Inside the Ethics and Aesthetics of Participation
Lois Klassen (Vancouver) in conversation with Angela Piccini (Bristol University, School of Arts)
2.00pm, Saturday 7th August 10; Spike Island Associate Space, First Floor, 133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, BS1 6UX

Leading up to and during the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the public was urged to be part of the action. As host city, Vancouver Canada was a site of complicity in mass spectacle and a space of vibrant resistance to the narratives it produced, with both positions relying heavily on the active involvement of the public. As the 2012 summer games in London draw near and conflicting discourses on their social and cultural impact invite participation through a range of engaged arts practices, the conversation will focus on Lois Klassen's work navigating the ethics and aesthetics of participation and the mega-event in Vancouver and Angela Piccini's research into the Olympic city, memory and screen media.


Lois Klassen is a Vancouver based artist, community worker and educator who actively researched the participatory art forms during the 2010 Olympics by getting involved. While dutifully responding to numerous calls for participation through officially sanctioned artworks, by artists including Bik Vanderpol, David Rokeby and Rimini Protokol, she co-produced Covering Up, a critical participatory project across the city, and a discussion series at VIVO Media Arts – an artist-run centre and one of the few venues in the region to refuse Olympic funding – addressing the widespread use of public-engagement in all areas of cultural production during the 2010 games and the role of spectatorship in relation to the contested local, regional and national politics glossed over in its official narratives of inclusion and growth.

Angela Piccini continues to research screen media generated around the 2010 Vancouver Winter and 2012 London Summer Olympic Games. Specifically, she is investigating the ways in which the mediatised material cultural heritage of each host country produces specific experiences of the Olympic cities. Her interest is in the architectures and materialities that are produced when individual cities are transformed into both camera lens, via the intensification of surveillance technologies, and projection screen. In her work the shifting constellations of screens that structure our engagement with place - from those in your pocket and those at the pub, bus station and shopping mall, to the giant screens in public spaces - comprise a suite of mobile and distributed surfaces that constitute the city as a new kind of archaeological body.