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Alec Finlay is an artist, poet & publisher based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. His work crosses over a range of media and forms: from poetry, sculpture and collage, to audio-visual, neon and new technologies. He has published over 20 books and won 2 Scottish Design Awards. Much of his work as ‘microtonal,’ combining a number of smaller elements within a wider field. In residencies at BALTIC, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and NaREC Finlay has produced a series of acclaimed participative projects, from innovative publications to windmill turbines. For 'skying', Finlay is pioneering the place of the arts in contemporary landscape and energy dialogues. His current Leverhulme Trust-funded residency at Northumbria University (Newcastle) will run till spring 2012, and will include a series of talks, events and innovative collaborations.
Alistair Peebles is a writer, artist and publisher who lives in Orkney, Scotland, UK. He owns and directs Brae Projects. Alistair's work is concerned with landscape, especially the landscape of Orkney, with a continuing interest for roads, travel, resource and place.
Laura Watts is Assistant Professor of Technologies in Practice at the IT University of Copenhagen. As a writer and ethnographer she is interested in the effect of landscape on how the future is imagined and made in everyday practice. How might the future be made differently in different places? Alongside this, she has an interest in the effect of different ethnographic writing practices as part of an apparatus for making knowledge, and for making futures. For the last fifteen years Laura has worked with the telecoms, transport, and renewable energy industries to reconsider how the future gets made in high-tech industry, and how it might be made otherwise.
Amy Todman is currently working on a PhD which considers drawing and print-making as forms of knowledge over the long seventeenth century with a particular focus on observations and records of place. She is also an artist, interested in interactions and boundaries, often particularly drawn to natural forms and processes. In both practices she recognises a tension, not always comfortable but often productive, between an irresistable tug towards certain places, people and things, and an equally strong resistance to yield. Fabienne Collignon is particularly interested in American techno-culture and machine aesthetics; her work to date focuses mainly on Cold War dream weapons and their implantations in the land. She has recently also worked on narratives of plastic utopia; the insidious Cold War appropriation of Antarctica; the linkage between electricity and vampirism. She currently teaches and lectures at the University of Glasgow. This short essay emerges out of postdoctoral research conducted at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.
Alexander Maris describes himself as a 'post-urban' artist. He studied at Glasgow school of art (1977–81) and the Royal College of Art (1985–87), and is currently based in Kinloch Rannoch. Recent exhibitions include There is no road (the road is made by walking) curated by Steven Bode, Laboral centro de arte y creación industrial, Gijon, Spain (2009); and sometimes making something leads to nothing, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (2009).
