The Zero Dollar Laptop Project aims to change the way we all think about technology through a program of workshops, public debates, exhibitions, and networks of skills and media sharing for arts, technology and the environment.

View the Zero Dollar Laptop workshop blog for resources and news.

Workshops ran in London from January to April 2010 with clients of St Mungo’s charity for homeless people and we are currently developing workshops with groups of young people.

We are recycling hardware, breaking Windows and installing Free and Open Source Software to build media laptops and create music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet. Participants leave the project with street-smart technical knowledge and a wireless enabled media laptop, classier than any shiny power-book.

The Zero Dollar Laptop is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective- now and long into the future.

The Zero Dollar Laptop project is developed in partnership with Access Space in Sheffield, inspired by the Zero Dollar Laptop Manifesto as part of Furtherfield.org Media Art Ecologies

Artistic Team: Jake Harries and James Wallbank (Access Space) Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Olga Panades (furtherfield.org)

Decode: Digital Design Sensations
The Victoria and Albert museum, London
8 December 2009 – 11 April 2010

Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) brings the state of the art in art computing to a venerable cultural institution. Everything from the posters and banners around town to the hoardings on the entrance to the gallery containing the show makes it clear that Decode is a serious cultural event. It’s a spectacle, a dark space alongside the well-lit galleries of the V&A, drawing you in with points of light and distant sounds. The crowds are reassuring for the popularity of art computing yet disconcerting for the experience of the art at times.

Don’t forget to ask for a catalogue as you hand over your ticket on the way in. The sponsor’s foreword should raise a smile to anyone familiar with the software industry, but the introductory essay (which only occasionally becomes the latest casualty of the confusion that the word “open” shows), the details of works in the show and the interviews with Golan Levin and Daniel Rozin are all very informative. The catalogue also draws attention to Karsten Schmidt’s specially commissioned graphic identity for the show, which can be downloaded and modified as Free Software.

The show is divided into three sections. Generative art, data visualisation, and interactive multimedia (or, as the catalogue puts it – Code, Network and Interactivity).

The generative artworks suffer in comparison to the other pieces by being mostly small-scale screen based pieces. However appealing the images are on the screen (and they are) they cannot compete with the projections and three dimensional installations of the other sections. With the exception of an interactive version of the video to Radiohead’s House of Cards by James Frost and Aaron Koblin, the work does not refer to the human figure or to the viewer, another feature of many of the most popular pieces in the other sections. And apart from Matt Pyke’s typographic totem pole, my other favourite piece of the section, the work is calm. Beautiful, but calm. It would reward prolonged contemplation in a quieter environment and might benefit from presentation on a larger scale to better bring out its aesthetic qualities. But this is not that environment, and that presentation is not given to the work here.

The data visualisation section has more projections and custom hardware, and also has more human interest. The emotion of We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, the surveillance state expose of Stanza’s Sensity, CCTV assemblages, Make-Out, the porn-inspired kissing figures of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the social data visualizations of Social Collider by Sascha Pohflepp & Karsten Schmidt are sometimes less visually sophisticated than some of the generative pieces, but address current social and technological developments more directly. The world wide web is twenty years old, it has drawn in the mass media and media feeds from the real world, and many of its users produce and encounter gigabytes of data over time. Representing and exploring that technological and cultural environment is something that art can do and that art is particulalry well placed to do given the importance of the aesthetics of interfacing and visualisation to the contemporary web.

The interactive multimedia section contained the real crowd pleasers of the show, although some of the pieces had “out of order” notices on them when I visited. Yoke’s virtual reality Dandelion Clock controlled by a hairdryer, Ross Phillips’s Videogrid, a physically interactive group portrait and Daniel Rozin’s Weave Mirror, a cybernetic sculpture-cum-display-screen. They all give their audience an aesthetic experience that briefly changes their relationship to the world, and in some cases shows them themselves in that new relationship. Interactive multimedia installation is clearly due a resurgence.

The V&A have presented Decode as a design show. I was struck by this framing of the work when I visited the show, and most of the people I have spoken to about the show since have commented on it as well. Many of the participants are graphic designers or work in design as well as art and education, but much of the work would be poorly served by being regarded as design rather than as art. It is not advertising, or presentation of anything other than itself for the most part. Where the work is information design, the information has been chosen by the designer. That said the art computing MA I attended as a student had to be called a “design” course to get funding, so possibly this is a constant. And the V&A have done a great job of presenting the work and letting it speak for itself to the visiting crowds.

This isn’t quite Cybernetic Serendipity 2.0. It excludes the conceptually and performatively, rougher edges of contemporary art computing. But these exclusions are largely practical; there is no livecoding and there are no email or self-contained web browser-based works. Some of the work is strikingly but subtly political in its representation of current social and political trends such as surveillance, online pornography and the death of privacy.

The V&A have done the conventional artworld and the general public a great service by presenting Decode. The show contains enough big and up-and-coming names in art computing and digital design to provide a convincing if necessarily incomplete survey of the contemporary scene. Decode also serves an important role for artists and students with an interest in or a stake in art computing by focussing attention on what others have achieved that can be built on.

Decode shows the achievements of the personal computing and web eras of art computing becoming established with and recognized by the broader arts establishment. The danger is that the story will finish triumphally here. Processing has become the new Shockwave, and particle systems and shape grammars are not enough in themselves for long without an accompanying progressive and deeper deeper engagement with the aesthetics and history of art, technology, wider society, or all three. Art computing is not immune to technical and aethetic conservatism. To avoid this I think that it needs to intensify, to become more like itself; to become more beautiful, to tackle larger datasets, to become more interactive. In other words, it needs to build on the achievements gathered together and presented here.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/future_exhibs/Decode/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Image: SMartCAMP logo, all images courtesy of SMartCAMP

Part of New York’s Art Week, SMartCAMP, or social media art camp, took place on March 5th and 6th, at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, a slightly unusual kind of place in that it’s a hotel with its own production company. That company’s artistic director, Matt Semler, who is also the director of The LAB Gallery, became interested in the ways Roger Smith marketers Adam Wallace and Brian Simpson were using platforms like Facebook and Twitter to build an online community. According to Semler, his curiosity “ultimately led to more questions than answers and we found ourselves wanting to bring the leaders in the social media (SM) art world together to talk about their process, goals and best practices. Once we came up with the name SMartCAMP we were pretty much off and running.” Conference organizer Julia Kaganskiy of New York’s Arts, Culture, and Technology Meet Up curated SMartCAMP’s program and a former actor, Danika Druttman, handled communications for the event.

In other words, from the beginning SMartCAMP was about people, people who post, blog, tag, add, and tweet, but above all, people who meet and link up through quirky, often unpredictable, circumstances to pursue a shared idea. According to the speakers in SMartCAMP’s program, this is the kind of easy serendipity that gives social networks their authenticity and value. While these qualities can’t quite be summoned, they can be encouraged and directed. For artists and administrators, the question is how to sustain these connections to build audience and patron loyalty. Whether you like the idea of artists taking on their own distribution, or whether you find it somehow uncomfortable, social media is influential and growing. As more than one person pointed out, social networking has surpassed pornography as the number one activity on the web.

Mark Schiller’s keynote opened the Saturday session. Well-known in the New York arts community, Schiller is the founder of The Wooster Collective, a public arts site that documents street art from around the world. Like many successful online projects, Wooster Collective began accidentally. Out walking his dog in his downtown neighborhood, Schiller began photographing street art, which he then posted online, forwarding the link to friends, and asking for their reactions. Soon his web page was managing hundreds of photos, receiving thousands of hits per day, and turning artists into online celebrities. Two Wooster Collective discoveries that have gone viral are Josh Harris, famous for his subway grate inflatable dog, and Jan Vorman, an artist who uses Lego bricks to patch crumbling city walls. Today, after eight years of posts, The Wooster Collective is the online authority on street art. Schiller receives a self-sustaining five hundred emails a day from artists who have done work, or have seen work, and would like to contribute. Wooster Collective also has a YouTube channel and a Twitter feed.

In many ways Wooster’s success seems unpredictable and non-reproducible, a fad, some kind of dumb luck. Yet, in retrospect, Schiller is able to point out specific qualities that made the site popular. First, there was page rank. Since no one was writing about street art in any other media, Wooster Collective’s art tags quickly went to the top of the search engine indexes. This kind of self-reinforcing rank allowed Schiller’s blog to get more traffic and, consequently, to pull more traffic from user searches. Second, ninety percent of the content on The Wooster Collective was original, making Schiller’s blog a feeder for other arts pages, increasing its incoming links and, again, boosting its reputation and its rank. Third, there are no ads at all on the Wooster site per se, mostly, Schiller says, because ads would be distracting both for him and his followers. Free from ads, Wooster Collective has no traffic stats to maintain, meaning Schiller is free to indulge himself in what his readers like best, Wooster’s own weird personality. On most days the site wavers slightly between media outlet and community bulletin board.

However, as important as his community may be, Schiller explained that Wooster readers are actually heavily restricted. The community is largely passive. Readers can email, but they can’t comment, upload, or see who else is online. Although some of site is user generated content, sites built on user content are notoriously second-hand and boring, so reader contributions are very heavily curated. The result is a blog that remains personal and interesting to all. Schiller also says audience building on the Wooster site has always been secondary to his main mission of sharing a passion for street art. According to Schiller, that passion is what works online and the effort to express it means a willingness to try anything. After all, Schiller reasons, “if you don’t like it, you can always stop. If a projects takes more than ten minutes to finish, stop. If it’s not fun, stop. If it’s not inspiring, stop.” Finding podcasts “not fun”, The Wooster Collective recently quit making them. They quit making mobile apps too. Schiller suspects that it is the resulting cheerfulness, lack of strain, exuberance, or even silliness, that connects an audience to a blog, a pursuit, or to an artist.

For Etsy, an online site where artists sell their work directly, community came first, web presence second. Anda Corrie, manager of Etsy’s Twitter feed, explains that Etsy was started at a time when the DIY arts culture was strong and growing, but artists still had few outlets for what they made. Etsy was one of the first sites to give them that outlet and, for a small commission, the site benefited greatly from its fortunate timing. Still, there is a balance between artist and audience that sustains Etsy and makes it work. In addition to responding to community needs, Corrie notes that the governance of sites like Etsy should be as transparent as possible. She reminds media managers rushing to reach out to remember to build a way for their readers and followers to reach in. Etsy uses a community council model. Councils change monthly, giving suggestions for improvements to the site and its forums. This is a time consuming model to attempt but, like Schiller, Corrie feels media planners who go through the motions without really getting involved are unlikely to succeed.

Michelle Shildkret, who represented Cake Group would say that you can’t fake what you are online, just as you can’t hire someone to “make you go viral”. She advises artists to slow down, figure out who to reach out to, where they are online, what they do when they’re online, and how someone might get their attention. When you can answer those questions, you’re ready to approach a social media plan. Shildkret also believes that a small, engaged community may be better than thousands and thousands of disinterested friends. Choose to introduce yourself and your work to places you like, make a difference there first, then advance slowly. John Birdsong of Panman Productions says artists often need to open up in exchange for popular attention. Birdsong endorses the strategy of a behind the scenes look at a studio or art process by posting “making of” videos to UStream or YouTube. These sentiments were echoed by others. Natasha Wescoat, a writer for EBSQ, the self-represented artist’s blog, became obsessed with eBay auctions as a community college student. Wescoat noticed that what honestly attracted her to an artist’s online profile was not necessarily the work. As an audience member, she also wanted personality, a connection, and some sense that there was a real person behind the presentation. Where Schiller describes a community that grows out of a shared passion, Wescoat sees community as a group centered on personality. Like Schiller, she encourages artists to try all ideas, continue with what feels right, and allow a web identity to evolve over time. For example, Wescoat describes her own online identity as an arc with three phases: experimentation, where she tried different approaches to making and selling work; narcissism, where she spent a good deal of time showing how the work was made; and establishment, where the size of her online audience is large enough to attract commissions from corporations and collectors.

Sharpie sketch queen and self-described “art school drop out” Molly Crabapple credits her web personality as fundamental to a full-time practice that draws commissions from the New York Times and Marvel Comics. Founder of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, Crabapple introduced her online persona by compulsively posting to LiveJournal. Today, her favorite platform is Twitter and her media tool of choice is the one hundred and forty character tweet. Crabapple likes Twitter’s immediacy and tweets to get illustration suggestions from her followers, to find emergency crash spaces, and to “manifest” anything. She advises underrepresented artists to do whatever it takes to build a following online: friend friends of friends, promise to perform humiliating stunts for your followers, tweet about everything you do, reward your one hundredth or one thousandth follower with some kind of gift, a sketch or drawing, for instance. When the earthquake struck Haiti, Crabapple tweeted for drawing suggestions, drew those suggestions live online, then auctioned those drawings off in a benefit for Doctors without Borders. Yancey Strickler who co-founded the microfunding platform Kickstarter goes a step further. Kickstarter allows artists to post projects online and request small funding pledges from their followers. These pledges remain virtual until the project pledges reach full funding. At that point, sponsors pay up, the project is funded, and Kickstarter receives five percent of the amount raised. But pledge money is not always a reflection of your project pitch, Strickler points out, saying that what succeeds online is a good narrative and a connection with the audience that feels authentic. According to Strickler, people on Kickstarter are only somewhat concerned with the quality or originality of the work in front of them. More often, their decision to contribute to an artist’s goal proceeds along the lines of questions like “Do I like this person?” or “Could I be friends with this person?”.

If all this sounds a bit disingenuous or self-serving, remember that social media connects artists and audiences directly and that this connection now has its own considerations. There are some dangers in its manipulation, but the benefits need to be recognized. Adam Smith of Dance Theater Workshop’s and the New York branch of the Neo-Futurists uses blogging and community choreography as forms of outreach. While there are no hard numbers for increases in audience through the blog, DTW’s paid audience has gone from sixty to eighty percent of the house. Working on getting the tools right isn’t necessarily a negative and will probably take some work. Dancer Lisa Niedermeyer says: “You can’t just be clever, you have to be smart, and that none of this has been around long enough for any of us to be wise (yet). That any one experiment can be clever, and with speed and easy access can go live, but it takes being smart for it to be sustainable.”

Niedermeyer works on Virtual Pillow, the tech initiative of Jacob’s Pillow Dance. In some ways Niedermeyer considers the company’s online presence a fourth stage: “A global, interactive space serving a virtual community that might not ever be able to physically visit us in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, but highly value our archives, performances, professional school, creative development residency programs, etc.”

A second part of Virtual Pillow’s mission is to bring the work of the company, including its history, to a wider audience via social media, streaming sites, or any other online platform. Niedermeyer attended SMartCAMP for the chance to hear other institutions and artists discuss what worked and what did not. She says the conference gave her more perspective on the strategies available to Virtual Pillow: “I felt that the conference speakers and participants were really talking about the big picture, big ideas. Gravity Rail, for example, with their passion to explode open and transform eCommerce models for artists.”

Performers are not alone in the need to link up. According to Nancy Proctor, the museum is a distributed network whether curators accept that idea or not, and agile use of social media is essential to responsive curation. Proctor heads New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a museum which now gets more visitors online than in person. Are those online visitors any less real? Should their visit be any less satisfying? Should their use of the museum be any less respected? Noting that desktop activities are increasingly moving to the mobile web, Proctor urges curators to meet visitors where they are through sms, tweets, and mobile applications.

Examples of another kind of user centered curation came from Titus Bicknell, founder of pinkink, who believes audiences and their questions now lie at the center of any program strategy. Bicknell’s examples of user centered curation included a podcast that asks visitors to enter a space, look at the art, and record any questions they might have. In this curation model, socially aware programmers ask audiences what they would like to know, rather than telling audiences what it is believed they should know. Allegra Burnette, Creative Director of Digital Media at MoMA, pointed out excellence in web presence like the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s fine arts blog ArtBabble, but added that MoMA uses Twitter feeds specifically to talk about current exhibitions at home and elsewhere. MOMA also offers podcasts on iTunesU where, Burnette says, downloads have increased about ten times this year. More and more, curation extends beyond the exhibit to the conversation about that exhibition, a conversation that defines your institution on the social web through bookmarking, favoriting, collecting, sharing, recommending, and searching. Like the Wooster Collective’s Schiller, Burnett advises media managers to avoid blatant marketing and to discuss events of interest to readers whether those events are part of a home exhibition or are occurring elsewhere.

Even in competition with Arts Week, SMartCAMP sold out. In addition to a long list of good speakers, there was a great deal of conversation and connection going on across the seats, in the halls, throughout the lobby and meeting rooms, and at the bar. Absolutely no one was asked to turn off a cell phone. Executive producer Matt Semler says: “We trended on Twitter both days and ended up with 120,000 individual views on UStream. The audience was very nicely mixed. While we don’t have any specific data on demographics my impression was that the room was evenly split between art executives and artists.”

In April, Semler and Roger Smith Arts will present a cello performance by Peter Gregson from within a Morgan O’Hara installation inside The LAB gallery space in New York. As Gregson plays, O’Hara will perform one of her “Live Transmissions” of Peter’s performance. The event will be streamed live over UStream and, as with all LAB performances, will be viewable from the street as well.

Featured image: F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab) were found causing trouble at the Transmediale.10 this year.

A collaborative review/interview by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati

An interesting outsider project at Transmediale.10 this year, was F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab). A collective of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, musicians and trouble-makers who have been working together for two years, on the intersections of Pop culture and Open source. Their stapline describes them as “An organization who is dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media”. Beware, they love using the word ‘Fuck’. A lot! Which means they are cool, and some you grown ups may feel slightly unnerved by their over generous outpouring of flippant explitives, but the kids out there just love it!

You can read an explanation of their work in the about section on their website, and view a video presenting some of their ideas and works. With a simple rap base with nasty yellow and pink colors, it could be considered as a joke. Perhaps, to some degree it is, but at another level they are playing around with social contexts of the Internet culture’s, presumptions and acceptance of things. Through an omnipresent ludic approach they reuse what is given to us all with a contemporary pop attitude – showing us the many contradictions from these given systems. Proposing other possibilities in order to loosen and to free things up from the copyright laws and prescribed rules of both big companies and clumsy governments.

One of their projects called Public Domain Donor, consists of D.I.Y stickers saying “In the event of death please donate all intellectual property to the public domain”. They write “Why let all of your ideas die with you? Current Copyright law prevents anyone from building upon your creativity for 70 years after your death. Live on in collaboration with others. Make an intellectual property donation. By donating your IP into the public domain you will “promote the progress of science and useful arts” (U.S. Constitution). Ensure that your creativity will live on after you are gone, make a donation today.”Simple and humurous.

Yet, behind their process of cultural detournment exists a reference to earlier net art critique, by Critical Art Ensemble who way back in 1995 said “Each one of us has files that rest at the state’s fingertips. Education files, medical files, employment files, financial files, communication files, travel files, and for some, criminal files. Each strand in the trajectory of each person’s life is recorded and maintained. The total collection of records on an individual is his or her data body -a state-and-corporate-controlled doppelganger. What is most unfortunate about this development is that the data body not only claims to have ontological privilege, but actually has it. What your data body says about you is more real than what you say about yourself. The data body is the body by which you are judged in society, and the body which dictates your status in the world. What we are witnessing at this point in time is the triumph of representation over being. The electronic file has conquered self-aware consciousness.” The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net. Critical Art Ensemble Summer, 95

Also as stimulating, is the idea Graffiti Markup Language, an XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags, and easily reproducing them.

Their style is easy, effective and of course – Pop!!!

For Transmediale.10 they presented a project called Fuck google, one of their more involved works, appropriating the image of Haus der Kultur der Welt, the futuristic bulding hosting Transmediale, formerly known as the Kongresshalle conference hall, a gift from the United States, designed in 1957 by the American architect Hugh Stubbins Jr. as a part of the Interbau exhibition. John F. Kennedy spoke there during his June 1963 visit to West Berlin. Fuckgoogle focuses on reminding us all how this big company has become omnipresent in our digital lives, refering to the risk that too much data is owned and is going to be owned more and more, just by Google alone. It exists as a collection of browser add-ons, open source software, theoretical musings and direct actions.

Not necessarily trying to be a definitive solution against the big G in any sense of the word, but more a reminder, a provocative virus to diffuse. So we have a graffiti firefox skin, fuck google pins, The F.A.T Pad or some plugins to reclaim your public individual space on your browser. Everything is D.I.Y and opensource, so you can easily replicate it. The approach can be find with FuckFlickr a free image gallery script offering everyone who visits a Flicker-like image gallery.

The F.A.T. Lab is an example of technological sabotage. Of course, it’s not a new thing in respect of the hacker community: using the instrument, medium directly, in order to change perceived assumptions of our reality. What is quite new is F.A.T. Lab’s blatant exploitation of everyday Pop culture and its language. The hacker counterculture has always had it’s own way of communication, built in the late 80’s and 90’s. These days, more and more people use the computer, not just hackers. Using Pop culture in order to communicate one’s message could be one possible way to escape the duality culture/counterculture. On the other hand, F.A.T. Lab could be creating a fresh paradigm which allows others who would not normally appreciate hacker culture or even media art culture, filling a space beyond art culture which could be considered as too refined.

Interview with Evan Roth from F.A.T. Lab at Transmediale.10

Marcello & Gaia: Can you describe who you are and how do you connect each other?

Evan Roth from F.A.T. Lab: We are a group of friends. There’s not any formal application process or open call, many come from typical art organizations. It started out as a group of friends and then slowly, more friends joined. We also made more friends, collaborators on line. Here at Transmediale.10, it’s actually our first chance to meet face to face and some of us have not met before. There are two things that mainly characterize us. On one side, there is the open source culture and advertisement free culture, but also the idea that this all should be fun. Art and political activism doesn’t have to be a boring, the interface of it all, can be accessible to more people. We try to push this candy coding, get the those audiences who are using youtube videos, that is our primary audience. We like it when art organizations pay attention to us but really our main audience is at the borders of things, using different networks, commercial networks out there, happening outside of the gallery.

M&G: If we look at the projects you are showing here there is a kind of aesthetic in common, the colours are really interesting, the pink and the yellow remind us early 90’s spam. Is that aesthetic a primary decision, is the style you choose to define you, or has it just happened in the progress of your work.

E: I answer that in two. There is a thing from open source development culture that is ‘release early and release often’, we try to apply this model to the media production. We try to release ‘early and often’. If you are on the fence where you should release something or not and it is not quite ready, just push out the door, because it is better to have it in the public counter system than not. So the aesthetic of the website is in part probably pushing out the door rather taking care of the nuances or the color it is. We just try to get this thing published quickly. Someone could be sitting on their brilliant idea and waiting for years to release, waiting for some details and then you find that no one really cares about this in the end. But there is also an aesthetic interest in common, that comes from this ‘dirty style’. There is an artist friend, Cory Arcangel who is one of my favorites, and he describes the dirty style as ‘either you take little interest in design so it becomes so un-aesthetic or you over-work it to a point that the work itself becomes something too trivial’. We don’t have meetings about how the website is going or what it looks like.

M&G: Don’t you think that this “dirty style” is somehow hiding the real content or the message? The use of ‘dirty style’ is obviously an answer of the hyper sensibilization, concern of the form but at the same time this makes your work splitting in between the no-attention of form and pushes content in the corner.

E: The way our websites look matter’s less and less now, because people don’t go to websites for content anymore. Most of the traffic in the websites do not even see the pink and the yellow, design. There is some kind of form/function relationship going on. We are interested in rolling up this web 2.0 idea a little bit, and that’s what this installation here is about at Transmediale. The early 90’s aesthetic was with people hand coding html and making tables, not downloading a WordPress thing. In that sense, there is a sort of connection to the DIY, rolling back to the way of 1.0 – where the files are hosted in your own server and not google or yahoo.

M&G: Isn’t it more interesting to try and critique in a more constructive way, creating something else, not just another google appropriation but other kind of net platform for a community? Could that be one of the important challenges for artists now?

E: Open source is a big movement and free culture is even bigger and so we know that there are people out there hacking in this way right now, but we are not programmers, there are programmers taking part but these are not our skills. Our place in this movement is in the media side. We do have programmers in our group but we feel more like media makers. We make these videos and they are kind of funny and taking something from the pop/culture, twisting them, possibly people have a look and pass them around. But there are messages in them. And the messages are trying to reveal the money and the branding business that google is making and saying it is not cool, and being involved in an alternative open source culture looks better. We also have a development tool like fuck flicker and flv player where you can have your own videos up like you tube.

M&G: Why are you are supposed to win this year’s Transmediale? You stood up on the stage during the award claiming the award for yourselves!

E: Oh no, we don’t think we are supposed to win. Do you know Kanye West? This is a USA story, we joked about Kanye a little bit. We’re always trying to pay attention to what is going on in pop culture and surf a little bit. Kanye was notorious for interrupting a ceremony whenever he lost, grabbing the mic. As we were for this fuck google project – last night, the winner was a youtube related project, and google is a sponsor. The message we tried to get across last night, was a reference to this, and we are gonna have an official press release on it soon. But I think that for Transmediale, our project was an anomolie, showing this fuckgoogle in contrast to accepting web 2.0, which is actually a range of projects. We were surprised to be invited, who know’s what for? But we think that it was a very wise decision, and we are really happy to be here.

On their website you can get a clear impression of their feelings towards Google “So, what is so “fuck-worthy” about Mother-google? It is the fact that a corporate entity, even one as beloved and competent as Google, is in control of such a large stake in the digital network and public utility upon which we have all grown so reliant. And, that as a publicly traded company, it doesn’t have to answer to anyone but its largest shareholders, despite the fact that its decisions effect the lives and private information of millions of people. Few even question or raise a voice in opposition to the Google-ification of the Internet.”

There were more than 1,500 submissions for the Transmediale.10 awards, nine art projects were nominated and F.A.T. Lab was a runner up amongst them. Showing contemporary, activist art within a larger more incorporated festival is to be commended, it is not an easy thing to do. And we all know how easy it is to criticize rather than make something ‘real’ and positive happen. F.A.T. Lab are a tangible byproduct of a culture, caught in the trappiings of Hyperreal situations, a confused world losing itself even further into a perpetual state of denial. Pop culture and celebrity related banalities are constantly distracting our gaze. It is an interface which can only handle life via mediated proxy. F.A.T. Lab know’s this, and have adapted themselves to literally scrap with it on their own terms. Their role and place in the world is to get out there on the front line and go places where the common people reside. They want to be on the main stage battling it out, whilst challenging the interface presented to us all – making it their playground.

You can also read Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati’s article about this year’s Transmediale.10 here…

Curated by Carolyn Kane for Rhizome September, 2009.

#60605 plus #20101 does not equal black, but it looks like it to me. And despite Newton’s insistence, a rainbow is never made from seven colours in neat lines, nor can I see millions of colours on my calibrated monitor. It is more likely that each day I engage with the screen as a greenish-blue glow infused with hits of magenta. Or as it is today: a summer grey of sea fog glimpsed through the rain. Is that a colour? Carolyn Kane curated HTML Color Codes in order to ask these questions of the relationship between colour, code, and subjectivity. Tracing a carefully structured path through twelve artworks Kane seeks to examine whether artists working with the Internet are limited to a ‘ready-made’ colour palette. Asking if digital colours reflect the programming languages that have been adopted, Kane considers whether the Internet adds its own rules for colour through the adoption of the hexadecimal system of colour values. Does the language determine the content?

The answer is, not quite. It all depends on where and how the viewer approaches the screen. Rather than trying to be paintings these works engage with the materiality of digital colour and the manipulation of a different kind of flat predetermined surface – the screen. Chris Ashley gives us rectangles within rectangles, Dlsan manipulates circles within circles, and Michael Atavar offers the blue screen of an empty window with text written as if in the condensation of a cold morning. It is the noise of the digital image embraced by the inadequacy of a gif representation of a treasure heap of digital gold in Jacob Broms Engblom’s “Gold”, or the absence of any controlling frame in Owen Plotkin’s “Firelight” and the flickering spaces nested within and alongside one another in Rafael Rozendaal’s “RGB” that suggest different rules for the digital image. In these latter works the illusion of immediacy raises a spectre of some kind of phenomenological directness.

Twentieth century colour field painting was never a single set of experiments yet it carried within it a set of cultural and formal presuppositions. The digital colour field has its own baggage set. It is inbetween: inbetween code and software, browser and window, network and bandwith. More often than not the experience of the digital colour field is the result of an image within an image or a screen within a screen. Despite its origins in hexadecimal notation digital colour is not a ready-made, but an experience and a process of light and interaction. Anyone who has attempted to capture or translate a colour between screens knows that accidents occur. Noah Venezia’s “The Rainbow Website” suggests that a kind of synaesthesia can be experienced through the screen, that colour exceeds the values assigned to it. Andrew Venell’s “Color Field Television” mimics the flicker of experimental film from the 1970s. Perception becomes a process of seeing the colours inbetween, the work turns back on itself mirrored within a screen. Structural film experiments were about exploring more than perception they too turned back to the medium. Morgan Rush Jones gets even closer with the phased colour space of “Number of ManufacturingIndustriesbyNumberof Product ClassesinanIndustry”. The work is simultaneously overloaded with image and abstracted from it. There is a strange congruence reflected here: in their formality these works do not push new experimental boundaries but reflect older ones.

Michael Demers explicitly engages the materiality of the digital medium by establishing a series of systems within which abstraction can occur. Sampling Morris Louis’s oil painting “Where” from 1960, Demers generates a sequence of flat colour planes (windows) from left to right that disappear as quickly as they appear. The drip and movement of Louis’s work is rendered temporal. Brian Piana’s “Elsworth Kelly Hacked my Twitter” also addresses the temporality of the digital. Real-time data orders the compositional frame in a direct chronological sequence. Each square is a representation of an invisible network. Manipulation of the scale, size and shape of the frame is left to the viewer. For me it is Elna Frederick’s “@ = landscape” that allows an interactive experience of the subjective dimension of colour that is specific to the digital. The click of a mouse becomes the experience of putting a finger into a stream of water and disturbing the flow. It is not necessarily the colour that makes the rain but the movement and the belief instilled in us from Super Mario that onscreen fluffy white blobs potentially contain rain. There is a cool sensuousness to the trickle of pixels as it becomes water and when left alone returns to simply being yet another onscreen blue.

There is a risk of over determination in this show, the kind of visual parity that results from too many works looking at the same thing and becoming somewhat redundant. It is the quiet spaces between the works, the mutable changing structures of the blue screen that resist this limitation. As long as bandwidth remains with us, and the links stay live, these works are infinite and through their repetition we experience an abyss of generated colour and code. These are predominately forms consisting of colour alone, and surprisingly, that is enough. This is how the medium of digital colour should be approached. There is no translucency, but there is an unlimited interplay of substitutions.

Featured image: An interview with Chris Dooks, a ‘Polymath’ exploring various creative avenues, making his art using different media.

One of the many interesting and rewarding elements of being deeply involved in what, I’ll loosely term as ‘media arts’ practice, is the breadth of imaginative people you meet along the way. We first met Chris Dooks in 2005-6, when he worked with us on a project by Furtherfield called 5+5=5. We commissioned 5 short movies about 5 UK-based networked art projects exploring critical approaches to social engagement. These pieces offered alternative interfaces to the artworks and the every-day artistic practices of their producers. Including the motivations and social contexts of artists and artists’ groups working with DIY approaches to digital technology and its culture, where medium and distribution channels merge. Chris produced a film-work for the project called Polyfaith. A Psycho-Geographical Web Project introducing the beliefs and philosophies of his (invented) friend Erica Tetralix.

“My friend Erica Tetralix died. She gave me the task of fulfilling her dream which was that people would enjoy the parts of Edinburgh that were so dear to her in her life. She also loved tourists and sympathised with people on a budget, so she devised, with my posthumous help, this free way to enjoy the city. It’s a beautiful gift for both transients and residents. It’s popular with backpackers, parents and children, cultural groups and well, basically anyone.”

Later on we discovered that the name Erica Tetralix, is actually a name of a plant. Often called a cross-leaved heath, a species of heather found in Atlantic areas of Europe, from southern Portugal to central Norway, as well as a number of boggy regions further from the coast in Central Europe.

To view Polyfaith visit link below:
http://furtherfield.org/5+5=5/polyfaith.mov

The value of an interview is that it can serve as a useful documentation, a process allowing a kind of unfolding of time, All layed out in front of you. The reader can experience not necessarily a retrospective, but a dynamic and creative life and a personal history openly shared, on their own terms.

This interview reveals various levels and approaches by Chris Dooks. An inquistive and playful mind is at work here, engaged in exploring across different forms of personal agency, as well as redefining his practice in relation to the world he exists in, and the people he comes across in connection to various projects. His art is not a singular activity. Meaning, he does not rest in one particular art genre or movement. Instead, we are asked to acknowledge a personal enquiry formed from different engagements and choice of mediums, which happen to meet his creative intentions and questions at the time. We are all relational beings and Chris Dooks is a clear example of how this can work in an artistic context.

The Interview:

Marc Garrett: Many out there will already know you as a professional film maker, directing arts-based TV documentaries such as The South Bank Show in your twenties. Since then, you have developed other skills involving design, composing and making music, audio visual installations, explorative psychogeographical projects, as well as continuing making films, and you’ve even got a record deal. You have as far as I can gather four different music projects curently on the go, your electronica group BovineLife, an architecture music project known as As Ruby’s Comet, Feible for laptronica and also the Audiostreet project featured at The Leith Festival.

Chris Dooks: It’s amazing how many people still know me from Bovine Life which was a moniker I used for an internet audio project way before broadband in 1999. It’s the tenth anniversary of my bip-hop album SOCIAL ELECTRICS and I would like to make all my albums available for free for furtherfield readers. Don’t let itunes rob me of any money! The transition to musician was down in part to the South Bank Show when working with Scanner. I was really frustrated at making work about musicians. And the technology was making it easier for folks like me without a classical training. Here are three for you for free – check links below for free tunes at the bottom of the interview.

South Bank Show UK television documentary directed by Chris Dooks, featuring Robin Rimbaud speaking about his practice and ideas. 1997. Click here to watch video.

MG: In The Glasgow Herald, in Scotland a journalist called you a Polymath. Even though you were delighted to receive such a compliment in the local press, you decided to re-edit the term, reclaim it so to make it less seemingly mathmatical. Prefering Polymash because it sounds “friendlier, resourceful and potentially charming.” Sticking with this notion of you being a Polymath or rather a Polymash. Your diverse approach in creating art works in a non-singular approach, is a core element of your practice. I was wondering whether this is a deliberate decision or a natural and overall state of being?

CD: It’s weird though, I learned more in my background as a wedding videographer aged 14-19 (35 weddings at weekends!!!) than on any other course. Doing weddings gives you various skills as a digital artist. Fuck a film degree! As a wedding videographer, you need to be able to mike the vows in difficult audio environments (i.e. reverby spaces), film it about fifty feet away, liaise with highly emotional temperaments, be like a war photographer – it’s only gonna happen once, miss it at your peril – and stay sober. Not to mention edit it at a time when non-linear editing was non-existent, (I remember the heady days of “crash editing” between two panasonic VHS machines) white balancing everything on manual heavy equipment and creating all the graphic design and labelling of tapes. I was like a teenage record label!

So in 2009 when I made www.studio1824.com – making a record (netlabel) for an icehouse in Sutherland (remote Scottish Highlands) I got a kind of deja vu experience. Only with an education and life experience in the mix now.

When I was 8 years old, I had two epiphanies. One was that death is really gonna happen, and two, that cinema is wonderful, emotional and that it offers us a naive form of immortality. Cinema was the only artform that even at that age, I felt could make me feel…spiritual, for want of a better term. I became quite religious.

I was obsessed with super 8 cameras and video. And now I am trying to get all my pre-teen works tracked down! But even at this stage there was always a healthy distraction in other areas. I wouldn’t get involved with narrative and this has never been my strong point, even though I was reasonably good with words. My uncle played a lot of classical music and my dad took me all over the UK in his lorry, and at this time I won a scholarship to play the cello at school with the posh kids, being the other three. (It was a working class music “initiative”) But alas, I didn’t realise how lucky this was for me. So I went back to making videos, this “poly” approach was probably set quite early. I remember doing a kind of pre-Blair Witch thing when I was 14 and I would get sidetracked into filming the shapes of the leaves and the sound of the wind. Then I realised that the material didn’t make sense in the conventional sense. So I became an aesthete of kinds at an early age. And in every way, from Granny’s trifles and an early lust for Kate Bush, I was concerned with the sensual world. But until 22 I was monogamous to film projects and would work as a corporate director in the art school holidays to fund my college life, with the odd wedding video thrown in. By the time I did my film degree at Edinburgh College of Art, I was much more interested in people like video artists Bill Viola, Gary Hill and Daniel Reeves – (I met all three) via the “team-building” world of film shoots. Bill Viola’s THE PASSING changed my life.

The Passing, 1991. In memory of Wynne Lee Viola. Videotape, black-and-white, mono sound; 54 minutes.

Pre-degree, in those days (1989-91) you had to REALLY know your kit and be a good all rounder. I trained on huge Umatic machines and did a BTEC before a degree. I was from a part of a culture where there was no film degree, and I was a couple of years behind my peers. But by the time I hit ECA, I could mix radio programmes, edit timecode, black and white balance studio cameras and location kit and I spent most of the time buggering off to the hills to film Scottish waterfalls. I might have been techinically proficient and this was behind the poly approach to an extent, but I had bugger all conceptual skills. These have only really solidified in my thirties…

MG: Lets talk about the Surreal Steyning psychogeographic audio tour, part of the The Steyning Festival in 2009. On the web page for the project is written “This tour is simply a different way to skin the proverbial cat. In this case, the cat is Steyning. In fact, if you think of Steyning as a cat, you are already a psychogeographer. Well done. You’ve engaged your psyche with geography. You’ve mapped the town conceptually. The High Street becomes the cat’s spine with the head chasing Mouse Lane. Now you are in the same company as such artist groups as the Situationists, the Dadaist Movement and other high fallutin ripples in art tourism, and even The Ramblers.” Did those who took part manage to understand and appreciate where you were coming from? Also, how did it work?

CD: There was a tiny degree of spin with the site’s headline Traditional English Town Embraces Conceptual Art Walk but by and large folk did embrace it and it would have been patronising not to drop a little sand in the vaseline, not to deliberately challenge, because the Steyning Festival, was, I felt, in danger of being a little like a tasteful village fete. A good fete I might point out, so this year, there was something brave about them putting a conceptual artist at the heart of a residency in the village. English villages like Steyning were not and are not, all tasteful. Whenever I encounter these tasteful expectations in the arts, I think of that Stereolab song, Motoroller Scalatron with it’s chorus “What’s society built on? It’s built on blood. (some say the lyric is “bluff” not blood but either way it works)” So I saw my role not as a socialist historian, because I wouldn’t have a clue, but as someone who encourages an enquiry per se into unusual histories, paganism, aesthetics and philosophies of very local travel. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything angry or unloving in the tours. In fact, I try to make them about folk being nicer to each other. These activities have a small socialist agenda but as a performer, I am not exactly Stelarc, slashing my wrists in the street. I’m not about shock! However, this tour had a couple of “jaw droppers” (See The Steyning Star on the tour). The main outrages came from people who wanted a straight history tour and were not given one, depsite my first words on the tour saying “this is NOT a history tour!”

Example taken from section 4 of the The Steyning Star on the tour:

“This is Brotherhood Hall, built in the fifteenth century and now part of Steyning Grammar School. Look closely at the symbols which adorn the gables. They may look like simple decoration to us, but these markings are rather unusual. They have been the subject of no fewer than three PhDs, and for a century the world’s leading symbologists have engaged in hot debate over how to read the meaning of them. One of the most important questions is what shape we are dealing with. While some people see predominantly circles, others see squares and diamonds, rather like those tiles that everyone had in their bathrooms in the 1970s.”

“Was this a pop premonition? For some time it seemed so, and this remains a strong theory. But in the mid 90s the school took part in a German exchange programme, and visiting German students proposed yet another alternative. When they looked at the patterns on the gables they saw a cross drawn within the circles, or a gammadia, to be more precise. A gammadia is a cross voided through, or a cross formed with four of the Greek letter Gamma. It looks a bit like an ‘L’ to us. The swastika is the most famous example of a gammadion. The German students believed that this was not a pop premonition at all, but a foretelling of the success of German heavy metal band Gamma Ray. This theory also gained popularity among members of the school’s very active astronomy club.”

The festival had hired a PR person to market aspects of the festival and commission an artist, and so I was brought there with a little Arts Council of England fund, so felt obliged to make work with the tools I’ve been developing – or my “brand.”

Nothing was watered down simply because it was a village (it’s actually a town but it feels like a village) because it would have meant compromising the ideals or enquiry, of looking deeply and into the areas of my interests of paradolia (faces in chaos) and simulacra formations (things that appear to be other things).

Most of them got it! I mean, it was nearly two hours long and they stayed till the end, although it did split the audience, but not badly. 2-3 out of 20, left. We had to do it again the next day due to popular demand! The ones who stayed had smiles on their faces by and large, which made me very happy. The weird thing was, not once had it been stated that it was a “straight history tour”, and it should have been obvious within the first thirty seconds that I make some of the stories and hypotheses so outrageous that surely this is tongue in cheek? However, I had written some slightly anti daily mail sentiment in it and two or three people angrily walked out of the tour. I got that wrong. It’s a Tory (conservative) heartland, and I don’t think you can be an artist and right-wing, you are just too aware of the world, but I should have considered this aspect more.. My landlady was one of the people present in the audience and she walked out, that upset me a wee bit.

But there’s something about my personality that makes people trust me in my tours, folk are quite sweet and gentle perhaps. The message behind the tours is one of re-imagining everything you hold to be true. The motivation behind these tours is to see travel as something that can be done anywhere. People go to the other side of the world to enrich their lives, many don’t even journey over to the other side of the street, or drive through a different part of town! I find that hilarious. So for me, psychogeography is about the chicken crossing the road..

If we can’t even do that, what hope is there for atheists like me (who find Buddhist philosophy and its practice the only religion without the conceit of the other big hitters) who are forced to approach the world from multiple angles, because we can’t accept the idea of monotheism and monotheistic thinking. This single mindedness of approach, when challenged (not just in religious people, but people stuck in their ways) is bound to create a bit of friction even on a playful level like in Steyning.

I became invloved in Surreal Steyning based on another project, in Brighton, where I made several songs about a building on Brighton sea front. This was a song cycle, based on a very specific bit of geography.

There is this idea that psychogeography is only urban – but I prefer to bring this intense work to the home counties! After all, the whole point of being an artist is to see through the privets, the darkness of the forests. So while I was in Steyning I was reading about Alistair Crowley and witchcraft and when Steyning used to be a port – it’s now land, ten miles inland! In the middle ages everything was different. I think a lot about how many contemporary English folk in these wee villages don’t realise their own foundations. I found Steyning a really charged place and not just a twee place to get (admittedly excellent) cream teas and real ale (a bit flat for my northern British palette).

This was, without a doubt though, the most successful public psychogeography tour I had done, even more than Polyfaith. There have only really been three tours – Polyfaith, Select Avocados and Surreal Steyning. And Surreal Steyning learned from the other two – so I had my schtick by then. I think it’s the best executed one so far. Let me be clear, I care about the audience. I adapted to their demographic, their language and their refinery in this tour, but I really care about people, but what I hate is bigotry and there was a little bit of friction about some of the left-wing ideas in the work and some of my own goals. But they needen’t be upset by a Middle East reading of a thatched cottage, the similarities of Tudor graphics and the 1990s version of the Take That logo, and the roof of some flats that might look like an arrow.

MG: This critical approach of consciously making room within yourself to understand or at least appreciate the sensibilities of others, surely it must be a difficult task to accomplish? What I find fascinating about your engagement with the public is the measure of respect for them, mixed with a healthy level of detournement.

Thanks! I actually think it’s a big complement to have the public stay on a tour for up to two hours, or buy one of my records. So I’ve really tried to attack attention-deficit tendencies whenever possible. It’s also my grammar. I don’t really do critical theory, although to apply for money you need to know where your bit of culture fits in with others. I really dig a good bit of popular culture. I think the best stories in our culture in the UK can all be seen on Jimmy McGovan’s The Street. He is a master of audience respect. Also, I feel confused by a lot of art, so I like to call a spade a spade, unless I am in a surreal mood and I’ll call it a Sad Ape (Sad Ape is an anagram of A Spade).

I had a slightly uncomfortable childhood and adolescence That “public” thing comes from Teesside. I also particularly like North of England humour – and actually I really like it when “clever shits” (to quote my Granny RIP) get usurped by that kind of spit-and-sawdust philosophy. There’s something survival-like and super-clever about grass roots humour because it comes out of neccessity. So I think my own personality is a bit of art school but with angry chips on both shoulders. It’s why working in Scotland is great, because the Scots hate bullshitters – especially the Nathan Barley set. I always found that very attractive. I remember seeing and being heavily inspired by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s first series and thinking, this is a dangerous combination! Northern swagger and charm! Dada! but with more academic kudos than might appear at first glance. And it was bloody funny! It was both alienating and accessible at the same time.

I grew up in Teesside and North Yorkshire and school never encouraged me really. I never had a bohemian upbringing, but I believed in the soul and went to Sunday School (my own choice – I was very religious for a kid). But I probably owe my interest in orchestral and “difficult” music to my uncle, and this was partly my first exposure to other worlds – I was particularly inspired by Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. And I liked that piece because it had something I could relate to (the church organ), it felt something otherworldly – both the sustained drones and mechanical math-like, transcendental nature about it. And no words. I remember talking to my music teacher about it. She got all excited and presumed I could play it so she got me the sheet music to learn it. But I could never do it, I had no discipline. Anyway, that piece was amazing, spiritual to me. When you thought it couldn’t end, it changed scale and key and ascended to even more articulate heights, clever and gorgeously aesthetic at the same time.

I failed art. I grew up around lorry drivers, grandma’s trifle and Christmas at working men’s clubs. A lot of nice memories but I’ve always been looking for ways to sweeten the sour ones. And then, a huge affliction came. Around twelve, I started to have these really strong life changing shocks, like my psyche being ripped to shreds – just by thinking, enquiring, looking deeper. I would call them “dark epiphanies” later. They are still with me. Adulthood has not softened them. I’m always on the lookout for liberation! Like Russel Crowe in A Beautiful Mind he learns to live with his Demons and accept they are there! I’ll never get over these mortal messengers, but it’s what underpins all the puns and humour in the work. Tears of a Clown maybe? At the time, (aged 12-15) there were pennies dropping about mortality – real hopelessness of mortality. I’m still dealing with it. The problem is, because these visceral thoughts will never go away, I have started trying to make them my teachers. And all I want to do across all of my works is reduce anxiety – mainly my own – and look at multiple universes – and I think we forget that your street is part of the universe. That’s where the work begins, in your block, your local Lidl – these places should teach you as much about our ridiculous situation as anywhere else. It’s like that idea that “the environment” is outside somewhere, when really it’s in the most mundane places. The mundane is “supramundane” at the same time. It’s no wonder I became a Buddhist in my early thirties. I need to get back into it. I’m getting somewhere maybe.

MG: Perhaps, it is not just about re-inventing a selection of different mythologies, histories in relation to localities, whilst exploiting contemporary mediums; which includes elements of satire, a certain level of hyper-reality.

CD: I think it’s about a hatred of authority, not because we don’t need order, I think we do, but authority takes all the colour out of our history and culture. I watch X-factor, like Peter Kay (underrated surrealist like most comedians – despite the professional Northerner get up). I never liked punk and thought anarchy was really stupid! Civil disobedience maybe. I hate it when I see musos on the telly talking about punk, getting all nostalgic. Maybe the Clash. Maybe it’s the patronage of culture by high fallutin’ types I don’t like. Because patronage kills proper culture doesn’t it? And because of that, I never got passionate about history at school. It was a bit grey. So what do I do without the arsenal of the passionate historian? I make bits up and flirt with it. These projects mean I have to know bits of history now. And this bit is really telling – the bizarre thing about the hyper-reality aspects of my tours and other works – is that the bits I make up and flirt with – those bits are often scarily close to the truth. Also you say I’m really respectful to the public, but I like to push it a lot. In Edinburgh, on the Polyfaith tour, folk were swallowing my wildest tales about the city when they’d lived there all their lives! I came in under the radar I suppose. I like usurping the pompous stuff with a passion though, I really do, I feel it’s my duty!

MG: There seems to be a kind of niggling question in this work. I get a sense that this question does not only relate to asking those who take part, but also yourself. It touches upon something quite raw, authentic and complicated, and untouchable at the same time. I am not referring to the sublime here, it relates to all of our collective histories, on this earth. A Genealogical form of re-assembling, re-knowing and perhaps not knowing. Are you trying to make contact, or reconnect some how to a type of authenticity; if so, what does this look like in respect of your intentions?

CD: I want to find spiritual relief. That’s a terrible word – maybe the sublime is better. Fuck it, I want it back from the New-Agers. Even though I am a total Dawkins fan, and am partly liberated by looking deeply, I just want a bit of peace really. And the tours train me to think outside the box, that’s it. I suppose it’s like doing my own philosophy degree “in the field.” But there’s a bigger box I am being prepared for (see what I did there!). There’s not much relief. I am a highly charged person – some would say high maintenence! I’ve just seen the Andromeda galaxy from the back garden. I want more of that. This is a really hard life. I want to be less fat. I’m sick of having M.E. My wife is pregnant. Christ, I am going to be a father. Maybe that will help my afterlife woes. Men aren’t supposed to moan. I’m being genuine here though. I forgot to mention Derren Brown. I’d love to do a project with him. I am sorry these answers are not very articulate. It’s in the tours! Do them!? Seriously, do the tours.

MG: What qualities and values do you think or feel this form, process and working offers yourself, the world, art and culture on the whole?

CD: I look at my place in the digital arts as a priest being sent to a remote parish – so hopefully we’ll clean up here in Ayr, our new home! ha ha! A lack of funding might make that difficult but it hasn’t stopped me before. My current thoughts are… Paradolia and Simulacratic Forms as narrative agents for psychogeographical tours. The benefits of the sustained drone in music. “Dayglow” hues and man made fibres in landscape photography. High hills. The idea, place and value of the troubador in the present age and the potential of “singing the news” as a deterrent for media-saturation. My next project may be about folk-music and psychogeography, using local folk clubs to make popular songs based on themes by bloggers. Some of the things I think of, I sometimes see being made around the time. A bit of Zeitgeist, collective unconsciousness awareness maybe! I am also still digging around popular atheism and the atheistic roots of Buddhism. Folk-Art and the search for genuine Scottish culture as opposed to the much-touted facsimile. These are my daily concerns. A project that I should mention is Ayrtime. A series of eclectic cultural events presented in the heart of Ayr, Scotland. Gigs, Theatre, Literature, Astronomy & more – on this site you can find archives of the events with beautifully crafted podcasts!

My work offers me the stuff I was told at school really. No different to building or plumbing on one level. Just a sense of achievement and pride I suppose. Quite traditional aims. I remember a conversation with my dad in the last few years (we row a lot) in The Ship Inn in Marske. I asked him why he never wants to know about all these fantastic projects I’d done! And he said “Well that’s your work isn’t it? If you were a plumber we wouldn’t be sat here discussing U-bends” and at first, I felt slighted, I’m not a plumber I’m an ARTIST goddammit!! It made me think of The Cohen’s Barton Fink, human and pretentious character “The life of the mind, there’s no roadmap for that territory” but on reflection it’s quite good to be making this mad work in working class areas, to take my artist ego down a peg or two. Lord knows I need it sometimes because I have two fights generally – the first is the fight to get work funded and made and promoted and so on and it be stimulating work. The second is the fight with M.E. which I feel like I am totally on my own with a lot of the time. I get really unpleasant symptoms, often with no break for weeks on end. Sometimes I can only do 30 minutes of work in a day. Sometimes, even that is a pipe dream. I’ve had twelve years of this shit. I was directing arts documentaries for telly when I was well. The upside of the M.E. is that it is humbling. I’d probably be that Nathan Barley wanker by now, and I wouldn’t have touched the Buddhism, the philosophy, proper art and gotten arts council funding without the lessons I have learned.

Free Downloads of Chris Dooks Music:

Social Electrics 10 year Anniversay edition 1999 – bip-hop.
You Know, You Love Something Little – Lost Vessel 2002.
The Aesthetic Animals Album 2008 – benbecula records.

Chris also makes websites for extra pocket money:

www.eleanorthom.com
www.karencampbell.co.uk
www.alanbissett.com
http://www.louisewelsh.com

Danja Vasiliev will be working as an Artist in Residence at HTTP, Furtherfield’s Gallery and lab space in March 2010. During this residency Danja will work on his Netless project. Netless is an attempt to create a new network, alternative to the internet. More precisely – networks within existing city infrastructures, possibly interconnected into a larger network alike the internet. Netless is not dependent on specialized data carriers such as cables or regulated radio channels. In fact, there is no permanent connection between all of its hosts (peers) at all – it is net-less.

The network is based on the city transportation grid, where traffic of the vehicles is the data carrier. Borrowing the principals of the ‘sneaker-net’ concept, the information storage devices are physically moved from point A to point B. Numerous nodes of the netless network are attached to city buses and trams. Whenever those vehicles pass by one another a short range wireless communication session is established among the approaching nodes and the data they contain is synchronized. Spreading like a virus, from one node to another, the data is penetrating from the suburbs into the city and backwards, expanding all over the area in the meanwhile. The signal of any of netless nodes can be received and sent to using any wifi enabled device – a laptop, pda or mobile phone.

There are no addresses or routes in the netless network – any participant can potentially receive all data circulating in the network – all data is broadcast. Personal messages and datagrams can be sent using pgp-like personalized keys which ensure that only two people (the original sender and intended receiver) can decipher the message. Only such, as it might seem, oversimplified approach for communication allows the network to be completely homogeneous and flat – any node can be replaced by any other without any modification or configuration. In such an environment it is also impossible to trace data flows.

EDUCATION:

2006-2008: MA in Networked Media (Media Design) at Piet Zwart Institute, Netherlands
2006-2003: BA in ‘Media art’ AKI Academy of Visual Art and Design, Netherlands
2000-2001: Institute ‘ProArte’, short course of  new media arts, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
1996-1999: Academy of Culture and Art, Media and Information Design, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Danja Vasiliev is a co-founder of moddr_lab – http://moddr.net/.

Digital Pioneers
Victoria And Albert Museum
7 December 2009 – 25 April 2010

(Illustration – Herbert W. Franke, Squares (Quadrate), screenprint, 1969/70)

Digital Pioneers is a deceptively modest exhibition hidden away in two rooms upstairs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It contains some of the earliest examples of art produced using electronic devices and computing machinery along with some creative later work.

The bulk of the art in the show was produced between the 1950s and the 1970s. This means that it was produced or recorded as photographs from cathode ray tubes or as print-outs from teletypes and pen plotters. Some of this work will be familiar to students of the history of art computing through reproductions but as with most art reproductions do not tell the whole story.

Seeing the actual work itself is as important for art made using the paraphernalia of early digital computing as it is for art made with linseed oil and cotton duck. What Digital Pioneers drives home is just how deeply and intentionally involved early computer artists were in manipulating the aesthetically limited but socially and ideologically key technology of computing machinery. This leaves both social art historians and code aesthetes with some explaining to do, or at least some catching up.

The show starts in the 1950s with the algorithmic and electronic but non-digital and non-computational photographs of oscilloscope patterns by Ben Laposky and screen-prints of photographs by Herbert W. Franke. Most of the works included in the show are prints of one kind or another, and these are no exception. They record the movement of a beam of light on a cathode ray tube as other prints in the show record the movement of a plotter pen or a laser in a laser printer.

If Constructivism was socially realistic for revolutionary Russia then these works are socially realistic against the backdrop of NATO’s military-industrial-educational complex. They turn the technology of that culture back on itself, using it not to produce weapons or market products but to produce aesthetics. This reclaims a space for perception and contemplation that is not simply militarily or economically exploited. The obsessively quantitative managerial culture of spreadsheets and inventories yields uncomfortably to the qualitative culture of aesthetics, productively so. These strategies continue through the show. Technology is pushed beyond its intended uses to address cultural tasks.

Many of the prints in the show have a similar number of stages of production to Franke’s process of screen, then photograph, then silkscreen prints. His later plotter-drawn work is also screen printed, as are Klee-inspired generative images by Frieder Nake, and Charles Csuri’s random montage of flies. I don’t know what to make of this. It feels like something should have been lost in the move from an original to a print but plotter drawings aren’t particularly originals, being already representations of data structures in the computer’s memory.

Csuri’s lithograph of randomly placed vector outlines of toy soldiers was produced in 1967 during the Vietnam War, a war that ran as long as it did in no small part due to game theory and computer simulation. There are two armies, one plotted in red and one plotted in black. They meet and presumably battle inevitably but only by chance. There’s more of the outside world in art computing than is often assumed.

William Fetter’s wonderful three dimensional vector images of human figures produced for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, a lithograph from the Cybernetic Serendipity show of 1968, also deal with the human figure within the military-industrial complex. We should not be confused about the status of such images as art by the use and funding of computer graphics by corporations any more than we should be confused about the status of painting as art by the use and funding of oil painting by the Catholic church.

Ken Knowlton’s cheeky nudes and other typographic images of the 1960s and 1980s are an effective escape or release from the constraints of corporate information culture. I’d seen them many times in reproduction but again they are much richer visually as prints.

More detailed systems-based patterns emerge in the 1970s in the work of artists such as Manfred Mohr, Paul Brown, and Vera Molnar. This era that epitomises the approach of rule based serendipity so beloved of later Generative artists. These images are pleasurable to look at but also contain visual or psychological complexity. They also continues to push the performance of computer systems outside of their intended use cases.

By the late 1980s the technical achievements of computerised mass media were exceeding those of art computing. Pen plotters, where they were still used, were no rival to laser printers. Rendered images had to compete with the earliest rumblings of Pixar and Adobe. The increasing availability of digitally designed fashion and entertainment meant that far from being the exception, digital elements in the lived visual environment were becoming the rule.

The reactions to this that art computing in general have made are the subject of the Decode show that is also running at the V&A. Digital Pioneers instead follows the printmaking thread of art computing into the present day where artists such as Roman Verostko, Mark Wilson and Paul Brown have continued with the systems art all-overness of print-based art computing.

To continue in this way marks such work out as something different from the all-pervasive presence of digital imagery in the visual environment. The work has to look different from graphic design and new media rather than from CAD plots or teletype reports, and it does. These works remind us of the history and of the wiring under the board of digital culture. They successfully resist any attempt to reduce them to digital mass media images comparable to the output of the design software that they exist in the same era as.

This switch away from early adoption is necessary to maintain a figure/ground relationship (or a critical distance, or a constructive difference) between the general level of technology in society and the level of technology in art computing. It is not the only solution to this problem, as the Decode show demonstrates, but it is not a retreat.

As a long time fan of Harold Cohen, I found the show’s inclusion of computer generated works from his very earliest 1960s felt-tip-on-teletype-print experiments with generating figure and ground relationships computationally to a recent large-scale full-colour inkjet abstract was a real treat. Plotter drawings of abstract shapes from the 1970s and of human and plant forms from the 1980s show the progress that Cohen made in using computers to rigorously explore how art and images are created and function. Being able to study this work close-up reveals details such as debugging information in the teletype prints and the operation of the collision-detection algorithm in the 1980s images. And it provides the pleasure of seeing detailed, well-composed drawings.

This is a recurring experience in Digital Pioneers. Despite the uniformly dismissive attitude of both popular and academic criticism towards art computing the fact is that when you actually see the work in the flesh it rewards sustained attention. Not as historical or technical curiosities, but as images with cultural and aesthetic content and resonance. To ignore this and to continue to claim that this art is less than the sum of its parts would ironically be to fall prey to a particularly extreme attitude of technological determinism.

The show also contains displays of ephemera including magazines and books such as back issues of the Computer Arts Society’s “PAGE” and William Gibson’s supposedly self-erasing story on a floppy disk “Agrippa”. I’d not seen an actual copy of “Agrippa” before. PAGE back-issues are available online, but their presence here flags an important point.

The revived Computer Arts Society has been key in promoting and deepening understanding of the history of art computing in the UK. The Digital Pioneers show and its excellent accompanying book are a good example of how CAS’s project has spread out into more traditional cultural institutions, and many of the images and exhibits in the show come from the archives that CAS has donated to the V&A.

The “Digital Pioneers” book (by Honor Beddard and Douglas Dodds, V & A Publishing, 2009) serves as a catalogue for the show . It contains an informative introductory essay and printed images of many of the works on display as well as a CD-ROM with 200dpi scans of them. These scans are high-resolution enough to be able to examine the images in some detail, although they are no substitute for seeing the images in the gallery. A slightly excessive copyright licencing notice is the only indication that the book has in fact been produced as one in a series of pattern books from the V&A. It’s a must-have if you enjoy the show or have any interest in early art computing.

Digital Pioneers is an opportunity to really look at the work of early computer artists and to evaluate that work directly rather than through the medium of poor reproductions or through the fog of received critical opinion. As a slice of artistic history that just so happens to have been produced on computer it contains much to reward both the eye and the mind.

Digital Pioneers at the V&A

Digital Pioneers book

PAGE Back Issues

Update: Two recently published books provide more extensive background to the period covered by the show, making the history of this fascinating era available to current practitioners –

White Heat, Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980‘ edited by Charlie Gere et al covers the history of British computer art and the Computer Arts Society.

A Computer in the Art Room by Catherine Mason describes the relationship between British art schools and computing (which is how I became interested in this area in the first place).

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

A collaborative review by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati

The article features artwork, projects and conference highlights from individuals and groups/organisations such as Honor Harger, Gebhard Sengmuller, Franz Buchinger, Ryoji Ikeda, Julian Oliver, Damian Stewart, Clara Boj, Diego Diaz, Ken Rinaldo, Michell Teran, Aaron Koblin, Daniel Massey, F.A.T, Warren Neidich, Kahaimzon Michel, Bruce Sterling, I-Wei Li, Steve Lambert Matteo Pasquinelli and more…

This year’s Transmediale.10 Festival explores the theme ‘future’ through connections between arts and technology. A part of the introduction read “Futurity is a concept that examines what the ‘future’ as a conditional and creative enterprise can be. At its heart lays the intricate need to counter political and economic turmoil with visionary futures. […] what roles internet evolution, global network practice, open source methodologies, sustainable design and mobile technology play in forming new cultural, ideological and political templates.”

2010 is a year that has often represented the future in Science Fiction literature, such as Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, and now here we are. A good time to compare how we percieved the future, the past, and assess what is really happening, what we lost and what we have gained, and ‘perhaps’ find better ways to proceed. Art can offer different perspectives, ways of seeing and understanding, revealing our present states of being, sharing alternatives or even new meanings for our futures. This festival allows those visiting and taking part, an opportunity to explore, negotiate possible avenues in understanding together, what all this means.

Most of the Transmediale.10 events and art presentations were hosted at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the same venue for past editions. The main exhibition Future Obscura, was curated by Honor Harger. A big dark room, a labrynth of exhibits divided up with high black curtains. Presenting different artworks enhanced by their own resonances of light. The concept was to use the actual light-sources from each of the artworks, as a kind of curatorial, installation metaphor. Immediately effecting the visitor’s experience through its overall ambiance, built around the theme or vision of future.

We make our journeys out there in the low light of the future, and return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusion of safety, to report on what we’ve seen. What are any of these ‘utopian dreams’ of ours but defective forms of time-travel? Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006).

The work Parallel Image by Gebhard Sengmuller, in collaboration with Franz Buchinger, supported by Fels-Multiprint may of inspired the whole concept. An electronic camera obscura and media-archaeological, interactive sculpture. An apparatus for presenting different possible fictions, futures. “Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel Image” is technologically completely transparent, conveying to the viewer a correspondence between real world and transmission that can be sensually experienced.” It presents the fiction that the technology of transmitting moving images was not discovered or invented at all – so no electronic pixels, just a camera and a monitor connected by 2,500 cables in order to track the movement of a body or an object.

Whilst weaving through the dark, curtain bound maze, discovering the separated presentations of Future Obscura, or what we can consider playfully here, as the ‘futurity tunnel’. We come across the video-audio installation data.tron, part of the datamatics project by Ryoji Ikeda. A huge screen (about 15 ft high & 40 foot wide) stands in front of visitors on a flat wall-surface. Various projected sets of data – consisiting of databases, computer consoles and white noise move and unfold before your very eyes. Music plays along with the images issuing forth deep hypnotic sensations. Each single pixel is strictly calculated by a mathematical principle and composed from a combination of pure mathematics. Ikeda reuses and deconstructs the data, building it up into a massive art-work, which also becomes an immersive experience. The same concept was used in his live performance at Transmediale.10 ‘Test Pattern’.

The Artvertiser, a work by Julian Oliver, Damian Stewart, Clara Boj and Diego Diaz, is a tool to swap advertisement with art in public spaces. With a self-made binocular device and dedicated software, you can experience a new metropolitan landscape, replacing the omnipresent adverts which plague our urban environments with art or images of your choice. The swapped, proposed images are often a play on the words of the original advertisement. Whichever image one substituted, the central message of the Artvertiser remains the same; our public city landscapes are bulging with publicity, we want to take that space back and personalize it – quite the same concept of graffiti, but dealing with the reproduction and re-representation of our public spaces. The software running on the device is an open source project and it will soon be available for all to download and use with Smartphones and Standard Camera phones. The Artvertiser points out a thoughtful and critical view point of our present, proposing an alternative future directly linked to our everyday lives. Ironically, this is a theme that is unfortunately scarce or missing in most of the selected Transmediale.10 works.

The work Paparazzi Botsby Ken Rinaldo, consisting of a series of autonomous robots. Each of them upright, the height of the average human. Packed with lens-based hardware, such as “cameras, sensors and robotic actuators on a custom-built rolling platform, they move at the speed of a walking human, avoiding walls and obstacles while using infrared sensors to move toward humans.” Capturing images of the visitors as though they were celebrities, flashes go off, then the images are projected up onto the surrounding walls. A popular installation reflecting on the abuse of reproduction and exhibition: some of the images were also uploaded and then distributed through social networking sites – a mass mediatic celebration of the visitors as well as the celebration of the bots.

The selection of Transmediale.10 seems to award reproduction of content rather than consciousness of a different form of creativity. Also, the main prize is unexpectedly given to a woman, Michell Teran, with the project Buscando al Sr. Goodbar: a real tour through Murcia, a Spanish town, taking place at the same time on Google Earth and YouTube, an interaction between reality and social media. The work was presented at Transmediale.10 as a video remix of the original work. “The tour audience was introduced to everyday performances and actions happening in the city that often go unnoticed. Somebody solves a Rubik’s Cube in under 2 minutes, a young man plays a piano, a group of friends drunkenly sing together, a 14 year old boy headbangs in his bedroom, somebody is choked, a man teaches himself Arabic and two people fall in love. At certain points the audience left the bus and met some of the video authors who presented them with re-enactments of their performances.”

In the same way the second prize was awarded to the project Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey. A web-based, software able to record people repeating what they heard, then they used these voices to make a reconstructed version of the song Daisy Bell – the first song that implemented musical speech synthesis in the 1962.

Speaking about the difference between re-production and creation, it is interesting to notice that the group F.A.T were present at the awards. Using intentionally, and excessively open source and pop culture as way of expressing their creative actvities, claiming and distributing activist propoganda-like projects, on networked territories and facilities (facebook/google ndr.) in order to stress out the holes of content present in the Web2.0 culture. For Transmediale.10, they presented a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to free software, browser addons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, they also built a fake Google Street View car and toured it in the city of Berlin.

A more singular approach, which revealed different or other connections of a network is shown in Neuropower, by the biologist and artist Warren Neidich who won The Vilem Flusser Theory Award 2010: he researched new ways to manipulate the process of ongoing cerebral reconstruction. Exploring the potential of Neuroaesthetics, formulated in the mid-1990s “as a paradigm capable of describing the complex conditions of the ‘now’-a moment in which global technological networks and novel potentialities for subjectivity are coming into greater focus and correlation to each other. As knowledge becomes ever more commodified, and labor increasingly immaterial, our notions of art, work, and politics…”

The gap between what could be the future or what we are imagining through the mass-media industry and the challenge that artists and creative thinkers are asked to face, is not really elaborated. A good example is the conference Phuturama: a space dedicated to the possible alternatives of an ‘imaginary’ for the future. One of the guests was Kahaimzon Michel: his description of the new version of Far Cray was mostly focused on the technical improvement of the game and no word at all was spent on the idea, the concept itself: the umpteenth war-games, colonialist and male-centered. The celebration of technology itself was the splitting point of this Festival, as it was somehow already announced at the opening day by Dr. Franke. His main contribution seemded to be about the importance of ‘Avatar’ the movie, for its big technological improvements.

Going back to the events, one of the most awaited speeches was Bruce Sterling’s keynote speech “Atemporality – A cultural speed control” about time and its relation to ‘future’. The main introduction text for Atemporality – A cultural speed control read “The speed of our society is constantly increasing in terms of processes, logistics and media, causing the present to ‘shrink’. We are experiencing the dissolution of meaningful frameworks in a similar way as Henry DeTamble: in politics, the intervals of planning and acting are reduced to the duration of a legislative period and in post-industrial economics volatile unpredictability has come to replace regular traits of growth and stability. Progress as the paradigm of modernity has been replaced by the continuous modulation of events. If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The structure of the future has changed, and with it our sense of time. Are we running out of a future as a resource for growth, progress and stability? Has our cultural cruise control become defective?”

Reflecting on the proposed theme, Sterling presented Atemporality as he viewed it, an approach in understanding and recontextualizing history, “an effort in humanities” to embrace reality, the now.

“Step one – write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already.

Step two – write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys.

Step three – write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted.

Step four – open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further.

Step five – start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem.

Step six – make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem.

Step seven – create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it.

Step eight – exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine – find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.” Sterling.

The philosophy of history studies, an objective point of view, a map that does not always reflect the real. Atemporality instead, has to be a “calm pragmatic skepticism about the historical narrative” like telling stories of people who were not the winners, report history that has no literacy or playing fiction into reality, being a “personal public testimony of a future that doesn’t exist”.

“Atemporality is a philosophy of history with a built-in expiration date. It has a built in expiration date. It’s not going to last forever. It’s not a perfect explanation, it’s a contingent explanation for contingent times.

Futurity was expected, futurity is here now, there goes futurity into the past, so long futurity, thank you for an exciting, fulfilling and worthwhile time.” Sterling.

The Atemporal approach asks us to cool things down, challenge the need and desire for a constant, linear future. Proposing not to rush ever onwards, remembering what we have now, reclaiming and rediscovering the qualities we possess rather than feverishly running forward all of the time. You can read Bruce Sterling’s whole speech here – Atemporality for the Creative Artist

A subject which played a central role for much of the discussions held, was related to the economy and how it addresses the creative work (a third of the speeches were about this topic). The financial crisis had also influenced much of the artistic agenda. Unfortunately all this talking about commerce was often presented without critical reasoning, and so we had a lot of showing off and gesturing about how amazing certain new technologies were. Which gave off a more bland sense of enthusiastism, a technologically determined, already accepted future, without the necessary awareness of the overall social contexts of what it all really means. Yet there were some projects that tried to propose a different view on this theme. The performance Values, by I-Wei Li, pretended to calculate, with the help of a computer, the value (artistic-value) of the participant, based around questions on art and art practice. The Laboratoire Deberlinisation uses an uncommon way to discuss about immigration and value in our globalized world, with the provocative use of an African value, the Afro, an international insurance card and passport.

A deep critical, discussion of the current socio-economical situation produced by the international financial crisis, was held in the main auditorium, Liquid democracies. Steve Lambert presented his works and talked about direct politics, re-using our culture and how to subvert it. In his opinion, utopia has to be used as a direction and not as a destination, living moments of freedom: an alternative approach for direct, political change, using small actions and persistence, participating tactically through our cultures. Matteo Pasquinelli later focuses attention on the whole of net society and the digital matrix. He wondered who has the strongest power, who detains the monopolies and which place is dedicated to the workers and specifically to the cognitive (creative) workers? Pasquinelli used the concept of a “new feudalism” to define contemporary societies. The multitude is not fluid but embroils in a participatory process that traps it in-between the oligarchy of the big companies. Democracy in this sense has ended and gives the go-ahead to a post feudalistic society. The end of this construction is an open question: is there any subject able to break the power of these big monopolies?

Parallel to Transmediale festival is Club Transmediale Festival CTM a music and visual arts event held every year in Berlin. The festival started as the musical side of Transmediale and then added more and more interests involving the arts. Through the years it has become more popular and expanded, not just with music during the night, but also with their own exhibitions, talks and lectures during the day. This year the event was even longer than Transmediale itself, starting from January 28th and ending February 7th 2010, with the subject “OVERLAP – Sound & Other Media” giving a lot of attention to the relationship between music and videogames.

A missing element worthy of attention at Transmediale.10 this year, was its audience. Even though the amount of visitors were three times more than last year. The time for questions and discussion with the public was often too short, or ineffective. A contemporary approach in acknowledging the audience would be to understand there is not a clean divide anymore. And even though the old protocols still count in some cases, its representation at the festival was not necessarily a true reflection of the nature of networked, contemporary art and its culture. A hidden and dynamic audience which could have offered their own ‘valid’ interpretations around the subject was lost. Yet, on the whole the festival was extremely interesting in many ways, and had some excellent works and discussions well worth experiencing.

“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

Mark Napier’s Venus 2.0
Angela Ferraiolo
February 5, 2010

“Now that I’m done’ I find the artwork disturbing. It freaks me out. Maybe I’ll do landscapes for a while to detox.” — Mark Napier

Artist Mark Napier, well-known for the net classics Shredder, Riot, and Digital Landfill, recently exhibited his latest work Venus 2.0 at the DAM Gallery in Berlin. A sort of portrait via data collection Venus 2.0 uses a software program to cross the web and collect various images of the American television star Pamela Anderson. These images are then broken up, sorted by body parts put back together and — as this inventory of fragments cycles onscreen, a leg, a leg another leg — the progressive offset of each rendering of Anderson’s head, arms, and torso makes her reconstructed figure twist, turn and jerk like a puppet. It’s odd looking. Even her creator is a little afraid of her:

“I have to say’ if I ever meet Pamela Anderson in real life I think I’ll completely freak out and run away. I don’t think I could have a conversation with the woman after this project … I started with a sympathetic view of the actual Pamela Anderson. She is part of the spectacle of sexuality in contemporary media. She’s caught in that ‘desiring machine’ as much as any other human’ probably even more so. She has surgically modified her body in order to have greater leverage in the media. Does this put her in control? I think not.”

Napier’s project doesn’t answer or intend to answer the question of who is in control either, but it plays with the possibilities. Although I wasn’t able to see the portrait at its exhibition. I did track down part of the series Pam Standing at a private location here in New York. Napier has also posted video excerpts of the work online. Unfortunately, these still images and clips are a bit too static to really do the piece justice. If you get to see the real thing and if you look for a while, you’ll see what I mean. Venus 2.0 is an amazing jigsaw puzzle, a deceptive surface of shifting layers – part painting and part search result.

The effect is translucent, lyrical, mathematic and creepy. When I implied that it must have taken an awful lot of precision and calculation to get something like this to come together, Napier insisted that focusing on the technology behind Venus 2.0, its algorithm, or even on the unique materiality of networked art in general, is a way of missing the point. The way he relates to Venus 2.0 is through the painter’s hand. What counts is not the data feed, but who were are, what we want and how we behave:

“The artwork is a riff on sexuality as an elaborate hoax played by a precocious molecule that builds insanely complex sculptures out of protein, aka, meat puppets or more simply, ‘us’. These animate shells follow a script that’s written and refined over the past half billion years. And that script is in a nutshell: 1) survive 2) reproduce 3) goto #1. So sexual attraction is the carrot to DNA’s stick. Attraction is part of the machine. In art history this appears as the tradition of Venus. And more recently: Duchamp’s ‘Bride’. Magritte’s ‘Assasin’. Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’. The focus of digital art is still the human being. Don’t be distracted by the gadgets.”

Hi-tech or not, new media artists are by now well-practiced in the technique of unraveling a familiar image to expose an occluded, yet equally valid identity. In Distorted Barbie, Napier relied on a repeated process of digital degradation to blur both the literal and conceptual fiction of the Mattel franchise. Another early project stolen, took the female body apart, presenting attraction as database. Years later these kind of approaches, pixel manipulations and indexing without comment, as well as parsing and remixing have become a sort of standard operating procedure in new media. So much so that as technique becomes more well-known and more accessible, it can be hard to tell one work from another or one artist from the next. With this in mind’ it seems important to note that in the case of Venus 2.0 it is not so much a choice of subject or an organizational scheme that guarantees the final effect, but the manner in which Napier investigates the image and the ways in which Napier illustrates and manipulates both the visual elements of portraiture and his relationship to the figure involved.

Napier builds and destructs, assembles and tears apart, but in doing so tries his best to keep us focused on these activities as processes. At times Pam’s contortions are allowed to expose the wireframe which allegedly guides her construction and at certain key points on the interface, there is also a steady stream of vector coordinates to embody the idea of data. But Napier makes less of technology than another artist might by effacing what some would tend to elaborate on, in order to draw our attention elsewhere – usually towards evolution, gradation and the ways in which images evolve, and by extension the ideas that inspire those images which reflect how unstable elements are, even treacherous:

“I work at probabilities: what is the likelihood that the figure will be totally opaque? How often does it get murky and undefined? How often should I let that happen and for how long? How often does the figure jump? How long till the figure lands and stands up again? How much time is spent in chaotic motion and how much in stillness? How often does something completely messy happen? Like the figure gets tangled up in a ball that has no structure. I don’t know how the piece will play out each minute, but I know what kind of situations will arise in the piece. I can plan those likelihood, and then let the piece play and see what it does.”

So, like the woman who inspired her. Pam Standing is beautiful, but more unsettling. What makes Pamela Anderson the most frequently mentioned woman on the Internet? Why do we mention her? What is it we want when we give our gaze to celebrity? What has celebrity done to attract us? Whatever your answers, what Napier privileges in his response is not a fixed portrait of a star, but a cloud of iteration that produces its own image and reproduces that image, jangled, confused and full of surprises. A portrait whose finest moments are accidental and whose design is an accumulation of fragments that tense and dissolve, floating like clouds one instant and then sinking like lead the next. This is where the imagination takes a step forward and Napier the artist or Napier the geek becomes Napier the puppetmaster, a networked Dr. Coppelious:

“My favorite moment with the PAM series was when I finally got all the math to work so that the body part images displayed correctly and the correct side of the body showed at the right time and the stick figure suddenly started to look like a ‘real’ puppet that was starting to come alive in the golem-esque way that I thought it could when I was sketching out the idea. I had that Dr. Frankenstein moment: ‘She’s aliiiiiiiiiive!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ which was really the point all along, to create this virtual golem that is clearly not alive at all and yet teases us all with this false appearance of life. Venus 2.0.”

Until the layers of arms, legs, breasts and hips collapse in on themselves and Pam is back where she started, a manipulated beauty unable to escape presentation as a collaged monstrosity.

Note: Mark Napier has been creating network art since 1995. One of the earliest artists to deal thematically and formally with the Internet, Napier has been commissioned to create net art by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has appeared at the Centre Pompidou in Paris’ P.S.1 New York’ the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis’ Ars Electronica in Linz’ The Kitchen’ Kunstlerhaus Vienna’ ZKM Karlsruhe’ Transmediale’ iMAL Brussels’ Eyebeam’ the Princeton Art Museum’ la Villette’ Paris’ and at the DAM Gallery in Berlin.

Featured image: Annie Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling – of agitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension.

This essay accompanies If not you not me, an exhibition of networked performance art by Annie Abrahams at HTTP Gallery in London. Where social networking sites make us think of communication as clean and transparent, Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling – of agitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension. This exhibition presents three new collaborative works alongside documentation of recent networked performances created and curated by the artist.

If not you not me

2002. My expectations and behaviour have been shaped by years of work and play at my personal computer. I have habitually ignored my hunched body whilst my attention is projected through key-stroke and mouse click into a social space made of people, digital technologies and the cables, hubs and protocols of the global network.

separation/séparation: A click on a blank web page, displayed in a tall, thin browser window, is like a poke at the body of a sleeping animal. “Do something then!” On the first two clicks, the words “lonely soul” appear in a standard font at the top of the screen. More clicking calls up the following words “…not knowing how to differentiate between you and me, you don’t feel my pain…” Accelerated mouse taps provoke an imperious message on a new screen. “You don’t have the right attitude in front of your computer, either you clic (sic) too fast or with too much force…” With more measured interaction I am allowed to continue with the soliloquy, interspersed with instructions drawn from Workpace, an exercise programme used to assist in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury. The first illustrates a facial work-out. An animated download bar sets the duration of the exercise. I wrangle with the regimen to find a way to skip the prescribed exercises, to get to the end of the story. Finally I comply, performing the therapeutic stretches by the light of my machine. In my imagination other viewers/participants, located around the world in their various domestic settings, are roused from their physical inertia, illuminated by their PCs, in animated, undulating fleshy frills at the edges of the Internet. Returning to the screen for the next chapter, one gentle click at a time, a story of unrequited love unfolds; between an implacable machine and a human-being laid low by their own computer-inspired dreams of control and unlimited power.

This is the first time that my body has been directly addressed, indeed disciplined, by a Net Art work. This is made possible by its complex composition. separation/séparation is made of many parts: a web interface, an economical visual aesthetic, texts (the monologue, the instructions, the commands), human-to-machine interaction. Most of these ingredients are also active in the real-time installations and documentary videos exhibited seven years later in If not you not me at HTTP Gallery. The addition of human-to-human interaction, physical space and objects produces ever more complexity in the structure of the work. However while its many different parts often remain visible, separate and present for the viewer/participant, the effect is not one of disconnected components. Abrahams continues to connect them with the sociality of viewers/participants, generating powerful, singular, artistic affects. More recently her favoured vehicle for artistic exploration is collaboration without which there is no relationship: no me, no you, no other and therefore no artwork. If not you not me asks visitors to explore how relations constitute identity and consider the corporeal implications of an emerging human sociality mediated by complex digital networks.

In 2007 One the Puppet of the Other/ L’un la poupée de L’autre explored the experience of solitude on the Internet while straddling both physical and virtual public space. In this collaborative telematic performance at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Abrahams and co-author Nicolas Frespech each sat in an igloo tents on stage. Their shadows could be seen moving about within, and who communicated via a system of webcams and microphones. They improvised according to a simple rule where each had to respond to the other’s instructions – “sing a song” or “say something sweet” – to make each the living doll or avatar of the other. The webcam images and amplified conversations were streamed into the auditorium and displayed on a simple double screen projection above the tents. The hazy, flesh-tones of the webcam images had a unifying effect giving the impression of a shared dream. At the same time their physical proximity on stage reemphasised the way in which they were separated by their attempts to control and resist each other as they chose whether or not, as Abrahams writes, “to give flesh to the projections of the other.”

The artists collaborated to negotiate the co-evolution of both a relationship and a performance. This was the first of Abrahams’s networked performances that scrutinised real-time intersubjectivity. More recent works in this area include The Big Kiss with Mark River and Double Blind (Love) co-authored with Curt Cloninger. Distinct from pointing and clicking to control a machine or a game, performers adopt the more complex and subtle rituals and tuning-in techniques of improvising musicians and lovers. This requires them to acknowledge the similarities and differences in the nature of the sentient-other and to accept the other’s autonomy. Unlike Paul Sermon’s reassuring installations such as Telematic Dreaming that invite participants to cooperate within familiar and intimate domestic spaces connected by videostreams, Abrahams’s stark interfaces amplify the performers’ awareness of their solitude. They are alone in their physical space and yet they are responsible for co-constructing an image or a soundscape to express their experience of a relationship with a distant other. The unexpected result for the viewing public can be a disconcerting impression of intense intimacy. Viewers (as voyeurs) witness the emergence of boundaries as they are made and remade in the co-creation of the performance – each piece is a dynamic double portrait of every negotiation, every partnership.

Abrahams’s fascination with collaboration and participation means that she has a strongly developed sense of the context for artwork (not uncommon with artists who work with the Internet – think Jess Loseby’s Digital Kitchen, Andy Deck’s Panel Junction, Avatar Body Collision’s Upstage). She understands the many subtle ways in which curatorial and technical infrastructures impact on the meaning of the work and others’ experience of it. She knows that in order to best familiarise herself with the mechanics and affects of collaboration she has to move through all positions from initiator and director, to participant, to viewer. Her two series of curated performances Breaking Solitude and Double Bind (which she created with technical partner Clement Charmet and Panoplie.org) are remarkable in that they demonstrate the power of a simple interface, a curatorial frame and an extended community of artists experimenting across networks. Breaking Solitude was simply set up as “Web-meetings of about twenty minutes long using chat and streaming to experiment (sic) new ways of being together.” For Double Bind Abrahams creates a more focused context based in her own earlier experiences as a biologist, where she came across the concept of the Double Bind; “a situation with no exit, whatever one chooses one looses [which] leads to illogical, inhibited, ambivalent and misplaced behaviour. Double bind is the result of conflicting cues about a particular situation. An animal that cannot decide between attack and flight is going to eat or scratch.” For this series she asked six artists to reflect on whether double bind describes our relation to technology, within a double webcam performance which could be viewed online and commentated on by up to thirty visitors within a simple message window. Abraham asks: “Is our relation to the computer and internet double bind, bound, bond?…Remote presence, ubiquity, multiple personality, absence of the body? Does this make us schizophrenic? How do we adapt?”

We are unaccustomed to experiencing either art or online social interaction in this way. Most artworks do not require us to participate with so many aspects of ourselves. Most social media interfaces are designed to smooth out the disconcerting glitches and vacuums created by the inevitable interruptions in data-flow. They aim at transparency to give an impression of irrepressible and unproblematic social exchange – as if the last thing we should be aware of when “using” technology is its impact on our physical and psychological well-being. On the one hand this transparency creates an exciting speed of exchange and a froth of production. On the other, however, the bandwidth of our communication is eroded and along with it the range of things that might be conveyed and relations evolved. If it can’t be said in 140 characters, it can’t be said. A voice disappears – no-one notices; the babbling stream of confabulation bypasses, drowns out – bleaches out – absences and depressions. With these ubiquitous interfaces we interact less with other people than with the social utility itself and with our ideas of ourselves.

Abrahams’s work always invites us to acknowledge, feel and imagine in our interactions the many aspects of the machine and the other human being speaking through it. Her current artistic research project Huis Clos / No Exit directly addresses how each person will react in a context of collaboration, at the same time as studying its technical and formal limits and possibilities. Her work’s place in the proliferating network of machines and human-beings (their emotions, desires, even their hormones) makes us aware of the artwork’s simultaneous openness and resistance to our contribution. It encourages us to bring our whole selves to the question of the part we play in the co-evolution of future relations.

About Annie Abrahams

Annie Abrahams was born to a farming family in a rural village in the Netherlands. She obtained a doctorate in biology in 1978 and found that her observations of monkeys inspired curiosity about human interactions. After leaving an academic post, she trained as an artist and moved to France, where she became interested in using computers to construct and document her painting installations. She began experimenting with networked performance and making art for the Internet in the mid 1990s. Her work has since returned to the questions raised by the monkeys, concentrating on the possibilities and limitations of communication on the Internet. She has performed and shown work extensively in France, including at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and in many international galleries including among others Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castello, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan; festivals such as the Moscow Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and on online platforms such as Rhizome.org and Turbulence.

http://aabrahams.wordpress.com/

Data Soliloquies
Richard Hamblyn and Martin John Callanan
London: Slade Press, 2009
112 pages
ISBN 978-0903305044

Featured image: Data Soliloquies is a book about the extraordinary cultural fluidity of scientific data

Although much has been said about C.P. Snow’s concept of a “third culture”, we haven’t actually reached an understanding between the spheres of science and humanities. This is caused in part by the high degree of specialisation in each field, which usually prevents researchers from considering different perspectives, as well as the controversies that have arisen between academics, exemplified by publications such as Intellectual Impostures (1998) in which physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticise the “abuse” of scientific terminology by sociologists and philosophers. Yet there is a growing mutual dependency of both fields of knowledge, as the one hand our society is facing new problems and questions for which the sciences have adequate answers and on the other scientific research can no longer remain isolated from society. Some scientists, such as the astronomer Roger Frank Malina, have even argued that a “better science” will result from the interaction between art, science and technology. Malina presents as an example the “success of the artist in residence and art-science collaboration programs currently being established” [1], and considers the possibility of a “scientist in residence” program in art labs.

Our relationship with the environment is certainly one of the main problems we are going to face during this century and it is also a subject that brings up the necessary communication between science and society. The UCL Environment Institute [2] was established in 2003 to promote an interdisciplinary approach to environmental research and make it available to a wider audience. While being representative of almost every discipline in the University College London, it lacked an interaction with the arts and humanities. This gap has been bridged by establishing an artist and writer residency program in collaboration with the Slade School of Fine Arts and the English Department. Among 100 applications, writer Richard Hamblyn and artist Martin John Callanan were chosen for the 2008-2009 academic year: Data Soliloquies is the result of their work.

Despite “belonging” to the field of art and humanities, neither Hamblyn nor Callanan are strangers to science and technology. Richard Hamblyn is an environmental writer and historian who has developed a particular interest in clouds, and Martin John Callanan is an artist whose remarkably conceptual work merges art and different types of media. This may be the cause that Data Soliloquies is by no means a shy penetration into a foreign field of knowledge but a solid discourse which presents a richly documented critique of the apparently ineffective ways in which scientists have made society aware of such a crucial problem as that of climate change. The title of the book has been borrowed for a term that Jon Adams, researcher at the London School of Economics, coined to refer to Michael Crichton’s novels, who uses “scientific” facts to give his imaginative plots an aura of credibility. With this reference, the authors state that the way scientific data is presented actually constitutes a narrative, an uncontested monologue: “…scientific graphs and images have powerful stories to tell, carrying much in the way of overt and implied narrative content (…) these stories are rarely interrupted or interrogated.”[3]

As the amount of data regularly stored in all sorts of digital supports increases exponentially, and new forms of data visualisation are developed, these “data monologues” become ubiquitous, while remaining unquestioned. In his text, Hamblyn exposes the inexactitude in some popular visualisations of scientific data, which have set aside accuracy in favour of providing a more eloquent image of what the gathered evidences are supposed to tell. On the one hand, Charles D. Keeling’s upward trending graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which according to Hamblyn is “probably the most important data set in environmental science, and has become something of a freestanding scientific icon”[4], or Michael Mann’s controversial “Hockey Stick” graph are illustrative examples of the way in which information displays have developed their own narratives. On the other, the manipulation of data in order to obtain a more visually effective presentation, such as NASA’s exaggeration of scale in their images of the landscape of Venus or the use of false colours in the reproductions of satellite images, call for a questioning of the supposed objectivity in the information provided by scientific institutions.

In the field of climate science, the stories that graphs and other visualisations can tell have become of great importance, as human activity has a direct impact on global warming, but this relation of cause and effect cannot be easily determined. As Hamblyn states: “climate change is the first major environmental crisis in which the experts appear more alarmed than the public” [5]. The catastrophism with which environmental issues are presented to the public generate a feeling of impotence, and thus any action that an individual can undertake seems ineffective. The quick and resolute reaction of both the population and the governments in the case of the “ozone hole” in 1985 points in the direction of finding a clear and compelling image of the effects of climate change. As Hamblyn underscores, this is not only a subject for engineers: “the reality of ongoing climate change has yet to be embraced as a stimulus to creativity –in the arts as well as the sciences– or as a permanent and inescapable part of human societal development” [6].

Martin John Callanan took upon himself to develop a creative response to this issue, and has done so, not simply by creating images or objects but by depicting processes. He states: “I’m more interested in systems –systems that define how we live our lives” [6]. A quick look at his previous work [7] will show how appropriate this statement is: he has visited each and every station of the London underground, collected every command of the Photoshop application in his computer, officially changed his name (to the same he already had), gathered the front page of hundreds of newspapers from around the world and engaged himself in many other activities that are as systematic and mechanical as ironic, poetic or simply nihilistic. During his residency, Callanan created to main projects. The first one, Planetary Order, is a globe in which the patterns of the clouds on a particular date (February 6th, 2009) have been sculpted. The artist composed the readings of NASA’s cloud monitoring satellites in a virtual 3D computer model, which was then laser melted on a compacted nylon powder sphere at the Digital Manufacturing Centre at the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. The resulting object is a sculpture, an artwork more than any sort of model in the sense that it develops a discourse beyond the actual presentation of data. An impeccable white sphere textured by its subtle protuberances, the globe evokes the perfection of an ancient marble sculpture while presenting us with an uncommon view of the Earth, covered with clouds. The clouds, which are usually erased in the depictions of our planet in order to let us see the shapes of the continents (the land which is our dominion), become an icon of climate change and the image of an order which is, in all senses, above us. Callanan freezes the planetary order of clouds in an impossible map, a metaphorical object which appears to us as a faultless, yet fragile and inscrutable machine.

The second of Callanan’s artistic projects is the series Text Trends. Using Google data, the artist has collected the number of searches for selected terms related to climate change in a time range of several years (from 2004 to 2007-2008). With this data, he has generated a series of minimalistic graphs in which two jagged lines, one red and the other blue, cross the page describing the frequency of searches (or popularity) for two competing terms. The result resembles an electrocardiogram in which we can see the “life” of a particular word, as opposed to another, in a simple but eloquent dialogue of abstract forms. Callanan has chosen to confront terms in pairs such as “summer vs. winter”, “climate change vs. war on terror” or “global warming”. Simple as they may seem, the graphs are telling and constitute and visual summary of the book whilst suggesting many other reflections. The final conclusion is presented in the last graph, in which the perception of climate change is expressively described by the image of a vibrant line for the word “now”, much higher in the chart than the flat line for the word “later”.

Pau Waelder

DIWO At the Dark Mountain: 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.

Join us at full moon from 3 pm, Saturday 30th January 2010 for our closing event- to take apart and redistribute Mail-Art provoked by the Dark Mountain project.

• Take down the artworks and mail them back out into the world .
• Everyone who comes along gets to take an artwork away with them and to send artworks to friends and acquaintances.

This event is a celebration of the DIWO (Do It With Others) spirit, the collaborative process and excellent contributions from the artists who took part. As well as a chance to reflect on the ideas and controversies generated by The Dark Mountain Project, which provided the focus for the exhibition. There will be eating and drinking!

Visit here for images of the exhibition opening and performance

Do you want to Do It With Others at the Dark Mountain?

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.

Mail via Royal Mail: working with, or around, striking mail-workers, send chain letters, circular interviews, or invent some rules for Royal Mail object relay.
All outrages, gifts, offers , overtures and bids should arrive at HTTP Gallery by Thursday 26 November addressed to:

DIWO, HTTP Gallery,
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre,
71, Ashfield Road,
London, N4 1NY
England, UK

The Open Curation event: Friday 27 November 2009, 12-3pm to decide how to best display all submissions and entries at HTTP Gallery. Join us at the gallery or online by webcam, instant messaging and Skype. To learn how visit http://http.uk.net/diwodarkmountain

Follow the blog where Dark Mountaineer, Dougald Hine, will be your guide to the emerging landscape of email and snailmail exchanges.

Attend the Open Disassembly Event: 30 January 2010, 7-9pm Full Moon
Assemble at HTTP Gallery for the closing event to help us disassemble the display and to choose the work you would like to take home with you.

Arriving at the homepage of Ten Thousand Cents, an Internet artwork by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, a mottled image of a one hundred dollar bill slowly fades into view. Ben Franklin looks out sedately. Mousing over the large image, the cursor is replaced with a small red rectangle. And here lays the beauty of the project; with the click of each rectangle, a zoomed in portion of the one hundred dollar bill is revealed. On the left side is a high-resolution photograph of that tiny portion of the bill. On the right side, a real-time moving image plays, revealing how the image was drawn by a human hand in a drawing program created by Koblin and Kawashima. There are, in fact, 10,000 such rectangles and each was created by a Turker through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace.

Over the course of five months (from November 2007 to March 2008) Koblin and Kawashima posted tasks, known as HITs, Human Intelligence Tasks, on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site. Having broken down an image of a one hundred dollar bill into 10,000 sections, Turkers were tasked with redrawing their assigned section. Each Turker was paid $.01 for the task, making the total payment of drawing a one hundred dollar bill one hundred dollars. (Prints of the project can also be bought for one hundred dollars. All proceeds are donated to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project) Each Turker worked anonymously, unaware that what they were drawing was a section of a bill or that their work would eventually be combined with other Turkers’ work to create an art project. The variability is endless. Some Turkers methodically draw in the lines and painstakingly shade in boxes. Some quickly slash the paint tool across the page; one imagines they felt they had better things to do with their time. Some are cheeky, using the space for digital graffiti or messages like “I love U.” Most copy the image exactly. Yet, with the differing movements and tempos, every one suggests a different story and different person behind the tool. I suggest you take a few minutes and watch the unfolding scenes. They are oddly, satisfyingly banal and beautiful.

The project and its presentation on the website are undoubtedly elegant. Yet, the conceptual work behind the piece is a bit murkier. The project description states, “The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, ‘crowdsourcing,’ ‘virtual economies,’ and digital reproduction.” Big and important themes. What are the implications of crowd-sourcing for creative work? For any kind of paid work? Where is the distinction between work and play? Creativity and re-presentation? In this deeply networked age, what are the evolving relations between individual and collective action?

The Mechanical Turk, made by Wolfgang de Kempelen in 1769, caused a sensation in 18th and 19th century Europe, first for its existence as a seemingly intelligent chess playing automaton – one who could beat Ben Franklin and even Napoleon in chess – and subsequently, for being an infamous hoax. Inside of the automaton was in fact a man, a skilled chess player. The Mechanical Turk was no thinking machine. It was an elaborate performance of concealment and human skill.

In 2005, in an ironic (and some might say distasteful) turn of events, Jeff Bezos of Amazon named a new business venture, Amazon Mechanical Turk. The idea was to make a digital marketplace that capitalized on the unique intelligence of human agents. Broken down into microtasks, known as HITs, Mechanical Turk provides a means to accomplish those tasks that humans can do quickly but which would take computers much longer to do, for instance, tagging images, taking surveys or transcribing audio recordings. This Mechanical Turk is also a performance of human skill, one that revels in its basis in human intelligence – Bezos calls it “artificial artificial intelligence” – but one that also operates within a mode of concealment and indeed, alienation.

As Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon wrote about Mechanical Turk in 2006, “There is something a little disturbing about a billionaire like Bezos dreaming up new ways to get ordinary folk to do work for him for pennies.” Critics of Mechanical Turk abound, and their objections point to the insidious labor relations that Mechanical Turk enforces, implying that Mechanical Turk approaches a virtual sweatshop. The system was designed for employers, not employees. The earnings of Turkers fall within a gray area of digital labor, officially being classified as contractor work, subject to high self-employment taxes and no option for benefits. Although a rating system protects employers, in so far as employers can choose to reject a work offer from a Turker or refuse to pay a Turker if the work is completed unsatisfactorily, no such system protects Turkers. As advocates of a Turker Bill of Rights have pointed out, there is no effective outlet within Mechanical Turk for Turkers to voice grievances against employers. What does exist is a vibrant community forum, Turker Nation, where Turkers advise each other on known scammers.

Moreover, although anecdotally Mechanical Turk is understood as more game or past-time than employment, a recent study out of University of California, Irvine’s Informatics Department points out that almost a third of Turkers rely on Mechanical Turk as a source of income. Another study found that nearly half of Turkers report their motivation for working as income related. For this population of Turkers, it is troubling to consider the possibilities of exploitation and unfair labor practices.

In this light, I find the artists’ neat appropriation of the mechanisms of Mechanical Turk unsettling. The implications and the stakes of Mechanical Turk as an economic system are left untouched. And considering that the artists chose to create a representation of money and employ Turkers, these dimensions of economy and labor are present but disappointingly unaddressed.

Yet, the moments in the project that remain in my mind’s eye like lovely specters as I glance at the dollar bill that I traded for coffee this morning, are the movements of the individuals who drew each section. On this level, the project is like a fantastic cabinet in which each drawer opens onto a new wonder. Perhaps what Ten Thousand Cents effectively offers is not a statement about labor politics or late capitalism’s continuing ability to provide structures for domination and exploitation. Perhaps Ten Thousand Cents asks us to take a different step toward understanding “the circumstances we live in,” revealing the endless variability of individual expression. In this networked age, we often act collectively, that is, together, parallel, most often without knowledge of the larger directions toward which our actions will lead. Collaboration, laboring together, is notion whose meaning is expanding and changing in the 21st century. What remains, even among protocols and code, is individuality. Though we are subsumed by larger structures, we do have spaces for self-expression and self-formulation. Leave an exploration of the limits of these spaces to others – and I surely believe we must consider the limitations. Yet we must also explore and value the spaces of possibility and the domains where we are active agents. We are called to remember that every artifact is irreducible to its mere instance in the world – it is a sum of processes and individual actions.

Of course, “the circumstances we live in” also requires us to keep in mind the bottom line. It’s all about the Benjamins, as the phrase goes. In response to a HIT, no less, requesting an answer to the question, “Why do you complete tasks in Mechanical Turk” one Turker wrote, “I do it for the money!”

Featured image: make art is an international festival focusing on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), and open content in digital arts

make art, one of the world’s most important free and libre art events, happens far away from the European metropolis, in the small town of Poitiers. However, it does not represent an integral piece of the ville‘s agenda to favour cultural tourism and development, as we might suppose thinking of some Brazilian film festivals and even of Bilbao’s Guggenheim. If something is to blame, it should be the grassroots effort of the native GOTO10 collective.

The name might sound familiar because not long ago they were doing a series of workshops in the UK to introduce FLOSS tools using their own pure:dyne operational system – a GNU/Linux distribution for multimedia creation. Having received some funding from the Arts Council, pure:dyne recently grew in efficiency and popularity.

Personally, the first time I heard about GOTO10 was in 2006, at that year’s Piksel festival. Some of the group’s members were there for audiovisual performances. Yes, they are artists as well – in fact, on the same days of make art, the group was taking part in the Craftivism exhibition, in Bristol. And between producing events, engineering software and, well, making art, they also found time to publish a book.

As diverse as these projects might be, they can all be inferred from the GOTO10’s creative practice, in respect of their real time interaction with people (in workshops) and machines (in live coding, etc). Given the way make art, pure:dyne and the group’s performances are interconnected, we could see them as one and the same activity, extending itself to various platforms.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, similarly, GOTO10 is a poitou group that has been expanded to other parts of the world. But, now that it has members from Greece, the Netherlands, Taiwan and the UK, the localization of make art seems even more meaningful to the collective’s identity, hinting on where and why it started.

According to Thomas Vriet, one original member who is still in town and mainly responsible for make art production. The group first got together in 2003 to promote digital art performances, workshops and exhibitions in Poitiers – sharing thoughts and ideas on things they were interested in, but could not find in the local art scene or École de Beaux-Arts.

So, in the same way pure:dyne was developed to cope up with GOTO10’s own needs for a live operational system capable of realtime audiovisual processing, make art is the ideal festival they’d wish to attend in town. Both projects find their reason in the group’s artistic demands, and grew simultaneously from it: the inaugural version of the distro was released in 2005, right on time to be used in a workshop in the first make art the following year.

Even though make art’s production is concentrated locally, the event is curated online, by the whole of GOTO10. The other member directly implied in this year’s planning, Marloes de Valk, arrived from Amsterdam just in the first day of the festival. make art is a group initiative that cannot be isolated from the larger open source community – a circuit that includes not only artists and programmers, but other venues as well. It is from this sizeable repository that the pieces that constitute the event’s programme come from. The aforementioned Piksel, for instance, has previously contributed to make art with a special selection of Norwegian works, creating an unexpected interchange between Bergen and Poitiers.

Together with the different Pixelache editions, these festivals form an international calendar of FLOSS art events, closely committed to developments in technology and aesthetics that, in many senses, are far more interesting that the new media proofs-of-concept proliferating elsewhere. But how does such package of extraordinary themes work in the traditional platform of the French countryside?

Altogether, make art seems to be the right size for Poitiers – not too small to feel incomplete, neither too big to feel overwhelming. The night programme may put you off if you are on a budget and decided to stay in the youth hostel (like me): there are no buses to that area after 8pm, forcing you to endure a half hour walk through cold streets. Apart from that, the city space is very well occupied by the festival, with the exhibition and debates in the central Maison de l’Architecture and a couple performances in other venues, emphasizing the curatorial logic. Posters are everywhere in town, competing for attention with those from the film festival.

However, the participation of the poitou community seems very restricted. So far, no local project has ever been sent in response to make art’s call. It might be that the theme is still alien to most people. Not surprisingly, the activity that attracted the majority of local public was the debate “Internet, Freedom and Creation” – which, beyond dealing with themes of more general concern (digital freedoms and copyright), was in French.

One of the efforts to increase this involvement was to open free places in the Fork a House! workshop to local students. Student volunteers could also be found mediating the exhibition and assisting production.

In that sense, the project that seemed to make the most of the festival’s situation was the frugal Breakfast Club. The first of these morning talks hosted by Nathalie Magnan was especially refreshing after the highly technical presentations the day before. Complex subjects were re-discussed over croissants, bringing the tone and rhythm of the event closer to the atmosphere of the #makeart IRC channel (which sometimes was livelier than the physical space).

The priority of Breakfast Club was not transparent accessibility but dialogue. Less of a tutorial and more like the public forum an open-source project cannot really do without. It made things more understandable to a laymen’s audience; it made the whole festival experience more coherent, pointing to directions in which it should grow within the city’s everyday life and structure – without having to be included in Poitiers’ tourism department masterplans.

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.

This article is co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange.

Millie Niss, the writer and new media artist, died of swine flu with complications at 5 a.m. on 29th November 2009. Her mother and longtime collaborator, Martha Deed, was with her then. She had been in hospital for four weeks, mostly in intensive care, after picking up the virus, which quickly became serious in her case, probably because she already had respiratory difficulties due to a rare condition known as Behcet’s Disease. She was 36 years old.

The news would have been sad to hear about anyone, but it was especially sad in Millie’s case because she was one of the people in the new media community with whom I felt particularly close. I met her at the trAce “Incubation” conference in Nottingham in 2004. When I first arrived at the conference, I was directed to the part of the room where Michael Szpakowski was because he and I had already struck up an e-mail friendship, and he’d left a message for me at the door. I found him talking to Millie. Michael was only there for that first evening because he had to go and see his father, but Millie was there for the rest of the conference, and I sat next to her at many events. She was dark-haired, overweight and funny: very easy to talk to. Later in the conference, she gave a presentation about how to attach behaviours to objects in Flash, which I attended along with Jim Andrews and others. She kept saying beforehand that she was feeling pretty nervous about it, but she seemed very natural and nerveless when it came to the event. In the beginning, she asked for suggestions from the audience – I think for an initial idea on which to base her Flash piece – and at first, nobody said anything. She suddenly became acerbic – “Oh come on – don’t make me pick on someone like you were a bunch of school kids!” Immediately you could see her as a teacher and imagine how she would have controlled a classroom. I suggested spiders, which set the ball rolling, and from that point onwards, everything went very rapidly. She quickly and expertly demonstrated how to set up a drawing of a spider as a symbol, and attach a behaviour to it so that when the mouse pointed to it, a sound file played. Another thing I remember was that she was very critical of certain aspects of Flash – how you had to import things into your library and then drag them from the library to the stage before you could do anything with them. You could feel her personality’s force, her opinions’ sharpness, and her sense of humour and fun.

From that time onwards, she and I regularly exchanged e-mails. She knew that I worked in the National Health Service, and because she was very much in the mill of health care herself, we had some lengthy correspondence about how the UK system worked, compared with how things worked in the USA. She also sent me two glass unicorns through the post – occasionally, she would run little competitions on her “Sporkworld” website and offer glass unicorns to participants as prizes. The first of these unicorns went to my daughter Rachel, and the second is still sitting on my study window-ledge in a white cardboard box. He used to stand out on his own four feet, but unfortunately, he had an accident with the curtain, and one of his legs got knocked off. I stuck it back on with Superglue, but it fell off again. Millie knew all about this, and I sent her a photograph of the unicorn on my window-ledge – I think I even sent her a second photograph, showing how he looked after his accident and temporary repair. She was always very interested in Rachel and liked to hear my stories about her. Perhaps they reminded her of her childhood, or perhaps she just liked kids.

One thing which came across from Millie’s correspondence, as well as from her work and her occasional online commentaries, was her sense of perspective on new media art. She was grateful to it because it provided an outlet for her creativity which she had never managed to find through traditional print; but all the same, she remained aware that it was a small and specialised field and that a good deal of new media work might seem incomprehensible to “ordinary” people. Her comments about other new media artists reflected this grounded attitude. She preferred work which didn’t reach for the hi-tech solution that a lo-tech one would do – work, in other words, which didn’t employ technology for its own sake, and where the form was dictated by content rather than the other way round. Likewise, she wasn’t particularly bothered whether her output complied with the dictates of new media theory – whether it was interactive, non-linear, coded or networked. The pieces on her website exhibit a cheerful mixture of genres and media: Flash, video, poetry, prose, photography, sound files and plain old HTML rub shoulders in much the same way that political commentary, literary criticism, observations of places and people, food appreciation, nature notes, raucous humour and occasional obscenity rub shoulders in her blog. The groundedness of her art, and her sense of responsibility towards her audience, is demonstrated by the way in which she habitually presented videos on her site in different sizes and resolutions – for example, “Warhol’s Campbell’s Brodo” is available 8.85mb, 6.23 MB and 2.43 MB – so that people with slower connections could sacrifice a bit of quality to save a long wait if they so desired. Similarly, her introduction to “Warhol’s Campbell’s Brodo” explains that “brodo is the Italian word for soup and the restaurant’s name”. Without talking down to her audience or limiting what she wanted to say, she was always at pains to be as clear and user-friendly as she could – and this insistence on clarity and user-friendliness, her desire to reach out to an audience of “ordinary” people whenever possible, was one of the things which made her voice such a distinctive and refreshing one in the new media world.

However, this is not to say that she was any Luddite or uninterested in the theory of any description. One of her best-known pieces of work – a collection of six pieces – is the Oulipoems, reproduced in Volume One of the Electronic Literature Collection in 2006. As Millie explains in her introduction, “Oulipoems is a series of six interactive poetry Flash works… loosely based on the Oulipo movement in French literature, which focused on texts based on constraints… and also on mixtures of literature and mathematics.” One of the Oulipoems is “Morningside Vector Space”, which rewrites a description of a simple incident in various ways, depending on how we move the mouse cursor over a coloured square. The source text reads:

Yesterday, I was walking on Amsterdam Avenue. There were cracks in the sidewalk. I looked up and saw the tall and unfinished Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A man approached me. ‘Excuse me, do you have the time,’ he said. I told him at 5:47. He walked (sic) away. It was windy. The coloured square is marked to indicate the inflexions this text will be given if we hover over different areas – from “Simple-minded” to “Pretentious” on the x-axis and from “Sociological” to “Melodramatic” on the y-axis. If we point to the “Simple-minded” corner, we get this:
I walked. On the sidewalk. By the big church. There was a man. He wanted the time. I gave him my watch. He left. I was cold.
The intersection of “Pretentious” with “Melodramatic” yields this:
A vagrant in tattered clothing invaded my personal space, filling it with his odor. ‘Hey, man, got the time?’ he whined…
The intersection of “Pretentious” with “Sociological” produces:
The sidewalk, unmaintained by the municipality, contained evidence of substance abuse…
– and so forth.

A number of observations come to mind about this piece. First of all, although it isn’t tremendously technically sophisticated, it does reveal a very competent grasp of Flash and object-oriented coding. This grasp is also displayed in many of Millie’s other pieces. Secondly, it demonstrates the “mixture of literature and mathematics” to which Millie refers in her Introduction to the Oulipoems – the idea that different styles of writing can be mapped onto a graph and summoned by pointing at different vectors – and in doing so, it demonstrates a willingness to experiment with text, and an openness to the idea that text in digital literature may sometimes be manipulable by the audience, rather than fixed into a single unquestionable form by the author. Thirdly, “Morningside Vector Space” is funny and accessible. The labels with which Millie marks out her vectored space are humorous, and the texts with which she illustrates these different writing styles are exaggerated for comic effect. At the same time, there is an undercurrent of social observation, with a suggestion of political edge: “I was observing a mixed-income neighborhood on the borders of a low socioeconomic enclave… Lacking funds for a watch, he had to rely on others in the community to be on time for his appointment with the social services…”

Lastly, perhaps least obvious is a powerful sense of place. The piece’s title refers to Morningside Heights, an area of Manhattan in New York. The texts allude to Amsterdam Avenue, a street in Morningside, and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, which stands there. St John the Divine is also known as St John the Unfinished because although it was begun in 1892, it remains incomplete to this day – hence the description of the cathedral as “tall and unfinished”. The coloured vector space in Millie’s piece contains another reference to the cathedral, in the shape of a wobbly but recognisable line drawing of its facade. This sense of place is an important aspect of Millie’s output – not only in videos about places such as “Jewel of the Erie Canal” or “A Hecatomb in Cheektowaga” but also in new media works such as “The Talking Escalator at Penn Station”and “Unscenic Postcards” – and like her interest in politics, it demonstrates her commitment to the “real” world, as well as her talent for observation and comment.

Another of Millie’s Flash pieces, and one of her most personal artworks, is “Biological Time Clock”. In a central pane, the words “womb”, “amoeba”, “bomb”, “bang”, and “boing” appear, accompanied firstly by Millie’s voice intoning the same words, and secondly by drawings of a womb, an amoeba, a womb inflated to the point of bursting, a womb breaking into pieces, and another slightly different drawing of a womb in bits. Underneath this pane appears a randomised sequence of phrases, arguing both for and against getting pregnant and giving birth: “It’s not for me”, “I’d be nurturing”, “I’m more than a womb”, “I’m not together enough”, “maybe I should do it while I can”, and so forth. There are also buttons that allow you to add extra sound effects, such as Millie saying “tick-tock” or chanting “biological”.

There are feminist aspects to the piece – one of the anti-pregnancy phrases is “I don’t want to be a breeding cow”, and another is “I’m more than a womb” – mixed with what seem to be more autobiographical notes, such as “why am I alone?” and “I don’t want to lose my creativity”. However, a question that seems to go to the heart of the piece is what is the word “boing” doing in there? The drawing which accompanies this word is enigmatic. Still, it may be meant to suggest that the womb, which broke apart at “bomb”, is now somehow bouncing back together again – and by implication, that no matter how many times the author talks herself out of childbirth, her consciousness of her womb keeps coming back to bother her afresh. But the word “boing” serves another purpose by introducing into the piece the quirky, unpretentious, comical note essential to Millie’s art. If the word sequence at the heart of the poem were simply “womb, amoeba, bomb, bang,” then both the message and the tone would seem much starker. With “boing” on board, there is a playful and funny element to the piece, a release from serious description into exaggeration, which seems to suggest that Millie herself isn’t taking it completely seriously, and we don’t have to take it completely seriously either.

In some ways, this insistence on the quirky and the wacky might be considered a weakness or a limitation in Millie’s art, flinching away from completely direct and honest engagement with her subject matter, symptomatic of a tendency to let both herself and her audience off the hook, especially if her subject-matter happens to be personal. But it should be borne in mind that Millie had more personal subject matter to deal with than most of us, and her insistence on humour was an essential part of her strategy for dealing with it. One of the anti-pregnancy arguments on “Biological Time Clock” is “I’m not well…” and it is impossible to write about Millie’s art without taking her mental and physical ill health into account, if only because so much of her art deals with it. For many years she was considered – and considered herself – to be mentally ill with Bipolar Disorder. Millie’s experiences of mental illness and the health and social care professionals with whom it brought her in contact are memorialised in “The Adventures of Spork, the Schizophrenic Skua”. As described on Millie’s site:

Millie Niss created Spork… to be a sympathetic and intelligent character who was also an indigent client of the mental health system. The cartoons began to express frustrations about how mentally ill people and welfare recipients are treated, but later on, other issues and pure silliness were added to the Spork series.

Eventually, after years of treatment for mental illness, Millie was diagnosed with Behcet’s disease, a severe disorder of the immune system which can cause depression along with ulcers, skin lesions, stomach problems and inflammation of the lungs. Before this diagnosis, however, she suffered attacks of dangerously acute depression, and one part of her website is devoted to suicide (http://www.sporkworld.org/suicide). The way in which she tackles this subject makes it clear how her sense of humour, far from demonstrating an unwillingness to confront her inner demons, was really evidence of her mental toughness and self-discipline in dealing with them – a refusal to give in to self-pity:

I was often, very often ready to kill myself, but I hate guns and wouldn’t want to use one. And lying on a gun license application was out of the question: I would not sign my name to a paper which said I was not intending to kill myself or was not mentally ill… Hanging was reputed to be painless and so we thought getting sentenced to death was the perfect out: that way you could have the benefit of dying without the guilt of doing it to yourself. It was unfortunate that you had to do something awful to get sentenced to death, though… A big question was the suicide note. Should you leave one or not, and if so what should you say in it? The argument for not leaving a note was a strong one: someone might find the note and stop you from doing it… The desire to write a suicide note that was a literary masterpiece kept me alive at times. I couldn’t kill myself until I thought of something good enough.

In these passages, Millie combines a sharp, satirical, almost gleeful insight into the ironies and self-contradictions of the suicidal mindset with an understated – but nevertheless essential and genuinely tough – conviction of her individuality and status as an artist. As she insists in “Biological Time Clock”: “I have a brain”, “I’m more than a womb”, and “I don’t want to lose my creativity”. In “Suicide”, the idea that she doesn’t want to kill herself until she can devise a sufficiently well-written suicide note is a good joke at her own expense. Still, it also points to something deeper: her writing is her way of dealing with depression and her reason for not succumbing. It gives her a sense of self-worth, and the discipline of art allows her to detach herself from her feelings and sublimate them, thereby gaining some form of control over them.

In an article entitled “Suicide, Art, and Humor”, which she published on Michael Szpakowski’s website “, Some Dancers and Musicians”, Millie wrote that “The artist has a duty, some might say, to produce art. But with that comes the more fundamental duty to stay alive.” This is a typically grounded remark: the artist’s duty to life is “more fundamental” than her duty to art. Referring to her own “Suicide” piece, she goes on: “I was at least trying to be funny… Art is a force that tends towards life… While you are writing a despairing poem, you are, in the act of writing, temporarily suspended from the act of despairing.” The effort to be funny and thereby entertain an audience, art as an affirmation of life, and art/humour as a defence against despair – all of these ideas were essential to Millie’s work.

The same values are apparent on the Sporkworld Microblog, which Millie shared with her mother, Martha Deed. They are present even in the very last days of her final illness. Here is an entry from 16th November: “We like to keep a chipper tone here, and we do not intend this to be a place to list complaints. We also insist that any personal events must be… transformed from raw anecdote into something with literary intent.” Martha actually wrote this, but Millie approved it, and it reflects a shared philosophy that runs right through the site’s contents. “Raw anecdote” is inadmissible, not only because it may lack the “chipper tone” that the Microblog seeks to maintain, but because it also lacks the discipline and detachment of real art. The word “raw” suggests something of the harshness of unfiltered experience. The artist’s job is not to pass on this harshness to the audience direct and unmediated, but to control it through an effort of will, to fit it into a composition, to comment on it, reason about it, make jokes about it and turn it into an element in discourse; and thus to humanise it.

After Millie’s death, Martha published a poem on the Microblog entitled “Travelling with H1N1”, which contains the following lines:

even if it is difficult to be funny
while intubated, you will fight and fight and fight…
you will be sending email on your way to the fluoroscope
with subject lines like
I never thought I would write email while intubated”…

The sense of humour, the refusal to give in, and the determination to fight back against her difficulties by finding something to say about them were all there until the very end. Martha relates that in the intensive care Unit (ICU), although she couldn’t speak because she was on a ventilator, she kept her lines of communication open by writing things down. She struck up a friendship with a nurse supervisor, Tom, who “was astonished at her ability to tolerate the ventilator and keep up a running conversation in her notebooks… He continued to visit her in the ICU and received her candid evaluations of her care there – both good and bad – and he found her to be very funny and brave.”

Mentioning the Sporkworld Microblog, and the fact that it was shared with Martha Deed, brings us to Millie’s frequent and long-term collaborations with her mother. Millie is known as “Spork Major” on the Microblog, while Martha is “Spork Minor”. Apart from the blog, they collaborated on many other works – Martha co-wrote the “Oulipoems” texts, for example, and “Jewel of the Erie Canal” is credited to them both. But one of the largest, most ambitious and most formally developed of their collaborations is News from Erewhon, a series of parallel surreal fictions created by the process of “guided free association”.

News from Erewhon is by no means a perfect work of art. Firstly, the title makes a rather distracting reference to Samuel Butler’s satirical, pseudo-Utopian novel “Erewhon”, which doesn’t really seem to have much to do with the rest of the book. Secondly, each chapter is accompanied by a number of images which zoom up in front of the words and then quickly fade away to allow us to read on. The Introduction argues that these add “another level” to work and that the pictures “appear only briefly to affect the viewer in an almost subliminal manner”. In fact, their main effect is to make you lose your place. Luckily, Millie provides a button which allows us to switch the images off.

Nevertheless, the texts themselves are fascinating. They were written in an almost Oulipo-like manner. Several words were picked randomly from chosen books; then, using these words as “seeds” and incorporating them into their writing as they went along, both Millie and Martha produced a series of eight “miniature fictions, situated halfway between poetry and prose”. As the Introduction says, these fictions suggest “a bizarre alternate universe, whose characters and settings evoke themes such as war and peace, the workplace, and religion. These themes… weave in and out of the texts like strands in a braid. The two authors can also be seen as separate, interacting strands.” The image of strands in a braid suggests both the closeness with which Martha and Millie were able to work together and the fact that they always retained their distinct identities and styles, and News from Erewhon is a good demonstration of this. Millie’s sections are generally longer than Martha’s and more narrative in style, whereas Martha’s tend to be more surreal and poetic. Both, however, display a constant flow of inventive wit. One of the funniest of the lot is Millie’s fourth:

The mice lived in a cream-colored bungalow under Mrs Johnson’s sink. Or so at least it seemed to them. Others less culturally attuned might have seen only some half-eaten Triscuits and the remains of a sesame bagel… “God save all the creatures who crawl under the moon, and all of their offspring,” murmured Chuck in a non-denominational invocation of the Divine. He would feel differently in the morning when he blistered his toe in the empty mousetrap from which the clever mice had stolen the cheese. “God Fuck!” he would swear into the mirror, cursing his fate as he brushed the All Bran from his teeth.

Seed-words for the passage are shown in bold. Here is an extract from Martha’s equivalent passage:

A cream-colored bungalow? How could you? It will curdle in the sun, and this is July, she said… Your invocation of natural disasters has blistered the mirror of my mind, he moaned.

Both writers, it will be noted, start by cheating: instead of introducing the “cream-colored bungalow” into their stories in a literal-minded way, they bring it in obliquely. Martha imagines a bungalow, not the colour of cream, but actually painted with cream on the outside – hence the objection that “it will curdle in the sun” – while in Millie’s story, the bungalow only exists at all in the collective imagination of a family of mice. Martha sticks more closely to an underlying structure suggested by the seed words, producing a more densely written text and poetic texture. This is particularly evident in the alliteration – “colored”, “could”, and “curdle” or “mirror”, “mind”, and “moaned”; but also in the lilting rhythm – “Your invocation of natural disasters has blistered the mirror of my mind, he moaned”. Millie, on the other hand, shows something of the novelist’s delight in incidental detail – “Triscuits”, “sesame bagel”, “under Mrs Johnson’s sink”, and “he brushed the All Bran from his teeth”. Her passage seems to take a serious turn with the phrase “God save all the creatures who crawl under the moon” – simultaneously poetic, literary and religious – yet this moment of gravity is almost immediately reversed by an explosion of comical blasphemy – “God Fuck!”

It would be too simplistic to suggest that Martha was always the more focused and disciplined partner in collaborative work. It should be remembered that Millie was the techno-savvy one, and therefore the design and construction of the Sporkworld site, the Microblog and News from Erewhon were all carried out by her. Her work in this area is always individualistic rather than textbook. Still, at the same time, it exhibits both a powerful emphasis on user-friendly functionality and a considerable visual flair. She may have presented herself as the mercurial, comical, slightly wacky half of the partnership, but there was always a sharpness, toughness, self-discipline and a determination to succeed just under the surface.

On the other hand, Millie’s work undoubtedly has an impulsive element, and in the collaborations, this makes a compelling contrast with Martha’s more studied approach. “God Fuck!” is one example; another is “Voting”, a video made in November 2008 showing Millie’s difficulties, as a disabled individual, in trying to deal with her postal vote form. Her ballot paper combines a list of presidential, senatorial, and Congress options and several constitutional issues specific to North Tonawanda, the town in which Millie and Martha live. As a result, it’s a huge sheet about the size of a tablecloth, with as many creases as an Ordnance Survey map, and just as difficult to flatten or re-fold. Step by step, Martha takes Millie through the different options on offer, with Millie keeping up a gunfire of questions and acerbic commentary, interspersed by short periods of silence during which she gasps for breath. Both Martha and Millie are represented on-screen mainly by their hands – first Martha’s, as she manipulates the ballot paper and fills it out in accordance with Millie’s instructions; then Millie’s, towards the end of the process, as she signs the outside of the envelope to authorise her vote. Apart from this, they are represented by their voices: Martha’s calm and methodical, Millie’s staccato and satirical, but both become increasingly impatient as the difficulties of dealing with the ballot paper become increasingly apparent. Ultimately, Martha can’t get it folded to fit the official envelope. Then Millie has to rehearse her signature because her hands are so afflicted with arthritis that she struggles to hold a pen. Then the envelope is difficult to sign because it’s so fat and unshapely with the ballot paper inside it. Then it turns out that the envelope will have to be taken to the Post Office and weighed because it isn’t pre-franked or freepost; at which point –

MILLIE: Okay, so we’re gonna have to pay postage on top of this… and it has to be weighed because it’s so fucking heavy!

(Slightly shocked pause.)

MARTHA (elaborately self-restrained): Did you mean to put the word “effing” in?

MILLIE (immediately): I did! I absolutely did! I mean, it’s a matter of free speech. The Supreme Court would have upheld my right to say fucking on my own blog. There have been efforts to make it impossible to say that.

MARTHA (holding up the envelope, with a noticeable change of subject): Okay, I think we actually have it done.

It’s a wonderful piece of film-making. Whether or not you agree with what Millie seems to be hinting, that there is a deliberate attempt on the part of the establishment in the USA to discourage people at the margins of society from taking part in the democratic process, or whether you prefer the view that bureaucrats have no conception of the difficulties faced by the people on the receiving end of their bureaucracy; the point that the postal ballot, which is supposed to make it easier for disabled people to vote, actually makes it almost intolerably difficult, has been well and truly established by the end. But the real strength of the video lies partly in the interplay between the two main characters and partly in the underlying theme of Millie’s disability and how they handle it. As with Millie’s work, her illness is central to the meaning of the piece, yet it isn’t about the experience of being ill. It’s about how illness changes your relationship with the rest of society – one of her most powerful themes. But it’s also about coping with that situation through the help of others – in this case, Martha – and through a supreme effort of will.

Much of the poignancy of the piece lies in the soundtrack: Millie gasping for breath on the one hand and Millie rattling off her machine-gun-like commentary on the other. You can’t ignore how ill she is and doesn’t ignore it herself, but she won’t let it shut her up. The video is a gradual crescendo of comedic impatience, culminating in the obscenities at the end. Her outspokenness is a refusal to be silenced by society and the universe, which has trapped her spirit inside such an inappropriate body. She overcomes her difficulties by externalising them. She makes them the subject of her art, and by doing so, she finds her voice.

No doubt Millie would have become an artist of some description, whatever body, circumstances and state of health she was born into. She was sufficiently remarkable for that. But without her ill health, the work she left behind would have been very different: less spiky, poignant, funny and perhaps less urgent. Her output is not defined or limited by her health, but her health gave her her most important themes and powerful moments. The supreme irony of her art is that, like the knotty grain of a piece of burr elm, the things that made her imperfect were the same things that made her unique and beautiful.

©Edward Picot, December 2009

Seven years ago, or about two years before the invention of youtube, the editors of Tank Magazine saw the possibility of an internet platform dedicated to video art. Their response was tank.tv, an Internet site that is part moving image archive, part online gallery, and part cutting edge video art exhibition.

After a quick and painless registration, tank visitors can wander by artist through a catalogue of some of the best short films of recent time, including works by Ken Jacobs, Pipilotti Rist, Vito Acconci, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Guy Maddin, Jeremy Deller, and Saskia Olde Wolbers. This archive alone is enough to make tank.tv a cultural treasure. But about eight times a year, tank also puts up shows organized by theme, and here films by emerging artists like Claire Hope and David Blandy are featured alongside more established filmmakers and more recognizable names.

“The sole focus is on the work,” explains curator and creative director Laure Prouvost, who has been with the site since its beginning. Prouvost describes tank.tv as a completely open endeavor, one that supports experimentation by accepting submissions and curatorial proposals throughout the year: “We have worked to make tank.tv a collaborative platform over time and we’re still looking for ways to open our programme as much as possible.”

After running a series of solo shows in 2009, tank decided to finish the decade with the group show Open End. About twelve films were selected from the submissions tank.tv received throughout the year. Works by emerging artists received special attention. They include Just a Quiet Peaceful Dance by Dean Kissick, a rapid, flash cut montage that cascades in one smooth glide over its upbeat house track, and the dreamy, slightly disturbing 3D animation Your Uncertain Spirit by Jonathan Monaghan.

Each of these films were beautifully made and conceived, allowing a special kind of online engagement. In the lyrically photographed Momentary Seizures, Katja Aglert gives us an allegory of war and genocide through the life of a garden snail. Filmmaker Andrew Cross uses a single shot of the landscape as a meditation on time in his film Across. In Pulcera, Nicholas O’Brien uses a series of long takes to explore the relationship between image, gesture, and memory. Filmmaker Michael Fortune exploits the conventions of the reality television and the non-fiction form to make visible the relationship between custom, ritual, and community in We Invented Halloween.

Not quite essay, but something more like the spirit of anti-narrative informs other films in Open End. Among these is Jon Purnell’s CackULike, which documents men in white linen invading the mass transit system, and Steven Eastwood’s self-reflexive and ironic examination of filmmaking in Seminar in Film and Sound.

Screengrabs: CackULike by Jon Purnell (left) and Seminar in Film and Sound by Steven Eastwood (right)

By deconstructing the war film genre, Matthew Johnstone manages a few genuinely harrowing moments in Modern Warfare, a film which combines aerial photography of a bombing run with routine and no-so-routine audio tracks depicting military training sessions. In Inadvertent Prose, filmmaker Mark Shorey distills noir down to its single essential moment of threat and violence.

Animators are also represented. There’s the completely silly and kooky Conveyor-Iphone by Oliver Michaels, which just gets funnier and funnier as it runs its six minutes – really it is just wonderfully preposterous. Simon Woolham’s The Pile creates a mysterious and idiosyncratic relationship between an odd group of objects or states and their related sounds. In The Sausage Party #2, #D animator Michael van den Abeele pairs the evolution of a wire grid that slowly increases in complexity with the sound of a desolate, blowing wind.

About twenty thousand visitors from sixty countries will see Open End. This is obviously good news for the filmmakers who show work here and audience reach is one of the main benefits of their being online. But tank curator Laure Prouvost sees additional benefits in internet exhibition: “Websites such as ours or UBU or LUX offer direct and fast access to work that would otherwise be very hard to view. It’s a fantastic way to get an introduction to an artist’s work. For us curating online gives us a lot of freedom – we have low overhead costs and can react very quickly.”

While the Internet will never replace the cinema or the gallery, Prouvost does point out its use as an extension of those spaces. As the quality of delivery improves, Prouvost believes the web will be used more and more as an introductory space for serious video art. If you watch films, a copy of Fresh Moves, the first DVD compilation from tank.tv can be ordered through tank.tv’s website.

If you make films, Tank is also accepting submissions for The Whole World, an upcoming show by curator Ian White. Prouvost explains The Whole World as a show about the idea of lists: “Both a formal device and a political strategy, film and video that deploys a list as part of its structure often does so with political intent: to subvert hierarchies, to undermine rationalism or to reveal contradiction. In contemporary culture the pop chart’s Top 10 has been replaced by an ever-expanding craze for “Top 100s” of everything from Hollywood genres to celebrity gaffes. The Whole World attempts to wrestle back the initiative. As part of the show we continue to accept submissions of list-centric videos so that The Whole World continues to grow over time.”

If not you not me is the first solo exhibition of Annie Abrahams’ work in the UK. While social networking sites make us think of communication as clean and transparent, Annie Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling – of agitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension. This exhibition presents three new collaborative works alongside documentation of recent networked performances created and curated by the artist.

Live feed of Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée from SelfWorld during gallery opening times.

Read the article If not you not me, Annie Abrahams and life in networks, by Maria Chatzichristodoulou in Digimag 54 May 2010.

Images of the exhibition.

Annie Abrahams (b. NL 1954, lives and works FR) is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art. If not you not me at HTTP Gallery in London is the first solo exhibition of her work in the UK. While social networking sites make us think of communication as clean and transparent, Annie Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling – of agitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension. This exhibition presents three new collaborative works alongside documentation of recent networked performances created and curated by the artist.

Working with simple interfaces, disruptions in data-flow and carefully crafted instructions, Abrahams sensitises participants and audiences to glitches in communication and invites them to experience and reflect on different ways of being together in a machine-mediated world. This exhibition asks how we deal with the tensions of collaboration and physical separation as we negotiate relationships through video imagery, computer software and digital networks.

Abrahams has created three new works for If not you not me, inviting collaboration from visitors to the HTTP Gallery and others around the world. Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée, the central work in the exhibition, is a telematic still life for mixed media and LED message board. Visitors to HTTP Gallery are invited to communicate with those at Kawenga – territoires numériques a media arts space in Montpellier, France by arranging objects in the still life and sending messages to one another, with the results visible in a projection in both galleries. Two additional performances will take place during the opening on 12 February. On Collaboration Graffiti Wall, a collective text and speech performance, visitors will reiterate reflections on the nature and problems of online collaboration collected on a special website open to contributions. The resulting traces on the gallery wall will remain visible throughout the exhibition. Huis Clos / No Exit – Jam, a telematic performance projected at HTTP Gallery and in Kawenga – territoires numériques, will feature four women artists: Antye Greie (Hailuoto, FI), Pascale Gustin (Paris, FR), Helen Varley Jamieson (Wellington, NZ), and Maja Kalogera (Madrid, ES). Sitting before webcams in different locations around the world, they will try to organise a unified sound performance, despite the inevitable delays that result from the international live feed. Audio documentation of the performance will play in the exhibition.

In addition to the new works, the exhibition presents documentation of live Internet video-streams from two ground-breaking networked performance series curated by Abrahams, Breaking Solitude and Double Bind, as well as Oppera Internettikka-Sécurité et protection, her collaboration with Slovenian artist Igor Stromajer, and her artistic research project Huis Clos / No Exit. Concerned with questions of co-existence and collaboration they include performances by influential artists working in the field including Helen Varley Jamieson (NZ), Robin Nicolas (BE) and Renée Turner (NL). The exhibition also includes performances by Abrahams with other international collaborators. Individual agency, controlling behaviours, intimacy and improvisation are the subjects of three extended performances questioning the ‘presence’ of the digital network: One the Puppet of the Other co-created with Nicolas Frespech (FR), Double Blind (Love) co-created with Curt Cloninger (US), and The Big Kiss featuring Mark River (US).

Annie Abrahams was born to a farming family in a rural village in the Netherlands. She obtained a doctorate in biology in 1978 and found that her observations of monkeys inspired curiosity about human interactions. After leaving an academic post, she trained as an artist and moved to France, where she became interested in using computers to construct and document her painting installations. She began experimenting with networked performance and making art for the Internet in the mid 1990s. Her work has since returned to the questions raised by the monkeys, concentrating on the possibilities and limitations of communication on the Internet. She has performed and shown work extensively in France, including at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and in many international galleries including among others Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan; festivals such as the Moscow Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and on online platforms such as Rhizome.org and Turbulence.

If not you not me is co-produced by Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery, London, and bram.org and Kawenga – territoires numériques, Montpellier, France. Furtherfield.org supports experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change. This exhibition was conceived in connection with Furtherfield.org’s Rich Networking project interrogating the transparency of communication, artistic collaboration and sociability through digital networks. This is the fourth event in Furtherfield.org’s three-year Media Art Ecologies programme which foregrounds practices sharing an ecological approach – an interest in the interrelation of technological and natural processes: beings and things, individuals and multitudes, matter and patterns.

Events

Private view and performances: Friday, 12 February 2010, 6:30-9pm, HTTP Gallery 7pm: On Collaboration Graffiti Wall – Collective text and speech performance at HTTP Gallery. To contribute or view texts to be used during the performance visit http://bram.org/collaboration/index.php 8pm: Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée goes live – Telematic Still Life at HTTP Gallery and Kawenga – territoires numériques, Montpellier, France.  8:30pm: Huis Clos / No Exit – Jam – Telematic performance projected at HTTP Gallery, featuring Antye Greie (Hailuoto, FI), Pascale Gustin (Paris, FR), Helen Varley Jamieson (Wellington, NZ), and Maja Kalogera (Madrid, ES).

Group Visits

HTTP Gallery will be arranging special group visits simultaneous with visits to Kawenga – territoires numériques, which will allow interaction between the spaces through Shared Still Life / Nature Morte Partagée. To arrange a visit for a school or university group, please contact Ale Scapin at ale[AT]furtherfield[DOT]org.

More Information

Catalogue essay by Ruth Catlow on furtherfield.org
Annie Abrahams – http://aabrahams.wordpress.com
Bram.org – http://bram.org
Kawenga – territoires numériques – http://www.kawenga.org
Furtherfield.org’s Media Art Ecologies programme –
http://www.furtherfield.org/mediaartecologies.php
Review of the exhibition on Fabric Magazine

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1N4
+44(0)77 3700 2879
Click here for map and location details

Annie Abrahams will be working as an Artist in Residence at HTTP Gallery in January 2010. During the residency Abrahams will work on the production of three new works including live telematic and online networked performances to be presented as part of If not you not me at HTTP Gallery in February 2010.

Annie Abrahams (b. NL 1954, lives and works FR) is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art. If not you not me at HTTP Gallery in London was the first solo exhibition of her work in the UK. While social networking sites make us think of communication as clean and transparent, Annie Abrahams creates an Internet of feeling – of agitation, collusion, ardour and apprehension.

The residency and exhibition are conceived in connection with Furtherfield’s Rich Networking project interrogating the transparency of communication, artistic collaboration and sociability through digital networks; and as part of Furtherfield’s three-year Media Art Ecologies programme which foregrounds practices sharing an ecological approach – an interest in the interrelation of technological and natural processes: beings and things, individuals and multitudes, matter and patterns.

Working with simple interfaces, disruptions in data-flow and carefully crafted instructions, Abrahams sensitises participants and audiences to glitches in communication and invites them to experience and reflect on different ways of being together in a machine-mediated world. The exhibition asks how we deal with the tensions of collaboration and physical separation as we negotiate relationships through video imagery, computer software and digital networks.

Annie Abrahams was born to a farming family in a rural village in the Netherlands. She obtained a doctorate in biology in 1978 and found that her observations of monkeys inspired curiosity about human interactions. After leaving an academic post, she trained as an artist and moved to France, where she became interested in using computers to construct and document her painting installations. She began experimenting with networked performance and making art for the Internet in the mid 1990s. Her work has since returned to the questions raised by the monkeys, concentrating on the possibilities and limitations of communication on the Internet. She has performed and shown work extensively in France, including at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and in many international galleries including among others Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan; festivals such as the Moscow Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, and on online platforms such as Rhizome.org and Turbulence.

http://www.bram.org/

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
Scribner Book Company, December 2009
ISBN 1439116830

Featured image: We Feel Fine project poster

“We Feel Fine – An Almanac Of Human Emotion” is a hardback book that in just under 300 pages of well designed montages, data visualisations, diagrams, illustrations and text presents and analyses the data gathered by the We Feel Fine project. Started in 2005 and launched in early 2006 by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine is based around a database assembled using a webcrawler that searches the blogosphere for statements of the form “I feel” or “I feel like”. Any matches are stored along with as much contextual data as the webcrawler can find (a photograph nearby in the blog post, the poster’s age, gender, and location, local weather). The database contained twelve million such entries by the time the book was published.

Sections of the book categorise statements of feelings by age, gender, the location of the poster, and subject of the statement. Individual statements are presented superimposed over images found in the same blog post. The photographs presented with their accompanying expressions of emotion have a high-contrast, shallow depth of field, and highly focused look that resembles Lomography. But this is a product of the presentation of photographs on the web rather than an hipsterly ironic invocation of the contingent aesthetics of mass photography. The images are for the most part JPEGs, and show the contrast, mach banding and visual noise of that technology.

The montages of “I feel…” statements in a standard format superimposed over an image found in the same blog post serve to provide a (sometimes incongruous) context for the statements that the project is based on. They resemble Gillian Wearing’s “Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say” 1992-3 featured photographs of people holding up placards on which the artist had asked them to write down what was on their mind. Going back further into the history of art, the montages and in a novel way particularly the data visualisations and graphs bear comparison to Vermeer’s seventeenth Century paintings of bourgeois social relations and reverie. Both “Girl reading a Letter at an Open Window” and “We Feel Fine” present social class, social self-presentation, advanced communication technology and consideration of the thoughts of others in a medium and way that epitomises the way people see things in that era.

The book’s volume of data and graphics quantifying social phenomena might resemble a “state of the blogosphere” corporate social media report in some ways, but its presentation directs attention back to the emotions featured rather than trying to tie them to any corporate or governmental agenda. This is a book by, about and for individuals in contemporary mediatised society. I found reading it became quite overwhelming sometimes once I had adjusted to its presentation.

Dictionary definitions, statistical breakdowns of the kinds of words, ages and genders of bloggers and other demographic and affective data are presented in compact graphic form on every page, and larger charts show more general conclusions. Feelings, or the words used to refer to them, are shown to vary between genders and as people age. This is an exemplary application of Edward Tufte’s science of the graphical presentation of information. They even have sparklines. But that science is applied to data that is at its heart qualitative rather than quantitative.

Such “data visualization” was a hot trend in 2009. Visualisations of crime rates, corruption, climate change and other issues can be produced using such data, and have become an important weapon in the arsenal of visual persuasion. On the We Feel Fine web site, feeling data is mapped to coloured blobs in an interactive user interface to the constantly updated (every minute) database. In the book, feelings and demographic information are processed to produce graphics that represent the prevalence of feelings over time, between genders, in different locations and in relation to each other. But as visual persuasion this is directed back to the vividness of human, qualitative experience rather than a more political or economic agenda.

“Sentiment analysis” was also hot trend in social media marketing in 2009 and its limitations quickly became apparent. Current systems simply cannot handle irony, sarcasm, regional differences in the usage of words and in many cases even simple negation. The We Feel Fine system is an exercise in gathering affective or sentiment data to visualise, but it avoids the pitfalls of sentiment analysis by automating only the gathering of the statements of emotion themselves, not analysis of how they relate to what they refer to. This is a classic example of well-chosen limits strengthening a project.
The problem of the relationship between qualitative (how you feel) and quantitative (how many people feel what you feel) data and how to deal with this in a non-voodoo way are avoided in We Feel Fine because of this.

Another 2009 hot trend was “big data”, the assembling of datasets that vary from many megabytes to many gigabytes in size. Datasets from regional and national governments, scientific research and freedom of information requests can be used in “data mining” to search for facts among the numbers. The We Feel Fine system is a good example of a big data dataset (and API, application programming interface, for accessing that data over the web). Unlike global temperature data it neither offers the possibility of objective accuracy nor involves any great risk if it lacks it. But it does reintroduce the human subjectivity that big data threatens to replace with numbers.

The striking thing about this is that although the We Feel Fine book is very much of the zeitgeist for 2009 the web-based system it presents started five years ago in 2005. At that time blogs were regarded by the mass media as disposable, narcissistic and somehow inauthentic. They were an unlikely subject at that time for art concerned with the authentic expression of emotion. We Feel Fine’s history, subject and results therefore both prefigure and go beyond the current state of the art in Internet social and corporate culture.

Harris and Kamvar are admirably candid in laying out the history, methodology, technology and in the case of the book’s production even the finances of their project. The code listings included in the book are tantalising glimpses into how the We Feel Fine server works, allowing a rare chance for students and artists to study such a system, and are licenced under the GPLv3. The book is under the obscure but principled Creative Commons “Founders Copyright” licence which will automatically expire the copyright on the book in twenty years time. This is all invaluable for critique and study of the project by artists, academics and anyone with an interest in art and technology, and more artists should do it.

In the FAQ and other essays contained in the book Harris and Kamvar are open about the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the We Feel Fine system. They acknowledge the limitations and demographics inherent in profiling bloggers (who are younger, wealthier and more technologically savvy than is usual). They also make a convincing case for the very real conceptual strengths of the project, discussing how the system holds up as science and statistics. And the project itself is overwhelming as an aesthetic and, strangely, somehow as a social experience.

Even if we don’t deny or question the existence or status of emotions for ideological reasons, do we know what we really feel? And even if we do know what we really feel can we really express it in a way that will be understood by others? We Feel Fine doesn’t address these questions. They are outside of its scope. Its acceptance of sentiment at face value and its mechanical (re-)production of representations of sentiment might look like the hallmarks of kitsch. But that would deny the subjectivity of the original authors of the expressions of sentiment that We Feel Fine processes. And a progressive art needs to represent the masses, not merely rulers and pop stars. Not everyone will be feeling ironic or critical on any given day. Given this, the transparency, scale and effectiveness of We Feel Fine mean that ideological objections to big data, to emotional taxonomies, or to the very idea of emotion face a problem in the project’s aesthetic and affective success rather than vice versa.

Some of the stories found while researching the posts and presented in the book are heartbreaking or uplifting, but the statistical nature of the project makes these outliers – they are rare events and can be identified as such. What comes through from page after page of casual statements of feeling is an impression of the range of human experience, or at least the range of human expression. If you can adjust to the montage format and the diagrams then the book can inspire sympathy, pity, and joy for your fellow human beings.

The book ends by considering the philosophical and spiritual meaning of feelings, how they affect our lives, and what we can do about this. The data gathered to back up this consideration makes the conclusions both persuasive (this is a paradigmatic representation of humanity) and surprising (that would be telling).

We Feel Fine faces up to the challenge of making Internet art that realistically deals with the scale of the contemporary web. It does this by tackling the millions of daily new entries in the blogosphere but crucially it retains a focus on qualitative, subjective human experience. In its engagement with multiple levels and kinds of representation, from emotional taxonomies and statistical methods to digital photography, weblogs, and data visualisation, it shows just how broad are the range of systems and modes of depiction that artists can and possibly must deal with today. And it’s a project that simply wouldn’t exist if the people who made it couldn’t code.

We Feel Fine is a persuasive and insightful portrait of the individuals that make up the blogosphere. It can be overwhelming in terms of the amount of information and in terms of the volume and strength of emotion presented, but that is part of what makes it vivid. It is a paradigmatic, realistic and persuasive depiction of the qualitative experience of individuals within networked information society.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Featured image: Photograph of a creative experiment on more intelligent modes of inhabiting the planet

Open_Sailing‘s biggest achievement is perhaps to have turned our future into an open source project. Led by a group of enthusiasts, gathered around the idea of “we don’t know what will happen, but together we can invent our future and cope”, the project puts forward a very ambitious, action-driven, experiment-led, way of thinking forward. After meeting with the founder of the project, Cesar Harada, Open_Sailing proved to be a much more complex enterprise than I originally thought.

Initially the project started by mapping threats, the idea being that threats can produce something else than fear. Indeed Cesar Harada, was decided to turn threats into design constraints. This constitutes an interesting methodology to deal with the current climate of fear. The exploitation of threat has become the standard procedure to stabilize a permanent state of emergency. Mobilising virtual threats, states acquire exceptional powers that facilitate the implementation of ever more pervasive measures of control. The current case of swine flu is the last of a long list of exercises of mass modulation of fear. War on terror is the paradigmatic one. On the other hand, and following the warnings of the Maya calendar, all sorts of popular tales for an apocalyptic 2012 have started to populate the planet.

The role of Open_Sailing is to function as a catalyst that channels all this energy into the production of a better future. In short, its role is to transform fear into hope. Certainly this functioned as a strong attractor for new collaborators and soon the team started to grow. After putting together large amounts of real-time data about all sorts of dangers such as tsunami, terrorist attacks, nuclear accidents or pandemics, it became clear that the potential safest spots on earth were mostly located at sea. That led to the idea of designing the infrastructure necessary to inhabit those spots based on the concept of ‘Open Architecture’. Fear had been successfully turned into an active force unleashing the creative process. Inspired by this initial concept the Open_Sailing team started a very intense process of scientific, technological, architectural and artistic research that resulted in a first prototype awarded at Ars Electronica: Open_Sailing_01.

“A drifting village of solid and comfortable shelters surrounded by flexible ocean farming units: fluid, pre-broken, reconfigurable, sustainable, pluggable, organic and instinctive.” [1]

This drifting village, which is about 50 metres in diameter and can host four people, is designed to respond to its environment, being able to become compact and endure severe weather conditions, and spreading out to harvest in calm situations. Open_Sailing_01 was supposed to set sail last May 2009 but mis-coordination in the production with Ars Electronica delayed the plan. In the meantime, small intermediary prototypes of different modules are being built and tested constantly, but the Open_Sailing team hopes to put together the main modules of the International_Ocean_Station for general testing by the summer 2010.

One other important thing that came across in the interview with Cesar Harada was how soon after Open_Sailing was set in motion, it became clear that the project was not only about escaping the problematics of our society. It was definitely not an idealistic utopia happening elsewhere and starting a world from scratch. Rather than an exercise of escapism, they realised that the idea of inhabiting those sites where there is no threat had become an experimental laboratory where to grasp the future. Indeed Open_Sailing is very much about finding ways to face and deal with the very problems of our world.

“Be it overpopulation, global warming or energy conflicts, we are living in a time where ‘Apocalypse’ beckons. We need to collectively invent and spread bootstrapping DIY technologies for the forthcoming challenges, not only to survive but to re-invent how we inhabit this planet.” [2]

This became particularly obvious when the team flew to Morocco to try out some live-saving structures. Between the coast of Morocco and the Canary Islands in Spain hundreds of illegal immigrants die every year at sea. A high-seas permanent shelter would provide a low cost life-saving facility for the migrants.

This particular instance is also paradigmatic of the way in which experimentation is carried within the project. Future thinking is developed through material instantiations. This very characteristic process of design and engineering disciplines gives Open_Sailing an exciting palpability, a materiality, a commitment with actualisation that accounts for its potential to bring about real change. Commitment with results drives the project away from the artistic disciplines, but the poetics of the project undeniably brings them back together. A project that in a year of development has acquired such a level of complexity necessarily had to go through a very intense and accelerated process of conceptualisation and experimentation. And there comes the figure of the enthusiast, an experimental survivalist who is willing to take a plane the morning after an idea has come up to participate in a military training testing life-saving technologies.

Even more interesting is perhaps how this enthusiasm becomes contagious and the project starts to work as a truly open source venture. Open_Sailing becomes a powerful autonomous entity that keeps bringing people in a dividing itself into labs. Each new lab engages a whole new group of contributors, with a new set of preoccupations and hopes. The project proves to be definitely not about the implementation of a master plan or utopian blue print, but an example of how open source can literally be applied to the construction of alternative worlds. Within these labs we find different experimental research projects focusing for example on mesh networking; pollution, climate and natural reserve monitoring; sustainable aquaculture in high seas; or energy autonomous systems that generate electricity through wind, sun or wave power.

Now, there is of course the problem of co-option. The research being done is a very useful material with infinite commercial and even military applications. But perhaps this is not something that compromises the success of the project. Rather, its value lies in its capacity to encourage people to co-design their own futures. It is more about joining people that want to create than attracting those that want to buy. Surely, it is the process of creation of alternative that’s been set in motion that is truly significant, even more than the technologies being produced. Furthermore, Open_Sailing manages to reverse the process of co-option, the same way it reverses the effects of threat. Collaborators turn to scientific institutions, corporations, military research, as a useful resource, and then open up the knowledge acquired. This is not a new ‘green design’ product for the consumerist society, it is a spark for a collaborative rethinking of the world.

Image: Wilfried Agricola de Cologne. All images courtesy Wilfried Agricola de Cologne

A person would think that, while watching the infrastructure of print journalism implode, or while noting the universal flight of viewers away from the television set, film makers would learn from the missteps of other mediums and make an early ally of internet distribution. But, for the most part, no, that is exactly what is not happening in film circles. Artists and film makers may put a trailer or a few movie stills up on a web page, but the film itself? Even in the age of broadband, it seems Netflix takes online distribution more seriously than curators. Fifty years after the invention of the internet, it’s still the case that screening a film online will certainly invite rejection from a festival circuit of jurists seeing premieres.

Since more than half the video I watch is now online video, my first question for artist Wilfried Agricola de Cologne was what he thought of these types of film festival policies. According to Agricola: “This is completely out of date. We live now in 2009, not in the media stone age of 1980. I think such a policy is principally wrong, since it is up to the artists/directors to choose and decide how they want to deal with their creative products.”

A media artist and film director himself, Agricola is also the founder and of the Cologne Online Film Festival, or CologneOFF, an online festival where I’ve lost more hours than I want to admit watching great art films from all over the world. Agricola describes CologneOFF as a new concept in art cinema – the networked festival – which includes a networked jury, networked contributions, networked screenings, and networked audiences. Now in its fifth year, CologneOFF takes place in the virtual and in the physical simultaneously, first, through the on-demand festival website, and second, through traditional screenings offered by cooperating partner festivals. In addition, each CologneOFF festival, from 2006 to the present, is permanently available for on-demand viewing online.

The ideas at work here are simple. If you like art cinema, you can watch some whenever and wherever you like. If you make art cinema, your avenues of distribution are becoming a bit more independent of external influences. If you are an absolute traditionalist, CologneOFF, and other festivals like it, show that programmers and filmmakers may not be able to avoid the Internet audience much longer and that barring online and interactive films from the festival circuit may not be the most forward thinking audience policy. After organizing over a hundred new media festivals, Acgricola questions the agenda of the anti-online curator: “Such a policy will not survive in the end or [it will survive] just as a fossil, since already now the best film and video artists use the Internet for their purposes, and some of them make currently big careers. Nobody honestly cares about some remaining totalitarian structures from the good old days.” Agricola notes that, as the CologneOFF continues, it creates its own rules, and follows those rules more and more.

Whatever your motives, the films are excellent, easily as engaging as the work you might see in a museum or traditional art cinema screening. Some have been shown in galleries. One example, Casey McKee’s cerebral chase film Corporate Warfare (2005), which pits two briefcase carrying, business-suited adversaries in a knock down drag out fight on the escalator to nowhere.

Since its beginnings, CologneOFF’s primary focus has been on films that examine memory and identity. As mentioned earlier, a visit to the festival website will give access to the festival’s earlier themes of identity, image and music, and art cartoons and animation. This year, under the title Taboo!, there was a special emphasis on the issue of prohibitions, the forbidden, and the transgressive.

Filmmakers Jaime Waelchi, Anna F.C. Smith, and Les Riches Douaniers responded with especially disturbing images. In Little Pleasures, Waelchi indulges herself in chewing gum to the point of drooling, choking, pain. Meanwhile, Smith uses Which Came First (2009) to present an ordinary kitchen chore as a scary and destabilizing sexual metaphor, drawing a link between taboo and the everyday household routine.

Image: Little Pleasures, Jaime Waelchi, USA (left) and Which Came First?, Anna F.C. Smith, United Kingdom (right)

There are notable works of machinima in this year’s program. If you can bear to watch, the film partnership Les Riches Douaniers remix Grand Theft Auto IV as a squishy critique of avatar indifference in the face of massive multiplayer game violence in their short film Motorized Ordeal (2009).

Watching movies as conceptually dense as these made me wonder when the online movie grew up and how it happened so fast. But when asked if this years entries were more complex than perhaps some of the straight plotted narrative entries of earlier years, director Agricola disagreed, reminding me that CologneOFF has always attracted challenging works. Often there is more worthwhile art cinema than even Agricola can present: “There were … too many excellent films submitted. Choosing Taboo! as a topic, we were hoping we would receive less submissions, but in the end we received 203 films and videos. This may … not sound [like] too much, but every work is reviewed several times before a selection is made and reviewing more than 200 films seriously represents a challenge for everybody, especially if so many good submissions come in.”

On another note, what is especially exciting is the maturing use of digital effects as an artistic medium in its own right. In Red Star (2009), Milica Rakic overwhelms history by creating a personal memoir of the past that blends archival photography, cut-up titles, and Serbian folk music. Part of the post-MTV generation, Nikesh Shukla assembled his film, The Great Identity Swindle (2008), as a video comic book that literally draws a picture of the taboos he faces as an adolescent Br-Asian. Thinking about the rules of personality led Sibylle Trickes to use video mutiples as an army of her many selves in her film cyclic islands – we and me (2009).

As digital tools move beyond the service of the seamless Hollywood effect to expressive mediums in their own right, what other cinematic forms might emerge from the digital film and the networked festival? Agricola says that technology is advancing so rapidly, he would need to be a fortune teller to predict the future of online cinema. However, he does point out that the Internet has already revolutionized the both viewer behavior and the distribution of art film: “Everybody can determine for himself where and when he wants to enter cultural contexts. I think, the physical live festival and the independent online availability complement each other, and make cultural experience for people, generally, much richer than it has been before ever. The development of cinema needs such different types of approaches, in order to be more attractive and future orientated. Restrictions are there to be overcome.”

4th-12th December ’09,
Re-opening 8th-30th January ’10

Live performance at 8pm representing a central controversy arising during the project.

Visit the blog http://http.uk.net/diwodarkmountain

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. – Uncivilisation, The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

The Dark Mountain Project is ‘a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.’ It aims 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, calls 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 presents 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 to be 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 will also feature a performance representing a central controversy arising during the project. The exhibition offers new myths and maps for future uncivilisation at HTTP Gallery.

The Exhibition features contributions by:
Alan Sondheim; Alessandro Ludovico; Andreas Jacobs; Andrei Tisma; Annie Abrahams; Antonio Dias; Antonio Roberts; Arn; Bob Catchpole; Brian Gibson; Crowe; Curt Cloninger; Dan Walwin; Dave Miller; Dion Laurent; Dougald Hine; Edward Picot; Fung-Lin Hall; Helen Varley Jamieson; Karen Blissett; James Morris; John Criscitello; J. Trautwein; Lauren A Wright; Lucille C.; Maja Kalogera; Manik; Marc Garrett; Mark Cooley; Mark Hancock; Mez Breeze; Michael Szpakowski; Neil Jenkins; Olga Panades; Pall Thayer; Peter Gomes; Pim Peterse; Renee Turner; Paulo R. C. Barros; Riccardo Mantelli; Rhea Myers; Ruth Catlow; Simon Biggs; Simon Longo; Steven Read; Stuart; Valentin J.-A.; Vittore Baroni; Wolfgang Spaeth.

This is 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.

Do It With Others at the Dark Mountain is a collaborative project by Furtherfield and The Dark Mountain Project.

+ More about The Dark Mountain Project

The Dark Mountain Project is curated by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine.

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.org’s three-year 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. HTTP Gallery is Furtherfield.org’s dedicated space for media art. Furtherfield provides platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices in art and technology. Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are supported by Arts Council England, London.

A conversation between G.H. Hovagimyan and Mark Cooley conducted through electronic mail – January 2008.

MC: Over the years, you’ve had experiences with various authorities that have tried in one way or another to censor your work. I’m interested if you could identify and comment on particular sites of censorship that exist in and around Art institutions and identify some the taboos that tend to generate negative responses from potential censors (curators, board members, sponsors, politicians, and other interested parties).

GH: The most blatant example was a piece called, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture. It was a text piece. I was going to put it in the windows of 112 Workshop (the first alternative space in New York City & the US) in 1974. Since 112 depended on grants from NYSCA and National Endowment for the Arts I was told I couldn’t do the piece because it would jeopardize their funding. I did do the piece later for another exhibition called the Manifesto Show for COLAB (an artists group I was a member of). When I first started working on the internet twenty years later in 1994 I put the piece up as a hypertext work. I have also updated it from a manifesto to an interactive textual maze http://www.thing.net/~gh/artdirect . The piece is not cute. It deals with the dark side of the American psyche. It is a meditation on the psychological states that would bring one to be an anarchist. It is a New York Punk Art piece. Punk was a rebellion against the fake hippy utopian art that was being produced at the time. That type of art is still being produced. It gets a lot of funding because it is uncontroversial.

There are of course several ways to censor artists for example the simplest is to not include the work in an exhibition or ask the artists to alter the work to make it more acceptable. This happens to me a lot in the US. Several of my artworks in particular my net.art works have sexual content. One of my first internet pieces Art Direct/ Sex Violence & Politics was always raising hackles because of the sexual content. It was not included in several major internet shows because the museums were afraid that children would come upon the images and they would be liable. In this case both the government and the institution censored the work. In France the same work was featured in a centerfold of Art Press magazine in a special issue on techno art.

People who censor are often corporations flexing their muscle. One of the pieces in Art Direct … called BKPC used Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls. At some point the isp host, *the thing* received a letter from Mattel toys demanding that the site be removed for violation of copyright. I had to get a lawyer and send them a letter saying it was fair use and for them to back off. Luckily the people at the thing were not intimidated by Mattel so the site stayed up. By the way BKPC is about interracial sex so it makes people uncomfortable or it’s titillating. When I showed the physical work in a Christmas showed called Toys/Art/Us, I was asked by the curators to make sure that children could not view the art work. I did this by mounting the works in glassine sleeves on a podium that could only be seen by standing adults. I was lucky the curator wanted to show the work and was willing to work through the problem with me. In other cases the curator would not be that imaginative and simply shy away from showing anything that was vaguely controversial.

Another case of censorship was the Whitney Art Port an online new media projects gallery. I did a piece called Cocktail Party that featured synthetic voices in conversations as if they were drunk and at a cocktail party. I was asked to remove three sequences because of their sexual content. I wanted so much to be included in this project and the curator was a friend that I altered the piece, removing the offensive parts. The curator was afraid that the corporation would stop funding the project if I offended them with my overt content.

This happens all the time to every artist and it’s quite a dilemma. If you do the work unaltered it often means that you are not ever selected again for exhibitions. But then again Michelangelo had to paint a fig leave on the Sistine Chapel.

MC: The funding issue is interesting to me and seems to come up in many of your experiences. Censorship stories, as rarely as they are covered in the news, seem to focus heavily on the ideological component of censorship and whether public money should be used to fund controversial art. I’m interested to hear more about how anxieties regarding funding (public or private) influence curatorial decisions inside art institutions. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this sort of economically determined censorship and its effects on art and public discourse around art. I’m also interested to know if these funding anxieties have worsened or changed as art institutions have switched over to the Arts management model and have made themselves so dependent on corporate sponsorship for programming?

GH: I did a large billboard piece called Hey Bozo… Use Mass Transit. It was five large billboards scattered around New York City to convince people to use mass transit. It was part of a competition put on every year by the MTA and Creative Time. I received an Honorarium of $500 and they produced the billboards. The piece caused such a stir that it was in the papers for a week straight and I was on TV on all the networks. One of the upshots was that conservatives wanted to know why public money was used to produce an artwork that insulted motorists and the other thing that happened was that Bozo the Clown tried to sue me for trademark infringement because I used the word Bozo. These are symptoms or indications of a deeper issue albeit a populist one. One the one hand you have a media figure (bozo the clown) who tries to sue anyone who uses the word Bozo. He’s got a sort of cottage industry. This is the way that corporations deal with the avant garde they can’t control. On the other hand you have mass media that tries to produce outrage in order to keep the attention of the population. This is also called delivering eyeballs and is a way to sell advertising. As you can see the main tool to attack an artist is money. either cut off funding or sue them. This is a way to stop them from getting their message out whatever that message might be. But there’s a flip side to this coin. We live in an information environment. There really is no way to stop information from coming out. It will be presented in a different venue for example the internet or in the case of art, alternative festivals, galleries etc.. So the idea of censorship is media specific or venue specific. It becomes a power game that is about who controls the venue and therefore controls the message. In this case it’s a reflection of the capitalist marketing system and art is a part of that system. But I see art as something beyond that system.

There are essentially two economies for art. One is the market for objects this includes galleries, museums, magazines and all the ancillary services of art fairs etc.. The other is the academic economy, which trains artists, curators and all the people interested in art. These systems shape what art is seen and what the content and style of the work is about. Both systems have self perpetuating mechanisms. In the market it is about the object. If you don’t make art that has a physical object you can’t be in the market. There is a component that has to do with entertainment and ticket sales in museums. This allows for installation and performance art as well as digital art and screen based art. Indeed, the economies of temporary museum spaces are a reflection of corporate manager style art.

The academic system on the other hand allows for artists who don’t necessarily fit the market to have some financial patronage by teaching. The problem is that the artist’s work and creativity is all about getting students to attend the university and their own class. This is another form of marketing.

I believe in a different type of art, an experimental, anarchic art that shakes things up and operates outside the existing art economies. In many instances this has been confused with the idea of an alternative life style that is a sort of well of inspiration for entrepreneurs looking for new products, ideas and people to sell to. Anarchic art is about something different it’s about challenging and critiquing the existing systems. Why? because I believe that art is about seeing things clearly and is one of the few areas that has freedom. That form of art becomes dangerous because it is uncontrollable. It can’t be packaged and marketed. That is why there is always a move towards censorship of radical art works.

There is also fake censorship or more precisely using outrage as a way to manipulate the art market. This is used successfully by people like Maurice Saatchi who had a show of his Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum. This show was also shown in England and there was outrage in London as well. The outrage in the US was about Cris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in a virgin mary painting. A nice piece of art that was about his African roots. The outrage in London was about a photograph that portrayed a famous criminal child murderer in England. The public and the press demanded the works be “censored.” The works themselves went up in monetary value because of the outrage. The position is that of an artist that uses an epatez de bourgeois position in their art. This reinforces the patron’s sense of being better than the masses. It is an elitist position. I happen to like the art works but the content of the pieces are standard for the art world. The Ofili piece is multiculturalism and the other work is punk. Both styles were first presented in the late 1970’s and I view these latest pieces as stylistically conservative.

As you can see the notion of censorship is more of an unfulfilled demand by an outraged person in the street than any sort of actuality when it comes to the marketing of objects. Those works that are actually censored one never sees or hears about.

MC: I’m interested in what you call “fake censorship” or the use of public and media outrage as a marketing tactic. I’m reminded of an article – http://rtmark.com/rockwell.html – by Jackie Stevens concerning “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” a 2000 Exit Art show concerning biotechnology. The article points out that, though the show included some very hard hitting criticisms of the biotech industry, it was nevertheless sponsored by biotech companies – companies that would have much to lose if consumers in the U.S. had the same sorts of concerns about biotechnology as some of the artists in the show. The obvious question of why would the biotech industry sponsor exhibitions that are openly critical of the industry’s practices is answered with the help of interviews with the chief biotech investor behind the show. Stevens writes, “The reason is simple: art about biotechnology, especially with a critical edge, serves to reassure viewers that serious concerns are being addressed. Even more importantly, biotech-themed art implicitly conveys the sense that gene manipulation is a “fact on the ground,” something that serious artists are considering because it is here to stay. Grotesque and perverse visuals only help to acclimate the public to this new reality.” I am also reminded of a transcript I used in a piece once in which a Sara Lee Corporation executive, speaking of the corporation’s “gifts” of impressionist art to the Art Institute of Chicago, stated, “Sara Lee’s art collection has made a statement – a quality statement – about our company. Art is all about excellence and vision and striving for perfection – the same standards that we uphold for our portfolio of leading brands. We are quite certain that the ‘brand names’ of Monet, Renoir and Degas have been a great complement to Sara Lee and have become icons of excellence that reflect our approach to doing business.” It seems that the mythology of fine art or the aura produced around fine art itself (namely, mythologies concerning artists being prophetic or ahead of their time, that art is about transcendence, universals, timelessness and so on) is a very useful context for the deployment of marketing schemes. Cases like these I’ve mentioned could almost make one nostalgic for old school censorship – the kind in which an authority comes down on an artist for producing work that is perceived as being offensive. At least in these scenarios the content is working – the work is having an effect. All this raises a couple of questions that I’d like to know your thoughts on. Firstly, do you agree with Stevens’ assessment that the content of an artwork as intended by the artist can be eclipsed (effectively censored) by the curator, sponsors and institutional framework surrounding the show and fine art itself, and if so, should artists be trained (in academia and elsewhere) to be able to anticipate how their work is being used in a larger context and be prepared to engage in content production beyond the frame (so to speak)? What are the lessons you have learned over the years in these regards?

GH: This goes back to Wittgenstein’s Dictum, “the meaning of a word is its’ meaning,” and “The meaning of a word is its’ use.”

Look at it another way Steve Kurtz http://www.caedefensefund.org was creating some bio-art that was also political when he was arrested. The event caused the USGOV to come down hard claiming he’s a bio-terrorist. The art world has rallied around Steve and is doing what it can to stop his persecution. Steve’s artwork was in process and never exhibited so you can’t say that it was censored and yet the USGOV is trying to pin a terrorist label on him. The context here is fluid between a media occurrence, freedom of speech, and forces of unreasonable paranoia. Steve and the people around him now have an ongoing performance work that is a cause celebre about free speech. In the end it doesn’t matter if anyone ever sees the actual work, the censorship and repressive activity of the USGOV is the key factor. When realpolitik comes up against art, art always loses. On another level both sides of the Steve Kurtz dilemma are winning because they are using the event to create meaning for their separate actions.

Back to your initial question which is the context created by the venue and the funders. There is always a deal struck between the funders/patrons/venues and the artists that show in the venues or accept support from the patrons. The patrons are seen as progressive and open because of their support of the arts. The artists are seen as giving their support/approval of the patron and the gallery system by participating in it. That’s the simple deal. The complex deal has to do with the content of the artwork. When the church is your patron you do religious paintings. When the Dutch merchants are your patrons you do domestic scenes. When the government is your patron you do heroic art that glorifies the government and its programs. In America the market has become the patron or more correctly corporate marketing capitalism and its technocratic bureaucrats/ managers are the patrons. The content of art reflects that reality.

However, there are many forms of art that operate outside these realities. The notion of experimental art is an art that doesn’t function in established arenas. Maybe we can call this theoretical art because it posits an art that can function outside of the normal venues set up for art.

In terms of censorship it may be more of a case of power and control. If one chooses to work in theoretical art one can expect no support from the existing patrons of the arts. This is a very fundamental struggle about who controls the meaning of art (content). Who controls the how, when and where of art? That is one of the reasons that I choose to work with the internet and digital art. The venues are much freer. There is little or no market action attached to this type of artwork. Indeed, this very interview is an artwork that uses the internet as its vehicle. I can state that it is an information/meditation that comes from the use of the networks. In this case it is an outgrowth of all the other communication artists that have come before me such as Fred Forest or, Joseph Bueys or Allan Kaprow.

MC: Earlier, you spoke of an anarchistic art practice that would function in opposition to the status quo. I’m assuming that this art practice would take on the political economic structure of an anarchist community. What might this look like? Are there examples of art subcultures that operate on anarchistic principles like anti-authoritarianism, free association, nonhierarchical organization, consensus decision making, egalitarianism, etc? I’m also interested in your estimation of online communities and new media art portals (like Rhizome.org for instance) who seem to reference some of these concepts in their mission statements yet seem to fall short in their editorial structure and policies. Perhaps, the concepts that sites like Rhizome imagine – decentralized and nonhierarchical – and indeed the internet itself seems to offer – would work in such stark contrast with what the dominant values of the fine art establishment (and our dominant political economic systems) that it becomes impossible to maintain funding, affiliations etc. Do you think the openness and opportunity for alternative systems and practices that electronic networks offer(ed) is now closing up, or do you see as much opportunity now as in the mid-to-late 90’s when it comes to networked art practice?

GH: There are many artists groups that are functioning at the moment. There is always a struggle and a dynamic where groups are involved. Rhizome has set up a sort of blog/news reporting website that has a brand name and a loose community around it. They have a mailist that functions somewhat as a place for critical discussion but the fundamental question is how does one move from discussion to action. The answer for rhizome is to be techno-centric and highlight emerging artists and technologies. They also spend a lot of time fundraising. The original project of rhizome by Mark Tribe was a simple anarchic mailist. This was also happening with nettime and thingist lists. There is one functioning now that is called [empyre] that comes out of Australia. Empyre was one of several list/communities that was featured during the documenta 6 in Kassel. I was actually involved in the discourse. My position was that I wanted to have my thoughts presented at the documenta http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=1718 .

There’s a back and forth flux on the internet that has some onerous aspects of fake digital democracy and fake creative freedom. This is web 2.0 where everyone can be creative and be content providers ala blogs and youTube etc.. This is the corporate bullshit of Facebook and Second Life. There’s an interesting piece in the Guardian about facebook that has be re-published on post.thing.net http://post.thing.net/node/1883 .

In any case, I am involved with three very vital digital art groups that have online/offline communities. One is called [PAM] http://perpetualartmachine.com – this is a video-artists community that has a physical kiosk presentation mode that is very much about non-hierarchical presentation. Another is locus sonus http://locusonus.org in France – that is an experimental sound art lab. I’ve also organized an artists group called Artists Meeting http://artistsmeeting.org that is just beginning to pick up steam. Part of what these groups are about is using the technology to create a media space for group interactions to occur. The funding model is pooling resources. I maintain the server nujus.net that Artists Meeting and locus Sonus use. The sysadmin is an engineering student in Split Croatia who is donating his services. Locus Sonus is funded by the French Cultural Ministry as an experimental lab. [PAM] got its’ start by being included in the SCOPE art fair and artists Meeting is bootstrapping it at the moment.

What these groups have in common is the notion of doing projects together rather than having an individual artists’ voice. I like to engage in both positions, that is, I do individual pieces and I do group works. Two previous projects are accessible on the web right now. One is called rantapod http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod and is a series of performance/meditations that is downloadable to ipod. The other is called Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt, which is a podcast/sound art piece. These all challenge the art market in some way because they exist and are seen by large numbers of net audiences without any artworld support whatsoever. So I can say that the internet does still function as a good venue for experimental anti-hierarchical art.

ADDENDUM

MC: In preparing this conversation for publication I noticed that in one of your initial emails to me – before we actually started the interview – you stated that you’d been censored for not using particular software or hardware in the production or display of your work. I think this ties in nicely with our discussion concerning corporate funding, but something that seems more of an issue in new media art then anything else (I can’t imagine a paint company sponsoring a show and requiring the artists to only use their brand of paint). Perhaps you have some thoughts on this.

GH: There’s a lot of net.art and digital curators who set up defining parameters for new media shows. These often focus on a piece of hardware or a type of coding as an organizing principal. This plays into or is a symptom of the computer/technology scene where there are *platform* wars such as internet explorer vs. netscape or mac vs pc. There are software wars such as Dreamweaver vs GoLive. These competitions are about dominating a market. This also happens in digital art where a group of artists insist that for example they are the only net.art artists that exist and try to corner the market with the willing help of a number of curators. Often artists working in new media believe that you must write your own code in order to be a digital artist or you must use JAVA or you must use open source software or …. You get the idea. I remember once speaking at a panel where there was a net artist who was using perl and php and Peter Sinclair and I were using Max MSP. The other artist talked only about the coding structure. Our piece used custom built software as well but we were interested in the content and the user interactions. This happens all the time where a person mistakes writing code for art or insist that digital art is only code. It’s a rather boring discussion about hardware and software.

The original interview with G.H. Hovagimyan by Mark Cooley in 2008, can be seen here: http://flawedart.net/conversations/hovagimyan

G.H. Hovagimyan – nujus.net

Mark Cooley – FlawedArt.net

Main top image is from ‘A Soapopera for Laptops- A Soapopera for iMacs – Exercises in Talking’. A collaboration between Peter Sinclair and G.H. Hovagimyan. http://nujus.net/~nujus/html/soapopNu-2.html

This interview is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported

DIWO At the Dark Mountain: 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.

Join us for the DIWO co-curation event 12-3pm at HTTP Gallery Friday 27 November 2010 and Online here http://www.livestream.com/furtherfield. Log on at noon for a 12.15 start.

Join us to view the work and discuss the concepts and approaches explored and make decisions about how the work can best be displayed in the gallery.

From the webpage you will be able see and hear what we’re doing in the gallery and contribute to the discussion via instant messaging.

If you experience any problems, email aleATfurtherfieldDOTorg.

Stanza, Ximena Alarcón, Peter Cusack, Furtherfield.org, Chris Joseph, Francisco Lopez, Katharine Norman, Aki Pasoulas, Pedro Rebelo, Ambrose Seddon

View Sound Ecologies commission by Chris Joseph.

A day of presentations, participatory workshops and informal performance around themes of urban sound, networked sound, locative media and acoustic ecology – the relationship between living beings and their environment, as mediated by sound. Featuring Furtherfield.org (Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett), and guest speakers Stanza, Peter Cusack, Ximena Alarcón and Pedro Rebelo.

The event is free, and open to anyone interested, including musicians, artists, curators, technologists; ecologically inclined thinkers, makers and doers of all kinds.

BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL

Space is limited. Please reserve your place here.

We hope to offer wireless access. If you wish to have wireless access you MUST email in advance your name, computer model and MAC address to Katharine Norman at Katharine.norman@city.ac.uk by 7 November 2009.

We invite you to contribute sound and AV media on the theme of ‘urban sound’ to VisitorsStudio for incorporation into the mix by participants on the day.

What to bring

Bring headphones to take part in the VisitorsStudio workshop.
Wear comfortable (and quiet!) clothing and shoes for the soundwalk, and be prepared for rain.

Maps and information about getting to City University London: the Performance Space and Lab are on the lower ground floor of the College Building, entrance on St John Street.

View more details of the day’s events here.

SOUND ECOLOGIES: LISTENING IN THE CITY is a partnership event funded by LCACE convened by Katharine Norman, Department of Music, City University London and Furtherfield.org

More about Participants and Presentations

Ximena Alarcón – Sounding Underground: Linking urban soundscapes via commuters memories.

Ximena’s practice-led research project studied commuter’s perceptions towards their daily life soundscape in underground public transport systems, taking the case studies of Paris and México City as counterparts of the London Underground. The results are the basis for the creation of a score that becomes an interactive user’s interface in an Internet-based sonic environment: Sounding Underground. Interactivity, understood as “Listening and Remembering”, has taken two main forms: navigation, including written feedback, on the web, and a off-line networked improvisation for groups of four commuters who used their voices to express memories. This approach strives to make commuters contributors in the creation of these environments, and furthermore performers and narrators of their commuting experience. Ximena Alarcón, born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1972, is a multimedia artist specialising in soundscape, collective memory and interactivity. She completed her PhD in Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University in 2007 with a work entitled An Interactive Sonic Environment derived from commuters’ memories of soundscape: a case study of the London Underground. For the last two years she has been expanding and implementing this work at De Montfort’s Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT), thanks to an Early Career Fellowship award given by The Leverhulme Trust. One of her objectives is to find a balance between artistic and socially based work within specific soundscapes that involve virtual and real migrations, and with people who are usually outside the artistic scene, doing so by creating narratives in new media.
Peter Cusack

Peter’s presentation will focus on the ‘Your Favourite London Sound’ project that aims to discover what Londoners find positive in their city’s soundscape, an idea that has been repeated in other world cities including Beijing and Chicago. Peter is based in London where he works as a sound artist, musician and environmental recordist with a special interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Projects move from community arts to research into the contribution of sound to our senses of place to recordings that document areas of special sonic interest, e.g. Lake Baikal, Siberia, and Xinjiang, China’s most western province. Recently involved in ‘Sound & the City’ the British Council sound art project in Beijing 2005. His current project ‘Sounds From Dangerous Places’ examines the soundscapes of sites of major environmental damage, e.g. Chernobyl, the Azerbaijan oil fields, controversial dams on the Tigris and Euphratees river systems in south east Turkey. He produced ‘Vermilion Sounds’ a monthly environmental sound program on ResonanceFM radio, London, and is a Senior Lecturer in ‘Sound Arts & Design’ at the London College of Communication. Recently appointed research fellow on the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council’s multidisciplinary ‘Positive Soundscapes Project’.As a musician he tours regularly at home and abroad. Musical collaborators include Clive Bell, Nic Collins, Alterations, Chris Cutler, Max Eastley, Annette Krebs and Viv Corringham.
Furtherfield.org – Media Art Ecologies

Furtherfield.org have worked with Katharine Norman at City University London to develop SOUND ECOLOGIES: LISTENING IN THE CITY. Furtherfield.org supports experimental practices at the intersection of art, technology and social change. They are currently working to increase opportunities for art making and appreciation, critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage.
Chris Joseph – digital writer and artist

Chris Joseph has been commissioned to provide a visual interpretation of the day’s themes (watch this space!)
Chris Joseph creates electronic literature, multimedia and interactive art, which may include text, images and video, sounds, music and reader/viewer participation. His ongoing projects include Flight Paths, a ‘networked novel’; Inanimate Alice, a series of interactive multimedia stories; and remixworx, a collaborative digital remixing community. Other projects are NRG, a bicycle-powered interactive multimedia installation around the themes of sustainable energy, and The Breathing Wall, a digital novel that responds to the reader’s breathing rate. From September 2006 until September 2008 he was the first Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies in De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Francisco Lopez – Buildings (New York)

Francisco López is a major international figure in the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he has developed an absolutely personal and iconoclastic sonic universe based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival.
Review of Buildings (New York).
Katharine Norman – Sound Ecologies

Katharine Norman composes computer and electronic music, often using documentary sound and voice, and increasingly writes texts. Her PhD (Princeton, 1993) focused on documentary sound in sound-based art and she has more recently completed a postgraduate diploma in creative writing and new media. She has various bits of sound art and music and writing on the web, and on CDs – including two solo cds: “London” (NMC label) and “Transparent things” (Metier). Increasingly, she writes about music, in particular electroacoustic and electronic music – Sounding Art: Eight Literary Excursions through Electronic Music, a book of experimental writings on recent electronic music (of many kinds and approaches) was published by Ashgate in 2004. She is currently head of the department of Music at City University London, and has previously taught at Goldsmiths (Music), Simon Fraser University (Communications) and Anglia Ruskin University (English).
Aki Pasoulas – City Soundwalk

Aki Pasoulas is a London-based composer of electroacoustic and acoustic music. He lectures at the Universities of City London, Middlesex, and the Arts London, and he is finalising his doctoral research at City University London under the supervision of Denis Smalley. Aki’s research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), investigates the listener’s experience and interpretation of time passing, and the interrelationships among timescales in electroacoustic composition. Further research interests include psychoacoustics, microsound, spatialisation, sound poetry and the use of voice in non-western musics. Aki originally studied and worked as a graphic designer, before embarking into music studies at the Open University and then at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Pedro Rebelo

Will present a talk on some recent work linking locative media with network performance. Pedro is a composer/digital artist working in electroacoustic music, digital media and installation. His approach to music making is informed by the use of improvisation and interdisciplinary structures. He has been involved in several collaborative projects with visual artists and has created a large body of work exploring the relationships between architecture and music in creating interactive performance and installation environments. Pedro conducts research in the field of digital media, interactive sound and composition. His writings reflect his approach to design and composition by articulating creative practice in a wider understanding of cultural theory. Pedro was Visiting Professor at Stanford University (2007) and the Music Chair for the 2008 International Computer Music Conference. He has been Director of Research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre and is now Director of Education at the School of Music and Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast.

Ambrose Seddon – City Soundwalk

Ambrose Seddon has a background in rock and electronic pop music. After graduating with a degree in music from Goldsmiths College, University of London, he spent a number of years teaching, while writing, producing and performing in various bands, with releases through a number of independent record labels. He completed a Masters degree in electroacoustic composition at City University, London, in 2004, and now continues his studies at City University as a PhD student, supervised by Denis Smalley. His music has been performed in concert internationally, and has been awarded 1’st prize in the Visiones Sonoras Electroacoustic Music Composition Competition, Mexico, 2006, and the European Composition Prize at the International Computer Music Conference, Copenhagen, 2007.

Stanza

Stanza’s artworks explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within context of architecture, data spaces and online environments. His presentation will focus on his online and sonic work in relation to urban and networked spaces. Stanza is a London based British artist who specializes in interactive art, networked spaces, installations and performances. His award winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world. Work has been shown at The VeniceBiennale, Tate Britain, The Victoria and Albert Museum. Recipient of Nesta Dreamtime Award, AHRC creative fellowship and numerous prizes. All his artworks can be found at www.stanza.co.uk/

EVENT SCHEDULE:

Throughout: LISTENING IN THE CITY. A visual interpretation of the day’s themes by Chris Joseph, digital artist in residence.
Performance Space Foyer

10:00-10:30 WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION
Performance Space, City University London

10:30-13:00 LISTENING IN THE CITY: PANEL PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSION
Performance Space
Artistic and research presentations by Stanza, Ximena Alarcón, Peter Cusack and Pedro Rebelo of work with locative media, urban listening, acoustic ecology and networked performance.

13:00-14:00 BUILDINGS (NEW YORK)
Performance Space
A multi-speaker diffusion of Buildings (New York) by Francisco Lopez.
Come in and out, bring your lunch, listen.

14:00-15:30 AFTERNOON WORKSHOP OR SOUNDWALK – All welcome

VISITORSSTUDIO WORKSHOP: URBAN SOUND AND VISION SCAPES
ALG04 (PC lab)
Live AV collaborative mixing led by Marc Garrett, Furtherfield.org (participants please bring headphones).
Places limited.

OR

URBAN SOUNDWALK
Commencing from Performance Space Foyer – a City Soundwalk led by Aki Pasoulas and Ambrose Seddon.

15:50-16:00 WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS

16:00 END

SOUND ECOLOGIES: LISTENING IN THE CITY
Wednesday 18 November 2009, 10am-4pm
City University London, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB

enquiries

SOUND ECOLOGIES: LISTENING IN THE CITY is a partnership event funded by LCACE convened by Katharine Norman, Department of Music, City University London and Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield.org

“Mapping CCTV around Whitehall”, 2008, is, as its name implies, a performance of mapping Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) security cameras around the UK’s parliament in London and a video record of that performance by Ambient.tv’s Manu Luksch.

Starting with a HAL 9000-like image of a CCTV lens, the video of “Mapping CCTV In Whitehall” has a glitchy techno aesthetic of sound and images with a post-MTV-Style Guide reportage feel. The first half consists of a recording of the police stop-and-search interviewing Luksch under anti-terrorism legislation, with a map of the area superimposed. The second half consists of CCTV views of the range of Camera number 40 being taped out, and of the people caught within those bounds. Words flash on the screen to identify the subjects of CCTV (….Artists! Sexy Arses!). This redeployment of the language of mass media visual persuasion opens up what we see rather than closing it down, making it a very effective encapsulation of the project’s ideas and aesthetics.

(One tiny criticism is that the video ends with a Creative Commons logo but doesn’t specify the licence. Artists, please at least give the licence URL, and do choose the copyleft BY-SA licence if you can…)

Wandering around to locate CCTV cameras may seem like a cosy techno-fetishist performance, a post-cyberpunk flaneur’s stroll around the streets of London with a pencil, an A-Z, and a tri-field meter. But the creeping authoritarianism of still-Thatcherite Britain makes it an act of protest against a specific law and a reversal of the assumptions of our seemingly unstoppable surveillance culture.

The Serious and Organized Crime and Police Act of 2005 criminalized political expression within an exclusion zone for a kilometre around Parliament Square. It is an indicator of the authoritarianism and assumption of privilege that has come to define political culture in the UK. It is too easy to become cynical in the face of such brazenly opportunistic ideology. If art can help to defamiliarise this in a playful and aesthetically rewarding way then it can help to undo that cynicism, and even more to go beyond it.

The assumption that the State needs to know where you are at all times, just in case you are a terrorist or a paedophile, but that you must not know the workings of the State, just in case you are a terrorist or a paedophile, is at odds with the idea of an open society. The area of London that Luksch has mapped is the SOCPA exclusion zone. A map of CCTV cameras is clearly useful to terrorists, and a map of the CCTV cameras near Parliament is clearly an act of dissent against the political consensus that constitutes domestic extremism. The police who interview Luksch touch on these ideas.

A political elite that is fearful both of and for its polity has retreated into managerial, authoritarian, paternalistic risk-management. That polity is conceived of, post-cold-war, not even economically, more nihilistically. This produces the very loss of freedom that it claims to protect against. The paradigm of government has become the watchful parent who is seen to be good by their watchful neighbours because they prevent their child ever straying into danger. But it is impossible to protect the population against all risk and this knowledge leads to impotent fearfulness. “Something must be done” and so security theatre, the spectacle of impossible systems and behaviours designed to reduce the perception of risk to zero, is used to reassure. Although whether the populace or the politicians are meant to be reassured it is hard to tell.

CCTV is part of that reassurance, of the spectacle of security theatre. The UK has the highest density of Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV) in the world. The average Briton is (allegedly) captured on CCTV 300 times a day and there are more cameras in the supposedly open society of the UK than in notionally communist China. Not per head, in total. The area that “Mapping CCTV around Whitehall” focusses on is ground zero for this tendency.

CCTV doesn’t solve crime, it is used to spy on legal protest and it has been placed in school classrooms and pubs.

CCTV recordings are subject to the Data Protection Act, and from 2002-2008 Manu Luksch used personal data requests under the act to obtain the CCTV recordings of her going about her business that she used to make the film “Faceless”. The videos usually had other people’s faces blotted out to protect their privacy, which gave the resulting film its science fiction plot of people starting to lose their faces. But as Luksch was making “Faceless”, the responses to her personal data requests became rarer as the authorities adjusted the balance of power back in favour of themselves.

In 2008, Luksch returned to the subject of CCTV with “Mapping CCTV around Whitehall”, this time mapping out the CCTV cameras themselves within a particular area of London over two days. On the first day she located hundreds of CCTV cameras, on the second she measured the range of the wireless broadcasts of one of them. Part performance, part land art, this has a number of artistic precedents, from the 1960s conceptual artworks that consisted of magnetic fields or patterns of heat, to Situationists strategies for recontextualising the city by navigating it using the wrong map.

Mapping unseen electromagnetic forms was a strategy of some Conceptual Art, whether Art & Language’s landscape art infrared photograph of buried hotwires under a field or gallery-based magnetic and radio-proximity devices. Contemporary artists have used RFID tags Intangible form is irresistible for post-Duchampian attempts to keep the philosophy of art about aesthetics, and for conceptualism it is a way of keeping the artwork open. But the range of a CCTV camera is both definite and, if you have access to the camera, visual. The unseen form of the limits of its observation and the transmission of what it sees tie form to power quite directly.

In “Mapping CCTV around Whitehall” these forms and their composition are part of the landscape of the city. The city is obviously an artificial environment. In contrast, nothing might seem more natural than a painting of the landscape of the countryside. But landscape painting are depictions of valuable property for the landed gentry who commissioned them. They show and by showing make real the products of the ideology of the ruling class using aesthetics. They extend the domain of taste, a novel and socio-economically exclusionary concept, to the presentation of nature as property. They are as artificial, as culturally determined and laden, as cityscapes.

The successor to landscape painting is the “land art” of the 1960s and 1970s with its photographs of walks, mud and stones. Viewed cynically, the ‘land art’ of the 1970s is less about one man’s journey through nature than it is about cheap transport and expensive large-format cameras. It is a predecessor of the logistics art of Relationalism. The Romanticism that it shares with landscape painting is for its audience, not its commissioners. As with much art, those are two separate constituencies.

Art creates visual order and visual form for the unseen ideological order and form of the ruling class. Religious icons, jet-age land art and neoliberal Relationalism all serve this function. Critical art also depicts this ideological order, ideological form, aesthetically but to make it strange and criticise its production or content rather than to promote and naturalise it.

The Situationists treated Natopolitan 1950s Paris as a landscape to be made strange through art in order to critique the ideologies that sought to capture its population. Wandering its streets using the wrong maps was a way of challenging the authority embedded in its layout by the old regime and the new order that sought to impose its own new way of looking at things. Creating rather than using a map again re-arranges an equation, not just the equation of ‘derive’ but of the mass-media mass-politics spectacle that the Situationists were so opposed to. CCTV cameras may not seem like generators of spectacle, but their footage is used to sensationalise media reports of crime and terrorism, and their presence and visibility enforces the message that we are all part of an observed spectacle.

Radical land art sounds oxymoronic. But the aesthetics projected onto a landscape can be used as links to the ideology flattered by those aesthetics. And re-arranging the terms of land art can critique that ideology, or at least expose it to critique. “Mapping CCTV around Whitehall” re-arranges the equation of land art to make art of travelling to cameras in order to map the landscape they observe. This is a kind of critical, urban, reverse land art.

George Orwell’s vision of a mediatised totalitarian society from his novel “1984” is often used as a reference point for Britain’s surveillance culture. But this can obscure as much as it illuminates. Bringing out the true, novel, problems with CCTV surveillance as the default solution to the ruling class’s perception of society’s ills is an urgent and difficult task. As CCTV is a matter of the production and control of images, it is an area that art can usefully comment on. “Mapping CCTV around Whitehall” uses the status of art to represent the dark heart of surveillance ideology. Look upon its works…

http://ambienttv.net/content/?q=mappingcctv

Public screenings include ‘Films by Manu Luksch’ at Cinema2, Centre Pompidou (2009)

Betting on Shorts (2009)
http://ambienttv.net/content/www.bettingonshorts.com

NHK Japan (Japanese National Television, 2008), LIFT (2008)

Watch the video (160 sec, mp4) online at low-res.org
http://lo-res.org/~manu/MAPPINGCCTV.mp4

Or on Vimeo
http://www.vimeo.com/3802118

Featured image: A group of Australian media artists known as Horse Bazaar produce Digital Fringe at the festival

Every year as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival (September 23rd – October 11th), a group of Australian media artists known as Horse Bazaar produces Digital Fringe. This is a nonstop digital playlist of short form video, sound, and images, some of it made by artists, some of it not, uploaded to the Digital Fringe website from around the world. Once individual entries are catalogued, the work is assembled into feeds and DVDs, and then streamed or delivered to a network of public and private locations. As expected, the festival’s general stream is sent to museums and galleries but, in an effort to commandeer every available space, Horse Bazaar also sends Digital Fringe to bars, cafes, public squares, libraries, restaurants, and pretty much any other location that will allow them in. You can see the festival online, along with an interactive map of this year’s screen locations, at the Digital Fringe website, http://digitalfringe.com.au.

According to festival co-producer Simeon Moran, an estimated half-million people saw this year’s festival which was broadcast on about 250 screens. Most of these showings were in Australia, but there were also screenings in Africa, Europe, Asia, the US, and the UK. To project at locations where there is no existing equipment, on a street or in a public building, Horse Bazaar gathers donated screens from schools, community groups, and private supporters. To project across key buildings or monuments, Horse Bazaar calls in its mobile unit, also known as the MPU. Other than that, the festival can be, and is, about anything. There’s no jury. Submissions are not restricted to a theme. There’s just a global call for work followed by a global response.

As a result, one of the most enjoyable aspects of Digital Fringe is the range of sensibilities it manages to present. Emerging artists especially stand out. Among the more lyrical of this year’s entries is Waveform (2009), by the Amsterdam based French photographer Federico Campanale. Using video shot in Finland, Campanale lays an ambient track of digital pops and clicks against a perfect, languid, 360 degree pan of a line of trees reflected in a lake at dusk. The harsh, guttural rasp of the soundtrack set against the blue infinity of the horizon forms a direct commentary on environment and endurance, and on nature’s coexistence with the manmade.

There is the moody, existential narrative The Man in His Tower (2009) from Tone Gellein of Oslo. In this video, one of those tough guy movie characters walks down the street while suffering jump cuts and odd camera angles. He ends up swinging from lampposts in a cinematic expression of an existential state of mind. Other films may be less accomplished, but are equally philosophical. For example, filmmaker Joe Tusley sent in Spud & Amp in the Barra, Part 2 (2009), a no-frills documentary about a few minutes of fishing in the Apsley Straight, Bathurst Island, NT. Maybe it’s a personal reaction, but it’s hard not to think about the big picture as, on camera, Spud reels in a huge, silver barramundi, then slits its throat.

Digital Fringe also streams sound pieces, music videos, machinima, and performance films. There is a good amount of 3D modeling and animation. Colliderscope artist Zennor Alexander and musician Fiona Soe Paing submitted Thayn Tyha Hai (2009) from New Zealand. In this work, the sun and moon follow each other across a wispy, ethereal sky that lies somewhere between dreaming and waking. If you prefer something more scientific, there is the stop-motion simulation Every Second Equals Forty Million Years (2009) by animator Gregory Crocetti of Melbourne. In just under two minutes, Crocetti uses children’s blocks to build the Tree of Life from the beginning of time to just a little while ago.

There is software art such as Turkish programmer Tahir Un’s screensaver project Concepts and Images (2007). Ãœn chooses words ending with the suffix ‘ism’ as the query strings for an internet image search. After collecting images for 90 minutes, a software program fixes a random sampling of that data set into a collage.

Another interesting aspect of Digital Fringe is its continued support of open source computing and shared culture. Artists uploading work to the Fringe website keep all rights to their projects and are able to license their work in a number of different ways. These include the traditional ‘all rights reserved’ copyright, the Creative Commons ‘some rights reserved’ license, and the completely unrestricted category of ‘public domain’. Creative Commons says that about 75 percent of the festival’s participants choose the CC license, which secures rights of ownership while allowing for mash-ups and remixes. This shows that many emerging artists are willing to distribute under non-traditional copyright provided there are a still few small protections.

Ultimately, Digital Fringe, is a festival that intends to include everyone, play everywhere, and show it all from the dreamscape of the perfect virtual environment to the underlit reality of the amateur video guy. Aside from its inspiring generosity, we get a lot of interesting experiments, the unmediated juxtaposition of the professional and the amateur, and a kind of yearly almanac of what up and coming digital media makers seem to have on their minds.

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Link: Digital Fringe Trailer.