Quays Culture’s programme producer, Lucy Dusgate, is currently at the ISEA in Vancouver, and reports back to us her experience at this celebration of all things electronic and digital art!
“ISEA is the International Symposium of Electronic Art which this year is hosted by the beautiful city of Vancouver. This is predominately a conference that sits within the academic realm, but as an art producer and programmer this event informs and creates discourse for the curating and commissioning areas of my role.
“This year it has been great to see the return as a keynote speaker of Artist Director for Rhizome Michael Connor after a nine year absence. He continues to be a formidable force in the world of art curation and questioning the context for digitally-born artworks in the online space. He explains the presentation of any artwork to audiences as a ‘performance’ by an institution, which in itself is performing a role for the public.
“It is day three and I have just come from a panel event on media art curating, with a focus on how we preserve and even market for the commercial art sector some of the artworks being commissioned. In relation to Quays Culture it has been useful to reflect on the audience experience of these artworks, and the way in which we document the artworks which are created and experienced in a fixed time period for the public spaces at Salford Quays. The panel included four curators who will be part of The Lowry’s next gallery show in the winter – RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW – a digital art show of recent artworks by artists leading their field.
“I’m now in a robotic art presentation which has a fantastic presentation by a USA university who has developed robotic plants on wheels that react to the human environment, a bit like having robotic dogs around the house, but in the form of plants. The software feeds off a plant’s natural (and far superior to our) sensitivity to its immediate environment. Very sweet.
“There are some great ideas and links to be made at this global conference, which is nomadic and travels to a different city each year. For 2018 we are part of a competitive proposal to host the ISEA conference, with FACT and Liverpool John Moore University in Liverpool as the main hosts, and ourselves (The Lowry) and HOME as the main committee partners. There are two other cities in the bidding who we are up against so fingers crossed when we go to panel this afternoon.
“I’ll leave you with a short video of an augmented reality iPad artwork by artist Ian Haig from Melbourne’s RMIT university.”
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