Loop-pool

Produced under the banner Art Creating Society in partnership with The Yellow House, this work was commissioned by Liverpool City Council as part of the programme for the European Capital of Culture bid, and comprised a large scale public art and multimedia project sited on the Pier Head, Liverpool.

The notion of the art process becoming a pre-text for the creation of networks of association was first explored in the Art Creating Society exhibition and symposium (MOMA Oxford 1990) (Elliott and Willats). Informed by this idea, Loop-pool proved to be a summative project of research around new media and collaborative practice over a 10 year period, involving collaboration with The Yellow House working in Hamburg, Glasgow, Gdansk, Frankfurt, Koln and Prague, where the working premise was to investigate how, in different ways, with participants in cities linked by twinning agreements, an art process could explore aspects of difference in an international and transaction-based context. The key issue explored was how artists and participants in these differing urban contexts could interact with each other through an art making process.

Loop-pool was a spatial intervention literally reflecting the cityscape and the river Mersey as the historic gateway to the wider world of trade commerce and cultural exchange, incorporating videowork of people in Koln, Prague and Gdansk speaking about Liverpool. The Loop-pool public art installation, constructed collaboratively by the project participants, gave wider public access to the activity, documented over the previous eight years, of this network of European citizens. Loop-pool manifested a socially and interactively constructed critical but positive and celebratory view of Liverpool’s place in Europe, contrasting with more negative, stereotyped and media driven perceptions of the city.

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/about_us_page....