Unruly Pitch:Flows and stoppages in football, art and methods

Mobility is made in the relations between flows and stoppages. At the center of this paper is an artist’s residency with a mass football game in the north of England that is said to have no rules. A mobile making practice revealed the tension between unruliness and convention in both the game and the research methods. Massumi’s (2002) use of football to reflect on the ongoing and productive relations between the individual and the collective suggests that through the absence of a referee, who stops the game to apply the rules, the game and the town are open for greater collective ownership by participants. Mobile making, and its openness to improvisation, provides researchers with a unique analytical perspective on the game

The Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium Instant Journal

Tan initiated, edited, designed and produced this ‘instant journal’. The publication includes an Art & Mobilities Manifesto, as well as provocations and reflections by 30 participants of the Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium at the Peter Scott Gallery, which Tan co-curated. The journal was an experimental platform which documents some of our activities and thoughts, and which we will continue to edit and develop. Tan was a 2017-2018 Centre for Mobilities Research CEMORE Visiting Fellow, Lancaster University. CEMORE initiated the new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences, arts, humanities and sciences. It was the first such centre (founded in 2003 by John Urry and Mimi Sheller) and continues to be at the heart of this burgeoning global field. Mobilities research develops a deeper and broader understanding of contemporary challenges through social science as a transdisciplinary endeavour. It encompasses the analysis of the global, national and local movements of people, objects, capital, information and material things combining together to engender the economic and social patterning of life. Previous Fellows include Dr Dr Bradley L. Garrett, well-known for his urban explorations During her Fellowship, Tan worked closely with the Director of Mobilities Lab Dr Jen Southern, as well as Professor Emma Rose and Dr Linda O Keefe of the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts, and successfully co-curated the Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium. The study and practice of Art & Mobilities has been gaining momentum in the past decade. This includes pioneering solo and collaborative work led by Jen, a key player in the field. The Art & Mobilities network consolidates, celebrates and develops this work. On 3rd July, nearly thirty artists, writers, curators and researchers gathered at the Peter Scott Gallery. Apart from UK-based colleagues like Nikki Pugh, Elia Ntaousani, Bruce Bennett and Bron Szerszynski, we were joined via Skype by Mimi Sheller (USA), Owen Chapman (Canada), Kaya Barry (Australia) and Sven Kesselring (Germany). UK participants brought with them objects, images or texts for a pop-up exhibition. We wrote our big ideas on a ‘manifesto wall’ and considered the histories of mobilities in art practice through a timeline running across the Gallery. Tan also gave a performance-lecture as a keynote lecture. It tells the story of how art and mobilities collides for Tan as an artist, curator and woman. She re-presents a version of it in the form of an online story through 100 slides which she published on ISSUU. Jen also gave a keynote packed full of information and provocations covering creative research methods, the aesthetics of mobility and so on. We closed the colloquium with a role and ‘next step’ that each of us intends to perform to get the group going. In the longer term, we will seek funding to build this network internationally and to facilitate collaborations and activities such as conferences, exhibitions and publications

Mobile Utopia:Art and Experiments

The exhibition of 13 international artists, 12 Experiments, a catalogue of essays,and Mobile Utopias conference hosting 180 delegates, launched a new platformfor Art and Mobilities. The exhibition was developed in connection with the world leading Centre for Mobilities Research. In this context, the exhibition aimed to encourage artists, participants and spectators to take a fresh look at experiences of mobility, their connection with each other and space. To consider ways in which the artistic interventions contribute to the reconfiguration of spaces for experimentation, critique, and political communication, creating new organisational forms, and potentially the reformation of mobility regimes. Artworks were selected for the exhibition from an open call, through a rigorous selection process. The artists were from 4 continents: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal & UK and are established and internationally renowned artists. The exhibition included works in video installation, sound art, data sculpture, walking art, book works, performance, networked art and participation. It included the following artists: Kaya Barry, Tess Baxter, Valentina Bonizzi, Fernanda Duarte, Michael Hieslmair & Michael Zinganel, Vicki Kerr, Clare McCracken, Peter Merrington & Ilana Mitchell, Nikki Pugh, Max Schleser, Gerda Cammaer & Phillip Rubery, Samuel Thulin, Christina Vasilopoulou, and Louise Ann Wilson. Published in conjunction with the exhibition a catalogue of critical essays underpinned the concepts. This included an essay by Southern, J., Rose, E.E., O Keeffe, L., Art as a Strategy for Living with Utopias in Ruins and The Mobile UtopiaE xperiment by Bȕscher, M., alongside images and statements by the artists addressing the Mobilities theme.The project attracted a range of funders and sponsors. Followingthe exhibition, the curatorial team Southern, Rose, O Keeffe with Kai Tan established an international network in Art and Mobilities with a further symposium: The UK Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium held on 3rd July 2018, with 22delegates

Art as a Strategy for Living with Utopias in Ruins

The term ‘utopia’ is problematic. Originating in the Greek for ‘no place’ or ‘good place’ it suggests an ideal that can only be imagined. To imagine utopias could be seen as an unrealistic orientation to a future in which the local impacts of global change will be severe. However, utopian thinking also includes the pursuit of a transformation, it is about how we might strive towards a better future and find strategies for living with dystopic situations. Anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests that we need imagination to grasp the precariousness and unpredictability of contemporary life. She does this through both a metaphorical use of the Matsuke mushroom to imagine the possibility of life in a ruined landscape, and through detailed observations of the lives of mushroom pickers surviving economically in the ruins of capitalism. This parallel practice of imagination and observation also characterises the works in the Mobile Utopia exhibition. Through the works we see utopian plans and ideas come up against the frictions of physical place; where ideas are not only imagined, but attempted, enacted and grappled with. Although all the art works are distinctly mobile, they are grounded by the frictions that the artists unearth, enact and perform through investigations of situated and spatial practices. We suggest that the processes and journeys that produced the art works can be thought of as strategies for living and making meaning in the ruins of capitalism. We have grouped the works into three themes: an exploration of infrastructures that enable particular kinds of mobilities; the negotiation of identity on the move and in relation to changing geographies; and the questioning of veracity of or within distributed, networked and mediated mobilities. The themes often overlap within the works as the artists navigate between material geographies, mobile lives and distributed networks. The works are not propositions for the future, they are all explicitly grounded in the way that past, present and future are entangled in a complex relation to each other and to the frictions of location. While reminding us of past ideas of utopian planning they also offer new ways to make critical observations

Homing

Homing is a sound art work created by artists Jen Southern and Sam Thulin with the Media Innovation Studio at the University of Central Lancashire. The experience begins at the Roll of Honour in the Harris Museum & Art Gallery and moves out onto the Flag Market and the Cenotaph. The work is accessed through headphones. Homing uses sound to make connections at a distance; between presence and absence, people and place, displacement and home. The work is based on the original letters of Preston soldiers serving in the front line trenches of World War 1, taken from the archives of Lancashire Infantry Museum. The letters are testament to the attempts of soldiers and their loved ones to keep in touch despite the distances and atrocities of the war. The distance was not only physical; the longer the war continued the greater the distance in life experience between soldiers and those at home. Each letter represents an attempt to bridge that gap and, as much as is said, more is left unsaid or is unsayable. At the Roll of Honour, a sound composition from the cemeteries at the Somme can be heard, with all the sensory qualities of the local conditions; wind, rain, whistling, stonework. Out on the Flag Market, these sounds give way to fragments of stories from the men in the trenches; a stilted marriage proposal, an enquiry about health, a thank you for kippers sent through the post, a description of daily conditions and accounts of the terrible realities of the conflict. Approaching the Cenotaph, the soldiers’ words are disrupted by ever intensifying GPS interference. This distant, targeting technology of modern day warfare, creates a sonic fog through which individual voices can no longer be heard, reflecting the difficulty of communication through the constant battle between signal and noise. Homing contrasts the modes of communication used in WW1 and contemporary war. Voices from the harrowing fight on the front collide with the current technology that emphasises accuracy, immediacy and removal of the body from warfare, but that cannot know the context on the ground

An agenda for creative practice in the new mobilities paradigm

Creative practices have made a standing contribution to mobilities research. We write this article as a collective of 25 scholars and practitioners to make a provocation: to further position creative mobilities research as a fundamental contribution and component in this field. The article explores how creative forms of research—whether in the form of artworks, exhibitions, performances, collaborations, and more—has been a foundational part of shaping the new mobilities paradigm, and continues to influence its methodological, epistemological, and ontological concerns. We tour through the interwoven history of art and mobilities research, outlining five central contributions that creativity brings. Through short vignettes of each author’s creative practice, we discuss how creativity has been key to the evolution and emergence of how mobilities research has expanded to global audiences of scholars, practitioners, and communities. The article concludes by highlighting the potency of the arts for lively and transdisciplinary pathways for future mobilities research in the uncertainties that lay ahead

2018: Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium Instant Journal (Peter Scott Gallery)

"Mobilities has been gaining momentum through networks, conferences, books, special issues, exhibitions and in the practices of artists, writers and curators. In recognition of this activity we are forming an Art & Mobilities network through which to consolidate, celebrate and develop this work.Inspired by the recent foregrounding of Mobility and the Humanities (Pearce & Merriman, 2018) and drawing on last November's successful Mobile Utopia Exhibition amongst others, the Centre for Mobilities Research (CEMORE) at Lancaster University are pleased to hold a UK Art & Mobilities Network Inaugural Symposium 2018 on the 3rd of July 2018. The aim of the symposium is to bring together people in the UK who are active in the field of mobilities and art in order to discuss the distinctive contribution that art makes to mobilities research and vice versa. We would be delighted if you can join us for this one-day event to help shape the network, particularly in the context of a fast-changing world, not just socio-politically but in terms of the place of art in the academy and vice versa. There are nearly 30 key international artists and researchers gathered on this day both locally and via Skype. We invite all participants in the symposium to bring with them an artwork, artefact, written statement or quote that can be displayed as a ‘pop up’ exhibition. These artefacts will be used during the day to focus discussion around different facets of mobilities and art." (Jen Southern, Kai Syng Tan, Emma Rose, Linda O'Keeffe Editors

Setting our sights on infectious diseases

In May 2019, the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (WCAIR) at the University of Dundee, UK, held an international conference with the aim of discussing some key questions around discovering new medicines for infectious diseases and a particular focus on diseases affecting Low and Middle Income Countries. There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat most infectious diseases. We were keen to see if there were lessons that we could learn across different disease areas and between the preclinical and clinical phases with the aim of exploring how we can improve and speed up the drug discovery, translational, and clinical development processes. We started with an introductory session on the current situation and then worked backward from clinical development to combination therapy, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) studies, drug discovery pathways, and new starting points and targets. This Viewpoint aims to capture some of the learnings