Australia-based Social Activist, nomad and technoevangelist Fee Plumley talks about:
Her strange relationship to place, how wherever she is she's home; the difference in the funding models for the arts in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia; the Tyrany of Distance in Australia, and how difficult it is to bring audiences to your work in remote areas, which are common throughout the country; how she defines herself as an artist, in the context of a non-traditional artistic life that has involved theater set design, designing early mobile phone applications and interactive performances; what her definition of being an artist is, from creating mobile platforms for aps to guided meditation, and how she views her engineering, platform-based work as an exploration of the creative process; how she is admittedly a nomad who has "dropped out": she's not an artist trying to build personal wealth and not trying to become part of the hierarchy of the arts/technology world, but enjoy her relationship to this (Australia) lovely country and the planet in general, meet diverse people in diverse places, etc.; the realities of being a bus-traveling nomad, in terms of food (whether it's generously given to her, or dumpster diving), being both independent, and yet dependent on infrastructures to survive, and the question of safety, which she beautifully articulates in reading a piece from her blog; "how everything in my world at the moment is about how can creative processes and technology contribute towards constructive social change;" how she finds that nomadacy relies on technology, especially for finding relatively safe camp-out spots for homeJames (her bus); her tech consulting for grassroots causes and the people that lead them, which she doesn't want to charge for, because not only do they not have money to pay her but she also doesn't believe in the capitalist system; the "Commons" model (particularly active in Norway), in which the land is accessible to the public, something Fee takes advantage of when possibly, but so rarely is; her ongoing project "Hammocktime," which involves guiding participants through meditations sessions on a hammock, set up wherever, though ideally between two trees, and how it's a project exemplary of the type of art she makes, which are big projects that are very process driven, which she dubs "the traveling minstrel of interactive immersion/social change arts practice*;" (*her word) and lastly, she reads from her profound opus to life on the road, "5 things I learned from living life as a solo, bus-dwelling, nomadic woman."