National Heritage
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Politics, Art & Society
Presentation Title:
- National Heritage
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
a. To commit audiences, artists and project collaborators to confronting their complicity in the widespread use of new communications technology for the dissemination and organization of nationalist and racist strategies.
b. To create a gallery installation that involves the audience in a contractual relationship with a computer program designed to address the process of “racialization” — the reframing of ethnic difference as racial distinction —and the new eugenics” — an aggregation of disciplines harnessing biological engineering technology to the values of the social marketplace.
c. To engender interpretative methods of collaborative working, between audiences, artists and project contributors that exploit the possibilities presented by new communications technology for art working within a social context.
d. Formation of Mongrel, Producers of National Heritage Although much of his work has been collaborative, Harwood has always been singled out as individual producer. In an attempt to deal with this, Harwood co-founded Mongrel, an artist-led group, after forming close working relationships with other artists on Rehearsal of Memory. Mongrel is an London-based artist-led organization of mixed people, instituted with the aim of confronting elite values composing the sites, events, media, technical and aesthetic practices of dominant cultures. Our work evades hegemonic culture and the uniformity of its privileged social groups, blurring lines of distinction and social categorizations. Instead we attempt to set up open practice on the terrain hegemonies refuse. We celebrate and foster the hybrid, clashing, mongrel forms of non-elite cultures and their rich brew of discourses on race, class and identity rooted in the mutable vernaculars of the public sphere.
e. What Mongrel does. We make socially engaged cultural products employing any and all technological means available to us. We have dedicated ourselves to learning and developing technological methods of social engagement which means we program, engineer and build our own software and custom hardware.
