UCF Research Leader delivers papers at International Symposium

Kate Southworth, iRes Research in Network Art Cluster Leader at University College Falmouth, has presented two papers at the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2009 (ISEA) hosted by the University of Ulster from 23 August to 1 September.

Kate delivered a paper entitled, Co-curating: distributing art globally, enacting art locally, as part of the Positionings: local and global transactions strand of the symposium. The theme, Positionings, looks at the processes through which spaces are constructed, re-mapped and negotiated in the contemporary situation of global capital, digitisation and migration.

Transformative practices: the aesthetics, ethics and politics of social relations, is the title of her second paper which she delivered as part of the Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices: New Media Art and Relational Aesthetics strand. The conference theme, Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices, highlighted the operations and limitations of conventional (post-modernist) aesthetic models and cultural representations. Contributions were invited that challenge established templates of creative practice and audio-visual /multimedia representations and their associated hierarchies of value, modes of understanding and agency in society.

Cultural Capital is a distributed art work by Kate and Patrick Simons and was selected for the juried exhibition at ISEA2009 curated by Kathy Rae Huffman.

ISEA2009 focused on Engaged Creativity in Mobile Environments - the incessant change of physical and virtual environments under the influence of global capital and mass migration effected by digital information and communication technologies that has come to determine the life experience of billions of people. These conditions radically and rapidly alter the ways we communicate; how we make meaning of the world and how we conduct our lives along dramatically changing fault lines of the private and the public.

For more information about ISEA2009, please visit their website http://www.isea2009.org/.

Kate is an artist and researcher and trained in Fine Art at Manchester Polytechnic and The University of Leeds, and in Multimedia Systems at London Guildhall University.

Kate works with Patrick Simons as glorious ninth, the independent net art collective, exploring new creative territories that straddle between the virtual and the real. They work with sound, protocol, text, images and video to make artworks and DIY installations for galleries, online and other places.

Their work is disseminated through a variety of forms from text-based lists in publications such as Databrowser 04 Creating Insecurity: art and culture in the age of security; numerous online exhibitions since 2001; events at festivals such as The Port Eliot Literary Festival; and gallery installations in exhibitions such as the Arts Council England funded, Net:Reality touring group show. For further information about Glorious Ninth, please visit http://www.gloriousninth.net/

iRes Research in Network Art is a dynamic research environment focusing on the ethical production and dissemination of cultural forms within network societies. It brings together practitioners, theorists and communities of interest to work across a broad spectrum of art, performance, design and media.

For further information about research at University College Falmouth, visit http://www.ires.org.uk/, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 213730.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012/2013 that will be unique to the South West.

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

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For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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