Tracing Mobility: Cartography and Migration in Networked Space :: May 15, 2010; 10:00 am – 7:00 pm :: Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross
Nottingham NG1 2GB :: Free – reserve a place visit or phone 0115 924 2421.

Tracing Mobility, the first of Radiator’s three international symposia, examines the emergence of a new art space, a space born out of the technology used to control and divide society. Presentations by artists and speakers from diverse fields as geography, urban theory and computer science will explore what constitutes being nomadic these days and how developments in networked and open source infrastructure are transforming our expectations of Place.

Participants include; Frank Abbott (UK); Active Ingredient (Rachel Jacobs); Heath Bunting (UK); Simon Faithfull (UK/DE); James Kennard (UK); plan b (Sophia New & Dan Belasco Rogers) (UK/DE); Robin Bhattacharya (UK/CH); Kasia Krakowiak (PL); Krzysztof Nawratek (PL/UK); Kate Rich (UK); Michelle Teran (CA/DE); Open_Sailing (Ollie Palmer) (UK); Gordan Savicic (AT/NL); Trebor Scholz (US); Basak Senova (TR); Société Réaliste (HU/FR); Joanna Warsza (PL); Mushon Zer-Aviv (IL/US)

Introduction

Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the 9/11 attacks, Europe has entered a new historical phase characterised by the wholesale movement of its peoples across national boundaries. Migration has become one of the biggest political topics of the last 10 years, uniting left and right in the demonisation of millions of people whose only crime is trying to find a way to survive.

Perversely, the western industrial-military complex at the heart of our society has been preparing us for mobility for the last 30 years –- ever since we put the first calculator into our pockets in the 1970’s. Society wants us to be mobile, pro-active colonizers of new spaces for new reasons.

We hear about the mobile office, the digital city and augmented reality. Connected with one another through digital networks, we can now file copy in a park, on a train or in a café. The question is now whether we need to visit the office at all.

In parallel with this personal mobilization, the public realm itself has become a hybrid zone – one physical space overlapping with another through a pocket of connectivity where we meet and do our work, like an architectural Venn diagram.

It is not only business that takes advantage of this. Virtual communities are springing up everywhere dedicated to the expounding of particular and specific cultures and ideas. Recent migrants benefit from this overlap because it means they can continue to live remotely alongside their compatriots while working in a land where they may be unable to speak the language and may have little opportunity to make home visits. This scenario may provide a gentle integration into a new culture for many but it could also result in a lack of integration too. There is a question here deep at the heart of the multicultural versus integration debate.

These new forms of mobilisation are so successful, that they could change the very space of our cities. While we are increasingly encouraged to populate these virtual spaces we would do well to remember that it is us doing the data input that provides their bricks and mortar. Everything that we write can be analysed. Spiders and bots can trawl through the megatonnes of data spitting out trends and anomalies. Corporations, hungry for trend analysis, pay dearly for such information. Our virtual worlds are not innocent – the hybrid spaces we inhabit have real world consequences. These consequences change the very nature of the real world that we live in, change the very structure of the city we work in, dictate the very roads that are open for us to take.

In the field of art, many new artistic practices and approaches can be observed that are tracking this re-organisation of space. New artistic formats are emerging. These formats connect specific places to data (image, video, sound, user generated data etc.) and allow us to re-imagine these non-geographical, virtual spaces.

Taking place in Nottingham, Warsaw and Berlin the Tracing Mobility symposia provide an opportunity to increase knowledge about the cultural aspects of future mobility and new spaces. Contributions from the fields of art, architecture, urban theory, geography, social sciences and computer science will explore different aspects of the “Mobile Me”, uncovering how artists are cataloguing new cultures, stories and histories thrown up in the urban and rural landscape through the technologies used to pinpoint, follow and connect us.

The Tracing Mobility Symposia will also take place in: June/July 2010 The Knot, Warsaw, Poland; and Summer 2011 House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany