daniel belasco rogers
::news::projects::texts::cv::contactnews
I've started a blog about my 'adventures in digital arts'. You can find it here
This year, we are artists in (non) residence at the Mixed Reality Lab, looking at extending our data collection practices from GPS and text messages to other forms.
I've left Facebook! Find out why here
There's an interview about my GPS work by Eduard Prats Molner on Shift which can be accessed here.
Don't forget, you can still experience Peninsula Voices by getting in touch with Independent Photography by clicking here.
You can also experience Fortysomething by contacting the Büro der Erinnerung in Graz.
biography
I am an artist who works with psychogeography and personal history through performance, drawing, fine art, video, locative media and writing.
After working since 1989 in live art contexts in Britain as well as a short time working for the Contemporary Art Society, I received an Artsadmin Artists Bursary and began to develop a strand of lecture performance making, taking in all aspects of my artistic practice.
In 2001 I began to spend more time away from London where I grew up and had spent most of my life, and to divide my time between there and Berlin, a city I knew little about. I started to realise the wealth of personal material I associated with London streets and banal street furniture that thousands of people wonder past each day but hold, for me, the memories that constituted my life thus far. I began to be struck by how hard the surfaces of a city are and how they resist the marking that these hard surfaces readily make on one’s own body. This led to an examination of accidents that I had had in London and the precise plotting of these so that I could find out where these had happened in Berlin. This involved overlaying the two cities on one another, using the centres of both cities as the anchor point and seeing where the events of my life thus far had happened if I had been in Berlin instead of London. I also realised that Berlin was offering me something London couldn’t and that was an opportunity to document how I came to learn about the city, how my mental image of the city builds up as I navigate my body through its passages. All this became the material of the performance Unfallen.
Since 2003 I have recorded every journey I make using a GPS (Global Positioning System) and have collected the traces these wanderings have made into large maps, usually printed out to show a city such as Berlin or London and how they accumulate over time.
My interest in cities as mnemonic edifice rather than architectural honeycomb has also led to working with locative media to annotate the urban environment. In 2004 I was the recipient of a research commission from the University of Bristol and Hewlett Packard which led to working with handheld computers attached to GPSs, primarily to build audio environments with which the spectator/listener can navigate his or her way around a demarcated section of the urban environment (a city square for example) and listen to the memories and annotations of other passers-by, placed in the exact location to which they refer. The latest locative media project, Our House, is the virtual realisation of the house I grew up in mapped into the interior of another, larger building. As you walk around with handhelds, images from the house, family photographs and the voices of the people who have lived there (my family) are heard.
In addition to these projects, I formed the performance art company ‘plan b’ with my partner, the video maker and performer Sophia New in 2001. As plan b, we have been resident artists at the Podewil and performed in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and the UK.
I was awarded a residency at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin as part of the Junge Akademie 2006. In January and August 2006 I led a workshop on psychogeography for international choreographers as part of the ‘Dance Roads’ programme, represented in Berlin by Tanztage and Sophiesäle. In December 2007 I was part of a group exhibition at the Akademie der Künste as well as taking part in group exhibitions in Berlin at Arttransponder gallery and with Sophia New as plan b in Aberdeen at Peacock Visual Arts.
