ARTStap Vol.2 Issue 2

SALOME VOEGELIN - [Exploring the Critical 'I'] HENRY SOLEMAN - [Interview by Studio Critical] ARTSTAP ONLINE TOP ART GALLERIES & SPACES OLGA ANACKA - [Open Submission Award] MARIA COLEMAN - [Reappraising the Disappearing Body and the Disembodied Eye through Multisensory Art - TITLE Award] ALICE BURNS - [MAKERS Award] SEAMUS McCORMACK - [MAKERS Award] JULIETTE LOSQ - [MAKERS Award] WILMA VISSERS - [MAKERS Award] RICHARD CARR - [Between the Visual & the Spatial; The Sonic Object] ARTSTAP ONLINE TOP 5 FERGUS KELLY - [A Congregation of Vapours] LUC MESSINEZIS - [Audiopsy Jerusalem: an existentialist approach to exploiting the soundscape for artistic purposes] THE FRANCHISE PROGRAMME

Journal for Contemporary Visual & Sonic Art Vol.2 Issue 2

ARTS tap

ABOUT ARTStap was founded to readdress the current lack of representation focusing primarily on the development of emerging and under represented artists within their creative and research practices and is dedicated to create a platform for discussion and collaboration for the emerging artist. Most work is seen from the perspective of the artist themselves alongside critical texts focusing on contemporary art and its relation to a wider artistic, theoretical and social context. By taking this approach ARTStap aims to be at the forefront of art criticism and theory and to engage and represent the work of committed emerging practitioners.

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CONTRIBUTORS SALOME VOEGELIN - 'Exploring the Critical 'I'' - [Invited Artist] HENRY SOLEMAN - [Interview by Studio Critical] ARTSTAP ONLINE TOP ART GALLERIES & SPACES OLGA ANACKA - [Open Submission Award] MARIA COLEMAN - [Reappraising the Disappearing Body and the Disembodied Eye through Multisensory Art - TITLE Award] ALICE BURNS - [MAKERS Award] SEAMUS McCORMACK - [MAKERS Award] JULIETTE LOSQ - [MAKERS Award] WILMA VISSERS - [MAKERS Award] RICHARD CARR - 'Between the Visual & the Spatial; The Sonic Object' - [Invited Artist] ARTSTAP ONLINE TOP 5 FERGUS KELLY - [A Congregation of Vapours] LUC MESSINEZIS - 'Audiopsy Jerusalem: an existentialist approach to exploiting the soundscape for artistic purposes' - [Invited Artist] THE FRANCHISE PROGRAMME

LIST OF INTERESTED DISTRIBUTORS FOR FUTURE (PRINTED) ISSUES Ireland, Scotland, UK, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, USA NIVAL, NationalI rish Visual Arts Library, (NCAD, Dublin, I reland) Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, (Barcelona, Spain) RUA RED, (Tallaght, Dublin, I reland) The Burren College of Art, (co. Clare, I reland) Basement project space, (cork, I reland) Arttrail YMCA, (cork, I reland) GSA, Gorey School of Art, (co. Wexford, I reland) Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre (co. Wicklow, I reland) The Little Ghost Gallery (co. Kilkenny, I reland) SOMA Contemporary Art Box, (co. Waterford, I reland) Basement Project Space, (co Cork, I reland) NenaghArtsCentre, (co. Tipperary, I reland) Number OneGallery, (co.Dublin, I reland) Mothers Tankstation, (co. Dublin, I reland) Exchange Gallery, (co. Dublin, I reland) EnnistymonCourthouse Gallery & Studios, (co. Clare, I reland) Tallaght Community Arts, (co. Dublin, I reland) Pitzer Art Galleries, (Claremont, CA, USA) Academy of Fine Arts, (Prague, Czeck Republic) CollectiveGallery, (Edinburgh, Scotland) Soundfjord Gallery & ResearchUnit, (London, UK) Trailer project space, (Rotterdam.Netherlands) Arteria Art Gallery, (Montreal,Canada) 221 A, (Vancouver, Canada) Draiocht, (Blanchardstown, I reland) CIT, Crawford School of Art, (Cork, I reland) Catalyst Arts, (Belfast, Northern I reland) Filmbase, (Temple Bar, I reland) Cake Contemporary Arts, (co. Kildare, I reland) ICPA, Colgate University, (NY, USA) 1 26 (Galway, I reland) West Cork Arts Centre (cork, I reland) Galway Arts Center, (Galway, I reland) Darc Space, (Dublin, I reland)

Note From The Editor Well what can we say! The ARTStap Team have been a busy bunch and we have made some major advancements over the past 4 months, this is mainly down to the huge amount of international support we have received from all of you, so thank you.

Yes, we are now ARTStap. Since the release of our previous Issue studentsZINE Vol.2 Issue 1 we have been operating under a new name, ARTStap. This choice was made by the ARTStap Team to accommodate the wide and varying practices, discplines and interests of our readers and all of you at the ARTStap Network. We also hope this will allow us to reach an even wider international audience.

Over the past few months our international readership has expanded with our latest issue receiving over 22,000 reads/downloads, that is 7,000 more than our average readership for previous issues. Our online network of professionals has expanded into the thousands catering for individual artists, curators, collectives, galleries, museums, educational centers etc. and has become as we believe the largest online Irish platform for Contemporary Art, with our website recording an average of over 30 million hits last year, so Thank You. In the past month, we have launched the ARTStap FRANCHISE, so check this out! The Franchise Programme has been set up as a media partnership programme to promote and bring to the world your event, exhibition, symposium etc. We offer a number of packages designed to cater for Production Companies, Galleries & Museums, Educational Centers & Universites to the Individual Artist and Curator. Our packages are set up to make your projects as successful as they can be.

Coming up is the first issue under the new name ARTStap but it is continuing the volume series, so this issue is ARTStap Vol.2 Issue 2 and what an amazing issue it is. We would like to thank all contributors and congratulate all ARTStap Award Recipients, and hope this issue lives up to and betters the previous successes of studentsZINE. Regards Richard Carr

WWW.ARTSTAP.COM WHERE THE ART WORLD MEETS ITSELF

Exploring the Critical "I"

commissioned by the Static Gallery in Liverpool for the Static Pamphlet. Available on-line on www.static.org. Published by the Static Gallery in an anthology on arts criticism ‘Us and Them’, editor Becky Shaw and Gareth Woollam, 2005, ISBN 0-9546498-1-8

Salome Voegelin

Sit yourself down comfortably, staring ahead of you, looking at nothing in particular and repeat ten times in slow succession: Why am I I? The usual effect of this experiment is a sharp certainty about the limits of your body and mind, and a strong sense that you exist. Most likely some acquaintances of yours and even people you only met in passing will flash before your mind’s eye and you are suddenly very clear about the fact that you are not them. Maybe you start to wonder what it would be like to be them, how they are feeling, what they are thinking, etc.. In any event you realise with startling clarity that you have always been you, and that you can only ever be yourself. This is accompanied by a stark sense of incredulity that one should exist as one does. (Why me?) Subsequently you might be overcome by a strange sensation of being trapped, or you might experience an immense sense of joy. Either way, you perceive an intense focus on yourself and all relationships to people and things around you appear quite fragile and distant, impossible to draw them closer, however much you squint.

I see a barrel rolling down the hill into a ditch, a male figure gets out, I see him from the back running, disappearing behind the corner at the foot of the bridge. Then my glance becomes his. His arms extend out in front of me his voice is between my ears. Having just escaped from prison he is on the run and I am running with him. I am caught in his body. His eyes are my picture frame. Struggling with bushes and the steep terrain we run onto the main road. We stop a car and hitch a lift negotiating the driver of the car as a ‘‘you’’ vis-à-vis our shared ‘‘I’’. This intimacy is dizzying, every time he turns his head I turn as well, I am caught as in a vice, unable to look back, unable to choose my own image. His monologues are our dialogues, are him as me.

The man is Vincent Parry. His character guides the camera around Delmer Dave’s film Dark Passage. The clumsy sharp edges of the camera trap the eyes of the viewer in the body of the character. He/I is/am invisible to him/myself whilst clearly always at the centre of the action. It is claustrophobic in these eyes, there does not seem enough space to breath and I would like to turn around to look at myself, to gauge myself from without myself. However, the director insists, and every ‘look’ at myself is a look from within myself which gets caught in the incredulity of a singular existence.

From this point on there is no us but only a them and even this ‘‘them’’ is quite clearly heterogeneous beyond categorical descriptions. Every ‘‘them’’ is an ‘‘I’’ as I, and communication becomes a matter of desire, the willingness to collude momentarily in a collective sense with no expectations to hold on to it as meaning.

By the time Vincent Parry has visited a plastic surgeon and become Allan Lanelle I know that there is no other place to view the film from but myself.

And although he is turning around to me now, facing me and becoming a ‘‘you’’ to my ‘‘I’’, I know that I am the centre of the film I am viewing. The film is produced in my contingent complicity. My spectatorship is that of a transitive viewer, my engagement narrates the material. I see as Roland Barthes’ écrivant writes: urgently and individually, producing the film in my temporary perception rather than reading it from a distanced position through the channels of filmic orthodoxies and conventions.(1 ) For the viewer as spectatant (spectating) the film is an individual and subjective expression, provisional but not ambiguous. It is rendered unambiguous due to the particularity of my subjectivity. Ambiguity arises in the generality of (film) language, not in the particularity of the action of seeing. By contrast, for the spectator the film is a text, monumental, and thus invites and confirms consensual interpretations and objective criticism. I understand this not as a paradox. Rather, if you understand the work from a meta-position, confirmed beyond its current perception in a shared reading, you can accept subjective interpretations and ambiguous readings without them destroying the underlying authority of its institutional language, and thus without interpretative ambiguity destroying the authority of the consensual voice. For the transitive viewer this is different.

The authority of my perception lies in my individual and momentary conviction. The work is produced in my viewing of it, and my interpretation becomes the film as a generative action. Thus the sense of the film lies in the conviction of my interpretative production rather than in the relation to

presumed conventions of contextualisation and its orthodoxies of valuation.

Such an urgent and individual perception seems to be forever in conflict with conventions of viewing and cultural inertia and thus challenges any notion of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ sustained beyond the moment of perception. The transitive Barthes disregards ontological values and his individual fervour and engagement leads continuously to a particular subjectivity: an ‘‘I’’ as I experience it in the sharp intensity of being only ever in the moment myself. My ‘‘I’’ is radically me, any affiliation in an ‘‘us’’ or a ‘‘them’’ is only my desire to stop the dizzying intensity of looking from within and survey the frame from a detached position, outside the work. My need to escape the intense involvement makes me negotiate a consensual sense.

What makes Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) trust Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), is his desire to connect, the will to overcome the intensity of the ‘‘I’’ in a momentary ‘‘us’’. He needs this alliance to get himself out of his difficulties as an escaped convict on the run. (He was put away three years earlier for allegedly killing his wife.) Everybody else seems a hostile and suspicious ‘‘them’’ to him.

Theoretical conventions and descriptions are attempts at consolidating the ‘‘I’’ into an ‘‘us’’ beyond such individual desire. Conventions and orthodoxies, contracts of viewing and listening, determine my perception within a consensuality. However, there is no ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’, only ‘‘Is’’ with the occasional will to belong together as ‘‘us’ ’’ and identify some ‘‘thems’’ to hold the tautological truths established in a contractual description against. In this sense the desire to form such momentary affiliations is by no means always benevolent. The notion of an ‘‘us’’ and a ‘‘them’’ manipulates the ‘‘I’’ into a vice,

into positions and agreements, and not every ‘‘I’’ that pushes for an ‘‘us’’ or a ‘‘them’’ equals another. Even if the terms ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ pretend equivalent belonging, the ‘reality’ of this affiliation depends on the who of its experience rather than the category of its description.

Vincent soon finds out that ‘‘us’’ is an illusion, and ‘‘them’’ the frightening concept of betrayal.

If taken to be more than a momentary affiliation ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ lead to the terror of categorisation, of homogeneous totalities even if hidden behind heterogeneous differentiations. Instead reality is generated in the dynamic intersections of individual and momentary conceptions. The collective sense is produced continually in the dynamic relationships between the individual subjects conceptualising the film in their perception as transitive ‘‘Is’’, rather than in relation to a pre-existent determination.

The consequence for Vincent or Allan, is exile and a shaky ‘‘us’’ of love and desire with Irene. Most ‘‘thems’’, hostile or friendly, have inadvertedly been killed along the way.

is the hope for a shared sensation and a momentary relief in collectivity that explains my being me beyond the intense feeling I get staring ahead of myself thinking why am I I?

Notes 1 . In his text ‘Écrivain et écrivant’ (1 960) Barthes debates two different forms of ‘writing’. L’écrivain is the person who writes, for the term écrivain is a noun. He is an author who uses and produces the institutional monopoly over language.

He presents a literary tradition, institutions and conventions of writing and reading: literature and the collective sense of good writing. By contrast, l‘écrivant is a different voice of action. The ‘-ant’ denotes the present participle, thus the écrivant is writing; he produces the work continually from his vernacular position and his urgent individuality generates his expression.

According to Barthes it is the task of the écrivant to state without hesitation what he thinks; and in this urgency and subjectivity lies his criticality. At the same time, the function of the écrivain and his literary language is to transform such critical production into a commodity, to make it writable in a conventional, shareable sense.

Selected Bibliography

The consequence for the viewer is a fragile and provisional sense of conviction in his/her own generative interpretation. I can aim to share my individual narrativisation of the material with you, bearing in mind that any such connection is only ever temporary and dependent on the willingness to engage rather than facilitated by a contract of engagement. Thus it is fraught from the start and all that keeps me from abandoning this affiliation

Barthes, Roland, ‘Écrivains et écrivants’, in Essais Critiques, (Éditions Du Seuil: Paris, 1964, [orig. 1960]) Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Manchester University Press: UK, 1994, [orig.1979]) Massey, Doreen, ‘Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in Mapping the Futures, local cultures, global change, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner eds, (Routledge: London, 1996, [orig. 1993])

HENRY SAMELSON Interviewed by Valerie Brennan of Studio Critical

Thursday, April 5, 201 2

A behind the scenes approach to contemporary painting www.http://studiocritical.blogspot.ie/

Henry Samelson is a painter, born 1962, lives and works in Brooklyn NY. Recent exhibitions include two Solo Exhibitions at the Horton Gallery NY 2007 / 2008.

What are you working on in your studio right now?

I'm working on about 50 small paintings simultaneously right now. I'm starting or revisiting--depending on how you look at it--some very small paintings on canvas.

I wanted to start some new work after reaching a stopping point with a recent series, but looking around the studio realized I have a glut of old work that I am not really close to anymore. So I'm recycling.

Can you describe your working routine?

I have a day job, and my wife and I have a 22 month old boy, so there's a lot of time-management and scheduling involved in my routine which basically involves working around job and family 2-3 nights during the week in the studio, and one day over the weekend. I do a lot of sketching with ink, crayon, pencil every day whenever there's a gap in my schedule. So, along these lines, before going to my job I've gotten into the routine/ritual of sketching in the park beforehand. I sketch later on my lunch. And at night after work if I can't make it to the studio, I work on some watercolor and pencil drawings on the couch, or drawings on my iPad or phone.

Puck, acrylic on canvas, 12 x 9", 2012

Can you describe your studio space and how, if at all, that affects your work?

Studio view

I have a studio in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn which has a nice view of midtown Manhattan in the distance and a Taco Bell in the foreground. I share it with another artist who I have only seen once in all the months I've been there, so it's almost like having my own space which is important for me as I don't work well with someone else in the room. The space itself has a certain bearing on my work that I haven't figured out yet. I've worked in a tiny spare bedroom in a former apartment on some very large-scaled canvases. I think that working in that cramped space on such large paintings makes it hard to see the space inside the painting and maybe that's a good thing, to work somewhat blindly that way.

Conversely, I have a lot of working space right now but am working on smallscaled works that I tend to stand very far back from to look at when I'm just looking. So in a way I'm just as blind about the space painting those. I work best when I have a nice view outside, and maybe that’s a lonesomeness thing.

Tell me about your process, where things begin, how they evolve etc.

Pencil sketch of the Taco Bell parking lot across from my studio

It’s hard to pinpoint where things begin and evolve with me. Drawing is important to my painting. But there is reciprocity between them with ideas/influence flowing back and forth. I work on a lot of paintings at the same time with dialogue between them as well. Everything plays off of everything else. Sometimes when I stumble in a good idea I have to go back and work over what I thought was a good idea in something I felt satisfied with a week or year ago. Like many other artists, I'd say drawings help me locate ideas, marks, color, for the paintings.

When I turn to painting, however, it's hard to stay true 1 00% of the time to the template I thought a series of drawings had established. Departures happen as a result of accident, frustration, ineptitude, and the difficulty of translating the muscle movements involved in drawing into the act of painting. I think the circumstances I have just described are common among artists who move from drawing to painting. Drawing feels more acoustic and disciplined than painting. In painting, I get a lot of feedback that can't be controlled. I always reach a point of anger and disgust in a work which I think is an essential part of my process.

Acrylic on canvas paintings in progress, 2012, 10"x10"

What are you having the most trouble resolving?

Everything. But I don’t think of this as trouble really. I don't think of any of my work as being resolved. I mean I do, in moments, but there are so many ways to finish something, resolved doesn’t seem like the clearest way to describe how I look at a work I've stopped working on. Maybe there's some word in a dead language that means essentially "the work has just stopped, sort of".

Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?

I basically paint and draw using mostly the usual media and supports associated with those forms. I do a good bit of spray painting and digital drawing, if that counts as different. I've made paintings on aluminum that I hired an auto body shop to finish. But I still think I've remained true to a fairly narrow band of working, even though many of my art heroes do some pretty wacky stuff with varied materials. I just haven't gone there yet.

What does the future hold for this work?

Things that are related to question number 6. I’d like to explore different materials, different approaches to support/presentation, avoid squares.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I really appreciate this invitation to discuss my work and process Valerie.

Thank you. I am sure I would answer these questions differently in time, maybe even by the time I get home from work tonight. In fact, I am sure after I send you these answers I am going to wish I had answered everything another way.

Top Arts Spaces & Galleries to join ARTStap Online

Oonagh Young Gallery

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The Secret Kitchen

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OPEN SUBMISSION AWARD

O L G A A N A C K A

Olga was born and brought up in Poland where she also graduated in 2004 in sculpture and art teaching, and thereupon established a studio with a little foundry. In 2005 she was chosen as a finalist of Warmia and Mazury Art Biennale.

Having moved to Ireland in 2006, Olga been carrying out a set of researches and experiments in a kind of kitchen laboratory which resulted in being shortlisted for the latest Celeste Prize in New York. Although being a niche artist, Olga has presented her work worldwide, mainly contributing to group exhibitions.

I perceive art as a phenomenon which is not limited to professiona interest. It is a way of life, and thus I always create a piece related to the situation that I participate in; current and touching. Although aesthetic is still important in my works, I give priority to thought or feeling existing behind a concept. Therefore, playing with reality by drawing parallels to art matters is my never-ending pleasure The idea of cocoons that I am devoted to explore, stems from motherhood and other feminine qualities. When I was a child all around was magical and undefined. Women of my childhood were always busy with crafty works, especially a grandma who was a tailor. She passed her skills to 3 daughters, so I am used to having scraps of materials popped in corners of a house, and also colorful threads and buttons laying everywhere. Women in my family came easily from stirring meal to sewing, knitting, embroidering, composing flowers and so on. The work was left at their fingertips waiting to go on with it. Accordingly, since I have become a mother this reminiscence strongly influences my art practice .

The process of creation is aimed to act regarding old craftsmanship, in particular house-holding works carried by woman in the old days. Therefore, my work has a potent social value. Conceptual exploration of textile sculptures implements a series of installations possible to compose in countless places so that the relationship between one who is locked at home and public space can be depicted. Likewise, such a visual stimulus incites mutual interaction between the two worlds which fascinates me the most.

Semi-circle by Olga Anacka

Pinky promise by Olga Anacka

Nest by Olga Anacka

Upholstry by Olga Anacka

Maria Coleman Recipient of the ARTStap TITLE Award

Reappraising the Disappearing Body and the Disembodied Eye through Multisensory Art School of Art, Design and Printing Dublin Institute of Technology Ireland

Abstract This paper examines the mind/body dualism inherent in western culture, tracing some causes and consequences of the ‘disappearing body.’ It considers the complicity of the ‘disembodied eye’ in privileging the intellect over corporeality and proposes the more holistic approach of interactive and installation art as an antidote to this age-old mind/body split.

The Disappearing Body The evolution of mental history in Western culture describes the displacement by reason and logic of the body as an instrument of knowledge. Bill Viola [26, p.234] The body is a contested site where many of our cultural discourses are played out. Stephen Wilson [32, p.149]

The forebears of western thought trusted their minds and doubted their bodies. Plato's allegory of the cave, written in the fourth century BCE, teaches that the realm of the senses is arbitrary, amounting to little beyond shadow play. Sensual pleasures were recognised as leaden weights that dragged the vision of one's soul downward.

The Judeo-Christian story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden also portrays how the intellect was raised above the body in the collective imagination. In this story, the cumbersome fruits of knowledge brought a burden of disrepute and shame to the body. It was henceforth to be civilised, covered, dominated and controlled by the intellect. The bad reputation meted out to the body goes deeper than the necessity for fig leaves. Corporeality is further downtrodden behind layers of metaphor in the story. The treatment of the woman and the snake in fact compounds the misgivings about the body. As the female is presumably the more body-bound sex due to her bearing role in reproduction, Eve's temptation translates perhaps to the lure of bodily senses. In countless primitive cultures, the snake is a powerful symbol of life, sex, birth, death and rebirth. Our bodies connect us to all of the characteristics assigned to the snake: they define our sexuality, allow us to join the reproductive cycle and serve as our agent of life, growth, renewal and mortality. When the snake was cast down to crawl in the dirt, symbolically our sensual bodies were too.

Centuries of Christian dogma built upon this mythological foundation to transform the idea of humanity living in harmony in a physical earthly paradise into a vision of an otherworldly utopia, or heaven, where ethereal souls were loosed from their body-bound existence to dwell in eternal bliss. The conquered physical body of Christian thought was compounded again centuries later by Descartes's maxim Cogito ergo sum – ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In an attempt to distance himself from the mortal coil of the senses (‘Am I so dependent on the body and the senses that without these I cannot exist?’ [6, p.225]), Descartes imagined his sentient soul existing independently of his corporeality. ‘I think’ was far superior to his seventeenthcentury mind than the ambiguity of ‘I feel.’ The sensual body was definitely not the chosen gauge of fact. Trusting intellect, science set about dissecting and cataloguing existence into discrete elements. This set western culture apart and allowed people to govern the natural environmentand develop increasingly abstract thoughts and tools. This mind/body split has been a useful abstraction and has brought us to a unique, technologically advanced moment in history, but it also fosters dangerous delusions.

In the book Mind Children, roboticist Hans Moravec argues that protein-based life forms will be replaced by silicon in the future.

He loosely adapts Moore's law of exponentially growing computing capabilities to predict that the next twenty years will see the development of robots with intelligence far superior to humanity's. His prophesies continue that robots will inherit the earth, and that our only avenue for survival will be to download our consciousness into the system, making it effectively immortal, transferring to new machines as required. An immense simulator would then recreate our complex reality. Moravec describes this as follows: Now, imagine an immense simulator that is able to model the whole surface of the earth on an atomic scale, and that can run time forward and back, and produce different plausible outcomes by making different random choices at key points in its calculation. Because of the great detail this simulator models living things, including humans, in their full complexity. [21 ] Marvin Minsky, a prominent figure in artificial intelligence research, hopes to decode and synthesise the brain, allowing a digital form of the brain to survive in more durable material after the death of ‘the bloody mess of organic matter’ (qtd. [30, p.1 7]).

The philosophy of these ‘neognostics’ can be discerned in the work of many fields. The artist Stelarc believes that humanity's propensity for knowledge accumulation has superseded the significance of physicality.

[T]he body has become profoundly obsolete in the intense information environment it has created. It's had this mad, Aristotelian urge to accumulate more and more information. An individual now cannot hope to absorb and creatively process all this information. Humans have created technologies and machines which are much more precise and powerful than the body. [24] William Gibson, who coined the phrase ‘cyberspace,’ writes in his novel Neuroromancer of networked computers that enable a matrix of pure data with ‘bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void’ [7, p.11 ]. This realm of data glistens with the particular kind of beauty only found in the harmony and eloquence of a mathematical equation.

His male protagonist Case, who feels trapped by his body (he refers to it as ‘meat’), jacks into this matrix to enjoy ‘the bodiless exultation of cyberspace’ [7, p.1 2]. Interestingly, he does not lose the joys of bodily consummating his relationship with the heroine Linda Lee, fulfilling Stephen Whittaker's definition of a ‘cybernaut’ as ‘someone who desires embodiment and disembodiment in the same instant. His ideal machine would address itself to his senses, yet free him from his body. His is a vision which loves sensorial possibility while hating bodily limits’ [31 ] (qtd. [30, p.258]).

Gibson's Case ascends to the ‘light’ of cyberspace at the close of the novel, when a data version of him is fed into the matrix to live forever, a point from which it is clear that these anti-body sentiments superimpose neatly upon the Christian ideal of heaven, where the soul finally leaves the body to independently ascend to eternal happiness.

[I]n our time of social and environmental disintegration [\] today's proselytizers of cyberspace proffer their domain as an idealized realm ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ the problems of a troubled material world. Just like the early Christians, they promise a transcendent haven – a utopian arena of equality, friendship and power.

Cyberspace is not a religious construct per se, but [\] one way of understanding this new digital domain is as an attempt to construct a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven. [30, p.1 6] Michael Heim tells us that cyberspace is essentially unintelligible and inscrutable (even to experts) and acknowledges that these attributes were formerly attributed to God [1 2, p.1 60]. Its unintelligibility lies in the fact that the computers required to run the colossal switching stations at the heart of the telecommunications network are so complex that artificially intelligent subroutines have to design the chips and software that run them.

The computers in effect design themselves, so in theory the network is infinite. However, despite their ‘infinity,’ these networks would not ‘grow back’ autonomously were they shut down. They are inanimate and unconscious, much like the floating sardine can pointed out by the fisherman in Lacan's anecdote: ‘You see the can? Do you see it? Well it doesn't see you!’ [1 6, p.95].

The views of Moravec, Minsky, et al. are extreme and arguably of limited consequence, but understated anti-body tendencies can affect our daily lives and lead us towards a denial of physicality, particularly in an era when technologies increasingly augment our lived experience.

The necessity to be deskbound when interacting with computers (the portals to cyberspace) is a subtle extension of this predisposition, as is the stationary compulsion enforced on us by the cinema. Both phenomena are strong forces that divide us internally and from each other and the world around us.

When judging user interfaces, our usual standard of goodness is the efficiency with which one can progress from point A to point B using the application. At some point we must recognize that our lives are spent in between. [\] [T]he quality of the experience provided by the computer interface has bearing on the quality of life itself. [1 4, p.422]

The phrase ‘our lives are spent in between’ rings deeply true in our accelerated culture. Planes, trains, automobiles and the Internet all strive to cut out distance and make our lives more efficient; it remains that in the time in between we are likely to be tapping keystrokes or sitting motionless, transfixed to moving images. Philosopher Paul Virilio believes we are victims of our own accelerated culture. He refers to the cultural effects of speed as ‘speed pollution, which reduces the world to nothing’ [27]. Technologies like the Internet and media of illusion like virtual reality (VR), which was initially developed for military purposes, are underpinned by an association with military precision and speed. Aby Warburg, writing in the 1 920s, also felt speed was destroying the universe: Telegrams and telephones destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic reflection creates space for meditation or thought in the struggle for spiritual links between man and his environment, but this is murdered by splitsecond electrical connections. [29] (qtd. [8, p.227]) Performance artist Marina Abramovic agrees: We use telephones instead of telepathy. With all the progress, we exchange computers for our sensitivity. We don't use our intuition or our creativity at all. Even if we have free time we switch on our television and will just be hypnotized by the programmes. [1 , p.209]

Despite all the progress in media and industry, our physical bodies, our primary resource, evolve at a much slower rate.

Speed has managed, however, to change our bodies: diets have been revolutionised by the transport of goods and the increased demand for convenience food. All the choice and convenience comes at the high price of refined, artificially preserved foods, which are not optimal nutrition for our bodies, and perhaps even detrimental to health. Abramovic met an old man on a train one day who had worked in a crematorium. He left her with this anecdote: ‘You know, forty years ago the temperature required to cremate the human body was 1 25 degrees [Celsius]. These days it is 71 5 degrees because the chemicals in our body have increased’ [1 , pp.207-208].

The Disembodied Eye The Cartesian dualism that abstractly divided the human entity into the discrete elements of ‘body’ and ‘mind’ was complicated further by a collective focus on another of our faculties. Our over-reliance on eyesight has been complicit in the anti-body tendencies thus far outlined. The tendency towards a dominantly ocular understanding of the world is longstanding. Marshall McLuhan attributes this to the advent of written language, which substituted an ‘eye for an ear’ [20, p.94], giving previously oral information a visual and recordable form.

This sea change towards assimilating worldly information primarily through eyesight soon saw the development of visual illusionary devices such as foreshortening and rudimentary perspective in the visual art of antiquity, devices famously revisited and refined during the Renaissance.

The development of perspective in the Renaissance was not just a technical innovation, it instantiated cultural themes such as the importance of sight, the privileging of particular points of view, the disregard of the other senses, and a faith in the ability to organise and dominate space. The power of contemporary media and representation derive from this dominance. [32, p.261 ] The very fabric of our artistic tradition is woven from the threads of this ocular dependence, from painting to cinema, television and now the burgeoning field of virtual reality. Perspective encoded a particular viewpoint, initially acknowledging the physical position of the viewer. Eventually however, artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea Mantegna began to play with this device, putting obscure centers of projection that were not physically attainable into their works. The vanishing point in Leonardo's Last Supper, for example, needs to be viewed from fifteen feet above the floor to be aligned to the viewer's body.

Perceptual psychologist Michael Kubovy explains: ‘These effects achieve the goal of divorcing the viewer's felt point of view in relation to the scene represented in the painting, from the viewer's felt position in relation to the room in which he or she is standing’ [1 5, p.1 59].

Kubovy understands this as a kind of mind game that allows one to develop a virtual eye that can ‘leave’ the physical body through a flight of imagination to view from the physically unattainable point of entry. Further to its capacity to virtually extend our sensorial facilities he also attributes this roaming virtual eye with the impressive ability to ‘induce a feeling of spirituality, perhaps one conducive to a religious experience: a separation of the mind's eye from the bodily eye’ [1 5, p.1 59]. Painted in such a light, the subtle act of mental adjustment described as the ‘disembodied eye’ can be understood as complicit with the aforementioned tendencies towards a ‘disappearing body.’

This virtual eye, a potent cocktail of visual understanding and cognitive flight of fancy, quickly enabled humankind to think outside of its limits and distance itself from its corporeal gravity. With the magical wings of this virtual eye, western imagination set flight. Galileo employed it to make the monumental leap of decoding visual information from the heavenly bodies and realising the true spherical form of the earth and its cyclical orbit around the sun. ‘Perspective was not, as is so often and wrongly held, developed in order to reference the physical environment, but to produce space for contemplation, meditation and fantasy’ [4, p.78].

Here perhaps, lies one of the deeply grounded reasons why westerners understand themselves to be a divided mind/body. The disembodied eye and mind have afforded

thought processes not previously attainable and set us free on a metaphysical realm.

The cinematic camera, like the high Renaissance painters, toys with viewpoints. Initially true to physically attainable frames (so physically probable in fact, that the first viewers of one Lumière film ran away as a train was apparently coming straight for them), filmmakers like D. W. Griffith (The Birth of a Nation) eventually used the camera as a mechanical disembodied eye that panned, cut and focused to tailor attention.

[T]he relations of self, world and medium are reconfigured. Their interactio converges [\] in the eye, which to take on this role as mediator, must leave the dog-eared bounds of sensual reality.[\] The pulse of disembodiment and recorporealization is the flutter captured so well in cinematic suturing of the gaze from shot to shot. [4, p.32] Offered unlimited travel in the vehicle of the mind's eye, and using the skill acquired since the inception of perspective, the viewer registers the physically improbable viewpoint, and fantasises to compensate. As the flickering flame of the campfire mesmerised our ancestors, so we continue to be fascinated* by the glimmering light of the silver screen and we continue to lose ourselves to the dream. This stationary, private escapology obliterates the individual abilities of the audience, rendering them inactive, non-interactive and submissive.

The old cinema removes experience, making us see things along with (or through) a protagonist with whom we identify, and a plot in which we are caught. Such an approach tends toward not only a lack of viewpoint, of definition of whose experience it is, but also filters the power of sight into mere habit, dissolves insight into vicariousness. The spectator is reduced to a voyeur – which is, increasingly, the individual's role in society at large.

[1 3] (qtd. [33, p.61 ]) Ken Kelman, quoted above, understands the cinema viewer to be ‘reduced to a voyeur.’ Invisible and nonexistent, fixing a predatory gaze on her object of desire, the voyeur is gratified, her yearning not exposed by actions.

Kelman links this condition to an atmosphere of social detachment. This potentially damning indictment of the phenomenon of the disembodied eye is compounded by Gene Youngblood's assertion that the lack of participation promoted by ocular reliance leads to a stagnant environment for the growth of ideas and learning. ‘If the information is redundant, as it must be in commercial entertainment, nothing is learned and change becomes unlikely’ [33, p.65]. ‘Participation’ in the cinema is on the subtle level of empathising with the characters. Its structure is pre-recorded, and consequently closed, allowing no response, be that vocalisation, applause or action.

The negative implications for the the ‘disembodied eye’ are clear. Despite the fact that this virtual construct is precariously divorced from its sensual home, it has nonetheless been instrumental in raising sight to a dominant cultural position, as the mediator of psychological experience and the arbiter of understanding, objectivity and truth.

In most languages of most cultures throughout history, seeing has been equated with understanding. The entire Indo-European linguistic system is filled with examples: I see, ya vizhu, je vois. Yet nearly twenty-four hundred years ago Plato asserted, ‘The world of our sight is like the habitation in prison.’ Recent studies in anatomy, physiology, and anthropology have lead to a similar conclusion. We have come to see that we don't really see, that ‘reality’ is more within than without. The objective and the subjective are one. [33, p. 46] If seeing equates with understanding, then sensing by inference is a somehow clouded judgment. We tend to subjugate our intuition in favour of rationality, imagining an objective and truthful stance to exist despite the fact that each person is contained within his or her subjective body. Indeed, cognitive science and neuroscience teach us that the much-contested split cannot in actuality exist [1 7]. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson contend that reason is a by-product of our physical makeup and is profoundly shaped by corporeality.

There is no such fully autonomous faculty of reason separate from and independent of bodily capacities such as perception and movement. The evidence supports, instead, an evolutionary view, in which reason uses and grows out of such bodily capacities. [\] Our sense of what is real begins with and depends crucially upon our bodies [\].

[1 7, p.1 7] The particular characteristics of our bodies define how we conceptualise and organise information about the world.

The categories into which we group phenomena are limited to the number of neurons available to carry sensory information, and the colours we perceive depend in part on receptors in our eyes. In short, we assimilate the outer world through our bodies, and our bodies colour our view. ‘For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism’ [1 7, p.26]. Therefore, the dualisms that have defined us for centuries are arbitrary at best, and dangerous and delusional at worst. The twofold distinctions attribute positive traits like intelligence, objectivity and clarity to one pole, and labour, subjectivity and disorder to the other.

Putting the body back into the picture requires a mode of analysis that can complicate and unravel the simple dualisms that underlie its erasure, while still acknowledging the force and efficacy of these dualisms in creating cultural constructions. [1 0, p.6]

Perhaps this vigorous distinction was developed as a means to distance one's mind from mortality henceforth pinned solely on the body, with the mind striving to overcome finitude through achievements recorded by posterity. If so, our haste to disassociate ourselves from mortality removed our sense of wholeness. By distrusting bodily truths and intuition, we divided ourselves internally and splintered our wider relationship with nature. Bill Viola sees this as our major cultural malaise: The larger struggle we are witnessing today is not between conflicting religious moral beliefs, between the legal system and individual freedom, or between nature and human technology; it is between our inner and outer lives, and our bodies are the area where this is being played out. It is the old philosophical mind/body problem coming to a crescendo as an ecological drama, where the outcome rests not only on the realization that the natural physical environment is one and the same as our bodies, but that nature itself is a form of mind. [26, p.236]

The Re-Emerging Body in Multisensory Art If art and media are cultural barometers, they should reflect and address these issues. Morton Heilig, the inventor and theorist, saw art's role as one of emotional expression, with the aim of increased sympathetic communication. Writing in the fifties, he saw that art had a long way to go to achieve its goals, and that society at large badly needed its transformative input. He advocated that it address its audience holistically, communicating its message to all senses possible. His idea was to break the hegemony of the sterile dissection of human faculties, allowing more than just eyesight and psychological engagement. In his 1 955 essay ‘The Cinema of the Future,’ Heilig outlined his vision for the potential improvements of the medium, based on insights into the nature of human perception that would transform it into a polysensory experience. ‘For all the apparent variety of the art forms created, there is one thread uniting all of them. And that is man, with his particular organs of perception and action’ [11 , p.243]. His ‘methodology of art’ advocated that artists should be familiar with the workings of these organs of perception, intimately understanding the psychology and physiology involved.

We can now state the third law of our methodology of art: ‘The brain of man shifts rapidly from element to element within each sense, and from sense to sense in the approximate proportion of sight 70%, hearing 20%, smell 5%, touch 4%, and taste 1 %, selecting one impression at a time according to the needs of [the] individual [...].’ These unite into the dynamic stream of sensations we call ‘consciousness’. The cinema of the future will be the first direct, complete and conscious application of this law. [11 , p.248] Unlike today's cinema, which isolates a few senses, thus restricting our experience, his vision was for something altogether more subtle and real. As he candidly put it: ‘If man can have intimate moments in life with his peripheral vision, stereophonic hearing, smell, and touch, so can his art’ [11 , p.250]. He foresaw that once one hundred per cent of the field of view was addressed, as well as the other senses in varying degrees, the biggest concern of the artist would no longer be narrative, but how to lead attention, for individuals would focus on different information according to their particular interests.

The viewer then must shake him/herself out of the lazy habits of the current formula, and work to search for meaning in the production. They will find that their inner truths are the ideal impetus for this endeavour.

‘Realism,’ or, in aesthetic terms, ‘experience,’ is that something which is created by the unity of the outer world with the inner. No matter how extensive the artist's means, he must use them to provoke more of the spectator's participation, not less. For without the active participation of the spectator there can be no transfer of consciousness, no art.

[11 , p.247, emphasis in original] Heilig's work puts forth striking developments on Richard Wagner's theory of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk.’ Though Heilig focuses more on the senses, Wagner's focus on an interdisciplinary art has the same thrust. Both agree that the human body is the primary artistic material. Heilig saw that the preverbal stories of primitive humans (recounting perhaps an incident with an animal) were the first inklings of art, which relied purely on bodily gestures to transmit important knowledge. Wagner, too, felt that the future lay with actual bodily humanity with all its vitality in the form of the actor who would reunite the disparate threads of art in ‘bodily portrayal with all its wealth of movement’ [28, p.7].

An important step towards the readmittance of the multisensory and participatory body came with the Dada art movement, born in the furnace of World War I Europe. Its goal, according to Dada artist Hans Richter, was to ‘bring forward a new kind of human being’ [22, p.65]. This aim was to be realised through a mixing of consciousness and

unconsciousness, chance and purpose.

The official belief in the infallibility of reason, logic and causality seemed to us senseless – as senseless as the destruction of the world and the systematic elimination of every particle of human feeling. This is the reason why we were forced to look for something which would re-establish our humanity. [22, p.58] Chance and the underlying synchronicity it allows permit genuine experience to be an art material, which, Dadaists believed brought them ‘closer to the source of all art, the voice within ourselves’ [22, p.50]. The performance art of the sixties picked up this mantle and attempted to deal with ‘life in the round.’ An art practice was developed that was more eventbased, temporary, body-centered and collaborative. Formerly disparate art forms intermingled, and the audience was invited into a more active role. Everyday mundane actions were celebrated with a new piety, and conceptual boundaries dissolved, paving the way for a ‘total art,’ with the body and psyche of the artist as the primary material. In the work of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci and Daniel Burren, the human as integrated mind/body re-emerged with primeval potency, placing our corporeal selves before us in a live, striving, shamanic, performative sense.

Today's installation art, which increasingly involves a technologyenabled interactive element, also carries hopes for a multisensory art that celebrates an integrated mind/body.

It is a plural zone that marries visual art, sound, theatre and cinema into an inclusive art that envelops the entire human sensorium. MoMA curator Robert Storr describes installations as ‘complete immersion environments,’ asserting that once the proscenium arch had been removed, the division between actors and audience became blurred [25]. The installation artist is in effect setting the stage for discourse between the viewer and artwork, providing unexpected scenarios where our visual and intellectual routines are confronted or disturbed, and we are entreated to engage with, or act upon, the new stage. Nicholas de Oliveira attests that installations must refer to and dismantle the supremacy of cinema as the foremost place of communal immersion. He writes: Cinema provides the dominant cultural experience that installation must explore. Film has been instrumental in setting the viewing conditions and expectations for today's audiences as it envelops the spectator in an overwhelming spectacle of narrative, sound and vision. [5, p.23] True to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, works by the American artist Matthew Barney blend installation, theatre and film in a vague, evocative mix. French artist Pierre Huyghe melds music, theatre and installation in his L'expédition scintillante: A musical (2002).

The work features three 'acts' set on three floors of a building, which is programmed so that light, weather (temperature, simulated fog, etc.), music and performance follows a script. A physical space that demands corporeal presence to be activated, the installation has an open outlook as to what constitutes an art material, and so engages the compound character of modern life. As the installation continually assembles information in unique combinations, the focus no longer resides on discrete art objects but rather on the sensations induced.

Experience is mediated through the body; the degree to which our sensory faculties are stimulated is linked to the impact that the experience has on us. [\] The way we think about space is therefore wholly experiential and is reliant on a series of stimuli, which renders our perception of it much more fluid and transient. [5, pp.4950] Ernesto Neto's installation Walking in Venus Blue Cave (2001 ) literally softens the boundary between the body and the surrounding architecture. Polyamide material creates a skin-like interface that takes tactility in hand, while turmeric is used to give olfactory stimulation. Art critic Ina Blom uses the term ‘immersive mode’ to describe this type of experience ‘in which the subjective awareness [\] appears to merge with the artwork, so as to create the sensation of a new more powerful experience of totality’ [2] (qtd. [5, p.49]). Visuals no longer have to be the seat of meaning in such art. Light, fog, smell, texture

and space can be the avenue for dialogue, with the body of the audience being the essential component.

Marcel Biefer and Beat Zgraggen's God (1 998) creates an ironic place of worship where the spectators are provided with a changing room to take off their clothes before confronting an abstract light sculpture: ‘God.’ Of course the shared nudity of the audience is the inferred ‘real’ contact with the ineffable. Chinese artist Cai Guo-Quaing's, Cultural Melting Bath (1 997; 1 998) is a rock garden with thirty tons of rocks from China, arranged around an herbal bath according to feng shui principles to bestow good qi energy on the gallery and visitors. Visitors are invited to bathe communally, and the shared human intimacy is perhaps the crux of this beneficial energy. Works such as those outlined above are addressed directly towards the body and seek to highlight its status as ‘a walking sensorium’ [33, p.363].

Interactive art can potentially combine sensory experiences with opportunities for action, fun and descision making.

David Rokeby is a recognised talent in the area. His Very Nervous System (1 986) tracks the movements of a person through video tracking in an open space, and these actions trigger synthesised sounds. Though invisible, the system transforms a normal outdoor site into a nuanced musical instrument. He sees these interactive systems as microcosms in which viewers/participants can become

aware of the reaction to their actions and possibly therefore the consequences of their behaviour. Much as a sensitive animal like a horse might react in amplified ways to one's presence, these works acknowledge company, and allow us to practice for the real world. Rokeby elaborates: ‘By providing us with mirrors, artificial media, points of view, and automata, interactive artworks offer us the tools for constructing identities – our sense of ourselves in relation to the artwork and, by implication, in relation to the world’ [23, p.1 53]. German media artist Monika Fleischmann also sees such works as providing a symbolic exercise: What is important is to push back the boundaries of perception and, whenever possible, to climb over these.

The Greeks invented theatre to externalize the drama of life lived at the symbolic level. [\] Interactive theatrical illusion spaces are used for trying out new scenarios.

Reality is treated ‘as if.’ In the virtual space, we practice for reality and live with a feeling of ‘as if.’ As if we are dreaming, as if we are flying, as if we are dying, falling, sliding, going into orbit, as if we are existing. (qtd. [32, pp.734-735]) Technology-enabled interactive art not only offers choice and fosters participation but also presents opportunities for more heuristic computer/human interfaces. Crucially it seeks to engage the entire repertoire of human movement.

Though never acknowledged as a ‘sense,’ the joy of movement is innate and expressive, and our ‘colonisation’ of it, in our checking of our body language and the strict formulation of movement and contact activities in civilised society, is perhaps an indication of how private and dear we hold it. Fleischmann states her aim: ‘I want to recover the senses of the body and to observe the dynamic gesture of different gender and culture [sic] in interactive media. If we don't support digital art and media culture, the quality of life will be lost through the dominance of machines’ (qtd. [32, p.734]). Michael Heim, a prominent voice on Virtual Reality acknowledges that technology threatens to further subjugate our physicality.

As it stands today, technology rarely acknowledges the fragile web of energies in the internal human body. Technology works more like human stripmining than like yoga practice. It pulls the upperbody ever further into the tunnel of technology and offers nothing to restore the resulting imbalance.

[1 2, p.58] Quite optimistically, Heim feels that VR will liberate the ‘hunchback computer user’ who is almost fastened to a monitor, transforming her into a ‘radiant body’ [1 2, p.57]. If Heim is referring to the VR that uses head-mounted displays and datagloves, it is worth remembering that these are just one step away from monitors and mice, and actually more intrusive.

One might question how liberated a body can be when tethered to a device whose initial prototype was nicknamed the ‘Sword of Damocles’ because its cumbersome weight threatened to decapitate its wearer.

Through the subtle use of sensors and tracking devices, it may be possible to foresee a future when humans are not ‘extensions’ of bulky machinery, but rather that the machinery will adapt to humanity. Theorist Sean Cubitt sees partnership between humanity and technology as the way forward. This modus operandi would leave neither party dominated or depleted, and the human would act as the dynamic animating force. He writes, ‘The digital yearns for the organic with the same passion with which the text longs for the reader’ [4, p.35]. New media artist Brenda Laurel corroborates this view of technology as irrelevant without the person with her concern that software development tends to overemphasise what the program can do instead of what a person can do with the program, despite the fact that ‘a computer-based representation without a human participant is like the sound of a tree falling in the proverbial uninhabited forest’ [1 8, p.2].

Myron Krueger was combining artistic concerns with computer science as early as 1 970. His projects link position- and gesturesensing technologies with intelligent video installations that have networked or AI capabilities. The audience is generally unfettered by body-mounted equipment, since he strives to subvert this convention.

I have a profound personal prejudice against wearing devices on any regular basis. I suspect that I am not alone. Therefore, I believe that human interface research will branch in two directions.

One fork will have the objective of completing an artificial reality technology that includes force and tactile feedback, using whatever intrusive and encumbering means that are necessary. The other fork will pursue an interface that merges seamlessly with the rest of our environment. [1 4, p.420] Krueger's output generally travels along the latter fork in this road. Through subtle sensing technologies, he aims to engage even computer non-literates in immediate, intuitive ways that urge them to be creative in their interactions.

VIDEOPLACE (1 970) is one such work. In a darkened room, one sees a live image of one's silhouette on a projection screen. Once motion is registered, the system retorts with graphics, video effects and synthesised sound.

The system includes a number of unique effects: standing in a central position in the room holding one finger aloft enables you to ‘draw’ on the screen, while a spread hand erases this drawing and a closed fist disables the function.

A horizontal open hand induces an interactive graphic creature, ‘Critter,’ who is programmed to climb up the edge of your shadow and dance if it gets to the top of your head.

If enclosed by shadows, Critter attempts escape, exploding

and appearing elsewhere if it fails. When the system is used with networked telecommunications, two people in different locations can interact through their silhouetted images. Scale disparities are used to add interest in such a scheme.

The second person can exist on a different scale. Thus, we have juxtaposed the giant hands of one person and the shrunken image of another. These hands can lift a tiny person and suspend him from a graphic string dangled from a giant finger. Inevitably, the tiny people wonder if it is possible to swing on the string. Sure enough, when they move from side to side, imparting energy to their images, they begin to swing back and forth. An opportunity has been offered and accepted without a word being spoken or a manual consulted. [1 4, p.41 9] Though the actual visual qualities of this system are rudimentary by mimetic cinematic standards (‘Critter’ for example would not look out of place in an early video game like Space Invaders) the symbolic depiction is reinforced by the fluid instinctive nature of the physical communication. The intelligent system enables the surprise of discovery as repertoires of movements announce their possibilities. Corporeal involvement suspends disbelief in the visual illusion, which the viewer after all realises is based on her or his own living form. Krueger has noted that we tend to have a very strong psychological tie to self-images, reacting to perceived touch to them.

The artist elaborates: ‘some people reported a sensation in their finger when they touched the image of another person [\]. [I]ndividuals have a very proprietary sense about their image. What happens to it happens to them. What touches it, they feel’ [1 4, p.41 8].

Placing an image derived from the viewer's own body at the centre of the presentation thus has immense psychological impact. Reflecting a body's unique shape and dynamic movement gives that viewer physical empowerment. It involves viewers and their choices in the unfolding drama.

Crucially this scheme is the polar opposite to the still compliance required of the cinema watcher. Unlike the subtle psychological self ‘reflection’ through identification with a hero/heroine in a movie presentation, Krueger's viewers are present individually in an immediate way. Here at last physical engagement rather than cerebral involvement brings about the transformation and ‘transferal of consciousness.’ Though the surface novelty of VIDEOPLACE might seem at first a frivolous engagement, when put in context with its unique ability to make untutored users instantly active and to allow creative, physically empowered expression and interpersonal interaction and play, it points to a future that might, importantly, overcome ‘the sedentary tyranny of existing systems’ [1 4, p.420].

Integral to this work's success is the gesture-driven interface that ‘merges seamlessly with the rest of the environment.’ It places the acquired knowledge of decades of technology at the service of the embodied user, sensitively adapting to the user's behaviour rather than requiring user adaptation. Cognitive science might describe such a designed environment as ‘external scaffolding,’ other examples of which might be infrastructure, customs, languages, organisations, countries, email networks, etc., each constructed to aid our modern existence. This ‘scaffolding’ in fact allows us to build simple actions and thought processes into complex systems. It might be attested that this scaffolding is what makes us intelligent.

[A]dvanced cognition depends crucially on our abilites to dissipate reasoning: to diffuse achieved knowledge and practical wisdom through complex social structures, and to reduce the loads on individual brains by locating those brains in complex webs of linguistic, social, political, and institutional constraints. [\] Our brains make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace!

[3, p.1 80, emphasis in original] The notion of an embodied mind that moves in a ‘scaffolded’ smart world is gaining credence and momentum and calls into question the presumed nebulous heights of pure intellect. It embeds the mind back in its fleshy home.

It paves the way for the specialised, segmented western world to reconverge in the service of holism. Works like Krueger's VIDEOPLACE pioneer this path and thread a needle across the perceived mind/body split. ‘Mind’ and its constructs work in harmony with ‘Body,’ while ‘Body’ teaches ‘Mind’ how to engage with and play with the system. Interactive artworks of this ilk directly subvert the inherited problem of mind/body dualism. Communion with such a work requires an integrated mind/body approach.

The tendencies in interactive art to think first of the audience and second of the means to address them is a welcome change and promises to be a more wholesome and natural persuasion than traditional approaches in both art and technology. As the interface evolves to adapt to and partner with the human agent, a holistic, interactive ‘total art’ will ensue that allows for impressive media envelopment that might do more than just be an entertaining illusion, and instead accelerate understanding of subsumed aspects of our humanity. If one takes inspiration from theories such as those propsed by Heilig or Wagner, or perhaps from the art that draws on such theories, the indications are that the disembodied mind and eye that so powerfully divorced us from our sensorium may be increasingly challenged by a ‘total art.’ Artists such as Bill Viola realise the crucial need for such an art:

In my work the visual is always subservient to the field, the total system of perception/cognition at work, the five senses are not individual things but, integrated with the mind, they form a total system and create this field, an experiential field which is the basis of conscious awareness. This is the only true whole image. [26, p.268] Rationality has marched countless advances through our lives, but at the expense of our sense of wholeness. In thought, action, art and life our anti-body tendencies need checking in favor of nurturing the bodies and ecosystems that allow us and our abstractions to exist. Philosopher Karsten Harries recognises this imbalance: The old Adam fell when his spirit awoke and let him see his own nakedness. The new Adam will be born when his spirit is brought as a sacrifice. Man having suffered the pains of individuation, having emancipated himself from the mother and from the home, finds that the price he has paid for his emancipation is too high. His world has become meaningless and he wants to return. [9] (qtd. [22, p.92])

The broader need to integrate body and mind, corporeality and spirit, may be currently viewed as a larger and urgent necessity on a worldwide scale, as we continue to plunder our physical and environmental capabilities for short-lived materialist ends. It could be cautioned that apocalyptic nightmares mark the dead end of the over-simplified mind/body cul-de-sac. We may have to redress the balance to return the mind to its rightful home in the body, and the burgeoning field of multisensory interactive art may be an invaluable tool in this process.

Note * The word fascinate comes from the Latin fascinare, which refers to the ability of dancing flames to attract attention.

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Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. World of Art. London: Thames and Hudson,

Human-Computer Interface Design. Edited by Brenda Laurel. Reading, Mass.: Addison-

1 997.

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Rokeby, David. ‘Transforming Mirrors: Subjectivity and Control in Interactive Media.’

Kubovy, Michael. The Psychology of Perspective and Renissance Art. Cambridge:

In Critical Issues in Electronic Media. Edited by Simon Penny. Albany: State University

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of New York Press, 1 995. 1 33-1 58. Available at:

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http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/mirrors.html; accessed 1 2 February 2007.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by

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Alan Sheridan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Hogarth, 1 978.

Stelarc. ‘Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc.’ Interview by Paolo Atzori and Kirk

[1 7]

Woolford. CTHEORY. Article 29 (1 995). http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=71 ;

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its

accessed 8 February 2007.

Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1 999.

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Storr, Robert. ‘No Stage, No Actors, but It's Theater (and Art).’ New York Times. 28

Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1 991 .

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Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Leonardo. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

Viola, Bill. Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1 973-1 994. Edited by

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Robert Violette in collaboration with the author. London: Thames and Hudson, 1 995.

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McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Sphere

Virilio, Paul. ‘Speed Pollution: Interview with Paul Virilio.’ Interview by James Der

Books, 1 967.

Derian. Wired 4.05 (1 996), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.05/virilio.html; accessed Feb 1 2, 2007.

[28] Wagner, Richard. ‘Outlines of the Artwork of the Future.’ Translated by William Ashton Ellis. In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. Edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan. Expanded ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. 3-9. Available at http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm#d0e3566; accessed 1 5 October 2006.

[29] Warburg, Aby. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America.

Translated by Michael P. Steinberg. 1 923. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1 995.

[30] Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. London: Norton, 2000.

[31 ] Whittaker, Steven. ‘The Safe Abyss: What's Wrong with Virtual Reality?’ Border/Lines 33 (1 994).

[32] Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology.

Leonardo. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

[33] Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1 970. Available at http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/ExpandedCinema.html; accessed 1 5 October 2006.

About the Author Maria Coleman is currently engaged in a practice-based Ph.D. at the School of Art, Design and Printing, Dublin Institute of Technology entitled ‘Body Responsive Media Environments.’

She holds an honours degree in Fine Art (Sculpture) from Limerick School of Art and Design, and a first class honours M.Phil. in Music and Media Technology from Trinity College Dublin.

Paper Originally Published in Crossings - Volume 5, Issue 1 ejournal of Art & Technology

WWW.ARTSTAP.COM MAKERS Award

A L I C E B U R N S

Alice Burns is an Artist she lives and works in Northern Ireland. Her recent solo exhibition “Loci of Memory” was made possible by the support of Ards Borough Council and The Arts and Disability Forum. She received a first class, BA (Hons), Fine and Applied Arts Degree from the University of Ulster Belfast, in 201 0.

Alice Burns’ art practice develops out of participatory narratives, other peoples’ stories and combines this with a desire to play creatively with the material of the ‘archive’ as she develops experimental and interactive ways of [re]-presenting artifact and narrative materials. The experiential nature of documents, artefacts’, and narratives – their ability to be woven together in relation to the fallibility and fidelity of individual and collective memory drive this practice.

Via a process of dialogue and interaction the transaction between the story giver and artist is woven into encoded objects that represent the unspoken or the unspeakable and memory acquires a physical presence in the work. Others can engage or re-engage with these narratives through these objects. Connections can be made, entangled and disentangled as the audience engages and re-threads their particular narrative.

Future projects I am working on several projects exploring individual and collective memory and narrative. The first is a long-term project “Remember When” that evolves through storytelling and reminiscence workshops with age specific groups or individuals, initially working from photographs with a Northern Ireland specific context, taken pre 1 968. Exploring life’s commonalities and shared experiences, this work combines my personal narrative history along with groups of others who I work with as a way of foregrounding the nature of (in this project) Northern Irish life pre- troubles.

Myth Making The work is exploring Urban Myths regarding mental health using the definition of ‘Myth’ by William Bascom.“They are accepted on faith; they are taught to be believed; and they can be cited as authority in answer to ignorance, doubt, or disbelief.”

The work is based on the construct of the ‘urban myth’, a collection of narratives via a blog and a video installation. Participants are asked, “Do you believe in mental illness” they are free to answer this question in whatever way they wish. Using the aesthetic of the ‘urban myth’ actors not necessarily the authors of the blog posts read a sentence or two from the blog posts to video. The video provides an alternative vehicle for the narratives to be presented to another audience and the myth progresses.

S E A M U S

My interests lie in transitions and transformations, masquerade and play. Borrowing elements and motifs from the black box theatre/cinema space my work deals with social performance and identity construction and takes notions of performance and artifice as present in theatre as a metaphor for wider concerns. The mise-en-abyme is a structure that I have continually referenced.

I am interested in how mirroring and repetition can draw attention to and deconstruct the whole.

This structure is similar to that of a Pirandellian hall of mirrors with infinite reflections of itself. My aim is that these pieces create liminal spaces that disorientate or re-orientate perception, and question what may be mimicry. Repetition is an important element of the work, creating awareness of a difference between the passing of real time and represented time.

M c C O R M A C K

Born in Mullingar, Co.Westmeath, Séamus Mc Cormack graduated from DIT in 2006 with a first class honours degree in Fine Art receiving the Best Fine Art Student Award, and in addition was awarded the Gold Medal for Academic Excellence from the Faculty of Applied Arts, DIT. In 201 2 he completed MFA in Sculpture at the NCAD, Dublin. He has exhibited his work in two solo exhibitions, most recently in Ballina Arts Centre, 201 0 and in group shows across Ireland including the Stone Gallery, Dublin; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; Éigse, Carlow; Tulca, Galway; Broadstone, Dublin; Galway Arts Centre, TACTIC, Cork Mostertruck Gallery, Dublin. Upcoming exhibitions include commissioned works for Plastic Arts, Rua Red Tallaght, and Invited MFA Graduates at Boyle Arts Festival. In 201 0 he was one of the award winners at the Claremorris Open Exhibition, curated by Lisa Le Feuvre. He has received a number of grants from the Westmeath County Council Arts Office and in 2006 received the Emerging Artist Bursary Award, leading to a commissioned artwork for the Westmeath County Council’s Collection. www.seamusmccormack.com

Facsimile, 201 2, Video Projection

Presence/Presents, 201 2, Installation - Two Channel Overlapped Projections with Audio

La Répétition, 2011 , Two Monitor Video and Sculptural Installation with Audio

Two Doors, 2011 , Video Projection with Audio

Galatea, 201 0, Video Projection with Audio

J U L I E T T E

Juliette Losq (B. 1 978, UK) graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 201 0, having gained her BA in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Art (2007). Losq won the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2005 and has work in various collections including All Visual Arts and The Saatchi Collection.

Selected exhibitions include: 201 2: AVA The Collection at All Visual Arts, London 2011 : National Open Art Competition, Chichester; Catlin Art Prize, London; 40 Artists 80 Drawings, The Drawing Gallery (touring) 201 0: Pulse Miami, with Theodore Art; Juliette Losq / Darren Norman / Eric Poitevin with Theodore Art, New York; Diploma Show, Royal Academy of Art 2009: Life of Wood, GS Tower (1 F), Seoul; 2 x 2, Fred [London] Ltd ; Premiums 2009, Royal Academy of Art; 2006: Drawing Breath: surveying 1 0 years of the Jerwood Drawing Prize, London and touring; Different Views: Sharon Beavan, Jane Dixon, Juliette Losq, Barry Martin, Keir Smith, The Drawing Gallery, London; London Art Fair, Art Projects with The Drawing Gallery In 'The Clearing' we feel at our most safe and yet our most vulnerable: stray too close to the edge and the forest may snatch you into its depths.

Perhaps it is for this reason that wild spaces within our cities and town are ‘sites of aversion’[1], for they evoke the point at which the forest encroaches upon civilization. Generally shunned by city-dwellers as superfluous to their needs, they are inhabited by creatures that render them

L O S Q

marginal in the minds of all but ‘outsiders’. These areas are marked as the territory of children by graffiti tags and the creation of dens, or they are used as places to urinate or copulate. In popular culture they become ‘symbolic recesses’ where monsters may hide.

Losq acknowledges the fictive history projected on to these transitory sites by the modern viewer, subconsciously influenced by diverse written and visual media, from Victorian photographs to science fiction films.

Integrating these sources with her own photographic documentation of neglected areas, Losq makes collages which are then transformed into composite drawn scenes, with a technique that references both printmaking and watercolour processes.

To an unknown god

Scumsucker, ink on paper

Wunderkammer, Ink on paper, Oil on Cabinet

Petroglyph, ink on paper

W I L M A V I S S E R S

I am inspired by emptiness and space. Spatiality and infinite space must be present even in the smallest work. A particular role is played here by my memory of land and seascapes seen in Ireland. These visual impressions formed the material I used in the past to make my paintings and drawings. It is often small trivial items, unimportant to other people, that are the basis of my work. I collect images seen in a cursory glance in the street, on the television or as film stills in the paper.

I always ask myself while making a work of art how much can be excluded. My work must express a feeling of monumentality and spatiality. There is often a balance between spatiality and twodimensionality resulting from my use of irregular dimensions for example long and narrow. In the last year I have used actual objects such as a paint spatula, an icelollly stick and a large matchstick. By incorporating such unusual materials, the work is charged with a lightheartedness and humor, putting the burden of ones relationship with art history in to perspective. The round painting is new, lacking corners such a form appears to have a stronger relationship with space.

The works must be thought out spatially, line and colour do not stop at the edges but appear to continue beyond.

The walls of my studio have a similar function to the walls of an exhibition space and therefore become part of the work. In this way an overall picture is created which one could describe as a new work of art.

My latest work is made with oilsticks, wood, paper, carton and sanding paper . Often it arises from objects other artists friends give me. For example an interior designer that I know has very nice samples of wood. These wooden blocks have a very interesting surface or a very nice flaming and colouring. Every piece of wood has an different internal character which I can accentuate by putting oilsticks on them. Sometimes a littte dab of a certain colour is enough and large parts of the wooden surface will be unadorned.

RICHARD CARR Between the Visual & the Spatial: The Sonic Object Towards a Philosophy of Sound(in)Art

Within recent times ‘sound’ has gained in importance. This could be due to the ever increasing acceptance of ‘sound art’ practice and theory, which has inevitably created a discursive network between the histories of music and the visual arts and ultimately perception, particularly a listening sensibility and everyday living. This has come about with the introduction of texts concerned with sounds role within the contexts of the arts and the phenomenology of perception from artists and writers of which are highly respected within their own domains. Some of these texts include Listening to Noise and Silence, Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art by Salome Voegelin, Background Noise, Perspectives on Sound Art by Brandon LaBelle and Sounds and Perception, a collective of texts edited by Nudds and O’Callaghan.

Everyday living or experience is full of cross-modal information from the senses so in one way it may be pointless in trying to isolate the senses from one another in theory.

However, by doing so has led to interesting observations. One of the main distinctions between the visual and the auditory may well be the ‘visual gap’.

What the visual gap suggests is that vision in its very nature assumes a distance between the beholder and the object of attenion no matter how close. What this then suggests is that seeing always takes place within a meta-position which encourages stability, monumentality and structural certainty encouraging the definition of ourselves in relation to these structures.

Throughout this paper, I will endeavour to examine the physical and emotional traces of sound as 2d or 3d ‘things’. To do this I will firstly discuss aspects of listening and its relation to contemporary art practice by speaking generally about the practice of Michael Brewster and dealing specifically with one of Lars Lundehave Hansen’s pieces; Spiderbytes. I will then put forward some of the common debates around the ontology of sounds stemming from empirical and philosophical research that aid in the development of a knowledge around notions of listening and the sonic object.

Michael Brewster, a sound artist based in the USA once said you can't make sound become hard and solid; but you can make it seem to stand still, as if hovering in place. (Brewster 1 998). This statement has become central to the practice of Michael Brewster that is probably most commonly associated with the term acoustic sculpture. Although Brewster has worked using sound with drawing in mind, the physicality and materiality of sound within the sculptural experience is central to his practice. For Brewster sound has physical size, dimensions in feet and meters as well as density, vibrancy, rhythms, textures, volumes, edges, planes, fullness, flatness, roundness and hollows a medium fully equipped to work with within sculptural experience.

For Brewster by using the sonic instead of the visual he aims to construct the object of attention around the viewer/listener in a way that does not restrict their presence and movement, where people can experience and listen to the very spaces they inhabit, which Brewster says is like exploring a landscape from the inside, with all of your body and not just from the front with your eyes. This for Brewster is in relation to the visual where the sculptural object will always be experienced as a bunch of sequenced frontalizations where the object of desire is always over there no matter how close we try to bring it; even with touch he suggests there is an away-ness. What this does, which is important for Brewster is alter the conventional art viewing posture of ‘stand and look’ to an exploratory ‘move and listen’ (Brewster 1 998).

Pierre Schaeffer (1 91 0 – 1 995) a pioneer in Musique Concrete coined the term ‘Objet Sonore’ or Sonic Object that for him summarises the main achievements of musique concrete. Objet Sonore was the conception that recorded sound was something almost independent from its source, its own entity contained within the tape recorder or phonograph. For Schaeffer the object sonore created a reduced listening, an attitude that consists of listening to the sound for its own sake, as a sound object by removing its real or supposed source and the meaning it may convey. Another influential practitioner and writer Michel Chion explains that it is not the separation of sound from its source/environment that constitutes the object-ness of sound but the developments of electromagnetic instruments and their means of fixation and reproduction that constitutes its concreteness. (Lopez 1 998).

This physicality or object-ness of sound that Brewster talks about is also explored by a more contemporary artist Lars Lundhave Hansen (Denmark) in his piece Spiderbytes, albeit in a much more direct and literal way. Lars has exhibited Spiderbytes in a variety of different forms but the one I was fortunate enough to experience consisted of a table-top plinth covered in a large sheet of paper with two speakers each mounted on four pencils as legs sitting on top. What Spiderbytes did essentially was use sound to move the speakers and pencils around the page leaving a direct visual trace/picture of the sound/movement on the page (Carr, 201 2). For the purpose of this paper Spiderbytes is interesting as it does not only use sound to move other visual objects in space but it also shows that sound can be so physical it can almost exclude other visual objects from its space, creating a tension between the almost known differences between what is object-like or event-like.

I believe more contemporary practitioners and writers such as Salome Voegelin who discusses in depth what a listening sensibility may be would believe that the object-ness/concreteness of sound should and would not rely on the sound being contained within the electromagnetic instrument or as Chion states its means of fixity and reproduction, but that the object-ness of sound would be that of listening, not with a reduced listening but a generative one.

Thinking of the sonic object as a listening engagment of this type turns the experience of listening into a collaborative and generative process and the sonic object into an object that has been created through intersubjective sensation.

This is not only important within the discourse surrounding the history of the listener who has all to often been relegated into a passive role throughout the histories of music, visual art and speech perception, but also for the future development of discourse,

which according to Gemma Corradi Fiumaro western foundations of knowlegde and logocentrism are founded on a half logic, a logic of saying and expressing but forgetting to listen (Fiumaro, 1 990),1 and most importantly for this paper the importance and placement of the sonic object in contemporary art practice.

Within the ontology of sounds there is one main disagreement between leading philosophers. This disagreement might be put down to differing views between distal and proximate theories of sound, or wave based accounts such as those from O’Shaughnessy, Sroenson and Nudds and source based accounts such as those by O’Callaghan, Casati and Dokic and Pasnau. The main disagreements between these two views concern the location of sounds, spatial audition and what type of things are sounds. These differing views encourage debate around the nature of sound but also the experience of sound, with wave based theories locating sounds within the medium, saying sounds disperse and occupy various different locations over time. Source based accounts locate sounds at or near their sources, they argue that sounds only travel if their sources do so therefore sounds do not travel through a medium (Nudds & O’Callaghan, 2009).

They would also argue that auditory perception is akin to visual perception in that sounds are located at a distance and only percieved by reason of a medium. It is this medium which is the carrier of information about the distal sounds / objects like light bringing information to the eye / brain about distal objects. In this respect sounds would not be waves and would not travel through / with the waves, instead the waves would be a mediator between hearers and sounds. However, there are many differing views on this, and numerous writers and philosophers stemming from the proximal camp would maintain that auditory perception differs from visual perception in that sound as thing is located near the perceiver, and it is sound that bears information about distal objects or events. To put it another way, distal theorists would believe that to hear a sound as located would come about because that is where the sound is located, where as others such as O’Shaughnessy would believe that sound is aspatial, located near the perceiver at the time of hearing and it is the perceiver who works out the information about the sounds locatedness. Much debate concerning spatial audition stems from Starwson (1 959); A world of sounds would be a no-space world because sounds are not intrinsically spatial. Spatial concepts have no intrinsically auditory significance, auditions spatial capabilities depend upon its inheriting spatial content from other modalities. (Nudds &

Many of these questions also revolve around the notions of authenticity of perception. Many distal theorists would imply that if sounds are where they seem to be then they should not travel through a medium unless systematically we mispercieve sound, and maintain that in constructing accounts of sound we should not so easily appoint wholesale illusions to the act of experience. (Nudds & O’Callaghan, 2009)

O”Callaghan, 2009 p.9) With regards to what type of things are sounds it would be most common to say that sounds are things we hear, and whatever you hear must be a sound (however Sorenson would argue we hear silence which he believes does not involve hearing a sound which may well be in contrast to the views of John Cage).

More traditional philosophers such as Locke would suggest that sounds are secondary qualities similar to colours, tastes and smells whose experience of them would be intrinsically linked to subjects. Pasnau (1 999) would suggest that sounds are properties that would be identical to the vibration of things, such as a tuning fork. Recently more and more philosophers such as O’Callaghan believe that sounds are not properties but more particulars or individuals, and would argue that the property theories do not account for the conditional identities of sounds as they change through space-time (Nudds & O’Callaghan 2009). What this does now is raise questions around whether sounds are more object-like or event-like.

experiences. Secondary qualities he proposes can only be perceived through one sense-modality like sound and colour. Sounds being objects of hearing and colours being objects of sight. It is obvious that it is possible to recognise sounds through vibrations which Scruton believes would be similar to tactile lip reading, but the important part would be the absence of sound. Through the detection of vibrations the deaf would learn no more about sound than the blind reading about colours through the method of brail. However there is one major distinction that Scruton proposes for the difference between sound and colour and that is that colour is a secondary quality and it depends on the things that possess it. Sound on the other hand is not a secondary quality as it is not a quality at all according to Scruton, things do not have sound in the way they possess colour.

There are many experiments, situations and discussions that are debated on by the proximal, wave based and distal followers such as the vacuum experiment, the echo and modes of transmission that are extremely interesting especially in attempting to understand the nature of sound (Appendix A). For me, although I find them fascinating I cant help but think their approach is all a little to physicalist. It may seem a little non-sensical to some, but others have given accounts of what sound may be that does not neglect the experience of listening so sorely. One that comes to mind and one in which I find extremely interesting is Rodger Scrutons theory of sound as secondary object and pure event which he discusses in his text The Aesthetics of Music, 1 997. Scruton makes his case for sounds as secondary objects by discussing the varying possible differences between sounds and colours. Firstly Scruton believes that primary qualities possess the possibility of being perceived through multi-model senses, the shape of a box can be perceived through, sight, touch and auditory

If every sound must have a cause, it does not follow that it must also be emitted by its cause or that it must be understood as the sound of that cause. (Scruton, 1 997, Nudds & O’Callaghan 2007).

To get a clearer understanding of what Scruton might mean by stating that sounds are secondary objects and pure events it is necessary to discuss O’Callaghans rainbow in relation to sound. A rainbow I believe is an excellent example of a secondary object, their existance, qualities and nature are all determined by the subject. Rainbows are objects of sight, visibilia. We are all aware of the explanations of a rainbow through the refraction of light through water droplets in the air but this is not the interesting part. What is interesting about the rainbow is not only does it have secondary qualities but it also possesses many primary qualities such as size, shape and duration but it cannot be touched, smelled, tasted or listened to.

Its having these qualities depends entirely upon a counterfactual experience. Rainbows take up space but do not exclude any other objects from that space, although from our point of view there is a definte difference between where a rainbow is and where it is not. The explanation regarding the physicalities of the rainbow I believe are similar to the wave theorists explanations of sound, but what is interesting here is that the explanation of the rainbow does not describe any particular object that would be identical to the rainbow so why does the physicalist insist that sound would be identical to the vibration of its source? As O’Callaghan puts it the subject is free to locate the rainbow whereever it may appear within the relationship of water droplet, sun and the eye of the beholder (Nudds & O,Callaghan 2009).

This tension within sound between object and event within the ontology of sound, a listening sensibility or sounds and perception relates directly back to the history of a visual art discource and many of its debates and concerns from abstract expressionism, action painting, form/content, installation, happenings, performance, new media to the practices of contemporary painters such as Paul Doran whos work could be said to hover between the terms of abstraction and figuration concerned with many aspects of provisional painting and conditional pictures. It’s also in conversation with and pushes the limits of what Donald Judd calls ‘Specific Objects’ in relation to 2d and 3d space or ‘real’ and ‘illusionistic’ space. (Kellein, 2002). Many if not all of these concerns, interests or problems are asked of the ‘materiality’ of ‘sound’ before the artist has even used it to make stuff with; this may be due to the common notions often relating a visual sensibility to aspects of knowledge or understanding,

it also may be due to the notion that the ‘materiality’ of ‘sound’ is intrinsically characteristic of the contemporary.

However in contrast to the visual gap and its certainties hearing is full of phenomenological doubt on the part of the listener in regards to the heard and the hearing it. This may be due to views that hearing in particular does not really offer a meta-position in the sense that the sonic object may sit in the ear no matter what the distance of its source. This means that to hear you have to be immersed in the auditory object, not its source but its sound, as sound itself.

Due to this aspect of sound it seems to involve active participation from both parties rather than making possible a detached viewing position. In this sense the object / event under contemplation and the subject become generative collaborators encouraging an aural knowledge and producing subjective meaning through intersubjective sensation, similar to Merleau-Ponty’s world of perception of ‘being honeyed’ (Voegelin, 201 0).

It may well be this very nature of sound that has appealed to so many within the arts to utilize it as a medium to make stuff with, this unstabilising of a percieved certainty that could be said of a visual aesthetic. Many sonic practitioners suggest unstabilising without putting forth a dialectical stance similar to Walter Benjamins Dialectical Image by focussing on sounds potential to bring forth unseen aspects of visuality concerned with a sonic sensibility (Voegelin, 201 0).

This may also be similar to what the film theorist Christian Metz discusses in his essay ‘Aural Objects’ 1 975 where he states that it is in language that sound gets rehabilitated into the visual order, where it takes primary role but in doing so relinquishes its aural quality (Voegelin, 2006).

It seems an exciting but almost impossible demand for sonic material and artistic practice to be acknowledged and understood by being referenced to its ‘sound’ rather than a visual thing, event or score. One way of doing this is by possibly placing the ‘sonic object’ in contemporary art practice between the visual and the spatial.

Footnote 1 ) Fiumaro in her text ‘The Other Side of Language; A Philosophy of Listening’ puts forward the argument that Western philosophy is based on a half logic in which the power of discourse is deployed while the strength of listening is ignored by primarily discussing the transitory meanings of the word ‘logo’. Synthesizing the insights of Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer, among many others, she puts forward a powerful argument for the replacement of the 'silent' silence of Western thought with the rich openness of an authentic listening.

List of References Brewster M.,(1998) Where, there or Here? An essay about sound as Sculpture, http://acousticsculpture.com/essay2.html, Accessed 20th February 2012.

Carr R.,(2012) Being Honeyed: An Exhibition of Sound(in)Art [online]. studentsZINE Publication for Contemporary Visual & Sonic Art, Vol. 2 (1). Date Accessed 2nd March 2012.

Fiumaro C.G.,(1990) The Other Side of Language; A Philosophy of Listening. Routledge, New York.

Kellein T.,(2002) Donald Judd Early Work 1955 – 1968. New York. Originally Published in Arts Yearbook 8, 1965.

Lopez F.,(1998) Schizophonia vs. L'objet Sonore: Soundscapes and Artistic Freedom, http://www.acousticecology.org/writings/schizo.html, Accessed 22nd March 2012.

Nudds M., O’Callaghan C.,(2009) Sounds and Perception; New Philosophical Essays.

Oxford.

Voegelin S. (2011) Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. Continuum, London.

Voegelin S. (2006) I am not a Sound Artist; an exploration of sound as concept and the fear of visual definition. – Originally presented at Sound as Art conference, 21-24 November 2006, Aberdeen, www.urbannovember.org/conference/index.php?cf=2. Accessed 20th December 2011

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A Congregation of Vapours Fergus Kelly New Audio CD from farpoint recordings New album by Dublin sound artist Fergus Kelly, featuring a short essay by Paul Hegarty.

Presented as a folded A5 size card printed on satin paper stock.

Available now for only â‚Ź 1 2.00

A CONGREGATION OF VAPOURS is a new album by Dublin sound Artist Fergus Kelly, released through Farpoint Recordings, in May 201 2. It contains 8 tracks totalling 57 minutes, and features a short essay from writer Paul Hegarty. The Compositions were made using speaker feedback, no-input mixing board, DIY electronics, field recordings and processing.

The pieces employ a wide range of textures and timbres across a broad dynamic spectrum, ranging from full-bodied, dense soundfields, to more muted and understated presences. Feedback is the core sound and starting point for the compositions, and is taken to various extremes via many stages of intensive electronic processing and forensic editing. Sounds as raw, malleable matter, stretched to the point of collapse, pulled inside out, further distilled and cross-hatched, breeds inscrutable new forms, at once physical and phantom in nature.

A Moebius strip of endless decay and regeneration, the sound of sound cannibalising itself, these fugitive soundscapes were grown from residual traces of empty spaces, ventriloquised into being - a void given voice where feedback makes dimension audible. In this case, the dimensions of various metal vessels mounted on speakers, which resonate, buzz and rattle with microphones placed inside.

Woven together, these disembodied, atomised artifacts establish their own space for the listener to navigate, volatile and capricious as the weather.

Threaded through this speculative fiction is documentary reality in the form of field recordings, which augment and galvanise a particular sense of place and narrative flow, which sits uneasily between the created and the real.

About the Artist

The textures of both worlds have an interconnectedness, and a parity of presence. The ceaseless surf of traffic, the hums and drones of supermarket fridges and myriad other machine presences - sounds we daily swim through with varying levels of awareness - intersect with magnetic fields of prepared noises, aural detritus and sonic fallout, to form a climate of disturbance and disruption. A seepage of spectral broadcasts, corrupted signals and insidious transmissions tactile yet immaterial - suspends us in sound.

He Curated VOLUME 2 for Temple Bar Gallery in 2005, performing with MAx Eastley, David Lacey and Paul Vogel. He performed in the I&E festival in Dublin in 2005, 2006,2007 & 2009. In 2007 he was selected joint CRASH ENSEMBLE's Free State concert in Dublin. In 2005 he established a CDR label and website, Room Temperature, as an outlet for his solo and collaborative work producing 1 0 CDs in 5 years, including his critically acclaimed 201 0 release, Long Range.

Fergus Kelly is a sound artist from Dublin. He has been in numerous shows around Ireland, and has shown in Canada, America, Germany, Finland, Holland and England. Radio Broadcasts include A.A.R.T, Dublin, 1 994 and 1 998, HEARING IS BELIEVING, Liverpool, 1 995, HORIZONTAL RADIO, Alberta 1 995, RADIO GAGARIN, Hamburg, 1 996, RESONANCE, London 1 998, YLE Radio Helsinki 2000, and DRIFT:RESONANT CITIES, Edinburgh, 2004.

Work was performed in the AVE Festival, in Arnhem, Holland in 1 993 and 1 995, THE TUNING OF THE WORLD conference in Banff, Canada in 1 993, and in SIX WEEKS OF SOUND and IN THE EYE OF THE EAR II, both in Chicago in 1 996. He performed at various INTERMEDIA Festivals and sound art events in Cork from 1 988-2001 .

In 2009 he performed in London with MAx Eastley and MArk Wastell. A soundwork featured in A Quiet Position, curated by Jez Riley French, as part of a broadcast during the AV FESTIVAL in London, in 201 2.

About Farpoint Recordings Farpoint Recordings was formed in 2004 by Anthony Kelly and David Stalling.

Originally set up to act as a fulcrum for their own creative activities – both in the audio and visual arts – Farpoint Recordings has now developed into an artist-run creative project that seeks to publish works from the margins that intersect in some way with contemporary sound and audio-visual practices. www.farpointrecordings.com

Audiopsy Jerusalem: an existentialist approach to exploiting the soundscape for artistic purposes Luc Messinezis The Global Composition. Sound, Media, and the Environment Darmstadt-Dieburg/Germany, July 25 – 28, 2012

ABSTRACT

The term 'Audiopsy' refers to exploring a soundscape and the aural reality of a location or system by following a reverse-engineering strategy. The ultimate aim is the production of a hyperreal sonic artwork which consists of extracted and enhanced components such as sonorous objects, gestures and sound matter of a subjected soundscape. These fundamental structure blocks are treated as autonomous entities as part of a wider system and are examined following philosophical existentialist principles. This way the sonic body of the location and its semiotic, semantic and acousmatic potential are exploited and transformed into an aesthetic medium.

To take the soundscape apart, recognize its building materials and explore their qualities, enables the artist capable of creating an aural hyper-reality within the spatial canvas of the gallery. Through this particular practice, the terms 'aural entity' and 'conceptual listening' emerge and are introduced as the main tools of the adopted methodology.

'Audiopsy Jerusalem' is the artistic outcome of the application of such a reverse-engineering strategy within an existentialist framework, on the soundscape of the city of Jerusalem. This Middle-Eastern metropolis has always been the subject of conflict and tension between different cultures, but also of their coexistence and interaction. Such elements are audible and provide great ground for research and appreciation.

The recognized and collected audible materials have been treated according to their acousmatic qualities – without disregarding their semiotic or conceptual value – and have been enhanced or exaggerated. Using a spatial installation format, the aural entities are diffused using an array of carefully positioned loudspeakers within a visually minimal, yet audibly rich hyper-real aural environment. As a result the audience is encouraged to appreciate Reverse-engineering the soundscape surfaces a vast the aesthetics and conceptual depth of the original soundscape variety of sonic elements which reveal socio-cultural through a reality that is not real. information, psycho-geographical characteristics, causality, action and further on describe space, timing, collective emotional reality and memory.

INTRODUCTION The existentialist sound artist 'The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known' [1 ]. By this statement of pioneer sound environmentalist R. M. Schafer one may perceive the soundscape as an abstract catholic aural quality; independent from its subjects and the components it consists of. Mainstream philosophers of the past used this notion in order to describe, examine and analyze humanistic problems or subjects. This approach was broadly accepted and it wasn't until the middle of the twentieth century that a group of scholars and artists recognized as existentialists, established an approach to such subjects based on the uniqueness of the individual in contradistinction to catholic absolute concepts.

A comparison is inevitable between the term soundscape as it is characterized by Schafer's statement and the philosophical approach it imposes. By following the arguments of the mentioned dispute, I try to determine the soundscape's potential for artistic expression by approaching it not as an abstract catholic sonic quality but by examining closely the nature, attributes and behavior of its fundamental elements.

An important detail of this approach, in correspondence to the philosophical tendencies involved, is the fact that the aural reality and its distinguished building blocks are investigated as an autonomous field of study. Sound artist Francisco Lopez mentions 'As soon as the call is in the air, it no longer belongs to the frog that produced it' [2]. Therefore the framework of analysis I propose, refers to the actual sonic elements (sonorous objects, sonic gestures and sound matter) as entities/existences and their unpredictable behavior – each contributing to the final form of the soundscape – but not to their physical sources.

The sonic hyper-realist In post-modern philosophy hyper-reality is often described as the inability of perception to identify and distinguish reality from a simulation of reality. Jean Baudrillard claims that 'Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyper-real' [3]. These ideas penetrated the visual arts and in the early twenty first century hyper-real artworks started to emerge as an advancement of photorealism. Unlike photorealism the hyperrealist uses the photograph as a reference source in order to render a reality that is not real, transforming the frame into a more narrative and emotive medium for expression. This is usually achieved by enhancing specific qualities of the depicted objects such as lighting effects, textures and shading.

The phenomenon of schizophonia has enabled us capable of discussing the possibility of sonic hyper-realism. In correspondence to visual hyper-real artworks which used photography as reference, sound practitioners may use phonography for similar purposes. Modern means of detaching sound from its original source, render its reproduction as an alternative reality, yet one could claim that this is the equivalent to photorealism.

The sonic hyper-realist tends to identify objects within the soundscape and attach them with new enhanced or exaggerated abilities such as texture, spectral and spatial attributes. These sonorous objects in their turn acquire new roles within the newly formed simulacrum, confronting the audience with a meticulous illusion of an audible hyper-reality. To achieve my goal, a methodology and a philosophical framework within which the creation of hyper-real soundscapes is possible, needs to be established in order to identify the individual objects that with their existence will shape the aural hyper-real environment.

REVERSE-ENGINEERING THE SOUNDSCAPE Taking the soundscape apart It all starts with listening. Many papers, essays and books have been written or lectures have been given on the subject of listening and its various modes. As an artist I am left with no choice than to start to listen, yet I do need to define first what I am listening to, decide what I am listening for and with which mode of listening I will conduct my research.

Walking through the streets and alleys of Jerusalem's old city, I forget all that. I can feel tension and I realize that this tension is audible. I focus my hearing to actively recognize not where this is all coming from, but what does it do and how does it do it; what is the very position and role of each sound within the aural reality I am experiencing. I try not to forget the framework through which I have decided to exploit this city; I am interested on the unique individual existence of the sounds involved.

On its whole the soundscape is dense, noisy and rich but my intention is to penetrate within it, use my microphone as a lens and capture these etherial entities on a digital trap. I listen and let myself get directed, letting my body respond freely to the stimuli the sounds I am listening to are enforcing on me. Sometimes my attention is drawn by the emotional charge these sounds enclose, sometimes by my curiosity and even more by acousmatic qualities I

recognize. Yet this is not the time for theory, it is the time for practice. So I walk through the alleys of this ancient city and start collecting materials just like collecting shells while walking on a sea-shore [4].

Reverse-engineering the soundscape is not the process of capturing it as a whole and then breaking it down to pieces. In order to explore it fully and understand its structure and form, I get involved with the sounds as they happen and capture each sound's behavior independently from anything else that might be happening around or further on. My hearing is the medium for distinction while my instinct and intent the driving forces. All modes of listening; active, reduced or profound are the tools with which the unity of this system is broken into its fundamental structure blocks.

who introduced the term of sound matter. My practice is based on the fact that all these descriptions of the nature of the audible are acceptable depending on the angle from which a system is being explored. By investigating the materials I gathered while reverseengineering the soundscape of the city of Jerusalem and by following the principles of a philosophy based on the value of existence, I discover that these definitions act within the system as aural entities, each serving its own unique purpose within an wider audible reality. These aural entities may be of various types and possess different characteristics or attributes. The last stage of the process of reverse-engineering the soundscape is the identification of the uniqueness of each aural entity and the understanding of how it contributes to the shaping of the original soundscape.

HYPER-JERUSALEM

Aural entities

Conceptual listening

The collected materials are sonorous objects, environmental sound matter and a variety of sound gestures or events. Important theorists and practitioners have discussed over the years the existence and nature of such definitions, sometimes clashing with each other. For example Pierre Schaeffer who proposed the existence of the sonorous object and defined it originally by what it is not [5], was opposed by the claims of Francisco Lopez

The ultimate aim of my practice based research on the aural reality of Jerusalem, is the creation of a spatial miss-contextualized hyperreality. Having had the soundscape of the subjected location taken apart, I intend to achieve my goal by enhancing the various abilities I have recognized to the chosen aural entities. The process again starts with listening, yet this time I propose a new mode of listening called conceptual listening.

Active listening is associated with the source of the produced sound while reduced or profound listening is strictly based on the acousmatic experience. Conceptual listening on the other hand is directed only by the intent of the listener and does not clash with – rather than one could say it includes – all other modes of listening. Since the artist's intent is the driver, each sonorous object, gesture or quantity of sound matter is received by the listener's aural perception freely, using any appropriate listening mode, even if this is different than the mode used for its initial recognition and collection. It is a listening mode without restraints aiming to identify the role of the aural entity within a new spectrum of possibilities the artist's imagination and creativity may unfold.

Conceptual listening therefore is the first step of the process of how the aural entities involved will be treated, which of their attributes or characteristics will be enhanced or exaggerated and how each sonorous object, gesture or quantity of sound matter will contribute to the simulacrum that will emerge.

Rebuilding the city Following the recognition of the nature and role of each building block through conceptual listening, the next step to building the hyper-real environment of 'Audiopsy Jerusalem' is to process and treat each aural entity accordingly. There is no general methodology in altering, improving, enhancing, distorting or exaggerating the attributes of these materials, except from the one the artist's perception and his intent dictate. Each aural entity is treated as an individual existence and this is exactly where conceptual listening becomes important. For example the sound of the bells of the holy sepulcher, ringing at the day of Sabbath and heard from within the Jewish quarters where idleness – and therefore silence – is enforced, was perceived by myself as an aggressive aural force who's acousmatic attributes and spectral characteristics evoked nuisance. By using the mode of conceptual listening and in order to achieve the desired narrative and emotive result, I process this specific aural entity in an effort to exaggerate the aggressiveness of the sound of the bells, by altering the banks of the object's spectrum that cause a feeling of nuisance.

The attributes that are altered, enhanced or exaggerated on each aural entity vary and the way this is achieved depends on the imagination of the artist which in its turn has been inspired and directed by conceptual listening. These changes may refer to spectral characteristics, volume, clarity, spatial behavior, positioning, movement, distortion, resonance and more.

Presentation Once the materials have been prepared, the last step is the actual building of the hyper-real aural environment and its accessibility to the audience. The aim of 'Audiopsy Jerusalem' is the creation of a simulacrum; a reality that is not real inspired by the soundscape of the city of Jerusalem. This sonic hyper-reality in order to be fully appreciated by the audience needs to be diffused in space so that a new aural environment will be generated.

An array of high definition loudspeakers is arranged within an empty space. The visual elements and stimuli need to be minimal in order to encourage the audience to focus on their hearing rather than any other sense. The positioning of the loudspeakers is determined by the way the aural entities are distributed between them, achieving the desired emotive dynamics and the spatial effects which enhance the hyper-real experience. The final form of the presented hyper-reality, although narrative in nature is not temporal or time based. It is rather the result of interaction between the existence of different aural entities located in the same space. This effect is achieved by the long duration of the piece and the movement of the entities to different spatial positions over time. Therefore it becomes less important how much time an individual spends within the installation space,

rather than the feelings that are triggered and the way his or her perception is stimulated by experiencing the sonic hyper-reality that is generated.

REFERENCES [1 ] R. Murray Schafer: Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World,(Rochester: Destiny Books 1 994).

[2] Francisco Lopez: “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by C. Cox & D. Warner (London: Continuum International Publishing 2004) pp. 82–87.

[3] Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1 994).

[4] John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition, (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press 2011 ).

[5] Pierre Schaeffer: “Acousmatics” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by C. Cox & D. Warner (London: Continuum International Publishing 2004) pp. 79–81 .

Luc Messinezis was born in Athens, Greece in 1 977. After relocating in the UK,

he achieved a MA in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts, London and since, he has engaged with sound arts practice professionally, developing several projects that explore the means throughout which sound can constitute the main medium for artistic expression. Phonography, electro-acoustic/concrete composition, performance, audio-visual works and sound installations are a few of the ways Luc uses to explore the attributes of sound and its aesthetic/acousmatic qualities within a contemporary art context. Luc’s conceptual interests mainly focus in triggering feelings, aural awareness, and memory by challenging perception and stimulating the imagination of the audience, using the concrete audible world as his sound palette.

He was recently awarded with an artist’s residency in the lower Austria region and his latest work has been presented in various venues and galleries around the world in countries such as England, Greece and Israel.

Audiopsy Excert - Luc Messinezis Download Document and click to play

Production Company Packages | Gallery Packages | Artist & Curator Packages | Educational & Student Packages As ARTStap is a completely voluntary and non-profit operation, we are constantly working at innovative ways of keeping ourselves alive and kicking. The latest initiative to rise from the buzzing studios of ARTStap is the FRANCHISE Programme.

Based on the idea of creating a Franchise, the ARTStap Franchise program has been set up to help promote your event / exhibition / symposium etc. and bring what you do to the world. We advertise your event on the home page of the ARTStap website prior to your event opening which receives over 35,000 hits a day. We e-mail your events details out to our thousands of online users and subscribers, include an article in the following Issue of the ARTStap publication about how your event / exhibition / symposium went [min. 1 7,000 readers per issue] and to top it off we inlcude the information and documentation of your event in our franchise database which remains there 'forever'. All we ask is for you to include our logo on all your promotional material.

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It is the premier show-case for Indian and international modern and contemporary art which offers a platform for exhibition and sale of distinguished works of art and projects in the finest of environment.

With a burgeoning economy and a wide collector base, India has established itself as a leading art market in the world. We recognize the immense potential this market offers and how, as a critical platform, we can bring together artists who can present their art to the world and audiences that ranges from collectors, critics, curators, journalists, students and art lovers to the general public.

An opportunity to discover the value and diversity of art, the Fair is accompanied by wide range of programmes showcasing the best that artists from all over the world has to offer. Entries are selected by a panel of eminent experts, and an experienced curator is entrusted with the responsibility of the presentation. We accept the thing that is original, unique and what deserves to be exhibited. These can be paintings, installations, sculptures, video projections, site-specific art works, audio and digital and multimedia works, performances or internet art. The works may also be created in situ.

The first edition of United Art Fair – India’s premier art fair for modern and contemporary art will take place in September 27-30, 201 2 at ITPO, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. It will feature some of the most exciting Modern & Contemporary artists in the world.

The fair will also include full-fledged Seminar Programme, Curated Art Projects, dedicated Video Programme, Sculpture Park, Book Launch and Art Store, Artist-led Workshops, Artists’ Studio visit, Curated Walks and Student Internship.

The fair will exhibit the works of more than 2000 + artists, including the great masters of modern art and the young contemporary artists. The exhibition will include the finest paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs, and video art.

India is a destination of cultural activities and always attracts the art lovers from all over the globe. We are committed to create a platform for networking by bringing together collectors, curators, artists and galleries from different parts of the world.

India has grown as a destination of important art market. The most respected galleries across the world will participate with the new and finest works by both renowned artists and young talents. The fair will accompany several collateral events in the city to offer diverse form of art to the visitors. An extensive seminar program featuring reputed speakers will talk about the relevant topics of contemporary art practices.

Sound//Space | Pop-Up Record Store & Community Hub Took place May - July 2012, Organised by Soundfjord London

The Philosophy

Increasingly frustrated by the lack of opportunity to buy music and sound art in a welcoming and knowledgeable environment with that personal touch (and not a simple click of a mouse), SoundFjord brings back the community to the store and creates SOUND//SPACE, a pop-up record store-cum-community hub for creative makers, practitioners and enthusiasts alike.

SOUND//SPACE is a specifically built unit within the huge V22 Workspace (ex-Peak Freans Biscuit Factory) located at Bermondsey, to the south of the Thames. Our philosophy is simple - to instil and celebrate all that is independently published, selfreleased and hand-made.

The space is a record store, but equally a locus for conversation across genre (from experimental music, sound art and field recording to free jazz, electronica and exploratory music), where SOUND//SPACE showcases the most creative individuals and labels within the industry. SOUND//SPACE contextualises such work, highlighting the culture and importance of independent publishing and self-releasing via a programme of events including sound "treasure" hunts, sound walks, (audio) screenings, live performances, talks and workshops.

We welcome the specialist, the geek, the generalist and you to our store. Why not hang out a while, listen to some releases at our listening stations (for vinyl, CD and cassette); marvel at the variety of hand-made and hand-printed releases, screen printed posters, limited editions and special releases we have in store.

In addition, we encourage one and all to take part in related talks - learn about the creative and business side of independent labels; or a workshop or two - practical field recording; make your own record -design a sleeve, etc.; or simply kick back and experience a screening or a live performance. And why not take something unique home with you? A hand-printed vinyl, an audio-book, a customised cassette - a memory that will keep giving whenever you play it!

SOUND//SPACE is a transient venue, indeed an experience not to be missed, so make sure you're there, join in, listen to new things - or simply pick up the pin badge! We open from May to July 201 2, then we disappear into the sonic aether.

Sound // Space at V22

Sound//Space Pop - Up Store

Performances by Listening Mirror; Ed Hamilton; Isnaj Dui + Karina ESP, and Wil Bolton

[SLP] Ian Vine | Larry Groves | Caroline Haines | Aaron Parker | David Futers | Laurence Tompkins | Tom Bayman | Tom Rose | Sam Quill | Kaede Fujimoto

Andrew Page (Raxil4)'s durational performance

Residency and installation by Steve McCarthy

Residency and installation by Steve McCarthy

Material Studies: Introduction (monthly improv workshop)

Decentred Performance (Tom Chant, Benedict Drew, Angharad Davies and John Edwards)

OPEN GOREY INITIATIVE The OGI is a cultural media programme set up by ARTStap to help develop and publicise the arts and cultural ongoings in Gorey Co. Wexford, Ireland. This initiative was set up to help bring a zest for cultural life back to the community of Gorey by collaborating with local artists, the business community and local councillors, focussing on bringing the best of what Gorey does to the World and the best of what the world does to Gorey.

Since OGI was founded in 2011 we have initiated, developed and publicised numerous projects and events in Gorey including: - BRIEF: Curated by Natalie Doyle in association with Crawford Art Gallery, Farpoint Recordings, Image Masters Studio, Gorey Town Council & The Market House Festival.

- Life Between Building's: A Public Consultation - Best Halloween Window - GAFF Gorey Arts & Film Festival - Ghostly Stories, Ghastly Films - MoCA[gorey] Pop - UP Studio Residencies - Gorey Film Club.

The movies are coming to Gorey!

Looking for something to do mid week without dipping into your bank account? Looking to meet like-minded individuals with similar interests? Love films?

Well look no further!

The Gorey Film Club will be running from June (hopefully) to September in the Cellar Bar/Katie Daly's Pub. Whether this will be a weekly or bi-weekly event remains to be seen, but it will take place Wednesday nights at 9.30pm and with no entrance fee.

We will be showing films that range from comedy to action to classics and even a little bit of horror (no seriously depressing dramas.....we want people to leave with a smile on their faces).

We will be announcing the films before they are shown, so follow our facebook page and invite your friends to join as well.

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