Space Junk, Subversive Bloggers and Gigs of the Future
New artist commissions from The Space
The Space has announced the winners of its first Open Call for new digital artworks.
The Space (tagline "Digital Art. For Everyone") is a joint venture set up by Arts Council England and the BBC. It commissions new work by artists and showcases them to worldwide audiences via TheSpace.org.
The Open Call, which went out in June, brought in over 300 applications from 32 countries. A total of 31 shortlisted pitches were then developed into full proposals.
The winners, announced by The Space on Friday 10 October, will now receive full commissions to be launched next year.
Open Call #2
Also on Friday 10 October, The Space announced its second Open Call for artist submissions. Established and spiring artists from anywhere in the world can submit ideas, closing date 14 November 2014. Find out more at TheSpace.org.
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The Space Artworks
Explore the artworks already hosted on The Space, including City of Drones with music by John Cale.
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The Space Open Call
Find out more about the new Open Call for submissions from The Space.
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Ai Weiwei backs The Space
The launch event for The Space at Tate Modern featured a video message from artist Ai Weiwei.
The Space: Open Call Winners
The concepts behind the four proposed digital artworks chosen as winners: Adrift, Blackbox, The Sprawl and The Unfilmables.
Preview the commissions in a series of films and images below, with the artists themselves describing their vision for their digital artworks. More films will be added in the coming week.
Adrift
Misplaced spatulas and the art of tracking space debris
Cath Le Couteur and Nick Ryan's audiovisual project tells the story of hidden space junk through a film, a sound installation and website. It asks whether people can connect with this material on earth.
The narrative looks at the commercial imperatives for tracking space debris, and examines how our sophisticated technologies can be threatened by this phenomenon through the stories of three people on Earth.
One of these people is Piers Sellers, the British astronaut who accidentally dropped his spatula while repairing the International Space Station.
The film will be hosted on a website. The experience of watching will include virtual sounds attached to individual pieces of space debris, allowing people in different Earth-bound locations to uniquely experience what is in the atmosphere above them - learn more about the artists' vision by watching their short film.
Writer and Director Cath Le Couteur has won a number of awards for her short films. She was awarded the Sundance Sloan Award to develop fiction feature 'Bed', about five strangers taking part in a micro-gravity study to help astronauts in space.
Nick Ryan is an award-winning sound designer and artist. In 2004 he received a BAFTA for The Dark House, a groundbreaking interactive drama made for BBC Radio 4.
Adrift - The Space, Open Call Winners
Nick Ryan and Cath Le Couteur discuss their digital art project around space debris.
Blackbox
Gigs of the future?
Blackbox Collective, led by Jamie Roberts and Will Hanke, is a collaboration between production and consultancy company Fieldwork and London-based artistic agency and studio Alpha-ville.
Blackbox is a live music series, available exclusively to online audiences, experienced as a live video stream alongside web-based interactive elements.
Each event in the series is a one-off live broadcast, providing an opportunity to integrate musicians, filmmakers, digital artists, and live theatre.
The aim is to provide an alternative to existing live music formats. Each event is experienced only online as there is no physical audience in the same space as the live performance.
Blackbox Collective is developing the concept based on a pilot series called The Blackbox Sessions from the Roundhouse.
The Sprawl
Weapon of mass disruption
The Sprawl is a cinematic work that visualises worldwide social media as an architecture for political activism and propaganda.
I'm fascinated by how people use these tools for good... and for badJuha van 't Zelfde
Watch the short film to hear Juha van 't Zelfde explains his vision for the project.
The artist and curator says he is "fascinated by how ISIS uses social media to hack virals and memes", and how people use these tools for "good and for bad".
The Sprawl is a collaboration between Lighthouse, a Brighton-based digital agency who support, commission and exhibit work by artists and filmmakers, and Amsterdam design studio Metahaven.
Lighthouse Artistic Director, Juha van 't Zelfde, curated the exhibition Dread, Fear in the age of technological acceleration, at De Hallen Haarlem in the Netherlands.
The Sprawl - The Space, Open Call Winners
Juha van 't Zelfde discusses his concept for social media documentary project, The Sprawl
The Unfilmables
Voices of the unseen
The Unfilmables is a documentary that explores the worlds of people who have lost the right to be seen: activists, subversive bloggers, unionized sex workers, revolutionary street artists and radical musicians, political prisoners, journalists who have spoken out against corruption or corporate interests.
The Unfilmables puts the human voice at its centre. Each character's words will be recorded over the phone - from their cell or place of hiding, or while on the run, during secret interviews with the director.
A haunting and immersive story will give voice to these raw recordings.
Tim Travers Hawkins is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and interactive artist. He moved to Latin America aged 21, where he trained as a filmmaker and became involved in radical art and film collectives.
Hawkins said, "The Space is offering total freedom and integral support to artists working in digital and interactive. This is absolutely crucial at a time when agency commercialism, click bait and branded content is swamping the digital domain and painting it beige."
