The Roadtrip is parked for four days at the Conflux Festival, 2006 in Williamsburg, New York. Conflux is the leading new media festival of the fall art season, and it's dedicated to locative media projects, an omnibus term for works that explore space, place and location through cartography, mobile phones, GPS and the like. It's about the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practices. Eighty artists are presenting works here, and there are many additional talks and events.
Locative projects are a key concern for many artists these days, due in no small part to the new tools and technologies – photo geo-tagging, Google Earth, GIS and so forth – that proliferate and upgrade daily. Add to this the reinvigoration of city studies in response to the emergence of a new digital city existing in parallel with its physical counterpart and you begin to understand the combustibles that ignite Conflux.
This festival has been organized annually since 2003 by Globlab, an artist-run production and publishing lab headed by Christina Ray and Sarah Pace, among others. Glowlab produces a webzine about projects and critical perspectives on psychogeography and locative city projects.
Carleton Roadtrippers are providing support infrastructure for the Festival. We’re assisting individual artists in mounting and executing their projects, documenting everything, and – of course – participating in artworks. Today, for example, Tom Schmidt found himself chasing all over Manhattan helping a lanky British artist who is a member of the anonymous art group, C6 and goes by the name Léon. Technical difficulties proliferated: Léon had to buy all new equipment because his Brit stuff just would not work here, and his heavy dependence on cellphones meant that he couldn't participate in his own project. Fortunately, such similar difficulties are rare at the festival, and the misty skies have not dampened anyone's enthusiasm.
As for us, our major project will be a series of graphically sophisticated essays on individual artists that we'll mount online. These will include an essay on the works, photos and other forms of documentation. Keep an eye on the right hand nav bar for a link to the completed work.
[Above: Fest Director Christina Ray doles out assignments. Below: everyone working at the wifi watering hole.]
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