What is the most urgent need that you have?
The most urgent need I have in the context of this mini-summit is to investigate
-how we can stimulate our understanding of the functioning and the experience of our more complex society and spaces and
-how we can simulate agency of the public in these spaces by looking into artistic case studies.
What is the best/ interesting case or project on new media arts that you have just recently experienced?
The phenomenon of ‘ubiquitous computing’ refers to the fact that technology is being integrated into our environment ever more ‘seamlessly’. In many cases, we no longer know where technology is concealed, let alone how we can manipulate it ourselves. Artists can make these invisible networks visible, or rather tangible, in interesting ways, using maps, visualization or photographs.
In the project routes and routines (2008), Peter Westenberg made internet walks through the city of Hasselt using technological shoes equipped with lo-fi technology. He asked the inhabitants along the route of the walk to share their private internet connection. This enabled participants to register images, sounds and electromagnetic fields when walking along the route via their ’smart’ shoes and send this data live to the exhibition space. Westenberg raises the question of how open (public) our (technological) spaces are today. The way he addresses this question makes his artwork interesting. His routes and routines-project is a result of a long trajectory of his explorations of the ‘publicness’ of technological space. His approach is rich in the way that he enables the public to experience and sense what remained concealed before. He makes the obvious strange and stimulates curiosity.
In your opinion, is there a potential for change on and change through a policy level, i.e. has the status of policy as an accelerator/ a meaningful factor for practice changed?
The question is how an artwork can generate new working, thinking and communication models for the future? How can the literally revelatory thinking of some artists contribute to a sustainable added value for our place and our possibilities to act in a space? And how can policy makers learn from that to stimulate agency of the public in our complex societies.
Many artworks, like routes and routines, came about by collaboration and crossing disciplines. The way in which they are created is often connected to scientific models that prioritize transparency. This makes it possible to share and accrue knowledge. This is done by visualizing difficult or invisible characteristics of spaces and intensively documenting the work process. They also reveal tools and technological networks that we use in our spaces (such as RFID), which are often developed within laboratories and make them available to be used by the public or put to alternative uses so that we can also participate in constructing our spaces.
Evolutions in the use and development of technologies are connected to changes in our daily spaces. Artists who try to master these technologies and use them in an alternative way can teach society and policy makers a lot about other possible ways of dealing with them. In doing so, they contribute to greater digital literacy in a way that is not purely functional and is always from an open perspective.
They may even help produce a space born out of co-creation with the public. The work of, for example, Westenberg invites visitors to participate, interact and reconfigure. It shows the possible social and cultural implications of a technology or a technological space, and its interactive nature stimulates the feeling of ‘agency’ of the public. This feeling is connected to the fact that we can manipulate complex technological spaces and change them so that we can use them ourselves. ‘We can do it ourselves’.
It is within the space of art that another, unexpected or even magical gaze can be shed on the material. As mentioned before, policy makers could learn from the new or alternative modes of creation and use of technology and alternative ways of including the public in the creation of technological environments in artworks. The knowledge that these artists generate could be more carefully investigated and distributed to other domains by policy makers.
In Belgium the Flemish government just started with documenting artistic practices in the field of art, media and technology in a book Cross-Over, Art, Media and Technology in Flanders. This is a start to open up the discourse to other fields and domains.
The recent developments in Belgium regarding research and Phd in the arts offers a lot of possibilities for transparancy, knowledge transfer and knowledge building in and outside the artfield.
At this moment the research fundings and research spaces are not adapted to artistic research, and especially artistic research working on technological and scientific themes and materials. Traditional research funding is often too much oriented towards the direct scientific, economical or technological value. In artistic research this is not an explicit goal, but a logical outcome.
Our policy makers could look into the needs of artistic research and the added value for society more carefully and create new funding models and maybe also new spaces for artistic work.
