What: Open Participatory Session (Free entrance) 
When: Thursday 16.5, 16.30-17.30 
Where: KUVA, Doctoral Study auditorium 

The international exhibition Fields, jointly curated by Armin Medosch, Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, will present a variety of challenging artworks on issues such as sustainability, ecology, tactical biopolitics, social art practice and related areas.

Fields, opening on May 15 and lasting till August 03 2014, will form a major part of the Riga Culture Capital 2014 programme, and will be held at Arsenals, the Exhibition Hall of the National Art Museum, as well as other venues in Riga, Latvia.

In this Q & A Session Armin Medosch will explain the idea behind this exhibition and project and how people can get involved. Fields understands the exhibition as a participatory research project. The central research question is:

"Which Fields act as catalysts and underpin those artistic practices which offer the greatest potential for social change towards more imaginative and sustainable ways of living? Which pre-cursors in the last 30-40 years did exist and what can we learn from those often untold stories?"

A premise behind this question is that practices which were once subsumed under terms such as media art, digital art, art-and-technology, art-and-science, have become so diversified that no single term can work as a signpost any more. The assumption is also that typically those practices are transdisciplinary and socially engaged, combining imaginative use of technologies old and new with participatory processes and interventions in the social fabric. The changing role of art in society is one where it does not just create a new aesthetics but gets involved in patterns of social, scientific, and technological transformations. Fields is about mapping those expanded fields of artistic practices which are contextual seedbeds for ideas and practices aiming at overcoming the crisis of the present and developing new models of techno-social evolution.

The Fields Q & A session can be understood as a collective brainstorming. If you have an art or artistic-research project, or a project which is more about social change but has a creative and cultural dimension, please come along and present your idea in a short statement. If you can not attend the Helsinki session but want to participate in the exhibition please send a short description to: fields@rixc.lv