EN

UCA/STARTS

Artists are constantly facing new challenges, with NFT for instance being a recent and ongoing issue. How do artists maintain their ethical position as well as remain relevant, catalytic, and critical while working with industry and trying to make a living? What are the ramifications of entering the market and selling their work? How can artists ensure they consider the social, economic and environmental impact of working with industry?

We have a panel of experts including Eva Pascoe, Ghislaine Boddington and Camille Baker who will challenge two exciting projects to consider their future way of working with industry. The projects that are taking part have both recently taken part in STARTS in Motion, a STARTS initiative designed to empower artists and technologists in further developing their art-tech project by exploring the business side of the creative endeavours.

Echoes App: a collaboration between King’s College London, Cellule Studio and Maastricht University. Echoes is a new app which uses your smartphone’s inbuilt microphone to record your heart sounds. You can play the recordings of your heart back, listening and watching visualisations of its ebb and flow, as well as accessing a library of different heart sounds.

The Projects:

Isaac Monte from VYX (NL), a tech-driven wearable tailored to the aging population that enhances vital and beautiful living through preventive health monitoring. VYX is part of the Prosthetic X project: prostheticx.eu.

Peter Wu+ from EPOCH (US), an artist-run virtual gallery that functions as an inclusive community building platform inviting established and emerging artists working in both digital and analog mediums to participate.

Biographies

Ghislaine Boddington is an award-winning speaker, curator and director, specialising in the future human, body responsive technologies and immersive experiences. She is Co-founder and Creative Director of body>data>space. With a background in dance and performing arts and a long-term focus on the blending of our virtual and physical bodies, she engages in highly topical and future digital issues for our living bodies, including personal data usage, and sees a future in which we connect ourselves into a networked “multi-self,” an “Internet of Bodies” enabled by hyper-enhancement of the senses and tele-intuition. Ghislaine co-presents bi-weekly as a Studio Expert for BBC World Service Digital Planet (formerly Click) and is also a Reader in Digital Immersion at the University of Greenwich. Her research explores “The Internet of Bodies”, the evolution of our future multi-selves through gesture and sense interfaces, augmented realities, immersive experiences and embedded digital body connectivity, pointing to the rapid blending of the virtual and the physical body

Eva Pascoe has pioneered ecommerce in UK, as the first Director for Ecommerce for Arcadia Group. She has developed fashion webshops for Topshop, Topman, Dorothy Perkins, Racing Green, Burton, Miss Selfridge and Evans and developed Omnichannel for the Group.
After a successful Crowdcube fundraising campaign (1.4mln raised), in January 2017 Eva joined Bluebella as a non-executive director, overseeing the brands Digital Acquisition and international E-commerce strategy. She is joining retail veteran Richard Simms and digital entrepreneur Seb Bishop to strengthen the board and prepare the business for rollout to new markets. Since 2013 her ecommerce consultancy The Retail Practice has been advising the largest pan-European lingerie brand Hunkemoller. In her role as Charity Trustee for Trading Group, Eva has also advised one of the largest UK military charities, Help4Heroes, supporting the charity team since 2013 in their online trading activities on Digital Acquisition, CRM and transition to new e-commerce platform. She has recently co-authored digital retail policy papers on Re-imagining The High Street and a new policy for West End of London in her “Surf and Turf” contribution to a recent publication commissioned by Centre for London and New West End Company. She regularly speaks at key retail industry events run by Retail Institute and runs a weekly digital innovations blog “The Retail Bytes” at steering the sector through the challenges of Ominichannel.

Camille Baker is an artist-performer/researcher/curator within various art forms: participatory performance and interactive art, mobile media art, tech fashion/soh circuits/DIY electronics, responsive interfaces and environments, and emerging media curating. Baker develops methods and approaches to exploring the body within performance & interactive art contexts, using soh circuits/etextile, wearable electronics & mobile media. Her recent book New Directions in Mobile Media and Performance showcases exciting approaches and artists in this space as well as her own work. She is the Principal Investigator for UCA for the EU funded STARTS Ecosystem (starts.eu) Apr 2019-Nov 2021 and founder initiator for the EU WEAR Sustain project Jan 2017-April 2019 (wearsustain.eu).

Peter Wu+ generates artworks and immersive environments utilizing modeling and rendering software, projection mapping, 3D printing, and machine learning. Through speculative fiction, Wu+ investigates our estrangement associated with technological advancement and modernity. In 2020, he founded and created EPOCH, an artist-run virtual gallery which has established itself as a destination that challenges the status quo with its critical and innovative approach to curation and exhibition building. The gallery’s current show, “Freeport” (epoch.gallery), is the the first entire virtual exhibition offered as an NFT, and the first to introduce an ecological, equitable, and sustainable model. In 2021, he was invited to participate in the S+T+ARTS in Motion program with his project EPOCH. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his BFA from the University of Windsor. Wu+ lives and works in Los Angeles.

Isaac Monté: Fascinated by societal sustainability I am interested in unusual, new materials and how I can manipulate those. I see myself as a pioneer who, by means of combining technology, art and science, shows how art can contribute to a strategy of sustainable development. Since graduating in 2013 I have focused on understanding, controlling and manipulating unusual materials. In projects such as Filter Factory (2013) and Leek Packaging (2017), I have explored the possibilities of using waste streams to create new opportunities. Since 2015 I have been combining waste streams such as overdue foods with new, promising technologies in synthetic biology. This resulted in projects like The Art of Deception and The Meat Project. Within my work I combine different media, using techniques and media tools either to experiment and document or to strengthen the message with video and visual images. My work has been shown in a variety of museums, galleries and exhibitions in Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Italy, USA, Austria, Hungary, United Arabian Emirates, China, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. My work is part of several private collections in Europe and the USA. “The Meat Project” is part of the permanent collection of The Centre Pompidou, Paris. Isaac Monté collaborates with In4Art for the project Prosthetic X. Further on his work is supported by Creative industries fund nl, SIDN and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.

Salomé Bazin is a french designer and artist, founder of experiential design studio Cellule.
She holds a BA from Olivier de Serres in Paris and MA in Industrial Design from Central Saint Martins London. Starting as an assistant for award-winning stage designer Es Devlin, followed by work as a freelancer in media art, lighting and experience design. Bazin gained extensive experience in her early years for a working for a portfolio of high profile clients including Beyonce, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Samsung and WhiteCube, amongst others.
She founded Cellule studio in 2018 , which was acknowledged by the British Design Council as one of the ’10 most exciting UK emerging design practice of 2018’. Cellule is a design studio bringing a creative and collaborative approach to science and healthcare innovation, envisioning the future of the human body and health. Their work is driven by a human-centered methodology, taking inspiration from human physiology and nature, seeking for real time poetic-technologic experiences.
Her work with Cellule was showcased at the Science Gallery London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Barbican centre and Sadler’s Well theatre. Her studio got honorary mention from the STARTS Prize Ars Electronica and part of the Lumen prize Longlist in 3D Interactive art. They also got nominated by the prestigious Beazley Design Award from the Design Museum in 2020.
Bazin’s work is a tension between digital art, experiential and scenography, in an exploration of new mediums to experience natural phenomenas, evolving technologies and human physiology. She is particularly interested in experiential design as a way to reconnect to our bodies.
www.cellule.co.uk