ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [9 March 2010]

About RAT+ talking with things Blog

I wasn't prepared for blogging to become part of my arts practice. But it has. Initially I just needed to document my Arts council funded  project " RAT + talking with things and blogging offered me a useful tool that provides maximum transparency, allowing my collaborators and others to see into my project. Come evaluation time I will be well prepared.

You can visit my blogspot on

http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/rat-talking-with-...

My aim is to tell you about my experience of collaboration with Land management Organisations and others.

And in this my first blog, I'm going to be looking at my project blog as a medium; talking about Blogs and blogging is I think an appropriate way to start.  I just can't ignore the presence of the blog, as if it was invisible and begin to use it. And really my arts practice happens around the Agency of things. Not everyone knows what "Agency" means, but I imagine artists like you will have an idea about it already. Artists are aware of the collaboration with materials that happens in their practice. But anyway... broadly speaking Agency is the capacity of something to act upon something else with or without purposivity and intention. One part of something may also act upon another part, as do the constituents of the cells in our body for example.  I won't go into any more detail, it's enough to recognise that a blog has "agency", a blogsite has "agency" and the blogosphere has "agency". Each separate organism is nested inside the other and they act upon one another to generate meaning and upon outsiders or "Others".   And you can't really separate them from the rest of the objects of the world. We are all linked.  

The shape of blogging software means that bloggers, and this goes for all of us that blog, are potentially hooked right from their first blog. It's plainly an addictive activity and no-one thought to warn me!

As an artist, with a contemporary Arts and Ecology practice, I'm intrigued by the aesthetic structure that houses my blogwords, images and thoughts. To me, my iweb with its templates and options resembles the intricate structure of a coral reef; its myriad nooks and crannies ready to host potential forms. And of course the blogsite itself dwells inside my own website which in turn lives inside my domain.

www.annakeleher.com

And then there are blogcatalogues, servers and the rest of the web and all that takes place now and you are a part of it, just by being here and reading this post. 

It goes without saying that cyberspace, has its own rich ecology of which we experience only a tiny part. The part I'm familiar with might share aspects of the area which you inhabit, but no two views are ever going to be identical. And only a small part of cyberspace is visible at all, a lot of it is underground, like the mycelium of fungi.  (mycelium is the web like structure of fungi that extends beneath the ground and is not the fruiting body; the mushroom). 

So of course this blog, this tiny blog that is building itself line by line, image by image and is finally finding its shape, represents only a dot in the blogosphere in which it will exist for the briefest time.

The blogosphere is an entity, a kind of organism or system which is growing and contracting and changing all the time with all our communal inputs. Constantly inventing itself and constantly maintaining its integrity. I think its important to keep that present and not let it become invisible to us, to use and abuse.

Now this new blog that I'm starting well...Its  not just a tool, it acts as a kind of instrument, like a microscope or a telescope which offers me a perspective on my existing project blog; the one I told you about earlier, allowing me to see it in a way that was not possible before. 

I'm hoping that for you the reader, this blog might also be an instrument, which will allow you to see in a different way and this might affect how you act in the world and perhaps your own art practice. That would be a fine result.

# 2 [26 March 2010]

This week I'm filling you in about my project and sharing some extracts of my last RAT + talking with things post with you.

RAT + talking with things is a 6 month research and development project funded by National Lottery through Arts Council England.

My project kicked off at the end of Sept 2009 with an exhilarating trip to New Mexico to exhibit, co-lead a participatory piece at a prehistoric Native American settlement and make work for Sand Dunes National Park and Wild Rivers Recreation Center. My collaborator Claire Long and I  had a full on amazing, fun and productive time, which was an excellent start to my funded period. So much happened.

Back home in Devon permissons from the land management orgs I'd be working with still hadn't come in. So I set up a project web and blog site, let my project find a name and contacted my local arts officer. She called a meeting and after I flipped an entire "camelback" full of water over the table the Geopark co-ordinator Mel Border gave me the green light!

Its all working out fine and I'm having an amazing time, though it can be tough juggling 3 pilot-projects in two countries.

So many people, places and sites make up the English Riviera Geopark.it is  filled to the brim with gateway sites, rangers, experts, animals, plants, people, places and many many ROCKS and stones that go way down towards the mantle of the earth.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RATmkF9zXy4 I make sure I allow myself plenty of space to reflect, time to think and dream..... its not all about packing in the experiences, the live-interactions and the documentation.

The parallel worlds of the blogosphere and the Geopark are rich and vital places to inhabit and its fun, thinking, leaning and sharing my projects with the public.

Extract from RAT + talking blog www.annakeleher.com

"In the natural woodlands of Paignton Zoo, there are several small rocky openings that lead to worlds quite distinct from those which most of us (humans) inhabit.....

Danielle Schreve from London’s  Royal Holloway Collage http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/Schreve/ spent a brief but rewarding spell inside Lynx cave. She needed to check some things and emerged, smiling like a cheshire cat! I found her post cave chat session really helpful in constructing potential Geopark pasts.

I’m already seeing a niche for myself as a creative thinker/experimental researcher. My mind is pretty agile and like the shrimp in the cave I’m adapted to working in the dark. Art thrives in the gaps between the facts.
 
Using myself and the contemporary natural environment as lab I allow potential artifacts to emerge and I think such techniques could be valuable in helping us to find out more about our own and other hominid cultures, in the absence of artifacts (from organic material) from the archaeological record.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8583254.stm