Action at a Distance

i-DAT’s underpinning research concerns making ‘data’ palpable, tangible and accessible. It involves creating new experiences through the design and construction of networked, sensing and intelligent ‘things’ and software.

Digital Practice is central to exploring the significance that data, its harvesting, processing and manifestation, can play in contemporary culture.

The research is collaborative and participatory at its core, engaging audiences and communities and cultivating a rich transdisciplinary approach through collaborations across the arts and sciences.

Action at a Distance #1:

Professor Chris Speed.

Location: Zoom Link

Date: Wednesday 11/11/2020.

Time: 13.30-14.30.

Title: Keep Cutting.

Chris Speed introduces a design research project and trial with Oxfam Australia that places public donors to the charity within an economic relationship with earthquakes (amongst other humans and more than humans) that reveals issues of trust, presence and gambling. The public trial using iOS and Android apps that took place in Autumn 2019 revealed a series of tensions that emerge when personal economic transactions (the act of donating) become entangled within a network of social, environmental and temporal feedback loops. Interested in exploring the role of smart contracts across a blockchain that are sealed according to parameters set by the donor, for example: if there is an earthquake of greater than 5 on the Richter scale, in Asia, Oceania and Africa then release funds to the Oxfam Emergency Disaster Aid Programme, the trial also revealed a series of unexpected outcomes. It is these outcomes that are of interest to the author. The talk will outline the intentions of the design research project before exploring its affect as an ‘agential cut’ within the 86 participants who used the apps.

Prof Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at University of Edinburgh where his research focuses upon the Network Society, Design for the Digital Economy, and The Internet of Things.

Action at a Distance #2:

Presenters: Mark Waugh and Ellie Porter

Location: Zoom Link

Date: 25/11/2020

Time: 13.00-14.00

Title: The Art360 Project

The Art360 project is based on principals of networked knowledge resources that can consolidate in material archives but are essentially ephemeral. These networks are understood to function like circuits between artists and groups of artists whose practises are in dialogue directly or indirectly due to the materials they work with;  their political sexual, geographic affinities and other strange attractors. These affinities might be understood as forces that have the capacity to create black holes in art history and radicalise what might otherwise be overlooked. Our presentation will look at questions of material in the archive and their status as information and artworks and how Art360 as a project has come to understand the volatile interface between the realms of analogue and digital artefacts. This session will be a preface to the later session with the pioneering artist Keith Piper who has produced hybrid aesthetic forms in diverse media including the now obsolete; Marco Media Director. WIKI Says; “Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director) was a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia and managed by Adobe Systems until its discontinuation. Director was the primary editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s.”

Ellie Porter is Head of Programme Art360 and has overseen the development of the Art360 Programme since 2017.

Mark Waugh is the ART360 Co-Artistic Director and Business Development Director of DACS.org.uk.

Action at a Distance #3:

Presenter: Dr Tegan Bristow

Location: Zoom Link

Date: 10/03/2021

Time: 14.00

Title: Fak’ugesi

Dr. Tegan Bristow is the Director of the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, Senior Lecturer in Interactive Digital Media at the Wits School of the Arts – with a specialisation on African Art, Culture and Technology and Editor in Chief and Digital Editor of the Ellipses Journal for Creative Research. Bristow is additionally a developer of interactive digital media in installation, performance, screen-based and online media.

In 2017 Bristow completed her PhD on Decoloniality and Actional Methodologies in Art and Cultural Practices in African Cultures of Technology, which she wrote with the Planetary Collegium at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Arts at Plymouth University in the U.K.

In Bristow’s Directorial role for Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival The Festival supports: VR / AR, Animation, Gaming, Critical Digital Arts Practices and questions of the digital in Creative Economies in Africa. Under Bristow’s directorship the Festival has grown into an internationally recognised IP that not only critically supports the development of culture and technology in Africa, but has become an important market place for new work with in these industries in the region.

In her role as Senior Lecturer at the Wits School of Arts, Bristow developed and ran the Masters in Interactive Media in the Digital Arts Department from 2007 to 2017. And further developed three programs in Internet Art, Creative Coding and Data Visualisation and most recently theory  in African Culture and Technology. In this period, Bristow has continued to supervise Masters research and more recently PhD’s in these areas.

As curator (outside of Fak’ugesi Festival) Bristow’s curatorial highlights include in 2018, Digital Imaginaries with Afro Pixel (Senegal), Wits Art Museum (South Africa) and the ZKM (Germany). In 2017, the 2^nd Season of the Centre for the Less Good Idea.  In 2015, Post African Futures with the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Action at a Distance #4:

Presenter: TBC

Location: Zoom Link

Date: TBC

Time: TBC

Title: TBC

Action at a Distance #5:

Presenter: TBC

Location: Zoom Link

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Title: TBC

Action at a Distance #6:

Presenter: TBC

Location: Zoom Link

Date: TBC

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Title: TBC