Prologue:

My name is Dewi. I am an avatar. Fifty foot tall and rising. I am of medium build, with pixel-defined features. I stride as you direct me across mountains, valleys and wetlands. This is your land, but my home.

Luckily, there is plenty to see. As well as the vastness of Wales, there are other lands and more information that cannot be contained within this screen.

Out of the landscape, small information screens rise up as I pass and you change my scale to become small enough to enter new worlds which are normally invisible or overlooked. This is where real truth lies. Your aim is to direct me across this land so I can connect you to stories and information from farmers, geologists, locals, tourists, etc, for you.

You are in control.

The Impossibility of description

Who and what are Artstation? Why and where do they do what they so consistently and cogently do? ‘How’ and ‘why’ seem obvious questions to pose, but any questioning is immediately synthesised into Artstations’ process of asking questions.

It would be hard to describe someone as standing outside Artstation’s practice. They may think they are but Artstations approach to questioning their surroundings is so pervasive and all encompassing that you have probably been touched, however slightly, by one of the many arms of their research and practice.

In attempting to investigate the collective practice of Artstation, and the many diverse links it connects, up to the present day ArtMap project, which is being presented as an open studio and workshop for the incubation of discussions leading from their work as part of the Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology, it is worth mapping and noting their history.

Artstation are Glenn Davidson and Anne Hayes, who met at Cardiff College of Art in 1976. They are Fine Artists. They have organised events and exhibitions in galleries, museums and public spaces across the world for over 25 years. They have questioned their own practice through a fellowship in Cybernetics, regular lectures, seminars and invitations to the widest possible range of collaborators and partners. The artists were the first practitioners of the present generation in Wales to realise and develop their work through international academic connection.

Graduating from live art and performance they have expanded the education and community sector. They have built some of the most beautiful and complex large-scale public sculpture and installation in the most public of arenas, constructed from paper and air. They have developed multimedia projects with architects, County Councils and refugee groups, using digital media, animation and 3D modelling. They have worked in the National Museum of Wales, and appeared on Blue Peter. Again, they are Fine Artists.

A decade or so ago, a lazy and casual viewer, one without any specific questions or lines of enquiry may have dismissed them with that rather 80s term, community artists. But not so. Artstation deserve to be recognised as a stepping stone between their obvious and declared reference points, (mainly Artist Placement Group (APG), Art + Language, Robert Smithson and Lawrence Weiner) and the growth of what has become known as a socially engaged practice and relational aesthetics.

A question of questions

In asking Artstation a question you are immediately aware of their status as a company or brand, but one with (two) personalities and social empathies. This brand allows both individuals, with their different but complimentary skills, access to a wider range of possibilities and opportunities than may be readily available to a ‘single’ artist.

Secondly, you are also aware that you have become part of on ongoing process that may not have a conclusion and one that may take a number of days, months, even years to unravel. This unforgiving, time-based approach to the process of questioning and answering belies a confrontational energy and commitment to change. Artstation has consistently explored our social networks, environmental surroundings and the hidden power structures contained within, their work is definitely underlined by a strong socio-political conscience with a commitment to creating and extending possibilities.

Their work is by no means limited to this. Perhaps APG offer the best example of how Artstation operates. Led by artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni and later joined by writer and broadcaster Nicholas Tresilian, APG initiated the engagement of artists in non-art environments on an open brief – actively repositioning the role of the artist within a wider social and economic context.

While Hayes and Davidson are almost a generation on from Artist Placement Group, they are of their lineage (Tresilian is now one of Artstation’s Directors). As American artist and critic Frank Galuszka notes: “Artstation are able to transform simple ideas and materials into remarkable outcomes in everyday situations through a use of technologies ... This is achieved through their self-negotiated placements and a keen collaborative spirit”.

A broad range of agencies and organisations have commissioned their monumental public works. Though relatively well known in Wales, Artstation’s existence owes more to the international works and their collaborations in science, with the American Cybernetics Society (ASC)

They are passionate about the wider implications of how we relate to each other as individuals and communities, with our collective ideologies, these are processed not to provide immediate answers, but to ensure the right to question authority is upheld.
Artstation are suspicious of society’s obsolete methods of negotiating opposing views and creating a fixed consensus. As Galuszka says, “Artstation operate without ego and great utopian statements, being more interested in collaboration and a creative negotiation.”
This skillfully avoids a fixed, generalised consensus, one that would be seen to be transparent and compliant and whilst initially appealing, this way of thinking proposes a single view or way of thinking. Artstation prefer to build up complex issues, promoting the contextually located characteristics of knowledge. They set up sometimes clear and precise processes of questioning questions, of thinking about thinking.
Recent work in Brussels, provided Artstation with access to the European Parliament and relations with the Welsh MEPs and bureaucrats. It was this close contact with the heart of European political life that has lead to ArtMap, their most ambitious and intriguing work to date.

ArtMap as process

ArtMap is the name that the artists have given to the process they used to examine LandMap, CCW’s method for describing, assessing and evaluating the qualities of landscape.

Landscape is far more than what we see, it includes the stories we tell, the people we meet, our individual and collective memories and history. A geologist will look at the landscape in a different way to a farmer, or a tourist. To capture how society as a whole values and relates to different landscapes is a complex and daunting task.

Over two years ArtMap has emerged, through the constituency of its relationship to LandMap, into a process in its own right. Looking towards LandMap and back outwards to us, the citizens, ArtMap attracts stakeholders toward its manifesto on the art of mapping locality.

Rob Owen of CCW notes: “In this work Artstation are questioning the way we understand each other’s viewpoints and rationale for decision-making in say, urban planning, highlighting the lack of engagement with the people affected by those decisions. ArtMap can be seen as new interpretative layer which deciphers, or at least gives voice to multiple viewpoints”.

An interactive database interface
Described as the beginnings of a new planning tool, from ArtMap has come a novel new interactive user interface, which has initially been developed for interpretation at the Ynyslas visitor centre in mid-Wales. On a user level, an avatar (the one in the prologue named Dewi) in a three- dimensional map, is operated by a simple joystick. The person looking at the computer screen can then move the avatar in the virtual landscape in any direction, to explore wherever they find, it provides the possibility to explore LandMap and ArtMap information and in this way creating different perceptions of the territory.

Pop-up information video screens are operated by walking the avatar towards them. This marriage of data and insider knowledge spans a gap between resident and architect, farmer and urban planner, government and citizen.

Artstation and ArtMap do not offer easy or perhaps any answers to a multitude of questions and dilemmas. The most persuasive aspect of ArtMap is that the avatar seeks out further lines of enquiry and demands from the user a response, another question or, more importantly, a position.

Epilogue:

My name is Dewi. You can use me as a creative conduit for change. You can use me as a communication device, to speak to the landscape. You can use me as a tool to carve out new opportunities. I am the link between the mappers and the mapped, between the civic and the civil, and between them and us.
You are in control.

Gordon Dalton is an artist, curator and writer. He is Festival Coordinator for May You Live In Interesting Times, Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology.