No place - Some place

“No place–Some place” was produced for the Liverpool Biennial exhibition WALK ON, curated by Bryan Biggs of the Bluecoat Arts Centre Liverpool, for the 6th International Shanghai Biennale, 05/09/06 – 05/11/06

The work developed from cultural exchanges, e.g., Loop-Pool, Loop-Pool II and “in different places”, linking people at a local and global level experiencing large scale changes to their urban and social fabric, was recognised as relevant to the Biennale taking place in Shanghai, Liverpool’s sister city.

However, at this point, Actor Network Theory (Latour) is now guiding e-space lab’s activities, shifting its focus away from the specifics of mediated technology as an artistic tool, and towards the social and cultural contexts and the practices of everyday life, where questions of connection and representation become linked. Actor network theory (heterogeneous engineering) and non-representation theory have reconfigured our research questions, especially in examining participatory roles of the audience in this virtual context. The piece in Shanghai was a three-screen work showing DVD loops on either side of a central e-space distal mediation space, essentially documenting e-space concepts and processes.

On the penultimate day of the Biennale (05/11/06) a further event in which audiences in Liverpool connected with those in Shanghai negotiate a real time walk through of the Citic Square exhibition, Shanghai, whilst observed by an audience at the A Foundation (Independents Biennial), Liverpool. This was developed in a follow-up exchange at the Out of the Bluecoat space and The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Café in Shanghai on 10/03/07. The final upshot of this phase included an event at BBC Radio Merseyside on 07/07/07 where the audience included Yellow House members from Liverpool.

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....