Saturday 7 April 2007, 14.00–20.00

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£25 (£15 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks reception and access to live art intervention following the event.

    

Art, Lifestyle and Globalisation is a one day intensive event opening up debates across the realms of modern life. The event deliberately bites off more than it can chew - raising more questions than can be answered - mirroring the complex signals of digital life.

A series of guests will present their ideas on technology, activism and culture. Artist John Jordan reflects on the role of artist as activist, Tim Kindberg (Hewlett Packard) discusses his research into active bar codes while Jemima Rellie (Head of Digital Programmes, Tate) reflects on how we curate culture through networks. The event is chaired by Anne Nigten (Director of V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam).

In the run up to the symposium, a series of independent voices from around the world will be asked to reflect on a number of questions, which will in turn be fed back into the day.

• Has Marshall McLuhan's global village gone tribal?
• Is cooperation the new corporation?
• How democratic are the new Web 2.0 spaces? (MySpace, YouTube)
• Who owns the internet?
• Which MP3 player should I buy?
• Why are more and more artists turning to open source strategies?
• Are art and activism opposites or alike?
• Is corporate money driving the cultural agenda?

If you are unable to attend the event itself, please txt your question for the Panel to +44(0)7806 710661. Please include a name. Your question may appear on the Tate Modern Auditorium screen.

This event is a collaboration between PVA MediaLab, Tate Modern and alias, with additional support from London College of Communication.

Timetable

13:30-14:00       Registration

14:00-14:10       Welcome and introduction to the event by Paul Howard (Tate Modern) and Simon Poulter (PVA MediaLab).

14:10-14:30       Anne Nigten, presentation of the event.

14:30-14:50       Case Study 1: Presentation by John Jordan

14:50-15:10       Case Study 2: Presentation by Jemima Rellie

15:10-15:25       Questions from the audience on first block of presentations.

15:25-15:45       Break

15:45-16:05       Case Study 3: Presentation by Tim Kindberg

16:05-16:25       Case Study 4: Presentation by Bella Dicks

16:25-16:40       Questions from the audience on second block of presentations.

16:40-17:30       Break-out discussion groups facilitated by speakers.

17:30-18:00       Plenary and discussions.

18:00-18:30       Refreshment/networking

18:30-21:00       Live art intervention, Level 2 Cafe

Speakers’ Biographies and Abstracts

Anne Nigten (V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam)

Co-authoring electronic art

Anne Nigten will outline some of the key issues affecting today’s art practice in a technology driven age. In this short presentation Nigten brings to the surface hypothetic parallels of sharing and team-working in today’s art and technology practice and collaboration in the open source and free software community. Is collaboration the ground which hackers, cultural activists and artists working with technology share? Is this in line with MacLuhan’s predictions in the 1960’s? How does this collaborative attitude relate to the so called ‘established’ art world?

Nigten is the manager of V2_Lab, the aRt&D department of V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. ANne is lecturing on research and development in the interdisciplinary field from an art perspective.  She is advisor for several media art and science initiatives in Europe and board member of ISEA. She completed her PhD at the University of the Arts London (UK), and frequently publishes papers on art, engineering and (computer) science collaboration and software development. Before her current position at V2_ she has been working as an independent media artist, and simultaneously fulfilled several management jobs for the media art sector in the Netherlands.

John Jordan

Radical Aesthetics at the end of the world

Ecological systems around the world are collapsing, the chasm between rich and poor expands daily, and our climate could tip into catastrophic runaway collapse within our lifetime... What a time to be alive. What is the role of art faced with such global crisis? Perhaps it is time for art to shift from being an end to being a means, from holding out a promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating a way of living meaningfully in this one? Perhaps its time for the artists to walk away from the prisons of the art world, the glamour of corporate lifestyles and the annihilating logic of global capitalism?  Perhaps its time for artists to disobey again…

Jordan's work merges the imagination of art and the social engagement of politics. Co-director of social practice art group Platform (1987-1995), he then went on to be a co-founder of the infamous cultural resistance collective Reclaim the Streets (1995-2000).   He has written and lectured extensively about the space between art and activism, ecological thinking and aesthetics, including at the Tate Modern and Museum of Modern Art Barcelona. In 2003 he co-edited the Verso book "We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism" which has been translated in six languages.

He was Senior lecturer in fine art at SheffieldHallamUniversity for 8 years, until he gave up the relative safety of academia to go to Argentina during the popular uprising, to work on the documentary film "The Take" with Naomi Klein. He has just finished co-writing an operatic downloadable guided walk "And while London Burns" that explores London's Square Mile and its role in climate change. (www.andwhilelondonburns.com)

Jemima Rellie (Tate 5^th Gallery)

Using Tate as a focus, this presentation will explore how digital technologies act as both a catalyst and a support for the ongoing transformation of culture and museums. Tate Online's core functions will be presented, as well as well how the site impacts on visitors, activities, distribution channels and the organization's competition.

Rellie has worked at the interface of new media and contemporary art for over 10 years, gaining extensive experience in cross-platform commissioning in both commercial and not-for-profit sectors. In 2001, she was hired as Tate’s first Head of Digital Programmes, with responsibility for public-facing digital content, including a bespoke online programme crucial to establishing Tate Online as the fifth Tate gallery and a destination in its own right. Jemima speaks and consults internationally on issues facing museums in the digital age. She is the co-curator of Feedback: art responsive to instructions, input, or its environment at Laboral (Gíjon, Spain 2007). She sits on the steering group for Ofcom’s Creative Forum on the Public Service Publisher; the editorial board for CHArt (Computers and the History of Art); the programme committee for Museums and the Web and is a trustee of the 24 Hour Museum. Prior to Tate, Jemima worked in interactive TV (EC1 Media), internet development (Saltmine Creative), and art book publishing (Phaidon and Macmillans).

Bella Dicks (Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences)

Culture on Display: a cultural economy of visitability.

Bella Dicks will be talking about the difficulties and implications of putting culture on display in a cultural-economic context that insists on interactivity and accesibility. Display-oriented settings for cultural consumption are proliferating, whether in web-mediated or physically-embodied form. Two technologies are of particular interest in the cultural economy of visitability: interpretation and interactivity. Both interactivity and interpretation claim to narrow the gap between consumer and cultural artefact. The talk will assess this claim and consider the various ways in which culture is transformed in the process of being brought into alignment with 'users'.

Bella is senior lecturer in Sociology at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences. She has published and researched in the areas of heritage, regeneration, cultural display, placed identities and digital methodologies. She has written or co-written a number of books, including: Heritage, Place and Community (University of Wales Press, 2000); Out of the Ashes (with David Waddington, Chas Critcher and David Parry: Routledge, 2001); Culture on Display (Open University Press, 2004); Children, Place and Identity (with Jonathan Scourfield, Mark Drakeford and Andrew Davies: Routledge, 2006) and Hypermedia and Qualitative Research (with Bruce Mason, Amanda Coffey and Paul Atkinson: Sage 2005).

Tim Kindberg (Hewlett Packard, Bristol)

Tim Kindberg is a senior researcher at HP Labs, Bristol, UK, and a visiting professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Bath.

About PVA MediaLab

The studio is an artist-centred, not-for- profit organisation which has established itself at the heart of artist led activism in the UK, working directly with artists and new technologies. The organisation sets out to engage artists from all backgrounds in the production of new work including audio, music, video, interactive, live performance and online projects. PVA’s strategic role in the UK is to encourage a broad and diverse range of participants and audiences to take part in creative activities that involve new technologies. We exist to promote debate, challenge perceptions and develop opportunities and the economic potential of artists. We work locally, regionally, nationally and internationally to achieve this. PVA is a revenue funded client of the Arts Council England.