2019, Allen, Jamie, Boelen, Jan

A School of Schools: Design as Learning is an educational web of design strategies for learning and learning strategies for design. The answers needed to address the world’s constant sense of crisis are not being delivered by the tried-and-tested education models. With the age-old logic of material abundance and information scarcity inverted, new ideas and knowledge to address previously unimaginable complexities are needed. We need to liberate our minds from the preconceived outcomes with which we have been schooled. Not knowing is the first step to learning something new. The Lie Machine project forms part of A School of Schools: Design as Learning as project and publication, curated by Jan Boelen, co-founding artistic director of the research program Atelier Luma, with Nadine Botha and Vera Sacchetti. The exhibition features the work of multidisciplinary practitioners from around the world and is presented in a custom-made ensemble in Arles. Throughout the course of four weeks in Arles, the exhibition becomes a temporary laboratory and observation display of a 2030 horizon. It explores the learning environment as a context of empowerment, reflection, sharing and engagement, providing speculative responses to recent global preoccupations.

2011, Allen, Jamie

For more than ten years, a number of archival and curatorial projects have mapped out a trajectory of art-historical roots for the values and practices of new media arts, its conventions and institutions. These accounts are, as often as not, earnest attempts made by practitioners and theorists alike to “save” new media’s artists and works from the purported inevitability of becoming a ghettoized subculture, walled off from the resources and distribution channels associated with Western contemporary (and commercial) museum and gallery culture. Saving new media in this way purportedly holds the promise of improving critical discourse surrounding “the work”, developing audience and interest, stimulating economic potential, and securing new media its rightful detent as another lineal “movement” in histories of creative practice. The experimental, process-driven and often anti-professional outlook of the conceptual avant-garde of the latter half of the 20th century provides an oft-cited and somewhat contradictory framework for situating new media within a contemporary art system that has remained relatively formal. As well, the current proliferation, popularization and extension of abilities that only a decade ago were the exclusive purvey of self-proclaimed new media artists have resulted in a number of points of entry for non-specialists to access concepts in non-objective art, participatory performance, process and systems-art. Is the dream of the early techno-artistic avant-garde becoming a reality?

2012, Allen, Jamie, Papadimitriou, Irini

Refractive Index is a visual media essay and compositional about the environmental and ecological impacts of large scale media. Site-specific software creates a digital camera obscura, and in a series of late night screenings a programmed sequence of flashes, strobes and streaks, emit bursts of light and colour across the hue spectrum of large scale public displays. Outward facing CCTV cameras, part of each screen’s infrastructure, captures images throughout. Programmed algorithms examine the footage for slippages and incongruities of the screen-camera feedback system. Every pixel we light up, in turn illuminates the environment surrounding it. The light energies that impact city and lived spaces, highlights the ways that media infrastructures effect nonhuman and human movement and behaviour in these spaces, as well as their luminous and aesthetic interactions with quotidian environments. Refractive Index inverts lines of synoptic-panoptic vision, showing us what our screens "see" when they peer out the night sky. The screens 'speak' with their own machine voices, in the language of technological, digital light. The work is shown as a collection of research media (photographs, site-specific films, interactive software, printed renders, screen-based video and projection), and has featured test-patterns screened overnight 9 cities in the UK as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad leadup to the 2012 London Olympics. Refractive Index was presented as part of Future Everything 2012 in Manchester, and as solo-exhibition at PH. Gallery, Newcastle, UK. The project was initiated through a commissioned by BBC Big Screens and the Olympic Cultural Foundation, UK. Dynamic, visual digital moving imagery increasingly blankets our public space and architecture. Their history can be traced to the late 19th C adaptation of magic lanterns to project “advertisements and election results on public buildings” (Huhtamo 2001). We still think of this media, these dynamic rectangles-of-light, as vehicles for transmitting messages — as ways of telling stories, delivering messaging, engaging people in linear or interactive content-rich experiences. At their best, these are valuable, creative and communicative platforms, and occasions for communities to meet and celebrate. The physicality, energetics, or thermodynamics, of these non-trivial systems is seldom discussed. Notable and inspiring exceptions include Blake Gordon's 2009 Cloud Projection project about uplightingfrom buildings casting light into overhead clouds, and Terraswarm's 2007 Color Shift project which took over a single large scale display in Brooklyn, bathing the burrough in coloured light. What is curiously elided from the critical picture of public digital screens is their massive architectural, ecological and infrastructural presence — the Olympic Big Screens used are at least 25 square metres in light-area, and necessitate a nearby server and control room the screens have significant, critical architectural impact. Where once there was shadow, glaring reflections appear, interrupting movement and traffic patterns, exposing once hidden places. Cladding, materials and paints turn into multicolored surfaces, glowing, reflecting and flickering with the energy of outdoor screens, their potency multiplied into the 3-dimensions around them. Turning 180 degrees from these screens, we see that the architectures of a city are continuously reshaped and remolded by the presence of media, in direct and immediate way. As important as the content on the screen, these are the effects of the screen on content of the city, architecture, space, human and nonhuman beings. Refractive Index was created with the grateful support of the wonderul Tom Schofield and David Gauthier, exhibited and supported by the Future Everything festival, Ph Space Gallery in Newcaslte, 2012 Cultural Olympiad in the UK, the BBC Big Screens engineers and programme, Culture Lab Newcastle University.

2010, Allen, Jamie

Art-historical chronicles of new media art often invoke a set of conceptual underpinnings instigated in art movements that are themselves defined by lukewarm or combative relationships with art history, its cannon and establishment. Connections are most often made to Alan Kaprow, his Activities, Environments and Happenings of the 1960s, as well as to Fluxus practitioners such as Nam June Paik. At their most extreme, a number of these artists’ undertakings were clearly and actively hostile toward the serious-minded approach of art-historians, curators and institutional cultures of their time. New media, now a quite defined and delineated mainstream Western art form, does not betray its lineage in maintaining a difficult relationship to art history and scholarship. Handling a modern touchscreen mobile phone gives us immediate an immediate feeling for the “real time” of our real world technologies. Gone are the days of hierarchical, navigable descriptions - "push 'menu’, then ‘settings’, then ‘network’”. Instead we struggle to conjure up a descriptive language that appropriately outlines to the new user the set of swipes, squiggles and pantomimed gestures required to access function on the device. These interactions clearly value individual temporal experience over transferability - and increasingly create the opportunity for time-based communion rituals linking person to technology, and technology to person. Through a set of discussions around time, technology and time-based arts and the systems, process and performance art-historical ancestry of new media, we affirm a deep valuing of “real-time” at play in contemporary technology-art practice. Standard chronologies of art-history lose their importance as models for technology and art move from art-as-progress to art-as-experience. In this, we perform at least a partial autopsy on art-history, celebrating its time-of-death as marking the birth of a resurgent appreciation of the authentic experience of artists and non-artists, as people-in-the-world.

2011, Allen, Jamie