WELCOME!

MARK SMITH 

media artist — designer — educationalist

After leaving school, Mark worked as a fine art studio assistant and graphic designer in the quaint English seaside town of Swanage, surrounded by the rolling landscapes of rural Dorset. Initially his art and design practices were focused upon drawing and painting. Then, in the mid-1980s, he bought an old Sanyo Super 8 camera and began making contemplative, experimental and esoteric ethnographic films. 

Station Lights (Smith & Toh, 1999)

As video and interactive digital media technologies slowly became both affordable and available to artists in the UK, Mark experimented with different approaches to moving image and audio production offered by these 'new media'. Over the subsequent decades, he has created works that have been exhibited and screened internationally at film, video and arts festivals. His work has been shown at various galleries in the UK, including the Tate (Liverpool), the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), and the Pedestrian Gallery (Leicester). The following video, 'Station Lights', was commissioned by the Singapore Ministry of Education in 1999. The 16mm film was made to accompany a recording of the Singaporean poet Toh Hsien Min's poem of the same name. It was shot on 16mm, then telecined to a digital format. The textual elements were added using an early version of Adobe After Effects and then uploaded onto the Internet. 'Station Lights' (above) provides an early example of digital distribution of artists' moving image.

me.... and others (Others & Smith, 2014)

His artistic output focuses upon the relationships between individuals within local communities, including educational environments. The video still of the male teenager on the introductory page of this blog is taken from a recent video installation made with students based at the Pedestrian Gallery, located in Leicester's Cultural Quarter. Made as part of a series of works for his recent doctoral degree, the work used four large projection screens to display students' faces as they 'watched' pedestrians walk to and from the Curve Theatre. The following image is a photographic montage of the event.

Much of Mark's recent art and design work emanates from his fascination with a philosophical and environmentalist approach to teaching art, design and media. Broadly termed as 'ecopedagogy' or 'critical pedagogy', this perspective on education was developed by educationalists and sociologists who took ideas from the Frankfurt School of Sociology and developed theories that balance the importance of developing literacy in societies with the need for citizens to appreciate the power of the media to influence their daily lives. Mark's special interest is in the ability of digital art and design practices to help develop a more peaceful and democratic world in which we may live in creative harmony. Of course this is a never-ending process for humanity! But his art and design output demonstrates his recognition of this irrefutable fact. For instance, the illustration below (Paulatim) asks the observer to contemplate the need for literacy as a bulwark against social chaos. The illustration also asks for an understanding that we must be patient in achieving universal literacy around the world. 'Paulatim' is a Latin adverb that may be translated as meaning 'little by little'. That is, learning and understanding (for most of us) comes through making 'baby-steps'! 

Paulatim (Smith, 2016)

In addition to his artistic practice, Mark has worked as a commercial graphic designer, with clients such as the English Tourist Board, the British Library, Cosmopolitan magazine, the NHS (National Health Service), and Singapore TV. He has also received commissions to produce media work from diverse bodies, ranging from the Arts Council to the Disability Video Board. An example of a video work (for Kaldor Public Art Projects) is Canberra Teachers (2016), a still from which may be seen below.

Canberra Teachers (Smith, 2016)