Thinking about .Re/act…

I think a lot about the space .re/act provides and about the value of this space. I was hoping that, perhaps, we could talk a little about what .re/act and spaces like it (do we know of any others?) mean to the artists engaging with this platform and how do we perceive this space relative to the real-world institutional spaces we are familiar with within our respective practices.

I tend to shy away from biography, however, I realised, while thinking over this subject, that some background details are necessary and fair in order to understand my position here.

So, a brief synopsis: Northern Ireland, late 1990s, my excitement begins! Graduate with BA in Fine Art, complete studio residency in Belfast followed by international studio artists’ residency at PS1/MOMA; continue performing/screening national & international festivals. FF >> few years: no job, no money, complete MSc in Interactive Media, no job, no money, exhibiting intermittently, get job in Japan for a year, return to Ireland, meet my darling husband, work in educational curatorial job, have children, exhibiting becomes even more intermittent…child very ill – art superfluous – child well and happy, art nudges back in there…but wee kids make the act of finishing a sentence a major challenge…

I think you probably get the picture, eh? 😉

So, the PBR course comes along and I think: Wow! Fantastic! Couldn’t fit the bill better if I’d written the brief myself! I sign up. I love it. I hate it. I feel out of my depth. I feel alive. I won’t finish it. I will finish it. I do!  🙂 And, in the background (while the course is running), .re/act is simmering and I’m excited to have a paw in there. The course finishes (kind of abruptly, really, in the end) but .re/act is alive and kicking and is everything I recognise (and more) from my involvement with artist-run spaces in the past. Part of the beauty of .re/act, for me, is that it is critically alert and self-consciously aware of its environment, its posturing in a cross-over stage. I think this may be because we are coming from very different disciplines with very different real/virtual-world skill-sets and experiences but we share in common an urge to experiment, play, make positive changes and explore the medium rather than simply showcasing stuff online (which, in my experience, seems to be how many visual artists approach the medium). I clearly remember Vanessa issuing the challenge to us, as artists, to lead with new technologies rather than lamely pursue them…I couldn’t agree with her more!

I met up with a dear friend in Belfast last week. He’s an artist and curator whose practice interrogates performance and its documentation, through performance.  He’s currently working on a project that minces time and place, is fluid with ‘fact’ and ambiguous about ‘evidence’, simultaneously celebrating and critiquing inaccuracies in archival processes. We’ve known one another a long time. I told him a lot about my experiences in .re/act (his deliciously disobedient approach to history reminded me of our fun and games with 1850 Charla) and we talked about shifts the “established” art world needs to make if it wants to remain relevant in this changing world.

Yesterday my sister accused me of falling victim to “the illusion of democracy on the internet” but is this notion of online democracy really so illusory? Strikes me that it is certainly not any more so than the illusion of democracy as it functions in the real world…In fact, I’m choosing to believe that, at this moment, the internet can much better support creative freedoms – and that, before we lock it down and suffocate those freedoms with laws (heaven knows, there’s enough energy and money wasted on copyright issues already!) and inhibit its potential by institutionalizing online educational/creative spaces, we’ve got to find ways to propagate and nourish the alternative spaces like .re/act and Izzy’s Uni. There’s a sense of urgency that, I feel, we cannot afford to ignore. It’s this kind of energy that propelled the artist-run initiatives I “came of age” with in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s and, I think, there’s something really powerful here…