What is the most urgent need that I have?
The capacity to be in at least five places at the same time.
What is the best/most interesting case or project on new media art that you have just recently experienced?
I’m very impressed by the work happening in Brazil across the new media spectrum. There is an intensity and complexity to the work there, happening both within and outside institutional formats, that strongly impresses me. Somehow, there are various elements in Brazilian society (the cultural, social, economic and environmental mix) that has helped to produce a diverse set of individuals and projects who are working in a distributed way within a richly networked society (in a communal sense) to adapt the focus on technology away from being about gadgets and ‘toys’ (the next innovation fix) and towards (or back) a deeper level of engagement with the factors underlying, technological change within our society. From this you also get reflections on the future – for eg how to balance technological with ecological/environmental challenges - that I also feel are crtical. This trend – the rebalancing of technological with environmental concerns – is becoming visible across many different parts of the world – and networked projects, like bricolabs, can give voice to some of the individuals who are working in small but significant ways in various localities and diverse contexts. These DIY, networked initiatives are among the most interesting I have come across recently – whether or not we would want (or need) to call them new media art opens up another set of questions which perhaps we should address at this forthcoming workshop.
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?
I like to think of policies not policy and see these as a series of inflecting, reflecting activities rather than one mass movement. I have witnessed quite a few examples of where it has been possible, through a kind of structural intervention, to make shifts in policy informed by practice but I now think we’re moving into a period of distributed actions and that applies also to what we used to call new media policy. The movement from practice to policy, which was quite influential in the late nineties in Europe, had its moment – and helped to galvanise and generate many spin off developments. But things have changed. We’re no longer asking for funding to be made available for new kinds of experimentation and R&D. That was then, and this is now: There is possibly a danger that people will keep repeating mantras from the past thinking that because something worked in Europe in 1999 then it can be activated in Asia for eg in 2010.
There are other questions on the horizon – many questions around the future of life itself. And of course cultural activists have to make some kind of dent into the large scale experimentation that is going on. This for me is the work and the answer in terms of practice has got to be in relation to changing perception – which in turn informs policy, though this may take some time. The renaming of the department I work for in the RCA` in London from Industrial Design Engineering to Innovation Design Engineering is one interesting eg of how structural change can happen and signify a larger series of developments over time.
