Getting the bug

Did you think the millennium bug might capsize civilisation overnight? I didn’t – though equally I wasn’t optimistic about the likelihood of an exciting, Wild West style frontier opening up in my professional lifetime. Yet, like many of us in late 1999, if I’d seen past the media scare stories of the day, and appreciated the exponential growth of the web and of new, disruptive technologies that were introducing themselves with increasing frequency and affordability, I might have appreciated earlier that the time had come to saddle up.

I’m someone who’s been passionate to explore new work and emerging platforms – particularly in relation to socially engaged art – throughout my career. It’s been daunting to immerse myself in the complex, ever-shifting field of media arts, but also, I feel, essential – and newly invigorating. I’ve been privileged to meet and work alongside artists who possess genuine vision, combined with compelling political positions that permeate their creative work in sophisticated ways. Through consultancy for organisations such as Lift and New Work Network, I’ve aimed to share my knowledge of how media arts can work within arts programmes, and how the insights it brings and connections it makes can support the development of creative networks and organisations more widely.

The short time I’ve spent prospecting on the digital frontier has hugely influenced the way I think about all of my work, and the way that my company operates – as a consultancy, fundraising agency and as a production house which is active in performance and participation as well as media art. We try to communicate in a way that takes account of our insights into media arts, while remaining comprehensible to the general public. This can be a difficult balance, though. What is the point at which simplified concepts and messages have become dumbed down? Shouldn’t we have to engage with technology’s increasingly complex positions in relation to society, and shouldn’t that complexity be critiqued rather than passively accepted? And isn’t that a great, demanding arena in which to realise a very contemporary kind of art?

In this tricky territory, we produce projects with artists who work with technology as an active aspect of their practice – such as Roshini Kempadoo’s ‘Amendments’. This prototype installation uses a domino game, played by gallery visitors, to trigger a mixture of video performance, animation and photography on LCD screens – so reconsidering archive material from Trinidad and the country’s history, as a former British colony, in the aftermath of slavery’s abolition. Equally, though, we’re involved in what I’d broadly describe as new approaches to creating content, and to building creative communities, online and in the real world. These projects sometimes ‘feel’ digital, but often don’t. They include a collaboration with SPACE media arts in Hackney, East London, to develop resources for artists working in participatory settings who may be using technology in this aspect of their work, or want to begin doing so, and for those who want to engage in a fluid series of conversations about how participatory practice is developing in a wider sense. Another example is our input into the development of creative networks – such as CDR, an open network for music makers led by Burntprogress, that includes club nights, workshops and live artist showcases – and the community building plans of the Western Wedge, a coalition of West London’s local authority arts officers, which is rallying the response of West London’s creative sector to the 2012 context.