Seven Senses on the Land (SSOTL)
Hosts: Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman of the Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) together with Leena Valkeapää
Participants: Netta Norro, Stephan Dudeck, Avner Peled, Judith van der Elst, Jose Marcos Perez Diaz, Alia Malley, Charli Clark
Complex ecological networked systems can be observed, read and navigated by employing Intuition and Technology. Artists, hunters and herders, tactical media workers and scientists will be joining forces to develop, deploy, use and question enhanced sensing systems and methods. This could lead to new and surprising insights and construction of semantic territories, in which the gaze and measurement become knowledges and are projected back onto the land in order to structure completely new vectors of meaning, understanding and orientation. Our senses guide us through the world. Combined with experience, knowledge and openness we can begin to develop new realtionships and understandings of Earth systems and our collective embedded positions within. We will develop the ability to augment these senses through Technology and Intuition, engaging Local and Traditional knowledges, Art, Engineering and Sciences. This group will explore the machinic in the ecologies and the animals in the machines.
Matthew Biederman works across media and milieus, architectures and systems, communities and continents since 1990. He creates works that utilize light, space and sound to reflect on the intricacies of perception mediated through digital technologies through installations, screen-based work and performance. Since 2008 he is a co-author of Arctic Perspective Initiative, dedicated to augmenting traditional knowledge through new technologies for greater autonomy of the circumpolar region. His work has been featured at: Lyon Bienniale, Istanbul Design Bienniale, The Tokyo Museum of Photography, ELEKTRA, SCAPE Bienniale and CTM among others. http://www.mbiederman.com/
Marko Peljhan is a theatre and radio director, conceptual artist and researcher. From 1994 on he has been coordinating the Makrolab project in all its dimensions. He is the co-founder of the Ljudmila digital media lab (1995) and the initiatives I-TASC (Interpolar Transnational Arts Science Constellation) and API – Arctic Perspective Initiative with Matthew Biederman. His work has been widely exhibited in numerous exhibitions worldwide. He is the recipient of several art prizes, among others the Golden Nica in the Interactive arts category for the work "polar" with Carsten Nicolai. He also works as Professor of interdisciplinary studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is also the artistic director of the not for profit arts organization Zavod Projekt Atol and the editor at large of the music label rx:tx. http://www.ladomir.net/
D.A. artist and researcher Leena Valkeapää lives in the wilderness in the northwest Lapland. Her doctoral dissertation In the Nature, a dialog with Nils-Aslak Valkeapää´s art (2011) proposed a dialogue with nature and its poets. Se has exhibited as a visual artist since (1988) and has produced public environmental artworks, including the rock wall piece Ice Veil (1999) in Turku. She wrote a regular column to Lappish newspaper Lapin Kansa during the years 2012-2014. Valkeapää is taking part of the daily works in a reindeer herding, in sami culture tradition. Leena Valkeapää works as a visiting lecture in the Department of Art in Aalto University.
Jose Marcos Perez Diaz studied technical engineering and topography at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and is CEO -UAS Manager at Airdrone 3D.
Charli Clark is a UK artist, currently based in Espoo, Finland where she is completing her Masters in Environmental Art at Aalto University. Clark's practice is collaborative and social-specific, exploring the inter-connectivity of Earth through working alongside others to share and exchange skills and knowledge in relation to the concepts of society and consumption. Recent commissions include 'Take One Down' for AMORPH!14, Community?, MUU Gallery, Helsinki, Finland, ‘SWARM’ for BZZZ International Sound Art Festival, Harp Art Lab, Sweden and 'Catch Your Breath' for Paper Makers: Bring Science to Life through Art, Glasgow, UK.
Stephan Dudeck is an anthropologist working at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland as a member of the ORHELIA (Oral History of Empires by Elders in the Arctic) project that collects stories from indigenous groups of the Barents regions. He finished his dissertation on the persistence of reindeer herders' lifestyles in Western Siberia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany in 2011. From 1993 to the present, he visited regularly Khanty and Nenets reindeer herders in the Russian North and Siberia. Among his interests are adaptations to technological change, visual cultures, resistance and practices of avoidance.
Netta Norro is an international based arts manager, cultural producer and communicator. She is the coordinator for Changing Weathers project which Field_Notes HYBRID MATTERs is part of. Norro holds a BA in Arts Management and MA in Arts. She has been working extensively in culture and in arts with production and coordination and with communications in culture and in btob. Recent years she has also worked with development and internationalization of creative organizations. She is a qualified process and online facilitator. She used to have love for factory buildings and cargo ships but these days she is more into humanity and nature.
Avner started off as a software developer and IT security specialist in the Israeli military. Later he moved on to game development, while pursuing academic studies in Neurobiology and Philosophy of consciousness in Tel Aviv university - Including one year in Waseda university, Tokyo. For the past 3 years he has been working part-time in a music industry start-up, using the spare time for New Media art, 'Making' and volunteering within the refugee community in Tel Aviv. Now he's entering the next step – A Master's in New Media art at Media Lab Helsinki.
Judith van der Elst is an anthropologist/archaeologist specialized in humanistic approaches in the geosciences. She received her PhD from the University of New Mexico for research testing the limitations of spatial information systems for representing and understanding the diversity in human spatial thinking, using the concept of cognitive landscapes. Her work focuses on understanding multimodal perception of the land, through merging embodied learning, sensing technologies, and ubiquitous computing within a biosemiotic framework. Leading a semi-nomadic lifestyle she explores this approach through transdisciplinary collaborations, among others with Urbino University, Aalto Media Lab: Systems of Representation, and Machine Wilderness project (Theun Karelse).