space of imperception - at Radiator Festival Nottingham, UK, January 2009

Dislocate is a long term project which examines the relationship between art, technology and locality. Its objective is to promote international interdisciplinary discussion and debate upon the impact of new technologies upon our concept and construction of place, pointing towards the various challenges which we may face in this process but also the creative potentials and commentaries which exist here.

 

Through artistic, cultural and intellectual exchange and collaboration we aim to enable an important sharing of experience and expression of the various contexts which impact upon our daily lives and affect our attitudes to place and new media. Dislocate aims to achieve this through various forms, including an annual festival held in Tokyo/Yokohama and various collaborations and workshops held between Japan and international partners.

 

Dislocate has been working closely with Trampoline for a number of years and we have recently collaborated on an education program for young people in UK and Japan. Dislocate is pleased to be able to contribute to the Radiator Festival and we look forward to further future collaborations. As part of the festival Dislocate is presenting a special program of events including an exhibition, film screening and artist talk.

 

‘Space of Imperception’ brings together some of Japan’s most exciting young artists exploring the territory of new media. New media technologies have entered every level of the space around and even within us, a merge which renders the technology increasingly invisible, an imperceptible presence. At the same time as these systems fluctuate between presence and seeming absence, they also oscillate between revealing and concealing their contents.

 

In the systems of control, as Deleuze notes, codes “mark access to information or reject it” and our traces are tracked by various digital ‘eyes’, but with such proliferation that Foucault’s Panoptican turns in upon itself, at once the seeing and the being seen. And through this eternal external/internal gaze the Hyperreal is formed in which there can be no distinction between the real and its mediated form.

 

The artists in this exhibition and series of events scrutinize our own scrutiny, the slip between the mediator and the mediated in an investigation of the interplay between the perceptible and imperceptible forces present in our environment.

Dislocate Director, Emma Ota www.dis-locate.net