‘Place-Space/face to face.’ A remote course on art, ecology and the ethics of the long distance spacial encounter.

Place-Space/face to face is a course for artists and writers who want to explore and deepen ideas of the remote encounter. The course stretches over an academic year with weekly readings and bi weekly lectures. There are regular group crits and the opportunity to make and share new work through remote platforms whilst developing your own remote peer network.

About the course: What fills the distance between us? The idea that the distance is populated somehow by forces beyond the technologies themselves has long been held: As early as 1894, Sir William Preece, the top engineer at the British General Post Office, a champion of radio and wireless technology suggested that we may be in communication with beings from Mars and Guglielmo Marconi suggested that the radio waves may be populated by the voices of ghosts - inspiring a class of mediums emerged called “phone voyants” who claimed they could hear the voices of the dead crackling through telephone wires. We will consider contemporary iterations of what fills the space between us and will look at artists using Zoom; radio, postal projects, morse code, wandering Avatars, and attempts at extra-terrestrial communique.

We will consider the work of Rebecca Birch; Jen Southern, Carly Butler, Kim V Goldsmith, Lenka Clayton, Dianna Thater, Evan Roth, Mona Hatoum, Ingrid Pollard, Robert Good and others.

On the course we consider communication networks instigated by material sources; from Nasa and the US Government and accounts from early radio pioneers, to contemporary artists’ interactions through radio based art works, Zoom-performances, works made about the geographies of ocean based internet cables and VR tech. We will consider both the materiality and the ephemerality of our communication technologies.

The course aims to explore an ethical position for distance set against theories of proximity and the Face to Face which have traditionally defined friendship and care within the humanities (Ie Levinas, Buber, Nancy) and will consider the environmental arguments for maintaining distance and how our remoteness can be an enabler of intense experiences and relationships with distant people and places.

We will look at theorists and writers such as JR Carpenter, John Urry, Laura Kurgan, Emmanuel Levinas, Homi K.Bhabha, Maayan Amir, Ines Weizman and Deidre Boden.

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Please register your interest for the 2023 intake through the aTE application form - stating ‘Place- Space/Face to face’ as the subject header https://www.artsterritoryexchange.com/apply and you will be send a course handbook as a PDF.

Fees £995 per year.

Course leader Gudrun Filipska - Gudrun@artsterritoryexchange.com