Wilderness Art Conference is an international research conference for organizations and artists working in remote and rural areas of the EU and furthermore. The conference will explore the question of how contemporary art can be relevant within remote areas and can be beneficial for local communities, visitors and artists alike.

Participants:

Dr. Leandro Pisano (Italy):
Exploring rural territory as (new) medium

Leandro Pisano (b. 1973) is a curator, writer and new media producer for projects and events focused on new media, sound and technological arts. He is also specialized in ICT development strategies for rural areas. He is the founder and director of Interferenze new arts festival, an event taking place in South of Italy since 2003. He conducted lectures and presentations for new media art and design events worldwide (IST 2010, Tokyo; Doors of Perception 9, New Delhi; ISEA2011 Istanbul; ISEA2010 Ruhr, Dortmund; Dott07, Newcastle; Offload festival, Bristol). Leandro Pisano received his Master degree with honors in Ancient Greek, Latin and Italian Literature from University of Naples, focusing studies on digital philology, electronic teaching methodology and relationship between new media and classic disciplines.

Glenn Boulter (UK):
Remote Possibilities – Sound Works in Cumbria 2009-2012

Glenn Boulter is an artist and curator based in Cumbria (UK). Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2005, his work incorporates print media, sound and performance.As a founder of sound art collective Octopus, Glenn co-curates the bi-annual Full of Noises festival since 2009. The festival occupies under-used spaces across the post-industrial town of Barrow-in-Furness ranging from the canteen building of a nuclear submarine plant to a Victorian public park. Octopus were recently awarded Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation status in recognition of their approach to developing artists and commissioning new work, resulting in an ongoing program of residencies, public realm works, radio and education projects during 2012-15.

Rael Artel (Estonia):
“centre” and “periphery” from the point of view of contemporary art and cultural production and how these terms affect my lifestyle in the forest.


Rael Artel is an independent curator based in the forests of Estonia. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003, and participated in the Curatorial Training Program in De Appel, Amsterdam (2004/05). Since 2000, she has contributed to a number of magazines in Estonia and elsewhere, and curated shows in Estonia as well as in Amsterdam, Budapest, Lisbon, New York, and Warsaw. In 2007 she initiated Public Preparation, a platform for knowledge-production and network-based communication, which since the beginning of 2008 has focused on issues of nationalism and contemporary art in Europe in the format of international meetings, exhibitions and publications.

Carsten Stabenow (Germany):

Artist In Residence for the Sound Room in Marjaniemi. Carsten Stabenow - Curator and artist, born 1972, studied Communication Design and postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies in Berlin and has worked freelance as a communication designer and cultural producer. He is also a member of the Staalplaat Soundsystem and has realised several installations and performed worldwide at festivals and in museums. Carsten Stabenow is the founder of the German Media Art festival garage, initiator and artistic director of Tuned City and co-founder of the Berlin art and media production platform DOCK.

Leena Valkeapää (Finland):

Leena Valkeapää (1964) is a Finnish artist most known for her environmental art works. Recently she moved to a very remote location in Lapland off road only to be reached by boat or walking to write her doctoral study on “Wind, Reindeer and Humans”. She recently published “In Nature”, a dialogue with the works of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää.

Erich Berger (Austria/Finland):

Austrian-born Erich Berger is an artist and cultural worker based in Helsinki, Finland. His interests lie in information processes and feedback structures, which he investigates through installations, situations, performances and interfaces. His work has been shown and produced internationally, and received a number of awards. Currently he is a lecturer at the Fine Art Academy in Vienna/ Austria and the coordinator of the Ars Bioarctica initiative of the Finnish Bioart Society in Helsinki.

Laura Beloff (Finland):

With acclaimed international reputation as an artist, Laura Beloff’s works can be described as peculiar wearable objects, programmed structures and participatory, networked installations. In her pieces she combines technology fluently with various mediums ranging from video to textile, from sound to sculptural and organic materials. Beloff has exhibited widely in various museums, galleries and major media-art events in Europe and worldwide, recently f.e. in Vienna (2011), in Russia and Brazil (2008) and in the Venice Biennale (2007). She has received various grants, residencies and awards.

Kyd Campbell (Canada):

Kyd Campbell is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer. In 2004, she founded Frontierlab, an informal and nomadic research and production platform for art and design. She first studied textile and fashion design and later sculpture and experimental film. She has worked in different contexts across Europe, Africa and North America. She is currently a researcher in the Faculty of Media Art & Design at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her creative practice is heavily influence by a critical view on media practices and an intuitive view on history, environmental problems and politics. She is currently involved in open ecological design research, is producing a short experimental film and works as a food designer, in Berlin.

Kyd Campbell will be the food artist during the conference. She will do selected food presentations.

Marjatta Hanhijoki (Finland):

Marjatta Hanhijoki is a renowned painter and fine artist from Finland. She alongside with artists Reijo Hukkanen, Markku Keränen, Pirkko Nukari and Tapio Junno headed and supervised the famous fine art school in Ojakylä, Hailuoto from 1971 to 1979. She will come and tell us about that time.

Antye Greie (Germany/Finland) Hai Art - Artistic director
Nella Nikkilä (Finland) Hai Art - Project assistant

reCAPCHAT use the reCAPTCHA system, an extension of the CAPTCHA test that recognizes text in images to determine when the user is human or not. Jimpunk has modified these systems to generate a nonsense chat, an intervention in Twitter where every time a user fills out the reCAPTCHA, is published in an account open for the project, creating a new and unexpected spontaneous way of experimental communication.

Jimpunk is a well known net-artist who has been using Internet as context for his art practice from late 90’s. He lives and works in Paris.

On this practical and theoretical workshop with Anna Dumitriu, participants will begin to learn how to work safely with bacteria as an artistic medium using commonly available supplies. They will start to develop a bacteriocentric view of the world, understand the textile techniques used in the exhibition and discuss the new advances in clinical microbiology being investigated by the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project. The workshop will also look at other key artists in the field of bioart, issues of public engagement in science, ethics, and the nature of collaborative art/science practice.

This coincides with the exhibition Normal Flora: Bioart Responses to Modernising Medical Microbiology.

Turbulence.org is the oldest and most consistent net art commissions site in the world. Now celebrating 16 years it has commissioned, exhibited and archived over 200 works. We are also in the process of archiving the collection at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. You can read about the project in Virtueel Platform Research: Archiving the Digital by Annet Dekker and Rachel Somers-Miles.

Listen to KPFK’s interview with Micha Cárdenas:

Space Program Mars is a four-week mission to the Red Planet that explores the universe as a path to discovering ourselves. This interactive installation recasts Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall as an immersive space odyssey featuring dynamic and meticulously crafted sculptures, including elaborate spacecraft, Mission Control, a launch platform, a Mars landscape, and much more. Space Program Mars will be manned by Sachs and his studio team of thirteen, who will perform the myriad procedures, rituals, and tasks of their mission at the Armory.

In preparation, Sachs and his crew have engineered all that is necessary for survival, colonization, and scientific exploration in extraterrestrial environs. They will perform mission tasks and systems throughout the run of the exhibition, including Space Camp, Rover Deployment, Red Beans and Rice Preparation, and Suiting Protocol. The team will also “lift off” to Mars several times, with real-time demonstrations playing out various narratives from takeoff to landing, including their first walk on the surface of Mars.

“Tom Sachs’ work taps into the role of space flight in America and in the American psyche, particularly relevant given the recent grounding of the NASA shuttle program,” said Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time. “Space Program Mars explores the idea of space travel as a lens through which we can examine ourselves and our present, past, and future.”

Rebecca Robertson, President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory, said: “For the launch of Space Program Mars, Tom Sachs has produced elaborate instruments of space travel and will create a dynamic interplay among astronauts, thus simulating all aspects of the iconic experience without actually getting to Mars. The work is both humorous and serious, giving viewers insight into the challenges of space travel, but also leaving us to ponder one’s place in the universe.” Kristy Edmunds, Consulting Artistic Director at the Armory, added, “The shift in space travel from the public sector to the private mirrors Sachs’ own work, which has often commented on the commercial impulse inherent in our society.”

Evident in Space Program Mars, and in Sachs’ practice at-large, is a compulsive tinkerer’s mentality and ribald wit. Beneath this is a conceptual underpinning that addresses serious and profound issues — namely the commodification of abstract concepts. As seen in SPACE PROGRAM, Sachs provokes reflection on utopian follies and dystopian realities. Throughout all of these explorations, Sachs’ central emphasis is on the craft of constructing and the presence of the human hand. He reminds the viewer of the hard work involved, while asking barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation.

In conjunction with Space Program Mars, the Armory and Creative Time have developed public educational programs that underscore how imagination and exploration are fundamental to both art and science. Programs include live demonstrations of the “Flight Plan,” an artist talk with the project’s curators, two breakfasts with Sachs in conversation with NASA scientists, and weekend workshops for families.

About Park Avenue Armory

Part palace, part grand industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory is a non-profit cultural institution dedicated to presenting spectacular visual art and performances. With its 55,000-square-foot drill hall and array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory fills a critical void in the cultural ecology of New York City by enabling artists to create — and the public to experience — unconventional work that could not otherwise be mounted in the city.

About Creative Time

Since 1974, Creative Time has presented the most innovative art in the public realm. The New York-based nonprofit has worked with over 2,000 artists to produce more than 335 groundbreaking public art projects that have ignited the public’s imagination, explored ideas that shape society, and engaged millions of people around the globe.

for the time being explores the sound of movement in a 30-minute premiere of a new stage work inspired by the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913) and its fantastical visual designs. Nearly a hundred years ago, the Futurists collaborated on an eccentric vision of a society to come, based on revolutionary fervor of the time. The DAP-Lab’s choreosonic performance, both comic and unsettling in places, is an intimate piece that looks at our current precarious existence in a world full of outworn clichés of revolutions.

Featuring four dancers, the work incorporates body-worn-technologies where the structure of the wearable has been developed alongside its interactive and sound generating potential for gestural performance. The artistic premise of the design is to make the activation and presence of sound very visual and sensual to both the performer and the viewer.

Featuring: Helenna Ren, Yoko Ishiguro, Aggeliki Margeti, and Ross Jennings (performers); Sandy Finlayson (sound synthesis); Cameron McKirdy (graphic interface),;John Richards (electronics); Art direction/ audiophonic design by Michèle Danjoux; Scenography by Johannes Birringer.

Directed by Johannes Birringer & Michèle Danjoux

The ensemble: The DAP-Lab’s cross-media work highlights convergences between physical movement choreography, visual expression in dance/film/fashion and wearable design, and real-time interactive data flow environments. Since founding DAP-Lab in 2004, Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux have brought together artists and researchers from the UK, Japan, Brasil, U.S.A., and Europe, and developed prototypes of wearable garments which respond in distinct ways to body movement, camera capture, and sensory processing. The ensemble has created online performances, video exhibitions, the digital dance-work Suna no Onna (premiered at London’s Laban Centre in December 2007, recreated at Watermans in 2008). Its choreographic installation, UKIYO (Moveable Worlds), produced in collaboration with artists from Japan, premiered at Sadler’s Wells, London after touring Eastern Europe (2010).

“for the time being” is shown for the first time and will undergo extensive expansion in 2012 before touring internationally The project is supported by the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance at Brunel University, London and is part of a three-year collaborative project with artists in São Paulo, Brazil.

“Catherine D’Ignazio is an artist, software developer, and educator. She leads the Experimental Geography Research Cluster at RISD’s Digital+Media program. Her artwork has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam, MASS MoCA, and the Western Front, among other locations. Her artwork is participatory and distributed — a single project may take place online, in the street and in a gallery — and involve multiple audiences participating in different ways for different reasons. Her practice is inherently collaborative.

“In the early days of the Internet, you had a handle,” D’Ignazio recalls. Hers is Kanarinka. “It was given to me by a friend from Montenegro. In Montenegran it means ‘canary.’” That explains one of the linguistic mysteries surrounding D’Ignazio. The other is the title of her collaborative, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, which is both the name of a book (Analyse des infiniment petits (sic), pour l’Intelligence des lignes courbes, a seventeenth-century treatise on differential calculus) and a graduate school project of D’Ignazio’s…” Continue here.