About : A Conversation Between Trees is our latest project, a touring artwork that connects forests in the UK with forest regions in Brazil. This book is a literal exploration of the Materials needed, Conditions set, Research conducted and Audience involved, creating a series of snaphots – new conditions of practice – to share with those interested in our work.
Active Ingredient is an award winning artist-led group founded in 1996, creating interactive artworks that merge art, technology and science, bringing together location, social networking, bio and environmental sensing, data collection and play. www.i-am-ai.net
About : This is a polemical and personal exposé of the place of children in the city and in the art world. The artist examines the experiences of being a mother and an artist in the city, and the reactions of others to artists with children. Maclennan calls for new thinking and action, and the confidence to transform society and the street, taking on board the radical potential of children, and inspired by the experiences of being an urban artist-mother.
Ruth Maclennan is a visual artist whose work includes video installations, photography, bookworks, drawings, live events, and curatorial projects. Her work often begins with her own encounter with a place â a neighbourhood of London, a futuristic capital city, a derelict building, a ruined railway station in a desert. Her single and multi-channel video installations focus on overlooked moments, material remains and fragments of stories that reveal unresolved conflict and suppressed realities. www.ruthmaclennan.com
About : We admire people who can keep the show on the road. The show, of course, could be anything: a marriage, a business, a career, even an outlook or philosophical stance which might fly against the prevailing winds. The show, in a creative and specific sense for this book, is the artist in pursuit of the work they are creating or the work they feel they need to make. What motivates and inspires us? What does it take to bring our ideas to the screen? How do WE keep the show on the road?
Born in Dublin, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (Desperate Optimists) have made a circuitous route via theatre, visual art and writing to arrive at film-making. Over the past 8 years they have produced, written and directed 10 acclaimed short films under the title CIVIC LIFE, and a feature film HELEN, all screened extensively around the world. www.desperateoptimists.com
About : Extracts from notebooks and photo documentation evoking the strategy within nature of torpor or hibernation as a way of surviving limited resources and inhospitable environment; the speculation that hibernation is a latent ability in humans.
London Fieldworks was formed in 2000 by artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson as a cross-disciplinary, collaborative practice working across social engagement, installation, video and animation, situating works both in the gallery and in the landscape. Recent projects have created speculative works of fiction out of a mix of ecological, scientific and pop cultural narratives. www.londonfieldworks.com
About : Citizen movements like “Occupy” indicate that the boundaries between government, business and civil society have been blurred to such an extreme extent that the “voice of the people” is no longer a factor in the equation. What makes this movement different from others is that through advocacy, activism and technology we are able to connect with one another quickly to amplify a transnational “people’s voice” generated through social media, citizen journalism and grass root community collaborations.
As long as we stand together we are strong together. Finding ways to stand strong together across our differences is where we need to put our energy. Our “together work” is to compassionately deconstruct the oppressions that have divided us so we can become reconnected through actually listening to one another. This process of listening and sharing is the bridge that can help us create an new awareness of one another and our shared global society. We need to commit to the belief that standing strong together over the long term is our life work and pathway.
Janet Owen Driggs is a writer, artist and curator who, along with Matthew Owen Driggs, frequently participates in the collective identity “Owen Driggs”. www.performingpublicspace.org
Jules Rochielle is a socially and politically engaged artist interested in innovative public practices and collaborations. www.julesrochielle.com
About : Music, Collaboration and Place are important to me in terms of creativity. I’ve combined my photography with the lyrics of “Reconvexo” by Caeteno Veloso, which speaks of an identity rooted in a place and it’s culture, as well as collaboration and remixing during the creative process. This booklet is about the place I chose to live. The place I call “home”. A place I can return to after being away.
Karla Brunet is an artist, researcher and university professor. She has participated in many photography and digital arts exhibitions in Brazil, Europe and the USA, and is interested in projects where art, science and technology intersect. www.karlabru.net
About : making/do: big idea, small budget, can do is the story of making my first piece of “land art” and reflects on two years during which I moved countries, shifted from an urban to rural environment, and re-calibrated my art practice in order to keep on making work despite a lack of funding.
Jane Prophet is a British artist living in the US. She has worked with new media for two decades and integrates it with traditional materials to produce ‘surprising and beautiful objects’. She makes photographic pieces, temporary installations, objects and video. www.janeprophet.com
About : A ‘poetic biography’of my relationship with writing, and with working as a writer and project manager in the creative industries. I am interested in, and discomforted by, my self-defined categories of paid ‘work’ and unpaid ‘writing’, and how these relate to my motivation, my relationship with space, and how I allocate my time. Knowing Where You Are is an examination of how I find value in the work I do.
Sarah Butler writes novels and short fiction. Her work, which explores themes of home, place and family, has been published in anthologies and journals, and online. She runs UrbanWords, a consultancy which develops literature projects engaging with regeneration and urban renewal.
You can find out more at www.sarahbutler.org.uk and www.urbanwords.org.uk.
This Autumn, as part of our Public Goods Programme, Proboscis is inviting contributions for a new series of eBooks to be published in the Diffusion Library – Material Conditions. It will offer diverse insights by professional creative practitioners on how they see the future trajectories of culture, creativity and practice emerging. We are experiencing a turbulent period of change at fundamental levels of our society; social, political, economic and cultural changes are taking place all around us, and we face adapting our practices, routines, rituals and methods to continue to be creative and effective.
Material Conditions aims to explore what it means and takes to be a professional creative practitioner – from the personal to the social and political. How and why do people persist in pursuing such careers? How do they organise their everyday lives to support their practice? What kind of social, political, economic and cultural conditions are necessary to keep being creative? What are the bedrocks of inspiration that enable people to continue piloting their meandering courses through contemporary society and culture? We are inviting contributors to share some aspects of their own practices as well as to reflect on the wider social and cultural conditions necessary for maintaining a creative practice.
What now are the material conditions for being creative?
How do we continue to be creative and productive everyday?
What methods and practices do we use to shape our creativity?
What motivations govern our continued drive and desire to make things?
What are our own personal libraries of inspiration?
This series aims to create a library of responses to these urgent questions: which can inspire others in the process of developing their own everyday practices of creativity, that can guide those seeking meaning for their choices, that can set out positions for action around which people can rally.
Through the Public Goods programme we are seeking to map and share different kinds of ‘intangible assets’ that are precious aspects of what binds us to others, to our communities and environments; to map and share new values and ways of valuing those things which are often considered ‘small beer’. This library of inspirations aims to become a beacon for others in shaping and directing their own creative endeavours, built on top of a free-to-use platform for self-publishing (bookleteer) that in itself is a model and tool for ‘public authoring’.
Commissioning Editors : Giles Lane & Haz Tagiuri
Short Run Printed Edition In addition to publishing free downloadable PDFs and bookreader versions in the Diffusion Library, we plan to print a case-bound set of each series, which will be available to pre-order online once the line up of contributors has been confirmed.
Submissions & Publication Dates We aim to publish the first series in early December 2011. If you would like to submit a proposal, please contact submissions editor Haz Tagiuri (haz at proboscis dot org dot uk) with an outline. We’re looking for contributions that explore these questions from different perspectives and through different forms such as : diaries, manifestoes, visual essays, poetic speculations, selections from sketch books, comic strips/cartoons, photograph albums, recipes or instruction manuals.
Material Conditions 1 | Proboscis [...] December 15th 2011 we will be launching a new series of Diffusion commissions called Material Conditions. This series asks… Comment posted on 11-29-2011 at 15:09
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