The live projects are a key part of the Sheffield Diploma course for 5th and 6th years. Each year for the first 2 months of the course, groups of students offer their skills and knowledge to local communities, artists, and charities.

Remote Control was a live project investigating the culture of rural border communities along the Irish border regions. The client was PS2, a group of artists based in Belfast who had begun to consider the border condition of Ireland (between North and South), its different cultural policies, regional independence and creative activities in rural landscapes, villages and small towns.

Our Brief was to research different types of agriculture from high end art galleries to traditional agriculture. We then aimed to produce alternative cartography/mapping and analysis of cross border conditions (past-present- future), indicating cultural sites of production/ dissemination in a rural context (formal/ informal), and rhyzomatic formations of alternative cultural activities (alternative gardening/ housing/economy/creative practice/art projects) through distant and at first glance dis-connected locations.

This lead to the propositions of possibilities for temporal cultural centers (small and large scale) as well as proposals for ‘housing the fluid’. We were also encouraged to suggest through a design process the nature and location of new rural sites for cultural production/sharing. A report of the findings was presented to the clients PS2 and other cultural industries.

Credits: Tutor Florian Kossak, Client PS² - [Peter Mutschler and Ruth Morrow], Students: Nicholas Evans, Pól Gallagher, Caitríona McGhee, Lee Jin Ting , Dean O’Brien , Stefan Amato