Technology, Exchange and Flow: India
The Exchange & Flow Writing Workshop came together in March 2019 to explore the question ‘What do audiences do with artworks?’ and to support the rallying call of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale for creating “a public stage that will belong to everybody who wants to claim it”.
Funded by an AHRC Follow-on Funding Award for Impact and Engagement project, the workshops brought together twenty international participants over two weeks to run writing workshops at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 addressing audience and user-led initiatives in India, and produce new writing by non-academics with support from Leonardo journal. Through various creative methodologies, participants explored collaboration between viewers and artworks and gained new insights in order to understand what mediates between artists and audiences, and what audiences actually do with their experiences of art. Through this exploration, the critical importance emerged of the need to create, preserve and share archival resources, to promote the writing of art and science from the global south, and to encourage new writing from non-academics.
The outcomes of these explorations included an improvised writing performance exploring audience experience, new filmworks, an anthology of new writing proposals and a framework for publication in Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for Arts, Science and Technology, a key partner in the writing workshop. Exchange and Flow documentary film work was nominated for the AHRC Research in Film Awards (RIFA) at the BFI.
Exchange and Flow documentary film work nominated for AHRC Research in Film Awards (RIFA)