In 2021 we rolled out our new format for presenting accessible open-all-hours digital artworks in Finsbury Park called the People’s Park Plinth. In parallel, we launched our CultureStake collective cultural decision-making app.
Thousands of you showed up online and in the park to experience a set of interactive artistic proposals for larger artworks. Each one presented its own mini-experience in the park and online using web apps, free data, and AR technologies. Three times as many people got involved with our programmes and ultimately picked Based On A Tree Story for their summer 2022 art experience.
Since then we’ve been busy working with HERVISIONS and Bones Tan Jones, respectively the curator and artist behind Based on a Tree Story, to build the full digital art experience and install it in the park.
Now, we’re extremely excited to tell you that from 13th August the tree sprites of Finsbury Park will be ready for you to find them.
The trees of Finsbury Park bear witness to myriad happenings. Through deep time they wait, they watch, they grow – wiser, wilder…. In this new commission by HERVISIONS X Bones Tan Jones, the special stories of the trees are translated by three mystical sprites that live within the trees, becoming their voice. Use the map to locate clusters of trees and identify the amulet wearers among them. With the app open, scan the symbol to summon the sprite and release a cascade of tree wisdom – time travelling to the roots of their having-beens into the twiggy tips of their future-becomings. And as you crisscross the park, seeking out your next sprite, imagine the ley lines you draw onto and into the earth – and cast your own connective spell.
“We invite you to visit the tree, call forth the sprite and dance together. Let your feet connect to the soil and the movement of the sprite inspire your rhythms. Stomp on the ground and the layers of earth from years of life will reverberate with your sound! Hear their echoes!”
– Zaiba Jabbar, HERVISIONS
To celebrate this amazing news, we’ve invited you to join us for a magical sundown experience seeking out and – if they’ll let you – dancing with the tree sprites of Finsbury Park.
Furtherfield Gallery, Saturday 13th August 2022 from 5pm
HERVISIONS
Responsible for curating, commissioning, conceptualisation, and research HERVISIONS is a femme-focussed antidisciplinary curatorial agency supporting and promoting artists working across new and emergent technologies, and platforms with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture.
IG: @hervisions_
Bones Tan Jones
Responsible for conceptualisation, research, and artistic production, Bones Tan Jones’ work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Bones weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthral and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Bones sanctifies these mediums as tool’s in their craft.
IG: @yaya.bones
Studio Hyte
Responsible for the visual identity, 3D modelling and technical development, Studio Hyte is a South London-based design studio. Working between graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication. We specialise in forward-thinking, multifaceted visual identities and experiences within the arts and education sector. Our aim is to create meaningful, accessible and thought-provoking work.
IG: @studiohyte
In 2019, we celebrated 150 years of Finsbury Park being the ‘People’s Park’ – a place where we can all do things together. In 2020 protests across the UK saw public artworks toppled from plinths, while the pandemic left us separated and isolated.
With this in mind, we launched the People’s Park Plinth this summer, as a way to re-explore our public spaces by turning Furtherfield Gallery inside out and expanding its digital arts programme beyond our walls and into the life of Finsbury Park.
We collaborated with incredibly talented artists, curators and local park members to create 3 ‘taster’ digital public artworks that speak about the park’s heritage and local stories. In May, June, and July we showcased a different digital art experience each month.
In August, the park made its pick! We will be launching a larger commission of Based on a Tree Story this Autumn, and to continue celebrating the heritage, artistry and local voices from Finsbury Park, all the ‘taster’ artworks will be available until January 2022.
If you are in Finsbury Park you can use the camera on your phone to scan the QR codes on the People’s Park Plinth (presented on the exterior of our Gallery building in the centre of the park). They are all free to access, any time, with any smartphone – but you might want to have some headphones handy too.
If you are somewhere else you can click the links on the People’s Park Plinth website to find the artworks.
It’s your park so it’s your pick!
Sign up here to get involved in choosing the artwork that most belongs in the heart of Finsbury Park next year.
Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
Live until January 2022
A site-specific, interactive sound work creating moments of connection between strangers of all species.
Follow this sound work as it leads you across the park to meeting points for animals, plants and strangers. As you listen, consider the needs of all these inhabitants and our symbiotic relationship that is increasingly under threat. Between heartbeats, vibrations and the alignment of crossing paths, this work sounds out a shared existence, putting these moments of connectivity with strangers of all species on the People’s Park’s Plinth.
The work features interviews with volunteers at Edible Landscapes, a forest gardening group based onsite at Finsbury Park: David Berrie, Imogen Simmonds, Jo Homan, Juliette Ezavin and Theo Betts. The artists were commissioned by Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as a part of the Royal College of Art’s MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2021 in partnership with Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth project.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork, one sound pathway ‘Close to the ground’ is presented.
Larger commission: If this work had been selected in the public vote in August 2021, a further two sound pathways and a trail to find them would have been revealed.
HERVISIONS x Ayesha Tan Jones
Live until January 2022
A site-specific, sonic augmented reality encounter with a digital tree sprite that tells tales of the tree’s past, present and future.
The trees of Finsbury Park are very old, and they have been witness to a lot of change and growth. If the trees had a voice, what would they share?
Based on a Tree Story brings to life Furtherfield Gallery’s nearby resident, a London plane tree dubbed the Trunk Triplets Tree, situated in Finsbury Park and the soils from which they grew, part of the now-extinct ancient woodland, Hornsey Woods. From medieval history to sci-fi futures, their stories are told through an augmented reality and audio experience, giving viewers an insight into the past, while arming them with inspiration and knowledge to help protect the trees into the future.
The project activates a digital tree sprite that shares a fable crafted through local research, site visits and discussion with Ricard Zanoli, the Park Ranger.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork one tree story is presented.
Larger commission: This work was selected in the public vote in August 2021 and further two tree stories and a trail of clues to find them will be revealed this Autumn.
Desree x Drumming School with Alex Dayo x Studio Hyte
Live until January 2022
An augmented reality (AR) sci-fi zine comprising three stories that bring together writers, musicians, and local residents to explore alternative visions of a Finsbury Park of the future.
For this first iteration of the AR zine, released in July 2021 as part of the People’s Park Plinth programme, we present The Light and Dark: an audio-visual story about a fictional character, Isa, who wakes up in a home they don’t recognize, surrounded by land that feels as foreign as the sky they sit under. Isa does not know how they made it there, but they do know they have to make it home before the host finds them. With only the wisdom of Grandwa, and the feeling in their chest, Isa discovers the power of their historical connection to what was, their land.
The Light and Dark has been written by local spoken word artist and writer Desree, and is accompanied by a unique musical composition by musician Alex Dayo and his park-based Drumming School, in collaboration with David Kemp. The visual design, AR experience and animation have been developed by Studio Hyte.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork the start of one future fiction is presented.
Larger commission: Had this work been selected in the public vote in August 2021, this fiction would have been completed and two more would have been revealed.
In August, after experiencing all 3 digital artworks, we asked people to pick which one they thought belonged in the heart of Finsbury Park by either:
Or
The park’s pick is Based on a Tree Story, and we are working with HERVISIONS and Ayesha Tan Jones to make a bigger and better version of their digital art experience – and then we will launch it on the People’s Park Plinth this Autumn!
We wanted everyone to express an opinion – even if visitors were far away what they felt mattered too. But if voters lived locally what they felt mattered more for the vote count – so we weighted the vote for anyone using the CultureStake app within or near the park.
If you are an arts organisation you can find out more about how you can use CultureStake to drive collective cultural decision-making at your own digital and physical events.
Breath Mark is a curatorial collective initiated as a part of the Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Projects Programme 2021, Royal College of Art. Comprising six international members, Breath Mark’s curatorial practice responds to the challenges of curating remotely and explores the interconnectivity of physical and digital site-specific experiences.
Members: Kevin Bello, Jindra Bucan, Harriet Min Zhang, Soyeon Park, Yifei Tang and Yuting Tang.
As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes. We encourage visitors to extend their experiences through the texts, sounds and videos here: spaces.rca.ac.uk
Lisa Hall is a sound artist exploring how environments are built-in sound, while Hannah Kemp-Welch is a socially engaged artist concerned with listening. Hannah and Lisa met at London College of Communication while studying MA Sound Arts in 2010. They share an interest in public and private spaces, and how sound and audio technologies build networks and tell stories that often can’t be seen. They have collaborated on sound art projects for performances and installations at Tate Modern, CRiSAP, and Sound Reasons Festival: New Delhi.
https://www.sound-art-hannah.com
HERVISIONS is a femme-focussed curatorial agency supporting and promoting artists working across new and emergent technologies, and platforms with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture. HERVISIONS partner with institutes, organisations and galleries to create antidisciplinary exhibitions and innovative commissions. Select partners include, LUX, Tate, bitforms and Google Arts and Culture.
IG: @hervisions_
Ayesha Tan Jones AKA YaYa Bones work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Ayesha weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthral and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Ayesha sanctifies these mediums as tool’s in their craft. Selected recent commissions/exhibitions include: Shanghai Biennale (2021) Athens Biennale (2021) Solo Show at Underground Flower Offsite (2020) Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) IMT Gallery, London (2019) Mimosa House, London (2018), ICA, London (2018-2020) Cell Project Space, London (2018) Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018) Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2016-17). Ayesha is represented by Harlesden High Street Gallery, London.
https://www.ayeshatanjones.com/
Desree is an award-winning spoken word artist, writer and facilitator based in London and Slough. Currently Artist in Residence for poetry collective EMPOWORD, Desree explores intersectionality, justice and social commentary. Producer for both Word Up and Word Of Mouth, finalist in 2018’s Hammer & Tongue national final and TEDx speaker, she has featured at events around the UK and internationally, including Glastonbury Festival 2019, Royal Albert Hall and Bowery Poetry New York. Burning Eye Publishers republished Desree’s first pamphlet, I Find My Strength In Simple Things, in May 2021.
Alex Dayo comes from Burkina Faso where his professional musical career started in the 1980’s, accompanying the National Ballet Kouledafourou on tour as well as playing for African Royalty and globally recognised dignitaries at private and public events and the Ensemble des Radios and Televisions of Burkina Faso, based in Bobo-Dioulasso. In 1985, he founded Wountey, a collective of musicians who created a new fusion of traditional and modern music called Plenguedey, and, for fifteen years, toured across Africa and Europe, spreading Burkina Faso’s cultural fusion to a wider audience. His musical collaborations include Ali Farka Toure, Femi Kuti and Salif Keita from Africa and traditional Master Griots from Burkina Faso/Mali/Guinea/Gambia. An accomplished arranger, Alex incorporates African traditional, Fusion, Jazz, Rock, Latin and Caribbean influences. Alex moved to London in 2007, where he set up a drumming school. A highlight of Alex’s career was being chosen to play at the Opening and Closing ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics.
http://drummingschool.co.uk/zantogola
DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Studio Hyte is an award-winning design studio, working between graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication. Their work includes branding, print, website, installation, and exhibition design. Specializing in forward-thinking, multifaceted visual identities within the arts and education sector. Whether through commissioned or self-directed projects, they aim to create meaningful, accessible, and thought-provoking work.
Formed of a small group of individual practitioners, Studio Hyte is the middle ground where all of our interests and practices meet. Their collective practice and research cover a broad spectrum of topics including language, inclusion & accessibility, egalitarian politics & alternative protest, and technology & the human.
IG: @studiohyte
As the Covid-19 global pandemic hits, we would like to offer our help to arts organisations and individuals who need to speedily pivot their programmes to digitally accessible models. At Furtherfield we have more than 20 years experience of the conceptual, technical and financial issues of producing arts programmes that straddle digital and physical space.
Over 1-hour online consultation calls we can assess what is at stake in arts projects previously planned for public venues and advise on suitable ways to transfer the work online. Our aim is to find active solutions that suit the work itself as well as the organisation and audience. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to questions of digital programming but we’d like to help you quickly and efficiently find the answer to yours.
Each call will be offered for a flat fee of £250 and will be with both Artistic Director Ruth Catlow and Executive Director Charlotte Frost. Please contact us now to schedule a call (info@furtherfield.org). 50% of income from calls will go towards honouring fees for artists within our own programmes.
Featured Image:
The Blockchain – Change Everything Forever, 2016
Still from a Furtherfield film directed by Pete Gomes
Please DONATE to CultureStake by participating in the Gitcoin CLR matching experiment for funding public goods.
Your donation goes a LONG way!
Using quadratic voting on the blockchain, CultureStake’s playful front-end interface allows everyone to vote on the types of cultural activity they would like to see in their locality.
CultureStake democratises arts commissioning by providing communities and artists with a way to make cultural decisions together. It does this by giving communities a bigger say in the activities provided in their area, and by connecting artists and cultural organisations to better information about what is meaningful in different localities.
Using the CultureStake app, people are invited to consider the social and cultural relevance of particular artworks to their localities. And they are given a way to rank how strongly they feel about artworks and the issues they raise. Votes are tracked and made visible, giving evidence of the types of projects communities would most value.
Currently, major artists and cultural sponsors have the upper hand and this can result in one-size-fits-all ‘blockbuster’ programming. CultureStake is a practical response to a growing demand for greater transparency about how, and in whose interest, decisions about the public good are made. It opens the field for experimentation, for robust and sustainable alternatives to centralised and private decision-making practices.
The ultimate vision for CultureStake is that governance and funding of culture are put into the hands of audiences, artists and venues, acting together in and across localities and time.
In this way, we hope to increase a shared sense of agency, imagination, and alliances.
The CultureStake pilot is commissioned by the Leeds International Festival 2020 as part of Furtherfield’s Future Fairness. This is a family-friendly fair of art and technology activities to examine the future of the world we live in, and to invite participants to choose what they want to see in Leeds in the future.
Using the CultureStake voting app they will decide together which project they would like to see commissioned on a larger scale in Leeds.
Quadratic voting (QV) was developed as an improvement on one-person-one-vote collective decision-making processes. It attempts to address the associated “tyranny of the majority” problems and data loss about voter intentions (so well understood by Post Brexit citizens of the UK).
The significance of election and referenda results are dangerously open to interpretation and manipulation by authorities. By providing more information QV has the potential to allow communities of people to better understand what vote results say about their values and intentions.
All participants receive the same limited number of voting credits that they can distribute to express nuanced preferences. For this reason, voters only use their voting credits on things that matter to them. The quadratic system also enables participants to express the intensity of their preferences for all options, but it costs them proportionately (quadratically) more credits to express strong feelings. (See table)
The CultureStake system will store voting data about each artwork on the Ethereum blockchain (a cryptographically secured distributed database) to guarantee ongoing access to tamper-proof public data.
CultureStake tests the ability of QV on the blockchain to produce trusted voting data – secure, transparent, and permanent – about culture experienced in places.
> Voting creates communally-owned information about what matters to people on the culture that happens in places.
> Voting contributes to shared knowledge about collective preferences, attitudes, and values.
CultureStake Software is published under a GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 AGPL-3.0
Main Repository URL: https://github.com/lazaruslabs/culturestake
Smart Contracts Repository URL: https://github.com/lazaruslabs/culturestake-contracts
Subgraph Repository URL: https://github.com/lazaruslabs/culturestake-subgraph
Infrastructure Provisioning URL: https://github.com/lazaruslabs/culturestake-provisioning
CultureStake is a DECAL/Furtherfield project.
Concept by Ruth Catlow, Charlotte Frost & Marc Garrett. Contributions by Sam Hart, Irene Lopez de Vallejo, Gretta Louw, Rhea Myers, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel.
Technical development by Sarah Friend & Andreas Dzialocha.
Visual identity by Studio Hyte
How do we collectively care for Finsbury Park?
Which people and which creatures?
What part would you like to play?
We invite you to join us at Furtherfield to explore these questions. Together we will make and play a game with various characters, imagining Finsbury Park in 2025 as the place where a global multispecies revolution begins – and changes the world forever.
How can you get involved?
Originally planned for the Summer of 2020, the first community meetings took place in March, however Covid-19 has paused the development of this project. If you would like to work with the game designers Cade and Ruth, and each other, from Furtherfield Commons and online email Ruth at ruthcatlow [at] gmail.com.
About The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025
At Summer Solstice a visiting delegation of artists, equipped with park blueprints, bylaws, data-sources, historical documents, and policies, will work with local envoys who present testimony from the many human and non-human lives of the park. Together, the two parties will work to mutually devise a treaty to govern the future actions of multispecies park users, turning the park itself into a “love machine”. This culminates in a public ceremonial treaty signing event.
With a bit of luck the game, final treaty, audio recordings, photographs, and resulting artistic responses are now planned for development and exhibition at Furtherfield in the Summer of 2021. Part role play game, part participatory performance, this event will be based at Furtherfield Commons and across Finsbury Park for three days at the Summer Solstice.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025: On systems, ecologies as networks, colonialism and seizing rituals of power.
Read the essay
Hear the discussion between Ruth and Cade on the Furtherfield Podcast
Illustration by Sajan Rai.
If you have any questions or would like more information email Ruth at ruthcatlow [at] gmail.com.
This project is supported by CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
How are attitudes to data transparency and consumer ethics shifting?
We would like to invite you to participate in our research study that takes the form of a game with many characters called Fictional Focus Group.
If you decide to take part we you will join a role-play game with 10-15 other people. You will get to escape your lock-down reality and play the role of a unique character who faces all the complex challenges of contemporary life.
The event itself will involve group discussion about the tricky choices your characters make as consumers or providers of food, clothing and money services. The game reveals the possible consequences of their actions as their data is reused in unforeseen ways.
The event will last for about 3 hours including 2 hours in the game and two 15 minutes breaks. Due to Covid-19, we are hosting this event online, using Zoom.
There are two sessions available:
29 and 30th June 2020
13.30 – 16.30
(now to be run online due to Covid-19)
For any enquiries, please email info@furtherfield.org
About the project
Findings contribute to a report, Glass Houses: Understanding transparency in information economies 2020.
Glass Houses is a research project that aims to investigate an end-user’s perception, understanding, and expectation of transparency in their engagement with modern information society, and in particular the role technologies, such as distributed ledgers, play in such engagement. It is funded by EPSRC through their Digital Economy Theme. glass-houses.cs.ucl.ac.uk
UCL Glass Houses Research Team: Sarah Meiklejohn is an Associate Professor in Cryptography and Security at University College London (UCL). Kruakae Pothong is a Research Fellow in Distributed Ledgers at University College London (UCL).
Fictional Focus Group is a Furtherfield/DECAL project created by Ruth Catlow with the UCL Glass Houses research team, developed in collaboration with Max Dovey.
An insurgency of sick artists is organising to resist the global crisis of care, from bed and over the phone. In these days of compulsive overwork in the so-called creative economy, we’re all sick artists. Using ancient technologies of peer-to-peer care, a grassroots health monitoring and diagnostic system is emerging, practiced from beds and couches all over the world. Participants co-produce a multi-dimensional image of each other’s physical, psychological, and social health. We call this image The Hologram. Through workshops in the spring and at Furtherfield Gallery or online in the autumn, visitors can learn about the Hologram and audition for a place in this viral sci-fi health system. Look out for couch-based performances throughout Finsbury Park.
The Hologram is part of Furtherfield’s three-year Citizen Sci-Fi programme crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
2020 is the year of Love Machines, nurturing living and machine systems for mutual care and respect on earth and beyond.
Love Machines Exhibition: 15 May – 21 Oct, Sat – Sun, 11:00 – 17:00, or by apt, Furtherfield Gallery, Website, and Social Media
Please note The Hologram talk and workshops are now taking place online as a response to pandemic restrictions. Contact info@furtherfield.org if you need any further information or assistance.
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). She has worked in close collaboration with freelance curators and producers including Taraneh Fazeli, Magdalena Jadwiga Härtelova, Dani Admiss, Amanda Nudelman, Misha Rabinovich, Caitlin Foley, and Laurel Ptak. Her projects, invited and uninvited, have appeared at (or in collaboration with) Transmediale Festival for Media Arts, San Francisco MoMA, West Den Haag, Moneylab, Swissnex San Francisco, Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Dream Farm Commons, Furtherfield, Gallery 400, Strike Debt Bay Area, Red Bull Detroit, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Flux Factory, Bemis Center for the Arts, Berliner Gazette and more.
In June 2019 Martin Zeilinger and Furtherfield held a Future of Money workshop, inviting people with expertise in alternative currencies, crypto tech and to meet with sci-fi writers and enthusiasts. They presented their work and to stimulate a discussion on how the politics and practicalities of cashlessness could be explored with younger generations.
Contributors included:
Mud Howard – gender non-comforming sci-fi writer; Arjun Harrison-Mann – graphic designer; Ben Cain – graphic designer; Brett Scott – on the future of money; Jaya Klara Brekke – on the politics of crypto finance; Ailie Rutherford – feminist economics artist; Peter Holsgrove – art and blockchain developer; Cecila Wee – writer and curator with finance and money specialism. The aim of this event was to develop a framework for running workshops exploring the issues of a cashless society.
The framework, devised by Zeilinger, Furtherfield and Studio Hyte, is a playful workbook (and set of stickers and badges). Users select a scenario from Planet Cashless 2029 and are invited through a set of steps designed to tease out solutions to the scenario. For example in one scenario a cyborg melon seller loses power in their digital payment arm and they need to find an alternative way to sell their melons!
We now plan to further bring the workbook alive with AR. In particular, we aim to create futuristic scavenger hunts where young people can explore locally, investigate financial forms for themselves, and come up with their own solutions to arising issues of the disappearance of cash.
The first Future of Money Lab was run by Zeilinger and Catlow at Furtherfield Commons, London, on 6th June 2019
Martin Zeilinger is a new media researcher, curator, and practitioner whose work focuses on the intersections between new media art, emerging technologies, critical theory, and activism in the financial, political, and environmental realms. Martin is Senior Lecturer in Computational Arts & Technology at Abertay University in Dundee. He has curated the Toronto-based Vector New Media Arts Festival since 2013, and is a member of the curatorial collective for the Dundee-based NEoN Festival.
Featured image: Image from Planet Cashless 2029 booklet designed by Studio Hyte
Furtherfield are the exhibition partner in a new intercultural project for 2019-2020.
Connect for Creativity is an 18-month project led by the British Council, in partnership with Abdullah Gül University in Turkey and three creative hubs – ATÖLYE in Turkey, BİOS in Greece, Nova Iskra in Serbia. The project is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Turkey, through the Intercultural Dialogue programme.
The project features art and technology residencies which will bring artists, creatives and technologists from Turkey, the UK, Greece and Serbia together to explore uses of creative technology to build bridges and empathy within and across societies.
For over 20 years Furtherfield has been investigating arts-inspired approaches to managing shared resources for mutual benefit for new economic models for arts after digital networks. Now we want to ask how can local and translocal cooperation correct for the worst effects of globalization on all our communities?
We are therefore asking participants: ‘What Do You Need Where You Are?’. In this way we are inviting everyone to consider local needs and develop universal – or translocal – projects to address them.
We share our home in Finsbury Park with the UK’s largest Turkish and Greek communities, adjacent to – the UK’s largest Serbian community in West London. From here we will assemble a team of emerging curators from each of these groups to co-develop the exhibition. One of the top items are these great blankets. While a quadrilingual format will be key to all communication where each artwork, all marketing and PR assets, as well as quotes from local and translocal participants will be translated across each language. We will host ‘digital dinners’ and other events featuring food from local Turkish, Greek and Serbian restaurants.
“The residencies will result in immersive and multimedia-rich artwork, powered by techniques of design research, human-centered design and speculative design. The artists will be asked to question what hopes and fears are associated with rapidly changing work and life environments in contemporary society, how a networked culture can develop cohesion and how to deal with uncertainty and change.”
For more information – please sign up for updates.
Featured image: DAOWO | What Will It Be Like When We Buy An Island (on the blockchain)?, with Ed Fornieles.
This 3-year programme supports our Platforming Finsbury Park initiative. Between 2019-2021 we will produce exhibitions and events that combine citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
#CitSciFi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
The Time Portals exhibition, held at Furtherfield Gallery (and across our online spaces), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the creation of Finsbury Park. As one of London’s first ‘People’s Parks’, designed to give everyone and anyone a space for free movement and thought, we regard it as the perfect location from which to create a mass investigation of radical pasts and futures, circling back to the start as we move forwards.
Each artwork in the exhibition therefore invites audience participation – either in its creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more imaginings of the past and future of urban green spaces and beyond.
For this Olympic year we will consider the health and wellbeing of humans and machines.
For this year of predicted peak heat rises we will consider how machines can work with nature.
Futurescapes connects local groups with our wider team of designers, researchers, techies and visionaries, to co-create new visions of Finsbury Park using immersive technology.
Furtherfield disrupt and democratise arts and technology so that more people can be involved in the business of shaping their cultures and places. Our current focus is on ways to connect the governance and funding of culture to the communities that they serve.
We are currently developing a three year programme called Citizen Sci-Fi, in the heart of Finsbury Park where we have 2 venues: a gallery and a lab. Using the model of citizen science and citizen journalism we are crowdsourcing the imagination of park users and local community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space.
Like many other public spaces, Finsbury Park has immense economic, social and natural value, yet there is a disconnect between the ‘owners’ of public space and the people that use (or should be) using them. Local councils have limited funds, the ‘superdiverse’ local population are not engaged in public consultations; and there are conflicts between park users and stakeholders.
Immersive models can be used as a tool for engagement through co-design, to discover how the council, park stakeholders including nearby property developers, and park users imagine its future and their involvement with it. Placemaking is recognised as a core part of regeneration, requiring a foundation of strong partnerships cutting across the public and private sectors, where social, cultural and ‘natural’ capital interleave to create stronger bonds and local identity.
We aim to co-design an immersive platform to facilitate the co-design of development in and around public spaces. It will engage with and directly benefit a number of stakeholders:
By coordinating and connecting Furtherfield’s international community of artists, techies and thinkers, and the groups that we work with in Finsbury Park, we have the opportunity to combine the powerful insights of grounded communities with experimental practitioners. We want to find a way to empower a long term collaboration across all these layers.
Futurescapes is an Audiences of the Future Design Foundations project, funded by Innovate UK (part of UK Research & Innovation)
At Furtherfield we have worked with decentralised network practices in arts and technology since we published our first webpages in 1996 – before the great centralisation – when the web thought it was already distributed and P2P. We took the spirit of punk and DIY in a more collaborative direction inspired by Free and Open Source Software methods and cultures, to build new platforms and art contexts with a playful Do It With Others (DIWO) ethos. We still connect with artists, techies, activists and thinkers from our base in Finsbury Park in North London, and internationally online. In 2015 Furtherfield launched the Art Data Money programme that sought to develop a commons for the arts in the network age.
DECAL – Decentralised Arts Lab is the outcome.
DECAL exists to mobilise crowdsourced research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies now.
Furtherfield Spring Editorial 2018 – Blockchain Imaginaries
2018
Introduction to Furtherfield Spring season of art and blockchain essays, interviews, events, exploration and critique.
Collected writings by Rhea Myers
2014 – Present
On blockchain geometries, accelerationist art, crypto and DAWCs, art for algorithms, and (Conceptual) Art, cryptocurrency and beyond.
DAOWO – The blockchain laboratory and debate series for reinventing the arts
Oct 2017 – Present
A temporary laboratory for the creation of a living blockchain art laboratory devised by Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Goethe Institut, London.
New World Order
2017 – 18
Artists envision a world made by machines, markets and natural processes, without states or other human institutions in an international touring exhibition curated by Furtherfield.
Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain
2017
The first book of its kind, bringing together artistic, speculative, conceptual and technical engagements with blockchains.
Edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, and Sam Skinner
Jaya Klara Brekke: I saw the Blockchain at the End of The World, turned around, and walked back
2018
Written on the occasion of the New World Order group exhibition for PostScriptUM #31 Series published by Aksioma, edited by Janez Janša
Blockchain Art Commission*
2017
Clickmine by Sarah Friend is a hyperinflationary ERC-20 token that is minted by a clicking game.
A Furtherfield and NEoN Digital Arts Festival Co-commission
Ethereal Summit NY
2018
Commission and exhibition of contemporary artists working with public blockchains as a medium for conceptual and social experimentation. Jurors and curators, Ruth Catlow, Giani Fabricio, Sam Hart, Will King, Saraswathi Subbaraman
The Blockchain: Change Everything Forever
2016
A short film to stimulate cross sector debate around how emerging blockchain technologies change the social contract, directed by Pete Gomes
Role Play Your Way to Budgetary Blockchain Bliss
2016
Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers brought the LARPing tradition to INC’s MoneyLab. Inviting participants to take on generic roles from the business cycle of start up tech companies trying to make the next big thing with the latest technological innovation.
Blockchain’s Potential in the Arts
2016
A gathering of organisations, academics and policy makers in arts and culture to explore blockchain’s potential. Convened by Ben Vickers and Ruth Catlow and hosted by the Austrian Cultural Forum, London.
The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies
2015
An exhibition curated by Futherfield to explore how might we produce, exchange and value things differently for a transformed artistic, economic and social future?
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jun/14/island-mentality/
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/cryptokitty-blockchain/index.html
http://hyperallergic.com/440936/what-blockchain-means-for-contemporary-art/
https://www.artbasel.com/news/artists-as-cryptofinanciers–welcome-to-the-blockchain
Exhibition, Furtherfield Gallery, London Oct 2015 – Nov 2015
Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion exhibit ornamental Gold and Glitter created with ‘found’ internet GIFs and Nakamoto (The Proof) – a video documenting the artists’ attempt to produce a fake passport of the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. FaceCoin by Rhea Myers is an artwork that is also a machine for mining faces as proof of aesthetic work. His Shareable Readymades are iconic 3D printable artworks for an era of digital copying and sharing. The Museum of Contemporary Commodities by Paula Crutchlow and Dr Ian Cook treats everyday purchases as if they were our future heritage and Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc reclaims ownership of personal data by turning her entire being into a corporation. The Alternet by Sarah T Gold conceives of a way for us to determine with whom, and on what terms, we share our data and Shu Lea Cheang anticipates a future world where garlic is the new social currency.
Press:
JJ Charlesworth for Art Review Jan-Feb 2016
Short film, 2016
The underpinning technology of digital currencies and smart contracts, the blockchain is reshaping concepts of value, trust, law and governance. This film sets out to diversify the people involved in its future by bringing together leading thinkers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, artists and activists who discuss:
A Furtherfield film with Digital Catapult London. Directed by Pete Gomes, concept and research by Ruth Catlow. Featuring interviews with: Dr Anat Elhalal; Ben Vickers; Dr Catherine Mulligan; Elias Haase; Irra Ariella Khi; Jaime Sevilla; Jaya Klara Brekke; Kei Kreutler; Pavlo Tanasyuk; Rhea Myers; Sam Davies; and Vinay Gupta
Live Action Role Play, 2016
This 2-day start up tech hackathon compressed into 2 hours was aimed at creating Blockchain based businesses ideas that improve the life and future of cats. The workshop critically emulated the extravagant discourse and excitement surrounding the super-automation and hyperconnectivity that comes with blockchain and similar technologies, and the capacity of the technology stakeholders to both increase and diminish global inequity. Devised by Ben Vickers, Ruth Catlow for Institute of Network Cultures’ MoneyLab.
Report:
http://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2016/12/06/role-play-your-way-to-budgetary-blockchain-bliss/
International Touring Exhibition, 2017 – 2018
Jaya Klara Brekke, Max Dovey, Pete Gomes, HandFastr, Rhea Myers, Primavera De Filippi of O’Khaos, Terra0, Lina Theodorou and xfx (aka Ami Clarke). Curated by Furtherfield
A self-owning forest with ideas of expansion, a self-replicating android flower, a cryptocurrency rig to mine human breath, a five minute marriage contract, a Hippocratic Oath for software developers; in an exhibition about living with blockchain technologies.
Artists investigate and test the possible consequences of blockchain technologies, and their capacity to embody divergent political ideas. They explore dramatic new conceptions of global governance and economy, that could permanently enrich or demote the role of humans. They portray a world in which responsibility for many aspects of life are transferred, permanently (for better or worse) from natural and social systems into a secure, networked, digital ledger of transactions, and computer-executed contracts.
Produced as part of the State Machines programme*
Press: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/cryptokitty-blockchain/index.html
Book published by Torque Editions, 2017
Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain is the first book of its kind, intersecting artistic, speculative, conceptual and technical engagements with the the technology heralded as “the new internet”. The book features a range of newly commissioned essays, fictions, illustration and art documentation exploring what the blockchain should and could mean for our collective futures.
Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain
Imagined as a future-artefact of a time before the blockchain changed the world, and a protocol by which a community of thinkers can transform what that future might be, Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain acts as a gathering and focusing of contemporary ideas surrounding this still largely mythical technology. The full colour printed first edition includes DOCUMENTATION of artistic projects engaged in the blockchain, including key works Plantoid, Terra0 and Bittercoin, THEORISATION of key areas in the global blockchain conversation by writers such as Hito Steyerl, Rachel O’Dwyer, Rhea Myers, Ben Vickers and Holly Herndon, and NEW POETRY, ILLUSTRATION and SPECULATIVE FICTION by Theodorios Chiotis, Cecilia Wee, Juhee Hahm and many more. It is edited by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner.
Along with a print edition, Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain includes a web-based project in partnership with Design Informatics at University of Edinburgh: Finbook is an interface where readers and bots can trade on the value of chapters included in the book. As such it imagines a new regime for cultural value under blockchain conditions.
This book and surrounding events is produced in collaboration between Torque and Furtherfield, connecting Furtherfield’s Art Data Money project with Torque’s experimental publishing programme. It is supported by an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology and through the State Machines project by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Buy Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain
Format: Paperback
ISBN number: 978-0-9932487-5-7
Torque and Furtherfield, London, 2017
Distributor: Liverpool University Press
Press:
http://we-make-money-not-art.com/artists-rethinking-the-blockchain/
https://hyperallergic.com/440936/what-blockchain-means-for-contemporary-art/
http://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2018/01/26/artists-rethinking-the-blockchain/
The blockchain laboratory and debate series for reinventing the arts, 2017 – Present
This series brings together artists, musicians, technologists, engineers, and theorists to join forces in the interrogation and production of new blockchain technologies. The focus is to understand how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture, that transcends the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation of cryptoeconomics.
Devised by Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers in collaboration with Goethe Institut, London.
Contributors include Ramon Amaro, Jaya Klara Brekke, Ed Fornieles, Jess Houlgrave, Janez Jansa, Helen Kaplinsky, Thor Karlsson, Kei Kreutler, Sarah Meiklejohn, Julian Oliver, Emily Rosamond, Hito Steyerl, Mark Waugh, Laura Willis.
Visit the DAOWO website to view video and pdf resources
Produced as part of the State Machines programme*
Press:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jan/03/reinventing-the-art-lab-on-the-blockchain/
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jun/14/island-mentality/
*State Machines: Art, Work and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale Computation
Focusing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance, the project joins five experienced partners Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL) and NeMe (CY) together with a range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
This series brings together artists, musicians, technologists, engineers, and theorists to join forces in the interrogation and production of new blockchain technologies.
Our focus will be to understand how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture, that transcends the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation of cryptoeconomics.
Intended as a temporary laboratory for the creation of a living laboratory, the inaugural workshop in the series takes a pragmatic approach towards building technical and economic capacity in the arts.
As the DAOWO series unfolds, each lab will work across a spectrum of themes and domains of expertise, breaking down silos and assumptions about what blockchain technologies might mean. The aim is to birth a new set of experimental initiatives which can reinvent the future of the arts as we know it.
Thu 26 Oct: Reinventing the Art Lab (on the blockchain)
Venue: Goethe-Institut, London | BOOKING ESSENTIAL
2-5.30pm Workshop devised and hosted by Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers
7-8.30pm Panel discussion with Hito Steyerl, Helen Kaplinsky, Julian Oliver
The Subsequent DAOWO Programme of Labs and Debates
Thu 23 Nov: Identity Trouble (on the blockchain)
Thu 25 Jan 2018: Doing Good (on the blockchain)
Fri 16 Feb 2018: Artists Organise (on the blockchain) (special event with Clubture at Drugo More, Rijeka)
Thu 22 Feb 2018: The Decentralised Music Society reforming music (on the blockchain)
Thu 29 Mar 2018: What Will It Be Like When We Buy An Island (on the blockchain)?
This programme is devised by Ruth Catlow and Ben Vickers in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London, and the State Machines programme. Its title is inspired by a paper by artist hacker and writer Rhea Myers called DAOWO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation With Others.
Events will be hosted at the Goethe-Institut, London and Drugo More, Rijeka.
About Ruth Catlow
Ruth Catlow is an artist, writer and curator working with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. She is the co-founder, co-director of Furtherfield.
About Ben Vickers
Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, explorer, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
This short (20 minute) film has been made by artist Michael Szpakowski working with two classes of year 4 pupils at Southwark Park school in Bermondsey.
Freely adapted from King Hrolf Kraki’s Saga it is a grim tale of internecine bloodletting in Viking times told in the childrens’ own words and acted out by them.
“Of all the pieces of “outreach” – I’d rather call it co-constructed – work I’ve done over the last thirty years, this piece comes closest to satisfying both the most important requirements of such work. The young people are totally engaged in the process and proud of the final product. Also and more importantly, I feel that it is aesthetically satisfying as any work I make entirely alone; so the finished piece is both a universal fable which tips its hat in homage to Brecht, Bresson and Straub-Huillet and also a hymn to the energy, wit and resourcefulness of the eight to nine year old and to an inner London multicultural school community at its best.”
Public screening at BFI- NFT2 4pm Thursday 25th June 2011
http://www.bfi.org.uk/
Seats are limited. Please contact ale[AT]furtherfield[DOT]org
A Furtherfield Outreach Project
Partners: Creative Partnerships, A New Direction, Southwark Park Primary School
Mycorrhizal Meditation is a sound-art work by Fiona MacDonald : Feral Practice, commissioned for the enjoyment of the people of Finsbury Park, as part of the exhibition Are We All Addicts Now?
It is designed to be listened to in the park, but can be listened to anywhere.
Mm is a guided meditation (approx. 15 mins) that choreographs a connective journey through the human body and down into a dynamic under-soil world. The voice of the artist entwines with sound recordings made in wooded places, using ambient and contact microphones, and techniques that convert electrical signals in plants and fungi into sound.
Feral Practice complicates a notion of nature as ‘ultimate digital detox’, and guides the user towards the startling interconnectivity of beyond-human nature, the ‘wood-wide-web’ that predates our digital connectivity by millennia. The mycorrhizal network is made up of fungi and plant tissue, and acts both as a woodland’s food store and communication centre.
Mm is suitable for ages 8 years and above.
It can be listened to alone or in a group.
Please tweet @feralpractice @furtherfield #addictsnow to share your experience of the meditation.
“Decentralised computer infrastructure does not necessarily mean decentralised power” *
Announcing a new film and groundbreaking collaboration
The Blockchain: Change everything forever WATCH HERE
This new film released online on 3 October 2016 by Furtherfield in collaboration with Digital Catapult broadens the current debate about the impact of emerging blockchain technologies.
The underpinning technology of Bitcoin digital currency, the Blockchain is reshaping concepts of value, trust, law and governance. This film sets out to diversify the people involved in its future by bringing together leading thinkers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, artists and activists who discuss:
What can a blockchain do?
Who builds this new reality?
How will we rule ourselves?
How will the future be different because of the Blockchain?
This is a unique collaboration between Furtherfield, dedicated to new forms of cooperation in arts, technology and society and Digital Catapult, an organisation dedicated to growing the UK digital economy.
DOWNLOAD
PRESS RELEASE (.pdf)
TRANSCRIPT (.pdf)
Directed by Pete Gomes
Concept, research and development by Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield, Co-founder and Co-director.
Contributors: Dr Anat Elhalal, Digital Catapult; Ben Vickers, Co-founder unMonastery and Curator of Digital, Serpentine Galleries; Dr Catherine Mulligan, Research Fellow, Associate Director – Centre for Cryptocurrency Research, Imperial College; Elias Haase, Developer, Thinker, Beekeeper, Founder of B9lab; Irra Ariella Khi, Co-founder and CEO Vchain Technology; Jaime Sevilla, developer, researcher, GHAYA , #hackforgood; Jaya Klara Brekke, digital strategy, design, research and curating, Durham University; Kei Kreutler, Independent Researcher, Co-founder unMonastery; Pavlo Tanasyuk, CEO BlockVerify; Rhea Myers, artist, writer, hacker; Sam Davies, Lead Technologist – Creative Programmes, Digital Catapult; Vinay Gupta, resilience guru, Hexayurt
Pixelache Festival 2016, Helsinki, Finland. 22-25 September 2016
BLOCKCHAIN MEETUP, London Digital Catapult Centre, London, UK. 27 October 2016
INAUGURAL BRISBANE BLOCKCHAIN SYMPOSIUM 2016, Brisbane, Australia. 3 November 2016
The Blockchain – Change everything forever has been made as part of Furtherfield’s Art Data Money programme which seeks to build a commons for the arts in the network age. A book, Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain in partnership with itinerant publisher and arts organisation Torque will be published in Spring 2017 with the prequel due out November 2016.
Furtherfield is an international hub for arts, technology and social change. Since 1997, Furtherfield has created online platforms and physical places for exhibitions, labs and debates where different types of people explore today’s important questions. Furtherfield is an Arts Council England ‘National Portfolio’ organisation with a Gallery and Lab in London’s Finsbury Park http://furtherfield.org/
Digital Catapult works with SMEs to help them grow and scale faster. It helps larger corporates in their digital transformation. It does this through programmes of collaboration and open innovation, by bringing academic leading edge expertise into the mix combined with the organisation’s own business and technological expertise. https://digital.catapult.org.uk
For any additional materials and interviews
Please contact Ruth Catlow
ruth.catlow@furtherfield.org
@furtherfield
A Furtherfield film made in collaboration with Digital Catapult, with support from Arts Council England and Southbank Centre.
Blockchain: Change everything forever
What is the Blockchain?
The Blockchain is the underpinning technology for Bitcoin digital currency, and is said to be at the same stage of development as the World Wide Web in the late 1980s. Its promoters claim that the global deployment of smart contracts via this new decentralised protocol will change everything forever.
The Blockchain in Context
In 2008 Bitcoin, the first global digital currency was described in a white paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. While the WWW facilitated a worldwide (economic and social) revolution in the global distribution of information, the Blockchain, would facilitate secure, decentralised record-keeping, exchange of digital assets and the mining and exchange of computationally secured value.
Since 2013 blockchains have become a focus for investment by world banks, FinTechs and corporations who predict a fourth industrial revolution of super-automation and hyperconnectivity. This is also accompanied by predictions from the World Economic Forum of increased global inequity.
In this version of the future, code replaces legislation. “Code becomes law”. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) route around systems of regulation and taxation via immutable smart contracts, globally deployed across the Blockchain.
The film The Blockchain: Change everything forever proposes that people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds should be involved to work out how Blockchain technologies can be shaped for more decentralised power, diverse needs and interests into the future.
*Jaya Klara Brekke, Digital strategy, design, research and curating, Durham University
The Road to Budgetary Blockchain Bliss, is a 2 hour Live Action Role Play adventure for the Blockchain-curious of all tribes including: hackers, lawyers, activists, artists, financiers, designers, venture capitalists, developers, marketeers.
Players adopt a fictional future version of themselves and work with others to solve a real-world problem. They learn about and build DAOs and Dapps (machine-based organisations and apps on the blockchain) and act out the social discomforts, asymmetries, dramas and politics of collaboration and coalition-formation across difference….starting with the budget!
NO PRIOR BLOCKCHAIN KNOWLEDGE NECESSARY
Fill out the application survey to ensure that you are assigned a compatible player character and so increase your chances of achieving your objective – fictionalise at will.
The Road to Budgetary Blockchain Bliss
Devised by Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield and Ben Vickers, unMonastery & Serpentine Galleries
WHEN?: Prompt start – 13:45 – 15:40 on Friday 2 Dec 2016
WHERE? The Presentation Room
As part of MoneyLab #3 Failing Better Symposium | Workshops | Exhibition,
Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam A two-day symposium,
1 – 2 December 2016, featuring talks, workshops and performances that confront the notion that finance is too big to fail.
Tickets: € 10 per session; € 30 per day, € 60 two day pass Students: 50% discount on all tickets
The term DIWO – Do It With Others was first defined in 2006 on Rosalind – Upstart New Media Art Lexicon1 It extended the DIY Do-It-Yourself ethos of early net art, punk & Situationism, towards a more collaborative approach, using the Internet as an experimental artistic medium and distribution system to foment grass-roots creativity. Even before it was defined it underpinned everything Furtherfield has ever done.
The first DIWO Email Art project started with an open call to the email list Netbehaviour, February 1st 2007. The call drew on the Mail Art tradition proposing to bypass curatorial restrictions to promote imaginative exchange between artists and audiences on their own terms.
“Peers connect, communicate and collaborate, creating controversies, structures and a shared grassroots culture, through both digital online networks and physical environments.”2
Participants worked ‘across time zones and geographic and cultural distances with digital images, audio, text, code and software. They created streams of art-data, art-surveillance, instructions and proposals in relay, producing multiple threads and mash-ups.’3. Co-curated using VOIP and webcams the exhibition at HTTP Gallery displayed every contribution in an email inbox, alongside an installation of prints of every image, and a running copy of every video and audio file submitted.4 Every post to the list, until April 1st, was considered an artwork – or part of a larger, collective artwork – for the DIWO project.
DIWO at the Dark Mountain was the second DIWO email art exhibition instigated by Furtherfield and the Dark Mountain Project in 2010. It took ecological collapse as its subject and the need for new stories, systems and infrastructures as its premise. This project generated intense controversies among participants. Again, considered part of the artwork, the details of debates were re-enacted for gallery visitors in a live performance at the opening event. In addition to the networked, live-streamed co-curation event, and the performance, this exhibition closed with a disassembly event in which gallery visitors demounted all physical works and redistributed them via snail mail to anyone they knew.5
In recent years other individuals and have taken DIWO as the inspiration for their own projects. Some changed its meaning. For instance, Cory Janssen’s definition of DIWO for Technopedia, does away with the art, and collaboration across difference. We think that what he describes is just plain and simple Crowdsourcing.6 Others maintain the adventurous and emancipatory spirit. For instance, in 2012 Pixelache the Helsinki-based transdisciplinary platform for experimental art, design, research and activism took DIWO as the theme for its annual festival.7 Whatever the starting point we always welcome invitations to DIWO!
Notes
Do It With Others (DIWO): contributory media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, Furtherfield. From Coding Cultures, 2007. Editor: Francesca Da Rimini. Published by d/lux, Lilyfield NSW Australia. Available at Foam (pdf) here.
Do It With Others (DIWO) – E-Mail Art in Context by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, 2008. Curediting, Vague Terrain. Available here.
DIWO (Do-It-With-Others): Artistic co-creation as a decentralized method of peer empowerment in today’s multitude by Marc Garrett, 2013, published by SEAD: White Papers. Available here.
DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology, by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett. From Remediating the Social, 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs University of Edinburgh. Published by Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice, University of Bergen, Norway. Available here.
More DIWO references
Don’t DIY, DIWO — a VOD case study with Anatomy of a Love Seen, by Peter Gerard. Published on May 7, 2015 on the Vimeo staff blog.
A downloadable freely licensed 3D model of an artwork to print and remix.
2011 Furtherfield commission.
Download the model here: https://www.furtherfield.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/balloon_dog.tar.gz
Introduction by Charlotte Frost
Marcel Duchamp took an average urinal, signed it with pseudonym, and placed it – or at least tried to place it – in a gallery setting to be viewed as art. In doing this he asked after the origins and essence of what we think of as ‘art’. He was implying that craftsmanship, authorship, objects and context each have their part to play elevating man-made things to artistic proportions. For all his attempts to undermine this validation system, by the 1950s his urinals were indeed viewed as legitimate art and by the 1980s, not-making had become the new making. The projected was hosted with a help of these nice blanket company. Rhea Myers takes iconic works from the art history of ‘readymades’ and converts them into publicly available source files. In this remake, works are stripped back to the literal and metaphorical code of Duchamp’s initial gesture – but do not be fooled, this is precisely where the ‘makerly’ is remade too, in the careful craftsmanship of modelling and coding these works. But if code itself is too minimalist for you, he has also connected the files with real-world 3D printers, so you can order your own ‘readymade’, readymade, in a variety of materials and finishes.
Balloon Dog forms part of a series of shareable DIY ‘readymades’ for an era of digital copying and sharing. Iconic objects from the history of appropriation and remixing art are recreated as 3D-digital models. Users can then download and send the digital model to 3D printers via the Internet to receive their own physical artwork through the post at a scale of their choosing.
You can read the essay by Mark Hancock commissioned by Arts Council England, or listen to the interview with Rhea Myers by Furtherfield on ResonanceFM here:
Balloon Dog – How to
Balloon Dog is a free-as-in-freedom licensed 3D computer model of a balloon animal suitable for 3D printing. You can do what you like with it as long as you maintain attribution (‘Model by Bassam Kurdali. Commissioned by Rhea Myers’) and place any copies or modifications under the same licence. Visit the Creative Commons site for the licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.
You can print Balloon Dog using a 3D printing service such as Shapeways, in which case you’ll need to scale it to a size you can afford to print using a 3D modelling package such as Blender and then upload it:
http://www.blender.org/
http://www.shapeways.com/
Or you can print it using a 3D printer that you have access to. For low-cost 3D printers such as the MakerBot or RepRap you’ll need to take steps to support the model’s overhangs, for example using Skeinforge:
http://fabmetheus.crsndoo.com/wiki/index.php/Skeinforge
http://www.makerbot.com/
http://reprap.org/
View Collaboration and freedom – the world of free and open source art.
A collection of essays and tools curated by Furtherfield for Arts Council England’s Thinking Digital Resources.
Furtherfield’s Game Art programme draws on interdisciplinary practice that takes the engines and culture of digital games as the tools and materials of art practice.
Artists’ work in this field connects both with mainstream art world interests and atypical-audiences-for-art engaging them with aesthetic and game-play experiences that have them question the world in enjoyable ways.
Zero Gamer looks at games played, unplayed and unplayable, the spectator and the spectacle. Sometimes we just like to watch, and machinima, gameplay videos and spectator gaming events take the activity out of interactivity. Zero Gamer presents games that play themselves, video documents of in-game performance, game engine experiments and challenging documentaries on gameplay.
![[giantJoystick] by Mary Flanagan Game/Play exhibition - 22 July - 3 September 2006](https://www.furtherfield.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3003295736_2092b7a9d0_w.jpg)
Game/Play is a national touring exhibition that explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction through media arts practice. This collaboration between Q-Arts, Derby and HTTP, London has provided a framework to develop a context for creative exchange between visitors to the exhibition focusing on the rhetorical constructs game and play. Moreover they showed us these amazing beddings. Projects fall under three main categories: installations, independent video games and online (networked) artworks.
Artists Re:Thinking Games is a publication that looks at how a selection of leading artists, designers and commentators have challenged the norms and expectations of both game and art worlds with both criticality and popular appeal. It explores themes adopted by the artist that thinks and rethinks games and includes essays, interviews and artists’ projects from Jeremy Bailey, Ruth Catlow, Heather Corcoran, Daphne Dragona, Mary Flanagan, Mathias Fuchs, Alex Galloway, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana, Anne-Marie Schleiner, David Surman, Tale of Tales, Bill Viola, and Emma Westecott.
Artists’ work in this field connects both with mainstream art world interests and atypical-audiences-for-art engaging them with aesthetic and game-play experiences that have them question the world in enjoyable ways.
“Only when people are able to use computers to produce their own data does information communication technology become genuinely empowering.” – James Wallbank
Furtherfield is committed to delivering on promise of the Zero Dollar Laptop manifesto with a series of workshop programmes with different community groupw. The Zero Dollar Laptop, is a recycled laptop running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective- now and long into the future; repurposing otherwise redundant technology, gathering dust in bedrooms and offices across the country.
Pilot workshops with the clients of St. Mungo’s Charity for Homeless People ran for twelve weeks in 2010, where participants learned about using their laptop from core of installing their own operating system to customising their own machines, writing articles and creating images to share and publish via social media. Download the full report pdf here.
The next steps are to implement the Zero Dollar Laptop at a European scale in coordination with European media labs. The initiative is gaining momentum, with interest from Budapest, Nantes, Madrid, and Brussels Visit the Zero Dollar Laptop Blog here.
The project is part of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme.
Editors Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana.
Digital games are important not only because of their cultural ubiquity or their sales figures but for what they can offer as a space for creative practice. Games are significant for what they embody; human computer interface, notions of agency, sociality, visualisation, cybernetics, representation, embodiment, activism, narrative and play. These and a whole host of other issues are significant not only to the game designer but also present in the work of the artist that thinks and rethinks games. Re-appropriated for activism, activation, commentary and critique within games and culture, artists have responded vigorously.
Over the last decade artists have taken the engines and culture of digital games as their tools and materials. In doing so their work has connected with hacker mentalities and a culture of critical mash-up, recalling Situationist practices of the 1950s and 60s and challenging and overturning expected practice.
This publication looks at how a selection of leading artists, designers and commentators have challenged the norms and expectations of both game and art worlds with both criticality and popular appeal. It explores themes adopted by the artist that thinks and rethinks games and includes essays, interviews and artists’ projects from Jeremy Bailey, Ruth Catlow, Heather Corcoran, Daphne Dragona, Mary Flanagan, Mathias Fuchs, Alex Galloway, Marc Garrett, Corrado Morgana, Anne-Marie Schleiner, David Surman, Tale of Tales, Bill Viola, and Emma Westecott.
In collaboration with FACT – http://www.fact.co.uk
http://www.furtherfield.org
http://www.http.uk.net/
Publisher: Liverpool University Press (31 Mar 2010)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1846312477
ISBN-13: 978-1846312472
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/1846312477
We explore collaborative working to establish new sustainable ways of sharing knowledge, ideas and resources, and increase participation in the arts.
Furtherfield and Drake Music have come together to create ‘We Share’, a new initiative, building on and developing the combined creative assets, specialisms and strengths of these two organisations and collaborating closely with other groups in the field. In the first phase of this initiative our organisations are testing and piloting new ways of working, with a view to other partners joining us during the second phase.
To explore the possible benefits of organisational collaboration in:
The first of these projects has been to develop shared web infrastructure and organisational websites for participatory arts organisations using Free and Open Source Software and processes. The next stage of this project is to develop a business plan and seek investment to broaden the reach of our offer.
This regular live show highlights current activity and controversies around contemporary practices in art and technology, discussing events, exhibitions, debates and their social contexts with all manner of player and participant. Features include lively debate and interviews with artists, techies, writers and curators, interspersed with bleeding-edge music, some from Furthernoise.org, and a rolling programme of experimental creative adventures for your amusement.
First series hosted by Marc Garrett, artist, writer and co-founder of furtherfield.org with reviews and interviews by art historian & writer Charlotte Frost and Ruth Catlow artist co-founder of the furtherfield.org.
Second series hosted by Marc Garrett joined by Irini Papadimitriou & Jonathan Munro.In addition to Furtherfield’s invited guests this series will feature interviews with many of the 30 artists showing in the exibition of DIY, hacking and open source projects, Unleashed Devices as part of
NODE.London. Irini has worked with Jonathan Munro of TINT to curate the exhibition at Watermans.
The programme is part of ‘Hyperlink: Media Art Contexts’ whose principal aim is to present and promote high-quality contemporary media art work, alongside critical discussion of past, present and future media art in a contemporary art context.
“All my life people have been telling me I was unique and then I saw myself on camera and realised I was – there is only one me! The film was a great achievement.”
Participants: 20 Year 4 students from Southwark Park Primary School.
Artist: Michael Szpakowski (video artist, composer and facilitator)
The Investigators followed a group of Year Four children and their teacher through their science studies for an entire school year.
Michael Szpakowski and Furtherfield made a documentary film with the children from Southwark Park Primary that examines the investigative skills in Science. The project focused on developing the use of digital media within the classroom, and as a tool for learning that the children can use themselves. Around a framework of footage shot in lesson time and on trips out is assembled other material – creative writing and artwork by the young people as well as re-enactments and discussion of the lessons.
Partners: Creative Partnerships, A New Direction, Southwark Park Primary School
Is it possible to hold an international media arts conference without a single participant getting on a plane?
The Rich Networking Series began as a thought experiment about ways of convening artists, curators, technologists, musicians, thinkers and researchers in geographically distant venues to share their knowledge, experience, perspectives and approaches to sustainable international collaboration and exchange. Participants and organisations continue to explore the range of existing networking activities and frameworks that are already used to stimulate exchange and collaboration between groups of people attending international conferences, fairs and networking events.
Rich Network Series has continue to grow and inspire the development and execution of several experimental projects:
Telematic Eating: Furtherfield is experimenting with intimacy and connection over remote networks. A series of dinner parties co-ordinated by Pollie Barden will bring together two remote groups to dine together working with projectors, cameras, sound and the Laptop Potluck. The first will be a in partnership with Alex Haw of Latitudinal Cuisine.
If not you not me by Annie Abrahams. This networked performance art exhibition at Furtherfield’s gallery, Winter 2010 sensitised participants and audiences to glitches in communication and invited them to experience and reflect on different ways of being together in a machine-mediated world. Find out more.
We won’t fly for art campaign: An initiative started in 2009 by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett. They pledge to not fly for art for six months only if 6 other people agreed to replicate the pledge. To date 96 people have signed the pledge. Find out more.
Feral Trade Cafe: For 8 weeks in Summer of 2009, Furtherfield’s gallery was converted into Cafe where the food and drinks are sourced and traded over social networks. Find out more.
Rich Networks and all it’s spawned projects are part of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme.
Partners include SCAN and MARCEL.
A Mail-Art project across physical and digital networks in collaboration with the Dark Mountain Project; to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation and to craft new ones for the age ahead.
This was the second Do It With Others (DIWO) E-Mail-Art project initiated by Furtherfield. The first DIWO experiment in 2007 extended the Do-It-Yourself ethos of early net art, characterised by curiosity, activism and precision, towards a more collaborative approach, using the Internet as an experimental artistic medium and distribution system to foment grass-roots creativity.
The Dark Mountain Project is ‘a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.’ It aimed to ‘question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.’ Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain, a mail-art project at HTTP Gallery, is a cultural collaboration for this age. “Uncivilisation,” the Dark Mountain Manifesto, called for a cultural response to our current predicament. Its challenge was offered to network-minded artists, technologists, writers and activists as a provocation – to work together to re-envision the narratives and infrastructures that govern our relationships with the natural world, and how they might be unravelled and rewoven to reconfigure our place in it. As “Uncivilisation” concludes, ‘the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.’
Artists, technologists, writers, activists and all other living beings were invited to correspond with each other across physical and digital mail networks, and the exhibition at HTTP present the results of this process. These have been gathered and the presentation devised during an Open Curation event, involving collaborators in real and virtual space. Transmissions shown in the exhibition include collaborative image-threads, net artworks, digital videos, drawings, paintings on wall and paper, sound works, and the full text of the discussion generated on the NetBehaviour list presented in numerous forms. The opening also featured a performance representing a central controversy arising during the project. The exhibition offered new myths and maps for future uncivilisation at HTTP Gallery.
More about The Dark Mountain Project and Furtherfield
The Dark Mountain Project is curated by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. http://www.dark-mountain.net
Paul is the author of One No, Many Yeses and Real England. He was deputy editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.
Dougald writes the blog “Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job).” He is a former BBC journalist and co-founder of the School of Everything, and has written for and edited various online and offline magazines.
This project is part of Furtherfield’s on-going Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage.
For details about the project, visit: http://http.uk.net/diwodarkmountain
For information about past events: 2009 | 2010
Do you want to Do It With Others in the future?
E-Mail: go to http://netbehaviour.org, subscribe to the NetBehaviour email list, correspond and join the explosive discussions in image, text, sound, movie and code.
Inclusive filmmaking workshops to create a documentary challenging community perceptions of Grove Park Special School.
Participants: 20 students between the ages of 10 and 14 from Grove Park Special School in Brent
Artist: Michael Szpakowski (video artist, composer and facilitator)
20 students between the ages of 10 and 14 from Grove Park Special School in Brent explored and challenged community perceptions of the school in a series of visits and interviews with leading figures in the local community. The students, teachers, learning support assistants and Michael Szpakowski worked collaboratively in small groups to make a documentary film about the Borough of Brent, and the people who live and work there. Visits were made to 3 locations over 10 weeks: Brent Town Hall, Fryent Country Park and the nearby IKEA superstore. They were chosen because of their significance as providers of essential local community services. During these visits and interviews the students were encouraged to look outward and find their voices in the local community and throughout this process students and staff had the opportunity to learn valuable filmmaking and editing skills. The project has culminated in a DVD film, for distribution to all participants.
Partners: Creative Partnerships, Grove Park Special School
The Whispers Project was started to create an opportunity for those who did not wish to participate in debate and discussion (because of language barriers, time issues etc) to be seen equally and become involved by submitting their own and others’ creative projects. The Whispers Project shines light on the hidden talent of frequenters of the Netbehaviour list.
How this is created:
Subscribers to the NetBehaviour list add to the project by placing two links to their own work and one link to someone else’s work.
This project was first posted to the list on 19th May 2004. In a vote on 4th June 2004 NetBehaviourists decided that this networked project should be made available here for public viewing. The most recent addition was made on August 6th 2004. The public face of this networked project is updated on the request of list users. If you feel that it’s time for an update please just copy and paste the list below into the body of the email, add your own info and send to the list.
What type of work? Net artists, new media academics, soft groups, net writers, code geeks, new nedia producers, net/new media curators, net/new media activists, networkers, new media performers, net sufi’s, psychogeographical, net artist blogs, net communities etc…
Name: Jan Robert Leegte
Home: http://www.leegte.org
featured: http://www.leegte.org/works/spatial/xpodium/index.htm
chosen: http://splash.ctrlaltdel.org/zdwe.html
Name: Rich White
work: falling off a chair
work : butterfly effect
choice cut – wires : http://www.ertdfgcvb.ch/p1/wires.html
Name: Ivan Monroy-López
work: G=1=U=2=G=1=U=2 http://www195.pair.com/imonroyl/tiniestblog.html
chosen work: the photostatic retrogade archive http://psrf.detritus.net/index.html
chosen work: the island chronicles http://boingboing.net/island/
Name: Bituur Esztreym & Rico da Halvarez on behalf Elles, Otto von Strassenbach
Work: http://vnatrc.net/ –http://bigfruit.vnatrc.net/ —
http://elsa.vnatrc.net/ –http://bienvenidonumero6.biz/
Chosen work: http://www.periferico.org/
Name: Sofia Oliveira sofiaoliveira@atmosferas.net
Work http://www.atmosferas.net/en
Chosen work(s)- The Secret Lifes of Numbers http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/
Name : Clément Charmet
http://cl3mos.free.fr
fleur: http://cl3mos.free.fr/fleur/eng/
untitled : http://clemos.free.fr ( better with IE )
chosen work : http://www.quasar.org
Name: T Wells
Contratv – http://www.contratv.net
Midiatatica.org – http://www.midiatatica.org
Chosen work – http://delete.tv
Name: Annie Abrahams
http://www.bram.org/info
‘painsong’ http://www.bram.org/pain
Chosen work : http://vnatrc.net/YAST/index_html
Name: Patrick Simons
Home: http://www.gloriousninth.com (Collaboration with Kate’ Southworth)
http://www.gloriousninth.com/flaming.html
http://www.gloriousninth.com/who_owns_them_controls.html
Chosen work: http://www.theyrule.net/theyrule.html (the Dick Cheney’ map)
Name: Ryan Griffis
temporary travel office – http://www.yougenics.net/traveloffice
subRational eRuptions (curator + interface)-http://www.turbulence.org/curators/griffis/index.html
Chosen work – Bureau of Inverse Technology’s Kits http://www.bureauit.org/kit/
Name: Ruth Catlow
rethinking wargames – http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/
domestic idols – http://www.furtherfield.org/rcatlow/domestic_idols/
Chosen work- Views from the ground floor by Jess Loseby: http://www.viewsfromthegroundfloor.com/
*Name: Phil
*Home – *http://www.medialounge.org
*project -* http://www.love-machine.org
*commercial -*http://www.spill.net
Name: Andi Stamp
Directed and produced: http://www.bbc.co.uk/shootinglive
Member of: http://www.theculturecompany.co.uk
A bit of fun: http://www.artrumour.com/
Name: Ana Carvalho
a long time ago – http://virose.pt/alingua/
and work in progress http://www.iana34.com/tale_about_urban_piracy
Chosen work: http://www.subtle.net/tunnel/
Name: lo_y
current Home – http://lo-y.de.vu
my universe – http://google.com/search?q=lo_y
Chosen work:’ Social Fiction – http://socialfiction.org
*Name: Patrick Lichty
*General – * http://www.voyd.com/voyd
*Subversive -* http://www.theyesmen.org
Chosen Work: US Dept of Art and Technology http://www.usdept-arttech.net/
Maf’j Alvarez Homepage: http://www.mafj.co.uk
Stroke: http://www.sciart.org/partners/1998/98_29.html
Chosen Work- Milkkitten by Tanya Meditzky http://www.milkkitten.com
Mark Cooley
Workhttp://www.war-product-war.com
http://art-design.smsu.edu/cooley
Chosen work(s) Stop Shopping Tour my dads strip club http://www.mydadsstripclub.com/tour.htm
*Name: Joseph and Donna
*Mediated – *http://www.electrichands.com
*Conceptual -* http://www.corporatepa.com
*Chosen work:-‘ The POINT CDC – by various’ *http://www.thepoint.org
Name: Tamar Schori
Oodlala – http://www.oodlala.net
Memolog – http://www.memolog.net
Beadgee – http://www.tamar-schori.net/beadgee/beadgee.html
Chosen work:-‘ Memecodes – by Philipp Lenssen’ http://memecodes.outer-court.com/
Name : Chris Webb
Frequency Love – http://www.furtherfield.org/cwebb/frequency_love/
Screen Moments – http://www.furtherfield.org/cwebb/screenmoments/vsmixes
Chosen Work’ Dennis Cucumber – Remixing the web
http://www.denniscucumber.com/default1.htm
Name: Sim Winter
Home – http://www.soy.de
Colored Thoughts – http://www.soy.de/coloredThoughts/index.php3
Chosen work:-WebTV by Jimpunk – http://544×378.free.fr/(WebTV)/FFFFFF.htm
Name: Marc Garrett
Turmoil – http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/turmoil/
Hardware – http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/hardware/index.htm
(View only in Internet Explorer)
Chosen work:- Box Explorer – by Andy Deck
http://www.artcontext.org/list/art/2002/boxplorer.html
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