Locating grid technologies: performativity, place, space

This paper arises out of a brief period in the early- to mid-2000s when the British funding and research climate facilitated a relationship between the technical, operational language of e-Science and the creative and performing arts. It concerns the ways in which live creative practices produce media traces that are fractured across screens and networks to produce new spatial relations between live events and their records. The split and contradictory subjectivities produced in these highly mediatized environments bring to the fore creative tensions between the live event and the recorded document. That is, the discourses, technologies and practices (if we may separate these) of e-Science not only produce new, spatial connections between events and their archives, they enact the "liveness" of archives as they are accessed and recombined to produce new art forms. Locating Grid Technologies: Performativity, Place, Space, a research workshop series funded by the A&H e-Science Initiative in its 2006 round, aimed to investigate how e-Science technologies might inform new understandings of space and time for distributed, creative research practices. Arts and technology researchers from the UK, US and Japan met to generate, analyze and re-use audio-visual documents of distributed practice-led research. Specifically, the project sought to combine and repurpose e-Science tools in order to investigate the spatial relationships produced between time-based, live events and their immediately mediatized traces. This paper investigates those performative fragmentations of place and space. It suggests that the potentialities and pitfalls of e-Science tools and technologies present fertile material for the arts researcher, particularly within the area of practice-based research: from the politics of surveillance to the aesthetics of video compression, from the ethics of multidisciplinary collaboration to the theoretical implications of mixing video time and space with the time and space of the performance event.