The following links are to biographies of groups and individuals who are currently engaged in research with the project.

The works of Anna Best select elements for new narrative games within the past frames of the location. The border between the realistic and fictional territories of theory is as unclear as the border between history and fairytales. Both depend on a system of belief. And yet contemporary history is less often exposed to big doubts about the authenticity of the source, the way events happen, the continuous passing of time …
Anna Best’s practice as an artist is not easily categorised, though a constant thread is her interest in making connections and narratives between different people and situations. Elements of live art performance, documentation techniques and research processes are given equal emphasis in her work. Best’s past projects include A Real Pony Race for a Bridle, which saw a full-scale gymkhana in Burgess Park, Peckham, and The Wedding Project, commissioned by Tate Modern, in Borough Market. More recently she has worked collaboratively at Grizedale Arts in Cumbria on The Festival of Lying, made a website commission, error 404 for e-2.org, and exhibited in Belgium, the USA and Venezuela.

www.daniellearnaud.com/phil.htm

Anne Elliot is a visual artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. She studied painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1980 to 1985 and graduated with a BA Hons in fine art and a postgraduate diploma in painting. In whatever media she uses – drawing, video, photography or audio recordings – Anne is interested in portraiture as a tool for conveying ideas about society and humanity. She initiated several temporary public art projects in which she placed her large-format photographic portraits in a specific context, including Tight Knit, a series of billboards in the small Borders village of Newcastleton, and Tripping, in Glasgow’s underground train stations. Working with people and communities is integral to Anne’s work as an artist. Between 1999 and 2001 Anne was lead artist and full time employee of Artlink Edinburgh and the Lothians working on Fusion collaborations. Through these collaborations she explored boundaries as an artist working with people, in the context of psychiatric hospitals, with a particular interest in communication, negotiation, process and documentation.

Major awards and exhibitions include the Richard Hough Bursary for Photography, What Happens Next at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, and My Father is the Wise Man of the Village at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. Currently Anne is developing the Functionsuite programme for Artlink in her dual role as artist and team leader. She is also embarking on a new project for the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow.

Kate Gray is a visual artist who lives and works in Edinburgh. After studying at Oxford Brookes and Sheffield Hallam universities she moved to Glasgow School of Art to complete a Master of Fine Art. Kate’s practice includes lens-based and digital works as well as installation. Her areas of interest include liminal spaces between documentary and fiction, illusion and reality and making artwork in dialogue, with artists and non-artists. Kate has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad both in galleries and site-specific projects and has been actively involved with many artist-initiated groups and projects. She was a core artist in the Fusion Collaborations programme (1999-2001).

Tectonic plates move at the same rate as our fingernails grow
(geologic movement/ personal shifts)

Urban Seismology
Daily Trembling
Remote Bathing Facilities in a Volcanic Basin.

My work is an exploration of the intersection between personal, historic and geologic time. Merging a topography of intimate activities with natural phenomena, my aim is to navigate entropic possibilities between private and public expanse. 'Real time' occurrences have become central in my recent projects. Whether boiling milk in a 100 degree Celsius sulphur spring in the crater of the Krafla Volcano, or meeting a European friend on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the site where the North American and European tectonic plates converge, my practice has evolved to make initially poetic concerns practical and tangible – the merging of personal and topographic shifts, the intimate mirrored in physical geography.

Presently I am involved in an ongoing collaboration with the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. This multi-disciplinary approach combines individual and collaborative research with non-art environmentally based resources. Our most recent project is a direct response to the September 23rd 2000 earthquake in Warwick. The sound work is comprised of a list of individual responses to the early morning earthquake, transforming seismic data into a narrative of responses to one moment of trembling.

Post-Ice Age is small in the geological continuum. Tectonic pleasures can make way for geologic intimacy as the bed, the bath, the hot spring become synonymous. Through gently shifting plates, erosion and repeated eruptions, I hope to find a terrain of possibility.

www.ilanahalperin.com

Harwood started out as an artist during the 1980s. He was involved with publishing initiatives such as the Working Press (books by and about working-class culture), Underground newspaper (a London-based free newspaper aimed at promoting and exploiting the uses of new media in culture and society), and books such as Unnatural – techno theory for a contaminated culture (theoretical positionings on new media). During this time, he produced the first computer-generated graphic novel If Comics Mental and was widely published in graphic journals in the USA, Canada, Italy and France.

After Harwood trained in new media and learned programming at the end of the 1980s, he was invited to make a piece of work for Video Positive '95 (international video art festival in Liverpool). He worked at Ashworth maximum security hospital in Liverpool where he produced the Rehearsal of Memory installation.

As an educationalist he worked on various new media courses at Guildhall University, and advised on numerous other academic new media initiatives. Disappointed with the state of academic education, Harwood was invited to work at Artec (London Arts Technology Centre) where he provided innovative training for the long-term unemployed.

It was here that he received his Arts Council funding to develop Rehearsal of Memory with Artec and ex-trainees to produce, re-author and publish the CD-ROM version of the installation. Since, Harwood has exhibited and spoken at numerous events in England, France, Austria, Australia, Germany, Canada, Portugal, Finland, Holland and Norway.

In 1997 Harwood left Artec to form Mongrel, with Matsuko Yokokoji and Richard Pierre-Davis. Mongrel has created collaborative, socially engaged cultural products, including National Heritage and the Natural Selection search engine, to international acclaim. In 1999 Harwood/Mongrel received two national awards, the Clarks Digital Bursary and the Imaginaria Award, from which emerged the software Linker – exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Watershed Bristol.

Justin Kenrick is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Glasgow who works with hunter-gatherers in the Central African rainforests and with marginalised groups in Central Scotland.

In Africa he has focused on the music, performance, story-telling, conversations and ritual that are at the heart of these people's relationship with the forest. He has been examining the way this sense of a personal relationship with the environment influences their non-coercive approach to childcare and the equality that characterises gender relations and social relations more generally. He is working to support them in resisting dispossession by more powerful outside forces.

In Scotland he has focused on how to enable health-care initiatives to reach and support marginalized groups. This has involved working with people in situations of drug use, sex work and domestic violence. His work has highlighted the way their central experiences – such as those of power and control, addiction as a coping strategy and leading split lives – reflects, rather than is an aberration from, widespread coping mechanisms employed by people in mainstream society.

His current research into the processes of using non-conventional art to build co-ownership in a hospital context continues his interest in the processes whereby people can reclaim their creativity, agency and equality by identifying the processes of empowerment and disempowerment that structure social interaction.

Angela Kingston is a curator and writer. She is also an experienced commissioning editor, sub-editor and copy writer. Her career has involved marketing and publicity work, and she is currently developing fund-raising skills.

Her curating and writing often touches on political issues, such as feminism, refugees and the environment. Her approach – in terms of the artists she works with and the audiences she addresses – is socially inclusive.
Angela Kingston currently has a part-time contract to undertake development and marketing work for Stour Valley Arts at King’s Wood, a public art and environmental project near Ashford in Kent. An exhibition she curated, called Somewhere: places of refuge in art and life‚ was launched at Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham, in autumn 2002 and toured until summer 2003; an exhibition about the fairy tale in art is at an early stage of development.

From 1999 to early 2003, Angela Kingston devised and ran the Centre for Drawing, an experimental gallery, residency and publishing project at Wimbledon School of Art, where resident artists included Vong Phaophanit and Lucy Gunning. During this time, she curated Girl‚ an exhibition which opened in 2000 at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, followed by a tour, and Girlish‚ a video programme which continues to be distributed internationally by Lux, London.

From 1994 to 1999 she worked as a freelance curator. Her projects included co-curating Well-Spring‚ the 1994 Bath Festival Exhibition, and curating Freedom‚ an exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography and video commissioned by Amnesty International, which toured to major galleries in England, Scotland and Ireland (1995–7). During this period she worked part-time as Editor of Artists Newsletter (1996–8) and Marketing and Commissions Manager at the Public Art Commissions Agency (1997–9). From 1985 to 1993 she worked as a curator in public galleries, including seven years at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

She has written extensively for art magazines, and gallery and public art publications. Two examples from the past year are an essay about Mariele Neudecker’s recent work for a catalogue accompanying an exhibition at Chapter, Cardiff, and an essay about the first stage of a major public art project by Andrew Sabin at the Horsebridge, Whitstable, for the project’s website and for eventual publication.

Paul Rooney was born in Liverpool in 1967 and trained at Edinburgh College of Art. He has had residencies at the British School at Rome, Dundee Contemporary Arts/University of Dundee Visual Research Centre, and was the Tate Liverpool MOMART Fellow for 2002–2003. He is a founder member of Common Culture, who have shown at EAST and had solo shows at the Cornerhouse, Manchester and Gasworks, London.
Paul's individual practice focused from 1998 to 2000 on the music of the 'Rooney' CDs and performances, and a Radio 1FM Peel session was broadcast in October 1999. Paul now works primarily with text and video but performances and events continue to be part of his practice, and venues have included the Thread Waxing Space, New York; Ormeau Baths, Belfast; Dundee Contemporary Arts; and Cubitt, London. Other recent work has been shown in Melbourne, Stockholm, Toronto, Siena, New York, Washington, St Petersburg and Utrecht.

Recent commissions include 'Crossing Over 6' hosted by FACT, and the Whitworth Art Gallery with Manchester Camerata (chamber orchestra). In 2003 his entry of a three-minute DVD film entitled Flat 23 won the first Comme Ca Art Prize North.

www.thecentreofattention.org/exhibitions/rooney.html