Simon Pope: Netwalking

Project Announcement – 2013

The ADA Network is proud to present Netwalking, a series of workshops and master classes with UK-based media artist Simon Pope that will take place in March and April 2013.

Pope will lead three public workshops hosted by the ADA Network in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch which will draw upon his recent work of walking-as-art. The ADA Network will also host a residency period in Whanganui and coordinate a trans-tasman collaboration with a residency at the University of Wollongong, NSW.

The Netwalking Tour will focus on the themes emerging from Pope’s recent projects such as The Memorial Walks (2008), A Common Third (2010) and Memory Marathon (2010). These projects involve walking with others to negotiate routes as a way of exploring relationships between people and our relationships with ‘land’. In ‘A Common Third’, (2010), Pope walked with others to jointly-negotiate unfamiliar terrain through hills and mountains, which later formed the basis of an audio installation, drawing parallels between processes of working together and models of dialogue.

The master classes will include: presentation of the artist’s recent work, a discussion of ‘sociality and walking’ in contemporary art practice; and a practical workshop addressing the specific themes emerging from Pope’s practice.

Pope has been a leading figure in early challenges to media art, and his ‘walking work’ has developed out of an ongoing exploration of the various ways we might be together and how this is negotiated. As a member of the new-media-artist’s group I/O/D, Pope was interested in the connectedness of things – both human and non-human, social and technical – that constitute the Web, as explored in Manuel de Landa’s ‘Meshworks’. I/O/D took a sceptical and exploratory view of interface and developed ‘speculative software’, such as ‘I/O/D: The Web Stalker’.

The Netwalking master classes and workshops will serve as an opening remark in a new dialogue with NZ artists and curators through which to explore an expanded, networked notion of ‘landscape’ in relation to dialogue and negotiation. The master class series will engage NZ practitioners with new ways of working that are not only at the cutting edge of media art practice internationally, but that contain particular relevance to NZ as a country mapped by complex economic, social and cultural networks.