A six-week process-oriented artist’s residency for the development of a new media project. The residency provides living, working and exhibition space in the heart of downtown Boston, as well as “think tank” support from professionals in the field. Projects should be experimental, research-oriented, community-based, and in need of further development.

As part of a year-long process, the Real Space selection panel, including guest panelists George Fifield and Michael Mittleman, choose Petra Gemeinboeck as the 2005 Artist-In-Residence, from a pool of applicants from all over the globe. Impossible Geographies 01: Memory is the start of a series of interactive media installations Gemeinboeck has planned with collaborator Mary Agnes Krell.

“This new work dynamically traces visitor's actions, mixing them in unexpected ways with memories held and stolen by the physical space. Throughout the exhibition, those memories of visitors and actions seep into the environment, creating a virtually woven fabric of events that grows and evolves over time.

The piece uses memory as a metaphor for the fluid boundaries between the physical and the virtual. It consists of a series of implied and shifting geographies, signified only by beams of light. When crossed, visitors interrupt the space and trigger a kind of evolutionary storytelling. As a result, the space becomes infused with the presence of past events, making slippery the relationship between the fictive and the `real' memory. Impossible Geographies is, in a way, a system that exposes, invents and mixes layers of reality beneath the surface of urban spaces.”

Petra Gemeinboeck is an architect and media artist, currently based in Sydney, Australia, where she is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Sydney. Her artistic practice and theoretical research bring together the fields of architecture, computer science, media art and visual culture. In her works Petra creates scenarios of encounter in which spatial boundaries of the physical, the virtual, the social and the subjective become perforated and hybridized. Her interactive installations and virtual environments have been exhibited internationally at venues such as Archilab 2004, Orléans, France, the Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, USA, and the InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan and have been featured in magazines such as ARCHIS and Computer Graphics World. Petra has published widely on the interrelations of physical and virtual spaces and issues of embodied negotiation in virtual environments.

Ms. Gemeinboeck's doctoral thesis ‘Negotiating the Virtual: Inhabiting Architectures of Emergence and Remoteness,’ completed at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, is concerned with the conditions of a virtual reality, in which the virtual does not simulate another reality, but unfolds its own reality in the relationship with the temporary inhabitant. She received her Master of Fine Arts at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA and also has a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Mary Agnes Krell has worked as a digital author and artist in the UK and the USA for over ten years and currently lectures in the practice and theory of digital media at Sussex University in the South East of England. She is also an associate member of England’s Forced Entertainment as a digital author and, with them, has created a number of interactive works that have been exhibited internationally at venues including the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, the ICA, London, UK and The Art Institute of Chicago, USA. Mary’s current work explores impossible geographies using locative and pervasive technologies, collaborating with artists in Sydney, Iowa and San Francisco.