I'll be presenting a paper at the ISEA 2009 conference which takes place in Belfast & Derry from the 23rd August - 1 September on the Positionings: Local and global transactions panel. The paper on Joyce Walks is entitled 'Joyce Walks: remapping culture as tactical Space' and I'll be speaking on the 26th at midday in the Waterfromt Hall.

Positionings: local and global transactions
The theme takes its point of departure the processes through which spaces are being constructed, re-mapped and negotiated in the contemporary situation of global capital, digitisation and migration. Issues of space are highly pertinent in terms of its constitution, perception, appropriation, consumption. These issues cannot be divorced from a scrutiny of the social, political, cultural and medial conditions under which spaces are being produced, trans/formed, and re/presented. Of particular interest are new and convergent models of space and spatial dynamics, and thus of reality construction, whether real, virtual or augmented, and the challenges they pose to the relationship between local(ised) and global(ised) transactions in the cultural domain and the re/formation and re/presentation of identities connected to them.

Click here to read the abstract (PDF)

Space is the Place is an exhibition I'm curating of documentation of artistic practices which intervene in public space. The focus is on ephemeral, temporary works which take place out of a gallery setting, living on only in their documentation. The exhbition includes 26 artists and artists groups and it's been a great privilege putting together this collection of works most of which I've admired for a long time.

It takes place in the NCAD gallery from the 27th Aug- Sept 1 as an official Dublin Hub event for ISEA 2009 with a closing reception on Monday 31st at 18.00-20.00 in the gallery.

More information and artist list here.

I gave a talk and led a Joyce Walk at the En_lloc. Diālegs entre art, territori i tecnologia conference in the Fundaciķ Pilar i Joan Mirķ in Mallorca in June.

It's been such a busy summer that I still haven't had a chance to upload the images and videos but will get to it when ISEA is over.

Now_Here/En_lloc

Land Art constituted a particular approach of art to nature and the concept of land, fleeing the white cubic space of galleries and museums. Land art interventions – the remains of which have often been reduced to visual or written documents – re-aroused man’s interest in his surroundings, either to question them or to modify and transform the natural into something artificial. As the world has become more globalized and cities have become contemporary man’s habitat, places have become increasingly uniform, impersonal and functional. Concepts like the Third Landscape (Gilles Clément) or Non-Places (Marc Augé) illustrate the new reality in which land and nature are to be found. The ubiquity that can be achieved with information networks contrasts with the increasingly obsessive capacity to locate our position that GPS systems and associated software facilitate. Thus we live in a perpetual state between here and nowhere, in a hybrid relationship between the need to be everywhere, always on the move, finding the same places wherever we go so as not to lose our sense of direction, and knowing exactly where we are at all times.

Download En_lloc catalogue (PDF 3 MB)