Researcher, USED project (HIIT/m-cult), media artist, producer
Research topic
Contextual media fieldwork: participatory mobile systems, devised events, and socially-engaged art practice
Research abstract
The main proposition of this artistic and practice-led research is that contextual, participatory mobile media systems can be designed to allow the manifestation and sharing of everyday experience and relations between communities, people and places, for creative, social or agenda-based purposes. But, how can engagements be made in a socially responsible way? What are useful methods and conceptual tools to communicate the aesthetics of involvement, representation, and sustainability in such systems? How can one facilitate – better introduce – the multiple and combined roles of initiators, contributors, audience-members who partake in/of the process?
These questions are explored through workshops and devised encounters: within actual, material and situated places, involving direct engagement with particularities – specific people, communities, localities, sites – which make meanings, interpretations, re-presentations, and so tell stories. Theoretical support is found in critical socially-engaged art approaches to collaboration, ethics and exchange; devised performance and narrativity; complementary methods in fieldwork practices within social science.
Short bio
My creative practice involves working in the roles of initiator, participant, author and producer, according to/and within different collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. These roles operate within the field where ‘artwork’ is a conversation, devised situation, designed workshop or event. The activity specialises in mobile and collaborative interfaces or interactions.
This focus has evolved from the layers and processes of printmaking, through a blend of poetic text, inter-relations between media, virtual/augmented environments and organising community art workshops. Of the past year, story-making/telling and listening are an influential set of modes in representing my own and others’ experience.
In 2003, doctoral research began at Media Lab UIAH with aims to consolidate the artistic and socially-engaged organisational practices, mainly through two complemetary projects ‘Aware’ and ‘Mapmyths’.
Links
Personal pages and portfolio: http://mlab.uiah.fi/~apaterso
Aware: http://aware.uiah.fi
Mapmyths: http://mapmyths.rixc.lv
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