Bio

Marc Garrett left school in 1979 and grew up on a council estate in Southend-On-Sea, Essex. After working various jobs while attending college, he moved to a farm twelve miles outside Bristol and then to the city in 1987. From then on, Marc had an artist studio, made art in the streets, and co-ran the pirate radio station EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference). This was when he began taking writing more seriously and broadcasting working-class culture on pirate radio. He briefly moved to Birmingham in 1991 and ran public artists talks at the Icon Gallery. And then moved to London in early 1993. Between 1992-95, he worked as a co-sysop on several anarchist bulletin boards, including Cybercafe, an art and hacktivism community, while making street art, painting and digital art.

He was involved in several artist studio builds, first at Art in Perpetuity Trust, founded in 1995 by a group of artists in an old warehouse on Deptford Creek, London. After realising he couldn’t afford the studio rent, Marc had to leave and, in 1995, joined a Bow Arts Trust where he was part of the team to establish The Nunnery Gallery.

In 1996, Marc and artist Ruth Catlow co-founded the art organisation Furtherfield in response to Brit-Art and the Saatchi’s dominance of art via marketisation, drowning out lesser-known artists. Collaborating with artists, techies, and activists exploring similar critiques worldwide, they built alternative art contexts and grassroots infrastructures off and online. Experimenting with analogue and digital tools and networks to build bridges, demolish top-down hierarchies, and set the conditions for societal emancipation. Furtherfield is still going strong today.

Marc has widely published critical and cultural essays, articles, interviews, and books about art, technology, and social change. In 2017, he co-edited Artists Re: Thinking the Blockchain and, in 2022, published Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century. After eight years of study, Marc finished a PhD at Birkbeck University, London, in 2021, during COVID-19. From his PhD autoethnographic research, he is now writing a book about Furtherfield: 30 Years of Art, Technology, and Eco-Social Change of the Arts Collective Furtherfield, reflecting on the communities established around two physical galleries and a community lab, the Furtherfield.  

Since 2012, Furtherfield has run two venues in Finsbury Park, London. Marc has curated over 60 contemporary exhibitions and projects exploring art, technology and eco-social change, as well as exhibitions and projects nationally and internationally. His other personal output explores contemporary society in a post-digital context and examines aspects of working-class culture as part of an intersectional enquiry.

In 2022, during COVID-19, he was diagnosed with cancer just after moving to Felixstowe, Suffolk. Since his gradual recovery, he has focused on ideas and questions that acknowledge and engage working-class and feral-class contexts as a springboard for more extensive dialogues on creating conditions for social change across art, technology, and ecology.