Introducing the symposium

Temporary Host is an experiment in conversation. It came about because - at the end of the first year in which I have been ICFAR's Director - we wanted to bring people we had met over the year, had worked with or want to work with (and who we want to meet each other), around a table to talk, share ideas and dream up intellectually interesting and artistically inventive research projects. We quickly realized that one table would not be big enough, and so we created five tables, each with a host or curator, a list of guests and a small number of contributors prepared to prompt questions and share projects in order to shape and drive discussion. We realized that it was our job to bring people to the table, to enable them to talk and then to extend the space of the day into a more porous, reflective virtual space that would live on after the event and act as a possible model for future web presence.Temporary Host is the result.

The idea of hosting conversations in intimate, curated spaces, seems to be one of the most productive and interesting of contemporary art phenomena. In some ways it has become an art practice in itself, as if the role of hosting has itself evolved into an expanded form that combines curatorial practice with social networking. Open Space events have unpicked traditional top down conferences and have underscored the desire to make lateral connections and enable people to bring to the table their own experiences, and share them in a structured way. This event focuses on art as/and research - its ultimate question is how research might open up art practice - as a personal, cultural and social phenomenon. At what point does research become a dynamic driver of new ideas? At what juncture does it renew what art does, and how does it enable us to see how art itself thinks?

In arts universities we now inhabit a research environment. In the UK we have just gone through a major research exercise - at Temporary Host we want to think about what this means for us within particular, specific and focused set of topics, but ones that we hope will act as a hub for further topics and further ideas - some of them brought back to ICFAR, some of them taking place outside it. ICFAR is one of ten research centres at UAL. Essentially it is a hub for future collaborations, a way of hosting connections, a means of encouraging the kinds of creative conversations that can generate research. It is a space inside an art school, connected outwards to artists, writers and curators outside UAL, locally and internationally.

We hope you will enjoy the event and contribute to the web presence,and we look forward to welcoming you to Temporary Host.

Claire MacDonald ICFAR Director