Loop-pool II

'Loop-pool II' was a public art event.

Whilst Loop-pool [http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/1591/] gave the wider public an insight into the Art Creating Society process, it lacked the immediacy of contact with human networks involved. This led to a re-thinking of the research question, to explore the way mediation technology, e.g., video streaming and virtual and visually interactive spaces, might contribute to exploratory and collaborative public art events.

“e-space lab” was formed in 2002 by Courtenay and Hatton as a research project to explore the role of mediation technology in public art events involving the articulation of local urban knowledges, including informal and subjugated knowledges (Foucault), foregrounding qualities of spontaneity in the creative responses activated through a dialogic interactive visual interface. Jointly, Courtenay and Hatton, of e-space lab, working with The Yellow House in the International Centre for Digital Content, Liverpool, and the Solidarity Museum, Gdansk, produced Loop-pool II as the first exploration of these ideas.

Loop-pool II, at the Solidarity Museum in Gdansk, involved young people (aged 16-24) from the Copernicus School in Gdansk, and The Yellow House in Liverpool, interacting with each other using mediation technology. These young people showed an ability to utilise video and polaroids to engage in spontaneous exchange of ideas, images, in a collaborative process which activated a public space in the Solidarity Museum as a space showing the everyday, personal and intimate life of the network.

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....