Stanza

Stanza is a London based British artist who specializes in interactive art, networked spaces, installations and performances. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world. Work has been shown at The Venice Biennale, Tate Britain, The Victoria and Albert Museum.

All his art can be found at www.stanza.co.uk.

His works explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within context of architecture, data spaces and online environments. Stanza travels extensively to present his interactive art, lecturing and giving audio visual performances. Having just completed a three year Arts and Humanities Research Fellowship at Goldsmiths Studios, internationally renowned interactive artist Stanza spent July 2009 as FLI artist in residence, assessing his work, its impact and relevance with some of the Northwest region's leading curators, critics and artists.

During his time in Ulverston Stanza kept a blog here on the FLI site.

Stanza also created new work during his stay. Searching for the sublime in art in the digital age, A world of new possibilities is a series of sonifications and visualisations of landscapes. Using ad hoc wireless sensor networks to map live data from light, temperature, humidity, noise, sounder and gps, environmental data is turned into artworks. Four of these artworks are now accessible online at www.stanza.co.uk/possibilities. In March/April 2010 folly were pleased to be able to invite Stanza to exhibit in the Spring 2010 iteration of the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival. Park was shown throughout the festival at the historic parlour in Towneley Hall, Burnley.

Also available to view online is Infestation. Robotica Series: What Robots get up to after dark. At night when all is dark the Lanternhouse comes alive with strange noises and weird bangs. Armed with only a torch and camera Stanza aimed to find what was making all the noise… Check out the evidence at www.stanza.co.uk/infestation.

For the second in a series of ‘Digital Lunches’ Stanza hosted the The Last Supper. A City of Bits in February 2010 at Lanternhouse. The supper took the guise of a performance piece, computer chips painted silver displayed to represent ‘A City of Bits’, with artwork generated from movements by the guests projected down over the table, ‘The Panoptic eye’. A glass shelf had been laid over the city with Nigiri and Maki sushi ‘embedded’ as a binary code message and around the room were generative real time news feeds and generative live CCTV with background city sounds setting off the buzz of conversation. To see photographs and read about the event in full, follow this link to Stanzas website.

Following his residency Stanza returned to Lanternhouse to undertake a research project with Beaumont College, Lancaster, which caters for residential and day students, aged between 19 and 25, with a broad range of physical and learning impairments. Read about the project on his website here and here.

Stanza will return to Lanternhouse again in July to September 2010 for A City of Dreams.

Images: (left) Possibilities: Field (2009) by Stanza