speaking for someone else
scott townsend
2025 MARCH 06 - MARCH 16 | Wednesday - Friday ,1PM - 7PM. Saturday - Sunday, 1PM - 6PM.
39 Keppel Rd, #03-10 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065
brief
The internet provides global access to events, stripping away local context and history. Global media simplifies events for audiences, often relying on simplistic storytelling, stereotyping, and political and economic rhetoric. The installation Speaking for Someone Else uses figures and objects acting out simple relationships and stories of fragmentation and control using looped hand-drawn animations and Augmented Reality (AR). It’s a reflection of misperception and miscommunication.
Collaboratively, I work on and contribute to “design and social innovation” projects in communities as a designer and academic. For example, during recent long-term projects in Greece, people were influenced by the rhetoric from more powerful and hegemonic EU countries that insisted on neoliberal reforms. For some, this weakened their sense of agency in directly confronting local problems, which is in part what design and social innovation is based on. Others became angry, remembering historical conflicts and nationalistic differences.
artist statement
I create digital and physical interactions and visualizations working in communities as a form of public engagement and research. I publish with colleagues in the social sciences in peer-reviewed publications, books, and conferences. I also create digital and physical installations, recently integrating older ways of making with augmented reality.
Originally trained as a photographer and graphic designer, I was interested in social documentary, over a long trajectory, that eventually led me to project-based work using installation and digital media to visualize social practice and engage audiences for change. For example, in an earlier project, I presented stories of immigration with real-time visualization of participant answers between two groups in a gentrifying neighborhood in the US. Later, in Imaginary Country, I invited comparisons between the history and experiences of the Berlin Wall and the US Border Wall using three connected installation sites in Berlin, Mexico, and the US. By 2012, working with online and f2f participation became increasingly problematic, prompting me to work more directly in communities and for more extended periods. I also started collaborating with people in the social sciences, working within a framework of qualitative research, working in the qualitative research network of the European Sociological Association.
In 2013, I began examining issues of hegemony and control in smaller countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. The EU uses branding strategies to compete with traditional nationalistic symbols. Social Capital is an ongoing project that uses animations to introduce themes such as history, future, immigration, etc. It was begun in 2013-2014 to build dialogue and research in Eastern European communities. It investigates how people feel about their own history and practices and touches on larger issues of progressive ideas in competition with a new sense of nationalism.
BIO of Artist
Scott Towsend
MFA Cranbrook Academy of Art. Began in 2002 examining globalization issues vis-à-vis effects on communities with visualization of data. Projects and exhibitions are often part of a greater engagement that also includes workshops, lectures, and other activities connected to the project space. Exhibitions in over 90 national and international group and solo venues in the Czech Republic, Greece, Egypt, Cuba, Mexico, South America, Canada, Germany, Japan, Iran, Italy, Serbia, Venezuela, Cuba, China and the United States. Articles in Zed, Statements, Brujula, Art Papers, Visual Communication, Design and Culture, Design Issues, and the European Sociological Association. Public, conference, and research network presentations in Australia, Europe, China, and the United States, and as a featured presenter alongside John Maeda, Suguru Ishizaki, and Krystof Lenk. Mitchel Lecture at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, 2014. Editorial board Design and Culture 2014-2019.
Website: imaginarycountry.org
