Functions, Fissures and Failures: How artistic research can break and build societal strategies

 July 26^th – Aug 2^nd, 2017 in Saulkrasti, Latvia

Alia Zapparova
A disencounter – for Curated Spaces
It began with a grey thread, an (almost) empty room and a blue-grey sky through the windows; clouds moved and seventeen birds crossed back and forth, echoing the thread.  The thread splits the sky, takes the structure of the wind and follows the paths of the birds.
I tried to follow the thread.
What does the thread do and where can it go? It is a line through space into time. A tenuous existence, in the most fragile way, on the threshold of visibility, it acts on the interior and alters the possibilities of what can be seen in a room.

The thread interrupts, splits and connects. Picture becomes thread and thread is a time-line. A room is a picture that is habitable: a space of emptiness and encounter, populated with threads as lines to think along. The encounter is with nothing particular, only with the non-events that are not happening and one is not participating in: a disencounter.
My proposal is a series of small intervention into the common interior spaces where the symposium will take place, to be part of Curated Spaces. I would like to show and test out some visual work that deals with forms of non-productive temporality in the everyday, as an ongoing experiment in using ‘nothing’ as a strategy. The work connects with the theme of fissures and failures by aiming to generate a disencounter. Instead of a significant object, it is composed of repetitions, minor variations, imperceptible shifts: the indistinct markers of nothing happening. It seeks what is left over from meaning and purpose: what is not recognisable as significant; looking for the points where meaning fails; aiming for a kind of making/thinking that is a form of waiting for its own failure. My aim is to discover small, everyday non-events of transformation, where various forms of doing (almost) nothing become not meaningless actions, but openings onto new configurations of seeing.

Bio: Alia Zapparova is a visual artist. She was born in Moscow and lives in London. She makes books and installations composed of photographs; her subject matter is the everyday at the limit of its perceptibility. http://aliazapparova.com

Anna Frew
Technological Failure During The Presentation Of Artistic Research
As an artist whose practice often involves using digital technologies, especially those at the cutting edge, I find when presenting my work the technology often fails. When making work in the studio there is room for failure, prototyping, and finding ways to make things work. However, when presenting work, be that in an exhibition, or conference format, the ability to fail without public consequence is removed. This session proposes to explore what happens when technology fails during the public presentation of artistic practice. Its aim is to draw out strategies and insights to better understand the consequence, risks, and possibilities of technological failure in artistic presentations. As my practice is focused upon storytelling, the session will begin with a short series of spoken vignettes. These vignettes are about previous presentations of my digital arts practice where technology has failed. From a drone setting on fire in a children’s workshop, to dancing where my projections should be at NSU (Iceland Summer Session) they will set the scene for themes to be discussed during the rest of the session. The discussion will be in small groups made up of circle members. This is to give space for more voices to actively engage than in a larger setting. Each theme will be available to be explored by every group one at a time. There will be opportunity through how the themes are presented, for groups to build upon, or find shared insights with others. However, if a rich theme is found for one group, they will be free to pursue this.

Possible themes: • At what point are you performing technology? • How might you retain your artistic intentions when your planned technology fails? • Has failing technology ever helped when presenting your practice? • Is there such a thing as a “minimum viable product” in artistic practice? • Should the artist care if the audience doesn’t understand the technology in their work?

Bio: I currently work as a PhD Researcher and Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. My research is focused on how we use technology to tell stories whether through drones, virtual reality, 360 degree filmmaking, or through data. My PhD research is being completed alongside BBC Research and Development where I am looking at the use of digital media to tailor a broadcast to its audience. Known as ‘Perceptive Media,’ this involves collecting data about the audience or their context to help inform the structure of a narrative. My research defines this kind of storytelling, demonstrates how it works, and explores the possible artistic intentions behind it.

Anniki Wahlöö
A Critical WedgeA performance that explores the gaps and cracks. I am interested in working with human specific theatre where the authentic meeting between actor and audience/participant is at core. A way of working where everything is not choreographed and thus allows the unexpected to happen, you might call it a crack or a failure.
In my research, I have taken a big interest in different ways of working within immersive and participatory performances. When you are working within these practices failures and slippages are vital for an authentic performance. I have noticed that I very often find the perfect as boring and hard to comprehend and somewhat closed. Reality contains the unexpected and to make a live performance believable I think it is crucial to embrace failures and cracks as a gift rather than a mistake.
“In an increasing aestheticized society, a mistake becomes a moment of resistance… “ (Gob Squad)
By juxtaposing, creating possible gaps, and cracks where there is room for risk and failure, one can make room for a critical space. An in-between where the different and the other can flourish, a place for reflection, fantasy, a place where you can get a glimpse of other worlds and systems.

I will work with a text I have written about the sea and underwater world that is written from two juxtaposed points of view. The text explores the environmental issues and the emotional experience of being immersed in the other world that the sea is for me. I will do this in a performance that mix live performance, water, sound and possibly video projections.
Bio: I am an actress and performative artist and have been working mainly within theatre for more than 20 years.
I have studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, Malmö Theatre Academy and at UniArts in Stockholm. In 2010 I studied with the SITI company in Saratoga Springs New York. I consider myself as an artist with a background in physical and political theatre. I am part of the Cosmonauti festival network based in Italy and Norway, the network consists of performers educated in the Russian tradition manly from Anatolij Vasilijev and Jurij Alschitz.
The last 15 years I have been working more and more with experimental projects and within a more multidisciplinary field, with dancers, choreographers, musicians and visual artists.. I have been doing site specific, human specific, immersive, performative work. I have been in projects in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Italy and in the USA. In small and large scale productions from one to one to large scale.
I finished an MFA in acting at the Academy of Music and Drama, Univeristy of Gothenburg 2016. My thesis A Critical Wedge – is about performance as a liminal place where performance can occur in the cracks of society. I believe that failure an mistakes within performance is of great importance to create presence and urgency.
Currently I am a fulltime student at Alma Löv education – a 1,5 year scriptwriting education for film and television.

Eduardo Abrantes
WIND THE VERB – regret as a catalyst and failure as framed by rituals of reversion
One of the most loved, and repeatedly listened to, album of my teenage years was Helium’s “The Dirt of Luck” (1995). Written in small curved letters printed close to the hole of the compact disc was the following pun: “All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed.”  This playful phrase relates to reversal, inversion or backwards repetition of both gestures and sounds, which is a technique found in magical rituals belonging to many different traditions. More specifically, this is commonly used as a ritual to counter incantation, in the situation where two agents of magical powers engage in a magic battle, or when someone believes a curse has been placed upon them and wishes to null its malicious effect, possibly even subjecting the original author of the curse to its reflected consequences. Putting aside the arcane arts, the everyday “I wish I could take it back” is one of the most commonly used expressions of regret after one has acknowledged wrong doing or failure. It is also simultaneously the avowal of the indelible consequences of our actions and the irrevocable forwardness of time. The instinct to pursue reversion is however more than mere wishful thinking, childish escapism or unwillingness to face the responsibility that comes with agency. It is also an acknowledgment of the fluidity of subjective time, and in artistic terms it is an approach to process and performative practice that often invokes the potential for healing and revelation that comes from thinking, doing, making, and experiencing backwards. For the upcoming summer NSU symposium, my participation proposal consists of a lectureperformance titled Wind the verb, dealing with the dynamics, uses and rituals of reversion and backwards oriented strategies, as they can be met in performative dimensions of artistic practice. More concretely, the lecture-performance will focus on sonic and spoken word materials, entangled with short biographic experiments and participative rituals. This piece relates to the theme of this summer’s symposium by taking a natural, unreflected reaction to failure, which is regret and the drive of undoing, by conceiving it as a catalyst to inspiration and ultimately, reinvention and growth.

Bio: Eduardo Abrantes (b. in Lisbon, Portugal) is an artistic researcher, sound artist and filmmaker involved with phenomenology of sound, site-specific performative strategies and exploration of embodiment in relation to creative practices. In January 2016 he concluded a joint PhD (Södertörns Högskola/Københavns Universitet/ Universidade Nova de Lisboa) titled “Voice and Presence”, and dealing with the notion of the human voice framed as a philosophical problem, the acoustics of the extended body in space and an intersubjective interpretation of the concept of sonic territories. Currently based between Stockholm and Copenhagen, his recent practice has focused on the exploration of the dynamic crossing between sound and embodiment, mostly in the context of how everyday experience is enacted and brought into a heightened awareness through performative practice and strategies.
www.pairsofthree.org /

Elina Saloranta
TRANSPARENCIES FROM THE PAST: Failed images and fissured sounds
I attended my first NSU symposium in 2010, a few years after I had started my article-based doctoral research at the University of the Arts Helsinki. As a visual artist I was used to working alone, but in NSU I discovered a new way of doing research: demonstrations, performances, collaboration, experiments… Gradually I also started experimenting and using the study circle as a laboratory. Now I have (almost) finished my thesis and would like to present it to my “research group”.  The presentation begins with a screening of my video piece Transparencies from the past (10 mins 47 secs), which is the epilogue of my research. After the screening I will shortly present the rest of the thesis: an electric publication made of five essays and seven videos and an introduction written in the form of a letter.   The video’s image track consists of eight glass-plate photographs projected on a white curtain as if they were slides of a magic lantern. The photos were taken by the Finnish village photographer Frans Viljamaa (1888–1983) in the 1910s or 1920s, and most of them are over-exposed, double-exposed or otherwise “failed”.   The soundtrack is based on an old recording in which a woman born in 1899 recalls her memories of the Finnish Civil War (1918). However, the video is not a documentary and the speech has been mixed so that it creates an equivalent of double-exposed photographs, a fissured soundscape.

Bio: Elina Saloranta is a visual artist and a doctoral candidate from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. She works mainly with the moving image, which she has studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 2001). Her research concerns the relationship between image, word and sound.

Myna Trustram
In Museum Ricklundgården: Re-imagining the Museum through images and words  
Grace  Gelder and I met at the Circle Seven residency in Saxnäs in March 2017 which took place within the Museum Ricklundgården.  We both became interested in the relationship of the Museum  with the surrounding landscape, with its interiority and the external world. The external world caused a constant shifting of the light within the Museum and it is this that we used to guide our making of images and text to convey something of our experience of the Museum and its collections.  We would like to present the work we made together about this. It is a visual and performative essay: a series of photographs and a text. We will project the images and read the text, in various combinations, in order to encourage a reflection on the nature of the museum and its location within the landscape of Saxnäs.  We will introduce the work within the framework of fissure i.e. an opening. The residency itself was an opening for us into the landscape of northern Sweden, into the Museum, and into ourselves. We also experienced an opening of our practices into collaborations; we each re-imagined the museum through our own practice and through that of each other. And we will consider the ways in which the work itself has opened out during the four months since its first presentation.  Fissure also evokes cracking or splitting: the residency can be framed in terms of the cracking of preconceptions, methods of practice and of daily life in an unfamiliar landscape.

Bio: Dr Myna Trustram: I work within the fields of museum studies, life-writing and experimental non-fiction (or creative criticism as it’s sometimes called). My subjects are the phenomenon of museums and the experience (cultural and personal) of loss. My analysis starts with Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and develops through Winnicott (1971) and Bollas (1986).  I joined Manchester School of Art in 2013 where I work as a research associate with particular responsibility for the Researcher Development Programme of training for PhD students.  Prior to this I held curatorial and management jobs in museums.  My most recent post was at Manchester Art Gallery. My on-going research is about the psychodynamics of museums.  I also work in performance, through writing and performing my own texts. This work brings together my interest in scholarly research and experimental ways of forming and presenting such work. http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/mtrustram

Ginta Zabarovska                                                                                                                                 Broken jewellery as a determination                                                                                                  The very first jewellery 7000 jears ago was all about small pieces most likely broken of something like teeth of animals, shells etc. As time whent, it was more and more about processed pieces and skilled work. Broken was equal to failure and poor quality. At some point broken objects came back in sight. They came with the idea of finding value in something happened by chance. Bernhard Schobingers most famous broken glass necklace might be one of the turning points in the estetics of ‘broken’ in jewellery. How does breaking affect the development of ideas not the estetic scene? Are there any common ideas shared between the artists working with broken objects? These and other questions will be raised in my presentation. As I am doing my PhD research on contemporary jewellery in Latvia I would also pay attention to comparison between regions.

Bio: Ginta Zabarovska is a Latvian jewellery artist and a PhD researcher at The Art Academy of Latvia. Primarily her research seeks to enrich the historical analysis of jewellery art history in Latvia during the Post-Soviet period. Ginta holds BA and MA degree in jewellery program at the Art Academy of Latvia Design department. She is giving jewellery art history lectures for BA students at the Art Academy of Latvia and continuously participates in various exhibitions and competitions. As an important source of impact in the artist’s activities she considers studies at the Art Academy of Strasbourg in 2012/13. Due to the semester spent in France, she has found a growing interest in contemporary jewellery. Last year Ginta accomplished an internship working as an assistant for artist Yiumsiri Vantanapindu in Strasbourg, France.

Grayson DelFaro
Vixensongs: Translations From the Language of Foxes
The arctic fox is the only land mammal native to Iceland, meaning they were the first Icelanders. Since the arrival of humankind to the island, a tenuous relationship between the species has developed. This was the basis of my MA thesis, analyzing the representations of the fox in Icelandic literature and folklore from the Middle Ages into the modern period. This provides context to my full English translation of Skaufhalabálkur, the only poem from the Old Norse corpus to feature a fox. In this survey, I discovered specific motifs that have been associated with the fox in Icelandic culture. These include connections with magic and its practice; gender, queerness, and homosexuality; death and survival; and most frequently, an association with the cracks in the earth where the fox lives. These findings have provided the critical framework for my creative practice as a poet.

Drawing on theories of ecopoetics and experimental translation as creative writing practice, I am creating a series of constraint-based prompts to transform my traditional English translation of the poem into a new cycle of poems. Based on the motifs from my critical study, the poems explore queerness, death, and fear. For example, one proverb in the poem says that for every ten cowards, one is missing, having run away in fear. I have taken one word from every ten words in the poem to create a new poem exploring fear. Taking the project’s name from the tóukvæði (vixensongs), 18th-century poems inspired by Skaufhalabálkur, I am attempting to “translate” the language of the foxes. Foxes have been hated, feared, and killed throughout the human history of Iceland. It is my hope that by drawing their language from the fissures of the earth where the foxes live and considering their humanity, they can be brought better into the Icelandic society. The humans and foxes of Iceland have at least that much in common: we are all Icelanders. I would be honored to present these findings and poems at the Nordic Summer University session in Saulkrasti. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Bio: Grayson Del Faro is a poet from the Rocky Mountains. He immigrated to Iceland in 2014. He holds a BA in English and Visual Studies from The Evergreen State College and will complete an MA in Viking and Medieval Norse Studies from Háskóli Íslands, the University of Iceland in May 2017. His writing has appeared in Fragments, Ellipsis, The Evergreen Review, and The Cooper Point Journal, among others. He has been a contributor to The Reykjavík Grapevine since 2014 with a regular column since 2015. He edited an anthology, Mutilations on a Theme: Best Experimental College Writing, published by Jaded Ibis Press in 2015. A book collecting his retellings of the Icelandic sagas with humor, queerness, and vernacular language is forthcoming from Forlagið in 2017. He is also an occasional volunteer for the Arctic Fox Center in the Westfjords of Iceland, where this project has its origins.

Helen Turner
Fracturing the forth wall; How audience participation breaks and then makes the artist/performer : audience relationship
We place ourselves as the viewer to experience art (visual, live, performance) in order to be moved, challenged, stimulated, validated. Each audience brings an expectation.
Often the expectation is to be a ‘passive’ viewer, a consumer; but what happens when the artist invites participation? What is the motivation of the artist who extends the invitation? What is the purpose and outcome of involvement?

Working within my folk duo Union Jill and also alongside performance poet Kate Fox, collaboratively we have developed a series of shows (currently for a Rural Touring audience). Through our experience of Folk Clubs and Arts Centres, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Literature Festivals, we have developed an understanding of our audience and how to form the transient relationship with them.

Bringing my visual art participation experience, privileging doing and making over speaking, the audience are invited to share haptic involvement in the performance through the creation of artefact from the safety of their own seat. This has manifested in various performances as knitting, blowing bubbles, eating biscuits, making paper airplanes and decorating or expressing thoughts onto paper dolls suspended to form temporary installations.

Boal’s forum theatre broke the forth wall by inviting the audience to be active theatre makers. In our shows the audience are involved not exposed; they keep their anonymity. The forth wall is fractured enough to allow the connection between artist and audience to be tangible.

I am interested in the artefact made, the relationship formed and the potential ongoing impact of each performance. Considering Reasons ‘detritus of performance’, Reason, M. (2003). Archive or Memory? The Detritus of Live Performance. I am questioning how and why this collection can become archive, artefact or exhibition. Questions of impact on audience (social change?) and aesthetics are a fascination. Intentions for ‘social change’ come from a feminist perspective and the performances gently, humorously and provocatively challenge social norms.
In this 30 minute workshop the artist:audience dynamic will be made and then broken as the audience are invited to physically create artefact which enables them to be active participants, colluders, collaborators.

Bio: Helen Turner is Subject Director for BA and MA Fine Art, BA Illustration and BA Photography at York St John University. Helen has taught in HE since 2003 and has a background in Public Art, with a specialism in Textiles. She is experienced in arts project management and participatory practice including arts in health projects (working with mental health services users, care leavers and elderly patients) and projects in schools and informal educational settings. She is a board member of Chrysalis Arts. Helen is a natural voice practitioner and feminist activist and performs across the UK with feminist duo, Union Jill. Her research interests explore the creation of artefact through participatory performance.
[175 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE]<http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/175.aspx>

Ilze Loza
Influence and/or failures of visual communication strategies on European culture by Islam culture in the 21st century Economic, political as well as globalization processes in the world have countenance mass migration from Middle East regions to European countries. A large proportion of immigrants and asylum seekers belong to Muslim religion. Social and cultural integration of Islam minorities is the proposition of the Western world in 21st century. The proposal analyzes influence of Islam cultures on the European advertising design, principles and ethical considerations when dealing with Islamic audience. An emphasis is placed on the advertising design, communities and differences in the design ethics. Reflection of values and design ethics, fissures and failures of visual communication/advertising between East and West.

Presentation considers impact and failures as theoretical and practical artistic research and practices of visual communication, advertising strategies. Presentation will demonstrate practical examples based on the theoretical research and artistic/design research of commercials dealing with Islamic culture in Europe and vice versa. Influence and/or failures of visual communication – advertising between East and West. Exploring shifting functions of artistic practices in graphic design and theoretical research as bases of the successful visual communication. Demonstration will show impact of breaking and failing within artistic practice of the visual communication in advertising strategies. Experimenting with ideas of strategy building systems between design ethics of Western world and Middle East region. Discussion will encourage participants for self-reflection of values and ethical design norms in comparison with ethics of Islam design. Analyzes of Influence and/or failures of visual communication and graphic design.

Bio: Design Lecturer, Visual Communicator, Graphic Designer Design Artist with 14 years of international experience on Graphic Design, Art Direction, Visual Project Management and Design education. Experienced designer and design educator. More than 8 years of teaching experience at university setting. At present, teach Graphic Design at the Higher Colleges of Technology, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. I have also worked as Senior Lecturer on Graphic Design at the Raffles education corporation in Malaysia, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China from 2009 till 2014.
HIGHER COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY 2015.02. till present Lecturer of Visual Communication/Graphic Design, Applied Communications department, United Arab Emirates FREELANCE GRAPHIC DESIGNER 2005 till present Projects includes: Managing Design Process, Idea generation and Design Development, Branding and Identity Systems, Graphic Design and Culture, Visual Communication, Interior Design Projects, Photography Projects

RAFFLES EDUCATION CORPORATION 2009 – 2014 Senior Lecturer of Visual Communication/Graphic Design
RAFFLES UNIVERSITY ISKANDAR (2013 – 2014), Location: Malaysia
RAFFLES DESIGN INSTITUTE (2012 – 2013), Location: Bangladesh
RAFFLES INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE (2012 – 2012 one term contract to establish design program), Location: Mongolia
RAFFLES INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE (2011 – 2012), Location: Vietnam
RAFFLES DESIGN INSTITUTE (2009 – 2011), Location: China

Jaana Kokko
Encounters with Hella Wuolijoki
I am proposing a lecture ‘Encounters with Hella Wuolijoki’ concerning of my on-going-research process for a new film. The film is about the power of the worker’s movement overlapping in two countries, Estonia and Finland, and going through these landscapes in the contemporary situation. There are three sort of time zones in the work: one approximately 100 years ago, one around 1944-1950 and the contemporary situation.

Hella Wuolijoki was an Estonian play writer, who spend most of her life in Finland. Among being a play writer she was also a powerful leftist politician and a businesswoman and the head of the Finnish broadcast company Yle. She immigrated in Finland around 1908. In her childhood she was living in Valga, a town in the contemporary Estonia-Latvia-border. It is located 150 km from Saulkrasti. I am doing a one week residency in Valga in June 2017. She has been writing her memories with the name Juhani Tervapää (male) that gives me a lot of information about the worker’s movement. In may I will visit the archives at the Yle, Finnish Broadcast station.   Lecture will be probably in the form of a film diary, showing a lots of photos, where I think that there is an encounter with a past historical person, who has been active in the same geopolitical areas that I am at the moment. It is not telling the story of Hella Wuolijoki (there are already a lot of material of her/ written by her), but as the title says: through lived landscapes there could be some sort of meeting of us and if those landscapes could be places to think about the contemporary situation. Nsu:s theme for the summer ‘failing’ means in this case failing in historical facts: whatever I do in terms of researching and looking back to the history I will remain subjective and I do make an interpretation of the past (why not also of present). By the imaginary I do fail in presenting objective, non-political truth, but by the imaginary I might move the listener somehow – or it can fail even in that. Failing is a part of the process. I have earlier shown many experiments in Nsu:s winter symposiums. All of those have been somehow vulnerable, but there has been a change to take a risk by presenting it. Often I have felt that I failed, often I have received also some negative critique, but always it has been important to my artistic practice.

Dr Joanna Sperryn-Jones (York St John University, UK) and Anna Svensdotter (SE) 
Genius Loci Fragmentum: fragmenting the spatial sound
Artists have worked with musicians to make music videos and album covers, and musicians have composed scores for Fine Art, however, the intention of Anna and Joanna is to create new assemblages of sound and space through collaboration, and invite the audience to explore and participate in this installation that will create sounds through breaking. Anna is one of the few flutists in Scandinavia with a focus on contemporary music and extended techniques. She creates soundscapes in which the sounds of her live flute playing are mixed with a repetition of the sound, produced electronically, in an unpredictably broken and reassembled form. The varied repetitions resonate in the space and Anna’s live playing reacts to this evolving context in a continual series of repetitions and difference.  Joanna creates participative sculptural installations exploring experiences of breaking. Giving the audience the experience of physically breaking places them in the subject position of breaker; a position they might not choose in everyday life. The sound of china breaking is both unsettling and melodic and allows the participants to explore the contrast between the violence of breaking and the pleasure and power in breaking.

Anna and Joanna intend to bring their two heterogeneous practices together to collaborate in creating a soundscape sculptural installation that involves the audience in its production. Anna and Joanna do not want this to be a simple collaboration where one provides sound and the other visual. Instead they intend to create new assemblages as the context of each practice is made unpredictable by the presence of the other. They are drawing on the readings of Deleuze, particularly his concepts of becoming.  The performance will bring Anna’s flute soundscapes to the space of Joanna’s sculptural installation. Joanna’s installation will be made from hanging bone china bells that create ringing sounds as the audience explores the space. The sounds of both flute and the sculpture will be electronically recorded, unpredictably broken and repeated. The ongoing performance will react to the repetitions. Sculpture becoming soundscape and music becoming spatial, audience becoming artwork and artwork becoming multiplicity.

Links https://open.spotify.com/track/3TXwzDw9xgcm3NxRmgl3EL (from Anna Svensdotter CD Alpha Waves, gives an idea of the sounds that will appear in the installation, as the same software will be used)  Joanna will be drawing on two previous installations:
‘breaking’ https://joannasperrynjones.carbonmade.com/projects/3170784#1
‘hanging by a thread’ https://joannasperrynjones.carbonmade.com/projects/4962866#1

Bios: Anna Svensdotter holds a Master of Fine Arts and a post graduate performance degree from the Academy of Music in Gothenburg,  Since 1993 she has been on the scene for contemporary music and improvisation. As a soloist and with different ensembles, such as the flute quartet 40f, the experimental quartet Ensemble Parkour, and the free impro trio Ek/Janson/Svensdotter, Anna has performed in Sweden and rest of Europe, and 2015 in Australia. The solo CD “Alpha Waves” with Swedish music for flute and electronics, most of it written directly for Ms Svensdotter, was released in March 2013 with great reviews.
http://www.annasvensdotter.com/
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?visual=true&url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fusers%2F7637482&show_artwork=true&maxwidth=500&maxheight=750

Dr Joanna Sperryn-Jones completed her PhD ‘Breaking as Making: In what ways can making sculpture contribute to understanding perceptions and experiences of breaking?’ in May 2013, registered between Norwich University College of the Arts and University of the Arts London. Her doctoral thesis simultaneously explored and drew parallels between personal experiences in life, such as breaking bones, with those of making/breaking sculpture, Derrida’s concept of the break and breaking as a methodology.  She continues to explore this theme through participative sculptural installations and audience participation in experimental formats for conference papers. She is currently Lecturer in Sculpture on the degree and masters level Fine Art at York St John University. www.joannasperrynjones.carbonmade.com

Kim Wide
When Things Go Wrong and How to Fix Them:
Developing a Manifesto for Particpatory Working in Communities that Supports Us All!
Short description:
WTGW is a discussion/therapy session and workshop addressing the crucial but often hidden questions of socially engaged/participatory practice – what happens when the project goes wrong, what can we gain from failure and how can we use the learning to ‘fix it’ for the next time.  The 30 minute presentation will take the form of a case study and ‘therapy’ session where artists working in the field of participatory work are able to discuss what happened when things went wrong, how it made them feel, how they approached ‘fixing’ it and what they took away from the experience.  It will culminate in the collaborative making of a manifesto that can support practitioners by acting as a guidance point when starting new projects.

Longer description: Often in socially engaged practice, outcomes are airbrushed and tweaked to support success, but often it is in the failings that we find our way towards new ways of working and open up new dialogues. Focussing on the early development stages of Take A Part CIC, Kim will look at how failures with artists and collectives such as WochenKlausur (AT) and Encounters Arts (UK), shaped a more open and honest approach to the practice as well as the work.

The session will open out to the group to discuss failures within their own audience based practice and will culminate with the co-development of a manifesto for working in community settings that can act as a toolkit, guidance or talisman for artists and practitioners to adopt when approaching engagement in the field of community based arts. As manifestos tend to be utopian in their aims and objectives, I will refute this in inviting the group to consider as much WHAT to do as WHAT NOT to do in this working.

The findings will form part of Take A Part CIC’s 2018 iteration of Social Making: Now and Next Symposium (Plymouth, UK – http://www.effordtakeapart.org.uk/social-making/) and will be added to within the context of this international symposium dedicated to socially engaged practice.

Questions Include:
→  How can we mend the ‘burned bridge’ between the artist and the audience?

→  What happens when someone feels they have a lesser voice in the process? How can we avoid this problem?

→  What happens when your intentions are thwarted? How do we avoid being used as ‘tools’?

→  Who decides what success and failure look like?

Bio: Kim Wide, Director, Take A Part CIC Kim Wide is a curator and producer, based in the South West region of the UK. Interested in communications, engagement, access to arts and culture and impacts of social practice, Kim has worked both nationally and internationally to engage communities and the public directly in sustainable, engaging, educational, risk-taking  projects about people’s lives and communities.  Educated in Canada, Kim came to the UK in 2003 and works currently at Take A Part, where she has established an innovative co-commissioning public realm curatorial process developed and managed by communities themselves.

Kim has developed the project from a pilot to a city wide company, supporting the strategic regeneration of the City of Plymouth. Take A Part and the process was recently case studied by Arts Council England as a project of excellence on a national level – http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/funded-projects/case-studies/take-part/  Kim has curated socially engaged projects such as The Dividing Line (Mark Vernon), The South West Disability Film Festival (with BFI), Dance Feast! (with Dance SW), Nowhereisland Radio (Sophie Hope/Mark Vernon), In Praise of Trees (Peter Randall-Page), Shed On Wheels (Anne Marie Culhane), CommonGround (Thelma Hulbert Gallery), Out of Conflict (Cornford + Cross), Trail (Laura Daly), Kinterbury Creek Bridge (muf architecture/art), Social Making: Now and Next (Assemble, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Situations, Effervescent Diving Reflex, HomeBaked).
www.effordtakeapart.org.uk

Larissa Lily
Bad Ideas Club – a market place for your less than perfect ideas
Break out of your perfectionism! Wreck that polished ego. This session is a bit like a clothes swap or money free market place, but instead of things, we`ll be swapping ideas – particularly bad ideas. You are welcome to bring along ideas that you are too hesitant or scared to work on, the ones that failed or that you have simply grown out of. Put it all out there and see if someone else might want to grab them. Your bad idea could be another one’s artistic inspiration. Or not. It is worth a try. You might find an idea in exchange that you`d be willing to try your hand at in this failure-friendly environment. So go ahead, break your patterns and try something new. Or if you are particularly attached to your bad ideas, this could be an opportunity to find fearless and willing collaborators to work with.  The aim is to provide a supportive space to share and test ideas and recruit new collaborators, all with a sense of fun and play and no expectations to accomplish anything. The idea is to take ourselves less seriously, connect with others, have fun, and in the process – who knows! – build new collaborations.  Format – Participatory workshop / money free marketplace.  If there aren’t enough bad ideas in the group for the market place, I am willing to facilitate a warm up workshop to generate some.

Bio: Larissa Lily is a depressed lesbian and a failed writer. Her writing has not (yet) been featured on the Guardian, the Independent or the New Statesman. In 2016 she did not, regrettably, win the Man Booker Price, nor any other award. She failed to get accepted to a PhD Programme in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. In 2015 she was too fatigued to even try. Her self-published masterpiece from 2016 has so far sold: zero copies. Not even her parents read her blog. She would be suitable for leading a session on bad ideas, because she has lots of them. She is also easily enthusiastic about other people`s bad ideas.

Lucy Lyons
The Existentialist Plumbers’ Collective: interventions and subversions of a failed artist
In this presentation I will demonstrate the power of failure and falling through the gaps of practice and research on the journey to not becoming a famous, successful artist.
As a drawing based practitioner and researcher in the field of medicine for seventeen years my research has intended to have an impact within the field of medicine and on society. The aim has been to bring the role of drawing to the forefront as a method for engaging with medical phenomenon through slow looking and building relationships that break down preconceptions and allow respectful understanding and appreciation of medical subjects. This has been through the activity of drawing and in scholarly activities, and manifested predominantly through pedagogical and museum contexts.

Intervention has been key and so too has the element of the performativity of drawing. However, this has not gotten me anywhere, so I accidentally became involved in performance as intervention, showing people things, telling them facts interwoven with fiction and generally having a lot more fun. The Existentialist Plumbers’ Collective was formed spontaneously on April 1st 2017 in a coffee shop in west London whilst on the way to a cemetery. It was founded by a small group of interventionists who identify as existentialist plumbers and feminists. Their aim is to plumb the depths of existential of crisis, fact and fiction, and being, through acts of unblocking, scrubbing away the residue and sediment of mediocrity and overcoming the stench of patriarchy. They enjoy playing, making and collaborating. And plumbing, but only existentially.

TEPC was formed with two other erstwhile members of Circle 7 in protest at being underappreciated and made ‘other’ as artists and women. The absurdity of being an artist, and of the world we find ourselves in, seemed fitting. And plumbers fix, mend and are essential. TEPC cannot plumb anything other than the depths of existential crisis and want to find the tools and create a manual that will help us to do this. Can we fix society? No, but we can make interventions that hope to get others to see the situation and work with it.

Bio: Lucy Lyons has a PhD in drawing and uses drawing as intervention into different disciplines. She has worked in medical sciences through researching medical museum collections for the last 17 years, investigating how the activity of drawing can lead to better understanding and appreciation of medical phenomena through slow looking. She formed Holidays At Home with Larissa Lilly when eating lunch in a restaurant in Riga in 2015 and then Larissa and Lucy together with Tereza Stehlíková founded The Existentialist Plumber’s Collective spontaneously on April 1st 2017 in a coffee shop in west London whilst on the way to a cemetery. Lucy is an artist, a coordinator of NSU Circle 7, a lecturer in drawing research at City&Guilds of London Art School, an interventionist, and existentialist plumber.

Nastassia Yaromenka (proud listener)
By the age of 25, I have never had a “normal” job, and having two bachelor diplomas, one in linguistics and the other in media and communication, I find myself employed as an exotic dancer in Vilnius. Earlier this year I got scared: what if I’m faking? I have been living a life that is not mine, a life where not a single decision was truly mine, basically, a sad life. I am on a journey, which have started with a new year’s resolution to treat myself better, was followed by a year long academic leave from the master’s degree studies on critical urbanism at European Humanities University, and has been in progress ever since. Currently I am what I do. Currently I dance, professionally. I write, rarely, not well. I explore music, hungrily, all the time. I go out, a lot. I meet people and get disappointed. I come back almost never, but if I do, it’s some kind of magic, probably love.

Nathalie Fari
the impossibility of performance
Short Description For the next summer session of NSU, I would like to propose a performance for the Lab Night based on the topics of functions, fissures and failures. Starting point for the creation of this performance (around 30 minutes), will be the selection of three situations that I have experienced during a performance in the past twenty years (I started to develop my own performances in 1995, but my first public performance was in 1997…), since then I have been building an extensive and diverse archive of photos, videos and texts.

Each of these mostly absurd situations, 1 will serve as a source to demonstrate in a performative way, some of the characteristics, qualities or effects of these topics. Doing this, the main goal of the performance isn’t to create re-enactments. Instead of illustrating what happened, I would like to elaborate three new narratives (or actions) that translate and especially «embody» a certain function, fissure or failure.  To give an example: one of the selected situations is an accident that happened during a performance in Berlin in 20112. At this occasion, I was executing slow and reduced movements within a concrete mixer until the moment I felt over… after that, I was not only blocked in the concrete mixer and thus unable to move, but I had also no idea what happened. The audience had also no idea, if this fall was meant to be part of the performance or if I needed help. Fact is, that I continued to perform, even though I was in extreme pain… In this case, I would like to apply this emotional state of being „blocked“ as a basis, to enact a narrative in which my own experience merges with fictitious elements.

Thereby, I’m not primary interested in describing the situation itself, but rather in finding a bodily language that subverts and transcends the meaning of it. It is about the exploration of a second (or third) level of what happened (or could have happened). In this sense, in the impossibility of performance the body not only serves as a „catalyser“ for particular functions, fissures and failures, but also as a translator that reinvents a narrative which is at the same time, possible and impossible.

Bio: Nathalie Fari in is an independent performer, teacher and researcher based in Berlin. She holds a degree in Art Education from the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo and a MA in Space Strategies – Exploratory Art in Public Contexts from the Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin. Her primary research is in the field of embodiment and performance practices with a special focus on the relationship between the body and space, body and city. Under her production label atelier obra viva, she has been developing artistic and educational projects in collaboration with artists and researchers from different fields and also with several institutions and organisations, in Brazil and in Europe. From 2011-15 she was a co-organiser of the independent Platform Month of Performance Art Berlin and since 2016 she is part of the Study Circle Practicing Communities: How can artistic research transform society? from the Nordic Summer University. Currently she is designing a residency program called Body Mapping Lab for the historical site Teufelsberg in Berlin.
For more informations:
www.atelierobraviva.org
www.bodymappinglabwordpress.com

Per Roar
Post-failure: rehearsing strategies
With my proposal Post-failure, I want to conduct an experiment which aims to highlight what the notion “strategy building systems” (cf. Cfp) could imply, both on an individual and a group level. Through this experiment, I want to explore what it could mean to address what the Cfp describes as “shifting functions of artistic practice and research within the context of failure and breaks etc.” I want to do this by suggesting a practice for a “context of failure”, understood here as the aftermath of a failure, hence the title “Post-failure”. The experiment might fail, and then deepen a sense of what a context of failure is, or alternative, offer avenues for emancipatory strategies. The proposal connects both to my interest and concerns around the understanding of communities that Jean-Luc Nancy discusses in his Inoperative Community (1991), as well as my search for emancipatory strategies that can contribute to societal change.

Bio: Per Roar is an Oslo based choreographer who in his artistic work merges a socio-political interest and contextual enquiries with somatic approaches to movement. He obtained his BA in choreography from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHIO), contemporary dance and performance in New York, gained his MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and his doctorate in dance on choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki. In his artistic work, he also draws on his studies in history and social sciences from the University of Oslo, Corvinius University, Budapest and Oxford University.

His artistic works include: White Lies/Black Myths (1995) – on the construct of ‘the other’ (see: Anne Britt Gran, 2000); Shot in the Recliner – the art of camping (2000) – a low-tech interactive camping happening that toured caravan sites in Norway; and the trilogy Life & Death (2006) in which he – by looking at grieving – explored a contextual approach to making choreography. An approach he developed further in the performance If this is my body (2013), and addressed in his doctoral research Docudancing Griefscapes.(2015).

Per Roar is a recipient of US-Fulbright scholarship (1998-1999), the Norwegian Government fellowship for artists (2000-2003), worked as a research fellow in choreography at KHIO (2003 – 2006), and awarded the Norwegian Government’s Guarantee Income for Artists from 2012. Since 2017 he is professor and head of the MA programme in choreography at KHIO.

Skånberg Dahlstedt, Ami
The laugh of the Medusa
The laugh of the Medusa is the title of Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt’s new two hours long performance, and it is also the title of Hélène Cixous’ manifesto for the liberation from the patriarchal stranglehold. What is masculinity? What is a masculine movement? Will the planet get better if everyone becomes a dude? Ami will perform a 20 minutes excerpt from the Laugh of the Medusa, in which she failed to achieve masculine power and recognition. She will instead offer everyone a divorce from patriarchy, and the opportunity to free yourself from harmful body- and thinking work with the help of disco. Is disco enough to divorce from the patriarchy? Absolutely. Let us become spacious singing flesh!

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
– Hèléne Cixous

Bio: Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt is a Swedish performer, choreographer, filmmaker and writer. Ami often creates stage work (solo, and collaborative) on the basis of her embodied life story in a particular theme.  Her 90 min solo performance A particular act of survival received a performing arts award at Scenkonstgalan in Sweden in 2015. In April 2017 her new solo piece The laugh of the Medusa premiered, and even though it was based on her failure to become a dude, it was very well received. The slow walk suriashi is essential in Ami’s practice, which she has studied since 2000 with her teacher Nishikawa Senrei in Kyoto, Japan. Since 2014, she walks in suriashi in different spaces as part of her PhD project. Ami also explores the various accents her dancing contains, where nihon buyō has been an important source of knowledge the last seventeen years. Ami is a member of the Peer Review board of Journal of Artistic Research since February 2017.

Stephanie Hanna
proposal for emotional fissures: assembling a better world
part 1 – app. 6 minutes  depowerment manifesto Starting with a brief input outlining a social-evolutionary question that might be most useful to be adressed through the arts: How do we use power as artists? Most insterestingly, which aspects of power are intriguing, and maybe also subverting us? We talk a lot about wanting to subvert society, and we might succeed here and there, on a small scale. But what is the big picture that we do contribute to, and that we might not want to recognize? I do not necessarily claim there is one answer to this question. It might just be important to give these kind of questions more space in our busy lives… Because what happens while we are busy planning the next revolution? While my thoughts revolve around questions of power, in my actions, I find myself questioning power. Actually, I realize I am employing depowerment strategies for most of my life. One might say that it started as some sort of self-defense that seemed to work when I was young.   Then, rather quickly in my very early adolescence, the strategy seized to bring any advantage. I still could not let it go. So here I am now, with this wonderfully ineffective strategy – it is so ineffective that it is even hard to find the word for it in the existing dictionaries. And somehow, deep in my heart, I do believe that this is the way out of capitalism. Yes, it really might be. (… and so on, a little bit more about depowerment. then:) … 3 minutes to jot down own thoughts ideas visions experiences etc. on / with depowerment recommendation (+ material spread) to continue taking notes on own thoughts during the lecture.

part 2 – app. 6 minutes a herstorical overview of depowerment looking into some expamples of depowerment strategies in the arts. taken from own experiences, observations, talks with friends and colleagues and word-of-mouth of herstorical incidents. then: … 10 minutes time to finish jotting down own herstory in timeline / mind-map / mood board etc pp, with preferred strategies, tactics, experiences, visions, thoughts and emotions that might lead to the desired change in the world – which is that exactly, by the way? Using word, image and any other imaginable form of notation 8 minutes of closing round, proposing and discussing the idea of opening a daily expanding mind – map / mood – board, starting from these evolutionary stances, in one of these curated space aorund the house and area, collecting the singular maps / outlines / boards into one communal one which may expand further over the rest of the stay.  After the symposium, I would like to take the physical map into the public think tank that is currently developing at the department store window Donau Ecke Ganghofer.

Bio: Stephanie Hanna makes process-oriented and situation-specific works in the fields of participative artistic projects and actions, spatial installations, drawing, painting, printing, objects, costumes, video and performance. In 2001, she completed the BA studies “Theatervormgeving” (stage and costume design) at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, Netherlands, followed up by the MA “Art in Context” at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany in 2006. Between 2005 and 2012, she has been developing the participative art project “senior street art” through facilitating workshops and participative actions around graffiti and street art for people above 50 years, acting from Berlin and around Germany, with global media coverage on the project.

Since 2011, she explores shifting constallations and unannounced performances in the department store window Donau Ecke Ganghofer in Berlin, Neukölln. When she is not doing an own project in the window, she is improvising to curate befriended and completely different artistic positions that might as well by chance fit to that corner. Since 2013, she has been assembling an audio collection of advice for a good life. So far collected in the streets of Berlin – Neukölln, Wedding and Marzahn, and in Görlitz and shown respectively on location, often installed site-specifically in Haus am Kleistpark (collective / Tempelhofer Kunstpreis 2016), Zukunftsvisionen Festival Görlitz (2015), Galerie M (Temporäre Kunstprojekte Marzahner Promenade, 2014), OKK (2013) and Labor: Urbanes Altern /48 Stunden Neukölln (2013).

Tom McGuirk and Joanna Neil
Breaking/Mending/Making
This project emerges from a shared interest in making, specifically how art ‘presences’ from making activities that involve an element of destruction, and from a relinquishing of control within a collaborative context. This collaboration evolved from presentations by the authors/artists at the NSU Summer Session in Druskininkai Lithuania, 2015 and the iJADE conference at the University Chester, 2016.

Theoretically this project is informed by ideas regarding creativity expressed in Martin Heidegger’s seminal text, The Origin of the Work of Art and in physicist David Bohm’s book, On dialogue.  Heidegger discusses the concept of the Riss (a German word meaning both to sketch and to tear). He draws attention to seemingly counterintuitive connotations, whereby the creative action of drawing are associated with destructive, even violent meanings – ‘rift’, ‘tear’, ‘cleft’ or ‘breach’. So that the simple act of drawing a line involves a breaking through, that Heidegger associates with “strife.” He insists however that, such “strife is not a rift (Riss), as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other (Heidegger, 2001: 61). This is an old idea; Heraclitus paradoxically suggests that such “cleaving apart bears together, and from bearings apart [comes], the most beautiful harmony” (Robertson, 1984: 241).

Through collaborative making we will address Bohm’s analysis of creativity in terms of “conversational exchange,” whereby something said by one person is responded to by another with something similar but not identical, wherein the “first person sees a difference between what [he/she] meant to say and what the other person understood” (Bohm & Nichol, 1996: 2). It is in this gap that Bohm envisages a space for creativity.

Our collaborative making will involve reworking each other’s drawings/images through constructive/destructive redrawing, combined with needlework and printmaking, accompanied by an ongoing theoretical dialogue. Thematically we will exploit a serendipitous shared interest in deep-sea images from coincidentally similar childhood encounters with such imagery in old encyclopaedias.

Bios:  Tom McGuirk is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory/Critical Theory at the University of Chester. He holds a PhD (2003) from the National University of Ireland. He has worked in higher and further education in Ireland, Denmark and latterly Britain. He was Research Fellow in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK (2008-2009). He was Lecturer in Painting at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, (1990-2002) and at KEA – Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (2005-2008). He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK). He co-edited (with Christine Fentz) the last NSU Study Circle 7 anthology: (2015) Artistic Research: Strategies for Embodiment. He has published widely, including a text in James Elkins’ book (2012) What Do Artists Know? Penn State, University Press. He has presented at numerous international conferences, most recently: Artistic Research: Is There Some Method? The Academy of the Performing Arts, Prague, April 2016.

Joanna Neil is currently working on her PhD at the University of Glasgow. She is based in the school of Education where she is bringing together her research interests: Arts practice, Education and Technology. She is interested in what can be made visible by reflecting and re-seeing through different media and using digital auto-ethnography as a methodology to do this. She teaches drawing, research methodologies, reflective practice and textiles at University Centre Blackburn College. Drawing is central to her practice, happily moving from pen to sewing machine to digital voice recorder and more recently to performance to explore this. Her research blog: https://feltlikeit.wordpress.com/ and digital auto-ethnographic research project blog: https://drawnconversation.wordpress.com/ give examples of her research and practice.

Valérie Lamontagne
Failure to wear: liminal process and breakage in wearables tech
The myth of wearable technologies is that they will make us: more healthy; self-aware; connected; mindful; rested; efficient; fertile; live longer; safe; better; happier lives. However, when it comes to new technologies of the body, the reality and the myth seldom align. Wearable tech adoption and use is limited in scope, and quantifiably positive effects. A high number of wearables consumers fail to continue using their devices, thus pre–‐emptively limit potential positive outcomes and life changes. Perhaps we’ve gotten it all wrong?

Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner builds on Dutch/German/French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s idea that rites of passage construct an “in-betweenness” akin to a border or threshold between crises. Turner describes this ritual process as “liminal,” or existing in a transitional state (Carlson, Performance; van Gennep, Rites). A “liminal” state is experienced in traditional cultures when, for one example, a boy becomes a man. During this transitional period, the individual is neither quite boy nor yet man (Turner, “Betwixt and Between”). For Turner, “liminal” activities are characterized as “anti–‐structure,” opposing the structure of everyday cultural operations in which work and play are clearly divided (Carlson, Performance, 19). However, Turner recognizes that many activities in industrialized society-such as sport, leisure, and art-no longer operate at a clear divide between play and work. These variegated zones of activity, like professional sport or theater acting, according to Turner, provide an opportunity for social and cultural disruption and resistance, which create what he calls a “liminoid” space. We can use this concept of the “liminoid” to express how micro–‐ruptures happen through devices such as wearables, where the human wearing it is neither fully working nor at play, neither fully participating or not participating in the wearable. The “liminoid” accurately describes this passive, parasitic quality of wearables and other body-worn devices in their capacity to collect data, energy, etc., without immediate awareness or visualization thereof. For the past year I have been developing an open–‐source wearables, synapaseWear, which aims at creating a new experience with technological devices. sW aims to let individuals experience wearable tech via non–‐quantifiable means such as haptic devices (touch, heat/cold, pressure), olfactory and other non–‐traditional and post–‐optical modes of visualizing data. The aim is to create a devices which can accompany the wearer in both his/her engagement and non–‐ engagement phases, aligned with the liminal and disruptive moments of experiences.

Bio: Valérie Lamontagne is a Montréal artist–‐designer, curator, and holds a PhD in “Performative Wearables: Bodies, Fashion and Technology” at Concordia University where she teaches in the Department of Design & Computation Arts. She is the owner & designer at 3lectromode, a wearable electronics atelier and founder & director of the upcoming Fashiontech Festival in Montreal. She is also co-owner of the wearables startup synapse.Wear with Alexander Reeder from Art&Program, based in Tokyo. She has curated design and media arts exhibitions and events such as: “Tech-a-porter,” MUTEK IMG, Montréal, Canada (2016); “The Future of Fashion is Now,” Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, RoTerdam, Netherlands (2014); “TechnoSensual,” Museums Quartier, Vienna (2012); “Clothing without Cloth,” V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, RoTerdam (2011); “Electromode” at the the Vancouver Winter Olympics (2010); “Ellipse: L’art sur le web,” Musée national des beaux–‐arts du Québec (2002); and “Location/Dislocation,” New Museum, New York (2001).

William Card
Emma’s Running Bath
Uprooting site specific art
Artwork created in response to a site must deal with the practitioner’s encounter with the otherness of that location, the unimaginable world-without-us. At the same time the artwork is other to the site and leaves a trace of this intervention. So, what becomes of it when the artwork is moved to a new location?

A report on the NSU artistic residency at Ricklundgården and a meditation on the paradoxes of uprooting site-specific art. The presentation will include a close examination of our shared space. Participants will be asked to create a ‘resident’ artwork that will, in some sense, remain with the space but will also be removed and installed elsewhere. This fissure between the artwork and its location, creator, object and place will be the focus of the presentation.

Bio: William Card is a graduate of Wimbledon School of Art’s Fine Art programme. He is currently a lecturer at the University Centre Blackburn College, teaching design and fine art and is also a postgraduate research student at the Manchester Metropolitan University. His interests include the uncanny, affect in art and digital visual effects technologies. Recent exhibitions include A\ /OID in Manchester and Carbon Meets Silicon at Oriel Sycharth Gallery, Glyndwr University. In 2017, William was Nordic Summer University Artist in Residence at Ricklundgården, Saxnäs, Northern Sweden. Recent conference presentations include and NSU summer symposium and the transdisciplinary imaging conference (TRANSIMAGE) at Plymouth University.