The 4th International Symposium on Emerging Techniques: SportArt

Finally, the pundits of Creative Economies and all that malarkey will be forced to confront their own bastard child: SportArt. Despite the eagerness to strip mine 'creativity' and 'leisure' in an effort to stave off economic doom, the consensual hallucination of a Creative Economy on which it rests is turning more psychedelic than value-producing. While erstwhile 'industry leaders' like super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist subject themselves to marathon public mea culpas (cf. his forthcoming 24hr talk on Art + Finance at the Serpentine) others, such as the SportArtists, are quietly turning the distinctions between sport and art into spaghetti shapes. As they so provocatively ask, who will sponsor this aberration? What does it mean for audience participation? What does it mean when the Arts Council starts sponsoring people to go to holiday resorts and roll pebbles? And will the media start asking 'but is it sport?'

Calla d'Or, Majorca 12th-16th October 2006

Inclusive registration fee (travel, accommodation, registration) is £250 Symposium registration fee only, is £50/£15 (conc.) Both fees include access to daily climbing and tumbling workshops, as well as sessions of escalatory rhetoric, vertical polemic, all keynote presentations and panel discussions.   For registration details and further information: irational@irational.org

'Whenever I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my chequebook' Jack Parlance, in Le Mepris

'Every sport pretends to a literature' Alistair Cooke

Call for papers and actions

The International Symposium on Emerging Techniques is a restlessly discursive interdisciplinary forum for artists, academics and amateur enthusiasts. In previous years, the symposium has been called to consider topics as diverse as 'Domestic Science: genetic modification in the kitchen garden' and 'Spectres of the Spectrum: piracy, transmission, reception and static'. It has convened on a camel caravan leading into the Great Mosque of Djenné, on an abandoned oil rig in the North Sea and in the catacombs beneath Paris.

This year the Symposium convenes on the cliffs and in the caves of south western Marjorca, Calla d'Or, to get to grips with the emerging techniques of SportArt.

With an eye on the 2012 Olympic Games, this gathering will map out the parameters of an emerging discourse and practice that promises to be an increasingly intense focus of public and corporate cultural investment and media attention. SportArt intervenes in an institutional apparatus that conflates art, sport and tourism in the production of a novel managerial artefact: the 'cultural economy' (comprising of the 'creative' and 'leisure' industries).

This is the final call for papers and actions addressing the emerging techniques of SportArt. We welcome submissions that speak to or perform to the following rubrics:

The spectacle of culture: "There is culture, which is the rule...there is the exception, which is art. Every one speaks the rule." - Jean-Luc Godard Under the signs of Theodore Adorno and Guy Debord can be placed two oppositional approaches to the spectacular commodification of 'culture'. On the one hand, Adorno holds the autonomy of art against a marketplace culture. On the other hand, Guy Debord deploys tactics of disruptive appropriation. Given that SportArt might at times resemble the 'stunt', how is it to be placed in a genealogy of avant garde, modernist and postmodernist art practices that address the 'spectacle of culture'? Where does it stand between the athleticism of action painting and the less physical discursivity of conceptual art? How is it to be situated in relation to situationism, Dada, and various strains of performance art? For that matter, where does it stand in relation to rhythmic gymnastics and chess?

Freedom and constraint or the rules of the game: Founded in 1960, by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, Oulipo, aimed to explore the potentials of literary production through the voluntary adoption of formal constraints. They noted that all artistic forms consisted of more or less arbitrary rules and constraints (rhyme schemes and metre in poetry, say), in any case. Sports, too, are defined by a conformity to recursive regimes devoid of utility - twenty-two humans on a rectangular plot of earth endeavour to sink a leather bladder in a net using only their feet, chests and heads. SportArt asks, faced with a rock and the laws of gravity, or, faced with a wall and the dictates of the town planner, what are the rules of the game?

Performance and spectatorship: The practices of sport and art share a number of family resemblances, the most significant of which are perhaps the centrality of 'performance' and 'spectatorship' to each. The possibilities of solitary practice, notwithstanding, we ask what are the dynamics of doing and looking, and what role do technologies of record play in SportArt?

Modernism and Machismo: Boxing, fencing, and hunting are key elements of a modernist tradition to which Hemmingway is central. What are the gender dynamics of the contemporary practice of SportArt and what are its connections with a modernist legacy?

Amateur athletics and Corporate sponsorship: The institutional economies of both contemporary art and sport are marked by a tension between, on the one hand, an ethos of amateur or vocational disinterest (art/sport for art/sport's sake), and, on the other hand, the imperatives of sensational commercial exploitation. What will be the material and economic conditions of SportArt? Will it have sponsors or patrons? Will it find public support or develop as the private pursuit of committed amateurs? How will it fit into the institutional matrix of the flourishing culture of 'Blairite Baroque'?

Technology and Nakedness: Given that many SportArtists have emerged from net.art practices predicated on the appropriation of a massive technological infrastructure, SportArt's ethic of 'nakedness' and renunciation of 'equipment' is perhaps somewhat ironic. To climb without shoes or chalk, to sleep beneath the stars and travel without burden into a vanishing distance. But what is 'nakedness' in an often toxic urban environment, and what are the potentials of mobile and textile technologies for a practice in an increasingly 'localised' nature?

Sport, art and fascism: Leni Riefenstahl and Adolf Hitler's Triumph of the Will is perhaps the greatest and most disturbing aesthetic achievement of fascist sporting spectacle. How might the emerging discourses of SportArt position themselves vis a vis the spectacular legacies of the fascist and social realist aestheticization of sport, on the one hand, and the sensational commercialisation of much contemporary British art, on the other?

Irony and Death: SportArt and romanticism

Invited participants include: Kayle Brandon - home scientist and arboreal artist Heath Bunting - retired artist and SportArt practitioner David Lammy - culture minister Kate Rich - domestic industrialist and commercial artist

Made possible by:

department for culture, media and sport: Aiming to improve the quality of life for all through cultural and sporting activities, to support the pursuit of excellence and to champion the tourism, creative and leisure industries.