ANAT: News #33

Login:   immersive residencies for artists in mid take off

One of ANAT's primary aims is to facilitate situations whereby artists can spend concentrated periods of time researching new ideas, acquiring new skills, forming fruitful collaborations, playing with new media and developing new bodies of work.

ANAT has received funding from the Visual Arts Craft Fund of the Australia Council to develop a series of residencies for emerging visual artists to develop web-based projects.

The online environment is currently a site of some of the most politically challenging and aesthetically innovative art projects. It's a context where traditional artforms meld and mutate, and where traditional notions of authorship, exhibition and publishing dissolve into and out of each other. The intention of this project is to provide emerging artists with an opportunity to explore and experiment with the consequences of what it means to participate in the connectivity of the internet. Artists will be provided with an opportunity to develop new skills, test their hypotheses, develop new processes and create new works. The cumulative effect of these experiences will be distinct projects which effect mappings of information drifts.

The pilot year of this project will initiate four online residencies/research projects for emerging Australian artists in partnership with four members of the Contemporary Art Organisations (CAOs) network. The host organisation will provide access to computers and the internet. ANAT will provide server space, some technical support and the context of an online community.

Selected artists will work at the Contemporary Art Organisation in their city of residence, and will develop work to be hosted on the ANAT website. The will therefore also be 'in-residence' online and physically. For this project, the following members of the CAOs network will be hosting the physical component of the residencies: