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March 11, 2009 11:54 am

March 11, 2008: Geotracing- locative media, mobile networking

I’m starting to feel like I’m onto something as I continue to research my project. It’s amazing how one link leads to many more. Andy put me onto a couple of projects- like the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference on the geospatial web in May and things have developed from there. What’s interesting about this conference is the focus on the geo-spatial web and which considers open source projects like Tim Schaub and Chris Holmes’ Open Planning Project with the Open Geo-stack workshop and the open source Geo-server. I’m supposed to be writing my project outline for Friday, but I keep finding more and more interesting events that are happening around the world.

Regine Debatty is giving a workshop on RFID: Radio Frequency Identification next week, March 24- 27 at iMAL Centre for Digital Cultures and Technologies in Brussells. The workshop will “explore the social implications and artistic possibilities of RFID technologies to track people or objects.” I wish I could attend- both the organization and the topic look great.

Even more intersting is a Geotracing: locative media and mobile networking workshop iMAL have scheduled for September 9- 14, 2008, with Simon Pope and Just van den Broecke.

March 10, 2009 1:09 pm

March 10, 2009: the basement tapes

There are a lot of great references to basements in rock music.

I can still remember buying a bootleg version of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes on vinyl many years ago. It was a double album in a white cover- with no label- the Great White Wonder, sold in a now defunct record store on Granville Street in Vancouver in 1969- what ever happened to that album? Columbia released it a few years later as the Basement Tapes.

jc-basement-3

Then there’s the Ramones I Don’t Want To Go Down Into the Basement and of course Basement Jaxx.

Don’t get me started.

March 9, 2009 1:42 pm

March 9, 2009: Alan Peacock, External Examiner

An External Examiner Alan Peacock, Course Leader in Interactive Media and Screen Culture at the University of Hertfordshire, in Hatfield north of London was present for 30 minutes of an online tutorial in March. He teaches in a similar course in digital arts. His role as far as I can understand is to assess the Camberwell MA Digital Arts to see if it meets the MA standards. It is a peer review. He wrote that: “perhaps it is useful that digital arts is less than clearly defined… do you know the phrase ‘incanabula’? It means ‘in swaddling clothes’ it was used for about the first 50 years after Gutenberg of printed books - metaphorically ‘emerging into its own form’ - like digital arts… and the plurality of the digital - its very width means it is difficult to identify the ‘masterpieces’ or even to know them?”

Interesting thought, which I guess is proposed to make us feel like we are at the start of something new. Tutor Jonathan Kearney said something similar last year.

This seems to be part of the myth around digital arts that the tutors believe- we know digital arts is going to be big, but it is just forming and still being defined so don’t expect any clarity about what it is anytime soon. Which I guess is another way around saying that they are not sure how to assess the quality of the research we do.

March 8, 2009 1:07 pm

March 8, 2009: reflections on the Camberwell 2009 exhibition

I have just sent an email to my colleagues in the Camberwell MA Digital Arts with the following questions. I hoping to clarify the context that we will be exhibiting our work at the Wilson Road Post Graduate Research Centre this summer. These questions may be obvious to the full-time students and to those who live in London, but there are a number of assumptions that seen to be understood that are a mystery to me from my vantage point. I am hoping to make sense of this exhibition opportunity from a great distance away and trying to understand the purpose of this exhibition in the hopes that I can make a useful contribution to this exhibition process and this is my attempt to start a discussion.

I can see that Camberwell is trying to clarify its MA courses, or Visual Arts pathways as they are now called, and to better articulate the relationship between the various Colleges that form the University of the Arts London.

Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbleton- CCW have formed a strategic relationship. The Wilson Road Building is now a Post Graduate Research Centre which “brings together all taught pathways in a creative and flexible environment”. The CCW Visual Arts Masters pathways are: Book Arts, Designer-Maker, Digital Arts, Drawing, Fine Art (Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Installation and Environmental Arts), Graphic Design, Illustration, Printmaking, and Transnational Arts. That pretty much describes contemporary visual arts and design.

Here are some questions I find myself asking in relation to this exhibition:

1. What is the purpose of the exhibition?

2. What are the relationships between exhibiting artwork and exhibiting research outputs?
I think there are some major tensions between creating an aesthetic experience for a viewer and the outputs and evidence of practice based research. What does it mean for a Research Centre within an art college to transform itself into an exhibition space or ‘gallery’ for a brief, temporary period of time?

3. Why is the exhibition held at Wilson Road and not in a gallery like the South London Gallery for example?
(I would imaging that the conditions for display are fraught with compromise in a space where exhibition is not the primary function.)

4. How many MA students will be participating in this “Camberwell 2009″ exhibition? Is everyone exhibiting at Wilson Road?

5. What is the budget for this exhibition? How are funds allocated for things like publicity, printing, equipment, private view etc.?

6. What is the relationship between the various students in these various pathways- in the context of this exhibition? Have they met and has this been discussed?

7. Why is Digital Arts designing its own graphics/poster/invitation? Do each of the pathways do this? Why?

8. What is the relationship between the Chelsea and Wimbleton MA students and the Camberwell students- in relation to this exhibition? Are there exhibitions at Chelsea and Wimbleton at the same time?

9. What is the relationship between the CCW (Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbleton) College and the other Colleges- within University of the Arts London, particularly Central Saint Martins in this context? Are there collaborative discussions between students in these colleges?
(It might be interesting for example for Camberwell students to show their artwork and research at Saint Martins or Chelsea and so on.)

10. What is the relationship between Camberwell 2009 and all the other Fine Art Colleges in London, like the Slade and Goldsmiths? Is there any larger joint symposium planned to discuss the ’state of the art’ or post graduate education- for example?

March 7, 2009 2:38 pm

March 7, 2008: leaving Singapore

I’m behind in writing this week as I’m getting ready to leave the country for a week. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about writing my project summary and looking forward to the challenge. I have made some good progress this week, I just need time to reflect and write- hopefully, traveling will provide that. I’m now writing from a departure lounge at the Vancouver airport (YVR) having checked in and passes through customs.

I’ve been reading William Mitchell’s book C++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. He’s got a good, high level overview of our bodies and how we protect them from the reality of the natural environment- with clothes, automobiles and buildings, but also how porous we are- with a variety of waves, matter and energy passing through us. He then moves on to write about how we are connected through as variety of networks.

His ideas are excellent. I like how consistently he approaches each topic he’s looking at starting from the smallest and nearest and then scales out from there.

He sees humans as wireless bipeds and discusses the logic of wireless coverage starting with the smallest, lowest-powered, shortest-range systems which can only communicate over close distances- like NFC and Bluetooth-enabled devices, up to high-powered global transmission towers for radio and television broadcasting.

March 7, 2009 1:45 pm

March 7, 2008: live dynamic displays

In the research I’ve been doing around mapping, graphing and the visual representation of ideas, I keep bumping up into amazing projects which gather live information from the internet not just for information visualization, but that explore the expressive potential of information. Eric Rodenbeck at Stamen Design and live dynamic displays he did for Digg Labs and his taxi project Cabspotting for San Francisco, where you see the locations of every cab in San Francisco at a particular time are a good examples. He plotted of every cab location over a 31 day period in 2007. The result is a beautiful ghost map of the Bay area.

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s we feel fine project is another amazing project- ideosyncratic but very elegant- tracking and interpreting the feelings of bloggers everywhere. These feelings are then catagorized and listed based on frequency, gender, age, weather, location, and so on.

Moving your mouse over the screen causes the bouncing dots to cluster and clicking then selects that particular feeling- like feeling real, tells you how long ago it was posted and from where. Another click will take you to that blog. Recently posted pictures are also graphed and organized. Technically I have no idea how these projects are done, but I admire the creativity and the results are amazing representations of a very large internet community.

March 4, 2009 5:09 pm

March 4, 1975: Joel Shapiro

Joel Shapiro makes these beautiful little objects, they are small with a great material presence.

March 3, 2009 4:32 pm

March 3, 1976: Lawrence Weiner Film: A Second Quarter

Lawrence Weiner came to screen his film A Second Quarter. It was back and white with sub-titles, which made good sense given his interest in text.

secondquarter_250

March 3, 2009 1:06 pm

March 3, 2009: Art Spaces Archive Project

David Platzker, the former director of of Printed Matter who now runs Specific Object organized an great panel: Mitigating the Obvious Culture and the Search for Broader Humanity: Bridging the Gap between Us and Them. He spoke about the Art Spaces Archive Project which he started and is now housed at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. ASAP archives the history and the best practices of the Alternative Movement from 1950 to the present throughout the United States.

It sounds like a great resource- too bad the focus is so narrow. It would be great to see it expanded to include the rich history of artist run galleries in Canada going back to the mid 1970s like the Western Front in Vancouver, A Space in Toronto and Eye Level Gallery which started in 1974 in Halifax.

eyelevel

March 2, 2009 2:58 pm

March 2, 2009: Social Movement Cultures

Wednesday morning at the CAA was the best of the past three days. Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960 to Now, an exhibition curated by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee that was first shown at Exit Art in fall 2008 and is currently on at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University.

This exhibition documents the relationship between social chance and cultural production, showing evidence of social movement culture by presenting the ephemera from events, protests, grass roots movements, social projects that are more than often a small scale response to a local situation, and often happen ‘off the grid’.

In a broader sense they were asking how do we engage in the social realities that we live in and arguing for importance of social protest. They were questioning the relationship between the artworld and the larger forums of social protest and reflecting on the effectiveness of both.

European social movement groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s like Provo and Kabouters who both active in Amsterdam created real social change- like their white bicycle programme which provided for free bicycles throughou the city and were ahead of their time through these and other social and political activities.

February 28, 2009 4:57 pm

February 28, 2009: Manifesto of Possibilities

Cameron Cartiere, from Birkbeck College, University of London gave an excellent presentation at the CAA around her large research project which began in 2006 as a series of three community meetings on Public Art and Community Engagement, (May 8, 2006) at the Tate, Art Community and Urban regeneration, (May 16) at the Greater London Authority (GLA) on Art, Community and Urban Regeneration, and finally Art Activism and the Community (May 24, 2006) at the Whitechapel.

hewitt_jordan_beech

Her research into Public Art then took her to organize a wiki in 2007: Building Cultures: A Manifesto of Possibilities which explored the changing role of public art as a negotiating power. In addition to a series of public presentations to various constituencies she has printed a poster of this manifesto which she will send you on request.

February 26, 2009 12:55 pm

February 26, 2009: CAA in the City of Angels

I’m in Los Angeles for the CAA 2009 the 97th annual conference of the College Art Association. It is an interesting meeting in that it brings together what must be at least a thousand artists, art historians, curators and art administrators, along with many more hundreds of recent art school and university graduates looking for jobs within art schools and academia. It’s been called a meat market and some of those aspects are definitely there, with many schools doing interviews for faculty for the next academic year.

It is also a big part of the academic validation for art historians in particular, where presentations at conferences like this are seen as part of what is required to maintaining your stature within your field. That said this is the event that draws the big names in our field. The CAA is an American organization with all the complexity of what that means and it is clearly a different contemporary world that we are seeing described this year. What’s been interesting for me, in addition to catching up with some old friends who are here, is to see how the topics of what I think are the most interesting panels have changed since I last attended two years ago in Boston. Maybe it’s just LA, with its ongoing interest in social justice, but the most interesting panels have been on topics of cultural production outside or on the fringes of institutions and academia.

I started attending Artist Educator Innovations to hear Sanjit Sethi speaking about the California College of Arts: Center for Art and Public Life as I knew it to be a model in best practices. It was started by Suzanne Lacy in 2000 and is now co-directed by Sanjit Sethi and Anne Wettrich who also spoke.

I shifted sessions to Relocating Art and Its Public to hear Kim Yasuda from UC Santa Barbara talk about the California Institute for Research in the Arts. She draped a towel by David Shrigley over the lectern. Gregory Sholette from Queens College, City University of New York gave an excellent polemical introduction to his theory of artworld Dark Matter, discussing the invisible mass of unrecognized, unsuccessful art educated individuals who continue their practice as artists outside the sanctioned system of social production we call the art world. They form a large, shadow art world and what a huge unregulated effect they have- by being part of the art public- seeing exhibitions, buying art magazines, working in art related jobs.

He argued that as artists we have to embrace our redundancy, that we are part of a surplus economy, and with the larger world economy ‘hitting the skids’ it means it is time for us to embrace and look to artists who have coexisted for so long outside of an institutionalized art space. He ended his presentation by posing two questions- first: What do institutions want? and second given the ‘neo-liberal’ mantra that: we have to be creative, he then finally asked: what would it be to resist creativity?

February 24, 2009 12:53 pm

February 24, 2009: What Happens in Halifax

Mario Garcia Torres’ What Happens in Hailfax stays in Halifax (in 36 slides) 2004- 2006, exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale relates closely to my current research. This project recuperates a particular student exercise set in autumn 1969 for David Askevold’s Project Class by the American conceptual artist Robert Barry based on a shared secret idea common to the group.

I like that Mario Garcia Torres recuperates this project almost forty years later in a different context.

February 23, 2009 3:00 pm

February 23, 2008: Social RFID and Mapping

In October in Amsterdam, debailiemedia hosted a conference on Social RFID and Mapping Future Histories of RFID, where debates on RFID connectivity. I’m interested in th idea that RFID could be integrated with ideas of web 2.0 social networks and and exploration of the social web.

One of the key workshops was with Richard Rogers, Director of govcom.org which has designed issuecrawler software which has pulled some very interesting issue network maps. They have also designed a number of interesting applications like viagratool for assessing information politics on the web. Anne Helmond has been doing research with the Digital Methods Initiative on visualizing whether RFID imagery is “wet” or “dry”. Wet are images have something to do with people, animals and other living things. Dry means basically the technical things- interesting way to catagorize a google images search.

Last week, the GSMA’s Mobile World Congress met in Barcelona with more than 55,000 visitors- amazing numbers! Interesting to note that GPS phones linked to cameras by Sony Ericsson and Nokia. Nokia’s N96 will geotag your photos automatically. I’m wondering if this might be useful for my project. The Wired correspondent Charlie Sorrel, notes that GPS is still too much of a battery drain and suggests faux-GPS using WiFi triangulation. He also writes about all the latest phones including the Android Googlephone.

February 23, 2009 1:35 pm

February 23, 2009: silent critque

We were asked to propose several questions for a presentation of our artworks for a critique from our colleagues. We were to each post our questions in advance.

My questions for this critique are as follows:
1. Can a text heavy website be compelling enough as an artwork for the viewer to take the time needed to reflect on the content?
• Here I was considering whether my colleagues felt that the viewer would take the time required to give my nonsite project a close read.
2. How does this website which can be read anywhere at anytime online relate to an exhibition.
• Here I was reflecting on the difficulty of considering exhibiting a website within the context of an exhibition.
3. How would one present a website appropriately in the context of a large group exhibition- in this case the Camberwell 2009 exhibition?
• This question is self evident.
4. Do you think there should be some particular ‘visual’ aspect or manifestation to this project- beyond the website, for an exhibition?
• Here I was wondering if my colleagues felt that the viewer needed some kind of visual hook within the context of the Camberwell 2009 Summer exhibition in order to consider actually viewing my nonsite project.

I wish I could say that I received thoughtful and considered responses and feedback to my four questions, but sadly I did not.

February 22, 2009 9:20 pm

February 22, 2008: GPS Drawing

I’ve had a productive morning researching various leads developed out of GPS drawing. Jeremy Wood and Hugh Prior seem to have received quite a bit of attention for what they’ve been up to, which is great. There’s a great link to an article in Made magazine for how to make a GPS drawing. I wish I was more interested in some of the drawings they’ve produced, most are quite banal- like the Brighton Elephant. However, Jeremy Wood’s map GPS Tracks Over London is very beautiful.

Somehow I got a reference to Timo Arnall, a designer based out of Oslo, and his blog elasticspace opened up some exciting ideas for me about Near Field Communications (NFC) which links RFID objects with mobile telephones. He links to a mapping RFID project. The weblog for this project is Touch, which features link to a research project the Lisa Smith is working on out of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

February 20, 2009 6:17 pm

February 20, 2008: GPS drawing and mapping

While I was doing some reseach on GPS systems, I found that there is a Global Positioning System Drawing Project called Mapping the Imagination on at the Victoria & Albert Museum in the Julian and Robert Breckman Prints and Drawings Gallery

February 20, 2009 8:54 am

February 20, 2009: MA Research at Camberwell

Next week we have set up a critique situation with the other MA Digital Arts students currently at Camberwell. I don’t really have a sense of who most of the other students outside our group are. I’ve been in touch with Zai Tang and Simon Ball briefly via email and they both seem great- enthusiastic and committed to what they’re doing.

I realized this morning that one of the complexities of most research is that it tends to be collaborative and carried out by small groups of people with similar interests or who embark on that research based on common concerns. However what seems to have happened at Camberwell now, at this point in this semester is that this idea of artist as researcher, seems to have fallen away and shifted radically to artist as exhibitor. We are all now focusing on the large Camberwell 2009 exhibition which will be mounted this summer to open July 7, 2009.

Research is a more speculative endeavour. Making results public and disseminating research is not usually dependent on an external timeline like this group exhibition. There’s a contradiction there. I guess you could also argue that research doesn’t neatly fit into the one or two year timeline of a MA with units and learning outcomes either.

What seems to have fallen by the wayside within this Camberwell program is the original research paradigm and the questions that were asked when we applied for this MA. What were our research questions- what are we proposing to discover or explore; what is the context- what work, both theoretical and practical, relates to our projects; what will our methodologies be- what methods will we employ to research our projects; and finally what resources will we need- what equipment, facilities and expertise will we require to carry out our research?

Instead these larger research questions are being replaced with the exigencies of a large group exhibition- we need a 500 word artist’s statement to accompany our work and figure out the technical requirements from our work.

I’m not sure how to address this question with my colleagues and fellow students. What is the real purpose of this Camberwell 2009 summer exhibition as it relates to our various research projects?

February 18, 2009 7:34 pm

February 18, 2009: What was NSCAD?NSCAD

Reading Marc Augé’s Non-Sites has been great in that it has made me reflect on what I believe were the qualities that made the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design a place. What was NSCAD?

I have written earlier that I was there ‘back in the day’, but what does that mean? NSCAD back in the day was mythic. It was a place, but it was also an idea- that you could create an art school in a small town in a province on the east coast of Canada than could have an impact on the world of contemporary art. What an amazing proposition!

You need a hang-out, a centre where people can meet- at NSCAD in the 1970s it was the library.

February 17, 2009 1:26 pm

February 17, 1976: Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager presents himself as a very traditional artist. I liked him and his work immediately. I appreciate his dry sense of humour. He’s older than I thought, but once he started showing his work his age makes sense. I knew him as this mythic artworld carpenter who fabricated Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 Bedroom Ensemble. He didn’t talk about that.

He showed a brief, twenty year chronological retrospective of his work starting in the late 50’s. The work changed as he received more recognition and acclaim and began showing with Leo Castelli. The architectural drawings on these textured grounds, and the swirly formica sculptures that look like they should be paintings, all of which have these elaborate oversized frames incorporated as part of the works seem smart.

richard-artschwager

I’m particularly struck by these small lozenge shaped objects that he first showed for the opening of PS1 in 1971. I love the idea that he can place them anywhere, they were installed in various ‘non’ locations throughout the building.

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