Wed 13th May, 16:30 - 17:45 GMT, hosted online
Future Focus: Art Hack Practice series, exploring shifting spaces of production, labour and artistic practice in a precarious world.
Future Focus – FutureEverything’s new online space for critical conversation – launched in May 2020 with a series of conversations and provocations from the editors and authors of Art Hack Practice, a collection of case studies exploring critical and interdisciplinary modes of practice.
Art hacking is a term that seeks to describe how pervasive technologies continue to disrupt traditional and hierarchical boundaries between the arts, innovation and society. As hacking, DIY and making culture continues to shape both cultural and corporate agendas, and policy, artists and curators working within these contexts are developing new working practices, and value systems that respond to the modalities of interdisciplinary creative practice.
The first event in the Future Focus: Art Hack Practice series explored shifting spaces of production, labour and artistic practice in a precarious world. Many chapters and case studies in the book present collaborative and co-working contexts, which are at this moment impossible to work in. Our first session considered what we can do given our current limitations and the resources that we have access to now. How might the notion of co-working shift?
Participants: Victoria Bradbury, Suzy O’Hara, Irini Papadimitriou, Hannah Redler Hawes, Julie Freeman, Clare Reddington, Mugendi K. M’Rithaa, Tania Aedo, Garnet Hertz and Saki Mafundikwa.
Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement (Routledge, 2019) is a publication edited by Victoria Bradbury and Suzy O’Hara that explores critical and interdisciplinary modes of practice that combine arts, technology and making.
The book presents contemporary case studies from twenty-six international authors interrogating perceived distinctions between sites of artistic and economic production by brokering new ways of working between them. The book also discusses the synergies and dissonances between art and maker culture, analyses the social and collaborative impact of maker spaces and reflects upon the ethos of the hackathon within the fabric of a media lab’s working practices.
Please click here to buy your copy of Art Hack Practice book and receive a special 20% discount: https://www.routledge.com/Art-Hack-Practice-Critical-Intersections-of-Art-Innovation-and-the-Maker/Bradbury-OHara/p/book/9780815374916
Art Hack Practice was released less than 6 months ago, yet is now a historical record of contemporary art and technology practices before the COVID-19 pandemic. Our community of authors have shared their global perspectives as culturally, racially and gender diverse art and design practitioners, operating at the nexus of art, technology and innovation. They have presented art-making and curatorial strategies that address and engage with social, political, environmental and cultural issues emerging within unusual and cross-disciplinary contexts of creative production. More than ever, Art Hack Practice can be seen as an important resource to help us collectively reconcile, understand and process our current situation.
Through this series of three discussions, we aim to facilitate conversations that will help us in ways that are creatively productive and can seed and extend future formats for arts production and engagement. What might allow cross-disciplinary art and technology practitioners to begin the work of recovery planning from this trauma?
Future Focus is FutureEverything’s new online space of critical conversations, talks and debates, as well as cross-sector exchange, networking and collaboration.
From panels, performative talks and workshops to roundtable conversations, industry meetings, mentoring and artists’ advice, Future Focus will develop around curated themes and flexible, experimental formats inviting our creative community, partners, collaborators, colleagues, friends and anyone else to join us, connect, share work and explore future collaborations.
The Covid-19 pandemic – apart from devastating communities and putting everything on hold – has highlighted the fragility of our society, environment and living beings, and the urgent need for changing our actions. The aim of this new space is to explore ideas for a kinder, more considerate future world, to offer inspiration, support and feedback, but also enable exciting new links, creative cross-pollination and critical discourse at challenging times.
