Chloe Hodge

Itinerant Assembly was a six-month programme of events which investigates the productive potential of temporary togetherness, through initiating collaborations of people in real and virtual space. This project was informed by an understanding that today 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. 

Itinerant Assembly comprised five 'assemblies', describing participatory events which grew in scale over the course of the project and investigated four central questions:

What does it mean to inhabit the temporary? 

Where do we find the local, when we are constantly on-the-move? 

Who forms our community, when we exist inside a global network? 

And what does it mean to be an artist in today’s digitalised and nomadic world?

The first assembly was a series of projective interviews between the curators and Gasworks artists in residence, intended to develop a shared understanding of the affect of itinerancy on artist practice; the second a Reading Troupe with Berlin-based artist Emma Haugh, exploring Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone; and the third, a movement workshop with artist duo They Are Here and dancer Thiru Seelan to study how movement affects thinking and vice versa. 

The fourth assembly was titled 'hollow tongues', and comprised a virtual reality (VR) installation housed inside a real-reality (RR) immersive installation in the Gasworks Participation Room, by artist group (play)ground-less, whose four internationally-located members work together online. Developed with virtual reality designers, Werkflow, and using software which allowed them to upload new artworks to the VR environment in real time, (play)ground-less were able to virtually and collectively 'install' the work together over the course of one week with the VR as a live, publicly accessible, space of making. The artists simultaneously performed live into the RR space, speaking through a live audio stream, so that every visitor's experience was entirely different from the previous.

Throughout the project, the research produced by each assembly was documented and distilled in the form of a graphic manual: this describes the process of the assembly, and enables the user to reactivate the assembly at a later date, therefore enabling the project to have an ongoing life. This research was explored by the fifth and final assembly, the Hackpad event, which took place not only at Gasworks but also Green Rooms artist hotel and Second Home co-working space, over the course of one evening. The nucleus of the Hackpad event was a live text-based panel discussion between invited internationally-based architects, artists, scholars and creative practitioners including Lina Hermsdorf, Nora Khan, Bo Zheng, Ben Vickers, Anne de Boer & Eloïse Bonneviot, Shumi Bose, Alice Bucknell, Giselle Beiguelman and Salvatore Iaconesi. This conversation took place online, and was physically streamed and projected into each of the three venues where artists (play)ground-less (Gasworks), Jane Frances Dunlop & Mira Loew (Green Rooms) and Luli Perez (Second Home) responded to the conversation through live performance.