Respondents: Tate Encounters Research Team

This recording is part of:

Art and Politics: Uncertain Practices
Programme D

Three years ago the research project Tate Encounters set out a number of original research aims which explicitly bound together the spheres of politics and art. Indeed on many accounts, from within the recently established field of museum studies, the foundation and dynamic of the museum is essentially that of a politics of the public and as such the Tate Encounters research programme is fundamentally a study in cultural politics. Firstly it framed Tate’s role in holding the National Collection of British Art at Tate Britain as a practice of the political representation of nation.  Secondly, it framed government cultural diversity policy as a politics of civil society.

After two years of fieldwork Tate Encounters is in the process of elaborating a number of understandings about the ways in which Tate Britain produces and reproduces itself and its audience organisationally and how a group of voluntary participants with migrant backgrounds engaged with and made sense of Tate Britain as audience members. In this respect, Tate Britain has been understood as a cultural site and a potential ‘contact zone’ in negotiating transcultural, generational and class identities.

The project now aims to locate these emergent findings in the wider context of enumerating the recent history of the development of cultural diversity policy and to understand its politics and cultural outcomes. This programme aims to critically scrutinise the intellectual and political roots of cultural diversity policy through examining understandings of the politics of the policy process, and the ways in which museums responded to diversity policy. In addition, it wishes to look at the impact of a changing social demographic upon traditional cultural institutions in relationship to contemporary cultural forms of expression.

In more detail the programme. is interested in examining received thinking about multiculturalism, cultural pluralism and cultural diversity as a way of identifying both older limits and new possibilities for progressive cultural change. In doing this the project recognises the need to look at the ways in which such debates were informed by intellectual and practical thinking about race and ethnicity.

Chair: Mike Phillps
Respondent: Andrew Dewdney

• Munira Mirza, Director of Policy, Arts, Culture and the Creative Industries, Greater London Authority
• Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery
• Lola Young, independent consultant, Cultural Brokers

This recording is part of:

Art and Politics: Uncertain Practices
Programme D

Three years ago the research project Tate Encounters set out a number of original research aims which explicitly bound together the spheres of politics and art. Indeed on many accounts, from within the recently established field of museum studies, the foundation and dynamic of the museum is essentially that of a politics of the public and as such the Tate Encounters research programme is fundamentally a study in cultural politics. Firstly it framed Tate’s role in holding the National Collection of British Art at Tate Britain as a practice of the political representation of nation.  Secondly, it framed government cultural diversity policy as a politics of civil society.

After two years of fieldwork Tate Encounters is in the process of elaborating a number of understandings about the ways in which Tate Britain produces and reproduces itself and its audience organisationally and how a group of voluntary participants with migrant backgrounds engaged with and made sense of Tate Britain as audience members. In this respect, Tate Britain has been understood as a cultural site and a potential ‘contact zone’ in negotiating transcultural, generational and class identities.

The project now aims to locate these emergent findings in the wider context of enumerating the recent history of the development of cultural diversity policy and to understand its politics and cultural outcomes. This programme aims to critically scrutinise the intellectual and political roots of cultural diversity policy through examining understandings of the politics of the policy process, and the ways in which museums responded to diversity policy. In addition, it wishes to look at the impact of a changing social demographic upon traditional cultural institutions in relationship to contemporary cultural forms of expression.

In more detail the programme. is interested in examining received thinking about multiculturalism, cultural pluralism and cultural diversity as a way of identifying both older limits and new possibilities for progressive cultural change. In doing this the project recognises the need to look at the ways in which such debates were informed by intellectual and practical thinking about race and ethnicity.

Chair: Victoria Walsh
Respondent: Mike Phillips

• Faisal Abdul’Allah, artist
• Hew Locke, artist
• Raimi Gbadamosi, artist

Art and Politics: Uncertain Practices
Programme D

Chair: Victoria Walsh
Respondent: Mike Phillips

Mark Miller, Curator, Young Peoples Programmes
Jennifer Batchelor, Curator, Interpretation
Indie Choudhury, Curator, Visual Dialogues

This Recordingis part of:

Art and Politics: Uncertain Practices
Programme D

Chair: Victoria Walsh
Respondent: Mike Phillips

• Professor Paul Willis,  Social/Cultural Ethnography, University of Keele
• Professor Andrew Dewdney, Project Director, Tate Encounters

Art and Politics: Uncertain Practices
Programme D

This recording is part of:
Programme C: Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship

This session will bring together critical thinkers who have been crucial to the development of Visual Cultures. The panel will include Professor Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College, University of London and Dr. Marquand Smith, Principal Lecturer in Visual Culture Studies, University of Westminster. They will be joined by Dr. David Dibosa and Dr. Raimi Gbadamoshi.

This recording is part of:
Programme C: Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship

Co-researchers Rebecca Cairns, Jacqueline Ryan and Patrick Tubridy, present their work, asking whether Tate Britain allows people with diverse backgrounds to engage with culture across generations within families.  This session will also contain a screening of an ethnographic film looking at co-researchers’ lives. It will be followed by a panel discussion with Visual Anthropologist  Sarah Thomas and Co-Investigator Dr. David Dibosa.  Dr. Raimi Gbadamoshi will present reflections on the work.

Watch the films presented in this recording here: Rebecca Cairns, Jacqueline Ryan and Patrick Tubridy

This recording is part of:
Programme C: Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship

Co-researchers Mary Ampomah, Nicola Oyejobi and Deep Rajput present their work, focusing on the way that cultural institutions reflect key issues in their lives. This session will also contain a screening of an ethnographic film looking at co-researchers’ life-worlds. This session will be followed by a panel discussion with Visual Anthropologist Sarah Thomas and Co-Investigator Dr. David Dibosa. Dr. Raimi Gbadamoshi will present reflections on the work.

Watch the films presented in this recording here: Deep Rajput,  Nicola Oyejobi and Mary Ampomah

This recording is part of:
Programme C: Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship

Co-researchers Adekunle Detokunbo-Bello and Maria Cinta Esmel Pamies present their work, looking at ways of engaging creatively with museums beyond the conventions. The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion with Visual Anthropologist  Sarah Thomas and Co-Investigator Dr. David Dibosa.  Dr. Raimi Gbadamoshi will present reflections on the work.

Watch the films presented in this recording here: Adekunle Detokunbo-Bello and Maria Cinta Esmel Pamies

This recording is part of:
Programme C: Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship

Watch the films presented in this recording here: Aminah Borg-Luck and Dana Mendonca

Co-researchers Robbie Sweeny and Tracey Jordan present their work, highlighting concerns with the way cultural institutions relate to the lives of their audiences. The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion with Visual Anthropologist Sarah Thomas and Co-Investigator Dr. David Dibosa.  Dr. Raimi Gbadamoshi will present reflections on the work.

Tate and its Publics

• Dr David Dibosa, The Engine Room, University Arts London
• Dr Raimi Gbadamosi, Artist
• Robbie Sweeny, Co-researcher
• Tracey Jordan, Co-researcher
• Sarah Thomas, Research Assistant

Taking their own experience of migration as a starting point, the co-researchers in this session take a sidelong look at Tate Britain as a national institution often regarded as the custodian of British Art. Through a series of films and slideshows, the co-researchers look at issues such as the funding of national museums, the place of popular culture, the relationship of national museums to British Imperial history and the status of research.
Co-researchers Robbie Sweeny and Tracey Jordan present their work, highlighting concerns with the way cultural institutions relate to the lives of their audiences

Watch the films in this recording here:  Tracey Jordan and Robbie Sweeny

This recording is part of:

Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship
Programme C

A central focus for Tate Encounters has been the engagement of volunteer participants in museum practices. This has involved: the viewing of exhibitions, participation in museum events, as well as visits ‘behind the scenes’. As a result of this activity, films and other visual media works have been made collaboratively with different members of the Tate Encounters Research team. Volunteer participants who generated visual media works became more fully involved in the research process and have been called ‘co-researchers’.
This session brings a group of the Tate Encounters co-researchers together with researcher Sarah Thomas, who worked closely with several of them to produce ethnographic films tracing their life-world experience. They will be joined by Dr David Dibosa and Dr Raimi Gbadamoshi.

• Dr David Dibosa, The Engine Room, University Arts London
• Dr Raimi Gbadamosi, Artist
• Sarah Thomas, Research Assistant
• Jacqueline Ryan, Co-researcher
• Mary Ampomah, Co-researcher
• Adekunle Detokunbo-Bello, Co-researcher
• Tracey Jordan, Co-researcher

This session brings a group of the Tate Encounters co-researchers together with Visual Anthropologist Sarah Thomas, who worked closely with several of them to produce ethnographic films tracing their life-world experience. They will be joined by Dr David Dibosa and Dr Raimi Gbadamoshi.

This recording is part of:

Visual Culture, Transmigration and Spectatorship

Programme C

• Dr David Dibosa, The Engine Room, University Arts London
• Dr Raimi Gbadamosi, Artist
• Veronica Sekules, Head of Education and Research, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia
• Professor Janet Holland, SPUR Research Institute

• David Garcia, Dean of Chelsea College of Art and Design and Professor of Design for Digital Cultures, HKU
• Charlie Gere, Head of Department and Reader in New Media Research in the Department of Media, Film, and Cultural Studies, Lancaster University
• Kelli Dipple, Curator, Intermedia art

This session discusses the wider contexts of the museum’s position in relationship to digital and globalised culture. How will the increasing use of information technologies across a whole spectrum of social, economic and cultural activity impact upon art practice and the value of museums?

This recording is part of:

Resolutely Analogue?: Art Museums in Digital Culture
Programme B

At the outset the research project Tate Encounters chose to use new media for volunteer participants to record their own encounters with Tate Britain as well as a research tool for reflexive documentation and commentary. This took the practical form of a dedicated intranet site and the use of mobile digital recording.

In using new media the project made a number of assumptions about how undergraduate student participants used new media, how this related to the ways in which a national art museum understood the potential of new media and what the use of new media might produce as research data. Having now completed two years of fieldwork, the project is now reflecting upon its initial assumptions and raising a number of critical questions which it aims to share and extend with a wider group interested in the development of new media in relationship to museums.

Some of the initial questions relate to the following:

• To what extent does the web visitor have agency to ‘act back’ or to ‘author’ their interactions with museum websites?
• How is new media being conceived as an ‘interpretative’ or ‘augmenting’ dimension of the museum experience and with what effects?
• How do museums see and understand the value of the use of personal mobile media within the museum?

These questions have been grouped under the title ‘Resolutely Analogue? Art Museums in Digital Culture’ to signal the tension between change and continuity, between new media enthusiasms and traditional museological practices. Issues such as the use of media in the gallery centered on authority and provenance, ownership and copyright, and user engagement will also be discussed throughout the week’s programme.

• John Stack, Head of Tate Online
• James Davis, Online Collection Editor, Tate Online  [ click here for presentation ]

This session focuses upon how museum websites operate as online portals for various constituencies of online users. How porous can museum websites be within loss of identity and focus? How are questions of value and provenance negotiated?

• Will Gompertz, Director, Tate Media
• Damien Whitmore. Director of Communications, Victoria & Albert Museum

This session focuses upon the growing relationship between art and media, specifically upon the possibilities presented by online transmission for museums to take on new roles as producers and broadcasters of media.

This recording is part of: 

Resolutely Analogue?: Art Museums in Digital Culture
Programme B

* Sarah Cook, Research Fellow for the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at University of Sunderland

* Ross Parry, Lecturer in Museums and New Media at the University of Leicester Programme Director of Museum Studies at University of Leicester
[ click here for presentation ]

This session will focus upon the ways in which new media has been taken up and used within museums. It explores how new media practices become objects to be curated, collected and archived within museums, as well as designing new media objects for interpretation and education within museums

Marc Garret, Net and new media artist
Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and New Media at Channel 4
Anna Colin, Exhibitions curator, Gasworks
Honor Harger, Artist and curator

This session focuses upon new media practitioners who have looked beyond the context of the museum and gallery in generating a presence for innovatory, independent practice on the Intranet and with what consequences and outcomes.

This Recording is part of: 

Resolutely Analogue?: Art Museums in Digital Culture
Programme B

• Graham Harwood, Artist and educator
• Gary Stuart, Head of Multimedia at Iniva since
• Roshini Kempadoo, New media artist, photographer and Reader in Media Practice at University of East London

This session looks at new media art projects which have had a relationship to gallery and museum exhibition and asks questions about how artists working with new media understand the context of  working within contemporary art context and what their experience has been.

• Richard Colson, Artist and Senior Lecturer in Digital Arts at Thames Valley University
• Mike Philips, Reader in Digital Art & Technology and Director of i-DAT [Institute of Digital Art & Technology], University of Plymouth
• Paula Roush, New media artist and lecturer at London South Bank University and the University of Westminister

This session will have presentations on perspectives of teaching new media and will focus upon questions of the cultural contexts of new media practices, knowledge and understanding in curricula design and teaching for interactivity.

This recording is part of:

Resolutely Analogue?: Art Museums in Digital Culture
Programme B

Digital Media Arts Project (October 2008- February 2009)
At the end of the first year of the project it was noted that whilst participants attended workshops at Tate Britain and continued to document their experience, they made little use of the online blog. Instead they worked to the deadlines for submission to the Image/Sound/Text section of the [E]ditions online publication. The project still wanted explore what a digital encounter might be and negotiated to work with third year students on the BA(Hons)Digital Media Arts programme. Tate Encounters constituted itself as an external client commissioning a series of prototype interface portals for the Tate Encounters Online Archive. In  this session the student disscussed how they ended up on their course, their thougths on digital media and the museum via the Altermodern show next to the Duveen Studios.
To view the prototypes click here

This Recording is part of:

Richard Morphet
Richard Morphet joined the Tate Gallery in 1966 and retired in 1998. His first appointment was as Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection, becoming Deputy Keeper of it in 1973, and subsequently Keeper from 1986 until 1998.

This Recording is part of: 

Helen Charman
Helen Charman was previously Curator, Teacher Programmes, Tate Modern

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

Toby Jackson
Toby Jackson joined Tate Gallery Liverpool in 1988 as the founding Head of Education and Public Programmes and a member of the Gallery’s senior management team, later becoming the founding Head of Interpretation and Education at Tate Modern in 1999.

This recording is part of: 

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

Andrew Brighton
Andrew Brighton worked for Tate between 1992 and 2002. He was Curator of Public Events at the Tate Gallery, Millbank until he moved in 1999 to Tate Modern to become Senior Curator: Public Programmes.

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

 
Anna Cutler
Anna Cutler is Head of Learning at Tate Modern and took up the post in 2006.

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

Sylvia Lahav
From1987 to 1993 Sylvia Lahav was Curator of schools at the Tate Gallery, and from 1994 to 1995 she was Curator responsible for devising and co-ordinating lectures and events and for the planning co-ordination and management of a large varied programme of events, conferences, seminars. From 1996 to 1999 she became Curator of  Public programmes  at the Tate Gallery moving in 2000 to Tate Modern as part of the team established there.

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

Tim Marlow
Tim Marlow began working at the Tate Gallery as a lecturer in the Education Department and subsequently move to the Communications Department where he established and edited Tate - The Art Magazine

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson joined Tate in 1967 as Official Lecturer. He became Head of Education in 1980, Curator of Interpretation in 1991, Communications Curator in 2000, and retired from Tate in 2002.

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A

Michael Compton
Michael Compton joined Tate in 1965 as Assistant Keeper in the Modern Collection (now Collection). In 1970 he was appointed as Keeper of Exhibitions and Education Department to be assisted by 2 Assistant Keepers.  In 1980, he became responsible for the exhibitions programme, Education and the Archive & Library

Click here for Paper by Michael Compton

This recording is part of:

Education Practice at Tate 1970-present
Programme A