Fosca

Kia ora koutou!

Welcome to my project: Fosca: a low-resolution investigation of high technology

I would like to invite you to donate to help hold a series of free sculptural workshops. The workshops support unique and vital ideas from artists that are crucial to mainstream discourse. Your donation will keep these workshops free of charge as not all people could afford to attend otherwise. 

Fosca is an initiative that intertwines my fine art practice and my community art practice. In the first step I'll develop 2D and 3D ideas in my studio with painting and ceramics. I'll then bring these ideas to workshop groups to play with and to extend on their own unique path of understanding. The communities I work with all have a degree of isolation or difference, whether geographic, social or of outlook. I am interested in these groups as I want their independent, non-mainstream thoughts and perspective. I believe theses artists offer outsider solutions that mainstream minds fail to imagine.

Core Concept: We have always been enamoured of technology, from ancient technologies like art and language to the technologies of high science and industry. As artificial intelligence (AI) rises from the dross of human ambition it crosses the liminal space between the virtual and the haptic worlds. As it swivels its vertebrae-free head around to see the view it can't differentiate us; pavement, tree, beetle, human, rock. Everything is an object.

I want to make objects that imagine what AI will look like once it is an independent actor in this world. And what this world will look like to AI.

The Workshops: The workshops emphasise collaborative work and experimentation. We will use spontaneous, volatile media such as charcoal, ink, and assemblage and then transpose the developed ideas into clay objects. The workshop group explores ideas around the purpose of art as an investigative and expressive tool in the 21st century. And they experience an idea as it manifests itself in different media - jumping between 2D and 3D forms.

The workshop sites are in the process of confirmation, they are: Village Arts Gallery, Kohukohu, Hokianga with curator-artists Heiwari Johnson and Marg Morrow, and in Auckland: Waiheke Adult Learning, M?pura Studios, and M?ngere Arts Centre - Ng? Tohu o Uenuku with curator-artist Anna Rae. The Kohukohu group are predominantly professional artists, Waiheke Adult Learning are both professional artists and outsider artists, M?pura Studios are all outsider artists and the Mangere group will provide a youth perspective.

Please contact me for any further information or images- no question is too big or small!

Ng? mihi nui

Margaret.