AIR

More information on contributors to AIR’s first annual forum for artists, taking place at Firstsite, Colchester, 11 February 2012.

Keynote speaker:

Carrie Bishop

Carrie is a director at FutureGov, a consultancy and social innovation incubator specialising in new media for government in the UK and USA.  She loves her job.

She has a background in Local Government, having worked at the London Borough of Barnet, first as a graduate on the NGDP (National Graduate Development Programme) in the role of Policy Officer and then as a Change Manager.  She was responsible for piloting the first social media project at the council. 

Carrie has also worked with several other local authorities and public bodies, having been a consultant at the public sector consultancy Capita Consulting. 

Since joining FutureGov, Carrie has led projects focused on using social technologies for better collaboration, open innovation and organisational change. She led on the development and implementation of the Safeguarding 2.0 project, and is currently working on lots of FutureGov Projects.

Twitter: @carriebish

Action presenters:

Tessy Britton

Tessy is a senior associate at Nurture Development and is a social designer and thinker focused on all types of asset-based creative collaboration. She is a specialist in cognition, emotion, learning and human behaviour, which she applies to contexts which require a wide range of systems thinking about people work, both individually and collectively.

Tessy is Director of Social Spaces, which aims to research, understand and spread new emergent knowledge and practice for positive citizen-led community action. The project she is best known for The Travelling Pantry project which visited communities all over the UK, travelling 20,000 miles in 4 months, conducting creative community workshops with about 800 people in 2010/2011. Social Spaces publishes the Hand Made series of books which reveals and documents inspiring community-led projects from around the world. Later in 2011 the project will begin to publish The Community Lover's Guide To The Universe - a collaborative, appreciative, crowd-sourced series of city and town guides where a high level of creative community activity is emerging.

Tessy is also Co-founder of Mindapples, an organisation focused on wellbeing, whose goal is to make looking after our minds as natural as brushing our teeth. Both these social projects work directly with people, designing innovative tools and methods to reveal and connect their existing capacities.

As Associate Lecturer of the University of Chichester, Tessy delivers a module on the MA Education course on Metacognition, Learning and Wellbeing. Tessy is a member and former Chair of the RSA Fellowship Council, and a member of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society.

www.tessybritton.com/

Twitter: @TessyBritton

Dan Mcquillan

Co-founder and Director of Social Innovation Camp. Lecturer in Creative & Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, co-convenor for the MA/MSc in Creating Social Media, and teaches 2nd year undergraduate Social Computing. Co-founder and Director of Social Innovation Camp.

After a Ph.D in Experimental Particle Physics, he worked with people with learning disabilities and as a mental health advocate and was also active in local community campaigns. Doing particle physics Dan was introduced to the Internet, and he became interested in its potential for social change. He founded Multikulti, a community-led multilingual site for asylum seekers & refugees which won a Global Ideas Bank Social Innovations Award, and SocialSource, an independent collective advocating for open source in the voluntary sector. Dan attended the protest against the G8 in Genoa in 2001 and was among 93 people who were beaten, disappeared & tortured by Italian police. He joined Amnesty International as global web manager just as web 2.0 was emerging, and 'added some oomph to their ecampaigning' by introducing blogging and the use of social networks. Dan wanted Amnesty to understand that the web was not just a tool but a key terrain for human rights struggle, and he headed Amnesty's first delegation to the UN's Internet Governance Forum. This was followed by a stint as Head of Digital for the Make Your Mark campaign, using social media to promote and support entrepreneurship, and then Head of Digital at Media for Development using participatory digital innovation as a way to empower marginalised communities.

Dan is a former Director of The Open Rights Group, and a consultant for Transitions Online on ways to use digital tactics for anti-corruption and good governance in Central & Eastern Europe. In 2008 he co-founded Social Innovation Camp which brings together ideas, people and digital tools to build web-based solutions to social problems in just 48 hours. Successful projects that started at Social Innovation Camp include Enabled by Design, The Good Gym and MyPolice. In 2010 he led Social Innovation Camp Caucasus with participants from Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan.

www.internetartizans.co.uk/About

Twitter: @danmcquillan 

Josie Appleton

Josie is convenor of the Manifesto Club; she oversees the club's campaigns and publications, and coordinates the membership programme. She heads up the Campaign Against Vetting, and is author of its series of reports (starting with The Case Against Vetting in October 2006) and blog. She also founded and edits the Thinkpieces series and wrote a Thinkpiece on Hate Speech, A New Deal for public debate, and chairs Manifesto Club salons. As a journalist and writer, she writes on the freedom issues of the day for a number of publications.

Twitter: @manifestoclub

Event orchestrator:

Richard Layzell

Richard is a London-based artist who works in installation, video and performance internationally. He pioneered a series of innovative artist residencies in industry, defining the role of the 'visionaire', and was recently based in Shanghai for the Visiting Arts Square Mile project. 
His interactive installation Tap Ruffle and Shave, commissioned by Glasgow Museums, toured the UK and was seen by 100,000 people. His collaboration with Tania Koswycz has led to The Manifestation, a major work for galleries.

He is the author of Enhanced Performance and Cream Pages, is an Honorary Associate of the National Review of Live Art and an artist/researcher with ResCen at Middlesex University. He is currently the lead artist for the innovative King's Lynn 'Aspire' project.
 He has been commissioned by Tate Britain, Ikon Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery and Firstsite.

www.rescen.net/Richard_Layzell/r_layzell.html

Facilitators:

Manick Govinda

Co-ordinator for the Manifesto Club's Visiting Artists campaign, against the UK Home Office's restrictions on non-EU artists and academics. He is an artists' producer and head of artists advisory services at Artsadmin, having produced and commissioned artists such as Zarina Bhimji, Zineb Sedira, Franko B, Yara El-Sherbini, Peter Liversidge and walkwalkwalk. He is a member of the Mayor of London's Cultural Strategy Group and is a non-executive director of ArtRole, a-n: The Artists' Information Company, and The Showroom.

www.manifestoclub.com/visitingartists

Twitter: @manick62 

Esther Salamon

Esther Salamon is a consultant, facilitator, mentor, trainer and researcher with over 25 years experience of creating, developing and managing interdisciplinary arts projects across voluntary, public and private sectors. Areas of expertise include interim management, developing effective collaborations and partnerships, board/governance development, project and organisational development, fundraising, and strategic planning and review. She has undertaken research, evaluations, feasibility studies and consultancies for universities, local authorities, artist-led organisations, cultural organisations, national and regional arts funding bodies and trusts and foundations.  She is currently a non-executive director of (a-n) The Artists Information Company and developed Art for Conferences. Although a specialist in the cultural sector, she has considerable experience of developing and working with multi-disciplinary teams - engaging, challenging and stimulating active collaborative and imaginative solutions with deliverable actions that are owned by the members of a group.

For over fifteen years, and prior to going freelance, she was Co-Director of Newcastle-based charity Helix Arts where she created and managed projects that placed practising artists from across disciplines into health, community and criminal justice settings. She also took primary responsibility for internal operations including human resources and finance and established key partnerships with probation, prison and youth offender institutions and health trusts.

www.artforconferences.com 

Judith Stewart

Judith Stewart is a visual artist whose work focuses on the role of culture within politics and the place of the political within a cultural work or event. Her curatorial work has developed in order to provide a space where some of the questions raised in this area can be tested more comprehensively than is possible through individual practice.

Her experience of working with artists as a curator led to an involvement in debates concerning socially-engaged practice, leading to a PhD from Manchester Metropolitan University for Objects of Exchange: the role of the artwork and the artist in the context of social inclusion. This has developed into further research relating to the aesthetics of process-based works and the difficulty of re-presenting these effectively through the gallery system.

She is currently working on collaborations relating to cultural experiences of landscape. These include: Good Husbandry, a research project developing new work and methods of distribution that reflect how working away from an urban artworld could, and should, effect a different approach to cultural production (with Jonathan P. Watts, supported by Arts Council England); Unrealised/Unrealiseable, a forthcoming residency at Orford Ness supported by the National Trust; and Lost Spaces, a collaboration with the poet Anna Reckin.

Since 2010 she has worked as Artists' Support Researcher for firstsite in Colchester. She is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London, Sessional Tutor at UEA, and teaches Art History courses for the WEA.

www.stoprojects.com/judith_stewart

For the full schedule and list of speakers click here »

Bookings: As places are limited booking is essential. Contact airevents@a-n.co.uk with OpenAIR in the title and you will be sent more information.

Follow OpenAIR live on Twitter using the tag #OpenAIR. There will also be a live video stream (details to follow), with edited highlights available on the AIR YouTube Channel.

First published: a-n.co.uk December 2011