I was pretty relaxed when i went to bed on monday night, if not with a head full of code and programming and interactivity mush (like i said, i'm totally novice and still have to bend my head in new ways about this stuff a lot).
But do you think i slept well?? no. some squeaky noise kept going all night - woke me up enough to bother me and i got up this morning with a headache. Not a good start to the day in anyone's books.
Today's account will be in point form, in keeping with its tone:
- Schlepped to Jaycar to get aligator clips (found bonus set of wireless digital headphones to hack into - the most expensive chip i've bought so far.
- Almost back at uni, I realised that i left my phone and sunglasses at the hotel. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
All that smugness from yesterday's sense of accomplishment: down the gurgler.
- Found missing arduino and raced into class. thankfully I presented at the end of the lesson, so had time to deal with my lacking caffeine levels.
Surprisingly, after that the day impoved.
Chatting to second years was fun - some of them are feeling so overwhelmed with electronics.
Which i can relate to.
I passed on some valuable information I received as a student from one Philip Wilson, who was a third-year to my second. Phil said: use second year to experiment. At no other time will you have access to the kind of material and studio that you do now. Plus you have leeway. In first year, you don't get time to do anything, third year, you have to focus on your project, but second year - go nuts. (And i did.). Actually, the second year spirit underlies a lot of my practice nowdays, so it was nice to revisit that important moment in my learning.
I had some beautiful conversations with a couple of students who were keen to chat either about coding environments, or about how to 'get out there'. it was so lovely to pass on 'how to be keen'.
During lunch i pulled apart my super-expensive transmitter, excitement plus! i realised i must have been learning something about how circuits and electronics work 'cos i ascertain what was important and what what wasn't. I don't quite know, yet, how to make it interact with an arduino board, or control it yet, but hopefully i will.
After talking to the second class of second years, who weren't quite as interested in what i had to say, i raced over to Bldg 25 to join the faculty of creative arts for an afternoon tea. whilst not quite as rad as CIA's morning teas, it was pretty special anyway. great cake, nice to be introduced and chatted briefly with some music teachers. yay.
Back to Innovation Campus to spend 3.5 hours not getting anywhere with my arduino. I managed to hamfist a soldering job and bust my lilypad development board. huzzah. i just wanted to set up a script so that i could test the flex sensor, and set up and if/else statement to write to digital, so that when the flex sensor flexes up to a point, the light goes on. and anything over or under that, it goes off. no luck. nada. zip.
i gave up, ran for the train (again) and spent the rest of the trip writing up these blogs.
I spent most of it on the main campus in Building 25 - i started off sorting out some problems with my computer and setting up insurance, which was very adult of me.
-I did some other application/admin-type things;
-Uploaded the documentation from Thursday's Listening Project and
-Emailed around a call-out for participants in another one, planned for 4pm.
I caught up with Jo Law, one of the Media Arts lecturers, and whose students i'll was booked in to talk to the next day and we sorted out what I might discuss.
Then i met Robyn Douglass, the TA in the textile studio, with whom I'd booked a textile screen-printing session. I had been trying to print the lists from Listening and Being for ages - having little success at CIA.
And now i know why - i had too heavy a hand and too narrow a squeegee. Philosophy for life, really.
It was excellent to get a print refresh - i hadn't done any emulsion exposing for ages and my process was a little rusty. Now i feel like i could do it again really easily (and may do, if i get some time).
Mostly i printed tests, albeit nice-looking tests. Red ink on calico and curtain backing fabric, with varying degrees of success.
The ultimate plan one day is to print some large, long scrolls of the sounds heard on listening projects - replicating old public documents, or manifestos, or creeds. That will require a much larger screen and a large-format printer, but it can be done.
At 4pm, I started my listening project, then had a student from third-year, Jess Millman, join me.
We listened (in stereo) for 30 minutes, to the same site I did on Thursday. It was great for me to revisit the site and note the differences in the time of day and the quality of headphones i was using as a prop. In the comparison afterwards, it was quite validated to realise we heard similar sounds (the overwhelming sound of scuffing shoes) and had similar difficulties discerning large volumes of conversation. I'll upload some documentation for that later today, hopefully.
Overall, it was a good day. I had booked into a serviced apartment for the night and perhaps because i knew that i didn't have to rush back to Sydney that night, i was a lot calmer.
I set up the apartment as a mini-studio, paid the overpriced internet connection (a future rant on that later) and did a bit of work, made dinner being as resourceful as i could (boiled pasta in a salad bowl full of boiling water in the microwave) and worked on a presentation for the students.
Annoyingly, when it came time to sit down and start working on my arduino, i realised that i left the main board back at the University! Aaargh! so annoying… especially as i've been carrying it around with me for the last 4 days, working on it on the train (and maybe trying to become one with it so that i understand it better).
I really couldn't do anything more, so i did some more research, trying to find code that might fit what i want to do: use flex sensor (input) to create sound with the wave shield (output), use lilypad accelerometer (input) with arduino shield (it included an extra 4051 chip, though), and simple code for flex sensors.
When i knew that i had enough, i did what any self-respecting girl would do in such circumstances:
it's the beginning of day 3, and i'm on the phone to ITS again.
i'm sure that if i've ever really hurt anyone in this life, i'll be coming back as an ITS worker in some university. surely it has got to be the shittest job in the world. i bet mark zuckerberg spent half a day working it and unleashed facebook on the world as a result (i know, i've seen the social network, it's really 'cos he didn't get laid).
whilst being amongst other artists and educators and students is great for arts practice, dealing with university admin for 25% of that time has been extremely frustrating.
like, i want to cry.
i can see why artists prefer a studio/independent cell model to an institution model because simple things like accessing the internet are relatively easy. even on an overloaded multi-router tangled mess like the one that CIA had.
so far i've had a very lovely time meeting loads of great artists and teachers. i've had lots of coffee and talked quite a bit. i've met up with an honours student whose work crosses over nicely with mine and all that has been great.
i've now got two workstations set up - one in the creative arts faculty, which i am using for admin garbage and sewing, when i get to it. and i've also got a tech set-up on at the digital media centre on innovation campus, for working on my arduinos. it's in a small black-box room, with amazing sound qualities, lighting, space, great flooring and access to all kinds of gadgets and media things. projector? sure!
i met glenn anderson, the UOW geek overlord who has recreated Orac from Blake 7 with arduinos, who has kitted out these great electronics kits for everyone to use and is super nice and helpful. actually, being over at the innovation campus is very welcoming and i have a feeling i'll be spending more and more time there.
i think ideally i would like the tech setup to be amongst other students, but actually it's also nice just being around students who are there for media arts and interested in that kind of thing. and glenn and i have already compared notes for arduino shields. i might help him make a chucky-doll :)
not being able to access the internet, though, is majorly problematic. are you seeing a pattern here? amazing equipment, friendly people, infrastructure breakdown. i think this is the main drawback of the institution.
open source programming is all online, so again my work on arduinos has stalled. argh! i want to tear my hair out. luckily, i have a multi-headed practice and can find something else to work on until the admin_sys jerks send paperwork somewhere.
by the end of the two weeks here, i really wanted to have a prototype of a garment, that i could at least start to test at electrofringe and two listening projects.
at the moment, i have had coffee with sarah miller, brogan bunt, boni cairncross and lucas ihlein; lunch with derek kreckler, michelle elliot, mike leggett, lucas ihlein and brogan bunt; three blogposts, bookmarks on lilypads, the wave shield, planning diagrams, research notes and two workstations.
i'm known for my impatience, so take all of this with a grain of salt. but it's something for me to bear in mind for the future.
i think i'm going to get coffee and do a listening project. hopefully the act of listening for 30 minutes in the middle of campus will help calm me down. and at least i'll have some documentation of that, and an understanding of the university that way. perhaps i should have done this on day 1.
UPDATE: i've done a listening project - it was very successful and firmly grounded me back in my practice and on the site. i'll write about that later, and will post it on the listening to the city blog later.
i now also have net access. i'm a happy camp(us)er again.
i may be writing a bit about interaction in the next few weeks. primarily because the project i'm working on sits pretty firmly in the 'interactive' camp of arts practice. but also because i've been reading a bit about the philosophical aspects of interaction have been thinking about the dynamics of human interaction - listening, conversation and relationships.
counterintuitively, one of the first things i'm interested in unpacking a bit about is the interaction of 'goodbye'. i recently wanted to say a formal 'goodbye' to a stack of peeps in perth after spending much time in their tribe. sadly, and for a stack of reasons, not many people were able to make it, and i left wondering about the ritual of saying goodbye.
even though 'goodbye' is the end of an interaction between characters, it is also the beginning of a new interaction. it has its own set of variables and etiquette, rarely discussed in white, australian culture. the country of the laid back 'g'day' are also not so formal with their goodbyes. 'see ya'.
perhaps because i move around a lot, or because i've spent time in cultures for which the goodbye is given (linguistically and culturally) more weight, i'm finding that casual-ness a bit unsatisfying.
in schlock pseudo-psycho terms, there is no closure.
it's a metaphysical sentence that has no full stop. and when there's no punctuation, there ceases to be meaning. there also ceases to be intent. and therefore no beginning of the next interaction - the one of 'still friends, but separated by distance' or something.
in coding/system term, there's no } - no end to the instruction, which creates errors, which means you don't have an interaction. in not saying 'goodbye', one nulls and voids the interaction at all.
ok, so that's abstracting it and perhaps creating an analogy that simplifies things too much - human interactions are far more complex than a missing }, / or . but i do wonder if we lack consideration of the deeper sides to human interaction protocol (HIP) in the same way as we now do our other forms of interaction.
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.
i haven't had a lot of time to blog lately - i'm trying to be very good with having time to make stuff and do my own admin, as well as come to the last 4 weeks of my intense residency.
i'm stupidly excited, feel wildly unprepared, but naive enough to be open to whatever the hell i learn. i'll probably be the least sound-specific nerd there, but i'm hoping to do some new listening and have a ball anyway.
a couple of things i'm interested in are the methods for listening to a non-urban, or even a non-earth-based space, and what the experience is of listening to the past - which is what stars are, really - (extending this idea that sounds don't disappear).
I'll try and take some decent pics too - especially because the geek-in-residence project is now heavily into HTML land and very un-photogenic. :)
i haven't been so exhausted working in ages. but it's been a fun week.
i'm working on this still-kind-secret project at cia in perth involving people and space and measurement.
yesterday we (my partner in crime, steve, and i presented to the board a bit of our methodology, some of our early findings and threw out a few questions/points of discussion about our project. which is kind of hard to describe to you guys, because it's a) still confidential and b) we're yet to properly describe it to ourselves.
but we're close.
what i can say, though, is that money is easier to achieve than time, and we're more motivated to make people go away, than we are to make them come here.
and we found that through a program of depth testing and intense focus and insight developments, complex social engagement protocols.
otherwise known as tug of war.
[pretend there's an awesome picture of the teams holding a rope here]
it was brilliant. danger zone from the top gun soundtrack played in the background, primal grunts and angry reserves of energy were drawn on.
michael, tony and kelly - the money team pulled time (steve, kate and bonnie) over the line,
in the second round: come here vs go away, it was a tough match. everyone learnt from the first round's experience, they dug heels in, yelled, encouraged each other, grit teeth and the swearing came out. at the end of it all, there was more prepulsion for go away and just not quite enough energy for come here.
there are a few cool kids' gangs that i feel like i'm part of, even though i'm not really. or not really 'there'.
probably to the point of embarrassment.
like, i'll walk in there one day and say 'hi!' to everyone, and they'll have NO idea who i am:
the design conspiracy is one of them (especially before ben terrett left) - in fact, i think i did walk in there like i was part of the crew. luckily ben was there and i could just shuffle into doing something to help out
coffee mornings was another - i would see pics and read about who was there on every friday morning at the breakfast club in soho and i felt like i was part of the crew. when i did arrive in london, of course i would rock up. even though they were mostly planners and russelldavies fanboys (sorry russell). but i had a good time and everyone was welcoming and i met people who i continue to keep in touch with in elastic ways.
slightly less chummy, but just as 'part of' was actually tate modern. although it was more because i would read TATE ETC, their members' magazine, and my friend/husband john would send me stuff from their exhibitions. and it only takes one visit to the museum i reckon and there's a physical connect.
kaotic craft kuties is another club that, when it was in full swing, i felt like i was there when i wasn't there; my friend esther's new loungeroom sunday salon, where artsy and/or farsty crew talk about the stuff they're up to, discuss themes like committment, burnout and collaboration - i get a great wrap-up of what happened at the salon, and i feel like i was almost there, which is great.
i sometimes forget that i don't work at ARUP with dan hill from city of sound or geoff manaugh at bldgblog, or rory/simon/stewart/christine from The Architects - because when i read their stuff, or listen to them on the radio, or watch them present, i feel like i could be there if time, money or qualifications were no issue.
i'm sure i'm not alone with that one - there are tonnes of advertising creative types that want to work there, i'm sure their receptionist in london gets it ALL THE TIME. and i supposed their CEO and creative directors get emails from strangers asking for advice and think 'who the fuck are you?'. annoying maybe, but then hopefully they see it as proof that they do a good job of keeping people connected to them.
it's a bit sad that there aren't many art organisations that i feel that connected to really. e-flux does a good job of making me feel at home in the art scene generally. as does artlife. but i'm yet to walk into a gallery, or arts organisation for the first time and get weird looks when i say 'hi!' like i've been there a thousand times before.
maybe i'm not trying hard enough. maybe there's something in that...
a while ago, a friend of mine sternly told me that i should watch that amazing TED video by Brene Brown on vulnerability. it took a few days, but on a cold, gloomy day in Berlin i sat in bed and watched.
i cried and i laughed. i laughed, like she said, in a knowing way 'oh god..'
and apart from hitting some personal nerves, i loved what she says about humanity's need to connect. actually i believe this need built into our cell.db - but even if it isn't, history has consistently presented to us our need for connection and the damage that is done in isolation.
having said that, when i was in berlin, it was the first time i got in touch with a level of isolation (and therefore vulnerability) that i hadn't experienced before and i thrived.
i was removed from my big group of friends, my sense of complacency about navigating public space/the shopping experience, my command of language and even the outside world for a couple of weeks (i spent a week only going downstairs to get coffee and then coming back up to the apartment).
but there was something about that 'outsiderness' that enabled me to really get to know myself, my work and my place in the world. sorry. i can't believe i just wrote that either.
what i'm trying to say is that i discovered the complexity of isolation. it turns out i needed a little something of 'removed' in order to have the space to be.
obviously, i'm a modern young lady/geek, so wasn't completely isolated. i was still checking into blogs i hang out on, twitter, facebook, e-newsletters and phone calls to people. and, to be honest, the fact that i was in germany and within a culture that doesn't reject art-making kind of helped.
cut to: perth.
isolation is a thing here.
the population is actually small (as opposed to the rhetoric of small population as excuse for poor public service. another rant), the feeling of being closer to jakarta than the canberra is palpable and unless you live within walking distance to work like i do (ha!), it takes bloody forever to get anywhere. it feels like time slows down here.
so, it's little wonder that there is a combination of intense frustration and intense production here. the artists that are here are super generous, fruitful and really focused on making work that is interesting, engaging with technology and pushing boundaries. i think there's a reason that there are more art schools in perth than in melbourne, that anyone interested in working with bio/body/electronic art comes to perth and that the state of WA was the first to implement a percent for arts scheme.
perhaps in the same way that iceland is a feminist country - there's not the overbearing bully neighbours to tell you what to do, so you just fuck it and do it anyway.
i could go on and talk about the link between isolation and space for shame, that enables people to act freely. and i could go on about space/time for contemplation too.
but the other aspect to being separated from the rest of your pack is that you feel vulnerable.
and lonely.
and there's no room for complacency.
sometimes being complacent is a wonderful thing, even for an artist.
not having to fight for your right all the time can be valuable.
how can technology and the internet and the rest of the world help meter your isolation, so that you have just the right amount of "come here and go away."
a few weeks ago, i popped over to london to take care of a few things: there were a series of excellent exhibitions on that i didn't want to miss (i'll write about them later); there were some friends i needed to touch base with; and there was a little symposium about the future to attend.
thrilling wonder stories, part II was organised by geoff from bldgblog and liam from tomorrows thoughts today at the architecture association in london.* and featured a stack of writers, gamers, interactive designers, artists and researchers talking about a whole range of fiction-based ideas about the future and its possible construct.
oh, and did i mention it was free? charlie and i were there at 10:30am, expecting a marauding mass of architects falling over themselves to be part of the discussion. turns out architects aren't quite like that.
i don't really consider myself much of a futurist - sometimes i'm disappointed when discover that i'm actually too romantic to readily cast aside old ways of behaving in favour of new innovations. but i'm really attached to the idea of innovating and changing and mixing it all up so that we don't get caught up in our stinking thinking.
and unlike my dear friend rob who thinks that kind of talk is bollocks, i do actually believe in the idea (one i think i've garnered from bldgblog or russell davies or some other awesome brain) that in aiming way forward to gain 10, with the inherent 'backdraft' of life, you can still actually gain 3.
science fiction (inc some of its design associates like buckminster fuller and pentagram), is an excellent tool for designing for the future in this way. if you get wacky and can really design for 'a galaxy far, far away' you might just unlock something that will be functional for a building that will be great for 10 years' time.
or, free from the constraints of 'must be viable', you can end up with 'could be possible' and you start to solve problems that no one has bothered to think about yet, whilst still make them believable to an audience firmly sitting in the present day. language, imagination and concept rooted in fact. ftw.
so, the day was split into 5 sessions (perhaps a little OTT, by the end of it all), but each session started to unpick different aspects of designing for the future.
i didn't really make very objective, journalist notes like rory did, so my report of the day is going to be quite subjective and perhaps influenced by where the ideas took me, rather than what was actually said. (if that isn't a caveat for sloppy reporting, misquoting and laziness, i don't know what is!)
the ideas which floated my particular boat i'm calling designing for hiding, the smell of the moon, and using changed behaviour through gaming.
designing for hiding
geoff manaugh spoke about geologists dealing with nuclear waste having to come up with a protocol to signify to future generations: DO NOT OPEN THE CAN!!. basically, there's a stack of toxic waste being drilled into the earth, which is all fine and dandy for us who can read a sign or two, or who have the means to be in communication with the culprits. but how do you build a vault to hide that garbage, with those 60,000 years in the future in mind. given that we've no concrete idea about what stonehenge, the pyramids or macchu pichu are trying to tell us - how can we expect the equivalent to understand what our 'wrong way go back' signs might mean.
not only did this particular feat of language and signification pique my interest, but the whole idea of designing for the hidden was exciting too.
everyone knows that if you want to hide something, put it in plain sight. the real outcome of a tunnel, maze or complex series of encryptions is not safekeeping, but a means of revelation, discovery and inquisition. the safe is the best kind of learning tool. it got me thinking of other ways to use this kind of design process. maybe the best way to teach young boys to read is to bury books in a well, or the hide ideas about sound behind a glass soundproof door.
the smell of the moon
now, when i told this story to my scientific photographer friend, of course i didn't have all the facts and he picked holes in it straight away (spoil sport), but the idea and the possibility of what this means still totally floated my boat.
nicola twilley presented a story about perception from the moon - astronauts on one of the apollo missions recalled the particular smell of the moon - that it was something like gunpowder. they brought back a sealed sample of the moon dust and no aspect of its chemical added up to smell anything like gunpowder. which means that the way humans smell on the moon is different to the way we smell on earth.
which of course calls into question our whole perception of life itself, but also about the possibilities for the actual science of earth and/or the moon itself. if we perceive things differently away from earth, whose to say that things aren't actually different here. and if the chemical properties are different away from the moon, whose to say that what we believe is on the moon is not completely different. like, what if we only see a desert of sand and dust and fuck-all, but
now all of this is fascinating from a philosophical point of view, but the reason i think this kind of 'what if' thinking is important is for other areas of existence. like the perception of power, or the perception of life itself (like the couldabeen arsenic-ingesting bacteria from last week).
which leads me onto...
changed behaviour through gaming
ed stern spoke about the splash damage game brink, which was an intense FPS multi-player, multi-level game with some amazing architectural and wayfinding structure inbuilt. he spoke about the need to really make things work - "a barrel needs to big enough to really hide behind and small enough to jump over". each level had varying levels of decay - this being based in a future in which war is being waged. the imagery was brilliant and the architectural possibilities for archiving and spatial experience were super exciting.
when talking about designing the next version of the game, ed said that "it would have more women in it" - highlighting the fact that v1.0 was all blokes**. which had me thinking about a game solely designed on feminist or gender equality principles - it could be a completely different world: social organisation could be different, motives and spatial organisation could be altered - imagine what that could actually look like!
and what would the kids who played that game grow up to be like, if they had already experienced a world in which women and men really were treated equal? what if gaming is used to construct alternative social dynamics in which we experience an altered perception, reinforced by haptic and sensorial memory. i mean could we equalise men and women? could the israel/palestine conflict be solved through gaming?
** although the lead character, i noticed, was an afro-carribean man - something i haven't really seen in macho gaming this far. not that i'm a gamer, per se - i have zero dexterity.
for those of you who are in melbourne; and for those of you who perhaps walk down flinders st, perhaps you've seen a little mess hanging off the edge of a building on spark lane. a little discarded knot of cable, or thread? some kind of undealt with complexity left to swing in a dark alley?
well, if you haven't, my work is installed at craft victoria, as an extension of the work in craft cubed, so check it out if you have the chance.
also, there's a closing party for the craft-based festival next week: september 4th.
the last two days of isea have been jam-packed. i'm kind of glad that i need to leave on friday night, because i suspect after more late nights tonight and tomorrow night, i'm going to need an early night in very soon.
a large chunk of yesterday was punctuated with problem-solving to do with my iphone, so i missed a bunch of excellent sessions and the rest of the electronics workshop.
however, i did get to the session i had most wanted to get to - sonic strategies. 4 speakers all talking about interaction with sound, audification, sonification, mapping and the gesture of listening/playing. rachel o'dwyer from ireland, yolande harris based in the netherlands, shintaro miyazaki based in berlin and marc chia, currently based in spain via indonesia.
both shintaro, and yolande had listening/mapping elements to their work, which related to my listening/mapping works and marc, whilst not directly related, reminded me about the need to maintain the soul of music/sound/performance and that improvisation can help maintain that.
unfortunately i missed rachel's actual presentation, but we had an excellent natter at the festival club afterwards - we both fawned over michael bull, bill smith and hearing/sound cultures publications.
alessandro ludovico moderated that session and after georg klein's fantastic 'don't call it art' intervention, i was planning to see his presentation at really existing social media in the afternoon, when technology called. so many people have said how great it was - the slides were sent to the audience's devices and they had to listen to (not watch) presentations. we also ended up having great discussion about the fanzine>blogger transfer phenomena at domicile later.
and speaking of domicile, last night i saw an unexpected, but super-awesome performance of UK performer infinite livez - think rick james vs radiohead vs beanie man vs peter gabriel. and maybe a bit of george clinton/sly stone in there. he totally played up on the black-man-soul image, but totally fucked with a stack of field-recording/relay/synth-beats stuff. so much so that there was some seriously terrible german dancing going on in the front. i fell in love a little bit.
today, whilst everyone was out and about through the ruhr region, i stayed in dortmund and wandered around the e-culture fair and the exhibitions. perfect day, actually.
i discovered that most of the e-culture labs/projects that i was interested in (and had the best conversations with) were from the netherlands/belgium. those low-landers know how to float my boat. v2, foam, dropstuff, and UP Labs - all doing great things with sound/public space/interventions/fashion or generally rockin' stuff.
the trust exhibition, on the floor above, featured a few good works, but didn't really sweep me up to suspend my belief. joyce hinterding's graphite sound drawings were completely rad and the robotic camera arm work (which followed you around the room) by seiko mikami was really unnerving, but really quite beautiful. carsten nicolai's work was an great concept and pretty intense: a light-based hypnotic work, although the placement of a sound work nearby disarmed the complete mind-bend/altered state that the work could have been. perhaps that was intentional.
unfortunately, my biggest criticism about the symposium so far has actually been about the site that is housing e-culture fair and the trust exhibition: dortmunder U-tower. it's an amazing building, with a fantastic media facade, but it's still really under construction: wires are still exposed, plaster dust is everywhere, floors shut off and whole sections still behind scaffold.
the only really great thing about this is that you're sharing the lift with workmen as you go up to the exhibition - keeps us all honest in a way. but seriously, as an audience, there are enough barriers to interacting with art, let alone media/electronic art, that physical barriers and perceived spatial barriers are kind of unhelpful, really.
/rant.
i saw two other great exhibitions: one at MKK - full of excellent sound and interactive works. the other, agenten 2.0 a student show, which surpisingly kicked arse over some of the more 'professional' works. in a shopfront, it is the document of a series of interventions, actions and situations which challenge the sleepy, comfortable, gemütlich public of dortmund out of their complacency. actually, i think i will write a whole post about just these two exhibitions, so i'll cut it short here. but if you're reading this and you're in dortmund over the next 2 days, go to lütge brückstraße and the MKK on hansastraße.
right now i'm off to go dancing. again. for the closing party of the e-culture fair. see you in the morning! [which of course was written last night, but i'm fuckin' with the time-space continuum, can't you tell]
today was the first real day of proceedings in dortmund and it started off with a bit of a fizz. i was ill, so missed out on the first session. but the second session was a good mix of festival experience: a bit of an experimental electronics workshop, some internet catch-ups and then a few presentations on media in the public space: one establishing engaging criteria for good media/public projects -
interestingly, i'm sure that advertising planners and media buyers would have similar criteria, and a valid question was raised about what differentiates these questions for art, as opposed to, say, a children's playground, etc.
one of the key ideas in that list was 'challenge'. i do see that a lot of works that are not quite successful (including my own), don't necessarily have an element of challenge to them, which is a common element within public audience.
this was furthered during lanfrance aceti's presentation on isea2011, in istanbul, a city with many challenges in public space. seemingly good public projects challenge both audience AND artist and that perhaps artists' work can become complacent without them.
after that, i went back to my circuit-bending workshop and finished fucking with a kids music instrument. i've never done anything with electronics before, so it was all new to me - but it was great fun and tomorrow i'm going to go back and insert a jack into it, so we can either amplify it, or listen to it with headphones :)
before dinner and the official opening/performance of the festival, i went to see the Heavy Matter exhibition at the Westfalen Forum. I'm a bit critical about it because quite a few exhibits were still not working and there wasn't a lot of knowledge/understanding. It also seemed a bit derivative. But then i realised that it is a student exhibition, so maybe there's a little more room for error.
I hope the other exhibitions aren't also like that, though, because so far, my first impressions of the festival are good, but still a lot of unfinishedness/unpreparedness - the U-tower is still all wires and plaster dust, i had to wait a day to get my festival pass, and then a few difficulties with the wifi too - doesn't reflect so well. but maybe it's just first day jitters.
After the official stuff, it was over to domicile club for drinks, more performances and some excellent discussion over beer. the germans do alcohol-free beer, which makes my life much more fun.
we covered the gamut of australian and german politics, feminism, gender studies, gentrification, media festivals and art in general.
this week was the the final full week of my time at west space. it has been a week of excitement, disappointment, frenetic consolidation and hope that what i've done here has made a difference in some way. my last day here is tuesday, but today is the last day i'll get to hang with all of the peeps from the space, 'cos they work part time and rarely on a monday/tuesday.
there were two major things to sort out this week: one has been resolved. one isn't yet.
web design
at the end of last week, most of the content that we could chuck into the new back-end was there. it needs editing and tweaking, but 90% of the furniture was in last week, all in preparation for wednesday's meeting with the designer/developers. the big reveal. one of the interesting things about the project from the get-go was the fact that they were going to be designing-live. they would implement their designs onto the structure of the content and alter it on the site. the equivalent of live art.
we were all pretty excited, looking forward to seeing our armature - all the events, publications, projects, outline text and the structure - would look wrapped in colours, organisation, fonts, delineation, menus, etc.
unfortunately, the meredith music festival stole our thunder. i'm not really jealous, because the meredith site is amazing and only possible through the hard work of the kids at golden grouse, but because it was a lot of work, sadly the west space site had to be relegated to static sketches of what the site would look like. sculpture had become photography (ed - lesson, lauren?).
the site will have design applied to it from next week onwards - we will see the true form soon, and be able to engage with the design/development of it, but we have to be patient. and i'll have to do so from the northern hemisphere. bittersweet.
network
when i first arrived, after we upspecced the girls with new macs, back-up, etc; i set about making a better network for them, one that would approximate a file server: all data in a single place, separate from a computer and able to be backed up.
my network skills are not as good as i would like, but i knew the concept of what was important. i enlisted the help of my inhouse geek side-kick and we came up with an ethernet plan: modem>ethernet switch> main workstation>external hard drive>back-up.
over the last 2 months, this has been working well-enough, but occasionally we couldn't save to the file, or open a file properly . no immense troubles, but enough to be annoying and problematic long term. obviously we really did need a file server, or a dedicated computer to control the traffic.
yesterday was the day in which i had to decide how to do it, so there was time to implement before i head off. i had been in contact with one of the other geeks, dan from TSO, and he was awesome, but really, we needed a fileserver*.
it was a pretty exciting day on an investigative mission:
i googled how to set up a basic mac file server - thanks to the very clear, if slightly naff, about section on macs
we had a G4 power mac spare and i used mac tracker to find out how high we could upgrade
i've obtained a copy of leopard, which has excellent file-sharing capablities, and we're going to install it and transfer the data on monday.
it's gonna work nicely! yay us!
party time
i wish i got a photo of our little party, but the gals threw a little lunch party for me to say 'cheerio' and wish me well. it was super lovely and they got me a couple of excellent books: letters to a young artist, and situation, edited by claire doherty. awesome.
next week is going to be little amounts of tidy up and then i leave these kids, hopefully with some more knowledge, a bit more confidence and a whole lot of capability to do the awesome things they do.
* i had a nice little family moment - i called my stepdad who has been in IT networks for years - and he helped me out and assured me that i wasn't as dumb at this as i felt. geek families rule.
if you had've told me 3 years ago that i would continue to create work that actively includes craft practices in spatial and media arts practice, i would probably have vomited on you. or at least told you that you had the wrong lauren brown.
but, it's true. my short time spent at craft victoria influenced me profoundly and i find myself creating works that relate to fashion, thread, wearability, patterns, measurement and insertion.
craft victoria have reinvented their winter festival program from a single textile-based festival, to one that encompasses a range of craft/making practice and aims to remind everyone that there's more to craft than bloody knitting scarves.
one of the interesting projects is called whitebox - a selection of video works that interact with the ideas, materials or gestures of craft practices. this year they also relate to the festival theme of childhood. and i'm privileged to have a video work in there: ariadne's tangled mess.
it also includes some spanky works by some of my fave peeps: dell stewart, cory archangel and holly mcnaught.
the festival opens tonight at craft victoria and there are a stack of exhibitions, commissioned works, satellite events and online programs to participate in. check out the site for all the deets.
tonight i'm heading to sydney for an education workshop as part of the geek program. i've been doing a bit of research and in talking to phip, who also works with NGV, i found out about the sa-hu-pa-her cool gaming technology art education program, floating world.
what jumped out at me first? "we put it up on the CLASS WIKI!!" (my emphasis). oh my god - i got so excited!
i think wikis are the bestest thing in the world, but i've only had a few really awesome experiences with using them. some people just don't get how they'll work. and perhaps email keeps people from really utilising them to their potential.
the interesting south crew used wetpaint really well, as did the candystripers for a couple of our projects so far. the website development part of geek program i'm doing here at west space is using basecamp, which is going well-enough, thanks to RSS and email capabilities, but could also be used a little more by peeps.
i've tried to get a few other groups using them, without success. and maybe its the interface, rather than the concept. or maybe i'm just not so good at convincing people :D
but the grade 5 kids from sydenham primary school have got a class wiki!! as the teacher said in her ning post - it meant that they could upload the links at school at the end of the day and then go home and be able to show parents what they had done for the day. and if they felt confident working on it at home, they could!
go team!
and it is the team aspect of this floating worlds project that i love the most - it just crosses a whole bunch of important learning outcomes: they're learning basic multimedia tools/techniques, they're using historical art as their source material (and they learn about the context for that art), creating stories and understanding narrative/dialogue, they translated the stories into japanese in their japanese class - excellent comprehension activity (not to mention ramming it home that technology is not just in english), plus they create the works in pairs and share the info with the class. this helps them also work problems out amongst the team and then wider to the class - information sharing and exchange 101.
i have barely written about other people's art in the last 2 months, so i apologise profusely to all the poor souls who are sick of hearing about me.
but if you could be patient, i'm off to europe next month for a super extended trip, so you'll be hearing plenty.
back to geek-town, though.
this week liquid architecture were installing in the space and i had the great opportunity to assist Lionel Marchetti (top pic) with his work. It's a beautiful installation, referencing renaissance painting, with an electronic sound/loudspeaker element to it. it's super-dramatic and really captivating to watch.
having the sound boys and girls in here was a bit exciting for me - all that techy, specky goodness. it was also interesting to see what kind of mess sound-based crew make, compared to a painting or photography crew. i noticed that these media arts kids set up little workstations for themselves with laptops, powercables and chairs as tables - like little cities that sprung up in the gallery overnight.
of course i still had a stack of other work to do after database week last week, so it's back to uploading content to the new structure for the website.
i started to get into a bit of a rhythm, which was great and only just today i feel like i'm finally making inroads into it. thankfully i have a volunteer to help me, which is super-ace, as we're trying to upload at least 6 years' worth of stuff as much as possible before go-live.
we also had a web-meeting, to reconnect after a couple of weeks without different staff members, and we really nutted out some of the structure and the language of the site: how to name the pages/sections and exactly what order they're in. we had done 80% of that work, but we did the final tweak yesterday.
i found it interesting that, as in art, most of the discussion was about language. do you go with the tried-n-true ways to describe the sections of the site? or do you have it reflect something else about the gallery? how do you keep the tone?
and how does tech language change over time? how much risk can you take with it to reflect your identity, in line with social (tech) norms? i know that when i go to sites and they've got dicky menu names or navigation words, i vomit a little. but if there's no thought in it either, i roll my eyes.
so what do the structuralists/post-structuralists say about language in technology?
when i have some time and brain space, i think i might have to investimigate a little further*. it will be interesting to see how it will influence the decisions about the site made from here on in.
setting up a new filemaker pro database for the gallery and discovering that a) there aren't that many real templates and b) not that many other arts organisations have them to share.
by the end of the day, the bulk of the database will be set up. i still have to fiddle around with how to create a good exhibition history, but otherwise, the basic stuff is covered: artists, board, funding, supporters/subscribers and volunteers.
i'm also talking with the geek peeps to find out the best way to share these templates. surely other ARIs and arts orgs could use filemaker templates set up for those kind of organisations? why waste the time i did figuring out how to customise layouts? heh.
and let's face it, database designing is kinda dull. small victories are key. as is a good soundtrack.
although it was great to concentrate on just one task for the whole week, i spent the week transferring data to the awesomeness of diplo in china. here are some of the nostalgic awesome trashy tracks - a database mix tape if you like. i would have liked to post others, but you know 'embed disabled by request' on a few put the kybosh on that.
