Author: James Field

Annika Eriksson

A recurring theme in discussions with students and colleagues, is the nature of a process, the process of making art. In an area with so few absolutes as art, the bittersweet topic offers a common ground. The frequently so time-consuming, painful and yet absolutely fascinating process is something to which all artists can relate. Procrastinating, researching and then ultimately doing can be such a challenging part of the artistic process, however, that one resolutely feels that a golden shortcut must exist.

Although there is no such easy route, there are some ways of dealing with this. A first essential step is to let go of the anxious desire to please. To forget about what you “should” and rediscover what you really want to do can be key when the lock has jammed. Perhaps you need an archive to dive into,
a compilation which can remind you of what really sets you ablaze. As an artist you are constantly working, everything around you can potentially contribute to what you do. To keep your eyes open and release that knot of anxiety can help you enter the subtle state of conscious unconsciousness.

The course of wrestling with something that does not yet exist requires you to actively search for those things, however ridiculous, that gets you going. To analyze but also daring to let go, trusting both intellect and intuition are key elements. Sometimes you need to put up limitations, a frame within which you can work. By limiting yourself, you are also challenged to find new means of expression; the boundary can become a liberating force.

Biography

Annika Eriksson is a Swedish artist living in Berlin. Over the years, Eriksson has produced a large number of works in which the perception of time, structures of power, and once acclaimed social visions are called into question. Strategically Eriksson plays with the heated debates around the public realm and structures that regulate it, revealing the urban changes and how this is subject to unexpected political appropriations and inversions.

Max Schleser

Max’s smartphone and mobile films are reviewed in Cinemascope and Vague Terrain. He is referred to as a pioneer and leading practitioner of mobile phone filmmaking. He also conceptualises and conducts mobile filmmaking workshops. Past mobile filmmaking projects include 21cc, the educational link of the BBC, Nokia, local councils, community groups and film festivals in London, Ekaterinburg, New York, Wellington and Auckland. He curates the International Mobile Innovation Screening and in collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive he produces the International Mobile Innovation DVD and eBook (http://bit.ly/eBook2013).

In the video presentation Max will talk about the developments in mobile filmmaking in the last decade. He will also refer to his short and feature mobile-mentaries (mobile documentaries) and his current collaborative project 24Frames 24Hours (www.24frames24hours.org.nz)

Biography

Max Schleser is a filmmaker who explores mobile devices as creative and educational tools. His portfolio includes various experimental and collaborative documentary projects, which are screened at film and new media festivals internationally. Schleser co-founded the Mobile Innovation Network Aotearoa. He teaches video production and supervises MDes, MFA and PhD students in the College of Creative Arts at Massey University.

Dane Sutherland

The recent Punctum Records release, Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen, maps an emergent community of practice mobilized around the task of implementing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from within the distributed centre of vectoral power. Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen is a USB device (and free download) containing music or ‘sonic- fictions’ by artists including Plastique Fantastique, POLLYFIBRE, Head Gallery, English Heretic, Jillian Mayer, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants and others. As curator of this project, I embrace and exploit managerial subjectivity as a ‘malware interface.’ My role is to ensure the viral propagation of the ideas, concepts and methods generated by the speculative fictions of these artists. Here, the mannerisms, codes and formal properties of music act as an organon of noise.

The methodological model of ‘hyperstition’ (outlined and swarm-authored by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and the Hyperstition blog), is an epistemic device that introduces noise into a given system (of thought, of action) by opening a new field of relations within, by infection. It involves the maladaptation and weaponisation of dominant cosmologies by employing speculative fictions. The USB itself contains several audio- objectiles each proposing separate, antagonistic, different futures and worlds. This swarm of fictions represents a singularity of antagonism, an inhuman bastardisation of ‘agonism,’ which as an entity is reminiscent of the R-U-Dead-Yet? attacks which utilize a distributed botnet in order to disrupt the operation of a server. It is implicitly proposed within this project that the ‘curator’ can be identified as a contemporary accelerationist subject (such a subject is also proposed by the alienating properties of musical projects like ‘vapourwave’). The central aim here is to highlight extant accelerationst methods which may be further used.

Biography

Dane Sutherland is a curator, writer and pessimist from Scotland. A skeuomorphic malware interface and co-director of Embassy Gallery.

www.agencyofnoise.wordpress.com

Yvon Bonenfant

I like voices that do what voices don’t usually do and bodies that don’t do what bodies usually do. I make art starting from these sounds and movements.The tactile qualities of the human voice are central to the way I imagine my work. The voice that touches is a central and key metaphor.

My work has strong political qualities, insofar as it works to question the structuring, indeed, the disciplining and punishing of non-normative vocal gesture within our cultures. It often confuses audiences in the way that it marries very different registers of address and combines aesthetic codes that usually aren’t experienced in proximity to one another. There is a strong element of virtuosic technique embedded in my pieces and this is often used to do non-virtuosic things with great skill and finesse. Musicians rarely think it’s music. Theatre makers rarely think it’s theatre.

The live art circuit doesn’t think it’s live art. I love this. And in this sense, my work is very queer. I am currently making work for children and families that involve their voices as raw aesthetic material. I want to create environments in which audience voices expand, and move beyond the ‘charm factor’ and/or ‘shock factor’ that a lot of interactive work relies on. I also have become militant about countering the writing off of sophisticated art for children by mainstream production values. The presentation explores the three resulting art products of this process and the ways they and culture interrogate each other.

Biography

Yvon Bonenfant is Reader in Performing Arts at the University of Winchester. His unusual, intermedia works have been produced in 10 countries in the last 10 years, and his writing published in journals like Performance Research, Choreographic Practices, and Studies in Theatre and Performance. He currently holds a Large Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust and funding from Arts Council England to collaborate with speech scientists on the development of a series of participatory, extra-normal voice artworks for children and families; see www.yourvivaciousvoice.com. Despite his air of Lenin, he does frighteningly accurate vocal imitations of both Axl Rose and Jon Bon Jovi.

www.yvonbonenfant.com

Misha Myers

‘Bumper Crop‘ is a physical and digital board game developed by a research team of UK/India academics and practitioners (Dr. Misha Myers, Saswat Mahapatra, Dr. Nina Sabnani and Dr. Anirudha Joshi) working in partnership with Digital Green, a Delhi-based non-profit that combines technology and community engagement to improve the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of small farmer livelihoods. The game was developed as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council research project, Play to Grow: Augmenting Agriculture with Social Impact Games, whose original aim was to design and test a digital game based on the experiences and challenges of being an Indian farmer as a method of storytelling and learning to promote young urban adults’ awareness of issues facing small farmers in India. However, initial results of playtests with both focus groups of young urban adults in Mumbai and farmers in Madhya Pradesh revealed that the game may be most effective for a different purpose and audience than originally intended. The farmers’ gameplay drew upon the participatory, immersive and dialogic advantages of digital gaming and revealed how game and games thinking can be employed to leverage the power of positive peer-to-peer identification and feedback to create engaging opportunities for learning and sharing locally relevant skills amongst farmers themselves.

Biography

Misha Myers is a researcher and practitioner who creates digital, located and interactive performance. She is leader of the Articulating Space Research Centre at Falmouth University. Bridging ethnographic and creative practices, her research is inter-disciplinary and often involves collaborations with organisations and communities within specific socio-cultural contexts. She is interested in creating new methods for sharing knowledge and learning about complex issues of place through various interactive media, including games, digital artworks and live performance. She has published a number of articles and chapters in books and journals and project blogs on located, participatory, mobile and digital performance practices, and the potential offered by the convergence of these practices for a socially engaged practice.