A Memorial for the Still Living. Premiered at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. Upcoming show at the Horniman Museum in London.
BOOK
Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. MIT Press; Leonardo Book Series. ed., Beatriz da Costa & Kavita Philip.
WORKSHOP
Invisible Earthlings Workshop. [as part of "Species We Live With"]
Pigeonblog [documentation & ephemera] on view at Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside, CA.
REVIEWS/INTERVIEWS I LIKE
The Place of Art in the Age of Biotechnological Reproducibility. (pdf) [Review of Tactical Biopolitics in "BioSocieties."]
Processes, Issues AIR: Toward Reticular Politics. (pdf) [Full fledged article about Preemptive Media's and my work in "Australian Humanities Review."]
Interview with Beatriz da Costa. (pdf) [by Alessandro Ludovico, "Neural Magazine."]
COLLABORATIVE
Preemptive Media Preemptive Media is a collaborative operating at the nexus of art, activism and technology.
BEATRIZ DA COSTA
Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She works at the intersection of art, politics, engineering and the life sciences.
Installation at John Hansard Gallery A Memorial for the Still Living is an installation originally developed for “Dark Places,” an exhibition conceived and organized by the
Office Experiments and the Arts Catalyst in London.
A Memorial for the Still Living confronts visitors with the realities of species endangerment in the UK. On view are a number of regional
taxidermed specimens currently being under threat of extinction. The specimens are temporary donations from the Natural History Museum
in London and the Horniman Museum and represent the only form of encounter we will be able have with those species once they have been eradicated
from our planet. As humans we will be able to "study" the species in their dead preserved form but the opportunity for in person
encounter will be lost. "Go out and "meet the species" before its too late," is the somewhat sombre undertone of this project.
A Memorial for the Still Living is a commission by the Arts Catalyst.
Future exhibitions and enhancements of the project are currently planned for fall 2010.
Details Some info about Dark Places: New works by Neal White of the Office of Experiments, Steve Rowell,
Victoria Halford & Steve Beard, and Beatriz da Costa explore spaces and institutions below the radar of common knowledge.
Dark Places examines how artists are evolving strategies for art as a form of knowledge production, challenging accepted patterns in contemporary culture and society.
The Office of Experiments’ (OOE) Overt Research Project sets a background for Dark Places as it maps and records advanced
labs and facilities that are unwittingly – or purposefully – concealed from public view. Developed by a team of independent
researchers, 'Dark Places - South Edition', will feature an interpretive slideshow as well as field guide to local sites through
an information kiosk. Elsewhere in the gallery, OOE celebrates the openness of knowledge through The Mike Kenner Archive.
Revealing years of campaigning by one man into the public biochemical warfare experiments conducted by Porton Down (Salisbury),
the work explores how 'Dark Places' throw their shadows onto those that question them.
Victoria Halford and Steve Beard's film Voodoo Science Park traces a secret geography of the Health and Safety Laboratory in
Derbyshire, where train crashes and industrial accidents are re-created to examine their destructive pathways. Mixing fact and
fiction, the film imagines a delayed encounter between poet William Blake and political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The result
is an uncanny meditation on science and popular memory.
Exploring the ‘dark places’ of zoological science, Beatriz da Costa’s A Memorial for the Still Living is a sombre reflection
on endangered species of the British Isles. Presenting a selection of rare animal, insect and reptile specimens, including
loans from the Natural History and Horniman Museums, da Costa identifies these collections – and the bleak future they imply - as sites of hidden knowledge.
Steve Rowell from the US group the Centre for Land-Use Interpretation (CLUI), in his project Ultimate High Ground, uncovers
shared US-UK spaces of military power. Realised as a multi-screen film installation, the work focuses upon RAF Menwith Hill,
North Yorkshire, a communications intercept and missile warning site, known for its distinctive raydome structures. Steve has
also worked as a key researcher on the OOE Overt Research Project.
Details