Engines of Difference: Dubai

I was delighted to hear last month that Lynne Heller and I have been accepted for ISEA Dubai 2014 with our proposal Engines of Difference.

We will be working collaboratively on the project, via skype and together in the galleries, malls and desert fringes of Dubai during the ISEA conference and arts programme.

I met Lynne - a Toronto-based postdisciplinary artist - at ISEA Istanbul 2011, and we began to develop this proposal the following year - to explore what might happen if we were to coordinate the coordinates of real-world geocaching with Lynne's avatar's adventures in Second Life.
We hope to secure funding to develop the collaboration in Canada and UK, as well as to make the work in Dubai and tour it in the UK through a series of interactive events and performances.

Since receiving acceptance of our proposal we have worked up the project requirements, budget and description, and will continue to do so in partnership with ISEA curatorial team over the next few months.

Project Description, for ISEA Dubai:

Engines of Difference, 2014, is a site-responsive project utilizing tourist transportation, the geographies of Dubai, sites of consumer consumption and virtual worlds, to investigate difference and glocalization. The project title references Elizabeth Grosz who, in a keynote address for the 2007 Feminist Theory Workshop, quotes Charles Darwin speaking about nature as “the most beautiful machinery for the endless proliferation of difference”. Grosz follows this with “…difference is now the very force that vibrates the world itself into becoming”.

Artists Jackie Calderwood (UK) and Lynne Heller (CA) collaborate in a hybrid reality experience of becoming within the urban settings of Dubai, in the virtual world of Second Life, and in traditional gallery space. Their collaboration builds on the possibility and inclusivity of Calderwood’s Hunter Gatherer, a geo-art-cache participatory encounter in the physical landscape; and Heller’s performative work in Second Life with her avatar, Nar Duell.

Calderwood will invite participation from ISEA delegates and interested public to board the Dubai tourist bus. The group will be given the option to download an iPhone app to augment the treasure hunt through the shopping malls of Dubai and the fringes of the desert on the edge of the city. The audience will disembark from the bus in search of specific GPS locations en route, in both natural and man-made sites that have been previously prepared by the artists. The group’s experiences and perceptions will be relayed back to the gallery space where Heller will attempt to follow the hunt through the geography and shopping malls of Second Life.

Viewers in the gallery will witness the unique ‘DNA of moments’ sent from the geocache locations as they become the engines for difference. Audience and online participants will be encouraged to join in; each quest and discovery will generate visual and text content. Heller will interpret the ‘DNA of moments’ which will guide her avatar in a series of real-time adventures through Second Life. In between performances, machinima and documentation will be screened in the gallery along with the unique responses sent by participants. The length of time of each session will be a couple of hours and the performance repeated at various times throughout the conference. Along with the local participants, people viewing the project through Second Life will have the ability to interact with real time audience at a distance and will be guided in that virtual experience in unexpected and creative ways.

Material collected from the performative work will be exported from the virtual world and made into assemblage art in gallery comic book form. Subsequently the comic book will become a concrete artefact to complement the online documentation of the project.

This collaborative project explores the idea of art as an engine of difference and possibility between constituencies and sites involved: ISEA delegates, the general interested public, Second Life participants, geo-caching communities, and local businesses. The artists intend the project to create a dialogue with the local community such as tour bus companies, store owners, mall managers. Calderwood and Heller hope that the delight in making, as a group or as an individual in a larger collaborative effort, will lead to enhanced sharing and understanding. Artistic stimulus elicits expressions of noticing which act as “the most beautiful machinery for the endless proliferation of difference” in this glocalized hybrid reality performance.