Synapse elist: Impairment & Augmentation
Throughout the month of May the Synapse elist will discuss impairment and augmentation and, specifically, artistic engagement with this field. The discussion will look at different types of augmentation practices and tease out the impacts of each on how we think about, inhabit and use our bodies. Also under investigation will be the way in which artistic concerns intersect with experiences of impairment and/or augmentation – from the synaesthesic nature of communication aids, to the questions raised by an artist’s use of network-driven prostheses.
DISCUSSION GUESTS
LIZBETH GOODMAN is Director of the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute and Magic Gamelab at the University of East London. She established (and is now Director of) the Trust Project for children in hospital, which uses gaming and haptics to enhance the physical well-being and learning of those with limited physical ability. http://www.smartlab.uk.com/1about/director.htm
JU GOSLING, aka ju90, is a London-based artist, writer and activist who works primarily with digital lens-based media, but also with performance, text and sound. In 2006-07, she undertook a residency at the UK’s National Institute of Medical Research, where she explored how science affects the way we perceive ideas of disability and normality, leading her to develop a scientific model of disability. http://www.ju90.co.uk
BRAD NUNN, an artist, has been exhibiting since the late 1980s. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts and teaches sculpture and fine art programs at undergraduate and postgraduate level. In 1993 Brad had a serious brain haemorrhage, leaving him with physical and neurological deficits. Since then, his artistic practice has explored and engaged with the prevailing ideas of the prosthesis in contemporary culture. http://www.synapse.net.au/people/brad_nunn
STELARC is an Australian performance artist who has presented his work extensively in Japan, Europe, and the USA. His projects have included the Third Hand, a Stomach Sculpture and Exoskeleton, a six-legged walking robot. His present project involves surgically constructing an extra ear on his arm that will be internet enabled. He is Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and a Senior Research Fellow at the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au
To subscribe to the elist visit: www.synapse.net.au and select ‘Discussion List’
Synopsis
For over a year, Perry has researched the Arts Council Collection’s holdings. Unsurprisingly for an artist who has always positioned himself on the margins of the art world, the ‘tranny potter from Essex’ has found himself drawn to art made ‘before British art became fashionable’. He favours an art that conveys a sense of tradition, restraint and quiet accomplishment – a selection featuring modern British paintings, sculpture and photographs that embody a certain nostalgia, while exploring notions of place and environment, issues of identity and class, ideas about form. Rather than retreat into a world of rose-tinted romanticism, Perry presents an alternative view of British art, one that reassesses the relationship between past and present, and questions the boundaries between the radical, the conservative, and the radically conservative.Conventional assessments of post-war British art tend to pursue a standard art historical path with a strong scholarly focus.”Unpopular Culture” seeks an alternative view, one that moves away from facts, dates and movements and towards a more subtle investigation of the mood, pace and preoccupations that underline British art of this period.