Thanks Claire

this overview is much needed and I agree with you, the media arts sector is far more fragmented than Live Art. This is true as digital technologies are naturally and rightly integrating into all forms of art in this decade, so we have no true common base. It is experimentation that can hold some of us together if anything, and work that approaches critical issues and makes contemporary commentary.

At this time body>data>space, a digital design collective focusing on the live body at the centre of the digital, has an exhibition of our work in Paris at CDA Enghien-Les-Bains focusing on the future of the virtual and physical body in work and play.

We also have just come back from the Forum for our EU Culture 2007 project Post Me_New ID in Dresden, where, with an excellent range of speakers, we looked at network creation processes and multi-identity issues emerging from digital mobilities.

body>data>space will no longer receive its regular fixed term funding from the Arts Council from 2009, we were cut in the culling last December. Our funds were transferred to other media organisations, and no new funds were made available for new digital based organisations.

bodydataspace survives now on professional fees, very few of which are available in the media art sector in the UK which seem to survive through barter and run very tiny budgets for what are put forward outwardly as huge multi partner projects. We question this as a valid way forward.

In France and Germany for these two projects this autumn we have received strong and professional support, good fees, genuine respect, great press coverage, and catalogues/books/dvds are published on our work.

In my 18 years of working with new media in the UK, as shinkansen, Future Physical and since 2005 as body>data>space, none of this has happened really, not in this way ( although we have worked with some great people). I have seen only pockets of strong coverage or really good professional support for other media groups either.

We need to find a way to encourage the funders and venues in the UK to understand the value of experimentation in the chain of evolution from the new to the mainstream. It is an imperative to allow true innovation and the Live Art sector also aims to enable this.

In my view one of the key issues is that, in the constant push for “large scale new publics” by the funders and the venues, the little support that there is goes to traditional mutators, rather than to true innovators.

This is big mistake as the UK then produces niave and under developed work by big names jumping on the digital band wagon. Often venues and established artists totally ignore the previous 20 years of work by the digital pioneers.

My projection is that unfortunately we will see much re-inventing of the wheel over the next years, as mainstream arts integrate the digital, and this work will be placed out there with ” the first time ever” marketing catch line attached.

It is already happening at the Opera House, and my gut instinct is that the ICA will also do more of this – motion capture projects with pop stars, net art pieces made by well known journalists, robots commissioned from racing car stars and such like will become the known and supported outputs of media art within the UK.

Ghislaine Boddington
Creative Director body>data>space

Post Me_New ID Forum, looking at identity, the post human body & digital practices taking place in conjunction with CYNETart festival / TMA Hellerau in Dresden 
between 31st October – 2nd November 2008.


http://www.postme-newid.net

Post Me_New ID is a co-production between body>data>space (London, UK), 
CIANT (Prague, Czech Republic), CYNETart / TMA (Dresden, Germany) 
and Kibla (Maribor, Slovenia) supported by the European Union within the Culture 2007 Programme.

Centre des Arts Enghien-les-Bains, Paris
body>data>space exhibition ‘Virtual Physical Bodies’
9th October 2008 – 11th January 2009.


http://www.cda95.fr

http://www.bodydataspace.net

This is a well balanced article and I am glad that Claire has written about the subject…