Itinerant Assembly: CCA Students Present Graduate Project at Gasworks

The series of assemblies, which began in January this year, culminates in two final events this May: a new commission by emerging international artist group (play)ground-less, and a hackpad event based around a conversation between international participants, which will take place on an online collaborative document updated in real time.

Itinerant Assembly asks: 'What does it mean to be an artist in today’s digital and nomadic world? Who forms our community when we exist inside a global network? Where do we find the local when we are constantly on the move? What does it mean to inhabit the temporary?'

The project is informed by an understanding that nomadic modes of living and working, whether forced or desired, are ubiquitous within global cities like London. This includes both the displacement of people due to rapid urban redevelopment; and hyper-mobile lifestyles, whereby digital technology allows some people to live and work on the move, forming networked and mobile communities of people across different countries and time zones.

At Gasworks, (play)ground-less will remotely develop a virtual environment. Working with digital arts studio Werkflow, they will build a space within a space, an immersive sound installation (RR) that connects into a virtual reality space (VR) and vice versa. Each member of (play)ground-less is based in a different city – Copenhagen, Bogotá, Madrid and London, nevertheless they will remotely lead the viewer through a fictional narrative delivered in real time, exploring ideas of territorialisation and representation.

Staged simultaneously within the (play)groundless installation at Gasworks, at Green Rooms artist hotel and creative workspace Second Home, the hackpad event draws together the different questions the project has raised and interrogated over the last five months and through the previous three assemblies. During the hackpad event, artists will engage with, interpret and interrupt a live online conversation that takes place through the hackpad.

Alongside (play)groundless, the artists invited to take part in the hackpad event are: Jane Frances Dunlop, an artist and writer whose work addresses emotion and performances of relation on the internet; Mira Loew, a visual artist working with photography, video and performance whose practice explores the human body and the physicality of taking and making space; and Luli Perez, who makes live experiments with video, sound or text, exploring perspective and feedback.

Assembly 4

(Play)ground-less: hollow tongues

Gasworks, Vauxhall
Opening: 11 May, 6.30–8.30pm
Continues: 12–17 May

Assembly 5

Hackpad event: (play)ground-less / Luli Perez / Jane Frances Dunlop & Mira Loew

Gasworks / Green Rooms / Second Home
Date/Time: 18 May 7–9pm

Itinerant Assembly is curated by Alice White, Chloe Hodge, Hannah Zafiropoulos, Rosie Hermon, Tiffany Leung and Xiaoyi Nie as part of the Curating Contemporary Art programme Graduate Projects 2017, Royal College of Art, working in partnership with Gasworks. 

Read more about the other CCA graduate projects.