in different places

“in different places” was a public art event. It was facilitated by an invitation from the Bluecoat to stage an event at The RENEW Rooms in Liverpool 25/06/2005, during Architecture Week, aimed at showing to Liverpool key moments of neighbourhood decay and demolition in an area of Shanghai, arising from its rapid transformation. This event established the nascent collaborative network that provided the starting point for “in different places”, also bringing the photographer and artist, Peter Hagerty, into the e-space lab project as an equal collaborator.

In this project e-space lab constructed a virtual public art process linking the “Z” Museum and Biz Art in Shanghai with the Out of the Bluecoat space in Liverpool, February 24-26 2006.

Building on insights from Loop-Pool II, which primarily explored the research question of how to connect (i.e., what mediation technology is appropriate) “in different places” developed from this point to explore how the technology might enable knowledge of two places to be built up simultaneously in a unified virtual and real space.

Virilio’s reversal of inside/outside relationships in the virtual context of the screen environment, and his notion of the meta-city informed our theoretical approach to “in different places”, which involved two connected cultural exchange events. To illustrate, when inside the “Z” Museum and the Out of the Blue Coat spaces, the event participants are in effect in a virtual multimedia global space, constructed through the interactions of those participants. Stepping outside this global orientation is to move into local space, where mobile technology can be employed to reconnect with the mediated space.

e-space lab was set up by Philip Courtenay and Peter Hatton in 2002 (whilst academic colleagues teaching public art at Chelsea College of Art & Design) principally as a research environment. In 2005 we began working with Peter Hagerty, a Liverpool based photographer, and in 2006 we were joined by Jonathan Kearney, a son of Liverpool but a China based artist at the moment, and have been supported and assisted by Shaw (Xu Zhifeng) an architecture student based in Shanghai we met on our first video streaming link between Shanghai and Liverpool.

At the heart of our recent experiments is a set of questions, questions that we are still in the process of articulating and will develop as we go forward with our model of practice. Our common interests lie in collaborative work, and work that has a concern with people, places, spaces, identity, history and change. Our current work is called in different places.

We are focussing our research on the potential of streaming video and other virtual spatial effects and seen as an aspect of an art process and/or performance. This is also a research environment about new types of space for new forms of public art in a sort of hybrid territory where the electronic and virtual aspects of the art event modulate a view of “real” spaces.

We envisage using the e-space lab to operate as a “place” for the creation of work around questions of ‘culture’ and also the role of the visual in the exploration of urban and social fabrics (Liverpool-Shanghai-Gdansk), at the moment looking at these places as cities in change. This virtual laboratory is open to artists, to individuals, groups and institutions to create work around these questions and to see how a trans-national model of practice might grow. So, e-space lab is first and foremost a research environment for artists exploring how new electronic and digital forms generate new perceptions.

• http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17210.htm
• http://www.e-spacelab.net/index2.php
• http://www.e-spacelab.net/whatwedo_secti...