Artist Talk: Ruth Catlow, Idit Nathan and Helen Stratford
Join artists Ruth Catlow, Idit Nathan and Helen Stratford as they talk about their work and explore how technology can be used to engage the public in playful ‘games’.
Wednesday 22nd January, Metal Chauffeurs Cottage, 7pm
Ruth Catlow
Ruth Catlow is an artist, curator and educator. As co-founder and co-director of Furtherfield.org, a grass roots media arts organisation and its gallery in North London, she works at the intersection of art, technology and social change with artists, curators, musicians, programmers, writers, activists and thinkers from around the world. She is adviser to Tiltfactor an independent games production lab that focuses on critical play.
Ruth is currently employed as Head of School at Writtle School of Design (WSD) where she is supporting interdisciplinary work and exchange with other sustainability and land-based disciplines within the college and with local, national and international partners. WSD is in the top four Art and Design institutions nationally (Guardian University Guide 2011).
Ruth Catlow is currently working with artist Mary Flanagan to create Play Southend – an online game to imagine the future of Southend, developed following a residency at Metal. Local residents were invited to make a platform game of Southend working with artists and game designers.
Follow PLAY SOUTHEND on facebook and Twitter for latest updates on the project.
Idit Nathan and Helen Stratford
For the past two and half years artists Idit Nathan and Helen Stratford have collaborated on a variety of projects, all of which share an engagement with spaces and how different publics interact within them in performative and playful ways. Following a recent Time & Space residency with METAL Peterborough, and a METAL Digital Lab earlier this year, their current ongoing project is titled ‘Play the City Now or Never!’ and will see them develop a mobile app – designed to solicit playful engagement with cities including Peterborough; exploring the potential of play to inspire engagement with places and ideas, however challenging, complex or even commonplace. Idit and Helen’s blog Play in the City Now or Never!
Idit Nathan - Following twelve years as a tehatre practitioner (working as a screnographer) Idit’s current visual practice is oftern playful and intractive. Her work creates a provocative space in which the viewer is challanged to respond to unsettling contemporary dilemmas derived from our identity as both actors of free will and actors in an historical context focusing on coexistence and tensions between past and present, the galelry and’non gallery’ space and the interactivity pf the audiences that inhabit these spaces.
Helen stratford - While located between perfomance art, architecture and writing., Helen’s collaborative social researches the rythm/routines by which people negotiate soace, define and produce everyday spaces. In analysing the rythms of daily life Helen’s practice investigate how we can rethink the power of the built environment within social, politcal, economic and emotonal infrastructures.
