RCA Creative Exchange Research Informs Experimental Liverpool Show
Research into behaviour and the workplace by the Royal College of Art’s Creative Exchange Hub has informed a major three-month exhibition, opening next week at FACT, the Liverpool media arts centre.Â
Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life will use artworks, research projects, archival materials and interactive installations to explore the issues of, attitudes to, and behaviours around our changing working lives.
PhD candidates within the College’s Creative Exchange Hub – John Fass, Ben Dalton, Ben Koslowski and Veronica Ranner – have worked with artists, creative producers and researchers to address issues such as the blurring of work and home boundaries, notions of the work-life balance and productivity, and the impact of technology making our lives easier or ultimately rendering us redundant. The Creative Exchange Hub is part of the wider Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded The Creative Exchange Knowledge Exchange Partnership with the Universities of Lancaster and Newcastle exploring the future of the 'digital public space', often regarded as the public archives run by national organisations and institutions.
Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life will feature a co-working space, developed by the RCA CX team, weaving together venue, audience, workspace and digital space, transforming the gallery space into a live research ‘lab’. Visitors to the space will participate in the research, interacting with the installations and interventions, as well as attending workshops, salon discussions, and hacking and making sessions.
Ben Dalton, who is leading a number of installations and workshops, including the Elf Protest workshop, said: ‘Being able to carry out primary research at FACT means we’re able to draw on its strong audience relationships and existing community.’
The ‘CX Co-Working Space’ features three design interventions. The first, Hybrid Lives, will feature video artwork by Karen Ingham and an interactive installation that responds to data traffic, with ‘co-working furniture’ and a sequence of experiments.
Where Do You Go To? is a wall-mounted image sequence installation showing the output from an app, co-designed with a group from the BBC, based on the idea of connecting remote workers through sharing images of desks and workspaces. Sharing ‘desk context’ helps capture the ‘headspace’ of remote workers, according to Dalton.
The third project, an installation represented by sculptural data, sits between self-tracking movement, biomedicine and data privacy. Rhythmanalysis offers an alternative experience of body data, translating this into a rhythmic light installation.
RCA CX researcher John Fass said: ‘The team has been working on this project for a year now and in some ways it has been a test case for how to manage long-term knowledge exchange with a diverse range of partners. The added element of working on a public space, open for three months in a large UK arts centre, has certainly contributed to project complexity.’
Artists and creative producers featured in the exhibition include: Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Harun Farocki, Oliver Walker, Blake Fall-Conroy, Sam Meech, Molleindustria, Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothernberg, Andrew Norman Wilson and The Creative Exchange.
A complementary book, Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life, co-authored and edited by the RCA's Director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Jeremy Myerson with CX Hub researchers, has been published by Liverpool University Press.
Former Rector of the RCA, Christopher Frayling, will deliver the FACT Roy Stringer Lecture, which this year, will explore public images of work and the office from the origins of cinema, via the heyday of time and motion to the present day and beyond.
Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life opens on 12 December 2013 at FACT Liverpool and runs until 9 March 2014. Click here for further details.Â