiety.
Peak anxiety satellite, is an amateur experiment which tries to bridge the gap between our desire for a better future and our everyday anxiety about the present compromise. In this experiment, Ounanian, reproduces the design of a soviet era anxiety receiving satellite; sending human anxieties over a short distance to be received by a 12 foot arial balloon set to orbit the earth.
Keep in touch with Steve’s investigations, and if you know of any amateur radio enthusiasts in Riga, London or Newcastle, get in touch with Steve on www.stevenlevon.com/amateurs/
Steve Levon Ounanian describes himself as ‘a self-initiated researcher into emerging technologies’, and uses collaborative experiments and public interventions to prototype future scenarios. These collaborative experiments question family, authenticity, and religion in the context of a technology driven age. As a designer and performance artist, Ounanian generates videos, performances, objects, and situations that seek to unravel what it means for people to be human, together. Technology (from crude phones to synthetic biology) has challenged what it means to be human on a fundamental level. Somehow there is an element of ventriloquism or puppetry that occurs as we associate with this technology. Ounanian enjoys exaggerating this phenomenon, giving external techno-social identities agency and voice, watching what happens when they get out of control.
Valters Sīlis (Riga, Latvia)
ANTROPOZOO
Valters Sīlis has spent almost ten years of his life working in a zoo. Having had a powerful experience taking care of animals, he now continues to work with humans. This performance is about humans, what makes our species so special, and if we were put in a zoo how you would be able to distinguish us from the other animals?
Valters Sīlis is a Latvian theatre director and performer, who works across the country’s institutional and independent scene. His previous two performances, in collaboration with the National Theatre, include the stories of the last three Latvian Presidents after Independence, and the deported mothers and children of 1941. As a performer, he is interested in exploring ways of communicating and improvising with audiences.