ABOUT

This is an archive of artworks that I've produced since the early 1990s. It tracks my interests in art and networks, the socialities of walking, and – most recently – more-than-human social worlds. Throughout, there's a concern with relationships between the human imaginary realm and material reality. This work begins with making artworks to experiment with human-computer interaction and art's relationship to networks, then tackling the relationships of structure & agency and human socialities through walking, leading most recently to work that experiments with how we form alliances, interdependencies, and develop collective agency among ourselves and with biotic and abiotic things beyond our species.

These artworks are made in response to conditions that prevail in the time and place where they were developed: in London in the 90s, internationally in the period 1998-2016, and lately in Canada and the UK. As a result, this work shifts from a technological and urban focus, towards mountains and meetings in the context of international exhibitions, conferences, and commissions, and now to matters close at hand such as ecological concerns or the experience of decololonial processes and of migration.

This work is situated among social relationships – creating, maintaining, and sustaining them, as art. I often work with collaborators and participants, whose names appear throughout this website. My thanks goes to everyone who has enabled me to make the artworks listed here.

This website features select examples of commissioned work made public through exhibition, performance, etc., and which has recieved institutional support in some way, either through its funding or presentation. More ephemera, documentation of various projects' development, and work that was not made public in this way, is available at https://simon-pope.tumblr.com/; and information about my collaborative work with Sarah Cullen is available at bit.ly/popecullen.

Email: simon.pope AT protonmail.com 

BIO

My early work was in the field of new media art: I was a member of the seminal net.art collective I/O/D (1992-99), whose Web Stalker won a nomination for Prix Ars Electronica (1997) and a Webby Award (2000), and was included in Rhizome’s new media art show at the New Museum, New York (2017).

In 2003 I represented Wales at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art, which coincided with a fellowship award from the UK National Endowment for Science Technology and Art (2002-05) to explore the social modalities of walking as art – especially in the production of art through walking together.

My recent art works are practical experiments with how we negotiate human social relations in a more-than-human world – the focus of my doctoral project at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2012-15). My work is made collectively, resulting in the collaborative production of artefacts – walks, songs, sculptures, or paintings, for example – and is responsive to specific social and material relationships. This is a way for me to grapple with art’s practical and theoretical engagement with themes shared across disciplines, such as ecological thinking, and an interest in more-than-human social and material relationships; as as result, much of my work is made through interdisciplinary collaboration, often within public and academic institutions and with other researchers and artists. I am curently a Research Associate at the Centre for Rural Policy Research/Food Studies at The University of Exeter (UK) and an Eccles Fellow at the British Library.

From 2000-2010, I was a lecturer (Associate Professor) and Reader (Professor) in the UK, leading MFA and MA Fine art programmes, and have also taught masters and undergraduate level programmes in Canada and Belgium and given artist-talks at universities, art schools. and galleries internationally. I supervise and examine artists' PhD projects, specializing in practice-led, more-than-human, participatory and ecological approaches to contemporary art and research.