Ambulant Science Studio
at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art 2003
Documentation, and interview from the exhibition catalogue, from the inaugural exhibition of Wales at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art 2003.
This work was produced during a 6 month residency at the Ex-Birreria on Guidecca (Venice, Italy) and exhibited in a group-show alongside the work of artists Cerith Wyn Evans, Bethan Huws, and Paul Seawright. The exhibition was curated by Patricia Fleming.
Ambulant Science Studio marks one of my earliest attempts to get to grips with walking as a contemporary art practice and the theories that accompany it. This work was largely concerned with walking as an everyday practice in an urban environment, and built upon the methods and themes of my book, London Walking, which had been published in 2001.
Subsequently, my work increasingly gravitated towards the discourse of participatory art, and the various social modalities of walking within and beyond art. A paper, offering some self-reflexion on this tension – It was meant 2 b gr8: reneging on the participatory ethos of software culture in the 2003 Venice Biennale –is to be published in Page: the Journal of the Computer Arts Society, (SpringerBriefs in Cultural Computing Series) in 2019.
Simon Pope in-conversation with Kris Cohen and Sarah Cook
Kris Cohen and I met artist Simon Pope at a conference titled, appropriately enough for Simon's invitation to Venice, Bridges. Simon's reputation as a noteworthy media artist had preceded him, in part through his winning of a Webby Award (2000) for his collaborative project, I/O/D 4: The Webstalker (http://bak.spc.org/iod 1997) - a free tool for browsing the Web. It is not often that 'net artists' working in the open-source software camp get glossy media recognition for their anti-commercial, anti-institutional work. We were intrigued.
Naturally, it turned out there was a lot more to learn about Simon - his position as a Course Director at UWIC Business School in Cardiff (a forward thinking place to be, charting data flows from art to commerce), his NESTA fellowship, and his curating of the Art for Networks which was first exhibited at Chapter, Cardiff in 2002 and which has toured the UK this past year.
That Simon is now in Venice, charting that most not-wired of European cities is exciting indeed. For the Wales Pavilion , Simon is developing a project which follows on from both the 'tools for enquiry' / 'speculative tools' aspect of the Webstalker and his book London Walking (2000). While the former is software that enables one to navigate around the non-locality of the World Wide Web, the latter is a text that enables one to find ways around the very location-specific capital city.
With our joint research interests in technology, mobility, performative art projects, and exhibition structures, Kris Cohen and I paired up to ask Simon about his work for the Biennale.
SC + KC: Venice is a city which is difficult to navigate unless you have a compass or are content to 'crowd surf' the trails of tourists (which, as you've noted, lead inevitably to a church or a bathroom). As your new work is about navigation, how are you going about your research while there? And what form will your investigations take?
SP: I'm based in a temporary space in the Ex-Birreria on the Giudecca. I'm following leads from people on the ground there and, from these 'street smarts', describing exercises and investigations that both visitors to Venice and an online audience can participate in.
At the moment, these activities include: looking for rainbows, (especially in glasses of Campari); making a flotilla of origami gondolas; logging kisses across the city; building bridges over the slightest of gaps in paving; and learning to whistle loud enough to be heard across the Giudecca canal. Some of these exercises will result in a series of photographs, audio recordings or text panels in the Ex-Birreria; others in live events, and small objects sited around Venice itself, made while walking there.
SC + KC: How do you arrive at these exercises? What relationship do your investigations have to common experiences of walking around Venice?
SP: This new work springs from my current research into art practice as a possible 'ambulant' research methodology. You could think of 'ambulant method' in literal, technical terms: walking as a research method that might reveal, disseminate or validate knowledge in ways that are impossible for 'proper' or 'major' scientific enquiry.
But there's a wider definition that is also useful here, where ambulant describes an approach that is revocable. This might provide a way of thinking through what could be considered as 'valid' knowledge, and who can speak about it. Quite often, I've felt that I needed to have certain knowledge - derived from someone else's situation - before I can begin to speak. What if you don't have supposedly 'valid' knowledge? What if your situation makes it impossible anyhow? Rather than seek a commanding position with 'proper' knowledge, I want to explore the process of coming to an understanding. This might be a tentative process, constantly developing and revising methodological ''rules-of-thumb', but at each point being able to speak about the world and your place within it.
SC + KC: In an earlier conversation, you mentioned Deleuze and Guattari's theory of 'minor science' as an important influence. Can you talk specifically about the major sciences you're interested in with this project and how you want the minor sciences you're inventing to act upon, or deterritorialise them?
SP: My practice is related to 'major' disciplines such as Urban Planning and Architecture, but also works as a critique of proper research methodologies across many academic disciplines. It is by no means unprecedented though, and may exemplify Hal Foster's critique of the 'enthnomethodology envy' displayed by many contemporary artists. I prefer to see my ambulant approach as a way of breaking even the least objective of academic research methodologies. Rather than being too lazy or stupid to learn a 'proper' ethnomethodological approach, I want to be able to willfully use or misuse these methods, or even drop any pretension to a formal approach altogether. I'd rather look for popular, accessible, everyday ways that people use to understand what their city is, or might be, how they fit or fail to fit in; that is, ways of sensing and making sense of the city.
To that end, you could consider walking as one of many possible methods within a broader research activity which includes secondary research such as reading about how Venice has been the site of prior enquiry.
Other points of reference are Michel De Certeau's opposition of 'strategic' and 'tactical' modes of operation, which concentrate on how things are used, rather than what is used. This also seems to relate to the 'rich' and 'poor' arts as outlined by the Italian curator and writer Germano Celant who coined the term Arte Povera in 1967.
SC + KC: Maps are the conventional method for 'making sense of the city'. In one way, maps are technologies that allow sight (also: governance, control) at a distance. They are also translations of the city for people who don't know it. What verb would you use to describe your investigations? What will they do?
SP: In the form that we often encounter them, maps appear to be innocuous and the functions that they perform, the ones you mention, are of course considered to be beneficial, useful, and desirable. But they also embody a particular way of understanding the world that privileges certain things above others (sight being the most obvious one). They presume that to know where we are is more important than how or why we are. They also bear a particular relation to our ideal of knowledge: its object must be considered at a precise distance. We choose our map to give us a specific, sublime over-view: too far out and we lose clarity; too close and the world appears too complex to comprehend with one glance.
There's always going to be a disparity between this overview and what is actually happening at ground level. This was even acknowledged by a spokesman for the UK military recently when he noted the difference between aerial surveillance images and 'ground truth'. As if we didn't feel the difference anyway!
The incursions I'll be making in Venice will be at ground level: they will be speculative, opening up spaces for enquiry; they will be revocable, tentative and revisable; they will describe possible ways of operating by making the first iteration and then inviting participation to carry the enquiry further.
SC + KC: What kinds of relationships with Venice's population will you try to enter into by way of your work there? Entertainer? Teacher? Observer? Tourist? Refugee? And what kinds of relationships would you want to avoid?
SP: This new work presents me with a real challenge: the way of working developed through the book London Walking was reliant on me living and working there, developing and describing the de Certeau-inspired 'ruses and tricks' that could be brought into play in everyday life. Finding these in an unfamiliar city such as Venice, given the rudimentary understanding of the place I have now, is the basis for the new work.
There are some historical, literary examples of encounters with new places that have informed my approach. In Italian Journey Goethe uses the optic of the natural sciences to view Venice: adopting this 'proper' scientific mode gave him a language and method to legitimise his observations, while also determining what was deemed worthy of recording.
There is a great interview with Gabriel Orozco where his interviewer reels off dominant, heroic roles that artists have sought to mimic: bureaucrat to scientist to factory worker. I'm sure that today's ideal model is of the 'free software' geek. It's tempting to take the equivalent contemporary scientific optic and bring British IT or management skills to bear on Venice, to see what limited set of concerns would become apparent.
In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann conducts his enquiry through the optic of love: speaking through this less-than-scientific language we get to find out about sickness, lying, paranoia and conspiracy (as well as deep narcissism and love). Even though the idea of love is vague here, it at least sits clearly outside any notionally objective scientific mode. For me, that's a vital place to be right now.
Baci
Whistle Test
Lost In The Supermarket
Region
Rough notes from interview with Gordon Dalton
Gordon Dalton: Did your selection for Venice 2003 pose any problems for your practice, given that however which way you put it, you are seen as representing Wales?
Simon Pope: It's a fact that i live in cardiff and was a lecturer here for the past 3 years. Since moving here from london i've tried to bring the connections that i had together with those that exist here - working with Chapter for 'art for networks' or the national BBC centre - i've been involved with people here as a producer, educator, artist, designer, writer, curator and now researcher.
GD: can your (ambulant) approach be imposed on any city.Place - does it then become a critique of those places or help open up new avenues?
SP: The idea is that i can travel to any place and start to work to make sense of that location. Previously i'd written about London, where i lived and worked and was familar with for at least the past 25 years. That can't happen very often in your life, so i've gone about devising ways of being able to have a take on anywhere.
GD: Obviously your approach is based in a lot of research and theory, but are actual quite accesible and 'human', such a kissing. Do these individual approaches come out of the place, or out of the thery, or from somewhere a bit more 'pop' like 'lost in the supermarket'.
SP: I think that the place you describe - somewhere, (wherever that is) between academic and popular is where i'm happiest: too popular and you become just an 'impact statement'; too academic and you end-up with only 5 people ever being able to understand you. In venice the 'kissing' piece that you mention is a 'device' to gather research data of sorts: this idea came from theory - that intimate acts between people is somehow more important than the data collected about cities is so much biased toward knowing 'where' rather than 'why' or 'how' you are in a city and also from the immediate context of the biennale: venice is where people come for romance of some sort or another - except in the case of poor old John Ruskin whose newly-wedded wife had a whole other take on the place.
'Lost in the supermarket' was made for several reasons: it harks back directly to 'London Walking' and the exercises it described - a cheap bastardization and 'mungling' of several academic theories; and i wanted to get at least some reference to the late Joe Strummer in there of course - he wrote the song of the same name on "London Calling'.
Edited version of interview with Gordon Dalton
Now that the dust has settled an excruciatingly hot vernissage, the participation of Wales still sticks in the memory from the Venice Biennale. Situated on Guideca in the ex-birrera, the exhibition Further, Artists from Wales, features the work of Paul Seawright, Cerith Wyn Evans, Bethan Huws and Simon Pope. Their work extended out across Venice and beyond through various methods and connections. Although the actual exhibition and artists are to be celebrated, it is the brave selection process and exhibition context that deserves some credit for opening up the possibilities of extending the boundaries for debate surrounding nationality, place and community, as well as highlighting a wide range of practice from Wales.
For Further, Curator Patricia Fleming, who her self is from Scotland, selected 2 artists who are Welsh who reside in Paris and Berlin; an English and an Irish artist who reside in Wales. Throw in a English Commissioner, a selection committee from across Wales and a myriad of possible artists from Wales who could be selected and you start to unearth a wide and diverse range of influences. The selection scratches the surface of practice from Wales, but does provide a glance at practice originating from here.
These methods of extending boundaries, mapping communities, collaborations, creating new networks and equally celebrating and criticizing the existing infrastructure are part of a seemingly new optimism that is visible in artists from Wales. The 'from' is the all-important word here, and one that gives Wales a new flexible freedom whilst still recognizing its recent and more distant history.
From Cardiff, Simon Pope works in and uses new and existing networks, encompassing different communities, technologies and tools of enquiry. "I was initially involved in what became known as 'net.art'. Whilst this was an international network of artists and curators, I knew it through an independent media lab near London Bridge called Backspace. This became the meeting place for hackers, geeks, artists and activists until it was forced to close in 1999. In South Wales, I've met a similar crew of people. There tends to be a physical meeting point for these 'communities'. I obviously travel to keep in touch with artists and to meet with new contacts, so my 'art community' or network is broadly spread across time and place.
Pope's practice manifests itself through projects such as his Venice residency, mapping the city through couples kissing and making paper gondalas; the award winning I/O/D 4: The Webstalker to the more simplistic, but equally useful method of using objects in a supermarket to find your way around. The fact that The Clash song 'Lost in the Super market' initially influenced this work highlights the mix of research and theory with more accessible forms of information.
'That place - somewhere, wherever that is, between academic and popular is where I'm happiest. Too popular and you become just an 'impact statement'; too academic and you end-up with only 5 people ever being able to understand you. In Venice the 'kissing' piece is a 'device' to gather research data of sorts. This idea came from theory - that intimate acts between people are somehow more important than the data collected about cities, which is so biased toward knowing 'where' rather than 'why' or 'how' you are in a city. Rather than the immediate context of the Biennale, Venice is where people come for romance of some sort or another."
Pope views his selection for the Venice Biennale as just one strand of his practice, but agrees that it represents a step forward for Wales. "The selection for the 'Wales Pavilion' doesn't pretend to be comprehensive; it's not a broad survey of artists or types of media for example. It just shows some of the various scales and modes of working that have come from, or are in Wales at the moment. For me it acknowledges that an expanded practice, which encompasses academic work, independent research, writing and curating, is possible for those who base themselves in Wales. The venue just offered me another tangible outcome for my ongoing research."
'If the project had reinforced a 'blood and soil' nationalism I would have had nothing to do with it. My practice, in fact my life, depends on broader and subtler affinities than that.'
Calendario Delle Maree
Amora a Venezia
The Stones of Venice
RECCY TO VENEZIA, DECEMBER 2002
