48 hours | Field/work Sunday

Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB
Sunday 22nd November 2009, 10am-12noon.

The Field/work Sunday practical symposium was an extension to the AHRA conference Field/work hosted by The University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art.

The conference was developed in collaboration with colleagues at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and VARIE (Visual Art Research in Edinburgh). The conference examined the question of field/work in its historical, contemporary, disciplinary and inter-disciplinary terms.

Field/work Sunday featured a series of walks into the 'fields' surrounding Inspace using a series of locative media technologies:

Field 1: Chris Speed invited people to walk the streets of Edinburgh as though they were laid out 150 years ago. Using a mobile phone applicationthat swaps Googles contemporary Sat Nav map for a historical map, users were able to walk streets that have long since changed.

Field 2: Jen Southern invited people to walk the city as though they were on the other end of a thread. Based upon the collaborative piece 'running stitch' Jen demonstrated the use of GPS technologies in a live field/gallery piece.

Field 3: Mark Daniels (New Media Scotland) remained at Inspace exploring questions of new media technologies are shifting the nature of fieldwork. How is New Media curated? What is its field? What is the potential of field/work in this context?

Field 4 Southern and Speed also invited a small group of delegates to use Comob iPhone software to work together to map subjective spaces with GPS technology. The teams drawings on the landscape were streamed back to Inspace in real time and reviewed later through discussion.

www.comob.org.uk