Well, I’m currently somewhere in a place called the Third Space. To recap, Third Space is an international artist exchange-based collaborative initiative established between eight Australian artists and eight Chinese artists. We work in pairs towards creating a collaborative artwork that then exists within this third space, a space that exists at the margins of cultures when they (we) interact. The project impetus is drawn from cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s notion that cultures share incommensurable differences, or share no commonality by which to measure, and therefore become hybridisations of the differences of identifying cultural traits. This of course creates tensions and incompatibility is eminent. We increasingly experience this in our daily lives, intensified especially in extremely urban and extremely rural settings. Even my self as a temporary American-Australian, experience this cultural difference, yet in a bizarre way, almost like living in a parallel dimension.

As Bhabha explains, “the incommesurable elements are the basis of cultural identities” [1]. Thus identity is informed by misunderstandings and miscommunications. When alien cultural and social systems make contact, identities are formed, yet not in a systematic way that can be attributed to solely either system. Identity becomes reactivated with every interaction, and eventually this hybridised marginal zone develops at the edges of each system, of each culture. This is a third space.

Coming back to the third space that we are presently floating through, above is an image, a snapshot of our exchange. Chinese artist Liu Qingqing and I have been exchanging virtually using video clips in order to create our own visual language system, in essence a third language consisting of time-based glyphs/pictographs, (maybe these can be called filmographs or videgraphs). Eventually we will produce our own ideo-cultural translations…

References:

[1] Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

After the past three months of critical introspection into my multi-dimensional artistic practice and reflexive self-analysis, the time has come to delve back into the “real world” and find myself making something again.  I’ve begun a new project after a brief hiatus from the more practical pursuits of being an artist. No better place to begin then in the third space! For sure.

The “Third Space” is an international collaborative art exchange developed through a unique creative partnership between the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (China) and Edith Cowan University (Australia).  The impetus for this project, according to Professor Clive Barstow (ECU), the chief coordinator, “[…] is based on what Homi Bhabha refers to as ‘the third space’ a notional space between cultures, and in our case a space in which we will engage through creative collaboration.

Bhabha describes this space as ‘incommensurable’, a space that creates tensions and incompatibility within cultural groups forced together through global migration:

” The non-synchronous temporality of global and national cultures opens up a cultural space — a third space—where the negotiation of incommensurable differences creates a tension peculiar to borderline existences… Hybrid hyphenisations emphasize the incommensurable elements as the basis of cultural identities” 1 (Barstow, 2009).

Here, in the ‘third space’ there are some central themes that emerge ripe for artistic exploration.  Broadly, these include personal and cultural identity, communication, globalisation, and hybridisation.  Personally, I’m attracted to the concept of identity hybridity and how identities might develop collaboratively and communicatively within a ‘third space’.

Considering one’s identity outside of cultural boundaries, the ‘Third Space’ project focuses a concept asserted by Nikos Papastergiadis; “that what we are is where we are now, rather than where we were from” 2 suggesting that our cultural histories have little bearing on our current identity within a modern hybrid society.” (cited by Barstow, 2009).

This notion is of course contextual, in that our present context, being a matrix of our own trajectories (and histories), culminates in what we perceive as our current situation through which we create identification of self and other within various relational contexts, i.e. ontological, phenomenological, etc. In other words, our present context carries more weight in our understanding of who or what we are in comparison to the limiting perspective offered through the lens of all other past contexts. This train of thought seems to lead towards that old “the end of history” line. Are we continuously forgetting our past in exchange for a fresh mind for an open future, free from the restraints of historical ideology?

Before I forget what I was talking about…coming back to the project, the group consists of 16 artists, (eight Chinese artists and eight Australian artists). We are paired with a counterpart and given four months to collaborate on a work of art, exchanging the work either via snail mail or digitally via FTP. The work can be in any medium we choose to incorporate.

“This shared form of collaboration places certain demands on the artists, such as surrendering the individual right of ownership of the work along with many established methodologies of art production that are common to both western and Chinese cultures. A collaborative approach will promote the need for individuals to communicate across languages, and/or let the work communicate to prompt the partners response. Works should be exchanged a number of times to develop the notion of hybridity.” (Barstow, 2009).

Another interesting facet of the project is the final exhibition, which will be shown in Perth and Shanghai.  The exhibition will be visually communicated in its entirety. Designers from the School of Communications and Arts are given the task of designing the media for the exhibition and  “asked to explore non-textual and cross-cultural means of expressing time, place and direction.”

In the near future, we Australian artists will be off to Shanghai to kick off the project, beginning with a brief residency at USST where we will meet our partners and get a taste of Chinese contemporary art culture. This almost feels like cheating…..

Some pressing questions that I hope to work through:

Is there really a third space? Or, do we each develop our own third spaces?  If the third space is between culture, a space that has no common means of identification, and is incommesurable (having no common standard of comparability), is it possible to bridge this space? And if so what type of bridge can do it?

More to come… from a third space.

1 Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

2 Papastergiadis Nikos. 2003. Complex Entanglements Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference: Rivers Oram London. Reviewed by Ian Maclean at http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-April-2004/maclean.html

Title: FAIR 87.9 FM

Date: March 18, 2009.

Materials: Pirate radio station, FM transmitter, Internet, Computers, Microphones, Speakers, Automobile, Radio

Dimensions: Variable Dimensions

Location: Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, WA, Australia

Keywords: Interactive audio installation/event, free radio, interact, collective art, transmission

Website: http://fairfm.info

Description:

FAIR FM was a nomadic community pirate radio station, initially created and exhibited during a month-long artist-residency at Spectrum Project Space, Northbridge, Western Australia in March, 2009. An operational broadcast booth was built into the gallery, which housed broadcasting equipment including a mixing console, transmitter, computer, and a large antenna.  In the adjacent gallery space, a series of portable radios, including a small automobile, aired the station live to viewers. An array of advertising materials including promotional posters, T-shirts, and other media adorned the walls. Broadcasting on 87.9FM through the use of a low-power FM transmitter, FAIR FM had a broadcast radius of approximately 1km in Northbridge[1], which technically classified it as a micro station. The station went live on air at 2:00pm on Wednesday 09 March, 2009 and broadcast daily from 2:00 pm to 9:00 pm Wednesday through Sunday until 05 April 2009. During these broadcasts, the viewers in the gallery and the public at large were invited to create, perform, and broadcast their own audio programming over the station, which resulted in an eclectic mix of pirated music, live spoken word, musical performances, and sound art. Throughout the duration of the four week residency approximately 15 individuals became involved in the station, including a street busker from Athens, Greece, a professional nightclub DJ from Sydney, the local Perth punk band - Red Triangle, and an array of other interested audiophiles, musicians, and sound artists.

The concept and motivation for creating this project was in response to my situation as an artist within the field of practice, which aestheticised an idea of social relationships, as in relational artistic practices. At the time, researching a theory of relational aesthetic in order to understand the relationship between artist and viewer as an inter-subjective relationship, I became focused on creating an environment in which the viewer could immediately transcend, or change their role as receiver in the often one-way communicative directive often experienced in a gallery setting. I was interested in challenging the boundaries of the inter-subjective experience facilitated by the work of art. This inspired the name FAIR FM, an acronym for Found Air Instant Radio, or Free and Interactive Radio, or any other acronym the users could create. Modelled after initiatives such as Radio Alice, a free broadcast radio station in Bologna, Italy in the late 1970s in which Felix Guattari was involved, I sought to create an open line of communication between the subjective spaces encountered in the gallery and the spaces that existed beyond.[2]

Specifically, I was interested in creating an artwork that moved beyond the subjective boundaries that I create when I make art as a form of self-expression. In other words, I had the urge to explore art making for others, in a way that I feel I had not previously explored in past projects. This meant pushing the boundaries of my practice into new, unseen, unknown realms.  Radio broadcast inspired me as an opportune medium to work through as it represented an invisible link through which one can communicate and connect beyond the boundaries of time and space. I have had experiences in my past working as a disc lockey at a small community radio station, WMEB 91.9 FM, in Orono, Maine, USA, inspiring another reason to use radio as my chosen medium of expression.

Through the use of radio broadcast as an expressive, artistic medium, in this project I desired to manipulate an everyday channel of media through which I could subvert the system of communication and exchange. Through subverting a communication system such as radio, I enabled an altered position in which I could experience my role as artist, or maker, in new terms, in this case in a reversal of roles, whereby the viewer or listener became the maker, or broadcaster and I as maker became the listener. In a system of radio the majority of its users are consumers, the countless throngs of listeners that complete the system as a form of mass media are at the end of the communication. Traditionally radio operates as a one-way medium of communication. Foreseen by 19^th century socialist Edward Bellamy, radio was pre-empted as the “collective telephone” in which the masses would be mobilised by the propaganda of nationalist corporations of industrial power (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1998, p. 17). It is not difficult to see radio operating in the form that Bellamy foreshadowed.  While it may be argued that radio functions as a medium of expression[3], fostering and communicating the musical expression of individuals and communities, the current state of radio is a far cry from free with the majority of publicly broadcast channels produced by national, and multi-national media corporations. I was interested in facilitating others in an attempt to challenge these boundaries, which to me represent the power relationships that exist within the field, in the creation and reception of art, or in a way of subjectivity in general.

The creation of FAIR FM enacted my response to these observations. The development of pirate radio and free radio supports an idea of opening up radio as form of mass communication, operating beyond the boundaries of control and governance of communication often encountered in modern society; FAIR FM challenges this means of control. In short, FAIR FM questioned, to what degree are my own communications controlled by the formal constructs of contemporary society and my social role as an artist?  To what degree are my own forms of communication, my own productions, or programming, formulated through a similar type of conditioning?

Beyond my desire to confront these boundaries through this project, FAIRFM allowed me to explore my practice as an open, and evolving process of creative social interactions. Somewhere between performed and lived action, by creating a public pirate radio station I could create possibilities and opportunities to move between roles, to aestheticise exchange on a communal level.

When viewers entered the gallery, I often greeted them over air, which was broadcast through the radios stationed throughout the space. Inviting these viewers to enter the booth and become active users, I had a number of individuals, prompted by their own musical and audio interests to get involved in various ways (see Figures 22, 25).  However, these experiences were very limited.  In many ways it was the lack of interaction, the limitedness of the station as my channel of communication to the public. In most instances the station acted as a platform for individuals to perform.

Modelling FAIR FM within a theory of relational aesthetics, I was examining my own “inter-human” exchanges facilitated through the pirate radio station as the “aesthetic object” that Bourriaud discusses as “producing sociability” (1998/2002, p. 33). These exchanges occurred through the communicative aspects of radio broadcast. FAIR FM functioned as a means of enabling an extension of myself in a way that challenged my boundaries of communication. Through this challenge I pushed myself to experience my role as maker of my subjective self, as artist, in an extended form, through more temporal, distanciated processes.

Because radio broadcast, as a communicative means of interaction and exchange often functions in a one-to-many context, it can be an incredibly introspective process, and in turn self-reflexive.  FAIR FM extended this representation of one-to-one communication, however the majority of the time I felt is if my communications were “one-to-none”.  Becoming lost in the self-centredness of the radio station was another instance.  Sitting, often alone in the stations broadcast booth, I became very aware of myself, listening to and monitoring myself.

Knowing that the communications I created through the process of broadcast were being transmitted beyond the space of my own perception, I was sending out signals. These signals represented attempts to define my position. One program entitled, Organised Silence, a broadcast in which I transmitted only the white noise that was created in the process of producing the broadcast itself. This gap, its space, created a divisional space, a void through which I could find another form of distance between my place and myself.

The temporality of the various transmissions I created through FAIR FM became relevant as a means of producing observable instances of myself, occasionally interrupted by the presence of another, in which, I would offer the station to that individual allowing them to gain control of the transmission.  This immediate transfer, in ways allowed me to disrupt my subjective processes, and the communication, transmission of this subjectivity.  In ways this was the first instance of exchange that occurs in the collaborative effort involved in communication. The possibility of taking over a pirate radio station, in my opinion, affords the possibility of extending ones subjectivity into inter-subjective space, yet a space that is transient and ephemeral as the radio broadcast itself. However, this transfer between viewer and user, or in this case listener and DJ, never transpired to anything more than an exchange of control.  In hopes of further extending this process of exchange into a more sustained form, FAIR FM was revised into a second installation, which was included in the exhibition, what is displace?.

[2] Guattari’s interest in free radio was in its “form and mode of social organization” (Multitudes 21, 2005, n.p.).

[3] See article Wrightson, K (2003). An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology. As Wrightson explains, “In the developed world, sound has less significance and the opportunity to experience “natural” sounds decreases with each generation due to the destruction of natural habitats. Sound becomes something that the individual tries to block, rather than to hear; the lo-fi, low information soundscape has nothing to offer. As a result, many individuals try to shut it out through the use of double glazing or with acoustic perfume–music. Music–the virtual soundscape–is, in this context, used as a means to control the sonic environment rather than as a natural expression of it. Broadcast speech and music provide the same opportunity for control, turning the sonic environment into a commodity. Networks, transmitters and satellites extend the acoustic community across the entire planet, a fact that has been utilised for fair deeds and foul. Schafer refers to the latter use of sound as “sound imperialism” (1977a, 77)” (2003, p. 3).

so you think you can make art?

nathan stevens: splendid arts lab 2009

AS THE SAYING GOES, “TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE”, SO 10 HEADS MUST BE SPLENDID. FROM A UNIQUE INITIATIVE BETWEEN LISMORE REGIONAL GALLERY AND THE MUSIC FESTIVAL SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, NORTHERN RIVERS PERFORMING ARTS (NORPA) AND ARTS NORTHERN RIVERS, COMES SPLENDID, A NEW EXPERIMENTAL ARTS PROGRAM AIMED AT PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART AND AUDIENCE, PUTTING THEORY TO THE TEST………..

Click here to read the rest of the article at realtimearts.net

Splendid in progress. Phase one of the Splendid Art Lab initiated.  Artists and provocateurs are hard at work, conducting various social and psychological experiments in creativity.  Read the full observational report at:

http://blog.splendid.org.au

From the 20th of July to the 7th of August I am very fortunate to be conducting some field work on collaborative art processes through a cooperative involvement with the unique arts project, Splendid. Based out of Lismore, NSW the Splendid Project is aimed at offering “…ten participating artists opportunities to work collaboratively together in a dynamic environment that encourages critical thinking and experimentation. The aim is to create new ways of thinking about site specific experiences. Facilitated by leading local and international artists and provocateurs, guided by a curatorium and supported by specialised production personnel, the Labs are structured as immersive and exploratory playgrounds, designed to allow for a diverse range of artists to intersect, exchange and unfold ideas.”

Acting as a virtual facilitator and ‘collaboratarian’ in the Splendid Arts Lab, my role will involve working closely with a group of ten extraordinarily gifted emerging Australian artists in order to gain critical and invaluable insight into the dynamics of collaborative artistic activity.  How do artists cooperate across mediums, across creative languages, subjectivies, and idiosyncrasies?  Why do artists want to work together?

Through the development of the Splendid Blog, I will help the artists to maintain a map of their inspirations, ideas, provocation, and observe with a critical eye the precipitating relationships that develop through this type of collaborative and cooperative interaction. I will be coordinating the development of the Splendid Blog in an effort to not only help document the creative process that unfolds between the Splendid artists, but also in an effort to examine the role of reflexivity in this collaborative environment. How might the blog, acting as a real-time virtual collective sketchbook foster the group process?

Hoping to gain some experiential understanding of some of the processes that artists working in collaborative climates may share, this projects can serve to crystalize some of my initial expectations, and reveal some essential relationships between artists.

more to come on this….