Mark Fell & Robin Mackay: Rewilding Practice
Published
Live conversation
20 NOVEMBER 17:00
Kulturhuset, Vaskerelven 8, second floor
Register by booking a free ticket at https://bek.ticketco.events/
Multidisciplinary artist Mark Fell and philosopher Robin Mackay discuss the relationship between practice and theory and examine beliefs about creative practices: for example, relationships between creativity and technology, approaches to collaboration, concerns with authorship and agency; as well as ideas about inspiration, expression and communication of meaning as the fundamental principles of creative production. How do such beliefs not only structure creative practices, but also the spaces and systems intended to facilitate and contain those practices?
The conversation looks back at a workshop for creative practitioners, convened by Fell and Mackay in Bergen*, as well as taking up major themes from Fell’s newly released book Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice. From the unspoken theoretical underpinnings of ‘practice’ to the logistics, economic and material constraints on ‘doing theory’, and at a time when technology intervenes in our thinking as well as our actions, is the distinction between theory and practice now obsolete? How do our physical and technical environments become a part of our thought processes? What models can we turn to in order to redraw or reject the tension between the cognitive and the productive?
*The workshop Rewilding Practice was organised in cooperation with STUDIO, part of Public Art Norway’s art project for the new KMD building in Møllendalsveien 61 in Bergen. Details on the workshop
Mark Fell
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotherham, UK. His practice draws upon electronic music subcultures, experimental film, contemporary philosophy and radical politics. Over the past 30 years, Fell’s output has grown into a significant body of work — from early electronic sound works and recorded pieces to installation, critical texts, curatorial projects, educational systems and choreographic performances. His recent works, drawing from sacred geometries to programming structures, underline Fell’s particular interest in non-linear systems and structures and our complex inter-relationships with them. http://www.markfell.com/
Robin Mackay
Robin Mackay is director of Urbanomic, a publisher of contemporary philosophy, and has written widely on philosophy and contemporary art, and has instigated collaborative projects with numerous artists. He has also translated a number of important works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye and Undoing the Image. Robin Mackay at Urbanomic.com
STUDIO
What is a studio? How might a workspace provide both concentration and inspiration from the outside world? And what might an interdisciplinary studio for fine art, music and design look like? Between 2021 and 2023, the project STUDIO project at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at UiB will explore these questions in practice and theory. STUDIO is initiated and supported by KORO / Public Art Norway.