LAUNCH
Detail: Contained III Triplicate. Tate Gallery St Ives.
Susan Collins ©1996
Launch is a project taking place over a number of UK locations, featuring new work by British artists Susan Collins, Sera Furneaux, Jane Prophet and Diana Edmunds.
Working with new technologies and electronic media, each piece is developed to respond to specific sites, contexts and each other.
Architectural sites, public galleries and museums, open and public spaces, as well as new commissions for both Cathedral and heritage buildings will be developed as potential sites for LAUNCH .
The first and host location is London Docklands. Each piece will tour Wales, the Rural West and Birmingham.
This project aims to set itself apart, breaking new ground with particular regard to both audience and new work as a commission. Both work and sites are considered in a developing partnership between artist and location.
LAUNCH would like to thank the Arts Council of England and the London Docklands Development Corporation for its support.
For further information contact LAUNCH @
530A Commercial Road London E1 OHY
Telephone/ Facsimile: 0171 702 8675
E-mail: launch@element.demon.co.uk
NEW MEDIA ARTS
The new media aren't so new anymore. Cage and Stockhausen were experimenting with electronic music in the 50s, and John Whitney beganmaking his computer films in 1960. Today, anyone can make pictures and sounds on a home computer. So what do we need artists for?
You could say that artists are like grand prix racers, driving the machines at the limits of their capabilities. Or you could say that these digital artists are the pioneers in the exploration of post modern cyberspace. But most of all in the age of the internet, the new media arts are reinventing what it means to communicate. They show a way forward, from the scientific description of the world, or the technologies for conquering it, to media whose first concern is the relationships between people, and perhaps a new community - of people and machines.
Sean Cubitt ©1997
Sean Cubitt is a writer and Reader in Video and Media Studies at John Moores University, Liverpool.