As data management and digital distribution formats become more advanced, as more personal information is collected, connected and published, the notion of 'the distributed self' becomes increasingly significant. In recognition of this open, participatory and collaborative practice common to media arts the Distributed South residencies avoid the single focus on the artist and asks -

What roles can galleries, media centres, curators and artists all play in the development of distributed, collective creativity?

In distributing content onto different and multiple platforms beyond its original source, what impact does this ever-changing context have on artworks and on audiences?

What conditions are necessary, technological, artistic, and social, to allow for true and effective public participation in distributed artworks?

Residencies:
Bandwidth, John Bell
Partners: Artpoint, regional advertising companies and agencies in the four regions.
A research paper and pilot public project on the usage and response to moving image/interactive billboards currently used exclusively for advertising. John Bell will conduct a survey of selected billboards in the regions to find out how the public engage with the billboards in their area. This will be written up as a research paper and then, using the results from this research, a pilot project will be held at one of the billboard sites with a view to delivering a large-scale project in the long-term.

Curating New Media, Stanza
Partners: I-DAT and Plymouth Arts Centre
Stanza will investigate ways to exhibit his extensive body of work online both within and outside the gallery space. Through a residency at Plymouth Arts Centre (in the exhibition space) and working with invited curators he will look at a range of options for exhibiting both his own and new media work in general.
http://www.stanza.co.uk/

Media Arts and Public Participation, Jeannie Driver (formerly Kerswell)
Partners: Bedford Creative Arts
Driver (formerly Kerswell) is a participative public artist who uses media arts tools to enhance her work around public engagement and participation. In this residency, she will work with groups at Bedford Creative Arts to explore the role that different interfaces can play in encouraging participation in projects. http://www.jeanniedriver.com/

Lektrolab, computer programming for 10 year olds lab
In a 5 day lab hosted first at ArtSway, Paul B. Davis will teach year 6 students the basis of computer programming. http://www.lektrolab.com/

Out of Time, Kyp Kyprianou and Simon Hollington
Partners: FAST, Slough Estates and South Hill Park Arts Centre.
A residency at the old Royal Aircraft Establishment (now FAST Museum) in Farnborough including video documentation of the volunteers who work there (ex RAE employees), work using the objects and archive material at the museum, and intergenerational workshops looking at the changing role of technology in the transition from the 20th to the 21st Century.
http://www.electronicsunset.org/news_current_projects/farnborough_fast

Windscale, Rob Smith
Partners: Jaywick Martello Tower, Hackney Wick Festival, Fawley Power Station Date
Rob Smith’s online project uses anemometers measuring wind speed linked to a web camera. The wind speed (using the Beaufort Scale) affects the way in which the image from the webcam is viewed. Windscale chooses deliberately sites that are fragile in their cultural context and exposes them online; Jaywick Martello Tower, on the Essex coast and in the middle of a priority regeneration area; Hackney Wick festival, part of which is in the heart of the soon to be developed Olympic site; and Fawley Power Station which lies on the edges of the New Forest National Park. http://www.windscale.net/

Status, Heath Bunting
Partner: ICA (Pilot project) October 2006 – January 2007
A residency expanding Heath’s current project Status by visiting all embassies in London. This built up his database of records around the information needed to establish particular identities.
http://status.irational.org/visualisation/snap_shots/

Wearable Technology Residency, Rachel Beth Egenhoefer
Partners: University of Brighton, University of Wales, Lighthouse Brighton, Furtherfield and Textile Futures Research Group
This residency will take place at different times at University of Brighton, University of Wales (which hosts a specialist research unit in Wearable Technology and Smart Clothes) and Furtherfield with outputs at TFRG and Lighthouse Brighton. Rachel Beth’s work will focus on knitting, motion analysis and its relationship to binary code. This is a development of Rachel Beth’s previous work that looks at the relationship between domesticity and the computer. http://www.rachelbeth.net/work.html