geeking out

i know that i haven't written a whole lot of blog posts about the last 4 months - i've been erratic, sporadic thanks to being boring and having my head buried in work and writing. i promise to write a little more about what i'm up to at the moment but i've just finished up as full-time geek at CIA, so here's my last post about it for a while.

i'm going to talk less about the specifics, and more about the process - that of 'resident', 'geek' and 'collaborator'.

the resident
despite the focus on remote connections, the act of 'being there' made quite a difference on the place, according to pvi collective (chief tenants) and other regular residents. my excitement and 'doing things' energy is apparently infectious. i was 'around' a lot and participated in discussions and posted things in the facebook group and talked to people and ran up and down the stairs and made coffee and laughed. from a sound perspective, my presence resonated. i think that makes a difference.

and i enjoy being that person too. my 'geek factor' is really less tied up in the technical sharpness and more about being the chatty enthusiast (steve is the proper technical geek in this project). i'm the one who gets excited at the possibility of doing things better, faster, cheaper, collaboratively or funner (word? yes it is). and whilst the concept of 'viral' is one of art in a digital era, it's hasn't got quite the same influence as live excitement. i tell you, i do a mean happy dance.




collaborator
and apart from me, as a singular person, the act of being in residence with a collaborator made a difference too - together we would work things out, discuss our projects, hypothesise about possible implications. there was a lot of show and tell - steve would show me how things worked and i would tell him how amazing it was. :) on a physical level, i would walk up and down those stairs, forget half the details of what i was discussing, but regularly end up laughing and/or being completely confused about the slightly different angle we were taking on an approach.

i think there's something necessary about the very physically human synchrosies of awkwardness, forgetfulness, laughter, confusion, boredom, procrastination, urgency and randomness. all of those things provide a noticeable difference in a building (especially in a building shared by discreet practices), that the slick, organised, efficient and logical world of digital and online-ness can gloss over. i may be talking through my arse here, but i think it's the balance between the chaos of human beings in a dynamic and the order of zeroes and ones that is going to be the sweet spot of this project.

other geeks may disagree, but i'm wonder if the great things of having geeky-nerdy-thinky-types on site would be lost if we all just organised a bunch of interactive works or applications from our behind our forums, groups, sandboxes and remote connections and just delivered them. like pizza.

to go with the metaphor, home-delivery is great, but how much more amazing is a dinner party?

the geek
there's a whole lot of fun stuff on the internet about geek culture, and the australia council go into their rationale a bit too. but want to go into why i feel the place of the geek in the arts is important. and what that place is.

one of the questions i asked of us, when we first arrived was 'why geek?': what is a geek? and how does geek thinking differ from how a philosopher, theoretician, marketing manager or mathematician might solve a problem? i think i've said before that geeks have a really strong allegiance to fun and pop culture. and collaboration and connecting between existing ideas/networks/tech. in that sense, i would argue that they are the result of post-modernism. i know, gratuitous cultural studies reference. but that's what they bring to the table. and that's the connection between tech/weirdo and art. they are absolutely interested in mashing it, fucking with it, getting excited by it and crossing barriers. whilst they may suffer in the romance department (speak for yourself - Ed), i don't know any geeks that haven't created ways that enable them to easily cross social divides.

CIA was, before the geeks arrived, a place that housed several similar, convergent and concurrent art practices, but mostly kept separate by social divides, disparate itineraries and few ways to connect easily without feeling overwhelmed.




the 'being' element of the residency, added to the action and reaction of collaboration, all under the hello kitty umbrella of geekness has started to spark and fizz in the building - residents are talking to each other, formal collaborations are happening, plans are being hatched and everyone is opening up to new and exciting possibilities of what next. i think that's pretty rockin'.


for those actually interested in how it's all going, follow #residentgeeks and @ciahq on twitter, like their facebook page.  and in a few months' time, when we open up the wiki to the general public and have a brand-new website, you'll be able to read/see more there.

instagram sycophancy

right now i'm super in love with instagram i know that for all my friends without iphones, they miss out and i miss out. yes, it's a bit annoying, but i'm still totally in love with it.

it's a brilliant sharing kinda thang and i tell you, it's like the early days of twitter where i really did have some some quiet online time with people i would like to know but don't get a chance to.

i like the fact that it's a bit hokey. and that the social side of things still needs to be sorted out. but i feel like it's the next new awesome thing.

and i feel like artists and image makers really should be bullying it more than they should.

what is it?

OK, for those who don't know, it's an iphone app that is an image-based social feed, a bit like twitter. you can take a pic from your phone and apply a stack of filters to it, give it a name, geo-tag it and upload it to the stream. other people see the stream and can 'like' your image if you want.

there's a sense of close-ness about it and it's fantastic for us arty-visual types. it reveals the visual motivations or processes for a person, and being visually motivated myself, i find that element of exchange so satisfying. 

there are a couple of artists on there who i really only know through their instagram, despite technically sharing a studio space with them. 

call to artists

frankly, i would love to see a whole lot more artists on there. not just from a 'functional' point of view of showing new works, but as an artist, i would love to see what, say, miranda july sees on a regular basis, or spiros panigirakis, or olafur eliasson. 

this is such an opportunity for artists to really grab hold of a social network and gain some cohesion or interest or involvement. 

i think it's also perfect for some of the arts organisations, especially the GLAM crew - i follow brooklyn museum on there and it's so sweet, every couple of days, to see an item that is being conserved - i got to see the Rietveld Dollhouse being restored and it was stunning.

if you were an old-fashioned, art-historian hater-type, it could be argued that it trivialises Art (note the capital), but i think a lot of people said the same thing for reading/writing about twitter. but the amount of writers i follow, and literary events i attend because of writers on twitter has grown. i hold books and heavy theory in higher esteem since finding an outlet for my text-based piffle. perhaps the same happens with instagram.

--FIXME--



it's still in the fairly early stages of being, so there are still a few pitfalls that i would like to see resolved:

- being able to organise my feed into lists - like twitter. i have a few peeps i've had to unfollow because they are prolific (which is rad) and clog up my stream (which is not).

- make the switch to multi-platform. i really miss seeing the daily perspective from a few particular people who are part of my twitter crew, but who don't have iphones (and i still manage to love them). it must be a contractual, or financial reason on instagram's part, but i just wish they could open up the doors a little. maybe they need to deal with more server space first.

- find it easier to find people. it's still a 'tunnel' based social thang - i have to find people and go to their 'who they follow' section and then follow a person. it's not quite so easy.

- share pics. this bit is particularly hard. i've taken to leaving a cc @user tag in a comment, which will notify that user that they've been mentioned in a comment, which leads them to that image. it would be much quicker to just be able to do something like RT/re-tweeting.

there's still something cute and secretive about it this way too (which the nerd/hipster in me kinda likes)


and even after all that, i'm still quite excited to see where this little app will head in the near future.
now, artist buddies get on it.

UPDATE: oh look, @topfife has posted something similar. waddyaknow.

geek update

it's been a while since i've written about the geeky goings-on at CIA studios. possibly because i've been so caught up in it, and because we had a couple of weeks' break there that i forgot to keep writing about it. sorry about that.

we're into the second term and are now really starting to get a rhythm with our little project - large projects are starting to take shape and the smaller ones are starting to have an effect, which is lovely.

some of these things may still make little-to-no-sense outside the bounds of the centre for interdisciplinary arts, but here's a bit about our work in progress

project socrates: the interdisciplinary arts wiki

one of the qualities of CIA that jumped out at me immediately was the importance of connections between practitioners that was facilitated by pvi and the CIA. as we were developing building each other the world, our strategic project, it became apparent that we could visualise and capitalise on the myriad of connections through using a wiki.

over the last 6 weeks, we have installed a dokuwiki wiki on our local server and begun to 'dig tunnels' connected to the building, each other and the world. 

the small picture is a helpful repository for practical information about having a residency here - network info, keys, security, emergency, maps and timelines.

the medium-sized picture is to provide a more-public place that residents can frame their practice, discuss their work and the works created as part of the residency, as well as highlighting the relationships and collaborations as part of that practice. it is also a site that unpacks the nature of the sector - information about our peers, publications, organisation and critical research.

the big picture is an interdisciplinary arts wiki that will serve the international sector. where anyone interested in interdisciplinary arts practice will come and find out more information about artists, research, practice, organisations and publications. it will be an archive for interdisciplinary arts practice across the world.

the langley screen

at CIA, there hasn't really been a place to check out what other residents are doing, researching or inspired by. we've started working on a 'channel' that uses web tech to make a navigable slide-show of works from the various places that residents post their works. 

we didn't really want to have to give people too many more places to hang out and get distracted, so we're streamlining and broadcasting on a screen in the CIA lounge. it will broadcast from residents' vimeo, twitter, instagram sites and their pages on the wiki.

the testing for that this week has been fun - playing movies on the projector and establishing the site as a space to watch stuff from. less about the tech and more about behavioural changes and 'placemaking'.

we're trying to raise some funds for CIA to be able to purchase a big screen for this project, so if you're reading this and have been wondering where to invest a lazy $1000 you've got kicking around, get in touch with the kids at CIA.

other fun stuff

-website

obviously we need to fix the website. the workflows are all out and the intergration with the blogging format of wordpress needs work. the nice thing is that steve berrick does website work with his eyes closed, so he's working on that with the pvi crew behind my back. it's great.

- the building entrance

this week i'm going to work on some not-online things related to the building. although the geek project is focused on arts in a digital era, part of being a geek is also focusing on that reference from online to real life and back again. you know - how we all love those 'no place like 127.0.0.1' mats, or '10 types of people in the world' shirts. well, i'm going to focus on the entrance of the building and making some works and installations related to CIA-aesthetic, a bit of technology and some fun things related to the residents in the building.

- stairwell cam

this is a little pet project of ours - a timelapse 1fp7s camera that is starting to capture the movement on the stairs. CIA is a two-storey studio space, with 3 studios, the CIA lounge, hub and the kitchen upstairs. the stairwell is a place that sees people out of their studios and either passing each other, or heading to the other space. it will become a fun reflection of what's going on in the building and a fun way to check out random happenings, especially when you're elsewhere.

- the isolat-o-meter

remember that crazy meter that i wanted to put in the building? well i think we're going to make it. we've started designing a combination of an iOS app, with an arduino-powered servo that turns on daily basis. it's gonna be way fun.

- movies in the lounge
we've borrowed ololo's mac mini to do some testing for the screen and in the mean time we've started showing cool movies. i've been having a jason bourne marathon. hey, so that i could get into the swing of CIA-style aesthetics! and we also checked out the arcade fire/spike jonze suburbia love fest. it's been pretty fun and has felt like the centre is active and alive.

sadly, not much time left

my role has been as a catalyst for the project, with steve berrick, who will stick around to implement the rest of the projects. i've only got 2.5 weeks left, which came around quite quickly. but, unlike the last geek project which felt unfinished after 3 months, i don't feel like i'm leaving an unfinished project behind. not only am i leaving our projects in capable hands, but the pvi crew and resident artists are all open to the things we've been doing, and i feel pretty confident that they'll continue.

i'll still keep in touch with the project occasionally, and will be coming back to perth in december to finish it all off and have a christmas party :) and i may even cross-post steve's blogs from here, so they anyone who has been following what's been happening can keep up to date.


links:
CIA studios facebook
CIA studios twitter

CIA term one

today is the last day before a two-week break for the CIA studios geeks.
steve is heading off for some paternity leave.
I'm heading back to melbourne to install a show - childbirth of a different kind.

this seems like an appropriate time to give you an update and overview of the things we've been working on to date.



even though the chair of the board suggested we focus on one deep project, we decided to stick with our matrix approach and do lots of small-ish things, with a focus on two decent-sized projects. one each, kinda.

this method was because we felt that when there are lots of new, exciting, manageable changes, it was easier to engage with the residents across a diverse range of practice, commitment, timing, finances and relationships. and, looking back on term one, i think we went with the right approach.



in the seven weeks we've been working together as geeks, we've started 14 projects, including two major projects that are ongoing:


major projects

wiki (this is my baby)
screen (this is steve's baby)

*we'll go into these next term, as we haven't really 'released' them yet





minor [but important] projects

facebook group
facebook page
resident morning teas
starting online networks (skype, posterous, instagram, vimeo)
workshops
library
geek party




works in progress
website/hosting/email
isolat-o-meter
more of those online networks

overall ideas


Building each other the world is the ethos of our project - where we're all helping to build and support each other a world of interdisciplinary awesomeness. It is a gradual, compound approach in which we're 'empowering' (for want of a far-less self-help term) the residents to focus on helping themselves, which flows into helping each other, which flows into helping the whole studio, which flows onto helping the rest of the sector.






And we also acknowledge that this 'flow' is also two-way. The sector's contribution influences the studios', which influences the residents as a whole, which influences each individual practice.


informal feedback so far is proving positive - there is definitely a sense that residents are more engaged with each other and each others' practice, they are sharing information and there is an external interest in our workshops and informations sessions.


report card



i made a little report card, even. as a nice, simple matrix-type way to get a sense of how we're tracking. is that too geeky?

each project or 'thing' we've done is on the x-axis and our 'goals' on the y-. Building Each Other and The World are the three concentric areas of interaction that is underlying our strategy. The other six items are the six points of provocation that CIA gave us when we first arrived.

like any kind of 'box-ticking', this doesn't necessarily cover quality well, or assign any kind of weight to particular projects, reflect the time spent developing them, or the value given by the residents, but it's small and petite and easy to capture quickly.

we'll be back in two weeks to start on the next stage of the project, which is to introduce the major projects to the residents, do some training, play a little more and to set up a workshop on some vital digital stuff: hosting/servers/email/websites.

it's all in a name

so, you know what else i've discovered geeks and artists have in common? naming stuff.

the title in an artwork has become synonymous with the work, even if it's Untitled, it means something. Postmodernism has seen the naming of a work as its framing, and Dale Frank takes the cake of the coolest artwork titles in all of history.

Whether you think the title should explain, perform or confuse, you have to admit that the moment in which you title an artwork is a 'thing'. It plays a part.

Talk to any geek that hasn't named his harddrives, or other electronic devices, and i'll show you a geek i outta hassle. Part of it harks back to that conceptual fun idea i was chatting about earlier. But i have a feeling that it's motivated by the same relationship with one's 'offspring'.

Naming our stuff, or our projects, or our systems makes them personal. It customises them. And it sets up a dynamic between them and us. They belong to us, and we have power over them.

I give all my devices old-fashioned ladies' names: Ethel, Mabel, Mildred, Betty. My hard drive's name is Annabelle, which is not quite so old-fashioned, but is the name i would have liked to name my daughter, if i had ever chosen to have kids. a HD is close enough.

steve, my geek partner-in-crime, names his devices after breakfast cereals.

and way back when I was an apprentice in the printing industry, one of the tradesmen used to name his drives/discs after characters from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Trinian, Zaphod, Marvin.
that opened up a whole new world for me.

see? it's all in a name.

geekender

on friday, the geeks hosted a bit of a party at cia. the geek weekend, or as @rashasman called it, the geekender. i'm not sure where the geek party comes in on this geekslist of types of house party. but it was a good party. 

it was much more fun than an artist talk (even if i do love talking) and had quite a few more people, too. the ololo kids set up some projectors and a kinect cam, we had remote/itunes dj running for party tunes, and and a table of circuit boards, tin snips and a hot glue gun for some halla geeky badgemaking goodness. i made a nice hair clip and a cute firewire badge.

the oligatory geek/nerd/dork venn diagram was up. with an accidental intentional missing segment (usually dweeb). it was pretty rad to see everyone debating what the missing segment was and taking it upon themselves to edit and expand the meaning. including some nice derogatory terms there..

when WAAPA had the building, word on the street is that there used to be some killer parties in the building, but CIA hasn't really had many here. it was a nice opportunity to get some of the residents all together, who haven't had too much of a chance to hang out. it was also for peeps who maybe knew a little bit about the studios, to come and meet some of the crew. we made the place look and feel quite different, which i think is always the best excuse for a party.

designing a super-geeky costume is the other great excuse for a party. i think we could have had waaay geekier efforts, but steve looked pretty glee with a nice blue button-up vest with red/blue/yellow stripe detail. i went meta-mad and printed some pseudo code for constructing a garment on the garment: input and output, yo.

fortunately or unfortunately, there was no ridiculous behaviour - no-one got caught shagging in the toilets or making a complete fool of themselves, but it was still kicking on at 2:30 am, which is pretty tidy i think.

thanks to everyone who came (if you read this blog) and we're planning one in about 6 months' time (at the end of the project/christmas/etc), so join the cia mailing list for updates in the mean time.

what is the role of 'geek' in art?

i'm making sure i ask myself these things a lot lately - so that i'm not just geeking out for the sake of it.

which leads me to analyse what is particular about geeks, that might connect with traits of artists.

geeks like conceptual fun

at cia we've set up a wiki. it has some practical extensions, like breadcrumbs. but we've also included awesomeness.

so what the fuck is awesomeness anyway? nothing but this; o_O.

but conceptually, the idea of extending an online space with awesomeness through a php extension? that is the mark of a geek.

but it is also not that far from the conceptual imbuing of meaning into artworks. hans haacke imbued history into a box by capturing air and keeping it - exhibiting the air from 1965.

it's nothing,really.

but both challenge the viewer to consider a site as more than just the objects in it.

cia geek week 3

we're at the next level of getting our heads around things, and we've decided that the best way to think is actually do. this may be the mark of fools, but it's worked so far, so we're going with it.

i've done quite a bit of writing this week for a new blog, and some more writing for other bits'n'pieces, so i don't know how much i can really contribute.

rather than a long wrap-up, some highlights included:

- the third afternoon tea: with about 7 of us there. much laughter, discussion and sharing of stresses. feedback is already coming in that these kind of face-to-face connections are having an impact. it sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how often 'obvious' doesn't happy.

- purchasing equipment and fun stuff for our first arduino workshop. we got sparkfun flex packs from robot gear - super helpful local peeps with next day delivery :)




- making and starting to work with my new super-high-tech critical meter (above), measuring the amount of proper thought, meaningfulness and rigour we've felt we achieved/received in the day. i've been uploading the 'results' onto instagram.


- planning our geek party. instead of doing an artist talk, which is standard for new residents, we're having a party instead. there'll be music and alcohol and people dressing up as geeks. we'll have some of our toys to show and we're setting up a bit of a geek spin-the-bottle for matching geeks with other arts organisations that said they needed geeks on board. revenge of the nerds vs rebecca black mashup. 


- some admin stuff: a nice clear schedule of works that we're making and working towards, promoting the workshop and the party.

- starting to thrash out some of the deets from our two major projects (langley and project socrates) - more on them later in the week methinks.

here are some pics to make the whole thing make a bit more fun:

geek in residence, west side.

so, i'm in perth.

i'm working at cia studios, with a bunch of amazing people, as one of their inaugural thinkers in residence supported by the geek in residence program. and yes, for those who have been paying attention, that means that i have been lucky enough to have two bites at the geek cherry. it's a bit embarrassing in a way - there are loads of amazingly smart, techy, fun, enthusiastic tech/geek-types out there who are also ripe for a job like this. but i'm grateful that it has been an excellent fit for me to be here.

usually the first thing i do on a project is blog about it. writing, as a mode of language, defines it for me and i can then, seemingly, get my head around it. thanks to a long time of it being a bit hush hush, and a few weeks of intense working, i haven't and now it's 3 weeks on and i'm writing my first post about it. i kind of don't know where to start now.

so i guess i introduce the band, first:

cia studios is a bunch of people working in interdisciplinary arts practice - performance, video, interaction, sound, online, intervention/live-art, gaming. the works. everyone is super smart, super lovely and pretty keen on doing amazing things with their practice. it's a great place to be.

it's a project of pvi collective, who are stand-out political/public/tech infiltrators with a super-cheeky spirit. hopefully i'm not being too mean to be honest and say that it was only because of their presence in the program that i was willing to put in another application. i've always been a big fan of their work and already it has been a great fit.

i'm sharing the geek thing with steve berrick, who really is the brains and awesomeness behind the whole ship. i'm just the chatty bird who wants to make a stairwell cam. he's super-smart, super chilled and been working with the ololo kids doing some great interaction design, public intervention, cheeky-making stuff for years. it could have gone either way, but as it turns out, steve and i are a killer team [this is where i should link to his post that competely discredits that, right].


where we're headed: testing testing

cia have really encouraged us to think broadly and wackily, but gave us a great structure in the beginning with some clear goals (which we've called the six pillars of awesomeness). i spent the first week without steve, getting my head around the place, introducing myself to residents, asking questions, playing with coloured foam and planning a strategy session with the board (those things were not mutually exclusive).

i think i came up with 50 possible things to do in that time. i may have dug us a grave.

in the last two weeks we've done some pinning down and some knitting together. i put my best matrix/spreadsheet knickers on and set about categorising and sorting and fleshing out all the ideas, how they fit into cia goals, our goals, financial holes and measuring possibilities.

we've started testing types of channels, ways of connection, different tools and reasons for living. we're starting groups to test administrator models, sending out hashtags to see what comes back and what cross-references, we started new weird accounts searched with some painful keywords (i put 'random tv' into google. not a good idea before 10am). so now i'm planning some wacky chat roulette art night, just to see if that works too. we're playing with different colours, wires and lights and observing behaviour in the building.

new online accounts/action this week alone include facebook, twitter, soundcloud, vimeo, flickr, wordpress, instagram, listgeeks, github, delicious and words with friends (that's internal comms only, right).

and for a digital project, we've done a fair amount of paper-based muckin' around and planning face-to-face contact. we've started an afternoon tea, i've made a paper meter diagram, we're planning a bangin' house party. and we're going to run a couple of cool workshops - which i'll post about closer to the date and once we've got some rad flyer.

next: setting the clock

the next task will also be about giving ourselves some key dates to work towards and a nice calendar because i head off at the beginning of august, leaving steve with a pile of half-finished projects and a newborn.

- -  er. maybe i should rephrase that - steve and his partner are having a baby, which will be born very soon, and by the time i leave, he will be focusing on being a new dad. and some of our projects to deal with.
i'm not going to be starting projects, getting pregnant and leaving steve with my baby. that would be weird. and wrong.

our aim and approach

it's still open, but our little internal slogan for the project is building each other the world. it is actually three areas of focus for our project, strung together in a lovely sentence that underlies our desire for technology to help everyone help everyone make interdisciplinary arts practice great and amazing and reachable.

and probably because we are geeks with a healthy level of gen x/y nostalgia, and not business consultants with intense degrees in economics, our approach to the project is firmly rooted in fun and barrier-reduction.
we know it's kind of the 'cool' thing to do in certain circles but we don't care. we're working on fun and cute and totally bodacious ways to cross some of those boring and complacent barriers to time, money and cynicism. and hell, if you can't have fun at the cia, where in hell can you have fun?

until next week..





















*cross-posted at http://www.residentgeeks.net/