Office of Experiments artist Neal White leading a bus tour of Dark Places in the South in 2010
 
Experimental Ruins: West Edition
Saturday 15 September 2012, 12.30-5.30pm - Experimental Fieldworkshop
Saturday 6 October 2012, 9.30am to 6pm - Critical Excursion
Experimental Ruins: West Edition is a critical excursion and an artwork devised by Neal White of The Office of Experiments. It is part of a series of artworks which use a technique called Overt Research to explore the UK landscape as a multi-layered territory that can be interpreted through aesthetic, archaeological, geographical and techno-scientific interpretations. Combining these approaches, Experimental Fieldworkshop participants will be led through experimental research techniques and strategies which they can then apply during the Critical Excusion, which others may attend simply as a witness or situated spectator.
Experimental Fieldworkshop, Saturday 15 September 2012, 12.30-5.30pm
The Arts Catalyst, 50-54 Cerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PS
Participants will take part in experimental field research to examine the interior and exterior space of a specific site close to The Arts Catalyst space. A normally inaccessible space will then be explored and mapped through technological and artistic means.
The fieldwork will be used as an instance of engagement with sites that reveal facts that are stranger than science fiction. Participants will document and map the space, using it is a test bed for further work and discussion. The outcomes of this work will be integrated within the operations of the second part of the project.
Book online here for both Experimental Fieldworkshop and Critical Excursion
(please make sure you will be available to take part in both 15 September and 6 October events).
Critical Excursion, Saturday 6 October 2012, 9.30am to 6pm
Meeting point tbc, likely to be near Uxbridge Station (Metropolitan Line), the event will end at The Arts Catalyst in Clerkenwell
The second part of the project is conceived as a spatial enquiry into recent histories as articulated through sites and spaces of the cold war across outer West London. The project allows participants to engage directly with the contemporary reality of military, scientific sites as well as the political imaginary that entangle the remains of both science and activism, as well as technology and fiction. Questioning how and when sites become sites of heritage and when historic interpretations become fact, science fiction or conspiracy, the excursion will explore the representational spaces of media, artistic and literary responses through the suburban territory of the M4 corridor.
Participants already experienced in fieldwork will help document the visits to key sites, some of which remain to this day contentious and even shrouded in secrecy. The tour itself is devised to generate an account, which being part fiction and part fact involves participants engaging with historical sites to re-imagine the material landscape that surrounds them.
Book online here to be a witness/spectator for the Critical Excursion on 6 October only.
Experimental Ruins: West Edition is commissioned by The Arts Catalyst.
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