name: The Laboral Art and Industrial Creation Centre
URL: http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/
An fairly interesting and obviously functional model of industry and art working together to find an outside of ‘institutional’ stasis. This centre focuses on encouraging a dialogue around new media arts practice. It is built around the availability of a historical space and its dedication as cultural ‘precinct’ by a regional government in Spain (Government of the Principality of Asturias).
There is a great deal of artwork featured here that amounts to providing a non-linear history of media art by the juxtaposition of work and the promotion of dialogue within that particular space. There are interesting if oblique references to an inversion of the space/architecture as organizing, to the space as providing for an intersection/transduction – a flow – between works that would otherwise remain typologically distinct – this appears close to the modus operandi of the centre itself.
The most interesting thing here is perhaps the use of the terms ‘industrial’ and ‘industry’ and ‘creativity’ to actually refer to a kind of generative activity. This approach is considerable divergent form the often utilitarian approach to culture and creativity often espoused in creative industries centres. Here it seems clear that industry is involved not in any attempt to monetize our glean cultural capital from the activity of the centre but rather to provide the means and the ‘distance’ (in the Deleuzean sense of a differential distance that give rise to the Idea) to art as a generative engine that finds it ‘end’ in utility – ‘end’ as in death and ‘end as utility’- utility as the end of variance. Of course I may be well clear of the mark but there is none of the sponsorship iconography or crediting that by now we are well use to seeing wherever the term ‘creative industries’ is deployed. In this instance the ‘industrial’ sits comfortably beside artistic industry and the flow between them appears mutual – although this centre is clearly concerned with the industry of art rather than the artfulness of industry. One comprehensive exhibit focusses on computer games – a site where industry and expression are clearly engaged in an ongoing, coextensive, dialogue. This is perhaps the most comprehensive array of varying approaches to gaming culture I have seen presented – a historical collection, serious games, experimental games, recodings (machinima and hacking etc.)….many terrific examples of innovation in gaming cultures from both the industrial and the end user perspective.
As an aside I should note that this is foremost a museum and gallery space and it is a space that is always already written. There is no dialog – and although a forum is provided for it is currently inactive and while the centre has amassed a large amount of online material documenting and extrapolating the intersections between the works it collects this nonetheless remains a curatorial space rather than of art or theoretical practice (as much as curation remains an art in its own right).
The centre is new (2007?) but currently features two comprehensive exhibitions both with a substantial online presence. The first is titled Feedback (2007, May-June) and examines reactive and recursive models of media expression. Many of the works are presented as historical archetypes and/or precursors to vectors of new media art. Marcel Duchamp and Nam June Paik are featured alongside contemporary new media works- Some of which I’ll catalogue here. The second is the ‘Gameworld’ exhibit I have already discussed.
From an institutional perspective and as is the case with many of the examples I’ve looked at there is an emphasis on topos..movement, flows, as productive and multiple. Its a nice rhetorical trope but one that has strangely disconcerting neo-modernist overtones. Those overtones are self-consciously addressed in the remapping of this post-Franco cultural space but I wonder if there is also a forgetting that operates in this cartographic revisionism. Here I mean not only a forgetting of history but a forgetting of the constructedness and manipulation of the topology as an architectonic figure….the multiple is always already determined.