We have a situation!Worklab and participatory live-performances online and on sitehttp://www.wehaveasituation.net We have a situation Graz: Performance: Wed. 22.5., 19:00 - 19:30 p.m. CET Location: Ökoservice, Puchstrasse 41, 8020 Graz. 22:00 Conzert: Jenny Pickett (UK/FR) / Eva Ursprung
Location: club wakuum, Hans Sachs Gasse 12, 8010 Graz.
We have a situation! is a series of live, trans-border, online-offline participatory performances addressing current cross-cultural European issues. Four “situations” were created, in France, Netherlands, UK and Austria, between March-May 2013. Each involved a 4-day workshop and a performance and discussion event, using the online platform UpStage (www.upstage.org.nz) In each location, a current topical issue was chosen as the theme and researched; from this a performance was created, that shared stories and posed questions to creatively frame the specific situation. After each performance, the audience - both online and at physical venues - participated in a discussion that imagined creative solutions to the situation. The project was supported by a grant from the European Cultural Foundation. Situation GrazAs the saying goes, “we are what we eat” - but the increasing use of pesticides, chemical fertilisers and genetic modification, as well as the extensive movement of food around the world, means that we often don’t know what we are eating or where it has come from. If we don’t know what we eat, how can we know what we are? Our venue in Graz was appropriately located near to the slaughterhouse and a former factory for animal food. During the workshop we researched industrial and organic farming in Austria, and made excursions to a local community garden and the kunstGarten Graz. Participant Veronika Koren from the VGT (Association against Animal Factories) gave a presentation about Austrian meat production and industrialised farming in Europe, and we drew on our recent learnings about intensive pig farming in Eindhoven to make connections between people’s eating habits and meat production. The large group of workshop participants from diverse artistic and cultural backgrounds brought a wide range of personal perspectives to the situation. With the experience of three situations already behind us, we were able to plan well for this last event and allocated more time for the whole programme. This meant we could experiment more with the technology, had more time for rehearsals, and fitted in cultural visits - to Kunsthaus Graz and the church St. Andrä, which displays contemporary art in and on the church. Our cyberformance “U.F.F. – Unidentified Flying Food” told the simple story of a pig who breaks free from her cage and journeys across the lush Austrian countryside, only to discover that outside life is fraught with questions and uncertainties that leave her wondering if she wasn’t better off in her cage. Pig’s story was interspersed with news flashes about sightings of “U.F.F.s” in the Austrian skies. Facts about global food production and farming practices were presented in the news flashes and through animations and audio. Eva Ursprung facilitated the discussion, which began with a streamed presentation from London responding to the situation and continued with the local audience in Graz, online participants, and a stream from Eindhoven. Changing our personal eating habits was a solution offered in the discussions, and from later feedback we learned that some people have indeed made permanent changes to their eating habits as a result of participating in the event. (Text: Helen Varley Jamieson) Participating artists in Graz: Helen Varley Jamieson (DE/NZ) “Satellites” in London, Nantes and Eindhoven: Christina Papagiannouli (London) PARTNERS APO33 (Nantes, France) APO33, based in Nantes-France, is a not-for-profit association/artists collective founded in 1996 by Julien Ottavi. APO33 research practices cross philosophy, poetry, visual, sonic art and anything else that may arrive through collaborative working. APO33 operates across networked and physical spaces and develops tools (hardware/software) for creative projects and the wider FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) community of artists and programmers. APO33, as an interdisciplinary laboratory drawing on the artistic and technological fields, fosters various collective projects associating research, experimentation and social intervention. Furtherfield (London, UK) Furtherfield was founded by artists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett in 1997 and sustained by the work of its community as the Internet took shape as a new public space for internationally connected cultural production. Furtherfield is now a dynamic, creative and social nerve centre where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a visionary culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas. Furtherfield believes that through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and technology people are inspired and enabled to become active co-creators of their cultures and societies. Our mission is to co-create extraordinary art that connects with contemporary audiences providing innovative, engaging and inclusive digital and physical spaces for appreciating and participating in practices in art, technology and social change. MAD emergent art centre (Eindhoven, NL) Foundation MAD (Multi-Disc Art, 1995) was established as an artists initiative and has become a very active organization with enthusiastic volunteers, each with their own specialization, which develop connections between art, science and technology. MAD acts as a laboratory, platform and provider of Emergent Art: art that arises from the tension between cultural – and cutting-edge technology. MAD maintains its interfaces as large as possible and focuses on artists, designers, scientists, technologists, public interest groups, educational institutions, governments and businesses. This takes place both regionally, nationally and internationally. The use of networks like the Internet, ICT and new media offer the possibility to represent interactive research, development, presentation, production, distributions, and discussions that are accessible for public. Institutional Partners European Cultural Foundation (NL) back | 
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