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Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel

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Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel | 2 Comments

Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel with Laka D and the SPACE Sirens – defying categorisation

“We never deliberately entered the field of ‘community arts’….” [Mukul]

For The Not Quite Yet, Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel worked with the SPACE Sirens, an Older People’s choir active in Tower Hamlets for many years. Their collaboration resulted in a text based and sound installation, setting sung vocal scores to the contents of user manuals for technological appliances such as washing machines.

In conversation, the two artists reveal their positions and feelings about participatory art and technology projects to be as distinctive as the work they produce. Distancing themselves and their participatory projects from the “community arts” tag that might be imposed by funder and governmental policy agendas, they question whether a ’sector’ can or should be defined, or whether there is greater strength, self-determination and possibility if we remain unclassifiable:

“[Participatory arts projects are] not the space of architecture, the space of gaming, the space of advertising, it’s not the ‘Creative Industries’ – it’s this ‘counter-environment’ – potentially.” [Mukul]

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