SIMONE DOUGLAS // ART & RESEARCH AT THE OUTERMOST LIMITS OF LOCATION SPECIFICITY

 Image: Simone Douglas, Eternal Return, 2014, dry mounted onto Dybond, 180 x 135cm

Internationally renowned artist and Director MFA Fine Arts Program Parsons, Simone Douglas, last week attended, co-organised and chaired the two-day conference 'Art & Research at the Outermost Limits of Location Specificity' alongside Sean Lowry.

The conference, which took place in New York as part of Project Anywhere, explored the challenge of producing and disseminating art and research outside traditional circuits.  

As part of the conference, the following questions were discussed and explored: 

• How should art and research that takes place outside traditional contexts and timeframes in the fields of the visual arts, design and performance be validated, experienced and disseminated? 
• What alternatives exist to the traditional role of the curator? 
• How should art and research be validated within institutional contexts that typically champion the traditional journal based-paradigm for evaluating research outcomes? 
• How do we negotiate the relative values of direct sense experience and exegetical and paratextual elements? 
• Is documentation necessarily a “second best” experience? 
• What kinds of evaluative criteria should we apply to interdisciplinary projects that straddle aesthetic and other realms? 
• What are the outermost limits of location-specificity?

The two-day conference was provided free of charge by Project Anywhere and Parsons Fine Arts, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design. 

Project Anywhere is an expanded international project space for art at the outermost limits of location-specificity. The role of curator is replaced with the type of peer review model typically endorsed by a refereed journal. This conference features presentations from international artists that have successfully navigated blind peer evaluation at the proposal stage within Project Anywhere’s 2013 and 2014 programs, together with a series of invited speakers and panel discussions featuring established artists, scholars, graduate students and arts professionals. This two-day event will bring a discursive world of new ideas from art at the outermost limits of location-specificity into critical focus. It marks a call to arms in the ongoing process of finding appropriate new models for the recognition, evaluation and dissemination of expanded art practices.