Meet the Artist
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My sculptural practice often consists of large installations and sculptures, supported by (photography, video, drawing etc.) and text. The artworks, conceptual meaning is located in the act of making, its system or process, looking beyond the more usual subject or object, towards procedures that oscillate between process as a generative and/or a degenerative investigation.
Resonances III Project
Forever-Do Game & Installation
Her project for Resonances III explored the idea of "fishing" into data sets in order to extract coherent patterns of data and represent them as visual artwork. Networks are one of the techniques used for the analysis of process data. Petri Nets were introduced by Carl Adam Petri in the 1970s. During the Milan Digital Week in March 2019, participants in the Forever-Do Game physically travelled a Petri Net system. As the game was played, a sculptural installation emerged, consisting of piles of boxes – "data-towers". The order and colour of the stacked boxes provided a binary code that is used to inform the modular build-up of the Forever-Do Sculpture that was constructed in front of building 17c for the Resonances III Festival.
A collaboration between Jill Townsley and Carlo Ferigato.
Continued collaboration @ JRC (2021)
Jill first met scientist-philosopher Nicole Dewandre (European Commission, Cabinet of Von der Leyen) during the Resonances III cycle, where Jill developed The Forever-Do Project & Collaboration together with Carlo Ferigato and Nicole worked with artist Tomasz Prasqual for IN(de)Finite - Never consider your mind just as a mirror of reality. After the third Resonances cycle they decided to pursue a collaboration which included many exchanged, reflections and philosophical prompts.
Presentation of Residency (09/12/2021)
On Thursday 9th December 2021, they presented the results of their ongoing collaboration and of Jill's residency with the SciArt project. Their multimedia SciArt talk presented the ideas, possibilities, and artworks emerging from the encounter between an artistic perspective, Jill’s, and a scientific one, Nicole’s. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s political thinking, they consideres the term “transformative literacy”. Through visual means, Jill played with themes such as time, temporality, natality, and Arendt’s theoretical triad of labour-work-action. They discussed their collaboration process and presented the possibility of future publicly authored artworks. Their work aims to tread a creative path between the polarized states of ecological catastrophe and denial, by harnessing the energy of “now” through present curiosity and cooperation.
Whilst no project was produced, theirs was an awesome example of the value and benefit of continued art-science collaborations at JRC, for all parties involved.
Humans can be agents of change, if we change from within, and realise we have the power to achieve what we want to achieve, now.
On 09/12/2021, artist in residence Jill Townsley and philosopher/scientist Nicole Dewandre (DG EC-CAB) presented the development of their SciArt collaboration after Resonances III, datami (2019). Jill had made a video to convey the contents of their discussions; an artistic medium which was a wonderful example of just how important the process is for SciArt projects. Their talk was an example of how SciArt can be a worthwhile exercise in democracy of disciplines, experimentation and meaningful interdisciplinary encounters, which can help us all open up to collaborations. As such, Nicole stated that working with Jill had complemented her philosophical studies, and thanks to Nicole, Jill felt more confident to pursue her intentions as a contemporary artist, by understanding and listening to herself.
Drawing from the writings of Hannah Arendt, they expressed their principal concern for a need for immediate action, if society is to change at a systemic level and the Green deal is to succeed. They observed how the present is the only transformative space where creation, collaboration and interaction take place; where the constructive joy of living flourishes and where our energy resides. To be able to change our living conditions, we should engage with this present space, diverging from the modern trope of trying to fix issues such as climate change by thinking about the future. We cannot solve these problems without considering the present – once we are in the future it is too late! Jill and Nicole mentioned transformative literacy, as a way to foster public engagement and prepare audiences to understand and effectively respond to concerns.
Jill and Nicole presented a proposal for a four-part installation which would strive to embody and consolidate the immediacy of the present moment. To instantaneously connect people with each other all over the world, they would start from a 3D sculpture made out of mist, which would change in accordance with its viewers’ data. This would visualise the present moment and remind us of our interconnectedness and similarity across space. To further embrace humanity and ground us in the here and now, they proposed a return to the earth and a link to natural processes of construction, working with our hands. To do this, they would draw from what participants created from mist, to produce material sculptures as the final part of the installation.
IN(de)Finite - Never consider your mind just as a mirror of reality
In the sound installation IN(de)Finite - Never consider your mind just as a mirror of reality, composer and sound architect Tomasz 'Prasqual' Praszczałek takes a critical philosophical look on Big Data and its perspective of infinity. He wants to highlight the new concept of humanness with relationality and mutuality at its core. Filtering is a new epistemological gesture of dealing with masses of information: managing the saturation instead of accumulation or striving for more. The filter is present in the sound, but also as the grid over the audience. The grid puts the print into the skin of the performers, but also into the mind of the spectators. The time needed for the impact is experienced as a pure duration. This is an experience of expanded present, instead of journey or heading somewhere. Giving the feeling that one can lay into the present, shifts us from speed to duration. In recent works, Prasqual develops his own method of a transmedial stage presence of musician-actor performer. He is interested in neurolinguistics, language and culture evolution, collective psychodynamics, cognitive science and psychosynthesis.
A collaboration between Tomasz 'Prasqual' Praszczałek and Nicole Dewandre