(selected by Hannah Firth)
BACI, 2003
Simon Pope (b. Exeter 1966) studied Fine Art at South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education, Cardiff (1988). He was co-author, with Matthew Fuller and Colin Green, of the net.art project, 'I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker' (1997) and author of London Walking, published by Ellipsis/B.T. Batsford (2001). He was a NESTA fellowship awardee (2002- 2005) for his work investigating walking as a visual art practice and represented Wales at the Venice Biennale (2003). Exhibitions include Art Base 10 (New Museum, New York 2005), Net_Condition, (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999), Walking Here and There, a research project in collaboration with the psychologist Vaughan Bell (Wellcome Trust, Sci Art Project 2005/06) and Charade a BBC/ACE 'Private View' commission (Birmingham 2005/06). He is Research Associate at at Transmedia, Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels (2002-) and the Digital Studios, Goldsmiths College London (2005-). Pope is currently exhibiting Gallery Space Recall (Chapter Gallery, Cardiff Oct-Nov 2006). He lives in Cardiff, where he is a Reader at Cardiff School of Art & Design, and also works in London & Brussels.
Pope first established his reputation as a 'net artist', receiving international recognition for his work with I/O/D, exploring software and networks as an art form. He received a Webby Award (2000) for his work on the speculative software project 'The Webstalker', a free tool for browsing the web. He also curated 'Art for Networks', a national touring exhibition (2002-3) and BBC website (2001), which surveyed networked art practice.
Pope's subsequent work continued to develop the notions of 'tools for enquiry', or 'speculative tools', into environments other than computer networks. In transfering these ways of working into the urban environment, Pope explored the process of 'coming to an understanding' (1) of cities through developing a tactical, 'ambulant science'.
Ambulant Science
For Pope 'ambulant science' contains two key concepts. A literal meaning of ambulation (of walking) and a broader interpretation of 'ambulant science' as an informal, heuristic approach to investigation, the results of which may be revised or revoked at any time. He states 'rather than being seen as too lazy or stupid to learn a proper ethnomethodological approach, I wanted to be able to wilfully use or misuse these methods, or even drop any pretension of a formal approach altogether. I'd rather look for popular, accessible, everyday ways that people use to understand what their city is, or might be, how they fit or fall into it, ways of sensing and making sense of the city'. (2)
London Walking
'London Walking' (published 2001) is a 'technical manual' developed through Pope's experience of living in London. The book doesn't contain information about how to get from A to B, instead it attempts to explore an approach that can be taken in order to find out about the city. It reveals information you don't expect, alternative facts such as the truth about what kerbstones say about an area. Pope explains 'when they put granite kerbstones into your street, you know the area is on the up, and you won't be able to afford the rent there this time next year. Granite kerbstones are an early sign of urban regeneration'. (3)
Walking is used as a means of gathering forms of knowledge that exist outside of accepted academic or scientific research. As Pope states, 'walking enables you to talk to people, to get close to things, to gain and generate knowledge' (4) and this contributes to a deeper understanding of our cities.
Wales at the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003
For the Welsh pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Pope adopted his 'ambulant approach' to sourcing information. Unlike in the 'London Walking' project, he found himself in an unfamiliar environment and in a city which is notoriously hard to navigate. Faced with having to come to terms with his surroundings through alternative means, Pope took to looking for things which were considered particular to that place. He undertook activities such as looking for rainbows, making a fleet of origami gondolas, building bridges over gaps in the paving. Some of these actions resulted in series of photographs, audio recordings or text panels, others in live events or small objects sited around Venice.
In 'Baci' (2003), Pope mounted a map of Venice onto a large board. He then asked visitors to mark on the map using pink chalk, all the places that they had kissed. For Pope, it was important to use a map, which is usually the accepted method of making sense of a city. He claims that maps 'embody a particular way of understanding the world that privileges certain things above others (sight being the most obvious one). They presume that to know where we are is more important than how or why we are'. (5) The very act of kissing someone is hard to define and full of possible inaccuracies. Each kiss might simply have been a formality, a greeting, a goodbye. This undermines the accepted information system, and with enough kisses the planner's map would be completely obscured. Whilst Pope's work is related to disciplines such as urban planning and architecture it also has a role as a critique of accepted research methodologies.
Recent Work
Pope's current work questions some of the assumptions, made in this earlier work, of the role of walking in art practice and its relationship to notions of 'space' and 'place'. Far from consolidating his earlier enquiries into walking as a way of sensing place, Pope has introduced an altogether less quiescent attitude to the role of walking in both as an art practice and as it is utilized as a 'tool for enquiry', in urban regeneration, for example. His recent project, Walking Here & There (2005-6), undertaken in collaboration with the Psychologist Vaughan Bell, explores the impact of walking and memory on 'place', suggesting that its uniqueness or singularity may be at question. The resultant experimental method has also been used in Pope's current exhibition, 'Gallery Space Recall' (2006) in which participants are invited to "recall, from memory, a walk through a familiar gallery space," summoning descriptions of the spatial, social and professional dimensions of the gallery, especially as it is constituted by the literature of recent 'institution critique'.
A forthcoming research project (2006-9), in collaboration with Sociologist Pascal Gielen, aims to develop a theoretical model, based on a study of modes of sociality, through which to understand the work of contemporary and historical 'walking art' practices. 'Charade' (2005-6) used walking as a method for migrating cultural products, ordinarily stored in media such as books, DVDs or mp3 files, into the bodies and memories of participants in this widely-distributed performance in Birmingham, UK. Commissioned by BBC & Arts Council England for 'Private View', this work is perhaps an echo of Pope's earlier concerns, that of the role of technical networks in the production of social formations and a belief in the ingenuity of people and their everyday practices.
References
(1) Simon Pope in conversation with Kris Cohen and Sarah Cook 2003
(2) Ibid
(3) Simon Pope, Nesta Profile
(4) Ibid
(5) Simon Pope, 2003
Links/sources
http://bak.spc.org/iod
www.charade.org.uk
www.ambulantscience.org
October 2006
