Plausible Artworlds - The Book
Introduction
Plausible Artworlds is a project to collect and share knowledge about alternative models of creative practice. From alternative economies and open source culture to secessions and other social experiments, Plausible Artworlds is a platform for research and participation with artworlds that present a distinctly different option from mainstream culture.
The aim of the project is to bring awareness to the potential of these artworlds as viable “cultural ecosystems” that provide both pedagogical and practical solutions to a range of emergent socio-cultural challenges. We view Plausible Artworlds as an opportunity to discuss the interdisciplinary role of artist as creative problem solver and the expanding notion of what an artworld looks and feels like.
Please accept this book, and online expanded version, as both an introduction and invitation to join us in an ongoing collaborative effort to research, discuss, and work towards new Plausible Artworlds...
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FAQ
- How many kinds of artworlds are there?
- Why do you insist on writing “artworlds” in a single word like that? And why do you always use the plural form?
- If what you say is true, then no world is “a world unto itself.” How do artworlds mesh with other lifeworlds?
- Wouldn’t it make more sense to just try and integrate the mainstream artworld rather than trying to change the world? It seems juvenile, utopian even dreamlike to try and change the artworld or any other world!
- But what you insist on dismissively calling the “mainstream artworld” is actually a very plural environment! In the name of art, one can get away with almost anything! Is that benevolence genuine or just an illusion upon which its hegemony is founded?
- What you call “plausible artworlds” is actually a description you ascribe from without. The projects you invite to take part and describe as plausible artworlds were not initially conceived as such. There would seem to be a difficulty inherent in representing an artworld when one is immanent to it.
How many kinds of artworlds are there?
“Kinds” is a nice way of putting it, since it dedramatizes the whole question of taxonomy – which is important to us since Plausible Artworlds focuses on the singularity of its “examples.” The short answer, then, is that there are as many kinds of artworlds as there are examples. However, for convenience’s sake we have drawn up an informal typology of several “kinds” of artworlds we’re interested in examining: Organizational Art; Secessions and other social experiments; art(www)orlds and open-source culture; Alternative Economies; Autonomous information production; Archiving creative culture. The list is anything but exhaustive, and it may even be less helpful than misleading given that the projects we’re looking at tend to overlap several of those “kinds” and remain ultimately undefined by any of them! Still, the list sometimes helps us be sure we are striking a balance in terms of what features of the mainstream variant people are seeking alternatives to. We deliberately avoided categorizing artworlds geographically: the artworlds we have looked at have been from all latitudes and longitudes and we’ve found as much common ground between the most far-flung as diversity amongst groups in close proximity to one another. The important thing, is that the projects actually exist, for again, this is not about “possible worlds” but all about looking at experiments exemplifying “plausible artworlds.”
Why do you insist on writing “artworlds” in a single word like that? And why do you always use the plural form?
For one thing, so that those very questions get raised!
It was Arthur Danto who first gave currency to referring to the artworld as a discrete, relatively autonomous entity requiring a single world: not the sphere of the world where art happens, but a world unto itself, with its own ontological specificity. As he puts it,
an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.
Something has happened to art that makes it different than any other walk of human activity – precisely because anything can be art without ceasing to be whatever it also happens to be. Danto again:
These days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell him so. And part of the reason for this lies in the fact that terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate art from the rest, consists in making art possible.
Of course, we don’t want to underwrite the sort of separation between the artworld (the mainstream, museum- or market driven variant) and other life worlds the way Danto does! Quite the contrary, which is why we follow sociologist Howard Becker in pluralizing the term. In his book Art Worlds (1982), Becker offers a plausible definition of that concept:
Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. Members of the art world co-ordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice and in frequently used artefacts.
Art, in other words, is not the product of those professionals of expression known as artists alone; it can emerge, be sustained and gain value only within the framework of a specific artworld. Interestingly, Becker always speaks of artworlds plural – as if there were many of them, as if others were possible, as if still more were plausible. What is a plausible, as opposed to a merely possible or just plain existent, artworld? This project stems from the desire to unleash the potentiality of the plausible, as communities and collectivities around the world seek to redefine new, more plausible artworlds. For in a sense, what could be more implausible – that is, all too dismally plausible – than today’s mainstream institutional artworld? The project is thus premised on a desire for irreducibly different plausible artworlds, not merely contrived takeoffs on existent organizational forms; a desire born not of a perceived lack or impoverishment of current models, but stemming like all genuine desire from a sense of excess of collective energies which are proactively coalescing in new artworlds.
From a philosophical perspective, it may seem a moot point to insist on the plurality of worlds. As Nelson Goodman eloquently argues in Ways of Worldmaking – following upon William James’ A Pluralistic Universe –
if there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many depends on the way of taking.
Why, then, insist on the multiplicity of worlds? Discursive strategy has something to do with it: it seems far more conceptually satisfying to insist on the multiplicity of artworlds than the overarching, all-encompassing, all-inclusive presence of a single artworld. It also seems important to stress that we are not talking about multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world; but of multiple, actual and hence plausible (albeit embryonic) worlds. But these plausible artworlds are not other-worldly: all worlds are made from bits and pieces (assemblages of symbols, words, forms, structures and still other assemblages) of existent worlds; making is remaking – though the outcomes can be incommensurately different.
If what you say is true, then no world is “a world unto itself.” How do artworlds mesh with other lifeworlds?
An artworld is a relatively autonomous, art-sustaining environment or eco-system. Outside of an artworld, art – as it is currently construed – cannot be sustained over the long term. Art can, and of course does, make forays outside of its established circuits, but it invariably returns with the booty: repatriating into the confines of the artworld the artefacts and documents it has gleaned in its expedition into the lifeworld. This is mainstream art’s predatory logic, all too reminiscent of colonialism; and though it may push back the boundaries of the artworld, it can by no means reconfigure or imagine any plausible alternatives to the status quo.
On the other hand, contrary to what the spatially determined metaphor might misleadingly suggest, an artworld is not a discrete “world” unto itself, un-tethered to the lifeworld. Spatially, these “worlds” are overlapping; there is nowhere that the lifeworld is, that the artworld cannot go.
Their distinction is systemic (or chemical, like oil and water) not geographic. As ought to be obvious to any critically minded, participant-observer, the current mainstream artworld – and the plethora of variants which, in our pluralist societies, thrive upon it and parasite its resources, providing it with a permanent pool of innovation – curtails art’s potential, impedes its unfettered development, defangs it.
Artworldly economies are inevitably bound up with other, broader economies. But plausible artworlds need not be mimetic of the restricted economy of artificial scarcity, which sustains the exchange value of art today; they may be linked to a general, open-ended economy. A plausible artworld is an inherently critical proposition, in that it embodies a questioning of the apparent self-evidences of what an artworld entails: Does an artworld imply a reputational economy? Is an artworld premised on the struggle for recognition? Is an artworld necessarily founded upon the almost self-evident “holy trinity” of objecthood, authorship and spectatorship? That is, on the model that an artist produces objects for consumption by an audience?
Though artworks, artists and audiences have become naturalized features of some artworlds, they may be entirely foreign to other, equally plausible, artworlds. An example from fiction may help bring out the unforeseeable though plausible properties of competing or parallel world orders. In his fictional essay, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Jorge Luis Borges describes “a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,” the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:
1. those that belong to the Emperor, 2. embalmed ones, 3. those that are trained, 4. suckling pigs, 5. mermaids, 6. fabulous ones, 7. stray dogs, 8. those included in the present classification, 9. those that tremble as if they were mad, 10. innumerable ones, 11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 12. others, 13. those that have just broken a flower vase, 14. those that from a long way off look like flies.
As Michel Foucault admits in his preface to The Order of Things,
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions between the Same and the Other.
This sort of artworld-shattering laughter may well prove contagious freeing us from clutches of a single world, leading not to a “Noah’s Ark” of worlds but a broader spectrum of plausible, mutually irreducible artworlds.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to just try and integrate the mainstream artworld rather than trying to change the world? It seems juvenile, utopian even dreamlike to try and change the artworld or any other world!
One has to be pretty mean-spirited to find much wrong with dreaming. But what I like best about dreams is that they put the lie to the increasingly prevalent idea that we all live in the same world – the very quintessence of contemporary ideology. Clad in the decidedly dad-reminiscent rhetorical garments of “common sense,” the one-world argument is regularly trotted out by our neoliberal realists to encourage us to fall into line, wake up to reality, singular, and give up our insistence on alternatives to the merely existent. In the name of the efficient governance of the existent order, they trivialise the fictionalising imagination – that is, the imagination that splinters and multiplies the real – as utopian dreaming, claiming that the real is one. But in making such a claim, they let the cat out of the bag – if only because everyone has that extraordinary and yet perfectly ordinary experience of dreaming. Everyone experiences the fission, fusion and overlapping of ontological landscapes that is the stuff of dreams. Dreams – however stereotyped, reassuring or troubling – are the most basic and intimate form of that world-fictionalising function that adds an “s” to the notion of a world. The possible and impossible worlds of dreams, their very plurality, should be enough for us to intuitively refuse the injunction to align our dream worlds with the so- called “real world.” And an injunction it invariably is, because the very mention of the “real world” is intrinsically congenial to the powers-that-be.
A generation ago, Herbert Marcuse sought to defend dreamspace as a placeholder if not indeed a crowbar of the imagination in the established order.
Today it is perhaps less irresponsible to develop a grounded utopia than to write off as utopian the idea of conditions and possibilities which have for a long time been perfectly attainable.
His point, I take it, is not just that other worlds are possible, but that they are this one. However, I am prepared to make a brief concession to the realists in the form of a thought experiment (realists can’t possibly like thought experiments – they fly in the face of their whole mindset, so it isn’t much of a concession anyway). Rather than talking about possible worlds, let us consider plausible ones – and not just of the conjectural variety but worlds which have actually found some inchoate form of embodiment. Which is why we love so much Miss Rockaway Armada’s self-description:
We want to be a living, kicking model of an entirely different world — one that in this case happens to float.
But what you insist on dismissively calling the “mainstream artworld” is actually a very plural environment! In the name of art, one can get away with almost anything! Is that benevolence genuine or just an illusion upon which its hegemony is founded?
It must be clear that those would-be artworlds that are merely parasitical on the mainstream artworld’s resources – its money, its reputational economy, its conventions, its acceptability – are not plausible artworlds, but merely a by-product secreted by any intelligent system (and an artworld is an intelligent system) in its attempt to shore up its legitimacy and ensure its long-term hegemony. One is never more enslaved to a system than when one imagines oneself to be free from it – and given the blasé, been-there-done-that outlook of many critical artworlders, it is staggering to observe their epistemological naiveté in overlooking the extent to which they and their contrivances are the pure product of the mainstream artworld. To imagine a substantively different artworld necessarily entails deconstructing the conceptual norms and conventions (along with the devices through which they are expressed) in order to reconstruct a plausible alternative. Such apparently self-evident conceptual institutions as objecthood, authorship, spectatorship, visibility and a host of others need to be subjected to sustained and systematic scrutiny in order to reveal them as the product of history (an inheritance of the Renaissance) rather than the natural order of all things artistic.
We assume, for instance, that art must engender expectation (see something, do something, be something) and that an artworld can be circumscribed by the horizon of expectation specific to it. But is expectation a necessary or merely an artworldly contingent feature of art? Any plausible artworld must provide for the sustenance of those who are in it. But does that necessarily entail an economy – that is, an internal order of monetary and reputational value where expenditure is ultimately commensurate with income, loss on par with profit?
What you call “plausible artworlds” is actually a description you ascribe from without. The projects you invite to take part and describe as plausible artworlds were not initially conceived as such. There would seem to be a difficulty inherent in representing an artworld when one is immanent to it.
Very true. Because of divergent value systems, it is comparatively easy for one artworld to observe another and objectify its workings. But to understand why there are artworlds, one requires empathetic, and thus to some extent participatory observation, which at the same time makes any fully integrated representation impossible – for how is one to account for one’s internal yet privileged observation point? To put it differently, no transcendent perspective is available on the artworld to which we are immanent. This paradox, which tends to further naturalise the status quo, cannot be wished away. It means that there is no outside perspective from which to observe and deconstruct the artworld.
In an incisive article, entitled “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique” drawing heavily on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, institutional-critique artist Andrea Fraser writes:
Just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. And what we do outside the field, to the extent that it remains outside, can have no effect within it. So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a ‘totally administered society,’ or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can't get outside of ourselves.
Though there is something not only frustrating but logically scandalous about this kind of discursive self-limitation, which only just allows reflecting on one's own enclosure, Fraser’s position deserves to be taken very seriously. In the face of art’s enduring desire to break free from the by now quite implausible mainstream artworld, Fraser maintains that art is, and must by definition be autonomous.
With each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it.
This is a schoolbook-class instance of one-world theory at work in the artistic imagination, or what remains of it.
There is not single recipe for thinking out of and around this kind of logical closure, but again, we must be clear not to merely play at finding alternatives – tantamount to mere gaming in a slightly eccentric creative sandbox that the mainstream is only to happy to provide and maintain. Perhaps then our best prospect is to imagine the artworld to which we are immanent, yet with which we are dissatisfied, as if it were freed from the normative structures that curb art’s potential. And rather than seeing that plausible space as empty – without authorship, without spectatorship, without visibility, without objecthood and so on – to see it as replete with plausible potential. A note on the plausible, to suspend reflection for the time being. Unlike the possible, which implies an as yet unactualised variant on a presumed “real” world, the plausible almost inherently invokes worlds in the plural. In Nelson Goodman’s words,
With false hopes of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced by worlds that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function, and the given acknowledged as taken, we face the questions of how worlds are made, tested, and known.
Archiving creative culture
Week 52: Public Collectors & Against Competition
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is the final event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
To wrap up the year, we’ll be talking with Marc Fischer, one of three members of Temporary Services, about his project “Public Collectors” network. In conjunction with this project we will also be discussing Marc’s manifesto entitled “Against Competition” which can be downloaded below.
http://www.publiccollectors.org/
http://publiccollectors.tumblr.com/
http://www.temporaryservices.org/against_competition_mf.pdf
The Public Collectors project seeks to redress what amounts to a massive and systemic cultural oversight whereby countless cultural artifacts are either deemed unworthy for collection by public libraries, museums and other institutions or the archives currently in existence are not readily accessible to the viewing public.
Therefore, Public Collectors invites individuals who have had the occasion to amass, organize, and inventory various cultural artifacts to help reverse this bias by making their collections public. The purpose of the project is to provide access to worlds of collected materials so that knowledge, ideas and expertise can be freely shared and exchanged.
An initiative of this kind gains its meaning and importance against the backdrop of the culture of artificial scarcity upon which mainstream artworld values are founded. The majority of this artworld is structured in this way, and not surprisingly so, as competition between individuals is at the heart of free market capitalism. Grants are competitive. Students compete for funding. Hundreds compete for a single teaching position. Artists compete with artists – stealing ideas instead of sharing them, or using copyright laws to prohibit thoughtful re-use. Artists typically compete for exhibitions in a limited number of spaces rather than seeking alternative exhibition venues. Artists conceal opportunities from their friends as a way of getting an edge up in this speculative capital-driven frenzy. Gallerists compete with other gallerists and curators compete with curators. Artists who sell their work compete for the attention of a limited number of collectors. Collectors compete with other collectors to acquire the work of artists. Essentially, these are the many reasons that make Plausible Artworlds plausible; that make alternate artworlds, premised on pooling resources and mutualizing incompetence, so important. We felt that it was all too fitting to conclude 2010’s discussions with some words that might help describe art beyond competition.
Transcription
Week 52: Public Collectors & Against Competition
Mark: Hello.
Scott: Hello.
Mark: Hey.
Scott: Hey can you hear me okay?
Mark: Yeah.
Scott: Sweet. Okay. Give us just a quick sec to make sure the audio all works and everything or not. How about now? Is this better now?
Mark: It sounds good to me.
Scott: All right cool. So Mark welcome, it's great to have you in on this chat. If anybody gets dropped from the call just let us – please flag somebody down in the text chat and we can add you back or if anything else if you need anything just let us know and we'll try to keep the text chat and the audio synced. Just a tiny announcement. Also if anybody doesn't want to be recorded let us know but I guess staying on the call assumes that you do want to be. Yeah it's awesome to have you Mark finally to talk about Public Collectors Project as part of this series.
Mark: Yeah thank you. I'm getting a little echo there is that okay?
Scott: Yeah let's see. Do you have headphones by chance?
Mark: Not on me at the moment.
Scott: Yeah if you turn down your audio just a little bit it might help cut the echo.
Mark: Oh okay. How's this?
Scott: It sounds good for us. And so this week everyone –
Renee: Oh great Adam's here.
Scott: Mark as long as I understood that properly you'd like to have a really informal chat.
Mark: I mean whatever works. I'm trying to figure out how to turn off the chat notifications that are popping up crazily.
Scott: Oh right on Skype. Yeah I think one thing you can do is if anybody actually really cares about this you could go up to your Skype preferences and then there's a flag called Notifications and you can uncheck your little notification boxes…
Mark: Oh okay.
Scott: …and you won't get all those little notices. It might help. Oh yeah there's a couple of new people in the chat we should probably add.
Renee: Hi Mark.
Mark: Hi Renee, how are you doing?
Renee: Good how are you?
Mark: I'm well.
Renee: Good so am I. Very briefly here before I depart tomorrow back to Amsterdam.
Mark: Oh I'm sorry [inaudible 03:27].
Renee: Yeah. Well you know it's the Philadelphia holiday thing.
Mark: Yeah.
Renee: Are you in Chicago?
Mark: Yeah.
Scott: Yeah Mark why aren't you here dude?
Renee: Yeah why aren't here dude?
Mark: I'm sorry [inaudible 03:49].
Scott: Oh really from this side too.
Renee: Yeah it's hard to understand.
Scott: All right hold on a sec let me mute ours and see if it's us.
Renee: Okay.
Mark: Okay that's the headset.
Scott: All right.
Mark: Hello.
Scott: Yeah hey. So is it us that's doing the buzzing?
Renee: There's a phone…
Mark: Yeah it sounds like it.
Renee: Greg has phone use speakers.
Scott: No phone in pocket. Let's move this back a little bit.
Renee: Is this better? Can you hear us better now? Hello.
Mark: It sounds fine to me.
Renee: Does it sound okay?
Greg: Yeah that sounds better on my end.
Renee: Okay is that Greg. Hi, Greg.
Greg: Yeah hi Renee. How are you?
Renee: Good how are you?
Greg: Good.
Renee: We have a little small party here.
Scott: Totally.
Renee: Party of six.
Scott: And for anyone who hasn't been here…
Renee: Seven.
Scott: …before just feel free to chime in any time. If you want to say something you could just come on up and speak in the microphone or just flag us down if you'd rather do something like that or just hang out. But yeah so okay I think we're all good with the peculiarities of Skype and just the general kind of tech check stuff. So Mark what I think would be really awesome, and I guess just in case there's any question about it, what I was hoping we – and I think what several of us are hoping we could talk about today were two things. One your Public Collectors Project the initiative or whatever you want to call it, the network or whatever, and I think it would be great to talk about that as a proposal for a different kind of artworld or even maybe a component of a different kind of artworld.
And whether it's usually referred to that or not that's what we're looking at, and so just really at any step along the way it would be great to talk about the again competition text which we called a manifesto even though you might not call it that.
Mark: I believe its okay.
Scott: Okay. So yeah I mean if you don't mind would you give like a brief description of Public Collectors for people who aren't familiar with it at all…
Mark: Sure.
Scott: …just so there's some context?
Mark: Sure. I mean I can tell you maybe just an easy way to do this would be the sort of short version would be to read the About Text of the Web site. So just a sort of a basic introduction to the project it has worked a bit. Public Collectors consist of incorporated for collectors around the content of their collection to be published and permit those who are curious to directly experience the objects in person. Participants must be willing to type of an inventory of their collection provide any contact and share their collection with the public. Collections can be based on any GAA web page.
Public Collectors is found under the publication under their many types of cultural artifacts. The public libraries and museums other institutions and archives either do not collect or do make real accessible. Public Collectors ask individuals who have the luxury to a mass an organized inventory of these materials to help reverse this [inaudible 07:56] Collections Public. And that's sort of first happened to kind of basic background. The sort of thing that inspired this for the past 12 years I've been part of the group Temporary Services selling from the group also present tonight in the background somewhere.
And you know and we're sort of basically collaborate work is within the main focus of my creative work for about the past 12 years and in terms of institutional collections this kind of work is usually pretty much on the margins. There's not a lot of collectors support for it. And commercial gallery support or interest in this kind of work when you have a bunch of artists working under a group name. Likewise, one of the groups themselves aren't necessarily very interested in the commercial gallery world either. I am certainly am not that hasn't been an inspiring or motivating kind of place to present the work I do either by myself or in groups.
So a lot of what I do a lot of what I'm involved with you can't just sort of go to a museum and see it, you can't go to a commercial gallery and ask the galleries to pull out material from the backroom or anything like that. So this stuff tends to kind of be hiding either in our own homes or people in our networks. So because a lot of groups are not involved with commercial galleries our group makes a lot of publications and I make a lot of publications. They may also just sort of I'm interested in books I'm interested in cat title things like records. I think the original stuff is important and means something that is different from, it's a digital version of that thing, but I think it's important to have primary experiences with be kind of a sumeria that results from different creative practices.
And so as a result of the kind of work I do my apartment is just kind of filled with years and years of publications made by other people, publications I've been involved if I meet someone new that'd be [inaudible 10:30]. And so if you wanted to see – if you were in Chicago and you wanted to see actually the publications made by the finished collaborative duo I see 98. Well I mean nobody really has this stuff. You can't go to the Public Library you can't go to the Art Institute or Columbia College's Library or Northwestern Library. The best collection of that stuff is probably in my apartment because they're friends and we've exchanged so much material.
Then there are other individual practitioners that I've had a long friendship with who have just sent me many, many years of material either as an exchange or as a gift. So for example, my friend Angelo who Temporary Services worked with on a project called Prisoners Inventions for the moment he's still incarcerated in California and I've been holding onto all of his creative output for about the past 20 years. A French artist Brulo Richard is very obscure in the US just through our friendship I probably accumulated like a six foot stack of material of his work in my apartment. That's not really kind of, it's not being activated at all, it's not really being seen by anyone other than myself, and it's kind of not really doing anyone any good just sort of sitting in boxes.
So the idea with Public Collectors was that people all over the country have all kinds of stuff but it's sort of unavailable, it's not accessible unless they make some kind of disclosure about what they have or once they become more generous in offering that up for viewing, for information. Maybe the way it's accessed isn't that someone comes over to your house but they just email because there's one thing they wanted information about. I try to keep my record collection inventoried which is sometimes a very difficult task. But yeah sometimes someone will email from Holland or from Sweden or something and then they don't need to hear the record they just need like a little piece of information. They need to know do you have a copy of the comic book that came with it is there any chance you can scan that and make a PDF of it? So usually I'll accommodate a request like that and I'll scan this thing and put it up on the Web site.
So there're a bunch of resources I've made available myself and then there's other people who've made artist books available some really, really hard to see things. Steven Perkins lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin and has a tremendous collection of artist books in the sumera and he's inventoried everything and made that available. And Green Bay is an area that doesn't have particularly great museums but if you were interested in certain kinds of art practice I mean Steven has a really extraordinary collection and he's willing to share that. And not only do you get to see the actual stuff but you also get to benefit from his expertise. I mean he's surely knowledgeable about this stuff it's what he's most passionate about. So it's a very different experience to encounter something like that in someone's home with collector present able to illuminate the material, create a context for it, than it is to just sort of find it on a Web site.
Can you guys hear me okay?
Scott: Yes we can totally hear you.
Mark: Oh good.
Scott: We just muted temporarily so you didn't hear the Kung Fu over our heads.
Mark: Okay. So okay maybe you should just leave it there because I'm hearing that echo. Cool.
Scott: Yeah I just pasted in a link for one of the images from one of the collection on the Web site everybody, the Public Collector's Web site. There's just tons of examples of the different kinds of not necessarily art that some of the people are collecting. So what I like about this Mark - I mean I don't know can you hear me okay?
Mark: Yeah. I'm getting that crazy chatter.
Scott: Hold on. Is that better?
Mark: I think so.
Scott: Oh man okay. I don't know what that could be but we moved the mic a little bit away and it's better. So I don't know one of the things that really interest me is that like what Public Collectors is, is more than just a bunch of stuff right. I mean it's not exactly an antique road show like in miniature. Although there's not necessarily a huge difference between some of the items in this something like that. I mean it would be fine…
Mark: Yeah just to be clear that my concern with art with all kinds of the [inaudible 15:45] updates. So it includes – it's moved a bit. What are the problems of the projects is that other people offered to [inaudible 15:58] for direct period that kind of project has really not worked very well. Most people I think sort of like towards the internet they are not actively making the effort to go visit these things. I'm not those requests. And I kind of realized that while I think that part of it is important and I do want to continue hosting these inventories and information to people who do have things they want to share.
The site was getting a lot of traffic and it also made sense that maybe there's some claims that since some people are going to persist in dealing with mostly the Web site that there's more I could offer in digital format. So one way of dealing with that is to start just making PDFs of [inaudible 16:53] obscured books. And obviously there are other sources to this kind of material but compared to say like the underground music world does a really amazing job at archiving I think. There are tons of cassettes that were released in an email in like 250 copies or some like obscure [inaudible 17:16] there are only 500 copies of. Even though these things were available in such quantities someone has done that work to digitize a lot of that material. And of course you always come across things you can't find an MP3 of, but the sort of underground music culture world has done a really good job of spreading things around much, much better than people in the arts or sort of other kinds of Sumera documentation.
So making PDFs of obscure publications was the way of providing something I think sort of needs to be amped up a bit. Like for example, Kim Isaac's "Living the Instructors Book" or the book that White Columns published on the "Artist Run Restaurants". That's a book that's been out of print for a long time it's very, very expensive to purchase in the secondary market. And so I basically just decided just too sort of pop up question about licensing. And I basically just define copyright and scan the material and there's nothing adversity just need assist about. But I focus on things that are out of print and some of these things they've been downloaded several thousand times. I think "Dumb Book" has been downloaded 2000 times so far this year. So these are things that are just very, very hard to see. I've also…
Scott: Sorry Mark I just wanted to mention or just ask you or just clarify that this isn't really only about the archiving of the objects whether digital or physical. I mean it's important to you that people get together in person to look at these things and talk about them right. And more than that when someone agrees to be part of this archive in affect what they're agreeing to isn't just to list their stuff online because like I think Christian's comment just kind of another follow-up question that it begs is do the people that are listing the stuff even have a right to distribute in terms of copyright laws. But more than that I think what they're agreeing to is allow to people to come into their homes right.
Mark: Right or to accompany some of the way they meet at some other location if that's preferable for – I mean another potential I saw with this is that perhaps things could be borrowed for exhibits. And so by making something that's available to someone maybe it's available to show but also there might be a situation where you're chairing something and you really need this one poster or this publication to sort of fill out representation of some kind of practice in a media event.
Or for example, one of the things I collect are records, music or standup comedy they were recording inside prisons. So there's these concert albums the most famous ones for example people like Johnny Cash at the [inaudible 20:44] or Tim [inaudible 20:47]. So there may be pure things like [inaudible 20:50] too or this vocal group where a Motown producer came into the prison but what I was interested in this relationship between people on the inside and people on the outside who are the audience for these records and then sort of movement back and forth between people in prison and the public. And even though much of these records for an exhibit I had maybe 45 examples right, but there are certainly other examples of these records they know about that either can't find but I can afford them.
So if the project existed for this kind of material at the time I was organizing this show captive audience at this gallery 400 in Chicago it would have been really great if I could have approached someone who disclosed [inaudible 21:43] and said hey, [inaudible 21:46 muffled audio] exhibit it's just going to go in front of all and is to be played but it'll [inaudible 21:52] if you try. But it's even knowing that someone had this thing and knowing that there was a way to experience it and to ask about it and find something about it that would have been very useful to me.
So they're – yeah I mean if you do participating in making yourself available to visit it’s not really to duplicate the issue. I mean there are people who participate and you could ask what could record this cassette for or something but that's going to be up to their discretion how they want to be helpful. But basically asking people to about other challenged just inventory collection is incredibly time the way they tested the obligation. So a lot of people saw participation as they began doing that work is really – and so I tended to focus a bit more on the digital industry as I'm looking at [inaudible 23:08].
Renee: We have a couple of questions for you.
Scott: Yeah would you mind coming to the mic.
Lee: Hey Mark its Lee.
Mark: Hey Lee.
Lee: How you doing?
Mark: Good.
Lee: Hey I kind of have a question. I'm pretty familiar with Public Collectors and I just got the Public Collectors blog Ezine from you which I loved. And I was interested in what you were talking about in terms of exhibiting it and how it could – and it's something I'm curious about as a curator I often thing about exhibiting things right and there's always this kind of pressure to show what's new. What's interesting about if you want to curate a show that either consisted of archives from Public Collectors or was something like that obviously there's that pressure of what's new and how do you present something that is a collection I guess? Who is the artist?
Who is the – I know I'm throwing a lot of different junk in here – and I'm kind of wondering about that and I'm also thinking about I obviously love the book that you guys have done that Temporary services did on public phenomenon and I'm also thinking of Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's book on "Folk Archive". If that's just another kind of thing that you're building toward with your Public Collectors project or if there's other venues more social media ways of kind of getting the work out there to different people. Can you answer any of that or none of that?
Mark: What will help you launch exhibition and using this as a way of pulling things into public view that are usually neglected it's definitely something I'm more interested. And the Art Gallery of Knoxville did in 2008 maybe they did a Public Collectors show which mostly focused on local material. So [inaudible 25:16] has a lot of [inaudible 25:18] who collect these basically the Facebook like old school book with drawings by children then they're sort of in the margins or you have these drawings from late 1800s or early 1900s.
There are archives in digital collections and [inaudible 25:43] for anti sources. This should drag out all of these pages like drawings [inaudible 25:55] or like [inaudible 25:56] houses and the type of photo of a mountain in some ancient text book. And this is the kind of work that there the archive is not and probably would not have sought her out for an exhibit.
Renee: Right.
Mark: But because of Public Collectors participation connected to the [inaudible 26:13] that was really to be able to do that. One anecdote to people maybe being a little reluctant to go to some stranger's house and [inaudible 26:24] just sort of dried things out and bring them to some other sites. So there was an event I coordinated at mess hall where I basically brought all of the [inaudible 26:35] Bruno Richard who sent me over the last nine years or so and laid it on the table and we can go through all the envelopes. We had like this thick packages with hundreds of sheets of paper in them. And still different drawings and sort of copies and layout from books and things like that.
And so I think more and more of that would certainly be a way to do this. Right now I just finished teaching a course called Collections and Archives and this creative practice at Columbia College in Chicago and the student from that class were doing this exhibit. And it's really fun because a student gallery it's normally reduced to showing student photographs, paintings and drawings or videos. And the exhibits kind of crazy if on one hand you have like one student has some slide in event in stage with 35 video tapes packed of like all the watching the appearances and her and her mom and her sister recorded in like the late '90s early 2000s. One student like coupled together her grandmother's salt and pepper shaker collection so there's sort of fancy [inaudible 28:00] equality.
And some other people – another student who's father's death and also didn't have the money so he's mostly distributing a visual thing related to Chicago sports which he feels like every opportunity that he can. And she made a video and start talking in sign language with her subtitles describing all the different ways the [inaudible 28:27] collection which involves [inaudible 28:31] in Chicago to cut down Chicago Bears and Cubs better [inaudible 28:37]. So that's also a way of kind of pushing some of the event spaces to include things that normally get left out because there's some other cultural – you might be quite interesting if you get a chance to properly see it. But there is this sort of outside parameters of what you care about.
And so I mean part of the opera or Public Collectors and [inaudible 29:10] problem can become kind of addicted to somewhere in this culture of all of these people through sharing things and commenting on each other's things. And it's very gratifying to post something and then see [inaudible 29:27] come up with responses or people [inaudible 29:29] and maybe add like a personal note or something. And that's going to be another way of activating just all the stuff that surrounds me in my home. So it's sort of like a project of every day to kind of find some other formulas they had that looked in a lot of and pull out some kind of material like a lot of [inaudible 29:53] flyers for a rally about lack of support for people in Philadelphia but the flyers from like 1987 there's others [inaudible 30:05]. Twenty to 500 people have died so far and that was really kind of in the early days of that disease being identified.
And yeah it'll be nice to have like a more larger focus for [inaudible 30:20] this kind of stuff but there is just one thing that can be added to that larger turnout [inaudible 30:27].
Renee: It's Renee. That was my question just to go back because I've been to your house, I've seen a lot of the archives, and I know what you've been up to for a few years now. And then I was curious about how culminate everything together and then how does the network work so that it's distributed. I remember getting Temporary Services or your mailing a while back, maybe two or three years ago, asking for your public collection. Are you then the hub of everything that people go through you or is it through this personal network or is it that sometimes things come in out of the blue for example?
Mark: There are people that tend to be off the blue of the things that that they want me to host. I mean I have a question about like how much was really all necessary because obviously there's many, many have represented and they're obviously switched the groups...
Renee: Yeah exactly.
Mark: …which looks really I mean much better than I'm doing. And you sometimes hear people asking those groups. Mostly I don't want to put anything between people who participate in Public Collectors. So if someone asks me something I certainly don't want to feel [inaudible 31:49] that person. They may provide their email contact and someone else gets in touch with. So there're been a number who have I've sort of used this on the Web site to promote what they had but then it's on them for smaller and want to do a story about the collector, they want to borrow image for something.
Scott: Hey Mark.
Mark: Yeah.
Scott: Scott here. Just correct me if I'm wrong about but isn't there a difference in the sense between Public Collectors the kind of title project that has to be that in order to show it and Public Collectors the proposal? What I mean is Public Collectors it's not just a specific item right. It's a proposal for another kind of distributed ownership of cultural, not necessarily artifacts or heritage or whatever, but yeah I guess so cultural heritage or cultural artifacts or the things that like give the creative output that we make but also just creative…
Mark: Hey Parker.
Scott: Sorry. You want to say hi to Mark.
Parker: Hi.
Mark: Hi how are you doing?
Scott: But also it's not just showing the detritus of creativity like the creative culture practitioners that make stuff as designers or artists or whatever but also that you teach there's a kind of "creativity" or whatever you want to call it in collecting itself and you're focusing on that thing but not just with like a specific curated selection right. I mean I guess it's a multi part question but he main question is there a difference? Don't you see – let me just rephrase this slightly. Sorry I'm a little distracted. Don't you see that Public Collectors is as much a proposal for another way of doing things as it is a specific set of curated collections that you think are cool?
Mark: Yeah. I mean certainly like it's an encouragement for a cultural of greater generosity which are things that are kind of holding onto. And I think things like with my students certainly like I want to get them thinking about how do you deal with like representing yourself? How do you deal with like representing your own culture or how do you create context or how do you deal with like the stuff that you're interested in that you're not seeing represented in the kind of museums or libraries you have in your cities.
To sort of get kind of strangers possibly working together and they'd be sort of like feeding into a little bit about – but one of the first places that I started thinking about this idea of Public Collectors true it's not anything in the artworld this underground music discussion which we recently just kind of fell apart somehow. Hello?
Scott: Hey we're just adding someone else to the audio.
Mark: Oh okay. And I felt like this sort of online community that mostly kind of existed to discuss underground metal bands and stuff like that but it was really hyperactive. And people really started doing stuff off of the site. They started these people who were kind of talking about their shared interest really started getting someone with medical [inaudible 35:54] on that. But these people really banded together and started making all kinds of things happen in the railroad group, bands helped tours, people raised money for each other or they need medical help. I can't even imagine the number of grown deals that happened as a result of that site. I know that part didn't really have an interest for me.
There were people that I put up in my house because of that place. I could go through places when I travel with these folks in other cities and it was just very energetic as a both discussion forum but also as a thing that became like these real sort of [inaudible 36:51]. But I saw that as a very promising set of development for shared resource and shared knowledge and just kind of generosity that both – I think I'm curious among those many of the people who are participating in this discussion but then I think it much less the balance in the art [inaudible 37:19].
There are people who you're some cultures around collecting or a hobby like thing that's really kind of put the art world to shame and they're there to work together in their noncompetitive and shared information. My wife participates in this [inaudible 37:50] Ravelry which got like a million members and it's much more multigenerational than the forum I was using for music. But it becomes this very all purpose thing. We go down there you talk about all kinds of political issues and certain members within society. People you could probably for help advice or information about home ownership. And it seems to be really credible and very, very vibrant resource. And so I would like to online Public Collector but it has drawn interest from these other kinds of online communities that were strange resource are asked a lot more.
And [inaudible 38:35] has quite a bit of this also but that wasn't setup very well for discussion it's really more of a kind of display tool. And it's very effective for circulating online. The public place that I do for the Public Collector is this concept [inaudible 38:56] but other people do [inaudible 38:59] hundreds and hundreds at a time. And so the curators are used by people not having whatever they needed. I know l scan like this one from something like a fancy like the picture of the month or something. And some of the site is entirely devoted to muffets. Someone had a question about called Rivalry. I believe it is www.ravelry.com.
Renee: Oh knitting and crocheting.
Mark: Yeah.
Renee: Got it.
Mark: I'm sorry I tried to look at the common – like I stopped noticing the chat talk
Renee: Yeah no it's good it's just that I couldn't understand exactly what it was. Cool.
Mark: Yeah.
Renee: Thanks.
Mark: And Patrick's question about tumbler. I mean people usually give right away about to use this sort of very streamlined blog where you can follow the people tweets and then you search together this kind of continuous feed with it. It interesting for work space and it works better for instance something like Facebook but that's [inaudible 40:47]. Yeah I definitely think it was quite [inaudible 40:52].
Scott: Hey Mark, does this seem like a good time to talk a little bit about the Against Competition text?
Mark: Yeah sure.
Scott: We sort of are already.
Mark: I feel like I've been very unfocused and I hope I'm making sense.
Renee: No you're making sense.
Greg: Scott before we go on I have a question about.
Scott: Oh sure.
Adam: Before we get into a wider topic I just wanted to ask this because I follow the blog, I'm a total fan boy of the Public Collector's blog, and my observation it's really cool and just as Uncle Bob's collection of corporate ceramic statues for Christmas towns is not cool. And sometimes the collections that Mark looks at in Public Collectors or that add Public Collectors we're sympathetic to them because they're endearing and sometimes they're alienated and very weird like the Vanilla Ice thing is just sort of an ironic enjoyment. And I wonder if Mark could talk a little bit about how or if he thinks that the blog and what's on Public Collectors really lives up to the populist imagery or the populist project that's described in the About Section.
Mark: Well the blog is definitely sort of more personal extension of – I mean I only post things that I write that are in my apartment. So something like the person on the Public Collectors Web site who collects makeup packaging. I host that on the site because she contacted me out of nowhere and offered that. And I don't really discriminate if someone has something to offer then I will host that. And it's unusual that people do offer I mean there are not many people who have done that. It's a little easier to find people who have something that can be presented in digital form.
But in terms of the material like on the tumbler thing I mean there's a little note in the sort of introduction to that that explains that it's basically a place for small things or fragments of larger things and really kind of an account of the contents of my apartment. It's a way of me sharing without inviting the world into my home to kind of randomly peruse, which really wouldn't be a very effective way of sharing beyond like one or two people at a time. I can open up a box and put something on the scanner that no one else has scanned and put online before. And instantly 700 or 800 people are looking at it and then those people blog it and then hundreds more people are looking at it.
But it is definitely different in that it's sort of my own – it's really more like a personal territorial thing in a way that I didn't really – I don't think – my sort of ideal for their Public Collectors main site. Does that make sense?
Renee: Yeah.
Scott: So I had a question has anyone contacted. Adam, did you say it was Jessica's uncle? Well anyway whoever you were just talking about has…
Adam: Sorry yes, Jessica's uncle.
Scott: Oh okay. Has anyone contacted her uncle about, hey I want to come to visit this collection of stuff.
Adam: No we'd rather not visit but we were treated to a collective. The thing is it's interesting because this is a discussion that goes beyond the thing and the attitude. When I took Mark's spot for selecting we had a discussion about the corporatized takeover of collectives so that people collect things and take back like the impulse versus people coming up with interesting collections of their own.
Scott: Yeah. And are we really talking about not so much like what stuff is collected exactly. I mean of course the stuff is important to the people that are collecting it, the people that are interested, but not everyone is going to be interested in everything in all of these examples. I mean I think that's part of the point rights they're just such a tiny slice of, I don't know subjective population that's going to be interested in like…
Renee: It's a niche in the long term.
Scott: Yeah it's a super niche. And so I guess isn't it more about on the whole - yeah this is really echoing sorry guys.
Renee: Yeah somebody's got their mic on.
Scott: Yeah hold on it might even be us or whatever. Sorry. My question is isn't this project largely about a different form of ownership, because you were just talking about the corporatization of collections or maybe the sort of ethos even for individual collecting that's sort of internalizing that. I mean when you take what you've been looking whether it's a perverse interest if you want to call it that or just like obsessive compulsive or just like a hobby or a life pursuit or vocation or whatever if you decide, hey I'm not actually – I guess my point is the difference between this anti-growth chart is that people aren't looking to sell these collections they're looking to distribute them in a different sort of way. Do you know what I mean? I mean I feel like the network is really important here in this discussion.
Mark: Yeah. And I mean the other thing maybe one of the things that I'm just sort of working on for this exhibit and my students are putting together, I mean I really don't care and in Temporary Services but it's also something like the public phenomenon [inaudible 47:09]. I mean I don't really care about the distinction between the creativity and then some building a collection of like snow globes and thinking about the aesthetics and how it's organized and sort of creativity that goes into making a book about like some other kind of artistic phenomenon.
I mean collectors are like absolutely concerned with so much of the same stuff that artists are concerned with right. I mean they care about aesthetics, they care about content, and they care about history, about the ideas behind things. And when you see this sort of thoughts fully assembled and organized collection of stuff I mean it's as immersive an experience as any of those collection pageant. And I won't say the answer is pushing for these official spaces and institutional spaces to incorporate this kind of stuff. Because I think it holds on better than people like to think some [inaudible 48:21] activity. I mean [inaudible 48:24] these questions and to show them what my students are working on is that each project of theirs is probably at 15 things but that's 15 things time 15 people. And some of the questions maybe like 80 things in them. So visually from this rich experience of stuff there are all these different approaches to organizes, to categorizes it, some of them maybe [inaudible 48:52] source of chronology. And sometimes people are posing more of the personal narratives on the material and context around [inaudible 49:01] or creating pretty different circles for which you would look at it.
But I think after [inaudible 49:10] they're interesting because of course there's this sort of mobile whatever that is kind of like holding my breath about the [inaudible 49:21]. Yeah both of those discussions really talking about where does this history come from, really which history of objects.
Lee: Mark this is Lee again. I think it's really interesting you're discussing like Antiques Road Show. I always kind of found that show when I was a kid I really enjoyed it a lot and as an adult I can barely watch it, in fact I can't really watch it. The one thing I found really interesting about the internet over the past few years is like the ubiquity of video now. It's like I spend so much time on YouTube – maybe I shouldn't – whatever fine I'm proud of it. So I think a lot of people do like there's so much video on the internet people kind of doing everything. There's people dancing on the internet and sharing their dance, there's people doing all kinds of stuff on there and I'm wondering if there's some kind of life to being able to show your work through some kind of video means like walking through the collection if that kind of adds anything or maybe you think it's not really that valuable, I'm not sure.
Mark: Oh no there are lots of videos on YouTube of people showing their collections and talking about them. And I definitely watch those and some of them are really boring, some of them are sometimes the personality of the person or the [inaudible 50:49] it talks about. Some of the are sort of creepy I mean this guy will show you 80 million batman costumes and you [inaudible 51:00] for. They're sort of challenging it's probably more interesting than any of the objects. And then the guy looks like he's not going to be wearing those batman costumes anytime soon. So a really different type of person which is this sort of ideal thing that he's collecting.
Yeah I mean you can do some with that kind of stuff. And thinker and tumbler also I mean come with these really amazing people doing this incredible job of dealing with like their – they have maybe a south card selection like the stuff is just – I wish I could with you to the Chicago Museum of some sort and look at that [inaudible 51:55]. And then quicker those kind of things quite well because you sort of [inaudible 52:09] they're all easy to scan. Yeah the actual object but they do hold up quite well. And then the people are trusting really high resolution to this. So there's some pretty good venues for this kind of stuff online.
Female: I was just thinking it would be possible that these people could have these collections could be improving on them using the internet and such like that. They can check and see what they have, what they don't have so that communicating on it, polishing it up. That's certainly.
Mark: Yeah some of them really nicely network with each other but if you look at this other question about fortune I haven't spent very much time with fortune but certainly like fortune wants to get things done. I mean they're just people obviously are I mean they're incredibly effective at pulling resources and energy and doing some really constructive things right. But certainly in the online community and some of them do get together in the world too. I mean there's [inaudible 53:44] in their bedroom or something.
Lee: Someone asked a little while ago like collecting- I'm sorry I think they mentioned that – I can't scroll up because I don't have access to the computer – but it said something like I think there's a Public Collectors look like what the internet use to look like back in I guess the early 90s or mid-90s, and there's actually I don't remember the Web site and I'll have to look for it later maybe post it somewhere maybe I'll send you the link, but there actually is one group online that does collect old geocities pages and archives them and writes about them and has tons and tons of them saved. And they look beautiful. So I just wanted to mention that.
And the second thing was that got me thinking the artist Cory Archangel actually for awhile, I don't remember when this was this might have been like in the mid-2000s or maybe like the early oughts, but was I think specifically trying to create that kind of style. He still sometimes does but he was making Web sites that look like that as far as I can recall he called that Dirt Style. So it was like he was inspired by the look of those things and was using that as like to create an art style Web site or web media.
Mark: Yeah. [Audio is echoed and muffled] that old material right.
Lee: Yeah.
Mark: I mean I think it's kind of a task but I like to – I mean I guess I sort of admire that in an artist they not only [inaudible 55:54] but still it's a matter of [inaudible 55:57]. People who make time for the preservation or promotion of the artwork is not there it gives some energy to write about it to figuring it out how to get through to some things to sort of lately be [inaudible 56:22] there are a allowed to open a bit for something outside of themselves. Or making contact with their predecessors and actually know the [inaudible 56:35] a fan or something.
Lee: Yeah. One thing that people are kind of discussing I'm looking at some of the text now, a lot of those Web sites they're not really – someone said it's not a coherent structure. And I think one of the things that's interested about those Web sites, what makes it difficult too is basically someone post something and then moves onto the next thing right. And so even though there's like an institutional memory to some degree that's not the exact right word. There's an archival memory in that you can go back and look at the past archives. Basically it becomes the past and we move on it's like your email you archive it when you're in your Gmail and you just kind of move onto the next thing and you kind of forget about it.
So there's something about using those Web sites that doesn't really allow for, I don't know I guess reinterpretation or discussion. I'm kind of waiting for Patrick he said "What I meant was", I'm curious to see what he's about to say.
Mark: Yeah I mean most are interested in [inaudible 57:49] of how you archive the stuff that gets generated by the discussion but there's this [inaudible 58:03] these really great threads of [inaudible 58:08] who try to redraw their favorite album cover on [inaudible 58:11] it's really kind of basic graphic programs idea in a couple of minutes or something. And they were noticeable for doing the [inaudible 58:26] and kind of pulling them together so you can fill like an example of the same [inaudible 58:31] of creating other [inaudible 58:36] three minutes.
And you have to go on different Web sites to find that thread and one form completely different [inaudible 58:48] occupation so there's like a lot of stuff on the internet that's being wiped out really quickly as [inaudible 58:58] and go and things like that. And it's the joy just be [inaudible 59:02] in how you want to preserve. I actually think that preserve is something you care about but you do that when you publish [inaudible 59:17] this kind of amazing of collection of some internet creativity.
Scott: I think what I would ask you Mark if you can think about this because you've definitely been a huge advocate of keeping an archive of making friends. And I've heard you actually criticize because we don't do that. But do you think that there is space now for this kind of culture that we're talking about that has no interest whatsoever in ever creating a past that is constantly evolving, that no interest other than to actually like make a joke and then sending action right at the moment to forget about to completely.
Mark: But what was the question part of that?
Scott: The question part is how you feel about this evolving culture because I think that's how I would describe the four hands and the other subcultures. I don't like to say culturally but whatever you want to call them. But these structures, these groups of small evolving communities of anonymous people who just take action and then disappear and they don't really care about archiving. And you're sort of coming from this culture and you're talking about this sub-culture and this unit culture that does archive and does keep a memory history. So where are we going if that is the future and these are the future? Are you the last best of keeping some cultural archive?
Mark: No I mean there are lots of people who like often try to figure out [inaudible 1:01:00] or going back and it's very hard to [inaudible 1:01:08] ago. A lot of people look at the other stuff like it's this discussion that I [inaudible 1:01:18] for a long time it's [inaudible 1:01:23]. I let you know that it's lost because most of them are not [inaudible 1:01:29]. But of some of those discussions I think are quite useful 20 years from now maybe.
[Too muffled to make out context]
Renee: What did he say?
Mark: [Too muffled to make out context]
Renee: I'm sorry what did he say about the…?
Scott: Mark we missed what you just said can you say it one more time.
Renee: Sorry.
Mark: I think one of the [inaudible 1:05:44].
Greg: Just to [inaudible 1:06:06] can you talk about – one of the things I just remember that was really great recently is when you posted the prison catalog images on Public Collectors and it was actually a political response to the strikes in Georgia. Can you talk about your feeling and maybe some of the other people on Public Collectors of people who are collectors like how politics can function and the collection can function politically to bring – like when you brought all these images out of prisons it was disturbing to see all these really disturbing images of restraints of humans that were not old and medal and something in the 18th Century but very contemporary.
Mark: Yeah. I look the version that if you're thinking about this one kind of material that maybe sort of manicurist and then I sort of put something that has a really different feel to it, a really different texture to it. Right now there are probably close to 800 people who follow the tumbler blog and then they follow it for extremely different reasons. So one person may take a whole bunch of stuff that's like typography or some point of medal or like the science fiction and covers or something. And people start following because they're interested in that. But it's fun to sort of switch gears on them and then give them like nine examples of restraints that are in the market.
[Too muffled to make out context]
Scott: So Kristin just had a question. Mark you are not really promoting that everyone should archive everything right. I mean isn't it the case that people are constantly collecting and that aren't you as critical of the kind of violence inherent collecting. And even just some of the problems of collecting. I mean this project isn't really a promotion of collecting like just in general right. Isn't it a promotion of distributing ownership of collections?
Mark: Well I shared enough resources that because they reside with private individuals are just not those. They would be in vast parts of the country where they'd normally be and sort of terrible public libraries but there's all this stuff that people are holding onto which you somehow see what was there these pictures would be filled with riches and with history and which really needs some material that it's just sort of a presence certainly in business.
But Kristin's question about editorial direction or value there's a difference the kind of focus thinking that goes on and it's like the collection I have are the prisons and the albums recorded in prison. The less material I've given an enormous amount of thought to. It's something that has gone on time with but they're also [inaudible 1:11:05] they just sort of [inaudible 1:11:08] maybe interested to share but I'm not ready to make any given about them or write a book about them.
But nevertheless you get someone and give them to me I have a choice to just to sort of disappear into your box or be shared in some way but not with the [inaudible 1:11:30] behind but maybe someone else can do more with it like with those [inaudible 1:11:38] there's one that I took a cover of which is sort of a really strange interpretation from common form of the abuse at Abu Ghraib and the characters and just completely re-imagine of this [inaudible 1:12:09] woman who had [inaudible 1:12:10]. I mean it's really like quite remarkable. And I felt that it was a bit racist but I didn't feel like I felt the desire to share through guest forum but I did put in the cover of it and there was someone who were renewing their PhD research on relationships between foreign and violence and the war in Iraq who was really interesting.
So he contacted me and begged me to write the [inaudible 1:12:52] and we do more research so that was really helpful to him. So I need to be the expert in that comic book but taking the time to do that work for someone else that gives them an extension kind of into their own research. Like I was really happy to enable this guy to work on his PhD project and also that he was kind of do that possibly.
[Too muffled to get context]
Scott: Hey Mark. So remind me when Against Competition was written again.
Mark: In 2006. It was written for this little journal that only did about five or six weeks of BHE and it definitely had a much larger lifeline than.
Male: Have we gone silent?
Mark: Yeah it's a nice comment. It's a nice situation question. I mean there are [too muffled].
Scott: So Mark maybe it would be good to give a brief overview of Against Competition as a – I wouldn’t necessarily say a theoretical stance even though it probably could be described that way, but I have a feeling you probably not want to say it that way, but not necessarily as a positional argument but as a recommendation for artists to consider their position in relation to other artists differently. Would you want to describe that a little bit or do you want me to describe that or are you feeling kind of..?
Mark: Yeah I can say a bit about it I think if people had a chance to read it a little bit I think it's a pretty straightforward, in fact, the examples are pretty clear and diverse. I feel at this point its only administrative work it's really not that much that I want to do entirely by myself. IT's not for me to have companies like yours when someone contacts me and asks me to host something or they have some structure they're trying to figure out a way share. Again like that one-one-one kind of smaller collaboration than a group situation of trying to just sort of endorse what individuals. But I think like the I'm kind of continually impressed by how much people are able to accomplish when they open themselves to making some part of their creative work allowing to get involved, organizing things that include other people, not always selfish like a solo show or a solo participation in a group show.
But really it's basically to make space for other people to realize that there's other people who have formal ideas and it's stupid not to learn from them and compare notes and benefit from most of the people putting their heads together.
[Too muffled for context]
Male: I have a question about it. It's a really broad question but maybe it's something you can respond to. In teaching it for I think a year and a half now like in several classes it's surprising to me how hard it is for, especially like the younger college students, to even grasp what the argument is that they really cannot even imagine the idea of it being the competition and that they be able to work together. And I'm curious whether you in the classroom or working with young people working with artists that talk about these ideas or what your experience has been in that and whether you're surprised that it's so alien still. I mean to me it just seems like a given at the brink really I find that it's engrained in our society in competition and you're essay just scratches the surface of what we really need to delve into to change the outlook.
Mark: Well I guess when I'm teaching I do ask students do you have assignments where you collaborate with other people are you allowed to do that, are you encouraged to do that? And some of them say yes some say no. Some of them have already been given the space to do that in their other courses. So if I'm the only other person teaching the course let them do that there're not that very many people in getting to them collaboratively.
I mean the other thing I always tell now to students is that I mean you're working with other people constantly. Like we came back from Thanksgiving break which was right before around the time they were doing their final project and when you share Thanksgiving with your family you need everyone to work together on this you know. Like someone brought the potato, someone goes out to eat. I mean it's just [inaudible 1:24:04] in every aspect of our lives not only in the art with regard to like a whole other by themselves and to their studies. A lot of the studies are setup so [inaudible 1:24:18] space and it's like usually as private as they can possibly make it. And that kind of separation is really encouraged.
And I remind the students that they're going to get out of art school and like you really need some kind of unity. I mean like you're going to be really soft if you have the greatest ideas and no one to talk to about them, no one to give feedback and let them know that the [inaudible 1:24:54] are maintained something until the school because you have the job market is horrible. And you have to tell them okay one of you will probably get a teaching job before the other does or get a teaching job if that's what you're trying to do. And you'll probably get this shitty budget of like $100 or $200 dollars to bring in a guest speaker. And after you hit up like your friend you went to school with because it enforces them to figure out and talk about what they do in front of a smaller audience or it gives you a break from having to talk it out to the class or they really. And you can take an opportunity to go through for your friends or you organize an exhibit together.
I don't know I think I've never have done that presentation so ideally that somebody else would do everything for you or it's really foreign to me. Like if you're interested in the community you're actually adding to publishing promotion, whatever you consider to bring to this. And you know I think like I mean young people are obviously going to run through [inaudible 1:26:30] themselves and [inaudible 1:26:33]. Again I don't know my industry is like with I think to get things done. Like going to gallery up in smoothing people tend to get opportunity.
[Audio muffled]
Renee: Can I respond to this as well.
Mark: Yeah.
Renee: Yeah just to go back I think Gavin asked about it in regard teaching, let's say art, and my students the class or the project that I teach in The Netherlands is really focused on, it's called Negotiating Equity, but it really was looking at fairness in the collaborative endeavor with self-organization. And I'm doing it now for the third year and my group this year is more into it as in working together and collaborating. But a couple of students in the past they really didn't like it when they were in a way forced, I use the word forced openly, to work with other students and had to really lose their sense of authorship because they go back to in the long run they sign up for their MA in Fine Art. Not that they would come out of it with a teaching job necessarily even though it's a Masters but that they would promote themselves and their career and their network.
And it's a battle to find people or to instill this kind of openness and the discussion at least about it. I mean Brad Blume from Temporary Services came last year and I think his whole presentation really put ideas into people's heads and they saw it from a whole different perspective. But the pressure of coming out there when you finish as a brand yourself is very great still. That was my two cents.
Mark: Yeah. And I had about five students a semester who collaborated with their parents.
Renee: Yeah.
Mark: Which is really the performance where they had to work with a partner and we had two people collaborate with their dad.
Renee: Yeah.
Mark: I just like really didn't expect at all. I mean this one piece like this kid's father gave him a piggyback ride across the field and then they switched to go to [inaudible 1:29:33] 100 times more than what. So I have seen about half way back. And I mean it was really touching [inaudible 29:43]. But also just like this sort of that the father even bothered with the kids art is very education. Yeah it seems kind of like pretty easy to people chose again. And again it was just this sort of suggesting the possibility.
Renee: No it's not a garden secret it's a link I'm going to add it if that's what Adam's asking me.
Male: So this is what I find interesting because you guys are talking about or someone made it sound like handwringing maybe there's students who are more competitive today or can imagine without competition. But I actually see examples through the internet of kind of open source culture but also kind of the maker culture. And we were talking before like kind of the knitting culture and kind of all these examples like hat labs. And granted a lot of that is kind of hands on making like in kinds of instruction. And also you're talking about curriculum sharing but kind of like the MIT open course where online stuff like I use that to like…
Renee: Right.
Male: …take classes or whatever online.
Renee: There are lots of physics.
Male: Yeah. So I don't know I see a lot of examples of that that I think are actually somewhat new at least in terms of how they're operating probably through the internet. But I don't know I don't think it's all bad right now. I'm not sure.
Pete: Well according to MIT who is proven the theories of super symmetry and of course Einstein's old Theory of Relativity ease to MC2 he says upon ever right angle upon every right angle upon another dimension is developed. But see the thing about the Master Degree of the Arts is that Einstein proved that you must see artistically without the terrestrial, the terrestrial, and the celestial mathematics. Most people can see the very same thing which biological creates an egg it's the same thing which creates the sun.
Now unless people realize that sciences do overlap or we don't always have the right mathematic forums to prove that most sciences overlap, chemistry, biology, and so forth you have to understand what each variable or strength means. But since MIT proved that have overlapped most of the major sciences of astronomer or astrophysics, biology, chemistry and dynamics, and of course engineering and energy, we realize that the only person that can see it clearly is the person with an artistic eye. Once he sees that there are distortions that do not relate on a grand omniscience scale he must realize that this is not truly symmetry or it's not truly mathematics. But what happens is if he ponders on that puzzle long enough he may add another variable which we already have 256 dimensions.
So everybody in metaphysics is telling the truth if it overlaps artistically it does create another physics problem and another mathematical formula, which is true. From Newton to Einstein they proved it's true. Did you hear that? In 1919 Einstein wide Strotham Brown he collected all the papers that collectible activity today with the internet and the computers we have successful combinations we could overlap like Japanese artwork all these mathematical formulas and all these architectural engineering industrial shapes. Despite what some people didn't realize that if we use the vibrations or the reverberations of these shapes with our computer chips and our technologies we can realize the basic mapping of how we can develop a new physic formula what is ease of the MC2 or whether it's something from Kent like the three laws of motions which actually is even further that to the sixth dimension which Einstein had theorized which allows science fiction basis theories of them.
And what else testing, testing 1, 2, 3 the University of Pronto which is my source today has a new collection of educational philosophies. My reference of this is slightly in the order of a collective news which is USA status and YBP which us US. The date of this collective knowledge which of course relating to metaphysics in the collective of minding in the liberal arts around which can relate to mathematics is 11/24/2010. And of course the last year reported receiving messages that I have from my colleagues was 10/25/2010. Anyway out of these which they find which are not relatable will eventually break the code of 256 dimensions which of course is a bigger puzzle in quantum mechanics. But if you listeners and readers relate what 256 dimensions mean that means quantum traveling the wormhole dimension power universe and partum space as well as hyperspace.
The space proves that it must be a microscopic universe produces quasars and quantum trails which actually exists the same time this universe. We absolutely do know which quantum mechanics does prove that there is a parallel universe which passes through us at incredible speeds but we are simply unaware unless we look out with our telescopes of what it is every time.
Well anyway my name I Pete Peters that's what they call me most of the time. I need my alias again later. But thanks a lot bye-bye.
Mark: Thank you.
Renee: Did you get all that?
Mark: I got all of the…
Scott: Guys we have six minutes left of this chat and basically last chat in this yearlong series for the year. So did anyone have any other burning questions or things they wanted to add to this discussion? Not that we can't continue I just…
Female: This makes me think of my neighbor. I had a neighbor right he used to have this garage and he had pictures all over the walls of the garage the door was always open and people would just walk by. And his story came to me later after he died and said that's what kept him alive so long he'd just go in there. And I'd go past him and he would just wave at me and I'd wave back. And one day he just showed me that garage.
Renee: Was it a garage sale.
Female: No, no.
Renee: Okay.
Female: That's just where he just showed that up it was in a museum.
Renee: That's what I mean there were stuff in it. That's what you mean it's not an empty space with him in it…
Female: Yeah.
Renee: …it's stuff in it and not just him.
Female: Yeah.
Renee: Pretty cool.
Mark: Yeah I mean that's the environment [audio breakup].
Scott: Is there noise at Basekamp like feedback? Oh okay. How about now is it better?
Renee: A cell phone sound.
Scott: All right let's back up a bit.
Mark: Okay it's gone.
Scott: So Renee wants to explain artificial scarcity in three minutes.
Renee: No I just thought about competition and teaching and sharing and knowledge production and all these things that that's been going on for the last year with Plausible Artworlds that I've been trying to vicariously follow because it's way too late for me in Europe. But this whole sharing of collections I just think it's a good note to end on. I mean I had not read your text Mark until I just saw it today right before. And I tried, like I said, to at least put the demon in my student's heads that there's more to life than their own – they go into these artificial scarcity markets where they're thought to do that and to produce. And I don't know, I don't know how to do anything more than I'm trying to do other than to invite like people like you to discuss stuff with them and things like this.
Mark: Yeah I mean for me like of this is much of the people on the tape are interested in art generally are in the margin and they're not in the dominant culture they get their own sitcom.
Renee: Right.
Mark: We have these sort of pledge forms and sometimes the only way to find out about them is too really to go directly to the author to the artist or the group and be okay, I'd sure like to know more. I'd be interested in your thoughts or I'm traveling. I'm going to be in your city and I'll try to move out. And it's like I can't always satisfy my curiosity by like it requires some work and contact. And interviewing people or having direct contact with people and have the material to look at in order to learn about or care about. That much is sort of necessary for certain kinds of enlightenment that just could not happen by physics.
Renee: Yeah. And also I noticed that there's shift if they feel if it's a kind of sign or something that is not part of their inherent work or working methodology then it's participants let's say in community, or let's just use relational stuff in a large frame for this discussion then it's done because it fulfills this kind of network or this need to work with others in this collaborative way. And I find that this is now kind of also specifically in maybe still state funded institutions from which, I'm talking about Northern Europe at the moment, this is the norm and it's kind of taken over for a lot of the marketing yet their name is still the brand let's say for the production.
And I question it also in my own practice but knowing how this kind of – yeah how do I say that – imposed community practice or collaborative endeavor that doesn't seem to come natural. And of course I'm not talking about everyone. And like you said earlier I have to agree with you even though sometimes collaboration is rough I don't want to do things alone. Is everybody asleep? You got to come over here Pete my microphone's here.
Scott: We at least want to say thanks everybody because even though we actually in the very last section of the year should we still stay on target?
Renee: Does anyone have anything else to say?
Scott: Yeah. Is there anyone who hasn't said anything?
Mark: I feel really dumb for not having checked in on the structure earlier.
Scott: Well Mark ultimately the kinds of questions that like everybody's bringing up and we're talking about hopefully will get fleshed out. It continues to be fleshed out a number of different ways and at least one of those ways – basically expanded upon in a packet of information. I mean we're planning on contributing to it and we really want you to Mark as well. That's going to go out to students ideally every place where people learn about where art is supposed to be. That's this kind of recipe book for ways of alternative world making that we've been talking about all this time. I feel like Public Collectors is definitely an example of how to do something different. I mean what you do is very particular and no one can reproduce exactly what you do. So it's not a model but I think that there are definitely features of what you do and ideas behind what you do that you teach your students. I mean there's a couple of your students in this chat now and also that other people can learn from. People are pouring by the thousands out of these art education factories.
Renee: Factories, did you say factories?
Male: Yeah he did.
Scott: These places where people are learning supposedly about what it means to be creatively involved in the world…
Renee: They're learning about…
Scott: …are not really getting all the options they're getting a very narrow picture of what…
Renee: They're learning precarious labor.
Scott: Yeah. And so anyway if you…
Male: Well just to be fair I would also say they're also being very real to think about what it takes to make a living in the world…
Renee: Yeah exactly.
Male: And I'm not down this like completely trashing that idea because we all do it as well.
Renee: Yeah.
Scott: Sure.
Renee: Point taken.
Scott: And there are other ways to do that besides entering a competitive field where maybe 4% will sort of meet the promise that's given to them.
Male: I haven't had a [inaudible 1:46:59] that doesn't compete with somebody.
Scott: Oh yeah. Again we're not actually – I mean maybe someone in this chat is a bible sort of – a coming manifesto something.
Peter: Actually even in the legendary world…
Scott: But anyway it's definitely worth following up.
Mark: I got to get going.
Scott: Mark thank you very much.
Mark: Thank you again for inviting me and I appreciate all the questions and interest. And sorry if I got a little mixed with trying to follow everything.
Male: Thanks Mark that was great.
Renee: Bye Mark.
Peter: Actually there's a guy in Architectural Magazine he had two good names his name was Gabriel Michaels who created a geo city mansion. He created a geo city mansion out of stone and wood and of course solar cells, ovens, radiators and so forth. He created a place of amnesty. He said the problem with the world, although he did it poetically, is committees he said, is politics, as legislation. If the world ran itself like a geo city mansion like he created there wouldn't be shelters underground and in emergency rooms. There'd be like cubicles and there would be like warehouses where we warehouse the homeless. And this way we can see what state of mind they're in.
Scott: All right cool.
Male: Hey gang can you hear me?
[Music]
Week 41: KEIN
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Florian Schneider, one of the founders and administrators of KEIN.ORG, a collaborative networking environment that offers a wide range of internet services to activists and artists, groups and individuals from around the globe.
KEIN.ORG started in 1997 at Documenta X with the launch of the “no one is illegal” campaign. The group soon set up its own server and developed its own networking infrastructure. The idea of KEIN.ORG is self-supply in terms of networking techniques, operating on a strictly self-authorized and self-organized basis. KEIN.ORG runs eleven servers situated at various locations in Europe and beyond, hosting more than 500 websites, some 200 content management systems and countless mailing lists and email-accounts. A plausible world of plausible worlds, one might venture to say — except that the people at KEIN.ORG would likely point out that this is “KEIN world” — “kein” being the negative indefinite article in German that negates whatever noun follows it (translating as “no” or “none”): the KEIN.ORG website abounds in straight-faced play on the word that they are, featuring “KEIN manifesto”, “KEIN history”, “KEIN community — KEIN.ORG eluding identity by stating it is not what it is. But the word play makes a serious point, as their manifesto points out. It’s short and very much to the point:
“KEIN.ORG implies no organization: No organs, no shared purpose, no common ground, no identity and no feedback.
But rather than a negation KEIN marks the moment of withdrawal, an escape, an indefinite line of flight out of the overcoded structures of networks as formed-matter, of networked economies, of a standardized and controlled production of networked subjectivity.
KEIN is a machine for the production of production. It is asignificant as such: it produces not meaning, but means. But it has itself no means: it is free, free of charges, free of advertisement, free of liability, free of claims, free of complaints, free of duties, free of representation.
KEIN.ORG is about self-authorization, un-organizing and becoming fluid. There is no staff and there are no assets. But there are lots of links, connections, and conjunctions to be made.”
Week 39: Ultra-red
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Janna Graham and Robert Sember of the sound art collective ultra-red.
Founded in Los Angeles in 1994 by two AIDS activists, ultra-red has since expanded across Europe and North America its membership of artists and activists in such social movements as struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS. Over the years, ultra-red has developed a kind of ambient sound activism combining situationist radicalism with the sound research techniques of the acoustic ecology movement.
“Exploring acoustic space as enunciative of social relations,” as the group puts it, ultra-red develops uncompromisingly political art projects sometimes in the form of radio broadcasts, performances, installations or recordings — including two albums “Second Nature: An Electroacoustic Pastoral” (1999) and “Structural Adjustments” (2000). They have conducted “militant sound investigations” of the spaces of needle exchange (Soundtrax, 1992 – 1996), public sex (Second Nature, 1995 – 199
, public housing (Structural Adjustments, 1997 – 2003), resistance to global capital (Value System, 1998 – 2003), labor (Social Factory, 1997 – 2002), education (School of Echoes, 2001 – Present), anti-racism and migration struggles (Surveying The Future, 2001 – Present), and HIV/AIDS (SILENT|LISTEN, 2005 – Present). Just to round this sonic world off, the group also runs the fair-use online record label, Public Record.
The acoustic dimension is obviously constituent of any plausible, sentient world — as much as, perhaps more than the visual realm, given that we don’t have “earlids” allowing us to naturally filter sonic experience. But it is something that we have yet to really address in Plausible Artworlds. What dynamics are at work — or at play — in the relationship between acoustics and political organizing? Between conceptual art and the sonic realm? What kind of sound-based research will help us map out the acoustic space of contested spaces and favor the emergence of more plausible (art)worlds?
Transcription
Week 39: Ultra-red
[1st part]
Scott: How's the sound quality for everybody?
Female: Hello?
Scott: Hi there, great. So welcome you guys, I know we just talked a moment ago, but welcome to another week in this series of talks about plausible art worlds, or what we're calling plausible art worlds. It's great to have you guys here.
Female: Thanks, it's good to be here.
Scott: So we usually start these chats off, at least when we actually get the audio rolling just with a short description or just ask you guys, if you wouldn't mind, to give us a brief intro to Ultra-red for, I know we posted a link in the chat, that's for everybody who doesn't know to get a little bit of info, so they can follow along with the chat, would you mind giving us a brief; this is how we got started, this is who we are...
Robert: Yep, no problem
Female: Yep, so Ultra-red has been around for 16 years, Robert and I haven't been with the collective for all of those 16 years, but it was started in Los Angeles, and the story goes; it was started by two age activists who were working in the context of a needle exchange in Hollywood, and making use of sound recordings to engage in political analysis of the struggles around HIV and AIDs in Los Angeles at the time, and in the history of Ultra-red, and that moment there were two members and sort of grew over time and I think collected people as we call them investigations, so people who are involved in analysis around struggle through sound, and the sort of collecting of people, or people meeting each other is really based on a number of shared interests. The first may be, one of them being an interest in working with sound or increasingly as we say now less sound, and more scenarios and choreographies of listening, but also I think over time, when we met each other or exchanged e-mails we started to realize that all of us have some background or interest in popular education in strategies and structures and processes of organizing. The members of the group now, there are 9 of us, we're in three countries, and sometimes more, including the US, there's still people active in Los Angeles to some extent, and the people in Los Angeles work primarily around issues of migration and public housing, but also around AIDS and HIV, and we have a group in the UK who are working on investigations also around border regimes and issues around migration and racism and anti-racism, and increasingly here, the intersection between thinking about the border and thinking about sites at the border and issues of immigration, and new immigration policy in the UK, in relation to spaces of education and how privatization of the university and the use of schools and universities in relation to border control is coming collapsed. Then we also have some projects that have been going on in different parts of Europe, and they've been a bit more mobile projects that are site specific, but tend to circulate around the issues around migration, racism and anti-racism. So I don't know Robert, do you want to say anything else about what it is we're up to? I mean I think, so we all share these histories of working within struggle, some of us have more explicit relationships to the art world, like training, or background in the arts, but many members of the group really don't, and come out specifically of struggles and analysis of struggle and also action within particular struggles, so...
Scott: How many members do you have in your group?
Female: Nine
Scott: Ok, and you guys are in London now?
Female: Yeah, we're in London right now; I live here, and Robert is visiting, right now he's living in [inaudible 0:06:24.8] hooking up a project there, but yeah, it's exciting, we don't all spend that much time together, this is kind of like an issue, I mean this kind of Skype call feels a bit [inaudible 0:06:38.0] to some of the ways in which we organize ourselves, but we tend to work in project teams that are located in a place for a period of time.
[Silence]
Scott: Oops, look like we lost them.
[2nd part]
[male][continued...] so that there was a sense of a need to actually shift [inaudible 0:00:11.5] away from construction of analysis and then circulation of those in a packaged form into a much more process-based collective investigation focused kind of procedure. And so we often [inaudible 0:00:31.1] as we moved from imposing sounds to organizing [inaudible 0:00:37.2] and this shifts an emphasis from the creation of objects to the constitution of these investigations that had been [inaudible 0:00:53.5] through these processes of collective listening, questioning, discussion, analysis and the formation [inaudible 0:01:03.4] of a kind of contribution to organizing that [inaudible0:01:09.7] arise from the language we would use, the articulations of the ideological [inaudible 0:01:17.5] that sort of group of people who ...
[3rd part]
[male][continued... inaudible/unclear sound until 0:10:08.9]
Female: Does anyone have any questions?
Scott: Yeah, I'm sure other people do too, just a quick question is; you're interested in groups, at least one thing of what I remember from what you were saying is that, well I guess what happens when groups really listen, and I was curious about what your criteria are for the groups that you work with? Do you have criteria?
Female: It's a really good question, we've been trying to grapple with that, I think in the last year or so, because we've had a lot of invitations to go places for shorter periods of time where maybe the earlier work of the collective came out of a very long engagement with the struggle in a particular place, or within a struggle that a longer trajectory this kind of way the art world operates develop invitations for shorter term visits has made us revisit that. I don't know, in the UK, I think we've found-- because we've done quite a lot of these maybe shorter-term visits to places, but we've found the most important moments that we've had have been where we've been able to have criteria around working with other people who are involved in a struggle that we have direct experiences within, so for example, we're doing a project in Glasgow, but because we've done a couple of years of work, doing anti-racism work with people who have been direct, who have experienced racist violence directly in the South West of England in a rural area, we thought it was would be best and most important for us to work with an organization that's already involved in that struggle, so there's an organization in Glasgow called Unity that works doing direct migrant support, so that would be like one way we would approach who we would want to work with, but having said that in the last year, I think we've also worked with other groups that; or gone into a situation where a gallery has identified groups on our behalf and we've had to negotiate which of those groups would be appropriate to work with, or that we could work with in a way that would...
Scott: Groups of people around the gallery that were requesting?
[female]Yeah, a lot of the time where [inaudible 0:13:11.5] been brought in, especially to galleries, or are invited into galleries to almost as like an outsourced arm of their public engagement; like there's a funding stream and a number of galleries that need to be doing public engagement work; want to maybe do it more radically than the instrumentalized model of arts education in Britain, which is very specific, but really has over the last 25 years involved arts educators and artists in processes in so-called integration, pacification. So there's also a critical group of curators and educators who are saying "We don't want that, we want to do engagement, but we don't want to do that", and part of that invitation is really to also assist them to work within the culture of their institutions or funding streams to develop a different way of doing that. Having said that, that can be a bit clumsy it can mean that we enter into a space and there are some groups that have been defined as groups who are local who might have affiliation with the movements that we've been involved with, but sometimes that can be quite a loose affiliation, or a loose reading of those movements, so in those cases, we do these kind of listening exercises where we find I think a lot of the time the most resonance is with organizations that share to some extent either some of our commitments; whether those are commitments within a political struggle, or commitments within popular education, or within particular histories.
Robert: I mean I think there are two actually very useful terms to spend some time thinking about, that Jenna has introduced here; one is the idea of the invitation, and the other is this issue with the public--all the groups, particularly the sort of ubiquitous ever-patient within art spaces of this idea of the public, in face in a conversation earlier today in which this sort of question of "So at what point is there going to be a public engagement in the project", and this sort of notion that something actually hasn't really happened within the context of an art institution until it's gone public in some way. So this question of invitation and both the public are basically... the mains in which a lot of our work is being evolved at this point, there are essentially three kinds of invitations that are possible that help to constitute the group. One is an invitation that actually comes from an Ultra-red member who is involved in some kind of work or struggle and says "You know, I'm at a phase in this work where I think it would be useful for us to do some of the procedure that Ultra-red has been developing and organizing, and so this is what will occur, and it becomes something that is then nested within the context of a very long relationship. Then there is the invitation that will come from a constituted group that will say "We're at a phase in our own work, we would be interested in having you come in and work with us in some way", and in that sense there is a kind of coherence, so the group already has a sense of history, their own vocabulary, their ideological commitments, and through the process of working with Ultra-red, sometimes some of those go into crisis, sometimes some of the things that are accepted as established procedures or terms become questioned, and a new set of analyses, or a new set of propositions emerge. Then the third invitation is the one where we are invited by and art institution to do an event, and the event itself constitutes for the period of the event, a kind of collectivity, but there is no illusion that this collectivity actually proceeds the coming together of the event, or will actually be continued beyond it. These three kinds of invitations produce three different engagements on our part in some way. The conditions that they establish make certain things possible and they make other things not possible. For us to determine what the value is of something and what has been compromised within each of these projects is a long conversation for us; what is the value of us doing this, given that there is this constraint, or something like that. On the other hand is the question of the public. I think that this is one of the major struggles, certainly what I'm having in a number of the projects that I'm involved in at this point, where there is, I feel, a deep need to actually have a somewhat closed investigations so that a group can in fact go about its work and develop its analysis, and at a certain point it will be in a position to invite others to come into conversation with it. In terms of art institutions, part of the negotiation is in a certain sense "can you trust us enough, or will you give us the authority?", "will you give up the authority of being the ones who define the terms of the invitation to the public and the moment at which that invitation is going to be issued?" so that a group is able to constitute itself through this investigation and at a certain point it can determine that it has arrived at a point that it can now have a wider address. In a certain sense, what happens is the public becomes fragmented into constituencies and then are no longer this generic, by which often in the art world is meant sort of essentially a bourgeois constituency which is the base constituency for most of the art world. And so when you say the public, what you essential mean, referring to is a very particular audience. So the question of the constitution of the group; there isn't a single criteria or formula. A lot of it has to do with where the invitation comes from for us, under what conditions, we will then consider how we will respond to that invitation and how we might be able to make a contribution to the event or the process that we've been asked to contribute to in some way. On the other end, where is this going? Who is this for? What is the point of this work? And another series of invitations, it may be for Ultra-red to continue working on it, or it may be for group to expand its own constituencies, its own address in some way.
It's been really interesting to think about how profound, how important the invitation actually is, and the fact that the invitation keeps on being issued, it itself is revised as each phase of the procedure moves forward. This is what happens when you work with people over time as supposed to say; here is one event, here is one encounter; that you are constantly negotiating the terms of that relationship. That's part of what you listen to, are the terms of that negotiation for the continuing work.
Scott: Speaking of that being part of what you listen to, I don't know if you noticed just a second ago there was a questions from some of the people at Base Kamp; did someone over there want to ask that question? Or do you want me to read it?
Yes, Cassie, or someone there, I'm not sure who was saying that they're curious about what role the music, or what role the audio takes within the projects? Is it just a way to approach these issues; is it more about the audio itself in conjunction with these issues? And they're curious without having heard any of the audio from these projects.
Robert: This is actually, it would be great to actually hear some of the audio, and my suggestion is if you do follow the link to Public Record, and listen to--when you have a chance, listen to either the entire 60 sounds that make up the project, what is the Sound of the War on the Poor, or just click through a random sampling of them. And I hope that one of the things that will be immediately striking is how different the audio response is to the same question, and so that will, I think, begin to give some sense of the texture, the variation and texture that sound makes possible. The actually procedure of working with sounds is deceptively simple; essentially people will make a recording, bring that recording in, and we will sit together around the table and listen to the recording. More often than not, it's a sight recording, it's not a piece of music, it's not composed, somebody has gone somewhere to a particular place, or sit and has made a recording for a period of time. After listening to it there is the question; What did you hear? The inventory of those responses, as they begin to unfold, and it's quite exhaustive; some people will begin by wanting to catalogue the sound; "I have heard the sound of a city" and that is sort of the response to what did you hear , and then that question is asked again, and then you'll hear some people will attempt to then treat the sound as though it were some kind of quiz, I need to sort of guess exactly where this sound is. So you see a range of responses to the listening, but by doing it collectively, the limitation of each of those responses is almost the way in which each of those responses return you to the sound, and as you're sitting at the table, you being to hear the sound differently; "I wasn't listening to it as a kind of quiz, but if I was to listen to it what would I then be hearing?" and so you start to generate a long list of descriptive. Some are very simple, very direct, others are more interpretative or poetic, and the vocabulary of the thematic becomes very rich and broad.
Jenna: But I think also what happens is each of those modes of listening, interpretation and cataloguing, or what we mind call conceptual listening which happens quite often where people say that they heard the sound of violence, or a concept actually, maybe more so than a concrete thing in the world. Each of those modes of listening reveals also a set of investments and desires of those people who are in the room, and that's somehow listening to those desire as well is also quite important in the formulation of some kind of group; whether it's a group who completely disagrees with one another, or a group composed or on solidarity or something in between, that active projection of the desire is also really important to catalyzing a collective experience.
Scott: And what is your preferred role within this group? there's you, there's the numbers of Ultra-red who some of you are in proximity, while some of you are not; when you enter into this kind of activity with other people listening, is your role always organized at the events? Do you participates in trying to interpret sounds and let other people know what you were thinking? I mean obviously you have a special role within the project because you are part of the organizing group, at least assuming from what you guys are saying that all the projects you're talking about are organized by Ultra-red; and I understand that especially when you were talking about earlier Robert about organizations and--not necessarily outsourcing activity, but outsourcing responsibility, usually they invite artist groups or curatorial groups, but specifically people who are involved in organizing to take on that responsibility; and I was just curious about both of you individually and other members of Ultra-red if you can speak on their behalf too-- what your desired position is, or if you feel that you have a responsibility to maintain a certain position within that activity.
Jenna: It's a really good questions because I think we've struggled with it in different projects in different ways, and many of us will probably disagree on what the role would be.
Scott: Maybe I should ask you individually then?
Jenna: Yeah, I mean I can just speak from a very specific project where we did a project in the south-west of England which was the first invitation what Robert talked about; it was another member of Ultra-red who worked for an anti-racism organization and invited Ultra-red--other members of the collective-- to come and work in that context, and the conversations that we were having were about answering the question what is the sound of racism in the south-west, which is a rural community, and the south of England where there's increasingly a lot of right-wing organizing, and also a lot of racist violence happening, and in those contexts we started this process of listening with a kind of facilitation, I was facilitating the sessions and Elliot was at different moments where we would be very much a quiet facilitator, facilitating, asking the question; What did you hear? taking notes when people spoke, but really quite out of the scenario in terms of our own interpretations and felt that that was quite important to leave space for people. But increasingly in the project that we've been doing, and even in that project, our silence became quite a problem for us because we were-- in particular Elliott as an anti-racism organization--and myself as I became more involved in people's lives and in this moving towards actual political action around the issue, it was impossible to play that role of a facilitator only, so we became much more involved in the interpretations and in the discussions, but as we moved closer towards the constitution of ourselves as a collective and that would be one particular case where we all; Elliott, myself and the people we were working with were involved in collective analysis and eventually some forms of acting together as well.
Scott: Do you mean that in sense that you were actually moving towards other forms of self-organization rather than
Jenna: Yeah exactly, like moving from the question; What is the sound of racism in the south-west to what is the sound of anti-racism in the south-west. So really, trying to think about how we would constitute a group, or a network of people, how that network could organize itself locally in response to racist violence that was happening in that particular project; some of those small self-organized groups developed through the project, and yes , and the process went on, and that was over the course of about a year, we were very much a network. We were part of that network, and the idea that we would be facilitating something that we weren't directly involved in, or that we would be a kind of outside figures within that, didn't seem appropriate or possible; and it was quite early on that that became the case because the more we worked with people in even the recordings of sounds, we had spent quite a lot of time with people discussing the way that they would approach recordings, the sites that they would go to and also formulating analyses with them. The idea that we would be facilitators only just didn't work.
Scott: I understand what you're saying is that it's more in the spirit of action research than some kind of a so-objective...
Robert: Action research is certainly one of the movements, one of the paradigms that we have actually have discussed
Scott: And I'm mainly asking about group dynamics, not to sort of try to poke at your group specifically; just out of curiosity, because I think the questions that you're asking are really relevant regardless of who's asking them, or what methods you're using; not to say that I don't think the methods are relevant--they are-- but I think that it's also something that whenever is brought up, I'm really curious about; I guess a slight elaboration on that question could be; do you also work with other groups who are on an equal playing field with you organizationally-speaking?
JennaThe question we're approaching in the work that we're doing in Scotland in one organization for example that works one issues of anti-gentrification and is maybe in a preliminary moment of organizing, but in terms of what they do and our knowledge of them, that we've know about them for a long time, and know about their analysis and shared some perspectives with them and were invited by them, and maybe this is an example of the second kind of invitation that Robert was talking about, where they invited us to come and attend an anti-gentrification walk that they were doing and make recordings and then work with them as partners in developing a mechanism for listening, for people to listen who had been on the walk a week after, and to use that listening of the sound walk to start formulating shared analysis, and then in that sense I think the organization was quite different than ours but comparable in terms of commitments and histories of working in Scotland and critical vocabulary and all of that kind of thing. So definitely, that would be more of an example of an organization that invites us to do this kind of work. I mean, even that was mediated through an art organization, but in general, the group was wanting us to com because we're part of social movements and because they know us, and we know them, so yeah; does that answer the question?
Scott: Yeah definitely, I think my question might not be that, I don't know to what degree it applies to you, or work with you've approached difficulties around the issue you're working with, or around the question of how does intergroup collaboration work when people usually take similar role; I think it's often easier for people who are in groups for those groups to work together when their roles are usually different. I think it's sort of a larger question for organizing but it's also a question for how collective activity connect especially within the creative cultural realm can really be productive.
Robert: Actually a number of things that I would consider might be helpful, some very pragmatic things, one is something that Jenna was pointing to in the description she gave of the project in the south-west is while there are these sorts of events, and the events have a beginning and an end and they are situated often within an on setting, they're actually preceded and followed by many hours of conversation, of interaction and those are essential. In a certain sense, the project itself that gets formally framed; so if you go to the Tate, the Tate Britain website, you'll see a project there that we did called "We come from your future", you'll see documentation of an event, there's about three photographs, there's a description, that is such a small moment in what actually is a very long collective process of building trust, and in many ways what I think are [inaudible 0:39:11.7] dynamics, the [inaudible 0:39:14.4] of friendship, of care, and in many instances a kind of love and affection, and so the development of that closeness--and then of course some instances also sometimes conflict, disagreement, animosity-- but those elements that mix together, these relationships of commitment--those are very much a part of what happens. As occurs, I think, with any group; over time, as you begin to become familiar with each other so the tone and the nature of the conversation is going to change, so that's one thing: Is that it's really important to not [inaudible 0:40:04.1] the kind of art that sort of gets formally identified, documented and circulated, but to see it as part of a group process, and often the event, as sort of formal as it might be, is basically a consolidating moment for a group, it's something that we're working towards, we're going to do this, it's going to be an opportunity for us to reflect on where we are within our process at this point to be able to hear how others are reacting to what we're doing, so that we can actually figure out where we're going to go next. So it's not a culminating event, actually, this is a very important thing for us as well, is that the event, which so often within art situations; the event completes a project. Here, for us in many ways, the event actually begins a projects, there'll be all of this procedure leading up to it, the event happens and then the questions of what can we do now? That's a very important question, it's not now we have had a public moment, our work is done; but it's actually what have we learned from this moment about ourselves and how to we move forward?
The other thing is something that we've been working with a lot, is protocols, so that it's not as though in the facilitation people will arrive and they will sit there ignorant of what's happening and then just be directed by us through this, there actually is a formal written protocol that people actually have access to and are able to follow. The protocol, because it is there, in a way, I think removes some of the conventional structure of authority, it doesn't create a kind of--as an equal everybody out, but in a certain sense, it becomes a kind of document to which people can reference.
Scott: Do you mean protocol the fact that you follow protocol? Or the specific protocol itself?
David: [inaudible answer] and the protocol is repetitive, and so in a certain sense, all of the anxiety about what are we going to do next? How are we going to move next? In a certain sense, it becomes quite transparent, and I think that protocol-- you can break protocol, there are many instances where people have said "actually I don't want to do it this way, can we do it another way?", but the fact that there is something to begin with, I think that helps in situations, so one of the thing I'm imagining in your question is; you're working with a group that are actually very used to being the ones who facilitate group processes and suddenly they are being asked to actually be facilitated, does this cause--and especially if they have a different procedure, I mean I'm thinking this event that we did in Glasgow which was rather difficult where we actually had sort of three very strong, very different kind of facilitation styles and strategies present in the room, having the protocol didn't resolve those differences, but it became a way in which we could actually reference those difference. It just provided a structure and organizing to the process, that made a conversation about process at least at some point in the event. There's a lot of work that goes into the development of protocols.
Jenna: I was just going to say the protocols that we develop for an event, or listening session often have a great deal to do with what we've learned about the organization and its own capacity to listen. For example, one project that we worked on, the one we worked on at the Tate, we were working with an organization that had a real habitual kind of practices of speaking, listening, where very particular within the organization do to a large extent to where they were situated in relation to public funding meant that there we spokes people in the organization and other people who were brought in as evidence of situations, in this case of racism, and so they had this dynamic of speaking and listening within the group and we knew that if we were to have a group discussion, or a listening session, we would somehow have to produce a protocol that would somehow equalize and then draw attention to that habitual way of speaking and listening, so that some people in groups we always have people who feel much more confident and much more comfortable and who have also been authorized by institutional structures to become those who speak and so in many of the protocols that we've developed, it's about trying to rearrange those practices and to see what happens, to bring attention to these micro-politics, or micro-dynamics of speaking and listening that become habitual and unspoken within a group.
Scott: Interesting, yeah, do you ever feel that you guys as a group are intervened upon in a way that surprises you?
[both]Always
Scott: I mean because you project is about listening, I would assume you would discover things you didn't expect, but at the same time, you probably expect that so...
Robert: Well [inaudible 0:46:01.7] we haven't spoken on it and I think we should is this issue of pedagogy and I think this may be a point where, I'm not sure we will know how to deal with this, we deal with it in the same way, but certainly within our own collective, when we spend time together we all have a conversation at certain point will occur what I call these teaching moments. Where we find ourselves in a moment where somebody in the collective has been reading something or has and experience, or has a history that becomes very meaningful at that moment, and so we find ourselves sitting and listening to what this person has to say. It can be a particular theoretical analysis, or it can be a particular deep history that we hear about, and these are the most wonderful and surprising moments in the event, this work I'm doing in New York at the moment is with a group of people who are creating an archive, and the moments of arriving at a point where somebody feels compelled, or moved to actually say "it makes me think of this" and suddenly there is now this sort of teaching moment and we--those who are facilitating are in the position of students in that moment as well, and the experience of learning collectively and then working together and sort of saying "now I see how this fits in to what we're doing at this point", and so collaborative pedagogical process is really the strongest element in all of this. The listening creates this co-learning, and so the issue of who is the facilitator, the issues of authority, the issues of control, these become reorganized into the pedagogical relationships where there is an understanding that at certain points it's very likely, if the procedure, if the protocol makes this possible, that everybody will be able to teach, and that everybody will be able to learn, and the group then builds its knowledge through this process of teaching and learning. This is the popular education model; the group finds its questions and then it also finds, within its procedures, ways of responding to those questions, and sometimes it's very straight forwards--you go and find the answer--How did this developer obtain this piece of land in order to be able to build this particular building that is now reshaping the neighborhood? Let's find out; and so you begin to actually build that kind of critical analytical knowledge, but it arises within the context of this collective pedagogy.
Scott: I definitely don't want to take over the Q part of the Q&A discussion, so please anybody just stop me if I just keep throwing things out here, but I'm curious, since I started; a big part of your you've said is about listening, or a lot of what you do, or a lot of what you think is important, and I was curious if we have been over emphasizing the acoustic side of what you do, or if not; if you wouldn't mind--I know you've already elaborated enough--but if you would mind elaborating on this point, I feel when you're using the term listening, you're really talking about paying attention generally speaking, not necessarily listening with your ears. At the same time though, you could pay attention by strictly looking and plugging your ears, but you don't do that and I was curious to know; what does, assuming again that there is an emphasis on listening with your ears and on acoustic experience, what do you think that gives you, or what kind of potentials do you think that lends for building different kinds of art worlds, that an over-emphasis on visual culture or looking with your eyes doesn't?
Robert: I'd like to make this even a little bit more specific is recorded sound; so there are these sorts of sound walks that provoke an awareness or an attention to the procedures of listening that very quickly we move into recorded sound, and what does it mean to actually make a recording in one part of the world and then actually listen to that recording in a different part of the world with a group of people, and what are the qualities of sound that, we think, that sort of distinguishes in some way from visual material. So that this metaphor of listening, as supposed to in a way to paying attention, which has a more visual quality to it, is something that we're very interested in. There is a number of ways of responding to that question, there's sort of deep theoretical considerations of those kinds of questions. Just to situate very simply a kind of quality to it, one of the things that's lovely about sound is that it happens over time, and that listening to a recording is sort of listening to a sequence of sounds that over the listening of the couple of minutes, or something like that, also to accumulating; that structures attention in a certain way, it provokes potentially a narrative, it creates space in some way, a sonic environment that's emerging, there's a registering of the resonances of a particular space that begin to develop and a building up through paying attention from the details of that sound a possibility, and it's the sort of unresolved nature of sound, particularly recorded sound, or what was technically referred to as the [inaudible 0:54:20.9] this idea that a sound through recording is removed from its source. So the moment [inaudible 0:54:30.1] that particular sound, we are separated from it this sort of distancing procedures, the unfolding of a time, that this [inaudible 0:54:46.7] becomes very useful. But I don't think that what we're doing is only about sound at all, I think this is something that we're certainly I think grappling with, there are [inaudible0:55:04.2] who are very wedded to the qualities of a sound recording, and there are others that are interested much more in what we would call the scenes and procedures of listening in a very rich sense, paying attention as you said. I think that the emphasis on sound should be... it has a pragmatic quality, it shouldn't be over theorized, I don't think it's a hugely complicated investment on our part.
Jenna: But in relation to the visual, we don't only use sounds when we're doing the recordings, the sounds are field recordings and they are often somehow not immediately recognizable in many cases whether that's in the case of people making statements, to people speaking at the same time, which alters the legibility of the statement, or whether it's someone making a recording that to them is incredibly personal but to other people it is not recognizable at all, something about the--I don't want to call it opacity because it's not opacity-- but something about the invisible visual register I think there's a lot more things that are recognizable and something about may be the fact that the sounds that we tend to work with are not recognizable, allows for a situation where people can begin to hear themselves in those sounds in maybe a different way than the visual register which is much more highly [inaudible0:57:10.2] in some ways. That might be something. I think also, I mean it's also what we talked about before, looking at the register, not just of sound, but of sound, but of listening does allow also one's attend to power in a group and in a situation differently--I don't know whether better or worse--but you listen to relations in a different way
Robert: This is a question that I've seen come up which is about the public school in London, I don't know if you want to say anything...
Jenna: What was the question about the public school?
Robert: Just a comment would be [inaudible 0:57:56.6]
Jenna: I haven't been there yet, so I can't really say very much I know about it but
[inaudible 0:58:03.6]
Jenna: I thought there was a London branch of the public school, is there not?
I thought I heard someone talking about this already in London but...
Sorry, could the person who asked the question about the public school in London maybe be a bit more specific, just to understand what the proposition would be because it sounds exciting.
?: I would like to use this as an opportunity to ask you to sort of say a little bit about radical pedagogy, or sort of radical education and the fact that we are very caught up in the sort of [inaudible 0:58:59.5] within education, and these questions around, we can talk about what the institution's about but I think given our very deep investment in popular education and pedagogical practices that no less important than the institutions around [inaudible 0:59:18.6] and these are things that we are thinking about a great deal in [inaudible 0:59:24.6] in particularly involved in thinking through these kinds of questions...
Jenna: Ok sure, I mean the work that we've been doing in the last and that we will be doing in the next year is really marrying the work that we're doing in struggles with what's happening in education and in particular in the UK right now at the higher-education level, but also it's at high-school level; the new migration policies are really honing in on the university asking professors to report on students who are not from the UK, not coming to class and really extending the border to the universities so that, putting quotas on the number of faculties that can be working at the university form outside of the UK, and that kind of thing, so, we've been talking about, we starting to think how is it that we intervene into those spaces in particular also in relation so curriculum about migration whereas at university the sense of the border itself at the university in the elementary school and secondary schools, I'm sure it's the same in the UK the kind of curriculum around difference and around racism around what new migration policies are actually producing for students in schools which is a heightened sense of policing and a heightened sense of difficulty in terms of families trying to gain entry to the UK, and also a general discussion of racist practice as it's happening that we've felt it quite important to be working and thinking more about our work in schools and in trying to constitute alternative spaces for investigation that both intervene at the level of curriculum and policy, but also try and build stronger coalitions between movement, struggles, who are struggling for more people to be involved and this crisis that's happening in the universities and schools. Is that what you're asking about?
?: I mean the other thing I think is also is a place where the influence of anarchism is particularly present as well, where it has been the free-school movement in the UK has been a very strong influence, so creating alternative spaces for learning and alternative procedures for learning and actually doing that.
Jenna: Which is really important to mark as a difference between for example David Cameron has put on the table that he's very excited about free-schools and there's some new policies within the higher education and high-school level where groups of people can autonomously form free-schools and apply to the government for money, but these free-schools are really; there is an understanding that they would be like Steiner schools or class students as that being held up as the ideal situation and we're trying to reconcile these contradictions around what it actually means to have autonomous education that is radical and that doesn't reproduce these class-divisions and in particular cultural divisions around learning, which are already embedded the schools, so it's a difficult moment right now to think about the intervention to produce; how do we understand autonomy in relation to an autonomy that's a notion of freedom that's being of course in a new context reformulated in reactionary policies.
Robert: And I think the question has come of a October 7th action the national day of action [inaudible 1:03:58.2] that's happening in the United States, I actually teach form time to time in universities, I've taught in the UC system and in very regular contact with students who are organizing in particular at UCLA around the cuts in funding and the shifts in the curriculum, and most recently I was working in the state-education system in Ohio, in the university system there, and they too are experiencing profound cuts, and the way in which these are being used to continue the co-operatizing of higher-education and the dismantling of public-education systems is incredibly troubling. The helplessness that students are feeling in the face of this crisis is really extraordinary and just at a very basic level being able to create opportunities or procedures for people to speak about what they're experiencing and to being to formulate on the basis of a recognition across each other of how the crisis is affecting them very directly in their education, and being able to understand a connection between a [inaudible 1:05:31.0] process and the curriculum. So not seeing the sort of curriculum as a independent but actually as a curriculum it is something that is already in an ideological relationship with the broader context. It's been astonishing being in the US education system, Columbia University, I taught there for many years, the lack of a vocabulary or procedure to actually undertake an investigation of the conditions [inaudible 1:06:10.1] education has been very troubling and it means that administration are just moving forward with the dismantling of curricula that are focused on education around social critique towards the service model of education. I think that there is, for me, this questions of pedagogy and the procedures of pedagogy is one of the most important areas for radical action at this point, and this action--the work that has been happening particularly with the UC campuses the [inaudible1:06:51.2]I think is incredibly important.
Jenna: And we have a series in the UK, in terms of sharing events, there's a series of announcements coming up of recommendation on the cuts that will come to higher-education which is being undertaken by an executive from British petroleum who's also an authoritative to Tate has made a really necessary -not necessary [inaudible 1:07:19.8]as someone involved in other social struggles in London around education that there's a group of people right now who are trying to produce an analysis that looks at the cuts to culture that are proposed and the reformulation of the cultural sector and its relationship to the reformulation to education and how the proposition of this creative economy which the British government has been proclaiming for about ten years and the reconfiguration of education are tied into each other. So we're looking at a series of actions here in October/November, a whole series of [inaudible 1:08:04.7] and investigation that are going on by different student groups and one thing that I've been looking at quite a lot and I think Ultra-red has been looking at also is this work-experience and the internship and the apprenticeship and how this free-labor that gets really highly model within the cultural sector, but is really spread across all the sectors at this point, is becoming a standard way of bringing people into a situation of [inaudible 1:08:42.0] but also dividing out; for example migrants, students, from affluent British National students in terms of the way the education is being formulated, so we're working in two schools right now and one is 80% asylum seekers and the students are all being streamlined into apprenticeships and free-labor practices around skills and the other school [inaudible 1:09:12.4] the students are of course being streamlined into free-labor in culture and how to we understand those two things together; how do we understand the practices around migration and how they get institutionalized within education but then also this cycle of production related to the culture industries as well. So there'll be a series of things, so it will be nice to keep the discussion going back and forth.
Robert: I mean if anybody on the call who works in education, it would be really interesting to hear your thoughts on that, I've been thinking a lot particularly about what I see in the US and a kind of [inaudible 1:09:52.7] of teachers, I would always say to rephrase this [inaudible 1:09:58.8] was the sound of a war on teachers at this point, in the same way the economic crisis, the emphasis on undocumented labor is a distraction from the addressing the real causes of this crisis. In a sense this shift to this distraction into questions, standardized testing and also the failure of teachers to provide an appropriate education is a distraction from what is really producing the crisis in education and it is a conversation that I wish was more robust or louder in the United States.
Greg: This is Greg, and I have the privilege of teaching at a small art college right outside of Philadelphia and that atmosphere is obviously quite different that large public research universities but before I go into that, I just want to point out that we're about four minutes to eight, and we do try and keep it to eight o'clock so that we don't keep you guys too long, we know you have other things going on as well, so we don't want to keep you up too late. But I really appreciate the question, and I'm sure Steven has some ideas and I don't know if anybody else on the call is a teacher, a professor or whatever, but it's also the whole Ricardo Domingo situation also calls into questions the role that tenure has played in the past, plays now and will play in the future, or the lack there-of, but what was really established, not to keep old [crummaging? 1:12:04.1] in place for 35 years, but rather to protect interesting and experimental research, that loss I think is more dangerous than people might think, to lament this loss of protection for being fired because you're not doing your job well, I think that's the sort of public face of tenure, but rather I think those of us who are of course seeking it, it's so that we can really start to make, or do the research we've always wanted to do without fear of being silenced. What's amazing about Ricardo is he was doing that work from the time he set foot on campus, and I think that's an really an amazing and commendable and more tragic that he's in the situation that he's in because they're firing him for the same reason they get granted on tenure so [inaudible 1:13:02.2].
Robert: I agree and I think that this is a case that should be constantly reiterated and repeated what this case is about because the closeting of dissent is terrifying, it's very disturbing and particularly within the [inaudible 1:13:30.0] in the high-school level, even the silencing [inaudible1:13:35.7] it's just really profound.
Greg: Yes, I agree. Obviously we don't want to turn this into an entirely separate conversation but also we're here at either o'clock and we just really want to thank you for sharing a lot of various angles on the work that you're doing, it's just tremendously exciting, inspiring...[inaudible 1:14:05.4]... please keep us posted, although we won't be there physically, we always like to keep in touch and hear about what's going on.
Jenna: Great, we'll add you to the list.
Robert: Enjoy the rest of your evenings
Greg: Yes, you as well and thanks everybody for coming, and thanks again you guys this was truly interesting, and we look forward to continuing our communications with you all.
Jenna: Thanks for inviting us, have a nice dinner!
Greg: Thanks, goodbye everybody.
Week 38: Groundswell Collective
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with James David Morgan from Groundswell Collective.
http://blog.groundswellcollective.com/
Since 2006, the Groundswell Collective has been producing work that fashions and furthers alternative modes of social organization in both visual art and folklore — thereby implicitly acknowledging that there is no one artworld but rather a multiplicity of them. As they put it, their interest is in “how art relates to social movements, especially in its capacity to compose new social relationships. Art as an insular phenomenon (if it ever really was that), where its main focus was itself, is no longer; what it concerns now is its relationship to society, how it is composed and how it affects.”
The very fact that many people continue to speak of an artworld, singular (however implausible), is revealing of the extent to which cultural production has been integrated, almost seamlessly and ever increasingly, into capitalist logic over the last half century. And it is this logic that the Groundswell Collective sets out to reverse:
“the once avant-garde aspirations of making art an everyday practice have been realized, and the terrain on which power is built and contested has a decidedly cultural composition – producing politics is a cultural endeavor, and vice versa. Taking this second claim first, we recognize that the knowledge economy, or cognitive capital, is a salient force against which the left has yet to develop an effective strategy. Activist art offers extradisciplinary critique, and a theoretical model for this task, for the necessary engagement of power on the terrain which it now inhabits.”
Bringing together artists and activists, the group draws self-consciously on the long history of imagination, desire, and creativity on the radical left — which they refer to under the umbrella concept of “affective composition” — to alter, disrupt, channel, or otherwise impact hegemonic, one-world discourse, through a mutual aid online store and barter network.
Transcription
Week 38: Groundswell Collective
Dave: Hello
Scott: Hi guys, Hi Cassie and Base Kamp, Hi David, Matthew, Greg
It looks like we have an intimate enough group, at least via Skype, to do some quick intros, which is kind of fun, I think that would be a nice way of just checking in an saying hi. Cassie, you guys want to start at Base Kamp?
Oh, she's going to type it. Ok, that's good too.
Cassie: Can you hear my correctly?
Others: Yes, I can, yes
Cassie: Ok, Hi everyone, we're here at Base Kamp just hanging out eating some banana chips, and sweet potato dip. We're excited to talk tonight, we've got a couple of people here, Michael just walked in a few minutes ago, he's getting some stuff ready.
Other: Hi Michael. Ok, we'll move on, who is this guys Scott Rigby?
Scott: Yes, here, present, I'm probably may need to mute my mic off and on just to keep that down, but David, it's great to have you, I've really been wanting to talk about, or to hear about Groundswell Collective. [inaudible 0:02:12.8] stuff might come up a number of times, but we haven't already had much time to talk yet.
David: Matthew, how are you, and what are you doing, and what can we expect from you in the years 2010 and 2011?
Matthew: I'm doing too much is what I'm doing. I'm based in [inaudible 0:02:40.2], we doing community organizing with some [inaudible 0:02:49.4] efforts, but the activism side of tonight's talk should be really great because a lot of what I'm trying to do is to try to interact with different kinds of cultural groups in the city, to kind of engage them in creating ways that they can voice who they are. And then I'm also starting up a festival of some sort in the next year or two, that will support artist students in more practices so that's what I'm up to right now.
David: Awesome, thank you. And you're going to be showing, or doing a workshop at Conflux with the project that you're working on Freespace right?
Matthew: Yeah, Freespace is like a collection, well, I'm asking people to provide images and some information about spaces that they [inaudible 0:03:47.8] connections with. And then create an archive with those, and then eventually starting to program them, so we're still collecting them right now, I'm hoping in the next few months to start creating some tours or some kind of thematic ways of allowing people to interact with those spaces.
David: Awesome, that sounds great, I'm just adding Adam here to our conference call, so give me a second to do that. Steven's with, us I'm going to add Steven. Hi Adam.
Adam: Hello, how're you doing?
David: We're doing great, we're mixing it up today, we're actually doing introductions, do you want to tell us who you are and why you're here?
Greg: David, do you want to tell us a little about where you're calling us from, or where we're speaking to you from, and then maybe we'll get started.
David: Yes, sure, I just moved up to Toronto, been here for maybe three weeks, and before that I was living in Boston, calling from home at this hour the busy street outside people like to honk their horns quite a bit so I apologize if there's some kind of background noise in advance. You're not allowed to turn left onto the intersection and people still like to, so they like to honk their horns at one another.
Greg: Not a problem, we contend with kung-fu upstairs at the Base Kamp space, so oftentimes you hear tumbling and rumbling from the Base Kamp space, so not a problem at all. Well, welcome everybody, thanks for coming out tonight, we're really excited to have David, and to hear more about the Groundswell Collective. Before we get started maybe I'll just copy and paste this link to your blog. There we go. And then, as I said before David, you can utilize the text however you want, or not at all, it's completely up to you. But what I'll do is I'll sort of give a quick read of what we wrote about you, or what Steven wrote about you, and then you can fill in the gaps and sort of further elucidate some of the projects that we might be mentioning here.
So and please correct this if any of this is incorrect, but I'm sure it's spot on since Steven wrote it. Since 2006 the Groundswell Collective has been producing work that fashions and furthers alternative models of social organization in both visual art and folklore; thereby implicitly acknowledging that that's no one art world but rather a multiplicity of them As they put it, their interest is in "how art relates to social movements, especially in its capacity to compose new social relationships. Art as an insular phenomenon, if it even really was that, where its main focus was itself is no longer. What it concerns now is its relationship to society, how it is composed, and how it affects. " So I won't read all of it, but I think that is a good primer to some of the things you'll talk about, so please feel free to pause and ask us questions, or ask us to participate, or obviously just talk as long as you'd like. The floor is yours.
David: Cool thanks, well, hi everybody, again, for the sake of introduction, David Morgan. I'm one of the co-founding members of Groundswell, and Ryan [surname 0:07:53.3] is the other founding member. We started in 2006 I believe, we were living in western [place 0:08:03.5] at the time, and sort of studying how art and politics intersect and thinking about cultural production as a port of activity etc, and just came together around a bunch of conversation that we were having. So, in the five or seven years that have transpired it's been a really interesting path that we've been on , it's been primarily way-finding and I'll send around a link to an article that I wrote recently for [inaudible 0:08:42.4] an online magazine, and I started it off with saying what is it that Groundswell does, that was the point of the article, and our gathering here today and my answer was that we don't know, and that we're happy that we don't know. Also I remember guys just had a conversation with a think-tank that has yet to be named, and they have their directives yet and whatnot; I was on an excursion with them once upon a time and I was the director of not yet knowing, and I think the title is still pretty apt. We are constantly becoming something other than we were and shifting, not just in form, or philosophy, but in space. I mean obviously I just moved here, from a place that I had been set up for a number of years, Ryan moved from Newfoundland where he was to Portland Oregon, which was a move back home, and we had a guy we had been working with who was moving to Peru to work on the [inaudible 0:10:00.7] per child projects, it was his transition out of the States, and simultaneously mine that precipitated a whole bunch of changes and I guess I can talk about that later on. So, with that, fluidity, with that kind of geographical separation and what not; I mean to be honest it's been really difficult, Ryan and I have lived in different places for almost the full five years that we've been working together, and it's been...
David: I guess we are primarily based in Boston since Ryan was more removed, I mean he was working with local theatre groups, he was doing work with a local radio station, and also some work with a local fishing community, and that kind of gave us the framework for the journal that we produce, and I'll talk about that more later too. But it's weird, you know it's definitely done primarily over the internet and we star, our communication is, so... who's coming on? [phone ringing]
Female: Hello
David: Hi, I'm David
Greg: Dave, we'll be adding people throughout as they join us, so just continue at your normal pace, we'll manage that in a bit, and welcome to all of our callers, to all of our participants.
David: So, we gathered this past summer, and the one before that to try and hammer out some more details about what we're doing, you know, we gathered in person, is what I mean to say. So, that's where we came up with the idea that it is directly the relationship to social movements that we're interested in, and how that can comprise new social relationships and reiterate what our mission statement is but that doesn't really elucidate much, so what does that look like? I guess some examples from the work that we've done and that we think is particularly interesting, or successful, or just stuff that we choose to concern ourselves with anyway, I've been organizing the [inaudible 0:13:01.5] festival that I mentioned earlier in our chat. The festival of radical marching bands that happens once a year in Boston, and for anybody who's interesting, it's upcoming it's [called Mystic Weekend 0:13:15.4]. There is a sort of genealogy that you can [inaudible 0:13:26.6] in that phenomenon, and for what it's worth, it came from earliest Dada, surrealism, definitely this situationist kind of thinking, and that got filtered through punk, and it got filtered through other sort of underground sub cultural sorts of phenomenon and in the 90s, I might contend that that's sort of train of thought or radical imagination, or however you want to refer to it, found it's fruition in [inaudible 0:14:11.5], anti-globalization and those gatherings that happen reclaim the streets being one that frequently gets pointed to and honk bands were a part of that. So, that kind of basis in social movements, you know being the anti-globalization movements specifically is a very good example of what we're talking about. Other folks within the Honk community would point to a different kind of genealogy and that's totally fine and fair and valid, and I also agree with it; the [inaudible 0:15:01.0] of these sort of folks were a huge inspiration for Honk bands as well, so it pulls from a lot of places, a lot of sources. Again, that's a project that I've been personally involved with, and sort of tangentially Groundswell itself has lent a hand too. One that we're more involved with is a group called Sprout, and they're sited in [inaudible 0:15:43.1] article. They've been using the models, it's somewhat like Base Kamp's chats to gather folks and, I mean they eat spaghetti together, they have this sort of critical conviviality that happens, and it's a great, lovely little catch phrase that some folks have used to describe that kind of phenomenon of gathering, and with Sprout we put together a couple of events. The way that happens is they get together and they eat spaghetti once a months, and they have a performance and a lecture series that's ongoing, [inaudible 0:16:32.8]spaghetti and we have presenters and the likes come and talk while we eat, and it's a wonderful little environment. So the stuff that Groundswell helps put on was, or rent public space, particularly around transportation, public performance, and sort of linking up those local threads that we were touching upon in those presentations and performances, sort of combining for the evening I guess, just the... I've lost my train of thought.
Anyway, Sprout, it's a wonderful organization, you should check it out.
Scott: Oh, yeah, I'm looking at it right now.
David: Cool, I'll mention a third, the design studio for social intervention, I think you guys at least tried to connect with, I don't know if they came off, but they have been focusing on using design thinking as a category for revitalizing the non-profit sector in the United States, and that's their overarching mission. So, to take and use the existing infrastructure, the existing networks, and to sort of infused that with some new thinking about the social relationship that we can compose by using this same old stuff, I mean it's not dissimilar to the dismantling the master's house with the master's tools kind of argument, but I mean, they draw from so many different sources that that's not really a fair characterization, it's something that they've been working on for decades prior to their coming together in the past year, so to do that kind of works specifically. In their case, it's using the social movement infrastructure that we've seen rise in the past 50 years, and on questioning we're going into that infrastructure with a new plan; linking social movements, new social relationships, and this aesthetic-affective thinking.
Groundswell, in that sort of milieu has been working in between, primarily we've been working with and for those guys, like I said, organizing those events at Sprout. [inaudible 0:19:51.1] we're kind of a cousin of the design studio and they're all quite good friends of ours and we focused all this effort around Boston, all three of the organizations that were mentioned are head quartered there, and so we were supporting their particular art words. We recognized at the outset that there are various art worlds, and that each of these organizations, including our own, comprises of public, and that that's a very important facet of doing this kind of work, the networking that could happen between those sites and organizations where we can help develop one another's power for lack of a better word, and how to be together in such a way that we're effective and... it's a primary task for us.
Greg: Dave, not to interrupt, but I was intrigued as you started to talk about, your transition from Boston to Toronto, and I wonder if you could talk about aspects in which you see the work changing based on your new location, or also currents that will continue regardless of geography, you talked a little bit about the local art community that exists in Boston, and I know that's going to be vastly different than that of which is happening in Toronto. Maybe you don't really know about what the specifics are in Toronto, seeing as you've only been there three weeks, but maybe you can talk about things that you foresee changing or developing in a different way, but also threads that will continue.
David: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I wanted to do is to spread out the geography a bit, we've been working in such a way that we're in distinct locations, and this is an opportunity where we're both relocated and have this blank slate to... it's true that I don't yet know what Toronto's lay of the land is, but treating it in the same way, certainly going to lend Groundswell as a support organization while we figure out what is possible here. Already we've met with Toronto free-gallery, which is a social-justice concerned gallery, and we might do some programming there, and there's a couple of other folks, Toronto's School for Creativity who are also doing much more of a [inaudible 0:23:12.8] series kind of track, and so the lending a hand is certainly a primary consideration of our, and is one that we will pick up in our new locations. It's also a question of whether we'll continue to work together in the same way; obviously I mentioned earlier, we put together this journal that was based on Ryan's experiences in Newfoundland. To say a little more about that, he was working in a fishing community there, and was basically doing folklore anthropological kind of work, and noticed the community was facing the Canadian government closing down the town in which they lived, it was an argument that they couldn't the infrastructure any longer, and so this meant a dislocation for all of that community. It's part of the reason that Ryan had to relocate. His being so very embedded there means something has changed drastically in the way that we have been thinking for the past year, the journal was a process that took at least a year to pull off, we're onto new lines of lead I guess, with our new locations as well.
To mention another one of the projects that we've set up; we have an online store, and we've set it up in a mutual way of fashion that we could syndicate the work of other artist activists, and give a location for resources that we found interesting, or good, or what have you. So now we'll be developing relationships with different groups around that particular site, we've worked out a partnerships with Half Letter Press to syndicate some of their stuff, and we may find the same is true with Toronto's School of Creativity. I guess I'll go back to the journal in a second because that's a good example of working in those in between spaces and finding connections and being able to give voice to the kinds of work that we're focusing on. We had, as I said the work Ryan was doing was around folklore, and he was gathering stories of the folks that were being displaced, so we recognized that similar displacements were happening on different scales and in different ways in different places. To describe some of the similarities and differences, we wanted to dig into this same kind of story telling from those other locations. The title was "Crisis [Folklore? 0:27:16.9] and we solicited both real and imagined stories, folklores to describe that phenomenon; that dislocation. We pulled from a climate change intervention in the U.K, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination wrote a piece about the bike-lock which was their intervention there, Team Colors did a piece somewhat differently about the non-profit industrial complex, and a friend of mine, John [surname 0:28:07.8] was working on anti-eviction blockades of [inaudible 0:28:16.6] houses, and he's developed a piece telling a story about those particular sites through shadow projections on actual house that's been foreclosed and where the eviction is actually happening, so they'll set up and do its presentation, this intervention while the family is being evicted, and before and after, to tell the stories of what went on in that house, both personal stories, and the ones related to the financial crisis that they found themselves in. there are some other imaginings about what to do with empty property, there's what to do with this sort of network in which we find ourselves, as activists, public practice, bulletin. So, a couple of examples of making those linkages a little more clear, and giving space to the folks that are out there in the world doing them.
Greg: I'm really interested in the crises who are narratives, are these accessible somewhere other than ordering the booklets? I mean, we should do that anyway, but I'm just curious
David: There's a PDF that you can get from our store, but we should at this point probably just free that up for everybody and post it on [inaudible 0:30:05.7] or something so that it's out there in the world.
Greg: I guess you could still tell people who want to buy it and make it available on [inaudible 0:30:17.7. As a way of supporting, and I am really interested in the [inaudible 0:30:32.0]. I was curious about part of the way you describe the Groundswell [inaudible 0:30:44.1].
When you catalogue this other work, that's how I came to know about you guys was [inaudible 0:31:18.7] before that. [inaudible 0:31:20.6]
[Other talking]
Maybe to tag a little bit on to that question is [inaudible 0:31:50.4]
[Other talking]
David: It's been referred to as unregulated discourse, and I just put that little saying on our website the other day that that kind of cataloguing is a way of doing... I guess referred to also as extra-disciplinary critique, this act of creating work, and I see it in a parallel way that the cataloguing the coming together, understand, criticize, re-work, have conversation about, performs the same function. The extra-disciplinary critique thing is sort of a political philosophy also about creative capitalism about [inaudible 0:33:36.3] economy and what not, and how one can go about addressing those circumstances. How to play with the levers of capitalism and I see that those two things share some common ground and to the act of cataloguing, I think is--on a good day I'd say it's close to an artwork in and of itself, but it's not creating in a similar way; it is art work, like it's labor that involved affecting aesthetics etc, but I don't know whether we can consider it a practice and I went back and forth on it. I'm open to hearing other people's opinions about this because to me it just seems like a curatorial role, and that is art labor. Does anybody have opinions about that?
Greg: I think we all should, it's whether or not we can formulate them in a cohesive manner, but do people have strong feelings about that? I mean I don't know if Stevens--not to put him on the spot-- if he's in a place that he can talk I imagine you have a fair amount to say about the process. I think that's what we're kind of teasing out in terms of what makes up or what concepts [inaudible 0:35:22.7] art world. I think these are definitely questions that we may not have immediate answers to, but rather that we're looking to tease out further and investigate and flesh out and try to understand better. But if anybody else who has ideas and wants to join...
Scott: The kind of art worlds that people are setting up usually have something to do with the infrastructures that comprise those usually have some role with rethinking relationships that help to make those up. How people conceive the role, other roles that are [inaudible 0:36:11.7] I think the role of the most common notions of curatorial world aren't very stable either, they've been shifting too, and it really wasn't that long ago, if you think about it where [inaudible 0:36:30.0] almost like how [inaudible 0:36:40.9] describes the director in relationship to the actor [inaudible 0:36:47.4]. Describes how actors at a certain point [inaudible 0:36:54.2] but also because of the film industry lose a relationship with the audience that they once had, and also understanding of their own place within whatever narrative they're helping to build [inaudible 0:37:09.9] they're co-construction, they become more [inaudible 0:37:15.0] because they're unaware of whole set-up, so really the director of that also the editor has more say than the actors do.
Greg: Scott, I find that a really interesting comment because it's also very much about when he talks about the difference between the painter and the cameraman, and the magician, and he sort of compares the painter to the magician; you go away and you come back with this great work, but there's no real understanding of how it came to be, whereas the camera man is integrating himself into daily life and penetrating reality with the camera and such, but beyond [name? 0:38:10.6] I think what's interesting is how the creative practice is shifting to one which includes is what Matthew Slats talked about when we were doing intros which was community building, community activism and I think obviously Dave is working with aspects of that as well, and so the creative practice is redefined or broadened if you will. I think that's an interesting comment, I don't know if David has thoughts about that?
David: I do, it's hard to tell because usually when people ask me if I practice I say no, I don't really, even with this critique that we bring to art and to philosophy and what not, it's difficult to describe one's personal practice and I can point to a couple of collaborations that we've done in print that are visual art, poster art kind f things as a practice, but I do have difficulty even with this critique talking about this curatorial role as practice. I don't know if I can elaborate on that, but it's an ongoing question I guess.
Scott: I think the reason that I mentioned this critique of the director and relationship to the actor in the same breath as the curator and the artist as role anyway; I was just thinking it wasn't that long ago where curators and contemporary artists have had assumed this position where they become authors, or at least that's how they are often perceived, and I think to be fair, that's really the way a lot of curatorial practices are shaped, or at least it has the effect. But I think more and more artists have been talking through strategies in their work, for quite a while now, partly as a way of reclaiming that loss of agency in their cultural role, but also there's some kind of upstaging going on and stereotypically artist [inaudible 0:41:14.8] can't stand that. In a way there's something else I think about certain kinds of curatorial strategies that I don't really see necessarily to try and [inaudible 0:41:40.8], in a way it kind of lends us more towards a shared, or distributed attention [inaudible 0:41:51.1] if you wanted to describe it that way, being aware when you're referring to the work of their peers often it's not so much that you're actually trying to throw your authorial [inaudible 0:42:02.7] around them, but depending on how it's approached, more that you're attempting to somehow put yourself and other people in context and just acknowledge that you're working within a share of social field, not necessarily a social network in the sense of social network of [inaudible 0:42:22.8] but in some kind of a world where alienation isn't one of the goals where you're not really trying to [inaudible 0:42:38.0]. I get the sense that the way you guys approach it it's more like that than it is that you're trying to adopt a strictly territorial role.
David: Yes, that's a good description and the unregulated discourse, if you put the emphasis on unregulated thereby mean at least less mediated than the alternative I think that lends itself to the same thing that you just described, so yes.
Greg: Actually I'd like to follow up on that, it's a basic question, but I feel like to some extent I-- not that I knew who you were Dave-- but I felt like following your timeline via twitter, or reading your blog; there's a certain level of connection that one can make through social media, but it can also be that cool detachment of knowing but not being active and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the role that social media plays for Groundswells, obviously you utilize it, but to what extent? and do you see if any, a transformative power, or any potential power in social media? Obviously the days of using text messages to avoid police in terms of rioting, how do you see social media, to what extent do you invest in it as a tool for getting out information?
David: Obviously we use it quite a bit given that we're in different places, and that we're comprising an audience online by keeping this catalogue, choosing to keep this catalogue in that kind of virtual space. I don't really know if it was a conscious decision, it wasn't the democracy of the social web that lured us in, it was just finding ourselves in that environment, it was a convenient tool more than it was something that we considered at length and decided to use after much deliberation. I think if anything we'd be more prone to say that there are a number of... it's hard to say it has had a democratizing role in my opinion, and I think that Ryan would agree, I don't know if we're using strategically to achieve that kind of an end to have an audience, or community or that have reached a center of resources that functions; I can't say that it was conscious and to be perfectly frank, the reason that I do use twitter so frequently is that I have a desk job, and that seems to be the tool that's literally right in front of me, so it's somewhat circumstantial I guess.
Scott: David, earlier you were talking about doing programming where you are, did you mean event programming? or did you mean code programming?
David: I meant event programming. But actually, I guess I wouldn't be telling the whole truth without saying that when we were first considering what shape Groundswell should take, was tending towards a more traditional design studio format, and some of the work we did early on was for movement organizations that needed these tools put together; ways to communicate via the internet, and so we did do quite a bit of work early on with that explicit focus.
Scott: Got ya, that's interesting, there does seem to be an entrepreneurial [inaudible 0:48:14.4] even though I feel like it's almost always somehow [inaudible 0:48:20.0]because it's encapsulated in [inaudible0:48:23.9].
David: One of the things that we did was to recognize that we had that going on, that we had this energy, and that we wanted to move in that direction, and we didn't have the same critique that we do now. We were totally... sorry I'm looking at the text...
Scott: What do you think actually instigated that; what you're describing almost sounds like the process is becoming radicalized, would you describe it that way? Has your involvement with looking into the work of other people had an impact on what you guys do and how you approach what you do?
David: Yes, I think it's taken quite a number of years to develop a particular [inaudible 0:49:28.3] it's through the work that we've found most appealing, and through this process of cataloguing it that we've been able to arrive at this stand point I guess you could call it. I don't think that calling it becoming radicalized it too far off the mark, I mean that's pretty spot on actually.
Greg: Dave, is there a difference between cataloguing and archiving to you? And it's not a loaded question, I'm just curious in terms of; I think we've had a fair number of discussion about the archive, and its potential usefulness and its potential dangers if you will; but I'm just curious when you say cataloguing, should I be thinking along the same lines as archiving or creating an archive?
David: It feels like that, but with more breadth to is, and more of a living phenomenon as in what we're comprising becomes something more than itself; like you can talk about constituent power, congealing energies towards an end, or many ends; that feels more like a better comparison for cataloguing I guess than the archive, the archive just feels older I suppose, not like something that one frequently updates. That's an [inaudible 0:51:44.1] response, it's not one that we've considered, it's more in this effort of sharing that we chose to use a blogging software and that by default becomes a catalogue, an archive, whichever word you choose to refer to it, it has the effect of indexing.
Scott: It's definitely an interesting issue for us because some level, if I'm talking about revising or mixing different traditional roles within art worlds, archiving is really similar to the act of collecting, at least some times it is, and I feel like oftentimes there's a danger there because in collecting there's a kind of violence, there's different approaches, but often there's an accumulation to that, there are different benefits that we all get from archiving and having this kind of internal ownership. On the other hand archiving is really crucial for the kinds of things that interests us, or at least that are the central focus of this particular series of [inaudible 0:53:34.0] we're engaged with right now. One of the main kinds of art worlds that we want to look at was people that are engaged heavily in archiving collective practice in particular because it hasn't really until recently been something that's had much attraction, although there's been a lot of activity, and so I wonder why that is, or at least that's something we continue to ask, why is that? Is it sort of a mean, are there other effects of this? We kind of assume that because something's happening a lot that there's a specific reason for that, sometimes it's just because things snowball or become a fad, or whatever-- I think in the case of archiving where practice is that there are some things that are going on, and I'm curious as to what different people think about that, because I have my thoughts about it, that I don't want to endlessly hypothesize you know? Or somehow imagine what I feel is important is somehow important for everyone else so that's the reason that they do it.
David: Maybe the one direction that we've gone in lately is thinking about the idea of care, and in fact off the record it's likely to be the next issue that comes out of the journal, and I think that it's an interesting question, the archive question is an interesting one to raise in the context of care; the way that we get at the idea of care is that there are these sort of art worlds, there are these connections between them, they overlap, bump up against one another, repel etc, they have relationships, and how do we lend a hand to that, the longevity of that relationship? How can we build infrastructures that support that network that doesn't capture them, but permits them to function further, and thinking about the archive there, is an interesting one. I think we could talk about it in terms of infrastructure at that point, building a common pot to draw from, having...
Scott: Yes, let's definitely talk about that, I mean let's keep talking about that.
Greg: Now, let's talk about it now.
It's encouraging though I think Scott, and everybody would agree, that this is something that we somehow continually come back to, I think it's a really intriguing aspect that we don't prompt necessarily in what we would say is plausible art world, or even the categories that we defined, although I guess we do archive creative culture right... actually I'm lying, so never mind, I'll shut up.
Scott: No, for sure, you're right, and I think David, what you're saying about focusing on care is... I mean it's pretty important often in critical conferences, some of them will bring up the etymology of the word curate and that's derived at some point from Latin, specifically what [inaudible 0:57:57.1] to care for, or to take care of them or whatever and if you think about how at least in colloquial definitions of, or ideas of what curators are, often people aren't thinking about art per se, they think about a library curator, because that's what it is often used as, [inaudible 0:58:22.5] than it was some sort of grand architect of ideas; and I think a number of people are attempting to reclaim that because they find some value in caretaking, not necessarily purely in a curatorial role, but more like active care like you were describing. And I think it's really appropriate not just because of some academic connection, but I think it seems to be an apt word, or an apt term to keep using, and practically speaking for art and certainly the people I'm working with, I think it makes a lot of sense to reclaim because it's a really confusing role. It's also confusing in what your relationship with the [inaudible 0:59:18.6], whether you study curation, or got into it in practice, or that's your day job, or whatever, if you're super involved in [inaudible 0:59:34.8] it's like it really effects the creative practice of that art world how people see your role as a curatorial practice within it. I think that these ad-hoc curatorial teams, or people who at least adopt curatorial strategies to attempting to redefine it through different types of activity, not necessarily definitions in terms of dictionary definitions, but just like when people do something different that you start talking about it in a different way, thinking about it's almost like another tool in your box to use, or something else, if you know what I mean, so I guess I would definitely would like to keep hearing ideas about how that kind of activity can be useful.
Greg: Yep, I kind of have a follow-up to that Scott, if you don't mind, just in terms of David; and this is a loaded question; what is the end goal? What is the end goal? What do you want to see achieved through Groundswell Collective? Are there actual changes, are there actually actual things that ideally, in a perfect world, you would see as being the instigator of the initiator of the glue that brings together a variety of artists, activists, different disciplines, are there aspects to the works that is very tangible?
David: In terms of an end goal, I would say probably not, it's difficult to have result come from all of this, but then again that begs the question of efficacy, is this even worthwhile to do. That's one that's been circulated in the activist circles for, as long as I've been paying attention anyway, I mean, does the work that we're doing just preach to the choir, and is that choir one that's already assembled, or does it need to be assembled? Those are even heretical questions sometimes for somebody like me, but they're the ones that are most important. In terms of attaching Groundswell's name to something, we certainly don't have that kind of drive, I think that we in the much much longer term see the role that we're playing is one of-- as I said before-- pulling the levers on a much larger systems and seeing what the result is; what kinds of social relationships we can put together, cobble up from this kind of work, what that change is about, our lives and about the social movements that we've found ourselves involved with; it's a much much larger answer and result I suppose.
Greg: Definitely, I mean, like I said, it's a pretty loaded question to begin with, but sometimes that can result into some interesting insights into what you see as role that Groundswell is playing, and it doesn't have to be in one particular arena, and as we know it's not, but here are things that obviously sustain our creativity, our interest, motivations, and it's just curious to hear sometimes, what constitutes a success for Groundswell, is it simply existing in this economy, society, whatever, or is it more than that?
Scott: Isn't part of what Groundswell hopes to do... when you describe what Groundswell ultimately as some kind of mass of people doing something, and so I mean kind of like we're doing with the plausible art worlds initiative, it seems to me that especially because what a lot of what you do is trying to find people doing a certain kind of things [inaudible 1:04:37.9]it's almost like proof. that not only [inaudible 1:04:44.2] for however long, but it's also showing a literal Groundswell activity and I guess I'm just curious, similar as Gregg was asking, how much proof, well, I don't know what kind question to actually ask about this; but I was curious about how you felt about that, that on some level what you're doing, not just representing yourself, but in some way trying to plug into the larger [inaudible 1:05:21.0] a part of that, and specifically the part that says "Hey, there's a lot of this going on".
David: Yes, one of the things that I've been thinking about recently, and that I just saw come up in the text there is the idea of comprising in public. I've come back to this a couple of times now in this conversation, but whether one can create work of this kind that does presuppose the audience is already put together, and what it means to function in a way that does cobble those things together in the doing of the work, and I suppose that's how I see Groundswell's roles. I mean we say participating in and commenting on, providing a narrative about, and participating in activist efforts, social struggle etc, so I guess that we do suppose that does; we assume that there is a public and we point to it. But the ones that we point to are ones that are comprising a different set of things, and that's done in relationship to social movements kind of [inaudible 1:07:14.2] whereas we're just at this nether-level commenting on the things that are doing that. Does that answer your question?
Scott: Sure, totally.
Greg: Is it now a good time to see where we're at, chime in, see how Base Kamp's doing there, the space that is, are there any questions that people are kicking around, sometimes as you talk Dave, we are often times are talking behind the scenes with our muted microphones, but now maybe is a good time if anybody wants to pose those via audio or text, whichever.
Dave, we usually record these, is that ok?
David: Yes
Scott: One reason why I asked was how much proof you needed, is just because one of the things we were trying to determine in setting up this particular series of chats was like well why should be even bother doing was the more informal, non-directed, series of talk, already got enough, do we really need to focus on plausible art worlds per se. We decided yeah, we do, just because there is a certain range of something that we wanted to see more examples of because we think there's [inaudible 1:09:34.8] and I just want to see them somewhere. We were also thinking each of these examples is a kind of proof we were describing them even as exhibits in the sense of exhibits in the courtroom; Exhibit A, Exhibit B etc. They help to prove that something's happening we decided just for fun: why don't we give a whole year so that's going to be 52 of them, and I'm just curious; I mean to us we were already thinking about how much is enough, how much is too much, maybe a [inaudible 1:10:25.8] format would have been even better because then there would be no limit, we wouldn't even have limits of [inaudible 1:10:29.8]. So I'm just curious about how you felt about that; as an ongoing research tool for you guys in shaping your own perspective, is this something you think you would probably continue on with, are you interesting in getting others to help, and if so, I guess in either way whether you want to continue it yourself, or with others, I was wondering if you had shaped any set criteria; I'll stop my question there, but it's like a two-part question. One is, do you have a sense of how much compiling will actually be helpful for what you want, and also if that's the case, and you want others to help, what should they be looking for?
David: Yes, we do plan to continue, we are always interested in hearing from other folks, we've had a number of guest bloggers who have posted about efforts that they're involved with, efforts that they see happening, and it's always just good to connect with... I mean there's two of us, and for the most part, I've been doing a lot of the organizing, being in [inaudible 1:12:02.6] centre and all that, so it's great to have relationships with other folks outside of the collective. As for the criteria as to what would get indexed or archived, or catalogued, I always used to refer to is as that's definitely a nebulous things, I mean we haven't codified any sort of things like that, we have our personal ideas about what might work and what might not, recognize that how the contextual, I suppose and can be problematic because it's sort of a; they're frequently time-based, temporal in the sense that they expire rather quickly, that's like, it makes it difficult to characterize the thing that just kinds of pops out seemingly spontaneously, works in some cases, doesn't work in others. but at the same time, there is a sort of... it's almost a theory, it's so hard to condemn what would be an activist artwork, or meet that definition.
Scott: Yeah, for sure, I think that's pretty good; sometimes you can only really give an attempt your, I guess what instigated it, wanting to do this in the first place, your motivations and just the process of who helps to shape that I think that's enough.
Greg: I was just going to say, were you going to go to the text Scott?
Scott: Yes. Cassie was just asking, you were saying that the microphone isn't the best do you want me to just read that out Cassie?
She was just saying do you contact the people or groups in advance when you posts on the websites, Mallory was just wondering that as Base Kamp and there's another question after that; what's the purpose of [inaudible 1:14:58.7] a catalogue, what's your focal outcome?
David: We do have an exchange pretty frequently with the [inaudible 1:15:10.1] we network with or involve ourselves with, comment on, etc. It's not done [inaudible 1:15:19.9] usually it's kind of our understanding of what went on from the documentation and in a lot of ways that's a lot of second hand forest that we turn to, I wish that we could be there an involved with all of the stuff that we're dealing with, but it's not possible. So we don't do it any less frequently than folks will see that we have written something and it will carry and exchange from there. Cassie's question about the purpose; I'll admit that I began writing stuff like that, somewhat selfishly to gain a better understanding of what we were talking about, and like I said, it gave us a sense of direction to see everybody else's sense of direction and what we like, what we didn't like, what we saw that worked and so on. In that way it was, it sort of outstripped our capacity to digest everything in a meaningful way, so I suppose that it mutated and as it took on its own energy, had a different purpose, which was the archiving function which was providing the forum for visibility and conversation around this subject, if I could put it somewhat succinctly, I would say that is the purpose. Cassie asked did it begin with one purpose and change; yes, absolutely, the blog format is a somewhat public one, by nature, I suppose it was available for the same kind of [inaudible 1:18:36.0] to be the same kind of resource it is now but at the outset it was more of a chronicling of who our friends might be, for lack of a better way of saying it.
Scott: Yeah, maybe the people who you met and like to get involved with; I don't feel the sense that it's a closed clique of friends.
David: It's led some very good friends, and good collaborations and what not.
Greg: Dave, I'm curious, we often talk about how plausible art worlds is not just anything that's not the art world; oftentimes we talk about having a foot in the art world and a foot outside the art world, whatever that might mean, but you get a sense of some of the things that we're addressing in terms of the [inaudible 1:19:46.9] art world. Are there activities that Groundswell's involved with in term of more traditional art practices that is in exhibition, or things that are housed within white walls and roof, ways that you're involved, other than the sort of more grassroots activist end of the creative practice?
David: To date, not very much, the first thing that I did that was in a more traditional territorial role if we can call it that; we did a show for [name add art? 1:20:28.6] the [ibeam? 1:20:30.9] add replacement plug in, I'm sure many of you are familiar with, that we focused on the subject of care, and that was considered more traditional curatorial role, but in a totally not-white walled, non-gallery kind of setting. So that being the first [inaudible 1:21:00.9] into the... something we can point to as an exhibition, that evinces how removed we are from the four-wall kind of gallery...
Greg: That's great; many of the people that we've spoken with do work outside, but often times there is some overlap with the more traditional practices that involve gallery or museum spaces.
David: I mean, we do overlap in a lot of places, we comment on it quite a bit, we have friends that exhibit there, and we exhibit outside of it, we do work in a similar way. I guess it's a direction that we are familiar with and that we might head with in my move to Toronto here, doing programming for a gallery in Toronto would be an activity that I could take on now, have an opportunity to do and I suppose it's a more traditional role one that has specifically the social justice focus.
Greg: That's great, thank you.
David: I'll give an example of one of the projects we did recently, the People's [inaudible 1:22:56.9] of Greater Boston, that probably most of you are familiar with the Experimental Geography Exhibit that was curated by Thompson and Independent Curators International, people's outlet was a project begun in Chicago that toured as part of that exhibit. It was done in Chicago to start, and that is what [inaudible 1:23:42.7] in the Experimental Geography Exhibit. So the one that we did in Boston was rather recently, it was kind of piggy-backing off of that, that successful Art world circulating show, and a little bit more of a description I can just send to the text here. I believe that's the right link.
So that's ours of Greater Boston and essentially we circulate a blank map of the political boundary of the Greater Boston area and ask the individuals fill it in with their version of the city, whatever that means, it could be their favorite ice-cream shop, it could be relationships of power within the city, where people go of a certain type of class or something of the sort, so there's a lot of room to play with this in a very explicitly; also just allowing of amateur photographers to sort of define the city vis-à-vis this map is another inherently political activity.
Greg: Although, if I'm looking at the right map, it's shall we say open, or vague?
David: Right, it's totally not labeled. Boston's kind of a confusing city though, so the slashed side of it with diagonal lines on the right-hand side is the ocean, and dead centre is downtown Boston and we've left the north, west and south rather open because of the nature of Boston, I mean people commute in from the suburbs quite a bit, it's a rather sprawling kind of area, so we wanted to permit a lot of variance in that, that actually was a successful choice, that was a, this guy David, I can't remember his last name; he was the designer for this map, and we had an event at the design studio for social intervention that was Daniel Tucker presenting on this specific thing that he and [name 1:27:02.7] had started and we got together and assembled these maps. The coolest p[art of the night for me was that there were three different generations of this one family who came together, a grandmother, a mother and a son; and the son was from the suburbs. He's a teacher who wanted to take these blank maps and have the kids in the suburbs have their conception of Boston, and it's very cool to hear from the Grandmother how racism has changed over the course of her life, she did a map etc,
Greg: Yeah, as I posted in the text, I think the fact it doesn't venture into the hyper real that a Google map does in terms of specific location and three dimensional architecture, which in and of itself is really interesting and compelling in a weird way, but this is really subtle and poetic and open and I think allows for a greater degree of interpretation and how one approaches this; not to mention it's beautiful like the outlines are really beautiful, they're also very geometric which I find pretty interesting too in the sense that certainly the coastline in of Massachusetts, or in this case Boston and Boston harbor and that area certainly I don't think has those right angles but at the same time it really is compelling and you don't even really sp[end too much time there beyond wanting to know your relationship in that space. I don't know w, it's really interesting, I think it's; I would have liked to have been a participant. I also see that [name 1:29:16.8] project launches in Boston, it makes me think about that in terms of dealing with school children, or lending a voice to people that wouldn't otherwise necessarily have it, specifically obviously in his case of children not being able to vote. But here, like you said, engaging the image or cartographer, or the nonexistent cartographer I think it's great.
David: Yes, I mention that in relation to the questions about the Art world and where we touch on it and we don't. I remember reading once upon a time the-- I can't remember the name of the exhibition-- but Martha Rosler had, it's democracy I think-- does anyone else know what I'm talking about? like 1980s housing rights, New York exhibit... anyway, Martha Rosler had commented on this exhibit and had said something about opening up Art world and the function of all of these exhibits that they had curated would be to do precisely that and -- I don't' think that's it, I actually have the book, somewhere...
Greg: Yeah, I'm at a loss as well, that's the only one that came to mind.
David: But anyway, we kind of started-- yeah that's it, I'm pretty sure that's it. Since we weren't working with the Art world, neither Ryan nor I have in our background even, I mean we came at this from our interest in politics, in our interest for social change we're infusing this with our interest in art, but one that we weren't like necessarily trained in, or really had that kind of official background, so we'd assumed that we weren't going to be part of the Art world to begin with, and so in creating these--to use the Base Kamp word: Plausible Art Worlds-- Martha Rosler talks about it in a sort of post-modern opening up of big art. I see that as... it works, it describes to some extent our approach, and I think that we had assumed it at the outset.
Greg: Just keeping an eye on the time, if there's anything that people want to ask, or have been thinking about and have been chomping at the bit to ask Dave, or if inversely, this is also the time when I ask the question of What's next for Groundswell? What's in the works? I know you certainly have a new location so is it just digesting what Toronto has to offer? Of what's next?
David: Like I mentioned, the care things is on our mind, and working out this way of talking about it in terms of affect and trying to put together a good enough synopsis of those varied thoughts that we could put out in the world and maybe call some responses to, like a call for papers basically for the next version of the journal. It's usually a several-month endeavor at least...
Greg: Has that call gone out?
David: No, it hasn't yet, I'm still thinking about it.
Greg: Feel free to keep us informed too, either by e-mail, twitter, whatever, just so that we can; we like to also keep tabs on all the people we talk to obviously.
David: Absolutely yeah.
It seems like that's an inappropriate subject, it seems like it's taking hold the subject of care is taking hold in a number of activist circles and also I've seen it recently in a good deal of work recently, this success of a Domestic Workers Union in New York was one that catapulted that into the public eye to the font of newspapers and what not, and sort of riding on that wave that's appropriate to be thinking about...
Greg: I think there's also a sort of poetic in just the work, just as your map was; gave us a loose definition of a coastline, the word care can be interpreted in such a vast variety of ways and I think the potential response to that could be really, I'm sure intriguing, in terms of the differences but also the overlap.
David: Absolutely, and I mean, we are working up this caliber, it's one that will still be a survey-approach and I agree it is a very nebulous term, it's four letters-- how much can you really insinuate with that?
Greg: Well, four-lettered words though, you know...
[laughing]
David: Sure, I mean like the Team Colors folks we've been in communication with them about this subject and others and they have a particular definition that I'm particularly fond of, but probably won't be limited to that in the call. So in a more background--in my undergrad I went to Hampshire College and I studied Disability Activism and so this idea of care has pressed me in that way too, I've been thinking about physical illness, about networks of caretakers, relationship between taking care and giving care, and so on for quite some time, so just to underscore how varied the concepts can be, it's like those that I just mentioned, plus unpaid work, the care that we take in curating, we've talked about that...
Greg: Yeah I mean, or even just thinking about healthcare, just generally, where we're talking about the threat of socialized medicine and then of course now you move to Canada, I mean, even just being in a new location where you are guaranteed healthcare, or I imagine you are right?
David: I'm not because I'm just on a temporary residence
Greg: Something tells me that they wouldn't turn you away though.
David: True. So yes, I mean, if anyone has ideas about people who are working in these kind of area-fields, send them my way. I'd be very interested to talk with them, and perhaps they would be looking for a platform to put some ideas out into the world.
Scott: Yes, for sure, let's continue to share info...
Greg: I don't know that we have time, but I'm also really curious about when you put these calls out, and I think you talked a little bit about this already; but how do you decide what not to include? Because that's the down and dirty process that you have to deal with right?
David: It's true, fortunately it's been somewhat self-selecting in the last process; we were limited to a number of pages and happened to make do with the final copies of what actually came in, I mean we had slated for more and some of those didn't get delivered, so we wound up just being able to fit it what did come in; so kind of de-facto way of curating I suppose, but I guess one of the things that we emphasize is putting it out to a variety of audiences, and specially with this care subject, we really wanted to hit up the folks that are front-line, I mean like ranking-file activist individuals, organizers that are thinking about this work in their context, whatever it might be. So there is like an audience selection process that happens, in terms of actually putting the thing together it's been much easier.
Greg: That sounds great. Well listen, are there any other final comments or questions that have been floating around out there? Either at the Base Kamp space, Scott, Steven, Adam?
Scott: It's been really great having you here and talking about Groundswell, I think there's definitively a gazillion overlaps between our work and interests and yours, and we may as well... our mutual goals are to coordinate with people who have overlaps and to try to amplify each other's practices in some levels, we've got to think of a slightly more focus, or direct way of doing that, you know?
David: Yeah, absolutely. I see in the text a couple of ideas about folks for the care subject, which is great, just drop a line...
Scott: Awesome, so when are you putting out the call for entries, or whatever it is that you want everybody to distribute widely?
David: By the end of October, I should hope, because that should have given me a couple of weeks to, I mean after the Honk festival to recoup and...
Greg: Well, beep beep!
Scott: Absolutely, have a great night everybody, sorry am I cutting out too short?
Greg: Not at all I think we've reached a natural end to things. Dave, it's been great, and really fun and illuminating and has certainly made us think about a lot of the questions that we think about a lot anyways, but in a new light, so that's exciting, and thank you for sharing that with us.
David: Likewise, I appreciate it.
Greg: And again just to echo what Scott generally says which is certainly stay in touch with us and we'll certainly help to promote the call for entries for the care subject matter, that sounds really interesting as well.
David: Awesome, thank you.
Greg: Alright everybody, thanks a lot for coming, good night Base Kamp, good night everybody, see you next Tuesday.
Week 25: Dark Matter Archives & Imaginary Archive
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with artist and writer Gregory Sholette about his ongoing “Dark Matter Archives” project. As Sholette will be joining us from Wellington, New Zealand, where he is currently organizing his “Wellington Collaboratorium”, the conversation will also focus on the related “Imaginary Archive.”
http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/
Performative archiving is obviously a key component of many plausible artworlds but it has remained largely implicit in our weekly discussions until now. Though we have focused on practices with deliberately impaired coefficients of artistic visibility, this week we hope to explicitly tease out some of the paradoxes around the politics of that (in)visibility. The wonderfully and elusively titled “Dark Matter Archives” is dedicated precisely to those who resist visibility, as well as to those who are refused visibility by mainstream culture. In doing so, the Archives seek to provide knowledge, documents, and tools about the history and current practices of culture’s “missing mass.” Their goal is to reinforce whatever degree of autonomy marginalized artists, informal artists, and art collectives have wrested from the mainstream institutions of culture.
The “Wellington Collaboratorium” issues forth from the ambitious project, taking the notion of collaboration as a living, working material to be uncovered, explored, and put into motion. One of the collaboratorium’s outcomes is the Imaginary Archive, comprised of novels, brochures, catalogues, pamphlets, newsletters, and other material inserted into second-hand bookstores and other public places, seeking to present an alternative vision of the realities our society plausibly might inhabit, had the world been shaped differently. And perhaps more plausibly.
Transcription
Week 25: Dark Matter Archives & Imaginary Archive
(Group greetings and background chatter)
[Scott]: How is everybody doing?
[Steven]: Okay here in Paris.
[Scott]: So, we've been chatting here on text for a loud. Welcome everybody. There's a little bit of an ambient noise, but I think that just might be the lobby where you are right Greg?
(Loud background noise)
[Greg]: Perhaps.
[Scott]: Also, is Olga there? If so, I think her audio...
[Olga]: Um, yeah.
[Scott]: Are you guys there together?
[Olga]: Yes.
[Scott]: Maybe I should drop you from the audio reader so that you were not revering off of one another. You can still be in the text chat, but I can take your audio you're out. What do you think?
[Olga]: Uh, yeah (inaudible 0:01:00.7).
[Greg]: It is better just a mute it.
[Scott]: So otherwise, I think what it will echo like crazy. Okay.
[Olga]: Otherwise I will just (inaudible 0:01:08.4). You know I never know which button to press.
[Scott]: Okay, we'll let me know if this doesn't work for you. I will go ahead and drop you so you can share with Greg's audio.
(Loud background noise)
Alright, that seemed to be good.
(Loud background noise)
[Greg]: Okay.
[Scott]: Whoa. Crazy. So welcome Greg it's good to have you I know that you talked a little bit in the text chat about the New Zealand project. But, um, a bunch of people who are here know about the Dark Matter Archives and maybe even about the Imaginary Archives. But some of us don't, and I bet people that will be listening in later won't too so it will be nice to maybe described them both a little bit.
(Horn honks)
[Greg]: okay so you are breaking up quite a bit but I think you ask me to describe both of the archives that we're talking about. The first one, Dark Matter Archives, Scott has played a crucial role in organizing it and developing it online. Basically the idea for the project is to continuously upload documents that have to do with mostly unknown histories of collectives, the kind of work that I have been doing research on for the past 10 years or so. The new book that I have coming out in a few months with Pluto Press is essentially based on this kind of research and materials. So the archive project here is kind of an extension of this but it is extending into maybe the realm of, you might say, of fiction as much as it is a kind of actual intent to documenting real unknown histories. Projects here consist of materials, some of which are publications and documents of groups and collectives and events of projects that people know very little about. In other words, a kind of dark matter.
(Loud background noise and inaudible chatter)
Okay, so this is not working.
[Scott]: Greg, we hear you really well by the way.
(Typing and loud background noise)
[Greg]: So, I'm going to just continue about the (inaudible 0:04:58.7) projects. The project here consists of kind of a wooden structure that you will see in the images. And the material inside of it's consists of archival documents, projects, booklets that I have brought with me. Material from contemporary services for example, material from political art documentation distribution in the 1980s that I was part of as well as repo history. And a whole slew of things, some of them fairly obscure. And these are clipped in sort of eccentric ways inside this wooden structure.
[Olga]: (Inaudible 0:06:03.7). I did that. I did already.
[Greg]: I don't think it's (inaudible 0:06:18.3).
[Scott]: I'm actually wrong. It is not the pause button. It looks like a little microphone symbol with a line through it.
[Greg]: I'm turning this down (inaudible 0:06:28.2).
[Scott]: Great. Either way it would work, as long as you don't have two sources. That's much better.
[Greg]: You can hear me pretty well?
[Scott]: Yeah, that's much better. As long as you feel that you can hear yourself not revering back you'll feel much, much, much. Like it's much better to talk. Great
[Greg]: Anyway, so the archives is the kind of (inaudible 0:07:00.1) as I have been calling it because it's kind of a wooden structure. It extends a set of stairs that go outside of the gallery seemingly to nowhere besides the window. One of the pictures I sent shows this mysterious stairs that I discovered when I arrived here. So we continue the stairs inside the gallery. Kind of a little (inaudible 0:07:25.8). Anyway, inside this wooden structure there are publications and as I said that, I mentioned that I brought those here, are some of them were created for the project by people here in New Zealand, people in New York. Each one is from (inaudible 0:07:47.6), which is actually brilliant. So there are a number of things going inside the space. So forget the images, you can take a look at some of that.
One of the publications for example is by (inaudible 0:08:02.4) in New York, a Russian artist who lives in New York. He essentially created a (inaudible 0:08:10.6) looks like it came from the Museum of Modern Art, but in fact is highlights from the collection of of communists artists. So it has Picasso, of course, (inaudible 0:08:21.5) and a whole slew of artists all done and away that looks precisely like the museum itself, this document. He also created another fake document that looks real authentic which talks about Stalin embracing the (inaudible 0:08:41.3) as opposed to depress it. And so it is very sort of funny, but also conscious of engaging twists on what history might have been if the circumstances have played and themselves out differently. So I think about this part of the project and an archive of (inaudible 0:09:02.7). And I'm hoping that in this band of that aspect of it, you know maybe the creating of the project again somewhere in the United States so we could add more material to it.
[Scott]: Uh, yeah, Greg, I'm really interested not by the way.
[Greg]: Well it certainly connects to the plausible Artworlds (inaudible 0:09:37.2) maybe more through history them through alternative contemporary (inaudible 0:09:44.7).
[Scott]: Yeah.
(Loud background noise & foreign language speech)
[Greg]: Okay, I hear you now talk because you're going through.
[Scott]: (Laughing). Yeah just to let you guys know Greg, both you and Olga have your audio on at the same time still. I definitely don't want to be labor that because it's still working but it would be a lot easier for you probably.
[Greg]: For some reason we can't seem to turn her, we got her mute on.
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Okay, can we just do a second of tech support? Um, basically there's a little window that pops up that says "conference call". Once you are, really once you are in Skype at all there is a little window that pops up that says "conference call" and you can see the other people inside the call. Somewhere in there.
[Greg]: Yeah, I don't see that.
[Scott]: Hmm.
[Greg]: But I can see that you can hear me through her computer even know the mute is on. Let me try system preferences.
[Scott]: Well does it say it "call on mute"? What you can do is, there should be a callat the top of your screen and you should be able to see "mute".
[Greg]: Okay, I solved it a different way.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Greg]: I just went into the system preferences and turned her volume down for some reason, even though what was on mute, it was still working.
[Scott]: Okay, gotcha. Technical. Okay great (laughing) back to content. Thanks. Yeah, perfect. So yeah, Steven suggested that maybe the BaseKamp space could be an interesting place to, for the United States version or for one of the versions. We should definitely talk about that.
[Greg]: yeah, let's talk about it. You know, definite, I think it would be perfect. I was born in Philadelphia so it would be really interesting to sort of explore some kind aspects of the history. I used to work at the state hospital there, which was locally known as by Bilberry and completely demolished the building. So I have my own set of entwined history with the space of that city
[Scott]: could you tell us some more about the histories themselves? Or about the different examples of these "what if" scenarios?
[Greg]: yeah, I have another project by Jeffrey Schuler, who is a cinema study faculty member at Berkeley University as well as a filmmaker. Jeffrey and I have known each other a long time and we're in a reading group together in New York in the eighties. His project is a series of "what if" movie quotes by Sergey Eisenstein. As if Eisenstein had completed this Hollywood movie he was once going to make and it didn't happen. Actually, one of the images that I sent you and I think to upload it shows this movie. It's basically capital, which Alexander (inaudible 0:13:23.6) has also recently done a version of. So that's one of the projects.
More recently I'm developing one last" what if" project here and I asked people in New Zealand from Wellington what the general strike had taken place back in the turn of, what was it there really massive sort of strike here, and actually been considered radical political change. You know, what kind of present would we be living in this, which is the capital city and the sea of the government, how would the architecture be different? How would (inaudible 0:14:09.7) rights be different? Gender issues? And so people are constructing "what if" (inaudible 0:14:15.8) from now and make that into one final booklet. And maybe I can share some of that with you once I get back a little bit further a long (inaudible 0:14:26.4).
[Scott]: Uh, yeah. Please do.
(Loud background noise)
[Steven]: Oh yeah, Steven?
[Greg]: The project...
[Scott]: Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead Greg. We can try...
[Greg]: I'm not sure, I think we lost the connection from you to me. Maybe you can still hear me? Can anybody hear me?
[Scott]: Oh yeah, we can hear you really well. We were just these images while you were describing them. Not to leave you hanging there (laughing).
[Greg]: the other project without another book store called (inaudible 0:16:16.3) and a particular project I created one of sort of a garage kit miniature projects that I like to do. I took a book on landscape of New Zealand, which you can imagine the landscape here is extremely dramatic and really a big part of some of the cultural the imaginary of the country, and of course if you've seen the Lord of the Rings films you've seen actually some of the local imagery which is where a lot of that was shot. But, I took a book of photographs on the landscape and then began to do kind of an archeological dig within the book. I believe I sent a couple of those images as well.
[Scott]: I like the Moma communist highlights. So what's interesting is that how conceivable is it that a show like this would happen?
[Greg]: I think it was interesting kind of genesis. I t was supposed to take place maybe a year earlier and then some things came up that made it impossible to happen. I think that the idea here was that I was supposed to collaboration, it was unclear what the collaboration would be. In an ideal world, I would have come here and maybe spent three or four weeks working with people and then produce an exhibition. That wasn't really possible in terms of the timing and the money that was involved. And so I had to come up with a kind of framework in which people could kind of plug in and collaborate in a way that was actually not that unlike what we did with (inaudible 0:18:16.8) history where we had a structure which was we create a sign about an unknown history. And, you have certain dimensions you have certain specifications for that project. But you are free to kind of work autonomously within that framework. And that was more or less what I adopted here. Imagine a future that hasn't happened and create a document for it. That was more or less the dimension, the sort of parameters of what people could do.
So, this is how this project came about and I think it's not been maybe 100% successful in terms of the local artists getting into it, but they are beginning to do that now. But it's been sort of successful with (inaudible 0:19:12.5) particularly.
Oh, sorry Steven. I meant imagine a future that hasn't happened that was, you know, the sort of limitations for the project itself. That was the parameters for the project itself.
[Scott]: Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly appropriate. At least from our point of view. What's interesting is that when we first started talking about Plausible Artworlds as a general direction of looking at, I don't know, just looking at the different kinds of weird like half starved or untapped possibilities for creating cultural environments. Or creative cultural environments. We were looking a lot at fiction at first. A lot more than it turns out we've been doing since then. I think maybe because we keep finding people that have actually started experiments of different kinds, you know, and have a sort of a vibe for the plausibility of those, you know, maybe, I don't want to say (inaudible 0:20:23.6) but you know, fledgling initiative and experiments. But, to me, and I think to Steven too, and a bunch of other people involved or interested, you know, what's plausible and you can still argue if something is plausible if it hasn't happened. Or kind of tease out its implausibility or its plausibility and that's part of what makes it so interesting. It's, you know, it could change at any point and maybe with a few differences, a world event or something unforeseen. There's so many, there's kind of, I don't want to say a butterfly effect, but there are so many triggers. So many trigger chains that can happen from any event.
[Greg]: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think what interested me here, and I think you're project was certainly one of the streams that kind of flow into this as well as the yes men publications recently and other projects. What interested me here was because I'd done all this research into actual histories that didn't' seem to have a future, at least in terms of institutional proper kind of art. I wanted to think about what would have happened had some of those now mostly overlooked histories been more recognized or had been more successful. For example, the art workers Coalition in New York in the early 1970s, late 1960s made all kinds of demands on The Museum of Modern Art and other museums. Some really interesting sort of proposals for example, suggesting that the museums actually provide health care and other social security to artists. That there are galleries opened up for women artists, for minorities, that living artists have more rights over their work. Where it's shown, how it's shown, how it's repaired and most of all getting some kind of numeration if the work is sold a second time. All of this really didn't come about. All of this was lost, except for one small change that took place in museums and that was that they created free nights. Artist Coalition demanded that the museums be open for free. The only thing that happened was that the museums had created one night that was free for people and other museums had the same thing. So we have that tradition today. What's really ironic in New York is that Target Corporation has taken to branding Free Night so that if you go there on Friday evening, to the Museum of Modern Art and see their logo all over the place, and yet people really don't know that it's the Artist's Coalition who generated this free night in the first place.
So, getting back to what I was talking about with the Imaginary Archive, what if the Artist's Coalition actually in fact had actually been successful? How would the Museum o f Modern Art institution change? What would have taken place? What kind of institution might it have become? Would that new institution actually then also gone through a transformation and become, in a sense, just sort of problematic? Let's say, The Museum of Modern Art, after all these years. These are some of the questions that I want to raise for the project. In other words, I don't see the change in the future as being necessarily instantly positive. I think it can also have some kind of (inaudible 0:24:22.4) and I think (inaudible 0:24:23.3). And, I think someone is here. Greg. Is that GAAG? Gorilla Art Action Group? That was one of the spinoffs from Artist's Coalition. They were involved in, for example, they carried out a number of actions in lobbies of museums against the war. Perhaps most notoriously, they one of the Board of Directors' fancy dinners, the group along with Lucy Piccard and others, released thousands of cockroaches into the museum and upset the dinner. The members of Gorilla Art Action Group were actually banned from the museum for many years. Although one of them now ironically works there today. These are some of the sort of convolutions that I was hoping people would sort of address. I think that to some degree, that's starting to happen.
[Scott]: Greg, so in the Dark Matter Archives, it's kind of a different direction. I mean, it is right? In the sense that there may be fiction inside. There may be fictional projects inside of the Dark Matter Archives, the actual archive material. But the material itself are all things that have really actually happened on some level right? I mean, the archive itself is made to be, it's sort of mining things that were invisible in a way whereas the Imaginary Archives are sort of mining our minds. Kind of what we, are, our collective desires or interests or these, um...
[Greg]: I didn't catch the rest of that.
[Scott]: Yeah, that's because I had a brain aneurysm. Yeah. They may be more ironic. Sort of, these fictional works have a lot of cultural critique in them but also maybe some desire in there too, you know? I guess I was just thinking that, I'm not really trying to say anything brilliant. I guess I was just asking because we're now talking about Gorilla Art Action Group and you know, you're talking about these other examples and a lot of that stuff is in the Dark Matter Archives.
[Greg]: That is correct.
[Scott]: I can imagine. I mean, you can probably go on for twelve hours straight just about describing stories from these projects from the archive.
[Greg]: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I have collected a lot of these histories and know a lot of these people are sort of knowledgeable about them. It's not as much of an unknown history as it was when I began this kind of research. Although, it Artworker's Coalition has become well known, there's probably dozens and dozens of other groups that remain pretty much in the dark, who were just as interesting but continue to be unknown. I think that's kind of the project that is going on. I wouldn't want to see an imaginary kind of fictional or para-fictional kind of project completely overtake the literal history in any way. That's not the intention. It's more to stimulate a question about history itself and the nature of remembering. I think this is something that the group Rep History actually managed while it was at its best to do. It wasn't that it simply put up site specific signs talking about histories that people didn't know about. It did that. That was part of it. For example, marking the site of the first slave market in New York City, or in New York or Old New Amsterdam at the time. Or perhaps marking where all famous abortionists had their offices. Those are things we did and it was like you could walk by and discover something you knew very little about. But what we did that was most interesting and successful was allow those histories, that past, to disturb the present. Make some kind of disturbance in the everyday contemporary. That happened particularly when Mayor Giuliani tried to stop several art projects from taking place, it was history itself. This kind of other archive (inaudible 0:29:23.0) different city where something that just couldn't be tolerated in the new sort of gentrified and obnoxious city that New York has become. I think some of that is what is the relationship to this notion to the imaginary archive. To think of the archive itself as kind of politically unsettled bit of information that can (inaudible 0:29:48.7) into the present.
[Scott]: Yeah, Steven was just asking or just sort of mentioned something that was on my mind. This isn't fiction of escape here in anyway. I mean, it might be (laughing). There might be an element of escape or of temporary escape into something. I don't know if escape is really right. There's an imaginary that can be fulfilling in its own right in a way, but, it definitely seems there is an interest in disrupting the present. For sure. I think that's what Steven is mentioning is you know, that maybe there's not that much difference between certain non-fiction documentation and some of these fiction projects in that sense. What do you think Greg?
[Greg]: I think that absolutely. I mean, the way we read history is constantly being read through the imaginary in the present. It's also being read through sort of the ideology that people participate in the construction of the past. So, I think these terms like "actual" and sort of "imaginary" are very fluid in many cases. Obviously, we construct the notion of the past that we use in the present and that's of course what nations do all the time and what polictal parties do all the time. Why shouldn't, what I sometimes refer to as, the Dark Matter construct its own concept of history or perhaps multiple histories?
I think to answer Steven's question, why shouldn't Dark Matter construct its own history since there was an argument against it. It would be that history would pose itself sort of the correct narrative, the proper reading of the past. But I'm sure that Steven and I would both agree that certain ways of narrating history could actually disturb the very concept of historical correctness itself. And would begin to sort of rethink the very nature of the way history is written. That's sort of the ideal. My hope, for example, the book which I just posted a link for, is not that it's going to fill in the areas of art history that we don't know about. That would be kind of a (inaudible 0:32:48.2) that I'm supposed to be somehow showing people the histories that aren't known. As if I'm some sort of spelunker in a cave, you know. My idea is that, and it's not so different from I'm sure, Steven's and others, is this way of thinking about history actually disturbs proper readings of history. The way history has gone about being constructed, it actually challenges the very notion of how the archive is used and interpreted.
[Scott]: Exactly. It's not about really bringing this stuff into (inaudible 0:33:30.1) of history, right? I mean, that's kind of the thing that people say to us all the time too. It's pretty annoying, actually. It makes me feel like, it's kind of like imagining what we're involved with. When we reach out to other people, it's not an attempt to join in this massive kind of gold rush of curatorial head hunting. Like "hey, let's go to the farthest reaches of the world and find the people you've never seen before and aren't we so wonderful because we've uncovered this special thing and we're inserting this into history". It's not that. And I feel like Greg, with your project, my sense and one of the reason's I've always been so excited about it since knowing, the first time you wrote about the ideas about Dark Matter, is that... I don't know. It's just a very powerful metaphor. Um, it's not, I think it's extremely challenging to ideas of what history is and why we even call it that. Why we give so much weight to this.
[Greg]: Yeah, well obviously, this metaphor Dark Matter, it has its limitations, but it's been useful in the sense that Dark Matter has an astronomical concept. It suggests that most of the universe is physical, it's non-reflective. Some kind of energies, some kind of mass that's unknown. Without it, the standard model (inaudible (0:35:07.8) proposes that the universe would fly apart. It would just fly apart into a void in space. So, it's an essential anchor of gravitational pull and at the same time it's an unknown. So that kind of works very well with research and the history of (inaudible 0:35:28.3). They form the majority of cultural production of the present but they are unseen. They also anchor the mainstream of the artworld. The one big difference between the two metaphors right there is while scientists are desperately looking for what dark matter is, carrying out experiments, most (inaudible 0:35:59.3) art historians (inaudible 0:36:03.2) the dark matter of (inaudible 0:36:08.4).
(Background noise on Greg's end)
[Scott]: Alright, yeah Greg. So, can we try that troubleshooting thing again? I guess my question is, if you and Olga are sitting side by side or in the same spot maybe you guys could share the same audio one way or the other. Through her mic or yours. That's what we often do. Like for instance, we have three people with laptops here right now, but two of them have their, aren't even joined on the audio chat because we can just share. If we did that, it would be kind of reverby. So...
Anyway, just suggesting maybe rearranging chairs or something if that could help.
[Greg]: Okay, we found the problem.
[Scott]: Okay, cool. It's just tech set up. So, yeah, you were just... Would you mind just repeating that last part again because I think it kind of got blogged out for people?
[Greg]: What I was saying is unlike the scientific exploration of what dark matter is and the search for what dark matter is, the artworld establishment, you might say the curators and the administrators, the art historians. The people who generally think of themselves as the interpreters or managers of art and high culture. They're not interested in discovering what dark matter is. That's a contrast to the scientific community which is desperately trying to figure out what dark matter is, if it exists at all. Obviously, if the standard model is wrong, maybe there isn't a dark matter.
[Scott]: There might be some difference in opinion out there. Well, that's actually an understatement. There's definitely some opinion out there about what would constitute what this metaphor you're bringing up, you know, what would constitute dark matter when we're talking about art practice. Greg, you know what I mean? There's on one hand...
[Greg]: Well, I can't. You'll have to tell me what the differences are since I don't (inaudible 0:39:00.1).
[Scott]: oh, I don't have to know them all, everyone's opinions. But, I definitely, I'm sure you've heard this as well. You know, on one hand it's just there's an idea that this could describe, you know, new possible kind of hot artists we haven't discovered yet or something. For example, you know. And, you know, whether they're individuals or groups or whatever. On the other hand, it could describe practices that might not be immediately recognized as art at all, and that might have a difficult time even, being articulated that way under current definitions. It might be a ground swell of creative activity that is a little bit harder to handle. Or it might just be, you know, people that are almost, you know, they're just ready to be discovered.
[Greg]: Okay, you're breaking up a little still in your audio. It sounds like there are some other problems with the audio if I'm reading the script of it. I think what you're saying is that the dark matter concept could be used to describe artists in waiting. Waiting to become successful
[Scott]: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've heard this. People try to get their heads around a concept like this that's thrown out there.
[Greg]: Well, I think if you read some of the essays I've written and when you read the book you'll see that's not, let me use the word plausible, interpretation of the way I'm presenting this idea. I mean, essentially, if you said there would be three kinds of dark matter. Let me put this schematically in cultural terms. One would be artist groups such as Artworkers Coalition, who we spoke about. Who had remained kind of hidden and sort of absent from the historical narrative. But groups of people who sort of organize around and own redundancy, to use the term that you like to much Scott, recognizing that they are sort of structurally already failed in terms of the artworld. And simply sort of addressing the politics of that kind of production from the outside margins. That's the smallest group of dark matter that I talk about. It's the one that interests me the most because it's the one that's the most self consciously politically aware, but in the smallest (inaudible 0:42:12.1). If there is a dark matter universe.
The largest section would be informal artists. The people that maybe (inaudible 0:42:19.6) would have thought of as artists who could have actually been artists but never had the opportunity. People who continue to do all kinds of informal art work totally for the sake of doing it for pleasure. All of which are becoming suddenly much more visible curiously, thanks to internet technology. And, I think more visible in interest to the business world. So, we have all kinds (inaudible 0:42:49.2) around how the lines of professionals and amateurs have completely reshaped in a sense, capitalism. That's another whole discussion. But, imagine that sort of informal productivity as a kind of dark matter because many of those people actually, are directly tied into the economy of the art world. Who takes art classes? Who pays the salary for many, many people who teach art? Who buys art supplies, thus supporting the professional manufacturing of art supplies from a few art professionals? There's lots of ways of looking at it. Who buys art magazine subscriptions, museum subscriptions? Many of it is done by people who imagine themselves as amateurs or informal artists.
There might be a third component, and this is an interesting one in that most artists who are trained as artists, most professional artists who go to art school are basically failed before they even graduate. They're structurally failed. They can't possibly succeed because it's not possible for everyone to succeed in the way the art world is structured now. Not everyone work can be galarized. So, in a sense, the question is, what role do they play in the economy of high art? And that's a question of course that you could answer quickly by referring to Marx's idea of the army of the unemployed, but it doesn't completely work in this situation for two reasons. The classic Army of Unemployed is there to help lower the price of production, actually, the price of the commodity of labor itself. So if you're working in a particular industry and most people are unemployed, you're fear that you might be replaced by one of them lets you accept a lower wage for the work. In the art world, it's a little different. The people who really are successful actually the value of their work is increased by the Army of the Unemployed. That would be the price of the work itself.
Steven, are you off line or are you just lost with what I'm saying?
[Scott]: Steven has actually been dropped from the call, we're actually just adding him back.
[Greg]: Okay. So, I was making sort of a long...
[Scott]: It was really good Greg. Oh, sorry. Just saying it's really good to hear your descriptions. Okay, we'll add Heather back as well.
[Greg]: I think Greg Scranton's work is great. I love that. I wish I had that, I could have used that in my book.
[Scott]: (laughing) totally. Nice one Greg.
[Greg]: So, I'll just wrap up this last point that the other way that the Army of Unemployed is quite different in the art world, is actually most artists who come out of art school train as professional artists. Inevitably structured to fail in every league, continue to support the art world and reproduce it. They have to. What they do is even when they're complaining about the art world, for their gossip at parties, whatever, they're helping to reproduce its system. But of course, they're also talked into it in more ways than once which includes teaching art, buying magazines, going to museums, all those things that support the art world. What you might say is a (inaudible 0:46:35.5) concept would be embrace your redundancy. Embrace the fact that you are structurally going to fail and begin to sort of use that as a point of liberation. Understand that it's a kind of freeing thought and go on to organize yourself that gallerizes your production without the gatekeepers of the art world necessarily having to sort of stamp your work with their approval. And I think that gets back to the artist (inaudible 0:47:08.0). I think in one way or another, whether it's conscience or not, that's exactly what they're doing. They sort of accept the idea that they're not going to participate in this kind of gallarization. And they try to discover self gallarizing, whether it's through politics or social engagement, or whatever. That's a little bit more about the dark matter idea (inaudible 0:47:34.4) why artists who have not yet been discovered is not quite the right interpretation for what I see.
[Scott]: Yeah, absolutely. And you wouldn't say Greg, that when you say that they must reproduce this, you wouldn't say that each individual must reproduce this for themselves, I would guess. Just that for the system to exist as it is, it must be reproduced by the individuals who maybe don't really see any benefit for not doing that. It seems to be all the benefits in the world, promised in a way. Or at least tentatively promised if you do.
[Greg]: I'm just adjusting Olga's set.
(Loud background noise)
[Male group member]: Can you hear him?
[Scott]: Yeah, barely. I don't know if what I said came through.
[Greg]: Okay, I'm back.
[Scott]: Okay, great.
[Greg]: I'm sorry. Could you just repeat your last question?
[Scott]: Yeah, um, at one point during this, and I really grasp, I mean I really I think I have a pretty firm idea of what you mean. By the way, with my comment earlier about how this can be misinterpreted, I don't necessarily mean by people who carefully read what you write (laughing). You know, more so, most ideas are not passed around by people who carefully read texts. They're just sort of notions that kind of get spun through word of mouth. Sort of oral history in a way, kind of contagious thoughts.
Anyway, I really think it's important to hear someone like you elaborate about this out loud and talk about it because it's the way a good number of people really get their information. And feel like they can really grasp it, and there is less chance of it getting lost because there is a greater chance of them finishing listening than finishing reading your book. This is sad, maybe, but probably true. So I'm psyched about it and I guess there was just one point in what you said and before we get onto these kind of long questions here that are being typed out, you were saying that artists who are part of this group are not gallerized yet, they must reproduce the system. And I get the sense that what you mean isn't that they must reproduce it for themselves but that for the system to exist it must be reproduced by them. And they or we or whoever, may not necessarily be aware or have any real incentives to not reproduce it. But yet, there seem to be all the incentives in the world promised or tentatively on offer when you do. So how to get passed that for people who are going through art school and trying t6o get their heads around what world they want to live in or even just what kind of life they want to have themselves. And how they can position themselves in whatever system is currently out there. Not being a teacher myself, but having been in that realm too, I can see it being hard to convey that information and get the conversation about that going in a way that is really productive. So, anyway, that's not really a question it's more of a statement of curiosity and I'd be interested to hear what anyone thinks about that. Maybe as we address these other questions that are coming up.
[Greg]: Yeah, I totally concur with what you're saying. But, you know, it's going to require peoples' minds being shaken up a bit in how they participate or reproduce a system that structurally locks them out the rewards that it holds out, as you say. Which seems to really sort of plentiful. And of course, people do actually cross over and grab the brass key, there's no question about that. It's just that the point of view of the structured system can only be over a small number of people. So, what would sort of full employment in the art world look like?
[Scott]: You know, or maybe. I don't know. I was just going to say or maybe it's not necessarily a good idea to shoot for full employment in the art world but to see these different fields of activity that could be called art worlds ad being other realms to help kind of pinch hit and fulfill some of those needs. I think Michael has a question or wanted to... Oh, my mistake. I'm jumping the gun here.
Anyway, did that come through at all or is the audio just crap?
[Greg]: No, we're getting most of it.
[Scott]: Okay.
(Loud background noise)
[Michael]: Hi, this is Michael at BaseKamp. I'm really intrigued by this idea of what full employment could look like if all artists were sort of employed in their field. A couple things that sort of come to mind as, maybe certain moments such as the WPA maybe being some sort of attempt at something like that. Or artist placement groups. I'm wondering. I'm trying to imagine what that would look like. I'm curious about your thoughts.
[Greg]: Well, I kind of agree with Scott in that the idea of full employment in the art world might be maybe more (inaudible 0:55:06.2) than realistic. Maybe what I was meaning was that artists could take responsibility to sort of collectively represent themselves in a way that could provide numeration for all those who participate in the art world but don't receive any of its benefits. In other words, to begin to really think about collectively trying to develop (inaudible 0:55:33.7) security and full participation from people who are doing creative work which maybe extends even beyond professional artists at this point. We have to begin to rethink the notion of value cultural production. That seems to me what many of us, Steven I know, and others have been interested in for some time. I don't know if that's an answer but I don't think APT would be the model. Although, I find it very interesting. Excuse me, I mean APG. What I do think is that so many artists today could take greater advantages of these new technologies to begin to try to in sense, create some other system of (inaudible 0:56:32.9) for each other. A kind of peer to peer art world, we'll call it. And you know, maybe this economic crisis, which is only really beginning to effect contemporary art, maybe it will shake some things up and open up some possibilities for another way of gallerizing peer to peer art worlds. Gallerizing artistic practice.
[Chris]: Hello? Can you hear me?
[Greg]: Hi Chris, yes.
[Chris]: Yeah, I was just saying that some of the artists might not want full employment. Some of them might not be taking it seriously or just be doing it for the heck of it or something like that, you know? That might not be their main interest.
(Inaudible comment from background)
Yeah, (inaudible 0:57:30.9)
[Greg]: I'm sorry. I missed the first part.
[Chris]: That they might not be interested in having full employment for the artists. Some of them might be.
[Greg]: I'm not sure who you're talking about.
[Chris]: Well, some of them might...
[Greg]: You mean the artists? Some artist or some not artists?
[Chris]: The artists. Or some of the people that we would consider artists.
[Greg]: I don't think that forced employment is a good idea if that's what you mean.
[Chris]: Yeah, yeah. It's counterproductive. Okay.
[Scott]: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.
[Greg]: I think... No go ahead.
[Scott]: Well, I think I was just going to state the obvious. Those ideas of slacking, they sort of sometimes brush up against a sort of focus on labor gaining work for everyone. It's interesting because often there are similar goals on a high level. But on a level for the individuals involved, there are differing motivations.
[Greg]: Right.
(Loud background noise)
[Scott]: Greg, that's a fantastic idea.
[Greg]: How about if we do that after we do the Imaginary Archive.
[Scott]: Yeah, maybe at the same time. Maybe the boot camp can sort of be maybe compulsory voluntary to help put the show together.
[Greg]: Absolutely. Or we could tell all the artists that they're going to go on a residency and when they get there, lock the door and make them start.
[Scott]: That's kind of what we do already (laughing). No, I'm just kidding. We're actually the only ones who work our (explicative 1:00:14.7) here. Everyone else just slacks off.
[Greg]: No, I don't think so. I think artists work really, really, really hard all over the place. You know, it's just incredible. You're working all the time. You're working 24/7 and basically you're working in your sleep. It's the way, of course, a lot of precarious workers in sort of knowledge industries now live. It's like you're constantly tethered to the electronic office, to the turning out creative solutions for problems. The system has mined itself deep into our psyches.
(Background noise)
[Scott]: So, Olga. This is probably as good of time as any to just quickly mention this as a side note. When Greg and Steven and Jato, the crew was over in Beirut, I didn't get a chance to mention that at all. About the potential project and recording, so I hope that you've been able to connect. But if not, maybe it would be good to just mention to you guys, Greg and Steven, that there might be some interesting connections although he's doing something with Efflux. Maybe we could either talk to Anton or just talk to... One way or the other, try to make some connections. For example, I think Olga would like to do some kind of a project. Yeah, anyway, maybe we could talk after this about opening some communication channels about that.
Anyway, more on that later.
[Greg]: I just sent a little excerpt, actually, a quote from Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine talking about this concept of (inaudible 1:03:15.5). FYI.
(Loud background noise)
[Scott]: Okay, Olga. I'll try to type it up in a bit. Not to derail this conversation.
So, yeah. Um. So Greg, so far how do you feel about how the project has been received in New Zealand? Have you been able to talk to a number of younger artists or other groups that might be there?
[Greg]: Yeah, it's gone well so far I think. What I can tell is I've had two radio interviews involving the project and people would ask me some very interesting questions. People in the book store and the library were very open to the project. I think it's a little bit odd a new experiment for the people here. Both having someone in residence from so far away, at least for this particular alternative space. I also think that many of the artists here are not as publically engaged with ideas as many of us are in Europe and the United States and so that's been kind of a new phenomena for them. But I work with some great people. One of them is an artist name Mary Hewitt and Mary's helped me construct the archive. She went and got me recycled wood and helped me put it together. But he also does really interesting work. Actually, not so different from (inaudible 1:05:33.5) work in some ways. He's working on a video project now about sites where the Maury encountered the colonists, the European colonists (inaudible 1:05:47.5) and he's kind of reviving that history of this video. He also created a publication to that effect, which is in the archive itself and I think I have some images on my Facebook.
I think that we lost our connection. Can you hear me Scott?
[Scott]: Yeah Greg, we can hear really well.
[Greg]: Okay. So, I think, overall, the (1:06:37.9) been good although I think they've been a little bit puzzled of what it's all about. Although I think they're starting to get into the spirit of it quite a bit.
So, at this point Scott, it might be better for us to move on (inaudible 1:07:17.0) here.
[Scott]: Oh hey Greg, um, I think you guys traded now all of a sudden. Now Olga's audio is on and yours is off. No actually, did you drop from the call? I think so. Let me try adding you back.
[Greg]: We lost you for a minute there.
[Scott]: Okay, there you go. I think we dropped you from the call accidentally because of the connection. Has anyone else, well, anyone that can hear us, not been dropped? We'll ask in text. But yeah, okay, great.
I'm definitely interested in what Steven just said (inaudible 1:08:14.7) just asked about as well.
[Greg]: What? I'm trying to find it.
[Scott]: Let's see. 7:40 pm, oh wait, that's a different time for you. It starts of "Greg, are you in cahoots with..."
[Greg]: I don't see Steven's comment, sorry.
[Scott]: We'll repaste it real quick.
(Loud background noise)
[Greg]: Someone asked me, I'm not sure who. Is this you Scott? About Souly and about Anna?
[Scott]: That was a question that Steven asked. I was just curious if you had seen it or what you thought too.
[Greg]: Yeah. There both people that I've worked with in different ways. Anna certainly contributed to the book as well as I have recorded her extensively in some places. I'm not directly involved in their archive projects but maybe that's something that can actually come about. That'd be great. So, I think that'd be fantastic Steven.
Anyway, I think that we need to kind of move on and get back to some work here.
[Scott]: Well Greg, we often end a bit before this two hour mark. That's more than a maximum than a minimum. So, it's wonderful to be able to connect with you while you guys are over there.
[Greg]: Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity, it's been great. It's been great to do this for the (inaudible 1:10:38.4) you know, we'll have to do it from the next strange location we end up in.
[Scott]: (laughing) exactly. Um, yeah, maybe one of the upcoming strange locations can be this weird place called Philadelphia.
[Greg]: That sounds great. The city of brotherly love.
[Scott]: Indeed.
[Greg]: I forget that W.C. Fields, who was born there, has on his tombstone "at least I'm not in Philadelphia".
(Laughing)
[Scott]: Alright, well Olga and Greg, thanks again. And to everyone else who has joined us. Even though a few people just joined us. We're recording this. All of these chats. You know, just hit us up if you want to hear more of this before we get a chance to move through the editing process and all of that. So, yeah thanks again. We'll follow up and we'll see you next week.
Later everybody!
[Greg]: Sounds good. Bye Scott.
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:12:05.0
Page |
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$ae9a4a704e5780fb" title="#basekamp/$ae9a4a704e5780fb">Dark Matter Archives and Imaginary Archives http://basekamp.com/about/events/dark-matter-archives-imaginary-archive (#basekamp/$ae9a4a704e5780fb)
Created on 2010-06-22 21:30:50.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:01:25
- we received a lot of response from people about tonight's chat, but no one has appeared yet at the baekamp space
- BASEKAMP team: 18:01:44
- we're all set up with audio too. tested with Greg, and all good
- BASEKAMP team: 18:02:06
- won't make Greg - or any of you - wait too much, but perhaps give a few mins to let people arrive here?
- gregory sholette: 18:04:48
- ok I see the window now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:17
- ok great
we're just helping channel people in... - BASEKAMP team: 18:05:24
- if we can give that a few mins...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:45
- in the meantime, how's everyone doing?
- Greg Scranton: 18:06:12
- grrrreat! hoping this thunderstorm wil cool things off
- gregory sholette: 18:06:13
- sounds like a job for a psychic
- Greg Scranton: 18:07:11
- maybe but I am more of a shamen
- gregory sholette: 18:07:50
- its been mostly rainly and cold here - between 48 and 65 max (fahrenheit) with short days that end around five pm - essentially its like winter in oregon
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:05
- mm sounds unpleasant
- stephen wright: 18:08:11
- charming
- gregory sholette: 18:08:46
- its been nasty at night to be honest because there is no indoor heating - but after a couple of nights they provided portable heaters
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:04
- so greg S, we're downloading your images - didn't realize clicking that link wsn't all we needed. Took a few xtra mins due to that
- Greg Scranton: 18:09:07
- I must be a misanthrope because that sounds lovely to me
- Greg Scranton: 18:09:30
- ha ha I am assuming that I am not "greg s" in this instance
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:40
- oh dang. yes...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:46
- greg sh
- gregory sholette: 18:09:55
- it has its lonely charm I suppose - a bit like being on a whaling ship
- Greg Scranton: 18:10:05
- it's fine...is TODAY you're birthday at least?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:08
- hi Paul - added u
- gregory sholette: 18:10:42
- so Stephen W - what do you make of this recent Supreme Court ruling - our time in Beirut might be open to question even?
- stephen wright: 18:10:56
- haha!
- gregory sholette: 18:11:15
- where are you now ?
- stephen wright: 18:11:16
- aiding and abetting those terrorists by debating with them
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:11:19
- but you are not american, are you?
- stephen wright: 18:11:43
- you mean they won't let me into guantanamo?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:50
- lol
- gregory sholette: 18:11:58
- i am sure they make special exceptions for special people
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:12:02
- yes. greg will do the term for both of you.
- gregory sholette: 18:12:12
- i snore
- gregory sholette: 18:12:48
- could be worse than torture
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:57
- greg scranton - if you've got a sec, want to batch UL some images to the Flickr page?
- gregory sholette: 18:14:32
- I sent Scott some images of the project as well as a few of new zealand in and around wellington
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:00
- greg yeah i was going to try to upload in advance, but haven't had a chance yet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:16
- we can look at them here, but will need to get them up somehow...
- gregory sholette: 18:15:34
- Wellington (pronounced /ˈwɛlɪŋtən/) is the capital city and third most populous urban area of New Zealand. The urban area is situated on the southwestern tip of the country's North Island, and lies between Cook Strait and the Rimutaka Range. It is home to 386,000 residents, with an additional 3,700 residents living in the surrounding rural areas.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:36
- oh, actually -- Greg, I couuld upload the Zip archive to basekamp.com for people to download faster?
- gregory sholette: 18:15:53
- sure whatever works
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:55
- ok, well - time is crawling... and the weather here is the opposite of yours Greg - hot & soupy
- gregory sholette: 18:16:23
- I don't look forward to those conditions when we return next month
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:39
- enjoy the bitter cold while you can!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:45
- ok... so perhaps we can get started with the audio and get more time to chat together
- stephen wright: 18:16:54
- That is poetry -- the piece on ˈwɛlɪŋtən
- gregory sholette: 18:17:28
- thank Captain Cook
- gregory sholette: 18:17:54
- Captain James Cook FRS RN (7 November [O.S. 27 October] 1728 – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator and cartographer, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Royal Navy. Cook was the first to map Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean during which he achieved the first European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands as well as the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.[1]
- stephen wright: 18:18:12
- he had a way with words, did the Captain.
- gregory sholette: 18:18:32
- aye he did matey he did indeed
- gregory sholette: 18:19:19
- but when as Europeans arrived they found another group of people had been here about 1000 years earlier:
- stephen wright: 18:19:33
- doh!
- gregory sholette: 18:19:44
The Māori (commonly pronounced /ˈmaʊri/ or /ˈmɑː.ɔri/) are the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand (Aotearoa). They arrived from East Polynesia in several waves at some time before the year 1300,[6] settled and developed a distinct culture. Their language is very closely related to Cook Islands Māori and Tahitian.[7][8]- stephen wright: 18:19:48
- that's always a drag
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:10
- !!
- gregory sholette: 18:20:18
- oddly enough this particular group of colonists were somewhat more accomodating to the native population
- stephen wright: 18:20:31
- hence the All Blacks
- gregory sholette: 18:20:44
- very popular team here
- gregory sholette: 18:22:32
- its a law in parliament that the Maori have automatic seats and are permitted to speak their language with an interpreter - imagine if cherokee or mohawk were fully recognized in the congress with set-asides
- Greg Scranton: 18:23:05
- scott are we no longer doing public chat links? Did that stop working for us for some reason?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:08
- hi Heather
- heather hart: 18:23:14
- hiiiiiii
- gregory sholette: 18:23:36
- we can do this via chat if you prefer
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:47
- Greg SC yes - i mean, yes that stopped working. Skype is b0rken on that one... but.. we don't need it!
- gregory sholette: 18:24:01
- not following you
- gregory sholette: 18:24:25
- oh the OTHER greg!
- stephen wright: 18:24:33
- But isn't there some movement in NZ that all the settlers should leave.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:37
- greg sholette -- hhe, yeah. 2 Greg S's here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:39
- lols
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:00
- texting is super-wicked-fun, so no harm there... but will be nice to hear your voice too
- gregory sholette: 18:25:05
- settlers might be the wrong term now but no doubt there is something like that Stephen
- Greg Scranton: 18:25:12
- Scott, ok. I just wanted to invite folks to this chat and sometimes that public chat link was useful is all but yes don't "need" it. Thx
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:39
- i know... it's an annoyance... but... imagine trying to do this at all 15 years ago
- stephen wright: 18:25:57
- Or skyping with Captain Cook
- stephen wright: 18:26:02
- can we start?
- gregory sholette: 18:26:03
- what Olga and I noticed is that many of the less desirable jobs (trash collecting etc..) are held by Maori
- stephen wright: 18:26:52
- are they a large segment of the overall population?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:59
- BTW Greg (Sholette), we're uploading the images to the site.. will link to them when it's ready for people to download!
- gregory sholette: 18:27:04
- there also appears to be a Guiliani like policing of younger Maori - controversy now about illegal DNA procurement of young people
- gregory sholette: 18:27:45
- In 1840, New Zealand had a Māori population of about 100,000 and only about 2,000 Europeans. The Māori population had declined to 42,113 in the 1896 census and Europeans numbered more than 700,000.[26]
- gregory sholette: 18:27:46
- In many areas of New Zealand, Māori lost its role as a living community language used by significant numbers of people in the post-war years. In tandem with calls for sovereignty and for the righting of social injustices from the 1970s onwards, many New Zealand schools now teach Māori culture and language, and pre-school kohanga reo ("language-nests") have started, which teach tamariki (young children) exclusively in Māori. These now[update] extend right through secondary schools (kura tuarua). In 2004 Māori Television, a government-funded channel committed to broadcasting primarily in te reo, began. Māori is an official language de jure, but English is de facto the national language. At the 2006 Census, Māori was the second most widely-spoken language after English, with four percent of New Zealanders able to speak Māori to at least a conversational level. No official data has been gathered on fluency levels.
There are seven designated Māori seats in the Parliament of New Zealand (and Māori can and do stand in and win general roll seats), and consideration of and consultation with Māori have become routine requirements for councils and government organisations. Debate occurs frequently as to the relevance and legitimacy of the Māori electoral roll, and the National Party announced in 2008 it would abolish the seats when all historic Treaty settlements have been resolved, which it aims to complete by 2014.[32] - gregory sholette: 18:28:10
- I am getting this from wikipedia of course so its probably reasonably accurate but...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:50
- wow, so... just a sidenote
- gregory sholette: 18:29:08
- all of the signage here is in English as well as Maori (mostly) and many peole of apparent European extraction have at least some Maori vocabulary
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:47
- i picked up a *cold* case of beer 30 mins ago - now it's luke warm -- and it started raining here. good thing we're inside online!
- gregory sholette: 18:29:51
- all in all, its a very different history of colonialism than america and I would guess africa and asia as well
- gregory sholette: 18:30:45
- but as one person told me this more 'progressive' history was thanks to the english landing here and not the irish prisoners that went to nearby austrailia
- gregory sholette: 18:31:13
- despite being 50% american-irish I still managed to hold my tongue
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:26
- ok everyone! the images from Greg's project in New Zealand are here: http://basekamp.com/about/events/dark-matter-archives-imaginary-archive at the bottom of the page
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:32
- under "Attachments"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:41
- everyone DL @ once!
- stephen wright: 18:32:09
- THe Irish prostitutes and Cockney prisoners never actually ran Australia. The British military ran it.
- Greg Scranton: 18:32:27
- Scott & Greg should we keep these where they are or would it be ok if I uploaded them to Basekamp's Flickr?
- gregory sholette: 18:32:33
- but of course the english that came did so in the 1800s as opposed to in america - they had already ended slavery years before the US and perhaps had some lessons in colonial power given to them by the american colonies - so maybe that also plays into this somewhat less harsh approach here?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:13
- greg seems ok w whatever works -- so Greg scranton yes please UL to the Flickr page if u have the inclination -- will be easier for some people
- Greg Scranton: 18:33:32
- will do!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:40
- ok let's do a phone call -- i'll stat it -- ready?
- gregory sholette: 18:33:42
- THe Irish prostitutes and Cockney prisoners never actually ran Australia. The British military ran it - I was citing the person here who defended NZ politics who also FYI happened to be american and british - wonder why she had her opinions as she did!
- gregory sholette: 18:33:49
- call away
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:34:44
- : )
- Greg Scranton: 18:34:48
- good thx
- gregory sholette: 18:34:54
- how is the sound its a bit fuzzy here
- gregory sholette: 18:36:14
- interestingly the Maori themeselves managed to exterminate one of the largest birds the great moa when they arrived here only a thousand years ago!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:40
- the project itself is great, whcih is why Basekamp has offered to help with the online component!
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:38:19
- i have no audio
- Greg Scranton: 18:38:30
- uh oh audio in robo-mode
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:33
- olga- i thought you were there with Greg? sorry
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:39
- let's add you back
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:38:43
- yes.
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:38:44
- we have okay audio here
- gregory sholette: 18:38:53
- can you hear me - greg sholette?
- stephen wright: 18:39:00
- I hear you okay
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:03
- olga, please mute your audio when you get back on
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:39:10
- but i use my own computer.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:13
- ok
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:39:18
- i do hear typing
- gregory sholette: 18:39:19
- so I will continue where I left off? greg s
- Greg Scranton: 18:39:21
- Same images on Flickr as on the Basekamp page http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/sets/72157624335549252/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:22
- added you back
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:39:27
- sorry, i misunderstoo.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:34
- everyone please mute your audio unless you're speaking -- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:47
- (please do feel free to speak though)
- gregory sholette: 18:39:59
- now I am hearing myself
- Greg Scranton: 18:40:16
- wooden structure: http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/4725251591/in/set-721576243355...
- stephen wright: 18:40:18
- Olga needs to mute her microphone
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:33
- greg, yes Olga needs to turn off her audio -- there is a mute button "||" in the bottom left of the audio window
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:46
- you're getting double
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:40:58
- i did that!
- Greg Scranton: 18:42:05
- outside stairs http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/4725251629/in/set-721576243355...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:17
- nice
- Greg Scranton: 18:42:18
- (and I am just guessing these are the corresponding images btw
- stephen wright: 18:44:25
- Maybe Basekamp would be the suitable place for that
- Greg Scranton: 18:45:09
- posted file Screen shot 2010-06-22 at 6.44.58 PM.png to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="11769" index="0">Screen shot 2010-06-22 at 6.44.58 PM.png</file></files>
- Greg Scranton: 18:45:23
- just posted a screen shot of the mic icon
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:55
- thx gregscranton
- Greg Scranton: 18:47:59
- Eisenstein: http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/4725900242/in/set-721576243355...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:08
- we're loking for that now --- oh, great thx
- stephen wright: 18:49:00
- the "what if" structure was one of the tropes that Scott and i used to frame the whole plausible artworlds project.
- Greg Scranton: 18:49:07
- installation shot including Eisenstein et al
- Greg Scranton: 18:49:13
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/4725899978/in/set-721576243355...
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 18:52:10
- yeah, it was the most elaborate contribution to Greg's project.
- stephen wright: 18:53:37
- "Imagine a future that hasn't happened, and create parameters for it"
- stephen wright: 18:53:49
- That sounds P@W-like
- stephen wright: 18:54:15
- I understand!
- stephen wright: 18:55:04
- Here's a quote from our introductory essay, with a quote from Vaihinger:
" What-If expresses the basic logic of fiction, which he defines as a superflexible mechanism of the mind for the solving of problems. “What, then,” he asks, “is contained in the as if?”
“There must apparently be something else hidden in it apart from the unreality and impossibility of the assumption in the condition sentence. These particles clearly also imply a decision to maintain the assumption formally, in spite of these difficulties. Between the as and if, wie and wenn, als and ob, comme and si, qua-si, a whole sentence is implied. What, then, does it mean if we say that matter must be treated as if it consisted of atoms? It can only mean that empirically give matter must be treated as it would be treated if it consisted of atoms or that the curve must be treated as it would be treated if it consisted of infinitesimals. There is, then, a clear statement of the necessity (possibility or actuality), of an inclusion under an impossible or unreal assumption.”
Fiction, in other words, enables our understanding to be guided by the effort of subsuming the unknown under the known. Thus the As-If is a kind of relay, forcing the imaginative into a form in order to pry open a broader ranger of plausibilities. It is where the imagination and consciousness overlap, yet where practical purpose (tackling the existent artworld) requires that consciousness remain dominant, such that the imaginative is present in consciousness only as potential, as a still empty, plausible space. - gregory sholette: 18:55:18
- A public art project, An Imaginary Archive of novels, brochures, catalogues, pamphlets, newsletters, and other publications and material will infiltrate Enjoy and other Wellington locations during Sholette's residency. Inserted into a number of second-hand bookstores and other public places, this archive moves to present an alternative vision of the realities our society might inhabit, had the world been shaped differently. Sholette explains, that 'the exact content of these "para-fictional" publications including their layout and cover illustrations will be articulated within the processes of the Collaboratorium, but the goal will be to imagine an alternative future in which various artists groups and collaborations successfully changed the culture of Wellington, New Zealand, the region, and the world.'
- gregory sholette: 18:55:49
- Sholette's residency project takes the notion of collaboration as a living, working material to be uncovered, explored, and put into motion. The project has developed from a series of open calls for participation, and as a result Sholette has been working with artists and collectives in the months building up to the residency. These artists include Danna Vajda (NY), Darra Greenwald & Josh MacPhe (NY), Grant Corbishley (NZ), Matt Whitwell (NZ), Bryce Galloway (NZ), Johan Lundh (NY/Sweden), Lee Harrop (NZ), Malcom Doidge (NZ), Murray Hewitt (NZ), Oliver Ressler (Austria), Yevgeniy Fiks (NY), White Fungus (Taiwan), Maureen Conner (NY), Olga Kopenkina (NY), Jeremy Booth (NZ), Jeffrey Skoller (NY), and Ellen Rothenberg (Chicago).
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:12
- back to back texts!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:22
- AWC++
- Greg Scranton: 18:58:34
- GAG ++
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:48
- MoMA --
- Greg Scranton: 18:58:56
- Basekamp ++
- Greg Scranton: 18:59:07
- oops yes
- Greg Scranton: 18:59:10
- sorry about that
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:15
- P@W ??
- stephen wright: 18:59:31
- I'm thinking so
- Greg Scranton: 18:59:36
- a classic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:41
- loves the cochroaches -- yea
- Greg Scranton: 19:00:07
- and Jean Toche
- Greg Scranton: 19:00:19
- oops his famous fight in the foyer of MoMA
- Greg Scranton: 19:01:10
- lol!
- gregory sholette: 19:01:18
- among the 13 deamnds by Art Workers Coalition AWC included:
- gregory sholette: 19:01:26
- Sholette's residency project takes the notion of collaboration as a living, working material to be uncovered, explored, and put into motion. The project has developed from a series of open calls for participation, and as a result Sholette has been working with artists and collectives in the months building up to the residency. These artists include Danna Vajda (NY), Darra Greenwald & Josh MacPhe (NY), Grant Corbishley (NZ), Matt Whitwell (NZ), Bryce Galloway (NZ), Johan Lundh (NY/Sweden), Lee Harrop (NZ), Malcom Doidge (NZ), Murray Hewitt (NZ), Oliver Ressler (Austria), Yevgeniy Fiks (NY), White Fungus (Taiwan), Maureen Conner (NY), Olga Kopenkina (NY), Jeremy Booth (NZ), Jeffrey Skoller (NY), and Ellen Rothenberg (Chicago). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O5-ArtWorkersCoalition.html
- gregory sholette: 19:01:41
- oops sorry did not cut and past correctly
- gregory sholette: 19:01:55
- among the 13 deamnds by Art Workers Coalition AWC included:
- gregory sholette: 19:01:56
- ‘Museum staffs should take positions publicly and use their political influence in matters concerning the welfare of artists, such as rent control for artists' housing, legislation for artists' rights and whatever else may apply specifically to artists in their area. In particular, museums, as central institutions, should be aroused by the crisis threatening man's survival and should make their own demands to the government that ecological problems be put on a par with war and space efforts.’ The AWC also demanded that museums should show ‘the accomplishments of Black and Puerto Rican artists' and ‘encourage female artists to overcome centuries of damage done to the image of the female as an artist by establishing equal representation of the sexes in exhibitions, museum purchases and on selection committees'. The association soon broadened its scope to include protests against the Vietnam War.
- Greg Scranton: 19:01:58
- oh awesome I did not know this
- Greg Scranton: 19:02:04
- wonderful resource
- stephen wright: 19:03:57
- but fiction and documentation ("non"fiction) are not in opposition here -- it's all about disturbing the present, right?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:10
- a lot of this material is here: http://www.darkmatterarchives.net/archives (the current site, which will be updated again soon)
- gregory sholette: 19:04:59
- my chapter on REPOhistory in the new book is entitled "History that Disturbs the Present" btw
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:36
- right
- stephen wright: 19:06:23
- Why shouldn't the dark matter construct its own histories? Yes!!
- gregory sholette: 19:06:23
- Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Marxism and Culture) http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Matter-Politics-Enterprise-Culture/dp/0745327...
- Greg Scranton: 19:06:54
- "Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available."
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:21
- gregscranton - it hasn't been published yet, right?
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:07:28
- probably, in the end of this year.
- gregory sholette: 19:08:05
- the book should be out from Pluto Press in November they tell me
- Greg Scranton: 19:08:29
- oh I see.
- gregory sholette: 19:09:02
- I am in the process of proofing the text and collecting images for it so its far along at this stage -
- Greg Scranton: 19:09:20
- looking fwd to it
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:44
- looks like both greg & olga's audio are back up
- gregory sholette: 19:10:55
- the sound is really breaking up for us down here
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:58
- still listening, but - reverb=ing
- gregory sholette: 19:11:08
- at times it sounds like flocks of birds
- gregory sholette: 19:11:33
- let me check her settings gain
- stephen wright: 19:11:35
- Most of the universe is invisible, not reflective, but without that part, the universe would fly apart. so evocative
- Greg Scranton: 19:11:44
- looks like Olga's audio is pretty hot generally
- atrowbri: 19:14:31
- audio dead here
- gregory sholette: 19:14:32
- curiously birds became the dominant animal species in new zealand because there was only one type of mammal - the bat- here until the Maori came with goats a thousand year ago
- atrowbri: 19:14:47
- call dropped maybe?
- atrowbri: 19:15:41
- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:53
- no prob adam
- stephen wright: 19:19:28
- lost me
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:32
- note: the 44 min mark in the recording Greg Sholette talks about the 3 kinds of Dark Matter he'd identified
- Greg Scranton: 19:19:34
- we should all be so lucky to fish in the morning and critique art in the evening!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:37
- ok, re-adding you
- heather hart: 19:19:59
- me too please
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:20
- okay!
- Greg Scranton: 19:20:23
- I think it's maybe from german ideology
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:35
- talking about the "army of the unemployed"
- Greg Scranton: 19:20:50
- that's my poor recollection and paraphrasin of course
- Greg Scranton: 19:22:30
- it was my attempt to connect what Greg was saying about Art School graduates have already failed in a sense and his comments on Marx. And it is from German Ideology
- Greg Scranton: 19:22:30
- He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
- Greg Scranton: 19:22:35
- http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
- gregory sholette: 19:22:57
- yes Greg - I got that right away and really liked your spin on it!
- Greg Scranton: 19:23:44
- oh good
- gregory sholette: 19:23:58
- Product Description
Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalised artists, the 'dark matter' of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it. Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite. This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this 'dark matter' of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world. - gregory sholette: 19:24:32
- that is the blurb from Pluto about the new book fyi
- gregory sholette: 19:25:26
- your fading in and out Scott
- gregory sholette: 19:26:12
- they are like heliotropic flowers - despite being far from the sun they constantly point towards it!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:15
- yep
- stephen wright: 19:28:24
- I wish I could participate more, but the sound is pretty choppy
- Greg Scranton: 19:28:46
- I can try to call everyone from here for the last 30 mins if you'd like
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:28:46
- i agree.
- gregory sholette: 19:28:52
- during the WPA and during the 1970s when the NEA was at its peak in the USA there was an attempt to "employ" as many art workers as possible
- gregory sholette: 19:29:07
- hi Michael
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:08
- can u all hear michael?
- gregory sholette: 19:29:27
- I can hear him but only geting some of it
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:39
- michael was metioning examples like the WPA and Artist Placement Group, and interested in what you think full employment by artists *might* look like...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:46
- sounds like you got most of that
- stephen wright: 19:31:21
- a P2P artworld!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:30
- Kris here also has something to say at the next break
- gregory sholette: 19:31:39
- hi Kris
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:51
- peer to peer model for artists - definitely an interesting idea IMO
- gregory sholette: 19:32:03
- who does it for the heck of it - that part was lost
- gregory sholette: 19:32:13
- who is they
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:22
- Kris suggests some artists might not be interested in ful employment
- gregory sholette: 19:32:41
- no labor camps for aritsts!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:45
- LOls
- atrowbri: 19:32:46
- no work.
- Greg Scranton: 19:32:47
- lol!
- atrowbri: 19:33:25
- "we don’t work anymore: we do our time. "
- stephen wright: 19:33:25
- some "retraining" camps for mainstreamers, as Gustav Metzger suggested
- gregory sholette: 19:33:33
- there is of course a pleasure artists take from being semi-employed - but I am not just talking about money but also wuffie
- Greg Scranton: 19:33:42
- no more reality TV shows about the "next great artists" hosted by the bourgeoisie
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:52
- wuffie?
- gregory sholette: 19:34:05
- retraining camps for art workers - we should set one up at basekamp!
- gregory sholette: 19:34:16
- someone help me with a definition
- Greg Scranton: 19:34:22
- The Hegemonic Art Studios
- stephen wright: 19:34:23
- Yes!!
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:34:30
- how about this?
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:34:34
- http://www.guelman.ru/xz/english/XX22/X2207.HTM
- atrowbri: 19:34:45
- kopenkina: YES
- gregory sholette: 19:34:53
- sorry I spelled it wrong:
- gregory sholette: 19:34:54
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
- Greg Scranton: 19:34:56
- ouch
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:05
- for sure
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:35
- Whuffie is new to me - thanks for that!
- Greg Scranton: 19:35:47
- boing...boing
- gregory sholette: 19:35:52
- its a hacker term I think
- stephen wright: 19:35:56
- Olga, on the same note, here's a great interview with Mladen:
- stephen wright: 19:35:58
- http://www.voxphoto.com/english/expositions/stilinovic_mladen/stilinovic...
- gregory sholette: 19:37:51
- ‘Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free,’ exclaims Chris Anderson, editor of magazine Wired, one of the early proponents of the networked ‘gift’ economy,
Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, ‘wuffie,’ or simply whim. - lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:37:56
- great!
- Greg Scranton: 19:38:10
- Greg do you have a link to that article?
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:38:22
- i couldn't hear well what scott said about mladen..
- gregory sholette: 19:38:22
- so sure Scott - once we are back up north into the hot summer we can discuss this and other ideas
- Greg Scranton: 19:38:49
- oh I think I found it: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/people.html
- atrowbri: 19:39:52
- we got dropped again
- Greg Scranton: 19:40:12
- robo-audio
- atrowbri: 19:40:19
- hamburger lady
- atrowbri: 19:40:37
- thx!
- stephen wright: 19:40:48
- Greg, are you in cahoots with people in other areas who are working on similar archiving projects? I'm thinking of the COnceptualistas del Sur in SOuth America -- people like Suely ROlnik and Ana Longoni amongst others are doing incredible stuff around the alternative histories of political conceptualism
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:05
- Olga, I was saying now that Greg & Stephen and you are all on the call - maybe we could open a channel of communication with Anton and whoever else about that Mladen show, and get some cross pollination
- gregory sholette: 19:41:13
- hi Greg here it is: ‘People Power Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing – the peer production era has arrived’, Chris Anderson, WIRED July 2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/people.html
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:19
- hi George, adding you to the call now
- Greg Scranton: 19:41:58
- uh oh
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:23
- has anyone else been dropped?
- atrowbri: 19:42:41
- we're here
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:42:48
- to Scott -- Anton is going to be a speaker on the CAA panel on 'dark matter' next year.
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:43:03
- but we can try to initiate something before that..
- stephen wright: 19:43:05
- I was referring to Mladen's show in Montreal: Idler: An Artist who invents nothing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:14
- Greg, are you in cahoots with people in other areas who are working on similar archiving projects? I'm thinking of the COnceptualistas del Sur in SOuth America -- people like Suely ROlnik and Ana Longoni amongst others are doing incredible stuff around the alternative histories of political conceptualism
- gregory sholette: 19:43:21
- Hi everyone - just along these last lines of dark matter and p2p networks here is an excerpt from the new book to end with:
- gregory sholette: 19:43:26
- The once shadowy archive spills open. Blogs, wikis, mashups, fan edits, numberlesss P2P file sharing programs and free, collaboratively evolving software evince the revenge of the excluded. But De Certeau’s everyday dissident appears on the verge of mutating into something else, something that some neoliberal theorists describe as the networked engine of 21st-century capitalism. ‘Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free,’ exclaims Chris Anderson, editor of magazine Wired, one of the early proponents of the networked ‘gift’ economy,
Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, ‘wuffie,’ or simply whim.
Still, there are filters. Ways of pruning, delimiting, and enclosing impurities within this social productivity without completely erasing its fecundity. Shortly before the dot.com crash in 2000 a leading oracle of networked culture prophesized that the initial, giddy, ‘protocommercial stage’ of cyberculture was necessary before profits could be realized. According to Wired magazine’s founding editor Kevin Kelly,
The early Internet and the early Web sported amazingly robust gift economies; goods and services were swapped, shared generously, or donated outright – actually, this was the sole way to acquire things online. Idealistic as this attitude was, it was the only sane way to launch a commercial economy in the emerging space. The flaw that science fiction ace William Gibson found in the Web – its capacity to waste tremendous amounts of time – was in fact, as Gibson further noted, its saving grace…In the Network Economy, follow the free.
There are filters because like all dark matter some of this ‘amazingly robust’ free productivity distributes less commercially desirable offerings. Gifts whose embrace remains suspect including dissident, even poisonous gifts. Right from the start De Certeu’s primordial tricksters began to hack the Internet. Open-source programmers developed free software to compete with privately copyrighted commercial programs, The Yes Men produced mirror-images of the World Trade Organization website that ‘corrected’ its institutional identity; and hacktivist culture-jammers built self-detonating ‘Google bombs’ so that someone searching for the phrase ‘more evil than Satan himself’ would find themselves directed to the website of Microsoft corporation. And yet these tactical games operate in two directions simultaneously. While they provide a means by which the wary and ephemeral fishes of resistance can hide from the panoptic gaze of power, disappearing into some inner fold or temporary autonomous zone from where they can carry out tactical strikes, this same clever mimicry inadvertently projects onto the spectacular screen something that in a moment of panic might be mistaken as an exaggerated menace. Perhaps this is why a deeply compromised government already seduced by the fog of war initially misapprehended the threat presented by Kurtz, Ferrell, and CAE? Like a mistaken encounter with its own doppelganger the state was first startled, then transfixed. Then its disciplinary apparatus drove forward with one objective: to produce a political show trial in which an unnamable threat would not only be given a name, a fearful name, but ultimately compartmentalized, disciplined, and assigned a numbered prison cell. When CAE transformed various insurgent theories – either avant-garde or radical-corporate – into accessible, DIY procedures, and then directed a diffuse, yet unquestionably resistant force towards select, private and governmental targets, it publicly demonstrated its ability to operate within the same nebulous terrain of power that the state now deems its privileged concession to own, lend out, or direct. Authorities compare CAE to terrorists? They reveal their inability to categorize what is unnamable. Kurtz and his colleagues sinned yet a second time and really brought down ‘the man’ when they published manuals explicating how to make use of this counter-knowledge, including its tactics and circuitry, and did so not with the ambiguous idioms of art-speak, but rather with the determined hyper-clarity of the techno-geek. This is where something far more grotesque than a simple return to the past begins to be teased out of an otherwise incomprehensible instance of state censorship. It is a warning aimed as much at the ‘avant-garde’ entrepreneurial spirit of many dot-comers, as it is against a group of interdisciplinary TM interventionists who refuse to stay in their assigned role as isolated cultural workers. - BASEKAMP team: 19:43:34
- omg ok
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:49
- olga ko great - so sounds like you have the communication alraedy open
- stephen wright: 19:43:51
- yeah
- stephen wright: 19:44:09
- I know you know them
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:25
- interesting yes
- stephen wright: 19:44:34
- maybe it could be facilitated
- stephen wright: 19:46:21
- Greg, sound has been a challenge for me tonight -- but what I've heard has been great
- gregory sholette: 19:46:25
- by everyone - sorry to end a bit early but its difficult here in this noisy cafe! best - greg
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:46:30
- thanks!
- stephen wright: 19:46:35
- good night
- Paul Wityenbraker: 19:46:35
- thanks
- George Wietor: 19:46:38
- thanks!
- heather hart: 19:46:40
- sound dropped but thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:54
- we've just ended the call ---
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:47:17
- oh hey Paul
- Paul Wityenbraker: 19:47:24
- HI
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:41
- if anyone wants to listen to our recording of tonights chat -- give us a heads up! or leave a comment here http://basekamp.com/about/events/dark-matter-archives-imaginary-archive#... -- you'll automatically get an update when we post the audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:40
- We really need some podcast closing music!
- heather hart: 19:48:55
- lol
- atrowbri: 19:49:41
- http://content.onsmash.com/archives/40106
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:59
- next week starts a 6-week course on Plausible artworlds with the MFA students from UArts... they'll be joining these weekly potlucks each Tuesday night from here
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:37
- adam, playing now...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:58
- ok, so if everyone on the chat clicks that link and hits play... you'll get a sense
- atrowbri: 19:51:05
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:51:38
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:46
- adam & jessica, when does P@W start at SAIC?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:52:10
- i need to plan classes next month
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:52:19
- i dont have my head there yet
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:52:25
- moving in 6 days
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:17
- let's work all together (on some level) on an open curriculum
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:36
- we're still playing "it's a shame" btw
- Greg Scranton: 19:53:41
- oh no it's over?
- atrowbri: 19:53:45
- it's a creat cover
- Greg Scranton: 19:53:48
- Well thank you all
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:10
- Greg, the audio is anyway -- Greg had to roll
- Greg Scranton: 19:54:18
- gotcha
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:26
- ok, another track coming up...
- Greg Scranton: 19:54:59
- I am running bet basement & 2nd fl...sweaty
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:21
- http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/artist/Sleigh+Bells/1210636
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:09
- ^ this is the next track in our closing intro
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:56
- ada & jessica & greg & stephen -- you all got the Google doc for the UArts P@W curriculum right?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:12
- we can also migrate to IRC now that the chat is over
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:17
- if you'd like?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:57:31
- scott - do you draw?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:43
- in the curriculum? sort of
- atrowbri: 19:57:52
- hm
- atrowbri: 19:57:55
- i do not remeber getting it
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:59
- i changed it to include .. um.. i forget -- "air drawings"
- Greg Scranton: 19:58:05
- got it Scott! Looks like a good sturdy skeleton thus far. Are you looking for feedback, ideas, "curriculum".
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:05
- oh, hold on a sec
- atrowbri: 19:58:09
- the outline?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:11
- greg yes
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:58:11
- i got the keynote grettttt twittererered
- atrowbri: 19:58:11
- or more?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:18
- ohh yeah
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:22
- keynote is different
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:42
- getting googel doc link now...
- Greg Scranton: 19:58:53
- ready?
- Greg Scranton: 19:58:56
- About (1/2 of) this course
This course is an extension of an evolving conversation about the plausibility of different kinds of artworlds. The course will attempt to open up more questions, rather than attempting to define or answer anything definitively. Using an open doc like this for the the course outline process itself will help keep the material fresh and open to active engagement.
The 'teachers' and the students of this course are all curious - trying to learn and share what we can from this ongoing research. Everyone can get something out of this and everyone interested can help. Let's get this party started!
About Plausible Artworlds 2010
Plausible Artworlds is a project to collect and share knowledge about alternative models of creative practice. From alternative economies and open source culture to secessions and other social experiments, Plausible Artworlds is a platform for research and participation with artworlds that present a distinct alternative to mainstream culture.
The aim of the project is to bring awareness to the potential of these artworlds as viable “cultural ecosystems” that provide both pedagogical and practical solutions to a range of emergent socio-cultural challenges. We view Plausible Artworlds as an opportunity to discuss the interdisciplinary role of artist as creative problem solver and the expanding notion of what an artworld looks and feels like.
The project currently offers a weekly public potluck hosted at Basekamp in Philadelphia, during which open informal discussions are held with invited artists, writers, curators and anyone interested. The project is also compiling a collaborative publication from research, conversations and projects connecting with the Plausible Artworlds initiative.
Participate
We invite participation by sharing your stories about the Plausible Artworlds you are creating in your own community. We want to know what this artworld looks like, what it smells like and what kinds of impacts it is motivating. Send us text, send us a photo or video and send us your ideas about a Plausible Artworld you wish existed. Propose a project or ask for help on an existing one.
Our plan for this year is in process. We have slots open for our potluck and a collaborative workshop and exhibition space available for use. If you want to get involved, get in touch with us!
• Propose a Potluck Topic or Guest
• Learn how to “tune” in or visit the Basekamp space in person!
• Submit your ideas and stories about a Plausible Artworld
• Start a project at Basekamp
Schedule
* WEEK 1: Archiving creative culture
* WEEK 2: Organizational art
* WEEK 3: Secessions and other social experiments
* WEEK 4: Open source culture
* WEEK 5: Alternative economies
* WEEK 6: Autonomous information production
Class group projects
Mondays:
Week 1: Intros, personal and entire P@W project quickly - announce the weekly guest - look at P@W as a living archive for creative culture - begin experimental micro-research-project w students, start with discussion-based air-drawings (collaborate w 1 other person)
Week 2: Weekly topic, look at what organizational art sometimes is, and consider what it might be - open discussion during train ride together to and from the end of the line - continue micro-research project - consider perhaps how to work within the confines of the university, or our day jobs (collaborate w 2 people)
Week 3: Announce weekly guest - discussion about secessions - consider other approaches for experimental research project responses, consider dropping out of school and living on a communal farm (collaborate w 3 people)
Week 4: Presentation of FOSSCON rapid examples (nearly 100 slides and semi-automtic-shotgun-style info saturation on open source @Ws">P@Ws) - consider how to extend or build upon existing research through a rapid micro-project (collaborate w 4 people)
Week 5: Announce weekly guest - bring a gift and exchange ideas or consider alternate compensation for each other's time - expand experimental research project (collaborate w 5 people)
Week 6: Weekly guest is announced & quickly discussed - past weekly experimental research projects are considered in the context of autonomous information production - agree on a form of exchange for knowledges and experiences produced over course of past 6 weeks (collaborate with entire group)
Tuesdays:
Set up a workspace in a given area at BK to be used throughout the duration of the course.
Before each weekly potluck, join improv cooking class - bring and prepare food - culminates w/ feast - collaborate w entire group
White elephant research
the thought is that each week's topic could also have a set of secondary research topics the students can draw from for mini-research projects.
I've adapted these instructions for white elephant gift exchange here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant_gift_exchange#Gameplay
* All participants draw a number (from a hat, perhaps) to determine their order.
* The participant with #1 selects a face-down topic card. Each successive participant, in the order determined from the drawing, can either 1) "steal" an already flipped topic card (if there's one they really like) or 2) be adventurous and go for a face-down topic card. If the participant chooses to steal, the person whose topic is stolen now repeats his turn and either 1) steals another person's topic (he cannot immediately steal back the topic that was just stolen from him) or 2) selects a new topic.
* This cycle of stealing can sometimes continue for a long time, (although we could set a stealing limit per topic per round of 3 or something) until a new topic is chosen, at which point the turn is passed to the participant with the next number from the drawing.
* Since topics can be stolen, the topic in your possession is not yours until the game is over. However, this is often amended with a rule declaring a topic "dead" or "safe" after it has been stolen a certain number of times (usually three). This helps the process go more smoothly (avoiding, for example, the hypothetical scenario of the same topic being stolen by every successive participant) and limits the disadvantage of being among the first to choose gifts. The game is over once all numbers have been withdrawn from the hat or all gifts are opened - Greg Scranton: 19:59:02
- oh yeah! bam!
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:59:06
- plausible promises
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:59:09
- june 18
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:16
- nice greg - thx!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:05
- keep in mind, this is our syllabus
- Greg Scranton: 20:00:19
- also just emailed it to AT & JW
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:40
- greg.. the google doc link?
- Greg Scranton: 20:00:49
- yep
- Greg Scranton: 20:01:02
- well it said "attach as html"
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:05
- W to the double 0 to the tt
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:12
- mm
- Greg Scranton: 20:01:28
- oops brb. if u guys are gone when I get back g'nite
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:53
- greagscranton++
- stephen wright: 20:06:35
- This description sounds like a slightly determined kind of artworld already, one premised on gaming, creativity. If we really want them to come up with new artworlds, plausible ones, then we need to give them less direction, no?
- stephen wright: 20:06:44
- I don't know, I'm tired I guess
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:33
- stephen, you mean the White elephant research method idea?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:40
- stephen, gotta step away for a moment - Michael & I need to plan this week - but will be back on in a bit!
- Greg Scranton: 20:09:22
- nite all
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:38
- night gregg!
- stephen wright: 20:09:48
- nite
- BASEKAMP team: 20:10:51
- Stephen - let's talk about the overdetermined part tho soon.. this is something we can change. Personally i just want to bring them in and have immersion into p@w examples... but that might mean other experiences than just a verbal description... so... something to think about
- BASEKAMP team: 20:10:58
- be back in a few...
- atrowbri: 20:13:15
- I agree with Stephen. I get the idea of getting people involced with a game but I don't see how this really bridges anything
- atrowbri: 20:15:04
- On the other hand, I really wonder if the students will be able to come up with new, plausible artworlds without some sort of anti-direction, by which I mean actively attacking scholastic structure, freeing them from expectations and encouraging them to look at their own lives, communities and asking them to consider plausible artworlds that are not imposed from outside
2010-06-22
Week 16: Collective Foundation
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Joseph del Pesco about three experimental grants developed by the Collective Foundation.
As recently mentioned in Art Work newspaper:
The Collective Foundation (CF) describes itself as “…a research and development organization offering services to artists and arts organizations. The Collective Foundation focuses on fostering mutually beneficial exchange and collective action by designing practical structures and utilizing new web- based technologies. Ultimately the central concern of the Collective Foundation is to serve as an ongoing experimental process and catalyst for new ideas. CF proposes ‘bottom-up’ and decentralized forms of organization and investigates the formation and distribution of resources. This means inventing new forms of funding and new ways of working together. Like the Art Workers’ Coalition, who proposed pragmatic solutions to problems faced by artists, the Collective Foundation seeks alternative operational solutions, while reducing the bureaucratic formalities of overhead and administration.”
In 2007, this San Francisco-based group issued three separate $500 grants to artists using a variety of creative fundraising strategies. For the Collective Library Grant, Collective Foundation solicited donations of 100 art catalogs from ten area art spaces that were sold as one Collective Library. Sales of the library paid for an artist grant to facilitate research and participation for a web-based audio project that Collective Foundation hosts. Uncirculated or old exhibition catalogs are a very common surplus item at art spaces. A particularly sweet result of this sale was that the library was purchased not by an individual for private consumption, but by the San José Institute for Contemporary Art, which turned the books into a reading room.
The $500 YBCA Grant drew money from three separate sources in conjunction with an exhibit that Collective Foundation participated in at the Yerba Buena Center for Art (YBCA). Memberships sold during the exhibit opening, part of the sales from the Co-op Bar (another CF project created with artist Steve Lambert), and some of the sales from CF’s printing press generated a $500 grant for an artist. The final jurors of the grant consisted of YBCA guards.
The $500 Collective Hosting grant generates funds from fees paid by artists who host their websites on CF’s web server, paying a $100.00 fee into a fund used for grants rather than giving it to an internet service provider. Those who pay into the fund then become the jurors for the grant. Source: www.collectivefoundation.org
Transcription
Week 16: Collective Foundation
[Joseph]: Their chat side. This is the first I’ve done the voice oddly enough. By the time we talked about Pickpocket Almanac it was just text.
[Scott]: Yeah, that’s right. Interesting. I guess we had done voice maybe like a year before that. In any case, awesome. So, yeah, great. So this week I guess the plan was to, I mean there is a lot of things to talk about with you. I guess the plan was we were going to focus mainly on your micro funding project or I guess y you could say experimental grant structures that the collective foundation set up. You may have noticed this Salem, the description, not our description but the description that we sent out, we basically said “as recently noted in Artwork Newspaper” and basically just cut and pasted what you had. Perfect description of these systems. But for everybody here that didn’t either see that email or didn’t get to read it, it was a little big long for one of these intro emails. Would you mind describing a little bit Joseph? Or do you want way to pick one and ask you about it? Or is it easier to just kind of jump right in it and tell us a little bit about it. Like give everyone an intro to why you guys started that.
[Joseph]: Right. Um, I’ll kind of like start talking and you can kind of interrupt me and ask questions. It’s sort of a monster, the Collective Foundation. It’s a fairly large beast. It came out of research into groups like kind of the early stages of the alternative space movement in the late sixties and early seventies and thinking about the history of these spaces as in responding to specific needs and concerns of the day. People, there’s actually a wonderful book by Julie Alts that was like a key text, it’s called Alternate Art New York” and with the dates which go through the eighties and start with the early seventies. Anyway, in the various kinds of contributors to that book, that collection we’ll talk about that and enforces why these spaces started. There were things like a need to have a space to exhibit the work of women and minorities or a need for space to exhibit experimental media installation performance and space for radical political work or group thinking or organization for self representation of artists or supportive representation of artists who were doing outside of a commercial gallery sort of representation system. So these were kind of specific needs that were kind of, not exactly oppositional, although some sort of post themselves as a more political structure, but a kind of rationale and certain forces at work that were being kind of dealt with and considered when they were founded. And how over the years those forces have shifted. You know, a lot of museum (inaudible 0:03:47.05) now bring in the work of women and minorities. Maybe not as much as we would like but it does happen. And the same thing with installation and video and even performance. So., the question that a lot of people who are involved in the alternative space network and, you know, history now because many of the spaces that are running now have been doing so for 30+ years, are asking themselves the question of “what is the function of these spaces?” And so, that combined with an interest in the art worker coalition and in thinking about their statement of demands and the work of people like Lucy (inaudible 0:04:30.5) and Andre (inaudible 0:04:32.8) who are all involved in that origin in the moment of that art worker coalition. And thinking of the things that they set out to do and that they were kind of hoping for some reforms in the museum. I mean, the demands were originally, at least, directed to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Anyway, so those two things were kind of the background in the foundation for what became the Collective Foundation. So in a sense it is a proposal, not just for a new kind of space and space in the broadest sense of the word. You know, as a metaphor more than a grounded term. And the problems of like the economic situations for the alternative spaces in the Bay area but sort of nationally too. You know the rising costs of renting a space and that in relation to the amount of money available to actually fund projects at that more experimental level than the lower or smaller budgets of these kinds of spaces. Anyway, we were trying to deal with that complex constellation of problems in doing this in these spaces already thinking about. And so, in a sense, it’s presented The Collective Foundation as a research and development organization. It’s thinking about things that the alternative space and network doesn’t really have time, money or personnel to deal with or think about. So it has a number of different programs that try to accomplish or peek at development seriously. They started with a shotgun review which was kind of an early days of art blogs. It was an attempt to kind of distribute the critical dialog about exhibitions and events in the Bay area with a goal of having as many writers as possible. A lot of blogs now operate on this sort of (inaudible 0:06:53.4) of people who are regular contributors and we wanted to have 100, 200 or 500 people contributing. The idea was that if we could get to that point, even if any individual only contributed once a month, that was a total cloud of critical (inaudible 0:07:11.6). It’s sort of to culminate and create this sort of ferment and build on that kind of excitement. And the idea is sort of a dream of having every exhibition having a possible response. The idea that even the small exhibition in out of the way spaces could have a chance to be part of a larger discussion. So anyway, the key to the Shotgun Review is the idea of reducing administration and (inaudible 0:07:46.1) kind of collecting small contributions from lots of people. And that led to a larger thinking of distribution ideas. I feel like I’m just talking and talking and talking (laughing).
[Scott]: That’s okay Joseph. I’ve muted myself so we didn’t get total feedback. I think the other reason you’re talking is because what you’re saying is super interesting. So I’m guessing everybody is just listening. But uh…
[Joseph]: Right. But uh, maybe I should, while I’m sort of talking since it would be useful since we’re on computers anyway, would be to click over to collectivefoundation.org. Then I can kind of narrate a little bit with some images. I think it would be useful.
[Scott]: That would be great. And before you do, I wanted to paste this link here just in the frameset. The statements, The Collective Foundation statements which kind of summarize six of the points. I think you’ve pretty much covered most of these briefly over the last few minutes. Some of the background of these came to be or some of the reasons why you’re interested in these. I just wanted to ask you, when were these set up? Pretty early on right?
[Joseph]: Yes, I think we set the Shotgun Review up in 2006, or 2005. I can look it up, the site is still going and it has an archive. I worked on that with Scott Oliver, who when we were in school together we had this idea to take advantage of (inaudible 0:09:43.9) and develop. It’s quite common now to have this sort of art blogs and journals that happen primarily online and through that work together we kind of spun onto while we were in school. It started while we were finishing our masters program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. So, I think it’s useful to talk a little but about, well the name is Collective Foundation, which implies granting and that a key part of the work of The Collective Foundation. And it’s the only thing at the moment that kind of continues on. You know, I asked Oliver Wise to join me today because The Collective Foundation at the moment is just starting a new grant partnership with The Present Group, which is a wonderful really subscription project in Oakland that it works with (inaudible 0:10:47.7) and produces projects. And we’ve worked together on another thing as well, which we can talk about later. The…
[Scott]: Is Oliver with you there now?
[Joseph]: He’s not. He’s connected to us but he’s not in the room.
[Scott]: Oh! Is there an Oliver online?
[Oliver]: I’m here now.
[Scott]: There you are. I guess I wasn’t sure who that was.
[Joseph]: He’s the rocket ship.
[Scott]: Yeah, Mr. Rocketship. How are you?
[Oliver]: I’m pretty good, how are you?
[Scott]: Awesome. Yeah, that would definitely be good to. I know I would be interested in that. I don’t know about everyone how. But about how that shaped up, at some point.
[Joseph]: Yeah, maybe I can give kind of a little background and history of some of the grant programs of The Collective Foundation and then we can sit and talk a little bit about the travel programs that we are working on together. How does that sound Oliver?
[Oliver]: Sure.
[Joseph]: So, the idea of the grants came out of the wanting to find us our third option in relation to the sort of non-profit fundraising. You know, the 501c3 sending out applications to other foundations in the state or that kind government or asking for money to support programming. And, you know, reading people out of college who are thinking after the culture wars brought down things like individual artists and the NAA and thinking about how important it was to try to work out schemes outside of the different funding structures, also, sort of outside of this kind of marketplace selling objects, selling artworks as commodities. So yeah, trying to be outside of that market and also outside of the 501c3 was the goal of The Collective Foundation grants. So it became primarily about trying to identify surplus and really trying to transform it or repurposing into funding for artists. We did three grants all of which involved going around to all the art spaces in the area and asking for one copy of every publication that they had ever produced. We did this knowing that there would be boxes of catalogs and such in the basement. We produced a gigantic library that was like 5-6’ long and sold it as kind of a survey of the Bay Area activity for $500. That $500 became a grant for an individual artist.
We also did a hosting grant. Actually (inaudible 0:14:00.6) before because that sort of leads into the (inaudible 0:14:04.1) with Oliver. (Ringing) oh, now I’m getting a ring.
[Scott]: Yeah, we’re just adding Steven to the right chat
[Joseph]: Oh.
[Steven]: I’m on.
[Scott]: Hey Steven! Welcome.
[Steven]: Thank you.
[Joseph]: So Steven, we were just talking about the grants produced by The Collective Foundation and I just mentioned the, actually, if you click. If you go to the collectivefoundation.org website and click on that initial image, it takes you to a page with a list of programs of The Collective Foundation. The one of the top right is the Collective Grants and if you click on that it will take you to a sort of blog page that has the three grants that back in 2007 when The Collective Foundation was happening. Well, I should say launched since it hasn’t exactly gone away but, this is sort of an act leading up to the big exhibition at the Yerba Buena Convention Center in San Francisco.
So we just talked about the Library Grant and so the YBCA Grant was a kind of combination of those things that were happening, during the exhibition. The most interesting of which was the club art that was produce in collaboration with Steve Lambert. Now this was in New York, I didn’t live in the Bay Area at the time but anyway, he and I worked on a sort of… You know every opening has a bar, at least at the Yerba Buena Center, so we saw that as an opportunity to kind of create a micro economy. We invited individuals to contribute a little bottle of alcohol in which they became a shareholder in the Co-op. So each time a drink was poured it was a mark on the bottle and they received part of the profits. After that percentage the total profits from the bar were into the Yerba Buena Grant. And part of that included the sale of pod cast publications which I can talk about a little later. So the idea there is just like drinking happens and there is an incredible mark up on how you pour a shot. It costs $0.50 and you charge $6.00 or whatever. And so we kind of took advantage of that situation and turned it into an experiment.
And the last thing, which leads mostly into the conversation with Oliver and the travel grant is the collective hosting grant and it is instead of paying $100 or $90 or whatever for an artist to pay a company for yearly hosting of their website, we hosted five artists on The Collective Foundation’s server and they each paid $100 into the fund and (inaudible 0:17.13.1) program. So it actually was taking advantage of the surplus of a typical webhosting account that was like several gigs and needed to be fast to download you know with images and texts and we ended up using 3%-5% of what they were actually paying for. So it was taking advantage of that left open 95% of space. And so right now we’re hosting a number of different people who, three years later, we’ve asked to kind of like follow up and do it again with a final Hosting Grant. Five people which paid $100. And then while working with Oliver… Hey Oliver, do you want to post the link for the for the present group hosting?
[Oliver]: Okay.
[Scott]: And while you’re doing that Oliver, how many people did you say you were hosting now?
[Joseph]: Well, two people have multiple sites on the server. So right now we’re at five people who are hosting a bunch of things.
[Scott]: Okay, cool.
[Joseph]: To kind of, uh yeah. Oliver has just posted the link for the new group hosting. So we’re sort of like picking up on that strategy of simply working with artists and providing what (inaudible 0:18:56.2) works for them, the hosting group. Maybe you can just have a quick look at that just the general (inaudible 01:19:06.07 – 0:19:12.9)
So (coughing) that’s the kind of Collective Foundation grant section in general but we’ll send you guys the link to the blog so you guys can read about the Travel Grant. So the Travel Grant is, and a again The Collective Foundation is about picking up on needs and specific conditions of the Bay Area. Alrighty, there it is. Thanks Oliver.
[Scott]: So can I just recap for just a super quick sec about what we’re talking about now because the BaseKamp, via Meg, just logged on. We’re talking about is that Joseph is describing one of the collective grants that is part of The Collective Foundation. There’s some links above but I’ll just read posts and you can follow them and follow what he’s… Okay, there. Cool. Great.
[Joseph]: Yeah, this is um (inaudible 0:20:38.5) on this blog (inaudible 0:20:44.5) There was a recent post by a man named Renny Pritikin about artists leaving the Bay Area and artists staying in the Bay Area and quite common for people to (inaudible 0:20:59.0) here and schools are quite good. So thoughts are that we’ll come here and stay for a few years and then we all have to judge the limitation to being here. So, there is this kind of loose, this idea on a kind of informal conversation of how useful it would be if there were a travel grant. You know, to kind of increase mobility and do it in a way to increase people to travel, add more mobility and access to (inaudible 0:21:17.6) that actually might be easier to make a home here. The idea of the Travel Grant kind of came about. Partnering with the present group was a way to think of the life span of the Collective Hosting Grant as a strategy which as they build, actually continues to do that. They’re kind of going forward and Oliver has a tremendous amount of experience in like internet applications and much more than me (laughing). And so they have developed this package and we’re kind of working on it together and I had recommended a couple of web content managing systems that I think are key and useful for artists and one of them is Monitored by WordPress. Actually, back to Steve Lambert because he worked on what’s called WPfolio and it’s quite a simple thing to install with WordPress and it allows you to (inaudible 0:22:51.5) for artists basically. So it’s a mod of WordPress. Another one is (inaudible 0:22:59.4). Those are the only two. Right Oliver?
[Oliver]: Uh, yeah.
[Joseph]: So, given the option for artists to sign up with this package to have one of those like automatically installed. And that’s part of the feature for this set of web hosting package. Anyway, it’s $25 a year for the total and well go (inaudible 0:23:30.2) grant with the present group. Hopefully it will make it so much easier that there’s like thousands of dollars to have been given away. That’s only my hope for it.
[Oliver]: Oh boy.
[Joseph]: (Laughing) so yeah, we’ve just kind of kicked this off a couple weeks ago. So it’s just like in the first phase since the beginning. We’ll see how long it takes to build it up to give $1,000. I can’t imagine an artist who like has a website that wouldn’t rather send their money rather to the arts rather than to any internet company. Certainly there are internet companies with value and that’s…
[Scott]: I don’t know. I kind of like Go Daddy.
[Joseph]: Something about the NASCAR and the…anyway, go on.
[Joseph]: (Laughing) there are some free ones. Is that what you’re talking about? The Go Daddy free one?
[Scott]: No (laughing). I’m like definitely kidding.
(Laughter)
(Inaudible comment or question from background 0:24:50.0)
[Joseph]: Post Papa. Is that the one you meant to say? (Inaudible 0:25:21.0) that’s an example of an ISP has its values, we can say. (Mumbling or reading out loud)
So anyway, that’s the overview. In a way that’s why we wanted to bring up The Collective Foundation again. For me it serves in 2007 and 2008 it was a fairly elaborate proposal for a new kind of an institution. One that didn’t rely on space and you could use the capabilities of the internet and technology to allow for inexpensive structure to make things happen in terms of cultural production. For example, we for the exhibition produced I think five publications, which using print on demand and (inaudible 0:26.14.1) I hope that one of them was a different provider. Um, but, that was more for those five publications that was more than any non profit. It is still, I think. To my knowledge doing in the Bay Area in any given year. We sort of are prototyping a lot of these things and know that many of these non profits are now using print on demand, not that we necessarily gave them the ideas. It was out there to begin with. I think to, in some sense, demonstrate that it is a useful tool for artists and some things, and some applications anyway. And that it’s a smarter economic processing that maybe ideally you could spend more of your money on paying rent or as an artist produce incredible content on the $5,000 or $10,000 it takes to produce a minimum of a publication. And then again, you don’t have boxes of dead trees in your basement rotting away. And that seemed like an important proposal to make.
And so The Collective Foundation kind of was a kind of capsule of these proposals. Do we want to talk about some of the other things The Collective Foundation is involved in?
[Scott]: Um, yeah. Definitely.
[Joseph]: Okay, and then maybe I should open it up to question or directions that are more interesting for you guys to sort of like follow.
[Scott]: Well, I’m definitely really interested in these grants and how they’ve evolved. I guess my Understanding before has kind of changed. I was kind of thinking that the baton has sort of been passed.
[Joseph]: I think that’s right in the case of this grant. Oh but…
[Scott]: Except that Oliver was involved sort of early on, right? Or was that just later on?
[Joseph]: Sorry? Oliver?
[Scott]: I was under the impression that Oliver from this chat was involved from the outset.
[Joseph]: No. Oliver and I just work on this travel grant. I mean, Oliver and Eleanor, the other half of the present group. We’ve kind of just, a few weeks ago, worked out this and at the end of last month worked out this idea to compose this travel grant together.
[Scott]: I see. Oh, cool. Okay.
[Joseph]: And they have been slowly behind the scenes working on launchi8ng this new hosting platform and kind of providing that service to artists. I think in general, I supposed. It’s not always artists right Oliver? It’s just that culture workers are sort of the target and who you’re interested in working there. It’s just a hosting thing.
[Oliver]: We are just hosting. We were just trying to think of another way to produce grant5 money basically.
[Joseph]: And then kind of mapping and crossing, in some extent, into the present group and the production of the additions, right?
[Oliver]: Yeah, to help support the project. That was the other idea behind it.
[Scott]: Did you guys see this question from Adam? Do you want to ask that Adam or do you want me to sort of…
[Adam] Q: Is there anything different in the grant recipients are selected?
[Joseph] A: Yeah. We wanted the process to be more transparent. A big part of us prototyping in the original phase of the grant making process was to kind of think about the process of the grants as well and transparency this idea. Like is it possible and what are the limitations of transparency? So we actually had a Wiki, it’s not up online anymore, but use the Wiki to have kind of a transparent process of (inaudible 0:30:21.2) for the grant. And we felt like because the amount of money we’d be giving away was quite small, that asking for artists to even propose anything there just wasn’t enough money involved to do that. So for example, the calling for Hosting Grant, we invited each of the artists who were paying into the grant and were ultimately the jury to nominate. And so that nomination process was on the Wiki. It’s also a blog as well. You can see if you click on the bottom. The $500 Hosting Grant. It says the jurors and the name of the artists and then eventually who won the grant. And then a very funny picture of me and Rene Gisman giving it away and no Amy. Which I guess is strange.
An anyway we kind of wanted to open up part of the exhibition of The Collective Foundation. If you click on the pull down menu on the top right of The Collective Foundation window you can go into installation images. And it sort of gives you an overview of the actual installation which I mentioned to Scott however earlier in relation to the Shotgun Review. And Scott did all of the furniture, which is also a project which I can tell you a little bit about too.
But what I wanted to mention before was the Service Works project by Josh Green which was included in the exhibition as a kind of autonomous thing that is like related in spirit. Josh green worked at a fine dining restaurant in San Francisco and once a month he took all of the money he made as a waiter in tips and turned that into a grant and gave it away to anyone that sort of emailed and sent him a brief proposal. The idea was to kind of cut out the bureaucratic process of applying for money to set up a foundation or something like that. There may be a jury and everything is fair but you have no idea what the process actually is. Josh was a just hinting that he was very explicit of about what he was interested and what kind of work that he was making and what to support and you could directly send him an e-mail or have a conversation with him. That sort of like cutting through the bureaucratic (inaudible 0:33:10.0) of it (inaudible 0:33:10.9) was important to him in that project. And I think crossed over into (inaudible 0:33:18.1) The Collective Foundation too. You know, wanting to make it simple for those involved especially given the level of money they were working with. The idea was that some of these could be scalable. It might be possible to sort of prototype a kind of grant with $500 and then over time scale it up to, say, $5000. I think that that's more realistic for some more than others.
Yet, maybe since we're looking at the images of installation we can talk a little bit about that. Does that make sense?
[Scott]: Yeah, absolutely. From my point of view. I have just a quick question.
[Joseph]: Sure yeah, go ahead.
[Scott] Q: will enter my mind is you are talking about Josh Green's Service Works and as you were also talking about The Collective Foundation's, well this particular grant in the same breath. It ties with something that I've been thinking about, but you and I have discussed before kind of a lot in the past. I hate to get bogged down with some kind of focusing strictly on the art status of these projects but I'm kind of curious because we are looking at artworlds as models to sustain creative practice and also to see what kind of practices can cannot of these different kinds of structures. Artworlds structures. It seems that what you guys have set up with The Collective Foundation is a series of proposals were there are several different models being proposed. But overall it's a kind of art world in itself, a small one maybe? You know? But one that basically says like you had just said, it's scalable and it says "Hey! This could be expanded to a larger scale!" These ways of doing things could be on a citywide or an international scale. I guess my question was that you identify as a curator. An independent curator. But ultimately you're a transdisciplinary person and a lot of what you guys do and what The Collective Foundation does is, maybe I should just focus on that, could be described in lots of different ways. But what I was thinking about in comparing Matt to jot screens project I wonder what makes a more of a curatorial initiatives and the other in our project?
[Joseph] A: Yeah. No, it's a good question. I think probably the Josh would say he's an artist with curatorial leanings and I would say that I am a curator what kind of artistic means.
[Scott]: Yeah, totally.
[Joseph] A: Maybe that's not enough to some. (Inaudible 0:36:15.4) I had the same conversation and I think the… You know, I've always worked with artists and cultural producers in general but I think that artists have more flexible, well not that they, yeah, it's kind of blurry. A lot of times artists work with other people as collaborators on projects were as I'm pretty much just presenting and developing programs that people work with and respond to and that sort of thing. I mean, I guess the general kind of role (inaudible 0:36.51.3) is that I'm always still working with artists and that's how I makes sense of it.
[Scott]: Yeah, that makes sense. Say you include the work of, I mean, it definitely seems like you adopt curatorial strategies and the things that you do and in a lot of The Collective Foundation's components. You know like" what is this". So anyway, if you get why am asking it was mainly not so much to try to make the conversation born all of a sudden...
(Laughter)
[Joseph]: That's okay.
[Scott]: It was more to, I guess, to think about the reproducibility of this because when these things get reproduced there not only going to be, I mean, maybe they will. But it seems that your hope might be that they may not only be reproduced, shoot a lost my (inaudible 0:37:46.5)
[Joseph]: I mean, in part, let me try to pick that up. I think that the thing that we're interested in proposing (audio feedback 0:37:54.6)...
[Scott]: Hey Jonathan, are you there? I was just adding someone else to the call.
[Joseph]: Oh. I mean the thing that we're interested in was propagating it as this idea as this kind of thinking about surplus as a strategy. You know the idea. There's a series of statements that we call out and serve as little anchor points. It's a kind of like really (inaudible 0:38:30.3) we to say but thinking about (inaudible 0:38:32.8) tie and how a society uses its surplus it defines this culture and the kind of values the society gives in kind of speaking through kind of like excess or an expenditure of excess. I think it's crucial in sort of like a really macro way of thinking about general economics after Mouse's "The Gift". And it was sort of a response to that. There's lots of like thinking and economics that came after that but were trying to just pick upon the idea of surplus as defining culture and how, there is a lot of ways, and how a lot of it has value. I've actually been working on this project off to decide with Marisa Jahn about byproducts and artists roles in sort of working with business and government and on and on. Enough about that. So anyway…
[Scott]: If you don't mind just quickly before moving on. I think what I was really, why I was really asking about roles is that part of how, part of the ways that we can have access to both identify and ultimately have more access to different kinds of surpluses depend on the certain types of roles that we take and how we define those. At least to others that they know how to give us those access points, you know (laughing)? I guess what I was asking you earlier I got kind of distracted because I'm realized I needed at somebody to the call, but what I meant to ask was about the artist vs. curator roles and how those can be useful or leveraged. Mainly I was asking because if this is something that could be scaled or reproduced, it could be scaled in reproduced by others more. It would be good to sort of help others to know how they can reproduce these kinds of things. And how we identify what these projects are have a lot to do with that. Don't you think?
[Joseph]: Yeah. I would agree with that for the most part. I mean I think…
[Scott] Q: It's also good to blur those and sometimes ambiguity can be super helpful. But I was just curious if there was something in that.
[Joseph] A: I think, one of my favorite conversations after a presentation of The Collective Foundation was with Robert who was like teaching (inaudible 0:41:05.2) state schools in California and he was talking about how (inaudible 0:41:12.7) to stick with it and taking advantages of that is a way to concrete resources quickly and (inaudible 0:41:18.5) and how it is sort of like a field and you can just interpret and find ways to identify the surplus and transform it. What he thought was potentially useful was the like activist groups and us just sort of like a general strategy. To think about surplus and identify it and kind of track it down and (inaudible 0:41:41.1) how hard would it be to transform this particular excess into something that is useful whether it is literally transforming someone's money and buying things or funding things with it or building things. I guess I'm interested in this toxibility of surplus in general in thinking about art, not just as a surplus. That's just too easy were simple. But kind of thinking through how (inaudible 0:42:26.6) there is this excess time and energy and it's pointing me to this guy (inaudible 0:42:32.5) who talks about gin and sitcoms and Wikipedia and saying how like people have this sort of cognitive surplus correct and (inaudible 0:42:43.4). I watched some YouTube video that was a little fuzzy but basically the idea that Wikipedia takes images like cognitive surplus so that before we volunteer, it's a way to kind of funnel the sort of cognitive surplus and it's mutually useful for a kind of common experience. So anyway…
[Scott] Q: Is this kind of where the reason for the focus on collective and The Collective Foundation comes into play do you think? Where the overlap of people's ideas and interests can create more than what they do individually? I mean I would want to try to turn this into (laughing).
[Joseph] A: Yeah. I mean, I think there's more like in the collective and The Collective Foundation comes into play like with the grants the in the right kind of (inaudible 0:43:39.0) that individuals are each paying $100. It's time to find something that, like in that case, is mutually beneficial. You're not just paying $100 as a kind of philanthropist. You're paying $100 for something you need and then we are transforming that money into a grant. And so we have just been able to identify this sort of virtual or sort of (inaudible 0:44:03.1) somewhere on the Internet into money. And that's like a strategy. I don't know (inaudible -reading question to himself 0:44:15.0). For artists per say, but and I am kind of like skeptical of this kind of venture philanthropy. There is something interesting about its potential but I am not (inaudible 0:44:29.1) in effect, right?
But anyway I still think that if he can do it and have values and be really open about it and do good things with it if and ideally do it without having (inaudible 0:44:42.3) and having it take up to much of your time as the organizer of this thing. That's kind of a crucial goal. In some ways I mean we haven't really like talked about whether we can assess the value of these (inaudible 0:44:53.8). That's kind of a useful consideration to bring into the conversation but (inaudible 0:45:03.6). And another kind of key idea here is about distribution and is one of our other statements. It says something like the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed yet which is from William Gibson, a Canadian fiction writer. And this idea is just like matter of finding ways to distribute our information and ideas and the money. The process in which through distribution happens are kind of the future as well as the ideas that need to be distributed.
So, maybe I can kind of like shift gears and talk about a couple other programs in The Collective Foundation?
[Scott]: Yeah definitely. Please feel free to chime in.
[Joseph]: I'm sorry?
[Scott]: I just talked over you accidentally. I was just going to say, just to let everybody know that is listening, just to reiterate to totally please feel free to chime in at any point. I know it's not always easy to know how to do this on a Skype call. One of the really easy ways is to just like type something in if you have a thought or a question that want or can contribute. If you want to know something more about it, it's perfectly fine at any point. But yeah, for my sake, I'd be very interested and I think other people would probably want to hear more about other parts of The Collective Foundation, other projects. Oh, but before, it looks like Steven did just send and something.
[Joseph]: I try to leave some spaces too when I'm talking about things for people to jump in. I'm going to read Steven's question here.
(Inaudible Joseph reads question out loud to himself 0:47:09.5)
[Joseph]: Well, okay. So (inaudible 0:47:48.4) talks about surplus and (inaudible0:47:50.8) he's thinking about not economics of (inaudible 0:47:57.2) but economics of excess right? It sort of like a different, at that moment in time any ways, a different way of thinking beyond kind of a capitalist motto or as like now the gift is what we're trying to deal with. There are political implications for thinking that way. For me, the theory is (inaudible 0:48:19.2-0:48:28.5) so to me this motto is like okay well the status quo as far as (inaudible 0:48:31.8) talked about with surplus and excess energy is one of the first things that happens (inaudible 0:48:37.6) and, um, you know an expansion often leads to limitations. Like you should hit a limitation within town or a group or a city. And then as soon as you run up against those limitations you hit another town or another city and war happens in conflict happens and it becomes about surplus (inaudible 0:49:00.3). And then he talks about the history of religion and a bunch of other things. And I'm sort of interested in what those values are. With surplus, you can put it into Wikipedia and GEN account. I don't know how those things happen. I don't pretend to understand the macro social economics to say I can make a call. But I do see it as like more than just like carrying the artists but as kind of like a subject that is interesting to artists I guess.
(Inaudible Joseph reads question out loud to himself 0:49:42.3)
[Joseph]: I'm not sure I'm really hitting on your question Steven. We can talk about it. Are you still there?
[Scott]: I think Steven is still on the call.
[Joseph]: Did you want to follow up on that?
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Joseph]: Okay. Did you?
[Scott] Q: Well, I had a question. I was wondering if part of the, if part of your question Steven... I mean, I think I get parts of that. I'm wondering if part of that question comes from the fact... Oops. Sorry. Let me just add BaseKamp again for second.
[Joseph]: Okay.
[Scott] Q: It should be happening now. Hey guys. Cool. So, I guess I was wondering if part of Steven's question, I suppose this is directed to you Steven. If this had something to do with the fact that these grants were kind of pulled from artists and then sort of given back to other artists as opposed to maybe crossing disciplines or cross and other areas of culture?
[Joseph] A: I'm just trying to read your question again Steven. I guess I would say that it's a model of political implication but not a political model. I think that the proposal of collective information is like kind of quietly embed values (inaudible 0:51:28.4) be a political statement (laughing). Is that alright? Was that responding to what you said or what Scott said?
(Laughter)
[Joseph]: Sorry, I've kind of lost track...
[Steven] Q: Maybe my question wasn't entirely clear and maybe it's not actually entirely clear to me because maybe I tried to get a number of different things at once. I think that you were being excessively humble when you say that it just has political implications. I mean, if I understood correctly the way you describe the projects and then when you argue that surplus is something that defines culture, I mean I entirely endorsed those kinds of insights. But I think that in going about this, you know, despite the relatively modest scale it really is experimenting with a truly political model redistribution of wealth and resources and what you call, I don't know, the drawing (inaudible 0:52:35.9). What you call the excess drawn from me general economy rather than be restricted sense of the economy. I mean most people will see things that way. Most people will think that they have their (inaudible 0:52:45.9) they are just barely getting by. You know?
[Joseph] A: Right, right, right. Yeah. And I think that is something we wanted to draw attention to as a potential practice for artists and for social workers in general, just sort of a not just identify the surplus of their own practice but identify surplus and culture by been general. I think you're right. I'm not totally, I hadn't gone super deep and thinking through surplus and all that's sort of… But there's something incredibly exciting to me about these ideas. If only that's suddenly there was a new way to like raise funds outside of signing up for the bureaucratic trappings of a 501c3 or kind of like hocking artwork. And that sort of like what registers. But I think surplus in general there is kind of like a rug there that kind of crosses over. Am I too quiet?
[Scott]: No actually our setup at BaseKamp got a little compromise this week because our audio setup was different. Hold on; let me talk a little louder. Um, okay great. Yes oh, I think that maybe the voice level is normal but maybe we can try to speak just a little bit louder for...Oh great! A little bit louder for their sake.
[Joseph]: Steven, I know that you were sort of deeply thinking about these issues and maybe you have some (inaudible 0:54:29.2) if you want to copy me in making sense of what we are doing in making an (inaudible 0:54:33.0) read of this. Sometimes it's (inaudible 0:54:37.2) but I haven't necessarily been able to find the time and information and I also haven't been digging deep. And in fact if there are some key facts, I'd love to know about it because thinking about surplus in this way has been really exciting for the project.
[Steven]: Yeah I know, but you guys are actually doing it. That's the thing. It's kind of like you're raising taxes. It's something that normally someone does on a scale where there is legitimacy on a state or some kind of institutionalized level. But you are actually doing on a voluntary basis within sort of a self identified community. And that's what makes absolutely fascinating. But the process is the same. Basically it's suggesting that there is redistribution of resources and there needs to be democratic oversight. So, I think that it really is excessively humble to not described in those terms because it's precisely what your experimenting with and yet what you're doing is totally different than what, for example, in places Canada, in Quebec or in France where surplus is sort of redistributed to artists or whatever for whatever system. They obviously with entirely different results. I think it's super important also, is who it is that's organizing. It's not passing through a state sanctified kind of structure. I mean, these are not really questions their kind of suggestions. And very much to mix with a lot of praise also. The encouraged emulation of these things that you set up.
[Scott]: I kind of agree that they should be taken seriously both in terms of praise and criticism wherever possible. You know, not to be, not that I actually have that right at this second, but I'm just saying. I think that we often sort of what verged on various projects. Sometimes seemingly unfairly because they are so small it's like "why are you kind of taking this task is so much?" And I…
[Steven]: Seriously, right?
[Scott]: Yeah, I think it's important to take something seriously as a model if it's been put forward as something that could be considered for, like you said emulation. For doing it for other people as well as in other ways and finding ways to overlap different examples are practices or even just sort of take it to the next level whenever possible. Whether it's only five people hosting and sort of channeling this monthly or whether it's 50,000 people doing it. I think the model is just as important and that that needs to be thought of and considered. I mean, had fun with too but, you know. All of that should be… I think it's important to think about and look at.
[Joseph]: Yeah. I think that, you know one of the things that I didn't mention early on when I was just laying the groundwork for The Collective Foundation and how it came to be was my sort of excitement about the (inaudible 0:57:47.6) interpretation and worked a little bit with (inaudible 0:57:51.8) when I was in graduate school and learn a lot about how they work. The network model of the interpretation. And how a lot of the work they do; the tours, the sites, the kind of thinking about when. It's kind of like their following this simple strategy of sort of uncovering things and talking about things and finding sort of like hidden and stories. There actually is that kind of political implication and everything they do but they don't present it in that way. It's not even an indication of a strong political kind of aspect to what they're doing. And I guess I can sort of identify with that, which is to say that there is certainly kind of underneath. I don't know, maybe I'm totally off here. But there is some sense that like the values are embedded rather than having been sort of like a stigma of chronic, you know, in itself. It's about surplus and surplus has political implications. I'm trying to kind of like just do the work and make it work and just stating that through that, I guess show the potential that maybe something kind of grows out of that.
[Oliver]: Can I ask something about the Present Group real quick because I feel like it might be related?
[Joseph]: Yeah, definitely.
[Oliver] Q: Um, for people who don't know what that Present Group is, it's sort of a subscription based model for creating work. Basically artist multiples and limited additions and then redistributing them to all subscribers. And going along with what you're saying about the models can be reproduced. When we first started and in 2006 there really wasn't anything like that and one of the goals was to spread this idea, basically like an artsy essay sort of. People put all of their money in a pot and that money produces surplus or whatever and it's redistributed again. But that idea, now there is probably eight different ones and in all different styles on that same basic model. Like Helena as hers and there's one in Oakland called Art in a Box were they all have sort of different parameters but they are all sort of built out of this subscription model.
[Joseph]: Right, and the thing.
[Oliver]: And the thing. There's one with paper mateese or something where it's like paper, flat paper works. But the only thing that I would say that I wouldn't get too carried away with, I don't know, the thing I think about a lot is sort of that it's more like a conservative idea. This idea is more conservative. It's like the ownership society. Carry and the government is not going to support you, you have to do it on your own. I don't know. That's just one of the things that I worry about sometimes.
[Scott]: You mean that it might seem sort of libertarian sometimes?
[Oliver]: Yeah. You're right. That line runs into problems too. You know, there's problems sort of. I mean, you can try to keep it as democratic as possible if everyone is aware that sort of (inaudible 1:01:56.7) that happens with private institutions or just large institutions in general than maybe you can sort of avoid pitfalls. But that is basically what it is. You know, I mean…
[Joseph]: I'm not sure that, I'm sorry I want to think about this for a little bit. I'm not sure if the present group are involved (inaudible 1:02:21.2) exactly. I mean I think the people are buying a subscription and their potentially funding artworks that they then receive. So they're buying kind of a distributed series of things for a year, right? And they are paying the cost of producing the objects and to some small extent, the labor for the people who produce it.
[Oliver]: And, right. And the grant is what they paid up artist stipend to.
[Joseph]: Right.
(Inaudible - speaking over each other 1:02:52.8)
[Joseph]: I can see where that would be where paying the artists type would be like a place where after the production costs there is money to pay the artists a stipend.
[Oliver]: I mean, really what it is that, you know, the cost of an artwork is of physically producing a piece of art as much cheaper than it actually worth. It's almost like surplus is art itself. I don't know. But yeah, maybe you are right. Maybe it doesn't fit into the...
[Joseph]: No, I mean (inaudible 1:03:27.1) production.
[Joseph] Q: Yeah, I'm not particularly sure. Certainly with the collective host, with the hosting thing the Present Group is like in a way more apparent or something to me. $25.00 comes out each year towards payment of the hosting, which is like after the kind of costs for hosting has been paid. Am I right?
[Oliver]: Right.
[Steven]: How would you feel about upscale in your grants allocation system on a very large scale? I mean is it important to you that the grants are $500 or $1000 at a time or would you like to go up to the Guggenheim scale? Say $60,000 at a time? I mean it's not just (inaudible 1:04:25.3) question because you don't have the means to do it but the notion is really whether you see the essence of what you're doing in these kind of a more grassroots modest structure and it kind of goes back to this idea of what kind of experimental model you were composing. Or do actually like to replace the overwhelmingly bureaucratic top heavy kinds of grant allocation systems which exist on state or on very large institutional levels which is something that is much more democratically controlled? But still, with 1000 bucks that's helpful but it's not the same kind of thing. You can't live for a year on that, you know? It can help you do a project but it can't help you. Whereas a Guggenheim grant, if you ever get one, you can go nuts right?
[Joseph]: Right, right. Part of the question of scalability is the transition from the sort of prototype of the collective hosting grant into what the present group that Oliver and I are doing, which is a much more (inaudible 1:05:26.3) and it's more thought out. It can accommodate. We sort hit the limit in terms of like the hosting, actually sort of like the service that we have. We can't really host too many more people. You know, Oliver has a mechanism to keep the cost low and actually to be able to afford to do it which means that you have to be a realistic and take $25.00 out of the hosting fees rather than 100% of that fee which we were a little bit optimistic. Yeah, it is more kind of grassroots thing. I would love to see these things get scaled way up. I mean, I'm not sure that any of these here are that exactly. But we did take seriously, we had some conversations with a few investors about taking on (inaudible 1:06:17.5) or other people's pixels that hosts like hundreds of artists and they make almost $0.5 million a year, so I've been told. That's significant. They don't give any of that money back to the artists. So it should follow that if someone was doing that potentially the same thing that giving a significant percentage of that money, I mean hopefully (inaudible 1:06:46.4) and kind of transparent, but in a strange transparent way that art would work for that. I'm not sure anyone is really doing it but the present groups hosting could very well be that thing. And maybe it's just a (inaudible 1:07:05.0) making and presenting it clearly.
[Oliver]: That actually sort of answers what you were talking about earlier Joseph. Is that maybe the surplus in the Present Group is about $2.00 per subscription.
[Joseph]: Right.
[Oliver]: Right, and by binding them together they create something.
[Joseph]: But in a way, I mean like there should be in my mind, like an expectation to pay artists. And so that's a built-in cost, right? And so like if we were to say "what is that $2.00 per subscription going to" you know what I mean, just in terms of like (inaudible 1:07:48.9) of a grant.
Like my cat is meowing and meowing at the door. I'm going to have to go letter in. I'll be right back.
[Scott]: Awesome.
(Cat meows)
[Joseph]: Okay, sorry about that.
[Scott]: No, that's great. What's your cat's name?
[Joseph]: Uh, her name is Melba.
[Scott]: Nice.
[Joseph]: She's happy now. So anyway, I don't know where we left off. But I think the conversation about surplus is super interesting and I'd like to go a little deeper. And actually just in recent weeks been looking back at the tying in and kind of rethink about how to use that as a starting point of the project rather than ending there and working. Sort of more recent thinking about general economic theory because I don't have much thinking of knowledge about that stuff. And there's a lot of work being done right now about irrationality and economics and how people's behavior influences. Because economics is always considered with sort of rational thinking and I've been kind of working on gaining theories. Even just like in the Obama administration. They are rethinking that sort of like hyper rational expectation of people to behave like according to these charts and graphs and trying to take an account of people with a more irrational behavior. So how about like affects our expenditures. I truly want to think about (laughing) some way to do this. Just kind of (inaudible 1:09:39.1) in a way that would actually work. I haven't gotten there but these are kind of like examples and bread crumbs that could sort of lead to something more significant. The things that I've done more recently, The Pickpocket Almanac, which we talked about awhile ago. Their very much like in echoes of this sort of sphere of The Collective Foundation. I think that the model that, I'm doing a much better job of working at certain scales, much larger scales.
A lot of the things that are a part of The Collective Foundation now, or have been kind of passed on or closed down for the time being, to make an example, I saw Meg and company (inaudible 1:10:31.6) had actually been picked up by a web kind of journal called Art Practical. And we handed Shotgun Review over to them last year and they started a new site that incorporates the search (inaudible 1:10:48.2) for Shotgun Review which is like as many people as possible to kind of more measures and edited way of critical discourse. So, and then Collective Playlist started by simply as a kind of project site for thinking about playlists as kind of a production, kind of a creative production. And to do something that was a bit more like (inaudible 1:11:22.8) if you know what that is. It's kind of a (inaudible 1:11:24.2) different mp3 media close.
(Inaudible Joseph reads question out loud to himself 1:11:35.1)
This one is like actually super complicated technically. It's pretty amazing. It's like tens of thousands of mp3s here and it really compiles references links to all this music online so it makes it available. It's actually not illegal because its separate links and you can create playlists based on mp3s based on people's computers and you know like e-mail them to people and stuff. (Inaudible 1:12:17.5 - 1:12:23.1) Anyway, you can like look here and blog it and search it and tag it and do all kinds of things. And sort of like halfway towards something interesting.
[Scott]: Joseph, aren't the Collective Playlists curated?
[Joseph]: Uh, no. Well, originally they were. And there is one on the left there called the Feature Playlist if you're looking at the website, collectiveplaylist.com. That one on the left there Product Placement Rap, it is kind of like curated you could say. Curated is probably an understatement for this. By this artist, David Stein (inaudible 1:13:07.5) these songs that have like product placement in the songs.
[Scott]: Yeah, I just remembered that from the past. I wasn't sure where it....
[Joseph]: Yeah, I really like that kind of function. That was sort of the idea to have that part of it. But, you know it does get up into like turning into a copyright and just became in the end, a lot more interesting...
(Rap music playing loudly)
...collective action of all this activity. All these music blogs and all these people uploading tracks and (inaudible 1:13:47.3) log in through the back here and figure it out. And the idea is you can add tracks in places and make your playlist. It's free to sign up and this whole thing is just kind of bizarre experimental (inaudible 1:14:06.2).
(Middle Eastern music playing loudly)
But and there have been some kind of like experimental collaborations of people using this playlist in the database. Anyway, that's probably something that should have second life because it's potentially like super interesting and scalable in a really extreme way. But we started with just this simple collection of artists' playlists and they, in a very interesting way, scaled it up to something that's much more like ongoing and very active in terms of its input. It's very aggregate. We're scraping all these music boxes (inaudible 1:14:52.1- 1:15:02.7) we figured out how to manage this like mass of information. You guys know about that? Hype machines? Pretty awesome.
[Scott]: Wait, what is that? Sorry?
[Joseph]: A good place to fine music. Hype Machine.
[Scott]: Hype Machine? I don't know. Maybe.
[Joseph]: It's mostly, it's more like a community. People who are into like electronic music alternately. But you can find just about anything through their search and figure out where it is on what blog. Um, so, anyway.
[Scott]: But Joseph, the goal of this is not, the goal of the Collective Playlist wasn't just to have a new tool to share music right? I mean, it seemed to me that this was a place where the idea was that people would generate these playlists that had some, I mean, they are exactly like what Meg, or whoever at BaseKamp was typing out, like these mixed tapes. They make maybe a theme or something else, but there is some intention behind each clipping of music.
[Joseph]: I mean, like, again. It was a rough prototype that evolved into something and this is what it evolved into. You know what I mean? It is ultimately now, the form that it's working in, is less programmed that it was when it started. It became more open ended than a tool to be able to program your own playlist, your own collection. Your dramatic thinking about a group of artists through a series of tracks. But whether or not that's something interesting (laughing) is at least arguable. I don't use it (laughing). Maybe it's not so great. But it's like what's the motivation to create a playlist? It's not very clear. These are things that we haven't thought through. That was part of sort of like the irony attitude of The Collective Foundation. Just like "let's try this out and see what happens!" Maybe it's going to be amazing.
[Scott]: Weren't there some statements before on that site that aren't there now?
[Joseph]: Sorry?
[Scott] Q: Weren't there some statements about, I just remember this from awhile ago; maybe I'm focusing on it way too much just asking it. I get like that. But, weren't there some statements on the Collective Playlist project page before it became its own site that um, sort of described what it was about and why this was here? It sort of seems like even a tool can have a fore grounded mission.
[Joseph] A: This is the original site. I just sent you a link. The music doesn't work at the moment in part because they pulled, I think the server was just like killing mp3s everywhere (inaudible 1:18:18.4) Yeah, we were kind of like asking people, like Mark Fisher, who did the Screaming in Music production, which is like a much deeper thinking about the history of a particular genre and strategy and kind of politic even. And those riot shows of Julie Myers. There's like a lot of, these are super interesting. Let's see if the music works at all. Oh yeah, it does on some. No, that's great. I mean, these are still here. But yeah, it's like, I don't think that there is a statement of purpose and maybe that was kind of like the fault of the project. It never kind of arrived in a clear goal. I think it probably would have been better just like programming. But then again, that's sort of like... Part of the overall goal of The Collective Foundation is to sort of like give out these structures that have lower administration because of these web interfaces.
[Scott]: Welcome back Salem.
[Steven]: Steven here. I was just reading your statements. Um, the red manifesto statements? Nicely written. I was just wondering, it occurred to me in reading them if that kind of very self conscious articulated approach doesn't predetermined to a great extent that type of, I don't know, symbolic activities which you describe as art. Art is a word that's pretty unstable these days. We tend to all use the same word but we're really not talking about the same things. That's not a bad thing it's a good thing, probably. But it's a bad thing when we don't recognize that and we start to think that we've the monopoly on the definition. I was just wondering if there's something self consciously value laden about what you are doing. Or the grants for example. Can they go to like impressionist painters or does it have the kind of go to the type of thing that fits in with the kind of groove that you were talking about. Do you know what I mean?
[Joseph]: Um, I think I know what you mean. I mean, this value laden I think that these sort of like statements our kind of key for setting context for a foundation and how it behaves in trying to make sense of something that doesn't necessarily have an a ton of precedent. For example, it's a collective foundation but it has no space. So that's a really simple way of saying "how do you make sense of it?" Well we are making the argument and this obviously has sort of like a Marxist ring, but space is not a physical thing but rather a structure of relations. You know, they have kind of histories and they're kind of complicated but in some sense like in thinking about them in practical ways. I think trying to get to your kind of more complicated questions or the second part of your question about like who ends up with these grants. The Collective Foundation operates on the same network principle as the center for learning and interpretation which has grown and now has employees but is still a fairly a lightning fast network of internationally contributors. Not everyone is interested in this kind of thinking and so we sort of tend and people who are tend to fall into the mix and knowing about the grants when they come about. Or when we are looking for people to sign up for hosting we sort of (inaudible 1:23:08.3). It's just a kind of default. I mean I don't think that there's an explicit or calculated decision to sort of say that we want to end up finding people whose work we like. It just sort of ends up happening with the circles that are available and interested and are enough affiliated with in terms like the interest and in terms of their politics and their practices. I mean it's more of kind of like an accident, will not really an accident, just more of a default part of the process. It's new and coming out into the world. And maybe overtime you would see that. I mean, I used to work at Artist Space and they have a wonderful artist file but its full of like impressionist painters and those are the kind of people, for whatever reason, are kind of like out there more so than the project artists or the people who were doing (inaudible 1:24:09.6) work and maybe that's just like different decisions have been made along the way. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
But that's a good question. I don't know that the values extend. It's a problem of the artists and art spaces, the alternative art spaces in the sense that when you do have a truly democratic system I mean a lot of them were founded with that idea that politic was kind of post SDS and some of the founders who are involved in it were kind of like at that moment in the seventies do talk and point to you. You know, artists run. The idea of giving artists power and that was certainly a big part of what the imprint is for the Art Worker Coalition too. Putting artists on the board at the Museum of Modern Art. And all of those things if you really do have a democratic situation, you end up with not always the best stuff. Does that mean you change the system? I mean, The Collective Foundation never lived long enough to have run into the problem which could be a proof of some sort of problem at it aspect of it. I think that's legitimate.
[Oliver]: Um, whenever we do subscribers choice ones, we narrow down the proposals to like five proposals and then the subscribers vote within that. So it's not, at least for us, it's not fully democratic. It's just one way.
[Joseph]: I think there's like really good practical considerations that make that a good idea. Like you were gonna have to deal with this person. You want to present the kind of work that is relatively interesting to you. Let's say your constituency IE your subscribers. I mean, you know, there are all kinds of forces at work there. And to some extent the straight democratic coalition is it necessarily taking into account all those forces and conditions at work. Wouldn't you agree?
[Oliver]: Yeah. Right. It just wouldn't be practical to do. To put out 50 proposals and have people try and go through them all too. People just don't have the time for that. That's another consideration.
[Joseph]: Without paying them something that like that you mean?
[Oliver]: Right. Well I mean for the subscribers. That's even the problem in California where we're voting on all these issues that really know when fully understands. That's why we have representatives. I don't know.
[Joseph]: I mean, to some extent we have a responsibility to understand when it comes to politics. That's different than saying like you are paying money as a subscriber to in addition to a subscription projects and suddenly you have to do a bunch of work. I mean, like reading 50 proposals is work that a jury gets paid for by a foundation.
[Oliver]: That's true, that's true.
[Scott]: I was just curious why do you actually even inject the voting site into this?
[Joseph]: for us, it was part of the original idea that this is a group funding project that they want.
[Scott]: But in a sense, I mean, not to play devil's advocate too much because I'm not necessarily suggesting that you should do all of what you said what was completely impractical. But say you were narrowing down these things in order to present selected choices. Out of 50 present maybe five. Or what if you narrowed it down to two? Or why not just a " hey guys you're finding the kinds of projects that in general you think are good because you trust us to make these decisions" and that's part all works. Ultimately, there's a lot of that going already so I guess I was just curious why.
[Oliver]: No, that's a good point. Three of four issues a year we do that. We do just that were we just pick and if you don't like the type of work that we pick a then you don't sign up. But the reason, I mean, it was an experiment originally and we've got a lot of participation with it so that's what we kept going and its fun. One of the other reasons that we started in the first place was in sort of gives you an appreciation of the process too. So you get to see the row proposals, you get exposed to five different artist as opposed to one every season. You can sort of see how the finished product ends up being different than the original proposal. It's more collaborative. But that was one reason. But you're totally right. By us choosing five we are, it's no longer a democratic. But I still think there's value in that.
[Scott]: Yeah, yeah. It sounded like I was kind of (laughing) suggesting that was sucky way to do it, I can see. But that's not really how I feel personally. It sounds like there's a really a lot of good things that come out of that process.
[Joseph]: So where are we? Sorry. I just had to step away for a minute.
[Scott]: Oh, I was just like "Hey! If you guys are narrowing down from 50 to five, why don't you just go ahead and pick one of them?"
[Joseph]: Pick one? Is that what you're saying?
[Scott]: Oh, I was just trying to catch up Joseph as he stepped away for a second. I was just saying hey if your narrowing down from like 50 to five, like 50 proposals to five proposals, why are you actually present in these options in the end? Was it just sort of to make it seem as if more people are involved in the process than they really are?
[Joseph]: Like it's a false choice sort of?
[Scott]: You know, just sort of asking the question. Basically all over was saying, he just sort of explained some of the other… First of all that this isn't an attempt to try to create a specific model of democracy but that there were practical reasons why this way of choosing was helpful. Anyway, was that a good summary? I don't know.
(Laughing)
[Joseph]: Sounds good.
[Oliver]: Yeah.
[Scott]: So guys, we've got leaked T-5 minutes before we generally end our weekly chats.
[Joseph]: Right. Well maybe we can open it up a little bit to any other directions or questions that are relevant two things that we've been talking about. I was quite enjoying the kind of directions and thinking about surplus more specifically and its political indications, Steven, earlier. But maybe there are other threads like that that we could pick up on (inaudible 1:32:32.6)
[Scott]: would you think about, you may have noticed a number of people have been proposing using the public school opened course proposals as a way to follow up on these weekly chats or different threads that have come out of them. Would you think about having a micro class on surplus?
[Joseph]: Oh, you mean in Philadelphia?
[Scott]: May be between Philly and wherever else.
[Joseph]: Well it sounds interesting I wish I could be there for it (laughing). I'd actually to learn a lot more about it and think a lot more about surplus. I think that there's a lot (inaudible 1:33:19.8) to be sort of explored and considered.
[Scott]: I was actually thinking more along the lines of, yeah there we go. Exactly. We could do over Skype or what to do over IRC or we could do it over whatever. And just sort of follow-up even whether it's just discursive and people just contribute things that they happened to have found in the meantime and are looking for and like. Or you just want to tease out ideas or whether there are very specific resources that could be offered, texts or whatever, that might be helpful to some people. That could be something that can be grouped together really easily and a course, and open Free course. It's just a practical way.
[Steven]: the one thing that um, I mean if you go back to (inaudible 1:34:11.6) idea of the general economy that type of excess that he was so radical about is approach to economics when he talks about the general economy and excess which is being produced, he's not talking about the universal equivalent. I mean, he's not talking about money because that's what he calls the restricted economy. That's the way economists think the economy is. In fact, the excess that is being generated and absolute profusion according to him is all the other forms of energy and value which are in commence with the universal equivalents. It's true that it becomes a model when you redistribute the surplus money but in fact, to follow on Scott's question I think he said that to redistribute resources but in fact it is even hard to put your finger on what those resources could be because... For example, if you take a project like ARG, which is in a certain sense is facing difficulty I understand, what they're doing is using this proliferating capacity of digitizing things to really break the whole notion of a restricted economy. It's a very Batai sort of conducive kind of endeavor because it's not taking anything away from anybody but it is identifying the surplus and making absolutely available all over the place. So would be interesting to consider the generation and distribution of excess in terms other than of money. Money is an interesting way of dealing with the universal equivalency, and that's how we do it, but there's so much other energy that can be and value that can be thrown into the mix.
[Joseph]: yet and I think that's a lot more interesting to me ultimately, the models like a ARG that you can give away, so to speak, a PDF without losing what you have so that kind of a feature of a copy is also true of mp3s. And so the way that the Collective Playlist sort of operates in general strategy. Which is to say like aggregating…
[Steven]: I just signed out. I did know about it before, but now I'm a member.
(Laughter)
[Joseph]: Cool. I hope you can find some music. I mean there's certainly lots of music there. But you know it's like having other kinds of resources. Its super great, I think. Art is something that happens in other domains, right? It happens in academic domains to write disciplines (inaudible 1:37:22.8) and distribution like informally around. It's like just for some reason it's more recently happening, to me anyway, through ARG. And I'm starting to scan text that I think are interesting to me (inaudible 1:37:42.7) making them searchable that spend kind of like the new addition of my kind of process and practice as a curator and researcher. So we should all run to support ARG in my opinion, but it is the public good's dilemma. Like the social economists talk about like where everyone loves the benefit but how many people contribute (inaudible 1:38:14.0) the number of people who were just like taking advantage, and not necessarily wrongly because they are welcome too. But the very success of art might be its downfall because of bandwidth issues and stuff like that that are running (inaudible 1:38:31.0).
(Phone rings)
[Scott]: Yes. It definitely seems like there's some mutual interest for us to cross the board here and having a follow-up course but some resources posted on ARG.
[Joseph]: I think it would be great to have liked a (inaudible 1:39:11.6) were like a reading list like with the issues. Sort of like a....
[Scott]: Yeah. Exactly.
[Joseph]: I think it's pretty cool.
[Scott]: Well, the great thing about the public school courses is that they are integrated on the back end so you can pick text to add to a course. And like you said, you can group them on the art side too under an issue or something. So on both fronts it can be super helpful. And since you want to follow up on this anyway, and we're interested. Let's do it.
[Joseph]: Okay.
[Steven]: I have one last question. Slightly different but a little bit linked to this one. It came from (inaudible 1:39:58.6). We identify The Collective Foundation as a Plausible Artworld. It's easy for us to see why we did that and it's easy to see that it's justified on the basis, from our perspective and my perspective, in the light of this conversation, because we talk about an artworld, we're talking about an art sustain ecosystem. A system where art can thrive and prosper and not only survive. And in a sense, on a certain scale, this is what you're doing. But how do you feel about being described as something that came into a Plausible Artworld? Maybe that's not what you're up to at all. Maybe you just didn't know.
[Joseph]: Um....
[Steven]: Maybe (inaudible 1:40:54.9) falls into something else and you don't want to be one. I don't know.
(Laughter)
[Joseph]: I'm interested in culture and arts (inaudible 1:41:06.6) sort of like ability to direct and participate in culture in general. An artworld is a kind of like encapsulation and to an extent, you might even say isolation. I think it was like Dante that proclaimed the term "artworld" in like the sixties or something. And I think he was thinking about a very specific artworld, not definitive (inaudible 1:41:31.8). The interest in the Plausible Artworld is that there can be many and they are layered as a constellation of them I think. The idea that is kind of working for me and is interesting to me right now is the idea of algorithms or programs and like responding to the conditional complexity of various situations and trying to build a program that has the built in freedom, the built in flexibility but that also makes something kind of productive happen. In that sense, those algorithms can (inaudible 1:42:11.1) and things like that so it's just one of those kinds of things. For me it's a model for a new kind of institution which services artworlds. I've always sort of like struggled when I've talked about, for I don't know, for over a year now and it's like I've never quite like clicked with this idea of Plausible Artworlds even in just understanding what it's goal is.
[Steven]: Yeah. But, so you see Collective Foundation more as a kind of proto institution. Is that right?
[Joseph]: Yeah. A proto institution but that has a sort of shift and it does kind of like embed values and kind of directing. It's more reformed that it is (inaudible 1:43:07.9).
[Steven]: Okay. That's a very clear answer. Okay. Great.
[Joseph]: I'd say that it's a reform of the alternative which is a strange thing to. But as the alternative becomes institutionalized, not homogenized, but standardized by the foundations which are supporting them, there's a need to kind of break away again and to kind to get back to something that's more alternative. You can even say it's something like a lefty conservative (laughing).
[Scott]: Well yeah, definitely. That's a common criticism against people that take a reformist stance like probably maybe 1/6 of all the different people we're talking to are people who are working with organizations directly. You know, and who often take that kind of stance. That's a legitimate position. You kind of take it slightly differently because you often throw these proposals out there and let them spin themselves into something and then our willing to work with an institution at whatever point comes along, not necessarily doing one or the other. You guys tend to see one leading into the other. If you understand what I mean.
[Joseph]: Yeah, I think like (inaudible1:44:32.2)lets say like a bureaucratic (inaudible 1:44:40.9) make other things possible and have a value and kind of spread out like cancer (laughing). Or a contagion I should say is better. It does value. And I think that's true in different kinds of groups and including BaseKamp. Working from a curatorial perspective but also from a perspective that you are able to kind of create agency from within an institution that doesn't necessarily give that kind of flexibility in the agency out so freely to even artists. And that's the great thing about working as an independent curator is you can actually fight for things and not feel like you're going to lose your job. That's a Plausible Artworld in my mind.
[Scott]: Well, I'd like to recommend that we go ahead and wrap it up for the night to give a break to everybody who is either... For me, it's only 5:00 here but for Steven it's like 1:00am and for other people. It's really been great having you man. And having you too Oliver. I'm glad that you were able to come.
[Oliver]: Thanks for the invitation.
[Joseph]: I'm just noticing that Steven put this quote from Dante (inaudible 1:46:05.7) and a bunch of the history of art and artworld. Great to do that. Thanks for that. Yeah, and I guess maybe we can talk offline about the afternoon since you don't know where to go, we should hang out.
[Scott]: Yeah, definitely. Now that I'm feeling a little less (expletive 1:46:29.4) up, I'm going to give you a call and try to get together.
[Joseph]: Maybe we should talk to Adam and see if he's got time.
[Scott]: That sounds perfect. Yeah, see ya Salem. And with everyone else here, we'll...It sounds like someone will propose a course, a public school course, and we can tie in the text that Adam posted. You know, we can start the discussion. Like, with everybody who is interested and take it from there, let that have its own life and then we can get on our stuff.
[Joseph]: Sounds good.
[Scott]: Alright guys, have a good evening.
[Steven]: Thanks a lot Joe. Thanks. It was super interesting.
[Joseph]: Thanks Steven. Thanks for your comments and everything.
[Steven]: I must say that I'm very sympathetic to your social democratic radical reform approach to institutions. It's maybe not one I always endorse publically, but it's one that bears a lot of reflection. So I hope we'll have the occasion to think more about it and talk about it sometime.
[Joseph]: Thanks, I'd like that.
[Steven]: Okay.
[Scott]: Okay, bye BaseKamp. Bye everybody.
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:47:44.9
Page |
Week 11: Groups & Spaces
Hi Again,
This Tuesday is the next event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
We’ll be talking with Chris Kennedy, Brett Bloom and Scott Rigby, about the history and future of Groups & Spaces.
Edit - the URL is now live:
http://groupsandspaces.net/
Groups & Spaces is an online platform, initiated by Temporary Services with the help of many contributors, which gathers information on people making art in groups and collaborative situations, and groups that independently run artist spaces and centres. In the site relaunch we will discuss the potentials for the Groups & Spaces project to provide historical reference points, opportunities for networking and the chance to visualize collaborative cultural production and its impacts on situated and global communities.
The discussion will touch on a preliminary research project initiated by Chris Kennedy called Artiscycle which explored the inner workings of various independent art spaces around the country. Brett Bloom of Temporary Services and Scott Rigby of Basekamp will talk about the early manifestations of the Groups & Spaces site, its intention and current content.
The deliberately unrestricted scope of “groups” and “spaces” — avoiding any mention as to whom the groups are comprised of or what the spaces may plausibly contain — raises a crucial question: Is the Groups & Spaces platform a catalyst for plausible artworlds? Or is a federating initiative such as this a plausible artworld in and of itself?
The following day, Wednesday March 17th at 7-9pm, Basekamp will also host a community dinner for members of groups and spaces in Philadelphia and anyone who would like to connect with this community! During the dinner, Janette Kim of Columbia University’s Urban Landscape Lab will share renderings of a physical archiving unit and library that will accompany the Groups & Spaces site to provide a physical interface for the information gathered through the site. Bring some beer, something green and let’s talk about groups and spaces!
Week 10: Community Museum Project
Hi Again,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
We’ll be talking with the instigators of the Hong Kong-based Community Museum Project (CMP).
The CMP was founded in 2002 by Howard Chan (cultural programs curator), Siu King-chung (design educator), Tse Pak-chai and Phoebe Wong (cultural researchers) — basically a group of disaffected curators who believed that another museum is possible and, pointing at the streets, shops and housing of Kowloon, that it was this one. The Community Museum Project thus focuses not on establishing conventional “museum” hardware and elitist collections, but carrying out flexible exhibition and public programs, within specific community settings and driven by timely issues. Through this process the Community Museum Project aims to nurture platforms that articulate personal experiences and under-represented histories. For though Hong Kong is highly multicultural, it is not transcultural: CMP seeks to foreground overlooked forms of everyday, non-professional creativity and to reevaluate the cognitive contributions of the city’s marginalized populations, by creating platforms that can also be occasions which facilitate cross-disciplinary collaborations and neighborhood participation. To CMP, the word “Community” has three connotations: subject matter, settings and creative public interface. It is the site of their reframed museum — a plausible artworld.
CMP website:
http://hkcmp.org
Transcription
Week 10: Community Museum Project
1:50:53.3
[Siu King Chung] I’m ready.
[Scott]: Ok. Excellent. Let’s just make sure that we have everyone on chat. I’m not 100% sure that everyone knew that we were going to call right this moment so they might not have been like ready to pick up. So if you could just hold up one second for me, I’ll start chat.
[Siu King Chung]: Your audio, your sound seems to be a little bit staticky.
[Scott]: A little staticky?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah. (inaudible 0:00:42.0)
[Scott]: Um, how about now, is it better?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah it is better now.
[Scott]: Ok. We actually have a microphone we can pass around if we need to do that. So, um, so. Super.
[Siu King Chung]: Ok.
[Scott]: Uh give me just a moment. We’re just trying to get everyone else on the phone.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, uh, whenever you, you say start.
(Laughing)
[Siu King Chung]: We can just start.
[Scott]: Ok, perfect. I’d at the very least like to uh, I, I, I know Renee would like to be in, I know Steve and Ray would like to be in, um… We’ll give this a shot. I think it’s Stephen now. Interesting, it doesn’t seem to want to let me add. Oh yeah you know what, um King why don’t I, why don’t I try calling you right back. I don’t seem to be able to add people to the conference. Maybe because you started it. So why don’t we uh give you a call back?
[Siu King Chung]: (inaudible 0:02:01.0)
[Scott]: Yeah, we’ll end it and we’ll call right back.
[Siu King Chung]: All right. All right.
[Scott]: Ok, bye bye.
[Scott]: (inaudible 0:02:08.01). Ok, lovely, all right, yep that’s always good to impress uhh, (inaudible 0:2:53.8). But actually if you would be into..
[Scott]: (Inaudible 0:03:07.2) Let me know if you’re not able to hear for any reason.
[Unknown female group member]: Ok
[Scott]: Hey there. Hello. Hello. Yeah I’m here. (laughing) Great. Ok, I think we. I think we have almost everyone on the phone. Let me just check if people that said they’d definitely log in are in, uh, Aaron is not. Let me just try to add him.
[Unknown Male Group Member]: Yes it’s working. We’re gonna just add a few more people.
[Scott]: Just like it is. Ok great. Uh, ok. Super. So, hi everybody. Welcome King. Thanks for joining us. Um. Thanks for joining us so early. There, you’re time. Oh great just want to add one more person. (Inaudible 0:04:20.6). Yeah so, you know we’re happy to welcome uh, King. Umm, from Community Museum Project. And you know that King we talked to you earlier and you’re basically ready at any moment to jump right into your presentation, um. I’m not actually sure if I’m pronouncing you’re your name correctly, I’ve just been informally referring to you as King but your name is Su King Chung? That’s more of a question. Can you still hear me?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, just a just a little bit (inaudible 0:05:01.6)
[Scott]: The audio isn’t that great?
[Siu King Chung]: No.
[Scott]: I can hear you actually really well. How is the audio on your side?
[Siu King Chung]: Ugh, it it’s very, uh, far away. So it (inaudible 0:05:16.2)
[Scott]: Ok.
[Siu King Chung]: (inaudible 0:05:18.6)
[Scott]: I see.
[Unknown Male Group Member]: Ok, (inaudible 0:05:23.0)
[Scott]: How about now?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah this is better.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Yeah it’s better.
[Scott]: Ok, we can actually we can adjust. Get us a pencil (inaudible 0:05:36.0) so we can adjust more. So uh, so great, uh, King, am I pronouncing your name correctly? Su King Chung?
[Siu King Chung]: Yes that’s correct.
[Scott]: Awesome. Ok great. So for everybody here who doesn’t know Su King Chung is from Community Museum Project in Hong Kong. Um I won’t assume that you all read our little announcement that went out, but um, basically instead of giving you a long introduction about Community Museum Project. We really. We’ve spoken to King earlier and he’s ready to go ahead and just jump right into a presentation. So uh, so yeah so thanks a lot and uh I’m looking forward to hearing about CMP.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, uh, so we set up this entity Community Museum Project in 2002. Uh it’s basically a, a name that we accidentally come up with. In order to apply for funding. Uh, from the Astibellum Council. Because, the Astibellum Council has to provide us, to, would like us to have a kind of entity uh so that we could apply. So uh. The the project uh, that we were trying to get funding from was uh called Optical Demonstration. Um, so we were very interested in the focus culture in Hong Kong at that time. And, and this idea we have been pondering around for around ten years. Uh, before in 1994, uh, uh. While we were all doing research with the design school. We meaning, uh, Howard Chan, Wong, uh, and some other colleagues that is now not CMP members anymore. But uh, interestingly um, we were very interested in this kind of indigenous creativity as opposed to this elitist art world creativity that we have been always seeing in the museums, um so so we promise to try to mix and match a couple of words like community like uh museums together and uh and then we started to think of maybe we should call ourselves project because we really don’t have a museum, we really don’t have the art work, right, so we are not going to collect the thing and and, and uh and store it somewhere. We have no space. As you can see Hong Kong is uh a very small space and there is no space for us whatever to get our collection stored uh in any form so, so we, we decided to call ourself projects because projects would be more classical and uh and whatever things come up we could call it projects and we do the projects and then we vote someone could stick around with uh some antiquity or through long time. So at the time, then we started to, to uh, get to know people from the activist circle uh, trying to borrow the protest objects from them. Um, and then we met Pok Chi, um at that time from the Social Work Department from where I teach at the college at the university. So he was one of the activists uh, which bring us to all these activist groups and then we start our research in talking to all these protesters frequent protesters who has put a lot of effort in making the protest objects uh, in every demonstration, and the intent is interesting that the they are very conscious in making these objects so that it captures the media attention in the news, uh uh . One secret example is that this uh person always make coffin, coffin from either the Chinese tradition and western tradition. He’s at, he makes coffin in the kind of Chinese form that (inaudible 0:10:51.6) and, and the demonstration with. He makes the coffin with the Western form so he has a kind of hiarchy of a of a choice to make this coffin and bring it to the demonstration and in front of the camera he will throw the coffin onto the ground and broke it so, so that it has this kind of high climax at this uh demonstration so yes this, this is very interesting and eye opening for us and we met a lot of different communities who are very conscious in, in doing these uh demonstration objects and some ladies form into groups and make poetry and uh and out of uh, uh out of the blue so, so and, and this poetry is very rhythmic and uh attention grabbing uh it highlights some of the, the issues that they want to protest uh again and (inaudible 0:12:21.7) so, so we at last found that this is very interesting because we don’t see this kind of like dynamics in the art art world. Uh, many studio artists think in our circles seem to be hiding uh in the studio and work and when they show they are and when they do their exhibition or these um people dress in dress in suit will come and have wine and all this kind of culture. Which is not happening in the community groups that we are encountering at all and they have really practical uh reasons to get together and to be creative so but, but the, the thing that uh, we, we have this I, I, I would say a kind of at least at last found this alternative uh perspective towards great dignity and uh and then we have this uh, exhibition and immediately it draws a lot of media attention and it further confirms to us that ok this is the thing that we want to do uh is that is that to highlight it highlight some of the, the things in our culture or in our city which has not been not paying much attention too, so, so I think this is the genesis of CMP. Uh, am I making any sense to you guys?
[Scott]: Absoultely, yea um, it’s definitely really great to hear you speak about it. I, I was able to glean that from your website after spending a long time with it, um, but uh, I think it was difficult at first, would you say that the city. Oh actually you know what there’s, there’s a question from Stephen. Here that just came up. Um, I’ll hold mine until afterwards. Do you want to go ahead and ask that Stephen?
[Stephen]: Q: Um, k mate, (inaudible 0:14:46.5) it’s pretty simple. More simple than sugar, even though I just typed in. You say you’re interested in indigin in indigenous creativity as opposed to the art worlds uh elitist variety. But indigenous to what, indigenous to, to uh a certain community, indigenous to a neighborhood? indigenous. It’s kind of a slippery word, I wonder if you could clarify that a bit?
[Siu King Chung]: A: Yeah, I thought this indigenous to our uh, city. City. (inaudible 0:15:21.3) at first, because now I think you can I just want I think you just want to get an, an alternative uh, uh, uh reference to what this art world can typically reference. So, so I think indigenous in the sense of the city at first when we tend to view our other projects we get to be more specific into the context of the each project so, so it may be indigenous to the project or to the community partner where we’ve engaged with during executing our project. Am I answering your question?
[Scott]: Yeah, definitely. Um, no, that’s, that’s definitely, I think it would even be more clear King if you actually would go through a couple of the projects which you actually have done. I’m familiar with a couple of them but it would be interesting to hear you describe uh, one or two or three um, over the eight year history of the project.
(Many people talking in background)
[Siu King Chung]: Ok, ok, so, so indigenous to, to the afterward. So when people still ask what is for the community right? So, so I think um to us I think community has to come first is a kind of like small uh, group uh, they all have similar intentions towards certain things uh towards some, some city issues, that they want us to bring out. And one of the interested thing was that the (inaudible 0:17:25.4) of these this, this culture which is not very explicit uh, from the uh, media uh, perhaps at first. For instance the, the demonstration operates at the (inaudible 0:17:48.5) demonstration exhibition. And when the media portrays them, it always, um, do it, it always, they always do it in ways that they, they are protest right, so they never talk about these people as some kind of creativity. They just say that they are people who have special (inaudible 0:18:13.9) or special political ideas cus they don’t talk about it (inaudible 0:18:22.5) so, so later because we, we get to know the, the activist group and then we get to be more sensitive to this local community, community, some special or, or specific community, for instance the (inaudible 0:18:44.4) street project. Uh, where we, where we take pictures of the whole façade of the street uh, which is uh a, a kind of intensive uh, stock ticking process. Because this uh, (inaudible 0:19:06.8) was uh, was going to be dismantled uh, by the government or the Urban Renewal, Renewal Authorities. So these uh, residents come up and, and start, to, to lobby or, or protest against the government of a different kind of, of a model of renewal, so they, they don’t want to, to let the government just dismantle the, the, the area but uh, there has to lot of political complaint there. But all these complaint, have a case of the news, was just uh, talking about control by the selfish residents who want to keep old places and uh, and (inaudible 0:20:12.3) and must pass for good conversation or something like that, so, so the media or the government try to influence the public to see this event as a, a kind of negative. Uh, uh or to the benefit of those residents. But um, but what we are thinking of or what the, the, the community of (inaudible 0:20:43.0) street residents were thinking of is to (0:20:46.6) of a different model of urban renewal. They want, they don’t want to be moved out and, and left (inaudible 0:21:00.2) this uh, assembled so they want to get this whole street, cus this street is a commercial area um, which is famous for, for wedding street uh, wedding part and (inaudible 0:21.23.4) so this is for also for the wedding part street. So it has a name, it has a system, um. But once it was dismantled then the whole community was in (inaudible 0:21:35.8) right, so, so um so they, they asked people plan different models for, for Urban Renewal and (inaudible (0:21:50.0) talking about all kinds of public forums and debates. Uh, uh I only saw the one. But, and, and some were (inaudible 0:22:02.7) but the issues never come across as a kind of uh, uh as (inaudible 0:22:12.6) we didn’t know what and the same time we were preserving the (0:22:20.4) of the street. So that we accomplished the uh, the higher the (inaudible 0:22.29.0). And each shop and each floor, uh, each apartment of the street and then compose the whole thing together uh, with photo shops and some uh, uh (inaudible 0:22:57.9) and, and that’s the whole street here, that’s the whole façade. The whole (inaudible 0:23:09.4). So that suprisingly at the time we, we did the English (inaudible 0:23:15.9) and people started to talk about the piece and, and the interest that they see from this, this façade picture uh, because it really captures a lot of details of the, the shops and the apartments and it becomes a kind of talking point for, for people on the streets and most of the residents themselves. To start sending me their, their, their stories uh, in front of the apartment. So, so the image on the street to our realization becomes a kind of talking point. A kind of soliceter of some, some uh, discussion and issues, so, so and also community starts to be more clear. Clearly, uh, uh more apparent I would say uh, by, by coming together and, and talking friends of the picture. Right so, so in that sense the community is quite uh, physical uh, at first I mean what we think the community was a group of people living around streets and around this uh, uh around the area who are interested in proposing the remodel of uh Urban Renewal, but once these image appears uh, then they, they start together, together in front of the image and start talk about them. So then that said by needs of this uh, physical work of the facade image we are able, at least we thought so uh, that we draw the community together and lift it a (inaudible 0:25:35.5) in a sense. Uh, so that this is not only uh, our CMP point of view. Of course it becomes some social activist or social worker who have been involved in this project. We already have a lot of different kind of forum activity to which try to draw people together, uh, but without that kind of initial interest that we are able to achieve uh, in attracting uh, uh the, the general populace to really, really look at the issues. Am I uh, making myself clear enough?
[Scott]: From our point of view
[Siu King Chung]: Scott?
[Scott]: From our point of view over here, definitely.
[Siu King Chung]: So, so this is a, another uh, portent that we talk about (inaudible 0:26:38.1) but somehow uh, there’s another context that the, that the community was not as concrete as, as we wanted it to be at the very beginning. It was only after the projects that we have done then there seems to be bonding of community. For instance. We did the project on a bunch of five people on Christmas. These five people originally don’t know, don’t know each other, or, or they, or at least don’t know each other personally um, so they was just practicing their own trade uh, and then they all were very pessimistic about the future because these uh, hanging ponds uh, in the industry in Hong Kong has been uh, disappearing. Are going to be extinct right, so, so we were very interested in research in the pond area but it wasn’t process and ordinance and also they found mongoloids and, and (inaudible 0:27:57.3) our audience or whatever. So, so we tried to um, propose for an exhibition which features all these fat people from this uh, from this uh, district called (inaudible 0:28:16.6) Po in Hong Kong. So, so we get to know them we take a lot of process photographs from their working places and then uh, I put that together and also an exhibition. So in that sense, in that sense after we take all these, then because we, we, we keep it when we do the exhibition and also invite all these uh, young people to come to do a demonstration and they know and they can know each other and then they can talk to each other uh, and whatnot. So in that sense after we do this project then the community must pass people seems to strong (inaudible 0:29:10.0)
[Unknown Group Member]: (Talking over voice of Su King Chung.) It’s real interesting, isn’t this?
[Siu King Chung]: Uh, uh, under the structure of our project uh, yeah of course I’d be very interested in, in also the condition as the (inaudible 0:29:32.9) of these fat people because they are all making interesting stuff like wooden pot. Uh, I (inaudible 0:29:42.5) A couple are (inaudible 0:29:48.2) in their sentences. Uh, but they have been doing this trade like, making wooden pot out of recycled material uh, fifty years or so. At least fifty years ago (inaudible 0:30:04.4)
[Unknown Group Member]: (Talking over voice of Su King Chung.) Is this stuff on the web site do you know?
[Siu King Chung]: And there is a panel for me to operate (inaudible 0:30:09.6) that is uh, they try to uh, collect, uh, use the tire and then and also use a ribbon length uh, from this (inaudible 0:30:31.2) and from the garage and then they have this economic relationship, so when they pay them uh, bring them this root uh, or the (inaudible 0:30:43.6) tire they will pay them back, small amounts, right. So, so they keep constantly taking orders and material then they will fashion, repurpose this material into a ribbon pot. Uh, so they use this uh, tire, use the fire and they cut it and then they use the roller to make the (inaudible 0:31:13.2) off the pot and also the wheel of the pot and, and they in time they develop a kind of modular system for bunching as well. Uh, uh they make this rolling wheel uh, wrapped with this piece of rubber and then they have it done in piles of different sizes and then they use this uh, to start the drip to make this, this uh, Teflon, this pot uh, in different sizes as well. And to and then to pile them up as well so then when customers come in they will walk and make an order will assemble them according to the customers requirements. In terms of the size and the features of the pot in two hours. So, so we found that this kind of working process very fascinating. Uh, not only that this (inaudible 0:32:29.7) family, There is a kind of (inaudible 0:32:29.0) but since fifty years ago, long before the (inaudible 0:32:37.1) was talking about it. And then they developed this kind of modular assembles, assembling system for, for the pot assembly. Um, um, so, so, so, we are really looking into, looking for from our city and not only, not only this pot maker there are, there are other (inaudible 0:33:08.2) a, a shop which make, make stuff animals but not of this Mickey Mouse or a (inaudible 0:33:21.1) type. Very strange and uh, uh like monster looking stuff animals. Which is very unusual to commercial market. Uh, but they are making them for a lot of persons. So, so I think this kind of things um, which strength the community and the quality of the community together. Uh, this tie to business activity, this tie to economic relationship and also uh, this tie to practical ideal that they pursue. And we thought this a lot to a lot for us to learn about as a kind of (inaudible 0:34:23l4). Well maybe I, I should ask weather you have questions.
[Scott]: Uh, yeah, definitely. (laughing) I wouldn’t want to overtake the conversation with questions but I had a, I had a few.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah?
[Scott]: Um, well there’s one. Ed, Ed actually just asked a question. But there’s one that I asked uh, just a moment ago that I think you may have, you may addressed, um. Sorry just helping someone with tech support. That you may have already addressed in a way but, I wasn’t completely sure. Um, I don’t know if you were able to read this but, um you had sent us earlier notes on the street as museum as method.
[Siu King Chung]: Yes.
[Scott] Q: Um, and I’m not necessaryily gonna read this question but um, well maybe I just should. I like the way you think of museum as a way of doing something not as an architectural structure. But you do seem to think of museum in the context of uh, of place. And from what Stephen’s told me you or at least this is what I interrupted him as saying awhile ago. That you see the on one hand you might even see the entire city of Hong Kong as a kind of museum or as a kind of art world. Um. Which I think is you know it’s a pretty grand scale, to think of of a creating another kind of art world and I was just wondering if you see that as, um, if you see that at all of if that’s mainly us kind of applying our, our a perspective on what you’re doing? Um.
[Siu King Chung] A: Yeah. I think this idea seeing the whole city as a museum comes from my original friendliness as painter. In fact, all right? So I have to tell you a bit about this story. Uh, because um, when, when I do a painting when I was studying um, there is always a hard time of thinking of what to do with this uh white frame right, what to put in it. Um, so if I stop to imitate a (inaudible 0:36:36.9) style of painting and try to find what you could put on this white surface, white frame. So, uh, I think in that sense, a painting is a (inaudible 0:36:55.0) in a way and it makes you think of nothing uh, uh you think of contents of nothing. And, but I’m not satisfied with this kind of, like uh, pondering (inaudible 0:37:11.1) uh, pursuit. Uh, because all I need was some kind of content. Which has meaning to it. So I started to try sculpture then. And uh, but not as satisfactory as I expected because in making a sculpture I seem to, I seem to create something out of , out of nothing. But also is the meaning of the work or the contents. It still, it still needs to be justified, right? So, what, what needs to be done with this sculpture with knowledge to make it meaningful? And, and this also inspire me of, of the model of uh, uh from the point of view from the audience because, because as you, as you see we look at a painting we look at it uh, in front of the painting. But if you look at a sculpture, you walk around a sculpture and uh and experience the aura and visual impact of this sculpt this uh, uh this sculpture. So maybe the, the uh audience as factor are very important so I, I, , started to think about installation in that way, so maybe uh with a person could get into the right frame or get into a kind of interior then experience the frame in three dimension that becomes the final installation right, and, and maybe we are not only taught in thinking up some meaning and putting it on the surface. We as audience or creator could in fact be part of the installation, inside uh an interior frame. Ok that is the into the interest of the museum. Because the museums need as audience try to experience what is inside the museum and the meaning of the exhibition inside the museum was determined by the, the curator. Uh, in terms of new categories of uh, new ways of sorting out the art work inside the interior right? So, so this has some kind if implication of what is the role of the curator as well as an audiance so, so in a sense a curator is trying to do to, to uh craft the paints from, from whatever he wants to craft and arrange them inside the room which is another (inaudible 0:40:48.1) the white frame of the painting. (inaudible 0:40:50.7) Four dimensions right, so so this notion of curator interests me technichly. And then if you extend this model, of thinking into a street as well as a city, so what we are doing is in fact arranging stuff uh in a meaningful way for the audience. Inside this city frame or the street frame. Uh, it doesn’t matter what uh, our design it is a matter it is only a matter of our arranging it, and feeling it in order to uh, bring out certain kind of meaning which is uh, what happens, it happens to be meaningful to somebody. So in that sense we try to, we establish a (inaudible 0:41:56.9) a concept of theme staging so, so we in fact stage a theme of certain pictures and then and treat the city as a museum entity. Kind of a museum interior. Uh, so that the people, the audience are the participants, actually get involved. And, and, and uh, uh, work with things themself and ultimately they are of course get a lot of different models. Uh, how should rend our city, or how we should theme our city. There are a whole lot of possibilities that we really want to explore in our project. So, does that make sense?
[Scott]:Q: Yes, yes absolutely. I, I think what you’re saying is very, very clear. Um, Ed had a question that uh, we said we would get to. Next. Um, actually right after Lukes question. Luke’s is more pragmatic. Is, is the notes on street as museum as (inaudible 0:43:11.4) posted online somewhere, by the way?
[Siu King Chung] A: Uh.
[Scott]:Q: Or is that more of a private thing? I, I wasn’t sure actually after asking that.
[Siu King Chung] A: No, it’s, it’s from a journal. Uh, I, I could send it to you if uh, if you want me to do that.
[Scott]: Ok, we do have a copy so if, if uh, if you think it would be helpful, we could uh, we could add it online and let people who are interested know.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, you could do it. I think there, there might be some kind of copyright issues. Uh, the CD put onto this uh, CD publisher.
[Scott]: Ok.
[Siu King Chung]: And, and they will sell it I think.
[Scott]: Ok
[Siu King Chung]: I think I’ll (inaudible 0:43:55.3) my rights to you to use it.
[Scott]: Ok, you won’t feel, you won’t feel uh, betrayed?
[Siu King Chung]: No, no, no.
[Scott]: Ok, excellent. We’ll, we’ll uh, we’ll take it as it comes then. Ok. Great. Um, and then Ed had a question um. So, anyway Luke. We’ll, we’ll uh, we’ll let you know. Um. And uh, Ed had a question. Uh, he, do you want to go ahead and ask um, verbally Ed or would you rather us just read it out loud, or?
[Unknown Male Group Member]: Uh, is it (inaudible 0:44:32.2) Sorry.
[Scott]: That’s ok. Hey Ed.
[Ed] Q: My question was about how
[Scott]: Come on in.
[Ed] Q: How Community Museum Project interfaces with communities. How does the um, how does trust build between these, the project team and, and the community that is being interpreted, being represented, being gauged or whichever sort of term um, fits best for that project? And sort of what are, I got, what are some of, some of the obstacles that came up with um, working with specific communities? What are some of the hurdles, I guess that, that you need to get through to, to get uh, sort of a healthy working relationship going with the community?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, I think this is a crucial question. Uh, because every time when we approach these craft people and go to the residence they don’t seem to trust us at first. Uh, and because we, we need to for instance on the (inaudible 0:45:32.3) Street Project we need to go to the shop and then, and then sometimes and then uh, stand in front of the shop and take their picture. Uh, so they are very suspicious at first. Uh, so, if, if we, we, if we insist. And we, if we have a, a photographer uh who uh, social (inaudible o:45:59.2) um, we need to talk to those people. Uh, and ask them thing, ask if we are customers first and then when times uh, or, or, or our conversation builds up they will show them some of our pictures of other shops. So that to create a kind of like I don’t know a kind of jealousy in a sense because uh, if we show them picture of another shop, taken in a really impressive uh, uh, look or manner then they will want to do it also themselves and slowly with this ninety different shops on (inaudible 0:46:55.5) we are able to talk to all these owners and they are all willing to be uh, research point and also be taken uh, uh pictures of. So, so I think this is time and social skill and also with great examples of work at hand so that you could show them. So this is one of our tactics. The other for instance for the craft people project. At first when we approached them we. They send them, they sent us away. They, they are not really welcoming us. So, so but we insist. We, we wanted to talk to them and ask them a lot of question about how these, these uh, carved or items or stuff animals or leather is made right. So we, we keep asking them question but we at first we, we don’t treat ourself as curator. I mean at least we not uh, uh identify ourself as curator or, or, or, or uh researcher. At first we just identify ourself as uh, ordinary customers which, who are, who are very interested in the, the logistics or the jist of, of their, their work and started to talk to them. And once do the, we have this request taking picture. They are all very suspicious and when we talk about having to do an exhibition with them there’s even more uh, uh suspicious. So, so we, as usual we would show them work of other projects at that, at that point so that they, they would be more interested in the other project and or some kind news clipping. News clipping from other projects so, so they are uh, tempted somehow to do it. One very crucial methodology for us it that uh, ok, for instance if we, uh, we want to take pictures or their working process which is uh, uh very tedious to them uh, but we willing to pay a higher price to commission their work for instance. Uh, uh, uh a metal box right and then and request them or, or ask them if they, if we could view the boxes stack by stack uh, in the, uh, (inaudible 0:49.49.1) right. So that we could take picture of each stacks. Uh, so, so this is, I mean at first we, we, we need to use uh, different uh, uh tactics to, to get them in and get them involved so we pay them two or triple the price of an ordinary uh, items. But request them to be uh, making it slowly and then so that if they allow and, and, and, and ask them if we are allowed to take pictures of it. So, ok once this part is done we have the material and then we start to do the exhibition uh, thing and always get them involved. And always involve, inform them of our progress will, will help and then this kind of relationship lives on. And, and in the later stage, they are all who come in part with our, our uh, uh curator scheme in fact. We ask them where this kind of arrangement or display is telling what they are really doing so, so we always go back and consult them. So I think in this way it enables us to build up their trust and not cause after the exhibitions was launched uh, or the book was launched a lot of other ordinance of customers um, started to, to approach them and commission them to do things. So in a sense they, they, they get a lot of uh, new commissions after the exhibitions and, and the publication so, so if people will, will follow the address inside the publications and go to that shop and show them. Uh, show the crafter people. Uh, think oh I want to order this particular item something like this. So, so in a way uh, they, they started to own the project themselves and then they have also this kind of recognition from people from all other places how to make that. So now they are very happy with all these new commissions and media explosion. A lot of reporters uh, approaching them as well. So, so in that sense the trust was confirmed. I mean after all these uh, all these tactics I should say and now uh, they feel part of it. Uh, I have on and off some art commissions that I will also go back to these craft people and ask them to make it for, for us. And then we will also now introduce designers to them so the designers and these craft people can work together to develop new products so, so I think in a way uh, originally that was not a community persay. But now we are forming a community on the streets uh, where these craft people, with designers, with new customers, with students and teachers as well because uh, teachers and students sometimes uh, saw our book and then they will, they will do a kind of life subject tour uh, and visit the craft people on the streets. Yeah, so. Did I answer your question?
[Ed]: Yes, very well thank you.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Do you have a question as well?
No response given.
[Siu King Chung]: So, uh, are we doing allright?
[Scott]: (Laughing). I think so. Are you still awake?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, yeah fine.
[Scott]: (laughing) It’s a, it’s a, there hasn’t been a, a, a. We really haven’t stepped in to interrupt you too much because I think you’ve been inter.. I think it’s been really informative to hear you describe um, how the project is going um. I think there have been a couple of things that were asked that, that um, that may not have been addressed fully. Um, I think Stephen’s was probably the. Yeah.
[Stephen] Q: Stephen here. Um, I have uh, I have two questions actually. Both related to what you’ve been saying about uh, confidence building, but not uh, with a little bit of a difference. The first part is, I’m trying to think of what the uh, the, the (inaudible 0:55:18.6) for this type of project might be. I mean, your precursors. And one of the things that occurred to me is that it might be somewhat late to uh, out (inaudible 0:55:28.1) um, which you know DuBefey defined as art without artists. And I was wondering at, at one point when you saw your project as a sort of a, a museum elite so to speak. But, listening to you, I’d like you to comment on what some of your historical anchor points might be. But it seems to me that on the contrary what you’re, even when you’re talking about the confidence building the way CMP functions is on a kind of a, a disparity in your capacity to up to scale up. Uh, I mean your capacity are as curators or as initiators and the indeginous creators that you identify in each segment. Uh, thery’re sort of otherwise being condemned to just being what they are. So, you’re, you’re able to confer that specific museum like visibility on, on their work, but if that’s the case. Uh, this is my last question. Do you want to break down that disparity? The disparity between your capacity to confer that, that museum kind of status or uh, break it down so that you, so as not to reproduce museums uh , in the street and just sort of colonize uh, uh the entire city basically with a museum logic or do you want to use that disparity in a stratigic way um, to , to valorize and validate and perhaps uh, in that way uh, overturn the, that higharichal elitist system which you began by,by critiquing?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, um. Let’s see if I understand your question right.
[Scott]: (laughing) There was maybe five questions or so.
[Siu King Chung]: Pardon me?
[Scott]: I was going to say there might be about five questions or so.
[Stephen]: Two.
[Scott]: Oh. Ok.
[Siu King Chung]: So, I, I try to uh, do it briefly. Um, historically it’s not if you, if we say a museum group yeah I think this might be a kind of cool terms. having talk about it. In a way it’s, I think philisophically it is quite different because we are I mean the work that we are doing is not replicating a museum logic I think . It’s just employing the museum logic as method so is quite different uh, and the end is not to to make up another show or other art or indigenous art show so as to impress people from the city. In fact our focus are on people themselves. Uh, why we have been pondering on the word social curating, term social curating. In fact we are not curating the work but we, we use these all these excuses involving around the work or the class or whatever issues in order to heal up social relationship. And for instance, for incident the craft peoples project uh it seems to me that they see the people themselves. No matter the designers the teachers the students the craft people craft persons all see themselves differently after the project because uh there has been more public attention to this kind of thing that has been silenced by whatever social political agenda and now they are coming back and then they have participate uh more activlly in in the city in wait. And in a sense the craft people have managed to, to be their own network other than or beyond their own circle right now they are they are always meeting different commissioners from all other places so, so I think in that sense it’s not uh, the museums uh, as the street as a museum as a kind of like physical hardware kind of things uh, not a showcase but the people who has been changing. This is what interests us. Ok. Is it clear or does it make sense to you?
[Scott]: Absolutely, um, King
[Steven]: Extremely clear, thank you.
[Scott]: Yeah. Uh, one thing that I, I uh, can’t help but to continue want to ask is how um, maybe kind of I think it’s related to Stephens question and also um, the question that Ed was asking earlier. I’m wondering how the people that you’re describing see um, see themselves. I guess really, do, do you think that the people that you’re working with understand that uh, their work is being presented um, in a context that draws on um, that draws on, on art I guess you could say, uh, or on museum histories or on presentation histories or that it’s part of the conceptual art project um, or do they not and if either way does it matter to you?
[Siu King Chung]: I don’t think it matters. Um,
[Scott]: Okay
[Siu King Chung]: I think this ok if you use this uh uh terms stick holders, right.
[Scott]: Uh huh.
[Siu King Chung]: Uh, stick holders always has a different perspective on, on the same thing. Uh. They, they are super stick holders while we are curators having our stick as bringing things to the cultural scene. They as stick holder has perhaps has uh benefits from the new commissions. So, so for the teachers and the students they have their own stake of having this education done. Uh, for this uh, future requirements from the school, right. So, so I think in that sense we are only producing projects which becomes an excuse for all these uh, peoples to, to join them and in that sense uh, we, we believe this is a path of win, win, win, situation. We don’t need to, to like a pollinate one of the meaning so, so I think this is our approach so they, they will get whatever they get from, from selling things but I think what we do is just apparently initiators of, of things by having this knowledge and skills to apply funding and also having the network from the cultural circles to uh, get things done on, on the end through the cultural circles or the activist circles in order to bring up the issues that we want to initiate. Yeah. So.
[Scott] Q: The other day. Or actually the other week, King. We, we spoke with Barbara Stiviney from Artist Placement Group and uh,
[Siu King Chung]: Yes?
[Scott]: And talked, as you know talked quite a bit about um, uh, the incidential er art. Well not just the incidential person but art as incidential generally speaking. Um, to some of those practices. And you have referr, you have mentioned, um, uh, uh art or even, even uh, museum or a museum method or an art world as a, as an excuse a number of times.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I saw that there might be something kind of similar there.
[Siu King Chung]: Um.
[Scott]: I think that’s more of a statement but uh, I’m not sure if there’s a question attached, in fact. Uh, but I, I like, I like your uh, I like your not necessarily reliance on um, uh on histories of art presentation but I like uh, that your use of this as a um,
(inaudible mumbling)
[Siu King Chung]: Scott? Uh, is the audio having some problems?
[Scott]: No, that was me mumbeling.
[Siu King Chung]: Oh, okay.
[Scott]: Laughing. (inaudible 1:05:35.7) go ahead please.
[Siu King Chung]: Uh, In fact if you, it is not entirely out of the historical context I think because what I believe what art and history has done at least they are like seven different levels of work or idealogy right. So I mean arts the first level art is a pleasure kind of thing the second is this apparent business okay, that’s why you we have the gallery system and, and the art dealer and all that so, so this is a second effort I would (inaudible 1:06:26.1) and then the third level I think this is the art as therapy kind of stuff, kind of stuff so, so art somehow on the third level I think this is art therapy so you could express yourself and you, you , you like art those things to be a kind of therapy. So, the fourth level is perhaps is kind of like um, critical and intellectual cultural. I mean we use art as a kind of malaise and phylisophical pursuit. Uh, and the fifth level you could say this is a kind of the art is a means for the creative culture so you talk about larger thing it’s not only personal, phylisophical pursuit but also a means for creative culture of a place or of a city so the sixth level it could be a kind of like uh, uh, critical culture right, uh, and seventh level is sometimes exploration for a secret society. So I think in a sense if you use art instrumentally which I think in whatever sense this is true then the ultimate goal for art is to achieve some kind of insight or, or, or some operation to what’s a kind of secret society. So, so I think in a secret society the craft men the people who have not been portrayed by uh, a specific attention culture should be attended to as well and, and their view uh, could be attended to. I think this is most cruitial for our ideal. So, I don’t know whether this makes sense but I think at the back of our mind I think most of you want to achieve from the museum community museum project has all in a way we want to use social curators to achieve that. Um.
[Scott]: I like, I like your uh, I like your textonomy for uh, categorizing uh, the different levels of, of a art. (laughing) I was tempted to paste in some of what you had written in that uh, in that text but I think I’ll just save it for uh, we can post it later and send a note to everyone about this.
[Siu King Chung]: So, so I this has been on and off in history has been many stressed in whatever level. I mean there are a lot of examples in different kinds of art in our world but most of our discussion has been drawn to this uh, like, has not been drawn towards this simple society kind of stuff I think. I mean especially in Hong Kong.
[Scott]: Can, can I ask you just a quick question about the um, that you’re working with once again. I know you spoke quite a bit about them. But um, I
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I’m curious if you, if you all, if you guys also work with other um, with other artists or other people who might um, have an understanding of what they’re doing that would, that would in some way match with yours. I know how you described how the shareholders may have, I’m sorry the steakholders may have a um, a different, you know, understandably a different idea about what’s going on than the people that are, are helping to organize the project um and who are working as a curatioral team. Even though you see them as part of that team they probably see themselves differently. I’m wondering if. I’m wondering how many people, or if you if you ever really do work with people that um, that you feel you could probably share your critical perspectives with or at least overlap a number of them. And that you feel you know you’re on some kind of an equal playing field on that side of things. Um, I’m curious because these notions of participation, contributorship um, uh as Stephen likes to describe, not to paraphrase you Stephen but, uh, describing people as users, um, talking about usership. I guess what I’m thinking about uh, trying to imagine these um, the social relations that you’re helping to set up. I think your, your goal is really not so much to create an art project but like you said, to work to use art in the service of the civil society. Um, I’m just, I’m still curious though about if those implications for other art practices um, and I think the kinds of social relationships we help to create have something to do with, with that.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah. I mean the, the first criteria is not to dominate any of the social relation or social perception.
[Scott]: Uh huh. Right.
[Siu King Chung]: I mean, for us as (inaudible 1:12:47.0) or as people from Community Museum Project, we, we do have a certain kind of agenda but the people comes in at different levels at a time, but depending on situation. Uh, so, so we don’t do, make uh, we don’t intend to dominate on any of the agenda where everybody could pick their own part, take their own thing away. I, I think this is important for us. But on the other hand, uh, in terms of social relations uh, it depends on which group we are cooperating with or collaborating with. For instance we have the other projects uh, we have been doing a project uh, for the last suit you’ll ever need uh, which is working with this elderly uh, on the, the, the funeral suit funeral clothes. So we invite designers uh, to, to talk to these elderly people uh, whether they want what kind of like burial suit or what kind of funeral suit they, they want and, and through this process I mean the designers are painting new perspectives on the elderly. And, and visa versa as well, so, so uh, another project is dealing with these uh, people on, on welfare social welfare uh, we manage to take pictures of every item in their refrigerators and uh, and did a show on it and using a refrigerators as a kind of manifestation of their life. Uh, as a, as a receiver of social welfare. But of course this is a little bit complicated to talk about. But what I want to say is uh, uh, uh, yes, there are, there are different agenda for different people. If we are able to build a platform, the platform, is for everybody to, to play fair in it. And to their own satisfaction so after, when we promote our exhibition we don’t usually call it an art exhibition. We just call it an exhibition about certain issues. So, but we, we use this excuse, I mean, you are aware of my language here right? Uh, I always use excuses to get people together and to get people uh, uh, say the things they wanted to say but without a channel. Hopefully, CMP projects could provide such channel for them and for also for us to learn about them. I think this is very important. Because in exhibition I have been pondering a point. Why am I going to exhibition at all? Uh, and perhaps uh, we need to learn something from it or we need to make (inaudible 1:16:57.9) work from it. I don’t know. Maybe there are some agenda behind uh, which is more meaningful to a secret society. Uh, is there any other question?
[Alan]: Uh, yeah I have one, I, I think Aaron had a question I thought. Just let me ask this one. Um, a couple of years ago uh, I remember Howard was telling me about a project which you were working on with uh, recent immigrants to Hong Kong, in order to shift the negative uh, perception of them as benefit seekers and social parasites towards a more positive uh, understanding of immigrants as knowledge producers and inseminators. I like that. I don’t know whether you did that project but I like the idea because it didn’t have to do with the production of objects. But rather, with the dissemination of knowledge. It was kind of an immaterial case of indigenous uh, creativity. Because you asked them, if I remember correctly to teach uh, evening classes, teach language classes and, and, and otherwise disseminate their sort of a public school. Did that ever take place? And if so, could you comment on it.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah. Uh, not to that extent. Uh, in teaching classes. But we are still working on it. Uh, but, but this, rich project that we have just, I have just talked about is uh, somehow linked to that idea. Um, before this social group uh, I mean many of them are new immigrants from main land China. Uh, and also some from Southeast Asia. So some of them are receiving social welfare right. And uh, so the media has been blaming them of doing nothing but receiving money, that kind of stuff. And, what the media has missed is how they manage to live under this kind of circumstances and how they manage to live creatively or, or effectively. Under this kind of circumstances. Uh and then we need to admire them of that abilities to do so right. So, so their excuse was the, the fridge project uh that we work with Ox Farm um, is to go with, it is to identify every items in their refrigerators and then of course we, we had twenty four cases. Uh, half of them social welfare receiver and the other half was some well off uh people from well off family. Uh, refrigerators from a well off family. So the reason why we look into the refrigerators is that uh, we believe that they are some kind of indigenous (inaudible 1: 20:28.6) in the, in the way they preserve things, in the refrigerators. Uh, things meaning the physical things of food. Uh, and surprisingly we found the refrigerators is not only for preserving food. They also preserve toy uh, Channel perfume and also uh, the memories so so we use this exhibition. We displayed all these objects from, from their refrigerators and do a kind of like uh, statistic. A visual statistic of it and uh, and trying to see from the objects something which is indigenously created or memorable to their life. Uh, and we solicite a lot of interesting story uh and also for indigenous knowledge for future part. For instance because these people are really careful in using their food because they don’t have money to replenish their, their refrigerator often so, so what they do is they come up with a lot of interesting method of preserving food uh and surprisingly uh, the most uh, the most abundant items in all these refrigerators all together uh, dry food, uh, so if you visualize a kind of like food pyramid out of all these uh, food items from these twenty four refrigerators you can see most of them. Uh, either sauces at the bottom of the pyramid are sauces and the second level is fried food. So this say something about how they use this sauces and dry food for, for their, their cooking and, and, and this is quite interesting so, so, um, so I, I think we, we uh, research a point of view a view of these people who, who has a special way to preserve their dry food and a special way of utilizing them uh, I think this might be the kind of knowledge uh, we are looking for. Uh, and also another thing that we are working on is a, a kind of kitchen uh, where the, we are thinking whether or not we could um, try to curate a kind of cuisine tool. A kind of cuisine exhibition. Having all these people, some of these people perhaps to demonstrate how they cook their food out of limited amount of resources uh, does this example work for you?
[Scott]: Oh, um was he asking me?
[Alan]: Excellent, yes. I can’t wait to see how, what the results of will be of, of your cooking show. But I think there are some other questions actually that are on cue here.
[Scott]: (laughing) Cooking show, exact. Yeah um.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, uh, curate of cuisine exhibition. Yeah.
[Scott]: So.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah?
[Scott]: So uh, King. Um, Aaron had a question. Can you hear me pretty well by the way? I did turn down that uh, ok.
[Siu King Chung]: Yes
[Scott]: He, he was, I don’t know if you’d like to ask it Aaron or if you’d just rather me read it out loud or either way is perfectly ok.
[Siu King Chung]: I’m checking the, the text.
[Scott]: Oh, yeah so basically Aaron asked how would you represent social curation? Um, he’s wondering what you mean by, I think this a multiple part question too. He’s wondering what you mean by a civic society? Um, in the art context that you’re describing, um, he’s saying why do you speak in and us? Supposedly yourself, he’s supposing, yourself and the people in the museum and them possibly people you work with. Um, he’s wondering if there is such a division at all or if or yeah, that’s really his question and then we have two more as well.
[Siu King Chung]: Uh, us, ok this is uh, a good question I think. Okay when, when plenty of time we talk about community art we have notion of community artists that lives in Hong Kong is that uh, we as artists use some art and then we use some art for the community and or as if we are outside of the community. So that we make some kind of art to inspire them uh, so we inspire the community. So there is a kind of implicit hierarchy that artists make art for the community right. But uh, in our sense of the community we are already in that community we are the community. Once it is formed together. So, so we are not making the art for the community we are producing art from the community including us as a kind of curators with a kind, a certain kind of skill. But on the other hand, the craft people uh, uh, uh, duh, the residents from the Mekong streets they have their own agenda for themself right. So, so and together we work out something within our own strength. So I think in that sense this is what social curating is all about I think, because uh, if you look at it as a community then the most important entity inside this community are people so we are not doing art work. I mean the end is not to do art work. The end is to have everybody get related and do something together as a community. As a whole. Uh, did I answer your question Aaron?
[Unknown Male Group Member]: Just let him know.
[Siu King Chung]: Uh, is that not an artwork? Yes this is an artwork in a sense. But a kind of intangible, a more intangible one. Like social sculpture perhaps. Using a (inaudible 1:28:42.7) terminology.
[Scott]: Ok, so uh, there’s also um, (chuckling) great, um, there’s also a question um, that uh, that the Elsewhere Group um, asked um. Do you guys want to go ahead and ask that out loud or would you rather us read it.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Um, I can talk if you can hear me.
[Scott]: Yeah we can hear you really well.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah. Yeah.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Oh great.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Um, I guess that my question is a two part question. Uh, I think you talked a little bit about it but I just wanted a more direct answer. One, I was wondering um, when you were talking earlier about how you try not to label your exhibitions as art exhibitions and how you in fact are questioning the whole idea of an exhibition in itself. I was wondering um, to what extent the question of audience comes in? I mean it’s part of CMP’s goals to change the audience that sees the quote unquote art or that changing it from a gallery or a museum kind of audience um, and if so I was wondering what strategies you’ll employ to achieve that goal? Given that you and your cofounders seem to have a strong network within the art scene in Hong Kong.
[Siu King Chung]: Um, in fact.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Is that clear?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Ok.
[Siu King Chung]: In fact. Uh, we don’t attract a lot of art audience in many of our shows. Uh, many of our shows could draw a lot of media attention and then a lot of the public audience. Mainly ordinary citizens uh, looking for things interesting. They would come. I, I remember for our (inaudible 1:30:54.3) demonstration of tradition during the opening although we uh, we were having the at the art (inaudible 1:31:01.8) we call it an art village.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Uh huh.
[Siu King Chung]: In Hong Kong. But the very few artists come, come by. But all these people from the social welfare circles and also ordinary citizens from around the city come to our exh, our opening and some are very participatory as well, they bring their own demonstration object uh, uh, uh at the opening, they, they bring their own object and, and put it in our show. So, so I think in that sense this is quite uh, interesting see the art circle was not aware of it, in fact uh, at that time (inaudible 1:31:57.6) time, uh, but later on uh, as we had more publicity and for instance the, the, the MeKong Street image has been publicized in lots of like uh, um, um news media then the artists started to aware of this kind of like artistic craftsmanship which has been involved in, in making this uh, these kinds exhibitions possible. So, so it has been talked about by the, by the art circle a little bit. But I think the most crucial thing is to invite them to get in ball park so we have other programs uh, like uh, like uh, like the craftsmanship program we invite designers and artists to join us and to develop the, the, the new products as well so, so some of the art the art world will (inaudible 1:33:05.2) or beatify the artist for a kind of for their own show was later on commissioned by uh, later on made by these craft people. So I think in that sense. The art circles does take the channel or, or take the opportunities to, to collaborate with some of our partners uh, uh later on.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Hmm. Okay. Uh, just one last thing. I was wondering whether you said a lot of sort of you know, people who wouldn’t or weren’t connected to the art scene in Hong Kong came to your exhibitions. It, was that, um, was that um, something you worked towards in any way or did that just happen organically.
[Siu King Chung]: I think it uh, I think it happened but uh, I don’t know why this is uh. I mean originally we were not that conscious about it. But if you think about secret society as the ultimate goal then this is the way we should go. I mean having people from different communities or different circles to join together on secret issues and then all could contribute to either working together or keeping comment on certain things so this is the kind of opin, opinion generator with ,with possible in the longer run.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Okay. Um, thank you. That’s very interesting.
[Siu King Chung]: So, is there other questions?
[Scott]: Yeah. We can just keep throwing them at you all uh, all (laughing) day.
[Unknown Male Group Member]: No, all morning.
[Scott]: All morning for you. Um, I, I had one quick question. I mean it may not necessarily be a quick answer but maybe it is. I was wonder if you uh. Yeah, or all night for Stephen, yeah. Uh, and many of you here. Um, I wondered if you were concerned at all um, about Community Museum Project being instrumentalized by the state or, or even directly co-oped at some point or on some level. For two reasons, one is that I know that you guys received funding you said you received funding and it sounded like it, the funding came from the state. Um, and secondly I’m um, I’m uh, I’m not making a direct comparison but I’m thinking of uh, how some of these kinds of projects um, are, are at risk of being corrupted by the st or instrumentalized by the state here in the U.S.. Uh, one small example is people will do a uh, uh, a community oriented project um, which is really, which is really great, and uh, you know I for one would be very, and very supportive of the, of more of this kind of thing happening. But there, there is a concern I think by a number of people that sometimes it might, it might even unintentionally lead to be counterproductive and lead to less of this kind of thing happening in the sense that these in order for a real uh uh civic society like you’re describing to take place um, it would need to be supported by the state it can’t just happen here and there in an ad hock way by a few artists or a few people trained from the art background and I think the funding or the support from the state is often um, mostly a token form of support. There’s really no interest in changing the social program in order to uh, in order to help change the conditions overall it’s mostly just in order to gain a lot of visibility in, with these very, very tiny drops of, of uh of sort of social programs that are launched by artists. And so I guess I was just concerned if that um, issue that we face here in the U. S. I know that that’s an issue in the U.K. as well with council funded projects um, turning into you know kind of group hugs that sort of are more of a conscious, a conscious clearing thing if anything for the state. I was wondering if that was an issu, a concern of yours uh, in your context because I don’t know as much about your context as I do about here. Does that, does that question make sense or?
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah I uh, we, we don’t intend to get funding from the city or what you call state but we are in a city. It’s not a state yet. But
[Scott]: Okay, right yes, that’s I meant that generically speaking. But you’re right. Sorry about that.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah. In fact a lot of our collaborators are NGO’s. Like Ox Farm and, and uh, uh, and also the um, um, district council so it’s not and then we for, for the, for the pocketbook demonstration afterwards we acquire the funding from the Arts Development Counsel. So, so there, there are different channels of funding uh, that, that come to our work. Uh, I think recently either a lot of different NGO’s with, with some agenda, with their own agenda in mind will approach us and, and ask us whether we could come up with some kind of good ideas to help them promote their, their issues. Uh, through our like museum methods. So, this is, this is what we have been doing. Uh, before for the city funding we just uh, we just uh, got the funding from Design Smart. Uh, uh, which is uh, a funding organization uh, which support designers to be able to fund their own work and, and, and the back of state is going to, I mean the city is trying to boost our image as a kind of creative city. Hong Kong right, so, so they have this, this kind of agenda and they distribute funds to, to us. But uh, but what we propose uh, is that we do an up cycling project drawing the experience from these craft people and uh, and the collaboration between designers and craft people and NGO’s. Uh we, we now seems to uh, uh, be like tapping into a project which the city has not been thoroughly uh, uh, thought about. Uh, that is to, to build up the kind of like system for recycling or, or creative reuse of stuff thrown out from the factory. So, so, so yes we, part of the funding is coming from the, the city but we are always aware of the issues that you have talked about that we, we co, co-opted by a friend but on the other hand we uh, tries to do the things in a different perspective than they what, than what they expected and if they give us the funding we have a chance to do a little demonstration on uh, uh alternative way of funding people. Because uh, uh, uh they don’t, I think this is the first time they tries to um, uh sponsor like, like uh this kind of craft people and designers uh, collaboration project as well. So, so I think that if we had the chance to, to apply for funding from whatever sources. I think we will propose something with a different perspective on that at least as a start. As you know, later on with this demons, if this example is successful they will tries to replicate it and in whatever their own way. But I think uh, as a initiator of my years and uh, projects. I think we will do it first. Right. Okay.
[Scott]: Yeah that definitely does address what I was, what I was wondering. I, I, I, I didn’t really ask you this. Oh my gosh. I apologize for the noise uh, after unmuting. We’re. There is Kung Fu going on right above our heads. Um.
[Siu King Chung]: Really?
[Scott]: Many of the people that join these pot luck chats know that because every so often when we turn our volume back on there’s some ass kicking that’s going on. Uh, it just happened right when I unpaused so sorry about that. Um, yeah, I, I, I wasn’t really asking. Oh first of all, and thanks a lot um, for coming but uh, but uh, yeah, King I wasn’t really asking, assuming anything um, but just curious because I know that um, that these issues I, I can imagine them being a problem everywhere or something that people who are doing the kind of work that, that you are doing and um, and that a number of people here are doing here need to think about. I can imagine that being an issue regardless of where you are just because business seems uh, you know, somebody’s business model and uh, uh and I was calling it the state but think I really meant Governmental I guess um, uh, models of government or whatever are uh, seem to work for some people everywhere. So I was curious you know if you were you know if you ran into the same issues and if maybe some of the ways that you’ve been able to uh, to deal with them or even some of the strategies that you’ve come up with or, or have been thinking about could even help us and visa versa so definitely seems like we could be contact about it since it does seem to be an issue there too, from what you’re saying.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, I, I think the, the, the government or the state or the city should be inspired by some kind of alternative perspective as well. So, so if uh,
[Scott]: Uh huh.
[Siu King Chung]: We could establish a different kind of examples uh, we wanted to illustrate different possibilities. Then I think this our work are meaningful.
[Scott]: See you later Salem. Well we’re, we’re really wrap uh, we’re three minutes until uh, we normally end um, I’m uh, you know I’m hesitant to bring up other questions that would take up uh, quite a bit longer because we like to kind of try to end on time but um, uh unless there was any other burning you know kind of statements that anyone wanted you know wanted to say.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: (inaudible 1:45:02.9)
[Scott]: Oh, do you have something that.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: (inaudible 1:45:04.0)
[Scott]: Oh.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: (inaudible 1:45:07.5) why didn’t they just interview the people.
[Siu King Chung]: Interview who?
[Unknown Female Group Member]: The people that they were doing things with the, with the suit and the refrigerator and everything.
[Siu King Chung]: Why? Would you repeat the question again?
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Why didn’t they just come out there and, and talk to the people about, interview them about their life and such?
[Siu King Chung]: Do you know, who are “they”?
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Excuse me?
[Siu King Chung]: Who, I said who do you mean by “they”?
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Well the people that were doing their projects on their refrigerators and the, and the uh, suits and
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah we, we have been interviewing them.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Oh, okay.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah we have been interviewing them as a process, but as you see uh, we do interview in all our projects the only difference is that from a social work fair or for people in a social science. The interview is all by cash and it is often hard to approach people with this uh, taxes based information so, so
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Yeah
[Siu King Chung]: from a community fusing project we are very conscious of isolating this kind of action from interesting official or, or meaningful official so this is our apple, our approach to (inaudible 1:46:48.1) That’s why the excuses for exhibition is to, to do this official (inaudible 1:46:55.5) of issues.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: I thought it was something like that. Okay thanks.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, Okay thank you.
[Scott]: Well, um, King thanks so, I’m really glad that we had this excuse to have a good conversation about what you guys are doing there.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, thank you.
[Unknown Male Group Member]: Yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you very much. It has been extremely uh, rich and uh, precise. Uh, and also the reception was really good so, I, I certainly got a lot out of it. Thank you so much.
[Siu King Chung]: Okay, thank you, thank you. Um, so, do you need me to send to you this uh, street as museum as method thing?
[Scott]: Well I have a uh, well I’m not sure unless what you sent earlier was only an excerpt. Um.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, that’s uh, an excerpt. I, I just gave, sent you a full article.
[Scott]: That would be fantastic. If you wouldn’t mind, we would probably post it on arg.org and send everyone the link. Um, they, they pretty successfully uh, uh, uh, well, uh, allow text to be posted for a long time without uh, only very rarely our, our publishers um, uh, concerned about their placement there so.
[Siu King Chung]: Ok, then yeah no problem. Yeah I’ll write.
[Scott]: Excellent. King, thanks so much and we’ll, we’ll uh, we’ll be in touch about, about the space here and, and everything we’ve discussed.
[Siu King Chung]: I see some Cantonese and Chinese in the text. Is there somebody uh,
[Scott]: Oh, yeah.
[Siu King Chung]: Uh,
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Yeah that’s me. (laughing)
[Scott]: Oh there was actually a question earlier that you had, wasn’t, wasn’t there about, about civic
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Oh, I was just wondering about how you, how you translate uh, civil society into Cantonese because I asked because from the time that I spent on the mainland. It took me a very long time to understand um, this idea of (speaking Cantonese). Like this overwhelming idea of creating a harmonious society on the mainland. Cus westerners I think, don’t really have that concept. And so, I was wondering how you translate civil society into Cantonese? And also just to say, (speaking Cantonese).
[Siu King Chung]: Responding in Cantonese
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Responding in Cantonese. Huh, huh, interesting, okay. So it’s just,
[Siu King Chung]: Okay?
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Yeah.
[Unknown Male Group Member]: So, what does that mean?
[Siu King Chung]: So, this means, uh, (speaking Cantonese). It’s citizens, citizens society. Something like that. Yeah, it’s, it’s similar but uh, often we use (speaking Cantonese) uh,
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Speaking Cantonese
[Siu King Chung]: Uh, rather that’s (speaking Cantonese).
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Okay, thank you I’ll, I’ll, I’ll do a little bit of my own research.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah, okay.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Okay.
[Siu King Chung]: Thank you.
[Unknown Female Group Member]: Thank you.
[Scott]: Thanks so much King.
[Siu King Chung]: Yeah
[Scott]: Laughing, And we’ll all, we’ll all speak soon, so. So, see you all next week.
[Siu King Chung]: All right, thank you.
[Unknown Male Group Member]: See you.
[Scott]: Bye bye.
[Siu King Chung]: Bye bye.
[Scott]: Nice, I have the feeling like he probably would have stuck around for an extra fifteen, twenty minutes if people kept asking him questions. It’s nice to let him off the hook. (laughing) yeah, I’m going to go ahead and stop recording this now.
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:50:53.3
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Week 2: The Library Of Radiant Optimism For Let’s Remake The World
Hi everyone,
This Tuesday is the second evening in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 focusing on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll have a converstion with Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune about The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World, which is both a historic archive and a generative project focused on connecting current related practices. During this event, books will be available for folks to take, a live video will be projected, and The Book of the Month Club will be launched.
The Book of the Month Club is an opportunity to share some newly selected titles with you. Each month during 2010, a new book will be scanned and uploaded to their website. Books that are hard to find, or particularly capture the spirit of the Library, will be selected to share with you during the Book of the Month Club project.
The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World was started as a way to gather, look at, and catalog a groundswell of optimistic and visionary activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s represented by how-to books. Many people organized around freely sharing information and materials. The books they generated embrace a grass roots exchange of information and themes of self and community empowerment. These books are written from the counter-culture. Their authors were interested in communicating their direct experience as it related to their experiments for living in harmony with the natural landscape, building sustainable communities, and more. They offer practical applications of optimistic ideas for radical change.
Transcription
Week 2: The Library Of Radiant Optimism For Let’s Remake The World
[0:00:00]
[Background Noise]
Scott: Alright. We see you on the wall now.
Male 2: [0:00:59] [Inaudible]
Scott: Larger than life. I’m waving back but you can’t see me.
[Laughter]
Male 2: Hey, Scott.
Scott: Hey.
Male 2: [0:01:25] [Inaudible] some pictures. I didn’t get enough chance to [0:01:29] [Inaudible] and share to people.[0:01:34] [Inaudible] going to talk about. But maybe you could [0:01:38] [Inaudible] and start talking about [0:01:40] [Inaudible]
Scott: Sure. I guess what we could is we could upload the images to photo which –
Male 2: [0:01:49] [Inaudible]
Female 1: Yeah. Just to get pumping. We’ll just do what you were about to do.
Scott: [Laughter] Rock on. If you want me to do it, I can, you know if you want to focus on the talk but it’s up to you.
Male 2: Oh, okay.
Female 1: [0:02:06] [Inaudible]
Male 2: Yeah. I’m going to send them. Which should I send them to?
Scott: Oh, emailing? You can send it to projects@basekamp.com. That way several of us will get it.
Male 2: [0:02:26] [Inaudible]
Scott: If you send it thru Skype I think it’ll send to everybody in the Skype chat there, unless you have any separate one.
Male 2: I’ll set up a separate one here [0:02:40] [Inaudible]
Female 1: Let’s start he talk.
Male 2: [0:02:53] [Inaudible]
Scott: I was actually just suggesting that we wait just another moment because there are very many people here. Why don’t we wait. I was gonna say till quarter after but that’s in three minutes. That’s probably okay. Why don’t wait at least until then. And then go ahead and get started and people can join in when they do.
Male 2: Alright. [Cross-talk] [0:03:16] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yes. Definitely.
Male 2: Right?
Scott: I’m not sure.
[Background Noise]
Male 2: Wait a minute [0:03:45] [Inaudible].
Scott: Yeah. Michael is coming. He’s running a few minutes late.
Female 1: What’d you do?
Male 2: [0:04:02] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah I think that’s sent to everybody. [Cross-talk]
[Laughter]
Female 1: Aah.
Scott: No worries, it’s all good.
Female 2: Doing great. [0:04:27] [Inaudible]
Unidentified Male: Oh, you guys haven’t seen the library yet.
Male 2: No, we haven’t. [0:04:57] [Inaudible] [Cross-talk]
Scott: I’ll grab a couple and put them on flicker and send you guys a little of it.
Male 2: [0:05:16] [Inaudible]
Scott: That was my way of saying I think that’s a good idea. Cool. So, now it’s nearly 6:15. We should probably check in. Matt, who is on this, why don’t I ask people who would like to join the audio and we’ll start adding people now.
I probably should have done that ahead of time. I think we got caught up on the recording side because we didn’t want to be a tree falling in the woods. Although we could if we had to. But now that we don’t have to, that’s probably a good thing.
[Background Noise]
I need to add. Where is Adam and Jessica? Okay, anyway, Matt, we can add to the chat. Oh, yeah. [0:06:55] [Inaudible]. Awesome. [Background Talk].
[Background Noise]
Okay. There’s someone here who is really trying to join but we cannot seem to add them easily.
Unidentified Male: Seventh?
Scott: Yes.
Male 2: [0:08:22] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah. That happens sometimes. Like last week, we had to ask some of them to restart. Adding Abby now? So, Matt, can you hear us, by the way?
Male 3: [0:08:36] [Inaudible]
Scott: Okay, great. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started soon. We’re jus – preferably week by week we’ll inch minutes closer to starting at six.
Male 2: Alright.
Scott: So … Did anyone else on the track ask to be added to the audio that I [0:08:59] [Inaudible]. Okay? Okay, cool. So what do you think, Greg? Do you want to – oh you’re adding us to [0:09:13] [Inaudible].
Greg: Well, I mean I could stop to it.
Scott: Okay. [0:09:21] [Inaudible] it’d be pretty cool.
Greg: Well, I can do that. It’s up to you. I mean …
Scott: Mabel’s copy. Oh, thank you, Steven.
Male 2: [0:09:33] [Inaudible]
Scott: Where’s Mabel? I don’t see Mabel, Steven.
Male 2: [0:09:42] [Inaudible]
[Background Talk]
Scott: Great. So if you can give us just one more moment. I think – oh, fantastic.
Male 2: [0:10:46] [Inaudible]
Scott: If you don’t mind, can I just try to get Adam and Jessica on the call real quick? I believe they have a class that’s supposed to patch in here. And I would sort of hate to miss them. Although I don’t want to put you off any longer so …
Male 2: [0:11:12] [Inaudible]
Scott: Right now, audio? 1-2-3-4-5-6.
Greg: She’s, Jessica doesn’t seem to be able to get to …
Male 2: [0:11:36] [Inaudible]
Scott: No, absolutely not.
Greg: Our U stream is buffering.
Scott: But that’s okay because if we need to we can always refresh it.
Greg: Okay, you got it.
Scott: Okay, cool. Now writing Adam. Fantastic.
[Background Noise]
Male 2: [0:12:54] [Inaudible]
Scott: Hi, Adam, can you hear us by the way?
Adam: [0:13:07] [Inaudible]
Scott: Hey, fantastic, yeah. So did you guys have your class hooked up to this tonight?
Adam: Yes. [0:13:17] [Inaudible]
Scott: Awesome.
Male 4: Hi, everybody.
[Laughter]
Scott: So if you guys could turn your microphone up a little bit, Adam, we could actually hear you. I think it’s just a little bit low.
Adam: [0:13:51] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, that’s not possible?
Adam: Yeah. [0:13:55] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, that’s totally fine.
Greg: Whatever you’re doing now is better.
Adam: I’m talking louder.
Scott: You’re yelling.
[Laughter]
Excellent. Okay, why don’t we go ahead and start chatting so that we’re not just waiting. So yeah –
Adam: Is there a [0:14:29] [Inaudible]
Scott: There is a text chatter. You guys not in the text chatter? I thought you were. Oh, I guess you’re not. Hold on a second. Here you go. Great. So how about this now? Can I sort of replace this Greg?
Greg: Yeah. [0:14:50] [Inaudible]
Scott: [0:14:50] [Inaudible]. Well, first of all, welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to our little weekly chat. [Laughter]. Can you all hear me? Okay.
Male 2: Scott, which one [0:15:10] [Inaudible]. Did you invite us?
Scott: Yeah, I believe so.
Adam: [0:15:14] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, I see.
Adam: [0:15:18] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah. If you click into there first. I think you have to click in first, you kind of can’t [0:15:25] [Inaudible]. Stay there. Now you can [0:15:28] [Inaudible].
Greg: Alright. So I’ve got Jessica in. oh, she got banned?
Scott: Yeah. For some reason it’s saying that we cannot add you to the text chat. I don’t really know why that would be. It says …
Greg: Jessica [0:15:45] [Inaudible] is using an older version of Skype that does not support multi person chat?
Male 2: [0:15:50] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah, we did that first but let’s try that again. We’ll try one more time and if not, the … Oh, look at that.
Greg: Here you go. Oh.
Scott: Oh, you got bounced.
Greg: Same thing.
Scott: You got bounced. Sorry, guys, that’s actually really annoying, isn’t it?
Male 2: Okay. I that a [0:16:10] [Inaudible]
Greg: Yes.
Male 2: Thank you.
Scott: Rock n Roll. So great. Welcome everybody to our little chat. We’ll be adding more people throughout the evening, more people’s audio. So if anyone sees someone on Skype that [0:16:38] [Inaudible] that’s pleading to be added, please let us know. We just might not be noticing it, okay? Great. So first of all, I want to welcome Brett and Bonnie, our invited guests for the week.
Brett: Hi Scott. Hi Greg and Steven.
Bonnie: Hi.
Scott: Hi.
Greg: Hi.
Scott: And hi everybody –
Greg: Natalie, hang on a second. Sorry.
Scott: Cool. The way the evening will go is – just to let everyone know, this week, Bret and Bonnie will be giving a more straightforward presentation probably for about 20 to 30 minutes or so and after which we can have a Q&A and a less structured discussion.
So first of all, everyone at the class, once we actually get to that point it would be great if you guys could flag us whenever you can on text or kind of like step up to the computer’s microphone so that we can hear you.
In any case, and then we can just spend the rest of the evening on that. And near the end, what we’re going to be doing with this week and future weeks throughout the year is focus a bit of time at the end, kind of reviewing some of the ideas and interests that came up through the evening.
And see if we can come up with some course proposals for the public school. At the end we’re going to be generating public school courses at the end of every week or at the end of every Tuesday night, I mean. So Brett and Bonnie, just let you guys know, we’ve been in dialogue for probably about ten years now.
And one thing I should probably say now that I just remembered; if everyone can press mute on your Skype until you want to say something, that will be excellent.
It will help keep the feedback really low. But, at any case, we’d known each other for years now and one of the reasons specifically though that we invited Brett and Bonnie to come in talk with us tonight is because they’re working on this called The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-make the World which is a long-term project that they’ve started. I won’t describe it in detail.
I’ll leave that to them. But as sure, we’re looking at this project as what we’re calling a plausible artworld because they’re focusing on some highly optimistic work and DIY manuals from the ‘60s and ‘70s and the range of practices that grew out of that era. They also do work together.
In many ways is inspired by that era and the work that they are compiling in their library and they seek to work together with other people who are similarly I think reinvigorating some of those practices from that time. And so we’d like to focus on that side of what they’re doing, those networks that were created and are continuing to be created now. Anyway, Brett and Bonnie, would you guys mind going ahead and giving us an intro to The Library of Radiant Optimism?
Brett: Sure, Scott. [0:20:29] [Inaudible]
Scott: Awesome.
Brett: [0:20:36] [Inaudible] Bonnie and I discovered [0:20:52] [Inaudible]
Scott: Okay. We’ll let them know thru the text chat. You guys can go ahead and keep on going.
Brett: Okay. That sounds good. So Bonnie [0:23:49] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: So the first. I’m Bonnie. [0:24:22] [Inaudible] the first few books that were [0:24:25] [Inaudible] project came from our personal collection. And [0:24:31] [Inaudible]. And it’s [0:24:35] [Inaudible] because the book document not only, it [0:24:56] [Inaudible]. So pretty great book and Brett can tell you about [0:25:40] [Inaudible] now.
Brett: Alright. [0:25:42] [Inaudible] published probably and it’s been around for less than a thousand hard bound black and white [0:26:14] [Inaudible] produced [0:26:15] [Inaudible] from internet and useful source. Yeah. [0:26:28] [Inaudible] it’s really interesting [0:26:34] [Inaudible] experiment [0:26:35] [Inaudible] your [0:26:36] [Inaudible] as well as create small efficient psychological values [0:26:44] [Inaudible] rethinking [0:26:47] [Inaudible] . [Cross-talk].
Bonnie: This is where we are guys. We found this book in a [0:28:00] [Inaudible] near it in [0:28:02] [Inaudible]. And this is a radical [0:28:05] [Inaudible] community of the [0:28:10] [Inaudible] community now.
Brett: Primary [0:28:13] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: The primary community now and made by people in our town in the [0:28:18] [Inaudible] all of the academic art [0:28:25] [Inaudible]
Brett: Yeah. [0:28:35] [Inaudible]
Scott: No.
Brett: [0:28:48] [Inaudible]
Scott: Sorry, sorry. Hey guys.
[Background Talk]
Brett: So, another part of what we have [0:28:59] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: Oh, oh yeah. [0:29:19] [Inaudible]
Brett: [0:29:56] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:30:18] [Inaudible]
Scott: Guys, sorry about the continual audio [0:30:38] [Inaudible]. We’re just adding people up [Cross-talk] Okay. Super.
[Cross-talk]
Bonnie: [0:30:48] [Inaudible]
Brett: [0:31:15] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:32:30] [Inaudible]
Brett: [0:33:14] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:34:00] [Inaudible]
Brett: [0:34:55] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:36:36] [Inaudible] Is there anything we can do to change that? So [0:37:51] [Inaudible] they’ve been making illustrations imagining what people would look like by [0:38:34] [Inaudible]. We produced a different kinds of poster that you would see right here on this table and [0:39:08] [Inaudible] on the wall here. We’ll put a [0:39:13] [Inaudible]. This is one thing [0:39:18] [Inaudible] library. [0:39:21] [Inaudible]. We definitely [0:39:36] [Inaudible]
Brett: [ 0:41:35] [Inaudible]
Scott: I was just going to say Brett. No, never mind.
Brett: Yeah?
Scott: I’m sorry dude. Just not to trample over you, but yeah, we have a stack here, like basically a box of books that Bonnie and Brett shipped here that we’re giving away to people that come.
So if you’re local and Philly and you are just listening on Skype, just flag us down, let us know the [0:43:06] [Inaudible] for you if you‘ve joined tonight and get to wing by some other time to pick it up. I’ll post photos of the library right now. Philip, Philip. Greg was just saying he’ll post photos of the library on flicker right now and we’ll send you the leg.
Brett: [0:43:24] [Inaudible] website later as well.
Bonnie: So, tonight [0:44:04] [Inaudible] Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Remake the World book of the launched book. And this is [0:44:33] [Inaudible] project . We’re [0:44:36] [Inaudible] uploaded a new title and [0:44:43] [Inaudible]. Our website and [0:44:48] [Inaudible]. [Laughter] but [0:44:56] [Inaudible] . The first title in [0:45:02] [Inaudible] child. [0:45:05] [Inaudible]
Scott: Hey, Bonnie. Sorry. Can I interrupt you for a quick sec? Hey, Bonnie? Hey, did you guys – is the video down? Because it looks like other people are not getting the video. We thought it was just us.
Brett: [0:45:23] [Inaudible]
Scott: It’s okay. We’re just checking.
Bonnie: [0:45:27] [Inaudible]
Scott: Okay. Cool., cool Carry on. If –
Brett: [0:45:30] [Inaudible]
Scott: Just in case you didn’t know. Thanks. But yeah, please go on about the book of the month club.
Bonnie: [0:45:37] [Inaudible] The video will be back in just a second.
Scott: Awesome.
Bonnie: In the meantime, [0:45:47] [Inaudible] Brett?
Brett: I dunno. No. [0:45:51] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, really.
Brett: [0:45:56] [Inaudible]
Scott: That’s completely fine.
Brett: [0:46:11] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:46:14] [Inaudible] and in the meantime we’ll go [0:46:17] [Inaudible] the posters here.
Scott: Thank you.
Bonnie: [0:46:20] [Inaudible] And we are – we think that [0:46:26] [Inaudible] we haven’t shared them with others and this is our [0:46:43] [Inaudible] of the library project and one of the reasons that we [0:46:48] [Inaudible] was that basekamp provided us with the [0:46:53] [Inaudible]
Brett: [0:49:31] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:51:02] [Inaudible]
Brett: And we found many people [0:51:31] [Inaudible]
Scott: Great. Guys, thank you so much for that key end to your project. I think if we went ahead and had a quick conversation without that presentation, many of the people here wouldn’t have any idea what kinds of things you’re talking about or what range of practices you’re looking at. Yeah.
By the way, anybody that wants to, anyone on the call can feel free to unmute at any time to ask a question. Or I’ll say you can send to your text chat as well. It might be worth [0:53:02] [Inaudible].
Brett: Hey, Greg.
Greg: Yeah
Brett: [0:53:09] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Oh, sorry can you –
Brett : [0:53:17] [Inaudible]
Scott: Sorry guys. When people ask you a question -- I was sort of was guilty about this. This is Scott speaking right now. Can you just briefly introduce yourself, just sort of saying who is speaking so we can all know. One of the requests we had from last week was that people had no idea who was talking. This is Adam, right? Is this Ad –
Unidentified Male:
Scott: Oh, okay. I didn’t hear.
Unidentified male: [0:53:44] [Inaudible]
Brett: Okay. [0:54:23] [Inaudible]
Scott: So, guys, the mike’s on right now. So if you wanna say anything, ask anything, just flag me and I’ll unmute it. And then I can help flag it down too.
Bonnie: [0:56:21] [Inaudible]
Scott: Hello, yeah. No, we’re here. We just have ourselves muted so you don’t hear the interment and kung fu while you’re talking. And we’ll unmute as people have questions or wanna say something. Did you have something that you wanted to say? You can. But I think you need to get a little closer.
Unidentified Male: I mean, these books, you’re just selecting them previous – I mean, you’re selecting as the book of the month from previous publications, right in the 60s and 70s. They are not books that you are actually bringing up, right, like publishing and writing.
Brett: [0:57:04] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: Yeah. [0:57:46] [Inaudible]. We will be uploading a new file this month. We actually [0:57:50] [Inaudible] the books that are in our library or the books [0:57:55] [Inaudible]
Brett: Yeah. And we are also publishing our own books but that’s not part of [0:58:20] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [0:58:52] [Inaudible]
Brett: [0:59:19] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:00:35] [Inaudible]
Brett: [1:01:34] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: Do we have some more questions [1:03:04] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah. Steven had a question. We can read it out loud if that would be helpful or Steven can actually read it out loud if you’d like to ask or you –
Bonnie: Sure.
Scott: I was just thinking that it might be good to repeat it for everyone, one way or the other. Steven, are you there? Would you like to or would you rather one of us do it?
Steven: [1:03:28] [Inaudible]
[Laughter]
[Cross-talk]
Scott: Brett, I hope your mom and dad are in town are listening to this.
Brett: [1:04:40] [Inaudible]
Steven: [1:04:53] [Inaudible]
Brett: [1:05:02] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:08:55] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah, just unmute it.
Michael: Hi there. This is Michael at [1:09:00] [Inaudible]. I’m interested in what you guys mentioned about sort of idea of cultural amnesia or ways and which I guess there can be extended projects or ways to activate some of this material that you’re sharing. I guess the second part of the question would be, has there been any interest in terms of connecting with the intentional community that you guys mentioned in Tennessee that’s still up and running. I hope that makes sense.
Brett: Yeah. [1:09:42] [Inaudible] in Tennessee?
Michael: Yeah.
Bonnie: I mean [1:09:47] [Inaudible]
[Cross-talk]
Brett: [1:10:01] [[Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:12:19] [Inaudible]
Brett: [1:13:44] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: So another question?
Scott: Yeah. Hi. I think Greg had the next question. Do you still remember?
Greg: I have no idea but I’ll make one up. No. I remember. IN fact it’s about remembering in a particular way right? I’m curious how these books carry a certain sense of nostalgia and how that might affect sort of the potential for the book to be acted upon because it seems like you guys are really about the intentionality, the thoughtfulness, the content really, less so in the context of kind of culture.
But still along that some of the questions that Steven was raising. Is nostalgia a dangerous emotion or how does that factor in to you as you read it and how potentially the view in public might interpret these texts? As like, ha-ha, goofy or wow, this is incredible stuff, you know.
Brett: [1:15:21] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:18:47] [Inaudible]
Brett: [1:19:31] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: We’re trying to include more issues of [1:20:27] [Inaudible]
Brett: yeah. We’re also doing [1:20:43] [Inaudible]
Scott: Thank you. That was great. That absolutely covered it more. Thanks. So Hank had a quick question actually. And then Steven did. Hank was asking who your audience is or if you have a target audience or if you market your projects at all? She was curious I guess about who you’re speaking to? Oh, sorry if you wanted to say [1:21:31] [Inaudible] okay. Hey, Gerick. Hey. Come on guys. Come on in and have a seat, guys. Brett and Bonnie and everybody, we just have some more people coming in and –
Female 1: Hi people. [1:21:44] [Inaudible]
Scott: Hannah, did you have anything else to ask about that or did I –
Female 1: Well, I mean, I guess, you know, I work in the design field and I guess, you know, I just been recently really interested in kind of how projects relate like if there’s a specific target for this information getting distributed and who, you know, if that’s thought about in the process.
And in turn, you know, we can all sit and discuss this information. I guess it’s just interesting to me that process of if there’s a goal in mind as far as distributing these information or if it’s just open discussion with likeminded people. I guess that’s kind of – yeah, the basis of my question.
Brett: [1:22:42] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:22:47] [Inaudible] control center. So that meant that there were [1:23:08] [Inaudible]. There were discussions sort of like a community center. Okay. So within that space there was cultural [1:23:23] [Inaudible] Brett and I both noticed almost at the same time that [1:23:35] [Inaudible] and that really sort of [1:23:48][Inaudible]
Brett: And there also seems an explosion and interest in these terms of [1:23:58] [Inaudible] issues and [1:24:00] [Inaudible] but I think there is a research and interest on this kind of information and it often goes, like we’re saying the history of these things. [1:24:25] [Inaudible] so the history [1:24:29] [Inaudible] working on the internet which are called [1:25:03] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:25:11] [Inaudible]
Brett: So, its –oh thanks.
Scott: Yeah. He’s not on the call yet but he will be in a second.
Brett: Okay, guys. So [1:25:22] [Inaudible]. That’s quite [1:25:30] [Inaudible] in art to figure out sometimes. We’re also. We also [1:25:36] [Inaudible] who lived in Cummings. [1:25:38] [Inaudible].
[Cross-talk]
Female 1: [1:26:02] [Inaudible] Aaron’s question and then I’m going to put Steven Wright’s question which I think is great about other international histories that [1:26:17] [Inaudible] and so we’ll take Aaron’s now? Is that okay with everybody? And that question is, what do we mean by [1:26:30] [Inaudible]
Brett: Okay. So Aaron is, in terms of plausible artworlds, we’ll just say that [1:26:35] [Inaudible]. We jokingly call ourselves librarians but we’re not trained as librarians. [1:26:55] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: Yeah. Exactly. The first reason [1:27:38] [Inaudible] of our practice. We only [1:27:42] [Inaudible] and we use [1:27:44] [Inaudible] that’s because that’s the world that we’re involved in. But yeah, there are many [1:28:01] [Inaudible]. It’s not a library [1:28:11] [Inaudible]
Brett: Yeah. But it is a [1:28:21] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: But it’s a [1:28:21] [Inaudible] at the same time so [Cross-talk]. And we actually had a [1:28:31] [Inaudible]
[Cross-talk]
Brett: We’re going now to Steven’s question.
Bonnie: Steven asked, he’s kind of wondering why we focused on the United States and he’s talking about [1:29:03] [Inaudible] in France and [1:29:05] [Inaudible] in this country as a separate secularly [1:29:08] [Inaudible]. But not only that. And here is the [1:29:15] [Inaudible] Argentina, Turkey [1:29:20] [Inaudible] and I think that’s a really big question. And we have been talking about adding books [Cross-talk].
Brett: [1:29:33] [Inaudible] from Denmark that we want to add. I ‘m sure the books [1:29:39] [Inaudible] in Canada and in the United states. [1:30:10] [Inaudible].
Bonnie: Yeah. I think [1:31:23] [Inaudible] from power points to sound to other things. These are things that we are [1:31:45] [Inaudible] at to the library [1:31:48] [Inaudible]
Brett: Alright. So let me add a question for Aaron.
Bonnie: Okay. So this is another question about plausible artworlds. [1:32:04] [Inaudible]
Brett: [1:32:06] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: Aaron is asking, you mentioned that you use that in your project in your daily lives and then added that in art context as well. And since you did [1:32:17] [Inaudible] I wonder in that case what other context you define as art?
Brett: Okay. So I think those contexts [1:32:25] [Inaudible] already by other people. So [1:32:31] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: We have [1:34:44] [Inaudible]
Brett: Okay. I’m just typing in [1:35:27] [Inaudible]
Scott: I was curious if Adam, if any of your students have questions. I wanna hear from them. If Adam’s still with us, I’m not sure.
Unidentified Male: [1:35:50] [Inaudible]
Brett: I’m sorry? [1:36:04] [Inaudible]
Unidentified Male: [1:36:07] [Inaudible]
[Cross-talk]
Scott: Okay. Guys, I just wanted to mention something really quickly. Actually Bonnie, can you hear us okay?
Bonnie: Yeah. [1:36:30] [Inaudible]
Scott: Okay good. I just saw that you were breaking up but they seemed like it wasn’t like a very contemporary way of breaking up with us., but your just saying the audio you can hear. You’ve heard about all that, right? So I guess we won’t get into that.
Bonnie: [1:36:47] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah. That would be a text message. But yeah, if everybody would be into it, or if anybody would be into this, we could still continue to discuss this but as it’s now quarter till the time when we usually stop out chat, one of the things I wanted to --
Brett: Scott, [1:37:10] [Inaudible] one more question [1:37:11] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you said that you didn’t. I apologized. Yeah. Totally.
Unidentified Male: [1:37:17] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, yeah. Rocking.
Unidentified Male: Alright, Scott. Did you ever build any of these things [1:37:27] [Inaudible]
Brett: Yeah. There was a lot of things that were kind of related [1:37:41] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: I think I checked this out [1:37:46] [Inaudible]
Brett: Yeah. [1:37:49] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, yeah. We can see you guys now actually holding up a lamp. There might be a delay.
[Laughter]
Greg: Ask Brett to move back towards the [1:40:56] [Inaudible]
Scott: Oh, Brett. Can you move back towards the camera ever so slightly? We want to -- ooh, look at you, very spooky. Oh, look at both of you, very nice.
[Laughter]
Anyway, we wanted to take at least one photograph of that. So thank you very much. Yeah. It just took us a while to get the U stream to capture it properly. And you know what it was, it was a several second delay. So it’s sort of a little disorienting which is probably good.
Brett: Yeah.
Scott: But guys, I wanted to quickly, oh I just want to make sure I did … Adam and Jessica, I didn’t hear the name of the person you asked that question, but if, did that sort of address what you guys were asking?
Adam: Yes. [1:41:54] [Inaudible]
[Laughter]
Scott: Awesome. Yeah. We’ve talked about building some crazy stuff here. IN fact, when Adam and Jessica were in Philadelphia on New Year’s, part of our plan was we were going to build some of the stuff. But then I think after talking more with Brett and Bonnie, it seemed that wasn’t really necessary and it probably was more important to really focus on the book of the month club and have that going. In any case, one thing –
Brett: [1:42:25] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: [1:42:48] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah. I was hoping you guys would be wearing them during this chat, but anyway, oh well.
Brett: What’s that?
Scott: I was hoping you’d be wearing them now during the video, but …
Brett: [1:43:50] [Inaudible]
Scott: I’ll share it with the rest of the group here. We’ll all try to fit in together.
Brett: [1:44:01] [Inaudible]
Scott: One thing I just wanted to mention is it’s a little less than ten minutes before we usually end. One thing that – pretty much every single one of these weekly chats, there’s some interest to follow up with everyone. And I have to say, that’s probably on us but usually that rarely happens.
One of the things we want to do – yeah it’s like there’s sort of these micro discussions that seem like there’s a real desire to continue. And they really don’t, partly because everyone’s busy but also partly because it’s probably not that easy. And we wanted to change that or at least make that a number of people ahd wanted to change that. They’ve been asking us and have been pitching in to try and help make that happen.
What I was mentioning right before the class question was that one of the things the people from the public school wanted to help do during the year. Just like you guys are doing a year- long thing here with the book of the month club, they wanted to offer the public school like the Philly branch of the public school has a place to basically to follow up on interest that any of us have that we would like to explore further. So basically, anything that has come up in the form of questions or interest that people might have that they just didn’t ask per se.
Or even something that you guys have said that anyone either in class there or in Skype or anyone else listening or anyone here would like to follow up on. We can form that into a very simple class proposal. Most of them probably won’t happen. But the ones that gain some interest can happen. So I just wanted to throw that out there and suggest that for this year we’ve turned on comments on the events on the basekamp site.
We’ll be posting links to the audio just like we did for last week and also any links to public school courses that are created thru this process which set a number of them were last week probably because we were talking with them, but also I’m just thinking we may want to do that again. So that was a long winded way of saying, if you have ideas about those, feel free to type them in or post the comments and all, or say them now. I’ll send the link where you can post comments if that helps.
Adam: Sure.
Bonnie: [1:46:50] [Inaudible]
Scott: Yeah.
Bonnie: [1:46:55] [Inaudible] happened in Los Angeles?
Scott: Yes.
Bonnie: [1:47:02] [Inaudible]
Scott: Basically the public school has branched into different locations. There’s one that has started in Chicago and one that started in Paris, Belgium and
Brett: Brussels
Scott: Oh, I’m sorry, did I say Belgium? In Brussels and in San Juan. Anyway, I won’t go on about it, but I’ll paste the link so that you at least have a sense [Cross-talk]. Here’s the link to last week, the comments for last week which has links to the audio and we’ll be pasting links to the course. And then I’ll go ahead and also past the link to this week’s. Just so that – oops. Yeah, paste the link to this week’s chat so you guys know where you can make recommendations for courses.
Female 1: You talked about this AAAARG.org thing?
Scott: Exactly. And in fact, the great thing about the way that’s set up now? Here’s where to post comments for this week. Sorry guys.
Greg: We lost your stream.
Scott: Anyway. Yeah, the AAAARG. Org is a place where like Bonnie and Brett like we had talked about posting the PDFs of their books from their library. And the great thing about creating a course is that we can tie any course to any publication on AAAARG very easily.
They have a back end where the two sides are tied, so we can potentially carry on with a number of discussion threads or as course proposals that connect with any of the publications in the Library of Radiant Optimism.
Greg: For instance I just proposed to class for the Philly Public School for making things out of buckets. So we could potentially use some of your texts – buckets.
[Cross-talk]
Yeah. Wouldn’t it be a great class?
Scott: Yeah. Actually, we’ll send the link just so that you guys get a sense of what this is about and how approachable it is to suggest the course. It’s not something that you have to spend weeks or months putting together.
They can develop into more full blown curriculum but they don’t have to. And some of the courses are extremely simple. Like one is called how to get in and out without being seen. And others are more developed of course.
Brett: Sounds like a [1:49:57] [Inaudible] It’s awesome. Alright?
Scott: So anyway, please add your comments to that length right above the last comment. Also, you should know that we’re eating fortune cookies that – What’s your name? Gerard Rock. And I think we should at least read you one fortune specifically for Bonnie, get it?
[Cross-talk]
Bonnie: Wait, I don’t get it.
[Laughter]
Greg: And mine says a good time to start something new.
Bonnie: BY making buckets.
Greg: Exactly.
Scott: Well, yeah. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. I know we’ll carry on but being able to talk with you with everyone on audio has been a real pleasure.
Brett: [1:51:09] [Inaudible]
Bonnie: Yeah. This is really fun.
Brett: So [1:51:16] [Inaudible] We also encourage you to [1:51:26] [Inaudible]
Scott: Hey guys. We have some burning desires.
Gerard: Late question. I arrived a little bit late. Make PDFs of everything. I kind of have been doing that for quite a few years. Do you have server you want to upload it to, or where do you, where you want it to go?
Brett: [1:52:14] [Inaudible]
Gerard: Scott and I can do that. I mean, we have a pretty substantial library of stuff that’s pirated to share.
Brett: Cool.
Bonnie: Sorry. What’s your name? And do you have a place to access the server that you have set up or --?
Gerard: No. I was asking if you knew of a good server to use. My name is Gerard.
Bonnie: Oh.
Scott: Yeah. I was just gonna recommend –
Gerard: For wide access. Scott was recommending one right now. So …
Scott: Yeah. In fact this site is tied to the public school that were stating about. And the great thing about proposing classes on the public school, I was suggesting that we do that in relations to this chat tonight, that you can also do things in relation to other things too. And you can tie any of the PDFs that you upload to these courses. Great.
Gerard. Thank you then.
Scott: Awesome.
Brett: [1:53:19] [Inaudible]
Scott: And we could definitely anybody who’s on. One other thing that might be kind of nice if anyone’s still listening. It looks like pretty much everyone is, we promise not to create a spam list but if you would like to send your emails to us, we can keep you in touch about this particular threat of conversation because there will be some ongoing updates. So many of you are already on our list, but the ones that aren’t, please let us know if you want to receive info. And we’ll do it. But anyway, that’s the least exciting of it. Thanks a lot, guys. It was great.
Greg: Thanks, guys.
Bonnie: Thank you. That was a lot of fun.
[Applause]
[Laughter]
Scott: Stay warm everybody.
[Background Noise]
[1:54:37] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$6091908a676b1f3" title="#basekamp/$6091908a676b1f3">The Library Of Radiant Optimism For Let's Remake The World (#basekamp/$6091908a676b1f3)
Created on 2010-01-13 02:14:57.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:49:46
- Hi Brett & Bonnie
- BASEKAMP team: 17:49:48
- we're here
- Brett Bloom: 17:49:55
- hi
- BASEKAMP team: 17:49:57
- settings up audio
- Brett Bloom: 17:50:02
- cool
- Jonathan Wagener: 17:50:17
- howzit everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 17:51:06
- Hi jonathan - we're setting things up now & will start in 10 mins or so
- stephen wright: 17:51:06
- Hello all!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:51:12
- Hi Stephen
- Jonathan Wagener: 17:51:16
- ok awesome
- BASEKAMP team: 17:53:37
- hey B&B can we do a quick call to check the recording levels?
- Brett Bloom: 17:53:43
- yes
- Brett Bloom: 17:54:04
- call bonnie
- BASEKAMP team: 17:54:51
- bonnie can you set your skype status to active
- Brett Bloom: 17:54:58
- it won't
- Brett Bloom: 17:55:21
- there it is
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:26
- hmm really? i don't think we can call an inactive skype person :/
- BASEKAMP team: 17:56:19
- can i try you too stephen? we need 3 to conference call
- Brett Bloom: 17:56:23
- it says call refused when she tries to call you scott
- stephen wright: 17:56:36
- call me
- BASEKAMP team: 17:56:39
- yeah - we're trying to set a conf call, so we can add more. cool
- Brett Bloom: 17:57:20
- bonnie's skype crashed
- BASEKAMP team: 17:57:24
- ok
- Bonnie: 17:57:33
- I think I am on this chat
- BASEKAMP team: 17:57:35
- we can try again in a moment
- Bonnie: 17:57:38
- hey!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:57:59
- hey bonnie let me add you
- mattadams: 18:05:33
- haha am i here or am i supposed to join a conference call?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:03
- hello everyone
- Aharon: 18:06:20
- hiyas!
- bfreee" title="dbfreee">Dave Beech: 18:07:02
- hello
- Brett Bloom: 18:07:11
- hello
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 18:07:29
- hello
- Greg Scranton: 18:07:38
- hey everyone
- mattadams: 18:07:43
- hola
- Greg Scranton: 18:07:48
- just working out the tech on our end here at Basekamp
- Brett Bloom: 18:07:59
- http://www.ustream.tv/channel/library-of-radiant-optimism-for-let-s-re-m...
- Brett Bloom: 18:08:42
- the link is so yous can see us. weird delay happens sometimes between skype and ustream.
- Brett Bloom: 18:13:00
- posted file k_isaacs-136.jpg to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="311377" index="0">k_isaacs-136.jpg</file></files>
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:03
- hi stephanie
- mattadams: 18:14:46
- hmmm no audio on the ustream. just me?
- Bonnie: 18:14:54
- no audio on ustream
- Bonnie: 18:15:00
- we dont want feedback
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:02
- so who wants to join the audio chat?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:05
- Matt, right?
- Bonnie: 18:15:06
- its just for a visual
- mattadams: 18:15:06
- ahh gotcha
- stephen wright: 18:15:16
- I'm on already
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:20
- mattadams: 18:15:22
- yah would like to listen
- Aharon: 18:16:02
- can not hear a thing from ustream
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:04
- hi adam & jessica
- Brett Bloom: 18:16:12
- sound will come from skype
- Brett Bloom: 18:16:16
- ustream is just video
- Brett Bloom: 18:16:21
- otherwise mad feedback
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 18:16:22
- I would like also to listen from skype as poss
- Aharon: 18:16:37
- i c.. lol
- stephen wright: 18:18:20
- mabel tapia is asking to join
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:01
- we don't see mabel?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:12
- jessica & adam - do you wantt to join the audio now?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:55
- mabel can you "request contact details" from us?
- mabel: 18:20:16
- ok
- mabel: 18:20:20
- yes
- Bonnie: 18:23:32
- Hello everyone!
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:23:40
- howzit
- Brett Bloom: 18:23:47
- http://www.ustream.tv/channel/library-of-radiant-optimism-for-let-s-re-m...
[1/12/10 5:08:41 PM] Brett Bloom: the link is so yous can see us. weird delay happens sometimes between skype and ustream. - Bonnie: 18:24:06
- thanks for having us!
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 18:24:17
- glad to be here listening. hope to talk next time!
- Brett Bloom: 18:26:44
- but we are open to questions in the middle
- BASEKAMP team: 18:27:48
- hi natalie
- BASEKAMP team: 18:27:52
- welcome
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:29:06
- i will be on audio just now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:19
- welcome bojana
- Aharon: 18:29:44
- wasup with audio..?
- bojana romic: 18:30:28
- hi!
- Aharon: 18:30:31
- i can c bearded guy talking on ustream.. no sound via skype
- Bonnie: 18:30:34
- hi
- Bonnie: 18:30:39
- that's brett
- Bonnie: 18:30:47
- you shouldnt be able to hear him on ustream
- Aharon: 18:31:07
- i know.. am looking fwd hearing on skype..
- Bonnie: 18:31:14
- Aharon: 18:31:38
- and the answer is..?
- Bonnie: 18:31:55
- not sure why you cant hear him on skype that is up to Basekamp team
- mabel: 18:32:23
- I can't hear him either...
- Bonnie: 18:32:29
- http://www.halfletterpress.com/store/images/selfpub/library_guide_3.jpg
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 18:32:39
- love the name and philosophy. I can hear
- Aharon: 18:32:39
- hello BR team!! wassup with skype audio again..?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:57
- mabel, sorry but the UStream has no audio here, we're using Skype for audio
- Bonnie: 18:33:02
- http://www.letsremake.info/library_guide.pdf
- mabel: 18:33:30
- yes, I know. I have no audio by skype (sorry
- Aharon: 18:33:35
- i can not hear the skype audio!!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:40
- ah, no problem
- Brett Bloom: 18:33:48
IMAGE LINK: http://letsremake.info/images/spiritual_midwifery_small.jpg- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:51
- aharon, let's add you then
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:56
- ad to skype audio aharon?
- stephen wright: 18:34:07
- please add mabel too
- Aharon: 18:34:09
- pls do
- Brett Bloom: 18:34:23
- Spiritual Midwifery, By Ina May Gaskin, Book Publishing Company, 1976, 480 pages, paperback, ISBN: 1570671044
Spiritual Midwifery, now in its fourth printing, is a must read for students of midwifery but it is also an influential history of the counter culture. Ina May Gaskin and her husband Stephen Gaskin are founding members of The Farm in Summertown, TN, one of the longest running communes in the United States. The Farm was founded in 1971, Ina May published Spiritual Midwifery, in 1975 to document of the beginning of the Farm and the development of a successful out of hospital birth center, one of the first in the US. The book describes how the Farm was settled and how soon after there was a need for safe and secure medical care for pregnant and birthing women. The Farm Midwives learned how to be midwives out of necessity. An understanding local doctor aided them along with their education. The Midwives have gone on to deliver thousands of babies and are still practicing today.
The majority of the book is a collection of birth stories from the women of the Farm. The fourth edition has added birth stories from the Old Amish Families near the Farm whom some of the Midwives worked with, and birth stories from people who came to the Farm just to give birth. The book also includes a practical section for midwifery students with how-to skills infused with the Farm philosophy of home birth.
Ina May’s writing makes this book special, particularly in the way she frames the material. Although she never set out to be a midwife, she pays close attention to the way words affect how women perceive not only labor, but also their bodies in general. In the book, she weaves a powerful history of a group of people creating their own place in the world, calmly and peacefully, and how communication through specific language and touch plays a vital part in the success of their endeavors. There are also amazing photos of women giving birth. - Bonnie: 18:35:05
- http://halfletterpress.com/FREE_STORE/bld_lvng_strct_lrge.jpg
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:13
- hi Dave, we're adding you to the conference call now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:34
- everyone, please mute your audio - until we do Q&A in about 20-30 mins
- Bonnie: 18:35:34
- http://www.letsremake.info/k_isaacs.pdf
- Bonnie: 18:35:45
- That was the pdf of the book for ya'll
- Aharon: 18:35:57
- cool
- Bonnie: 18:36:00
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/lefortune/4269551977/
- Bonnie: 18:36:05
- here are some more images
- Bonnie: 18:36:15
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/lefortune/4269557705/
- Aharon: 18:36:18
- ..and adio audio..?
- Bonnie: 18:36:36
- Aharon still does not have audio Scott
- Bonnie: 18:36:49
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/lefortune/4270301944/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:11
- h iMabel
- mabel: 18:37:25
- great!! It works
- mabel: 18:37:27
- !!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:30
- please mute your audio everyone until we do Q&A in about 20 - 30 mins
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:32
- lovely
- Aharon: 18:37:36
- looks like it blocked me out
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:37:43
- Hi
- Abigail: 18:37:48
- hey basekamp, can you add me again, i got booted
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:49
- aharon trying to add you again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:51
- ok
- Bonnie: 18:37:52
- can you see the map
- Bonnie: 18:37:53
- ?
- Abigail: 18:38:00
- thx
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:11
- adding you again
- Bonnie: 18:39:45
- k
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:13
- mabel i think you need to turn your skype status on
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:33
- we are trying to add you to the conference call (only we can add you)
- mabel: 18:42:46
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:58
- but we need to have people accept our details request & turn on their status to 'available'
- mabel: 18:44:03
- it's done now isn't it?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:09
- yes - adding you now
- mabel: 18:44:24
- great!!!!!!!!
- mabel: 18:44:34
- working now
- Bonnie: 18:44:40
- aquaculture is done now. we visited an amazing aquaculture space in northern denmark
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:45
-
- mabel: 18:44:58
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:45:05
- Lol
- Bonnie: 18:45:06
- (wave)
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:45:12
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:21
- hi valentina
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:38
- fantastic Brett & Bonnie
- Valentina Desideri: 18:45:43
- hello
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:51
- Valentina, would you like to be added to the audio too?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:00
- we have a dozen people on the call
- Valentina Desideri: 18:46:14
- i have bad internet connection audio won't work
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:34
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:54
- Bonnie is talkign about the book "Radical Technology"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:04
- Whoa - that looks amazing
- Brett Bloom: 18:48:24
- http://www.halfletterpress.com/store/images/whoever_voted_for.jpg
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:33
- For those not on audio, they are holding up an image of a DIY basemaent workshop
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:35
- there you go
- Brett Bloom: 18:49:02
- http://letsremake.info/images/whatweknow.jpg
- Brett Bloom: 18:49:08
- poster from the gathering
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:09
- Everyone please mute your audio, until we move to Q&A (the microphone icon in your call window)
- Brett Bloom: 18:49:38
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/lefortune/2221335047/sizes/l/in/set-7215760...
- Brett Bloom: 18:49:47
- images from the event
- Brett Bloom: 18:50:01
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/lefortune/2222111922/sizes/l/in/set-7215760...
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:50:10
- I want to try my audio. Please add me to the call.
- Brett Bloom: 18:50:22
- http://www.joaap.org/6/lovetowe/fortunebloom.html
- Bonnie: 18:51:33
- http://letsremake.info/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/lets-remake-1-212...
- Bonnie: 18:51:40
- The book that we put together with YNKB
- Bonnie: 18:51:54
- http://www.messhall.org/
- Bonnie: 18:52:04
- http://www.ynkb.dk/
- Bonnie: 18:52:17
- The spaces we have worked with that we are talking about
- Bonnie: 18:52:30
- thanks greg!
- Bonnie: 18:52:39
- # http://letsremake.info/Lets_remake.pdf
- Bonnie: 18:52:50
- we have got a lot of optimism to share!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:15
- David do you want to join audio too?
- Brett Bloom: 18:53:27
- http://letsremake.info/images/book_club_poster.jpg
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:53:35
- Could I join?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:41
- yes
- mattadams: 18:53:47
- thats a mouthful
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:48
- loves the title BTW
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:53:49
- Don't know it it will work
- Aharon: 18:54:33
- it is down
- Bonnie: 18:54:40
- we need to check brett's connection
- Bonnie: 18:54:52
- http://letsremake.info/images/book_club_poster.jpg
- Brett Bloom: 18:55:55
- video should be back
- Brett Bloom: 18:56:15
- can you all see it?
- mattadams: 18:56:16
- it is
- Brett Bloom: 18:56:28
- The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let's Re-Make the World began with a mutual fascination for books from the late 1960s and early 1970s that shared the aesthetic and ethics of self-publication and self-education. These how-to books document cultural practices from the founding and maintence of communal living spaces and growing your own organic garden, to early sustainable design initiatives and home-birthing. The people and projects represented in the books selected for inclusion in the Library paved the way for today's environmental movement and sustainable design culture. The counterculture of this time took seriously the task of building the world they wanted to see.
The Book of the Month Club is an opportunity for us to share some newly selected titles with you. Each month during 2010, we will be scanning and uploading a new book to our website. Books that are hard to find, or particularly capture the spirit of the Library, will be selected to share with you during the Book of the Month Club project.
We begin welcoming Library patrons on January 15, 2010.
The Book of the Month Club is realized in collaboration with basekamp. - BASEKAMP team: 18:56:39
- btw, stephen wright is co-host since he's co-organizing Plausible Artworlds with us in 2010 ]
- Brett Bloom: 18:56:59
- oh yeah, thanks stephen
- Brett Bloom: 18:57:10
- Charas, The Improbable Dome Builders, By Syeus Mottel, Drake Publishers, Inc., 1973, 191 pages, hardback, ISBN: 0-87749-490-8
“This book is dedicated to everything that is.” This simple dedication begins Charas, the Improbable Dome Builders. The book is a document of a Lower East Side community and their struggle to build a geodesic dome, beginning in the early 1960s with struggling New York City street life and systemic racism. Several men who would become CHARAS members led or were involved in gangs and moved in and out of prison while watching friends and loved ones succumb to drugs and violence. Carlos “Chino” Garcia and Angelo Gonzalez, Jr. two friends from the Lower East Side and involved in gang life from an early age, start the CHARAS story.
Angelo, after serving a long jail sentence and Chino, after spending a year in Puerto Rico at the request of the NYPD, meet up again in their old neighborhood with the idea to do something for their community. The two men were inspired by Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society plan which sought to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in America. Talking at a party they joked that they would start the “Real Great Society” in their neighborhood. The joking led to long discussions drawing in friends and neighbors in an apartment space on East 6th Street. Finally, the group was able to obtain the entire building as a meeting and organizing place to launch the Real Great Society in earnest. Much of what the Real Great Society project was about was developing community autonomy through self-directed economic and education projects. The project managed to do a lot for the neighborhood forming several businesses and setting up several storefront schools for teaching reading and basic math in East Harlem and the Lower East Side.
This project brought national attention to the Lower East Side. Despite its initial successes the group continued to do research and work toward finding the answer to affordable housing. This led them to contact R. Buckminster Fuller, after Chino learned of his design work. Fuller came and spoke at the Real Great Society loft to a rapt audience. This meeting led to the formation of CHARAS, an acronym of the first names of the original six members of the group, committed to implementing Fuller’s ideas for housing in their community.
The original idea was to build a dome in upstate New York so that city dwellers could experience fresh air. Budgetary constraints forced the group to begin building on an abandoned lot in the city. The group worked closely with Fuller’s assistant Michael Ben Eli, a PhD student in London at the time who often traveled with Fuller. In a strange collapsing of scale, Ben Eli commuted from London to the Lower East Side to teach the CHARAS members and friends about the applied geometry of dome building. Several CHARAS members had not graduated from high school and had a skeptical attitude to teacher student relationships. According to the book, there was a long period for CHARAS members and Ben Eli as the learned to communicate with each other. The commitment to the idea finally led to the building of a dome.
Marriage, childbirth, death, and the need to work to support families form the backdrop of the CHARAS story to build a dome house. The process as described in the book is long and arduous and the dome house does not clearly produce lasting change in the community. Rather the process initiated by the former gang members of creating alternatives to poverty and the violence of street life through collective work is the most salient aspect of the book. The book includes an introduction by Fuller and plans for dome building in appendix. Domes were a touchstone for liberation through design, and captured the imagination of many people; this is one of the more interesting stories of their impact on radical culture. - Jonathan Wagener: 18:57:11
- mattadams: 18:58:30
- been reading about / watching tons of buckminster fuller this week. nice!
- Bonnie: 18:58:42
- cool matt
- Bonnie: 18:58:48
- you will love this download then
- Aharon: 18:59:19
- how is a book of a month become such a book..???
- BASEKAMP team: 19:00:52
- hi carolyn & henken
- Aharon: 19:00:53
- ..but surely one of the creteria is how you chose/selct/curate these..?
- Bonnie: 19:01:11
- how do you mean Aharon?
- Bonnie: 19:01:35
- we select titles that we are interested in and fit the criteria of the Library
- Bonnie: 19:02:24
- And criteria for the Library are-books from the late 60s early 70s that are often "how-to" books.
- Bonnie: 19:03:00
- They are also often self published, but not always and they express some idea about building up another culture or way of doing things
- Aharon: 19:03:02
- @bonnie you have a range of books to be chosen as book of the month, surely, someone somehow chose it..?
- Bonnie: 19:03:46
- yes we have a range. We have been wanting to add Charas to the Library itself for awhile
- Bonnie: 19:04:09
- so we saw this as a perfect opportunity to both add it to the Library and to put up a scan of the book as well
- Bonnie: 19:04:35
- does that help?
- Aharon: 19:05:41
- hummm.. did i hear that u chose a book from a range of them each month..?
- Bonnie: 19:05:53
- yes
- Aharon: 19:06:10
- who makes that selection/choice?
- Bonnie: 19:06:16
- we do together
- Aharon: 19:06:29
- i c.. thanks!
- Bonnie: 19:06:43
- cool
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:07:02
- Very interesting
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:16
- hi cecilia
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:07:22
- What do u do about copyright?
- Cecilia Guida: 19:08:08
- copyright??? and you? let me think and know what you're talking about
- Aharon: 19:08:09
- another thing.. i wonder if this can be elaborated by ppl, i have not heard the term "counter culture" for a veeeeeeeeeeeery loooooooooong time.... Do u use this term because it was a rather used one at times these books were made..?
- stephen wright: 19:08:30
- I have a question. I'm of two minds about "how-to" books. Growing up in the 70s, my parents had all sorts of these books around: user's guides to this that and the other thing. Joy of Sex. Build your own log cabin. How to tie flies. How to catch salmon. The anarchists handbook... I always figured that those books came too late. Kind of like Hegel's owl, that flies only with the coming of dusk. I mean, the action was relevant before the book spelled it out for everyone, by which point the cutting edge had moved on. -----
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:55
- So stephen has a question, then Michael has a question after that
- Aharon: 19:09:18
- i had 1 b4..
- Bonnie: 19:09:33
- That's is an interesting thought Stephen. I wonder if that's why we feel the need to draw attention to these titles for a new generation, because perhaps there is time to "how-to"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:38
- oh, yes - aharon first
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:42
- then stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:44
- then michael
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:53
- keeping a queue
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:10:16
- Lol
- Bonnie: 19:10:52
- thanks basekamp team
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:17
- then greg
- Aharon: 19:11:43
- ok.. i get that.. it is contextual..
- Bonnie: 19:11:56
- yep
- Aharon: 19:12:45
- ..and another one.. I wonder.. u just mentioned that u publish books as well as gathering/collecting in your library.. am just wondering if indeed this is a library or a "library"..
- Bonnie: 19:14:21
- you mean do we lend the titles out like a regular library?
- Aharon: 19:15:10
- in a sense that titles are produced by you(??) getting lended out/avaliable to download..
- stephen wright: 19:15:36
- the urban homesteading case is a good example of how recalling usership 's potential is empowering
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:39
- the next question in queue was from Michael
- Bonnie: 19:16:45
- So, it's two-fold. We collect the book titles and share them through reviews online and the PDFs (Book of the Month.) But also, we self-publish our own titles-reviews of the books, or documents of projects that we have done
- BASEKAMP team: 19:17:56
- B&B you guys could take pics and make a pdf out of thost if it's too fragine to scan
- Bonnie: 19:18:09
- that's a good idea
- Aharon: 19:18:16
- i c.. so in that case am wondering why you call yourselves a library? it seems like this is not a description but more of a metaphor in the "as if" sense of a metaphor..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:57
- Guys, was that the first time you've visited that island as part of Continental Drift?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:14
- that was a quick Q i guess --
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:26
- Greg is in queue for the next question
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:27
- Hi Alex
- Brett Bloom: 19:22:36
- http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/farms_pdf
- ourcreamesteem" title="sourcreamesteem">Alex M.: 19:23:32
- Hey
- Henken Bean: 19:25:10
- I'm curious who your audience is or if you have a target audienceand if you market your projects if at all. Maybe it was already answered earlier-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:37
- So Henken is next in queue unless there was another one we missed?
- Bonnie: 19:26:45
- yep
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:02
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:36
- we've finally downloaded the call to farms pdf & are projecting in the space
- Bonnie: 19:27:44
- great
- Bonnie: 19:28:34
- http://www.letsremake.info/library.html
- stephen wright: 19:29:10
- I totally agree with your point about re-evalutating the 60s, taking back their work from its dismissal, and repurposing the hard work that was done.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:23
- stephen wright: 19:30:11
- But don't you need to expand -- geographically -- what you mean by the 60s.
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 19:30:47
- hey henken
- Bonnie: 19:31:35
- @stephen you mean will we include books that are from other regions and the counter cultural activity that happened there?
- Aharon: 19:32:03
- hummm... in terms of paw.. would you say that your artistic practice is curative..? with an emphasis on curation of the "counter culture" lit within a library metaphor..???
- Henken Bean: 19:32:21
- Hey scrap!
- Bonnie: 19:34:00
- I think @aharon should be the next in the cue yes?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:08
- Hi Alan
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:14
- adding you to the call now
- Aharon: 19:34:17
- thanks! @bonnie
- stephen wright: 19:34:43
- While you answer the other questions, let me contextualize mine: I live in France, and May '68 in this country is a secularly sacred moment of contestation; it changed everything (and opened the door to gentrification). But not only that, and here as in the States, the radical and caustic edge of that movement needs to be reposessed. But what about Mexico? Argentina? Turkey? India? The global spirit to do things differently and to do them oneself was very powerful. So I think you might want to consider that in choosing your titles of the month.
- Henken Bean: 19:35:01
- Yes thank you!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:01
- Alan btw, there werre lots of hellos to you after adding to the text chat & before you got on audio
- Bonnie: 19:36:11
- @stephen wright nxt in the cue
- Bonnie: 19:36:20
- hello alan
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:24
- oops, alan calling you back
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:54
- will try again
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:30
- hmm, alan we have to add you
- Aharon: 19:37:49
- yup
- Aharon: 19:37:49
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 19:37:56
- not fully researched-- but I work in the International Center of Photography Library and there is a radical self-reliance spirit that seems to come out in Eastern European solidarity movements of late 80's/90's
- Aharon: 19:38:09
- thanks! will have a follow up though..
- Bonnie: 19:38:39
- k
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:53
- hey alan - you got in the call!
- stephen wright: 19:39:54
- the problem is that south american counter culture was crushed and exterminated by american imperialism
- mattadams: 19:39:54
- pura vida!
- Aharon: 19:40:51
- hummm.. to follow on the question regarding your project as a paw.. you mentioned that you use stuff from your project in your daily lives, then added that in art contexts as well.. In a sense you did there a seperation between "life" and "art".. I wonder, in that case, what are the contexts you define as "art"???
- stephen wright: 19:41:01
- great! thanks
- Bonnie: 19:41:29
- you are welcome
- Greg Scranton: 19:41:50
- Photos of the "library" at Basekamp: http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:09
- thanks for that Q stephen -- i would like to follow up with this maybe as a public school course proposal, as well as other ilnes of thought or questions that have come up tonight
- Greg Scranton: 19:42:10
- books will be added each month
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 19:42:14
- scrap compilations of resource information fuel activated intelligence toward living systems without conflict! rock-on
- Bonnie: 19:42:41
- that looks great @Basekamp team
- Bonnie: 19:42:48
- thanks for putting it together
- Greg Scranton: 19:42:59
- sure Bonnie
- Aharon: 19:43:47
- i c.. thanks!
- Bonnie: 19:44:19
- http://www.letsremake.info/mnd.html
- Brett Bloom: 19:44:47
- for those who just joined or recently joined you can watch us without sound: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/library-of-radiant-optimism-for-let-s-re-m...
- Bonnie: 19:45:11
- breaking up
- Bonnie: 19:45:52
- I can hear you!
- Greg Scranton: 19:46:07
- Adam, if you or your students do have ?s perhaps text them in
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:26
- can you show us those things again?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:30
- B&B?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:37
- took us a while to get ustream to show
- Bonnie: 19:48:44
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:48
- TY
- Bonnie: 19:48:51
- I will show you the lamp again
- Bonnie: 19:48:54
- get ready
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:19
- okay... but there's a delay
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:27
- grr, now it's spinning. dang
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:47
- alan we have to add you to teh conf call, whcih is why we keep declining your call
- Bonnie: 19:51:02
- YEAH!!!
- Bonnie: 19:51:08
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:03
- we keep trying to add you alan,... seems like you are in for a moment or so at a time
- Greg Scranton: 19:53:25
- bucket undies?
- Bonnie: 19:53:40
- undie-comfortable
- Bonnie: 19:53:55
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:36
- http://basekamp.com/about/events/public-school-and-aaaargorg#comments
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:22
- FOR THIS WEEK
http://basekamp.com/about/events/library-radiant-optimism-lets-re-make-w... - stephen wright: 19:59:17
- Thanks so much B&B! It's 2 am here, so I'll be acknowledging my comatosis and going to sleep, but it's been... radiant hearing about your project.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:20
- ^^ COMMENT HERE
- Bonnie: 19:59:36
- Oh thanks Stephen we sincerely appreciate your feedback
- Bonnie: 19:59:37
- !
- Bonnie: 19:59:48
- Please keep in touch
- stephen wright: 19:59:58
- count on that
- Bonnie: 20:00:07
- sleep well
- Aharon: 20:00:20
- thanks guys for coming!!
- bfreee" title="dbfreee">Dave Beech: 20:00:50
- thanks everyone
- stephen wright: 20:01:08
- Long live radiant piracy!
- bojana romic: 20:01:13
- thanks, bye!
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 20:01:26
- any brooklyn affiliates? we run some of our own inititives as "noetic lab school for noosphere" but not reaching a growing population and would rather have discussions for "creatively/collaboratively envisioning new futures" than just high-brow Art discussions (such as bhqfu). thanks BASEKAMP and RADIANT OPTIMISTS!!
- Bonnie: 20:01:26
- lefortune @gmail.com
- crapworm" title="scrapworm">scrapworm: 20:03:01
- noeticlab@earthlink.net
- stephen wright: 20:03:23
- until next week!
- Bonnie: 20:03:23
(wave)- Brett Bloom: 20:04:47
- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:35
- you guys rock
- mattadams: 20:05:59
- thanks guys!
- Greg Scranton: 20:06:11
- L8R all. Thx a million Brett & Bonnie
- Bonnie: 20:06:24
- thanks
2010-01-12
Organizational art
Week 43: A Constructed World
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Geoff Lowe, Jacqueline Riva and a half dozen or so other members of A Constructed World.
http://www.aconstructedworld.com
http://speech2012.blogspot.com/
http://telic.info/node/37
A Constructed World make whatever they make — events, installations, videos, drawings and publications — using the media of not-knowing, idle banter, pamphleteering, live eels, dancing, absences and errors, sleight-of-hand and mistakes. In addition to talking about their projects over the years, which has focused largely on raising the question “what is a group?” collectively, and approaching working with other people as constituting what psychoanalysts call a shared space of “not-knowing”, the group will discuss their recent “Fragments in A Constructed World” project, premised on the hypothesis that there may be a lot of unknown overlaps, or potential points of shared interest between people who aren’t aware of that yet. The project has entailed setting up spaces for dialogue, using fragments of Morse code, Chinese pictograms, telepathy… In fact, this week’s discussion will be an open-ended instantiation of the project, even as the group discusses specific tangible methods and infrastructures which they have set up.
This is of course all very much in the spirit and undefined ambit of Plausible Artworlds, which by design is committed to the idea that all (art)worlds are constructed worlds — yet in both popular and learned parlance to describe a world as “constructed” is not trivially tautological. Why is it that worlds appear invariably natural to those operating in them? Or do we “not-know” they are constructed as a form of knowing? Perhaps this is the key to the experimental epistemology of not-knowing. Who knows? And by extension, who brings what to group making? What form of not-knowing do artists — or other categories of not-knowers — bring to world-construction sites?
Transcription
Week 43: A Constructed World
[0:00:00]
Male speaker: Hey Scott.
Scott: Hello there.
Male speaker: How is it going men?
Male speaker: Hey how are you?
Male speaker: All good.
Jackie: Hi Scott?
Scott: Hello everyone?
Male speaker: You hear me? Hey Jackie.
Jackie: My God [0:00:16] [inaudible] how are you?
Male speaker: I’m good.
Jackie: Good to [0:00:20] [inaudible] you.
Male speaker: Sorry?
Jackie: Good to hear you.
Male speaker: Me too good to hear you.
Jackie: Yeah.
Male speaker: Is Jeff there?
Jeff: Yes I’m right here, I’m right here.
Male speaker: Hey.
Jackie: You know how I was making some telepathy with my—my art students today and I showed them the word fang.
Male speaker: Oh cool.
Jackie: Yes and they knew a lot of the meanings of the word.
Male speaker: Oh really?
Jackie: Yes it was very...
Male speaker: Maybe because they are Chinese.
Jackie: Yeah.
Male speaker: Sure.
Male speaker: Part of the reason.
Male speaker: Well it’s appropriate that tonight’s chat is going to talk not only about a constructive world but about fragments because it sort of started out that way.
Male Speaker: Are you there Mathew?
Mathew: Yes I just had my thing on mute, hello everyone?
Jackie: Hi Mathew.
Male speaker: Hello Mathew.
Male speaker: [0:01:27] [inaudible] sorry Scott.
Male speaker: Oh not at all Welcome everyone to our humble weekly chat. The context is of this year—
Jackie: [0:01:41] [inaudible] there?
Male speaker: Sorry?
Jackie: Is Mathew and Antoine there?
Male speaker: Oh right I think Antoine is at basekamp.
Jackie: Right.
Male speaker: There we go, he is texting in. Then I believe they are waiting on Mathew and a few other people to show up to the basekamp space.
Jackie: Right.
Male speaker: Yeah I guess there is some kung fu going on pretty loud but yes you can always unmute and say hello any time Antoine. But yes so I’m really glad that you were able to join us tonight especially some of you it’s incredibly late where you are and you know we are always happy that people are able to actually either get out of bed in the middle of the night or stay up really late or wake up really early to join this. Or like in the middle of the afternoon which could be equally unpleasant sometimes, Jeff thanks. And so yes, so welcome to another week in the series of chats about different examples of kinds of plausible art worlds or what we are calling plausible art worlds, this year.
We are talking with Jacqueline Riva and Jeff Lowe about I guess a number of other people involved with the constructed world, about A Constructed World and your practices over, you know over the last 15 or quite—actually I should have come with a good way to introduce that but over quite a long period of time that you have been investigating this [0:03:30] [inaudible]. What is the group and you have been addressing this in lots of different ways. For the people that are—I think and a lot of us do know you and already work with you but for the people here that aren’t aware yet of what you do would you mind giving us a brief intro to why and how A Constructed World got started?
Male speaker: Well I’m thinking when you invited this for to just start with what we’d proposed that’s it’s almost like we’ve already started what I was going propose tonight.
Male speaker: Okay.
Male speaker: Like there is the way this conversation started was an example but I mean maybe the fastest was to explain that the first things that Jackie and I did together was we made a Art magazine that ran for ten issues and we invited people who said they didn’t know about art or contemporary art to write about contemporary art. So it’s just been like an ongoing that that we’ve looked at this in all sorts of different ways of thinking what not knowing is or what saying you don’t know is or how you can move between ignorance and knowing or resistance to knowing or even innocence of knowing and knowledge like in the case of Adam and Eve and things like that.
[0:04:56]
So that’s sort of been what we are interested in. but we recently did a performance which quite a few of the people at Rome [0:05:04] [inaudible], we at the [0:05:08] [inaudible] in Paris. And we did a project where we had all different forms of communication coming in to the space at the same time which we have planned to do tonight. So we had, Hal sent us some Chinese characters which we couldn’t , which nobody could understand and then we showed them all to the audience and then later we read out the mulit-often really multiple meanings of them. We had Sean and Veronica who are in Melbourne know and doing this and they sent us in Paris a telepathy message.
Male speaker: Are they sending telepathy at the moment?
Male speaker: Yes they are sending, I have it on good [0:06:03] [inaudible] they send me some now.
Male speaker: Okay.
Male speaker: And we can find out later what that was. And then well we have had a number of—I had Morse code which if anyone’s interested I can play it again for you tonight.
Male speaker: Great.
Male speaker: That we had a conversation that commands someone else that we were working with, and that Marie who read out a text and Mathew has a text, Mathew Raner who is with us. That it would be great if he could either read out of it or talked to us about it. So what we would I guess try to just think about is that, I mean it’s pretty obvious in a way that if everything’s so full and you don’t really know what you are doing which is a kind of pretty common way of operating now, that there is far too much information and that you usually don’t understand most of what’s going on.
And so what we are kind of interested to think about is to think about that can that be a shared space. So if we mutually don’t know what we are doing together could that exist in the space we could be occupying in any kind of collective or perhaps collaborative way. And so I guess just a very—I have never really been on such a large chat of course if any have there been too big before but I kind of just by the chaos of how we started I guess it has this kind of a feeling already so.
Male speaker: Its coming through very clearly though.
Male speaker: What’s that?
Male speaker: The audio is coming through very clearly.
Male speaker: Okay good.
Stephen: Jeff can I ask you a question its Stephen here, so that this collective space of understanding actually functions, it’s important that nobody understands the Chinese characters, that nobody really knows anything about telepathy and that the Morse code can’t be deciphered right? Because of course if it--.
Jeff: Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah.
Jeff: So in the sense that…
Jackie;Well I don’t think that, I mean that’s not necessarily the case because of course we all come to the group or come to an event with different experiences. And so there maybe people in the group who have been making telepathic passes or experiments, there maybe people in the group who do understand Chinese. So the thing is that we, you know what we are really working with is the experience of the people in the group and what that inevitably does is bring together quite a bit of knowledge. So we start from the point of not knowing but you don’t really end up in a situation of not knowing once you have engaged in an activity or some kind of experience together.
Male speaker: Yes well I guess that’s right I mean I was just about to agree with you Stephen so that’s interesting right? It’s really interesting because what we kind of supposed about art is that it’s kind of impossible to not know about art in the end and that often people once they would say oh I don’t know anything and then offer an opinion, they’d kind of say something that was often more compelling that what the art could exhibit and on the same page. So yeah like I suppose we are just trying to think how to further this that if you don’t understand things where are you?
Jackie: Yes well I think that after or by the time we got to 10 issues of the magazine what we considered that we had done was to make a research. And going back you know occasionally I go back and read one of the magazines and what I realized was that in fact the people who said that they didn’t know about art certainly did know something when they were writing about it. And…
[0:10:37]
Male speaker: So does that mean I know Chinese?
Jackie: Well I think, you know that’s a different, I mean no I don’t think you know Chinese I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet but you know certainly you know the way that people wrote about—I mean I think the thing is that we live in a very sophisticated manner because we grew up with television and we understand how to read images and with internet and changing the channel and we have a very sophisticated mode of reading things, reading signs. And you know signifies and all this kind of thing and so when you finally get to the point of looking at an art work for someone who hasn’t been trained you know, who thinks that they don’t know anything about it, they still have a very sophisticated language of how to read signs and symbols. So you know there is something that’s there from the way that we all engage in society and in the community that we live and in the kind of world that we live in.
Male speaker: Yes anybody out there?
Male speaker: Yes definitely.
Male speaker: Well I mean the example that we used to use a lot like that was that if a person has a remote control watching the television and even someone who has almost no education that they make incredibly informed visual decisions in you know really a portion of a second and they can flick the channel and decide what period, what genre, what type of show it is. And you know like numerous categories and just sum it up really in a part of a second. And so that is a lot of, you know, visual acumen to be able to do that. And yeah so like how is that perhaps joined to how people might interface with what we have come to call contemporary art?
Male speaker: So you guys see, you make very little distinction between creativity from people or so called creativity or whatever term you want to use, imaginative, oh I don’t know, perception or whatever, by people who are trained in art and people who are not.
Male speaker: Well I think the thing that we thought a lot about lightly was that what we would try to do was that we would try to write a bigger repertoire for the audience to work with, because at the moment we’ve got a kind of situation where the artist has this you know possibility to be in movement and to be changing media and changing ways of working to be moving and to be nomadic and things like that. Whereas the audience is still expected to be constituted and know what they think and to have an opinion and that’s why people are thinking the audience feels really intense pressure as though that they should know something like that.
Whereas it’s been acceptable for a long time like from the modern artist and like John Coltrane or Roscoe or people or you know, to not know what they were doing and to put that forward as a methodology. Whereas somehow the way that the audience seems to face doesn’t allow that, it’s not allowed. So yeah this was what we were trying to think about is that you know what can you say when you don’t know you know? Or could we be together when we don’t know in this kind of way?
Stephen: I’ve got about, hi Stephen again sorry to jump in again but I’ve got about six billion questions already okay.
Male speaker: Okay.
Stephen: Can I just ask like maybe one of those questions? Is this kind of based on the experience like this morning I was in the Metro in Paris and I had two weird experiences of people not knowing things and maybe three actually. Okay and they are three very different kinds, one was this guy, an African guy who was illiterate and who was trying to—he needed to buy something but the guy who was selling it to him would refer him systematically to the, like the sign of what was for sale. And the guy wasn’t interested in what the sign said because he couldn’t read it, he wanted an explanation of what actually the guy was selling and he wasn’t very forthcoming about that.
[0:15:33]
So obviously a person who is illiterate and we have all seen it and he can negotiate a world of signs and semiotic in an incredibly sophisticated way without actually using those signs in the way that the rest of the user ship can. Are you talking about that? or the second scenario was this blind guy who was not, obviously hadn’t been blind for long because he was making his way very inadequately through the Metro system, waving his white cane like far too widely, hitting people with it and stuff. It was kind of funny in an uncomfortable sort of way. But it reminded everybody I guess that, like this is not about illiteracy this is about something which has happened to him which has deprived him of what in our civilization is the primary sense, the sense of vision and he was not accustomed to using his other senses.
And then in a more banal way the guy who was sitting next to me in the metro turned to me at a certain moment, this is like at 7:00 in the morning I’m trying to think about how to write up the blurb for this conversation tonight. And the guy says can you tell me in French is the word K like where you stand to get on the train, is that masculine or feminine? So that was kind of non-knowing which is like the guy was completely familiar with our visual semiotic, he was obviously literate because the reason he wanted to know that answer because he was using his Blackberry he was typing an SMS to somebody and wanted to tell them about something, all he needed to do was not pass for somebody who didn’t really know how to speak French very well.
So there is three kinds in a few moments of totally different unknowing, how do you deal that, you know that the equivalence of intelligence that we all share that makes it impossible to share a world, to construct a world. Which type of non-knowing are you interested in or how do you differentiate?
Male speaker: Well I think this is what Jackie was perhaps talking about he said it’s still very much a risk we are just working on case studies really. And so those are all perfectly you know, good and implicit case studies. And the other one I mean obviously there is many others but then there is also like the passion for ignorance where people deliberately pretend to not know things because it gives them advantages. And yes there is a lot of that in politics in that at the moment where people pretend to be a lot more ignorant of information than what they actually are so it’s kind of like a strategic not-knowing as well.
And so it’s a kind of question of that what we are looking is could this be a space rather than an absence in this kind of sense. That could be a space where it kind of could be occupied. I mean one of the things that we hadn’t start [0:18:34] [inaudible] that was talked about quite a lot is that Nicha says this thing that he didn’t read books and that he criticized other intellectuals for reading because they were getting the wrong kind of way of entering things. And you know so we thought this was really interesting, did that mean that other people who didn’t read books could be considered to be in the same space and Nicha sort of thing.
Male speaker: And guys there is a continual emphasis, sorry I’m just traveling at the ongoing text chat here. There is a continual emphasis on approaching knowing as a group in some way. As if like you said it’s not as if we are pretending to or sort of feigning ignorance or somehow [0:19:41] [indiscernible] things that we have learned or experienced. But that this kind of maybe removal of an idea of knowing might help us reproach a space together and have a different kind of knowing.
[0:19:58]
Male speaker: Yeah well like I mean it’s to do as [0:20:00] [indiscernible] in that kind of sense and maybe it’s to do with the kind of the unconscious of the audience you know? That the audience could not know in that kind of sense just like Van Gogh had an unconscious or you know famous artists have an unconscious that the audience could be working with their unconscious [0:20:24] [inaudible] as well. And so is this someway that we can try and make a picture of where this place instead of outside our immediate grasp but obviously there where they are if that makes any sense you know. Like in terms of psychoanalysis or something where these places are reliably there and have a kind of presence in all sorts of different ways but necessarily, you know slipped, you know, [0:20:57] [indiscernible] and away from us.
But then there is also at the moment like I was saying, well I’ll stop talking after this, but about this idea of you know the kind of disingenuous subject where I was reading, there is this would – be senator in America and she is like part of this [0:21:17] [inaudible] and she said that she doesn’t believe that in masturbation as a sort of blanket statement sort of thing. And it just seemed like such an incredible thing to say and it’s almost like sort of willfully saying something that can’t be possible that will bring a lot of other people aboard sort of thing.
So that we can sort of say things that we in a way know aren’t true or my last example would be in Australia we had what they call the dog whistle politics. Where the politician would say something that was in fact racist or something that wasn’t on the page [0:22:01] [inaudible] that all of the people would come to know that it was you know? So yes, so there is all this place outside of what we are saying that kind of could be vacant in different ways. So just say that Mathew, what is it that you said? Are you there Mathew?
Male speaker: Yes Mathew do you want to say that over audio or would you like someone else to read it out?
Mathew: Are you talking to me Mathew or the other Mathew who is in Philadelphia?
Male speaker: We are talking to you.
Mathew: Okay.
Jackie: Mathew Raner.
Mathew: Hi.
Jackie: Hi.
Mathew: Yes I was trying to, you know fragment the conversation a little bit with this magic text.
Male speaker: Yes.
Mathew: So that was just what I was doing.
Male speaker: And so do you want to just tell us something though in audio rather than in the written?
Mathew: Sure, I mean you know I guess just I mean listening to you, this you know one thing I was thinking I have been trying to follow both the audio and the text. But you know the kind of strategic not knowing or something like that I was thinking also about kind of how we are trained to read things like as a text in this way and this sort of space of not knowing I think like this Nicha I guess not reading books I guess sort of a—it’s not like a willful ignorance but it’s trying to sort or maybe escape some of the kind of binary, the binaries of like signifier and signified and things like this. So it’s, yes it’s a big question, I’m sorry it’s a little late here in Sweden.
Male speaker: No, not at all.
Male speaker: Mathew we fully expect you to know exactly what to say.
Mathew: Exactly so in any case I feel like I’m a little bit more prepared on the text end of things than the audio.
Feale speaker: So will you read your text Mathew?
Mathew: Sure if you prefer it read.
Male speaker: We would like that because I have got an audio from comontse [phonetic] [0:24:49] that I was going to play. So we would like it if you’d read some of it out or all of it whichever you prefer.
Mathew: So I suppose that you know I could try to contextualize this a little bit, it came out of the event in Belleville in Paris when we were meeting with the speech and what archive which is kind of another aspect I guess of your practicing. I know you haven’t really discussed but it’s just thinking about how speech can kind of maybe be documented or kind of have a longer life than just in the present does that sound about right?
[0:25:33]
Male speaker: Yes cool.
Jackie: Yes.
Mathew: So this was kind of some of my thoughts I was having you know in that even and they were about magic and they kind of revolved actually around Paleolithic cave painting strangely enough. So I’ll go ahead now, this is what I wrote its called notes towards a sympathetic image.
So from the first of these principles namely the love of similarity, the magician infers that she can produce any effect she desires merely by imitating it. From the second she infers that whatever she does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact whether it formed part of her body or not. What of the image, of its completeness on the one hand and its lack of result on the other? What of the cartographic inversion, the math that becomes the territory? What of this extensively debates type of reality? Of this crude and spectacular relations, the product of a world mediated by false images. What of an epistemic order built upon the close binary of the ideal and its representation? What of this reality and what of the world shot through with truth? What of movement, of time, incompleteness, of non-knowledge and unresolved?
Fragments then for movement, for contradiction, for an incomplete and sympathetic image, fragments then for the two principles of magic, homeopathy and cotangent where like produces like and the properties of one are transferred to the other by way of intimate contact. This illogic’s or “mistakes” of an erroneous system are internal event and fundamentally contaminated, nothing more than a primitive misapplication of concepts, of similarity and continuity. Fragments then or both principles of magic they assume that things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether.
The object in the image both shot through with their distance, a special temporal sympathy across the territory and across the map. To get a hold of something at a great distance, to stand in the radiance of an erratic presence, that flash of history in a moment of danger, the force propelling you backward yet somehow forward, parallax within a dialectical movement. And this magic objects are simultaneously viewed with exhibition value and co-value, a sign value and symbolic value. But when shattered the fragments open up and become available.
The anthropological theorization if prehistoric paintings suggest that these images operated at the level of consecration, performative images they brought forth into the world the action they depicted. That is to say they were of the thing itself, a register, a valiance of the thing distributed across distance and time [0:29:01] [indiscernible] varying speeds and varying in forms, produced by and producing reality. The great rift between representation and our deal, the distance between the not knowing of this illogical and irrational operations and the knowing or logical and rational is broken down.
The logic of the performative image is that it is part and parcel of the thing, that it is invoked and extended toward us in time through its image. Partial views, fleeting moments, embodied perspectives, parallax, self evidence, erratic, messianic or magical power, affectivity, textures, temporalities, economies of circulation, modes of reception are here brought forth into the world.
Doing away with antilogies and the concept of original only arises after the original is multiplied. The thing is resident and multivalent, not the imperfect and profane manifestation of the ideal but a side of presence, of none knowledge against the appearance of every surface and every curvature of line at the edge of every frame of vast and empty field and ones terrifying and it’s a [0:30:24] [indiscernible] of uncertainty and yet accelerating as we fall. For just as we know that the product of knowledge truth and power are intimately linked, we must also acknowledge the productive of none knowledge to create that rapture within linear or historical time. That blasting from the continuum of history and power and great account of mystification the specific fragility of the present and its secrets sympathies.
[0:30:58]
Jackie: Nice yeah.
Male speaker: That’s very good thank you, thank you so much.
Male speaker: Sure I guess that’s a some kind of cocaine is in order. But yeah so that’s sort of that’s what I wrote in response to what happened in Paris.
Jackie: Yeah well I’m very it’s you know there is a lot of things I mean you’ve obviously you know may give even more much more thought for and sophisticated reading of the event. But yeah there is a lot of things in it for me that you know I have thought about after making that event. and a way that it unfolded and there was so many people involved and there was so much generosity between everyone to really make it work and yet it was with the a fragmented like the people who were in the event did really know what the other people were doing. So there was a level of there was level of trust, there was a level of waiting to see what the performance before yours to see if you wanted to adapt yours a little bit to what was going on and you’ve really encapsulated a very nice and a big explanation and description of what was happening there.
Male speaker: Thanks so much.
Male Speaker: I think maybe a lot of it had to do yeah with the fact that I was performing for a lot of it, and so there was this kind of - I was well mostly actually aware of kind of having an embodied experience more than I typically I’m you know. and that’s something I have been thinking about a lot lately is this sort of I don’t know maybe it’s my own like lifestyle because I’m not like going to the gym or anything but this idea of like you know the uncertainty of the body or something as well it’s kind of counter point to kind of analogies of the image [0:33:37] [inaudible] the vision or something like that.
Jackie: Yeah.
Male speaker: Okay well let’s see a couple of [0:33:47] [indiscernible] its, he doesn’t understand anything. So would you like to proceed with something? Just before I say I have just received an email from the people in Melbourne which I haven’t read to say that they’ve sent us a telepathic message and if I hope it will, it all kind of say what it is so maybe at some point you could maybe take a bit of time to see if anyone is able to receive the telepathic message.
Male speaker: Jeff are they sending to anyone particular or just for the generally [0:34:20] [cross talk]
Male speaker: They are sending to this group yeah. Steve was saying that he’s been sending, I have explained the best I could what is screw it was and how they were kind of constituted or whatever and I said that could use the same to them but and so maybe how did you want to send us something or say anything or…?
Male speaker: Not really just.
Male speaker: Because you just said that you didn’t understand a lot of that and so I just thought it could be interesting you know.
Male speaker: Yeah well I think I don’t have to understand everything just that I’m fine I’m happy to you know to try to figure out what’s going on now and how my task of you know have a lead of it understanding about what’s going on but probably its wrong.
[0:35:21]
Jackie: Jeffery well what I was it just occurred to me that perhaps we could say a little bit more about that event because Mathew’s text has a made a response to the event but I don’t think were really given a description of it.
Male speaker: Yeah I’m sure that you know it was a great sort of event something that like I said and it needs more well scrutiny to kind of understand that takes part that respond to what happened that we don’t have in common but yeah sure tell a bit about the event sure.
Jackie: Well we made an event in Paris a couple of weeks ago for the [0:36:06] [indiscernible] and we called it speak easy medicine show and Jeffery did mention a few things about it a bit earlier in the conversation but we invited about 25 people to be involved in the event. And that as Jeffery said we had someone who had made this Morse code to the, as a sound work and we had people giving rating making ratings. We had singing we had speakers we had someone who made an [0:36:45] [indiscernible] for the audience to drink, we had a novelist Denis Fukard [phonetic] [0:36:51] from Paris who adopted one of his novels into a very short play.
And the whole idea of this event was to bring people together to speak and we have been thinking a lot before more before this event that also in our work for some time now we’ve been thinking a lot about speech and perhaps the impossibility of speech what can we talk about now and who do we speak to when we want to speak, is it possible to speak about politics, is it possible to speak about social issues. And you know I think that certainly the way that I feel more and more is that there is not there is either a desire for people not to speak to each other in these particular kinds of ways. So what we look for is a way of bringing people together and speaking. So we don’t in this situation we don’t invite people to speak about anything in particular but we just ask them if they would like to speak and if they have something to say. So this event run over just down to two hours and people spoke saying and you know [0:38:12] [indiscernible] all sorts of things. And so Matthew’s text is really a response to the event on that day it was a response to the speakings in Madison show event. Jeffery is there anything that you could add to that?
Jeffrey: No look I suppose I am just thinking along the lines where we are just trying to show that there is on the one hand that Matthew’s was a very detailed and considered kind of thing and then someone else said I would like to have some cocaine now would you understand immediately. and so we are just kind of got continuing to kind of build a field of all of these different ways of talking together and we are grasping some of it and we are not getting other bits and then in Hal’s case there is problem with the language like we had been friends we haven’t really learned French very well you know there is a lot of things that we just don’t kind of get like that.
So we’ve sort of tried to be open to that and it seems what we are doing with this experiment if you want to call of that tonight to believe some of these things floating without feeling I have to be, I suppose what I’m trying to say is that if they are not closed off and obviously consumed, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. So that if Matthew [0:39:34] [indiscernible] then we didn’t get the whole thing that it doesn’t mean it’s kind of not there it’s still there in some kind of way and we are aware that it’s there even if we haven’t you know consumed or understood it all in that kind of way. I was just wondering if I could invite everyone like if we could just take a couple of minutes and like I’m getting its ten plus four here so its ten plus if you are at? Some is calling.
Male speaker: Hello.
Male Speaker: No I am just adding someone else to the call.
Male speaker: Yeah to take let’s say two minutes to receive this telepathic message for Melbourne and to write onto the Skype chat thing if you’ve got anything at all.
Jackie: Yeah I think it’s probably maybe it’s what we could do is just decide you know just to have two minutes of silence so we can attempt to receive something.
Male speaker: Yeah is that seemed okay is anyone?
Jackie: Someone got Jeffery do have got a timer?
Male speaker: Yeah I have a timer here we can do this.
Male speaker: Maybe you can do it and it would be great the thing is like I think it was Mathew before sort of or someone said that it’s not so much that we believe in telepathy we are just kind of working on this as some kind of material case about the whole thing. Go ahead all right lets receive the message okay Scott lets would you want to go for two minutes and see how we go?
Scott: Sure starting now. That’s the timer.
Male speaker: All right if you’ve got anything to write and need so probably its time I don’t know.
Jackie: Got a cube in a black way.
Male speaker: Is that Alyssa I mean are you asking that question? Yes of course. It’s out there in Melbourne. They are sending it in Melbourne and what we found it doesn’t necessarily come on straight away and then other times you get complete everything send really really unrelated and then sometimes of course you may need subtract your time you know like something that you couldn’t see in relation to twitter the connection develops over time you know kind of I guess strange but predictable way like that.
Male speaker: So will your friends in Melbourne…
Jackie: So what if they yeah what if they?
Male speaker: Well is anyone else going to come in with anymore before I tell you? Has anyone got?
Jackie: Mathieu Raner what did you get?
Male speaker: I got the word dolphin.
Jackie: Is that and [0:45:26] [indiscernible] see Mathieu that Mathieu saw the word bullet, why are you…?
Male speaker: Well dolphin. Anyone else got anything there?
Jackie: Did anyone else think that they received a message?
Male speaker: Because I will open it and open have a look because I mean ones we’ve looked it’s kind of done you know.
Male speaker: I just got a little heart burn and anxiety that’s it.
Male speaker: Yeah well.
Jackie: And Pat got something red yeah?
Male speaker: Well I have got these nonsense words which I have never heard before you know.
Jackie: Oh okay someone got a beach yeah.
Male speaker: We will open it up then.
Jackie: Its Marie, we’ve got [0:46:21] [indiscernible] got here?
Male speaker: No I don’t think so I don’t think so.
Male speaker: I think she and Kiera both went offline.
Jackie: Right.
Male speaker: Steven did you get anything? Oh he is gone is he?
Stephen: No I’m here I’m afraid I didn’t I don’t know I don’t really know.
Male speaker: That’s cool like.
Male speaker: I don’t know what I got right?
Male speaker: Very good okay I’m going to open it.
Jackie: Okay let’s hear what it was.
Male speaker: Attached is the image that Sean and I are trying to send telepathy to Melbourne to basekamp. We send it from 6:00 to 6:30 Philadelphia time other things that might have got send along with include the kitchen Veronica was in, she was in she send at the school assembling Sean was in while he send so [0:47:23] [inaudible]
Jackie: Okay so they are in two different places when they send the message?
Male speaker: Yeah. Just opening in Photoshop here. And so can I attach this image and send it to everyone without saying what it is? How do I do that Scott?
Male speaker: Is it a jpeg?
Male speaker: Yes it is a jpeg.
Male speaker: I think you can just drag it yeah.
Jackie: You just do a same file and attach it.
Male speaker: I will just put it on the desktop just to see.
Jackie: And then I guess everyone has to accept it.
Male speaker: Sort of just taking a second if you want to go on and do something else you should probably go I allow you.
Jackie: Anymore questions from anyone that might kind of take us in a direction?
Male speaker: So when do I get to share?
Jackie: No you go in same file so [0:48:26] [indiscernible] can you see the same file button?
Male speaker: Sorry I’m stupid.
Jackie: Just on top of the window it’s got add, topic, hang you know and it should have same file.
Male speaker: So you know I don’t see that I get a there is a more button on mine that drops down and you can choose same file from there.
Male speaker: More okay send file okay I’m on it here it comes.
Male speaker: Receiving. This is a kind of telepathy.
Male speaker: Yeah, exactly eccentric yes to me that makes sense. Because it’s sort of like a knowledge that what we don’t know it’s not anymore and masturbation would be common knowledge. What is that picture, I still haven’t seen it?
Jackie: Well it’s a painting of a woman who looks like some 17th century man. But it’s sort of funny it’s got a little bit of the Van Gogh about it. You should be able to save in the email Jeffery email. Yeah well I didn’t see anyone I didn’t see anyone wearing a purple shirt.
[0:50:19]
Male speaker: Okay alright I got it. So could we get anything anything whatsoever?
Jackie: Well no dolphins or swans.
Male speaker: Telepathy is like a language, Patrick I don’t know who you are but yeah well that’s a really or does it become language ones we I don’t know use it or talk about it in some case. This is just what we found was really interesting it’s kind of doing it with no expectations and it being open to its failures it leads you to all these kind of ulterior places and stuff that especially how you can time might become quite interesting. Because you weren’t looking to see anything more implied than anything than what we actually got. But of course when you look at this now well nothing familiar comes what we got if it’s a swan or a beach or whatever comes.
Male speaker: So if the images that came into people’s mind weren’t what we are sending in the telepathic message is does it is it a mistake?
Male speaker: Well what we’ve originally started thinking of was like kind of lost mail office you know. that suddenly went useless in that you know and the images definitely say something about us individually and its [0:51:59] [indiscernible] what we attributed and but I don’t know I don’t really know how to articulate it but then we have found this through time things do attach in a way that they seem completely fragmented and unattached to what’s going on but that’s how it seems to me now you know. It sort of seems like failure.
The other thing that really got involved in which is the idea if we did or think it will kind of be horrifying and maybe a bit [0:52:33] [indiscernible] you know. like if we all saw a beach and then we got a beach like it will sort of be horrifying likely but in a way we are quite open to it invoke in something like I don’t know more I don’t know is it more in the possibly because I’m not quite sure about it [0:52:53] [indiscernible] with my ability to articulate yeah what’s interesting.
Jackie: I may have to say that our telepathic experiments have not been terrible successful.
Male speaker: [0:53:06] [indiscernible]
Jackie: Yeah so but we you know but we are in a sense we are in the middle of a research about telepathy so we continue to make things telepathic classes or receptions.
Male speaker: I was just thinking about your error deceit mistakes publication and that you know it wasn’t really that long ago we were talking with the errorists and about ideas of success and error, mistakes and all that and that’s definitely not foreign territory for you guys. I was curious you know that I think you embrace experiments not knowing well and like you said because yeah I think not just as a kind of foil disguise like fear of things not going well or possible but because that’s something that you genuinely - another area that’s been a big part of your work and not just part of your work but part of the frame works that you’ve helped setup which is really I think what we are mostly interested in. so I mean even in a class like this it’s a kind of frame work you know methodologies even or approaches are for me I think I wonder you know sometimes I wonder what the value of talking about things that people are doing or the experiments people are getting out there and maybe describing [0:54:53] [indiscernible] what the value of that is you know and.-
Male speaker: Describing the most what?
Male speaker: As art worlds or even micro art worlds especially for creative practices or things that people do that often get distorted by placing back into a kind of framework that you know that either displays or supports or even understands those works or these processes as a kind of protocol art.
[0:55:24]
Male speaker: Well presumably sorry.
Male speaker: No no I guess what I meant was just that I think much of what you guys have done at least in my impression knowing you over like over a long period of time is that you are really interested in certain question but just not sort of not only illustrating them with your work as artists where you make art objects that then get sorted into a certain kind of framework which of course they do. Because you do have a foot in world that would be considered you know I mean that are would be mainstream our world so do many of us. But that you at the same time uncompromisingly you setup these kinds of situations where they just can’t easily be understood or reconciled with those world and that not you, you are not just trying to disintegrate then you are actively developing your own and I’m really excited about interested in that.
Male speaker: Well I think too though it’s very concurrent is what you know this idea of plausible art will do something because I’m guessing here but presumably [0:56:30] [indiscernible] in which they had nothing in there whereas now ones [0:56:35] [indiscernible] got talked about it, it has incredible urgency and you know it might even stupid balance sort of thing. so you know this idea of making speak and discussion around something or to identify that something plausible is kind of you know well it’s not an interesting it’s kind of seems that’s really necessary sort of thing to [0:57:03] [inaudible]
Jackie: Well maybe in a sense what we are seeking is to know more and I think with the errors and then sits mistakes project that what I think is that we only know ourselves through mistakes and deceits. And so thinking about it in that way it was a research to bring together some way of understanding something. and so when we invited people to be involved people to be involved in that project you know what we would ask them was not to do a lot of work because we don’t really like giving people a lot of work to do and making them come up with new ideas. So we would write to people and say we are working on this project it’s about errors, deceits and mistakes. If you have something in your computer or something that you’ve been thinking about recently, maybe you would like to send it to us to include in the publication.
And then in the sense the project becomes performaty. so in a way it’s not a publication anymore its becomes a kind of confirmative act that we are the first audience for and I think we anticipate that other people then will be the audience for these acts that then play themselves out on the paper. And it seems to me you know the way we’ve been speaking tonight this whole idea of not knowing is really to bring people together so that we know more.
Male speaker: Well exactly it’s not a sort of fetishzing of a lack of understanding or something like that.
Jackie: No not at all. Because in fact when you bring you know we’ve talked about this when you bring a group of people together they really know a lot they know different things.
Male speaker: Yeah and not knowing can be used like you know in the case of global warming and things like that you know it’s the things that aren’t in doubt have been thrown into doubt in a really ugly way using as part of post modern strategies of not knowing in a really kind of disingenuous way. and so you know I don’t think that we could you know just sort of stay not knowing this you know an ethic place with what you don’t know good things will necessary follow but it was more to you know to realize that what we are working with is not such a big part of the picture.
Male Speaker: Are you saying then that so that knowing actually remains your horizon, not knowing is simply the way that dominant expert culture has characterized people who are not legitimized as knowledgeable and so you bring people together who are not like indexed within the knowledge economy, you bring them together and you find out that they have more knowledge than the expert culture was prepared to acknowledge, is that right?
Male Speaker: Yeah and that, I mean what you are touching on there is potentially political in a way that I really like the idea of the two but you know not in the [1:00:57] [indiscernible] not in a predestined way but maybe in a use way, the people are using more stuff together but it’s just not picturing sort of thing. So people could actually be together more than what they are aware rather than this kind of fantasy of having the notion and individualism. Like it’s hard to know how real [1:01:20] [indiscernible] or something.
Male Speaker: And just, Mathew hi.
Male Speaker: Hi Mathew.
Male Speaker: But I think that hits on you know the song that you performed, the – I don’t know of the title…
Male Speaker: The one that ends up the show, yeah.
Male Speaker: But I mean I think that the lyrics are really or when you sort of demand and you are sort of narrating the story about reading your email over and then you say like you know, let me show you what my use value is kind of thing. I mean I think that that kind of hits on it in a good way. I don’t know if you have those lyrics that you can share.
Male Speaker: I don’t know if I can find that, let me just see. It was actually, it’s what I got from a book by [1:02:13] [indiscernible] wrote here as Francis Ferguson that was arguing that pornography was kind of useful [1:02:24] [inaudible] someone just joined us.
Male Speaker: Yes, someone we threw out the [1:02:33] [inaudible] probably adding people like I dropped or maybe out of the field.
Male Speaker: Okay I’ve got a rough version where I can put this on? You are starting to cover a lot of ground and so I am sorry if it’s too much.
Male Speaker: This is the song?
Male Speaker: Yeah. So it was really a way of trying like I read a book so you know like to put this in a more series seems like we are in a more kind of readable way than what we’ve been talking so far. I remember reading a book, ‘The Summer before Last’ and being you know just totally you know having compelling feelings about this book that had all these relevance to me. but if you hadn’t asked me to explain the book to you, it was – you know I had no [1:03:24] [indiscernible] at all just sort of say, well it’s about using, it’s about that and to tell you what it was, you know to bring it into any coherent shape. And then after about a year and a half, I kind of got this idea about what she was talking about, his use value that you know you [1:03:42] [indiscernible] sense that if it wasn’t so much that we were kind of in a kind of bad use value but the way that it was possible for someone to reveal [1:03:56] [indiscernible] family and I can’t really explain better than that.
And there was something about what she was saying that’s very explicit and pornographic themes are playing the role of that in our society that rather than us being you know desecrated by our use value or used up by [1:04:22] [indiscernible] but it was prompt in an opportunity to kind of show something new and revelatory about a physical and kind of mental selves or something. And so far one of the reviews of this book by Francis Ferguson went on to kind of say that she thought that what pornography could teach religion because if you think about [1:04:44] [indiscernible] needs ecstasy of the virgin and that religion has a lot of kind of pornographic revelatory you know beyond knowledge kind of moments like that that now Christianity has moved into a very kind of damn sort of knowing where all its about its about us keeping things as they are.
[1:05:07]
Whereas religion used to have a kind of very sexual revelatory kind of orgasmic kind of quality about it and so this was what this book was talking about here, the ideal.
Male Speaker: But Jeff aren’t you really just talking about two forms of expert culture, disagreeing about what the relevant point of debates are? I mean someone who is an expert on pornography and someone who is an expert on theology will not agree, but there are two experts that are disagreeing and we know that kind of situation. I think, I mean I think that I misunderstood what you guys were on about. I think I didn’t understand your point. I thought that you were talking about not knowing per se. In other words not knowing as a form of knowledge. And that’s much more radical because that is a form which is excluded from the epistemology per se, you see what I mean?
Male Speaker: Yeah I mean I actually had a talk the other night and someone said I don’t exactly get what you are saying and forgive me but I don’t either. You know that’s its more to do as most speaking of the straits of things and sure there are things that become more clear over time. But what the distinction you are making between not knowledge and experts going over particular issues, is that what you meant? Making a distinction between those two things or…?
Male Speaker: Well I think that generally speaking you know debates between, almost all legitimate debates have been two different kinds of expert culture. In other words if you can talk the talk and you have the legitimacy of your community, you can go and challenge another expert. But there is a kind of knowledge that all experts will exclude as non knowledge. I don’t know whether it’s just I mean sometimes we think of that as – you were talking about user ship, I mean users are people who are considered so stupid that they [1:07:25] [inaudible] thing that the expert come up with before them. But that’s not the same thing as pornography, I mean there are specialists on pornography, I mean obviously people who produce pornography and are involved in pornography know a lot about pornography.
Of course it could be dismissed as being stupid by people who are experts on theology. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are people that are speaking with legitimacy of the accumulated knowledge of their fields. What’s interesting though is what psychoanalyst call space of non knowledge or non-knowing or not knowing is where, is speaking from a position which is validated by nothing and by no one. And that’s where the hidden, and I mean it’s not even hidden because it’s not even unmainable kind of space from which knowledge or anything with, while may ever emerge.
Male Speaker: Sure.
Male Speaker: I mean in terms of psychoanalysis that’s where you don’t usually understand yourself like and it gets bigger the more you try and do it and you know generally the role of, one of the role of psychoanalysis is just to find a way, to find acceptable rhymes through where you are in the midst of all this non knowledge or communical of minds.
Male Speaker: Exactly and I totally agree with that. Can I extend that maybe in a banal direction? Because one of the questions that I wanted to ask you right from the beginning is why you chose the name ‘A Constructed World?’
Male Speaker: This isn’t [1:09:25] [cross talk]
Male Speaker: But its – hang on my question maybe is not every interesting either but it wants to be interesting because if we are working with things that are, if we are working with a space of not knowing, it’s very difficult to construct anything. And at the same time, there is a kind of a parallel with the fact that everybody who lives in the world and operates in one, kind of goes along with the idea that that world is not a construct. Because if you start thinking of the world is constructed, it becomes like fake and you can’t really accept it anymore. So we kind of I don’t know rule out that possibility. It’s not just by now to say the world is a constructed world; it’s true by definition but somehow always radical. How do you like square that circle?
Male Speaker: Well my version of it and because its changed a lot like once yourself something, it takes, and its seven down years, so you know it’s taken on a lot of – the way that I was thinking about it and I suppose to something, that it’s something that is put together rather than procedural and maybe put together as we are doing something like that. Or you know like it was just a way to find way of talking about something that didn’t have an origin and something that wasn’t you know implicitly there that you can find that sort of thing, well that – and that it is something that could be put together or made up or continued to be put together or made up as you kind of interacted with something like that.
Jackie: In a way it’s a little bit of a mistake that we’ve ended up with this name I think.
Male Speaker: What do you mean Jackie?
Jackie: Well I mean it was a name that we used in a few projects very early on and then we had a constructible publishing which was found in a magazine. And so we just kept using the name and the different times we did think you know perhaps we should change our name, you know change our artistic way and the thing was that we’ve done so many projects using that name but we had you know we just thought that it was more of a continuum to keep using it. At one point we did change our name to costructed world and that was kind of a mistake as well that it could be.
Male Speaker: So when we mistakenly wrote that in a catalogue and it was printed goes back well, and so for about six months we tried to change prospected like in abstract and the costructed and so we tried to change our name and [1:12:35] [indiscernible] was so [1:12:36] [indiscernible] we are just sort of, it was yeah there it is.
Jackie: People kept running to us and say do you realize that you’ve misspelled your name…
Male Speaker: And they wore us down. So we made it work about it, we did make it work about that prospect. But I suppose you know that’s the sort of – and then apparently in the like 2000s Constructed World had some various specific meaning in terms of video games and how video games are put together. If you look up in wiki and things like that, that it was there and that came kind of after in our knowledge at least, in our Wiki that came after kind of using, and then it’s used economically as well. So I guess it is something that – we didn’t have a manifesto, let’s put it that way, like we didn’t have an origin including that, it’s not as you can know.
Male Speaker: You know this did come up earlier and I wouldn’t want to kind of derail but I think it’s kind of important right? That you’ve – we’ve been talking a bit about psychoanalysis but also probably an equal measure Constructed World, I mean your backgrounds draws, well I don’t know if its equal measure but draw from Rock and Roll in my understanding almost doesn’t, not as much as from psychoanalysis.
Male Speaker: You mean that kind of origins and…
Male Speaker: Yeah origins and competencies and also things from other, ideas from other fields that you draw from in your work.
Male Speaker: Well I think we just wanted to be where more people were and you know the art world can be as we all know, I think everyone on this, discussion it can be pretty [1:14:41] [indiscernible] specific so you know we were just interested in having defined ways which involve big pool, getting into a conversation with some more people. And you know like I suppose in psychoanalysis and rock roll and things like that this could potentially lead other people there that their urges and new pulses might overlap and that they might see themselves participators you know where the gap between the sending or receiving or production and reception starts to become a bit more interesting rather than being [1:15:26] [indiscernible] out someone knowing and someone else not knowing.
[1:15:29]
Male Speaker: Right yeah, I mean you’ve been in so many group situation now. I mean I am aware of a couple of handfuls of them and I am sure there is a lot more that you’ve got that I don’t know about. You know and what I am really interested in, I mean one of the many things but one in particular is how these experiments where people enter a space not knowing together, I mean that’s one of your primary strategies for a long time. The kind of knowledge that’s costructive there, how does that sort of spin back out into other sort of rebuild other world structures? Because when you group together in a group, you create a kind of world, a micro world, you know, a temporary one off and some of them have been ongoing projects like the Dump Collector and other group situations that have kind of like an organism people have come in and out of, it’s taken on this life that has kept going. But another case is that they are not quite sure but I think in all cases you are, there is an experiment, part of what you get from an experiment is you, you are not necessarily only focused on results but I think you really want to learn something about groups and I guess I am curious, what if those things, not necessarily just that it filter through your understanding but maybe that too but at least in your awareness have kind of filtered their way out into the world and kind of…
Male Speaker: I think the primary level but we’ve been very happy if people wanted to do stuff together and that’s been really important to us. But we have had groups that have started working, we stayed together 10 years and even more and that has happened quite a few times. So if people wanted to somehow it seems important especially after we Mind of Vegan left the place of working like that. But I think what is touching on for me now is what we are talking about in this group now is a real interest to me but Jackie and I are aware that it generated so much information and in a way we’ve not drawn that much I don’t know you couldn’t really call it understanding but we haven’t really drawn that much already information from what was started and that we really want to begin to concentrate on that more to kind of even if it’s very complicated to work with more people to go over.
Like if you think of what we’ve just done tonight, you know like if you look at one of this telepathy experiments, it’s in fact very complex in itself and we’ve kind of being going on and on and on generating all of these things and I guess it’s about time in having worked together for so long and even our age to think about now how could we perhaps make more analysis and of what we’ve kind of done each time and to take that more serious rather than just trying to create the next thing to perhaps give it some sort of place and a kind of field of knowledge maybe or something.
Jackie: But the moment we are working with a group of people on a project that’s called [1:18:59] [indiscernible] archive and Mathew Raner is involved in that group. There are about 10 people involved in it and it’s a group of professional and emerging artists, art, historian, curators and we meet and really starting with this idea of speech and what can you say what is it possible to say, we are making research. And so this group is just involved in being together and getting to know each other and so we are at the point where I hope we are just about to take off to make some work together. And the thing for me that’s very interesting is that even thought I have had a lot of experience working in groups, with groups of people, it’s still difficult to work with other people.
[1:19:58]
And so there is something very interesting in understanding myself in the group and being with other people and negotiating how I can be an individual in the group and how I can be a participant and how I can put something in and get something out at the same time. So that group is emotion at the moment.
Male Speaker: Just in terms of the sidekicks that are going on while we’ve been talking on just sort of glancing over it, I am not comprehending it in any way at all. But one of the things that’s changed for us that we still – we used to find the relation with other people in the sense that they would say that if someone else said I don’t know about art, we would decide that that was [1:20:48] [indiscernible] not that we said that they did not or that the institution said that they didn’t not but the persons themselves would decide that they did not know about art, that this was in a sense a useful subcategory or category for us to work with. And we kind of worked with that for a long time.
But now with the kind of changing technology and stuff that we are getting a different kind of scene now that everything has been deregulated so much that I remember going to the fiack [1:21:18] [phonetic], the art fair and seeing a really kind of imminent curator there looking at a show and I said to him what do you think about all these? And she said, “I am meant to be an expert but I don’t even know any of the artist.” So that you are getting another kind of deregulation from within when no one could keep up with all of the information that is going on and given that we are all or many of us now are so educated like I was talking about the remote control TV visually in other words, but you can’t really be outside of knowledge in the world. You know this is impossible.
So I don’t know, it’s sort of interesting like to keep the how we could on make on map these changing thing that the experts don’t know and there is no one in one way you can’t really have a place that knows nothing about – now I don’t know if you’ve all noticed but there are all these examples in that were dominant [1:22:20] [indiscernible] talking about performance side and they are like Lady Gaga and Walkin Phoenix and there have been all these examples now where they go, got performance art whereas for a long time, performance art was seeing as something that was very marginal crooked and now as this kind of rigid steady place in the mass main stream sort of thing. And so I think that these changes are really interesting too.
Male Speaker: Absolutely and you know and Jeff I know we’ve had a few chats briefly with them and I have I guess a wide spread clear understandings of collective creating, creativity have been changing, I think relates to a lot of what you are talking about because you are talking about technology but it’s also generational. Number two, impact one another. There is some of the generation predictors as Lee here often talks to us about. Looks at group activities in the changing phase of not just what people do together but what they understand themselves within groups seems to be changing. I mean that’s something I think that will be really worth talking together about more over time.
Male Speaker: Yeah well it’s just mate like a lot of – there are so many dubious things obviously with technology and fantasism and fakes and you know especially about socialiabilty and you know I think people are very part of, aware of this and there are so many things that we already did before the technology that haven’t really changed in other ways too. But so…
Male Speaker: Yeah absolutely, some description of this, not that technology is changing so much but that technology is just amplifying the kind of social networks that we already have. You know this idea of somehow a free and open web or the social web would give us new freedoms and new possibilities but at some studies, referring to studies generically is a really good way to try to [1:24:56] [indiscernible] someone says so, sorry about that saying that but I thinking of something in particular but I can’t recall it now well but I looked at Facebook as a sort of mirror of the type of [1:25:14] [indiscernible] exist, it already existed in our culture.
And not just that application but others where it’s not so much that these are opening up new possibilities, of course they are in a way but in another way they are really just emphasizing and amplifying the kinds of inequalities that we already have, the kind of cliques that we have already formed, you know the lines of thinking that we already follow, excluding and other that we already do in order to form a group and things like that.
[1:25:49]
I am definitely not being fatalist by mentioning that, I am just saying that I think we need to do more of what you guys are doing and a sense of going in a group situation you are not just going into it, you are also helping them to set up but you also go into the ones that other people set up and you are trying to like get a sense of what they are what they could be, your green knowledge that you have but you are also interested in other claims of knowledge that other people have and not just a certain idea of what knowledge is. That’s not an expert idea but with the assumption the kind of interesting assumption that you take that everybody has knowledge, different forms of knowledge and that we can collectively come up with something else and I am really interested in that because a lot of what you are – you know Steven is still here. Great!
A lot of what you are doing or a lot of what I am seeing come out of it, there is something to it and that you kind of have to, we can’t really cover it all up in two hours of course. We’ve got to look at each project or each experience one at a time and rally get a sense of what can come out of it. But I would love it if there are other more opportunities for you to share that stuff, you know or for us to distill some of that so that we can learn from what you’ve learnt too.
Male Speaker: Well I am going to have to go because I am actually going to teach a class here at the school where I am…
Male Speaker: No that’s all right.
Male Speaker: But you know I’ve got really a lot out of it tonight and I think it is interesting so if we could do it sooner than the last time. I don’t know like it’s really fantastic every wake just seeing that you continue to this discussion and I think it’s kind of amazing.
Male Speaker: Yeah and you’ve even expanded the space at basekamp for the next several months with Atoine Mathew which was great.
Jackie: Well I mean that would be great if they were open to do something at basekamp and you know work with a lot of people or do something with you that reflects something like this.
Male Speaker: Well we are talking about it, we’ve got into some discussions and it would be great to continue to connect with you guys on that.
Jackie: Yeah, yeah.
Male Speaker: You should.
Male Speaker: Cool well guys thank you so much for coming and thanks everyone for…
Male Speaker: Well thanks everyone else for coming too. Of course there is a whole of stuff that you [1:28:23] [indiscernible]
Jackie: I am sorry I couldn’t, I just couldn’t really follow the text because I was trying to listen to what like we were saying, like what was happening within the audio.
Male Speaker: It’s a strange space to sort of juggle this too at the same time.
Jackie: Well it’s really very interesting because in fact you know there is this kind of subgroup thing going on within this group. People are having conversation with each other and other people coming into those written conversation. So it’s quite interesting, there is quite a lot happening in a parallel space and I don't know in some ways you know some of, we’ve missed some of this really interesting things that have come up in the text.
Male Speaker: Its very interesting and it’s not lots there is a model too, you know that it’s kind of all still there, I mean that’s all written down and what Sean and Veronica can give you, they are perfectly willing to go over it again and go back and that’s presented they did not understood trying to [1:29:32] [indiscernible]. So I am thinking that that, you know this is what we’ve got [1:29:36] [indiscernible] and I hope as a magazine the expert, it’s really just been a time of doing something of wanting to perhaps I don’t know analyze and grasp things a bit more rather than just keep making something new and something.
[1:29:56]
Jackie: Look I think really the think for us, the reason why we work in this way is that we want to be in contact with more people and it’s not really to make a research about groups and we certainly aren’t making research about not knowing. I mean not knowing is a very – I mean I think in a way we’ve over talked about it because I mean of course the thing we know is that knowledge is small and what we do know that what we could not know. So we have an interest but if we don’t know because what we know is so minuet, what is that we have together and what is it the knowledge that we can have between us we can share.
So you know it’s a kind of contradictory field in the way that we use it. But the thing we are really interested in is making conversation and attempting to make contact through conversation and to get something out of it. You know to make us feel good, to make other people feel good and to feel like we are in contact and we are not alone.
Male Speaker: Well we are actually end of the [1:31:10] [cross talk]
Male Speaker: Thanks very much guys and…
Male Speaker: Thank you.
Jackie: And hope to talk to you all again soon. Bye.
Male Speaker: Bye.
Male Speaker: Bye.
Male Speaker: Bye everyone, have a great evening and morning and afternoon. Closing music anyone? Can you sing us a song? Okay.
Child Speaking: [1:31:47] [inaudible] get in the spaceship dad. I have a fun dad like [1:32:07] [inaudible] [singing]
[1:34:07] End of Audio
Week 32: E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology)
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Julie Martin, one of the founders — with artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, then a research scientist at Bell Laboratories — of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a groundbreaking initiative in the late 1960s that brought artists, engineers and scientists together in an attempt to rethink and to overcome the split between the worlds of art, science and technology that had come to characterize and warp modernity.
A series of performances organized in 1966 incorporating video projection, wireless sound transmission, and Doppler sonar — now commonplace but at the time emergent technologies, still untried in art production — laid the way for the group’s founding in 1967. Until the early 1980s (and the beginning of the Reagan era), E.A.T. promoted interdisciplinary collaborations through a program pairing artists and engineers. It also encouraged research into new means of expression at the crossroads of art and such emerging technologies as computer-generated images and sounds, satellite transmission, synthetic materials and robotics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_Art_and_Technology
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=237
The whole experiment, with all its utopian energy, is somehow reminiscent of a Thomas Pynchon novel: born of a union between the anything-is-plausible outlook typical of art and science at the time and the blossoming technology industries indirectly funded by the Vietnam war, E.A.T. is undoubtedly one of the most inspiring and emblematic attempts ever undertaken to bridge the gap between the worlds of art and technique. As instructive in its measurable success as in its ultimate inability to correct for the ideological bias inherent to an industrial laboratory, E.A.T. continues to point to a horizon shared by many collectives today — as for instance in its 1969 call for PROJECTS OUTSIDE ART, dealing with such issues as “education, health, housing, concern for the natural environment, climate control, transportation, energy production and distribution, communication, food production and distribution, women’s environment, cooking entertainment, sports…”
Transcription
Week 32: E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology)
[0:00:00]
Male speaker: Well hey everybody.
Scott: Hi guys. Oh one thing I forgot to mention everybody if you do want to speak I mean feel free but just so that we record this just for this publication that we are putting up next year so if you don’t mind we will just pass the mic around and we will just deal with that formality just so we can have something about that. But hey everybody that’s there if anybody if you see anybody getting drop can you just let me know because I’m going to be kind of going back and forth between here and talking. So Steven can you hear me?
Steven: I can here you great Scott hi Julie.
Julie: Hi.
Scott: Well let me just give a super quick intro. So hi for everybody tats out there we just kind of you know we took our time getting started because we didn’t want to be too early you know we didn’t want to set the bar too high for next week. So for anyone out there who doesn’t come to this normally just pay attention just check out the Skype chart and if you know you feel free to speak up if you want to there is a little message up at the top about that and if you would rather just take you’re your time to type out what you want to say or ask go ahead and do that we will queue up questions or whenever they seem appropriate or whenever you want to jump in.
So yeah so this week we are following in our series this year of looking at another example of A Plausible Art Worlds each and we are pleased to have Julie martin with us who’s representing experiments in art and technology the 40 some year projecting that were looking at a kind of a prototype in its realm I guess you can say or that’s spear headed a lot of other projects who have sense in her curly following some of the strategies and were really interested in seeing this as a kind of a world or a prototype world or a plausible one an example of plausible one and we want to ask Julie to maybe give people a run through of what EAT is. Many of us know but a lot of people here might not and so Julie has prepared a presentation and she is happy to jump into it really whenever so.
Julie: Do I adjust the slides?
Scott: Oh absolutely yeah so. One thing that I maybe you don’t mind one thing that I want to say is that we actually the slides did not upload properly so I’m going to have to upload them again I just realized. but don’t let that alarm you we are going to upload a PDF to the website and I will post the link as soon as its up that Julie can go ahead and get started talking anytime and you can jump in whenever you get them.
Julie: So do people here see them?
Scott: People here can see them and people online can be able to see them in a moment if so.
Julie: Okay so I can so you want to start with the first one?
Scott: Yeah.
Julie: I think one of the most persistent ideas in 20th century art is that of incorporating new technology into art. You of course had the futuristic blind devotion to technology Russian constructivists who attempted to merge art and life the very strict attempt design approaches of the bell house and they were continued by Kepish at MIT with Molinage, Garb [0:04:33] [phonetic] etc and then of course Marcel Du Chance attempt to make art from every day objects. But in the ‘60s there was an upsurge in the interest in technology among the society and among the artists but they were shut out. It seems like such a strange idea now but they were really shut out from technology, computers were mainframes you had to take your little cards that you’ve coded and take them and then wait two days for anything to come back. and the idea of using materials that were not traditional artist materials had just not it was impossible for the artists to get some plastic they could get one sample or a car load of plastic but to get enough to work with was impossible.
[0:05:19]
And so into this desire beginning desire came Billy Clover who was a Swedish engineer he had gotten his degree in electrical engineering from in Stockholm but loved the movies and the minute he could no longer have to do the draft in this country he came to America in 1954. But because of McCarthyism and the fact that lab were being kind of walked into and told what to do he went to Berkley and got his PHD in electrical engineering and then came back to Bell Labs. Bell Labs at that time was the premier laboratory for physics for engineering the transistor was invented there, the laser was invented there and they did that by giving their employees free reign to explore whatever they wanted and free time to do whenever they wanted and they could come and go.
And one of the places that Billy came in and went was to New York. He had been interested in film as I said in Stockholm he had been the head of the film society and so began to meet some of the film makers and in New York. And also one of his good friend was Punters Sultan who was a director of [0:06:38] [indiscernible] art in Stockholm. And then in January of 1960 Punters wrote and said John Tingly is coming to New York he as an idea and can you help him? So Billy met John at an opening and said what do you want? John had the idea to make a machine that would destroy itself. First his idea was to do it on stage and have chicken wire to protect the audience from flying objects but then Dory Ashton and Peter Seltz let him have the garden at the museum of modern art, there was a [0:07:11] [indiscernible] down there so they built the machine in the [0:07:15] [indiscernible]
This is a drawing Billy always said that John was his natural natural engineer so this was his drawing of the machine next slide. What Billy did with his colleagues at Bell Labs was to make a timing device he had a, every three minutes of 27 minutes of electrical switch was tripped and some event would happen. A radio would start playing, a fire would start a little wagon would run out from the machine etc. so this is the timing of the different events next. This is the machine and we see Billy talking to a fireman they were very nervous at the Museum of Modern Art it was six months after they had that famous fire where Rockefeller was carrying the [0:08:14] [indiscernible] out of the building so they were very nervous but they decided this was a contained fire. So here is the machine for 27 minutes went through its destructive.
Scott: Did you say that this was inside the…?
Julie: No it’s the garden they built it inside the [0:08:30] [indiscernible] dome and then brought it out into the garden for the performance next. There you see the little card down below you see smoke ammonia and carbon tetrachloride combined to make whiter smoke that was one of the events, so variety of events it went through until it finally collapsed next. [0:09:00] [indiscernible] this was also a metamatic machine I don’t know if you know his work but John made machines that did drawings with pins and this one it was supposed to that huge roll was supposed to unroll into the audience. But John put the pillion backwards and when Billy wanted to change it after it started he realized and John said no no don’t touch anything just let it happen. So you see the metamatic drawing that never got made.
Next. There is the machine afterwards that John’s with his collapsed machine. The title of the machine was homage to New York next. Bob Rushingburg came by to see what was going on you see here to the right Billy and John went to the left and next, he contributed a mascot to the machine, a money thrower those coils were fussed into the bottom of the box, there was gun powder in the bottom of the box and in a certain moment the resistor heated up the gun powder this spring’s through a part and flew 12 silver dollars into the audience which were never recovered.
[0:10:20]
After that Bob really liked the idea of collaboration and collaborating with engineers and Billy felt that he could begin to provide a new pallet for the artists he could provide new means for the artists to make art. Bob first asked could I have an environment which as I walk in I change the environment the sun, the light, the and that was too far ahead of his time the technology at that time just couldn’t do it of course now its fairly simple and done a lot but couldn’t be done. So Bob fastened on the idea of a sculpture in which five radios would receive signals and broadcast their signals to four other pieces you see here the different pieces of the sculpture called oracle and this wouldn’t have been hard except Bob wanted no wires between the pieces.
So in those days there was no wireless when they first started out they were trying to transmit over Am which of course the interference was impossible during the time from ’62 to ’65 all of a sudden FM wireless of a home kit was developed and then they built the Am radio would come into the one of the you can go into the next one, to the stereo case here that’s where the controls were we had the 5AM radios. Bob wanted AM because FM was only cultural stations he wanted you know the real thing come into the radio and then be broadcast to each of the five pieces and this was oracle next. Here it is shown in 1965 at the Casteli gallery.
Scott: Well after you go back and forth [0:12:12] [inaudible] here.
Julie: So the next project Billy began to work with other artists Andy Wohol asked him could I make a floating light bulb? And Billy again went to his colleagues at Bell Labs and they did the calculations really a bulb would have as big as a house because the battery technology in those days was not as advanced. So but Billy had found this material called scotch pack which the army used to pack sandwiches it was re-sealable and impermeable and so he brought it to Andy he said this is the material let’s make clouds. So again they went back to lab and tried to figure out how to heat seal curves because it’s also was not had never been done in those days. Meanwhile Andy just folded it over and said these are my silver clouds.
Male speaker: Can I interrupt you?
Julie: Sure.
Male speaker: You had said before that day the research at Bell Labs had [0:13:08] [inaudible] some kind of economic liability [0:13:17] [inaudible] thanks well I’m just curious because I mean presumably these engineers are were they on salary or something?
Julie: [0:13:28] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Well then I guess I’m trying to understand more concretely more specifically how it was that someone like Andy Wohol could kind of just call them up and be like I want to built a floating light bulb can you help me?
Julie: [0:14:04] [inaudible]
Male speaker: So it was outside of his capacity as a Bell Labs researcher? He wasn’t being paid for he wasn’t like doing that under on the clock of Bell Labs if you are okay.
Julie: [0:14:14] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yeah okay I just wanted to be sure I kind of had this image that they were kind of doing this in Bell Labs for Bell Labs with like yeah okay thank you thank you.
Julie: [0:14:25] [inaudible] next project. so here you see the pillows Andy, Josphat Johns wanted a neon is that forward or backward wanted a neon light that had no had been plugged into the wall again a wireless neon and Billy and his colleagues figured out how to do this was a changing DC into AC and then rectifying it up to 1200 volts and running the neon off of the batteries. Yvonne Rainer wanted the sound of her some sound of her body to be broadcast while she was dancing and they had a small mic at her throat with a small FM transmitter again that they built that was in broadcast to receiver and the speaker so as a sound of her dancing next.
[0:15:21]
[0:15:24] [inaudible] and John Cage did a piece called variations five in which the movement of the dancers affected the music. So you see those tall polls there those were like theraments and as dancers approached it triggered something as they went away it triggered something else. At the base were photoelectric cells aimed at lights off stage so as they broke the beam that again triggered some of the electronics that John Cage and David tutor were doing. The input was tape recorders but there was electronics input.
Male speaker: John Cage [0:16:01] [inaudible] I mean I have a direct question about John Cage and his music concrete movement I know he would take pianos and jam things in between the wires and each was like the first kind of like rementary synthesizer so did Bell Labs help develop things for him to create music or was this more of just kind of part of this like electronics and art movement like what’s like I’m sort of the correlation thanks.
Julie: Well I think no Bell Labs did Bell Labs did have some music some interest in computer music and some artists did work at Bell Labs in computer music Max Mathews who worked there. But the composers in general were ahead of the visual artist they had some understanding and interest in electronics because of course speakers and that kind of thing. So john was using his input tape recorders records but David Tutor and Gordon [0:17:20] [inaudible] had built circuit his work to circuits filters other kind of basic circuits so they were beginning to incorporate into their work. So things that would move sound from speaker to speaker or cut sound off and turn it on this kind of thing.
So it was just the beginning of using electronics in composition but again it had nothing to do with Bell Labs just with some people from Bell Labs who worked with them.
Female speaker: Do they do anything like that nowadays?
Julie: Well Bell Labs doesn’t exist anymore. There are lucent but there is no lab really it’s a focus is on what’s the next gadget you can make so there is not just kind of free ranging interest next.
Male speaker: Google labs.
Female speaker: Yeah I have a question.
Julie: Yeah.
Female speaker: I have a question about the clouds it looks like it’s made of they look like they are myler [0:18:29] [Phonetic] that they look like they are myler does it a relationship?
Julie: It is a, it’s kind of a myler it’s called scorch pack and so it was a myler that could be heat sealed. So this is another picture of variations five you can see the kind of electronic equipment with the dancers in the background and [0:18:54] [inaudible] did a video and film during the dance as well. In 1966 the possibility came to do a larger project nine evening theaters and engineering, it started out as a project to go to Sweden festival of art and technology Billy and Bob Rushingburg asked some of their friends as composers, dancers, artists and Billy recruited about 30 engineers from Bell Labs to work together for more than about ten months to develop performances that incorporate the new technology and when the idea of going to Sweden fell through they said in typical American fashion lets it on the lets put it on the show and found the armory in New York the armory where the famous 1913 art shows which introduced European art to America was held.
Next at the first meeting Billy asked the artists to say anything they wanted ideas that they wanted to do most people wanted to fly or be lifted or float but then they began to get down to work and different engineers were assigned different artists and they worked on separate projects. Next so this is the 69th [0:20:20] [indiscernible] which was a huge space, we turned it into a theater with lights with sound, here are the bleachers and there was an extraordinary excitement so many people in the art world not just the artists who were doing the pieces but their friends were helping them working, so there was a huge excitement about these performances.
[0:20:42]
That’s the first opening night the army was still drilling there so there was trucks that they sit outside while we were in there for two weeks. Steve Parkston just quickly do the different pieces, Steve Parkston built a huge air structure which took up the whole floor of the armory and had people walk through it and see the performances going on inside the air structure so the audience walked through the performance. As they walked out there was a fish net above them with wire loops attached to tape recorders they were so the magnetic resonance could be picked up by little handsets that we made from radios from transistor radios and as people walked they heard different sounds under the different loops I mean this is the technology now its in our museums for a costar guide but it was sort of built by hand for this.
Debra Heyhed had remote control cards. We, one of the things said that the engineers did is they built the horse FM system a wireless FM system for control for transmission of sound for other things and one of the things that Debra did was to have a card. You see there the FM antennas and the people are holding little boxes FM transmitters and the card is moving around the floor next. Again the dancers interacted with these moving cards next. David Tutor’s piece was beldonian factorial he put eight contact mics I think you can see them at the bottom of the beldony there contact mics on the beldonian going to different sound modification systems of one system turned lights on and off in the armory another one went to a video system that [0:22:48] [indiscernible] had done making images with video and others went to moving sculptures that became loudspeakers when sound was fed into them.
Fred Walder you see on the left invented a control system that would move sound from speaker to speaker proportional control with the light pen he could move sound from speaker to speaker around the armory. This is going pretty fast and its long information but this just gives you a background. I don’t know if you can see the video image or not but Low Cross was the first sound artist to use to do laser patterns run by sound and this is we worked in a [0:23:39] [indiscernible] that he had changed. The laser pattern at the Pepsi Pavilion right. So Alex [0:23:51] [indiscernible] laid down and it was some sort of interminable piece he laid down these colored clothes and you heard the sound of his sounds from his body, his was wired his lungs, his muscles, his brain waves. So as he was doing this very pedestrian task the audience heard sounds from his body the engineer also built a system to raise the volume of the sound the body is quite quiet actually so that he could be heard.
Then he sat down and thought presumably he thought waves were also heard in the armory as Bob Rushingburg and Steve Parkston picked up the claws. [0:24:28] [indiscernible] did a very political complicated theatrical political piece one part of which was a match down sixth avenue with placards with Bob, Hope and Mel. So it was a Bob, Hope, Mel match. I don’t know if you know his work but he most political of this kind of artist in the ‘60s and this piece had this wonderful different things going on. Next was a guided missile that followed the man around the armory and again we use the idea of the myler missile was a little radio control motor at the back and it followed someone around the armory.
[0:25:09]
Male speaker: It just floats.
Julie: It floated yeah and the motor pushed it forward. And at the end space girl comes down from the ceiling and there is a match with the head of Johnson and a rat you have to see the whole thing to get the picture but the idea of these different images that he used in a theatrical way. Bob Whitman had cars that drove out onto the floor of the armory. Each car had a projector or a video projector they parked and then next slide these images were projected onto the back wall sort of a drive in theater. The girl was typing up on the balcony close circuit television. A close circuit television showed here every large and there was a contact mic attached to the typewriter so the sound was quite loud. The armory had a six second echo so you can imagine this kind of reverberating sound in the armory.
Next there is Jackie Levy typing and on the other slide two girls were moving slowly in front of a curved mirror myler mirror and their images too were being broadcast down to people below. At one point he had one camera at the top of Jackie and one camera at the bottom so you get this idea of split person in penguin movie so there was a great mix of different imagery. John Cage next John Cage wanted only sounds that were present at the time to be in his piece so he had ten telephone lines brought into the armory with pick ups on the telephone lines, he had places if he called and left the open telephone…
Male speaker: [0:27:20] [inaudible]
Julie: Hi Sid. And this was part of the input into his piece here you have John getting ready for the piece calling and again you see this kind of primitive pick ups on the telephone but all these were built by the engineers next. Here is John’s piece in which there were blenders and fans and other things with contact mic feeding into this electronic sound system. he also used the electric eyes to break the sounds so as the performers David Tutor, David Bareman walked along the platform they broke the beam and triggered the sound off and on randomly which was one of Chris Johns ideas was to do it complete undetermined piece. Next there is John tuning in a radio one of the pieces next next.
Male speaker: Yeah [0:28:36] [inaudible] alright, thought I had it.
Julie: Another view just with the shadows behind dim lights of course made shadows just keep going Yvonne Rainer sat very high above the floor and instructed people to move for dancers she cold poser dance and she was watching it. There are people listening to the walkie talkie and waiting for their next instructions next. It ended by Steve Parkinson swinging from the balcony all the way across the armory kind of magnificent. Go to the next one Lucinda Charles had a dark ward [0:29:32] [indiscernible] setup so that the buckets that she swung in front of this 70 kilohertz sun mean unheard broke the sound beam and made a kind of whooshing noise in the whole armory, so she created the sound for her performance by her movement.
Again this idea of translating sound into movement, a movement into sound next. Bob Rushingburg wanted a tennis match. so he only made special rackets there is a small FM transmitter in the handle., the contact mic is at the base of the head of the racket and the antennae was wound around the racket, next and every time the people playing tennis hit the ball you heard a huge bang in the armory and a light went out, the light turned out through a very a light to go out. So the people Frank Stiller and his tennis pro played tennis until it was dark, once it was dark a crowd of 300 people came onto the stage in the dark but led by infrared light there are infrared sensitive cameras and you could see them only on screens hang above the audience and Bob had very simple you know hug somebody, wave a hunk, take off your coat but the audience could feel the presence of theses people but they couldn’t see them they could always see the…
Scott: [0:31:07] [inaudible]
Julie: In a sense yeah next and for the last the last third part he decided to soften up the piece and he put Simon Forty who is a wonderful dancer but also a great singer in a sack and she was singing a task of love song and he carried her from place to place around the armory and put her down in this voice which is reverberating through the armory. So there is the group the [0:31:41] [indiscernible] was an official photo of artists and engineers and in those days you couldn’t really tell the difference between the artists and the engineers next.
So there was so much excitement about these performances that the artists and engineers involved decided they should start a foundation to continue the possibilities. We held a meeting at the Broadway central hotel and asked any artist who was interested to come 300 people showed up and we had about 80 requests right way for technical help. So the first job of the EAT was the interest engineers in working with artists. So we did a number of things next put again a newsletter EAT news next we took a booth at the IEEE the professional engineers society in which we talked to engineers and tried to get them interested in working with the EAT that’s John Tucker talking to an engineer with Tom Gromely talking to an engineer next.
Billy gave talks here is in Toronto giving a talk to a one of the things that happened is local groups sprang up, people all over the country decided they wanted to form art and technology groups and we said sure go ahead and in fact in Philadelphia there was someone named Carl [0:33:20] [indiscernible]
Male speaker: Yeah [0:33:21] [indiscernible] Tyler.
Julie: Tyler was started the, an EAT group here and A K Newman who must have been an engineer worked with him. So we would go and talk to them and people could do what they wanted.
Scott: Julie, Steven, sorry just for anyone following Steven has asked me about what time we are talking about this is ’67 is that right?
Julie: ’67.
Scott: Okay.
Julie: ’66, 67, 68 by 1968 we had about 2000 engineers members and 2000 artist members and had started a matching system in which an artist could make a request and we would try to match him or her with an engineer that they could work with.
Scott: Thanks for coming guys.
Julie: Next my friend next. So we had a series of talks on technology in the EAT love for artists talking about holograms.
Scott: So were these I mean if all these happened in 1967 so by how long did all these take place I mean every month every?
Julie: Well the lectures we did 67, 68 I think it was maybe every two weeks we lined it up this is Sarah [0:34:42] [indiscernible] talking about do you think how big lasers were in those days that was a typical laser and then the diffraction grading to make a hologram, people were very interested in holograms. In 1968 the possibility came to work on a Pavilion for export 70 the idea was beginning to develop other artists working in non-art situations. and EAT we were very interested in this and the possibility came up to do a Pavilion for Pepsi Pavilion for export 70 we were given the dome. And I will just talk about the different there are four main artists who did a basic plan and then more than 63 artists’ engineers industries were involved in the different aspects of it.
[0:35:32]
Next, so we were given this dome sort of origami folded dome and the four artists, Frosty Miles, David Tutor, Bob Brio and Bob Whitman really didn’t like it so they said how can we make it disappear. So the idea came for fog we will cover it with fog. So we began to do research on fog in the US and of course dry ice would have been a disaster I mean mosquito and [0:35:57] [indiscernible] would have flocked to the Pepsi Pavilion also there was a physicist who was working with urea and that could make a fog but we didn’t think that Pepsi wanted a Pavilion covered with urine or urea so that was that.
When we first went to Japan for the first meeting to look at the site we met a young artist Fujiko Nakaya his father had been a great snow scientist he. In fact he grown the first artificial snow flag on [0:36:24] [indiscernible] rabbit’s hair. And Fujiko was interested in working with fog he had been doing some desktop pieces so Billy said you want to make the fog for the Pavilion? And she said yes and she found a go back just go back she found an engineer a physicist in Pasadena who was working on pure water through small opening pipe pressure water through small nozzles which could make fog and we’ve strands of fog on the Pavilion the white domes were sculptures that moved very slowly one foot per minute around the plaza. when they bumped into something they would change direction and Bob Brio also had a tape recorders in there so you could here people talking about the view or [0:37:13] [indiscernible] or different environmental sounds. Those two black polls were Frosty two polls made a light frame around the Pavilion two unseen lights were aimed at each other making frame through the fog there is a picture of it later next.
Male speaker: Did Bob Brio he was doing art edge paintings like ten years before that in Canadian films and so the experiments in art technology allow him to make those fiber glass things that bumped and backed up?
Julie: Actually he had been working with those sculptures he had been working with smaller versions of them, not that big small ones that move very slowly. So as making films they went very very fast and sculptures they went very very slowly next.
Male speaker: Sort of I mean just this is pre DT2 here just timeline here.
Julie: Next and so here you have two little kids playing with the - next here is a photo of the fog as it in all its glory so it could on a good day with a little wind it could cover the whole Pavilion. When we first turned it one all of a sudden these fire engines the expo fire engines arrived and they were very relived to see it was only water smoke.
Male Speaker: Amazing.
Julie: Next so there you see on the right to pumps we had about 12 pumps on the left the installation of these strands of pipes was with the nozzles. Again another picture of the fog and here is a picture at night of the Pavilion with Frosty’s light frame you entered through this tunnel into a room next I think there is we called it the clamorer it was sort of clam shape. And there was this moving patter laser light showering down on people as they walked through. The inside the dome was a spherical mirror 90 foot diameters spherical mirror here is a test we did at the dirigible hang in there in Santa Anna.
Male speaker: That’s [0:39:45] [inaudible]
Julie: It was 90 foot diameter and as people walked in next the property was just, just to let you know how it was done we built inside the dome we built a air type bird cage and then pulled the vacuum so the mirror was held up by negative pressure so you didn’t have to have air locks where a lot of air structures is. so here we seeing it being installed with the helium balloon to hold it up until that it could be - this is one of the first pictures we took inside the dome you can see she is standing in the middle and her whole image is mirrored upside down its like its three dimensional other people would see different versions of her image.
[0:40:32]
This is next there you see her, this is just this ray tracing of how that works but next, next I’m sorry so here inside the dome you see this balloon covered with cloth its at a certain point in the dome makes it bloom so you see the whole mirror becomes pink. There are these quite amazing optical effects not really like funhouse but very real and quite amazing. Here is a picture inside the dome you see the whole floor is mirrored upside down and people could see themselves. also we use the same idea that Steve Parkston had used in his piece of each of the floors was made of a different material, glass, stone, brick and under that was sound loops with different sounds and people could walk around and compose their own sound experience in the dome.
The main thing that the artist wanted or didn’t want they didn’t wanted a Disney kind of get in a boat and ride through and be pointed put what they should see, the idea was to make an environment that was very very rich and people could explore it and on their own. Also the idea was that the this space will be a performance space and we wanted to invite different Japanese and American artists to make pieces in the space and we did about two or three but then Pepsi decided that they really didn’t want that kind of performance. Here it’s showing it upside down so you see how three dimensional the real image is.
Next this was a control council the sound modification, sound and light control council that artists were able to use to control the light and sound in the Pavilion the speakers were put behind the mirror in a [0:42:45] [inaudible] grid so that you could move sound across the dome around the dome focus it at one place and David Tutor made several recordings in the dome. Again this is again how it was put it up there you see the speakers this is the different things that the floor was made out of next. This was the you can see the technology of the day again that was a handset for picking up the sounds from the sound moves under the floor.
Female speaker: Excuse me [0:43:25] [inaudible] just to create different sounds.
Julie: And on different experience as you walked on [0:43:32] [indiscernible] you could hear birds as you walked on slate you could hear maybe horses hoofs, if you walked on icefall you might hear cars so there is again the group picture on the day of the opening next. so more and more just to sort of bring this to a close a little bit we became interested in what we call projects outside art and the idea was that the art was a valuable not just the art work but the artist himself had qualities that could be a valuable member of a team of a multi professional different professionals and the artist could be a part of this team and they could focus on projects outside art.
Male speaker: I mean obviously these are cross dimensional teams you’ve got artists, engineers, composers you know the urban cards sort of the mathematical and scientific how did they organize? I mean like was it were they self organized, were there like leaders like how did they- this seems that I mean obviously these large structures that are caving in so obviously the engineers had the influence on that yet there is some of a very kind of whimsical like that big dome this is very unlike any you have ever seen before. Almost as if they are challenging the shapes which have pushed the limits of design because they are just trying things that are just so different. So I guess my question is that who are the ones that coordinated that kind of that led or at least not led director I mean I may even use the wrong terminology like how did all these stuff come together from all these ideas and everything else?
[0:45:32]
Julie: I will talk just specifically about the Pepsi Pavilion because some of the later projects were smaller and demonstration project. But the Pavilion of course we had an architect John Pierce one of the first people brought onto the team was John Pierce and we worked with a Japanese construction company in Tokonaka. So the inner phase with them was interesting we would say where you had a four soaky meeting or a five baler soaky meeting depending on - but not the artist came up with some of the basic ideas I mean some of them of course are sculptors Brio wanted to do hi moving sculpture Frosty had the ideas about the light frame.
But the interior Bob Whitman was very interested in optics and the optics of mirrors but over some time from first to bend around there would be a mirror and maybe a rock band playing the ideas the four artists kind of developed their this coherent idea about the Pavilion. And then Bob Brio was saying it never would have worked if we each hadn’t taken responsibility for other things were interested in and I think Billy let them. So Brio we set him up with an engineer who worked with them and then over saw that he could get the thing built. so there was of course a structure and EAT was running it but one of the elements I think was the person most interested most concerned was in charge of that piece of it. Bob Brio had I don’t know if you noticed the tube coming out, he had huge not well fights with the Japanese architects because they wanted to do something sort of you know very very elegant and he said no no it has a to be a tube coming out. So you know he was left to fight with them about that.
So I think the point was each one there was a structure but each person within that structure. so we started doing - I just want to say the project sets out – we had asked for proposals and that’s the rainfalls the image of the rainfalls is very much something that we thought the rainfalls is something that is sustained by activity it doesn’t put down strong roots or deep roots it’s the activity that I going on. So this idea of the artist engineer artist active in society was the rainfall was just kind of a metaphor for that. And one of the first projects we did we were invited by the head of the atomic energy commission in India to develop software for educational programming. the ATSF satellite was going to be pushed over India for a year and this was in 1970 69, 70 and they were going to be able to bring down to certain villages and give instructions to the villagers and so how do you begin to make the software? We chose as a demonstration of a dairy that they the [0:49:00] [indiscernible] and this is one of our best images of the cow being led for artificial insemination.
Then more than 1500 villagers twice a day they took this small amount of milk from the buffalos it was weighed, it was tested and then sent to the diary. They already had this incredible communication system and we tried you we made a proposal in which you used half inch tape which was just beginning to be known to let the villagers make visual research notes about how they saw what they were doing, how they worked with images and then take I back to the studio and develop a programming from - rather than having someone from the BBC sitting in Delhi thinking how you educate people. And this version of this society project actually was put into effect in the ‘70s. We weren’t involved but some ideas like this. Another project we did its kind of a proto internet project and actually we did it the first of the year the first communication about internet happened in 1971 called touring communication there were two sides linked by telephone lines with telex telephone some called it electro writer and fax. And kids from different schools went to the different areas and communicated with each other using this equipment the idea would be that the school could communicate with another school the kids wouldn’t have to leave their environment.
And so they immediately learnt how to use the equipment play games they were totally at ease with this equipment, these are just some photos of it.
Male speaker: So this is the [0:51:00] [inaudible]
Julie: Its I mean it was a direction we were going definitely but of course using telephone lines at that point this is the whole concept of the internet wasn’t there.
Female speaker: It strikes me that this possibly has something that could do like practically everything.
Julie: Yeah I mean one proposal that we made again using the technology that was available at the day was called the USA presents it was for the bicentennial the idea would be to work with super eight and have people distribute super eight cameras to groups in allover the country and have people make three minute movies, bring the movies to centers again around the country and have it broadcast on UHF and VHF stations 24 hours a day you would have a channel or program by the American people. Well I need to say that didn’t get taken up either. But these ideas of were working with some of the artists we worked with you had these ideas of using the technology to communicate next.
Male speaker: [0:52:33] [inaudible] elaborate on what the photo is.
Julie: Oh okay.
Male speaker: Just [0:52:35] [inaudible] for people because they are asking for it and I can’t send it.
Female speaker: [0:52:40] [inaudible]
Julie: He doesn’t look happy.
Male speaker: Okay so where were we? Fax machines.
Julie: So you see the kids I think and an artist made the environment this kind of cave like environment but this I think that’s really there was some more collaborations with artists with engineers but I think I just want maybe in the end we could talk now this whole idea really of the value of the artist the value of the artist getting access to the technology so he and she could be in the society doing projects in the society not you know confined to painting in the gallery modern of the art. And I think there is yeah you see the picture of USA presents if you want to put it up for the people here just showing.
Male speaker: I send it to them oh here we go yeah.
Julie: Quite primitive but the idea that using satellite technology in the day you could program three minute programs 24 hours a day for the year.
Male speaker: [0:54:02] [inaudible]
Julie: I’m all out I’m not sure its completely I mean, so I just think we can you know we can all you know talk I mean what’s interesting is now with so much access to technology what’s changed I mean is the artist more involved in the society, is have some of these ideas percolated down certainly the idea of working with technology. You know in 1966 it was you know like a dancing bear it was just like just amazing you could do it. Now it wasn’t well you danced its you know it was just you could do it but now its taken for granted and has but has the side of the artist been more involved in the society more active, taken hold.
Male speaker: Can I ask you a question can I ask you just a question about this last image just because I think it sort of leads into other questions about worlds.
[0:55:06]
Julie: Oh okay this is this is a picture of an island [0:55:11] [indiscernible] island in the capelin going Sweden David Tutor had the idea to do a concert on an island called island eye island year in which he would take antennas facing each other if you have two three foot antennas facing each other feed sound into them then it makes the sound beam that you can walk into and walk out of. So his idea was to record sounds from the island during the year and then compose a concert on the island using these different sound beams. The audience would walk through and again compose their own concert. Another thing was to face antenna toward a cliff and the sound would hit the cliff and then just be dispersed all over and we went to this island we map the island we decided also to have fog. So Fujiko Nakaya was going to make different fog sculptures on the island to really show the wind to make certain things about the island visible, the wind patterns, the humidity this kind of thing. And so the blue things are so David what do you call it antennas.
Male speaker: The aerials.
Julie: The aerials sure of the antennas between that the green is where the fog would fall down we also had kites Jackie Matis is an artist who works with kites and tails of kites as he would be flying kites and there was a dancer Margret Olsberg would also do performances. So it was the idea of working on the island and somehow revealing the island through different artists work would reveal the island and the person could experience again the way they wanted to compose it. It’s the greatest concert never done.
Scott: So this is moving back outside of artist outside of art basically this is okay. Great a few people have a couple of questions if you don’t mind hi Judith a few people have a couple if you don’t mind we can just bring them up.
Julie: Sure.
Scott: Maybe yeah come on in and take a sit and grab so food, maybe I will just ask this real quick Steven hey Steven if you can hear me did you want to ask your question from earlier about well there are a few of them but in particular about Julie statement about artist working and non-art situations and asking where that came from did you want to get into that because I feel like a couple of these questions are strained together that and the yeah.
Steven: Yes sure yeah I kind of raised I mean three points in your extremely fascinating presentation Julie unfortunately I could only follow by what you were saying by not without the pictures. You made reference to the importance for EAT of artists working in non-art situations and of course that’s really of key interests to us t A Plausible Art Worlds because it kind of is the essence of our work plausible or otherly plausible art work too. but I was kind of wondering first of all in your experience I mean that I was something which emerged by and large at the time but EAT was obviously one of the vehicles for its emergence. in your experience where do that idea of artists even wanting to work in none-art situations come from not I’m not looking for an artistically answer but really more experiential answer from you.
And the second sort of following from that maybe its the same question in the circumstance is you said that there was it was clear that there is a value that the artist had working outside of the studio and gallery right that leads us to suppose that they the artists bring with oral body or a incarnate some kind of competence or skill that they can move around outside the customary environment. How actually did you define that value what is it? You know I mean if artists leave their customary environment of working outside of an art situation why aren’t they just like everybody else working outside that situation, how do you see that whole thing where do you see it coming from?
[1:00:05]
Julie: Well first the idea of projects outside art I think getting involved in the Pepsi Pavilion we very soon realized that this you know a world’s fare is not your normal art world situation. Although the artists the Japanese artists were very important in the fare and Pepsi had to do a non commercial Pavilion so they did look to artists. But the more we worked on it we realized you were doing something outside the normal art world. Ultimately we decided that the Pavilion was a very large huge work of art but it was in a non-art situation so those ideas began to percolate I think. And I think one of the early ideas that Billy had was that the there was not just making technology available to the artists but this the collaboration between the artist and the engineer and that the engineer would get something from the artists that something would change in the ay the engineer did his work and that the engineering would change it would less insolated, less isolated, less you know what’s the next thing.
So early from the very beginning the EAT had this idea that it was a two way street that it wasn’t just making it possible for the artist to work with new technology but also that this collaboration would feedback into engineering. And how utopian that was I think is more somewhat more utopian but certain engineers did - I mean the main example Fred Woldo who was one of the founders of the EAT went onto develop the first digital hearing aid resound through his interest in music and hearing and his work with David Tutor and sensitivity to this he used his expertise to develop the first digital hearing aid.
There are not a lot of stories like that but that was the idea so as we worked with the Pavilion it became this idea became more and more interesting I think Bob Whitman got more and more involved with EAT at the time and I think he was this was something that was very close this heart as an artist was the idea of being of working in other areas. And you are asking what does the artist bring to the collaboration? I’m trying to - we had three or four things I think one is his sense of scale the artist has a sense of scale of things a sense of doing things with a least amount of material the uses of material, uses of himself I think you can say that a good piece of art has nothing supofolous to it that’s something else. And very very important is his sense of responsibility the artist takes responsibility for what he or she does. He cant say well my boss told me that the deadline you know when you do a work of art and you show it it’s like that’s you.
So this whole sense of responsibility for something which we felt was very important in these kinds of projects. So there was this kind of non-art but I think things that distinguish the making of art that we felt were very valuable in a collaboration with other professionals.
Steven: Julie did you ever put those I mean you just listed off three really interesting points did you ever at that time put these ideas to paper about what artists were bringing with them to extra artistic collaborate endeavors?
Julie: I think we wrote it a little bit yeah I mean if you are interested I could try to find it what we wrote.
Steven: Well I will be super interested that’s for sure because as far as I know nobody else was formalizing those kinds of issues at that time and I think that it was really the essence of that kind of collaboration because you know its clear what engineers were bringing down, they were bringing the capacity to do all these absolutely futuristic kinds of things. But it isn’t so clear specifically what artists were bringing you know accept that sort of goofy creativeness that aura that surrounds art but its not very solid that kind of thing. So I will be super interested to read and to know where those things were published and who might have set eyes on them and so on.
Julie: Well yeah I mean I think Billy talked about it in talks I will find it I mean I know these thee things that we talked about were very important I don’t think there was a lot of analytical work here it was really a belief in the artist. I think at the basis of the EAT it was really a belief in the artist that they she should have access to the technology and that the whole society would benefit from this. And I think you find out more and more artists more and more artists projects are projects in the society I mean you know I don’t know I’m just thinking about new art are they quantifying this and looking at this and its not coming out of art as much as its coming out of the society the art itself maybe I’m wrong.
[1:05:57]
Scott: Sure if you want to speak to her okay.
Female speaker: She was saying just kind of like I guess adding onto that point I feel like its not and correct me if I’m wrong - I feel like its not necessarily like maybe a physical representation that the artist is bringing or like an object or a certain exact thing but more just like that outward thinking like just you know the idea that to broaden her eyesight and think in a different way that most engineers and technologically people right brain refrain you know just don’t quite think of unless its kind of brought to their attention.
Scott: I’m okay [1:06:49] [inaudible]
Male speaker: But don’t you think like experiments in art and technology is just like one of many steps that happened in the 20th century and the fact that they are real engineers kind of boosted it up but it also goes back to like [1:07:04] [indiscernible] calling up and having enamel paining and [1:07:08] [indiscernible] making knee in an environment of 48 and a constructivist and using plastics and cage and its just a part of a soup but it all kind of like went together with fabrication techniques that were going on in the ‘60s and openness to all kinds of things were happening so its great that Billy was involved and all the guys in Bell Labs but it kind of went from slowly going up to like a jump and so its just a part of the continuity.
Julie: Yeah I think that’s true I do think that one of the things that EAT or added was just this idea of collaboration that I think that Billy increasingly felt was important from as I said he first thought that engineering could provide a new pallet for the artist you know new toys to play with but after working with Bob Rushingburg and seeing how Bob worked this whole idea of collaborating and that two people could work together the artist would have the first idea but maybe the through working something would come out that neither of tem thought of at the beginning. So as a human it’s a human interaction that I think in bringing that into the art making situation.
Male speaker: [1:08:36] [inaudible]
Female speaker: Oh I’m sorry.
Male speaker: [1:08:44] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Its Rushingburg, its Cage, its Cunningham first collaboration and black mounting college back in the late ‘40s and this is more industrial or more engineering techniques. but its very visionary and to no end except aesthetics in the funny its not like oh I’m going to make a better sound you know like the artists are coming up with the ideas and the engineers are allowing them giving them the with their [1:09:20] [indiscernible] they are allowing them the engineers gave this technology and idea and knowledge to enable the artist to do the things they couldn’t do without the engineers so its a real collaborative thing that never happened before, before it was like artists kind of having these ideas and kind of forcing other people to do it and like the enamor guys in Chicago with Mollinage they didn’t know that could be art whereas this Billy knew it was going t be art.
So it was kind of whatever the word is so it’s kind of that’s why its kind of there is this jump. But it’s also the ‘60s where it’s kind of open to a lot of things too especially collaborative things you know and things that happened. So anyway I’m just rumbling.
[1:10:13]
[:10:20.1] [background voice]
Steven: I’m confused Scott no I mean we are talking about collaboration but I think on the hand that was [1:10:30] [indiscernible] what would happen when there is discord where maybe an artist was like no you are ruining my vision or an engineer is saying you are completely out of your mind with this shape that isn’t viable. I mean were there ever arguments that just like maybe it was something that maybe it was one that came to mind that you could share with us that kind of illustrate maybe how they start off with the really rough point and maybe how they found way to smooth things over and come to a conclusion on how to work together maybe if they didn’t see eye to eye or maybe they never did.
Julie: I have to one of the things that EAT never did we had a matching program where artists would write in and we would match them and we never followed up. So a lot of experience about collaborations we is that we had no idea what happened so I can’t I didn’t have large experience. but I can say the sometimes the problems would be if the engineer wanted to be the artist, the artist never well yeah sometimes they wanted to be the engineer but mainly the engineer would still want to be the artist or the accountant wanted to be the artist.
But actually with the Pavilion it was interesting what you’re saying we had a young man from Bell Labs who came on board to help to build the control council and David Tutor had an idea he wanted certain number of inputs I think he wanted 12 inputs and there were going to be 37 outputs and Gordon Momoore was going to build the sound modification system and the engineer the young man he said just why do you need so many inputs? And he ultimately didn’t give David as many inputs as he would have liked you don’t need that many.
And Billy always felt bad that he wasn’t monitoring the situation he didn’t understand because for David he could use everything he could get his hands on and he knew what he was doing but he was an engineer who didn’t ruin the control council but it limited what David could have done. And so there was an engineer making an aesthetic some kind of aesthetic decision or. But I also have to say that Billy said that in general those things that the artists asked for were fairly trivial for the engineer. I mean trivial in this kind of mathematical sense the sense that they knew how to do it or it was a different use for saying they knew how to do but it was the advantage was operating in an environment they had never operated in they you know on the stage instead of a clean laboratory that you come to nine to five all of sudden on the stage trying to get this FM transmitter to work. I mean things were built for [1:13:22] [indiscernible] that were a little bit ahead of his time but not the artist never really sparked oh my God the transistor or something but it was the idea of using their expertise and building in another environment that was valuable.
Scott: Yeah so a couple of questions were queued up from earlier mainly from okay actually one other thing I wanted to write down.
Julie: [1:13:54] [inaudible]
Scott: Yeah exactly so I guess I just wanted to quickly sum up a few things that came up in conversation so far just so that they don’t get buried and not to derail the conversation but some people on Skype may not have been able to jump in or wanted to really interrupt yet but. So there is two things in it if you don’t mind Anthony asking what you were going to ask first I think it has to do mainly with number two in this little list here and I know this is really generalizing because some of the questions are a little bit more specific than this but I think they kind of fall in here and then if you don’t mind Steven following up with one and three. Anthony was asking about - can you try your mic Anthony if not we can try to read out your question.
Anthony: Right how do I sound am I coming through right [1:14:56] [inaudible]
Scott: Turn up the volume a little bit.
Anthony: Hello.
Scott: Yeah we can the volume is a little low.
Anthony: Can you hear me?
Scott: But yeah there yoyo go.
Anthony: Because it’s really loud is it.
Steven: I can hear you great Anthony.
Julie: Now we can hear you.
Anthony: That’s good as I was saying its excellent. okay well okay the question I have been bursting to ask is well the impression I got to what of cause there was a great sense of excitement and optimism with these collaborations and a lot of performances and illustrations of the work of course took the form of the trade show I mean you even mentioned that and there was like a dancing bear which of course makes me wonder about how the essence of the day what have we inherited from this and whether how the collaborations and whether they would trust the same type of collaborations in the context we have now. For example adept with the technologies and the researches of the early 20th century would it be game to do a collaboration with [1:15:59] [indiscernible] who is Zurich.
And I was very interested to wonder in the light of artists like Mark Polin and even your artist working with second hand and digital technologies today whether they will be game to do collaborations with them or out of fear that what they produced might actually make those companies and those researches look really bad these things seem to be very companies and researchers seem to be very afraid of what others are going to do now and how they are going to make their work look. So that’s my question are such collaborations possible today or are others too cynical to be out to work with these researchers?
Julie: I don’t think artists are cynical I’m sorry but that’s not the point. I think the way EAT operated it was really on a one to one basis the artist had an idea and Peter Pool or Billy or Fred Woldo or someone would look into the list of engineers and say well say and so is aeronautics engineer he might be able to help you make this thing float or fly or balance and then we would put them together and the idea was that the engineer and not working mainly with engineer not scientists necessary it was a problem solver and the artist was he was presenting them with the problem that if it interested them they would work on. Maybe the nature of the…
Anthony: It was a part of research it was a part of research continuing to some degree.
Julie: Yes they could use their skills to solve this problem. Now Mark Polin had to had the engineers working with them but there were people who disaffected from their company so that doesn’t count. But he did have engineers working. its such its individual thing really and it’s the project if it appeals to the engineer or the scientist they are going to do it.
Anthony: Thanks for that I was wondering if [1:18:37] [indiscernible] question along those lines is whether it’s also any different from how people worked together in the ‘60s to kind of work together in the ‘70s in light with the technology and progress with artists it really depends on like artists and researchers whether there [1:18:58] [inaudible] technology at that particular period or whether they just [1:19:02] [inaudible] why is it that’s why [1:19:09] [inaudible]
Julie: Well you know yeah there were people who didn’t want to work with technology there were people who when we did the Pepsi Pavilion said oh you’re working for the industrial military complex. There are to know there are always there is a political aspect but I think artists the artists at least that wanted to work with technology just wanted to do their work don’t you think?
Male speaker: I think there was a thank you you mentioned a few times that Pepsi you funded the expo70 that was what it was the Pavilion?
Julie: The Pavilion.
[1:19:57]
Male speaker: Yeah so where did the I guess I just kept wondering for all these projects like and I have wondered this for projects I thought of and scrapped before even they got out of my head like where does the money come from and how do you prevent the money for a project from just overwhelming the project itself you know I mean that’s a cynical question but how did you pay for it all?
Julie: With difficulty. No the Pepsi Pavilion was unique in the sense that we were commissioned to do a Pavilion and there was a budget.
Male speaker: What about smaller projects?
Julie: Smaller projects we would get grants the nine evenings just kept growing the budget developed day by day and there was a huge deficit at the end of it. So but we worked with grants and I think part of the problem I mean EAT was less after the mid ‘70s it was less active partly I think because artists were, knew how to approach to companies and work with technology it was an established thing that you could get access to certain materials and techniques but also we really did fall between two stools this idea of projects outside art and we did a project in education and we did a project in telecommunications and nobody quite knew what to do with the EAT so we would make proposals but it didn’t fit anywhere so there was less and less funding for these ideas.
Female speaker: Did that ever limit you?
Julie: Not for the ideas we wanted to do but to take the project bigger or move forward possibly yes.
Male speaker: The irony of all this talk today is that we are using incredible technology then in the 1960s and 70s would have been unfathomable or it would have been something like [1:22:17] [indiscernible] wouldn’t been thinking about and it’s my kid who is eight is using computers and downloading digital camera images and things like and going on the internet. so that what was I think it hasn’t technology hasn’t been co-opted but it’s been absorbed and everybody and lasers which were thousands of dollars and four feet long probably when those images were are now pointers in art history lab you know for $30. So technology as technology becomes more and more democratized there is probably less need for engineers and projects like this or not? That’s the question.
Julie: I think with the idea that you do in you know disciplinary projects to attack social problems that hasn’t gone away.
Male speaker: No I’m not saying that. Do we in the ‘60s and ‘70s we needed the engineers to do this things now artists or whatever artists ‘can now do this themselves because technology is more visible and available.
Julie: So it is interesting what the next step what the next art is going to be like I mean for your generation of kids it completely at ease with certain technologies then what are you going to do with it I mean that really is the question you know. I mean Bob I’m working with artist Bob Whitman still and the projects which he has done we have used engineers and ITP people that know the technology better who know the communication technology better but so the possibility of collaboration is still there. And I think a lot of projects that you all do that the younger people do you collaborate with people so this idea is definitely it’s still in the air and it’s still something.
Scott: Sorry I mean this is one of the reasons that we were really interested to bring you in particular into this series of chats. Not that collaboration wasn’t already in the air in the ‘60s on some level you know interdisciplinary ways as well but specifically within the art field [1:24:57] [indiscernible] that way [1:24:59] [indiscernible] I mean. but EAT was a way of seem to me a way of trying to interrogate that collaboration without suffocating it you know or putting it rather. there was a high level of inter disciplinary by definition you know it was I mean that was that it was at the core and I think that there was it seems to me that there was some implicit bias toward merging of efforts or some kind of or like what [1:25:35] [indiscernible] called an integrate of approach as opposed to focusing on differentiation.
[1:25:38]
It seem like a lot of people who you worked with were maybe not always working that way but very interested in that. And so it’s really it’s a really interesting case study for us because it’s a sort of parallel world you know it’s a microcosm because it gained a spotlight and obviously there were some prominent people involved in. And so even within the art realm there is a historic bookmark EAT at the very least you know in most you know like 20th century art history courses. But it doesn’t always go in depth and to me it seems like a kind of you know whenever you have a certain bias, you tend to add certain ingredients to the perdition of others. And so what? the EAT seems to me is an ongoing you know culture in a way or a growing organism of sorts that we are trying to figure out and get a sense of what it is because it includes some things and not others but because of that it has its own qualities. and I think that other things that relate to that, other initiatives, other artist and other people whether aware of that or not are kind of sort of building on that case study and that’s really interesting to us. Yeah we are very interested on focusing in collaboration and particularly that’s our bias for this project of course that’s a big part of it so it’s a good thing though.
Julie: I think collaboration but also respect for the professionalism of each of the collaborators I think that is really important that to understand what each person brings to the collaboration and letting that have full flowers as in you everybody isn’t the artist or sense kind of but everybody isn’t the engineer either but that idea of the respect for the - what’s interesting to me is how that has gotten blurred a little bit with computer technology I mean with programmers. so is a programmer an engineer or an artist and I think sometimes it’s just blurred and maybe not for the best that I mean what is programming and how does that fit in or how does the programmer fit in as opposed to the you know artist who is working with it?
Male speaker: Julie Billy was a unique person and because he was both an engineer but he was friends with artists and he was friends with museum directors, so he was able to kind of work in this inner space that was you know as sometimes as curator and sometimes a facilitator and sometimes almost an artist himself are there any engineers or more engineering like thinkers that at that same level I know that the art world was smaller than it was probably easier to maneuver or make the connections between them but are there any at that level that you know of today?
Julie: I don’t but I think that’s my lack rather than there must I mean there are people thinking and doing this out there I just don’t know them a lot of you know media critics and technology critics and you have to tell me who they are.
Scott: Oh definitely well come back next week but seriously yeah I mean it’s definitely a good conversational topic focusing on people that do work in that environment I mean it’s sort of become [1:29:36] [indiscernible] by talking about collaboration ads a fad but definitely there has been a ground swell and there is a lot of examples to point to. People that and particularly people that collaborate on between discipline for instance and that type of technology on some level.
Steven: Can I jump in here a little bit because.
Scott: Yes Steven.
[1:30:00]
Steven: What Greg just said Greg just mentioned that it’s good that we don’t know you know one or two big names but in fact maybe that’s one of the signal differences between arts in the ‘60s with respect to technology? the technology is much more diffuse I mean we have an extra 40 years of people learning programming of learning how to write code of learning becoming really literate I guess in technology and I think that what Julie has been describing the type of collaborations that you were doing in ’67, ’68 , ’69 period was with bringing the cutting edge of the technology industries and in Bell Labs was Bell Labs you know this were like went to you know the dudes who could people on the mood if they actually did that.
But then today you know that kind of technology even very high [1:30:50] [indiscernible] technologies in the hands of many you know. So maybe there is its more resomic kind of an arrangement that we’ve had but that leads me to a kind of a question because. if that’s true then that’s one of the big differences between now and then I think that in the conversation which we had with [1:31:20] [indiscernible] Stavini and Julie you were there for that conversation in Apex Art one of the critics that was made of not of the EAT that vening but of the artist placement group was that they had a kind of a 1960 style utopian belief that you could collaborate with big business and somehow not be subjected to its agenda and that was actually a little naïve and in fact to extend that maybe to - well let me put it this way is that obviously bell labs were extremely open minded to working with artists even when artists were saying [1:32:06] [indiscernible] do things that ordinarily they weren’t really being paid or trying to make money in doing.
But that wasn’t only true with respect to art I read today for example that at the beginning of the Nixon years in United States the police department of the United States couldn’t believe the amount of money that as being thrown at them to do anything, they just all of a sudden had their budgets increase exponentially and they didn’t quite know how to handle this.
So you know the most kind of a lot of money floating around all over the place and a lot of desire and belief that you could sort of do anything and that would kind of circumscribe actually the lifespan of EAT I mean I don’t know if this is actually true but it’s kind of look there seems to be a great deal of belief that it was possible for artists to work on even in a flat plain fields with business that obviously had a capital agenda totally incommensurate with the artists sort of desires right. And if that all came to an end surprisingly enough with the advent of the Regan when all that utopian stuff was sort of just cut back. That would be a very different conjuncture than the one today and a very different horizon of expectations what do you think about that?
Julie: Now today you have the world comics and the Jeff Coons and the today you have this weird what mega artists and this really conjunction of fashion and art and business and art and you have luxury businesses advertising in art magazines. I mean that never happened I said whatever I mean the society is different I mean somehow the art world is more integrated into the society not necessary for not unless the way the EAT say in vision did of the individual having more access to the technology for his or her own pleasure of variety I mean I was looking at the EAT had these aims which seemed very they are hard to read written by Billy and Bob.
If you don’t its maintaining a constructive climate for the recognition of the new technology in the arts by a civilized collaboration between groups unrealistically developing in isolation, eliminate the separation of the individual from the technological change and expand and enrich technology to give the individual of variety and pleasure and adventure through its exploration and involvement in contemporary life. And the third one encourage industrial initiative in generating original forethought instead of a compromising and aftermath and precipitate a mutual agreement in order to avoid the waste of a cultural revolution. So I mean there were somewhat utopian grandiose.
[1:35:23]
Scott: What is this from maybe if you don’t mind?
Julie: These were the EATNs that were written up you can I think Billy and Bob wrote them together so just some of the impenetrable languages Bob Rushingburg or both of them actually. But I think the idea of the separation the individual from technology which was true in the ‘60s that maybe at least toady they had separated from they are not separated from certain aspects of technology but there may be others that are just as far into the individual.
Male speaker: I think how can I put this I think and from where getting from where you are telling us engineers with artists and the derivative of that was something different today we all talk about Google many of us have smart phones we work in frameworks the idea that there are tools prebuilt for us I mean the legos are you know you can build whatever toy you want but you’re limited to only so there is a lot of possibilities but you’re limited by those to a certain point like what would you recommend for people that want to break those norms. Let’s say there are people that on the bleeding edge both of art and both of technology what recommendations would you give them to basically breakaway from the Google’s because Google is becoming a paradigm. and I think that this idea that engineers with because I always see artists as visionaries and I see engineers as being you know people that can make something that can something practical or lend you kind of applied technology to kind of make your life different and easier and give you a new perception. So I guess that’s my question is that for those that are you know the teenagers that are in their garages now that like I don’t like any of these that’s up there I don’t like Skype I don’t like all these you know even beyond the open source, the idea that because we are still working with tools that with rules so how do you break the rules and try to do something different and without alienating people that you never really need to help make it plausible?
Scott: Would you mind if we had a piggyback question as well I don’t know if Jenna you have access to your mic or if you want me to just mention what you said earlier or…? Or maybe she stepped away first okay. Yeah well I will mention it well I mean Jenna was just sort of argument that question you can address about the stereotypes of artists and engineers as well that I kind of want to pull this up but I don’t know how quickly I will be able to find it, I think the gist of it was and Jenna correct me if I’m wrong is that yeah they both are I mean they both have quarter “creativity” or imaginative practice often they just have different there is a sort of there is a different playing field within the field and you know the artists can be just as the [1:38:49] [indiscernible] predictable I mean not to step on any one as engineers can be imaginative and mind expanding but at least I think is what you were saying Jenna so correct me if I’m wrong but I want to pass it over to Julie.
Julie: This word always comes up creativity right when you’re talking about artists and engineers and obviously yeah I mean a good engineer will come up with a good solution and it’s probably a creative solution I’m not you know saying engineers can. But I think your question it’s the individual artist I don’t know you can. The individual artist is going to have the idea and then I think now it’s easier to seek out perhaps somebody who can work with him or her on that idea but it has to come from it comes from the individual. I mean you know I just saw a Christian [1:39:50] [indiscernible] show as a Whitney and I didn’t know his work in the early days but it’s amazing you know cutting up records and playing them you know taking very simple this breaking out off of the technology and then breaking into something else it’s the individual artist, it’s up to you all.
[1:40:13]
Scott: Do anyone have any burning statements that they wanted to follow that up with because we end right on the dot at 8:00 but we don’t want to squash any something that someone else wanted to mention that we could sort of bookmark for later.
June: [1:40:38] [inaudible]
Scott: Oh Julie were you saying something it almost sounded like someone was on I can’t tell who.
June: Yeah that’s me this is June can you hear me?
Scott: Oh hi Julie yeah let me turn up the volume up a little bit. Oh my bad June.
June: Actually I was weren’t you [1:40:57] [inaudible]experience there are often times where I have seen artists working with fake engineers or scientist where surprisingly the more creative solutions or even deeper conceptual insights might come from the sort of scientific [1:41:14] [inaudible]I’m wondering if you have examples that capture that in those projects.
Scott: Sorry I think the audio really sort of…
Julie: Alright I just [1:41:35] [inaudible] I mean you know.
Scott: Oh you were able to hear okay yeah.
June: Did you get that shall I turn it up?
Julie: No I got it I just can’t think specifically I mean I’m not putting down engineers or you know or artists. I just can’t specifically so many we did know about a lot of the projects and a lot of things in the Pepsi Pavilion and even nine evenings it was a consensus going on a lot of different inputs maybe. But do know people who’ve you know artists now who work with some scientists and worked with people about crystals and other things it’s you know it works the kind of human the human interaction works.
Scott: Yeah we definitely I mean our main interests is in elaborating on that kind of criticizing problems of that but also following up on the possibilities of that so. But anyway we have to end at 8:00 just because we promised that were always going to do and we are slightly few minutes over but it’s really just fascinating we could keeping but Julie it’s been great having you.
Julie: Thank you very much. It does seem like a land far away does it?
[1:43:11] End
Week 30: The Think Tank that has yet to be named
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Jeremy Beaudry from the anomalously named “Think Tank that has yet to be named”, a sort of roving creative public policy institute that initiates site-specific conversations, performative actions, and educational projects questioning contemporary urban issues wherever they happen to crop up. Specifically, the group is concerned with how artists and their creative practices so often end up embroiled in urban (re)development strategies, gentrification and the general homogenization of urban space.
http://www.thinktank.boxwith.com/
Since its inception in 2006, the Think Tank’s permanently open-ended denomination draws particular attention each time it is enunciated to the perils and pitfalls of name giving — above all naming’s inherent tendency to a assign a fixed identity, something any would-be plausible artworld must be wary of. Naming is a powerful political act when it makes a previously unauthorized body appear; yet perhaps only “as-yet-to-be-naming” can perpetuate this political potential over time. As Jeremy Beaudry, Director of the Dept for the Investigation of Meaning, explains,
the Think Tank is comprised of several Departments, each led by a single Director. There can be no Department without a Director, and there can be no Director without a Department. Directors are both autonomous agents and cooperative collaborators. In this respect, the Think Tank has no members, only directors. The declaration of a directorship in a Department amounts to a statement of that individual’s bias and agenda. Nothing is more offensive to the Think Tank than the pretense of neutrality.
The list of names of the Think Tank’s Departments (past and present) wryly makes the point:
- Dept. for the Investigation of Authenticity (DIA)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Cross-Pollination (DICP)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Documentary Subjectivity (DIDS)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Ecological Subjectivity (DIES)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Failure (DIF)
- Dept. for the Investigation of InterSubjectivity (DIIS)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning (DIM)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Metaphorical Agency (DIMetA)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Neutrality & Palatability (DINP)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Radical Pedagogy (DIRP)
- Dept. for the Investigation of ReHumanization (DIRH)
- Dept. for the Investigation of the Structure of Expectations (DISE)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Tactical Education (DITE)
- Dept. for the Investigation of Tactical and Strategic Alignment (DITSA)
- Dept. for the Investigation of the Unmentionable and the authentic
- Dept. for the Investigation of the Unthinkable (DIUT)
Transcription
Week 30: The Think Tank that has yet to be named
[0:00:00]
Male Speaker: Hey everybody.
Male Speaker: Hey Scott.
Male Speaker: Hello.
Male Speaker: Hey Christian.
Male Speaker: Hey.
Male Speaker: Cool so it looks like we got pretty much everybody if you get dropped and didn’t see my message earlier just go ahead and ping us on through the text chat and we will just add you. Thanks sailor yeah that’s what I need to. So welcome everyone to another another week of our series on plausible art worlds where we are looking at one, different another example of an art world each week that’s structured differently than one’s currently on offer in our estimation anyway. And this week we are talking with the think tank, we are talking with Jeremy Beaudry about the think tank that has yet to be named. I guess I would say I don’t want to say ironically named but maybe paradoxically named. Think tank that has no affiliation with any large organization or municipality and anyway Jeremy thanks for coming. Would you mind, normally we jump right in to asking you to describe what it is for those people who don’t know, would you mind going ahead? I could give you a more flowery intro but we should try to avoid that.
Male Speaker: So I'm talking in a microphone to you out there and also to you guys in here. I'm going to have to wrap my brain around that somewhat. Thanks Scott for having me out to talk about the think tank. I'm hoping you’ll help me and all of you here help me make sense of why we were invited to participate in this plausible art worlds extravaganza. So what ill do is kind of talk through somewhat historically about how the think tank came to be, why it is what it is, maybe I can talk about some of the projects and perhaps even can talk about how it might be changing. And of course when you guys have questions please just interrupt and let me know. For those of you who are in front of your laptops as many of you are, if you want to pull up the think tank website its thinktank.box with.com. It’s linked from the base camp site. That can, you can just tune me out and look through out if you want to see an extensive archive of a lot of our well a lot of our projects really. And also for the Skype folks if your having trouble hearing me anyway as I hold this microphone let me know, I want to make sure everyone can hear me clearly.
Male Speaker: [0:03:56] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: I'm worried about sound and hearing so I think I'm okay.
Male Speaker: [0:04:06] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Okay. Alright so the think tank that is yet to be named, it began in 2006 and it was started by four of us here in Philadelphia, specifically four of us who were living in a neighborhood called Fishtown and sometimes also Kensington which is not in the center of the city it’s a neighborhood that’s kind of well, now anyway its on the very edge of gentrification that pushes up from center city and consumes a lot of neighborhoods that are now so called desirable. But before I get into the think tank it’s important for me to talk about my experience, our experience in the neighborhood again with the four of us and that helps me communicate why the think tank was formed.
[0:05:10]
So what’s really important is that the four of us were very much involved in some intense community organizing community activism around the proposal of two casinos for Philadelphia. At the time we didn’t know where they were going but we knew they were going to be five of them, and it turns out that three of the proposed casino sites were actually in our neighborhood in Fishtown in Kensington. You can read about that history somewhere else, I won’t go into it in too much detail. The point is that it was myself, Meredith Warner, Liana Helen, who were artists and another individual named Jethro Hico who is a long term community organizer. And we were very much kind of knee deep in really an intense day to day engagement with activism and community organizing around this particular neighborhood issue. And it was important, it wasn’t really about kind of not in my back yard attitude, it was more about things like transparent processes by which neighborhood development happens, good governance and really just giving the citizens of Philadelphia a voice into what happens to the city and how it happens.
So this time it was really intense for us. I mean it was it was multiple community meetings a week in the evenings a lot of us were poaching time from our jobs to do the work; I mean it was a crash course and what it means to be a community activist. We were doing media outreach we were doing public outreach we were lobbying here in Philadelphia and in the state capital, we were organizing our neighbors, we were building coalitions across the city networking other kinds of groups, civic organizations etcetera. And it was really exciting and it was really frustrating, it just about killed us. I can say that now because I have taken a step back from that particular issue I have made out alive. So that was just a really intense thing that was happening, it was a way to very intense way to experience the city of Philadelphia because I had just come back to Philadelphia in 2005, I had been away for five years and this was kind of like I was just thrown in the deep end so to speak. Okay so why is this important? Well as I said at the time considered myself an artist two others of us who started the think tank consider ourselves artists and we are really starting to wonder well one, as artists doing this work, this activist work this community organizing what were the connections the possible connections that were there. What did it mean for us as artists to be doing this kind of work and also was there any way to somehow you know perhaps bring those two worlds, art and activism next to each other in some way.
And so this was the question and I haven’t quite answered this question. But I kind of make sense of it as I go. The important thing here is to as I said this was a very intense period of doing this work I think we were also just wondering is there a place for so called art, is there a way to kind of do work like this and have it live in the world, not as kind of directly identifiable activist work but perhaps as something slightly different from that that might consider art depending on how it looks or not. So that’s kind of the the kind of context around which the think tank came about. I mean we were curious about doing work as artists that dealt with the same kinds of content and issues that our work as activists did, but was slightly eschewed from that, purely instrumentalised activist organizing work.
So I think like if I can just interject one of the things we learnt on the way is that or we decided is that we didn’t want a kind of total blurring of a line between art and activism. We actually wanted them to kind of maintain some integrity and live adjacent to each other. So our work as artists couldn’t inform how we thought about things and how we did our work as activists and vice versa, our work as activists could influence and inform the work that we did for whatever reason we labeled as art. And I don’t want to get in to the art, not art, art versus activism kind of discussion right now but this were just some things that were kind of in our minds.
[0:10:18]
Also important for us at this time was really kind of wondering critically about what our roles as artists in the project of gentrification meant because we were living in a neighborhood that was on the fringe of a gentrification wave and we were benefiting by that. We had, you know we had cheap rent some of us we bought houses for cheap relatively speaking but and we also knew that our presence there as artists was changing the neighborhood. I mean if you go into Fishtown this neighborhood there is this Frankfurt art, Frank wood art corridor and this is an economic development tool that the local CDC uses one to do things that I think are generally good and sincere and about improving the community but two may have unintended consequences, such as you know raising rent raising housing prices and ultimately perhaps displacing people. So this was kind of a built in point of criticality in terms of how we were thinking about our relationship to the place we were living. So I'm I seeing questions, should I start answering questions.
Male Speaker: [00:11:43] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Okay.
Male Speaker: Thanks, my question about whether there was a place for so called, well activist practices within the realm of art, he says well, the answers definitely yes. I guess that was more of a statement than a question that at least that’s something to connect with. I was, I was curious to know how sort of maybe even connected with Steven’s comment that you saying that your, your statement about not wanting to blur art and activist as professionally [0:12:37] [indiscernible]. Yet then again you kind of, you didn’t want to you didn’t want to blur them. You might be, you might disambiguating them but you at least see that they could have a relationship to one another and I was curious about how the practices were eschewed in order to achieve that and I'm sure you are going to get to that I just want to mention it and Chris was asking why keep them separate. I think besides the last clarification point that’s really…
Male Speaker: I think those questions are related or those comments are related and if I, I think I’ll transition to talking about the think tank itself like its structure because it is a bit of an absurd entity in many ways and I think it gets to the heart of those questions. Okay so and I'm kind of going to this narrative I hope it’s not too tedious. So okay I’ve set that context we were artists, we were heavily involved in this community organizing and activism and someway we were looking for an outlet to deal with some of those similar issues but in a practice that was perhaps more located within a kind of art practice itself. We, I have to go back to some more information about the kinds of things we were doing or the kinds of experiences we were having as we were doing this community organizing work. As I said we were going to all these various community meetings, sometimes they were civic organizations sometimes they were with local politicians, state politicians and we kept running across these very curious things and these very curious positions. And all of these situations we would always find out politicians or community leaders who wanted to somehow be neutral or agnostic about a particular issue or a particular agenda. And so they would kind of play this ‘I’m a servant of the people’ idea as if they were mediators or didn’t have an agenda.
[0:15:08]
What became really clear is actually no one in this situations is without bias or without agendas or without a particular perspective. And so this was just a really annoying thing. So we wanted within the structure of think tank to find a way that if somebody participated if somebody was involved they would by default have to sneak a declaration of what their particular bias or agenda potentially would be. And so this starts to get into this idea of the directorship. So the think tank that is yet to be named was considered as a kind of loosely networked group of individuals, there were no members, there would only be directors and each director would be the director of a department that had a member of one, them as directors. And so we developed this kind of formal almost full bureaucracy that could somehow in a way absurdly mimic some of the bureaucracies we were finding ourselves involved with and working within. But at the same time we would have a mechanism built in whereby you just understand where people are coming from. So early on I became the director of the department for the investigation of meaning and you can look to the website for a number of other of these examples. There was, there is the director of the department for the investigation of metaphorical agency, there is the director of the department for the investigation of failure and so on and so on.
And this was again the mechanism whereby people who were involved in the project would be very kind of clear and transparent about, well this is what I care about, this is my position and in this situation this is kind of the perspective that I hold in this, in whatever the project was. Now I think let me move to answer a few of the questions early on about the ways in which maybe that line between art and activism was maintained and why we thought it was important. The, I think a very influential text for us at least for me and it was shared and discussed often in these early days was Hakim Bey’s The Temporal Autonomous Zone. And I think the way the think tank thought about itself in setting its work and itself actually into the space, the public space, the space of the city was very much dependent upon some of, some of the ideas from the TAZ whereby you would through our work and through the strange kind of structure that we had created and the kind of persona that we took on with these directorships, we were really kind of eking out a somewhat autonomous space within the public spaces that we were doing the projects and kind of within the space of activism and organizing in general.
So if only for a moment, if only for the life of a particular conversation or a particular meeting or project we were through this absurd structure and through just the shifting of the space and opening up something that again was as I say slightly eschewed from the everyday practices of activists and organizers within the city. I'm going to take a breath and just see if anyone has any questions right now about anything or needs clarification.
Male Speaker: [0:19:29] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: I'm still here.
Male Speaker: Looks like everybody is bugging out here. This is Allen Amber.
Male Speaker: Hi.
Male Speaker: Hallo.
Male Speaker: Yeah yeah, sorry I missed the very beginning you were involved in community activism organizing enrollment issues?
[0:20:02]
Male Speaker: Yes. I was for about two and a half three years very heavily involved in a citywide effort to stop the development of casinos, two casinos in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia and this also kind of led into just kind of general organizing around transparency, for public processes and land use and urban development. So that was kind of the context from which we started to think about what the work of the think tank might do. Somebody just fell to the floor; there is kungfu above us which you guys probably already know.
Male Speaker: Yeah the Dojo. Did think tank continue basically with this kind of an engagement with the community organizing or urban development issues?
Male Speaker: Not so, not so focused generally, I'm hoping everyone heard the question. The question was did the work of the think tank kind of continue to deal with these issues of urban developments and perhaps the casino issue itself. And the answer is, well there were some crossover, I think we were much more, well actually, you know now that I think about it let me say at times the think tank addressed very specific and pertinent questions that had to do with the work we were doing as activists. So for example one of the publicly held private meetings that we did was on the site of the proposed Sugar House casino and this is a very, this is a very significant site not only for the casino project but just in terms of the history of Philadelphia its on the river front. It has a lot of layers of history that go back to pre-colonial times and this was a site that we held one of these meetings at in order to kind of investigate the ways in which metaphor are used by just about anybody who is kind of competing for the life of the city, or the right to the city if I could use that phrase.
And because developers, politicians they use metaphors for their own means and also we as activists and artists we use metaphors sometimes appositionally for our own means, residents use metaphor. Metaphor is a very powerful tool that helps bring things, helps explain things helps frame things, helps position a number of things. So in that case yes we were kind of addressing the, some of the issues we were focused on in the community organizing and activist work. But what's important is again there was an adjacency, it wasn’t that things were overlapped but we found that using the think tank as a kind of critical lens we were able to kind of shed new light about how we had thought of the issue, how we had thought of the struggle, how we had thought of even its history. So in that case it was a good example of this kind of, this one informing the other where the, the work of the think tank could directly and indirectly inform the work that we were involved with as community organizers.
Male Speaker: And you maintained a separation between artistic practice or artistic inputting and the organizing work yeah?
Male Speaker: What was the question?
Male Speaker: [0:24:05] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: I think we can go on, go on to some other questions.
Male Speaker: [0:24:14] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Okay. A question?
Male Speaker: [0:24:24] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: We are here.
Male Speaker: Oh yes you maintained a separation between your organizing work in the community and your artistic practice yes?
Male Speaker: Yeah that was, I mean that was an important kind of point we started from because we needed, we felt like it was more productive to keep them somewhat separate so they could inform each other and actually be useful from one practice to the next. There’s a question here.
[0:25:03]
Male Speaker: Yeah, can I interject here because I really don’t understand how that’s possible to do that. I mean either art is a kind of a formal and slightly, I don’t know, almost whimsical endeavor that has no impact on the community or else it, without even, without being instrumentalised it can also be a factor in social transformation. So I don’t understand how it is that artists would want to get involved as activists while keeping their art part of their lives so separate from their activists’ part.
Male Speaker: [0:25:42] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: It seems like as community organizing the particular perspective that would inform any kind of aesthetic practice that others don’t have.
Male Speaker: Well, what I would say is of course as an artist, I actually don’t like this, I don’t want to really get into this conversation and I, not because I don’t think it’s valid because in some ways it’s not productive. So if I frame things in a kind of binary I apologize because of course art has impact. It has significant impact. And what I would say though is in my experience, in our experience as activists and community organizers doing that work, the intensity level and the kind of rush to put out a fire on a daily basis did not leave ample time for critical reflection, for even, a lot of times we didn’t have opportunities to develop long-term strategy.
And so what the think tank provided for us was a way to build in a space in which we could address some the issues we were dealing with as activists and organizers, but kind of put them in a different context again using base language create a kind of temporary autonomous space in which to kind of think through what these issues were, what some of the underlying problems are.
I mean ultimately you might think of it, the think tank as a research group in many ways and a lot of our recent projects have been focused on research and even the question of can research be a practice, an artistic practice or even an activist practice.
So it’s not my point to exclude one from the other, our point in the early days of the work was to find a space in which we could have these different kinds of conversations about the issues we were facing as organizers without having to necessarily, instrumentalize them down to the day-to-day operational activities, operational necessities, or that kind of organizing activist work. I mean I don’t know where everybody is coming from; I was totally green when I got into these issues and this work as an organizer and it subsumed my life like completely. And so the think tank was a way that kind of again eke out this space where I could start to make sense of things but in a way make sense of it through a language that I understood, which was coming from you know an art and even architectural background. So I hope that clarifies the point a bit. Does it clarify?
Male Speaker: Yeah I have great respect for community organizing missions of US City, the present visiting in the amber and yesterday I had a discussion with the [0:29:11] [inaudible] it’s the group behind [0:29:14] [inaudible] the of development of a park really in the tip of the city and commercial interest and who are capitalists center of the Hansiatic League [0:29:28] [phonetic words] they curved out this park. First they were going to cancel [0:29:31] [inaudible] of the strength of Open Bus planning movement [0:29:38] [inaudible] and it was the 15 year long commitment really invent kind of an urban planning, for example, for example with the community and would sort of revive and [0:29:54] [inaudible] several years ago.
0:30:00
So kind of became kind of para dramatic type of urban development from below as it were. And I just want to [0:30:11] [inaudible] impossible in the states in urban situations Philadelphia you described like putting out a fires. To what extent does one fall into through like kind of habitués community organizing [0:30:32] [inaudible]. I'm just going to do what everybody is doing then you step back and analyze it, is there any way that you can bring aesthetic strategies to bare on kind of permanent problems that confront community organizers or are they kind of too over whelming in terms of shrinkage of any kind of caretakers they just too too too overwhelming to see any space for development, community development from below, sorry to blubber on.
Male Speaker: [0:31:23] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Going on some other way?
Male Speaker: Yeah for sure that is definitely a super interesting line up questioning. I hate to derail it, we could definitely, we could definitely get back to it I just want to answer some of the, maybe not answer but bring up some of the questions that people had mentioned. And Allan I'm not sure if you actually got them in the text chat because think you’re the only person right now that’s in the chat that has like three different chats running. I'm not sure what to make of it, it’s like a Skype blip but I'm so sorry about that but three, basically three other questions or sort of comments that people brought up in texts I said we would at least try to address. Christian and Jessica’s are very similar. Just trying to get to the nuts and bolts of what's actually happening with the think tank I think. Christian is asking if these are mainly a bunch of conversations or what else does the think tank really do, Jessica is asking if we if they still produce artifacts or if it’s you know primarily social behavior negotiation or role playing etcetera. And I’ll just mention them all because the chats kind of gone on beyond this. And so I had mentioned that the light to the city life, the life of the city could be spoken in the plausible art worlds context too that’s a powerful idea. There’s been some more conversation below so we can get to that after the first two, which I think are kind of similar.
Male Speaker: Yeah so what does the think tank do and I will, I will try and communicate that. We started off very much again focused on this kind of temporal performative actions that would take place in the space of the city where they could be seen, where they could be happened upon by people in the city and again I’ll point to this influence from the TAZ, Temporal Autonomous Zone, where we could eke out these spaces in the life of the city to all hold these kinds of conversation. So many of the events we have done are called publicly held private meetings. These are generally called by a single director who poses a particular topic or question or set of questions that they would like to discuss in a site that is directly related to the content of the meeting itself.
So I mentioned this example of having one of these at the site of the proposed casino, there have been others held on subway trains held in the courtyard of City Hall and so on and so forth. I mean it was which, it was very much intended as a project, a series of meetings that would address issues where we find them in public space. Now this, the along the way of course many other forms and formats and even artifacts have evolved. One of our more long term projects has to do with the creation of so called readers and we have produced six readers today. The readers are anthologies, collections of texts around a particular topic, particular issue. The first one that we compiled was on I believe art and gentrification, artist and gentrification and you can look to the website for all the other readers.
0:35:06
This was well we were doing a lot of reading as we were thinking about our relationship to the issues that were coming up for us in the city of Philadelphia and we wanted to make these accessible, we wanted to curate them and then have them available for others to use. So the reader was a really kind of proactive way to share our research with so much wider audience.
Male Speaker: [0:35:34] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Yeah, yeah, all the readers are available online as a PDF download. Sometimes we print the readers out and make them available in exhibitions and other kind of public venues but I think primarily they are most valuable as you know electronic documents, PDFs that people can access. A related kind of smaller scale project to the readers is what we have called a prototype for pedagogical furniture. This was something that we designed and built for an exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center in 2007 which was called Pedagogical Factory. It was organized Jim Digdan, at The Stockyard Institute in Chicago. And this was again I think one way to make substantial or make even more accessible in public space the readers themselves so we decided to construct this piece of furniture.
Most recently that piece of furniture was taken to a gallery exhibition in Geneva and was kind of touted around the city and used as mobile furniture for the readers. I would say a lot of the work is temporal, is performative. It’s about initiating conversations, it’s about bringing, identifying the right people that we’d like to have, difficult perhaps conversations. Another recent project I would point to is one we did in Boston a couple of years ago where we organized the kind of a walk in conversation in Summerfield Massachusetts around the kind of controversial proposal to extend one of the train lines into a long standing kind of working class neighborhood.
In this case we go together a number of stake holders who had some vested interested in that issue and we just explored where the train line was being proposed and along the way, all the issues that come up came up and we had conversations around them and actually I think in some ways brought people together to understand various points of view around that issue. So that’s, I mean I think historically those are the kinds of things that we’ve done. I would say the think tank is a transition right now. One thing that’s important is we started very much as a group of people rooted in Philadelphia. It’s since become much more distributed than that and so the kinds of sites specific things that we’ve done in the past perhaps don’t make as much sense to us right now. And the work has tended to become more focused around the reader, around research and I think that’s kind of an open question for us as to what the future of the work is.
I mean also to the somewhat absurd structure that we have invented for ourselves, well I particularly like the idea of the directorships that perhaps changes as well. And it may not make sense moving forward because new people come in, they have different relationships or expectations about what the work is. And so it is important for us to evolve and if something doesn’t make sense, I mean we’re not going to be slaves to the original structure that we developed. We want this work to be kind of full of life and full of relevance so it changes as new people become involved with it.
[0:40:00]
Male Speaker: I’m actually not sure how to best negotiate the, all of this text discussion with what’s been talked about because I mean a lot of it is being addressed but since they’re not all sort of two second answers and there’s a lot more, sort of contributions and texts that’s come up. I wonder if a few of the people either that are listening to this recorded later who don’t see the text immediately or who just can’t relate easily multitask that way, visually might be getting lost about between the two a little bit. And it’s interesting enough that I wanted to try and bring it in quickly if possible if that’s okay with you guys. I just wanted to kind of go through a few of this even though a lot of it has been addressed since then.
Let’s see. I think with one of the questions that was brought up before, one of the statements before, between politics and art is you Adam asked if, sort of addressing Steven’s question about maintaining a distinction between art and community organizing and what he asked about that in the audio track. Adam had said this is curious position so if I volunteer for a campaign or I take on a role to help organize people for a local issue I have to volunteer my art practice question mark? And he said you know there is no more need for an artist to become a political artist when engaging in politics than there is for an accountant to become a political accountant. Ellis in the same breath says, think tanks are often political tools. Is it possible or has the work of one been utilized by activist groups, of this one sorry been utilized by activist groups.
Jessica thumbs up research; I’m just going read this through real quick. Steven response to Adam saying right it sounded a bit like I was supposed to remain autonomous from politics organizing “life” why not? Why not actually? But do we, but how do we culminate that double consciousness is also is sort of responding to Selim’s not really question but point earlier about the right to the city of the kind of plausible art world. Yeah Sam is also interested in the nuts and bolts which I think, I’m sorry Jeremy is getting into and Selim if he really hasn’t addressed it enough maybe you let us know the actual nuts and bolts of how it works specifically because I think that was like the meat of the last kind of run right. And we were just sort of going back and forth a little bit about whether the right to the city of the built environment or the sort of negotiated environment can be a kind of plausible art world.
I don’t mean to get into every micro detail but just sort of bring up the bits of points that we probably want to address is just sort of this phrase of accommodating the double consciousness again between an interest, I’m sorry an interest in art competencies and being politically active. And I don’t this is a topic worth discussing maybe Jeremy you can talk about how it’s addressed in the ongoing think tank work even. I think you did a little bit Adam maybe let us know if you’d like clarified a little bit more, you know whether there is art without politics and politics without art occurring or is it all these Nicks now. Well I mean there is definitely more discussion but I think sort of more of these addresses that question. Christian is also asking about how people get involved in a discussion, even you know how do local people get involved and let’s what else wasn’t brought up. I think a lot of that is just responses to that.
I think the only other thing is we’d like to at some point talk about the directorships, a little bit more. Both in terms of naming and in terms of forming different kinds of maybe non managerial or non hierarchical relationships, it seems like that’s part of why you set that up or maybe there were some other reasons too. And that would interesting to talk about. Clarissa asked also if you could a little bit about the ask me about gentrification project and the Davis Square Tiles project, what was the expected outcome, what assumptions or plans did the think tank have for the results and how was the work funded. I can help to like keep track of those few things. So a lot of those were grouped in similar but at least now for the people listening to you and reading the chat there is some connection between the two.
0:45:10
Male Speaker: Okay where should I start? This is somewhat anarchic, that’s good.
Male Speaker: [0:45:24] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: So by the way I want to say hi John O’Shay, I think you remember meeting me in Belfast last year, I hope you will. I’m going to answer your question. The think tank…
Male Speaker: Am I on right now? Can you hear me now?
Male Speaker: Yeah. Yeah.
Male Speaker: Hi Jeremy it’s great to meet you in Belfast.
Male Speaker: Yeah it’s good to have you. Well in terms of funding we, I’ve actually not received any funding really. Occasionally because I am a university professor I can get support from my university for like travel. We’ve not applied for any grants. I mean as you can see the work is pretty immaterial so a lot of the work just costs as time and maybe travel. When we can get donations for things like printing costs for the readers and so on we are happy to accept it. But we are a fairly lightweight group in terms of the resources we need. I would think that we would have to have serious conversation about what happens if we started to get funding or seeking funding because one we’re a group that is somewhat is unsolidified in terms of our membership, people come in and out, it’s not clear who has authority a lot of the time. These are issues that perhaps need to be resolved but certainly if we were going to be receiving funding we would have to resolve them in a hurry.
So I think for us to go for funding raises a huge question for us and one that we have not wanted or had to answer yet.
Male Speaker: Okay okay that’s cool. I suppose the reason brought it up is I find in my own practice that we work with housing associations and councils and even contractors but also lots and lots of other groups. And it’s funny how you’ve kind of built this structure of the director who declares the agenda because what we found is because of working with money as well what tend to do at the beginning of a meeting is have each of the partners declare their agenda which seems like exactly the same thing in a way.
Male Speaker: Yeah that’s really…
Male Speaker: Just to say you know what actually that it is that you are saying that you want from this, you know I think is a really important thing whenever you’re getting money from somebody. Is that involved in any scenario actually?
Male Speaker: I think it’s a really important point and it speaks directly to again this experience we’re having and these ranges of meetings we’re going to whether they were with City Council people or developers or non profits in the city. It just was never quite clear exactly where people were coming from, like what their position was and that…
Male Speaker: It’s interesting when you get into these sorts of money related scenarios it’s just to give one quick example; we’ve been developing a project for some time which involves temporary installation of cinemas in empty spaces in small towns actually. And in one small town this, town had a cinema for 25 years. And so the project was to install the cinema for one day. And the city council were totally behind it but once we started to knock on some doors and speak to people in shops and other types of buildings, it actually turned out that pretty much this town didn’t own that town anymore.
0:50:05
You know there weren’t any spaces that were open for any kind of civic activity and that was actually quite disturbing even for on the ground council workers. They were quite shocked at actually the total lack of power they had in their own town.
Male Speaker: Yeah I mean just to kind of quickly comment on that I think in the beginning the public nature of the work that we wanted to do these conversations, the other kinds of projects was also about finding exactly where public space is or could be and could actually happen there. Now I wouldn’t say that was an overt or an even emphasized part of the project but for me like coming from in my other work kind of thinking about public space and the way public space is used and what public space means to different people I think that was embedded into the way we thought about doing the work in the space of the city in public.
Male Speaker: Sure yeah.
Male Speaker: So am I back tracking now to another question?
Male Speaker: Thank you, yeah.
Male Speaker: Thanks John.
Male Speaker: How do people get involved in the projects, well I think this is where our work is very problematic? And it’s speaks to perhaps the larger problem of participation within the art world but within politics and I would say like we always felt, well I think in the beginning we had very ambitious ideas about participation. Who participates, what participation means, whether or not participation is a kind of marker of success of a project, which I don’t think it is especially in terms of numbers. We wanted again to intervene into the life of the city, we wanted to hold these kind of curious conversations, meetings and we wanted people who just happened to be sharing that space with us to be curious to ask what we were doing, to start talking with us and even declare directorships themselves.
Now what I will say is that this happened. People were interested, people of a certain temperament thought it was curious, somehow they understood it and often times we had at least one or two people with a given kind of publicly held private meeting joining in the meeting on the site, declaring a directorship and having interesting conversations. Now if you want to talk about numbers it was a small small percentage. I mean these were not incredibly well participated in events. I think what’s more effective and what we started to do later on was actually to identify different kinds of people, different individuals that we wanted to discuss certain things with in the specific places. So we’d reach out to individuals who we thought had something to offer, we reached out to people who were potential stakeholders around an issue we were looking at. For example if it was in a particular neighborhood and that was how we started to think more about the ways in which we could get people to participate.
All these we’re still being open to anyone to be curious enough to happen by and join in. But that was, I mean it is a much more useful, if you want people to participate you should probably think about inviting them, it’s the way to put it. Now I don’t know if that’s so important anymore and what it means moving forward but that’s how we began. There’s a question in the room.
Female Speaker: I read you piece in the I can’t remember which reader it is, the one about gentrification I guess. And you talked about going to all these meetings and how there was all this participation in the meetings and sort of rah rah filled off is great you know. And that participation I thought you were characterizing as some sort of anesthetic and I guess I was curious about how to differentiate participations between the anesthetic and the wakening the beaver you know.
[0:55:20]
Male Speaker: I mean for me this question of participation is really hugely significant and important and there are a lot of people who are really questioning this notion of participation. The writing that you just referenced I think that way that we started to think about delineating or differentiating different modes of participation was and this is provisional and it’s of course it can be elaborated, but we started to think about it in terms of thick versus thin participation. Thin participation was the kind of participation that we were seeing in a lot of these community meetings whereby you get people to show up, they put their email address on a list, you give them pizza, you sit them down in small groups and you talk about some stuff and you show your funders or you show your politicians you know look ho w many people we had out, is this great? And actually it turns out the decision was already premade and the participation was pretty much meaningless. So this is thin participation. This is the kind of aesthetic participation as she phrased it, it’s very superficial.
Thick participation of course is much harder, it’s much messier. It actually takes longer than a night for people to participate and contribute meaningfully to something. It takes months, it takes an investment of time and energy and resources. This kind of participation is very rare because it is so, I mean it’s inefficient, I mean this is like real kind of in the trenches democracy you might say when people are engaging on a kind of equal footing and actually listening to each other and really producing something that interactional exchange that has substance and has meaning. So just to take this kind of back to the think tank we were okay with doing a meeting a public space and having one person come by and kind of understanding what we were doing and having a conversation and hearing them and then hearing us and making a connection. I mean those are very small things but they become really meaningful. I mean they let you know that you’re not alone that you can be understood. They also change your perspective because you hear other perspectives and this is the kind of participation I think that is really important and significant and if you scale it up becomes the foundation of a really healthy society, a civic society.
So I mean I think that’s what I’ll say about participation right now but I think it’s so important to thinking about. The last point I’ll make is I’ve been kind of working with, collaborating with to some degree an architect named Markus Miessen who’s just finishing a third book in a series of books about participation, the latest volume is called The Nightmare of Participation. And I think it’s just, he looks critically at participation and I think that’s something that we need to be doing especially after coming out of the, I don’t know the hangover of relational aesthetics. Participation is, it needs to be reformulated in some way.
Male Speaker: Yeah Jeremy I totally agree it needs to be reformulated. How would you like to reformulate it?
Male Speaker: Can I just ask you how you would like to reformulate it? No. I mean I…
Male Speaker: Yeah you certainly can, you certainly can because I mean it’s kind of a value laden question when I ask that. I’m very critical of participation but even more critical of passive spectatorship. And what I’ve proposed as a solution to that is or what I think is more inclusive and more intensive category of political subjectivity which I call usership.
[1:00:06]
Male Speaker: I haven’t thought of that in that way but it sounds like an interesting approach. Do you think that comes from a kind of recent focus especially within interactive design I would say where the user becomes such, you know the primary focus of experiences with technology or experiences with services? Do you feel like or would you locate that usership perspective in that area or in that terrain?
Male Speaker: For sure. But I would also locate it within the terrain of drug usership, of users all sorts of services and goods which are all very easily dismissed by expert culture as being near consumer self interest and so on which I find in a particularly cheap and underhanded way of dismissing citizenship actually within a consumer society. But yeah this is something which I’ve talked about not enough I mean you know one of my little obsessions. But what interests me is that users have a particular relationship to the goods or the services which they use. Which is not that at all of expert culture, nor is it that of spectator culture and it cannot, whereas I think participation can be relatively easily assimilated into or am I’m afraid it can be assimilated into the regime of creative capitalism. I think usership actually poses a different kind of a problem although I acknowledge that it also is a double edged sword and can perhaps which is also what makes it interesting.
Male Speaker: Scott were there other questions that we might jump to? He’s mid type.
Male Speaker: Yeah there were here. Let’s see. I think we’re on to the second one out of five.
Male Speaker: We just answered that. Participation.
Male Speaker: We just sort of [1:03:06] [inaudible] sorry just in case no one else can hear me but people in the room. I think maybe we can save like that three for just for a little bit you know you can kind of look at those specific projects in detail. But because we already started talking about it I mean I feel like it kind of flows right into the rise to cities, don’t you think? And the question of usership kind of flows very nicely into the question of, I mean usership and participation anyway flow very nicely I think into ideas about collaboration and community and sort of co working as other phrases that are often abused you know. At least from my point of view and I think from some of the other people that are here, those terms are used really loosely sometimes you know in order to imply some kind of liberatory strategy or some kind of democratization or something. When in reality, that’s not, most of the time that’s not really happening when those terms are used it just means that multiple people are given some kind of agency to play along by the rules of that someone else set up for them within a certain context.
And it seems like what you guys are doing often is questioning that really directly at least from what I know that of what you had done a couple of years ago and also from looking over these readings and stuff that I haven’t been able to read yet or be involved with you guys on yet. But it seems like that’s something that you’d really question. I was curious about that because I feel like those tie together probably. Can you be more concise? Yeah I think if you had any thoughts on how this discussion about participation, the idea that somehow participation itself leads toward a more equitable world or even it’s just a democratizing principle that you’ve definitely have a problem with you’ll also feel the same way about ideas of more intensive participation that are often referred to as collaboration or co working and co design like Christian mentioned that’s a more sort of maybe more current term in the design world.
[1:05:40]
Male Speaker: I guess with anything you have to ask why or for what reason or to what end. Because then you always end up in this kind of participation for the sake participation or anything for the sake of anything. So for me it’s, or what’s it’s hard to even like abstract or generalizing, I mean what are we talking about? What’s going on? Where are you living? What do you have a problem with? What do your neighbors have a problem with? What’s going on with this country that we don’t like? I mean how do you start to change something?
Well there are many ways about it. A lot of them probably mean you have to participate in something or work with other people or at least understand where other people are coming from. So it’s really hard to kind of answer it in a general way I mean.
Male Speaker: Yeah I mean so just to make sure I understand you, your suspicion of the language around that leads you instead, I mean primarily to say okay well this is just too abstract to really tackle purely with language, let’s actually talk about the specifics of a thing and kind of work our way out from there. Yeah I definitely understand that. I mean maybe that would lead to one of those other questions that I asked you to identify another project and talk about that in depth because maybe that would lead a conversation that might start feeling a little bit abstract and might ground that a little bit again.
Male Speaker: Well the challenge is what are the motivations for the work that the think tank does. So okay we make a reader, why we make a reader? And we make a reader because we’ve been investigating something, a particular issue, a particular topic and that investigation for us often means collecting a number of texts that help us understand the particular topic or issue. And it’s important for us to share that knowledge, share that research in some way. So that others could use it, it’s a quick way to kind of access material. Often times it takes texts that have been locked in books in obscure libraries or they’ve been locked behind copyright protections and we make them freely available. Thank you.
is that I mean, that’s not really, I wouldn’t frame that as any kind of participation, I would just say there is a reason why we did something, there is something we wanted to accomplish by doing it and it’s fairly simple on that case.
Female Speaker: [1:09:00] [inaudible] by giving those texts to the public you enable a participation of those texts don’t you?
Male Speaker: Yeah I think that’s a good point as well to point to something, to distribute it, to share it so others can participate in that knowledge, participate in that research of course on their own terms and for whatever reasons they do. Yeah. So where should we go? Does anyone want to pose another question? Is there something I missed, something that doesn’t seem clear? Can I tell you more about the think tank specifically? Is that important? Tell me.
[1:10:09]
Male Speaker: Well Ellis was asking more specifics about how you distribute the readers.
Male Speaker: Well the readers are sometimes distributed at specific events like an exhibition or a conference. Just recently two of our directors attended the Open Engagement conference in Portland and they contributed the texts, the readers to the library that was created there. I mean there are always available online to be downloaded and generally there is a kind of informal distribution network that just kind of happens through linking on the web. I wouldn’t say we have a very rigorous distribution project. In fact we don’t even have a mailing list. But it’s just things get out and find their way to people who seem to be looking for them.
Male Speaker: I’m sort of biting my tongue because I think some people have, there is a lot of interest going on in the conversation and I don’t want to just kind of push the questions that I have. Steven was just asking maybe if he could describe some of the departments. If all you do, maybe you could possibly keep in mind this question I have. I was really interested the aspect of naming and so I think so is Steven in I guess in how you’ve, well I guess in how you came up with the particular department titles. I have a sense of at least what you said, your, I don’t know where I’m standing here but I have a sense of what you said your motive, you guys motives were for starting that. I mean there’s a lot of things to discuss about why you departmentalize that way and only had directors and no one below you and so on. But what was the naming about in particular; maybe if you don’t mind getting into that while you explain a few of the departments.
Male Speaker: Well I can explain any department other than my own because the departments they’re created by the individual directors. So I can tell you that I have had two directorships. One is the director of the department for the investigation of meaning and the other is the director for the department for the investigation of radical pedagogy. And I can tell you where those come from if you’re interested. As far as the other departments, again the individuals determine the nature of their investigations, the nature of their perspectives and they self declare their directorships. And this is not, this was never and isn’t an academic exercise. And we quickly learnt that as we started to take the project outside of, well it never really lived squarely on the art context. But as we moved, as we did things out in the city at various events and we ran into people who were not artists, not even academics, they knew exactly what we were talking about somehow and they declared their directorships.
And they were always really interesting and really they did what they were supposed to do. They told you something about that person, what that person cared about at that particular moment in that particular space. And that’s why I still feel that they are useful in that case because they position people. And it allows people to position themselves like people we’re always interested that, people are really excited about that opportunity to say, hey this is who I am at this particular moment, this is my department. I’m a director of this. So it was always a very effective mechanism I thought.
Male Speaker: Can anyone make a department [1:14:53] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Well this is something that unresolved because we started; well we started with the assumption that basically there were an infinite number of directors and departments in the world and beyond. And they were directors that we didn’t know of, there were directors to be that didn’t know they were directors to be.
[1:15:17]
And so it was this very kind of naïve idealistic like, oh everybody is a director and the think tank that is yet to be named has billions of members. That’s very funny and charming at a certain level of thought but when you get down to it, these issues of authorship and authority start to come up. So I’ll just speak historically what has happened. Often times people who come into the think tank to do projects have been invited by existing directors to work on a specific thing and perhaps that leads to a relationship and that newly invited director kind of comes in to the culture and sticks around and then initiates his or her own project. Personally with what’s been invested in the think tank as a project, a sustained project I’m not so much interested anymore in the kind of anarchic distributory rhysomatic model of everybody is a think tank or potentially could be a think tank. And I’m kind of just saying that now I haven’t thought too much about it.
But I think as is the case, when you invest time in something and develop something you do start to feel ownership and authority and a desire for control. So if I was to say, how does the think tank structure work now? It’s very exclusive in terms of like member directors who, it’s between four and six people. It’s certainly open but as you can see this is a huge question that if we go forward needs to be resolved I think. And it’s actually a question that we’ve started discussing if only very recently. We’ve said we wanted to discuss. Yeah, it always creeps in. Since I can see people in the room, do you any of you have a comment or a question?
Female Speaker: Is a desire for, is a desire to expand is that necessarily a bad thing?
Male Speaker: I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. To expand. But I think for me it would be something that is deliberate and strategic and well considered. So whereas initially we had this kind of funny ideas the think tank is as big as how many people are on the planet, theoretically speaking when it comes down to practice, I don’t know what the structure of the think tank looks like beyond what it is now with 46 people who know each other doing projects more or less together. I don’t know how that becomes distributable. I certainly think it could and it might. But for those of us who are doing the think tank work now we haven’t had that conversation and we don’t know what it would mean.
Male Speaker: Jeremy can I?
Male Speaker: Yeah go ahead John. Go ahead.
Male Speaker: I wanted to ask a question about the naming issue which has got referred to previously but which is just the first thing that really struck me when I heard about the name of your, I mean the paradoxical anomalous name of your think tank, The Think Tank that doesn’t, that has yet to be named. Because it made me think about the whole politics of naming and the whole politics of naming with reference to the production of knowledge because of course naming can be a real powerful political act. You know when you name something which was not supposed to be there, when you name a body which was not, when you use a word which was supposed to be a reference without reference to anything and infact you name a body which was there but was unauthorized it’s very powerful.
[1:20:23]
But of course what happens is then you fix that body in an identity and so it can turn out to be counterproductive. And it seems like by finding a ploy that you will be very elusively named but not named but named with a name that reminds that naming is a problem. You kind of wanted permanently to address that with your permanently provisional name. Can you say something about that?
Male Speaker: Yeah that’s a really good, your point question. What I’ll say is that at the beginning we were very concerned about the problem of identity I guess or more crassly, branding, meaning that we wanted to avoid it. And also there was a degree of anonymity built into the project from the beginning I mean we’re all, we were these directors of these departments. We didn’t necessarily broadcast our real names, certainly not on the website. And as just, I guess we didn’t want the question about identity or naming to get in the way of work that we just wanted to get down and do.
So that The Think Tank that has yet to be named was a kind of dumb solution. I mean we had kind of decided on the think tank as a kind of structure which we could loosely form around with this kind of absurd bureaucracy and you know we didn’t want to think of a name. We didn’t want to lock something in a particular way. It’s kind of like the problem of you start a band and you have to think of a name and that’s probably the hardest part of starting a band maybe. So I mean we just didn’t want to deal with this question and in fact I mean we were very skeptical about even building a website for the project, for the think tank because of this same issue like you lock things in to a specific representation and it starts to lose the kind of energy or verve or flexibility. Ultimately we built the website because we wanted to document the work and we wanted to communicate the work to a much larger audience.
So I actually appreciate how you have interpreted and commented on the name itself I think that was really really well said. And I think it’s still a concern although I don’t think it’s as important as it was when we first began. Yeah. What is the community, that’s a question that we took up in the fourth reader and that reader was developed. And that reader was developed around the other project that we did in Boston in Summerville.
I mean that was another thing that I think we learned from the community organizing activist work and even from like you know, whatever, participatory art practices, social practices, is this word community, it just gets thrown around like as if it was the most natural thing in the world and everybody knows what you are talking about when you say, I am work with a community or we built a community. It’s a question that I don’t have an answer to like what constitutes community. But somehow we always seem to know what we are talking about when we use that word, when I think it warrants investigating much further.
And that reader on community was an attempt that needs to be resumed and that is you know problematizing what community or communities are and how we talk about them especially. Because I think that is another idea like participation that gets used by lots of different kinds of people for a lot of different reasons. So I don’t know the answer yet. Love to hear some of weigh in.
[1:25:09]
Female speaker: I guess going back to the thought that you said you were skeptical about starting a website, half the question is what were you skeptical about happening? And did that happen or did anything positive happen, did anything negative happen? What, I guess was anything expected and then unexpected later?
Male Speaker: Well the skepticism about even creating a website for the project, well the first thing that you need to do when you say, I want to build a website, is you have to choose a name, right? A domain name and this again got to this point of we don’t want a name, we chose this thing, the think tank that is yet to be named is kind of a dumb solution to the problem. And the website and all it represents is really about fixing an identity or fixing a brand if it is in the commercial realm perhaps. And we were just really nervous about that because, so some of the things we considered like okay, could we have a website could it built in such a way where there is a new domain name every day, maybe the website changes every second so it’s not fixed? But that just gets kind of a little bit annoying.
So I think for us the importance of documenting the work overtook any concern about the problem of a website or a website name or identity. It was more important for us to be able to archive the work and hopefully make it available for other people to use and look at and all that. I mean I am pleased that we have a website. Because I think it allows us to share the work with a lot of people that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise.
Male Speaker: I am really just mentioning Christopher’s question about whether these readings, oh dear, I was just reading Allen’s comment about, yeah; whether they are available online I know you mentioned that earlier but...
Male speaker: Yeah all of the readers are available online. Go to readers link and that’s the link, they are all there. So Scott’s going to post a link. That’s it that should be it. I think so, no it’s not. Okay, so correction, it is possible that the most recent reader doesn’t have a link but I can make that available. But all the others I believe should be there. Well I know the first four are there, so the second, the last two I will have to make available. If anybody is desperate for one, feel free to email me.
Male speaker: Hi Jeremy, I have a quick question if I could chip in?
Male Speaker: Sure.
Male Speaker: I just, I am kind of interested in the decision because you have spoken about all of, and the fine decision name to do with the name, to do with the website, to do with the roles that people play. But I suppose just kind of stepping a level from that I just curious, I am really interested in your decision to get involved in instituting this kind of formalized structure for this kind of art or activist activity as opposed to just having discussions or just making work or why and to the point where you have almost, I hate this term, where you have almost fetishized sort of corporate structures, if that’s fair?
Male Speaker: Yeah that’s a really good question and I thought of the word before you said it so no worries. It is a really, really valid point and it is something that we are starting to actually discuss amongst ourselves especially with a couple of people that came in much later to the Think Tank Project.
[1:30:18]
For me I go back to what I think I gleaned from my reading of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. It is one thing to get interesting smart people together and have a conversation. And it’s productive and it’s meaningful and it does something. I think for us, we wanted to do that but we wanted to do it with a more distinct or heavy frame around it. So the kind of absurd bureaucracy of the think tank the kind of, the slightly off, I don’t know off but weird you know titles of the directors and the departments, for us this was a way to draw a frame around what we were doing such that it wouldn’t necessarily bleed into all the other great wonderful productive conversations that people were having amongst themselves and even in ways that are similar to how we do it.
Now as far as fetishizing corporate structures or bureaucratic structure, I think this is a line that we are kind of playing with. I think in the beginning we actually were much more kind of adherent to a formal rigid bureaucracy. Even if you look at some of our email communications from those first few months, it’s like; wow do they have a soul? I mean we were really like buying into this full bureaucracy that we had set up. I think we’ve eased off on that quite a bit so that really what remains for me is just like the essential stuff to still maintain that frame around the work that we do to make it distinct.
So I think, I guess my opinion is it doesn’t fetishize corporate bureaucratic structure. The potential is there I feel for me what it does is that again it draws a frame around what we do to make it decipherable or legible in a different way.
Male Speaker: Yeah that’s cool I remember as well I see what can be a very interesting texts which sort of brought up some of the pitfalls of less formalized organizations and the tyranny of structure.
Male Speaker: Yeah, yeah that’s a good one.
Male Speaker: Cool thank you,
Male Speaker: Thanks for the question.
Male Speaker: Have you guys, have you thought about integrating it all with art.org? Org, just because I mean you know a number of the texts probably all of them are there if they are not you can probably upload them?
Male Speaker: I am going to give a quick shout out to Heath who is in the Skype audience because this question concerns him as well. Heath is another director in the think tank and of course they are a number of ways in which really interesting important texts are distributed online, org being one of them as well known and one of the most useful. At one point Heath and I were having discussions about whether or not we might want to initiate a similar kind of project to make all these great texts we are finding and somehow consolidate them into a single place and perhaps make them more available or filtered in a different way like the way I would phrase it. And this was an idea that was initiated by Heath actually. So we didn’t end up following through on that project I don’t know if it is necessary or not. Perhaps it is I mean I think a lot of the texts we were finding weren’t necessarily online they were being pulled from books, actual books that we had in our libraries or school libraries. So yeah that was something we considered at one point but haven’t moved on it.
[1:35:10]
Male Speaker: So we are reaching kind of far and wide with Skype and well I was wondering if all your directors are local and if you are interested in pushing beyond geography and stretching out?
Male Speaker: Yeah. We started very much like super local I mean we were in the same neighborhood and we came together in a very specific context around a very specific situation. But of course as with all of you, we know a lot of really amazing smart people and they don’t all live in Philadelphia believe it or not. I must say, and so we reached out to people who were not located in Philadelphia, currently one of our directors is in Iowa City the other is in, actually two of them are in Iowa City and then another is in Chicago and some of them more or less occasional directors are also not in Philadelphia. So it certainly is a possibility and again the problem I have here is we don’t know how we expand or if we want to expand we don’t understand how to deal with things like authority, things like perhaps funding if it comes to that in the future. So I think I am a little bit skittish about you know saying, open the flood gates, let’s get in as many people as we can because I don’t know how to handle it or address it yet, yep?
Male Speaker: Oh yes, I am from Jamaica. I have a plantation loft next to the Bob Marley [1:37:19] [indiscernible] and there is a lot of movies shot there. The Weather Burns are my first cousins and they are professors at Spanish Town University, the caste system over in Jamaica. I have many credits over in the caste system, liberal and professional sciences but Film, Photography and Directing is something that I try to achieve more. Because I am so close to the Marley’s over there it’s like we can do a lot of like celestial, transcendental type things right? Most of it is movie shots like trailer shots but we can’t really get into more than beyond the music video or documentary. So I am at Costa the cousin of the Weather Burns and yeah I am from the caste. I can call up the Weather Burns anytime to get like grands and directors come down from Jamaica because they are like head of the University in Spanish Town. I am from Oltoris, Jamaica.
Male Speaker: Yeah nice to meet you, welcome, cool. Does anyone have any other, we have got you know like under ten minutes to go.
Male Speaker: I think the discussion that we have got is pretty interesting I would say, a few different projects were mentioned that kind of that refer to academia. I think Allen described as for academia, I was maybe wrongly but I think possibly rightly just saying that we were describing something very similar as autonomous information production with kind of less of a focus on whether or to what degree academic institutions are being mirrored. You know there usually there is some degree of that but really sometimes there are high levels, sometimes low level. And there was a discussion about the United Nation’s plauser project and the college arts association and panel that Allen was on and I guess one thing that has got to be worth mentioning because now we are talking about the realm of education on some level we can either avoid the subject or bring it up. I think it might be interesting to bring up.
[1:40:09]
Here is a question. Do you feel that it is a challenge at this point that ideas about alternative education have entered the, I guess realm of art practices with such a force and that you are probably doing that kind of work you have to at the very least deal with the fact that that’s becoming a kind of, well in one hand a groundswell on the other hand a fad. And how do you sort of negotiate that the opportunities and the dangers there. And by dangers I don’t mean professionally but dangers in terms of maybe the effectiveness of what you are doing?
Male Speaker: Yeah I mean that’s relevant question because and I see Heath agreeing, yeah. We became really interested in education as a part of our practice in the think tank that is yet to be named. And I think it was one because many of us were involved in academia for example I myself I am a university professor and of course all of us went through the university education. Others were also faculty members at other universities and colleges. And so I think an interest in what other models are, what other kinds of alternative education forms might exist and this is partly out of frustration with academia and higher education.
We are of course interested in that question as a lot of artists are. I mean you are right; everybody makes an exhibition as a school now right? And I think I would like to defer this question to Heath but he is doesn’t have a microphone. He is a director for the department for the investigation for tactical education. He is of us all been perhaps most invested in trying to understand the relationship between art activism and education and he has typed if he’d like to join in in some way.
I think you can’t help but come to education through the door of community organizing and activism and if you are making an art work that also kind of lives adjacent to those practices you are going to arrive at education as well because if you want to change the world or if you want to envision a world perhaps different from the one that you live in the way to get there is through kind of building that world through the sharing of knowledge, the sharing of experience.
And certainly a lot of us in the think tank have read people like Paulo Ferreira and other names that I am blanking on right now alternative education thinkers and writers the last 40 or 50 years. Yeah, so it is something that we are interested in and that we care about. I won’t say I have any kind of strategically formulated ideas about it to share right now but if you’re going to build a world instead of in addition to the one that you feel you’re in, education is a way profligate that world. And Heath is starting to comment a bit.
Male Speaker: I promised to read out loud what he had said. What kind of accent does Heath have? Chicago? Can anyone do a Chicago accent? 1:44:49[inaudible] still on? Chicago. Well Jessica you’re working on it? Can you give it a shot? Well I’ll just quickly say.
[1:45:04]
Well I’m always interested in these art projects like United Nations or whatever as opposed to perhaps military research or popular education many of which 1:45:11[inaudible] above. Yeah I mean we can definitely have an ongoing conversation about this and yes Friar we had long discussion that stem from Paul Averick’s book, Francisca Friar in the modern school movement which outlines Friar Anarchist schools in New York by Emma Goldman and others. Yeah I think if Heath if you’d like to join any of these future chats and I only parenthetically say that because we have like kind of two minutes till closing, we’ll try to keep it fairly structures for the next event and the people who are, it’s 2:00 am for them now.
Then I personally would love to continue this discussion because not only does it comprise one sixth of this year long series, a focus on education, on some level or at least on autonomous information production as we call it. But also it’s just an ongoing interest for sure by me and I’m sure a lot of other people here. So I think probably one of the questions that I have is you know kind of why, what can we really, what art competencies can we really bring to that or what benefit can we have in merging this with a so called creative cultural context in any way or connecting them in any way whether it’s merging or parasiting or making use of or camouflaging or whatever. And that would be, I think those are some of the conversations we’ve had in the past. But in any case I don’t know if you had any other burning things to say Jeremy? Shaking your head.
Male Speaker: To those of you in the room and to the many of you out in Skype land I really appreciate the time you spent with us and hearing me and asking questions. Always love to continue these conversations. So my email is an open email for any of you to use, yeah Jeremy@boxwith.com. Yeah there it is. So again I appreciate the time that you spent with us.
Male Speaker: Awesome, and yeah it’s been great. Anybody with closing music? Anybody want to beat box?
Male Speaker: I was going to do a poem tonight and I was going to do a song from Axel Rose, Sweet Child of Mine. But, should I do it here? [1:48:23] [indiscernible]
[1:49:26] End of Audio
Week 29: Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with the founders of the CIA or El Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas — more casually referred to by those in its immediate periphery as “El Centro”, in Buenos Aires. A literal translation would be the “Center for Artistic Research” but the founders of the southerly Centro — artists Graciela Hasper, Roberto Jacoby, and Judi Werthein — tend to nudge the acronym toward a “center for intelligence in art”.
El Centro is an artist-run space of interaction and debate for artists and thinkers from around the world, with an emphasis on rethinking norms imposed by northern “centers”. The CIA began operations in 2009, but emerged from intensive discussions in 2006 on the need for renewing art education, devising more plausible teaching models and education environments going beyond disciplinary and geographical frontiers were. The CIA’s activities are extradisciplinary, with a strong pedagogical focus on historic research and art theory conducted virtually and physically. The CIA seeks to hone the critical tools needed to challenge the frontiers of genres and disciplines, expanding the borders of practice, genre and media; promoting those that propose new ways of production, of exhibition and exchange; those that explore broader social contexts than the institutional or market-based mainstream.
Though El Centro operates an international residency program, its lectures, seminars, courses and workshops are also very much neighborhood based: neighbors are encouraged to participate, implicitly challenging the artists’ exclusive expert position on art-related questions, thereby ironically decentering the axis of the artworld — socially as well as geo-politically.
Transcription
Week 29: Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas
[0:00:00]
Female Speaker: Hello
Male Speaker: Hi there.
Female Speaker: Hello?
Male Speaker: Hello guys.
Female Speaker: Hello. Yes.
Male Speaker: Judy you invite somebody to participate by, Iím just responding about your chat, by if theyíre in Skype already just drag them into this window and let them know to request contact information from Base Camp or we can do that from them you drag them in.
Female Speaker: I just drag them like from the Skype into the chat.
Male Speaker: Yeah drop them into the window you see all of the broken hearts.
Female Speaker: So what do I do? I just drag the name from Skype?
Male Speaker: Drag and drop them. It should work yeah, it should just add them and theyíll magically appear on the list and then for them to get on to the call Iíll look into that. Okay let me go ahead and Iím going to techie for a second hold on. Alright so I just requested contact details from this person and they have to say yes and then as soon as they do. Okay great. Well go ahead and do the same with MIR.
Female Speaker: Okay, MIR, Martinez. Martinez is in Spain. Okay. So who am I talking to, is that Scott?
Male Speaker: Super cool. Yeah so you know weíve kind of started off a little bit slow today as it can happen sometime on like a hot and lazy day. But yeah Judy thanks for coming again and representing CIA which I canít really pronounce well.
Female Speaker: Thank you for inviting me, thank you Steven.
Male Speaker: So if you would, I mean I donít want to take the words out of your mouth Scott but Judy can just present what you think is most important about Centro, why itís called that, why you set it up, where did it come from, what function did it fulfill that was not there before, you know all that stuff. And then weíll, we are not satisfied with your answers anymore weíll start asking questions.
Male Speaker: Yeah that would be great Judy. Iím interested in, well first like why itís referred to as El Centro; itís pretty funny, fairly generic.
Female Speaker: Yeah. First Iíd like to give you some context of like Buenos Aires the small tiny art world there. And you have to think about Buenos Aires or mainly I should say like this Southern Cone, not cone, Latin America has not really many art institutions. So there is basically thereís no institutions. And that we donít, we donít have letís say, museums we donít have schools, we donít have a formal art education down there. So actually the CIA started as like basically like a group of friends that we all happened to be artists and most of us have been working in different like arenas and grounds and always kind of like working somehow in community projects or projects that involved the community and a lot in politics too.
[0:05:06]
And well so we started this thing saying okay letís create just a point of encounter, as a point of encounter we decided itís El Centro, El Centro in Spanish could go for like and also in English as a point. And then from there we started like working on what would that be as in how would we do it. And mainly, so well then we invited a lot of people which basically theyíre all friends that work in different fields. Many of them are art historians many of them are philosophers, many of them are sociologists and artists in every field, music, architecture because we kind of consider it art. And who else, writers, lots of literature writers because thatís like kind of the strongest that we have in Argentina I mean itís mainly in literature. In visual arts thereís not much that hardly happen there ever other than maybe you know Antonio Barnie and this is like way back and then youíd have all these political artists, political conceptual artists from the 60s which were the ones that lead [0:06:37] [indiscernible]and the retailer which actually Roberto was part of world of 1960s.
So with Roberto talking about all these we decided that it was time to have a space for dialogue and culture, whose calling?
Male Speaker: Yeah Judy never mind the ringing, thatís just me continuing to add people to the call.
Female Speaker: Okay. Yeah so basically started like in a very like informal way and it kind of like got more formal because there was no other way to do it basically to get the funding needed to develop what we want. Most of the people that teach at El Centro all faculty and professors in the public University Buenos Aires in the philosophy university, the [0:07:33] [indiscernible] and in the Letters, the way we call it. So there all of these people like the, the public university in Buenos Aires thereís a very very low salary. I mean itís mostly that people teach there just for the sake of teaching you cannot even pay a rent from that.
So since we started recruiting all these people, all these amazing minds that were buried in these public universities, with like you know teaching 500 students at a time, we needed like to have kind of structure in order to get some funding and also we wanted to operate as letís say as a community in which everybody that worked get paid and that knowledge gets paid and acknowledged that way because thatís something that in Argentina doesnít exist up to now. Now there are a couple of private universities that they do pay well to professors but none of the people that teach in El Centro teach in a private school or university and that has to mainly with ideological reasons.
Male Speaker: So El Centro pays the people that put on these classes?
Female Speaker: Yes and we have, weíve developed a system I mean in order to be sustainable and to be like also coherent with our way of like thinking and the way we think things should operate. Which is mainly as you know we have an open call for artists like its totally open inter disciplinary? And every year itís annually and we select well a jury that we appoint that like participates selects 25 artists from that applications and they have access to the whole program of the year. And then each of the seminars or each of the classes that are given by each professor itís open to other people to participate.
[0:10:02]
So the way we do it is like we ask to the people from outside to pay a small fee and from that amount we divide it in two and half of it goes to professor and half of it goes for the sustainability of our centre basically, basically to pay the electricity bills and things like that.
Male Speaker: You mean you are actually able to pay the teachers just from the student fees?
Female Speaker: No we donít have, I mean the people that get grants theyíre totally free. Then we have people that want to come certain seminars for example with Ricardo Piglia which is a very very important Latin American writer and he teaches in Princeton. He does teach in Buenos Aires. So when he does his seminar at CIA, hundreds of people you know from literature want to come. So from the people that they want to come thereís a bunch of those that Ricardo knows already, for example that are writers that he wants to have in his class. And then thereís a bunch of people that we ask them to pay basically. And they pay happily.
Male Speaker: Nice. How do you decide who is who?
Female Speaker: Who decides what?
Male Speaker: How do you decide who pays and who doesnít?
Female Speaker: Itís basically, we have the 25 grant holders which are already itís the open application. If you want to do the whole program you apply for the whole year.
Male Speaker: Oh okay.
Female Speaker: And if you want to do a specific seminar or your interest there is a small fee thatís the cost of the seminar. But also what happens is that each of the professors that teach have to work with a group of researchers or they have also their own communities. So they asked us that they want their own people in also for free. So each professor comes selects letís say ten people that are not going to pay and thatís the decision of the professor of the teacher not ours.
Male Speaker: Judy I think you are kind of overstating of there not being any public art education in Buenos Aires. I mean there is an academy of fine arts which has existed for a long time and maybe it is very unsatisfactory but exists. And there is an art world in Argentina and there always has been one despite the, well despite it being very bourgeois and despite there being, having been a lot of political obstacles to it. I mean thereís been kind of an unbroken continuity of avant-garde art practice in Argentina. And I think itís really important even politically to insist on that because thatís something which in the Northern centers is not acknowledged. So I heard you denying that in certain sense saying that you were kind of coming out of nowhere, El Centro was like an invention from nowhere but infact is part of an ongoing project is it not?
Female Speaker: No, no I didnít say come out of nowhere. I just gave some context and actually what was I said was like some of the artists of the 60s that were like the ones [0:13:40] [indiscernible] which was the most avant-garde letís say institution that existed in Argentina. And then from there this group of artists later were [0:13:55] [indiscernible] which actually [0:13:59] [indiscernible] his my partner he was part of that, I mean he is part of that older generation. And the thing is that the history of Argentina politically as you said has been a constant like broken history. We havenít had like even any kind of; I mean democracy is something that in the last 100 years in Argentina was just like kind of flashlights within the whole 100 years. It was constantly interrupted by military coups.
So the same happened with letís say with art right, with any movement in art that had some kind of like begin thing or start to be something and then it would get interrupted. And particularly with the thing of Manara on 60s, all those people most of them when the military coup happened in 76 they dropped art because they all got involved in the what was called La Rucha Alamara which was a political side of it.
[0:15:16]
So yes there is some stuff, there is true there is a school of arts letís say, a public school of art thatís been there forever but most of the, I mean none of the artists that I know came out of there and that I know that I could be interested in looking at their work. Then what you really notice is that many of the artists in Argentina come out from different other schools or other kind of education. I studied architecture [0:15:54] [indiscernible] Roberto studied Sociology and when lots of people come from architecture or sociology or even philosophy or literature too and then they were drawn towards the visual arts. But the school that exists in Buenos Aires and existed for a while is completely, itís useless I mean. Nobody that wants to be a serious artist goes there basically. Or whoever goes there, itís not really something that, itís they donít have an interesting program, they donít have I donít know they are very outdated. They are completely disconnected from any kind of interesting discussion in the field of visual arts really.
Male Speaker: I mean isnít that a socially conservative institution or?
Female Speaker: No itís just like; there well there is the school of visual Sartis which is the school that is there. Itís just a school that is like, I remember when I finished high school and I considered myself an artist at the time and I went to visit that school. And then when I visited I realized I was not going to study there because it was so far from my interest of art and then I visited public university of architecture and it was way closer to my interest in a way and thatís why I studied architecture.
Male Speaker: But Judy why do you think that is the case? I mean donít want to talk too much about this but just so we understand the context where the El Centro came from, why is the public art education system so catastrophic?
Female Speaker: Well the whole, I mean itís very complicated because this will involve the whole history of the public University of Buenos Aires which is a very long and complicated history. But the public university in Buenos Aires is really public meaning you donít pay and itís really popular. I mean so you study, the way I studied for example in architecture I studied in a building which was unfinished and had no windows and was next to the airport. So I remember we were in each class we were about 300 students and every time there was like somebody giving a lecture to 300 or 400 people and a plane would depart from the airport, we would all have to keep silent for like 20 minutes. I mean to give you an idea of the infrastructure and how it worked. Basically there wasnít no heating, there were no bathrooms and there were like, and thatís how I studied for seven or eight years.
Those are the conditions of the public university and it has to do funding and it has to do with like larger economic issues of the country. Although also the incredible thing is that the academic level of the public university has always been super high because the best intellectuals have always been involved with it. So itís kind of like complicated, I donít know if Iím explaining myself, maybe not.
Male Speaker: Well, yeah.
Male Speaker: It seems like a strange paradox thatís all because on the one hand of course it seems like something you would want to make better and on the other hand it seems so bad that you need to create something else which is in fact what youíve done.
Female Speaker: Yeah. And also what weíve been doing is something that itís kind of small you know. And with any kind of, we have no really potential of being anything like bigger or even compete with what the public university is at all. Itís a program basically in which, first of all itís not a school. We donít give a degree, nobody is accredited for anything. Itís basically a program that you navigate it on your own. Itís really like driven by the interest of each person that comes close to El Centro.
[0:20:13]
So even the people that get that rights, I mean thatís another program I mean thereís a lot of things going on at the same time they can choose whatever they want to do or participate or whatever. And then also what happens is naturally is that from the grant holders and I know this is not the right word by I cannot find an equivalent to use. Many of them I mean they started to develop things on their own so now like a group of them started a radio in the Terrace which is private radio that they are running it every week and they have all these like competitions and music and guests and everybody drinks from the same glass of wine to share the germs. So itís kind of like, kind of an open program in which every participant kind of like starts being part of it creating and proposing content.
Male Speaker: Just to talk about a little bit about the founding membership of the CIA, the Centro, I mean I think itís interesting for me for sure that it would include someone like Roberto Jacorbi who couldnít be with us tonight but who was very active in the avant-garde very [0:21:38] [indiscernible] movement of the 60s and 70s and someone like you whoís actually come from an entire, from a different generation and obviously with the different kind of political old look and agenda. How would, that would seem to me to account for the singularity of what youíre doing, how d you look at that?
Female Speaker: How do I look at that? Well actually weíre not that different, thatís how we see it basically. What happened is like we live in a different time in which you have to also change the ways of operating. Itís not anymore about what was or letís say in Latin America like in the 60s I mean the way the letís say the left was organized [0:22:29] [inaudible] yeah, than the way today things are like, yeah organized and they have to operate in different ways. And thatís basically where all our discussions like started. How do we create a new way of operating and also acknowledging something that we have and we are geographical problem which is Argentina is really far removed from the world. Itís very difficult for the artists, the local artists of Argentina to travel. And so in a way its like how can we like also have some kind or like interaction with the world.
Male Speaker: You can ship them to Philadelphia.
Female Speaker: Who pays?
Male Speaker: Yeah.
Male Speaker: Yeah but thatís also a paradox isnít it of Argentina. Itís I mean, maybe not Argentina, Buenos Aires because Buenos Aires is really a Latin American city. It doesn't live itself that way, it doesnít think of itself that way itís really a European city situated outside the Mediterranean basin. And actually Iím not entirely sure; itís true that itís difficult for artists from Buenos Aires to travel. It maybe comparatively more difficult for artists from there to travel than those from New York but in fact if you think of almost anywhere else in South America thereís a fairly decent representation of Argentinean artists, wouldnít you say?
Female Speaker: No I donít think so. If you compare to Brazil or Mexico or even Colombia itís not even close. I think Argentina would be like 10% of that. And what you say, it is true, Argentina does not doesnít have this kind of Latin American identity, does not share that. And there is also the separateness thatís why itís called the South Cone which is the Chile, Argentina and Uruguay which differs radically from the Northern parts of South America I have to say in a way, culturally you know.
[0:25:09]
And actually itís funny because once Borcas was asked to define himself somebody asked him if he was an Argentine and his answer was that he was a European born in exile. Thatís kind of like the sense of the Argentine meaning. But at the same itís kind of complete illusion of being like living in the Paris of South America that the reality of it is that it completely disconnected from the world I mean culturally speaking, [0:25:39] [crosstalk] literature.
Male Speaker: For sure but at the same time obviously you take that into account when you set up a thing like the center for intelligence in the arts, the CIA. I mean did you take that into account because youíve created an international residency program, Buenos Aires has a very strong international pull. And at the same time it is different. You wouldnít set this kind of thing up in, I donít know its [0:26:19] [indiscernible] for example in Bogota or Mont Video or somewhere like that. Itís really youíre working with a different self understanding and youíre able to do something which is very different. Itís important for me to hear how you think of that difference.
Female Speaker: Well, itís true that it is. I mean because what is Buenos Aires as metropolis in South America too. And but there is also this thing for example that idea, which like many artists or people or thinkers are on the world [0:26:51] [indiscernible] Buenos Aires, they contact me and I always want to give a talk or do something. At El Centro and itís always this thing, oh no I go on vacations there you know. And then the best thing that Argentina exported in the last I donít know, 30 years is basically soccer players and models, super models. So within like that kind of exchange what comes in and for what, what goes out and for what there is a whole system of a weird dynamic that itís directly linked with the economic situation of not only Argentina, of all Latin America which has to be with the international debt which is bigger also thing [0:27:43] [indiscernible]. I donít know if answer your question Stephen.
Male Speaker: You did in a way. But I think that itís not quite true that we donít know who Roberto Jacorbi is. We do know who he is. We also know who is Graciela Caranavala is, we also know not only artists from his generation but we know art historians whoíve talked about the very important political conceptual art practices. I mean itís not like we donít know anything about what happens in Argentina. We do and actually weíre quite interested. I mean, whoís weÖ
Female Speaker: Yeah, the way is probably is cold, itís radically different that way that the, of course the reality was experienced. And of course itís always like framed within a Eurocentric and American discourse. I mean thereís always the process of translation when, which is it is complicated because itís like we as South Americans have to engage in a dialogue in which we could be understood right by Europeans or Americans or even a wider world, conceptual world. And at the same time that has to be the exchange the other way around but doesnít really happen in reality. Itís more about I mean always this thing of the political thing in art in Argentina appears in North America or in Europe when they need the content because they donít have it.
So itís kind of like itís taken out of context and like shown and I think that most of you know it from exhibitions that happen maybe here and in Europe. But itís always chunks and pieces; I mean you donít get to know I mean how things develop and why things develop. Itís just a really complex scene you know. So it has to do with this thing of like how you export culture.
[0:30:05]
But in fact, I donít know it seems to me that El Centro at least what I heard you saying before is not so much about exporting culture as it is about shifting the center and shifting it of course south in geo political terms, but also shifting it away from the elite because thatís another thing. Maybe you can talk more about actually how El Centro works on a day to day basis because itís really pretty fascinating how you have in an international residency program, you have like art theorists and artists talking and doing seminars and conferences and lectures and workshops. But at the same time youíve got people just wandering in from the local neighborhoods.
Female Speaker: Yeah we have, itís like really difficult to explain I mean because itís really a whole mix of things. And at the same time we have also, we operate outside of our, the Centro itself now for example from the projects that we started there, we started to work with I donít know I think I spoke about this [0:31:16] [indiscernible] maybe you remember with one of the biggest shanty towns thatís in Buenos Aires in the central city. And basically what was going on there was going on a territorial war between the neighborhoods in the shanty towns because there was no regulation since the government would never acknowledge them as owners of the land. They couldnít have their property delimited.
So they would start like these kind of small fights then they develop into these big fights about like a foot, more like a neighborhood move peace a foot further into the other neighborís territory. And then thatís how it would start the whole rise of violence and stuff. And we started working in these Visha Tentra Uno itís called and 15 of our grant holders from 2009 studied these with Teri Cruise because Teri Cruise was invited, I invited him to the Centro to do a workshop. And Teri wanted to work in the Visha Tentra Uno so they started working there and then Terry left. Of course his workshop was of only ten days and then he left and then all these grant holders continued the project and actually took it to Congress. And now this week itís going to be approved by Congress and the territories are going to be legally delimited and which was a huge thing.
And the students were working with local architects continuing this thing. So now it became something else. And now in August 14th weíre having the presentation of all these cooperative because they created a cooperative called the Coperativa Watimaltika. And there are some You Tube videos where you can see the discussions in Congress where all the students are presenting the plans and trying to organize this whole situation and work is finally is happening. And this entered the realm of politics somehow and not somehow, it did. So now August 14th weíre having the presentation because theyíre giving already the papers to every settler there in the Visha, the government is giving them like the legal papers and everything of their properties. And the grant holders are organizing this big event there August 14th with all the settlers of the Visha that are coming to the CIA, to our Centro, our building and together theyíre going to do this presentation. I donít know now theyíre working on that and Iím kind of working with them but weíll see what happens with that. And thatís one of the projects.
The other one is that this next year weíre opening two more branches of the CIA in Buenos Aires which are actually weíre working together with the public university of Buenos Aires in this. And weíre going to have the CIA in the two biggest in Buenos Aires, in the womenís prison and in the men prison. And itís going to be part of the program of the University of Buenos Aires and mainly of the philosophy department that is going an art program.
Male Speaker: So Judy how does this come about? I mean it seems like El Centro is, sorryÖ
Female Speaker: Something else about what it was is the project. So yeah the Centro is like thatís centralized that brings people to our center together. But then from there it multiplies outside in many different ways and in many different kind of like society letís say. And within that we also include the international realm right which is also one of those.
[0:35:18]
Male Speaker: Hey Judy, I was just teching out for a second.
Male Speaker: Yeah.
Male Speaker: I was just geeking out for second trying to add Allan to this.
Female Speaker: Iím sorry that I speak like so, itís kind of confusing because itís kind of difficult to explain because itís not like a program and we donít have curricula, we donít have anything. Weíre basically work upon on ideas and basically the people that are a part of it. And thatís how it works. So itís constantly changing and weíre constantly like as I told you, now weíre growing into these other two new branches in the prisons and weíve been working in these shanty towns, the Villa Tentra Uno with the regulation of the property there. And also we have another associated project that itís being run by Fernanda Laguna that is a high school in another shanty town which is the other biggest shanty towns but this is more in the outskirts of the city and itís called Fiorito. And this is the shanty town where Maradona comes from Iím not sure if you would know that.
And so there weíre starting a high school and weíve been working for these last two years in getting a high school that is accredited by the Ministry of Education which now we got. So weíre going to have a high school in Villa Fiorito oriented towards the arts and itís going to be the first one in a shanty town. And this program is going to be run by of course weíre doing it now in order to be accredited by the ministry of education. Weíre going to have teachers as a regular like high school program and then weíre going to have our own art program in it which is going to be taught by the grant holders that we already have from 2009 and 2010. Those are going to be the teachers of art there.
Male Speaker: At the same time, I mean looking at your, looking at the program that you have on your website it looks like where on the one hand youíre going into like the most difficult kind of situations like prisons and shanty towns and so on. At the same time youíre maintaining a really high level of sort of conceptual exigency program which you have with the network of Southern conceptualists which tries to draw attention to the unduly neglected conceptual political practices in South America in the 60s, 70s in the conceptual family. But doing it in a context where it seems very paradoxical to do that kind of a thing because where art is understood in very different terms.
Female Speaker: Yeah well actually itís not so paradoxical because I mean none of the people that are part of CIA are kind of like part of like what is called the art market in Buenos Aires. So it kind of makes sense to us, itís actually very in line with our own practices. Itís not, there is a very clear determined line of like there is a serious, I donítÖ
Male Speaker: What do you mean Judy exactly what do you mean?
Female Speaker: What do I mean? I mean that we are I mean the people, we do believe in this system I mean we wanted to create this kind of center of thought, center of interaction of all these intellectuals that were like kind of operating by themselves and kind of lost you know in this kind of like masses of like people and they wanted to enter a conversation with each other. So this was kind of like the first idea of the Centro, I mean to get together all these people and letís start to re think and even what we do basically together is we study, thatís what we do, everybody. The grant holders whoever comes, the faculties, itís kind of like Iíd say, yeah kind of oven where knowledge gets cooked kind of thing.
[0:40:16]
And then from there, there is no purpose for us to keep it there closed. The only purpose we can do this is we can multiply, if we can disperse this knowledge if we can like open it up. If we can like really like use it for other purposes.
Male Speaker: And so the other purposes are, various things, yeahÖ
Female Speaker: The multiplication factors which is all these things that weíve produced at the Centro then itís kind of like distributed to the wider community and to the wider community meaning a community that has mainly no access to these things which in these case are these places that weíre intervening like shanty towns and prisons and yeah.
Male Speaker: So you guys use art projects or sort an art infrastructure to help bring what you guys are starting or the kinds of issues that are coming up and out of your intensive kind of school into other realms?
Female Speaker: Yeah something like that. But what is important is we donít do art projects. We donít consider the CIA an artist at all. Each of us has their own practice and we continue with our practice and thatís what we live off basically. But the CIA is not an art project we do not produce art projects. Itís a center for thought and for reflection and for whatever happens to happen there, letís say, whatever, the radio or these things that people started doing. Of course we let everything happen and thatís the part in which we lose control and thatís the part we like the most.
Male Speaker: Well I mean not to detract from that because I donít necessarily think anyone should make art, but whatís up with the name of the center? I mean itís you know I think I wouldnít say this necessarily applies to you but there is kind of, thereís almost a stigma that artists who engaged in social practice have against acknowledging that what theyíre doing has anything to with art. When in fact, many of us including I think you guys make like ample use of that. You make of kind of what we get from playing within the realm where we draw on art, you know we draw on artist competencies and you know and I look at your website thereís definitely a lot of that going on.
So I guess Iím just curious why the revulsion, why I donít know, why it seems I mean I guess Iím not really sure how to put it because I donít want to interpret why youíre saying what youíre saying. Why you shy away from that word I guess or thinking about it that way?
Female Speaker: No, because it is important to make the difference because [0:43:34] [indiscernible] look in the art in which many of them considered [0:43:42] [indiscernible] and many of them are considered exhibitions in themselves. But thatís not what weíre doing with El Centro and thatís not what at all, itís really not that. Itís just like the area of like bring together a conglomerate of people and practices and just connect them and whatever happens happens from there. And itís not that project letís say, itís not that oh weíre doing these things together. We artists [0:44:16] [indiscernible] project, an art project. Itís not an art project. Thatís why we kind of talk [0:44:27] [indiscernible] within like the realm of pedagogy which actually we donít feel very comfortable with it.
Male Speaker: But Judy you know that your project is taking place within a context, a global context of art pedagogy or art education as an artistic project. I mean thatís laws even context in which we first met in Beirut where Beirut as art school was being discussed and then you one of the key speakers in talking about this example that youíre talking about tonight. So it is part of this sort of dissatisfaction I think that artists, many artists have and I presume you has with the way art is going and the need to move, not forward a step but move back a step in order to kind of retool what the words, the ways and to rethink the whole thing basically, it is part of that right?
[0:45:40]
Female speaker: Yes.
Male speaker: Its part of a kind of a pedagogical term.
Female speaker: Yes there is definitely but what I mean is like its very different when we talk about Europe and North America again and when you talk about in the particular case of Argentina which I am from now. Because its like, its radically different or even the case of Beirut in the intent of doing this academy because within my conversations with Christine when I met her a while before and she then, she reminded me was this thing, her first question to me was like how do you get the students and I said to her, and my answer to her was the fact we did 400 applications a year. I mean [0:46:19] [inaudible] everybodyís got a difference on likeóand then you see the need for something I mean. And when you have all of these people you know like applying for a program like this which is very like, how can I say? Not institutionalized, not professionalized, not accredited, not you know, then just that drive of the people is the thing that keeps you like moving and trying to grow within this thing you know [0:46:50] [inaudible], which is different than what happens for example in the case of Beirut in which they are trying to do an academy that is accredited and it is funded by foreign funds and they have no students.
Male speaker: I think so, Judy did you say you accept 25 out of 400 right? Or have however many apply? Okay.
Judy: Yes around 400, between 300 and 400 yes. We get 25 because we donít have the structure we need like we are tiny, I mean and we work like crazy and really hard to keep it going.
Male speaker: Well you know I am curious, the kind of work that you are describing and the kinds of things that you know, that I have seen on your site, do you feel that many of the applicants are on board with that program or are rethinking the kinds of structures of the world that you guys are interested in rethinking or do you feel like, you know, they are just a number of hungry artists that are just applying willy nilly kind of to any art center? I am asking you because if there are even like even a quarter of those people, you know you feel are invested or involved in some way in artist social practice that would be kind of staggering to me.
Judy: Yes no, absolutely not itís a mixture of both, of the two things that you are saying. Of course there are a lot of people that just apply but there is a lot of people like actually good artists that are applying. And most of the applicants and the grant holder that are now at the central most of them are, I mean many of them are engaging social practices but many of them not and thatís our idea, create a really eclectic environment you know. We are not trying to like, you know to like create any kind of dogma or not at all actually. We are trying to bring together a multiplicity of voices.
Male speaker: Well I dint mean that, I didnít mean that youíd be imposing your views on other people just that for instance you know we help to run our center at Philadelphia and you know there is often people that, I mean people sign up for our mailing list everyday but thatís a very low commitment. Applying for a residency program I mean most of the time I would say, I donít know, here maybe about half of the people that apply are really interested and invested in the kinds of things that we are investigating or doing.
Judy: Yes.
Male speaker: And thatís one of the first things that we ask people you know but we donít get nearly that many applicant anyways. And I was just curious because you know I feel that itís, I mean more and more as this kind of work makes its way out into a kind of mainstream or at least becomes more visible that there is definitely going to be more artists or there seems to be more artists involved in cit or interested in that. But I still, you know I still would say you know if I were to count the number of artists in Philadelphia who are interested in critical practice or social engaged practice it probably wouldnít be even as many, you know, applicants as you guys get in an entire year. So I was just curious and you know I can imagine that different context could help encourage or maybe even like incubate or just set the conditions for different kinds of interest and I was curious if that was going on down there or what.
[0:50:30]
Judy: Well I think it is again, itís a very different context and that starts from like the political system that you live here in America and the political system that, I mean happens in Argentina which is radically different.
Male speaker: For sure yes, definitely.
Judy: So thatís basically what it is, thatís one side. And then the other thing is like here the artist is like so professionalized you know. Everybody went to like a university you know and everybody like read all of these psyche I donít know basic theoretical text which in Argentina itís not like that. The artists come from a totally different context does not come from the academic education, the artist in Argentina doesnít know how to write a statement and we donít want them to write a statement either, thatís not the point. But I mean the artists has been so, how can I say it? Authority institutionalize that you know you have to have all these kinds of formats in order to exist as an artist in America which for me are kind of ridiculous. So I donít think thatís something like the CIA that we did in Buenos Aires can happen here or in Europe really, honestly. Thatís my experience of living abroad and teaching in schools here and Europe, I donít see it possible.
Male speaker: I mean Judy I was just thinking that you donít want people to write a statement but not because they couldnít, sounds like you might not want them necessarily to write an artistís statement because you donít want toómaybe it sounds likeójust let me know if you think I am off base with this but it sounds like E l Centroís position is one of not supporting over professionalization or professionalization at all of creative practice.
Judy: No professionalization yes but not in the American way that it was set up or in the European way, we donít think that those are systems, those are completely sterile systems that are completely like killing the art production itself. In which you are much more in the format of what you are as an artist to be able to be exist in the world than to think your practice and to be an artists.
Male speaker: For sure yes but itís not that, I mean it sounds likeóI am probably reading into this but itís not that the artist or the people that are doing this kind of work or involved with you guys couldnít write any kind of statement but maybe it would be a statement of a different kind so--. I mean you guys you are involved with you know these free schools on critical issues, oh Iím sorry free classes, reading groups and really kind of tackling difficult material and difficult problems, approaching them in creative ways. I mean its sort of easier to write a statement about things like that you know in a way or at least its more, maybe more valuable, meaningful possible than, I wouldnít want to judge anyoneís work but I will say writing a statement about oh I donít know, making art work that really isnít addressing those issues if you know what I mean. Maybe artwork thatís more concerned with material or surface or things like that you know.
Judy: Well I told you we have any kind of variety and we are every variable creature that you can imagine in a fable you know really. It is really like that and as I told you that one of the main purposes is like not only producing knowledge but the dissemination of knowledge. but the dissemination of knowledge not within this kind of like, you know, intellectual bubbles but break that intellectual bubble and see how much can we reach. Thatís why we are like you know trying to like operate in this other kind of parts of the city and social context mainly. But it has to do more with like dissemination of knowledge and yes, I think.
[0:55:03]
Male speaker: Judy I mean I know that you are talking about the specificity of the context in which you are operating and thatís fair but many of the things that you are saying are actually values which people all over the worlds , I mean sort of disaffected artists are sharing. Thatís quite something we have noticed actually in the context of Plausible Art Worlds you know, maybe you noticed it when we were in Beirut but we have noticed it in many other cases as the people are just not satisfied with the elite culture which is often promoted by the notion of art but are trying to break with that and not only trying to break with it but actually are breaking with it. So donít you think it would be intermeeting to, I mean or would the CIA be prepared to imagine links with similar institutions elsewhere or is it really something which is south American or Argentinean in specific?
Judy: No are actually we have links with institutions elsewhere and actually we have exchanges and all that but what I do really think is that the situation in America I mean letís see how I put it. For example what we [0:56:28] [inaudible] and then we picked 25, one of those 25 was a group of 20 people right? And then which was a collective that was called [0:56:47] [inaudible] or in English would be the Movers. And their work basically was to whoever was moving from a house; from an apartment to another apartment they would move them for free. They had a truck and they would move these people for free and while they would move them they would start like you know arranging the furniture or their things and they would create this kind of like temporary piece which they would photograph or they would like [0:57:16] [inaudible] videos or even like short theater plays, theater plays yes with the people that were being moved you know.
And so then our group of 25 grants all of a sudden it was like 40 people you know, and you have this kind of things that constantly like question us you know or like should we take this whole group you know, because it means for us like you know a lot of more effort and work and everything. But then its like, so itís like we are really working, we improvise a lot too you know, itís like we work a lot on improvisation and we are good at that because our history is constantly, has been constantly improvised for the last 100 years which is different than what it is the European or the American context in which like things are like, you know becomes turn on and everything is like you know becomes a written history very quickly and labeled and boom.
So that is kind of like certain qualities that happens there that I donít see them happening here or in Europe and I am sorry this is my personal view on this thing of course. I am not saying that it is not possible in America but I think it operates differently really. And it has to do with this kind of historical context in which like people are used there to like you know, survive basically and survive in the hardest like political situation and economic situations. And we are not only talking about people I mean of like working class, even like the [0:59:16] [inaudible] I mean itís almost the same because the economic instability or Argentina has been such that classes have been also like kind of like, people have been up and down like you know in a period of like I donít know 20 years like they navigated the whole class structure you know. Other page...
[0:59:45]
Male speaker: I wonder if you have any connection with the street art. I guess the only things really that I am familiar with Argentinean art classes, sorry I am so ignorant, are the [1:00:08] [inaudible] and the street art, stenciled work and the [1:00:13] [inaudible].
Judy: But the street art is something that is very important and itís something that is not very well known in the world and actually one of the historian had worked at the center which is Anna Longoni and has written an amazing book about it which is called [1:00:28] [inaudible]. And I consider it one of theóunfortunately it has not been translated to English and also Anna which she is an amazing genius, she doesnít want to do lectures in America or Europe or she is very kind of like picky about it, I donít know, and thatís her personal position.
But itís a very interesting thing that she kind of like started studying which is all of these phenomena that happened during, from 78 to 82 letís say, which was called [1:01:00] [inaudible] which basically what it was, it was like during that period of time there was a lot of people that disappeared and a way of protest became of people, anonymous people doing this painting but it was always the same kind of painting which was the silhouette of a person in human scale painted into the walls you know around the city with a name right, which was not identifiable I mean of course. You couldnít see who the person was butóand she has been studying this phenomena of this kind of like creating this imagery from real popular, you know I mean, the play, coming from that side letís say is.
And you canít compare it to the graffiti of personal that but this is like of course more related to politics and to like trying to find a voice to speak and when representation becomes kind of like a key component for something that you claimed for and not just the [1:02:14] [inaudible] of just working in representation or you know.
Male speaker: Yes I notice also Marcelo Esposito [phonetic] [1:02:26] part of your gang, I know [1:02:32] [inaudible] has been working in Spain doing videos and the historical [1:02:37] [inaudible]. I wonder what you know else is there also this historical memory I guess is that a continuous subject of investigation, is there something?
Judy: Iím sorry I canít hear you well.
Male speaker: Oh it was a rambling question but I noticed Marcelo Esposito is part of your team and he has done a video about the situation, the historical in Spain, years of the [1:03:18] [inaudible] dictatorship.
Judy: Yes.
Male speaker: And I wonder to what extend this historical memory in Argentina its part your kind of regular program of investigation [1:03:29] [inaudible].
Judy: Well it is part of it because this is basically lead by Anna Longoni and she is teaching a seminar called arts and politics which actually itís like so many people want to come that they donít really fit in our building, I mean if we let all the people in then we will get, you know closed by the police basically because of regulations. So yes thatís basically the seminar that is led by Anna Longoni of the CIA. I mean itís related to all her research for the last 12 years.
Male speaker: Interesting you were just looking up some of this links online while you guys were talking so donít all know a lot of these stuff.
Judy: Yes now I am trying to convince Anna Longoni to translate her books so maybe if somebody has some publishers I would wish to publish it here, that would great. Well then we have that other thing which is the issue of translation thatís why all the people that we invite, international faculty that are invited to workshops or teaching in the CIA are Spanish people. Because most of the people that we have at the Central do not speak English and when we bring an English speaker what happens is that we have a simultaneous translation and thatís very expensive and it gets very complicated. So basically everything is spoken in Spanish and we are working also in translating some texts thatís have never been translated to Spanish to make them available in Spanish.
[1:05:27]
Male speaker: Thatís a real divide itís amazing.
Judy: It is, it is radical and thatís, yes that is something that for us itís like itís a very interesting problem.
Male speaker: Iím here in Germany and I was speaking today at a table with people, my German is so terrible, I was speaking germ-nglish and at one point the conversations which they were [1:06:02] [inaudible] in English turned to the question of Esperanto which well has the language develop our anarchists and communists and you know and attempted universal equity, I donít know itís funny.
Judy: Yes but also for example I mean I am just like we deal with all these kinds of problems but at the same time we started to do these kinds of experiments and for example two months ago there was a workshop that was donít by Michel smith which is an American artist and I am sure you know him well.
Male speaker: Yes I saw him earlier [1:06:43] [inaudible] in Austin, he is Austin.
Judy: Yes so Mike came to the CIA for the work that we having been talking for a long time and he wanted to come and it was funny because he was very stressed about the language issue and how he would, you know do it and whatever. And we discussed I mean this whole thing and of course he works with performance and he has all these kind of performance he works it makes it easier. But basically what happened is he went to do the workshop and then I was talking with the grand founders of the CIA asking them like what do they think and they totally loved it. And this whole thing of like struggling with this problem of communicating you know became part of the workshop and I think it was a fantastic one [1:07:35] [inaudible].
Male speaker: Mike Smith hardly speaks in his performances so that must help.
Judy: Exactly.
Male speaker: You know the University ofÖ
Judy: No I think basically this workshop itís been ñlike you know he teaches in University of Texas also and he has been teaching from experience and he has a lot of experience in teaching. So he also showed a lot of work where I can see he did a whole kind of a workshop in which there was kind of a strong part of like showing arts and the performance arts of the American performance arts since his time on and he was doing it all in English. And I am sure, I mean many of the people that participated in the workshop got half of it whatever but whatever they got it was like kind of an interesting experiment. And also like just like being there like facing such a reality is a problem right there you know. Like how do we communicate with each other?
Male speaker: I know the University of Texas at Austin has a really extensive collection of [1:08:54] [inaudible] art political from political movement in the 60s and 7670s and I wonder to what extend do you make the relations between the western academy perhaps or there is more of, I mean well not only in store but in Mexican [1:09:16] [inaudible].
Judy: Yes but the difference for example that we have with Mexico being in Argentina is that all the Mexican artists speak English and most of the Mexican and most of the Mexican artists studied in North America. So there you have a radical difference because the discourse that they manage and you know itís a North America discourse mainly. And which is the radical difference with Argentina which none of the artists studied in North America or Europe.
Male speaker: Yes I donít know I understand Argentina is more kind of a Latin American country that is sort of more historically related to Europe, thatís just my vague understanding.
[1:10:16]
Judy: Yes it is but I mean itís like if you think about it the level isolation that Argentina had in the last like, I donít know I would say even since 45, yes 1945 itís been huge. Except like very small groups of people that were able to travel or take some classes you know at some universities maybe in Paris and all of those people belong to the literary world mostly. And there is where you have like Victoria Ocampo and you know all the group of [1:10:53] [inaudible] and all that which was called the magical realism. Btu itís really a very small group, I for example I studied in Buenos Aires I didnít study abroad and I feel that most of the time I donít manage the language or the specific concepts to be able to articulate them in English you know in order to communicate properly and thatís something that I feel in myself all the time. And itís because I have been educated in this other language and in this other ideology so it is a huge difference.
Male speaker: I justósorry.
Male speaker: No go ahead Allan I have a question that is kind of is more of a departure I guess.
Male speaker: Oh depart, I was just going to say one moment there, I think always political; one moment there Argentina was right up front in the dependence for lands and the political [1:12:05] [inaudible] or during the crises that the generation of popular assemblies and worker control [1:12:15] [inaudible] enterprise as capitalism was daily there. It seemed a very exciting moment and one that seemed to kind of vanished.
Judy: Yes.
Male speaker: So yes I kind of never figured out sort of in a way what happened to Argentina in terms of being inspirational through [1:12:38] [inaudible] in some sort of notion of new different kinds of economic arrangements that might emerge from the collapse of capitalism which it seems to me you know in this moment of global crisis was to be important. Thatís not a, I mean it is a cultural questions; I throw it out [1:12:57] [inaudible].
Judy: Yes well actually what happened is like since 45 onówhich that was the period in which like it started the [1:13:11] [inaudible] government right. That was the moment letís say they were like six, seven year in which Argentina shifted. There were only two moments necessary one was in the 30s with [1:13:21] [inaudible] and the other one was Veron after 45 in which Argentina became industrialized. Any other period other than that mostly it was exporting resources, so once Argentina started to develop and to get industrialized and I mean it [1:13:43] [inaudible] industry what happened actually I mean itís not a causality , itís not a coincidence I mean. Both governments one was from the [1:13:56] [inaudible] and the other one is the [1:13:58] [inaudible] which I am sure you all know Veron were like interrupted by military coups and mostly that had to do with economic measures that were basically or international policies that were basically from North America.
Male speaker: Somebody is reaching the bottom of their drinks.
Judy: Sorry?
Male speaker: Sorry the noise it sounded like someone is reaching the bottom of their drink with a straw.
Judy: No there is a political headstone there is an economic power that kind of controls and rules and determines who does what and what do you serve me with you know and what do I need you for. And it doesnít matter when the own development of the country or whatever, its rules by a larger, a bigger clan [1:15:03] [inaudible]. So thatís why also I am now going back to the central thatís why I am coordinating the CIA itís kind of like okay so letís internalize the enemy you know, as it is called.
[1:15:13]
Male speaker: The cannibal manifesto.
Male speaker: So do you feel like on some level you areóis it even worth asking I mean would you even tell us that do you feel on some level the center is sort of manetic In a way producing other types of centers at least on the surface while doing something else?
Judy: No not really I meanÖ
Male speaker: Yes.
Judy: I mean if it happens that more, itís not like an intention really I mean thatís a lot of people participating and there is a lot of things that people are doing in there and we really leave it open you know. So if somebody has a particular agenda I donít know it could happen, butÖ
Male speaker: Yes it seems like an organization as a kind of a form of creative practice.
Judy: It is.
Male speaker: There you are experimenting with the structures themselves as a sort of practice without really raining it in as an art project or really having to define it as such but thatís actually what it sounds like you are doing.
Judy: Yes something like that, and also like itís a very fertile ground Argentina since there is really few structures, I mean there is a lot of room you know, operated that way.
Male speaker: Yes I mean a big interest of ours is when looking at these various kinds of things that we are calling art worlds or plausible ones anyway, a big part of that or at least a number of the examples are people who are experimenting with organizations in some way. Some people have called that type of thing organizational art and others are really either not foregrounding a definition of it or defining it differently but the more you talk about the structures that you are setting up the more that seems to be the case. And I am just really interests in that I am wondering; you know I guess one of my big interests is how these kinds of organizations are sort of Petri dishes in a way for experimental cultural forms you know.
And I wonder that in different conditions maybe the intentions might be flexible or they might be adaptive but for whatever reason the kind of structure that you are setting up and playing with seems to me that this could ñwell I donít know. I am interested in the possibility of those whatever knowledge has come out of that or whatever, well I donít know, problems arise that that could be transferable knowledge on some level you know, that it could be potentially be an interest to people in other contexts as well. Yes and we do hope itís contagious Stephen for sure.
Judy: Also I mean something that I mean we always get demand with, we started this thing and then of course basically we started it like you know just cooking dinner and inviting as I told you all these intellectual or people that are working in somehow related to the arts and having these discussions basically through food, cooking and having dinner and in a very informal way. And also we donít have any kind of plan of like you know how long we will exist I mean if this whole dies tomorrow its fine with everybody too. We donít really have any kind of expectation of you know, of becoming something else or whatever its just I mean what it is really for the moment because we cannot go on ahead because we have no funding, no support and I am talking about financial support.
[1:19:49]
So it is really like that, it is something that we cannot just like make big plans into the future. So we set up kind of a time frame we say we are going to this for like five years you know and most of us that we are doing it we work for free basically and yes, and then we will see if we can do it or we cannot [1:20:19] [inaudible]. One of the things I would set up that was very important for everybody is that nobody would do anything that makes him a millimeter uncomfortable in anyway, we all have to be happy.
Male speaker: Would you mind expanding on that just slightly because I want to hear you know, I mean I can tell already that you donít mean that everyone is supposed to just do things that make each other feel comfortable because you are already doing work that would make a number of people feel very uncomfortable and thatís probably a very good thing. On the other it seems like you are talking about a kind of ethic a kind of group ethic and I am curious about that.
Judy: Well basically itís a very simple thing you know, itís like whenever there is like situations that we are like not comfortable with or we areówe just donít do it period. And sometimes when we get t o these discussions and they get really complicated we arrive to the point of like, and itís kind of an internal joke that we have itís like you know what, this is not making me happy.
Male speaker: Okay yes.
Judy: And itís over.
Male speaker: That whatever your shared values are, actually this is sort of a tiny point because you havenít really talked much about the way your group works and I donít know if it is really time for really getting into that but you know, is it the case that if anyone person in your group has a problem with it the you guys you kind of have an informal sort of intuitive veto power and everybody just kind of respects or is it something that you develop a kind of consensus about like that you have a kind of collective uncomfortably and then you address it and stop it.
Judy: No you have to, first of all itís very important that you have to take into account that Argentina is I think the society that has more psycho analysts than any other one, so most of the people that work like at the CIA or were doing something went through many years of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy maybe. And so it part of kind of an exercise that is still ready , I donít know, itís part of the conversation bit, I mean again itís not regulated, itís not organized as like this is what we do if this happened or that. No we kind of address issues as they come and yes, and we try to be very kind to each other and to take care of each other. Itís a very basic things itís not you know, exactly.
So I mean for us itís like our meetings, for example, when we have meetings for like of issues of administration and issues of like you know, they always last many hours because we are talking about the structure and we are talking about administration and then one of them starts talking about you know she broke up with her boyfriend and then we all turn to that and then we go back to the administration issue, you know itís kind of like that. Yes Mexico is cheaper, no I mean itís like a culture that would really was raised with psychoanalysis. You take a taxi I mean in the city of Buenos Aires and the taxi driver, you start a conversation with the taxi driver you know about psychoanalysis you know, itís like an enormous thing.
Male speaker: This is amazing [1:24:27] [inaudible] proud.
Judy: No itís not because it also makes the sickest society you could ever imagine, because everyone is a neurotic, everyone is a cautious neurotic which I donít know whatís worse.
Male speaker: Okay like I was reading Julia Brian Wilson in her new book Art worker, as the discussion of the Rosario group which appeared in the text and says that Lucy Lampard was very influenced in her conception of what art stood politically but the work of the Rosario group. But she only saw the first phase of that work, she didnít see the second and third phase where it was brought to the public and discussed and fully cooked as it were. And so she didnít really have a complete sense of the kind of social practice that the Rosario group was developing within the political context. I thought that would really interest you because eventually I think to the great extent the [1:25:45] [inaudible] criticism collapsed into an old socialist realist problem of representing the political where the Rosario group was working within a conceptual paradigm and kind of cooking something different.
[1:26:01]
And I think itís so important in the US in New York on particular there is really an explosion of scholarships around conceptual art in South America when they will really affect the conversation in the future.
Judy: Yes definitely and also I think it will be like yes, extremely like I donít know, I think I got to play this like an exercise or something like that.
Male speaker: Well we donít get any exhibition in New York I mean thatís another issue.
Judy: I think I have tones of exhibitions in New York; you have tones of galleries and tones of museums.
Male speaker: Well yes in the [1:26:50] [inaudible] had a wonderful exhibition [1:26:56] [inaudible] but you know not that enough people saw it.
Judy: No I think thatís the basic situation that happened in New York really was the one that was a bit squeezed museum, was it global conceptualism I think by [1:27:15] [inaudible] or something.
Male speaker: Yes but that was 10 years ago.
Judy: Yes.
Male speaker: And it was global.
Judy: Well we never had an exhibition like that; we never had an exhibition like that in Buenos Aires, not even in [1:27:33] [inaudible].
Male speaker: Really?
Judy: Yes never, so itís been shown more in New York than in Buenos Aires.
Male speaker: Also El Muzeo [1:27:43] [inaudible] which is a really good exhibition of South American conceptual art and performance.
Judy: Yes that was a good one.
Male speaker: And the catalogue was great.
Judy: Yes but you donít get to see those exhibitions in Latin America.
Male speaker: Oh men thatís weird.
Judy: Yes you get to see Felix Gonzalez [1:28:06] [inaudible]. You know I mean the few museums that are there I mean are very interested in like showing us like kind of like practices and like showing what should be looking at the model that is kind of the, you know the European North American kind of artists production.
Male speaker: There is thus kind of deep question that I was having and never really could understand wasÖ
Judy: [1:28:42] [inaudible] Stephen is saying, sorry [1:28:44] [inaudible] is saying what about Buenos Aires to join the arms struggle I love our land.
Male speaker: okay.
Judy: And thatís the thing, the thing is like how can you struggle within a system that today I mean the whole , the plan is shifted I mean today there is no point of an arms struggle. I mean thatís kind of a very kind of an old way of ideological struggle and itís not really ñI mean I am not interested in it because I guess violence [1:29:19] [inaudible]. And like how do we reformulate all these together with these old folks from the 60s that were in that and all the ones that have died which also were many, and many of them also left in exile. So thatís why we are like trying to create a sensor for like discussion of how, how to disseminate our ideas, how to operate in such a [1:29:55] [inaudible] historical context than what it was in the 70s. And also we learn a lot from that because all those fight and struggles like took lots of life and it was a lost war you know. So it wasnít a very interesting or smart topic. Your question was [1:30:23] [indiscernible]
[1:30:24]
Male speaker: Sort of a conversation stopper. I had a ñ I donít know I just returned into my art store [1:30:35] [inaudible] the ways in which the formal screening was in the extremely formal practice of the bow house of connect it artists transformed itself into a real dynamic of social sculpture or a participation was [1:30:57] [inaudible] how was that termed being political that you know I can understand participation becoming political but how the formal constituent of the bow house graffitiís and the connect it artists transformed itself into a sort of practice that has always been very obscure to me I donít know if thatís the question.
Judy: Yeah I donít know I mean perhaps we are like just and again we try to work each [1:31:42] [inaudible] a perfect moment and historically speaking in Argentina we developed like we are doing because itís the first time in many many years that we had almost all since 1985 we have democracy letís say which is not a long period really. but we need enough so that we can say okay we can start you know trying to at least together several minds and you know create an environment in which just create the environment in which we can think you know and think about our context and out context in relationship to cost figure and bigger contests.
Male speaker: So Judy what if we wanted to open an El Centro here in Philadelphia or in New York?
Judy: How would that be? Itís almost impossible. Now I donít think we can do that but we can do it if you want the art organize a spiritual seminar but the thing is that all the professionals which are part of the El Centro because we are all part of it and have to agree and I donít think they want to come here really thatís the thing, very simple.
Male speaker: A great [1:33:15] [inaudible]
Judy: I know I mean but they are like excited some they are doing their research, some their work on their very [1:33:23] [inaudible] things and their gaze is not exactly towards North America.
Steven: Judy my gaze is not towards North America either. I mean thatís a fact how do you deal with the fact that I mean I donít represent of course the international art world but a lot of like art historian or art critics like me are really interested in talking to you and not talking to you know what is the northern center. so how are going to deal with that fact I mean how are going to avoid the fact that we are going to actually bring things which are peripheral and which you are complaining about the peripheral status into the center while maintaining their critical edge. Now that was my real question right from the beginning.
Judy: I think itís not possible really not for now at least maybe itís possible in the near future. But up to now - I mean everything is like a little baby you know down there everything. I mean because of just change like you know kind of a little baby. and also I donít know itís like I feel for example I also live in New York [1:34:48] [indiscernible] and I do have and I also travel a lot and I feel kind of like for me for example I learned to speak English watching Hollywood movies and reading the subtitles. You know and it really comes out of like your desire to connect or to communicate itís what makes you communicate more [1:35:10] [inaudible]. I didnít go to school to learn English but itís also out of necessity I think of need.
[1:35:20]
And so there has to be a need in order for that bridge to like happen [1:35:29] [inaudible] well we get a lot of curators [1:35:41] [inaudible] let me tell you. but no no we work on everybody of course in the centre and its open. And then some of them find things that are super interesting for them and they keep on visiting and visiting and some of them just come and look at this stuff and leave and some of them come and take some of the grand piece [1:36:02] [inaudible] too which is fantastic. Anything that happens we donít have the kind of critical thing of like judging it like oh you know itís bad or its terrible or like no I mean we just let things happen we are not at the stage where can be critical because we donít have that [1:36:22] [inaudible] institutionality. Well there are yeah there are many yes I think that also something thatÖ
Steven: So Judy since time is pressing how do things look for the future for the CIA? I mean there are things set for 2010, 2011 is everything like moving ahead youíve got some kind of funding or are you managed to function without getting funding or how does it work?
Judy: No actually we have some funding which were some grants but I actually got in the States then abroad and now we donít have any kind of support for the next for 2011 we have no support whatsoever. so we are trying to I donít know we are basically discussing it like how we are going to do it and also there is a lot of people for example like I told you Victor [1:37:32] [inaudible] and his writers which you know they have [1:37:35] [inaudible] everybody is like you know like I know like okay I will put [1:37:40] [inaudible] whatever it comes out in a very kind of natural way and Iím not really like I donít know I donít fear I mean if there is no money coming in there is no money coming in we can still do it I think somehow.
Male speaker: Thatís really interesting time to decide to expand into a couple of different locations new locations.
Judy: Yeah yeah it is actually but yeah the idea is to see I mean now we can get more support from the local community instead of from foundations from abroad actually most of the foundations from abroad that were giving us grants and now they pulled out, like in Latin America [1:38:25] [inaudible] actually maybe they are mostly putting their money in them English. So yeah I donít know. then we also have like - really I have to say something everything English happens out of enthusiasm I mean in a way thatís the real move of the whole thing in. and people here got engaged in doing all these things without making a penny you know this whole negotiation with the ministry of education for the high school in the shanty town was done all volunteer basically.
So in the end things end up kind of happening and people up here you know people that are you know part of the centre. And also something that happened s during our first year of operation gave this 25000 grant and then they had one year right to do the program or anything that was happening there. And then we had another open application and then when he saw the year before that they said they wanted to stay that they didnít want to leave so we decided that many of them and the ones who have collaborated the most would stay.
So then in order for people to stay we are kind of accumulating people through I donít know how we are going to do this but itís hard to say no. Yeah well thatís definitely the idea thatís I mean we donít want to create the center that the only speaks art intellectually but would be that would have no purpose at all that we would be that will be like to drive a plant as I said for example you know.
[1:40:16]
Female speaker: The idea of expanding in the art centre which is underfunded doesnít -sounds like itís not necessarily anything thatís going to be funded but it might be something that the people themselves will fund and it will be like just expanding the group.
Judy: Its kind of expanding the group yeah it is and actually what happens is also like kind of a natural [1:40:43] [indiscernible] of people I mean the people that get more involved with everything that we are doing, they keep on with that and there is some people that come or even if they have got a grant and then they leave and they are not [1:40:54] [indiscernible] so it cannot build by itself you know. Yeah so it really happens out of enthuse and if you see that story or how things even when all these groups can even be political groups and [1:41:16] [inaudible] groups it all really happened out of enthusiasm, it never happened out of like funding programs or like artists getting money to do things. I mean itís been part of almost artists are used to work like that in Argentina, itís not that they we are waiting for the grant to do something we are just going to do it you know. There has never been any grant really. And let me put this clear well when I talk about the grants that we give its not that we give them money we give them access to all the [1:41:49] [inaudible] and all the programs that we are developing.
Steven: So Judy what about a class on Plausible Art Worlds, about art worlds which are not mainstream which are sidious versus which challenge the dominant norms and that kind of stuff?
Judy: Yeah that kind of stuff but the other something important to make clear I think that when we talk about the centre or different [1:42:26] [inaudible] itís not again itís not a piece of art it is a program that we are doing and it is being run by artists it happens to be run by artists but itís not our piece and itís not we donít even consider it as collective piece of arts. I know itís complicated but-
Steven: No I didnít mean to suggest that it was a piece of art. What I wanted I mean what I ñ again as we are suggesting [1:42:56] [indiscernible] itís not a piece of art but what it is is a life sustaining environment where art can actually take place and perhaps thrive.
Judy: Yeah but I donít think that are happening in the capitalist system.
Male speaker: You what?
Judy: I donít think that kind of happened in a capitalists system.
Male speaker: Uh okay so we have to first change the system and then that can happen?
Judy: No [1:43:33] [inaudible] culture I mean you grow up in the culture in which you were raised a priority with your individual needs you have no sense of I mean itís a very different kind of education.
Male speaker: I think artists are really [1:43:52] [inaudible] in society where best positioned to step outside of that subjective frame because art is a mixed economy including the elements of gift [1:44:06] [inaudible] and to the antic market capitalism has been overrated.
Judy: Yeah but what happens is like - what I see happening in north America actually and Iím sorry Iím probably like completely saying something that is out of the I donít know. But I donít really see it happening I donít think itís not I mean itís culturally impossible. And also the other thing that I do think is that artists canít change the world, cannot change the system and I really stand for that artists cannot change the political system a piece of art cannot do that. And I feel that thatís the problem of the artists in North America that they have this naÔve idea which is an idea that in what has already thrown to the garbage in the ë60s in Argentina thatís never happened political changeÖ
[1:45:18]
Male speaker: A group of artists also went to jail for the Puerto Rican art as well.
Judy: No changing the political system yes can become art yeah the other way around probably.
Scott: Hey guys I hate to say it but its 8:02 its Eastern Standard Time time to drop the gate in.
Male speaker: Its 2:00 here Jeff.
Male speaker: Well itís definitely not late the reason we end on time is for your sake actually I definitely would be into doing this for another couple of hours. Because especially this particular question is one that Iím ready to just kind of jump right in and get started but I think we need to wrap it up just for the sake of not burning people out as we do this every week. But thatís definitely not expression for lack of interest itís an intense interest. The question of whether artists can actually have an effect on the world they live in? I think the jury is still out on that one and its definitely debatable it also seems to beg the question of whether anyone can affect the system of their part of the world they live in regardless of the field that they are a part of. I donít know I think there are things that we should definitely be talking about.
Judy: Yeah I think so I think she should be talking about that but the thing I was saying before about this kind of like kind of an entire kind of naÔve approach has to do with this again this cultural difference.
Scott: Indeed yeah.
Judy: I donít know if Iím being clear
Scott: Oh hey guys I just want to say Judy thanks for coming again I hope even though itís you know itís not something that you are able to do all the time I hope that you are able to join this more often and that we can you know we can bring some of these discussion you know bring some of these questions or I guess some of these topics of discussion into the other chats because a lot of these same issues come up again and again and it would be great to talk about them in various contexts.
Judy: Definitely yeah any time anytime I will be really happy to participate itís been a lot of fun and thank you so much really for inviting me.
Male speaker: Have a great time guys who has closing music?
Judy: Hey so thank you everybody so much really for listening and being a part of the conversation and helping me in explain something that is very difficult to explain.
Male speaker: Awesome guys till next week good night everybody.
Judy: Bye.
[1:49:27] End of Audio
Week 21: byproducts
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Marisa Jahn, currently in the throes of compiling and editing a collection of essays and conversations entitled “Byproducts: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices,” to be published this fall by YYZ Books (Toronto).
http://www.rev-it.org/projects/byproducts.htm
“Byproducts” examines art-related projects — many of which have been discussed in the context of Plausible Artworlds — whose artfulness lies in building micro-worlds within other non-artworld systems. While parasitically reliant on the socioeconomic structure and symbolic order of other dominant systems, these artworks or “byproducts” — exploit loopholes, surpluses and exceptions in order to affirm individual agency and complexify the mechanisms of their dominant “host.” As pivots or turning points between art and other sectors, these works function as carriers for meaning across disciplines.
Through examples from the late 1960s through to the present (including Au Travail / At Work, Experiments in Art and Technology, The Yes Men, Mr. Peanut, Reverend Billy, Kristin Lucas, Janez Jansa), ‘Byproducts’ explores what vocabularies may be required to describe, and what criteria needed for evaluating these practices. The book draws both on Jahn’s involvement in the arts as an artist/writer, her invitations as a practitioner-from-the-outside into other disciplines, and her work as an outreach/campaign coordinator and community organizer with a variety of grassroots advocacy-based organizations. Plausible artworlds within “Plausible Artworlds”…
Transcription
Week 21: byproducts
(Group greetings)
[Scott]: So great! Welcome Marisa to our humble weekly chat.
[Marisa]: Thing?
[Scott]: Thing. Talk. Here, let me turn that down a little bit. The audio is a little bit whacky today. But, we'll try to make due. Just let us know if it gets so crazy on your end that you can't understand what we're saying and we'll adjust it.
Yeah, so for everyone who doesn't know, we want to welcome Marisa Jahn who has been in the process of editing this publication called "Byproducts". I'm not going to explain too much about it as an introduction. Although, Steven could since he wrote the preface.
(Laughter)
But, a, I don't know. Oh wait, is Steven on the call? Oh dear. Let's add Steven back. That's really ridiculous.
(Audio feedback)
Ah, Steven, you're back.
[Steven]: Marisa! Hello!
[Marisa]: Hello? Steven?
[Scott]: Hey. Hi.
[Steven]: (inaudible and 0:01:56.4)
[Marisa]: Hi.
[Steven]: How are you?
[Marisa]: Steven, I'm good but I can't hear, hear coming in and out in really kind of fuzzy.
[Steven]: I'm going to mu my audio because I'll be listening to you mostly.
[Marisa]: Okay. So can everyone confirm that my sound is okay?
[Scott]: Yeah, you're great. So, yeah, it's awesome to have you. For everyone listening, Marisa has been and involved with the Plausible Artworlds for… Oh geez. This is going really crazy. Oh, I see. I think, David do mute your audio if you're able to hear this? Thanks.
So Marisa has been involved with the plausible Artworlds series for this year. It has really been only going for a few months now but the project has been going on for a few years. Marisa has been involved for at least the last four years and in a long-term discussion with us. So it's great to be able to have you in this series to talk about all the stuff that you've been doing. I know "Byproducts" doesn't cover everything that you were doing this sounds like we might talk about that and some of the artist activist networks that you have been involved in over the past couple of years. If we have time.
[Marisa]: Yeah, I thought I would kind of play the part by ear. What I thought I would do is talk about, stuck by talking about how it is that I got interested in this topic and why, which relates to my personal other vocational engagements i.e. like the active is kind of things. Um, and then I thought I would go through and give examples of some of the things that are in the book they have kind of further developed these kind of ideas that I am thinking about. I bet Steven is coming back. Steven, are you there?
[Steven]: I'm here now.
[Marisa]: Okay, good. So I was just saying that I was going to talk a little bit first about how it is I got interested in the topic, which will also kind of introduce me. Then I will talk about some of the projects in the book and kind of delve into the themes or things that come out through example.
[Scott]: Awesome Marisa. That would be great.
[Marisa]: So I just want to make sure that everyone has this link or URL to the images that I have online. You don't need to look at them right now. How do I communicate that Basekamp?
[Scott]: We have that. Are you going to plan to keep that up forever and ever? Like should we… (Laughing).
[Marisa]: No I'm going to take it down also because some of the photos have permission rights and things like that. So as we're done I'm going to delete it.
[Scott]: Gotcha. So no need to spell it out in audio. I think that everybody can see that text chat. Yeah.
[Marisa]: Okay, so everyone has the URL link is what you're saying.
[Scott]: Yep, it's right up above. I'll paste it again for everybody. Cool. Yeah, we're looking at that now.
[Marisa]: Well, I first started thinking about byproducts and it was in dialogue with Joseph DelPascoe. We had both been involved curatorally and myself personally as an art maker in shop dropping. So shop dropping being the idea of reverse shoplifting. Instead of taking from the store, you're gifting it back or you're giving it back. There was a few, I think that structure, and there are a lot of stellar examples of shop dropping. But I also found, discouragingly, that they were a lot of examples in which the art maker was producing something and was shop dropping it for context and they are photographing it and then they are running away with the photograph, displacing the object itself and that they were putting the photograph and the gallery. So, like it wasn't really an existing in the context in kind of an authentic way. I mean, authentic (inaudible 0:06:49.4) that knowledge is a problematic word, but whatever. It was kind of (inaudible 0:06:52.7) or uprooted from the context in which it was actually intended.
So there's kind of this disjunction between the intended audience, i.e. the passerby, and the gallery goers. The white box gallery goers. So I and Joseph both were starting to look at other examples of what I began referring to you as "embedded art projects". So artworks that are embedded in a context and they often don't make it back into the art, like the mainstream hegemonic commercial art world. For example, I don't know, it's not necessarily clean. But oftentimes the artworks are producing meaning or the kind of signify within a certain context. And I was looking at the problematic of that. So for example, sometimes those artworks kind of, because they're so context based and they often involve the people in producing the art work itself, kind of begin to disappear. Or they are in fact invisible. There's no documentation other than a kind of rumor or conversational way of communicating what happened. So that's where this book kind of comes from.
For me, I think this interest in this kind of, there are two other personal strains that for my interest in it. One of them is, and not to like collapse everything by bio graphically, but for me, I'm half the Ecuadorian and half Chinese, and so I feel like I grew up adapting to different context. I just felt kind of like maybe an outsider or an interloper into another context but also comfortable in kind of adapting and being interested in this idea of alterity or otherness. Also for me, this idea of being in another context and perfectly adapting kind of camouflaging and that challenge of doing that is something that's interesting. And I became aware when I was at MIT, I was aware statistically something like 90% - 95% of the women at MIT as if they are interlopers in that context. To suggest that they don't feel qualified or they feel like an outsider but yet, of course, the women who were there are perfectly qualified. So, I don't know. For me that's a personal thing that is relevant, in some way, and you can tell me, if by virtue.
Also, can I make a request? Now I am somebody that when I'm speaking I like audience feedback. So I can't see people's eyes or people nodding. I guess I see people chatting a little bit. OK, so if you make little (inaudible 0:10:10.9) things here it helps me. You are not sleeping, I don't know. Something. This is a new medium for me
[Scott]: One thing I did not see was Steven's, uh, Steven got dropped again because we're looking at the website. We'll don't worry, we're not just looking at the wall cat stuff.
(Laughter)
Were listening to what you're saying. But yet we can definitely give feedback back and forth anytime. I'm just curious about what you're saying too. It would be good, since to put up these images, to connect with some of these. Like, you know what I mean?
[Marisa]: Sounds great.
[Scott]: Like when you were just sort of talking about some of this stuff. Because I've scrolled through the first three just for, I don't know, because number three has a lot of things to look at and read that are funny. You know, and interesting.
[Marisa]: Go.
[Scott]: Yeah. 1, 2, 3...GO!
[Marisa]: 1, 2, 3...So, okay, so looking at the URL of images I want to say that the book is divided into two sections. This first section is art in (inaudible 0:11:19.2) some artists that are embedding themselves in industry. And the second part, it's called performing politics and its art, it's less sector specific in a way that we think of industry as a specific sector. So it is less bounded.
To begin, some of you guys may be familiar with the work of Artist Placement Group. I think that those of you guys who are familiar with their work may also be familiar with the kind of surprise when one is discovering them given the scope of their ambition. A Stephen, we are talking about APG and I was beginning to talk about the images on the URL and was saying that I think one of the things when first learning or people who are familiar with APG's work along with that you learn about the relative kind of like, not invisibility. Especially in the States that they're just not as well historicized as they ought to be. so Artist Placement Group was started in the late sixties by Barbara Steveni and John Latham in London. They created this kind of agency that would place artists in industries
The first image is here is one that john produced well he was a research institution, a non art research institution, and it's called "Big Breather". It's an image of, well it's a work, it's not as known as some other images for example. I think it's absolutely fantastic. And what it is, if this kind of big bellow and the gravity… It's a bellow and there is water inside and twice a day the gravitational pull of the Moon makes it so the bellow goes up and down. And what is going down a kind of leaves this big sigh. You know, hence the "Big Breather". You know, I think, right. There are a lot of projects with an APG's work that is actually less object oriented. Around the same time, in Canada as a group called Anything Company which was started by... Is anybody here familiar with the work of anything company? I know like everybody in Canada and their mother knows, but they tend to be less well known in the States.
[Scott]: Yeah, Ian Baxter isn't really as well known here from my point of view. Just because something seems low on the radar for most of the time I've had my feelers out doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't' a huge following somewhere that I just don't know about. But, you hear them come up here and them. I'm aware of him mainly through, a couple different outlets, but mostly for Steven's writings and examples. Yeah it would be great if you could describe them and also, like, maybe after that, David Goldenberg was asking about the interest in…
[Marisa]: Explain APG?
[Scott]: Yeah. So maybe in whatever...
[Marisa]: Okay, okay. Thank you for the clarification David. I appreciate your feedback.
So, the reason that APG was, was because they, and I, sorry. I totally did not, the kind of being thrown off the loop by not being able to see people in the audience. You know, having PowerPoint things, you know. But the interest in APG is because essentially the work that APG did was they involved artists and placed them in different industries. So governmental positions, British Airways, like the range of different industries. I am really impressed by the way in which Barbara, who seemed to be the main person negotiating and meeting between the individual and the institution, was able to both frame what were, a lot of times, investigations in conversations as artwork. And also the scope of their work because they had quite a lot of placements. When I was editing Barbara's work I had suggested that they were successful placements and she corrected me. I think that the thing about APG's work and something that is quite so experimental and, in fact, entirely open ended is that the idea of success is a different criteria or value of criteria that you would use to judge something like this, that is really process based, and often evading documentation. (Inaudible 0:16:40.3) for example, normative artworks that exists in kind of a commercial art market. I'm impressed by her work and her and insidiousness and also just the sheer confidence, it's a really bold move. And also, on Barbara's behalf, but then also there seems to be by and large a kind of readiness or an openness or willingness to hosting on behalf of these institutions.
Am going to skip down to the next set of images. The first one is, so these two images are from Anything Company which started in the late sixties by Ian Baxter and Ingrid Baxter. The first image is of Ian and this is in the DPMA conference, data proc... Let me look up for a caption here. But it's a conference for data, people involved in the Data Processing industry. They set up this trade fair, a booth in a trade fair and in this case they were both recruiting companies to offer their services. So their services ranged from what they refer to as ascetic sensitivity, which is pretty vague, to things like… They also found that there was a lot of success on behalf of industries when they offered things like installing a fax machine, which was new at the time, and then offering these different services to go along with it. Ingrid has this nice, she speaks of that time, and the fax machine is quite interesting. She said the faxes were fantastic because you can fax them stuff in the middle of the night and then people come back to their corporations and you could kind of penetrate the companies, was the verb that she used, and then they would come back to work and they would have this piece of art through the fax machine. The fax machine also became an artwork. So that's me is kind of emblematic of their larger interest and in kind of been involved and offering these kind of viable services. And also recognizing or seeing aesthetic sensitivity as a kind of service.
The folder, it kind of, one of the documents that they use. You can see where they are using the language of corporate businesses but it's kind of loopy, right? So that they want to this trade fair in setup this booth is interesting to me, and I don't have this image up here...I'm thinking about Experiments in Arts and Technology also came up about the same time in New York and was started by engineer Billy Kluver, who was at Bell Labs, along with Robert Rauschenberg and a host of other people too, but those were the main components of the organization. And there is this equally kind of gripping image also, sorry, I'm distracted. So experiments in art and technology they also would set up trade fairs and EAT Conf, it's like this industry standard fair for electrical engineers. Hi Steven. So and they (inaudible 0:20:58.3) art and technology when they set up this booth in the trade fair, they garnered hundreds and potentially thousands of engineers who are interested in being directly involved with artists. And so EAT did a lot of innovative, they again like Barbara Steveni from APG; they did the work of kind of suit stringers. Stitching together and actively kind of matchmaking between artists and industry.
The image that I have here, the first one is, um... At first they were this kind of transactional relationships so that the engineer what kind of perform the technical things needed to assist the artist and eventually they found more integrated ways of collaborating. So this is from one of their earlier images, it's from 1966 and it's an image of an engineer's drawings for (inaudible 0:21:53.4) Faulstrom's performance. So this is the kind of electrical and engineering document and then below is kind of the performance as well. So you see they're a little bit separated. But I think through this they eventually found that the engineer successively began to work in a more integrated fashion with the artist. I think that's kind of a good indicator, not indicator, but that's like the ideal thing that these groups wanted to have happen.
So at this point I should clarify that when I was doing this book, there is a lot of examples of artists that work with industry. There are two sets of criteria that I used to kind of choose and kind of bound when I was looking at. One was I was not interested in artists that perform work or create work and services to corporation's primary goal. That's to say that if an artist goes to work in a rug factory and then produces rugs. I wasn't interested in that. I was interested in those examples where there was kind of like a friction. I think I'm (inaudible 0:23:21.1) that too. And then the other kind of criteria was there is a lot of examples, there's a fair number of examples, of institutionally initiated collaborations between artists and people in a certain industry sector. I'm interested and when the artist goes to the industry and initiates or instigates that kind of collaboration because what happens is the artist has to qualify why they are doing what they're doing.
So, moving along to the images. So on the one hand, the images that we saw above is like artists working with personnel and people involved in industry. There's this image of two girls hugging and what is suggested as a vat of oil at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and this is by the group named Au Travail, or at work, which I think was on last session. Did Bob go through these images? Scott or someone from BaseKamp?
[Scott]: No, not these. There might be a few. We can go through all of your images yet. But, this is new to me. This is pretty incredible.
[Marisa]: Okay. So these are Au Travail does this project where per their manifesto they insist that artwork should be done from one's place of work because the workplace is often alienating and want them to produce work from that context. And this image here, and it's sort of unknown art it's something sort of mythical about Au Travail because it's unclear about how many people are involved with their organization or whether it's in fact mostly prompted by a few people or a core of people. And this image its girls in an oil vat at KFC and it looks like they are taking photos of themselves. The one below that is an (inaudible 0:25:21.9) and somebody who had submitted images to Au Travail worked in an (inaudible 0:25:27.9) and rather than teach them some kind of traditional lessons in English, she educated them and how to fill out complete forms. Bureaucratic complaint forms which is, in fact, a mastery of legalese and perhaps more valuable than learning how to get to the beach or how to shop for beating suits or something. And I think there's something about their work, Au Travail, that's interesting and also kind of problematic in the sense that kind of abandoning this idea of transforming the workplace and too systemic, it's not a systemic approach to making subversive artwork. It's an approach that is given this sets of constraints and then all do this or this is a way to, like, go around. So I find it problematic.
So going down to the next set of images you see this little bird sign that says "Harkopod". Those are a set of two images. This is by an artist named Thomas Johnson who lives in Canada. And he was doing this project in Estonia in a small town of 400 people, which felt like 40 people, and he was buying… He got $100 from the Canadian Council to do this project. And he took that $100 and he bought goods from a grocery store, kind of like these little General Stores, and he sat at this little table. They were goods that people buy all the time. He sat at this little table on the main street, there was only one street in that this town, and he was selling these items for the exact same price that they were being sold for in the stores. He would take that money that he received or earned and he would restock his store. So he was never making a profit. So it is a kind of economic or redundant project that kind of foregrounds a kind of economic exchange as a means of social exchange. He kind of playfully refers to… It also, like, whose personal way of integrating himself or finding a meaningful role in this community. And he playfully refers to himself as this magpie that is in Estonia in this harkopod. And a magpie is a bird that steals the eggs of another bird nests and sits on them as if they are his own. So he's kind of appropriately inserting himself in this way, he's kind of camouflaged.
So I think that's what's interesting in these kind of embedded practices is that these artists are camouflaging themselves in ways where they may be entirely imperceptible or alternately their differences are kind of fore grounded in a playful way. Is there any questions so far?
[Scott]: I'm really into the fact that he sold these for the exact same price, these items. That's not a question though.
[Marisa}: Steven is asking a question about the use of some terms and is pointing out to me that I am hijacking or retracting them. So I'm going to read his question. He says "I'd like to ask you about a couple of them or generally ask you what you think about those whole vocabulary questions where you call yourself an interloper. What's that? You explain byproducts right off the bat, but is clearly a case of repossession of that word as an in embedded. Do you see my point?" Um, Okay. That's a good series of questions. I don't know if you heard the first part, Steven, about the interloper. The interloper, in kind of pointing to these examples that we just talked about like the Thomas Johnson one and his harkopod. You know, it's kind of like he is cognizant and that he is playfully referring to himself as this magpie. This bird that contextualizes itself in other contexts and is kind of self consciously attracted by camouflage. I think that for me bio graphically, what I had explained as one of my interests and the genre of work is that I often feel as if I am an interloper. To be honest I didn't really see that as (inaudible 0:31:01.5) until I, I still am considering it, but until I went to MIT and I understood that women often have this interloper syndrome. I don't know, I guess for me, one of the things I see. To me there's an interest in the challenge and adapting and I see that in a lot of these artists working where there's this kind of playful approach to adaptation and kind of co-opting and repossessing of signifiers of legitimacy and sometimes a quite self conscious way. Actually, so the idea of embedded, that I think is borrowed from the idea of embedded journalism which is the most common kind of colloquial use of that term. Journalists are embedding themselves and the context of reporting from within. There's a kind of danger of upsetting that context. There's this kind of ethical concern about betrayal and the challenge is kind of too authentically were meaningfully document the work that is produced in that context.
So jumping back to the set of images. That's a set of driver's license and it's Kristen Sue Lucas on both of them. So Kristen, she's an artist who lives in Beacon, New York right now. A few years ago, she felt that in her life she needed a refresh as in she had reached this kind of turning point in her life and she needed some other kind of, she needed it to be publicly acknowledged in a way. So the solution that she came up with was that she went to the county court and filed for a name change. She felt that she wanted to change her name from Kristen sue Lucas to Kristen Sue Lucas with the same spelling. And so when she wanted the judge, the judge asked her why it was that she was doing this. And she said, this is recorded in the court transcript, and she said " your honor, I really feel as if I'm the same person but different and this is a way I thought that would acknowledge that". In she had explained that it's kind of like a refresh in the sense that the analogy she used as a technical one. You know when you're looking at a web page when you hit refresh its recalling data from a central server but the page looks the same? The data hasn't changed. So it's the same, but different. So in the same way, by referring to this she is kind of playfully conceding to the central authority of the court to grant her this name change. And the judge granted her, after kind of much back and forth and thinking about it. Well I should say there some rough stuff in between. The judge didn't immediately grant her the name change. The judge said "Okay, but you're going to have to come back in a few months. I'm going to have to think about it". So when she came back the judge granted her the name change. So was interesting about this, as Kristen not when she's describing the sense of being in a court and been told that her name was being changed or that she's been granted this request, she felt that the blood had rushed out of her and rushed back in. So she kind of semantically felt this change. And then she went about her life in making the name change in her life like the DMV, which is what you see here. Also she refers to, she acknowledges her name change as her second birthday.
So in the second set of images are (inaudible 0:35:37.4) baby and that is her first birthday when she was one years old. And the one below that is her second 1st birthday. So it's taken a year after her name change. So she celebrates both birthdays. One of the outcomes of this project, besides having to explain it to the people in the DMV for example, which gets them involved and talking. If you can imagine her going into the DMV and kind of explaining it, she's very earnest, and then everyone in the DMV Office is kind of explaining it. You know, having to explain to each other what is going on. And some people are more sympathetic and it prompts these kinds of debates. But the other thing that was interesting that she said was that prior to that time she had felt kind of alienated from her mother. But her mother was excited about her second birthday because it now made her an Aries, at least for second birthday fell within being an Aries (inaudible0:36:44.1). So her mother and other people in the family along with friends started having an Aries birthday party. And that's one of the ways that her life had changed.
I also think that some of the other works in "Byproducts" that are interesting if this kind of emphasis on what the linguist John Carol refers to as status indicators i.e. these kinds of official documents that legislate change. And so that's kind of a theme throughout the book as there are a lot of these ones. I think that the emphasis on it is because oftentimes no one knows about these projects and then the status indicators are ways that people do know about it. The invitation has been like fixed or legislated.
And then I'll go through the last set of images a little bit quicker. Similar to Kristen Lucas 'project is um, are you guys familiar, yeah I think you guys are familiar with the Janez Jansa? The Janez Jansa project which is three... Yeah?
[Scott]: I was just been afraid to send some information about that. But yet that would be great if you could tell people about that a bit.
[Marisa]: so the Janez Jansa project started I think two or three years ago and it was by these three artists. It was during that time when the right wing prime minister Slovenia by the name of Janez Jansa was running for reelection. And the three artists change their name to Janez Jansa. Like Kristen, they went through the links of changing all of their legal documents. The media started referring to them this way. It started building their own artistic acts this way. They had Janez Jansa Facebook pages. One of them got married and there's an image of one of them getting married. So in all of these kinds of steps what happens is it immediately subversive and humorous. If you can imagine "Janez Jansa gets married to new blah blah ". And it's like this person, you know, she something very pleasant lady or a woman, you know. And it's like these people are clearly not the Prime Minister. If you can imagine why, Facebook page just by virtue of the fact of them even listing their hobbies. Like planting, going to the beach on Sundays with the kids or shopping. If you can imagine the Facebook update it's just like immediately funny and subversive and kind of (inaudible 0:39:54.3) the Prime Minister Janez Jansa.
And then there is some moments in their work, I mean a really timed their whole thing fantastic. Just really great about anticipating the kind of political residence of what otherwise were ordinary gestures. So for example, this is not the most ordinary of examples, they published a biography on Janez Jansa. They kind of describe the three lives of these three artists and it was timed at the release of this book that was revering the Prime Minister. What was interesting was that the project was quite controversial in Slovenia and they never explained what their gesture or the meaning of their gesture and so would force the media to explain their gesture for them. So they came up with a million different examples of why and then people went so far as to suggest that it was the media, in fact, that produced the artwork. So people were always talking about the media's obsession to live the artwork on this project and one of them was sense of vocational imperative on behalf of journalists to cover. When you're covering issues as a journalist you have to cover both sides of the spectrum. So for example you're going to report on a policy change or whenever then you would ask both the president and you also ask the prime minister and then you also ask the artist Janez Jansa. It was picked up also out of this (inaudible 0:41:41.1) journalistic objectivity.
So kind of along the same wavelength there's like every step pointing out the kind of artifice and the constructions of these institutions that one otherwise takes. For example, Mr. Peanut who in the mid seventies and Vancouver ran for mayor. So Mr. Peanut as you may recall, is this kind of icon from Planters Peanuts. And two artists, Vincent Trasov and Michael Morris, ran as this peanut character. So one of them is the tap dancing silent peanut and the other one explains the gesture of the peanut. So here's an image of Mr. Peanut in front of City Hall. The one below is where Mr. Peanut is walking. I think the image is of him walking with one of the other candidates. And just by virtue of someone silent is standing next to you, the "straight" candidate derails the other candidate. And what's interesting is that Mr. Peanut garnered 11% of the vote in Vancouver. Larry Baggett in his book called "Gorilla Electoral Theater" writes about how when this kind of gorilla electoral performance projects happens it's often indicative of a sense of disenfranchisement among the voting constituency. But it is a way to kind of garner a movement build. It's often kind of happening at these times where voters are (inaudible 0:43:39.3) stuck, as in they don't have any options and nothing to do, so these kind of moments arise. And his book is fantastic, I have to say.
[Scott]: I'm sorry, what was the name of the book again? Because I don't…
[Marisa]: "Gorilla Electoral Theater"
[Scott]: Oh great, thanks.
[Marisa]: And Larry wrote the introduction with me, actually.
So I think most of you guys, it's likely that you guys are familiar with the Reverend Billy recently ran for mayor of New York City. He was running for mayor when Bloomberg was essentially buying his third term in kind of rewriting the laws of electoral politics. You know, bought himself his third term essentially. So it was likely that he was gonna win so in a sense there was nothing to lose. I think Larry writes about Billy and people involved in that campaign including the director of (inaudible 0:44:54.7). During that time when they go through this sense of like not knowing whether they should. For example be as outlandish and just had this wildly utopia proposition or whether they in fact should be pragmatic and eventually they decided to (inaudible 0:45:08.9) utopia because they lost a lot of their own support when they started coming up with a viable solutions for hotter run the city.
The last set of images, one is broken, is Camille Turner. Are you guys familiar with Camille Turner's work?
[Scott]: I don't think so.
[Marisa]: Okay. Camille Turner is of Caribbean descent and she moved to Canada. When she first moved there she described the sense of being received as a foreigner. Of course Canada is proud of having a really wildly diverse population. That's just some biographical background that informs her practice. Your references this character called Miss Canadiana and the word Canadiana is equivalent in American English to Americana. So I think that's kind of kitchy, maybe kind of curio in Americana it's like kitchy a little bit. As Miss Canadiana she shows up at events unannounced, well sometimes she's invited, to kind of officiate in a sense. Show up and say a few words and bestow grace on, you know, officiate. But sometimes she shows up unannounced. Her unannounced appearance is including the training ground for the royal Mounties in Canada. So that would be like showing up at the, I don't know, West Point. And they received her very graciously and they were excited to have this beauty queen figure show up and in fact she got invited back. And so she's able to kind of create this new kind of access through this invented persona. She was describing this moment where she was in northern Canada and she was getting this lecture performance to a group of people. She was nervous about the whole thing because they seemed like maybe they could be hostile and she didn't know how the performance was going to go over. And she remembers at some point the audience started stirring and someone turned on the lights and they said to her a little bit abruptly "so what is this?" And she goes "what do you mean?" And they said "well what is this? What is this?" And she explained that she had invented this character. And so the person in the audience said to her "oh you mean we can do this too?" And so it was like this fantastic moment of just recognizing that kind of constructiveness of things and that, in fact, in doing so you could have a similar kind of agency. So to me it's this moment of recognizing that institutions made up of humans. It's this moment of re-sensitizing one's self to a political agency and recognizing, uh, just taking it all.
Steven Wright is saying "this is all the funnier as the governor general of Canada, our head of state, is herself Haitian born. So there's an automatic confusion between Miss Canadiana and the queen's representative" That's funny! Yes, "so there is a real Yes Men twist in the terms of race relations". I think also was funny about Camille is her presence. She doesn't' fit normal. She's such a graceful and at that data that Jeff Tackett said it smiling person and she doesn't fit normal beauty queen standards. So what happens is you don't judge her on that, you judge your idea of what beauty queen standards are. You know what I mean? So it kind of forces you to re-evaluate those.
Now, what questions do you have (laughing)?
[Scott]: We're just looking at these websites Marisa. There's a lot of material on here to look through.
[Marisa]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I was curious how your role as an artist and an activist has led you in the direction of these other artists' works?
[Marisa]: I know that in the conversations I've had with you and Steven about that, I never quite know how to answer that. So to explain the background, when I'm introducing myself or some other introductory kind of thing I say that half my life is in the arts as in artist/writer/curator and the other half is in working with different grass roots, like a community organizer with grass roots for activist or advocacy based organizations. I mean, I really do spend, it really isn't a 50/50 kind of split and sometimes it is or is not kind of overlapped. For this book I think I'm interested in the ways, for example, and the way that a lot of these practices are self conscious in kind of like investigating new forms of documentation and this kind of interest. I'm interested in these artists, their interests, and kind of finding these impuracle ways of verifying that a thing existed. And I guess for me it's kind of this interest in looking at the outcomes or impuracle indicators that this work has taken place and it comes from my work is a community organizer where I'm involved in campaigns and has very specific outcomes. And were also always trying to measure and evaluate what those successes are. So for example, one campaign has been very dear to me for quite some years is working in this coalition of people who are opposing the privatization of this pavilion on the north side of Union Square in New York City. You know the outcome is on the one hand saving up a pavilion and there are all the steps in between really. And I think for me, on the one hand, activists and community organizers and advocates are really good about naming those impuracle things but can be saved and they can be in the nonprofit industrial complex. You key used to doing things like finding or indicating or articulating those things in between that are the work of movement building. And for me, this is also the works of art does. Like sitting within a space of and knowing and anticipating these ways of which thing signify and for really subtle shifts. Like in movement building account the numbers of people that you reach out and connect with and build into your organization your constituents. And in artwork that scope is different sometimes.
I don't know. I think that's one kind of overlap between are enacted this practices. And I think the other one is just simply being. You know sometimes artwork, I don't disenvow things being shown in a gallery, and I think it serves a function. I think oftentimes when people are really anti gallery and anti museum it's like throwing the bathwater out with the baby. I would like to remind people that the first public museums came out of the French Revolution and this idea of making it accessible to people. And to be privatizing these kind of cultural legacies or whatever. But to be honest, I get really grumpy oftentimes with the way with things are shown in galleries and I have found that I'm just always interested and practices that go beyond that aggressively and rigorously. I guess that's where this book comes out of as well. Does not make sense?
[Scott]: Yeah totally. Someone else has a question here too.
[Kate]: Hi Marissa, this is Kate. I was just wondering if you at all explore commercial art as byproducts of societal discourse in your book or not?
[Marisa]: Um, so, I'm sorry. So just to make sure that I have you correctly. So whether I explore commercial works as a byproduct of conversations that take place in society. Um, that's a good question. I think that's when (0:56:44.5) my scope too is artworks that are produced within a non artworld sector.I should have clarified that in the beginning. So, because for example, themes a lot of works that are produced within art institutions themselves. Like for example, the genre of institutional art or kind of seventies through nineties genre work that investigates art institution itself and the politics of (inaudible 0:57.14.9) structures. I'm not looking at that. Actually because it's pretty well documented and kind of (inaudible 0:57:19.7). And so I feel like that's the work of (inaudible 0:57:23.8) and a kind of work has been done... I am looking at those that tend kind of invading the contextion oftentimes. Also, I'm looking at work where the artist is embedding themselves in the context and it's the system and the rhythms and the patterns of that context that itself produces the work. So, in answer to your questions, no.
But for example, Kristen Lucas' project, that was shown in a gallery. It has been shown in galleries and museums. So it's not like totally separated from that world, do you know what I mean? But I'm looking for context, I'm not really looking at the kind of documentation so much in a (inaudible 0:58:17.9) gallery context, I'm looking at that moment in which it was produced. I'm kind of focusing on that. Also Janez Jansa work has been shown extensively in museums and galleries and a lot of their work incorporates this kind of institutional art dialogue. And am not focusing on that aspect of their project because it is (inaudible 0:58:37.4). I'm focusing on their work in the moment of its production, in which the context is producing the work itself.
Um, if someone is saying, they did is saying "what about artworks that take the place inside and outside of institutions but do not produce material evidence such as Ian Wilson's?" Um, I don't know Ian Wilson's work. I would like to know. I think that I am looking at stuff where there is not material evidence. Like APG's work really. Barbara, in one of her interviews, acknowledges that there's kind of shoddy documentation of her work in fact. One of her contemporaries and colleagues are in Joseph Boyd's exemplary self documented. And she remembers that APG as a group, in fact didn't have very many photographs. They saw their own group being documented in Boyd's work and then they recognized they not only should that should have been documented. Well, should have been documented. Self documented. So I think I'm looking at, I think a lot of these works really exist as... On one hand I am interested in status indicators and these kinds of material documents and I'm also interested in and the way that a lot of these projects really operated by and large verbally, through oral passage. You know, through language. Rumor or snippets of conversation.
Sorry. Sorry I started looking at Ian Wilson's work. Um, okay well um...
[Scott]: Yeah, so Marissa. I wouldn't want to guide you too much but I am definitely super curious about your, I mean, you've been involved in art and activism for quite awhile. But not specifically artists who only choose to instrumental themselves and the service of activism and the ways that are most predictable. I wouldn't say so anyway. It doesn't seem like it. I think it would be interesting to hear about that. You know, maybe some your strategies. You know, a lot of "art activists" are involved in making directly political zines and posters probably or involved in protests or attempt to use their art competencies in those ways that don't necessarily make conceptual art projects with that material. It seems like you have been involved in this project called "Pond". You had been for a long time. It's sort of labeled as art activism and ideas, right?
[Marisa]: Mm hmmm.
[Scott]: And, I don't know. Would you be in to talking about some of that because you're networks have become more expensive sense then I think what that kind of work right?
[Marisa]: Yeah. I think it started with.... For me my interest in being engaged in a kind of atavistic or atavistically, whatever, politically. A lot of people just kind of solidified. When I went to Seattle WTO in 1999, that was one of the most fascinating experience of my life and everybody was like, you know. Reality. Everybody just pales since then. I acknowledge that I, I think for a lot of people who want there, it easier to romanticize. It was fantastic and all some at the same time. For the past 14 years I have been involved in K through 12 education and I sometimes consider going into a college level teaching. K-12 education teaching and literacy and also art to underrepresented youths. And my interest in that is, I will, you know, I feel privileged to be in this country. I'm the first person to go to college on my Ecuadorian side so I, you know, I'm cognoscente of that. I think that I'd like teaching and I think that I have a lot of patience, or so people have told me that. I think one of my favorite applications of patience is teaching people how to read. I mean, anyways. What a curious thing for an animal to be doing. Teaching (inaudible 1:04:40.2) reading books. So I was always kind of involved in K-12 education and I still am here and there. Last semester I was teaching a group of teenagers in Brooklyn about the Red Guidelines Board, which is a specific body in New York that makes decisions about red regulating units in New York. There are a million red units and so they're making this project about that kind of involved investigating what this policy, this body of politicians do. There are nine people in the RGB and they're all handpicked by the mayor. Anyway, it's kind of curious, one of those curious bureaucratic monsters in New York. I guess from that I also got involved in different advocacy based work. I guess I thought that when I was younger that I would get into education or being involved in the field of education as an advocate. Instead what I think I started doing is I got involved with this group...
The first advocate based organization I started working with a few years ago was called Eye Witness Video. They document the policing of protests in order to ensure the first amendment right of people to protest which is a kind of civil liberty that is increasingly, especially after 9/11, gets cramped down. So what that work involved doing was taking videos of police at protests and also documenting their badges or whether they had them or if they were covering them. Documenting undercover cops, how they (inaudible 1:06:40.4), how they approach the protest itself, what weapons they use and kind of following that through all the steps of a protest. For example, the lead up to the protest or how they litigate or prosecute activists after it. So mounting these kinds of long term investigations. Then in 2004 a witness was able to prove that 1/3 that out of the 1200 tickets they had issued were digitally fabricated which resulted in dismissal of 1200 i.e. thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars that would otherwise be revenue. When I joined them it was in the lead up to the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention in Minneapolis, St. Paul and Denver. That involved, you now, documenting all the stages along with all of the kind of historic moments that just sound totally stupid describing them now, but involved (laughing) the harassed all the time, having cell phones tapped, having the house be overrun by FBI agents pointing guns at you, having to be threatened with door being run down with the battering ram and all that kind of psychological paranoia that goes along with that. I have since been involved, besides that organization.
Right now I work with a program called Street Vendor Project and we advocate and we have the street vendors. Well, I should say, the interesting thing for me about advocacy organizations is that they not only involved advocating on behalf but they also really involve often times in encouraging and fostering. So if you can imagine what for eye witness before people go to protest, people would want to make sure that eye witness was there to make sure that their backs are covered. OR people would also send their tapes to us to use in mounting this long term forensic investigation. Right now I'm involved in Street Vendor Project and it's a vendor led organization in New York with 1000 members and we advocate on behalf of organized street vendors. So it's centrally like our union.
Then another group that I've been working with for quite some years is NYC Park Advocates and they've been really effective in terms of... well, they advocate on behalf of, they advocate for equitable access to parks. And in New York, public parks are something that is very contested because people need green space and recreational space and people are in their cramped quarters and, you know. So that's a quite heated and cross classed and cross sectored group. It's been interesting working with them because I've been really affected actually in being a thorn in the Bloomberg Administration's side and effectively getting parks open. We're drafting policy and enacting kind of like a change, these changes that are perceptively and probably felt on an everyday level in people's lives. So last weekend, I was on a park inspection at this park in Queens and it had been shut down despite the fact that it was only $5,000 to maintain normally. So, there was like some new pieces that were on the local news channels and that drew attention to the fact that our Governor's way of getting legislators to, it's kind of holding the parks ransom in a sense. So, it's kind of like drawing attention to public policy, you know, the politics of what's happening. And also for example in park inspections, we talk with people who were in this neighborhood that was surrounded by mosquitoes and tons of weeds and dumping and things like dead dogs were dumped in front of these poor people's front yards. And we had told them that we had launched this news piece five years ago about this very neighborhood and we had gotten the parks department to say that they would be accountable for their property, which was their front yard, and clean up the space. In fact, it was kind of precedent for them to come back and there is this negatism for accountability. You know, that's like affecting someone's daily life. The fact that in the future could not be bitten all the time by mosquitoes or the smell of dead dogs or see a bunch of weeds. And it's like "why shouldn't these people have a Central Park in front of their yard?" It's like, you know. It's endless. The Park's Department. Their kind of failures and it's an endless supply of (inaudible 1:12:35.1) (laughing) things to work on and projects.
[Scott]: Yeah, Steven. Did you want to sort of ask what you were saying out loud or do you think your connection is too poor for that?
[Steven]: No, my connection is really good now because (inaudible 1:13:07.1)
[Scott]: They've stopped watching porn?
(Laughter)
Awesome. Welcome back.
[Steven]: It's great. All of a sudden I can hear everything. It's crystal clear where as before I just wasn't, you know. Anyways, I think that David has a question which kind of took up a thread of what I asked earlier. And I think it's a crucial time because we've got some (inaudible 1:13:30.2) and I have this sensation when I was talking to you before too. You know, you're sort of extremely articulate but slightly have a strange type of vocabulary which sort of pulls us along further. We understand the words but we don't quite... But maybe you have to come back to it because I think there is something very key about using that kind of language to read into these practices.
But actually, my question is a bit different, or maybe it's a bit linked as well. When I was listening to you talk about your eye witness privilege project. I can sort of see there was something linked to what art in a certain kind of, I don't know, a forensic art that is kind of procured over its long history. And now a kind of focused process that has developed like lobbyists do. Like look very closely at things and document them very accurate, you attempted to (1:14:37.0) you know, escape. I think that's a great case to be made for art. Which is making and witness bearing then what will be, in fact. That's one of the greatest arguments to be made for not giving up art actually because it really does have a strong case. But then when you got to the end of your presentation, you were talking about people being like arrested and having their rights absolutely (inaudible 1:15:09.6). This is something which is very unfamiliar. Even to radical art producers. So, I was wondering to what extent you think that kind really...
I have another question but I'll give you a few seconds about that.
[Marisa]: So, um, okay. So is your question, Steve, about for example, radical art producers are not subject saying often times...Well, for the most part, radical art producers are not subject to the same kind of consequences as something like what happens in other forms of avocation or social engagement? Or in the case of Eye Witness, which is somewhat extreme, of being harassed or physically harmed. Is that what you mean? Is that your question?
[Steven]: Well, that's for sure two of my (inaudible 1:16:15.1) whole question, that's definitely the case. Maybe I can put it this way. If you really beyond that specific example, what are art related practitioners really bring into the mix and why are these advocacy groups and activists bringing into their mix? Another one, one that's close to art and a little but further back from activism. The artist might be a little bit further from art but a little closer to activism. How does that crossover or that (inaudible 1:16:50.8).
[Marisa]: Okay, okay. So what is each? What is activism bringing to the mix and what is art bringing to the mix. Well, I think that this idea of kind of like a forensic look or a long-term investigation is to me, I think what art has to offer is this sense of subtlety or resensitizing to otherwise (inaudible 1:17:19.7) processes or otherwise these really subtle ways of looking at new connections. I mean, Kristen Lucas' is one really good example where, I guess, you know... I some of these practices what happens is that over time something new happens and then all of a sudden it recontextualizes all of the moments proceeding it and make them somehow resonate in a different way. And then another thing could happen. And it's shifting. Like in the case of Mr. Peanut or Reverend Billy. It's like because these are...I would actually say less than this, you know, this idea of sudden shifts and were like fractions. It's less so in Miss Canadiana's case because she's not involving herself in an institutional practice that unfolds narratively. For example, an electoral campaign unfolds in a familiar way. In those ones where it's really, really scripted and someone is exerting themselves and taking these on and what happens is it automatically is resonating against the other person who has been unwittingly cast as the other player. So, it resonates against our responses. So, for example, if Janez Janša the Prime Minister does a gesture also, he suddenly becomes encompassed in part of the artwork. Do you know what I mean? So when like Janez Janša the Prime Minister updates his Facebook page, that becomes part of the artwork. So it's just kind of this solemn way of looking is what one of what these practices can bring.
On the activist side, the activist practices remind us of these larger stakes and scope of things and the scale. I mean, it's like when you're involved in organizing protesters or involved in consistence through teaching. I don't know. It's like you really count numbers a lot oftentimes.And the fact that like, for example, the art and non profit and industrial complex you certainly count numbers when going through the gallery of (inaudible 1:20:05.8) whatever. It's different. It can be quite different. Yeah. I think activist practice is also the way that they bring in ideas of consequences or consequentiality and an outcome is something art practices can learn from. I think the engagement with impuracle information and information from the ground is something that activism and advocacy groups bring to art. And also really knowing how to work with communities, which is a very, it's a skill and it's something that... On the one hand it's like a knack, but also like a skill that one can learn how to do. I think that is something that, especially social engaged practices, more specifically embedded our practices needs to know. How in fact to meaningfully engage themselves in a way where it's not the art activist taking the photograph of the thing going to the context and then they, you know, they have their documentation and the thing happened and the art piece happened and they went away and can put it in the White Box Gallery in the community. It's like "where did the artist go?" That, um...
[Steven]: Thank you, thank you. For sure. That was great.
[Marisa]: Collective autonomy. So something art is not too good at. Oh, well, I think the thing about artwork is that often... Okay, look. Yesterday I was at these crypts. A friend of mine, Lauren Connor is teaching and I was visiting her class. And I was reminded about art. I sometimes forget, but in fact, but I was re-reminded about how art institutions (inaudible 1:22:24.7) reinforce individuality. And they don't often teach or emphasize an artist knowing how to work with each other collaboratively or alternately learn with contacts. And I think that in meaningful ways, or in committed ways. Um, yeah. Also, I was reminded about how artists oftentimes need help or training in learning how to deal with evidence or information or things impuracle. Information about the world. Worldly engagement. Which I don't see, for example, in the like education institutions that teach architecture. To me it seems a lot like the strength of that training is a lot of times I feel like architecture students get that training on working with land information and people. And artists don't often get that training but I think that we should.
Did I sound too despairaging (laughing)?
[Scott]: No, not at all. Actually, Chris here has a question for us.
[Chris]: Hi. I was going to ask about that sometimes I wonder looking at the thing for the Up Against the Wall people, I thought that maybe sometimes they might come across as being way too aggressive. When their actually not or something. Yeah.
[Marisa]: So, is your question about like groups being (inaudible 1:24:16.9) or what do you mean? Or like (inaudible 1:24:22.0) or kind of tone?
[Chris]: Well something is saying, yeah. Having a group called Up Against the Wall (expletive 1:24:27.5) might be considered to be a bit way too threatening to people.
[Marisa]: um hmmm. Well, I think Steven can maybe talk about these interests in that. I think it's the way, well okay. So you're question is about being confrontational or aggressive or being agro?
[Chris]: Yeah, something like that.
[Marisa]: Um, well I think I okay, well. I'm interested on the one hand. Okay. Do you mean activist practices in general or do you mean like that particular example Up Against the Wall (explicate 1:25:12.7)?
[Chris]: I meant activist practices in general.
[Marisa]: Oh, well I think, I mean I think one of the problems of activist work, activist artwork not activist work; activist artwork is that it airs on the side that they feel. The problem I feel that is with activist work is that it often feels like it has to look like leftist artwork. Kind of like it has a syndrome of this embarrassment of riches where it feels like that it can't take pleasure in essential. It has to be this left looking artwork and it drives me nuts. You know, um, and I think that's the problem with the left also. Besides art activist practices' problem with the left, it feels like its identitarian based politics. It's like politics rooted in an identity and all the accoutrements with it instead of being more open minded about what that is. Um. Yeah. I don't have a problem I guess, I think that's your question right? I personally don't have a problem with.
[Chris]: Yeah. Yeah.
[Marisa]: I don't know. Did that answer your question?
[Chris]: I also was thinking, like you know, would it backfire, yeah, would it like scare the general public off of it? And, yeah.
[Marisa]: I think that when the strengths of art is, I mean, I think that one of the strengths of art is when it can get somebody to look anew at something or to look again deeper at something. I agree if I'm kind of corruptly understanding what you're saying that when something looks like it's going to be (inaudible 1:27:21.8) then the general public is turned off. And when art uses its strengths and is presenting something in a luxurious way then its illusive then interrogates something then it's successful. Or makes something more interesting or sophisticated than something that's afraid to not be like...
[Chris]: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
[Michael]: Hi, this is Michael at BaseKamp. I was interested in what you were saying about kind of going to an art school and their not necessarily being a conversation about how artists interact in the world with their practice. So what do you think about programs that are attempting to move in that direction with social practice or something like that? Like Portland or San Francisco.
[Marisa]: I think it's a case by case thing. I think it's super important to have those kinds of classes. In my opinion I think those classes are successful or those kind of (inaudible 1:28:43.4 - Lost most of audio feed here) engagements are successful and they involve like a really diverse mix of people who can inform the students in different ways. I think artists always like, the organizer side of it in me sometimes wants to encourage... It goes with (inaudible 1:29:05.1). I'm not jaded by art because there are so many examples but I obviously get grumpy about certain things. And the same thing goes about art. But I think, I don't even like to emphasize for, well, for artists not to be (inaudible 1:29:24.6) about what they're doing. You know what I mean? And then I think also, like sometimes, artists, it doesn't always have to be their own art project. They could do something and it doesn't have to be an art project. And I think that in both cases, you have to let yourself go and just go with this. For example, when you're doing an art project in a way that one wants an artist to really get into what they're doing and find that. For me, I always think of it in terms of finding a certain kernel of logic and kind of unraveling it and extending it. I think in the same way, if you're involved with a community that you'd have to be, you'd have to let yourself go. And that's more of a question of commitment to the issue and that community. And I think that sometimes they're at odds in the sense that like even in an artworld there's (inaudible1:30:19.5) structures that you have to be, for certain art careers it helps to be really mobile. Do you know what I mean? To do the certain art practices involve this kind of looking about like internationally without ever really being involved in the community. And I think that a (inaudible 1:30:37.7). So I think that when we talk about social practice we have to think about finding something where you're not organizing a community, where you're not just being involved in a topic because it's like a class assignment, but you're really committed to that thing. And so that's a question also of like understanding one's self and what topics you're super (inaudible 1:31:01.4) in. And that starts with self knowledge. Did that answer your question?
(Either question from lost audio feed or text)
Hi. Um, I finished "Byproducts" as a book, I wrote the introduction but it's an embology of essays. So, I wrote parts of it and other people wrote other parts of it. In December of 2009 I finished a book called "Recipes for an Encounter" and that's a meditation, drawing on examples from art (inaudible 1:32:11.4) and architecture that look and consider the propositional nature of recipes. So a recipe, as in a magic spell can be a recipe or from an architectural point a diagram can be a recipe. A list for a certain kind of art project can be a recipe. So looking at all these kinds of things that are schematized and looking at their propositional nature and then also looking at the difference between a recipe and what's inactive. So, a recipe invites improvisation and they are open ended by nature. There is an improvisational aspect to them. So, that was the first book. They're not exactly too related.
(Either question from lost audio feed or text)
It's called "Recipes for an Encounter". And then if you, let's see (inaudible 1:33:19.4). Yeah, if you Google it, it comes up.
[Steven]: Marisa? I have kind of an art historical question. It's really a question because it's something that I also deal with. A lot of your examples, historical examples come from the 1960s. Thinking of Ian Baxter, Anything Company, Artist Placement Group, Mr. Peanut and then all of a sudden the examples are all young artists today. I mean, Reverend Billy isn't exactly a young artist but he's pretty cutting edge. So my question is what happened in between? How come all this stuff happened in the sixties and then early seventies and then nothing happened? And then it's kind of... Is anything cool in those years?
[Marisa]: I don't know. You know, I'm not saying it's a very good excuse for (inaudible 1:35:13.9) on my behalf. Perhaps I should have worked at that a bit more. I don't actually consider myself an artist so I mean... Pardon?
[Steven]: That's to your credit. I mean, it wasn't like that. If you noticed that, maybe it's just me (inaudible 1:35:37.4) really exist but...
[Marisa]: No. I certainly noticed it. First of all (inaudible 1:35:51.0) I'd be interested if you had examples or if somebody else had examples of an in between. I don't know what that is or what that... That for example, did institutional critique you know, things that happened in the 1990s? Did that soak up people's anti-institutional reflex or antiauthoritarian reflex? I don't know. Is it like in the eighties and the seventies like the punk movement happened and that soaked up people's anti -authoritarian reflexes? I don't know.
(Inaudible question from group 1:36:30.3)
[Marisa]: Oh yeah? Miss Solid States? Miss Altered State. And was that... Huh?
(Inaudible response from group 1:37:03.00)
[Marisa]: Interesting. So it's like a character. That's interesting.
[Steven]: It's not like nothing was happening in the eighties obviously. You know, there was the (inaudible 1:37:13.7) revolution. I mean, there was a lot of political activity going on in Central America. There was the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Like very, very important political events that challenging (inaudible 1:37:28.9) all over the world. But the funny thing is, that often times in our accounts, and I'm wondering if this is at least grounds for some sort of self critique, is often our accounts of these things we draw with examples from these really great examples from the world we are just discovering now. So it's not like this has been going on for a long time. This is like anything (inaudible 1:37:51.5). Nobody was talking about this stuff a year ago. It's news that has come up on our radar screens. But the funny thing is that it would be easier to find stuff and remember the things that were happening in the eighties than it would be to dig up stuff that was happening in the sixties.
[Marisa]: mmm hmm. Um.
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:38:15.7) it was different for sure.
(Inaudible/Audio feed lost 1:38:25 - 1:40:19.3)
[Marisa]: Well, you know there is the art historian Vincent (inaudible 1:40:27.3). I don't know if you know him Steven Wright, but he's quite interesting and (inaudible 1:40:35.8). He suggests that 1968 is the year when the Sony Portapack was invented and that was also the time of a (inaudible 1:40:55.9). So Sony Portapack that made video cameras portable spurred this interest in technology art. In Canada, the Canadian Council had funding initiatives not only for the usage of this technology but for artists to use, I forget the name, it's a look and pilnib. It's a funding initiative for artists to work in acknowledged art sectors. A lot of times was what that meant was the artists were going to do media. And this was an initiative that was taken up by the Baxters in Britain and also spurred some similar but not has prominent engagements with mono sectors. Any kind of like rejuvenating spur of artistic innovation and technology innovation rolled together.
(Inaudible question from group 1:36:30.3)
Vincent Vonin. First name is Vincent. He actually just published a book about, called, (inaudible 1:42:18.6) documentary protocols. It was (inaudible 1:42.23.5) gallery in Toronto, I'm sorry. Montreal?
[Steven]: It was a great show. A really great sow
[Marisa]: Yeah. A really good archivist. So, on the Canadian side, I think there is an interest in that. For example, Ingrid's fascination with the telefax and the able to penetrate companies is kind of the most heightened emblem of this initiative. Yeah.
[Steven]: Maybe this is a topic we can pick up at another location because it's kind of late here for me. It's just a little after 2:00. And I would love to continue this conversation because actually didn't even think of it before. I'm really just thinking of your examples and they way we talk about them it seems like we're doing the splits for about a decade and a half. And it's maybe why that would be and then maybe directed by it or else at least to (inaudible 1:43:46.7). I also am somebody who became politically and artistically aware in the 1980s so of course I know a lot about the 1980s and I never talk about the stuff that formed in my youth. Anyway, maybe there are more things to be said but I think I'm going to have to duck out at this point. I want to thank you very much for your presentation and your thoughts and for joining us. I hope you'll come back, before the book gets out, for another potluck and before I read the book
[Marisa]: That sounds good. I look forward to reading the book (laughing)
(Laughter)
Why don't we close it there altogether and leave on an inquisitive note (inaudible 1:44:54.0) and more for later.
[Steven]: Okay, goodnight!
[Marisa]: Goodnight! Thank you Scott. Thank you guys!
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:45:25.0
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Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$ad563cc59b22afa4" title="#basekamp/$ad563cc59b22afa4">byproducts http://basekamp.com/about/events/byproducts (#basekamp/$ad563cc59b22afa4)
Created on 2010-05-26 09:13:04.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:54:38
- hi marisa, stephen & nick!
- stephen wright: 17:54:52
- Hey Scott!
- Marisa Jahn: 17:54:52
- hi!
- stephen wright: 17:54:55
- Hi Marisa
- Nick Hanford: 17:54:56
- Hello
- Marisa Jahn: 17:54:59
- just getting some images emplaced
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:06
- let's wait a few mins for people to come in before starting
- Marisa Jahn: 17:55:09
- should i send them to someone or what do i do with them?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:10
- ok great
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:22
- well... could they be available online somewhere? like flickr?
- Marisa Jahn: 17:56:55
- hm. i can upload them to my server?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:58:20
- totally
- Marisa Jahn: 17:58:33
- i mean i know i can, q is, does this make sense for people to then click on them?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:58:44
- i only suggest online so people can be passed links
- BASEKAMP team: 17:58:52
- whatever's easiest for you honestly
- Marisa Jahn: 17:59:02
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:09
- even if no images, it would be ok but they're always a bit of a help
- BASEKAMP team: 18:00:57
- who's up for a quick sound check call?
- Nick Hanford: 18:01:16
- i can take it
- Marisa Jahn: 18:01:50
- ok you call me then?
- Nick Hanford: 18:03:01
- i think they are testing basekamp's connection
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:37
- so that was fun
- Marisa Jahn: 18:09:45
- yar
- stephen wright: 18:09:57
- having fun are you?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:03
- indeed!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:05
- sound checkin
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:09
- maxin & relaxin
- stephen wright: 18:10:11
- rock on
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:18
- chillin & illin
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:31
-
- Marisa Jahn: 18:10:31
- just uploading these images...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:22
- btw, reading this: http://basekamp.com/about/events/byproducts
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:38
- & http://www.rev-it.org/projects/byproducts.htm
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:52
- How are you all this evening? (afternon . latenight depending on your timezone )
- stephen wright: 18:13:21
- fit as a fiddle, given the hour
- stephen wright: 18:13:43
- Hi David
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:13:57
- hi how are you?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:14:14
- sorry to have lost you the other day
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:29
- lovely . drinking beer and looking at dessert on the table and hummus and chips
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:40
- glad to have you as always David!
- stephen wright: 18:14:40
- We'll have a chance to catch up. I enjoyed our exchange though!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:14:50
- funny to bump into you at the tate
- stephen wright: 18:14:57
- haha!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:15:05
- I was exhibiting poster works
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:15:11
- yes it was
- stephen wright: 18:15:33
- I should go incognito to places like that!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:08
- so guys, who wants to get started with having an audio chat?
- stephen wright: 18:16:25
- that's what we're here / hear for
- stephen wright: 18:16:34
- whenever Marisa's ready
- Marisa Jahn: 18:16:42
- ok just testing the html page - 1 sec
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:56
- the weather is so.. sometihing - beautiful - or - that most people are out walking. or sleeping -- but a few of us are here & happy to chat
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:07
- sweeet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:26
- jsut let us know when you're done marisa & we'll call everyone
- Marisa Jahn: 18:17:37
- ok i'm ready
- Marisa Jahn: 18:17:39
- url is here:
- Marisa Jahn: 18:17:40
- http://www.marisajahn.com/basekamp.html
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:41
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:47
- awesum
- stephen wright: 18:18:42
- lost me
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:50
- d'oh
- Nick Hanford: 18:20:35
- yep
- stephen wright: 18:21:08
- lost me again...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:26
- oh noes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:35
- http://www.marisajahn.com/basekamp.html
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:25
- Joseph was on earlier & says HI btw
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:47
- he'll try to pop in sometime near the end
- stephen wright: 18:27:52
- lost me
- stephen wright: 18:27:57
- bad connection tonight
- stephen wright: 18:28:11
- please call me back
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:50
- dang sry stephen - trying u again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:34
- will keep trying
- stephen wright: 18:30:40
- please
- stephen wright: 18:30:46
- maybe we can do some text
- stephen wright: 18:30:59
- It's really interesting, but technology is not happening
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:13
- o
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:15
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:42
- marisa is talking about Artist Placement Group, ... image #1 on taht link above
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:31:55
- can you explain why the big interest in the group
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:59
- this one is by Jonathan Latham, called Big Breather
- stephen wright: 18:32:11
- can you call me again
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:32:43
- both groups were very famous in the 70's
- stephen wright: 18:33:14
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:15
- in the UK yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:38
- neither were so famous in the US...
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:33:44
- sure
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:34:04
- we produced material for the same magazine
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:34:15
- AND
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:59
- Stephen it might be good to calrify P@W's interest in Organizational Art in this context... at some point...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:19
- tho wouldn't want to derail Marisa's chat
- stephen wright: 18:37:09
- dropped again...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:58
- eating http://deallocker.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/stacys_pita_chips_... btw
- stephen wright: 18:42:20
- scott... sorry, lost again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:56
- d'oh!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:10
- we lost stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:45
- re-adding u stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:50
- talking about Au Travail
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:12
- next image down... two girls hugging in a vat of oil at Kentucky Fried Chicken fast food cahin
- stephen wright: 18:47:16
- When the connection is cooperating, I have no problem following you Marisa. And yet what is interesting is that you use some off-beat terms, not idiosyncratically, but pointedly, kind of hijacking them or retracking them. I'd like to ask you about a couple of them, and more generally to ask you about what you think about that whole vocabulary question. You called yourself something of an "interloper"... What's that? You explained "byproducts" right off the bat, but it is clearly a case of repossession of a word. As is "embedded". See my point? All this beyond the examples per se.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:47:29
- yes
- stephen wright: 18:51:29
- d'oh!
- stephen wright: 18:51:38
- I like that project too!
- stephen wright: 18:52:37
- It seems as if all the bandwidth in my hotel is being consumed by my neighbours downloading huge amounts of porn.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:52:38
- calling you bakkkk
- stephen wright: 18:52:41
- Please call me again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:04
- tell them to get a room
- Nick Hanford: 18:53:25
- i think the problem may be that they have a room
- stephen wright: 18:53:47
- They should all be given a common room
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:16
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:48
- and... http://www.mykitchenaddiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/2009-02-03-...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:01
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janez_Jan%C5%A1a
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:13
- and...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:14
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janez_Jan%C5%A1a_(performance_artist)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:04
- stephen wright: 19:02:15
- Guerrilla Electoral Theater
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:14
- http://books.google.com/books?id=X2RlSHAYUd4C&dq=guerrilla+electoral+the...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:02
- Reverend Billy & the Church of life after Shopping
http://www.revbilly.com/ - BASEKAMP team: 19:05:51
http://www.misscanadiana.ca/- stephen wright: 19:07:49
- This is all the funnier as the Governor General of Canada (our Head of State) is herself Haitian born. So there is an automatic confusion between Miss Canadiana and the Queen's Representative. So there is a real Yes Men twist in terms of race relations
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:52
] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]- stephen wright: 19:14:12
- You chose to do it as a book -- not as an exhibition
- stephen wright: 19:16:05
- it's the rythms and patterns of the context that produce the work
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:31
- the work focused on is critical, but not involved in "institutional critique" exactly
- stephen wright: 19:16:53
- I really like the Lucas project -- it's one of the strongest in the book in my opinion -- but it could easily be part of any good mainstream exhibition -- it has the appeal for sure
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:17:01
- what about art works that take place inside and outside art institutions but do not produce material evidence, such as Ian Wilsons?
- stephen wright: 19:17:37
- he does produce material evidence though
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:17:44
- they take the form of discussions
- stephen wright: 19:18:02
- I mean, people bear witness, there are recordings...
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:18:10
- sure
- stephen wright: 19:18:16
- great work to be sure
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:23
- we're looknig for evidence of ian wilson's work
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:18:25
- but their experiential
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:38
- think we found some http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2l6Xg40JY
- stephen wright: 19:18:44
- yes it's a good example
- stephen wright: 19:19:05
- He's this south african artist who just does talks in museums
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:05
- it's not a rick roll don't worry -
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:08
- but close
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:25:12
- I find the issue of the everyday and the real , and the differentiation between something that appears real or subverts the real very interesting but difficult to get my head around, so the terms and language you use to read practices looking at these issues fascinating.
- stephen wright: 19:27:42
- This Eye-Witness project is interesting and important, but have you considered in what ways its conditions of possibility lie in art-related activity? I mean it sounds like the "up against the wall motherfuckers" take on radical conceptual art
- stephen wright: 19:31:04
- This fact may not interest anyone but me, but now that the skype connection is working perfectly (it's 1:30 am) seems to suggest that my hypothesis about the porn downloaders was accurate -- and now they've all nodded off!
- stephen wright: 19:39:19
- for sure!
- stephen wright: 19:39:32
- accountability and working with communities
- stephen wright: 19:39:50
- you might call that "collective autonomy" -- something art is not too good at
- stephen wright: 19:41:53
- artists need help in dealing with empirical data, with worldly knowledge!
- stephen wright: 19:42:44
- They were WAY aggressive!
- stephen wright: 19:42:57
- oops, lost my connection (those motherfuckers are back)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:17
- adding u bak
- stephen wright: 19:43:27
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:45
- ing u
- stephen wright: 19:45:46
- on!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:41
- kung fu!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:41
- LINK
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:42
- http://www.mucketymuck.org/b_1_exhibitions/kits4encounter/archive_book.htm
- Marisa Jahn: 19:51:51
- this link is better:
- Marisa Jahn: 19:51:51
- http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=...
- Marisa Jahn: 19:51:55
- oops not that one
- Marisa Jahn: 19:52:01
- http://www.rev-it.org/projects/recipes.htm
- Marisa Jahn: 19:52:02
- this one
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:09
- you mean the 80s?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:25
- happened...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:07
- i was definitely kidding above -- there was a ton of activist art in the 80s.. but it was different
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:58:12
- Latham disappeared or became invisible in the 80's along with Metzger
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:58:47
- coincided with the failure of the official avant garde
- stephen wright: 19:58:50
- Sorry what was his name?
- stephen wright: 19:59:25
- the art historian?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:52
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portapak
- stephen wright: 20:00:20
- Bonin, Vincent
- stephen wright: 20:00:41
- Documentary Protocols
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:17
- link to exhibition
http://ellengallery.concordia.ca/en/reflexion_protocol1.php - BASEKAMP team: 20:02:11
- right
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:02:21
- yep I need to sleep
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:43
- everyone from europe - and elsewhere - thanks for staying up sleepless with us!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:02:49
- yes thank you very much
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:03:07
- bye
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:11
- bi!
- stephen wright: 20:03:19
- until next time!
- Marisa Jahn: 20:03:24
- thank you scottage and basekampers!
2010-05-25
Week 19: Democratic Innovation
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Kent Hansen from the Copenhagen-based initiative, Democratic Innovation.
Several times in previous weeks’ discussions, the question of democracy has come up — as an aspiration, a modus operandi, an exigency, but most often as stemming from a desire for a more inclusive aesthetics of decision making. There isn’t much substantive democracy on offer in the mainstream artworld — nor in the broader lifeworld — but is it really plausible for artworlds to promote and practice democracy? What, if anything, do artworlds have to do with democratic will formation?
Democratic Innovation was founded in 1998 by Kent Hansen as a way of fostering greater interplay between art, free association and working life. Though not a collective/group per se, the initiative’s focus is definitely on collective work — and the collective workplace is the site of its interventions. Responding to the challenges facing democracy in today’s neoliberal economy, Democratic Innovation instigates collaborations within institutions, organizations and corporations. Typically, Hansen and his collaborators work with people in factories and businesses, seeking to integrate other artists and groups using art as an organizing platform, to consider how democracy — as it is currently understood, but also as it could be reconfigured — might be used to improve people’s working lives.
Experiences and knowledge creation in the workplace play an extensive role in cultural and societal developments — and are carefully scrutinized by neo-management as a way of increasing profits. But what if they were to be taken seriously on their own terms? Would that not be something of a “democratic innovation”? Thus, the initial ‘platform’ for democratic innovation is the notion that the ‘collective workplace’ is a time-space where different norms and conceptions about ‘production’, ‘procedures’ and ‘life’ are struggling for legitimacy — and where collective aesthetic strategies can challenge the ‘ordinary’ practice of organizing and decision-making regarding ‘production’ – be it cultural, societal or industrial.
Democratic Innovation is thus seeking alternative models to ‘managerial practices’. Can art practices contribute to the development of a critique of current neo-management practices and organizing regimes? Do participatory collaborative art practices merely mimic soft-management tactics or do they have the potential to point the way to democratic innovation?
Transcription
Week 19: Democratic Innovation
[Scott]: So Kent, welcome! Thanks for coming to our weekly chat again.
[Kent]: Yes I've been a bi disconnected maybe. So yeah. Its 12:00 in Denmark, sometimes it's hard to stay up.
[Scott]: Are you feeling awake?
[Ken]: (Laughing) I am feeling awake so there's no problem.
[Scott]: Great.
[Kent]: Depending how long this will take us (laughing).
[Scott]: We are going to drag this out for as long as possible.
[Ken]: Okay.
[Scott]: We will keep it just under 2 hours at the maximum. And if you need to go sooner because you are tired just let us know. Cool. And so I'm not sure who else is out there. Jessica and Adam, school has already ended correct? Or do you guys have some like diehard students that are hanging on? School is out. Yeah (laughing) great.
Um, in any case we know pretty much everyone here. Welcome everybody again two in other example in the series of Plausible Artworlds where we take a look at different examples of emergent or fledgling Artworlds, for lack of a better term. Many of you know Democratic Innovation but some of you might not. And so Kent, I was hoping that you could help everyone who was out there or listening to the recording later on get a sense of what democratic innovation is. Ah hah! I'm just reading some of the comments (laughing). Maybe through how it got started. I know democratic innovation is a project that grew out of Copenhagen 12 years ago and since then it's my understanding that that it has often worked with people in factories and in other kinds of situations. Other corporate settings or other settings where people are working but not necessarily just as a ploy by the top level in the company but somehow you've convinced these various companies are factories to allow you and your collaborators to come in and work with the people that are working. I think we're just really fascinated by this process and it would be nice to talk about some of these projects that you have been doing.
[Kent]: Yeah, what should I say? Yes the project for the initiative started up as a trial to star of various conversations. The startup, now it feels like way back, this was like at the end of the nineties and it was actually the first trial to get people across the south between Sweden and Denmark working together in a project that was addressing the (inaudible 0:03:43.8) development in Holbæk area. That is a Danish city just across from another city, a Swedish city. And I created a project that kind of address the infrastructure in these (inaudible 0:04:04.6) city. And it connected to a larger cultural program that looked at the same business development of the Holbæk development. And the idea was that job situations and how to work in the area was changing to kind of a home based work so we felt that we should address this topic of the issue you somehow have to direct to the organizations and to the working life of these organizations. The idea was somehow to get a dialogue of these conversations in the area. I engaged several people more or less, some symbolic. It was actually meant to work in kind of directive organizations that it became more or less symbolic and should to be very difficult in engaging the Swedish organizations. It became kind of more symbolic on the notion of this kind of crossover project, the crossover between art and organizations. So was kind of a test project and it happened and luckily that I came across some working life consultants in the Copenhagen area that we're interested in this idea of creativity and workplace and so forth.
So the next project they came, is this mentioned? No. Okay. It was a project that was eventually called industry ambition. And this project started up with a context that was kind of a test project (inaudible 0:06:29.7) actually. So this (inaudible 0:06:34.6) became more realistic to enter organizations because I was keen on pursuing these ideas. With the contacts of these working life consultants we eventually succeeded in the entering into different manufacturing companies and reaching the (inaudible 0:07:12.9) were the companies were situated kind of attached of this project is well. Yeah. So was kind of by the help of these consultants that succeeded the project (inaudible 0:07:32.4). Often we had spent time to fundraise the project and to get all the preparations up. I involved kind of colleagues and friends that I knew. So it was kind of super flex, the group super flex and the video artist (inaudible 0:08:05.2) who took part in the project. But the financing part was in the end of mainly, from money point of view like cash money, was supported by the Danish trade unions actually. So was first of all not supported by a kind of art funding or by any other kind of cultural funding and on these premises we carried out and it kind of lost its idea, this project. Kind of the whole project compared to corporations. Yeah. I probably shouldn't talk. I will probably just regret (laughing). Maybe I could answer some questions. Maybe I could ask myself what probably could create interests in democratic innovation practices (laughing).
[Scott]: Well I can definitely continue to ask questions and was anyone else had anything they wanted to say immediately or ask you to clarify
[Kent]: Yeah, certainly.
[Scott]: Okay, yeah well. I think, I don't know, how you guys feel? I think that one thing that could help is to focus on one of the projects. Not necessarily in a hyper details but just kind of a little bit of detail and maybe tell us a little bit about what the experience of working with is the actual experience in the factory was like. What they seem to get out of it and what the results were from your point of view. It might help us to, almost like a story, it might help us to kind of put ourselves in your place. Maybe help get the conversation about other questions related to it going.
[Kent]: Okay. Yeah.
[Scott]: I know there have been a number of projects. You've done some…
[Kent]: Yeah, that I can say that this project that I've mentioned that was kind of carried out throughout one year at different corporations. At this time in Denmark and there was an initiative from the administrator of trade and administer of culture and they came out with these reports on the potential for Denmark and the corporations that are working with the cultural sector. And this project was prepared some years before with the kind of test project so was kind of by accident that this project (inaudible 0:11:36.7) was up when this report came out. And we were kind of taken for how good or how bad it could be (laughing) when if someone carried out some of what the report was describing though they were not describing actually art projects as such it was more of kind of cultural projects and the cultural sector in industry and so forth. Only a few projects were as an example for artists working in corporations. This project in distribution for one example. And I and the project and other business partners were kind of dragged into the discussion in the art field and, how can I say, the more cultural fields. And from then on I have done projects not quite similar because I have found out it's very hard to establish these kind of the projects at factories with the workers. So it's been kind of smaller projects that I have is well engaged myself in (inaudible 0:12:51.3) around these things. Organizing (inaudible 0:12:56.5) workshops, hearings and worked with researchers on these issues. That kind of stirs it all up.
[Scott]: Sorry, hey Kent? A real quick question. Just for all of us out here, do you have, are there any images from your website that you think would be good to go to kind of help a company? I put some up on our page here, but I don't know if they're like appropriate at all to what you're talking about. Or if they're just kind of generic. Well, not generic. Or if you think that these are in any way helpful to give people a sense of some of what was going on.
[Kent]: Yeah, two of these images are from these industry projects. The top and the one that is second from the bottom.
[Scott]: Okay, yeah. We're looking at it now.
[Kent]: So yeah. Kind of describing the more tangible results (inaudible 0:14:16.9) or the house that is in the factory space (inaudible 0:14:24.1). And the more kind of process based part of the project. These two images are from the same factory. The largest factory that we entered. What we did was first of all to have some meetings with a group of factory workers that had signed up for the project. Together with kind of a group coach, you could say, and a project manager. So we kind of started off by actually kind of making a void for something to happen. It was more or less by making the factory workers have input of what ideas they had or feelings they had about making these kinds of projects. At the kind of second meeting we had a more extensive project where we tried out various tools or methods. Kind of walking around the factory space and taking images and video of other employees and so forth. And in the middle of this session, there was suddenly a lot of fuss going on because those that took part in the project had heard, by accident, that some of the employees should be laid off in the near future. It was not actually the being laid off itself. Because I think that was not unusual, but people cannot be employed and then laid off frequently, but they were not informed of this. And this started off this discussion on why we should actually talk together and they internally talked together. SO the project became less circling around the internal communication and the kind of culture at the factory. We started working with what kind of tools we could use and what tools should be alternative to the current tools at the time. What kind of communicative methods should be used in the factory? And in the end, you could say that this is a kind of (inaudible 0:17:37.7) of this various process throughout almost a year, we came up with this radio station at the factory. So they established this internal radio station and that should eventually somehow mix the more formal communication with informal communication. So we can say that this gave, this was meant to give the factory workers more hands on for the communication itself, internal communication in the factory itself. In the space, the factory organization. Yeah.
[Scott]: Kent, how did that come about? Just curious I was just kind of curious that information. How did that information during come out during the project that you guys were working on there?
[Kent]: How it came out? The information about the sacking?
[Scott]: yeah. Sacking the employees.
[Kent]: I actually don't know. I think it was by rumors. The thing was that we had the possibility to confront the project manager on the factory itself, not at the corporation but at the factory itself. Kind of the human resource manager. So we had the chance to confront this person and a factory worker (inaudible 0:19:27.5). At that time we had kind of, more or less, informal communication in the group. So it was more the case that the rumor was out there and it was able to confront someone responsible instantly. I think it was more that we (inaudible 0:19:59.7) and not the source of information because it showed to be true. So, yeah.
The thing is that the interests for the managerial party were about communication is well but it was more to somehow enhance the communication between these various (inaudible 0:20:46.2) production workers. It was more like addressing more, how can I say, practical or more production related communications. So this was kind of our, how can I say, ticket for entering conversations. But we made it clear from the startup one week kind of negotiated this possibility of entering the organization that we are not obliged to do something specific even if they wanted it or not. The negotiation of our, I'm looking for the word, kind of (inaudible 0:21:46.6) about was that if we were not free hands there was no reason for us to be there as artists. In this sense we had the mandates to do whatever emerges from the project itself through the process. So, yeah. And of course this was possible because we had these working like consultants on our side that they trusted. It was the artist group that was kind of gathered at that time that had the authority for the project. Though we had some, I was, for the project and the factories kind of the art director even though I don't like the word. So I had to confront sometimes the consultants when they tried by a habit to take on responsibility for management of the project itself. I had to kind of make them to step back. It was kind of funny in a sense. And unusual for me of course. To ask someone who by tradition some power and assistance to kind of step back because if they did not there was no reason for us to be there.
[Scott]: So that was a kind of negotiating position for you? You guys were kind of like "well, you paid us to come and we came all this way and we're working with the company and if you fire these employees then we're going to leave". Did that work at all? I mean, I'm sure it was more nuance than that but...
[Kent]: yeah, in principle it worked. The argument that we stated was that if we couldn't do what we set out to do when we initiated the project in those places there was no reason for us to be there. So why stay? And we were not paid by the factories. We were paid by the trade union. So in a sense we were not distracted by the paying of the corporations.
[Scott]: interesting. So you guys sort of represented them in a sense. Well, I have a question.
[Kent]: Yeah, yeah.
[Scott]: Go ahead first.
[Kent]: we didn't represent anything or anyone other than ourselves. There was no kind of anything attached (inaudible0:25:13.5) responsibility and obligation to carry on the project and this was exactly the argument. If we carry on the project as an experiment or whenever then it should be us that were, you know in comparison with the consultants or management, that should be in charge of the project. So that we could make something happen. So was negotiated in a decision that enabled us to do something that we couldn't do otherwise.
[Scott]: all right you guys. Don't let me take over this conversation (laughing). But I just keep having questions. You know, actually, someone did have a question earlier maybe we should just bookmark it until after this factory part because I know what this was from. Greg was asking about the strategy blows (inaudible 0:26:06.1). I just wanted to mention that as something that maybe we can talk about next after we talked about this particular factory project.
[Kent]: Yeah, yeah.
[Scott]: but while we are on this, I guess I just wanted to ask you... You are an artist who didn't just come into conceptual art from a managerial background or anything. You are somebody who has made, I know years and years ago you had made conceptual paintings and sort of monochrome paintings in the sort of distant past and sculptural objects and things like this. And you find yourself, and I guess in over the last like decade or more, you've been doing these large negotiation projects. How does that work for you as an artist? Is that a relevant thing to ask?
[Kent]: Yeah.
[Scott]: (Laughing) because this is your, its not only your project, you working with other people. But it's also part of what you do now. You know, you work with , you know I guess you work with (laughing)...Working with ideas of democracy and ideas of how we work and live and part of what you do is that you work with people now and you do still. I was looking at these photographs and you guys are still making things in a sense but you're making it through a kind of process that has a new and different kind of meaning that what you were doing before when you were working as an artist.
[Kent]: yeah but I would not say that I was originally a painter. I worked with the various media since art school. And in art school I would paint that it was part of projects. One example that was back when, I'm an old man (laughing), so this goes back to the mid eighties. I was part of this project on a state prison working with the inmates on a project that was related to their situation. So in this sense of worked with various medias all along. And my interests and more formal and conceptual stuff partly, to be honest, the handicraft (laughing) and this was kind of (inaudible 0:28:40.3) maybe. And partly, going towards minimalist things, it's because kind of the notion of minimalism for engaging the audience for something happening outside the frame. Beyond the frame. Having this kind of interaction with the audience in a kind of series and all these things. So in this sense, the connection of the engagement thing is kind of what hosts these various and specific interests and details altogether. Does this make sense?
[Scott]: Um, yeah. To me it does. Definitely. You know, I sort of constantly curious about when there is someone who is sort of willingly takes on the role of negotiator and of large projects, someone who has been working as an artist. I think, you know, sometimes I wonder just what... Do you ever feel like "what have I gotten myself into", you know (laughing).
[Kent]: Yeah, yeah. For me it's rather distance than studio with being in front of your canvas and just being alone, you know (laughing).
[Scott]: Sure.
[Kent]: I like the interaction with other people. But anyhow, now I find myself in front of the computer screen so it's just maybe trading the canvas for the screen (laughing).
[Scott]: (Laughing) right.
[Kent]: Paradoxical actually because of course there is a lot of, yeah, administration in doing this kind of project.
[Scott]: I know that in this email that went out there were some questions. There were some pressing questions that were asked in this email that I think are tied really closely with what you do which is why it was an occasion to ask. But maybe it would be worth bringing some of those up now. And I guess I could just kind of throw some of those out. I don't know if anyone else out there is kind of thinking some of these and have some burning questions because this isn't' really meant to be just a dialog between Kent and me. It's just sort of turning out that way so far. But, I don't know. Maybe I'll just bring them up and perhaps we can kind of then about them over the next like half art or something. And then maybe we could talk about another one of the projects like, for instance, Greg was asking about these balloons. Maybe it would be a good idea to talk about the organizational arts summit. But the questions that I'm referring to, by the way, just so you know what I'm talking about, ultimately, I'm really thinking about the ones at the end. Whether it looks like you Democratic Innovation is seeking alternative models to managerial practices and I guess what this asks is can art practices contribute to the development of a critique of current neomanagement practices and organizing regimes and do participatory collaborative art practices merely mimic soft managerial tactics or do they have the potential to point the way to "democratic innovation"? There's probably another way to ask that, but it seems pretty seined. So I guess I just wanted to throw that out there while we were talking about all this stuff.
[Kent]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I mean it could be a good time to address it now or later. But, they seem like pretty large questions to me so... But they kind of cut to the heart of what you're doing I think.
[Kent]: You know, first of all, working with different people in different fields and in talking about management or how to organize projects probably, how can I say, the idea that artists should be better managers (inaudible 0:34:14.1). It probably is not the case. You will probably find more back management in the art field then in the managerial field because they are trained for this. Of course this is about ethics as well. But, I don't know, for artists it's kind of more ethically then kind of people in general. I don't know, I don't think so. But the point for me or for this project rather because it should necessarily revolve around me, is more kind of the collaboration between groups that have various backgrounds and various experiences. So teaming up with workers or employees or in some case managers and researchers is not so much trying to teach them anything. It's more trying to work together with them to try to maybe come up with other ways. I think this is kind of maybe both the idea from the startup to come up with the collaboration part and the learning as the democratic innovation carries on. Yeah. But I think the critiquing, is of course is more around how you were organized and how one organizes stuff. I think the aesthetics or the process of working with aesthetics could be forming parts of the critique of neomanagement practices (inaudible 0:36:32.5) kind of neoliberism. Because of how this kind of affects (inaudible 0:36:46.2) human values and life itself in a more grand, in my words. I don't know what you would say in English. So it's more interesting the more other areas and how to generate knowledge. So I think this is kind of more the issue. I think that this element has been the case for art for many, many times which address other sides of the human knowledge. I think this is very discarded in our times, more than before. It surely still a problem. We cannot sanction kind that this kind of knowledge is used an experience that is made by aesthetics. I think this is kind of maybe the issue. But if it were to be enforced in the industries, it would need some kind of collaboration (laughing) with other kind of like minded people within the industry or in the research area. So teaming up with these people.
[Scott]: Aaron had a question. Aaron, do you feel like asking this out loud or would you rather us just kind of read it out and address it? I don't know if you even have a microphone there.
[Kent]: Aaron, you still have our microphone.
(Laughter)
[Kent]: Okay. Its okay (laughing).
[Scott]: Maybe he stepped away for a second. But yeah, well it seem that Aaron is asking about the tension between I think what he is describing, I mean literally between what he is describing as just kind of... Oh, oh I see. Well, we'll just address it Aaron and you know, you can type in. He is describing the democratic as something that is bottom up and organization as something that is structured and advanced and top down. I think he just sees a tension there and was...I'm not even sure if it was a question (laughing).
[Kent]: If I understand correctly, it's a very good question actually. The thing is that organization as such is not necessarily top down. It depends on how you can be up to date on emerging processes. So how you are dealing with what is going on now and how you actually tell the story afterwards. You have this telling the story afterwards and is always the one who was winning the game, you know? So if you're not necessarily keen on telling the winners story, you could tell the other story as well and not to be one winner. This is kind of the idea of organizing another way that is not necessarily top down. I think it's about being able to grasp what is going on in a situation. It's probably something that I think by training and the specific field of aesthetics a something artists are more tuned into some help. Not to say that everyone is very skilled and a social setting but I think that in dealing with aesthetics you probably… This is for me, and I think for others as well. It's hard to generalize. Probably, I think that this is some part of working with aesthetics that are able to grasp details of something that is happening that you don't notice any usual frame of mind if you're not tuned into aesthetics maybe. I don't know. Does that make sense?
[Scott]: Well, hey Kent? Do the people stored in the factory think about this sort of thing you are sort of going for your process in working with them? These issues are you guys talk about these issues or... I mean, I know you were saying that sometimes it's hard to know what's happened until after the fact, after a period of processing. I was just curious about the people that are there. Are they sort of subjects? Do you know what I mean? I know you sort of talk with them and treat them well, but I guess I was curious about the level of awareness of this stuff.
[Kent]: I understand. Awareness. Yeah, but we had discussions (inaudible 0:43:16.1) references to art history or all of these things. But kind of issues that we talked about in our sort of fields were addressed for them and by them as well. So, in the end there was a kind of (inaudible 0:43:42.6) it was kind of by interview and so forth. Trying to find out what happened not long after but just after. Statements were in the direction that some of the interviewed factory workers had kind of experienced this other way of working and kind of a positive side of it as well. So they kind of found out that probably there was some other ways to do things in both kind of a practical sense but as well as how to go about group work and all these things. So, these things we addressed specifically. Yeah. So in a sense, yeah. There was much talk about how to organize and how to communicate. And this factory was kind of specifically addressed in how to communicate and which elements were kind of important. The informal part of the communication to look at elements in the organization or in the organizing that are usually discarded.
If I talk in long sentences and people are logged off, it will probably be quite difficult to...
[Scott]: (Laughing) yeah, exactly Kent. You have to keep the sentences shorter in case people get booted off of the audio again.
[Kent]: So just a quick question. Organizing?
[Scott]: (Laughing) well, did you want to talk about another example of a kind of practice that Democratic Innovations is involved in that doesn't with people like factories? Like the, I was going to say for example, like the Organizational Arts Summit. But, maybe it would be good to address what Aaron is asking because I think that has more to do with the factory stuff. We can continue to go back to that too if anybody has any ideas or thoughts about it.
[Kent]: Yeah, if the organizations kind of continue the process? Work on another project afterwards? This of course is on a short time projects. Short or long time depending on how to look at it. This example that I mentioned before and that Scott addressed the industry (inaudible 0:47:12.4) was extended over a year.
[Scott]: is that the radio station Kent?
[Kent]: Yeah, the radio station project. Yeah.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Kent]: so if this carries on, the radio station was established as in the factory space as a prototype but to my knowledge (inaudible 0:47:47.4) is that they didn't implement it for a long period of time. But I'm not sure if… It would of course be interesting to see what would happen to if they enforced more informal communication or enforced more kind of sanctioned informal communication. But I think that as with all other types of projects, exhibitions and so forth, it's more the impact of the experience. It's not necessarily important that people will be a continuing of the project but that they will learn as much as we do. Hopefully, they will carry this onto the next project or in their daily lives. So I don't think that you should expect more of such projects than other types of projects. However, I think you should expect more but I think it's more effective in a sense if you have direct contact. It could be symbolic, but not as symbolic as just leaving posters on the gallery wall.
(Reading text question to himself - inaudible 0:49:41.4)
They are asking if the time element matters in my mind. And you mean like, in my conscience? Time matters because time goes by. It is, in a sense, a project. I consider this kind of like a time based media. If projects morphed into one another, ideas too, this I think that projects fit more together.
[Scott]: yeah I can't. I mean, for instance, you are part of a group in Copenhagen called TVTV. It's not exactly the same as a radio station but you guys for a sort of a long period of time have been occupying a television station in the middle of Copenhagen right?
[Kent]: Yeah. You can say that. The radio station has two reasons I think.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Kent]: Many reasons. First of all the media is more familiar to people who were or are working in this factory space. So this is one thing. Another is more of a mass medium so we can get in contact with the people at once although was covering a very small area. I think total, this factory had 350 workers. Of course, this kind of fluctuating between being a mass medium and direct contact… Yeah. For me that TV is interesting. The TV is somehow the same because TV by tradition a collective production. Art is not necessarily, not by tradition anyhow. And then it addresses other groups and the already informed audience. For me, more and more throughout the years. Not particularly interested and the art topic or the arts audience. It's not that I (inaudible 0:53:12.7) distribute art into the public. The TV is not distributing art, you know, or mediating art to a broader audience it's more using TV as art medium. TV tries to engage people, as well, in various ways both through the screen but also invites people to the production itself. And a sense, it's kind of a prolonging of these elements that I have worked with before.
I can link. Those are links to kind of current projects from this address.
Aaron go on. Aaron was actually in Copenhagen a week ago exactly, Tuesday. We made a project at TVTV together. Yeah. People could buy a mobile phone and e-mail and send and sound clips and in the studio was a live DJ that mixed these clips and found it's together. And the idea thing was to make a somehow a collective produced jingle for the poor signal in TV at the same time. We in the live studio made this enforced image as well.
[Scott]: Do you guys have links to that online somewhere?
[Kent]: Yes, there's some description at (inaudible 0:55:41.2) website. There's a news section in the one website and so as far as I recall. Following the address for TVTV, there is a link as well to this kind of current project. And TVTV for me, it's as much of a production as it is the organizing part as well. (Inaudible 0:56:37.2) been interested in how to organize these types of projects. Yeah. So for the question in the case of TVTV, I have been much involved in the organizing. It's actually an association with a board and a sense of a democratic organization in itself. But yeah. If you remember, a board can be voted out and not being in charge anymore. And this could be, I think, a bit scary for an artist to lose control over a project that he or she had initiated. But this is possible in the case of TVTV.
[Scott]: Yeah, do you think this is a good opportunity to tell us about the Organizational Art Summit at all and other projects like that where you work with a group of other people? Specifically other people who you are on an equal footing with, like other artists for example.
[Kent]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I'm going to bring up the photograph of that balloon again.
[Kent]: Yeah, yeah. It should, yeah. I'm going to put the link up in the chat, yeah. The balloon is kind of (inaudible 0:58:36.7) some kind of merchandise for the summit. After the summit, actually. So this summit was an initiative first of all from this research department at the Danish university of (inaudible 0:59:01.6) and they had this consortium called the creative lines that addressed sort of this series and distribution had addressed. And because of this activity of democratic innovations I had come in contact with different researchers at this place and other places. So I was asked to co-organize the summit that invited international artists. Scott was invited too. So you can correct me if I'm telling it wrong (laughing). Artists were invited, curators, other researchers in this field of kind of cross discourse of artists, cultures and organizations. A few business people as well and some consultants. So what was the gold or kind of the topic of the summit was to find out what were actually happening with these types of (inaudible 1:00:43.1) or the fad of arts and business and cultural industry and organization and such things. And artists organizing as well. The setup of the summit was to get together with this group of various people from various subjects fields and to produce a book on the topic. It was a four day summit and all of us were transported to this disclosed area in the northern island sea land, where Copenhagen is situated as well.
[Scott]: it was in this...
[Kent]: This old, former...barn I guess? So we set off, kind of very ambitious, to produce a book in four days. And I'm, sorry. I'm not used all these happenings at the same time (laughing). I'm really sorry.
[Scott]: Yeah, sorry about that. We keep adding more people to the chat.
[Kent]: Yeah, I'm getting distracted. Anyhow, sorry. The thing for me, was actually how to do this collective production of a book. The funny thing was it actually kind of happened by more or less being random. Someone kind of took turns in organizing it because it's kind of initial researchers and myself stepped back and try to see what would happen. So, in a sense, it was very interesting. We didn't actually succeed in producing or publishing the book itself but the process kind of extended beyond the summit and we made this kind of documentation of the summit.
Sorry, I'm just typing. This is kind of a documentation of the summit.
[Scott]: okay, we're going to pull that up now. The saloon. Sorry to confuse everyone with this. The Sister Nancy link up there. Okay.
[Kent]: So this goes back to like 2006, the summit. There are groups and individuals that created texts. You kind of have to push the colored figures and it will take you to the different texts and drafts for text. The thing was, it was then collected on this page of this website and was then meant to be carried on or meant to be carried on Wiki where people are invited for kind of co-writing.
(Mumbling and typing)
And the balloon is like I said not any kind of merchandise. It's both some of the sign, the sentence and text from the summit that is applicated on the balloon and is then used for informing about the summit itself and the field of work for these artists and the contributions from the artists and researchers and consultants.
[Scott]: Kent, wasn't the balloon part of launch of this book?
[Kent]: Yeah. So it's on several occasions been used for launching the book by me and by others that were part of the summit. SO it was like everyone was offered a certain amount of balloons that they could use for launching the book or the sites. And it hopefully continues work on this.
[Scott]: DO you still have any balloons? I thought we were supposed to launch them here but I don't think we ever did.
[Kent]: No, I don't think so. We obviously still have balloons left.
[Scott]: (Laughing) can you send a couple hundred balloons to us?
[Kent]: (Laughing) sure, sure.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Kent]: And, yeah. The last time I actually used it was at an event at Copenhagen (inaudible 1:08:41.7). That's addressed to (inaudible 1:08:49.0). And Copenhagen School is kind of a university.
[Scott]: So how did the really work out? The Wiki and the website and everything for writing the book. How do you feel it worked out? I mean, in terms of... If you had it to do over again, would you help to organize it way for writing the book? I mean, it seemed to take kind of a long time, huh? But...
[Kent]: Yeah, yeah. The process itself was interesting. I can imagine doing kind of similar things. I think that what was needed was actually a budget for producing the work. It was a very small budget that went into the balloons.
[Scott]: do you think that we should… You know that we are putting together a publication next year for Plausible Artworlds. Do you think that it would be a good idea to organize it in a similar fashion?
[Kent]: I have ideas for trying it out once again. I'd probably learn something the second time, more than the first time. Yeah.
[Scott]: Oh, I see. Steven was asking you to clarify what you were missing (laughing). Do you see this? Are you following this on the text (laughing)?
[Kent]: The summit itself did not put out a lot of material like text or graphs or signs and so forth. The challenge was kind of too collect it after words. And as often as you have a project and gather people from all around, and I do this to, you are experiencing energy. So people start doing something else. We manage to make what is at the website and hopefully… What I had was a (inaudible 1:11:30.9) in a Wiki of the co-writing stuff because of other projects as well (inaudible 1:11:40.9). But not in the sense of research (inaudible 1:11:47.9) should be continued and I would take it up again. But the saloon is kind of an interpretation, and this is what is. (Inaudible 1:12:07.2) on the saloon site. But these texts will be, some of them are already, changed into other texts and some of them will probably be written out of the awaybook.org sites. In the sense, in the end making it more coherent contributions to discourse. So money and stamina make it (inaudible 0:12:45.7).
[Scott]: Kent, I know it's getting quite late there. Did anyone have other thoughts about, oh yeah? So Steven is asking about the collective writing process and how you feel it worked? I'm definitely interested in this selfishly because having been involved but also we've gone through this process with this particular project a couple of times and you've been involved. And so now we're sort of entering a new phase so it's kind good to be self reflective here for a moment.
[Kent]: Yeah. The process at the summit I think worked quite well. We probably needed more time because of the more loose organized processes. I think that if someone had stepped in and taken the lead that it probably would have been possible to a coherent draft for a book for publication. But I think, then it would be another book. So in this sense, we could have prolonged the project may be two days if we had the time and resources. So the writing at the summit I think was functioning very well. The images that you can find at the saloon summit site is something that is created more or less with the idea of the drafts and images that were come up with at the summit. So was pretty much wind up for publication afterwards, or doing the publication afterwards.
[Scott]: Kent, this might be worth addressing. Basically, I'm thinking that Greg's last... (Laughing) nice Theresa, definitely. It's just getting it done sometimes, definitely. But Greg asked just about the tools. I actually don't think it's a dull question. This probably would be a really interesting point. Yeah, did you see this one yet? Did you use paper and a pen? Email? Google Docs? Wiki? Etc. And Steven was just asking about your experience in the work place, as I happen to know that some of the tools we used at the summit were experimental or organizational tools. Experimental design processes. Both processes and objects and literally tools that you and other people put together that I know have also been used in the workplace. But they were kind of used on us or used altogether. Some of the images on that webpage that we put together show that one projection table that you put together and there were a number of other devices that I could help describe or you might want to describe. Yeah, would you like to just mention that a little bit? Because it also leads from your earlier question from your work as a conceptual artist who was even entering into the realm of minimalist painting and using other kinds of media. You had sort of evolved this interactive table that was once a painting and sort of an interesting projection tool.
[Kent]: I think that the experimental table, the first time I actually set up for the exhibition for (inaudible 1:17:05.2) project. The exhibition was not kind of the project process but somehow a way of back feeding kind of public debates on this area. So, any sense, it was established (inaudible 1:17:32.1) and I had used it before and more of this exhibition type situations but I hadn't gotten it to work yet. The table. Though this was kind of the basic of the ideas of what happened at the planning sessions. So it was kind of carried on in this way at the planning sessions, if you recall.
[Scott]: I definitely do. I mean, do you mind if I described it a little bit for second? Just real quick. So I sent this image and basically, just tell me if I'm wrong about this and I will try to be super fast because of the time. It's kind of a large glossy monochromatic painting with a big white area in the center and you use dry erase markers of different colors. And each color has this kind of special unit that you stick it in that has a different kind of audio frequency. There are two pickups connected to the table like a guitar. An X and a Y access and as you draw with each of these colors with these different frequencies, this software program picks up what you're putting down and throws it up on the wall projection style. And also records it like a movie so you literally get this movie of this brainstorming session. Anyway, I thought that might help people to know what they're looking at.
[Kent]: Yeah. Thank you. Actually, it's a very ordinary kind of white board that you would use in the business field actually (laughing). This was from years ago and it probably works better now. Anyway kind of this thing at the museum in connection with the industry project was ambition. I didn't expect it to work like a collaborative tool at that time, there was more kind of a (inaudible 1:20:02.8) in the sense of someone outside of the museum putting something up on the wall at the museum. So as we had entered the industry or the factories as artists, everyone could actually access (Audio feed lost 1:20:23.6).
(Silence 1:20:23.6 - 1:21:50.9)
[Chris]: You mean to tell me that... Oh, okay.
(Background noise and chatter)
[Chris]: That machine can tell what color that is? That they're using?
(Background noise and chatter)
[Scott]: Kent? Are you back now? Is everybody back?
[Kent]: Yeah. I just found out I was gone. Sorry.
[Scott]: Hey Kent, the audio sounds terrible now. Can you hear us okay? Hmmm. You're volume sounds super, super low. We don't want to like get into a tech support thing but if we could at least hear one another. Can you try saying something again?
[Kent]: (inaudible 1:23:42.5) my mobile.
[Scott]: Oh you're on your mobile. Okay. Yeah, the audio was definitely much better before. Should I try? Oh, let's try calling him back.
[Scott]: Hey everyone. Greg just offered to host the audio. It might be the case that sometimes the signal drops in and out around here. And he's offsite so maybe we should go ahead and let him do that. I'm going to hang up now so I guess you'll all be getting a call from Greg. Everyone just go ahead and pick up and I think it'll be a lot clearer.
[Greg]: Hey Scott? Should I log in as BaseKamp?
[Scott]: No, you don't have to do that. You can just go ahead and click the call button at the top of the screen.
[Greg]: Okay.
[Scott]: If you can.
[Greg]: I'll give it a shot.
[Scott]: Okay, great. See ya in a second
(Silence 1:25:08.0 - 1:25:29.1)
[Scott]: Better?
[Greg]: I think so.
[Scott]: Oh, its better except for Kent's not there. Can you add Kent manually or do you have him in your list?
[Greg]: Um, no I don't.
[Scott]: I may be able to help do that.
[Greg]: Okay. Maybe you can add him.
[Scott]: Nope.
[Greg]: Okay, I'm adding Kent right now.
[Scott]: Okay.
(Greg talking to himself out loud as he adds Kent to Skype)
[Scott]: So is Kent hosting a different call to himself at the same time? Hey Kent, maybe you can (laughing). We're getting cross calling. It's like Ghostbusters. Something bad might happen if we keep doing this.
[Greg]: Um, okay. I have to call everybody back together. For some reason, I can't add him as a...oh wait. Let me try this, hold on.
[Scott]: Actually, everyone on Kent's call. Kent would you mind just hanging up the other call?
[Greg]: I'm trying him now.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Greg]: There we go.
[Kent]: Okay, sorry.
[Scott]: Cool. Great.
[Kent]: This girl and I talked quite a lot and I sort of forgot (laughing). But I did really like it. Where did...
[Scott]: I know that Chris here had a question. By the way Greg, I'll send you, never mind.
(Greg talking in background regarding adding people to Skype)
Okay, now that we're back on. That was a good five minute intermission. Chris had a question for you, Kent.
[Chris]: The thing with the pickups. That can tell the color of those things? Of the markers and stuff?
[Kent]: Yeah, it's like single colored pens has its own (inaudible 1:28:09.2) so it kind of picks up which pen will be used.
[Chris]: Wow. Cool. Cool.
[Kent]: Yeah, it's kind of (inaudible 1:28:27.1). But, Scott's description of the guitar like functions is probably very saying.
[Scott]: oh cool. So at the organizational arts summit there were other devices used as well.
[Kent]: yeah there was a cornucopia of devices (laughing).
[Scott]: processes as well and other…
[Kent]: yes, processes as well. It was a mixture of tested methods and methods that came out through the summit. I think one that was kind of interesting in itself was (inaudible 1:29:34.3) came up with this idea too metaphorically conceived it as a factory space (laughing) so that the groups that were working on various topics, as they were divided into topics or theme, was working on sort of small production groups. And this sort of kicked off a lot of inner energy somehow. It was kind of the other way around for arts in industry and industry in arts. There were tubes, like metaphorical tubes, using this process of putting up post it notes and clustering a into various topics that were interrelated and creating groups from these kind of clusters and so forth.
[Scott]: Yeah, there were other things like, well I mean personally, I found that the factory metaphor really helpful because essentially we all kind of snapped into different roles within a factory and really got an incredible amount of work done. I mean, for a conference where often like, what was it like a four day conference and like half of the days half of the people probably didn't sleep and we were drinking for the other half, we were actually really hyper productive. Even though the actual results of it took a few years to go through and deal with. But I think a lot came out of that. And also, there were other things like Alchemy, he's a magician. Or at least he describes himself that way. And was sort of making use of some of his work to help along. We also had this really large conference table that was...
[Kent]: Yeah! That's right!
[Scott]: And Steven, you know access locale. And for those of you who don't know. It's a large table that has a set up kind of like a UN meeting where everyone has one of these kinds of things that's in front of me. A dial with twelve stops on it and everyone has a microphone and everyone has headphones. And each person can switch the dial and that determines who they're listening too. But you can't actually determine who you're talking too, which has a very perplexing and jarring effect because at any given moment you could be talking to no one and what you're saying is just kind of going into the ether. And in a moment everyone might be listening to you. And you can also continue to switch back and forth. Yeah, yeah. Exactly what Steven is saying (laughing). It's even more random than using Skype. It's way random. It's just ridiculously. You get slices of what people are saying but what comes out of it is a disruptive tool where ideas emerge that no one had coming into it. It's pretty interesting. In a way, I feel like such a chump saying this because this is what businesses talk about. Its like "oh this is what artists are good for. They come in and they sort of help us think outside the box and keep us on our toes." But what really did happen in this particular case is that we weren't just stepping into a role, we were helping to develop new meanings, like I guess what Steven is saying right now.
[Kent]: It creates understandings. Not only the kind of caught up methods.
[Steven]: Steven here. It's a little bit like my experience sometimes with Plausible Artworlds potlucks because sometimes the sound is really great sometimes for a few minutes or few seconds and then it cut out and so I am imagining what must have been said while I wasn't able to hear anything. And so it's a total projection for my part and then when I get back in on the conversation 5 minutes later on, we are on to something else. I'll never really know what happened but there is that kind of a breach like an opening where meaning somehow wells up. It's random. It's quite interesting and that sense.
[Kent]: in the sense of allowing something that is probably not sanctioned otherwise to kind of emerge. No one knows what happened except that something just pops up. I lost every one. No?
[Chris]: It's like we had to fill in the gaps.
[Kent]: Exactly.
[Scott]: Kent, well we're really looking forward to having you come back to Philadelphia to work on a project here.
[Kent]: thanks. I will look forward to this as well. Sure, yeah. Let's see what can happen.
[Scott]: Yeah maybe we can work with some other local people to help set up some kind of a project that is not just a "gallery space project" but something that could involve other people locally.
[Kent]: (inaudible 1:35:49.1) sure. Yeah.
[Scott]: Yay! Thanks Theresa (laughing).
[Kent]: Thanks (laughing).
[Scott]: yeah, Theresa is also a local organizer.
[Kent]: okay, cool.
[Scott]: indeed.
[Kent]: (inaudible 1:36:06.9) was in Philly.
[Steven]: Kent, you have a pretty broad definition of what a factory is, right? Like the factory isn't just a place with smokestacks and you know cogs wheels and stuff. I mean a factory is like a, I don't know sometimes I'm taking a train to work and I see these incredible, we call the office is now, but in fact their factories. They've got like thousands of people in thousands of square meters of space and they are all sort of plugged into headphones and computers. I guess they must be call centers or travel agencies, booking flights and dealing with people whose flights are canceled. How do you, it's very sort of individualized labor relations in those kinds of places that's why we don't call them factories in anymore. It's very difficult to establish any kind of solidarity. That kind of goes back to the beginning of our conversation. How does it work for you and those kinds of cutting edge factories?
[Kent]: These factories I worked in were actually sort of production factories themselves producing products. So it was (inaudible 1:37:43.3) in one end and the product in the other. I had actually not worked in organizations that have the type of work that you are addressing here. Although, I have worked with the office people if they have been more highly educated in academics in universities. So in a sense I haven't worked with an organization that has attachments of social life. This would probably be hard and a challenge. But you know, yeah.
[Steven]: but in a way it kind of ties in with the other part of the discussion, actually which I missed and it was one of the things I was most interested, about how your Wiki actually worked. Because I think of a certain way for us and material laborers were isolated in our work spaces, our cubicles, and our isolated spaces just trying desperately to collaborate and defined collective democratic innovations, if you like. We are kind of trapped in a certain neofactory model which makes using a Wiki really a big challenge. I don't want you to have to repeat what you already said, but maybe there is something you can add that could fill that little gap in my hearing of the conversation.
[Kent]: Yeah, you know, the Wiki has not worked so well yet. I think it needs a lot of pushing and pulling for making it work probably because we are placed in various spaces in front of our own screen. We definitely need to meet once in awhile like a workshop or at a summit or something like this for sure. And if you do not do this once in awhile it would be pretty hard to do anything that is organized. Because someone can always sitting on top of the building in the top floor and pulling strings is controlling but not organizing as I understand it. Some would call a organizing but, no. It's pulling strings.
[Scott]: I think Aaron is asking about your definition of organizing.
[Kent]: Yeah but it's my own definition so... In a general sense, kind of in theory you would say, you would call it (inaudible 1:41:22.5) organizing. But no, I'm just pushing the issue that this is actually more controlling then organizing. Yeah, organizing for me is a social process and if you're sitting on your own in just carrying on orders that's probably not very social. One way communication, a very formal communication. So, this is kind of a question of definitions. I think if you put it like this could potentially come to discuss something that is of importance. And it's a skill that actually needed to make people work together. It's kind of interesting what if or if not artists can contribute to some sort of development in these areas. Being more attentive to probably emerging processes and something that's by accident or random pops up suddenly is.
[Scott]: But it's kind of nice to just do your work sometimes without having to think about it isn't it?
[Kent]: Sure.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Organizing is hard.
[Kent]: Yeah.
(Laughter)
[Kent]: And in terms of talking about work force and lots of people are not interested in doing anything else to get the work done and go back to their homes and family and your computer or your computer game and just collecting the money. I think many are quite satisfied with this (inaudible 1:43:56.2) enforce that they should work (inaudible 1:44:01.4). And they are forced to do so if management tells them to do so. They'd probably not find it very fun to be ordered to do so. So, of course, working with organizations you should be aware of this and your own symbolic power or authority being an artist. That you can actually get something done by sheer cultural authority. All these things are at play. I am not one of those that say you can make power go away because it's there all the time. You have to address it as consciously as you are able to. And your own power as well.
[Scott]: Well thanks Kent. It's been really great having you here during our little weekly chat.
[Kent]: Yeah, thank you. I enjoyed it too. Even though the late hours (laughing).
[Scott]: Yeah, I was going to say you're still awake.
[Kent]: Yeah, I'm still awake.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: I think Steven's been booted. I'll add him. Oh, no I can't. Never mind. Well (laughing). Have a great evening Kent and yeah, we're definitely really looking forward to having you come back here. We'll stay in touch about that and hopefully you'll be able to find some way to be able to stay up some more late nights drinking and joining some of the other weekly chats this year too.
[Kent]: That'd be cool. Sure, yeah. Thanks.
[Scott]: Okay, goodnight everyone and we'll see you next time.
[Kent]: Thank you! See you next time. I hope to join your Skype again.
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:46:40.07
Page |
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$e37f965fff58e5a6" title="#basekamp/$e37f965fff58e5a6">Democratic Innovation http://www.basekamp.com/about/events/democratic-innovation (#basekamp/$e37f965fff58e5a6)
Created on 2010-05-11 20:04:25.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:42
- hi everyone - we're still getting set up here.
- atrowbri: 18:00:29
- Scranton
- BASEKAMP team: 18:00:30
- awesomely, Skype "join" links are all b0rken this week, and -- it started raining here not long ago >
- atrowbri: 18:00:30
- everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 18:01:28
- while we finish setting up audio here & wait for kent -- hows everyone doing?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:02:06
-
- kent hansen: 18:02:39
- guess I'm here...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:02:51
- well hello kent
- kent hansen: 18:03:56
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:10
- will be on in just a moment everyone -- i know you're sitting on pins & needles
- Greg Scranton: 18:04:28
- I'm sitting on a duck
- Greg Scranton: 18:04:33
- a few in fact
- atrowbri: 18:06:18
- poor ducks
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:07:01
hello nice to meet you all- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:12
- ok guys, let's give it a shot
- atrowbri: 18:07:48
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:51
- so jessica doesn't want audio --- everyone else?
- Greg Scranton: 18:08:15
- soundz 4 me pls
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:21
- jessica- ok for us to just call eeryone and you not pick up? or is that too annoying on your end?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:37
- ok, we'll see...
- Aharon: 18:10:14
- i can hear fine. mic on mute
- atrowbri: 18:10:29
- we are on, muted
- stephen wright: 18:10:29
- are you calling us scott?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:39
- yea
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:12:12
- school is out
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:12:17
- last week
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:12:58
- note: we had 3 weeks of senior shows/lectures that interrupted our class meeting
- stephen wright: 18:15:24
- sorry, audio got dropped -- can you call back?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:35
- yes!
- stephen wright: 18:15:44
- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:49
- np
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:31
- http://www.basekamp.com/about/events/democratic-innovation
- Greg Scranton: 18:28:11
- love the "strategy blows" balloons! can you tell us more about what's written on them, hard to tell from photo. Dymaxion map?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:10
- hey greg yea - i know what thost are from we shuld def talk about that soon
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:22
- btw, is the audio a little better? just muted ours!
- Greg Scranton: 18:29:58
- audio sounds great Scott yes
- atrowbri: 18:30:11
- the audio is fantastic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:56
-
- stephen wright: 18:33:09
- just lost audio... can you call me back?
- stephen wright: 18:35:05
- hey scott.... can you call me please?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:16
- oh yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:26
- calling bak now
- stephen wright: 18:35:37
- hey thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:43
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:17
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:10
- calling you now bojana
- bojana romic: 18:40:38
- got it, switched off the mic
- Aharon: 18:48:12
- one of the things that seems interesting to me, or rather possibly ironically interesting, in this tention (??) between democratic - which is bottom up process of exploration, and organisation which is a sort of design/top-down kind of a process..
- Aharon: 18:48:33
- i find it hard to make it a question - but in fact, it is!
- Aharon: 18:50:04
- am not sure about thre mic
- Aharon: 18:50:24
- because it usually disturbs others here..
- Aharon: 18:50:33
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:34
- for example "self-organization"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:16
- hi theresa ---- adding you to the audio now...
- stephen wright: 18:55:43
- hey scott -- can you add me again too, slipped off again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:44
- cool
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:47
- oh
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:57
- adding u again sw
- stephen wright: 18:56:00
- thanks again!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:26
- kent was just saying there was a lot of discussion about the process of organizing and communication itself
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:38
- throughout the process of working with the people in the factory
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:40
- ies
- Greg Scranton: 18:56:57
- we're still here
- Aharon: 18:57:27
- are these organisations operational only for a certain persiod - or continuos..?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:34
- elysa adding you to the audio nowwwww
- Aharon: 18:59:39
- does the time element matter - in your mind - if yes, how?
- Aharon: 19:00:23
- ..so.. do u see projects morph into one another..?
- Aharon: 19:01:05
- in your view
- Greg Scranton: 19:01:47
- maybe another way of recontextualizing the ? w/out speaking for Aharon...is each project discrete, one ends and another begins
- Greg Scranton: 19:02:04
- or is there some overlap
- Greg Scranton: 19:03:05
- Scott did you say TVTV? As in the SF vid collective? Sorry I missed that
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:06
- Greg, in Copenhagen
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:08
- http://tv-tv.dk/
- Greg Scranton: 19:04:42
- ohhhhh ok
- Greg Scranton: 19:04:52
- is there an awareness of the SF group?
- Greg Scranton: 19:05:02
- just curious
- kent hansen: 19:05:14
- tv-tv.dk
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:25
- hah nice ----
- Greg Scranton: 19:06:50
- Aharon was that related to the "hack my cellphone" thing you did a while ago?
- Aharon: 19:07:08
- http://www.mellemtiden.tv/
- kent hansen: 19:07:14
- mellemtiden.tv
- Aharon: 19:07:19
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:25
- ok thx
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:39
- http://www.basekamp.com/sites/default/files/event/oa_balloon_0.jpg
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:15
- i could never pronounce that!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:09
- ]
- Aharon: 19:12:18
- lost sound
- Aharon: 19:12:23
- Aharon: 19:13:18
- no sound..
- atrowbri: 19:13:33
- haha
- atrowbri: 19:13:36
- chaos!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:53
- calling you bak aharonn
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:07
- aharon, are you playing sister nancy in the background?
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:15:29
- hello
- kent hansen: 19:15:36
- http://saloon.dk/oa
- Aharon: 19:15:38
- sorry.. it was playing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:41
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Nancy LOL
- kent hansen: 19:17:17
- http://aobook.org
- kent hansen: 19:17:34
- http://oabook.org
- stephen wright: 19:18:27
- very cool
- stephen wright: 19:20:54
- What was that?
- stephen wright: 19:20:58
- what was missing?
- Theresa: 19:21:15
- the money i think
- stephen wright: 19:21:30
- oh, figures
- stephen wright: 19:21:33
- $$
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:07
- Sasha, -- -audio too?
- ashadela" title="sashadela">S Dela: 19:22:16
- Yes Please!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:24
- okay!
- stephen wright: 19:24:04
- but the collective writing process worked well?
- Greg Scranton: 19:24:29
- yes I am curious as well!
- Theresa: 19:24:39
- and how did it work?
- stephen wright: 19:24:43
- I'm interested too in knowing if your experience in the workplaces impacted in how you went about that
- ashadela" title="sashadela">S Dela: 19:24:43
- yes- me too
- Greg Scranton: 19:25:42
- perhaps a painfully dull question but I wonder what "tools" you use? Paper & Pen? Email? Google Docs? Wikis? All of the above?
- Theresa: 19:26:11
- dull is helpful sometimes!
- stephen wright: 19:26:42
- pointed question rather!
- Greg Scranton: 19:26:50
- heh
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:27:06
- lol
- stephen wright: 19:27:58
- that strikes me as important too scott
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:21
- here's one image of the projection table
http://www.basekamp.com/sites/default/files/event/table2_0.jpg - stephen wright: 19:30:26
- lost me again -- can you call me back
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:50
- d'oh! yea
- Greg Scranton: 19:30:55
- a student of mine and I built a crude version of one of these using processing: http://www.reactable.com/products/reactable_experience/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:15
- stephen, i had just described kent's table i know you wanted to hear about that
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:15
- has similar potential
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:27
- despite primary use as live audio interface
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:35
- greg - looks interesting!
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:38
- audio?
- Aharon: 19:31:43
- no sound
- stephen wright: 19:31:43
- no audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:48
- ruh roh
- bojana romic: 19:31:50
- my audio is lost too
- Theresa: 19:31:50
- none here
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:52
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:55
- kent we lost you... calling you bak
- Greg Scranton: 19:32:02
- us too
- Elysa Lozano: 19:32:07
- me too
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:14
- ack ok
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:19
- let's call eeryone back
- stephen wright: 19:32:20
- I'm having a hard time following because of sound tonight
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:30
- sorry stephen -- will call back now
- ashadela" title="sashadela">S Dela: 19:32:34
- call me too please!
- Greg Scranton: 19:33:17
- we back
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:17
- is everyone back now?
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 19:33:18
- hello again
- stephen wright: 19:33:25
- back!
- Theresa: 19:33:25
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:26
- adam not yet
- bojana romic: 19:33:43
- cool now
- Greg Scranton: 19:34:00
- I don't hear anyone
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:02
- ok... almost there... calling kent back
- Greg Scranton: 19:34:10
- oh ok sorry
- Greg Scranton: 19:34:19
- there we go
- kent hansen: 19:34:29
- hallo!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:13
- kent we need to call you back
- kent hansen: 19:35:23
- ok
- stephen wright: 19:35:56
- okay
- Greg Scranton: 19:36:23
- yep that seemed to work
- Greg Scranton: 19:37:05
- Kent I just added you to contact list
- Greg Scranton: 19:37:12
- pls accept
- bojana romic: 19:37:19
- Kent is the host of the another call
- ashadela" title="sashadela">S Dela: 19:38:01
- Greg- can you add me to the audio?
- Theresa: 19:39:06
- good jobs guys
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:26
- Greg, Sasha's skype name is 'sashadela'
- Greg Scranton: 19:39:40
- thx Scott got it...I think
- ashadela" title="sashadela">S Dela: 19:39:40
- I'm on- thanks
- Greg Scranton: 19:39:43
- ya
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:43
- kewl
- Greg Scranton: 19:40:48
- of course now I need to step away for some kid duty - brb
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:03
- greg - thx
- stephen wright: 19:43:32
- It's even more random than using skype!
- Aharon: 19:44:19
- r u talking about chatroulette?
- stephen wright: 19:44:19
- but what's strange is that it does actually allow some meaning to emerge at the other end
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:47
- aharon yes exactly
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:30
-
- Greg Scranton: 19:46:00
- funny I just got back and now you guys are talking about things said that you missed
- Theresa: 19:46:29
- yeah!!!
- Theresa: 19:46:56
- i'll help scott
- Greg Scranton: 19:47:04
- there are plenty of factories in Philly
- Greg Scranton: 19:47:38
- yes that was my read as well given the photos
- Greg Scranton: 19:48:07
- cubicles are now called "work spaces" at my wife's "factory"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:11
- we also have co-working spaces here... a more current kind of workspace, where everyone is online
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:33
- greg ^^
- Greg Scranton: 19:49:51
- it's interesting too to think of factories as spaces where the division of labor is quite obvious despite shared space
- Greg Scranton: 19:50:12
- physical space that is
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:18
- yes, and it feels kind of metaphoric as artists when our own identity becomes the product
- Aharon: 19:52:05
- y is it not organising?
- stephen wright: 19:55:57
- oh oh, all's silent
- Greg Scranton: 19:56:36
- this has been, once again, really excellent! Thanks Kent!
- Elysa Lozano: 19:56:46
- thank you!
- bojana romic: 19:56:51
- 1:55 central european time
- bojana romic: 19:56:56
- Theresa: 19:57:05
- thank you
- bojana romic: 19:57:08
- thanks!
- Aharon: 19:57:17
- thanks kent!
- stephen wright: 19:57:20
- here too -- thanks kent. I'll just fill in the gaps. the rest is silence
- kent hansen: 19:57:24
- thanks to all of you
- Aharon: 19:57:28
- have a good sleep!
- Greg Scranton: 19:57:28
- Good morning/day/night all. See you next time
- Aharon: 19:57:39
- nighty night!
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 19:57:56
- bye all!
- kent hansen: 19:58:02
- good night, bye
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:06
- cyas next weekk
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:58:08
- cheerio
2010-05-11
Week 12: Au travail / At Work collective
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with some of the people AT WORK / AU TRAVAIL, which is not so much a collective as an open call to artists and workers around the world to regard their workplace – whatever it may be – as a site of clandestine art production. Members are invited to consider their current employment as a kind of readymade artist’s residency, complete with wages, social connections, resources, and downtime. At Work / Au travail’s members, far from attempting to unite labor in order to leverage its power against capital, have simply stopped believing in work altogether, while continuing to be “At Workers.” Rather than sabotaging the means of production, they use their right to manage their won labor time in order to turn the machines to other experimental purposes — or just turn them off for a bit. In so doing, “At Workers” seek to transform their conditions of exploitation into the conditions of freedom, with no further goal than the continued practice of their own personal freedom. While this strategy might be read as so much playful resignation in our era of generalized precarious labor, it offers the following provocation: the onus is on each of us individually, and all of us collectively, to produce our own freedom, regardless of how hopeless the conditions might appear.
Created in Montreal around 2004, AU TRAVAIL / AT WORK now has members worldwide — indeed, one wonders how many people are NOT potential members! It offers its members a network of relations as well as methods for sharing, and organizing exhibitions that ensure the dissemination of their ideas, actions, and accomplishments. Immersed in highly diverse sectors of the economy, does AT WORK / AU TRAVAIL sketch the contours of a new form of commitment, where the all-too-stifling workaday world is a plausible artworld?
Transcription
Week 12: Au travail / At Work collective
(Audio set up chatter and group chatter)
[Scott]: Domenic, have you heard from Steven recently?
[Domenic]: He write me through Facebook.
[Scott]: (laughing) okay. I spoke with him this morning. He's probably just running behind and I know he is eager to join us. But since I'm not sure what is going on with him I don't think we should really wait for him. But okay, great. So welcome Domenic, it is really great to have you. I'm just going to give a really super shore introduction for everyone here that doesn't know who Dominick is and what this is about and then get right into hearing from you about Au Travail, the At Work group if that is okay with you.
I'm not exactly sure how informal or formal this is but Dominick's alter ego is Bob the Builder. I can never really tell if I should be addressing you as Bob or Domenic.
[Domenic]: (0:03:58.2)
[Scott]: Okay. So tonight we'll be talking with Bob the Builder from Au Travail, the At Work collective in Montreal. Or at least the group is based in Montreal. Ultimately I have been telling people that we are going to be talking people who make art at work. From my understanding, Au Travail, in a sense is a residency program and in a sense it is the collective and in a sense it's a kind of art world. But are also not necessarily any of those exactly. From my understanding Bob, you have seen people's places of labor as readymade artist residencies. Fully equipped with an organization that pays you money to basically exist there and do whatever it is that you do that back as all of the other features of a residency if you treat it that way And I think there is a bit more about recuperating labor. I'd be really curious to hear from you, if you wouldn't mind just giving us all a really brief introduction to the At Work group and how it got started and specifically even just practically how it works if you wouldn't mind. That is a really big interest of mine. It would be great to give an intro.
(Domenic]: So you want me to tell you how we all started? First, the collective is not so much about originality because lots of people have been working since they (inaudible 0:05:59.9). And At Work practices are as old as work itself. So we didn't invent anything the only original thing about this project is that we have decided to be a group of people (inaudible 0:06:25.5 - 0:06:59.5) a social projects would be easily something (inaudible0:07:08.7)
[Scott]: Sorry, Domenic? Could you just repeat that last part again I think it might have been my fault. I was moving the speaker and it was really cutting off and on. Sorry.
[Domenic]: Is that alright?
[Scott]: And we will be muting our audio too because there is Kung Fu. The people that come here regularly know this, there is Kung Fu above our heads and it can start to get some feedback. And actually, everyone else who is on the call has already taken the queue to mute their audio which is nice. So don't think that we have gone away.
[Domenic]: So, should I go?
[Scott]: Please, yes.
[Domenic]: So I would like to explain the project (inaudible 0:07:54.0) as object of collaboration. Which means that they are helping us to make art in a social project (inaudible 0:08:08.0). We don't have any needs to them we just go out and use what we need on the job. Me, I have been doing it for about five years now. But we have always been doing this somehow because I'd never have jobs that really fulfilled my desire as an artist, as we are free thinkers. I slacked at all my jobs. But to call it art and to (inaudible 0:08:56.1) as data in the art world is a nice (inaudible 0:09:04.4). It gives me a bit more confidence that people that are part of the collective are more confident to go that way and knowing that there are more people around doing it. The bigger we are the smarter.
[Scott]: And how many people are involved with Au Travail right now?
[Domenic]: It's really hard to judge but I would estimate (inaudible0:09:37.4) of people.
[Scott]: Did you say 300 people? Sorry, did you say 300 people? Hey Bob?
(Inaudible 0:10:06.4)
[Scott]: Yeah, it's actually because the mic what was not in all the way. Sorry. So you probably answered me twice. Did you say that it was…? Oh, 300 to 400 people. Wow. I thought it was 130 people but that was last year.
[Domenic]: The last time we talked, yes. It was probably around there. We've had a lot of people involved since because we have had extensive (inaudible 0:10:35.6) from colleagues.
[Scott]: Could you tell us a little bit about some of the things that people do at work?
[Domenic]: Can you repeat? I didn't get that.
[Scott]: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the things that people do at work?
[Domenic]: Do you mean as the in the project?
[Scott]: Yeah. I mean I know generally what people do when they are working or a lot of jobs but specifically what you are doing is...
[Domenic]: (inaudible 0:11:18.2) the last project was (inaudible 0:11:26.2) was a young man who works for public television (inaudible 0:11:35.0) of digital files (inaudible 0:11:39.6) archives that they had digitalized. The job was to go through the archives and back to the original tapes (inaudible 0:11:56.5 - 0:12:30.4). Normal people were just checking on the side of the (inaudible 0:12:33.9) talking about the weather. (inaudible0:12:41.8 0:13:13.4).Are you there?
(Massive sounds of Kung Fu in background)
[Scott]: Yeah, we're here. The audio cut out for just a second and I think we kind of recovered it.
[Domenic]: Okay.
[Scott]: Hmm... I'm causing because I can tell that actually cause or…
(Laughter)
Okay, great. Yeah, Bob, I would really like to hear, or can we look at... I think the audio just cut out. Or the signal cut out entirely. Well guys, we will see how this goes.
(Kung Fu and background noise only 0:14:15.9 - 0:14:46.9)
[Scott]: Yeah, it's interesting using Skype for these. Sometimes you get varying results. Right now we are trying our second attempt. There we go.
(Kung Fu and background noise only 0:14:55.4 - 0:15:38.5)
[Scott]: This is supposed to be the best connection, 4G.
(Kung Fu and background chatter only 0:15:39.4 - 0:16:47.9)
[Scott]: Yeah, this would be a terrible place to end. Because I feel like he's sort of just gotten started (inaudible 0:16:52.7).
(Kung Fu and background chatter only 0:16:52.7 - 0:17:32.5)
[Domenic]: ...were working for Santa Claus for the Huffington Post and they were supposed to write back letters to kids who were asking for gifts from Santa Claus. The kids only had the write to Canada and then the kids would receive a letter back from Santa Claus. Those guys were hiring for this service and we're starting to write really bad things to kids. Things like " your mom is it a (expletive 0:18:16.2)" or "you won't get any gift" (inaudible 0:18:21.8) and end that we started to search and had to stop the service for 48 hours which partially paralyzed the letters. Like a human chain of letters, they stopped it for 48 hours. And when you think of all that, it's funny to think about it because it's really bad to write letters like that to kids but at the same time how bad it is to teach kids that it was Santa Claus (inaudible 0:19:12.1). I like that because it brings out, I don't know. You think twice about after (inaudible 0:19:22.2).
[Scott]: Hey Domenic, could you send us the link to your website again? I only have an older presentation site on 50megs.com. Is it possible to type it? Are you still holding a baby in one arm?
(Laughter)
[Domenic]: Oh, it's slipping out. Our web site is hosted by and arts center in (inaudible 0:20:04.8), Holland who had in residency decided to host our site. It's an old version of the site right now but you still get a lot of things there. Can you get it?
[Scott]: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
[Domenic]: Okay.
[Scott]: I know we have a lot of information from you that we will really be talking about were using. Talking about or using in tonight's show that we can put up the video stuff throughout the next couple of months. That's great to see this site. So really I just wanted it to get a good sense of… Steven Wright has been talking with us about Au Travail for years now. And then we had that discussion when we are at the Invisible Networks Conference in the UK, which was really interesting. I think a lot came out of that and I would like to get into just kind of bring everyone here up to speed up bit. The other thing is that we are recording these sessions; we're recording these communications, so that we can use that material to help to build tangible archives of examples of different kinds of Artworlds. So, I think… I am trying to stand in for the kinds of things that Steven would be asking if he were here but...
(Laughter)
I will talk about ontological landscapes but I want to ask ultimately if you see this project as a kind of, I am not saying I see this, I'm just curious. If you see this project as a kind of session from other creative culture systems or kinds of art world or art sustaining environments because it is sustainable in itself, a weird way. It's already a readymade Artworld of sorts. Or do you see a lot more connection and overlap with other kinds of art sustaining environments? If you know what I mean? I was thinking of some of the people that work in like art handling and things like that and have done at work projects.
[Domenic]: There are a lot of individuals we hear about us and then they decide to join and have been practicing this form of (inaudible 0:23:06.6) or something like that, they have been practicing it for years. The collective works more like a socket for people to greet and know each other's projects. Ultimately the point of it is a life that is more informed by art (inaudible 0:23:35.8). Sometimes there is a small hole in Canada and sometimes I am there and I feel like I don't need to work because everything is free. The food and the water and everything. I still have to work a lot (inaudible0:24:00.9) and every time I have to work now I try to keep in mind that I have to enjoy myself and have fun. (Inaudible 0:24:11.5) you get into social if you work for an (expletive 0:24:23.8) or you work for a pig then you start to have different ways of (inaudible 0:24:34 smiling when you work is (inaudible 0:24:36.6) and sort of vengeance trip or tried to hijack situations where material or resources and then you can become more of an activist almost. So it is not about liberation it is about freedom. It attacks institution but it doesn't want to dismantle it. We just want to be used to the max and use all are capacities because the collective started because people felt that they were not being totally recognized for what they can do the best in their job. They're just being asked to do the minimal. It's like people taking over in starting to do things for themselves is a good way to scratch the economy.
[Scott]: We are looking right now. I'm not sure who did this, but someone who transports artwork. Who takes the art work out periodically and just sort of sets them up on the side of the road and takes photographs. Let me just send this link to the people who are not here in our room.
[Greg]: Yeah, it's called "Truck" by (inaudible 0:26:33.0) is what I read.
[Scott]: that's not really a question I guess. Would you tell us a little bit about this? Or is this self explanatory?
[Domenic]: No, no it's one of the nice projects that we have encountered. The guys have been doing it for a long time before we have started the collective. He had not stopped doing it but he had shown the pictures (inaudible 0:27:12.7). It is a bit illegal to do things like that. But he did basically he stole famous paintings for a few minutes and then he exhibited them (inaudible 0:27:37.0). So that's what he did. He took pictures of the situation of the famous paintings in various situations.
[Greg]: yeah. I posted a PDF from your website. I don't know if that is the same person, Scott, but you were refer into but at least in the PDF he is referred to as X.
[Scott]: Yeah. That is what I was referring to. I am just trying to get a good sense of… There is so much material here that when I try to browse the web site I was really having a hard time plucking out and (inaudible 0:28:28.9) examples because I am not, we'll like you said, there are 300 to 400 people involved. There are a lot of projects Dom, er, Bob. And I'm only familiar with some of them that I have seen in remember and I'm not easily able to locate them. So we are just kind of browsing a little bit and I kind of stopped on one, probably for too long now, that I remembered (laughing) and found to be very interesting. Would you mind telling us some other stories?
[Domenic]: Yeah I can tell you many stories. If Steven right there?
[Scott]: yep, Steven did get online.
[Steven]: Hey Domenic, I'm here. Yeah.
[Domenic]: I'm alright. You tell the story about the magazine translation.
[Steven]: Sure, yeah. I guess I can contribute. I guess I'm sort of an At Worker in my professional time that is. As some of you know, I work as a translator. That is kind of my working day job. In translating for a specialized art magazine the stuff I'm called upon to translate those and always deserve to exist in one language let alone be translated into a second or third language. So that leads to a certain amount of cynicism and my workplace. And I was asked by a very famous, or distinguished, French art magazine called Art Press to translate the text by an author whose name I will not mention right now and the collective group of artists whose names I will also not mention. And I adopted a particular protocol for that translation. I would systematically invert all of the adjectives into the opposite. So if the author wrote that if he was very good I would say that he was very bad. If he said that the sky was blue, I would say that it was cloudy. If he said that the text was written by Karl Marx and I would say was written by Groucho Marx and so on.
(Laughter)
So, I translated the (inaudible 0:31:25.5) using this protocol. But I did a good job on it so it read and sounded really professional. And since you know that in contemporary art you can basically write one thing and mean exactly the opposite, I wanted to test that certain intuity. So I sent it into the editor and he changed a couple colons and semi colons here and there and gave it his stamp. (Inaudible 0:31:53.1) and article was published and of course the translation is published with the original. I sent in my bill and they sent me a check for my work while thanking me very much for my translation. And it appeared that everyone was pretty satisfied.
[Scott]: Steven, did they even notice?
[Steven]: No. They never noticed. The thing is that the only person that would actually compare the two texts is someone like me, a professional translator who is looking for professional references about how you would (inaudible 0:32:34.1). Most people would either read it in English or in French. But if you read in English of course it said the opposite of what it said in French but it was equally implied. It was not more or less implausible that it was written in the original language. So that is one of the exhibits and the At Work hall of fame.
(Laughing)
[Steven]: Did you already talk about the (inaudible 0:33:09.3)? It's really a pretty interesting document. It's not available somewhere on YouTube or (inaudible 0:33:12.6) or something?
[Domenic]: No, not for now. I just finished it last week. The French and English versions. I've been working on it all this time and it will be sent to you all if you want if you send me your address. It is obviously a Copyleft so you can make copies and public presentations and put on the web if you please.
[Scott]: Domenic, is that information on the datasheet that you sent me earlier today?
[Domenic]: Yes it is about that thing.
[Scott]: Okay.
(Loud background noises)
[Steven]: I asked Enrique to join up tonight but I guess he hasn't called in yet. But his contributions to At Work have been pretty interesting. Maybe you would like to comment on those as well. There are a pretty singular kind of practice.
[Domenic]: Yes and I think he is still working on it. It's been a really long project.
[Steven]: Can you say a few words about what it is? That project?
[Domenic]: Yes. What it is as an extra for movies. Like a Hollywood fashion movie producing in Quebec. He was hired as an extra and he decided that while they asked him to pretend to talk (inaudible 0:35:09.2) because they take the (inaudible 0:35:13.7) of the main characters only and what the clock run in many film productions and they start to say the same lines every time (inaudible 0:35:28.3). So every job he had was on different sets. And then after he would dub his voice over and reconstitute the whole text as he has been hiding in major productions, many millions of dollars of TV productions. So what he does now is (inaudible 0:36:05.2) small clips that he has been performing the text is about the society and a spectacle of the criticism. (inaudible 0:36:23.5) for him is a nice poetic presents into our big set designed and being in the background as this continuous line and use it in the final edit of all those parents clips. I don't know if I told it well but maybe Steven will have more to say about it.
[Steven]: I think that you don't wanna make it too clear about exactly what he does. Basically it's pretty obvious what he does. He takes advantage of being on a film set to use those moments of spectacle time as the site of visibility for his practice, which is not what they had in mind. The interesting thing about At Work if the incredible variety of workplaces that can be used as sites for artistic exhibition, a residency and production.
[Scott]: Hey guys, are you still there?
[Domenic]: Yes.
[Scott]: Oh, great. Let me pass this mic over. Okay, super cool. It does have a pretty long cable.
[Ryan]: H, my name is Ryan. How do you respond…? Can you hear me?
[Domenic]: Yes.
[Ryan]: Okay. How do you respond to the common criticism? As you said on some of your things up there such as "slacking at work" or "why wouldn't you do this as an artist after work" or" stop doing this at work and be an artist." You know, I mean I kind of get it but, goofing off at work in putting a fancy name on it? I mean, I'm totally into it and I do it myself but then you get fired. So how do you respond to that common criticism that I'm sure you always get?
[Domenic]: What I will answer is more of like a personal answer because when I decided to start this project is because I was out of money and I found the stupidest job I could find and I got bored really quickly. Even though I knew I could do better than that there was no other opportunity for me and I needed the money. So instead of just getting depressed I started to slack on the job. I realize that my freedom and being a good worker somehow says so much about how doing what is asked of you and doing it so well that you have 80% of your time free to do whatever you want with their computer and their phone line. All the culture, all the situations and all the resources. It's more about finding a studio and being like a double worker. You can use the words slacking at work, I would say that it's more of a (inaudible 0:40:32.2) activity.
(Male group member]: In our current economy, people have started to change ever to flex time. You know, working for days a week and things like that. So what they're proposing now, and what you were saying, is work harder and then have more time to do work. Is that kind of what you were saying too? (Laughing) is there a way to work with and an employer on this? Like, I'm going to do my work really well and you give me a day off.
[Domenic]: Yeah, you can take it like this. Me, the situation I was in was that I was under estimated. I could do so much more and they were asking me to do such stupid things that it wasn't not hard at all to do it. And so I completed the tasks really fast and then after word I had free time. It's not about becoming a better worker. It's about making yourself at home somehow. And instead of running at 24% of your power than you decide to go at 100% then the bonus is not for the boss, it's for you. Most people don't like their job and if they work really slow and they are being sloppy then time doesn't go fast so much. When you were, time goes fast. If you ask any students (inaudible 0:42:29.0) and security to be an adult (inaudible 0:42:29.9 - 0:43:08.1).
[Ryan]: So it's not like…
[Domenic]: ...to work more or to get more (inaudible0:43:16.6).
[Ryan]: So it's not so much as putting one over on your boss as kind of pushing yourself to do something at work that is for you as well. Kind of?
[Domenic]: Uh huh.
[Scott]: Yeah, I was curious about that personally.
[Steven]: I think it is this also. The bosses (inaudible 0:43:48.2) take second place. They don't disappear. And so it's not about sabotaging the workplace. It's not about deliberately try and undermined the logic of capital accumulation. It is simply saying that's not the important thing. So it becomes the secondary kind of logic and the primary logic, of course, is the realization and using the means of production and the space which the boss has so kindly made available.
[Scott]: Steven, how would you describe this in terms of...? I understand Ryan's question, I think, in terms of immaterial labor and the drive. Ultimately, the changing face of economic, well… The changing the way that employees are being encouraged to spend their free time at work. It has become a viable business strategy. It's hard not to think of Google plex. It's hard not to think of, not mandatory, but almost mandatory or strongly encouraged free time. A lot of "progressive businesses" are and have been for quite awhile now, it and by have been I mean probably for the last five years and the US anyway, and my understanding is this is the case in Europe too. Something fueled by organizational studies. Yes. Exactly. Neomanagement. It's a viable management strategy, and economically viable that strategy that is encouraged in everything from day care to really wonderful sounding things. Like the very best meals to be found are to be found on these large almost corporate campuses as they are sometimes called. Even and not very large businesses, it's just that it's harder for smaller businesses to pull it off. And the ones that can really try to encourage the workers to sort of live and breathe and be at work. Be the company in a way. And I guess I was curious what you thought about this Steven. And also curious about what you think about that, Bob since you have spent so much time thinking about this and working this way. I'm sort of piggybacking a little bit on what Ryan was asking. I guess I'm trying to stimulate the conversation a little bit in that direction. I know this is a critical practice. But I'm curious. On one hand, I think there is a real generosity, in a way, a very non judgmental point of view. Really is saying that people are in the world, there are economic issues, and people are working constantly as part of the way we live. And so there's something about this project that incorporates art in the everyday. Not necessarily that everyday trash on the street or some of the other things that sometimes artists do when they talk about the everyday, but literally what people do every day and go to that (expletive 0:47:09.2) job and work. I think there's something really, I wouldn't say honest, but something very sobering about it. But I was just kind of curious about conceptually what you thought about those other points. Does that make sense? Does my question make sense? Or the way I sort of flushed out the question was asked before me?
[Steven]: Yeah, it makes sense. Theoretically art can take place in any workplace. In any workplace where there is a surplus of produced by viable labor that is being recuperated by capital. Those are the conditions in which At Work can take place. But generally speaking, At Work (phone ringing - inaudible 0:48:06.4) based on (inaudible 0:48:08.2) and precarious labor conditions. In other words, in jobs where you have no particular future. It doesn't take place in the jobs where you were being totally fulfilled and stimulated and you really loved what you're doing. It takes place in these (expletive 0:48:30.9) that you have to do in order to get by and to fund our artistic or other immaterial practices that we can't fund on our own. And so it's not about spending your free time at work, it is taking that time you were at work and not using it for what the boss says to use it for. In other words, to repurpose your labor time, that time you are (inaudible 0:49:02.3) to waste in the workplace and instead of wasting it you repurpose it towards what we call art practice (inaudible 0:49:09.1). That doesn't have any specific substance or content, it could be anything provided that it is not devoted to the extracting of surplus value for the employer. Does that kind of (inaudible 0:49:30.0)?
(Background comments)
[Steven]: Well surplus value is the term which is used and Marxist analysis to describe what capitalism is. Capitalism exists because our workers who are producing more value than what they are being paid. So where does that extra surplus go? It goes to the accumulation of capital. It goes to the employer and not to the employee who actually produced it. And that surplus value is what makes capitalism function. So basically At Work coming from that kind of an analysis is there shouldn't be any more surplus value produced. You should go to work just so you don't get fired up that surplus values should be devoted towards the production of some variation of art.
[Chris]: I was thinking about when I was younger and I use the work and a shelter workshop situation and there were people in there and I was doing things like listening to the radio there and stuff. And they would have these songs they are. And these mindless people were doing the same thing over and over no matter how bright you were. The station played love songs and were the same songs every single day. And I would do things like have this male character sing the songs in a dress and make lists in my head of the love songs that would never get played on that station. So I was thinking that maybe that was an example of what you were talking about?
[Steven]: Domenic, I will let you comment on that.
(Laughter)
[Domenic]: I don't know. I don't know if I understood exactly what the story was about. If you were bored at work and you had ideas that had nothing to do with your work (inaudible 0:52:13.8) you were on the right track.
[Chris]: Yeah, I think something like that. I was in the situation where there were people of various mental capabilities and because they had these disabilities they were being put in there and the lowest common denominator. We had everything from college educated people to people that could barely function. And they were just being put in there and this whole thing being and this, I hate to say the term, work for retarded people. I hate to say it that way. So that was the way I kept my sanity.
[Scott]: Are guys enjoying listening to the Kung fu above us?
[Ryan]: it's awesome.
[Scott]: Yeah. It helps to fill the void.
[Steven]: Domenic and you told me recently that some of the more recent members of At Work are strippers from California.
[Domenic]: Are what?
(Laughter)
[Steven]: You said you had been contacted by some people, some sex workers. Some dancers from California. What's the story?
[Domenic]: She's working on different projects but its not super clear. One girl in particular, she works as a sex worker and like peep shows and stuff like that. She has inverted mirrors that are normally to, let’s say, see her. And she can turn around and see people and makes revealing images and things like that. She records conversations all she does blow jobs in cars and she is doing some kind of diary. And she is a performance artist as well, I mean outside of this job. She is using most of that (inaudible 0:56:10.9) to do a video based project and a video installation. She is taking lots of risks doing so she is under a pseudonym.
[Scott]: I mean there's a tradition...
[Steven]: (Inaudible 0:56:39.7) or is she working for (inaudible 0:56:39.9)
[Domenic]: She works for a specific peep show and she also does contracts.
[Michael]: Hi there, this is Michael at BaseKamp. I came a little late to the conversation but it's interesting this idea of play or this experimentation that can also take place beyond the workplace, which is in like the domestic sphere. I wonder if it has served as inspiration for anyone to move beyond work with this sort of play. If that makes any sense.
[Laughter]
[Steven]: Sir, can you please repeat that question? I didn't understand the question.
[Scott]: Oh yeah. Did you want to try repeating it or do you want me to paraphrase what you were saying? Okay, well mine is going to be much shorter. I think Michael was asking if any of the people who are making art at work ever take it beyond work and into play. Is that accurate?
[Michael]: I'm curious about other spheres beyond work. Such as the domestic sphere. In this case there is definitely a blurring in terms of sex workers. So, I don't know if that makes sense.
[Scott]: Yeah. So the question is if Domenic or anyone has thoughts about that.
[Steven]: (Inaudible 0:59:03.9 - speaking in French).
[Domenic]: (Inaudible 0:59:04.7 - speaking in French)
[Steven]: (Inaudible 0:59:12.5 - speaking in French)
[Domenic]: Um, okay so sorry. I needed a little translation in order to answer the question. I remember when we traveled in Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand and there was this thing called (inaudible 0:59:54.5) and it means that you work you cannot be too serious and if you lose your temper then people start to laugh at you. You should have no reason to stress and smile and take it easy and then you enjoy yourself with your friends and you do work. It cannot work if there is not (inaudible 1:00:19.4) and to me working is really hard to define sometimes what is work and what is not work. Like for example, right now what am I doing with you guys? Am I working? Shall I use this situation of working if I consider it work (inaudible 1:00:44.0) or the use of clips or excerpts in my next movie and maybe I'm using this context right now to do something that is more constrictive for me in terms of film making because I like to make films. Here's a really good chance tonight to record ideas and (inaudible1:01:17.1) the data movies so it would be using clips of what was said tonight. And then when I go to bed tonight I don't feel like we were talking about the same thing again and again and again but that I took something out of the situation that is going to help me in my project. So, it's not really working but still it's like (inaudible 1:01:46.8 1:02:10.7).
[Scott]: So there is a parallel discussion going on, Domenic, in text. And I think this was already addressed but I think that this is probably a pretty important point because some of the ranges of examples of alternative or alternate or plausible artworlds that we’ve been looking at this year span a continuum, I don't know if it really is a continuum or if it's just jumping a all over the place to different strategies. But ultimately, there was at the very least people who are oppositional. Some examples of artworlds... The reason I asked about successions earlier was because that happens to be one fairly extreme way of being directly oppositional is, or at least to ultimately throw it out completely. Throw out what you dislike or don't find to be in line with their values or interests. You know, there more sort of violent oppositions. And then there are people that are perfectly happy to keep coexisting with other structures that they may not necessarily be so fond of. This might be beating a dead horse because I feel like you've already answered that. And Steven sort of clarified it a few times that At Work isn't exactly set up to try to bring down any system but is there to kind of find ways to make it useful for you. For each person. If they have to do it anyway. I think it just might be good to just clarify this stuff a little bit. Some of the things that are being discussed in some Marxist terms and Neomarxist terms or (inaudible 1:04:26.3) there's definitely a lot of neomarxist language around the worker and surplus. I know a Marxist strategy is to find the hidden surplus and that can be a way to subvert but it can also be a way to exceed. I guess I was just kind of curious, I didn't want to make this discussion more boring, but because there was a lot of this being discussed in text I was curious if you guys wanted to just talk a little bit about it out loud.
[Steven]: Since I am kind of responsible for the surplus value (inaudible 1:05:08.4). The objective is to reappropriate the surplus value (inaudible 1:05:34.2 - 1:05:45.2). It doesn't have that kind of a Marxism, if fact it sort of cancels (inaudible 1:05:51.9 - 1:06:34.7) to do fun stuff. In other words to engage in the extension called self realization. It's kind of saying I wouldn't go to work. I would collect welfare. I would steal money (inaudible 1:06:54.3 - 1:07:31.6)
[Domenic]: If I can add just one thing it is that the job system is this fear. You go by the fear so much to lose that job (inaudible 1:07:49.61:07:54.9). If you look at all the projects in At Work then you start to feel more easy going about the things in your job because this person did that and didn't get caught and this person did that and didn't get caught (inaudible 1:08:11.0). In this way it's possible to bring down the system, the fear system. Like (inaudible 1:08:22.9). To me it's never to feel that working (inaudible 1:08:39.6 - 115:38). You want to go to work to free you. You just want to exercise freedom you don't want to exercise to work. You take the freedom for yourself.
(Loud background noises)
[Greg]: This is Greg. It's interesting that sort of the perspective which Steven and Domenic are bringing in which to me, they seem outside of the United States, for instance. Because I'm thinking specifically of this whole healthcare reform issue and often times, at least it has been the case in my personal experience, that you get a job so that you can get health insurance. And I think that idea that perhaps this healthcare reform gets passed and that’s no longer a connection, that is, healthcare through work, I wonder if they will be more opportunities to be at work and being producing. Being creative and producing at work. I don't know. Just a current event that's happening that I thought of.
[Domenic]: I think about how to, let’s call it a crisis like before getting jobs that they don't really want but they have to take them to be able to (inaudible 1:11:20.7) And if they don't know what they want from themselves I'm sorry for them. If you can't appreciate your job or find something you want for yourself then you ought to look for something else maybe with less pay but then (inaudible 1:11:49.9).
[Female group member]: What do you think about, in the creative world, projects that are excessively long? Projects that have a built in time period. For example, three years for a project that could really be done in one month. How do you deal with that kind of a pyridine? Because it is in the creative world.
[Domenic]: I'm sorry. I didn't get that last part.
[Female group member]: Well, I'm saying that the pyridine, that time, the excessive pyridine. You know, creating all of this work to make art which it doesn't really need. All of that time to make a good piece of work. I meant in the opera worlds so I'm talking about operatic projects. So how would you respond to something like that? In other words, it is a creative project so if somebody in Au Travail were involved with that project, even though it's artistic, they would still do their own productive work as soon as they realize that it was just a waste of time in investing all of that time to make a piece of art that doesn't need that much. Is that the idea?
[Domenic]: I don't know. This is becoming personal to, the collective becomes really (inaudible 1:13:51.0) and there are many individuals that consider (inaudible 1:13:53.2) and we all have different visions of what art should be or what is meaningful or how much time we should spend on a piece. It depends so the collective has no position on (inaudible 1:14:15.0).
[Female group member]: Yeah.
(Laughter)
[Female group member]: I was just going to follow up on that. Just maybe the scale and the lengths of the projects that you are working on At Work would tend to be shorter in my assumption. I don't know if that's necessarily the case and whether you've observed or discussed any interest in making any changes or just adjusting that component of the lengths of the projects. Or if that's a discussion that you have at all. Does that make sense?
[Domenic]: (Inaudible 1:15:23.5).
[Domenic]: um, (inaudible 1:15:24.1).
[Female group member]: Okay, well, I...
[Domenic]: (inaudible 1:15:28.3) I think I don't get what you (inaudible 1:15:31.0).
[Female group member]: Yeah. I guess it's a kind of two part question. The first part is so the format of the projects being at work does that influence the scale of the projects or the work themselves? Scale in terms of time?
[Domenic]: I don't know how to answer this question. I am sorry. (Inaudible 1:16:09.0) To me what is interesting is that shortest stories are often the best and the most comprehensive stories are the most (inaudible 1:16:24.8).
[Female group member]: Yeah.
[Domenic]: I like it when it's really up in your face.
[Female group member]: Uh huh.
[Domenic]: It's hard to say (inaudible 1:16:33.8 - 1:16:41.7) once he was a truck driver and he decided to create the artist truck for on the streets and the highway. And he was stopped in traffic in Mexico and the (inaudible 1:16:57.0) and he made his first art piece. It was a real creative way of using his job. In a sense it was mostly (1:17:25.7) project and he became an artist (inaudible 1:17:25.9).
[Female group member]: No, thank you. I think that it's interesting to talk about the stories I guess.
[Domenic]: Yes like short stories (inaudible 1:17:43.0) because people like to recall them, like jokes.
[Scott]: Adam, do you want to ask your question out loud? I think it's a pretty good one to bring up. Or would you rather someone just sort of read it out for you?
[Adam]: Did I un-mute it?
[Scott]: You did! Hi Adam.
[Adam]: Okay, yeah. The question I was asking was related to how value might get transferred into artworld value. I know a couple shows have been done relating to this and I was trying to figure out that what if it was (inaudible 1:18:48.8). I would imagine that doesn't necessarily mean anything, it's just showing art work. But, I wonder how many of these people making that work do translate that value into artworld value of some sort so that it becomes as if excess value is really stolen or taken from the work job and translated into some sort of artworld value whether it be credibility for teaching job instead of this terrible office job, or just credibility just within the artworld as it has its own value system.
(Laughing)
(Inaudible background comment)
[Scott]: Is it a...
[Steven]: Domenic, do y you want to answer that?
[Domenic]: Again the collective when it first started was a bit about fighting depression. And of course in the beginning we were really have attention from the artworld and it was a way to find the (inaudible 1:20:00.6) for our days. It was nice to be coming out as a worker because we were typically known as artists that were not talking about so much, we pay the bills and we earn our money and I think it's a (inaudible 1:20:26.5). It was funny to come out as workers and say "yeah, I do like this (expletive 1:20:34.3) job." And for awhile all kinds of people would come to me and say (inaudible 1:20:38.1) so it was sort of funny things to do coming out. Some delivery, or more generally those others are now going out on their own because the collective has no platform anymore. To still do At Work is okay but they follow more into the normal art system. I don't have much opinion on that. But the types that I like the most more often are often illegal. So people have to remain anonymous and protect them from being exposed too much to the art world because it covers up as much as (inaudible 1:21:52.4). I like this kind of disposition of being productive. A happy worker and a happy artist at the same time because you don't get all the regular attention that an artist gets
[Adam]: I think it might already relate to what position you take on artists as workers, just as a big discussion topic. But if your an artist as a worker and let’s say teaching art and doing this crappy job, and you're either working on your syllabus or working on your art work at work I have this question on if you're actually taking time off from where you actually triple work and you are providing more value. I think that's what the question means. I don't think it's answerable, but I do wonder about the position of artists as workers and whether you're doing just a very, what I would consider, a very American thing, which is doubling up on your work hours and how is that different from running a business at the same time that you're working this crappy job?
[Domenic]: People choose as they do.
[Steven]: Yeah, I'm thinking about that question. I'm thinking about whether it's doubling up. It strikes me that the examples (inaudible 1:23:33.1) either negates that it's similar to doing crossword puzzles or do doing a small business or your wage labor job. Because this stuff really is different. With conceptual art, while being paid to do something else while doing crossword puzzles to pass the time. Unless, of course, doing crossword puzzles is your art production. It is kind of a, it's more than a Plausible Artworld. It's a totally implausible artworld, but it's one that really exists on a surprisingly large scale.
[Domenic]: Also, it would be wrong to take an art production as a... It's just about being in a good disposition to think about things. And to take pictures at your workplace would only take one second but you can think about it for weeks and what you are going to do with it. So, it's not so much about sweat but about just opposing two or three activities and making them work together instead of like thinking triple. It's more using your brain and (inaudible 1:25:24.1) is not more energy consuming. It's just about being wise and if you want something, take it.
[Chris]: I was thinking about this movie I saw where these people were working at a restaurant and they were talking about ways to rob the restaurant and I heard that this movie was from people that would actually sit down when they were working at this restaurant and think ways to rob it. I thought that would be a good example. I hope. I was also thinking about when I was working and had the guy in the dress and doing all these things. And I was doing peace work and every time I finished all these things, that was him recording a song and I got paid by that.
(Inaudible background comments)
[Female group member]: Excuse me, could someone or everyone give me their definition of what art is? What is art? What makes something art?
[Scott]: I think that is very similar to what Randall was asking. Don't you think Randall? Maybe I'm putting words in your mouth. You were again and again throughout the conversation, once you came into it, kind of teasing at that. Sort of saying is there an implication that the "artwork" is more valuable than other kinds of work or some sorts of experiences. Do you think I'm right about that at all?
(Inaudible background comment)
Well, I don't know. Steven, isn't art whatever a particular group of people, enough people to support the making of the art and the understanding of what makes something art?
[Steven]: Yes, of course.
[Scott]: I'm just sort of building on what you said I guess.
[Steven]: Yeah. No, I didn't say that art was the artist says it is. It's what it understands itself to be. I mean, I'm thinking about (inaudible 1:28:50.6) that means there has to be an aggregate. It has to be a community basically. A life sustaining environment that is prepared to go along with that understanding. The thing to point out about At Work is that it has its value neutral in terms of what it considers art to be. I mean you can think a painting is really (expletive 1:29:17.8) but someone who uses their McDonalds night watch person job to do abstract painting, they qualify as an At Worker, of course. So it's not only the most farfetched (inaudible 1:29:33.2). It's whatever. It combines a life sustaining environment to what art understands itself to be.
[Scott]: I was actually... It's my ignorance because after looking at this Wikipedia article about Annabelle Lopez, that seems like we probably would have run across but just have not for some reason or another. And when you were describing this person that was parking a tractor trailer at 90 degrees on the highway and blocking traffic, it was immediately appealing to me. I found it really interesting. It did not, however, seem like a success story that this person "went on to become a famous artist" or well known for this kind of work. It didn't necessarily detract from that in my mind, but it didn't help it. I think I was mostly interested in how interested that person was and what kinds of effects that could have. Beyond just generally being a nuisance. I also think it's just something you don't see every day.
(Inaudible background chatters)
[Scott]: Oh, okay. That's one thing I'm a little more familiar with but I still wasn't familiar with the truck and the 90 degree parking. In any case, I wasn't... Thanks Steph. I think my point was basically the same. Alternately that the activity itself seemed really compelling and the fact that it may be legitimized by a larger Artworld is not necessarily a plus for me. I'm not actually sure where I'm going with this (laughing). I guess my point is that's not necessarily, we're not necessarily talking about things that understand as art. Excuse me, I understood as art.
It just got really loud in the year. Can you still hear me?
And that is sort of some of what we're discussing earlier. Steven says that art is what it understands itself to be. And Randle was saying kind of raising an eyebrow to the privileging in of art in that way. I think what we're really talking about is creative practice. Some people feel very comfortable just going ahead and not having to over qualify what they mean by art. They are talking about creative practice generally speaking. And I think yet others had a much more complicated view on that. And others avoid the word art all together. Some very good friends of mine, and I also take issue about sometimes.
[Domenic]: I try not to think only in terms of art production because it is fun to see if the At Work collective has a bit of a reputation for something that could happen bigger. You think a movie about a robbery and you see they (inaudible 1:33:45.8) and all together we can make the product of a perfect robbery. And then the actress has this personal project while doing their (expletive 1:34:01.0) jobs but they know that the bigger subject is to crack the bank and (inaudible 1:34:08.9) places and the economy will all be in place. At one point we go "poof" and they are all in the right positions to organize their crime. I like to think of the collective in the future as if we would be so many we would only need to have ideas and say " okay we need someone who has access to this kind of computer" and another one gets a paper and the other one gets two trucks and we can make our project for free and it could be producing (inaudible1:34:47.5) more like cultural evidence like as any music show. You often see that in the cinema industry people will work for (expletive 1:35:03.2) films and (expletive 1:35:05.5) productions and then at night they will use the equipment they are supposed to take care of to shoot their own independent movies. And to do that as teams and all help each other and share skills. Their only a team, there's nobody else involved and it is just for the sake of it. And that is what I could call art today. It's one of those things that happened outside of the economy system. And one that involves worker skills
[Steven]: Excellent (inaudible 1:35:48.6). I totally agree.
[Scott]: Well guys, we're getting close to our 8:00 PM limit. We're not there yet but I just wanted to ask if anybody had anything that was plaguing the back of their mind and wanted to bring up before we get too close and have to cut off.
(Inaudible background comment)
[Female group member]: I was just thinking about Leonard Bernstein in a comment he made and the Norton lectures that he gave at Harvard and he was saying that in art we have a universal language. And so it speaks to the emotions through this universal language. What do you think of that idea?
[Domenic]: Maybe that's why At Workers get along together all over the world because they understand what they're doing. They understand their actions. To me, art is just the way of saying that something in my life isn't… There is no art project I can read (inaudible 1:37:04.7). That's what I call art is what actions are, activity, not quite except things as they are and invent new ones. I think there are many definitions and they'll go along together.
[Steven]: Randall, if I understand your objections correctly, you were saying that, how should I put it? Let me think a minute. It's really late at night and am having a little bit of a brain freeze. I want to address the question you raised, just give me one second.
(Typing and background noise)
[Domenic]: Well, Steph, can you (inaudible 1:39:42.0) question? If upper class artists were really clear about this and I have to say that it's surprising how people (inaudible 1:40:03.0) the collective easily when they are upper class or the class or lower class. It's frightening to see people who want to commit to the collective. Certainly working class or upper class.
(Typing and background noise)
[Scott]: Yeah, Randall, I hope I'm not breaking the silence of thought at all. Yet, in the case of the jackknifed tractor trailer or the 90°tractor trailer, sure. I think you were right about that. Actually, are we still on the audio? Oh, it sounds like we are.
Hello? Can anyone hear us? Yes, I guess so. I hear typing. Okay, super.
So Steven, I was just kind of curious if you are still formulating your question or not. I am curious about that because, I wasn't sure…
[Steven]: I think Randall has to go, so I will keep my question for future correspondence.
[Scott]: (laughing) Okay. Cool. Awesome. Fair enough. Well actually, we're actually T-30 seconds or something till our normal close out. It's really great to have you Bob the Builder, and everybody who joined us. Thank you very much.
(Applause from the group)
[Scott]: Yep, it was really fascinating.
[Steven]: Thanks a lot Domenic.
[Domenic]: You're welcome.
[Steven]: Actually, I think Eric (inaudible 1:43:24.7) this just tried to call if we want to have a final testimony from Eric. I think now is the moment.
[Scott]: Well, if anybody wants to stick around for a few moments we definitely can. I don't know, here's a question. Do you guys want to stick around for another 5 minutes or so? Yeah? Okay. On our side it's all good. We just tried and so that no one feels the burnout. But that sounds perfect although we are in Eastern Standard Time and other people are on different time zones so if anybody needs to get out don't feel shy. Can someone data Eric to this chat? Awesome.
Steven, are you able to add Eric?
[Steven]: Uh, hang on. Oh he's going to call you.
[Eric]: Hola! Sorry to be late.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: Well, two more minutes.
[Scott]: I think its four more minutes for us. Nice to hear from you Eric. How are you?
[Eric]: I'm fine.
[Scott]: Excellent.
[Steven]: Listen, were you just at work and that's why you were late? At work doing art?
[Eric]: Exactly.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: So fill us in.
[Eric]: Well actually, I am in a real art center so it's not real work.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: Well, we try to talk about what you do as an art worker before but maybe you would like to give us a self description. I'm sure it would be more accurate.
[Eric]: Basically I work as an extra on movie sets. They asked me to pretend I'm talking with other people as like the background performer. And basically the stars are in the front of the camera and I'm in the background which furniture or props. This is what extras are. So I have to pretend I'm talking with people like would sign language and say specific things (inaudible1:46:16.4) coded messages of a secret agent and TV transmission. I used to do that on cable TV shows and cable movies but also in some Hollywood movies because there have been a lot of Hollywood movies that have been made right here. I always use the same effects in the background that you can read on my lips and I do some gestures which are from sign language (inaudible 1:46:52.5). And at the end of it I can construct the whole sequence which is basically a (inaudible 1:47:03.1) theater that I just put it there but I just choose to really because of it can another career of many things. Among the things can be (inaudible 1:47:18.5) and industry of cinema and TV and must be entertained. So it's (inaudible 1:47:26.3) and it is inspired by a scene of the Old Testament. So I've been doing it for five years. Every time I have to go there which is possibly two or three times a week I am doing now all day long. Always the same thing and always the same text. And sometimes some of these are visible on TV or on film or on DVDs. I collect also DVDs.
[Scott]: Eric, what is your favorite Trojan horse excerpt that you've inserted a film or television show?
[Eric]: You mean the best one?
[Scott]: I just asked what your favorite was, yeah to you. The best one to you. What you liked the most.
[Eric]: Do you mean a mime the ones where I did that right?
[Scott]: Yeah. Exactly.
[Eric]: Will there are a lot of them that are probably unknown to you because they're probably Quebec films.
[Scott]: I was curious about how you felt though. Not so much something that I might be able to see immediately. But, you know.
[Eric]: I have a special way of (inaudible 1:48:50.8) higher if it is a Hollywood movie right? So probably, I don't know which one. I know that I appear but I'm not there in the film about Bob Dylan but you only see my nose and my lips in a really close shot. And then this other… I'd really have to check about it because I really don't watch them (laughing). So I collect all the movies and then I think eventually I will spend a couple of months tracking myself in these movies but for now I don't have time to do that. Because they are actually movies I would enjoy to watch, I don't watch them (laughing). The action of (inaudible 1:49:34.0) on a daily basis.
[Scott]: I would definitely watch them. I really like cheesy, oh I don't know, what am I trying to say here? Cheesy. Basically Hollywood cheesy films or formulaic TV shows. As long as we know what to look for I probably would spend a little bit of time pitching in.
[Eric]: I tried to tell you, I know I am and this (inaudible 1:50:15.7) movie like (inaudible1:50:16.9) but I didn't watch it so maybe I'm invisible because there was a lot of videotape or film. They really like to spend money. It's really their biggest fun to spend money for no reason. A lot of the time I am there it is because they're like to spend money, they don't keep the shots. Maybe because I'm terrible.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Because you're talking about something. Or what kinds of things to talk about? Actually, I'm going over our time limit here. But just out of complete curiosity real quick, do you recite poetry, do you make up stories or…?
[Eric]: Well, this is what I told you earlier. It's always the same excerpt from (inaudible 1:51:03.8) a classic in French literature.
[Scott]: Oh, I see. I totally missed that.
[Eric]: it's based on the Old Testament and ends this scene; I think it's a nightmare, where she sees her mother. She's from a Jewish family and she sees her mother right before she died and she's then gorgeous and even looks younger than what she is. So its (inaudible 1:51:42.9) it's not really about hallucination but also about beauty. I'm just trying to translate the text into my head. And then she suddenly sees as she is a cadaver and there are dogs eating her bones and suddenly there are beautiful children who appears to her and look so attractive and a tractor and seduces her. But at the very last minute of the dream, you take a knife and stab her. And I think this is a perfect story about history of cinema and (inaudible 1:52:24.1) for the last 30 years.
(Laughter)
Expressly the Hollywood cinema in a certain way. I mean it's certainly gory, you can be reading it in many ways. The scene is really about something that's actually read about a kind of anger of a sense of cinema and the disappearance of the apparitions were all mixed up together in the same environments. So this text about (inaudible 1:53:01.2) is just perfect about that. So it's really kind of connected with (inaudible 1:53:05.6) and is part of the text (inaudible 1:53:13.1).
[Steph]: Hi. I just wanted to say that repeating it in the background endlessly is also perfect.
(Laughter)
(Inaudible background comments)
[Scott]: Well Eric, thank you very much. I really feel that as exciting as it could continue to be we really should go.
[Eric]: (inaudible 1:53:45.8)
[Scott]: There are a lot of films. You could always visit to be an extra here in Philadelphia.
[Eric]: (inaudible 1:53:58.9) to help me find a job.
[Scott]: Yeah well. We have a job board here now.
[Eric]: Let's keep in touch.
[Scott]: Excellent.
[Eric]: So we have greetings from (inaudible 1:54:09.6) where everybody greets you here.
[Scott]: Awesome! Will hello from us. OK, we'll have a great night or early morning everybody and we will see you next Tuesday.
[Eric]: (Inaudible - speaking in French 1:54:39.2)
[Steven]: (Inaudible - speaking in French 1:54:39.1)
[Domenic]: just a reminder for anyone who wants to copy of the film data to send me your address to (inaudible 1:54:57.9). Just send me an address I will send you a DVD.
[Scott]: Great Domenic. And if you want, we can help you put that online since you want to open source so that everybody can get much faster, if you want.
[Domenic]: Of course.
[Scott]: Cool, yeah. We'll talk about it tomorrow.
(Group chatter and goodbyes)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:55:38.5
Page |
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$799f7512b1450425" title="#basekamp/$799f7512b1450425">At Work / Au Travail (#basekamp/$799f7512b1450425)
Created on 2010-03-27 10:17:34.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:23
- hi all, we'll be getting started here shortly. We'll call you and a friendly reminder to mute your microphones until you'd like to chime in.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:44
- scott......
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:07:49
- thanks
- Aharon: 18:08:13
- hi scottrigby
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:14
- teching the audio, we'll begin shortly!
- mabel: 18:10:35
- ok
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:10:52
- Dominic, we finaly have our AV tech finishing the setup >
- Dominic Zlatanov: 18:11:07
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:10
- ha ha "AV tech"!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:11:23
- w00t
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:17:50
- ok guys, we're ready to start
- Aharon: 18:18:20
- cool
- atrowbri: 18:18:56
- skype crashed, recall pls?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:05
- on it
- atrowbri: 18:19:08
- thx
- Aharon: 18:19:31
- we can post links (to images vids etc..)
- Aharon: 18:20:11
- he mi8 not be awar of your new time!!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:53
- atrowbri who am I calling? you? or UTC?
- atrowbri: 18:21:09
- me
- atrowbri: 18:21:13
- utc crashed
- Aharon: 18:21:38
- for me bob da bilda is obama.. well.. now a nu one..
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:47
- yes thank you all.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:43
- 300-400!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:45
- Wow!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:29:30
- cutting in & out slightly
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:51
- it's crystal clear in the burbs...how is the audio for everyone else?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:29:59
- btter now
- mabel: 18:30:09
- very good here!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:39
- yikes!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:33:32
- trying 2nd www connection
- Aharon: 18:33:42
- do u really think your car is not powered by ppl now..?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:34:20
- well, www is funny tonight
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:34:35
- we have a weak signal strangely
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:34:38
- back!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:34:45
- thnak you Greg
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:34:54
- is there some sort of archive of these examples?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:35:02
- Yes
- Aharon: 18:35:20
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:20
- Ho Ho Ho Ho!
- Aharon: 18:35:52
- nice!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:11
- sure.
- Dominic Zlatanov: 18:36:50
- http://www.atwork.enter1646.com/
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:37:28
- thank you
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:29
- yep looks great!
- stephen wright: 18:41:03
- Hey, can I hook up?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:14
- on it Stephen
- stephen wright: 18:43:08
- Hey Dominic!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:14
- Truck
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:18
- by X
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:43:30
- http://www.autravailatwork.50megs.com/photo.html
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:43:38
- bottom of page
- stephen wright: 18:44:18
- Shows the works by Chuck Close by the edge of the highway!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:35
- try this link: (assuming this is the same artist you were referring to Scott) http://www.atwork.enter1646.com/trucker.pdf
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:44:36
- Stephen, hello there!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:44:48
- you are on the call
- stephen wright: 18:44:59
- Yup -- in a hotel lobby!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:45:08
- which city are you in?
- stephen wright: 18:46:06
- Hey Dominic, you made a movie about At Work. A really good one. Is any of that uploaded to the web -- on YouTube or something?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:47:48
- by the way, i didn't mention this at the beginning as i normally do -- but -- please feel free to chime in if you have any questions or comments about at work
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:39
- yes please! great!
- stephen wright: 18:50:48
- Definitely!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:51:09
- great
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:51:54
- is there a link for that project btw?
- stephen wright: 18:52:24
- maybe under the name of Saint Thomas the Imposter
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:52:33
- ok,,,
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:53:03
-
- stephen wright: 18:53:03
- we'll have to ask him for sure. He's the guy in the policeman's outfit on the website and the PAW mail-out.
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:53:56
- google search turns up a lot of generic stuff stephen & BOB
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:54:04
- oh
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:23
- yep
- stephen wright: 18:56:04
- slacking at work -- and putting a fancy name on it!
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:56:20
- <ss type="laugh"></ss>
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 18:56:30
- yeah, that's a rad decription
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:42
- I like to call them J.O.B. Grants
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:57:03
- there's also something slightly exotic in doing crappy jobs don't you think?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:14
- indeed Stef...the go to question for movie stars..."What was the worst job you had while you were a struggling actor?"
- Aharon: 19:00:12
- so.. is it not that in a sense, doing at-work ativities encouraged by a given corporation - will actually be profitable for the man..?
- stephen wright: 19:00:17
- There is actually no reason why at-working only has to do with low-paid jobs.
- Aharon: 19:00:59
- i can c this being really encouraged by the capital..
- Aharon: 19:01:26
- sure
- stephen wright: 19:02:30
- Spend your free time at work! That's neomanagement strategy for sure.
- Aharon: 19:03:34
- from this pov - its a really concervative practice.. that irony is possibly interesting in itself..
- stephen wright: 19:04:28
- At workers dont spend free time at work -- they free up work time while they have to be at work anyway
- Aharon: 19:04:52
- s it not actually about making work in this society more palatable..?
- atrowbri: 19:05:18
- Could it take place at 12hr a day Apple iPod factories in China?
- Aharon: 19:06:03
- yup it can.. i can imagine that anyway.. adam..
- Dominic Zlatanov: 19:06:09
- You make a video with the ipod in secret,
- Aharon: 19:06:57
- u place secret image pieces.. one in each..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:13
- also labor itself can be bought and sold
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:07:23
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:07:42
- hi randall
- atrowbri: 19:08:09
- hey randall
- Randall Szott: 19:08:16
- hey scott
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:09:49
- hellllo. i am late with child.
- atrowbri: 19:10:03
- nononononon
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:10:12
- wait. no
- Aharon: 19:10:14
- well.. that assumes the surplace value analisys is correct.. i think it is more correct to say that marx himself was question ing the validity of that - and other - theories.. for example, he had another pov based on production dictated by mode of exchange..
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:10:16
- scratch that
- stephen wright: 19:10:35
- Surplus value does exist!
- stephen wright: 19:10:44
- Otherwise how would accumulation take place!
- stephen wright: 19:11:04
- How would rich people get richer?
- Aharon: 19:11:08
- it does, ofcourse. question is how it plays in the grand sceme of things
- Randall Szott: 19:11:34
- well surplus value exists and it doesn't
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:47
- "dancers"
- Aharon: 19:11:53
- ofcourse we do not have money trickling down but up
- Randall Szott: 19:11:57
- it exists *within* the confines of the economic frame
- Randall Szott: 19:12:27
- but whether it exists in any ontological sense is dubious
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:31
-
- stephen wright: 19:13:06
- it exists within the economy where at-workers are working -- and it is what they want to repossess rather than seeing it exporipriated by the employer
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:07
- W.O.W.
- Randall Szott: 19:13:35
- but they are chasing phantoms
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:14:00
- independent contractor
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:05
- no pun intended
- stephen wright: 19:14:33
- Randall, hi! What do you mean about "chasing fantoms"?
- atrowbri: 19:14:41
- There is a stuent sleeping through this discussion
- atrowbri: 19:14:44
- She gets an A
- stephen wright: 19:14:50
- A+
- atrowbri: 19:15:44
- Another student reports she was working on a class project @ work
- atrowbri: 19:15:46
- A
- Randall Szott: 19:16:51
- stephen - i'm just rehashing Baudrillard...in his claim that workers are not being exploited by accumulating their surplus value, but by being inculcated in the frame of vlaue itself
- stephen wright: 19:17:26
- It seems to me that it is in both those realms
- Randall Szott: 19:17:26
- it is the tryanny of *value* that is the problem not finding the appropriate baance of surplus/exchange value
- Randall Szott: 19:17:58
- but I'm a Baudrillard zombie, so I'm useless
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:38
- Randall aren't we all zombies according to Baudrillard?
- stephen wright: 19:18:40
- OK. But At-working is not really about stymying the bosses ability to extract surplus value
- stephen wright: 19:19:20
- It is only secondarily about that -- as a consequence of using the space / time of the work environment as a place of artistic production
- Randall Szott: 19:19:24
- yeah stephen i joined late so missed the initial qualifier
- stephen wright: 19:21:19
- You know, when i translated the art critical text using the strange protocol I mentioned (inverting all the values, translating words by their opposites), everyone was happy. THe journal was happy to pay -- because they never noticed the ploy. They just thought my English prose was acceptable.
- Aharon: 19:23:57
- sing the blues in the cotton fields?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:24:21
- knit turtleneck sweaters in the cotton fields
- Aharon: 19:24:49
- is that the slave pic u have..?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:25:10
- did you just pull a "don't joke about slavery" move?
- stephen wright: 19:25:22
- But we don't work in cotton fields. Probably cotton workers need trade unionization.
- Aharon: 19:25:29
- the other way round
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:25:47
- fair enough
- stephen wright: 19:25:54
- We work as "cognitarians" -- immaterial laborers in post fordism
- Randall Szott: 19:26:05
- but this is not just a tactic right? i mean slack is built into most office environments
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:26:12
- the idea economy
- stephen wright: 19:26:29
- slack is only built into high end, immaterial labour
- Randall Szott: 19:26:33
- people write birthday party invites, make appointments, play in their fantasy foot ball leagues
- stephen wright: 19:26:47
- maybe software design, advertising
- Aharon: 19:27:03
- well.. in a sense you put it so well Stephen, that we need to produce - so we do work/job
- Randall Szott: 19:27:07
- working as a temp i saw oodles and oodles of ordinary people making work time their own
- stephen wright: 19:27:17
- Great!
- Aharon: 19:27:20
- ..or did u use re-produce..?
- Aharon: 19:28:11
- which is exactly where we go back to the cotton field with the blues and all that.. be it a metaphorical - litteraly metaphorical - field..
- Randall Szott: 19:28:29
- students doing homework, people doing crosswords, surfing the web, looking at restaurant menus, texting, chatting...all on "company time"
- Aharon: 19:28:38
- hi magda
- atrowbri: 19:28:50
- the recent SEC guy fired for looking @ porn...
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:28:51
- Greg, can you add Magda to the audio chat?
- stephen wright: 19:28:59
- But those poeple are "killing time"
- stephen wright: 19:29:08
- At work is not about killing time.
- Randall Szott: 19:29:09
- no
- atrowbri: 19:29:10
- art is not killing time?
- Randall Szott: 19:29:23
- exactly adam
- stephen wright: 19:29:31
- well, only if it is self consciously about killing time
- magdalenatc: 19:29:35
- hello. great thank. i am in.
- Randall Szott: 19:29:35
- what makes art better than fantasy football?
- Aharon: 19:29:40
- no.. they keep trying to make sure time does not kill them]
- atrowbri: 19:29:44
- More than 24 employees and contractors at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have been investigated for porn-surfing at work in the past two years, according to published reports.
- atrowbri: 19:29:57
- Are they not using work time to "produce desire"
- atrowbri: 19:29:58
- stephen wright: 19:30:46
- That might be stretching the point if they just gazed at some skin-observing
- Aharon: 19:30:57
- and therefore its subsistance kind of practice.. an expression of subsistance, not subversion of subsistancy.. just a feel of..
- stephen wright: 19:31:05
- If they made porn, then YES
- stephen wright: 19:31:18
- I think we should be making more on-worksite porn
- stephen wright: 19:32:14
- Yes, that's probably true. They tend to be fairly one offish.
- Randall Szott: 19:32:31
- a mom typing up her Christmas family newsletter at work is just as interesting to me as some post-grad using video software to edit a project
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:32:35
- I'm wondering if the sleeping student is not upper class, so will never need a dayjob to "au travail"...
- Aharon: 19:32:40
- i wonder about your position, bob.. are you a kind of a curator? making your curation via films..?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:33:01
- stephen, maybe you can help translate too?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:34:23
- who was that?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:34:27
- is/was
- atrowbri: 19:34:56
- if the post-grad's video shows and becomes part of a gallery exhibition leading to a teaching job, you could argue the value is merely transfered. How many of these slack-art-workers are transfering excess work value into artworld value possibly leading to either credibility or better art-related positions?
- stephen wright: 19:34:57
- slackers tend to be -- though are not always -- from middle class society.
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:35:15
- Anibal Lopez, that's the name of the truck driver
- atrowbri: 19:35:27
- trying to unmute
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:35:58
- thanks Stef
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:19
- street cred = use value?
- stephen wright: 19:36:22
- Excellent question!
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:36:32
- (couldn't remember it either, had to look it up)
- Randall Szott: 19:37:28
- can't we side step this question? or maybe reframe it...why talk about value? why not talk about meaning or maybe the conversion of value into meaning.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:59
- do value and meaning have to be mutually exclusive Randall or is this getting too semantic?
- Randall Szott: 19:39:25
- well economic value has no necessary relation to meaning
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:39:41
- this debate came up earlier, and i wasn't sure how 'valuable' it is to be honest... whether or not 'value' can exist outside of capital
- stephen wright: 19:40:12
- Let's bear in mind that one of the important characteristics of At Work is that it really exists -- it has some 400 self-acknowledged members worldwide.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:40:34
- despite those who define themselves based on accumulated property or how "valuable" they are not that we should be focusing on this at all
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:27
- or knowledge production (re: crosswords)
- Randall Szott: 19:41:36
- but passing time is how you would charaterize it....
- Randall Szott: 19:41:52
- because you don't find it meaninful apparently
- Randall Szott: 19:42:00
- or not meaningful in the same way art is
- Randall Szott: 19:42:35
- but some people find meaning in less "elevated" arenas
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:42:39
- randall yes.. dominic earlier said that this approach would probably not be necessary at a job one finds fulfiling
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:45
- Is Au Travail a kind of art therapy?
- stephen wright: 19:42:45
- I see your point, Randall, but the kind of self-understanding that goes with art doing changes everything for me.
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:42:48
- regardless of what it is
- Randall Szott: 19:43:14
- self-understanding
- stephen wright: 19:43:26
- as art
- Randall Szott: 19:43:27
- or navel gazing....sometimes it's hard to tell
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:46
- as long as he was giving blow jobs!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:57
- oops did I just write that?
- Aharon: 19:44:11
- are you looking for meaning, randall?
- Aharon: 19:44:18
- lol@art q..
- Randall Szott: 19:44:30
- no i dont care at all what art is
- stephen wright: 19:44:39
- neither do I
- Randall Szott: 19:44:49
- i am interesed in human meaning making and creativity in whatever form it takes
- stephen wright: 19:44:50
- it is whatever it understands itself to be
- Aharon: 19:45:00
- is art a taboo term/word?
- Randall Szott: 19:45:05
- art is highly privileged in this regard
- stephen wright: 19:45:17
- uniquely so
- Dominic Zlatanov: 19:45:23
- art is what makes life more interesting than art
- stephen wright: 19:45:27
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:29
- well...not caring about what art is is caring
- Dominic Zlatanov: 19:45:29
- filliou
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:44
- not about form then, about concept/process/space of creation?
- Aharon: 19:46:51
- what doesnt qualify as at-work..?
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:47:40
- by the way, it could have been santiago sierra and not lopez
- Randall Szott: 19:47:53
- "
not caring is caring - whooo boy - stephen wright: 19:47:54
- well, if you work at an art gallery and just do what you're told, that doen't qualify
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:48:08
- <ss type="giggle">
chuckle)</ss> - Aharon: 19:48:40
- y not? it mi8 be exactly what u've always dreamed of!
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:48:54
- sorry, i think it was santiago sierra.
- stephen wright: 19:49:02
- well if it's a dream job, so much the better
- Aharon: 19:49:20
- it mi8 be a dream activity
- Aharon: 19:49:46
- point is that from that pov you do indeed place a very large set of values..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:02
- whooo boy?
- Randall Szott: 19:50:11
- yes exactly - creative practice in *whatever* form
- Randall Szott: 19:50:39
- from making family newsletters, knitting at work, filling out March Madness brackets, etc.
- stephen wright: 19:50:50
- I would say that At Work is more interested in "decreative practice" in whatever form
- Randall Szott: 19:50:51
- not just making videos, novels, etc.
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:51:03
- stef - thanks
- stephen wright: 19:51:03
- certainly not making videos necessarily
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:51:30
- someone here is teaching a class on lock-picking
- Aharon: 19:51:32
- has anyone seen mikmaks..? (maybe wrong spelling.. your movie ref..)
- Aharon: 19:53:11
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micmacs_
- Randall Szott: 19:53:46
- art as esperanto!
- Randall Szott: 19:53:51
- both equally useless
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:54:43
- i've heard claims that critical theory was a kind of universal language - but I doubt that really
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:55:01
- Dominique, do you think "at work" is a prevalent working class artist activity?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:55:13
- buzzwords that help people to think they're talking the same language
- Randall Szott: 19:55:38
- did i miss a question?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:55:47
- stephen is thinking
- stephen wright: 19:55:49
- didn't ask it yet -- sorry
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:55:49
- (my kids are asleep so i can't say it out loud)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:51
- thanks for the music
- Dominic Zlatanov: 19:55:58
- prevalent working class activity?
- Randall Szott: 19:56:07
- oh ok im not objecting per se
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:56:15
- i'm totally into it actually
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:56:27
- yes, i mean, upper class artists wouldn't really care about this no?
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:56:43
- Randall Szott: 19:56:53
- just wondering why we seem hesitant to grant the activites i mentioned as being relevant
- Randall Szott: 19:57:06
- relevant is not the right word...
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:57:25
- randall, - really? i might have missed the activities - can you repeat?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:27
- applicable?
- Randall Szott: 19:57:35
- but we seem intent on making art/activist purposes more important thna less "heroic" ones
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:43
- Scott...from making family newsletters, knitting at work, filling out March Madness brackets, etc.
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:57:45
- "not just making videos, novels, etc."?
- stephen wright: 19:58:00
- Not At Work -- the members activities are pretty unheroic
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 19:58:07
- ah--- ok, i didn't get the impression anyone was hesitant that 's all -- ok
- Randall Szott: 19:58:12
- a form of heroism seems to be smuggled in somewhere
- Randall Szott: 19:58:29
- oh so sorry guys
- Randall Szott: 19:58:40
- my ride has arrived i have to run
- stephen wright: 19:58:49
- well, ripping off the man with the clock is slightly heroic
- stephen wright: 19:59:02
- yup
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 19:59:03
- yes, we can all hear you
- Randall Szott: 19:59:11
- but crosswords rip off the man as much as art
- Randall Szott: 19:59:14
- to me
- Randall Szott: 19:59:28
- but i really have to go sorry
- stephen wright: 19:59:29
- well then it,s heroic
- Dominic Zlatanov: 20:00:00
- ciao Randall
- Aharon: 20:00:28
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:11
- yep
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:01:12
- it's only 1 am here, we're cool.
- magdalenatc: 20:01:34
- i would like to, as i joined late and still trying to follow ... the silence of thougts (my silent thoughts in particular <ss type="smile"></ss>
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:02:10
- he was "at travail"!
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 20:03:38
- Eric that's fantastic
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 20:03:53
- or.. i mean -- i like that you're doing this
- stephen wright: 20:09:46
- Great allegory!
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:10:04
- Eric would you rather become a famous artist or a famous actor?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:11:21
- Thanks everyone!
- magdalenatc: 20:11:32
- thank you all.
- stephen wright: 20:12:14
- g900@hotmail.com">dg900@hotmail.com
- magdalenatc: 20:12:15
- that's very kind
- magdalenatc: 20:12:16
- thanks
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:12:41
- Thank you, that was fab.
- Aharon: 20:12:42
- d900@ where??
- Aharon: 20:12:48
- o
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:12:49
- hotmail.com
- Dominic Zlatanov: 20:12:54
- g900@hotmail.com">dg900@hotmail.com
- Aharon: 20:12:54
- ta stephen
- stephen wright: 20:13:06
- See / hear you next week!
- stephen wright: 20:13:12
- night night
- cottrigby" title="scottrigby">scottrigby: 20:13:28
- nighty night!
2010-03-23
Week 9: Orgacom
Hi Again,
This Tuesday is yet another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Orgacom, a group located between Istanbul & Amsterdam.
Orgacom (a combination of the words ‘ORGAnization’ and ‘COMmunication’) aims to develop and introduce new roles for art within businesses and non-profit-organizations.
Orgacom is primarily concerned with visualizing the culture of companies and groups through contemporary art. Through this visualization, Orgacom encourages companies and organizations to reflect on their group culture in a nontraditional manner. Through creating images that express the specific culture in which participants are involved, Orgacom wants to encourage them to reconsider the various roles art can play in their lives.
Though employees of companies are often highly educated and interested in culture, the images and ideas relevant to their experiences within business life are rarely found in the most visible artworlds. Orgacom has chosen the experiences of people in companies as a subject. This choice may result in the discovery of new themes, new methods of presenting art, a new audience, and may even make the development of a new vocabulary of images possible. Or, given the dramatic disparities in the power relations between art and business, it may lead to art becoming still more vulnerable to co-optation by so-called creative capitalism.
What makes Orgacom’s plausible artworld compelling is that it boldly challenges the assumptions of both activist artists (for whom the group’s practice is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy) and of more market-based practitioners (who basically want no truck with the collective “experiences” and identities of wage laborers, except in their capacity as art lovers).
Week 7: Artist Placement Group
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
We’ll be talking with Barbara Steveni, co-founder of the legendary APG, or Artist Placement Group (later renamed O + I, for Organization + Imagination), an important precursor for many later “organizational art” practices, who are not always fully aware of the scope of APG’s proposal to rethink artist’s place in our lifeworlds, while at the same time maintaining art’s fundamental autonomy.
The discussion will happen in-person both at Apexart in New York, and Basekamp in Philadelphia. And just like other weeks, people will be joining by Skype from many other locations.
About Artist Placement Group / O + I
The Artist Placement Group (APG) emerged in London in the 1960s. The organisation actively sought to reposition the role of the artist within a wider social context, including government and commerce, while at the same time playing an important part in the history of conceptual art during the 1960s and 1970s. APG as is undoubtedly one of the most radical social experiments of the 1960s, yet it raises many questions as to where artistic agency can be most effective, palpable — and corrosive.
This conversation will take place in the context of the exhibition, “The Incidental Person”, curated by Antony Hudek at Apexart. The term “incidental person” was coined by the late artist John Latham (co-founder, with Steveni and others, of APG) to describe the status of the artist as he saw it: both “incidentally” a farmer, a cook, a thief, a scientist, a house painter or real estate agent and, no less incidentally, an artist. Indeed APG saw no opposition between art and other fields of human endeavor — the latter being support systems for the former. Talk about plausible artworlds!
Transcription
Week 7: Artist Placement Group
[0:00:00]
Speaker 1: How does it work for – I mean I’ve worked for every single one of them. I mean I went through the thing exhaustively and they’ve tried to – so how does it work if you’ve only booked for [0:00:16] [Inaudible]? Doesn’t that stoop over to your fax number or – I’m serious more than the usual – okay. We’re going to be probably like 20…
Speaker 2: You know the show is one aspect of this process, [0:00:38] [Inaudible].
Speaker 1: But that’s not have we’re doing it.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we ask people to go about at least 25 or as many as they want. Now if you believe that there is a commonality between all these good proposals and that’s even – like we’re not fully – like your phantom writer could be similar to somebody else into the larger [0:01:11] [Inaudible] then it works because each one gets about 27 votes.
Speaker 1: Okay and it never happens that there’s one that doesn’t get any votes just because we wouldn’t talk to them.
Speaker 2: It can if the script won’t bring anyone or won’t make it to the top to make sure we’re all getting the same number of votes.
Speaker 1: Okay, that’s an interesting algorithm. So it’s like okay, it’s like just random actually. It’s like it’s random but its [0:01:41] [Inaudible].
Speaker 2: I think so yes, if it’s part of the scrip but I think it’s rarely because the ones that are going, “Wait, wait, wait” – that’s perfectly fine. So I love the process because I don’t know if you noticed but they’re turning into creative artists.
Speaker 1: I was surprised for the fact that they were able to use four images instead of – I was like the [0:02:11] [Inaudible] proposal because ideally it was image first.
Speaker 2: [0:02:18] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 1: I don’t think it added – there was one occasion where I thought I’ve added something, very humorous one where the person wanted to point it out that there had been an error in the map maybe of Berlin; a town that didn’t actually exist. Somehow it was out on like – and in fact it was shown that [0:02:37] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 2: I think we still have to let some of the jury [0:03:11] [Inaudible] are invited for the wrong reasons.
Speaker 1: And you we would never know with the jury what they would bring to the table because they would have to exercise it as well because there is a kind of – unless you’re a really obnoxious character – everyone plays the game. You have different points of view but it’s kind of consensus though. But you’re all to yourself, there’s no reason not to be consensual – fuck that.
Speaker 2: If you want the full integrity of the jury, you can’t let them talk.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: There’s always a dominant personality or somebody who’s going to be – yeah are you going to be around for a little bit – they just sort of turn up at the – hey Greg!
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 2: So we can actually hear that ourselves; I’m thinking our mics might be too sensitive.
Speaker 1: Can you hear me Greg?
Speaker 2: I’m sure he can.
Speaker 1: Yup, no problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah we can, I think we’re just given with a mild echo so if – not from me but from us. I guess we’ll just have to ask you to speak up a little bit when we deal with Greg, I’m not sure what else we can do because if we turn up our mic we hear ourselves. It’s just extraordinarily sensitive, I’m not sure how…
Speaker 3: Is the microphone on, am I on speakers or are we all on speakers or…
Speaker 1: It’s on the table in front of us but…
[0:05:05]
Speaker 3: Try to turn on the speakers in front of you that you can feel it in front of you and not behind the speakers…
Speaker 2: Yeah it is actually, the speaker is like kind of facing the other direction in the other side of the room. Yeah I’m just going to see if I can get one more – so actually am I in…
Speaker 1: Do I need to contact with Greg?
Speaker 2: No I don’t think – if you want to join the chat on the basekamp website.
Speaker 1: Okay I just go to basekamp – I’ve never been to basekamp before, would they pick me up?
Speaker 2: Oh you can, you can actually just say hi to the basekamp because Greg is on the basekamp channel.
Speaker 1: Okay thank you. But I don’t see that you’ve added me because I think the chat hasn’t started yet that’s why.
Speaker 2: Yeah there is actually like a little drawer if you click – let’s see – there you go.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, thanks a lot.
Speaker 2: If you click on the area you can see all the people in that as well. By the way if you would like, you can set your preferences to us under city Skype on your friend’s list. Under let’s see notifications, you can click – you can type on the – oh wow it’s a little tricky isn’t it?
Speaker 1: So what do you –sorry I was not – what happens if – place sound did you say?
Speaker 2: Yeah just uncheck the place out and then you just close that out and then whenever someone wants to talk to you there would appear a blue opinion mark.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: [0:07:40] [Inaudible]
Speaker 2: You can turn that back on later but if you want that to – that would keep on blinking….
Speaker 1: Yeah we’ll go ahead and I’ll be fine.
Speaker 2: Or maybe not, that kind of was actually working. Yeah as long as we’re solid with the – it seems that we generally are, except for the fact that they have to keep their volume relatively low – you know one thing that you could just actually do if you want to turn off your audio…
Speaker 1: Completely up, yeah maybe that was what was causing the problem.
Speaker 2: Not really a problem it was just – you can just hear from the bleep – I just did that recently in fact almost all these time, it’s like five years of doing Skype here, I’ve always heard the bleeps and I was just recently checking that one. What do you think, does that sound okay Greg? Okay maybe just tell them to hang tight for just a second, are you on the audio tract or no? Okay is Mike there?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh no, really? Oh I’m sorry to hear that, oh okay. Do you have a Skye account?
Speaker 4: [0:10:33] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 2: Would you mind just going to Skype to kind of validate that, that way all we have to do is set it up real quick?
[0:10:40]
And just people know – you know like they can hang out and we’d be just running a few minutes behind here and then we’ll kind of start? Yeah it will say add contact if you just click it, it will pop up in your contact list; and then you will be able to search for a contact. Just click add contact – very cool –so now yes and now do the chat – excellent. Yeah just keep looking – great.
So great, can you hear me okay still? Yes I just need to listen for you that’s all because if I turn this up too much you’ll hear – it will start to get like crazy feedback. So do you think this is going to work okay Greg? So we’re going to get started in just a moment, I think it would be – we’ve been trying to set up the audio but the thing is our mic is actually very sensitive so we have to keep our speakers on. But the thing is if we keep our speakers on that line, we can’t hear that so I’m just basically just distracting everyone. I think we have to flag them down before they say something and then we can move ahead and get our audio from there and turn the speakers up. I guess we just haven’t used this high-tech microphone before.
Speaker 4: Actually we just haven’t been checking. You know how this goes, you will say what you want.
Speaker 1: [0:14:55] [Inaudible]
Speaker 2: Absolutely, definitely.
[0:15:30]
Speaker 1: What’s up?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I met you some years ago.
Speaker 1: Oh yes of course, you’re very familiar.
Speaker 5: Yeah we met at the…
Speaker 2: I think that get together in Philly, I think that’s it.
Speaker 5: I think in 2004.
Speaker 1: What you could have done is write your own book.
Speaker 5: Well I’m working on it.
Speaker 1: Well then good.
Speaker 5: It’s still – yes it is, I have to take more of a job.
Speaker 2: And it makes sense to be able to talk about it and you have no idea – it’s great to be able to talk about it.
Speaker 5: I know.
Speaker 1: For some reason I had that book reserved because I saw a very impressive list of authors including people who were…
Speaker 5: You know what it was reviewed in S – do you know people from S?
Speaker 1: Yeah I contributed there.
Speaker 5: Oh you worked there. It came out and they announced what was coming out in spring and there is that kind of in depth [0:16:47] [Inaudible].
Speaker 1: I know her from Montreal.
Speaker 5: Yeah and Manchester so it was…
Speaker 1: I saw Gina Badger; she makes good writing as well. She’s writing that, actually she’s staying in this place…
Speaker 5: Oh great, that [0:17:06] [Inaudible] thing. Yeah that’s why I know about – because I saw that he was in…
Speaker 1: Actually we are inviting [0:17:19] [Inaudible] in three weeks I think. You know these guys, [0:17:30] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 5: Yeah I’m a little bit confused about who plays – who is…
Speaker 1: They are real people; they just have completely unreal names. But the builder is actually named Dominic [0:17:43] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 5: That’s right, yeah – his part of the Gina interview.
Speaker 1: Did she get with her boyfriend on…
Speaker 5: I don’t know about that, there’s a lot of usual suspects…
Speaker 1: I wouldn’t think it was unusual, I mean she’s an interesting – she’s got someone who has incredible potential. Yes she’s still a student but she’s got these really very interesting gardening projects but a very critical take on it as well.
Speaker 5: You know – I’ve met her and – but I don’t see her actually very often.
Speaker 1: She’s living in Boston but I knew her in my film when she was doing – it was an interesting project but it didn’t turn out too well but then at school – you know the summer school.
Speaker 5: That’s right yeah.
Speaker 1: But she’s working with us as well with the school of creative methodologies which is next week. You know Gina will actually join me.
Speaker 5: [0:18:57] [Inaudible]
Speaker 2: Yeah I definitely see you guys do a lot of good – so yeah I’m definitely psyched and yeah I might be a little too excited when I say “Hey, are you even separating these publications because there seem to be a lot of” – I just want to say you know this one’s really cool, I’m not sure if I can even separate the [0:19:42] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 5: [0:19:45] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 2: We definitely do, we definitely do. Okay so we’re going to get back to some of the…
Speaker 5: Okay great, now tell me – I was thinking about – can you tell me something about what it is you’re doing because I want to figure out that’s like related to…
Speaker 2: Tonight?
Speaker 1: We have lots of writings about possible key words.
Speaker 5: But more about the thing – like overall I’m considering that would be involved in – well there are two applications. One is for this book about by-products which is about banned practices…
[0:20:39]
Speaker 1: And the excess…
Speaker 5: And the excess which is pretty vague and then Robert for example he will tell you things about the [0:20:54] [Inaudible]. So that’s like very specifically but the other thing that I was thinking about was and more generally publishing that for this online magazine that I aptly call, where we are now looking at our politics in New York and so it’s about partly politics in New York. So to those pertaining to…
Speaker 2: I think the one that focuses on New York – I would suggest that New Yorkers visit it often, it might be the kind of [0:21:28] [Inaudible].
Speaker 5: Yeah and we’re staying here for the week.
Speaker 2: Yeah I’m always here, I’m just not here in New York. But you know, I’m always like…
Speaker 5: Because I do have this thing to go to like in the 29th so I would also do a follow-up for something that’s flexible.
Speaker 1: Well I’ll give you my number and you can SMS me, I mean you can phone me as well but it’s a French number so it’s not too bad to call. So it’s +33…
Speaker 5: [0:22:09] [Inaudible]
Speaker 1: Or you can do zero and then the numbers.
Speaker 5: Okay, zero-one-one…
Speaker 1: three-three-six-six-one-four-eight-four-two-nine-nine.
Speaker 2: We are going to be talking about [0:22:44] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 5: So you’re going to like it?
Speaker 2: Yeah actually we’re [0:23:19] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 1: Okay so we should be probably on in two minutes?
Speaker 2: I think it would be probably good, if Barbara sits here and if you want to hang out with us as well like it would be just kind of informal and we’d just sit around and like hang out in the platform and – it’s just audio and it’s all here. Basically we’ll just let everyone know at the moment and there are a number of people like there are about a dozen locations right now and one of them has 30 people on it so there’s actually a lot of involvement online.
Speaker 1: 60 seconds okay?
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, yeah – yeah. SO just hang out with us so we can probably represent you and the way it’s set its kind of like a…
Speaker 1: It’s very informal Barbara, it’s very informal.
Speaker 6: [0:25:16] [Inaudible]…
Speaker 1: No need to be afraid because it’s the vertical…
Speaker 5: So Barbara we have to leave a little bit early like at eight, I want to make sure that we’re going to have to leave early. Are you here in New York for a few days?
[0:25:32]
Speaker 6: Yeah until Sunday.
Speaker 5: Okay great because we’ve got this long…
Speaker 6: Can I give you my cellphone number? I mean that should be me talking in the lead, but in that case…
Speaker 1: You are getting a little echo…
Speaker 2: We are getting a little bit of an echo, it’s kind of funny it’s almost – hey everybody how is it going? And I know we’re positioned like a panel with you as the audience because that’s just because of the chairs available. Often when we do this we exhibit on a picnic table but we didn’t seem that was necessary to build one of those so…
Speaker 1: Because these things actually takes place weekly, Scott – the first name was Potluck and they’ve actually been – it’s kind of a basekamp tradition, basekamp being the space in Philadelphia.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I’m just going to answer this call…
Speaker 1: I’ve always thought that I was going to – so each Tuesday night for 52 weeks beginning first week of January and going to the last of December 2010. I always thought that I was going to be spending every potluck sort of in the virtual situation because you can join in like no matter where you are…
Speaker 2: No actually if you would mind muting your audio…
Speaker 1: It’s muted.
Speaker 2: Okay great, that would be great. I mean pressing that little button there – excellent.
Speaker 1: Now it’s really mute.
Speaker 2: How about now, guys how’s the audio is it okay?
Speaker 6: Shall I answer? Can you hear me?
Speaker 2: Okay great, everybody can hear you just fine.
Speaker 1: I think we should begin by saying that tonight we’re welcoming and pleased to have Barbara Steveni, the founding member of APG group. With us in no particular occasion which gives us the occasion to thank both Steven Rand, executive founding director of apexart which is hosting both these events in the context of the exhibition organized by Anthony Hudek called, Incidental Person. Incidental Person being one of the key concepts which we are going to tackle I guess. Developed first I think by John Latham but one of the key concepts of the artist [0:28:55] [Inaudible].
Speaker 6: Well Incidental person was a Latham term, Latham was very concerned with language and very suspicious of language as in carrying a love baggage and in fact he said that language of money, the flaw of media – of course the biggest flaw. Language and money which of course shows up in his – in the way he wrote books and the way that he alter words and incidental person was his word and caused a lot of furor both within Artists Placement Group because they felt that it was pulling other artists Lathamesque type of when they were all longing to drop a Latham so to speak. But Artist Placement Group – the idea of Artist Placement and so making the stand here came from an idea that I got when as a result of Robert Filliou with the Fluxus group staying with me in our house in London and joined us in America and they wanted some material for putting on their show in Gallery One.
Speaker 1: Daniel Spoerri?
Speaker 6: Daniel Spoerri and Filliou and other members of Fluxus group, but those two actually stayed in our house in Portland Road in London. And I said well I’ll go get you some material. And so I went to the industrial estate in the artisan road [0:30:34] [Inaudible] in London and it was night time, I think it must have been winter but it was dark.
[0:30:41]
And I got lost in this industrial estate, the factories were roaring away and I thought, “Why the hell aren’t we in here” not just to pick up buckets of plastic but there’s a whole area here. So while we’re here – because the fine artist was not represented in industry in any way at all except Oliveti desk [0:31:06] [Phonetic] resource but there was of course a plan out with industrial designers and the plain artists. So I came back with this idea, this eureka idea, John came back from America and I said what about this and he was teaching in St. Martins at that time with Barry Flannigan and Jeffrey Shaw. And John talked about this to the head of sculpture and I said, “By the way if I go winding off of these things, then pull me back for goodness sake”.
Speaker 1: Or push you.
Speaker 6: Or push me and that was what I was this story. Anyway so I went to Frank Martin who was head of sculpture at that time. He was very astute, he realized that although Anthony Caro at that time was head of sculpture, London’s head of painting – they realized that John and Jeffrey was another sort of breed and so he made a sort of department between things to which he invited me to come in a day in a week. And I’ll ask questions if the students and what do they think they were going to do after school and everything. And as a result of that I started the Artist Placement Group by – Frank Martin the head of sculpture said, “Oh Barbara I think this is a terribly good idea, why don’t you go and see these people?” And he was reading The Financial Times and I remembered it in all its pinkness you know at that time. And he has this guy Robert Adeane, he’s chairman of Shell, RTI – chairman of at least four or five companies. And so I went along to Robert Adeane with my idea and he said, “What a good idea, I’ll be on your committee” of course we have no committee. I’ve told the story already today because I’ve watched around you know that what was I was doing before I came here and so I realized I had to get a committee. And so I went to go out to get a committee with all the people that you get to put on a committee like the head of painting, the head of Industrial Design and everything and so we had our committee, Artists Placement Group and that’s where the eureka happened.
But the Incidental Person was the way John’s vision and Anthony’s – really the person who has been putting a lot of time into that – were John’s vision of time based and time – that’s time based that’s not clock time. He called it time based and determination and events and also his suspicion of language was readapting language came right into using that in the context of the practice of APG that he was already thinking like that. So when there was a context of APG which was practical, John gave it this Incidental Person notion like if we were going to be a new type of artists, what sort of artists would we be and what were they and so that’s how the term came.
Speaker 1: Thinking about a new status…
Speaker 6: It was a new status for the artists which was useful having drawn suspicion of language messing around there because the other offices would say like David would say, “No for goodness sake we must keep it opaque; don’t do a manifesto, don’t do these stuff because otherwise we’d be caught and held out yet again” anyways stop me and then take me on. I didn’t know if that was any…
Speaker 1: Incidental is such a slippery word, I take it to mean at least two things – one is that the incidental person – an artist who was placed outside the context of the established meaning in the world, will create an incident…
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand he’s only incidentally on it – it’s like incidentally I’m a foreigner but incidentally…
[0:35:13]
Speaker 6: Exactly and both – and it was sort of keeping this going, this sort of uneasy juxtaposition. I mean when it came to actually negotiating with industries and governments the use of the term incidental – for god’s sake Barbara, you know we’ve had difficulty getting a budget for an artist and now you want me to get a budget for an incidental person. I mean John was really a menace to them and I’m sort of – I was very smooth into looking this is what we need, here’s a contract. But then looking again and it has been really helpful for me to be involved in this Incidental Person project to look again at exactly how John’s meaning, his words didn’t fuse on the long stories so to speak. Although I as a pragmatist didn’t use these terms until they were able to be used because you’ve already made the relationship and then they could sort of listen and they could hear those sorts of terms.
Speaker 1: Previous to this, you were an artist – a practicing artist yourself?
Speaker 6: Yes, yes.
Speaker 1: But do you relatively…
Speaker 6: But I was making – I suppose I was using a assemblage of everything and so this suddenly became – I gradually realized that this was the biggest assemblage of putting people together and it was all a journey and a performance and in my recent work which I’ve called, I Am an Archive and I’ve been doing performances in various places. I’ve returned very much more into performing and to making some siftings as I call it and in my series of works I Am an Archive which was set in [0:37:07] [Inaudible] when we were negotiating our sale of our archive to the Tate because they’ve never bought – I’ve figured this out this morning…
Speaker 1: It is actually really…
Speaker 6: Is this relevant?
Speaker 1: Yes, definitely I mean I think it’s interesting personally. You guys find it interesting but I also think it’s interesting in the context of [0:37:30] [Inaudible] project as well.
Speaker 6: That’s why I say stop me and then journey on to what…
Speaker 1: We need to know I mean, I need to know the facts. Basically of course the way I would see it to put it in like two sentences is that we’re interested life sustaining environments for art which I’m not – which is substantially different than in the mainstream offer with its alienating and rarifying structures and devices and I think this is exactly of course what you’ve pioneered in the 1960’s and mid-60’s whereby taking artists and really arresting them away from a logic of respect and dictatorship and object production and offers and so on and then placing them in a totally different context.
But if I understand correctly to go back to your story it almost started as a student placement…
Speaker 6: No, although…
Speaker 2: Maybe because you were talking about the university complex or…
Speaker 6: Oh you mean the – because I’m in and being in at Central St. Martins?
Speaker 1: Yeah I’m curious.
Speaker 6: That’s an interesting point that you’ve made though, I haven’t thought of it in terms of students because they were the particular artists that we were working with you know, that we were a part of and yes it was students, I haven’t thought about that. But the point was they did have – each of them had broken the boundaries of their particular form of expression like David [0:38:53] [Inaudible] video, Jeffrey Shaw with “Inflatables” and structures like hues that started the Venice structure which is a search group in Holland; Anthony went on to Carlsworg and magnificent at that. Yes they were the students at Central St. Martins where Anthony Caro was the boss guy but there were these people who would cross the structures, who were breaking the boundaries with other forms of expression and we were doing all sorts of events and happenings even with Yoko Ono and Dhal and things like that in the streets prior to APG. But then when I had Filiou and people there and then went back to St. Martins and started to talk to the students like Robert and George and people like that, the people that I’ve asked, “What would you be doing after college?” you know and things like that.
SO yes it was, it was the first time I’ve thought of it as students because I’ve also been part of that group as – with the artists that are doing it you know, it’s interesting you’ve pulled me up – we were students.
[0:40:01]
Speaker 1: What seemed like an interesting ploy or strategy because it would be hard to find money for Incidental Person as artist but you know, what are you going to do with art students, what are you going to do with your degree in art?
Speaker 6: Well that was my questioning…
Speaker 1: The placement scheme is kind of an interesting…
Speaker 6: That was my questions to – at Central St. Martins where Frank Martin, head of sculpture got me to ask questions – of being able to draw from people then – how do you see yourself afterwards school, where do you see it and when you think now of the expectances of students coming out of those schools and things like that? You know, we’ve got our careers, we’ve got our agents, we’ve got our shows something that is very difficult then.
Speaker 1: Who was placed? Were you placed? I know John Latham was.
Speaker 6: John Latham, Jeffrey Shaw, David Hall, Stuart Brisley, Ian Breakwell, Anna Ridley and me in a funny sort of way – me in a funny sort of way. I mean yeah I did a very recent placement. When I say recent you know, like it might have been in 2000 or something because I’m so busy doing it. And there again my sort of identity which in my own work, I Am An Archive; I’m pulling out what was it that I actually did and you know, what were the component parts of my practice so to speak.
Speaker 1: In the video we have here you are obviously playing a very key…
Speaker 6: Well this is – apparently I was very good at this. I didn’t know – oh that’s a big fat minus with union, I fell short in the union – now this was from the 70’s. And the questions if you hear it, the questions of Stuart was just saying, “Well I don’t care if I’m an artist” and something, something you know and all of that’s the same. Then you get Tony Benn who’s our very prominent statesman who is our Minister of Technology in the middle clip which is also on this video where he talks about where two disciplines meet together and how it fuses and does some other things. And so all these were – it’s like right now you know…
Speaker 1: What did you do to placements?
Speaker 6: Placements were – the first industrial placements – the first important placement, industrial placement was with British Steel and I’m very pleased that we took a social one that was quite obviously with the Ministry of Sculptures. [0:42:42] [Inaudible] I’m very pleased to say is going to be tomorrow here with Julie Martin from Experiments in Martin technology and we’re going to talk together about the difference between art and technology and APG which would be roughly about the same time which has much more to do with fabricating and engineers and others much more with social – well he took it to the social level for the first time using the Artist Placement Concept. And I have done a recording with Garth which we can bring tomorrow as well but the interesting thing about the Steel Corporation Fellowship was that I did a bit of a – well it’s not called a search but it’s never called a search then – to find out that the British Steel Corporation had a fellowship for meteorologists and sociologists and I said, “Well why not have an artist”. So they immediately thought that we were going to have all these student sculptures and so okay we’ll have a few student sculptures.
And actually Garth had been working in a fiber glass which was very prevalent with St. Martin’s school of Art at that time. And so when they took it, they were really, really pleased with what he’s done and then they gave him another two years. He made the ports and he talked to the apprentices and…
Speaker 1: So it’s really about talking, it wasn’t really about making objects.
Speaker 6: He also made objects and other artists also made objects where it was kind of necessary to do so, but they were really…
Speaker 1: Why was it necessary?
Speaker 6: Sometimes because why were they an artist? Didn’t they make things? You know I remember Stuart Brisley say, he was talking to all the…
Speaker 1: To reassure expectations that it actually was art?
Speaker 6: Yes you can put it that way – I can do this as well but I’m actually doing this as well. I mean these occurred lots of times like with George Levantis who was an artist who went to sea and negotiated that he went with ocean fleets and a cargo ship and a liner and what was the other one – cargo ship, liner – there were three types – a passenger ship and I had to negotiate the budget in Liverpool with the ocean fleets.
[0:45:05]
And they had sort of artists on board to sort of help well way at that time to do painting at sea or something. George Levantis would be swinging from the side of the cargo ship, chipping off the paint and everything went unto his trollies along with the rest of the – talking about art. And they would be saying, “George, how do you, you know – what are you going to do with your painting and what’s this guy Picasso – you seem to be more ahead of Picasso” and that you know and so it was about talking. But it was also about bringing a different perspective, a discipline to a completely different context, a bi-context – that means all the component parts of the context. That means the people, the orientation of the hosting organization and words are interjected too as well.
Speaker 1: It’s like a double autonomy here in the sense that in one hand an artist was placed, it’s completely autonomized from the world economy because their salary depend on – the reputational economy disappears when you’re on a boat. But at the same time there seems to be an existence…
Speaker 6: But they weren’t paid…
Speaker 1: They all – Latham’s writings, the idea that the artist maintain a certain fundamental autonomy, autonomy of art…
Speaker 6: This was the thing that was negotiated in an association, with any hosting association and that you kept all the way through you know, compromises and what sort of happens or something but that was that there should be no project, work or idea until something developed between the artist and the hosting organization. And the hosting organization would take on this concept and by invitation and through I say the word, “trust” was required and they would be taken on for this period of time in a feasibility period and then after that feasibility period if nothing happened then you could spit it out again and nothing would happen. But if they can make a proposal that would be relevant to go forward, and I use to say and I’ve quoted this before and you’ve heard this all this morning or today or this afternoon – I’d say that that was the biggest achievement was to get the capitalist structure to pay for not knowing. Because they took on the artist on the strength of one does not see things and on what they’ve actually done and what they were capable of. And also they chose these artists out of few people that we’ve put forward and it will be the strength of their personalities and also the artists, all IP’s or whatever would have to respond to the context. They would not have to arrive with a preconceived idea of what they would do, that was absolutely lock on.
Speaker 1: I mean to put it in really contemporary terms; you could say that these artists were using their placements as places of artistic residency…
Speaker 6: How dare you [Laughter].
Speaker 1: Of production and exhibition in a sense that they would arrive with their artistic competence and incompetence, without a preconceived idea and they would take advantage of the I don’t know, the dialogical structure of their colleagues in the place, in the context itself – the context of being at least half the...
Speaker 6: Work.
Speaker 1: The work and not really imagine – the reason I said contemporary because that’s really imaginable in a kind of post-artist environment but in the 1960’s that was the height of Freudism, when in fact…
Speaker 6: Freudism.
Speaker 1: Well I mean it was a very…
Speaker 6: I’m not an academic but I do know these people but I don’t quite – I don’t link the relationship…
Speaker 1: Yeah it was kind of an object-production based economy and not artist economy.
Speaker 6: Yes, absolutely you are completely right. One of the things was the whole notion of bringing something back and then putting on an exhibition was not something – they were so – I could say genuinely all of us was so gripped by the excitement of the new context and the exchanges and where it was working so well that our representatives in the host organization. And for instance in ICI, I would say one of our most successful drop-outs was the marketing manager of ICI Fibres who was so keen on the idea that he dropped out of ICI and started to take a local university course and we’ve known him ever since and he speaks in universities. And strange enough on that particular one ICI the artist was rather traditional where he was holding his artist cloak so to speak.
[0:50:12]
And therefore he didn’t engage so much with the employees and the managers and with everything and the ICI marketing director who came with us to join us in some of these pictures and everything and he spoke on behalf of ICI. And he was in a way the person who was infected by the brief and said the plan is not doing it. And you know so sometimes it was the other side that was sort of being the success and winnings so to speak. I don’t know, I might not be answering your questions, so push me back.
Speaker 1: My questions may not be the right questions either but I mean at that time how did you see this? Did you see this as a way of replacing the mainstream art org in fact I had a promising future if only artists could get out into the – I don’t know, the economic and social mechanisms of the society.
Speaker 6: But I supposed art and economics have been put on – if one looks carefully into the catalog and you see the tampering done by John Latham mainly conspicuously – but the other artists you know like Jeffrey Shaw and the other ones in their various ways and very differently – they were saying you know, if you have 50 – I mean John did that sort of thing which was a negative loss of courage. Which virtually said if you have 50 IP’s – well he was calling them IP’s all the time and other people were calling them IP’s and not Incidental Persons – to something and you get this value or this value and was sort of a negative or plus value all the way. So virtually say, yeah have one of these specialists and one of these types bearing the developed sense of making and listening and non-verbal media skills with the exception project and have these people associated with these structures, something else could happen. And I think that that was – and I’m thinking how can we get burned in the art world or even in something like – I really don’t think that we had that much premises. And that was one of the main reasons why the Arts Council was so pissed off with us.
They were like, we’re thinking of 2005 and you know you’ve only had 10 placements. You know I said in this piece here that the amount that they got and the amount you know, the exchange of everything was ridiculous on what they talked about.
Speaker 7: Barbara would you want to say something about that Art and Economics because…
Speaker 6: Oh yes, yeah so you must pull me on to think because I’d go like this. Well Art and Economics was an exhibition we had at the Hayward Gallery of which this old piece here is from 1970-71 which was the time of the Hayward Gallery and Art and Economics was an exhibition in time – this has been printed out so you can read it after. But it was an exhibition in time which was of two years of talk for us to get those particular placements which was the heavy industry and some of the other ones like Helium, Seckers and people like that to get them to be able to get a result and by result it could have been a report or a process or whatever it was and that was then put into the Hayward Gallery. And I went to talk to Arnold Goodman who was the chairman of the Arts Council and Secretary General [0:54:07] [Inaudible] who was a great little guy too. And I said can we have the Hayward Gallery to demonstrate our placements with these industries…
Speaker 1: So you used gallery spaces as meeting areas?
Speaker 6: What we did was first of all we had to get the placements; we had to get the industries to say that they would be committed to having placements along these lines. We still didn’t quite know when I was doing the negotiations with the Hayward Gallery because it was a major venue of the Arts Council, it was one their biggest buildings in the south bank. So I had to say, “Well look, this is all written in here” I have to say, “Well we’ve got this and this industry and this industry, you think we can get so and so” otherwise they would not listen to us. And he said well do you want the Hayward Gallery and this is Lord Goodman who is the chairman of Arts Council – and I said, “Yes”, and he said, “Ambitious, but I’m sure we can do it with a wheelbarrow overnight” so I use this metaphor in my latest performances of the wheelbarrow overnight in all my diaries in my two years in the talk to actually get that.
[0:55:18]
And then – so we put on this exhibition which had Garth Evans with British Steel and he had all these pieces of steel that he had from Port Talbot which he moved around and shifted. We had the side of the steel – HR side of the steel making process and we were hoping to pipe it in but we couldn’t get it across the Thames so we had to record it from Port Talbot. And it was absolutely deafening and everybody was like, oh god you can’t even get it to Hayward Gallery because there was so much noise and we had John Latham’s smashed up car because John Latham had a near fatal crash with all his x-rays and [0:56:02] [Inaudible]. And that was John’s placement with the south wing as intensive care unit hospital…
Speaker 1: And then it worked in turn…
Speaker 6: And it worked yeah, of course John was…
Speaker 1: Yeah I never even realized that.
Speaker 6: Oh no, absolutely and here he was at Hayward Gallery and then he smashed himself…
Speaker 2: I was going to ask you actually about how direct and easily instrumentalized to make these placements – industrial placements where and it seems like there is a lot of play going on in there like yeah, I mean you were commissioned by a hospital to happen there…
Speaker 6: No, no, no that’s a John Latham because the British Steel and Hillie and British Airways with David Hall where he flew over to go under cloud formations and all the industries that Art and Economics. Their representatives came to their show and had these discussions in our sculpture which was the boardroom. So we had British Airways reading up and saying, “Oh do you want me to make a speech or something” and I said, “No ma’am” and I was in the bath at that time and I said, no we just would like you to come and discuss how it was for you and things like that. So all of them with the exception of John Latham which of course when he had this accident – were very much the placements that were directed and negotiated in the time span of two years – anything from three months to two years with the length of the placements that were done in the industry.
Speaker 8: In this industry but on the other hand Latham also did a placement as a relatively high civil servant at the Scottish…
Speaker 6: That was after the Art and Economics, because after Art and Economics we had this huge sort of close down and I said okay, if that’s the case I’m going to go to the government and…
Speaker 8: Okay, this is actually really helpful, I hope this is easily accessible somewhere but I’ve really – we’ve talked like a day in the past like I still don’t know a lot of these stuff. So I was curious where government bodies came into this as well. Because there was an industry and there was – I want to say NGO’s but that wasn’t really the case…
Speaker 6: No, no but there are NGO’s that are very much more prevalent now than they were so there was art and industry. So in that area of decision making process where institutions are controlling you know…
Speaker 1: So you were able to negotiate that actually artists would take their place in decision making?
Speaker 6: Yes and because in Germany for instance where I haven’t done my German work yet, I would have to pick that up – the minister for Education and Science he was just a fantastic guy – Reimut Jochimsen and he was Minister for Education and Science and he actually stipulated that artist’s activity had relevance to government work which we negotiated with our civil servants and he translated it to German and out it on. But after the Hayward Gallery thing I asked Lord Goodman because we were sort of closed down like this – to write a letter to the Civil Service Department to say that we’ve done good work in industry, and how about the government? And so they wrote this letter with my instructions there. And so this letter went off and then nothing happened as usual because artists dropped it into wastepaper baskets and what good government would do that – so Latham said could we try it again and he said, “Where did you send this to, who were the people?” Then I followed up each of the people they’ve sent it to and then talked to them and some of them were the lucky people that you need to meet like you know the link person in the Department of Environment because they do have Scottish Office environment do have something and also Tony Benn, our wonderful socialist statesman…
[1:00:28]
Speaker 1: Formerly Sir Anthony…
Speaker 6: Sir Anthony who gave up his title to be Tony Benn and I’ve got my thing about Tony Benn being here in the archive and he said, look I think this is really great I mean you saw in my Tony Benn clip. And then he introduced me to Barbara Castle who was head of Health and Social Policy and we had Ian Breakwell and Hugh Davies who was a musician and had people in Stockholm in the Department of Health and they had a long project there which went into age consulting and which went into board or rent in hospitals that they were reviewing at that time. And so three people like Tony Benn through writing this letter and then going after them and finding out who the people were and guided Scottish off themselves and it landed with – was it head of – I can’t remember – I’ve got all these on my Scottish work, you have to watch it though.
Speaker 5: From the way you are describing it now I see very much that you were playing a very active role in initiating kind of doing follow-up phone call for example and where there other people who were equally involved on that level?
Speaker 6: Oh you mean in the follow-up and in the push through and everything…
Speaker 5: Well just in general I mean I see – the picture that I’m getting is that you’re very much – and this is also from what I’ve read about APG – was you were playing this role of initiating and finding and meeting these contacts and then I’d imagine that you were kind of negotiating those institutions and artists and just at some point the artist and the hosting institution. But so were there other people who were equally involved in that same role that you played in mediating and facilitating…
Speaker 6: I think with the whole – No, those initial ones but as soon as there was a sort of – I mean John played a lot of support because you know I’m not an academic I mean he had big over – you know I always consult with him. Sometimes it would be good if he came and sometimes it would be really bad if he came because he could really fire up things. You could go in and there’s one entry and you know which is just doing terribly well and then one entry that doesn’t – he’d be out in the way. But once…
Speaker 1: Would you mean that there’s a fair amount of duplicity involved in negotiating these things?
Speaker 6: What’s duplicity?
Speaker 1: I mean a fair amount of like…
Speaker 5: That’s it, you do have this – because there’s this – because you have those institutions there is this…
Speaker 2: Not entirely forthright is what…
Speaker 5: But then there is a fine line between hospitality and when it becomes hostility. And so I was wondering also about that because we – it’s often times that you’ve had success cases but then you might be labeled as controversial or sensationalists you know explosions. And I’m also wondering about the failures which are also interesting…
Speaker 6: Well the failures where yeah I mean the failures – there were failures along the way. You know when the artists were really sort of doing you know like were well into it and with Ian Breakwell with the Department of Social Security for instance – the teams, the architects that he was working with for Broadmoor and Rampton. They got really ratty about the publicity that could come around Ian as an artist and his sort of his you know, his cloak of being an artist was very different to all of them, why should it be so special and everything. And you know I have to – No, I probably shouldn’t say this – well you might as well just crop this. Is anything scrapable or is it all escapable?
Speaker 1: Everything is scrapable.
Speaker 2: It is although I have to say there’s probably about 60 people listening so if you don’t want people to hear I can definitely clip it from the audio.
Speaker 6: No I’m just sort of thinking about the personality of the people – no I mean there were times where the artist really rub people the wrong way, they’d come back to the APG and they’d say, “Look, why is he having all of these sort of publicity and everything” and you know I have to say that do we have to use the first person – singular on every line Mr. Breakwell.
[1:05:26]
But I don’t you know, I’m fairly aware of the amount of [1:05:28] [Inaudible]. Ian was the most – I mean he was a marvelous artist he got really so much to happen and be done and he was – and in the Tate we have his – in the Tate archive when I was doing I Am An Archive and Adrian Glew who is head of the Archives and the Tate opened up at the end of my [1:05:50] [Inaudible] to welcome to APG world but we had all the banners out when we had that and all that stuff. Felicity Breakwell was his partner because Ian has died unfortunately and she read the report that he got out about how the report was deliberately suppressed on his suggestions for the development of Broadmoor and Rampton hospitals but you know he was fantastic. I mean I’m just saying it’s very difficult to being an artist because they had all these sort of hyper thing around them and better to be pointed out. Like the artists that went to see Esso Petroleum who put on two and a half stone I was told.
The petty officer said, "What we don't really like was he was eating so much and look at that lot of weight he has put on" then I said, well he's eaten for weeks I would say. Well he had had appendix before he went on, I was told to shut up and not move and not leap in defense of the artist. But I think of the ones that did these pioneering placements – these were not failures, they were learning situations and I would consider their use as collateral for youth, for future engagements. Plus the methodology, plus the sublime view – is a big resource and that's what they would want from here.
Speaker 7: A little bit of follow-up on that question, at what point did you – it sound like you went from – you've played multiple roles in this story - one of a partner, one of a mediator, one of a negotiator and I think there's a few more up until possibly an artist now…
Speaker 6: Yes I've returned to being an artist; I suppose it was just before we were selling Archive to the Tate. I was beginning to do performances with my banners of which I did a thing in Berlin called Product & Vision where a banner which was made from the treaty that we negotiated with the government which was really the Civil Service Memorandum which we called, "The Treaty" and I had it translated into Russian. And because I was invited by the Artists Union in St. Petersburg to go and talk to them and open an exhibition called [1:08:46] [Inaudible] which was all about consumers and everything. So I made this banner out of using the pieces from the Civil Service Memorandum then translate them into Russian and getting the artists to – invite an artist to write ingredients and method and everything and in colored Bouche and the dye would come back again in several years time and see whether we've cooked what we have done with our government, could they cook it with some of their thoughts in schools in very different situations and that was sent to an exhibition, the banner and it came back of course in a crate. So I then went to Berlin and did a performance about value which was the concept – not valuable – but when it came back in the crate in a box , it was not edible it was an object and so I did performances around this and I've just been doing it with my wheelbarrow and all the things…
Speaker 7: About a few things that you brought – I mean if it's okay…
Speaker 6: Okay please do.
Speaker 7: I get very quick – how long was your – I simply just want to – about your stats as an artist – consider all of your work from this time to the – what you think would be more easier to describe as tour that's practiced today, or would it be more difficult to describe it that way at that time? Not that it relates to your performance – what you call performance – all of your negotiating, organizing and that sort of thing – would it be more difficult for most of us now to really understand that within an artist's practice?
Speaker 6: Yes.
[1:10:34]
Speaker 7: But when I say most of us, I don’t want to make any blank assumptions but just I'm guessing because people are coming here to Apex to try to hear you speak that thing, I don't know. Maybe like self-selective enough to be able to understand those kinds of activities within the range of artists about this practice, or this thing may have been more difficult then – I was just kind of curious about that because I think only a certain part of a lot of what you've described did you really identified yourself as an artist…
Speaker 6: I have been long time identified myself, I actually sorry if I have interrupted you – I actually only came out one was Me, which was in 1977 when I was in Germany when I changed you know, I used my name Barbara Steveni as something since I was Barbara Steveni which was my maiden name rather than Barbara Latham. Just also hiding behind APG's sort of letters, not necessarily meaning to hide behind them but just not noticing that I was…
Speaker 7: The kind of like the student in a four year…
Speaker 6: Yeah for my practice and my energy and my – whatever it was. And so in more recent time I'm seeing my journey like my actual journey; as my art journey, as my assemblage so I've come much more into a recognition time often what I was doing I guess.
Speaker 5: Do you – I'm trying to figure out when I say this word it doesn't seem quite so reductionist but the question that comes to my mind is what are the gender difference that you were able to reacted and speak on behalf of like you say in the APG and whether that's easy for example to be active because you were speaking on behalf of others. Whereas that thing traditionally there are roles that is not done by for example not women, then it's something that you know I noticed or I'm interested when women find it easier to speak or to act as an agent behind another – kind of whether you've tied it tight enough how you've factored in the environment or whether they've have chose to adapt to that influence…
Speaker 6: I think I was so busy doing and being very excited by the doing and getting that action to happen that I haven't looked at that time. I may began looking at what it was and what I was doing and seeing it in relation to you know my assemblage work which I was doing in the late 60's and 70's and you know my time at task and everything. So I was busy doing and I only looked later and began to reflect too late, I did not notice any difference that's of – it as an artist, as a journey and I think in doing my – these works and these sculptures that I'm pulling out that aspect of it as well. But that's for – this is us going up on the babies in Scotland.
This was as much for looking at generation or change of recognition of gender and what was going on at that time. I mean it's just only very, very recently and actually through Anthony being working at Flat Time House which is John's ex studio which is being made into a research center but also I invited Anthony to be on some Westminster works and my Scottish works that this has come into my practices to – they were looking at the whole journey and at what time I noticed myself being an artist or something. Although you know Chelsea I was that artist and I was making things; yes Anthony Caro saw my assemblage and yes he knew and so I've had different points of recognition maybe of myself.
[1:15:22]
Speaker 1: I think I'd come back to what you actually did and what you thought the effect might be and what the effect actually was. There's an interesting parallel to be drawn I think between the movement of much more politically motivated movement of [1:15:40] [Inaudible] in the late 1960's. Pertaining in the wake of May 1968 in the student union uprisings at that time is that young Marxist would go into the labor force, they would go and deliberately seeking appointment as manual laborers on an assembly line. And it was for two reasons in Marxist discourse is that one, so they would learn the true reality of what it was like to be a worker right, it was like a projection about it and secondly of course it was to teach people whose experience really was really as a worker. Some of the intricacies of Marxist theories were that they would be better equip to emancipate themselves.
Speaker 6: That is interesting.
Speaker 2: And also to steal from – to commit small petty acts of theft.
Speaker 1: And sometimes I mean…
Speaker 6: You mean you actually go into destroying…
Speaker 1: And to sabotage.
Speaker 2: Not necessarily on a large scale but as a part of a process.
Speaker 1: Sabotage was a long part of the labor movement; it didn't require any Marxist student intellectuals to take place. In fact labor emancipation never required this actual talk but it did take place and they can see that there were placements. They called them – they would establish themselves but there was also a certain amount of duplicity involved. In other words they weren't completely upfront about what they were doing. The feeling was that they were not when they actually, effectively use their tools or their skills to achieve social emancipation and so on. So I mean there's a kind of parallel with what you're doing but that was a predictably non-autonomous way of acting, in fact there's almost a slavish commitment to a very specific time and therefore it didn't really go anywhere. So I'm understanding I mean how are you…
Speaker 6: Politically…
Speaker 1: It came out of the same kind of ethos in the 1960's…
Speaker 6: It came – it did came out of the ethos, there was an artist union at that time which you would have started easily talked about in the original you know, 1970's you know own tape. I mean John Latham in particular and I suppose me because I was accused of, "You haven't even read Marx's" desperately like this capital method but it – yeah what were we talking about. I had my line but I was just starting to get lost now – I think that the ethos that was there made another ethos but I do feel that this ethos came very specifically from a motivation of making art and context but that they are being very aware of what the context consist of and that is just the component part of the context, it means it's not a place its time, it's the ends to which the hosting organization is going. Where does it relate to the human race and the planet so to speak.
There was sort of these concepts of what we looked at in the association and I mean we were accused a lot of both things – one of being there to destroy the system, that was one of the things that was labeled to us which might be along the lines of what you had said. But the other one was that you know we were so politically naïve we don't have doubts you know – taking the political force of the workers part of this admin but one of the points about being inside was to be able to operate at all levels of the organization and okay one can be accused of glowing up in the top level. But what was going in at a level where something could happen and then it had to be joined I mean you couldn't do anything without – when you're inside without getting the trust – I call it trust rather than agreement of the workforce whether it be a manager level or whether it be at the employment level you know you have to get that going otherwise nothing was going to happen. So I don't even know if what are those things.
[1:20:22]
Speaker 2: Yeah I mean one of the interesting things is really the explosion of what some people have called organizational art or practice that – rather practices that you know, we're artist sort of cultural, we're cultural actors or whatever and institute themselves in these existing renovations. You know on one hand it's not all that radical, it's kind of at this point – what was I trying to say – and I have heard of people who are creating their own worlds in kind of a different way. See I think I sometimes have a hard time seeing the value in this practice which one of the things that I find fascinating about are artists who whether they are sleeping with the enemy or taking the short approach or the backdoor method if you put it or whether they're actually trying to sabotage or if they are just working with an existing structure and taking it as it is. I think its' a different way of creating a sustaining environment for creative practices especially when it becomes critical way of practice like I find that to be really exciting and interesting.
But I think that there are some who are really having a hard time resolving themselves with one another and one is the directly I think in a really generalized idea – I'm sorry but like I can think a lot of specifics but I can't just bring them enough clearly for a second. I think often people who are working in a directly oppositional way have a hard time coming to terms with people who are working on the insides so to speak, working with existing organizations. There's kind of a flash of you know, world sort of way, this collection that is hard to reconcile sometimes, I guess I was just wondering if you had a hard time dealing with that because of so many of the artists who were involved in this art or in a pretty directly oppositional loss of time…
Speaker 6: Well I mean Stuart for instance, Gustav Metzger but a lot of them…
Speaker 1: This group was in APG?
Speaker 6: They worked in APG but for instance he was very against – when we first did I think Industrial Negative Symposium in '68 and Gustav got up and said I hate all of you sort of something – I want to burn down your factory so British Arts is going to go up in flames, it could be burned down any moment. But then Gustav was one of the people who wanted to come and have a place for later in ICI and so I mean in a way when he heard the way that we were trying to negotiate and because – no it was not ICI, it was IBM sorry – and we were…
Speaker 1: So you got elected to their…
Speaker 6: Well we were proposing it when we were negotiating it with IBM and IBM said produce this paradox – I don't know if I'm getting it right with what – if you're doing what they think you're doing, we wouldn't have you anywhere near us. And if you're not doing that there's no point in having it – a terrific paradox. It was a rather good paradox but I just remembered on that one.
Speaker 7: Do you like – when you enter into an organization I think there's a risk now in it's history but it seems to kind of figure out or stop in a way with your realization of who you were in the late 70's and today where there seems to be this missing history which is the 80's or the 90's. And that was something else, that was a way of life, an organization and eventually …
Speaker 6: Yes I know that's quite true, we broke this out again – this is why the whole idea of that they could be…
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, can you rephrase that question again for a moment, I was going to try to but…
Speaker 6: There's a gap here between the history and…
Speaker 1: Yeah 20 years basically.
Speaker 6: 20 years that's…
Speaker 2: There was this anger in the years between the 80's and the 90's…
Speaker 6: They're fucking awful…
Speaker 2: Soon after the 70's in this vein of APG, there comes something else…
[1:25:07]
Speaker 6: Yes we had to get this – we had to change the name from Artist Placement to another name because the Arts Administration and Authorities were going to do their placements weren't they and things were not under the same – they were not under the motivation and the brief that we set up with APG so we changed the name to Organization and Imagination which was also from nothing to finding out and from O+I. So we did that and under that when they sort first of approaches to the government again and also when we did some oversees placement and stuff but when the late about government came in I thought oh wow great – and we got socialist work again – and but of course they hit the ground running and they really didn’t need to know about artists in that way because it had all to do with celebrities and things like that.
So that took a lot of energy and time so in doing that but now it seems that especially using the events like the selling of the archive and the TATE, the school and the archive that took a lot of courage thinking both in government interest and everything again and we also did some educational projects in that meantime. And so it was the end of our labor which was the end of London Education Authority and the education projects and schools which were not artisan schools and had to look at policy of the changed curriculum. And we did those, we just wanted to work something good.
Speaker 2: I think it's important to look at the successes and look at the failures as well because ultimately – it's actually hard to say once it's in that state currently but many of us working – we don't have so much history as we are working today…
Speaker 6: I really wanted to you know have some more time on your working today lessons and all that you know – all that I haven't got that…
Speaker 1: I had the sense that you might feel that we're reinventing the wheel in a certain sense, you know what I mean. Debates that which got really clearly summed up – those are things that you were confronting I don’t know before we were born and in certain sense so it was kind of disappointments to – I kind of wonder how do you – do you think things have moved on or do you think they've just sort of repeated themselves?
Speaker 6: Well we have a different time, we have a different context to do these things and I think that APG's history and also it's method is very appropriate to be used and to be used as collateral and I think it is terribly encouraging to hear like in this show different ways people are working and that it is possible to look again and see whether one can one use the methodology and the experience – all the successes and the failures. I mean I've just been talking to Robert about the ones that worked and everything I mean what didn't work are sort of in the archives of the TATE that we didn't get that far from these other reasons and I use these in my performances where I have to arrive at a [1:28:50] [Inaudible] keep them in the grow backs to grow again spores and I mean that's – but I think that it's not reinventing the wheel, although somebody did say that the worse in the world of Arts, somebody was sitting next to Nixon as he wrote – and so director of the TATE gallery and he said, "What we need is a contemporary APG" I thought it felt when I was told that that there is a contemporary APG but it's how it – what is appropriate to do and that’s why we were looking at often economics too.
What would the issues be, what would the motivation be, how strong will it be and they wouldn't be just government and industry – they would be the issues, they would be the issues of the day and that is really what we're looking at and seeing whether it's possible you know from people like you.
Speaker 2: Absolutely you were talking about the [1:29:45] [Inaudible] project earlier – I want to find out more about that like just at least the little – but you did talk about that – I get the sense that it was somehow translated what you all have done in one context into another context and other people were kind of testing that out somewhere. And I think time plays a factor too I mean it really hasn't been all that long in the sense like we have now an academic almost discipline like there's different discipline organizational studies and – I wouldn't say the frightening thing but the thing that makes me feel – that's much more difficult for artists to not necessarily escape but just to not as easily be instrumentalized by the…
[1:30:41]
Speaker 6: That’s the fear isn't it the institutionalization, the bureaucracy eroding the artist…
Speaker 1: I think it's more than that, I think it's the economy. We live in a area of creative capitalism in the sense that we're creatives – not artists necessarily but creative types are hijacked and harnessed and yoked to the wheel of production…
Speaker 2: And willingly as well…
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 6: As you say they expect them to – oh I see that’s' the funding stream or whatever you know.
Speaker 2: It's a hard time now because on one hand you need to do a certain – you need to play a certain ball or whatever right to get to actually do the kind of practice where you have something for yourself in some way into existing organization. You know you can't come in there with Molotov cocktail, you have to – right, right exactly…
Speaker 6: What did you say?
Speaker 2: Now that sounds like a porno or something, hello? Anyways just that like – I don't know where that came from but one hand you know, you have to have a certain amount of integration and acceptance of playing a game that you're not necessarily fond of in order to get somewhere with it. Because you're actually – you're not a secessionist, you are – this type of practice is a negotiation but strong negotiations.
Speaker 6: Strong negotiations.
Speaker 2: The hard thing is like how do you actually have not to like have all these laying metaphors but you know the cards in your hand that you can actually play so you can be a strong negotiator now when organizations are – I wouldn't want to pretend that oh this was back before any company knew about advertizing, they weren't all that savvy. I realized they were savvy but this is like really savvy now, especially along these lines. Yeah and like specifically it's like you actually – when you go to business when you're trained basically on how to properly use artists…
Speaker 6: Exactly, exactly…
Speaker 2: So yeah I think we're up against something kind of different now…
Speaker 6: Yes that is what one is up against and in a way we've helped create it you know and but the business of questioning the motivation and finding an echo of people and stuff in it I mean that's almost out of skill in negotiation. All I can say is let's use what we managed to do in whatever way, see whether that could be used as an example like this is what happened other than seeing it would be different in this context and in this time but this is the approach that managed to make…
Speaker 1: But really the knots and bolts I mean, in those negotiations where you learning things, I mean was it really I think trying to – who would pick these guys, these leaders the captains of industry – are they letting artists into their workplaces? Or was it really like also you were learning something from them or was it a cyclical process…
Speaker 6: I do think that we were learning something from them I mean when I say learning was learning their world and also learning about – that was an interesting thing I'd like to – learning about the individuals in organizations who – and they are relative attachment to the job and then to themselves as individuals and you really begin to feel that in the pressures in the stuff so when we did the catalogue with the Times Business Forum – I think one of the things you know the more that my job is worth, the more of sort of you know and where that could in some way – oh god, I'm sounding so ridiculous – it was where you could win out and then the exchange and where the exchange began to fuse.
[1:35:10]
And It's short at times but I've always been an optimist and this also been taken cared of and I – is that I feel at this time where you know the economy has shown itself to be more of a tease where the planet and the human race is certainly tough to be what it is. That there is something to be worked on here that is worthwhile of which this could be utilized in some way and I think after Economics II however were developed could be a really interesting worthwhile I think to throw out.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about the term like the embedded artist? This is a term I've heard…
Speaker 6: Embedded in what?
Speaker 1: You know it's very…
Speaker 6: I haven't heard of that term.
Speaker 1: Well it was a term that I first heard from the Swiss artist and I suppose embedded artist Ursula Biemann who considers herself to be an embedded artist. Basically she considers herself to be a secret agent…
Speaker 6: Oh my god, oh no near…
Speaker 1: And you know the embedded journalists are these guys – well not only guys I mean people – who…
Speaker 6: You mean investigating…
Speaker 1: The company troops for example in Afghanistan or in any part wherever they are deployed, and they dress up – they wear the same gear as the soldiers and do the same – they sleep under the same trees and they march on the same…
Speaker 2: Action research or…
Speaker 1: And basically they expose themselves to the same risks because you would report back into the front line so these are called embedded journalists and of course it has been taken out after some extent by the – by an artist. So if I'm going to do that I'm going to be an embedded artist and I'm going to go with a group of archeologists or a group of anthropologists or a group of whatever and – except that I'm going to bring my particular lens – and I don’t mean the camera – I mean focusing device for example. Do you find that a troubling term or do you think that’s' an interesting – like pursuing something if you have….
Speaker 6: I mean that’s another way of – rather around a similar way of pursuing such an action. It's the question of the motivation at that time like where's the motivation going on in that and what is it's effect on asking that question of the effect of the impact of themselves…
Speaker 7: That’s' interesting the effect I mean the way the embedded person is speaking through a consistency outside that is watching or expecting or waiting for someone for resolved. I think that's where we differentiate APG and that you didn’t seem to be going into the frontlines knowing that at the other hand on the flight on your return trip you would be eager to read or listen or see what you will be producing I think – I mean your absence in that return trip seems to be decisive and you weren't speaking for anybody back home. Your home seems to have dissolved…
Speaker 6: That's an interesting thing is that's yes, yes…
Speaker 8: In a way we're sort of more excited, there is definitely the feeling that there is a safety – there is a public out there and that is safe watching this from their homes with museum which can see this in the safety and so they will appreciate that risk taking. But here the risk taking was shared with the duo who would go and have to follow that…
Speaker 1: I totally agree, it's a very different paradigm actually. I think embedded artists almost presupposes that you've taken a conventional exhibition practice and the gathering for that into a unusual production context. But I think the APG did something already, actually that’s why rather glibly but nevertheless – but I wasn't even suspicious, when I said in fact it was conceived as a place of residency, production and exhibition because the entire art – I guess this leads to a question. This leads to a question like the title of Marissa's book – did this lead to exhibiting by products? Did the placements lead to producing art objects in an inverted plate which is dry clean and might – you know we've seen a bit of conceptual art right? Things that just happened to be produced along the way and they ended up being the finality…
Speaker 6: They didn't have to be at all, I think the fact that Hayward Gallery or the fact that like what you said embedded back into the art world and you that's some description of that Incidental Person thing – the fact that we did that and that it was down didn't seem to be and certainly wasn't the motivation. The motivation was making the work whether it was published or put back into a gallery or something somewhere, somewhat.
[1:40:16]
And I think in doing the Hayward show for instance it was a demonstration and a questioning of value of what would be possible of new forms of association that would be new forms of art. I don't know if that makes sense…
Speaker 1: We have a question – oh I'm sorry…
Speaker 5: Let's just say that I am taking an opportunity of taking out the by-product and kind of junking back to the earlier part and the early part of this conversation – I mean the word by-product to me was a curious thing that it talks about the way that that's colloquially used that the term by-products is that it's an industry or system and by-product is sometimes kind of chanced upon and it's as thing that kind of comes out of a larger system. And what I noticed in artist practices that are involved or integrated themselves into an industrial or a governmental systems is that they're – and what's interesting to me is that there's this listening like and there's this kind of reciprocally between the artist and the hosting institution. So the by-product I think to me was kind of open-ended term, I think it's really pragmatic at times when there are – there is an emphasis and a kind of pressure for the arts produced in the gallery and that it's in entirely different minds and it's like uprooted from it's context and from the people involved in the creation…
Speaker 6: That's what I mean, uprooted from it's context…
Speaker 5: Yeah and so that's kind of a negotiation or kind of negotiating or code switching on behalf of the artist if they are asked to because they are often times I think talking or asked to talk to two artists in two different audiences but…
Speaker 1: I disagree with you actually; I think it's not so much a market pressure as it is a museulogical…
Speaker 6: The museum.
Speaker 1: Blindness because these artists are some of the most favorite cases of these artists who died young for example for those who died in the 60's and in the 70's who were not represented necessarily by galleries now but its' the museums which are fetishizing and rarifying of the object...
Speaker 5: That need archival…
Speaker 1: Yeah because they have to show something because the whole physical and conceptual architecture of their space is promised upon them.
Speaker 6: Yes exactly and how also…
Speaker 1: First I'm not trying to let the market off the hook but oftentimes I think in this higher end of the value production within the art world museums are really much more – they certainly have a play of very perfidious role…
Speaker 6: Well they have to justify the government spending for – big capital spending for their actual bricks and mortar of the museums. So all these business about them threatening for access and you know educational programs and the conceptual art movement would be another part of that as well.
Speaker 5: Well I think it's even this kind of institutional logic which hasn't even – perhaps has nothing even to do with the archival quality of things but for example I have this friend who works at the MOMA here in New York and she is in the new media section – it's not the film section, it's not the sculpture section and so she has to always qualify herself, produce something or kind of contain something within it. So it's all these kind of like annoying institutional habits that can get in the way of making an archive's distinction.
Speaker 2: And it's part of their role as an institution is that let's figure it two ways – yeah exactly and kind of like to get these organization to eat their sandwiches and thank them for it, to find ways to not necessarily meet their expectations…
Speaker 1: Well we have actually a question here…
Speaker 7: And as the strength of that what you call yourselves now when you say my projects are my practices and I am not – they were saying like something similar but very different with what you're saying that my personal work is not an object, it's not a collection, it's not an institutionalized entity but it is repository, it is labeled as – I mean there is something very strong about being able to answer I Am An Archive to the institution because then we're really resisting opposition but for me that's not true.
[1:45:11]
Speaker 2: The archive is kind of a colonizing kind of way…
Speaker 6: No I'm keeping the archive beyond the Acid-Free as I've said for my thing like keeping it, by calling myself the Archive although the Archive is there you know I'm keeping it beyond the Acid-Free by action and by performing it.
Speaker 1: Anthony's was quite – I mean I had questions rather than it could be a point as well. One of the most interesting archives of conceptual art in the 60's is the [1:45:49] [Inaudible] archive from Argentina and the person the woman who is the owner of that archive or basically who has that archive is [1:46:02] [Inaudible]. And the most interesting thing about that archive is when she talks about it, well you can see the pictures and you can read the texts and it's been – but it's really when she was there when she points at it and says, oh this was when…
Speaker 6: Yes this is what I find that I was going into the archive and I said, oh did we do that and something, something it was Adrian Glew's up on here recording the archive as I speak so there's a lot of that sort of going on to actually…
Speaker 2: And he could probably just do a lot of that on Facebook, just use Facebook to archive your every move and your…
Speaker 6: I mean this is rather what's happening to my house if I've got cameras up here you know from there so that anything I'm making is you know – I'm making and I'm sifting and you know this is what the stand report about or the population is and this is what we were coming up. I mean its' a nightmare, you've got cameras coming up me all the time.
Speaker 2: So when we get to visit you basically it wouldn't be a part of your archive…
Speaker 6: Yes you won't.
Speaker 1: Okay we have a question here actually I think David I think from Post Autonomy has asked three questions now – should I read them or would David want to come on and read them yourself?
Speaker 2: If he does then I'll have to turn off the – hold on a second David…
Speaker 6: I love that.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's what he is suggesting – okay go ahead and do that okay, well actually one was a bit…
Speaker 3: I think three is the letter to him…
Speaker 2: Okay one was in the context for this was you were talking – well I'm not exactly sure the context – the context was yeah thanks – well let me just ask this question, you'll probably get a better sense than I do. Does this include a nostalgic view of the former Avant Garde scripts such as the 0+1…
Speaker 1: O + I …
Speaker 2: Oh is that what he was referring to – I thought he was talking about something else but then okay then I do get that. Yeah so does that include the nostalgic view of the former Avant Garde groups such as Organization + Imagination? I'm not sure I completely understand…
Speaker 1: You know it was in reference to the Marxist question about things becoming fetishized and becoming derivatives or by-products, standing in for the real thing and to what extent is O + I susceptible to that kind of a pitfall and to what extent is it avoided, I think this is his question. That was his first question, and the second…
Speaker 2: Maybe we should just kind of go one at a time…
Speaker 6: I don’t know what I could quite sort of part of this – perhaps Anthony can be drawn in here. Well one of the things is that we changed the name from APG for the couple of reasons given; the arts institutions were apparently doing something which was not for artist's original intention. Also as Flat Town House with John's works and theories is an active spore you might say and because I Am An Archive is the other active spore in the process of knowing or not until there's something relevant that will come out of this present thing to really – whatever it is consuming you have to keep this organization going for something and so you can consider this a spore, here is a spore so it is something else and organize in a morph stage and this is maybe this is what it's morphing into.
Speaker 2: Yeah I get the sense that…
Speaker 6: I don’t know whether that's a…
Speaker 2: It's not purely an archiving, it's just a keepsake or something.
Speaker 6: Absolutely not, it's an active living thing about practice and the relevance of practice of this type of artist engagement and you know society is not…
[1:50:37]
Speaker 1: This leads to David's second question which is more sort of deep cutting question is this: Isn't the overall question here whether there is a continued value in the Avant Garde and to extend that question the value of autonomous artists and the privilege role of the artist in shaping reality. It's true that throughout the discussion there has been a presupposition that – both a privilege and of agency. I mean not all artists have this privilege role because they can actually change reality. I think that David is wanting to question both whether artists really do shape reality and just what – is it really anything more than just a privilege to do whatever sort of top full range shenanigans that occurs to them.
Speaker 6: Well I know the word privilege hangs around the word artist and also has done. I do actually believe that art expressions do and can change things and always have done the history and when they contextualize in different places they will take an effect on their context and people that they are encroached with and this is my belief and this is what I've seen and this is what is clear I think the case. Of course by moving into these different context of meeting up against the things that are going to be a completely different sample form of what it is that this context is not going to make of this so called privileged Incidental Person con-artist or whatever.
Speaker 5: And I think the notion of the Incidental Person makes a more interesting answer is because it implies that not to assume that artist is…
Speaker 6: Not assuming that he is an artist…
Speaker 5: The work is so self contained but he needs the context and all the operational contextual place which…
Speaker 6: And also that by using perhaps that term it can apply to any person, specialists who is working using the skills of that particular you know knowledge, life development that they've been set on the course of involved in that sense. I mean it's interesting that Stuart was actually sort of saying a bit there about you know it could be anything, I don't have to be a bloody officer I guess you know it could be anything. So I do think Incidental Person however annoyed people might have been at that time and however cultish it might be on the privileged term artist could be a useful one to deploy for an expert and I will take away the word privilege because it's just kind of different set of skills.
Speaker 1: But the question is strategies did take advantage of the privilege the symbolic…
Speaker 6: Absolutely, absolutely…
Speaker 1: Like why are you able to have a strong negotiating position at times – the Ministers, the Councilors…
Speaker 6: It has been something else, I have been accused of that.
Speaker 1: Certainly on that accusation but I mean it's clear that was part of the strategy and that anyone has the right to look like a Cabinet Minister first of all to get a meeting with a Cabinet Minster and look them into their eyes and listen this is what – this, that and the other thing and be taken seriously.
[1:55:06]
Speaker 6: Yeah but as you can see as Tony Benn is saying there was no difference –we're all people and okay some managed to get to Tony Benn because he lived up the road you know. So you wouldn't bump into him in the station but you meet whoever they are whether they are cabinet ministers or steel workers or apprentices or something as he says on that thing they are all people and that's somehow this – you're carrying your skill – also I'm messing about John…
Speaker 1: I think you're right you know if we are talking about competency and about the privilege state sans the artist that I figured I'm kind of curious to hear what he was saying…
Speaker 5: I probably thought Avant Garde…
Speaker 1: No I just felt you were sort of back paddling your efforts because you may have been going up force but I kind of found the connection…
Speaker 6: No I mean I do feel very strongly and I know I don't have to say I feel strongly I mean it is recognized throughout history about the artist and the part of being able to change something because of a recognition or fusion in another off of something that they feel is the truth about the human race or something like that. Is all I'm saying is bring another specialist and it's not a privilege and maybe we could use the term Incidental Person, I'm just saying really this other one being and fight back the capitalist structure on which will use artist – you know use oh we’ve got the artist now or something in whatever way.
But it's a different fight and we have to do but it's a very good fight that we can use as stuff to fight with.
Speaker 7: Maybe in all it's existence we use of the first part of the Incidental which is the incident…
Speaker 6: The Incident.
Speaker 7: And I think that it is also this strategy would affect me – help you with a fighting chance you know there's definitely a sense you were creating a structure or organization or strategy that allows the chance and allows your…
Speaker 6: It has to allow for chance and it has to allow for risks and all – everybody knows that if you – if this is not allowed to take place well nothing can change and also you know I find it partly interesting talking with the civil service and management place – oh you know they all know all about these things about managing risk bar. We'd get the download about managing risks but the whole point about it was that they wouldn’t risk managing risk you know so maybe that's another interaction there.
Speaker 1: To rift a little bit on that question that a subject in question has been asked – one of the points of so called relation aesthetics have been most sort of…
Speaker 6: Is that Claire?
Speaker 1: Directly criticized is for making these sort of floorings out of the art world per se into the life or other life worlds. But not really to do anything of substance there but really to sort of behave in a really colonial fashion. In other words to colonize those life worlds and then to repatriate the objects or the artifacts really that would have been gleamed in this process back into the art world for the greater glorification of the artist and really of not much good at all. So I mean I wouldn't – so the question really was how is the use of space as APG used space and context by APG or Incidental Persons different from this colonization of life worlds which we – which unfortunately we are really, really problematic which used to be called relational aesthetics.
Speaker 6: Well I could be very interested in Claire coming up to our thing because she's done a lot of research for APG and said that it was very different and this is why I wanted to know what are the things that she was finding – what were they different.
[2:00:03]
I think I can go along with that idea of going on colonizing and then bringing back again and having it for the artist because I don’t think the worlds like that now. I mean if you look at absolutely every form of anything it's all being a part of everything else and you know the internet and sampling of music and I don't think it's colonized and brought back again and I think it's taking a different direction and making something new. I don’t think it’s called the art world if you see what I mean. I'm probably not doing very well in here, remember I'm not an academic.
Speaker 2: If I can interject for a second, can I speak up here for just a second?
Speaker 6: What do you mean speak out for me…
Speaker 2: I'm just kidding…
Speaker 6: I don't even understand how Skype is skyping I mean I don't…
Speaker 2: I mean I was just telling them that but basically about specifically Artist Placement Group – the Organization + Imagination, I feel like it's a bit different here than in the UK, even the awareness of that work but my understanding is that this is not necessarily even though we're talking about maybe at least 40 years later you know like it's not necessarily highly visible even currently what was going on then. I feel like it's easier to level that critic when artists are much more visible and it's sort of obvious that a lot of the secondary game that we're getting is for the enhancement of careers or you know we are sort of claiming a lot or gaining a lot from that work. Basically the possible facts of what these sort of social practices like have is in those cases its' really easy and often times probably true to say that they are like secondary if that too. Like the benefit that we are getting for ourselves you know but I feel like I'm not sure that that was necessarily case for – I mean it would be harder for…
Speaker 1: It's a sober question to ask though because it's all to easy to suppose that you know art is good and more art is therefore better and that is kind of one of the built in suppositions I think of art in public space, in the broader sense of public space which actually wasn’t a private space, business spaces and so on.
Speaker 6: I would question the word good, I mean I don’t think more out or art is good it is what could be said to be going on to use a John Latham phrase that anything is happening and is being made here like don’t make more follies, don't be you know – just question what it is, the action is. Now that this so called art and Incidental Person is out there and is affecting much more than his you know – I mean he is in contact much more. I want to say affecting it does or doesn't so I don’t think I wouldn’t ever sort of say art is good or art is something that I could say for instance, that art does affect change and therefore where one does it and when one does it and whatever it is that one does needs to be questioned very, very strongly.
Speaker 7: We could request certain questions if you allow us –someone asked about that the other day and maybe I can ask that if you don't mind…
Speaker 6: Sure.
Speaker 7: Elise Lozano was asking that she'd like to know your opinions Barbara on change like really what that means were where you've seen this happened historically, and what you felt were the APG impacts. I think that may have been addressed briefly on that.
Speaker 6: Why don’t you – using those on placements again you know the ones that I have quoted and I haven't quoted I think there was a…
Speaker 1: Barbara I just want to make a connection…
Speaker 2: I think I lost that interaction earlier – well we might as well keep talking until that gets resolved…
[2:05:05]
Speaker 6: I just think about change that the areas that definitely have sort of changed I mean for instance there was a change in the marketing director ICI who said you know he may have thought of this was great and this would affect future managers of ICI but he was the one that dropped out rather than you know the artist and stuff that lead to this sort of change. I think that what happened on the Esso Tanker was a big amount of change on the people that they came up against. What against – came out who they touch with, I think it 's affected the art institution whether for good or bad I don't know I mean there would be lots of change as a result of the actions. Steel Corporation had lots of change, the artists involved in my works – it was amazing to get in these different venues. There was a Lisa coming from – it wasn't the Lisa from Flat Town House was it?
Speaker 2: No she is on the – I don't think so, she's doing a socialist colony project in the US on the West Coast. I'm sorry I'm forgetting the exact state right now but it's yeah it's in the US.
Speaker 6: There was definitely a lot of changes on both sides I mean it was typical change and that's of just the individuals but then how it actually affected a bigger policy change or something I think the Germans or Scottish – I have to go into each of them with details. It's definitely changed, hastened or brought on a new position for artist engagement in society in a wider way whether that's a good thing or a bad thing – I'm not using good.
Speaker 5: Well good because I was just going to say that [2:07:15] [Inaudible] was one of the – he was one of the founders of Xerox part, he had this term productive friction that we already spoke about and there's this other artist from Canada Darren O'Donnell and he wrote this book, Social Acupuncture and it's about – this idea that working in other organizations and this is like less specific like APG is working in an institution but he had this – he compared this to acupuncture which is really painful and you've got to feel something but it's painful. So I think the definitions that involve the foreground and understanding are actually…
Speaker 6: That's an interesting take.
Speaker 1: We're on my computer here.
Speaker 8: Alright great, thanks Steven.
Speaker 1: I think we are just about done, that was a good question coming – I'm afraid you've missed the answer to it. Next time.
Speaker 8: So I'll be.
Speaker 6: Who is that guy?
Speaker 1: it’s Greg from the Atlanta…
Speaker 6: Alright, right.
Speaker 8: Hi how are you thank you so much for an amazing, amazing talk.
Speaker 1: You've had a busy day Barbara maybe we should wind it…
Speaker 2: Well in fact normally just before eight sometime we generally wind things up it's just been so interesting that I haven't even realized until the internet cut for me but…
Speaker 6: So does it cut off after a certain time, okay.
Speaker 7: If you could just you know people who were talking can have an audio recording and can give you the…
Speaker 2: That would be great yeah – I don’t know if you guys have heard that at all because our mics probably not connected…
Speaker 1: Yeah this is my computer mic there would be a number of events this week at Apexart around this exhibition the Incidental Person and on Saturday there will be a panel discussion with Barbara.
Speaker 6: And Noah Latham who is just flying here…
Speaker 1: Yes and there's also…
Speaker 6: Garth Evans also and Judy Martin is that tomorrow?
Speaker 1: And Anthony Hudek has generously offered to give us a copy of that debate which had to do something with post on the Plausible Worlds what's that – should we wind up to that?
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah, definitely this is really interesting we will continue right now.
Speaker 6: I wanted to hear much more about Post Art worlds but I don't just have much time to…
Speaker 1: You are more than welcome, thank you so much Barbara. Thank you to Anthony also for making this possible and thank you very much to Steven Ranch and…
Speaker 6: Where is he?
Speaker 1: Somewhere, he's in the wings somewhere. It was a good pleasure.
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you.
[2:10:24] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$1114586eea1678f1" title="#basekamp/$1114586eea1678f1">Artist Placement Group (@ Basekamp & Apexart) http://bit.ly/9QWMVy (#basekamp/$1114586eea1678f1)
Created on 2010-02-17 01:46:52.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:46:17
- Hello Leah & Scott
- Leah Anderson: 17:46:26
- hello
- Julian: 17:46:43
- http://www.skype.com/intl/en/share/publicchats/join/?skypename=basekamp&...
- Julian: 17:46:52
- did you get the link?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:52:05
- atrowbri!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:52:08
- welcome
- utcplausibleartworlds: 17:52:11
- niiiiiiice re: link connect
- utcplausibleartworlds: 17:52:34
-
- BASEKAMP team: 17:52:59
- you know it. (this is greg btw)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:02:57
- hello stephen
- stephen wright: 18:03:09
- Hello!
- scottrigby: 18:03:13
- hello guys
- scottrigby: 18:03:28
- so we're at Apexart, and people are chatting in the background -- which i asume is all beign picked up
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:52
- Hendrix ghost at Apexart?
- scottrigby: 18:04:01
- haha yeah
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:24
- hey everyone we will most likely get started soon
- scottrigby: 18:04:30
- great
- stephen wright: 18:04:38
- Give us 5
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:48
- sure Stephen
- scottrigby: 18:05:13
- Greg - will you flag us on the text chat if we're not hearing someone?
- scottrigby: 18:06:08
- the thing is we just need to keep the speakers low so we don't get feedback. We can mute whenever we need to, and raise the speakers up
- scottrigby: 18:06:11
- if that sounds ok?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:28
- Hey everyone, tonights a bit unique in that we are bridging NYC & Philly so please hang tight everyone
- scottrigby: 18:09:49
- ok, so our audio at Apexart is a little too high-tech the mic is uber-sensitive, so we have to turn down the speakers -- otherwise we get Hendrix-like effects...
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:10:13
- test
- scottrigby: 18:11:51
- what that means is that we likely won't be able to hear you, until we know you want to chat -- and then we'll mute our audio and turn up our spekers
- scottrigby: 18:12:05
- if that makse sounds ok to everyone?
- scottrigby: 18:15:32
- hey everyone -- we haven't started the audio yet -- we'll let you know as soon as we do
- bojana romic: 18:15:47
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:23
- As Scott mentioned, we've not begun just yet, waiting for some more people to file in at ApexArt in NYC.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:17:36
- ok
- scottrigby: 18:18:29
- So everyone - let's use the text-chat to organize starting the audio. We're getting close to starting here
- scottrigby: 18:18:56
- it's shaped up to be highly informal here -- which we'll wrangle very soon. Within minutes....
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:08
- Scott I was planning on calling everyone and whomever doesn't want it can decline the call
- stephen wright: 18:20:00
- scott is coming toward the table...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:28
- ok ApexArt is settling down, audio soon.....?
- stephen wright: 18:21:12
- 60 seconds
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:26
- Scott's making the plea...Stephen says 60 secs.....
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:35
- count it down everyone
- stephen wright: 18:21:37
- 45 and counting
- stephen wright: 18:22:22
- trying to get the participants to the table!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:30
- stephen's gonna have to do some fuzzy math pretty soon
- scottrigby: 18:22:36
- so Greg, if you'd like to start adding people to the chat -- and we'll continue to ask them to mute their audio... we can go ahead and get started whenever
- scottrigby: 18:22:41
- haha
- stephen wright: 18:23:10
- GO!
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:23:52
- we have audio
- scottrigby: 18:24:01
- Great - hi everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:06
- great to hear utc
- anthony sawrey: 18:24:18
- im so there!!
- magdalenatc: 18:24:25
- hi there.
- anthony sawrey: 18:24:31
- feedback occuring
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:33
- please mute your mics everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:39
- great
- magdalenatc: 18:24:39
- done
- anthony sawrey: 18:24:43
- perfecto
- magdalenatc: 18:24:45
- fantastic
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:24:50
- some feedback
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:36
- if you are not currently on audio please let us know if you want to be
- scottrigby: 18:25:42
- how's the feedback now?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:48
- ok here Scott
- scottrigby: 18:25:54
- great
- bojana romic: 18:25:57
- perfect
- magdalenatc: 18:25:58
- no feedback, great sound
- mabel: 18:26:14
- very good sound indeed
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:26:57
- yes the sound is good, but I didnt catch the name of the speak. Is it barbara Stravini?
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:27:02
- sound is great
- scottrigby: 18:27:15
- Davig G :Yes -- Barbara Steveni from APG
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:27:35
- ok - sorry about the spelling
- scottrigby: 18:27:42
- fr anyone interested in a short intro: http://basekamp.com/about/events/artist-placement-group-basekamp-apexart
- scottrigby: 18:28:12
- oh, it was my misspelling -- it's part of the process
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:25
- Salem shall I add you to the audio?
- scottrigby: 18:28:38
-
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:28:57
- hi, thanks, sure!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:46
- by chance...
- scottrigby: 18:32:06
- ^^
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:56
- don't mince words Stephen
- scottrigby: 18:35:54
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:49
- hi did the audio start/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:50
- ?
- scottrigby: 18:37:10
- greg, can you add MGB to the chat?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:32
- (sorry if this is confusing, this is phiilly bk)
- anthony sawrey: 18:38:49
- whoah, wheres the video? i missed that bit
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:01
- scott I don't see him?
- scottrigby: 18:39:22
- yeah - the video isn't online currently -- we're talking with Barbara to help make that happen, but not yet
- scottrigby: 18:40:51
- the video is here at Apexart -- we'll let you all know (if anyone's interested, please comment on this week's event page on basekamp's website http://bit.ly/9QWMVy, and we can keep you posted there)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:53
- yes
- scottrigby: 18:44:08
- oh -- michael -- can you use your personal account?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:13
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:14
- brb
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:17
- you need to log in as a diff user
- scottrigby: 18:44:25
- in order to get on the audio, you need a separate acct - thx ]
- mabel: 18:45:14
- is video working now?? I didn't understood it
- scottrigby: 18:45:24
- no video - only audio
- mabel: 18:45:36
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:52
- hi mgb
- scottrigby: 18:45:53
- there is a video playing here @ apexart, but it's not available online yet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:01
- can you mute your mic mgb
- scottrigby: 18:46:02
- hello Basekamp space!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:23
- michael, can you mute your mic please
- scottrigby: 18:46:34
- michael, in the skype audio window, the mute is a little icon in the lower left
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:38
- thx
- scottrigby: 18:46:43
- second from the left ----- cool
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:55
- thx scott
- scottrigby: 18:47:15
-
- michael g bauer: 18:47:28
- hello thank you we are connected
- scottrigby: 18:47:48
- w00t!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:15
- michael, seems your mic is still on, no?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:46
- there is a small mic icon in the call window, can you mute?
- michael g bauer: 18:48:59
- will do sorry
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:07
- ha ha no worries, thx!
- scottrigby: 18:49:21
- basekamp space --- also let us know if you want to speak --- we'll have ot pause here & turn up the speakers at that time. --- just let us know here on the text chat, because it'd be easy for us to speak over people
- scottrigby: 18:58:00
- btw, if anyone has questions, we can start queueing them any time
- scottrigby: 18:58:41
- this is marisa jahn asking the quesition now -- can you all hear the question ok? assuming yes
- michael g bauer: 18:58:57
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:00
- yes, please type any comments and/or questions here in the text and Scott can help
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:12
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:00:14
- deceitful?
- stephen wright: 19:00:53
- not quite deceitful, but involving some tongue biting.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:22
- everything!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:51
- audio redaction
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:46
- 1 stone = 14 pounds
- scottrigby: 19:04:30
-
- stephen wright: 19:04:31
- Antony Hudek speaking
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:41
- Elysa would you like to be added to the call?
- Elysa Lozano: 19:05:52
- hello! please!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:38
- welcome Elysa
- Elysa Lozano: 19:06:46
- thank you!
- magdalenatc: 19:09:20
- hi greg, i am out of the audio, can you add me again. thanks
- magdalenatc: 19:09:45
- ok, i see it is not only me
- scottrigby: 19:10:02
- please don't call -- Basekamp will call you -- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:21
- others who need to be added to audio?
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:10:27
- yes
- scottrigby: 19:10:30
- but please do let us know in the text chat if you've been dropped ----
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:10:36
- ok
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:11:17
- need audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:22
- a reminder to newcomers to please mute your mic
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:58
- sr I've tried a couple of times...nothing on your end?
- scottrigby: 19:12:39
- sr, you'll need to accept a call from Basekamp when it comes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:31
- sr it says you are not online
- scottrigby: 19:13:44
- ah -- sr, can you chantge your skype status?
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:13:46
- hm
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:13:51
- can you read this?
- scottrigby: 19:13:59
- yes
- scottrigby: 19:14:08
- sr, are you on a mac or PC?
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:14:31
- ohmac
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:14:41
- mac
- scottrigby: 19:14:48
- Ok --- so when in skype, under 'Window', click "Skype" (to make sure you're in the right window)...
- scottrigby: 19:15:12
- then in the upper left there is a little grey Xd out icon next to your name 'sr'
- scottrigby: 19:15:32
- click that, and select "Online" (green check mark)
- scottrigby: 19:15:40
- then you can be added to audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:46
- thx Scott
- scottrigby: 19:16:01
- ^^ skype does this so we can't call people who arent' there ]
- scottrigby: 19:16:05
- or something like that
- scottrigby: 19:16:16
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:25
- welcome sr
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:16:40
- thank you
- scottrigby: 19:16:44
- np!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:17:07
- one last thing, can you mute your mic, small icon in the bottom left of the call window, it helps keep the ambient noises down. but please join in when you'd like
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:22
- ohhhh!
- scottrigby: 19:20:39
- anthony sawrey is not on the call?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:02
- held remotely? not sure what that means scott
- scottrigby: 19:21:05
- antony hudek speaking now
- michael g bauer: 19:21:11
- hi can you paraphrase the question via text?
- scottrigby: 19:21:11
- ^^ greg - ok
- scottrigby: 19:21:52
- was that better?
- stephen wright: 19:21:56
- APG became O + I at that time
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:01
- yes
- michael g bauer: 19:22:03
- thx
- stephen wright: 19:22:04
- (Organisation and Imagination)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:23
- off & on
- scottrigby: 19:22:43
- is the audio ok though?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:47
- yes
- michael g bauer: 19:22:52
- yes
- scottrigby: 19:22:55
- bojana romic: 19:24:46
- Have to go - it's 1:23 now here. Thanks guys! It's great, as always - hope the whole conversation would be added to the audio archive soon!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:51
- not reinventing but still "dealing with" no?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:59
- bojana thx for joing us!
- scottrigby: 19:25:09
- l8r!
- bojana romic: 19:25:10
- thank you!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:11
- oops joining
- scottrigby: 19:25:17
- see u next week ]
- bojana romic: 19:25:28
- <ss type="wink"></ss>
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:18
- oh boy!
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:28:31
- think i'm off
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:28:53
- thx
- michael g bauer: 19:29:01
- thanks for joining
- scottrigby: 19:32:30
- some incredibly quotable comments here chris (by the way)
- Matthew Slaats: 19:33:51
- was wondering if Basekamp is recording and making these avaiable? Is so, do you have a url?
- scottrigby: 19:33:59
- matthew yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:07
- Matthew yes we are recording
- scottrigby: 19:34:21
- we record them all -- and chris ryan has been cleaning up the audio over time..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:31
- Will be posted here: http://basekamp.com/about/events/artist-placement-group-basekamp-apexart when it's uploaded
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:43
- a link that is
- scottrigby: 19:34:57
- exactly ...we've been posting to archive.org, and adding the links in the comments below each event page on basekamp.com
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:09
- scott can you snap a few iphone images at the very least for flickr?
- Matthew Slaats: 19:35:28
- thanks! I'm wanting to re listen to this talk already and catch up on those that I missed.
- scottrigby: 19:35:40
- the first 3 weeks audio are up on the site now matthew
- scottrigby: 19:36:07
- chris is speeding ahead with it, after overcoming a technical hurdle... now they should be up much faster
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:10
- rather ironic Stephen, when googling "embedded artist" I cam across this: http://www.embeddedartistproject.com/
- scottrigby: 19:36:21
- greg -- Apexart has been taking photos
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:01
- great. are they willing to share?
- scottrigby: 19:37:07
- definitely
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:37:08
- What did Logsdale think about these activties?
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:37:23
- we share everything
- scottrigby: 19:37:34
- marisa jahn is speaking now
- scottrigby: 19:37:39
- sr - is from apex?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:41
- grrrreat! Thanks!
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:37:43
- yup
- scottrigby: 19:37:53
- oh - stephen - got it
- scottrigby: 19:38:02
- thank you
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:38:40
- with a v
- scottrigby: 19:38:47
- oh
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 19:38:51
- ha
- scottrigby: 19:39:15
- http://www.stevenrand.info/
- scottrigby: 19:39:51
-
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:40:23
- does this include the nostaligic view of former avant-gardist groups such as the 0+1
- scottrigby: 19:41:30
- david g's question is in queue
- scottrigby: 19:42:53
- Stephen - reminder to add some info about that archive - I'm not familiar
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:43:48
- Isnt the overall question here whether there is a continued value in the avant-garde? And to extend that question the value of autonomous artists & the priviledged role of the artist in shaping reality?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:16
- wow
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:44:17
- thats fine read them out
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:41
- does this include the nostaligic view of former avant-gardist groups such as the 0+1
[2/16/10 7:41:30 PM] scottrigby: david g's question is in queue - BASEKAMP team: 19:45:05
- AND...[2/16/10 7:43:48 PM] post-autonomy: Isnt the overall question here whether there is a continued value in the avant-garde? And to extend that question the value of autonomous artists & the priviledged role of the artist in shaping reality?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:45:06
- 0+I
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:45:10
- sorry
- stephen wright: 19:50:09
- marissa talking there
- scottrigby: 19:50:45
- barbara is pointing to the video at Apexart again
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:51:03
- can I ask a further question - how is the use of space and context by artists differ from the colonising of space?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:52:28
- sorry to ask such basic questions but arent we looking at the rethinking and reinventing of the role of the artist and their role?
- stephen wright: 19:54:11
- david, I'll ask those questions in a second.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:54:40
- ok - but only if you think they are relevant
- scottrigby: 19:55:14
- well... personally i'm not assuming we're reinventing the role of the artist -- i think some of the existing roles may be relevant in other contexts
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:36
- kopenkina can you mute your mic please
- Elysa Lozano: 19:56:00
- Would love to know her opinion on 'change': where she has seen this happen historically and what she felt were the APG impacts. (apologies if she covered this earlier!)
- scottrigby: 19:56:18
- Elysa - we'll ask that next -- a good question
- Elysa Lozano: 19:56:53
- thanks!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:57:01
- good question
- lga_kop" title="olga_kop">kopenkina: 19:57:59
- sorry, didn't know how to do that! can you put me on again?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:41
- thanks kopenkina sorry was in the midst of something but was going to try and point out how to mute
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:59:36
- yes this my point
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:59:42
- this is
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:15
- kopenkina there is a small microphone icon in your call window which will mute your mic
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:38
- or you should be able to go up to the call menu at the top of your screen and choose mute
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:19
- lost audio?
- magdalenatc: 20:01:29
- yes
- Matthew Slaats: 20:01:31
- yep!
- michael g bauer: 20:01:31
- yes
- Elysa Lozano: 20:01:34
- yes
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 20:01:36
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:39
- ok hang tight
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:01:45
- yes
- stephen wright: 20:02:27
- please reconnect
- scottrigby: 20:02:39
- temporarily we're using my iphone. can you hear?
- magdalenatc: 20:02:46
- i was really intersted in the answer to that question...
- stephen wright: 20:02:47
- we lost our connection
- michael g bauer: 20:03:48
- hi thanks for adding us
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 20:04:37
- back
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 20:04:59
- hm
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:28
- Perhaps this is off topic but perhaps for the queue-after hearing a bit about the APG archive that was recently sold, I'm curious to hear if there is any fear that the "archive" as a secondary form of representation of the work and events themselves is in good hands with the Tate?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:39
- that was my witty question
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:31
- sorry for the late tech snags but thank you so much to Barabara, ApexArt, Stephen, Scott, and everyone who joined us online!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:06:31
- the audio has gone
- magdalenatc: 20:06:46
- ok. tx greg.
- magdalenatc: 20:06:54
- tx all in apexart
- Elysa Lozano: 20:06:56
- thanks for the great talk!
- michael g bauer: 20:06:56
- alright thank you. very interesting discussion. look for to learning more about the artist placements
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:59
- sorry gang the tech issues are in NYC and out of our control, plus it's 8 and time to wrap up
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:06
- thanks MGB!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:07:07
- so suppose thats it for tonight
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:11
- yep
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:07:30
- thank you so much sorry for my primitive questions
- stephen wright: 20:07:31
- Thanks for your questions.
- stephen wright: 20:07:42
- I just thanked you for them!
- Matthew Slaats: 20:07:50
- Really enjoyed this. Might try to make it down this weekend for the other talks.
- tjaraskype" title="stjaraskype">sr: 20:07:51
- thanks folks
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:52
- thx stepehn!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:11
- thx everyone
- stephen wright: 20:08:13
- Next week: A School of Decreative Methodologies
- magdalenatc: 20:08:20
- thank you everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:23
- ah yes good plug stephen
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:08:24
- anyway look forward to the next talk
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:08:50
- thank you stephen
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:08:56
- good night
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:00
- good night all
2010-02-16
Week 5: Reinigungsgesellschaft
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 focusing on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Henrik Mayer and Martin Keil from REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT, (whose German implications range from “Cleaning Service” to “Purification Society”), an “artistic venture” as they call it, working “at the point of intersection between art and social reality”. Of course art is itself a social reality, though the mainstream artworld encourages artists to remain aloof from other realities, representing them, exploiting them as material, rather than merging with them. Reingungsgesellschaft, however, operates in open, project-oriented collaboration, taking the form of autonomous organisations. They place unresolved social questions at the heart of their practice, integrating critical content into advertising-style strategies, which differentiate themselves from traditional product or target-group promotional models. Through their work with partners from different fields of human endeavour, inventing platforms for non-disciplinary activities, they use art as an art-specific form of social inquiry (“The Readymade Demonstration”), and a catalyst of social and economic processes. The collective’s work method seeks to connect different spheres of society and, potentially, to find other, more substantive life-sustaining environments for both art-making and art-doing.
Visit REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT to learn more:
http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/
Transcription
Week 5: Reinigungsgesellschaft
“
Male 1: Because I don’t – [Background Noise]
Male 1: Hello, hello, hello. I can actually see the green light coming out even if the Skype’s muted. And it’s generally, like right now … Okay. Great. Like how long should it be? I’m kind of holding about six inches from my mouth. I’m talking right now. Okay. Well right now it’s …
Male 2: I think this is interesting aspect of demonstrations who in most [0:43:22] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Okay, cool. Thanks a lot [0:43:25] [Inaudible] I appreciate it.
Male 2: There’s a certain [0:43:34] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Awesome. Thanks a lot then, buh-bye.
[Background Talk]
Male 3: Although I’m not sure that’s unique or specific to the [0:46:53] [Inaudible] I wish I could say that [0:46:56] [Inaudible]
Male 2: It must [0:46:58] [Inaudible]
Male 3: Right. I sent these to the [0:47:26] [Inaudible] questions.
Male 2: Actually most of the call from the [0:47:52] [Inaudible] the participants [0:48:01] [Inaudible] most participants were [0:48:06] [Inaudible]. Like there was one guy who took the chance to [0:48:26] [Inaudible]
[1:09:43] [Inaudible]
Male 1: By the way Conrad, our audio is … It’s possible that we might be able to connect with audio but we haven’t tried because for the [1:15:56] [Inaudible] it’s been disconnected. The three people that normally help us connect the component to this, all have emergencies that came up which is okay. We have actually been able to have a pretty decent one way of discussion. Anyway, we’ve been able to contribute by text.
Male 4: So you’re texting and they’re answering?
Male 1: Pretty much. Well, there are audience coming in and there’s about – I’m not sure how many people are on the call right now because people drop in and off. Okay. So ten people are on the call or ten location are on the call right now. But I’m just giving a heads up. [1:16:30] [Inaudible]
Male 4: That’s been going on for a little while.
Male 1: Oh, yeah. We started at six. I should probably open this for everyone.
Male 2: Is there [1:16:50] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah, yeah. We’re recording this. IN fact, luckily I’m able to record them because we’re not able to contribute to the audio. IN fact we could. One thing is I have all the equipment, some quality headphones and I kind of don’t like turn it on and blast everybody out. I want to make sure everybody is okay.
Male 4: So [1:17:15] [Inaudible]
Male 1: This would be where the headphone comes in. These could go to other devices, other input devices. Actually, that’s an output device, another speaker. Okay.
Male 3: [1:17:33] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah.
Male 4: So they were working [1:17:39] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Like us, yeah. We tried to – oops, I guess that’s not helpful. Oh yeah.
Male 3: [1:17:50] [Inaudible]
Male 1: [Laughter]. Is that what it should be [1:17:57] [Inaudible] to? You know, we – Jeremy right? Jeremy’s least favorite place in New York.
Male 3: They call the art types of people come out of there …
Male 1: Yeah.
Male 4: Is Greg on or is he?
Male 1: Greg is on. Greg is actually under this name right now. And right now we’re under my personal Skype account because we couldn’t both be on audio same time out of the same account because you can’t end yourself [1:18:33] [Inaudible] actually on.
Male 2: [1:18:43] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Do you mind if I [1:19:04] [Inaudible]?
Male 5: No. Go ahead.
[1:19:09] [Inaudible]
[Background Noise]
Male 3: Not sure a few spots even.
Male 2: I just [1:20:07] [Inaudible]
Male 3: Me too.
Male 2: You also?
Male 3: [1:20:16] [Inaudible]
Male 2: Yeah.
Male 3: [1:20:22] [Inaudible] Artworld? I mean the Artworld didn’t [1:20:59] [Inaudible] Do you think that we’re – do you see yourself participating in [1:21:24] [Inaudible] a different Artworld or do you see this kind of [1:21:31] [Inaudible] plausible other Artworld [1:21:35] [Inaudible].
Male 2: I think [1:21:54] [Inaudible] [Background Noise] So it’ important to use [1:22:52] [Inaudible].
Male 3: [1:23:24] [Inaudible].
Male 2: [1:23:44] [Inaudible]
Male 3: [1:24:04] [Inaudible] let’s not give up on art. Let’s not give up on the Artworld. Plausible Artworld [1:25:18] [Inaudible] It looks like simple art. Why [1:25:27] [Inaudible]
Male 2: You mean the spectators?
[Background Noise]
Male 3: Or are engaging in art [1:25:45] [Inaudible] . Your sharing a lot of those things you decide to [1:26:05] [Inaudible] and you want to stay in the [Background Noise] People are challenged [1:26:11] [Inaudible]. You actually continue to [1:26:16] [Inaudible] in art [1:26:17] [Inaudible]. This is not the [Background Noise]. [1:26:47] [expand and to cooperate to] [1:26:50] [Inaudible]Also get involved with the non Artworld. [1:27:01] [Inaudible]
Male 2: The best that you mentioned [1:27:25] [Inaudible]. maybe that’s a good [1:27:29] [Inaudible].
Male 5: [1:28:09] [Inaudible] I was wondering about [1:28:22] [Inaudible] when you talk about artistic competence, what are you actually talking about?
Male 2: I think it’s a [1:28:36] [Inaudible] competence.
Male 5: What does that mean? I mean I [1:28:42] [Inaudible] too but I we would like to know what you think of it when you say that.
Male 2: Well, I mean [1:28:54] [Inaudible] We design the [1:29:15] [Inaudible]. We look for strategies and we [1:29:25] [Inaudible]. We do it on our specific [1:29:40] [background].
Male 5: [1:29:43] [Inaudible]how we [1:29:51] [Inaudible]
[Whispering]
Male 2: No, I don’t really [1:30:12] [Inaudible] because we don’t really [1:30:16] [Inaudible]. We really try to [1:30:29] [Inaudible] by [1:30:33] [Inaudible]. And I think we are interested in this specific [1:30:44] [Inaudible] that is [1:30:47] [Inaudible]that focus so much on the work as a product.
Male 1: By the way, I think [1:31:16] [Inaudible] have any other – any thoughts or questions about any other, just tell me. Feel free to try to type them up. Greg has also offered to use, to put our phone on speakerphone on his side near our mike. So, we could even also try this –actually maybe this is a good time. [Typing].
Male 2: I don’t know if you call it Michael’s comment / question about he talks about the plausible article [1:32:19] [Inaudible] network created activity operating outside the [1:32:23] [Inaudible]. I’m not sure if [1:32:26] [Inaudible] on the matter. [1:32:31] [Inaudible].
Male 3: I think that [1:32:37] [Inaudible].
Male 5: [1:32:40] [Inaudible] [Background Noise]
[Audio Gap]
Male 5: [1:33:22] [Inaudible]
Male 3: Just [1:33:22] [Inaudible] for Scott is that he just might, may or may not work. I think – oh, there we go.
Male 2: [1:34:22] [Inaudible]
Male 5: [1:34:26] [Inaudible]
[Laughter]
Male 1: See if this works. Guys, can you hear us up? Hello? Oh, let’s try this one more time. Can you hear us at all? Is this any better? Anything?
Male 6: Anything? Hello? Hello?
Male 3: Yeah. [1:35:04] [Inaudible]. Okay.
Male 1: Well. I don’t know if [1:35:19] [Inaudible] a natural closure [1:35:21] [Inaudible] people out there have more questions and yeah, really [1:35:26] [Inaudible]. I know I’ve enjoyed it and I think everybody else there as well. But if there are not anymore questions or any further questions, I just want to thank you [1:35:43] [Inaudible] very much for joining us. Here we go. Michael curious about, yeah, I’m like their collaborating, maybe just a little bit of background.
Male 2: [1:36:02] [Inaudible]. We came together when we were students in 1995. And then we come in 1996 [1:36:17] [Inaudible]. because we are students and we are [1:36:23] [Inaudible]. And so we act like our true responses and [1:36:39] [Inaudible]. And so also we invited guests . have lectures and are performances of artists. That was quite an [1:36:53] [Inaudible] place for two years. But then we continue – we came to our concept of we are more oriented on the international scale. But I test one thing [1:37:16] [Inaudible] and one thing on my mind, just to follow the [1:37:23] [Inaudible] of the what is it like to specific, the quality of this kind of activity. I think we have [1:37:41] [Inaudible] that we are [1:37:43] [Inaudible] right now of our project, our product. It can be our product, but I think [1:37:49] [Inaudible] and at [1:37:54] [Inaudible]. And if maybe we go all the different participants are collaborating with us, that’s at least like this is a specific [1:38:10] [Inaudible]. And to go back to when we came together, this was also [1:38:34] [Inaudible]. We were at the same arts academy in [1:38:41] [Inaudible]. When we make our exam, we [1:38:50] [Inaudible] who make together as a student. So we have to know professor and our project was we [1:39:02] [Inaudible]. Combining our talent, combining items, combining [1:39:11] [Inaudible]. And just like we have two sets of this game and as long as 1:39:19.4 we make workshop with business people. And [1:39:27] [Inaudible]with unemployed people. And we want to figure out about their creativity and imagination of combination [Background Noise]. We presented once in the chap member. This was the [1:39:51] [Inaudible] of the business people. And the unemployed people, we presented in their empowerment of [1:40:00] [Inaudible]. And [1:40:02] [Inaudible]. we did a conference.
Male 2: What is in [1:40:39] [Inaudible].
Male 6: Mr. 1:40:40.7 on Skype texting one another, messaging one another but neither able to communicate verbally. [Cross-talk] asking questions but they’re 1:40:53.9. Maybe I would –
Male 1: 1:41:00.0
Male 6: Well, 1:41:04.5.
Male 1: Yeah, I’m not sure I can – I [1:41:15] [Inaudible].
Male 6: Well, we are going [1:41:27] [Inaudible] so try and keep on six to eight and I imagine it’s, you said [1:41:33] [Inaudible] Wednesday in Germany. So, we’ve been trying to keep you too late. [1:41:42] [Inaudible]
Male 3: Well, it’s time to go out now.
Male 6: Oh, wonderful.
[Laughter]
Male 6: Yeah. And you usually like to do in some which is requirements is sort of to follow up as [1:41:56] [Inaudible] is reminding me just a [Background Noise]. [1:42:02] [Inaudible]in going to the party, right? On behalf of everyone, we just want to thank you for participating in tonight’s chat. It was very informative and gave us a lot to think about and consider.
Male 3: I hope you [1:42:21] [Inaudible]. That’s a great question. I just want to [1:42:24] [Inaudible]. If you ever go to Germany, just contact us. Be our guest.
Male 2: [1:42:33] [Inaudible]
Male 6: Wonderful. Well, thank you [Cross-talk]. Wonderful yes. At least check out, yep. Well, thanks again and –
Male 3: [1:43:08] [Inaudible]
Male 6: Yeah. [1:43:11] [Inaudible] it was really great. [Cross-talk].
Female 1: I think tonight you were talking to somebody in Germany [1:43:30] [Inaudible]. So I think this is great too.
Unidentified Male: Alright. Rock ‘n roll [1:43:53] [Inaudible]. See how –
[1:44:01] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$22b6da17a90a403e" title="#basekamp/$22b6da17a90a403e">Reinigungsgesellschaft (#basekamp/$22b6da17a90a403e)
Created on 2010-02-02 23:26:14.
- Henrik: 18:28:27
- hi scott!
- scottrigby: 18:28:44
- hah - finally
- michael g bauer: 18:28:56
- hi!
- scottrigby: 18:29:04
- hi michael
- Henrik: 18:29:09
- greetings from tomorrow!
- scottrigby: 18:29:19
- we're here @ basekamp finally able to listen AND read - thanks guys
- scottrigby: 18:29:42
-
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:28
- sounds a lot like Basekamp space from time to time
- scottrigby: 18:30:58
- chuckles
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:25
- kinda reminds me of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"
- scottrigby: 18:37:30
- BTW guys, we are going to watch a video at some point, right? Just want to queue it up here
- stephen wright: 18:38:58
- I have to confess that I am pretty sceptical that art - as art - can change the world (or make people more tolerant etc) except as a form of symbolic privilege. How do you negotiate the fact that your work is perceived as art?
- scottrigby: 18:39:36
- hi stephen
- stephen wright: 18:43:35
- sure
- scottrigby: 18:44:32
- luckily www connection is not so bad - seeing how we're currently pirating a neighbor's
- martin keil: 18:44:42
- http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/projekte/_2009/grambow_en.htm
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:34
- also sometimes going directly to YT makes for a quicker DL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACx8fXLgHzo
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:55
- I think someone posted this earlier but here it is again: http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/projekte/_2009/readymade_demonstrat...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:42
- lol!
- scottrigby: 18:51:40
- ok, just letting you know we have the video loaded here - so we're fine whenever you want to take a break to watch the "Orientation System to the New" video.
- scottrigby: 18:52:12
- no rush - we can queue up the columbus video now too
- Henrik: 18:54:25
- <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XsSugXKq28&feature=player_embedded">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XsSugXKq28&feature=player_embedded</a>
- scottrigby: 18:54:45
- ok, we have two videos... the columbus one, and the first one. WHich one are we watching?
- michael g bauer: 18:55:23
- yes
- scottrigby: 18:55:23
- yes. for a sec
- michael g bauer: 18:56:59
- i'd like hear more about the process involved in 'constructing' a rally. also i'm curious about how something like this staging could be co-opted commercially
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:48
- can you talk a little bit about the makeup of the protesting group...looks like students but other town's people as well? curious if the local community felt compelled to get involved or were just wondering what was going on.
- michael g bauer: 19:02:32
- thx
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:39
- yes
- scottrigby: 19:02:44
- we're watching now
- michael g bauer: 19:02:53
- watching
- anthony sawrey: 19:03:45
- Silly question.. i arrived late you see.. where do i watch video?
- michael g bauer: 19:04:00
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XsSugXKq28
- anthony sawrey: 19:04:07
- danke
- stephen wright: 19:05:57
- When I was writing up the short description of your work, I was wondering how to handle your claim that you work at the point of intersection between art and social reality. As you noticed, I decided I had to mention that art IS a social reality, except that in mainstream circles and worlds it is not supposed to really merge with those realities -- merely show them (for the weirdness they are) or prey upon them ("involve" them in art). Since you do not try to "lose" yourselves in social reality, nor to show it in an estranged way (Brecht style), how would you describe your aesthetic. Similar to that of Chto Delat?
- stephen wright: 19:06:53
- their more recent work where they re-enact social situations...
- stephen wright: 19:11:49
- yes
- stephen wright: 19:12:09
- Le partage du sensible, The Emancipated Spectator, amongst others
- scottrigby: 19:12:53
- BTW, Ranciere is coming to NY soon for some Crative TIme programming, and Nato suggests setting up a Plausible Artworlds chat with him while he's here
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:13
- http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/projekte/_2009/urban_de.htm
- stephen wright: 19:13:21
- Fucking Yes!
- scottrigby: 19:13:24
- Stephen - we can talk about this over the next few days maybe?
- stephen wright: 19:13:36
- Of course we can
- scottrigby: 19:13:39
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:10
- Jacques Rancière- http://a.aaaarg.org/library/r
- scottrigby: 19:16:35
- staaaaaaatic. better now
- martin keil: 19:17:10
- super I would like to join the discussion with Ranciere
- martin keil: 19:17:24
- here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ShGV28MBQ&feature=player_embedded
- Henrik: 19:18:29
- can you see the video?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:45
- cow demo...yes
- Henrik: 19:18:46
- its´bilingual
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:45
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol5KFMlry6c
- utcplausibleartworlds: 19:21:00
- class is loving the cow protest
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:20
- moooooooo
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:14
- great!
- scottrigby: 19:24:33
- BTW, Kris here is mentioning that she's interested that the protest projects happen largely in rural areas
- scottrigby: 19:24:45
- which is unusual, in the united states anyway
- scottrigby: 19:25:12
- or remote 'city' spaces. Not exactly ultra-urban
- stephen wright: 19:28:09
- ulrich beck
- Henrik: 19:28:31
- exactely!
- scottrigby: 19:29:35
- Henrik & Martin, are you in any way interested in working with other artists on these kinds of public projects, or only non-artists? I'm asking mainly to see what place there is - from your point of view - in this practice for overlap between people who are also authors of this kind of work
- michael g bauer: 19:31:31
- i may have been disconnected. . .
- scottrigby: 19:31:41
- well... not to suggest that it's too "convenient" not to make a distinction... -- and by the way, pardon our ack of audio -- ...but the reason i asked is because you as artists are constructing the overall projects, and injecting them with meaning. I was just wondering if the people you work with are mainly "participants" or also "collaborators"
- scottrigby: 19:31:55
- this is not a value judgement, just a question
- Henrik: 19:32:10
- <a href="http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/projekte/_2009/swingspace_de.htm">http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/projekte/_2009/swingspace_de.htm</a>
- scottrigby: 19:32:20
- we're looking here
- michael g bauer: 19:32:28
- thx
- Henrik: 19:33:01
- hi Amanda
- utcplausibleartworlds: 19:33:38
- Street of Crime Rates Shifted to Other Areas
- utcplausibleartworlds: 19:33:40
- HAHAHAAH
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:47
- a reminder to mute microphones unless you are Henrik or Martin
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:20
- I love "Ave to spend your youth in style" !!!
- scottrigby: 19:35:51
- soneone here suggested that Brookly should be renamed to "Jeremy's least favorite place in New York"
- stephen wright: 19:35:54
- It's definitely a nice project. But does it lay the groundwork for what we are calling a "plausible" artworld? How do you generally feel about our (potentially overblown) claims about there being such things as Plausible artworlds developing to challenge mainstream hegemony?
- scottrigby: 19:37:01
- maybe i can help a bit with that one too
- scottrigby: 19:37:17
- Stephen, I suggested that Reinigungsgesellschaft's work was an example of a kind of micro-artworld, that's structured differently than the most dominant artworld --
- scottrigby: 19:38:26
- Henrik & Martin, with the above, I was mainly thinking of their work within other existing government and business sectors. Not necessarily "parasiting", but working in a critical way that is not strictly oppositional
- scottrigby: 19:39:18
- ... thinking about this work within the wider context of "Organizational Art" practices
- anthony sawrey: 19:39:44
- howdy Amanda
- scottrigby: 19:40:05
- Martin - an dHenrik - I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this... I realize it's been *quite* a while since you & I have talked about this in depth
- stephen wright: 19:40:07
- Scott, it is clear that their work is critical without being oppositional. But what do they think about our hypothesis?
- Amanda Hills: 19:40:10
- g'day
- scottrigby: 19:40:42
- yes... maybe we need to clarify our hypothesis in this conversation ...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:48
- I think Stephen mentioned Brecht earlier and this discussion reminds me of his famous quote: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:10
- is this the debate, art as tool for social change?
- scottrigby: 19:43:15
- then again stephen... many of us have a foot in both worlds -- and take advantage of the existing art institutional structures... without necessarily "believing" in them
- scottrigby: 19:43:26
- not to be an apologist --
- stephen wright: 19:43:26
- I have a foot in both worlds!!!
- scottrigby: 19:43:30
- yes
- stephen wright: 19:43:39
- my larger foot in the mainstream
- stephen wright: 19:43:43
- to be honest
- scottrigby: 19:44:06
- well, we are just teasing out ideas i realize... not saying anyone is immune -- i realize you are just asking which foot of theirs is in another world...
- scottrigby: 19:44:12
- sometimes, it is just a little toe
- scottrigby: 19:44:41
- i realize we are looking for what that looks like, however small
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:54
- no no keep 'em coming stephen
- scottrigby: 19:45:32
- we can also talk about art's 'incompetencies' ]
- scottrigby: 19:46:00
- ...btw Stephen, thanks for asking these Qs out loud -- it's great actually
- stephen wright: 19:46:03
- and an equivalency between "incompetence" and "competence" à la Robert Filliou
- scottrigby: 19:46:09
- w o r d
- michael g bauer: 19:46:31
- i think about the art world as being centralized/sanctified hubs of creative production -- maybe in part, a plausible art world is a decentralized network of creative activity operating outside of these spaces? but as people are saying, the two often blur together.
- stephen wright: 19:46:36
- by "specific background" do you mean art's history?
- stephen wright: 19:47:16
- haha!
- stephen wright: 19:47:55
- Yes!
- stephen wright: 19:48:05
- But you did say "specific background
- scottrigby: 19:48:19
- hey guys, want to try somethign crazy?
- stephen wright: 19:48:23
- so that begs the question as to its specificity
- stephen wright: 19:48:33
- of course
- scottrigby: 19:48:43
- we have a microphone that *might* work.. but i didn't want to blast you out unnecessarily
- scottrigby: 19:49:17
- now that there's a small lag however, i thougth we could try the mic now... for a moment... and see if the basekamp space could try to connect by audio now? --- or at the next available moment
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:21
- right right
- stephen wright: 19:49:22
- I agree
- stephen wright: 19:49:48
- with Henrik that is
- scottrigby: 19:50:30
- the microphone question
- stephen wright: 19:50:40
- turn it all on!
- scottrigby: 19:50:50
- ok! preare yourselves!
- scottrigby: 19:51:03
-
- Henrik: 19:51:15
- nice!
- stephen wright: 19:51:30
- stockhausen?
- scottrigby: 19:51:37
- oh well
- scottrigby: 19:51:40
- nope
- scottrigby: 19:51:45
- ok fine
- stephen wright: 19:51:55
- Listen, this has been really interesting
- michael g bauer: 19:52:18
- can you talk just for a second about you two came together and began collaborating
- stephen wright: 19:52:20
- Becuase you postion yourselves really at that problematic threshold
- stephen wright: 19:52:27
- or interface rather
- scottrigby: 19:52:44
- oh yeah -- that would be excellent --
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:45
- thx mgb
- scottrigby: 19:53:32
- and Yes Stephen, i agree... it brushes up against some problematic and interesting questions about the aesthetics of protest, and the threshold of a mainstream to accomodate 'dissent'
- scottrigby: 19:54:46
- BTW.. we do have some time after this which we can use to screen soem of your video documentation. We did watch one (wiht the volume way down).. but if you have any specific suggestions for the videos that would be great
- scottrigby: 19:56:09
- ALSO, Michael, maybe you would like to ask about the potential for followign up with some "Public School" course proposals from this discussion? I can think of a few... like "Organizing Micropolitiks" and "Protest zones"
- scottrigby: 19:56:34
- Michael B... not sure if you have access to audio or not?
- Henrik: 19:56:46
- here is my extra video suggestion: <a href="http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/video/city.htm">http://www.reinigungsgesellschaft.de/video/city.htm</a>
- scottrigby: 19:56:51
- thx Henrik
- michael g bauer: 19:56:54
- would love to tho i'm at a public library
- scottrigby: 19:56:58
- haha
- michael g bauer: 19:57:06
- maybe you can fill in a bit?
- stephen wright: 19:57:19
- For me, th emost compelling project is the "readymade demonstration" in terms of "art specific competency
- michael g bauer: 19:57:20
- oh . . .
- scottrigby: 19:57:24
-
- michael g bauer: 19:57:30
- please you can do it!
- scottrigby: 19:57:39
- oh, ok
- scottrigby: 19:58:04
-
- stephen wright: 19:58:10
- 12 - 2
- scottrigby: 19:58:17
- Henrik & Martin, we can follow up with this later for sure
- scottrigby: 19:58:31
- yeah, don't let us hold you up from going out to party
- scottrigby: 19:58:50
- btw, one of you are in Berlin right? Henrik? martin, where are you right now?
- michael g bauer: 19:58:50
- thank you!
- martin keil: 19:58:50
- yes thats our pleasure!
- scottrigby: 19:59:19
- Henrik & Martin -- of course
- stephen wright: 19:59:24
- please stay in touch! this was really interesting.
- scottrigby: 19:59:27
- btw, please check this out : http://basekamp.com/about/events/public-school-and-aaaargorg
- scottrigby: 19:59:46
- ^^ to get a sense of The Public School courses which we try to follow up with, in connection to each week's chat
- scottrigby: 19:59:56
- thank you very Much from everyone @ Basekamp!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- michael g bauer: 19:59:57
- bye!
- Henrik: 20:00:05
- DAnkeschön!
- scottrigby: 20:00:20
- Goodnight Stephen, Greg, Michael, & everyone else too
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:22
- thanks so much Henrik & Martin!
- martin keil: 20:00:30
- thanks too!
- stephen wright: 20:00:31
- bye!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:35
- nite all
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 20:00:36
- interesting talk- thanks gang!
- martin keil: 20:00:49
- Bye!
- Henrik: 20:01:48
- the sad thing about skype is that i do not really know how you all look like
- Henrik: 20:02:00
- hope to meet you one day
- stephen wright: 20:02:06
- we,re invisible actually
- anthony sawrey: 20:02:14
- video calls would solve that
- scottrigby: 20:03:34
- stephen
- Henrik: 20:04:04
- scott, your icon creations are so funny
2010-02-02
Week 45: Cittadellarte
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking about Cittedellarte, the interdisciplinary laboratory founded in 1998 by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, near Turin, Italy. Parts of Pistoletto’s project have recently been activated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Plausible Artworlds has been invited to host a debate — this coming Friday, 12 November — in the museum’s exhibition space as to whether Cittedellarte is (or not) plausibly an artworld. Tonight’s conversation will be the occasion to take a first, and informed, stab at that question.
The name, Cittadellarte, implies both a fortified enclave and a (plausible) city of art. As a quasi institution in and of itself, the project is structured around several autonomous and self-organized offices geared toward a multiplicity of topics such as art, economics, education, politics, ecology, and communication. Indebted to Pistoletto’s participatory work of the mid- to late 1960s, for which is he renowned, Cittadellarte places at the core of these diverse offices and activities the artist’s commitment to an “art [that is] at the center of a responsible process of transformation of society.”
However praiseworthy those aims, one cannot but wonder to what extent a project that is so comfortably at home within the physical and conceptual architecture of the mainstream attention economy can be considered a genuine alternative. To what degree does the project merely expand the artist’s notoriety within the reputational economy? On the other hand, what elements, components or ingredients of Cittadellarte may be truly useful for rethinking artworlds, their structure and use? From its very inception, Plausible Artworlds has struggled with the ticklish question as to how to deal with projects (like Cittadellarte and others) that seem both to be, and not to be, plausible art-sustaining systems… A debate it is high time to open.
Transcription
Week 45: Cittadellarte
[0:00:00]
Female Speaker: Hello.
Male Speaker: Hi everybody.
Male Speaker: Hello.
Male Speaker: Yes Scott are you going to tell us we have to mute our audios or can we leave it on this time?
Scott: You can leave it on until it starts getting crazy.
Male Speaker: Okay
[0:00:28] [cross talk]
Myla: Okay welcome everybody I am Myla Shoemaker and I am member of the staff for division of education, I am the head of education here at the art museum and we are delighted you are here. This program and this evening belongs to Basekamp and [0:00:44] [inaudible] and I am going to turn it over to him in just a second. And I thought I might say a minute’s worth about where we are sitting. I am also sitting with Erica Battle who is one of the curators of the Pistoletto Adult Education exhibition and Adelina Vlas who is – will be back, who is another curator in the modern and contemporary art department.
Anyway we are delighted that you are here with the lot especially the Basekamp is here. I am going to lead this in a conversation tonight. We are sitting in one of the exhibitions that represents the works of Michalangelo Pistoletto and it represents his current collaborative effort which he calls Cittadellarte his invention of a word in fact I believe it’s a real word now, it’s real to us. Cittadellarte is a combination of the words citadel for art, a safe place for making art and city of art with the implication that art has a responsibility to engage with society.
I have some pictures of what Cittadellarte looks like in Biella if Scott wants to go there. Cittadellarte is actually a place in Italy where the artist Michalangelo Pistoletto to lives. Let’s see if it can hold up. You know can you [0:02:04] [indiscernible]. I never do it on Mac so will just keep talking. Oh go to slide show, go one more, one more there you go. Just say slide show, it will go. Okay so Biella is in Northern Italy, right against the Apse. It’s got the pied mark on one side which is great place for growing delicious food and one of the offices of Cittadellarte is a nourishment office and a small food restaurant and you can see the apse right behind it. This is what the place looks like. It is Biella the city, where it’s located was once a big wool and cloth manufacturing town now superseded by Milano and other places. So a lot of these new buildings are empty and Michalangelo Pistoletto has acquired some of them and is building this place.
Why don’t you go to – sorry, there is one more I think? It’s on a river; you can see there are some other new building which are currently unoccupied. There is Scott’s family, huge you have to admit. So in any case, it’s a place and it’s also an idea. I hope that you will all go and see the exhibition on the other side of the museum which is the historic exhibit of Pistoletto’s work representing what he did between about 1960, 56 to 1974. We are here to talk tonight or to let Scott talk with us and everybody tonight about the Cittadellarte. I want to introduce one more person…
Male Speaker: Okay Scott just [0:03:50] [indiscernible] by the way.
Myla: I know you will say all that – which is Camille De Galber [phonetic] [0:03:50] if you want to raise your hands. Camille is here, she has come from New York tonight because she was an artist in residence at the Cittadellarte for four months so she will bring her perspective having lived there and worked there in this city created by Michalangelo Pistoletto. So I am finished with everything I have to say. Oh Michalangelo Pistoletto designed this room, let me just say a little about the two mirrored table. This is the Caribbean Sea that we are sitting by, that’s the Mediterranean Sea over there. One of the early offices that became part of Cittadellarte offices sort of was about political engagement around the cultures of Mediterranean.
So the Mediterranean mirror table became a place to have conversations. He made this one especially for this exhibition, he caused this one to be made I would say represents his design for the Caribbean Sea which is the sea in this Hemisphere that is surrounded by land, Mediterranean in between the laths and we will be having a number of conversations like this when – pick up a brochure those orange brochures if you are engaged by the thoughts and the actions of tonight and want to do this again, they will be throughout the exhibition. I can’t think of anything else. Okay so I am going to close my mic off. But we may ask you just because it’s hard to hear because the ceilings are so high in this room, we may ask you to use a mic when you ask a question or something so that everybody can hear it and we have lovely people Perak and others who will bring a mic to you. So thank you for coming and enjoy this evening, enjoy both the exhibitions and we hope of see you often.
[0:05:40]
Male Speaker: Is it okay to share the images with people aren’t here or are they copyrighted? Is it okay to share the images with people aren’t here so that we can potentially email them to some and they can upload them? Okay. It’s funny using a mic to talk to someone who is sitting two feet away. Great well I actually got a mic here, I am sort of…it was. Hi everyone, welcome to a follow up to what we did this Tuesday which was another week in a series of weekly discussions that we have about what we are calling plausible art worlds. Normally we wouldn’t expand too much on that because what we generally do is talk with representatives of different, of different art worlds, ones that we, that are arguably plausibly excuse me and have a conversation with them at Space Around the Corner and Artist Run Space around the table sort of like this except instead of being mirrored and shaped like a sea, it’s more like a picnic table and we have the series of conversations.
So yeah this Tuesday, we talked to a number of people about Cittadellarte and one of the things that we want to do is look at or get a better understanding of Cittadellarte from the point of view of imaging this as a kind of art world in itself. So I think what we usually do is ask someone to give us a description of Cittadellarte which I can’t really adequately do. We generally jump right into the discussion. I think so since we are doing a follow up we’ve already had that, we might many of you weren’t here, some of you were, thought we might as well do the same thing.
Female Speaker: [0:08:19] [inaudible] Basekamp
Male Speaker: Sure, yeah. I think I ought to turn it around because it’s kind of, its kind of strange talking to you guys behind me. Basekamp and artists groups and a number of us are here right now, Michael who is over there is part of our group and Greg who is online and Steven and Hanken should be here somewhere and there are a number of people that we work with generally, yeah hey. And Basekamp is also the name of an art, a mini art institution I guess you could say that sort of, a sort of alternative art center that focuses on collaborative and collective practices that has a kind of exhibition space or an exhibition program literally.
Mainly it has been an event program for this year. We have a shop, a residency program where there are spaces for 10 artists, international artists and residence, they are local people if they want to come and we have two international artists and residence here too right now, Clinton and Mathew from Nice. And there are a bunch of other residence that are here. What else is Basekamp? We opened in 1998 so we’ve been looking – well we‘ve been working as a group even though some of the people in Basekamp have rotated a bit. We also specifically look at groups and group activity.
[0:09:55]
We are interested in taking a critical point of view when – we are both fulfilling a supportive role for other groups and looking critically at what does it mean to be a group or work within a group because it’s not all – just because we are working collectively doesn’t automatically make it liberatory somehow. But it’s a worthwhile thing to do somehow. And anyway if anybody has any questions, I think maybe somewhere near the end might be end because I can go on about Basekamp really for about 12 hours and I think we have an hour and 15 minutes exactly, right? Or from 15 minutes ago. So yeah I love it if someone who feels like they would like to, would like to start just give a brief example of Cittadellarte and we can have…
Female Speaker: [0:10:54] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Cool and we probably would just like to have questions for you, we will probably bring up some of the, some of the things that we talked about on Tuesday and just kind of restate them here so no one is lost halfway part of the conversation but also kind of get more in-depth about how true the dellarte works and what its structures are like and that sort of thing.
Female Speaker: Okay I was – I have been to the Cittadellarte for a visit for five days just as an observer and Camille will tell you as an artist in residence what it felt like to be there. They take as their philosophy, the notions of making art the center of a socially responsible transformation of society, what would it look like and there is an essay by Michalangelo on our website which you can read where he talks about this in the office, what would it look like if art could be the place from which transformation of society grows, what do artist have to contribute, what does art have to contribute.
And their logo looks like sort of a self structure and they started one way and they continue to sort of move out – oh there it is, yeah thanks Esperanza Altmar also from the museum. He is holding it up there kind of like a self structure and it winds up, they are divided into offices but Michalangelo who also designed this which has some of the names of the offices that they work in. you might say what has art have to do with economics? What does art have to do with – well particularly economics is sort of the one that catches people, it’s about creative thinking and thinking creatively about solving both macro and micro economic problems both in Italy and around the world. But using creativity to engage with that idea and Camille will say more what actually happens when the artist come.
But Michalangelo said he built, he designed this structure because he wanted to make it clear that the offices were sort of have porous borders. So for instance there is an office at Pert and obviously that affects everything and there is an office of sustainability. And all of them are trying to live in a sustainable way. So you can see the names of the offices there sort of built into this structure, this skeleton here in the middle of the room.
So our curator Carlos was Waldo who began these searches to do this exhibition said when he was teaching in Venice which he does part of the year, all the young students 10 years ago or eight years ago or five years ago were talking about this place Cittadellarte. All the young art students at Venice he was teaching. And so he had to go there and find out and that sort of started his journey to study this particular artist and ultimately offer this two exhibitions, a historic show and this representing this idea that people should come together and talk about important things and they should talk about whether art matters, how it matters, when it matter and how art can address societal issues. So I am going to stop with that and take the mic over to Camille or maybe talk experientially about the teaching.
Camille: So I’m Camille De Galber, I’m French and I was resident at Cittadellarte in 2009 and I [0:14:26] [inaudible] installation. And so basically I was in the branch of the [0:14:33] [inaudible] so the residence parts based as a branch knowing the foundation and I don’t really know what you want to know but…
Male Speaker: I think just for anyone here they may not know really much about Cittadellarte we are going to start talking about some of the details that might be good to know, you know what your experience of it, what’s like a little bit…
Camille: So basically we were 15 artists from different countries and we all arrived with a project that we had in mind but it’s not only artists, it is also curator. So its curators and artists and researchers so some people are coming to write, some people are coming to – there is photographer, video artists and so we all meet there, we are there for four months and we try to develop projects and we have also not [0:15:33] [inaudible] guest so artists, curator and socialogue so it was sort of like a university summer university, so it’s very intense.
[0:15:44]
So you at the end you have more time to actually work on your own project but the beginning of the residency its only like talk, you know exchange in the workshop. Not a very good [0:16:06] [indiscernible]
Male Speaker: And by the way if it wasn’t clear, everybody at this chance is welcomed to ask any questions or say anything at any time. Generally we don’t have mics like this, but you are welcome. I mean – and I think we are only really probably don’t need it in a group like this, but we are only really using it so that the people that are joining from elsewhere can hear us plus we record this, I probably should mention initially so if you don’t want anything you say to be recorded, I guess don’t say anything or let us know and we will take it out.
Female Speaker: We might mention there is another artist Skyping in who just is as I see Maggie that you said you’ve just got back from Cittadellarte from the summer residence of 2010. So she is another person who had lived there for four months in Kent at her box.
Male Speaker: Cool, yeah I am kind of curios what the tone of the place is like, like one question that came up and I guess we can get more into it later is what, what is the general feeling of the people that are going through there about the relationship between the artists who started this you know sort of God Father figure costileto [phonetic] [0:17:39] yeah and the other people there as if, you know because there is sort of a feeling that this is a collective thing, you know and we are curious about that, what happens when a single artist an incredibly famous single artist or very well respected single artist so creates an institution you know that his tied to. And what's the feeling of that? Because it sounded like there is an independence there and we are really interest you know – don’t mean to say this in any negative way but just really interested how that plays out, what that’s like and yeah, how that felt.
Camille: After four months, it was very intense because we were all together for a long time. That Michalangelo was – so he lives in the foundation so he’s with us and basically he is there if you need help for your project, he is completely open to talk to you and we were having dinner with him at their home, you know his Maria and of course it’s after four months at some point it’s hard because I don’t want to say negative things…
Male Speaker: You can say anything I mean it doesn’t have to be positive or negative, it’s….
Camille: Yeah no problem its.
Female Speaker: I can say something, can you hear me?
Male Speaker: Were you still thinking of working on your thought though [0:19:25] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Yeah go ahead Maggie.
Maggie: I am sorry, it’s hard to know if she was [0:19:29] [indiscernible] or not
Male Speaker: There is not a good visual picture but just jump in any time.
Maggie: Okay, definitely. You know my feeling is that Cittadellarte is Michael Angelo’s art project. Like he is really the directing lead artist and I think the projects that come out of Cittadellarte are social projects in a lot of ways. So they are stocked, people that run the projects for him but I really think the final creative decision come from him. That was my impression, you know that was my feeling and I think a lot of people are invested in his ideas. You I mean they really invest in his vision for the center, for the work, they are really committed the people that work for him are really committed to working with him and for him but I mean it’s like, it’s kind of like a nonprofit that is run like an art project. But it’s a mastermind of Michalangelo that was my impression you know.
[0:20:37]
Camille: And I also think it was very hard when you it’s given to do which are coming to do but if you are a photographer or a video artist, you cannot write like very strong ID and being like okay, I am going to do that. It’s more like I think a residency for people who need to write, to sing and really developing making projects. Like it was hard for [0:21:08] [inaudible] find the [0:21:11] [inaudible] in front of the computer.
Male Speaker: Sorry I can’t hear what you are saying, you are fading out.
Camille: Sorry? Sorry.
Male Speaker: Maybe if you could repeat that last record, try to paraphrase it if…
Camille: Yeah I was saying that it is very hard for a photographer or video artist or I mean there were no musicians there or dancer or those but I think it is a residency for people who really want to develop project to write but not to really create it and do it and have the matter out there, it’s not really easy. You have to leave the space; you cannot stay for four months when in the foundation I think. So it was hard sometimes you know all that.
Male Speaker: That’s interesting, I mean I don’t know it’s – how long do people really stay?
Camille: How long?
Male Speaker: Yeah for like the length of time that people usually stayed?
Camille: Four months.
Male Speaker: You were there four months, okay.
Female Speaker: No comment.
Camille: People were leaving during the weekend and coming back.
Female Speaker: I have a question for, to artists that I had the residency, I did Cittadellarte where Camille and Maggie you just, you kind of bring up an interesting thing which is you as an artist, the individual practice are coming to Cittadellarte, you know work here against kind of a collective arts practice. So I am just suggesting if you can elaborate on that a little bit more and perhaps also start from what motivated you to come to Cittadellarte, how did you hear about it, what was that process like, you know even practically speaking but also conceptually for you as an artist, what did you hope to get from it and you know kin of where did it take you in the end. And also the that tension between your practice as an individual artists and kind of coming into this collective, this area of collectivity to me is really interesting and maybe some people also from Basekamp can talk about how they deal with that because that is also something you guys are doing.
Female Speaker: Shall I start.
Female Speaker: Sure.
Camille: Well basically I heard about Cittadellarte through a friend’s writer Ancalas [phonetic] [0:23:30] and she was doing a project about correspondence and she brought me to the Cittadellarte and then I asked for a grant and finally I went to the residence and I did a collaboration with her during the residence and I made 12 videos, it was a video installation and this videos I actually made it with [0:23:55] [indiscernible] residence, it was a collaborating project. So basically all I have done there as a residence if it was their voice or their have or the – you know so we all worked together for me. but then some people worked alone and it was with lots of different projects or – but for me it was a very good experience and I mean all the artist, not all of them but a couple of them were like still there in contact and…
Male Speaker: Maggie did you have anything to add or was that sort of…
Maggie: Sure I can add some. Yeah the residency is kind of a separate project and it takes a place over the course of four months and [0:24:49] [indiscernible] be part of the residency you propose a project before you come or some artists come with a portfolio and do say specific work and I do art at occasion and I am also an artist and a woman here in Oakland and from California and a woman here in Oakland had to have her residency last year and wasn’t an artist and I was really interested in how a non artist became part of an artist residency and she is an acquaintance and a colleague of mine and I started an art project, a nonprofit project here in Oakland for artists supporting artists and I was really fascinated by the idea that this artist had started a nonprofit and was running this projects – yeah I wanted to see what it looked like basically.
[0:25:40]
You know and I got the residency and I also created a project, it was a game and so the work will continued through into 2010 and hope there will be several auditions of it. The graphic design was, I worked with another one, the artist there had to do some of the design, the carpenter helped me create the actual some of the game pieces. And then we did a week long collaborative project in Sunraymore which is a town in the Mediterranean. But most the collaboration came out of you know we were living and working together, we eat three meals a day together, we lived in the same space, we worked in the same space. So it’s – you have more or less affinity with certain artists and everyone had the expectation that they will come and see their own project but you just can’t help but not interact about the work. You know the space is there for collaboration and cross pollination and you know it’s just, it’s the nature of how we were living and working for that time and Camille is right, it was very intense because we were also doing workshops together and you know we are in a small town in Italy where we don’t know anyone else except for each other.
So I think that is kind of, it’s kind of organic. The collaboration there is no fixed, there were no fixed agreements about how we would collaborate or what the final project would look like but it happens, it’s inevitable.
Female Speaker: Are you friend with [0:27:18] [indiscernible]
Maggie: I’m sorry?
Female Speaker: Do you know Esiar from Oakland?
Maggie: Yeah Esiar is the one who…
Female Speaker: Okay [0:27:29] [cross talk]
Maggie: Yeah
Male Speaker: Steven did you want, did you feel like elaborating a little bit on that or…?
Steven: Elaborate on it, I mean I just think it’s a kind of an issue that can’t be avoided by talking about you know how I mean the subjective nature of the experiences that one has in this kinds of residencies. The statement that is kind of often repeated that the object here is to make art the center of socially responsible transformation of society. I mean it raises the, it jolts sort of imperative that artists were to edify society by showing the good, the true, the beautiful and there was kind of a break with that towards the end of the 18th century with romantism a break that art in fact would even go beyond that but would show a different kind of good, true and beautiful kind of provide a messianic model for the radical transformation of society, I mean the radical responsible transformation of the society.
And I mean I kind of – I hear that very much in the Cittadellarte sort of manifesto in the tax that was put up on the website. But ultimately I think you have to wonder whether that is just sort of a necessary but in fact ultimately diluted corrective to the rather uncomfortable role that artist often times have and I think in this case its sort of undeniable have is the hand maintenance to wealth and power. Now obviously you don’t start a Cittadellarte of art you know without a certain amount of complexity from the powers that be and from capital and so on. And so I don’t see how we can really avoid the question, I don’t want it to sound like a nasty attack, it’s not at all.
I mean but how I mean how can we square that circle, I mean how can we talk about serious transformation of society when we were to that extent in bed with capital and you know and wealth and just symbolic capital and I mean I ask that question and I am going to stop now but I am asking that question from the position of what a plausible art world would be because you know obviously that sounds kind of like the good intentionalism that exist within the mainstream in our community.
[0:30:32]
Male Speaker: Well I think one of – just to piggy back on slide one of the questions might be how is Cittadellarte re-emergening society. Isn’t re-emergening every part of the society except for the structures that support art? I guess those are some of the questions that I have. I don’t think – it sounds like that’s not the case but we are super interested in that because you know like what Mark is saying, there is subsition of course everybody’s embedded in the structures of the world, that’s definitely true. I think our interest is you know not that’s evaluated you know how well or poorly someone is doing at proposing an alternative. But to discuss that specifically, it seems like what Cittadellarte is doing, he’s imagining a kind of alternative experimenting with in a sense that its built, its lived out, people are testing it, people come there from all over the place to test it out as well and try and contribute to that and to try and contribute to the thoughts behind it too, you know.
And I think you know what this series of talks that we are having with a bunch of other people that other people are having too completely separate from us but we like to link with that is about we want to say when we are doing something, when we are proposing a certain kind of alternative or a certain kind of option that maybe didn’t exist before, maybe wasn’t as elaborated as our proposal is to really take it seriously and to look at the entailments of this, what comes along with that proposal. I think Tuesday we, everybody pretty much agreed that this, it’s pretty undeniable that Cittadellarte is a kind of model that it is, is a parasitical one.
You know that is not in itself bad, you know it’s just we need to understand it for what it is. It’s funded by someone who is making a good amount of money out of the sale of art work in the mainstream art market and funneling those funds into something else. And what we are interested in is okay let’s acknowledge that that is happening and that’s an interesting thing in itself too. You know what if every artists is making tons of money or you know some money by the sale of their work through most standard, more standard channels that we know, we are taking that and trying to imagine something completely different with it.
I mean that’s petty miraculous and what is made to accomplish with a bunch of other people’s help is miraculous too. I think what we really want to do is look at what it is that they are actually doing, you know what is it that’s made and if we were to imagine that it could be reproduced elsewhere you know is it something that we should just, you know something we should just keep doing and try to make more of this or do you see what I mean?
Camille: And also its very hard because Biella is a very small city and to do a social transformation in Biella and work with community when actually there is no one and when you walk on the street with Esiar from Oakland with black and Boner with Asian and whatever and all the people are like wow it’s like [0:33:57] [indiscernible] commercial you know, like it would never happen in US or you know is a very small town so it’s very hard to be like what are we going to be able to do. I mean in Torino at least its bigger so you can maybe you know but Biella is like wow, okay so let’s have coffee here and then go here and go home to bed.
So it’s not very hard to try to change things when you are – but I think Cittadellarte is very very good for the city because a lot of things are happening during the summer but for us it was hard sometimes you know like to social transformation you know and you are like thinking what you can do and you know like…
Male Speaker: Oh yes would you give, would you like to ask [0:34:46] [inaudible]
Female Speaker: Well my question is I am curious how is Basekamp similar to Cittadellarte? Because what I love about this exhibition is the fact that the Mediterranean table over there, we have the Caribbean table here and they represent different countries, different people coming together to talk to have a dialogue and I feel like when we get lost in that wealth and power dichotomy and privilege. I mean we are all privilege. Anyone who has this kind of [0:35:11] [indiscernible] is coming from a privilege position.
[0:35:14]
I mean I myself being an immigrant is very lucky to study art. So I think that debate to me is not new or interesting. To me what’s interesting is what this camp is doing and how that can change these models are really, create those models for more people and more artists.
Male Speaker: I mean yeah definitely would want to train from the same kinds of questions being directed back at us as well. I mean that’s definitely – you know when Mark who I think has left now, yeah who runs machine projects in LA was, was just describing that he thinks that there is a lot of, there are a lot of points in between decision making happening by a single sort of strong arm and some kind of idea of what I am paraphrasing in that but like some kind of the idea this you know completely open democratic or whatever benevolent process yeah, where everybody gets to have a say and everything is fair and equal and perfect.
In my experience, it’s definitely been the case. You know I mean there is almost none of our collaboration have been a real success in my point of view. I think on that level, no way I mean it’s really hard. I mean working in groups is, it can be a difficult thing to do especially when, what you are trying to do is re-think the interrelation dynamics, how people work and live together generally speaking more specifically in certain areas or in certain dynamics or in certain fields like the general field of art or even within very specific things like well we are working as part of the collaborative group or we are working as an [0:37:13] [indiscernible] or we are working as an architect group by a couple of principals and some intrinsic, you know it’s very tough and like often art position has been mis-read as being 100% celebratory of all collective endeavors. I mean it’s not the case you know.
There is no more success, I mean a corporation is a group, one of the most – it’s probably the most you think with this kind of group that there is but there are sorts of groups and just because people are collaborating doesn’t necessarily mean what you are doing together is good. You can collaborate on you know a gas chamber; you can collaborate on all sorts of things you know. It doesn’t mean that because you’ve made some kind of decision together even or even under the guides of consensus that consensus was actual or fair. I mean it’s – so anyway I just want to say that I don’t think there is any kind of assumption on our part that that’s ever going to be the case or that should be the case in Cittadellarte.
I think what we are interested in though, we are a little bit more dysfunctional in the corporation. Whenever efficient if you are to measure us by those kinds of standards as a group but I think one of the reasons that we are focusing on different examples of what we are strangely calling plausible art worlds every week this year for a year is because we actually want to look at what people are really doing and not to try and start mold, try to create sort of mold or creates you know specific, I mean we can make comparisons but we are not, we can’t really compare what someone else, what someone is doing and what someone else is doing because we don’t really want to look at what people are doing as a model exactly. I mean you can’t really stamp that out and redo it.
But at the same time, it’s really hard for me personally not to be interested in reproducibility or wonder about if what we are actually doing is making a proposal. I think what is so interesting about what happens when artists make a proposal is that they are, some are injecting it with symbolic value and part of what’s happening is not just that you are making, not just that you are having a party or making an agreement between a few people but you are proposing somehow that this is an agreement that you should consider, that you can possibly contemplate that possibly you should critique, that’s what this is for. That when you say this is an art work, that’s what we understand when I say we royally, what is generally understood to be one of the most basic guys where artist sort of, just contemplate a value you know and the symbolic value that is carried with it.
[0:40:13]
So we have to think about this, if we are going to take it seriously as in our project which somebody like Michalangelo Pistoletto wants us to do and what other groups that we are looking at and talking with and working with directly what us and everyone else to do, then we have to think about this stuff, we have to wonder what would happen if you were to expand the ship. Is it something that could be expanded like sort of a city, should it be a continent you know or should it shrink down, what happens if there are more of them? So that’s our reproducibility question. That’s one way that people often think of plausibility is, is we reproduce for, it is expandable, if it is sustainable, is another thing you know could keep going. I think that’s where the I am not trying to break it down for everyone else, I think people will have their say and I don’t want to keep rambling on but just really, just a sort of tie what I meant together if you will indulge me for a second.
I think when we were talking about the parasitical nature of this, imagination but the city of art, how it really can only exist as a kind of, as a sort of love this sort of I don’t know unclaimed love child of mainstream art world, of an art mainstream art market. You know, it wouldn’t exist financially without him right? So it is that, you know that’s part of their sustainability question. And I think one of the other things we are looking at when we are thinking about what makes something plausible is, is it substantively different from what’s already currently on offer in a mainstream. Because if – or what is currently accepted already. If something is already accepted as being absolutely definite like oh like this is the way something is done, right and this will work then you wouldn’t call plausible, you will say oh sure.
You know plausibility it means something that is either just out of reach or something that you are not quite sure of you know, it has some chance but you are not sure how much, maybe it’s very plausible, maybe – oh that’s plausible, it has the slimmest chance. But you know – so I think that’s why we look at that rather. So if you see what I mean those are the reasons like I think why some of these questions were being raised. Not so much to create dichotomy like a black and white but just to look at what that model is in those terms. You look like [0:42:37] [inaudible]
Female Speaker: Yes I was really interested in what you said about how it was hard for people with a certain medium to come and picture of you in that medium and I guess what it kind of makes me think of a little bit is the difference between collective brain storm, idea generation, plan generation versus collective action and I see this as relevant in two ways there might be more than that but one, in kind of the way that Basekamp with this model of the plausible art worlds project where it is really about dialogue and discussion and idea exchange and a lot of the ways that I have experienced Basekamp working have been idea bring collective brain storming and I wonder also if this is what in a sense we could say makes the project plausible in that its intangible in this world somewhat because it is idea generating.
And so it’s plausible because we’ve created something but it’s not tangible because it’s not here. I don’t know I just kind of wanted to just that I really like what you said.
Camille: There’s 15 people from different country and even if you want to do a collective you know it’s like if you – there is one Palestinian, one Israeli, one Indian, one Korean, we are all so different from different country and it takes time but at the end we made it but it was not easy at the beginning. For me actually it was okay. But some of the people it wasn’t, it was hard but I believe what you say is to create a common ID which is I think it’s really dependant on the character and the [0:44:48] [inaudible] even if you really want to, sometimes it is hard. So we understand [0:44:57] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Actually I think I said that if Steven wanted to elaborate on this, he was next to the queue and is that okay Chris?
[0:45:08]
Male Speaker: Steve did you want to follow up on that or just kind of add that to the conversation that will roll it, how do you feel?
Steven: No if somebody has a pressing question I am happy to step back but otherwise I would like to say something but it’s not urgent.
Male Speaker: Okay, let’s just have Chris.
Female Speaker: How long is this supposed to last? Is this going to be keep going on or is this a short term project? Yeah.
Male Speaker: Does anyone know?
Female Speaker: We have talked about this Erica, I mean I think that’s an open question of how long can it sustain itself. Right now it is sustained by Michalangelo and by himself financially and also by grants that they get from the regional government just the same way that the art museum is sustained by grants that we get from the regional and the federal governments and I am sure that you guys get grants too etcetera you know from Pew or whoever the local foundations are. So I think that they struggle, they struggle to find are there versus they opened the slow food restaurant which we talked, the sustainable slow food restaurant. They are right in – it’s just if they are in the middle of New Jersey the garden state, they are riding the garden basket there of a very flat and fertile ground.
So I think the restaurant is pretty successful whether it actually turns but with the restaurant turn of profits. We heard last week, we held a conference at Warden school to talk about this creative ideas for sustainable development and we – one of the people that talked to us was Stone Barrens, Stone Barrens up in New York and they occupy this building, series of buildings built by the Rockefellers but no longer belonging to them and they are trying to sustain themselves by having a restaurant which then supports the forum etcetera. I mean there is who knows and they are trying product, you know they design projects for some of the local companies there and seeing if they can sell those. But I think I mean Erica would agree, it’s a struggle and how will it continue. I don’t know exactly. Yeah, yeah just like everybody else who are trying to figure out is this plausible? As you say is this a plausible thing? Could this exist for another 20 years or 10 years or whatever?
Female Speaker: And I think just [0:47:46] [indiscernible] saying is I think the question of longevity is kind of what we left off with Michalangelo and Paulo and Francesco and the people from Cittadellarte that were here especially for the conference and the question is what is the longevity of Cittadellarte? How well will this sustain but also in what form. I mean there will be – will it have a life after Michalangelo and if so what would the function, will it change the function, will it change the forum of the place? They certainly have a property, they have a structure of what they do within that, space may change, I mean it may be different and I think that we definitely gave Michalangelo a lot to think about when he was here both within the Warden conference and the talks with [0:48:29] [indiscernible] and I think you know we will be seeing some interesting things in the future for them.
It has been a formal foundation since 1998 just like Basekamp [0:48:40] [indiscernible] in 1998 as well. So the question of what is next for this collective and collaborative practices whether you call them a foundation or a project or whatever is always the question. We can’t really answer with the sustainability of this is but I think those are things to kind of think about and I know that Michalangelo was thinking about that as well.
Male Speaker: So Steven I think you had something that you want to say, a sense of what you are thinking.
Steven: Yeah I must say that I am a little bit perplexed because – but I – I am often perplexed when art worlders start talking about the role that they play or intend to play in the field they are playing, in the transformation of society and then it actually comes down to something that resembles to some extent the United Nations with the successful restaurant. I think we need to be more specific about exactly what it is, I mean beyond like asserting things about what art can do in terms of its transformative value. Exactly what are we talking about that art can bring to the table for the point of view of Cittadellarte.
[0:50:02]
You know because the use of art and creativity in transformation of society has been absolutely devastating. You know it’s been used as a – it’s been instrumentalized and uses the tool by finance capital to you know literally destroy the life world of people and so it doesn’t, I mean it’s not, it’s a mute point to know whether art does play a role, it does play roles. It’s played in a particularly perfidious one and so you know when you say that it needs to play a responsible and then you need, I think it’s incumbent to actually specify just exactly what that role would be.
And so far I haven’t really been able to understand in what way it’s not merely sort of a factory of immaterial labor that’s moved in to a factory, into a former industrial area and has upgraded it into a new form of capital accumulation. It doesn’t work like a factory anymore which is why I quickly typed in that quote from [0:51:04] [indiscernible] because we think there are no factories anymore because they’ve been socialized into museums and other places of immaterial labor production but which do contribute fundamentally to the production of social relations values and profits.
So you know I am not – it’s not like, I don’t want to appear to be the prosecutor here. But there is some prosecution to be done when and I think you would all agree with that when you talk about the need for social, responsible social transformation and the role that Cittadellarte wants to play in that, but in what way is it not, is it playing that and what in way is it not merely contributing to the reproduction of or the displacement of capital accumulation process to a different sector of effective labor.
Male Speaker: Yes, yes but Maggie you were saying you need more time? Do you still one more time or has this been the [0:52:15] [indiscernible]? Okay no rush, yeah I mean anything you want to say is great.
Myla: I guess Steven this is Myla. What I want to say is then where would you have art reside? In other words is you know if you have one at one end of the spectrum making pretty things all by yourself with the door close behind you and selling that. I mean I am not a philosopher of art so I can’t argue that way except that you seem to be, there seems to be a hidden message under what you are saying is an appropriate place for art and for artist and that Cittadellarte so I want to say if not this then what? Just Steven well [0:53:08] [cross talk]
Steven: Thank you.
Male Speaker: I don’t think I have ever heard you saying that Steven that there is a…
Myla: Let me hear from Steven.
Male Speaker: Okay cool.
Steven: Oh thank you Myla it’s a good question and I think my prosecutorial tone probably begged that question. No I am not saying there is one good place to do art. I’m just, I am wondering, I just think that these are the kinds of questions that not only do we need to ask but we also need to answer. I mean we do need to – Greg made a quip a little earlier on. Let me just try and find that one. That basically I forget what it was but that the way that Basekamp where the plausible art world is far more dysfunctional than a corporation. You know that it was a just a quip but in certain sense it has a true meaning because that would suggest that we are dealing with a different type of an economy, we are dealing with a different kind of – we are not dealing with managerial logics of the same not only the same scope or the same kind actually.
So the whole point of plausible art worlds has been to identify a polarity of places where art could take place in a responsible way but to look at it in very specific ways not just saying oh yeah we are going to create this really great utopian internationalist kind of a structure but actually what are they doing, what is going on and we never want to run away from this kinds of questions but what we really want not run away from away is the kind of answers.
So it really was, you know it sounded like I was asking a mean spirited question but I was really just asking to one to try and get to the I don’t know the core of this was what exactly is Cittadellarte contributing, what has it tangibly and measurably contributed and what could it be said to be contributing to the transformation of public space or I mean by public space, I mean the kind of debate around social and political and economic concerns that it legitimately identifies as being high priority. I mean has it done that or has it – I mean in a way the testimony of the two residence which I have heard sort of waivers between yeah it was really cool and well it was kind of frustrating. But I actually haven’t had what potentially I mean any kind of – what kind of teeth does it have towards – I mean we are talking about a protofascists government in Italy, it’s no joke.
[0:56:02]
So what have they done in terms of disturbance towards the extremely racists politics towards immigrants, the devastation of new liberalism of finance capital, what are we doing, what kind of responsible action is actually going on the ground and what does art have to say about it. because if you can’t answer that question, then I really think it’s just window dressing around art usual position of you know being sort of smoke screen for the other sectors of symbolic capital accumulation.
Female Speaker: I will just say that once again we are sort of not the right people to answer this question. What I would say is just because we have artists who have lived there for four months in a very highly specified way as a residency. We need someone from Cittadellarte, we need Paulo or Emma or some of the people that are leading various offices there to answer your question. I guess I think about it in terms of project by project, they’ve done interesting work. But I am not the right person to tell you the details of it and what because it is through the details that either becomes authentic or not, yes they have worked with issues of immigration in the Mediterranean, yes. I am the wrong person to talk about it. So I am just going to pass the [0:57:39] [cross talk]
Male Speaker: Not even necessarily even what [0:57:41] [indiscernible] or not but just what could be useful to us too.
Male Speaker: Since we are not experts on Cittadellarte or expert enough, we do have experts in Philadelphia. We spent a year talking about plausible art worlds. So instead of answering the question in terms of Cittadellarte why don’t you tell us about some of the plausible art world you found for Philadelphia and the conversations you’ve been having over the last year?
Male Speaker: That’s a great question. Interestingly enough we haven’t – well it’s certainly we haven’t found any but we haven’t really talked much about any specific examples of art world like [0:58:26] [indiscernible] of many our experiments here in Philly though I think we could. I know that there are a lot of awesome things going on here and interesting things. We spent a good amount of time trying to reach out to people in Philly a few years ago and just haven’t really taken that route recently, not for a lack of interest. We just, there are a couple of reasons just too sort of let you know so that it doesn’t seem like some kind of – and we don’t Philadelphia sometimes hands off. Our like [0:58:59] [indiscernible] are open to anybody to come in. it’s obviously not, it doesn’t have a great PR engine behind it so we can’t really be like you know more inviting than just simply opening our doors and trying to distribute it.
But our choice of looking at this example of last year and mostly then we were looking at trying to look at different kinds of art worlds and its really then hard to identify substantively different kinds of art worlds. At first we thought oh well there is going to be a staggering number of this. And then we started kind of looking at them and saying oh well this is in a [0:59:36] [indiscernible] solely around a kind of alternative autonomy that it is proposing or this is a full blown session shoot out or another kind of social experiment or this kind of art world is an organizational art system that is being proposed as kind of tying in with existing organizations kind of lectured in art you know.
[1:00:00]
Except in many of these examples we’ve looked at in the past they’ve been tying in with very specific organization. We’re sort of parasiting off that or sort of in the process of instituting some other, transforming some other existing organizations. So it’s like the opposite of a succession. It’s like a Trojan horse we’re embedding. We’ve looked at art worlds that, what we’re calling art worlds or fledgling art worlds in some cases that are premised around the open source ideas. So like really we keep looking at these and I mean more than just like as many as you can fit weekly in a year and they keep kind of falling into the same sorts of categories if you call them that or tie ins.
And so we’ve tried to spread some duprecy around that just to look at a bunch of different examples so we’re not like accidentally focusing too much on one kind of art world. And also we’ve tried to look, have some geo diversity, not so much that so that we can claim to be global or something like this but so that we can actually find different, the kinds of experiments that people are doing that might be informed by location. You know because it is. If everyone we’re looking at was on the East Coast of the United States or something like that we’d get a much different impression than if they were all in the Balkans you know.
So I think since we’ve tried to spread it around a lot we’ve looked, a few of them have been from the US and a few of them have been from the East Coast. One of the examples that we looked at was, I mean I can give you a few now that I think about this. One was an example called FEAST. It was based in Brooklyn but there is a Philadelphia chapter that’s really going strong and that’s really interesting. I think people from Lodren organizations are involved in it. I would say it’s a sort of, I don’t know how I can; I don’t want to say Metagroup you know. But it’s definitely not an isolated group. There are people who are involved in peace from, I think from I’m not sure but I would guess from some of the people that are here or at least it would be likely if they were.
And there was another organization that was local in Philadelphia that’s also rather fledgling called the public school. It started as a project in LA and had, didn’t exactly franchise itself but it was formed around people, I’ll briefly describe it just so you get some kind of sense of what I’m talking about. A zero, a no membership quasi group that’s formed on a really simple idea that anyone can propose a course or whatever that means to them. Some of them are really elaborate, some are like, you know I’ve seen some courses proposed like “How to get in and out without being seen” or “ how to pick locks” and others are a film series or a Lucerne reading group or something like this. You know it’s like the really wildly, I mean and there have been hundreds and hundreds of these quasi proposals and a bunch of them happened.
Without going on too long about this, the idea is that people will use this website to try to, anyone can propose a course and then anyone can express interest in any course proposal when there are enough people that want to do it. Then you make arrangements and it happens, almost always face to face with people. And so because of that it’s happened in a number of different cities and it’s happened in Philadelphia as well. That’s one of the other examples. I’m sure there are more, I can’t think of them right now. But we really want to connect with anybody who’s interested in these sorts of endeavors. I mean and really I think in some ways like us who want to consider what role we play in the world and what kinds of plural worlds that we’re making. And specifically when we’re doing that what our role as artists is and what we can bring to the table, what kind of competencies as artists we can bring from our field or from our experiences to other needs.
Male Speaker: Which one Scott? Which exactly ones are we talking about?
Male Speaker: Which competencies?
Male Speaker: Yeah. I mean because which incompetence’s, but what are we talking about?
Male Speaker: I don’t know, I definitely don’t want to make, when I’m holding the microphone I’m taking up line sure of this side of the conversation. But I don’t really why that is actually but I guess I wouldn’t want us to sound like some kind of, I don’t know some kind of summary of project or anything like that because we’re really interested in finding out what those are and there is a lot of examples. But I can think of some. I’d like to think, I’d like to hear what other people think as well. I mean I can just throw out one so that I think one of our competencies as artists is to be intra disciplinary. To be completely promiscuous in that sense, you know to tie together different fields, to steal, to borrow, to instantiate them elsewhere and to heavily use metaphor in that way. And I’m sort of using metaphor metaphorically in the sense that when you say what a metaphor is it’s really just talking about one thing and that we’re thinking about one thing or doing thing cultured in the terms or the ideas or the context of some other thing.
[1:05:44]
So I think artist’s metaphoric thinking historically can be very useful. And now it can be useful for all sorts of reasons I mean. Artists are like hired by corporations to brainstorm their products all the time. I’ve done that you know. That’s a competency or maybe you could say an incompetency. But anyway…
Female Speaker: In terms of examining all collectives that all artists there’s like what do we leave behind? When we have program in our city like the mural arts programs, we have murals that are a tangible thing. But when we do a lot of things that are more intellectual property or think tanks, I mean where then is there something that lives on beyond us? And I think we’re talking about worlds in way but in another way we’re really talking about material world and intellectual or spiritual, whatever you want to call the other world of that. And one on my favorite books is The Gift by Lewis Hyde which is the gift in the erotic like property which really looks at these two sources of commerce. There’s the economic physical market commerce and then there is the spiritual community building, idea sharing world of commerce and how do collectives function with that. Is there mission to have something tangible finished accomplished or is there mission just to have a dialogue keep the ideas flowing and how do those ideas then continue.
And my question is because I’m thinking Rick Low with project Row House in Texas or Lilly Yeh with Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philly, people who can say these are the things they did and kind of check those boxes, houses were built, Meltians project with Vendredi, you know raising money for education. Is that the goal of collectives to have social change or is it more in the idea and in the artistic world of intellectual properties? No I mean I was going, my comment was very related to that and also related to kind of the question or statement that I said before and that is that I think for me personally plausible art world has been about personal change and dialogue like you were saying and less about leaving about something behind. So for me it’s less important to answer your question by saying, alright, this is what we physically left behind and these are projects that we’ve done which is also another way to respond to it.
But for me it’s more about like the change individual based on the conversations and the dialogues that have happened through the discussions that we have every week. And to me what was said before about this group coming together and idea generating and brainstorming together kind of collectively is really for me personally what this project, what excites me about this project. And also it did sort of seem that I caught a glimpse of somebody who was pulling up the one of the first lines on the description of, I can’t pronounce it, and it said something like the production of dialogue. Like how is dialogue productive and that’s what both of these projects that we’re talking about tonight for personally are and that’s really I think gets what you’re kind of saying that distinction between the physical world and the kind of idea spiritual world. And also to me what I didn’t really quite understand Steven’s comment about well I mean for me you have to work in the system that you’re given and regardless of the fact that we’re using the monetary system to do this project it’s still producing something outside of that.
[1:10:18]
Female Speaker: I guess I was going to take their conversation in a little bit different direction I think. One of my criticisms of Cittadellarte in my experience there is that it’s really, well to start with the positive it’s really connected on an international level to the international art market. I mean like Michelangelo is really well known artist who obviously selling his work. And like internationally I think that it’s recognized probably more than it’s recognized in the region where it’s at. I think people are talking about the project may know about it. But it’s like I didn’t really understand living in the other, people like I would say I was living at [1:11:08] [inaudible] saying and they had an idea about that. But they weren’t coming to public programs very often. I mean there’re people from that program that come to their public program that comes to our exhibitions. But mostly they are attended from people outside that community.
So it’s I guess I was always really, I don’t have the answers but I was really interested in like the integrity in that and having a program that’s a project or it’s about social transformation and then kind of the folks, you know the regular folks that aren’t artists aren’t really accessing the project. Like there’s some discrepancy there for me at least. It’s a huge resource to the community you know and I just, I wonder how I can, for me it needs to be more accessible to the community.
Male Speaker: Yeah that’s definitely true. I mean arguably Philadelphia struggles with this as well. I wouldn’t want to say that to any from Philadelphia. I’ve lived here for 15 years so I kind of feel like I’m from Philadelphia, I don’t know ish, you know like if you ask me where I’m from I often say that. But yeah it’s definitely true and when you are collectively as a city generally eclipsed by sort of brighter neighboring stars it’s you know often your audience when you have a “high level contemporary art program” people are from all over the place. And I mentioned the mass mock effect only because that’s sort of a largely written about example where some planners wanted to put a center and then it was supposed to boost economics and there’s…sorry…oh and build value yeah, exactly.
It’s I mean I guess then when you start talking you get into regional politics and how good is this really for the community and then the conversation is all about that. And that is definitely an interesting conversation. I think it’s a different one than this but that is super interesting.
Male Speaker: I was going to ask, is there space for me to say something or have I said too much?
Male Speaker: I guess it’s up to you, you guys we officially ended four minutes ago so I guess it, yeah the answer is yes.
Steven: Okay. I’ll be less long winded than usual. No because I, the previous speaker one before said something which appears to be intuitively self evident that we have to start with the system that exists which is given. So you don’t just sort of make up something else, well of course I disagree with that. Of course I think that nothing interesting could ever, I mean that’s just my point of view but nothing interesting could ever possibly happen with the way that pie is currently being divvied up. You know there’s all sorts of points of view, it’s in the mainstream art world it’s not a homogenous place by any means. It’s extremely heterogeneous. There is a great deal of heterogeneity, there is a great deal of animosity and enmity and conflict and so on.
[1:14:58]
So but even within all of that of course you’re really just remaining within one framework of the art work can mean. One place where expert culture can encounter expert culture can challenge each other. And so I want to say something actually interesting about, I mean I want to say something more generous about that art. I don’t really know more about it than what I’ve heard this evening and on Tuesday night but what it seems to me from what I can hear is that it’s really attempting and it is attempting to do it within the system. And of course that’s not something which I think is you know the route that I want to go. I mean plausible art worlds is interested in people who’ve simply like left the attention economy and have gone to other routes and other ways of imagining what art can be.
But I think what Cittadellarte has done is taken the pulse of that change and it’s taking the pulse of the word art itself has been given an incredibly heavy burden to bear. It’s come to mean so many different things and I think that it attempts to in its experimental mode of kind of embodying that shift in the usage of the word art. And I think that’s probably the sense of why it’s bringing these people together in this sort of, in a sort of unpredictable way because it doesn’t, I mean as far as I can get, it doesn’t really like particular line of what art is supposed to be viewing. But it’s somehow by not knowing what it’s supposed to be doing but doing something, something good will become of this. Well this is like a very new; I mean art historically is an extremely new kind of a concept. I mean it seems goofy from an older perspective and it seems not really, it seems a bit defanged from my perspective.
But if you put it in a contemporary perspective what it looks like even though it may not be engaging with the local communities, it does seem like an attempt to democratize taste as a kind of prelude to the democratization of politics which is something that Italy is certainly in dire need of. So I see it as at once extremely contemporary and an attempt probably to take, well work on all the possible art worlds and gently ease them into a mainstream framework while we might want to see that as being a kind of a form of co-optation. But it also might be a way of, I mean it would a shame to see it as a cynical strategy it might be a potential strategy for, I don’t know not only just taking a measure of the shift in the word art but kind of pushing it gently in another direction.
Male Speaker: Yeah. Actually I think that’s what we, that was sort of how left the last chat wasn’t it, that there is this sort of like, there is a sort of gently nudge in a way, sort of an open ended gentle nudge where a lot of them, I don’t know, the procedures for closing down questions or closing down conversations are kind of left out and that’s one of the things that seems really interesting about Cittadellarte, it may not be the answer to all world’s problems or anything like this and I think we need to discuss how it closely resembles some of the larger power structures that we have and many people are struggling with all the time, in and outside of circle art practices. But also I think we also want to take a look at the other things that are happening there that are, I wouldn’t know if I want to go so far as to say miraculous but…
Steven: It’s gone; I meant to say one more thing. It just gone, because you just attributed to me. You know my Brian Holmes who was a guest Plausible Art Worlds and it’s week four, he’s written an interesting text about what he calls liars poker. And he uses that term to describe how political artists engage with would be political institutions like the Cittadellarte and other museums, you know the Macabre in Barcelona and so on. They play this game of liar’s poker so that the artist always pretends that they have a political ace in their sleeve. And the museum goes along with that bluff. But if the artist, this is Brian’s point, if the artist actually has a political ace in his sleeve in other words if the artist is ready to engage in live politics then he or she gets carried out by the bodyguards right out of the museum and right out of the institutions.
[1:20:23]
So I think that very probably if anybody, any artist ever dared to bring real politics inside the citadel of art that would be the end of their residency. And I’d be very interested to hear someone contradict that point of view.
Female Speaker: Well I feel that if a museum is this structure of the art world, if that’s the system, the corporation whatever you want to call it I feel responsible in myself and I feel as a society that we have to hold those institutions accountable and responsible to change. I mean if we just form these art worlds as completely separate, as completely a universe dismissing the entire world that exists then they can do whatever they want and my sense of justice is that’s not fair. I know that I don’t have the ability to change overnight or that a few people are going to change overnight but I want to go down fighting and maybe that’s like the rocky Philadelphia side of me you know.
Female Speaker: Okay. I was just thinking about I work with puppets and I have one particular puppet that was always saying, I can get away with things. I’m cute people don’t listen to me; I can say whatever I want. Whereas if you, like everybody else could do he could go in there and slip a political idea right in there, right under people’s noses and it happened.
Male Speaker: Did you want to say something? Yeah.
Camille: Also from like a community arts standpoint if you work completely outside of the system you’re discounting people who aren’t even considered artists by the art system which I think that’s also why it’s important for me to try to what you were saying bring justice to the systems that already exist because it also includes people who aren’t even considered by like the elitist “art world” as artists that are artists and just need to be told they are.
Male Speaker: Should we go on with this…
Steven: Hang on, I just, I wasn’t talking about that I mean I wasn’t saying that we’re talking about artists that are recognized as such, I mean whose self understanding as artists and who are recognized as such by museums. But the, our experience in Europe has been that when those artists actually show their teeth, when they say okay this is a show about responsible transformation of political transformation of society so we’re bringing in the equipment right? Well no they’re not. No I mean that’s when the museum says no. You know we’re not talking about they’re doing some sort avant-gardist activity that nobody can understand. We’re talking about they’re saying, you just said we were going to do a show about or we’re going to do a project or the whole initiative is about social transformation. So we’re going to do that. Well as long as they talk about it that’s one thing. But when they actually have live content no way. I mean there has been no exception of that.
Male Speaker: Yeah I mean it’s like what happened Steve Kurtz; I mean the FBI came in. It’s like what happened with b.a.n.g. Lab, these are highly respected art groups and artists and are supposedly and it’s you know, I think I get the point that Steven is making is that when we’re talking about the department of politics I just linked it here you know I think what you might be asking is how far can that go. We also have a lot of directions which we [1:24:28] [inaudible] but yeah.
Female Speaker: [1:24:35] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Oh definitely. And also if I can just contextualize this a little because we are students out our normal context in the sense that we often discuss that out of our space and refer to past discussions, just a couple of things that came up real quick. From the overall point of view of this project there isn’t any judgment that everyone should abandon all institutions. Just to let people know, especially when questions of legitimacy for people who don’t have visibility yet come up. I mean channels for visibility that already exist that are kind of, that are mainstreams that are pipelines for visibility can be very helpful definitely and anyway I don’t mean to be an ultimate apologist for anything that we say.
[1:25:31]
But just sort of, I mentioned earlier that there different kinds of plausible art worlds that we were looking at and some of them are completely antagonistic to any existing institution I mean to the point where they only barely reluctantly agree to talk with us, because somehow we’re tainted you know. I mean and others who are incredibly enmeshed with the idea that somehow I think like Steven had said earlier that you start making “compromises” and you somehow become a double agent in an institution with the idea of transforming it and suddenly you become a triple agent. You don’t really know who you are anymore. It’s, and there is a lot of not only in between but alternate kinds too that we’re looking at that might help something in case there is an impression that this last string of conversation summarizes the project entirely. It is one head of this multi headed hydra.
There is a book or a publication anyway, we don’t really know exactly what it’s going to be that’s already paid for like he said by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative which is awesome that the people that were on that panel to decide what should be funded decided to fund something like this as opposed to another blockbuster show which is cool. And our basic idea with that is we’re going to try, what we propose we’re going to print 2000 copies. We are going to donate half of them as much as possible to every institution that we can, formal or informal that where people are taught about what art is supposed to be because we feel that the core key point of view is not that it’s a sociological project per se that we are looking in art worlds. And it’s also not just a conceptual art project even though we are working with a number of people art worlders and art groups and we’re an art group ourselves and I mean Steven is a writer and a philosopher but other people do all sorts of different things and so I think there is certainly a point of view that this is a project.
But I think specifically there are cocky perspective that we’re trying to or the lens that we’re trying to look at all these various things through is that it’s not just the things that we do because we can do all sorts for things and find cracks and fissures in any existing structure and not even think much about the structure because we’ll just assume that we’re not going to change it and let’s do what we can within it. There is a lot of different, what am I trying to say, that is a way to do things. What this project is mainly doing is looking at all those structures and saying, hey the structures that we’re building to support creative life are as important, or as much a part of what art is as the actions or the performances that we do as artists, as the objects that we make as artists or the processes or the writings that we do or the criticism that is written is just as worthy of discussion and even exhibition like inquiry which is not really a normal way to look at it.
So that’s why we’re, but the fact remains that from out, I think we’re trying to make a strong case for this sort of through exhibits as we’ve discussed like kind of exhibit A, exhibit B, you know kind of proof in a way that this is a major part of what many artists are doing. It’s developing structures that support creative life and we’re thinking, hey it would be awesome, it would be interesting and hopefully valuable for people that are learning about what art is to see a bunch of different kinds of options when they’re learning about that because let’s face it we’re going to insert ourselves or find ourselves in one structure or another we’re going to believe we have some degree of influence of what those are. And largely on how we talk. So whether these people have already gone through some formal education or not.
So that’s the point of the book anyway and that’s at least we’re getting started on that with again like I said and it’s not just, well what Steven calls a pseudo demographic bluff, it’s not just a I hope a lip service to say, hey you’re all invited to the work with us when we really have no intention of doing that. We really actually do. We have a certain set of pages I think that we can afford to print that many copies of based on the target that we have. But it’s still relatively up in the air where that’s going to be. It’s still one of the major components of it is a glossary that don’t even have, we hardly have started yet because from almost every single person that has, we’ve been in contact with or had these discussions with, there’s always these questions about what does that mean and I think this means something different than you and somehow we often get to the issue that we don’t have adequate language to really build the kinds of worlds that many of us want. And we also don’t have adequate language to describe them and understand them mutually.
So we are really, we’re trying to build a glossary and we want people’s help with that. And we’d like to also mention that we, and I see what many other people are already doing like what you had asked as plausible art worlds themselves are, you know already plausible art worlds we’re not trying coin it, we’re not interested in coinage of some phrase or trying to stake some kind of territory. In fact many people are already much more invested in doing that than we are and we just want to meet you, you know people that are doing these kinds of things and know more about it. So is that enough of a wrap up that, okay. Thanks everybody for joining us on Skype and we’ll see you next week.
[1:32:02] End of Audio
Secessions and other social experiments
Week 51: IRWIN
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Miran Mohar, founding member (with fellow artists Dušan Mandič, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik, who may also skype in) of IRWIN, a collective of Slovenian artists, primarily painters, which would become the visual-arts wing of the broader collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK).
http://www.nskstate.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRWIN
http://times.nskstate.com/tag/irwin/
IRWIN was founded in 1983 by a group of guys from the punk and graffiti scene in Ljubljana, who decided to call themselves Rrose Irwin Sélavy. The name of course is a wink to Marcel Duchamp, who used “Rrose Sélavy” (pronounced, tautologically, as éros c’est la vie) as one of his feminine pseudonyms. The group subsequently shortened the name to R Irwin S. In 1984, the group co-founded a larger collective known as Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), with like-minded artists from other fields, including the rock band Laibach, and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater group. NSK’s modus operandi was what their contemporary and compatriot Slavoj Zizek has called “over-identification”: that is, rather than critiquing powerfully connoted political imagery (including Soviet, fascist, religious and Suprematist images), they would endorse it to an excess, to considerable traumatic and provocative effect, engendering confusion that could only be resolved by acknowledging that no space, no frame — no world of interpretation — is neutral. In some ways, it was a particular, post-Yugoslavian brand of institutional critique; but the insistence on collective, depersonalized production, pushed IRWIN and NSK as a whole in the direction of imagining alternative forms of political communities, including the project “A State in Time”, which led to opening embassies and consulates in Moscow, Ghent and Florence, issuing NSK passports to “citizens” who have used them to cross borders.
More recently, IRWIN has developed the large-scale, open-ended cartographic project “East Art Map” (presented at Basekamp in 2006), one of the most ambitious attempts to map the vectors of influence and development of conceptual art in the countries of the former Soviet bloc — reappropriating a history and horizon of aspirations and production, challenging the hegemony of the Western art-historical canon. With humor and meticulous detail — not to mention some beautiful maps — IRWIN has shown the importance for any plausible world to be able to map its trajectory. The group refers to this approach with the paradoxical term “Retro-avant-gardism”, drawing attention to the temporal provincialism inherent in conventional art history with the 1987 statement: “The Future is the seed of the past.” With one week left to go in our year-long cycle of discussions, and before Plausible Artworlds morphs into a new project, what could be more important to address than that performative paradox?
Transcription
Week 51: IRWIN
Miran: Are you at the hotel or at the airport or in the city?
Stephen: I'm in, what do they call it, the food court at the airport.
Miran: O my God.
Stephen: Yeah it's a complete American concept. You got to see it to believe it.
Miran: Yeah.
Stephen: Here I am and it's great to talk to you.
Miran: Great. Great to talk to you again yes.
Scott: So that's really fabulous I love that you're at a food court Stephen. So hi Miran welcome.
Miran: Hi.
Scott: Welcome to one of our weekly chats. The second to the last in this year of discussions about what we're calling Plausible Artworlds. And welcome everybody. Tonight we'll be talking with members of Irwin and NSK represented by Miran Mohar. And yeah I know would give a lengthy introduction but Miran instead I was wondering if you would be into describing Irwin for people that might not know. And don't feel like you have to give a formal presentation but if you wouldn't mind just giving us a brief intro.
Miran: Okay so how much one, two minutes or something like that more?
Scott: Well you know just I thinkÖ
Miran: Okay.
Scott: ÖI think it might be worth saying what we're ñ yeah let me paste a description by the way for everyone so you can have a slightly more lengthy introduction. I just pasted it into the fact. And for people listening later it's one of the links right on the Basekamp Web site to Irwin under Plausible Artworlds. But I think it might be worth saying what we were just reiterating what we were most interested in. And you can talk about anything you want but I think what we really want to see or look at is to look at Irwin and NSK as a kind of prototype for a different kind of artworld.
Miran: Okay.
Scott: And so we'd really like to know about how you guys, like kind of a little bit of the why, a little bit of the context maybe. But also at some point it would be great to get into the structure of how you set everything up and all of that.
Miran: Okay should I say a few things also about what NSK really is and a little bit of history? I mean if this is important I could do that as well.
Scott: That would be great.
Miran: Okay. Tonight we just start this for the people who don't know anything about it. I'm a member of the collective [inaudible 03: 46] which is a group of five artists, five painters and we work together since 1983. And it is also part of the wider structure which the beginning was called Mia Slavenish Securs. Later in the end of '80s changed the name to Accu Namaniska. And the group was founded in 1984 and consists from the group Laibach started much earlier, basically the beginning of the '80s; 1980.
And this is the group which was mostly in the field of music but they also started in a wider field of ours. They also did visual arts in the beginning. Then Bob Densky was also theatre group a CPO analysis and designed studio collective, later on joined the Department of Pure Practical Philosophy. And we also have a television department architecture but just for a very short time. So basically the group, each group was serious with the [inaudible 05: 15] Charter but from time-to-time we agreed ñ can you hear me?
[Background noise]
Stephen: Yes. Can everyone please mute their mics when not speaking?
Miran: Something is ñ hello.
Stephen: Yeah give us just a second to sort out the - okay is that better?
Miran: Yeah. But I don't see others, are the also others on line?
Stephen: Yes there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 people on the channel.
Miran: Okay. So just to continue each group was from the beginning completely independent but we had some kind of common ideological background for certain things. But we have been also very different and we still are. So the NSK so first different first group agriculture and in the beginning of the '90s in 1992 it got switched from organization NSK to the State in Time in fact. So speaking of Irwin it's getting very much with contemporary art today about ideological elements in art itself. And especially we have in interested in the conditions of art and production of art, at least in Europe, and we did many project related to this issue and this field. NSK State in Time was kind of initiated by [inaudible 07: 29] being the buddy and NSK Embassy in Moscow in 1992. And other NSK groups accepted this also as a platform to their own activity.
So just recently we had a conference of the NSK Citizen in Berlin this was in October and at the moment we're working on three of them covering the Congress. And we also lately do an exhibition related to the NSK In Time which one of the Soviet's still own in the city near [inaudible 08: 14]. This was very, very brief introduction and I think it's better maybe if you just Scott or Stephen ask me some questions you think that could be interesting to the public and then speak more to your ñ yes I hear you.
Stephen: Miran I have about 2000 or 3000 questions so let me start with a really basic one. I think it's the first time in our yearlong series that we've talked to people who self-described as a group of painters. You didn't say we were a group of artist you said we were a group of painters. Could you elaborate on whyÖ
Miran: Yes.
Stephen: Öyou say that?
Miran: You know what I would say we studied painting because the academic academy in Vienna was a quite conservative 19th Century institution and we studied painting what's what our profession. And our diploma it's written that we are painters actually. So of course today everyone is using many people is using, especially just being an optimist. So we are just professionally we are painters. Of course we have been working now also in the media but primarily our education it's based on the practice of paintings.
Stephen: And painting continues to be an important practice where you find.
Miran: Of course all the time yes. All the time. All the time is a kind of red line from the beginning yes. So we started our first even exhibition ever paintings of course yes.
Stephen: I think particularly a line with the Su'prematist movement. There seems to be sort of an ongoing relationship with engagement with Soviet Su'prematism, Malevich and so on. Am I right about that?
Miran: Well yeah. Malevich Su'prematism was, let's put it this way, important part it is an important role even in practice but it's not the only one, it's one of them. Our paintings many times the multitudes are taken from I would say modern Su'prematism then also for totalitarian style conceptual app and so on. So you have a very wide I would say, very wide space. Also we are taking material from I would say Alpinean culture and motifs which are around s basically yes.
Scott: You know Miran would it be okay to talk a little bit about Irwin NSK's overall approach to embracing or just adopting a kind of access. Stephen wrote a little bit about it in this introduction and I know other people have written about your approach. I'm asking that because you're talking about motifs and to the casual, well to someone who might not be familiar with work it might sound as if you're just representing things.
Miran: Yeah okay. I would tell you maybe I can answer you like this I'll explain to you. I mean the motifs we are using in our works this is not based on the identification with these motifs it's not this kind of equalistic perception. For instance, we do [inaudible 12: 32] now and sometimes we would have a deal but we don't believe in deals of course you know. I mean we don't believe in deals. So basically what is important in even most relations between certain motive constellations and such and such isn't, so basically what is important is not what you see. Basically for instance we don't paint it here we think that motif is such a glamorous strong motif but it is a point of preference. It's just like something what is around me and it is never did itself.
We have for instance one of the paintings on the abstract painting. So it's always the motive for doing the relationship with the background. So in our work it's the view is the one who kind of at the end propose his own story.
Stephen: Do you have any images you could send us to a link? Actually I didn't find a specific Irwin Web site I found the NSK site I found reference to Irwin. Maybe it would help some people to see some pictures of what you do.
Miran: Yeah I must say that I'm very bad to describe so I have to say I could add things from my computer if somebody explained me how this works.
Scott: Yeah Miran. So let's see here. Do you see the chat where Stephen was just the last person that typed in?
Miran: I haven't checked your HTP ñ yeah, yeah I see this one. Yeah the check, yes, yes.
Scott: Yes and Stephen just checked in the motive of the [inaudible 14: 35] important dot, dot, dot. So if you write a littleÖ
Miran: Just the motives are very important. Just a moment I go down. Yeah I see it yes, yes of course.
Scott: Okay. So if you scroll all the way to the bottom and leave it at the bottom it will continue to automatically scroll for you whenever someone types in and you can just copy a link from your browser and paste it right in there and hit enter, return.
Miran: Okay but basically we don't have specific areas inside so maybe yeah I could send the link to the ñ okay I look at the web here our gallery site yes.
Scott: Okay.
Miran: There's some works. Just a moment.
Scott: Okay.
Miran: Yeah.
Scott: And here are a few links that we already have.
Miran: Just a moment. I'll send you the link yeah because ñ just a moment. Okay this will work yeah I'm sure. This is fine. Okay. I also have yes. So here on this link here which is a [inaudible 16: 11] you can see some of your work, some of your paintings and the latest paintings of monochromes is also one of his dear and okay. I have a question Scott, can you hear me?
Scott: Yes.
Miran: If here I have a command to send file so here I can attach a small image.
Scott: Yeah if it's not too large it'll go through Skype really well.
Miran: No it will be small maybe I'll attach one here, yes okay.
Scott: Great.
Miran: One or two in just a moment.
Scott: Okay.
Miran: Just a moment. Okay.
Scott: Okay that's coming through.
Miran: It's coming through. This is a typical a little icon namely a painting a mileage between two wars and probably it's three handed car or something.
Scott: Yeah it's almost here.
Miran: Yeah.
Scott: Oh really. If anyone can't see this we can upload it to the Web site.
Miran: Do you see it?
Scott: Yeah we do here.
Miran: Okay.
Scott: Would anyone like us to upload this online somewhere? Anyway if so just let us know and we can upload it.
Miran: I don't know how this works. You probably see a ñ okay so I can say something about, for instance this two works. The first one which is called Irwin Icon A this is called Mileage Between Two Wars. In fact on this painting you'll see basically two female portraits, you'll see the mileage to cross it and you'll see basically the two statutes, which looks very Nazi because they are before the Nazi. They are from the first German, the first World War in fact. And basically it's a kind of sandwich you see that the image of Su'prematism is in between realism.
And then on the second one you see, as I said before you see the deal on the account objective the fine abstract paint I mean this example from '85 or something it's earlier in the room basically. Okay any questions?
Stephen: Yes I have a question.
Miran: Yes.
Stephen: It's a very strange aesthetic that you have. It's a very complex ñ remember when I went to see Live Box the band for the first time it was also very strange experience for me because it appeared to be fashionable but it wasn't obviously. I think it's what [inaudible 20: 33] refers to over identification.
Miran: Yes.
Stephen: Where did this come from? How did it happen a whole bunch of the graffiti arcade and from the street arcade and from sort of political theatre and really hardcore sort of heavy metal rock all came together as really hard aesthetic? Can you say a few words about the biggest reflex aesthetic project?
Miran: Yeah that's basically I would say over identification it's just not something what was just started was on a scale live zone it was already on the scale before but I would say that through live [inaudible 21: 21] accelerated. So I mean it's so connected to the crisis of language. For instance, with this kind of politicalistic language when you are saying that you are expressing will not express themselves in a positive language. And then basically the meaning comes out a little twisted because first of all in Yugoslavia the Communist Party called names and say I want to get out of the working class.
So the space of the Avengard was already occupied so you could appear only as retro Avantgard. And basically this over identification matter was how to say it was more for that too because the viewer had to construct his own meaning. And you should care for things; you should follow all these things carefully. As usually would say except of the aliba, they are not the answer, they are kind of question marks. So the public it is true that we said Stephen that when public come they were confused they said "What is this? Is this like a ñ there's something odd about it, something to reiterated not just some but anyone who go closely to the content or to analyze these it was clear that this is not artistic, they're not artistic elements. But basically using this method of over identification was very, how to say purpose to make the public the older thing. Hello.
Scott: Hey yeah we're here. I think everyone's just listening. Yeah I am ñ this was one of the most interesting things to me about all of this when I first found out about your work when I first learned of you.
Miran: Yeah.
Scott: I think it was also very I think very interesting from a I want to say, well from a western perspective, because there is well our version of over identification was kind of like Andy Warhol's kind of embrace of capitalism but it's something very different I think what you guys were doing. You're not really ñ I mean you are using art historical imagery but you're not really making art about art really. You're always occupying a position of artist; well you're using the role of yourselves as artists in order to look at other things.
Miran: Yeah. I mean basically we do have very different roles in NSK. The liable politicians of that era is the chronist like painters who are doing like chronical somehow, commutation whatever you want to call it, and to see if they're presented the ritual, the religion. So we have very precise roles in fact. And basically even when lately it's not as much connected with over identification. It is to a certain extent but it's also very much interested in the deal of construction to construct our own reality our own conditions. So the [inaudible 25: 52] has this meaning and also how we deal with the issues of the artist in Eastern Europe it's very much about art. And of course through that it's political through art not through language or the political you know, or daily politics let's put it this way.
Greg: Miran this is Greg at Basekamp. I'm wondering if there's some discussion on the chat in regards the context that your work is, within the context of your work as its specific to your geography, your location. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how the work is received locally in Slovenian and how it's sort of perceived around the globe.
Miran: Yeah.
Greg: Because I know sometimes those things can differ.
Miran: Of course, of course. No, no I can tell you and you just stop me anytime if I'm going in the wrong direction or I didn't understand the question, basically the perception of course NSK, and not only NSK all the groups that I have [inaudible 27: 02], was very different from recent, especially Eastern Europe or Western Europe in America. For instance when you go to Moscow immediately understand what we're talking about. So they immediately understand the humor in the live box or NSK work or so on. While for instance in, I don't know, Germany training then [inaudible 27: 27] matter is it you know.
While I think also in the United States things were very different because people were not familiar that much with certain [inaudible 27: 41] and so on and society was very differently organized and so on. So yes I mean basically our concept never, I mean we never used this kind of ironical moment on the first, let's put it this, we were not ironical on the first side so everything on the first layer was did the serial. When you go more inside you could reach other layers and so on. So basically of course it was a lot of misreading and misunderstanding and a [inaudible 28: 22] but we knew that this would be part of it. So basically we would have people all the time pro contra and basically for the most of the people it's clear that the totalitarianism in 20th or 21st Century would not appear on this way. I mean the totalitarianism and the uprising of fascism on all this more contempt reform, in fact much more liberal reform.
Greg: Thank you Miran that was good.
Miran: For me it's basically because I'm not that good in English it's really difficult to talk and read all the chat. So if there's any interesting question or questions anyhow just repeat it to me by voice and I will answer so.
Greg: Yeah, yeah no I was just sort of picking out parcels of the discussion and thought I'd sort of try to frame the question on that.
Miran: Yeah.
Stephen: What I'm trying to do Miran is trying to run a commentary going on what you're saying as well so we'll have a textual trace of all of this. I was very ñ a few minutes ago you talked about politics through art. You don't do direct political action, you don't see yourself as a political activist.
Miran: No.
Stephen: And you don't just do art either. But it seems to me that one particularly emblematic example of your work is that east art map projectÖ
Miran: Yes.
Stephen: because that is something specific art competence to try and repossess a history from which artists, and particularly concept artists across the eastern part of Europe former socialist countries had been written out of history and they wanted to write themselves back in, in a certain way.
Miran: Yes.
Stephen: And that's successful both politically and art historically. So it'll really be great if you talked about that, particularly as I think you showed that or at least part of it at the Basekamp space.
Miran: Can you hear me?
Scott: Yep definitely loud and clear.
Miran: Okay. So I will talk a little bit about it yeah. Basically the Eastern Art Map definitely it's a very ñ on the flipside it's a very I would say almost traditional project. It's nothing else than like the eastern of the artistry. But at the same time because there is no such thing so the history of contemporary art in Eastern Europe for different reasons. I mean for the reasons that the art history only exist in the countries which possessed follow to create history. I mean history's always constructed. I mean these countries are countries which have developed a system or they have an old tools which our system is made of like the museum collections, collectors, artistic and basically there is no such things in Eastern Europe. So basically we only have kind of local methodologies about it.
So just the idea the history can or at least elements of the history can be created. It has some political indications in fact because basically to explain to you if you are an artist living in Eastern Europe and you are living in a space where the art system does not exist or exist in a very basic element then you cannot only be just artist you have to also create your context with it. And Eastern Map is just one of quite complex project where we try to create a context for ourselves. I mean if you do art this art has to be part of some kind of stories, some kind of miracle. And basically we just reach this position of ourself not trying to criticize maybe worse or whatever that artist from east are not included in these but because it's not productive. The most productive thing is and still believe that you start to create your own context, you start to create your own elements of your art system, and that's what we did with the Eastern Art Map project.
I don't know maybe Stephen should I go more into details about what it is what this project was or?
Stephen: In my opinion it's crucial to talk about it because what you just said there is extremely important right that if you don't have a context you don't have any art. Yes and you can make things ñ you can still political images until you're blue in the face you can show people starving to death and people hitting other people over the head with guns and you're not doing politics, and you're not doing art you're not doing anything at all because there's no context. And what's interesting about the Eastern Art Map is it's sort of you've created a context where there couldn't be one. So I think it would be good if you just grabbed the whole process.
Miran: Yeah it's fine with me. So basically I would say that Eastern Art Map was just kind of a thought of the ice mountain iceberg. Iceberg of urban project which we started in the late 80s basically, beginning of the 90s and we ended it somehow with Eastern Art Map. At the beginning of the 90s in fact at the end of the 80s when the Berlin Wall fell down many people ñ do you hear me?
Stephen: Yes.
Miran: Yeah many
[Audio ended abruptly]
Week 50: Mildred's Lane
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with J. Morgan Puett, co-founder (with Mark Dion) of Mildred’s Lane, a long-term collaborative experiment in research and event-based practices situated on a 92-acre farm compound in the upper Delaware River Valley region of Pennsylvania.
Mildred’s Lane might be simply described as an “artists’ colony” — a remote location, bringing artists and art-related practitioners together for discussions, shack building, worldmaking and dinners — except that given the methodological agenda, it is actually more oriented toward “decolonizing” our very conceptions of art and the world. As they put it: “The project is actively reassembling the terms of exchange and collaboration, and enthusiastically soliciting participation to co-evolve our (inter and intra) institutional engagements. It means to be a revolutionary rigorous rethinking (the 3 Rs) of the contemporary art complex.” “Complex” is a nice term, largely but not quite synonymous with “world”, adding an interesting nuance by suggesting an intricate plurality within a single expanded field.
The project statement suggests that this is not so much art about life, but literally life about art — everyday living as practice: “The core of the project practice and educational philosophy at Mildred’s Lane is an attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world — this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, new sociality — all of which compose an ethics of comportment – and are embodied in workstyles. As a participant at Mildred’s Lane these issues will be negotiated daily through the rethinking of one’s involvements with food, shopping, making, styling, gaming, sleeping, reading, thinking and doing. This is a program and a place where a work-live-research environment is developed to foster a rigorous engagement with every aspect of life. The entire curriculum is based on experimentally rethinking being as a practice.”
Transcription
Week 50: Mildred's Lane
Mildred’s Lane
I’m Christina McFee, I’m a new media and visual artist.
Wonderful!
Where is there?
I’m Scott, I’m here in Philadelphia in an apartment with my daughter Parker.
And there’s Steven there.
Yes, in Paris.
Hey Steven, what the hell? You’re in that apartment I’m going to live in next year.
Exactly, make yourself at home.
How are ya’ll?
Speaking for myself, I’m great. How are you Morgan?
I’m really good. I’m sorry I’m a little late.
No problem we’re used to that.
And who is this other person, Lanas Quinton?
I did the same thing Morgan, this is Greg. Hi how are you?
Hey!
Yeah, that’s Quentin and he’s also one of the interns here this year from Nice also with Matthew and they are at the Basekamp space with a number of other people.
Ok.
Interestingly, I’m at a Skype named Basekamp but I’m not at that space. But Basekamp is actually a group of people all over the place so, hence the confusion by that space by the same name.
This is very, but I’ll go with it.
Hey Morgan, this is Theresa here, Theresa Rosana.
Theresa!
Hey, how’s it going?
Listen, I’ve been carrying around a thank you note for my backpack, and I’m going to send it but I could never find where your address was. I felt embarrassed to ask to send you a thank you note.
Don’t worry about it. You just said thank you.
I’m so glad you’re here. Good to see you, I mean hear you.
Yeah, you too.
Who else is out there?
Yeah, well Maggie Lawson just texted in.
Oh gosh, I have to read and listen now.
It’s ok. You don’t necessarily have to we can kind of translate between the two.
This is good brain exercise. Can Maggie Lawson hear me?
Yeah I love you too, I didn’t want to interfere with the conference call but yes, I can hear you. I’m Maggie, I’m a visual artist in Oakland, California and I’ve been following the talks via the internet so. Looked like an interesting project I wanted to hear what you were doing.
Oh good! Welcome!
Thank you.
And ya’ll thanks Basekamp for having me here and I’m sorry I’ve been so hard to get a hold of. It’s just been a rough season for me. Anyway, let’s start because I know we’re behind schedule here. How do ya’ll want to proceed?
Generally we welcome you and we don’t usually go into a long introduction about what exactly you’re representing but usually it might be nice to make a, you know just briefly say, I know we’ve mentioned it to you for a while but why we’ve invited you as a representative of Mildred’s Lane and why we wanted to talk with you about that. In short, as you know, this year we’ve been talking every week, and if anyone else is here for the first time or not very often, we’ve been talking every week with different representatives from what we’re calling Plausible Art Worlds. Whether or not your project or the projects of the people that we’re asking to come on board are self-identified as developing alternative art worlds or rethinking art worlds structures. It’s useful for us to describe it that way because we’re looking at art worlds as the things that people build that both help in our practice to be able to be sustainable to actually exist as such and a group of people that helps define what art is within that context. You at Mildred’s Lane have been doing a lot of interesting things for quite a while and we really just wanted to catch up with you and talk with you about it, in the context of, how what you’re doing compares to, practically speaking, what’s currently seen as the art world or what’s generally on offer in a mainstream. So if you, I’m kind of pausing here, stopping and starting.
Do you want me to jump in?
Yeah, if you don’t mind just giving a brief introduction about Mildred’s Lane to people who might not know and maybe give us a sense of what you do and we can just kind of discuss from there.
Ok. I’m trying to see who… Ok, well, for those of you who do know, forgive me, but Mildred’s Lane is an ongoing collaboration between myself, Mark Dione, our son Gray Rabbit Puit and a lot of our friends and colleagues across disciplines. So, if we could just sort of look to, and I’m quoting someone but I don’t know who it is, “Let art go fallow” for a little while and just sort of rethink what that landscape is. Mildred’s Lane is a place where we’re just concerned with living, researching, working in an environment that’s loaded because it’s domestic. It’s a domestic environment and I’m going to talk more about that probably a little while longer but right now I just probably should say that it’s a place in upper Pennsylvania, north eastern Pennsylvania, a real crusty farm. Some of you… Can you hear me still?
Yeah, we’re just adding other people to the call periodically.
Ok, I heard that ringing. Some of you have been here, some of you haven’t. Theresa you can chime in and back me up on anything because she’s been here. It is unusual in the sense that, I mean I really don’t know what happened, but it’s evolved, co-evolved with institutions, with friends, with the community into what we call a new contemporary art complex city. It’s a really living, breathing museum we’re building with our friends. It’s an ongoing project, it’s been sort of slowly evolving over the last fifteen years or more and it’s become a site where there are active projects ongoing, and they are very slow moving and long term, but we have this 92 acre little parcel, upper Delaware recreation valley and it is very magical and I think that’s all I’ll say for a minute because I want questions and then I can go on.
Yeah, did you say it’s 92 acres?
92 acres, well it’s probably a little bit more like 95 acres.
Yeah, that’s not a little parcel exactly.
No, it’s not.
That’s quite a place. I was thinking maybe I could just bring up one of the things that was discussed right before you got on. I was wondering if you guys who organized Mildred’s Lane would see what you’re doing in any way as being, if you would see Mildred’s Lane as being interested in developing a kind of prototype alternative art world? Do you think that’s a fair thing to say or do you think that it should be distinguished?
No that’s unfair. Like I said, I would really rather the term art go fallowed because it’s really about what we call work styles, as opposed to Bruce Maus lifestyles, recomposing lifestyles. Work styles are how we as artists or practitioners from any discipline live and work and research in the every-day environment, and how difficult it is now not only to get funded to do that but to find jobs, you know teaching jobs. We found that it was incredibly frustrating terrain, all of our peers griping about teaching, griping about funding, griping about being taken advantage of or not getting paid and just frustrated with the bureaucracy of teaching. Really it sort of became a real discourse that finally we felt, well god dammit, let’s do something about it. You know this is a spinning off of all the institutional critique artists that are sort of our peers. But I’d really like to think that this is a moving on from institutional critique. I like to use more biological, universal terms like co-evolving. We are trying to now co-evolve with the critical 20th century and move into the 21st century and find alternatives. We’re not meaning to be any model. There are so many changes ongoing all the time. There’s no manifesto or statement or model that we want to make. I think that that would be once again repeating sort of those static critical positions.
You’re right. We don’t usually like the term model either. We’re really interested in looking at examples and accompanying them and doing that ourselves as well. If I said models I probably was out of term.
No, but it’s a good thing to bring up and say out loud.
Yeah
Sort of nullify the term so don’t ever forget. Somebody’s got to go, sorry Mary Margaret, we’ll see you later. I’m looking down and seeing, Ok, some people are writing. We’re going….oh is he supporting it I see. I’m trying to see how this is working.
Morgan hi, that was my comment. I was doing a little bit of a commentary on what you were saying but actually I had a question that I just typed in a second ago.
Ok, let me just see it. Go ahead and ask it.
Well, you started off by saying that you’re involved with people from other disciplines as if, I mean by saying other you made it sound like art was a discipline too. I kind of wonder if art is a discipline or if that’s a useful and relevant way to describe art because it kind of makes it, you know discipline kind of goes hand in hand with penitentiaries and those kind of institutions. I kind of like to think of art as not being a discipline but although rigorous being extra disciplinary.
Ok, one, I think you’re absolutely right about that, but two, I think you’re absolutely wrong about that. Let me explain. I think that we’re referring to the way we thought about art in the past, especially between the 19th century right? That has just become a discipline in the 20th century, in the 19th century there was a more romantic view of art and going earlier in history obviously it was an employable subject. But not to take it on with such these grandiose or general perspectives that is a discipline such as penitentiaries because then you put, ok democratically, you put two penitentiaries next to science, biology, nursing and so on, so I’m not so sure that it’s extra disciplinary either. But, in the spirit, as you brought up, at creative time summit, I think they need a new explanation for the term. I’m not sure, I mean I think this could go on forever but, perhaps in this context let’s think of art as an overall life and you know what it’s potentiality is. Does that make sense?
That sounds great. I just wanted, I was being a little political. I hate to admit it but…
Some people like that. That’s good. That’s fine. Does that make sense? We can move forward and not spend the next hour arguing about what art is.
Actually we haven’t spent very long at all.
What we want to do is hear about what Mildred’s Lane is.
You know what? Mildred’s Lane is a home. Mildred’s Lane is a neutral home because of practices that we’ve chosen to apply here. It could be any home, it could be anywhere, but I think it’s our curiosity that goes there and I’m only going to try to use terminology that broadens the subject because it’s pretty mundane to say, you know, here I am, I’m a single parent living with a kid in the middle of the woods. For some reason, you know, it’s become something else, because it’s not that simple. A lot of people have moved in and out of here. We’ve had…originally this property was bought with two other artists. They sort of had a very sad divorce. They sort of moved apart, moved away. Mark and I lived a life here and then also our careers really…other people pulled us apart. We were floating in these other drains, yet we still…Mark and I had a kid together, and so biologically we still are so centered here. Though I’m speaking for him I think he feels the same way. This is kind of a life project and it’s slowly evolved into a situation where we grew up with all of our friends doing projects here, doing presentations here, you know we made a long time practice of a very incredible (inaudible) dinners and then suddenly woke up one day and we were middle aged. And now all of our friends are in all of the collections around. We realized there was a moment for it, there was a place where this thing could fall apart. We decided, oh my golly, we’re producing history, why stop? I think that’s what it was, is just recognizing what the home, what this potentiality could be and so we proceeded. We proceeded a little more formally and took on all of the complaints and gripes (inaudible) All of our friends are now teaching in all of these hobbies, they’re deans at institutions, they’re presidents at these schools and they’re scientists, economists and geologists, historians writing books about this subject. So, why not turn the place into a place where we can all think tank and discourse these ideas out? So our crude site, which is this really crusty, crusty site, slowly we’ve been building into this future. I think it’s future becoming. There’s no end to it, there’s no statement that I want to say. It just is. I’m going to stop for a minute so people can chime in. I got to read what people are saying.
Is it possible to ask a question?
Sure.
I’m really interested in your speaking about this site is kind of open ended or endless and making history, I’m wondering about the spacial aspect of that. How have you worked with the architectural potential there at the site to sort of carry out these ideals?
Well, ideals is a problematic term too. First of all, it started out as a very democratic problem. We had four people sort of proposing what we could do with the site. So very early on, I think we got this place in 1997, very early on we were thinking of how to deal with it because it really had no electricity, no septic system, no well, no running water. So it’s been 12/13 years coming now where we have taken on each one of those things single handedly. I guess I’m the one that’s been living here pretty much most of the time. Because a person (Inaudible) in and out in a single day, so I’ve pretty much moved out of New York and sort of set up shop here and then just have been going back and it was in 2000 when I actually had a baby and I pulled out of New York all together and then just been solidly working on this as the site architect but in a broader sense of the term architect, as a sort of a moveable collective. The site’s been opened up to friends to propose projects that will keep the landscape inventions. Really opposing the traditional sculpture park, blob art kind of situation. You know what I mean?
Sure.
So everything that we do here is active or interactive, every folly, every little building, every art project that never went anywhere, that got shipped back to us and we’ve rebuilt here, has become a dwelling for a visiting artist or visitor. We even have a little stack of little projects that Mark and I both have out in the construction yard, we call it, that still have to be produced here. But it’s just a matter of time, money and man power.
In a way you’re saying that there’s a kind of a, what I’m hearing you say is something about new kinds of habitation or domestic habitation is a big interest.
Definitely, creative domesticating, I refer to it. I think the domestic environment is socially and politically really potent right now. Really thanks to our economics and our global situation. There’s this rash of interest (inaudible) time and I think it’s really (inaudible) that people have taken it on and we’re not the only ones, by golly, and I support every colleague (inaudible) that are actually intending to turn their homes into a site of discursive, critical discursive (inaudible). But yes, the place….
So you’re…I’m sorry go ahead.
No she asked, so go ahead because I’m going to go on describing the place for her.
Yeah, I was just going to say, so you see….I’m sorry I’m having a difficult, difficulty talking right now. I have a three year old crawling on my back. Hold on a sec.
See, see what I mean?
I know. I know. So yeah, what you’re describing is an idea of a
It looks like you’ve been sort of the translator here. I’m backing up the
We often do that because
It’s a good record.
Yeah, and it’s helpful for people that don’t always get the best audio and it keeps a syncing between what’s happening on the text chat and the audio chat.
You know what let me qualify a couple of things here because I’m reading the archives and it sounds really silly. “We are making history.” Let me back up two steps and say that our friends who are doing projects here became sort of think tank projects and then got spit out into the art world. Ok, let’s use that art world for a moment. Such as, let me use the “Elephant Smith” project that was at the public arts fund in New York in 2005. Huge success, huge project, got a lot of press. The 2004 version of that was kind of the dress rehearsal as I often like to think it as. Where she experimented with the idea, here build a site first. I think those kinds of things happen here quietly before they move into the world where people are actually trying things out. Allison’s was particular success, also there are people who have been our friends then to have attended events and discourse this year who have now proposed projects such as Jasai Midwaney, he has a glass pavilion on proposal and it’s just a matter of getting the funding to do it. Although, what we’re not keen on is looking to the art world for funding. What we’ve tried to develop is a real interesting co-evolving situation with institutions. So the very frustrated terrain that we make our livings in has suddenly got on board and supported our efforts and set up scholarships, programs where they’ll send students to help us create that Jasai Midwaney project. His is not on the schedule for next year but it’s coming up pretty soon. It’s a very convoluted and crazy thing that’s going on that actually the institutions are supporting chaos here.
Can I add to that? This is Carolyn Morgan, hi. I just thought I should add to the comment about the culture there. Just as someone who’s experienced Mildred’s Lane a lot and been helped by it. I feel like it’s a great place to have long term discussions with people who really care about issues that are overlooked in the, like larger, art world. So, the retail think tank has helped me incredibly because it’s a community pretty rigorous artists who are at the edge of the art world doing really great work and spending a long time together really. Just hunkering down and having all their meals together and talking about issues that are often overlooked so that retail think tank has helped me incredibly.
Let me just qualify. What she’s referring to, retail 21st century is one of several (inaudible), so at any given moment in a year there are many (inaudible) going on but what’s interesting is they’re strewn out they don’t have deadlines, they don’t have endings or beginnings, they’re strewn out over our lives. So retail 21st century is a project that’s been going on for three years and it’s evolving into it’s fourth year and Carolyn saying too…because I want to talk more about that for sure. I’m so glad you’re here.
Yeah, of course.
But yeah, jumping around, retail 21st century, Carolyn’s project grew out of that discourse, I think that Carolyn, you should talk about that. It’s like a little epiphany at the very first think tank and Carolyn…
I mean I can put a link to it but I was just saying, yeah. It’s kind of a specific example but it’s just a sense that people are there to help each other, think through the topics that really matter most to them. So, getting all the people, Christine Hill and Allison Smith and Claire (inaudible) in a room together for a week is really incredible. Like a lot of work gets done and generated that way.
Thank you. Anybody else? I got to catch up, this reading/talking thing is very difficult so I’m distracted.
Well, most of the text comments so far have been not really transcriptions but…
Yeah, I see, Ok.
We’re more taking notes I guess. You know I wanted to say that I’ve been sort of, I’ve kind of had a hard time giving…
Pardon me?
I’ve had a hard time presenting a coherent thought during this because of wrangling a small kid, but I think I’m in a better position where I can ask you a better question now. If that’s ok?
Please.
What I’m hearing a little bit, I mean there’s a lot of interesting things coming up here, but one of the things I wanted to ask, I guess sort of, bring up earlier was not to belabor questions about defining art necessarily or somehow focusing on that partly because it’s boring and also it may not really be very useful. But at the same time I think we’re approaching a kind of clash of terminology a little bit because, what I think I was really asking was about the kinds of alternative structures that you are helping to set up just with the example of what you are doing at house, and the kind of structure that you are proposing beyond just what you’re doing. You’re imagining a network of similar things, maybe not exactly the same but you know of independent initiatives. That’s a kind of proposal and I think, the kind of proposal that it is, is a proposal for another kind of art system, otherwise known as an art world. I think what I meant by clashing terminology is that we’re really not that interested in talking about what’s often referred to as the Artworld, with a capital A or whatever, with a capital T whichever. But really looking at the various kinds of systems that people are setting up as artists, not just the objects or “projects” that they are making but the actual set ups that you’re developing. I know that you’re an artist and you do all sorts of things but one of the things that you do is set up this. You know which I think you can see as an artwork but I think it’s also a kind of, a kind of structure and it has meaning for you and for the people that are involved but it also might shed some light on what else is possible. If you know what I mean.
Yeah, I agree. You know I do do a lot of things but if you look at my scope of work which actually on my website it’s really I mean, it has not been updated for several years because, I’ve been so focused on these things. Life has been going too fast but the work is all about Mike. It’s about shared experiences, it’s about collectivity and you know modes of living, modes of being. In all of my writings and statements and lectures the most paramount thing that I put across there is being is the practice. Being is the complex practice and it’s taking on, you know the social and political head on. It evolves and I list them out, we’ve all heard it but I’m going to say it again. The environment, all of those issues like we are completely, I mean cemented in the issues of hydraulic gas factoring up here in Northeastern Pennsylvania which will absolutely poison our earth where we will not be able to have free border, we will not have organic food because our ground will be too toxic. Although the government keeps lowering the standards for certified organic where no one will ever know. You know, so, we are grounded in the environment we are grounded in modes of dwelling so, it’s not you. Modes of dwelling, where we’re rethinking what is comfort? Comfort is essential to our being, our being creative, our being intellectual. We need enough sleep, we need enough rest and we need comforts. It’s something I want to talk about later. Another one is clothing apparatus, I believe clothing is the intersection of all these discourses. If you talk about it historically, politically, socially, clothing is absolutely a terrain that my entire adult practice has been involved with. Clothing relates to dwelling, dwelling relates to clothing. Another thing and the most important thing, is creative domesticating, which I started the conversation out with. I like to wrap all of these things up in what I call an ethics of comportment. The comportment of how we are, how we behave on this planet with all of these other human beings. So I’m furling the early language because you wanted to keep going back to this other art world. It’s not that so much as that art complexity again. It’s a complexity living, working, and researching. I bang this out again and again because it’s kind of a new association language. Does that make sense?
Sure. I think art complexity is an, I mean we’re not really stuck on terminology necessarily. I think, one of the main reasons that we actually decided to continue to talk about art worlds, albeit you know in the plural, is because I think, often a lot of our work and many people that we have known that have been doing something besides what you mentioned earlier that you don’t want to really focus on either and kind of institutional critique, people that are saying, “well we don’t just want to criticize what’s there we want to be involved in reshaping what’s in the world,” and part of that is working with existing institutions but also part of it is sidestepping them all together and doing something completely different, whether it’s off grid or…
The thing is that people really forget that, you know sidestepping is about, you know, doing it well in your own domestic environment. Doing it in the way you perceive and not following the mainstream. I’ve recently been doing a lot of study on Thoreau for this project is Boston. He speaks about how we follow this path, same path, you know and how he talks about falling into this rhythm of the path, from his house to Walden pond and he walks this path daily and it starts wearing a trench. Then he talks about how he visits the same place years later and how people sort of fall into that path and they just follow it. Then he talks and expels more about how difficult it is to get off the path, break habits and move off the path. Weed whack so to speak. It’s really beautiful to look at the way he (inaudible) Ironically, the 21st century (inaudible). Are ya’ll still there?
Yes.
In the mid 20th century and we look at (inaudible), it’s a great example, which is one of the first things we looked at when we started the retail 21st century think tank, which I want to get back to, Carolyn, if you’re still there. But it’s getting off the beaten path and creating new paths and rather not even walking but lifting up and sailing. Getting up and imagine not putting your feet down on the ground at all. What does that mean? Here’s a question, Keith Richards, “autobiographer recently”…Keith Richards? Oh I clothed him at some point. “the rest of the time he’s awake and as he said so to demoralize most people twice as much can we apply that logic to your kind of art practice? I mean you have turned” (inaudible). I’m reading this, “as you know I am a strong supporter of your practice, saying I’m a fan of your life. But, isn’t there a risk of someone cheapening life by declaring it to be art?” Excuse me but I never declared it to be art. “Isn’t there a real case to be made for demanding a specific anta logical status for art and for life, rather than conflating them? I am of few minds of this personally but what are your thoughts?” Well, first of all, I’m not saying my life is art. I’m saying let’s let the term art go fallow so that we can actually talk about existence?
Morgan I think I sorry.
Let me just finish this question. (inaudible) is great explainer, which I really like.(inaudible) I could move anywhere from here but I’ve just been in that head lately. “Declaring it to be art” It depends, ya’ll are falling back on this term that I’ve hoped we could let go fallow for the conversation because there’s no anchor. I would rather be on a ship floating forward. I’m not anchoring at any terms right now and I’m answering these questions one by one. He asks again, “Isn’t there a clear case to be made for demanding a specific anta logical status for art and for life?” Ok, let me back up. Keith Richards, you know, made a pretty cocky sort of statement there. I just wanted to ironically say that I clothed Keith Richards. Again, clothing becoming an (inaudible) to talk about and now I’m going back down here. You know, that’s been done again and again, “Isn’t there a clear case?” It’s been done. “Rather than conflating them”, I don’t know that I am conflating them but I am saying that it doesn’t matter to me what you call this. It’s interesting that the term art is applied, I do have a deep history with that term but I’m moving on. I have two mindless persons, yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand the dilemma but God leave it behind.
Morgan, I think the thing is, this isn’t a new conversation for us. I mean, we’re not stuck on, I mean I think most of the people on this chat aren’t stuck on the term art.
It’s been the subject of your conversation in all of the Basekamp dialogues, right?
Well, in this particular year we focused on a specific question. Which is, so many people that we know are doing other things, but one of the things that I think, I mean I’m not really sure why you got into a work as artists in the first place. Maybe that would be an interesting thing to talk about.
How I got to where?
Wanting to work as an artist in the first place. Perhaps that would be an interesting thing to talk about at some point. But for now, I think, there should be no shame.
I have no shame.
Well, it’s not an accusation, it’s more of a general dilemma that we’re facing and I think a lot of people are facing, which is we try to do something different right? Something different that’s not on offer in the world that we’re not satisfied with because we know that often what’s on offer in mainstream leads to a certain kind of world. No matter how hard we try, regardless of what we do eventually, I mean we may have different outcomes from what we do, one to one experiences with other people, impacting certain communities, inspiring others, and so on you know. But at a certain point what we do, and if you don’t mind me finishing this, because I feel like we’re having a little bit of a disconnect here. Where you feel like we’re sort of putting up a barrier to discussion, I think that what we keep winding up with often is that a lot of alternative art practices continue to be framed within existing systems that defang it where that sort of channel in a very specific direction. I think what you’re doing, I’m super interested in your interests and your modes that you’re not concerned with art hardly at all. That’s great. These conversations are about, “hey, could you just sort of step into the conversation for just a moment”, about how what you are doing could be useful to other people. How you can continue to be, if you want to say, inspiration or affect or whatever. Other people who are just pouring out of schools, people who are channeled into art education systems because they’ve expressed more general creativity whether it’s connected to art or not. There’s a push in that direction right? And they’re going through these education bills and they’re being taught how to be a creative person in the world for these systems. So I think what you’re doing and what a lot of other people are doing are finding other ways to explore what it means to have to have a creative life. But you can’t do that only within the existing systems. You’re helping to create other ones and I think that’s what we want to look at.
I hope I’m not coming off defensive, really I was just getting excited. And sometimes my tone gets excited but it sounds really, it starts getting really, really offensive. It’s completely a conundrum to me that there’s so much interest in the way that these things are moving right here at Mildred’s Lane. But I think just to address what you say is that I think that critically, there’s a lot of hoopla around the term social practice. If I could just stab through that middle right there and what we’re doing, and Mildred’s Lane’s, what Mildred’s Lane’s doing is sort of lumped into these modes but I don’t think that we’ve been doing anything….now my son is starting to get me to giggle and distracting me….I don’t think that what we’re doing has been anything we’ve been doing for decades, but terms sort of catch up with you. Terms follow people, you know, the trend of terms. Let’s just, you know, I want to drop the term forecasting mechanisms which I’ll get back to later if we can get back to retail 21st century think tank. But these terms are dredged up for purpose, they’ve become co-modifiable. Art is one of those terms I’m afraid to say, in the 21st century and the 20th century even. I think that that’s very suspect. What I have to say to those people who are sort of making those decisions and moving into those drains is, who and what are you doing it for? I’d liked to ask a series of questions. Who and what are you doing it for? And another question would be, who is actually in control or who desires control? Are you able to live poorly or humbly or do you desire to have money? What are your motivations for these avenues? And most of all, where is that money coming from? I think that those are questions that interestingly the world of non-profits are particularly interested in, but I don’t want to be in the non-profit world. I mean, we’re going through this terrible growing pain of do we, don’t we, do we, don’t we. What is it about the home that is somehow more extraordinarily and potent socially and politically now then ever before? That’s the question I’m interested in and that’s the question I’m interested in sort of keeping up in the air, because I think the home, domesticity has this new potency that we should be moving toward. I laid out a big section there and I want to take out each one of those questions but somebody interrupt me so I can re-gather and proceed which way we want to go. Who’s Parker? Hello? Is anybody there?
Yeah, we’re all here. Parker is Scot’s daughter and I think…
Did everybody leave?
No, we’re all here.
I was on such a rant, everybody left.
No, no. Scot had to step out for a bit to do some fatherly duties but…
I understand. I understand.
Listen, there’s a couple more questions, Morgan already, you’re just like a, you know it’s like, you just sort of stoke our questions. I think Christina has one. Christina you want to ask your question out loud?
Let me read that. Shall I read it out loud, Christina?
Sure go ahead.
Volume 0 the spacial ocean is a design…
Alright, I’m back
My god I was answering all these questions and talking and no one was there.
Well sometimes it works this way sometimes it doesn’t.
Christina, I was sitting there having a whole dialogue with your question
No, I can now. Speak, Speak.
I was going through your whole thing for the last 5 minutes.
Oh cool. Ok, well sometimes I write better than I talk. I don’t know, sorry. So I didn’t say that I just wrote a note.
I was ending up with Hidigir’s dwelling and I follow you and I understand. I think it’s a very important term that you introduced and I know that people have a big issue with Hidiger. Get over it you know, he did have a brilliant idea that we’re still reeling off of it and I think that’s where I go back to being, although it’s not the right of being necessarily. It’s so complex now through Fuco and Deluse and above all Bruno Lauture. I’m more interested in moving beyond. I’m not so interested in (inaudible) but actually dredging up what’s good and seeing what’s in the funicular tradition.
I think that’s…go ahead. Yeah, I think that this idea of trying to use what’s good and take it to a new place. That’s kind of a really core value and sort of a critical design project. So I think that this is where it excites me about what you are doing, whether you call it art or life, it kind of doesn’t matter.
I call it work styles.
Exactly and I think when you combine a little equation or a little algebra here of work styles X dwelling =what? I mean it’s like going into some kind of interesting potential space of development in which you’re continuously architecting something new. That’s why you say that it’s history but it’s not ending. So, which is kind of an oxymoron and yet is something that you’re actually doing in a pragmatic way. That’s really exciting.
Well, I’m excited. I’m excited that people keep coming and keep creating due discourses and just being a part of it. We’re opening a new project, Carolyn, are you still there?
Yeah, I’m here.
We’re opening a new project. In our third year of retail 21st century, which is one of the sessions during the summer think tank, that she reeled off a few names who are involved with that Claire Pintacos, Brian Hongs, Christina Hill, Carolyn Hopkingsberg, Allison Smith, Lacey Wosney, Carolyn fill in where I’m filling the blanks, Deena Cockoronas,
I think you’ve had a lot of them, I don’t know.
It goes on and on because you know, it’s sort of a, it’s open ended. All of these dialogues are open ended but we’re entering a new phase that we’re actually moving and tackling the old notions of community and new notions of sociality on to mainstream USA in a little village called (inaudible), New York. Upper Delaware river, just about two miles from here, so it’s very convenient, so that we can think tank and move in. We’re actually going to rent a store front and do a series of experiments. There’s also a class that I’m part time faculty this next season with a class of students that are going to be involved and becoming the diplomats in this project where we develop relationships in a community. Every artist that does a project in the store front space, which is still indescribable because it’s not a gallery, it’s not a store, we will make product, we will have events, we will have food, we will not do other things. I mean it might be just quiet for a little while, but whatever happens in this store front space, the one rule is that the artists have to collaborate with someone in mainstream USA. There’s a weaver, a real estate agency, two home stores, there’s a knitting store, two cafes and a restaurant, there’s a furniture store, there’s a funeral home, a couple of flea markets, there’s a hardware store a lumber yard, it’s endless. It’s a real mainstream USA that has sort of been gentrified into this fancier town for part time New Yorkers to come to. So, it’s a very interesting site to sort of play around with. You want to chime in Carolyn and answer questions about and I can go on? Or I’ll just keep talking.
Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe we should see what people want to ask.
I thought I’d let you know, there’s a couple of blurbs on the Mildred’s Lane website under “Town & Country” about what sort of the general interests are of that think tank but in a nutshell it’s about the future of exchange, future of exchange and collaboration. And what that means to us. How can we sort of take hold of the way things go? I’m not seeing any text here. Basekamp, “back in action sometimes I feel like I’m talking to myself”, I was talking to myself. “How do we get involved?” How would you like to be involved? What interests you about it, Greg?
Everything, I’m just curious what different capacities folks can get involved. You know, like if we’re not close by or…
Well, we will some kind of internet interface there. That’s one thing, I think, that’s crucial. So, I think we’ll have an ongoing dialogue in the space like this, so that people can chime in and say what’s going on there and then someone, whomever is ambassador of the space, will be involved with that.
Ok.
I was also thinking that if any of these people listening are interested with helping in web design or helping with research online and things like organizing conversations, they could help that way.
Yes, that’s definitely true.
Is there a time frame for this to take place?
We’re starting the ambassador rounds in January. We don’t have a space secured yet, although there’s one pending. But I’m actually being a little open. We will have office space down there, as soon as, probably within the next month. But we won’t have the store front probably, our opening schedule is May 2011, hopefully. If all things go well and we get the space that we’re sort of hanging on to. But there’s some complications, you know, mainstreet is pretty tight. We’re sort of waiting to see what’s unfolding here. We will be present in the office at least by February or March at the latest.
By we, you mean Mildred’s Lane, the office?
Well, actually this entity will be called the Mildred Complexity and “ity” at the end of the word complex, it’s like complex but “ity” is in quotation marks. I mean excuse me in parenthesis, so the Mildred Complex really but it’s a complexity. We are not seeking non-profit, but we will be a not for profit endeavor. That is going to be an interesting discourse. How will we proceed to (inaudible) subject who the incredible rigid terrain of capitalism. I mean I think that there’s so many modes that we have not yet experienced or experimented with and I’m looking for that kind of discourse. How do we get around these big boulders as (inaudible) bolder and the bolder of capitalism, realizing that it’s there, that’s absolutely infected the entire world and how do we proceed around it? Who’s giggling?
I have a question and I’m laughing, I’m sorry to be laughing, I do apologize but I’m wondering how people are going to pay. Are they paying their way to come to this? I mean like if you’re far away, how does one afford to spend time in the Complex(ity)…
What do you mean pay?
How does it get paid? Let’s say a person, how can a person manage to go to this? What’s the financial basis, I mean not all financing is capitalistic so I’m just trying, it’s just a pragmatic question about how we can do this that’s all I want to know.
Let me clarify and I’m referring to Brian I’m assuming because he’s the one who speaks about capitalism being a fact that we have to live with. That we sort of work with it and figure out ways around it. I’m interested in how do we find new modes of exchange and just what retail is interested in. Carolyn Woolard’s one of the most brilliant examples to date out there in the world inventing new modes of exchange with her peers. But, Mildred’s Lane proper, two things, the Mildred Complex(ity) and Mildred’s Lane proper most of all is a generosity endeavor, you know by myself and Mark Dion. Interestingly we’ve gotten institutions to support it by creating scholarships to send students here every year and there’s a handful of incredibly innovative institutions that have bizarrely created scholarships to send students here every year. That scholarship money goes towards paying minimal travel stipends for our friends to come, pays for all of our food, it pays for all of the staff, which are not servants, they are actually collaborators and they are working hardest amongst us and it basically barely covers the cost. There are a bunch of independent artists who also apply and we select and they pay to come and they pay their own way. But ideally I like to go to, again continuing the collapse of institutional critique and moving forward into something that’s more co-evolutionary with institutions. I like to think that institutions can quietly come up with these funds to send people here. The Mildred Complex(ity), on the other hand, will be a complete experiment in how it supports itself. The first investments are a generosity project by me and my collaborators which will partially be the students and other artists like Abby Lutz, Athena Congronis, Monique Millicent, other artists that are in this area but, that will be helping to create a series of what we call “Rent Dresses”, so we’re going to create a series of dresses that are dredged up from whatever we find here at Mildred’s Lane that will be sold off for each month’s rent. So, that’s how we’re going to support the overhead as we come up with kind of a thread product, like the “Rent Dress” idea to sort of support what the needs are. And we’ll come up with a in each case that there is a need. It’s just that we’re interested in other modes of exchange which might include barter. Such as Carolyn’s model. It might include monetary exchange but services for services or whatever that will be, I mean it’s as yet to be defined. There’s all of this is up for grabs but, each event based and discourse based practice that happens in the space, it might not be tangible. Whatever it is will just have to come up with a small mode of supporting itself and supporting the artist that goes with it. We’re also going to try to make an alliance with Delaware Valley Artist Alliance which is also on mainstreet. We hope that we get some support through them that will help our meager endeavors. But it’s a tire experiment, it’s a tire experiment where we are completely open to ideas and if you’d like to be a part of the discourse we welcome it.
So you’ve asked institutions for help and you’ve gotten educational grant funding…
No, we have no funding, none.
You have no funding from, sorry I was under the impression that you explained that Mildred’s Lane itself was partially funded by grants that support students,
No, they’re not grants
some undefined students like high school students maybe or sometime student. So I was just wondering whether there’s some artists who are not students, how do they…they would need to get there somehow right? Whatever project they might have would be able to translate into some type of goods for exchange, whether by barter or into monetary system, in some way their object or project or something has to…
Let me clarify, and I’m sorry I presumed that you knew…Mildred’s Lane is not grants actually. MFA or EFA students in schools all across the world, they are not all art schools, they’re universities, they are science students or history students they are trans-disciplinary students who come and live and work with our artist friends who are dozens of practitioners again trans-disciplinary all around world come and discourse and lecture, do seminars, workshops, whatever, it’s kind of the wild card of education. You have some intellectuals from Princeton suddenly who want to propose to do something as a one week think tank and you know we take it on. We collaborate with them. They’re generally, you know our network of friends. So, that’s what I’m talking about institutions and colleges, those educational institutions are now sending scholarships, making scholarships for students to come and live here with us in these little intensive sessions. The Mildred Complex(ity) on the other hand is a project that’s an outgrowth of one of those sessions. So there’s several different projects, discursive projects that happen throughout the year. Retail 21st Century is just one of those that Carolyn here has been a huge part of and the Mildred Complex(ity) is a new experiment that’s grown out of that. So, I’m just speaking about that one problem, and that’s still being defined. I’m not the only one that’s doing this. It’s a group of people who are sort of weaving in and out…I’m sorry I’m reading at the same time…”university grants”, they are not grants, they are scholarships. “Bartering” bartering is always everywhere, you know, it’s just a natural exchange of being, you know, you’re just like figure out what feels right for someone to do something for something in exchange for something else. Oh gosh, is it almost time? It’s late.
Well, yeah, Greg was just asking…and it always goes by so fast and we start….
I’m sorry I was so late, I’m embarrassed about that, it’s terrible…
I wouldn’t be seriously, don’t worry about it. Often we don’t start till about then anyway. But, yeah, guys it’s been really great. You know, Morgan I think there were a few things that have come up through this conversation that would be great to follow up on and if not in another chat like this then in the publication that we would like you to contribute to for next year.
Well, that’s great. It’s really rich, it’s fun. I wish I was a little more organized; it’s kind of like what’s going to happen?
No, no we definitely don’t want it to be more organized.
It was kind of off the cuff and I thank you all for being patient with my long diatribes.
Yeah, it would be great for a number of us to come up visit you sometime soon.
I reckon you’ll have to come up and present this project. It will be really interesting, next summer.
Cool, yeah, if we can find a time to do it. That would be awesome.
Who’s still there?
I’m here but soon coming to the east Delaware River.
Yes, upper Delaware River.
Upper Delaware River, right.
Yes, Steven you got to come when Claire and Bryan are in their house.
Yeah, that’d be really cool. I mean Bryan was telling me how really fucking fantastic it is.
It’s really strange, very unusual little thing and I’m really proud of it and I’m glad to be in dialogue with you folks about it. Thanks a lot for questions, thanks a lot for your comments and I’m so sorry if it was a short space to not really articulate all the details. It’s really a complexity for God’s sakes.
You could never do justice to any of these in two hours. There is just no way.
Ok, thank you.
Bye everyone. We will see you next week.
Carolyn?
Hey Morgan.
Carolyn, thank you for being there.
Yeah, I’m going to go have dinner with everyone in the studio now but I was going to say something about that. That you definitely showed me the social side.
You’re doing so well, you are the pride and joy of Mildred’s Lane. You have to know that. We toot your horn all the time, don’t you think otherwise. Go give Athena Cockoronas a big sloppy kiss for me.
Yeah, you need to come here. It’s not as beautiful but there’s a lot of love and there’s a lot of flowness.
That’s so great. I wish I was years younger sometimes. I got to go feed my kid. I bowed out on him because I forgot about this thing and I completely started this big stew and this big download on my computer…
Well, I think it’s low key. I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Thanks for being there.
Yeah, no, I miss you, I would like to see you and…
It’s seems like you’re always here when I’m not here.
It’s very strange, I was trying to help out Monique but then it seems like it’s all weird like Nathaniel Whitmore is all over her, their place. I can’t really handle him.
You know what, I’m so with you. Nathaniel, I mean he is really such a mooch. I don’t really like that scene. Poor Monique, I got to talk to her.
I used to like him but now I’m like every time I thought I was helping Monique I felt like I was crashing his party like he turned their house into his party and I’m like I thought I was house sitting like what are you doing here?
Oh no.
Yeah, like every time that’s what I’m doing and then what is he doing? I’m like why are you here?
I’m so glad you told me that because I think Monique is not into that at all. I don’t she’s into him being there.
Yeah, I mean he’s a bum. He’s sleeps out on her couch all the time.
He’s a mooch man. I know his girlfriend…
He doesn’t have a house…
He’s a mooch. Lonnie kicked him out. Lonnie is grey rabbit’s, she’s my friend and she’s grey rabbit’s teacher. She’s just crabbing about him all the time. But you know she’s, but they’re still lovers, so he must be doing something right. But she won’t live with the guy, she kicked him out. I’m sorry I have a lot to say about him maybe we shouldn’t be on this public Skype but…
Oh no, are there still people here?
I don’t think so, I think they all went…
Well anyway, let’s go eat and then tell me when you are coming into the city and…
Are you coming to New Years?
I don’t know. It’s a question. I would like to but last year we had this roof top sauna here and people really want us to do it again so, it’s a question. We got to figure it out.
Come stay with us for New Years.
I know I would love to but people are all into going to Coney Island and jumping in the water on the 1st. Kind of crazy! But yeah, sometime soon we need to see each other.
Well I’m going to be in New York more this spring. I’m staying home. I have just been traveling like crazy, I am so over that. I quit installation art completely.
I agree.
I quit. I am just going to make some dresses God dammit.
Yeah, Jenna told me that’s so great.
I’m really excited about that.
You do them so well, there’s no reason to not do it. Like it’s a gift you know?
It’s going to support the Mildred Complex(ity). It’s going to be good. That’s the way we’re going to support it. So, at least we’ll be able to afford the experiment. Monique and I were going to get together yesterday but I didn’t realize it was her birthday, so that was a total screw up. So, we’re going to see her probably tomorrow. But you know she can’t have that guy around when they’re having that baby. She’s got to go through a little incubation time in that house.
She’s got a lot to deal with.
Oh dear, when were you…
I want to be helpful but I don’t know how.
Oh dear, yeah, you know, he’s probably threatened by you coming in and making your dwelling action too. Oh gosh.
Yeah, like we came in and I cleaned the whole place because it was gross because he was like leaving it that way. He came in and was like, “Oh you’re going to be here during my date.” And I was like, “What? This is not your house.”
Oh my god and what did he say?
He was just like just kidding. Whatever, hopefully he fed the animals.
Oh no.
Anyway, let’s go eat. I need to go to dinner you need to go to dinner.
I love you and I miss you dammit.
It was good to hear you talk.
Oh gosh, I think I, I completely forgot and he called me and I was so embarrassed and I was like oh my god I said, “why didn’t you tell me today or yesterday?” I just got home from a huge 3 week trip.
I think it’s ok. I think they just do it, it’s an informal chat. Nobody really understands how to use Skype seriously so it’s a little crazy.
I was not prepared, but you know there was questions and…
I think it got going by the end.
Yeah, thanks for being there and chiming in though. Your voice had nice direction for me so thank you very much.
No problem.
Give Chris my love and I hope to see you…oh I got mail from a friend of ya’lls.
Who?
Jonas something.
Oh, he’s a voyager.
Yeah, voyager. So, I’m going to send him a note back. I just have been catching up since I’ve been home since yesterday, so I’m going to send him a note.
Let me just tell you that we don’t really know him. He just got in touch through Collen through several Voyagers.
Collen I said Chris didn’t I? Stupid, I’m just reading a Chris.
I thought you meant Chris Kennedy. Oh yeah, Collen for sure.
I saw Chris Kennedy in North Carolina. I was at Elswhere.
Random.
Yeah.
I would just say with the voyager he seems to have a very strange girlfriend. Watch out.
Oops. Ok that just…thank you.
You will know, quick, I don’t know if they are really together or what the deal is but you will figure it out in like two seconds.
Well, he has to have some real heavy recommendations for me to take anybody cold turkey. That’s for damn sure.
Yeah, well we had dinner, he seemed nice. He was excited about Mildred’s Lane and I just said, “yeah, just write her a letter.”
That’s good. Thank you. Keep your eyes peeled. Ministry of comfort. We’re not going to have Monique. She’s going to be completely squiggled down with her little animal.
I know.
Good golly.
Yeah I’m thinking. But I really need to leave. It’s a family dinner and I’m late.
Be in touch.
Love you.
Bye.
Bye Bye.
Week 28: Miss Rockaway Armada
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with some of the sailors and crew from Miss Rockaway Armada, “both a collection of individuals and an idea”, as they put it with their characteristic understatement.
The idea takes the form of a flotilla of rafts the 30-odd individuals cobbled together themselves out of trash and which they are using to float down the Mississippi River. How plausible does that sound for an artworld adrift on America’s major inland waterway, in wake of eighteenth-century performance artist Johnny Appleseed? “The catch,” as they disarmingly put it, “is that we don’t much about boats or rivers, and we don’t have any money.” Why would that stop anyone? “Last year we met in Minneapolis in late July with sections of our raft in tow. We pieced together our pontoons and filled them with salvaged blocks of foam. We made it beautiful and tied on anything that would float, adding it to our junk armada, our anarchist county fair, our fools ark. Our precious cargo is everything we hold dear: pieces and parts of the culture we are already creating. Our zines and puppets, sewing projects and poster campaigns, mutant bicycles and punk rock marching bands. Plus our thoughts and dreams and irrepressible energy.”
The Mississippi float is not the group’s first voyage. Under the name of The Swimming Cities of Serenissima, members of the group last year sailed on the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia to Venice on a fleet of boats homemade from junk. http://www.swimmingcities.org/
Fun? Adventure? Not only.
“We want to be a living, kicking model of an entirely different world — one that in this case happens to float.”
Can we borrow that one for Plausible Artworlds mission statement?
Transcript
Week 28: Miss Rockaway Armada
[0:00:00]
Male speaker: We as [0:00:02] [indiscernible] by the way or chatting we don’t have to but if you guys don’t stop mind it’s nice because that’s just,
Male speaker: Hello? Cool.
Male speaker: It’s nice because it allows us to…
Male speaker: Hello, hello, hello?
Male speaker: Anyway it allows us to like or [0:00:34] [inaudible]
[0:00:44] [background voices]
Female speaker: Would you just pass that too?
Female speaker: [0:01:54] [inaudible]
Bob: Hey it’s Bob.
Male speaker: Hey there, everything’s okay?
Bob: Yeah perfect.
Male speaker: Super cool. Let me just check this audio for a sec. How is it really doing today?
Bob: We are good this is like the eve Bastille Day here in France.
Male speaker: All right, awesome!
Bob: Oh no, no. mute my mic though.
Male speaker: Oh it’s super cool. You know I think that the audio quality seems to be pretty good so, no worries.
Male speaker: Yeah so welcome everybody we’ve got half a dozen people on the call today, actually not even and about the same number people here. So we are going to kind of have an intimate party. by the way for you guys let you know we use this mic just to help record this it’s sort of does make it feel like a game show but that’s -. Anyway so we’ve got some of the folks from Miss Rockaway Armada hanging out here, and we want to start off by looking at we want to start off by looking at this web page that we put together about their work, the reason why we are laughing is because the picture that was up was the two, three, four, five, six and seven from down from the top which is a birthday lap dance. Can you tell us a little bit about, a little bit about this?
Female speaker: My assistant is just totally a really flamboyant birthday lap dance. There are some lamb chops that were cooked on the barbecue and a bottle of wine and then we surprised the birthday boy, and then…
Female speaker: [0:04:37] [inaudible]
Female speaker: The maitre de took off his pants and started all dancing on the birthday boy and it was fun.
Male speaker: Yeah so [0:04:54] [inaudible]. Hey just for the record it was Scott’s birthday yesterday I don’t know if that counts?
[0:05:02]
Female speaker: Oh we didn’t know about that.
Female speaker: Oh no way.
Female speaker: Just for the record to get it on the record, we will say happy birthday to Scott. Happy birthday Scott, happy birthday Scott. What oh yeah, oh
Male speaker: So yes, I wonder if they can hear me over here, maybe. Maybe, maybe not but maybe just have this pass around. Yeah so today is one of those days I wish we had like one of those like radio microphones except for the fact that we just moved out this big industrial fan that’s blowing on us and a radar, radar mic that’s just it wouldn’t do well in this environment. So we’ll just have to keep passing this back and forth artificially slightly but anyway…
Female speaker: Maybe someone [0:06:10] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yes, someone will win one of the two PBRs the rest are [0:06:17] [inaudible] loggers. So yeah welcome you guys it’s awesome to have you back after like a year, have something?
Female speaker: Half a year.
Male speaker: Half a year, okay was it the…okay.
Female speaker: Yeah.
Male speaker: Okay, so since September so after half a year we are now half a year through this series of Plausible Art Worlds chats really run like I think like we 26 or something of 52 weeks of you know weekly events over the year. And we’ve been talking about you guys as an example of internally anyway as an example of the of what we are calling Plausible Art Worlds. Anyway for a while because of the kind of environment that you had set up. I know that many of you have a foot in different worlds you know it’s not just you know a complete session that’s why you’re like, fuck the art world or let’s just remove ourselves from life entirely and this is all you do I mean it’s a part of what you do but its seems like a pretty big part in addition to whatever other individual practices you have as artists and collective practices.
So I’m really interested to hear a little bit more about it, and I was just kind of hoping that you could share some of that with, with the people that are on the chat but also with us for you know for this recording for people to hear later and also this is a chance for us to chat and like think through some different stuff and maybe generate some questions or things that may be useful when we make the publication next year too. So, I don’t know who it feels like coming from that, I’d really like it if one of you guys or more or whatever would wouldn’t mind just to just maybe even just giving us a brief intro to the project, now pull up this page so that people know that you know just kind of talking it through, with us little bit.
Female speaker: [0:08:14] [inaudible] Yeah. I guess I’ll say that again, I don’t know if the microphone cut that or not but it’s a project that is pretty cool and it voices many thoughts so the three of us that are here we will all give our corresponding or uncorresponding blurbs about that I guess.
Female speaker: Can I ask a question about the audience, I just want to know who we are talking to in general, how many people like this where everyone’s coming from?
Male speaker: Yeah so again sorry about this mic it is making this little artificial but I think we can handle that. Yeah you guys were just asking about the audience that you are talking to? Yeah I mean it’s like right now there are a few artists online and there’s a writer, Steven Wright who co-organizing this project with, there are possibly be other people coming in throughout but you know right now it just seems to be one of the one of the low attendance side, it’s actually one of the more intimate ones that they may be kind of nice since we are just sitting around [0:09:20] [inaudible] I don’t know drinking beer but then like as far too who will be listening to this will actually clean things up afterwards so, you know we’ll cut out something if you want us to of whatever.
Female speaker: [0:09:35] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Hey guys yeah so basically like who the audiences who we will listen to later I mean we’ll be variable, we’ll put a nice podcasts on our website but it’s probably just primarily people that would be interested.
Female speaker: Cool, so I am going first time.
Female speaker: Yeah. Anna [0:09:59] [inaudible]
[0:10:03]
Female speaker: Okay
[0:10:22] [background voices]
Female speaker: I don’t know what kind of…
Male speaker: Oh it’s okay yeah I mean if you don’t mind its maybe giving us a brief intro to this project for people that don’t know.
Female speaker: Okay I’ll do my best.
Anna: Okay so my name’s Anna and joined the [0:11:47] [inaudible] the second year that we were going down the Mississippi river on some boats that we made out of junk and I’ll do my best to give my very brief perspective on how things came together and how they just kept rolling along one way or another So the first year which was 2006 some folks mostly in New Yolk got together and developed though various ways which I wasn’t present for, but I imagine is sort of conversations in politics and sort of at night about building a boat and living on the river. As a collaborative project to me a lot of needs that a lot of people felt for a lot of reasons, since I wasn’t there I will just say that I joined them the next year because I had a long standing interest in living on a boat made out of crap that I would make and live on a river.
And when I found out that other people were doing this, it seemed like I should probably do it with them. But let’s see, this is one of the boats that was made the second year, this boat here. On the first year it was one long boat, I forget how long it was, it just 110 feet or something like that long, 130 feet long and it just cut parts that kept adding on and adding on and adding on. And then there was some [0:13:18] [inaudible] for a lot of reasons. So the next year it split into many pieces and the new boats were bought and parts were destroyed and sort of turned into a different creature. Yeah that one is the Garden of Bling, the Garden of Bling yeah it was, it was originally three people were talking about building this boat, one person wanted to have a garden and one person wanted a lot of blingy gold stuff and so they compromised and this is the Garden of Bling that came about as a result.
[0:14:01] [background voices]
Female speaker: About what the project was? So should I like I was saying I’m having a hard time talking back and forth like I’m not very good at multitasking between different kinds of media.
[0:14:18] [background voices]
Female speaker: Me personally or?
Male speaker: Maybe you, yeah.
Female speaker: There were some people involved in this trip who have done some sort of boat trip before but this was the first thing that any of us have probably ever done along this lines. None of us really knew anything about navigating a large craft or building a large craft or could it would mean when we got there and there was this giant river and then we supposed to live on it, so it was yeah it was our first Mississippi trip.
[0:15:07]
[0:15:14] [background voices]
Female speaker: Oh okay. Sorry I thought for they were like seeing that is and it’s happening [0:15:24] [inaudible].
Female speaker: Okay, I want to hear what on the website and it says that you traveled on Mississippi and I guess you stopped and did like workshops and stuff like that? Just kind of curious that what kind of workshops and things like that did you do?
Female speaker: It was different year to year depending on who was there and what they wanted to do and what they were capable of basically pulling out of their ass. There were pretty much always had screen printing stuff going on for like kids like put stuff on our shirts and what, there were some - yeah, well I don’t know the first year they were different the second year they ended up being more like a little more junky a little more art oriented, I don’t know, the first year what did you guys do?
Female Speaker: Yeah first year along in the river would stop over in towns and mostly we’d be doing performances in the evening time so we would had all sort of instruments and commercial made and handmade instruments and we would design some flyers and put on wild crazy costumes and have some tall bikes and would roll through town at a huge parade, and we’d hang out for a couple of days and be like we are having a show, this is like whatever upcoming Thursday night 7:00pm come down and have a friend and just to get interest and get to know some of the folks in the town and sometimes on the day of show or maybe the day after we would host workshops for kids or whoever was interested.
Mostly kids from the local town would come through so yes I was definitely sub screening and wild animals was like the pretty popular one that people do or like the zeen making project or coming try and play that drum instrument that I made or try and yeah story telling lines, there was a girl that built the story telling booth and would [0:17:19] [inaudible] story telling booth and would ask people from the small towns we had visit to come and tell stories about living on the river, and she was collecting the stories for a while and she did and audio project about it.
Yeah, I got people do all sorts of weird stuff, yeah basically whoever had an idea costume making workshop, puppetry making workshops, stencil making workshops, it was like whatever you felt like doing that day. and we had a especially in the first, I was part of the first year as projects in 2006 and policy that we had body politic was very important with skill chairs. So you have and that everybody should be able to do everything, right? There are definitely certain characters that had more of a an ear for working on the mortars that could handle the noise and the heat all the time and all the people that wanted to cook more and other people that like were more gong ho but cleaning up the toilets and things than others you know.
There are definitely certain crafts or skills or jobs that some people chose more over than the others but the general politic was that everybody should be able to do everything, everyone should like learn how to pick up and use whatever power tool you want to learn how to use, that we like people have different skills that you are able to share those skills. so be it crocheting or collage or playing accordion or playing a piano or wood cutting or I mean whatever that you had you are able to give and then be able to receive, we had very strong DIY body politics that we could make it happen and we’re trying to. Yes oh. Mutualizing confidence you have no idea. Right but I’m really so all the same level or you know trying to figure things out ourselves and sort of somewhat sustainable somewhat performatory manner. But trying to figure out trying to learn from each other what we did know and source out what we didn’t. So that we often have motor break downs and had to pull around a small town and you know have some really fascinating interactions with small timers from the motor shops and auto body shops and just learning a lot as much as we could from locals on the way, it was really fascinating for me at least. I spent a bunch a fair amount of time kind of running around, talking to people on the town to meeting them, learning their things at least having impact but yeah.
[0:20:04]
Female speaker: Of the bushing? Sorry, what did you say? Do you remember the day that we learnt the importance of a bushing? A bushing with a B? Yeah its part of a way to starter engages with the mortar and the engine wouldn’t start and we couldn’t figure out why and old mechanic from I don’t know , the last [0:20:40] [indiscernible] Iowa comes and he’s like, there is this tiny piece of metal it’s the breath of a hair and looks like a washer and it’s just its there like someone on the starter and it makes it work, you don’t have it, it doesn’t work, its tiny is a metal we would never figured it out without him.
Female speaker: Where were we?
Female speaker: We were talking on the projects so, it was a project based on a lot of ideals, I actually came into the project two weeks into the river trip so the bags were essentially they were essentially already built when I got there. I oh computer talk. Oh my God!
Male Speaker: Can you mute that for a second? And figure this out.
Female speaker: Wow makes, that’s very inspiring sort of noise band. Yeah I had been traveling around Europe for about a year and a half or so, squatting hitch hiking working on farms, all sorts of things and I actually ran into an American in Berlin named Maddy Apolis. he was this boy that was building a boat and I remember having this conversation with him, probably sometime in the spring time, he’s sitting there [0:22:28] [inaudible] crusty squatter kid from Minneapolis called Maddy Apolis and he was sitting there in this [0:22:34] [inaudible] sort of collectively run squatted bar space, and he pulls out this weird digital camera that he had. He was showing me pictures of his boat that built the year before and he’s like, ‘I got to go back to America, I’m going to go back to this boat and I’m going to take it down the river this time.’ Because he had spent like a year of his life building this thing and he had all these dreams of living in this boat and whatever.
And I just remember going home and writing in my journal, that day, ‘oh I met this boy he’s gone on his raft trip on the river and it sounds like such a dream I hope I get to do something like that someday,’ and I ended up back in the States that summer, and I started calling up a bunch of my friends from New York as I had been living in New York before them, and I was in the Midwest in Chicago, and I was calling them up and they are like, ‘hey we’re on Mississippi around the bunch of boats we built all these rafts, you’ve got to come out here and check it out.’
They were most of my closest friends that I knew from the city and I was like god you guys are all together all in one place doing this crazy wild thing , of course I’m going to come and visit you. and I showed up and I ended up staying for about two months and I was living and had been part of sort of loose network of people ever since participate in three years of raft projects. But it was a group of very young idealists who were frustrated by the way they saw life ahead of them and wanted to try to make a vision of their imagination happen for real and to many extents they did, we did and it was a very inspiring time.
Female speaker: Robin do you want to talk about, Robin do you want to talk a little bit about, you want me to talk a little bit about your experience?
Ariel: My name is Ariel by the way; I don’t think I properly introduced myself. I ended up on the Rockaway the first year kind of serendipitously and it’s like all of the things I was doing in New York just turned into being one circle of people doing this one thing and I was dating a guy [0:24:45] [indiscernible] and it was amazing, I was just flabbergasted that like that was happening, it blew my mind.
[0:24:54]
And if there was a possibility to do it again from the ground up I wanted to do it. and they resumed the project the second year and I helped from the fund raising point and was there the whole time but some of the magic, not just that the project didn’t lose it, the project didn’t lose its magic but the course of being on its course as a participant the whole time definitely changed the naivety I think I initially experienced when coming on board as a visitor and I mean we were idealists and we were naïve and we took on a lot and we did this crazy thing but there were parts that were like there parts that were scary and there were parts that were dangerous and we were very lucky in retrospect that things turned as well as they did there’s a big flood on the Mississippi in the second year, the water rose like 20 feet, the places that current increased was like a bog like full trees in the river. We almost hit a badge a few times like you know kind of almost went over down, lost control, crash landed how to get safer from hitting bridge by the coast guard. And all those people into it were very intense and very scary and very part of it and seemed to me I don’t know like in some ways like I don’t view them negatively in retrospect. But I think there are very real moments but somehow indicate like the kind of naivety smoothers hard like going into it.
I don’t think I would do a project like that again, honestly. I’ve learned to value my life in a way I didn’t when I’d started that project. I was going at it with like other ideal is on and like I really naïve idea of what nature was capable of and this hopeful like, we can get through it, there’s 20, 30 of us here, we’ll do it we are all capable people. But I don’t know in some ways I think I came out of there being really humbled by our environment and by our really armaturish understanding of it. And on the one hand I think amazing things can happen that way but I think you also have to reflect on them when they are done and realize that having that attitude indefinitely into the future is reckless. And I don’t know I think it was a very important informative and beautiful experience but like I said I don’t think I would make decisions that again, I like you know being alive.
Anna: This is Anna again; I thought that I would say something quickly about what Robin just was waiting through. The best part about the project for me was the actual being on the water and being in towns was just actual day to day of floating really slowly with 20 year 30 brand new best friends, making a village of fools and having to deal with each other in incredibly intimate ways but just also being on the water and having a piece of life that was incredibly removed from those other things giving us the time to like examine mosquito bites right stupid songs write some pretty good songs, come up with really silly puppet shows, make puppets just things that are I don’t know just so down and you move about five or ten miles an hour. Everything is really so down, and then about the crushing part, I’m grateful for that because I stayed where we crushed. I haven’t moved more than five miles from where we crashed in St. Louise.
Female speaker: For the last two years?
Anna: For the last yes since I maybe three years, so I’m grateful for that crush, something really sobering about crushing but it was actually more exhilarating than anything else. Yeah, well you see two coast guard boats with like 900 horse power between the two of them failing to save you from your own folly, or rush. So I appreciate that.
Male speaker: Where were you before that?
Anna: Me personally?
Male speaker: Yeah.
Anna: Where was I before the - kind of I didn’t I hadn’t lived anywhere for a long time before that happened those fairly homeless all over the States over the mid West and Europe a little bit I was in Italy in a farm for a while, didn’t really know that I wanted to be anywhere putting down any roots so putting down roots like could travel is like yes, this is the perfect compromise, I would build a house that moves.
[0:30:21]
Male speaker: Have you [0:30:21] [inaudible] at some point [0:30:23] [inaudible], sorry yeah I was just thinking at some point it might be nice to talk with a few other people here who are here tonight who are involved with the vagabondism project? Well it was a six week course through the public school that happened here but it was really a series of investigations, that were meant to you know pace the link for, for everyone else not to detract from what you’re, from what you are talking about but just to you know just to make a connection for maybe next time or you know the next month that you are here or whatever.
Something I think you at least you might be interested and maybe some of the other some of the rest of you like be interested in this idea of vagabondism kind of tying to oh I don’t know hobos for riding the rails to people though just transient generally. as a specifically as a life choice and there are a number of people that we know that are interested in something of a project along those lines that lasts for a little while. So it might be nice to talk about it later yeah so anyway. Now that’s interesting to me by the way that you well that you landed and you’ve been you’ve stayed there for a while, when you mentioned where you were based I was just thinking oh well perhaps that you were just based there for a while I didn’t know that the boat you know basically went tips up and you guys crushed and you like crush landed and you stayed put, that’s interesting.
Anna: Well there’s this other reason to live anywhere else for long periods of time as far as I am concerned but that was like the world says, ‘here’s my gift, I’m going to put you here in your own [0:32:26] [indiscernible] PS it’s an amazing city.’ So how could I say no to that?
Male speaker: [0:32:39] [inaudible] Another question but I’m going to hold on to it, Steven do you want to ask your question would you rather ask just ask it out loud and address it.
Male speaker: Yeah.
Steven: No.
Male speaker: Hi.
Steven: Yeah I can ask it , another one of the groups where we’ve met where we met when we talked to invite onto Plausible Arts Worlds is this group based in the North East on India compare a ferry in fact it’s a collective of artists that are based on former governing ferry on the Brahmaputra river, and the Brahmaputra is actually an interesting river because it’s as big as the Ganjis and it’s the only river in India which is a masculine river, all the other ones are feminine. Anyways they are really interested in floating on this river and cruising up and down and doing stuff , and it’s a pretty wild river I mean its big, it’s as big as the as the St. Lawrence in the Mississippi where the Amazon actually.
Male speaker: Steven are these Indian people or experts?
Steven: Yeah, you know they are Indians, they’re they don’t consider Indians because actually North East of India is a, in decedent province of India and so they’re what you know southern what they call Southern Indians refer to as Natives. They are like first nations Indians I mean it seems bizarre to call Indians first nations because it seems pretty redundant but in fact they are and there’s a very there’s a war going on in this province that is called the Asan province.
Male speaker: I was in part of the North East in December actually, that’s why I ask.
Steven: Okay so I am telling you stuff you doesn’t need to know.
Male speaker: Well no I’m curious.
Steven: Maybe you know these people.
Male speaker: I don’t that’s why I’m asking [Laughter] yeah.
Steven: Well its funny because they are kind of a duluthian product of you know that showed up in this you know on the banks of the Brahmaputra river in the Asan province and they’ve got this they managed to say question this former government ferry, which they use as their platform for exhibitions and discussions and screening and all sorts of things. but particularly I like to float around on the river on the thing and I just thought that it was you know they don’t make their own boats but they have a kind of a very, you know when you say that you’re dream is to have is of a totally different world except that this one would actually float, I think that sort of describes their project as well.
[0:35:24]
So I may not you know this kinds of affinities might be worth pursuing because I only asked that because I saw you actually wanted them to do this some kind of project in the Ganjis which kind of you know picked my imagination.
[0:35:40] [background voices]
Female speaker: Yeah I actually, go ahead.
Steven: I’ll send you a link, hang on a second.
Female speaker: What did you say?
Ariel: Oh hi Steven can you hear me? I guess I hope so. So this is Ariel here I actually wanted to delineate a few things. we are talking from the Miss Rockaway Armada collective, there are a number of us that have worked on other projects which have included the swimming cities of Switchback seas which was a project designed by the artists Wound, incorporated a lot of the same people went down the Hudson river in 2008 and then another project that happened in 2009 that was also designed by the artists Wound, a number of us also worked on that was called the Swimming Cities of [0:36:35] [indiscernible] and so these are all different titles of similar projects with pretty tight or loose depending on how you want to use it network of up to 300 people that had been involved in all these projects variably. and so the group that is doing the Ganjis river project, are building I think five stainless steel motor cycle powered pump tune rafts, and their plan was to go down to India and float down the Ganjis river but it’s not necessarily, I don’t think anyone that’s specifically doing that project right now had any physical ties with any of the heirs of the Miss Rockaway Mississippi projects.
It’s kind of confusing yeah it was like a snow ball effect it was like this one thing happened and then some more people came the second year, other people left, other people traveled and it was like this community kept on growing and growing and growing and some of the boat projects kept on drawing people back and some of them put you know people went off in their own directions and so the title is going under Swimming Cities Oceans of Blood, for the India project but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the Miss Rockaway collective.
And Miss Rockaway collective is actually now independently more or less become an artist group network of like in spirits and he’s gone off to do installation at Mass mocha and an installation that was commissioned by the Moue and the Van Apple museum in Nonwoven for a project about the heart land of America, that was happening in 2008 in the fall and that’s also what we are here doing right now as a Miss Rockaway Armada collective project for the Mural arts program here in Philadelphia which is how we ended up here. Does anyone else have any other question for us about who we are or what we do what’s happens what we think might have happened?
Male speaker: We are some of [0:38:56] [indiscernible] as were asked you again what if what kept you in St. Louise out of curiosity?
Female speaker: Well, I guess that I wasn’t really living anywhere particular before this but I have been spending a lot of time in Missouri in Northern Missouri in Iowa. And I met a couple of folks and sort of thought to myself men this is really a place that I never really thought that I would identify with so strongly. But then I kind of left and went off and had some ridiculous adventure and didn’t think anymore of it until we washed up you know in St. Louis. And I don’t know basically I went on this bike ride just like oh my God rest of you were ridiculous together sleeping in one tent get away in this place. So I biked into the city which is I don’t know 10, 15 bike ride and basically all this stuff that we had been dreaming about although like little post apocalyptic wet dreams that we had been singing ourselves to sleep within the past six or seven months or completely true about that city.
[0:40:22]
So basically I don’t know I, I just found a place that suited me, there’s tons of space it’s a jungle everything is fallen down everything’s beautiful, everything’s cheaper you just find it in the weeds and you drag it home and make it into something else and its basically exactly what I wanted from a place to live sort of like a my own desire to live somewhere difficult and beautiful and inhabited sorry. Or watch me.
Female speaker: So the whole boat crushed were you the only one that stayed, did the boat go on?
Female speaker: No.
Female speaker: The boats crushed and they came apart from junk to junk, there’s nothing left that except the patter wheel off of my boat and the feel because I raised about 2500 pounds and no one can move it. So it’s all gone everything is gone. anything that we thought that we would maybe leave like there are some people who wanted to build more on to it and have their own voyage to keep going down the river and the river just said no. It took back everything started again although all the pontoons that we had left were gone everything gone just the end. Yeah the end, yeah the river made up its own mind.
Female speaker: [0:41:49] [inaudible]
Female speaker: Oh yeah I forgot about that, one of the boats that was going to keep going down the river was parked on the Illinois side of the river. We were on the Missouri side and it was downstream that we couldn’t live it, we couldn’t get it off of the beach where we had landed, the coast guard couldn’t target we nearly killed ourselves trying a couple of times it was just insane. And so we left it there and we thought it was the Garden of Bling that did crazy looking one that’s on this web page here. and they are going to make into a Garden of Bling version 2.0 and it was going to be totally banging got a big mortar and stream liner and take all the weird junk off and then more mobile but then on New Year’s day 2007 or 2008 I guess that would be the Illinois fire department came and burnt it, burnt it to a crisp and that was that.
Yeah I mean they said they gave us warning I didn’t get a phone call but that’s life. It was sad but it was also okay I think they burned it yeah they set it on fire it was a nuisance, it was a nuisance yeah it was crazy. Actually have you guys heard of the floating metrinos [0:43:06] [phonetic] you know what those are? The floating metrinos are people that Miss Rockaway is sort of like clams in a funny way, it’s like predators of this idea they are people who have sailed all over the goddamned world on ships made out of junk across the Atlantic. Yeah it’s a family Papnetrinos [0:43:24] [phonetic] this machine of a person it’s just amazing visionary also crazy. And they sailed on this amazing ship to Ireland and then back. And then they also went down the Mississippi and some of our boats were based on their models because they have tested a lot of models a lot of them boats have fallen apart or stayed together and we copied the ones that stayed together.
So when I was a kid when I was like seven they came back from Ireland and I grew up on the costal long island and I lived in the port where the boat came into dock and it was like foreshadowing 20 years of foreshadowing because the town that I grew up in totally burned their boat. I was like damn I had seen that one coming. Someone else want to tell stories?
Female speaker: [0:44:18] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yeah and there is kind of no lack of questions here I think it’s just that I was interested in what other people were asking. I was interested in the how you guys see what Miss Rockaway Armada is at this point you know because I don’t mean professionally speaking necessarily or anything like that just like - okay, yeah I was just replying on text. but I just mean from well from whatever I remember you are , someone saying that the Armada isn’t just a fleet of physical boats necessarily but in a way it sort of seemed to me at least like it’s a network that’s not just based on boats, right?
[0:45:18]
So the Armada is kind of an Armada of people in way you know yours it’s like a floating body of individuals you know who do different things together you don’t just go down the river you know you help each other with various projects, you evolve together in a different way to do a lot of stuff in your own individually. but that’s it seems like that’s part of what the group is and I was just kind of curious what you guys thought about that how these experiments extend into other areas of your life or how those others in your life kind of merge with this. Because we’ve been focused on this one particular project which definitely captures the imagination but also it’s not all of what you are doing it’s also not all you want to do. So I was just curious of that.
Female speaker: [0:46:09] [inaudible] Well I think it’s get complicated because we are continuously trying to redefine who we are ourselves and it has shifted a lot and there yeah you know we are still talking about it its nothing we are not the traditional forum of the collective and it has shifted a lot and a number of us have gone on to work on some amazing projects there are some wonderful bounds that have come out of those encounters that have had, there is a baby that came out of an encounter that was had you know a baby wolf who lives in California was yeah was here also in the fall at Base Camp and was conceived on the Rockaway project you know. There is there are record companies that have been created, there are fine fine artists that have found their roots and inspiration out of that moment and time of their life happening with all these other people around at the same time.
And I think that whether or not people want to like lay claim to it it’s definitely people spend months of their lives on these projects or even years. and I definitely spend a few years working on a number of boat projects and it has definitely heavily impacted the way that I view the world what I view as possible and the kind of skills that I have now and what I want to be seeing and I what I want to doing. When we talk about the network yeah there is probably you know some are between 100 and 300 loosely connected people across America that are travelling or stable and still continuously part of the community or have kind of found their own way that are part of the Miss Rockaway Armada of extended family of people that you can reach out to depending on what you need.
I mean Anna was talking to she just got a truck and she is going to drive it down to a friend of hers who has now become a professional mechanic so that he can teach her everything she needs to know and you know they met on the Rockaway project. and there is a lot of welders, there is a lot of sculptors, a lot of carpenters, there is a lot of painters, wood cutters, fine artists, herbalists you kind of acupuncturists, musicians you name it people who are coming from all mmh yeah people are travelers hobos, you, performers you kind of name it, it was project that drew a lot of different characters and had a lot of different skills and spanned a lot of awesome trouble yeah I don’t know look forward to answer that.
Female speaker: What did you start with?
Female speaker: Awesome trouble.
Female speaker: No no no.
Female Speaker: Sorry where were you we are going.
Female speaker: Oh Miss Rockaway Armada.
Female speaker: Thoughts about it I’m sorry well I think feedback woooo! Okay thanks sorry about that. The kind of new thing about this is that it’s not simple and it’s not easy to like really talk about or even think about what it means to me or to any of us to be part of this group of people. because it’s just there is like so many different forces pulling on us to coming from each other, so many different things that could happen or are happening or that we regret happening even but it’s still compelling it’s like watching a train wreck you know it’s it might be terrible or might be okay but you just can’t look away because it’s that interesting.
[0:50:21]
So yeah I find myself drawn back time and time again and being like well friends I have this concern about this thing perhaps we should speak about this oh you are not listening okay let’s do this fun thing. but it isn’t even I don’t know sometimes it doesn’t matter because it’s so it’s kind of unusual to have a non geographically base collective of friends even if it’s - yeah I don’t know I mean I keep trying to think of ways for me personally to make use of and be useful to this group of people like when I bought that when there was a van actually a big diesel step van and making it into a cottage. When I bought that thing I was totally broke and I was like men dear Miss Rockaway everybody loan me $5 and then everybody did and there was like 250 people $5 and I bought this diesel van and it took me to months to pay back all these $5 loans. But it was great because that was an instance of collectively working in a totally complicated and excellent and successful way. I think we all struggle to find our individual spaces inside of this like sort of sass pool of friendship and it’s really challenging and really fun at times.
[0:51:51] [background voices]
Female speaker: We are not harpies. It is true that our identify as collective is changing and it’s kind of unusual I think in the realm of collectives that we don’t really have an over arching ideology politically, socialticaly, artistically that unites us. We are all very different people and like living very different lives in different parts of the country and the thing that unite us is this weird project we do together. But I guess like what Anna was saying, its more, maybe it’s more real that way because its more complicated and its more diverse and you have to talk to each other on a fundamental level of like why are we doing this, is there anything that unite us anymore should I mean should we break up? Should we break up I don’t know.
Female speaker: [0:52:59] [Inaudible]
Female speaker: Or what is like is there a way that the collective - in many ways it has like I don’t think it would be possible really for the collective to break up its just I think become a very informal thing of what it is.
Male speaker: [0:53:18] [inaudible] do you mean that it’s impossible to break up because your criteria of what it means to be together is so incredibly loose? And that actually was one, and it was actually one of my other question kind of - okay one of my other questions was what’s really what do you guys what does it take to be a part of the group or what constitutes membership for your partnering part of the network has?
Female speaker: Its impossible to break up because I think we are- we’ve lived our paths are entwined this way and like many of us are friends and even people who don’t really want to be friend with anymore we can’t get away from Rockaway could have to see one way or the other. I don’t know I think the Miss Rockaway Armada in some ways it’s still limited to the people who shared this boats experience although the network of people is expanding and constantly expanding and there are new peoples in our lives that are part of our network that weren’t part of the Armada. It’s just that the Armada does share these experiences that we’ve at a particular place in a particular time and very intimate yeah.
[0:54:50]
Female speaker: I will hearken again on this fact that we keep on saying we are not, we are hippies though no I mean that was a big joke that we had we are not hippies I swear, people sort of fancied themselves after you know a hobo punk, hobo punk perfomative kids but really we weren’t going for the non anti-definition of who we were people we didn’t want to draw boundaries it wasn’t about drawing boundaries it was about being free to do everything and anything. But there were certain aspects to the collective living that was a very unique experience to the Mississippi years that didn’t necessarily always on like the switch back or the [0:55:39] [indiscernible] projects. You know we shared meals, we had group meetings, we had sort of collective sleeping piles, we had you know we shared tents, we had shared medical supplies, we all took turns running jobs it was we were trying to be as fair and egalitarian as we possibly could and it didn’t always work we all had a lot of troubles but it was definitely a goal that was constantly being sort after.
So there were certain things that and we had this performances where everyone was encouraged to participate so we had variety shows and we had theatrical skits and we had puppetry shows and we had you know people learning instruments for the first time and trying to encourage and incorporate each other as much as possible which was very unique to the Armada experience. So it’s not just us being on some crazy sculptural raft thing on the river and being really dirty all the time. But sharing in all of these sustaining life experiences with a particular group of people is what has mostly been the bonding factor I think for all of us.
Also there is like I think for a lot of us and for a lot of people in the world this is - there is a lot of like sort of romantic nostalgia for communal egalitarian you know village based life. We all raise each other and we get raised. But also there is the other nice side of that there is a practical side which is that sometimes when you live in a village you have to get along with people that maybe you have reasons to feel you shouldn’t get along. But the village is so tiny that you have to work it out its not Brooklyn you can’t run away you can’t go and hide in your own scene your scene is the entire world so you better make it work. So it was kind of like the chitokwa series if anyone is familiar with that just like what have you got come and bring it and we will talk about it and we will try and improve in a maybe all bums are hippies but not all hippies are bums but not all bums are hippies is what I would say.
Female speaker: [0:58:06] [inaudible]
Female speaker: Yeah.
Female speaker: [0:58:06] [inaudible] on record.
Female speaker: Agro circus kids agro circus punk kids yeah them too.
Female speaker: [0:58:15] [inaudible]
Female speaker: I don’t know.
[0:58:20] [background voices]
Female speaker: Surprised why are you surprised if there isn’t nostalgic element to this? I mean the nostalgia of this small town spirit. No not at all I mean I was raised in tiny town.
Male speaker: No my question was I mean I wasn’t raised in small town and I don’t have any nostalgia for at anything really and I have a bit of problem with the notion of nostalgia I mean it’s interesting to me and still don’t have it you know you can ground values in the good things from the past but in fact it seems like it seems like it seemed bizarre when you cobble together a boat out of junk that you would have nostalgia for the past I don’t know how you square that.
Female speaker: Oh no I never meant nostalgia for any past I meant more nostalgia for our past.
Male speaker: Nostalgia is not really forward looking kind of by definition you know what I mean?
[1:00:00]
Female speaker: I don’t know if I completely agree with this because I don’t know I have had three years of living in a city that’s completely exist in the past or think about this pretty hard and I don’t think of nostalgia as like a stagnant system of emotions that is just based on the thought that what happened isn’t going to happen again, I don’t know maybe I get a little streak of sentimentalism I’m okay with that actually. I think that nostalgia is an awfully good driving force for me personally to do things that I did ones not so hot and enjoyed all the same to try and play that same goosh doll better again later, I just meant nostalgia for I don’t know a lot of a lot of a lot of I don’t know maybe this is a scene specific thing. but a lot of people that I know my age I’m 27 really at this point in their lives are dropping out of their like crazy punk rock lifestyles men and they are getting a firm. So if that’s not nostalgia driven in some sense I don’t know what is.
Male speaker: [1:01:28] inaudible] yeah it’s an interesting because there is definitely a stigma attached to nostalgia maybe for good reason. but also a lot of people that we’ve been involved with have an interesting some fidelity with some moment from the past or certain or even certain elements from different contexts that have happened before that could be useful in another context.
Female speaker: Yeah maybe along those lines or maybe I can say this better by saying that there is some form of nostalgia in the original sort of mental makeup of people of these two years on this river being like - this river used to be a mass transit centre there used to be all kinds of crazy things living on this river I mean it was a completely a live highway just full of all kinds of like snake oil quakes and gypsies and giant talkers and boats and everything I mean. Yeah the city centers are along the river it used to it just to be a completely alive thing and there is life in that thing yet but it’s pretty empty all the same.
[1:02:42] [background voice]
Female speaker: Do I have a fin you know we were just planting [1:02:45] [indiscernible]
Male speaker: [1:02:50] [inaudible] what?
Female speaker: [1:02:51] inaudible] yeah.
Male speaker: [1:02:54] [inaudible] meant, who knows. Yeah okay so I wanted to know about not just the your particular [1:03:11] [indiscernible] but like I saw some of the photos that things happened on the shore right? In the context of the boat not just in the other projects. and so I was curious about this that you are kind of you know going from place to place and in sort of in away picking up what someone else is throwing down but also other people are picking up what you’re throwing down you are kind of spreading something around. But you know I mean probably different stuff thinking you know like I was curious about what these things what those times were like you know when you it’s like you know literary you know pulling in the port or whatever even if it’s just a beach docking and what not, I’m just curious you know that factored into your you know what you guys had planned on and how that side of thing has turned out and if there was part of the project in all that.
Female speaker: I think that was like a fundamental element of the project that nothing was planned on ever. So there was like a limited if none if no scouting that was getting done whatsoever it was like you literary – like we had some maps you know we had maps and we were in contact with the coast guard and we had our life vests and what not. but mostly we had no idea like how far our engines had bust out that day or if we would be able to like work with the currents and get five miles or get 30 miles or what you know the weather was going to be like that bad in terms of rain we would just like stay camped out. We would pull over on the side of the road and stay in an island for a couple of days at a time or you know get beach and not be able to pull out because of the way that the tides are working even though we had our charts. So there were these things that were unpredictable and that is what we were really living for at that point in time you know we were there for it, we were ready for it, we were calling out for that unpredictability and accepting it with full force.
[1:05:03]
And we pulled in towns and we had no idea what to expect and that was a huge part of it that was kind on the point just not to know what you were getting yourself into and dealing with whatever came as it did. God and what else I mean you know sometimes we had a great time at the town sometimes they would run us out and be like, “you crazy bastards get out of our town, what you think you are doing here?” And most of the times there was a lot of, “well where are you coming from, where are you going, what’s going on, who are you?” People would roll up on the side of their boats and throw beers at us and you know get funny - it was like you know people would be so welcoming often because they had never seen anything like this before in their lives and they would just showed boxes of socks and boxes of raingear and boxes of food and local produce and I don’t know there would also wild stuff like all slams of venecine or like a locally cut fish or…
Female speaker: Dunk and doughnuts?
Female speaker: Yeah dunk and doughnuts like randomly like someone brought us in the first year someone like brought like a huge tray of these gigantic MacDonald’s milkshakes and like we are all vegan like you know like vegan, arecas you know we don’t want to have anything to do with MacDonald’s but we are all just like wow this wow it’s so hot out you know. So some people like some people drink some people are just like couldn’t have anything of it. But whatever it was you take what you get as you get. So that was kind of our MO for rolling down the river at least.
Male speaker: So…
Female speaker: Do you want to go?
Male speaker: Yeah [1:06:48] [inaudible]
Female speaker: Justin what did you feel like asking?
Male speaker: Oh hello do you hear me?
Female speaker: Oh yes.
Male speaker: Can you hear me now?
Female speaker: Yes we can hear you great.
Male speaker: Okay cool I’m sorry if my question has been already addressed because tuned in kind of late I’m not sure. But actually I have kind of two very practical questions that pertains to sailing down river that I wanted to ask you about. The first is kind of like local or legal. like I can’t be sure I really don’t know but I get the feeling and this might just be like the kind of like a certain kind of like go mentality that kind of comes some kind of silly super ego that I have for something because I’m not all sure about this but I’m feeling if I were to build a raft and throw it into like let’s say the Delaware river in Philadelphia, someone would be there to like kick me out or to tell me that that’s not allowed and I would be arrested for something, because that’s not completely not the case like you can just thrown down in a river at any time and just [1:07:54] [cross talk]
Female speaker: There is a couple of little tiny things that you have to do other than that that can stop you because Mississippi river at least is a federal water way and cops have no jurisdiction and coast guard is very busy but the. But the down river, I’m not sure about. Basically you have to have a certain amount of things on your boat you have to register it and you have to follow a couple of easy rules and that’s pretty much it. for example you have to have as many life jackets as there are people plus a couple of extras, you have to have running lights some in the front and some in the back that right that show which direction you are heading, you have to have a horn and you have to have a what do you call fire extinguishers and you have a whistle and flares sorry signal flares and you have to have an anchor. And if you have those things on your boat I mean one of the coast guards guys said I wouldn’t be caught on it but have a great time I think have a lot of fun, so yeah there is that.
Male speaker: Cool, Those are very good answers thank you.
Female speaker: And we were also fully we were fully registered you just, just like registering your car you go you pay a fee you get a number like a license plate number you pin on the side of your boat and you are good to go during the day. We have lots of friends or at least I do that don’t care to play these rules. so they navigate at night and they go through the sleaze which are like the side the side sort of swampy parts of the river off of the main shipping channel and they sort of totally under the radar really cover it. You can do it either way but it’s a lot faster if you can move it during the day.
Female speaker: In New York.
Male speaker: Okay interesting though.
Female speaker: But somebody here somebody who was this is Robin she was she did the same project but on the Hudson river which is I think a lot more maybe as close to or similar to the Delaware river.
Robin: I was just going to say I’m not sure how many of the laws vary State to State but I know when we are registering boats in New York if it’s under 16 feet and does not have a motor you don’t have to register it.
[1:10:04]
Female speaker: [1:10:05] [indiscernible]
Robin: So if it’s like a canoe or even a boat under 16 feet without a motor like you can stick in the water I think as long as it’s not at night the running light it sure comes up there and you have life jackets you are legal.
Male speaker: Cool, if I could quickly ask just another question that’s kind of related in the sense that they both relate to kind of like practical fears that I’m curious about and again I don’t know if this is realistic at all or if again this is kind of just a fantastic kind of political you know like effectively conservative fears that prevent people from doing cool things like these. but my other impression is that going down a river like the Mississippi or the Delaware especially for long stretches of it one will be bound to encounter let’s say like very like fatal rackets or some kinds of like waterfalls or things of these nature that would really kind of spell a disaster are they out there, are there not really not many these kinds of situations or are they manageable if you wanted to say a few words about that?
Female speaker: Okay well.
[1:11:19] [background voices]
Female speaker: For that as well. The most of the major rivers in the United States at least the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Delaware, I am imagining the Hudson all these rivers have been shipping channels for 200 plus years. And at this point the Mississippi specifically has been pretty well divided into manageable segments by the army court of engineers; there is all these locks and dams. and all you basically if you are like a river or raft it, all you need to do is you can find a chart and then you can look at it and if there is a waterfall you have to walk around which is the case in the upper Missouri there is all these crazy waterfalls but you can footage them supposing you had a little boat and then when you get to a certain point where it’s been a shipping channel its navigable.
Shipping channel means that you are guaranteed of enough clearance for a large enough boat to be shipping a lot of stuff to go through like a badge a giant badge. Actually badges are much huger practical fear in reality of being in the river than any waterfall I have ever seen. Badges are gigantic they are trains they take forever to stop or turn and they usually don’t see you and they don’t care and actually our friend Maddy Ovalis was on the Mississippi river the year before us I don’t know if you were here while Ariel was talking about running into this fellow he built his own boat and he going down the river. He had a run in with a badge and some tag boats they didn’t even touch him. Their backwash from the motors it was so powerful that it instantaneously sank his boat and he is lucky to be alive. Everything that he owned was inside this thing so yeah there is some really scary things on the river you have to play the game right but you can win.
Male speaker: Okay cool good answers I mean I just wanted to relate to it and this is kind of [1:13:10] [indiscernible] comments and I will give her the mic at that point. it’s just that I mean the reason I referenced both of these question with you know the statements that I did, saying that is that I’m not sure if they were realistically or real or this is just my imagination. I mean those that itself I think is an interesting and indicative about how it’s actually more practically and actually possible to just throw for a boat in a river and go down it. It seems like from your answers it’s really quite possible it’s not very far flung. but you know I mean I’m not pretty well educated you know urbanite in Philadelphia and I still had it in my imagination for some reason out like you know the river for these reasons its off limits right? It’s like imaginary fears or issues that would prevent me from kind of making the river in a certain way my own and using it to my you know for my own purposes. and so I think it’s really interesting just to use my, me as an example about how you now these things are more realistic than they might seem even to you know political savvy and fairly educated people. So it’s very interesting thank you.
Female speaker: Well yeah we were just looking now at something that Scott pulled up which was a terrible collision of a dock boat and a badge a baggage badge on the Delaware. yeah its I mean nothing is safe we were very I mean I’m not so old now but I was much younger then and I believed and I still believe to some extend that I’m bullet proof but I’m much more open now to the possibility that there might be a situation where that is not the case. I mean the natural world is terrifying and amazing and it’s great to subjugate yourself to it because life is gigantic when you are very small.
[1:15:10]
Female speaker: I can attest to an experience that we did have on the Mississippi river on the first year where we came across a five mile stretch that was wide five miles wide off the Mississippi river. And the current was quite remarkable it really felt like you were out at sea in terms of the types of waves that you are getting out on the water at that point. And time and we that was the year that we had a series of floating sort of platoon based rafts where there were platoons and Styrofoam, nautical Styrofoam that were floating the boats and they were all tied together. So it was this long raft system.
And we had on the second floor kind of built through a stage on the piece in the middle and the boat was bucking and pieces were flying everywhere. We had a friend that actually I think he was trying to pull up one of our tires that was working as a bumper between some of the through the rafts and he broke his finger. and then there was a raft that was we were pulling in our tow that had all our bikes on it that we had - actually one of our friends Marshall was standing on at that point in time and it was connected to the last raft by some polls that were then bolted with some very very heavy lag bolts down into the raft, and they wrecked out because of the bucking that was happening with the rafts. We only just barely able to get him back onto the main part of the raft and we lost that raft floor like four days time or something. it’s just like it floated back off through that five mile stretch and like landed safely actually in the end into a swampy area and nuzzled itself there for us to find about a week later with a very shallow speed boat.
But we thought we were going to die and it was frightening and we were making SOS calls to the coast guards every badge, anybody that would listen it was frightening in were all standing there in our life jackets and parts and pieces of the boat were breaking off left and right it was a terrifying terrifying terrifying terrifying day. There was actually this girl Amber who was we had taken on under wing she was like 17 years old. I think she was betrothed to this guy that she wasn’t in love with or she was about to get she was about getting married to this guy. her mum was super cool but somehow she got stuck in the small town and her mum was like take my daughter with you like let her have a life please take her out of this small town. and she was there with us, she had only been with us like a week maybe she was very shy and she was just like she just stood in the kitchen in the middle of the raft and all these chaos happening left and right and was like we are going to die! We are going to die! SOS! SOS! And Amber is just like crying in the kitchen bowling like what have I gotten myself into these people are crazy.
And we were I men it was genuinely frightening. And we actually managed to get through that stretch of river and got to the next lock and dam and pass the lock and dam were you know we were shaking in our boots and then afterwards the life guards or the coast guards came like these hooks and nets attached to the end of them because they weren’t prepared to come out and help us while we were on the water having troubles on this very dangerous situation. they came to fish dead bodies out with these like long poles and hooks and nets to fish dead bodies out of the water and they are you guys are okay that’s fine whatever.
So I’m just saying don’t always trust in the abilities of these so called powers that the please do your research, use your ingenuity and your street smarts, make things as structured sound as you possibly can do your research and definitely get registered radios are great totally use radios and love your life vest. But yeah I mean what we did is no joke we’ve come across several life threatening instances and yeah we had a lot of fun doing a lot of dangerous things but it’s not always as easy as you might initially think it to be and its one of those moments when ignorance is a bit of bliss I guess you could say.
Female speaker: I will turn us onto something, to Fiona, so…
[1:19:50] [background voices]
Male speaker: Oh yeah.
Female speaker: What is that?
Female speaker: We are looking at a picture of the dimaxian car I’m going to pass it over to Scott now.
[1:20:02]
Male speaker: Yeah just want to pull this up because we are somehow the discussion about Jonathan - well this little thread talked about what was it? That these boats ultimately are a lot like - Jonathan just he just sort of gave another example like they are kind of like people they are trying in the US to get bigger and bigger cars to be safer and safer just slightly ridiculous that’s…I think this conversation just kind of came up because you know you guys have experienced some difficulties on the water you know and then again - yeah I mean other kinds of boats have difficulties too. And it kind of doesn’t matter at what level of velvet rope that we sort of place around ourselves. I definitely wouldn’t want to encourage people not to be experimental of the fear of the unknown because you know we “safe as humanly possible” and then just wind up dead.
So there is definitely a good reason to explore these other ways of living and working together in life. At least that’s the moral of the story for me. but anyway so I just pulling up this dimaxian car because well we were looking at N55s floating platform real quick because I’m like well I would like this car you know as opposed to a small car or this boat. But - and they were kind of dimaxian inspired and Bucky Filler made this car in 1939. And this is actually his first giant failure really because this was like the car of the future and what ended up happening was he was driving some investors around who were ready to bankroll this thing and the car crushed and they died. Hello! You know so this was his first giant you know failure but I mean it’s an incredibly cool amazing car from the ‘30s you know so. Yeah I mean its super crazy awesome if anybody feels like browsing some you know I will have to add [1:22:10] [indiscernible] back to the call so I bet you know it feels like browsing some images there, there they are and that’s the end of my part of this story [1:22:15] [indiscernible] take it over.
Female speaker: Wow! What we were talking about? Oh we were talking about dangers of the waters but I don’t know there was not actually a question.
Female speaker: Dangerous major. Does someone else have something that they want to talk about?
Female speaker: Anyone here, do you guys have a question?
[1:22:44] [background voices]
Male speaker: Oh okay.
Female speaker: That’s [1:23:21] [indiscernible]
Male speaker: I guess yeah they make arrangements for that but yeah so I was - okay I was curious about your other projects and I wouldn’t want to move on too quickly because this one is like very interesting. Oh wait no I’m sorry before we do that I have one question that we asked at our we actually asked you guys a question in our description that Steven mainly to be quite honest wrote on based on texts from your websites. Yeah can we borrow your description for Plausible Art Worlds; it just happens to be a really fantastic quote that applies to other things besides boats. And it is just for people that aren’t reading here I will just paste it but…We want to be a living kicking model of an entirely different art world one that in this case happens to float and yeah as Steven pointed out it just sums up a lot for us. So I don’t know what kind of a question that is actually.
Female speaker: Yeah [1:24:32] [indiscernible]
Male speaker: Okay yeah sure oh awesome okay alright next question. I was curious about your other projects and if anybody has questions about like the boat side of the Armada I mean don’t feel shy. But I just maybe we have like maybe less than 20 minutes before we rap up I know you guys do other stuff I know you are here in Philly to do a project now. Yeah you are doing something with middle arts and I definitely don’t want to divulge anything but I mean you are or are not doing something with the boat too? But anyway I’m curious about the other stuff you are doing so.
Female speaker: Do you want me to like very briefly synopsize at this point or do you want me to say something about Philly, Mural Arts? Interesting things okay.
Female Speaker: [1:25:30] [inaudible]
Female Speaker: Basically everything that has come of this that we have done as collective projects that we didn’t conceive of ourselves say like a boat on a river going down [1:25:40] [indiscernible] has come because somebody instigated something or somebody in one occasion it was these people at Mass MOCA, the Museum of contemporary arts in Massachusetts in North Adams were like oh my God you build all these stuff out of crap, well we have all these crap you should come over. So there is that one and then that happened again where this woman from this sort of difficult to define sort of contemporary art center-ish, sort of a gallery, sort of a museum not really either one, governmentally funded in Holland.
She was curating or being part of this giant project that happened during the election when Obama was elected that had to do with the heartland, heartland USA like what is it mean to be from the heart of it all. So they had all these people from the Mississippi Valley of the United States, all these crazy different people doing all these different things at the Vanader Museum [phonetic] [0:01:33.1] is what their official museum is called. And then they were like and then there is these funny people like we should have them over too, so they had us over and they didn’t have any junk at all home’s really clean so we had to like really do some work to scour up some crap to build out of.
But these are two things that happened because in the case of Holland she was literally in a car driving around the Midwest and then on her way back she went through the museum in North Adams and Mass MOCA was oh this is exactly—like look at these nice stuff, completely serendipitous, completely unprofessional.
Female speaker: [1:27:31] [indiscernible]
Female speaker: No I didn’t really think about that but then here we are in Philadelphia doing this totally different thing. Its just three of us and some of our friends are going to come later, me Ariel and Robin and we are working with Mural Arts and to tell the truth is still don’t know why they asked us to do this or why they trusted us to do this. But they have given us like two big gangs of kids and, yes and we are hanging out with these two gangs of kids and we are totally shooting from the hip and being off the cuff and totally informal and making some people at Mural Arts probably pretty uncomfortable and hopefully making some really cool mural with this kids. So no we have to figure out which wall it is yeah. but we thought we would try and use some of the sort of like super organic decision making unilateral styles of doing stuff with some kids to see whether they think its cool or not.
And in terms of building boats here in Philadelphia [1:28:50] [indiscernible], I’m not going to say too much about it but the Armada has also won a grant from the Philadelphia Art Alliances to come and do a project here in Philadelphia in the fall of 2011. And I think some of that will include building some boats that will navigate the waters and some other projects throughout the city mostly building projects and things. We will be a much larger endeavor. I mean right now we are just a very small group we’ve got some funding, we got a grant from the Mural Arts program and Scott wrote us a message saying he could get more beer which sounds lovely I guess on these hot steamy days but—and we will cut it later too I hope.
But yeah and so that’s what we are doing right now, is the loose collectives that we are and there are various characters all over the States right now that have a lot of smaller projects, independent projects that are happening or becoming more professional inspired artists or farmers or mechanists or underwater deep sea, welders, divers or puppeteers or performance artists or record label musicians, and founders of record labels and I mean movies makers. Its really, it’s an interesting crew and so and we are looking forward to seeing what’s going to happen in the near future.
[1:30:30]
Female Speaker: Next question please, oh its like we are sweating, drinking frothy beer and dancing with the stars, oh there is a few more emoticons happening here. Oh mooning what’s the shabby short cake character she is doing? That looks like York and they are in her swan dress that she had.
Female speaker: You should discuss the [1:31:09] [indiscernible].
Female speaker: Oh was anyone involved in the Flood Time film? Yes definitely. Is it a documentary? No not quite missed the screening last week. Yes Flood time is a fascinating project that was a project that was designed by a man named Todd Chandler who was also a part of a band called Dark, Dark, Dark which was a product of some of the Rockaway experiences. Todd Chandler was also on the Boats and so where many of the characters of, I think all of the characters of the Miss Rock - of Dark, Dark, Dark, wonderful band based out of Minneapolis. He created a script and filmed a lot of—I’m sorry I’m distracted by a lot of what’s going on [1:32:04] [inaudible] I will just talk.
He developed the scripts that would happen it was a fantasy, it’s a narrative that will coincide with the floating of the Switchback Seas projects which was a series of rafts that were designed by the artist Swoon, it was connected to the Diche Projects galleries in New York City. We started up in Troy New York and floated down the Hudson River and finished docking at Diche Projects gallery in Long Island City. And it was a project that happened over a series of months and Todd Chandler filmed this footage coinciding with that Switchback project.
So there a number of characters that were part of the Switchback project that are incorporated into the film. There was a screening that just happened at the rooftop film festivals at Socrates Sculpture Park on July 7th so about a week ago. And it was a lyrical, it was a very beautiful lyrical screening where they had live music accompaniment and with the setting of the river behind it outdoor in the park screening. And it was a cut that was made just for that very particular viewing that was happening with the Rooftop film festival. The final cut of the film is going to come out I think in the fall and they are also going to be doing a screening, they have been invited to the San Jose Biennial. It’s a project that Todd Chandler is doing in conjunction with a man named Jeff Stark who was also a producer of some of these boat ventures.
And they won a grant to be part of the San Jose Biennial and they are creating this whole sort of indoor drive-in cinema situation where they are bringing in I think 25 scrap junk cars and inserting their own home made radio system. So they will be paying live the music that is accompanying the film footage as a huge art installation project for the festival. And then the film is being applied to various film festivals internationally right now and so we will see the final cut coming out in the fall. But it’s a narrative, it’s a fantasy, it’s about a girl falling in love with the river and she had another relationship and a number of buddies and friends that helped her build this raft and she ended up choosing the river over her reality. It’s a beautiful piece, I highly recommend checking it out and following up with it the more you hear about it. What else? What’s next? Have to run but thank you Miss Rockaway Armada that was really fascinating goodnight, see you Greggles.
[1:34:57]
Female speaker: [1:35:01] [Inaudible].
Female speaker: Oh yes here we go Anna’s got a good one.
Female speaker: Nile.
Female speaker: There is this amazing book which I can’t remember the name of sorry which is about this woman who set out to row the entire length of the Nile which she did. And it’s a story about a river that is so unpredictable and crazy and interesting that looks, I don’t know, makes the Mississippi look kind of tame actually. Because the Mississippi is wild but at least it doesn’t you know just like spontaneously disappear once in a blue moon which is apparently what the Nile does. I’m totally game let’s do it.
Female speaker: I mean there are actually a series of rafters that go out the—they call them river rats actually, number of people who build their own homemade rafts and raft down the Mississippi every single year. We happened to be one project that happened down the Mississippi river. But there are kids that go down every single summer and they are growing and growing and growing. And tones of retirees on the sun as well. You know it’s not something you think about so much. I live in New York City and it’s not a City that’s based around the water. We see the water when you bike over the bridge but it’s not something that you have as much access to and it’s easy to forget how important our environments can be and what kind of an impact they can have on you. And it was, I have to say it has been a privilege to be able to spend this much time living so close to the actual materiality of your environments at least you know, feeling the outside weather inside, as you could say, down the Nile [1:36:55] [inaudible].
Female speaker: Yes that’s the one that I was just trying to…
Female speaker: Yes that’s totally the book Jonathan, that’s the one. Have you ever—maybe since you know what it was you have already read it but totally great, its great. No the Armada? Only armed with bullets of love for you know stuff like this. No how did we choose the name? I think there was a lottery, I think a bunch of people chose names and then we voted and some of the names were better or worse than others. There was one that I really liked after the fact it was called ten thousand fingers in the soup, that’s a pretty good name.
Female speaker: I think there was a reference to the [1:37:36] [indiscernible] Rockaway’s and it was based on a play that Finley wrote the first year that was not kind of direct like the sad directly and side show character Miss Rockaway and that [1:37:52] [inaudible] part of the family of a circus side show yeah and that’s probably where the name came out of, alight.
Female speaker: I unfortunately can’t remember the name of any of these artists now so I’m just going to talk about them as artists. I know there is currently a lot of people that are doing kind of like the similar thing but they are doing a lot more in the design aspect I guess where they plan the whole thing out before hand, the whole boat, the whole structure. And its more about like creating your own personal island, maybe not like movable, I’m sure—I mean I know there is a lot of artists that are doing it now and I’m not sure but, and I guess they are more about like—well not they but some of them are specifically about like growing, doing everything that you can live on and never have to leave.
Female speaker: You mean like [1:38:54] [inaudible].
Female speaker: It’s like self sustaining.
Female speaker: No bio-dome.
Female speaker: Oh kind of like the bio-dome but I guess on water and then there would be like things growing all through out and stuff like that.
[1:39:08] [background voices]
Female speaker: That sounds familiar, that might be—
Female speakers: [1:39:12] [indiscernible] the water pod is it?
Female speaker: Yeah there was a water pod project that happened on the river, on the Hudson, was going around to the five burrows in New York City, it was meant to be somewhat of a sustainable art living project and artist residency that was happening. It was on a barge, it wasn’t like its own independent moving boat or Island, it was a barge that was getting tug boated around to the different, five different burrows. And they were hosting workshops and events where they—they had chickens they had a garden and they had this sort of geodesic dome type structure and they were trying to host artist residencies and shows and had a lot of parties and discussions.
But it was something that was heavily sponsored and was very successful and they had a lot of architects and designers and people that were involved in making that project happen and yeah it was called the water pod project. I actually haven’t met too many of those characters but it was a project that was happening with some like minded artists and craftsman that was happening a very similar time to some of the projects that we were doing. It’s another example of the fact that you now there are a lot of people doing similar things out in the world in their own varieties, in their ways and we happen to be one of them that also came with the sort of punk rock circus.
[1:40:45]
Female speaker: [1:40:45] [inaudible].
Female speaker: Oh I don’t remember, I don’t know.
Male speaker: I have a quick comment, I’m Ed.
Female speaker: Yes please go ahead.
Male speaker: Its very interesting to talk about all these other related projects, these related attempts to kind of reclaim water as a kind of –as a space for new possibilities ad new kinds of lifestyles. Because I mean it really makes ,me wonder if water waves or just the water is kind of like, you know, really emerging as a new kind of battle ground, a new kind of cultural, political background in which you know maybe very significant battles are being played out. Because I wanted to bring something up, I’m not sure if you guys are familiar, if anyone is familiar with this but there are actually other projects not quite as cool as the ones that you guys are talking about to reclaim the water for like, you guys were talking about nostalgia before, for these like really kind of like nostalgic, like basically like radical returns to capitalism. Like are you familiar with these at all?
They are like big buildings like floating communities, they are not rafts, they don’t move they are docks. But the idea is build these communities outside of the jurisdiction, outside of like traditional territorial jurisdictions. Not to like reinvent some kind of like radically new kind of art world or something, something like that but rather to build like even more free markets. And it’s this, all of this--it’s surrounded by all of this really profound kind of political ideology but it’s almost exactly the opposite of the kinds of ideas and ideals and values that you guys are talking about. So its really interesting how water ways are becoming this area in which very kinds of, you know very conflicting visions of what the future should hold are kind of being battled out. I don’t know if you are familiar with that or if you have thoughts on maybe the kind of the more general future significance of the water as a political space.
Female speaker: Well you sound like you are probably a little more up to sniff on that particular thing than I personally am, this is Anna. But I am totally with you in the sort of inexplicable gift out sense that the water is kind of like one of the last frontiers in some aspect be it fresh water as a capitalist resource, the control system, be it salt water as actual physical space that can be controlled and used and like casinos expending outwards avoiding loss, you know, tankers flipping a switch and burning crude oil as soon as they are a certain a mount of miles off shore. Like yes I feel you.
Male speaker: Cool now just its very interesting yes.
Female speaker: I mean I don’t necessarily think its anything new though, it’s like property, wars over property and space and land. And I think yes sure there is an exponential curve to everything but it’s like the same ways that those wonderful, hacker, pirate, you know, radio piracy or media piracy groups are able to live on--. Yes sea lands able to exist and those wonderful borders are able to exits with the pirate radio stations off the coast of England and then you know there is certain things that are able to exist is you make them possible right?
Female speaker: Or the –just like in the [1:44:27] [inaudible] islands.
Female speaker: But I think from our—yeah. Or what did I just say? The recycles crap community is floating islands in various parts of South America, water is still free, land is not free anymore water is free. And so anything goes, it can be bad and it can be good.
Female speaker: But I men Amy just going to reiterate one more time and its one of these situations where its, you know if it doesn’t exist or you want to see more of it like we were taking matters in our own hand and making life the way that we wanted to see it. And that was what we were offering and putting out into the world and encourage everyone to live in that manner too. It’s like if you want to see something happening, you want to see more of something existing in your world make it happen because you can.
Male speaker: Yes totally.
Female speaker: Right on, what else? More questions bring it on yes.
Male speaker: Actually sadly I was sort of hyper focusing unnecessarily its 8:02 and we are two minutes past so even if people have burning questions too bad sorry and we have to close this because people are in different time zones and like its 2 am there. For the few of you who are in that situation like Jonathan in South Africa, Stephen in Paris and I think everybody else is in the US except I’m not sure where Chris is. In any case thanks everybody for coming it was awesome to chat with you guys, it definitely won’t be the last time, does anyone have any closing music that they’d like to put on? Yes.
Male speaker: Thank you folks.
Female speaker: What about Dark, Dark, Dark?
Male speaker: Yes what about Dark, Dark, Dark? Problem is I can’t get to it quickly enough, oh well. I don’t have any of that, yes anyone feel free to turn your mic on and throw us some closing, music on. We probably have some competing by the time that happens. This is the learning site and in –yes. [1:47:12] [inaudible] I can’t believe it’s so tough to get music, yes totally do it, online?
Female speaker: Is this really geeky? I can use this internet? It’s already on the internet?
Male speaker: Yes.
Male speaker: How do I do that I’m sorry?
Male speaker: You are already up there your [1:48:14] [indiscernible].
Female speaker: Oh I’m so computer illiterate it’s not even funny.
[1:48:18 -1:51:08]
Male speaker: Yes so if you guys ever want to get on IRC with us, I’m actually on this all day long everyday and some of a few of these other people. Botcamp is our pet robot, you will see the rules of this chat room is that this is the main chat for Base Camp, yes filthy drunks are definitely allowed, consider saying hi to Botcamp you will be happy you did. So you can give Botcamp a box snack and we are Dark, Dark, Dark because that’s what I signed in as, you can sign in as anyone you want, say bot love. Oh yes bot love, how about – do we know anything about Miss Rockaway? The camp doesn’t know anything about Miss Rockaway. Let me say this –oops, yes definitely [1:52:35] [inaudible], I’m trying to train her right now; anyway you can have fun with this okay.
So then you can say Rockaway, awesome, but you an also say hello Jonathan? See how free note is a really interesting project, its one of the past events in the plausible art world series. Its one of the groups of people that is a really incredibly large group, at any given time it picks at about 60, 000 users and they don’t identify themselves as an art project in anyway. But many of them are artists and its mostly independent servers throughout the UK but it’s not a parallel internet but it’s completely independent channel for communication which I like because like Facebook. Yes it’s like they are basically just harvesting our information, our data, it’s like trying to figure out ways to sell the shit better you know. The great thing about something like [1:54:07] [inaudible] or any IRC channel that it’s completely out of principle except for the people that are in there.
So I mean that’s why it’s the hackers chat, you know communication channel of choice then you will really like it further for that reason. It’s nice, it’s more internet bills, you know who is in there. Some of them might be robots and some of them might lo going it except there is a channel of tones of people you don’t really know but if you do know who is there [1:54:32] [inaudible].
Female speaker: How do you know [1:54:37] [inaudible]
Male speaker: You don’t really-- I mean how do you ever know you know what I mean?
Female speaker: If you talked face to face I’d like to help but if you have enough beers you might not notice he is a robot.
Male speaker: Okay that’s where you have to go, actually if anybody is interested there is a local meeting tonight with a group called stake S-T-A-K-E which is a Philadelphia version of feast.
Female speaker: Oh yes.
Male speaker: And its definitely growing like quite a bit of momentum, we had a couple of meetings her and then its really completely grown in [1:55:43] [inaudible] and there is like just of a ton of volunteers and people that are like really interested in the cooking side and some people are really interested in [1:55:51] [inaudible] side, people are really interested in micro fundraising side or maybe a little bit.
[1:56:01] [background voices]
Male speaker: Yes I don’t like to go I’m not [1:56:02] [indiscernible] to that except for the ones here which is lame. So you are heading over there now? I’m actually going to be heading pout of town soon otherwise I would totally go but I encourage everybody here who even slightly existed to like go check it out.
Female speaker: Well whatever you do—
Male speaker: Isn’t that Teresa’s house? Okay
Female speaker: [1:56:31] [inaudible]
Male speaker: I just want to write it down real quick, like this?
[1:58:20 – 2:07:53] Background voices
Week 23: Biosphere 2
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Vienna-based artist Ralo Mayer who has been researching “Biosphere 2,” a radical experiment from the 1980s that sought to reproduce the earth’s biosphere in a gigantic, hermetically sealed greenhouse in the middle of the Nevada desert, where a group of eight artists — self-described for the purpose as “bions” — went to live in total isolation from the rest of the world for two years. Inside, they would produce, seed and harvest all the food they needed to live, while closely tracking biospheric conditions.
As it happened, the group’s mission in this Noa’s Ark of the desert coincided with the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent redefining of global priorities, including scientific priorities. The project drew sharp criticism from the academic community — perhaps jealously guarding its role as arbiter of biospheric knowledge — which dismissed it as crackpot science, leading the project’s financier to withdraw his support, and the group disbanded. Today, the greenhouse and the property on which it is located has been purchased by a local real estate developer, who has applied to turn the area into an upscale gated community.
Named after Biosphere 1 (that is, our Earth), the project was both a time machine and a scale model. It was above all, in the words of its initiators, a “time microscope enabling the witnessing of as many events as possible in a short period of time.” In many respects, Biosphere 2 has exceeded all expectations in the witness it continues to bear to life here in Biosphere 1. Ralo Mayer’s extensive research into the hopes, prospects, dreams and illusions of Biosphere 2, as well as its all too prosaic fate, is part of his long-term research series, “How to do things with worlds.”
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$133463938ba5d3aa" title="#basekamp/$133463938ba5d3aa">Biosphere 2 http://bit.ly/bpSdEf (#basekamp/$133463938ba5d3aa)
Created on 2010-06-08 20:05:17.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:46:25
- Hi Guys, you're now in the public chat, about 15 min early
- BASEKAMP team: 17:46:43
- awesomely
- BASEKAMP team: 17:46:51
- anyone want to do a quik audio check?
- Jessica Westbrook: 17:47:05
- hellooooooooooooo
- stephen wright: 17:47:15
- Hi Scott
- stephen wright: 17:47:21
- gimme 5. or even 4
- ralo mayer: 17:47:39
- hello world
- BASEKAMP team: 17:47:49
- hellos
- BASEKAMP team: 17:48:37
- sure
- BASEKAMP team: 17:56:50
- I hve to warn you all, the weather is extremely beautiful today ]
- Jonathan Wagener: 17:56:59
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 17:57:04
- it was lovely here too
- Jonathan Wagener: 17:57:06
- it rained all day i cape town
- Jonathan Wagener: 17:57:11
- and cold
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 17:57:26
- it was sunny in helsinki, though still only around 12-13C
- ralo mayer: 17:57:47
- viennas: 24 degrees right now
- ralo mayer: 17:57:50
- C#
- Jessica Westbrook: 17:57:51
- perfect here down South (US)
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 17:58:15
- it's 8 right now actually
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 17:58:19
- hooray for nordic summers
- Jonathan Wagener: 17:58:22
- lol
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 17:58:55
- there has only been one day so far this summer where i could go out without wearing a jacket
- stephen wright: 18:02:28
- We thought we'd start the potluck off by screening the first part of Ralo's film on Biosphere 2. And then wind the evening off by screening it in full. At Basekamp that is.
- stephen wright: 18:03:20
- People are only just wandering in slowly (from the balmy Philly evening I take it), so we'll just give it a minute.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:44
- so how are you guys doing? yes, we're a few die hards ATM... and looking forward to chatting!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:56
- loading up the video
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:08
- so Ralo, we should paste the video link here yes?
- ralo mayer: 18:04:17
- yes!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:31
- ok... 1 moment
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:46
- Ralo, this one right?
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1681443/anintroisafootnote_h264.mov - ralo mayer: 18:07:54
- i guess so
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:27
- lovely -- so everyone should begin to download that... we'll queue it up here -- and play the first 15 mins or so before the chat
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:47
- hmm, stephen, mind sound checking with us again? the recording sounded kind of imbalanced.
- stephen wright: 18:10:09
- ok just call me
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:15
- hi amy, do you see the video link above?
- Amy: 18:11:34
- no
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:12:12
- have you started playing the film already in philly?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:49
- not yet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:52
- almost!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:58
- did everyone downoad it on your end?
- ralo mayer: 18:13:03
- shall i say a few words before?
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:13:20
- it's going to be 25 more minutes for me before i have it all, but i can start watching it i guess
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:20
- ok, let's get this party started
- stephen wright: 18:14:26
- Yes!
- stephen wright: 18:14:31
- Are you going to call us all?
- ralo mayer: 18:14:47
- the video is actually made for a specific video installation
- ralo mayer: 18:15:09
- which looks like this:
- ralo mayer: 18:15:11
- hat die Datei parataxe_titel.jpg an Teilnehmer in diesem Chat gesendet<files alt=""><file size="83249" index="0">parataxe_titel.jpg</file></files>
- ralo mayer: 18:15:20
- hat die Datei parataxe_titel.jpg an Teilnehmer in diesem Chat gesendet<files alt=""><file size="83249" index="0">parataxe_titel.jpg</file></files>
- ralo mayer: 18:15:25
- oh
- ralo mayer: 18:15:38
- i got an error msg
- ralo mayer: 18:15:44
- did you get the image?
- stephen wright: 18:15:56
- Yes we did
- stephen wright: 18:15:58
- Thank you
- ralo mayer: 18:16:00
- ok
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:16:07
- i didn't - just saw a message that you posted it
- Amy: 18:16:11
- same
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:16:12
- i don't see the actual image
- ralo mayer: 18:16:19
- in an exhibition context i show it as a reflection on a glass pane
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:21
- it doesn't look like that here Ralo
- stephen wright: 18:16:22
- you need to accept the download
- ralo mayer: 18:16:39
- i try again
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:16:42
- i'm not being prompted
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:44
- we got it
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:16:47
- skype is evil
- ralo mayer: 18:16:47
- hat die Datei parataxe_titel.jpg an Teilnehmer in diesem Chat gesendet<files alt=""><file size="83249" index="0">parataxe_titel.jpg</file></files>
- ralo mayer: 18:17:05
- anyway
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:17:05
- is this image online somewhere and you can just paste a url?
- ralo mayer: 18:17:22
- our server is down these days
- stephen wright: 18:17:42
- Is everyone watching the film?
- ralo mayer: 18:17:58
- http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1681443/parataxe_titel.jpg
- ralo mayer: 18:18:00
- thats it
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:18:05
- thanks ralo, sorry to be a pain
- Amy: 18:18:18
- thanks!
- ralo mayer: 18:18:24
- as a reflection it looks a bit unreal, hologram like
- ralo mayer: 18:18:41
- also the partly bad quality doesnt matter as much...
- ralo mayer: 18:19:58
- the performer in the video is the choreographer krõõt juurak
- stephen wright: 18:20:48
- that's a cool name incidentally
- ralo mayer: 18:20:57
- estonian
- ralo mayer: 18:21:07
- one note to all downloaders:
- ralo mayer: 18:21:16
- pls don't put the fim on any sharing networks etc
- ralo mayer: 18:21:32
- i use a lot of footage without proper permissions...
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:21:42
- understood.
- ralo mayer: 18:22:01
- and as i plan to continue the project with a full scale film, i wouldnt like to get into trouble
- ralo mayer: 18:22:03
- thanks
- Amy: 18:26:52
- something's come up and I have to exit the chat for today - v. sorry, & BK team. Ralo, I'll try to learn more about your project online, I'm very interested in works about Biosphere 2. thx. Amy
- ralo mayer: 18:27:37
- if you send me an email, i can send you links once our server is up again...
- ralo mayer: 18:27:45
- rrralo@gmail.com
- Amy: 18:27:53
- Great, I'd like that a lot. will do.
- ralo mayer: 18:28:06
- thanks
- stephen wright: 18:28:39
- thanks amy by the way for the link to the interview on Biosphere 2 you posted
- Amy: 18:30:17
- happy to. signing off! amy
- stephen wright: 18:31:44
- What I suggest is that we start the audio chat soon -- and that we all watch the rest of the film after the potluck.
- stephen wright: 18:34:21
- Where is everyone at in the film?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:33
- stephe, scott had to step away for a moment, he will be right back
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:56
- but as soon as he gets back here we will surely start the audio chat
- stephen wright: 18:36:20
- ok Basekamp, or we can start without him if you've finished the film
- stephen wright: 18:36:30
- just initiate the conference call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:49
- ralo, just caught your ray davies quote, nice
- ralo mayer: 18:36:56
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:17
- we are at 20:33, i'll go get him though
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:58
- ok i am going to start up the audio chat, if all are ready
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:41:19
- i think it's too late for me, so i bid you good night
- stephen wright: 18:41:27
- let's start
- stephen wright: 18:41:36
- I really want to hear Ralo
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:53
- thanks stephen
- stephen wright: 18:52:11
- 200 x tighter than the space shuttle!
- stephen wright: 18:52:23
- not bad for artists!
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:53:41
- hey we are getting kicked out of this space, and will have to get back home, so we will be in transit 20 min, or so... sorry for interruption
- stephen wright: 18:58:31
- You wrote in your publication Multiplex Fiction that your "interest in the Biosphere stems from my own experience with failed collectives." Could you say something about what you mean by that?
- stephen wright: 19:06:26
- But do you look at Biosphere as merely illustrating dilemmas (failure of collectives, wrong place at wrong time, etc) or as pointing some way forward? I mean do you see it as a multifacetted failure that allows us to understand or perceive other failures, or as having some kind of success -- something to teach us?
- stephen wright: 19:11:50
- fascinating
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:10
- ralo, are you aware of the genesis of the concept of the american suburb in the exposure of the public to the World Expo in the early 30s? in a way, this was a precursor of the coloniation of space, in that it involved the expansion of a population that had overgrown the inner city into an "infinite" amount of living space?
- ralo mayer: 19:14:58
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vernadsky
- BASEKAMP team: 19:17:29
- http://tigger.uic.edu/~pbhales/Levittown.html
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:06
- Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb - 50's idea of suburban living..
- ralo mayer: 19:19:30
- got kickecd out of the chat
- ralo mayer: 19:19:32
- can you reinvite me
- ralo mayer: 19:19:37
- (the audio chat)
- ralo mayer: 19:19:58
- suburb colony
- ralo mayer: 19:19:59
- http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArt/AC76-0628.jpeg
- ralo mayer: 19:20:11
- http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/70sArt/AC76-1089.jpeg
- ralo mayer: 19:20:13
- etc
- ralo mayer: 19:20:15
- ralo mayer: 19:20:44
- anyone there?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:47
- trying again!
- stephen wright: 19:20:52
- WHat if we imagine an analogy from Biosphere 2 : We could create Artworld 2. Based on the standard model we know. Could we somehow engineer an influence-tight artworld, recreating some of the conditions of the mainstream variant, but small enough to force us to be as careful with the ecosystem as the Biospherians had to be with their greenhouse ecology? The example makes me laugh, but it doesn't sound too plausible.
- ralo mayer: 19:28:15
- 250 mio $
- ralo mayer: 19:28:20
- 80s dollars
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:32
- wow
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:04
- stephen personally i find that a really powerful analogy
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:04
- exactly - we're not talking about a world of one's own - how far can a world be reducible. 2 people? 3 people?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:35
- (scott has returned, stephen)
- ralo mayer: 19:40:35
- ralo mayer: 19:40:53
- very interesting point...
- ralo mayer: 19:41:03
- is it possible to start up again?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:14
- we'll fix it, i was just thinking the same
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:44
- we are calling, any luck?
- stephen wright: 19:42:12
- My question was this: to what extent was what happened to Biosphere 2 an historical accident, and to what degree was it a necessity. It was itself a very counter-intuitive kind of experiment. But what counterfactual history would have made it turn out differently? Was it doomed by overwhelming necessity? Or just by historical contingencies?
- stephen wright: 19:42:20
- Can you call us back please!
- ralo mayer: 19:42:43
- i'd like to answer in audio if possible
- stephen wright: 19:42:54
- Of course!!
- stephen wright: 19:43:03
- I'd like to hear the answer in audio too!
- stephen wright: 19:43:11
- Basekamp...
- ralo mayer: 19:43:15
- stephen wright: 19:43:20
- Houston, we have a problem
- ralo mayer: 19:44:15
- ralo mayer: 19:44:24
- mars to earth: 7 minutes delay
- stephen wright: 19:44:35
- 7 minutes?
- stephen wright: 19:44:46
- And Earth to Tranquility Base?
- ralo mayer: 19:44:51
- 3 seconds or so
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:53
- so sorry, we must be having a connectivity issue. we'll keep trying
- stephen wright: 19:44:59
- that's like skype!
- ralo mayer: 19:45:12
- cyberspace killed the outer space star
- stephen wright: 19:45:28
- Basekamp, do you copy?
- stephen wright: 19:45:52
- Maybe North America has been deleted.
- ralo mayer: 19:46:01
- i restart my skype
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:14
- we copy, wireless signal seems to have degraded for some reason
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:21
- let's carry on in text for the moment
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:50
- if that's okay with you guys
- ralo mayer: 19:46:53
- ok i try
- ralo mayer: 19:47:10
- from ideological / political point of view it woulöd habe worked better earlier
- ralo mayer: 19:47:17
- in the 70s?
- ralo mayer: 19:47:33
- but then again from available technologies etc: it would have been bettre later
- ralo mayer: 19:47:47
- the opening of the soviet union was quite important too
- ralo mayer: 19:47:58
- because they could communicate with scientists there
- ralo mayer: 19:48:02
- the vernadkians etc
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:21
- yes, i think the narrative of ascendant capitalism and the panglossian "best of all possible worlds" philosophy that was pervading society at that point likely had a lot to do with the narrative turning against biosphere 2
- stephen wright: 19:48:22
- so it's dialectical -- the moment it became possible, it was no longer possible.
- ralo mayer: 19:48:51
- precisely!
- stephen wright: 19:49:33
- these are crucial questions with respect to plausible artworlds too -- because by the time they are thought of (ideologically), they may already be too late (technically)
- ralo mayer: 19:49:36
- one could also say':it could only happen then
- ralo mayer: 19:49:41
- even if it didnt work out#
- stephen wright: 19:49:46
- right
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:24
- and the public had less of a need to extrapolate itself into a more ideal world in the presence of the narrative that biosphere 1 and american society were going to become practically ideal in and of theirselves
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:36
- through momentum already present and generate
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:39
- d
- ralo mayer: 19:50:45
- can you tell more about your concept behinf plausible artwolrds?
- stephen wright: 19:51:03
- well that's a concept in the making!
- ralo mayer: 19:51:05
- but now is thet time again
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:15
- stephen indeed
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:46
- the easiest way to begin to understand the p@w project is to look at our choice of language
- stephen wright: 19:51:47
- sometimes we call artworlds "art-sustaining environments"
- ralo mayer: 19:52:21
- stephen wright: 19:52:26
- but that tends to overplay the ecospheric side of things
- ralo mayer: 19:52:31
- is a market a world?
- ralo mayer: 19:52:40
- a greek market?
- stephen wright: 19:52:46
- it certainly helps shape a world
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:00
- ....the idea of "plausibility" (it's hedging but also speculative qualities)
- ralo mayer: 19:53:09
- the act of speaking at the greek market as politics
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:17
- and 'artworlds' -- those (plural) environments set the limits and potentials of creative practice in some realm
- stephen wright: 19:54:30
- the reason we focus on artworlds per se (other than the fact that we're part of artworlds and so have first hand knowledge) is that art is a kind of experiemtnal undertaking that makes (art)worldmaking a more easily observable phenomenon
- ralo mayer: 19:54:40
- plausible seems to be more a rich term in english tw
- ralo mayer: 19:54:48
- in german it's more feasible only
- stephen wright: 19:55:08
- plausible is like possible++
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:12
- ralo - yes -- in english, we use it both pejoratively and optimistically, depending on context
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:23
- stephen exactly++
- ralo mayer: 19:55:30
- i like the meaning of "obvious"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:47
-
- ralo mayer: 19:55:52
- so art is experimental science
- stephen wright: 19:56:04
- it's experimental
- ralo mayer: 19:56:27
- can experiments fail then?
- ralo mayer: 19:56:36
- only if you don't do them
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:38
- and an artworld is a petri dish for those experimental microcultures
- ralo mayer: 19:56:39
- i would say
- stephen wright: 19:56:39
- not really
- stephen wright: 19:56:44
- yes, right
- ralo mayer: 19:56:58
- fascinating
- ralo mayer: 19:57:22
- i apply for the PhD program
- stephen wright: 19:57:25
- hypotheses need to be verified -- but failing to verify them is not a failure
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:44
- so as stephen said in a different way, artworlds are our case-study of chioce, for looking at mutations for ways of worldmaking
- ralo mayer: 19:57:49
- speaking of hypotheses
- ralo mayer: 19:58:14
- i think i remmebert the biospherians said they did science without hypotheses
- ralo mayer: 19:58:19
- more like darwinian
- ralo mayer: 19:58:21
- oberserving
- stephen wright: 19:58:47
- that's excellent! sure to drive the academics bananas!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:56
- so guys, i am tempted to call you all back just to say goodbye--- we are committing to sticking to an unreasonably strict schedule -- ending exactly at 8pm EST, (regardless of how late we start!)
- stephen wright: 19:59:08
- try
- stephen wright: 19:59:13
- please
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:16
- okay
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:45
- and thanks Chris for moderating on our side
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:11
- Basekamp -- and now we'll be drinking beer ans wine and watching your video
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:22
- ciaoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
- ralo mayer: 20:02:26
- enjoy!
- ralo mayer: 20:02:29
- g night
2010-06-08
Week 4: Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor
Hi everyone,
This Tuesday is an event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 focusing on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Brian Holmes about Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor.
Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor is an invitation to look at our collective existence on all the relevant scales: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental and the global. It is a mobile assemblage of people presenting their projects, observations, experiments, discoveries and questions, and producing value through social exchange and a self-educating tour through our concrete world and its abstract representations, discovering distant lives in familiar situations, and embracing the interdependency that links what is usually treated as separate. Continental Drift is intended for anyone seeking to locate global economies, pressures and possibilities in daily life and to reorient aesthetic invention in response to an ethics of equality.
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$d0006c7d0606a63c" title="#basekamp/$d0006c7d0606a63c">Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor http://bit.ly/bjnWqq (#basekamp/$d0006c7d0606a63c)
Created on 2010-01-26 22:00:46.
2010-01-26
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:28
- Hello everyone, we're getting close and closer to starting at 6pm EST ]
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:10:13
- Hello all
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:25
- Hello
- Aharon: 18:10:31
- hiyas!!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:44
- So who would like to be added to the audio?
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:10:49
- <----
- Aharon: 18:10:54
- me2
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:10:58
- ^^^^^
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:11:10
- ok
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:11:27
- how about 'not sure'
- Aharon: 18:12:06
- i wonder how scott could interpt that, sb..
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:07
- "not sure" is perfectly fine. we'll keep up with text in any case, for those who can't do audio
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:13
- chuckles
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:13:38
- I have decided I would like to be added to the audio
- Aharon: 18:13:42
- hi magda
- magdalenatc: 18:13:52
- hello aharon.
- magdalenatc: 18:13:58
- and everyone
- magdalenatc: 18:14:42
- yes, i would like to be added to the audio too
- magdalenatc: 18:14:57
- once you are ready that is
- Aharon: 18:15:16
- any notion wen audio mi8 begin..?
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:15:31
- Also basekamp pleae announce when audio begins so those with problems will know
- Greg Scranton: 18:16:19
- Hey everyone so we are working out the tech details and will hopefully get started shortly
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:56
- starting the call with brian, and will add others in a sec
- Aharon: 18:17:02
- lovely.. m going to work out some natural stuff.. bk soon..
- Aharon: 18:17:23
- o.. better hold on to it then..
- Greg Scranton: 18:17:38
- lovely thx for sharing Aharon!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:03
- Brian, trying you again
- Aharon: 18:18:05
- i know yall can not wait to hear the nxt part!
- Aharon: 18:20:52
- ok.. lol.. bk in 5ish..
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:22:48
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:23
- great -- so who would like to be added to the audio chat now?
we've finally got the discussion going - caleb waldorf: 18:23:31
- me please
- magdalenatc: 18:23:32
- please
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:40
- brian lost connection, but we can start and add him when He & Stephen get back onilne in Paris
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:23:43
- PLEASE ADD US
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:23:46
- yep
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:23:52
- me too
- kype.stephanie" title="skype.stephanie">Stephanie Pereira: 18:24:12
- me please
- utcplausibleartworlds: 18:24:58
- problems calling us?
- gillian s wilson: 18:25:11
- me too
- anthony.sawrey: 18:25:31
- me too
- Greg Scranton: 18:25:34
- we will add everyone, hang tight
- Greg Scranton: 18:26:03
- we've not started yet...so you are not missing anything
- magdalenatc: 18:27:35
- this http://www.heavydutypress.com/books/farms_pdf/view doesn't work
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:27:47
- that worked ok for me
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:27:53
- I'm quickly reading up
- magdalenatc: 18:27:57
- maybe everyone is trying to get to it now?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:28:30
- got the text but the audio has vanished
- Aharon: 18:28:38
- dont wrk 4 me either
- magdalenatc: 18:29:23
- maybe we are in china, aharon?
- Aharon: 18:30:32
- helloo??
- Giancarlo Norese: 18:31:14
- ;
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:26
- please mute your audio
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:29
- thx
- Greg Scranton: 18:31:35
- hello aharon!
- Greg Scranton: 18:31:39
- welcome
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:31:45
- I am no longer connected
- Aharon: 18:31:51
- hi greg!
- caleb waldorf: 18:31:57
- can you give me a ring please
- Greg Scranton: 18:32:08
- working on adding folks
- Greg Scranton: 18:32:21
- we have had some internet issues here in Philly at Basekamp
- caleb waldorf: 18:32:30
- jdevin247" title="djdevin247">Devin Zuczek: 18:32:38
- wahoo
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:32:49
- the sound is terrible
- Greg Scranton: 18:32:59
- yes it is
- Greg Scranton: 18:33:17
- not sure what we can do to improve it at this point
- Aharon: 18:33:18
- can not get anything from heavydutypress.com domain
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:33:20
- the audio is like a sound art project. it is cutting out regularly as if someone is chopping out ever 10 seconds
- Aharon: 18:33:48
- can not hear a thing..
- jdevin247" title="djdevin247">Devin Zuczek: 18:33:57
- yeah...muted
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:33:59
- scott sounds completly clear here
- kype.stephanie" title="skype.stephanie">Stephanie Pereira: 18:34:09
- sorry, was kicked off call?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:34:11
- scott is 5x5 here too
- caleb waldorf: 18:34:15
- i got kicked off as well
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:34:15
- I have been cut off again
- magdalenatc: 18:34:21
- i have been cut off too
- anthony.sawrey: 18:34:44
- me three
- Greg Scranton: 18:35:14
- everyone cross your fingers!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:01
- we've muted our audio
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:24
- hi sarah - would you like to be added to the audio?
- magdalenatc: 18:37:25
- i am on hold apparently
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 18:37:30
- I am chatting via iPod touch, but don't have my mic hooked up.
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:37:35
- post autonomy keeps calling me
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:37:39
- The sound is very unclear
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:02
- yes everyone please dont' call anyone -- we'l help manage the calls, thanks
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 18:38:09
- Thus is ryan and sarah - audio would be great - thanks!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:38:24
- thats because I keep losing audio connection
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 18:38:29
- I can switch to a computer in about 15 min.
- magdalenatc: 18:38:30
- i am on hold, do you know anything about it?
- magdalenatc: 18:38:49
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:39:01
- I think basekamp wants to call you not vice versa
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:04
- adding you again magda
- Greg Scranton: 18:39:20
- Hello everyone, we are aware of the technical difficulties people are having and believe us we are working on it, we're really sorry pls be patient we'll add you when we can
- magdalenatc: 18:39:48
- thank you.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:52
- le triangle, would you like to join the audio chat?
- magdalenatc: 18:39:59
- but hardly hear anything
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:40:09
- I have lost audio connection yet again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:11
- Brian thank you -- the audio is much better , and we're all here listening
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:16
- david g will call you back
- caleb waldorf: 18:40:19
- i would love to be in the audio chat
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:40:25
- 0o
- le triangle: 18:40:29
- yes i would like to <ss type="smile"></ss>
- mabel: 18:40:40
- i'm listening nothing
- Dan Schimmel: 18:40:58
- I am on the chat but having trouble getting your audio on
- mabel: 18:40:59
- I've lost the connection
- mabel: 18:41:18
- I have no audio, either, sorry
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:53
- mabel is that better?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:00
- patricia are you on the audio now?
- mabel: 18:42:10
- yes, some difficulties but much better
- mabel: 18:42:17
- thank you!!!!!!!!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:22
- no problem
- mabel: 18:42:30
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:42:31
- I am still not connected
- caleb waldorf: 18:42:37
- basekamp, mind ringing me as well?
- Patricia Watts: 18:42:37
- If you mute the audio then I cannot hear you?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:48
- it's never as good as face-to-face, but it's a way we can connect over long distances
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:10
- no, you can mute your audio and you can hear (not || Pause)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:23
- no prob caleb
- Patricia Watts: 18:43:29
- ? more info, I'm on a macbook
- caleb waldorf: 18:43:55
- thanks ya basekamp
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:43:57
- ok what shall I do just wait to be contacted or do I need to contact basekamp?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:00
- patricia, the mute button is in the lower left hand of your call window
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:16
- david g calling you back now
- Patricia Watts: 18:44:21
- Got it! thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:24
- no prob
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:44:58
- ok
- Dan Schimmel: 18:45:32
- Ah, fixed problem at my end and can sort of hear now, though smudgy
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:33
- is that a pregnant pause, or did we loose you brian?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:41
- gail, can you mute you audio?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:46
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:45:49
- I think brian is gone
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:45:54
- and gail has unmuted
- caleb waldorf: 18:45:59
- i think brian has left
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:59
- calling brian back
- le triangle: 18:46:03
- hey guys...i'm it seems we're losing focus
- le triangle: 18:46:08
- ok back on
- le triangle: 18:46:09
- <ss type="smile"></ss>
- Patricia Watts: 18:46:12
- grrubini needs to mute
- Patricia Watts: 18:46:18
- ?
- le triangle: 18:46:25
- EVERYBODY MUTEEE
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:46:39
- I still dont have audio connection
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:03
- Yes that would be great
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 18:47:04
- can someone call us in... thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:17
- calling you sarah
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 18:47:34
- got it thanks!
- Patricia Watts: 18:47:40
- post-autonomy is calling me?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:48:01
- same here unless you want me to call
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:48:08
- gail rubini is making some noise
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:48:15
- ls she doing dishes?
- Patricia Watts: 18:48:43
- The call has dropped on my end, call me back please
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:48:53
- can someone call me please
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:02
- david we have been trying
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:49:08
- ok
- magdalenatc: 18:49:21
- complete silence now
- le triangle: 18:49:30
- enjoy the silence...
- magdalenatc: 18:49:33
- got it now again
- le triangle: 18:50:11
- can we do both?
- le triangle: 18:50:15
- text and audio?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:50:24
- yeah
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:50:24
- still absolutely nothing
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:55
- I think we will somehow start out talking about the Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, so if you wanna show some pics of the 2008 drift you can find some good ones (Claire's) organized into sets here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27761309@N04/collections/72157605686515322/
- magdalenatc: 18:52:06
- postautonomy was calling me
- magdalenatc: 18:52:17
- i lost audio now
- Patricia Watts: 18:52:31
- post-autonomy is calling me, should I answer it? I'm expecting Basekamp to call.
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:52:42
- I found answering that unhelpful
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:52:53
- it automatically puts the present chat on hold
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:52:59
- then you have to un-hold
- magdalenatc: 18:53:15
- that's what happened here, though i declined the call from postautonomy
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:53:25
- yeah, just decline it
- magdalenatc: 18:53:28
- can you unhold me basekamp?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:53:35
- p-a is trying to get a good connection
- Patricia Watts: 18:53:44
- There is probaby a limit as to how many can participate on a SKYPE call, no?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:53:47
- I think you unhold yourself as it were
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:55
- Stephen and Brian are switching connections... we'll add them whenever Stephen is connection
- magdalenatc: 18:54:14
- not sure how to unhold myself - can you help?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:54:29
- see in the lower left corner?
- anthony.sawrey: 18:54:32
- Hello basekamp team. When yu have equilibrium. Could you give me a call?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:54:33
- theres a pause button
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:54:45
- and theres a mute button
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:54:54
- hit the pause button to hold/unhold
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:55:24
- thats in the conference call window with all the participants; not this text window
- magdalenatc: 18:56:13
- i think i am looking in the right place, but can't see the pause button... just mute and end call .... sorry
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:56:36
- hm in my window on the lower left are two circles; do you have that?
- magdalenatc: 18:56:46
- nope
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:56:48
- can you call me again
- Aharon: 18:57:11
- cool
- Dan Schimmel: 18:57:12
- Ah, sound coming back now
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:57:14
- dang;
- magdalenatc: 18:57:16
- ok. i am in again, but did nothing
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:57:20
- sound is back here too
- le triangle: 18:57:28
- sound's wayyy better now
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:57:37
- I still have nothing here
- Patricia Watts: 18:57:51
- I'm out, have things to do . . . .
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 18:57:57
- it left but came back
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:58
- stephen we'll try you right back
- le triangle: 18:57:58
- oh no...
- le triangle: 18:58:08
- skype 101...
- magdalenatc: 18:58:11
- and again on and off...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:16
- calling back stephen
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:58:29
- can you call me as well
- magdalenatc: 18:58:31
- i am here again
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:58:32
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:20
- david we're trying to ad you again
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:59:47
- I am in now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:53
- lovely
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:59:58
- but the sound is indistinct
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:00:16
- yeah you didnt miss too much actually
- BASEKAMP team: 19:00:57
- chuckles
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:19
- dan we can call you --
- Dan Schimmel: 19:01:26
- yes please
- Dan Schimmel: 19:02:03
- ok great
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:14
- dan please mute your audio --
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:22
- though it's very cute
- Dan Schimmel: 19:02:33
- oops - sorreee
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:43
- no problem
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:30
- BTW Brian and Stephen, what are you reading from (whenever you get a chance) -- is it online?
- anthony.sawrey: 19:03:43
- hello Basekamp?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:03:55
- I have just lost audio connection
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:03
- ok, we'll ad you both
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:46
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:05:04
- connection lost again
- anthony.sawrey: 19:05:20
- charz
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:26
-
- le triangle: 19:06:23
- those will give me a seizure ....
- anthony.sawrey: 19:06:35
- he he
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:06:51
- I dont have audio connection again
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:06:53
- man I want a recording of this
- magdalenatc: 19:07:04
- i have been dropped too
- magdalenatc: 19:07:14
- can you add me again?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:19
- yes
- magdalenatc: 19:08:47
- thank you
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:47
- stephen, we can share the recording ------ a cleaned up version of course
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:09:54
- lost connection again
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:10:06
- doh - dropped us too...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:13
- david i'm not sure what do say except we can call you again
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:18
- you too sarah
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:10:21
- oops, there goes everybody
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:10:30
- please do
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:10:35
- me too
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:44
- you all might want ot stop downloading porn while on the call too
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:10:48
- back - thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:32
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:11:57
- I cant stop
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:06
- i know stephen...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:12
- steven even
- magdalenatc: 19:12:30
- call me please.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:36
- will do now
- magdalenatc: 19:13:00
- thanks.
- caleb waldorf: 19:13:01
- i'm still here and would love some audio goodness
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:08
- w o r d
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:20
- here it comes caleb
- le triangle: 19:13:33
- call me please...
- le triangle: 19:13:35
- <ss type="sad"></ss>
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:38
- BTW Stephen Wright & Brian -- what time does Brian need to leave? i know there's a tight schedule
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:42
- ok triangle!
- le triangle: 19:13:51
- THE triangle ...
- le triangle: 19:14:00
- <ss type="tongueout"></ss>
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:14:02
- and me
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:07
- le - y
- le triangle: 19:14:25
- thanx!!!
- le triangle: 19:15:06
- le , the...same thing hahaha thanks again
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:15:19
- can you call me back when you get a chance?
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:16:54
- thanks
- magdalenatc: 19:17:19
- call me please
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:55
- did we lose Brian & Stephen?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:05
- yikes!
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:19:12
- yep
- caleb waldorf: 19:19:12
- i think so
- stephen wright: 19:19:22
- call back
- magdalenatc: 19:19:28
- can you call me too?
- magdalenatc: 19:19:31
- thanks
- le triangle: 19:19:51
- oh oh ..again...
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:20:11
- i think a lot of us may have been dropped...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:29
- sounds like it! TOngiht's tech was kind of a bust
- Dan Schimmel: 19:20:54
- suddenly audio is much better now ironically
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:21:04
- where are we now?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:21:14
- no audio connection for some time
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:21:15
- we are back at basekamp I think
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:21:31
- scott could do simultaneous translation
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:21:41
- I can hear them better through scotts audio
- le triangle: 19:21:44
- do you guys have any kind of manuscript about the subject that you can send us, 'cause the calls keep dropping <ss type="worry">
</ss> - abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:22:20
- now I need a callback
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:34
- yes, all calls dropped
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 19:22:39
- I am on a computer connection now, but I am fine with text only if it's an issue for others.
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:22:41
- call backs all around
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:22:44
- skype is awesome
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:22:53
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:22:58
- are you planning a follow up discussion? where audio or text?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:23:52
- whether audio or text I meant to say
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:23:54
- I'd be willing to stick around for text only
- Dan Schimmel: 19:23:55
- It usually does actually work much better than tonight!
- Aharon: 19:23:58
- I wonder what exactly do you refer to when you mention "radical" - a term i seem to have heared a fair few times. I know what you might possibly mean it to be, as very different to something, possibly "midle of the road", capitalistic kind of culture, however, this is just my assumption. I have to mention that such radicalness, in my view, is utterly not enough, or not at all - however, I'd rather ask then assum your view..
- stephen wright: 19:24:04
- please feel free to ask any quesgions
- stephen wright: 19:24:09
- thanx aharon
- Aharon: 19:24:26
- happy to oblige..
- Greg Scranton: 19:24:30
- we are attempting a Q&A so please feel free to post your ?s and we'll do our best to start a queue
- magdalenatc: 19:24:58
- is the answer on audio or text?
- stephen wright: 19:25:15
- audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:22
- audio for now --- we'll try to add people back and see how it goes
- magdalenatc: 19:25:27
- if audio, can you please add me again basekamp, thank you
- Aharon: 19:25:33
- will b gd if replies were in audio.. qkr.. i think..
- caleb waldorf: 19:25:34
- me too please
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:25:46
- I have the same ambivalence to the use of radical + recuperation of situationist/letterist strategies
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:25:50
- and me
- Aharon: 19:25:55
- indeed, i do not have audsio
- Dan Schimmel: 19:26:06
- thanks
- Aharon: 19:26:10
- can not hear a jolt
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:26:25
- me too
- Dan Schimmel: 19:26:29
- great sound here now
- Aharon: 19:26:31
- possibly need to b added
- magdalenatc: 19:26:36
- great sound now
- Aharon: 19:26:39
- ta!
- magdalenatc: 19:26:44
- thanks
- caleb waldorf: 19:27:18
- hahaha
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:27:29
- connection lost again
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:27:39
- that would be a great message to receive
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:27:43
- but the sound was good while it lasted
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:09
- ok so who is missing? we can call you back
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:28:18
- I am still missing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:31
- adding you stevennnnnnnnnn
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:28:53
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:59
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:33:02
- This sounds like a morton subotnick gig
- Dan Schimmel: 19:33:03
- I was interested in A Call to Farms in the idea of drift as a kind of mobility, drifting around... how do you see the idea of mobility/drift in relation to homestead/farm/roots?
- Aharon: 19:33:04
- what does "mid-west" mean in the us..?
- Dan Schimmel: 19:33:53
- more or less between the mississippi and the rockies?
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:33:59
- Sarah and i (ryan) just attended a talk by Fred Turner who counterposed the New Left and the "new communalists" (typified by Stewart Brand and Fuller's "comprehensive designer"). Was a powerful critique of design/cultural consciousness as politics, but it also (al least to me) revealed a lack of recognition of the kind of politial strategies NOT bound to traditions of the european avant gardes - such as that GL Boggs typifies. Anyway - Turner's lecture hit a nerve with some of our MRCC discussions. Brian - do you know his research and what do you think?
- Dan Schimmel: 19:35:59
- of course at conferences everyone hangs around in corridors too!
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:36:34
- I thought it was interesting what Scott was saying earlier
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:36:45
- I think you have to rediscover radicalism
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:37:10
- you are finding out about things that predate your studies
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:37:21
- and incorporating them
- Aharon: 19:37:32
- question was about meaning, cultural meaning of mid-west
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:37:44
- sure
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:55
- yes >
- Aharon: 19:39:15
- Stewart Brand - guy that did whole earth catalogue..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:45
- good question ryan
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:40:47
- same guy...
- Aharon: 19:41:25
- the smilie face of capitalism
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:41:40
- or the simile face of capitalism
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:12
- just checking... is anyone left out of the chat?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:21
- there are a lot of people here now, but just checking
- jdevin247" title="djdevin247">Devin Zuczek: 19:44:04
- voice me up
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:06
- ...because the audio is finally more than listenable -- to the point where we've also finally beeen able to imagine an exchange back & forth
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:08
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:44:45
- thanks Brian!
- Aharon: 19:45:00
- are u saying that the only way is out, brian..? (drifting "out"?)
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:46:05
- but continental drift implies to me enormous pressure and extremely slow movement; is that not a part of the metaphor?
- Dan Schimmel: 19:46:20
- that kind of overlaps with the feminist idea that the personal is political
- Greg Scranton: 19:46:33
- I know this is an uber academic question but I was curious if you might define some of the terms you use in your writing Brian...terms like meshworks and activist-researcher and artist-researcher
- Aharon: 19:46:51
- where do you have self critique in this process..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:13
- muting audio again, but we are here
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:34
- right, that's a lovely ruling
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:59
- Dan Schimmel: 19:48:17
- and Audre Lord's concept of erotic agency -- politics starts in bodies, bodies are in relations with each other, basic necessities have to be met for all to thrive etc., knowledge starts at home
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:48:18
- the drifting looks serene on the surface but theres subduction
- Aharon: 19:48:30
- (..irony is that that decision was inspired by the film ferenheit 9.11..)
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:49:35
- or maybe even the book
- Aharon: 19:49:51
- no.. def the film..
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 19:50:11
- following on Dan S's comment - lots of folks have been referring/practicing this as a "politics of care" - which certainly has something to do with the stabilities (as opposed to mobilities) Brian mentioned as well...
- Aharon: 19:50:25
- as it was financed by disny
- Greg Scranton: 19:54:21
- Thank you Brian. I read a certain optimism in your writings despite the overwhelming odds of the activist-researcher/artist's battle against the status quo even…Thank you for this esp.
- Dan Schimmel: 19:54:34
- can hospitality and politics of care also be applied to our response to Haiti?
- Dan Schimmel: 19:55:00
- so that mid-West as an idea can also drift over the Caribbean?
- Dan Schimmel: 19:57:04
- and help in restoring farming in Haiti is also crucial to creating stability there and a more just global politics based on sustainable agriculture
- Aharon: 19:57:09
- ..yup. that is an ibnteresting question
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 19:57:39
- also agricultural activity is the source of much habitual behavior
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:57:46
- sorry lost connection again
- Aharon: 19:57:57
- however, is it not framed, in itself, via a certain percpective that seeks questions of choices..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:44
- david g will try to add you again
- Greg Scranton: 19:59:29
- I am curious then why you might use something as hegemonic as a map or the cartographic process as a basis for "rethinking" "remaining" and/or "remapping" the axis of power. I think it's a wonderfully poetic approach but am curious what compelled you to use the metaphor of the map.
- Dan Schimmel: 20:03:07
- even stronger critique is leveled at the Slow Food movement in Europe, as being bourgeois comfort, but the idea of a radical cultural corridor seemed to combine radical food/farm cultures with working class issues, urban sustainability, and other kinds of radical history in a way the Slow Food folks don't generally
- Greg Scranton: 20:03:18
- oops remaining = re-imagining
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:30
- heh, i read it that way
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 20:07:41
- Dan S: i think that was a big part of the '08 Drift... actually becoming the dominant conversation during/after even.
- Dan Schimmel: 20:08:31
- wasn't the counter-culture subjected to a massive conservative backlash in 1970s which accused it of "narcissism" and being the "me-generation" and in a way negated all the possible good ideas, free spaces, cross-currents that were truly politically radical even while grounded in daily life?
- Greg Scranton: 20:08:43
- not to mention the rise of consumer ubiquity w/ gps gis etc
- Aharon: 20:09:00
- with all these drifts, i didn't get/missed - how is it being funded..?
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 20:11:04
- there was no budget. group-pooled resources.
- Greg Scranton: 20:11:23
- yes that's lovely...a kin perhaps to "pedestrian speech acts"
- BASEKAMP team: 20:11:44
- Is it worth sharing some of the info-graphics that you and bureau d'études have worked on together?
- Dan Schimmel: 20:11:47
- lots of work like atlas of radical cartography, experimental geographies, biomapping also explores new forms of mapping worked out throuhg/with bodies and their orientations, emotions, presence
- Greg Scranton: 20:12:07
- yes Dan agreed
- Greg Scranton: 20:12:21
- not me deCerteau!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:12:29
- re bureau d'études "maps" -- we can post some links here for people who don't know... it might be off topic a bit, but it might give a bit of visual context
- Dan Schimmel: 20:12:35
- there's a Haitin saying 'You signed my name, but not my feet"
- BASEKAMP team: 20:13:16
- I'll post some links for those who are searching:
http://bureaudetudes.free.fr/
http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html - aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 20:13:40
- wow - that's a nice saying.
- Dan Schimmel: 20:13:52
- peasants have a way with words
- BASEKAMP team: 20:14:28
- danshchimmel++
- BASEKAMP team: 20:18:14
- absolutely Stephen -- tangible examples of options are powerful
- Dan Schimmel: 20:19:49
- people used to have rotating credit associations for solidarity and mutual aid instead of the new fad for individual-oriented "micro-finance"...
- Aharon: 20:21:20
- is it not the the question might be how to learn - and hopefully improve - upon old left practices? eg find questions rather than searching for ways to answer?
- Aharon: 20:23:17
- re haiti, mi8 b of interest - http://marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm
- Greg Scranton: 20:23:44
- well Brian talks about the neoliberal lurking just below the surface of the neoconservative, at least in the EU no? "On the one hand, they must remap the cultural and political parameters that have been transformed by the neoconservative overlay, while, on the other, remaining keenly aware of the neoliberal principles that remain active beneath the surface."
- Greg Scranton: 20:24:18
- sorry yes from Continental Drift: Activist Research, From Geopolitics to Geopoetics
- Aharon: 20:25:50
- lost sound..
- BASEKAMP team: 20:25:55
- oh no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:25:56
- same here
- BASEKAMP team: 20:25:59
- dammit!
- stephen wright: 20:26:10
- too bad......
- stephen wright: 20:26:14
- call us back
- magdalenatc: 20:26:17
- and here
- Aharon: 20:26:24
- it is 2.30 am in paris..
- abrower" title="sabrower">Steven Brower: 20:26:29
- please deposit 25 cents
- stephen wright: 20:26:35
- Shall we wind up with that
- Dan Schimmel: 20:26:44
- i gotta go too -- but have enjoyed the talk
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:26:55
- I have to go as well
- aralross" title="saralross">sarah ross: 20:27:09
- Thanks Brian, basekampers and Stephen! take care.
- Aharon: 20:27:23
- many thanks, brian!
- Dan Schimmel: 20:27:25
- Yes, thanks to all!
- magdalenatc: 20:27:27
- thank you.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:27:27
- despite everything it was again very very interesting
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:27:56
- yes thank you
- caleb waldorf: 20:28:22
- thanks basekamp for all the technical heroics! and thanks brian!
- Greg Scranton: 20:30:34
- thank you so much all of dedicated skypers!
- Greg Scranton: 20:30:50
- so sorry for the tech issues sometimes they're completely out of our control
- Greg Scranton: 20:31:03
- the GLOW!
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 20:31:10
- thanks & hope we'll chat again next wk.
Week 3: House Magic: The European squatted social centers movement
Hi everyone,
This Tuesday is an event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 focusing on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week Alan Moore will join us in person to talk about the research project and exhibition House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence, which will be opening at Basekamp the same night.
House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence is a first step in a project to explore squatted social centers in Europe. The social center was a key feature of the Italian Autonomist movement of the 1970s and 80s. Squats on the Lower East Side of New York City borrowed elements of English and German social centers, including cafes, infoshops, performance spaces and art galleries. Across Europe, social centers became important organizing foci of the global justice movement during the first decade of the new century. House Magic will present this important movement through an accumulation of printed material, videos and public events.
http://collectiva.wikispaces.com/House+Magic
http://art.usf.edu/about_us/faculty/moore_a_files/moore_a-statement.htm
Transcription
Week 3: House Magic: The European squatted social centers movement
[0:00:00]
Scott: Great, so we want to make sure if we – looks like we don’t have Adam Trivage [0:00:09] [phonetic] we are going to go ahead and add some other people on the conference call so just bear with us for a second.
Male Speaker: Alan is low.
Scott: Okay cool. Steven can you hear us okay? By the way…
Steven: Yeah I hear you [0:00:37] [inaudible]
Scott: That’s totally awesome.
Alan: Alan is here.
Scott: So we got Jess, we started the call just and we are on the 6:30 mark. So we are doing better. So great so everybody that was able to make it on the Skype chat, will probably be funneling more people on as we go but welcome everybody. Just want to welcome Alan Moore, can you all hear us okay?
Female Speaker: Yep.
Scott: All right, cool. Great so Alan and all the other people that are joining us here in person, its – anyway thanks for coming, its great to have you.
Alan: Good to be here, I hope I can be heard.
Scott: Yeah, if you can’t be heard – actually did you guys hear that?
Female Speaker: Yeah.
Alan: Okay good.
Scott: From Alan? I didn’t know if you – sorry did you hear what Alan said or just did you hear what I said?
Female Speaker: No I heard everyone.
Scott: Perfect, okay great.
Male Speaker: [0:01:50] [inaudible]
Scott: Okay well just let us know if you can’t hear somebody and we will like rearrange to mic to speak up.
Male Speaker: There is a mic over there.
Scott: Yeah this is the mic and its pretty ready also so should be okay. Great so basically we have invited Alan here to talk tonight as an example, as a representative of this example of Plausible Artworlds, what we are calling a plausible artworld this week. We are looking at a pretty fast movement, the European Squad of Social Center Movement and I think it probably has, Alan will be talking a lot about bleed over into the US as well. But basically we are going to be talking about this in the context of Plausible Artworlds just for a few of you who might be here at the beginning.
In short this project is focusing every week for a year on different examples of other kinds of art worlds than the ones, than the most dominant ones currently on offer. And we invite representatives from those art worlds to talk with us each week about them and invite anybody who is interested to join in on that. The goal is to put together some kind of compendium at the end of the year in the form of a publication that could be [0:03:07] [indiscernible] tool, the arts schools for example when people learn about what artists and also just for those of us who are interested in will be thrilled to have such a thing around.
Great, yeah so we also it’s nice that we also have a mini the vigil and the media and the information exhibit called House Magic that Alan – it’s kind of an accumulation network, some accumulation of a lot of work that Alan has put in and other people have put into researching, it’s quite in social centers and related information. So we’ve got a lot of that here as well that we may be able to channel some of that into Skype chat. So anyway I guess at this point I want to basically ask…
Male Speaker: Sorry I…
Scott: Quite all right
Male Speaker: [0:03:59] [indiscernible]
Scott: It’s good we need more photos, Alan is taking photographs here. Wanted to ask Alan to kind of if you don’t mind briefly describe how Magic influence and I think through that context that leads us into the other things that you want to talk about and I guess you have kind of a presentation that you can go on for a little bit then we can do a sort of Q&A afterwards.
Alan: Oh okay.
Scott: Or we can do a discussion throughout, we haven’t actually settled that yet. It’s probably good for people to know whether or not they could chime in or [0:04:40] [cross talk]
Alan: Well I considered this process is a little conky in terms of discourse but if people have questions at any moment, please you know it could be here physically or it could be virtually, please ask them. Essentially House Magic, the bureau foreign correspondence is a propaganda initiative to organize and present information about the movement of [0:05:09] [indiscernible] and social center or occupies social centers OSCs or Central [0:05:16] [indiscernible] SEOs and I basically started in Europe to look at these kind of places but it’s a global movement and its also present in the US but in kind of a disarticulated form, there is a lot of social center squad in the US but their components of the forms of this [0:05:47] [indiscernible] social centers such as info shops critical mass [0:05:52] [indiscernible] all this kind of viral archaisms that reproduce around the country in different cities are present in the squad of social centers in Europe.
[0:06:05]
So I brought the House of Magic correspondence exhibition, it’s really not a very good exhibition; it is a process more than it is a display that makes things clear. So behind we have on this wall social center wall paper which is basically hand outs and information that you would find in the social centers that’s been photocopied and pasted onto big sheets of paper, it’s a funky little collage and then above the card and logos are different, some of the different social centers [0:06:48] [indiscernible] in Madrid was just evicted three weeks ago, rolled to Florida in Hamburg Germany that little, that light thing there and New York Battani which is in Berlin is the flying building with the flag and the rope, social center Lupiata [0:07:13] [phonetic] Slovenia, those are the logos that we when the exhibition originated that [0:07:20] [indiscernible] real which is a cultural center and Lorrie cited Manhattan, we kept these stencils for the design of the exhibition, they put them all over the walls.
And then below the stencil logo in the social center wall paper are clip boards and the clip boards are sort of dossiers of individual social centers and - a voice from the depths?
Scott: I think guys can mute your audio until you would like to flag us down, that would be awesome.
Alan: Was there a question or…?
Scott: It didn’t sound like it, yeah if you do have a question though feel free to chime in or send us a text.
Alan: These clip boards contained dossiers I thought I had brought them from New York but it turned out that I hadn’t. So in the last couple of days, I have been sitting here making them over again. And they are essentially; most of the information about the social centers is present on the web. I visited a number of them, I haven’t lived or worked at any of them but they are all present through their websites and their photo streams. So you have basically the website of the social center on the front of the clip board and behind is the history of the social center, how they came to be, some of them no longer exist because they are illegal, disobedient and squatting in contravention of the laws of their particular nations and against the interest of the owners of the building. So as soon as the social center comes into existence, it began to process of legal battle to evict it or negotiation of the city agencies to continue their work, so some of them no longer exist. And they are regularly involved in pretty intense street demonstrations and legal structures and so on.
I brought in addition to assembling these dossiers, I collected media materials, many books each social center, each country and where the social center is placed generates books and experiences and I have brought many DVDs, we have paper sprays on the table here. The one that is playing now is [0:09:50] [inaudible] so they took over a building in the center of Madrid and a lot of these and you will see on videos activities that are taking place have excised class of theatrical presentation, music, dance, they just become kind of centers for cultural activity and they are open to the street, people can come in when the social center is open and it’s not so much, we understand squatting in the United States is like I need a place to live so I am moving into this abandoned building.
[0:10:36]
These are social centers that are doing things that the state is not doing. They also have, this is – oh the woman who is involved in this social center labatorial and she is saying how wonderful it is and how it reminds her you know of her earlier days as an activist but they really are a kind of new and this book fear which is also from the Madrid movement Antinomian [0:11:08] [phonetic] and Metropolis movement, occasion movement of the social centers of the second generation [0:11:14] [indiscernible] Spanish, they understand themselves as squatters who are in a new movement, a new phase of this movement of squatting. So people live in the building but those are the people who are running the social center.
Now in Madrid there, there is a diversity of social centers, many different groups you know they don’t get along; people are running when they will split off squat another building and run their own. And when I was just there I was toured through one that was in a neighborhood called Techwan [0:11:51] [phonetic] which is not a public social center, the guy said. Okay this is a social center that is working in the community, right? And its right across the street from the Mosque in Techwan district and so serving Muslim immigrants who are very poor and many are being deported and they get pushed around and are exploited so they are working with the immigrants trying to try and improve their conditions, teach them Spanish and so forth and help them with their legal problems.
So they are working in the community, they do what the community needs to be done, they are not like labatorial down town open to everybody, having concerts and so forth, good.
Female Speaker: [0:12:37] [inaudible] of what you’ve just mentioned, you hinted at a little bit before and that is just kind of this, the difference between squatting and squatters and social centers because it really if you are talking about a movement, you are trying to understand if the movement is the [0:12:59] [inaudible] sort of like art granular [0:13:03] [inaudible]. I get the base movement of squatters or if the new thing is the social centers [0:13:11] [inaudible] a little bit maybe your kind of explain that definition of squatters and social, squatter social centers, yeah that would really be helpful.
Alan: I mean squatting is ancient. There is a little booklet here, it is a joke but it’s called, Squatters of [0:13:32] [indiscernible] this is Washington Erving middle of the 19th century in the City of Bernada among the ruins of the mortgage temple, there are many people living, they are just living, they are squatting. This is continuous throughout history. George Washington’s first job as an [0:13:48] [inaudible] was to evict squatters on this family’s land, right? So there is that understanding. In the US, squatter nation, right, a Oklahoma land rush, people running up there, as soon as they come out, they stay early land claims. There is this understanding that you go, you take it, you make it, you develop it, you make it your own, you can’t live there. And this is the American understanding of squatting.
And it also is developed in Amsterdam when there was a shortage of housing, many vacant buildings being held off the market because of speculation but people had no place to live. The difference in Europe in general and many other countries in the world, housing is a right of the people. There is a very active social [0:14:43] [indiscernible] in the US the social housing programs have been dismantled over the years and housing is not a right, you do not have a right to housing. You can’t afford you know in the state since it’s not enough to settle you up, you know hit the road, again the street, it’s not a problem.
[0:15:03]
So there is kind of more of a recognition in Europe that people have this right and there is more of a legal process that happens in the course of an eviction says the longer term when people are often resettled from a squat or a shanty town into a social housing. Okay so…
Male Speaker: [0:15:29] [inaudible]
Scott: That’s okay, did you guys have a [0:15:38] [inaudible] Harry did you want to try that?
Alan: I am really kind of taking it very roundabout way of answering this question. I am not answering the question but essentially the difference is the social center movement understands itself as making room or provision within the city for cultural and political and social work is not being done by private practices or the state. So they are opening up for this kind of thing to happen.
Female Speaker: We are also leaving tonight; also squatters are living and opening their doors to the public.
Alan: Yeah exactly.
Female Speaker: So that’s kind of what I was wondering like the difference between the movement of squatting plus a right to live somewhere versus to like offering something back to the community which is open.
Alan: Yeah they are very different but they are related, I mean they are kind of continuous. But in New York when the buildings were squatted and the [0:16:42] [indiscernible] in the 80s and 90s, they were defended and also in Amsterdam, they would well, bars on the doors and you know defended against the police evictions. So they were very closed places, they are fortified, right? And these social centers are not. They are open and they rely on the supportive community to remain a place although they are also defended.
Male Speaker: Does that support come into play when [0:17:13] [inaudible]
Alan: Oh yes
Male Speaker: [0:17:17] [inaudible]
Alan: Yeah I mean again the difference is between the United States and Europe. In Madrid there are like 50,000 communists and at least socialists, anarchists, socialists everyone’s tribe or another, yeah. And these people come out on the street in hundreds and then thousands finally for the big moments. This is basically also in Italy where there are a lot of communists, they don’t have a presence in the government because they blew it electorally but there are many cadres and they can turn people out in the streets. So the State can’t just say everybody is going out, we are going to send our police, our 500 police because they will be facing 5000 people, it doesn’t work. Yeah, yeah so they will if they know the time of the eviction, they will call people into the streets and you know they will be just impossible for the police to proceed. I mean eventually they do succeed, they block off streets and – I mean that to me is that’s yeah one of the defense is the most spectacular aspect and a lot of these videos have brought like 15 odd videos, many of them have spectacular scenes of defense and eviction and there is tear gas and so forth.
In the movement, this is called the team of foreign. People like to watch demonstrations, final demonstrations on videos. So to me that really is not the most interesting aspect although…
Male Speaker: It adds value.
Alan: Yeah, yeah it’s exciting I guess as long as you are not being hit on the head.
Male Speaker: Well like I guess first they are talking about [0:19:23] [inaudible]
Scott: Oh sorry, would you introduce yourself [0:19:28] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: It seems like [0:19:33] [inaudible] would be okay let’s move on to the next place instead of like totally defending it.
Alan: Yeah.
Male Speaker: [0:19:45] [inaudible]
Alan: Well nobody wants to leave. Once they’ve cleaned the building, you know labatorial trace is labatorial trace because this was the third building they had, this group had taken and they were evicted from that one as well. Rampard in London was evicted a few weeks, couple of months ago and they took another building and now they are heading a place called Liften Hoist and Patio Maravias [0:20:13] [phonetic] was just evicted three weeks ago and have taken another building. So now they are very sophisticated and have a group in Patio, a group that’s investigating the situation of houses and you know if you can find one that’s owned by an absentee corporation or a corporation that is entering bankruptcy or that’s owned by the State or as often happens in England that is owned by what they called a housing council.
[0:20:46]
So a lot of times the housing council will clear a block of flats or building and be preparing to sell it or something and then people will take it, it becomes more difficult for them. My favorite squat is I don’t know the name, I should work out a clip, a dossier on them but they are in Vienna and there was a building owned by Viennese communist party and the communist party membership in Vienna shrank to mini scale proportion. They decided they are going to sell this building so after they put it on the market and the people took it, the squatters did and they’ve had it for 15 years because it was just too embarrassing for them. I mean the party tried to get them out but ultimately there are [0:21:33] [indiscernible] you know.
Male Speaker: By the way Alan, Aaron just mentioned the good TVTV on Copenhagen plus one in a building, I am not really sure exactly what it’s not really, my question is much but Aaron mentioned that TVTV also gets funds from the state, so it’s – but one side of the building, it’s all fenced but you know sometimes police come knocking and then on the other hand they actually get funding from the State so it’s a very strange situation. That’s [0:22:13] [inaudible]
Alan: You know there are some squats that are transformed into a State funded cultural institutions. And I believe it is in Zurich, the Rota fabric or the red factory, not the Rota flora in Hamrick but the Rota fabric has become cultural centered. It’s now funded by the State so it transformed. It has also transformed in the way that its run. It is no longer run by a popular assembly of people who would come together every week to decide what to do; it is run by administrator with a staff. Another voice from the deep
Chris: I have a question for you.
Alan: Yes.
Chris: My name is Chris Ryan, so I was wondering did the people who were not funded by the State they have to begin as antagonistic parties to the State and the State had to eventually give into the again the [0:23:18] [inaudible] the society they were part of therefore they should be supported by the state those who were antagonized or some states initially unable to get [0:23:27] [inaudible]
Alan: You know that’s a very complex kind of question. I really and in each country it is different.
Male Speaker: That makes it…
Alan: I think the most legitimated social center squats or cultural center squats or squats serving the creative community are probably in Holland. Holland is a very homogenous society and it’s a small country and they want everybody to get along, they don’t want to have really alienated elements so they try to accommodate. And they also want the artists, they have a very high percentage of artists, many many people, they want them to have some way of living and a way of making their work. So they will squat buildings and the squats will be regularized, normalized or enter into a relationship with the government of subsidy and then continue on and there are many many, I mean dozens. Not all are in Amsterdam but…
Male Speaker: [0:24:29] [inaudible] continue to happen as it has happened before [0:24:33] [inaudible] absorbed into spirit, enterprise that doesn’t have to [0:24:39] [inaudible]
Alan: Yeah, yeah it’s again a complex situation is very interesting in Eastern Europe which is formally communist. The people in Slovenia, in Lubiana Rogue, the Rogue is the name of bicycle manufacturing and there was a large factory that was on the edge of the city and it was vacant for many many years. They took it and the city announced no, no you can’t have it we have plans to develop it the same as happening with another Vinanpret [0:25:15] [phonetic] which is a factory in Amsterdam. and but and Lubiana city government made an arrangement that for a certain number of years the squatters will be allowed to continue to run for the Rogue social center in the factory until the development is going to happen.
[0:25:37]
Male Speaker: Okay
Alan: So then because you can’t just say oh we are going to develop it get out and then it’s vacant for another 10 years
Male Speaker: Right right. Got you. [0:25:48] [Inaudible]
Alan: Well that’s you know how it runs, Yeah so…
Female Speaker: I guess I was wondering if you could maybe, if there are no questions on Skype, talk a little bit about the goal of this incident and maybe kind of how it’s a zoo paid show a little bit and what your fans you know what they’ve learned from this what they’ve hoped to gain anything…
Alan: Well my, the show came about because I was researching a book on the Lori Sykes squatting movement with Clayton Patterson with came out co-resistance and I started working on this research book in the 1999, 2000 and at that time I was researching on Lexus Nexus which is the journalist database, I have access and squatting, it’s all about riots, clearances, crime, there’s nothing at all about the social center movement. And the social center movement can be said to have started in Europe in 1978 with a Down Cavalow Social center, there’s a dossier, one of the clip boards. This old one and they’ve had this intention to make mainly social service political center for over 30 years. And you know when you look in the media, there’s nothing about it.
Okay, so I felt it was necessary to bring this information to a US audience and I begin in New York at ABC Newrio and collective their work together to make the information, put the information and make these wall papers and make this kind of portable manifestation of sharing this information. It’s difficult because it’s in multiple languages you know about the Spanish movement, it’s in Spanish about the movement in Holland, it’s in Dutch even the archives in Holland, it’s all in Dutch, the finding aids are in Dutch cause it’s Dutch you know. But it’s still, I think you can see and now we have Google translate you can just damp the electronic text in and get a rough idea.
But it turns out there are many researcher’s now, younger academics are beginning to work on this, this book came out of what's this place stories from radical social centers in the UK and Ireland, it’s a PDF download, it goes basically city by city, center by center and documents for you know a couple of hundred pages all of the different centers in the UK and Ireland. so there’s beginning to be a lot more information and these - the way these centers are run and set up, the way that they negotiate with their populations, they are you know located in a particular urban community, the way they negotiate with the municipalities, the Governments, all of these are useful for people who are interested to do this kind of work.
So I felt the more that you can share this information, these strategies, the more it becomes known, people become more sophisticated in the way that they do it. A lot of people in The US who run info shops and so there is here a DVD called the [0:29:40] [inaudible] 2002 to 2004, across the US in info shops. They are not, they are doing it you know they are presenting, organizing radical information, making punk concerts and so but it’s sub-cultural, they don’t realize they are part of you know this larger movement and they have a, you know, an ability to expand their very small enterprise in certain directions so that’s the idea. I mean it’s very disarticulated, there’s a lot of different junk and many different languages but that’s the intention is ultimately you would come out with something like be like, you know social centers for dummies or best practices for social center cultivation.
[0:30:31]
Female Speaker: But also to like meet people and organize right, that’s you know the, there’s something that I think you said before tonight was you know you started at ABC Newrio New York and then went to Chicago
Alan: Yes
Female Speaker: Right? And now you’re in Philadelphia and then you have a chance to go to Baltimore. So I mean it’s really like this kind of all across the US kind of tour almost of this information, it’s my understanding of it [0:31:02] [Inaudible]
Alan: Well, in so far as I’m able to do it, yeah, that’s a scheme because I mean Manhattan is you know the center of global capital
Scott: Okay, Alan sorry, would you mind kind of repeat, reiterating the kind of live response ahead of it, it’s okay but I think because of the kung fu, people can’t really hear all of…
Alan: The thundering of bodies of the floor above
Scott: Yeah, it would help people, people are asking if you would mind repeating or if one of us wouldn’t mind repeating the question or if somebody has something to say they would get closer
Male: Oh, you’re far away, yeah
Female Speaker: I think, I mean, I can, if you want to take it, I can, I mean you can, but basically what I said was just, I guess I had asked the question of the goal of the show and one of the things that I don’t think was articulated yet tonight was just kind of where the show has already travelled and kind of the plans to communicate with different cities and kind of organize. so I was just kind of mentioning that it had, you know started in New York at ABC Newrio and then went to Chicago and then after that, it’s come, it’s here and then it has plans to go to Baltimore so that’s all that I said
Alan: Yeah, actually it began, it was organized at ABC Newrio and then it went at the same time to Chicago and then afterwards it went to Queens for the summer and then now it’s here in the suit case version, this is the first suit case outing and I realize what I want to have is a little work station that goes along with it so that people can go online and add to this dossiers like accumulating the information further. so yeah, and then we’ll go to Baltimore, I’m invited to Redemmas 2640 space down there in February, I doubt I’ll be able to do it but probably in March. And then in Detroit in June, there is the US social forum, and I want to take this there. and also at the same time just start to gather in the examples of spaces that are similar in the US, put those together in a similar manner and take that to London in late June for this social center research meeting. There’s a place here that I was just aware of called Lava? Yeah.
Scott: I just ordered the lake from someone else, I don’t know very much about that.
Alan: It’s very similar to a European social center, I believe they own the building it’s Lancaster Avenue, Lancaster Avenue autonomous space, so they do a lot of the same things
Scott: So just before, Aaron actually have a question, I don’t know if anyone else did. but before we get to it I just want to [0:34:26] [inaudible] because Alan he just sort of posed that as a goal out of collecting this pile of information about, Mayor should speak, sorry guys, compile this information about US social centers, squat and central spaces? Squad buildings, squad and social centers I mean that could be something that some of the people here, whether people are on Skype or certain people in this room might be able, might be interested in an idea to help them. So it’s actually something that you can follow up on if anyone is interested. But yeah, so actually we have two questions in queue so should I, can you, oh, you can see…
[0:35:05]
Alan: The first one, I don’t quite understand, it’s a regulatory function of such activities rather than the radical function, rather than like fighting to gain acceptance within a given system. No, I think, you know basically the social centers squatting movement they understand themselves as radical, enter capitalists, disobedience basis. They are very much and much invested in acting autonomously, taking direct action to reclaim space. So it’s not that they are really seeking to gain acceptance within a given system. but after you make this kind of insistence on your right to organize these activities in the center of the city, you need the resistance of the state so you have to then begin to negotiate and then you know, you get repressed or you get recuperated meaning that they either squash you or you know get some sort of deal and your functions are allowed to continue right?
So then you have to decide, do we want to continue under the conditions that have been laid down for us to do so you know, state subsidy, reorganization as a five months to three free corporation or the equivalent or do we want to fight till the end and be a victim? So these are all, sometimes they do, they just get squashed and that’s it because they don’t want to continue under a particular functional administrative gene
Scott: But like you said it’s not just a once and done thing, it’s a cycle that sees to crop up again and again
Alan: Yeah, I mean you know basically the motor for a lot of these social center squatting is very very it’s, I’d say the motor for a lot of social center squatting is a really hard core anti capitalist political ideology be it communist, anarchist, socialist, you know, it’s against the state, it’s against capitalism. So yeah, it’s not like, how do I you know study arts administration or I like very much great show less formulation extreme arts administration so you might think of it as being that you know in the sense
Scott: We have another question from Adam in his class in Tennessee
Adam: Can I talk a little about that positive tactics making the commune work before the tanks arrive? Well, I think basically the way these spaces run is as an assembly basis, they meet in an open assembly regularly and it’s a model expertise list, it’s you know, open democratic situation of course there are quadrays and
Scott: I’m wondering if other not to ask Adam’s question this morning but I wonder are there things that the squats can do to sort of make themselves more amendable to the particular neighborhood you know, things that they might, strategies and tactics that they might employ, to sort of soften their immediate impact on the surrounding neighborhoods or….
Alan: Well, the social center squatting movement makes a big effort to work with the communities; I mean that’s what they are basically about. They open up their doors, people come in, they form relationships and they embed themselves in the community. If they don’t succeed, then they will be evicted with no, no support. But if you get the neighbors, the buildings turning out I’d say to the police hey, hey, leave these guys alone what’s wrong with you? Which happens in Madrid and other cities I'm sure you know, it’s more difficult for them to be evicted. So the community relations are really basic to survival of the disobedience space. I mean there are many tactics too for resisting eviction itself but I mean people hang themselves on the outside of buildings and chairs, this is kind of wild you know.
[0:40:03]
Male speaker: So I thought that you were going to say something but I think we had something else come up but you said something about that it had been a center of capitalizism having an effect on the eventuality of squatting operations in Manhattan. Are there no, is it more difficult to effectively squat in Manhattan because the land is such a high premium you know also in that the system is so entrenched there that almost everything in Manhattan is controlled by very powerful interests and it is used to its maximum efficiencies, you know what I mean?
Alan: Well yes and no I mean it is the centre of global finance capitalism I think actually there is a real difference between the operation of markets.
Scott: Oh sorry they said someone couldn’t hear your question again.
Male speaker: My question?
Scott: Yeah I think it’s just that shuffling of the [0:40:52] [inaudible]
Male speaker: It’s the direction of microphone. I was just you know to reiterat4e, I was just asking if the function of Manhattan as the centre of commerce and sort of entrenched capitalism of Manhattan makes difficult for Manhattan to offer spaces that can be used by people this kind of movement?
Alan: Yeah well yeah it is also within the city of Manhattan it cannot be seen to succeed this kind of thing cannot be seen to succeed. So it’s a very highly policed situation. It is also artificially vibrant economy is artificially vibrant compared to other cities in the US.
Male speaker: Makes perfect sense.
Male speaker: There was a moment during the 1970s New York’s financial cities financial viability was very shaky the bonds were a junk and a lot of property was abandoned passed into the hands of the city for tax arrears. and as that property was being returned to private market that’s when the squatters took control of some buildings because the programs that were legitimate what was called slate equity where by people would take back buildings under city programs were being ended and the buildings were being sold to developed and flipped and flipped and flipped and flipped and crisis were going through the roof and the rents were going through the roof. So there was a moment a political moment to take those buildings and that’s you know the last moment when it was a successful squatting operation movement here in London.
Male speaker: One other thing I forgot to mention was that I would make the assumption that New York being the sort of magnet city that it is for people were interested in urban lifestyle you know in [0:42:46] [inaudible] short end. It would sort of see to magnetize people who would be interested you know sort of demographics that may be the target demographic of these movements. But so the concentration of the demographic being higher something that I had assumed you know just because I know New York just as a place where that would happen. However does it get chocked off by the bureaucracy in New York entirely saying there have been times when the veil slipped from New York [0:43:20] [inaudible] people have been able to make entrance it’s interesting.
Alan: Yeah I know. There is a lot of questions there.
Male speaker: Yeah I [0:43:29] [inaudible]
Alan: No the composition of the people who drive squatting movements is one part of your question and it’s really an it’s an interesting one. This varies around the country but in New York it was a lot of people who had backgrounds in the labor movement whose had communists or socialists parents, so an understanding of you know people power of movements. people who had trade skills who were able to actually take a [0:44:07] [inaudible] building and bring it back up to you know a habitable condition and people who had let us say [0:44:18] [inaudible] children who had the background of being able to deal with the legal system, the city political system, the media promoting their and organizing yeah. So it was a whole combination of different people with different capabilities. In European cities my guess is that most of these people are coming from political backgrounds that again that they are communists or socialists or anarchists. In Spain of course the anarchist’s movement is very deep a hundred years or more deep.
Male Speaker: Yeah.
Angela: I have a couple of questions my name is Angela [0:44:59] [inaudible] the first question was saying I was curious [0:45:03] [inaudible] where you talk about most of the US is not…
[0:45:08]
Male speaker: I hate to interrupt you but [0:45:11] [inaudible] maybe if you move it around but [0:45:16] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Its directional wise yeah.
Angela: My question is that I would argue that potentially in most of the US it’s not very conducive to squatter movements because of the I guess you would be curious just to hear why I think that it is. But it doesn’t seem like there is very many successful squats at this point in the US. but I would say that I would pose it that one of the things that is most interesting about the squatter movement currently in the US is that people are rather than focusing on buildings they are taking over vacant land and they are [0:45:43] [inaudible] urban and post apoplectic [0:45:48] [inaudible]. I think right now is what is currently is really exciting in the most part of the in the US and also what I would say will be a more plus a legal movement where there is a lot of interesting spaces that exist that are operating somewhere the land of legal non-profit if I go and see three status and not squatting but certainly not running enough fully legal faction and that’s where interesting things are happening.
Alan: No you’re totally correct actually in this mark up for the second ezine of the catalogue of house magic there is a poster by Anton [0:46:22] [inaudible] side garden and squat movement Emerald Rose. and in Laurie side the housing is very dense and they took it for housing but in order to create some sort of cultural social space the gardens also were taken they became centers you know a little casitas were built, little stages so things were going on in there. Yeah and you are absolutely right Detroit is full of urban farm [0:46:50] [inaudible] there is a really interesting project in Baltimore called participation park and in Pittsburg landslide farms. So there are a number of these kind of organizations I really would like very much to…
Angela: There is a number of [0:47:04] [inaudible] here too as well.
Alan: Pardon?
Angela: There’s a number of [0:47:06] [inaudible] in Philly as well
Alan: Ah okay yeah I would love to find out about them and again gather that information in the similar way that we will present that to people in Europe. So because there is like one outside of Barcelona called [0:47:21] [inaudible] just it’s an old leper colony, leper hospital which has extensive gardens and grounds which have been turned into urban farms. And then there is a tunnack [0:47:37] [inaudible] of course which was I don’t know anything about except that people were arrested yeah.
Male speaker: We’ve got a long question with some examples from Steven.
Scott: It might be worth asking Steven just to kind of read it [0:47:50] [cross talk] pretty well.
Male speaker: Yeah maybe Steven could chime in.
Scott: If you are up to that Steven.
Male speaker: Can you get this?
Male speaker: Yeah we can [0:48:06] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yeah I hear you [0:48:11] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yes thanks Steve.
Steven: I want to read my question I didn’t want to get [0:48:20] [inaudible] as the way in which when you were talking about which is extremely interesting fixing to where great sort of paradigms for a Plausible Artworlds. I was trying to I mean I was giving a sort of conjecture about how that would work in the sense that the squatting actually is almost a typology or really gives it an image of how art worlds could actually become plausible by using the existing architecture, the existing but under used or under exploited architecture which exists as an urban landscape or as a conceptual landscape. And the idea would be that you know park could take place anywhere but it doesn’t actually have a home of its own. So it merely needs to address that question in its homeless, its transcendental homelessness by finding homes somewhere else.
And I gave that example from Martha Russell’s interesting project about homelessness and really the re-emerged like it hadn’t at least since the in the [0:49:38] [inaudible] period that project which you did in 1981 in [0:49:42] [inaudible] was a really interesting conceptual project at the same time as it addresses the dire situations of people living without homes or under homes.
[0:49:55]
It also dealt with the question of arts almost as easy it refuse as an art project accepted as an activist project but was never embraced by the mainstream art world at that time. So that was a kind of example that I give, that I copy to replace the homelessness by art homelessness and housing by art system. But just speaking in conjecture on my part we would like to hear how you see this squatting world [0:50:21] [inaudible] and then I don’t know on the mainstream real estate but which allows can in the hypothetic way in other words which I guess which uses different sources of [0:50:44] [cross talk] without actually giving them the whole system the way I got to say is that the way you see it as a plausible in plausible artworlds?
Alan: Yeah no I was initially struck by the similarity between the intense matter of efforts that goes into a limited time for an art exhibition and the intense amount of effort that goes into a limited time to squat a building and to open it with a series for cultural and political and social programs they are very similar yeah. So they are parasitic, they are time bounded they are really model acts. Yeah the Martha Russell show yeah that was in 1989. Actually she evolved that in consultation with group material and it was a really influential exhibition one of the first so far as I know platform exhibitions which took an issue homelessness. again another reason why the New York squat succeeded was because they coincided with the mass social movement of poor people, large numbers of people were camped throughout the city and continually led camping being evicted by the city and then the recamping land because they were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of campers and thousands of homeless people in the city evolved now being evicted there was a pressure on the government pressure on the public to recognize this as an issue.
So the squatter sand some kind of social legitimacy which you know you just can’t generate for nothing. As an art world, yeah I think also you have now at this moment the rise of relational practice, participatory practice, kind of the hyper modifications of social sculpture and the social centre movement is totally networked and their presence is you know if you make a nice poster for the social centre concert series or film screening series it will be on the web, it will be seen by an international audience so that constitutes you know a market for graphic artists for people who are trying to have their work seen, to be with this movement and make signage for them.
So yeah I mean definitely there are worlds in which representation is key, how the social centre represents itself is instrumental in its maintenance or standing and falling Rose [0:53:17] [inaudible] is full of crazy analytical communists who really you know hang the bosses they have a terrible website and they are really in trouble with the city because post nine is trying to cultivate its closeness to Germany to become you know sort of a really centre for commerce. So yeah I don’t know is this coming towards an answer for your question?
Male speaker: I don’t know.
Male speaker: Its mine my dear.
Steve: Yeah sure.
Male speaker: Yeah.
Male speaker: Go ahead Steven.
StevenNo I mean I don’t want to monopolize the conversation because the, it was an unexpected way to have come with the answers.
Alan: Well you have a sense also of sort of how this movement plays out in France about which I know nothing absolutely nothing although I know that it was big in Paris for awhile.
Scott: Well there were Paris squats in late ‘90s which I’m a huge fan I’m sure it has a lot of history.
Alan: Yeah but it seems that France has sort of being outside of the social centre movement which is unfolded really in the south and in Germany in the east maybe I’m completely wrong about that.
Steven: Yeah east no you are absolutely right it’s a strange anomaly and I would say this about it I mean I don’t want to talk about France but in France there is a very strong institutional [0:54:58] [inaudible] movement very honorable training, very powerful socials and communist parties, [0:55:02] [inaudible] party groups represented in the national assembly and that means that there is literary no [0:55:07] [inaudible] of culture accepted and swine’s as part of [0:55:13] [inaudible] culture it’s you know it’s something I mean I like being a [0:55:16] [inaudible] powerful institution [0:55:19] [inaudible] the country it has been able to secure real or an interesting social benefits. But at the same time the country culture is really lacking. And it’s somehow re-emerged in the last couple of years in the very far right very sort of authoritarian and liberal government of [0:55:40] [inaudible] particularly you know the people who know the [0:55:44] [inaudible] which is in a certain respect created a country culture and it has created something maybe because the squatting social centers which you’ve been describing.
[0:55:57]
On another note you talked about relational [0:56:00] [inaudible] practices and how they tie into all these. I just like to point out that today the author of the book Relational Esthetics [0:56:12] [indiscernible] was appointed the top civil servant in the French culture of the bureaucracy I mean a very very high position, a very [0:56:23] [inaudible] in terms of the administration of visual arts. So it just shows how relational esthetic was only probably a very [0:56:34]] [inaudible]
Alan: That could be helpful I don’t know.
Steven: Yeah but I think the question of the [0:56:52] [inaudible] we are not here to talk about France the rights were [0:56:58] [inaudible] they were a direct source on the institutionalize and mainstream political democratic state which [0:57:11] [inaudible]
Alan: Yeah well they are of course in the social centers in the political side there are movements there are specific concerns serving migrates resisting [0:57:28] [inaudible] kind of working against the police in the borders is a really strong current of political current in the social centre movement. so yeah its attempting to create solidarities that are very different and actually is a big divide in the US between Spanish speaking movements and immigrant movements which are extremely strong and I would say are the dominant social movements in this country and the wide left you know which is really serialized, academisized and kind of atomized so that’s just like a big problem.
Steven: Yeah and I will ask you to [0:58:18] [inaudible] what you said because it looks that you will be [0:58:20] [inaudible] parallel draw between the sort of micro politics squat social centers and this attempts on the part of people in the [0:58:37] [inaudible] European they kind of squat work as Europe [0:58:41] [inaudible] is there a parallel logic there?
AlanNo that does that makes a lot of sense yeah. I’m looking at 200 [0:58:55] [inaudible]
Male speaker: I have a question for you.
Alan: Yeah.
Male speaker: Just so it seems like when you were referring to the New York the successful squatting of in New York a lot of that had to do with certain presence of catastrophes that when caused the sharp edge of disfranchising to sort of [0:59:15] [inaudible] you know what I mean so the seems just sort of when catastrophe becomes imminent and people are become less comfortable in their status as at least I don’t know the end franchises in the society they might be looking for an alternative sort of support system and that’s where these places come in in Europe you know for people who actually - you know for instance you can’t really say that the Muslim you know the immigration, marginalization of Muslims in America is as if it’s a different situation in Europe.
So people.0:59:52] [inaudible] so those people are coming over, immigrating with the knowledge that they are not going to become franchise they are not looking for the “American dream” style of franchise but they are looking for refuge. and you know so that’s also the alternative way of I guess provided by squatter social centers might be more useful for people in this country where there are imminent catastrophes, more widespread catastrophes such as you were explaining what’s happening in New York in the ‘70s [1:00:29] [inaudible] to the you know people supporting these actions as opposed to stopping them.
[1:00:35]
Alan: Yeah no again a very complex kind of question no no it’s cool. I think in Europe the immigrants many African are economic migrants. They are coming because they need the work right and their countries of course also many are in war. In the US, Mexican farmers are coming because there are free trade agreements have ruined local agriculture subsidized American corn is driving Mexican corn farmers who have been subsistence farmers, locally based agricultural systems have been devastated by those free trade agreements so they are coming here to work and support their families. you know a vast stretch of this country was Mexico in the past so you know you have lube dobs screaming about the [1:01:30] [inaudible] you know okay you know hey what the fuck you know this is America it’s not the Unites States. United States is not America, you know America is very very large and its sort of homeostatically re-equalibrising itself you know.
So anyway yeah I know very much what Steven said about the micro climates of social centers because in Europe it’s a very strong attempt to create exactly the kind of diversity and multi-cultural environment that in the United States we have. Particularly in certain sub-cultural spheres which don’t constitute art worlds and the sense that we understand that but you know like the punk and the hip hop scene are cultural spheres in which there is a lot of multi-cultural interaction. And so like the circles, cultural centre in Madrid which is on the edge of the city they mainly serve immigrants they try to do the legal counseling, they try to teach immigrants Spanish many of the Africans speak English which is kind of strange. But the core of people who run the place are Spanish you know and ethnically pretty homogeneous. So it’s kind of a little odd but they are trying again to create those links that they do not have.
Scott: Can I ask people here how many people know about - oh sorry can I ask people that are here now I know like [1:03:14] ] [inaudible] talked about it over the telephone very briefly but I just want to hear how many of you guys are aware at all of what’s happening pretty locally with squats. because I know like pretty much squat about it I don’t know anything about this movement that’s going but you know it’s not really something that I can connect to while here because I have been here for the last 15 years. So I was just curious if any of you guys are?
Female speaker: [1:03:40] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yeah I don’t know interested in they are interested in things happening locally that in some way connect to this or tell me a little about it and wouldn’t mind chatting about it together. I am just a little bit curious. And I know Alan had just a – to put it into context confidence too one of the things that [1:03:58] [inaudible] do is talk to more and I mean tell me if I’m wrong Alan but you wanted to talk with more people in the US about how they see squats and
Alan: Oh very much, yeah.
Male Speaker: And so I know that…
Male Speaker: [1:04:10] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Yeah that will be great if you don’t mind.
Male speaker: Do I need to get up?
Male speaker: Sure well you don’t have to we can move this a little closer.
Abel: I’m Abel Gevins [1:04:20] [phonetic] I’m an artist in the city and I have been involved in artist communities here in the city for some unseemingly long time. And Philadelphia has always had a lot of squatting and it still does. Have we talked about the sort of the two different kinds of squatting based on class? I think it’s been touching but I don’t really know because there has been much discussion about that?
Female speaker: Not Much I don’t know what that means.
[1:04:53]
Abel: Well there are people all over the city squatting because they are poor and because there are all these empty buildings so they don’t have to move into a building. And there is no generally no theory being behind that squatting beyond I need a place to live and look there is an empty building. And then there is you know the European social centre model of squatting coming out of theory, coming out of political belief system and a commitment to social change. And there has been some of that in Philadelphia that I have known of, I have been on the franchise of smaller attempts over the years of that. And I think the one thing that we don’t have in the States very much they have had a lot in Europe is that the squatters’ rights. I have a lot of friends who squatted in London in the ‘70s, and ‘70s and early ‘90s and they had squatters’ rights. and if you moved into a building that was empty and you stayed there long enough they couldn’t kick you out you know they just could not kick you out without taking you court and going through this long long process. So it made for a lot more stability I know people who live in squats in London for years and years and years and they were squats the whole time and we have never had anything like that here.
Male speaker: I must say that in New York during the squatter movement in the ‘80s and ‘90s there was a very significant expansion of case law for exactly that if you established your residency you cannot just be evicted by police action they would have to take you to court then you can argue you know many different arguments.
Alan: Yeah yeah but in England especially I know because that’s where most of my friends were squatting it was enshrined in the common law for a hundreds of years so it was just a part of the…
Male speaker: Its common laws.
Alan: Part of the law.
Male speaker: Its like case I mean it’s not an English in English it seems different yeah. In Italy the squatting has no basis.
Alan: No no no legal basis.
Male speaker: But they stay because political.
Alan: Yeah yeah and I think there are just so many differences between European social movements and US social movements and that’s a whole other thing.
Male speaker: I have a question like in the London squats can is there any incentive for the squatters to move out like when they get incentives of like electricity and water.
Alan: They could sadly with Margret Thatcher being elected most of these laws were slowly chipped away so there is not a lot of protection any more there is still a lot of squatting in London and there are a number of squatting entity social centers in London still but they don’t have a whole lot of legal defense anymore they are getting kicked out. I was over there couple of summers ago and I was hanging out with people who were in one squatting social centre and they had squatted in another building because they thought they were going to get kicked out of the first one but they ended up getting kicked out of the second one before they got kicked out of the first one.
Philadelphia has an incredibly rich history of poor people squatting because they need a place to live. One of the very strange and funny very American things is that in the late ‘70s and in early ‘80s Melton Street was sort of there was a grass roots squatting movement Philadelphia was so devastated at that point and so much was empty and there were so many really poor people. people really started to go out and do it and they started to organize and this insanely opportunistic pair of brothers Melton Street and John Street saw their opportunity and went in there and became leaders and then just sold the whole thing up so that…
Female speaker: What part of Philly was that in?
Male speaker: It was everywhere they were mostly in south west but north Philly south west yeah.
Female speaker: Because you said Melton street and John street.
Alan: Yeah.
Female speaker: And those were people not streets.
Alan: Oh sorry yeah John Street is the ex mayor of Philadelphia sorry about that and Melton was his kind of [1:09:29] [inaudible] crazy brother who, is he in jail now?
Male speaker: Yeah.
Alan: I think he is in jail now yeah. So there was that very very exciting and really rich squatting thing going on but it didn’t have the theoretical background to it and it was more of an individual thing. There was a certain amount of squatting buildings for use as for social services but it was never on the same level and never done in the same spirit. And that I have been involved in some [1:10:02] [inaudible] projects over the years where we are trying to do some squatting and it’s just really unless you hide in Philadelphia you just get kicked out right away I mean I was you know I watched my friend being dragged out of a building and then they came in with a racking ball destroyed the building because it is better to destroy it than to have people living in it for free.
Male speaker: You were in Philly? Like I was I have figured that there is places in north Philadelphia where like officials have a bigger problems looking for squatters in the building.
Alan: Oh they are not looking for them I’m talking more about I mean there are still lots and lots of poor people who are just squatting in buildings I’m talking more about trying to create something along the lines of these social centers something public that’s maybe has a live in component but it’s just as much as creating social centre.
Male speaker: It’s more of a social challenge so channels the net.
Alan: Yeah very quickly and very efficiently, so exactly.
Male speaker: I was going to say it makes me feel like kind of like [1:11:06] [inaudible] paying rent but…
Alan: Yeah no no you have a [1:11:11] [inaudible]
Male speaker: Very [1:11:14] [inaudible] books I have [1:11:16] [inaudible] since 25 years of occupation against the interest of the owner of property and you becoming on the owner of that property. So it depends on whether you manage to keep up your quarters and you know you [1:11:35] [inaudible] occupy this land and you just didn’t so the activist [1:11:37] [inaudible] but anyway if you qualify then you do get title.
Alan: I don’t know about that.
Male speaker: Adverse possession.
Male speaker: Adverse possession yeah that kind of adverse possession doesn’t happen very often it’s just.
Alan: Yeah that’s the longest time it took.
Female speaker: Do you have a question I understand that [1:11:53] [inaudible] mention there is a pretty rich and substantial history of squatting in West Philadelphia I know a lot about Philadelphia houses that’s being going on for many years. and there is a lot of I think [1:12:05] [inaudible] organizations in West Philadelphia that are maybe now more legitimate but I think in a lot of ways it belongs similarly to the social centers.
Alan: Oh yeah and I was…
Female speaker: [1:12:16] [inaudible] they are more legitimate and so therefore are able to sustain themselves but are actually very much and I think this [1:12:23] [inaudible] like land trust houses for example or need space I think there is a lot of actually really excited social activists in this in particular. Unfortunately what makes me really sad is that there is a vibrication between what I consider like the grass roots visual art community and the grass roots active zone community [1:12:43] [inaudible]which for some reason is very separate but are doing very small things and its unfortunately they don’t share about those more.
Alan: Yeah well I’m a part of the woodenship books collective and we are we just moved into a really amazing space and we are doing a lot more events and hopefully we are going to be collaborating at Basekamp on some stuff and maybe we can work on some of that stuff.
Male speaker: Yeah it was one of the things we were hoping we would address a little bit after this kind of talk to get some of the people that are here can talk together about [1:13:17] [inaudible]
Male speaker: There is a question I think it’s I guess for you pal.
Male speaker: Yeah I’m looking at this extract from Adam Travage, yeah how [1:13:36] [inaudible] doing the successful squat gentrification witness successful squat automatically become a tool of preparation for your gentrification?
Alan: Yeah this happens again it depends on conditions the squats that a guy from Zurich was describing his situation where squatters had moved into a particular area and because they had this really good parties much more free than night clubs, much cheaper, more crazy the neighborhood became a place for young people to go and they started to build condos there. Yeah so that happens and when I was at the city from the law conference in Baltimore in the spring of last year there was a guy from Philadelphia who took a really extreme position and you know speaking for the community of color saying that he thought the squatters in Philadelphia should be attacked because they were the advanced crowd guard of gentrification, white punks that was an extreme position but yeah it’s an issue it’s a problem.
Most of the squatter the social centre squatters and even the very crusty, drunken punk squatters and I’m thinking of Eric of Eric Lyle in San Francisco. The name of his book is escaping right now but he is describing the market street punks who did squatting and squatted a theater. They organized against gentrification, they helped to organize the community, they make it their business to do that political work. So in that sense in the same way that in the Lori’s side during the gallery movement of the 1980’s the PAD group, political art documentation and distribution group, organized a not for sale project to kind of in list the art community in resisting gentrification, yes it happens its part of the process.
There is somewhere there is a secret manual for real estate’s developers that describes how to use artists and to use squatters as the advanced guard of gentrification. All you can do I think is really to be sensitive to the problem and to try to organize your communities against those things, trying to connect people with housing lawyers and so forth. Poor communities tend to be disorganized and often, I am not saying defenseless but you know their defenses are weak against that sort of thing. But at this moment of economic crisis that’s kind of not really the big problem.
Male speaker: Thanks Amanda, see you. Yes there’s—I was just looking at—there is on the web a film about squatting in Philadelphia.
Alan: Yes it’s really good.
Male speaker: Yes.
Male speaker: Yes I talked about that when [1:17:00] [inaudible], it’s about the [1:17:02] [inaudible] that I was talking about the street brothers kind of came in…
Male speaker: So that’s recent?
Male speaker: No that’s mid early 80’s that they were involved [1:17:21] [inaudible].
Alan: No it’s, I think it’s really good to reconnect these histories.
Male speaker: Yes.
Alan: I mean before the squatting movement in New York which is pretty well known there was a community land trust movement in a home steady in the 70s you know before the real estate was valorized. So that’s like really forgotten and all of those lessons and that those modalities of organizing are not really all brought up to the surface. And the more people know about them the better off we are.
Male speaker: Yes we should track a copy of that [1:18:14] [inaudible] of years and years and years, track it down. Are there any other questions? Oh good.
Male speaker: I have question, Alan can you talk about how many classes of this [1:18:29] [inaudible] historical center in the community and what was into like promoting [1:18:38] [inaudible].
Alan: Well I mean I have really never, I have not been a part of this you know, we did a building occupation for like 36 hours and we are very open and public and we are shut down, this was in New York 30 years ago. But I think basically the squat is very open in public; in the second issue there is a group of people, of two people who are involved in a squat in Barcelona. They squatted the building first, the established everything inside secretly then they had a public opening with a big crowd and a big party. So they set up and they were running and you know they did a lot of stuff right away and it was busy, busy, busy. Yes so that’s how they did it but again really strong social movement, really strong anarchist union, all of the stuff of you know different conditions. I think they are all kind of based on local conditions and how they develop, but they are definitely committed collective groups of people that make these things happen and they are planned carefully and executed deliberately.
[1:20:22]
Scott: Any other questions either here or online? You guys can also unmute your mics if you want to talk.
Female speaker: Or type of questions?
Michael: I have a question, my name is Michael here at Basekamp I am curious I want to hear about a little bit more of the kind of organization and activities that happen at the social centers. [1:20:58] [inaudible] what else do the big centers provide in the conventional social services [1:21:08] [inaudible].
Alan: Well basically they have similar components, they have an info shop like a bookstore or library, they have a café, they have very often a weekly people’s kitchen open food situation, they will have a bicycle repair shop and maybe the critical mass large scale bike ride is organized out of there. They will have a free shop where people can come and bring things and exchange things, they may have a sowing workshop where people can modify clothing and sow together and they very often become venues for concerts. In Italy tire are some very large squats one in a former military base which hosts hip hop concerts and hip hop entertainers often, you know particularly in Europe and coming from Africa have a really strong political edge and regular venues for music don’t want them even if they are very popular so they go to the social centers.
My friend who was touring his wild style hip hop New York he went to the social centers in Europe. Also a lot of punk bands it’s a heavy sub cultural punk things so those things go to the squatter social centers. I’m sort of a little fried here but those are the components that I can think of, oh silk screen, they have silk screen workshops that are kind of regular components of these places. Oh and a hack lab that’s really key yes, often internet radio station that comes out of a pirate radio station tradition, you know short low powered broadcasts that there is actually an article in here about that movement in Italy, telestreet [1:23:22] [phonetic].
So they have a media center and hacking knowledge, this is one of the things that’s getting recuperated in Madrid because you know for the society to move into the electronic era you know people have to have these skills. So they are being developed in the social centers in the Hack labs, so they are now hiring people who are coming out of the social center movement to teach media skills in the media centers. So yes I mean to a great extent that is the strongest argument for the social center movement is that they developed open source software through combinations and particularly in Holland. And kind of generated a whole lot of technical capacity in societies that didn’t have it, so the squats are sort of like Silicon Valley you know, I mean that’s exaggeration but yes.
Female speaker: I have another questions about, I guess you know I am not very well versed so forgive me, make a [1:24:32] [inaudible] here but I guess I have a couple of examples. One of something similar happening, a similar type of movement where people buy a property from the city for like a dollar and they are allowed to squat there and create some type of business there but there is always the ability for the city to kick them out. And the example that I am thinking of is in Baltimore, this gallery called Current, Current gallery, it bought this building for a dollar and I don’t really know how this works but –and they set the gallery there and yes I was just wondering if you knew any more information about that or if that was somehow related to the social status, I don’t know.
[1:25:37]
Alan: I think so, I mean essentially the key question is it’s about development you know. You want to develop your city, you want to develop your community, you want to do it right? But unless you have a large amount of money get lost, forget it.
Male speaker: I can way be in a little bit [1:25:58] [inaudible].
Alan: The question is, is the value of labor and imitative, does it have any occurrence as opposed to the value of money per say.
Female speaker: Right.
Alan: So if you have the intention and you have the willingness to put your energy in, cities when they become desperate they recognize okay you can have sweat equity exactly, you are going to work and that will be equivalent to having you know X hundred thousand dollars that you are willing to put at risk.
Male speaker: I think you are referring to like the year—and I will admit that [1:26:33] [inaudible] early 60s, 70s took over spaces, the government allowed that [1:26:42] [inaudible]
Female speaker: Right.
Alan: There is a small city outside Cleveland where that’s exactly what’s happening, the mayor is offering buildings to artists straight up. You can just come have a building and this is a year old information and I don’t remember the name of the city because in wasn’t concentrating on The US at the time but it’s happened, because they are desperate the city is collapsing.
Scott: Well and just, I mean in Philadelphia for example we were highly considering maybe five [1:28:00] [inaudible], there is a question on queue here by I just wanted to sort of like mention something about local for a second. We were seriously considering about maybe, maybe at this point it was like six or seven years ago, moving to the United States about 10 blocks north of here. You know we were offered like a pretty large plot of land for a dollar at the city basically and it was like just North of Gerard which at this point is like actually fairly pricy and in such a short time. But the reason that we were offered this is because we were going to sink like maybe $400,000 into like building a building there or like you know actually erecting a building and we were just borrowing the money you know.
We had you know something kind of goofy but you know some kind of green building that would have been awesome, some designer who wanted to design the outside of it they were like oh yes that sounds great. And of course you know it’s really about gentrifying the area it’s not so much, you know it’s sort of like win some lose some, you know there is an area where there is not much going on it’s a lot of tumble weeds and kind of white racists in that area and there is not a lot economically going on so we will go ahead and invite these artists and you know for one little plot that used to be like a toxic super site you know. And you know what I mean so it seems generous on one hand and on the other hand it’s really just how can we speed up the gentrification process and not getting soap box about it because we ended up deciding not to mostly not really for political reasons as much as just we didn’t—we would have had to put our own like projects on hold for a couple of years just to be able to afford it and like work our asses of just to do it. And then we decided we’d rather just not own something, but maybe that was dumb but that was our choice.
[1:29:54]
Alan: The land slide farm in Pittsburg I saw them present and they, I am not sure exactly how they began but they own some of the land, they are squatting some of the land, they have like three or four different conditions or use, arrangements with the city for other parts of the land. But the land is built over one of these collapsing lines so there were a bunch of houses there but the houses are like falling into this abyss so everybody had been evacuated. It’s essentially a disaster area its useless, so they made a farm and the city went out of their way to organize different kind of arrangements so that they could do this with the limited capital. But of course when the summit of the financial community, not the GA but that was in Pittsburg recently, the police came around to make sure that these guys weren’t hosting any activist so.
Male speaker: Wow! staggering.
Male speaker: There is actually, I am sorry there is actually an active that they do the Art school of West Philadelphia, it’s a place that started like that they got offered the super [1:31:17] [inaudible] site which was a brown field left over by an old store, a [1:31:25] [inaudible] store. And they began rebuilding it and cleaning up and everything and it started to work when now they used to open a few months ago in Eastern West Philly. So it’s, you know it’s happening right here but they are just—they are looking more for funding through the bright initiative and you know a lot of [1:31:50] [inaudible]. So they are basically a—like I mentioned this because before, previously we were talking about like giving the right use to the squatted land you know to grow communities that are self sufficient and all that stuff so that’s what they are trying to do there.
Male speaker: Well Alan you have a question.
Male speaker: Perhaps I have to do this but maybe we can just move them like next to Alan.
Male speaker: Oh excellent or you could just pull your chair out.
Male speaker: Sure yes.
Scott: You mean as long as [1:32:20] [inaudible].
Male speaker: But I wanted to ask about a question about the project House magic is research and about this collection of various squatting situation, they are all very interesting and useful but I want to ask about your under pending question that you might be working on they are researching these projects that we’ve been answering. Yes basically this begun as a propaganda initiative, initially I wanted to call it collective propaganda. But you know basically that was the intention, was to bring these situations which are very interesting to public attention in the US and try to offer them as models.
So that was the intention, at this point I am more interested to kind of gather all the situations that seemed to me to be prefiguartive of kind of new social relationships that we need to construct because the kinds of atomized super consumptive society that we’ve built is doomed yes? So we need to reconfigure it, so maybe that’s sort of grandiose but that’s my intention it’s in my mind pretty clear. But as a research project I would be happy to get out of it as quickly as I could and collectivize it and somehow to turn it into something that is forward moving, you know a thing that a lot people are doing to collect these stories and information and put them out.
Scott: Are you sure you don’t want to brand this project Alan Moore House Magic?
Alan: Absolutely not, not unless it’s the other Alan Moore he can have it; I am hoping he will jump on it.
Scott: Maybe you have been talking about doing a comic book.
Alan: Yes I am going to do a comic book because I think my name could sell.
Scott: Oh it’s the other guy yes. Well there is seems like there is definitely a lot of interests in contributing to something like this so, any last comments we’ve got about one minute before we have a—not that it’s a drop dead cut off line but we are approaching 8:00, oh it is 8:00. Yes but luckily someone just asked the question who is the other Allan Moore?
Alan: Oh good, Alan Moore?
Male speaker: Try Google.
Scott: Yes there is a fairly well known comic book or graphic novelist.
Male speaker: Yes he is pretty awesome.
Male speaker: He wrote watchmen.
Alan: I sign as Alan W so.
Male speaker: Can we talk about maybe the [1:35:11] [inaudible] that can relate to this project.
Scott: Absolutely and if anyone has to go I mean don’t feel obligated to stay especially those in Europe who are like up at 2:00 in the morning right now we a really think you guys are troopers and love having you here. There is still about a dozen people on the line right now so that’s pretty or, actually less now sort of dropped down to eight locations. But oh, actually someone would like to be re-added; can you let them know that we are reading them?
[1:35:42]
Male speaker: Yes most of the time.
Male speaker: Yes that’s [1:35:44] [inaudible].
Male speaker: Yes the thing we wanted to do at the end of each of these, at each of these chats and it really won’t take very long, normally we do a little bit before 8:00 but okay, Is continue to address this question about art or just kind of ask you guys about follow up ultimately people that you know, during most of our chats and we have been doing these weekly chats for about five years before really sharpening the focus through the plausible artworlds projects starting three weeks ago. And at the end of almost every single one of them there is generally, I mean a number of people, a lot of people usually who express enthusiasm to follow up and I know that that’s not coming at this much because that was sort of in mentioning it out loud. But our goal with the public school launch in Philadelphia is to try to use this extremely vague and open but still useful framework to follow up with other people who want to continue on with different topics not necessarily hard core research topics although some of them could be. But even just kind of follow up with any of our curiosities about things that might come up for each week’s chat. So…
Male speaker: As conceivable first.
Scott: Right as proposals for courses, things that could be like seriously easy proposals like, you know like for instance how does, you know 10 strategies for squatting a building or just getting just people that are interested to know more about the history of European squatter social center etcetera. There is like a lot of material here I don’t if you guys have seen the he flicker photos, the great post. But there is actually like a lot of hand books that like I am definitely not going to get though any time soon, but a lot of these things we can post to our data work and kind of contribute. Anyway I won’t go on about this but if you guys have any thoughts about this the best ways its I mean like just sort of throw out your proposals either now or on the comments section on the event Basekamp to come we will send the link. Or just email us or Skype us or try to call us or anything, text message us and we will try to help make it happen on the public school sight.
Scott: Or post comments to the event’s message board here in the Basekamp.
Male speaker: Right.
Scott: Yes I did say that but that’s okay I will even send the link.
Male speaker: I think Adam sent the earlier [1:38:28] [inaudible].
Scott: Here is the link and I will send like a direct little—go ahead and throw comments in there or send us your email address if you like to we will keep you informed about anything that anyone else posts along with this particular thread. Anyway that almost sounds like a sales pitch but really there is a set up here to kind of help people who want to follow up on stuff if you do. But yes I guess if there is any other burning like questions and stuff you know like feel free to send them and we can try to follow up that route.
Alan: I will post online research is [1:39:11] [inaudible].
Male speaker: Okay if you guys didn’t hear Alan [1:39:13] [inaudible] online researchers to, because there really are a lot along these lines. I don’t mean to make it sound boring just by describing it that way I think they are actually pretty engaging so.
Alan: I have an article in the ezine [1:39:29] [inaudible] about relationships between artist collectors and squatters and [1:39:34] [inaudible].
Scott: Okay yes and that kind of – I don’t know if you’ve heard that Stephen but that kind of addressed your question. But anyway yes just so that we don’t like making it a habit of going of going, like starting late then going over and making people especially who stay up late feel kind of too tired, we should probably wrap it up.
Male speaker: Okay.
Scott: Thanks a lot for coming Alan it’s really a pleasure to have you, follow up in the internet.
[1:40:12] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$d9403d76ce6a2a19" title="#basekamp/$d9403d76ce6a2a19">House Magic: The European squatted social centers movement http://bit.ly/63xEP7 (#basekamp/$d9403d76ce6a2a19)
Created on 2010-01-20 01:28:44.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:22
- Hi everyone
- Aharon: 18:09:24
- hiyas!
- Aharon: 18:09:31
- thanks scott
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:10:18
- hi
- atrowbri: 18:10:40
- Art420005: Plausible Artworlds clas is here. We are discussing the history and theory of property/land rights
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:33
- so welcome everyone -- we are running a few mins behind, though inching closer to starting at 6PM ]
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:13:02
- hi hi hi
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:13:37
- hey y'all
- Greg Scranton: 18:13:49
- hey everyone welcome and thx for coming
- magdalenatc: 18:13:51
- hello everyone
- Greg Scranton: 18:13:55
- we'll be getting started soon
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:14:00
- ok no problem just need to drink afew cups of coffee
- Greg Scranton: 18:14:18
- jessicawestbrook!!!!!!!!!
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:14:24
- hi greg : )
- magdalenatc: 18:14:25
- hello david, haven't seen you for centuries i think nice to see you
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:14:36
- same here
- Greg Scranton: 18:14:50
- how is everything in TN? You in class with Adam?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:14:56
- gewd
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:15:00
- we are here in class
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:15:05
- yes
- atrowbri: 18:15:25
- The whole class is here
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:15:42
- that's an awesome turnout
- Greg Scranton: 18:15:49
- we are eating munchkins thx to michael's parents who are joining us 2nite
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:08
- so who wants to be on audio?
- Greg Scranton: 18:16:18
- Adam you ready to start audio?
- atrowbri: 18:16:59
- we are
- atrowbri: 18:17:13
- We are discussing whether there is a nearby dunkin donuts
- magdalenatc: 18:17:13
- i am too
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:17:18
- yes please
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:38
- hi Stephen
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:17:46
- yes
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:18:04
- that was yes to audio
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:18:14
- and hi stephen
- stephen wright: 18:19:18
- hello!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:37
- let's start the call, then we'll get sarted chatting in a moment
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:04
- stephen, can you turn your skype status on
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:47
- hi Ally --
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:56
- alliy i mean
- Alliy Reynolds: 18:21:28
- ha. no prob. hi!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:14
- who wants to call?
- atrowbri: 18:22:24
- <------
- atrowbri: 18:23:00
- ME
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:23:02
- can you call atrowbri
- Greg Scranton: 18:23:12
- Alliy we'll add you shortly
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:23:13
- his machine is set on a speaker
- Aharon: 18:24:13
- who is hosting the chat..?
- Greg Scranton: 18:24:29
- basekamp is hosting, hang tight everyone
- Greg Scranton: 18:24:37
- we're getting started here shortly
- stephen wright: 18:24:52
- who just called me?
- Aharon: 18:24:56
- ok.. it appeared here as if ally was hosting
- Greg Scranton: 18:25:00
- Alan is here in the space and we're introducing him here quickly
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:08
- starting the call now
- Aharon: 18:25:35
- its not calling
- atrowbri: 18:25:43
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:25:51
- atrowbri: 18:26:01
- Greg Scranton: 18:26:31
- eww jessica eww
- atrowbri: 18:26:45
- Greg Scranton: 18:27:20
- just a friendly reminder that it works best if you mute your mics until you are ready to talk, yes thx Aharon perfect!
- magdalenatc: 18:28:42
- are you on audio now? have i missed something?
- atrowbri: 18:29:25
- It might be good to note when the call starts.
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:29:36
- hello william
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:29:53
- audio status?
- WCulpepper: 18:30:18
- Helllo everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:41
- adding you now atrowbri
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:56
- ading you now magda
- Aharon: 18:31:13
- lost sound
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:16
- back
- Aharon: 18:31:18
- oh
- Aharon: 18:31:23
- bk
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:26
- who else are we missing?
- atrowbri: 18:31:32
- ME
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:31:36
- me
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:40
- should we keep trying atrowbri?
- magdalenatc: 18:31:41
- thank you i am in
- atrowbri: 18:31:50
- I havent gotten a single call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:55
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:08
- adam calling you now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:14
- do you see?
- atrowbri: 18:32:16
- nope
- atrowbri: 18:32:21
- NOTHIGN
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:31
- hrm
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:32:38
- use mine then
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:39
- can we try jessica?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:40
- ok
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:32:43
- teleSEED
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:49
- calling teleSEED
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:57
- yay
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:33:53
- we are set here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:59
- trying you again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:14
- oh - i see. ok
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:34:22
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:34:35
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:43
-
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:35:25
- i'm still not in
- BASEKAMP team: 18:35:59
- WCulpepper - we'll add you
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:06
- stepahinie ok
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:36:16
- thx
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:36:33
- whoops
- WCulpepper: 18:36:43
- copy, new here...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:18
- david g - you lost audio? want us to call u back?
- atrowbri: 18:37:57
- the noise is intense, can the mic be isolated?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:37:58
- yes I have lost audio
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:38:32
- do you mean my mic should be isolated?
- atrowbri: 18:38:51
- No, basekamp is just noise with a few voices
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:21
- ok , so we have 10 locations on the audio call -- not too bad
- atrowbri: 18:39:27
- the hammering and moving and slammig
- atrowbri: 18:39:33
- it's all basekamp noise
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:42
- yeah, we are noisy here
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 18:39:50
- yes i hear the hammering, slamming too
- Alliy Reynolds: 18:39:50
- :
- atrowbri: 18:40:01
- need an isolated mic
- WCulpepper: 18:40:05
- The ship is at sea
- atrowbri: 18:40:12
- this is not really worth listening for the class
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:18
-
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:25
- oh really?
- Alliy Reynolds: 18:40:34
- eh. it's okay. just listen to the man.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:40:35
- fantastic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:43
- adam, what is the biggest noise problem? kung fu?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:46
- typing?
- atrowbri: 18:42:43
- it's gotten better, it wasnt the kung fu, it's movement in the bk space
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:44
- please everyone mute your audio when not speaking
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:52
- though feel free to speak!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:57
- ok adam, thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:09
- tell us if it gets bad... we'll do what we can to keep noise low
- Aharon: 18:44:46
- well... in copenhagen, i visited tv-tv who are housed in a sqt building. however, they, tv-tv do also get funds from the state.. so on one side of the building, it is all fenced, because police come knocking at times - on the other hand, in the bank, they have money from the state..
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:46:00
- sounds much better
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:06
- Aharon: 18:46:13
- better than what?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:46:32
- we were getting a lot of brushing sound
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:33
- ok aharon - we can bing that up if you'd like? ALan hasnt seen teh text -- or you can speak yourself if you prefer?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:50
- kung fu? or typing?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:56
- i ask because i can stop typing
- Aharon: 18:46:58
- just a note
- Aharon: 18:47:04
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:53
- stephen wright: 18:50:27
- please call me back
- Alliy Reynolds: 18:50:57
- Do you think at some point we can get a little more of a bio on Alan Moore? Personal experience? How he started the House Magic: Bureau of Foreign Correspondence?
- Greg Scranton: 18:51:40
- hang on stephen I'm on it
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:52:17
- Is it possible to have the questions typed out?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:52:32
- its not so easy to hear them from here
- Greg Scranton: 18:52:36
- we'll work on the ?s
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:52:44
- ok
- Greg Scranton: 18:52:56
- text or we'll ask Alan to say them aloud before answering
- Greg Scranton: 18:53:51
- current ? was about the nature of the show as being a "suitcase exhibition"
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:54:01
- yes
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:54:03
- thanks
- Greg Scranton: 18:54:12
- sure
- Aharon: 18:54:44
- it is an interesting observation you made, re dutch cultural relationship with sqts. however, is it not that very example that shows the regulatory function of such activities - rather than a radical function that indeed challanges the status-quo..? (..a bit like fighting to gain acceptance within a given system, to be tolerated - rather than offering a different mode and arguing for equality..)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:29
- can you all hear that question?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:56:38
- no
- Greg Scranton: 18:56:39
- again a follow up to nature of the show travelling around city to city
- stephen wright: 18:56:44
- what question?
- stephen wright: 18:57:04
- i can't hear scott
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:28
- that's because i'm sitting right next to teh mic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:48
- can you hear henken better now?
- stephen wright: 18:57:56
- yes
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:57:59
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:06
- oh - "can't hear scott" -
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:25
- mumbles ...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:58
- aharon had a question above though...
- atrowbri: 19:00:21
- Question: Can you talk a little more about positive tactics, making the commune work before the tanks arrive, so to speak. Avoiding the police arriving at all?
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 19:03:05
- can you call me again?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:09
- y
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 19:03:09
- disconnected
- Aharon: 19:03:18
- capitalism is against state as well..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:23
- adding ou stephanie
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:17
- please mute your mic till you'd like to speak (feel free to speak though!) -- thanks
- Greg Scranton: 19:05:30
- can everyone mute mic unless talking, thx
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:34
- (mute button on your call window)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:46
- we are hypocritical of course, not muting ours
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:57
- but we have to keep it on, since Alan is here in person this week
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:06:05
- cant here the question
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:06:11
- hear
- Greg Scranton: 19:06:14
- ? is about the nature of NYC
- Greg Scranton: 19:06:31
- NYC as center of capitalism
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:06:52
- and whose asking the question?
- Greg Scranton: 19:07:03
- and how squats have been crushed by authorities etc
- stephen wright: 19:07:57
- Alan, I have a question regarding how you see this movement tying into plausible artworlds. Squatting is something of a typology of an artworld -- use the existing but under-used housing opportunities for your otherwise homeless project. The house of art is free and is everywhere to be squatted. Let me give an example. In Martha Rosler's "If you lived here..." project on homelessness, a quote by Peter Marcuse was written on the wall: "Homelessness exists not because the housing system doesn't work but because this is how it works." Well, one might replace the word homelessness by "squattership". Or, one might add the genetive "art" to homelessness and replace "housing system" by art system, giving: "Art's homelessness -- squatting -- exists not becuase the art system doesn't work but becuase this is how it works. Anyway... just a thought... but how to do you see the squatting model -- an epiphetic rather than a parasitical model - as a plausible artworld?
- Greg Scranton: 19:08:50
- you're next stephen
- stephen wright: 19:10:42
- I can't hear anything
- atrowbri: 19:10:52
- insane noise
- Greg Scranton: 19:10:55
- any better?
- atrowbri: 19:10:59
- yes
- stephen wright: 19:11:07
- marginally
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:23
- yeah - that's bkamp
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:34
- "insane noise"
- Aharon: 19:18:30
- homelessness at that time, well.. beginning of 90's was rather hip.. recall that song..?? dadadi-dadada..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:10
- no counter-culture in france --- except for the riots stephen, wouldn't you say?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:00
-
- Aharon: 19:22:48
- it can be argued that he was institutionalised - not nescsart RA..
- Aharon: 19:23:08
- though i agree that RA is a very weak theory
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:51
- Also, i'm curious if anyone here knows anythign about squattign in Philadelphia?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:25:11
- not a thing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:40
- Amanda Hills: 19:26:25
- Like Broadway squats ..in Sydney up to the 2000 olympics...the high profile of these spaces which were highly associated with independant art movements of the time allowing them to survive longer .. The art activist angle coupled with the sensitivity of the state goverment and Sydney city council in the games year to not appear heavy handed in a official response, allowed these spaces a greater oppurtunity to integrate into the community through art which was not usually the case with squatted social spaces previously therfore making them more resistant to immediate eviction....
- Aharon: 19:27:11
- in terms of "cultural centres" - would you say that in a sense, if one looks at religions as artworlds, such attempts at setting cultural centres and indeed, as you mentioned before "embedding within communities", is all too similar to the way religious people work within society?
- atrowbri: 19:29:08
- cannot understand scott
- Aharon: 19:30:08
- also, another question in relation to art, there are squats that set themselves for very limited period for the very aim of putting up a show/festival/gig - and then leave the place. at times, the powers that be let these things happen because they know it is "only temporary"..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:14
- i asked about squats in philadelphia
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:27
- can you hear albo jeavons?
- atrowbri: 19:30:41
- no knowledge of squatting in chattanooga beyond homelessness
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:57
- aharon & amanda, we will get to your comments too jsut wanted to address the local here for a bit
- atrowbri: 19:33:09
- "Squatters settled on land all over Cherokee Nation. This was strictly illegal and the goverment attempted to protect the Cherokee's legal rights to the land. A squatter could legalize his claim by marrying a Cherokee--or leave the territory. There was a sudden upswing in marriages between whites and Cherokee. Then John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, ordered Andrew Jackson to march from Chattanooga to Augusta to remove squatters from Cherokee land."
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:18
- alex is asking if squatters can get services like electricity & water in london
- Aharon: 19:34:08
- they can.. if they can get ito the electric/water system..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:15
- alex is asking whether or not there are places where people can stil squat in philly
- Amanda Hills: 19:37:02
- religious people link with communites via a number of avenues, they can then move in a community on a number of differnent levels so yes, squatting acitvist groups who are articized as well as politicized alter the algotrithim that authority is familiar with in that moment. It can create breathing spaces to give time for new things to happen..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:27
- chris has a real estate liscence, and is talkign about pennsylvania law - if you occupy a space for 25+ years then you qualify for "adverse possession" and can claim ownership
- atrowbri: 19:37:34
- [QUESTION] Alan: How would you see the relationship between a successful squat and gentrification, wouldn't a successful squat automatically become a tool of recuperation via gentrification?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:25
- btw, did you all ehar amanda's comment
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:27
- ?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:30
- hear?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:56
- "angela" oops
- Amanda Hills: 19:39:30
- thanks for the oppurtunity to listen in on this chat...very interesting.. gotta go and have a late breakfast now then go sit on a beach.....cheerio
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:43:16
- gentrification is not necessarily the problem, the problem is whether there have the resources made available for people/artists who dont have the resources or money to exist under the conditions that they need - which is something the Dutch have tried to resolve
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:43:38
- they have the resources..meant to say
- atrowbri: 19:44:18
- post-autonomy: anywhere we can take a look at those potential solutions?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:44:34
- I think the recourse to Roslers formula of gentirication is quite lazy
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:44:55
- I can find out for you
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:44:59
- if you wish
- atrowbri: 19:45:25
- there is a discussion page for each event you can post it to
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:45:34
- ok
- atrowbri: 19:45:49
- http://basekamp.com/about/events/house-magic-european-squatted-social-ce... comments, at the end of the page
- Greg Scranton: 19:46:35
- organization of activities at social centers?
- Greg Scranton: 19:46:50
- the question was (above)
- Greg Scranton: 19:48:17
- some photos from this evenings chat http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/sets/72157623120748615/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:16
- can you all hear Henken?
- atrowbri: 19:50:22
- ye
- atrowbri: 19:50:26
- s
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:31
- magdalenatc: 19:51:32
- i wanted to ask a question about the project Magic House as research and about this collection of various squatting situations that you have gatehred. they are all very interesting and useful, but I wanted to ask about your udnerpinning question that you might be working on and that researching those projects help in answering? perhaps you mentioned that already...?
- Greg Scranton: 19:52:14
- magda we'll get you in the queue
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:14
- someone mentioning the homesteading movement here
- magdalenatc: 19:52:55
- can you just read out my question whenever time comes...
- Greg Scranton: 19:53:11
- yes magda
- magdalenatc: 19:53:20
- thank you
- Greg Scranton: 19:54:16
- of course
- Aharon: 19:55:34
- maybe its a plausible gentrification artwirld..
- magdalenatc: 19:55:34
- thanks fo rthe photos
- stephen wright: 19:56:24
- oops. I'm disconnected
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:39
- connecting you
- stephen wright: 19:56:44
- thanx
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:57
- ben has a comment about a superfund site --- can you hear?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:01
- (then magda)
- magdalenatc: 19:59:32
- that's great answer!!! thanks
- Aharon: 19:59:57
- who is the other alana moore..???
- Aharon: 20:00:32
- oh
- Aharon: 20:00:33
- i c
- Aharon: 20:00:36
- lol
- stephen wright: 20:00:51
- Super talk Alan, thanks a lot! (Btw, there's another Stephen Wright too -- he's a serial killer though.)
- Greg Scranton: 20:00:53
- Public School....
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:00:55
- I have lost contact
- Greg Scranton: 20:01:14
- p-a we're on it
- Aharon: 20:01:26
- thanks alan!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:01:30
- thanks
- tephanietate1209" title="stephanietate1209">stephanietate1209: 20:01:35
- thanks
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:01:45
- yes very interesting
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:56
- http://www.basekamp.com/about/events/house-magic-european-squatted-socia...
- stephen wright: 20:03:58
- THe whole squatting scene in South America is really interesting (esp. Brazil and Argentina) and would be surely interested in finding out more about all this stuff.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:00
- http://www.basekamp.com/about/events/house-magic-european-squatted-socia...
- Greg Scranton: 20:04:47
- Alan will provide some links to online resources
- stephen wright: 20:05:12
- excellent
- magdalenatc: 20:05:34
- thank yp
- Greg Scranton: 20:05:35
- thanks everyone for coming
- Alliy Reynolds: 20:05:35
- *clap clap clap*
- magdalenatc: 20:05:39
- you
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:44
- goodnight everyone
- Alliy Reynolds: 20:05:51
- thanks guys!
- stephen wright: 20:05:53
- see you next week
- Greg Scranton: 20:05:55
- feel free to lurk as well
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:06:04
- thank you and look forward to joining you again soon
- Greg Scranton: 20:09:11
- nite all
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:09:46
- good night and thank you for a very thought provoking debate
2010-01-19
Art(www)orlds and open-source culture
Week 49 TUESDAY: Abriendo Caminos / La Comunitaria TV
Hi Everyone,
Please join us for another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This Tuesday we’ll be talking to Federico Geller, a founding member of the Buenos Aires-based group Abriendo Caminos / La Comunitaria TV, a collective which uses popular pedagogy principles to carry out training workshops on media tools — including video, radio and other art-related practices — with groups and communities whose use of media is all to often as consumers rather than producers.
http://www.colectivoabriendocaminos.blogspot.com/
http://comunitariatv.blogspot.com/
http://www.quevivaladiversidad.blogspot.com/
“Communication”, the group asserts, “is a human right that is curtailed when the media of expression and distribution are concentrated in a few hands alone. With our own media, we seek to multiply the voices, the perspectives and proposals that enable us to move toward a more democratic society.” On this basis, the group works very concretely to construct and share popular communications tools to produce a diversity of voices — and above all to open spaces where voices typically dismissed as noise make themselves heard as necessary and dissenting parts of the conversation in an non egalitarian society. The collective also works towards producing documents and records of social struggles, and on political intervention in public space using different types of visual and other media. It produces Radionautas, a weekly radio program in and for Don Orione, a densely populated but neglected neighborhood in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
What does it mean to use art-related communications tools and practices for such purposes? To deploy them in lifeworlds so far outside the framework of the mainstream artworld? At the very least, by suggesting that these tools and practices are potentially empowering — and may even be threatening to an unequal social order — they seem to stake out a very strong position with regard to a question which has come up countless times in the course of our discussions this year: What does art bring, if anything, to the collaborative endeavors in which it partakes? By seeing art as competence rather than object, as a tool rather than the end product, they believe that art does have a crucial role in lifeworld transformation. The type of television produced by La Comunitaria TV in the course of the workshops jars expectations geared toward the horizon of the mainstream — suggesting that the post-conceptual practices we call “plausible artworlds” are often very close in terms of their values to the mainstream they are seeking to escape. And this becomes clear in comparison with the collective work and world of Abriendo Caminos, an artworld utterly unlike any other we have examined, focusing on the desire to give world extension to the overlooked and the unheard. And perhaps the reason why the group’s latest project is called “Que Viva la Diversidad!” — whose subtitle alone explains the kinship with the outlook of Plausible Artworlds: “Los mundos posibles son mundos diversos”
Transcription
Week 49 TUESDAY: Abriendo Caminos / La Comunitaria TV
Greg: Hello Scott it looks like he's there.
Scott: We need Federico.
Greg: Let's see. I'm not seeing him in the list of callers here.
[child crying]
Scott: Hey Greg, his status is offline so he's probably bumped down to the bottom. He said that they've tried to turn it online and they can't seem to do it.
Greg: Oh he's calling now so what should I – let's see.
Scott: Everybody just say decline. We should probably tell him not to call because that'll confuse everything there'll be two calls. Decline and yeah he should be in the list down with the grey x's.
[child speaking]
Greg: All right here we go. But let's see. Let's try it here see if this will work. All right we got you.
Federico: Okay. There was something broke.
Greg: Yeah it was a little tricky. This is Greg by the way.
Federico: Who's speaking?
Greg: My name is Greg and I'm also with Basekamp just hosting the audio for this evening.
Federico: Okay.
Greg: So welcome. You're there we've got you still. Wonderful. Anyway hi. So how…
[child speaking]
Greg: Stephen, are you going to give an intro or I'm not sure how we were going to …?
Stephen: Yeah. Federico, can you hear me?
Federico: Yes I can hear you now but just two seconds ago I couldn't.
[man/child speaking]
Stephen: Okay. So there maybe moments when this doesn't work, if that happens just let me know and we'll let you know and then we'll like repeat stuff.
Federico: Okay.
Stephen: That's how it works when you use capitalism apparatus for free it works as well as it works.
Federico: Either sometimes.
Stephen: So listen, Federico welcome. It's great to have you with us. Actually I'm pretty excited about this discussion, this potluck, it's the 51st one or the 50th one that we've done in this year, examining what we're calling Plausible Artworlds or those kinds of art sustaining environments, and also of course beyond that life sustaining environments. And when I was talking to you not that long ago I guess about two weeks ago in Argentina we were just incredible in chatting about one thing and another and it just suddenly came up that you were working on a project, which in so many ways resembles the spirit of what we hope in Plausible Artworlds. In other words, this idea of what you call Long Live Diversity which is a project that Abriendo Caminos sort of linked into. But the idea of this is they need some to demote and diversity.
[man/child speaking]
And in fact possible worlds or what we call Plausible Worlds, which are slightly more than possible ones because they actually exist, are diversed worlds. And I think that nothing can be more in tuned actually with what the incredible diversity that in the last 50 weeks that we've seen, not really seen but we've heard. So you're here you're the only representative of a collective which is very broad and very diverse in itself. And you're talking about three specific projects. One which I don't really know anything about which is Abriendo Caminos, the other one is one which you've been working on I think if I understand correctly a little bit longer, which is called La Comunitaria TV Community Television, and a third one which I just mentioned Long Live Diversity which is a newer project. But just, and I'll stop with this one remark, is that some of the people on this discussion have already met you but perhaps didn't know that they met you. I know that Scott Rigby. Scott, are you still with us?
Scott: Yep.
Stephen: Scott you've actually met Federico on a previous occasion. It was on the occasion where you met me at a Paypax Arts in I think it was 2004…
Scott: Oh you know what.
Stephen: …when Federico was involved in a discussion around the notion of reciprocal ready base representing at that time a collective in which he was involved at that time which was called The GAK the group with [Algejaraio]. And so I don't know if you recall him but he's sort of been sometimes in the shadows and sometimes in the spotlight of discussions that have been most important to me involving how art can connect to politics. So Federico I'll leave it at that and I'll turn it over to you if you want to present why you do what you do and how you do it, and since when and where it's all going, then we'll certainly jump in. Thanks.
Federico: Thank you Stephen. La Comunitaria TV and Abriendo Caminos is the same project really. The La Comunitaria TV is like the video branch and Abriendo Caminos is the collective where we have the video TV for those radio and graphics. So the modern growth is Abriendo Caminos and La Comunitaria TV was the project that's serve as [inaudible 07:38] TV, which had our own entertainment and we began to make some TV emissions around 2004 to middle of 2005. And it was a very interesting experience with a very low rating, that means just a few people could see or sign them and because most of them have cable TV.
But was it very interesting for us who have the experience and to begin to work with media language and beyond towards it and the media TV went on after we decided not to make more TV emissions. So just for making TVs these problems about the name, not the levels of names, and sometimes they're more important than others. And I remember when you were talking the meeting we're having with in New York we have very good memories of this situation. And I remember we had very nice discussions and other [inaudible 08:44] at the gallery but those are the conflicts we have the [inaudible 08:48] Timeout Magazine.
Stephen: Yes because they said the opposite of what we were doing, exactly opposite.
Federico: That was very interesting the [inaudible 09:00] experience no but you were making such a big effort for explaining how I can change politics of life and the magazine was inviting people to see how I could do anything about that now.
Stephen: Exactly it was beyond belief but you're right exactly that was true.
Federico: But I remember also that we have this program where the schedule was basically traded with the demonstration against the world. But was a massive situation in New York it was very impressing for me to see these schools, to be in New York demonstration. And I remember that there were a lot of people there and I was very excited.
[Man/child]
When I read the newspaper the next day it was incredible to see how most of the headlines were talking about some kind of failure in the demonstration because just when you're before there was this massive historical demonstration before the war started. I don't know if you remember this.
Stephen: No I remember it very well. And I mean we decided not to do the talk at the gallery we decided to take part in the demonstration and then go to the gallery from the demonstration after distributing relevant material in the demonstration. So you're absolutely right the whole thing was spun, even though it was a very large demonstration, as being less significant than the previous one. You're right yeah.
Federico: Exactly. But if you see the story covered of the demonstration I think that this year they were one of the biggest demonstrations in human history but they were making a comparison with the demonstration of the year before, before the war started. And just talking about the cost of, talking about rating and about the effect of things or the work we have been making with the Abriendo Caminos and La Comunitaria TV is a very low rating work it's not something that has a massive effect. Only like residence it can have massive effects only when it's part of a more collective experience. But what we're doing now, most of the work we're doing, is to make work of bases. It's not what we call here in Spanish it's [inaudible 11:33] it means working with the bases.
Stephen: Yeah grassroots, grassroots.
Federico: Yes grassroots exactly. Grassroots work. And they use to make people produce their own media their own radio experiences and programs and to share time. And where you have quite a way from any kind of mainstream at the moment have been a very, very interesting experience, not only talking a collective but as an individual to mean – because in the moment we met I was in a very strange situation working with GAK. And we weren't really like touching the rising of this moment one of the driving of the political arts after the Seattle non-effect. But after this year after we split in those years to 2004, 2005 and I decided to return to this school and to be working in a place that is 25 kilometers far away from the downtown.
Stephen: Right. Yes it's very far, it's a very poor working class densely populated neighborhood right.
Federico: Exactly. But at the same time as we are doing this kind of grassroots work we are also trying to connect with some other subjects and not be reviewed to [inaudible 13:08]. This has been attention in the group all the time as thinking how to value our time, how to share time and to feel that we can do some groundwork this grassroots work, but also to participate in broader conflicts. For us it's very important to create into work with a coaching too no.
Stephen: For sure.
Federico: And in this moment we are also sharing [inaudible 13:38] time with a [inaudible 13:41]. You know Stephen and maybe the other members there have been some trials, in this moment lots of trials to, not only the military but also the civilians that took part of the Argentina dictatorship and we are helping with videos and graphics for promoting the social participation these trials.
Stephen: Yeah that's important maybe you could say a little bit more about that Federico. How you do that? What's the history of that? I'm not sure everyone is so familiar with that story.
Federico: Well I think it's interesting to know because it's very original I think. The situation in Argentina we have this terrible dictatorship. It was one of many but the last one was the worse one. And there was a political decision but was shared by many institutions, many social [inaudible 14:39] or Argentinean society that was the examination of a very broad territory that was composed by many political organizations. Some of them were armed but many of them were also, most of them, were grassroots organizations. And where it's calculated that 50,000 people were killed during the dictatorship was between 1976 and 1983. And when the dictatorship finished and it finished after the Venice or Falkland War that was the reason that they thought they had to finish was not because of the inner resistance but most because of this international trader.
When democracy arrived and all these crimes were revealed and they came to make trials and remained responsible of the dictatorship or just and some of the medium ranges also. But because of the military pressure and the pressure of other capitalist specters the trials couldn't go on. And then [inaudible 16:01] President a right to go forward he made implementation laws to release or to set free the military of the dictatorship. So this is the beginning of what we call the Impunitive Time now. The long years were they lost absolutely impunitive about the times of the dictatorship. But there was a very strong response of the CV society that wouldn't respect this opportunity or the situation where the media and the strongest representative of the political power tried to talk about some kind of specification, to look about forgiveness and the sociopath theory that Argentina was in some moment kept by two different things. Them on the voice on the right or them on the voice of the extreme left and democracy was to forget and forgive and just taking care of our press in the future.
But the Human Rights Organization mainly [inaudible 17:16] and their equals and they appeared in the late '90s take a very strong role, not only administration but also political world and communication role, in the legal world also. And just in 2003 the impunitive laws they were renewed or destroyed and the justice could make trials again. So it was a very original situation but since Sebastor more than two decades something that was supposed to be this perfectly important suddenly its [inaudible 18:04]. Nowadays like there are many, many trials happening here with society and in other provinces many stories, many histories that were kept under lock now are appealing them.
Stephen: And that's a really important thing. In fact just as an anecdote but it's a way of kind of making it tangible is that originally we had suggested you would talk, not tonight but in two weeks on the 21st. And in fact it works out better for you to talk tonight because as I understand on the 21st there's a very important judgment which will be handed down in an important case. Could you say something about that? And also that'll be a way to say what you do tangibly and materially and concretely when they're in the case of these much belated trials.
Federico: Okay. The 21 the sentences I don't know the Spanish word for this decision of the child supporting time that people have to be in jail or be berated. Now there's a lot of expectation about this. What's the word in English for this?
Stephen: Yeah the sentence, the sentence will be handed down. Yeah.
Federico: Okay. The sentence will be on 21 so there is to make a [inaudible 19:30] bell with heart and music and be waiting for the decision of the judges in the front of the tree of that building no. And it's a complex situation because the legal condemnation is just about of this what we're trying to do is to [inaudible 19:52] this legal condemnation with the social condemnation and that's our ability to call people, to join and to show this situation it's a real event. Not only is it happening just in the courtrooms of the criminal of justice.
Stephen: And so how do you do that? What do you do? I mean I know what you do but I'm asking you because I've participated in these carnavelist social condemnations but could you describe it?
Federico: Well there is these situations where you have been I remember like I think two years ago, no one year ago maybe, no two years ago.
Stephen: Yeah.
Federico: Because I thought it was a but now it's not but now he's…
Stephen: Iris Sedgeway yeah.
Federico: …because the situation was too slow and we want him to hurry up. And there is a lot of work are interventions or printing material for sharing with social organizations, going to school and top with students making the kind of work we do we were talking with chancellors about making medias and talking about present, about past, about history in our life. And we are also making more for this arrangement work that many of the places that were used for killing people some people call them Concentration Camps but they're very different to the Tramos German Concentration Camps. But another expression also is [inaudible 21:34] and there were many of these places more than 300 maybe 360 the whole country. And some of them now are being used by Human Rights Organization as memory plates.
So there are a lot of activities also and they're really a problem. There is a lot of communication and creative work we are using to promote memory and to give these things a lack. We'll start making [inaudible 22:12] but they are in for what page? Page I sent you where we're the recording side of the situation. And we're making now a longer appeal about capital [inaudible 22:25]. Capital [inaudible 22.26] is a place that still works it belongs to the Army. And what's the biggest of these places? It's a place where more than 5000 people were tortured and killed. And [inaudible 22:42] is not a very famous place there are others that are very more famous than this. So we're now trying to make a media to the standpoint happen there. It's not very clear how was the organization of the situation but it was a trial going on and now we have a more clear picture. It's like a puzzle where you have to find different pieces and put them together their contradiction. It's very interesting work.
Stephen: For sure. And so you do this as a collective but what exactly does your collective bring to the operation?
Federico: Part of the media recording…
Stephen: Right.
Federico: …because it's very interesting the situation that part of the trials are being recorded officially but the images are not being allowed to be communicated until they have the final sentence. So it can happen two years or three years for the images the official images to be shared probably quick. So in some way you have a blackout of image in most of the situations of the trials; there are no image about this. So one of the ideas we have was to call students art students to go and draw during the trials. And we have a good success because there was a lot of people going there and just drawing situations.
Some of them may release their drawings some kind of expression is absolutely subjective but we were collecting all of these drawings and they will be published next year with a description of the sentence of the trial [inaudible 24:42]. So this was a strategy to try to break these blackouts of image about the trials. Some of the situation can be filmed there are very specific moments where you can take your camera out and make some pictures, but there're just a few situations. I think this is a very interesting thing because we're very conscious that we're no image, there is no information. It's very difficult to talk about these things when you don't have images. So the work we're doing is part of the media recordings of the situation that can be filmed and filming the activities that are around the [inaudible 25:27] and also the graphic designs for all these situations.
Also we're making a map that you can see in the [inaudible 25:39] web page with an interactive map where there's also printed material where you can see the Argentinean map and you can see the points where you have trials and which other situations are having these trials.
Stephen: Do you have a link that you can send of that to us?
Federico: Yes. What I see here is the things we can log off and also something that just because problem with [inaudible 26:11]. I can send you an email if you want.
Stephen: You can send it in the text.
Scott: Stephen for some reason I'm not sure why we're able to add them to the conference but we're not able to…
Stephen: Okay. Okay.
Scott: But you know you could either send it to email or – is it off of one of the three, is it off of…
Stephen; No it's on the He-Ho side. I'll find it I'll get it for you.
Scott: Okay cool.
Federico: I can send it to you in this moment.
Stephen: Okay.
Federico: Maybe you can pull them.
Stephen: I will.
Federico: Okay.
Stephen: For sure yeah.
Federico: Because in there you will see in the first page part of the work we have been doing is just they're in the opening page.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: Federico.
Federico: Yes.
Scott: I just had a quick question in terms of my lack of knowledge of the political system there. If there's this control over images to what extent are the images you produce suspect to be censored or taken off the internet or like to what…
Federico: No there is no – that's not the situation. The situation is that the image we are producing are perfectly even we don't trace any kind of censorship. The problem is that in most of the trial the situations were these guys are there being judged you can go there and follow the situation completely but you're not allowed to bring cameras or videos or photographs. So we're not having the situation to record.
Scott: Is there any sort of understanding as to why or is this always the case?
Federico: No every tribunal has different laws and different information. So some of them we could go and film, but for example, the ones that are being developed in the capital in Buenos Aires you cannot do it.
Stephen: Do they give any sort of reason?
Federico: Yes it's because of protecting these guys before they are condemned.
Stephen: Okay.
Federico: You should take care of them no.
Stephen: Right.
Federico: Image.
Stephen: Okay understood.
Federico: But it's not only that it's also some way of by saying this is totally farced. It's totally farced where many, many sectors you can picture it in a country where the justice was also part of the dictatorship. We don't have a real democratic justice at this moment no.
Stephen: Right. Right.
Federico: The trials are also very important because they need conflict inside the justice institution.
Stephen: So I don't mean for this to sound like you're providing a simple service but to whom are you speaking? Like who's your audience with this work? Is it anybody who will see it or is it for a particular section or sector of the public?
Federico: Well to be true there are [inaudible 29:36] and a specific audience. The desire is to make the wider audience that is possible but what is a specific audience it must be taking into account the support of social organizations the verified of installation of groups where the memory work and the human rights history is important for building identity.
Stephen: So in essence you're building an archive. This is something we talk about a lot I think in our…
Federico: Exactly.
Stephen: Yeah okay.
Federico: In some ways an archive.
Stephen: Yeah.
Federico: But we expect to be a very active archive. We want to use it as tools using only as tools for [inaudible 30:19] people to participate now.
Stephen: Right that's great. I think that's exciting.
Federico: Yes it is because also it's very happy because it's not that culture society is really taking care of these and it's not that everybody understands that this situation is very important for the present and the future.
Stephen: Right.
Federico: Because it's such a bad history that not everybody wants to see [inaudible 30:47] because only to here again and on the testimony and the people that were in culture there and the things they saw it's not a [inaudible 30:57].
Stephen: Right.
Federico: So many people are really happy. Actually most of the Argentinean society are satisfied with just this time when you arrived and this is very important because there was a low moment in Argentinean history and you could feel that this thing was not really important for the whole but just for the people that had been in some way [inaudible 31:21] like this. Finally it was really important and I really think that the clarity of the Kissinger Program was a very, very, very, very extent deal than relation of the punitive. And this is a very fascinating question because you have from this [inaudible 31:46] to this moment you have a very strong economic development and capitalist experience, but at the same time you have a lot of work regarding human rights and very lax of the human rights movement.
So it was some kind of [inaudible 32:05] between their [inaudible 32:07] and the economics with some very important gestures from the state where the past was being kept away. Some of it was something that you could talk about much. And you can see that in the TV many programs in the film production. You can see that there's some kind of common culture where many people participate.
Stephen: Now that's a point, if I can just interject, that's a point Federico that I'd like you to elaborate on. Because I remember when you first stated, and maybe you'll have to go back a little bit in time, when you first told me you were working with this new thing called La Comunitaria TV you gave me some links to go and look at them.
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: And you gave me a warning. You said "You know this is not going to look like the kind of conceptual art that you're used to looking at. It's not going to look like high production value television." And it didn't and I think that's what is so unbelievably great about it actually is that it doesn't look like everything else it doesn't look like anything else. Could you talk a little bit about the aesthetic experience you've had of doing this political type of work?
Federico: Yes. We're having lots of discussions now about these because we have an aesthetic but this is something to a great extent is due to technical tools. We are really working with a very simple video camera and normal computers. And we have some kind of cheap aesthetic I think it's due to the tools we have, but at the same time we realize that we cannot fail because we have part of our work is relationship the problem with the mass media.
One of the first works the La Comunitaria TV made was a map of the big media groups to show the incredible amount of concentrations of TVs and radios. Well the same thing with this happened in the whole world. This incredible whole world concentrated in the production of images. And we are sure that we cannot do the same type of very sophisticated image production and we also believe that there is a lot of contamination of these and sometimes work and other times and with very simple images. It's also a way of saying "Okay we're a talking in a different language. Now we are not part of TV we're not part of the mainstream. This is a work which you have to see in another timeframe, another [inaudible 35:03].
But at the same time we need to be a little bit more, we need to work better with the images. And we are trying to have some experiments where we can have more sophisticated addition work because we see that we are living in a world where the people are watching a lot of images, a lot of things, and some way they we're handling with so many languages that to keep someone attention for 10 minutes or 15 minutes is also quite complicated. But the work we are doing now as we're not making this TV emissions but we are meeting groups showing the [inaudible 35:48] and using the [inaudible 35:49] as material for discussion allow us to create an environment before we showed the images and to create this openness I was referring to. I don't know if this answers your questions Stephen.
Stephen: No it answers it in a way that I wasn't expecting. It's kind of takes it in a different – well it opens up a whole new perspective. But I was really thinking more of the nuts and bolts of that experience we have. Because Federico I mean I know you don't want to talk about the GAK experience and it's not what we're talking about tonight but what I found most compelling about the GAK and it's through the GAK that I met you…
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: …was that it was a type of conceptual art of the highest level of political corrosiveness because in fact it was somehow releasing the total logical imperative of conceptual art on the real, it was unleashing it, it was making it dangerous. It was actually not about the consumption of signs and symbols but about participating in their production. And I mean I can give countless examples and I've written about it and the point is not to talk about that but it's important for people who are listening to understand that you came from very unusual – I mean it's almost unique to, well it's not unique to Argentina because you do find examples elsewhere, but it was a very particular case of using conceptual arts skills with graphic design and political activism.
And then you took that to La Comunitaria TV and the results looked very different. I mean it was a kind of a shock. And I think that was a really interesting move. I think it's one that almost no conceptual or post-conceptual artist who would dare to make. Now I just wanted you to kind of talk about that experience like what it was like to work with those people you know.
Federico: Okay I think it's as you say the GAK wasn't in any situation where there was a lot of discussion about the visual production. And what makes a single analysis of the political situation and then really trying to discuss very deeply about which where the images and the awards that could be [inaudible 38:27]. And this denounce was related to punitive time and punitive times we're talking about now. So we were trying to make connections between past and present. And I think punitive was part of the normal social life and [inaudible 38:50] saw very strong effects to see these images because these images didn't refer to the things that many people think or really have image about this.
So sometimes it's very simple images or very cheap images you were appealing to thousands of people and in some way were sharing your point of view. In some way I think that the graphic work or Abriendo Caminos and the La Comunitaria TV the thing that follows this kind of work. I will send you this production because I think I only share with you the media but it's also the writing on the graphic material. But the fact that when you're making grassroots work and you make a collective, another thing about Abriendo Caminos collective, the collective would make with all our groups for making grassroots production. You have to decide a listening with the people that you're working with who are making a new video. And in some way your language will be some kind of mixture of the presentation culture of the gross that they're participating.
So it's very different to work in a group or artist that has this culture or conceptual art and this close when you're working with that young group of people that lives on the outskirts of when I'm [inaudible 40:21] and from fear you have to create an email situation and decide together which way this will be told. So it's a very single language where you can see [inaudible 40:35].
Now but also I think the work about urgency, about working in this situation of denounce [inaudible 40:48] this very addition to the work you can make when you're working grass root work and you're talking about different things and this very, very low work now. So you're not trying to shape people's attention about the problems but to create a video that will be part of discussion. It's a video that the downside of this whole we'll share with the families. This is a very complete audience I think who we are dealing with.
Stephen: Greg you had a comment about that. Videos is a great discussion.
Federico: Hello.
Greg: Yeah sorry I was unmuting the mic. Yeah I mean I think in our sort of video culture now the discussion is less about sort of an exchange of ideas based on what's occurred or what we've watched in a YouTube culture where you're just reacting and there's no dialogue. It's simply a one way discussion, but I love the idea that you were thinking about videos which create, or as Stephen's written, spark a discussion. I mean I think that's really poetic it's also very useful. I don't know I oftentimes don't think that videos create discussion but rather stifle discussion in many respect. So I like that sort of positive activist's sort of stance that you're sort of taking by saying that.
Federico: Yes or this believing that you'll be there we create a discussion but this is the way that we're working the [inaudible 42:37] to be there so you didn't [inaudible 42:38] them or whatever. We use them in social situations right.
Greg: Right.
Federico: So you are talking we're in a group of 30 young people that they allow you and you allow them and you have to break ice, you have to start a dialogue, you have to create some kind of common ground to begin the discussion and to create new work and with it we produce the video or starting it. I think it's a very, very useful way of people understanding what you want to talk about and what do you want to do then. And it's not believing that the object by itself will opening discussions in a spontaneous way.
Greg: Right. Yeah no that makes absolutely perfect sense. I mean I know that when digital video became sort of a consumer based medium and we said "Oh look at how digital video will democratize the entire process for all people know that we can all make films.
Federico: Yeah.
Greg: You know that's exactly the problematic thinking that I see associated with videos in general. So I think what you're saying makes perfect sense. The opportunity the ability is there but without extending that into sort of the trajectory of whatever the goal of the group that's sort of an empty rhetoric.
Federico: Exactly. Yes, yes I don't believe that. We're being more democratic because there is a lot of media. I think it's a very big problem what you're talking about because this production we're seeing in so many cameras and people showing them in their face or in their blood and etc it's also a lot of noise. But it's a lot of production it was never so much production of images. And that doesn't mean really that we are communicating more.
Greg: Right. No I think that's it too like what you just said there's a lot more noise, there's a lot more to compete with you know.
Stephen: So in that case Federico what do you mean by diversity because I wanted to bring you onto that other project. Kaveeve and I did that we've actually…
Federico: Yeah.
Stephen: What is [inaudible 45:05] exactly then if it's not noise, it's not more of the same what is it for you? What are those voices that you want to bring into the picture? I mean not only why do you want to but what are they?
Federico: I think it's very difficult to talk about diversity. Diversity is I think something very good that appeared in the last years of the political value. As political value where any kind of future we can decide has to be the open to many ways of living life. And I think that we wanted to talk about this, about the problem of diversity we're showing the social more related to the problem of [inaudible 46:01] because Argentina is a place where grass root is not being discussed as much as it should. We're a country that has an image that we are very democratic mixture of phrases. There are very natural trained expression about this.
And finally we talk about the [inaudible 46:23] it's the place where they race is mixed. But what we have really was a very strong political immigration or the shadows of this country decide that this place was this moment in 19th Century was turning them to black and looking for more black and more white and European image. They brought lots, lots of people from Europe to Argentina. And this is now for the first time in Argentina say in the last 10 years and I'm talking about the Italian after this the [inaudible47:05]. The problem of diversity of our regional groups in Argentina began to be part of their change.
So slowly we're talking about diversity in relationship with the cultural diversity of Argentina has been neglected because of this very strong and powerful wide European sender culture. Well those who are diversity in the biological sense because the Argentina now is leaving these incredible moment of this whole big expansion where most of half of the ground can be culture is being used for transgenic [inaudible 47:50]. Maybe it's the country with more transgenic perfection in relationship with total amount of land with no money in the total sense but in the [inaudible 48:01] tense where the most incredible enchanted place.
And this is terrible because lots of natural environments are being destroyed and this some kind of green carepics is being created. And we're losing lots of biological diversity. So in a way we were trying to tolerate diversity using human diversity and biological diversity as values tools to protect. But we didn't show too much diversity or human or biological but we were talking about the obstacles for enjoying diversity. And these obstacles were two we were talking the main obstacles for enjoyed diversity and the ground of the soybean production and the biological aspect and the racism the undercover racism and the human aspect.
And also connecting what you were talking before about [inaudible 49:09] it's not the [inaudible 49:11]. Also what's her reaction of the famous [inaudible 49:20]? Do you remember another word was possible [inaudible 49:23] and some kind of rejection of that? We have to think in another world but it's not like that. Now we have to open the possibility of many, many potential worlds not trying to picture which is the world we have to be altogether.
Stephen: Exactly. Well that's exactly why I say it's very much in the spirit of Plausible Artworlds and it's the reason why we didn't call it possible artworlds because Possible Artworlds would have been, I mean for us, it would have been to give an enormous huge cake and it would be to have caved in completely to the mainstream artworld that likes to call itself The Singular Artworlds.
Federico: That's right.
Stephen: And to say that other worlds are possible is to say, yeah but they don't actually exist they're just kind of possible. It's just like these pipe dreams that exists sort of parallel to the sad reality. No I mean I think the point that you're making if I understand it correctly when you say that [inaudible 50:27] is that it's not just that easy you don't just sort – you can't just say it that way you have to say that if diversity exists then other worlds exists, at least in an embryonic form.
Federico: And I think that as you people and us and so many people around the world we're really creating this sorts of the works not this embryonic form of possible works. And I think it's very hard and very impossible and it's not even desirable that we share a common match of her world we have to go on with our experiments. But if we think back there is a world that exists now and I think that joining and the way of joining is to fight against this world. Now I think we can have our agreements in the ways of [inaudible 51:16] the production of normality. We have a common front on many, many fronts indeed but there is one world now, we know that there is one world.
Stephen: Yes.
Federico: And part of where some of us need to create new things the type of worlds someone must be also to fight against the normality. So when we're talking about the possible world is to say we have to protect a little of diversity but we have to join also in starting against normality.
Stephen: Federico I'm looking at the front page of your Web site the [inaudible 52:00] Abriendo Caminos blog spot and there's a map there, a purple map.
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: In the middle there's Clarene. What's this project about?
Federico: Yes this image you're seeing is just the back of the big media map I was talking about. Clandestine is just a lot of people the main part. It's the main group in Argentina.
Stephen: Okay it is the map I see. Okay.
Federico: It's an interesting situation we're working with this. We're making a mural about this media group and one of this Clandestine Detention Center because it's a very, very heavy story. Claudine was a very important newspaper was created in 1945 and just under the dictatorship was only one newspaper but important for the medium class. But during the dictatorship they began to grow because they made a very sound business the military [inaudible 53:06]. In this business was some kind of gift the military were living to Clarene it was a plan for producing newspaper. The paper for the news. Argentina dictatorship was important most of the paper was using for their tabloids.
So [inaudible 53:26] with all their newspaper like [inaudible 53:30] and there were some were having their own paper factory, so they have very, very cheap paper for producing. They could control most of the prices of the paper for all their newspapers. And in exchange of that they were some kind of minister of information for the dictatorship because they were giving the nice picture about what was happening in Argentina not printing news about the disappearance or the tortures I'm talking about all the achievements of the dictatorship. Now they knew our work the dictatorship the military will remember by self couldn’t do. That was the media one.
And after this after having this new business they began to grow out and the democracy arrived they bought a very important radio and then a TV channel. And then during the national expansion of the Men and Gorbaman they began to grow up and having lots of TV channels, cable TV, internet and suddenly they were the main media group of Argentina. And with this very, very interesting it's also you know that in Argentina there's an organ problem we've got many children where children disappear working by families, military family's relatives of militaries…
[child speaking]
…were changed the names were changed and they were not [inaudible 55:10] of these new families. So there are 400 of these children of Clandestine in the hands of these families. There's 100 of them that have been identified and [inaudible 55:23] but this is not a problem. And it was 32 of these kids were given to the owner of Clarene during the dictatorship. And this is a big problem that now has also legal consequence now that there's a child about this. Or the countries waiting for the DNA analysis of these kids this girl and a boy that refuse to give their blood for checking with the genetic databank. But the fact is that the woman the person as their mother is the owner of Clarine.
So I showed you also patterns of the war we're doing now connecting the past with the present and Clarene is the main political party fort his current problems with the government.
Stephen: Yeah. Can I just say something because it's clear what you just said but if you have never heard this story before it seems so unbelievably insane…
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: …that it might be difficult to understand is that the people who were arrested some of them were women who were pregnant and before they were killed they were allowed to give birth to their children, then they were killed. The children were given to families of the military dictatorship and to their friends. So it means that if the owner, the woman who owned Clarene who was infertile actually was given two children those children their mother was murdered shortly after their birth.
Federico: They had two different mothers.
Stephen: Their origin was never acknowledged. And what I think Federico is saying is that beyond the human horror of this 400 cases of it is that if these people are not cooperating, if they're not doing a DNA, if they're not saying I want to know where I came from, is because there's a tremendous amount of money at stake, which shows the complicity between big money, big media and military dictatorship in Argentina. So just to clarify that.
Federico: Thank you. It's just as you said it's something unbelievable this is for making a Hollywood movie because there are a lot of plots and situations. Like for example, in some moment justice decided to go by force and they wear underwear for making DNA analysis.
Stephen: It's not funny but it's so insane.
Federico: But finally they have this underwear of the lady. The guy for some reason was not using underwear in this moment but his pants out. They were at home now it was not on the street or in the [inaudible 58:19] but when they made their [inaudible 58:22] analysis they found not one they made but three. So these people were prepared for the situation.
Stephen: Yes.
Federico: And they were close but were contaminated with other people's DNA. So show you a very complex situation between the justice, the police, these firemen, the government, it's really something very, very hard. I think it's just an example we're talking about a very complex club where you see that all these situations are not finished. They're not finished by many reasons but one of them is where you have the habit of children they don't know their origins and they have a cloud of impunitive on them on [inaudible 59:13] of people that could help the parents out with reality but they are still keeping some kind of secrete Clarene.
Stephen: Sure.
Federico: Oh it's really depressing what is happening.
Stephen: Just to shift I don't want to take all the time from other people, but just to shift now one of your projects is the Tasha Dehara Mentas the [inaudible 59:40], so the workshop of popular communication tools.
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: What do you mean by tools? I mean could you unpack that a little bit?
Federico: Yes communication tools is all these matters we're talking about is making a [inaudible 59:58] or is making a poster or a mural or a video or a radio program. And what we do is we go to culture centers or we go to schools and we work for some days, normally with junk guys 16, 17, and 18. And what we do is to make them work in communication. So we have a format that we have we're always showing this media map. We talk about concentration of communication in a few hands. We talk about the consequence this has in not only the political but in the shaping of identity, in the shaping of the [inaudible 1:00:44] etc. Then when show one of our medias but it's this [inaudible 1:00:51].
Stephen: All right yeah.
Federico: It's a very strong video because you can see a very powerful [inaudible 1:00:59] in the videos its powerful because it shows this situation very well where you have thousands of guys in the street in front of the apartment of [inaudible 1:01:08] that was one of the men responsible for the dictatorship. And what they're shouting their they're singing there they are expressing their feelings about that. They're facing the police to be able to express their rejection. And after we talk about this we make a connection between the media map and history. This take normally just one hour and a half. And then we decide well it's very important that all of us be able to create our own communication during the next three days you will choose a subject, something you are worried about or interested about. Into the subject you will have to choose one message, just one message an important message to share. And I call in a message to better [inaudible 1:02:04] a strategy of communication. So it's a very nice work to do these people.
Most of the children are in schools they are very [inaudible 1:02:14] and oppressive. And the time that we are there they can have the experience of deciding by themselves. It's very antonymous in a way or some kind of work to decide together what they want to talk about. And what is incredible is the activity that young people have and the eagerness to do things. This is work we make with the [inaudible 1:02:40]. And then entirely after three or four days working with them we have communication or two. We have media normally or we have a graphic production and then we have to decide a way we need this to be. Many times their projections in the schools or in the culture centers where they invite their families and there're always some kind of shock because what is interesting is the children are more readily in school or in these spaces. Also the young people that put more energy for this situation so this change also some relationship between them and their teachers and their families. It's a nice work.
Stephen: Who do you work with when you work with these kids? I mean there's you I kind of know your background you're a biologist become conceptual artist, and for a long time political – I should say one thing also about you that I know is that after living in exile during the dictatorship you made the conscious decision to be a political activist and always to work anonymously. So it's not like you hide your name but you never sign your name to projects right.
Federico: Yes. The work of which I share is Abriendo Caminos work so I share this work with [inaudible 1:04:11]. And we are not always together there are always two or three. We split the situations. So it’s the most intensive work of Abriendo Caminos to work here.
Stephen: What about this motion of anonymity? That's a question of which actually is pretty interesting to us when we think about worlds. Actually I didn't even mean to ask you that question but now that it's come up I want to pursue it a tiny bit. How does that work? I mean you're more depersonalized than anonymous because you'll say oh yeah we work with [inaudible 1:05:06] and so on and you don't hide your name. But one of the problems I know that you have with the GAK was the names became a little bit too important the way they are in the artworld. But I think it's more than not just self-promotion I think there's a kind of politics to it and I'd like you to say something about that.
Federico: Look I'm not against using your name because finally we use it in some spaces. We're not hiding or working in the [inaudible 1:05:41]. I think the discussion was to have a common name not a powerful collective name and I think during the GAK times and also Abriendo Caminos the discussion was to say okay we have to build a collective identity and we have to be very aware of all the problems that are connected with the names because in spaces like the artworld, not only the artworld more so the media world, but whatever culture of work the name becomes very, very important or you have this connection and conflict between resources. And resources money capital or social capital or there are a lot of noise about this.
So I think that also it's some kind of way of putting the pressure on the egos of saying that we're enjoying this time we're sharing this time not for making an [inaudible 1:06:44] but because we want to create something that is new. But at the beginning, for example, when I started to make political work in the university we also had this strategy with the group I was working with. But also in the beginning of the democracy you feel some pressure that you didn't want to be very, very shame. You were not very sure about what could happen if you used your own name for everything you did. So it was also some way of protection. Now the situation has changed a lot because we have this formal democracy for 50 years and I think with all this development of revolution of the web the political of anonymous is really reduced.
So I think there are very different reasons to work in anonymous way but I think it's good for a specific situation it's not something you really have to do. I think that it's good that Argentina also a very long culture of being anonymous because it's a country where you had more time under dictatorship under democracy. So protecting the identity was something shared by a very wide territory of different social organizations was a way of protection. But when we were talking about this problem with GAK more than safety I think it was it was this rejection to the way that the artworld would be which means [inaudible 1:08:34].
Stephen: Yeah right.
Federico: But I can [inaudible 1:08:41] lot of the media world and I'm very happy to know the names of the people that are doing the nice thing. Everybody every can do it's going to be the same person all the time. I think we should play all the different activities. In fact we are not the same person all the time we're not the same person with the people we love or with our family or work. And we have a lot of schizophrenic pressure. So I think it's good to be aware of this and be able to put your name on some situation and then another name for another situation and playing with different identities. I think they only want to discuss our way of starting to do these. To say "Okay I'm not the same guy all the time, now I can change my name for every action." The name also is part of the action so sometimes you can have really nice names for an action that can also help to give them a new meaning.
Stephen: Very definitely. Greg did you have a question because I have another one but it's kind of goes in a different way. Do you want to pursue that a little bit?
Greg: No not specifically. I mean I think this whole chat has been really amazing about how we've been talking about all these different things. And I really am curious, and this is something we always ask our guest, is what does the future hold. I mean I know that a lot will happen what did you say on the 21st, but is that the next sort of stage of this project or are there things that you'll be looking to complete in the next few months or year?
Federico: Well it's a good question. I think it's a big problem because the situation that all the work of the human rights is trite against impunitive has a big problem. So many people participated it was not just a few guys. You could dedicate all your life to follow these guys as they went through trials and not doing anything else. And even in that case you couldn't put them all in child. So I don't know what's going to happen now but the situation of 21 is original because it's one of the first trials that's going to end and we have the sentence, so it will be open in this situation.
About future well there are a lot of questions. We want to go onto work this grassroots work. And I don't know what we are going to do with the trials of next year. We are in a moment of lots of discussion inside the group of how to dedicate with time because what we were talking knowing this chat I think it's the potential that there is when we do the work in a specific territory and there are all these problems of human rights and natural situation the media groups also needs lots of time. So we've seen all the time divided, not only because we have to work for surviving but our free time or political time has also many, many fronts which have to decide what we're going to do next year. What will be our main focus?
Greg: Yeah it sounds.
Federico: We will go on all these situations of trials will go on because we are just a group that are making part of this work of issues and all the friend organizations are going to go on with this. But this is really an open question because there are not many experiences about it.
Stephen: Federico I have two kinds of questions very different. I mean when we last spoke we talked about what I think is a very interesting conceptual project that was done by a young, well it was put together but it wasn't done by him he just put the book together, by a young guy called LaRosa called [inaudible 1:13:03] Gabrielle Lopez about the third disappearance of a man by the name of Lopez. Lopez who was first sequestered kidnapped by the military dictatorship but somehow survived. And because he was a key witness in these trials they're ongoing disappeared again, in other words he was kidnapped and probably killed when [inaudible 1:13:36] killed. And there was a big human cry and then he disappeared from the media.
So this project that has been done by a number of different artists but what they call the third disappearance of Julio Lopez right. Julio is it or Gabrielle?
Federico: Yes Julio.
Stephen: Julio Lopez. And so they've made it their point that no one shall ever forget that there is so far no answer to how it is even under democracy, even under a government that pretends there's human rights and democracy in Argentina that they cannot answer the question why it is that a key witness has disappeared in the middle of a trial. And even though they know who did it for reasons of political power can't say who did it. Now you could say such problems exist in the United States they exist everywhere but what was interesting to me is what your analysis of it was. And I thought it was interesting artistic perspective is because you said it's not an interesting question to say where is Julio Lopez if you don't also associate it with a different question. Could you unpack that because I was really fascinated by the way you described it to me last week?
Federico: Yes I remember we were talking about that and it was a very strong shock because it was a new disappeared after more than 20 years. It was like a nightmare that was common but again this is not only the case that this happened also woman who Santa Fe promised that was killed in a very strange situation but she was also witness once this [inaudible 1:15:26]. But I think that the problem is that the Julio Lopez was showing the police, the police of Buenos Aires that is the biggest police force in Argentina, was not under control of the government not the strict government control. Because it was the mafia everybody knows that the mafia. We do in Argentina we want to make a remake of Godfather the [inaudible 1:15:58] actors we'll be using a police unit. And so it's a very strong complex situation.
But when this happened all the human rights group they had to discuss how are they going to go on and I think it's a part of human flesh. But finally they could go on because also they were inside the police there are also different events. Now the police is not a [inaudible 1:16:31] but also being used by many groups to say okay this justice movement has now a very sound meaning because the problem still exists but the police has done so many people he used the feeling of Julio Lopez saying he was in this trial of justice so he has a chance to go on.
So finally what I think is saying just where is Julio Lopez is neglecting that we know that Julio Lopez was disappeared by a very specific mafia inside the police which is related to some guys that were being judged. But the main problem is that we're living in a territory where there is a very complex [inaudible 1:17:16] of forces between the friend Air Force and the [inaudible 1:17:20]. It's a very complex situation how to deal with that. If you have a image when you have a government and the government control all the territory of the police you're living in another reality.
Stephen: Absolutely. I think it's – I'm fascinated by the way you analyze this because not only does it make art into a kind of a useful – your outlook means that you take art to be a useful strategic tool. And you just don't sort of make an artwork about some sort of form of social indignation. You don't say "This is a scandal. Where is Julio Lopez?" You use art in a strategic way to produce certain results in the world, and yet I feel you're doing it in a way that doesn't instrumentalize art because a tool can be an instrument.
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: But this is a kind of a machine more than an instrument somehow. It don't know because you can see the danger right. You can see that if it's just about trying to produce some kind of immediate result and to measure the power balance and so on. But in fact it's more about pushing on a number of different buttons at the same time. Because you're not saying let's not ask that question because we might embarrass the government.
Federico: Of course.
Stephen: There's no censorship right.
Federico: You have to do something about you cannot neglect this way is very different to go and ask the government and only the government instead of going and ask the police directly.
Stephen: Right.
Federico: I think it is part of the left culture we have a conversation where you try to say we're all the same, police are all the same, they're all the same sharing some kind of disturbing state of [inaudible 19:27:6]. And I think it's very important to be able to make [inaudible 1:19:34] not to say okay not all these situations are the same we have to be able to make difference contrast, not for accepting them, not to melting with them, but to say okay this is all about complete shit and this and anonymous shit and they're not one for fracture, they're not diversity inside the shape like not being able to deal with any complexity of life or political.
So in position to the Julio Lopez affair I think the answer was to talk about Julio Lopez to ask about him but putting your thoughts and the creativity team and going on with the justice situation.
Stephen: Right. Okay. And the other question, I said I had two questions because following up on what Greg was asking about what the future holds, the other question is that I have a kind of a skewed view of Argentina because I see – I mean my friends or my network in Argentina is largely based on sort of conceptual artist who are also political activist. So I have an idea that the entire country is sort of extraordinarily open minded and progressive kind of project, which I know also is far being the truth. But one of the particularities of your group as opposed to anybody else I know is that you have done a lot of work in the south of the country.
And when I say the south of course I mean with the Mapuche Indians. And I've actually asked that question to other groups for whom I have a lot of respect. The [inaudible 1:21:29] for example and I said yeah "Abriendo Caminos they work with the Mapuche Indians why don't you have any contacts? Why are you ignoring that whole social dimension?" And they say they just don't, I don't know, they're not point in there. So how does that work for you? How is it that you are point into that community and what kind of work are you doing with them and what will you be doing in the future with them?
Federico: With whom?
Stephen: Well I don't know exactly with whom, but I know you have done work in the south right…
Federico: Yes.
Stephen: …of Argentina.
Federico: Yes. This is going to go on because we have friends living in [inaudible 1:22:13] and they work all the time with this situation. So we try to go and we try to create also situations with them. But going to the first side of the intervention is that I really think that they're happening just to the political [inaudible 1:22:37] you become here. We're feeling quite far away from this specialist spaces. In this spaces it's normal to talk about relationships between politics and us and that means a lot of accumulation of previous and former debates. And in fact now we're not talking about that. It's not a problem. The contact I have with this group of people is very sharp and it was I think three or four years. Because I think that there are some limitations very strong limitations either discussions about that are being held that it's a small world.
And I think this small world would be more productive and more creative in another moment of history. I think that there are moments of more activity of more political activity like we have in the 2001, 2002, and 2003 when you have a population of people mixing and where you have a special openness in the people that want to make a sensitive part. But they're also some kind of recluse where the participation of artist is not as creative. I think one moment of this I'm talking is the person nowadays. I think that the possibility that the artistic groups they make a collaboration and it's very open to the situation of society.
Stephen: Right. Okay.
Federico: And this is a moment of a lot of I think creative work that's been happening and is happening in outside group not only social organizations. But of course there are moment people were mixing. We have very encouraging moment in 2002 and 2003 with the media classes and the working classes were mixing in these teams and they were sharing a lot of their production material and subjective production. And that was a moment that is not happening in the same way. I think it just happened.
[humming sound]
Stephen: Okay. Well I feel like one question I always have, not always but often have for our guest and it seems like an oversimplified question but doesn't really get to the heart of the matter, but that is I noticed you had mentioned that you're a biologist or at one point you considered yourself to be a biologist. And I'm wondering do you see yourself would you call yourself an artist? Would you feel comfortable calling yourself an artist or do you believe that it's silly to even think about that, or how do you think about that term?
Federico: I was talking with my brother two weeks ago about this and I told him that I'm not an artist. He was laughing at me because he thought it was like some kind of very childish attitude for me.
Stephen: How come did he say why?
Federico: When I travel I put myself as a teacher when I have to feel this when these things you have to feel the airport I put teacher. I think it's only because I have conflicts with the art world. I think a lot of my work can be thought of as an artistic production.
Stephen: Great.
Federico: Well I started biology and then began to do graphic work always with the political but I think if my country [inaudible 1:26:44] because I think we cannot generalize our countries with the whole world. We share some problems but I don't know when you go to a place like Germany where you have millions tens of thousands of artist living your political discussions are very different when you go to a city like Buenos Aires where you can have maybe [inaudible 1:27:11] at this being the political.
Stephen: Right.
Federico: It's a very small world you know everyone.
Stephen: Right.
Federico: And in some places I think the one half can be more strong and more political than another. If you got to [inaudible 1:27:26] you will find many groups [inaudible 1:27:31] an incredible constellation of groups then your attitude to outcome would be the same. I think art is a very powerful thing. It's a very good way for talking about other matters also. And in Argentina you have to talk in your words it's very strong any place. You can start talking about art and to talk about history or about human sensitivity or biological problems that are there. But we know that in many, many places art still has a very strong [inaudible 1:28:00] and the same work by itself creates some physical attitudes and obstacles to talk about the police.
Stephen: Yeah I think that's as this whole evening has been very insightful and well considered. It's a term that I struggle with often because I earn my living by teaching so I consider…
Federico: What do you teach?
Stephen: I teach media. I don't know how else to categorize it but my background is in Art but in media based arts. So I always was very reluctant to take on this title of artist and yet as soon as I started teaching it just kind of became a natural way of defining myself in an area that was not the art department. So it's funny how I fell back to art when I was outside of the art world.
Federico: Of course.
Stephen: And now what you said is very resonant with me. It's like I recall why I was so resistant to necessarily call myself an artist but it's probably out of laziness to some degree.
Federico: Yes. But I think it's good that we can train ourselves to give different answers in different situations. And to be able to say I'm an artist and to be able to say I'm a teacher or I'm whatever. I am [inaudible 1:29:47].
Stephen: Yeah.
Federico: I'm a researcher or do I have to paint this house inside? It's very [inaudible 1:29:55] if I simply play with the schizophrenic and I have to go…
Stephen: Yes.
Federico: …because we're suffering a lot with that. And being a schizophrenia in society is putting us have to deliver us perhaps it's schizophrenia it's not trying to be different.
Stephen: Well said.
Federico: Now we have to look at the democratic way in which all of the different identities can be and contributed to happiness but now I have a certain to just one.
Stephen: Right.
Federico: I just think the uniqueness seem very hard to achieve very shape.
[male/child speaking]
Stephen: I think we are great.
Federico: I hear that you have like the magic because it's in here. This whole discussion around slackers.
Stephen: Exactly.
Federico: But when your concept is published we can share it.
Stephen: Yeah.
Federico: And when I say we I'm talking just about myself.
Stephen: Listen I think maybe that's a really good note, we I'm just talking about myself, that sounds like a pretty good note to end this discussion. For me anyway it's 2:00 in the morning here or it will be in two minutes. So Greg thank you for anchoring this with your usual eloquence and thank you Federico for joining us from Buenos Aires to talk about these really fascinating approaches. I mean we have I must say diversity has been the watch word and the principle of certainty but tonight was a particularly diverse example of diversity.
Greg: Yes absolutely. Yeah thanks for joining us it's been really amazing.
Federico: Also very nice for me to it's like some kind of psychoanalytical situation of the things I like and they were allowed.
Stephen: Schizoid analytic.
Federico: Yes. I would like to know your faces and also to know what you are doing. And I think I not only would like to join more about the project to see the production you have to really know the participation.
Stephen: Wonderful we'd love to have you.
Federico: I think I saw you making love to this local work and this situations they're important in national terms. Yeah I think it's very important for us interchange with people with other realities. I think something that's very good for the potential and plus afterwards this way of interchanging.
Stephen: Feel free to join us next week if you're so inclined to over the phone. We're not going to be doing it so regularly in 2011 but there will be a few – I think we won't be able to resist having a few…
Federico: Okay.
Stephen: …discussions from time-to-time. But anyway feel free.
Federico: Okay thank you we would like that.
Stephen: Okay.
Federico: So until next Tuesday. Thank you very much.
Stephen: Thank you. Goodnight.
Federico: We said goodbye.
Stephen: Bye-bye.
Week 48: kuda.org
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Branka Curcic and Zoran Pantelic of new media center_kuda.org, an independent organization in Novi Sad, Serbia, which brings together artists, media activists, and researchers interested in the political uses, creative misuses and social repurposing of free and open information and communications technologies.
“Kuda” means “where to?” and that open-ended query is pretty much the conversation-starter that underlies all the organization’s activities and programs. Initially, the question was quite literally about the world in which the small media center was trying to emerge. Its current day offices, and former activities space, is situated between a post office and a fishmonger in an industrial working class neighbourhood far from the city center. The original set of old computers that made up the center’s internet café were discarded Bavarian government machines from the 1990s, picked up by kuda.org director Zoran Pantelic, who hauled them to Serbia shortly after the NATO air raids, reconfiguring them all with Linux operating systems. Those prehistoric beasts now stand on a selfmade bar in one of the rooms of the center. Today as before, for all visitors to kuda.org, Internet access (on much newer machines!) is as free as a free beer.
Kuda.org’s work focuses on questions concerning the interpretation and analysis of the history and significance of the information society, the potential of information itself, and its influence on social policy making. New Media Center_kuda.org opens space for both cultural dialog and alternative methods of education and research through a series of programs, including kuda.lounge (a series of presentation, talks and lectures — some 100 events since 2000), kuda.info (providing free internet access), kuda.production (a matrix for publishing and exhibition) as well as offering free bandwidth to artists and activists.
Clearly, the world in which Kuda.org operates is utterly at odds with the mainstream political, cultural and artistic landscape of post-Socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Serbia — a lifeworld adverse and often hostile to the types of practices kuda.org thinks of as “art”. Looking at kuda.org’s track record, one cannot but wonder whether worldmaking is not inevitably informed by a performative “where-to” logic. But at the same time, kuda.org has provided a platform for assembling answer’s to its eponymous question — one that seeks to extract its own consistency from the components of the assemblages which it has produced. The enduring question is how to do just that over the long term — how to assemble plausible collectivities that function as counter-currents against all the seductions of fall-back positions, become aware of their own pitfalls and blindspots, while finding ways to realize their potential, risking themselves in the face of others.
Transcription
Week 48: kuda.org
Zoran: Hello.
Scott: Hello can you hear us okay?
Stephen: Can we hear him okay?
Cassie: Yes.
Scott: Super awesome.
Zoran: Can you hear us Scott? I'm going to turn this up a bit.
Scott: Yeah I can hear you. I think everybody here can probably hear you really well.
Cassie: Yeah sounds good.
Scott: Yeah so we're here with Michael, Chris, Cassie, Matthew, Quinton and Scott and there may be some other people trickling in. Just wanted to say hi to Branka and Zoran.
Stephen: Well let me introduce you to our – Scott are you guys hearing me okay?
Scott: Oh yeah.
Stephen: Okay. I wanted to introduce you to our two guests who are sitting right beside me here. Zoran on my left and a little bit further the extreme left…
Branka: The extreme left thank you.
Stephen: …Branka. Adam are you hearing us okay because Adam is reporting breakup.
Scott: I wondered if it was just because you stopped for a second or…
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: …initially. Okay cool.
Stephen: Good. Well you want to say a few words by way of introduction Scott or do you want me to say something?
Scott: Oh not at all just wanted to say hello first off. Hey guys thank for the intro.
Branka: Hey.
Scott: And hi to everybody else on Skype. We have a short write up but yeah Steven it would be great if you could give a super quick intro. Here's a short description for everyone if you haven't seen it.
Stephen: And it seems that I didn't make too many serious mistakes in the little write up except that I forgot to add that across the street in this working class neighborhood there is a park called the 88 Closest Park in honor of Martial Tito. And in the middle of the park there's a very large red star which kind of sets the little bit the ambiance for this neighborhood.
I'm not going to say really too much because I sort of wrote what I had to say but just that Kuda has been kind of one of those exemplary honing artworlds and I'm really glad that I guess it's the 49th, 48th week of the year we're finally able to actually talk to them. The Kuda played a – I'll let you guys fill us in on the details – but you've been around for awhile now and you've played a really instrumental role in promoting free and open information technology culture as way for creating an art sustained environment and also for creating another political sustaining environment. I mean I think if it's for you art and political action, culture action are quite indistinguishable and that distinguish is really very much in tuned with what we've been calling Plausible Artworlds last year.
So Zoran, Branka I'll turn it over to you. Do you want to like just give us a presentation of what this is all about and why and then we'll start firing questions at you.
Branka: Wow! So I think you should start basically because you were the starter.
Zoran: Yeah. I see what you said now it's already the case. And yes it sounds like we actually took a lot of the – we learned a lot also in the [inaudible 04:26]. Basically we started to snip and to establish ourselves as well and to invite as much as possible people from all around to be our guest here. And in this place here since 2000 to 2006 or '07 was a public space where we were to invite as much possible people who was started to be almost like part of the scene to share and to change all these knowledge and some particular aspects of new technology.
So last year has actually been we can talk more precisely of this relationship between our components. From the very beginning was actually just pulled when we actually more deeper and to learn about to this aspect. Later on according to some experts and some divisions what we actually developed it's also very much consist of the personal religion because at the moment for us actually we put that as a core structure of the organization. And during the year we actually established a lot of events includes a lot of the collaborate. So that's eventually the structure at the moment. And according the banquets are our personally responsibility it's also developed the tracts of our interest or some platforms of the projects and phenomenon work they would like to work. So I'm not going to say anymore and maybe Branka can just jump in.
Greg: But maybe Stephen has a question sorry.
Stephen: Very specific question when did you [breaking up] what year?
Zoran: It was actually the end of 2000, actually officially the program 2000-2001. The next year already came.
Stephen: Right. And this story about actually bringing the old computers down from Germany that is reported to be according to Snyder is actually true.
Zoran: Yeah.
Stephen: And you put them all together and you made it into an internet café actually.
Zoran: Sort of yeah. That was actually a free access point.
Stephen: A free access point.
Zoran: For the neighborhood.
Branka: Let me say that daily practice on the public space…
Zoran: Yeah.
Branka: …was to have a free access in this as you said working area of the city. And you have to understand it's Southeast Europe that 2000 infrastructure was not really developed so they actually had quite a lot of people coming into use the internet. It only became relatively obsolete to have things in taxes because of course technology came to the homes, infrastructures got better. So actually they function as a free internet access and free access to the library quite large library we've collected over the years. And then usually with some evening programs.
Yes some local artists or art critics giving a lecture, presenting the movies and discussions. So basically the public space was established not as a gallery space, not as the exhibition space, although we both for example come in there from the artistic background let's say, but it was intended to be place for discussions because we felt like really big lack of this kind of a state in indecision maybe all say in Serbia.
Stephen: Yeah I think that maybe for the – I don't want to overemphasize local specificity but it's true that with the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s when the war that left Serbia extremely ostracized. Not only that getting bombed b the US Air Force, but left it ostracized from many progressive people throughout Europe. And so it must have been kind of a solitary experience and I imagine in that sense that technology – I don't want to make it sound more than it was but kind of a linking to the rest world and get other information. That must have been a pretty important political thing to do. I mean it's important for us to talk to you today so it's always important to talk to other people. But in those years that must have meant more presses no.
Zoran: It is I mean the ratio and the role of technology was actually much more very related to that end of the table was very interesting because it was a really important channel to get any of the scope, to be part of the [inaudible 09:33]. So for a lot of people it was a kind of really opportunity for a partner to kind of emerge already. But later on was actually decided we could be perfect especially when it was actually becomes professional from the agency and the telecoms and etc. But just because of this imagine and this kind of a search and this kind of critical approach was actually difficult even for us and was actually very important and we actually crate – first I must say it was actually very focused and we actually started to realize and to become more clear for ourselves to understand and how to retro. And then later on we actually started to give up as a more established platform. Branka.
Branka: Well I have to say that although at the end of the night is this whole intimate thing and the new technologies and the promise of that world that came with that kind of ideology somehow for a brief moment worked out maybe from giving the people a different kind of a new access to something outside of Serbia. But from the beginning, as Zoran said we started in 2001 basically things a bit changed, and from the very beginning actually when we started our interest was in the very beginning to explore what's going on in this critical internet culture or critical new media culture. So it was never looked at it as a kind of, I don't know, California ideology but what California ideology was preaching basically. But more to see what things behind the culture the functioning but kind of an alternative to maybe the settled practices existing within that internet culture. And that's, how for example, in the very beginning we got the public methods from Vienna. They were quite, let me say, influential, important for our own work.
Stephen: Can you say a word about that?
Branka: Now it's something completely different it changed over time. This corporate organization and the name of the organization now they're called Burle Information Institute but back then they used to be a public internet based Institute for Progressive Internet Culture Network Culture, I forgot sorry. And they were originally from Vienna from the early 90s they started with this course, like you said, critical net culture. And not only that they were quite, like you say, critical in trying to act against, for example culture policies in Vienna, commercializing of misusing the whole public funds and many different – actually in a way also [inaudible 13:22] of the works. So but I wanted to say besides from this fickle media discourse but later on we actually did eventually many other things.
So when Stephen is saying our connection with art I'm still a little bit wandering what it is? What kind of connection is – what is political regarding? See that's something interesting that we can talk about or you can help us to figure it out.
Stephen: Well maybe – I know definitely that's what I'm here for – but maybe before that it would be important to talk about specifically your programs because you have about three or four different programs.
Branka: We have many…
Stephen: Okay.
Branka: …over all these years. So basically with those just to feel us and to feel people here with, let me use this phrase, typical internet culture. So for the first three years basically organizing lectures and presentations of really different people, from those mentioned from Vienna Florence Mider and Collective Berg. Really people quite kept wanting people really if it's important in that moment. A little bit we started to organize in 2003 with the [inaudible 14:57] for example because this kind of tutorial, but let me say not typical tutorial practices, are also like important for us.
What is interesting in my view of people that we are talking to actually of interest is that we're actually very well documented all that was going on in our space. We installed a little system of surveillance cameras inside our space so we were a little bit moratoria actually of what's going on but it gives us really nice possibilities to preserve all that like the same knowledge to use over the years. And since a couple of months now after almost a year it's finally available on our Web site so you can download or watch many different lectures that were given here in this.
Stephen: So this is like kind of an archiving of critical and creative culture basically.
Branka: Yeah like you say.
Stephen: First of all you produced it and then you archived it.
Branka: Yeah.
Stephen: But that archive is kind of a last you can have a history also in terms of practices today which is really quite essential.
Branka: Well yeah sure.
Stephen: Can we send a link to one of those things?
Branka: Yeah.
Zoran: Let me see where is it.
Branka: It's here but maybe you archive like Sales for example.
Stephen: And it's like 127 like that.
Branka: Yeah it's like 60 or more.
Scott: I was actually thinking – yeah sorry excuse me – I was actually thinking it might interesting if you don't mind, though I wouldn't necessarily always recommend this for these chats, but if you wouldn't mind giving us a kind of an intro to how to navigate your Web site. Just because I think you've set it up in a way that seems to match your programs. I thought and since it's sounds like anyway the beginning of your project it was setup as kind of an internet portal of sorts, maybe your Web site is pretty important it might help people to get a better understanding of the project overall.
Stephen: Okay you want to do that?
Branka: Yeah sure. That's actually a very good idea sometimes I forget. But it's actually on our Web site all our programs are quite well documented at least we try to have them well documented. So we started from this lounge of video archive just to maybe we also a little fascinating because we just setup this kind of a video archive on our Web site but also some video kind of a clue what kind of initiatives in people we were interested in from the beginning. So you see here one of the most inspiring things for us in 2003 was to have breaks of them discussions with critical art ensemble for example. I mentioned that since I guess you know that of course…
Stephen: Yeah we can paste that in for example.
Zoran: That's good.
Branka: Yeah.
Stephen: For example.
Branka: For example yeah, but this actually those studio operate much connection with those early years like I say 2004 is quite like I said biggest part of our activity. Then this is like in the main menu on the Web site its Kuda.lounge Kuda.info is basically the home page. Like the information connected to our own activities and on the right sidebar you can see that Zoran's choosing some kind of familiar or interesting events that we like to inform people about.
So Kuda.lounge you click on it there is like from 2001 to 2006 basically very well documented also video archive, but also a little textual like you say report about it. So you can see over the years how things also changed for u 2002 was the most like exploding one that I can get over, I don't know, 20 or 30, 2003 a little bit less because we started already with tutorial practice and also with the publishing project. And then time you can see that the number is a little bit shrinking to 2005 with a little bit more.
And then since 2006 we actually started a little bit to abandon our own public space to recreate it into the virtual space more or our own working space since we started to collaborate more with a couple of institutions in the city like. All those lectures held in 2006 were actually hosted by the museum of contemporary arts. Here actually was, for example now, hosting Stephen. There is a link in a couple of ways to go with the museum which is completely another story it's not really like all, like you say, museums of contemporary art where is total hierarchical organization. Like for example some of the cities in Western Europe. It's also quite flexible I can say. It's very easy in a way to establish the contact and to work it.
Stephen: Okay so the question was, Kuda.lounge is the largest part of Kuda activities, is that what you said, or did you say it was the largest part of some?
Branka: It was.
Stephen: It was.
Branka: It was. So maybe I can go just a bit more further. Perhaps you can see all the different…
Stephen: Yeah is this from the archive on Kuda production.
Branka: Yeah and there you get your exhibitions you get the publications to organizing [inaudible 22:32]. A project them some richer projects, rest of conferences, a little bit of media productions and some campaigns, and like you say, other lectures which we organize. But let me say that maybe those who the business in publications are something that we directed our main activities for 2004 forward. Exhibitions I think they're not given all of the documented here because some of them are also examples here in the actual product still going on. Because they are like for example collaborative projects that the lodging spending over a couple of years sometimes very difficult to put them under different categories on the Web site.
Stephen: If we look at them, I mean just off the top of my head I notice that they're largely I mean they're based largely around digital media in many cases. They're always collective almost always. They're invariably dealing with political issues and they're I think almost always an exception drawing on the political potential of conceptual art right.
Branka: Yeah I mean that was cool.
Stephen: We think of position of object and never…
Branka: No.
Stephen: I mean I could ideally think that you didn't but…
Branka: No. Maybe I should just give a couple of examples. For example, that those are like also different types of exhibitions. Some of the exhibitions for example are like you say imported. Like all the information goes all the exhibitions were produced by this nearly public message collection. But we felt like it's a really good moment to present that and to have it in Serbia. And that's really to basically containing some of…
Zoran: That's a different story totally.
Branka: To Jim my good friend he actually lives in new Philly.
Stephen: Okay.
Zoran: Very good.
Branka: So estimated to summarize somehow it's really, really about the art object. It's about concept, it's about maybe the most trying to contextualize art practices, not the actual object this is something that's really at least interested in but…
Stephen: If you contextualize it that's…
Branka: Try to contextualize it because to this notion of having the like autonomous piece of art is really not sustainable since long time ago but it was never interesting for us to look at the art as something isolated. I'd always put it in – and to try to look like the social, what some kind of economic background, production to this condition from that particular. And it's just I'd never really the art they're more interested into art practices, art as some intent or successful social engagement out of the process, out of the collective practice. It's something that we are trying to experience into practice our own.
So some of those exhibitions are actually already done for example, we did also this additional alternative economics of certain societies, one also actually [inaudible 27:20]. And then didn't object it was quite authorized it's really one author because he collected over the years interviews with really different people coming from different backgrounds and disciplines about possible or plausible alternatives in the economics and like we say social kinds of organizations. And I want to just you to pay attention the continuous odd place. This is something for example that is totally from our production our practice from the scratch.
Stephen: The continuous art class.
Branka: Yes.
Stephen: Great credit.
Branka: Yes. And in subtitles and other New Orleans guides are from the 60s and 70s. So basically there was a time of the breaking point in 2005 to start a little bit to go a little bit further in connectional to local context and how we felt like it's the right moment for that. So we decided to look a little bit in the history of [inaudible 28:40] basically something that the sphere might connected with international conceptualized of the 60s and 70s but it was slightly important for us to look in now our own backyard and to see what their kind of challenges that really are trying to build a little bit upon. Those were – maybe you can say I talk too much.
Zoran: Yeah okay. Basically I can just add in principle what you actually said is usually its actually collaborative practice. But to find out very interesting for us that all those groups from 60s I mean mirror [inaudible 29:26] and other side was actually pretty much concerned about this collaborative work. And we find out very interesting for us and something that we're actually doing and practicing very much is something that we actually find out is a very, very clear caricature and a very practice until just recently.
Stephen: Okay. You thought you were inventing something and in fact you find it very interesting.
Zoran: And we find accordingly we actually know it was the lack of [inaudible 30:00] that's their lives.
Stephen: Yeah.
Zoran: They're actually playing on some kind of machine parts. And that's the reason why the following parts of this publishing parts were actually called a [inaudible 30:11] because it's a little bit, it's never really done on a proper way. And then all those guide actually from the moment actually we put much unknown on the school in the education system.
Branka: Guys and girls.
Zoran: Guys and girls. And then we decide to work with them and then to try to establish at least to make them a strong spotlight on whatever. And to create something more clearer to what is our big now locally. And then it actually starts to be, an especially also.
Branka: This is a collection of the cultural practices like you say and our own we cannot prioritize it its simple. Sorry.
Zoran: So basically as Branka said since 2005 actually we start to reach our scope in certain length in this kind of capacity of the collective. And so then we started to be more active in this research part trying to develop another track of researching our own local base structure on then to going on both directions, going into the recent past and trying to connect with this practice with [inaudible 31:29] collective movements and their own practices and how we can share them to make them more connections with the present production. And on the other side it still connects with the international scene.
So that was actually since 2005 actually we tried to develop on both sides. So this continuing art class it's actually some title which is come from local Serbia gang which comes out in the guys from the product from Young and Newman. To notice how they actually performed public performances in a public space call it public art class which sounds in Serbian language Yamani class. And then continuous art class is actually trying [inaudible 32:31] so just continuing something actually creates this structure and [inaudible 32:39] how we actually include all those things. And that through this process actually still to now actually we tried to in some parts of to this specimen of opening this door, the structural door of the conception moment in Serbia, specifically [inaudible 33:01], we actually start to develop some other aspects of whatever they did. And with some still very active turbulence we actually continue to work.
So just recently actually we just made a DVD about selling [inaudible 33:23] directive from [inaudible 33:27] and essentially the whole process reactivates and to create this closing interaction with the programs from 60s still very active.
Stephen: Wasn't one of the major Yugoslav conceptual art collective after '56.
Bronco: '51.
Stephen: And they were from…
Zoran: No, no, they were from [inaudible 33:50].
Stephen: Yeah. What are some of the names that I should know from Novi Sad?
Zoran: From Novi Sad?
Stephen: Yeah.
Branka: There are many like individual artists that also joined in the different groups to work collectively. So they for example had a group called Codes. And they in a couple of cases tried to be very provocative. In other words, in some times in physical Yugoslavia like really hard and political times and they really tried to provoke a bit. And they employed from their perspective to call themselves the January Group in January, the February Group in February.
Stephen: I got.
Branka: In fact someone accused them like February Group did this and this…
Stephen: Yeah.
Branka: …but it happened in March. They said "No, no, the February Group doesn't exist anymore."
Stephen: Oh I see.
Branka: So they finally very short.
Stephen: It's a problem to hear that. That's what we have to do for the exhibition series it has to be basically a linear cycle that changes its name every linear cycle.
Scott: Oh man that's a good idea.
Stephen: Yeah.
Scott: Yeah I wanted to ask you another question though and I just pasted it but I'll read it out. I really like what – and you know what I just noticed the error on the posted question, but you know I'll go ahead and finish my thought just so that I'm not jumping all over the place here, and then we can get to that. But I was wondering if you guys are, I know you work with other people I mean the archive of different people that you've talked to and other things that you've been involved with is pretty extensive.
The question earlier sort of triggered this for me or the thing that you mentioned a moment ago triggered this for me. I wonder sometimes when people, especially tutorial groups who are involved in archiving, there seems to be I think among a lot of people interested in archiving collective culture in particular a sense of shared ownership and interest in breaking down some of what can easily become a sort of aggressive non-competitiveness for lack of better terms. And I was curious if you guys had had any thoughts or maybe had even been involved in any initiatives to try to merge some of those efforts, especially efforts around the getting a better sense of what collective creativity can be or what collectivity and art can do or the limitations of it and that sort of thing.
Branka: You mean merge like take over or…
Scott: I didn't mean takeover in particular I meant systems where say we're involved in some of that too and so are you, and yet in order to get that kind of information the best way that we can do it right now is browse to one another's Web sites. And of course we can talk to one another like we are now but how often do we really get to do it. And so I think one of the questions that I have is if there's an idea, and I'm not assuming that you have this, that there could be some kind of, whether it's social benefit or just general interest or whatever of this research into collective practice, that can add some value to someone one way or another? I'm curious if you think that there could be some value in accentuating that research or actually – what am I trying to say – mutually…
Stephen: You mean sharing an interest.
Scott: Yeah. Each one contributing to something that could sort of compound, or not necessarily only amplify in a mutual exclusive way but maybe compile or actually make better, if you know what I mean by catenating.
Stephen: Confederate to use a word that is not used very much in this part of the world anymore right. To confederate lack of energies you mean. I'm sorry I was just…
Scott: Yeah.
Stephen: That's sort of a joke.
Scott: Sure I think that's my question even though I'm stuttering through it. I think the question is about your level of interest in those sorts of possibilities.
Branka: Yeah. Our experiences really different let me say. And I personally find collective birth extremely important but also very demanding and very hard work, let me say, actually rarely now practice we meet other people in collectives that we can really exchange with. And this is something which is I would say also quite understandable but also maybe a little bit, if I may say so, a bit for me disappointing. Because you can see the people's interest are going really in different ways.
So it happens like many times and after the, for example, funding of one project has ended that the whole group is split or inside of the organizing one project or one network or many different factors are included. How this network or how this collaborative work is, or what basis is it set on? There are many cases that have been invited by interesting groups or individuals to start with new research projects for example based only on the funding opportunities. Of course that's rarely worked but in some cases it works. So I mean it really depends on the many different factors. But what I can summarize really and say this collaborative practice of me and I think for us if I can say, some kind of a sensual way of work, but I can also see how fragile it is. How people are really, really in a really fast moving attention let me say to this kind of a production or work. I don't know if this answers any of your questions but this is what I had in mind.
Zoran: More or less I mean it's actually something but is actually almost the case as you already mentioned before that this kind of collaborative structure it's going to produce more and more sublevels of producing and kind of discussions like platform. It's not necessarily to really produce something which could be kind of a final part of the communication but it's actually going to this kind of level of discussion causes and how we actually learn to really listen to each other.
So basically it's actually depends on the partner or someone who's actually collaborating in a particular phenomenon or some particular event. It's also pretty much interesting for us to learn about cultural differences. And also what Branka mentioned just recently it's also comes to these kind of very personal level when we're actually talking about sometimes a particular work. So in general I think this collaborative central is still getting as any medal with both sides but in general it's actually getting through much more open doors for getting more and more and more productive essential things than we actually never really ended this process. And it comes to be in a very, very exciting way.
Branka: Good questions.
Zoran: A list of questions.
Stephen: We have some questions here. Aaron has a question and he's had it for awhile. So Aaron do you want to ask that question or do you want me to read it out for you? Aaron asks it sounds like the local context that are important to you yet at the same time you're interested in making links with other locations plus the possible geopolitical contact such as critical art ensemble. Could you say what exactly the importance of that kind of interest and exploration?
Branka: Yeah well sure it's different geopolitical context. I mean as I said the local context is really is much of our concern but not only, we cannot look at local context without considering the broader picture as we say. In particularly if you are mentioning the practices the methods employed for example, the critical art example we are taking them as examples there. I cannot say something that could be applied here or there could be. It's not really important. I'm more referring to the methodology of their understanding of what collective and their collective practices in agricultural are they're openness and understanding I don't know current political situation compensation of odd in connection with science giving all those, like I say tune, or in a way several things more to the audience.
Stephen: More visible.
Branka: More visible let me say. So it's more like it's an ideology of them than on the first place there on the political context because I'm not sure I'm clear here.
Stephen: Well I think that maybe I would even disagree with the premise of the question because it seems to me that the people that you're interested in and the reason that we're interested in you is because you're interested in something like a very – I don't know if you would agree – like a contestitory culture. A culture of challenging existence and challenging it with a certain symbolic violence like not simply negotiating with it, negotiating with it but not really, running up against it is hard and proposing something else instead. And I think if I look at the list of guests and the list of projects it seems to me that more than geopolitical diversity it's political dissidence that would characterize your approach.
Branka: Yeah I mean I'm usually very hesitant to use this big words like…
Stephen: Dissidence.
Branka: Dissidence has really particular history over here but since we started to research in our local conceptual art and we are on guard here of closely got interested in particular need. I can say I never lived basically in Yugoslavia. I'm a younger generation but somehow growing up is always something that came after Yugoslavia. But to try to understand what was going on then and to see what kind of a different notion that dissidence had, not just official like common discipline. That's the first reference to me when I see political dissidence. This is not something that I'm interested in this picture of communist political dissidence is something completely, like you say, wrongly presented with a reason. But this is only around the finishing of the grain.
Stephen: Maybe this kind of links into what your friend Sedant said that, who speaking as a close collaborator and admirer of Kuda, thinks that Kuda always has a very good idea of what or who their enemy is. My question to my friends is thus who is the current and unique in your work and how do you envision future enemies in the future? That's a great question.
Branka: The enemies where should we start?
Stephen: Yeah.
Branka: Ourselves okay. Yeah ourselves that's a little bit connected with this experience of fertility of collective practices because although, for example, we are trying to have this structure without hierarchy or with this kind of motion of sloping hierarchy it's always small misuse of another person's time position etc. That I guess is still a kind of normal for different people trying to produce something or to break productively. They're much, much bigger. This starts from the stage for example.
Zoran: Because the social circumstances change a lot. I mean in general it's actually the whole society actually is very naïve position of unknowledged structure and we learn a lot of this kind of comparative analysis of what's going on in Europe and what's going on right now. And after the war during the 90s it's something that we actually grow up and some program we can create this kind of critical platform for some very strong positions for ourselves. But later on we actually find out that for some kind of social kind of capacity what they actually expect. It actually doesn't exist.
So in that way we can say that we are pretty much not really surprised but in a way with something we already expect them it could be kind of very helpful for the whole initiative and to spare the knowledge. It actually doesn't work on that way so in that terms it's much more enemies than we actually expect. So we had to step back in a way and to really work pretty much in terms very fundamental in a very basic social environment. Turning back to the political relationship something that [inaudible 51:09] actually mentioned now and from the question is something which deals our position and we call it sort of independent position. What does it mean independent? It's actually hesitant o explain the position of the very strongly monopoly controlled by political parties where they control complete very for some reason that just organization actually connect them with the part of the organization.
So what we are doing now is actually something that we are trying to keep our own, let's say, independent position because we are not in a court and we are not in [inaudible 51:50] party but It's the question of how to play me then because they strongest control the media, the public money, all the sponsors and you actually spark the system and you had to negotiate that. So in that way the whole structure of everyday life and negotiation with them will start to be pretty much strong and the [inaudible 52:21] and the least of enemies. And that will start to be much, much more open.
Stephen: You didn't mention his [inaudible 52:30] for example.
Branka: Yeah I was about too.
Zoran: Yeah.
Branka: Thanks Stephen.
Zoran: Yeah. I would say that the biggest enemy for us here in this moment is maybe more general emotional characterization. So the experience prioritization. It's only the manner of the ownnesses which is really the most fundamental project going on right here in Serbia. So basically prioritization of old public and stakes good factory are also public spaces. And what comes also as a kind of a consequence when I'm mentioning the prioritization in a broader term it's really not only the private ownnesses but the private interest no matter if they are like the powerful position or the capital driven they are like visible in every field, also in the field of culture.
So this transitory of positional liberal yet reality that we have here the good [inaudible 53:49] how do you call it, that we are facing. And it's really difficult as long as it makes step and you see what you are facing to try to somehow pose our tools are very modest I have to say, really, really very modest. For example, we are now producing the one exhibition that we are really enjoy. But I'm also struggling with this a little bit like kind of a cozy position to produce something coming from the culture field that is dealing with the transformation of City of Novi Sad under the new liberal circumstances. So we are making exhibition out of it.
And we are today having discussions with two other people and we are producing exhibition with what does it mean except that we really find it important that we are enjoying. Who do we go to? What do we want to do with it since revealing thousands of really like, not only a characterization of public spaces, but also like criminal actions going on. So it's really a question for me what can we do?
Stephen: So what's the answer?
Branka: The answer is I'm not sure if we should look into results.
Stephen: Okay.
Branka: If this efficiency is really our goal.
Stephen: Right.
Branka: So I'm not sure. I don't think that to say this was efficient in those terms. Have some kind of numbers of the variations. But there's something missing and I'm wondering what it is.
Stephen: Yeah. No I think this whole ethos of ownership is an incredibly presidios problem not only here in Serbia but I think just to contextualize it a little bit, I mean in Yugoslavia social property constituted almost all the property. Most of the factories, most of the means of production and distribution were publically owned not privately owned.
Branka: Correct.
Stephen: And now not that long after the end of like a socialistic economy as far as I understand although people are poorly paid in Serbia, they don't have much money they're being paid far much more than the economy is actually generating and the only way that they're maintaining that level of salary is because of the permanent selling off, or the bode as we say in French, it's the sort of the selling off at wholesale prices of the public property. Now as far as I understand there are only two things left to sell it's the electricity utility distribution and the telephone. And once those are gone what will happen unless there's some kind of miracle, which doesn't appear to be likely, there will be an Argentinean type collapse of the economy because it won't be anything left to float it with. And that's what happened under Carlos Maynheim in Argentina.
Branka: Yeah.
Stephen: And of course in a situation – and it's a tremendous amount of interaction in middle class Argentina society here is the situation where the political context is even more potentially explosive. I mean it's hard to say what this could lead to, particularly in the context to come back to the whole ethos of ownership where ownership is now sort of seen as, first of all I'm owner of myself it's a way of being in the world.
Branka: Yep.
Stephen: The only public property left is going to be the red star in the park across the street, anything that's of any potential value…
Branka: Yeah.
Stephen: …have already been sort of given away.
Branka: Exactly.
Stephen: But I think it's the type of work that you're doing. I even actually I just spent to do kind of collaborative action under those kinds of circumstances is potentially it's a lifesaving kind of an operation. I mean you guys when the day comes when the others have just failed because you're owned by somebody else so.
Branka: I didn't mean in that way I thought it was like the ownership of the concept of the ownership growth failed eventually yeah. I didn't get that was he complaining about – you don't want to talk to us about the owness?
Stephen: Feel free to turn on your microphone and ask or give your point of view, but don't feel obliged.
Scott: Yeah I'm getting a sense that there's a question that's sort of pregnant there or should we just move on pass that?
Stephen: Aaron is asking that do you see the ownership thing as a state private for artist issue and Serbia is asking? I think it is truly admirable to think and strategize what the collective is today. Well those are kind of both the same questions in a certain was because one at a time. [inaudible 1:00:19] was asking.
Branka;What Aaron is asking are I don't know I cannot be sure if those are like three different things or one because we are now under the pressure, as we said, of the craze of the product ownness. We had something as a source or public or in combination with the state onwness and that artistic issue I mean it could really quite a lot. For example, I don't know we extend from here what is the owness you think odd. That's something for example Stephen will probably talk about tomorrow because there's this conference here in Novi Sad about accumulation and trying to in a way know how to define it. Monetize and circulate art in those kinds of way. It tends also to prioritize.
Stephen: By the way, that was a remark that Scott made earlier is that the conference is organized at the museum but it's co-organized by Kuda.
Branka: Yes.
Stephen: So his question was so now you have seems to be in opposition to the museum and you have found some sort of way of working together. I mean that's an interesting development maybe you can talk about that as well because oftentimes I'm being very aggressive towards the conceptual architecture museum.
Branka: Yeah.
Stephen: And I'm happy that they paid me to come and talk to you. But in fact not really too interested in museum per say if there was no Kuda I wouldn't want to go talk to the museum. But at the same time, a museum is publically owned. I mean it is social property, it's public space. So there that was a stament…
Branka: Okay museum of contemporary art here in Novi Sad I would say really particular position. I mean I wouldn't compare it with any of the museums, for example, as far as I know in Western Europe and museums of contemporary art, because in this position process the state and institutions will also be crumbling down. So the museum of contemporary art actually doesn't own or its founders don't own the building for example. They are just renting the building of museum is ready now flying like historical museum of this area, like you say, of Serbia.
And there is obviously no kind of a political interest invested in the new building which could be of course a kind of a new city identity which could put Novi Sad on the map of me now used the cultural capital creative industries like everything but there's no even that kind of interest in culture here. And this is also something we're trying to fight. Not with the museum because they are all the time they're like changing strategies. But I have to say that there are only basically one of two decent exhibition spaces in Novi Sad. So somehow if you want to do exhibition it's usually in the own facilities. And to try organize exhibition in most places really are struggle.
Let me just put the long story short it is because of this crumbling decent exhibition space. Decent exhibition space is to have at least painted walls and at least to have walls. Because really there's just a couple of exhibition spaces in Novi Sad and not really much of them, more so than actually are privately owned and managed. The museum is really part of the rare public institutions. And besides that it's very important to say that one of our – the public that comes to visit really it depends on the event that kind of public discipline. We always try to do our best to really motivate as broader audience as possible. So I have to say that we have actually reorganize something in museum and we have large audiences more thanks to our own effort than to PR in Museum Service for example.
Scott: So I have a question. Did I just speak before someone?
Stephen: Go ahead.
Scott: Okay. We often ask things like this in these discussions about Plausible Artworlds because we're really trying to get to look at different examples of how people structure their sustained or that make possible or even understandable a creative practice that differs from what's in front of mainstream. I mean from looking at your Web site it definitely seems like the mainstream that I'm aware of there's a lot of difference clearly between the programming that you guys do and the topics that are arrived at.
But I'm really curious about how you guys - oh I don't know it's both structure what you do and they've described that a little bit a bit, but also how people there identify what you guys are doing as art or do they? I mean and if they do, I guess is a multipart question, if they do what kind of benefit do you guys think that the events that you do and the kinds of issues that you're attempting to cover or are covering benefit from being qualified as art in the minds of the people that come.
Zoran: Hey there's a question.
Branka: Yeah that's a good question.
Scott: I mean I'm only asking you because it seems like a lot of the people that show up might not really care whether or not it's art or not. And they may only sort of use that moniker because it's in fact in a museum, otherwise you might actually wanted to talk about some of the other projects, conceptual as they are, something not art necessarily just something else. And if not I guess I was curious about why? And if you can pinpoint anyway what the things that you do or maybe like even a specific strategy that you've talked about tonight or haven't talked about yet helps to accentuate that.
Zoran: Right.
Branka: I had to wait for it.
Zoran: I mean a lot of things are put on the table and in general what Branka actually started to explain in this role is how we actually collaborate with the museum. We had to actually explain that Novi Sad is actually first of all a small town and the whole field of the culture it's actually expressed in a very narrow space. So the whole scale in something where we can present on the bottom of the scale is something that we can present in some phase or some places. And then it's on the top could be let say the Museum of Contemporary Arts sounds very big. But in general the whole infrastructure of country is actually not developed on their terms as the [inaudible 1:08:51] our system on the west.
In general we are living in a society without our critic, without any kind of critical structure than we really extract kind of a variable argumentation. What's beyond and how it contextually comes up. So in that terms the relationship in between some very lawful chronic exhibition in some space and the museum is almost let's say the same. So that's actually the very frustrating position in that terms calling the cultural event, so –called culture event.
In their terms what we're doing is we can also edit as a kind of opportunistic asterisk then through this kind of visibility sharing some value and the bottom of the particular, let say, phenomenon what you present. For instance, what you're actually doing around the [inaudible 1:09:55] from Novi Sad we are very much insist to present in a museum of contemporary just to establish such a particular part as an admitted history in the local circumstances. But on the other hand we actually do a lot of different places which is actually doesn't get any connections to the museum. So in that case it's actually pretty much broke in many different positions. Sometimes you're doing some public actions so we are actually making a new social space and we're actually very much interesting how we should develop kind of new public who is actually the new public for the art production, art production. Who's actually following this action or any kind of critical approach which comes to the artistic actions?
And specifically when Branka mentioned this problem of lack of infrastructure it's a question that we have just two places where we can call it sort of gallery space. So sometimes what we learned actually you are living here in society actually without proper infrastructure the gallery system it means an artist already knew and somehow broke with and laid with it then to be able to adopt for themselves in a public space or some other aspect to promote what they're doing. And in that time check I think that still maybe from your point of view it looks and it's scary it's much bigger than what we're doing. But totally on the local circumstances all this care is actually pretty much narrow.
And it's something again Branka mentioned this our intention to focus on this population section we just simply learned and without knowledge and without proper position that you can articulate very precisely what you're to get and why you are doing this. We would start to publish as much as possible just to share this knowledge and to establish as much as possible this diffusion of knowledge and to create something that it's really impossible at least to criticizing everything what is done in the museum, as well as in kind of a small gathering. So that's something that it's a very complex process I must say. I'm teasing of course. And for us it's actually just to kind of this collaborative process it's very important to care as much as possible to spread and to organize more and more collectives around this, not only with all others I will be more easy you know.
So that affects the way that traveling going up and down is good just because of this unstable situation that we never know what will be happening with the museum because at the moment we have this very good relationship just because of this, let's say, personal relationship in a such a structure of criminal as Branka said. At the moment we have a good relationship with directors so who knows maybe after elections we have a completely different situation so no museum at all. So I think it's…
Branka: Since you k now that, for example, directors of the public culture institutions have to be party members.
Zoran: Yeah.
Stephen: Really?
Zoran: Yeah. So that's what I'm saying. So who knows what will happen after the election. So that's the way that we actually floating with it and then playing with this kind of structure of visibility in a way. So in that terms sometimes we're actually choosing which event we should particularly or very precisely put on a very strange life in museum. But basically you suggest the following with the media and everything which is actually following the political events.
Stephen: You know what interests me about this is really that the focus is not on art but they really quite decomplex the boat art. Their focus really is on what does it mean to build a collective that won't fall into the traps of other collectors?
Branka: What are the transpartical?
Stephen: We can come to that in a second.
Branka: Okay.
Stephen: But I wanted to say something else. One of the traps is that it's linked to the fact that when we met earlier in the restaurant I said "So are you both artists?" And you both said "No" and you laughed and you said no. And then I had to like cry and work to get the information that actually both were trained as artists but you do not self-describe or self-understand as artists today. And yet you do always work around art. I mean if you were artists it would just be self-interested. That would be a trap of a collective. It's in fact a collective community cannot be based on your self-interest right. It can't be just based oh we created Kuda because we didn't have any place to show so we created this place and now we're able to show our work more. Of course we showed our friend's work too but really we only showed our friend's because they're better artist than us they attracted more audience than we were able.
What I'm saying so maybe if you could comment a little bit about, actually when I push Branka it turned out maybe she actually is a sort of art related practitioner who practices theory. But what is specifically the thing we call art that strange ontological. We always like to say oh it doesn't matter but in fact we know it kind of does matter because it changes somehow everything while everything remains the same.
Branka: Yeah I'm really personally interested in what is political art or what is political in art? And what I learned and still feel like pretty much is the ignorant there because I'm really trying to be careful about it and I think that one first thing to discover what is political in art is abandon this self-sufficient position of feeling art produce like individual producer. And to work in collective would be kind of a first step. And then you are facing lots of other problems to in this kind of a work. And yet this is just me trying to make clear some things to myself, maybe somebody else can help with me, but for sure political art is not art that is dealing with political issues that's rarely the case.
But what is interesting the art or the art practices or collective art practice that could influence in a way the environment that could maybe change something in, as you say, change yet remaining the same. I'm not sure about that second part it does have to do with something that is disconnected with this efficiency subject or not I'm not sure. But yeah.
Zoran: Do you have a question?
Stephen: I've got a couple of more questions here.
Branka: Again you have a question.
Zoran: What does it mean the glue that collapsed?
Stephen: Yeah that doesn't fall into the traps of many other artists. One of the traps may be that an artist collective if it's composed of artists there's a high degree of inevitable self-interest. How can you have a successful collective based on self-interest? I'm pretty sure you can't I mean that would be my answer.
Branka: Yeah.
Stephen: I don't know what your thoughts on that.
Branka: Yeah I'm also pretty sure. It's not based – to be based solely on self-interest I wouldn't say that's very short term collective probably then. There must be another kind of common interest.
Stephen: I guess so like some sort of common goal or something like that you mean. Maybe let's just take Aaron's question because maybe it takes some things into more positive kind of direction. On a different note, you mentioned knowledge which sounds a bit like a vibrant knowledge as in stuff you learn and applying the future. Is that a correct assumption?
Branka: Wow Aaron you ask like good questions.
Stephen: Yeah.
Branka: It sounds a bit like the library of knowledge except you really apply in the future.
Stephen: Maybe what he means is we often talk about like artistic research producing knowledge but it's kind of a little bit mysterious as to what kind of knowledge art is able to produce. I mean it could produce the same sort of knowledge, maybe not quite as well as the social sciences or something like that, but what kind of knowledge would it predict let's say or what kind of knowledge would you predict specifically? I think he may be [inaudible 1:20:03].
Bronco: Yeah.
Zoran: When I assume the knowledge actually I'm actually focused on this kind of general view of the cultural production. In general that would include all these circumstances but what's going on and what's come up from the educational system and the artists. So what we have at the moment and still it's actually having this kind of myth of 19th Century era of the artists and still it's actually also added this sector of the artists where it actually comes from the socialism which is very, very interesting. I mean in general in socialism that it's actually very specific you know reservation artistic position. They actually already include themselves as a part of the heritage anyway. And it's a very important thing that actually have to be established as an succession for the artists and that they're already immediately start to be a part of this assembly and then comes up.
So basically we have his kind of very weak position of our system that they're actually just waiting from the stage to solve all these problems how they can just express their own quality or bright ideas. So that's actually why I'm actually say to just – and it also comes to this way a lot of artists, and especially the new generation, play at this kind of level of shifting with everything that comes up with this kind of everyday component of advertisement. And they actually make a lot of jokes of some kind of given positions but in general it's something which pretty much relates with this surface of everyday life. It's not really come deeply in the stature of what is really beyond the idea and why they're using some particular medium or any kind of business. So in that term actually I use knowledge just to be more critical for confidence itself.
So that was actually the way we actually approached the knowledge. Just to be able to argue more specifically what they would like to develop in the future. So I must say that capacity in general, capacity of art production in Novi Sad in Serbia is actually not so much developed. And then we actually looking on that to support or to given some kind of a positive kind of mood for any kind of collective we liked to start trying in our native.
Stephen: Sure.
Chris: I was going to say I would have no problem with self-interest as long as everybody in the collective got a turn.
Scott: That's interesting what does that mean.
Chris: Meaning if it's going to be collective it's just going to be one or two people and everybody just works on their projects and nobody else gets an opinion or whatever that I would have a problem with, but if everybody had a vote and a turn I don't have a problem with that.
Stephen: It wouldn't really be a collective it'll be some aggregate of individuals wouldn't it.
Chris: Yeah sort of I imagine.
Stephen: I guess you'd have a whole time where some of the parts would just be equal to some of the parts.
Chris: I supposed. Okay.
Stephen: I don't know.
Chris: I guess. Yeah.
Stephen: There's a question from – Branka is the study inside of art or perhaps the outside of knowledge for the art to be outside this powerful position and also to build oneself as a witness to chance is also charged with some kind of power. Now that Kuda is asked to solve some problems that others cannot do, how will Kuda approach these problems which are beyond the description of what it does at the moment? A bit abstract.
Branka: The second part, because they appeared in one minute time but it is already resourcing the kind of reaction that I cannot reconstruct now.
Stephen: Okay.
Branka: [Inaudible 1:25:16] can help us with that. Are we fantasizing the idea of the art collective?
Scott: Well I mean I'm actually glad that Chris asked that because on the one had well that certainly is one idea of what an ideal collective is you know. It's a sort of happy balance somehow or like some kind of happy marriage between full recognition of individuality and a kind of trusting togetherness or something like this where you kind of like can all share and take turns in some kind of ambulatory fashion. And true I mean a lot of the many art collectives some of the most interesting ones do operate that way in effect if not in presentation.
And it is a good idea I think to define what kinds of collectives that you guys are interested in and us too probably. If we're talking about the word collective I mean it's such a vast term but it's also sort of generic too it just means more than one thing that we're talking about at the same time. For instance, we've been talking about collective as a kind of like in the local situation there a collective or a public or something like that we've been talking about collective in that way or a larger collective sort of like collective memory or something like this. And then the sort of small tight knit groups that we often describe as this autonomous entities that are self-organized. And there's a kind of ambiguous with an ambiguous radical edge.
And many art groups actually even ones that are structured very differently than the most basic or the most, oh I don't know the most obvious ones, still are all structured totally differently. In our investigations or our – not investigations our interactions with other groups I mean the way that they structure themselves are setup as I mean they vary so widely from one to the other and even changes over time within the same group. So I don't know I think there might be a good idea to describe that. You guys probably have.
Stephen: Maybe you could address it just by talking about how you structured your own life. I mean you call it an organization and sometimes it feels like it.
Branka: It's basically like registered as a nonprofit organization like association of artist in some kind of interest to work together. That's…
Stephen: Done by load it's actually more…
Branka: Yeah it's a legal kind of a definition. But how do we operate? It's something that I would I don't know the closes definition would be that's the commission even kind of as much as I would like to have or its own thing equality. It's more like floating hierarchies so each of us are from project-to-project initiative-to-initiative give a kind of logic input, more entity. But of course there's the kind of discussions before that. So kind of a personal accumulative also plays a role. I for example am very much interested in starting and developing the publishing process. So that's kind of a mind thing but of course I'm trying to connect others to somehow have kind of a consensus about what the theme of the next publication will be. So I don't go and, I don't know, do something totally not relevant to the others.
So we tried to have based everything on the common decision. Of course it's sometimes some projects are more individually done than some others. And of course it depends as I said on the obscenities of people I'm more into the publishing than into the writing. Zoran is more into the organization and management. He's the person who can organize things very well. So someone with a different infinities and different capabilities, I don't know how to define it, the – I have to find the right it's important and so…
Scott: It sounds very much like what Chris was talking about.
Branka: No it's not healthy. So [inaudible 1:30:45] personality somehow.
Stephen;We'll get there.
Zoran: Definitely the [inaudible 1:31:07].
Branka: Yeah it's this script here in a way.
Stephen: Nice.
Branka: Thank you. That is funny. It's not really like that but it's…
Stephen: It'll be a great burger if you have them like that.
Zoran: Yeah.
Stephen: You know what we're running up to 2:00 in the morning here so we're going to have to end pretty soon.
Scott: Yes you guys are getting slap happy over there.
Branka: Funny.
Scott: But yeah for sure it's definitely getting late. You guys are troopers for staying up so late. I really hope that we can continue the discussion at some point about collectives. And actually I mean if you do still have a few more minutes we always try to end right on time at 8:00 but we could end earlier, it's six minutes until 8:00 though.
Stephen: Oh it's only six to well I was looking at the clock it's the wrong time here, sorry. No I didn't want to cut anybody short.
Branka: It's 2:00 am here.
Scott: We could…
Stephen: We'll come back to the collective thing but I just wanted to point out one interesting thing is that at one point in Plausible Artworlds we attempted to identify six different kinds of artworlds that we're interested in. And I maybe can't remember them off the top of my head but one of them was definitely the – maybe Scott you can help me – one of them was art having agriculture. One of them was a plausible art www artworlds and…
Scott: Yeah open source culture and online worlds in a sense. Yeah exactly.
Stephen: Yeah. But in a certain sense Kuda seems to – and another was autonomous production – but in a certain sense Kuda is kind of a reputation of our rather clumsy typology because they seem to be sort of like…
Branka: Going through.
Stpehen: Yeah sort of transversing the…
Bronco: Transversing is right.
Scott: I think that's a good point I mean in fact I think a number of the – not to reduce your particularities, but it's been very difficult for us to look at example and put them in a single category actually. I think what we are – I just pulled up another one of our old whiteboards but the different, not categories but kinds of artworlds that we've been looking at. I think you definitely have aspects of that people that in a process of instituting on some level. And either partnering with taking order in some cases just sort of Trojan horsing or other people transforming. Some just in bed with existing institutions.
And another example, not example but kind of succession in other social experiments, in my mind sort of the opposite of organizational art people who are saying well fuck these existing institutions we're out of here, we're doing our own thing completely off the grid or as close to it as possible. And it sort of sounds like the description of your local environment almost has that built in but yet you are making use of existing structures if you can. We've also like one of those was like what Stephen said art.www.worlds or something, open source culture and online worlds. And it seems like you're beginning to sort of portray that one.
Alternative economies is another kind of artworld or those structured around alternative economies. I don't know if you guys are involved in that as much as just sort of theorizing about it or an interest in that in general. And then the other two were autonomous information production which is definitely you're involved in and archiving creative culture which obviously you also are. So yeah.
Branka: And sometimes I have impression and some people accuse of for being inconsistent with our practices, but I think that's actually the main thing. Consistency for the state consistency is not leading us anywhere. So we are in away trying to accommodate our practices to the moment in time and place and to finish also to other times and place.
Scott: Yeah exactly. I mean it's one of the benefits from my point of view of using the art status at all. There's a kind of built-in inter or sometimes transdisciplinary leaning that you really can draw from or touchdown on any other existing field of study or practice without raising an eyebrow. And not necessarily designate any time to it either any specific amount of time. I mean I'd say that's one of its benefits. You know it's funny like what Stephen was mentioning earlier about your - I don't know if you necessarily said unwillingness to describe yourself as artist, maybe, but at least that you didn't initially yet we're trained that way. I mean that goes to a lot of people I think that are engaged in what some people describe as more open forms of cultural practice or who are interested in or basically interested in some kind of critical community building in general and who draw from art and other fields.
But I think I have to say it's kind of strange that we're doing this series of talk called Plausible Artworlds right. Why would we do we talk to all of these people who do all these widely different things and yet somehow try to like lasso them all together under this and say "Oh you're all artists and you're all building artworld?" It sort of seems stupid doesn't it I mean in a way, but I have to say just on one hand one of the reasons that we do that I think, at least from my point of view, is that artists are really good often, and rethinking the structures of almost anything else in the world. Often except for our own field.
And the problem is that often even when we're making up our own, especially if it's because of limited circumstances whether its location or whatever, if we make up our own path well that doesn't necessarily exempt us from pitfalls of existing art structures. And I don't necessarily just mean institutions with a capital I or big places necessarily but the kinds of structures that are setup that lead to certain results often and that we kind of know what those results are often. Not to say that they might not change in other circumstances that we can't change because I think that we can depending but I think that when we don't sort of acknowledge that we're working with all the benefits that comes with that if not history at least whatever sentiment comes along when you describe what you're doing as contemporary art. And if we don't focus our attention or our thinking to feel that we're working it what happens is all these efforts, all these alternative efforts that we are involved in gets funneled and represented through the existing structures sort of nullifying a lot of the efforts that we're involved in.
Stephen: Well I totally agree with that. I think it's the first time I heard you say that Scott. That's kind of like the reason we do Plausible Artworlds right. You guys want to wrap it up.
Scott: Yes. Michael was just saying he'd like to hear some specific examples of that kind of defaming process as we sometimes call it. But I think now we've actually gone over the 8:00 the 2:00 a.m. limit for you. But I just wanted to sort of mention that if nothing else, not to hear myself talk and I hope I didn't, but for maybe – I know I just had a two hour conversation but maybe another kind of conversation topic opener for next time or for a future exchange.
Branka: Yeah definitely would be great to continue.
Zoran: Yeah.
Branka: Because it was quite inspirational talk which we haven't had for a long time.
Zoran: Yeah.
Branka: That was.
Zoran: Yeah something to add just briefly is something you know that we actually do and actually establish something to be kind of a legal body is suggests one of the strategical tactics. Of course a lot of friends of ours and the other artists also in doing some other kind of petitioners and practice which is actually not necessarily has to be presentable. So basically it's a focal question of factual positions and how we deal with kind of art in society. And of course we share a lot of in the image of us but it includes all these circumstances of one of the town where we're from and some of the centralizing and economy of the country where we come from spiritually decided this kind of illegal body could be kind of the proper measure. But who knows maybe next year is always the case maybe summarize to create completely the [inaudible 1:42:21]. So the whole platform of presenting the collaborative works could be presented in many, many different ways. And it's a question of something…
Stephen: Okay well maybe we the word us is a good word to between us is a good one to end the conversation on.
Scott: Absolutely. Well guys thank you so much for staying up so late drinking and talking with us.
Branka: Thank you for inviting us. Interesting as well. It was a great stuff.
Zoran: Yeah.
Stephen: Thank you.
Zoran: Thank you bye.
Stephen: Until next week.
Scott: Until then guys.
Stephen: Yeah. Goodnight Scott.
Branka: Bye.
Scott: Goodnight. We need some music.
Stephen: Actually we're talking on Sunday right with Incubate.
Scott: Oh hey you're still there. Yeah absolutely we are planning to talk on Sunday.
Stephen: Okay. Bye.
Scott: Until then everyone.
Week 36: Post autonomy
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with London-based artist David Goldenberg, who several years ago launched a website called “Post Autonomy”, which functions as a research platform into the concept and loose-knit movement of “postautonomous” art.
http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/
Goldenberg attributes the term “Post Autonomy” to German Conceptualist Michael Lingner, but has subsequently sought to further develop this idea into a full theoretical concept and working practice. If “autonomy” — whatever that term may be construed to mean — is widely understood as the dominant paradigm of modernist art practice (i.e.- a private or at least individual art practice), unpacking some of the ways and means of whatever goes “beyond autonomy” is indeed a crucial task for any plausible artworld today. Thus Goldenberg’s emphatic stance with respect to “Post Autonomy”, which he sees as a reflection of art’s current condition:
“Post Autonomy reflects the state of contemporary art… It stems from the idea that modern art=autonomy, as research or understanding of autonomy, has reached its limits in comprehending autonomy, in that respect art can be seen to have exited autonomy. What comes after Autonomy in art can be discussed by Post Autonomy. Using a practice-orientated analysis of cultural, social, and political forces the aim is to develop a new mental framework out of which art can be reinvented.”
That’s a feisty claim to be sure — and one which has perhaps been implicit in many Plausible Artworld discussions, looking at the various ways art practices have freed themselves from the autonomy-informed structures of the mainstream. But what does Post Autonomy really mean? Is it chronological (art “after” autonomy) or extensive (art “beyond” autonomy)? Plausible Artworlds has often explored the category of “usership” as integral to practices breaking with a regime of spectatorship, Post Autonomy has advocated the more inclusive (but perhaps less incisive and extensive) concept of “applied participation”, linking Post Autonomy to Systems theory, “where the methodology of a participatory practice replaces the orthodox role of the artist, curator, audience.” Does this methodology of participatory practice really challenge hierarchies, thereby opening spaces for art’s reconstruction within the space of Post Autonomy? Is postautonomy a plausible conceptual underpinning for emerging artworlds?
Week 33: Pad.ma
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with the instigators and developers of Pad.ma.
The Pad.ma project is a result of the efforts of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organizations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.
Pad.ma, short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, is an interpretative web-based video archive, which works primarily with footage rather than “finished” films. Pad.ma provides access to material that is easily lost in the editing process as well as in the filmmaking economy, and in changes of scale brought about by digital technology. Unlike YouTube and similar video sites, the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking, downloading and the reuse of video material for research, pedagogy and reference. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.
For the past two years, Pad.ma has been operating as an online archive of digital video, in essence creating a folksonomy of “tagged” footage. During this period, the focus has been on gathering materials, annotating densely, and growing the archive. At present, Pad.ma has over 400 hours of footage, in over 600 “events”. Almost all of this material is fully transcribed and is often mapped to physical locations.
What are some ways to begin thinking about retrieving and utilizing material from Pad.ma? From the onset, pad.ma has had an API (documented at http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API), a programming interface that allows a user to access videos, perform searches, seek to exact time-codes, fetch transcripts, and obtain map data, all of which can be shared by any given online user. As such, Pad.ma’s General Public License (PGPL, http://pad.ma/license) is designed specifically for the reuse of the material on Pad.ma. Through the experience of running the archive, there have been various imaginations of multiple and layered forms of time-based annotation over video, including: pedagogical tools for learning and discussion; presentation tools that combine text and video in new ways, along with essays and other writing formats enabled by rich and context-specific media.
Transcription
Week 33: Pad.ma
Scott: Hello there
Hey
Scott: Well, for the most part, the audio is surprisingly not horrible
It looks like a number of people are contacting right now to be added to the chat, but I’ll wait just a second…
Yeah so welcome guys, thanks for joining our chat at this ungodly hour for you, either staying up super late or waking up just for it in order to talk about Pad.ma, we're really excited to talk about it with you, especially in the context of what we're calling plausible art worlds, these examples of creative cultural eco-systems, the kinds of things that support art practice and help art to be understood as such maybe in a different way because it's structured differently, and it seems like Pad.ma is an interesting example of this, so we're really happy to have you.
Steven: Do you want to take it away or
?: I need one minute, sorry
Scott: Yeah, if you guys just wouldn't mind giving us a short intro maybe for the people here that don't know anything about Pad.ma, that would be great.
?: Well, I have to say that we're missing a few people here and the reasons for that is that somebody who works close here in Pad.ma is sick at the moment and is in Bombay, and Shaina who is my partner is 9 months pregnant and she is in bed and I'm unable to wake her up at the moment…
Scott: Congratulations
Ashok: yeah it would be nice to have them but there's also a number of other people involved I think you have the list on your website, and it started off as a meeting of people who in different ways have an interest in [inaudible 0:02:44.9] and I could describe just briefly what that was; about maybe two and half years ago, several of us representing four or five different mini--some small, some large, large barely existing--institutions met and kind of centered around a body of material that was already existing; that was video material that was already existing in Bombay and centered around a project that already in a way predated Pad.ma which is the 0XDB which I'll let Jan and Sebastian speak about, kind of centered around these two existing potentials and things that already were there began to build what is now called Pad.ma and I think that it was really a diverse group, for example from Bangalore, a group of lawyers and legal researchers who had been working around issues of copyright and a lot of the local work of one [inaudible 0:04:00.5] continues to be done by this group called the Alternative Law Firm in Bangalore, there were two large Bombay-based NGOs who had a lot of material from the last ten years around cities, conflict areas mostly in India, documentation of slums in Bombay, stuff like that which was quite valuable because it had been lying around on tapes, as it quite usual in large institutions, and they were trying to get off the ground a kind of archive initiative. There was us, which was a group that was just starting to call itself CAM, but through Shaina's own work as a kind of experimental film-maker and working in video a lot over the last ten years of TV, and the ways it had been around in the Indian documentary film-scene for example, she in particular had an interest in the video archive, and I can describe a little bit more of what that was. Then of course there was Jan and Sebastian who we had met in Berlin and had seen by [inaudible 0:05:22.0] and seen what she was doing in terms of being able to look inside video material rather deeply that [inaudible 0:05:33.1] and so that was the starting point of the conversation. It has since changed shape, this was a kind of early matrix of interests if everybody go that, I'm not sure if everybody is able to hear me I may be…
Scott: Yes, we're able to hear you really well
Ashok: …developments that were in the pot so to speak, around two and a half to three years ago.
Hello Jan, are you here now?
Jan: Yes [I thought it was in two hours? 0:06:29.1]
Steven: I'm not sure what to ask first, maybe you could talk more about each of those components of the matrix, they're all extremely fascinating in their own right, but I don't know if that's the thing to ask you first, maybe the better thing is to talk about what the matrix actually is and what you build together; whichever way you'd like to go.
Ashok: Sure, but maybe, I could do that from the point of view of, well
One of the large components of it, I'll describe in detail one of those kind of situations as I saw it, and of course you have to realize that at this point I'm also speaking for a lot of other people so I could be saying kinds of things that they may not agree with, for example, one of the organizations that was involved with the early inception was [Modulus 0:07:44.2] which is a large NGO in Bombay which has a cultural kind of legal wing, it does very serious legal work around women's rights, all sorts of things around conflicts, class-based, caste-based work and so on, and have been very prominent on the city kind of legal scene, they also have, as part of a two-phase structure in some organizations in India, they have a cultural wing which actually uses funds from a variety sources, this is also typical in the Indian context from typically Modulus' direct would say they use animal husbandry money to do films, you know there was a large amount of cultural work, film production, and so on done with this kind of development money at a certain point from the middle of the late eighties to the late nineties and so on.
Scott: If you don't mind, sorry because we're projecting this and taking a look while we go, we're trying to find a website for Modulus and it seems to be a general term
Ashok: Modulusbombay.org would be the website
So in their case, they had a lot of material, they were trying to get off the ground an archival projects called Godam which, in this particular case had a lot of material around the city of Bombay and a lot of material on Kashmir, and it had been collected in the course of a career as an organization which actually have done rather well. So they had a lot of tapes, they had a lot of material in TV over the past ten odd years and they had done a project on Kashmir they had done several projects on slum and or informal housing situations in the city of Bombay and a lot of this material was then being put together in an archival they were calling Godam which translated into English means warehouse, now they were attempting also to make this material publically available and they were experimenting with various ways to do it, Shaina had been a fellow of Modulus, and was invited to be part of the exercise of imagining what Godam could be and how they could actually make it a more public archive. At that point [inaudible 0:10:48.2] organization which I was involved in, and we were giving birth to this thing which is now called CAM, a kind of organization that is now a non-profit, [inaudible 0:11:04.0]had its own archives which overlapped with Modulus' in terms of the Bombay material and Shaina had been working around [inaudible 0:11:15.2] of distribution of video in her own ways through things like [inaudible 0:11:19.2] television and so on, and so there was a group of people in Bombay who were involved in this discussion around the public archive, and this kind of video memory of the last say ten-odd years since the DV kind of thing had happened in India and had caused an explosion in the amount of production which was not the theme, or was not followed by an equal number of streaming venues or an equal number of even films being shown or seen around screenings and so on, so there was lots of people shooting, lots of material, but not necessarily many venues to screen it and not necessarily a sense that there were platforms that this material could be shared and so on. So this was the context that existed around two and a half to three years ago where Godam was already a existing archive project which needed a kick in its backside in order to--and they admitted it themselves-- which needed a boost to get it out there, all this material sitting in cupboards and actually other people were contributing to and so on was not accessible, was not being productive. Into that conversation also stepped in the software that Jan and Seb had already worked on and maybe it's a good time to ask Jan and Seb to talk a bit about that from their point of view.
Steven: Jan and Sebastian, maybe you can also give a kind of a bit of a history the way that Ashok did of where you guys came from.
Scott: Steven do you mean where geographically speaking? or where politically or
Steven: No, I was thinking of [texts? 0:13:26.3] basically
Sebastian: I mean historically speaking we were coming from a practice of copyright [inaudible 0:13:37.1] mostly and when we met with Shaina and [name 0:13:41.2] when we kind of had our initial discussions and pretty soon gave birth to Pad.ma, the project, Jan and me we had just been running a thing for a couple of years which was called Pirate Cinema. Pirate Cinema was a series of weekly screening we did in Berlin, we started in 2004, and the idea was that we just noticed that we were downloading so many films that we couldn't just watch them ourselves, we needed some help with that, so at the, yeah, it's there, but it's not there there, but Pirate Cinema was in a way they follow a project to [inaudible 0:14:30.9] which was just a huge online [inaudible 0:14:32.8] but Pirate Cinema had more of a physical component in the sense that we had a space for it, and every Sunday we would do a screening of films we had downloaded and you could screen it for free, you would get a copy of the film etc. Pirate Cinema [inaudible 0:14:50.0] has a schedule of what we did, I can paste that too, yes, no that was the problem I mean we noticed that once we'd seriously started to get in the business of downloading either we would become like lonely archivists or we would have to do something that involved more people so one of the things we did to involve more people was of course running this as a cinema, and I mean there were many pirate cinemas everywhere at the time, and all over Europe, in London, in Denmark, and Sweden there were many people we also knew who ran similar operations, but then we also noticed that in order to not become lonely archivists, we had to do something about archiving in a more technical sense which was to do some archiving software. I mean anyone who deals with a large number of files knows that it sometimes is not so much fun organizing stuff that sits on all kinds of different hard drives and so from that Pirate Cinema at the moment, in 2007 we were running this project called [All 21 0:16:05.9] the all of the 21st Century. So this had funding for a one-year long project conference, meetings, workshops etc on intellectual property, and part of the things, I mean when we did the budget we thought we also want to do something practical even though by the beginning of the project we had not really much of a sense of what this would be, we wanted to produce something that could be a blueprint for an archive, and since we were sitting on so many films, we thought ok, let's do something that takes film as a body of… as a medium and let's see that we can do with all the data we have that we normally don't find on the internet. I think 0XDB takes some time to explore, but what we basically thought was A)now that we have so many movies and so many subterms and files for them, actually do one full text search in movies, so for example, something like, I don't know if I have a good link..
and so one thing is, as you can imagine if you have subterms and movie [inaudible 0:17:37.6] or then later with Pad.ma text [inaudible 0:17:39.6] time-based, you can easily reference and retrieve information that is at a particular point of the film and then the other idea was as we had a bit of knowledge about video codecs and some idea about graphical representation of film, what we thought is that film is always so hard to browse on, if you have a huge digital library of films, it's almost impossible to handle it if you don't have the right tools, so one of the tools is maybe something like this
so we try to [extract visual information.. inaudible 0:18:22.8] blueprint-like overview of what's happening. I mean that last link you can just browse over see the subtitles and click on…
So in the end use this data gathered from all kinds of dark networks, make some public website out of it, and try to give a hint at what all the funded archive video projects that were already existing online failing at. Which we thought was mostly about search and video and mostly about making accessible, representing graphically [inaudible 0:19:12.9]
Of course it was also strategic kind of investment of time because we thought that a project like Pirate Cinema would actually win if it had as a side project or as a co-project a resource that had all the looks of being serious about software and serious about technology, so we always thought this was a nice combination. Then from this point on it became relatively clear, relatively soon what we could do with Shaina and [names 0:19:48.5] in the future, because all these archive tools just called for an application with actual material contributed by network [inaudible 0:20:06.0] and also called for actually user-contributed annotation.
Scott: Yes, we're here, Steven got dropped for a second, we're just adding him back.
?: I don't know how much of the [inaudible 0:20:48.3] … on the screen there but we have this timelines and ability to reference video at a specific point on the video so it's not only that you have the entire video, but you can say at this point in the video-- which is then something that Pad.ma plays a larger role with so we don't just have information about videos that are collected from various sources online, but is actually entered by people that mostly have a relation to the video that they work with the video, so that they have [inaudible 0:21:35.7]environment.
People can directly link to a segment in the video.
[pause]
Besides linking to a particular point in time, you can also
Scott: Ok, so we're looking at this link that you just sent, and you were just describing that a little bit? We haven't used the tool here on our end so, the actual workings of it are a little abstract for us.
Jan: [inaudible 0:22:47.2] … a bit like a video editor, so we have these different views of the video on the top on the left, while the most left one is a virtual player and the central one is the [inaudible 0:23:04.8] and the right one is the out one and below it you have this time-line which is a representation of the video we are looking at one pixel is one second, and we have a bit of information about what you can actually see there, so you get an idea of the videos.
Scott: Wow, this is amazing
Jan: If you navigate now to, you can click on anywhere on this timeline and then you see the player view will change to this position and if you for example press "I" and "o" and you can set the in point and press "o" to select the outpoint, so you could mark your own field, and if you would log in you could now add a new description, or keyword, or location, or transcript, you can also press the play button below the player which works with browsers that support html5 video playback [inaudible 0:24:15.1]
Ashok: If you want to explore the site later on for both sites, it's nicer if you get a free account on this site because then you cannot just read, but also write…
Scott: Yeah, absolutely, we definitely will
I was just browsing through using; not to get too technical about this, but this is a technical project on some level, I know it's both theoretical and practical, but just sort of scrolling back with my keys I can scroll through second by second through the entire clip that you posted, and see the description change as the clips change, and I guess presumably we could annotate this?
Ashok: If you press "0" then you jump to the next point where something changes so you don't have to jump through it second by second, if you press "h" which will bring up a small help screen with all the keywords that you can use.
Steven: How much video footage do you actually have on there now and how much [is voluntary? inaudible 0:25:48.7]
?: I think it's something like 600 events now that are different videos, and they have many thousand layers to that I think, for example I have some stats here; 7000 descriptions, so most of the videos have a description and a transcript layer, so there are many more transcripts though, 14000, sometimes they are a bit finer grain, but also they are of larger blocks
Ashok: Since there was already some transcript, many of them are also done specifically for the site.
Scott: Guys, if you don't mind me asking, just in terms of scalability, 8000 movies is not very much compared to other online, free online video repositories, I realize this is a bit different, I guess I was just wondering, when browsing through these, we haven't touched on all of them at all, but we get a sense that a lot of these are not necessarily all coming from the same political vantage point, but they seem to have social element to them. I was just wondering if this was something that was opened up for literally anyone to upload video and it became highly popular, and there were thousands or millions of videos uploading where you had to look for the documentaries amongst beer -fart jokes and you know, sort of frat-humor videos if you know what I mean; I wonder what that would do to the project.
Ashok: Yeah, I mean there's definitely the art of growing slowly and I think while Pad.ma has upload functionality and I know that anyone can just upload their video, there's still currently a moderation process so everything uploaded lands in a queue, and there's also not; I mean I think this question of scalability I would rather address it once is occurs because like so many projects don't make it even to the hundreds of hours because they're already thinking what they're going to do with millions of hours, and I think once Pad.ma has ten times more material than now, we can think about it again and result of this would always be a bit different. I don't see in terms of infrastructure that is technically why I wouldn't scale of course hosting more video material online costs more money, but otherwise I think the system itself is quite sound.
?: If we grow it slow enough then maybe the cost will not really rise, because all this is getting drastically cheaper, as hard drives and bandwidth goes down
Ashok: I also think that with Pad.ma that by establishing a certain level of description and transcript, and work that is putting a video on there, it doesn't fit for everything, it's not a place where you would just put your video if you are not interested in this level of annotation, so by that it also filters out a certain category of videos. Sure it can happen that the most interesting things people want to write about is some funny video.
Steven: But it is possible not only to comment and to comment on the comments of the visuals, but it is also possible to upload new video material if you're a registered user.
?: Yes absolutely it's possible, and one of the things we want to add because so many people want to do it; I mean what you already can do now, is you can download any video on Pad.ma in relatively nice resolution, download
Ashok: Not only can you download the entire video but you can also download a second of the video, if you mark an in and out-point, you can in the actions menu select just to download this clip, which allows you also to extract just a second of the video from the archive.
?: And obviously what people really seem to like to do in addition to that, and what we hope we will implement in the next version is that you can also remix the stuff right on the site, so now that you have this nice timeline, this nice video editor-like thing that allows you to set in point and out points than you hit "d" and add a description for example, people really do want copy and new empty timeline and paste, so you can basically create a huge list of bookmarks of clips and that will be a video in itself, so that's one of the things I think we would love to add in the near future.
Jan: I wanted to add regarding the upload functionality that when you have an account you can upload a video and you can do anything with the video, you can also send around the link to the video, the only thing that is not happening right now because it will not show up in the search unless it went through moderation processes where we decide if we want to have this as a public video, so that is the level on which it is currently open or not.
Sebastian: And then maybe one more work regarding scalability, I think that the thing that's least likely to scale very well is thorough annotation because for many videos, let's say for example we work with filmmakers that will work with people that have larger archives, now many of them are really willing to give them material or provide the DV originals and so on, but what seems to be really hard to do is good annotation because in some cases people have already logged the material, have their sheets so this can be easily imported into Pad.ma, but in many of the cases, lots of people work hard for weeks, if not months to get proper annotation done, which is descriptions, which is transcript, which is mapping out location, referenced in the video etc, so unlike 0XDB with which all we have to do is put movie files and subtitles on a server and be done so that can grow relatively rapidly, with Pad.ma there's another vector of growth if you want, which is not so much volume, but depth of annotation, and that we'd love to see grow just as we'd love to see the site grow in terms of volume, you just don't see it that easily, but if you dive deep into Pad.ma you will notice how deep it is in terms of what people annotate, what people contribute, in which ways people use the annotation function to actually incorporate their own writing on films that my span different items in Pad.ma so there's a lot of depth also.
Ashok: I was going to say that what we do also think about is there is a kind of ecology or a kind of process which relates to the term footage which was very important to the way Pad.ma was imagined and I think the way I think it has grown. This is a crucial term because it is distinct from film and deals with what you might call the remnants of all the differences in the processes of taking video, or shooting video, or being a kind of camera person and making films, there is a vast gulf between those two things, and it's something that we felt and physically felt in our context of piles of thousands of tapes gathering around up, but very few films to show for it exactly, but in general the idea that filmmaking economy, especially with things like documentary or art projects, creates its own [brutal? 0:35:32.0] selection process and while we can say that there is merit in that selection process, there are also things that get left behind, and there are things that potentially other people could use, and there is productive remainder which was one of the first things that Pad.ma was address, that there is the filmmaking process but then there is a thing called footage. Whether it's found footage, or footage that was shot for a project but ended up being used somewhere else, or not used ever, or has been lying around waiting for its film, waiting for the film; things like that which are quite common in I'm sure in all of our experiences. But what footage does is it gives you a long view, or a very different kind of landscape and now when Shaina and me for example watch films, we're watching footage, we're always that the edit would have been a bit different, or if we couldn't see a more of that; so there is a way in which the filmmaker is trapped into this ideal making of film, which is not necessarity the only result of that practice.
So to give an example maybe, I don't know if I have… ok so Pad.ma has for example lists, this is a project that refers to the previous link I sent out… so that's a list of events; events are individual pieces of video on Pad.ma; a list is a collection of such individual pieces, and is in this case a single project done by Shaina and myself in which we…so it's in the context of an art project we were invited to work with a group and a space in city of Manchester, and it was called CCTV Social. We had access to large CCTV rooms in the city of Manchester, and we invited people to come into them and to these kind of one-hour clinic sessions, or sessions in this CCTV room with the police, with other kinds of provocateurs and so on, and these are documented in their entire length in this list, and that has a very different kind of sensibility to perhaps what was presented within the context of the art work, or the exhibition that was created out of this process. And already there have been many people who have referenced this material in other ways; some people have used parts of it [inaudible 0:38:53.1] of Manchester for example, and it enters potentially a wider economy.
The idea was the Pad.ma give it as much context as possible to really think archivally in the sense that you're not only putting this stuff for viewing pleasure, or it's not a kind of YouTube situation, but it's really about a context for usability, a context for a kind of productive context that could be generated out of this material that mean the ability to download is very explicit, there is a lot of textual material, there is many many ways to search it, it's very deeply annotated, and there is a kind of generosity in the idea that we like which is that footage; not necessarily everything that you shot, not the stuff where you were testing the camera and so on, but also just not what you produce in a certain context, so there's a space between those two things.
And I think that extends then to this idea of the footage [inaudible 0:40:13.9] like film inherently extends perhaps to things like actually writing about films which is… something like that. So if you click on that that's an example of Lawrence, who is part of the collective as well who is writing about the viewing citizen as constructed through in the cinema; writing about a particular clip in the film, which shows an audience, a so-called [inaudible 0:40:52.2] and the ability to see the material, so if you imagine cinema scholarship or writing about video material which lets you actually see it, which is actually a primary condition of talking about it, it's something that Pad.ma lets you do, and in a way there's been already a move locally within our context to try and use Pad.ma for this kind of, not only for footage that is left over, but then to turn film themselves into a kind of footage-nest, an idea that's a bit looser than the in and out points that were determined by the length of the film at that point or by the BBC or whatever, was a constraint, but to be able to see it at other levels, and to then of course, as Sebastian said, you would be able to do in the next build and so on, and to be able to use this material in a way to see it, which we haven't really seen, I mean there's all this scholarship around things and the writing around it for example and viewing of films have been in to a degree a separate experiences. At one level what very simply happens is that you can see them both together and they don't necessarily need to be indexical related to each other, I mean they can be neighbors, they can be sitting next to each other in a space, and that's I think is a pretty powerful thing that happens in Pad.ma already.
Scott: Ashok I just wanted to ask you a quick question, about the CCTV Social project, I understand now what the features lists are about I think; those are project-based lists it sounds like, and I guess I just wanted to point out that in a sense it seems that this tool can be used in many ways, both to build meaning visually and literally too to edit, I mean for instance, the CCTV project it looks almost exactly like one of those monitor rooms, just that page link that you sent earlier, whereas other pieces of the site have a different kind of feeling; the editor for example and other sections, but yeah I guess… you were bringing back the disambiguating the efforts of Pad.ma from other pseudo-archives like YouTube or something like that, because it is moderated, and I guess I was curious because we are talking about this in the context of supportive systems for creative cultural practice, or critical cultural practice, Pad.ma is not only a tool, but is also a group of people; for instance it's moderated, so who moderates it? It sounds like you guys, or a few of you, or something like that?
Ashok: The thing about moderation is that Pad.ma has had a slow growth as Seb mentioned before. so what we started off doing was we started out with actually a group of people who had [inaudible 0:45:36.1] putting in a lot of effort, and I mean this quite seriously, there was a lot of effort that does go into the writing process, the annotation process, so a group of people including us, including the whole initiators of the project, and a slowly expanding group that was provisionally invited to try and create a kind of starting mass for the project. Because of the sheet amount of labor that it takes compared to an economy like YouTube inters of the kind of context that all the videos provide, it's not [inaudible 0:46:15.7] for random people to just come in and be part of that ecosystem and I think we've just got to a point where we kind of publically opened it up to people upload on fattier own, and then this has been happening but the volume of it is not huge amounts so the moderation process is still quite casual, it is done by a group of people who both moderate and invite chunks of material, I mean it's much more that we're interested in these mini archives that people have around a certain sense of idea, sense of projects or specific geographies like Kashmir, or specific city contexts or specific times like [inaudible 0:47:10.8] or 1992, or [inaudible 0:47:14.0] and so on, these things are [inaudible 0:47:18.3] and then people who look at these things on Pad.ma then write to us and say "Hey I have material around this as well…" so it's still at a state where it's a humanly possible set of interactions. This could change but I think also we're at the moment, still very much in building the archive mode where it is not necessarily advertised as this "come and upload" your own video site" it's advertised as a rather serious archival slightly nerdy kind of site where people are spending a lot of time over little bits of video and only a limited number of people are interested in that, so at the moment, and also I think the time that situation may change with the new software situation, so I a lot of this is very much the beginning of what we help to build densely, deeper rather than in purely in terms of participation of contributors of video [inaudible 0:48:37.9] to encourage to keep a relationship with it. So at the moment it's a combination of inviting people and moderating people who might be interested, and that's worked reasonably well, we demand a lot ..
Steven: [inaudible 0:49:01.5] I noticed in Beirut, in the context of Lebanon in the Middle East, when you did a workshop there, one of the sounds that I think that you encountered was that people in that area where very much involved in their own conflicted situation and lacked a kind of fluency in connecting with others; I think that is kind of [inaudible 0:49:44.0] to what Matthew wrote just a moment ago, is that it's very difficult to make all the links and then work that scale of [inaudible 0:49:54.9] between two local conflicting situations and a global framework which would allow them to be connected.
?: I mean because one of the challenges that you face in, not just in Lebanon, but in Lebanon it's very obviously, is that a lot of the people not being able to network stems from the fact that they have virtually no internet, so while you always find a specific archival situation if you want; both in terms of archival of politics and in terms of just technology and what you have in terms of infrastructure and for me it has been very interesting to do a lot of work on Pad.ma and work with a lot of communities around Pad.ma in conditions where both the politics of archiving and the technologies of archiving are not as clear cut as you would think maybe in the US or in Germany where you have this kind of idea that things are just as they should be because how could it be otherwise--no, I think in terms of technology we've been pretty, since we're used to it, we can run Pad.ma locally as a server, we could put it up in a room, it takes s few hours, it's not such a big deal, so you can play with Pad.ma locally if your internet doesn't allow for other things, and we've had the same thing with many contributors and not just in India, they said "ok, I put my video online, but just annotating online, I don't have the bandwidth, I can't do it" so you also have to account for that. Then, there's also of course the archival politics which means by now many people have noticed that archives--and this can be archives of art, this can be archives of [inaudible 0:51:51.4] sensitive material that a resource than can be monetized, that can be sensitivity can be exploited for all kinds of means, you can have the author who said that ok think is my archive, but if I share it online everyone will remix it, you can have the museum director who said "here is all my stuff" but there's some politically sensitive bits, or you can have like the huge companies who go after the many individual archive owners not just in western Asia, who actually reinforce that notion that there would be a monitory value in this and you can't just put it up on the internet and open source is not going to help etc. and given that situation both technologically and politically, I think you have to work with what you can work with; which in the case of a Beirut workshop where a couple of people we knew and many more people we maybe didn't know before, and tried to… I mean part of my [inaudible 0:52:53.3] is a tool for research. First of all, it can be the part of research that people could do when they look at their own things' you look at your own footage, you edit and you annotate your own footage, and then by opening it up, you allow other people who may or may not be familiar with the topics raised to annotate more and to continue that discussion, for us it was a logical starting point to involve people, to work with people whose research we could actually follow and had an interest in.
Steven: I was just wondering if you had encountered [inaudible 0:53:48.3] from people in getting them to add their footage for either copy right or intellectual property right for whatever fear that they have.
Ashok: It always happens, it always happens and to me dealing with copyright online for a long time, I think I can recognize in this.. we've dealt with filmmakers who have said we have this anxiety once their footage is out there, it can be misused. Whatever that means, I mean hardly anyone will walk up and say I'm [inaudible 0:54:37.2] copyright so I'm not going to put it on a platform where you have a creative commons [inaudible 0:54:43.2] and then everyone can download. Everyone individually is a big fan of liberal copyright and open source software etc, but when it becomes personal and concrete he will often be like "no this material is politically sensitive, someone can misused it" someone will say "ok, other people can annotate, but what about other people adding false information" so the figure of this author, they're very very strong, this idea that the internet is out there to screw you over and is common among many producers and today archivists are authors too so you feel that you're the author of the archive so the problem perpetuates. But the reasons people come up with I think are mostly, I mean I read a funny story today in Germany there's a huge discussion these days about Google Street View, it's going to be launched by the end of the year and now the government is critical about it and people are invited to privately, to personally have their own homes taken off the Street View for privacy reasons, but this is a --and today in one online magazine I saw people were posing, there was an article about these people taking off their houses off Google Street View and there was actually a photo of these people standing in front of their own house with a banner, and these people are going to have their house removed from Google Street View, but these people are actually in a publication online standing in front of the house they want to remove for privacy reasons. So I think there's always something else that motivates people to have what they think is their home taken off the internet, and in many cases it's so strange, I mean we can talk about this for longer if you life, we've-- one of the by-products of Pad.ma is deep research into author's anxieties to publish. Even though we would always way you don't have to put your material on Pad.ma, if it's juts about making content available, put it on YouTube, that is fine, there are many many options, but if you want it to have context, and I think Pad.ma provides context, even more than it provides content, if you want it to be on a specific context and be part of a network and be in a region of the internet that has a certain density, then I think some people then realize that this is actually a good argument, that it may be of value to contribute.
?: Yeah, and I think it's been important to make the suggestion--I mean to say on the one hand yes it is the decision including of the ethical decision of the filmmakers contributing their material or the authors otherwise contributing their material to Pad.ma it remains their decision to contribute whatever they wish to, but to push that always to the questions quite fundamentally, in order to debate what it is we're afraid of we have to see it and if we don't let us see it then the debate around what is the ethical problem can't really be had, so in a way you can black out entire sections of video and so on, but in terms of the discussion and in terms of being able to enter the discussion, it's impossible to do that without having anything to talk about, and part of our approach to filmmakers has been that yes, include the problem the archive is about talking through your immediate fear or its misuse and so on may tell us something about the nature of, not only of fear, but also if something is misused in a certain context then that may also tell you something about the footage itself that maybe more valuable than your fear at the moment. And I think Sebastian said this once that if they rightwing uses your material then maybe that said something about the footage itself- -is there such a thing as right-wing footage that the rightwing can use? and in which ways?
So in general, the provocation and idea has always been that the archive is a place for these conflicts, the archive must tell us more than just what we know and what is available anyway in other formats, or there is a space for this discussion here, and I think there's an ongoing kind of attempt addressing your previous point Steven, there is an ongoing attempt to now make this more of a reasonable question than rather just question stemming from the original groups kind of material. and it's just a point we haven't reached yet in Beirut, as you know, the internet is functionally quite bad, and nevertheless there are conversations that are going to continues; we're doing a workshop next month in Cairo, and so around this area, and the Middle East that we as [inaudible 1:00:33.7] work in as well, there is a bit of discussion now around what material can be in common, what ideas can be exchanged, there's a bit of a shared history around the documentary film tradition and with Egypt with the film tradition as well, so there are several possible points of [inaudible 1:00:56.2] and I don't think we're at that point yet.
Steven: I have a question to do with the type of search through the archives, you can do I know searches through the annotated texts, but is it possible, or is it conceivable to do searches that are based on for example visual criteria, or sound criteria, or criteria other than annotations based on the keywords of the annotation?
Sebastian: We'd love to do a bit more of this in the future, but I think if you wanted to search for the guy with the glass; technologically most of the interest in this field, I mean there's face recognition and there's also all these security related challenges that, of which a lot of effort has been put into at least getting face recognition right, but we're talking here not about a photo album, or limited like always fixed angles, CCTV situation but to be able to search for visual objects in films, is still a bit ahead in the future, nevertheless, what we can do now, what we can do today, and what we will do in the next version of Pad.ma is to retrieve a bit more visual information from the clips for example you can easily detect cuts in the material, you can easily, for example with something like 0XDB, because it's a different body of material, It's not footage, it's cinema, it's almost 10000 films of cinema, it would be really nice if you can at least sort your results by color, or by brightness, or by saturation, or by cut frequency, or play a bit more with these visual materials, but if you really want to find visual objects in moving material, I think you still have to wait, for a bit.
Scott: What about other ways of looking or working with the material such as audio? I was curious just for practical reasons, but also I'm curious, I know this is meant to be a visual index, but I also understand that this is video too, not just silent video, I was curious about the audio component, if that's something that's come up for you guys either theoretically or just technically.
Jan?: I mean the things that Sebastian just mentioned for more visual indicators there are some things that we can do for sound… most of these are right now more of abilities to sort through the ideas, not so much limit it. I mean you can sort it by the average volume, or if it's a loud film, if there are a huge variety of sounds, but in order to search you have to use some form of [inaudible 1:04:48.4] to formulate something, and then usually you do it with text, and so to transform that again into something that is not text… like you sing something and then it finds it, or so that you put up a picture and you draw something, It requires completely new ways of inputting a search, and then you could find it. But that is still quite far from anything that we've actually done.
There are some projects that try to do where you draw something and then it finds pictures there are similar, if anyone could do something like that as part of video…
?: and you could say that..
Jan?yeah I mean by systems where you sing a song and then it tells you which song you were signing, mostly used to detects sounds that are played in clubs, you phone out and then it records a bit of the sounds and then it tells you which song you were listening to.
?No I mean there is speech detection obviously but that works--I mean we've tried this clean room situation, English text, and it works relatively miserably, now a lot of the material in Pad.ma is not really clean-room, the audio doesn't have to be very good, and I don't know, we don't have a display that says how many languages are on Pad.ma, but in many cases, it's about finding someone who can at least transcribe this to English, it's not so straight forward and it's not so easy.
I mean one of the things, I think so far and I think we'll stick to that for a while that is to build on large amounts of good annotation, so if you wanted to have sunsets in Philadelphia, we cannot help you with the sunsets someone will have to mark sunsets in the films, but for example [inaudible 1:07:07.9] with the subtitles what we want to do is extract automatically location information which is place names, or calendar information in the broader sense which is the mention of Events or anything that occurs in time, and map them out automatically on a calendar or on the map so that you get that part for free and with a huge body of annotation which is like 10,000 films per subtitles on 0XDB or which is really deep annotation on Pad.ma on which you could also extract all kinds of things semantically, I think there are a lot of ways to get what you want.
Scott: Not to focus too much on the technical because I think we are also covering a lot of other ground, but have you guys considered audio to text methods at all? Do you see any practical advantage?
Ashok: …I've tried it, but it doesn't work, I was trying it with several films and it was really interesting because there was a scene where a woman walks down the street with high heels, and the text that was recognized was "Iraq, Iraq, Iraq" and I think that was more an indication as to who pays for this technology that is developed that has a military interest. But it is not really helpful for films, one problem is that a lot of the films are cut, and sound is edited with transition so that you don't have clear separation between two people speaking, and that way it was also really hard to recognize when they change, so when a new person starts to speak, and generally, at least with the software that I tried, it was not acceptable, and it is mostly limited to American English, so whenever you have anything that has many languages, or local dialects it becomes [inaudible 1:09:14.4].
Scott: I can definitely see that, I know with some of the more expensive audio-text software solutions you really have to train them, and training them for different dialects and different languages that sounds like a nightmare, but I was curious because it seems like you're interesting in what you called "misuses" and I was thinking perhaps you might be equally interested in the sort of miss-transcription or whatever they are, they would be called, interspersed with then they get it right so to speak.
Sebastian?: Yeah, if they were really original all of the times then yes.
Jan: Beside "Iraq" more of them were not even words, they were just made up things, so I was quite disappointed with what I …and if you train certain things it becomes better. One areas which we might explore at some point is to take a technology like that and only extract certain things again from these texts, so you don't take the entire transcript that is automatically generated, but within that you can, with a certain certainly decide on that certain terms are usually recognized right… maybe not "Iraq" …. it was recognized too often.
Steven: You've collectively authored and [inaudible 1:11:05.0] I've just posted a link to that on the Pad.ma site, maybe [inaudible 1:11:14.8] critical culture, archiving, political cultures [inaudible 1:11:21.7] in these series of discussion s of plausible art worlds, and I think [inaudible 1:11:29.3]
Ashok: I think one of the things about that text is that it was presented as a, in the context of a presentation, so it's not really meant as a text form, it's meant as a series of pretty much polemical short statements, and in that sense you know, and should be read as a kind of spoken text if you like. The "Don't Wait" thing I think was actually the title of the workshop of Beirut and I think the kinds of ways that the waiting around or for the archive for some kind of higher force of the archive or for some higher force of the archive to come and rescue the situation is the common, is at think that we experience a lot in our context, and I think in Beirut it's combined with the kind of waiting that's created by a very commercially [inaudible 1:12:42.6] specially among the media now increasingly about you know the cultural issues with…
So to give an example, there's a large archiving of [inaudible 1:12:59.7] which for ten years has been promising us the publication of its archive, or the access to its archive in some form, but we are supposed to wait until the archive launches, until a certain text has been written about it, till the institution gets its act together, which is never does because actually it's selling off parts of the archive using that money to trade on the stock market so that it can raise funds to make more archive which is still also not going to be visible to anyone, you know so this has been happening for about ten years, and it's really a situation where the archive becomes this promised land that [inaudible 1:13:46.0] the idea of something finished, but also something that is promised in various ways but never quite arrives. And especially in our context at least if you're going to wait for the state or you know, something like that, or a larger kind of commercial power to come and do it for you then obviously you would be living in that kind of regime. So the "Don't Wait" was a kind of practical call to think about these conditions in a way that was using the word archive in a sense politically was saying that it's not only about elections, but yes let's talk about the archive, let's talk about something that used to be the prerogative of large institutions, the state, and so on, and let's talk about that as a collective proposition.
Scott: I like that you have different ways of talking about it besides just talking about it as well; it seems like the Pad.ma project not only some of the content that foreground that I've noticed deals with copyright issues, but also the entire way that it's structured that you guys are actually doing this stuff and then inviting other people to do it as well is another way of talking about it.
I only mention that because well oftentimes there are criticism leveraged at people involved in these discussions where they kind of end on the discussion level and a project like this definitely does not.
Ashok: I think it works that there are many people involved, various people who have different things to take from it, and [inaudible 1:15:57.6] they're written by three or four different people so you know it's not like Pad.ma itself, it's not a canonical kind of statement, it's more like, it's not even going to words a set of canonical truths, but stacking up, layering up, adding to ideas that are already existing in some way or that really different people have different things to take and give to Pad.ma even at the moment, and this has been true I think for its short history so far.
[Alarm clock] It's five hours
Ashok: It's five am guys!
Steven: One more questions, I guess it feel like in the comments that have come up [inaudible 1:16:54.4] a few times already it's been mentioned [inaudible 1:16:58.9]
…a kind of an archiving as you see is like some sort of radical pedagogy and obviously [inaudible 1:17:08.6] teachers or people involved in alternative information production to want to use Pad.ma as a tool. What do you think about that, I mean that's, what if I said I want to do seminar with my students and I want to get them involved in this, I want them to be [inaudible 1:17:37.9] and annotating stuff, [inaudible 1:17:44.5] or what?
Ashok: Steven, I just have to go and get my power cord, but I think it's a great idea, and there's a couple of things that are happening, Pad.ma gives out these small fellowships at the moment and one of them is creating a pedagogic unit around the video archive of this organization that works which basically slum rehabilitation and kind of politics around that, around the situation of housing in the city, their archive is being turned into a kind of class room unit, which can then be used by different--so it's an experimented creating a kind of pedagogy unit, so I have to run off and I'll be back in a moment.
Steven: A question for maybe Sebastian and Jan, what [inaudible 1:18:43.4] language other than English, because if English is in India is the language which belongs to nobody so it's everybody's, that's what [inaudible 1:18:54.4] but what about people who wouldn't feel comfortable expressing themselves in written English, are there other languages on there? Is it possible? Is it conceivable? Is it desirable?
Jan/Sebastian: I mean the interface itself is English only right now, as for writing annotations, you can just write any language you want, and you can also use-- there were some issues with right-to-left languages, but in Beirut people also use Arabic and there [inaudible 1:19:33.4] so other scripts are used on Pad.ma ; the problem that arises with it is that if people search for something they will not find it because they might not be able to search with tat character every easily, or they don't know the language so it creates a sub community in that language
Scott: Would you guys be interested in creating a translation interface, or something like that?
Jan/Sebastian: I mean right now you could just add another annotation with the same in and out point and use a different language and they would show up, and once there are [inaudible 1:20:10.4]that doesn't really work anymore and becomes messy [inaudible 1:20:15.1]
So far I think it would be just that you take a text that exists, an existing layer, and add a new one within different layers and it's always possible if you are on the side to switch off one user, like different users, so you can only see the annotation of one person, or not of one person in the contributor' [01:20:46.2 from the top. So if there is someone editing annotations or some way of getting a translation effort then use you always switch that off.
So that is what you could do right now, and I think at two levels too different multilingual things, one is translation and the other is the people are working indifferent languages, and then I think it makes sense to do that and if it is a translation then this is a another layer of work that has to be put into the side and as people already have problems [inaudible 1:21:38.6] … is a lot of work, I don't know what they would think if [inaudible 1:21:46.2] has to be translated into.
Ashok: For example currently there is a --we're doing a film by a guy called [name 1:22:15.2] a kind of interesting figure in the Bombay documentary scene, and there is a Hindi and an English transcript of it happening at the same time, because it's a very specific king which I think merited that kind of attention and in Beirut for example, there was a few things that I think were translated, and there's already a bunch of Arabic stuff in there which ; this is a random selection but with something like this you could see…
Kind of descriptions in Arabic which I think are going to be followed up by transcripts in English, which are translations of what's going on, so there's different levels of [inaudible 1:23:23.9]
[pause]
Scott: Definitely
Jan/Sebastian: I think it's from a local TV station that [inaudible 1:23:56.8] type of footage
Ashok: Yeah so I mean there's a bunch of foreign material in different mixed languages which I think have been treated, this one has Kashmiri, Urdu, English as well and so on, so yep I mean there's an interesting set of questions around translation I think.
There is this nice feature on the info page that you can, it's like a little flip book of the frames, and the I don't know if you guys can see this, but on the last link I sent out, you can flip through the entire video via rolling over, by scrolling over basically the image you see so and when you click on a certain point, you're taken to that point on the timeline.
Scott: Did, was this covered earlier? I know we're talking with Jan, Ashok and Sebastian, Ashok I know that we had talked very briefly as part of this panel with Temple University here in Philadelphia, maybe a year and a half ago or something like that, or more; I was curious if I guess someone here just asked about the technical side of this, who was responsible for the different components of that night, my understanding was that all of you are, but I'm not sure if that's true, and are there many more people? Even though it's a freely accessible API it's not exactly an open source community right? It's a pretty close-knit group of people even if you are geographically dispersed?
?The software of Pad.ma is open source so it's available and can be used by other people, the development so far is what the people involved with Pad.ma do on it, there hasn't been anyone really from outside that's making for the development. We are right now in this next phase of work which is also open source and can be followed on these links. Both systems also have a public API that can be used to interface with the instance that is Pad.ma, and this will also be extended in the next version that there are more possibilities from embedding segments of the video to having ways of displaying annotations in different ways and using it on your side as you want to do.
?: I think what we want allow for in the future is like, many people like Pad.ma [inaudible 1:28:02.5] but then maybe they sit on larger archives that if they would just contribute the whole thing into Pad.ma would shift the focus of Pad.ma to much of people who want their independence, so people want to be able to run [inaudible 1:28:16.1] and while a couple of people have actually managed to do so with the existing software for Pad.ma, we want to make that much easier in the future by actually developing a video archive framework which then allows us to then 0XTB and Pad.ma on it, but which is then [inaudible 1:28:35.4] but which would allow anyone to run 0XTB or Pad.ma's style online archive with their own content, because in some cases it's really interesting if people contribute to Pad.ma, for some they have existing resources that are more a thing of their own. There would be many things you can do in the future for example, for now I find the uploading process is, just the concept of uploading a video to a site, it's nice if you upload every now and then, but if you have huge amounts of material, wouldn't it be nicer if Pad.ma in the future of this archiving system behaved a bit more like I-tunes maybe on your computer like here on my files, you are on a website just use a [inaudible 1:29:19.9] extension have this read in your own [inaudible 1:29:23.2] .
So what we want to make easier in the future is these workflows for users that are not so much individual who maybe add a bit of annotation here and there, or upload a video every now and then, but who actually want to manage within Pad.ma, or beyond it, larger collections of [inaudible 1:29:48.5]
Steven: I think that the, it's just that it's pretty overwhelming what Pad.ma is in a certain sense, I'm tempted to think, not so much to say about it, but you really have to have a hands on relation to it, I think [inaudible 1:30:40.5] because otherwise it's just an overwhelming amount of information potentially [inaudible 1:30:48.3]
Scott: Steven, could you just repeat that last part? For us here, it got garbled.
Steven: I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by the wonderful potential but that's not necessarily a feeling which I… I'm impressed but I don't want to be impressed, I would rather be a user, and I think it's in a sense what Pad.ma does best as well, is beckons us into a usership relationship rather than being spectators of this incredible device with which we can… we don't even know what questions to ask about it.
Ashok?: Yeah, but you can get that feeling in front of final cut pro as well, you know, it's a question of, yeah this is new stuff, and in a way, it's a bit of a tricky tool, always trying to do things which have not necessarily been done before, and there's probably I could tell you a lot more about the politics for example, the video call that are kind of embedded in the process and so on. Yes, of course, there is a way in which it is a bit of a new things and for the things that it's trying to do I think we're trying to a sense of what that really means beyond the first impression of "ohh this is a lot", but if you search for a specific term then it suddenly becomes a bit less than a lot, and then once you open that up and you're able to look at a piece of video and kind of look at it in a way from its inside if you life. Then it can start to make sense, and of course there are ways in which it could change and of course, Yan and Sebastian will agree that this current interface is only one possible way in which to instantiate the ideas that Pad/,ma represents. It's not the end of it suddenly, but the point being that yes, there are a few functions that it's trying to do and I think it will be good to go a bit further and say why, or what kind of, what's the word you used? what kind of impression it is and what is, what is the negative word that you used? - what's the fear and …
Steven: I think overwhelmed was the word I was using but [inaudible 1:34:21.0]
but on the other hand it doesn't mystify so much as [inaudible 1:34:34.2] really inviting us to grapple with it as users.
Ashok: Yes, and I think there will be different kinds of usership that will slowly evolve. I mean there are people obviously who want to view this YouTube style view full-screen, sit back and view a bunch of material, there are others who would be very specifically looking for things, so there's a whole range of things, there are those who might be using is literally now to put together a lecture for tomorrow morning, it could be people cutting up bits of footage and making new timelines and there is a range of activity there and we slowly find out which are the ones that are dominating depending on the context of the material, the material in it will change a lot of the views around it but yeah, so in that sense if we are over whelmed, is it a question of visual thing, or is it, because obviously you could be overwhelmed in generally quite easily on the internet, I am often, and so do we need a clean front-end like Google that tries to in a way offer you a clean way in, so these are questions yet, they are valid
Steven: That's a very interesting point: the clean way in, I don't know-- you're right that that does create the illusion of not being overwhelmed, it creates the illusion of control and there's and illusions of course, it's… I'm also kind of overwhelmed by the idea of Wikipedia for example, of all wikis, of the kind of modern contemporary miracle whereby so much brain power can be linked together, so much [inaudible 1:36:44.0]collaboration to produce something that's so enormous. It's like the number one billion it's very difficult to get a representation of it, but the only way to engage it is to just engage with it.
?: Definitely, I think that how people use Pad.ma so far I think is only a small part of what [inaudible 1:37:18.7] so it's also that they are [inaudible 1:37:22.4] of interpreting more, from new ways of linking the material to the [inaudible 1:37:33.5] Pad.ma is also really at an early stage still, there's still a lot to explore, and if you are overwhelmed maybe the best is to create an account and start maybe playing with it and seeing what comes up.
Steven: I have an account actually, I have an account but I haven't used it yet, I'm not really sure, can I just sort of wade right in now and start uploading and start annotating?
Ashok: Yes, you new videos will not show up for other people initially, but your annotations are not moderated or anything, so if you annotated an existing video that annotation will not be moderated, so it's like yep, you can go ahead and do that.
I think one of the ways I've used it quite often is to download pieces of video and also download annotations, for example recently we were in Gujarat, we were doing a project related to ships going to Somalia and so on, so I downloaded a whole bunch of annotations from Pad.ma which were around that project, which were around previous visits to that area, so it's really being used as a research tool, and to give you an example of what that was, …
so yeah, in a sense, apart from the annotation work, apart from adding to the archive, the ways in which its really convenient and fast and good to explore is the partial downloads feature that is even in the current build you can just download a bunch of clips, like pieces of video that you can then line up in something like VLC and use it for presentations for example, you can already do this and it's quite straight forward to do and the other thing that one can do is for example I was in this town and I had just downloaded all the annotations what were applicable to these videos which had been done about a year ago and I had them with me during my research trip and now the new material that has been collected is going to be added to this collection, so stuff like that, it's a kind of practical way really for us, it has been to link video material which is often hard to reference, or hard to find, or hard to look and bee inside of, to find a way to just reference that so video material that was shot last year in a certain situation has been annotated according to time code, and so we can find things within it, which is quite useful in a really straight forward way.
One of the fastest ways to zip through the annotations is like Jan said before to use "0" and "9" to go to next annotation.
Steven: Ok, so "000" allows you to skip from one sequence to the next, what about "999" what does that do?
Ashok: The same thing backwards, or from one annotation to the next one, so you can read rapidly all the annotations on that video clip by just going "00000" as long as you're in the edit page, that's editor view
And on actions, there is a thing on the drop-down menu, there is a thing called download annotations, and there are different ways in which you can download these annotations, and you can download all the different types of annotations as different SRT files that's kind of subtitles fields standard, and yeah, you can download as we said before parts of [inaudible 1:43:53.1], you can link to selections which is also quite useful, what we have been doing all evening, all morning. And we have I think a newsletter that I believe the next one is in a couple of weeks, we have a newsletter that I think comes out once in a couple of months.
And the sun is rising
Steven: [inaudible 1:44:43.8] I just want to ask, what is your usership now? How many people are registered users, and how many people are actually involved in a day to day or a week-to-week basis?
Ashok: I don’t know exactly, but I would say a few hundred, it's not a very big number, and also that will change… we've been a bit [inaudible 1:45:17.7] we're moving onto a new set of structures for bringing in contents so we've been on old [inaudible 1:45:33.9] I think that's going to change fairly soon. But yeah, I would say it's a couple of hundred people maybe....[inaudible 1:45:57.0] which are different from people who swing by and have a look who don't actually contribute the [inaudible 1:46:04.9]
Steven: Yeah, that's hard work to define with any precision at this point, but yeah I was speaking of people who are not merely spectators who actually [inaudible 01:46:17.0]
It's been a really fascinating presentation, I don't want it to end, but the sun is coming up [inaudible 1:46:28.4]
Scott: Yeah guys it's really been great having you, thanks for withstanding all of our prying questions
Ashok: So what's the Easter egg idea?
Scott: I'm actually not sure about that, I was going to ask, yeah I think Greg said something about an Easter egg idea earlier I'm not sure what that was.
However, I don't know if we have time to explain it because the clock strikes eight and we always try to end on time as much as possible for everyone who's usually ahead of us in terms of time-zone, especially you guys who … it's nearing six in the morning, so thanks again for bending over in a way to our kind of folding time in space to be with us tonight. We'd love to have you for future chats as well if you'd like to stay up drinking and taking stimulants and join us in the middle of the night, or early morning, you're always welcome.
Ashok: Yes, I think we're going to have a baby soon so that's not likely to happen, but we'll be up at 7am.
But thank you all and thanks Steven, we'll be back, we'll see you online and be around and keep checking in on how Pad.ma's doing.
Scott: Awesome guys, good night everyone, or good morning
Week 27: Design Studio for Social Intervention
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with some of the initiators of the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI).
Founded in 2005, DS4SI is a creativity lab for social justice work, a space for artists, activists, teachers and other social interventionists to reframe and reinvigorate the possibilities of the non-profit sector. Design studios are typically places where companies develop innovative products. In this case, it’s a place where progressive organizations within the non profit sector develop inventive practices to address real social problems. To do that, DS4SI borrows methodologies from design practices and implements them in unconventional and innovative ways. DS4SI brings together urban designers, cultural architects, community activists, game designers, performance artists, and youth organizers to translate design theory into public interventions.
In a sense, worlds – including artworlds – can only be said to be “plausible” if they are made plausible by design, that is, if people set out and redesign the existent and ultimately implausible worlds on offer. What DS4SI has done is to take the world-design imperative seriously, convinced that design concerns not only physical objects and spaces but also — perhaps above all — forms of social justice. DS4SI is dedicated to changing how social change is imagined, developed and deployed. Does effective social intervention mean breaking with exhausted forms, designing new ways to be interventionists? Designing new frames in which to intervene?
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$5cc776c9b0b96db8" title="#basekamp/$5cc776c9b0b96db8">Design Studio for Social Intervention http://tinyurl.com/25tjetq (#basekamp/$5cc776c9b0b96db
Created on 2010-07-06 20:09:17.
2010-07-06
- BASEKAMP team: 17:58:29
- so stacy, once we call, there will be a popup call window in skype. In the lower left corner, there are two buttons - one is a pause '||' button, and the other is a mic with a crossed out circle. The mic is the mute button
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:20
- hello everyone - we'll be starting in a few minutes
- tacyswitzer" title="stacyswitzer">Stacy Switzer: 17:59:56
- got it. thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:22
- jonathan, if you're on #basekamp IRC, do you want to relay things back & forth a bit as people comment? we can't rally do both in the space here because of the projector
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:06:35
- yeah
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:06:38
- i can try
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:06:40
- Guy Loraine: 18:06:45
- hello we are here... uarts crowd
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:07:07
- hello
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:11
- hi everyone. How's the weather where you are?
- stephen wright: 18:12:51
- weather's cool, warm
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:13:02
- cold
- lindsey baker: 18:13:10
- 100 degress in philly
- stephen wright: 18:13:29
- cold?
- tacyswitzer" title="stacyswitzer">Stacy Switzer: 18:13:36
- muggy in creepy kansas city
- stephen wright: 18:13:37
- you in alaska
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:13:41
- cape town is about 11C
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:13:49
- no cape town, south africa
- stephen wright: 18:14:03
- uruguay just lost to holland
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:14:11
- yup
- stephen wright: 18:14:27
- your hemisphere is out -- i am pissed
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:14:41
- oh
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:14:47
- uruguay are cheats!
- stephen wright: 18:15:03
- ghana, argentina, uruguay, paraguay, brazil -- out
- stephen wright: 18:15:06
- cheats?
- stephen wright: 18:15:10
- dude!
- stephen wright: 18:16:29
- where's the cheating? Europe has the draw power for the southern players, then they have to play for home as if we were still in the 70s
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:16:49
- uruguay cheated in the ghana game
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:16:54
- with the hand ball
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:17:07
- ghana deserved to go through
- stephen wright: 18:17:12
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:44
- so guys, does anyone have a preference about whether you'd like to talk with audio, or stick with text?
- stephen wright: 18:17:49
- but beyond that -- I mean it's a sport! It's also political!
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:18:04
- yeah i know. politics kill the game :/
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:18:07
- i can only do text tonight
- lindsey baker: 18:18:08
- i like text
- Guy Loraine: 18:18:18
- i like sound
- stephen wright: 18:18:27
- Politics gives it its significance
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:18:36
- yeah
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:18:39
- but it also makes it boring
- stephen wright: 18:18:50
- no, come on!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:59
- i know there are a few of you @ UArts today - how are you guys doing?
- Guy Loraine: 18:19:04
- The group here wants audio, just sayin
- Erica Bertke: 18:19:17
- doing great
- lindsey baker: 18:19:30
- fine here
- stephen wright: 18:19:33
- Paraguay / Spain was a great game
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:33
- mm kay well, we can do both. People who like text , and even people on audio, can do both
- Guy Loraine: 18:19:43
- 6 of us at room 200
- stephen wright: 18:19:56
- but ya gotta admit, Paraguay should have won on political grounds
- stephen wright: 18:20:17
- or else we scrap the north /south thing
- Erica Bertke: 18:20:17
- don't really follow futbol
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:20:22
- paraguay?
- stephen wright: 18:20:42
- yeah, remember that place?
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:20:51
- hehehe. yeah
- stephen wright: 18:20:54
- miniscule country
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:20:59
- haha
- stephen wright: 18:21:16
- I wanted ghana to win -- obvio!
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:21:34
- the whole of africa wanted ghana to win
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:21:40
- meh :/
- stephen wright: 18:21:40
- byut now I want to stop Germany
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:21:48
- no germany must win
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:21:53
- they play awesomely
- stephen wright: 18:21:57
- AÏ
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:22:02
- would be nice if the dutch get to the final tho
- stephen wright: 18:22:02
- true
- stephen wright: 18:22:19
- beautiful non-signature plays
- stephen wright: 18:22:21
- true
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:22:27
- yah
- stephen wright: 18:22:55
- you're right! They set the example
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:23:00
- yeah
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:07
- so we're about to place a call - if ayone wants to join please do... if not, jsut ignore the call from us and we'll keep texting
- stephen wright: 18:23:18
- But they're from the NORTH
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:23:21
- all the celebrity teams have been a cop out
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:23:40
- yah, but there are no more southern teams left
- stephen wright: 18:23:40
- Paraguay and Ghana were pretty hot
- Meg Frisch: 18:23:42
- great
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:23:55
- yes
- stephen wright: 18:24:01
- Football, Meg!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:20
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:12
- http://tinyurl.com/25tjetq
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:26:27
- scott your site is still lop sided
- stephen wright: 18:26:50
- Like the FIFA world cup
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:26:54
- lol
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:27:02
- the leaning site of philly
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:27:04
- hehe
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:39
- here's their website: http://www.ds4si.org
- Guy Loraine: 18:31:01
- we got dropped
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:38
- will add you again
- Nick Hanford: 18:31:54
- has the audio started?
- Guy Loraine: 18:31:57
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:23
- ye - we'll add you again Nick
- Nick Hanford: 18:33:41
- thanks!
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:34:04
- waves.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:49
- np ]
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:35:01
- is Asheesh. psst, I want the microphone for a sec.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:53
- it is clear! strangely... let's see what it's like when we call DS4SI's mobule phone
- Guy Loraine: 18:39:49
- we lost ya again
- Guy Loraine: 18:41:48
- you hoo?
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:42:21
- ho ho ho
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:15
- oh hey - will add you again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:45
- LOLs "the universe in it's early days"
- Guy Loraine: 18:43:48
- thanks
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:44:00
- http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper932/stills/4075cf3ab3ec3-85... is our flamingos
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:44:06
- But moreover, how early is early?
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:44:18
- It's okay to have photon pictures from, like, when there *were* photos! A few weeks in, say.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:08
- well, the will actaully be available in 15 mins - we'l be calling them
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:50
- brb...
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:46:34
- So what interests me is the idea of "intervention".
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:48:15
- that's all i have to say, so I stopped talking
- stephen wright: 18:48:36
- How the Design Studio works: A Case Study on Art and Activism
During the summer of 2009, the Design Studio worked
with youth activists and over 150 young people in the
Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston to
imagine new ways to address social or “horizontal” violence among youth in these neighborhoods. In
conjunction with our Artist-in-Residence, Judith
Leemann, we decided to intervene in the social practice of
“the grill” (where two peers catch eyes and assume
animosity, often leading to threats or actual violence.) We
wanted to play with how the grill demands the grill as
response, instantly creating a narrow space of on-edge
intensity and aggression. In that moment, all that matters
is what the grill says matters. We felt that anything we
could do to connect the grill to something else would
make it more difficult for the grill to be its greedy self.
The grill caught our attention because in our methodology for designing social interventions we
look for an entry point, a less explored angle with potential to interrupt social problems. Here was a
simple gesture that functioned on a symbolic level to epitomize a system where violence could start
over nothing more than “she looked at me wrong”, but also how the nothing was everything, their
very reputation and safety being on the line in the instant of response. So the grill was symbolic, but
also a literal act that we could point to, play with and make strange. Our interventions were aimed at
surreptitiously messing with the power of the grill. As one player said after our “Grill Game”,
“Damn, now I’m gonna smile every time I try to grill someone.” - aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:48:37
- What they call the ____ -- did you say "grip"?
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:48:45
- dairy and gluten in the pie, fwiw
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:48:46
- and eggs.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:37
- reading...
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:49:43
- So this is what we were trying to target with our flamingos <http://media.www.jhunewsletter.com/media/storage/paper932/news/2004/04/0... -- walking across the quad was our "grill".
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:51
- –O-O–
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:50:19
- I don't quite get what the grill game was that they played, but I guess I can find that online.
- lindsey baker: 18:50:34
- basekamp, call me back
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:47
- calling...
- lindsey baker: 18:50:57
- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:27
- nprob
- BASEKAMP team: 18:52:02
- hi Jessica!
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:53:10
- hi hi
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:17
- they also have a blog, which lists various projects http://www.ds4si.org/blog/
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:54:38
- Is "hackerspaces" and "open source" a meta-artworld? I'm not sure I understand what would qualify.
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:54:44
- (each one, a different meta-artworld)
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:55:21
- are the guests already on? sorry i'm all out of sorts
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:55:29
- no guests yet, at 7 PM
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:55:34
- oh cool
- stephen wright: 18:56:26
- good question. Paul. but when the defining features are singular enough, then we might talk about an art "world"
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:34
- what from underground?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:42
- scott your conf ref
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:52
- the city from below i meant
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:59
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:55
- true
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:59:27
- I didn't understand that last bit about "mainstream"...
- stephen wright: 18:59:45
- there is a mainstream
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 18:59:51
- well yeah, I just missed some of the words somehow
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:25
- http://www.avam.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:00
- this isn't ousider art only, is it?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:19
- "outsider"
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:04:44
- AVAM is about art "inside" the people's heads, but the people are seen as "outsiders", meaning "not in the mainstream."
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:04:57
- But our art worlds that we discuss here are "not in the mainstream" too!
- Guy Loraine: 19:05:19
- depends who is on the inside and defining the ousider.
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:05:51
- Well, the thing about AVAM is that for all the artists involved, it's work reflecting their internal state. (Blake or other can correct this, since they've actually been!)
- stephen wright: 19:05:53
- no
- stephen wright: 19:06:19
- yes
- Guy Loraine: 19:09:06
- What about parallel worlds created on line such as SecondLife?
- Guy Loraine: 19:09:45
- ahh crap, we got dropped again.
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:10:24
- Could you add csetlow too?
- Guy Loraine: 19:10:43
- thanks
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:13:06
- I like how csetlow has a moon next to his name, as if it's night-time for him.
- Erica Bertke: 19:15:24
- yup still here
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:16:04
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:15
- LOLs
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:16:15
- Meg Frisch: 19:16:17
- lols !
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:29
- it's so hot i forgot to drink this ice cold beer
- Erica Bertke: 19:16:32
- i am very interested in their idea of social change via art - most experiences with it we are familiar with are community art groups/places for art classes etc. and this sounds quite a bit different
- Meg Frisch: 19:16:37
- oop
- Meg Frisch: 19:16:44
- ⪃.⨀ེ_⨀ེ.⪄ ⪃.⨀ེ_⨀ེ.⪄
- Erica Bertke: 19:16:54
- and intriguing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:17:00
- for sure
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:17:49
- i'm reading their site
- Erica Bertke: 19:18:07
- it osunds more like its interactive with the entire community and not just those who choose to come to an art community or events
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:18:16
- Yeah, that's the joy of the intervention idea!
- Erica Bertke: 19:19:21
- i am curious to hear what some of the social intervention affects (positive i assume they are looking for) from the work they do
- Erica Bertke: 19:19:35
- you mean peta like the art based ads making social/political statements?
- Guy Loraine: 19:19:56
- we got dropped again!
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:19:57
- zing! wrong time zon.es
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:21:00
- re: DS4SI
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:21:16
- they hostt? or initiate projects?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:21:18
- both?
- Meg Frisch: 19:21:53
- ˆ–¡º•º¡–ˆ
- Meg Frisch: 19:22:13
- £–¢–º–¢–£
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:22:17
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yZFbzaWbg
- Meg Frisch: 19:22:21
- ™
- Meg Frisch: 19:22:54
- lols!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:23:58
- NSFW
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:24:05
- natural
- Meg Frisch: 19:24:19
- naturally satisfying for wildlife
- Guy Loraine: 19:24:31
- Scott could you add us back?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:03
- there you are
- Erica Bertke: 19:30:33
- pittsburgh is also a city of murals and i would have to say that some of them are very good for the community - i.e. it prompts a garden plot on the vacant lot adjacent the mural turning the space from something degraded and un-cared for to a "safe place" so to speak
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:13
- http://www.mightywriters.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:28
- Erica for sure
- Erica Bertke: 19:32:16
- asheville has an arts-literacy program through the asheville arts museum that does similar things to what it seems mighty writers does
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:33:52
- ahhh
- Guy Loraine: 19:34:26
- still not hearing anything but wanted to suggest a book by Anne Whiston Spirn called the Language of Landscape in which she discusses the process of students working with gardening communities here in Philly and how the process worked and did not work.
- Erica Bertke: 19:35:13
- perhaps - but not all are related/supported/funded by the government at all
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:04
- guilt relief is what that argument says these projects might be doing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:44
- Guy we'll call you back. your line keeps dropping - please just keep telling us when taht happens
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:36:56
- education is a way in
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:37:02
- educators...
- Guy Loraine: 19:37:05
- is there still an audio conversation going on? Thanks
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:37:07
- informing
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:10
- yes
- Erica Bertke: 19:37:12
- but how do you know you are not addressing a larger situation, i.e. influencing the lives of children who are participating in art of some kind which prompts their self-esteem to rise and can influence their lives to move in a direction it might not otherwise have gone. i know it sounds naive, but i have witnessed it personally so it does in fact happen
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:58
- Erica - yes - would you like to say this outloud? or would you rather we just address it
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:38:15
- yes erica - teaching risk and confidence
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:38:25
- is proactive
- Erica Bertke: 19:38:35
- you can address it - a lot of residual noise where we are
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:39:17
- teaching kids to apply this behavior in alt scenarios is awesome
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:40:24
- consumer guilt makes small impact
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:40:32
- compared to corporate
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:40:38
- junk
- aulproteus" title="paulproteus">paulproteus: 19:41:31
- (that's why art students go on to work in advertising, right?)
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:42:06
- ya art so powerful
- Guy Loraine: 19:42:43
- FYI http://www.vsarts.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:26
- LOLs indeed
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:35
- then again, who makes thos films?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:39
- art students!
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:43:45
- corporations
- Erica Bertke: 19:44:21
- well, we're curious what is a better solution than small movements of change - and is this how ds4si plays a role in greater change? we are having difficulty quite understanding what they do.
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:44:30
- those industry creative teams and teams and teams... make very few decisions
- Guy Loraine: 19:45:49
- That's how most people live.
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:45:53
- we tried to bring it to a small town
- Guy Loraine: 19:47:01
- Jessica, Where was this taking place?
- Erica Bertke: 19:47:54
- jessica - could you explain a little bit better what you did - i.e. what "plausible artworkd" meant for that situation in chattanooga
- Guy Loraine: 19:47:54
- we lost our connection again.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:56
- Erica, im not backpeddaling, but take what i'm saying with a grain of salt -- this is a perspective that exists, and something (from my point of view anyway) to consider -- it's not an argument that tries to preclude any form of social practice or "community" practice by artists
- Guy Loraine: 19:48:43
- Thanks
- Erica Bertke: 19:48:45
- it is good to hear other perspectives, it makes you re-evaluate how you do your own work in a positive way
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:52
- did anyone else get dropped from the call?
- Erica Bertke: 19:50:01
- yup
- Guy Loraine: 19:50:08
- yes from multiple spots
- Erica Bertke: 19:50:14
- still on call
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:21
- kewl
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:51:30
- (adam here) also we take no credit for the approach, it was straight from bell hooks and paulo fierere
- Erica Bertke: 19:51:52
- jessica - were the kids participating openly and would you consider it to be a success, if so how?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:52:16
- it was a good class, the students called it "detox"
- Erica Bertke: 19:52:22
- lol
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:52:54
- night class, food, team taught, ell family taught - we had our son there too... it became its own community
- Erica Bertke: 19:53:11
- because they don't get many opportunities to participate in things like that probably
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:53:46
- not in edu there
- Erica Bertke: 19:54:21
- how did you market/advertise it to get people to show up?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:54:38
- it was a credit course, special topics, undergrad
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:54:43
- we had full enrollment
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:54:54
- blogged and facebooked, word of mouth invite too
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:55:17
- i think it intimidated our colleagues
- Erica Bertke: 19:55:35
- sounds cool
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:55:40
- so it was just students, and a few friends of the students
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:47
- again, i'm not saying don't give money to homeless people
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:51
- !
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:55
- we're talking about individually funded projects vs socialized projects
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:59:45
- nice chatting all over teh place tonight
- Guy Loraine: 20:00:09
- Thanks Scott
- Erica Bertke: 20:00:14
- thanks!
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:00:19
- csetlow: 20:00:20
- Bye everybody & thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:43
- <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Transcription
Week 27: Design Studio for Social Intervention
[Steven]: So Scott, how do we know the Design Studio for Social Intervention?
[Scott]: Actually I don't. I talked with Kenneth Bailey and Lori Libenstein over the phone yesterday for the first time. They were recommended to us by David Morgan from Brownswell Collective, who we have been talking with for quite awhile. We just haven't had the chance to have him in on one of these weekly events yet. Although there has been a lot of email discussion. Yeah, he is involved with them and there are a number of other people involved with the Design Studio for Social Intervention in Boston. So we just finally wanted to connect with them. Ultimately, all until about them that is what I've been reading about on their site and what James and a few various people I've been talking with have told us. But we know about this practice in general. It's not as if we are approaching this fresh for the first time.
[Steven]: What this means about the whole thing if the notion of the design right? Because, you know, we usually think of design as being something that is sort of voluntarily and self consciously imposed on objects and spaces. And they've decided to take it to a different level or a different place and say "yeah, I don't know, justice! Let's design justice!" Because nobody has done anything about it, there is this thing called social justice and it's not working very well. It's more like injustice. Let's design it. And they decided to apply and to take art and design seriously enough to apply it to the forms in which personal relations take place in society. I think that's a pretty interesting take on what we call Plausible Artworlds
[Scott]: Yeah, it seems like they use the tools of design specifically. Or at least tried to use those methodologies. So we're looking at, we were talking with Kent from Democratic Innovation a few weeks ago. They have taken a similar approach; the idea of democracy in general is what's the content of that 10 year project through working with different people. I guess I mentioned that in the same breath because there are a lot of people that we're looking at who are instrumentalizing themselves specifically.
Actually, we don't have a Wi-Fi here right now. There are different ones you can pick up.
But, they seem to not be opposed in any way to instrumentalize themselves as artists. I think that a lot of artists have a problem with that. A lot of people in art have a problem with that. Many of the people that we have been talking to don't. And these people seem to, even in the title of their name, just be embracing it fully head on.
[Steven]: Yeah, that's pretty cool. You know, we talk about our projects that have to, like, hide themselves. We look for theories that help us to understand why are would like seek a maximal amount of visibility or seek a minimum amount. And then we have these people, and that's why we want to talk to them, right? It's because they're saying "Yeah, we want to use these tools that have been created over the last 30,000 years of art and design or whatever to promote social justice. So why the (explicative 0:04:53.9) not?"
[Scott]: Yeah exactly. I was struggling a little bit on the site to find information about the projects that they are involved in. I mean, there are a few things that I could see. Life Lab is one of them. But yeah, it might be actually hard to talk about them in specific unless any of you guys here know them well. We might just kind of need to talk about those kinds of practices in general for maybe the next half an hour. Steven, at the very least you and I could do that. At the other people here would watch or have something to say about that too (laughing).
[Steven]: One of the challenges over these kinds of projects over the years obviously has been that it's one thing to pay lip service for this kind of an idea. It's another thing to actually do it. You know, it seems like a cool idea when cognitive capitalism, like the mainstream process of accumulation, is using these techniques. It seems cool, more than cool. It seemed socially or ethically or morally kind of obligatory to not leave the monopoly of them into the hands of the adversary. To try and use them to do something (inaudible 0:06:31.9) and socially positive, but true. Usually what ends up happening is not much socially positive at all despite the very sincere wishes of the artist. What ends up happening is that the artist becomes the sole signatory of the initiative. So I don't know if this is or not the case, but I'm interested in talking to our guest tonight, whenever they show up, about how it is they avoid that kind of a paradox. That pitfall. Even in the cases that we've discussed this past half year we had some cases where it's been rather dubious. We were actually not in an art project and rather and a project of social justice. And that's what's interesting about this design project is that they are explicitly in favor of interventionism and social justice. They are not talking about art primarily.
[Scott]: Yeah it's crazy. I mean, this whole, I think Greg Schlotte's "Dark Matter" project, one of his big interests is in looking at the different art practices that are not exposed to the light, I guess, which really are visiblized yet. I know that the Dark Matter archives really hold a lot of updated practices yet, but, these are among the things that are going to be flushing that out. It's kind of crazy when you look at artist social practice, the explosion of artists who are interested and involved in other social justice movements. It almost parallels the mainstream ARTWORLD because there are so many people involved. It's kind of hard to know what to do with all of that.
[Steven]: Yeah, no sure. Scott, I want to say one thing and that is that the sound tonight is unbelievably clear. So I am hearing this perfectly. I think there are two kinds of scenarios we can talk about. One is where you have non-artists, like social activists who are doing things that are actually perceived as art so we would see them as a plausible artworld. But in fact they're really intervening for greater forms of social justice. After the first kind of phenomenon, you have artists who are doing that as well but aware that what they're doing is not actually perceived as art. It's perceived as social interventionism. So those are the two kinds of, it's kind of a, I don't know… a keyosmos. That X phenomenon where you have a crossing of competences and incompetence is of desires and contingencies basically. That would be the question I would really want to ask to our guests is whether or how they have managed to configure that kind of a form of convergence.
[Asheesh]: Hi, I'm Asheesh. Am I talking loudly enough? Probably not for you guys.
(Audio Feed Lost 0:10:32.4 - 0:10:55.4)
[Asheesh]: Whoa! OK, hi! I'm Asheesh. So I find this design studio for social intervention kind of interesting because I sort of accidentally became, I accidentally did something similar to what they do. A few years ago when I was in college, I was frustrated with what I felt was a lack of interest in non academic or non, like, career interests among the students where I went to school. So I, with some friends, inflated 288 inflatable pink flamingos and put them on the quad. I guess I realize, I guess I'm trying to understand, how that fits into the concept of plausible Artworlds. On one hand, the whole point of it was to be a plausible show of whimsy and make people up to the idea that there are other things than what they think about on a daily basis. I guess, so, we were trying to build a plausible artworld but we're trying to shock people into what I felt was something that was kinda along the ideas of social justice. I guess I'll stop talking now and see what you think.
[Steven]: Scott? Do want to deal with that?
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Sure, I guess so. I don't know how it specifically works with plausible Artworlds. All this initiative is…
[Asheesh]: I mean I would want to deflate it or say that it's small because, you know, these days it's kind of easy to make a gigantic project. You just add a curatorial component, invite 100 people you know who have extensive networks already and all of a sudden it's a ginormous project. You know, it's… So this is one of those two, but, and its course while certain ideas around it might be kind of complex it's actually pretty simple, I think. You know, Steven and I might agree on this. You know I think we're really interested in not just the certain, well objects that people make only or even an artwork that someone makes that might be a social practice type artwork. But, we're interested in people that create different kinds of conditions under which different creative activity can happen or be understood differently. You know. Or understood as creative practice even. And that's what an artworld is and that's why we adopted that term.
And I think our initial, really what this project does, is two things. It's pluralizes what in artworld is or what often referred to as the artworld when we're looking at different ones. And not only different worlds, but ones that are structured differently than the one most commonly referred to as the artworld. The one that we refer to as the mainstream artworld. And two, it's looking at not only fully established networks that everyone would recognize as Artworlds but sometimes they are vast. There might be thousands of people involved, or hundreds. Or it can be quite enormous. There could be a lot of money involved. There could be a lot of territory involved or whatever. But in some cases it's just a few people and well we take the stance that even in those cases where it's only a few people that it could be what Steven refers to as a fledgling artworld. The beginnings of an artworld. And that's why we're looking at, referring to the as plausible. You know, because they are not just things that are established already. They are things that, you know, you can buy for their plausibility however defined. We really don't set strict criteria for what defines that. We're more interested in the discussions around it. So, in any case, I think that as long as you're talking about people that set up an environment that either enables, accompanies, allows for or helps to provide an understanding for what creative practice can be, then that's an artworld in that it doesn't reflect a mainstream model. That particular example is something that is not necessarily innovative, per say, but it is experimenting with what creative life could be. Then we really like to and want to look at those things as plausible Artworlds and kind of see where it lands as different people weigh in on that. Do think that makes sense Steven?
[Steven]: Yeah, yeah, that's the gist of it. I mean, you know, I was looking at the pictures the other day of... The European space program recently sent up a satellite to take pictures of the universe and they wanted to take pictures of the universe and its early days. What the (explicative 0:16:21.1) is that? The universe and its early days, you know? Because apparently in the beginning of the universe, that's their hypothesis, there was nothing to see because the energy was not stable enough to actually hold light. It could actually host photons. And so were looking at these pictures they sent back, which are incredibly beautiful, are pictures of our universe before you can actually see it. So it's kinda like, it raises the question of why we talk about worlds. What we talk about universes, you know? Well, I guess there are not universes, its universe. And then why are there worlds and not just a world? Well, obviously that means that a world is something which can be a redesigned and I think that's the kind of sense of the discussion this evening. You can't redesign a universe. The universe is kind that thing which, like, is hoisted upon it. But what interesting is the, you know, this group, which when they show up, what their talk about is actually redesigning the thing but it's the same kind of logic. There was stuff that was there that was not visible because it could host light at a certain point. It was too energetic, actually, to actually a form of photon or graphed upon or whatever. Like, I'm speaking metaphorically but in a certain sense that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about the fledgling kind of projects which are not quite visible and why are they not visible? It's because light quite can't stick onto them yet. And yet it's all about redesigning things. It's all about, like, doing things the way you want to do it. You know, I mean we could look at the specific examples of what they are doing. Probably we actually should do that. The Design Studio for Social Intervention gets involved, right? They actually, they look… For example, there's this phenomenon which they worked on what working class largely African American neighborhoods in Boston. This project which they called, what was the word they used? It was when people look at each other in a specific way. When you grid somebody, when you like… What was the word for that? That project? Let me just look to their.
[Female Group Member]: Steven, I think Scott just went to the bathroom (laughing).
[Steven]: Oh, okay.
(Laughter)
[Female Group Member]: I don't know the word though.
[Asheesh]: I mean we're interested (laughing).
[Steven]: Hang on. I'm going to look it up now.
[Asheesh]: I think that I wasn't quite clear about what I was saying before and so I thought of it and clarified it. When I talked about the flamingos, it was because I think that it shared a sense of the intervention with the design studio for social intervention. I mean, we were trying to do, so I just want to their website whose front page defines intervention and talked about how it is the fact, the act or fact interfering with the condition to modify it or the process changes course. And the point of these flamingos was to provide an intervention with a specific moment of the shocking display of meaninglessness. To help people change their course and to consider more whimsical things as part of their lives. And so I guess, that will sort of be the frame that I'm thinking about the design studio for social intervention from. Since its part of my life and not really part of anyone else's accept Blake here who helped me lug the flamingos around.
[Blake]: (inaudible 0:20:33.5)
[Asheesh]: Weren't they in your car once? You drove us from the airport to the farm where we stored them for few days.
[Blake]: But they weren't inflated then.
[Asheesh]: They weren't inflated then, they were in a box yeah. Um, anyway, that sort of my perspective of social intervention twisted with art. So I'm curious how they will do it.
[Steven]: I'm just reading the story of the, um, of the design studio about what they call "The Grill". You know, it seems that, I don't know these things myself and that's not my culture but, check this out. Somebody walks through a neighborhood in Boston. You kind of a grill somebody else with your eyes and either it provokes them standing down or them engaging in some sort of conflict. And they've decided to use that notion of "The Grill", obviously a very powerful form of social interaction, as a design tool but to kind of deviate it into a different way of social engagement. Rather than creating a sort of black on black violence or inter communal violence of any kind, using that kind of energy to move (inaudible 0:22:11.5) and I think that's really a (expletive 0:22:13.2) fascinating idea of world design. Of saying "yeah we can make plausible worlds, ya know? We can just design them".
(Audio Feed Lost 0:22:22.0 - 0:23:46.8)
[Steven]: Yeah, you could say that. But there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? I mean you can just say "Oh yeah" like as you said, but, you can also try to redesign it on a more (inaudible 0:24:01.1) kind of a social scale. Like in a neighborhood or across a… But rather, you know, well I don't want to put words in the mouths of the people who are invited to speak. But it would seem to me looking at forms of interpersonal relations and, you know, not even personal, I don't know personal community relations. Um, which go beyond that kind of sort of simplistic reaction that everyone should have every time but actually reconfiguring the kind of parameters and engagements. They talk about frames.
[Asheesh]: Yeah it's super interesting. I was just trying to find more info about that online.
[Scott]: Yeah I definitely want to ask them about the grill (laughing). But yeah, by the way Steven, I don't know if you got my message but basically in about between 5 and 10 minutes we're going to call them on a mobile phone because they…
[Steven]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Oh, okay cool.
[Steven]: You know what, the thing that I like about it even know no matter what they will say, what I like about it is they take art seriously and design. I mean that's kind of a byproduct of art, but, they'd take it seriously as something which can actually be used not just to be instrumentalized by cognitive capitalism and creative capitalism to, you know, for the accumulation of some things value in the hands of the few. But actually can be used as something to really positively or negatively transformed forms of social engagement. And that's really, no matter what it is they have to say about it, that's really cool.
[Asheesh]: Yeah I'm (inaudible 0:26:06.7) a link to their blog here too, which anybody who goes to their website can easily see. But I'm just pointing out that that this is kind of a separate micro site for them that has a lot of, well, various things there are going on or have been going on anyway.
[Scott]: Yeah, you know, one of the things I wondered about what the plausible Artworlds examples was whether it would be good to have, to look at some Meta artworlds. You know kind of these larger networks. Part of our goal for this year was to look at concrete examples one after the other every week for the year. And, I mean, I can definitely go for much longer than a year. I could go much more frequent than just once a week too. But it's kind of enough for us right now.
[Steven]: Yeah you know what? I think that's pretty ambitious of you. Even to define and in a respectful way, once a week is about as much as we can manage. Honestly I don't think we could do more. I mean, you know? It would be hard.
[Scott]: Well not so much with the resources that we have. But I just mean, there are so many examples out there I guess was my point. And, and uh...
[Steven]: Yeah, sure.
[Scott]: And 52 of them is sufficiently bewildering, but it's also not nearly enough. And I think one of the thoughts that keeps crossing my mind, and I know Steven and I have talked about this, and every so often someone else asks us about something like this is that, you know, what about some of these really large conferences. You know, where not only thousands of people show up but hundreds and hundreds of, well at least hundreds of, practices that would be people we would invite to talk to each week. People we would want to talk to each week. And some of them are so intimately connected, intertwined, that they might be seemed as kind of a Meta or one of those larger kinds of art worlds that would parallel. You know, if we were talking about different worlds we might talk about just the gallery, not necessarily just plausible ones, mainstream ones. We might talk about things that are normally considered to be part of "The". We might talk about galleries and Chelsea or Brooklyn or London or we might talk about a whole region. So what we are looking at these examples sometimes it feels like "well perhaps we might wanna talk about the much larger collection of examples that kind of work together and sometimes play together". For instance, hacktavists. Spaces, hacker spaces or people involved in so called hacktavism generally. It might be good to look at it a grouping of them as opposed to just one small group or one initiative, especially when they do band together not just to generalize everyone but to focus on that larger thing that they are working as a concrete example itself. And in this case, there is a city from (inaudible 0:29:54.6) conference not too long ago and there have been others, a few others, since then quite major on the art and activism front end on that are and social justice overlap. You know, that may be good to think about and to talk about with them.
[Steven]: Well, sure. I mean, Scott, we are repeating things we've said before. We don't have a kind of an idea about what a plausible would be. Obviously, if people are proposing in one way or another in a very minor way, minor but nevertheless salient an way, a feature which is significantly different than from the mainstream, which we call THE artworld, then we are prepared to consider it as a plausible artworld. And so, I mean, The City from Below, yeah. It could be plugged into every single way into mainstream. Except in one very significant way which makes it differ, and for us that the plausible.
[Scott]: Yeah sure, definitely.
[Steven]: It's significantly different. I mean, what these guys are talking about, what the design studio is talking about, there actually saying "let's design things. Let's not just say hey, there's this Plausible out there, let's go into it!" They're saying, "Let's design one." You know, it's somehow freeing and empowering by saying "yeah, lets revamp that thing!" And kind of, that's what the mainstream always is doing. So we should be doing it too.
[Scott]: Yeah, I mean it's true. A lot of what we look at, or interested our people who are, I mean, we kind of adopted this from Disney, but who are imagineering the world around them and a specially certain kinds of setups that allow creative practices to happen differently. Um, so yeah, I guess there something implied, well not just implied, but something in the way they describe of the design process and how they design. I agree with you Steven, for sure.
Asheesh, did you wanna ask about that or talk? Oh, he didn't really care what Steven was saying or what I was saying about mainstream? Oh. Steven, someone was asking if you would mind repeating what you're just saying about a mainstream. I felt like you're kind of responding to what I was saying (laughing). So, to help clarify that...
[Steven]: Yeah sure. You know what, and I kind of don't remember exactly what I just said. The thing is the question about mainstream is like in any river. You know, it's undeniable that there's a mainstream. You know, that's just like the way the river goes. But, rivers change over time and even when they don't change, there are minor steams. And, what I was saying is that a mainstream tends to respond to the interests of the dominant powers in our society and the dominant interests and so on. It doesn't quite correspond because it's a stream, I mean it's moving. So there never keeping up with it exactly. What we are talking about his stuff that is not in that stream exactly at all. I don't know what to say exactly. The non-mainstream is that we are saying that art is too big of a word to be absorbed into that one stream. There are a number of other ones and, in fact, of those things are worlds.
[Female Group Member]: Last weekend I was (interrupts Steven)...oh.
[Steven]: You can't just...
[Female Group Member]: Oh, sorry. Were you finished? Steven, were you finished?
[Steven]: I was finished.
[Female Group Member]: Sorry. I was just going to say after thinking a little bit about mainstream, actually, more about groups. It's and I was thinking about how last week and I went to, or a couple weekends ago, I went to the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore. Is that what it's called? So, it makes me think a lot about the individual versus the group. I mean, really, those are definitely Plausible Artworlds that the artists that they've show have. But one distinction might be that it's the individual versus the group. And it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong as I haven't been to all of these Plausible Artworlds, but it seems like it's mostly group work and individuals together. Those sorts of layers that seem to be. Nonetheless, that museum was amazing and those artists are such visionaries in totally making their own world. American Visionary Museum.
[Asheesh]: I haven't been there, I lived in Baltimore. I drove by it a few times (laughing). Embarrassing, I know. (Laughing). But the thing about the American Visionary Museum is that the art there reflects people's unique internal artworlds. And so when you talk about individual versus a group, I sort of think about four expressing one's internal state versus four unifying people who share some vision or organizing idea about the world. So this, well, yeah social intervention seems to be quite on topic for that.
[Female Group Member]: They don't really use that word "outsider". They like to say "visionary". I think it's a good distinction. I mean, because they're inside the museum.
(Audio Feel Lost 0:37:11.3 - 0:37:34.3)
[Scott]: I mean, you were asking about groups too? And it is true that this particular initiative has a bias towards group practice. I think probably one of the reasons, well I mean, it's just bias. Maybe a reason why we were interested in this is because there's also a mutual interest between the people that are helping to organize it and also many of the people involved. An interest in group and collective practices. Um, yeah, totally. Theresa was also just asking if there have been any examples of artworlds that we've looked at, people that we've talked with where it's really just a single person. Ultimately, no because we would never know about it if that was the case. But in a way, there have been some people that we've talked with and looked at where... For example there are people that pose as a group. There are some examples of that that we've looked at and talked too.
(Inaudible comment from group member 0:39:09.2)
Yeah, exactly, yeah. So this has been a long discussion about how reducible is a world. Can you reduce it to one person? Can you have a world of one zone? Ultimately, we think that no, you can't. Can you have a kind of world where there's just two people? Arguably. No but arguable yes. The jury is kind of out on that. It's up for debate.
[Steven]: At certain points Scott, we said that a world was not possible at two or at three. It had to be beyond that. Because it's become very fashionable for a person in contemporary art circles to pursue a signal signature style and practice and at the same time work within a collective. At that's legitimate enough. But, a world doesn't exist just because you link up with one other person or you create some name to be fashionable. It really exists because there's a, I would say, when there's a mutualization of incompetence.
[Scott]: Yeah, exactly (inaudible 0:40:36.8). Yeah, it sort of seams ridiculous to say there is a world when there's really just a few people. It's almost like a grandiose metaphor for a couple of friends (laughing). But then again, what we're interested in it doesn't really matter. We're not really judging or evaluating at all the whole scale of setups and the environments that people create. We're more interested in who they operate and how they're structured and the entailments of them if we were to imagine scaling them. Even if it is less than a dozen people. SO yeah, I think that's probably what's part of what has conflated the issue a little bit. You asked about this last week. Or mentioned this last week, that sometime's we're looking for examples that are more or less a project only. Sometimes they're a group of people. Sometimes a small group and sometimes a pretty big group. Other times, their initiatives that are much larger or networks of other groups of people that then the scale goes up. But none of those, I don't think anyway, have been, like, what this way of looking at it does, I think anyway, is an attempt to try to evaluate these. It may be to discuss or try to get a better understanding of the implications of a particular way of structuring something or doing something. But it's not to say that, anyway, I'm repeating myself now (laughing).
But yeah, I think that's the main goal. So really, unless someone comes up with good criteria, I don't really know of any criteria of saying what makes a world. Except that we can pretty easily say that it's hard, at the very least, it's hard to say that a single person is a world.
Uh, I'm going to add Guy.
(Silence 0:43:05.7)
Oh, so, we're getting to the point where I'm going to try giving them a call. Give the people that we've sort of been peripherally talking about for the last hour, a call (laughing). So, if you guys don't mind just hanging out for a sec or continuing to chat. I'm going to step away and try to call them on the mobile first to set it up.
(Audio Feed Lost 0:44:00.1 - 0:54:07.0)
[Scott]: Hey, and we're back. It looks like the reason I wasn't able to patch through to them, I just tried a different route, is that they're actually in a different time zone. So, there was some confusion about what time. By the time they're ready to be called, we're actually going to wrap up in about a half an hour from now. So, OH NOES!
(Laughter)
Yeah, we could definitely try to approach this using just askey or emoticons (laughing). Yeah, well, in any case, it still brings up interesting questions and I briefly tried to pull Kenny away. But he let me know that they're still in the middle of this workshop with all these people. So, it was just not going to be easy for them because they don't have Skype set up. If they did we could probably just try to patch everyone in. But it was more like I was able to call his mobile phone. So, in any case, not to focus on that too much, I mentioned that we'd like to follow up with him about some of the questions that came up while looking at their work. You know, the differences between certain things that they do or some of the solutions that they've found to approach interventionist art, or I'd say community art. So called community art practices in ways that they don't just become instrumentalized by the state or just help to continue to perpetuate certain ideas about privilege. Some of the things that are very difficult for people that are involved in community arts or other things we mentioned. Specifically, what they mean by design and what it means to design a world. He said he's very interested, they're all very interested, to talk with us. I can only tease you with that though right now.
Oh gosh Jessica! We just clicked on that link (laughing). It's not safe for work (laughing). Um, indeed.
Yeah, so, it's a little too hot to think today. How is it in Chicago? I'm just curious. Did you guys just arrive in Chicago, Jessica and Adam?
[Jessica]: (inaudible 0:57:21.9) yeah, we moved in on Friday.
[Scott]: That's so awesome.
[Jessica]: Yeah (inaudible 0:57:27.7).
[Scott]: Oops. Can you say that again? We kind of...
[Jessica]: It is hot.
[Scott]: Yeah, okay.
[Jessica]: But that doesn't explain the video
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Yeah, sometimes it's so hot that's all you can really talk about. Is just how hot it is. Yeah, there's definitely so much going on in Philly that there's a lot of... I guess you could say there are a lot of community arts programs. We've touched on this in some past weeks. To me it seems like some of the things that came up here are really crucial. Just some of the questions that Steven posed and that a few other people had touched on are really crucial because, like Steven said, a lot of times those community programs just fall painfully short. I guess, like I had just mentioned, it's hard for anyone not to be absorbed into larger addenda. I mean, in a way, sometimes you could say "well, it doesn't really matter because if you're doing some good for someone then who cares if someone else's agenda is satisfied?" And that's probably true. But when the premise of what that community arts group is doing is that this is something that's empowering to the community at large or that particular community. Often times it is arguably counterproductive. You know, we had talked about how Philadelphia is a city of murals. There's a program that kind of tries to (laughing)...hey?
Is somebody snoring (laughing)? I swear, it sounds like someone is (laughing).
(Laughter)
Steven! That's you!
[Jessica]: So Scott, the city of Philadelphia is a city of murals?
[Scott]: Jessica, yeah!
[Jessica]: So, whose agenda is that serving?
[Scott]: Yeah, exactly. Well, you know what, I hate to say but I think....I'm not really sure to be honest.
(Laughter)
It is actually 2:00am there so I wouldn't be entirely surprised. I hate to, to a.....
(Commotion, laughter, chatter and snoring 1:00:18.2)
[Scott]: Sorry, I didn't really realize what was happening there. So Philadelphia is the city of murals, or at least it has an extensive mural arts program. There's debate on whether or not this is actually good. Whether it is good in the ways that it reports to be good.
[Jessica]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I mean, what does it mean to be good anyway? But, specifically, by its own self definition, is it empowering? People that take it very seriously would argue, you know, that it's artistic value anyway, but is it even culturally empowering. Sorry, go ahead Jessica.
[Jessica]: Oh, no. I was just saying that it may give some people some opportunities. But who knows, like its relationship with the neighborhood and everything gets really complicated after that. Adam and I are just sort of getting our bearings here in Chicago, but like the situation we're coming out of where it seems like every community bases initiative was sort of swept up into this massive marketing campaign. We saw that happen again and again. So, we're kind of in a state right now where we're stepping back and sort of looking at things in a broader way.
(Loud snoring 1:01:51.6)
I'll be right back.
[Scott]: Uh, I think you got cut off for a second Jessica. Can you do...? Oh! Be right back. Okay. It was just kind of mid-sentence and I didn't catch that. Yeah, I'm very interested in what's going on with them because they're actually going to be teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago and brining a lot of these ideas to the students there. And, Chicago also happens to be a city where there are a lot of art and activist practices. So that's definitely going to be probably some interesting cross city (laughing) discussions about this stuff.
(Inaudible question from group member 1:02:55.2)
[Scott]: Uh, no, they are... Actually, yeah. Around the area but I've been living in Tennessee for awhile, yeah.
[Erica]: I don't know, I'll take a stab at it, it is hot. Some of the groups like Mighty Writers in Philadelphia. Mighty Writers, it's a group in Philadelphia. It's a group that is teaching kids to write and sort of doing work shops with kids about writing. And like, in some ways, I feel like some of those sorts of things are so much more of a tool for social change than something like mural arts, which just happens to have the word art attached to it. It's probably doing less than what groups like, you know, their main focus is (inaudible 1:04:00.2) yeah, that's it. Like, their main focus is doing like interesting writing projects with kids and specifically kids that don't necessarily have the opportunity to work in those ways. I mean, that don't have the access to it. So it's interesting to think about that as opposed to things that like frame themselves as a tool for social change. Like something like the programs we have in Philadelphia. I don't like to say the name.
(Inaudible question from group member 1:04:47.8)
[Scott]: Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah, we were just talking about Mighty Writers. Interesting, yeah. And Erica was just...mmm hmmm.
(Inaudible question from group member 1:05:15.3)
[Scott]: Yeah, exactly. If somebody does something good for a small community it's not to say that that's not a good idea or that that kind of thing shouldn't happen. It actually SHOULD be happening all the time. And part of the argument for arts potentially being counterproductive on the larger scale is that, well, anyway this is not to say that people that are just like basically pouring their blood, sweat and tears into helping a small community are doing something good or useful or helpful to certain people. But potentially that community arts practices might be inadvertently using their symbolic value, their symbolic value as art, to get local governments and federal governments off the hook. This is especially true in the UK and it's become a cliché for counsel funded projects or ones that "help a community". But what they really do, it's like, when you total up the money and support and the attention that gets poured into those projects, it's tiny compared to actually what should be happening nationally. You know? And it really shouldn't be kind of picked up by the art per say. I'm not saying that art shouldn't be doing this. Obviously that would be pretty ridiculous, especially with many of the examples that we're looking at. But, that it's a problem. It's a challenge because what often leads art practice, arguably anyway, are doing is saying "hey, look at us. Not just us as the artists, but us as a people, as a local government, as a state or as a nation. Hey look, we are actually doing these wonderful projects. Look at all these amazing...." It's like a PR campaign basically. But one where there is such a small budge allocated to it compared to what actually should be doing. We're talking about educating people or helping to raise the value of a neighborhood or whatever. You don't just give a thousand dollars to like some hungry artists who are perfectly happy to work almost for free most of the time just to beautify the side of a building. I mean, it's not that it isn't helpful or can he helpful, but part of this argument anyway is that not only is it not enough, but we are actually helping to say that "oh, it actually is enough" which could be counterproductive.
[Male Group Member]: Scott, I couldn't agree more completely with that concept. It's something I've been struggling with and I don't want to derail anything in reference to boycott BP and all the things that we're going through to reference the oil situation in the gulf. Anything that I see that is like a small feel good protest seems to me, to be kind of counter-productive to the huge problem that we have with our lifestyle. So, I agree with you completely when we talk about in those small little art projects. I think a lot of the times; it makes us feel better about a situation that really, really we can't even begin to address on such a small scale. Like there's much more we need to do, and if we make a little art project about it, we're really making people feel better about. Rather than bringing attention to something we're making people feel better about something. But they really should feel bad about.
[Erica]: Right, right. Just like when the casino got a slap on the wrist for putting art up in the casino. They actually don't even necessarily want to do that. The casinos that are being built in Philadelphia, they have a requirement to put art in the casino. As if that's like a way out of the bigger problem.
[Female Group Member]: My problem is that if you're not in there and you to go into and fit into a certain A or B categories of these kinds of issues, that you could be educating these people with these issues. But unless you're like in one of those small little micro categories or something, your voice isn't going to get heard about it.
[Asheesh]: So saying that art isn't, like, the right place for this. Part of that, sort of like, funding art isn't the right place for a community improvement project seems to be the short version of what we're saying. Like maybe, I'm not quite sure how to break that apart. Is the problem that, um, is the problem that we shouldn't be funding this art? We should just tell people to do it and put up a big poster saying "Do nice things for the community" without giving them money. Would that be better?
(Inaudible comment from group 1:10:14.0)
Sure, yeah. So, my question is, it sounds like what you said is that funding art is a weird way to make communities better. And so part of the reason it's weird is that you're giving artists money for things they might have done anyway is one of the things you said. And another reason is that it's suggests that with whatever small constant fixed amount of money you're allocating to that somehow is enough. And even though more is needed, some action is interpretated as enough action. SO, um, what would be better? Would it be better to have giant posters everywhere saying "Do nice things?" Like, I'm...
[Scott]: Would it be better to have posters? I missed that last part.
[Male Group Member]: Do nice things for the people in the community.
[Scott]: Oh, do nice things? Yeah.
(Inaudible comment from group 1:11:10.2)
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. That definitely sounds....
[Asheesh]: (inaudible 1:11:14.2)
[Scott]: Yeah, that definitely sounds like a lot of our projects as well for sure. Um, yeah, I mean I think you're saying something that reflects what Erica is saying too. Okay. So Erica, just to repeat what Erica said just so that we have more contacts too. She's saying how you know you're not addressing a larger situation by influencing children who are participating in art on some kind which prompts their self esteem to rise and can influence their lives to move in a direction it might not otherwise have gone. I know it sounds naive, but I've witnessed it personally so I know that it does, in fact, happen. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to pretend to address this question fully or give like the answer to it or anything. But, what we're doing is raising an argument not just for as an exercise but because there's other sides to it too. Yeah totally. You know, why wouldn't we all be doing this. It's just hard to do (inaudible 1:12:23.1). And I think that our particular problem, you know, that I may have, I guess, with I think I'm sort of siding with that other argument because well... It's sort of like not using plastic bags at a grocery store, you know? I mean, yeah, it does do something. If nobody uses them, they'll stop being made. But often the proportion of that, basically it should be spoken in the same breath is that it's not nearly enough. It's like a drop in the ocean. Ultimately compared to what needs to be done environmentally, you know? And I think that it's, I'm just giving a kind of parallel that I think especially people here in the United States, but also elsewhere, need to be concerned about how these kinds of things impact our guilt relief. I'm not saying that we should, in fact, just feel more guilty. But, it's a cycle of uselessness. I'm not being an (inaudible 1:13:44.5) and saying that if you do one small thing for someone that it doesn't impact the world. It does. But it also doesn't mean that is enough and it definitely doesn't mean that we should be directly or even indirectly implying that it is plenty. And I think that is what happens with our projects is that art is SO good at persuasion. Art is good at persuading people. That's why, I mean, what's more powerful and persuasive than a film almost? Or why historically during war have bands played sort of thriving heart thumping music? You know, it gets people going. Art does things. I mean, I'm pointing to some of the more, I guess, things that aren't really considered "high art" often. But, they are. I mean films and what's been more influential than often certain novels?
[Female Group Member]: (inaudable1:14:49.7)
[Scott]: Well, almost. I guess my point ultimately is that art is highly persuasive so we should be very careful with what we do with it. Um, and if we do good things in the world, so called good things, then we might just want to also be cautious that what we're... I mean I'm not trying to add a moral lesson here. I'm really just presenting an argument that already exists. This is not from me specifically. It's just one that I'm kind of siding with at the moment as it's playing out. We're not only doing this anonymous good thing, you know, we are saying, I mean, there is an enormous amount of marketing that goes with this as well. And we may just want to consider what else it is we're doing. Um, and consider where those efforts are going and how we might modify them because we do have something to say about how things get presented and what it is that we do.
I don't know Erica, if that kind of addresses or what you were thinking about.
[Male Group Member]: At the same time, I think that you have to recognize that the entire effect of all the artworlds we're talking about and the artworlds that we don't want to talk about have a miniscule effect compared to the latest Pixar film. I mean, really, we really don't have that much influence compared to the machines that are out there who are not artists
[Female Group Member]: Yeah, I was thinking in particular, certain characters. I don't know if anybody knows anything about the wolves and that they're off the endangered species list and they're in trouble. And I was thinking about a particular character, a very famous one. And I had thought about going in there. I was doing a show with this character that had involved some bit about this character. I was particularly thinking about going and calling up the wolf people and asking them to send in leaflets or some kind of petition to tie into for when I was going to do some songs about that character. Because, I did that particularly because I just got frustrated with the feeling of being helpless about this.
(Inaudible Group Chatter 1:17:16.5 - 1:17:41.8)
[Female Group Member]: I think that's a good point about how many people art reaches compared to like how many people other things reach. I was in the suburbs not long ago and those huge stores that have so many products and there's so many people that live out in the suburbs, and I was just thinking about that and the way that it feels as though if we're going to really think about audience and people that we're reaching, that like things like this should take place everywhere. And maybe like in the Wal-Mart or something. Scott, maybe we should bring Plausible Artworlds to the Wal-Mart.
(Laughter)
(Group Chatter 1:18:16.9 - 1:18:44.0)
[Scott]: Absolutely! Yeah, Jessica. Would you and Adam mind talking just a little bit about that? About Chattanooga?
[Jessica]: Yeah. Well, the students that we had enrolled in the course that was sort of organized around Plausible Artworlds ended up sort of learning their way through. It was really positive and they sort of experienced art education in a different form than they had. They were exposed to all these different models and they just sort of started to get that there's other ways that they could sort of work as artists or work together. So that was super great. But what we had initially done is invite the whole community, including our colleagues at the university, and we were kind of met with a lot of blank stares and resistance. Almost like, I don't know. It was very strange and we haven't been away from it long enough to sort of really evaluate what happened. But, um, there was sort of a lack of response and we don't know. I don't know. I don't know if we know exactly what it means yet. But the idea of initiating something like this, in someplace like a Wal-Mart, is awesome but I think that it would have to sort of happen in a way that was a natural fit for the place rather than something real intellectual or something that was dislocated behavior from what people are accumated to at Wal-Mart. If that makes sense
[Adam]: This was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to answer the question. I think the most vital in approaching a small situation is in relation to (inaudible 1:20:27.6) the indignity to speak to others. And what worked for the students was not us coming and telling them about all these artworlds, although they were interested in that. What really worked was having them look at their own communities and some of the communities. One girl was from a really, really small town in, what was it...Mississippi?
[Jessica]: Alabama
[Adam]: Alabama, where they dismantled nuclear weapons at some point in their histories.
[Scott]: Hey Adam, sorry to interrupt you. I just wanted to get them back on the call again, because some of the people that were asking me that question just got dropped.
[Jessica]: Okay.
(Group Chatter 1:21:05.4 - 1:21:22.6)
[Scott]: Hey guys, welcome back! Yeah, Adam, if you don't mind just kind of picking back up on that.
[Adam]: Yeah, I don't want to go on and on. But I think what really worked was actually asking these small town students, who probably chose graphic design more because that's the only way they could combine art and making money because they were really interested in graphic design. I think a lot of them were interested in art and they were interested in how art can have an effect. You know, once we started asking them about their lives and their communities and these people that they interact with everyday, that's where it really took off. So it wasn't like we were really bringing the (inaudible 1:21:55.4) of all these artworlds, it was really what worked for them as we asked them about their own lives. Just the same as any other community where you ask people to really begin to look at their own lives and you don't give them any sort of framework. You actually let them create a framework by looking at the communities they intercept how is that art.
[Jessica]: Yeah, there's a direct parallel when you're asking students to make any sort of work to sort of draw from their own. So what started to happen was that they kind of got these Plausible Artworlds intellectually, but they weren't really connecting with it until they started doing projects that were based on their own specific relationships to their own specific community and the questions that would sort of drive their own work coming from that place. Adam just walked away.
Are the (inaudible 1:22:43.3) arts people on the call right now?
[Scott]: Um, yeah. A bunch of them.
[Jessica]: Okay.
[Scott]: A bunch of people from that class are. Not all of them.
[Female Group Member]: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think it's sort of the difference between inserting one's self in one's place and thinking that you have something to offer in the sense that you're teaching. Or which the opposite would be like going in and saying, and again I totally couldn't agree more, like being there, sort of listening, understanding and then like taking back. And I feel like that's when these sort of social engaged projects really seem to work.
[Jessica]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Yeah, it starts to sound kind of like political rederict when I say what I want to say, which is that... Well, you know, Bruce Nellman did this piece, this kind of like neon art piece that made me think. Its part of what he thinks art should do. And, uh, it's not just social intervention or people that are involved in art as social practice or people that are even interested specifically in merging art and politics overtly who think that art should shatter perceptions or help to change the way that we perceive or think about the world. But as soon as you bring it into that realm, it definitely takes on a certain tone. But, just for arguments sake, to be a devil's advocate, in a sense I'm definitely not back peddling on this one. I do think it's an interesting criticism and argument to make because there is no way for you to criticize community oriented art without sounding like a total (expletive 1:25:06.9) (laughing). You know? It's not that awesome that underprivileged youth are being taught to read or it's not that rad that an area that is covered in trash suddenly becomes beautified. It's definitely not what's being said. It's that if the message that's being sent predominately is that this is sort of the best you can hope for. Or this is good enough. Then, it's actually not changing perceptions. This is what we expect. It's like turning on the Jerry Lewis, well, those aren't really happening anymore. It's like turning on the telethons. It's a great thing to happen sure, but its' definitely not unexpected. America has a long history of charity and one way of, there are some writer's that that argue that capitalism is dependent on charity. From the early days, the idea is that capitalism in its current form can only really work if the people who are landowners, the people who have some say, act responsibly with their wealth. And part of the way you prove that is through kind of a moral thermometer. A scale or whatever. You do good by giving out to people who are "needy".
(Inaudible Group Comment 1:26:39.2)
[Scott]: Yeah, yeah. Right! Right! You get tax deductions. And so this is part of, it's built into the very foundations of our social structures as we know them anyway. And by we, I guess I'm assuming that almost everyone on calls is in the Western World, and if they're not then they're definitely effected by if they're not living in a capitalist system. Here in the States, that's been part of our history, is charity. And so one argument is that it that we have to convince ourselves, we have to advertise it unduly. We have to make, it's kind of like the classic argument of a suburban dad taking out the trash and making a huge deal of it. Like he just cleaned up the house all week or something. This, this (laughing) what am I trying to say? You know, it's kind of like, we get some spare change to some homeless people and we feel better about the whole situation. So basically, taking it back to art's role in changing perceptions is that if we're ultimately no matter what it is we're doing, no matter how good it is for someone, if we're not changing perceptions then are we really fulfilling our role as artists?
[Female Group Member]: I think that's a good point, especially in comparison to the homeless people because really, you giving homeless people money is socially responsible but you're not supposed to do that in the sense that it perpetuates the problem. And in some ways, giving small amounts of money to artists is kind of like a really good parallel in that way. It's like keeping someone in that same position. You're keeping the homeless person in the same position. Keeping the artist in the same position. Because really, there's not too much, with the exception of like stars, there's not too much movement up or down.
[Female Group Member]: I was going to say, if they were going to do things like give money to charity and stuff like that, first off there are a lot of people I know of that don't like Jerry Lewis for that. Don't like that particular bit. And there's also like, to cure Muscular Dystrophy or Cancer or something. Why are we the ones doing it? Why isn't the government doing this?
[Asheesh]: The only difference between the government and us is compulsion, right? Is there?
[Female Group Member]: I, it might be, yeah. I don't know.
[Male Group Member]: I'm really happy to hear that we're at a state now where people can say "we" and "the government" and we're so alienated that we don't begin to think that we are the government. We really are not. I mean, the answer traditionally would be that we ARE the government, but we all know that's not true. I'm really happy to hear that no one buys into that whole notion anymore.
[Scott]: I mean whatever position you take on it. Yeah. I'm actually hesitant to take a position on... Well, let's just say that this particular project doesn't take any position on how socialized any particular government should or shouldn't be. But, it definitely poses questions of when anything that we do, we claim to be doing something. You know, we should expect to be called on that. We should expect to be, well, at least to be questioned on that. Why not? Especially when part of what the question is, regardless of where you stand, is about what the good life is and who has access to what. And ultimately, I think that what we're interested in with artworlds is that we're interested who they serve and what we're capable of imagining in their place. I think that's why were extremely interested in different kinds of structures. Because, okay, it is a small slice of life I guess. What is an artworld or what is a creative practice. Creative life is kind of a big part of our lives too (laughing). Its impacts might not be as great as some fields, it's not insignificant. So, what we do and how we do does matter. So why wouldn't we want to be involved in a conversation about how these worlds get set up?
But hey, we have...
(Inaudible Group Comment 1:31:58.6)
Yeah, I guess everyone on this call, on some level, wants to be involved. Maybe. So, we have one minute left and we always try to stick to our time. Did anyone have any burning kind of questions or things that they wanted to add for next time? Does anyone have any good closing music?
(Laughter)
(Group Chatter 1:32:30.8 - 1:32:38.7)
[Scott]: Yeah, we usually try to have some good closing music (laughing). No? How about...
(Group Chatter)
[Automated voice saying 7:00)
[Scott]: Thank you very much. That was awesome. Alright everyone, have a great time. We'll see you next week.
(Closing Music & Group Chatter)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:34:41.3
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Week 24: Free Art License
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Antoine Moreau about “Free Art License”.
http://artlibre.org/archives/textes/133
http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en
Free Art Licence (or FAL) is a contract that applies the “copyleft” concept to artistic creation of all kinds, without formal or aesthetic discrimination of any kind. If you or your artworld call it art, you can protect it under FAL by making it free. The License authorizes a third party (a person or legal entity) to proceed to copy, disseminate, transform and use work on the express condition that it always be possible for others to copy, disseminate and transform it in turn. That is, what is free must remain free, copyleft cannot be copyrighted.
Far from running roughshod over authors’ rights, the Free Art License acknowledges and protects them. It allows anyone to make creative use of ideas and forms, regardless of genre, medium, form or content. Strict respect for authors’ rights has often tended to restrict access to works of the mind; FAL, however, fosters access, the being point to authorize use of a work’s resources; to create new conditions of creation so as to extend and amplify the possibilities of creation.
The License was drafted in Paris in July 2000, following a series of meetings of the group Copyleft Attitude by lawyers Mélanie Clément-Fontaine and David Geraud, and artists Isabelle Vodjdani and Antoine Moreau. The Licence is legally binding without modification in all countries having signed the Bern Convention, which established the international legal norms regarding intellectual and artistic “property”. Copyleft Attitude, which devised the license, has always sought to extend the whole notion of copyleft to the realm of the arts and beyond. To draw inspiration from the free and open software movement and to adapt the model — and indeed whole way of life — to creation beyond software, leading to establishing the Free Art License.
The License is suitable for all types of non-software creation. It is recommended by the Free Software Foundation in the following terms: “We don’t take the position that artistic or entertainment works must be free, but if you want to make one free, we recommend the Free Art License.”
Transcription
Week 24: Free Art License
[Scott]: So Steven and Antoine, are you guys both connected?
[Antoine]: Yeah, it works yes.
[Scott]: That might be kind of crazy.
[Steven]: We have two computers on here just in case. Actually, we have three. So we're like kind of...
[Scott]: Reverbing like crazy?
[Steven]: Yeah but I'm turning the sound off on two of them so we'll just be... Okay, we're all set.
[Scott]: Awesome. Well, um, I know a few people are still being rung up on Skype. But anyway, welcome everybody. We're about fifteen minutes past six and we're getting rolling. Welcome to another week of Plausible Artworlds. We're going to be talking with Antoine Moreau about Free Art License. Antoine, am I pronouncing your last name correctly, Moreau?
[Antoine]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Awesome.
[Steven]: Oh sorry. Antoine, that sounds good to me.
[Antoine]: Yes, that's right. Moreau.
[Scott]: Great. So...
[Steven]: You know Scott, I think we're probably going to be talking about two different but linked things. One is of course the Free Art License and the other is the kind of The Collective, which is behind drafting and supporting that license which is called Copyleft Attitude.
[Scott]: Yeah, right. Okay.
[Steven]: So those are two kind of distinguishable things. But we're going to kind of ask Antoine to unpack them individually, I think.
[Scott]: Oh, great. I was curious. I initially read this text and I think everybody that saw our email announcement and had time to read it, which I'm not assuming was anybody, but so here is the link to the page with that information. The very first link is a text. And, there you go. Yeah. Anyway, I was curious about that so yeah that will be great to get a better understanding of it. Steven, did you want to kind of give a bit of and into to this or should we just go ahead and hear directly from Antoine?
[Steven]: I'll just give like a ten second intro. Um, I got to know Antoine Moreau through the tentacles of the Paris beinalle, which we've talked about before. But Antoine was kind of on my radar screen and has been for about the last ten years. About ten years ago he was involved with this group, which I think we should probably start talking with first, called Copyleft Attitude. The idea, if I understood correctly, was to take some of the attitude of the free and open software movement, of the copy left movement, and to kind of generalize that attitude throughout all forms of creation. Which kind of in a logical sense through this very important seminar which you guys held ten years ago now in July 2000, so almost exactly ten years ago, which led to the drafting of Free Art License 1.0. Maybe you could just kind of like, really basically for people who have never heard any of this, tell us how it happened.
[Antoine]: Yes, it was in January 2000 in Paris and the goal was to meet each other, artists (inaudible0:04:20.2) and programmers of the free movement to see if the Copyleft, the idea of Copyleft, was pertinent. Not only for the software, but for the art works. And the end of those three days of talking and debates and different point of views we decided, not exactly "we", some of us because some others were not agreed to write a free license for art A free license lacks a general public license. And some of us did not agree with this because they said that art doesn't need a license, art is a kind of practice which is free. But, I do think the freedom needs a text, a legal text, to make the work of art free of copy.
[Steven]: Right. You mean to make sure that it's not privatized by someone.
[Antoine]: Yes. We could copy, distribute and transform the object.
[Steven]: So, you mean that this whole thing, Free Art License, was actually kind of born from a descensus. It was an originaly disagreement. Well, a désaccord.
[Antoine]: Yes, between some artists. Yes.
[Steven]: Could you say something about that because I think that is pretty important.
[Antoine]: Um, it's a way we can have (inaudible 0:06:57.8)...
[Steven]: With respect to the law?
[Antoine]: Yes, but not that we respect the law. It is to désaccord the law. And Copyleft désaccords the law. It is not the negotiation of the law, it is a way of win between the law and to désaccord it.
[Steven]: Like there is the law and so there's no point in pretending that it doesn't exist and that art is free and it can do anything because, in fact, what can happen is that art can be shut down. It can be privatized; it can be taken away from the people who claimed that it was free in the first place.
[Antoine]: Yeah.
[Steven]: Yeah. But it's interesting that right at the beginning there was that attitude. Before we talk about what you did, because obviously that wasn't your position. Your position was more pragmatic and was more hard-headed, pragmatic and practical. On the other side there were people like Francis Deck, well it doesn't matter their names, but the people who felt that art was somehow free and needed no license and must never have a license. A romantic idea.
[Antoine]: Yes, I think so. Yes. Art is art and it is over everything and it has no relation with this kind of reality. I do not think this. Like the general public license is a free software movement and can bring some freedom not by the submitting of the law but in the way of altering the law in the right way. In the left way.
[Steven]: Okay. Yes. Retooling the law in the left way. Yes. Okay. So, there was this split within Copyleft Attitude then. Because copyleft as an attitude everybody agreed but then when it actually came to drafting legal documents, that would be legally binding in all countries that signed the Bern Convention. Right? The convention that is legally binding with respect to intellectual property rights in the world. That was where the break came. And that was when you said we should, well, what did you do? You created this...
[Antoine]: We need to not only doing some free objects of art, free works of art which are not free in fact, but we need to write a legal contract to realize a real free work of art.
[Steven]: What do you mean by free exactly?
[Antoine]: Ah, it is really simple. It is free like free software. Free to copy, free to distribute, free to transfer and those freedoms can be real by an (inaudible 0:10:43.2) of closed what is open. When something is copyleft, we can't do it copyright.
[Steven]: Right. So that's the taboo. There's one big taboo. You can never privatize what is public. You can never make private what is...
[Antoine]: Yes, right, right. And this is the difference between open source and free software.
[Steven]: Can you tell me more about that? The difference between...
[Antoine]: Open source doesn't, is not copyleft. Open source doesn't care that what is open can be closed.
[Steven]: Okay. Okay, so the idea was that with this Free Art License, it would extend and take the idea of free software and extend it to all things that could be described as art.
[Antoine]: Well, art over art. All things can be protected by the copyright.
[Scott]: Just to clarify, it's not so much extending what exactly happened with, I'm sorry, with free and open source software right? I mean, open source software is just the most visible and the most successful and the most visible branch, if you will, of the free culture movement. But many things came out of those movements. They're not really spawning all from free software right? Free and open source software, right?
[Steven]: Scott, you're breaking up a tiny bit. Can you repeat that question?
[Scott]: Oh yeah, and I'll try to be more distinct too. Just to clarify, we're not talking about... I know that you were inspired by free and open source software, Antoine, ten years or so ago.
[Steven]: Only free software.
[Antoine]: Only free software.
[Scott]: Not open source, okay. Well the free software movement. But we're not talking about something that is an extension of that per say. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that other free cultural projects, as well as free software, come from the free culture movement more generally. I'm curious how you feel about this.
[Antoine]: Yes. I don't understand what we call the Frost Movement. Free open source software. Because the free software can be open source but the good of the copyleft is to protect the freedom. And there is a difference between the open source where the code source is open and free, yes? And the copyleft, the code source is open and free but the freedom is protected by the (inaudible 0:14:18.7) to close again the code source.
[Steven]: Yeah, yeah. The code source. Right. But what's the difference then between...Well, actually, we're moving ahead a little bit fast. But just to ask a question, what is the difference between free or licensed and Creative Commons? For example, it's a share alike license. It sounds very much the same.
[Antoine]: Yes. The equivalent of the Free Art License is a license of Creative Commons, share alike by (inaudible 0:15:02.8). It is the same in fact. But, the Free Art License is more simple and because it is based on the French author's rights. We don't need to adapt the license in the country.
[Steven]: Creative Commons is country based?
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: Okay.
[Antoine]: Creative Commons is based on the copyright act but it is obliged to adapt the license when we want to use it to the law of the countries. And in the French law, there is a Bern Convention and the chance of the Free Art License it is that we the French, we don't need or have to adapt the license. So it is more simple.
[Steven]: Okay. So one thing about the Free Art License that has also attracted some debate, I remember on some occasions, is that it is extremely undiscriminating in terms of what qualifies as art. I mean, although it comes from a very particular artistic and political culture, the copyleft culture, it agrees that anything that anybody calls are or any group of people calls art can qualify. Right? So it can be an object. It can be paintings. It can be sculptures. It can be immaterial work or very material work. It can be...
[Antoine]: Yes. Everything which can be protected by the author's rights. By example, some cooking recopies can be copyleft.
[Steven]: Really?
[Antoine]: Yes (laughing) because it is not protecting by author's right.
[Steven]: Oh really? Recipes are not protected?
[Antoine]: No. So we can't copyleft.
[Steven]: But any kind of a drawing or sounds?
[Antoine]: Yes. Pictures...
[Steven]: And I understand a great number of works have been protected actually under the Free Art License.
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: I mean this is not like a project that could happen. It actually, it's massive. How many works are we talking about that are protected under it?
[Antoine]: I couldn't say exactly how many because we have some undecided (inaudible 0:18:45.0) of copyleft. But some (inaudible 0:18:50.8).
[Steven]: Yes.
[Steven]: There's like tens of thousands.
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: For sure. And who actually wrote the Free Art License? Was that you?
[Antoine]: And two lawyers and another artist.
[Steven]: Who is the other artist?
[Antoine]: Isabelle Vodjdani who was very interesting by the way of the artist contract. And the first group of artists I do the meeting of the Copyleft Attitude, there were a journal called (inaudible 0:19:54.4) and they didn't want to write the license.
[Steven]: Okay. And what do they think now? Ten years on?
[Antoine]: What do they think?
[Steven]: Yeah. Do they agree that they were right to stay away from this?
[Antoine]: No, I don't think they were right. They don't do free art. They do things each themselves. The movement I expected at the beginning is done by other people that (laughing) that knew at first. Like other artists and programmers and different people, yes.
[Steven]: And so the Free Art License, if I understand, can be where anybody can simply apply it. They don't need to go through you; they don't need to ask for authorization. They simply apply the art license to their work and it applies in any country that is a signatory of the Bern Convention.
[Antoine]: Yes, but you must put a motion, a legal motion which is very simple, which says that the work of art is free. And that's (inaudible 0:21:40.7).
[Steven]: Okay, now what happens...? Supposed you use the Free Art License and then your rights are violated. What happens then? What can you do? Sorry, I'll let you do this and then I'll ask you a question. Supposed you use the Free Art License for your work. And then someone comes and abuses your right, like they tried to privatize it and they break that fundamental interdiction. What can you do as an artist? What is your legal recourse?
[Antoine]: We can take them to court.
[Steven]: And this happens? Has it ever happened?
[Antoine]: No.
[Steven]: It's never happened?
[Antoine]: No. Never.
[Steven]: But it would be interesting if it happened, to test.
[Antoine]: (Laughing) yes, of course.
[Steven]: Okay, inevitable question Antoine. I have to ask you this. Is this Free Art License your art work? And if so, is it protected under the Free Art License?
[Antoine]: No (inaudible 0:23:00.9) and because...
[Steven]: It's not an art project, it is but not really.
[Antoine]: Yes. It is not.
[Steven]: I see. In what way is...
[Scott]: I noticed that it, oh sorry. I noticed it wasn't authored in any way online. The only kind of thanks that they're giving is to the translators.
[Steven]: That's right. You didn't sign this. You're not the author.
[Antoine]: We are four persons.
[Steven]: But, it's true. I didn't notice...
[Antoine]: But is (inaudible 0:23:43.8) because on the mailing list, some people add us to write it. It was my position that the Free Artist License was not MY work but a collective work. Yes.
[Steven]: To come to the collective, the collective that is Copyleft Attitude. Copyleft Attitude remains extremely active right? And anybody who is in Paris on the last Thursday night of any month should try and join the regular dinners that are organized by this collective at a restaurant near the canal, what's it called?
[Antoine]: St. Martin.
[Steven]: St. Martin, right. For a sort of informal kind of dinner/debate/discussion around these attitudes. And when I say that it's a very lively discussion list, I mean, you told me when I got here tonight for example, that when you mentioned you were going to be speaking at Plausible Artworlds at BaseKamp over Skype you immediately received a reaction from one the collective members saying how ironic it is that you would be talking about Free Art License using Skype.
(Antoine]: (Laughing) free software (laughing).
[Steven]: So it's a very reactive list. It's very...yeah.
[Antoine]: Yes. Every part of different people are on the license.
[Steven]: It's an international list, or primarily French?
[Antoine]: Primarily French.
[Steven]: So, what's the history of Copyleft Attitude? Where did that come from? Because it's an older collective right? It's been around for awhile now.
[Antoine]: Yeah.
[Steven]: When did you start?
[Antoine]: Ten years.
[Steven]: Oh! Oh you started and then...
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: Oh, so the first initiative was Free Art License. They're really inseparable, the two things.
[Antoine]: The first was (inaudible 0:25:55.7) how do you say? House?
[Steven]: Of the building. Okay. Exactly. The building. And what are some of the other initiatives which you've done? What else does Copy Left Attitude do??
[Antoine]: Um, some copyleft sessions, some copyleft demo, some copyleft (inaudible 0:26:16.6). And everybody is very free to (inaudible 0:26:26.0) to make some things which are not in the art.
[Steven]: What do you mean?
[Antoine]: Uh, some site, some blurbs, some text... Some things, productions of the mind which can be free. And there is a lot of productivity like (inaudible 0:27:05.01). They are making some festival. Next Sunday there will be a festival in Paris of free art. I don't do this but I am (inaudible 0:27:31.8) and they are doing this, yes.
[Steven]: Okay.
[Scott]: Antoine, do you guys have. I'm curious if there is any, sorry for the reverb, I'm not sure who has their speakers up really loud. I'll try to ignore that. Do you have any easily accessible documentation of the work that you guys do?
[Antoine]: About?
[Steven]: Your work.
[Antoine]: About my work?
[Steven]: The work of the...
[Scott]: And the work of Copyleft Attitude.
[Antoine]: Yes, yes. There is a photo of work and it's not very easy for me to choose the kind of works I could send some are more (inaudible 0:28:25.9) than others. Maybe by (inaudible 0:28:29.0) I could and show this one. This one called "Atom Project" and it is a collective work with a lot of photos. The concept is to take some photos and join and people are putting it...
[Steven]: Okay, I'm going to look at this on my computer.
[Antoine]: Two weeks ago, I did something. I did a painting in the street. I was invited by another artist. I will show you. It is (inaudible 0:29:53.4). Zero (inaudible 0:30:03.0) face.
[Steven]: Which means? Okay. How many people are in Copyleft Attitude?
[Antoine]: On the list we are 400. It's not easy to...
[Steven]: How many? 400?
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: And active members?
[Antoine]: Oh yes, all active. And (inaudible 0:31:09.3) is collective of film makers while doing some films under the Free Art License.
[Scott]: Antoine, what is Atom?
[Antoine]: Atom Project?
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Antoine]: It is a project that a member of Copyleft Attitude did for copyleft and it he did operate camera to people for them to take photos during a day. Actually more than 12,000 photos.
[Steven]: Okay, so the ones we see here are all taken by the same person. Maria...
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: But then we go further down and they're taking by somebody else?
[Antoine]: No. You must click on participant.
[Steven]: Oh, okay. Wow. And so who are these people?
[Antoine]: Some friends and some people he met.
[Steven]: And they had no particular, there was no rules. It was just like "take any pictures of your day".
[Antoine]: Yes. One of the wake up, and the maximum during the day.
[Steven]: Well I see that he took like 2900 all by himself. But other people took a lot too.
[Steven]: Are the other people that were involved in (inaudible 0:34:34.7) like, what's the guy's name who has the collection of photographs where he's from.
[Antoine]: Uh, Phillip (inaudible 0:34:44.7)?
[Steven]: Yes, Phillip. Is he involved in?
[Antoine]: No, it was not agreed. The fact of writing a license and some programs.
[Steven]: (Laughing) so you have a problem with artists is what it sounds like. I don't mean that sarcastically, you know. Or only partially sarcastically. Do you find that is there some reason that artists don't agree with Free Art License? Some essential reason? I mean, are they caught up with... Tell me candidly. What's the issue? Why would they be against it? Are they like caught up in the art world market?
[Antoine]: Yeah, I think it's a sort of ideology of art. There is a kind of ideology of what is art and they are fond of this ideology. My position is that art is not an ideology, it's a (inaudible 0:36:16.7) is a law. Yes. And this is a reality. It's a realizment like (inaudible 0:36:36.8) could paint some paintings and realistic. The reality of the law. Not submission. Not out of the law, but real work. A real fight with the law.
[Steven]: We have a question here from David from Post autonomy. David do you want to articulate your question because I wouldn't want to have to state it for you.
[David]: Hello. Can you hear me?
[Scott]: Hi David. Yes. Definitely.
[David]: Most of the problems I hear about in the UK in terms of protecting the copyright of particular art works, really comes down to the ability of people to befriend their copyright. To pay for lawyers, to go to court to protect their works. I've never heard of any artist having problems protecting their work. Does that make sense?
[Steven]: You mean they don't have problems like people taking their work and then making money off of it. They have problems...
[David]: No, people have problems niche-ing their ideas for sure. And it's a very common place, but to prepare to do that in England for artists or students to protect their art works, or the copyright of their art works, costs a lot of money. And I think that's one of the main drawbacks. As I said before, it's very common place for artists to have their ideas stolen. People are very conscious of it.
[Steven]: Yeah, I mean, I don't want to answer for Antoine, but I think that is exactly the problem. I think that's what Free Art License is all about. It's about making that kind of thing more illegally difficult because it makes it possible for you to take advantage of that work. To transform it, to exchange it, to make use of it, to engage in a very open user ship but at the same time not enabling you at all to close it down and make money at their expense.
[Antoine]: We can make money with the Free Art License.
[Steven]: But not at the other artist's expense. Not by saying they can no longer make money right?
[David]: I don't think I was very clear, but I think you get the rough idea what I was trying to say.
[Steven]: I mean, what I was trying to say was that Free Art License makes it possible for other people to use your work that you have put into the public sphere and to modify it or do whatever needs to be done with it. But it doesn't, one interdiction that you mentioned, the taboo, is that they cannot shut it down. They cannot say "now it's mine. I don't care if you Amazonian people use this type of medication for the last 20,000 years, now I as Merc have exclusive rights".
[Antoine]: No. What is open stays open. Yes.
(Inaudible, speaking over each other 0:41:17.6)
[Antoine]: But we can make money with this.
(Male Group Member]: After the letter, you want capitalized.
[Steven]: Sorry, we're not hearing you. Can you say that again?
(Silence and typing noises)
[Steven]: I can't hear you guys.
[Scott]: Well, I mean, let's just assume that if someone wants to repeat the question they can. Or if someone wants to write it down, they can. We've had a couple of other questions come up in the meantime.
[Steven]: Yeah. I'm looking at these questions. Okay. So Greg says "If some corporation wants to use your work to sell products than they can but then everyone else can use the commercial produced by the corporation for the creative purpose they would like. Big money loathes this idea" Yeah, that's the idea right? That's why it's free. That's what free means in this particular...
[Antoine]: Yes but this free business stays free. What this business can do, every products are free so everybody can have their turn doing something with these free products. Like Linux. Everybody can do their free edition of Linux (inaudible 0:44:14.1). If I want to do business with Linux I can and there is no problem with other descriptions. So there is no more brands, we call it distribution. And I think that for the artist, it's the same.
[Scott]: Uh guys, I think, you know, David said that this doesn't really apply to art in the same way or the formal license doesn't work for art works. I think it's true that only when art works become really expensive does the legality seem to matter because normally you wouldn't take any recourse. It just doesn't make sense unless there's a large entity that has a lot of money behind it and you can use it as some kind of landmark case to make a big deal of it. You wouldn't sue another artist for doing something similar to what you're doing. That doesn't really happen. But I don't think that's really the point. I don't think the point is really to, or maybe it is for Antoine, I don't know. I think it's the idea of creating legal protection more so than the discussions that come out of that than it is actually worrying so much about protecting one's self.
I see David's concern and it's a concern that a lot of people have because they feel they work really hard and them some younger, or maybe even some older, artist with more developed connections already takes what you do and puts a small gloss on it and gets a lot of exposure. Not only diverting the attention that you deserve but maybe even diverting the ideas or watering them down, the importance of the ideas themselves. Maybe their taken out of context or made more palpable or easy to swallow. I think that's really frustrating for a lot of people. But these questions, I think, are much bigger. I don't think the answer is "oh well, it sucks that people are stealing my ideas so I really have to protect them". And I also don't think the answer is "well, we need a legal document so that we can sue somebody if they do something." I think, really, these questions bring about other issues about how we should really do what we do. About how we should or shouldn't professionalize ourselves as artists. Basically, who owns what we do? What's it for? Are we mainly building this immaterial thing, this sort of nebulous idea of a career, that's so fragile that we need to protect it viciously? I think that put it down and you can't wish it away so the discussion is really fascinating to me.
[Antoine]: In fact, there are two things. Copyleft is one contract and to earn money it is another contract. Here in France we are trying to think about a living wage for everybody, artist or not.
[Steven]: A living wage in this political sense means a wage to which any human being, by virtue of existing on this earth, would be entitled to each month. And then if you wanted to make more money than that, that would be an option that you would have. But that living wage would be sufficient already to meet all of your needs. It wouldn't be welfare.
[Antoine]: Yes. And I put, the site is under Free Art License. I really think, and some are thinking this, the living wage is the other side of the free movement because to do some free art or some free software, we need free time. And to have free time, we need to have some money for means to existence.
[Steven]: Means to existence. Not only to exist but to live.
[Antoine]: The idea is to institute to take a political decision to institute a living wage because the copyleft can't really be the way to very rich. Even some business can be done with free software. I think (inaudible 0:50:30.5) art for example, which was the first society which did a lot of money with (inaudible 0:50:42.6). I knew some here in Paris which are earning some money with free software and only free software, only copyleft software. But for art or other (inaudible 0:51:03.6) we need to institute a living wage. I really think it is an oversight of the free movement.
[Steven]: So the fact is that copyleft is really political. It's not so much really a legal thing as it is a political thing.
[Antoine]: Legal things are political.
[Steven]: Yeah, but it's not legal in the legalistic sense. It's legal in the sense of the laws in terms of legislation and in terms of a broader political (inaudible 0:51:49.3). When you (inaudible 0:51:52.2) at this point as Utopian, because in fact, there we are describing conditions that we need to have a human community. Not like we ever had before. Not talking about serious (0:52:06.7). What do you mean when it's registered under copyleft? Is that just on your site or what is the link between the living wage movement and Copyleft Attitude?
[Antoine]: The link is the possibility of freedom. Of free time, of free exercise, of free meeting, free not to be triggered by the economic necessities. It's not a Utopia, it's not idealistic. It's very realistic because the reality of the (0:53:12.5) is awful and it's not realistic kind of wealth.
[Steven]: But I mean the people that are behind the call for living wage, are they some of the same ones that are in Copyleft Attitude?
[Antoine]: Yes. And the link I (inaudible 0:53:39.9) those are Copyleft Attitude and the text is under Free Art License.
[Steven]: Okay.
[Antoine]: And so there is also another group called Society for Gift to try to find assertion not by other's rights but by gift.
[Steven]: What's that called? The Society for Gifts?
[Antoine]: (inaudible 0:54:28.3) some people of Copyleft Attitude.
[Steven]: Okay.
[Antoine]: On Sunday, there will be the founders of (inaudible 0:55:10.0) we come in Paris about some association we found which is called (inaudible 0:55:25.4) maybe I think you know it. And (inaudible 0:55:38.1) is very close to the start to find a solution by the gift.
[Steven]: Find some sort of solution but the gift.
[Antoine]: Yes. To find an economic solution. To finance (inaudible 0:56:07.7)
(A video is playing in the background - all dialog of Antoine is inaudible 0:56:04.0)
...which means free time and we must have some free minutes for this.
[Steven]: I think we have the people from Liter Omble have asked a few questions here, maybe we should take a look. They say, the thing is, once you give your rights of art work to Free Art License, you cannot claim them back. Also, if you have the rights of an art work you can set an agreement with the person who wants to use it so they don't have to pay you a fee. Is that true? Once you give...
(Speaking fluent French 0:56:58.8 - 0:57:18.0)
[Antoine]: It is like a public domain, but now. Not after seventy years after my death. It's a kind of public domain now and ever to be closed.
[Steven]: What Antoine means is that normally copyright is protected until seventy years after the death of the author or the composer or the artist and that after that time, the work reverts to the public domain and can no longer be enjoyed exclusively by any publisher. Anybody can use it freely. And what Free Art License does is that it removes the seventy year clause and makes it immediate so that you're still alive and it's like you're dead seventy years ago. In terms of how you're work can be used, in any case.
But beyond this is something else too. Something which I didn't understand. Something about the local laws in France. Can you guys repeat that question? Not seventeen, it's seventy. Ah, here's a good question. It has to do with Geilan, a proposal that you were involved with a couple years ago. The public freehold of (inaudible 1:00:00.0). You need to describe what it is first though.
[Antoine]: I was in touch with Geilan (inaudible 1:00:12.1) and we asked if him if he would agree to put the Free Art, the public free art sentences and the Free Art License because at the beginning it was very free (inaudible 1:00:47.5).
[Steven]: Oh really?
[Antoine]: Yes. He said "no, I don't want to because there done by me and I don't want it to be where everybody can do it". So it was a contradiction because at the beginning, it was free.
[Scott]: Well, it's kind of the way free software is often used now. IT's a strategy for, almost like, I don't know how many of you are familiar with like 1980s Public Service Announcement commercials in the eighties about drug pushers. It's kind of like "The first ones free Billy! But when you keep coming back for more, we'll start rising up the prices." Anyway, free software is like that. Or like Skype or like anything. Free is a model for making money. Or it's a model for gaining notoriety or gaining enough usership to basically form a coalition of the willing free beta testers or to sort of prove relevance and then of course it gets a price attached. You learn it in business school, from what I understand. Not that I went through business school. So, I guess I know Lawrence Weiner, I know that's really not his MO, but it's not surprising that once you have something to protect, you do.
(Fluent French dialog between Steven and Antoine 1:02:26.9)
[Antoine]: But free, the free software and the free art. It is not free as in free beer, but free as in free speech. It is a great difference. In French we have two words for this; " libérer" and "gracieux". It cost something; it cost what we invest in it. It's not a finical investment, it's a (inaudible 1:03:44.7) it is not free like free beer. It is free like free speech.
[Female Group Member]: I know that for instance I've done work with PETA. You know, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And I know one of the things that they always do is when they have software or anything like that with their logo, none of that is copyrighted at all. They don't care; they just want to get the point across.
[Steven]: Sorry, we didn't catch that question.
[Female Group Member]: I'm just saying as an example. You know PETA? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals? They don't charge people for the copyright and it's pretty much in the public domain because they really don't care who uses it as long as it gets the point across. That could be one thing also. An example?
[Antoine]: I think what is important with copyleft the way we can't close what is open. So it is not the freedom like the libertarian way, it's not a freedom of everything. It's a freedom for equality and for some kind of fraternity. It's not of freedom of (inaudible 1:06:19.5) it's not a freedom like your fetish. It is a freedom for something so that we can copy, distribute and transform something. It is not for someone who can copyright and say "So now you can't copy, distribute and transfer from what you did and I can't".
[Scott]: What David just said is really exactly what I had meant before. I was not coming from any place of cynicism or irony, it's just ultimately we need to recognize when... Well, let's just say to generalize this slightly, any progressive social movement needs to recognize then their strategies are adopted and successfully employed by someone who doesn't share their interested. A more powerful force. It's important to recognize that, like you had mentioned, Copyleft Attitude didn't mean free as in free beer but free as in free speech. I think that (inaudible 1:07:46.5) was super appropriate and it's important to keep in mind. But I also think that we need to recognize that most of what we see when we see free can easily become free as in free beer. Free as in free sample. Or free as in gaining a certain degree of notoriety before whatever kind of fidelity towards a free culture movement. It really isn't there anymore. I'm not really sure what should be there anyway. I think it's just important, at least for me, to recognize that these things don't have ideology built into them or ethics built in. And because something is free, it doesn't solve all the problems that are built up around it. It definitely does pose some interesting questions and I think it can be very challenging. The thing is I think it can lose some of that challenging potential if we rest to heavily just on the fact that it's free. If you know what I mean. I sort of hinted here that addressed very much and all I really got in response was we don't mean free as in etc. This is our ideology. But what about sort of recognizing that the strategy is something that has grown more and more and not just by a few conceptual artists from the sixties but by almost every company who does anything with software and hopes to get the word out about themselves.
(Automated female voice stating "Virus database has been updated")
(Laughter)
[Steven]: Yeah but I think, Scott, that you are using free in that sense, you're using it in the sense of free of charge. And I think that's precisely, if I understood, that's precisely what Antoine is not talking about.
[Scott]: Well, my question is how do you know the difference? Someone can, you know...
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:09:55.0)
[Antoine]: It is a question of trust and right and the law. I do think that the law helps the trust.
[Scott]: Right, but law is ambiguous. Law does not...
[Antoine]: Yes, yes, yes. Law. Trust. And this reason why we need to have a contract. Something in writing to motion to carry.
[Steven]: You're a paradox kind of guy. You're part of this free movement and most of the time people who are involved in art are anarchists. You have this sort of crazy respect for the law.
[Antoine]: No, it is not a crazy respect. It is...
[Steven]: No, but he's like (inaudible 1:10:56.1) he was like that too, right? It was this kind of always wanting to deconstruct the law, but ultimately always believing that the law was there.
[Antoine]: Ah, I think that. Yes. It is not to destroy it. It is to have a conversation and have a work (inaudible 1:11:18.2) freedom with it. And I do think that is not freedom for one people or other people if we don't take attention about this.
[Steven]: No, but I see that. That's kind of the crux of the issue, isn't it? You can't do with it, but you can't do without it. So the best thing is to... It's funny because I exactly understand what all you had that rupture right at the beginning. Because it would be like trying to get (inaudible 1:12:03.8) to be on the same boat together. One is simply saying "no. I don't' care about the law there is so many other ways of engaging the world without judging. And the other one is saying "no, that's just another judgment and you're a victim of the law until you recognize it".
[Scott]: There are definitely important... I just mentioned Katherine McKenna because she makes almost her entire like is built around trying to answer that question. You know, why should we care about the law and why should we try to adjust the law as a radical feminist. It's been really important for her, for example, to do that because the law stifles but it also sets the limits and potentials of much of what happens in life. Of course people break it, and we should, but when it helps to shape a world that's unfair for 50% of its inhabitants then it's time to change the law. So law matters.
[Steven]: Well of course. You're right because breaking the law is the greatest way to acknowledge the law. That's the thing. By transgressing it, you're really acknowledging it. I mean your acknowledging it porosity and its permeability and so on, but your acknowledging it's there and that it's the law. Antoine, isn't that right?
[Antoine]: Excellent. Yes.
[Scott]: Okay, so ten years later, fast forward. Actually, this is a few years ago now. Flicker adopted a Creative Commons License. How does this change Copyleft Attitude's missions stance and all of that?
[Steven]: That's a good question.
[Scott]: I mean we're not talking about something like that. It's a major win in somebody interested in, ultimately, interested in different types of protection that posts challenges to dominant ideas of ownership. But at the same time it hasn't exactly changed everything.
[Steven]: Yeah. Right. You follow these things, right? Flicker has adopted a kind of, what is Copyleft's attitude about that?
[Antoine]: The problem is that, by example of Flicker, choose Creative Commons they were out of six licenses. One only is a free license copyleft. I think that copyleft Creative Commons was not a good idea because they make the choice of sort of license and not the choice of the free license. So people can't... It is very difficult for people to know what is the right way to make a choice of the free movement. I have a discussion with (inaudible 1:16:12.3) about this he was very surprised that the most used is the (inaudible 1:16:22.7).
[Steven]: This one; Attribution Non-Commercial share alike.
[Antoine]: Yeah. And it is not free.
[Steven]: So this was Greg's question. That this particular license is not copyleft.
[Antoine]: No. Not at all.
[Steven]: Not at all.
[Antoine]: Only one is copy left from Creative Commons, it's a share alike by (inaudible 1:16:50.3).Other's are not.
[Scott]: What about the commercial vs. non commercial distinction because that's the other part of that.
[Antoine]: If you can't do any business it is not free. If you cannot.
[Steven]: Okay. So you're not an anarchist, you're a legalist but a libertarian.
[Antoine]: Not at all. (Inaudible 1:17:37.3) is a libertarian. For example Eric (inaudible 1:17:42.4 - 1:18:06.0) is the libertarian party. Open source is libertarian, free software and copyleft is not. It could be (inaudible 1:18:23.9).
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:18:26.9) cynicism. Hang on, I don't get this. Something that is explicitly non commercial...
[Antoine]: The devil is not the money.
[Steven]: The devil is not the money.
[Antoine]: Yeah. Money is just media to transport some value. I could be useful and it is (inaudible 1:18:49.4) to have some money. So it is right reason with free software and free art. Non commercial is a (inaudible 1:19:07.6) and copyleft is not creating a diversion. We accept the money which smells bad, yes. We accept it and we work with it, we pay with it. It is not the idea of non commercial and it is why free is not (inaudible 1:19:48.8) it is free.
[Scott]: So Antoine, I understand what you mean, but isn't that argument just trying to make the point that money itself is not exactly what you're talking about? You're not saying that it literally must be commercially viable to be copyleft. I mean, if are... It's not hard for me to understand what you're saying, but I'm imagining that you're kind of using a cannonball to swat a fly for the argument, if you know what I mean. Maybe too good of an effect because it's really drives the point home but in the end, I feel like it also has to be removed in order to move ahead. Otherwise, you're basically saying "our idea of copyleft is limiting only to certain forms of exchange otherwise it's not really valid within our framework". And I don't really think that you, it doesn't sound like from everything that you've said, that's...
[Steven]: I think what Scott's point was is that he can see in the abstract sense why you say this but he has a hard time believing that it's really that important. Because you're not really saying this to defend people making money, you just want to de-dramatize the importance of monetary exchange. Like it shouldn't be taboo the way...
[Antoine]: It is not important. It's just a medium.
[Steven]: Well it is kind of important in a real sense. It'd be important to have some more here, that's for sure. For example, Scott made the point that the website of Plausible Artworlds and BaseKamp is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 which is not copyleft because it is explicitly non commercial.
[Antoine]: Yes, but the (inaudible 1:22:39.1) of non commercial is fear. We fear that somebody could make money with our work. I don't think that the fear is a good reason to (inaudible 1:23:11.15). What are you observe with free movement copyleft. One is that there are not afraid by commission and by business, they don't care. They're doing some, people can do some too. It is public and it is (inaudible 1:23:58.7). I am speaking, do I must be afraid of somebody who can take away my words and ideas and take them again for his own? No I'm not afraid of this. I think that what is worrisome is that somebody can take a language for example or any of your products, for his own and only for his exclusivity. This is really frightening.
[Steven]: Chris, question.
[Scott]: Who really owns ideas? Ultimately. The thing is it's an interesting construction that we're all kind of working within. And many of us are working in different ways. Maybe the interesting, you made a distinguished, excuse me. Antoine, you just ambiguated free and open source projects earlier. I think part of the power of open source, even though it's ultimately really big business too, but part of the reason that it's so weirdly powerful is that it's kind of disproven that certain forms of competition or something like a natural law, even within aggressive markets. You can actually, there's all different ways to argue this but basically when you exchange things and you question your right or what ownership of an idea really means I think what happens is that very old notions of ownership and property and governance all come into question. Because they've been used for a very long time to legitimize ways of structuring societies that are completely unfair. Or at least that privilege certain people and not others or that many other people have spent their lives reimagining or fighting against. These things aren't extricable from one another. Notions of ownership of things and ideas are really tied to what you're talking about. They're really tied to Copyleft Attitude and they're also very tied to open source and those things aren't exactly the same thing. Do you know what I mean?
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Scott]: So I think the attitude of that if someone is going to steal my work is a reality because it's a fiction that's played out so successfully. But it's not a natural reality. It's just a game that we play.
[Steven]: It's because it's based on artificial scarcity. When we're talking about material objects there's a limited number of them in a finite world so their scarcity is actually real, although it may be sometimes exaggerated. When we're talking about ideas it's not because two people read a book that there's only half as many ideas left in it at the end. If fact, the more people that read it potentially the more ideas there will be generated by that book. So anything that would be done to create ownership around an idea would be a way of creating artificial scarcity. In other words, applying a model from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century's reality. Which is why I think what you're talking about right (inaudible 1:28:55.3).
[Antoine]: Yes. This is the reason I did this painting last week, "0+0= Total Space". I think that what we are doing is zero. It is not bad but it is zero like something which is really open and infinite. It is a real value (inaudible 1:29:55.8) inestimateable. So it is really difficult to take the value of the production because there is no cost in effect. Especially for production of the mind. So which is inestimateable? We can't (inaudible 1:30:31.0). It is like the language and it is life living, which is not a language. Which is dead. Living language, like living production of mind, must be open and we can't be afraid that it could be used by someone else. Copyleft is here to guarantee that nobody can capture it and have an exclusivity of it. This is the way of the law for us and the law which is not the law of domination, but the law of protection for creativity. For creative use.
[Antoine]: The connection with art for me is that maybe art is a free practice by (inaudible 1:32:39.0). Art is the way of free form. But if we needed to protect the freedom of art with a free license, it is because now everybody wants to count dominant production. So, the way to recover the freedom of art is to have a copyleft. It is like armor. A defensive one and a decor one. Because there is a passion of power. Everybody wants to have power over things and over people. Art is not power, it's a potential.
[Steven]: It's precarious, it's fragile.
[Antoine]: Fragile. Yes.
[Scott]: Well guys, I'd like to connect, if possible, back to software for a moment because we've gotten to a place where a lot of interesting questions open up. I think part of my concern is some of this discussion kind of gets boxed in certain realms of culture. I and I think several others here are very interested in bringing some of this discussion and some examples that tie to this to larger open source and free software communities. This is where a lot of these ideas actually make, not really made their way into a mainstream, but made a larger impact more visibly. I just typed this in. I don't know if you guys had seen this. We have Jonathan and Chris Simpson who are two of the co-organizers of this conference in Rochester, NY coming up this weekend. Steven and Meg and I from BaseKamp are going to present and kind of open with a key note presentation to all of these software developers and people interested in these ideas. So, if you don't mind, since there are only a few days between now and then and we're on the subject, I'd kind of like to hear from them and maybe we could have a little bit of a discussion about how these ideas overlap?
[Antoine]: Yeah.
[Jonathan]: Hey Scott.
[Scott]: Hey Jonathan.
[Jonathan]: I've got myself and Chrissy here and like you said we're organizing. We're one of the team, well two of the team really, that are putting this thing together. And kind of like you said in the opposite direction we're seeing how everybody gets in their own little silos and doesn't necessarily explore outside of that. I think you guys coming up and presenting from a different silo, if you will, than just "okay, here's software and here's open hardware and..." There are all these different pieces and brining that new perspective is very valuable. So, just so everybody knows, we have (inaudible 1:36:59.8) coming up this Saturday in Rochester, NY. Some of us from the Philadelphia area are going up and people from all over the place are coming in. One of our speakers is actually flying in from Denmark I think tomorrow. So there are people from all over. I really think it's awesome that you guys were able to be part of this for exactly those reasons. Just breaking down those barriers that separate groups with very similar goals. I'm going to let Chrissy say a few words as well.
[Chrissy]: Hi!
[Scott]: Hi Chrissy!
[Chrissy]: Yeah, I totally agree with John about just really expanding the boarders for what our communities are about and creating everybody and everything and trying to reach out to people in other senses that would not know about the different areas and able for people to participate in and are interested in participating in. Which is kind of the reason why, one of the reasons, why we really decided to do this. Late last year we were coming back from a conference down in South Carolina, the Self Conference. It really just talked about there is so many different places and so many different communities and we all really want a lot of the same things. So, we wanted to provide an outlet that we could all just come together and express that. So, we're really looking forward to it. There's been a lot of hard work that has gone into this just to make it available for the northeast community. Like John said, we have people from Denmark, Canada, all over the place that are coming in because they really, really share our cause. That's what is amazing about this.
[Jonathan]: Yeah, it's a lot of shared passion. And like Chrissy said, we all have a lot of similar goals in what we believe and in what we want to see happen. So I think it's really good to see different groups coming together and doing things together. So I guess that's about it for me. And like I said Scott's going to be there and Megs going to be there and we're very excited about that.
[Scott]: And we hope, anyway, if we can get our basic tech set up to work properly, which doesn't always happen. Hopefully Steven will be able to come on. Alright, now I have a question for everybody. We're talking about this stuff right? Now sort of bringing it into a practical realm where there is a time to connect with a bunch of people who do work on free software projects and open source software projects. I'm wondering, besides asking them "hey can you develop something for my art work", I don't know maybe that's okay too, but if we were to present say Copyleft Attitude as one of the examples of other things going on that relate maybe peripherally, if not directly, to the topic of this conference. What do you think we should present? What could we really (inaudible 1:40:34.5) from this week, this two hour chat where we passed around like a gazillion links and had a lot of interesting discussion and a little bit of argument (laughing). What do you think would really be valuable to offer?
[Steven]: I think Scott's question, it's something that I've talked with Scott about the last few days. You know, it's something you've already thought about Antoine, I'm sure. Because you've thought about how to bring the values of copyleft and free software into a domain which is largely premised on a very powerful reputational economy and individual signature style. I'm talking about art. It was easy to bring the generosity of that whole copyleft free software movement into art, but what could art actually offer to that community? Because if we're going to mutualize our desires and approaches then we have to be clear about what it is that we're bringing into the mix. Because, they don't need us. Maybe we needed them. But if they need us, what do they need from us and what can we offer?
[Antoine]: Maybe they need from us some kind of uselessness. Because the humility of the programmers in the free movement are preempted to doing something useful and maybe art gives them... I think maybe art is the freedom of freedom. I observe some programmers free yes, but they are they are not dominate by the freedom of the software. It's not sure that they are free in their mind. I think that (laughing) maybe, not artists, but art and sometime artists are free in their mind.
[Steven]: Sometimes.
[Antoine]: Sometimes. Yes. It could be.
[Steven]: In some best case scenarios because in other case scenario they are extremely alienated in their minds.
[Antoine]: Because we can't say that in the way I use free software I am free. It's not right and I'm not free because I use free software.
[Steven]: No. But you're not free because you're an artist either.
[Antoine]: Nada. I tried. So the meeting between programmers and artists could be interesting in the way of uselessness. I really think that if we can do some things in art simply interesting it is a freedom of freedom. And it could be useful for the free movement. I have some talk with (inaudible 1:45:21.0) a few months ago and we were together in Swiss for a meeting. I was very surprising that he was a guru of the free movement (laughing). But, I was asking if he was very free because he was always with his laptop and very detrimented by some kind of way of life, very special. I was wondering if he was a human person.
(Laughter)
[Antoine]: It was very strange. So I think that without art, free software is not free. What is free in making free software? It is the art of doing this. There is a kind of art of doing the free software. I think that programmers are artists of software's.
[Steven]: Excellent.
[Antoine]: Yes.
[Steven]: Antoine lets make that the (inaudible 1:46:55.4). Its one minute passed two here, in the morning.
[Scott]: Ah yeah, right. We try to keep to a very strict schedule but I was too lax in my strict time keeping. Its one minute over.
[Steven]: I think that is a good way to take a break for about the next seven days. That without art, free software is not free and what's free about it is the art of doing it freely.
[Greg]: Also, this is Greg. I just had one final request. I just posted a link on the chat and I thought that in the spirit of antique copyright, or copyright infringement, we might all un-mute our microphones and sing "Happy Birthday" to Scott Rigby.
[Steven]: NO! Is it his birthday??
[Scott]: No it's not! No, totally. You're one month early dude.
[Greg]: Oh no really?
[Scott]: AHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHAHA! But thank you (laughing).
[Greg]: My God, I'm so embarrassed.
[Scott]: I'd love if you would do it anyway. No, I'm just kidding (laughing).
(Laughter)
[Steven]: When is your birthday man?
[Greg]: I thought it was June 16th?
[Scott]: No way dude.
[Steven]: July 16th?
[Scott]: July 12th.
[Greg]: Oh wow. I'm way off.
[Scott]: Well, you're just not perfectly off, you're pretty close. All things considered (laughing).
[Greg]: Alright, well, sorry about that. I'm embarrassed.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: Good try Greg.
(Laughter)
[Greg]: Are you messin' with me?
[Scott]: No, I'm totally not (laughing).
[Greg]: He totally is. I can tell.
[Scott]: This would be a good way to deflect embarrassment for myself from being sung to but no, it's...
[Greg]: Okay, July 12th. The Skype chat that happens then we're singing you "Happy Birthday" even if it's not.
[Steven]: Yeah! And even if it's only like the 11th, we'll still do it.
Thank you so much for being with us. I think we could continue on for another hour, even without "Happy Birthday". But thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts with us.
[Antoine]: Thank a lot for the invitation and thank you everybody for this meeting.
[Scott]: Yeah, absolutely. And if you'd like to, since we talked about this key note speech or presentation, if you guys want to pop in during that we're going to be on Skype. We don't actually have to wait another seven days to continue this. We can actually sort of continue a little bit in text on this Saturday. I'm going to paste the details of this into this window. So, come join us.
[Steven]: Okay, I'll be there for sure. If it works. Skype willing, I will definitely be there. And I'll try to convince Antoine as well. You know one thing with Antoine we didn't talk about is Antoine is a very wide, often published writer as well on theoretical issues which are somewhat (inaudible 1:50:22.89) to what we talked about tonight. So I'll try and twist his rubber arm and get some ideas on Friday prior to our meeting on Saturday.
[Scott]: That'd be great.
[Steven]: Okay, good night you guys!
[Scott]: Good night everyone!
(Goodbyes and background noise)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:59:19.9
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Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$b65da2823d7ff755" title="#basekamp/$b65da2823d7ff755">Free Art License http://basekamp.com/about/events/free-art-license (#basekamp/$b65da2823d7ff755)
Created on 2010-06-15 20:14:48.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:00:00
- how are you all doing tonight?
- Lannes Quentin: 18:01:09
- chating
- Lannes Quentin: 18:01:34
- i'm not sure I understand the question ^^
- atrowbri: 18:01:52
- Lannes Quentin: 18:02:04
- it's too late now
- Lannes Quentin: 18:02:07
- ^^
- Henken Bean: 18:02:18
- hey basekamp
- Martin Peeks: 18:02:32
- hi everyone
- Lannes Quentin: 18:02:44
- hi
- Greg Scranton: 18:02:47
- hey everyone
- Mathieu Girard: 18:02:48
- hi
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:39
- Quentin - well, there area few french speakers who can help translate @ any point I think
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:02
- Renée Ridgway says hi by the way!
- Lannes Quentin: 18:04:25
- I will understand by myself
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:31
- stephen, can you turn your skype status to Available?
- stephen wright: 18:08:56
- Am I connected?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:29
- hi stephen yes - you looked disconnected for a moment
- stephen wright: 18:10:38
- I felt that way too
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:10:50
- what is happening?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:54
- apologies for this taking a while.. technically we are all set, but people keep pinging us about tonight's chat --
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:11:01
- Is every one warming up
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:03
- who would like to join the audio tonight?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:11:13
- or am I missing something as usual
- stephen wright: 18:11:17
- we would
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:25
- david - i think so yes in a sense
- stephen wright: 18:11:28
- no, David -- hi by the way -- nothing yet
- stephen wright: 18:11:50
- in what sense, scott?
- oui: 18:11:53
- hi
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:00
- oh,,, i meant - yes everyone is warming up >
- antoine moreau: 18:12:09
- o !
- stephen wright: 18:12:58
- hello
- Lannes Quentin: 18:13:20
- hello (salut)
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:13:28
- hiiii
- Henken Bean: 18:13:30
- warming u - nija style
- stephen wright: 18:13:32
- so we have our notes, our beer, and we're kinda ready to go
- antoine moreau: 18:13:37
- Salut (hello)
- Mathieu Girard: 18:13:58
- salut too
- Martin Peeks: 18:14:26
- hi
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:11
- http://basekamp.com/about/events/free-art-license
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:19
- http://artlibre.org/archives/textes/133
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:34
- copyleft_attitude
- Greg Scranton: 18:19:34
- Not sure how many were/are following aaaarg situation but seems for now they are back up and running here: http://aaaaarg.org/ (despite weird header)
- atrowbri: 18:20:00
- Warning: Table './aaaaarg_org/cache' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: SELECT data, created, headers, expire, serialized FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables' in /data/www/aaaaarg.org/www.aaaaarg.org/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 141
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:08
- ty greg
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:18
- adam let's hAck it
- Greg Scranton: 18:20:33
- ha ha sure.
- Greg Scranton: 18:21:34
- hello A & J how is Sophie...ok?
- atrowbri: 18:21:40
- YES
- Greg Scranton: 18:21:47
- Wonderful!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:22
- "what do you mean by free?"
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:26:02
- ya someone needs to ressurect aaaarg
- Greg Scranton: 18:26:04
- are we live? if so can you call me?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:27
- h igreg - re-adding you
- Greg Scranton: 18:26:38
- thx!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:44
- np
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:39
- FOSS
- antoine moreau: 18:29:21
- Floss
- Greg Scranton: 18:30:01
- was just going to ask how this is different than Larry Lessig's license thx Stephen
- Greg Scranton: 18:30:54
- other "copyleft" + "art" sites:
- Greg Scranton: 18:30:56
- http://opsound.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:25
- adding you Elysa
- Greg Scranton: 18:32:56
- sorry : meant to be ? as in if others had examples
- Elysa Lozano: 18:33:12
- hi! thank you
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:18
- nprobs
- antoine moreau: 18:34:07
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:FAL?uselang=fr
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:39
- hi Jonathan -- adding you now!
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:36:22
- howdy!
- antoine moreau: 18:36:46
- To benefit from the Free Art License, you only need to mention the following elements on your work:
[Name of the author, title, date of the work. When applicable, names of authors of the common work and, if possible, where to find the originals].
Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ - BASEKAMP team: 18:37:18
- hi Jonathan
- antoine moreau: 18:39:27
- http://wiki.artlibre.org/RencontresCopyleftAttitude
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:56
- haha yeah
- Elysa Lozano: 18:40:47
- did anyone else lose audio?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:58
- elysa will call u bak
- Lannes Quentin: 18:41:06
- sometimes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:22
- quentin you are stil on the call yes?
- Lannes Quentin: 18:41:54
- yes, there is some crash sound sometimes, but i'm still here
- Greg Scranton: 18:42:25
- anyone know this essay? http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:24
- everyone please mute your audio when not speaking --- thanks
- antoine moreau: 18:43:29
- http://www.adamproject.net/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:42
-
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:43:55
- /40
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:03
- greg i don't think so
- Greg Scranton: 18:44:15
- mmm Coke Zero and a Camel, sounds good right about now
- antoine moreau: 18:44:49
- 0+0= http://antoinemoreau.org/index.php?cat=Toto
- Greg Scranton: 18:45:11
- diapers...lots of diapers...so familiar...are those copyleft diapers?
- Lannes Quentin: 18:45:21
- do you know the face of toto?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:37
- what is ADaM
- antoine moreau: 18:45:38
- Free films : http://www.kassandre.org
- Lannes Quentin: 18:45:39
- I think it's a french joke
- stephen wright: 18:46:19
- kassandre is a collective of filmmakers working under free art licence
- Greg Scranton: 18:47:21
- the images seem to be taken by the same person?
- stephen wright: 18:47:54
- more than 12 000 pictures on line
- Greg Scranton: 18:47:59
- Toutes les photos (12567)
- Greg Scranton: 18:48:30
- oh i see!
- Greg Scranton: 18:49:43
- NSFBK? http://www.adamproject.net/en/photos/view/33247/160344/?of=418
- antoine moreau: 18:50:13
- http://www.peupleloup.info
- antoine moreau: 18:50:17
- wolfs
- Greg Scranton: 18:51:26
- these are really fascinating images but I feel like a voyeur...
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:51:31
- I dont think I agree with what your saying here
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:51:52
- in the UK it comes down to financial issues
- antoine moreau: 18:52:45
- http://per.sonn.es
- Greg Scranton: 18:53:48
- happens all the time in the US! For instance: http://boingboing.net/2005/06/29/minor-threat-vs-nike.html
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:13
- greg nice one
- Greg Scranton: 18:55:52
- right! so if some corporation wants to use your work to sell products then they can but then EVERYONE else can use the commercial produced by the corporation for whatever creative purposes they would like. Big $$ loathes this idea!
- stephen wright: 18:56:30
- please repeat that!
- antoine moreau: 18:56:37
- copyleft is not web 2.0
- stephen wright: 18:56:43
- haha
- stephen wright: 18:57:00
- someone was asking a question -- which we couldn't hear
- Elysa Lozano: 18:57:06
- it undermines the value system used for creating a price on a work of art, so maybe its part of a vision for a different type of art economy?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:57:34
- but your right this form of licience doesnt work for art works
- Greg Scranton: 18:57:42
- sure but many "web 2.0" entities embrace copyleft or at least creative commons licensing
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:57:46
- here in the UK
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:53
- adding you le triangle!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:22
- greg re Flickr - etc
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:31
- was the big win
- le triangle: 18:59:49
- thanx
- Greg Scranton: 19:00:06
- assuming Artworks are different than Creative works
- Greg Scranton: 19:00:21
- I don't make that distinction, at least not immediately
- le triangle: 19:01:01
- The thing is that once you give your rights of that artwork to FAL you cannot claim them back
- le triangle: 19:01:08
- same as creative commons
- le triangle: 19:01:45
- also if you have the rights of an art work you can set an agreement with the person who wants to use it so they don't have to pay you a fee
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:13
- right, so be careful b4 u CC or CL!
- antoine moreau: 19:03:20
- http://appelpourlerevenudevie.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:24
-
- le triangle: 19:05:55
- The thing is that most art colleges do not teach us this...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:03
- society for gift?
- stephen wright: 19:09:13
- sad
- Elysa Lozano: 19:09:15
- gift economy?
- antoine moreau: 19:09:20
- http://www.sard-info.org/
- le triangle: 19:10:05
- guys you gotta understand that
- le triangle: 19:10:13
- t
- le triangle: 19:10:17
- that thing is in france
- antoine moreau: 19:10:22
- http://flattr.com/
- stephen wright: 19:10:23
- the founders of pirate bay -- our heroes!
- le triangle: 19:10:25
- check your local laws first
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:33
- ++
- le triangle: 19:10:39
- http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf
- Greg Scranton: 19:11:13
- http://salrandolph.com/art/26/free-money
- le triangle: 19:11:53
- once that you are under the reative commons agreement you have to stick to that
- le triangle: 19:12:04
- *creative
- le triangle: 19:12:34
- depends on the country
- le triangle: 19:13:29
- some countries protect it for 17years other for more or less time
- stephen wright: 19:13:40
- 70
- stephen wright: 19:13:45
- years that is
- Henken Bean: 19:13:48
- i gots to go,
- Henken Bean: 19:13:54
- ciao basekamp
- Greg Scranton: 19:14:03
- c ya Henken
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:04
- hi Elizabeth -- can you turn your status to Available?
- Greg Scranton: 19:14:07
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Copyright_Act_of_1976
- Greg Scranton: 19:14:09
- for US
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:11
- l8ter Henken!
- pacesyntaxgirl" title="spacesyntaxgirl">Elizabeth: 19:14:12
- yes sorry
- le triangle: 19:14:17
- yes..
- Lannes Quentin: 19:14:26
- what do you think about public freehold of laurence weiner?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:45
- ok, adding you to the chat now
- le triangle: 19:14:49
- another thing is that if your work is used in other country you are covered within the law of the country where you registered it
- Lannes Quentin: 19:15:43
- He already do that
- le triangle: 19:16:15
- sorry i had bad audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:01
- re Richard Stallman, yes
- stephen wright: 19:18:13
- Most languages have two words for what in English we call "free"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:35
- but we are talking about a question --- where ideology meets economy
- stephen wright: 19:18:50
- in French, "gratuit" versus "libre"
- antoine moreau: 19:18:58
- yes
- le triangle: 19:19:03
- it should be free and free-of-charge
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:09
- hi aharon, adding you to the audio now!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:19:29
- how does this idea differ to the notion of the multiple? Which in many respects touches on the notion of the gift and something equivalent to a free art work
- Aharon: 19:19:51
- hiyas
- pacesyntaxgirl" title="spacesyntaxgirl">Elizabeth: 19:20:13
- Architecture for Humanity designs are the same - free to all
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:16
- HI aharon
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:21:18
- this was used as a marketing tool by artists to reach different levels of the market and audiences
- antoine moreau: 19:22:36
- http://www.pascal-leroux.org/films/decollage.html
- le triangle: 19:22:38
- That something is free of charge doesn't mean that it doesn't belong to someone...
- Elysa Lozano: 19:23:44
- maybe I missed this in the beginning - how are 'author's rights' defined by FAL?
- Greg Scranton: 19:24:20
- awesome!
- le triangle: 19:24:20
- hahaha
- le triangle: 19:24:24
- FTW !!!
- Lannes Quentin: 19:25:51
- I think that the signification of antoine's free is available
- Greg Scranton: 19:25:54
- ha ha I love that "you are a paradoxical guy" I want that etched on my headstone
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:26:15
- Howdy folks.
- Aharon: 19:26:20
- good point, stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:33
- Catharine MacKinnon is like that too... the law is a territory to occupy and re-develop in the service of ethics
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:26:56
- /32
- Aharon: 19:26:57
- why does it need a law/rule?
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:26:58
- oops
- Greg Scranton: 19:27:12
- seems to me the question becomes how is it enforced. If it's a social expectation devoid of any "authority" then it is in a way very anarchistic
- le triangle: 19:27:25
- He is right, you gotta have it written down...clear example: the moon...no one claim it until some guy registered it as his...i'll bet you'll want a contract to claim something as yours....it is beyond caring or not about the law is about caring about your pieces
- le triangle: 19:27:30
- art works
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:27:50
- Hursts dot paintings were initially given away free by his gallery along with a purchased art work.
- Elysa Lozano: 19:28:28
- anarhcy isnt necessary antithetical to 'law'
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:33
- good point
- Greg Scranton: 19:28:33
- sure and galleries are free to look whereas museums are not but why?
- Greg Scranton: 19:28:56
- authority and authenticity
- Aharon: 19:29:00
- are you talking about law as rules that constitute stuff, or that define stuff?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:29:21
- it is basically about being professional, and understanding at which position your art work and ideas can be effective. The politics of culture
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:47
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/basekamp2010/
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:30:02
- can I be called back in lost audio.
- Greg Scranton: 19:30:05
- we're using http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en
- Greg Scranton: 19:30:17
- not sure if this qualifies as copyleft
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:29
- jonathan yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:43
- calling u now
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:30:58
- thanks
- le triangle: 19:31:15
- post-autonomy
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:19
- it's not that difficult tho...is it? I mean it's spelled out for potential creative foks
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:31:34
- sturtevant tested many of these issues out in the 60's
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:45
- wait why?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:31:45
- the free use of art
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:49
- I don;t get that
- stephen wright: 19:31:50
- Sorry greg
- Greg Scranton: 19:32:26
- free as in $$$ not speech then!!!!
- Aharon: 19:32:36
- does it not the case that your licence acknowledge money as an exchange mode by default - hence free by metaphor??
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:38
- for example our site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License... so that is not copyleft because it's decidedly non-commercial?
- Greg Scranton: 19:33:16
- I'm having real trouble understanding how Free=Speech is it's contingent upon it being commercially viable
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:33:28
- if your inside the art world you can steal and replicate whatever other art works that you want to so long as it maintains the system
- stephen wright: 19:33:33
- me too
- Greg Scranton: 19:33:46
- so then isn't the only truly free license "public domain"?
- stephen wright: 19:34:09
- non commercial is wasp, puritan ideology
- stephen wright: 19:34:15
- is it?
- Aharon: 19:34:29
- only if you think that monetary exchange mode is required
- stephen wright: 19:34:55
- Antoine's point is that money is neither required nor bad
- Aharon: 19:34:57
- if you do - that is very conservative of you, isn't it?
- Aharon: 19:35:43
- but money is seen as a requirement
- le triangle: 19:35:44
- exactly he's taling about owning the rights of the art work which not necessarily means that you'll be ashing in tons of $$
- le triangle: 19:35:55
- c
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:20
- yes... not a literal -- but a very powerful argument
- le triangle: 19:36:34
- yes...
- Aharon: 19:36:52
- a medium is important..
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:37:23
- All the rich artists working in london with galleries work for free so that their galleries make money from their work
- Greg Scranton: 19:37:28
- so then by licensing something as non-commercial you are assigning more importance and legitimation and thus authority to $$$? Actually I kinda see that...your turning me around on this one
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:34
- david lol
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:08
- grrg noooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
- stephen wright: 19:38:09
- non-commercial is based on the FEAR that someone might rip us off and make money off our work. and fear is a bad motivation for anything.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:38:09
- what happens is that their work is distributed via the galleries contacts
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:11
- atrowbri: 19:38:23
- Aharon: 19:38:32
- yup. i agree. fear is indeed an element.. maybe we need a philosophy of fear.. (or is that capitalism..?)
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:38:50
- there is no fear I am certain I will be ripped off
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:52
- atrowbri
- le triangle: 19:38:56
- hahaha
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:24
- Kris here has a Question...
- stephen wright: 19:39:45
- yes
- Greg Scranton: 19:40:05
- ha ha ha BK I was just kiding hence the
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:40:15
- what you are basically talking about is positioning in culture
- antoine moreau: 19:40:29
- http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:FAL?uselang=fr
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:40:30
- i.e cultural politics
- le triangle: 19:41:40
- we should address he difference of owning an art work or owning the rights of that work...i mean, when you sell something doesn't necessarily means that you sell the rights of use i.e. making profit out of it.
- le triangle: 19:41:45
- t
- le triangle: 19:42:02
- i meant *mean...
- Greg Scranton: 19:42:30
- From that essay I posted a link to: "While narrowing this field of contestation, Creative Commons simultaneously portrays itself as radical, as the avant-garde of the battle against intellectual property. Creative Commons has become a kind of default orthodoxy in non-commercial licensing, and a popular cause among artists and intellectuals who consider themselves generally on the left and against the IP regime in particular. The Creative Commons label is moralistically invoked on countless sites, blogs, speeches, essays, artworks and pieces of music as if it constituted the necessary and sufficient condition for the coming revolution of a truly “free culture.” Creative Commons is part of a larger copyfight movement, which is defined as a fight to keep intellectual property tethered to its original purpose and to prevent it from going too far."
- Greg Scranton: 19:42:31
- http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html
- antoine moreau: 19:42:44
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon
- stephen wright: 19:42:47
- who really owns ideas? asks scott. the ownership of things is based on scarcity. But ideas are unlimited, so their ownership is based on artificial scarcity.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:43:19
- Well sturtevant was chased out of New York for testing out these ideas
- Aharon: 19:43:32
- the attribution becomes scarese
- Greg Scranton: 19:43:33
- artificial scarcity = scarcity of resources = Hobbes reason for civic society/organized government
- stephen wright: 19:43:57
- exactly
- Aharon: 19:45:22
- but that depends on the monetray exchange mode. if u had a good idea and some one else used it, but that would not affect your ability to eat, fuck and dream - then wth..
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:45:50
- well that is not correct
- Aharon: 19:46:52
- if it is a law, the producer of it has domination
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:47:07
- if someone is in a better position to use that idea and have the access to the means of publicity and distribution
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:47:32
- then if you dont your ideas are worthless
- Aharon: 19:47:49
- art the way of which freedom?
- Greg Scranton: 19:47:59
- by worthless you mean priceless?
- Aharon: 19:48:01
- if it is free - y need protection??
- Aharon: 19:48:12
- y is this binary there?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:33
- Guys, we have the co-organizers of FOSSCON here -- (Free & Open Source Software Conference), taking place this weekend @ Rochester Institute of Technology
- stephen wright: 19:48:46
- art is essentially free -- or else it is not art. But art could be threatened in its freedom if it failed to protect it
- stephen wright: 19:49:08
- Freedom too needs protection because it is a fragile potential
- Greg Scranton: 19:49:18
- FOSSCON is but a few days away
- Lannes Quentin: 19:49:25
- (bye everybody, it's 02:00 AM in france, i was happy to listen this conversation)
- Greg Scranton: 19:49:39
- bye Lannes!
- Greg Scranton: 19:49:45
- or Quentin
- Lannes Quentin: 19:49:50
- quentin
- Greg Scranton: 19:49:57
- oops
- Aharon: 19:50:03
- well.. in that case.. traditional collectors/museums etc. they "protect" art "freedom.. welcome to kafka, again..
- antoine moreau: 19:50:24
- bye Quentin
- Aharon: 19:50:33
- ciao q
- Lannes Quentin: 19:50:47
- stephen wright: 19:50:55
- great
- le triangle: 19:51:08
- they don't protect art freedom they protect art use...
- stephen wright: 19:51:16
- free use
- stephen wright: 19:51:25
- not just use
- le triangle: 19:51:33
- and we go back to the use of the word "free"
- le triangle: 19:51:42
- stephen wright: 19:51:47
- first word of Free art license
- le triangle: 19:52:30
- it's a linguistics issue then hahhaa..as they said before most laguages have to different words for wat we're talking about
- Greg Scranton: 19:52:32
- also think it's awesome that you reached out to BK!
- Aharon: 19:52:41
- their reason of being becomes that of the military and police etxc - to protect. and that is where freedom ends
- Aharon: 19:52:59
- ..or is it?
- stephen wright: 19:53:12
- i think, in all fairness, that Free Art License is pretty different than the military
- Aharon: 19:53:48
- yup, stephen.. was ref the comment re collectors etc..
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:54:24
- The purpose of art institutions is to project their cultural stock, and the legitimacy that maintains its cultural capital
- stephen wright: 19:54:25
- Hey Fosscom folks. It's cool that plausible artworlds are part of your meeting!
- stephen wright: 19:54:58
- But if our collaboration is to be fruitful, we need to emphasise our different approaches, not our similarities
- le triangle: 19:55:20
- let's change free for gratuitous art license
- stephen wright: 19:55:27
- We need to mutualise our incompetencies as much as our compentencies
- Martin Peeks: 19:55:28
- it's pretty awesome to be able to link FOSS with free/libre *culture* as a whole. it's easy to mentally seperate them and i probably usually do (despite having been involved in both sides to an extent), so this whole conversation's been really interesting and the conference keynoting seems great
- Aharon: 19:55:29
- though the idea of req protection via a law - might have militaristic similarities.. this is not a finger pointing crit, but a self questioning one..
- stephen wright: 19:55:39
- (gratuitous is pretty pejorative in English)
- le triangle: 19:55:52
- damn...
- Greg Scranton: 19:55:57
- Scott do you mean a singular project that reflects a copy left attitude?
- Greg Scranton: 19:56:07
- hmmmm
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 19:56:09
- sorry my connection dropped out. I think I'm back now.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:24
- "We need to mutualise our incompetencies as much as our compentencies"
- Aharon: 19:56:49
- a history of copyleft to begin with..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:10
- Greg i mean... would anyone here like to offer something to the mix... not necessarily any united voice, i mean, even a completely differing opinion or idea
- Greg Scranton: 19:57:21
- gotcha
- stephen wright: 19:57:56
- the freedom of freedom... hmm... that's conceptual artlike
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:09
- also... we are in the midst of putting togehter the presentation.. which we intend to be a bewildering array of free and open source cultural examples
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:58:37
- But there is a problem where freedom folds over into boundlessness and the free flow of capital
- le triangle: 19:59:00
- we're born free...but then comes the lawwwww
- le triangle: 19:59:02
- hahahaha
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:59:12
- which then turns into colonisation and globalisation
- Aharon: 19:59:42
- ..as the clash observed very well..
- stephen wright: 19:59:58
- I fought that law
- stephen wright: 20:00:02
- and it won
- Aharon: 20:00:11
- inddeeedd..
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:15
- freedom from freedom of freedom
- Greg Scranton: 20:00:24
- who are the Clash?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:29
- LOLs
- Aharon: 20:00:58
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clash greg at al
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:01:08
- which is the reason art is so intrinsically linked to capitalism
- Aharon: 20:01:10
- clash primer
- stephen wright: 20:01:17
- without art, free software is not free
- Greg Scranton: 20:01:29
- sorry Aharon I was totally kidding!
- stephen wright: 20:01:31
- what is free about it is the art of doing free software
- Aharon: 20:01:49
- couldnt catch your smile there..
- Greg Scranton: 20:01:56
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You#Copyright_issues_and_...
- Aharon: 20:02:36
- what is the art of doing it? a world..?
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:02:44
- I don't think it matters if it is.
- Aharon: 20:02:46
- it could be!!
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:02:47
- do it anyway
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:02:55
- it's someones birthday somewhere!
- Greg Scranton: 20:03:13
- July 12th!
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:03:49
- i say you just pretend its your birthday anyways
- Aharon: 20:04:01
- its gonna b 13th..
- le triangle: 20:04:03
- it's my dog's bday!!
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:04:03
- (crissi, the keyboard thief)
- Elysa Lozano: 20:04:13
- thank you!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:04:23
- yes thank you
- Aharon: 20:04:26
- thank u too!
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:04:29
- ooh
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:04:39
- I should add one thing.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:04:56
- I will be organising a series of radio programs soon
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:04:59
- Scott, theres a promo code for you guys too...
- Greg Scranton: 20:05:00
- I'll be there (I hope(
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:05:03
- (basekamp)
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:05:33
- thanks guys, good night
- Martin Peeks: 20:05:36
- thanks guys, night
- antoine moreau: 20:05:39
- Bye & thanks a lot
- pacesyntaxgirl" title="spacesyntaxgirl">Elizabeth: 20:05:53
- Many thanks, bye
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:05
- Jonathan yes -- if anyone thinks they can go, we have room in a car heading there an dback from Philadelphia
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:32
- there is a fee for the conference, but like Jonathan said there' s apromo code so -- let us know if you'd like to join us!
- Greg Scranton: 20:06:40
- nite all
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:50
- g'night Greg!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:00
- i loved the b-day thing btw
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:28
- atrowbri, so you say we might be able to stay with that band.. Crucifist? in Rochester?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:09
- BTW, the FOSSCON keynote skype thing is 9:30am-10:00am EST
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:52
- Check out http://fosscon.org/speakers/
- BASEKAMP team: 20:10:18
- examples of the sessions are "Demystifying GPL Enforcement: Using the Law To Uphold Copyleft
Bradley Kuhn" - BASEKAMP team: 20:10:28
- etc
- BASEKAMP team: 20:10:35
- so... related
- BASEKAMP team: 20:10:42
- see you there!
2010-06-15
Week 22: Machine Project
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Mark Allen from Machine Project in LA.
http://www.machineproject.com/
Is Plausible Artworlds about machines? Though weird sounding, that may well be the right question to ask. There has been a lot of writing recently about machines — drawing on Marx’s unconventional Fragment on Machines and Deleuze & Guattari’s more orgiastic speculations on (desiring) machines — suggesting that machines are neither mere prostheses of our bodies (unlike tools) nor mere engines of alienation, but rather factors of communication, creating unthought-of connections and couplings. In other words, machines like artworlds, machines like us do not extend or replace artworlds and bodies but make new arrangements… well, plausible.
Machine Project is a non-profit presentation and educational space investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, food, and whatever else humans like to do. The Project occupies a storefront space in Echo Park and more broadly operates as a loose confederacy of artists producing shows at locations ranging from the Santa Monica beach to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Though the diversity and scale of a city like LA gives Machine Project a virtually inexhaustible energy source, our broader cultural moment seems ripe with the desire to build machines, work together and create new and hybrid forms of culture. This suggests there is a need to rebuild and retool, from the ground up and in a grassroots way, an infrastructure for spaces and communities that allow people to come together around a life of ideas. Machine Project has always been about encouraging people – machines like us, or even drastically unlike us – to make culture for themselves and encourage them to want to experience it together.
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$5d6503f28614ee85" title="#basekamp/$5d6503f28614ee85">Machine Project http://basekamp.com/about/events/machine-project (#basekamp/$5d6503f28614ee85)
Created on 2010-06-01 20:28:55.
- michael g bauer: 19:23:16
- audi dropped out again for me
- BASEKAMP team: 19:23:55
- in fact our skype quit on us again!
- mark allen: 19:24:01
- by michael
- mark allen: 19:24:03
- bye
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:06
- ther's some talk here abou tmaybe the weather is the culprit
- mark allen: 19:24:08
- sorry we couldnt chat more
- Elysa Lozano: 19:24:27
- bye
- mary ruth walsh: 19:24:38
- all the best, late one here, good night
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:45
- goodnight mary ruth
- stephen wright: 19:24:53
- are we ending?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:07
- we don;t need to end yet - for our part anyway
- mark allen: 19:25:28
- i can keep going
- mark allen: 19:25:44
- its difficult to talk about any ideas with this constant break down tho
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:44
- we'l just call u guys back - whoever wants to will pick up
- michael g bauer: 19:26:00
- hey!
- amara: 19:26:38
- yes
- mark allen: 19:27:01
- micahel where are you these days?
- michael g bauer: 19:27:37
- i'm in philly
- michael g bauer: 19:27:39
- funny enough
- stephen wright: 19:28:58
- Mark do you ever schedule / curate / offer crash courses in things like art theory?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:07
- hi5 mark!
- mary ruth walsh: 19:29:32
- Scot, thanks for including me, great to keep touching base. Hope all well with you and yours? Have a residencty in IMMA Dublin for 6 months in 2011, so if your in Dublin then let me know. All the best.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:43
- you too mary ruth!
- stephen wright: 19:30:42
- is there audio?
- mark allen: 19:31:17
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/sets/72157605433605084/
- mark allen: 19:31:31
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/2658579027/in/set-7215760543...
- stephen wright: 19:32:03
- I'm not quite sure what' s happening -- if anything is.
- mark allen: 19:32:05
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/3261445316/in/set-7215760543...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:11
- oh yeah, we added an image of that to our webpage
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:19
- ++
- stephen wright: 19:32:21
- OK good pictures
- mark allen: 19:32:29
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/3384408392/in/set-7215760543...
- mark allen: 19:32:44
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/3422719670/in/set-7215760543...
- mark allen: 19:33:09
- http://machineproject.com/shop/lacmabook/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:43
- if everyone tries downloadign that book now skype wil barf on us again
- michael g bauer: 19:33:45
- fun!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:23
- amara: 19:34:25
- hi mark, a question: you mentioned that one of your goals is to help people build tools for production; i am interested in learning more about how you practically do this; how are your strategies different or similar to other education models?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:26
- gotcha
- stephen wright: 19:37:45
- is there audio? I sure don't have any
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:16
- patricia we'll call you to add u to the conference call
- stephen wright: 19:38:24
- add me too please
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:43
- patricia can you turn your status to "available"?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:38
- worked
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:45
- anyone else get dropp'd?
- Patricia Watts: 19:39:49
- TY
- stephen wright: 19:40:22
- eating machines
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:31
- BASEKAMP team: 19:41:47
- "if you go hunting you want to eat the entire enimal... i kind of feel that way about our space"
- mark allen: 19:42:09
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqXToxbK_RU
- mark allen: 19:42:15
- donation machine
- mark allen: 19:42:27
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auL3zESxRSM
- mark allen: 19:42:29
- bookstore
- mark allen: 19:43:51
- http://machineproject.com/shop/lacmabook/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:13
- mmm books....
- stephen wright: 19:44:26
- other machines
- michael g bauer: 19:45:13
- maybe we can hear just a bit about the future of machine -- five years ten years down the road
- mark allen: 19:45:16
- more videos of machine
- mark allen: 19:45:17
- http://www.vimeo.com/machineproject/videos
- mark allen: 19:45:24
- hey michael
- mark allen: 19:45:27
- no idea
- mark allen: 19:45:33
- letting it happen organically
- michael g bauer: 19:45:44
- totally
- stephen wright: 19:45:50
- I think your course line up is great and am fascinated by the idea of conceptual folk knowledge practice!
- Patricia Watts: 19:45:54
- is this discussion recorded?
- mark allen: 19:46:21
- more videos here
- mark allen: 19:46:22
- http://www.youtube.com/my_videos
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:55
- cool yeah
- mark allen: 19:47:01
- unstream live feed and archived events
- mark allen: 19:47:02
- http://www.ustream.tv/channel/machineprojectnow
- Patricia Watts: 19:47:04
- Just met with Dale Dougherty this afternoon and had a discussion about making and art. He really struggles with the combination of the two. How do you Mark reconcile this?
- mark allen: 19:47:17
- dale is a really lovely guy
- stephen wright: 19:47:17
- They save automatically
- mark allen: 19:47:31
- i think they are related activities
- mark allen: 19:47:36
- but have different goals
- Patricia Watts: 19:47:46
- It is hard for him to see "non art" fitting in a gallery setting.
- mark allen: 19:47:54
- well
- stephen wright: 19:47:57
- you can save them AS something, but otherwise they just archive
- stephen wright: 19:48:00
- OK I will
- mark allen: 19:48:02
- im not sure what non art is
- Patricia Watts: 19:48:08
- It's not 8pm yet!!!!
- mark allen: 19:48:16
- i see art as the space in our culture for experimenting with ideas
- stephen wright: 19:48:43
- sure
- Patricia Watts: 19:48:49
- OK
- michael g bauer: 19:48:50
- sounds good. thanks
- amara: 19:48:54
- yes
- stephen wright: 19:49:01
- I see 15 people
- stephen wright: 19:49:28
- Thanks Mark!
- mark allen: 19:49:33
- ok
- mark allen: 19:49:34
- still here
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:43
- yes there are 15 people on text - and were 7 on audio - so text is probably a good way to go for now!
- Patricia Watts: 19:49:43
- Mark, do you think it takes away from the maker to have their work looked at through the lens of art?
- mark allen: 19:49:55
- patricia
- mark allen: 19:49:59
- not really
- mark allen: 19:50:07
- i think we can think of art
- mark allen: 19:50:12
- not in terms of materials or practices
- mark allen: 19:50:15
- but as a lens
- Patricia Watts: 19:50:18
- I'm trying to understand his hestiation, it comes up every time we talk
- mark allen: 19:50:19
- to look at what humans do
- mark allen: 19:50:36
- so
- mark allen: 19:50:40
- we can look at making
- mark allen: 19:50:48
- from an economic perspective
- Patricia Watts: 19:50:51
- Yes!
- mark allen: 19:50:56
- or as a form of social philosophy
- mark allen: 19:50:57
- etc
- Patricia Watts: 19:50:59
- We talked about that
- Patricia Watts: 19:51:17
- making as a response to economic survival
- Patricia Watts: 19:52:04
- however, for the MASSES, how does exhibiting this work in a gallery or museum context give it more or less value?
- mark allen: 19:52:17
- huh
- mark allen: 19:52:26
- well by definition
- mark allen: 19:52:34
- putting something in a museum context
- mark allen: 19:52:44
- gives the work a value in that context?
- Patricia Watts: 19:52:54
- the art audience is small, the making audience, hopefully bigger than the art world
- mark allen: 19:52:56
- i guess it depends on how the masses feel about museums
- michael g bauer: 19:53:15
- i was interested in what you said about bringing intimacy into institutional settings
- mark allen: 19:53:16
- when i lived in houston
- mark allen: 19:53:21
- the fine arts museum
- mark allen: 19:53:28
- did a show of props from star wars
- mark allen: 19:53:40
- im not sure that made the public think any less of star wars
- Patricia Watts: 19:54:44
- hmmmm
- Patricia Watts: 19:54:57
- thinking
- mark allen: 19:55:38
- patricia, i dont think the making audience is bigger that the art world
- stephen wright: 19:55:46
- Well, I knew this house painter in Houston whose painting outfit was also a conceptual art project . But he rarely told his customers that because he knew that they would think they were paying more for the job -- which was not the case. His point was that art was a thing often removed from daily life for many people. Though his point was to counter that.
- Patricia Watts: 19:55:50
- How about this perspective, do you think machine project would be of more value to society if it were an official technical school with thousands of students?
- mark allen: 19:55:54
- hey stephen
- mark allen: 19:55:58
- bernard brunon
- mark allen: 19:56:01
- good friend of mine
- stephen wright: 19:56:03
- great artist
- stephen wright: 19:56:06
- mine too
- mark allen: 19:56:13
- small world
- mark allen: 19:56:17
- he lives in la now
- mark allen: 19:56:19
- patricia
- stephen wright: 19:56:21
- so I hear
- mark allen: 19:56:31
- not sure that translates
- mark allen: 19:56:52
- machine attempts to create a space for an alternative community
- mark allen: 19:56:59
- which is diverse in interests
- mark allen: 19:57:02
- so that includes making stuff
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:06
- sounds like it!
- mark allen: 19:57:07
- but also reading poetry
- mark allen: 19:57:10
- making pickles
- mark allen: 19:57:14
- going to museum
- mark allen: 19:57:15
- s
- mark allen: 19:57:20
- learning about science
- mark allen: 19:57:25
- at the core
- Patricia Watts: 19:57:34
- community
- Patricia Watts: 19:57:45
- small machine
- mark allen: 19:57:51
- what is the nature of this experience we are going through as people
- mark allen: 19:58:02
- to be addressed in as many ways as possible
- mark allen: 19:58:15
- poetry > science > food > technology
- mark allen: 19:58:24
- all about what is reality
- mark allen: 19:58:33
- and how do we experience it with each other
- mark allen: 19:58:41
- not to get too big picture!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:04
- so we have a dilemma - wan to help solve it?
- mark allen: 19:59:22
- sure
- mark allen: 19:59:32
- although im more into questions than answers
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:33
- there's this project called F.E.A.S.T. (inspired by inCUBATE's Sunday Soup)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:54
- Funding Emerging Arts with Sustainable Tactics
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:56
- anwyays
- mark allen: 19:59:57
- yeah awesome project
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:32
- they are workign with some of us here in philly to start a Philly version
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:49
- theere's a decision to change the name
- mark allen: 20:00:49
- cool
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:00
- what should it change to?
- michael g bauer: 20:01:08
- eat
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:27
- but it has to be COMPLETELY ORIGINAL
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:30
- (kidding)
- mark allen: 20:01:36
- woah
- mark allen: 20:01:39
- no thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:44
- lol
- mark allen: 20:01:45
- naming is the hardest thing
- mark allen: 20:01:49
- in the world!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:00
- how about Rotisserie
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:18
- this can be our mascott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bursa8.JPG
- mark allen: 20:03:28
- great
- mark allen: 20:03:31
- do that
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:49
- how about "head on a pike"
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:52
- http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/fun/devivals/X-Day98/POST-X-DAY/X-DayPh...
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:22
- or Scraps
- michael g bauer: 20:04:37
- grub
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:41
- short for Philly's famous "Scrapple" meat inspired product: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:09
- REcepie Box
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:27
- Scrapple (Pennsylvania Dutch) is traditionally a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:02
- L.O.A.F.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:23
- S.L.I.C.E.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:43
- P.I.E.C.E.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:57
- ok guys, we've totally derailed your conversation
- mark allen: 20:07:06
- yup!
- amara: 20:07:08
- well I like feast, why the name change....anyway, mark you have a background as an artist, do you consider what you are doing now a continuation of your art practice, or something different?
- mark allen: 20:07:22
- same thing, different material
- stephen wright: 20:07:38
- anyway, thanks mark, it's late in these parts.
- stephen wright: 20:07:40
- good night
- mark allen: 20:07:41
- as a studio artist i was interested in making representations of my interior subjectivity
- mark allen: 20:07:45
- now im more info
- mark allen: 20:07:54
- creating an exterior life
- mark allen: 20:08:00
- good night stephen
- Patricia Watts: 20:08:26
- Gotta run. I'm curating a MAKE:CRAFT show at Otis College of Art and Design, Ben Maltz Gallery, opens Oct. 4th. Garnet Hertz, Frau Fiber, David Prince, Kim Abeles, Seth Kinmont, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Mark Newport, Eddo Stern, The Crank Ensemble, and more!!!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:36
- night stephen!
- mark allen: 20:08:39
- cool have fund
- mark allen: 20:08:40
- fun
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:40
- and P
- michael g bauer: 20:10:49
- thank you everyone. i enjoyed the conversation
- mark allen: 20:11:02
- by michael
- michael g bauer: 20:11:08
- bye
- BASEKAMP team: 20:11:25
- bi!
- mark allen: 20:12:40
- ok anyone else?
- mark allen: 20:12:43
- got anything ?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:12:51
- bring it!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:13:05
- srsly thx for joining us last minute for a chat
- mark allen: 20:13:26
- sure
- mark allen: 20:13:31
- that was fun
- amara: 20:14:09
- thanks mark + basekamp!
- mark allen: 20:14:15
- bye all
- BASEKAMP team: 20:14:18
- yeah, you're totally welcome to coem back - we do this each week ---
- BASEKAMP team: 20:14:29
- also, we'll have to check ya in LA when we get there again
2010-06-01
Week 20: Beyond Participation: Toward Massively Collaborative Worlds of Art
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Carl Skelton of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center, co-initiator (with Martin Koplin, University of Applied Sciences, Bremen) of Beyond Participation: Toward Massively Collaborative Worlds of Art. The project focuses on the case study of the digital platform Betaville.
While in recent weeks, we have tended to celebrate usership and participation, these terms may be fraught with a side-effect that Betaville is designed to prevent: the implicit acceptance of a separation between active designers, determinant clients, and taking-it-or-leaving-it-end-users.
The extensibility of concepts and practices of “participatory culture” to fully peer-to-peer collaboration with citizens beyond the art world is a practical matter and a challenge to artists. The session chairs work together on Betaville, a massively multiplayer online environment for previsualization, development, and public participation in new proposals for public art, urban design and development – stretching the current “city limits” of participation by artists in public culture. With Betaville, the project seeks to enquire into “massive participation”, that is, an extreme form of relational aesthetics praxis, within which the role of the artwork is as a framework, rather than a procedure or product, and subject to evolution/adaptation at the behest of anyone with the gumption to do their own work with/on it.
Transcription
Week 20: Beyond Participation: Toward Massively Collaborative Worlds of Art
[Scott]: Hello there for those of you who are here already! It’s great to have you!
[Steven]: Hey Scott, hello! Good to hear your voice after all this time! It’s really great of you to be so quickly reactant and to be with us tonight. It’s going to be very interesting to talk to you.
[Carl]: And to year yours! I’m glad it will be interesting. I’m more than happy, if I get tipsy, to over share or go on to long.
[Scott] Or give you enough rope to hang yourself with (laughing).
[Carl]: (inaudible 00:01:53)
[Scott]: We are looking at this page, the page that we put up to give a small introduction to everyone.
[Steven]: The one about the Yuengling Lager.
[Scott]: Yeah, we’re checking out the lager. For everybody who doesn’t know, maybe it would be worth introducing Carl, Steven?
[Steven]: Um, I think I’m just going to let Carl jump right in here. But I have to say that Carl is, I don’t know if it’s relevant information or not, Carl runs a very interesting department. Department which I thought was called the Integrated Digital Media Department which is an experimental media center in Brooklyn.
(Inaudible/Silence 00:02:42 - 00:05:04)
[Scott]: I sort of, I followed some of it. I just don’t know the back story on some of it.
[Carl]: Anyway, (inaudible 00:05:18 – audio feed lost)
(Inaudible/Silence 00:05:19 – 0:08:12.2)
[Scott]: Carl, what is that? Sorry, the spirit of what?
[Carl]: (inaudible 0:08:00).
[Scott]: Oh, okay.
[Carl]: So, you know, it’s like (audio feed lost 0:08:22.8)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:08:22.8 -0:14:29.0)
[Scott]: Yeah, yeah. I definitely have a couple questions but I think other people have a few questions too. Maybe we’ll just write them down, you know, just quick notes and we’ll…
[Steven]: I’ve just been posting a few notes as I’ve been following along Carl (Audio feel lost 0:14:50.09
(Inaudible/Silence 0:14:50.09 0 – 0:15:21.4)
[Scott]: Um, do have it just locally or is it online somewhere?
[Carl]: Um, I think I have it locally, I’m not sure.
[Scott]: Yeah, if it’s not a humungous file, what will happen is if you drag it into your Skype window it will send it to everyone in here which probably will be good unless their gigantic..
[Carl]: Okay, let me just…
[Scott]: You know if it’s over a megabyte or two, it might take a little while, otherwise its fine to drop it in.
[Carl]: I don’t know it’s something crazy like that. Hold on a second.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Carl]: So what (Audio feed lost 0:16:00.3.
(Inaudible/Silence 0:16:00:03 – 0:16:17.5)
[Scott]: Oh no. What we have is just 300 and something kb.
[Carl]: Can you see it?
[Scott]: It’s downloading now. Skype isn’t the greatest file transfer thing, but it’ll probably be here in a minute or so.
[Carl]: Okay, so we’ll see how that goes.
[Scott]: Cool.
(Inaudible/Silence 0:16:42.4 -0:19:02.0)
[Scott]: Carl, do mind if we post this image up on the webpage for the people who can’t get them?
[Carl]: That’s fine.
[Scott]: Okay. (Inaudible 0:19:15.8) for real (laughing).
(Inaudible/Silence 0:19:20.2 -0:29:56.2)
[Scott] Q: Carl, do you often think fifty years in advance?
[Carl] A: Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. Brooklyn (audio feed lost 0:30:04.3)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:30:04.3 – 0:30:40.09)
[Scott]: (Laughing) right, definitely
[Carl]: We should start an (Audio feed lost 0:30:44.2)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:30:44.2 -0:32:30.8)
[Scott]: I’m not sure.
[Carl]: Hugh Ferris (Audio feed lost 0:32:36.3)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:32:36.3 -0:35:24.7)
[Scott] Q: So Carl, how can, this is my lack of understanding about Betaville and this project. But how can tools like this are used to encourage people to be involved? And large scale public art projects used to discourage that definition of sustainability or the same kinds of ideas or the same kinds of approaches?
[Carl]: Because the (Audio feed lost 0:35:59.2)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:35:59.2 -0:45:48.6)
[Scott]: Carl, we have a…
(Male Audience Member): I just want to say that (Audio feed lost 0:45:51.9)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:45:51.9 -0:53:32.4)
[Scott]: And this is where you can leverage things like open source technology.
[Carl]: Okay, so (Lost audio feed 0:53:45.8)
(Inaudible/Silence 0:53:45.8 -1:02:33.8)
[Scott]: We’re doing great. I think we have like a zillion questions sort of queued up if we can go back and try to address them. I not sure exactly where to start except that someone here has a question so maybe we should start with that and we can just kind of start going backwards.
[Carl]: Sure.
[Chris]: Yeah, I’m thinking, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Tom (inaudible 1:02:59.5) and things like that. I’m wondering, like, how long would anybody stay in Sims City live? Would it only be like a month and then everything would change and die or something? Like they are with the others?
[Carl]: Well, I mean, let me say that first, without a doubt something like that is hard. There are enough people that have to (inaudible 1:03:31.2) that they don’t have to make each other crazy about it. Like 4 or 500 obsessed persons per generations. You might see that (inaudible1:03:45.4) which is very active. But you might want to use it to develop a particular contact. Uh, and part (inaudible 1:03:59.4) So they may want to do that and repeat that over the course of the year or (inaudible 1:04:13.6) might be interested to live within a particular district and they might start playing with thing instead of bridge or batch ball or something like that (inaudible 1:04:33.0) recreational form, in that sense. And so, what we’re figuring, really, is that there will be (inaudible 1:04:49.0 – 1:06:13.8).
[Chris]: Oh, okay.
[Carl]: (inaudible then lost audio feed 1:06:21.8)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:06:21.8 -1:06:37.8)
[Chris]: But would they grow old and die and everything?
[Carl]: Oh (inaudible 1:06:39.0)
[Chris]: I mean would they, do they stay a set age or do they go through a whole life process?
[Carl]: Um, well, okay. This (inaudible 1:06:58.0). What if we would make a prototype that would actually…? (Inaudible 1:07:04.1)
(Inaudible 1:07:04.1 – 1:10:31.8)
[Chris]: Oh. Okay.
[Carl]: And I know a lot of people would do that kind of thing (inaudible 1:10:38.1)
[Scott]: I was actually backing up in reverse through the last hour of chat and I think the first question that really didn’t get addressed, or directly, maybe it didn’t. Erin was asking if this was a consensus process and that’s always something I’m curious about in any group process because it defines a lot of things, or at least it points to other interesting questions. I don’t know if you’ve read this one yet, but basically how are decisions made through this? Do people do this as a group and then kind of get a lot out of that like a consensus or is it sort of like every person for themselves. You know, encouraging more activity through autonomy.
[Carl]: Um, (Audio feed lost 1:11:49.2).
[Scott]: Okay, is a process of how these things get built, is that something that is not being sort of an issue right now is that being built into the idea then or is that something that is sort of yet to be determined?
[Carl]: (Audio feed lost 1:12:24.5)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:12:24.5 -1:18:13.5)
[Steven]…public (Lost audio feed 1:18:14.4)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:18:14.4 -1:25:41.8)
[Scott]: (Laughing) well a lot of things just came out maybe in the last two minutes. I don’t think I’m that slow but I sort of want to address them but there are people who asked things earlier. So, I am scanning and there have been a lot of text discussion that we haven’t really addressed yet.
[Steven]: I think what’s interesting, Carl, is that (Audio feed lost 1:26:09.6).
(Inaudible/Silence 1:26:09.6 -1:26:20.5)
(Laughter)
[Steven]: I think whets intriguing about you’re proposal, I mean, it’s obviously (Audio feed lost 1:26:40.8)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:26:40.8 -1:27:48.6)
[Scott]: Steven, are you asking if it’s mainly discursive or if it’s sort of byproducts or mainly a conversation or if it has some practical benefit as an application?
[Steven]: Well, I kind of get the sense (Audio feed lost 1:28:03.0)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:28.03.0 -1:32:00.4)
[Scott]: Definitely a lot of tee shirts can be made from this conversation (laughing). Yeah, maybe we can use the application to design them.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: That was a question I had earlier, actually a couple of technical ones. I almost hate to ask them now because the conversation that comes out of it seems, you know, kind of what you said Steven. At least half of it, right? At least part of what can come out of this is that there is a contemplative value of this as an art project. We’re supposed to have a conversation internally or with other people and something interesting come out of that, maybe unpredictable. Also, like you both said, there is something specific that this is going to do to and I guess that’s where the practical stuff comes in. So, I was curious about scale. And Chris was asking earlier about time and that side of things. I think you kind of address it but I’m not sure. Like, you know, I mean we haven’t really used this but are this kind of like a… There was an emphasis on a grand scale and I was just kind of curious. Public art projects are, and the way this was described as sort of extending some ideas that were popularized by reflationary aesthetics. I think you’re talking about artist social practice and I was curious.
[Carl]: Yeah, you don’t want to (inaudible 1:33:42.9)
[Scott]: No, no, no. Not at all. I guess I was trying to sort of frame it without getting sort of trapped inside a whirlpool of conversation that is uninteresting. There’s a focus on art as a social practice on some level. It sounds like it. But also a focus on public art and on structures and the built environment. And I was curious form an application stand point, what kind of things this could… A lot of art as social practice is people and like small things. I was curious if that could be a part.
[Carl]: Gosh I hope so.
[Scott]: Okay (laughing).
[Carl]: The thing that I can think of that would be really cool to happen either specifically or just in terms of situation types. But, do you know what I mean?
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Carl]: But it really doesn’t detail a whole lot (inaudible 1:34:49.1 – 1:34:59.1)
[Scott]: Do you need beta testers?
[Carl]: YES! Yes! Omigod!
[Scott]: (Laughing) okay.
[Carl]: And (Audio feed lost 1:35:07.2)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:35:07.2 -1:38:04.6)
[Scott]: Well, definitely. All the time. And I wouldn’t want to either open an invitation that’s not there or open anyone in this conversation to take the responsibility as a beta tester, but I know that a lot of people here are involved in these kinds of projects generally. Some of us are involved in virtual worlds, one kind or another. Some of us are also developers and others are involved in these projects without any kind of virtualization at all. It just seemed like the application itself, I mean every system or micro system has its own… Something comes out of it in response to the way that it’s built. Or at least you sort of see the limits and potentials, partly through the way that it’s set up. And I was just curious to get in and sort of dork around with it I guess.
[Carl]: Do it.
[Scott]: (Laughing) Okay! How do we do that?
[Carl]: Absolutely (inaudible 1:39:14.7).
[Scott]: Okay. Should everybody who is interested send you an email or should we try to follow up on the discussion list we have? What do you think is a good way to do it?
[Carl]: Okay, we can…
[Scott]: Well, you can sort of think about it later. I know that you didn’t have a lot of lead time to prepare for follow up (laughing). I think it was something like a few hours maybe.
[Carl]: Wait a minute! Hold on a second. Hold on please! There are at least two Canadians on this call and we’re like nice and smart. Can I ask some questions?
[Scott]: Oh definitely. Yes, please do. We should, I think everybody involved to should feel not necessarily as a presenter, although it’s great to have gotten all the information about this but I think a conversation is definitely called for.
[Carl]: Okay, Scott, what do you do?
[Scott]: I’m a collaborative artist and organizer and wear other hats, you know? I’m a person. I’m part of this group called BaseKamp in Philly, or, based in Philly. We also run a space here and work with people in different places, like Steven and other people on this call, a few of them. Like Adam who lives in Tennessee and Salem who lives in Chicago and Meg who is here and lives in Philly, and other people who are present and elsewhere. And what our group focuses on is group activity and mainly collaborative in the creative culture sphere. For lack of a better term. Yeah, we have an organization that’s sort of set up for that and have been doing it for twelve years and we do different kinds of projects, that we can sort of get into later. But that’s sort of the main thrust that I do and usually tell people about.
[Carl]: I’m going to have to Google the whole place.
[Scott]: Yeah (laughing) yeah, totally. We could definitely as a follow up, we could use all sorts of methods, but a quick and easy way would be to use this mailing list that we have. We could also use the comments on your webpage to do it. Unless somebody has a better suggestion on where to do that. But anyone interested should totally do it.
[Carl]: Absolutely. Send me in email (inaudible 1:42:25.4)
[Scott]: Okay, yeah. Could you, yeah. I could actually post that. Okay. And in fact, I want to encourage you to ask the other things that you wanted to because I know we started a few minutes late, but we often end exactly at 8:00 just to be nice to the people who are not in our time zone and who would be interested enough to stay up until ass o’clock in the morning. We want to encourage them to come back for the whole year. But, since you started late, maybe I should just throw that out there that anyone who really needs to go should definitely feel comfortable just sort of heading because it’s just chimed 8:00. But if you want to stay around for a few minutes we could time box it to like five minutes or something. Then you could still get into your questions because I’m still curious.
[Carl]: Technically we do mostly undigital stuff, so to speak. Digitally supported. Anybody coding on here?
[Scott]: Yeah, a number of us at BaseKamp code, but historically most of what we’ve done is use digital tools. We’ve sort of mashed them up, not even as a focus. Just for practical benefit because most of the people we work with are in desperate locations sometimes. But largely what we’ve done has been stuff like in real space with real people, um, meet space. But now, weirdly, after all this time and being involved in open source culture, a number of us are involved in open source software experimentation and work as day jobs too.
[Carl]: Oh, cool. Do you want to hear a happy Google story?
[Scott]: Okay.
[Carl]: Okay, so (Audio feed lost 1:44:32.0)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:44:32.0 -1:48:00.7)
[Scott]: Yeah, it may be worth mentioning, Carl, that we’ve basically chosen that, I hate to use the work “platform” but as a platform of choice for a lot of the work that we do culturally and otherwise. I don’t want to go on about this because we actually are about to get into, probably we should end this. But I just wanted to mention that we have been doing this open triple studio where we both have a kind of open learning exchange, kind of along these lines. People also help to make sites for commercial stuff to help fund our space and what we do as kind of an exchange for learning this stuff with us. And we also do pro-bono projects. So, it’s something that may be good to talk about together.
[Carl]: (inaudible 1:49:12.9)
(Inaudible/Silence 1:49:12.9 -1:53:16.5)
[Scott]: Yeah, absolutely. I won’t assume that you’re not privy to it because maybe you’re really active on there, but there is a lot of effort in the druple community or using druple as an educational platform. But increasingly lately, and maybe you’re really in agreement with that. But if you’re not, we’d be really psyched to connect with you on that point.
[Carl]: It’s huge. It’s HUGE! I mean (inaudible 1:53:36.8)
[Scott]: I think maybe we can end on this point only because I can see the capacity for us to just go like totally nuts now.
[Carl]: Yeah, I think we could talk till 6:00 am.
[Scott]: (Laughing) but we should definitely all stay up till 6:00 am and drink heavily and keep talking, just not on this Skype chat. But, it’s been really great.
(Inaudible background comment 1:55:23.4)
[Steven]: Here, it’s about 2:15 am so I’m going to have to…
[Scott]: Yeah, I’m going to take my rollers and moderator and say we should end this particular one. Yeaahhhhhhh.
[Steven]: And Carl, you’re invited to join us every Thursday night at the same hour and I think we have a definite infinities and people were having interest. So I think it would be really great to, if you have time, to drop by any of our potlucks.
[Carl]: Alright, I will.
[Steven]: We’ll definitely be in touch in the future about Betaville (inaudible 1:56:15.8).
[Carl]: And one thing on that point and it comes from (inaudible 1:56:28.1) is that (inaudible 1:56:29.7) through the TAA next February and If you guys want to be in on that then my all means, let us know (inaudible 1:56:50.1).
[Steven]: That’d be cool.
[Scott]: Yeah, we should definitely chat. Thanks so much Carl.
[Carl]: My pleasure.
[Scott]: We won’t hesitate to follow up.
[Carl]: Cool, I’ll be ready.
[Scott]: Bye everybody, thank you all for coming
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:57:19.7
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Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$aa0b248a22c6b97d" title="#basekamp/$aa0b248a22c6b97d">Beyond Participation: Toward Massively Collaborative Worlds of Art http://bit.ly/cFtVyb (#basekamp/$aa0b248a22c6b97d)
Created on 2010-05-18 20:30:59.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:28
- hi everyone -- how are you all doing tonight?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:48
- we're waiting on a few people -- namely, tonight's guest ]
- stephen wright: 18:00:23
- Hello all
- Jason Wilson: 18:00:28
- hi hi
- BASEKAMP team: 18:00:38
- hi Stephen
- Cecilia Guida: 18:00:38
- hi
- bojana romic: 18:00:40
- hello!
- Greg Scranton: 18:00:59
- hello all
- Greg Scranton: 18:02:35
- Stephen thanks so much for your poignant and insightful email to Nick!
- stephen wright: 18:03:21
- Hi Greg -- not at all, thanks to Nick for his interest. Hope to pursue that conversation
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:01
- btw have you all had a chance to take a quick look at the webpage describing tonight's chat?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:09
- http://bit.ly/cFtVyb
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:44
- here at the Basekamp space, things are slightly slow... weather is rainy again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:54
- but, there's beer on the table! and some food...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:32
-
- Carl Skelton: 18:06:44
- Hi everybody! Carl here in NYC
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:45
- some of you may have noticed we sent out the announcement a few hours before our get-together tonight
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:57
- hi Carl !
- stephen wright: 18:06:59
- Hello Carl!
- bojana romic: 18:07:05
- hi!
- stephen wright: 18:07:14
- Yes, Carl kind of saved the night!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:19
- indeed
- Carl Skelton: 18:07:29
- My apologies for being a bit late, I've had an advneture
- stephen wright: 18:07:30
- THough he had a longer standing invitation
- stephen wright: 18:07:47
- Tell us carl, what happened to you on the way to P@W?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:51
- no worries Carl
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:56
- chuckles
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:22
- just to help make this smoother -- would everyone mind holding tight for a minute or two while we call Carl to test audio?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:32
- are you set up for that Carl?
- Carl Skelton: 18:08:40
- Had to load Windows on top of 389 GB to run an experimental chat client to field test in Haiti... and get across town in a downpour
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:00
- you made it though!
- Carl Skelton: 18:09:32
- Absolutely.
- stephen wright: 18:09:41
- Are you then going to call us, Basekamp?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:04
- yes
- Greg Scranton: 18:12:23
- slaats!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:19
- ok, so who's ready for a call?
- atrowbri: 18:13:30
- <----
- bojana romic: 18:13:45
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:48
- and... are any of you all eating or drinking where you are?
- Carl Skelton: 18:13:55
- should we?
- atrowbri: 18:14:01
- rum+coke
- Carl Skelton: 18:14:07
- brb
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:08
- w00t
- stephen wright: 18:14:08
- Yeah, here it's beer at midnight
- Greg Scranton: 18:14:33
- ready. I have green tea from the fine dining establisment "WaWa"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:37
- this is where we're at: http://87coop.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/yuengling-lager-002.jpg
- Matthew Slaats: 18:14:53
- It's never too early for a gin and tonic.
- Greg Scranton: 18:15:37
- Stephen, yes I will surely follow up with Nick and should anything come of it feed it back onto you. Thx again.
- Carl Skelton: 18:15:41
- Okay I'm back with a little bit of St. Chinian (did I spell that right?)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:57
- very nice!
- stephen wright: 18:16:04
- Spelling's good, how's the taste?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:16
- ok, we'll just call everyone - even the few of you who can't or don't want to pick up can just not pick up
- Carl Skelton: 18:16:18
- I'm enjoying it!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:39
-
- Greg Scranton: 18:16:45
- do it BK!
- Greg Scranton: 18:17:58
- whoa!!!!!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:05
- http://bit.ly/cFtVyb
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:47
- howdy megfrisch
- Meg Frisch: 18:19:54
- waves
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:27
- also eating http://www.nexternal.com/vegane/images/TingsNewImageXL.jpg
- atrowbri: 18:22:14
- did they get your permission to use your likeness on that Scott??
- Meg Frisch: 18:22:31
- !
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:50
- atrowbri -- LLLOOOOLLLLL
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:01
- we're also eating http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll14/lollerkates/511483941_1740fca525...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:26
- and listening to http://jmonkeyengine.com/blog/betaville/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:48
- L –O-O– KING at i mean
- Meg Frisch: 18:23:50
- thanks for the contextual visuals!
- Meg Frisch: 18:24:10
- helps ...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:11
- what r u eating mf?
- Aharon: 18:24:24
- oh.. got lost the audio..
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:36
- ok rea-adding you aha
- Aharon: 18:24:43
- ta
- stephen wright: 18:25:31
- RFC?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:00
- for those only on text, FRC = request for comment
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:17
- Carl is also talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
- bojana romic: 18:26:31
- audio lost
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:41
- bojana asking re-adding you
- stephen wright: 18:28:26
- everybody knows that open software really works, whereas public participation in urban space projects doesn't. So we need to vulgarize the capacity of artists to try out their ideas in open source logistics and platforms.
- Aharon: 18:29:58
- is this an exercise in concensus making?
- stephen wright: 18:31:04
- low overhead of producing digital prototypes, plus ready availability of models -- makes this online game a way of versioning ideas for urban space
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:38
- * by vulgarize do you only mean to make readily available, to popularize, or to make a lot more coarse (etc)?
- stephen wright: 18:31:43
- taking on relational esthetics in a project where 98% of people have no idea it is even art
- Aharon: 18:32:02
- kinda sense.. do u want to make sense..?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:13
- bak in greg?
- bojana romic: 18:32:25
- (I still miss audio, sorry...)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:30
- another Q -- * what is the minimum size of the proposals - we can see the max size can be really large - but are public art / size concerns built intp the software?
- stephen wright: 18:32:53
- just post it
- Greg Scranton: 18:33:15
- yes ty bk
- Carl Skelton: 18:33:20
- posted file v14.11.png to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="379676" index="0">v14.11.png</file></files>
- Aharon: 18:33:40
- i wonder how do u think it mi8 work if one/single person "participated in that mass project..
- Aharon: 18:33:49
- oh
- Aharon: 18:34:01
- well.. u gotta b friends to c the dld
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:32
- Q: also - earlier you mentioned open source economics - i think - just curious about if and where finances come into play here
- stephen wright: 18:36:12
- Sim City for real!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:14
- we're looking at the image now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:37
- fur reals
- Aharon: 18:37:26
- is the img on the site?
- stephen wright: 18:38:50
- Scott, where did you put the image online?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:03
- almost up...
- stephen wright: 18:39:08
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:41
- uploading to main page
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:45
- ok - it's there: http://basekamp.com/about/events/beyond-participation-toward-massively-c...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:51
- click on the 2nd image from the top everyone
- stephen wright: 18:41:07
- average computer is now able to deal with sophisticated 3d imagery, and can use free software that'll make a game that looks as good and acts as good as high priced game software
- Jason Wilson: 18:41:36
- where does the geodata come from? the city?
- Aharon: 18:42:42
- paying?? not always..
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:29
- 26:45 that is incredibly quotable Carl
- Aharon: 18:44:38
- ..but we have more energy for game than so called reality.. thats a given..
- stephen wright: 18:44:42
- big time time / energy available -- if one considers the amount already invested in Sim City etc as opposed to how much time / energy exists in a human lifetime
- Aharon: 18:48:30
- how long ahead is too long atime..?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:38
- we will try to queue up the questions... there have been a few here
- Aharon: 18:49:11
- u make me feel like a teanager, carl..
- Aharon: 18:49:21
- teen even.. lol
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:22
- BTW, Miachael @ basekamp is involved in a project in New York seeking proposals that have a 100 year span
- Aharon: 18:49:50
- no id
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:34
- http://www.google.com/images?q=hugh%20ferriss
- Cecilia Guida: 18:50:55
- thanks
- stephen wright: 18:51:03
- very good point!
- stephen wright: 18:51:40
- sustainability -- a euphimism for "same old shit" as long as you can get away with it!
- stephen wright: 18:52:40
- as soon as there is an image in a debate, that's what it's about. So we need to get collective images into collective debates if they are to be collective and proactive
- Aharon: 18:54:04
- how do u know all these things in terms of how things will/will not happen?? r u based these ideas on what, a research? what kind of research? a vision? not sure what all the axioms are based on..
- Aharon: 18:55:12
- (these things = the effects that you thing will happen..)
- stephen wright: 18:55:57
- straight out of Constant's New Babylon, but part of a participatory game of what is intended
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:02
- Carl talkign about Constant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Babylon_(Constant_Nieuwenhuys)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:34
- images http://www.google.com/images?q=constant+new+babylon
- stephen wright: 18:59:30
- providing some public oversight into use of public space while allowing / encouraging unfettered imagination around public project making.
- stephen wright: 19:00:51
- I got dropped
- stephen wright: 19:00:56
- can you call me back?
- stephen wright: 19:02:09
- help -- I can't hear anything! Please call me!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:20
- calling
- stephen wright: 19:02:26
- thanx
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:38
- sry for delay - went to get a beer while listening!
- stephen wright: 19:02:58
- good reason
- Aharon: 19:03:25
- u presuppose certain things will affect in the way you want.. the whole point in life is that only dead things react that way.. where is the unknown in this stuff?? only the input??
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:16
- btw, also eating http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/dwinkles-old-fashioned-pecan-s...
- Aharon: 19:05:22
- (stephen.. scott n i r doing vote-swaps..)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:56
- and http://farm1.static.flickr.com/8/10785568_27d5d70c2a.jpg
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:07
- aharon, yes - do you want to mention this?
- Aharon: 19:06:28
- was that a secret?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:41
- aharon - no - i mean, might be good to mention out loud
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:51
- btw, there is another park-related question here - a technical question about the software
- stephen wright: 19:07:18
- We have some questions in queue. Let's take them one at a time.
- Aharon: 19:07:18
- oh. well.. u can tlk of it as well or better than i can
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:10
- Catherine, calling you now
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:21
- Kris here has a question - about the paarts of your application that represent the natural world rather than the built elements -
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:54
- is time represented - for example, does grass grow like a tamagotchi?
- Aharon: 19:13:23
- it is interesting how we ppl in general tend to imagine stuff based upon what we think is the cutting edge of tech in our time.. the amount of refs to "open source" nowadays kind of reminds me how the term "frame" was used in the 80's when video seemed really advanced stuff.. or how, everything was a system before it turned into networks and then platforms.. or historically, how the universe was a clock work just after clocks became wide spread and seemed high tech..
- stephen wright: 19:14:29
- Let me try and formulate a question about the "undigital" potential of all this. One of the most interesting things about our potluck with Freenode people -- major advocates, users and developers of open source software -- is how down-to-earth they are (for geeks). It is a way of life, as if it didn't matter if we were online or in the street, 2.0 or 0.0. What is the potential for using/ doing Massive collaboration without the technology? Maybe there isn't the possibility. But what is the degree of technical determinism here?
- stephen wright: 19:16:30
- so this is a way of bypassing expert culture.
- Catherine Page Harris: 19:17:06
- I'm interested in the translations, and retranslations of what seems like freedom in the virtual world, which is actually scripted by technology, and the analog world, the world of cars and freeways and houses and dinner and local food and networks sit on the ground. I like the idea of doing Massive collaboration as street action, as innovation in farmer's markets. We need to be down to earth, to learn our localities.
- Aharon: 19:17:27
- not much of an expert bypass.. in both ways, stephen..
- Catherine Page Harris: 19:18:33
- Stephen, all culture is expert and all culture is amateur.
- Aharon: 19:18:43
- cos many times u need to exhibit some expertees to b a meaningful cog in the "community" - for one
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:51
- Catherine i know you have to go soon - it was good to have you - would be interesting to have you in on the discussion a bit more at some point
- Catherine Page Harris: 19:19:04
- I look forward to it!
- stephen wright: 19:19:17
- Catherine says: all culture is expert and all culture is amateur.
- stephen wright: 19:19:36
- well tell that to the people who have to live with their expert decisions imposed on them
- stephen wright: 19:19:44
- who were never consulted
- Aharon: 19:20:19
- what do u all think it might mean when a person/group thinks they can engineer society..?
- stephen wright: 19:20:44
- I think there are is already a class of people who think that!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:47
- ^_^
- stephen wright: 19:20:48
- the expert class
- Catherine Page Harris: 19:21:27
- I do have to go, but I usually find that public process often hopes to invite everyone to the table, but somehow ends up with very few stakeholders able to come to it -- I guess I'm thinking about public process in landscape architecture which I've spent some years in and around. I think that experts are often just well educated amateurs and often well meaning. But perhaps that is too much optimism. Then there are awful examples of experts who fail...
- Catherine Page Harris: 19:21:35
- good bye and more soon!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:19
- till then
- Greg Scranton: 19:24:05
- sorry guys need to cut out. lil man needs food. many thx Carl et al.
- stephen wright: 19:24:30
- see ya greg
- Greg Scranton: 19:25:29
- I will be @ BK next Tue Scott. Will bring "country women" book to scan/return to Brett & Bonnie then.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:31
- later greggg!
- Greg Scranton: 19:25:37
- bye Stephen.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:51
- ah ok -- great! -- though -- i think they're in a little more of a rush than that :/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:59
- maybe Fedex? we can talk after
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:35
- So how are decisions made in and around this application?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:40
- Is it a protracted yet meaningful concensus process?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:57
- Or is it a "Do-ocracy", where everyone is free to step up as they're able and willing?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:16
- the 'objects' and context in the virtual world = the 'current state of the conversation'? or is there an a place for other kinds of discussio (text, audio, etc?)
- stephen wright: 19:33:46
- but concensus is not then the telos, not the goal and finality of the process?
- bojana romic: 19:33:48
- I have to go, it's very late here. Great talk, thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:32
- see you next time Bojana!
- stephen wright: 19:34:50
- good night Bojana
- bojana romic: 19:34:58
- sure thing!
- Aharon: 19:35:25
- so.. in order for something to be done there needs to be a general agreement - in this case, what are the mechanisms that make sure it is not a dictatorship of the users/the-many? what is there to support the individual??
- Jason Wilson: 19:36:17
- gotta run, will definitely be involved in conversations and thoughts
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:28
- aharon's question is sort of the opposite of stephen's current question on audio...
- Aharon: 19:37:54
- not sure if the opposite.. more like another fascet, i think
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:38
- similar question - yes, maybe focusing on another point in the discussion
- stephen wright: 19:40:09
- Here is the example I was thinking about -- the Karl Lueger statue.
Karl Lueger to be tilted
The winner of the competition to Transform the Karl Lueger Statue into a Monument Against Anti-Semitism and Racism in Austria proposes that the statue be reset with a permanent tilt.
From the 220 international proposals submitted, the jury selected the design by Viennese artist Klemens Wihlidal. It envisages that the statue, and a part of the plinth on which it stands, will be tilted to the right by 3.5°. The jury stated that the reason for their selection was the fact that the design made the City of Vienna’s attitude to Karl Lueger clear and also showed the current state of discussion. Both Karl Lueger as a person and the statue’s reception are (more than) a little unbalanced. The intervention breaks the vertical character of the monument and thus questions the myth of Karl Lueger as a Viennese father figure. The tilting is also indicative of the problems the City has in its dealings with its anti-Semitic past.
According to Wihlidal the transformation “…irritates the viewer. The monument becomes involved in turbulences intended to provoke the question: what is going to happen to it now? Contrary to the situation when a monument is pulled down, the tipping transforms the statue into a memorial.”
The working group and its supporters now demand that it be implemented. In a few weeks the design will be handed over to the City of Vienna at the City Hall. Thus the motion can be put by those responsible in the Vienna City Council before the summer break.
Negotiations are underway with the artists so that all the submitted proposals can be prepared for presentation on the website (www.luegerplatz.com). In addition a publication and an exhibition is planned for autumn 2010 / spring 2011. - Aharon: 19:40:50
- one of the interesting things that come to mind, is that actually, making virtual elements in the public space, can do away with the need to even question consensus, because the physicality of things do not play..
- stephen wright: 19:40:53
- Like the basekamp website!! Tilted!!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:26
- ^^ indeed Stephen!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:50
- http://basekamp.com/ =
/* Disorient me */
body.front {
-webkit-transform: rotate(-3deg);
-moz-transform: rotate(-3deg);
transform: rotate(-3deg);
} - BASEKAMP team: 19:45:41
- a serious joke
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:28
- "the idea of art being a serious proposition is kinky"
- stephen wright: 19:46:49
- who said that?!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:32
- ^^ ? i think Carl did -- slightly paraphrased
- stephen wright: 19:48:09
- "it doesn't have to be theater"
- stephen wright: 19:48:43
- we're having a blast already. And it might work!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:49
- if all i thought would come out of this is a negative hegelian dialectic 2.0, i wouldn;t be working this hard
- Aharon: 19:49:06
- what do u think makes it art even if it "works"??
- stephen wright: 19:53:14
- We've talked about participation, usership, the "built environment" as Scott nicely calls it. And we've done it in respect to a plausible type of artworld which we haven't explored at all before: a virtual-based one. But one which acknowledges it virtual status.
- Carl Skelton: 19:59:52
- carl@ultratopia.com
- stephen wright: 20:01:41
- got dropped again
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:48
- htttp://drupal.org/
- stephen wright: 20:01:49
- can you call me back.......
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:53
- calling u back stephen
- Cecilia Guida: 20:02:08
- scott i should go (here it's 2 a.m.). thanks. i'll talk/join you next tuesday. bye bye
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:18
- see you soon Cecilia!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:21
- great to have you here
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:23
- hey
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:27
- cecilia
- Matthew Slaats: 20:02:32
- Great talk - Have to run off to vote for the school budget. Hope to catch you next week.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:36
- speking of drupalare you still in Copenhagen?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:17
- we would like to come to the next Drupalcon in CPH, and may be good to hang out at Learning Site while there
- Cecilia Guida: 20:03:25
- great to join you, as usual! interesting presentation. good night!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:11
- http://cph2010.drupal.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:26
- Cecilia ^^ we can follow up about that
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:56
- Learning site link: http://www.learningsite.info/
- Cecilia Guida: 20:04:56
- yessss! for sure.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:02
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:08
- maybe a residency... we can talk
- Cecilia Guida: 20:05:45
- a residency??!
- Cecilia Guida: 20:05:51
- why not...
- Aharon: 20:07:27
- java is very restrictive - isnt it?
- Aharon: 20:08:02
- i mean.. compair to perl or python.. even php come to think..
- Aharon: 20:08:22
- y is it written in java?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:05
- BTW.. it's coming soon so thought I'd throw this out there- --- FOSSCON is still looking for peopel to set up "tables" and present experimental and truly social projects http://fosscon.org/ on June 19th @ Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.
- stephen wright: 20:09:29
- we need to talk about that scott
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:43
- i mention in part because we're talking about Free and Open Source Software, and that Basekamp is giving the keynote speech (with close collaborators of course)
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:50
- Stephen yes
- Aharon: 20:09:51
- int link - ta scott
- stephen wright: 20:10:19
- I'm in Amsterdam tomorrow night -- maybe we can skype briefly around 6pm?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:12:01
- re Drupal & Moodle - http://www.drupaldelphia.com/sessions/2010/lightning-talks#comment-29
- Aharon: 20:12:24
- i c ur speakin there on foss scott..
- Aharon: 20:12:30
- nice
- BASEKAMP team: 20:13:42
- they put my name but it is noy onl yme Aharon - bsekampp sa group + collaborators
- BASEKAMP team: 20:13:55
- less of a keynote than a key - chord? or something
- Aharon: 20:13:57
- hum.. loox like orily and ubuntu sponsor that..
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:14:16
- gotta go, y'all. thanks
- Aharon: 20:14:21
- well.. a key.. aint too bad
- Aharon: 20:14:26
- thanks
- Aharon: 20:14:32
- ciao ya'all!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:14:49
- bi everyone!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:15:25
- See you next week!
- Meg Frisch: 20:23:07
- dance party?
2010-05-18
Week 14: freenode
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
So far the series has featured projects and initiatives whose self-understanding is somehow “art” related, however tenuous their relationship to artworld-making may be. This week, however, we shift away self-described “art” worlds altogether to strike up a conversation with the ‘volunteers’ at freenode (chat.freenode.net) – an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network freely provided to a variety of groups and organizations. IRC itself is a bit like skype without the business model — that is, a form of real-time conferencing, essentially designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels.
freenode, formerly known as Open Projects Network, is a popular IRC network used to discuss peer-directed projects — such as Plausible Artworlds amongst countless others. freenode provides discussion facilities for the Free and Open Source Software communities, for not-for-profit organizations and for related communities and organizations. In 1998, the network had about 200 users and less than 20 channels. Ten years down the line the network currently peaks at just under 60,000 users and 10,000 channels, making it the largest free and open-source software-focused IRC network.
Though some aspects of freenode philosophy are specific to the workings of its medium, because the network exists to provide interactive services to peer-directed project communities, some of the group’s basic principles may prove invaluable to rethinking we we are calling artworlds. They include:
- Community members benefit from better access to each other. Putting a number of projects in close proximity in an interactive environment creates linkages and exchange between developers and projects.
- Communication and coordination skills are important to community projects. Peer-directed projects work because the paradigm works. Developers and community members are not unusually gifted at project coordination and communication. But improving those skills can make projects work better.
- Friendly interaction is more efficient than flaming. Calm, relaxed discourse without angry contention provides for better exchange of information.
- Project developers are self-driven. No one guarantees whose work will be used nor whether a project is worth doing. There is no single right approach to any design, implementation or support problem, and friendly competition is a fundamentally good thing.
- Peer-directed project communities need to grow. Many valuable peer-directed projects chronically lack skilled, motivated developers with time to devote to them. The potential base for peer-directed project communities includes anyone with the skills and interest to participate.
- Licensing must be free. For peer-directed projects to succeed, their creative output must be widely available and usable without significant restriction.
Many of the “plausible artworlds” we’ve been looking at could be described, strictly speaking, as “free nodes” of common desire, skill sets and exchange. Beyond its mere name, it may well be that freenode’s modus operandi too can shed light on the dynamics of more plausible artworlds.
Transcription
Week 14: freenode
(Background chatter & silence & greetings until 0:27:48.0)
[Scott]: Awesome. Can someone just, would someone mind typing into the text chat to just let everyone know that we’ve started the call in case they’ve been bounced. Just flag us and we’ll add them. That’d be great. So Steven, are you here? Excellent. So, welcome to another week of our little series on Plausible Artworlds. Where this year, we’ll be looking at a selection or I guess you could say just a, just an array of different examples of what we’re calling Plausible Artworlds. The creative cultural eco systems that sustain that sustain cultural practice, creative cultural practice and this week we’re taking a bit of a departure from, from some of the other strains that we’ve looked at and going more forcefully into, into a, a what’s become a sort of vast network that supports open source cultural projects. Specifically open source software projects but not only also other kinds of open source cultural projects. And we have Jonathan, Jonathan Simpson or I don’t know if it’s Jonathan D. from IRC. Here with us. So not to make such a flowery introduction, these are actually really informal talks Jonathan. We just wanted to give everyone a small sense of who you were and let them know that you’re here. I’m really looking forward to chatting with you about Freenode.
[Jonathan]: Thank you.
[Scott]: (Laughing) so, one, one thing that was a sort of point of confusion, and it’s partly my fault if not entirely. We really thought, hey, let’s go ahead and meet both on both Skype and IRC tonight. But as we start, you know it’s now 6:30 we had a bit of a hiccup getting started, or a few of them. And I’m just not exactly sure how we can easily transition between the two. Maybe, maybe we can talk for a little bit and then and then a little bit later um, try it out if everyone’s up for it. Does that sound good? So we can stay here for now, so we don’t kind of loose each other. And then we can migrate over to IRC either using the web browser, which anybody can go ahead and just click on and do at that point or your client if you have one. If that makes sense to everybody.
All right, cool. I feel sort of like Dora the Explorer. Asking kids at home if you can help me find a treasure map. So Jonathan we have, I mean there’s definitely questions that we can ask you about Freenode but I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind giving us a brief intro to, to the network for people who there, people that are here and people that might be listening to us recording later who don’t know what IRC is and not only that, I’d really like it if we could talk about why Freenode makes, isn’t just another IRC network but makes some significant changes in order to create a different kind of network.
[Jonathan]: Sure. So, pre-note. Well first of all, IRC is just the (inaudible 0:31:32.6) it’s been around for a long time. Pretty much since the early days of the internet and Freenode is a mutation of that, that IRC protocol. And Freenode's purpose is to provide a communications platform where people participating in open source projects, groups and you know anything that kind of fits into that so they can communicate with each other. They can collaborate and they can get stuff done. There’s a lot of IRC networks, Freenode in just a simple computer turns into one of the largest. But it’s, it’s also the largest open source network of its kind in the world. And what really makes it uh, different is its intent. It’s not made for a general purpose chat for people to go and just talk about whatever it’s aimed at. When these groups come together, flourish and you know cross pollinate a little bit because you’ll have connections made between some members of one group and another that might not have happened if they only met on their on website or their own little chat or, or whatever methods they would have used otherwise. So I think that’s, really you know a decent summary and that’s what, what brings the value out of, of Freenode is that it just allows things to happen that probably wouldn’t otherwise.
[Scott] Q: I heard about Freenode first through this open source community that I work with called Drewfull, which I know a number of people on this channel, also work with who leverage Freenode's channels a lot. Basically all their online or IRC communications through Freenote and, and uh, that’s what got me first interested in looking into, you know this network. First of all I was impressed at how they were able to build their community, you know, not wrapping community and smart quotes too quickly because I think it really is um, a pretty interesting kind of community that they’ve been able to build. With its own protocols, its own rules its own self understandings and values, shared values and stuff. Not that there aren’t a lot of trolls in there but whatever I found that to be really interesting and looked into Freenode's philosophy um, or the what’s the Freenode's philosophy page on your website and um, you know and a number of us looked at that and were really interested and impressed not only at how it’s been able to work. Which is sort of amazing you know and you said it’s one of the largest uh, one of the largest IRC networks in the world but I don’t know, if you guys want to know what this means like. I don’t know. How many people were, were using Freenode today Jonathan? Something like.
[Jonathan] A: The peak was a little over sixty thousand something today.
[Scott] Q: Yeah, people. Right. Which is kind of amazing I think for people like us whose networks are, you know, they might stretch into the thousands possibly. In a very, very loose sense, but whose direct communication networks are you know, you know even, even I mean probably a lot less for most of us including me but you know sometimes into the hundreds you know and uh, and so that’s an enormous number of people especially with, many of them with shared, shared interests. So any case we were really impressed not only with how that was able to come across er, how that was able to be sort of developed and built into something like that but also how, how this kind of channel needs this kinds of protocols to be useful for other um, creative projects and other kinds of open source cultural projects or, or cultural projects that are, that are in some way aligned with open source ideas. I guess that wasn’t really a question, um, would you mind Jonathan telling us about how Freenode is structured?
[Jonathan] A: Sure, so one of the important things about Freenode. This actually somewhat applies to most of the larger IRC (inaudible 0:36:34.2) and their (inaudible 0:36:34.6) the, the channels which are the different, basically the different chats on Freenode basically had basically run themselves. You had basic camp channel for example and you had your own people who have permissions to do things. And then on top of that there’s also network run staff which that’s, that’s the sort of thing I do. Where we manage network issues when there are spam and things of that nature. It does happen. It’s unfortunate but um, you know we do what we can to mitigate that and I think one of the things that you and I have talked about a little bit before is how it’s run usually the way that’s structured because we don’t um, exactly have, you know like a line of people. There’s no such thing as. If you call customer service as a business you’ll get um, um, at first you’ll probably get somebody who answers the phones and transfers you on to someone else who transfers you on to someone else. And we try to keep things to the point from a support perspective where, if you ask someone a question and their around, they're gonna, answer your question. Their either gonna answer your question themselves and handle your issue themselves or they're going to take it back to someone who can handle it and get it done. But you know basically it comes down to the people who can get something done will do it if they can’t they’ll find someone who can. And that’s something I think you and I have talked about a little bit and how that sort of functions. And it’s, you know it’s unusual but it works for us.
[Scott]: Uh huh, yeah, we were using some language that was barred from somewhere else but that Freenode seems to be a, a kind of do-ocracy.
[Jonathan]: Yeah.
[Scott]: And your, the hierarchy. I mean there are founders of the organization. That’s sort of a large organization too. Or at least it’s branched from one. But everyone involved the title is basically everyone from one of the cofounders, Christel to one of, you know, some of the newest dedicated members are all considered volunteers.
[Jonathan]: Everyone, everyone at this point in time is a volunteer but there was a time when there was actually a paid basically there was hired public to do process of things you know, forms and that is that but um, that was several years ago. At this point basically we have network staff and anyone who is network staff has never (inaudible 0:39:41.2). There are certain things that certain people don’t have the ability to do for numerous reasons. Like, and again let’s update but at the end of the day it comes down to like I said in my cue, If you can do something you do it and if not you find someone who can. It’s not the kind of formal hierarchy you would find in most organizations.
[Scott]: Uh huh.
[Jonathan]: You know, to a certain extent it just comes down to as you learn to do new things uh, you get to know to do things and stuff. And following that, the channels that make up Freenote. Like I said, you know they run themselves they form their own foundationional structure as they make a (inaudible 0:40:41.6) they need to build up.
[Scott] Q: Yeah, I was curious about that. You guys don’t, I mean have you ever, I mean you have a basic mission for the channels right. Have you, have you ever had to worry about enforcing that? I guess what I mean is, you haven’t had a group you know like, have you had to deal with like, kind of like white collar groups or other, other people who are. I mean an appeal of IRC is its relatively untraceable right? I mean it’s as much as any communication system can be.
[Jonathan] A: Yeah.
[Scott]: More so than most.
[Jonathan]: More (inaudible 0:41:45.5) I mean anything any website, any web forum, any online chat has probably had to deal with stuff like that with groups. Basically, and in some cases they’re just trying to cause trouble. In some cases setting up on Freenode not necessarily realizing that the intentions here are a little different. And maybe they have a place somewhere else or they don’t but they set on Freenode. And then there, you know there has to be some rules that has to deal with stuff like that but you at the same time you know we do have and we do strive to be welcome to open source projects in the works but there’s also several work channels with things that aren’t directly open but a lot of times we relate to. For example there, there’s a windows channel and it’s not organized by Microsoft and it’s not official in any capacity. Even those of us that keep this open source day in day out still running the things. From the, from time to time we need that kind of support too. So there’s stuff like that and a little brave but still usable looking and then there like you said there have been cases where there’s been (inaudible 0:43:17.7) and verbally and we’ve had to deal with that. But it’s not very often. There’s been,
[Scott]: Jonathan there’s a question. Ok, great I didn’t know if you saw. And by the way if you hear it go silent or at least a little less crazy that’s because we finally realized we could mute our audio and apologies to everybody for the crazy background feedback in the meantime but we’re here.
[Jonathan]: Okay, so the question here is about paid user ship and whether we get paid for what we do um, none of our volunteers are paid. We all basically do this because we, we because we believe in it. Freenode does accept donations and we use them to offset the cost of various things, some of them relatively minor. You have things like domain registrations and stuff like that you need to maintain. They don’t charge a huge amount of money. But we also have other projects. Freenode is part of a parent organization known as the Peer Directed Project Center. And this organization has a board of directors that from, from a distance oversees Freenode, and other projects that we have. We have open source event website which lists open source events and stuff like that, that we’ve been working on. We have something called a (inaudible 0:45:02.3) that we do and you know we have these other satellite projects and a lot of that gets started by these donations so. Freenode is basically supported by donations from people and, you know, there’s another side to that to because there’s a lot of servers that are used to make up Freenode and you know when you connect to a network you’re connecting to any one of these servers. And they’re all over the world. And these are donated by sponsors that basically post machine on our behalf and allow us to set up an IRC server on them and give us access to set it up the way we need to. And that’s where those come from. So they very directly support us as well.
[Greg] Q: Jonathan this is Greg. I’m just curious there was a question (inaudible 0:46:06.4) were, were uh, answering that. I was curious about, I don’t know, I guess maybe any illegal or ethical questions about how Freenode is used or, or service you offer. And I guess maybe some of the more theoretical aspects of what Freenode does or allow things to occur. What do you think about that? Or if there’s been any, you know legal issues or anything like that?
[Jonathan] A: There haven’t really been any issues with stuff so brazen that it’s causing problems. It’s definitely uh, (inaudible 0:46:55.1) I think I’m gonna drop a link to a certain page on the website here in a moment. But we have a basically a list of things that we consider on topic and then a list of things that we consider off topic and then there’s stuff that’s sort of in the middle. But as an example we’re pretty clear on not allowing people to talk about where is and software that might be less than illegal to acquire. Music and movie piracy and it bothers some people because in some cases where they are it’s not actually illegal. But do to the fact that Freenode is involved with network sometime we gotta aim for the lowest common dominator and also many of the places where users are possibly the majority of the places where users are so for the safety of the network when it’s noted it needs to be dealt with and most of the time that just comes down to letting people know. It’s not suitable for the net. So, there are a lot of things that creative staff were obviously not on every channel. They obviously are unaware of things that happen in private messages between users and in channels where there’s no presence by a staff member. And we don’t really have any desire to be in every channel. It defeats our purpose to intervene in the day to day running of these channels. They are their own entity and they should be so there could always be things happening behind the scenes that you know staff are not even aware of and you know as policy we don’t pry into issues that we’re not made aware of. So hopefully that answers your question. Let me try to find this link for you as well.
[Scott] Q: You know that’s great. I was just curious about, you know, when you said you know, once you see or read things that are shared but then who is we, and you mentioned that nobody is on all the channels but is that sort of a shared responsibility among all of the volunteers in terms of monitoring content?
[Jonathan]A: Not exactly, because we don’t directly monitor content. You know well, I’ll, let me put it this way. 99% of the time if someone from Freenode staff is in a channel it’s because they want to be there. It’s because they want to participate in the communication and not because they are there to intervene in any way in running the channel.
[Scott]: That’s cool.
[Jonathan]: So, you know if one of us sees something we sort of say something about it for the good of the network. But you know that’s pretty much where the line is drawn.
[Scott]: Great. Thank You.
[Jonathan]: And I just dropped the link. But I dropped it. But their both on the same page, and I dropped the corresponding on topic link. It tells about what is and isn’t appropriate on the network.
[Scott]: Hmm, oh okay. We’re just checking out your on and off topic policies. Jonathan I don’t know if you see Steven's comment, here Steven are you in a place where you feel like you’re able to ask that out loud or would you rather us just kind of.
[Steven] Q: Yes, sure. It’s really, really just a basic question cus. I’m just feeling that maybe either everyone here is already a user of IRC and Freenode and so can really jump into the technical issues that we’re already talking about now. Or maybe there’s some people who even know less about it than I do, it’s not entirely impossible. And so I was wondering on, the first of all if Jonathan, if talk a little bit about the pre history. Of Freenode, what Freenode was before it was Freenode, because I think it evolved into that wonderfully named entity. Freenode, from something else and I was wondering (inaudible 0:52:21:1) during the early history. The question they just asked just now is. You talked about cross pollination which is a really nice idea and it seems to me that it's somehow really a core value in why you volunteers actually volunteer to do this thing is so we can get in touch with people who would never possibly be networking with and we would build. I don’t know, establish a certain fruitful collaboration. Through this platform that you have set up. And how would we actually get in touch with them. That’s the thing sixty thousand people doing really great things. But how do I know which one to would be potentially, you know, a conversation starter with my Plausible Artworlds group for example. So, is there an index or are there some categories or groups. Are there federations, I mean how exactly do these things work? Because my experience, actually, with Freenode has only been on BaseKamp and Plausible Artworlds channel. I’ve met some surprisingly interesting people, that’s for sure, but I’m never sure how they really got there and I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t dare to barge into somebody else’s channel. Because I wouldn’t even. First of all, I wouldn’t know which channel to pick. It’s like, you know like picking, like making a cold call. To a number sort of randomly. I was wondering, just how does that cross pollination get structured in a certain way?
[Jonathan] A: That’s a really good question. And to be honest, I think the best answer is. If you spend time it just sort of happens. I would say, actually run into a little bit of my history if that’s okay. I came to Freenode, surprisingly enough about four years ago now. And I didn’t have the intent of ending up on staff and I didn’t really have any involvements with any other open source projects. What happened really was I knew some people. And they helped me to come there and I did and. After a little bit of time, I started branching out and seeing what else are they doing and you sort of head out and follow what other people are doing and talking to other people they know. You make these new connections. And on a small scale what tends to happen is you’ll connect with some people on another channel and they’ll connect with people in the channel you came from possibly and the community just sort of self built that way. With a lot of the support channels, often you just go in with a, asking a question about some kind of some kind of problem you’re having. As I said it’s not just these units and (inaudible 0:55:28.0) that have never worked with anything else. There’s, if you have a question about how to use Microsoft Word there’s a windows channel and um, branching out of an (inaudible 0:55:39.6) I think that’s actually what happened to me. I asked a question there years ago and I met some, some interesting people on the technical side and I, I follow along with them and that’s actually sort of how I ended up doing the volunteer work for Freenode. So, it is sort of you know, you meet people and you branch out into their communities. And eventually they become your own.
[Steven]: I see what you mean. It’s kind of like the more you do it. The more you do it. Um, and you meet people and it sort of works in a kind of a resolving kind of way. The last time we chatted Jonathan, in September I think, the conversation almost had nothing to do with open source and free software. It really seemed at that time that open source and free software was really just kind of a metaphor for the type of exchanges which were typically taking place on Freenode which was more about no when 2.0 or 3.0 but about 0.0 in a certain way. It was about a community organizing and people just wanting to get together and using Freenode as their sort of modes operandi for that. I mean, so, although you (inaudible 0:57:15.5) just say came out of a really technical perspective and that remains a kind of core user ship probably uh, I mean unless I got the wrong picture from our last conversation it seems that mostly now it’s really moved actually beyond that. Or beyond it in a sense that it’s not just that but that’s the free software idea or ideal is the it, you know, is the sort of the, the, what would I say. Oh yes the ideal for the type of exchanges or cross pollination that happen on Freenode.
[Jonathan]: It’s definitely, it’s definitely the origin. You know, Freenode started with a channel on a different IRC network called Lennox. I wasn’t around then so I don’t really know the characters involved but. There were just a handful of people involved back then and they were interested in running some open source and you know over time they started their own IRC network and years down the road there’s sixty thousand people here. And, probably a good portion of those are either people who are involved directly in an open source project or looking for help. In either an open source project or something technical. But beyond all that, there’s a whole other realm so to speak of people who are here to communicate but still share the same say the same, still believe, in the same openness. And the free exchange of information. And, these, and I think probably a belief that’s pretty prevalent that part of it that just came out of the fact that these are people who used Lennox. They’re used to open source and when you’re used to something like that the exchange of uh, other types of information for the betterment of everybody just sort of makes sense. So it definitely has become a pretty welcoming place for communities that just have a kind of, desire and beyond the source communities there’s also communities like the Philadelphia Lennox Users Group has a channel on Freenode and talk there and I’m a member of that as well. It’s a place for them to talk; it’s a place for them to socialize a little bit. Also to work together to solve issues and to plan events and to do all those other things so it’s really a focal point of that community and there are many many others like that.
[Scott] Q: Jonathan, I was actually going to your thoughts about this. Mostly because I have some thoughts on this. As to whether the kind of openness that you’ve been describing that’s built into the system. So to speak. If you think that that itself contributes to the social interactions? Sorry about the noise guys (laughing). Can you hear me all right?
[Jonathan] A: I can hear you.
[Scott] Q: Okay, Kung Fu. Do you think that the openness. Not only the idea of the openness but also, like the protocols. The connections to this to the kind of the systems, the way the actual network is built technically with that sort of openness in mind. If you think that that contributes to the kind of social interactions not just social but kinds of, interactions that people on the network have and the kinds of communities that are developing, the kinds of culture that is being helped to be produced. If you see, if you see that, I kind of assumed that you would see a connection there but I don’t really want too. I kind of wanted to ask what you thought about that.
[Jonathan] A: I think I agree with you there because. I mean basically. If you want to build a community on Freenode you can just go do it. (Inaudible 1:02:04.4) active as long as it’s within what’s acceptable and so forth. If you want to collaborate on something, if you want to build something you can just go and do it. You know, it’s kind of similar to what we were talking about before. You don’t have to come and ask permission. You just go do and start building. And accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish rather than trying to do it in another. I don’t know how (inaudible 1:02:40.1) maybe go build your own website with your own, and you can do that. But I think taking that step away let’s people focus on what they actually want get done versus the infrastructure needed to get there. But beyond that, you know Freenode and IRC actually (inaudible 1:03:00.8) you can do stuff with it like connect to it with your phone; connect to it with all sorts of things. (Inaudible 1:03:10.9) piece of software for it. It’s not like Skype, or even Skype is sort of open. But you know there’s limitations on what you can do with IRC basically anybody can know (inaudible 1:03:26.0) you know if you can do any programming you can probably have something that connects to Freenode and talks to people and in an hour or two without ever having done it before. You know, Skype is very closed up but I mean it lets you communicate in an open fashion but you can’t do your own stuff with it if you know what I mean.
[Scott] Q: Definitely. So, Michael was just asking how open source when it gets to the (inaudible 1:04:10.3) know you cultural trends at large. It definitely seems to a lot of discussion about open source culture. Did you want to ask? Okay, yeah. I guess that’s probably a question for you Jonathan. I don’t know if you’re posing yourself as an expert here but just because you’re here and you’re representing Freenode on some level it seems. Or not on some level, you are. It might be nice to know if you guys talk about this in your channels.
[Jonathan] A: We’ve been talking, you know, I think that’s sort of where these, you know. The first time we talked, I think basically the reason for it was because we were looking for more ways to raise the gap between open source culture and open source software because, you know, Freenode contributes to be open source software. And I mean there are some obvious or (inaudible1:05:19.2) implementations like Matthew mentioned earlier. I know a lot of people are just users and other things like it. So there's the obvious. There's software to the open culture by making it accessible. (Inaudible 1:05:41.2) makes certain things possible that might not otherwise have banned. But beyond that, (inaudible 1:05:51.2) that we share a lot of the same sort of feelings about things with open source culture. Some of it is the practical side using artwork and software like I said, using software to create artwork or other creative works. And using music and software and the other way around. And there is the actual connections between people as they are working together.(Inaudible 1:06:33.2) you get to a point where there is some really cool people out there who have an interest in both the creative side and the technical side and overtime you kind of increase the gap between the two. I don't know if I (inaudible 1:06:55.4) because I am terrible at (inaudible 1:06:58.6) but I still enjoy it. I like to see the community grow. I like to see the interactions between people with very different skills but very similar goals.
(Loud background noise)
[Scott]: Yeah, I think some of the reasons why we're asking about… Actually I see now there are a couple of questions. So maybe all this quickly say what else can say and then back up. To what you're saying, I think one of the reasons why some of us were asking or are so interested in this structure of Freenode is because part of the ideals or the ideas that are being put forward, some of the ideas of open source as a counterpoint to copy writing, they tie and to questions of ownership and as authorship as a kind of ownership but also that has to do with us as individuals. Sorry, the very notion of what makes us that. It may have to do with what hour individual place within a group can be. It has something to do with our organizations are structured, even our small ones or even the large ones, have to do with our or ideas what that can be for other areas in the world. Ideas of governments, of property and they're pretty large questions and I think that different pieces, like you said, different pieces of open source and parts of discussions that tie into open source culture. And specifically even licensing for creative practice is and software and things like that has to do with these larger questions. And I think that's what makes some of this discussion so central today because there's a lot of territory being fought over. I mean, we are still in the midst of software wars even though it's hard to see that now with open source making such good business sense to people. But it is still there. And there are so many other cultural battles being fought that these questions are really central. I think that was kind of more of… I don't mean to go on so much there but I guess I was sort of chiming in a little bit to what you're saying. I remember having some discussions with you a little bit along these lines when, the rest of you probably don't know this, but Jonathan lives in Pennsylvania and he is sort of the U.S. point person for Freenode. He happens to live not far from Philadelphia so we went on a picnic at his parents' house last year. Anyway, we had some discussions along these lines. I kind of wanted to bring them up just for context. I don't know how far we should go with them now.
[Jonathan]: You know one thing that kind of struck me there is, going back to...Well this one actually was a (inaudible1:10:29.7) will get back to that. One of the things that struck me there is we as Freenode feel, this is how I feel and I think its how the majority feels so I will roll of this, we are part of the network first as users. We are part of the community as users. And being staffed for Freenode is something that we do as part of the community. And yeah, I will answer Scott's question, I do have some responses to that. I think that is what it comes down to. It's not taking a role in controlling Freenode, it's taking a role in making sure Freenode is working correctly for every one that wants to use it, and that includes yourself. Because you are one of those people who wants to go one there and get things done and make progress in whatever it is you are working on.
So let me answer this question real quick because (inaudible1:11:47.1). So Steven asked how I would (inaudible1:11:56.5) Skype and I don't necessarily have an issue with Skype, it's a good platform. As for how I've used it personally? Well, I've used it four times talking to you guys and in between that I've used it maybe three times between that. It's not something I spend a lot of time on. I do have it and I have installed and I actually keep the logged on most of the time more recently, but, I'm on Freenode constantly. Even when I'm not (inaudible1:12:37.9). And one of the things I like really is just the openness. If you wanted to, you could go visit our website and visit the development section and actually download everything we are using. You can download our IRCD 7, we recently switched after many years of using something called (inaudible1:13:08.3) which you can also download freely. And our Network Services which are what you register your name and your channels, you can download those. You can go tomorrow and build your own Freenode. I like that feeling of knowing that it's their end that people can look at it and know what makes it tick and what makes it work and maybe even make it better. And that openness, I think it's important. And the open as not just of the software and being able to go grab it but the openness of the protocol. Like I said before, very little previous experience (inaudible 1:13:55.1) you can make something that will connect to that server that you just put together and that network that you just built yourself. And people do this. People go out and play with it and see how it works and what makes it tick and then sometimes tell us what's wrong with it. I don't know that Skype is really a reactive to the kind of comments you might send and of what you might think is wrong with it. Maybe they are. I'm not going to say that they're not responsive to such things. I don't really know. You don't have that level of visibility on platforms like this.
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:14:47.3) I didn't think of that answer but it's really obviously and intuitively what makes Freenode (inaudible 1:14:53.7). The thing is that with the free software in the open source movement we are really more, and I mean plausible Artworlds when I say we, and into open source cultural. So we're just kind of taking an idea that you are actually practicing and kind of applying it to cultural activity at large in particular with what have become visual arts. You know, it's kind of a strange thing because we share a kind of core value but really when we talk about Plausible Artworlds sometimes were frustrated with what people who are into other open source culture and free culture what they are prepared to counts as within the mainstream art culture. That sort of thing pushed us towards an open source approach. It appears, from the outside, to be kind of cool and groovy and not too problematic. I guess that's kind of what motivated my question about Skype. Because I use Skype obviously more than you do and it's kind of the way that I keep in touch with people and I guess it's because I haven't really made the effort to promote Freenode. Except there is one tiny technical thing. I feel almost embarrassed or shame to say it, is that with Skype you can talk.
[Jonathan]: Yes, absolutely. I'll be honest, Skype is used by many, many people in the open source world and that's probably the biggest reason. And I think really there's no alternative to that at this point.
[Steven]: That's not entirely true. There are parts of subscriptions like this today with people talking and listening and ways of doing that but there is nothing for streaming online for it other than Skype. For me it's a technical hurdle vs. a practical one because clearly it is possible it just hasn't been done yet. Are you guys talking about that though? Is there any talk of IRC going for audio?
[Jonathan]: I don't think I could ever see it happening as something that would be built into the IRC protocols. And part of the reason for that is the IRC protocol is very old and from a compatibility standpoint, I don't think anyone would want to take that step because they have the potential to break so many things. With that said, it doesn't prevent, kind of like what we're talking about earlier about having a voice conversation on Skype and a text conversation on IRC. If there was a better way to do it.
I don't know if I've ever used it actually.
[Scott]: If you remember early last year actually I could probably look if Mag is still on the call. Actually it looks like she's not. I don't know she dropped are went to sleep. She's also in the UK. Oh, Meg it still there but Mag (inaudible 1:18:28.4) yeah. She and a few other people had set up a platform or I guess you could say is really just a bot that would talk back and forth between a website, posting information on a web site and to Skype. You could talk to it and talk to each other and posts commands on Skype. It would pose back and forth for you. And a number of us, including Sean from the public school and some people from I Beam in New York and other people. There've been some random discussions about how to use bots to try to bring audio into text in text and audio and trying to make some are at work. One of the reasons we use Skype often is that, not justify why we're doing it because I think the reasons are obvious as it's free and we can connect with tons of people, oftentimes people can get on audio but they can be on the text component. Not vice versa of but often people really just want the audio and really aren't that active on text. Some people do both as they are really good a multi-tasking. It's nice that it's integrated. And so if we could find some ways to have some sort of audio service that doesn't really provide out level of integration but you some bots back and forth. I guess I'm taking this opportunity to brainstorm or maybe just bring in some of the brainstorms from other micro conversations that I've been a part of. It seems that work along those lines of what could be really helpful.
[Jonathan]: I can definitely see something back sort of stands on its own and provides a way to call people. Without the integration it's actually really easy to do something like that. There something called asterisks, which is not at all an alternative to Skype per say, actually a PBX System that you put together yourself on a standard computer and a lot of people actually use that for voice conferencing and stuff. So there might be a way to do something along those lines three that. But the issue with building it into IRC, the biggest one that comes to my mind, is that even if the server had a way to support it the clients would not, unless someone went in and fixed all of it. For example, I know a lot of you are using the web chat right now to get onto the channel and all these different things like that; web chats, there's dozens of web chats many of which can connect to Freenode, there's java chats, IRS (inaudible 1:22:07.4) which is what I use, there's MRIC that a lot of people on windows use. I think that I can safely say there are options and adding support for (inaudible 1:22:24.0) would be challenging. On the other hand, having web pages that connects you to a voice chat would be a little bit easier. It's pretty easy to share links over IRC. So there's almost certainly ways to do it. I'm not aware of anything that does exactly what Skype does in the open source world which is sort of unfortunate. Skype is not doing anything that is impossible to open source. If I had to make my guess is on why not yet it would probably be because the server side resources are expensive and it would require and efforts similar to Freenode's own with our sponsors and such for something like that to operate freely because there's no or rarely any commercials
[Scott]: and that's one of the things that surprises me the most is that somehow you guys have been able to pull off this pretty long, well in a very long standing, not exactly a coup. But you've been able to maintain and build something amazing when mostly what being supported are things that are often difficult to fund. Some of the largest financial interests of the people who often fund software projects, they get involved with open source projects more and more, but art necessarily interested in culture. I mean, I may be stereotyping here but I think it's probably fair to say that our interest in the product primarily is to see the culture in quantifiable terms. And so I think it would be very difficult for me to imagine. I mean, it's actually very difficult for me to imagine how you guys have really been able to continue and pull this off. But I'm really excited about that and interested not only in the fact that you been able to just maintain but in what kinds of things can still happen. Like you said with some of the bridges between other types of cultural like non software driven peer directed projects and the techies out there.
[Male group member]: Scott, I was thinking along the same lines just in terms of what does the future hold for Freenode? Is it just sustain what is currently in place or are there changes and developments that you guys see as necessary or welcome to developing or expanding Freenode in the future?
[Jonathan]: While we definitely want to preserve what we have because it's been useful to a lot of people. But there are things that we are trying to do... Like one of the reasons has been to sort of move out of the real world so to speak. I'm a pretty firm believer in bringing people together and actually meeting in person, that's valuable. So with at that end... Last year we started doing something called Geek Mix, which I mentioned a little bit about that earlier, that's a PDBC project which is the parent of Freenode, and they are advertised on Freenode and attended by whenever possible staff. And we had a couple in the Philadelphia area last year that I went two and we are actually doing some this summer is well. A camping trip we are doing. I'm hoping will get a pretty big turnout for it. I think that it's nice to have that in person contact and sometimes the in person contact is to accomplish something. But the Geek Mixes are really more about just getting people together and getting people to meet each other and doing something just kind of fun. It's more of a social activity. Not to say that we don't end up all sitting around a campfire talking about software and technology and whatever else interests us, but we also fight and go fishing into normal people camping staff. Or picnic staff or whatever the case might be. Anyway, we actually have a camping trip coming up in May in Worthington State Forest, New Jersey. So you guys are welcome to join of course. So there's the Geek Mix which are pretty informal and pretty social.
We also have something we're trying to do this year called Bots Con which is a free and open source software conference that we're doing in New York. This is the first time we've tried to do this and I'm pretty close to being a spearhead for that project. As far as directing and participation goes, it's pretty much my project. It's another instance where we get people face to face and do stuff and meet other people and hopefully when you leave, you've made more contacts and new friends and you have people to continue forward with on stuff that you want to do. I know that's been my experience in going to conferences and stuff with businesses. I get to meet people who I can help further their goals and they can help me further mine. It would be great if you guys were a part of Bots Con. I'd love to work something out in that regard. I think there are definitely possibilities for cross pollination and letting people know basically what else there is beyond these open source software projects. That there's this whole culture that a lot of them may not even be aware of.
[Scott]: So Jonathan, I don't know if you have seen Steven's question. Would you think? Should we read this Steven?
[Steven]: Sure. I'm reading it right now.
[Steven]: I can sort of summarize it. I was sort of listening to you in a technical way because I was trying to synthesize basically, I don't know, I guess the philosophical underpinnings of what's going on. When you talk about thoughts of people trying to recognize greater goals than what they had initially identified it seems, and listening to what you were saying earlier about what actually happens on a day to day basis on Freenode is that people have problems and they are sharing them and they are finding that other people have those similar problems and they're trying to find solutions. In fact, it's not so much about there's a community that does problem solving together it's that because there is a kind of a problem that emerges, and it's a problem which is not only technical but it's also a problem of a larger sort or a self conscious problem, is that's what allows a community to be formed. That's a very an American idea because it goes right back to the pre constitution and the times of the colonial townships. And there's a really interesting book that was written by the supremely American philosopher John Hughey called "The Republic and its Problems". I don't want to get to technical here but it is a fascinatingly encountered intuitive idea that seems to be similar to what happens on Freenode, at least the way you describe it. It's that there is no public to start with. In fact there's just a problem which emerges and for the identification, the common and self identification, of the problem it's then that the public which faces the problem is able to connect. And of course what he means by a republic is something that becomes bigger than just a town hall meeting. When that poses them the entire process becomes self conscious. Then it becomes a self conscious public community and can and actually become a society because it's not so much about the ins and outs about the problem, it's about the fact that subjectivity itself emerges from the articulation, the common articulation. If I'm getting it right, maybe I'm not, (inaudible 1:32:20.3) I did kind of hear an echo of speculation of what you were talking about (inaudible 1:32:34.2).
[Jonathan]: I think that makes sense. You know, that the community is committed out of all this. Sorry, I'm reading what Scott put in there.
[Scott]: Oh, sorry to interrupt. It seems to be a self conscious community in an interesting way. The backbone of Freenode and the pieces of these communities. Some of them are quite large themselves, you know how we're talking about the Druple Freenode channels, and there are over a dozen I'm sure of Druple related channels and some right now for example, I'm going to look. Yeah, the main Druple channel has 450 people in it right now. Probably less than 50 of them a seriously actively typing at the moment. But, like me, I'm there. But anyway, there's a lot of networks and so Freenode is a sort of super cluster that in itself sounds to me, like you were talking about Steven, a self conscious public community. The smaller channels might be in themselves as well in the way that they form together seems, I don't know, seems harder to place. Maybe more intuitive, if I can use that word in some cases. Maybe there can be interesting or surprising connections between seemingly desperate elements or groups of people.
[Jonathan]: That definitely true. Sometimes that comes out of when you're trying to get something done; you need to talk to some helpful people to get it done. A lot of times once you've figured out whatever it is you're trying to figure out, you'll sort of linger. You'll hang around. You just mentioned the Druple channel. I don't know if you just happened in there to see who was there, maybe you sort of hang out there now because you've been there before.
[Scott]: Yeah, I hang out there every day.
[Jonathan]: You do hang out there every day?
[Scott]: Yeah, yeah. For sure.
[Jonathan]: This is where I was going earlier when I said that as you participate in the community you sort of expand your horizons, you stay with things you might not otherwise. And you'll see what someone else says about something. A lot of times you'll get a new perspective on things. And especially with the smaller channels that you were just talking about. A lot of those just a friend of a friend kind of migration tends to happen where people connect in new and unusual ways they might not have anticipated.
[Scott]: Right now the BaseKamp channel has nine members in it.
(Typing and background noise)
[Scott]: Earlier I was thinking that it might be good to migrate over there but now I'm not so sure because in order to do that we sort of have to stop talking. Or maybe not. I don't know.
[Jonathan]: I want to add one thing.
[Scott]: Oh, go ahead.
[Jonathan]: The sponsors which I added the links too. When you connect to Freenode it will also tell you who sponsored the server you connected to in your status window (inaudible 1:36:43.1) and it will tell you a few things about them and why the server is named what it is. They're all named after science fiction writers.
[Scott]: Interesting. How do you find that out Jonathan? Is there a command or?
[Jonathan]: If you're already connected and you want it to display again you can type, let me put it in the channel here... Oh, that didn't work at all. It's MOTD for "Message of the Day", without the quotes.
[Scott]: I'm going to type that into the BaseKamp channel now.
[Jonathan]: In the BaseKamp channel window you'll have to go look in the status window, which is the first window. You're using the web chat I believe right?
[Scott]: Oh yeah. I'm actually using (inaudible 1:37:48.8).
[Jonathan]: Okay, yeah it will still be in your status window which will be your first window.
[Scott]: I wonder which one? Hmm. I don't know which one is my first window. You mean the first one I had open?
[Jonathan]: It usually says something along the lines of "status Freenode" or something like that. Let me see if I can find...
[Scott]: Oh, I see. I think...
[Jonathan]: Did you find it?
[Scott]: It might depend on our client. I'm using Colique and I don't actually have one of those windows, sadly. Anyone who wants to get on the web chat can get one. In fact, I'll do that now.
[Male group member]: Scott, if you're interested in doing it you just open up the console window and type in MOTD and it appears to be Gibson.
[Scott]: Oh, there we go.
[Male group member]: As in neuromedicine.
[Male group member]: Reluctantly, I'll paste some of it into Skype so you can see.
[Jonathan]: Like I said, there are mentions of who is sponsoring it and a little bit about the author who it's named after.
[Scott]: Logan's Run is such an amazing thing. Amazing movie. It's so appropriate for artists. I won't get into it except to say that one part of the basic premise is that people aren't supposed to live past 30 years old. Did anyone have any other burning questions? Not that we need to wrap up it's just that we sometimes do earlier and continue on with text chatting. But we have 15 minutes before we max out. I was just curious if anyone that is hanging out that didn't really didn't get to say anything yet or speak out had any thoughts or ideas about any of this stuff.
(Typing and background noise)
[Jonathan]: There are (inaudible 1:41:34.0) is used in educational context. There are definitely cases where it is. Are you asking specifically used by educators to effectively teach or to collaborate on educational practice? I mean, I could give one great example that only recently came to my attention. When I was in the process of planning Bots Con where, I don't know if you're familiar with the project from (inaudible 1:42:11.8) called Posse. Let me get some details on that real quick. Its part of a thing called the (inaudible 1:42:21.8) Source. The premise of the project and this is my understanding as I am not directly involved (inaudible 1:42:34.7) with the people that do, it that's exactly like what I was looking for.
[Scott]: Oh right, nice.
[Jonathan]: So, the purpose of it is to teach professors how to introduce open source into their curriculum and teach using it and with it and the use of it. And this is aimed at college professors. They'll actually be having one of these classes the week before Bots Con at the same venue as us, which is how I became aware of this and started working with some of the Posse people. This is actually probably a real instance of bringing things together because we're teaching teachers how to use open source and that's not just software, it's not just a technology. That's really an opportunity to teach the culture. I would hope, although I can't speak for them, I can hope that the instructors leverage that and take advantage of it. They're also, Freenode by the way, in the channel Hash teaching open source. There are definitely some good people in there. So that's one example of how it's used in an educational context.
(Inaudible background comment 1:44:17.5)
[Jonathan]: Yeah, it definitely is exactly that. As for... I can sort of give you one, but it's been awhile since I've dealt directly with any sort of educational stuff. When I was in college we actually did use, under our teacher's direction, we used Freenode as a resource for solving problems. Going in there with a question and asking a question. And really the lesson that day was, it really wasn't about Freenode, it was about asking good questions, which would have applied just as easily to a forum or mailing list or whatnot. The purpose at that time was to raise your question in a good way and present all the information you need to get a good answer and how teaching that is basically a skill. But there are other instances of it I'm sure although (inaudible 1:45:31.4). Yeah, I agree to that. The reason we used Freenode in that context and for that lesson was because we would get a faster response and faster feedback. We could ask our question and get a response, which is really one of the things that people look for with IRC. You can ask a question and if somebody knows the answer, you get a response right away. It's not like a mailing list, it's more like...Exactly. It's more like talking to someone. So you can start with a question and get an answer and then go on from there to implementation kind of stuff. To "okay, that's my answer now how do I apply that" and how to use it. You can continue that factor with the original person who answered your question or anybody else you might be interested in. And others can benefit too. It's kind of like the difference between what we're doing right now and leaving voicemails for each other.
[Scott]: Or leaving posters stapled to telephone poles.
[Jonathan]: Exactly. You know, that's actually a pretty good example. In a forum, you're hoping to write to the person you'll see at the right time before it goes off. But that can happen as well with IRC because I think the Druple channel, like you said, has about 400 people in it right now. The busiest channel of Freenode is the (inaudible 1:47:32.3) channel and it has (inaudible 1:47:44.7) as a result it moves pretty quickly. So that's not too far (inaudible 1:47:49.7) from hoping the right person will see it. But you also have a lot of interesting people who could answer your questions. If you're stuck, it'll last forever.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: I have a practical question. We're sitting in a space right? With a group of people at the BaseKamp space in Philly. And we've got like a bunch of windows open and we're projecting it onto the wall with a big projector. And a bunch of other people are here on this channel, well, right now not too many. A dozen or so of people are looking at their own channels on their laptop or monitor or whatever, or Iphone if someone is connecting that way, I don't know. And anyway, how do you keep from... You know, you're an IRC butterfly and you've navigated very easily so how do you keep from falling into a kind of induced metaphorical schizophrenia that you can get or ever shortening attention spans that you can get from hopping from conversation to conversation or from window to window? Do you know what I mean? I think IRC lends itself to that because you can join, join, join, join join various channels and keep up with lots of conversations. I can see how that has benefits, it allows someone to be an incredibly networked finger Like a bee, a cross pollinator and there are lots of benefits. But I'm wondering about the downsides and if you have found ways to navigate that successfully? Practical. I don't know if I'm asking for advice. No, I'm just kidding. More like thoughts on that.
[Jonathan]: I would say that my wife could probably tell you more about the downsides than I can. It's a real issue I supposed. You mentioned a large number of windows. I think it's pretty common for people who are really into the whole IRC culture so to speak to be in a lot of them. I had a couple hundred windows open in my IRC right now and that's not unusual for me. It's definitely interesting to try to keep track of all your various conversations and I think you build not a couple hundred channels. I'm in about 115 channels on a bad day. I have a lot of private message windows and stuff like that I tend to not close because I like to have the context going back maybe days later. The conversations that I've been involved with previously. The client that I use lends itself towards that sort of activity because IRC is pretty forgiving with big numbers and windows. I'm on a laptop and my IRC window about 5" across right now. I guess my screen has (inaudible 1:51:49.1). But like I said, it lends itself very well to being in a lot of windows. It really doesn't waste screen real estate on that.
[Scott]: Yeah, exactly. Which is where a design comes in. What I was asking earlier about whether certain ideas were built into a system. Often their built in through design or their built in through the technical back end, either the UI or the functionality. It's one of the reasons that makers have such an interesting place because our assumptions about the world, our interests and everything shape the ongoing iterations of the world. And this is a small thing because you're just talking about a chat window, but also you can imagine the kind of experience it gives somebody. The kind of connections it gives to other people, this is a huge part of, not of everyone's life. Not of people that don't have access to technology and that sort of thing. But it's a huge part of a very large and growing number of people's lives these days in these online virtual worlds. Connections with people who we may have never met in real life and maybe never will. Chat roulettes (laughing). Very thin, extremely loose ties with more people than we can ever remember. It's strange and I think the way that we build our technology, the way that we design and you and friends of yours all help to put these things together has something to do with the kinds of experiences that we have in the world and the kind of world that we build. Not to make it sound so (inaudible 1:53:47.3). I think other things have a big impact also. But, it has an impact. IRC Roulette (laughing).
Laughter)
[Steven]: We had thoughts of putting something together along those lines, Meg. In regards to having IRC (inaudible 1:54:10.1) connect you with a random other person that is connected to IRC.
[Scott]: Interesting.
[Steven]: But I never really had the incentive, I guess, to do it. It just seemed like something that would be an uninteresting social experiment. I'll put it that way.
(Inaudible background comment)
[Scott]: Bot Camp needs a hug. I don't want to say that you do Jonathan but, who can't use a hug sometimes? That was a rhetorical question. But yeah. Bot Camp is (inaudible 1:55:02.8) right now. It needs to be restarted, needs a little love. But we're always tempted to go over our time. Even if we start late, we try to end early just for the sake of everyone who comes to these. And we've got two minutes. T-2:00. So, now that we've helped brainstorm IRC Roulette and figured out a bunch of problems, did anyone else have anything they wanted to add before we say our goodbyes? You know, before.
[Steven]: Yeah, maybe I have one question because, well, maybe it's a terminology question. One of the terms that we've been using a lot is these conversations over the past few weeks is the notion of usership. And it's something that came up, Jonathan when you were speaking, and yet I see on the first page of the Freenode site a channel called Free Ownership. I was kind of surprised to see that work ownership emerge like that and it's because as you described it, channels in Freenode are owned and operated by the group which registers them. Is that a kind of very loose usage of the word ownership or am I missing something?
[Jonathan]: It really depends because they are operated by their groups and how their groups choose to do so is really up to them. It's reasonably common for a lot of these groups to basically form the same sort of ideals that we have. They're making people who have the ability to expand and stuff like that, and there has to be someone, not there to run the channel but to support the channel. But that's not always the case. There are definitely some channels that have a more strict form of people being in charge. At the network level we basically leave that up to them. They make the choice. I would say that most of the channels that I participate in, the people who are eventually given the ability to deal with the spam and things of that nature are people who have just been part of the community and it just sort of happens. And there are even channels... It's a simple thing. As an example would being able to set the topic. In many cases that's just left wide open for anybody who wants to can make changes to the topic. Really the only thing that being a channel owner gives you is the ability to say "these are the people who can remove someone from the channel if it comes to that" and it never does. It's almost unheard of, for example, for a channel owner to come in and say "this is what we're going to talk about today."
[Scott]: But it's happened on a few occasions with things like spam bots. Right.
[Jonathan]: That's a different kind of problem. You know. There's a big difference between guiding a conversation and removing obstacles from it. I don't think someone coming in and spamming junk is an obstacle to a productive conversation. With that removed, the conversations happen on their own without the intervention of whoever is there as a manager to keep things flowing if not to control it. So hopefully that answers your question.
[Scott]: Yeah, for sure. Or I don't know whose question it was actually.
[Jonathan]: At the end of the day you can form a group and only (inaudible 2:00:10.6) unless you go out of your way to manipulate where things are going, then natural conversation will occur. Usually in the extent of controlling the flow, it comes down to "this is the topic of this channel and anything generally related is okay" and that applies more to support channels than anything else. A channel like BaseKamp I think is almost where people are going to talk about what's related to whatever they want is okay as long as it's not like racism or something like that, or spam.
[Scott]: Yeah, usually it's just filthy jokes.
[Jonathan]: The support channels can be a little different because they generally, the people who run the support channels generally try to keep them available for support purposes. And a busy channel like (inaudible2:01:11.6) where people are talking about their pet bunny, they might not let that happen.0we depart to meet up next week.
[Scott]: Well, we're really excited to see where things go Jonathan. And, I'm pretty interested in the Geek-Nic. Canoeing.
[Jonathan]: Are we going to see you camping?
[Scott]: I think it's a very, very strong possibility. I don't have any camping equipment, it's been so long. But I'm really intrigued and it's so close.
[Steven]: I have a tarp and two pole sticks. That's it.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Awesome. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe a few folks from the camp might want to join up. I'm really tempted. I'm more than tempted, I'm leaning really strongly.
[Jonathan]: Okay.
[Scott]: If I can swing it in fact, I think I'm going. Yeah, so thanks a lot and we're definitely psyched to continue have connection between you guys and things that we're doing. Connect on (inaudible 2:02:31.3) and all of that. It sounds like we'll have some face to face time to talk about it.
[Jonathan]: I think that'd be great. I really hope to see you guys there. Thanks for inviting me tonight.
(Inaudible background comment)
Not a problem. I'd like to join you a couple other times at some point as well. I believe you do this every week?
[Scott]: Yes. Every Tuesday 6:00-8:00.
[Jonathan]: I know a fair number of you are out of the area so this isn't really a Freenode thing exactly. But the Philly (inaudible 2:03:24.9) has very frequent meetings and we've taken to having one of them at my house actually. It's more of a social than work thing. So if any of you would like to join in on that let me know. I'm in Bridgeport.
[Scott]: Awesome. Do you guys meet in Philly at all ever?
[Jonathan]: There is a Central Philadelphia meeting once a month. Let me get you their site as well actually.
[Scott]: And if you ever need a space, we've been talking a lot about this space in between us and other art activities can be a co working space, an open space for different kinds of meet ups between people who are involved in building things or ideas. Let us know. Cool.
Alright, well have a great night. Some people may continue on IRC, but hard as it is, we're going to stick to our timeline and say goodnight. See you all next week.
(Group chatter and goodbyes)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
2:18:01.9
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Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$fc277444798a9e1f" title="#basekamp/$fc277444798a9e1f">Freenode http://basekamp.com/about/events/freenode (#basekamp/$fc277444798a9e1f)
Created on 2010-04-06 21:16:55.
2010-04-06
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:24:34
-
- scottrigby: 18:24:51
- hello again
- scottrigby: 18:24:57
- so is everyone on a call?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:10
- not everyone
- Laura Trippi: 18:25:12
- no, i'm not
- scottrigby: 18:25:15
- greg are you hosting?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:32
- yep r we ready
- Meg Frisch: 18:25:58
- is ready!!
- stephen wright: 18:26:51
- can you tell everyone how to hook into IRC -- or is that going to be to complicated?
- Laura Trippi: 18:27:48
- (brb)
- scottrigby: 18:27:48
- hi stephen, i was going to - but we seem to have started out with a short disconnect, and i didn't want to fragement that further until we at least hook up by audio
- scottrigby: 18:28:03
- however -
- stephen wright: 18:28:10
- ok
- stephen wright: 18:28:21
- is audio about ready?
- scottrigby: 18:28:23
- here's how to get into IRC for anyone who wants to! http://basekamp.com/getin
- scottrigby: 18:29:06
- for those of you without an IRC client (not necessary!) you can se your web browser - the link above also links to an embedded webchat here: http://basekamp.com/irc
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:06
- Ok everyone ready!?!
- scottrigby: 18:30:26
- yes, jonathen is here now & ready
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:30:31
- I'm here.
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:30:39
- Sorry I think I hung up while you were still talking scott
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:33
- WE HAVE STARTED THE CALL!
- stephen wright: 18:31:37
- We're on
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:59
- If anyone drops off or wasn't included in the original call please let us know.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:05
- I'm wearing a tux
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:34:07
- yes
- Laura Trippi: 18:34:09
- sounds good
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 18:34:13
- sure
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:13
- sounds good
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:17
- boots!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:34:26
- ni-hao kai lan!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:31
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:54
- what's gonna work? team work!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:17
- freenode creates space?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:33
- I like that idea.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:40
- Freenode philosophy: http://freenode.net/philosophy.shtml
- Laura Trippi: 18:38:43
- it's great
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:15
- "Licensing which preserves freedom is essential to the health and success of peer-directed projects. "
- scottrigby: 18:41:52
- jesse is here btw, right?
- stephen wright: 18:42:25
- do-ocracy!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:58
- I presume this is far different than a Meritocracy?
- scottrigby: 18:46:57
- BTW, we muted our audio here - sorry guys
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:01
- coming on the heels of last weeks discussion which addressed "paid usership", I am curious, do you get paid for what you do? If so by whom? How is Freenode supported?
- Laura Trippi: 18:47:07
- (thnx)
- scottrigby: 18:48:56
- Also, everyone - as always - feel free to chime in to the audio, and / or post questions here
- Meg Frisch: 18:49:49
- hey - I got off the call
- Meg Frisch: 18:50:10
app fail- Meg Frisch: 18:50:54
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:12
- warez
- stephen wright: 18:52:46
- "IRC is a communications mechanism or protocol, that's been around since the begnning of the internet. freenode is one of the largest: it's intent is not for general purpose chat, but about letting groups get together and cross pollinate in a way they might never be able to if left to their own communications networks." So how does someone go about cross pollinating and with whom? Is there an index or a directory of whose on freenode (given that there's 60,000 I guess there must be, since no one could cross-pollinate on that scale). I mean, how does plausible artworlds cross pollinate with channel 9,999?
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:53:02
- http://freenode.net/policy.shtml#offtopic
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:54:09
- http://freenode.net/policy.shtml#ontopic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:34
- great thx
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:29
- hello sir/madam I am calling because...
- scottrigby: 18:57:41
- haha
- scottrigby: 18:58:03
- "if you spend time, it just sort of happens"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:22
- I've not spent a lot of time on freenode but it does seem like a place to just play, experiment, check in, check out, lurk.
- scottrigby: 18:59:00
- greg - where is atrowbri & jessicawestbrook?
- scottrigby: 18:59:07
- thinks they may be driving...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:00:20
- hmm not sure.
- Laura Trippi: 19:00:21
- (Sorry, I have to leave for a meeting. But I'm keeping the chat open so I can track what went on. Sort of. Thanks, all!!)
- scottrigby: 19:00:33
- Laura - great to have you
- scottrigby: 19:00:41
- ok
- scottrigby: 19:00:45
- see you next week!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:00:50
- "Web 0.0" love it
- Laura Trippi: 19:01:02
- yes, great stuff here! thanx.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:06
- I think that is the spirit of the project, I agree
- michael g bauer: 19:06:06
- yes how does open source contribute to the social milieu/cultural trends at large?
- scottrigby: 19:07:12
- yeah, skype isn't open at all really
- scottrigby: 19:07:16
- it's just "free"
- scottrigby: 19:07:28
-
- stephen wright: 19:07:33
- can you "critique" skype a bit
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:55
- does it "contribute" or allow for such things to take place?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:12
- seems more the later
- stephen wright: 19:10:54
- Jonathan, when do you use skype -- and for what? It's not a personal question, obviously, but a slightly coy way of asking you to critique skype (cause I'm not sure we really know what's wrong with skype) and to compare and contrast it with freenode and IRC.
- scottrigby: 19:10:56
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:48
- A geeknic?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:37
- any outdoor eating event w/ Scott Rigby is a "geeknic" imo
- scottrigby: 19:14:38
- and we'll get back to teh question about skype for sure -- i jsut found myself talking before i saw the questions -- and i'm very intrested in this too stephen!
- scottrigby: 19:15:09
- thanks
- scottrigby: 19:15:43
- stephen wright: 19:15:53
- !!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:02
- minimally
- stephen wright: 19:17:53
- exactly; I would say that that's what makes it a "plausible world" -- and not just a machine
- scottrigby: 19:18:35
- a giant network of makers
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:01
- funny though, IRC is often viewed as uncool, at least with my cool hip students
- scottrigby: 19:20:10
- our role is often ... partly theorizing, and partly prototyping... ideas about other kinds of culture - small or large moments in a world we either want to see, or are frustrated that we see
- scottrigby: 19:20:50
- Technically speaking -- maybe DimDim?
- scottrigby: 19:21:29
- for audio?
- Meg Frisch: 19:21:57
- i'm hre!
- Meg Frisch: 19:22:02
- oh...
- Meg Frisch: 19:22:06
- Meg Frisch: 19:22:17
- BASEKAMP team: 19:23:53
- are threre open source alternatives to Skype?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:58
- http://www.asterisk.org/
- scottrigby: 19:25:06
- interesting
- scottrigby: 19:25:27
- oh yeah --- flooding, bouncing, right?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:45
- colloquy
- scottrigby: 19:25:59
- colloquy++
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:13
- scottrigby ++
- scottrigby: 19:26:32
- not yet!
- scottrigby: 19:26:43
- greggles
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:23
- indeed
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:38
- freebeer?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:21
- scott mentioned that
- scottrigby: 19:30:38
- canoeing
- stephen wright: 19:31:23
- More than anything else, I am fascinated by freenode's philosophy. The idea, it seems, that a community can be built not by (after) the solving of problems but by the raising of problems/ questions. It's a very American idea. John Dewey wrote a fascinating book called "The Public and its Problems", arguing (on the basis of the early American townships experience) that there is no such thing as a "public" that then encounters some problems. It is through the articulation of problems, the experience of encountering problems and sharing them with others that a "public" emerges. A public is the generic sense -- a society, a community, what have you. And when that problem raising becomes self-conscious then you have a genuine, self-conscious public community. Sounds a bit like freenode, no?
- scottrigby: 19:31:46
- fosscon++
- scottrigby: 19:32:03
- http://fosscon.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:14
- sounds great!
- scottrigby: 19:32:16
- we are thinking about how we can do something with / for FOSSCON
- scottrigby: 19:32:58
-
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:33:20
- freenode.net/acknowledgements.shtml
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:33:28
- sponsors page
- scottrigby: 19:36:11
- these sponsors are great - and i dont usually say that -- GNU, Linux, Redhat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD - these are organizations that are on a certain side of the software wars
- Jonathan Simpson: 19:40:51
- "/motd"
- scottrigby: 19:41:00
- message of the day
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:06
- PING irc.freenode.net
PONG gibson.freenode.net irc.freenode.net
motd
375: - gibson.freenode.net Message of the Day -
372: - Welcome to gibson.freenode.net in Norway, EU! Thanks to
372: - SSC Networks (www.ssc.no) for sponsoring this server!
372: -
372: - GIBSON, WILLIAM (194 He is married with two children. In
372: - the early 1980s he wrote Neuromancer, and with this novel he
372: - helped establish a new kind of science fiction literature
372: - called cyberpunk. William Gibson defined the word cyberspace,
372: - and described virtual reality long before we saw the
372: - similarities with todays Internet. He has won the Hugo Award,
372: - Nebula Award and the Philipp K. Dick Award. - Meg Frisch: 19:44:58
- any examples where IRC is used in educational contexts?
- Meg Frisch: 19:45:38
- both scenarios are of interest -
- Meg Frisch: 19:45:48
- anything you have to share!
- scottrigby: 19:46:02
- good Q in connection with The Public School )
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:03
- http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE_2009
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:54
- awesome! I'm there!
- scottrigby: 19:47:39
- it's also an oppotunity to infect the minds of "educators" with ides of open and peer learning
- Meg Frisch: 19:47:40
- #teachingopensource
- scottrigby: 19:48:18
- bookmarking channel!
- scottrigby: 19:48:28
- I smell a public school course coming up
- Meg Frisch: 19:49:06
- its curious - I always thought about how IRC format makes communication a bit more accessible, or more active than email / discussion forums?
- Meg Frisch: 19:49:37
- more like real conversation
- scottrigby: 19:50:02
- less like a megaphone.. more like talking to a group of people sitting around a table, or in a room
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:09
- "real" is rather slippery a term
- scottrigby: 19:50:32
- twitter broadcasts... "out" ... which has other benefits
- Meg Frisch: 19:50:51
- thumbtacks > staples
- scottrigby: 19:51:02
- tape, zipties
- Meg Frisch: 19:51:07
- magnets
- scottrigby: 19:51:14
- velcro
- scottrigby: 19:51:24
- static electricity!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:35
- snot and duct tape
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:47
- so will snot
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:31
- right cause snot and duct tape are sooo theoretical
- Meg Frisch: 19:53:05
- chat like a butterfly, IRC like a bee
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:54
- lol
- scottrigby: 19:54:32
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:35
- whaaaaaaa!?! Hundreds?
- stephen wright: 19:54:36
- a couple of hundred channels!!
- scottrigby: 19:54:53
- @#$%^&*()!!!!!!
- scottrigby: 19:54:58
- mm hmm
- scottrigby: 19:54:59
- i see
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:09
- and your monitor is what size? 60"?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:24
- that is laughable!
- scottrigby: 19:55:25
- not for long tho megfrisch!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:37
- wow
- Meg Frisch: 19:55:46
- Meg Frisch: 19:57:12
- IRC Roulette
- Meg Frisch: 19:57:48
- sweet!!!!
- Meg Frisch: 19:57:52
- bot rampage
- scottrigby: 19:57:56
- botwars
- Meg Frisch: 19:58:16
- Jonathan should hug botkamp
- scottrigby: 20:00:17
-
- scottrigby: 20:03:21
- "there's a big difference between guiding a conversation, and removing obstacles to it" ..
- stephen wright: 20:03:34
- yup
- scottrigby: 20:03:47
- "where channels managers can keep things flowing, but not try to control them"
- stephen wright: 20:03:48
- THanks Jonathan!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:01
- this has been really interesting and a nice extension of a lot of the things that have been discussed over the first 3 months of plausible artworlds
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:27
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 20:05:42
- Scott what about that pup tent?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:17
- yes thank you very much this has been great!
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 20:06:27
- thanks good night!
- stephen wright: 20:06:31
- Hey Jonathan, thank you! Let's hope this'll lead to some new recruits to freenode!
- Meg Frisch: 20:06:31
- Thank you!
- scottrigby: 20:06:39
- please do!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:14
- yep I'm between Collegeville, Havertown, & Basekamp
- BASEKAMP team: 20:07:23
- great!
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:07:47
- http://www.phillylinux.org/ main site
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:08:03
- http://www.phillylinux.org/meetings.html dates
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:28
- thanks again. goodnight everyone.
- stephen wright: 20:08:37
- see ya'll next week
- scottrigby: 20:09:06
- for a moment i thougth the vacuuming above our heads was someone's "closing music"
- scottrigby: 20:09:20
-
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:30
- nite all
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:09:40
- hope my sound wasn't too bad
- scottrigby: 20:10:06
- was great!
- scottrigby: 20:10:20
- that's an old aviators mic you said?
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:10:48
- it's my grandfathers "airline" mic
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:10:50
- very old brand
- Meg Frisch: 20:10:54
- an interesting departure from / complement to other weeks so far
- scottrigby: 20:10:54
- wow
- Meg Frisch: 20:11:01
- [the talk, not the mic]
- Meg Frisch: 20:11:07
- [the mic too]
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:11:23
- I don't know much about it, other than it seems to do a great job with background noise.
- scottrigby: 20:11:36
- we should get one of those!
- Meg Frisch: 20:11:40
- i think its important to talk about communication channels, as they connect our art worlds
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:11:53
- I'm sitting in my workshop with half a dozen servers on my right, not sure if you could hear the humming
- Meg Frisch: 20:11:54
- and its important to talk about mics
- scottrigby: 20:12:07
- infrastructures
- scottrigby: 20:12:39
- i couldnt hear any humming - sounds nice tho!
- scottrigby: 20:13:39
- megfrisch - we def need to talk about mics
- scottrigby: 20:14:27
- gregscranton, yesplease & meg - would be good to have an in house tech talk sometime
- Meg Frisch: 20:14:46
- yes - for sure!
- scottrigby: 20:15:07
- welcome back michaelbauer!
- michael g bauer: 20:15:19
- thank you very much
- scottrigby: 20:15:32
- (we're sitting right next to earh other btw)
- scottrigby: 20:15:47
- barbara says: like passing notes in class
- Meg Frisch: 20:16:47
- my boss: "don't you have a potluck / talk tonight?" (staying late) me, re: "I'm skyping in!" him, re: "dont you live there?"
- Meg Frisch: 20:17:14
- hehe
- scottrigby: 20:17:19
- haha!
- Meg Frisch: 20:17:22
- actually nice to skype on this huge monitor
- scottrigby: 20:17:38
- au travail
- Meg Frisch: 20:17:45
- yesss
- scottrigby: 20:18:13
- ok guys... so... preview...
- scottrigby: 20:18:18
- next week...
- scottrigby: 20:18:26
- should i say?
- Meg Frisch: 20:18:48
- anticipating
- Meg Frisch: 20:19:03
-
- scottrigby: 20:19:38
- http://makeloveland.com/pages/about
- scottrigby: 20:19:58
- well, we'll see
- scottrigby: 20:20:03
- thy're scheduled
- scottrigby: 20:20:12
- thanx mf
- Meg Frisch: 20:20:23
- tips hat
- scottrigby: 20:20:52
- btw, the idea... is they are interested to donate a large plot of land for buildign our large network in love land
- Meg Frisch: 20:21:11
- OOoh
- scottrigby: 20:21:12
- thousands of square inches of vast open space
- scottrigby: 20:21:23
- in meatspace, and virtual space
- Meg Frisch: 20:21:30
- right -
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:21:40
- I might have to be here for that
- Meg Frisch: 20:21:49
- should be a treat
- scottrigby: 20:21:54
- JonathanD
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:21:58
- ya know, one thing I didn't touch on...
- scottrigby: 20:22:00
- we will also ask them hard questions
- Meg Frisch: 20:22:01
- neat model / idea
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:22:09
- is the ease of getting people in touch with other people.
- Meg Frisch: 20:22:28
- i lean so heavily on Twitter for that stuff
- Meg Frisch: 20:22:47
- i'm interested in IRC to cure my tweetosis
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:22:48
- I've been dragging scott around to make him meet people.
- Meg Frisch: 20:22:53
- haha
- Meg Frisch: 20:23:04
- yes! meat meetings
- scottrigby: 20:23:10
- i know a few people in that camp
- scottrigby: 20:23:16
- meatings
- scottrigby: 20:23:36
-
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:24:20
- So would any of you be interested in joining us for PLUG social?
- Meg Frisch: 20:24:26
- PLUG?
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:24:28
- There is food. And usually pie.
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:24:31
- Philly linux users group
- scottrigby: 20:24:44
- mmm pie
- Meg Frisch: 20:24:45
- I'm not specifically a linux user
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:24:47
- social meaning the one at my house... all the others are at businessy places.
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:25:06
- we had the first social last month, with tacos, pie, and lightning talks.
- scottrigby: 20:25:07
- i see.. so not bkamp as a good place
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:25:22
- bkamp is probably a great place for a meeting, actually.
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:25:45
- PLUG does lots of different things.
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:26:03
- for different sorts of people.
- Meg Frisch: 20:26:17
- it sounds great. I've been trying to get more involved with tech groups in philly
- scottrigby: 20:26:21
- it might help get the "not-necessarily-art" (crossover) event juices flowing here
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:26:28
- well, also...
- Meg Frisch: 20:26:32
- PhillyCHI, panma, drupal
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:26:35
- last time here, we had 4 presentations I think.
- scottrigby: 20:27:01
- what kind of facilities do you need jonathan?
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:27:07
- one was on "how did they do the special effects on star trek the wrath of khan"
- Meg Frisch: 20:27:15
- ++
- scottrigby: 20:27:22
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:27:24
- then one about ebook readers, one about hydrogen, an open source drum machine
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:27:34
- and one about blending photos together into panoramics
- Meg Frisch: 20:27:35
- neat -
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:27:49
- panoramas, too
- Meg Frisch: 20:27:51
- reminds me of Junto / the Hactory / ignite philly in a way
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:27:52
- or pajamas
- Meg Frisch: 20:27:56
- the programming
- scottrigby: 20:27:57
- michael says "i like & use hydrogen"
- Meg Frisch: 20:28:08
- PHUG -
- scottrigby: 20:28:10
- pajama party
- Meg Frisch: 20:28:14
- philly hydrogen users group
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:28:15
- it's a good diverse group
- Meg Frisch: 20:28:48
- a beat-box / break-dance crew called hydrolinux
- Meg Frisch: 20:28:57
- scottrigby: 20:29:03
- scottrigby: 20:29:47
- wants a mini beatbox dance-off 2night
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:29:54
- and myself, I'm not a programmer, I am a "computer guy" but I enjoy getting events and communites together more than anything, I think.
- Meg Frisch: 20:30:15
- Jonathan: you might be interested in following whats' happening with the IDEA conference. some of my coworkers / colleagues are helping to organize
- Meg Frisch: 20:30:20
- http://ideaconference.org
- Meg Frisch: 20:30:48
- if you have any interest in giving a talk I'd be happy to put in a good word for you, they're doing space / session planning right now
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:31:01
- So, -social info... it's going to be end of this month. I thin kthe 22nd.
- Meg Frisch: 20:31:14
- calendaring
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:31:16
- Meg, I will look at it.
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:31:28
- Skype needs tab complete.
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:31:54
- Local = good and fall = good. I think I could do that
- scottrigby: 20:32:34
- lookin' @ ideaconference
- Meg Frisch: 20:32:43
- cool. If you have any typical materials you send for conferences / events, feel free to forward to me
- Meg Frisch: 20:32:55
- if you have a specific talk in mind, that would be good info too. I have some people I would send it to
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:33:38
- I could probably do something touching on tonights topics, meg
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:33:44
- seems it would be appropriate.
- scottrigby: 20:33:51
- megfrisch - this woudl be a good link for the infographics TPS course maybe?
- Meg Frisch: 20:33:55
- the theme this year is integration - i'm sure there's tons of freenode stuff that speaks to that
- scottrigby: 20:34:16
- Jonathan, i think a Public School course was already proposed based on tongiht's chat!
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:34:30
- haha
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:34:31
- amazing
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:34:40
- from the TOS stuff?
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:34:45
- The TOS people are amazing.
- scottrigby: 20:35:00
- ^^ megfrisch -- personally, i would be interested in developing a presentation with the baskemap group - on "what is integration - what is differentiation?"
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:35:06
- talk to mchua in #teachingopensource, she can probably provide some advice.
- Meg Frisch: 20:35:21
- sounds great -
- scottrigby: 20:35:27
- ,...one of buckminster fuller's 40 questions, which - if answered - are supposed to reveal the sectets of our place in the universe
- Meg Frisch: 20:35:41
- Jonathan: my email address is megfrisch@me.com, feel free to send some info. I have to log off for now, it was great having this chat
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:36:10
- thanks! take care
- scottrigby: 20:36:17
- BTW "Open Source Systems and Notions of a Public Democracy" http://philly.thepublicschool.org/class/2322
- Meg Frisch: 20:36:26
- nice
- Meg Frisch: 20:36:34
- scottrigby: I'll be in touch sooner than later, && everybody else good night and good luck!
- scottrigby: 20:36:42
- JonathanD -- if you'd like -- and all of us of course -- each of us can just click on '+im interested'
- scottrigby: 20:40:51
- bi all
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:42:00
- g'night
- Jonathan Simpson: 20:42:04
- Thanks for having me!
- scottrigby: 20:46:14
- it was our pleasure really
- scottrigby: 20:46:18
- but what i mean is
- scottrigby: 20:46:31
- come any time
Alternative economies
Week 49 SUNDAY: Sunday Soup
Hi Everyone,
The exception to prove an established rule — THIS SUNDAY is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
We’ll be talking to Abigail Satinsky and other members of InCUBATE, particularly about their initiative called Sunday Soup — hence meeting on Sunday — a platform for the international network of food-based micro-granting initiatives, highlighting the growing community of granting projects with over 35 now in operation including FEAST, STEW, Philly STAKE, Detroit Soup, Portland STOCK, amongst others.
What is Sunday Soup? The Soup Grant is a grassroots model for funding small to medium sized creative projects through community meals. The basic formula is that a group of people come together to share a meal and that meal is sold for an affordable price. All the income from that meal is given as a grant to support a creative project. Grant applications are accepted up until the meal, everyone who purchases the meal gets one vote to determine who receives the grant. The grants are completely unrestricted and will be awarded at the discretion of the customers. Granting projects affiliated with Sunday Soup in different cities operate based on their own needs and context. The meals are more or less elaborate in different places and some people have presentations by potential grantees or past grantees as part of the event.
Why do they do it? The Soup grant not only generates independent funding but sparks dialogue about resource allocation within the mainstream artworld. In an environment where governmental support for experimental art practice is scant, and private support is dictated by the values and priorities of granting foundations, innovative and potentially controversial work is compromised in order to fit within categories deemed “fundable.” It needs a different “world”… in this case, the world of soup. With Soup, community participation in the grant funding and selection process is key. Applying for a grant is intentionally straightforward in order to encourage broad participation. As the Soupers say, “this enables us to stimulate and promote experimental, critical and imaginative practices that may not be eligible for formal funding. The Soup grant, while raising money, also serves as a way to build a network (or what some of us insist on calling a world) of support and community that reaches beyond purely monetary assistance. We like to think of it as an open platform to discuss ongoing projects with new audiences, meet new collaborators, and share ways of working.”
Transcription
Week 49 SUNDAY: Sunday Soup
Scott: Hey everybody. I just wanted to play a little intro for you guys real quick.
Abby: Oh yeah I didn't get to hear that yet.
Scott: Well here's something that you probably wasn't expecting I don't know maybe.
[Recording of Sunday Soup]
Scott: That's probably enough actually she just kind of kept going.
Abby: Is there a dance that goes with that?
Scott: I don't know Parker is there a dance that goes with that?
[Child Speaking]
Scott: All right well welcome everyone I'm just adding a few more people to this chat.
Abby: Do you know every time somebody wants to add to the phone call you have to hang up and then…
Scott: I totally don't and in fact interestingly we thought so for the longest time and like just killed our conversations that way.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: And we don't because I'm adding two more people right now.
Abby: Cool.
Scott: Or three. Okay anyway, did Mary get added? I'm just going to add her real quick. Let me try. But in any case welcome guys it's great to finally talk with you about Sunday Soup our weekly series of chats.
Brice: Totally.
Abby: So you guys how long does the Plausible Artworlds Project last? How many more of these things have you gotten through the year?
Scott: Through the year so yeah we're on Week 49 of 52 right now.
Abby: Whoa.
Scott: Right 52.
Abby: Long stretch.
Scott: Yeah. Basically just the first week of January through the last week of December. Is Kristin not in on the call let me just make sure. I guess not. All right let me try to add her real quick. But anyway yeah so I know a few of you guys have been on some of these past chats but I don't know if everybody has. So for those who haven't welcome to the series of discussions about these structures that people are making that we insist on calling Plausible Artworlds. We're talking with – I want to introduce Abby and Brice but I think there's like half the people on the call or more are already involved in Sunday Soups right.
Brice: Well I'm not sure. George Wietor who's also on the chat he does Grand Rapids Sunday Soup and Michelle does Public Meals in Upstate New York, but if anyone else does a micro granting food meal based project thing they should say hi and say we do.
Arianna: Okay hi this is Arianna. I do.
Brice: Oh yeah and Arianna. Yeah sorry I missed Arianna.
Arianna: No problem.
Brice: Hello.
Arianna: Hello.
Scott: Hello.
Brice: Arianna's out in Portland and does Portland Stock.
Scott: Very cool.
Kristin: Hello I'm Kristin. I participate in them and have in the past.
Abby: You participate in which? You're just here.
Kristin: I participated in the Sunday Soup [inaudible 04:40].
Abby: Oh excellent. Welcome.
Scott: Hello.
Abby: Hello.
Narisa: This is Narisa.
Abby: Hello.
Narisa: Hi. We do Feast in Boston.
Abby: Oh awesome I've met you right. Didn't we meet at that thing? We might at design studio for social intervention?
Narisa: Yes I think so.
Abby: Yeah cool. I'm glad to hear you're doing that.
Narisa: Yeah we're…
Abby: The whole town.
Narisa: Good stuff.
Abby: Yeah. So how do you want to do this Scott should we start introduce a project? I mean basically that's the format that we were thinking me and Brice talked about was that we were just going to talk about origins of the project and what we're kind of [inaudible audio breaking up]. And then ask George to talk but he just got disconnected.
Scott: That's okay I'll re-add him. Yeah that sounds perfect. Yeah talking a little bit about the origins would be great because ultimately I think if it wasn't clear from earlier talks or chats together what we really want out of these discussions I mean besides meeting everybody and having a time to meet up, which is totally awesome in itself – oh shoot hold that thought I'm like half talking and half adding people.
Brice: People are freaking out in the chat.
Scott: On hold. Yeah if someone could type in just like Kristin and Mary. Oh no Mary's back on. Kristin I think is holding herself so I can't – it says held remotely which means the other person's holding so maybe if somebody could sort of relay that to Kristin to.
Yeah so anyway what we really want out of these I think is to talk about the kinds of structures that people are setting up that sometimes are considered projects in themselves or are sort of recognized or self-recognized as art projects and other times are not. But in any case are setup because structure to support the kinds of practice and cultural practices that you want to already be involved in weren't there already or weren't sufficient or at least not in your area or not as specific enough. And in some cases just really weren't there at all. And those are what sociologist call artworlds. They're these structures that people make that allow a kind of creative practice to happen, like literally happen, as a kind of support structure. And also allow a kind of practice to be understood as art. So anyway it may sound kind of calling Sunday Soup art but in a sense it is, at least it's an emerging one or it's an example of one. At least we think so and we kind of like to talk together about, at least a little bit, about what it's about, like kind of why you want to do that in the first place…
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: …and how it's working out and maybe some strategies.
Abby: Cool.
Scott: Yeah. And of course I know you wanted to use this as maybe a kind of planning chat too a little bit.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: So we can totally do all of that.
Abby: Yeah. I mean I think for me I would prefer if we kept, I mean I'm totally comfortable talking about how we started Soup I mean me and Braswell and how everybody sees it, but I would also like to take this opportunity to hear from the other people that are on the chat. Because a lot of times what's really awesome is that we talked about this recently, we've certainly done a lot of thinking about it, we haven't had enough chance to hear from other people that started it where they were seeing like a sort of lack in their local artworld that felt like they wanted to make this thing happen where they were too.
So that for me would be an awesome thing to like really draw out in this public conversation is just sort of different perspectives on organizing, especially because InCUBATE doesn't do it anymore. So and that was kind of – and I think that is part of the conversation that we want to have to because there's reasons why we don't do it anymore and a lot of it has to do with kind of burnout or a sort of where it's like taking some time to think about these processes. And so I guess that's the other sort of part of this conversation because it's important to talk about the sustainability of initiatives like this. Because I think that sustainability we don't talk about it and expand it in an enough way. And it's not just about doing it forever it's about sort of thinking through this and it leads to something else. And what kind of long term way do we see all those things sort of linking up there mainly.
So I guess I'll just start Brice and you can jump in whenever.
Brice: Okay sounds good. Yeah go ahead.
Abby: So InCUBATE started in 2006 and we all met in grad school and we were studying Art Administration and Policy. And initially we came together with the idea that we felt like there wasn't enough conversation happening within an art administration program about nonprofits and how we can sort of open them up and think about creative organizing models. It felt like that we were just sort of being told the tools to be successful administrators like this is how you write a grant, this is how you do a marketing strategy, or whatever.
But at the same time it was pretty obvious that in the funding climate that was out there nonprofits were struggling really hard and that was just sort of like oh yeah this is kind of a little bit of a thankless field because you're never going to make any money and this is just rich people that sort are holding all the purse strings or whatever. At the same time that we were in this program in Chicago which felt like there was so many awesome examples of kind of radical organizing models both in spaces such as Mess Hall or experimental station but also different kinds of collectives like temporary services and/or long history of things like culture and action which was public art project that Mary Jane Jacobs organized.
So we were just then okay how can we take this kind of institutional learning happening and dry out the connections between sort of Chicago artworld that we see being really excited but it maybe it feels alienated from institutions because they don't really know. Like I don't know there's this idea of institutions transposing their model onto art collectives or something. I don't know like we felt like there wasn't any channels that were happening back and forth. I mean we wanted to figure out how to have a kind of active learning process of students and relate to our city and really learn from what had been there before and not just think that whatever we're learning in school was just going to translate into some awesome job. Some abstraction but that we wanted to learn what practice were happening and how we could better facilitate them as creative organizers ourselves.
So that was kind of our initial thought and we started with the idea of money too. Like think through the idea of alternative fundraising models for artists and for people that don't necessarily want to become nonprofits because we felt like the sort of overarching logic of nonprofits are supporting experimental art is that they have to organize specific way with the Board and a certain kind of hierarchy. And they're supposed to have the language of growth. It's like nonprofits like you're not going to get any grants unless you've existed for five years or whatever, all these things. And so we wanted to take the idea of like creating a space, figuring out how to fund it as like a creative problem. So we ran this space for a couple of years and we had residency program, we were curing shelves and all and a bunch of stuff. And people started to come and ask us about where they could get money. Artists started to come and ask us where they could get money for their projects. And that was actually Ben Shaafsma who came up with the idea of doing Sunday Soup which was a community meal that would generate money for creative project grants.
So we were just thinking what are resources at the table? We have the space, we have a kitchen and we have a community of people that seem interested in this question how can we create a platform that will both be functional in the sense that it will generate small amounts of money that we felt like could really be helpful to artists that were doing kind of projects that weren't fitting into traditional funding categories but also sort of have an open space to really think through these problems and talk about them openly and share ideas. And it wasn't just about the competition of the grant but about facilitating a community with a set of questions that could then sort of expand ours. So I don't know Brice if you want to talk about like, I don't know, how it worked or whatever.
Brice: Yeah. So we started doing it and when we began we would do it every single Sunday which was kind of insane. Either one of the four of us or a friend of ours in town maybe an artist a curator or someone doing something interesting would make a big pot of soup. We would hang out in the space for like three hours every Sunday afternoon and just try to let people know that they come by and buy soup for $5 bucks and that it would be contributing to this thing and then at the end of the month we would collect grant proposals, email them out to everyone who would come, they would replay with who they wanted to get the money and then we would sort of write a check and give it out to the wining artist or person who had applied for the grant.
So we did it this way for a year and a half every Sunday making soup. Sometimes with no one coming and sometimes with maybe just a handful of people coming usually brining leftover soup every week and eating it a week ourselves. So after doing this for a year and a half every Sunday we were starting to realize like maybe I think we were all kind of starting to get burnout on being there every Sunday and doing it this way. So we decided to kind of step back and make it a monthly thing instead of a weekly thing. And as soon as we did that we were almost always packing a space. I think people didn't have the excuse of saying "Oh I'll just come next week" anymore. So when we decided…
Abby: Yeah. And we formalized it too…
Brice: Yeah.
Abby: …so there was like talks.
Brice: So instead of it being just like three hours of like come hang out with us and we're stare across the table at each other while you eat soup. It was instead from 12:00 to 1:00 everyone would show up and they'd eat the food and when we changed it, it cost $10 dollars instead $5 because we were also making additional food beyond just the soup. So from 12:00 to 1:00 everyone would eat. We would pass around all the grant proposals that we'd printed out. And then from 1:00 to 2:00 the guest chef who had made the soup would either give a talk about their work or present some project they were working on, lead us in some kind of activity or arrange something else for everyone to do sort of like a group so that people kind of knew what they were getting into, they knew what they could expect when they showed up to Sunday Soup on the one day of the month that we did it.
And it was way more successful having it be kind of, not intensely formal, but at least kind of defined situation that people were walking into instead of this kind of nebulous like weird paying money eat soup with strangers sort of space. So we did it for a year and a half in that way and we stopped doing it last December because we decided to close our space here in Chicago. And we decided to close our space because Abby was going out of town for a Fellowship for Providence. Roman one of our other members is still in the Ukraine he went over there on a full bright and Matthew who's the fourth lives up in Evanston, which is a north suburb of Chicago so he doesn't live super close to the space. So I was going to be the only person kind of like right there. And its running space as I'm sure you all at Basekamp know it's like something that one person can't really do by themselves. And it's even hard to do with like four people so.
Abby: Yeah. That is just to say that like InCUBATE was never like a job for any of us and it was always something kind of about the collaboration between the members of the group. And so it just made sense at a certain point that we just couldn't keep it going at the pace that we were doing it at. But the other thing that over the course of the last year that we've been working on is we've presented it publically in a bunch of places. So Democracy in America, Creative Times Exhibition last year and we did it in Houston and we did it in Buffalo.
And then kind of just tried to start telling people about it and just saying that that this was a model that people could take up. And then last spring just kind of felt like it really exploded as a concept that it's really hard with this text thing and the talking at the same time yes. So luckily a bunch of other people has taken it on as a model and really been pushing it sort of on a national scale. And that was when we started to realize that we wanted a central resource to kind of hold information about all the different soups that were going on. Part of this grew out of a conversation last May at the opening engagement conference in Portland State University they have a social practice MFA Program and a lot of people that are organizing soup were working on that conference, were a part of that conference, and so we officially got together as a big group. We had representation from that do soups or soup related food projects in Baltimore and in Grand Rapids and at the Portland people and Detroit and Philadelphia and New York. And it was just a really exciting time to kind of swap notes about how people are organizing things.
And then we asked George and we were having conversations with George about creating a Web site that would just kind of have all the information, have a place where somebody that was uninitiated to the process could just say "Hey, like where is this soup that's happening in my city? If there isn't one how do I start one?" Just sort of making it more accessible to people. So I don't know is there anything else we should say Brice for now?
Brice: Someone in the chat asked about why was the competition, which is like an interesting question because I think Sunday Soups brings up a lot of and this sort of model having a lot of people pay money and then voting to decide where everyone's money goes in the end brings up a lot of democracy problem questions.
Abby: Yeah.
Brice: And I think it's other people who have done sort of meals like this since we did ours have found better ways to deal with the competitive nature of it all. But in an ideal world I like to think of it not as a competition but like as a lot of people gathering together in one place sharing the resource of money and making a collective decision about where that money goes, which is less competition to me and more like a form of small scale participatory democracy. That being said, there's all sorts of problems that come up when you have this thing too like somebody can bring all their friends and then all their friends vote for them, and of course they're going to win if they live in a place where they can just get more people that like them to come out…
Abby: Yeah.
Brice: …and pay for the grant. Some other ways people who have done some of these fee based micro grants in the past couple of years have dealt with this is by, for example, Baltimore Stew they sort of select themselves three different organizations or projects each time they do a meal that the money will be going to and it's split amongst the three of them. Is it split equally or is it split by default?
Abby: No it's not split equally so the way that they do it is they do a five course meal in between each course. The potential grantees present on their work. And then at the end you get to vote and so that you can either vote to fund one particular project or all three. And so basically nobody leaves empty handed, which I think really works for them because they're doing focused much more on like social justice initiatives or social justice art projects. And the one that I attended there was a domestic violence art therapy place, free after school program, things like that. And so it really kind of, there's an expectation that people are advocating for their particular projects, at the same time that it's creating an environment in which nobody will leave empty handed and they don't really feel like that they're up against the people before. I think that would be the goal.
Scott: Great.
Abby: So yeah. Oh and just really briefly somebody also asked if the InCUBATE's not our job what is our job? I'm the director at a gallery which is a nonprofit. And I think that that is also something that was really important for us about InCUBATE is that it was like a meeting space a way to come together and sort of assess out the problems of our career is going to be like or the choices we're making and the compromising and negotiations and just sort of being open about those questions. And so we never wanted to turn InCUBATE into a job so.
Scott: Also wasn't part of the point of doing this to raise questions about a number of existing systems and structures.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: I mean it's not as if you were trying to propose a panacea right.
Brice: Right.
Abby: Yes totally, totally. So yeah I don't know maybe George do you want to talk about the Web site a little bit?
George: Oh yeah sure I can. Can you hear me all right?
Abby: Yes I can.
George: Yeah okay. Cool. All right well the Web site is – the other point I don't know how useful they're going to be – but the Web site is basically a platform that helps us facilitate everything or almost everything that Abby and Brice just described. It has a whole bunch of features. Like on the front side you can see live stats like the total impact of 70 Street Network as a whole of the amount of meals that are charged, the amount of proposals that have been added to the systems, things like that. There's also the ability for each individual group to self-organize. A group so that no one has to approve them. Within the group you can add tons of information about yourself because too many people are arguing wasn't meant to replace anyone's personal project Web site just a way to facilitate grant reporting and things like that.
So you can have all sorts of information and links even to [inaudible 25:58] if you have something that's there. You can also use it as a way to plan a meal and a meal is sort of the basic unit, everything is sort of connected to the meal. And you can do it in two ways. You can do everything wise through the site, meaning they can accept proposals to the site if they wanted to use that framework or they could have it just the administrators only after the fact. Here you can use the Web site as a replacement for an individual project Web site so we are asking all our Africans to do it through the Web site.
Brice: And one of the reasons that we wanted to build the Web site was not only to like sort of create added ability for everyone's project but to kind of like produce this statistic thing on the front page that shows oh man when you add it all up it shows this is all the money that's given away by people around the world holding these sort of independent organized meals. But we also wanted there to bet he sort of functional component where if people wanted to use www.SundaySoup.org to be the place that they collected proposals because it's sort of easier just to point people somewhere and say enter your things into this field and we'll print it out and sort of circulate them.
Have a read to at the meal that it could be a Web site that's helpful to people in that way because I just know from doing it here in Chicago for three years it became a total pain in the neck to sort of like take everyone's weird PDFs and Word files that they would email to this other web address that we had setup and like try to standardize it all for these grant proposals that we circulate around. It was really difficult so if there was a way that would make I easier for the organizers who run these things to do things kind of simpler and quicker that would be a real tangible helpful thing to people. So we wanted it to have both those kinds to the Web site.
George: Yeah totally. And the way that I developed a proposal for was I just went through all the projects that were online and looked at the proposal environment. And all together that added up the side question everything was asking the same thing with a few variations. And so the form up there is not every possible question that went out but everything that everybody has had so far within reason.
Brice: Yes.
George: You can also add that piece to the soup. So it's a way to start a way to start sharing the recipe. You can also could add resources like trash that you were given, guides that you've written, tips and things like that. And those always start within the group and then also share publically in that sort of master resources list and that's the goal for the recipe book as well. The recipes within your group but also in a big overarching cookbook.
Brice: Right. I'm sorry George go ahead. I was just going to say that's sort of like the basic way the Web site works and everyone should go and check it out and see for themselves. But we'd really be interested to hear from people who are doing projects like this and from anyone whose lucky to attend projects like this. We'd like to hear what would be helpful for the Web site to have, what other things might make it a useful tool for people both as organizers and as kind of participants in these sorts of events.
So yeah that would be really helpful to hear some feedback on that as well. And I think we also forgot to mention that like we don't feel very like proprietary at all about the idea of Sunday Soup. We really want anyone anywhere to take up the basic premise which is like invite a bunch of people over and cook food, have them pay money for their proposals. And having anyone anywhere take that basic idea and change it around however they want and call it whatever they want and have it exist independently if they like as well.
So that's an important thing to bring up when talking about all this too. And that www.SundaySoup.org is not to sort of like just kind of glom everyone together back into this one project but to really try and help people because we know from running it ourselves that at a point you sort of get burned out on it. So if there's some way that even though we don't do it in Chicago anymore that we could sort of contribute to having people not get burnt out as easily that would be hopefully really helpful so.
Abby: Yeah and the other thing that I think would be awesome to hear from folks that are on the chat too is the idea of like what does it mean. Like the way that we were thinking about the Web site too is creating this place where all these different groups can meet together which I think is an interesting challenge with this particular project because it is so locally based and happens in real time and happens in particular places. I guess this addresses one of the questions that's coming in through the chat it's about where are these things happening and it's not to mean to – the Web site in no way replaces that experience of this happening there.
So I guess this is just sort of to say that what do people think about a kind of national network of these different kinds of granting projects which could be accomplished through them. Is it just important to point out that like these things are happening we can get excited about them or like what is the potential of a site like this too? So that being said, we'd love to hear from people that are…
George: Yeah. Should I cover quickly like what the immediate next steps are?
Abby: Yes.
Brice: Yes that would be great. Thanks George.
Abby: That would be awesome.
George: Okay some of them are really very small, for example like I said, if you press the fees on [inaudible 32:08] site it's just recipes. So some of these projects aren't [inaudible 32:13]. So [breaking up] add more stuff to the front page could be like a way to track new projects across the entire network as they're added. Because right now some of [breaking up] is very, very individual group oriented right now so you have to go, for example, to see all of the Brooklyn projects some kind of mute thing on the front page as well as the sketches from individual projects. As well as the directory of regional opportunities for some [breaking up] and people in your area who guide you to starting your own. Both of those kinds they kind of came up in that very quick and prompt view. She's obviously had a creative time so they're not really [inaudible 33:04], though that is something I'd like to talk about later.
Scott: Yeah George and everyone, hey this is Scott. I just want to ask you real quick. A few things come up in the chat and they're kind of, I know one thing was addressed at least slightly about the location. I think Aaron had a different point to that too which is sounds like maybe there was some other ways that things could be organized as well.
Abby: Oh I see.
Scott: Yeah like my topic or idea or maybe there's other ways that he didn't mention that could be organized.
Abby: Yes.
Scott: I definitely like the way you're setting it up. I think George already knows that's definitely not precluded at all by the way it's structured, which is cool.
George: Oh yeah.
Scott: Yeah. Because we can always be more organized. But I was also curious about like in one thing that I brought up around the same time when you had mentioned the recipes is that I was curious if you had thought about or were interested, or maybe already are doing a site thinking about recipes metaphorically in a sense. Because what you're doing beyond, I mean you're not really doing a cooking show even though food's obviously an important part of what you do clearly; there are other things that go into this.
And so it sounds like I sort of wondering if recipes could be almost like the, I mean not to be antichrist cookbook style, but we've also described the publication of putting together as kind of a sort of recipe for alternative ways of world making. I think in your case in a way you're making literal food but you're also, I don't know, making different kinds of recipes in a sense, different ways of structuring like certain approaches, like different strategies.
George: What the resources section is partially meant to be about adding the sort of How-To's, Best Practices, things of that nature.
Scott: Cool yeah totally.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: It sounds like a recipe for making an event someday.
Abby: Yeah.
George: There's still a lot to be added there but the functionality is there to do it it's just, as with anything, there's a lot of stuff you have to do there.
Abby: Yeah. Yeah I mean I think it's – I don't know it's pretty – I guess I would just say yes I mean that seems to make sense to me. I mean it really is about making it sort of understanding the meal plus raising money plus grant proposals equals a granting project. Like keeping it simple like that as a formula and then however people want to take that on. I don't know like yeah. I think it's just more like a style thing right too because recipes soup and the whole thing it's like you call it resources or How-To instead of recipes. Do you know what I mean? Yeah I don't know if anybody else has these thoughts about it.
Kristin: I'd like to speak a little bit about my experience with Sunday Soup.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: Yeah.
Kristin: I'm Kristin I participated in the Sunday Soup in Grand Rapids multiple times. I think the immediate benefits of having Sunday Soups anywhere is going to be an encouragement to artist and an encouragement to communities to support the arts and to have more faith in cooperatives. And I think it means it's inaptly difficult to keep up steam doing projects of your own or keeping energy for other people in their projects or both by yourself. So it's just a good time to meet and keep that energy going in a city. And I definitely received that from going to Sunday Soup even if I wasn't applying for a grant.
I think of a time I was needing to more just go and participate than receive the funds but now as in a different financial state I definitely do need the funds for doing projects even though I don't live in Grand Rapids anymore. Like I think the site is great also now because as being a person to have moved to a new place where there isn't a Sunday Soup I feel more encouraged to know how to start one going or to start one anywhere I now move, even though I've been to one and end up taking notes. It's nice to have it all in one place and be able to like have conversations going with other people. I think the first Sunday Soups of Grand Rapids were more so directed toward with a community mindset or community focused for the projects that received funding, but that's reflective of the town or of the city, and it's a very community based city which I think is great but it could be a versatile miniature grant too.
And it did start moving more towards individual artist projects kind of branching away from just community projects but kind of being community and the individual art. Sorry I'm not really explaining myself well. The Resograph project that was granted. The Miniature Man I think was a great transition from community based project grants to artist grants as it was an opportunity for artist to keep making. But I think it's I don't know I like how it was versatile and grants are often versatile. But I definitely think that it needs to be more inviting for an individual artists because if you're an artist up on the stage rooting for your project and it's a personal project for you to be able to make what you make and it's going against something that's going to benefit many different people that is a more of community mindset. It's kind of hard to get wind against that because somebody who wants to make you seem selfish and wanting to make your art one. It's a community outcome anyways when you're making your art. So that's some of my 10 cents I guess.
Abby: Yeah I mean I think that's an interesting question too because I like just to think about the Web site something that we wanted and that we hadn't done a very good job on our InCUBATE site is like sort of a catalog of all the different kinds of projects that we funded because it's not just about the form of meal it's about all this other kind of cultural activity that's happening locally that we're trying to support. I mean that's what we're really trying to highlight it's not the soup itself but its function is.
I don't know I feel sort of conflicted about that because I do totally feel really sympathetic to the idea that individual artist projects and individual artist brands are really hard to come by and they're deserving of support. I think also but to me it seems really exciting as well that this kind of community grant then goes towards not necessarily but I guess it does tend to do that about like sort of projects that had forward another way.
Kristin: Yeah.
Abby: But it's like kind of there isn't to me when I look at the kind of funny landscape it feels like the kinds of the projects that are about community engagement that are perhaps more experimental in nature but also they don't have very many that used to get funded too. So I guess it feels like I like the idea of kind of forum for an individual artist practice to be in conversation with a community based practice and that I would hope, and I don't know how to facilitate this more but sort of just have a conversation about how those different projects operate.
Because I know that somebody came to our soup once and they had to critique that it felt like we didn't have an open conversation about who gets the grant it was more just that person presents and then there was a voting process. Whereas in most granting panels there's a long conversation about what deserves that grant for what particular reason, what's come before and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know.
Kristin: There's just a certain energy though that can't be replaced when receiving the grant right after presenting.
Abby: I'm sorry say that again.
Kristin: I think I'm receiving the grant right after experiencing the proposals and then cooperatively whoever exists inside that room that they're voting there's a certain energy inside that room that is encouraging for a community or for cooperatives so. Immediate results are good sometimes too for the next meeting or for people to come back again.
Abby: So Kate is saying on the text that Philly Steak was set in a way that encouraged groups over individual artist practices. Is she on a talking chat? Are you on their Kate?
Scott: Kate I think is on the talking chat.
Kate: Oh hey. It was interesting
Abby: Hi.
Kate: Sorry I'm on Basekamp. Yeah what I should say like it was interesting to [inaudible 43:04] of people that individually state their – and I don't know that this was my desire but this was the whole one and it be very focused on TV and less on art practices. So the whole way it was setup was sort of – I wouldn't say discouraged but to your studio practice because I wanted the kind of proposals that what were brought out and the language such that it wasn't promoted to people like that.
So it's interesting to me that's what cooking is saying because like in Philly it was sort of like nobody wants that. And I always say one of my favorite things that about this whole network is that I think every other really like the flavor of the city. It begin to say that it's so valuable as a model. But yeah it's interesting. I know that there are other people – like there are others that are much more sort of individual artist brands that like one of [inaudible 44:18] studio types of people and their materials for that. Will that work?
Abby: Yeah. Yes.
Kate: It's all in French it's very confusing.
Abby: It's all in French.
Kate: I'm on a French computer.
Abby: Oh okay.
Scott: Arianna mentioned in the chat earlier that they had a system that they instituted in for one to kind of keep the Tierney of friends from overcoming everything. So maybe Arianna can talk a little bit about what we were talking about the changes they made to the voting and stuff.
Arianna: Okay.
Scott: Is that cool?
Arianna: Can you guys hear me?
Scott: Yep.
Arianna: Okay. So our first round we had it was very obvious that the person who brought the most friends won. And because we had this idea that we really wanted it to be people discussing what mattered to them like as a group. The people who were there for the dinner we started doing this as where we have all the proposals which was up to 10 be voted on in the first round and we narrowed it down to just three for the second round which would make it sort of virtually impossible for one person to bring so many friends that they would be able to staff both rounds of voting and that's helped a lot. Although I think that there's sad things that happened because of that too. But it seems like it worked better than – it's more beneficial than it is sad.
Scott: Thanks. It almost seems like – yeah I mean it's a strange problem to have to deal with because in a sense if people are doing that it's kind of like hey guys you don't want to become draconian and say "Hey you're disqualified for being jerky." We're kind of going against the spirit of bonding or whatever.
Abby: It seems like the way that that model is effective is because each proposal has a constituency and it brings in people so it's always refilling itself [inaudible 47:03] people.
Kate: I wonder if that isn't more of an issue in smaller cities than larger ones. Because like we had that at Minneapolis with the first Minneapolis Soup which is sort of like people really, really [inaudible 47:19] there were business people that stuffed the ballot box by a landslide and they're really not just about it. And then they're like you didn't really follow-up with their projects and there'll like all this stuff. But like in Minneapolis [breaking up] artists that don't necessarily know each other anyway. I don't know. And like I imagine that Portland is similar like turning small really relatively speaking.
Abby: Yeah.
Kate: But I don't know it's like it didn't happen to get [inaudible 48:05] thinking about it the first time that it caused problems. And I think people sort of worked it out that they would just like vote on the project that they last [inaudible 48:17]. I don't know it's kind of interesting.
Abby: Yeah every time we have a dinner it's really obvious who the constituents are for each application. So it always starts out with people being really sure who they're going to vote for and very few people come just to see what's there. Very few people come without having some sense of who they would be voting for.
Scott: You know when we talked, Kate and everybody else who was at that chat like weeks and weeks ago or months ago, when talked with Brooklyn Feast we also talked about Sunday Soup because we all obviously – because they make it really obvious that this is where, maybe it wasn't obvious to everyone sorry whoever wasn't there, but to everyone that was there it was super obvious that it was very clear that this was part of where – this is really where that sort of a process started. But we talked a lot about the particularities of their process.
And like one of the things that really became a sticking spot was like literally how the proposals were. I mean I think, sorry to clarify, how the proposals were actually setup in the first place had a lot to do with – it sort of set the game, the playing field because proposals were in the help situation where they were just like scads of people proposals were selected ahead of time and those are kind of things that were weeded out. And we really talked about how it was then put to a vote democratic style after that. But then we also discussed whether it was even – whether it made sense at all to actually even [inaudible 50:31] it was going to be a selection process at the beginning if you know what I mean. And I was kind of curious if anyone else has dealt with that issue or is that pretty much [inaudible 50:41]?
Teresa: Hey Scott its Teresa. We thought a lot about that and we basically decided as a group to choose these first commissions that came in so that we did not have anything to do with [inaudible 51:00]. We didn't want to think about the conversation that does come up when you select whether or not fair, whether or not people feel like they're given an opportunity and we really want to keep [inaudible 51:15]. So we accept the first…
Kate: [Inaudible 51:24].
Teresa: Can you guys hear?
Scott: Yeah it is a little staticky but I think that's [inaudible 51:32]. We'll just have to deal with it that's just the way it is.
Kate: In Brooklyn when they, and I can speak for them because I know what their process is even though none of them are here tonight, they kind of do it in a – I think they throw out some speakers – but I sort of try and get a good mix of very different kinds of proposals and ones that they feel would be successful project. Like they're not really happy with that. I mean it's not like [inaudible 52:07] but it's also like what do you do when you're getting toward the – I think even like the first Philly Steak we had 20 almost 30 project proposals. And it was just like totally overwhelming you can't deal with that much information.
Scott: Yeah I mean…
Kate: But what do you do in a limit then?
Female: And then the issue comes up are we privileging those who have better access to the internet that basically have you put a call out. I think we did 15 last time when we were talking.
Abby: Yeah. I mean I think that's when I went down to Baltimore that came out that seemed like a big question for them and I actually don't know how they've been doing it lately but it's like they were reaching out to people who specifically wouldn't know or be initiated into like this process. And so some place like a free after school program perhaps wouldn't know that this art collective was giving these big dinners at Red Emma's Bookstore that they could potentially get a couple of hundred dollars. But at the same time yeah it was kind of strange because you could vote for everybody to get money so basically they were curating who was going to have access to that event. So I don't know. It was really her team also liked that it was bringing up a lot of questions for them.
Teresa: This is Teresa again. I'd also like to mention our organizing process was just basically made of all strangers. We'd give like a call to organizers [inaudible 54:08] when we started and [inaudible 54:09] of that yet. And so we actually have a group of individuals that represent groups of people that wouldn't necessarily come together to an event. And when we do our call most people do their outreach I think that it's really helpful that our entire audience in that way [inaudible 54:28].
Kate: We also had two fellow line dancing proposals which were really odd I don't think that's ever happened before.
Abby: Well I guess it'll be good to hear from the other soup projects too about whether or not since we all do have individual web presence and particular ways of organizing and ways of reaching out to our networks like how the Web site, is the Web site a repository so that just people that are not involved with these projects can see all this activity or does it feel like it has some, I don't know, does it feel useful to you kind of centralized in this way? Especially because we all have really different ideas about what this project is about too so.
Brice: Quickly, one way that it's been very useful for Grand Rapids is having all of you out there actually gives our project a little bit more cache with the local community. Like it makes it easier to illustrate that this isn't our crackpot idea and we're asking for your money to fund our projects. I think that explaining it like ourselves as a note in the context of wider network is really, really helped other people to kind of instantly grasp what we were trying to do. So that's often helpful for all these meetings in Grand Rapids.
Michele: This is Michele and I guess we're pretty new to this. I mean our public meals has grown out of TV show, cooking TV show that I used to do in my house. And I got kind of burned out from that and it's a response to living. I mean that was in a response to living in such a rural place that's really not that great of restaurants. And so we started just wanting to do things for each other, cook food and really invite new people into eat with us and try to keep growing community in that way. And so we just done our first local table it was called in the fall where we asked people to bring in food, to donate food and me and my friend Angie and a group of other people who volunteered team up with a menu that was specifically tailored to that.
So we're still really interested in this idea of cooking and this idea of gathering people together but because I'm friends with some people in Portland and I met everybody out there last spring I started thinking about ways that we can kind of change it so that it actually has a bigger impact other than – I mean there is a great impact when you get people together and we do talk about work and we talk about what's going on with kind of local political issues and things like that but I think – so I'm actually I think the Web site is useful. I think this conversation is really useful because I'm in this point where we haven't decided how we have people present their projects or if we invite them or how we vote on them. And I'm aware of some of the issues that other areas have had.
So I think the Web site if it allows for even more communication about how those things are, how things are working out, or how different groups are doing things differently I think that's actually really helpful. So that's what I was looking for when I've been meaning to put our site up there and today I just went on and was looking. And I think that's one of the things that we're really interested in before we jump into having our next meal in January how we're going to handle that.
Scott: Cool. I was wondering if Narisa is still there if she wanted to kind of tell us how Feast in Boston works. Well maybe she's not still there.
Narisa: Hey.
Scott: Hey.
Narisa: Can you hear me guys?
Scott: Yeah I can hear you.
Narisa: Sorry I actually ran out for a few minutes I was supposed to meet someone so I kind of missed a chunk of this and just jumped backed on a minute ago. But if you want to – what did you want me to talk about a little more? Sorry I just…
Scott: Everyone's sort of just been kind of explaining how things how it works in their own specific context and bringing up stuff that works, stuff that we're still trying to figure out how to do better and things like that. So I just figured since you're someone else who is doing a project like this you could give us a little nugget to talk.
Narisa: There's four of us there kind of organizing it and myself and one other graphic designers and the two others are more involved in machine projects around Boston and we got together. And after hearing about the Feast in Brooklyn they went down and visited it, this is really amazing, we've heard about it in other cities, did some research and we had our first one here. And we've had three so far and the last one was definitely successful. We reached out to I think six local farms and they got really into it and they donated all of the food. Local breweries have been working with us and donating beer for the night.
So it's become this really kind of feud oriented event along with like an artist kind of excited. And I think we're trying to kind of figure out like where that line is. Some people come just for the food and some people are there just for the projects. And we want to make sure that it's for both. We the first couple where about 15 people, and the most recent one was a little over 100, and that atmosphere was really exciting; there was a lot of enthusiasm. And I think one of the hardest things for us is finding enough people to – or people have been really responsive to sending in proposals. We just need to find like a best way to more like ask for proposals. We have posters, we go to different like events and talk about feast but we want to make sure that we connect to as many people as possible in Boston. And we don't want to grow it so big that we can't handle it either. But I don't know.
Scott: Right. That's the other tricky thing that if you grow and let everyone know then not all those people that you told are going to get a grant in the end. I think we were talking about this a little bit earlier about how to sort of solicit people who might not be the most internet savvy or people who just haven't heard about this project how to get them kind of to submit something to it. And we were talking about how a student in Baltimore does it which is by selecting three specific like targeting groups and projects each time they do it and having it stay focused on just those three and entering others, like kind of a [inaudible 1:03:02] fee among the types of projects that are represented. But they're also trying to like get outside of just people they know already. I forget what else I was going to say.
Narisa: Yeah and most of our products have been focusing on something community related even if there are projects and that gives back to the community.
Scott: Right.
Narisa: So they've gone from just like a mural and kind of an art piece to things that are like more science and things that are just – we want to kind of keep it focused on that. I don't know if that is similar for all of you guys or some of it is more personal projects.
Scott: Right. Well when we did it here in Chicago it was sort of defecto for the most part the projects that ended up winning were sort of like community based collective branded sorts of projects and less individual artists projects. Although we did give out grants to individual arts projects. It was really ever like giving school money so that they could buy paint to help them finish their painting or something that they could eventually sell. So I think that the nature of the event sort of skews towards these kinds of art and show practices versus kind of more traditional individual arts that you practice. I mean we talked about a that a little bit earlier to Chris and was kind of bringing up this point as well. So yeah it's interesting [inaudible 1:04:46] about between all those different things but how many proposals have you had each time you've done it?
Narisa: Last time we had six and I think five each prior time. We were also wondering like if we start – does anyone get more proposals and have to turn them away or get down. Like do they find out having too many is a problem?
Scott: We never did in Chicago but it sounded like that has been a problem for Feast in Brooklyn before and I think Kate was saying that the way they dealt with it was just by taking the first 10.
Kate: Yeah we got nearly 30 at the first [inaudible 1:05:35] which was crazy. But yeah we put the first [inaudible 1:05:39] it was still too many proposals. But yea it's really hard because I think in Brooklyn are they collected 32 and it's just way too much information for people to properly – so you don't even know what you're voting for.
Kristin: We send some of the Grand Rapids.
Kate: Yeah we'll send you some artist no worries.
Brice: So if you guys were to imagine that a local, oh I don't know art economy could be completely sustained by Soup Granting events, how many of them would you have to do and how would you do it differently or would you just say that's just so impossible that it's really not the point for us thinking about it part of the point.
Kate: I think we have seven other ones.
[Audio breaking up]
Brice: Yeah totally. It would have to turn it into someone's job you know and that's always the sticky question like when does running one of these projects stop being a volunteer thing that you do for fun because it helps you get the answers to some questions that you've had as maybe a person that works in our administration or is about to or when does it stop being that or when does it start being like a serious obligation like other people rely on in which in fact it would help for it to be a job for you that you got paid to divert time to and energy and everything.
It's like this tricky transition that seems like having sort of people less for us here in Chicago but more for places where like over 100 people show up that's like talking to me to think about cooking through and orchestrating this meal for over 100 people. Because when we did it in Chicago the most people we ever had that could just even literally fit into our spaces like 40 and that kind of just made us crazy. And that many people we just didn't know how to handle it because we weren't the best at like running a restaurant basically. So yeah that's the dilemma I guess. Sorry I don't have an answer.
Scott: That's totally cool yeah. I mean I'm just curious because that's – I mean the soup method or project method [inaudible 1:08:43] proposal itself. I mean it's not really one you would propose at a Sunday Soup but…
Abby: Yeah. I don't know I mean I guess I just always think about it as if Sunday Soup is just like one like marker in the public conversation about what would be a supportive infrastructure for artist. Because I don't really see just as Brice said there's so much energy that goes into making these things happen and everybody bringing all these bringing like people together and reaching out to the correct people and all that. And trying to create I don't know as much diversity in your event as possible and all that kind of stuff.
Like Sunday Soup to me does not seem to be the answer to any of those things but it does seem like a way to create a space to have a kind of active engagement with those questions. So I guess for me what would feel really awesome is not just that that Sunday Soup replicates itself and continues to replicate itself because I think that it seems like really accessible and people are doing really amazing things with it, but also that other projects kind of can grow out of it and be tested out. Different kinds of fundraising initiatives like different kind of ways of getting together and supporting each other. And I guess I don't know, again, like I don't have an answer for that but I really don't think that – like I think it's awesome to get together and cook these meals with people, but then if you get burnt out then hand it over to someone else or just like try a different way of solving the same problem which is kind of a collective problem.
Female: The partnering with local breweries and local farms seems like a good answer to all sorts of things compared to the energy that it takes to put on things. I might be doing that like every other week, or not every other week but every other session of the soup event.
Scott: Great. Good point. And Abby and Brice I don't know if it's the time to talk about that now but just sense you mentioned it again maybe I at least want to bookmark it for a little bit later. I really like to hear at some point about what that transition is like for you guys going from a group that was based in a space to a group that's really not geo located at all. I mean you're somewhere.
Abby: Yeah. But you know I just exist on the internet.
Scott: Right. Exactly you're virtual. But I mean like where you don't have a space anymore. Yeah but you live in different cities and you still operate together, at least for the time being, and potentially in the foreseeable future. And I guess it's an interesting transition that I know a number of people have gone through some successfully and some not successfully.
Brice: Right.
Scott: And we've be sort of quasi going through it ourselves in a way, in different ways. But I'd be interested to hear about that because I know it can relate to many other things that you're involved in but I think it can also relate to the Sunday Soup thing since like you said you guys have kind of stopped doing this.
Abby: Yeah.
Brice: Right. Well one thing is Abby and I both live in Chicago she's just in Milwaukee for the weekend that's confusing.
Scott: Oh yeah it kind of was for a sec. I was like hey are you in Milwaukee.
Abby: Yes. No I don't live in Milwaukee no I just…
Brice: And so since this summer Abby and I have actually been working at the same nonprofit gallery and press it's going to close at the end of the month so none of us will be working there anymore. But on the point of like this thing about Sunday soup not being the answer to everything but maybe like a training ground for people eventually move into our admin jobs or to have other jobs in the control section and bring the kind of values and lessons they've learned with them doing these few base microgramming projects with them as they do. I feel like that was true for us in our jobs at this gallery that we've been working at.
We invented a process of planning this CSA Art Fundraiser that Abby's going to do at another gallery in town now. But I feel like in all the conversations we had running up to planning doing that thing they were all sort of like all the language we were using were like languages that we've learned in doing Sunday Soup and the values that we sort of realized we shared by doing Sunday Soup. So I think even if these meals don't solve like the art echo system problems of the cities in which they're located they can hopefully give the people that run them the tools to help solve those problems that makes them move onto other sort of professional jobs. So that's maybe one way to answer the question of how we work together now that we don't have the space like literally work together as a job.
Scott: Brice have you guys – maybe you guys should add like an arts administration placement section to the Web site.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: Like try to infiltrate all arts administrations with soupers. Yeah sorry. I just talked I accidentally Abby I didn't hear what you said.
Abby: Oh I said we're going to help other people get jobs.
Scott: Yeah, yeah totally.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: I mean like…
Brice: I don't know if we can get people jobs but actually this idea of like having people on the inside all over the place like people who are part of like Free Masons or something. This other thing that we started planning working together at this gallery arts administration conference that is most likely going to be happening next October hopefully gathering like minded people I guess like other people who run these projects together as a conference on like radical arts administration or like unconventional arts administration and finding who all those people are around the US and bringing them together in one place. And then just sort of all leaving and going back again, but all of a sudden having this sort of like professional network of people that is sort of called into existence or sort of recognized by having a kind of conference like this too. So I think that's another way to kind of work together with people in different physical spaces but who also share similar values and principles with us as well.
Abby: Yeah because I think that like I wouldn't have known that there was this like – I feel like a really wide network of artists that are working collectively that are doing socially engaged practices. And all of those things are like if we hadn't started just open the space and just been like what's out there. And Sunday Soup really enabled a kind of larger understanding of it or a picture of like how people are working. And so I don't know in that sense like I think we're really interested in creating resources so that people like us don't have to just ram at the wheel all the time or thinking through the idea of like, okay here's some alternate fundraising projects that have already happened that you can learn from and then make a better model.
Here's another way that somebody else organized the residency program in their home. Here's like the history of artist run basis like in Philadelphia or in Chicago or in Minneapolis. Just so that because it feels like when you have all this energy to start these projects you're just like, yes I'm doing the most important thing in the world, which is a really awesome energy to have and I feel like we had it when we started Soup. But I think also like to think about what those next steps are going to be as we like want to hold the same ethic that we started with but really take stock of like what our professional groups are going to be and be like realistic about like that we need to make money just to support ourselves or just sort of thinking through that process.
And so, yeah as Brice said, we're going to be doing a conference next October it's going to happen through us. It's doing that thing where it's about how do you learn your local history, what are some pragmatic strategies that people are applying to artist run spaces, and/or like unconventional nonprofits and how can we, yeah, like make more visible that network of people and also how can we create mentoring structures so that like generationally there's like a learning process happening so that it's not just these things popup and then they fade away, which is the whole sustainability thing. Like I don't really care I'm really happy that I'm not doing soup anymore I was really happy to do it, and I might do it again in the future, but it's like if there is a kind of continued conversation through all these different passageways or whatever, I don't know, if that feels good.
And I think InCUBATE had this really intense flurry of activity for the first three years that we were doing it because we were all in grad school, and then we're like okay well what's the next step? Like we were very particular about saying this is a nonprofit this is about a learning process for us. And then how do we be realistic about where this is going to go like we didn't want to throw rent parties every month or we couldn't run this residency program where we had somebody new coming into town that we would have to facilitate a project for no money. All that stuff which was so awesome and great just like felt like we needed to take a break from it and be honest about that. And respond to our own particular living situations and needs and career and all that stuff. So yeah so I don't know we're trying to figure it out basically.
Scott: Yeah I think basically 90% of what you just said is something that's like I think as you said an ongoing interest that we share.
Abby: It looks like on the text chat too there's a question about a nationwide soup grid or a nationwide day of getting together or like a soup summit or something. And I guess that seems like a good thing to discuss if anybody is interested in doing that like if that sounds like a good thing to do.
Scott: Like that one soup every so often would be something where you would just every soup instance would contribute the funds that they make on like pick to pay hollow line and everyone would get some kind of, I don't know, unrateable vote.
Abby: Yeah totally I'd be into that.
Brice: Yeah. Like what would be some other things that could be – oh yeah Stephen's like soup should be internationalist. And it kind of is there are soups in Italy and there's one that one worked in New Castle for awhile and there's one in Cev and Ukraine, and there's been a few one off events in other places in Eastern Europe that have been helped out a lot by Roman, one of our members whose been traveling around a lot there. But I'd be kind of curious to hear what some other ideas for like a national or like an international day where everyone sort of hosted a meal. Some other things that we could do like aside from like I'll pool the money from every single place and give it away to one project somewhere and everybody in every place puts on like the same international proposals, or what other stuff could be done to make it more interesting to make it more visible, to make it more like sort of dynamic and democratic and all that sort of stuff? I'd be curious to like brainstorm.
Kate: I was sort of thinking about the like celebrity call in telethon as soon as you started talking about this where you got like towards [inaudible 1:22:28]. I don't think this was a good idea but we're having this national day of [inaudible 1:23:37] and everybody's going to talk to celebrities on like the telethon. But I think it would be really interesting to the way like links artist project nationwide or international even like we're all doing it on one day.
Scott: Yeah you really have to pass it by anyone. I men except just the other soupers to call in international soup day just to sort of say it. Secondly I think the process that we were talking about before that's come up in bits and pieces past chat and this chat be of the utmost importance. Because the way that it's structured right now there's a lot of leeway because each instance they setup their won structure. And there's a lot of wiggle room because the experimentation is firewalled locally. But if it's something that everyone involved is sharing. And somehow in order to experiment with the structure of it you have to do it a number of times. If it was so periodic say once a year or twice a year or something like that I think the meaning that that carries out seems to speak for everyone and it may have wide implications. It looks like I'm stopping.
Brice: And just phrased firewall locally it's very net savvy of you.
Female: I think it would be interesting too if every program or city had one project that's representative and then one project that's selected I feel like there would be the pulling together that would happen that would be taking the web further as far as making us one group.
Scott: Right.
Abby: Or in that sense.
Kate: It'll sort be like the Olympics.
Abby: Yeah. So like each group would nominate a representational body like our project, like a representation project of that group.
Female: Yeah.
Scott: Say like a delegation.
Abby: Yeah maybe we should do it at this topic.
Scott: Guys I think that the Web site if you want to prepare for this George could setup, if you haven't already in a way that's not publically linkable, setup some kind of a forum just to tease out these discussions in a way that can be a little more asynchronous so people can sort of take their time thinking about different points and really build a kind of – I don't know if you actually want to build a consensus to decide how something like that could be setup, but at the very least that talking it out. I forget exactly who was saying it, maybe it was Kristin, but one way or the other it was about how it is dealt with before voting for each project there was like a really talking about together. I think the decision about soup has an overall project.
At the moment like I said before it really at this point are kind of preventive from really happening in an internationalist way because it's a bunch of localized events that are very loosely affiliated. But if in no other instance besides this one periodic international soup mix or whatever or soup-a-bowl in that instance then there is a kind of, not necessarily viable, but like a potential – oh I don't know there's some kind of power structure there where there's some kind of soft organization going on. So I guess my point is ultimately I guess it's whoever's building a Web site. I'm kind of going all over the place here because I'm getting interrupted, but basically my point is if there was some way to have a ongoing conversation about these very specific things for if nothing else for an instance of that kind of just every so often grouping event then I think that would be a really great thing to host on a site.
Brice: Yeah I think so too because it was only released last week or the week before last where Abby and I sat down and like these are remaining sort of like sister projects that we weren't aware of yet. And we haven't talked to everyone that runs a project like this. We don't even know the names of some of the people who do these things. So it would absolutely be super helpful to like all get together and talk about this stuff sometime. And we should throw out the number which are or have been 37 different projects like this happening in the US and in Eastern/Western Europe. So that's like the kind of amazing number that's sprouted up in the past a couple of years of people doing this kind of stuff which is to me one of the most awesome things to be able to like modify in that number of 37. So yeah. What's going on in the chat right now?
Scott: Oh I was just responding to one thing that George had said.
Brice: Oh okay tech question.
Scott: In fact you might remember that I brought up the same point during the We Want More Conference and I think there was some support during the conference but it really didn't kind of work out that way. But I didn't actually want to send it to a tech discussion because, I don't know, I'm only really interested in tech by the way when it serves some other need. And yeah like what Abigail said exactly like stuff gets lost in your Inbox. It's been quite awhile since we've talked with people – yeah George cool. But you know about this particular issue but it was a huge concern for us for the longest time.
Most of you on this chat know that we have posted a number of mailing lists and I've gone over this question again and again yet we used to use forums. And we also had done experimentation specifically parents have done this with us and other people have done this experiments integrating forms and mailing list so every time you have a mailing post it also goes into a correct kind of – oh I don't k now order in a forum so that you have discussions. And that seems to be very helpful because about half the people ask still, which is infinitely weird to me because technology keeps changing, like half o you guys are on your iPhone still prefer email stuff because it's just a tried and true or something that you do or you do it on the go.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: And other people really just hate getting stuff in their Inbox and really just delete it as soon as it's there they don't care and really prefer to spend their time doing the stuff online, whether it's in a forum or in some kind of an IRC chat or whatever. Yeah Greg right exactly. So I mean I think the thing is for people that like email often they have their laptops or whatever on the train or on the plane or wherever they're in some remote area where they're not really at home all the time. And it's helpful for them because they think through their thoughts, they can type it all out – and I'm almost done with this by the way guys – and send it off in this kind of hairdryer or whatever that takes a little while for each person to think out their position.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: Anyway I guess forums are very similar but I guess my point is like people who like forums more are people who have day jobs where they're online all the time.
Abby: Yeah.
Scott: Or who have a lot of free time and they're just constantly connected to a laptop or something. Yeah exactly like it's part of something you always do George. Yeah exactly. But like if they're tied then it sort of takes care of everybody that has a computer anyway not everybody.
Abby: Yeah. I mean yeah I don't know. I understand that obviously there's all these – I'm totally not tech savvy at all nor do I spend a lot of time on the internet – but email seems to work really like seem much more accessible to people. And I don't know yeah. But I like the idea of forums because I feel like I'm saying to myself that check-in notice particular place and read a bunch of thoughts. And it's not yeah it doesn't feel like I would get confused if it was all integrated with my work email, my InCUBATE email and personal stuff and all that kind of thing. So I'm for forums. I'm on the forum team.
Brice: Me too it's on the forum, team forum even though I obsessively label and sort and cleanout my Inbox the less of that stuff the better.
Abby: Yeah cool.
Scott: So guys we have four minutes left until we end this generally. Did anybody have any other – I guess I was just thinking if anybody had any burning things that they wanted to bring out to bookmark for next time or to start a conversation or to add?
Female: How are you guys coming?
Kate: I had one. The one thing that soon came up in Philly is that we [inaudible 1:34:07] by doing an event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And Teresa I don't think we actually polled aggressively group this because we were like so we didn't want to get into it necessarily, but it was a very interesting moment of sort of like would that be part of the magnet or are we working with the big [inaudible 1:34:33] or are we doing them. I brought up this whole really interesting tandem forum of sort of like where are we situated in sort of artworld. Yeah and they won't let you in the gallery there. But like it was just a very interesting sort of collection of like how we do we respond to that and what do we want to do and sort of led us back to that question that Abigail was talking a lot about [inaudible 1:35:07] and stuff like that so we immediately have a art institution and kind of wanting to make the public program by the way. It was interesting.
Scott: It depends if you have similarities.
Kate: It killed the idea by the way.
Scott: I was redundant there but it depends on if you have somehow that you think who's sort of an inside – like someone who's on the inside to be an ally. Because I think Brice you guys were just talking about is that part of what you're interested in is this process of instituting within art administrative systems.
Brice: Exactly infiltrate.
Scott: So I wanted to mention this one thing. I typed it in the chat but nobody responded and if you can like hear over the raspberries here. And I'll just read this out so that I don't lose my train of thought and take too long because we have one minute. I mentioned earlier that part of that Plausible Art System that recipe book for ways of world making or whatever, we haven't actually entitled it that but that's how we often refer to it to publish next year and it would be really great if you would – I mean we intend all of these weekly guests to be part of this publication if we didn't already make that obviously, but since the soup network is like so many people it'll be often if you guys would consider talking about this amongst yourselves when you do about contributing a recipe section for that publication.
Abby: Yeah.
Brice: Yeah totally.
Abby: It sounds great to me.
Brice: Yeah. That would be awesome right. I would just wanted to know how we can contribute that thing?
Scott: It sort of makes a lot of sense in least in like overly silly way but it could be really also helpful too because…
Brice: Yeah.
Abby: Yeah for sure.
Brice: Yeah that would be great.
Scott: And Narisa I have no idea seriously it was just a thought that Stephen and I were just sort of chatting about on another channel so I thought I'd bring it up while we're all listening.
Abby: Cool.
Brice: Well thanks for letting us talk about this everyone and thanks to everyone who joined us and kind of shared about their own projects. It was really nice to hear from everyone.
George: Can I say one last thing about the site?
Abby: Yeah.
George: So most people who signup I try to follow-up in person to see if they need any help. I haven't done that recently but I'm way up for helping in any way adding your projects in your proposals and racing to the site. I'm not afraid of data entry if you want to put some of that on me. I'm really excited about seeing all the content so I'm here to help if there's any problems. And I'll stick my emails in the chat.
Abby: Thanks George.
Scott: Awesome George. Who has closing music or should I just put on something.
Brice: Maybe some more raspberries.
Scott: Hey Parker can you play some more raspberries for us. Bye everybody see you next time.
Brice: Bye.
Week 34: Eating in Public
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma about the Hawaii-based artist collective ‘Eating In Public’.
Since 2003, Eating in Public has, among other projects, engaged in ‘remakng the commons’. Drawing on the example of the 17th century Diggers, the group began planting papaya seedlings on public land – ‘public’ land, not ‘common’ land. As they explain, ‘in doing so, we broke the existing laws of the state that delineate this space as “public” and thereby set the terms for its use. Our act has two major purposes: one is to grow and share food; the other is to problematize the concept of “public” within public space.’ In a scrupulously well-documented and lively narrative, the group describes the challenges to their attempts at ‘commoning’ in a society where every legal provision has been made to prevent it. The first papaya crop was eventually uprooted before the trees bore fruit, and the land fenced off. The group has subsequently shifted its strategy to another commons: the Internet, where they have set up FreeBay, an on-line service something like eBay, with the notable exception that everything is free – including papaya seedlings.
Nomoola is thus explicitly interested in promoting — and testing the plausibility of — a truly “free world”, something which Plausible Artworlds has also been examining over the past six months. “Free” as in freewheeling. Free, certainly, from asking the powers that be for ‘permission’ to develop a growing chain of free stores where anyone and everyone can leave or take goods. Free as in freedom — pointing to those common spaces tolerably free from the logic of capital, in the very midst of capitalist society itself.
Week 26: Art Work
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Salem Collo-Julin, one of the founders of Art Work.
Artwork is “a national conversation about art, labor, and economics” — a conversation that takes the form of a website and a free, 40-page newspaper comprised of writings and images from artists, activists, writers, critics, and others on the topic of working within toady’s depressed economies and how that impacts artistic process, compensation and artistic property. Freely downloadable, the newspaper “asks us all to consider how to use this moment to do several things: to work for better compensation, to get opportunities to make art in diverse and challenging settings, and to guide art attitudes and institutions, on all levels, in more resilient directions. It is also an examination of the power that commercial practices continue to wield and the adverse effects this has had on artists, education, and our collective creative capacity.”
Art Work was conceived and produced by Temporary Services, an Illinois-based group formed in 1998, which, over the years has produced a wide variety of exhibitions, events, projects, and publications.
http://www.temporaryservices.org/
Temporary Services, along with the help of SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, have distributed over 10,000 copies of Art Work internationally since its initial publication in November 2009. Recipients of these free copies have been encouraged to create their own programming using the themes in Art Work as a starting point. Many of the events, talks, and exhibitions that have resulted are available to view at http://www.artandwork.us/category/events/
As well as looking closely at the Art Work project and the work of Temporary Services that produced it, tonight’s conversation may be a good occasion to touch on a phenomenon that appears recurrent amongst “plausible artworlds” — that is, their propensity to engender or fructify other artworlds. This would seem to raise a series of further questions: What are plausible artworlds’ mode of reproduction? What kind of “family resemblance” can be observed? Is there a lineal — or even patrilineal or matrilineal — relationship between Temporary Services and Art Work, amongst other examples? Or is the relationship not more “avuncular” — introducing a shift, like the knight’s move in chess — meaning that Art Work might better be seen as Temporary Services’s nephew?
Transcription
Week 26: Art Work
(Opening greetings and chatters)
[Scott]: Hey Salem, can you hear us okay?
[Salem]: Yeah. You're a little soft. I'm going to try and bring you up. Hey everybody, like always, those of you that are on this all the time knows that if you're not talking mute on your call which will help everybody here. And then, if you want to talk you can just butt in and text on the chat and let us know.
[Scott]: Awesome. Yeah. So uh, we're really psyched to talk with Salem this week about the Art Work publication. A national conversation about art labor and economics. And we have a ton of copies here. But Salem, you'll actually be slightly, I'm not really sure what to know that we have them stuck in storage. At a certain point in the conversation, I'm going to run and dig them out because I didn't realize that happened two nights ago. So, um, so yeah, we actually have a bunch of copies here that we'll pass out to everybody. At least before or somewhere in the middle before you leave. But in any case, yeah, we're really interested in this and really interested in this network of events that have taken place around this single publication that a bunch of people have contributed too.
So, I thought it might be good, rather than giving a long introduction, to just ask you to describe the publication a little bit, Salem? If you're down with that? Oops, can you hear me? Oh no! Did I drop Salem (laughing)? I think so, okay, hold on a second.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Yeah we'll just wait for Salem. (Laughter, reading text) "Cat pulled the plug, be back on in a second" (laughing). Okay, we'll try here back as soon as her computer gets back up and running. Its real world stuff, cats.
Okay, yeah, for everybody who wasn't in the chat earlier on, here's the link to the Art Work publication website. You can at least browse it while we're waiting for Salem to get back online.
And, uh, if you didn't catch a link where we sort of reiterate some of what's on that site and sort of describe a little bit about how we think it fits into the Plausible Artworlds or sort of embodies some of that, there's this.
And, there she is...
(Background noises)
[Salem]: Okay, I'm back.
[Scott]: So, let's reintroduce Salem again (laughing). That was pretty awesome. So if you don't mind if I share this Salem.
[Salem]: Yeah, please.
[Scott]: (Reading text) "Cat pulled the plug, be back on in a second bwahahaha". So yeah, this is good times. We have two cats here too but just not in the front space.
So yeah, so we're welcoming Salem from, who is part of a group called Temporary Services based in Chicago. Also part of a lot of other initiatives. Temporary Services and Salem are responsible for instigating the Art Work publication, which I've just sent you guys some links too, and which has sprung up conversations about art and economics all over the country. Mostly in the US, right Salem?
[Salem]: Yeah, it's mostly in the US, but in the first couple of months that it was out into the world it was brought over to a small annual of sorts in Amsterdam. So, it's been elsewhere in Europe, um, trying to get it to some people in Australia and Asia as well. Um, but the, we'll talk about it in a second, the contributors are from the US and Puerto Rico and we, along with Spaces Gallery in Ohio, made a concerted effort to get copies into every single state as well as Puerto Rico when it came out. So, there have been free copies available everywhere since then.
[Scott]: Yeah. I don't know if you caught this part Salem, but you know that Spaces sent us like 500 copies and we have them but I'm going to take a break probably while we're conversing somewhere in the middle to go and dig them out of storage because we just did a push to do a big cleanup at BaseKamp and I didn't realize that they were among the things that got stuck into the storage loft. So, I'm going to have to dig them out. So, uh, sorry about that. But everyone here will have actual copies to give to you so you can check it out.
[Salem]: Cool.
[Scott]: But yeah, so I was just sailing, not sailing, SAYING that rather than giving a longer intro, I want to just kind of ask you, if you don't mind Salem since you've probably done this a lot over the course of the year, do just give us a brief intro to the project?
[Salem]: Sure. I am a member of temporary services, which many of you know is a group of three people; myself and Brett Bloom and Mark Fisher. We have been collaborating on public projects and publications since 1998. Mark and I are based in Chicago and Brett will be based in Denmark soon, he is currently and Albania, Illinois. We were approached by spaces gallery in Cleveland Ohio in their early part of the summer of last year to see if we would be able to participate in the exhibition series there and do something with them. We decided that from the support that they were offering us, it would be a really good thing if we could figure out some way to extend the money that we were getting for the exhibition and also the people support that they could offer us into something that would last longer than just that short exhibition time and that would reach farther than just the people who were able to go to Cleveland to see the show. And they were excited to work with us on that, and that's kind of the way the Temporary Services has worked in the last few years. We see it as one of the, one of the responsibilities of groups and individual artists that are in a position, when you start getting opportunities, it's our responsibility to share that in some way with other people whose work that we admire for one reason or another who are maybe not getting the same opportunity. And then we also have a love of collaboration, working with more than just our group of three. So that came into play in making us.
So the newspaper itself, I think all of you probably got the PowerPoint that I sent through scribed website. But if you're not seeing it, I think that someone can copy you are all in the chat box again. I think I can do that in a second. The first slide is what the cover of the newspaper itself looks like.
[Scott]: Um, say when we are actually looking for that right now. Give us just a second.
[Salem]: I'll copy and paste it.
[Scott]: Oh I see it. But if you have it, that's fine.
[Salem]: I have it. OK, there you go.
[Scott]: Thank you.
[Salem]: Um, so we have this love of publication. It's something that Temporary Services has done along with every project that we've done thus far. It started with just doing a real copy paste and Xerox kind of booklet that a company made our first exhibition at temporary services the space back in 1998. And we have just continue that tradition and we are doing, the three of us who are in the group now all had a background of doing zines, of doing independent publications. So self publishing is something that comes from far back for all of us. So making a publication like this isn't too far of a stretch for us. It's not too much of a challenge to think about. But since we've had a little bit of time and more support than normal, we really wanted to do something pretty spectacular. Um, also at the same time that we got this invitation we were in the middle of the economic situation that all of us in the states are in still, which is the depression, and it's affecting people in all fields. Not as people who make art, but people who do other kinds of creative things in their lives and people who work in other kinds of fields. I think all fields are creative, I think people are connected by the same problems and hopes and work really. So artists are not living in a vacuum and we're all affected by these kinds of economic situations. And one thing that was frustrating us a little bit about the situation in the states here is that we're carrying a lot of people, you know, quietly talking about the same experiences. You know, someone had planned on doing a publication and then the money ran out. Someone had been working for a couple of years for an institution like a college or something like that and their position was dependent upon some sort of grant funding and then their money ran out so suddenly they don't have a job. (Inaudible 0:12:15.0) and we would hear of people having these kinds of discussions quietly, you know. And the conclusions were always like "oh that's too bad, what can you due for work blah blah blah". We thought it might be a good time for people to start having these kinds of conversations publicly and for other people to really get a sense of others who work in the same ways that they do. And others who also (inaudible0:12:46.1) are artists who may be not be working in exactly the same spaces or using the same techniques that they do. We thought it might be good for all of us to gather together and compare notes basically and see what we could come up with out of that.
So if you will go to the next page of the presentation, for those of you who haven't used scribed the button that says "next page" on the bottom of it, especially not too hard. For some reason I thought I (inaudible0:13:27.9) but I don't. So great. All right, so, we set off on publishing this newspaper, you can see files of them at that space. Oh, Robert (inaudible 0:13:42.5) is calling me.
[Scott]: Yeah, um, hey guys if you get extra calls don't pick them up (laughing). It's too easy for anyone who gets dropped off the call to press the little green button. There's nothing we can do about it except for ignore it and add them back. So, in, it will add lots of confusion. So, sorry to interrupt, but its better than fracturing the conversation too much.
[Salem]: no, no, no, it's totally fine. And for those of you who haven't participated in a Skype chat like this before, it does get kind of frazzled and stuff like that. So I should say right off the bat that if you miss anything or have any questions feel free to type on the check box if you don't feel comfortable talking. If you want to talk, you can interrupt me. And if you would rather talk after this in a less texty setting or something like that, you can feel free to email me or really you can give me a call if you'd like. I try to sleep as much as possible but, you know, I will try to return your voice mail.
All right, so, back to the little presentation online here. So we set out to try to talk to as a diverse of a group of people as possible about this. And I know that means different things in different contexts. Diversity it means a lot of different things depending on the nature of the project that you were working on as well as who we were already working with and the kinds of things that you were setting up to do. For the oftenest context, really the biggest part of it was making sure that we replicated something that anybody is familiar with. Plausible Artworlds, the banner underneath which the Skype chat has happened, would be what you were familiar with. We are trying to get a lot of people to contribute to this publication that came from diverse parts of what we all refer to as the art world. You know, some of us within the group are academics as well as artists. We will teach sometimes for our money. Some of us, we kinda had a quick chat about that on the chat box before I started talking, some of us will do extra outside activities for our money and different kinds of capacities. Some jobs there may be vastly considered liked working class jobs vs. white collar jobs. We can talk later about whether or not those things really apply in this economy. For us it was really important to make sure that we got a diversity of kinds of artists as well. Here in Chicago there are some people who have commercial galleries and they're very involved and the local commercial gallery system who don't necessarily go to an event such as Chicago's (inaudible 0:16:47.6) where there is more of an experimental event, there's a lot of talking that goes on, where there is more of an artist academic (inaudible 0:16:58.2) is sometimes represented there. There's people produce street are here in Chicago who were not connected to any of the other places that have mentioned already. You know, they are not students, they are not teachers, they are not interested in some of the social justice components that of the work that they do. They're just putting their work into public spaces. So we find all of this variety of ways of expression of people who call themselves artists. We really wanted to make sure that if there was some, that there was some representation of a lot of different kinds of people. The biggest part of it was that we felt that, you know, in this economy everyone is affected. Every single job is affected. You know, and we all affect each other's work whether or not we want to. What Temporary Services does in some way indirectly affects what happens in a commercial gallery, which affects what happens in a nonprofit gallery. You know, I'm not trying to create a hierarchy there like they all affect each other at the same time. But I think you get the gist.
So there is 40 pages on paper, it's a variety of articles written by people of personal experiences as well as some history. There is a timeline that we edited together. A variety of different art projects and publications and writings about art and labor and different economic forms that we found. There are images from a lot of different kinds of people. And so it's a variety things. One of the things that we found that brought everything together is that when we first asked people to contribute in some way, people were interested and those who ended up contributing express some sort of worry about their personal situations. Quietly to us, like "just between you and I, it was great to write this piece and collaborate with you since I've been dealing with this stuff on my own and in the town I'm in for a while". And it was funny that those who couldn't contribute, because we… I fail to mention that in the beginning of the summer we had to go to (inaudible 0:19:50.0) in September so this was a really quick turnaround and we were publishing a 10,040 page paper and we had to get people to get things into us within two months, which was ridiculous.
[Scott]: Yeah, that's sick Salem.
[Salem]: Yeah, with that kind of a deadline it was kind of hard I think on our contributors. It makes me even prouder that people were able to bring so much stuff into it. But I did notice that the people who couldn't contribute at the beginning, and also in September, so that when we were just going through our final edit all of them had the same, you know, " I've got too much work. I've got this work and it had to take on this extra job. I have to take my kid that earlier than normal because they can't pay for the child care that I was able to pay for last year" so we heard those things over and over again. So it's really striking to us at the same people were in the same boat. Which is something that, I think from talking from people who lived through the great depression era as they called in the thirties here in the states, people will say "well everybody was poor. Everyone had a garden for the food, not just for the luxury of having an organic garden. We had to grow our own food because there was not enough to go around". And so you have that kind of sensibility and I think that part of having artwork was an attempt to normalize the situation, at least for ourselves to understand that we are all in the same boat and we all need to recognize that we can work together ports making real changes in whatever our communities were working in.
So this picture in this Scribe publication, you can see...
[Scott]: Which slide are you on? Sorry Salem, which slide?
[Salem]: I'm sorry, it's still slide two.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Salem]: On the left hand side there is a photograph of the piles of newspapers at Spaces. And then on the right hand side, is the three C's I think that sometimes they collaborate on. Chris Kennedy, Carolyn Mallard and Cassidy Thorton on the far right there, were three people who all contributed to the newspaper and different articles but also the three of them had the audacity to ask us if they could publish it right away. Carolyn has been invited to do the media arts bi-annual in the Netherlands so she actually facilitated the first printing of that. If you got a copy from her I can tell you there are at least six typos in that version of it. And then we printed the completely copy edited version about two weeks later in Cleveland. So just a copy editor in me wants to let you know that (laughing).
Let's move on to the next page.
[Scott]: Well Salem, to me that seems like such a tight deadline. One thing that Jessica was just mentioning, if you don't mind me saying, is that in the world of arts writing the invitations can be even shorter, you know. Like," can you read this article for us in a week or two weeks"? So, what am I trying to say? Its still seems really cramped to me. But that's actually totally awesome because we're actually happy to give people really short deadlines for invites. So I guess I don't feel like such a jerk (laughing).
(Laughter)
[Salem]: I don't know, I thought it was a really tight deadline but people really stepped up to the plate with what they gave us. And we gave ourselves maybe two weeks to edit. Chris Lynn from Spaces, actually I think he found the chat tonight, he and his partner were actually do in our last minute proof reading for us like two days before we went to print and caught a tremendous amount of things that the three of us had completely missed. So, you know, it's only by the grace of group work that something like that happened and I think…
[Scott]: Who was helping with that did you say?
[Salem]: Christopher Lynn is Director for Spaces and who is currently…
[Scott]: Who is on the chat? All I see. Hi Christopher!
[Salem]: Yeah who was on the chat?
[Christopher]: Hey guys!
[Salem]: Hi Chris (laughing). So I...
[Scott]: Awesome.
[Salem]: So I think that it's definitely a lot of, and I will talk about the distribution part in a little bit. I me this is the way the temporary Services Works and a lot of ways our projects (inaudible 0:25:15.0) inventions, which I know some of you know about. It couldn't have come to publication without the work of about 20 people, you know, not including ourselves and Angela, our collaborator on that. So, you know, we're kind of use to the idea that other people are great collaborators on any project that we can do. But yet, back to the editing part of it. I think that having such a tight deadline made us feel like we're going to lose some people, and we did. Some people were able to do the turnaround because of jobs or other things or projects that they were working on in that kind of stuff. I think people will publish like a regular publications like newspapers and magazines and stuff like that, that they take that into account and just try to get somebody for the next time. But there seems to be an urgency for us to do that. Like this was the right time for us to do this, the right time to instigate such a conversation and the right invitation to do so.
We had a lot of support from Spaces at the beginning for us to make this happen and actually Chris is also, I should say, Chris Lynn helped us put together the artandwork.us website which some of you may have looked out already or will be looking at soon. It turned out to be a great (inaudible 0:26:54.3) to have alongside the newspaper for those who were able to find a free copy or not able to get a copy for themselves. You can download a copy for free off of the website as a PDF or you can download it straight to your of mobile reading device. You know, your IWhatever, your Amazon, your women on the Moon things or whatever it might be you can get a copy that way to if you like reading that way.
[Scott]: Awesome Salem. Hey can I ask you a quick question?
[Salem]: Yeah please.
[Scott]: Just, I mean, not to stumble over anyone else who might have one. If you do definitely just say something or type and or just flag is down if you are here. I was curious about how you guys got the conversations rolling in different cities. You know, because the idea is that's what will happen here throughout the rest of this year and maybe in a couple of different sessions starting at a certain point maybe in combination with some kind of an installation or exhibition or what you want to call a visual presentation of this project that seems to draw people, which we will be helping with your. How did you guys get that rolling? Did you have any, oh I don't know, success stories or sort of tactics that seem to work okay? That, you know what I mean, that worked in different places so maybe is reproducible. Um, did you just kind of hang out with people? You know, talk with them?
[Salem]: (laughing) the first thing that we did was... I should back up and explain part of the idea of this newspaper is that it's a catalyst for other stuff that can happen in your own community and in your own city or town or whatever, whichever way you organize yourself. We really wanted people to do that and so when we went through the process of finding people who would be distribution points for us and type of distributors and, in a way, and let those people know and ask them permissions and a lot of times for us to just send them free copies of the newspaper and explain to them that they could distribute those to people or spaces and their cities or areas for free. We kind of planted the seed with and that's we are interested in people using the scenes in the paper as jumping plates for making their own conversation. We really wanted people to see that there are people from all over the States were talking about these issues but also to bring it back to what was going on in their own cities and in their own situations. Whether it be like a college community or whether it be just, you know, neighborhood in a city or what have you. We really wanted people to kind of bring this back to what was going on in their daily lives. Several of the people that we initially distributed to where people within our personal networks and temporary services who we knew were adept at putting together events and exhibitions. Either they were employed by a place that was open space or that they had an experience with us or otherwise doing some sort of public event. So we did kind of pick out people in different states where we thought there might be an interest. In the few states where no one who was involved in the projects had a connection, we reached out to university communities and nonprofit arts centers and experimental art centers. Squat spaces, (inaudible 0:31:15.4) spaces and stuff like that. Places where getting a free newspaper might not be a totally weird kind of prospect.
[Joseph]: Hey Salem?
[Salem]: And then kind of followed through. Go ahead, I'm sorry Scott.
[Joseph] Q: Oh no, it's actually Joseph. Hey Salem. I wanted to just follow up on that kind of lead. It seems to me that one of the really exciting things about the paper is that you were able to bring together so many different things happening across the country whether it be Feast and that kind of incubate guys doing the Sunday Soup or the people kind of protesting in New York. And that kind of moment where you brought them all together and the magazine is a sort of a way to see the whole kind of related activity right? And I'm wondering is if when you get these kinds of event, these exhibits and projects in conversations around the country, if you're kind of like tacking on or parasiting onto existing programming or, do you know what I mean?
[Salem] A: Yeah, I mean, I need to point out that we actually have not… Temporary services did not facilitate the majority of the events and talks and exhibitions that have happened with this artwork. People have contacted us and said "well we got these newspapers and we want to do something", and then they've just done it. So there's maybe only three of them where we've had any included all. Which is exactly what we wanted to happen. Um, and…
[Joseph] Q: Right, but like the people from Wage for example in New York, who I was thinking of, I mean I know that they have been kind of reaching out and trying to establish a network. And I know what kind of relationship you have with them. I know some people sort of feel like on defense of about what they are doing. But I just wonder if you guys, if you talk with them about establishing something through the paper or if the paper was kind of used in some way or appeared at an event of theirs. You know, if you have any sense of that. A start any echoes from that kind of exchange with people who are sort of running parallel organizations.
[Salem] A: Yeah, while one experience that I can talk about first hand is that temporary services also does a separate kind of thing that all three of us run called Temporary Press, which is a web store online as well as a publishing imprint. The three of us are technically not temporary services when we do it, but it's like all three of us own in this business called Path Letter Press and all three of us happen to collaborate as Temporary Services. Just to throw that out there.
There is a similar kind of concern called Ground (inaudible 0:34:09.6) which is this group based out of Boston which a lot of you may be familiar with. And, um, David Morgan who, oh, thanks for the linkage there Scott. David Morgan from Ground Swell, who is an avid blogger and avid Twitterer, as we try to be. Twittererer, Omigod. It's like tinfoil. I can't say that word either. Um, (laughing). You know, he kind of like, he saw the parallels between what they were doing with the journal that they were publishing and our publications and so he has instigated conversations with a couple of different presses. I think maybe Just Seeds is also involved in this where we're all trading stock and trading ideas.
You know, we're all like either cooperative businesses or cooperative partnerships or things like that. None of us are in it to make some sort of profit that's beyond paying back what we put into it. As so we're all in the midst of talking about what ways that we can combine resources for that. And so that is definitely separate from artwork and it didn't necessarily come out of the artwork publication. But it's kind of a conversation that we've had had after this has been out.
You know, I think that I know definitely in Chicago here about several groups that share resources, especially like in terms of AV there have been a couple people here who have instigated kind of these open store rooms where you can borrow equipment. Projectors are like a huge thing, you know, where you can like borrow a projector from one person and use it for your event or what have you. In those little ways, there's always this kind of collaboration around. So, I think um, really what we were hoping with artwork is that something that happened in Grand Rapids, Michigan, might collaborate on. Mark was invited to come speak there at one of the universities there as well as speak at (inaudible 0:36:33.1) which is an alternative space, kind of a self run space much like BaseKamp in some ways. And, um, what happened there was when he talked at the alternative space, it turned into a larger discussion of people talking about what was going on in Grand Rapids and there was this kind of sentiment even before Mark, Mark didn't necessarily need to be there for that part of the conversation because he wasn't part of the Grand Rapids community and the things that they'd be talking about. You know, that he could actually weigh in on this as an outside observer but the indecisions that people would want to make together would have to, you know, be true to people who were living in Grand Rapids and doing art in Grand Rapids.
And so now, as far as I know, this is still going on but at that time they were instigated a monthly conversation which is like an open kind of form for anybody who, anybody who, and I think this is the important thing for anyone who self identifies as being part of this conversation as having these issues as important to them. You know, and I think that to me, sounds like a pretty successful model in terms of, you know, you can decide to localize which is a really great way to actually get things done with people that you're living around. But, to also be aware of our own tendency to put people into particular genres and say like "I'm interested in collaborating with people but I don't know if I need to talk to anybody who is involved in the film community because I don't really do film". Well, that's not necessarily true. You probably both have printing needs. You know, you probably both have editing needs for the writing that you do. I mean maybe that's something that you can work on together. There are all kinds of ways that you can make connections with people that you may not necessarily work with on a daily basis in your town. So, to keep it open, to keep these kinds of discussions available to whomever feels the need to show up, is a really big, that kind of shows your community's commitment to actually creating a new idea of change and that kind of thing.
I'm seeing a lot of links on the chat here.
So yeah, I'm like Wolf, who is most of the time based in Chicago, started this AV equipment lending project. That actually, here in Chicago, it's influenced a couple of people to do the same thing with their equipment. There's a non-profit gallery called Three Walls here that also does that kind of quietly, but they have a tremendous amount of equipment and I've borrowed stuff from them just for exhibitions that I've done on the fly and they've been really great about it. So, um, you know, a long time, kind of, I feel Iike I'm getting off on a tangent here so I'll get back to it. But, I mean, a long time technique that those of us in Temporary Services have used is finding somebody who is currently employed by a university who has an AV department and that person will sign out the equipment for you to borrow for the weekend. And then you return it to them so they can return it on their own. There's all these, you know, anybody who has worked in an office knows about the brilliant stuff that you can do extra legally with your office photo copier. You can make a publication which in turn can, you know, completely change lives (laughing) and that kind of stuff. So yeah, all these things are always available.
I did see a question earlier in the chat from Patricia, who was asking if Art Work was like a current version of the 1967 Artwork Coalition. It's kind of funny that's asked because that is written about in Art Work. Um, Art Work itself, I think the main gist of all of the articles is that the way things are is not the way things could be. The way things are doesn't seem to be sustaining the most amounts of people. Um, and the way things are not necessarily working for the most amount of people. So in that, I know that some of the values that the Art Work Coalition had match up with that. But, I would hesitate to say that Art Work as a project has dialectic or has any... I mean, there are lots of different articles, lots of different writers each with their own experiences. You know, each drawing their own conclusions. So, you know, we kind of had a conversation here in Chicago about the Artist's Union of the 1940s. Nicholas Lampert, who wrote an article in Art Work about that subject and knows a lot about that part of history and that part of labor history as well as art history. It was kind of shocking of our dependence on the WPA as a metaphor within the introduction especially in Art Work. And pointing out the flaws in that in his presentation. So, it was quite interesting to see this more in depth kind of examination of people working towards, you know, solidarity with other kinds of labor unions and all these kinds of things that at that time in the States, which is something that we don't necessarily have on a really widespread basis any longer. People kind of know that history exists but artists and artists were union workers were working in that way to create change but also working in that way on a daily basis. And for some people that are an answer to what's going on in their local economy like that would be a really great thing. For other people, it may not work. It really depends on what's happening and how you're already getting your money. So Art Work exists to create conversation around those kinds of things to compare notes between a couple types of approaches.
So, if there's not any more questions at this point, which I'm happy to stop myself...
[Joseph] Q: It's me again, Joseph. Sorry. Um, okay. You mentioned that you guys were involved in three exhibition events? You could talk about them a little bit?
[Salem] A: Well the one that I can really talk about with any kind of skill right at this moment, because we were involved in it directly and it happened here in Chicago. We were invited to use the space at Gallery 400, which is an exhibition space on the campus on the University of Illinois at Chicago. There kind of interesting in terms of a university exhibition space in that they, throughout their history, they've shown almost exclusively regional and mostly Chicago based artist's work and a tremendous variety of contemporary artists here working in a lot of different ways. They've done a lot of challenging exhibitions before and we were happy to work with them. We worked with several of the people who happened to work for the university in different capacities before so Anthony Elms, who is the Assistant Director at Gallery 400, also is the publisher of White Walls, which is the artist book imprint. And White Walls helped us to publish Prisoner's Inventions a long time ago. So we knew it was a good situation to be in. For that, we basically, well the big difference between making an exhibition out of Art Work there vs. the first time we did, which was at Spaces, was that at Gallery for Hundred, we decided to make a poster that would chart out the money involved in this exhibition and in making the publication. How much everything costs, how much we got out of that and what we did with the money. Gallery 400 was able to give us enough money to do a reprint of the newspaper, which we desperately needed at that point because we were almost out of the 10,000 copies we had printed in Cleveland. But then we also had a little bit of money left over to pay our contributors which was and to our next thing that we really wanted to do. So in one of the rooms at the space… Well, while I'm talking I will see if I can find some of the pictures that are online for you to look at. But, in one of the rooms at the space, we made large copies of the text that we wrote to people. Two writers and two people have contributed in the images. We had decided to do for the images, people got a certain separate and had the writers got a rate per word. And of course, when we finally sent people checks which we didn't promise at the beginning because we didn't know if we would ever have money to actually ever pay people which is another kind of strange thing that happens when you were doing these sorts of work. Anybody that we sent a check to based upon their writing sent us a note saying "oh, if I would have known that you were paying by the word I would have written more" which is kind of, it's funny the first three times and then after it happens ten times you are kind of like "GAHHH". So, it was nice to be able to be transparent about the money in that situation. I hesitate to say if we did or did not get paid because I think it depends on how you look at it in.
But three of us and contemporary services did at the end of f it, write ourselves checks for just over $100 each. But we also put in months of labor and time and to me that always means missing out on other ways to make money because the money that I make to pay bills and my rent is all dependent on time. I do a lot of freelance work and I need time to get the work and let people know that I can do stuff for them, and all that kind of stuff. So when I'm working on my art it's always taking away from time to work on my money and I have not really bad and a lot of situations where working on my art and working on my money are the same. I suspect that a lot of you are on the same boat.
So, it was kind of interesting part to put that up there. We have this poster telling everybody how much money spaces gave us and what all of that money went towards. How much money USC gave us and what that money went towards. Most of the money in both cases went to print and, actually printing papers. Um, so it's one element of the exhibition that I think I would love to see in a lot of different exhibitions, not just at places like institutions like colleges and I kind of thing. But I think it would be really interesting to see that an alternative spaces as well. You know, for people to say "Okay, it cost me $3.00 to get the duck tape and it cost me $2.00..." You know, all that kind of stuff.
Someone is asking for images of the exhibition, so I'm going to continue to look here. I'm copying onto the chat room again. God, there's something about this that all of this technology is really fast. I'm talking to all of you people around the world but just going back and forth between windows I seriously feel that I'm about 85 years old and I have some kind of hand eye coordination problem. Does anyone out to get that feeling? No, okay. That's all right.
[Scott]: Sort of (laughing).
[Female group member]: That's because you were talking. You have to be texting.
(Laughter)
[Salem]: Okay, now I get.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Definitely.
[Salem]: It's just, it's hard out there for a joke.
[Scott]: Greg, are you having trouble hearing Salem or us? Or someone else?! Oh Damn! I'm being so slow tonight. I just never mind me (laughing).
(Inaudible background chatter)
[Salem]: Greg, get those kids off your lawn! So, that's what I'm saying. So, I just put up a link to the page where we have the announcement about the gallery 400 and, you know, I'm not (inaudible 0:50:57.9) either. I mean, I just, I feel like, you know… There is just something about fast technology that makes me slow down, which is counter intuitive. I am still kind of looking for some of the pictures. I think there is a Gallery 400 block where we can find some of that.
[Joseph] Q: Hey Salem, while you're looking can I ask another question? One of the things that I love about the newspaper is the personal economies and that kind of anonymous contributions. I wonder if you could say something about the decision to do than and, I don't know, how they figure into that kind of rubric thinking around the paper.
[Salem] A: Yes. Actually I'm glad that you brought that up and because that's one of my favorite part about the paper as well. A kind of came out of those little snippets of notes that people were sending us along with their actual contributions. And then we had a few people who at the beginning, we had asked them to contribute a piece of writing or a work. And we got more than one response saying that "we would really love to tell you about how this place screwed me over" or how "this job that I had really wasn't sustaining me" or "how I have no time but I can't talk about it really because I'm still employed by them" or "I do this". So we said, "what if you made an anonymous contribution and we would be the only people who would know. And if we see anything that might lead back to you we would edit it. You know we would take out names and stuff like that." And then, it kind of occurred to us that everybody has not just negative stories about working with employers but neutral stories about how they get paid.
And not everybody likes to talk about how they get paid or how they sustain or don't sustain their work and their livelihood. I know that it is an American thing, but I think that is wider than that. It's a cultural thing. And many cultures, you just don't talk about money. You either talk about it if you grew up really poor or maybe if you're rich you don't talk about it or not, I'm not sure. You know, everybody seems to be in that same sort of middle class place sometimes or everybody seems to be without money or everybody seems to be doing really well. And no one really talk specifics. We thought maybe that if we gave people the opportunity to talk about what was really going on, they would be a little bit more candid and totally happened. So we have these personal economy's which is a section on the Art Work site, all of them are kind of put together in one area but also they are scattered throughout the newspaper. We have printed a few on the artwork site that we didn't have time or space to bring in the newspaper. They are actually a pretty wide range of just very simple "this is how I make money. This is what my job is. This is what I do to make art" to a more wide ranging " this is one particular situation that I had was not getting funding or getting too much funding and here's what I did that". And I think taking the names off, for a lot of people, gave them the feeling that they had freedom to print the truth.
You know, I think personally that money is attached to the idea of sustainability when you really talk about people. It's been taken out of that context of and put into the idea of greening and the environment and stuff. But sustainability is also about people and the resources that we create for ourselves. It's all kind of attached to this emotional landscape as well. This is my big thing for the past few years, talking about this stuff. People really feel that when they're out of money and they are not getting paid for their work they feel like it's not as important as other work. They feel like they're not doing as well as other people were getting paid are. When you are broke in can't afford to do that your friends can do, you feel like there's something wrong with you and this comes from childhood. You feel like if you have holes in your shoes and somebody else doesn't, you feel like there's something apparently wrong with your family and that you're dirty and are bad. I think that even if you didn't grow up and those kinds of circumstances, you still hold on to these kinds of unconscious ideas about how you would respect money. So when you take away people's identity and say " Okay, now you can freely talk about this in an anonymous fashion" people just kind of flock into it.
It was pretty amazing. Some of the stories that are shared on there, it's the sort of stuff where you are just like " Oh, okay. Yeah. I've had that exact same thing happened to me too" or " I was promised something and it was taken away and then two months later I realized that the institution had spent money on XYZ's salary or on buying more property in a downtown city that shall remain nameless instead of rehiring some of the people that they had laid off last year" that kind of situation. It creates a situation where people feel unable to say that like "Okay, this is how one to be an artist and I'm going to do this job". It's like nothing is permanent or real. So, you know, who do we depend upon besides ourselves to do this kind of work?
Sorry if I'm a downer.
[Scott]: No, no, no, not at all Salem. It's tough that is important to everyone who is working in the arts. Except of course, for people who were doing really well financially as artists. Probably, this might not be quite as interesting. Um, yeah. Quick question, if I can quickly for off the mic to Michael.
[Salem]: Yeah.
[Michael] Q: Just a quick question that is sort of along those lines of what you were just talking about. What are some examples of sort of strategies, I guess, in terms of how people are kind of making it happen? I mean, there is the idea of alternative personal economies. A number of really interesting, I think, platforms are set up to kind of enable people that had access to resources and that sort of thing. I'm interested in sort of hearing about that. Thanks.
[Salem] A: Yeah, I think there is definitely a little bit more of the formal networking… Oh my mom is calling me, I'm sorry. I have to hang up on my mom (laughing). Um, that's one strategy, keep good relationships with your parents and then every once in awhile suggest that day help by a long arm stapler instead of giving you a gift certificate to Applebee's or something for your birthday.
[Scott]: (laughing) we won't tell your mom that you hung up on her. Don't worry.
[Salem]: Oh, she knows I did. Yup, it's fine (laughing).
(Laughter)
So, anyhow, I think there is definitely… One of the nice things about the Internet is that you know, just to have communities get together there are (inaudible0:59:23.1) conventions and a kind of thing. Like, that's one of the more funny (inaudible 0:59:28.1) to that. But, on a getting things done kind of tip, it also means that anyone who lives in such and such a place and that wants to do like, have a workshop on how to make a booklet with people that they live nearby, they can get on the Internet and for meet up or propose a class to their local public school. You know, they can, by that I mean the public school group not necessarily, you know. So and then that strategy is the same strategy that has always been there. Like creating a newsletter or finding your community and sharing those kinds of resources and knowledge of them.
But I really do like what's then going on, oh lord, I guess one of the BaseKamp members as a (inaudible 1:00:27.5). But that's cool. There's a place for all of us.
I think that I really like the projects that I have seen that are leaning towards other people making their own projects and doing their own work in the ways that they want to. In one aspect, something like the group Incubate that is Chicago based in one of the member live in the Ukraine. So they have this Sunday Soup, which Joseph mentioned earlier, which they hadn't been actively doing in the last few months. But, the basic idea if that's the outside community by the couple or a bowl of soup from them, a different soup is specially made for the occasion every week. The money from the soup sales goes into this community pot and at the end of the month someone receives all that money as a grant. And in the Incubate version everyone was bought into the soup gets to vote on who received the grant every month. By buying the soup become kind of a stakeholder in to receive this grant. And there's other ways of doing that to.
And other example of kind of a money resource sharing situation that I really love is something that a group called Chances Dances does that a Chicago based and really has been Chicago focused and its major. It's chancesdances.org for anyone that is fiercely typing into the check box. Basically it is three or four times a month depending on what other special things are happening those months. It is these dance parties and actual clubs and venues and the people from Chances, a lot of them are artists as well as DJs and artists as well as other things in their lives. It's an LDB, GQ and Allied dance party where the focus is on everyone having a good time. They are open to people of all ages, while 21 and over depending on the venue. And so they have one that happens once a month where there was always a $5.00 cover and all that money goes into this fierceness grant, which is basically a grant that will go to an artist or dart group or a collaborative work on some sort of creative project. And, um, it...
[Scott] Q: Hey Salem, I think I missed what that was. Fierceness Grant?
[Salem] A: Yeah. Chancesdances.org if you look at, and I will type it in here. If you look at their projects, I'm typing the URL in now, so if you look at their project age you will see the critical fierceness grant, which is completely from the ticket sales of one of their dances that they sponsor where it's like $5.00 to get in. Um, so, on the average I think for the last couple of years they've been able to give three different people $500 grants, which is like a huge boom to a lot of different kinds of projects. I was excited about at the beginning and I was even more excited about it after a few rounds of them actually successfully getting money to people because it's totally homegrown, it's based on this experience that doesn't rely on the grant in. Chances was actually just voted in one of our local weeklies as one of the best dance parties and the city and so totally, the audience for that may not be the same audience that's actually going to be using or enjoying the art projects that its funding. But, it's guaranteed money because people pay to drink, people pay to go dance. So they decided that instead of pocketing that, these people would support their community and a lot of ways. Which I think is really tremendous. You know, it's the sort of thing that you will see… For me I think, and again I think I'm going on a tangent here said write me back down to reality if you feel like you need to.
[Scott]: No, maybe I'm not joining and quite enough but I'm just marveling at the, well I'm interested in the examples that you brought up that I'm not aware of yet. Which is cool. And if I was, it would still be interesting.
[Salem]: (laughing) Okay, great. I mean, the last thing I wanted to say about that was just that, you know. Platform, the group that is based in London, and I can find this link later on, but they just made this map of all of the cultural institutions that BP give some sponsorship money to. BP, you know, that is short for British Petroleum. They are this company that is not necessarily just about Britain or petroleum. A lot of you are familiar with them they had the well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico a little while ago. And this map, when I was looking at this map, that Platform made of all these institutions that get money for their cultural programming from BP. It started to make me think not only about BP funding so many of these things, but also, wouldn't it be great if each of us who have a space or have a group who do these kinds of projects, we should be having that kind of list that we help these kind of people do this. Like members of our group go over and help put together this publication. What we are also sponsorships of our own lives. We can take care of each other too. I think in a way, the Chances grant does that. I mean, it's the small gesture, but it could be... I mean, $500 to the right project could be huge. They could be totally huge. And it's like, we don't have to rely necessarily just on corporate funding for these things. Oh, there's the Platform. Thank you Patricia. You know, we can do that to. So, okay.
[Scott]: definitely. So Salem, if you don't mind someone has a question who has to go fairly soon and then we can get back to this and a second.
[Salem]: Yes.
[Scott]: Do you want to turn your mic on and just ask out loud? Great.
[Salem]: So, take yourself off of mute, which is right next to the... Yeah. It's on the bottom left. Not the pause button, but the one next to it.
(Laughter and chatter)
[Carlos] Q: sorry. Hi everyone my name is Carlos and I was in the residency program at BaseKamp, I don't know if you remember me at BaseKamp (laughing).
[Scott] A: Yeah, sure! How are you?
[Carlos]: I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm from Columbia and right now I am at the (inaudible1:08:37.5) Center for the Arts in Canada doing a residency program. I'm doing a little bit of work right now that is a about what you're talking about. This is born from a question I have about being (inaudible 1:08:56.8) as an artist without having like other kinds of works and how to list my own work about just having to go to work out a note to like McDonald's or anywhere for additional jobs for economical success. So my project is about the CMG Performance Art Services and what I am trying to do is (inaudible 1:09:34.8) team of performance art and for selling performance art. So I am like looking for artists who are interested in giving me an action that will put in the catalog of actions. Like you give me an action and then you would have to pay for that catalog and for being in the (inaudible 1:10:00.7) and maybe like works like maybe (inaudible 1:10:06.0) or something like. So the conversation that you were having is like a real interesting. Unfortunately I have to leave but I want to give all of you guys my email and if someone is interested in entering or maybe receiving some information on the artists who are ready. I will be happy to send it to you and well that's it.
[Scott]: Thanks Carlos.
[Salem]: Thanks Carlos. Um, yeah, and if you have a web presence or something that you want to type into the chap box before you leave, that would be great.
[Carlos]: I am developing the work right now so I have no website yet. But what I can do is…
[Scott]: That's okay. An email is totally fine and that way anybody... If you do want to send it in the clear, you can send it here. You can also send stuff to the discussion list too, and that's a good way to connect.
[Carlos]: I can also send my portfolio if anyone wants to see it.
[Scott]: Sure, feel free to do that on the discussion list too or here is fine. Thanks a lot.
[Carlos]: Okay, so here is my email. And that's pretty much...
[Salem]: I think that you pretty much confused the word "services" in it, by the way. Just a personal, everybody in services, we once met (inaudible 1:11:44.4) and um, when he was leaving us, he actually put his hand by his head in the gesture where it looks like you're tipping a hat, when you're not wearing a hat, and he goes "KUDOS!" So I do the same now. Although, you cannot see me, KUDOS!
(Laughter)
Um, okay. So Carlo's stuff is up on the chat box right? For anybody who wants to see it, that's cool. That's great.
Are there any other questions or points to ponder or things that I should type or go over. I understand some people are having problems with their sound.
[Joseph] Q: I have another question Salem. It's Joseph. What about Art Work Issue 2? Is there a chance that there could be another newspaper somewhere in the future? Do you have any thoughts or ideas about that might happen or what a follow up conversation might look like?
[Salem] A: Um, you know, we've had some people ask about that (laughing). Christopher Lynn just said "Art Work 2 - The Revenge", um, I think which is probably better than my response which would be "Art Work 2 - The Electric Boogaloo". I mean, that's like an old joke. Uh, thanks. Thanks for the bone Chris, thanks for the bone. Um, yeah, I don't know. There's definitely been some conversations about more writing, and people have been asking us to make their projects they are working on to be connected to these... It's a wide variety of things. So, there's definitely a lot of, to use the marketing world's terms, content, for us to get back out there into the world. It's like we were just able to republish the original again because a group in Minneapolis called "Work's Progress" had some money for printing and they had originally wanted to buy a bunch of copies from us that we didn't have enough copies for them. And then they said "well what if we just get it printed here?" And they took it upon themselves to get a quote from a local newspaper printer, were actually does one of the dailies in Minneapolis, and we gave them all of our files. And they printed it and returned, they gave us, we asked them if we could throw them some money to get 1000 of the papers and they were able to do that. So really, the newspaper part of it is all based on on funding unfortunately. It's possible that we in Temporary Services will be able to either raise funds or get another partner who is able to do that. Definitely I think that the question that came up about maybe online, we're still kind of experiment and what the website should develop into so that the possibility. You know, I think that we might be open to having people who were outside of our group contributing to the website because there's so many different contributions from so many different people on there. We actually have an interview with (inaudible 11:15:14.3) who is based here in Chicago, was done for the original publication and that I've been sitting on, we are supposed to put it up on the website, and I will probably have the top of the next couple of weeks. I still have all of this new to the site stuff that hasn't made it yet.
So yeah, I think that if there is interest there is also, also I think that what would prevent us from diving into it right now is just that Temporary Services is doing concurrently 5000 other different projects. Plus after this week, my collaborators in temporary services are not on the Skype chat because everybody is either taking a break, and actually, my collaborator mark just got married on Sunday so he's going to be on his honeymoon. So that puts a wrench into making some things happen quickly.
Steven, I'm exaggerating, I said about 5000 but it's really more like 4500. Yeah, I tend to exaggerate (laughing). Yeah.
So I think that might be interesting another thing that is kind of happened is back in the effort of us just asking people to take on this as their own, and just do with it as they will, things that we had really even conceived of happened. Joseph, who is there at the BaseKamp space tonight, took it upon himself to start making the audio book version of Art Work, which I find very exciting. Joseph can tell you exactly where that is on the Internet. But several people have read articles and they are available to listen to as MP3s. It's at the San Francisco (inaudible 1:17:25.4) site. Joseph? The link is coming soon. Chris asked, since you are still publishing material on the site, are you open to submissions for art and work? Um, yes. Actually we are. Especially within the anonymous contributions part. You know, if somebody reads those over and feels the urge to share what's going on with them, we would really like that. People have been using the comments in some sections to share their own things and so you can e-mail any of us directly. I guess it's not completely anonymous because you do have to email one of us in Temporary Services. But you can even pick the one of us that you are the most comfortable, there are three of us, and send it directly to us. And then we won't sure the name with the other two and we'll put it up on the site. So there is that one moment of outreach that you have to do.
Um, so yeah, there are still a bunch of different possibilities of what could happen with this project. A lot of the projects that we do and temporary services tend to be open ended because in the middle of the projects we will realize that the ride lot of different things that could be done with the subject matter and other things that we would like to explore. I think that this is true for a lot of artists in our group, when you're working with such a big crowd of people and you were working with a lot of big ideas you realize that. I think that any art project sets out to be the solution, of course going to have the problem attached to it where there is a big moment of failure there. Especially where you were talking about art, money, sustaining themselves, and how we work in the world that the solution is going to be different for everybody. And that's something that we've all explored in Plausible Artworlds throughout.
[Alyssa]Q: I know you talked about a little bit, this is Alyssa, in terms of organizations sharing their projectors and equipment and things like that. But I wondered, like, in your research for personal or organizational economies what sort of successful models you may have come across (inaudible 1:20:07.3).
[Salem] A: The funny thing is that I feel bad that the first thing to jump to mind are models that were successful for some time but then kind of outgrew or all lasted their natural life span and then maybe completely not good for the people were sustaining them, and all that. And I'm thinking along the lines of shared space kind of models. Communal situations with people working as artists and with people working and living together and sharing their resources and that way. And some kind of emotional connection or other thing that wasn't really working from the beginning and I just kind of exploded. I feel bad that those are the first things that are going into my mind vs. The positive kind of things that are out there. You know, there are groups that successfully sustain themselves for a long time and then some outgrowth of that group does something completely different. Like Art Metropol, who a lot of you may know as distributor of our first publication as well as a printer, started out of the work of a general idea and the people who were working around the same capacities and in certain ways I don't think that it's a cooperative collective effort on some levels anymore, but is definitely doing what they set up to do which is to distribute artists publications. There are some things that are miniature successes that in our community in which (loud typing inaudible1:22:29.9) that have been able to give some direct help in terms of (loud typing inaudible1:22:38.0) kind of, you know, after school program and off the streets stuff that a lot of the kids in our neighborhood really used for getting interested in school. I don't know, that's probably not the kind of thing that you are interested in Alyssa. But I would count that kind of success on the same level that I would someone trying to create change in terms of a union or that kind of goal.
But the artists union that existed here in the states in the forties, they had, like, you know, there was this great damage that Nicholas used in his presentation, and I'll see if I can find it, when he was talking about the artists union to some of us in Chicago. Nicholas Lampert, again I mentioned him earlier for those of you who came on late. Where was basically a WPA (loud typing inaudible1:12:52.8) of the States, their schematics of how people who were being paid as artists under the WPA monies, you know, like how many there were and what they got paid. It wasn't very much but the idea that this governmental agency was paying people in this regards, which was enough for us to get excited about it. Nicholas kind of pointed out the failures of that situation, which is why this independent artists union that came up was trying to address those failures. And they were actually able to get more pay for people and guarantee a little bit of work and have this public camaraderie, which I think it's something we're really lacking a lot of situations these days. The art institute of Chicago here laid off a tremendous amount of workers in the last three years and then they have one of the biggest amounts of Financial Holdings and real estate holdings here in the city of Chicago and when you look at those numbers I don't know if they match up. The problem is that so many of us depended on whatever jobs we can get and art schools here in the states, you get into this kind of system where the people are being trained in art school with the same kind of older notions of how you're going to sustain yourself as an artist. There's a class called professional practices and a lot of art schools, and those of you who went through art school can attest to that, and the ones that have, I have never taught it. And never actually been required to take a professional practices class. I didn't go to a traditional art school kind of format. The idea that your professional practices class I mean, it sounds on the outside like it's going to help you figure out what you're going to do with his education and that you have in the different things you can do when you're out of your school and out in the world and been a real artist. I'm holding up my hands like using quotation marks.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: You know, Salem, I think it would be a really awesome idea if you and Jessica Westbrook and Adam Troughbridge could connect, if you haven't already, while you guys are all out there in Chicago.
[Salem]: Yeah, definitely. Well, we were able to meet briefly at a professional artist's conference (laughing). Yeah. It was at the College Art's Administration, that kind of thing. But I'm looking forward to... Actually, Adam did take a class with Mark Fisher from my group like a long, long... So, we're all aware of each other's presence. But I'm happy that they're moving to Oak Park is it Jessica? I love the money sense, it's hilarious. Um, yeah. Yeah.
[Scott]: I just wanted to say, I totally hate to cut it short, but I have to be, to play the gong.
[Salem]: Oh man! I talked so much!
[Scott]: And recognize... No! It's completely awesome, and I just only realized that it's five minutes after eight and we try to stay super strict about that just for, mainly for people who are in different time zones because they will, like fish eating as much food until they explode, they will stay up until they literally pass out from exhaustion. So just to be kind.
[Salem]: Fish eating as much until...wow. Okay.
[Scott]: We did start the audio late. But you know, you can probably expect a general mix of text and audio and then some weeks there is no audio. It's completely up to the person presenting and kind of up to the whim of how the conversation is going. But um, this is definelty not to be cut short. We ultimately need to continue this conversation. And Salem, I'm actually thrilled about however slim or larger change it is about the possibility of you moving to Philadelphia for however long. So, if that happens (laughing).
[Salem]: Yeah, that's not really that public yet Scott, but okay.
[Scott]: DOH!
[Salem]: No, that's totally fine.
[Scott]: Move to New Jersey I mean? Um...
[Salem]: Well, yeah, I might go there for a relationship, but that's cool. We'll see how it goes.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: I didn't mean to get into...
[Salem]: No, it's totally fine. Totally fine.
[Scott]: Scratch it from the record, for sure.
[Salem]: I just want to say before everybody gets cut off. The presentation that I failed to actually present to you will be on Scribed for however long it needs to be. It will be public and there is another presentation in there that you won't have the malivious sounds of my wonderful voice narrating it, but it's pictures from just a big, kind of huge, general Temporary Services kind of intro, kind of talk. Also on Scribed. If you're looking at one of them, you can find the other one when you click on my profile or whatever it is on there. A lot of you know that you can find any of us in Temporary Services by hitting servers at temporaryservices.org. You know, we're always happy to talk with you, answer questions if you have them, ask questions if it seems like you have answers. Maybe collaborate all kinds of things. So, anything that I didn't get to address that you maybe wanted me to address, feel free to email me and we'll have a conversation in another way.
[Scott]: Salem, thanks so much. We're really looking forward to starting those conversations here in Philly.
[Salem]: Yeah, definitely I'm excited about whatever you guys want to do with the paper and what kinds of conversations that those of you who are at BaseKamp now can address what is lacking in Philly and what is lacking, in, uh, and what you would like to see happen. You know, to help each other, you know, make a better creative work.
[Scott]: Rock on. Thanks everybody and imagine closing music here and we'll see you all again next week (really bad pretend beat boxing noises).
[Salem]: Oh, maybe I'll just repost the YouTube from earlier, it's my favorite YouTube. You can get off if you want. Oh, here's "The Vapors", that's pretty good. Let's see if I can, uh, here we go. Here, that's Biz Markie, "The Vapors".
(Closing music; Biz Markie- "The Vapors")
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:33:33.2
Page |
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$a64184b18dfe0b40" title="#basekamp/$a64184b18dfe0b40">Art Work http://basekamp.com/about/events/art-work (#basekamp/$a64184b18dfe0b40)
Created on 2010-06-29 20:21:30.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:58:58
- hello everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:10
- not that everyone is here yet
- Greg Scranton: 17:59:42
- hey all
- Randall Szott: 18:00:44
- im going to mute my mic - kid in room
- Randall Szott: 18:00:46
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:02:39
- thanks for the impromptu audio check
- Lannes Quentin: 18:03:11
- hi everyone !!!
- Greg Scranton: 18:03:16
- hello all
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:03:21
- hello all
- Greg Scranton: 18:03:28
- hi quentin
- Greg Scranton: 18:04:06
- sup at & jw
- Greg Scranton: 18:04:25
- in chi-town yet?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:04:25
- already 2 chat windows open!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:40
- hey Salem --- yeah, that's me... we'll stay here LOL
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:04:48
- haha
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:04
- how's everyone today?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:14
- today / tongiht / this morning - depending on where you are
- pacesyntaxgirl" title="spacesyntaxgirl">Elizabeth: 18:09:20
- excellent thanks
- GONTA: 18:09:21
- am )D
- orianfred" title="dorianfred">Dorian Kernytsky: 18:09:24
- boss
- Matthew Slaats: 18:09:26
- Not bad.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:28
- WORD
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:31
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:09:38
- I'm sleeping!
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:09:56
- it's midnight here
- Lannes Quentin: 18:10:06
- where?
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:10:17
- venice - italy
- Lannes Quentin: 18:10:27
- in france too
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:30
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:11:06
- Hi everyone! thanks for staying up late and/or waking up early and/or hanging in front of your computron!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:21
- hi patricia - added you to the text chat here
- GONTA: 18:11:46
- Hey everyone
- GONTA: 18:11:51
- Banff centre for the arts in canada..
- GONTA: 18:11:56
- artist in residency
- GONTA: 18:12:01
- be back in 5 min.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:24
- so as you may have noticed, we're kind of starting with a text chat ... soon we'll start the audio
- Matthew Slaats: 18:12:32
- What an international crowd tonight. That awesome!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:12:39
- Hey everyone - I loaded this for you to peruse while we're talking:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33712064/Art-Work-Discussion - alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:12:56
- there's another secret santa one out there too if we get bored for some reason.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:57
- there are a bunch of Summer MFA students from UArts here in the space @ Basekamp
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:06
- a spread of food...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:47
- http://paxarcana.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/pbr.jpg
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:03
- also.. we have http://www.nutsonline.com/images/items/g405.jpg
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:20
- and http://www.authentic-mexicanrecipes.com/images/mexican%20salsa%20recipe.jpg
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:15:27
- lord almighty.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:47
- and of course http://media.photobucket.com/image/bobbi%252527s%20hummus/lollerkates/ph...
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:15:53
- Hey all - you saw http://www.artandwork.us
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:16:07
- and www.temporaryservices.org is what we do
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:19
- & http://organicelitist.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/smart-water.jpg and ham & brie sandwiches
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:16:22
- but here's something in lieu of a personal Salem C-J bio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYqqfJZB7Ac
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:16:43
- Nice foodstuffs, basekampers!
- robertdlibby: 18:17:04
- Chaltin brought cookies
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:23
- it's a good crew -- people have been coming in .. which is why we're being lazy about starting the audio exactly on time
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:34
- you know we always start exactly on time
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:17:50
- Yeah, I have a reputation for always being early....not.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:57
- uhhhh -- snap
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:35
- hi Chaltin & Bob - and David & Kevin (maybe?) -- hello to crew stationsed @ UArts
- robertdlibby: 18:18:57
- Kevin is here. David is not
- robertdlibby: 18:19:06
- we're ready to go though
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:20
- so... let's start by watching the video everyone -- which is only a few minutes -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYqqfJZB7Ac
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:30
- watching now...
- Greg Scranton: 18:19:47
- wow I want to party with them!
- Greg Scranton: 18:19:56
- the girl on the right is magical!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:58
- oh no! LOL i fell for it
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:20:07
- It keeps getting better
- Greg Scranton: 18:20:28
- (spoiler alert) love the armpit sniff
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:20:30
- & I have to say that I've been told to use this as my "bio" from now on
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:20:46
- GS: yes! hahahahahah
- Randall Szott: 18:22:02
- Aw man Salem I was looking forward to rehashing my role as the naysaying creep, but I'm going to have to run in ten minutes.
- Randall Szott: 18:22:08
- I'm sure you're crushed!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:24
- Randall that's too bad
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:22:28
- oh Randall, c'mon. We're in this love together
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:33
- did you at least watch the video
- Randall Szott: 18:22:36
- true that Salem
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:22:41
- haha
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:51
- we're literally watching this
- Randall Szott: 18:22:54
- LYLAS
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:04
- she is pretty incredible... and you know which one i'm talking about
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:23:11
- KIT. Art Friends For-evah!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:46
- ok guys, so that was the best intro we've had for a while
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:24:26
- are people seeing anything on that Scribd link, btw?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:24:33
- this is my 1st time using it
- Greg Scranton: 18:24:49
- yes it looks good Salem
- Patricia Watts: 18:25:14
- good here - ecoartspace
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:25:20
- yes sure it's great
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:25:27
- ok, cool, thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:52
- ok so let's get this party started
- Greg Scranton: 18:26:17
- lezzdewwit!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:37
- so for anyone who hasnt been on these skype chats before, theres a little message at the top saying to please feel free to chat
- BASEKAMP team: 18:27:44
- that goes for the crew @ uarts too -- if it's easier to type comments or questions or whatever in the chat, go for it! anytime!
- robertdlibby: 18:28:02
- ok sounds good, we'll have video though right?
- Randall Szott: 18:28:13
- Gotta run - I'll have to throw this out: http://thedepartmentofaesthetics.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/art-work-leisu...
- Patricia Watts: 18:28:23
- are we taking a phone call as well (elizabeth?)
- Randall Szott: 18:28:26
- http://thedepartmentofaesthetics.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/art-work-redux...
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:28:37
- thanks, Randall!
- pacesyntaxgirl" title="spacesyntaxgirl">Elizabeth: 18:28:38
- 'm happy to text
- Randall Szott: 18:28:49
- go get em' Salem
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:50
- no we can do a callll
- Patricia Watts: 18:28:57
- chat is best, no?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:29:07
- good to have dialogue, sincerely
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:29:32
- Is someone trying to call me? I feel like I'm 85 years old
- GONTA: 18:29:59
- hey am back..
- GONTA: 18:30:04
- it seems like a miss everything..
- GONTA: 18:30:48
- is the audio already working_
- GONTA: 18:30:50
- ?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:53
- no, you missed only text... which... is a lot
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:30:56
- no, not yet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:04
- but no audio yet -- we are... about... to... st... art
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:31:05
- we can repost links & such
- GONTA: 18:31:13
- nice..
- GONTA: 18:31:14
- so hi
- GONTA: 18:31:17
- am carlos
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:22
- Joseph del Pesco is here IN THE FLESH btw and says hellos all around
- Patricia Watts: 18:31:23
- is there anyone here that is an artist or arts administrator that is working outside the confines of the art world? who has left the art world for a "regular" job?
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:31:32
- cia joseph!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:31:32
- me!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:38
- Patricia well... in a sense yes
- Patricia Watts: 18:31:45
- where do you work? doing what?
- GONTA: 18:31:52
- Am artist working with performance art
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:32:04
- that's a good way to start, Patricia.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:10
- Patricia - one of the past weekly Plausible Artworlds examples was totaly focused on that exactly http://basekamp.com/about/events/at-work-au-travail
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:32:22
- I'm a curator working between milan and Venice
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:32:26
- Italy
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:37
- but many of us probably fall in that category !
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:32:39
- For money, I nanny, edit texts, proofread, dogsit, occasionally clean a house, housesit
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:57
- several people here are also teachers
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:32:59
- do some "service industry" (occasionally bartend)
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:33:12
- i teach at Iuav niversity of Venice
- Matthew Slaats: 18:33:12
- I'm an artist that works a day job in IT.
- Lannes Quentin: 18:33:29
- I'm student in a french art school, and I will come in Basekamp for 4 month in October
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:33:49
- ghostwrite
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:58
- Quentin we're really looking forward to you & Mathieu beign here
- Lannes Quentin: 18:34:08
- me too
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:34:35
- do you have residency programs at BaseKamp?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:45
- yes
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:34:49
- cool
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:53
- more on that later though
- Patricia Watts: 18:34:56
- I create blogs for farmers/foodies and blog for extra income myself
- GONTA: 18:35:02
- I am a colombian resident artist at the banff centre in canada.
- Meg Frisch: 18:35:20
- I am working as a UX / interface designer in philadelphia and I am a resident at BK!
- GONTA: 18:35:22
- I have ocassionals jobs as art researcher..
- elbaglivo" title="delbaglivo">valeriodelbaglivo: 18:35:23
- Banff is great
- Matthew Slaats: 18:35:24
- Patricia - I caught up with Amy the other day. I think we're going to meet up sometime soon.
- GONTA: 18:35:35
- and I do lay out for books for extra incoming...
- Elysa Lozano: 18:35:47
- paid: nonprofit sector, graphic design, ghostwrite
- GONTA: 18:35:47
- but am working on the a piece to
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:35:51
- Do we have any of the contributors to the Art Work paper or people who hosted/organized events at BK or online?
- Patricia Watts: 18:35:57
- Hi Matthew! Great that you'll connect with Amy.
- GONTA: 18:36:01
- sell performance art in a pyramid scheme...right now!
- Elysa Lozano: 18:36:04
- unpaid: reviews, curate
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:05
- Stephen translates texts among other things
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:15
- beg borrow & steal
- Patricia Watts: 18:36:21
- No one here working for a corporation I take it?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:39
- Hi Christopher
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:36:47
- used to work for a corp - deli worker for a grocery store, as well as University of Chicago which is like a Corp
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:37:05
- let's get to gettin'!
- Patricia Watts: 18:37:12
- Or, the military? Capitalists?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:29
- ok word - ready for a call everyone? if so, pick up, if not it's cool - we'll keep text-ing along the way
- GONTA: 18:37:35
- iam creating my own corporation that works_
- GONTA: 18:37:37
- ?
- Patricia Watts: 18:37:37
- I'm interested in how artists can infiltrate non art worlds
- robertdlibby: 18:37:44
- ready!!!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:45
- and if you get mised, or dropped from the call, just let us know & we'll add/re-add you
- Christopher Lynn: 18:37:58
- Bring it.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:37
- http://www.artandwork.us/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:06
- http://basekamp.com/about/events/art-work
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:29
- hi again salem!
- GONTA: 18:45:15
- humm'
- GONTA: 18:45:27
- i think am out can you add me again..
- GONTA: 18:45:30
- fall here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:40
- gonta yea
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:00
- Quentin, could you press Mute on your audio? It's not terrible but would help slightly
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:22
- of course unmute whenever you feel like saying something though!
- GONTA: 18:47:59
- someone is typing really loudly
- GONTA: 18:47:59
- ...
- Lannes Quentin: 18:48:06
- it's done
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:48:08
- http://www.scribd.com/doc/33712064/Art-Work-Discussion
- robertdlibby: 18:48:37
- something happened, invite us back in please
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:52
- calling u back guys
- robertdlibby: 18:49:10
- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:26
- np!
- robertdlibby: 18:51:15
- keep getting cut off for some reason, invite please
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:40
- calling u jessica
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:58
- BTW Salem, Michael found the Art WOrk newspapers - Thx Michael!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:09
- adding the the uarts crew back
- robertdlibby: 18:53:16
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:24
- no prob
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:31
- sleep - ha!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:00
- to'ally
- robertdlibby: 18:57:17
- cut off again, i don't know what the problem is
- robertdlibby: 18:57:59
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:01
- oops
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:09
- oh noes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:33
- back?
- robertdlibby: 18:58:52
- back on
- robertdlibby: 19:00:36
- off again.
- robertdlibby: 19:02:41
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:54
- ups
- robertdlibby: 19:03:41
- alright thanks
- Patricia Watts: 19:03:41
- So, is Art Work like a current version of the 1960-70x Art Worker’s Coalition?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:07
- i mean... it's a catalyst for conversation.... but it's also a mini-exhibit in the form of a newspaper too?
- robertdlibby: 19:09:39
- sorry, we think we figured it out, our wireless keeps going in and out. we're out again btw
- robertdlibby: 19:11:00
- i think we'll scratch this and get a better connection next time
- robertdlibby: 19:11:45
- thank you basekamp, thank you salem
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:52
- jpseph was just asking to what degree the art work events connected with existing programming at different organizations
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:13
- or if the paper was useful to any of those parallel efforts
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:28
- salem is describing Half-Letter press
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:47
- http://www.halfletterpress.com/store/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:03
- w00t\
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:25
- twote
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:37
- http://blog.groundswellcollective.com/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:54
- http://justseeds.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:23
- http://www.stopgostop.com/nca/ncaav.html
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:45
- mike wolf's long-term lending AV equip project
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:10
- G Rad http://www.g-rad.org/4.0/
- Patricia Watts: 19:16:33
- http://www.freelancersunion.org/
- Patricia Watts: 19:17:33
- There will be several million people who are without work and cannot draw unemployment anymore in the months to come
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:08
- yeah, we're just getting to Snowman Genetalia on g-rad...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:42
- a lot of various stuff on there these days...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:18:50
- patricia that is interesting
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:08
- back Greg?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:22
- kewl
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:14
- Salem we're on page 3 of that Scribd PDF, ... teasing moving to page 4...
- Patricia Watts: 19:21:34
- are there orgs that are looking for "venture capital" or funding for artists to transform social space in this economy, outside tradition arts programming, based on economics?
- Patricia Watts: 19:21:54
- translates to jobs?
- Patricia Watts: 19:22:17
- privately funded WPA . . .
- BASEKAMP team: 19:23:15
- and Salem, after this - would be interesting to talk about Patricias txt quetions a bit
- Elysa Lozano: 19:24:05
- think i got dropped - can i get a call back?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:31
- y
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:53
- that's great
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:57
- haha @#$%^&*(
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:34
- pork barrel
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:55
- that's unjustifiable salem
- Patricia Watts: 19:27:17
- amen
- Greg Scranton: 19:27:19
- J.O.B. Grants
- BASEKAMP team: 19:27:40
- (untitled job club)
- Elysa Lozano: 19:28:02
- is there somehwere to see images of this exh?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:28:21
- http://www.artandwork.us/category/events/
- Greg Scranton: 19:28:45
- WHAT...WHAT"D YOU SAY?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:28:51
- when im trying to talk too
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:28:53
- yes
- Greg Scranton: 19:28:55
- I CAN"T HEAR YOU!
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:29:09
- talk, read, type, think
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:13
- no I was kidding that's my old person voice
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:29:18
- http://www.artandwork.us/2010/01/art-work-at-gallery-400-at-uic-chicago/
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:22
- lol
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:29
- ps- I'm not agist I swear
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:34
- and get off my lawn!
- Elysa Lozano: 19:33:17
- uh oh got dropped again..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:35
- will re-add u
- Greg Scranton: 19:36:13
- Elysa Lozano: 19:36:31
- somehow the connection won't hold - will sign off - thank you for the awesome talk
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:36:32
- http://gallery400.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html
- Greg Scranton: 19:37:28
- cause she's old?
- Greg Scranton: 19:37:32
- Greg Scranton: 19:38:23
- Scott's a big furry...or so I've heard/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:51
- want us to call u baack Elysa?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:23
- or it may be to terrible connection -- if so, next time Elysa!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:29
- oh Greg...
- Elysa Lozano: 19:39:39
- ok - try once more - just rebooted connect
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:45
- okay
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:42:26
- www.chancesdances.org
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:34
- nice!
- GONTA: 19:44:48
- I just wanna say something because i need to go..
- GONTA: 19:44:59
- do you want me to write down...
- GONTA: 19:45:12
- and then you say to everyone BASEKAMP_
- GONTA: 19:45:14
- ?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:17
- oh Gonta - if you'd like to speak in voice you defintley can
- GONTA: 19:45:33
- but is have nothing to do exactly what you are talking about...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:41
- are you able to --- that's ok --
- Patricia Watts: 19:45:45
- http://www.platformlondon.org/carbonweb/showitem.asp?article=13
- GONTA: 19:45:48
- ok i will
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:54
- ok.. just a sec
- GONTA: 19:45:56
- let me know when i can interrupt...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:03
- k
- GONTA: 19:46:27
- wair
- GONTA: 19:46:29
- yes
- GONTA: 19:46:30
- ///
- GONTA: 19:46:33
- but am not fiding
- GONTA: 19:46:35
- tjhe botton
- GONTA: 19:46:46
- is weird
- GONTA: 19:46:47
- the
- GONTA: 19:46:48
- window close
- stephen wright: 19:47:01
- scott
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:19
- hi carlos ----- --- hi Stephen!
- stephen wright: 19:47:24
- I just arrived
- stephen wright: 19:47:32
- Train delay -- massive
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:33
- Carlos, i didn't recognize your skypename @ first!
- stephen wright: 19:47:41
- can you connect me?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:41
- Stephen, wil add you to the call now!
- Lannes Quentin: 19:48:56
- I have a sound crash, I can't hear Gonta's question
- GONTA: 19:50:06
- erformanceproduct.ltda@gmail.com">performanceproduct.ltda@gmail.com
- GONTA: 19:50:31
- http://issuu.com/performanceproductltda/docs/portfoliocarlosmonroy0409en...
- GONTA: 19:50:34
- bye guys...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:40
- Quentin - how is the audio now?
- Lannes Quentin: 19:50:54
- not better
- Christopher Lynn: 19:51:26
- Art Work II: The Revenge!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:32
- quentin maybe try to reconnect if it's not better?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:34
- LOL
- Christopher Lynn: 19:51:43
- Also good.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:51
- Maybe online version of Art Work II?
- Lannes Quentin: 19:52:41
- can you try to connect me?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:53
- re-adding
- Lannes Quentin: 19:53:04
- thx
- Lannes Quentin: 19:53:06
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:29
- link http://worksprogress.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:36
- np quentin
- Patricia Watts: 19:54:19
- ecoartspace is interested to partner with other orgs to find ways to integrate artists into the "real world" as agents of change (via jobs)
- Patricia Watts: 19:54:33
- http://www.ecoartspace.org
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:52
- yessssssssssssssssss
- stephen wright: 19:54:56
- How many other projects did you say?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:07
- awesome Paticia
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:09
- LOLLLLLs
- stephen wright: 19:55:10
- 4500
- Christopher Lynn: 19:55:39
- Salem, since you're still publishing material on the site, are you open to submissions for artandwork.us?
- Christopher Lynn: 19:55:49
- The audiobook is awesome!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:01
- link coming soon
- stephen wright: 19:56:13
- "Do with it as you will" -- that's a very generous mode of contagion.
- Christopher Lynn: 19:56:16
- It's also on artandwork.us.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:34
- herte it is! http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/01/art-work/
- stephen wright: 19:56:37
- Please contribute anonymously!
- Christopher Lynn: 19:56:41
- And: http://www.artandwork.us/download/#audio
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:43
- there's also a part 2...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:56
- http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/02/art-work-part-2/
- Christopher Lynn: 19:58:09
- Patricia, email me: clynn@spacesgallery.org. I'd be interested in discussing " artists into the 'real world' as agents of change."
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:24
- a lot of this seems to be exploring definitions of success & "failure"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:16
- Elysa asked about other definitions of economies - personal etc, and - examples of successes?
- Patricia Watts: 19:59:22
- Hi Christopher, OK.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:33
- a few weeks ago Marisa Jahn presented here about her book ByProduct about artists working within business and governement... could be interesting (Patricia, Christopher)
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:44
- (Marisa is editor btw)
- Christopher Lynn: 20:01:01
- Hmmm..
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:25
- Also Ben Kinmont did a related exhibtion project at the Centre Pompidou last year
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:31
- "On Becoming Something else"
- Christopher Lynn: 20:01:33
- Patricia, I think you need to mute. Your tpying is showing up on the audio.
- Patricia Watts: 20:02:00
- Sorry! If I mute then I cannot hear . . . ???
- Christopher Lynn: 20:02:05
- Lame.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:21
- oh, not "pause", the mute will only affect audio going out from your end
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:24
- for future ref
- Patricia Watts: 20:02:32
- where is it?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:32
- the mic symbol, next to the || one
- BASEKAMP team: 20:02:51
- lower left had of windoe (usually, depending on version of skpe & OS)
- Patricia Watts: 20:02:57
- SO SORRY!!!
- Patricia Watts: 20:03:00
- Got it
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:03
- no problem
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:03:35
- : (
- Lannes Quentin: 20:04:04
- (I don't know this project of Ben Kinmont ... are you sure it was at the centre pomidou?)
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:11
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:32
- i have the poster
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:04:33
- i teach that, we read dark matter and art/work!
- Patricia Watts: 20:05:15
- http://www.centrepompidou.fr/Pompidou/Manifs.nsf/0/79CE5F22705A96C7C1257...
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:05:20
- hahaha
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:05:26
- $$$
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:05:39
- yup
- Patricia Watts: 20:05:45
- I missed the point about Ben's work?
- Patricia Watts: 20:06:06
- We started 40 minutes late!
- Patricia Watts: 20:06:33
- that's fine
- Christopher Lynn: 20:06:50
- This was great! Good job BaseKamp and Salem!
- Patricia Watts: 20:07:08
- BLEEP
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:07:18
- BASEKAMP team: 20:08:29
- >> ervers@temporaryservices.org">servers@temporaryservices.org
- Patricia Watts: 20:09:22
- Thanks!!!!
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:09:22
- thanks!
- Elysa Lozano: 20:09:24
- awesome - thank you
- Lannes Quentin: 20:09:25
- thanks to you and salem
- Meg Frisch: 20:09:28
- thank you salem!
- stephen wright: 20:09:29
- thanks salem -- sorry I was so late
- Christopher Lynn: 20:09:33
- Nice beatbox
- BASEKAMP team: 20:09:43
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:09:56
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv3sAFe1FCM
- Lannes Quentin: 20:10:38
- <ss type="dance">dance)</ss>
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:10:44
- haha
- BASEKAMP team: 20:10:55
- thank you! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:11:03
- thanks everyone!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:11:22
- basekamp irc still working?
- Lannes Quentin: 20:11:32
- bye
- Meg Frisch: 20:11:37
- yes of course
- Patricia Watts: 20:12:19
- ByProduct is Marisa's new book?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:13:09
- patricia... 2 secs - link coming
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:13:11
- totally missed this from Patricia, awesome! "ecoartspace is interested to partner with other orgs to find ways to integrate artists into the "real world" as agents of change (via jobs)
[6/29/10 6:54:33 PM] Patricia Watts: http://www.ecoartspace.org " - BASEKAMP team: 20:13:26
- http://basekamp.com/about/events/byproducts
- BASEKAMP team: 20:13:39
- patriciawatts++
- Patricia Watts: 20:16:15
- She mentioned a new book, but did not tell me the title! And, somehow I missed this one. I have worked with Marisa on two shows now, one coming up in October at Otis College of Art and Design, a show called MAKE: CRAFT. I love the last one, Recipes for an Encounter!
- Patricia Watts: 20:16:32
- excellent
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:20:51
- VOICEMAIL from my MOM: 3 minutes of the sounds around her as she sat on a train. The phone must have called me while it was sitting in her purse.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:21:03
- hahaahahhaa
- BASEKAMP team: 20:21:13
- gnight everyone!
2010-06-29
Week 18: FEAST
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with some of the people behind F.E.A.S.T.— Funding Emerging Arts with Sustainable Tactics.
FEAST is a recurring public dinner designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically fund new and emerging art makers. At each FEAST, participants pay a sliding-scale entrance fee for which they receive supper and a ballot. In the course of the evening, diners vote on a variety of proposed artist projects. At the end of dinner, the artist whose proposal receives the most votes is awarded funds collected through the entrance fee to produce the project. The work is then presented during the next FEAST.
FEAST emerged in Brooklyn in February 2009, inspired by Incubate Chicago’s Sunday soup, and now has sister programs in Minneapolis, Portland OR, St Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, and many other cities nationally and internationally, always tapping into the individual fabric of each community. In Philadelphia, preliminary meetings strongly suggest growing interest in this model. It seems Philadelphia is ripe for an occasion of arts support and community at the “bottom-up” level, with its wealth of artists, arts schools (recent graduates with few opportunities), collectives, thinkers, community organizations and emerging sustainability groups.
All too often “tactics” are considered situational rather than sustainable. But an artworld economy, if it is to be truly plausible needs to embody sustainable tactics. How does FEAST fulfill the mandate stated in its name? To address that broad question in practical terms, Tuesday’s potluck conversation will also double as a practical organizing session — part of an ongoing conversation about shaping a “FEAST in Philly”. What does Philadelphia need? What existing structures can be built on? What can Philadelphia learn from other models? What are the unique characteristics of Philadelphia that will form its own model? Who will be involved? How does Philadelphia define community? What will Philadelphia support? How will proposals be directed or selected? And beyond Philadelphia, can this kind of a conversation spark similar initiatives in similar communities?
More info:
http://feastinbklyn.org/
Transcription
Week 18: FEAST
(Silence until 0:17:44.6)
[Scott]: Hello? Can you hear me (laughing)? Yeah, that's the internet speaking. Hey Steven? Hello? Can you hear us?
[Steven]: Hey Scott. How are you doing?
[Scott]: Hey good. Can you hear us? Can you hear me?
[Steven]: Yep.
[Scott]: Awesome. Okay. So...
(Background chatter)
Is that better? Okay, cool. Yeah. Welcome everybody who is here online and everybody in the space to another week of, I feel like a talk show host here. But, to another week of this year of weekly events called Plausible Artworlds where we're looking at a different kind of fledgling or micro artworld. Some of them not so micro even, each week for the year. This week, we'll be talking with Jeff from FEAST, and Kate as well, from FEAST, who have been doing this thing in Brooklyn for a little while now. Rather than explain it myself, I wanted to kind of turn it over to Jeff. We're just going to try to have an informal conversation with a microphone. Is everybody still there?
Can you hear us? I assume. Well, just type in if it's crazy and you can't hear us. Oh, okay. Yes, thanks Alyssa. Okay, cool. Hi Jeff.
[Jeff]: H! Can you guys hear ok? Apparently there's a, what's going on upstairs? Oh, a Kung Fu class going on upstairs. Um, so, if you can't hear or if I get quite start waving wildly. So, who has been to one of these before? Anyone here at BaseKamp? The potluck before. Who's been to the potluck before? Cool. Who was at any of the talks a couple weeks ago, we did three talks here in Philly. A few people? Okay. Has anyone been to a feast in Brooklyn? Okay, cool. So, no one knows everything, which is a big part of my investigation and whenever I go talk to groups of people I like to reiterate that I have expertise and I have lots of non expertise. So, just because I happen to have a microphone in my hand does not mean that I am the one that should be talking. So, just to reiterate what Scott says, please rip this thing out of my hand. Specifically, especially tonight I think it's really important to have the people here in the room talking. We really wanted the sort of basic strategy to help get a feast or something like it going in Philly was for me to come to a few conversations and then to come back and see who shows up and who actually wants to organize and make it happen here. We do have some support but, at the same time what's long lasting and what's sustainable is that there are people here in the community who are saying "this is what we need. This is what we're interested in. These are the communities we want to serve. This is the style of support we want to create" so you're much better at answering those questions than I am.
The five cent tour of FEAST, for anyone who wasn't here a couple weeks ago and for those online. Are you guys online? Type something. We can see you. Maybe. Um, great. Awesome. So, basically we've been going on for about a year and a half in Brooklyn, NY. There is about eight core members that really sort of facilitate our project happening and I think that a nice size. And then about twenty members, volunteers that really make it happen. From the turnout from a couple weeks ago, it seems like it could be a similar size in terms of scope, here in Philadelphia. So, I would think about that in terms of if it's being organized here. You know there's probably going to be a couple hundred people that show up that you'll probably have about ten projects each time. That's sort of what we run on. And then it does take a good crew of people to make it happen. We host a dinner about every three months in a church basement. People come in and pay $20 and they get supper and (inaudible 0:23:03.2) that we work with a local farm and do an organic, locally sourced meal. A seasonal meal. And whoever gets the most votes of the projects that are around the room, there are about ten artist projects around the room. Whoever gets the most votes gets the money that we collect at the door. Then they come back the next time and show what they worked on. The whole sort of importance behind it... I can stand too, do we have enough chairs? The whole importance behind it was that the people that organize it all work in art production for the most part. Artist designers, museum folks, gallery folks, writers. And we felt and still feel that our jobs and the way that we were producing culture was really at risk in the economic downturn. And at the same time we were participating in sustainable food projects like CSA's Farmshare, grocery co-ops, composting, eating locally and that all of those systems, even though they allegedly were more expensive to buy into, were really thriving in an allegedly terrible economy. And so, we wanted to look at those sustainable food systems and try to apply them to create sustainable models of cultural production and consumption.
And I brought... I won't get into that (expletive 0:24:33.2). Maybe we'll do our throws right now.
So, Halloween last year, I got to the point where I really sick of producing in New York the way that you need to produce in order to pay your rent and to consume the way you need to consume in New York. And so I put my stuff in storage and started to different cities. As soon as we started FEAST a year and a half ago, people started emailing us from around the county saying "Oh that's so cool. Can we do that where we're from?" And my answer has always been "yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes!!" I mean, we ripped our idea off of kids in Chicago at Incubate who had been doing Sunday Soup for years and years who borrowed it from the great guy named Ben. He had started in Grand Rapids, Mi. It's really been something that has traveled across the county and to be honest, every nonprofit every year has a big dinner called a gala, where they invite all the people that give them money that actually make the decisions for the nonprofit and they do this exact system except it's a lot more coded and a lot less transparent.
Yes. Was that a yes? Can I get an "Amen" from the internet?
(Laughter)
So, we were really interested in this and also looking at emerging systems of technology as an inspiration for sort of the architecture of an organization and I was talking with Scott a little bit today about the idea of open source as being a way to fund raise. This is really open source fund raising for us. And to that end, you didn't need to get a masters degree in arts administration, you didn't need to go work at the institution for 10 years to know the funders, he didn't need to… Anyone could do what we were doing. Anyone could have 10 people over for dinner and ask everyone to kick in 20 bucks into a project that you're excited about $200. And so I think we were really excited about the simplicity of it as well.
So I've been going around. I went to Minneapolis and help started a feast there. Of help sort of remotely facilitate other projects and other projects have sort of emerged on their own. And I think FEAST, partly because it's about big ugly city which is often as people think of as a connecting point. We are a connector for Stu in Baltimore, stock in Portland, OR, there is a feast in Cleveland, there's a feast that's in the Berkshires in MA, there's another feast outside Boston and you know every time we get a little bit of press I get another round of emails from Jacksonville Florida or Orlando we just heard from as well. But this is a much more concerted effort. So I think we wanted this to be a place where it feels a little directed and a little more assisted. It's such a large city and has so many artists and so many resources and I think it could be a really... What, in three days we had 70 people show up or something? So there's, you know, obviously not everyone came back but there's a lot of energy behind something like this.
One of the conversations that came up. You know, before I even start getting into more specific stuff, does anyone want to say anything? I hate that I'm geographically dominating and physically dominating this conversation. Does anyone have responses that they've been stewing on since we had our meetings the last time? Kate or Theresa do you have anything to say? Scott? Oh! There's a hand! There's a hand!
[Male Group Member] Q: Can you talk a little bit about how the actual non-profit part works or how, I know that you guys have some kind of non-profit status that you operate under or a fiscal sponsor. How do like other cities tackle that for long term sustainability? And where does the money come from and go and all those things?
[Jeff] A: Um, does this get documented forever and ever? Probably. Um, so (laughing). No. So, we are fiscally sponsored under Fractured Atlas so if anyone makes a donation to our organization, it goes through Fractured Atlas. It's a non-profit that we fall under. And so that's how any sort of big donations happen. FEAST in Brooklyn has not received any sort of major donations. We did a big kick starter but those are all small, mostly $25 - $100. We did a few $200-$250 donations. But for the most part we're a $10 and $20 operation. The actual grants, it is a CASH CASH CASH situation! And the way that we think about it and now that we are continuing and growing and sort of production more money, we're seeking more specific financial advice. Which we're in the process of doing right now. But the way that we've always considered it is like it's a private event, its private party, and that really it's not we are an organization we don't have an LLC. You know, we're not like an individual propriety that it's many, many people making small donations to an individual and that's how we would define it tax wise. That no one is getting $1,000 from me, Jeff Hnilicka but that 200 people are in a room all giving someone $20 in cash. But, we also don't claim it. It's not really going through us either. We put it in a bag with a dollar sign on it and then we hand the bag with the dollar sign over to someone and then they walk away with it. If someone wanted to claim it as income, that would be where it would get tricky. But we have enough expenses where we are able to show... Like we have plenty of receipts. Our expenses far exceed our individual donations. So, that's sort of the logistics of it.
(Inaudible comment question from background)
We do. We max out at $1,000. We don't fund anyone more than $1,000. Last time we funded four projects. We did one $1,000 grant, one $600 grants and two $400 grants. That's what we did last time. One $600. One $1, 000, one $600 and two $400 grants.
So in terms, if you're asking like a tax question, we're looking into that ourselves and I don't really have a great answer for you. But, I feel like it's scrappy enough and fluid enough that anything that feels concrete is definitely taken care of. But we are like not interested in becoming a non-profit. I think, for us, it's an artistic practice. An artistic program and the formality of becoming an institution and having a board to answer to and...
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
Huh. NATO's getting loud. That's not really anything we're interested in. I think another big piece of for us in Brooklyn is thinking about responsible growth and sustainable growth. And we don't want to do anything else besides four events a year. We all like having our own things that we do. We started out doing once a month and it was insane. It's not fun. You finish one and you're getting ready for the next one. It feels a lot better to space it out. So, does that answer the question you were asking? I don't know if I answered that. Okay.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
Yeah, I mean it's not that we don't... The like going out and sharing the idea with other people, for me is a lot less about it. I've always described it as "I'm not trying to start whole foods". I want to help people start lots of CSA's around the country that are individual, doing their own thing. If they want to be called FEAST that's great. If they want to come up with their own name that's fantastic. All the different cities around the county sort of have their own iterations so, you know. In Baltimore they pick a couple of different organizations that they fund. In Portland they let the first ten people that propose go. Incubate has tried a bunch of different ways to do what they do and it's still an evolving process and for us it's an evolving process too. This last time we had 27 proposals come in and we did an internal prescreening where we only selected eight projects to be proposed, which was actually really successful and we were really happy with that. So, I think that actually something that I would love to do. Because I think most people know most of the things that I've just said.
So, I really want to hear from everyone that is here is what is it that Philadelphia would want and need? And what populations are you guys wanting to serve here? I think to reach out to people, we did three different geographic areas, but it seems more and more interesting for me as an outsider and from a lot of people that are organizing to do something more centrally located that would serve the entire city and to bring the city together in a different way. But, you know, you are the ones that are here at the table now and that are wanting to organize. So that's something I would love to hear peoples' responses on. Does anyone want to talk? I can keep talking so... Don't stop me.
[Scott]: One question that I have is I wonder if the prescreening... This was a similar question that came up during one of the other recent weeks where we focused on The Collective Foundation and some of their micro funding strategies or projects even. Just examples of things they've done. And one was something very similar where everybody that kind of bought into it, with almost no money, could then vote on the the pool of money, the surplus went to. To fund some project by that person (coughing). Excuse me. Anyway, one of the things that they were doing in one of these projects was prescreening them so like, I don t know. 30 or 40 or 50 applicants and then they sort of whittle it down to five and then everybody gets to vote on those five. And my question was like why not just go ahead and choose the winner? If you're going to go ahead and narrow it down already. I mean, obviously it's to give people a sense of voting but I guess I was just kind of curious about that process and why have a sort of first pass.
[Jeff]: No totally. And it's something that we really struggled with and I'm sure will re-invision the next time we do it. We've always let every proposal come in and they're always a lot of stinker. That's great and we love that because there are people that have never applied for a grant before that see what a difference that level of professionalism or that specificity gives to a granting pool. And so, it was sort of a heartbreaker for me to like get rid of the projects that were like not super great or really poorly explained or poorly executed. But, at the same time there's a logistics issue for us. We had 20 proposals the time before and you can't dig through that sort of information effectively in a two hour dinner
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
Yeah. So we knew that when we had 7-10 proposals it felt really good. And it felt digestible. SO that was the number we were shooting for. And then we just worked with the sort of the core organizers to whittle down what makes sense. Also to that end, we are really interested in contemplating and redefining and thinking about community for us and we've made an incredible effort to get a really diverse applicant pool because that means you have a really diverse pool of people saying "hey come to this event"
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
[Scott]: Hey Joseph! We just added you to the chat. We're talking with Jeff from FEAST right now. How are you?
[Joseph]: I'm good. You guys are in the middle of a conversation right now I guess?
[Scott]: Yeah, but welcome! Welcome in!
[Joseph]: I'll just mute myself! I'll just hit mute and listen for awhile us just a second.
[Scott]: Rock N roll. And totally feel free to join in anytime.
[Jeff]: YES! Other people talking!
[Lauren] Q: Hi, I'm Lauren. I guess I'm not super familiar with the planning process so far but taking advantage of your presence here, I'm curious to learn more about the details in your personal experiences about bringing large groups of people together and the actual planning and how you found the process of uniting desperate communities just represented here towards kind of a goal to serve many, many different communities as well. So maybe specific planning advice that you have through your experience?
[Jeff] A: Totally. That's a great question. And I think this is also not the end of my participation in this project either. To me I think that in the same way organizing people is a large part of what my practice is and so I'm really interested in that question. How do you bring a group of people together from around a city that don't know each other and define a value system and start making decisions and figure out how the leadership works within that? For instance, in Minneapolis it's a much smaller community so I think people at least had a sense of who was around the table. But I also think that at a certain point, because it's so task oriented, it's about practice not theory at the end of the day. It's a dinner. It's about making a dinner and having a party. And so, you can kind of get into the... I think the more task oriented the project the meetings start to be. I think there is a foundation of interest for people about what this project is and so I think that through saying "okay, these are the food people" then they get together and start cooking. During that cooking time, they start talking about what the community is.
[Theresa]: It's Theresa. I just wanted to extend on what Jeff is saying by way of I think that this is sort of unique in the sense that we're organizing the organizing group. We're not necessarily; it's not sprung out of a group of friends that started talking about something at a bar to make it happen. What we're sort of doing is almost like randomly sending out emails, sending out word and coming together to see who keeps coming back to talk about what it is that we're going to do. So really its a little bit f a different process in that way as far as the organizing goes. Would you say? And then I think that some of the things that we're interested in and thinking about is like "who is the community? What kind of audience do we want to draw? What sort of proposals are we hoping to direct or not direct?" So, that's a lot of questions. Maybe we should just start with one of those? You know, like what kind of projects are we looking to... Like for instance, Baltimore. They have a very sort of specific more like social services things like that. And so in Philadelphia, what kind of projects are we looking to fund? What do we see as needs of our community (coughs)? Excuse me.
[Jeff]: Yeah, and also if you told ten of your friends to come to this thing, not only what do you think would you like to fund but what would your friends like to fund too? That I think is the really interesting thing about when you start creating this community. If you have this sort of dispersed group of people organizing something, you have a pretty diverse pool of people that are coming and voting and then all of a sudden that group of people defines a value. And so I would like to hear ... What's really successful for us? I would like to pay for my studio time. We do not see a lot of success with that. It's a lot of like "I want to go and do this project in this community", "I want to be doing this sort of outreach". I want to hear what you have to say.
[Male Group Member]: I guess, to add to that. I think that there are so many artists in Philly that just need like $500-$1,000 to just get whatever they're doing off the ground. But I agree that it shouldn't be like paying for studio time or "I want to buy a new camcorder". I don't feel like that is a legitimate thing to fund. Even though it may help that person out in the future but there might be better ways for them to actually get that money. I think that being focused on projects that relate to whatever they're doing in the community or at least relate to Philadelphia, but not things like "I need this laptop and these speakers so I can do Skype chats every Tuesday." I love Plausible Artworld.
(Laughter)
I think that offering alternatives to the ones who do want to fund their studio time and like but a camcorder and say "well, there are these other resources out there that might be helpful" and at least have a list of links to say "there is Kick Starter, and there is the Awesome Foundation in Boston". Like there are a ton of groups out there that give micro grants to artists, just not like this dinner.
[Jeff]: Totally. Does anyone else? I like this action! YEAH!
[Chris]: I would like to know how you define community.
[Jeff]: Totally. That continues to be something that we talk about and think about. These two ideas of community and sustainability I think get thrown around constantly and their totally loaded words. I've been working in big institutions and small institutions and I think both of those ideas have a lot of mythology and falsehood around them that most of the time sustainable projects aren't sustainable. They're volunteer run. They have a huge start up cost, and a lot of expenses associated with them. I think a lot of times the sustainable projects, not sustainable art projects necessarily but sustainability ends up having a real boutique draw as opposed to something more pedestrian. And community projects rarely actually engage a "community" for people on Skype.
And I'm not reading that, I'm sorry. Scott? Are you on top of reading people's comments? If you want to read anything let me know because I'm not really able to read and pay attention like that
[Scott]: Maybe this is a good time to add in Steven's comment. He was just asking more about your earlier comments on a democratic process and he said that the way addressed what I was asking was more a comment on people's expectations and knowledge about preparing grant applications rather than how the project really makes democratic mean something. I guess that's not really a question. Maybe, I just wondered if you wanted to respond whether the project was trying to address ideas about democracy or whether it was just a way of kind of describing something briefly.
[Jeff]: I think democracy is really not in our name. We describe it as democratic but I think a better work is actually transparent. I think we're really a transparent granting organization where you see who is not winning, you hear conversations of people making decisions, you know how much people are being awarded and then you also see the return and people have to come back and show what they did with the money. The grantees have to show to the people that funded the project what they did. I don't know if that even answers your question Steven. Yeah? Thanks NATO! But that's sort of...here Kate. You are actually nicely articulating.
[Kate]: I was going to kind of fold this in with Alyssa's comment too because I think one of the great things is that, we've talked about this in the other meetings, but as an artist you apply for money and it's a totally opaque process and you don't know. You don't really get feedback most of the time. But this process, you're in there and you see the other proposals. So if your proposal sucks and you feel like you could articulate better you kind of say "oh, they won. This is why" and maybe like get feedback that way or you're having conversations with people that way. I mean, it is kind of an exercise in (inaudible 0:51:37.4). I don't know. I guess we don't talk about democracy that much but it is transparent and it is not a top down process really. It's everybody who is there, you vote for yourself. You're friends vote. The people who are organizing it vote. Like we're all there doing this project together, which is like democracy.
[Jeff]: I am also concerned about the organizational structure. Last night I did a talk about queer conscience and it reminded me a lot of where a lot of this project came out for me was in queer organizing. I worked with a group in Minneapolis, a help star group called Revolting Queers and just the systems and structures which really came out of labor organizing systems and feminist conversation circles and the way that was created. That really informs how we try to do FEAST and how I continue to try to talk about it. Which I think is important an important point to say that there is a reason that I'm so uncomfortable right now that I have a microphone. There is such a position of power that I hate and I really like that what we do may not be democratic, but there is enough activation of multiple voices. But I think that was nice to think back on. And also FEAST really came as a manifestation of an investigation for me that I was doing when the economy really started to shift thinking about queer economy and how we can queer economy. I'm really interested in how we can make small gestures to queer ourselves that's so outside of the way that we think about sexuality and gender that, you know. And I think that is totally in tune with queering the way that you think about your daily consumption and production. I don't know if I'm just rambling here...
[Kate]: (Laughing) yeah, I kind of got lost in what you were saying. Where my brain stopped last was, I guess I started thinking about how this isn't a perfect system and this isn't' a perfect event and it's still evolving and that's part of what is good about it and what is transparent about it. Is it everybody saying like this isn't the final solution to anything but we want an alternative and we're working on this together. Which is also...
[Steven]: Can I ask a question? Steven here.
[Kate]: Totes.
[Steven]: Is that okay if I just ask the question?
[Kate]: Please.
[Steven]: I didn't want to interrupt. One of the things that's really interesting is about how open ended it is in the terms of adapting to the community where it's going to be set up. You're obviously completely open to doing it differently in Philadelphia than it was done in Brooklyn and Minneapolis and Portland and so on. I have two questions really. One is I really wanted to know just how many places you have actually facilitated setting up this kind of a structure up and how different the types of means and responses were in each community? Like to what extent do you really get substantially different input and desires and proposals from one place to another? It would be kind of interesting for me to know that.
[Kate]: That's a great question. I think really that Jeff has been far more places than I have but I was involved in the beginning in Minneapolis because I used to live there and have been privy to the conversations there. I've been to the event in Brooklyn many times. But, they're actually very different events. I think Jeff said this earlier; Minneapolis is a much smaller community than Philly or New York. Everybody knows each other and the way that event happened was more like a group of people that already knew each other. And the event happens in a very different way. Part of this was the date was set very early so there weren't as many conversations as we are having here in Philly at all about the ideas. So it was like "okay the date is set, now we're producing the event". It's a very different feeling than coming in here and talking with all of you tonight even or even two weeks ago. Its like "what's going on in Philly?" That didn't' happen so much in Minneapolis. And so Minneapolis and it's partly because a lot of the people are high level art admin there, there's a lot of designers so it's a pretty slick event. They've got a really great website. They've got great design. They've got a lot of free production stuff that just makes it look really nice. They produce a really nice event. Brooklyn is much more low key and kind of rough around the edges maybe. I don't know if that's the right term or not. I think they are really different and really characterized by the city. I don't know if you want to add anything.
[Jeff]: Yeah. I went to LA in February and did a few conversations not nearly at this level of facilitation. But the biggest issue that they were talking about was a cross-city connection. They felt so disjointed from within the city of Los Angeles and that was something that they really wanted to tackle. I helped some folks in Jersey City do a project and that was SUPER localized. They really wanted to help fund artists that were working in a couple different studio buildings and so that's a totally different tactic. In Chicago, Incubate, I think they were really responding to a much more internal investigation. Again, let me preface this by saying that all these people have way more intelligent things to say about their institutions than my outside perspective. But, I think a lot of what they were responding to was that they wanted to consider different ways of organizing arts administration. And so it's a much more sort of... Abby talks about how they used to not want to do public programs at all and that they just wanted to do inside private events. I think it does wildly vary in what people are wanting to deal with. Part of what we do in Brooklyn is about creating an experience that is not complete without you. We let people come in early and help decorate. In New York everything is really polished. Everything is really clean and crisp. And you come and consume a cultural event. It's really rare that you can come and feel like you're an active participant in the organization of it, which I think is something that we're all responding too.
(Audio feed lost 1:00:15.9 - 1:01:24.9)
[Male group member]: Who goes to church?
(Massive laughter)
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
[Male group member]: Should I repeat my question? So, I had a question about ideal venues in Philly and this is for you to respond to if you're local and for people around the table. And then how FEAST Brooklyn chose their venue and kind of how it worked out and what is its location and all those things.
[Jeff]: Wow. That's a (inaudible 1:02:00.9) situation. And then there is also the question of do we pay them. We do pay them. It's very, very minimal. They're very generous with the space. We pay them several hundred dollars for electricity and time basically and wear and tear on the space. But I think that it also helps to have a place that maybe you are renting from. I've run into problems with donated space because you don't get any support. I love church basements because you get tables, chairs, and chip wear. You know, they're made to have church basement fundraisers. The Minneapolis FEAST just had an event at an Eagles. Like an American Legion sort of space, like a VFW and it was awesome. It was so, so, so, so fun and good. It was great because they had a bar and a full operating kitchen. To me, I think the most important thing is to have a serious kitchen. It is no fun to cook for 250 people in a ragtag operation and it makes a big difference to have something that is equipped to cook for that many people.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
We've done it all different ways. It's way better if you bring everything in and cook it there and serve it there and they have refrigeration there. It's way easier.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
For FEAST in Brooklyn we do it both on site and off site. And there is a kitchen in the church. This is also to say, that's if it's for 250 people. I mean, that's also a question. Are that many people what we want? Or what you guys want or whatever. What we all want. But I think, yeah here. Oh, can I just say one thing. I think that one thing that is important to me about a church or an Eagles or a space like that it doesn't feel like it's hip art kid zone. I think there is something really lovely about kids and old people and people that have lived in a neighborhood for a long time. That's really awesome. I think that if you move it into "fill in the blank industrial space" or "place that's really far and difficult to get to" that loses something for me. That might not be a problem from here though. So, I don't want to put that on you guys.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
No. no. no. no. no. no. no. Do you know what I mean? It's like when you're in some noise show then every tight panted, sorry if anyone is wearing tight pants...
[Elizabeth]: What's far? Philly is not that small and if we want to be inclusive I think that's kind of a loaded thing too. That's all relative and if you want to have everyone involved... It kind of takes me back to another thing. I attended two of the three earlier meetings and a came up, for instance, like the Kensington, is something that we kind of talked about at the second meeting too. The Kensington. There were some people that were like "well, this is the best place for it". I think that right of the bat it was sort of just have our own event. And I think that's something we should talk about. Do we want to have a Philly Feast or Neighborhood Feast? Personally, I feel like we should have one and sort of see how it goes. Let's not get ahead of ourselves in a way. But I also wonder what you think about the idea of having sort of a roving thing to begin with. Like doing it that it's really just getting the idea to catch on and having people and a lot of different communities so it's not appealing to just Center City. If we did one, I'd say Broad Street Ministry, who I've worked with in the past, is a big church on Broad Street. They donated the space, were very helpful, in my case anyway. You know, doing one in West Philly. Doing one in North. And just kind of... I just wondered what you all think about that. If there is a team of people that are working on the venue issue, that they sort of just start thinking of ideas and start working. You know, asking people all over. I have a connection here. You know. And just seeing. Maybe one catches on better as we sort of move along. But I just wondered about having sort of a roving thing to start with, at least to start with. I think it just encourages inclusivity.
[Female group member]: I was actually going to say a lot of the same things that Elizabeth did in the sense of what came out of the meetings thus far. I think it's really important. What the feel of the group is right? We want to include that. One of the main things that we got, other than a few people at this one meeting, was that there was an idea of being inclusive of everyone. So, not to say that having it in different neighborhoods on a schedule isn't an inclusive idea, but also the idea of having it in a central location where people can come from. I felt that those suggestions really strongly from the second two meetings. So just to give a little feedback from what has happened thus far. And also intention. What are our intentions as far as that goes? I think that's a really important question to ask. There are definitely some new faces here, so if there are new ideas about that we're really excited. I mean we're here just to get that feedback and that information so that it can shape our plans and organizing going forward. Broad Street Ministry actually has already offered to donate space and so that's really exciting. Now, that can't have alcohol so that's sort of too bad. But, anyway, we would obviously keep that in consideration. That's where we're at right now.
[Jeff]: Um, is NATO still on? Cause I'm going to tell a story
[Female group member]: I think he left.
[Jeff]: Aw man! Um, okay. So a couple responses. Minneapolis started doing a roving thing because they also wanted to sort of hit a bunch of different areas. I think it actually served them nicely because the first venue wasn't exactly right. And then they went to somewhere totally different and that was good for some things and not totally right. And now they're going to try another place. And so I think the nice thing about being roving is you can start to identify what your needs are and how many people come to where.
To the question about community, like how do we define community and how do we define location? Years ago, like 6 or 7 years ago, I was a lowly intern as Mass Mocha and NATO Thompson gave a lecture to us intern about the idea of becoming as a way to define community. And I'm going to butcher whatever he said because it happened so long ago and I wasn't really listening then but it stuck a little bit. Basically the idea is that there isn't some sort of static community that all of a sudden three different communities popped up. And now there's a new community here that's come together and will dissipate. And then we'll have another meeting in however long and that new group of people will become a new community. Not only is it these individuals that come together, but it's also this idea of value system and intention. And that's sort of to go back to the idea of are we interested in becoming non-profit. It's something that I loved about the Revolting Queers stuff was that there was no mission. There still is no mission. Whoever decided they wanted to make a flyer or poster or get on a microphone at a party, they were the ones who could start to define that evolving omission and that whoever sort of gathered and came together would define that intention. In the same way it can geographically roam, it can sort of cosmically or theoretically roam. Which I think is exciting and interesting too. Does anyone want to respond to any of those things I said?
[Male group member]: I want to respond to Elizabeth's comment and to yours about the roving place. I think it seems interesting that it's helpful in Minneapolis that they haven't really found what they're looking for yet. So they're kind of going to different venues. I also think it might be a little problematic to start out with the idea of roving and say "well, let's get one under our belt and if that venue isn't perfect then let's look at other venues." Because if the venue, like the Broad Street Church, is ideal then it might make sense to stay in a location because you don't really want to go to a lesser venue. It'd be like "oh man, I wish...we didn't have any spoons there. That sucks!"
(Laughter)
[Elizabeth]: What are we going to do to encourage proposals? How are we going to get the word out in neighborhoods I haven't even gone to frankly? You know, how are we going to get the word out? How are we going to market this thing too? I guess I was thinking with the roving thing is more appealing to people as a wider array of projects and community will be defined by the people that come to this thing. So, a more diverse sort of audience and proposals. Just to encourage that. Maybe geography doesn't matter. I just think it's really important that people are coming to these things that aren't just like, someone like me. I want to see other people that have other ideas than I do and that live in different communities where they want to propose a project that will help their community.
[Jeff]: I think there is a lot of possibility with as low of a price point, assuming that here a $10-$20 range you really get a diverse, that ends up being a non-issue a lot of the time. It's too big of an opportunity not to waste.
[Male group member]: Maybe price point is something else we should talk about because I think that $20 for a family is a lot of money. If you're bringing wife and kids that becomes an $80 meal. I think to some people, it's beyond their threshold of what they can afford.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
Do you do like pay as you wish?
[Jeff]: We have a kind and friendly yet forceful team of front desk people who ask $10-$20 at the door but no one gets turned away because they don't have enough money. That's in all of our materials too.
[Chris]: I think what you are saying about the movable community kind of answers my question. Like, what happens if there's problem with politics in there?
[Jeff]: If there's a problem in the community with politics? In organizing or...?
[Chris]: In organizing and such. Yeah. Because I've been in communities where it's like there were little cliques and politics just tore the thing apart.
[Scott]: Do you mean like inter-group strife and that sort of thing?
[Chris]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Jeff]: I think that also part of the architecture of what we're setting up now too. Just to think back to Revolting Queer stuff, now there are like the Pegasus Party and the Beast You Jump Party and several different little action groups that have splintered off and then there's still sort of this core group of organizers. I think what's exciting is that there can be pods of people that break off and say "oh, well I want to do it this way." I don't really fear that but I also think that letting people throw their two cents and figure out how this should be organized is an exciting and hopefully, lest I say it Steven, democratic-ish way of deciding how this event could happen. AND, I also really want to reiterate it doesn't have to be called FEAST, it doesn't have to raise money, and it doesn't have to do... It doesn't have to have voting, it doesn't have t be for art. You know, it doesn't even have to happen! I think it's interesting to consider what systems are needed here. Maybe there's a public granting organization in Philly that I don't know about that answers a lot of these questions already.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
What about bums? They only want free food! Hey! They are a big part of the Green Pointe Community. We are across the street from a park where people hang out all day. No, it's not like a lot. It's definitely... People come in. That's fine. I'm sure that people that I wouldn't consider bums a lot of others would. And I'm sure I'm sure some people consider me a bum. AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Timothy just joined the chat!!!! Um, does anyone else want to say something? Um, yes.
[Female group member]: I don't know if this is really a solution, just a thought. You could have a central dinner and then rotate around every other time. Obviously that will come organically, but as far as... I think the idea of the art projects being funded is great. But also in certain communities, like public amenities like parks or public spaces are in a lot of need for help like my neighborhood and a lot of people's neighborhoods. So, I think that would be a really interesting way to combine an art piece and a public space piece. (Inaudible 1:18:58.4) arts does a lot of work but they're actually really low on funding now and I'm not saying we should fund them, but maybe there is some kind of intersection there that could be explored.
[Jeff]: Yeah. Something that we, in Brooklyn, have always talked about but never really done is thinking about what if we gave a specific sort of charge or question or theme or neighborhood to respond to. And that might be another sort of direction to go in as well. And that also might reach out into a different demographic or population that maybe is difficult to connect with that this group really wants to end up serving. I sort of feel like maybe it might be, I know that it's helpful for this to be in a big group, but I kind of would like to see what would shake down if we said like "are there specific people that are really interested in the food thing?", "are there specific people that are really interested in the figuring out venues and outreach?" I'm just kind of going off of the Minneapolis has broken up and how we've broken up. You know, people who are really sort of wanting to do like decorating, finding bands, doing sort of event stuff. Do people feel like they want to specialize? Let me say this actually, because I think this is a worthwhile question. I don't want to assume. Are people that are here tonight interesting in being sort of organizers of this event? It's fine if you aren't. Are people here wanting to spend one day a month, two days a month considering working on this investigation?
[Scott]: Is it worth asking why people want to do that? The only reason I ask is because my understanding from some of the last meetings is there was something like upwards of sixty people who wanted to help organize or something like this. Am I getting that right? Which is totally ridiculous. It's not ridiculous for some things. For a large scale organization that might have thousands of members, it's not. But for an event where, pretty much, there may be only a few times with that many people in Philadelphia, if that. I think that what attracts people to organizing something is different for different people and sometimes that doesn't work out very well. Sometimes it really could. And people have vested interest for different reasons. For instance, if an event is going to happen in my neighborhood then "oh yeah, I'm totally interested in doing it" but it's not "ooooooooooh. I don't know." So maybe it matters why people want to do it is all I'm saying. It could impact how it all could shape up. I guess I was just curious. If people here are interested, I'd be curious as to why. Not to judge what anybody's reasons are, because everything is legitimate and fine but, yeah.
[Rachel]: One of the reasons that I'm attracted to it is because food brings people together. So, it's either the food or the art that you're coming for. And so either way you're going to be exposed to something new. I would love to be working with food. I love food. I cook all the time. I have a garden. You can just learn a lot by talking to the people next to you and could be like part of the theme too. I'm not sure, I don't know. It depends if we have theme nights, but the food can be part of it. I had something else but it escaped my mind.
[Male group member]: Scott, I think I disagree with your comment. I think like if we started a Google group and we had 60 people on there. We have a Google group, okay, and it has 16 but it's going to be up to 60 eventually. But I think that if kind of break those into committees of let's say venue and food and marketing or whatever, I think that organizing an event for 200 people is a really big task. I think it's better to have like 60 people who maybe half are really interested in doing something than have 5 who are pulling their hair out. So I think it's better to start with that kind of energy amongst us than to start with less and try to talk people into it. Who knows. I think there's natural leaders that kind of come out and will say "I'm going to plan the menu" or "these two people are going to plan the menu" and then everyone else helps cook and then someone else does all the legwork to chose the venue. It's like that's going to organically occur. But I think it's better to start with more than less. Because if you have like five people in a room who want to do this, it seems like it would be crazy.
[Female group member]: I think that the thing about it too is that it's a valid question in a way but I also totally understand your point. But I think that the interesting thing about the organizing process has been what I think is going to happen and what seems to be happening is like the people that keep emailing me back and the people that keep coming back are not interested in it just because they want to propose an art project. Which is kind of the sense of some of the people that I got from some of the other meetings. Yeah, we had like 60 some people, maybe more, but they'll sort of fall away and perhaps they'll come back and propose a project which is totally great too. But the good news is that it naturally sort of works its way out as we go.
[Jeff]: Yeah, I think that's outside of FEAST stuff. What I've learned is that you get a Google group of 60 people and in two weeks you either get where no one replies back and the group dies or you get 15 people left standing that aren't sick of getting emails all the time and your really start to generate a dialog. I'm willing to trust in that system as opposed to sort of allocating who is officially in charge of something or not. I mean I'm sure we could have gone about this saying four or five people in Philly who would be really good at this and we could have come up with a group that would have executed it in a really specific way and knowing what to do. Or work with a specific organization but I think this way, this sort of mass call out is a more interesting way to see who is out there. There were people at that meeting in South Philly that were like "oh, we don't really want to organize so we're just going to do this at our house" and have like a few people over. And that's great. That's shifting culture in a community or city as well which is really exciting.
[Female group member]: You started talking about food. What's your name again? Rachael. Rachael started talking about food and I think that's a really important place to be because it is sort of my weak spot in this whole thing. I think that's such a huge part of this and it can take so many different forms. So maybe if there are other people that have this sort of interest in food, we could talk a little bit more about that. Are there other people that are interested in cooking or have sort of ideas about local organic food or... Kate's pointing to her brother. Thank you.
[Elliot]: My name is Elliot and I was just mentioned as Kate's younger brother. I live in West Philadelphia. My primary interest in this, but not only interest, is in the food aspect of it. I'm a very avid cook. I went to Oberlin College which has a very strong co-op community where I spent a semester and a half cooking for about 60-80 people once a week leading the kitchen. So I have a bit of experience in that regard and what it takes to plan a menu and organize for a whole group of people like that. Just the idea of this community run project where it's got his clear focus where it's about community and it's about art and bringing food into the mix and having the same sort of community focus on the food as well is something that is really a great interest of mine. I think that in the end, I'd really want to be focused on, and I'm sure that many other people would agree, locally produced organic. I mean really knowing where the food you're eating is coming from and having sort of a clear explanation of why you're serving this and where it's all from so that people really understand where it's coming from the same way that people are coming in and explaining their art ideas and where that's coming from and what it's all about. I know I'm definitely on board in doing what I can for the cooking aspect. My girlfriend is a professional cook as well and she' completely on board. She's actually just quitting her job in a month and wants to get more involved in this. Not the only reason, but it's on the list. But that's my schpeal and I'm excited about it.
[Female group member]: For the food, I think if we had sort of like a next step in the food part of it. Like if we just had another meeting, like the food people or something and then there's not anyone... You know there are a few aspects that go into the food. Sourcing it. We talked about this at the South Philly one. Just about how you don't want to exhaust your sources too much and that all is going to depend on how often we're going to have the events. Like I have relationships with some farmers that I can definitely tap into if somebody else wants to take, like Angela and I were talking about, the booze. She already has some relationships in place. I think because there is the menu planning, but if we are going to do a local organic, which absolutely yes, the menu is going to be based on what is available. Seasonality and who is going to donate food. So there are two components going on there. So I think if we had a meeting and then we sort of could say who has connections already, what's the strong point, who wants to actually do prep work. I just think that's a solid next step. And that's just the food component. Just in terms of moving forward and what we're going to do. I think we should plan for that.
[Jeff]: Totally. And from what I've seen with other places is the food is. You can find a spot. You can find a place that can house people. At the end of the day, it's good to be thoughtful about it, but finding someone that's like "yeah, I'll cook for free for 200 people" um, that's a daunting task. So I think that getting that settled is really important. And then from that, that builds a lot of energy because that's also not only is that a big logistical issue it's also creating space for people. Go and have dinner, make dinner together and talk about what kind of meal you want to make. We talk about the menu. You start to build that sub-community of people which is where a lot of conversations happen.
[Scott]: Hey Joan, did you want to chime in? You typed in something but I can just read it if you want. Or feel free to talk. Oh, okay. Cool. So I don't know if you guys can get that but Joan used to run an organic cafe here in Old City, it's still in Philly. And Jonathan would love to be involved but he's a little far away. We can still talk with him about a Cape Town version maybe if people are interested. I just wanted to say that we had already offered use of this space if you guys wanted to try it for one of the roving things, except for the fact that we don't have a full service kitchen with like lots of big ovens and crazy (expletive 1:33:09.0) like that. We do have a kitchen with a couple of ovens and like a total ragtag operation however. So just bear that in mind. But, that's one of the few things we could do.
[Jeff]: Do we maybe want to do...it's like 7:36 and I know that officially we wrap up at 8:00. You can probably tend to go a little later it seems like, if the YouTube karaoke gets raging which, I am in the house so I think it probably will...
I actually think it's important to meet in person before doing the Google thing or the email thing. So maybe if we could just do a little break off of food, admin so like venue systems, emails and all that stuff, and artists. How to do outreach and that sort of thing. Does that sound like three distinct categories that people would be interested in participating in? Food, admin and artists. So like organizing stuff vs..... And artists would also be like decorating stuff, bands and more of the like aesthetic piece of it. Does that sound okay? Like an okay break up? Or should we just do food and... Does anyone want to weigh in? Please?
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
Just connecting people, setting up the systems. I mean, I can do a lot of the setting up of the systems too but... Um, food. That's like a whole committee. Design. I think that would probably be an admin group here. Web and print, because we have a lot of stuff that we need to make. And then working with our venue. That's all stuff that's in the admin world. Then the people that are like going out and trying to get people to propose projects and working with them to work on presentation, that stuff. Yeah, and then day of. Yeah. And those are sort of some different ways to think about it. Do we want to break up like that? Do we want to have a big group conversation still? I don't know. I don't want to propose that.
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
Well, maybe let's do at least this. Let's have food people meet at this end of the table and talk for 15-20 minutes. And the more admin type since that gets a little blurrier what roles those are. No, I think it's good to like stop and talk and like figure out what people are interested in and who is interested in what. Are people okay with that?
(Inaudible comment or question from background)
(Dog barking)
[Scott]: Ultimately, we wanted you guys to be here too in part to like look at different models and structures for artworlds and communities because this is an example of one of those. I'm really curious about... Oh, that's Joan's dog (laughing).
(Laughter)
I thought I heard a dog out there somewhere. No worries, it's cool. I thought it was outside. Yeah, anyway. Just wondering if anybody out there has anything else they wanted to talk about in the context of, I don't know, seeing this as either a reproducible model for other kinds of creative infrastructure projects or has any interest in that. We haven't had any real questions there for awhile so maybe we should just assume that people are just interested and happy as clams.I personally thought it was great to have part of this be an organizing session too. So, I wasn't really imagining splitting up into teams or whatever. But yeah, if that's the way that works best for you then maybe we should try it to see where it goes.
I just wanted to mention one other thing. We had like set up a kind of a conversation piece. Jeff had set up a conversation piece and said that at some point it would be nice to look at and talk about. All these kind of drawings and notes that come from traveling and visiting various cities and talking about this kind of thing. So it would be good to visit that at some point for anyone who wants to stay a little bit longer.
[Jeff]: I'm thinking kind of about making things these days. I've never made things. I'm not a "maker". So I'm dipping my toe into the world of making objects. This is hardly an object but I'm working... Just to give you a little wider scope of what I'm working on right now, I am in residency at a place called Transformer Gallery, not Transformer gallery, Transformer in Washington D.C. which is a wonderful non-profit space where they are letting me sort of take over and use it as a big note taking space and use it as a place to host events and try out projects and it's book ending a big initiative that I've been working on collaboratively with several artists called Empire Builder which is a cross country train trip leaving from Washington D.C. to Portland, OR next weekend. And we're going to do gorilla public programs along the train. When we arrive in Portland we're there to participate in a conference called Open Engagement which is about social practice and the theme is making things. Making things better, making things worse. And I feel like I do a lot of making things better and I feel like I do a lot of making things worse. So I wanted to try making things so I could be the holy trinity at Open Engagement. I'm doing a project there called 100 Dance Moves for Portland which is an exploration for me and a couple collaborators on how people's movements in a city can be charted and recreated and maybe even start a dance party. I can tell you more if you go stand over there. Or maybe not. Maybe I won't tell you anymore. We can at least touch things that I've made. Kind of. Alright. Thank you internet. You know who that is. Bye
Cool Joan. Just to clarify, you're specifically interested in food or all of it?
[Joan]: Okay. Food or artists. Whatever. Either or. I'm open for wherever I might be needed.
[Jeff]: You want the whole thing? Awesome. Cool, thank you.
Thank you BaseKamp. That's me thanking BaseKamp for the internet.
[Scott]: So see you all later and we'll follow up on the discussion list and let everybody know how the work groups go.
(Group splits up into groups 1:44:07.0 - 3:06:45.5)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
3:06:45.5
Page |
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$c8deb11cf07fb657" title="#basekamp/$c8deb11cf07fb657">FEAST Funding Emerging Arts with Sustainable Tactics http://www.basekamp.com/about/events/feast (#basekamp/$c8deb11cf07fb657)
Created on 2010-05-05 09:06:43.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:08
- hi everyone. surprisingly, we're runnign a few mins late ]
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:04:35
- hello
- BASEKAMP team: 18:09:40
- Hi Rachel - can you add us to your contacts? so we can add you to the skype conf call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:18
- hi everyone -- so we've gonna get started soon-ish
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:19
- ish
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:05
- how are y'all doing?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:19
- everyone else ready to do audio?
- stephen wright: 18:14:27
- hey good -- we about ready to go audio?
- Elysa Lozano: 18:14:34
- audio's great
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:14:35
- great, yah
- stephen wright: 18:14:57
- audio? yes good idea
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:15:44
- audios good
- stephen wright: 18:15:58
- pls call me
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:17
- ok... almost there
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:17:22
- good good
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:15
-
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:18:28
- hehe
- Elysa Lozano: 18:22:15
- yes
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:22:21
- sounds good
- stephen wright: 18:22:24
- yup
- Elysa Lozano: 18:24:52
- yes
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:24:57
- Nick Hanford: 18:28:39
- can i get added to the call?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:55
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:16
- W O R D
- Jonathan Wagener: 18:29:21
- lol
- Nick Hanford: 18:29:31
- yes, definitely an Amen!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:35
-
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:52
- hi Sally
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:17
- Rachel, are you there?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:22
- ghost in the shell
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:08
- sally - you're in Hudson Valley... can ou hear ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:19
- btw, also, can you mute your audio till you feel like talking?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:24
- you ARE welcome to talk too btw
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 18:35:17
- I can hear fine. For now I'll just listen. I used to be on the board of PS122 (Painting Space) in NYC
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 18:36:16
- I think I'm on mute now. Does it sound like that? I'm new at this.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:43
- sally yeah
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:22
- howdy
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 18:37:34
- Got it. Never done this before. Awesome.
- Nato Thompson: 18:37:44
- ok, I'm on.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:45
- w00t
- stephen wright: 18:37:45
- hi nato
- Nato Thompson: 18:38:00
- sweet
- stephen wright: 18:41:42
- You state you democratically fund new and emerging art makers -- what do you mean by democracy?
- stephen wright: 18:41:54
- yeah -- scott is asking my question
- Nato Thompson: 18:44:10
- welcome joseph
- stephen wright: 18:44:18
- hi joseph
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:54
- oh hai stephen -- just saw that LOLs
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:17
- stephen did you feel that was addressed ok? or are there other specifics you wanted to add just then?
- stephen wright: 18:49:13
- well, i felt it was more a comment on people's expectations and knowledge about preparing grant applications, rather than about how the project really makes 'democratic' mean something.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:34
- hey meg - want to join the audio? just saw you on
- Elysa Lozano: 18:51:39
- Is seems like there's specific criteria developing by the organizers for what makes a successful projects - is that articulated to the people making proposals?
- stephen wright: 18:53:29
- I would agree, yes
- Nato Thompson: 18:53:45
- Nicely articulate Mr. Jeff
- stephen wright: 18:55:04
- Yes, and I agree that 'democracy' is another of those laden terms it is probably good to be wary of in these kinds of projects
- Nato Thompson: 18:55:44
- It's good to not over-state what it is, but leave it open for folks to come to terms for what it is, and what it implies.
- stephen wright: 18:57:16
- true, but what i meant was that it is such a high octane word to start with that just saying 'transparent' or 'community something or other' might be better.
- Elysa Lozano: 18:59:03
- good question
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:03
- calling now joan
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:18
- stephen wright: 19:04:17
- is it just me or did the world go silent
- Nick Hanford: 19:04:25
- not just you
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:04:25
- silent here too
- Elysa Lozano: 19:04:27
- silent here too
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 19:04:30
- It's me too
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:36
- mic was off LOL
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:04:40
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:59
-
- Meg Frisch: 19:05:44
- woops
- Meg Frisch: 19:05:51
- is there a woops emoticon
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:59
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:28
-
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:07:31
- what sort of food?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:50
-
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:07:59
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:51
-
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:09:06
- beer is the most important
- Meg Frisch: 19:09:23
(JK)- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:10
- Nick Hanford: 19:11:56
- anyone else get hung up on?
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:12:08
- dang
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:12:12
- hehe
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:15
- nicK we'll re-add you
- Nick Hanford: 19:12:26
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:39
- i think everyone else is still on?
- Nick Hanford: 19:12:44
- Thanks
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:12:45
- yup
- stephen wright: 19:12:54
- here
- Joan Smith: 19:13:03
- present
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 19:14:44
- me too
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 19:14:54
- Love the concept of Revolting Queers!
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:15:04
- lol, its a cool idea
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:16:05
- no spoons? thats terrible!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:25
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:16:34
- O_o
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:18:20
- what about bums who just want free food?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:05
- TIMIOTHY do you want us to call you
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:07
- d'oh!
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:23:15
- so its essentially an autonomous kind of grouping idea?
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:26:19
- food is art
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:27:34
- i think the more the merrier, but you dont want to get into a fight about roles
- Joan Smith: 19:28:02
- politics is always a danger w. large, loosely organized groups
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:28:15
- yes, everyone has their own ideas
- stephen wright: 19:28:32
- nothing dangerous about that
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:28:49
- no, but it can also cause division
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:28:56
- but in this case i dont think its an issue
- Joan Smith: 19:29:02
- ahh, but I've been involved first hand.... not dangerous but can possibly killl the core ethos
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:29:14
- hmm
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:29:21
- you dont want to really do that
- stephen wright: 19:29:49
- maybe the core ethos has to be configured differently to thrive on dissensus
- Joan Smith: 19:30:17
- very good point
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:33:11
- im not in philly, but i am interested in the food aspect
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:48
- ^^ Jonathan in in Cape Town South Africa
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:33:56
- BASEKAMP team: 19:34:31
- ayone know where the mute button is on a PC?
- Joan Smith: 19:34:32
- i'm game to get involved - former organic cafe owner w. some ties to the organic universe...
- Joan Smith: 19:35:05
- it's usually at an arrow key (mute_
- Joan Smith: 19:35:27
- just that i'm on board
- Joan Smith: 19:35:29
- if needed
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 19:36:30
- I'm not in Philly yet but will be. I'm v. interested in the farm/food part. I've been writing a book on working animals, and I got in touch with a lot of farming practices while I was doing it.
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:36:38
- is seating space limited by catering availability?
- Joan Smith: 19:38:47
- seems important to have an admin aspect in addition to food / art
- allyeckhoff" title="sallyeckhoff">Sally Eckhoff: 19:40:09
- I've got to go. Sorry to cut out before the org. part. I could be in either food or admin but I have to become a real person first (in 3D). Cheers
- stephen wright: 19:40:27
- umm
- Joan Smith: 19:40:40
- i'll go sit at the right
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:41:21
- woof
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:23
- anyone else have burning questions before we split into organizing groups?
- Joan Smith: 19:45:34
- no questions, would be willing to attend a real life meeting if I get the info
- Joan Smith: 19:46:50
- chico says goodbye
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:46:59
- Elysa Lozano: 19:47:06
- must be off - good luck and thank you!
- Jonathan Wagener: 19:47:21
- cheers, sleep time for me
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:29
- we'l keep you on in case anything comes up in the meantime...
- Joan Smith: 19:47:34
- good night all
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:40
- for everyone else -- cya next week
- stephen wright: 19:49:53
- Had a question about sustainability -- but I guess that'll be for a subsequent occasion.
- BASEKAMP team: 20:40:06
- hello ausin
- BASEKAMP team: 20:40:18
- we're still here meeting informally
- BASEKAMP team: 20:41:10
- for anyone in philly - or interested to be involved in any way with the organizing side of FEAST in Philadelphia -- here's the Google group http://groups.google.com/group/philly-feast
2010-05-04
Week 15: Loveland
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
Our discussions over the past weeks have foregrounded an understanding of plausible worlds as largely immaterial nodes of shared desire and exchange — as collective constructs in time, which exist as long as the collective will to pursue them is sustained. This conceptual mapping has gently helped avoid any excessively down-to-earth take on the notion of a “world”. But even worlds online and in time must contend with the question as to the relationship between “world” and “land”. So this week we’ll be talking with the Detroit-based instigators of LOVELAND, a micro real-estate project premised on using social microfunding and online tools to get people experimenting with and rethinking collective land use and ownership.
LOVELAND sells square inches of land in Detroit for $1 an inch. The project then uses these virtual, tiny-scale investments to fund real-world projects throughout the city. Inchvestors — that is, the people bankrolling the initiative one buck at a time — are able to access their land both on and offline, transforming the land in a mutually agreed-upon manner, with a goal of purchasing numerous pieces of real estate throughout the city and developing them around certain themes. Anyone involved can also transfer or sell inches to others.
Practically speaking, LOVELAND owns the property and merely extends social ownership to its inchvestors, making them less titleholders than stakeholders. The purchased inches are not legally binding and are not registered with the City of Detroit, keeping taxes and other unpleasantries of officialdom out of the picture. But it also puts the onus on the stakeholders to contend with existent legal instruments to ensure their interests are acknowledged. Art-historically, LOVELAND harks back to projects such as Gordon Matta Clark’s never fully realized “Fake Estates” — the interstitial gutterspaces he purchased from the City of New York in the 1970s — but significantly throws into the mix the unresolved issues of collective agency, common investment, and social use value.
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$765f6f2bc43d35a2" title="#basekamp/$765f6f2bc43d35a2">Loveland http://basekamp.com/about/events/loveland (#basekamp/$765f6f2bc43d35a2)
Created on 2010-04-13 20:30:14.
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:13:45
- hello dere!
- BASEKAMP team: 16:13:57
- hallo
- BASEKAMP team: 16:14:09
- w00t indeed
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:14:12
- badadumbadadum
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:14:17
- cool beans
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:14:31
- so we'll be talking over voice and chatting in here
- BASEKAMP team: 16:14:35
- yes
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:14:37
- got it
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:14:39
- awesome
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:14:52
- i'll prepare a list of links to drop in
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:15:00
- does skype have any live link sharing windows?
- BASEKAMP team: 16:15:05
- you can feel free to drag people into this panel if you know others who are having trouble joining with that link
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:15:24
- test test http://makeloveland.com
- BASEKAMP team: 16:15:25
- no really - you can just post it here & they're linkable out
- BASEKAMP team: 16:15:29
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:15:52
- got it
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:17:26
- ok i'm gonna hop back to it
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:17:27
- ttys
- BASEKAMP team: 16:17:41
- rad --- cya in a bit!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:36:14
- pierce, can you read me?
- BASEKAMP team: 16:38:36
- Jerry, you can drag him into this chat
- BASEKAMP team: 16:38:43
- do u see the 'Drawer'?
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:39:57
- piercccceeeeeeee
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:40:06
- thanks basekampers
- BASEKAMP team: 16:40:25
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:40:28
- ha
- iercep" title="piercep">piercep: 16:40:46
- sweet
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:40:52
- yoyoyo
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:41:16
- truly it is teh future
- iercep" title="piercep">piercep: 16:41:35
- yes we made it jerry
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:41:51
- shwoow! glad that's done. so what now?
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:41:58
- ok, i'm gonna keep ordering my links
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:42:02
- and maybe eat a sammich
- iercep" title="piercep">piercep: 16:42:23
- i think we should make another future
- iercep" title="piercep">piercep: 16:42:37
- this one pretty good but i think we can do better
- Jerry Paffendorf: 16:43:03
- i agree. i'll bring snacks
- Jerry Paffendorf: 17:54:46
- test test
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 17:55:38
- here
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:42
- hi everyone - hold on to your seats - running a few mins behind
- Jerry Paffendorf: 17:55:45
- hello!
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 17:55:50
- hi!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:51
- hi there Jerry
- Jerry Paffendorf: 17:55:57
- sup basekampers
- BASEKAMP team: 17:56:54
- 'sup
- BASEKAMP team: 17:56:59
- lovelanders
- Jerry Paffendorf: 17:57:19
- brb
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:42
- how's everyone doing?
- Jerry Paffendorf: 17:59:48
- grrrrreat
- Jerry Paffendorf: 17:59:53
- should we do a sound check?
- Greg Scranton: 18:00:06
- hey scott. hey all.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:00:27
- i would say yes, except that our sound is being taken care of by our "av department", and he just arrived - grabbing the stuffs now
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:00:43
- lol i know the drill
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:00:51
- sup av department
- BASEKAMP team: 18:01:30
- *muffled "hello" from bk av dept*
- BASEKAMP team: 18:01:59
- greg -you guys doing ok?
- Greg Scranton: 18:03:05
- ha ha hmmm how do I answer that? lol. Yeah things are good, just a little crazy. I would offer to host but should I need to dash to hospital it would leave you in a bit of a lurch
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:37
- no - besides starting a few mins late,we're totally cool ^_^
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:45
- stay poised!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:31
- btw Jerry, Carolyn Lambert - one of your" inchvestors" - says hello
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:05:15
- sup carolyn!
- Green Racine: 18:05:24
- LOveland
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:05:35
- lOvElAnD
- Green Racine: 18:05:53
- Green Race = WAyne Clingman
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:02
- lovelAND
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:06:11
- wayne!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:06:15
- what's up, man?
- Green Racine: 18:06:17
- Sir!
- Green Racine: 18:06:25
- Your the man
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:07:00
- seems like some peops with new windows computers are having problems joining directly
- Green Racine: 18:07:13
- Yes I did
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:07:13
- says the public chatroom link isn't supported on their system
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:15
- btw, we're getting close...
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:07:21
- woa!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:07:40
- music time
- Green Racine: 18:08:01
- 80's please the best years I can not rember
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:03
-
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:44
- so jerry - can we call you first to make sure audio is okay? we're ready
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:11:27
- test
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:11:31
- are you here mary?
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:11:37
- sure thing, let's try this out!
- iercep" title="piercep">piercep: 18:11:43
- mary mary quite contrary
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:48
- oh kay
- Mary Lorene Carter: 18:11:49
- yo
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:12:12
- big money, big money, no wammies, no wammies...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:02
- hey guys, so... who wants to be on a conference call?
- Greg Scranton: 18:13:11
- meeeeee
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:16
- please no one press "call" we'll call you
- Green Racine: 18:13:33
- No mic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:41
- laptop mic?
- Green Racine: 18:13:45
- no
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:50
- type?
- Green Racine: 18:13:54
- yes
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:14:01
- yello!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:14:13
- ok, ready over here
- Green Racine: 18:14:13
- I blame the Ice potato
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:14:18
- me too, wayne
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:22
- normally, we do both --- text chat + audio, each for whoever can & wnats to \\\
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:14:22
- detroiticepotato.com
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:14:29
- http://detroiticepotato.com
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:14:48
- why is skype still so confusing?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:49
- ok, so we can go ahead & get started with whoever wants to call
- Green Racine: 18:14:51
- Happy just to hear what others have to say
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:15:07
- how do i get on the line?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:11
- can anyone who's able to call volunteer to help type stuff from teh audio back into this text chat box?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:13
- we'll call ya
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:15:21
- ok
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:15:25
- /assumes sprinters pose
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:41
- just makin sure we're all ready --- calling now. anyonw who can't or doesn't want to join just don't pick up.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:05
- if you do want to join, but miss it, or get booted, just let us know in this text chat & we'll re-add u
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:19
- hmm, there are a few people who we need contact details from to call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:27
- sending invites now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:29
- karen if you'd like to join audio - you'll need to accept our invite - but ping us when
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:51
- calling now
- karenmthornton: 18:18:03
- ok
- Kyle B. Doeden: 18:18:07
- can you add me to the audio too
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:13
-
- karenmthornton: 18:18:32
- juggling cooking dinner baby etc
- Green Racine: 18:19:40
- Sounds good here
- Alan Languirand: 18:21:00
- I don't have audio yet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:46
- we'll call you alan
- Green Racine: 18:28:11
- His childhood might expline things
- iercep" title="piercep">piercep: 18:28:40
- sup
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:44
- or - you could talk about yoru childhood!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:28:59
- adding you Patrick
- Green Racine: 18:29:16
- Mine was redheads and Red Lable
- Alan Languirand: 18:30:02
- that sounds like a wonderful childhood
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:10
- and red stripe
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:32
- hi sean - text-only right?
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:32:42
- http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/jerry
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:54
- we're looking now
- Green Racine: 18:34:11
- Helps to have a fun story
- Green Racine: 18:34:20
- Loveland is a fun story
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:46
- hi Jonathan - do you want 2 join the audio?
- atlichty" title="patlichty">Patrick Lichty: 18:38:51
- yes, SL is an open ended sort of thing
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:38:59
- yes please, will only be listening tonight
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:04
- ok
- atlichty" title="patlichty">Patrick Lichty: 18:39:14
- I'm doing the presentation for The Upgrade SL tonight - so artists presentations is an app
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:39:36
- plymouth online map: http://makeloveland.com/grids/1
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:51
- interesting patrick - which Upgrade? INTL? or ...?
- Alan Languirand: 18:40:56
- The interactivity at this point is just the detail/profile view
- Alan Languirand: 18:41:10
- And a status update system
- Greg Scranton: 18:41:18
- Rita you land whore!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:26
- hah
- Alan Languirand: 18:41:27
- Rita's big money on loveland
- Green Racine: 18:41:30
- Alan you rock!
- Alan Languirand: 18:41:41
- Thanks Green
- Green Racine: 18:41:49
- Welcome
- Alan Languirand: 18:41:51
- The next step of interactivity is Project Lemon Battery
- Alan Languirand: 18:41:58
- and AR
- Green Racine: 18:42:06
- and that whole idea is huge
- Alan Languirand: 18:42:16
- http://projectlemonbattery.posterous.com/
- Green Racine: 18:42:24
- I love how you guys are building communty
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:42:28
- here's the physical property: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=8887+E+Verno...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:33
- we're looking now
- Greg Scranton: 18:42:40
- wow I am loving this!
- Green Racine: 18:42:51
- Buy land Greg
- Meg Frisch: 18:43:02
- call google and tell them they need to zoom in more for photos!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:43:13
- the first physical property i should say, working on a new one now
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:43:30
- time-lapse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npsrhDLtPzw
- Alan Languirand: 18:43:51
- jerry close your youtube
- Greg Scranton: 18:43:51
- done Green!
- Green Racine: 18:44:05
- You rock Greg!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 18:44:44
- terraforming the property to look like the online map: http://dyooy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/IMG_6161.jpg
- Greg Scranton: 18:44:46
- nothing like buying a little land to make me feel even more bourgeois
- Green Racine: 18:44:56
- Greg you need to come on Indy Film Wisconsin
- Green Racine: 18:45:07
- and talk new Media
- Greg Scranton: 18:45:37
- done.
- Green Racine: 18:46:00
- email me at wclingman@wi.rr.com
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:02
- hey basekampers,
wish i could tune in for this one!
a few quick thoughts that may be addressed during the discussion:
1. $144 / sq. foot is quite a valorized price. i know we're supposed to be thinking in terms of inches not feet here -- but i could only look up square foot prices to compare.
industrial land in detroit city currently averaging $17/sq. foot (according to Asking Price Index). i couldn't find statistics on vacant residential lot prices, but i would guess that it's under $30/sq. foot for a market rate lot purchased from the owner. county auction properties would be at a fraction of that: so, what's the relationship between the asking investment price and "real" cost?
1b. if all inches of plymouth were sold - 10k sq. ft - that's $1,440,000: even capitalists would do a double-take.
2. are these "square inches" really "real property"? if so, how did they approach the jurisdiction?
(city of detroit and/or wayne county)? if they did not approach the jurisdiction, then whose seal is on the deed? (and, is there a deed?)
3. what about right of way for inch-locked inches?
4. does this remind anyone else of the "Million Dollar Homepage"?
- alexis - Alan Languirand: 18:47:15
- alan@makeloveland.com
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:32
- PS Please don't forward the below documents on, as I don't have permission to redistribute some of them.
- Alan Languirand: 18:48:25
- can you also send the link to the forum you're pulling from, besides the email
- Greg Scranton: 18:48:26
- so wait how do I actually buy land? link? directions? I iz challenGed apparently.
- Meg Frisch: 18:49:10
- greg, you can buy land from kickstarter - I'll post the link in a sec
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:18
- RESPONSE FROM STEPHEN:
Alexis,
Your "reality" check cuts right, even devastatingly to the quick! The 3rd point about easements to reach embedded inches merely underscores the (w)hole problem you raise in point 2 about who really owns the property -- which we couldn't quite wish away by mentioning that the properties are apparently not registered with the city's registrar, or not as collectively owned -- which in turn reinforces your first question regarding the preposterously overrated price... All of which begs the "real" question: why does art always have to set itself apart from everything else, why is it even able to lay claim to symbolic or even ontological privilege to get away with high jinks even venture capitalists might balk at, what surplus value -- and what kind of surplus value -- is it generating that makes such stunts make sense? I wonder, too, why artworlds can't simply sit in the landscapes that are... Anyway, thank you for your questions, which, it must be said, LOVELAND caused you to raise! It's too bad you won't be online tomorrow, but I propose that your questions be laid squarely on the table for consideration and discussion. - Greg Scranton: 18:49:20
- oh right, thx Meg
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:55
- RESPONSE FROM MEG:
Just a brief note as I know very little about the whole Loveland project and look forward to finding out more tomorrow! It is clear from the information on the Kickstarter page
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jerry/loveland-ghost-inches-inchermi...
--
Things you should know: Your inches are not legally binding with the city of Detroit so you won't have to worry about things like paying taxes or other legal implications. The way this works is LOVELAND legally owns the property and is extending social ownership to its inchvestors. We take this very seriously at the same time as we have a lot of fun with it. You will be able to visit the property, create on your space, and follow and interact with it and your new neighbors via the website. You can also gift or sell inches to other people.
--
also this note may be of interest:
http://makeloveland.com/pages/grants
--
1/2 of your inchvestment during season 2 goes to these 7 projects!
In some ways, inches in LOVELAND are like shares in the project, and teeny tiny shares of Detroit. And shares must be called shares for a reason, right? For season 2, LOVELAND is splitting the income from its 50,000 inch goal with seven different projects in Detroit that run the spectrum of practical to creative land use: farming, community gardens, architectural rehabilitation, and art
--
I haven't fully formed an opinion yet but I definitely have a feeling that these inches may need to be evaluated differently than industrial or residential properties; while the ownership piece (from the first excerpt begs a question), renting a property costs more than owning one in the longer term; though in this case its up to the organization to prove that this "inchvestment" is going to be as worthwhile in the longrun with regard to to deprecating residential/commercial- PHYSICAL - and fluxuating 'intellectual' propoerty values...
just a couple of cents;
- from mega - Meg Frisch: 18:49:56
- http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jerry/loveland-continues?pos=11&ref=...
- Meg Frisch: 18:50:10
- this is the most recent post to kickstarter [ i think, pls correct me if incorrect ]
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:14
- PASTING A FEW POSTS HERE... FEEL FREE TO SKIM
- Green Racine: 18:50:26
- Ah this is a game if someone does not likethe ideas etc then do not play
- Meg Frisch: 18:50:37
- giggles
- Meg Frisch: 18:50:45
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:56
- ]
- Greg Scranton: 18:51:40
- pee on it?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:58
- RESPONSE FROM AMY BALKIN
MINUS THE IMAGES, WHICH WE AGREED NOT TO DISTRIBUTE
hi Basekamp,
On the subject of inches for sale, I wanted to pass along some documents I collected recently about two inch-of-land schemes, and two other sites where land was given away promotionally, and what has happened to this land since. The research and text below was for a show (Proposals for a Socialist Colony) at Skydive in Houston. I have more information about these sites and their history if anyone's interested. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the chat!
Amy
PS Please don't forward the below documents on, as I don't have permission to redistribute some of them.
Land: Four case studies (Dawson, YK, Huntington Beach, CA, Newark, CA, Richmond, TX)
These four sites in North America were involved with the giveaway of marginal, unbuildable land as advertising promotions, or the sale of uninhabitably small parcels (2" or smaller). Surprisingly, in some cases this free or cheap land did gain in value, was buildable, had oil found underneath, or was eventually resold at a profit. With the exception of larger lots in Huntington Beach, CA and Newark, CA, where the land, while 'marginal' and oddly shaped, was buildable, most landowners were unable to make use of their micro-holdings, or afford to purchase significant adjacent parcels to expand them to usable size. Most of the land was never occupied, and some land was eventually recuperated by tax default, unbeknownst to the deed holders.
Developers, cities, and other entities that could afford to manage fragmented title and clear tax issues often bought the parcels in bulk, sometimes using lawsuits to quiet title, or condemning lands whose owners would not agree to sell. This happened in Newark (now a shopping mall) and at the Lazy C Ranch in Texas (first a golf course, now a subdivision), and at the Klondike Big Inch Land Co. in the Yukon Territory (now the world's northenmost golf course). It also signals the move of lands once thought of as cheap, marginal, and distant wildernesses, to nearby and profitable.
The enthusiasm for and fascination with the possibilities of marginally inhabitable places is still unchecked, whether in Gordon Matta-Clark's work Fake Estates, recent Web 2.0 projects like Loveland, Detroit, failing towns offering free land to stayers, and current inch-of-land schemes. Along with enthusiasm for novelties of property, these places raise the issue of how land is transformed into property, and the dispossession that results from this transformation, as seen in the hopes of micro-land owners for the stability that property ownership confers in a land transformed to property, where all non-landowners are pre-dispossesed.
Four photographers have collaborated on this project by traveling to the sites to document the land now. These photographs are accompanied by archival materials, including maps, deeds, photographs, and letters from deed holders inquiring about never-visited land in remote places.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Klondike Big Inch Land Co., Dawson, Yukon Territory, Canada (1955 – 1966)
Parcel size: 1 square inch
Price: Free with the purchase of one box of Quaker Oats cereal
Now: Ownership reverted to Canada in 1966 for nonpayment of land tax. Now the Top of the World Golf Course.
Location: Lot 243, Group 1052, Plan FB6718 CLSR. Quad 116B/04
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Pots and Pans Additions, Newark, CA (Early 20th century – 197
Parcel size: 20' x 30'
Price: Free with purchase of cooking ware, and encyclopedias
Now: The NewPark Mall, and commercial and residential buildings including Fremont Ford, Chevy's Fresh Mex, Chandni Restaurant, an empty lot, and the Joaquin Murietta apartment complex.
Location: Exact perimeter unknown
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Encyclopedia Lots, Huntington Beach, CA (1919 – present)
Parcel size: 112' x 25'
Price: Free with purchase of a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica Encyclopedias ($126)
Now: Beginning in the 1920's, oil was found and pumped on some lots, long narrow houses have been built on some, and the City of Huntington Beach is buying lots as they become available to expand Huntington Central Park.
Location: Bounded by Ellis Avenue and Goldenwest and Edwards Streets
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Lazy C Ranch, Richmond, TX (1954 – ?)
Parcel size: 2 square inches
Price: 75¢
Now: The Lazy C Ranch was later sold as a working horse ranch. In the 1990's it became the Old Orchard Golf Club, and is now the site of a housing subdivision.
Location: One acre parcel at 13134 Fm 1464 Rd.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
+
Socialist Colony, Richmond, TX (2010 - )
Parcel size: 1 square inch
Price: $9.95
Now: In March 2010, one square inch was purchased for $10 in Liberty County, Texas, and deeded to Socialist Colony.
Location: Liberty County, TX
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Credits: Amy Balkin, in collaboration with Sasha Dela, Kim Stringfellow, Lissa Ivy Tiegel, and Veronica Verkley
Archival materials, photographs, and research assistance: David McDonald, Caren Ferrera, Richard Fujikawa, Debra Jubinski, David Tritter, Bruce Baker, John Baker, and Allison Carter
Additional thanks to posters on the First American Title's Landsakes blog – Bert Rush, Don Schenker, R.J. Dold, and Keith Pearson - BASEKAMP team: 18:52:10
- HUGE TEXTs
- BASEKAMP team: 18:52:17
- </responses>
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:16
- land on the moon~
- Jonathan Simpson: 18:54:36
- lost connecyion
- Greg Scranton: 18:55:02
- Scott can identify who is making all the noise
- Meg Frisch: 18:55:04
- someone needs to mute their chat -
- karenmthornton: 18:55:30
- yes can you show me where it is
- Greg Scranton: 18:55:32
- Patrick?
- karenmthornton: 18:55:57
- better?
- Meg Frisch: 18:55:58
- woots
- karenmthornton: 18:56:06
- sooooo sorry
- Meg Frisch: 18:56:09
- karenmthornton: 18:56:48
- was trying to figure out if it was muted or not before but I figured must have been, guess was wrong
- Alan Languirand: 18:56:59
- one big difference between loveland and the above mentioned small land parcel schemes is expectation
- Green Racine: 18:57:28
- Like I said its a game
- Alan Languirand: 18:57:52
- we're not giving away land as a promotion, and we're specificially not trading inches as our own form of capital
- Meg Frisch: 18:58:11
- how can we determine expectation - if there is no screening process beforehand? Jerry, has anyone bought inches and tried to get a refund?
- Alan Languirand: 18:58:18
- In a very material sense, and certainly in a legal sense it does follow the mechanics of a game
- Meg Frisch: 18:58:21
- is there an inches blackmarket?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:40
- but alan - yeah - -- i thought you *could* trade inches, no?
- Green Racine: 18:58:43
- If not there should be damn that Ice Potato
- Alan Languirand: 18:58:54
- I'm not aware of anyone trying to collect a refund yet
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:02
- ice potato?
- Alan Languirand: 18:59:04
- and you can trade your inches, but we haven't published a tool for it yet
- Green Racine: 18:59:10
- Ask Jerry
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:18
- do u need a tool to trade?
- Meg Frisch: 18:59:22
- ideally you would manage most of the transactions online?
- Alan Languirand: 18:59:26
- http://detroiticepotato.tumblr.com/
- Alan Languirand: 18:59:37
- we don't need a tool for trade, but it would certainly make it happen
- Green Racine: 18:59:44
- I think the Ice Potato is a meth head
- Alan Languirand: 18:59:56
- it would ease the barrier to transaction for people who want to, and actually inspire people who hadn't thought of it before
- Meg Frisch: 18:59:59
- loves There are only 3 things you need to know about the Detroit Ice Potato (DIP) in order to love him: 1.) he is a potato, 2.) he is frozen, 3.) he is in Detroit. Everything else is gravy on mashed.
- Alan Languirand: 19:00:29
- Ice potato is a spoof of Greg's project: http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/
- Green Racine: 19:00:51
- Becuse of LOveland I have made great conetions with other Urban Farmers
- Alan Languirand: 19:01:06
- We'd like people to be able to trade inches among one another, but we'd also want them to value them and not just recycle our $1/inch
- Greg Scranton: 19:01:10
- this is such a boring, practical, and downer of a question but what happens with the money invested in the land? Beer? Smokes? More land? All of the above?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:28
- listening to Detroit Ice Potato Rap Demo Tape from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:40
- rhymes
- Meg Frisch: 19:01:55
- I saw mention of donating some of the proceeds to grants these next couple of rounds?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:57
- mind meld
- Green Racine: 19:01:57
- what iswrong if Mr. P made oh my god money on this!!!
- Alan Languirand: 19:02:04
- After more land, supplies for the project, keeping the lights on, that's a Jerry question
- Green Racine: 19:02:28
- Hookers?
- Greg Scranton: 19:02:28
- sounds all too practical
- Alan Languirand: 19:02:29
- So far - 1/2 of the next $50K goes too our grant program
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:31
-
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:02:53
- http://makeloveland.com/pages/grants
- Green Racine: 19:02:57
- great groups they are helping
- Meg Frisch: 19:03:06
- sweet
- Green Racine: 19:03:07
- Thank God
- Green Racine: 19:03:25
- must let in Dogs
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:04:08
- hey bk can u add me to the call?
- Meg Frisch: 19:04:15
- + =
- Alan Languirand: 19:04:21
- I work full time, and have been involved in Loveland as a voluteer up to now
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:04:24
- I wanna listen in
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:32
- hey salem
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:35
- adding u to callll
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:04:39
- thx
- Meg Frisch: 19:04:44
- How many people work on the web stuff for the project?
- Greg Scranton: 19:04:52
- Oh snap! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jerry/loveland-continues/backers
- BASEKAMP team: 19:04:53
-
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:05:14
- larry sheradon = http://lemonary.com
- Meg Frisch: 19:05:20
- thanks!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:05:40
- people working on the project = http://makeloveland.com/pages/people
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:44
- a few questions:
1. what's up w lemons? - Greg Scranton: 19:05:47
- I want a lemon with that.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:02
- 2. where did the robocop rap come from?
- Meg Frisch: 19:06:08
- != lemons
- Alan Languirand: 19:06:19
- I built this for the webcam http://projectlemonbattery.com/webcam/
- Alan Languirand: 19:06:35
- and it automatically feeds this http://www.flickr.com/photos/lemonbattery/
- Alan Languirand: 19:06:47
- robocop rap is Jerry's studio mate Kelly
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:03
- kelly busted that out?
- Alan Languirand: 19:07:06
- and the deal with lemons are that a lemon battery is a common science fair project
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:14
- mr wizurd
- Alan Languirand: 19:07:18
- Kelly did, with the iPhone autotune app man
- Meg Frisch: 19:07:26
- ++
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:07:54
- http://vimeo.com/9770583
- Alan Languirand: 19:07:57
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanguir/4391013702/in/set-72157623543175220/
- Greg Scranton: 19:08:14
- Oh so that's where the money from land investment goes!!!
- Meg Frisch: 19:08:23
- gold teeth, hoes
- Greg Scranton: 19:08:23
- iphone apps
- Alan Languirand: 19:08:27
- I built a scale model of lemon battery too, with an LED representing the electrical load of the camera
- Alan Languirand: 19:08:49
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanguir/sets/72157623543175220/
- Meg Frisch: 19:09:20
- do you have plans to present any of these artifacts formally in an exhibiton, etc?
- Kyle B. Doeden: 19:09:27
- i think you might be talking about different things, jerry, you posted a long robocop rap a while ago on FB
- Greg Scranton: 19:09:30
- wow! just wow! (re: video)
- Alan Languirand: 19:10:13
- as messy as it need to be to work really
- Alan Languirand: 19:10:59
- I would like to present these artifacts, but that's really not the focus
- Alan Languirand: 19:11:14
- and the lemon battery thing really boils down to personality
- Meg Frisch: 19:11:17
- nods
- Alan Languirand: 19:11:33
- and makes it interesting enough for us to experiment with over and over again and be passionate about
- Alan Languirand: 19:11:49
- and flesh these things out. This is all very much an evolving system
- Alan Languirand: 19:12:18
- Lemon battery could be extened as well
- Meg Frisch: 19:12:36
- have you had other orgs interested in sister projects / partnerships ? have you had any venture capitalists / funders interested in ownership?
- Alan Languirand: 19:12:54
- I'm putting an iPhone on a pole with a solar panel on it. It's totally off the grid - there' s no power or internet going to the property
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:23
-
- Meg Frisch: 19:13:43
- would you consider the work open source
- Alan Languirand: 19:14:01
- but it puts out a live stream and presses photos right to a flickr accout. I see it being a great foundation for comunity based security/servailance, or even Service based software for small companies who can't afford all the tech
- Meg Frisch: 19:15:36
- would you consider teaching a workshop to build some of these tools?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:16:11
- buildign on that, would u also want to test this out in an urban setting like philly?
- Alan Languirand: 19:17:00
- I would like for other people to know how to build these and create something of a community movement out of it
- Alan Languirand: 19:17:17
- and I think you could roll this out in Philly easily
- Meg Frisch: 19:17:32
- really into that idea
- Alan Languirand: 19:17:35
- I spent 2 months and surfed the web until I had enough information to build it
- Green Racine: 19:18:09
- I like to see this used as a communty building tool
- Alan Languirand: 19:18:24
- so others can definitely learn. I'm a graphic designer and a photographer who taught himself some web programming languages, and now I have this 3g solar powered webcam running. I would love to get more eyes and hands on this
- Alan Languirand: 19:18:37
- especially people who know more about the parts that I don't know as much about
- karenmthornton: 19:18:51
- lost audio somehow
- Meg Frisch: 19:18:51
- sounds like a nice talk for an audience like make philly, or ignite
- Meg Frisch: 19:19:06
- or public school philly
- Meg Frisch: 19:19:19
- http://philly.thepublicschool.org
- Alan Languirand: 19:19:22
- We've also been kicking around the idea of extending this community login system for a context like a large apartment building
- Meg Frisch: 19:19:29
- community login system?
- Meg Frisch: 19:19:34
- sorry, did I miss that..
- Alan Languirand: 19:19:51
- Yes. If you buy inches, you can login to your land and see who your neighbors are and what they're up to
- Green Racine: 19:19:54
- with Alan = rocker
- Meg Frisch: 19:19:56
- ohhhh yes
- Meg Frisch: 19:20:00
- gotcha.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:12
- but... what can you see?
- Alan Languirand: 19:20:17
- what if that system were offered by the homeowner's assoc. of a condo complex?
- Meg Frisch: 19:20:18
- could be location aware / but not down to the inch w/ GPS tech atm
- Meg Frisch: 19:20:20
- Alan Languirand: 19:20:28
- or a hirise apt. building?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:38
- or a prison complex
- Alan Languirand: 19:20:43
- at that point, the inches would be apartment numbers, but the model is the same
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:52
- or an internment camp
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:55
- or artist studios
- karenmthornton: 19:20:55
- BK did I drop the call.... lost audio
- Alan Languirand: 19:21:02
- lots of people in a dense space, but there are large barriers to face to face interaction
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:02
- or office cubicles
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:18
- oops - yes karen
- Alan Languirand: 19:21:18
- in our case, its physical distance, sinc people don't live on their inces
- Greg Scranton: 19:21:25
- well I think being located in Detroit also ties it to a real place with real issues surround real land and real people
- karenmthornton: 19:21:25
- thanks
- Alan Languirand: 19:21:48
- but it could be just that the apt building you live in had a shitty architect and there is no public or lounge space where residents can meet one another
- BASEKAMP team: 19:21:53
- karen, i think you need to accept out contact invite?
- Greg Scranton: 19:22:03
- whether or not that is intentional or coincidental
- karenmthornton: 19:22:06
- ok
- Alan Languirand: 19:22:12
- Right
- Alan Languirand: 19:22:35
- and the idea has come up, but we're kind of forced to imagine these tools with the loveland model
- BASEKAMP team: 19:22:36
- calling u now karen
- Alan Languirand: 19:22:40
- otherwise it doesn't function
- Alan Languirand: 19:22:52
- if nobody in an apt building knows anyone, rent still comes in
- Meg Frisch: 19:23:27
- public private / private public
- Alan Languirand: 19:24:59
- besides media production, for me he art piece comes in the whole output of the process being an artifact that sparks all these sociological questions
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:21
- I guess my question is what kind of value you get from calling certain parts of what you're doing "art" --
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:25:27
- In general I think a lot of people (not all) have issues with calling new media *art*
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:38
- Alan, that's what it seemed to me, but it was described kind of differently here & there
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:25:56
- I think of it as *art* as well as my business
- Alan Languirand: 19:26:10
- the initial idea, and the easisest way to imagine how to use your space, is leave an artifact on it
- Alan Languirand: 19:26:12
- leave an artwork
- Meg Frisch: 19:26:18
- mm
- Alan Languirand: 19:26:27
- and in that way we're playing the line game with hundreds of people
- Meg Frisch: 19:26:58
- right - the land is yr artifact, and then more artifacts on the land
- Alan Languirand: 19:27:20
- maybe we call it art because we're doing it and we all have art degrees?
- Meg Frisch: 19:27:28
- are any investors subdividing their plots?
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:27:33
- yes
- Alan Languirand: 19:27:38
- not yet, but Rita wants to
- Meg Frisch: 19:27:41
- milimeters
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:27:46
- Rita is curating a neighborhood
- Meg Frisch: 19:27:47
- nanometers
- Alan Languirand: 19:27:47
- some people have "gifted" inches
- Meg Frisch: 19:28:05
- inchteresting
- Meg Frisch: 19:28:09
- giggles
- Alan Languirand: 19:28:11
- get that metric BS out of here! (jk!)
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:28:15
- she is inviting people she respects to take a few of her thousand inches
- Meg Frisch: 19:28:15
- yEH
- Meg Frisch: 19:28:28
- 8ths of an inch
- Alan Languirand: 19:28:36
- haha, thank you
- Meg Frisch: 19:28:38
- Meg Frisch: 19:28:55
- nano8thsofaninch
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:57
- "maybe we call it art because we're doing it and we all have art degrees?"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:10
- catching up on the text chat
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:29:10
- yep. we do.
- Alan Languirand: 19:29:16
- haha, that's not serious, but it's certainly plausable
- Alan Languirand: 19:29:23
- and we do
- Alan Languirand: 19:29:38
- all have art degees that is
- Meg Frisch: 19:29:51
- i'd love to hear if someone bought their inches, dug them up, and sold them on ebay or some other market
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:30:07
- I think between the 6 of us there are like 10 different art schools
- Alan Languirand: 19:30:08
- They should. We want them to
- Mary Lorene Carter: 19:30:14
- I tranferred a fw times
- Alan Languirand: 19:30:36
- we want people to treat inches like the rest of life. Your inch is yours to hack and play with and extract value out of ect. ect.
- Alan Languirand: 19:31:00
- No one has dug anything yet except for us
- Meg Frisch: 19:31:16
- would you consider instigating challenges / calls for response ; since the inchvestors are "gamers" in a way
- Alan Languirand: 19:31:19
- we're in the middle of construction on the first property to make if visitable
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:19
- grrr audio is ruff
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:39
- greg?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:43
- oh
- Alan Languirand: 19:31:47
- Ideally, other residents will, but we've talked about it sure
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:50
- muting helps?
- Greg Scranton: 19:31:55
- who doesn;t love the lions tho
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:19
- @
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:27
- @_@
- Meg Frisch: 19:32:38
- roleplay yr inches
- Alan Languirand: 19:34:05
- Haha, a loveland first
- Kyle B. Doeden: 19:35:10
- can i get back in on the audio?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:21
- adding you now
- Greg Scranton: 19:35:40
- and by 14 or 15 Scott meant you're #1 in our book
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 19:35:54
- After 1.30 am here so I have to go. Thanks for the great discussion!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:36:06
- bye schoenbc
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:08
- http://groupsandspaces.artiscycle.net/drupal/
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 19:36:11
- bye
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:17
- cya!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:36:21
- Greg Scranton: 19:36:31
- internal error?
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 19:36:36
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 19:36:43
- night!
- Greg Scranton: 19:36:52
- oops old bookmark
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 19:37:14
- Oh- good night all!
- Alan Languirand: 19:37:27
- Good night Sean
- Alan Languirand: 19:38:55
- Thanks for the G&S link
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:50
- http://n55.dk/MANUALS/MICRO_DWELLINGS/micro_dwellings.html
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:06
- http://n55.dk/MANUALS/SPACEFRAME/spaceframe.html
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:19
- http://n55.dk/MANUALS/LAND/LAND.html
- BASEKAMP team: 19:43:33
- ^^ that last one is more closely linked with what y'ALL are doing
- karenmthornton: 19:46:13
- can you phone me
- karenmthornton: 19:46:18
- pls
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:47
- y
- karenmthornton: 19:46:52
- never mind thought is was just me
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:58
- calling u
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:13
- has anyone else dropped form the call?
- karenmthornton: 19:47:34
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:26
- Kyle we put u on hold temporarly -- can you mute your audio? & we'll re-add you >
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:50:30
- Russell Industrial map: http://makeloveland.com/grids/4
RIC: http://ricdetroit.com - Greg Scranton: 19:52:30
- Lovelanders, it's been fun, informative, exciting, etc. I need to put the kid to sleep. Thanks so much for the great chat. Nite all @ Basekamp!
- Alan Languirand: 19:55:00
- 'night greg!
- karenmthornton: 19:55:37
- are there height restrictions?
- Alan Languirand: 19:55:53
- not currently defined
- karenmthornton: 19:56:00
- pollution controls
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:06
- 1 mile high
- Alan Languirand: 19:56:20
- but physics will keep you in check by virtue of a small foundation not allowing you to get too tall
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:34
- how about going deep?
- karenmthornton: 19:56:35
- are these imporved lots with utilities
- Alan Languirand: 19:56:48
- There are no utilities yet
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:57:28
- http://makeloveland.com/pages/develop
- Alan Languirand: 19:57:32
- depth is the same as height - no rules et
- Alan Languirand: 19:57:35
- yet
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:50
- we work as a development team here btw
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:10
- looking @ api
- Jerry Paffendorf: 19:58:23
- extend that shiz!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:39
-
- Alan Languirand: 19:58:49
- yeah, if you guys want to connect with our tools and start experimenting with our public data then I would love to see it
- karenmthornton: 19:59:11
- should take a trip to the surveyors museum in Lansing
- Alan Languirand: 19:59:17
- another near term goal is an Augmented reality layer on top of the live video
- Alan Languirand: 20:00:55
- inch timeshares!?
- karenmthornton: 20:03:04
- goodnight from ann arbor
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:03:15
- thanks everybody
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:03:21
- goodnight ann arbor
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:03:25
- Mary Lorene Carter: 20:03:28
- Thank you!
- Alan Languirand: 20:03:29
- Thanks for having us and taking the time to ask some really good questions
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:03:36
- back out into the detroit night!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:03:50
- yea, let's continue!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:04:30
- bi!
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:04:35
- bye guys, talk soon
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:04:38
- <3
- Jerry Paffendorf: 20:04:44
- loveland outee!
2010-04-13
Week 13: n.e.w.s. paid usership
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is yet another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
We’ll be talking with the contributors and organizers at n.e.w.s. (www.northeastwestsouth.net) about their “paid usership” initiative.
n.e.w.s. itself is an online platform for the analysis of art-related activity, putting the emphasis on rethinking art’s economic underpinnings, focusing on the relationships between the attention economics of the mainstream and the smaller-scale shadow economies being experimented with. Recently, the group has initiated an open forum on the question of “remunerated usership” – and it is this aspect of the group’s work that will be at the heart of tonight’s discussion. Since its inception in 2008, n.e.w.s. has sought to maintain a model of payment (or partial payment) for putting content online, contending that value is always collectively produced through linguistic cooperation (polemics or just idle chatter) – that is, through the collective intellect. “People already get paid for online content,” they argue in the introduction to the forum, “but they are often the wrong people, because they are not all the people who worked to produce that content.” The forum’s objective is to discuss and evaluate the pros and cons of a paying people to use the internet, perhaps taking to heart Jean-Luc Godard’s remark in Six fois deux that television viewers ought to be paid to watch TV. Is it possible to leverage the potential of participative technologies and communities to ensure that user-produced value be remunerated? The very question is paradoxical inasmuch as n.e.w.s. itself is a non-commercial platform, without any institutional structural subsidy to pay its users, obliging the collective to both explore and test drive alternative models of exchange and collaboration – including gift economics.
Though fascinating, and perhaps economically coherent, the whole idea of moving from pay-for-use to paid-to-use seems to fly in the face of common sense. But could it be that for this very reason that it may point to a key component of a more plausible artworld?
Transcription
Week 13: n.e.w.s. paid usership
(Audio set up chatter and group chatter 0:00:00 - 0:10:10.3)
[Scott]: Hey everybody! We've got a small but awesome crew here tonight who ventured out in the rain, the surprisingly chilly rain, just to be here. So thanks everybody for coming. Yeah, while we were trying to get the audio setup people were asking about what tonight's topic was and I was really trying to restrain myself from explaining (laughing). Just because we're going to be talking with you guys. But let me just super briefly introduce Steven Wright, who many of you have talked with during these weekly chats before and Renee Ridgway, who many of you may have talked with during these weekly chats before. They're both here to talk about the North East West South Project Initiative called paid usership. At least I think it's called paid usership. And
[Steven]: It is. And Scott, our colleague Prayas Abhinav will also be taking part and he should be online right now and he's going to be hooking up in the next few seconds.
[Scott]: Oh great! Yeah, I was wondering if Prayas was going to be able to join, I'm glad that he can. That is fantastic.
[Renee]: Yeah, his space heater seems to be a typical (expletive 0:11:28.6). Hang on; I'm going to try talking again.
[Steven]: He's online Renee. He's online.
[Renee]: I don't see him.
[Scott]: Yeah, just if you can add him to this chat? Whenever. To the text chat. And we'll go ahead and add him to the conference call.
[Renee]: Okay. Because I don't see him.
[Scott]: Yeah, me either. He might be hiding from us.
[Male Group Member]: Or just direct him to the BaseKamp site and have him clock on the...
[Scott]: Here. I'm going to add him to this chat even though I don't see his status as on. There he is. Ah ha.
[Renee]: There he is.
[Scott]: Rock on. We'll just add him to the chat now and then maybe once he gets on we can start to describe what you guys mean by paid usership and some of where this came from.
[Steven]: Prayas is actually joining us from Northeast India. From Sam, so it's really not easy to get in touch with him as it is extremely late at night there.
[Scott]: Prayas, are you there?
[Prayas]: Yeah, hi everyone! Yeah, I just got online.
[Scott]: Fantastic.
[Steven]: Hey Prayas.
[Renee]: Great.
[Scott]: Thanks for joining us so late and taking the time out of your night to come and talk again with us.
[Prayas]: Sure (inaudible 0:13:12.9).
[Scott]: So yeah....
[Steven]: Are we going to start Prayas? Or should I start?
[Scott]: Yeah, let's just jump right into it. In general I think everyone here is really curious about what this whole initiative is all about.
[Renee]: Steven, would you like to start?
[Steven]: Well, I think… What is it all about? It's about the fact (inaudible 0:13:37.6). A minute ago a quote from (inaudible 0:13:42.5) where he says that working together supposes that we are able to trust the sharing of what we bring into the equation. Each person that brings some capacity of what if there's then they contribute something but they have to have the trust and how that capacity is going to be shared and used by other people. That's kind of the basis for a society and the basis for a community. It's the basis for doing anything collaborative. Strangely enough, it is not the basis for how our society, generally speaking, and for how our capitalist economy functions. When we look at what happens on the Internet it's an example of what happens in the neighborhood and it's what happens in the workplace. People contribute something but they are not paid for what they contribute. They are paid but not for what they contribute. So they are contributing more than what they are getting back. For example, today in a kind of (inaudible 0:15:02.7) configuration, if we (inaudible 0:15:03.8) idea is that knowledge and information plus value is produced through things like what we are doing right now. Like talking, like sharing ideas not sort of like just gabbing. Through that kind gabbing we can say " they did you read this?" (Inaudible 0:15:36.2). It doesn't appear like much is happening and yet what is happening is a kind of networked collaborative production of information and of value. The people who are producing that may not be getting a lot out of it because they are in a kind of exchange that what eventually happens is that there is somebody there to privatizes it and makes a whole (expletive 0:16:02.0) load of money off of it. And so the little crumbs that are spread out to the people that had actually been involved is nothing compared to the amount of value generated overall. And that is kind of what we called Web 2.0, not so much in the technical sense but in an economical sense of the term. News kind of comes along at a point where Web 2.0 would be a little bit highfalutin and fancy in a popular consciousness but in a business and scientific consciousness it's already on the cusp of shifting to Web 3.0. Web 3.0, we always say at n.e.w.s, is not a technical or it's not even a business model yet, it's a debate for...Yeah, semantic web, right. It is sometimes called the semantic web. Basically what it really is, it's a debate for control of public time and public space. This is where it all comes to be linked to the notion of Plausible Artworlds. Because, you know, the Artworld is a place like what I have just been describing and really takes place on a massive scale. Artists who are not highly (inaudible 0:17:27.8) and reputational, who are not extremely massive and visible to the intention of the economy are actually doing as much to produce the overall value of art as the ones who get highlighted because of their single signature. And being kind of (inaudible 0:17:48.4). We in plausible Artworlds would have to renegotiate the way value is distributed altogether. And so we thought one thing that should be done... Is how we value actually produced in these kind of situations? It's produced through the broad category of usership. I mean not every user is, of course, producing the same value. But if there were no users there would be no value. So in that sense it is through usership and through contributing and for debating and so one that all this value takes place. And so we felt that one way to go about it, in this way drawing on a (inaudible 0:18:41.5) made by (inaudible 0:18:42.2) back in the late 1970s - 1980s, where he said that people should actually get paid for watching television. I mean, he said of weird things and interesting things about television as opposed to cinema. He said that people should be paid to watch television. In other words, not even (inaudible 0:19:02.4) there should be paid TV.
(Laughter)
It sounds so completely (inaudible 0:19:10.4). But in fact, and maybe it was (inaudible 0:19:17.1) at the time. But in fact, 30 years on, it actually seems to make sense from a purely economical logical point of view. Because it is the people that are using, for example, the Internet. People that are posting content, even the most trivial kind of content or event who are just engaging with content which has been posted are actually producing that value. And that value, once again as I said, ends up being privatized and harnessed by an individual or a consortium and not collectively of redistributed among the community that produced it. And so at n.e.w.s, Renee is better at talking about the origins at n.e.w.s than me, right since it's very beginning n.e.w.s, although it's a precariously funded kind of operation, it doesn't have a huge corporation or governmental or academy standing behind it. They have maintained the principle of payment, or I would say partial payment, for the posting of content online. So in other words, we actually pay people to use are collective blog. And perhaps we don't pay them enough. Or perhaps the whole notion of paying them at all is stupid. We don't know. But that has been our principal and it is a challenge and now it is an object of an online forum. But for reasons that I really just try to quickly outline there, we feel that it's something that is not purely idiosyncratic and at the same time it's not something that's really possible for us to do buy any order for the content of what we are proposing to be reflected in the form of how we are doing it we have maintained this notion of reiterated usership. Because it's the only way we feel, or I feel, that people who are contributing their competence, their skill or their capacities is for them to have trust that those things will be used in a way which is consistent with what they intended rather than simply be ripped off and used by somebody else. We hope that this points the way forward to a new economic model for a more plausible Artworld. Renee?
[Renee]: Um, yeah. Hello.
[Scott]: Hey Renee.
[Renee]: Hi. It's hard to follow that up Steven. I think you summed it up quite well. I guess that what I can contribute is to go back to this kind of situation in which Steven just accurately described the predicaments in which n.e.w.s at the moment exists. I think it's time now to see whether instead of trying to run on the model that we've been running on, and I'm going to be a bit practical about it, of doing the grant applications and winning prizes that has financed n.e.w.s. over the course of 1 1/2 years. We try to come up with something now where we not only kind of find a way to, maybe in the long term, find sustainability but in the very instance in the course of the last weeks have tried to come up with the ways in which we discuss different models. And those models that we were looking at, I think a lot of them were awesome. But this is something that we're trying to deal with in the sense of dealing with the online.
What I wanted to say about the origins of n.e.w.s. was the idea was to create a niche that there were... I mean, I'm sure there are other platforms that have some type of exchange systems for people in certain ways that are reiterated and I'd like to hear about them if anyone does know. But the niche that we were trying to develop was that in like Anderson's book "The Long Tail". We were trying to focus on at n.e.w.s. that we did it get some type of reiteration through actual (inaudible 0:24:19.2). So the very first time that n.e.w.s, when we originated, everybody was paid to contribute. We have ever since then, quite unsuccessfully I might add, not been able to pay people for contributions. And sometimes that's kind of mapped out through the different people. Certain people contribute more and other people contribute less. But it's much like Steven said with a certain type of trust that the contributions will be taken up by someone else and that we fill each other on as much as possible. That's what I wanted to say in reaction to what you just said at this moment.
Yeah, I'm reading the questions as they are coming up. Prayas that you want to say something?
[Prayas]: Yes, I want to (inaudible 0:25:18.3 - 0:25:47.7)
[Renee]: Sorry, I lost some of that is well. Could you repeat that?
[Prayas]: Yeah. (Inaudible 0:25:58.9) the different kinds of users (inaudible 0:26:05.0).
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Prayas]: (inaudible 0:26:06.2 - 0:26:23.6)
[Renee]: But, yeah, I guess...
[Scott]: Were actually having a lot of trouble. At least I am having a lot of trouble really following because of the connection. If you got that better on your end, Renee, could you paraphrase that?
[Renee]: What Prayas basically brought up, and I will try to reiterate this, if that's in the structure of n.e.w.s. There are people mentioned as contributors and the (inaudible 0:26:53.2) with n.e.w.s. was that contributors be paid for content. But I think that Prayas is making the distinction between people who are, for the sake of argument let's call them regular contributors, in comparison to those who contribute with comments. They could be anonymous or people who just had a text in reaction to an online forum. And at this moment there has been no negotiation with those two such things. With that clear?
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Steven]: Not exactly.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: It came through clearly at least.
[Steven]: Yeah, the words were clear but I didn't quite get that concept. Can you repeat that Renee?
[Renee]: Okay. So as far as I understood, Prayas was making the distinction between those who are… Let's say we are all contributing to n.e.w.s. So people who are anywhere or anyone that wants to join and can, they just have to sign. But the original idea was that the contributors were originally started news were paid for the content of n.e.w.s. contributions. Price was making that point, as far as I understood. Which is not to say that that wouldn't change or would not change in a different situation.
[Steven]: Which means that, in other words, somebody who just adds a post or a response to something which has been posted does not necessarily reiterate or is not an automatic payment which is triggered by posting.
[Renee]: Exactly. Or that when you click on an ad, like Google ad words, you somehow create a system where money then goes somewhere to different people (inaudible 0:29:08.8) no. That does not happen.
[Steven]: One thing that would justify that is that, and this is a discussion that has taken place already on Plausible Artworlds, is that there is a difference between value and, let's say, symbolic capital.
[Scott]: What?
[Steven]: We believe that capital is a form of value, of course, but it's only one form of value and we don't wish to see value reduced to capital. We believe that's… Well, value is a tricky thing but capital, for example, symbolic capital, social capital, cultural capital, all these forms of capital are always produced by labor power. And that is something which is difficult to see. It's somehow systemically concealed. It's hard to see an object, the value of that object, being produced by anything other than desire and by subjectivity. It's hard to see that there is actually dead labor embedded within that object. It's true that there is another kind of value which is gained and calculated which cannot be reduced to the general equivalent which is gained by, I don't know, going to concerts or going to debates, conferences, discussions, posting comments on web sites like n.e.w.s. or Plausible Artworlds. And that it is another thing actually to engage in that labor which goes into producing and structuring the base which exists... I think that in the long term this is one of the things that the form hopes to raise. Whether people should actually, I mean, we're not actually supposing that our hypothesis is correct. It's a hypothesis that we want to verify and confirm and contest and so on. Whether it's actually makes any sense to pay people to use or whether… I mean, if the 20th century model actually wrong? And do we need to create a new one? That's what we are wondering. But we are wondering and not sort of (inaudible 0:31:47.4) and then asking that people agree (inaudible 0:31:51.1).
[Scott]: That doesn't make any sense. Earlier you said that it made kind of perfect economical sense, or at least under a certain type of logic.
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Steven]: Not exactly.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: Well, I try to make that case Scott but...
[Scott]: Yeah (laughing).
[Steven]: I can see that, because of course...
[Scott]: But by "doesn't make any sense" do you mean that you are actually a proponent of me and or is it something that's sustainable or is it something that is ethical or that it's…
[Steven]: I believe that is both ethical… In fact I believe that it is kind of an onion layer form. I think that it is an extremely counter intuitive proposal but I don't think that it is a revolutionary one. I suspect that capitalism is going to accommodate itself to it. I think that it is not so much a challenge to capital accumulation as it is an entirely new way of going about it. I'm not saying that it is not without a certain perversity from an anti capitalist perspective because it's true. I also believe, in my own perspective, I think that we need to oppose capitalism. And I don't think that this, this is opposing a certain type of capital accumulation but it is not opposing capital accumulation per say. You know? But I want to make that distinction really clear to that I do lots of things without being paid and not even wanting to be paid. Even though some of those things are more difficult than the stuff I actually get paid for without even having to ask for it. You know? Like, I teach at an art school and that doesn't take too much effort on my part and they actually pay me to do it. That's part of the joke.
(Laughter)
The other stuff, which takes a whole lot more effort, I don't get paid for. But that's okay because I feel that value is being engendered in a way and I am not being dispossessed of it. Like when we collaborate in something. You know how in these collaborative situations you collaborate and then the other person turns around and sells your ideas down the river. Well, then you feel really (expletive 0:33:59.3) and you don't want to do that anymore. But when you actually feel that you are a part of something that is very giving and taking you were kind of a part of a gift (inaudible 0:34:08.8). Then there's value in which you were partaking of is actually equivalent or greater to what you were putting into it. But this is not capital. This is not symbolic capital. It's a different kind of non quantifiable (inaudible0:34:26.1)...
[Renee]: Yeah, it's...
[Steven]: Sorry, I'm just finishing this line. When we're talking about posting online context, which actually is (inaudible0:34:38.2) produced in value. For example, the people who fund n.e.w.s. If we do a really good job with what they are funding then of course they're getting their money's worth so to speak. So then that's really not fair to the people who were helping them. Those idiots that they don't even know and are even sure who it is getting their money's worth. It's not fair that some of that money doesn't trickle up or down to them.
[Female group member]: But who are you talking about actually getting paid? Because to me, the most direct route for paying someone to produce content is to pay for the content. There are all types of... Newspapers now have to try to find new models for their subscriber base and things like paying for articles, paying for monthly subscriptions and things like that. I mean, if you are getting grant money for people to write something that's one thing. But to make it sustainable… I guess how are they getting paid? And do you see someone needing to pay for content in order to give the contributors money?
[Renee]: Should I answer that?
[Steven]: Yeah, you can or I can. Go ahead and Renee.
[Renee]: Well I was just going to say that newspapers now are setting up models where you can only read certain things or certain pages and those are for the privileged users. To answer your direct question about n.e.w.s.so far, it has been financed by grants that not to say that everything that is at n.e.w.s. has been financed. The other thing is that there is a prize involved, which is actually not just a prize it is a conditional prize, in which one actually has to produce something to get the second half of the money in that sense. So right now content and news is a mix.
I wanted to say something in response to Steven and what he is describing in his own personal mind as a (inaudible 0:37:04.0) model where certain things for which I think many of us share and do, either to teach or at our jobs or whenever we do to pay the bills so to speak, and end that is able to sustain our lives so that we can do other things in which we don't get paid for. This is also something that has basically become kind of the status quo or acceptable and that you're expected to do a lot of things for free. And this is actually a lot of the premise of not having any regrets and Chris Anderson's other book called "Free". And this is a larger discussion about what is happening and Web 2.0 and what could possibly be the future. Steven you want to add something to that?
[Steven]: Well, that's kind of what I was going to say. I mean I've been kind of actively involved in n.e.w.s. since its beginning. There is a whole bunch of is that were involved. Basically n.e.w.s. is an initiative of Renee Ridgway and the deal was we would all post at least a certain amount of content and we would be paid for that initial posting with the grant money that had been already received on the condition that then we would go forward and continue. It was a modest but a decent some. I mean, it wasn't like a lot of money. But it was what you would get paid to write an article in general in a current publication. But with the understanding that we would go on and continue to discuss. And it seemed like a pretty generous kind of an arrangement. And then, you know, some people dropped out in some other people kind of hooked in and that's the way things are. It has continued with that model. What has changed along the way is the need to find the means to continue and to sustain this kind of economic model. Because it is (inaudible 0:39:26.9) we can't simply turn to funding bodies and say that we are paying people to post content and " haven't you heard about review rated usership?" Because of course, they haven't. Because we are the ones who were talking about it. In order to be able to talk you can't ask people to contribute to a forum on page usership without paying them because that would really be (inaudible 0:39:50.3) your own hypothesis seriously. So it is (inaudible 0:39:55.1) to look at various other economic mechanisms. But what we hope to (inaudible 0:40:00.9) people will contribute to the forum will make arguments for and against and also attempt to quantify. Not simply "yes I should be paid" or " no way should not be, this is crazy. Let's keep money out of the Internet and let's try to make Web 3.0 a non capitalized form of value production". That kind of argument would be very resonant with many people. We always say we want to be paid. Okay, how much do we want to be paid? Of course we all want to be paid $1,000,000 but exactly how much do you think your ideas and your contributions or you're not in contributions are actually worth?
Prayas he was a great example in a discussion recently where he described how it was that Google calculated how much YouTube was actually worth. The basis of the calculation, which was very complex of course, was how many people had ever used YouTube.
[Scott]: Right. How many hours of content.
[Steven]: The overall number of users. And the funny thing is if that ended up being a (expletive 0:41:23.9) of a lot of money. But all those people who produced all that value, let's just hope they got some use value out of it because they shouldn't get any of the money that was distributed basically among three people.
[Scott]: Well I have a question guys about money. The idea is to pay people but like you said, Renee, that this is an unfunded venture largely. But what that really means, as you both said kind of tying until last week's chat, that it is funded but it's just funded out of your pockets. You get grants as an artist or a writer or whatever and you work out a job and you pony up and some people pay more than others. But basically in order for this model to work somebody has to pay. So it's not just getting paid but somebody else has to pay. And so I wonder that if you think about the sustainability of this model it sort of seems like to half the people pay and the other half get paid? Or does everybody pay the same amount that they get? Where does it come from? You've been talking about where it goes. How has that discussion played out so far?
[Renee]: (Laughing) Prayas are you awake?
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Yeah what is it like for the morning for you?
[Prayas]: Yeah.
[Renee]: Guys do you want to… Sorry. Did I interrupt you Steven?
[Steven]: No, let Prayas say that. I mean, I would have lots of things to say about that but go ahead Prayas.
[Renee]: Prayas?
[Prayas]: In keeping in tradition with the most users (inaudible 0:43:16.0 - 0:43:28.4) can contribute more and some users (inaudible 0:43:35.3 - 0:44:07.7).
[Renee]: Yeah. Did you guys get that?
[Scott]: Mostly.
[Renee]: He just said that tangible and intangible and that some people contribute more and some contribute less...
[Scott]: And that it can never be equal. Yeah.
[Renee]: Yeah but just that it can never be equal.
[Scott]: Right. But even know it can never be equal…
[Steven]: (inaudible 0:44:28.2) to start with.
[Renee]: Exactly.
[Steven]: You know we're not talking about… Prayas you only just talked for about 45 seconds and I talked for 6 minutes so… (Inaudible 0:44:41.4)
(Laughter)
But, you know, that is a double edged sword because blabbermouths are worth more but they're worth a lot less under certain circumstances. The important thing is that, and we're not talking about n.e.w.s. here we're talking about collaborative initiatives in general were value is being produced collectively and that's basically everything (inaudible 0:45:03.6). Because the people don't feel they are being systematically ripped off because if they feel that…
[Scott]: Well it wouldn't work, it would collapse.
[Steven]: Well that kind of value production will cease to function. Quite simply.
[Scott]: Right. You are not saying that the people are not systematically ripped off, just that they don't feel that way. Or we don't feel that way.
[Steven]: Well, I think when you were talking… That's a good question Scott. When you were talking about capital then you can quantify and objectionally describe where value is being produced and it doesn't matter what people subjectively feel. But in another way, of course, one being subjected as it's hard to tell people that what they desire is not worth anything. And what they are getting out of something is less than what they are putting in. And that's the kind of thing that n.e.w.s. is... To be more specific about the question that was raised, you know initially n.e.w.s. was funded and continues to be funded through a Dutch foundation. To be honest, what partially led to this forum was the fact that n.e.w.s. is writing a book because we joined an essay writing competition which had a significant prize, cash prize, attached to it. That cash prize allowed us to sustain ourselves and had a certain capital injection into the project.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Steven]: In fact, that essay writing prize itself is not just kind of a straight flat out thing. Someone raised the question "is this an economic or an artistic project?" Well, essay writing competition was also both. It was initiated by us, by someone who feels that essay writing is a form of artistic production and it is more interesting than object production and so on. I mean, we are not alone in all of this. There is kind of recognition that wealth can be redistributed for different types of value production. We are at the self reflective end of the production chain. So it is an artistic and an economic project but at the same time it is (inaudible 0:47:41.3) which is attempting to self reflexively look at what this is all about.
[Renee]: I wanted to say that's...
[Scott]: There are a few questions by the way. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead Renee.
[Renee]: No, go ahead. I just wanted to say that the funding agency that used to fund us does not fund is any more.
(booooo!)
(Scott]: That is a shame.
[Renee]: Hence the paid usership forum as a desperate plea for other opinions on how to setup models and to test out models and to think through this together.
[Scott]: Yeah. There were a few questions on the text chat. People here might have some too.
[Scott]: Where do we start?
[Steven]: Here's a good question. Is it utopian to pay for user made content? I mean, you can pay a photograph or a text or whatever which is kind of normal for us (inaudible 0:48:50.8) when you get to the scale of the Internet it's very difficult to say who produced what.
[Scott]: And there's a kind of (inaudible 0:49:01.1) process, there's an editorial process and um…
[Steven]: Yeah
[Scott]: Different from something like YouTube for example.
(Inaudible chatter)
[Renee]: What is the question?
[Scott]: We will repeat it again.
[Steven]: What I would say is a whole (expletive 0:49:28.9) of a lot more value is being produced on the Internet because there's a whole (expletive 0:49:33.8) more people that are involved in it. Which means that there is a whole (expletive0:49:37.1) of a lot more for me to figure out how to redistribute that wealth because otherwise what happens is that it is privatized and that community produced value ends up in the hands of very few who didn't produce it at all.
[Renee]: Yeah. Maybe it is just to say that there is no (inaudible 0:50:00.0) going on (inaudible 0:50:01.8). No, the only thing I edit out is spam.
[Scott]: So anybody here can post anything they want and you guys get paid?
[Renee]: HA!
[Scott]: Oh!
(Laughter)
[Steven]: No. That's what Prayas is saying. To get paid you have to be a user rather than just a contributor. To say just a contributor is to, of course, reveal something of a paradox of a contradiction in about how we approach this. But that's what I was saying earlier. Maybe every time you add a word that should trigger a payment to your account. We don't have a mechanism for that. But that is an argument that could be made. But as it stands now is it that only beyond a certain degree of participation and contribution like we'll say "hey that person has really made a vague effort". We would say easily if someone was really involved in a discussion. It's not like we're still overrun with people adding content so we can be really selective about all this. But yeah, of course, anybody who was participating actively like Prayas or Renee or me would be certainly paid. Is that right Renee?
[Renee]: Yeah. Well right now there's nobody to pay anymore.
[Steven]: (Laughing) yeah. What they're worth any ways.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: The thing about it actually is that someone who would probably contribute to the forum and was gonna talk about different types of (inaudible0:51:59.8) labor, so to speak. Labor in society and just focusing on, let's say, domestic house work primarily done by women of the last centuries and raising children and such. So I said to her" well if you contribute this text then next time I'm in London I will come and clean your house...
(Laughter)
...as an exchange". Because these are the types of things that are also starting to happen and I realize how much we can also ask of each other between ourselves but also when people want to contribute and not necessarily those they are making demands. But this is the kind of thing we're interested in and also what type of negotiations (inaudible 0:52:45.9). And how does that manifest itself either offline or online, so to speak?
[Scott]: Do you have a question?
[Female group member]: I guess I just sort of feel like it's not about, I'm sorry if I'm not very articulate right now. It's not about giving people money, it's about changing people's minds about what they want to pay for. So like if people value this content they should pay for it if they are able. And if that happened... It's the whole type of thing about contributing to organizations that give relief, the word is escaping me. It's more about changing the way people spend money than it is about saying what it is they should spend money on. If people paid money for what they value then everything would be different. I don't know. That's what this makes me think of.
[Steven]: Well, we are not so much talking about people paying money for what they value as being paid for what produces value.
[Scott]: Well but you guys are people too. You guys are paying money for what you value. It's not like, that's what I was asking you earlier. It's not like this is… It's a conceptual project but it's not as if it is coming out of thin air. You know, there are people being paid and there are also people paying so that has to factor in there somewhere. You're not asking people to pay that is part of the model. It's just not one that you are foregrounding.
[Renee]: And not paying would be with time primarily.
[Scott]: Well, if people are getting paid money than it has to come from somewhere. I mean, I'm not trying to harp on the money thing I'm just saying that, you know.
(Laughter)
This little equation, I'm missing a little piece of it somewhere and it's where the money is coming from. I mean, you have mentioned it but it doesn't seem to factor into the conceptualization of this so much. (Laughing) blood money.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: Well yeah, it's like saying basically the way I gamble, you know? It's like the investments that I make or the project proposals that I write and I fortunately have other kind of income that is created by another profession that enables me to do n.e.w.s. So I run off a (inaudible 0:55:39.5) economy in another (inaudible 0:55:42.5) which then because it is an (inaudible 0:55:45.5) take away from my time that I would actually be able to put into n.e.w.s. Is that what you were kind of asking?
[Scott]: Um, yeah. Well, sort of. Yes? Yeah, I guess I was being a little bit more… Yeah, definitely. Some money is coming from project grants, some money is coming from, you know, like...
[Renee]: (inaudible 0:56:12.2)
[Scott]: Yeah, but you are proposing a more… You guys are proposing a reproducible model. You're not just saying "hey are we awesome because we got this project and were distributing the money" you are saying " they wouldn't it be cool if." And so in the "if equation" that doesn't really factor in the fact that you guys got the grant. I mean, it could. That could be one way of doing it. You know, artists spend a certain amount of time. Or anybody that could be argued as grant worthy spends a certain amount of time pooling some of their writing times and writing grants and spending a certain amount of that on other people who may be are less conceptually part of the project but they feel should be paid. You know...
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Scott]: And so it's like "hmmm."
[Renee]: All I wanted to say is that maybe the term that I'm trying to articulate here in a way that I am just not going to, in a complicated way but just keep it simple. Like this network surplus value aspect to the collective of how we all pull together and redistribute the wealth, except that there really isn't any wealth, in a sense that the money that we got for the prize we were able to then conduct our own kind of open call which then was able to allocate a prize. So the money was then taken up in distributed elsewhere. These types of things are what we're trying to kind of experiment with n.e.w.s. and to further the thinking. To further the discourse. I'm not sure that it's working but...
[Scott]: I hope the publication gets written, you know? Because otherwise you have to pay back the money right?
[Renee]: Sorry?
[Scott]: I said I hope the publication gets written because otherwise you have to give the money back right?
[Renee]: Oh thanks Scott.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: You have to shake everybody down that you gave money to. Say "hey remember when we gave you a check?"
[Renee]: What?
[Scott]: You'll have to shake everyone down that you were given money to and be like "um."
(Laughter)
[Renee]: Now I'm not going to sleep tonight.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: No, it will all work out.
[Renee]: Prayas are you there?
[Scott]: Are you hearing this Prayas?
[Renee]: Prayas?
[Scott]: Write your section! No, I'm just kidding.
[Prayas]: Yeah...
[Renee]: Prayas do want to comment on that?
[Prayas]: Um, no. I think you have (inaudible 0:58:41.7).
[Renee]: Okay.
[Steven]: I wanted to answer Megan's question. You asked whether we can say what is the wealth that we think might be distributable and in what way. Of course we have been talking largely about how we try to redistribute the wealth on our own small scale at n.e.w.s. But in fact, this is much more than about n.e.w.s. We only do it that way at news because it would be inconsistent with our own principles not to do it that way. But what we really think is that there is a whole [expletive 0:59:21.8) of a lot of value that is being produced in places other than n.e.w.s. We don't think we are producing about much value. We really just think that we're having a discussion about producing value and we hope to do it in a way that is consistent with what we are for proposing. We really think that in most every place there are people contributing for whatever reason and these kind of debates, in chats, in (inaudible 0:59:53.7) and just sort of gabs. Value was actually almost inadvertently and undenounced to the participants or the shareholders being produced. We think that really that doesn't make any sense that those people are not somehow being reiterated because actually wage labor disappears from our society. You know, time needs freed up for this value. It's being produced so why are the producers not being paid? It doesn't make sense.
[Renee]: Can I just interject one thing? I mean, this goes back to the book that we're writing. It's really what is expected of one, and I'm speaking from just my personal experience. You don't have to be paid you are instead getting attention. And attention be that visibility be that you continue a career etc. etc. This is what it basically is the tradeoff and most people think that this is also the way it should be and it is assumed that having your name highlighted on the door that is the way you are able to give something back. I think that what we are working on now, and simplified terms, is trying to question this all type of assumption.
[Steven]: Yet basically…
[Scott]: Hey Steven? Would you mind if someone asked a question here? I'm sorry. I was just trying to queue it up but missed my chance. Would that be okay? Can you hold on to that thought for just a second? Okay, okay.
[Chris]: Yeah but, being paid and getting attention is better. It's like people have got to realize that a lot of things that they do have value and that's one of the things that I was thinking.
[Steven]: Well, what Renee was just saying now is that what we have observed if that a lot of people are not interested in attention. In fact, attention economics is the dominant model in our society and certainly within our artists' society, but it is not the only model. There are also what we call shadow practices. And I think among those shadow practices there are practices that don't seek to be as high ranking as possible. The attention economy. I mean what we are doing right now, for example, is an instance of that. That actually we must feel it's otherwise we wouldn't have all joined together and really odd hours of different times around the world to engage in this conversation that we didn't think was even some sort of collective value being produced together. We're not trying to get as many people on here as possible. I mean everyone is welcome to join but the object is really more to have a discussion consistent with the notion that defines this series of conversations and not to make sure we can fast track our way into some high end exhibition space that allows us to capitalize on these ideas. That really is not the objective. So attention is not the only thing. I would say that once again (inaudible 1:03:35.1) of course is tapping into the idea (inaudible1:03:39.3) philosophy that attention getting and attention paying is all uniform of recognition. But it's kind of a perverted capitalized form of recognition. Of course recognition and the need for love is a very important thing. It's an essential part of feeling human but it has come perverted into an attention economics which has become the dominant form of cutting edge capital accumulation today. And so making money and getting attention are not the objects for a lot of people. That's my personal opinion that it is not a worthy objective of human existence. But that doesn't mean that people don't need to be acknowledged and reiterated at some point for their production of value. And it certainly doesn't mean that other people should be paid for the value that they're producing.
[Scott]: To point out Aaron's question, just to clarify; we have been talking about money a lot just because that is sort the key thing that you have been focusing on. But also you have been focusing on other things. Renee talked about exchange and other things and we've also been talking a lot about… Well, we've been playing with words a lot. For instance, paying attention is part of how people are remunerated. There is an investment, you are spending time, you are paying attention and there are a lot of things that are exchanged and given that are not capital or at least not capital money, right? I mean, that's a big part of what has been coming out of these talks. Am I right about that? I guess I'm not asking a universal question. Hasn't this been coming out of these talks and isn't that a part of where you guys are coming from or are you really just saying that you think it's important to just focus on money as much as possible?
[Steven]: As much what?
[Scott]: I guess what I ate… I could have probably said it in 10 words. Buy paying, you do mean other things besides cash. Cold hard cash, right? I am just clarifying back.
[Renee]: Yes.
[Scott]: Okay.
[Steven]: Yes we do, Scott. But to be clear, we also pay cold hard cash.
[Scott]: Right.
[Steven]: That's true. I was just going to respond to Aaron by saying that yes collective value is not reducible to monetary capital. It is not just about dollars and cents but it is also about dollars and cents. And when we talk about paid usership we are talking about handing over cash. But we're not only talking about that. But I think that if you refuse to talk about that then that is a very interesting position. It is a radical take on the whole remunerating usership position but it is not the one that n.e.w.s. has collectively put forward. I am certainly hoping that somebody is going to take it up (inaudible 1:07:17.6). Do you see what I mean?
[Greg]: I will speak for Scott and say yes.
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:07:30.2) but for sure, when we talk about it we are actually… I think that every case… Let me say it this way. Every case where somebody is making money from collectively produced value then we should be talking about equating value of money to redistribute it. Do you see what I mean? In those cases, of course, with a value in question and the knowledge in question is not monitarized that it is not necessarily talked about as value. In fact, it's probably much more interesting to talk about either symbolic forms of payment to be arranged.
[Greg]: Steven, this is Greg. Or Renee, or Prayas. Any of you. I was wondering if there is any other examples that are out there that you could point to that you think work in a similar model? I said more generally a kind of reminded me of a more shareware model. But I'm curious if there are any other models that you could point to that function in a similar way as n.e.w.s. Or are you the only game in town?
(Laughter)
[Renee]: I would not say that. No, um... Well let's put it this way. What comes to mind just off the top of my head is that I know of other sites that are institutions that have a structural subsidy so to speak. Whether that the governmental or private. And that they then hire people to blog and there are a lot of them. So this is something that happens if we just set a limit to not newspapers but as a cultural section of the world in the larger sense of the word, there are many types of these sites. There are many sites to operate this way. They have an institutions with a large operating budget and they invite people to blog whether that be about whenever subjects they decide or what topic they want to do. It's usually a top down structure which means that the agenda is put forth from " this is what we want you to write about" and " could you please do this" and " this is how much you will get paid". And I'm not even sure if it's always per word or what kind of renumeratation, because I'm not part of that, but there are many sites out there that do that.
[Greg]: But that's not what you're doing is it?
[Steven]: No.
[Renee]: Well, no. no.
[Greg]: So you are the only...
[Renee]: I think that the...Sorry?
[Greg]: (Laughing) no, go ahead.
[Renee]: No, I just wanted to say that that is not what we are doing. I think that's that is something that we are actually addressing and this way of trying to... No, we don't really have this kind of agenda other than our own kind of research of what we are working on at the moment which is what we have been trying to share with you of why we're instigating this discussion at n.e.w.s. Steven, do you want to add to that?
[Steven]: Um, sorry. I was just reading the questions.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Scott]: We've got parallel conversations going on in text and in audio. It always happens that we can try to feed them into one another.
[Greg]: I don't need a closed answer. I mean, I don't need a perfect summarization of or answer to my question. I'm just posing that really just as a talking point. If Aaron wants to chime in with his questions than I am more than happy to hear about them to.
[Renee]: Um, Prayas are you there?
[Prayas]: Yes I am still here.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Very in synched response.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: Prayas do you know of other sites that, Greg's question, that operate in these ways?
[Prayas]: Um, on other sites like (inaudible1:12:18.0 - 1:13:39.0)
[Steven]: I think that n.e.w.s. is, I think, unique and actually explicitly organizing a discussion about paid usership. In fact I think the term doesn't really exist. If you would do a Google search on paid usership I don't know what you would find. I mean, we never really tried doing that so we just sort of figured out it was something we wanted to talk about. But I think that in every gift economy there is a sense of paid usership. Of course when you give something it is well known that you were also getting something. And by engaging in a gift economy you actually are engaging in a certain kind of, I mean the, whole (inaudible1:14:34.2) principle is based on that. And we hope to actually draw and command on the really fascinating stuff written about this really fascinating part of human exchange. That we want to draw on as a resource and I and deliberately using terms that are related to battle paragon, to kind of make our case. Or at least have a case argued in a public debate.
[Renee]: Yeah. As much as that can be public that people would actually know what n.e.w.s. is doing, I would not say that we have large readership.
[Scott]: So how do you think n.e.w.s's proposal works with other, well actually what may reverse that? How do you think other mostly artists initiatited micro granting systems fit in with what n.e.w.s. is proposing with this initiative? You know, people who from one way or another pool resources either from grants or getting it from somewhere else or from work or in some cases asking a number of people to donate an incredibly small amount and then pooling and giving it to someone or some group of people who they feel deserve it. How do you feel that those kinds of initiatives meet up to this proposal? I mean I can think of a lot of examples. I'm sure you can think of a few.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Steven]: Give us an example.
[Scott]: Some of the other people that we were talking to in this series like the Incubate Sunday Soup Project. Theresa, who is here, as was talking about FEAST, which is the Brooklyn based almost the same model but blown up on a scale that only a city like New York can sustain. We're like 500 people will get together and pay just a few dollars for something that is way more valuable. Like a meal that would cost a lot more than it actually costs a lot less because you make in bulk and they use the money to fund. Everybody gets to vote on the artist projects that are proposed. So everyone that comes can propose a project and everyone votes and the money goes to fund some project because they think that this is a worthwhile contribution to society. Or they're like it or whatever. Those are just a couple of examples. You know, we're looking at (inaudible 1:17:47.8) initiated project The Fundred Dollar Bill Project. Obviously this isn't coming directly from artists. Although I think that artists and another culture produces spearheaded this kind of research. But it has played itself out in all sorts of… The Obama campaign for example.
[Steven]: That's what I was thinking Scott.
[Scott]: Yeah.
[Renee]: Yeah. Well we are definitely not that organized.
[Scott]: Yeah. I'm not actually comparing but you guys or the project is putting forth a proposal and the proposal I hope it doesn't assume that they can never be met or that nothing can ever stand up to it. I was just curious how these other things stand up to the criteria that are being formed. This discussion that is being held was motivated by certain desires. Are those desires being met at all? Do you know to mean?
[Renee]: Yeah. The one differentiation that I think that we're trying to start out with or make is that this is about and comparison to offline. This an online attempt to put it (inaudible 1:19:00.5). Of course, there are other places where I'm not sure if things are voted on and that money is distributed back to the other within the entire community online as a remunerated, that it's remunerated. But the examples that you give, do they also have enough offline/online life? Where the one thinks sustain them and then something else? Or is it really in the context of being offline? Because the examples that I think of like Joshua Green's project and Steve Lambert has also given away money in Washington Square Park for the complex festival and people would decide on which projects would be funded and they would gather money. But maybe I think Aaron is also suggesting (inaudible 1:20:08.7). Is that true? I can’t click on all the links at the same time. I’m sorry.
[Scott]: Me either. I’m freezing.
[Aaron]: Yeah, I was just thinking of (1:20:23.0) the money that she puts around in a gifty kind of way.
[Renee]: So Randolph is also a contributor to you.
[Greg]: Yep, yep. Oh, that's where she gets all the stacks of money.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: No, no! It's not true (inaudible 1:20:40.6)
[Greg]: That's like a little insider process. The money just keeps giving away, and you give her some. I see how this works. It's incestuous.
[Renee]: I actually gave the money that she gave out back to her. Um, am I supposed to go through these links at the same time?
[Scott]: Why don't you do it one at a time?
[Renee]: I can barely handle the overload.
[Scott]: I know. It's been crazy.
[Steven]: Well, what I'm noticing with the links just off the top of my head is that what we're talking about is paid usership. It's not paid participation. It isn't like the participants decide how (inaudible 1:21:37.2) should be allocated. It's really like isolated individuals, isolated in every respect should simply be paid because (inaudible 1:21:50.1). It has to be a hard hit rather than a touchy feely love and peace kind of collectivity, like let's do things together against this nasty cold republic of strategic nationality. No. I'm not against that. What we're talking about is something much (inaudible 1:22:22.1). Just pay the (expletive 1:22:29.3) workers that are doing the work!
[Scott]: You're not actually suggesting that companies do this specifically right? You're saying that...
[Steven]: Well, I think companies... Actually, I am Scott.
[Scott]: Okay. Well that s the first time it's come up in this conversation, I've been asking.
[Steven]: For me it was clear. For now it's an experiment, obviously. And that what I was trying to say in an answer that I had typed to Greg awhile back. It's a gesture, it's an experimental gesture. But like every experimental gesture, it also (inaudible 1:23:10.8) in its life to have a kind of contagious effect on the real. Yes I believe that companies are ripping off. Once again, it's like we talked about last week, the surplus value of the people who are producing the values. I think they should redistribute that value to those who produced it. And so I think that it's particularly evident on the internet and I think that we are limiting our scope back (inaudible 1:23:46.4). Basically I think that every capitalist enterprise, every company, every business should (inaudible 1:24:01.7) paid or at least partially paid (inaudible 1:24:08.1). That's kind of what we're saying what the value is producing. (Inaudible 1:24:20.3).
[Renee]: Yeah, to go back to what you said earlier Scott. I don't think that we are in any way, shape or form capable of, right now at this moment, to organize to where we are pulling a large group and large amounts and then actively decide how to redistribute that. The only example (inaudible 1:24:50.4) is that we set up an (inaudible 1:24:56.6) to seek answers to our own questions...
(Laughter)
And then we did the payments or the prize money to (inaudible 1:25:07.1)
[Scott]: Yeah. That laughter wasn't actually based on what you were saying. We're not teasing you or anything. Sorry Renee, it was this link that Aaron sent. I wasn't expecting this kind of...fantastic. Pretty sweet.
[Greg]: Although, you know what's fascinating about this is like how much different it is going to a large university where you take a class with 250 other students where your papers are graded by your peers, essentially TAs. I mean really, how different is it? Aside from the fact that there's perhaps in the scenario in the website, a very explicive exchange of capital whereas it's more subtle when you're going to school for free and you're expected to have some sort of TA-ship that is work, as Steven might say, a wage slave. Reading hundreds of undergraduate papers if you will. I don't know
[Scott]: And they're doing a really good job like fighting against universal health care.
[Greg]: Steven got cut off.
[Scott]: Oh he did?
[Greg]: I'm glad he didn't hear me say that then.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: I guess there is also the question... I'm trying to multitask here and I'm not a very good multi-tasker and its 1:45am. The thing that is brought up here is also what's going on online with the (inaudible 1:26:58.4). People are getting paid to do all different types of tasks that maybe instead of a (inaudible 1:27:07.5) or a grant that they're being paid to do these things. And some of those things are, to the extent, even writing recommendations for books that they haven't read for example. This whole controversy of to which degree that this is basically acceptable and especially that (inaudible 1:27:31.2) can be used in a non ethical ways and how people think about there's all different types of ways to make money on the internet. I mean, this is a very broad large topic that I'm only really starting to gather enough about and I think there are more people out there who know more about this than I do. But, this is something that comes into play as well.
[Scott]: It'd be awesome if we could get paid to read n.e.w.s. You know? To browse your sight.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: (Inaudible 1:28:15.7) there is a serious argument for that because it's not just a joke. It's true that by reading n.e.w.s. in some way if there is any value posted on n.e.w.s. then by reading it then somehow you're I involved either in the production or the (inaudible 1:28:33.6) of that value.
[Scott]: I was wondering if you were going to argue that sort of the authorship of the reader is valuable.
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:28:47.8)
[Renee]: Yeah the author. The author or the reader.
[Steven]: Prayas is best to deal with that. Prayas organized a forum on the productive value of working on the internet.
[Renee]: Prayas, are you still awake?
[Scott]: He's sawing logs.
(Laughter)
[Prayas]: Yeah.
[Renee]: He's there!
[Scott]: Yay.
[Renee]: Talk about your broken webs.
[Prayas]: Broken webs (inaudible 1:29:27.2 - 1:30:05.5)
[Renee]: So introverts in a sense to fill the definition of (inaudible 1:30:09.3). That people are passively participating so to speak, but not being passive. That the action of lurking is an action, it's active.
[Scott]: That relates to the ongoing discussion of slackerdom too right?
[Steven]: Absoulutely. As teachers we tend to say that lurkers are parasites or poachers or something. But yeah, we have to think that in (inaudible 1:30:47.8) slacking are also forms of the greater community (inaudible 1:30:54.9) action.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Greg]: I have to teach a freshman seminar and part is a 40% participation grade and some of my brightest students don't say a single word the entire semester and I think there is something to be said about somebody who just listens. It doesn't make for a very interesting class but not all classes are that interesting anyway. I don't know. It's interesting. I love that idea of lurking in real space and time.
[Renee]: So we should all get paid for reading and for listening.
[Greg]: Yep. Yeah, absolutely.
[Steven]: And for lurking.
(Laughter)
[Steven]: That seems like insane doesn't it? What if we created a forum called Paid Lurkership? Then I would be suggesting that we should be paid for lurking, you know?
[Renee]: Yeah, yeah.
[Scott]: That's great!
[Greg]: But then again, it does assume that there is something to lurk. It comes back to that question that something is there to be seen or heard or maybe not. Maybe it's that awkward silence were you sit in a room and all lurking together. I don't know. That sounds like borderline meditation. No offense to anyone who meditates.
[Scott]: Yeah. Lurking seems so active. Lurking is such an active term. I wonder if it's even a good one. I like loitering because, you know, you're definitely not supposed to be there and you're specifically (expletive 1:32:40.4) off whereas lurking actually requires some work to hide. Do you think we should get paid to loiter too or do you think that it should be for people who are only paying attention? What about the people who aren't paying attention?
(Laughter)
(Inaudible background comment)
[Steven]: That question really, I think, highlights the distinction between value per say and capital per say, as a form of value. If you wanted to define lurking as somebody who is not paying attention that would be producing value on top of the type of value that was already existent there but wasn't spinning back into the equation. It was going into a different type of economy. (Inaudible 1:33:44.0) economies like touching but one wouldn't be feeding into the other. Do you see what I mean? It's like somebody who's working on a website won't be gaining something from that but would be feeding back into that value in a different place. So there you would have to calculate it in a different way.
[Scott]: What if I was really not paying attention and doing something entirely different. Like working a side job? Or like something while you guys were talking? Wouldn't you feel hurt?
[Steven]: Scott, we know you.
[Renee]: We have to say goodbye to Prayas, he's checking out. He's tired. It's 5:30am.
(Multiple goodbyes from group)
[Female group member]: Um, it seems like there might be three different types of usership or contributorship. One would be lurking. Either like just visiting by counting clicks or if you could measure how a long person is staying to see if they're an engaged lurker. And the other two would be someone who contributes and someone who inspires other discourse. And it seems like maybe a way of evaluating and finding a (inaudible 1:35:22.9) way to redistribute the wealth is generated by internet browsing would be to look at all three of those ways. Like, and I'm saying to maybe even discard the click through lurkers. You know what I mean? It's like channel surfing.
[Renee]: Yes, we need to find a way to set up where at least if you clicked on one of our banner ads so to speak, this was something that Prayas was getting at, you would actually be able to redistribute funds somehow for example.
[Female group member]: Right. Like if you took any single model like counting clicks and passive lurkers aren't helping advance the content and contributing members could just be blabbermouths and then people would be trying to make money by just saying the most rather than saying the least. To compensate people for inspiring other discourse would just kind of harbor a bunch of sensationalism, which is basically the problem with the rest of the media that people do for money now.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Getting paid per comment on your post or whatever.
[Female group member]: Right. Per comment or like per related article that comes thereafter. Or per like people who want to advertise on your story or your contributions.
[Scott]: It should be an algorithm where you deduct value if businesses want to advertise on your blog.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Scott]: I can't believe that everyone (expletive 1:37:12.3) agreed with that one (laughing).
(Laughter)
(Inaudible comment from background)
[Scott]: Actually, I have it all worked out.
[Renee]: What's going on?
(Laughter)
[Scott]: You were just nodding. You were doing something else, Renee. I see where this is going.
[Renee]: Yeah, like I'm going to bed soon.
[Scott]: Well hey, its 7:53. Yeah, exactly. So what about your dreams and stuff? Can you get paid for dreaming about n.e.w.s.?
(Laughter)
[Greg]: Renee's bed is like "why is she lurking? Why isn't she engaging with me?"
(Laughter)
[Renee]: At least I get to do chat in my pajamas.
[Scott]: Yeah. We can do that too. Pajama party.
[Renee]: To go back to the forum, basically, we've not yet had a response other than the people who say that they're going to participate and have some kind of text lingering in the background. We haven't had, this is in a way, a kick start for the forum. And I was wondering what would be needed, after an hour or two hours of chat, what would be the next step? Is it really about setting up a business model like the one I had said where I was going to clean someone's house that I'm personally doing? Or is it something that can be, without saying that there is a pot of cash so to speak to be distributed, then what is the next step? Does anybody have any thoughts?
[Steven]: Renee, just one word of cautiousness. I were forums usually don't take off the minute following their launch. They had our rhythm that is all of their own. Probably because they are very poorly paid. I don't know. I wanted to come back to something (inaudible1:40:02.0) that isn't my question but why we (inaudible 1:40:05.6) and I will just say one thing. This whole idea, n.e.w.s. is not really a plausible Artworld in itself but I think that it could pose as something which could be a key component of a plausible Artworld. In Artworlds, or let's just say a world, is not something that is just based on the few people who succeed in it. It is based on all of the people who took part in it. And without any one of those contributors, without any one of those users what it is would not be what it is. The overall value, I mean maybe you could say that some people produce more value than others. But collectively they produce the value that is produced.
[Scott]: Well, don't you pay people more than others? Some people more than others? Remunerate I mean.
[Steven]: Mostly our point. I think our point is that yes we do definitely pay some more than others. Dramatically more than others. If you look at how wealth is distributed on our planet you really see that the top 3% of people get about 90% of the wealth. So yes, we certainly do. We handsomely rewarded those who we think are producing all of the value. But I think that there is a good case to be made that the other 90% are doing more than producing that 3% of the value. I mean I think that's (inaudible 1:41:49.0)...
[Renee]: (inaudible 1:41:49.1)
[Steven]: (inaudible 1:41:53.0) the point of an Artworlds. But there's a reputation of a company and the world is a thing that is produced by an entire aggregate of the people that vested interest in it. That's something in which informs this idea that people should be paid. On one hand, it's the idea of a living wage and that people should be paid for being citizens. But more specifically they are paid for participating as citizens. And we call that usership.
[Renee]: And also I think what you were getting at is inclusive also of let's say "Dark Matter" by Greg Shallot. This text would also include the people who are reading n.e.w.s. in your collectivity, correct? Steven?
[Steven]: Yeah, yeah.
[Renee]: That surrounding of critical mass, so to speak, of all the people who are participating. And not just those who are contributing content through words or images.
[Steven]: Yes, right. Exactly. They're producing calculable amounts.
[Renee]: Yeah.
[Scott]: Will guys, thank you so much for coming. This was totally awesome. It is 7:58 PM.
[Renee]: I can go to bed now?
[Scott]: Yeah, you can participate in bed.
[Greg]: Rest assured the check is in the mail.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: Rest assured. Is that a pun Greg? Rest assured?
[Greg]: Yes of course!
[Scott]: And everybody that is supposed to contribute to this book totally will. Don't worry Renee.
(Laughter)
[Renee]: Do you mean we're not going to have to pay back the rest of the money?
[Scott]: Yeah, right. You were not going to have to take on a couple of extra jobs and write a new grant just to pay back the old one.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Although, that's not a bad idea.
[Renee]: Just tell them it's a business model.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Yeah, I hope not.
[Renee]: Thank you, all of you, for your feedback and I have to say that as a participant once again in a BaseKamp plausible Artworld I cannot keep up with reading text and everything that is going on. I just can't do it.
[Scott]: You did a fantastic job Renee.
[Renee]: Thanks but I wanted to say that I want to take the time to peruse all of the links and thank you everyone for contributing. It has really, really been very fruitful and I am sorry that it is so late and were out of time. I enjoyed it, thank you.
[Scott]: Yep, that's awesome. I think you should start waking up around noon so that you can make these Tuesday night chats.
[Renee]: Then Scott, you can take over my morning job while I sleep.
[Scott]: OK, maybe we will pass that around.
(Group goodbyes and chatter)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:45:45.4
Page |
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$113716b79e57cf5e" title="#basekamp/$113716b79e57cf5e">n.e.w.s. paid usership http://basekamp.com/about/events/news-paid-usership (#basekamp/$113716b79e57cf5e)
Created on 2010-03-30 20:37:12.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:21
- Hi everyone
- magdalenatc: 18:03:31
- hello
- stephen wright: 18:03:38
- hey hey hey
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:50
- Hi Stephen & Renée
- reneeridgway: 18:03:52
- hi
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:06
- magda, Patrick , Jason, Kimgrac , mabel
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:21
- >
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:52
- i know it's rather late for you guys - -- would you mind starting in just a few mins though?
- reneeridgway: 18:05:01
- yes
- reneeridgway: 18:05:09
- where's Prays
- Jason Sendaula: 18:05:10
- howdy
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:11
- this must be a big surprise for you, but we're still setting up here
- stephen wright: 18:05:22
- he's gone offline
- stephen wright: 18:05:43
- maybe perriferry sank
- BASEKAMP team: 18:05:46
-
- stephen wright: 18:05:56
- hope not
- stephen wright: 18:06:13
- maybe the gangplank broke
- stephen wright: 18:06:18
- more likely
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:57
- how are you this evening?
- Jason Sendaula: 18:07:19
- rainy
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:23
- Stephen, can you turn your skype status on, - otherwise - when it's time, we won't be ablle to call you on conf call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:34
- VERY rainy here too
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:49
- & deceivingly chilly
- magdalenatc: 18:08:06
- blowing here quite a gale
- magdalenatc: 18:08:22
- but cousy with the fire
- stephen wright: 18:09:54
- my skype status is on.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:25
- so it is!
- stephen wright: 18:14:46
- so let 'er rip
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:01
- word! --- but -- just another minute on voice....
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:16
- 'pologies for the timing. We are here & almost ready to chat with you fine folks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:04
- stephen I'm going to call you for a quick sound check
- stephen wright: 18:18:40
- Found a good quote from Jacques Rancière by the way, very much in the spirit of Plausible Artworlds: "se mettre ensemble suppose de réussir à donner confiance à la mise en commun [des] capacités dispersées […], c’est-à-dire créer une forme de rassemblement où tous ceux qui mettent en œuvre une capacité propre [de lutte] puissent avoir confiance en l’extension de cette capacité » (Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués – Entretiens, éd. Amsterdam, 2009, p. 673).
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:41
- ok guys, does everyone want to be on the audio call who's here now?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:46
- asuming yes?
- magdalenatc: 18:20:10
- yes please
- Jason Sendaula: 18:20:42
- <ss type="wink"></ss>
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:45
- btw, people are asking to be added to the chat now, so doing that
- stephen wright: 18:22:22
- "coming together supposes being able to trust the sharing of dispersed capacities... that is, to creating a form of gathering where all those who implement the capacity they contribute can trust in how that capacity is shared." dixit Rancière, in Too bad for tired people.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:44
- ok everyone - calling now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:29:21
- we're looking at http://basekamp.com/about/events/news-paid-usership now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:31:07
- n.e.w.s. by the way is for North East West South
- Greg Scranton: 18:32:29
- the semantic web...?
- Greg Scranton: 18:35:48
- e.g.-crowd sourcing
- Greg Scranton: 18:37:54
- I like it. But how is what you are doing different than the narketing & tourism board for phila paying cool hip kids to keep a blog on their site in hope of attracting more $$$pending cool cats to move here?
- catodextrina: 18:39:46
- I think it differs by making content *with* meaning, not just a hipster blog.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:48
- catodextrina - do u wanna b added to the chat?
- stephen wright: 18:40:00
- sorry I got cut... please reconnect me
- BASEKAMP team: 18:40:05
- oh, you are here?
- catodextrina: 18:40:07
- User-made content that is to be payed shouldhave analysis value
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 18:40:08
- hi everyone, i'm a latecomer with no idea what's going on
- Greg Scranton: 18:40:22
- I see. So then primarily based on content.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:10
- re-conecting!
- catodextrina: 18:42:42
- (sorry if i don't answer) currently at my job and i can only reply by text
- stephen wright: 18:43:02
- To answer your question greg: well it's not different in terms of remuneration, but in intent: their's is calculated, ours is egalitarian; their's is based on ensuring value, ours is on ensuring fairness in the acknowledgment and remuneration of those who produce value
- Greg Scranton: 18:43:05
- yes
- Greg Scranton: 18:43:47
- thank you Stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:58
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. - BASEKAMP team: 18:46:03
- yes, we just got this
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:23
-
- Greg Scranton: 18:46:53
- this also, from my perspective, seems to be more of a conceptual/poetic gesture rather than an approach to change how usership currently exists online. Or do you see NEWS as a forum aimed at proposing "real" change? Or perhaps both?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:39
- "it's a counter-intuitive proposal, but I don't think it's a revolutionary one"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:03
- "this is opposing a *certain type* of capital accumulation, but isn't opposed to capital on the whole"
- stephen wright: 18:53:28
- it is a conceptual gesture, greg, and a poetic one. but it is also hopefully an exemplary one -- in that it is an example of how and why value should be paid for. And thus, like any gesture, potentially a way for real change.
- Greg Scranton: 18:55:32
- yes, right Stephen. Intriguing.
- magdalenatc: 18:56:48
- It is tricky to separate the two the capital value from symbolic value in the system that we live in. so my question would be: do you consider an artistic or economic one (though I guess this question might be a paradox in itself, considering the first statement) Is it a provocation or is it trying to address the issues of sustainability of the community? And how would you define that community?
- Aharon: 18:57:02
- payment is a conflation of value - e.g. if I pay for something it might seem as if I value it, but its more of a contract..
- Greg Scranton: 18:57:37
- Well even Marx embraced capitalism as a way in which communism could then be implemented globally...alienated laborers globally make for a global "revolution".
- magdalenatc: 18:57:43
- i mean do you consider your project to be artistic or economic,
- Greg Scranton: 18:58:00
- I would guess both
- magdalenatc: 18:58:30
- i would guess so too....
- magdalenatc: 19:00:01
- would you consider this a kind of investement? the kinds of contribution and remuneration that follows or is negotiated.
- catodextrina: 19:00:49
- Is it utopian to pay for user-made content? Meaning, I can see someone paying for a photograph or extensive profesionally written text... it's normal under my profession. But in the internet its blown to a proportion where you can't really edit. restrict or conduct inaproppriate content.
- Aharon: 19:01:59
- hence if u get to control desire - u control capital..
- Aharon: 19:02:11
- well.. if not control - getting to have a say..
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 19:02:12
- i'm off to sleep - this sounds like a great session and i'm sorry i missed most of it
- John W. Pattenden-Fail: 19:02:14
- see you all in the future
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:25
- nighty night John
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:42
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:36
-
- Aharon: 19:03:43
- what is the difference between user payment at NEWS and payments for viewing ads etc. ?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:02
- Is it utopian to pay for user-made content? Meaning, I can see someone paying for a photograph or extensive profesionally written text... it's normal under my profession. But in the internet its blown to a proportion where you can't really edit. restrict or conduct inaproppriate content.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:22
- ^^ from catodextrina
- Aharon: 19:05:43
- it seems like you beleuve capital can be distributed fairly..?
- magdalenatc: 19:06:21
- when one becomes a user and not a contributor?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:23
- Aharon, -- well, i think Prayas anyway said it can never be eaually distributed -
- Aharon: 19:07:00
- yup. but it looks like there is an attempt to get some sort of fairness
- magdalenatc: 19:07:06
- when one does become, etc. sorry the question stucture etc..
- Greg Scranton: 19:07:10
- so then there is no system at all in which you are evaluating participation? It's purely subjective?
- stephen wright: 19:08:28
- We don't believe in the equitable distribution of capital -- we need to contest capital. But we think that it could be less obscenely distributed.
- Greg Scranton: 19:09:06
- or what they should be paid for
- Aharon: 19:09:48
- why do you think of payment as an expression/function off value>?
- Greg Scranton: 19:09:49
- makes me think of a sort of shareware model
- Greg Scranton: 19:10:37
- blood money
- magdalenatc: 19:10:42
- can you say what is the wealth that you think might be re-distributable and in what way? i understand one of the ways would be 'less obscene way of redestributing - can you expand on that?
- Greg Scranton: 19:10:57
- wel...isn't all money "blood" money?
- stephen wright: 19:10:57
- lost me again -- sorry
- stephen wright: 19:11:06
- please call back
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:13
- callinggggggggggggg
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:23
- stephen wright: 19:11:28
- Yes, it's like a kind of shareware model
- stephen wright: 19:12:59
- important idea: network surplus value
- Greg Scranton: 19:13:12
- cultural capital rather than "wealth"
- Greg Scranton: 19:14:18
- kinda reminds me of RTMark mutual funds in a way as well
- Aharon: 19:15:37
- good point - greg
- BASEKAMP team: 19:15:49
- needs a drink
- Greg Scranton: 19:16:04
- thx Aharon - how are you btw? seems like it's been a while. hope ur good.
- Greg Scranton: 19:16:53
- would this be a more general argument in favor of something like tenure then? (knowing you guys are in academia)
- Aharon: 19:17:25
- renee - can u elaborate about the text from the 70's you get re women and not renumerated labour?
- Greg Scranton: 19:18:20
- value
- Aharon: 19:20:14
- again stephen - "collective value" you seem to relate money capital with value.. i wonder why exactly given the fact that the price of X is a function of social contract/construct..?
- Greg Scranton: 19:21:23
- that never change hands per se
- stephen wright: 19:22:12
- collective value is not reducible to monetary capital
- Aharon: 19:26:11
- i keep wondering why is it that we talk about payments - when payments are the means of exchange for the poor? i think it is interesting to note that once you get to posses a certain amount of capital, the exchage you are likely to engage with your fellow "class mates", will be attention and trust - and these on their own.. (e.g. not mediated via direct capital/money)
- Aharon: 19:26:35
- in a sense, the very rich - are the super radical..
- stephen wright: 19:26:44
- You mean rich people don't exchange money?
- Aharon: 19:26:56
- not among themselves
- Aharon: 19:27:37
- ie i do something for you on the understanding that you, one day, will reciprocate..
- Aharon: 19:28:07
- which is exactly what we see with this "credit crunch" period
- stephen wright: 19:28:08
- I thought that when rich people sold stocks, other rich people bought them
- Greg Scranton: 19:28:39
- gold farming
- Aharon: 19:28:44
- stocks are the business - sustaining sources of income is work
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:12
- so it's sounding a bit like you ARE the only game in town
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:38
- i think this is very similar in form to artist-initiated micro-granting initiatives
- BASEKAMP team: 19:29:45
- there are lots of them
- Greg Scranton: 19:29:47
- google=capital boo!
- Aharon: 19:29:57
- paid readers will gain more results
- Meg Frisch: 19:29:59
- kickstarter-ish?
- Greg Scranton: 19:33:22
- again reminds me of an artists union
- Aharon: 19:33:55
- sorta paid readers: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
- Aharon: 19:34:33
- another example: http://www.waeagles.com/?q=node/59
- Aharon: 19:35:28
- marketing: http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=15372&Title=P...
- Meg Frisch: 19:35:29
- paid "inchvestors" http://makeloveland.com/
- Greg Scranton: 19:35:37
- sal randolph
- Meg Frisch: 19:35:37
- micro-real estate
- Aharon: 19:37:54
- so u r talking about curating - u as curator - of contributors
- magdalenatc: 19:38:01
- this is a question from Ben via me (Ben is sitting here and listening in): The earliest expression of the NEWS format as cartographical (North, South, East, West) that I know is from De Quincey (1840s), when he imagines the medium of a national news, distributed by the Mailcoach, as a medium that affirms and generates the category of the nation. Do you think of news, in a mainstream or alternative format, as necessarily a community activity / medium? Or do you think that the dissemination of political activity as an activity that has always been bound up in the commercialisiation of information about / the very constitution of politics?
- Aharon: 19:38:23
- who decides who will pay certain ppl? (chosen ppl..??)_
- Greg Scranton: 19:38:47
- it is a conceptual gesture, greg, and a poetic one. but it is also hopefully an exemplary one -- in that it is an example of how and why value should be paid for. And thus, like any gesture, potentially a way for real change.
- Greg Scranton: 19:39:01
- that was what stephen said earlier...
- Aharon: 19:40:15
- ..if u equate payment with value, stephen
- Aharon: 19:40:34
- ben - are u talking about the political usage of news?
- stephen wright: 19:40:34
- I don't equate it, but I don't oppose payment to value either
- BASEKAMP team: 19:40:49
- http://www.waeagles.com/?q=node/59
- Aharon: 19:41:23
- why do u not oppose such payments?
- stephen wright: 19:41:56
- oh oh, cut off again (I'm in a hotel and they give me 30 min at a time) reconnect please
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:17
- dag
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:23
- calling u bak
- stephen wright: 19:42:29
- thanx
- Aharon: 19:44:25
- re mechanical turk and money: http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html
- Greg Scranton: 19:45:18
- but aren't we, the readers, seen as "consumers" and thus we owe the "author" for his/her knowledge (I don't agree with this but obviously is current paradigm)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:23
- sean still there?
- magdalenatc: 19:45:43
- Hi Aharon. I'm asking about whether there has ever been a non- or a- political usage of 'news' - whether the category of news has always been bound up with the 'visibility', or extension, of politics.
- Aharon: 19:45:44
- another mechanical turk reflection: http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
- Greg Scranton: 19:45:57
- hmm I have lots of lurkers in my classes then
- Greg Scranton: 19:46:20
- participation grade is BULLSHIT imo
- Aharon: 19:46:56
- your question becomes more interesting at each time u elaborate it..
- Aharon: 19:47:03
- (to ben)
- magdalenatc: 19:47:37
- Thanks Aharon, I'm coming in to this a bit late,s
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:38
- "we should not only get paid for writting, or reading, - we should get paid for loitering
- Aharon: 19:48:22
- in a sense the visibility is political and invisibility can hardly be news - if it to remain invisible..
- Aharon: 19:48:38
- in a sense, lurking is the ultimate invisibility..?
- Greg Scranton: 19:49:38
- http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_ze907XEttTk/SWzOXSkfsVI/AAAAAAAAApo/5x8rq361zi...
- Aharon: 19:49:55
- hold on... google would not have all that money if it didn't have lurkers.. same cnn / abc / sky / name ur poison
- Aharon: 19:51:30
- what evidence do u have that egalitarian distribution is possible??
- magdalenatc: 19:51:30
- Sure, I've always felt that lurking is fine, rather than the implicit associations with the pervert that have always been there. I was using the idea of visibility in reference Stephens's use of Ranciere, and thus the idea of regimes of visibility. The current experience of politics is surely dependent on a regime of political visibility in which the 'press the primary agent.
- stephen wright: 19:52:09
- the overwhelming evidence that non egalitarian distribution is possible
- Aharon: 19:52:45
- this is like saying we can live without oxygen by the evidence that we do it all the time..
- Aharon: 19:52:52
- comeon stephen..
- stephen wright: 19:53:46
- we don't have evidence, Aharon. We don't need evidence. We don't have evidence that anything that is not, could be.
- Aharon: 19:53:53
- now u r trying to tie expression with payments..
- Greg Scranton: 19:53:59
- virtual puppy pile in homage to adam
- Aharon: 19:54:48
- right! however, we do do some assumptions - and I think such assumptions that are baseless, should be carefully questioned if they are to be taken seriously
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:56
- paying w pajamas
- Greg Scranton: 19:55:06
- pot of gold...end of the rainbow
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:22
- ESP
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:32
- mashed potato mountains
- Meg Frisch: 19:55:47
- i would work for naps
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:48
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:06
-
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:19
-
- Aharon: 19:56:30
- i wonder what u mean, ben, by regime.. what really constitutes/makes a regime? can we for example, say art regime - rather than art world..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:00
- Aharon: 19:57:46
- yes stephen.. this is an old point re for example how ex art students even though they do not engage in "art" allow, viw the understanding through their education, provide "value" to certain artists..
- Aharon: 19:58:05
- this is NOT RADICAL ENOUGH!!!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:29
- even iF it looks like not participating at all, like loitering, and anti-citizen-ish non-behavoir
- Aharon: 19:58:44
- it still relies on capitalist tools.. it simply re-inforcing of the same conditions we oppose!
- magdalenatc: 19:59:49
- Just to respond to Aharon (before going to bed), with the term 'regime', I'm just picking up on Ranciere's essay / book on Politics & Aesthetics, with the 4 regimes of Art. But the conversation#s over so maybe next time for further discussion... Thanks and goodnight.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:52
- robbig peTer to pay pauline
- Greg Scranton: 20:00:07
- this was great thx so much Renee & Stephen!
- Aharon: 20:00:44
- nity nite !!
- Jason Sendaula: 20:00:51
- we can take turns
- Jason Sendaula: 20:00:52
- bye
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:00:59
- thank you everyone (sorry I didn't participate actively!)
- stephen wright: 20:01:09
- lurker
- Greg Scranton: 20:01:36
- nite nite all
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 20:01:42
- <ss type="wonder"></ss>
- stephen wright: 20:01:48
- see y'all next week
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:15
- cya stephen!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:06:34
- BTW, we're proposing a Public School course on 'paid usership'
- Jason Sendaula: 20:06:54
- nice
- BASEKAMP team: 20:16:21
- http://philly.thepublicschool.org/class/2299
- BASEKAMP team: 20:16:49
- if interested, click "+ i'm interested"
- BASEKAMP team: 20:17:05
- this isn't too wel elaborated ATM
2010-03-27
2010-03-29
2010-03-30
Autonomous information production
Week 47: Urban Tactics / Atelier Autogéré d'Architecture
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou, initiators of the Paris-based network Atelier Autogéré d’Architecture (AAA), a collectively-run, self-managed architecture studio which, for reasons we will no doubt want to discuss, translates into English as Urban Tactics.
http://www.urbantactics.org/
http://www.urbantactics.org/documents/AAAposter.pdf
AAA is a collective platform which conducts explorations, actions and research concerning urban mutations and cultural, social and political emerging practices in the contemporary city — with branches and projects in Belfast, Berlin, Dakar, Sheffield and elsewhere. AAA acts through ‘urban tactics’, encouraging inhabitants to take part in the self-management of disused urban spaces, bypassing contradictions and stereotypes by proposing nomad and reversible projects, initiating interstitial practices which explore the potential of contemporary city (in terms of population, mobility, temporality).
It is at the level of the micro-political that they seek “to make the city more ecological and more democratic, to make the space of proximity less dependent on top-down processes and more accessible to its users.” They have initiated and participate in the collective management of a number of ongoing neighborhood projects, involving collective gardens, food distribution, and film screenings.
So-called “self-managed architecture” is an architecture of relationships, processes and agencies of persons, desires, skills and know-hows. Such an architecture does not correspond to a liberal practice but asks for new forms of association and collaboration, based on exchange and reciprocity and involving all those interested (individuals, organisations, institutions), on whatever scale. As they put it, their architecture “is at the same time political and poetic as it aims above all to ‘create relationships between worlds’.” More plausible ones perhaps…
At any rate, those objectives and vocabulary are obviously right up Plausible Artworlds’ alley, as it were. It seems that in the practice of AAA, architecture becomes an overarching metaphor for rethinking, repurposing, reskilling relationships and forms of engagement amongst city dwellers as much as for producing (re)built environments.
Transcription
Week 47: Urban Tactics / Atelier Autogéré d'Architecture
Scott: Hello everyone.
Stephen: Hey Scott.
Scott: Hey there. I think we're still waiting for a few people but they might have stepped away from their computer or can't pick up so we'll just go ahead and let it ring. I guess welcome guys. It's great having you here this week. Welcome to yet another week in this year of Tuesday night events focusing on different examples of what we're calling Plausible Artworlds. I sort of feel obligated to say that at the beginning. Does everyone have good audio? Can you guys hear us there in Paris?
Female: We can hear you well.
Scott: Fantastic.
Stephen: We can hear you well here in Buenos Aires perfect.
Doina: Yes in Paris too.
Scott: Great. Does anyone hear a ringing in the background or are we ready to go ahead and get kind of…
Doina: Yes.
Scott: Okay great. I'll go ahead and stop that other ringing. So fantastic it's great to have you guys here. I'm hesitant to even try to pronounce the rest of your title. Urban Tactics is as far as I get. And yeah I can go ahead and paste. There we go. I don't know Stephen if you'd like to introduce Urban Tactics Constantin and, is it Doina?
Doina: Doina.
Stephen: Doina and Constantin. Hi Doina and Constantin.
Constantin: Constantin please it's not Constantin.
Stephen: Okay. We won't get into – Constantin and Doina are actually Romanian, I think I'm not making a mistake about that, based in Paris and have been working as and are architects actually have architectural studio in the 18th Aranamous so are very decidedly working class part of the city. And have over the past, I don't know, 15 or so years have developed basically a non construction focused architecture studio which they call the Studio for Self-Managed Architecture. Originally in a squatted building formally occupied by the French National Railways. I found a very interesting project called Echo Box in which they involved people in the community in all sorts of activities but primarily in sort of re-dynamiting the green space and the urban space of that neighborhood through Echo Boxes. In other words, building garden spaces on pallets and on skids in a very large space.
That project was very dynamic and is extremely well known, probably the project for which they're best known. And then it had to transform because they left that space and they went into a second space a public forum a public school that left that space. Now they have a new space basically in the same neighborhood. But what they've done and I think what they're going to tell us about is have really diversified and really have expanded out into a kind of a network of similar minded urban tacticians across Europe and beyond. And so [phone ringing]…
Scott: Sorry everyone I thought my bell was meant to be called if not I just turn off. If you want to be added to the chat list let me know.
Stephen: Oh sorry. Okay thank you. Okay so I'll just leave it at that. Thank you for staying up so late and maybe if you could give like a quick half hour, if you can call half an hour quick. Sort of an overview of what you do and why you do it, when you started, why you started, and what you hope to do in the future and then we'll sort of all jump in and ask questions about all that sort of stuff. Constantin.
Constantin: Yes [inaudible 05:24] of course, how do you say? We started building in 2001 maybe one of the, there are many reasons of course, but one is to leaving this area in the [inaudible 05:35] to –
Doina: Can you hear?
Constantin: Can you hear?
Scott: Yes. We'll be adding people to the conference periodically and if they don't pick up for a little while I'll go ahead and stop it. Please continue.
Constantin: So they are many reasons. One it was to act like residents so it was something like local activities probably reason. And another one was to act like occupants in the place where you live because the architect today it's more and more connection with the power and it's dependent on the power and it's subordinate. And of course this kind of production of space for us it was problematic. And we tried in this way by combining our position like a professional, like an occupant when at the same time like original to start a collective process of production of space by bottom up process.
And so it does a very long process it does very typical in the beginning because, specifically in the French culture scene is really unusual. In this moment in 2001 in Paris and because he came to France the only comparison with our practice and our project it was squat movement and it was an interesting movement but went into a very specific population. Young people [inaudible 07:20] something like that and not to be so close. And our project it was mirage oriented to the people with families with background from north of the center Africa or other parts of the world.
Doina: Well but also I would say to whoever, to the ordinary habitant because we didn't choose a specific set of users off of this project and call organizer. We just opened the spaces and let them accessible to whoever wanted to join in. And I think that this is maybe the most radical part of it because to kind of be faced with all this diversity and contingency of the, let's ordinary user, is so what is the most challenging. And it was difficult somehow to keep it long term as we have tried and to face all the conflicts that arose.
But so what we wanted is to forgive the possibility to these people they have chosen to go to have a lot of kind of user specific but also little by little to become more politically aware about what's going on in the city. So when we had the first space it was an amazing space. And Stephen might remember it was quite a unique in Paris setting maybe that the last big wine house that was still empty in Paris three [inaudible 09:44] mentors in which lots of subcommittees starting with garden but then cultural, the political debates was taking place. But when the moment came to leave a certain intervention we had to negotiate and this was a very important moment because lots of the people using this space had never had any, let's say exposure to politics or to everyday life, only politics and they were so much quite effect keeping this project going on. They were prepared to go and fight for it. And for us this was a very important moment to kind of politicize this users that were not chosen, were not political beforehand and they were politicized in the [inaudible 10:58 child talking].
Constantin: I'm not sure if it's clear. Hello.
Scott: Yes you're coming through clear.
Stephen: It's definitely clear I'm trying to kind of give a running commentary of the selling points it was very clear. Hopefully things continue about maybe giving more specific examples too about what the…
Constantin: Yeah. What concrete example, by example because the area was a very poor and prime area so in 2001, '02 and '03 when we started the project there was any [inaudible 11:46] project and all this 30,000 people who live in this entire area they don't have any cinema, any bookshops, any museum, nothing and they were completely related between the railway lanes. And so it was like Iceland and our idea it was to obtain and to use as an empty space because there was a lot of empty space or industrial empty space on the railway without use spaces. Yeah it does do in a temporary way this phase and in a mobile tactic too, because all the empty space there was available for a short year short precise period something between two or four years.
The idea it was to develop a project in an existing priority of our ability of the space but with the capacity to move the project or the device developed to have it on was mobile. The project when this capacity to be no [inaudible 13:15]. So this mobility took priority finally was a very important key to keeping the project ton this reversible suppression.
Doina: It was somehow our main tactic because we were prepared to move and to occupy a lot of space all over the devices that we have conceived starting with…
Constantin: I believe in the garden.
Doina: …the garden made out of pallets. Then we had this series of mobile modules that were adding activities to the garden like we had the kitchen, we had a library, we had a media lab, all this were mobile in fact it were easy to push into another location and they became our war machines and weapons because of this condition, mobility condition and we didn't have any placed on the garden again or the location and now it has been moved for the second time and reinstall again with the same principles yes. So it was a way of resisting and instead of disappearing when the space was closed we multiplied all of the places.
Constantin: Yeah.
Doina: Because he's had the first big space he negotiated three small spaces that would make the same surface so to say. And so now there are several projects in the area that are collected to…
Constantin: The same approach.
Doina: Yeah.
Constantin: In fact what to call the automatic approach or automatic project in the sense to be able to top sell and step-by-step and a long time our involvement and our acknowledge of how to run a project like this to other people. So there are some of them to come just for garden and also to pass to be interesting to cook together or to practice different debate and smaller the [inaudible 15:44] of recycling or something like that. And step-by-step we have a lot of some of them and not a lot of them was able to run many actions, and finally a small group they were able to run all of the dimension of the project, and what to call the assessment manager of the project.
So the project is managed by us in the beginning in the first stage and that's what is culminated by us and the users. And we start doing the project because I [inaudible 16:19] space are these people who know different aspects of the project they are able to run them by this. It's like a leaf who is able to construct all the plant because the leaf has information and other part of the plant they don't have, but the leaf has information about the other plant and is able to put the leaf in the water. So these key people who were involved in many options they are often around the project so they're around the project and some of them they develop new projects. This is what you call a resonated project and automatic [inaudible 17:06]. It's important because for us it's a freedom to knew that project. And so one it was freedom to be [inaudible 17:19 child speaking] to build tunnels and to have the project however they want.
Doina: There is maybe a kind of important aspect to it which is exactly what we call a [inaudible 17:39] process because people would come in the first moment with very limited expectations like coming there for gardening. But because of the whole dynamic, the complex dynamic that was little-by-little infused in the project they started to do other things and they completely changed their attitude. They became more proactive and they started giving them that there were very interesting flea markets run by [inaudible 18:24] forms of artility where economy which were completely their idea, their initiative their adding's to the project. Some of them had stopped to ask a question about the status of the empty spaces and the issues on politics of everyday life and some of them because they became aware were able to continue the project further and to take over the management.
Constantin: Why didn't he ask you to sell an experiment?
Female: Because they didn't actually say cover the rental place but they said ground was on the ground.
Stephen: Maybe you want to actually ask that question kind of like unpack it a little bit. Could you do that?
Greg: Hi sorry. No I was just, this is Greg, I was just curious if you and encountered challenges along the way or things that didn't work quite as well negative as a result to determine what struggles you came up against and how you sort of dealt with that. When I enter urban tactics I think of tactical art of the week. And so you have to be creative in the way you implement them but that doesn't mean that they always work. So I was just curious about the challenges.
Doina: Yeah. Well I think one of the challenge was to come, let's say together at a kind of level of a shared project, because most of the people that came onto the project didn't have any experience of quality practice but they all came with references of, let's say, allotments or facts in guidance in which you are just hitting a plot and you manage it as you watch. And there were lots of conflicts of say individual desires and we have to accommodate so this was one of the challenges. And we tried to put together a mechanism in place to do this like regular meetings in which we discuss all the interested items browsing. But where there was a huge issue around the present of children with items in the garden that not everybody agreed on this because they felt responsible for children that were these African children that were hanging around.
And I think culturally they won't ever come with their parents that were also working during the day. So they came with their older sister that were the ones that sort of would take care of them. And so this is what we recognize also, we recognize the responsibility of their older sister and brothers and we took them seriously. We also kind of asked the children themselves to act as citizens to take responsibilities and in this way I respected them and it was fine. I mean even if they were not condone this type of discipline in children that we are used to. They were completely wild but these brought something important to the project which was a quite challenging energy.
Constantin: I mean this the message is really important to the project [inaudible 23:04] of this account of the people in Whelan because usually it tends to challenge that movement but particularly the people there they have this same values and they have the same reference to in [inaudible 23:20] project. But in other ones after other ones in certain of a tried to up on the project to people who've got really different backgrounds and you imagine there [inaudible 23:38] because our search don't even know from the beginning what kind of rules to, what kind of user guide of the space left to be in shape and left to be proponent. The idea tends to start with the project to [inaudible 24:02] and to discover step-by-step together with other people involved step-by-step to discover the rules in a minimum way so to have a minimum necessary route. And plus trying to discover the best way in our crazy task to establish rules like in homes, like in family so they want us to keep this place clean like in the same stage like he comes to this place so he must close the gate and when he leaves this place because it doesn't mean the gate on the entrance of parents and this space and things like that. So people with different backgrounds and they were able to resume together the space with a minimum conflicts. And this opportunity is not a typical situation but a consumer one.
Doina: Well another of the country where city hall that was a conflict we managed right after we went because we were able at the end to get other spaces that we never at least by this local government the super bowl of the 80s we could would have never managed to get our practice recognized and so as valid as interesting for them. And yeah so we are still somehow in conflict with them and we have an unresolved relationship. But we managed to get them recognized in other places and to provide a favor much more constructive relationship so no other local governments even the second project plays this around this much with some blaze. We had a much better relation with [inaudible 26:44].
Constantin: Yeah but before that maybe it's important to remember there was a sea of conflict some critical moments and when the [inaudible 26:59] because of space because the owner because a railroad company and he doesn't find the advise as building for a big Persian project. And there was a little [inaudible 27:15] of these people who was the key of this space when they buy around the space with 80 other families from the area. So 80 families I made 300 people because they are a big family in this area, maybe more I think. And so they had the key and they don't want to leave this space and so they tried to I evict us by saying yes it's a [inaudible 27:50] project is temporary and you force it to be very strong and to explain a lot of things on a temporary basis.
And some people from some very normal because I review it as very nice thing by literally saying "Yes but I don't want to return home every evening to watch TV." I hear you're able to decide together by also who to invite to what kind of [child speaking] or screening of one they say yeah this program saved my life because of what they mentioned was very important. It was this big space a lot of people they are so ready to find this objectivity. To find connective way and different position, social position to build a gardener, the [inaudible 28:54] it's a matter of decide to [inaudible 28:57]. Usually there was who should honor the position by this society so when we tell them they are unemployed or retiring before the middle age are very long time students because they may not have jobs who made of and this [inaudible 29:18] was able to find a subjectivity. And this is too very important and they start to fight with us in order to keep the project and save the project by this relocation. And this is a real quality for the mention of the project.
Doina: We're just looking at this Web site and the charter position of architecture. And I think we are definitely well for such charter then maybe there is a difference. Because I think we had an experience we kind of – we happen to reconnect charter as an [inaudible 30:15]. But we were fashioned in the experimenting with what arise in order to understand better the process. And at the end we haven't a written a charter and we regret a little bit because it would have been a way of not leaving jus the project and kind of the knowledge that has been internalized but also leaving a trace that can become a record for other generations of the project so.
Constantin: Yeah that could be done with them.
Doina: Hello.
Constantin: You are sleeping.
Scott: Yes. No, no definitely here and listening often writing. Often we'll pause or mute our audio so that if I'm typing it won't overtake the conversation or if someone's typing.
Doina: A couple of instructions I'm just a little…
Constantin: Yeah we can do that. So I tried to show some image and I was better to understand you but what you speak just [inaudible 31:39].
Scott: And just to clarify I think I mentioned or asked some of those questions in succession because I think once Greg had asked about the resistance or pushback that you received I was wondering if specifically one of your goals was to challenge an existing order with your experiments in adult environment. Not too assume that there is a right way to do it or anything like this or where even if that was one of your goals, but I was just curious if it was because in looking over your Web site it seems like on one hand there does seem to be a desire to post challenges they're not necessarily in such a direct outright challenge where that's sort of worn on your sleeve. But at the same time I just want to describe it because I'd like if we can talk about that side of this. And I sent the link to the Camp for Oppositional Architecture and Charter because I was curious sort of where you got stuck on some of those questions.
I mean A for example comes right out and say that they believe in outright dismantle of capitalism or at least fighting against the powers that be through their work as architects. And I was curious if those were some of your goals or if you see what I mean if you had specific goals that you were putting forth.
Doina: Yeah.
Scott: So I guess my question was – well I don't know if that helped to clarify why I was asking that but I guess I can just contextualize it just a little bit in that I think you know through talking with Stephen that we've been talking here for quite awhile about different kinds of artworlds and we're looking at that and we're interested in that, even if they're not self-identified as artworlds. We were really interested in the places where we're afraid of practice getting nurtured and happen and the kinds of structures that people build to create different kinds of procedures for creative life. And our thinking is that artworlds are the place where this happens that allows different kinds of work in the world to happen and it allows different kinds of work she understood as work on some level generally speaking or whatever.
And it seems like we've looked at different, when I say different trends we've looked at artworlds that are built on ideas of open source culture, you know artworlds that are sort of formed around alternative economies artworlds that seek to transform existing institutions where the other hand one seek to succeed entirely [child talking] are so directly oppositional that they can't really integrate with existing systems. And one of the things that we've looked at, I'm only mentioning this is because one of the other existing kinds of artworlds we've been looking at worth talking about are ones that rethink, re-imagine or experiment with the built environment. Maybe even the natural environment too. And you guys definitely do that both of those things. And so I guess I was curious about if you proposed an ultimate goal, not to sort of render you guys black and white or anything like this but if part of your goal of this is that what you help them build, both built and natural, can sustain the kinds of practices, it sounds like you're saying they can. And I guess I just wanted to bring those questions to floor.
Doina: Well I think there is already a quite throw take in habiting existing spaces rather than bending spaces and then transforming them to innovation but also recycle the additions and occupying them in residency the way living them as they were after awhile. So this is a very strong think I would say in terms of occupant towards a big space. But what is not visible and we've managed now to open a window and show some energy is that the social architecture of this project is very important and somehow this is structure to the kind of occupation that we are making as architects. Because behind the – well we propose architectural projects that are processes but that also social processes and a way of representing our project, for example, is through drawing and showing this social network that were formed that were stages within the process that are I think the social structure and the social production of this phase is as important or is even more important than the [inaudible 38:13] production.
So I think this is the particular very important I mentioned of a follower position another [inaudible 38:33] a kind of more than [inaudible 38:37] to contradiction of for the users. Because what happens is what we have done is that we have endorsed some that have matched as the user of the project at the conception and the construction of the project. So it was not asked during the project but to the use of the project the project has changed, has evolved and it still evolves.
Constantin: Someone can help me to explain how to open share a window to show some image.
Scott: Hold on a second.
Constantin: It don't want me to…
Stephen: There's two ways Constantin. One is you can actually a link to where the image is if it's on the internet already or secondly if it's a low resolution file you can simply send it to the people on the chat. You go to in that case you go to Window File Transfers and you transfer the file.
Constantin: Yeah. So it's not say the next part on…
Stephen: You have to grab it. You have to do a screen saver of it and then send it to us.
Constantin: Okay.
Stephen: Constantin if you use grab or if you use a screen save it will be a very low resolution file so it would be not a problem to do that.
Constantin: Yeah.
Doina: Maybe a link we can give – we have the Web site.
Stephen: Yeah a link is good. Ben had a question.
Constantin: I will find the solution and have…
Stephen: Okay.
Constantin: Another way of doing link but just wait you can [inaudible 41:06].
Doina: Yeah I'm trying to read a little bit some of the questions that have arrived.
Stephen: Maybe Ben could actually ask his question because I see that it's a little bit intricate, I think it's quite clear. But Ben are you free to ask that question?
Ben: Yes. Hi there everybody. Yeah I was interested in the references to kind of the use of terminology from Qatari and based on that I was just interested on how you want to talk about the relationship between Quatari concepts and the practices that you're involved in, which sounds really fantastic of course.
But it does seem to me that there is a history of dissent and circulation of these central ideas which is much, much longer than the terminology that you're using. And so really one question is how do you feel that, for example the [inaudible 42:13] enable you to practice in kind of a new way or whether you think you find the terminology useful to describe the practices that you are involved in?
Doina: Well I think that we are using much more Qatari and it's not only by living it but by let's say having contact, direct contact, with the people that practiced it, with people that are not bored. Once the members is getting influence or collaboration or close collaborate and so…
Constantin: I think that's looks good.
Doina: Yea so we are kind of in direct contact with the memory of practice. But I think, and because it's also there are many forums to mean these people to this class and all staff and we situated ourselves quite cautiously in this lineage. So we have tried cautiously to experiment with a transversal for community to create new forms of [inaudible 44:00] in solution because we would love [inaudible 44:04] institution but we try to form, well let's say an alternative where form for validation that has a rule in the background that are managing rather than they are informed. And I think that the rise is – we haven't won bigly with it as a direct cause of it. I think that we use it more as a metaphor or as an autonomy that I think that there are – well constants that were operational in one case and it was like at the end we understood that we had done what [inaudible 45:07]. We experimented with some of these.
Constantin: Yeah. You don't try to apply concept of [inaudible 45:22] from the little ones from the other ones. E tried to create bridge and formation within the experiment of practice architectural, not just architectural but social and cultural. And so you try in time to understand better what you do and in a way you try to develop identity period and don't develop into this practice. I mean it don't try to ply to from solutions in everyday because nobody don't want to follow us in this way. But we try to really leave and thirst them into new life situation together with other people. We try to open new ways to leave in everyday life.
And later when you have time and try to understand better of course you try to give support, to find support from other positions that are within the [inaudible 46:30] and then so other ones. And it's important for us but it's just a way to try to culminate it with other people who view the same references or to create connection by ideas and wage concept back, how to say, it's the other part of our practice is not the more important one. It's important for each one to do and the people and the real time and space and life and the presentation, the communication and the knowledge come later. And then you discover over time in my opinion it would discover later to be Qatari or Thailand or English but it's not labor it's not a brand it's just that there's some coincidences and they're not completely. And I believe it would be rude to be doing that. And we discover the importance of the [inaudible 47:33] scale and the [inaudible 47:34] scale that you discover because you have a practice of or you discover the importance of desire like the support of collective project but the work they come a lot of time later. But it's important.
Ben: Okay thanks a lot for the answer.
Constantin: Okay.
Stephen: Hey Constantin where are those pictures?
Constantin: I sent [inaudible 48:12].
Stephen: You know we're like conafiles here.
Constantin: Yeah. By example what is important for me really for what is real and it's to discover the importance of desire and how you say the [inaudible 48:46] it's something very important as far as [inaudible 48:53] to say the power of the capitalist is to be able to prolong desires to people. What kind of desires, desires to even [inaudible 49:06] desire to have a new iPhone and a desire to have a new car, a trip. There are things right now to say a lot of other [inaudible 49:18] that are important and they're not able to provide desires but I didn't say that. And a need to be important with our practice to be able to prolong desire to ordinary people to run the plan of space to run the plan of fraud.
By inapplicable there are much more, how to say, unemployed people and people who need really some occasion to be find the [inaudible 49:55] but in other programs they're more and more ordinary people, people with jobs, people with family, people who thought to be interesting to find this kind or other desire. And to develop together with them other everyday life practice. So they start to come in the beginning for, I don't know, for a half hour by week and step-by-step they come from two hour by week for everyday with other people. So they changing step-by-step they wait until everyday life which is real important. And it's really self-organizing process nobody don't know who's them and they discover their desires their dimension of this.
Ben: Yeah what you say there reminds me of blocks consideration after the II World War why Marxism has failed to appeal to a wider population and why actually national socialism. And he talked about the warm currents and the cold currents of Marxism, which to me sounds a little bit like what you're saying about desire and the ability of certain ideologies to generate widespread desire or not.
Constantin: And I don't understand your remark yeah. Ben I don't understand your remark. Hello Ben.
Ben: I was saying that your comments on desire and how certain ideologies are able to generate desire sounds a lot like discussions on Marxism in the 1970s and a kind of attempt to move away from what was described as the cold stream of Marxism and to try to reaffirm something more like the warm current and find that elsewhere than simply in economic theory.
Doina: Yeah we kind of had a discussion on the degree about these because we were arguing about what cross gender active which that left us only conduct to revolution or to revolution as a bark but to a kind of more slow and embedded in everyday life confirmation of subjectivity. That might be even more substantial inside.
[Child speaking]
Constantin: So Stephen you don't have questions no. Hello Stephen.
Stephen: Yes yeah. No I do have tons of questions. I have a question actually regarding the variable scales of your practice. I'm still kind of really appreciating what you said about the difference between deductive theory and inductive practice. I think that's a really excellent point and it's something that actually hasn't been pointed out in about 45 weeks of discussion over Plausible Artworlds so I'm really glad that that point has been made.
My question is not about that at all actually it's about the double level in which you intervene. It's on the level of it's always extremely neighborhood based and you've emphasized that that you don't choose the people in your neighborhood it's sort of deal. And that they use and misuse and redefine what it means to use urban space. But at the same time you've decided to do that not only in a neighborhood but kind of in a global neighborhood because if we look on your Web site we see there's a sort of a map of the network of Urban Tactics and we see that you are, I mean you have a project, not you perhaps but people working in kinship in Belfast in Bucharest and around Europe and in Africa in Dakar.
Isn't that kind of doing the splits? Isn't that like the gauntly car between a very local neighborhood no matter how estrogenic or however it is and on a scale of [inaudible child speaking] much beyond. I'm kind of interested to see how and why that's important for you to do that.
Doina: Well I think it's normal to be isolated in your neighborhood and the neighborhood scale is clearly a limitation because it's like a family you are very much depending on the fools in the neighborhood. So from one point of view, and I think that while some projects were doing terrific it's the project thousand it's go beyond the local scale it's in danger to close itself and even to minimize itself by being local. So for us the next one for keeping our practice connected to a letter of similar practice or trans practices was vital and was I would say also a political tactic because in this way we empowered our own practice and we formed it better. I think the network or such type of network it's clearly a way of acting maybe not globally we call this Tran local network, a translocal acting, which is an alternative to globalization I think.
Constantin: And then alternatives to the attention constantly became global and not – it's a scale where you keep the anchoring where the local realities that there are other angles or more [inaudible 57:51] what do you say? What other concernment and this bigger…
Stephen: Issues.
Constantin: …issues. Because you are involved in this very lot of project in their everyday life projects. So it would certainly be the everyday and its rant with kids going Paris and sometimes for something else. So you discover to be practical in a way of which we [inaudible 58:23] to the good work. I think we're limited by the project, by the big dimension of the project. And step-by-step you try to hope to be able to open new direction of our project to act in other case, in other space because there are other concerns, other issues political ones and social ones, important ones too and other case. So in order to be able to act this order case we must create mentors or risings. This is a little for right after this very local experiences which try to move the other little ones that include [inaudible 59:17] people and…
Doina: Also there's a problem in power because all other people we are collaborating with are also conducting local and small projects and they are all about kind of urban action urban resistance. And in this way we neutralize the problems and the findings and also we, yeah it's a little consolidating when we kind of follow each other and we get our practice oh so stronger and better recognize because of this organization.
[Man/child speaking]
Stephen: Scott you had a question there. I don't know whether you want me to ask it for you or are you're probably in a position to ask it now.
Scott: Hey guys I think I can ask. If it starts to get tough then maybe you can take over for me. My main question or the last question I was asking before the scale question came up, or maybe not necessarily before maybe simultaneous, was – oh dear I'm trying to find it just so I can reference but I guess, well I guess the main – I know it's on my mind is that like what do you guys, in all the things that you're talking about that are different approaches to what some people call creative life or approaching the world in different ways, you're not insisting that they do so in a certain way or as artists or as architects or anything like that. But yet when you talk about collective projects, different kinds of collective projects, I think you speak more generally about that. You talk about how, what is it, self-organization through different activities in the everyday can help to build collective desire. I know you guys just, Ben just asked you more about that and you talked a bit about that. But what I guess I'm most curious about is what you feel – you identify yourselves as architects on some – well you are literally licensed architects right.
Doina: Yeah.
Scott: And I'm curious about what you feel your competencies as architects, or as Stephen likes to say incompetencies sometimes, can bring to the equation?
Doina: I understand the question.
Scott: Okay.
Doina: I would translate it a little bit in a different way. So what is this specificity let's say of our contribution to the project as architects yes? Would you agree with this?
Scott: Yes.
Doina: Yeah because I think we have some skills and which I think was quite effective for such a project. One was the knowledge of all the kind of knowledge infrastructure to place things for some publicity and then the knowledge of occupying it in a way that allowed at the same time quite a lot of freedom to others to conform the space but also we brought a framework which made the project more sustainable and the whole idea of mobility and the kind of necessity to also the use of pallets that were in fact quite minimum amount that didn't cost anything, but at the same time it kind of produced a lot yet it produced a garden of lots extensile organization that we made by rearranging the pile of pallet that was always there so that the space was in a continual constellation publication.
So I think this was one of the skills that we brought the project. I think it was also an organization skill that as architects we have which is as I say because we are very kin in making roles so far which are not always special we were careful about the social structure in the project and we were also able to visualize it and we need to discuss all this with us. We used also a lot of visual literacy to guidance us at another violation to the project. And other projects became even more complex in terms of the let's say the big aspects of the project that we have done in the physics in the [inaudible 1:05:52] which is called Passage 66 involved some building while many were building were still building that I think would as occupants we were able to give design and to design again in a way that allows transformation, allowed dismantling and…
Constantin: And this is a very important because I translate in way this catching in another way what architecture is and an architect way. In the beginning of our practice a lot of people they ask us but you have a real practice like architect and our answer is yeah this is our practice like architects. And we explain why our practice is architecture and some people agree are on the socialist like [inaudible 1:07:11] or other ones are a conscious of our practice to be more architecture comparing with the normal way to do business. And one of the things is building another and the ordinary people where are they or are they are already in another project and step-by-step they exchange our image about what architecture is and about what the secret is what urban space is.
And I believe it's very important in the beginning you are less considered like architect by the professional one if you are in France and you are the more supported by artistic cultural institutions so we got a lot to learn. And after step-by-step there's a lot of I don't know political decisioner or the young architect early time they are more and more interested in what you do and they try to open new field. So in a way you develop what you call institutional practice in the professional world of architect. And you tried to return to a renew the production of space to political. Architecture is not just a jumbo of architects it's a big architecture is not look at [inaudible 1:08:45]. And in the normal tradition culture of the production of space it was a business of everybody and the political business of business of everybody. So it's a problem of [inaudible 1:09:00]. So you try to open the process, the architectural through other people who they're able to produce space all their life.
So it's not normal to cook for yourself, it's normal to choose and to render your moves, it's normal to produce your space not just a consumed space. So this equilibrium between production and consumption of space it's very important too. And he include dimension of democracy constructed together in quality way. He include dimension of subjectivity as the space of equal they are able to find subjectivities and [inaudible 1:09:40]. So it's more architectural in a way our space.
Doina: Yeah I see also questions from Steve asking what some of the users brought to the project is. And I think they brought content. And we took the use very seriously, in fact the content of our architectural projects in the sense that we have built as the project was used so that a number for moderns appeared in the midway to the project where new users were necessary, where people wanted to have a kitchen and we built a kitchen. A lot of the kids wanted to have a really rain waterfall in the shape of a flower and we helped him to build it.
So I would say we have taken people's desires seriously and associated them to the conception of the space that they were already using. Yeah is there anything else that we have…?
Stephen: I think Scott asked a question which I also would like to kind of elaborate on because I think it kind of links to this idea that users brought content. When people – I think it was an excellent point too – the people would say to you well so what do you actually do as architect because it's not serious? You're talking about architecture but where is your skyscraper? Where is the opera house that you've built?
Constantin: They're in the Dubai.
Stephen: Yeah exactly. Where is your in Abu Dubai? And you're saying like we're talking about people being in control of their living space and it's like we don't own a Five Star restaurant all we're saying is that people should cook their own dinner. But are you saying in that sense that when people exchange ideas in a kind of a meaningful way that what they're engaged in is something like architecture? Is this like a discursive form of architecture talking about the space in which you live in order to transform in a performative way? Is that what you mean by expanded architecture?
Doina: Well I think this too but not only. I think that we went beyond just talking about…
Stephen: No, no I don't mean that. But let's say the minimum thing because of course you went beyond I mean much beyond…
Doina: But the others too they were really involved in doing. I think this was very, very important but they were keeping making things, if it was only enough to move these pallets and to rearrange them in different way in order to get the space for their party or for fear that they were very motivated to have. We had also dormitories that were made out of a time were books were coming and…
Constantin: I want to answer with the kitchen. In this kind of space, in the space where this limited we found that a lot of amazing uses. They cooked together, the organized themselves flea market and organized themselves also to recycling and for a DJ session, etc, a lot of things impossible to be developed in further architectural space. And you know from [inaudible 1:14:28] how to settle his [inaudible 1:14:31] space and his space is produced by the fuses. And in our space when people that are able to produce a lot of [inaudible 1:14:39] so to produce spaces impossible to develop and in others public or private space. So it's not architecture.
Doina: There is another question here about, which is a quite concrete question from our queue, if we have been commissioned to work is this okay or are we initiated it ourselves without an organization? The Echo Books project was self-initiated but we negotiated a temporary use. So we had a kind of free lease for two years from the [inaudible 1:15:34] company. And this was very important because it was not a swatch without authorization and the fact that it was not like this that it was a kind of real application allowed people that were quite skeptical about being part of illegal projects to part of the project.
So we had even people without papers that found secure in our project, people that didn't have absolutely any political training that they were very, very ordinary people that would fear any exposure. Little by little they got interested and started to understand the joy, I would say, of being together and learning together, thinking together and they claimed together with us again on other spaces. But they were other projects in which we have been invited. I won't say commissioned because in fact we're not paid much. We were invited to define projects to mediate between existing initiatives and spaces to open up spaces.
This was the case in the 23rd of this month again with some [inaudible 1:17:22]. And somehow it continues with other in new [inaudible 1:17:29] and we are living off in this year again in the 20th of this month where we kind of generated a much more faster relation with the local government. Well not with everybody but with even the five persons in the local government that kind of understood the interest of such projects.
Constantin: Sorry with the other number I tried to connect you to and to show some image. Do you see the text about [inaudible 1:18:10]?
Stephen: Where's that Constantin sorry?
Constantin: With [inaudible 1:18:18].
Stephen: Okay hang on.
Constantin: Basekamp team analyst I tried to call.
Stephen: Okay. We have to wait for Scott to come back because we don't have access to that one. So he'll get that and he'll see I guess.
Constantin: So it's some future one so with the other one I tried to hold onto the clever of the cloud.
Stephen: Okay got you.
Doina: Clever.
Constantin: Clever Island to show some image.
Stephen: Okay. Maybe you could say something about what you're looking to do now? What's the kind of future for – because I guess one of the critiques that would be, I mean since I know you I wouldn't make this critique but I guess if I didn't know you, you could say one of the critiques of this kind of initiative is that however well meaning it can be easily kind of absorbed by an overarching recapitalization of urban space. Artists have often been manipulated and architects too in rejuvenating public space for investment purposes. And we've seen that happen in Paris and it's kind of an ongoing problem I guess in every space. So how do you answer that? How do you avoid that kind of a problem? I know Greg was asking earlier about the kinds of challenges you've faced but there's a real challenge obviously one in which you have an answer to.
Doina: How do we contribute to [inaudible 1:20:23]?
Stephen: No not how you contribute, how do you avoid contributing to it?
Doina: Yeah, yeah.
Stephen: How do you stand outside of it? How do you respond in an interesting way to that challenge?
Doina: Yeah because I think that the programs the type of activities that we are generating are, and the type of let's say users that are attracting by these activities there are those that are resisting the [inaudible 1:21:00]. And they identify themselves with this talented spaces which are not in our pool necessarily and they are also exposed to political debates that are critical and that are clearly questioning the situations. So it's not that they're not spaces for leisure and just for having fun but they're spaces of knowledge and political production. And I would compare it with - Echo Books for example we were very cautious of instead of, let's say we negotiated to leave a big space which it was clearly it was impossible to stay there, and we negotiated instead three other spaces. And now the new negotiation there are other spaces that were also claimed.
So instead of having one space there are now seven spaces in the area. And I think it was a multiplication rather than a multiplication of occupations of spaces that are kept even if only for awhile out of the real estate market, out of the beautification. And so yeah I think that from this point of view it's like a strategic, we have transformed tactics into strategies strategic occupation of space for other types of companies that are resisting [inaudible 1:23:22].
Constantin: In another way what you try to do, but I completely agree with your observation I believe to be a very useful one. It is a danger to be recreated to be [inaudible 1:23:37] and of constant to general danger with a lot of things. And in our case you try to be very careful in a very naïve way. In a more strategical tactical way you try to infiltrate the system. And in a Quatarian way what you try to do too is you try to provoke business oblige the people that keep it in the system they are broken by their everyday lifestyle. They don't have time, they don't have desire, they have a full agenda, they have things to be done, they have problems, they have kids, etc.
So in the very first moment you try to create condition to create an opportunity for them to be free to what you call it these are some blogs to escape from this system step-by-step and to be a reassemble together with others one in the new ways. So of course it's a risk to be manipulated or to be…
Doina: Appropriated.
Constantin: …appropriated, but if you create what I would call a [inaudible 1:25:11] illusion then I mean all the people there they know what they want to do. And the risk is smaller. So it's like I don't know it's a topical way but it's what you try to do after you try to obtain other spaces and by collaborating with some [inaudible 1:25:37] but they often might want. And with a lot of habitant we tried to develop a [inaudible 1:25:45] but this kind of space in order to be able to leave to have dealings and competitive ones to have economical activities and to leave with outside from the system. So we tried to develop more alternative way to leave I don't know.
Doina: Yeah I will put it in another way and trying to answer also your question about what are the plans now? How we get a lot bit further. And the plans are to go ahead with this idea of a strategy, with this idea of a networking phases rather than us having individual spaces that are managing according to availability of land. But to kind of think about complimentary roles that this spaces can have and to polarize also existing initiatives, not only to generate initiatives from the space out that the space that we are creating out, but to polarize existing organization that have interesting initiatives around the network.
And we want to as Constantin said, to not only, because especially negotiated now there are spaces in which people are coming during sleep time, when they are working and living in the system, let's put it like this, and they are just coming to be buried themselves in their free time with these activities of gardening or screening or chatting. And we were thinking but what about going harder and leaving in a different way, proposing activities in which people can work, leave, and create in a different way, which means that maybe we have to think at dwellings or maybe we have to think at working spaces that can be integrated in a strategy.
And so we are working towards this and also we try to think about this networks more ecologically and try to create locally close they're different cycles between the networks the relations with which bases are not realized by exchanges. Yeah they're not only spaces that are in connection with each other in ideological connection that materialized by circulations of matter, of people, of energy, of jobs, of information. This is why we call [inaudible 1:29:51] which means at the same time were bound a way of retrofitting recycling the re-band but also a kind of connection or a recognition of the urban with the [inaudible 1:30:08].
Constantin: Did you receive the image?
Scott: Yes I was just receiving them before now and I'm about to upload those three.
Constantin: Yeah they are mopping controversy of each page and a localize person. What is important Stephen to, and I try to complete what she's saying, which is this capacity to provoke political raptions after we leave some projects the people they are run and then send the space is on the project but they are able to reclaim right and spaces. And this is very important it's like the right to the city, it's a right to organize the city to decide in the local and a political way what exactly the city could be. We decided together by habitant. And so it's a risk to be manipulated or appropriate this lesson this way. But you have a lot of patience we don't know we are not sure.
Scott: Yeah.
Doina: Yeah maybe we take more questions if they are anymore.
Stephen: Could you describe just really quickly some of the projects which are happening outside of Paris, like I don't know the Belfast Project and the Berlin Project, the Dakar Project, the Bucharest. Not in detail with Paris but just to give us an idea of if how we might collaborate with you if we don't live in Paris and what we might suggest or what you're interested in developing.
Doina: The project in Romania I will start with this one because this one is the first one. In fact it was even before the Echo Box was based in a town in the mountain, which was a town that was really facing the past communist economical and political transformation. And it was a small town of 7000 co-habitants that had just had one factory that was closing. And they were really concerned with the economy; at least we thought that they were concerned. We a good contact there which was a friend of us that had initiated a single [inaudible 1:33:44] what was called the Foundation for Local [inaudible 1:33:47]. And she wanted to have a kind of information unique where people can find out about what jobs are available in this. It's a town that has still a quite strong growing economy and there are kind of seasonal temporary jobs available the whole year, but they are not – people are not informed about what is available.
So this was one and the other was sort of a big awful one just to showcase the different skills that exist in the city and even a different community was also strong gypsy community living on the outskirts of the town. And we imagined this information unit in which all the parts of the unit were representing some knowledge and existing skills present in the city. And there were also products on selling and there were again products that were local products or products that people would make in a little kind of domestic formula that are goat cheese, jams, or stuff like this, which we guided into – it was really to carry after the tourists so acting that they would become aware of what's going on in the city and also that they would contribute a little bit to the economy.
And everything went okay until a moment when we realized that the city called and said it was supposed to be a partner was starting to subtract the product on the [inaudible 1:36:16]. And this was because there was some interest on the site that it was in fact offered in the beginning by the people itself. But within the city there were conflicting interest that were hidden and we were not aware. So at the moment the product was almost finished almost been offered with again a stove made by [inaudible 1:36:59] older the wood work made by people who were unemployed that they were working the factory that got closed. It was also a green wall showing the different local plants of the area.
So all this was the knowledge after we left and we knew that it's not enough to kind of create agency that will generate the energy of spending but what is important is exactly what we both knew exactly what we feel electable just to have this long period in our mutual learning and explanation of what are the benefits of such a project and the kind of thing sharing the [inaudible 1:37:57] and the project with all those inborn indicating, including the city bowl and probably the right word using the city bowl. So this was a big lesson.
In the Dakar this was a project that I have been more involved in confronting because I often was like student Sheffield that worked for a whole year on this project of [inaudible 1:38:33] that women of the organization in the Dakar region were, let's say the growth, were crafted in an international organization called resolve the [inaudible 1:39:01] secret stuff where [inaudible 1:39:06] was a leader. [Inaudible 1:39:13] is a quite fond of [inaudible 1:39:16] she was a spoken professional for the [inaudible 1:39:21]. So she returned to synagogue and what she had done is to kind of revise the women movement and wasn't maybe movement it was too much it was a woman of an organization. But I tend to spend everyday life.
So while it was the project and it initially was to build 300 houses for women that are the kind of holder of that household for different reasons who are either the report or that particular woman, which is quite unusual and much in country yeah. So it was political from the very beginning and also being organized in order to obtain a mortgage from a social back and then with this money to have access to land. And what we have done is they didn't have money to build and we discussed with them we decided that they should go and tend bending and they should learn techniques of bending. So what we have done with a student when I went into that car was to organize a workshop, a [inaudible 1:41:13] workshop in which we have experimented with different buildings which mean that they weren't interested in because we had done a catalog that they had considered online. And they have children which technically they wanted to learn. And well besides this the students had started the different proposals for [inaudible 1:41:37] farm for the whole year and some of them have passed their Masters with this project. So this was Drakar.
Constantin: But maybe too long. What is important all this area project it was to have different kind of experiences and different political economical context.
Week 46: Ontological Walkscapes
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week, with any luck, we’ll be talking with Karen Andreassian, an ambulant artist based in Yerevan, Armenia, and initiator of a number of collective undertakings in and about the post-Soviet landscape, including Voghchaberd and Ontological Walkscapes, which will be included in the “Blind Dates Project”, opening later this week in New York City.
http://voghchaberd.am/
http://www.ontologicalwalkscapes.format.am
As its name suggests, “Blind Dates” is more or a matchmaking than curated project, pairing up artists and non-artists from “what remains” of the peoples, places and cultures that once constituted the diverse geography of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922). Andreassian’s own contribution is a fragment of his ongoing Ontological Walkscapes project — an invisible but undeniable form of dissent-by-walking against the current regime and its oligarchs.
Inspired by the “factography” practices of the Russian avant-garde (LEF 1923) Andreassian examines two apparently unrelated phenomena in contemporary Armenia: the slow disappearance of 1970s Soviet-Armenian architecture and the shrinkage of public spaces due to the construction boom during the last decade; and the peaceful protests which led to the forceful dispersion of the demonstrators during the last post-presidential election at Azatutyoun [Freedom] Square. With both, the artist takes on the role of a “walker” through whom personal stories of ordinary citizens create a map of places (social space) that are neglected, forgotten, or have disappeared.
Ontological Walkscapes is itself an extension of Andreassian’s also ongoing Voghchaberd project, in which he does literally nothing but accompany a small village near Yerevan as its inhabitants — historically escapees of the 1916 Genocide — cope with the slow but irrevocable collapse of their geological landscape, following an earthquake in 1995, which mirrors the parallel collapse of their geopolitical landscape with the demise of the Soviet Union. Andreassian is the focusing device for a project of which the village inhabitants are the self-organized coauthors.
Transcription
Week 46: Ontological Walkscapes
Scott: So Kathy just picked up an email and this is our first time trying it. It's like as soon as you turn on a mic it polarizes everything you say. So yeah, hey Stephen so you want to hear what Karen ultimately said? And we'll just sort of start this off informally because we have three people on the line and everybody hear me already.
Stephen: Scott I think you're going to have to move closer to the mic.
Scott: Oh yeah.
Male: I can't hear anything.
Scott: Hello.
Stephen: Yeah.
Scott: How about this is this better?
Stephen: That's good.
Male: Yeah that's better.
Scott: All right. I'll figure it out I haven't figured out how to use this yet. But yeah anyway.
Stephen: So you were saying something about what you found out from Karen.
Scott: Yeah so basically Karen finally showed up in New York about eight hours late and the two curators there they were like yeah we don't know what's going on but part of his stick is that he does these sorts of disappearing acts. So I guess they were sort of wondering if well by stick I meant he takes these walks right and he can sort of take a variable amount of time taking them I guess. And so they had no idea what was happening. So basically he showed up and so we were able to talk to him and he said well he didn't really want to do Skype from there he didn’t' really feel equipped to do it even though Quinton offered to go up and help facilitate it and everything but felt that Stephen could adequately describe his work.
So anyway can you guys still hear me okay?
Stephen: Yeah
Scott: Awesome.
Male: I can hear.
Scott: Okay. So yeah that's the way we left it. And somehow it sounded by at least filtered through the two curators there that this was sort of part of what he wanted to do. He agreed that it would be a good idea to have you sort of stand in for him Stephen.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: Interesting. And also we have Sam coming at a little after 7:00 now around 7:15 it sounds like so we'll do a double feature I guess. So anyway I pasted in this description earlier and Greg and Matthew saw that. I could start to read this out if that would be helpful. What do you think? Hey Stephen would you prefer to sort of talk about these projects a little bit or would it be better for me to introduce by reading this out loud?
Stephen: What I wrote you mean o?
Scott: Yeah I mean it's a little bit of an unusual way to start for us but I think its part of what happens when…
Stephen: Yeah.
Scott: I don't know I thought a full moon but I'm not sure what happens.
Stephen: Yeah okay. So if I understand correctly he's not coming is that right?
Scott: That is correct.
Stephen: Okay. So there's no chance that he's going to show up? No.
Scott: Not before we're finished. Actually there is a chance that he'll show up before we're finished but there's no good chance because they didn't show up in New York until like 4:30 and they were supposed to get there in the morning.
Stephen: Okay. How is that possible?
Scott: I actually don't know.
Stephen: Okay. Well I'm a little taken aback by this I must say, but maybe I could say a few things because I have collaborated with Karen on the two projects which she was supposed to talk about. And I have written about those so maybe I am kind of in a position to have some thoughts on them. I mean obviously it's not the same thing as talking to him because I collaborate with him whereas he initiated those projects.
Scott: Right exactly. And I mean he will actually be here. Oddly they'll both arrive probably after we're done…
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: …just because they're staying here. So I think that's…
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: So I think that's the deal. I mean we also will be talking with Sam so at any point we can move on to talking about Red 76 as well. But it still seemed interesting enough. I mean this was written up and it seems like a very interesting project so it'll be awesome to talk about a little bit if you feel up for it.
Stephen: Oh for sure. Let me talk about it in this order then. First let me talk about the conditions under which I first met Karen and then I've co-authored two books with Karen. The first one is called "Remaining Time" and the second one is called "Ontological Watch Groups". Actually that title was actually my title originally which we developed together. I'll describe that a little bit how that worked. In 2005 I was invited to be part of a conference in the Ukraine and I gave a talk about what I call Competing Ontological Landscapes, in other words when fictional landscapes are superimposed on physical geographical landscapes, and about the kind of ontological chauvinism that takes place when different predatory ontology's come into contact with other ones.
If doing art criticism and talking about art in a kind of a different way. What's interesting is that immediately after I gave my talk this guy I'd never heard of before was asked to talk. And we all discovered at that moment, he'd been asked by an art journalist, Spanish art journalist which he'd been collaborating to give a talk and what we discovered at that moment was that he didn't speak English at all. In fact he had been communicating with the art journal through his translator which is his wife which he's with in the United States. And in fact he speaks Russian and Armenian but he speaks them with a very severe stutter. And when he's speaking these very sudden cracks emerge in his discourse. The way people stutter and there's that kind of a gap that emptiness between sentences.
And it's very interesting that that's the case because what he was talking about was a very particular dual political situation in the former Soviet Union. So you have to remember that Karen was born and grew up in the Soviet Union and was in his late 40s when the Soviet Union collapsed politically. In the early 1990s the very day that the Soviet Union collapsed this just as a political project there was a terrible earthquake in the southern part of the Union in Armenian near Yerevan and they're the capital. And this town that was about 15 kilometers outside of the capital which was highly appreciated by the members of the Nomenkaltura at the time where they built their datches because that had good hair and good water and so on. The terrible earthquake hit that town and it literally collapsed asunder. All the datches collapsed. The entire town sort of collapsed. There were huge fishers emerged in the roads absolute devastation. And what's interesting is that it happened the very day that the Soviet Union collapsed politically. So you had almost a geological representation of the geopolitical collapse of well I guess the largest country in the world at that time.
And what happened was the big wigs like the Soviet big wigs they cut their losses. They just left their datches in ruins and moved on to the new neoliberal system that replaced communism and went onto sort of privatize all the datches plus the naturalized businesses. The people who lived in the town, I mean the farmers and the peasants, were told by the experts that in fact they had to evacuate the village because things were never going to get better. Now what the earthquake had done was it destroyed the bedrock of that mountainside and it was really just nothing but dirt now and it was inevitably going to collapse more and more, and they couldn't live there anymore. The government offered them a reconvinced of I think about $200 or $250 dollars to go and live someplace else. Now the interesting thing about those people is that they had not been living in that village, their families hadn't been there for hundreds of generation right, they'd actually moved there within living memory because they were refugees from what is called Westerner Media, which is the eastern part of what's now Turkey refugee of the Genocide of 1915, 1916. I mean to escape that they're ancestors had and they moved to this village and became farmers.
So these people were in no way inclined to like move out and move on. So they hung in there and they held their ground literally, they held their ground even as that ground continued to collapse beneath them. And every morning when they wake up they go outside and they see a new fisher has sort of cut the roadway in half, it's really quite an amazing thing and that hear that sound of the collapse. But there's a kind of an upside to it, if I could call it an upside, it is that what happened is the soil itself has been transformed and pushed upwards and it's become an incredibly fertile area for organic farming production, which of course is increasingly on demand in Armenian as everywhere else. And so these people, despite the fact that they're homes are being like permanently wrecked even as they rebuild them, are actually doing fairly well in terms of their vegetables and fruit production. It's a very, very interesting case of what's happening in the post Soviet landscape, which is precisely what is of interest Karen Andreasyan and which was of interest to me as well because I was talking about these ontological landscapes and I mean I wasn't talking about physical landscapes I was really talking about what happens when fiction comes into contact with reality.
And so we went to collaborate on that. And what Karen does as an artist is really nothing whatsoever. Actually I remember in a previous talk here I described what he does at sweet fuckle.
Scott: I remember that. So Stephen but he does do – I'll pull that link up actually and send that to everybody, but I mean he does do something right.
Stephen: He does.
Scott: Right.
Stephen: What he does is he accompanies that village in its collapse and he accompanies the people who live there in their journey accompanying that collapse. He doesn't actually intervene, he doesn't actually build roads or he doesn't do paintings of collapse, or occasionally he does document what's going on and he takes photographs and he's done some video, but those are really just sort of bi-products of an observation or accompanying process. What it is, is that he doesn't say that it's his artwork he just simply says we can look at this incredible metaphoric potential through what these people are doing and my naming it as an artist as a kind of an artistic not as an artwork. But as sort of the art critical lens which we've developed over the history of art we are looking at this it's kind of the essence.
Scott: Yeah hey Stephen I think we had a little lag for a second.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: And we're back.
Stephen: Yeah. So I don't know exactly where I got cutoff but it's basically his presence as an artist, his role, is just being there and accompanying those people or accompanying that village in its collapse and accompanying those people in their incredible kind of trajectory. And that project was an object of a book which we did together called "Remaining Time" in reference to the [inaudible 16:17]. It entirely just sort of collapses because of the erosion of the underground river beds led to a very different project when it came into collision with an unexpected turn of political events.
[Inaudible audio breaking up]
Stephen: Anyone else.
Scott: Yeah we're here. I don't know if you saw that but the last few sentences, actually the audio interested sounded like you were stuttering. And at first I wasn't sure if you just really were and then it started fragmenting out to the point where we were pretty sure that it wasn't that and then you got cutoff.
Stephen: Okay. No I'm not given to [inaudible breaking up]. In public space, public expression it's just a way of life as people's life has become much more difficult since the end of the Soviet Union. I mean the Soviet Union was obviously a disastrous political culture but it provided a certain potential for, I don't know, development in life that has literally disappeared with neoliberal capitalism. And it's palpable each time I return every year and a half or so to our meeting to see the general decline, the general rising in frustration and general depression.
Two and a half years ago there was a presidential election the election was totally rigged and the man who was proclaimed President at the end of it obviously had engaged in massive electoral fraud and was not, well of course we know these sorts of things is not specific to places like Armenia it happens in very large and old republics all over the place, but it led to very large demonstrations and those demonstrations went on and on and on until the government ordered that they be stopped or that the army to fire live bullets on the demonstrators which they did; they killed at least 10 people. Demonstrations were banned and this is where the project that Karen will be presenting a fragment of in New York began, is that they wanted at once to stop the demonstrations but maintain a return to normalcy. And so they couldn't simply say that people were not allowed to walk in the streets they just were not allowed to demonstrate in the streets.
And so what developed was I think one of the most original and yet invisible forms of political dissent which has emerged over the last little while is that in one of the central parts of Yerevan people just began to walk. In other words, they would meet every night at about 7:00 and they would just walk around and around and around this circle in the park. They wouldn't have banners, it wasn't a demonstration it was simply walking, but it was walking political because the regimen knew fully well what these people were doing but it couldn't exactly demonstrate or prove that that's what they were doing because it didn't look like they were doing anything except walking because they weren't doing anything except walking. But they were walking with a political intent. And I think what struck Karen about that and it's certainly what struck me about it is that that's very close resemble, this kind of invisibility but undeniability is very similar to something which happened to art in the course of Modernity is that things could actually become, while remaining what they are could become propositions of what they are.
And so it was in this way that the ontological walkscape that Karen is so interested in actually began. It's a form of, not I think of political walking, but of walking political. And it's ontological in the sense that it's both a walk and a proposition of a walk. It's both a walkscape, so just plain it is what it is as minimal artists used to say, and at the same time it has a double ontological status it's also with this political dimension. Yeah that's right they're ontological is that they're both a thing and also a proposal about walking right and a proposal about a different way to do politics. So there's a lot to say about that but that's kind of the basics. But this is also linked to an ongoing research project which Karen has been carrying collectively first of all with these students and then with a lot of other people about walking as a way of perceiving and reading and understanding the transformation of the post Soviet landscape understanding it as a walkscape.
There's been like the new regimen which has come to power, which is basically a bunch of oligarchs who are sort of selling off cheap mining rights and just about everything there is in Armenia to foreign companies there is a particular hatred towards anything that looks remotely like modernist Soviet architecture, and particularly a hatred of anything that looks like the 1970s Soviet architecture. And of course this is something which we've noticed across Europe as well, I'm talking about in capitalist here, is there's a particular hatred with the 1970s. Also in the United States when Nicholas Sarkozy became President of France he declared war on May 1968. He said that his presidency would put that legacy to rest once and for all. So that hatred of 1970s of collectivism, that hatred of protest, of rethinking the machines of desire which we are is the sort of thing we should [inaudible breaking up].
Scott: Oh no you're starting to break up again just now.
Stephen: Sorry.
Scott: You just started breaking up right now.
Stephen: Okay I'll continue.
Scott: Just now, just at the beginning of that sentence.
Stephen: Okay. Well what I was saying is…
Scott: Better now yeah.
Stephen: …1970s particularly palpable in a place like Armenia. And not only [inaudible 25:41] because Karen actually lacks these sort of very angular concrete [inaudible 25:48] it's the truth of the development of that country. I mean no matter what you think of the Soviet experience it was almost a century long experience in Armenia and it's eraser is surely not a way of moving forward but really a way of just repressing something which will return in form. So he's engaged these practices of walking political, not only as a form of at once invisible but undeniable political dissent but also a way of receiving sort of the devastation of the post Soviet landscape across the country. And I think that's what he will be presenting in New York, although I don't exactly know because I haven't spoken to him about what he's showing in New York. But I believe that it's a project around the proposed destruction of a valadrone, in other words of a bicycle track, in downtown Yerevan. It was built in the late 1960s a very beautiful example of this modernist Soviet concrete based architecture. And of course which will be replaced either by luxury housing for the lucky few or even more probably by a orthodox church built of course with traditional stone material and made to look it had been there forever. This sort of example of an invented tradition, which in fact is just a post modern imposition of a kit style design to ensure greater writer logical control.
So he's not so much interested in documenting that kind of idea the rise of ideological control through collusion between the orthodox church and the oligarchs in political power in cahoots of course with trans national capital, but more interested in looking at, focusing on this post Soviet landscape and the remaining examples of that Soviet architectural style. And that's also an image which I find particularly interesting and particularly interesting to explore it, not so much through the use of video or photography but through the use of walking. And he links this to - and this is I'll just end my little presentation here maybe we can have a discussion now my monologue's been going on long enough – links it to a very, very interesting movement in the 1920 Soviet [inaudible 28:45] which is called Factography.
Factography was kind of a derivative of the entire constructivist movement in the '20s in the Soviet Union and it's a sort of predecessor but an extremely incisive predecessor to what would become the documentary practices that emerged in the 1970s and '80s in which they actually become dominant components of the artworld today. And it's a kind of a focus on facts but facts not of something which were given but facts are something which are produced. And his particular take on factography is that facts can be also produced through walking, and that's something in which I think he's developed quite a lot. It's interesting that he's doing this and it's not, let me just say, it's not political neutral or even artistically neutral within the context of the former Soviet Republics. The imminent art critic and historian from Russia Boris Royce has this very strange tendency to somehow equate Soviet experience with the Stalin experience. See Stalin not so much as the destruction of the Soviet Union but of its essence incarnate. And Karen Andreasyan and may other people have, or at least many of his friends, have a very different take on the Soviet experience which they found in the 1920s. They had factography constructiveness was found to be a very powerful and progressive political experience and one with which they were and also groups like [inaudible 30:32] at the summit in New York to renew with that incredible [inaudible 30:41 audio broke up].
Scott: We heard you at incredible.
Stephen: Sorry.
Scott: You stopped at incredible. It went incredible [static sound]. That might have sounded like real static. Hey Stephen I'm actually here trying to…
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: …give a sense of how it sounded at first. But it probably sounded like real static to you in return.
Stephen: Yeah a little bit. Anyways that's obviously what I wanted to say. I just wanted to say that [inaudible 31:44 breaking up] to the stance Mudley sort of expressive art production that's going on in Armenia today because he's taking a very clear. I mean he's not even what might be loosely called as sort of post conceptual artist. It's really a kind of, I mean you could call him post conceptual except that it's not sure, at least in his opinion there wasn't a kind of conceptual art previously.
So the question remains then can you be post conceptual without their having been conceptualism. And which is why I think he is much more inclined to lay claim to that factographic experience which he reinvigorates through walking political what he calls his ontological walkscapes. So anyway that's kind of my take on his practice which is inherently conceptual obviously which is inherently collectiveness and his inherently yet invisibly political.
Scott: Yeah it's always an interesting question about. I mean if you don't mind me saying this it's always an interesting question. When people want to talk about art within these kinds of, well separating it into isms you know, or kind of era based ideas of art, because there definitely is there a zeitgeist at different points and there are also people working in similar enough ways to be able to classify it. But at the same time it's not always happening in all regions. And so when someone's working regionally it's funny to talk about modernism in a nation that has never been modernized. It's a…
Stephen: Well [inaudible 34:01]. There was a Soviet modern [breaking up]. Armenia had embraced modernity. I mean with strong tradition a desire to rationalize the public space. Of course the political system per say had never slowly involved the modernity it was repressive political system. Modernity in terms of arts and modernity in terms of social morass and so on was definitely a part of Armenian experience. It is now in post modernity is equated with Soviet totalitarianism for obvious ideological reasons and this sort of post modern neo limber mindset has decided, and that's the reason it's decided to drive out every last remananet and trace of Soviet modernity and form particularly the architecture that I was talking about.
Scott: Yeah Stephen just to clarify, I mean I definitely wasn't saying that that applied to that region but if you know what I mean. It was just to give some sort of sense, maybe a more direct sense, because conceptualism isn't really easy to say "Well have conceptualism happened to a region." Whereas it's a lot easier to say that modernity had happened to a region. And I find it interesting sometimes when let's say certain countries in Africa when people are making post modern work there's that similar kind of disjoint, if you know what I mean. I think that's the only reason I brought that up.
Stephen: Oh okay.
Scott: Sorry the static was actually so bad during the second half of what you said I couldn't tell if you actually did get it or not. Cool. Yeah today's a really weird day for a lot of people.
Male: Is here there?
Scott: Oh yeah I think so he's writing now I can tell he's writing.
Stephen: I'm here I just didn't want to monopolize the amount of the speech. I mean if someone else has stuff to add or to say on something else. I think Sam is going to show up at some point.
Scott: Yeah Sam should be here really soon. So you know I posted that link to ontological landscapes on the Basekamp Web site.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: I don't know if you saw that but here's the short URL or ontological walkscapes.
Stephen: Okay great.
Scott: I was using the other text for the landscapes. But yeah but I didn't post the information about Sam or about Red 76 because we hadn't really cleaned it up yet.
Stephen: Right.
Scott: But I think we can bring up his, when I say his Web site, the Web site of the main project that same has representing Red 76 is part of.
Stephen: Yep.
Scott: And I don't want to move onto it too quickly but yeah you're right he should be here pretty soon just for people who want to get started. But yeah like definitely it would be great to talk with Karen and we'll be talking with him when he comes here tonight.
Stephen: No but he's a fascinating character. There's lots of things about his work that I didn't mention. One key aspect of it is, in fact Karen doesn't - what I mean is he does lots of things. He's a very industrious energetic hardworking person on the one hand. What he doesn't do is create things. I mean if you like – factography it's about producing facts but it's not about creativity. And I think that Karen stands about the sort of creative economy that has urban, I mean among other things, within our [inaudible 39:06]. It definitely feels that art has no track with that kind of – essentially art has never had has anything with exclusivity or creativity.
I know that seems like kind of a hard line position and it's one that I like to raise in those exact terms but it's interesting to hear how he, he doesn't talk in genatotic terms, negotiates that way of being a practicing artist without creating things rather by accompanying processes, walks, and other geological collapses.
Scott: Yeah but you know Stephen it would definitely be – I'd like to know more about that coincidental geological collapse. I mean I had heard that sort of but I'd really heard it described the way you described it. The very next day you were saying after the collapse of the '78 Union. I mean it's just…
Stephen: Yeah literally.
Scott: Yeah.
Stephen: Literally Gorbachev was trapped in his datches Putin took control in Moscow just the Soviet Union was disintegrating as a political project, not as a political project, as a geo political giant it was collapsing asunder. And that same day the Village of Folk Everage collapsed and the terrible earthquake all across the southern caucus and the City of folk Everage collapsed n the theologically nearing the geopolitical collapse completely collapsed upon itself and all the datches all just turned into rubble in seconds. There is a Web site that you can Karen has a Web site it's…
Scott: Vocal Bard or the ontological walkscapes or blind dates.
Stephen: No voch everette.
Scott: Voch everette okay. Vochbird now I know. Yeah I thought it was.
Stephen: Vochbird exactly.
Scott: I think each image oh interesting.
Male: What's interesting?
Scott: Just because it wasn't really clear but the navigation on this Web site was.
Stephen: Well that's the thing that Karen has to explain to you. It's based on a relatively complexed algorithm and all those numbers reflect the time [inaudible 42:39] between the two clicks. There's kind of like a fisher between those numbers. If you go to this page here then you see a rather obscure arrangement of document and clicking on any of those documents will leave you to…
Scott: Oh right.
Stephen: …different places. So for example, you see there's a little book there which is this one, well there's a number of books right but here – well anyway I'll let you kind of discover that [inaudible 43:23] give a reason to idea many particular way. But all across those images there are different links to click on which leads you into – I mean Miriam's whole idea of a kind of an ontological scape or image scape of some kind. You think you're looking at one image but in fact what you're looking at when you look at an image is all sorts of crevices that leave you, or all sorts of I guess what Elizabeth Gatari would call Lines of Flight, which could leave you in all sorts of different directions. Each book is a line of flight or potentially a different landscape.
Scott: Definitely. I think something's broken in Chrome but we get most of it.
Stephen: Sorry about that.
Scott: Perfect. That's great yeah. It is well done I was just inperceptive. I do saw it as an image at first.
Stephen: Yeah. Well it is an image. I mean that's like everything else. And obviously [inaudible breaking up]. And the interesting thing about vochaverte is that it's not an artist controlled profit because it's a village so the only people who have control over the destiny of that book is, but I think it's a geological destiny that no one has control over, is that people control and become of it are the people who live there not the artists. So this is an art project which the artist does not have control.
Nato: Stephen.
Stephen: Yeah.
Nato: It's Nato. How do you describe this as being different than say a kind of ethnography?
Stephen: Well I guess I wouldn't want to necessarily say that it was. I guess it is a kind of ethnography except there's a very major difference. Ethnography is a discipline it's a discipline which has [inaudible.
Scott: I think we lost him.
Stephen: Can you hear me?
Scott: It's getting better yes but now you're not there.
Stephen: You're not hearing me. The signal is becoming really low here.
Scott: We can hear you now.
Stephen: Okay. I'll try and speak slowly so that [inaudible].
[child speaking]
Stephen: Are you guys…
Scott: Yeah we're here.
Stephen: …receiving my voice.
Scott: Now we are. It's just going up and down a bit.
Stephen: I can't hear you.
Scott: Oh what about now can you hear me now okay?
Stephen: I'm not hearing you.
Scott: Really? How about now?
Greg: Stephen can you hear me? Stephen. Nothing. Hey Basekamp.
Scott: Hey Greg.
Greg: Hey Parker.
Nato: Was that Greg?
Scott: Yes it is.
Greg: Yep.
[child speaking]
Greg: Hi kiddo. It seems we lost Stephen. All right I'm going to go back on mute.
Scott: The question exploded. Hey we also got your written text too which…
Stephen: You guys there.
Scott: Yeah we're here Stephen. We got your written reply though which I don' know if you wanted to augment that at all, basically that art is extra disciplinary, transdisciplinary, whereas ethnography is within a specific discipline. Well geez you know what, I think we're not going to be able to continue this.
Hey Stephen.
Stephen: Hey. So I'm kind of hopeful this is going to work better because I want to answer Nato's question which I thought was a good one. Am I audible now?
Scott: You are it sounds great.
Stephen: Okay. So listen, yeah, I mean on the one hand of course it is ethnography I mean it's obviously a dimension of that, but the difference is that I think ethnography is discipline. I mean it's an academic discipline with its community of researcher with a cannon of – it's a constituted body of knowledge with a cannon of references. You can contest and in fact you're expected to contest if you're a researcher, but at the same time you have to acknowledge or else you're taken to be a crank. And art certainly is carrying an drasian practice it is not a discipline in that sense it's not disciplined in the same way although it has a definite rigor which is why I stressed the fact that it is – I mean there's a definite methodology. Methodology in the most general sense because method means meto odos, odos being road and meta being of the road. So it's a shifting methodology but it's walking itself very closely linked to methodology.
But what it is it's an extra disciplinary practice. In other words it cannot be disciplined in the same way, it's an inherently – it doesn't have that constraint of having to respond a cannon of constituted objections. And I think that that is not just wordplay it makes art of this kind essentially different from the practice of the social sciences or any kind of science actually. And it also makes it interesting for artist like Karen to collaborate with scientific or ethnographic methodologies. But it does oblige him to engage in extra disciplinary collaboration, inter or trans or both.
I don't think there's such a thing as an art discipline, not in ethnography. I think that art is rigorous, art has a history but art has rested itself free, has met itself from everything with its own history and it's not in the way that sciences do have to contend with that motion of discipline. Of course there's many ongoing attempts on the heart of the [inaudible 55:20] and museums to discipline. Disciplining arts is a major component of the main stream art world today in my opinion. And it's one with its someone like Grassient is very concerned. I'm mostly hearing Parker I think I don't know whether you guys are hearing me.
Scott: We're totally here. I'm not muting the audio to keep the exchange going.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: Yeah your audio is really great now Stephen. It was just so broken up before…
Stephen: Yeah.
Scott: But it's plain so because sometimes it would go really strong and then we'd try to tell you when it got tragic.
Stephen: Yeah.
Scott: So just to go on your note about, and I don't want it to be so meta about disciplines, but I keep thinking about the geographic practice in particular as a kind of discipline that's become somewhat extra discipline in the sense that a lot of post modern geographies out of Lavefe has begun to take on everything and to really resist its own history. So I'm wondering if there's other disciplines that you think have moved into kind of an extra disciplinary status.
Stephen;You know what as far as I know nobody has. I think what happens is that when you get people like geographers like Trevor Pegland for example, as an artist and that's what makes Trevor so incredibly interesting to me is that he's using the incredible knowledge that the geographical discipline has produced over the course of its history. But he's framing it in that extra disciplinary frame of art. Because let's say when he collaborates with someone or with a collective what makes that collaboration interesting, what makes it necessary, what makes it fruitful is an initial diversity. Because in fact if we always want to collaborate with people that we have a lot in common with, because then we don't have to be sniping at each other all the time. But in fact similarity doesn't bring much in terms of collaboration.
What is interesting is whether that initial diversity. But when that diversity – so it's interesting to think well what is different than art and what specific competencies and incompetencies does art have? Well one thing that it doesn't have is a lot of knowledge. I mean the art is extremely impoverished in terms of knowledge but it's extremely rich if you like in terms of this freedom or this open ended methodology which is in some ways intrinsic to art in a kind of an essential way. I mean a lot of art is not like that for sure but in a kind of essential way it is like that. And what you find in disciplines, academic disciplines and others is that you find almost the reverse. You find it's a kind of closed and locked down type of knowledge direction but there is a great deal of knowledge there. And I think that's what makes some people work with someone like Trevor Pegland so interesting is that he's actually been able to access what's best both about an academic discipline and an extra disciplinary practice of art.
And I wouldn't say that this is model that Karen Andreasyan is using because he tends to not work with academics. He infiltrated the art department at the Yerevan University only to resign in protest because of the capitulation of the university in general towards illegitimately elected government of the country.
Scott: When you say he infiltrated does it mean he got hired but he didn't really like it.
Stephen: No that he pretended that he was doing something that he wasn't doing basically. In fact well he's written about this himself, and in fact I think it's on the Web site at the ontological walkscapes Web site where he talks about the meaning of that infiltration. I don't know that particular episode but I believe that what he did was that he got himself into the art department, not under false pretenses because he's too well known of an artist to do that, but with a different type of outlook. And he said he was going to do something that he in fact had no intention of doing. And he used that time, that public time that he had with the students to carry out the ontological walkscapes project.
And that was kind of the point whether than working with academics and people from the academic disciplines Andreaysan tends to work with, if you like, ordinary people. He tends to work with peasants, he tends to work in this case the students, but he works with students on the basis of kind of information and backgrounds which they had coming from different walkscapes, different walks of life, different landscapes from around the country of Armenia. And the types of testimony which they can bring to that factography practice.
Scott: Yeah I'm so holding myself back from bringing up the question of whether arts a field because I just got a text message from Sam saying just got back, network is down, I'll phone in a minute. But just with this caveat that we might get cutoff any moment because – then again by the time he shows up we'll probably be done with our chat but we'll see. Well anyway okay how about this? During the summit that you organized Andrea Frasier kind of made a slightly small back peddle in her earlier argument in order to accommodate the idea of multiple artworlds yet wouldn't really acknowledge that there were multiple ones because that would be a pretty hard argument for her to continue to position herself against. And I think I sensed a little bit of bitterness between the two of you Stephen, you and Andrea.
But basically she did recognize that there were multiple, oh what is it subfields, of the field of art. And I think this is the first time – you didn't really like the idea of subfield Stephen which I agree that there's a sort – they're multiple meanings of that and one is a little bit condescending but I think you also seemed to take issue with the idea that art is even a single field. And so I guess I wanted to bring this up as that, okay I know we're making this glossary, we're all going to be contributing to this glossary. You were talking about disciplines and so often a discipline is referred to as a field, let's say the discipline of art is often referred to as a field of practice and study or certain disciplines are referred to as a field. And I'm wondering about the relative value of that term. And also whether even seeing art as a single field is appropriate or a battle worth fighting.
Nato: Yeah just to kind of build on that too because I'm just thinking about – you know Andreas facing calls from Bordeaux in some ways and I think it's really productive to use Bordeaux when prioritizing this kind of conception of art in this way of staying art does this or art does that. Because of course art is so context specific at times it's capable of doing things at other times it's capable of doing totally boring things. And it seems Stephen when you talk about art capacity to be extra disciplinary I think well maybe in some instances yes in other instances absolutely not. But you kind of speak of it in a very kind of totalizing way that isn't broken apart in a different fields or related to the kind of context of the social infrastructures that produce that idea of art regionally as well as structurally. So how do we work through all that?
Stephen: Wow that's a huge question. In fact I guess it's a bunch of questions. First of all when Bordeaux and Frasier used the notion of field they don't use it in a sense of discipline. I mean it's true that we say "Well in the field of art or in the field of anthropology", but that's not the way we [inaudible 1:05:17] using the right term. They're using it in a sociological sense but the field is that place in which all the actors with which we have to negotiate to obtain our purposes are present in which we sense and feel and measure, incorrectly or correctly, their power and we have to negotiate a path through that field taking account of their presence there as well. That's very different I mean in a way it's similar it's fundamentally different from a way an academic discipline is concentrated.
I find even the very notion of discipline its problematic work. I mean the idea of disciplining practices, porportments, speech, disciplining to me and I think it sounds a little bit like cleaving its sounds a little bit like formatting, it sounds like making distinctions between what is socially obligatory or socially forbidden. And that's why Nato that I kind of go a little bit over the deep end sometimes maybe in saying well art is using that kind of collective magnetic formatting. I know full well that 99.9% of art it does nothing of the sorts and it jumps immediately right into bed with the first prop on the feet when it comes to allowing itself to [inaudible 1:07:05] but art is essentially can mean anything.
To me it's not [inaudible 1:07:16] it means not doing just any old thing anything goes, but it means finding an essence outside that kind of discipline. Even though it's worth in other ways that kind of discipline it doesn't need to be proven but disciplines can produce an incredible kind of talent. It just that it seems to me that art can be able to do anything it shouldn't and I found a great prescription enormous shouldn't see you know opening in that direction. So I agree and I don't agree. I didn't agree with Frasier I think about these notions of field because I really just I feel, literally I think that yeah each [child speaking] really our responsibility to try and break with that notion just one point back there in which is [inaudible 1:08:23] I feel that I need to say no that there's no reason why you couldn't set to deploy your competency and your incompetencies in a different field right. And sure most people in that field are not recognizing the way you use art, okay, but that's not even the case.
Scott: Yeah I actually do have a thought but Chris had a quick question let me switch over to her.
Chris: It's just I was thinking about it. Can you hear me?
Stephen: Yeah, yeah I hear.
Chris: It's just making something I was something I was thinking about rock music. And it's like it seems like everybody was thinking oh wow rock and roll music but it seems like that had sort of also gone into different genres no longer what it was originally like the same thing with art.
Stephen: I think I understand what you mean. I mean it's just that what I don't like about this, let me look at it this way, disciplines and the police is that they tend to say what is music and what is noise? They tend to say what is discourse and what is nearly gibberish? And when rock music first emerged it's true that people didn't say "I don't like that kind of music." They said "That's not music", they said "That's just noise." And it required the kind of resistance to break with that disciplining ear which have a great deal of societal sort of wherewithal behind it to get to the point now where rock music is, particularly more than the mainstream, it's kind of what defines what's noise and what's music only. I'm not sure that's the answer to your question but that would be one way of seeing how that normativity between what is in terms of the discipline what is acceptable and what's not mandatory and what is taboo.
Scott: Yeah but it is an interesting quandary when you say that we got to throw out 99.9% of art doesn't count and we're going to only…
Stephen: I think…
Scott: No, no, but I think the percentage maybe accurate and then I think but that is a kind of interesting circumstance right where you're discounting them also a high percentage of what calls itself art. And the reason I say that is because at some point you think why do we hold onto this term right because it almost like…
Stephen: Totally.
Scott: It almost becomes a default term for lack of a better one or something because certainly there's so many other what would you call them people that have gone extra disciplinary in different fields rock and roll or dance or poetry or farming or just on religious in some way.
Stephen: Yep.
Scott: In some ways it becomes something that their discipline didn't want them to be. Does this make sense?
Stephen: Yeah. No I think that's the most fundamental. I think that may even be the most fundamental question which we have to address. And I guess one of the questions we want to address in 2011 because as you probably Plausible Artworld is going to transform to some extent into of low words. And the first word that we have to attend to is the art itself because as you just said we're giving that word such an incredible semantic burden we have overburdened it to such an extent that it's almost like the landscape that Karen Andreasyan was looking at it's going to collapse and thunder. You can't shed that much meaning on one three letter one syllable word because the way you and I probably use the word art and the way most other people use it are so at odds with one another that we're making that three letter word stretch from miles and miles.
And I don't know for how long that could be done and what's going to happen when that collapse at first? Well my answer is why do I trickle into the word art, why don't I just grow up and say extra disciplinary practices or find something maybe a little cooler than that but something on those lines? Well one is that I'm kind of low to leave the monopoly of the definition of the word art to those people whose usage of it I find so particularly uncongenial. So maybe I'm waiting for them to give up the word or maybe I just think that if I use the word in my way and you use it in your way and they use it in their way we'll see in some point what will happen. After all meanings of words change over time. But I entirely agree with you that, and I think it's a wonderful question, whether it really make sense if we just don't sound like zealots at a certain point clinging on these words I've described, which actually have more or less shaken themselves free of the yoke. So art exerts their historical condition of plausible is to do to the fact that art does have a history and every art practice towards certain aesthetic and position making have to kind of reference back to that history.
Nato: But certainly Scott brought up a good point when he talked about, I mean it all sounds sort of crass but why not just be simple about it, to talk about he mentioned Africa but let's just talk about the kind of colonialist position of art as a framework right. And that there are of course art extra disciplinary culture phenomena in resistance to power that aren't coming out of that lineage whatsoever certainly, that in fact had to produce. I'm sure there's been versions of ontological walkscapes in colonialist positions because those were the necessary forms in order to resist the dominant positions put upon people that didn't come out of like an art lineage. Does that make sense?
Scott: Like Ghandi for example.
Nato: Like Ghandi, Ghandi's a genie because…
Stephen: You're right. No, no I think Ghandi is a great example. I think the great example Karen Andreasyan has mentioned that many times. It's true who can rival, I mean what performance artist can ever rival Andy's watch across lineage.
Scott: Hey Stephen I hate to interrupt you. Now we have 10 more minutes left almost exactly.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: And Sam was able to get online either through his phone or some other way and he's trying to call so.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: Can we just bookmark this and we can have a super short sharp chat with Sam about Red 76 for a few minutes.
Stephen: Great. Yes that's great but I would like to continue at some point that discussion with Nato because it's something that really – I'm improvising Andy again I'm really interested in learning the…
Scott: Okay let me just talk to him for a second and then emerge our calls. Hey Sam can you hear us?
Sam: Hi.
Scott: Hello. Can you hear us okay? Let's try this hey Sam.
Sam: Hello.
Scott: Hey, hey, hey.
Sam: Can you hear me?
Scott: Yes. That is an awesome picture. So hey I'm going to add you to this other audio chat that's already going on. There's just a few people on the call. Does it sound good?
Sam: Yeah I'm going to cut out again, hopefully not.
Scott: Okay. Well we'll give it a shot.
Sam: Okay.
Scott: And call you back in a just a sec, call you back right now.
Sam: Okay.
Scott: Hey Sam.
Sam: Hello.
Scott: So now we're aligned with, well on Skype anyway with Matthew Flatt, Greg Slanton also from Basekamp, Stephen Wright and us there's a number of people in the room right now, including Parker who you can hear. How's it going? We've got about 10 minutes. Okay we lost Sam again we're going to try him one more time. We're going to give this a shot because today is a little strange but.
Sam: Hello again.
Scott: Hey again. So we'll give it one more shot. If the connection is still really terrible we can just try it again another time or we can talk for a few. Can you hear me or is it just like – oh it is really bad.
Sam: Let's try but the audio is pretty bad.
Scott: You know what we'd love to talk to you dude and I think we should probably do it on another time and make sure that all connections are totally solid so that we don't have a frustrating time. In fact I lost you. Everybody else on the line just hand tight for a second, because that took five minutes and if we do that again then we're over so. Okay you know what we might as well continue on with our talk guys for the next five minutes or so because no use lamenting over bad networks.
Stephen: Mine is pretty good. There's a lot of interference on yours that's for sure. Now it's clear.
Scott: Yeah that was just Parker. Oh the interference before was it [inaudible 1:21:42]?
Stephen: No it's electronic interference.
Scott: Oh I think it was because there was dual calls going on.
Stephen: Okay. Well Nato maybe you want to go back to your question you were just in the midst of asking because maybe you had an answer as well.
Nato: I don't have an answer but I do understand the problems a little bit in so much as I keep trying to think about how to not completely – I mean the word art has such baggage too as much as neutral and it is western and it is part of a kind of condition, so it's like I'm always – and even just thinking about in the United States just thinking about how the arts are very racialized and how it breaks down in terms of class and race in the United States. And so my allegiance to the term is very fraught I suspect. Sometimes I'm like it's really good because it's a very broad umbrella to bring a lot of people together, other times I think it's such a limited kind of space that it actually produces more problems than solutions. So this is just to say that I'm very torn about its usage often. Sometimes I find it productive and sometimes I find it reductive. So I'm not saying anything. But I do think those problems need to inform the way we think about what these kinds of ontological practices can be. Because of course there are certainly like when Discerto wrote about people walking in the city in a sense it was kind of like a minute version of an ontological walkspace right.
Stephen: Yeah definitely. Yeah.
Nato: And that was not coming out of the lineage of art that was just coming out of the lineage of people resisting the powers that be in their everyday life. So I guess it's like trying to come up with a language for that would be really productive.
Stephen: For sure. I think it's a really – it's more than a fair question it's really kind of a crucial one given what's happened to art in the last little while. Even if you take a kind of relatively, I mean interesting but relatively mainstream art proposition, like you take Martha Rossler's Library that Efflux first of all setup in the lower east [inaudible 1:24:32] traveled around. At first I thought well that's, and I still do, that it was a really cool project because it raises a whole bunch of issues. It is the first school library of an artist, it's a very good library, it's a lot of rare books in there that you don't always have access to, and you do a free photocopy machine. It had a real significant use study; no doubt about that.
And I was thinking well it has a kind of a double value because not only does it have use value as a library but it's also a proposition of a library. You're always in your mind having this idea that its self-understanding is its art. So it's kind of twice as good as just the ordinary real thing. But someone said to me "Well no in fact it's kind of useless as a library because it's always in the back of your mind that this is Martha Rossler's Library. And so you can't actually use it properly because you're constantly like looking around to see what's art among people when you know there's nothing arty about the thing.
So I think what you're saying is when something has, when it comes out of as you call the lineage of art or has self-understanding of art is it enriched back or is it just sort of weird. I mean is it weirding us out or is it actually doubling our perception or our perceptive intentional. And I think that's a really [inaudible 1:26:07] of one example of Martha Rossler's Library but I think all of these projects that have doubled ontological status because they come from the lineage of art it all raise that question. And honestly I don't know what the answer to it is. I know it's an answer maybe there's answer in different, maybe sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But I know that people like our friend Demetrius Selinsky from [inaudible 1:26:31] that's one of the key arguments that he makes for not supporting that kind of art of double ontological study. He likes art that is fore grounded as art and that's the reason why he thinks it can have powerful political potential.
Now that's not my option in art at all. It isn't something that I, but I completely hear that argument and I think that when you talk about art that's been like so significantly racial life and in that way over determined and classified until one does have to wonder if when you find out it's art it's kind of off putting and confusing. I don't know.
Scott: Oh you know what guess what time it is.
Stephen: I know it's after 2:00.
Scott: It's two after yeah. So you know…
Stephen: It's two after 2:00 I mean for me.
Scott: For you. Well it's three after 8:00 now. So I would really like sometime soon to clarify, actually we have to clarify what do we mean by propositional? I mean in the sense that okay it's proposing something but if one of the most common parts, or the sort of components of this double ontological status that art has is that it's also some kind of a proposition, I often describe it as that it's injected with meaning or some kind of symbolic value. But I think you're describing something very perspective. You know often when something is a proposition it's meant to be well what does it actually proposing that a thing could be redone again or is it proposing it to us for consideration?
And I just think we might want to clarify that because depending if we're talking about it's a proposal for our consideration then we're talking about the contemplative value again which is definitely there. But if we're talking about a proposal for this could be something, meaning like it could be done again, it could be expanded or it could be, then we're talking about the kind of definition of plausibility that we often get asked. Like well do you mean that it's reproducible, do you mean that it's expandable, things like that. I think we might want to try to tease that out sometime soon.
Stephen: Yeah. I don't know if we can tease it out but we can certainly play around with it for sure.
Nato: Let's have some playtime with it.
Scott: Yeah.
Stephen: Hey listen, great talking to you guys. It kind of turned out better than I was thinking when I heard that Karen sort of left us between a rock and a hard place.
Scott: Yeah I opened up with a very drastic kind of news but.
Stephen: Yeah. Okay well anyway say hi to him when he does finally see fit to show up.
Scott: I think we'll never get to meet Karen actually.
Stephen: Is that true?
Scott: Yeah I think so unless he feels like meeting me for lunch tomorrow or something because you know.
Stephen: Okay. Well so I'm checking out because I got to get up early tomorrow morning because that's what I'm supposed to be doing here. Good talking to you Nato thanks for your questions.
Nato: Okay. It's good to hear your voice.
Scott: Until next time.
Stephen: Yeah well I think next week we're going to – I think let's confirm with Urban Tactic rather than risking a bit of confusion like this week. Does that make more sense?
Scott: Okay it's a deal.
Stephen: Okay talk to you soon. Bye.
Scott: Okay. Bye.
Stephen: Goodnight.
Scott: Goodnight.
Week 44: Spontaneous Vegetation
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with urban forager, seed archivist and inner-city homesteader Nance Klehm, founder of a project called Spontaneous Vegetation.
http://spontaneousvegetation.net/
http://salvationjane.net/
Nance engages in what — in art-critical parlance — might be called “expanded farming”, the way some talk about “expanded cinema.” She is interested in things edible, how to grow them, and particularly how to find them when they conveniently and spontaneously just grow themselves; how to compost them, can them, preserve them — and how to mutualize her bio-instigation skills with others. Nance lives and farms in the middle of Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in the heart of Chicago. Her house and land are daily practice in permaculture and urban living. But following some recent urban-foraging in Tucson, Arizona, she just happens to be in Philadelphia for this year’s edition of the World Toilet Summit, so she’ll be attending the potluck live at Basekamp, straight from the festival grounds.
Nance runs workshops in greywater conversion, water-harvesting earthworks design and installation, community greenwaste-to-fertility systems, horticultural systems design and green waste composting – including vermicomposting and humanmanure (hence the festival). Since 2006, she has been leading urban-foraging walks — Situationist-inspired deambulations through the spontaneous and cultivated vegetation of the urbanscape, where walkers learn to identify plants, hear their botanical histories and stories of their use by animals and humans, sharing anecdotes of specific experiences with plants. We have talked extensively about integrating artworlds into lifeworlds — but perhaps hastily assuming that those lifeworlds were human constructs or at least inattentive to the more extensive and diverse biodynamics of those worlds. Urbanforaging seems to apply the logic of the free and open software movement to the realm of vegetation and the edible in general.
Transcription
Week 44: Spontaneous Vegetation
[Scott]: Hey everybody! So, I'm here basically with about a dozen, a dozen-ish, people and Nance is here as well. We're a half an hour later getting started with the audio, which is cool. So welcome Nance! It's great to have you here. I'll be sort of like a Talk Show Host for a second. We're here for our weekly series of chats about each week focusing on Plausible Artworlds for the year. Yeah, we normally don't give any info for each person. We sort of just ask you to go ahead and give us a quick start. But, did you want to mention, we sent out this Skype, or this post that had a few, it probably needs a few changes. Do you think we ought to get into that or do you just kind of want to...?
We can chat about that as you go on. Okay, great. Okay, cool. Maybe I'll just ask everybody, if you can type in the text chat if you're having trouble hearing at all and we'll just adjust our speakers and our laptop mic, okay?
I feel like Dora the Explorer..."Can you sing along with me?" I think you can hear me. Cool. Ready, go!
[Nance]: So, I'm guessing that you read what I do in general? There are only a few things I would take issue with from there. But, I don't necessarily call myself an artist. I actually take coverage with being called an artist. But I use it if it allows me to have a wider audience. So I do use aesthetic strategies to open up the dialog around some things that I think are just ignored or maybe not brought up. Earlier, like in the seventies, and then dropped and then the way things are being allowed to work, I do, it contextualizes very doom and gloom (inaudible 2:34.5) around it. So I do use other strategies to view, kind of get people interested in what I'm interested in. Um, I guess I will, because of that, I also never call what I do "farming", we can touch on that later, only if you want too.
And, um, what I do, do in Chicago and now I've just moved to Tucson last week for five or six months and so what I do, do is I do a lot of growing and gathering of my own (inaudible 3:15.3). I'm equally an eater as much as I am somebody who wants to take care my own health with plants. But most of all, this is not a gastronomic that I'm going out there for. I'm really
interested in plants as another species that I live in cities with and usually people are adorned with plants in cities. They're either pruning them or ripping them out after a season and putting other ones in or they're hacking away or mowing them down, not giving them enough water,
feeding them etc. So I'm really interested with monitoring my plant world as I'm in the city. The other thing I really enjoy about Plant World is plants are especially spontaneous vegetation, which is the name of my site. These spontaneous things come up really are markers of what is happening below the soil and also kind of tracing what we are doing to the soil. So I can look at a site and actually tell you about the soil composition by just looking at the collection of plants. Also, a lot of the spontaneous plants are creating a habitat for collimators or animals or etc.
So, I'm kind of working on a more, um, book I'm really interested in ecology. I do think this is really important survival homework if you want to think of it that way. (Laughing) You kind of want to know these things if you're in trouble. Let's say (laughing) you're camping or the grid falls apart (laughing) and you just got to start taking care of yourself, these are my skills. It's just kind of really interesting how plants and animals migrated in the city, which is so different from how humans use it. Humans are always following a grid or their in their cars, where plants and animals are kind of moving and breaking that and coming at things in a much more, the way they navigate and the way they come into places is a lot more interesting. So, I'm interested in that kind of transversing my city in a more, uh, fluent way and a natural way than this constructive grid. So I, sometimes I go foraging, not because I need anything, but because I just want to like get out of techno consumerism of the grid mentality and I just go wandering through the city in a different way. In a different pattern, usually in a different path that I would usually. So foraging is part of my way of getting things. It's the way I navigate. It's part of a much larger kind of lived practices that some people frame as art. But I don't necessarily do that unless it's useful for increasing my audience because I have other, I have larger things I'm pointing at besides myself.
Um, this is kind of an interesting thing and I'm here because I actually came for the World Toilet Organization, which is the other WTO. Um, their summit is today. Toilet Summit. World Toilet Summit at the Convention Center! And one of the things I do, is I poop in a bucket. Okay, in Chicago, and I use that poop as kind of the power source for the growing. So I came, and I was at the World Toilet Summit like all day at the Convention Center. Um, which is awesome because I walked around the Convention Center and I found (25) things which I'm going to pass around and I guess I'm going to get pictures taken with a phone and scanned so everybody who is not physically here can see them. But, um, I found (25) things around the Convention Center within just like a block and a half radius. And, uh, building materials, medicinals, edibles, okay? And some of these medicinals actually are poisons too, so I found some poisons out there. Um, and then just for a quick (inaudible 7:24.3) found (5) other things. So I just want to talk about these things that we found and I also want to address your questions kind of a (inaudible 7:34.8). So, just in general, (2) building materials. You should all know this is pretty great because Chicago has already had their killing frost, where Philadelphia is slightly warmer and so there are a lot of things that are still green. It's a great time to get out there and forage. Anything you see, get out there and get this stuff. Um, almost everything I've collected, except for a few things, are HATED plants. Like weeds, that no one likes. The real spontaneous vegetation that is kind of coming up through our disturbed landscapes 'cause we actually live in really highly disturbed, to put it (laughing), landscapes. And these are the plants that are just making it and are much hated.
So the (2) building materials, you could actually make a roof with these (2) materials. This is, uh, Phragmites, which is a plant that grows in a lot of wet areas and it's used to thatch roofs in a lot of places. So, you can make a pretty durable roof material. And this is Dogbane, being that it's bad for dogs to eat and I wouldn't eat it either. But this is something that you can make rope
from. Really, really fasten it. So, you can actually, with your rope and many of these, you could actually construct yourself a little platform raft, a bed mat or a roof. So I'm just going to pass these around, Phragmites and Dogbane.
[Scott]:
Just so you all on the call know, we're taking photos of these and are gonna upload them, we'll be uploading them Flicker and posting the links here. Or, I'm going to be sending them to Greg, who I think is going to upload them to Flicker. And yeah, Daniel, we're trying to connect to you. For some reason it's not going through but we'll keep trying, okay?
Q [Female Audience Member]: The Dogbane, so you use vine or?
A [Nance]: What you do is you wait, you actually wait until the leaves drop off and it gets dry, okay. And then what you do is you take the stem and you put in on a table or you mash between your fingers. Usually, you put it on a surface, get really long fibers and you can start like you would with dread hair. You start, just kind of, like spinning them together like this. Just with your fingers and work your way up and you're going to have a very, very strong twine that can hold up to 50-75lbs, depending on what you can pull into it.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Dogbane. So it's something you recognize now because when the leaves drop, you don't see it. You're like "where did it go?", so know where it is now. It's all over the place here. Recognize it now, mark your territory and then in about (2) weeks, go back, cut it and start making string (laughing). And then of course, each strand that you weave together can make it stronger and stronger. It's a great thing to do when it gets really calm at night and you just don't know what to do with yourself. You're watching a movie, you might as well make some rope. (Laughing) As you're watching your movie.
But, let me just point out a bunch of, I'm going to pass out a lot of edible greens. Um, by the way, I just put this out. I saw squash, melon, tomatoes just like coming out of people's lunches. Um, just kind of growing all over the place too. Kind of amazing. Underneath those old ruddy train tracks.
Q [Female Audience Member]: Is part of your goal to, uh, influence the public to have less hatred towards these plants and actually embrace the plants?
A [Nance]: Connecting. Yeah, just connecting. I mean, a lot of this is just about connecting to a place and connecting to our bodies in a different way. And, uh, you know. This is like the, you might consume these things. This is kind of a walk through the city where you're not trying
A [Nance]: (continued)
to consume something. It's more about a relational thing. Yeah, so, I'm really interested in people just getting really excited about what's around them.
Speaker: [Nance]:
So let me just see, I've got about a zillion things in here. It's kind of, actually, I have (31) things. So I'm just going to go through really quickly, some of this stuff. Um, so I'm going to go
through some really easy edibles. This is something, you're allowed to take a picture first, and then you can nibble on it if you want. So there's a bunch of edibles that I've found. In fact I've found (10) pure edibles and another (8) that go between medicinal and edible because a lot of food is actually medicinal at the same time. Some of them are Yellow Wood Sorrel and Poor Man's Pepper. Very, very nice kind of citrusy taste and a very peppery taste. Um, a very great stand in for pepper. Sorry everybody out there, I thought there was a video component so I was doing a visual also.
[Scott]:
That's okay, we're taking pics and (inaudible 13:03.3).
Speaker: [Nance]:
Pics and stuff. Okay, so then I'm going to pass around, so we have. See how much everything looks like Clover but each leaf is a green heart as opposed to a round piece?
[Female Audience Member]: Omigod, I used to eat that when I was a kid, and it did taste like lemon.
[Nance]: Yeah! It tastes like lemon! It's called Lemon Grass too, but it's not Lemon Grass.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Okay, a Poor Man's Pepper. And then this is Smartweed that's tangled up with a vine. But this is a Smartweed, it's got flowers on it. Um, and it's a really nice edible green.
[Scott]:
(Audio noise) I'm just going to bring the laptop closer because a few people are having trouble hearing.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Okay, you're going to be the photo stylist. You're our photo stylist. So, I'm going to pass these around, these (3). Go around and look at those. Um, 2 greens that are really closely related to edibles that we eat all the time. One is Wild Amaranth, also known as Pigweed. So Amaranth, if you've had it cooked as greens but also the seed, they pop it and mix it with honey and turn it into one of the, a granola bar that you can find in Mexican stores. And the other thing is Lambs Quarters, also known as Wild Spinach, which is a very, very close relative to Quinoa, which
people are really excited about. So, both of these (2) greens are delicious and they have tons of
protein and they're widely available right now. And this is the last time to collect. Um, on this Lambs, I got two pieces of Lambs Quarters or Goosefoot or Wild Spinach. There are seeds and when those seeds come out, they taste an awful lot like poppy seeds. They're full of protein so they're great to use into breads or cereals or anything you want. So I'm passing those two around this way. Here's some more, this a really great seed head if you want to kind of take these out, they're going to dry out. You'll be able collect these later too. (Inaudible chatter in background 15:13.6 - 15:19.9). Um, you guys can move around too if you want. Edibles I'm thinking.
Okay, then there's this, um, a plant, this is something that, well, here's something else that's just popping up. This is Eposote. If you've ever had beans, this is like a great ingredient in beans. It's really, really fragrant and it's probably naturalized here because you do have a Latin
population. So if you even just smell it, it's really fragrant. It makes beans perfect. (Inaudible
audience comment 15.58.9). Yeah, cause you already made some beans, yeah!
Um, so, I'm trying to, see all my little leaves here, but I'm trying to do, we'll probably go into the edible/medicinal. Very delicious, so leave the leaves a little bit. (Audience chatter 16.20.4 - 166:29.4) But these are Hawthorne Berries and Hawthorne Berries are from just along the ramp near the expressway or something. These are full of vitamin C. They are related to roses and apples. The rose family has apples, crab apples, Hawthorne. Really delicious soft fruit, like soft apple. Very, very good for heart regulating and blood pressure whether you have too low blood pressure or too high blood pressure. So these are known as heart medicine. Fantastic stuff that you can make jams and jellies and just pop into your mouth. There are seeds, but there really...
Q [Nance]: Should I just pass them to you?
A [Male Audience Member]: Definitely.
[Nance]: And then you can nibble, if he take a picture, then you can nibble.
Q [Male Audience Member]: Oh for real?
A [Nance]: Yeah, yeah.
[Male Audience Member]: Great.
Q [Female Audience Member]: What did you call them?
A [Nance]: Hawthorne. Hawthorne Berries. Delicious
[Female Audience Member]: Wow, awesome!
[Nance]: There are seeds.
Q [Female Audience Member]: Were these on Lemon Street?
A [Nance]: (laughing) I don't know what the name of the street is. It's like going down to the
expressway. There's a bunch of trees, there's enough to make jelly. You want to make fruit leather, whatever. You want to dry them and use them in teas, they'd be delicious.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Um, (singing) do do do. So here's another thing. Blood cleanser which is good to have anytime you're sick or just trying to support your health. Let's say you binged once weekend and you just really need to clean yourself out. It's red clover. Mammoth Red Clover, which is this flower right here. It's a nitrogen fixer, so it's making the soil healthy all around. It's a great forage plant for bees. But this edible, but I kind of like it more as a tea. I just pluck this whole thing out and make tea from it. Really easily forage-able from April on. Oh, is that a picture? I'm trying to go through this fast you guys (laughing).
Q [Female Audience Member]: These are the Hawthorn Berries right?
A [Nance]: It's the only berries we got, it's the Hawthorne Berry. So if you just want to chew on the outside of it. It's kind of got a nice tart taste to it, without a lot of seeds. Some Hawthornes are going to be ovals this size, but I haven't seen any here.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Um, Gingko Flower, or Gingko Leaf, I'm sorry. Brain tonic. So anybody who's been in college who wanted to do like herbal brain stimulants cause you're staying up all night to study?
Q [Male Audience Member]: Like smart drugs basically?
A [Nance]: Smart drugs! Right here!
Speaker: [Nance]:
Gingko Biloba, they have it at CVS. But you know what you guys? It's right now. You've got to pluck the leaves when they turn yellow. It's the only time when the chemicals are available so you can totally take these, and you don't eat these, you shove these in alcohol or vinegar or something. Let the medicine go into that then take it as a tincture.
Q [Male Audience Member]: So you're like taking shots of brain juice at the bar?
A [Nance]: That's what you could do! You could make a brain juice martini. Very good! Very good! (Laughing)
Speaker: [Nance]: So anyways, I brought a lot of them in case anybody wanted to make some brain juice (laughing). So, beautiful Gingko. Very old plant. Um...yeah.
Q [Male Audience Member]: Just, even with saying, asking, where is all of this verbarium from?
A [Nance]: Uh, directly around the Convention Center. The Philadelphia Convention Center.
Q [Male Audience Member]: I just find this all fantastic and magic and very old. And we don't have this knowledge anymore because it's been engineered out of us. And, can you maybe talked it out...
[Nance]: Nibble on a leaf you guys, you want to pull a little leaf there and just nibble it. Sorry.
Q [Male Audience Member]: It's not a conspiracy theory or anything, but how did it come to be that no one knows other than a few people?
A [Nance]: Well, the birth of Capitalism and the death, and the birth of modern medicine are about the same time. And it was...
Q [Male Audience Member]: And it got engineered away from the public?
A [Nance]: Yeah.
Q [Female Audience Member]: I wonder if that was intentional though or if it was someone (inaudible 20:44.8) because when they found places for medicinal uses in faraway places that they (inaudible 20:52.5) some sort of form to bring.
A [Nance]: Well, you know, it was as people moved from more wood, connection to woods and populations grew made villages they moved further away from the woods. And further away from that plant source and they moved towards agriculture. And it was that kind of move where they were becoming more horticulturalists or agriculturalists than they were gathering. So, and there was this split from alchemy to modern medicine where alchemy was very much as above, so below microcosm and macrocosm, this idea that everything is relation to each other and everything is one but in different pattern sequences to understanding extractions of certain plants. It just got specialized so it moved away. Also, women moved into the physician. So there, it's pretty interesting trace of that.
Q [Female Audience Member]: (inaudible 22:02.9) education also, like I just saw this documentary about the English talking about global warming and this is how they see it happening and they're really kind of each one of the scientists would come in and who are all concerned about the polar bears not having a habitat and the seals. And they're like, you know, polar bears, they're fine. They're adapting, you know. And the biologists tell us not to hunt seal but that's just part of their life. Their like livelihood in their (inaudible 22:46.30) and I guess they needed sort of like more education, as education goes up the connection to the Earth goes down. Like sort of an understanding? It's sort of this weird indoors...you know, I don't know. You're stupid, you're smart but I'm drinking....
A [Nance]: Well, here I am at this conference where people are talking about basically, does poop really break down into soil? Have they done visibility studies? Have the engineers worked on this? But doesn't it stink? How long does it take? Like everybody's all panicked about it. I'm like "you guys, it's not the technology, it's the user". The problem is not the technology called composting, called like the natural process of decay and decomposition. It's the user and
what you understand of it. So it's amazing when all these people who are working in developing
countries are just like "yeah, everybody, that's how everybody deals with stuff to compost their poop and then they grow food in that". (Laughing) And it's safe if you do it right, it's never, you don't question the natural processes, you question the mindset of the user. The paradigm of the user. And I think that's what is so interesting is that like the Royal Academy of Art in London is studying this and MIT and all these people are talking about it and I'm just sitting there going "Wow". Like because it is this separation and how do we connect back in a way that we're comfortable and that seems to be the problem. How do we connect back? It's just, it was amazing. It was super interesting in that kind of way. Um.....
Q [Nance]: So does everyone like the Hawthorne Berries?
A [Female Audience Member]: I love that texture! Nice little....
[Nance]: There's bigger ones, but this is a, it still has a nice kind of rose hip thing
Speaker: [Nance]:
Um, alright! Getting through this! Goldenrod. Fantastic diet plant. Really, really good for colds
and flu. Mullen. One of the most, oooh I love those pictures! Um, Mullen. One of the most important asthma plants ever. Asthma, for asthma. Which is really big in Chicago. There's two cold plants in Chicago and a lot of people have asthma, so this is a fantastic respiratory/bronchial clearer right here. You can smoke it. You can dry it, light it on fire and just inhale the smoke from this. Or roll it. It's great. Cut your tobacco with this and help your lungs. (Laughing)
Um, so, you know. Here's another diet plant called Poke. You want to smoosh it and smear it on paper for the, the fantastic. When it's really popping up, it's edible. At this point it's totally poisonous. Birds love it. It makes a beautiful magenta dye.
Q [Male Audience Member]: So what would happen if we eat that?
A [Nance]: Don't eat it.
Q [Male Audience Member]: Okay.
A [Nance]: Let's not find out.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Okay, yeah. But I would squish this and drag, drag your finger like little finger paint. But it's all over the place and birds find it completely edible. So great diet plant.
Q [Female Audience Member]: What was the name again?
A [Nance]: Pokeweed. Or if you're African American, it's just called Poke. Like a Poke Salad. It's super big in the south. So, I learned that through some African American's who were like "what? You never had a Poke Salad?" And I'm like "I thought it was poisonous" and they're like "not when it's young!" And I'm like "well..." You'd have to be able to identify it when it's just a little chute coming out of the ground, which is, you need to be a little bit more trained in differentiating the green stuff to be able to do that.
Q [Female Audience Member]: It's like potatoes coming out of the ground?
[Female Audience Member]: I used to squash that when I was a kid.
A [Nance]: Yeah, but they're not in the same family. They're not in the nitrate family.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Um, Chicory and Dandelion are great to dig up now for roots. They make a fantastic coffee substitute. Also something you could cut your coffee with. Um, Mugwort, one of my favorite plants ever. A great, calming aid. It opens up; it's what Chinese use in their Moxa sticks or in cupping. It brings blood to the surface. It makes your headaches go away. It opens up your head. It is used traditionally by alchemists. Alchemists were using it to open up plant communication. So by smoking this, you actually are bringing more blood to the brain which is great also if you're looking for just clearing your head. And it brings a heightened awareness that doesn't last but it does do it. It's very gentle and amazing.
Q [Female Audience Member]: What was that?
A [Nance]: Mugwort.
Speaker: [Nance]:
It was something that warped the mug, so this was originally used a bit here until the Catholic Church mandated Hops. The thing about this, it's a bitter beer and people had lucid dreaming with their beer when their drinking as opposed to falling asleep when they drank beer. Hops is related to Marijuana. It puts you to sleep. This wakes you up. So people were drinking a lot of beer and were just kind of, you know, they just kept going. The Catholic Church said "you know, people are getting to crazy in the streets, we're going to mandate Hops. We're going to mandate a sedative to bitter the beers so they'll eventually stop the celebration". This is Mugwort. This is the mug. Awesome. I was like "yeah, can I have some of this?" (Laughing)
Q [Male Audience Member]: So you found all of this around the Convention Center area? Just earlier? Wow.
A [Nance]: Yeah.
[Female Audience Member]: It's silvery on the underside.
[Nance]: Yeah, silvery underside. Look at the underside of the leaves.
Q [Male Audience Member]: (inaudible 29:21.0)
A [Nance]: It's really bittering. So if you take a little bit of that leaf and you put it in your mouth, you'll be like "ooh, bitter".
Q [Male Audience Member]: (inaudible 29:29.0-29.34.0)
A [Nance]: Yes. You could use that instead of Hops. You don't, right.
(Inaudible audience chatter 29:39.0 - 29:47)
Speaker: [Nance]:
Okay, well here's some more Mugwort. It's my favorite thing so you just keep passing it around. Alright.
Q [Female Audience Member]: You said we could nibble on this?
A [Nance]: What?
Q [Female Audience Member]: You said we could nibble on this?
A [Nance]: If you nibble on it, the Koreans make a like a bean cake, a green bean cake with Mugwort. It's an unusual taste
Q [Female Audience Member]: That's what I needed to hear.
A [Nance]: Just a little bit of it. If you have any Korean places, you can probably get a green bean cake that's flavored with this. It's very bitter. It's not, it's not. You might want to chase it down with a potato chip.
(Laughter)
Speaker: [Nance]:
Plants right now. This is Major Skinner. Ah! I gotta get through this man! A Major Skinner Plantain. Not related to plantain, the unripe banana. This is raw leaf plantain and I have a narrow leaf plantain somewhere. And, oh, that's the pile up. Okay. Anyway, plantain, in this state, the leaf is something that you chew up. Beautiful! Nice. Good job!
So, I have to tell you guys, Poke Berry, fermented, the ink, fermented is what the Declaration of Independence was written in. I'm in Philadelphia! And, it fades to that brown color. It was written in Poke. Written in fuchsia. Can you imagine? Fuchsia? The Declaration of Independence? Yeah! (Laughing) So, you can use it as a writing and drawing ink but knowing it will fade out to this beautiful brown color when it oxidizes. Write your manifestos in Poke! (Laughing)
Uh, plantain, great stuff. Skinner, it pulls things out. And it also, it pulls infection out. It pulls bee stings out. It's cooling, if you burn yourself like sunburn or you get burnt on the stove or something, this is the plant that you want to have around. And you can either put it directly on your skin, or what I do is I usually chew up the leaf and let my saliva activate it and make it a nice cud and then use it right on there. So if anybody wants to chew up a leaf and just see how cold it gets, it turns into a little ice cube. Very, very cooling. Um, and ah, I use it. I had poison oak all over my legs and I took some of this, I took some water, I took some oatmeal and I ground it up like a smoothie and just took my clothes off and just slathered all over where I had it. And it literally took it out of my body. But it also was so cooling that I had to put on a sweatshirt in the summertime because I was so chilled. Because it's so cooling. Very, very amazing plant. You know, all plants are either cooling or warming to various degrees like this. And then, at this time of year, it makes this, if I can find it... It makes this! The seed head! The seed head, if you crush it, these seeds and you eat them you have smooth moves. It's like a really great laxative! But not like stomach gripping, but like really, really nice. You would just use these seeds a little bit. Sprinkle them on something.
Q [Female Audience Member]: And what, what are they called?
A [Nance]: The plantain seed.
Q [Female Audience Member]: Oh, the plantain seed.
A [Nance]: Yes. The plantain leaf is good for skin and the plantain seed is good for smooth moves. There ya go!
Q [Female Audience Member]: I'm going to write exactly that! (Laughing)
A [Nance]: Smooth moving! Oh my gosh. (Laughing) Smooth moves.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Um, this is called Fleece Flower and you should look at how spotted the stem is. Fleece Flower tasted like Rhubarb. Not at this time of year, you've got to take it a little earlier, it gets kind of pithy and woody at this. But you don't even have to grow Rhubarb because it's growing all over the place and you can just pick things that would be indistinguishable from Rhubarb, except that the shape is round as opposed to like a stem that's more fluted. So this is Fleece Flower and it grows about 6'. It's all over the place. There you go. Are you guys bored yet?
[Female Audience Member]: No! I'm glad you brought these!
[Scott]: We definitely want to get a chance to talk about them at the end, but it's also to see the examples too.
Speaker: [Nance]:
Okay. And then I'm just going to probably lay down some other examples. I do want split this pod and I do want to talk about this plant. Wild Carrot. You can did it up and use it as a Wild Carrot. It's almost like carrot parsnip. When this sets seeds, it's called Queen Anne's Lace, that's how most people know it. When this sets seed, it has a very, very spicy texture, really delicious. But it also is something that stops a fertilized egg taking hold. So if you want to look into it, look at some feminist herbal sites, you can read up all about it. But I would not use it as your only method of birth control. But, it's been long founded that it stops that from happening so there's a lot of people that take about a teaspoon of the seed and put it in their bread or something or have a piece of toast or something and they basically have a really good preventative. There's something about it that makes it really slippery and the egg can't adhere so it's shed. Wild Carrot. And that's really well documented you guys.
Um, I'm going to just talk about, I'll just talk about the one last thing on the table and then we'll open it up. This is Witch Hazel, which I don't remember what this is. And this is a plant, that unlike some of the other things that are so hated, this is something that is cultivated and when you cut it, since it's a shrub, you're actually taking from that plant. So you cut it very gently, and you usually cut it during the wintertime because what you need is the bark. And Witch Hazel is for the skin. Like people use it for skin washes and stuff. It's antiseptic and helps alleviate the oils in the skin. So anyway, this is a pod that you would take after the (Inaudible 36:36.0) leaves and you take this and you strip the bark off it, just as you would with Willow, which is aspirin. It's what aspirin was derived from was Willow bark. So this is something else you would need.
When you, the ethics of foraging, or when you cut things gently so that you don't hurt the plant. Um, I guess, I'll stop there because my mouth is getting dry and there's more on the table. But we'll just stop with whatever I covered at this point. And open up to whatever.
Q: [Female Audience Member]: I'm a lot more interested in your philosophy and (inaudible 37:16.4) philosophy and (inaudible 37:21.3) with this knowledge? Are you trying to spread a notion of urban foraging to everyone or?
A: [Nance]: Yeah, I have a really strong ethic to that. A lot of people are out there because they see dollar signs and there are a lot of people who are foraging to create gastronomic
innovations or they're cutting things and they're selling them as foraged foods or something. But there, you know, this is a wild craft and this is something that I take gently from. Like I only take what I need and so when I...
Q: [Female Audience Member]: But would you recommend that I do that and that we all do that?
A: [Nance]: Ah, I think that we could
[Scott]: Would you mind if I just rephrased, or not rephrase, but reiterate that just slightly for the people that couldn't hear? Actually, not to rephrase but to kind of like, I, I was also attending to something else but I think you were asking just at least generally, about Nance's general philosophy? Okay, yeah. Just for the people who couldn't hear your question.
A [Nance]: So I think there's a lot, I mean, these are ethical issues and I believe in connecting to our plant world as opposed to just, in that consumptive way. Consumptive in that I just want to eat this so I'm going to buy it at the store or buy it from the farmer's market. I think there's another way to connect. Because I think that the foraging aspect connects to us as being animals because we're all into like looking for things and discovering them is really cool when we find something and just like. I feel like it's kind of misplaced in our shopping habits, you know? We go look for something. I'm going to find it. I'm going to buy it. Yay! And I have this thing. So I think, I think this is a simpler way to kind of hunt and search that is really old in us. And I think you can do it in a way really does not damage our environment by taking only what we need for something. We know what to do with it when we take it. And then, also, I mean, this is the seed time so I literally, this isn't ready yet, but this is Evening Primrose. If you've ever had Evening Primrose oil or (inaudible 0:39:43.6) have seen this, this is something that when it sets seed, I just, when I go for walks I just like crush things and I just plant it. I just like throw the seeds around all the time (laughing). You know, I'm like "More dandelions! More!" and it's just like this also really insane wonderful thing to do. Just keep planting the sidewalk cracks and you know, in desperate little areas that are just rubble and garbage and you just get seeds in there because all these plants are the planarian plants and they're the ones that are dealing with all this super polluted, yucky soil and making it better. And building those soils so that other plants that are a little more delicate can start taking hold. So I'm all about that too. So I naturally seed as much as I'm gathering.
Q [Scott]: So Nance, we have a question about if you could speak about the toxicity of plants in cities. Now do you mean plants as kind of (inaudible 0:40:42.0) for the toxicity of cities or the reverse? Because that's what it sort of sounded like.
A [Nance]: Polluted soils. She's talking about polluted soils or air.
[Scott]: Alright, I see.
A [Nance]: Yeah, that's always one of the first questions. We have 9 feet of skin on our bodies that have a bazillion pours in them. So, we're super porous to our environment. We also have these things called lungs that are breathing in suspended particles, so all the air pollution is coming through us, anything. We're breathing in soil, we're breathing in dust, we're breathing in
things that are suspended in the air. And then we're breathing, you know, we're breathing, we're coming in contact all the time with stuff. So, we're not that walled off from our environment. We're in a constant relationship. So it's really about what kind of relationship do you want to have with your city and where do you choose to forage? So you wouldn't necessarily go someplace that's the dog park for example and start picking up your leaves that you're going to use in your salad. In the dog park. You're gonna, if you're going to go someplace that's a little bit more, cleaner? And, you're not going to necessarily forage underneath the expressway unless you want to have a connection to that place.
Q [Male Audience Member]: So eating maybe like homeopathy (inaudible 0:42:21.2)
A [Nance]: Yeah. Because we're taking it anyway. So there, there is this kind of metaphorical, kind of homeopathy kind of like what's outside of you, you have to take in. It's outside. But yeah. You do that with, if you're allergic to certain, let's say you're allergic to like Ragweed or something. And, ah, you have allergies to Ragweed. What you could do is take in Ragweed or honey where bees would be (inaudible 0:43:02.9) Ragweed and you're taking in part of that Ragweed and it'll help with your allergies kind of around that seasonal, So there is this kind of homeopathic, direct homeopathic relationship also.
Q [Male Audience Member]: There's 3 different types of fire alleviation or processes that. One is the plant fixes the soil in the soil (inaudible 0:43:29.2) and then there's another one where it kind of pulls it up into the plant and then the third is can actually process toxins and get it out. So it's a combination them all, this stuff, isn't it? So what you're eating may not be poisonous, it might have already done it's thing, but it still might be in its roots. But until we know more...
A [Nance]: Yeah, and certain plants actually will have certain affinities for certain kinds of things and will hold them in different places and so you can know more about that, you can read up about that too. But I mean, I would argue that, an apple that you buy at the liquor store? Gosh, you know, how long has it sat there? Where did it come from? Um, and Lambs Quarters that you get in the crack of the sidewalk? I'd probably want to do the Lambs Quarters because it's fresh. It's in my neighborhood. I had the connection with picking it. Then, to buy like an apple that traveled from wherever and used whatever kinds of pesticides. So I think there's, you just find out where you are on that spectrum.
Q [Male Audience Member]: Is it better to forage than to shop at whole foods?
A [Nance]: Dumpster dive for whole foods?
(Laughter)
Q [Female Audience Member]: Is that really a question?
A/Q [Scott]: Yes, actually it is but, I was just curious. Some people have criticized the neoliberal sort of directive. The sort of guilt relief. This kind of like warm fuzzy feeling that we all get from buying organic products. At the same time, it's not to say that we really do want to dump chemicals all over the place, but that somehow it makes not be as libratory as it appears on
the surface. I was just curious because there's some kind of practice that you have that's about basically, I think it's a little bit more direct. Still, but I was curious as to what you thought about this. There's another question afterwards that we can get to. But you were on this question about buying the apple from the liquor store and I was just thinking, well what about buying grapes from an organic market or whole foods or whatever.
A [Nance]: Well, I was in the Reading market today and they have this little local market place. A food farm stand. And I got really excited because they actually account from where it comes from. In that case, I'm like okay, all this stuff is in season and nothing, it's not January. The apples haven't been here forever. The celeriac root and all these things that they had there. So that's not whole foods. That's one step closer to a producer as it is to grow your own. But the thing about wild foods is that they're really unusual tasting and they're actually higher in their nutritive values. And, so many of them crossover into medicines so when you're eating you're also eating medicine. Or, as you pointed out, making a cocktail from Ginkgo leaves. Great idea!
(Laughter)
So, I mean, our food has been our medicine for so long and then we kind of got away from it. And seriously, I didn't find any, but there's wild iceberg lettuce and all lettuce comes from wild lettuce and wild lettuce is soporific and it's slightly psychoactive, which is suminous sedative. Where iceberg lettuce is not, obviously. So there's this kind of distancing between cultivated foods and wild foods that's pretty distinct. So if you want a little bit of an unusual taste or if you want that more packed vitamins or that medicinal quality to what you're eating, you can always incorporate some of them in your foods.
Q [Scott]: Stephen, would you prefer to ask this out loud or would you prefer me to ask this?
A [Stephen]: No, I can ask it. I can kind of rephrase it and maybe get a little bit more of a context. I think the context has to come through the series of discussions, which we've had over the preceding weeks, one of the things that I think Plausible Artworlds has been most venomitly hostile to several different things. One has been art that's pretty much on spectatorship. Another one is the whole regime of ownership. But, I think the third one is nonetheless been on an object of an awful lot of critical discussion. I mean, in this series, and that is the whole problem of expert culture. So, I was just wondering Nance, how you engage with expert culture because in a sense, when you talk about vegetation, you do it from a perspective but I was wondering, if for you, that's the perspective of expertise and of expert culture or if it's a different type of engagement. And if so, how does it differ? And that kind of links to my second question, which is really not a second question. Sorry, I mean, I don't want to ask too much at once. But it's the whole problem that you seem to have with being accused of being an artist or being misidentified with one and I can certainly sympathize with not wanting to fall into that can of worms. Why not redefine what it means to engage with art and be comfortable and just sort of de-dramatize the thing? Why push that off and why not be more concerned about taking a distance from expert culture?
A [Nance]: Oh, I do take a great distance from that. It's kind of infused in all my projects. In terms of expert, I really believe that this popular culture. All my projects are very much about, kind of, teaching. Teaching and passing it on and sharing things informally and through discussion. I wasn't trained as an artist, I mean, that's part of it. I didn't go to school for that. And I think that my big problem with art and artists is that they define themselves as artists and it doesn't reflect what they live and experience with their practice. And so there's a lot of people now really interested in ecological issues but they don't invest the time, and I'm talking about years and years and years of relationship. This is more experiential than it is being an expert. It's about many trials and errors and many, I don't know. It's not about a project. It's not about an audience. It's something I live that people started asking me to share and so talk about it. Does that answer anything for you?
Q [Stephen]: No, that's a great answer. In fact, that's exactly, I mean, I think. Anyways, what you say about artists is dismally true. I mean, in the conventional definition about what artists are up to. I just like to think that there are some which are doing things a bit differently. But certainly, in terms of your answer, the thing is though that when you're talking about plants, you talk about it with an incredibly vast and rich amount of knowledge compared to the rest of us. How do the rest of us engage in that conversation if not in a, I mean, how do you control the inherent hierarchy which is liable to emerge? I hear what you're saying about critiquing expert culture. How do you control for that?
A [Nance]: Well, I mean, I'm just trying to encourage. Just by, like, when I found out there was no video I really wanted people to be able to see the plants I was talking about and to kind of take them in the form that I have them as opposed to trying to look them up on Google images or something because you might not see exactly what I picked now in Philadelphia off the streets, in the form that's available now to use. So, I try to level it by talking about it this way. I don't, it's always about passing on the information. Some people do ask me to do an herbal consultation with them and I do that pretty reluctantly because I'd rather have them start building the relationships with the plants that might help their kinds of conditions or concerns slowly and in a way that they would want to as opposed to looking at a straight I.D. intake kind of way. I think just how I talk and educate people is about encouraging people to build their own relationship to these things and find out which of these plants that they want to use and how. It's probably not enough for you but it's all I can say (Laughing).
[Male Audience Member]: This seems to be, to the gentleman, to Stephen. It seems to be, in this context, more about sharing the feeling. The spirit here seems to be more about sharing than (inaudible 0:54:13.08) down, like authority or unknowing. It's really more about sharing. That's how the spirit feels. And two, just the aesthetic of what's happening here, Stephen, is just the photos and the concept of walking and being in a space as an art move or an art experience seems to really have happened here for Nance today in Philadelphia.
Q [Stephen]: Yeah, I hear you. You know what, that atmosphere is kind of infectious because I'm feeling it even here 15,000 miles away. But, it was just kind of wondering about the ethics of that sharing, which is something of an artistic experience or an aesthetic experience. But describing that to someone who is not trained as an artist doesn't necessarily feel uncomfortable as being described as one. That on the one hand. On the other hand, this type of knowledge that we've largely forgotten in western civilization is widely shared in places like (Inaudible 0:55:33.6) and Southern India and in Chinese herbal medicine. It's an ancestral tradition, which is very much ongoing. But it's also in those contexts, very much part of an expert culture. So, I'm just trying to ask for a kind of a precision or a precise bearing about how to describe that atmosphere of sharing without it either lapsing into art or lapsing into expertise.
A [Nance]: What are really interesting when I forage is the people who notice me. Either think I'm weird like something is going on and I have some kind of affliction to what I'm doing or they'll start a conversation. Most people who start a conversation with me are people who actually identify with what's going on. A lot of them are in Chicago and a lot of them are Eastern European who might not even speak English but they come up to me and they nod their head and they point at the plant and they're like "oh yeah". And so I have a lot, I've had Greek, Italian, Chinese, almost all the Eastern European countries. The Poles, the Russians. This is still part of their culture is that you do connect to plants as your own, kind of more than just what's going on in your kitchen. And I don't think these immigrants would actually come up to me for any other, would have access to me as a person unless I wasn't connecting with plants, and they know it too. So that's pretty interesting. I also connect with some homeless people from time to time who tend to know about who are really resourceful and do their own foraging. They will usually get into a conversation with me and will actually want to know what's happening with it and they're really good students of it since they're so disenfranchised of standard culture. So that sharing happens through brilliant form just like encounter. It's really cool.
(Audio feedback and random noise 0:57:49.2 - 0:57:59.8)
[Scott]: Yeah, we can hear a lot of typing. And I'm definitely guilty of that because we're using this laptop as a mic for this side of the chat. So everyone out there's apologies. I don't think it's to be helped unless I just don't type anything.
(Chatter and noise 0:58:11.7 - 0:58:25.3)
[Scott]: Penelope, do you want to ask that out loud or do you want someone here to do that?
[Penelope]: If I speak, can I be heard?
[Scott]: Yeah, we can hear you really well.
Q [Penelope]: I was just asking if you about, I came late, so the conversation about being aware of one's environment and of the usefulness in creating a fuller understanding of where an individual or society is in time and place, literally and metaphysically.
A [Nance]: Yeah. I don't always look at plants as usefulness but I'm aware of what they're doing because they're not necessarily there for us. They're there because the conditions are right and the communities are there. You can look at areas and not get close to them and from a distance determine "when was the last time that soil was disturbed?" Like dug up or moved around. You can literally tell that. My friend Brooke here was talking about the plants that I was finding underneath the old Reading tracks and then the plants on the Reading Railroad tracks which haven't been used for a long time and I was like "oh, that stuff up there is going to be rocking." Like it's going to be really advanced, like pioneering plants and much more bio-diversed because it's a real open pathway for the wind to carry stuff. It's not disturbed. People aren't going there to cut it down and spray chemicals all over it. It's, that would be a great place to go and forage exactly for that reason. So usefulness but also just seeing our pathways and what our pathways have done to land and how they've carried plants around. Eposote, the lemon balm that I found. The squash. The tomatoes that I found are all from us just like dropping sandwiches. (Laughing) Or half of a sandwich wrapper or something. (Laughing)
Q [Penelope]: I'm hearing an interest in the interaction. Whether it's from near or far, between humanity and the world. Whether its nature or you can expand that to other realms. But you're limiting right now to plants.
A [Nance]: They trace animal migrations too. Like birds obviously are eating and depositing things. Mice and other furry animals have things stuck to them and they drop them. So a lot of migrations. Sorry, does that throw you off?
Q [Penelope]: So it's the interaction?
A [Nance]: Yeah.
Q [Penelope]: Interesting.
A [Nance]: For example, the Eposote that was found. The only culture I know that uses that, it is a vermifuse, which helps you get rid of worms. Intestinal worms, which is not needed in this culture but sometimes maybe. But it's used in Mexican culture uses it in beans. So it's a mark of seeds blown, dropped, scattered from somebody who was cultivating it in the city and it got out. And that's fascinating. So it's only naturalized in cities that have a Mexican population. It wouldn't be out there. That's what's really interesting
Penelope: Thanks. I'm thinking.
(Laughter)
Q [Female Audience Member]: So what is this bean that you just broke open?
A [Nance]: Honey Locust and it's a street tree. Well, you can kind of taste it now. Earlier in the season there's long pods that come off of trees and when their green you can open up these pods and there's meat inside that somewhat tastes like mango and papaya. It's good. So I was like "oh, yeah." You can suck on a little bit; it's kind of like dusty date at this point. Last night at a gathering over at Brooke's, we had Honey Locust Ginger soda that someone made and he just dropped the whole pod in there, I don't know what state, but it was quite sweet and delicious. It was a really nice soda-pop that he had made from this
Q [Female Audience Member]: So it's just like an edible I guess, not medicinal.
A [Nance]: It's an edible that's fixing nitrogen in the soil, making it available for plants around. It's in the bean family.
Q [Scott]: So, you were talking about the different kinds of pathways. Well, I guess we'll just finish that slide and we'll get to Lisa's because I think it actually might segway into Lisa's question from earlier. It seems like you're kind of also talking about ways to burn new neuropath ways as well? You're talking about medicinal purposes. You mentioned earlier, or at least you implied. I don't think you really talked about psychotropic plants. You did describe some state altering herbs or whatever or plants. So, I had a question about that as well because they're definitely. I'm not necessarily going to say. Can you describe more specifically how this is political? I mean, I think because you have been. I was just curious, you know, beyond weighing if it's better to buy food at your local organic market or is it better to just pick it? I think there are also other things about social transformation, other interests that you have, at least from what I've seen, of your other work that kind of carries through. So I was curious about the sort of mind altering experience changing side of this and if there's a direct relationship between some of the plants' chemical properties and if that's been part of your interest or if you've just kind of avoided that altogether because of the obvious "are you guys growing pot on the railroad tracks?"
(Laughter)
A [Nance]: I don't, actually, I'm pretty sensitive to plants so I can just be around this plant, or just bring this plant up to my head and kind of get some of that from it. I don't necessarily need to unhinge like some people do. So I don't necessarily indulge that way. Because this is all about that more direct experience, that creative direct experience, in our environment and I feel like I get multiple highs all day just being out there looking at things in a different way. And I don't necessarily need to do that, but I do, there are some plants that I do use as kind of help through certain stuck places that I'll get into. But I don't necessarily need to take them in as much as somebody who is super entrenched in dominate culture.
Q [Scott]: You think maybe you're more sensitive to your environment because you're in it?
A [Nance]: Yeah. Well, I try to be. (Laughing)
Q [Scott]: I think it's plenty undoubtable that you really are.
A [Nance]: (laughing) Yeah, I don't necessarily go for the heavy hits. I know people who do because they have to make the break in their head so they go for stuff. I just need to think about doing that and that's enough (laughing). So I think it's really about where you're at and what works for you and what you're trying to get at. But I don't necessarily need to go into really strong medicinal plants, which all the really strong medicinal plants are the poisons. I mean, they're poisonous; you just take them in lesser extent so you can drop into the mind alteration before you get into the illness.
(Laughter)
Severe stomach cramps and....
Q [Chris]: What would be the difference between using plants as medicine and using it as food?
A [Nance]: There are 4 groupings of plants, roughly, in this idea those certain plants you can use for food every day. Everyday food. Other plants, you will only use every once in awhile as food because they're a little bit more active. So these would be tonics. Things that you would take if you had a certain low grade condition. For example, Gingko would be a tonic and not a food. Dandelion, Lambs Quarters...all those things would be foods. When you get into stimulate or sedative, I mean coffee and tobacco are really clear stimulants. So they're at that level. And the last level is poison. Which is where you're psychotropic's, your strong psychotropic's rest with it as well as super poisonous plants. So, food is every day. Dandelion is a food, but dandelion is also a really good liver and kidney cleanse. But it's safe enough to use every day. It's just a matter of what you're looking for.
Q [Female Audience Member]: I have a question about the Gingko (inaudible 1:09:37.8)
A [Nance]: No. By the way, if you have a female tree and you want to roast the seed inside of the stinky vomitty smelling fruit, it tastes like a boiled peanut. It's really delicious. (Laughing) But you've got to get around the other stuff. (Laughing)
Q [Female Audience Member]: (inaudible 1:10:01.8) and once the, just because I'm in this field once a week and once the nuts are visible and white with all the stinky stuff already gone you can collect them (inaudible 1:10:16.7).
A [Nance]: Yeah and as long as they're not dry, they're really good just to boil and eat. They're really nice.
Q [Female Audience Member]: (inaudible 1:10:24.8 - 1:10:36.6)
A [Nance]: I'm going to answer Alyssa's question because Scott's not here. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Gathering knowledge through a relationship with your plants, animals, whatever you have around you. Rocks. I mean, you could study; other people study architecture and human behavior. But, I tend to gravitate towards plants and animals so I studied that. I study weather a little bit and interested in soil. So, mostly because they're not, well, they might be, kind of related to human culture, they tend to be a little bit on their own. I'm interested in those other dynamics, slower dynamics or quicker ways of telling time. Or slower ways of telling time. So yeah...being outside is how I gather my knowledge. I just go around and again, I'm interested in plants. I'm more interested in plants than I am in people. Really frankly, it's true. I couldn't handle living in Chicago so I just started going for walks and looking at plants and that's how I got started plant connecting. That way.
Q [Alyssa]: So would it be safe to say that going out and kind of foraging and trying to just kind of experiment for yourself. Is that safe in an area like a city? I guess I'm asking are there many poisonous plants in an area like this and is there even enough that if you were to eat them it would be damaging?
A [Nance]: Yeah, you've gotta be careful. There is a yoga instructor that killed herself in Chicago because she misidentified a plant and used it in her smoothie and drank it then had severe stomach cramps and died.
Q [Alyssa]: What plant was that, just out of curiosity?
A [Nance]: She thought she was getting Comfrey, which I didn't find. It's a broad, little bit fuzzy leaf. Instead she collected Fox Glove. Comfrey grows in sun and Fox Glove grows in the woods. Fox Glove is highly poisonous and she did a smoothie of Fox Glove and died. So, there are some lookalikes we didn't talk so much about. Lookalikes are certain families that are generally safe, and certain families that are not that you have to like pick and choose. You go at it very slowly, everything I showed. Everything that was taken a picture of is safe for consumption. But you should look into it. It's definably something you should watch out for.
[Female Audience Member]: Get a field guide or something I guess.
A [Nance]: Yeah, there's a lot of different plant guides. I probably have 30 or 40 books that are different kinds of guides and orientations to medicinal and edible plants from different cultures and areas of the world. Ecosystems.
Q [Female Audience Member]: Are there any that are geared towards urban foraging (inaudible 1:14:01.1) that you know of?
A [Nance]: No, I'm supposed to be writing that, so I don't know. Not so much. These are super common plants. These are very common in Europe. I heard there are some French folks here. Most all these plants. Stephen, you're over there man. You get out in Paris, you're going to be finding a lot of these plants! (Laughing) In the sidewalk cracks in Paris! Almost all of these plants that I showed you are either Asian or European plants anyway. Very few of them are native American plants.
Q [Stephen]: Nance, since you're talking about European and Chinese plants....
[Scott]: Stephen, sorry, sorry! You couldn't hear this but someone else was just asking a question.
[Stephen]: Oh sorry! I'm shutting up!
Q [Scott]: That's okay. In fact, I wonder if this is a good time to try out this mic. Would you guys indulge me for 15 second maximum? Because we actually have a microphone, and if we have it, I could just pass it around and it would be much easier. Okay, great. This may not really... It may not really work, but it might. I'll try one thing.
(Audio crashes)
[Scott]: Uh-oh. Where'd you go? Lost the audio!
(Thumping and more thumping)
Q [Scott]: Alright, can you hear us again now?
[Penelope]: You're back!
[Scott]: Aright, well, never mind. We'll sort this out later. That was interruption of you.
Q [Stephen]: I was just curious; you said you were spending some time in Tucson? I was curious about the different cities and how foraging (inaudible 1:16:24.3) are and traveling.
A [Nance]: Well, Tucson is extremely different.
(Laughter)
I love it. I just have to amp up and go get to learn a bunch of new plants. I've been eating a lot of different cactus fruit on my hikes. I'm eating Juju Bees; the fruit is heightened right now. Mesquite Pods. To me it's just like a whole, you start connecting to your landscape. You understand why people ate what they did and why they built their pharmacopeias around the plants because it makes sense for the environment. So, I think it's a really great way to get into placeness. Particularly someplace like the Sonoran Desert. It is what it is. There's a lot of disturbance, but there's all these native plants in the Sonoran there. So just by taking them in, you get to internalize the place and are like "oh, I understand why the (inaudible 1:17:30.0) eat what they eat because it makes sense. Because it's available, but all the tastes aren't making any sense. Or like when I was in Australia. Bush food totally makes sense. Like, you get it, when you start eating off the landscape, you're like "oh, wow". You start getting into the headspace of the people. We always think about how we shape a place, but the place shapes us. So I'm really interested in that. Our weeds are the most prevalent and they're the ones that we need. They're our best simple medicines and it's all because we keep (explicative 1:18:09.05) the soils with our bulldozers and sidewalk plans or the house wreckages. Whatever construction. Deconstruction. Like all the plants that are here are exactly the ones that we need for kidney, liver. They're all about the stress and pollutants in the body. The respiratory plants to help clear our lungs. They all can help us with the ailments that we have in our environments. (Chewing) That was a project. (Laughing) That's art!
(Laughter)
I pushed, I planned a shopping cart full of pre-depression era corn for like 60 days around Chicago. Until it made...corn. (Chewing) And then I had the big corn rows in the gallery. That's art. That's what I call art. (Laughing)
Q [Scott]: Stephen, did you want to pick back up on what you were saying?
Q [Stephen]: I don't know why, but when I was saying, I think I was just kind of on the rebound with what Nance had been saying. I was going to say that I know that in China, and definitely in France, one of the major foraging targets is mushrooms. The thing was, when you go mushroom hunting, even when we talked a few weeks ago with that group of artists/mushroomers, you realize there is incredible diversity (inaudible 1:20:09.0) people. There is an incredible diversity of skills that come together among mushroom hunters. There's really no sort of expert mushroom hunters, they're all kind of fascinated by this mystique of, not so much the use value of mushroom, and of course they are interested in that. They're interested in the ones that taste good, the ones that can kill you, the ones that can do this or that or the other thing. But really, it's the fact that mushrooms are kind of like in the shadows and they're almost a metaphorical kind of pursuit. I don't think we even have to bring in the notion of art. It's just that there's some kind of symbolic dimension to it. I find that you're practice is more, and I may be wrong, but it seems to be more geared towards use value. I don't mean that in a positive or a negative way. That's just kind of the way I've been hearing what you're saying is that there's all this incredible potential with stuff that's growing in the cracks in our sidewalks and we should engage with it a lot more. Because it's free. And that's why in the last sentence of the little write up, which I did, and I took some liberties with your work just because I was fascinated by it and I wanted to spin it in a certain way. But, that's the opportunity also to contradict what I said,
(Laughter)
It seemed that you're applying the logic of the free and open software movement; see I know about that thing so I use that as an example, to the realm of urban vegetation. Do you think that's a fair comparison? Or do you think that I'm going out on an abusive limb there?
A [Nance]: I never talk about these plants because there free, it's because they're here with us. We're in the same place and so...
Q [Scott]: Well, just to reiterate and to clarify. I don't think she necessarily means that, and I don't want to speak for you, but just because we had this dialog before about the meaning for free. Not necessarily free as in money, or free as in free beer but free as in free speech. Or free as in society or maybe just to throw that in there. That can sound sort of like
A [Nance]: Yeah. And I like "yeah, and I don't have to spend money on them" and I'm like "well, that's not necessarily the point" so yeah. What Scott's talking about is in that sense.
[Scott]: Okay, okay.
(Audience chatter)
Q [Scott]: It is a good point though because when someone mentions free and opens our software, often times it's really confusing and confused. Often times that is the discussion, it's about money.
A [Nance]: So, I'll just reiterate. It's because they are here with us at the same time because of us. And they're interacting with us. We're exchanging our breathing with them at all times. So every time we're breathing out, we're giving it to them. Every time they're breathing out, they're giving it to us. There is already a relationship there and there is this metaphorical and kind of metaphysical thing that I'm interested in too. It's just not what I lead with because I think that there is other ways. It just doesn't have to just exist as a metaphor as it really does exist in this really practical way. But there is obvious connections to the metaphor of spontaneous vegetation or spontaneous growth and kind our wild mind connecting to that.
Q [Penelope]: In farming, they called them opportunistic. That the plant takes the advantage of the opportunity of being dropped and grows wherever it falls.
A [Nance]: Yeah, yeah.
Q [Penelope]: So they are opportunistic beings and a great nussience in the industry. And in cities because they destroy roads and like the railroad tracks that you brought up.
A [Nance]: But again, they're cleaning our soils and making them porous.
Q [Penelope]: But some of them are depleting the soils. It depends on the individual plant. And of course, they interact in return when you bring up the Fox Glove. It is poisonous as a method of defense. To keep animals from consuming it, and it's highly effective. It's digitalis. She actually didn't die of stomach cramps, she died probably of cardiac arrest. It's a self defense mechanism. So they are interacting in return.
A [Nance]: Yeah. I think that in these areas where I'm foraging, and in a public park where you're trying to do some cultivation, they could be taking water and other nutrients from the soil but a lot of these places that I forage are not places where people are cultivating or even caring for.
Q [Penelope]: Well, and some places would even be dangerous to cultivate and we know that. For instance, back to the railroad tracks. Nothing growing on a railroad track in Pennsylvania should be consumed by a human. There are way too many toxic chemical that could be taken up by the plant.
A [Nance]: Yeah. Exactly. You know, in the same time, it's a great place if you just want to study for. They're fantastic. Transportation lines are used as navigation by a lot of animals. Birds, coyotes, there hugely bio-diverse. So it's fascinating to just go there and do your studies because you can see a huge number of plants.
Q [Penelope]: Really interesting.
Q [Male in Audience]: I heard a term recently where someone said they want to make the invisible visible. It seems that what you're doing is taking something that's so invisible right in front of us back to that whole earlier discussion about how it's been bred out of us because of other interests and other mechanisms of society. Maybe even the visible, or the engaging with this visually or physically, it's invisible to us now. We walk right by it, it's all around us as you've shown us tonight. And yet it's been bred out of us as new types of artists or urban dwellers or whatever. And yet, your art at this point makes the invisible be visible again and shares it with everybody. That to me is a heart strategy or a thinking strategy, not to exploit, but just to experience again. There is so much that is so just right there and yet we don't even see it anymore. We don't see a lot of things in life anymore.
A [Nance]: Yeah.
Q [Scott]: I was just going to ask what your sensation of time is like. In a way, I'm sort of reminded about because there's often a cross cultural comparison, or of cultures that are prescriptively forward thinking or there's a sort of, not necessarily mandatory, but I guess its part of the culture's constantly being future oriented. Some of that has to do with religion, like imagining if there is an afterlife, well, you're always going to be thinking about the future. And some of it has to do with the land because you're potentially present. So I'm just curious if that was an interest of yours.
A [Nance]: I wear a watch because I really have to watch my time all the time because I'm always getting distracted. Like entering another time since I work a lot with soil, which is really slow.
(Laughter)
So I just always have a watch on. I sleep with it on and I wake up frequently during the night to check what time it is.
(Laughter)
So, I kind of... My birthday is tomorrow so I'm like "wow, man, I'm going to be like halfway on my way to 90 tomorrow! I'm going to be 45 tomorrow" that's just wild. Just kind of weird. So, I think since I'm looking at building soils and I'm looking at plant life and I'm constantly planting trees and grafting fruit trees so I can have fruit later, knowing that it's going to be 7 or 12 years from now. Thinking that I'll be like 55 when I can start picking fruit from this plant if it survives. So there's something that I do more because I'm working with a different time scale. I'm not a geologist, which would be really wild. But working with soils is close enough to being slow. So yeah, time is something I definitely have to, I always have my Timex on. I actually have 2 identical watches just in case I have a problem with this one.
(Laughter)
Q [Scott]: Speaking of time, it's 8:00 and that's when we always wrap up, even if we never start on time we always end on time. At least on the audio chat. Everybody here is welcome to stay and hang out. Nance, thanks for joining us.
A [Nance]: Thanks you guys for the tough questions.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: We'd definitely love to do forage. That'd be really awesome.
A [Nance]: Yeah. It's super fun. Stephen! All you Europeans get out there and look for stuff.
(Child's voice saying "bye")
End of Transcription 01:31:05.1
Week 42: Periferry
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya of the Desire Machine Collective, who operate the Periferry project, an artist-led space situated on the M. V. Chandardinga, a ferry currently docked along the mighty Brahmaputra River in Guwahati, Assam, in the North East of India.
http://www.periferry.in/
http://www.desiremachinecollective.net/
To describe Periferry as a floating laboratory for generating hybrid practices, while very true, is to skip a little quickly to the point: it is first of all a 1950s era, former government-run ferry barge, entirely river-worthy despite a bit of rust and a half century of plying the somewhat treacherous waters of the Brahmaputra between Assam and West Bengal through Bangladesh. Like the river itself, the space and its activities provide a connective, border-defiant platform for dialogue across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge. Periferry regularly hosts art-related, on-deck conferences and debates, regular film screenings and is more generally a platform — a floating, diesel-powered and steel platform — for cross-disciplinary flux, exploring new constellations of artistic relationships that challenge traditional hierarchical and autocratic strategies, seeking above all to move away from the center-periphery dialectics to renegotiate the role of local in the global.
Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya work through image, moving image, sound, and the time and flux of the river. As their name suggests, Desire Machine seeks to disrupt the neurotic symptoms that arise from constricting capitalist structures — of which the mainstream artworld is merely one instance — with healthier, schizophrenic cultural flows of desire and information
Transcription
Week 42: Periferry
Scott: Hello there
Steven: Are Mriganka and Sonal with us?
Scott: Sonal and Mriganka are not with us yet, I'll have to add them to the call now, so unfortunately we couldn't add them to the text chat, so I'll have to call them both separately. So if everybody could just hand tight for a second, we'll get them on the line hopefully right away.
[Scott's daughter talking]
Female: Is that your girl Scott?
Scott: Yes
Steven: I feel like I should add some baby noises to this conversation.
Scott: Oh, yeah, please do. Okay, adding Sonal now and Mriganka.
Hello Sonal, how are you?
Sonal: Hi, Hi Scott
Steven: Hi Sonal, Steven here, how are you?
Sonal: Hi Steven, good, how are you?
Steven: Good to hear your voice, it's very early...
Mriganka, Hey Mriganka, how're you doing?
Mriganka: Hi, I'm fine. There's a delay in the voice.
Steven: Yeah, well, it's normal, it's 3.30 in the morning right, so, we can [inaudible 0:01:42.4] a tiny bit of a delay, I guess. So, are we ready to go Scott?
Scott: Absolutely, we finally got everyone connected, it took twenty minutes, but we're here.
Steven: So, listen, welcome Periferry. It's a real privilege and a pleasure to have you with us. It's a particular honor since we've forced you either to stay up or get up at this ungodly hour to tell us about life on the Brahmaputra river, on this incredible platform made out of steel, with twin-diesel engines, that I've also had the pleasure of being on, talking on, and riding on. What we thought we would do is ask you to describe the project. We frame it as a kind of an art world, and art sustaining and life sustaining environment, but you're free to not think of it that way since it's yours. But basically to tell us where the idea came from, where you're taking it to, and some of the stuff you've been doing, and then people will jump in with questions as we go along, both on text -- I don't know if you're seeing the text questions or not.
Scott: No, they're not able to see the text questions, but I have a separate chat so what I can do is paste in things that are, well I mean everything's relevant but specific questions maybe.
Steven: Sure, perfect. Ok, I'm going to mute my mic for now, but don't worry I'll take it off very soon to ask questions.
Mriganka: Sonal, you want to start?
Sonal: Yeah, sure, I can do that.
Maybe what I can do is just give you a brief outline of how we came to start Periferry, which is a project of desire machine collective, so I must tell you a bit about what desire collective essentially is. The founding members are Mriganka, and myself, Sonal. We started working together in 2004. We started collaborating on a number of projects we were working on a number of film-based/photography-based projects, but what was very important for our practice is that our decision to actually come back to the region which is broadly called the northeast of India, and base our practice there. We belong to that place, so in 2004 we actually came down back from where we were, which is the west part of India, and started our project, and started desire machine collective and started working together. Now, just to give you a brief outline of what this region, northeast India is actually, I can just briefly take you through this. It's geographically isolated from the rest of India, it is 99% borders with other countries, like Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, China etc. It also suffers from economic neglect. It has a complex ethnography with dozens of indigenous groups, many [inaudible 0:05:23.9] across the national and state borders. People have migrated freely across the borders through the centuries, and a lot of the people actually find there are groups which actually stay on both sides of the borders. It's ethnically and linguistically quite different from the rest of India, and many still refer to it as -- you know the rest of India is mainland India. I hope you're listening because it's a little strange too you know.
[others]: Sonal it's perfect, and the audio is excellent actually surprisingly, please keep going.
Sonal: In 2007, in this region we started this project called Periferry, which actually works as a laboratory for people engaged across disciplinary practices. The project focuses on the creation of a network space for negotiating the challenge of contemporary cultural production. It is actually located on the ferry on the river Brahmaputra. It aims to promote experimentation in art, ecology, technology, media and science and create a public space and public domain. Now, to tell you a bit about the rive Brahmaputra, what is interesting about it is also that it is firstly a transnational river, it starts from China, actually, Tibet, close to China, and into India, Bangladesh, and into the Bay of Bengal. It has a length of 20,900 km and over centuries, people in the region have shared a close engagement with the river. In the Hindu belief, it is the only male river in India because in India there is some kind of myth, you might call it, which is associate with all the rivers, not most actually, all the rivers are female. For example, [Ganga, Yamuna 0:07:37.3] all of them are female rivers. Brahmaputra is the only male river, and the literal translation is Son of Lord Brahma and it has given inspiration to many artists, singers, poets of the region, and has found reference in folk and older traditions. We see the river also as a transnational space because of its particular location, and that is an important reason why we decided to locate Periferry on the river. Can I hand over to Mriganka?
Scott: Great, definitely.
Mriganka: Yeah, hi, I think in between the voice -- there's a lot of trouble in the voice, I could not hear probably, can you hear me?
[others]: Yes, we here you fine, no problem.
Mriganka: Basically, adding to what Sonal was mentioning. This whole transition of [inaudible 0:09:06.4] we were working towards a nature of a collective [inaudible 0:09:12.3] into the participatory thought and the active kind of domain. Basically Periferry becomes an instrument of looking at also critically to kinds of things; what Sonal was mentioning about this kind of territorial trap which was very contextual to our practice. So this, giving ideas, which also we have to admit to an extent what was also informed by writings - if you look at when we proclaim ourselves as [desire machine 0:09:51.8 collective it actually drives and delivers [inaudible 0:09:55.8 thought?]. Secondly, when we make a transition from our own individual artistic practice to something as participatory, or as open as, like involving a space, which was some kind of force this extended idea of [inaudible 0:10:17.2] so it's like a [inaudible 0:10:19.6] kind of trying to combine multiple spaces and kind of a utopian thought within a real space. Because there was no space which was given for any kind of artistic practice or even for a public thing, so there was a very thin layer between public actions and a more artistic [inaudible 0:10:44.5] to where actually Periferry tends to become somewhere [inaudible 0:10:49.7] kind of space. [inaudible 0:10:59.0] Can you hear me?
Scott: Yes, we can hear you, it broke up a little bit, but I think we got 95% of that, yes.
Mriganka: So that's why probably what Sonal has already mentioned, I think can address discussion of how the river is important as [0:11:27.6] as well as acts as a rhetorical flux which is also important creative space which is not bounded by certain kinds of boundary, because we had this working title of the project as something called alternate boundaries, or borders, so for certain reasons we couldn't have that name because of obvious reasons of political, or economic reasons. But that's the reason, so the project Periferry tries to dwell between this [0:12:05.3 inaudible].
Scott: Do you mean that you couldn't have that name for legal reasons?
Mriganka: Yes because when we were working towards this project proposal for certain kinds of funds, we were looking at it because if you look at it from a very mainstream Indian point of view, so most of the time the whole border of India and Pakistan --
Steven: Mriganka, excuse me, what name couldn't you have?
Mriganka: We said we wanted, when we started off, we wanted to have the [inaudible 0:12:56.0] name called alternate borders. That was before the ferry, but that was the name which we were sharing this idea with people who would like to help us to create this, this kind of problem paper, which was basically was called Alternate borders, but that notion of border is very problematic within Indian contemporary discourse because most of the time, India's border is mostly Pakistan, and it is one of the most important and very delicate matter, but our problem was much more different. It was basically that - like for example this whole 1947s memories of a new country partly from this part of this country, we don't really share anything, that's physical truth, but at the same time, we're actually northeast India, which is basically situated between south and south east Asia, which is a very interesting geographical location. So that creates an interesting link to think about borders, so that's how -- and as Sonal was mentioning that call the geographical facts, the river, this other Asian network of countries, which was very much there before 1947 gave us think in terms of a different trajectory to create new [inaudible 0:14:32.2]. That is the background of Periferry.
Scott: So it was possible for you to do these play on words where you were talking about an interstitial or a peripheral space on a ferry boat. When did the ferry boat come into play? The actual strategy of having these kinds of conversations on the water?
Sonal: I'll come to your question, but I would just also like to add a little bit more about north-eastern India
Scott: Oh yes, please, let's not jump to it too quickly
Sonal: I would like to probably just give you also a map for a reference so that we know what we are talking about when we refer to a geographical location like northeast India, so northeast India, it has a lot of indigenous groups in the region and it's a multi-ethnic society, and it has a weakness, or condition of prolonged conflict so since the division of the Indian state, there has been some or the other form of conflict and violence that has been continuing. In some senses it is a lot like Kashmir and India, which is also much more well-known, so it is an area with a condition of sustained violence and arm struggle. [0:16:13.3 Inaudible] cultural space transforms drastically, so markers of identity and [inaudible 0:16:19.6] health which traditionally manifest themselves in cultural forms are subverted and occupied predominantly the space for assertion of exclusive identity for political expression. And this is actually what has actually been happening over the years. It's basically a large masks of land between south and southeast Asia. Fluxes migration have been the only constant in this region, it's ever changing, and identity here is not a given, it is something that is again changing constantly. the movement for self determination translates most times based on assertion of difference into a demand for autonomy. Separate state and separate [inaudible, disentrances? 0:17:03.0] are what is really common. So then number of insurgent groups in the northeast and a lot of groups are asking for either more autonomy from the Indian states, or they are asking for a separate state altogether. So this is the background of the violence and the political tension that the northeast shares with the rest of India. In this space now what happens is dissent against the government is seen as a pro-militant or insurgent statement. So in that sense, in that kind of state, what happens is the public opinion and public space is what suffers. People don't have, like this again we experienced in our earlier works very early on when we were doing research on a certain film on the historical aspect of the region we realized that there is no public space in the region, so that is basically also why Periferry became really important for us to have. Because there were certain occasions when there were some academic lectures which were also banned. We were working with this professor who is from the region but he lives in New York, and he's teaching in a university there, he had come and he was trying to set up with the food foundation centre, and an academic lecture by a scholar was banned. It was at the last minute the authorities actually just stopped the lecture, so the public space is something which is very scarce in the northeast of India. That is why also it became important to set up a space where other people could also come in to be in, and there would be a space for dialogue, for discussions etc.
Maybe I also just want to add a little bit of history of the ferry here because what is also interesting in this regard is that when we were planning to set up a space, we were interested in actually looking at a space which is [inaudible 0:19:19.8] completely like a building which kind of falls within the structure, so there were a number of ferry boats which were lying in disuse. Until the 50s there was no bridge across the Brahmaputra so the region was actually using ferry boats for transferring people, for transferring goods etc. In the 50s there was a major bridge that came about and after that water transport became less and less used. So there are a huge number of ferries which are lying in disuse, and we saw these ferries as a potential spot for actually starting a project or having it as a space also because of the location, because where Periferry is located on one side you have the major city of Gauhati, and on the other side of the river is actually a rural area, so in a number of ways, it is an in-between space. So it's still actually the process of getting the ferry is also really interesting because in a lot of ways it's still a sport because we've been in conversation with the government to try and procure it, but we still haven't got any legal documents, or we haven't got a lease on it, so for the last 3 years we've actually managed to use it without getting a proper lease; which is also quite rare in these parts of the country.
Scott: That is very interesting, I was curious about the ownership and all of that.
Sonal: Mriganka would you like to continue?
Mriganka: We have already mentioned about the context, do you want us to speak about regarding aspirations or...
Steven: Whatever you think is important, but I mean I think that we have a certain idea, I mean a very rough idea now of the political, geographical context that you're working in, maybe why don't you say what you've done on the boat for the last three years while you've been squatting it?
Mriganka: I can't hear you, can you speak again?
Steven: Yeah, sorry. I think we have an idea of the political, the geographical context, and why you wanted to do this, but maybe you could describe more generally, what you do on the boat, or what you have done, the types of projects that you have done and hope to do.
Mriganka: Basically as we have mentioned that there's deep link between what we do as a desire machine collective and what we desire to do for Periferry. Periferry is a kind of a curated project of desire machine collective and it's truly a realization of the [inaudible 0:23:43.7] productions, or what happens it becomes a product in the sense of when you make a film, or in the sense when you maintain an artist's studio, within these conditions, so that aspires, or that motivates to create certain kinds of things. It also pushes us to create, has pushed us to create this project. So basically this project involves different kinds of people, collaborations, and when we mentioned which whole idea of borders, we were very instrumental because we tried to make a film, we tried to make several kinds of projects, but it was not really reasonable. So in a sense, in a very civil society negotiation, so in a sense what we tried was very consciously what happened was we invited people for funding reasons we said we are doing residences but it's up like that, it's a very creative residency, it happens through a lot of discussions and a lot of negotiations and it has been really very researched based. Projects which we have done in Periferry varies from a couple of artists working together trying to create a collaborative situation, to something like working with the community around the ferry, or to an extent, working with different communities. Say a group of musicians, a group of folk singers and trying to bridge this border, in one sense we are trying to look at border in a much broader sense of looking at the spaces between the categories like arts, science, technology and several kind of things. Another thing is very important because I think we also had a [inaudible 0:25:55.7] start where we are developing this, which is very real which is also a very taxing thing. Also one this was, this notion of border also has to be negotiated to some words again, we found something again with readings of [inaudible 0:26:17.4]. So basically we will thinking Periferry also as a concept, this month on the 8th October for the first time we did a Periferry even in Berlin. So the whole idea of notions of creating new encounters or inspiring people to meet at various frontiers, creating fresh dialogues, debates, negotiations and recordings, so we were trying to start in a new kind of discourse. That was what we really intended, so I think Sonal can also tell you, I am forgetting a few things probably she can add. Sonal can you please add some of the things I missed out?
Sonal: Yes, so, in the larger sense, we see Periferry as a context provider, stretching the concept of artist creation, from making content to making context. Because it draws so largely from a larger social/political reality, I think context is something that is very close to the way we actually function. So we are providing a context where we leave it open for people to actually come and collaborate, and also I think it's really important as a strategy because we do not want to also represent the northeast of India, or that region, or other issues, and we want people to actually come in and collaborate and we want multiple voices, rather than our voice to be talking about all of these things. A context provider in that sense does not speak for others but induces others to speak for themselves, by providing the means or tool and the context where they can speak and be heard. We like to engage with environment and communities and for this we invite international experts as well as very local people and people working in the natural resources, people who have very different ways of life, world views, and we see this as a really important method where we get the local and the global on the same platform as people participants. For example, we would like to work with local innovators, like this lady called [Name K. Pura 0:29:07.1] who is an expert on local plants and herbal medicines. So guided by this principle of practice-like theory, we look at it as a curatorial problematic localized participatory practices are central to our discourse. Creation and artistic direction will be undertaken through collaboration between the project partners and agreement of curatorial methodologies, we also give a huge amount of emphasis on research, so anybody who comes in would be spending a minimum of a month to - we had a really interesting residency this winter and two artists from [inaudible 0:29:56.3] spent three and a half months on the ferry. This is really important for people to come and engage with the place, because most of the people who come into the northeast come in as tourists, and to even understand the context requires that kind of time and engagement. This local/global partnership, the project aims to gain a perspective on key issues through bringing together diverse players. Now I'd like to just mention some of the key issues that we hope to look at.
Since the ferry is located on a river, the two key elements of the project are definitely the ferry itself and water. When we talk about water and rivers, we are very clear that there are going to be flash points of future conflicts. This is something that is already an immediate threat because China plans to build a really huge dam on its part of the Brahmaputra, and divert huge amounts of the waters to its drought-ridden areas. So in this sense, we are also trying to bring focus to really important issues to do with water, and rivers, and also what is really disturbing for us is the fact that since Brahmaputra actually flows through the northeast, it does not affect the rest of India so much, there is not a huge amount of outcry about the plans of China building this dam. It's going to have huge amount of environmental consequences on the region, and the whole region; not only just India, but also Bangladesh would suffer deeply from it because the river is the food provider, the food basin for the entire region, but the Indian government is not really taking a strong stance on this. So that is also something that we are planning to look at in the future. I would just like to also mention some of the other aims that we are looking at: I think that Mriganka has already mentioned, that since it's on the river, we plan to conceptually and physically connect the flow of everyday currents in the region. This again, we want to do by different ways, also, work as an archive of sorts because there are a huge number of people who are actually drawing inspiration from the river and most of the people are using older traditions to express themselves and the Bible was actually the first written text for most of the people in the northeast, so this huge tradition of oral tradition, and folk songs is central to the cultural expression of the people. In some ways acting as an archive for all of this, we want to explore the pertinent relationship that the river has with food, energy, electricity, geography, and we want to in the future also look at making the ferry a biosphere of sorts because we have already started working in this direction since the river is the life source of the region, the ferry is also located in Guwhati which is a huge city, but it also faces huge amount of crisis which any other city in the world, or in India has in terms of food, water, etc; we are also looking at the ferry as becoming central to this discourse for actually growing food, looking at alternative energy sources, and making it into a biosphere.
Scott: So you're working on turning the ferry itself into a resource production machine in a sense.
Sonal: Absolutely, yes. Also, because the ferry is a diesel-run vehicle and we haven't really moved it yet. So it becomes interesting for us to look at what it can become, if it's static, like I mentioned earlier, there are a huge number of these ferries which are lying redundant and we are on a water source as of now. They can easily be turned into a unit of food production, and there are also another set of community, which lives around the river; the huge amount of homeless people who live there also because there's a big temple, they get alms and food from people who are deputies of the temple so they live in that areas. This is something that we are also trying to do - to work with communities and engage in communities and also looking at it as a collaborative plan home for holistic and sustainable development.
Mriganka: I think here I would like to read out from some of the words which we used in our manifesto of Periferry: [inaudible 0:35:55.6] words which I would like to emphasize which we have been using, but the meaning, what we mean by those words. The three words basically, which is now we are making the lexicon of Periferry, so one of the words is experimental the word experiment being used here [inaudible 0:36:15.9] uses it, not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act out of which is unknown. So even though we are talking about all this, this is like a form of [inaudible 0:36:28.2] it is not like something. Even the residency what Sonal was mentioning, he was talking with solar energy, but he was not really as a artist, he was not really interested in the functional ends of it but he was interested in the poetics of the photoelectric effect, we also practice other things within the ferry. It also has this in between kind of thing. Secondly, we mentioned hybrid practices, so basically, changing the emphasis from knowledge, from art, technology, media and science, we try to encourage cross-disciplinary collaborative processes, also aimed to go beyond the [inaudible 0:37:13.2] nations of the world. It is our attempt to bridge the gap between the special vocabulary of science, art, and the general interests of the audience. Last thing, we call laboratory so basically Periferry --
[Scott's daughter talking]
Mriganka: [inaudible 0:37:39.6] on the basis of various concept between various disciplines. In Periferry we try serve space where knowledge and cultures are made. This laboratory also has multiple identities, it acts as a museum, a workspace, also, it can act as a studio. These are some of these broader thing which we work upon.
Scott: And maybe it would be worth for asking explicitly Mriganka, what kinds of specific competencies you guys are able to bring from your work as artists, and I think you just described some of the concepts that you bring from the field of art into his other realm, but I'm wondering if there are certain things that you've learned, certain specific competencies that you're able to bring as artists to this situation?
Mriganka: You were saying the functional capabilities of what...
Scott: I think so, yes. Well, I mean, when you say, I didn't meant to make a distinction between conceptual and operative, but I think I mean, it could even -- conceptual competencies could even be something but I meant that could in some way be applied, or the ways that you apply it, I think is what I'm curious about. Because was Steven mentioned earlier that we have been describing what you guys do in this realm that you're working with and you're creating as a kind of art world, a kind of ego system, a cultural eco system that sustains a certain kind of creative practice but an expanded notion of a creative art practice; one of the things that continues to occupy us when we're thinking about this is: What do people mean when they say art when we're describing their practice as art and usually we help to find it, or we come to some kind of a better idea when they talk about the competencies that they bring as artists. Often even what kinds of competencies come from other fields that's able to enrich your work as artists, but I'm curious about the first, does that make sense?
Mriganka: Yes, so basically I think in that sense we have also mentioned something, two kinds of things; I think we also have to explain what are our backgrounds, what are our histories -- individual history and what really [inaudible 0:40:53.9] us because also the whole archaeology of this word art, also we try to understand because personally, I think Sonal is trained in arts, one of the prominent art schools of India, but I had a very different thing, I studied science and then I studied design, and when we started this desire machine collective, working together, the primary thing was definitely moving [inaudible 0:41:29.4] but in a sense we were looking at ideas it was a pure ideas, it was not about the medium. In a sense that also made us to understand this larger domain between what we're trying to operate, because India is a little complicated in the sense there is very complicated pedagogical problem, very limited. Even sometimes, the vocabulary we use it will be amazing that this cannot be shared in a larger pedagogical situation, so it is derived from various sources, from very informal sources, there's this whole informal pedagogy-cum-conceptual domain has been created for a period of time, so basically in Periferry I think we also try to understand because sometimes it is also questionable, people question us if this is culture, this is science, so under which domain we are really operating.
Understanding of art, or in this sense, visual art what has, even in this radically, there's not an activity which is happening within India, which is radically interdisciplinary, and it is [inaudible 0:42:57.4] the concepts of art, I think to define for ourselves the groups working on [inaudible 0:43:11.5] and other practices, are involved in [inaudible 0:43:15.4]. So the amount of spasmodic events that are really rather different from what passes as visual art in the visual [inaudible 0:43:24.3] system. So in a sense, our decision to actually work beyond this is very limited, in India the alternative art system is also dominated to an extent at a whole ideal exhibition. Our practice is more like research to fill political, statistical and [inaudible 0:43:46.4]. So these are visual intellectual evolution that cannot be reduced to [inaudible 0:43:53.5] of the art system. So what we call art activity, or art, is expanding, it is already expanding for ourselves, and I think also in a sense, we also have encountered this you know, [inaudible 0:44:14.0] how to make our work apart that is not a work of art, so it creates a matter of ways we might be [inaudible 0:44:21.6] with works, events [inaudible 0:44:23.1] that don't look like art at all, because in the beginning we also had a lot of resistance from artists who work in the domain of painting, sculptures, they were questioning as if we had some level of mental thing that we are supposed to develop certain thing. Because there is no existence. So in that sense we were not even [inaudible 0:44:44.9] because there was nothing posing to ask, there was no predominant art system [inaudible 0:44:51.7] which was operating in this area.
Scott: I was just going to say, so maybe there's a kind of opening there, you described how certain kinds of art systems were inadequate for the kind of work that you wanted to do, so you produced your own machine, your own system, your own machine for this.
Mriganka: So it is also in a sense an experiment I think what we got I think was your question to answering I think in a very direct way what we got I think we got, we derived for our livelihood I think I work for a design [inaudible 0:45:37.7] is one of the [inaudible 0:45:38.8] so it is design, and I also have encountered doing a lot of these issues of renewable energy which is becoming much more prominent in this design discourse. Which cannot really implement some of these experiments within this formal system, which is pure taught. This whole act of [inaudible 0:45:59.2] act of these things. Which are not really domain in a dominated by products of things. Which is pure processes. Because I think in India think, and that's what exactly is also what Periferry is going to look in the next stage, is [inaudible pedagogy 0:46:17.2] because I think pedagogy is losing, is not really interested in the [inaudible senses 0:46:22.7] within Indian thing. It is becoming like a part of a bigger, larger sized industry so student or things, are not really exposed to this kind of, the way of looking at several kinds of systems, so it's like... to summarize I think what we would say is that it's a marker for ways we might be able to [inaudible 0:46:48.8] with works, events and different kinds of things. But what we calling it art somehow it can be electric, it can energy nodes etc, transmitters, conductors of new thinking, new subjectivity and actions that visual artwork in the traditional sense is not able to articulate. That exactly is what we're trying to bring in this, this kind of hybrid knowledge which needed that fresh way of looking at is, otherwise it is some gallery or some modes of, or some models like [inaudible 0:47:23.0] for people like that kind of models are predominant so it is like that model, it is a very simple model so there is non existence for that kind of thing. And secondly also that working beyond those territories, because I think we will also talk about network culture, but we have serious doubts [inaudible 0:47:47.8] network culture within this kind of domain, because ultimately it's still Bombay and Delhi because it still act as old port cities where trades are, where this kind of culture production happens. So this is not really extending our equal sharing of space or information to a larger extent, I think which is what our [inaudible 0:48:18.3] of utopia is all about. It's a kind of utopic project.
Sonal: I would just like to add one thing: We also seek inspiration from Martha Rosler when she talks about the role of artists as a social agent. So we see our role also to reactivate [inaudible 0:48:44.6] that are embedded in the society, yet may not have been asked. I think that is something that is very central also to our practice. Would anybody like to ask any questions?
Scott: Yes, by the way, you guys aren't able to see this, but we have a running text chat as we're talking, so I'm trying to pick through and see what kind of questions people have, does anyone have any other questions? I think probably Steven and I can continue to ask one after the other, but we don't want to rule everyone else.
Well, I could ask one in the meantime while people are thinking about the next questions. I'm curious about the other unused ferry boats, I think you said there are a lot of unused docked ferry boats all along the river?
Sonal: Right
Scott: And it seems to me often artists' project that are creating these kinds of micro social experiments - and I say micro, even though I think your project is actually quite large in scope, but micro in the sense that it's limited to one boat, and it's finite in that way - I like to see a project as this as a kind of pilot, in a way, it makes me wonder what might happen if the idea caught on, if there were a number of break out groups that could occupy other ferries, and I was curious if you guys had explored that idea at all, or if it just seems so already so much to handle with one massive ferry.
Sonal: Yeah, actually, I think we would like of course for there to be a ripple effect, but it would not be something that we would be ready at this point to take on. But when we speak of creating a biosphere or an ecosystem, that again, we want it to be a pilot in a sense that it can be a model for other people and the government to take inspiration from our - you know, it would work as a model for other people to also do. In that sense, definitely we are looking at our project as something that would be like a trendsetter for others. Til now, the only other uses that people have made of these ferry boats is extremely commercial, so there's a cruise that runs on one of the boats, there are people who started small restaurants and bars on it, but apart from that, there's not much that has happened. What would be interesting for us to see also is, there is also this complex kind of community which lives on the ferries because they serve also as home to the people who are actually taking care of them, and these people are actually government employees, and they use the space in the most intimate way, so they're living on it, actually using the water from the river, they are actually fishing in the river, and so in a sense we are really connected with the space, so we see them as true stakeholders in a project like this.
Scott: Interesting
Sonal: So, the moment, --yeah
Scott: please go ahead, It's just the lag, it's easy to interrupt
Sonal: It's just that also, I was just thinking of -- the whole vision is to, that the moment that you start growing food and people see that this is something that is [inaudible 0:53:33.1]and you have alternative energy sources coming in, then we see people actually coming on their own initiatives and adopting some of these methods. That is the way we see it going.
Scott: and I think what's so interesting about your project though is it's not a conceptual project in the sense that it's; in the sense that Mriganka you were describing how initially it was a kind of pure idea, I think what you guys have done with this is beyond that in the sense that you're able to, the way that you use this is to have these intense exploratory sessions. That's what it seems to me, not having been a participant, I know Steven's been on your boat, but what it sounds like to me is that you have conferences, you have experimental events, you see this as an ongoing research, whereas I think if it was purely a biosphere and a boat, that kind of activity wouldn't go on, that kind of critical community building or if that's even an appropriate way to describe what you're doing. But in any case, it seems like something like that wouldn't happen -- but what you're doing, that's part of what, it sounds like to me, it's part of the art contacts that you bring into this situation. It's not purely and academic pursuit, and it's not purely a visual pursuit, it's not purely the pursuit of a botanist or someone who is an eco-activist, you're, as you said, hybridizing things from many different fields but you're using, some of what at least in my impression, is some of the most flexible maneuvers developed by people in the art field over the last 50 years, or more, into this floating space of yours. In a way, I guess my curiosity, if this were to expand, of course there would be the danger of things like corruption, but also, you wouldn't want the activity that you're doing to be watered down -- no pun intended -- by something very, much more superficial, or too specific.
Mriganka: Can you just repeat what is your question? I understood everything
Scott: The actual question itself; is the specific hybrid practice that you've set up something that you would be concerned about becoming compromised if this were to be extended further?
and I'm only imagining this, of course, what you're doing might not really relate to what I'm asking because you're not actually actively seeking a large expansion of this, but I was curious about it because imagining that, even if what you're doing it's not a pie-in-the-sky thing, what you're doing is real, it's not just some kind of fantastical possibility, it's an actual plausible way of living and working. But, in order to think about how that can be, how it either already is, or could possibly be applied to other realms, maybe other areas, other places in the world, or even integrated into other parts of the culture that you already tapping in to work with. I don't know, for me it's sometimes important to take these kinds of mental exercises and sort of ask these questions. Maybe you guys are already actively addressing them, maybe not. But specifically, what were to happen if this were to be expanded.
Mriganka: Definitely, we discussed these possibilities and kinds of things. But definitely, in one sense, it is also a kind of very [inaudible 0:58:15.6] if you see it's only like five or six people actually running this, and also now I think it's also time we should talk about when Steven asked us about high points and low points. I think one of the things is also it is truth of fact is that ultimately this kind of thing what we created is also has some kind of, we have to save funds to able to realize some kind of thing, and a lot of compromises also, uncertainty also we have --
[sound cuts off for a few seconds]
Mriganka: which is also
Scott: Mriganka, could you repeat that last part? I think we got cut out for a second there.
Mriganka: Ok, so, what I'm saying is that I wanted to tell two things specific to this point is kind of, and I was mentioning this idea of heterotopias that he actually [inaudible 0:59:22.5] interesting an example of a garden inside a city. So the garden is the perfect heterotopias because a garden has plants and things from different parts of the world, so the garden is not pure biology, it has various kinds of other things one can dwell into, so life in Periferry is like to think we also borrow kinds of knowledge, it's also kind of fluctuating [inaudible 0:59:52.0]coming and using the floor Periferry, so the whole thing is ever expanding and sometimes happens that we also need to sit down and try to understand what is Periferry today, because various different kinds of things happening, so there is not a definite shape of Periferry, we could say about these things. Regarding the possibility, it has given us, you know the way we are doing it, it is an experiment within space, involving people, different practices, so it is for, when we say art, science and....
[pause]
so there are various other kind of thing which sometimes we just do it and secondly I would say regarding matter of process, we have, for the last two years, we have never planned it. Even the event we did with Stefan and Renee last year, it was basically not superbly organized, we discussed over things and little basic kind of amenities which was available and we let it grow which was never part of a program so we also belief in this whole kind of organic way of operating these things, we really don't see ourselves getting institutionalized and getting all this complicated. But it is also a danger, you know in one sense of this really, of the real world, of the whole thing of funding because Sonal was mentioning about the context is complicated it's very difficult because there is no state funding and there is all kind of [inaudible 1:01:46.3] kinds of things, so there's always a sense of you know, and which also in one sense, which is part of the thing, kind of uncertainty of this thing. So it can collapse, it can rise again, it's kind of really, you know a free-style kind of thing, which is not really conscious, but in a sense that's how the real state of mind, or state of Periferry is quite fluctuating, if I have explained you correctly what you really want to know.
Sonal: Yeah, I would just like to add a couple of points there, I think also what Mriganka [inaudible 1:02:27.6 ] slashed upon, the funding here is really important issue because if, I don't know if you're aware, but in India there is no state funding for anything like what we are doing, and most of the other spaces are not really, do not have any government or state funding at all. Most of them have international funding, which brings its own set of problems, but at least people are able to do things with that funding, but when it comes to the northeast of India because the government has deemed it as a security threat and it is considered a dangerous area with terrorists and insurgents etc, and there is huge amount of scrutiny of the foreign funding that comes in also, so even getting that small amount of foreign funding is very difficult for us. So sustainability is definitely a key questions with regards to the project so when you talk of actually expanding it, even maintaining as smaller project would be a huge challenge.
Scott: Absolutely, yeah.
Sonal: That is one, the other problematic, we are actually trying to, we are definitely clear that we do not want to get institutionalized and become an organization etc, but there's also the whole politics of development within these kind of areas, because it's a really underdeveloped area in the traditional sense of the word - the way people understand it. So we do not at all subscribe to this notion of top down central kind of development that the Indian government or development of ideas that people have. Out ideas is definitely -- that's why whenever we have this -- there are some certain amount of funds in India available for this kind of development of the art etc, but we are very clear that we are not trying to make northeast the next, maybe Delhi, or Bombay in terms of creating an art market and all of that so, we are very conscious of all these things. So I think that's why also still being small and being a micro initiative is much more conducive to what we're trying to do.
Scott: Yeah absolutely, I mean the mental exercise of imagining what would happen if something were to expand doesn't always mean that it would be a good idea to do that even if it were possible. We were just, not exactly choking, but getting a sense of the texture here, or kind of responding to what you were saying it seems -- Steven has a much better sense of it, you know, just sort of being in the area about how incredible unlikely it is for your vessel, and Kate on the chat here have both been in that area, both sort of realize how impractical it is to imagine your ferry being co-operated by some major corporation who wants to turn it into a luxury floating hotel or something for tourists. Actually, it's an interesting point about scale that often micro initiatives have a certain ability and strength that larger ones don't. Even maybe if there's an ability to bypass certain kinds of scrutiny.
You were saying before that you weren't interested in developing art markets in that region, or trying to, I wouldn't even say gentrify, but bring that kind of sensibility into that region, we definitely have a really good idea, or a good sense that that's really not what you're doing, but I was curious about while you didn't want to bring that kind of "art" into the region, I was interested in the fact that you are creating a certain kind of market in a sense, or at least a certain kind of system of exchange that seems like it really isn't there.
Sonal: Mriganka, would you like to address that?
Mriganka: I didn't hear it because there is a lot of disturbance on that side.
Scott: Do you mean audio disturbance?
Mriganka: Yes, I can't hear your voices clearly, there's a lot of disturbance in the mic.
Scott: I can try to repeat that, would that be helpful?
Mriganka: Yes, I still hear some disturbance I think.
Scott: I'll repeat that one more time, if it doesn't work I'll type it.
Well just, one of several things that were mentioned is that you guys are really not interesting in bringing a kind of art market into that region that exists elsewhere in Bombay or otherwise, and I was saying well, definitely not, but you are bringing something else to that region that seems to not be there without you. Part of that sounds to me like it's a kind of distribution system, or at least some kind of system of exchange or something like that, that really didn't exist before, it's not so much a questions as a statement I guess.
Mriganka: So basically I think you know, what you mentioned it's about from the very beginning when we were mentioning, we started speaking about the context, I think the idea of art market comes when we put it ourselves as artists, because there is always kind of pressure, because like if you see today if you would not have done in a sense, this communication would not have been possible. The artists sitting here would not have been able to communicate, so there is, as artists we have always been under pressure from the art market or certain standard ideas of looking at certain kind of practices. In a sense, what we want is the idea of perception, I think there is a lot of confusion in the beginning, with even artist communities this is art, this is because there are certain standards, modes of standards, a way of looking at art which art institutes or galleries they kind of circulate among our [inaudible 1:10:16.1] . Even to the west, a lot of these new exhibition which has really happen of the way of looking at Indian art, like there was a competition last week , we were in Amsterdam, and somebody was really shocked that we were using certain kinds of vocabulary that person didn't have. So this is an idea of perception.
Now, within India we have this reason, and we have this kind of... because this thing here now we're not really using as an directive, but in a sense it's a kind of phenomena, a phenomena of perception, of looking at certain areas. Another thing I think we missed was there's still some laws, like when Sonal was mentioning about disturbed military problems and autonomic conflicts so the government of India still has some law which is imposed on these zones which were initially imposed by Indian freedom fighters. So there is a certain way, this is militarization, secondly it is a way of looking at anthropological categories, so I think what we also in a sense I think we would also try to extend this in a sense crossover to the concept of perception, also as an artist we are talking a lot of things, moving in ways that interest us a lot, the whole notion of perception, how you perceive is our identity, like the questions of India, what really comes to your mind because which is very different from when you call it Dutch or German, or even to an extent an American, so India is very diverse, it is very quite hybrid, in a sense that there isn't this kind of monolithic construction, it's impossible. So this basically to Periferry what I think what we have, to some extent is to create new perceptions about this zone, or create a different kind of concentration, ok, this is also coming from there. I think what we're also saying is Periferry is happening from there, so this is saying in a sense not even saying because it's not even the whole idea of northeast is also very problematic because there is nothing called northeast because it's a very colonial construct, it's because northeast of where? Northeast of India. Because there's scums from the British colonial construct frontier northeast agency and the northwest was basically Afghanistan, so by 1947 this perception disappeared, the northwest, but northeast still remains because it is still understandable by Indian state, and again, this whole love-hate relation with China, so in a sense, the proximity, so in a sense we are also kind of reconfiguring this and trying to understand because this river is also kind of greater physical illustration of what a network can me. The river starts in Tibet, goes through Assam, and goes through Bangladesh and goes to the Bay of Bengal, so in a sense it works at the various stages, so how do we - so I think in one word it will be perception. We are what we are actually started off and slowly it is creating this kind of re-territorializing, because now in a sense Periferry does multiple ideas that is coming from various parts of the world because ferry of ship was a vehicle of colonialism; people ventured out to different territories but using the same kind of structure to create a new way of looking at new conversations. I think that's, if I have answered the question.
Scott: Definitely, I have more questions, but I'm hesitant to ask before anyone else gets a chance.
I'm curious about the, value or the importance of philosophy in your practice because a big part of your practice is discursive, it's conversational, there are conferences, there are experimental events, but many of the things that both of you have described have reference to a number of things that I'm aware of, and very likely a lot of things I'm not aware of, but a number of the things that you have referenced that made my ears pop up were, for instance to political philosophers, and I was curious if that's, I mean from the name of your group to a number of the key concepts that you brought up. I'm just curious if you find a value in that, in your communication so the people , if you find that it actually does help to build critical community, or if you think that's mainly a carryover from your education, that's kind of informed what you do, but not necessarily made its way into part of an ongoing discursive practice. I'm just not sure because I haven't been to any of your events, and I was curious about that.
Mriganka: I missed the last past, there was a disturbance in the last part of the question.
Scott: Back to say, I was curious if this is a carryover mainly from your education that informs the trajectory of how you got started and how you from your social practice as artists or if that really continues to be a useful tool in your arsenal that you use regularly in the conferences and these ongoing floating discussion sessions.
Mriganka: I think in a sense definitely I think what we do is definitely informed by our subjective reading and kinds of things, which I would also like to mention. We belong to this place and we have been in India, you have to travel about two to three thousand km to study, and ten thousand people you have to meet, you have to kind of very multiple, a very [inaudible 1:18:17.0] information structure you have, it is not so from it. In the sense when you encounter certain problems your solution is not so linear so you think about your practice and multiple things, your relation to other artists, your relation to your space and many other things, what it is your studio, and many other things. I think there I think in the sense when things has almost happens, we would say accidents --
[Scott talks to his daughter]
we have encountered in the [inaudible 1:18:57.6] most of where we are studying or working, Sonal was teaching, I was studying, and in a sense, that started off the trigger, certain kinds of ideas [inaudible 1:19:11.1] trapped to one kind of territory, if you look at what [inaudible 1:19:18.8] it's more or less, it cannot be even [inaudible 1:19:22.3] philosophy or with its history, it's very transgressive kind of critical domain, so in a sense I think what became, we became artists much later but we get engrossed and we try to understand this critical domain because in a sense living in 90s or trying to place yourself in this great, this larger domain of Indian systems, it was quite difficult to [inaudible 1:19:55.7] post colonialism and other kinds of things were also very very locational in a sense. So, I think it is actually derived from our readings and a lot of discussions and a lot of meeting with various people, and I think that's starting from, as I was mentioning in the beginning that desire machine collective it's from a collective action between me and Sonal because kinds of conversation, trying to create a collective kind of thing. Very participatory kind of unlimited kind of action which resulted into Periferry when we actually have to come back to the specific physical [inaudible 1:20:46.8] so when we have encountered space, we're looking at encountering studio, entrepreneurship that became desire machine collective and became like the whole idea of [inaudible 1:20:57.5] your relation of the work to other kinds of things. So I think in a sense it is a larger experiment which is happening and in a sense it is also not involving only two of us, there has become a larger kind of conversation, it's in one sense, people also inform us and also some of our thing also goes out into the public, it doesn't remain only with us.
Scott: Good point. There's a discussion on the chat, I don't know if you guys wanted to bring it into the audio realm? Not to put anyone on the spot, I just wanted to
Kate: I had to attend to dinner and then I hopped back in, so I missed quite a big chunk I think, but I think I'm wondering maybe you have gotten into this, having been to the northeast and having lived in Delhi for quite some time, I wonder even -- it feels to me perhaps it's important but it's in the northeast because like I would imagine doing some projects like this would be so much more difficult in Delhi, because of space and because of just the cultural differences of the northeast, and northern India for instance. I found the northeast much more progressive in some ways unless [inaudible 1:22:57.7]
I think I'm trying to get at is that it feels important to me that it's located, the original Periferry product has been located where it is, even though I know that's something you've been trying to get away from perhaps.
Sonal: Yeah, but, could you frame it like a question, because obviously we agree with you, you know, it's important, yes please go on.
Kate: I just think it's interesting as an artist that lived in India, I haven't come across lots of really socially engaged projects in other places in the country. I guess I'm wondering what it is about Guwahati or up there even without the contemporary art scene that made it possible?
Sonal: Yes, I think I understand a little about what you're referring to because it's strange right now, I'm in Bombay, and talking about Periferry from Bombay gives you a completely different perspective and we were having these huge discussions about space, the notion of space in a place like Bombay, or Delhi, and a lot of people feel that space is extremely limited, because there are so many other kind of courses where there's the media or a strong post like Bollywood in Bombay that dominates everything. We've heard from many people, even artists and art critics and writers who constantly complain about this aspect of, specially a place like Bombay where Bollywood and the film industry and its commercial giant is so dominant that there is not enough mental space to operate. In a lot of ways I understand the nuance of your question, and I think what you mentioned about --
Kate: I was going to say, I think one of the things I've always been interested in is how because in the US and a lot of western places, the artists and cultural communities tend to gravitate towards places where they squat, or places where the rent is cheaper, maybe not safe neighborhoods, there's like a long history of that phenomenon, but in Delhi for instance you don't really, I don't know if that exists in the same way because the squatters spaces are being occupied by other people that are immigrants or they're sort of just trying to survive, I have been so -- I've always been interested that there's this added layer of well where did the cultural communities that need to [inaudible 1:26:30.3] an existence go? and these cities of 20 million people, or like everybody's trying to fight it out for space. But you're on a boat on the Brahmaputra which is an answer to that.
Sonal: Yeah, I think this also ties into a larger problematic of the way contemporary art functions within India because in that sense, our initiative is really even smaller than micro because obviously there hardly exists any kind of space actually to do something like this, but also even the market is not really so large, but so obviously there's this huge gravitation towards Delhi and Bombay, so most of the people who have actually trained in arts, especially in arts, and in fact, most other professional fields would also move towards the bigger cities because that's where the jobs are, that's where they'd find all kinds of life-style, and all of that, so firstly of course there's this whole movement towards Delhi and Bombay, which I think is also problematic because a lot of the artists work -- I'm talking of individual artists now, and their work draws from a certain context and when they move to a bigger city obviously they lose that context, because, as I'm sure all of you are aware India is such a large country, and there are so many differences in terms of culture and language and religion and caste and class so to kind of bridge all of that, that's also our personal observation that a lot of time people lose out because they think that the market is in the bigger cities, so firstly they move towards the bigger cities. For us it was actually [inaudible 1:28:46.1] an easy choice when we decided to actually go back to the northeast, and I was personally told by many people that I'm crazy for doing that, but it was just so much more interesting for the reason that you mentioned earlier - that it is a space which is so different from the rest of India, in terms of the sensibilities because the huge amount of population is indigenous, and they have a very - in my view - a very progressive sensibility also because it's much more, the rest of India is much more patriarchal and the northeast does provide much more space for women, there's much more respect for women there are a number of - where I come from, the entire system is matrilineal, so women are traditionally empowered, there's no questioning of empowering them, they have been empowered. So in a number of ways, and also in terms of culture and just the way people operate, it's definitely something, we feel much more comfortable working with. So it was definitely a conscious choice to go back and try to negotiate that space and the standards and place our practice there.
Mriganka: And also, I think I would like to add one more small point, one thing which is also convenient I think in terms of matter, because we were not really, in the beginning we were very sure that we were not performing this for anybody. Neither any media agency or nobody, so we didn't really - a lot of people wanted to write about us, but we said they were not coming they can try to do this by telephoning interviews or something, but we refused because those kinds of publicity would really hamper us, because those media kind of things, were not critical, it was just a report of us, and this doesn't really create anything at all on the long run, it creates confusion. So in a sense I think more or less in the big cities the smaller initiatives they have to part from it for somebody because it has to be seen because we already are, it is invisible, so when we are performing [inaudible 1:31:14.8]in that sense of like it was convenient. But that is the only convenient thing.
Steven: I think we are all the more grateful for the fact that you accepted to talk with us, all of whom are extremely far from Assam, in various spots around the globe, but you also travel relatively extensively which is why it was so hard to pin you guys down for this discussion, I'm glad we were finally able to, but it's interesting, and you mentioned too earlier on is that you recently de-territorialized the Periferry experience onto the Spree river, in Berlin, how did that work out?
Mriganka: Basically we were in Berlin because of an exhibition which we basically did in Guggenheim that was part of the thing, because when we were mentioning about our [inaudible 1:32:35.5] we were basically Periferry was definitely an important component of our practice, so basically what we did was, the last, a few days back before the thing, the exhibition ends, we invited a kind of curated - the way we usually do Periferry in our northeast India, we do in Guwahati, we invited the people, they saw the exhibition, and then we wanted them to exit the gallery and take a curative part to this barge which we negotiated and took it for a few hours because of definitely certain expense we could not have been able to squat without any kind of [inaudible 1:33:20.4] .
So we invited a couple of people which we also wanted to engage, kind of people, you know certain things, this new kind of things which is happening around Europe, the social political fluxes, new thinking which is very happening, we were also quite interested to invited this interesting philosopher [Didracher? 1:33:52.2] but we couldn't contact him at the right moment so he couldn't make it -
Scott: Sorry Mriganka, could you repeat... ok Steven - you cut out for a second and I didn't catch it fully, thank you, please go on.
Mriganka: So basically we invited this group of curators, artists and initiated this thing which one of our lecture performance which was basically we titled "Speaking through to power" which it is impossible to repeat right now but the idea was to look at every moment to look the creating these temporary spaces, these kind of [heterotopic? 1:34:52.4] spaces in various kinds of things, because this journey was also curated which actually functioned like a border between past eastern or western Germany, or Berlin to an extent and then slowly we also planted two kinds of intervention, we also invited interruptions between our lecture, so it was like people were interrupting in between and kind of injecting, so it became a collaborative kind of performance which was in a sense certain points were accidental, certain things were also very intentional, so and then we also invited two of our collaborators in a larger sense which were doing a project with London-based organization called different exchange, we're doing a project called two rivers where we're looking at Thames and Brahmaputra and trying to do visualize a project, so we invited [1:35:55.9] and we had Peter [surname 1:35:58.7] from Vienna so they also kind of did their thing on the journey. Sonal you want to add something more?
Sonal: No, if anybody has questions, I'd be glad to answer.
Steven: I have another question because what's impressive is how broad-reaching your collaboration are, I mean they extend to different types of political, social actors, people from cultural and artistic scenes, in Assam, elsewhere in India, elsewhere in the world, but your collective itself is relatively small, it's you two. One of the questions that Scott and I had when we initiated this whole project around plausible art worlds and not only art worlds, but just worlds in general is how small can world be and still be a world? How small can a collective be and still be a collective? Is two enough? Or do we need three, or , how does it work for you to be two and to be a couple, moreover, and why haven't you chosen to expand out to a broader group to diversity, because in fact you're interested in diversity so why not diversify the collective itself?
Sonal: Yeah, I think that's something that we, that's a questions that we engage with all the time, and it's really interesting that - the way you put it because definitely what we kind of reflect upon a lot of times is that there have been many occasions where we've engaged other people in discussions, or in the process of making work etc, and we are definitely very open to having other people on board. But like I mentioned, within a space like the northeast that is not very easy to have number 1. Number 2, in terms of Periferry, we have about 5 or 6 more members in the official lists, but a lot of times what happens is of course again, that people are unable to even engage with the kind of contemporary art vocabulary that we work with, so it is a genuine problem that we see, but having said that, we've also been more and more working with many younger students and engaging people and even making work with us and I think we are definitely are committed towards creating more collaborative and collective practices, but in terms of it being just two of us, I think we've created, I'm very sure that we've definitely created a world, and the discussions and provocations for [inaudible 1:39:23.6] constant. So yeah, it does spill over to our personal space, and so there is for us not something, there's no division between personal and kind of work space, it all merges and, but I think that's why it's also very [inaudible 1:39:46.0] for us because we are constantly provoking each other, challenging each other, or sharing ideas, and I think it really works quite well for us.
Mriganka: I want to add one thing, basically regarding the collective thing, I got something which is maybe related to add to Sonal's thing; I think from the beginning itself we were very interested to have more and more people [inaudible 1:40:14.6] but I think in one sense, if we have to define specifically, Periferry has also become a collective, right now it's another collective which is like this hosting of this space, but regarding Desire machine collective, I think the [inaudible 1:40:31.9] of creating Desire Machine Collective involves certain kinds of conditions which we have put each other into. I think til now, a lot of contemporary people who, in one sense we credited as the individuals, but people don't want to put themselves into that position, like to put in this kind of location, or working with this kind of difficult, like for example, this film we just did for this exhibition, so we had, and we tried to see the possibility of creating a different kind of collaboration, we had four [inaudible 1:41:11.1] we opened our film and gave access to four of our collaborators, but at the end, so they wanted to be an individual, this is their choice, because that process was very important, that we had multiple authors, multiplicity coming into, constructing this kind of narrative, so I think that, trying to force that thing, try to invite kind of thing, we also left it open more or less [inaudible 1:41:49.2], so it is their inability in a sense we were always looking at the thing. Periferry in that sense has this possibility, I think people has to come and actually become part of the collective.
Scott: Well, Mriganka and Sonal, thank you so much for coming, I'm very interested by the way in this last point that was raised, this line of questioning, primarily, just to explain that about your exploration of collectivity and collaboration as artists, both in this particular project and in your process as a whole, as Desire Machine, but you know we'll have to follow up with you about that on another occasion, if you'd be into that, we've now hit a two-hour mark, and I think both for the sake of the people chiming in from Europe here and for your sake, we should probably wrap it up, but we really appreciate you coming to talk with us about this.
Mriganka: Thanks a lot
Steven: Thank you so much both of you, it's really been nice hearing your voices and hearing about this great project, and I think the way you concluded was really perfect, that Periferry remains open, so may it forever remain open, and thank you very much for joining [inaudible 1:43:27.8].
Mriganka: Thanks a lot, it was great talking to you all.
Sonal: I would like to thank the Basekamp team, and Steven and sorry for this huge delay that's been happening, and I think we also really enjoyed this entire conversation a lot. Good night and thanks.
Steven: Goodnight, or good morning
Scott: Goodnight, morning, evening.
Week 40: StrataSpore
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week — as we head into prime mushrooming season — we’ll be talking with Kate Cahill, Caroline Woolard and Chris Kennedy from StrataSpore, a platform for collective knowledge about mushrooms.
Initiated by Kate Cahill, Christopher Kennedy, Athena Kokoronis, Caroline Woolard, and mycologist Gary Lincoff, StrataSpore uses mushrooms as material and metaphor for latent, often unseen but eminently plausible worlds. Think about it: mushrooms not only feed communities — to great gastronomic, nutritional and hallucinatory delight — but at this very moment are eating oil spills, connecting old members of Fluxus, growing as alternative packaging material. As the earth’s oldest known organism, they may even have been what turned rock into soil, turning the earth into a plausible lifeworld. And mushrooms are the pivotal orientation point for members of StrataSpore to explore urban systems. Drawing inspiration from the connective function and form of mushroom ecology, StrataSpore uses local fungi in the New York City area as a model for engagement and re-interpretation of living in urban spaces. How do mushrooms discretely but radically change a landscape’s ecology? In what way do they insinuate a world within the world?
Inspired by rhizome networks as tools for bioremediation — a metaphor for the layers of unseen infrastructure below our feet, and a collaborative niche upon which to focus a collective narrative — StrataSpore seeks to cultivate “spores” of knowledge by combining elements of task/performance-based art, experiential learning, and experimental design practice that implements a dialogue about unseen, natural and man-made systems as sites for restorative sustainability applications in local NYC ecosystems. An invisible, but eminently edible world? Mushrooms as material and metaphor for worldmaking…
Week 37: Internacional Errorista
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Federico Zukerfeld and Loreto Garin, two of the co-founders of the Internacional Errorista.
International Errorism was born fortuitously in 2005 when a bunch of artists and activists in Buenos Aires, planning to protest the visit of George W. Bush to Argentina, meant to google “terrorism” but mistakenly forgot the “t” and typed in “errorism”… At the time, that error yielded zero hits; it is some measure of the group’s success (or error) that today it elicits over 300,000! With their hybrid blend of carnivalesque street art and savvy, corrosive political analysis, the group hunts down and exposes the errors that pollute our global public sphere, which the powers-that-be generally try to fob off as “the Truth”.
Indeed, errorism is a full-fledged if highly heretic philosophy — one that stands opposed to the “verism” that informs virtually all other modes of thought and human endeavor. For rather than being based on a quest for an elusive “truth”, it sees error as the founding principle of life: errare humanum est! How wrong could that be?! Proceeding by trial, but more generally by error, they claim in their manifesto that “we are all errorists:”
- Errorism : Concept and action are based on the idea that “error” is reality’s principle of order.
- Errorism is a philosophically erroneous position, a ritual of negation, a disorganized organization: failure as perfection, error as appropriate move.
- The field of action of “Errorism” contains all those practices that aim at the LIBERATION of the human being and language.
- Confusion and surprise, black humour and absurdity are the favorite tools of the errorists.
- Lapses and failed acts are an errorist delight.
The movement itself emerged from an earlier collective called Etcetera, but has gone global! Is error a plausible (art)world?
Transcription
Week 37: Internacional Errorista
Frederico: Hello
Scott: Hello there!
Frederico: Hello, Hi, how are you?
Scott: Excellent thanks
Jeremy: hola
Frederico: Jeremy, are you here?
Jeremy: Yes
[pause]
Jeremy: Some small children eh?
Scott: Yeah, that's my three year-old in the background
Jeremy: You're from [inaudible 0:00:47.0]
Frederico: What? No, in my home
[pause]
This is Scott's daughter here.
Scott: Ahh, yes, I'm hosting the audio remotely today, there's a bunch of people at the Basekamp space in Philadelphia, and a number of the other people that are on the call are from all over the place, some of their phones are still ringing, so we'll just sort of let that go, but any case; we might as well get started and if anyone gets dropped from the call please just give a shout in the text and let us know and we can go ahead and just keep going over the next hour and a half.
So anyway, welcome, Federico, and Loretta and Jeremy, it's really great to have you guys, welcome to another week in this series of talks where we're looking at a different example of a plausible art world each week. Every Tuesday night in 2010. You guys are this week's example and I know we'll be talking soon enough together at the Creative Time Summit, and we're really excited to have you guys there. So I don't know how many of you were able to read the intro page to the Errorists, but we also have a bunch of other links too, some videos that you made, and I'd like to post those at some point. And if you wouldn't mind going ahead and giving an intro to you guys, when and how you got started, and how you construct your art world.
Frederico: Wait a second, did you manage to make the video link? Which video link?
Jeremy: No, no tenemos el video
Scott: Yeah, we didn't actually add it yet, I'll go ahead and post that in a minute, I just wanted to, ohh it's ok, I mentioned something a moment ago.
I was thinking of this one just in case
Frederico: Ok, just to open the conversation a little bit. Thank you for the invitation to participate in this kind of meeting for us, it's a new experience and I think we feel very comfortable and I think we can show in the next one before we didn't know if we didn't send you sometimes, emails to try and be in contact and make this experience, but unfortunately we didn't find the moment, and now well, anyway, we are here, in Buenos Aires, not so far away.
So here it is half-past seven, and we want to try to go in this conversation, we would like to talk about something; not only about error, but the point of view of error that we have been trying to develop since some time ago. Now, we understand it's an important moment to understand how important it is at this time - the idea of error and how it can change our life if we can take care of it. For example here, we see how the relation of the new laws to control the society for example, this kind of anti-terrorist law that was operating here with this concept and this illogic of terror and error. Error was used to explain to the society how the system was operating in that moment, it was always the pretext of mistake, they say it was a mistake in the London underground, and the invasion to Iraq, and all of the last wars we have in the world. So, for the moment we see that in Buenos Aires it is the same sensation, and we have always, the justification after the action is error. So we discovered this word is working very well for this planification of the system, in the sense of the domination. Then, we say why we cannot recover the error as the real idea of error, you understand what I'm talking about? I say Why we have to fight to recover the error? Why error is now this very usable word. So for us, error is when we put in our flag; when we write errorismo, and we go to the streets of different places and demonstrations, or not, just walking around.
We try to demonstrate something, but at the same time, we try to live our life in another way. I think we are working here on two sides, one side; is this problematic, and this conflict about the error and the war on terror. On the other hand, we have this point of view, this philosophical point of view about error. For us it's not so easy, but at the same time, we enjoy the situation because we feel it's very contemporary in our context, in our life.
Jeremy: I think it's like some error we just want denounce, I don't know if it's a massacre in Gaza, we want to say; they say it's an error, but we don't think it's errorist.
In other place it's say if you just do what are the right things and jump to don't lie because it's all big [inaudible 0:08:49.5]. So, the error it's a capacity to liberate.
Loretta: At the same time, the problem here, in the 70s, after all the [generation? 0:09:08.4] who tried to develop a new system, like in Argentina, or Chile, the situation was criminalized after years as an error. A year built a socialist system here in our countries was taken as an error, so we took that word as a key to start again, trying to develop another kind of society. In a way it's a word to open a new debate about what kind of society we want, and it's a very good word for us to talk about this super successful society we had in our lives as capitalist system, or neo-liberalist system. It is a very good key word for us when we're talking about this art media space, because it's also a very hard and strong micro-world who put us under pressure to be successful and hyper-productive. So in that way, error made us a new way to work as an artist and also to think what kind of militants we want to create, what kind of life we want to have when we mix militants, political-militancy and art, so in that way, error for us is a very good way to escape sometimes from our life and work conditions.
Scott: Loretta, do you mean the worker conditions, and life conditions that expect zero error?
Loretta: Yes, exactly
Frederico: I'm sorry for interruption, but I think this is the principle idea we are fighting against, is the idea of successful, to be a success. This is a real problem in our country, and I think around the world it is the same. What does it mean to day to be successful? What is finding the happiness in this way? and why do we always try to go in this way and, maybe we can say it's not our choice, it's not our, you know? But it's a common stereotype in life. So, I think the problem of the education, when we teach children, and when they make some mistake, what is the way we have to take in this case? We have to make more reparation, we have to, and here, this is very problematic because in that [inaudible 0:12:17.6] of education, the now generation they are teaching us, they are very rebellious, they are more alive than us. For us, I don't know, I'm just 31 years, so for my generation we had to fight a lot to find some way in 2001 the country explode, and then in that moment we feel we are very close to some real change, and then a new liberal system came again, the people start to trust the banks and all this stuff, the history you know, so at the moment, what can we say? What's a failure? What's an error?
Scott: I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking, maybe you can both [inaudible 0:13:06.9] for later, but it's starting to get into it a bit, but I'm curious - you mentioned earlier the debate, the discussion that's been coming out of your approach about what kinds of societies you like to be a part of, or micro-worlds. I was curious what's come out of that so far.
Jeremy: Qué dijo?
Loretta: Can you repeat what you said before because it was a little bit... so we try to understand.
Scott: Oh, you want me to repeat? Sorry, my mistake; I was wondering if you mentioned earlier about the approach that you've taken in questioning the meaning of success and the meaning of what's right by being errorists, that's an interesting discussion about what kinds of societies you would like to be a part of and contribute, and what micro-worlds you would like to see, and I was just curious how that discussion and debate has been going so far.
Jeremy: Osea que llemos a...
Loretta: Yes, I think now for us, it's a big big discussion because we are trying to create this kind of international errorist movement. Many people around the world are trying to approach this idea, and during these five years we have continued with this idea of errorist. Many groups are starting to have discussions with us about what it means to create a movement in this movement of the world, and at the same time, what means support an idea and an errorist and what it means also to talk about error or mistake or failure. So, that is an interesting moment for us because it's more deeper discussion about what means this term of errorist. In that way, we are in a moment to be open to hear what kinds of answers are given to us, in the middle of all this kind of discussion, because it's very open, for example, last year, we know about one group in Turkey who is supporting this idea of errorist, but we don't know what kind of practice they want to have about errorist, so what's been interesting to know about what they are doing about it, but we don't know about what kind of political ideas they have in their bags. So, it's that kind of strange situation because it's a very open moment to discover what kid of real or possibilities this errorist movement has, or if it's just a passing of one idea to build a movement. What is happening with that kind of situation. I don't know if I answered well, I'm sorry.
Jeremy: I don't know, just I think it's just like, just not the same thing with all the militant rights will say we have a new man and a perfect man, he's a socialist, so just I think it's a break this idea, it's not new, but I think we are in this break.. It's not much to just want society or one perfect woman or man for the... yep, so we do...
[laughter]
Frederico: Jeremy, are you there?
Scott: Just to clarify for people who are listening to the audio but are not following the chat as much, I was just asking, what does it mean to support the idea of errorism, in your opinion, what's the best way for a group of people to begin going about that? and Frederico was just saying, "in my opinion is to recover the "ism"" and I'm curious what you mean by that.
Frederico: Well, I say that just as one shot just to open the debate about that, but you know the idea, the problem for example, in South America is all the process of these countries in the 70s was related to an idealistic dream of some revolution. After that, the new big idea dominating all the media and the society is the failure of that idea. That process was over, all the guerillas and the revolutionary movements were destroying and imposing a dictation and all this stuff, you know that. So, for us in this context, when we recognize, when we use one term as errorism, it's very strong because you can see how criminalized it is, the stereotype of Latin American terrorists, it's a very complicated moment, for example in Chile, Mapuches, they are originally people from there, and they are totally criminalized and under the law of the terrorist criminal. So, that is, for us, when I say recover the "ism" it's because you have in the history of all the avant-gardes, they use -- after that postmodern times, we cannot believe, we cannot trust in any "ism", "ism" is over. Because post modernity creates that sensation that nothing new can be created. When I say recover this "ism" or create that kind of "ism" for us it's important because it's not easy to think in this kinds of issues here, and well anyway, what can I say
Loretta: Also because when we start with our group, we are part also from etcetera, so when we started with the group etcetera in the 90s, it was a discussion for us about this close history time. About what was happening with history, what was happening with art, what was happening with the creativity, and what was happening with the politics. When we started as a group, it was very difficult to be involved with art and politics at the same time because the word politic politica was forbidden -- not forbidden, but it was a very bad word to talk about.
Scott: Got ya
Loretta: So, for that reason, we keep this idea of this old way of making politics as also as a key to open debates and also as a key to open a new possibility for on one hand to have a communication, on another hand to discuss about what we are doing in our life, and what to [expect? 0:22:33.7] about our futures, and what to [expect? 0:22:37.5] about this future thinking in the past and also what was the real failure of all the systems, what we think were failures or mistakes. I think we are not alone in that, I think after 2001, many of us are pushing to have this discussion because we are pushing to try to understand what was happening in the twenty years before that. In that way, talk about "ism" talk about movement, and using this way of metaphoric way to talk about politics opens a good possibility to talk about things that people are afraid to talk about. Error, for us, is very interesting to start to talk about terror but at the same time to talk about what was happening also with this process of the 70s and also this new possible process about guerilla or kind of idea of revolution as in the past. It's a good way to open this closed ---
Frederico: I think at the same time -- when we use to play with the stereotypes that a very well created by the mass media, we understood this is a our opportunity to try to take a little kind of power of representation because we fight against representation, but with errorism we can create these kind of fake identities, transitory identities, totally open -- but sometimes we are afraid about the [inaudible 0:25:02.1] we make some kinds of workshops about error and we find a lot of young guys they feel involved and they try to play with this concept of errorism but then we feel it's important to going on to the background part of this society and see how we can open this idea of one international movement in this moment when nobody with believes in that, this is complicated but at the same time it's good, if you see the [inaudible 0:25:53.4] --
Scott: It seems like, in a sense you're using terms specifically that you don't agree with in order to interrogate them, or to bring the discussion to the floor; but at the same time, it does seem like there's something that you wish to recover, or there's a surplus that you'd like to take some advantage of or connect in some way, and one of those it sounds like, it is a real genuine desire is to connect people who are interested in reimagining the world in different ways from all over the world. That's what my understanding is, do you think that that's true? I realize that you guys are playing with language, but I'm not really under the impression that it's all tongue-in-cheek.
[silence]
Did you hear me ok? Do you need me to repeat that at all?
Frederico: Excuse me, I'm trying to read the chat.
Jeremy: I don't know what they think about terrorism because USA is a country was speak about anti-terrorism and it's a real, some with real presence, and so we have a lot of things to know about...
[Silence]
[Loretta laughs]
Scott: I guess my main question is the way I understand you use.
I'm going to frame this in a slightly different way.
The way I understand you use language and employ terms that have implications that you wouldn't necessarily agree with in order to bring about a wider and more broader discussion. Many things may have multiple meanings to that it actually instigates or kind of prods, a sometimes uncomfortable discussion; at the same time, what you were just talking about—the interest to connect people all over the world who have overlapping interests, specifically overlapping interests in questioning what it means to be right or what the good life is—basically how we should live, essential questions about constructing societies, and even, in your words, micro-societies as well, that to me seems like a genuine pursuit, is that too strange of a questions to ask? I guess I'm curious to clarify that and I was curious about what kinds of interests you have in connecting with other people who have similar ideas or who are questioning similar things.
Frederico: This is the principle idea of our idea is this one you said: connecting people and making these kinds of contacts. First, you said something interesting about the terms that we use, or we cannot use, but we do, or do not agree with it, or the conceptions and this is interesting for me because I think when we have to contact or connect people through this idea of error and errorism, it's incredibly easy. In my case, I don't know, but sometimes I talk about that and I feel it's a very positive moment to speak about error in the life, and how error is working in this context and this society. For example, we don't want to create a group of errorists because here we have a lot of people, individuals, groups, collectives, and we can deal and make things together or not. But, the problem is the problem of how we can play this global and international situation. What you say to connect people is interesting because in the actions we organize here in Buenos Aires a lot of people are involved here and they take the risk, they go to the streets with us and we live the experience together. Then, our idea is these people, when they're back in their countries, they can develop something there, with this experience we have here, they can bring the experience to our micro-community, but in this case, the way to work in this kind of community I think is taking care of the sensibility and this [inaudible 0:32:01.0] part of the relationships. When we said in the beginning of the conversation, our main idea is to fight against success, now I think it's the same because we are in a really competitive society; for that reason, error is very popular now, because losers [inaudible 0:32:24.6] they don't want to be losers, and they fight for that. So for this reason I think if we take the way of making not an international movement, and we make a kind of new-age religion, we will be also very [inaudible 0:32:44.3]. Sorry for my long speech.
Scott: No, it's really interesting, and in a sense, I'm curious...
[Child laughing]
How someone might start a group of errorists, was because you were talking about some people who I wasn't sure exactly where. I didn't hear exactly where, but you said that there were some people who wanted to do this but you weren't exactly sure where they were coming from.
[Child talking on microphone]
Frederico: For example the case, some interesting cases for us we discovered last time, was a performance or music band, group in London, the errorists, they are three guys. We find that on the internet checking on Google searching for something about error and we find them and we find their manifesto that they wrote interesting, and also their music, their experimental music, so this is one case, another interesting case is in France, in Marseille, in an independent newspaper called [Newspaper name 0:34:52.2], it's a very interesting newspaper made by very great people, they're are like our family there, so they support errorism since a long time ago, and it was interesting because they use to publish some things about errorism in France, and this guy Jeremy who is now in the conversation with us was there because he is from France and he was involved with them. So [inaudible 0:35:26.9] but the problem is we don't have any head, we don't have a main control of the situation, and we don't want to have that. But at the same time we need to do something, for this reasons, maybe we have to create—we are working on that, some kind of website, or something to try to concentrate this energy of error, but you know it's difficult.
Jeremy: In each country they do something really different. I saw the video in the south of France, and it's really different to what we do in Buenos Aires, it's more violent, it's not bad, not good, it's just other things. The actions we do, we just have a really good relationship with the population - la gente al lado.
Frederico: Just to say something - I'm reading the chat there...
Scott: To me that sounds like an appropriation of that term —
Frederico: No, no, of course, this is —
Scott: when a major, when a powerful entity sees that language has some disruptive power, you know it usually is a good idea to recoup that, or try to in some why by organization, you know.
Frederico: The conflictive point for me is not only accepting the error, because accepting error is easy, you can go to pray to the church or something like this, accepting error is not complicated, the complicated point is living in error, making error your life, accepting error as something natural and not, you know. So when I say the critic about how competitive the capitalist system is today, everybody reshaped the error, it's not my crazy idea, it's what I see every day in my life, even if the people are very open minded, it happens the same, so it's complicated because nobody wants to accept we are going in the wrong way—our society. We are going in the wrong way so if we accept that, maybe errorism is a term very usable—we can use it in a lot of ways.
Scott: Absolutely, yes.
Frederico: We don't want to make this a very superficial situation, errorism is very easy to transform in some fashion, some stupid thing; so for reason we have to take care o that.
Loretta: Also it's very interesting how media and how error is to save their own system. They always say "This was a big mistake, how can we fix this mistake? We are trying to fix this mistake", the problem is for example when we wrote the first manifesto, we said we want to take error with the conscious of error; that means you are responsible of your errors. The power always escapes from their mistakes, saying at the last way "we are doing mistakes". We call that our not errorist mistakes, and that was one of the first points we used in our first manifesto in 2005. The media use the way to save this; for example how they save their legal problems, the guilt situation, taking as an error some plans they are making before; kill many people in one country, or making wars in Iraq, or whatever, they use that they make mistake, but what happens when somebody makes a mistake and is involved in a legal situation. For example, we had a workshop one year ago in Columbia, and one of our students is now in jail because he did a stupid mistake on Facebook, now he's in jail and he tried to defend himself saying "It was an error" and that, in the legal situation, in Columbia is not something that makes him escape from his legal problem now. So what happens with error to the people who don't have power? When the power use the error; for that reason, as you said before about the stereotypes made by the mass media, we use also in our actions, we use and we put evidence how this creates a stereotype and how the words error and mistake are used to build more power also. We use these two ways of error; one as a way to liberation, and one as a key used by power to dominate, for example now in Argentina and in all of Latin America we are celebrate 200 years of independence, and we call that independence was really planning error, because it's not independence.
Frederico: But that started with Christopher Columbus, that's a long time ago, we was look for India and he arrived here; in our condition this is very... somebody is writing here, sorry.
[quiet while reading text on chat]
Frederico: This is a kind of break, I want to share a link with you. Scott?
Scott: Yeah, we're here, I was sort of waiting in anticipation, it sounded like you were looking for a link or something, but I definitely have questions to ask.
Well there are a few things, I just didn't want to go in another direction is you're in thought here, but I was a little while ago, I was reading this discussion which turned out to be pretty elaborate discussion on the north/east-west-south website and there are a lot of things to say about this.
One thing I was interested in was last December you guys posted a video about urban errorist photography and as we're talking about this, I just keep wanting to get some kind of a picture of some of what you guys do, and that seems to be helping a little bit...
Frederico: It's pretty strange because I don't know if you have done something like that in Philadelphia, but here we have [Palestinian and the Israeli state 0:48:06.3] and you know, they are crossing one and another at his incredible, because when we discovered that it's a very urban errorist situation because at the same time, this point is under the control of Mossad, the secret service of Israel. When we discovered that we thought we must put some signal here, something to try to call the attention of the people because it's an incredible situation and for the people of the neighborhood it was amazing because they know that they are paranoid because they know why it's a danger, a problematic point in the city, but if you were working there nothing happens, but in the end it's controlled by cameras and some police force. It was strange because we organized the action only for twenty minutes because we cannot stay for long; the reaction of the people was interesting, and for us it was a crazy adventure because we tried to keep this city of Buenos Aires alive. It's difficult at the moment, but we try.
Scott: Sorry, Frederico, are these links to various public actions?
Frederico: Jeremy, Jeremy
Scott: We'll just take a look, I was wondering if you guys would be interested in describing some of the points from your manifesto that Steven describes, I'll type them in just so that we know what we're talking about.
I mean it may be self-explanatory, but when did that come about, I know we've gotten into some of this already, you've discussed some of this, but it seems that this is a succinct [inaudible 0:51:24.5] and I was curious if there was anything in here that you want to elaborate on.
But, you know I'm curious about how you feel about that now. I'm curious about how this concept, or this idea is working or not; what do you think in the United States, in the context of your country where you're living, what do you think about that? We can find some cells and people there?
Scott: I'd be curious to know what other people in the call think about that, I have media thoughts, but maybe you're asking about what people in the US think about what you've been talking about, maybe there's a cultural difference.
Frederico: Cultural difference, exactly.
Scott: I don't know, does anybody have any thoughts? I know a couple of you are from the US in addition to me.
[Daughter singing; Are you done Daddy?]
Frederico: Many of our reactions here in Latin America was because the Governmental decision during the last time, many reactions in the economic and social situation, so for this reason, for us it's very important to know if this context, this new situation in the United States is more flexible to organize or to do some things, I don't know, it's a simple questions; if you see the context, the situation more open to recover the public space, the public political activity and these kind of things.
Scott: That's definitely a really curious question; I'm partly interested, for instance Matthew and Greg, and other people on the call who I know deal with some of these issues in your work, I was curious if you had any immediate thoughts about that. I mean my initial response is that there's an idea of freedom in the United States; there's dissonance between the [inaudible 0:54:34.3] and the reality. For instance, like other places we have during major events there are distinct protest zones where one's allowed; sanction spaces where you're allowed to have dissent, which is kind of a funny idea. There is also this idea, but it's like a really twisted idea of the commons here in the US, we really don't have much of that. I mean there were times where that was an important idea, and depending on the government at the time, the administration, there are more or less "social programs" or "public spaces" and a lot of effort went into that. But during other times, it's the exact opposite, I mean your name, the International Error, obviously for people in the United States not coincidentally makes people think of terrorism and it's a way to play with that, of course, but just to let you know. I can give you a very localized anecdote, here in Philadelphia, this was the capital of the United States when it first unionized, and it's described as the cradle of liberty; we have, just a block away from Base Kamp, the Independence hall—where the Independence from Great Britain was signed, the Liberty Bell; (I don't want to make judgmental statements here so I'm trying to be very general) where it's a symbol of liberty in the United States at the very least, and there is immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, symbols like that, that few people cared that much about suddenly became these national treasures that had been guarded with military might, really there these armed guards in front of these icons, these buildings, basically at this point are really just tourist centers. They have no political power, and hard to say they even have ideological power; Japanese tourists will come and take a lot of snapshots, school kids learn about it; United States history; it's not the Pentagon, you know, but yet we somehow felt it was important to station armed guards and actually put up all of these very difficult to maneuver pedestrian walk ways, and barricades, it really was pretty crazy, and so I think that's calmed down just a little bit in this administration, but it still is, from my point of view anyway, it's just telling that tiny story which I think is kind of funny, especially if this is such a small city for being a large city, it really has such a small city feel. It's not isolated to that though; everywhere I go and everyone I talk to in the United States, no matter where they are has experiences like that, and sees that in their locale.
So, I guess my answer to you is that I can't really speak on behalf of the United States, but I can say that I think that the name of the group and also the statements that you've made, and the actions that I've seen so far; the manifesto—what it is to me it's a kind of linguistic shock, it's a very tiny shock to the system, but an interesting side-step to approach this really difficult core problem of enforced competition. I think that it's a very interesting strategy to approach a competitive environment with the idea that where all these expectations on us cultural producers to artists or whatever are that we have to win, not only that, but we have to impress, we have to success; not that we have to, but if we don't we're losers, we won't be supported, we'll have to work day jobs, all kinds of things like that, so basically I'd like to approach this where we're going to focus specifically on error. Not as something to overcome like [inaudible 1:00:16.2]
[Daughter talking]
But, I think it's interesting, so anyway, my answer is, I do think it has a lot of potential here in the United States, will people turn into a meme? and have lots of Errorist cells? I really don't know, but I'm curious about how you could see that happening.
Frederico: Error is something here, there is a lot of things in common but not really seen with our reference of error. But I'm curious about that because I think everybody together is in error, it's very common to find the division, but it's important to find the point in common. I think the point in common that we have is that we are living in the same planet, and we are under the same economic system, and sometimes that means just to go back to this idea of error in our life; if we make a plan of some activities, or some experiences, and everything goes, we do something very spontaneous and then see what happens. Of course it's totally experimental, but at the same time, we take, maybe this is the point of, not the division, but the difference, because we are trying to provoke some political answer. We are trying to use the resources of the art, the theatre, the performance, or I don't know; just to create some reaction—in the beginning we were shocked by the reaction of the media and how they transformed our ideas within five minutes, but at the same time, we can't try to enter there and make something. So in this context it's interesting because error has the potential to provoke the political field, and in the everyday life.
[reading text chat]
Jeremy: If we speak; a lot of countries I think we must think about actions in a lot of countries, so the things is, maybe I'm not really interested in the sense of the error, but I think if we think about something concrete to do and also the country in the same moment, because we have unity of moment—not unity of the place, maybe we do something interesting.
The [inaudible 1:05:14.2] when they do a big error, they annoy everyone in the world, so why don't we respond? I mean...
[reading text chat]Qué dice?
Frederico: More people great, and fortunately more people will...
Jeremy: Hola?
Scott: Yes, we can hear you.
Jeremy: Se entienden el video o no?
[Scott's daughter: Daddy, I want a pen...
Mummy doesn't want you do draw inside that book
Why?
Because it's her book, you've got other books you can draw in,
But I want a book with dots, like this one, I really want the same book as Mommy
It's Mommy's book, if she says no, then no...]
Jeremy: Qué es capitalisma [inaudible 1:07:18.4]?
Scott: It seems to me that you guys are questioning, tell me if I'm right about this so to speak, but it seems like you're questioning not so much only what is right and what is wrong, but you're actually trying to define how these terms are used because they are so misused. They are so often used to mislead. Do you think there's anything to that, can you hear me ok?
Jeremy: No, muy mal, it cut, and I don't understand.
Scott: It seems to me that you're not so much debating only that things that dominant cultures tends to tell people are right; it seems that you're not only saying "That's wrong", although that does seem like it's part of it, or that things that people judge to be wrong are actually right or things that are successful are actually errors and vice versa; but it also seems like you're trying to play with the language itself because, not just to debate the actual point on which things are right and things are wrong, but interrogate the way language is used because it's so often used to mislead.
And so if we continue to use these terms the way they're normally used, in the colloquial sense, or even that something is an error, or it's not an error, or it's right, or it's incorrect; then it's seems to me that we're missing the point of what you guys are doing.
And I guess I'll just stop with this, because I guess this is a question more than a statement, it seems to me, well, why don't I just ask it as a question; Do you think that you want to provide an alternative to the definition of error; in addition to just redefining which things are or are not errors? Does that make sense?
[silence]
Guys are you still there?
I just read you're missing Frederico.
Hello, Frederico?
I was asking this question, and I asked it three different ways because I thought that you were there, and then I realized well you're not, maybe I'll just ask that one more time.
I'm just wondering because maybe we're just missing the point when we're discussing whether something is or is not an error, or it's right and it's wrong. It seems to me that maybe you're not only debating that certain things we're told are right and are actually not, or that certain things that are errors are really not, but maybe do you think that what you're attempting to do is provide an alternative definition to what error actually means so that we shouldn't really be debating whether or not something is or is not an error, but that you're questioning the use of that languages because it's so often used to mislead us?
Frederico: I don't know how we can definite what we want to do, but I think if we want to put some words in action. I don't know if it's a good explanation. This is not an escape from the questions, but this is for me the answer. We are taking this concept of this word because we feel this is flowing in there, and we try to take it, but at the same time put error in action. How do you put word in action?
Loretta: I think, when we start to do this, you know how we discover errorists, was because of a mistake. We were preparing this action for the missing of residents in Mar del Plata and we were creating an action, a theatrical act, for that meeting. In that time Bush was coming to Argentina, it was full of demonstrations so we decided to be there, and the idea was trying to recreate the image made by mass media, and the image we decided to recreate was the image that the mass media created about the Middle East, for us. So the image we had here by media was the image of people full of weapons, women with veils, men with kafiyas, and full of tanks and things like that; dangerous people, dangerous countries. So we decided to recreate a kind of guerilla, fake guerilla, or a fake terrorist group and we start to write the text for that theatre piece when one of our comrades arrived with the pen drive and the text, we open the word program, and the title was "Acción Terrorista", "Terrorist Action", but it was written in a wrong way, it said "Errorist Action", and immediately when we tried to correct that word, it showed us two links of the word; Errorist and Terrorist, for that was the situation, that was the way how we discovered this word, and how we started to play with Errorist, but then for us the first discussion about error and errorist was in this theatrical performance we did in Mar del Plata, because it was full of mistakes; what was happening around this theatrical action, and one of the most interesting things for us, after this experience of demonstration in Mar del Plata, we discovered a method we were playing as a theatrical group. we had two kinds of possibilities to open the game, and participation, so after we did that action, many people who were spectators started to be immediately part of this theatrical performance. Not only people in the street, also the people who arrived to catch us, because of our Errorist action. So I think one of the first keys we used to play with this word is connected with what the body practiced, we put our body in these political situation, or in this public space, we are using around the world, like in the streets or whatever.
Jeremy: Os piensas que se entiende algo de lo que hablamos en inglés? (Do you all think they understand what we're saying in English?)
Loretta: We are reading now what they are discussing in the chat.
Scott: Maybe it would be good to repeat the question from the chat just for people who can only access the audio. Sometimes people are away from their laptops, so it's a good idea to repeat the questions out loud.
I can go ahead and do that if you want, Matthew, do you want to go ahead an elaborate out loud, are you able to do that?
Matthew: I'm just trying to make the associations with what we were talking before about the distinction between Brazil and America, and I think that there's a [inaudible 1:19:36.0]and I'm finding it really interesting when the media sources don't play this role of just providing us with information but trying to allow us to negotiate the validity of the information that we're giving. I've notice in [inaudible 1:20:02.9] I feel is the most obvious one where you've got a pseudo-newscaster commenting on comments that are being made in the political realm, and obviously showing that they're blatant lies. It also playing this role about the[inaudible 1:20:24.7] at the same time. So I'm guess I'm making a lot of associations with that role and the[inaudible 1:20:35.1] in that it's on a comedy network, but it's kind of news and people are taking it more as news, and I kind of feel that this idea of error [inaudible 1:20:45.3] in this grey area of... so that it can be either or, or it can be both, and it's post humorous in a way, but it's really specific, and so I don't really have a questions, but I find it really interesting that these middle areas where they're trying to make them visible and at the same time make comments on really important issues, yet we're playing this tongue-in-cheek role.
Frederico: Matthew, thank you. Ok, sorry for the silence, I don't know. Thank you Matthew for your opinion. I don't want to moderate here, but...
Scott: It's ok, please do.
Frederico: But what can I say, I think what... sorry, I'm reading here.
[Silence]
Ahh, no no, please.
Jeremy: Qué dijo?
Frederico: [laughing]
Jeremy: No entiendo nada, qué es "I like"?
Frederico: Que está diciendo me estás escuchando...
Jeremy: Si te escucho...tratemos de traducir porque no he entendido nada (Can we try to translate it because I didn't understand anything.)
Frederico: [speaks in Spanish]
Excuse me guys please, I needed to speak in Spanish because he didn't understand, maybe in French, we can speak something in French. Anyway.
Scott: Yes, I'm curious about this too; how different people here define and understand error, because whether or not you guys wanted to answer that earlier, it still seems to me to be a very point to your project, is the kind of redefinition of what error actually means. Obviously it's a re-contextualization of it, but also, I think it's a redefinition in some way. Even if it's not a strict definition, it does seem to be some attempt there to approach, a different kind of approach.
Frederico: It's interesting because in commentary it said something like... you know the difference in our context for our country, if we compare it to situations; it's totally different because in this context, we cannot take like them the same kind of activities. Today, if we make this kind of experience, we are repeating something, that's the problem, I told you before, I don't want to close the discussion in this level of representation because I think we can create this errorism international, and everybody can do it, everyone can take the word and the concept in the way they want. When we go to the discussion of how is the situation with this term and why we take this like our flag, it's for one reason because we trust. In a way, we become a little bit fundamentalistic on error, and you say error [inaudible 1:27:06.3]. But I'm sure, because maybe we are inside the error right now, maybe we are losing the point, you know?
Scott: I just wanted to mention that we have three minutes before we end this chat. Even if we don't always start on time, we always end on time, but just for the sake of people who are something like 2am for them now. But I just wanted to mention that and say if anyone had any burning statements that they wanted to make as a kind of a bookmark for a follow up, because we will be following up, when you come to New York, that this would be one of those discussion among other discussions from past weeks; but this one in particular would be good to follow up on between now and October 10th, which is when we'll actually be discussing this again in person.
Frederico: There would be a real [inaudible 1:28:53.6] situation.
Scott: Indeed. Well, it's been really great...
Frederico: I would make my [inaudible 1:29:03.8] to be a real errorist. Please help me, I will try to call you.
Scott: Frederico, if you want to send things by e-mail, the best ways to do that, are either to send it to the discussion list, or you can also send it, if you want to, I don't know if you actually feel like doing this, but there's comments at the bottom of that page which is a really good place to add extra information. We often add things like a link to the audio afterwards, or things like that. So if you have follow up stuff, that's a great place, and we can also post it to the list. But that will get some more people.
It was really great having you guys to discuss the International Errorists tonight.
Frederico: Listen, listen one question, when will we have the next, what is the program? Because I want to show you next time, please send me the program to my e-mail address.
Loretta: Thanks to everybody and we hope we can create a new language so we can speak errorism next week, it will easier for us to speak and explain more things.
Scott: We do need to create a new language, don't we.
Have a great evening, and we'll see you soon.
Week 35: Sewing Rebellion
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Carole Frances Lung, biographer (and sometime impersonator) of Frau Fiber Textile Worker, founder of the Sewing Rebellion.
http://sewingrebellion.wordpress.com/
The Sewing Rebellion began in the fall of 2006 in Chicago, initially as a monthly free sewing workshop and clothing exchange. In January 2007, acknowledging that a rebellion couldn’t happen once a month, weekly Sunday afternoon meetings were established until May of 2007, when Frau Fiber went itinerant. Frau Fiber’s intention is to bring the Sewing Rebellion to communities around the country — and more recently to Haiti — where she lays the ground work for an economy of what she calls “STOP SHOPPING, START SEWING.” The Sewing Rebellion furthers the emancipation from the global garment industry by teaching and learning how to alter, mend and make one’s own garments and accessories. Textile work and activist Frau Fiber and / or regional chapter organizers distribute their knowledge of the garment industry, pattern making and sewing, encouraging the reuse, renovation and recycling of existing garments and textiles in the creation of unique items tailored to individual tastes and body shapes.
Whereas many of the plausible artworlds we have looked at over the past months have focused on the worldmaking potential of new digital technologies, the Sewing Rebellion has strove to pick up an older, “ur-analogic” thread — stitching, weaving, sewing, garment making — as an alternative to consumerism. More than that, the Rebellion explicitly links this activity to labor… perhaps the most crucial component of any plausible life world.
Transcription
Week 35: Sewing Rebellion
?: Hi Steven, Hi Carole
Carole: Hi
?: Is that you Carole We've got Salam with us, did we lose Steven already? Steven is joining up from Salt Spring Island which I don't know where that is. Let's add Steven back real quick, and then we will get started.
Steven: OK, I'm back
?: Before we get started, if you're listening in, just be sure to mute your audio to allow for as clean an audio broadcast as possible, if you need help doing that just let us know, otherwise I'm going to turn it over to Steven to introduce Carol and Sewing Rebellion.
Steven: Thanks [inaudible 0:02:04.4]
[Steven cuts off]
?: Well listen, I'll introduce you, although admittedly I'll just basically be reading what we wrote to that people are all on the same page, and then you can take over and whatever gaps I leave you can fill those in as we go, does that sound alright?
Carole: Sure
?: So Sewing Rebellion began in the Fall of 2006 in Chicago initially as a monthly free-sewing workshop and clothing exchange, in January 2007 acknowledging that a rebellion couldn't happen once a month, weekly Sunday afternoon meetings were established until May 2007 when Frau Fiber went [itinerant 0:03:02.3]. Frau Fiber's intention is to bring the Sewing Rebellion around the country, and more recently to Haiti, where she lays the groundwork for the economy which she calls "Stop Shopping, Start Sewing" the Sewing Rebellion furthers the [emancipation 0:03:16.3] from the global garment industry by teaching and learning how to alter, mend and make one's own garments and accessories. Textile work and activist Frau Fiber and or regional [inaudible 0:03:27.1] distribute their knowledge of the garment industry, pattern-making and sewing, encouraging the re-use, renovation and recycling of existing garments and textiles in creation of unique items tailored to individual taste and body shapes. Whereas many of the plausible art worlds we have looked at over the past month have focused on the world-making potentials of new digital technology, the Sewing Rebellion has strove to pick an older analogical thread, stitching, weaving, sewing, garment making as an alternative to consumerism. More than that, the rebellion explicitly links the activity to labor, perhaps the most crucial component of any plausible life-world.
So hopefully that ties in more or less what you do, but obviously, we want to hear from you about the specifics of projects you've been working on and where you guys are at now.
Carole: Ok, well I think it's really important in the context of my work to consider my background in the garment industry, I actually worked in the apparel industry for twelve years before I went to graduate school and got my MFA and started to make this body of work that is I think slowing processing my experience working in the industry. Working in an industry that I love the material culture of, but I never really liked the politics and didn't appreciate that way that bodies are portrayed and the labor politics and things like that. So, I think the Sewing Rebellion came into being about the same time that I was travelling to Germany and I studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, in a MFA in public art and new artistic strategies. It was at that point where I think I gave myself permission to make work about what I knew and about what I know - and what I know is garment production. I realized, when I came back from Weimar that I had this skill set that was being lost and wanted to give it away. So that's how the Sewing Rebellion came into being, fortunately there's some great spaces in Chicago, like Mess Hall, that allow one to present free workshops and not have to pay rent for a space. So that's been one of the struggles I think, with the Sewing Rebellion and having it grow, there was always the search for space, or people that have space that they can host the event, so it is met in everything from private homes to public sewing spaces. The Brooklyn chapter meets at a community sewing space, and there's actually two chapters in Los Angeles; one is on the east side, which is meeting in a someone's studio space, Jennifer Bruce's studio space, and the other one meets in hands-on3rd which is in west Hollywood. Then of course the Mess Hall chapter continues to meet and it continues to evolve and I think basically at this point, I'm trying to get the Sewing Rebellion to operate without Frau Fiber actually having to participate. So, does anybody have any questions about that at that point? I'm just talking into space here, it's really funny!
?: No, yeah it might feel a little awkward at first, but believe me we're all listening and thinking, and really if there are links to specific works, or images or whatever you want to include…
Carole: Ok, well I think the national blog, which is sewingrebellion.wordpress.com
?: Yep, we've posted that, and Salem also posted a couple of other ones…
Carole: Ok, so what happens on the blog side, and I guess that's where I utilize public access and the internet, is by posting instructions, I try and distribute monthly. Sometimes it's quarterly, it just depends on other things that are going on at the time. It's really important I think for the Sewing Rebellion that it is a free event, I know that the Brooklyn chapter does have to charge I think a $5 donation because of space, but otherwise they are free events and that's important; and I also think it's really important that each chapter has their own identity, yes they're under the umbrella of the Sewing Rebellion, but it's really about coming together and building a community of people who are interesting in increasing the life of their clothes, and however that transpires is fine. The LA chapter did a screen printing workshop last week, or last month, and so the instructions that also go out are optional, they're there, people want to use them but they don't have to. One of the things that is happening now is the chapters are starting to make suggestion for instructions, and then I go ahead and type them up and format them and all that kind of thing. What else about the Sewing Rebellion? I'm just looking through the blog…
?: Yeah, I mean, you can pause and find specific things you want to share with us, so don't feel like you have to be rushed to talk through everything up front, this is very informal, very casual, and as you talk the gears will be spinning, and we'll start to formulate questions and ideas.
So far it's really wonderful and exciting, Steven is doing a play-by-play and so there's various threads that are happening simultaneously.
Carole: And I think it's really important to understand too that the Sewing Rebellion has become one out of several projects, and I like to say that Frau Fiber has this multi-national corporation that she's forming and the Sewing Rebellion is one element of it. The other element of it is knock-off enterprises which primarily are solo performances wherein Frau Fiber knocks-off regional apparel, so she did a performance in 2008 of knocking-off Hart Schaffner Marx suits in Chicago and Hart Schaffner Marx suites have been manufactured in Chicago for a really long time, and they're starting to slowly move their production off-shore, and so she does these commemorative sewing-performances that are durational in nature, oftentimes attempting to mimic what an actual garment workers' day would be like. So like in the performance in Chicago, she was working 12-hours shifts, 6 days a week, and then only allowing herself one little ten-minute break a day to go the bathroom and have a little bit to eat. Then most recently I'm doing, or Frau's doing a piece in Los Angeles that is supposed to start on Thursday although the pedal-powered sewing machine's not finished yet, and she will be knocking-off a Forever21 shirt which kind of looks like a cross between a work-shirt and a military shirt, and it's part of their American brand, which is manufactured in Taiwan, the label is super funny because it says [The American brand, manufactured in Taiwan 0:11:33.8] and she's going to be recreating these shirts in front of Forever21 stores, the flagship store in Highland Park, Hollywood, Santa Monica, there's another store in west Hollywood, and then in front of their corporate headquarters, which is on the southeast side of Los Angeles.
That's a couple of the on-going projects of knock-off enterprises, and then also most recently is the "Made in Haiti" work, which started in December 2009 but Frau Fiber was invited to attend the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, which was hosted by a group of found object sculptures who are consistently denied visas to attend their exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and so a British curator and one of the artists came up with this idea to bring the international art world to this neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. So for that project, Frau Fiber was looking at the process of used apparel and where it goes and our apparel ends up in developing countries like Africa and Haiti and what it's done is it's made a local garment production, so in Haiti you have this tradition of tailors that are trained in the French methods of tailoring and they're incredibly skilled, they basically are losing work because everyone is buying these second-hand clothes which are called "pepe", so I met this tailor whose name is [Jonas surname 0:13:22.8] and we've worked together three times now, I actually just came back last Thursday from Haiti, and he and I worked together on developing garments that are repurposed from the pepe, and then I bring it back into the States. We started a second collection this time around, which is stenciled t-shirts which are done by some of the younger artists that live in the neighborhood and then we also started a collection of backpacks that are made from overalls, so that's a full-scope of what I've got going on right now.
Steven: You listed a number of really ambitious projects, I was wondering if we could take a closer look at one of two of [inaudible 0:14:25.5]
Carole: Sure
Steven: [inaudible 0:14:27.8] needles and thread… how they work… the most recently one actually, the Haiti project
Carole: How the project works? Well, the first time how the project worked was hold on one second, I just want to get a statement up here.
How the project worked originally was I, as Frau Fiber went down to Port-au-Prince, and the curators new that I was interesting in working with pepe and was interested in working with a tailor, and fortunately there's a couple of tailors living in the neighborhood, so I interviewed both of them, and ended up working with one that was a little bit younger; the older tailor, he wanted me to pay him $150 a day, and it was a little bit out of my budget, so some of the important questions for me with doing the Made in Haiti work were asking the tailors and negotiating with the tailors on what they felt they should be paid every day. At the time too I knew that there was discussion in Port-au-Prince about wages, and there were several student groups that were trying to get wages increased to $5 a day, but there is some garment manufacturing that happens in Haiti, Hanes and I think David's Bridal used to manufacture in Haiti, I don't think they are anymore, but there are some lower-end products, and they said that they would pull-out if the wages went up to $5 a day. The minimum wage was set at $3.09 a day, and there's lots of questions about whether or not that $3.09 actually gets paid and how it gets paid. Primarily the workers do work on a peace-rate wage, oftentimes are expected to produce what way beyond can happen in an 8-hour day, so they end up working 12 to 16 hours a day, and they still don't make their quotas.
So it's really important to me as thinking about this project too as it's an art project, but it's also becoming like this business, that the tailor have a voice in how much he makes, so after many discussions with Jonas, we agreed on $50 a day, which is a little bit about $8 an hour I guess when you break it down to an hourly wage, which I think is totally fair, and for the skills that Jonas has, he's highly highly skilled, and all the work is also produced on a treadle sewing machine, power's not really reliable in Haiti and so almost all the tailors that I saw all work on the old treadle Singer sewing machines. Once I had established with Jonas that we would be working together, then we set about getting a bundle of pepe, so the pepe actually was called Kennedy and it was instituted by JFK as charity to provide developing countries with clothes, and I think at some point it probably was free and distributed freely, but today it's a very vibrant economy both from the US side and also in Haiti. And so if you can afford to get a bundle of pepe, you're an entrepreneur; you can resell the stuff on the street and actually become a shop. There are pepe shops all over the streets of Port-au-Prince, I have an article on the blog, let me see if I can just stick it in there really quick.
?: I'm just curious, this is all very new to me, but pepe jeans, it's that name aware of the way that word is used? Or is it just a coincidence because of the name Pepe as a first name is popular.
Carole: There's a jean brand called Pepe?
?: I think so
Carole: That's awesome! It could be a name, I don't know if there's any relationship between those two things.
?: It sounds like I'm curious about the language because you're also talking about, well first of all you're talking about Frau in the third-person, and then you're also talking about you being engaged in a corporate model, or an actually corporation if you so-call it that, but I'm wondering how language plays a role in either the performative aspect or also the way that you write about it and the way that you think about it and the way that, you know the satellite Sewing Rebellion collectives are communicated with… I'm curious what role language plays in your work, or in the work of the Sewing Rebellion, or in the work of Frau..
Carole: It's really funny because as a kid I was a terrible writer, I struggled with it so much, and had to go through all this special-ed stuff to learn grammar because I grew up in southern California and they never really taught us grammar in public school. The last year of graduate school I just spend with advisors that were writers, and really wanted to, it was really important to me to have that skill down and so now, when you ask that-- this is the first time this question's ever been asked, and I think that language is an incredible, it's so important to the work, it's so vital to the work, and the way that I contextualize it. I think that-- you made the comment about the Frau, and sometimes I talk about her in the third-person, and I still get really confused, because I have this other person, and then I'm trying to always keep them in check. I can do that much better in the written form than I do when I present stuff thus far, especially talks and things like that. With the language of the Sewing Rebellion, it's so important, and I really want that rebellious language to come through when people are hosting a Sewing Rebellion so the whole Stop Shopping and-- I don't think it's bitter or unhappy, it's more of like a milder revolutionary language, or soft guerilla language that has a critique in it if you so want to understand that, but at the same time it also has a playfulness.
One of the things that started with the Made in Haiti project, especially when I started working on the blog and was reading all these newspapers articles about the garment economy in Haiti and I just started hacking those articles and putting Frau's voice into them and taking parts that I wanted from them and erasing other parts so there was an article that came out early in November, I think I wrote it--maybe it was in December-- oh yeah; Frau Fiber's tough job in Haiti..
?: Yeah, if you want to post it, that would be great.
Carole: Yeah.
and it was an article that had been written about Bill Clinton and the work that he was going to be doing, and how he was named special envoy to Haiti and so I basically appointed Frau Fiber as a special envoy to Haiti, and on the uniforms that I made for the work in Haiti, they had patches on them saying "Special Envoy 100% Good for Garment Workers" and I've continued that practice throughout this project, and actually the blog, I have a solo exhibition in Appalachian State that open up on September 17th, we've actually created a newspaper, it's four-page newspaper that highlights important moments throughout the blog and the collection and the visual dictionary that I made to help communicate with Jonas, because I don't speak French, I don't speak Creole, but now I'm learning Creole little by little. It was a Creole-English-German picture dictionary of sewing terms, I don't think I've put that on the blog yet though. So yes, language is incredibly important, and it's really fun to play with, I really enjoy playing with these articles, and sometimes they're kind of screwed up and I'm not such a good editor for myself, I need to get some help with that…
?: I think that's one thing, writing in language is something we can all work of for life, it's one of those things that nobody's perfect in. I mean I think, I just posted a little quote from the blog that posted, the Tough Job in Haiti, and I think it's amazing how it reads very authentically but at the same time you can definitely get a sense of the humor and the underlying critique of the language that is being used.
Carole: Right, right and I think humor is so important, especially with dealing with this stuff because I think when I was in my early 20s I was like this bitter punk rock kid, and it was great and everything living in New York and really poor and angry, but I don't want to be that way anymore. I think that people tend to repel from that, and so the humor allows access that maybe I wouldn't otherwise have. It is sneaky in a way too because it gets people in and then they realize overtime "Oh right, this is some serious stuff, I need to think about".
?: I think even, just when earlier this evening you were talking about the workers getting--if they're going to bump them up on the $5 a day figure, I mean something like that is just, it's really unfathomable, and I think to some extent the language being playful at least gets you into that discussion and from there can feed you things subtly or not so subtly, and I think that's a really great strategy, a really great tactic.
Carole: Yeah, thank you. Well it's amazing to just think about $5 a day when I was in Haiti this last trip and decided to do this t-shirt stenciling project, I chose to work with three gentlemen, and there's all sorts of issue about gender in Haiti too that I'm trying to negotiate; primarily the artists that work from this neighborhood are all male, there's one or two young girls, but most the women in Haiti are very busy doing child-rearing, although the men participate also, I don't want it so seem that… they definitely are active as a community rearing, but their time is spend doing that kind of stuff. That was one of the questions I had about artists when I was there was like "where are all the women?" but anyway, I ended up working with these three guys and I paid them each $5, it was all I had left in my budget, but then they'll get paid form the t-shirt itself -- I'll send them Western Union their additional funds, and this one guy Claudel, Claudel was doing this amazing [new-inspired 0:27:25.5] images in black and white, he was really obsessed with black and white and the unification of black and white, and all this kind of stuff, and so I paid each of them, and I've never seen anybody get so excited about $5 in my life, and he was just like "Today is a good day, today is a great day" for $5 and Haiti's expensive, people think it's low-wages so it must be cheap to live there, but it's not because everything is imported, so the cost of living is really high, and $5 will get you a meal and a couple of beer and that's about it.
?: Yeah, I mean that really points to, and I'm sure Steven could speak much more eloquently than I can on the subject matter, but it really calls to mind this idea of the alienation of the worker. Be it from the assembly of a product, or the fact that the wage in which they're earning producing a product wouldn't even allow them to purchase the product they're making. And that's incredibly alienating from just a very humanistic stand point; the relationship you have with your craft, and knowing that what you're producing is unattainable and yet you are producing it. I think that's something we don't often think about unless we're reading [Marx? 0:28:58.4] or getting hit over the head with something like that.
Carole: Right, and I think that was something like what I started the Made in Haiti project, I really wanted the products to sell to the wealthy, and there is an elite in Port-au-Prince they live in Pétionville and they live behind these giant walls and they have palatial estates on the hills. When you go behind those walls it's like walking in to me Newport Beach California, it's shocking. I had a couple of people that saw the product, they thought it was really wonderful, but they were like, and they own boutiques and they were like "my clients would never buys this" because those people want to buy Chanel, Louis Voitton or the latest French, British, New York based designers, they're not interested in shopping conscientiously let's say. That was really disappointing to me because for the sale that we did at the Ghetto Biennale I tried to keep the prices as low as possible but still kind of cover the expense that I paid just to pay Jonas to make sure that was covered. While the people in the neighborhood loved the garments and maybe it's inspired them, I know it has inspired them to repurpose their own garments, even at $5 it was too much, and so that idea of not being able to afford what it is that you make is very much alive and well, even with Jonas the tailor, I'm paying him $50 a day, he still couldn't afford the things that he's making.
?: Right, after basic costs of living, food and everything else.
Carole: Yep, well and like this last trip, all the money that he earned, which was $500, his mother passed away while he was there and so it paid for her funeral, so it's like you think you might get ahead, and then shabam, your mother gets hit by a car, and the next thing you know all the money you were earning, that you were maybe hoping to get a passports so you could possibly to the States and maybe do some work here whereas that's lost in the blink of an eye, it's really kind of a bummer.
?: I was thinking about, and I want to just say this over the audio as well is please anyone who has a question feel free to chime in via audio or we can start a running list of questions and comments in the text as well so please obviously as they come to you go ahead and jot those down or chime in. That said I'll just post a quick questions which was when you were talking about how the clients really wanted Louis Vuitton or Chanel, or something like that, have you ever appropriated the logos or create work that's appropriating that market? In an effort to make that comment about what's desirable or how it's made, It's authenticity, I mean we talk about authenticity in terms of painting, but also in terms of a brand or a logo, and I find that to be completely bizarre and hard to fathom, but we know it's in existence obviously because there are knock-offs of originals, but brand names.
Carole: Well and I think that idea of knock-off and branding is embedded in the work through, like the vocabulary of [inaudible 0:32:43.4] enterprises which is knock-off enterprises so it's playing with the idea of what is a knock-off ad why are things knock-offs, although the Frau was knocking things that are made offshore primarily so she's kind of knock-off the cheapest of the cheap and actually it becomes in a way more expensive because it's made with domestic labor, it's made by this artistic labor, the fabrics are purchased in the States and are more expensive. So it's like this up-grade knock-off I guess, and then, also within the projects there are logos that are created and brand identities that I'm always playing with, like the Sewing Rebellion has this Sewing Rebellion patch which I've actually had produced as patches and there's a whole series of purchase of [inaudible 0:33:33.8] patches that you can earn, so it also mimics notions of girl scouting and achieving things, pretty much project that I do I do develop some kind of brand identity or look to the paperwork, it gets done on letterhead, oftentimes there's business cards, particular blogs, but I haven't really gone into knocking-off high fashion stuff in that way, there's two projects that I can think of; one was [Hacking good tour 0:34:10.9] that started in New York, I don't know if they're still making stuff, but they started this project where they actually did more knock-off designer looks using old clothes and repurposing the clothes to make them have this designer feel, and then the other project is [name 0:34:29.0] Micro Waltz where she developed a knitting program so that her idea was that people would knit logo like the Nike swoosh and create their own branded hand-knotted leg warmers and things like that. Maybe I feel like with those two projects they're kind of covering that and I also feel that when you repurpose a logo like that, it's almost like you're drawing attention to that company, and for me, maybe I don't necessarily want to draw attention to a specific company, but to the broader concept of apparel production and how our clothes are made and that there are a set of hands that go behind that work even though they have special machineries that makes it much easier to sew a seam together, it's must faster, but you still need those operator's hands.It is a skilled labor, it's not unskilled, so…
?: I think that in a way through the chat we're also addressing issues simply based on labor, I mean obviously you are going to Haiti paying people, of course it's a better way than maybe they would get otherwise, but are you ever conflicted with the process in which you go in, you establish a relationship and of course you said, in case you're sending royalties back to the workers which I think is incredible; but what level are you self-critical of the process if at all?
Carole: I think I'm constantly self-critical of the process, I mean going to Haiti was actually one of the hardest projects I ever did and I almost backed out right before; I was like "What am I doing? What am I thinking? I can't go to Haiti and make art about labor, this is ridiculous this is totally insane" and I muscled through and the first three days I was there, I was like "I don't know if I can do this project, it's so problematic, oh my gosh, what am I doing? Is this right?" and then I realized that the thing that I could do that would benefit the most would be to provide jobs and how important and how desperate everybody is just to work, and they'll work even if they're not going to get paid, they still will help you set up the site. The site where we did the Made in Haiti project, the dirt got swept and repaired, and I was not allowed to do that, and there were certain things that… I was looked at as the boss and I really had a hard time with that because I was so used in my practice being the one that was doing the labor, and all of a sudden, I became management. I was really struggling with the whole notion that Jonas wanted me to tell him what to do, and I kept saying "But I want to work with you" he was like "No, you need to tell me what to do".
?: Do you ever just impromptu get behind a sewing machine and work with them?
Carole: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah; but I had to earn that, I had to hang around and watch Jonas work and then finally he would let me sew, this last trip I was allowed to cut and prep stuff, but he's actually much better at the machine than I am too, he's better at operating it than I am, it's really important to him though that he does the labor, that is super super important, and part of it is my whiteness, you don't let some white woman come in and do the work for you- that's terrible! That's just not what you do.
So there's a lot of things that I think I face every trip I go down there, but then also what's happening between Jonas and I is we're realizing how much we have in common, and how much the skills that we both have; Jonas knows how to crotchet, I know how to crotchet, when I was working in the [inaudible 0:39:09.2] this last time like there's a lot of time I spent waiting, I started cutting up T-shirts and making beer Koozies for everybody and Jonas just thought that was the best thing ever. We're starting to share out skill-sets a little bit more, and I think in a few more trips we probably truly will become collaborators, and it will be where I wanted it last December, but it's taken some time.
?: Well again like anything when we were talking about language, it's a form of communication in terms of those shared skill-sets and being able to communicate it through a process or craft…
Carole: Definitely because we definitely, the sewing words in French are very similar and used as sewing words in English, so there's things that is like that language we can both speak and can understand pretty clearly, and then through doing drawings and things like that you can totally figure out how to accomplish things.
?: Steven has posed a question a little while ago and I don't want to let it get buried so maybe I'll just read that to you so it gets out there. He wants to know "I'd like to hear about how Frau Fiber engages with the art world, in other words the dominant art world, I really appreciates how she injects art into the garment making economy, but what about when those commodities and their production realities are re-territorialized, not just in the first-world economy but in the symbolic economy of art, maybe you can say something about the Ghetto Biennale to approach that issue.
Carole: [laughing]
I know how to answer that really, let me think about it.
?: If you need to reference it, because there is a lot there, it's in the chat there, I can post it again in fact; take your time with that, there's a lot there, and I think really what Steven is asking is much of the plausible art world is trying to tease out which is, what is the relationship? One foot in, one foot out? Trying to stay out of it, is there a dialogue between the worlds in which you are engaged, and also THE art world? Or are they completely separate entities? I mean I don't know that they are ever separate identities completely but…
Carole: No I don't think they're separate, and I think that the art world in many ways supports-- this is the way that I'm trying to make it work, is that I'm trying to get the art world to support the social practice world. So for instance, I would have never gone to Haiti if it wasn't for the Ghetto Biennale and being invited by an academic to participate in that.
Also, I have this solo show in Appalachian State and I think I'm more involved with the academic; What is the art world I guess is a good question what I have. I'm not involved in the commercial art world let's say, although sometimes I think that it would be good to have that other audience that then supports the work that happens in the field, but I view them as different audiences. So I approach each one very differently primarily the performances happen out in the world, let's say, like in Haiti or in Los Angeles you know, it's out in the street, it's happening live, and one of the things that I'm starting to do is really question how that material--because there is material culture that comes out of these performances, how that gets reinterpreted for the white box, or the white pew, and how that gets reinterpreted for an art audience. One of the things that happens, I gave this presentation of the Symposium at Northwestern last Fall and it was about a work I had done in New Orleans, there I created this pedal-powered sewing machine and the idea was that I was going to help people rebuild their domestic space by making table cloths, linens and things like that, and I had done a site visit the January before and went down at May to do this piece, which was part of an exhibition called Pathogeographies that was at gallery 400 at Chicago; and they funded $500 of the project so when I went down in May then to do the work, it had gotten hotter in New Orleans, duh, and people had started retreating into the insides of their homes and not coming out. So for two weeks, I basically set up these little shops all over this neighborhood and it took two weeks to get one customer. I really felt like for me, in a lot of ways that project had failed because I wasn't able to serve the community the way that I wanted to, but when I showed the documentation and then gave this talk at the Symposium, everyone was like "But the documentation is wonderful, the images are wonderful" so as an art piece, it was successful, but as an act of generosity on my part, I felt like it was a failure. I think that was one of the things that's made me realize that the art world and then the world where I engage in this work are two very different things and I approach them very differently. I'm starting to think about, I don't like doing performances in galleries, I did one in March at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, and I just was really uncomfortable with it, it seemed very staged, and it lacked spontaneity and I just don't like it, so I'm not going to do that anymore. I shouldn't say I'm not going to do it anymore because I don't know what's going to happen, you should never say never but it's not going to be my first choice, and you have to negotiate these things within institutions because they find out about you because of this informative work that you do, and so they want you to do it in their institution and you're like "Well that's not what I do for institutions" for me, I'm really comfortable with displaying the objects in an institution, and having people have an experience through objects. I'm even starting to pull away from photography and I actually do not like video at all; so everyone's always saying to me "You should do some video".
?: I'm curious, just as a follow-up to that -- not specifically for you to tell us why you don't like video-- but it might be telling in a sense, things that we've discussed over the course of the plausible art world's discussions are both the power and the problematic of the archive, how is something documented and to what end? Does this become a precious object that exists under a vitrine of some sort or is this photos that document the trip? and so and to what end? Is there something that you keep for yourself to sort of document the work so you can revisit and see what was successful and what wasn't, or like you said, is it something that lives as something potentially exhibit-able in an institution and I think oftentimes I'm really weary of the archive, it scares me, but at the same time, I think it's got great potential, but much like propaganda, it's got potential for a particular use, for a particular audience.
Carole: This is true, this is true, I like the idea about it being propaganda in a way. I guess for me the archive, or the material cultures that is created aesthetically it's something that I love, I love scissors, I love sewing machines, I love a collection of pins on a table, I love stacks of cut cloths that are ready to be put into production; it's an aesthetic of garment production that I really truly and enamored with; I love a stack of cloth
?: I can imaging smell too, I mean I don't often sew, but I'm sure that there's a certain smell to fabric, or fabric stores that is very present.
Carole: Yeah, I never thought about smell before, I'll have to think about that, I guess sometimes if you don't oil your machine it starts to smell a little bit like burning metal or something; and sounds are also I think are really important, but I still haven't figured out how I want to incorporate that and not have it seem too staged. I mean, I really see the art world and then my career as an academic is what fuels this and allows me to make the work, I couldn't make this work if I didn't have a full-time teaching job and if I wasn't getting invited by various institutions to come and do pieces that pay me an [inaudible 0:49:08.5] then allow me to do that piece and then maybe do another piece. So I guess I view the art world as a funding mechanism. Which is weird because there isn't really all that much money, but for now that's how it's working
?: and it's not quite at the level of bloody money or anything
Carole: No, God no! I think one of the things that happened too which might be in Haiti was that you met these artists and they make work because they want to sell it, and so most of the international artists that came to work in this neighborhood were doing social practice types kinds, and they all make really ephemeral work and none of us were represented by commercial galleries or anything, I think there was one. Actually the artists of the [inaudible 0:50:07.4] probably made more money off their work than I have; like someone purchasing an object, that kind of exchange. I was talking to one of the older gentlemen, I like was "You've probably made more money than I have" and he's like "Well why do you do it if you don't make money out of it?" and it just really makes you consider why you do it, and then I explained to him I have this teaching job, and it supports the work, so I don't have to be involved with the commercial gallery scene and it allows me more freedom to do the work I want to do without having to depend on it selling and making something that people are going to desire as an object to have in their home or have in their collection. so we had many interesting conversations about those systems, and then it also made me realize the luxury that I have to be an artist that makes work that doesn't need to sell in a gallery setting; that is not my primary income, and of course I basically work like two jobs or three -- I work all the time, as many of us do to do these project that we're interested in, but it's also because we're in this place that we have the ability to do that.
?: Do you have, and this is completely self-serving, and again please, anyone with questions- I feel like I'm directing this discussion and I don't mean to be at all. Do you feel like your role within your teaching life and your creative professional life as an artist or as Frau, is there an overlap there, and because again I'm trying to tease out this relationship between your creative practice and the art world--or in this case, the academic world--and again, you've talked a little bit about that, but for instance are there aspects to your teaching that I imagine you're not simply teaching someone how to crotchet, but rather to infuse that process with the potential for activism, or social…
Carole: Absolutely, absolutely, I teach at [inaudible 0:52:32.4] East Los Angeles, it's a commuter college of about 15000 students, and I'm in the art department, but I was hired to teach in the fashion option, which I struggle with everyday that I'm teaching fashion. I'm teaching students who want to go and get jobs in the [inaudible 0:52:50.2] industry in Los Angeles primarily, and the demographic of the community is about 95% first generation Hispanic Americans, and their parents work in sweatshops, and I have them reading texts about labor politics and gender and I teach them basically, like when I was teaching this introduction to sewing class, it was the Sewing Rebellion, teaching them how to repurpose clothes and redesign clothes. I try really hard to bring these discussions to the surface and to allow the students to be aware of the politics of the industry that they want to work in. I think for the most part, that's not what's talked about in the fashion industry or in institutions that are teaching fashion, it's all about decoration and beauty, bottom-line marketing and making sales and so I think that my students are getting something a little different from the average fashion program, and so far I've been able to get away with it -- no one's really complained to the dean or anything, so it seems to be ok.
?: I imagine you run into the occasional student, just by sheer numbers and statistics, but that is really not interested in that, they want to know how to do a seam properly so that they can get a job, so that they can, in their eyes, better their life or assist their parents and get them out sweatshops, or whatever that might be. How do you address that? How do you wrestle with that and say "Yes, that's super important and you can totally use these skills to do that, but it's also important; like we were talking about, understanding language or whatever, to be able to communicate those ideas or be aware of how they're being subtly used against you , if you will.
Carole: Well, one of the things I tell them is that in Los Angeles there's a number of 2-year programs or trade schools where they can go and learn the technical skills of apparel production, and there and a bachelors of art program, so I'm always telling them "You in a bachelors art program, it's not like it's not a trade school so you're here to learn the technical stuff as well as the intellectual stuff and the critical stuff that goes along with it." So while they're learning how to sew a seam, they're also doing a reading, or they're also considering--like there's a second-level sewing class where I have them break into teams and each team becomes a little piece-work production factory, so they have to choose a garment, they have to reproduce it, they have to cut it in piece-work style so they understand they system under which garments are made and hopefully they get some empathy into the expectation, and I time them and give them time-limits and they have to get so much work done in this amount of time so they also feel the pressure of what it's like to be a garment worker; and so I hope when they're in situation when they're maybe applying that pressure, maybe they might reconsider it a little bit.
?: Are you having them read Adam Smith and Division of Labor,
Carole: No, but I should
?: It just came to mind; do you really want to be that pin making? you know?
Carole: I have them read; there's a book called… oh my gosh it's completely just left my brain.
?: Well we have a question to fill that; Michael at Base Kamp is asking he says "I'm interested in outsourcing as a form of activism, any thoughts on that and/or more examples?
Carole: What do you mean outsourcing as a form of activism, do you mean like outsourcing or activism?
?: You guys want to chime in a Base Kamp? Please do.
Carole: Ohh, outsourcing labor as a form of activism…
?: Michael, I don't know if you're available to hop on…
Carole: So give me an example, I guess I do not really understand. I guess I am trying to relate it back to my own work, so then is Jonas as a form of outsourcing activism?
Michael: Hi, sorry the question is a little vague, but I heard about a book, which I have not read, it's called the Two-hour work-week [inaudible 0:58:20.8]
I guess I'm interested in outsourcing as a form of activism because a lot of people associate it as a sort of potentially negative thing, you know, you get the cheapest labor that you possibly can, in order to get a product of itself, I'm interested [inaudible 0:58:44.6] where you're outsourcing labor on some level maybe, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's a form of activism, if that makes sense?
Carole: Well I mean, I think what makes it a form of activism in the case of Jonas is that I'm paying him $50 a day which is almost ten or fifteen times what the minimum wage is, but also I've had conversations with people that are also starting economic developments in Haiti, this is where we perhaps differ; they want to pay people the minimum wage or piece-work rates that are incredibly low and so that's probably where the activism lies is that I'm negotiating with the labor force and trying to realize what they feel they're worth, also saying, this is what you're worth. And I think Jonas is worth much more than that, but the product that we are developing just doesn't have that kind of dollar return yet. But one of the things that popped inside my head is like Jeff Koons because he has so much work outsourced and there's something about that that I'm curious about in the sense of like what is he paying these people that are making his paintings, and then do they get a cut when it sells? Are they getting a bonus when it sells? Or is it just this one-time deal; they make the work, it's finished and they got paid whatever little teeny tiny bit of money and he turns around and sells it for millions of dollars. So I guess I'm always questioning that and how labor is used. I think there is tones of exploitation of labor in the art world, and in the fashion world, just the use of interns that we've all participated in, and I'm sure encouraged, just like this free labor. I was in residence of this space called Elsewhere in Greensboro North Carolina, and Elsewhere is this really interesting space, but they have--and I told them this in my exit interview-- a major exploitation of labor that is horrific, and it's really upsetting to see that happen in a place where we're supposed to be enlightened or something, right? Because we're critiquing and we've read this stuff, but yet we still are willing to exploit these interns and those students to achieve our goals. I mean, I have just as much problem with that as with garment workers not getting paid.
?: Thanks Michael, I think it was very helpful to hear your thoughts. any other questions or thoughts out there, I'm really curious to sort of open this up into maybe more of a discussion if that happens organically.
Female: Yeah, I was thinking about when I was in the 80s and I was involved with [inaudible 1:02:12.3] workshop and the problem is that a lot of people think "oh wow, we're hiring the handicapped and isn't that wonderful" and everything like that but the problem was people [inaudible 1:02:25.7]I was involved with that and there were times when I wasn't getting any money at all [inaudible 1:02:34.3] and then if you're on social security [inaudible 1:02:39.4] or anything like that and really it got I felt, a lot of people were really unhappy but not only that but it was work for really people with no brains.
Carole: Right, I mean I guess there's something on the blog here that talks about playing with NGOs and working in Haiti and, I mean I think people have really good intentions,; like I'm trying to have good intentions with the work that I make, but sometimes those good intentions end up being on the disastrous side when for whatever reason you're just not able to pay people a fair living wage, and so that you don't end up being like stuck. I think that everybody things "Ohh these garment jobs" which tend to be like some of the first jobs that go into developing countries, "It's good for them, it helps" and well yeah, it's better than nothing when you're desperate, anything will help, but is it really good? Are there other things that can happen? I want us to question it, I do not know what the answer is, I don't have an answer. But, I think that as a people that have all this intelligence to go into other countries to do work, we need to question our intentions all the time, I think that's really important too as artists making work in the social realm that we ask ourselves all the time "Is this really right? Is this going to be good for the community? Is the community's voice going to be heard? Am I doing this for my own benefit; why am I doing this?" I think that those are important questions to ask.
?: Yeah, absolutely, I mean I think in a way we all do that, even just in our lives, but maybe not to the extent that we're really engaged in the critical process to the extent of which, as you were saying earlier at times, almost withdrawing from projects based on those concerns. I think certainly on some level, we can't necessarily withdraw from all the aspects of life that we don't agree with, there are so many things that I'm a walking-talking hypocrite, and maybe that's a curious question that I have for you. Obviously being so aware of how garments are produced and where they're produced; do you buy new clothes?
Carole: No, I make all my own clothes, and I've even started making my own underwear because I think underwear for women is really unhealthy, I think that we should go back to things from the 20s the [inaudible 1:05:52.8] that are like silk and loose cottons.
?: [inaudible 1:05:56.7] the quality of the fabric being bleached or whatever
Carole: It just doesn't like breathe, especially like I'm a full-figured woman and then so you get a little sweaty here and there and your body needs to breathe. I think that like micro-fibers and spandex is the worst thing you can put on your body because it just doesn't let you breathe, and everybody's wearing it. There are some interesting conversations because there is a point where, like one of the things that's happening is when I first discovered Frau Fiber and first started performing, I really became her like completely in a way. One of the things that's been happening over the last couple of years is that I'm trying to separated, like we're Siamese twins, and I'm trying to form the Frausen Identity and my own like Carole Francis Long as biographer, as artist that's also interested in some other projects and then, so how those play out. And then also like Carole Francis Long professor. So I have like this uniform I wear when I teach in my lecture, and it's kind of like a jumper that has the top of overalls so it has a skirt on it and these pockets, and whenever Frau's present, she always is in some very stern, unattractive uniform that's either like a dark green or dark blue, it's very drab, and then this other part of me is starting to come out, which is much more feminine and playful and like when I went to Haiti this last trip I made myself a couple of nice cotton dresses because it was so hot. I had a bunch of discussions with the artists in the [place name? 1:07:50.8] they were like "this is not your artistic political dress, why are you wearing this?" And they were really perplexed because during the day they would see me in these uniforms, but then at night I was wearing these really feminine full-skirted kind of fitted cotton dresses that looked almost like the 1950s, but they also look a lot like Haitian peasant dresses. I was trying to explain to them that while I have this artistic dress that I wear when I'm Frau Fiber, I also am Carole Francis, and there's times when I just want to be a little softer, or a little lighter, and more playful, and wear bright colors and that's another part of my personality that was kind of dormant for a long time while I was developing Frau and her identity. So that's been really interesting to see that evolve too but yeah I don't buy [inaudible 1:08:50.0].
?: Sorry we're just adding Steven back, there was a little…
Carole: You don't have a question about the Stop Shopping?
?: Do you see it? Oh, yeah right there, sure
Carole: Yeah, if everybody followed my example there would be an extinction of outsourcing, but I think there's part my project that's totally futile. Sometimes I like to think about that it would be so great if this actually worked, but then I also realize that it would put a lot of people out of work and so I'm a little conflicted about that. I also think that there's also this connection to, if it was sewn in a way that was not gender-specific, like it didn't put women back in the home sewing, that's something that I'm really concerned with sometimes, and it depends on the community that I'm working in. Like when I was in Greensboro I thought these skills that I'm preaching have a relationship to the extreme right, conservative religious like Christian-extreme right, and it made me a little nervous, and at the same time it is a politic of the left as well, but it's like a younger, hipper kind of person who's probably an artist or something and they're choosing to live this way, and [repatch? 1:10:38.3] their clothes and there's a politic to it. There's a part of me that would really love Sewing Rebellion to be a part of elementary education so that everybody knows how to put a button on their clothes if they want to. So they have the choice, but they have the skill, because it's so much about having choice, and if you want to choose to use your tailor, your dry-cleaner, you can do that, or you can do it yourself. But so I feel that my work is incredibly futile, it's wonderful to romanticize and to be utopic about, but every utopia pretty much fails.
?: Yeah, actually Cassie earlier sort of commenting on sort of pros and cons about items or garments that are made in the USA which is outsourcing, she said because at this point it's become almost impossible to make money and still pay workers what they're worth
Carole: Right, right, and there is some stuff but it's really expensive
?: Right
Carole: It's incredibly expensive. And so it does make it for a certain class of people who are going to buy stuff that's made in the United States. Forbes magazine, my dad was always trying to make me read Forbes magazines and sometimes it's good to know who the double is; anyway, he had given me this thing out of Forbes that was all this Made in the USA men's wear stuff, and the things were gorgeous, these brilliantly crafted leather shoes and these suits that are just gorgeous, but it's like, they were so far removed from the everyday person; the everyday person can't afford that stuff, it's kind of like the Hart Schaffner Marx suits, which are the suits that Obama wears; they're very expensive, but some part of the suit is still made in Chicago, so people like the president can wear it, the rest of the country is going to go to wherever they go and buy something that's cheap.
?: Sorry again, we're just adding Steven.. this has been incredibly illuminating on a variety of different levels, especially just in terms of talking about your art practice and the personas that you take on; and it seems like those personas are not just about creating art work but for as Salem is pointing out, the amazing quality of having different uniforms that represent… and I think oftentimes only identify that with like our mechanic jumpsuit, in a way, and this is pointing out the obvious at this point, like your clothing in essence represents your job; not explicitly all the time, but it's like--what's that old saying, something about you can tell a lot by a person's shoes…
I think that the work seems to me at this point to operate on so many different levels that I can see how you being self-critical could in essence be paralyzing, in other words the work wouldn't happen at all. So I'm wondering what gets you over that, I mean you talking about being self-critical and sort of backing-up, but what--and I'm not asking for like tell us your end goal, you want to change the world? But like
Carole: Of course!
?: But maybe that is it! Is that it? I mean you say that the work is futile but there's got to be something for you like this glimmer of hope like when you were in Haiti; what was it that made the work, you want to do it again and again and again?
Carole: I think that the thing that makes me want to do my work again and again and again is --and you're not going to believe this-- but in a lot of ways I'm an incredibly introverted person, I don't like going out and meeting people, but if I have this action; this kind of thing I can do that helps me meet people it's the meeting of the people and the intimate conversations that are hard -- whether it's sitting in the Grand Rue all day, or someone coming in and talking about their mother trying to teach them how to sew and what a failure it was, or interviewing-- like when I was in North Carolina working, meeting these people who had grown up in mill villages in North Carolina, and under this social system in the United States of the company town, and then meeting people that work in the [inaudible 1:15:52.7] there was this one weaver named Millie, and she's been weaving for 55 years, this high-end Levi Strauss salvaged denim, so it's the contact that I get with the public that feeds the work, and keeps inspiring me over and over again.
?: I don't mean to come back to it, but I'm really curious now, it seems to me also that part of meeting these people is finding out more of their story.
Carole: Absolutely, and the research, like I love the research that I do, like before I did the project in North Carolina, I think I read like six different books about the mill villages and the mill towns in the south, and then to read these texts as a starting point, so that you have something to bring to the conversation too hopefully, but then it comes alive through the people I meet. So it's the same way with like reading articles about the garment workers in Haiti, and then having that opportunity to work with Jonas and sit with him, and get to be friends and colleagues through this action of sewing is a thing that's so fulfilling to me, and I think it's the thing that keeps me motivated and to keep making work, because there's so much to learn, there's just like so much history related to the garment and textile production and it's been the backbone of the global economy for centuries for thousands of years, like cloth is this universal thing that everybody has some kind of story or connection to, and people have seen it made in their homes, in their grandparent's homes, or they worked in the industry, I mean the garment industry in the United States was one of the hugest industrialized in the country and provided our initial wealth, but people don't want to know about that, and they just view it as blue collar workers and everybody wants to escape from being blue collars or some reason, I don't understand it but…
?: Have you ever been [subused? 1:18:22.6] by those experiences by those knew relationships to the extent that that's where you wanted your work to be? In other words, to turn--not to necessarily turn it into a Ken Burns documentary about sewing--but I mean have you ever thought about your work being more didactic in that way?
Carole: No [laughs], no really, I mean, I think that there's other people that can do that. I think that my.. I guess in a lot of ways I don't want this conversation [inaudible 1:19:03.0].
?: Right.
Carole: Conversations between me and the people I'm talking to, and then it's kind of like my job as artist--or this is what I view my job as-- is to process those conversations and put them into this performance or this object, so like one example of that would be the work I did at [inaudible 1:19:22.2] at the North Carolina project which was, it was called Revolution Textiles with the People, and it was part instillation into Elsewhere space, it's a selling a room/archive of their textile collection, and then sewing with the people part was meeting with these former mill families and talking about their history which they feel has been lost, their like in their 70s, and they want some form of commemoration before they die basically. They've been advocating with the city and nothing really much has been happening with that, and so I meet these people, and it's another one of those moments where I realize they're incredibly conservative, their politics are the exact opposite of what my politics are, but at the same time, I felt it was really important to have their voices heard, and to have this lifestyle acknowledged, and what I ended up making was this quilt--it was a four by eight foot quilt that on the front side was like a landscape of the White Oak Mill and the mill village, and it looked very country-craft let's say, just a terrible word to describe, it definitely was reflective of the community. On the back side though it was all denim, and I'd found this text from 1907 from Hog River that talked about the shift in the workers' work week from 66 hours to 60 hours a week, and what they had to agree to in order to get that shift. So we quilted the whole thing together with this text, and there were places where the text wasn't legible, and that was what I'd call a happy accident where the [chalk lines? 1:21:26.4] got erased and I was like "You know what, we're just going to go with it" so the text was very fragmented, and then because I had invited the community to quilt with me, there was all different levels of skill involved, and so one of the things that kept happening is people's threads would get really knotted on what would be the front side, and so it really became this metaphor for kind of like the disappearing history, but also like a messy history, so the front of the quilt was very beautiful and really nostalgic, but then there were all these knots and these tangles and these intentional flaws so I said to people just leave it, and that was really hard for folks as well just to create this mess. At first glance, this history seems so picture-perfect and very romanticized, but when you dig a little bit deeper you find out it's pretty contested and quite controversial, you know there was a lot of issues of racism, there was a lot of violence associated with the textile mill towns and their lack of letting people unionize and all sorts of interesting things that I hope are able to come through in that object.
?: Awesome
Carole: Ohh, you found that Elsewhere press release
?: Yeah, I kind of just typed up the words and it popped up.
Are there thoughts or comments or questions out there as we sort of, not that we're nearing the end, but we've got about 20 minutes left, and we're trying to keep it to 8o'clock exactly, again I feel like I've been dominating the questions, but it's been really engaging; I really wanted to thank you up front for filling in really last notice -- not filling in, but joining us.
Carole: Oh you're welcome, I was glad I had the opportunity to.
?: This is sort of the question you keep in your back pocket for when there's a lull; what's next? What's in the horizon for Frau Fiber and for Sewing Rebellion and all the different projects that you have?
Carole: The Sewing Rebellion, I think I want to, well actually I'm going back to North Caroline to install this show, the Labor Trade Show at Appalachian State and we're going to do an instructional video, so that's something that's been in my thought for a really long time in terms of one way that I would consider using video, so we're going to do an instructional video of a technique that Jonas taught me in Haiti, a way of binding a neckline or an armhole on a garment, like finishing it, and in terms of the Made in Haiti project, the next step in that is to, I think become a non-profit and start finding some stores that will carry the product and work on a little bit better a statement for the project that helps with getting people to purchase the product, and I think one of the things that I've been struggling with because I've been a little bit busy the last few years is that I want some reflexive time to look at the work and think about the work and what's next. I live in Long Beach California right now and I'm fascinating by the port of Long Beach, and every garment that's produced outside the United States pretty much comes through the port of Long Beach, so we'll see what happens.
?: Specifically like something that you might want to address is the shipping process…
Carole: The shipping process, the shipping routes and yeah, something that I'm also continuing to research in North Carolina, I'm really interested in the structure of the mill villages; one of the people I interviewed in North Carolina said that the mill [inaudible 1:26:19.5] was more socialism in the United States, and that statement has kind of grabbed me, and so I hope to do some more research there, and try and look at really what that system was and there's some beautiful architecture related to the mill villages and early textile production in the south after the civil war. I think I'm looking more domestically now, for a while I was doing a lot of work in Europe, and not that I'm still not interested in the landscape, but I just feel like there's a lot to do here, and trying to establish a headquarters and I think I'll be in southern California for a while.
?: The shipping process reminds me of the centre for urban pedagogy who did this map of train lines and truck routes and shipping lines, and I just posted the link in there, it just kind of popped into my head as you were describing it, but there's a certain interest in terms of the threads and lines of shipping and how that informs the production process as well.
Carole: Yeah, especially with Los Angeles, one of the things that has kept the Los Angeles garment industry alive is that it deals with juniors and the junior market turns over too fast, it turns over like every three months, and so having stuff outsourced to China just isn't economically viable, because you don't have the long turn-over rate, like instead of every 6 months, you've got to turn stuff over every two to three months, so that's one of the things that's left a little remnant of a garment economy here in Los Angeles.
?: Salem sort of posed a question earlier saying; How can people support your work in Haiti? and / or how can people start their own Sewing Rebellion group? She says "Hello Philly".
Carole: Oh, those are good questions, if you want to start a Sewing Rebellion, you just have to send me an e-mail and let me know that you want to start one and that you find a spot, and then I send you all the instructions or send them as PDFs and you them printed out, and you just start meeting. You just meet under banner of the Sewing Rebellion. It's pretty simple!
?: How can people support your work in Haiti?
Carole: The work in Haiti, I'm actually hopefully in the next couple of weeks going to get all the new garments uploaded, so they'll be on the blog, and you can buy them off the blog, or if you know of any stores, if you're a shopper and you go into some funky little international store that you think would be a good spot, or if you want to have--I'm just talking from the top of my head, if you want to have a trunk show, I can send the pieces to you and you can have a little party with your friends and sell pieces.
?: Awesome
Carole: That would be great!
?: Salem says; Cool, thanks!
Carole: Great, thank you Salem
?: This is the time in the evening when the texts start to come to life, and those threads start to happen
Carole: This looks cool, the Art Flux University, oh I think I know that group actually, I'll have to have another look at it though, thank you for that.
?: Yeah, a group of critical companies, as Steven puts it
Carole: That looks cool, I'll have to check that out.
Yeah, you can contact me at fraufiber@gmail.com
and then the other links were already … what's another [cut? 1:30:57.2] development?
Thank you guys for these links. It's amazing how much fascinating information there is out there. So hard to keep up on all of it.
?: Well, you are it too, right? At least for tonight you are.
Carole: Yeah, for now I am
?: Twitter and Facebook are abuzz with Frau
Carole: oh really? I'm on Twitter and I've never used it. I only signed up so that I can get bleeps from the guy who own the [name of hotel 1:31:47.3] after the earthquake, he was like, my vein of news that was the news that I would listen to [inaudible 1:31:54.3] from Port au Prince, and he has something like 16000 followers now, crazy.
?: Has that ever sort of filtered in, I know it was part of the description that we have on our website, but how in the past few weeks we've been talking about digital technologies or forms of new media that are being folded into in our practice in some way, shape or form, not necessarily being it and only it, but I mean, have you ever thought about using digital technologies in some way, shape or form; or do you? I mean you use the blog…
Carole: I use the blog, and I use the internet to e-mail and whatever, to send out information and Carole Francis Long is on Facebook and she announced Frau Fiber's activity when things are happening. I've been encourage by people to use Twitter and things like that, but it just, I haven't gotten, I just don't have time. It's just like one more thing, and I totally need to update my webpage as you can tell, it's been like two and a half years now or something, and it's one of those things that I don't have the finances at the moment to pay someone to do it, and I don't have the time to do it myself. Or I should say I'm not making the time, I'd rather sit at my sewing machine and make new underwear than "tweet", or work on my webpage.
?: I'm not sure how but there's connection there and I don't know what it is, but making underwear and tweeting sounds very related and I'm not exactly sure why.
[laughter]
Carole: It's like different modes of communicated I guess on some level
?: I don't know I just feel that there's got to be a connection
Carole: I think one of the things that I wish I had more skills about too is being able to-- I would like to do a book or some kind of a document for the [inaudible 1:34:23.3] that would be downloadable, so there's things like that where I really feel like the internet is this place for free information and a free distribution for information, but I don't realize, I don't use it as good as I could, and I'm aware of that, so just as a way of getting information out there. So we'll see what happens with the instructional video, If I like it, you might start seeing more Frau Fiber videos up in the world.
?: Awesome. Steven has a quick comment/question Carole, when you talk about Long Beach port it came into my mind that there's been a lot of talk about real-time garment production on ships exploiting workers onboard huge ships always at sea hence avoiding what little labor law there is; having them produce garments between ports to be offload to tailor need
Carole: And then you can also say with some of the ships you can say it's made in the United States.
?: Nice, that's great
Carole: Yeah, like the US has production in Guam, but they can put "Made in the USA" on the labels
?: What about like Puerto Rico?
Carole: I think that Puerto Rico says Puerto Rico, but I'm not sure, I just know the one about Guam, so it's amazing how you can get around these laws if you can afford to have a ship and all that stuff, but even free-trade zones are crazy things, like it's such a crazy concept, we're just going to make this zone in this country an area of free-trade where we can pay all the laborers whatever we want to pay them and, that's it.
?It's not even necessarily that it's bad, just that that's the way it's done is bad
Carole: Well, I don't mean to say whether it's good or bad, because on some level it's good, it is providing with people some amount of income, so it's just exploitative I think is the thing, that's kind of disheartening, and it's been that way since forever, the garment industry it's just bopped around the United States, and then it went to Mexico, and then it went to Asia, and then it keeps looking for new places to exploit labor, and right now the wages in China are going up, so yeah, probably things like the sea-faring garment companies or looking to Haiti and finding another desperate company that's willing to have its working taken advantage of under the guise of some kind of economic development.
?: It’s also just a bit dubious and misleading to be able to use say Guam to be able to say "Made in the USA" there's a certain cache to that, and in and of itself is misleading and dubious, not that it's not necessarily bad for the people of Guam per se, but there is something very suspect to me about that.
Carole: Well, in a lot of ways in the US we're a little bit better because at least we label our garments, when I was doing work in Europe and Ireland and Germany, they don't put any kind of labels on their garments at all, there's no labeling laws, to you don't have any idea where anything is coming from, you have no clue.
female: Do they [inaudible 1:37:55.5]
Carole: Yeah, I think they put those labels on but there's no like where things are made.
?: Are there specific laws to the United States in terms of labeling?
Carole: I think there are but I can't rattle them off on the top of my head, but I know that they do have to put country of origin in them, they do have to put fabric content, and care-- how the garment is supposed to be cared for.
?: We'll have to have you back in a couple of weeks so we can put together a quiz of some sort
Carole: [laughing] No quizzes, I'll be back in school by then. I should make that a quiz for my students, that would be better
?: I'm sure they'd love you for it.
Well Carole, this has been an incredible presentation and talk and I think all of us have been completely invested in all of the different aspects of your work, I don't know if there are any final questions but we've got about five minutes left before we wrap up, I think maybe Steven is writing something.
Totally, inspiring presentation, I agree completely.
If there are any things that we didn't talk about that you want to talk about but I think we feel like we covered most of the bases.
Carole: I thought I would give you guys a little bit of sound of my sewing machine because I'm trying to finish a uniform for this performance, so I sew on an old Singer, it's black, it's embellished with gold leaf, it is power operated, I have a treadle machine waiting for me in Colorado, but I haven't been able to get to it yet.
[Carole start sewing machine]
?: That thing sounds medieval, at least via Skype, it sounds like a torture device.
Carole: It is, it's like a [inaudible 1:40:18.9] it only does a straight stitch, I don't like fancy machines.
?: As Steven just wrote: It sounds dangerous, [inaudible 1:40:29.8]
It has a bit of a guttural sound to it, it's exciting.
Well thank you so much, it's been really wonderful , and I think as Scott puts it at the end of each one, we'd love to follow up, stay in touch and continue this dialogue in some way, shape or form, and you'll probably be hearing from us again soon.
Carole: Sounds great, that'd be wonderful I'd love to come back, maybe one of these days I'll actually be in Philly or something.
?: Yes, totally, and of course you're always welcome to join us every Tuesday 6 to 8, and I guess that's it.
Carole: Great, thank you so much!
?: Thanks Carole so much!
Carole: Have a good night
?: Thanks everybody, good night.
Week 31: b.a.n.g. lab
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Ricardo Dominguez, “principle investigator” of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), and b.a.n.g lab, a small group of artists and activists, actively engaged in developing the theory and practice of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD). In the framework of their U.S./Mexico Border Disturbance Art Project, the group has recently devised what they call a “Transborder Immigrant Tool” (TBT), a code-switch device that repurposes inexpensive, discarded mobile phones that have GPSantennae to function in the hands of “the tired, the poor,” as personal safety navigation systems in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands.
http://bang.calit2.net/xborder
TBT thus seeks to have both genuine use value in a geopolitical context where thousands of lives have been needlessly lost, as well as conceptual and poetic value inasmuch as it performatively raises the question: “What constitutes sustenance?” Or suggests that “in the desert, we are all illegal aliens.” But above all, the device – like the disturbance-art project of which it is part and parcel – directly raises the question of the politics of art today. What exactly is to be gained by understanding such devices and such projects to be art and not the mere real thing? By disturbing the porous borders between artworlds and lifeworlds, considering civil disobedience decidedly within the purview of artistic practice, the group clearly wants to give art political teeth; but how does art in turn add its own specific value to the device’s usership? And what kind of artworld would make that possible?
Transcription
Week 31: b.a.n.g. lab
[0:03:19]
Male speaker: Hello? Uh-oh, getting there, our signal appears to be really good and I’m talking to myself and the other people in this room, hi guys? How are you?
Male speaker: Hello?
Male speaker: Oh Greg, hello there?
Greg: Hi Scott Rigby—and everybody else at Basekamp.
Male speaker: Hello, well hello Greg?
Male speaker: Oh sorry I’ll mute my mic.
Male speaker: Hello Theresa? And –oh no you can unmute it if you want feel free. We are just going to try adding the other people back because of the signal issue but the signal is supposed to be really good right now so we will see if it works. Give me just a sec but in the meantime I will pass here to see them.
Male speaker: Greg I think you are the only one hooked into this, no the Theresa also.
Greg: I’m honored, oh my daughter is saying hi.
Male speaker: Maybe it works better when I’m in Paris, that’s my narcissism. Oh now I’m hearing the sounds of Kung fu live that’s even better.
[0:05:11]
Male speaker: [0:05:17] [Inaudible] you know it’s like karaoke when you are with a group of friends we are sitting in a small circle you know we could still pass the mic around and talk mainly to ourselves, oh yeah.
Male speaker: Is there anyone else actually? Who can hear us? Greg, Charisa, Jessica, Charlotte did we want to call him?
Female Speaker: There are clients and institutions world wide, Platinum Investments, a world of Investing. Produced in association with the University of—
Male speaker: Hello?
Male speaker: Greg hey good to hear from you men.
Greg: Hi and how are you, dido. I don’t know this sound like its not going to happen.
Male speaker: No, that can’t be.
Greg: Hello
Male speaker: Jesus. Jessica are you there?
Jessica: Yeah we are here.
Male speaker: Hi? Yes I think Scott’s right the FBI is fucking with Skype but they will give up in a minute.
Jessica: Okay, did you forget the key?
Female speaker: Is there a key?
Jessica: I’m going to put it on mute.
Male speaker: Okay so we will just do the Skype talk show host stick, keep an up beat tone as we patiently await connections. Hi Mathew? We need to put Greg back on. Yes maybe Greg could you try to host because for some reason maybe that will trick the FBI
Male speaker: Yes that would be nice.
Female speaker: [0:10:54] [Inaudible] I mean I think it’s supposedly our connection is actually quite good.
Male speaker: How do you measure that?
[0:11:06.6 - 0:14:53.0] [Background voices]
Male speaker: Wow so it’s actually extremely unusual to not be able to connect on Skype at all, Skype waits that’s really weird. [0:15:05] [Inaudible] so that half the windows are up there. Yes so how is the going?
Male speaker: Good.
Male speaker: Awesome.
Male speaker: Yes can’t complain, how are you doing?
Male speaker: Sweet not bad, do you live in Philly?
Male speaker: Yes sir.
Male speaker: Okay.
Male speaker: I live in [0:15:22] [Inaudible].
Male speaker: Yes rock on, super bowl have you been to…
Male speaker: Its exactly six minutes for me to get home to here.
Male speaker: On your bike?
Male speaker: Yes and I know that exactly because my girlfriend works for Billy Archer and Billy archer is what [0:15:40.4] [Inaudible].
Male speaker: Wow super cool.
Male speaker: Yes so it’s awesome.
Male speaker: Yes have you been to any of these events before?
Male speaker: No I scrape in once a few weeks ago, I was in Montreal but I came across you guys but I was interested in the meeting but I couldn’t make [0:16:01] [Inaudible].
Male speaker: Alright, but you live in Philly when you are around?
Male speaker: [0:16:05] [Inaudible] studying French actually.
Male speaker: Okay.
Male speaker: Yes I’m a grab student at [0:16:09] [Inaudible].
[0:16:12.2 - 0:19:23.2] [Background voices]
Male speaker: Hello Tom? Tom? Mr. Eslac. We are hanging up.
Male speaker: Maybe I will try—you went to Adam [0:19:50] [Inaudible].
Male speaker: He wants you to sign in a [0:19:50] [Inaudible].
[0:19:57.2 - 0:25:21.8] [Background voices]
Male speaker: So are people good?
Male speaker: Yes we are great here.
Male speaker: Adam can you hear well?
Male speaker: So the only thing that might be a little complicated I mean not be able to add people if we lose them right away, let me know and I will do my best to read people to the conversation.
Male speaker: Who is in the conversation right now?
Male speaker: basekamp, Jessica, Scott, Slat, Charisa and me. We missing anybody? I’ve basically just called everybody on the list.
Male speaker: Jessica is right though we did write the word project a little too often in that write up. I think we are going to have to…
Jessica: I didn’t even know how to sign up; it’s been pretty ubiquitous in everything I have been reading since the day I think. Yes I…
Male speaker: Our secret plan actually is to make words like user ship ubiquitous so that people think that it’s normal to talk that way and then it will be normal.
Jessica: can you guys hear the air conditioner that’s running right next to me?
Male speaker: It’s horrible, no it’s fine.
Jessica: No? Nothing? Okay.
Male speaker: No.
Male speaker: Can’t hear it.
Male speaker: Carissa yes it looks like you have muted your audio successfully although you should feel free to chime in at any point of course.
Steven: So listen, Steven here, I think we are going to have to not wait for Ricardo because he could be bat George Bush airport in Houston waiting for his connection or he could be on that connection somewhere between George Bush airport and whatever the airport is called in San Diego. Yes it’s no joke and unfortunately it’s actually called the George Bush airport and there is a very large and very naturalistic sculpture of the man whose name the airport bears. Yes grosses is definitely an understatement. But I think we should start without him and Scott momentarily disappeared here, I don’t know if it’s really—Adam do you want to give your spin on the work of the b.a.n.g Lab? Maybe you know actually what b.a.n.g actually abbreviates, maybe not.
Female speaker: Adam we will be back in a minute he took the dog to go pee.
Male speaker: B.a.n.g is bits, atoms, neurons and genes, I don’t know specifically the origins of that but obviously his work with Critical Art Ensemble [phonetic] [0:29:12] and such probably you know comes out of the stuff they were doing with genetically modified food testing and bits, atoms, neurons I don’t know, but that’s what it stands for if that’s useful.
Steven: That’s useful, who knows when the disturbance project begun, not the—there I used the project word again, but not specifically the device but the US Mexico border disturbance art project of which the transporter immigrant tool is merely one of the manifestations.
Male speaker: My limited knowledge is ECD is been around for a while but I’m trying to do a little bit of quick research to help flush this out. I thought that they grew out of heat; it was sort of something that grew out of CAE Critical Art Ensemble.
[0:30:23]
Steven: No definitely that’s a fact but the interesting thing is that the Critical Art Ensemble explicitly has stepped away from the whole concept of electronic civil disobedience which they endorsed in their first project and in their first book.
Male speaker: Right.
Steven: But already I the second book they had said that it’s like by the time the next five minutes conference took place it was already history. And they made a very compelling argument for that; I mean I remember working on that a little bit. They said that, you know, by the time it had seized to be a grey zone but had actually become a black and white zone that was really the--. It’s just like protest had already moved off the streets into the electronic sphere and it was time to move elsewhere so I suspect that it was at that time that Ricardo and others developed this, the boarder disturbance art project but I was wondering if somebody knew the details on that one.
Male speaker: I have limited details at the tips of my synapses, anyone else want to chime in or even just help flush it out via researching online. I have to step away from my laptop so I will only have my phone with me but let me know if we lose anybody on the chat and I will run down here again.
Adam: I think—I just got back sorry this is Adam, I think that the big thing with Ricardo and with the b.a.n.g lab and then there is another person whose name I don’t have in front of me but its somebody who is at UC, maybe Santa Barbra I don’t remember. Is they used what they had developed for the disturbance theater which is a way for anybody to go to a site, one single site, click on it and it will send a hit to another website as a way to disobey by just opening the page. Like a way to have you know a sit-in on a website and the reason that Ricardo has been on the news recently is because they turned that’s same technique against the University of California as part of the action or the insurrection if you will that was happening over the last two semesters, the fall and the spring semester. Is that who it is? Could be. I know he is not tenure track faculty or tenured faculty so I think he might even be at more risk than Ricardo is.
Male speaker: Yes he does like GPS like lands art, he directed like land stuff using GPS so I think he has been involved for obvious reasons in terms of the trans-immigrant or transporter immigrant too. He is, I’m just linking this up, and lecturer with security of employment is how he has listed himself at UC Santiago. So here I will send a link to the—let’s see, oh shoot no that’s not it. Yes here it is I will send this and then I am actually stepping away here.
Steven: Isn’t this a little unprecedented I mean what’s the point of actually having tenure if you can take it away from someone, I thought the whole point was that it allowed you to feel free from the threats of them, I don’t know , of a repressive environment, even relatively repressive.
Adam: Yes you are absolutely right its, well for just different reasons but I think tenure was for what my limited understanding of it is that it’s to protect professors research interest that for some reason your research interest are at odds with the institution they can’t can you for that but the argument with Ricardo is that he fundamentally and unequivocally broke the law. and therefore you know you can’t fondle your students, you can’t be belligerently drunk and show up to class and fall over and you can’t break the law of there is grounds for dismissal regardless of whether or not you have tenure. And so they are claiming that he has literally broken the law and therefore they have the right to excuse him and strip of tenure. Again I am talking about stuff that I think I know about but obviously it would be much nicer if he were here to discuss that.
[0:35:12]
Steven: Yes and I hope that he is going actually be able to join before the end of this but I’m just trying to flush it out a little bit, of course the reason there is tenure is because in every single case where the employer would like to terminate an objectionable faculty members research practice they could always say that it was, you know, at odds with the law. I mean maybe it’s—after all he didn’t exactly murder someone so if we are not talking about a criminal offence, are we?
Adam: Yes can you hear me?
Steven: Yes.
Adam: Yes I think it can be charged as criminal activity yes, what’s that?
Female speaker: That was my [0:36:05] [inaudible].
Steven: That’s the investigation Adam could you spell it out a little bit.
Adam: Oh I was going to go even further on that point because I feel it’s important to point out that he was tenured based harshly on the research that he had done with electronic disturbance theater.
Male speaker: Exactly.
Adam: If what he did to the UC is illegal so was what he did before, so they tenured him on something that they are now going to pretend is illegal now that it’s been turned on now.
Male speaker: That’s right Adam I think that’s absolutely correct.
Steven: But civil disobedience is not a crime, it’s not legal of course but it’s not a crime. It’s not and under some circumstance I think at least it is a crime not to aid persons in danger and couldn’t you argue that a GPS device that allows them to find water in a desert situation even if they are attempting to enter across the border without a VISA, that in fact helping them not to die like hundreds of other people actually have would actually be in keeping with the law?
Adam: I don’t think that’s what’s under—that’s not what’s being used against them, sorry, it’s the sit –in, the virtual sit- in. the denial of service attacks that they ran giants UCSD website as well as I’m sure the paritymarcudoff.com website surely probably didn’t help his standing with the college or the university.
Steven: Greg I’m not the only person with a little bit of a bewildered look on my face, could you say a little bit more about what that was, what they are charging him with, what he actually did or is alleged to have done?
Male speaker: I will do my best I’m literally, you know this is way too much information but I am literally standing over a toilet with poop in it from my daughter so I’m like doing lots of things right now. Uh oh, yes.
Adam: What he was charged with was what I was talking about a little bit ago, you go to a website, you click on a link. Anybody can do it they announced it to the entire web and you go and you click that link and that link is redirected to the website. So it’s basically as if everybody goes to a website at the same time and clicks a link, it’s also known as the denial of service attack when it’s used, when a whole bunch of remote servers are used by hackers or people who are pissed off at somebody. So basically what they are doing is crushing the UC foundation or I’m not exactly sure what part of UC but they were crushing the website using this technique, does that make sense?
Greg: Yes exactly and if you guys, I don’t know if you Google searched flood net? Flood net was one of the original, you know, denial of service sort of hacker attacks website, Flood net.
Female speaker: So that’s illegal then and that’s what he is being charged for?
Female speaker: Yes.
[0:39:57]
Steven: Nice, thank you, okay this kind of—I mean I really wanted to bring a little bit of that information because it goes back to an exchange which we had or at least I was involved in and Adam was involved in on the basekamp list a few months back. Because I think that it raises the whole question or at least for me it raised the whole question of the politics of art today because one way to avoid the, a strictly kind of legalistic defense by saying oh well you gave me tenure for something and now you are taking it away from the same thing so in fat you are involved in a legal contradiction as much as me.
I mean of course that’s—all arguments are good arguments in a case like this in law but in fact the politics of art also comes up in an entirely different way because one of the, it seems to me this is Steven speaking, that one of the tendencies which art has in cases where its threatened with censorship and in fact beyond the fact that he risks losing his tenure and therefore his job is that also it’s a direct attempt to sensor his art practice and to sensor art practices more generally which use civil disobedience as a material and field within the prevue off art. Is to say no you can’t, you could forbid this if—you could say it’s illegal if I wasn’t in the art department. If in fact if I was doing this as just any old employee of the university, but in fact because its art it has a special status and it has a preferential status.
I mean it has a symbolic status because we don’t like free and democratic society to sensor art and it has a particular ontological status, in other words that’s it actually is what you are accusing it to be but at the same time its only a proposition of what you are accusing it to be. And for me it’s a huge issue which way art is going to fall on that question, is it going to say listen I think it’s really important to—sorry I’m laughing at the poop joke there. It’s really important to decide whether art should attempt to get out of difficult situations the way no other human activity could by invoking this particular status which it alone has. Or whether it should no these political issues are really what’s important and if we say its art then we are actually saying its juts art and therefore not the harmful and potentially censorship deserving real thing.
Adam: I think that, you probably know better than I would actually because its more in your field but I think that women’s studies department, queers study department, several political on the fringe of humanities departments have done the same sort of thing where they use this sort of activity, this radical political activity and use it as a defense that it is academic research to some degree. I’d have to look up for examples to disagree with you fully but I think there are other fields where you could make the same argument as art.
Greg: Hey this is Greg; I will chime in when I can. It’s sort of not to related specifically back to Critical Ensemble writings or anything like that but I know in terms of digital resistance which focused on you know electronic civil disobedience. You know some of the questions they raised was, you know, not even whether or not its art but whether or not something like a denial of service can be considered terrorism in that anybody could--. You know and they talk about this now, this is like the huge hot button topic with, who is the dude that, you know, the guy that got--. The guy who said that there was going to be an attack from Al Qaeda and then it happens and now he is talking about you know a cyber attack on America as being terrorism. But like the whole argument of that particular essay or that particular section of the book was that terrorism only occurs when you know there is a physical body included in the harm that’s done. and you know that’s a pretty radical statement obviously but to some extend it sort of relates to what we are talking about in that whether or not its art or it’s you know activism, you know maybe it’s all in the language I don’t know.
[0:45:04]
Adam: I guess the other point that was raised earlier that related more to the transporter project than I think, well I don’t know. I guess it may have related to this too, actually it did never mind sorry to sort of like prep us saying nothing yet with saying a lot. But basically the question that we were discussing earlier in, not earlier tonight but earlier in sort of long back and forth email exchanger. One of the points that was raised was wasn’t—forgive me if I missed this while I was stepped out for a second but isn’t this part of what you risk when you do work that I guess that challenges ideas about what’s legal, that rides the grey zones of contested space? And I am not saying that once you do that you deserve to be canned or you deserved to be slapped or whatever, just that like isn’t this kind of a potential outcome of that type of, you know of that type of risk and if not then what are you actually risking you know?
If you are not even prepared and I’m not talking about Ricardo in particular but just if on isn’t prepared to actually risk something as, I don’t want us to call it trivial, but something as non-life threatening as losing your job for explosive political maneuver you know that rides the line of legality then what are you prepared to risk you know? And I guess I’m not saying that the question should be whether he deserves to be fired but just whether that’s the thing that we should all be up and arms about or whether the issue itself is, I don’t know.
Greg: Well I think there is no question that he is prepared to lose his tenure or he wouldn’t have done it I mean the man I remember him speaking before and I have read a few things, he knew when he did this especially attacking the UC site that that was a risk. However I think it was clear from the last time he talked to us that he was turning his entire academic career into a struggle and part of the struggle. I mean he put-- I remember the best that he did was somebody said that this re-situation of…
Adam: Yes that’s true.
Greg: But there is a reason with—there was a Wall Street Journal article that said this is the reason we shouldn’t have tenure and he put that in front of his tenure application. So he is really using tenure politically it’s not that he is hiding from it, he is going to go all the way with this as far as losing it or not losing it in my opinion.
Adam: Yes for sure, do you feel that the students that are protesting his loss of tenure are missing the point or are they somehow joining the struggle obliquely? You know because it seems like what he is doing isn’t about his tenure he is just using that as a point or a as opposition from which to challenge certain issues and ideas. And it seems like the protest should really be centered around those issues and ideas not so much –I mean I want to support him too I’m just saying, you know, if you see what I mean.
Greg: Yes but I think what the students are doing in California are doing is standing up for their rights as students overall. So the same people who are supporting him are also occupying building and getting arrested themselves or they were until summer came and know it’s kind of tied off which is hilarious.
Female speaker: Yes because it gets me that this guy is being put at risk for something which happens which is like a supped up version of something that happens to me practically every time I go on the computer, I mean it’s ridiculous.
Greg: All those things that I am imagining you are describing are also illegal and it’s just hard to track those people down, they don’t stand behind it with, again, a physical body. They hide behind it through a series of tubes of you will.
Steven: One of the questions that—now to come back to the specific to the trans-boarder tool itself and its ilk. It’s very clear that those kinds, I mean to call them tools is to underscore the fact that they have a use value, in fact that these things of course they have a symbolic value I’ll get to that in a second. But they also have a true use value; they actually work or are supposed to work and are supposed to be helpful and useful.
[0:50:06]
So that’s clear that that use value of those kinds of objects brings something to art, in other words it gives it teeth. But my question really is what does the fact that they are also to be understood as propositions and as informed by an artistic self understanding, what does that bring to them as tools? You know and it’s a question which I wonder for so many of the practices which we discuss within the framework of plausible art worlds, is that these things could just exist as the real thing. You don’t need to know that they are art for them to work for their use value is not dependant on their artistic status or their artistic claim. But the fact that that they have that artistic claim what does that do does that enrich them? Does that make them doubly useful? Or does it just make them kind of awkward and a little bit artificial.
Now Greg’s right that in the write up Ricardo specifically describes the trans-border tool as performing poetry right. I’m never sure what that word poetry actually means you know, when we say something is poetic it’s kind of like saying its artistic and it begs the questions but…
Adam: Yes it was definitely unclear but it seemed like when we were talking with him he was using poetry as more of like a word where he is describing like that which occurs is out of his control, it’s just sort of the unknown, the you know, sorry yes I will leave it at that.
Greg: Excuse me also isn’t it using art’s historic relationship to the symbolic realm or sort of arts—well yes its, the history of art is a history of people trying to build meaning out of doing things. Doing things and making things to present to other people, to present that meaning to other people through different, you know, through different means. Through the written word, through images, through activities you know actions or whatever.
Steven: But isn’t that valid for those of us who know something about a particular history of conceptual art and couldn’t it, I mean the type of people who are liable to be users of these devices are not really liable to make heads or tails out of that history. And so what is it really bringing to them? is it bringing something or is it really just appeasing our conscience as you know sort of post conceptual art efficienity that we want art to be a little bit more corrosive than it actually is. And so, this isn’t my position I am being a little bit of the devil’s advocate.
Greg: Yes.
Steven: But I have encountered these cases where people just, you know you can explain to them why it’s so doubly cool that it has this double ontological status but some people just don’t get and I understand why they don’t.
Adam: But Steven yes I’m curious you know when you talked about the fact that the tools as we would imagine much in the way that I don’t know Marks would describe tools or you know Adam Smith would describe tools. I am wondering in this case how many like does the utility of a tool depend on how many people use it or how it’s used because I’d really love to know like how many people actually used this device or how many people actually know that it exists. Because I mean it’s much like, you know, like a readymade you know. Like it’s a bottle rack like do people use it as a bottle rack? Like I don’t know how many people actually use this tool and so is it more of a gesture, a political gesture, a gesture of solidarity, a gesture of humanity that you know. I just wonder if it’s truly a tool as we imagine you know a hammer or a fork or a spoon or whatever else is a tool.
Greg: Yes I am also extremely curious about those practical questions relating to under what conditions and how often, how frequently these tools have been used and to what effect and in fact if we had the opportunity to talk to him those would be some of the questions I would be most interested in asking him, but to return for a second just to the question about the artistic component of these tools. I mean I don’t know the good professor’s intentions and I am not familiar with his work really personally but it would seem to me that at the end of the day the artistic component probably reduces to just a kind of nice gloss that you know educated people like ourselves like to kind of add on the real practical value of a tool like this. And that’s not to be cynical or to criticize you know the importance or the value of the artistic glosses that we add to, you know, to practically useful and politically effective tools or strategies.
[0:55:49]
But I call it the kind of gloss that we would add to the fact kind of expos facto only to probe the question, I mean you guys’ talk a lot about plausible art world is the term that you guys use. I mean I find something very interesting and attractive about the idea of art kind of coming to the scene expos facto as a way of kind of justifying political practices to kind of make arguments about they should be distinct from legal instrumental calculations. And so I am interested in the possibility that perhaps the functions of the artistic component is itself a kind of political strategy, something that we kind of add on after the fact to defend the justifiability of projects like these. Do you see what I am saying?
A way in which art is kind of just like a kind of cultural marker, a kind of signifier in which we can kind of justify or reclaim deviant and radical political practices that kind of keep a good faith for the University for instance. I would be very interested to see if a discourse about how these tools, these very kinds of subversive tools are in fact art, I would like to see if that argument could keep him his job, if that could save him from legal trouble. because then it would be a really interesting way to understand the artistic component as kind of a political tool itself to kind of salvage and protect these kinds of subversive practices and inventions.
Steven: [0:57:27] [inaudible] enjoying unequal society?
Adam: Steven was just asking if wouldn’t that just revalorize the symbolic privileges that art enjoys in an unequal society, back to you.
Greg: Well if those symbolic privileges that art enjoys are going to be authentically and legitimately honestly channeled into fighting for the rights and the capabilities of people who don’t profit from the privilege of art then I would be glad to hear that. That defense would reify the symbolic privileges according to art even if art is a kind of a highly stratified you know kind of class based privilege right?
Steven: I got into trouble with some friends a few year ago because I had been very much involved in a Palestinian solidarity group and at one point I was asked to sign what appeared to everybody else to be a self evident petition which demanded that Palestinian film makers be allowed free access to the occupied territories to make films because they were obviously being e3xtremely harassed and inhibited, every kind of imaginable obstacle was thrown in their path. And they made this plea that basically saying that they were the consciousness of the nation and that therefore Israel should allow them free access to make their movies. And of course I think that’s true but I thought that it was obscene to make the argument to frame it in those terms because in fact millions of Palestinians are not even allowed ever into their homeland and no mention was made of that in the letter.
The mention was made that it’s scandalous that film makers—well if you are a Palestinian film maker it’s because you have already had some greater degree of privileged and access to education and so on than the great majority of your compatriots. And so it wasn’t that I wanted to like take the side of the Israelis but I just didn’t—I couldn’t bear the idea of signing something which in fact would shore up the privileges of a group which was relatively speaking already [1:00:08] [inaudible] despite the fact that they were being oppressed.
[1:00:12]
So that got me excluded from that list but never the less I don’t totally give up because I think that this really has to do with the very possibility of a post autonomous and political art practice which is why I think this is really about the politics of art. Or to put the border argument just slightly the other way in think the boarder which we are really talking about is the border between the art world and the life world.
Adam: Well I’ll agree that art seems ludicrous often in the way that it’s used; I will also agree that it could be very useful and if it is then let’s use it. Then again part of what we do when we work as artists or what we can do, ultimately what we are doing whenever we are conscious of, or not, of working with—now what am I trying to say? In participating in culture production or culture meaning and any other sector not just the art field is you know we are entering the symbolic realm you know. And artists do that as part of their job description, this is what makes the field of practice and study called art not exactly unique but well yes, unique I guess among other fields. It’s something that we are—it’s not always framed that way but on some level that’s what we are supposed to be doing.
Now we are supposed to be doing all sorts of other things as artists but you know part of what we, at least many people think that we are supposed to be doing colloquially speaking, I mean not even from theories but even just if you ask anyone what the role of the artist is you will hear all kinds of clichés and all kinds of cultural baggage and all kinds of stereotypes from popular films and stories and you know whatever. Just how we learn about what the world is we learn about through clichés and we learn about through, you know, stories I guess. And part of the story that you will almost always hear if we listen is that what artists are supposed to do is, I mean it sounds like a lot of different stuff you know but what artists are supposed to do is imaginative. Not just with some particular object you are making, whether the person is talking about a painting or a sculpture whatever they understand art to be but they are also supposed to be imaginative with the way they live you know and the way potentially that we all live.
However it’s said you know I hear it so often by people who claim to know nothing about art. and ultimately I think they are right, people that claim to know a lot about art also talk about that, you know they talk about it differently but they talk about our role or part of our role as re-imagining at least on the more like I guess, like the stronger arguments, re-imagining every aspect of how we live and work together. And I think that that’s what artists often do I mean often really playfully, often you know self consciously, often not self consciously sometimes it’s hard to tell. And most of the time artists probably don’t do much of that or you know at least not with much ferocity. But sometimes they do and I think, and sometimes artists that do that do it in a very uninteresting way and other times they do it in a very, at least what I feel is a very interesting way.
I mean you never know I guess that’s why we talk about examples of artist practices and we have been looking at art worlds in particular because when artists turn their creative energies or their attentions to not just their world around them but in particular their world. And decide instead of playing by a game that someone else has set the rules for to modify those rules, sometimes to sort of open up the hood and mess up the wiring and other times literally make another kind of game. Then you know what they are doing is they are imagining even their small microcosm, their art world or whatever it is or you know plausible or implausible that maybe, they are somehow playing within the symbolic realm of the social and of something that could…Whether we think it’s actually scalable or whether we can just imagine that’s scaling up or out to some other existing system, they are playing or re-thinking culture you know.
[1:05:05]
Re-thinking the ways that we are together you know, how we understand ourselves and all that and not only re-imagining how you apply specific kind of material to another kind of material or something like that. So I think when Steven is talking about the possibility of a post autonomous art practice, I don’t want to put words in your mouth but that’s what comes to mind for me. And I guess the question of whether or not art should be used in the service of politics of whether the word art should be used as a shield for other kinds of activity, I think often it is but it’s not all of the question. I think part of the value is self or knowingly playing in that symbolic realm but realizing that by playing in that you are also changing the playing field.
Greg: I don’t mean to be overly sarcastic or anything but although, I mean how would you date the period in which art was autonomous, when was that?
Adam: Yes like the post art [1:06:14] [inaudible].
Steven: No but autonomy is the regime of 20th century art, in fact autonomy was something which was ten was a sort of conquest of an autonomous space which took place in the second half of the 19th century and of course there was no, you know we are talking about what Al Jazeera called relative autonomy. Of course art was never anything like autonomous but you know perfect autonomy—autonoma means auto is the self and Nomos is the laws. So it means giving yourself your own laws and to the extent that anything was ever autonomous, modernist art was autonomous because it gave itself its own laws. Laws were not dictated by the prince, they were not dictated by the cardinal or the bishop, they were something which emerged and it was sort of theorized by people like Adorno and Greenburg as something which emerged from an imminent logic of art itself.
Well we remain within that paradigm if when push comes to shove we say you can’t touch this because you are not respecting its autonomy because you don’t understand what it is. You think that it’s an illegal activity but in fact it’s an artistic practice and therefore it doesn’t fall under the prevue of your law because only half of the project falls under the prevue of your law, the real part, the other part is perfectly, socially acceptable. So I think that if we want to—because the down side of that or the up side of course is that artist do get away with stuff that nobody else can get away with that’s true. And therefore it’s fantastic because in a relatively oppressive society and it’s only as relatively oppressive as art is relatively autonomous.
But relatively oppressive autonomy is really useful to have this thing called art which doesn’t have to obey cost benefit analysis and it can do all sorts of things otherwise you can’t get away with. But at the same time it really boils down to the most enfeebling thing that modernist art suffering from that it’s just art. Because it’s autonomous and it doesn’t really have an effect because its own little world, of course it has an effect on consciousness but it doesn’t have an effect in the real. And I think what opposed to autonomous practice would be is not a practice that seizes to be autonomous in any way but in fact one which goes beyond that prison hose of the modernist autonomous regime.
Adam: Yes I mean if I could just follow up on that slightly, we are borrowing the term post autonomy from a theorist Michael Lingner who is writing through—not really, well these part of his writings weren’t really that widely used until another artist David Goldenberg started, well and some others using this term and exploiting the hell out of it and we just like it, you know because it seems to sum up a lot of things. But I for one I am not that interested in using that term as an era based kind of term. You know an imposed in terms of after, more like a beyond or a moving outside of or questioning of, you know what I mean?
Steven: Yes like you know post Marxists usually are not people who have broken with the political project that’s associated with Marxism, they are people who have Marxism. They have simply said well we don’t remain within the 19th century paradigm of Marxism we want to push it forward and I think that’s the ideas of post autonomy. It’s not like saying oh well what a bad idea lets seize to be autonomous and lets go back to the pre-autonomous, let’s make post autonomy look like pre-autonomy, no, It’s like lets apply autonomy.
[1:10:20]
Greg: Yes thanks for clearing that up I mean I completely understand, I understand that argument and that’s fair enough and I am sure the theorist in question made several very compelling arguments to that effect. But I mean I don’t think it’s that difficult to argue something but I think quite different maybe to kind of recast the situation in terms of maybe not autonomy versus pre-autonomy or post autonomy but maybe what it really might be described as. it might really described as like different regimes of dependence right because even this era or the style of art making in which we might want to think of it as autonomous because a certain amount our personal freedom has been curved out.
I mean even in n that era or epoch I mean artists are still of course extremely dependent on others in different ways or I guess I had cheaply in mind their benefactors or the people who fund them, their patrons. But also I mean let’s not forget as the autonomous artist as you guys might call him comes to the fore I mean also the power of critics, the power of kind of, you know. The real brokers of power when it comes to artistic meaning and artistic significance. I mean one could argue that sure maybe the artist gains a certain amount of autonomy but he is still really beholding to—right. I mean like he is still very beholding to the different kinds of it. But the reason that I would remind us of just this little point is. because I think it does go back to the conversation we are having and the specific case that we are talking about with his particular professor who is doing subversive political work under the heading or art because - I mean if we want to talk about ourselves as being in a post autonomous art epoch then one of the most important things I think to kind of put on center stage are the different kinds of institutional funding that dominate the possibility of doing art today and then of course the universities.
You know the major charitable trusts and things of this nature that the many endowments for the arts and things of this nature. I mean these are the major power brokers who make most contemporary art possible at least in most of the main stream ways in which art is being carried out. An so the question becomes developing strategies for using the resources and the power that these power brokers provide to artist but without paying back into them, you know. How should one phrase it? I guess what I’m trying to say is what we need to try to figure out I think is how we can use those resources to the maximum but without you know reifying if you will or kind of re-contributing to the, you know the reproduction of all the, you, know whatever. Here one could say all different kinds of clichés about like power structures and stuff like that, it’s basically what we are getting at. And so I mean this case that we are talking about now represents a kind of interesting case study I think in that sense and I will be very interested to see how you know he gets away with x or doesn’t get away with, you know, this project in which he is really putting his own cultural capital, his political academic capital on the line for trying to achieve something outside of you know what maybe he is supposed to be achieving with the institutional [1:14:14] [inaudible] that he is given as a tenure professor, yes I don’t know.
Adam: Hello, hopefully we are not commandeering conversation if anyone else wants to chime in do so at any point, pregnant pause.
Female speaker: I am just thinking about those times when I have seen people on TV or in movies or in the music or some cartoon or something where people don’t think it’s actually very political but they sneak in a message that, you know—
[1:15:00]
Adam: Yes I mean the politics is always there and I guess what you mentioned about the sort of, excuse me, historic autonomy of the artist, this is ultimately and you are right it never was that way and it’s not that way now and the relative dependence of the artist I mean isn’t completely that way either. I mean it’s…
Steven; [1:15:29] [inaudible] 1870s you know fine arts to you know the stuff that was going on prior to the French revolution. In that respect autonomy really has a very substantive meaning.
Adam: I mean absolutely the idea of what it means to be an individual changed, yes agreed. Yes but the artist is having a special, quote unquote the artist having some sort of special place in that is largely symbolic. Artists, you know I mean people that enjoy a certain—that are granted a certain degree of freedom don’t necessarily have more autonomy and artists don’t necessarily haven’t necessarily have more autonomy. What they have provided is a very visible and compelling story that the autonomy of the artist is like is considered a myth for that reason. Not just because people don’t have autonomy they do its relative autonomy and we fight for autonomy as citizens sometimes and also recognize our dependence sometimes. But we are always dependent too, I don’t think artist enjoy a special place in that except for their role as fulfilling a symbolic or a very visible I guess marcher for this you know? And often have been pointed to in popular culture and otherwise for that, you know not by—again and I only emphasize this because not by people who claim to be art experts but just you know by culture at large.
So it’s something I think we need to recognize as artist is that like you said, I mean I don’t want to put words in your mouth but like you said that that main, even in an era that celebrated our autonomy artists may not necessarily have curved out an autonomous path. And I think now it, I mean it’s as important as ever for people regardless of what field you are into to work toward—well to consider what it means to chat an independent course. It’s very difficult I mean in a field of collectivity which we are always part of. You know ultimately artists working in groups I think that part of the power of focusing on that isn’t to say no we don’t want autonomy on any level; we don’t want to be autonomous citizens’ yes.
Steven: We want autonomy we have had enough of the pseudo autonomy, of this regime of autonomy that in fact gives art some sort of special symbolic privileged but at the cost of there being no real autonomy, enough of the pseudo autonomy. I think that’s the whole point of pluralizing art worlds in the plausible art worlds, is that as long as there is only one there is no authentic autonomy because it’s the type of autonomy which is permissible within that rate, that’s particular regime.
Adam: Something like sanctioned protest zones?
Steven: Yes [1:19:14] [inaudible].
Adam: Yes well, there is kung fu.
Female speaker: It’s not really working [1:19:29] [inaudible] it’s not like registering a…
Male speaker: You are either on mute though.
Female speaker: The [1:19:36] [inaudible] is on mute?
Male speaker: No I don’t think so.
[1:19:45 - 1:19:53] [Background voices]
Greg: I mean what can we really say I mean just good questions to be asked.
[1:20:02]
Male speaker: Do you have a question?
Male speaker: Yes.
Steven: Yes here is a question that there is no answer to and we could ask Ricardo and certainly it would be really interesting but it’s kind of a question which even goes beyond the specificity of this project. Is if you wanted to consider the boarder disturbance project and device as an exhibit, what would you exhibit?
Female speaker: I fell like just given the political nature of the whole project, project yes, you would really probably have to exhibit all of I would think like the news coverage that has been coming up from it and all of the culture that has been, I don’t know kind of responding to it and the political—I mean this guy getting fired you know. I feel like it’s almost that’s what’s really important rather than the device or the tool or even how many people have used it. It’s more important that the coverage is getting out there people to actually be aware of it. And I feel like that’s kind of why he is acting in this realm of art rather than as an engineer if you would call it you know, because its more about just making things aware.
Steven: Yes that’s –I don’t know If that that argument actually has been explicitly made but I think it would be a very powerful whirlwind to make it. Because it would also you know sit very nicely with the fact that the object which is being, you know, sort of queered is actually a communications device you know and a mass communication device. Although a communications device which only works on a one to one basis and it replaced potential technology which was never allowed to go any further. one of the spin of actually from the Vietnam war which was CB radio which had that very short moment of glory in the 1970s until the government realized that actually it was really not—well not the so much.
I think it was probably largely the private sector, realized that this was no way to make a lot of money because in fact you were having group communications with--. It was neither the one way system of like radio nor the one to one communication that was developed subsequently with cell phones. That’s kind of a bit of an aside but it’s true that if that’s what it is about, if zits about raising these issues and in fact all of these, some of the other stuff is almost a pretext for getting on the front page or on the cultural pages and the political pages potentially yes then we are talking about real use value. But I think that has to be named too and I wouldn’t have any like problem with you know, as an art historian making up all sorts of arguments about how that sits within an art historical paradigm as we ll. Because that’s a good point that you also raised and has been re-raised is would it help if it could be like absolutely demonstrated by major art historians that this guy was really a great artist, I mean probably the University of California would not dare to you know, give him too much grief.
You know if Roslyn Krause and Benjamin Boklou and you know, I don’t know Terry Dudoff all write you know major books on this, I mean I think that the you know, the president of the University would be like shamed into you know having that dossier just basically disappear one day. But that argument actually hasn’t as far as I know, actually been made you know.
Adam; Yes you mean in a wide experiment [1:24:16] [inaudible], yes I mean in a way it is being made sort of by the b.a.n.g lab’s website if you know what I mean. If you know you scroll through their posts and there aren’t installation shots most of the time you know what I mean, they are videos of these activities.
Steven: That’s true and in fact there is very few references on their site anyway, I don’t know about the secondary material but on their site to the visualized tradition. In fact they are very much within the theater traditional and theater you know not in the realist sense or the naturalist sense of lifting the fourth wall I the room but of taking all the walls down and a sort of deployment of theatre skill and lack thereof in the real.
Greg: I mean this is kind of somewhat fantastic and slightly whimsical but I mean there is at least theoretically a down side risk and conceptualizing art as a kind of a political foil to protect and make possible certain practices like we are kind of thinking about it now. And that is, I mean I don’t see this on the immediate horizon in any way but one could, I mean the powers that be if you will could just as well kind of say like the boarder wall is like performative art right. Or like the minute men, the vigilante justice group, yes you need another vigilante justice people guard the boarder to prevent people from coming in, they could certainly claim to be making art, they could claim to be--. Well I mean they could certainly become artist if they wanted t right? I mean…
[1:26:05]
Male speaker: [1:26:05] [inaudible].
Adam: Well but at the point we would be skeptical of them making such a claim then we are like the snooty powerful art people who are not letting, you know, a certain self organized autonomous cell claim to be artists I mean right? All I am saying is that you know by claiming an area of free activity outside of legality for the sake of art one cannot so safely assume that the forces of radical progressive politics are always going to be occupying that location and it could just as well be used to justify practices we don’t find so [1:27:00] [inaudible].
Steven: I see you point but I think it’s a purely speculative point and I think sociologically you would be hard pressed to find any example of groups like the minute man acquiring an art world that was prepared the validity of their claim to, you know, chasing people down as a conceptual art practice. I mean I don’t think that they are self understanding whatever get to that and I don’t think that they would even if you got one or two guys who though it might be a joke to try that they would ever find anything like an art world that would be prepared to recognize that. Because you can’t just do art by yourself and have it work out. But let me give—Scott asks us to give a different example which we were talking about earlier today is that I 1960’s Argentina there was a very rapid, radical, a political radicalization within art.
In other words art went from sort of the modernist autonomous paradigm very quickly like therefore form obstruction very quickly towards a radical dematerialization of the art object and from there to a radical politicization and even beyond that into an abandonment of art all together. And particularly this was around a number of [1:28:31] [inaudible] movements which were mentioned few weeks ago by Judy [1:28:34] [inaudible] but particularly around a movement called [1:28:38] [inaudible]. But the outcome of that was that many of these artists who you know only months before in fact had been abstract artists and then who had dematerialized their practice all of a sudden abandoned art all together to take up the revolutionary struggle, I mean the arm struggle as the sort of logical extension of their art practice.
So they did it within a self understanding as artists and the prove of that is that in 1972 when they organized in Santiago in Chile in the last of the Ashende regime a congress for all the Latin American artists, these guys and women put down their guns and attendee the conference along with you know mural painters and relatively conventional sort of what we think of as political artists. But they did it and that is like for me, I mean of course many of these people were killed because they weren’t you know really, you know they were artists actually they weren’t really guerrilla fighters you know? And so they were in kind of a romantic trip in a certain sense but they really put, you know they went the whole nine yard with it. and I think that that’s super interesting not so much that they did because I think politically it was, you know, and maybe artistically it was really the wrong thing to do but what is interesting about it is they did it with a self understanding as artists and therefore with a certain acknowledgment of an art world. I don’t think that you would find that with extreme right wing vigilante groups you know.
[1:30:18]
Adam: I will say though that it’s a very interesting what if, do you know what I mean? I mean we are relay concerned with, we are really interested in these scenarios, I don’t know how plausible it is. Maybe speculative but like for instance you know terms are often, I mean more and more political groups are very, well groups of people are extremely savvy and not the groups that might be on my side you know, and media savvy. Yes I seriously doubt that would happen because like not that many people care about art but you know I can certainly imagine circumstances arising where the terminology could be used. And I mean people understand art differently, we may not all share the same histories and if certain terms are used often enough or with enough vigor or you know with enough—we wouldn’t agree on the definitions but then they become contested you know and it’s an interesting thing to think about.
Steven: I don’t want to talk about this groups but I mean obviously they are based on an ultra conservative conception of the political community which is totally at odds to – I mean I don’t know how they can possibly integrate any part of the history conceptual art into that kind of an ultra you know reactionary, close minded braces to supremacist kind of a vision of boarders because that is precisely everything at conceptual art even in this less politically you know hard line forum I wanted to break down .
Male Speaker: Can I [1:32:02] [inaudible] for a second because I think that is how this started and I guess what about the futurists? I mean they are fascist ultimately and you know like I mean that’s not in our world now, that’s not in our understanding of possible and I don’t really think there is any reason to be worried that arts are a power enough symbol for storm friends to take up, you know or would mean that much. But I could imagine you know, well I could imagine some right wing radio talk show host seeing some value in that as some point and stirring some people there. I am not saying I am imagining that actually happening, but I can’t imagine that happening, that’s an interesting thing to think about because I agree with what you are saying but there is definitely examples where that hasn’t been the case and we still understand it to [1:32:58] [indiscernible]
Do you know what I mean? It’s not a good, it’s sort of apples and oranges because we are talking about people that were trained as “artists” and sort of extended that out into politics. But a lot of artists that we are interested in, in fact came out of the other angle too. They came not because they were trained in art academy, not all of them anyway. But because they felt some infinity with created practices and that they could identify with and got into it from another angle. I don’t know how much, I don’t know how much I really want to tease out this idea but it is just an interesting thing to think about because I hadn’t really, it’s an interesting what if I guess.
Female Speaker: I think if we are thinking in the scope of autonomy and as artists wanting autonomy, then I feel like if we were to ever achieve that, wouldn’t everyone kind of? I mean not everyone but I could see a lot of people kind of latching onto the idea of being an artist and being autonomous and not having any repercussions and I could see it then being really appealing for I mean right wing, left wing everyone that didn’t want to have law chasing the tail.
Male Speaker: And in the US usually the language revolves around the first amendment and the so called abuse of that you know like often by explicit racists or bigots and other people who feel that’s a deliberate abuse that puts their own freedom from another political angle at risk because its, it confuses at least in the – I really don’t want to be unfair in balance talking about racists here but…
[1:35:00]
Male Speaker: [1:35:01] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Right, right
Male Speaker: That has not been, that’s not a successful [1:35:07] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Right, right, indeed yeah. But anyway this is about a lot of popular discussion revolves around and I think it’s tied to art because art is often tied very closely with, at least in the US, the first amendment.
Male Speaker: I guess my objection was the minute men is kind of, it is a political movement, it’s kind of – I think it’s one that has been hijacked by all sorts of power and so on. But it’s hard to imagine as a movement, it could engender an artistic expressing. But it is true what could be easily imagined – so in that sense it’s not like futurism because futurism really was a movement that was fascinated with technological progress and identified that with an inner logic that art had like many [1:36:04] [indiscernible] movements but except it is fixated on one specific logic but I can’t imagine that sort of thing but I could imagine some lunatic artist, conceptual artist would also be a minute man and who – but I can’t imagine as he never get any other minute man to acknowledge his claim to be an artist because they would say you know, dude that’s not art and if you continue to say that’s art, you can’t even be part of our vigilante band anymore because as we all know is like oil on canvas. Do I have – do you know about this sophisticated [1:36:48] [inaudible]
Female Speaker: No I think something to keep in mind is that art isn’t always art in the moment I guess. I mean a lot of times, you might make something or I mean in the past I guess historically, they wouldn’t accept it as art because their peer won’t accept it as art. This does not necessarily mean that it wasn’t art later in the history books. So I mean you know I guess speculation, let’s say this did happen, you know I don’t think there would be any credit behind any minute man artist, you know in the moment. But later in the history books, I think it would certainly be something at least to add in there, at least maybe if it’s a failure. Not all arts succeed, so I guess that kind of goes back to the idea of like what is art and does it have to be acceptable, do artists have to accept it, is there one artist that can say the list goes on. I don’t know if [1:37:54] [inaudible]
Male Speaker: I don’t know, I just like that it’s a ridiculous argument that I am somehow able to follow and find some like interest in.
Male Speaker: Look yeah, I mean obviously in an absurd hypothetical to be talking about whether or not the minute men might tomorrow style themselves tomorrow as a performance troop. Of course and so the point of bringing it up was not to wonder about this as an immediate political danger that our artistic discourses right now might be flirting with. But oh okay so I mean we probably talked enough about that absurd hypothetical but I think it does point, it at least points to I think a more concrete and fair political danger or risk maybe that we tend to forget about in this kind of well educated, urban milude such as the one we are in now.
And it’s the fact that we have to remind ourselves really still in America only are very very slight minority of people would be able to agree that something like technologically modified old cell phones handed out to Mexican immigrants would qualify as art. It takes a very savvy minority to be able to see that as artistic. Whereas a certain for certain practices, we dislike, we would probably all very much dislike or probably way closer to qualifying as what the median individual in the United States would actually be able to agree is art. So I can imagine like – oh here we go into kind of a ridiculous hypothetical’s but I think this does, it leads to reflect a concrete point that is worth considering when we are trying to think about making Art Worlds Plausible for all different kinds of people across this country or others.
[1:39:59]
I mean if you were to uphold the individuals in America and ask them, which one better qualifies as art and you said something like giving technologically modified old cell phones to immigrants or a very large brilliant architectural structure that divides countries and prevents people from moving. I mean just on the face of it, just already that has actually more kind of crude superficial artistic merit, then something like a GPS project to aid and abet immigrants coming to the United States.
So I think it’s just worth recalling the kind of mainstream or average conception of art that one has to grapple with in trying to sell these things in serious ways.
Female Speaker: We say that ways sounds like they are using the immigrants and they are really not considering them much at all, they are the ends, a means to an end.
Male Speaker: Unfortunately we weren’t able to talk to Ricardo tonight. I definitely don’t think that impression would come across if we were able to but I feel some, this tingling in my spine that happens about 8:00pm Eastern Standard Time every Tuesday night. Unfortunately we need to wrap up for the sake of at least online anyway, for the sake of everyone who is fighting sleep to join us in whatever time zone you are. So actually looks like Jessica is actually earlier than we are and Adam and Mathew I am not sure where you are, nice.
But I think Steven is typing a response he wanted to send and you know why don’t you feel free to continue to do that as you want to but we will say good night for now. All right Mathew, so in any case, just to keep up with our basic program, we will end it but we won’t want to trample over something anyone wanted to say if you had something burning. If you do feel free, also feel free to type, if you don’t, that’s cool and we can always keep up, continue later. But it looks like we missed Ricardo completely now that we are ending. I would hold out a lot longer but we don’t, we haven’t heard back, he might be on the plane. Absolutely Jessica, well good night everybody and we’ll see you, see you next Tuesday.
[1:43:43] End of Audio
Week 17: Homeworks Forum
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is the next event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with some of the participants in the Home Works Forum, a multidisciplinary platform held in Beirut, Lebanon about every other year. Since its inception in 2002 at the initiative of the Ashkal Alwan Association, Home Works has evolved into a vibrant platform for spirited exchange on art and art-related practices in the region and beyond. Artists, writers, and thinkers gather for ten days in order to share their works, which take the form of exhibitions, performances, lectures, videos, artists’ talks, workshops and publications. What links the forum’s usership is a desire to engage a common set of urgent questions, to produce and consider aesthetic forms capable of embodying those questions meaningfully — and above all to work toward the emergence of a public with the agency to carry the project forward through action and not just in contemplation. Now midway through its 5th edition, the Home Works Forum is a space in which political, social and economic realities can be explored, reflected, and made manifest as visual and verbal articulations.
“Home Works” suggests an intertwining of public and private spheres, the outside world of work and the inside space of home. More broadly, “Home Works,” itself an impossible plural, implies a process of internal excavation, of digging and burrowing deeper while simultaneously constructing and accumulating new practices.
This year, the Forum’s focus is on “In and Out of Education … What Can We Teach Nowadays”, looking at the crisis in arts education, the so-called “pedagogical turn” in artistic discourse and practice — all in the context of the plan to set up a new educational program, The Home Works Academy, which will use the city of Beirut itself as its campus, its research topic and its platform. Beirut as a plausible artworld…
Transcription
Week 17: Homeworks Forum
[Scott]: Hey there! I only wish I was recording the opening track. Yeah, thank you very much. I'm here with Barbara, Kate, Chris and Michael so far.
(Music playing in background)
Whoa. Thanks Steph. Steph, that was really fantastic
(Inaudible background chatter)
[Scott]: We were hoping that you guys would get a little pissed ahead of time, so I am really glad. Grease the wheels.
(Inaudible background chatter)
[Steven]: So we were actually going to start with (inaudible 0:01:28.3) who is a Lebanese Beirut based, I don't know what she does, activist and agitator. She's fallen asleep so I guess (inaudible0:01:44.8) is going to have to start and I am looking (inaudible0:01:46.8). I'm looking for Greg Shallotte actually because Greg, let me give a quick (inaudible0:01:54.6) and then I will handle the mic over to Greg. Can you guys hear okay?
[Scott]: Yeah, we can definitely hear really well. Hey guys! Come on in. Hey Nato!
(Inaudible background chatter)
[Steven]: Nato Thompson is here to my right, (inaudible 0:02:15.5) is to my left and a little further to the extreme left is Greg Shallotte and I have kind of put myself in the middle here because these guys have a panel this evening at the Home Works Forum. The third and a series of panels on the question of setting up an art academy in Beirut and using Beirut campus as the site as the subject of the artistic enquiry. And so it was kind of a panel about bringing in some ideas and counter ideas. Judy talked about (inaudible 0:02:55.9) which could be the object of the future of Plausible Artworlds potluck project. She is the co-initiator of the Buenos Aires in Argentina old project called CIA...
[Scott]: Oh Yeah.
[Steven]: It is the Center for Intelligence in the Arts.
[Judy]: (inaudible 0:03:22.8)
[Steven]: Let's try and get our facts right. So she talked about that. And to give a kind of a different example and to throw some concrete examples out there… Greg, has been actively involved in all of discussions over the last couple of days and the Home Works Forum particularly around these educational panels Greg kind of set up the discussion. Asking the question of how is it possible to produce, with any knowledge economy, to produce critical forms of knowledge. Nato also raised concrete examples would sort of his own take on it. What's it called? The Bruce?
[Nato]: The Bruce High Quality Foundation University, which is a product that big time supported to start and I'm sure many of you are familiar with.
[Steven]: And then go into a bunch of other examples and basically questions the use of, well, the problem of lapsing into this sort of high and semiotic... What you call it Nato? The purgatory of postgraduate programs. (inaudible 0:04:53.5) but let me say a few things before we talk about the panel and that just about what Home Works actually is. Home Works was actually started in the years after the Civil War that went from 1975 to 1990. In the mid nineties someone called Christine Tohme started an association called Ashkal Alwan, an association for plastic arts in Lebanon, and an attempt to kind of create something which really didn't exist. Are you guys still there?
[Scott]: Hey, yeah. Can you hear is okay?
[Steven]: yeah (inaudible 0:05:30.1).
[Scott]: Just talking into the ether? Um, yeah, I know we can totally here you. Before you talk about that real quick media would just be good to let everybody know that our setup is a little artificial here. We've got like it mic and liked a Skype setup and were all sitting around the table. But I just wanted to let everyone know, at least on our side and plus whoever is out there from different Skype locations, that it is totally cool to chime in. Even if you just wanted to say hello or have any kinds of questions or wanted to say anything. Don't be put off by the format. There's just no other way to communicate with people that are not sitting right in front of you decides to have some kind of technology. So please flag us down, oh cool Steph, or if you want to sort of say something. Just interrupt us or chime right in or type something out. It's totally fine.
[Steven]: (inaudible 0:06:29.5).
[Scott]: Okay great.Yeah, please tell us.
[Steven]: Christine decided in a city where there was no public space and public time we're basically what wasn't in the hands of private ownership was in the hands of the different confessions, the different religious groups that have been party to that war, to try and claimed some kind of space within the urban landscape. And using art and (inaudible 0:07:00.6) to do that and in any attempt to bring some new ideas and to create this about 10 years ago it is now called Home Works (inaudible 0:07:16.0) for the little layout that I did the other day. It's a kind of a platform which takes the form of exhibitions and performs lectures, videos, talks, workshops, publications and exchange in general than initially at around questions that were particularly linked to this region, which is loosely known as the Middle East but one is never quite sure of the middle of what east exactly. This now, we are right here in the middle of the fifth edition of the forum and it is kind of evolved over the years. What it has become it's sort of a meeting place basically to exchange of verbally but also artistic forms. Any kind of conversation in a larger sense around how to go beyond just wanting are to be have political agency but to actually create something like a public position to carry the (inaudible 0:08:34.4) energies of art. And the particular emphasis this year has been on the idea to turn Beirut an academy. In other words, to make Home Works not just a biannual event where people show up and talk and then go back to where they're from, but to actually use this platform as a permit kind of affair.
So there are many things to be said about Home Works and about his upcoming or potential academy in general. Maybe I should like Greg Shallotte, who was our moderator earlier today, tell us what he (inaudible0:09:20.9). I should say that this is Greg's second time year, right?
[Greg]: Yes.
[Steven]: But not your third time, not yet. Take the helm, I'll take the beer.
[Greg]: Hi Scott.
[Scott]: Hey Greg! We are all here and totally excited about what you guys have to say and what you were doing over there. It would be great to be there but…
[Greg]: Yep, it is beautiful here. It's always really lovely here in spring especially. One of the things that is always amazing about being here is not only the sort of the impressions in mass media of what the Middle East is are just completely destroyed immediately and you fall in love with the place. But, you know it's a complex situation as we found out tonight because we provoked a discussion and at which people were actually starting to talk about the actual conditions here in Beirut and some of this sort of difficulties in trying to start in art school here. You know, which has some similarities to (inaudible 0:10:23.6) Argentina. And maybe even a little bit New York's, except that in New York I remember in the 1970s it was really kind of a demolished structure physically and socially. But it is its own place of course. There's a lot of complexity, either a still a lot of wealth here and it mixes is into the situation in particular ways.
So one of the issues that came up was how do students enter into the system of art education when they don't come from a financially comfortable background. Now, in the United States we are familiar with that problem but it's not such the case in Europe. Here in Beirut is really not so much of an issue. So that was one aspect of it. Maybe another aspect that we didn't really address as much as we should have is what we do with the students that this art school might turn out. How do they fit into the world? What world do they fit into? We actually had one of the students ask that question of us. The way art school is taught now there's no sense of connection to what they might do when they get out. There's no sense of how to finesse the politics of having a degree in art and preparation of what might take place after graduation. So, you know, those are really complicated questions here but the most complicated questions seem to be in the United States. So those are some of (inaudible 0:12:04.7) thoughts.
(inaudible background chatter)
[Judy]: Okay. Kind of keeping it along the lines with what Greg was saying, something that also was addressed (inaudible 0:12:29.5) was this kind of like this huge conversation of the arts implication. And it's interesting how it operates in different contexts. For example, in the north American (inaudible 0:12:40.4) north American context than the south American contexts because (inaudible0:12:45.8). And there is (inaudible 0:12:52.9) context from Europe, from Europe to North America from any other context (inaudible 0:12:58.7). Because, first of all, there are institutions that are really crystallized (inaudible 0:13:06.3). So that gives already the background in which you can like base your discourse of education to the theory of one of these conferences. But then when you talk about it with a different context, like could be Lebanon with the program now or in Argentina (inaudible 0:13:26.18 - 0:13:36.3). But also because the student is not seen as a product in which in north America, a student is a product. The student is a consumer, is somebody that is paying (inaudible 0:13:50.4) which is very different in other parts of the world. In my (inaudible 0:13:58.5) which I've been working with two other artists on this project which is called CIA, Center for (inaudible 0:14:07.8) or Center for Individuals in the Arts or there is many names that everybody kind of (inaudible 0:14:14.7) in their own personal preference (inaudible 0:14:18.7). We operate in a very different context which education in Argentina has always been (inaudible 0:14:30.3). That means that you never pay to get educated. I went to (inaudible 0:14:34.9) University and the private universities did not exist in South America, they are pretty new. They started in the last 10 or 20 years. So it is a new industry that has been (inaudible 0:14:49.9) and that is something that is part of the (inaudible 0:14:53.8).
And now going back to the projects (inaudible 0:14:55.8 - 0:15:05.3). It is a different project because now in (inaudible 0:15:08.5) education has been privatized in Argentina and in other countries around. We propose in the model that (inaudible 0:15:20.9) and also propose by the artist (inaudible 0:15:27.9 - 0:15:31.8). And we are working on a model in which we don't have to (inaudible 0:15:38.1 - 0:16:00.4) a universal transformation of creating the institution. And what it is a central location because we (inaudible 0:16:09.9) and to differentiate this new trend that exists in every university across America. Like this thing with the (inaudible 0:16:23.6) because what happens there is everybody that is part of that visualizes. It is about incorporating the notion of (inaudible 0:16:44.1) and for this I mean the (inaudible 0:16:47.4) comparable to things like literature, music, architecture from the (laughing).
(Laughter)
[Scott]: What are you guys doing over there?
[Judy]: Proposals (laughing). So this is (inaudible 0:17:22.1) and the participants...
(background commotion)
[Steven]: (inaudible 0:17:26.0)
(audio feed he lost 0:17:34.4 - 0:17:49.1)
[Judy]: The laundry next door and they just sit there and they talk and they participate as any other student. And then we have this conflict with the students in which they complain because (inaudible 0:18:01.4) broke down. But, I mean, this is very important because as (inaudible 0:18:08.6) brings this element of reality to the program. And the other component that is important is that center or Cento, as I want to say it in Spanish, it's about forces that converge with the center (inaudible 0:18:26.2) and then from there they expand (inaudible 0:18:30.3). So we operate outside of this whatever center is. That means we operate in slums to create a high school that is approved by university of education and it's an official high school for art in which the students from the center go and teach there and they still follow the program of (inaudible 0:18:55.0). So it's this thing of like inside and outside and we operate in the real world.
The other component that is important is like a (inaudible 0:19:08.6) of art in a specific scenario, particularly there are things and human issues that (inaudible 0:19:15.5). My experience in North American universities is that it's always this kind of (inaudible 0:19:24.7). Very different from the way we operate. The way we operate is directly within the city (inaudible 0:19:33.7). In the case of (inaudible 0:19:41.4) which is a project we started (inaudible 0:19:42.0) in which there were participants all over the center who go there start working in a (inaudible 0:19:47.8) of the slum in order to make it legal. Legal for the city. Meaning this project of (inaudible 0:19:57.7) and got approved. So we have to go through the buearocracy. And on that level
When you have to go through the buearocracy of politics it is very different than when you dream with your school and you're beautiful tests. You know like "Oh, what city do I want to live in?" or " what should be (inaudible0:20:19.0) mean?" Because (inaudible0:20:21.0) you have to start dealing with the law, dealing with politicians and dealing with real forces. That is the part that we are…
[Steven]: So, you can here to talk about this law. To (inaudible0:20:39.5) and it wants to create something which is not similar but would actually (inaudible and0:20:45.3). What were the terms of engagement between you and Christine Tohme? What did she ask you? And why do you think she is interested and what you were doing did?
[Judy]: Well Christine Tohme found out about this center I think through other people that she was doing some research with. At some point she looked up me and then we met (inaudible 0:21:03.9) I was there and she was there and we met. And she was like very interested in the project (inaudible 0:21:12.4) and she might come here and talk. And we briefly talked about the model and we briefly talked about the different (inaudible 0:21:19.7) that she has here and (inaudible 0:21:23.5). One of those from the center of (inaudible 0:21:26.9) this is a program that lasts for one year. And we (inaudible 0:21:35.9) every year and we have around 400 applicants for 25 grants, for 25 spots. And the problem that Christine was having in (inaudible 0:21:49.5) is that they don't have students, they have professors or people who care to teach but they don't know who they're going to teach. They cannot (inaudible 0:22:03.4) for example, (inaudible 0:22:06.2)
(Inaudible comment or question from the background)
[Scott]: Can you just repeat that one more time? Did you guys catch that?
(Massive inaudible conversation in background 0:22:54.9 - 0:23:18.7)
[Judy]: this is the website (inaudible 0:23:16.4) translated into English (inaudible 0:23:22.0)
(Inaudible comment or question from the background)
[Steven]: Everything at Centro takes place in Spanish. That's the question to get actually (inaudible 0:23:39.3) here because all of our debates took place in English and English is not an official language in Lebanon. The official language, which is Arabic of course, and the national language is French and English just happens to be default (inaudible 0:23:54.3)
(Inaudible comment or question from the background)
[Judy]: Also we had a similar problem in Argentina. The present governor to Argentina is the (inaudible 0:24:06.2) of the Centro and doesn't speak English. And they have a strong resistance of learning English because for them to learn English (inaudable0:24:17.1). So it's kind of (inaudible 0:24:21.0). A system of colonizing or whatever. it's just a way that the world chose to (inaudible 0:24:42.5).
[Steven]: Greg are you posting pictures?
[Greg]: I'm simply getting (inaudible 0:24:49.0). If you know how to post them and you know what the password is, and they could see kind of the context.
[Steven]: Absolutely.
(inaudible background chatter)
[Scott]: Yeah totally.
(inaudible background chatter)
[Scott]: Yeah totally. She gave you a shout out man. You didn't see that? Do you want to say hello?
[Theresa]: hi baby! I miss you.
(laughter)
[Theresa]: you guys, just one thing. If you slowed down a little bit, it's really hard to hear speaking so fast. So just kind of keep that in mind. Okay bye! Continue on.
(inaudible background chatter)
[Male Group Member]: So listen, one thing I would like to say to you just kind of backing up from our specific (inaudible 0:25:59.5) just kind of first impressions about Home Works in general. When I was looking at this event, to be frank, I got asked to come from three different angles. I was having beers would Anton (inaudible 0:26:13.7) and he said there is this great event and maybe you should go and Shallotte was like you have to go and then (inaudible 0:26:23.3) and then one of our board members who is also (audio feed lost 0:26:27.9).
[Scott]: Yeah, that was our fault guys. The sound, I put the mic right in front of our speaker so you guys were getting crazy feedback probably. All just turn it off until we have something to say. Yeah, don't let us stop you.
(Audio feed lost/Silence 0:26:57.5 - 0:32:15.0)
[Scott]: Nato? Who is organizing the art school in Beirut?
[Nato]: What's that?
[Scott]: who is organizing the school in Beirut? Or the academy, I mean. The Beirut academy.
[Nato]: (inaudible 0:32:30.2)
[Scott]: Okay.
(Audio feed lost/Silence 0:32:34.2 - 0:34:20.7)
[Scott]: Hello. Yeah, we're still here. It just dropped for a second. We got basically everything right up to, well...
[Steven]: Okay so, I'm just going to (Audio feed lost 0:34:33.3).
(Audio feed lost/Silence 0:34:33.3 - 0:44:10.2)
[Scott]: Yeah, that was like a censored audio blast (laughing). But please, go on. (audio feed lost 0:44:18.7)
(Audio feed lost/Silence 0:44:18.7 - 0:44:39.7)
[Steven]: We actually managed to (audio feed lost 0:44:42.6).
(Audio feed lost/Silence 0:44:42.6 - 0:57:33.4)
[Male Group Member]: There is a question about how much this event costs to the group.
(Inaudible background conversation 0:57:55.9)
(Audio feed lost/Silence 0:58:25.9 - 1:03:28.4)
[Scott]: Hey, what are you guys drinking there by the way? Can you hear me? Were you guys drinking there, by the way? Out of curiosity.
[Male group member]: Beer.
[Scott]: Oh, okay. Same here. Okay (laughing). We're all looking at your photographs. Yet, by the way, we're all looking at your photographs. They are great. We should send some photos your way too. But yeah, I was just curious if what you're just describing were considerations that went into forming the art academy there? You know, because I was wondering you know sometimes it's easier to have political discussions that run parallel with artists practice and often when artists are involved they can kind of claim that as a practice because they are in discussion about it or maybe there were references it. But when people like all of you are involved on some level in forming something like this, a citywide art academy in a place like Beirut, I'm just curious if through this conference some of those considerations came up during the planning process.
[Male group member]: Just so you know Scott, the art academy has not started. It's just in the forming stage...
[Scott]: Right.
[Male group member]: Part of what this was about was to float various ideas, some that are successful in some that are failures around (inaudible 1:05:12.6) learn from, right? So I think that the first thing, most of the discussion has been (audio feed lost 1:05:24.8).
(Audio feed lost/Silence 1:05:24.8 - 1:06:37.5)
[Scott]: Do you think there's a lot of competition there? I mean, since a lot of the people involved there are involved in various pedagogical practices or creative pedagogical practices as part of what they do. You know. Do you think that? I don't know. Do you think that anyone is kind of stepping up to the plate or there is a demand for that? Do you know what I mean?
(inaudible background answer - audio feed lost 1:07:18.8)
(Audio feed lost/Silence 1:07:18.8 - 1:10:04.8)
[Female group member]: Scott went to the bathroom. We are here. So, I think maybe. I was wondering… Being from where you are at a conference in Beirut in a very specific place and a very specific group of people, I'm sort of wondering if there's any possibility of figuring out a sort of broader sense of what is going on. I mean, what other sort of other than the people you have experienced through the conference is there any way to experience Beirut in a broader way? I don't know if you can say anything about that.
[Judy]: In my personal experience (inaudible 1:10:46.7 - 1:11:13.0)
[Male group member]: I just want to say that, you know, one thing that in a broader sense is really important, that does sound so dorky. So maybe that is worth saying because dorky things are always works saying.
(Laughter)
You know, one thing that we can always know as the community is that there are people in this region that can be allies and can be our friends. (Inaudible 1:11:38.0) ability of presenting geography as a way of producing community seems all the more urgent in regions like this where we can learn a lot from the conditions here. I have learned so much about this kind of weird idea of what the (inaudible 1:11:56.3) is and really realizing that this isn't some complicated way of reaching people in real terms, human terms. And this art practice really makes more sense for me go into these regions. That sense of urgency translates to kind of a way of radicalizing me. And then a can remind us of this project that we are invested in what America can try to feel dead and stuck in our little alcove of art and whatever when in fact, this project that we're on has relevance. I think that is the big lesson.
(inaudible background chatter)
[Female group member]:I think what I meant by my question was more so like… Can they hear me?
[Scott]: I don't know.
[Female group member]: Can you hear me?
[Male group member]: Yeah.
[Female group member]: I think what I meant for my question though was almost more like an outsider perspective. Is there sort of any possibility of gaining an outsider perspective when you are sort of in the place that you are in? It sounded like, Steven, you went on a tour or something? Possibly you have some kind of a neighborhood where you saying? So maybe you have more perspective about that.
[Steven]: The practice is walking. He's sort of did a curated walk, if you want to call it that, through two different neighborhoods. Two very, very different neighborhoods. But not to produce an art object but to produce perception. He is an architect (inaudible 1:13:43.5) so it was a pretty cool interpretation of an urban landscape. But I want to add about the inside/outside dynamic. What is really interesting about Home Works is how it is kind of a magic combination of inside and outside perspectives which allows everyone to speak very freely and very frantically and often (inaudible 1:14:15.2) and speaking absolutely directly and not having to say " I don't really know what I am talking about but if you don't mind all just add my 2¢ worth." Maybe you could actually say "I don't agree with that" and the other person says (inaudible 1:14:33.1). I don't think otherwise I would come. What is really great for me is that we find common ground and this Artworld (inaudible 1:14:48.5) and that is super interesting.
(Inaudible background conversation Judy/Nato/Steven 1:14:56.3 - 1:19:01.0)
[Steven]: With interesting for me over the years to come into this thing is to see (inaudible 1:19:06.0) also in discourse. In certain conceptual (inaudible 1:19:10.2) has gained certain currency in the discussion today. But I think that what is really important for all of us is how all this (inaudible 1:19.22.8). We're obviously not, us and this room here, the ones were gonna be decided that. I love the passion in which Nato raised questions systematically. Greg, Judy and myself obviously we are not passive bystanders we also feel like we should take over somehow in a city where we don't live and probably never will. And I think that is an interesting thing. The series in which art is normally practiced (inaudible 1:20:00.3) is really infectious. Somehow we all want that to be the case. You know, I don't want to ask questions. I want to pour my heart into it.
[Nato]: Yeah! Yeah!
(Laughter)
[Steven]: Do you guys want to ask some questions because we are…
[Scott]: What? Are you guys tired? Oh, okay. I was going to say. I thought maybe you guys were getting tired but then I realize you just ran out of alcohol. It makes sense.
[Greg]: That is a much more serious problem.
[Scott]: Definitely. Wow, yeah. There's some interesting background noise here. I will be really interested in to see how the involvement of some of you guys and a few others that we know that are there can help shape this event. It sounds to me like, I don't know, I could be wrong. Sounds to me like this is a very participatory, but there is some input desired by the contributors, the people who were invited to come there (lost audio feed 1:21:36.1).
(Audio feed lost/Silence 1:21:36.1 - 1:23:09.5)
[Steven]: Well user ship at this conference is a term that has come up.
(Laughter)
(Inaudible background chatter 1:23:37.7)
(Audio feed lost 1:24:17.5 - 1:26:56.4)
[Theresa]: Babe. You look really drunk in the pictures that are coming over.
(Laughter)
(Inaudible background)
[Theresa]: Yeah, but Greg's sending video and it really doesn't do you well. Anyway, so let's continue. I was wondering something else (laughing). They are showing the video right now, is a little scary. I had a question about where this takes your personal practice like after Beirut.
[Nato]: Well the one thing that I have been considering is, well... I don't know, to be honest. But the natural urge is to just start doing something in Beirut or partner with an organization (inaudible 1:28:03.1). But then it's so funny (inaudible 1:28:06.9) and then another curator said that they were looking for partnerships and then I started seeing the logic of this thing and how they were creating an interest in the region and how that will show up. Because I'm convinced that within a year and a half we're going to see a million different pedagogical experiments in the art world. I think the real question is to really think politically what would be affected, how we actually produce something that affected. (inaudible 1:28:52.4) and think about ways that we can support people with things that they want. To start conversation about what they need from people in the west and what we could use and learn from them. The dialog around kind of a humble assistance to each other and then maybe think about building ties as opposed to this kind of knee jerk let's just do a project together. Does that make sense?
[Theresa]: That makes a lot of sense Babe. Anybody else?
[Scott]: OMG Greg.
[Theresa]: I mean to that question. Anybody else to that question.
[Nato]: What are you going to take back with you from this? How are you going to apply this to your practice?
[Judy]: To my practice in particular? I don't know. I did make an observation which is like, I think that there is dynamic that is established (inaudible 1:29:50.6 -1:30:07.2). And the sense of like the west kind of needs to feed on a sense of newness. (Inaudible 1:30:23.6) happens here, it does have a sense of newness and (inaudible 1:30:31.1). The western culture has a sense of oppression, you could say, and I do receive a certain sense of its limitations. I mean, it's not gonna go farther than that because there's so much that can be done (inaudible 1:30:59.1 - 1:31:13.8) and then bye bye.
(Laughter)
(Inaudible background conversation Steven/Nato/Judy 1:31:20.6 - 1:34:00.9)
[Steven]: I just want another beer.
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Steven wait, you're taking the last beer? You're not splitting it with your comrades?
(inaudible background comment)
(Laughter)
[Scott]: Hilarious.
(inaudible background chatter)
[Scott]: Judy, Nato, Salem, Greg it was awesome to chat with you guys. All of you guys too elsewhere.
[Theresa]: Bye Nato, love you. It
(inaudible background chatter)
(Singing theme from Bonanza)
END OF TRANSCRIPTION
1:37:14.1
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Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$f150c0fed29a73c1" title="#basekamp/$f150c0fed29a73c1">Homeworks Forum http://www.basekamp.com/about/events/homeworks-forum (#basekamp/$f150c0fed29a73c1)
Created on 2010-04-27 21:45:05.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:40
- hey everyone... we're running a few mins behind
- BASEKAMP team: 18:06:42
- LOLs
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:16
- Stephen just texted, says they're on their way & we shoud give em 10 mins (or so)
- Maria Kelley: 18:07:32
- hello
- BASEKAMP team: 18:07:37
-
- Maria Kelley: 18:07:54
- alright alright.. lol
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:09
- woot
- BASEKAMP team: 18:08:11
- hi mom
- Maria Kelley: 18:09:17
- hi Scott!
- Maria Kelley: 18:12:08
- my mic isn't working.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:13
- 'sok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:24
- you can just liten if you want... and type in here
- Maria Kelley: 18:12:58
- okay, sounds good. hope I can hear something. nothing yet.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:12
- haven;t started yet
- Maria Kelley: 18:13:17
- oh, hehe
- Maria Kelley: 18:13:39
- well, that would make all the difference!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:00
- so we're looking @ the Ashkal Alwan site now, while we wait for the Beiruit-ers to join
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:05
- how's everyone doing?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:17
- not *everyone*... ;0 how are you all doing?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:16:51
- hi all - can you post the url? thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:13
- oh snap http://www.ashkalalwan.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:34
- specific infos about tonight http://basekamp.com/about/events/homeworks-forum
- Maria Kelley: 18:17:46
- I'm doing well. no sound on my end yet.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:18:29
- hi Stephen, Nato & Greg!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:00
- it's a beautiful breezy day in Phildelphia... a few people here right now, more walking in
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:16
- but maybe we shuld get this party started since you guys are calling from 1am >
- gregory sholette: 18:19:16
- And Judi Werthein
- gregory sholette: 18:19:23
- yes yes yes
- gregory sholette: 18:19:43
- can you add rashasalti
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:56
- yes, but... i don't have the contact here
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:20:53
- bummer stf cant catch a break
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:06
- can you pass the skypename our way?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:14
- Sean ?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:24
- break?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:21:33
- Stefpasquini.com is using an older version of Skype that does not support multi-person chats and therefore can't join
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:48
- ohhhh.. but looks like she's in now, no?
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:21:57
- really? I thought I was up to date
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:00
- well.. let's try
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:12
- sometimes skype gives us random errors that don't not suck
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:22:23
- I'm in the chat, I'm not in the call though
- gregory sholette: 18:22:30
- ok lets go
- BASEKAMP team: 18:22:48
- right, we haven't started yet. do we need 1 more person on your end?
- gregory sholette: 18:23:00
- look likes shes asleep!!
- gregory sholette: 18:23:14
- It's late here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:17
- yeah, we can get started & add her later ---- ah, that'd xplain it!
- gregory sholette: 18:23:22
- call us
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:23
- ok, calling now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:39
- welcome so welcome Stephen Wright, Greg Scholette, Nato Thompson, Judi Werthein in Beirut
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:24:08
- wow, that was amazing
- Maria Kelley: 18:24:16
- Maria here
- Maria Kelley: 18:24:21
- just listening
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:29:30
- i'm listening and its clear
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:29:50
- sound's good here in italy
- Maria Kelley: 18:30:10
- I'm listening and the sound is very clear
- Maria Kelley: 18:30:31
- how's the weather in Italy?
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:30:44
- getting warmer!
- Maria Kelley: 18:31:15
- cool! lol
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:32:04
- although i am about to fall asleep (nothing to do with you guys - i'm overworked lately!)
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:32:29
- it's 12,30 am here
- Maria Kelley: 18:32:31
- I can relate.
- Maria Kelley: 18:32:33
- wow!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:44
- Nato, Theresa says "yo whatsup!"
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:32:51
- much later in beirut!
- Maria Kelley: 18:33:11
- I'm in Georgia, USA It's 6:30 PM here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:19
-
- Maria Kelley: 18:33:31
- Beirut! wow!!!
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:33:32
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:58
- BASEKAMP team: 18:36:35
- aharon add you to the call now
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:03
- aharon
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:42
- can you type the names of the artists in?
- Aharon: 18:39:59
- hiyas!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:11
- we're looking @ http://balkansproject.ips-dc.org/?page_id=145 Judi... do you think this is a good place to get a sense of some of what you're talking about?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:47:03
- basekamp can you call me in again? I had to cut out for a bit, thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:13
- salem yea --- calling u again
- gregory sholette: 18:47:13
- www.ciacentro.org
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:47:43
- ty
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:53
- np >
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:49:21
- aaawwww
- Maria Kelley: 18:49:27
- awww.. that's so sweet!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:35
- you guys are gonna love that we're looking at the site through GOOGLE TRANSLATE!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:07
- ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( ( (
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:50:13
- oh no remix sound happening
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:50:28
- better
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:30
- oops.. better
- Maria Kelley: 18:50:31
- sound is mixed, can't understand
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:32
- k
- Maria Kelley: 18:50:40
- better
- gregory sholette: 18:51:24
- posted file IMG_3678.JPG to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="659675" index="0">IMG_3678.JPG</file></files>
- Aharon: 18:52:03
- sounds like us army lingo of good/bad guys..? m looking for the uglies.. (where's the mirrir? )
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:52:15
- Nato - is that because it's in Beirut?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:52:25
- like the dark side & the jedi
- Aharon: 18:52:36
- who paid their flights?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:21
- we got you photo
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:43
-
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:51
- we need greg in the photo
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:04
- behind the pic
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:26
- ok, we see you in the reflection in the beer bottle Greg
- Aharon: 18:56:55
- so.. what kind of !="academy" is it?
- Maria Kelley: 18:56:57
- sound is bad again : -(
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:18
- oops!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:36
- the sound is much better!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:42
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:57:44
- yep
- gregory sholette: 18:57:44
- call us back
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:57:45
- Perhaps a later ? -- is the work that people brought there reflecting that same kind of "warring/disaster area tourism" that is bringing lots of interest to the "novelty" of art in beirut? & can those who have been in this situation as observers/participants reflect upon this?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:57:51
- later after the call comes back and all that was just said is repeated of course
- Aharon: 18:57:53
- plus why is it that the speaker sounds so sourprised about capital checking hip "new" locals?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:57:58
- hey guys, looks like wireless dropped here for a secccccc
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:05
- calling bak]
- Maria Kelley: 18:58:20
- i can hear
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 18:58:42
- OK I hear loud and clear!
- tefpasquini" title="stefpasquini">Stefpasquini.com: 18:58:48
- me 2
- Maria Kelley: 18:59:02
- m3
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 18:59:10
- interesting point, stephen!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:17
- "it's like it really mattered... it's as if art actually had a role in the production of the public sphere.."
- Aharon: 18:59:19
- what kind of "art" is "art" practice in beirut?
- Aharon: 19:01:03
- examples of discussion topics..?
- Maria Kelley: 19:02:38
- oh, let's hope not
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:39
- LOLLOLOLOLOsssss
- Aharon: 19:02:58
- any concrete examples of what he said? (the allah guy..)
- Aharon: 19:03:37
- what is "art power"??
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:05:03
- so the students that we're talking about are teenagers? did I get that right? that's really interesting
- gregory sholette: 19:05:13
- http://www.ashkalalwan.org/ the homeworkw forum program is on the site
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:19
- haha greg!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:24
- (photo)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:13
- hi megfrisch!
- Meg Frisch: 19:06:20
- Waves!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:31
- you have headphones at the UX conference? or text-only?
- Meg Frisch: 19:06:41
- UX show & tell I have headphones
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:45
-
- Meg Frisch: 19:06:46
- I can keep one ear in & one ear out.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:06
- so add you to the audio right (megrfrisch)?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:07:37
- assuming yes
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:08:59
- that's interesting - the idea that a leader would be talking about a difference between "popular" & "elite" culture, not at all an American idea
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:04
- stephen
- Aharon: 19:10:31
- hills.. and sea..
- Aharon: 19:11:13
- good point - salem!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:12:47
- that's a really good point - & think of that in terms of the difference between elite culture and other cultures
- Aharon: 19:12:53
- r u saying they were all educated by ralph nader..?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:13:10
- (point that Judi made about artists being educated outside of region)
- Aharon: 19:13:30
- yup.. a bad smile re that..
- Aharon: 19:14:31
- the binary though, of elite vs popular is also interesting because it it a western construct - by enlarge - however it is bloody usefyl for control..
- Aharon: 19:15:41
- does not feel set???!!! maybe it is set - but not feeling like..?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:16:26
- that's amazing, so then almost all decisions are in flux - talk about powerful lobbyists!
- Aharon: 19:16:31
- are these religious - or tribal groups..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:17:21
- how much money does Homeworks cost do you think?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:17:35
- sounded like a prety large event
- Meg Frisch: 19:18:09
- mm lost connection...
- Aharon: 19:18:25
- in what way, stephen, are these art works, like in home-works - are not symbolic..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:45
- hilarious!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:19:51
- it's like las vegas
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:19:59
- but could you have gay sex with a bear and some beers on the sides of tanks?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:23
- salem you can totally do that in philadelphia
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:20:25
- thanks for answering my very important questions
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:27
- minus the tanks
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:20:28
- haha
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:20:44
- no
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:20:51
- we hope you're all wearing pants
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:20:54
- hi good!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:20:56
- what are ou guys doing over there
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:20:57
- hi all
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:21:13
- berets!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:21:36
- so are political decisions effective ones? i mean you were talking before about how there were so many competing groups in political process and yet theres the sense that you can do anything, so are politics considered ineffective? irrelevant? affecting another sphere or life?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:23:55
- nice pic nato
- Aharon: 19:26:01
- is it not capitalism - exactly what u describe?
- Aharon: 19:27:48
- capitalism is not something organised.. the lack of state power just enables it to get more extreme.. like more extreme difference between rich and poor, etc..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:28:04
- are these considerations in forming the art academy there
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:29:37
- isnt it not the lack of state power, but the lack of a real political sphere (i honestly have no clue what politics actually looks like in beirut)-- if minimal state for neoliberalism is where the main role of government is just military defense/ prisons (and not necessarily the preservation or cultivation of public space)
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:29:45
- thats to aharon
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:33:56
- yeah, same thing happens on the south side of chicago too! seriously. culture history needs to come from the hands of the makers -- can't agree more
- gregory sholette: 19:35:13
- posted file MVI_3694.AVI to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="2982620" index="0">MVI_3694.AVI</file></files>
- Aharon: 19:37:08
- it is a good question, that of the political sphere and power/state-power.. but the point i was trying to make is that via stephen's descriptions it did sound like a very capitalistic place.. (maybe my critique of state-power was too flat and off-the-hip-ish)
- Aharon: 19:37:31
- (who is speaking now at basekamp??)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:19
- that was Theresa Rose
- Aharon: 19:38:59
- theresa, you have a new voice fan!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:39:13
-
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:39:47
- what will be coming out of homeworks? do funders require some kind of publication? is there talk about what that will look like? obviously people are returning to their respective homes like nato said and brinigng somehting with them... but some of that energy goes into the new academy, what do you think is going to come out and are there better or worse things that can be done?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:39:59
- cool to hear about texts & maybe even misunderstanding being a place for common ground
- gregory sholette: 19:41:01
- this is a very capitalist place - the middle east is a very capitalist place, but maybe not the kind of global captialism - or financialized capital - that we are so used to - its a city filled with many small enterprises - but hoping to reach, I suspect, into the global sphere, perhaps in competition with Dubai - which now is positioning itself as the new center of culture in the middle east "post" beirut and cairo - greg
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:42:09
- (bracketing my question: we are debating whether and how to do a publication for our recent drift with brian and im honestly curious about the question with respect to circulating concepts and discussions , like right now)
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:42:24
- its not a question!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:42:26
- haha
- BASEKAMP team: 19:42:49
- Lollllllllll
- gregory sholette: 19:44:09
- there are also many monied classes here - who have always had access to the west in a privileged way - so the question of starting up an art school is always already marked by that class problem - which here in Beirut is also complicated by religion and politics - this small country and city is like a pressure cooker of difference - g.
- Aharon: 19:44:36
- ok.. that is interesting "global" (dare i say "international") capitalism and it difference with outsider capitalism.. this is kind of having an interesting point re middle east politics/activities and its anachronistic nature visavi european/us perception.. indeed is it not that some of the fascination with mideast in eu/us is that its like a contemporary window into the past..
- Aharon: 19:45:10
- still fighting in phily..
- gregory sholette: 19:45:30
- I was born in philly - g
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:45:51
- great project
- Aharon: 19:45:56
- are they contributors, scott? not users..?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:09
- re Sean -- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:31
- @ Aharon -- kind of both aren't they? what do you guys think?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:46:36
- yeah i organize d ashow of pad.ma videos here and been in touch with ashok about it..
- gregory sholette: 19:46:50
- http://pad.ma
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:46:50
- sebastian also did textz.com
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:08
- apart from the question of whether or not usership is a form of production -- sounds as if there's a more active role
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:22
- Sean ++
- Aharon: 19:47:32
- lol
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:48
- we Bet Stephen!
- Aharon: 19:48:39
- difference..?? pls define..?
- gregory sholette: 19:49:16
- posted file IMG_3667.JPG to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="1028064" index="0">IMG_3667.JPG</file></files>
- Aharon: 19:49:25
- u said makes a diff
- Aharon: 19:49:35
- asked about define
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:50:03
- haha
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:50:50
- basekamp = you'll have to post all these pix somewhere, I think they're only going to y'all. beirut visitors -- can you quickly talk about the importance or unimportance of collectivism in beirut? I know that's a really large question and maybe not something you can deal with in 10 minutes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:57
- except FBI
- Aharon: 19:51:01
- lol
- Aharon: 19:52:12
- immigrate..?
- gregory sholette: 19:52:20
- difference in a very simple and direct sense: christian right, christian liberals, christian leftists (usually marxists but not stalinist), muslim islamic and more secular fundamental types, and just plain secular types - g
- gregory sholette: 19:53:14
- posted file IMG_3677.JPG to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="591336" index="0">IMG_3677.JPG</file></files>
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:53:29
- salem's question?
- Aharon: 19:54:13
- to greg - these are just groupings that live in there.. not what art(???) does to make a different "difference" in the lebanon..
- gregory sholette: 19:54:15
- sorry Salem - your question again ( we have only about 5 minutes left on this internet account)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:39
- good timing.. since it's 7:55
- gregory sholette: 19:54:59
- Not sure what you mean Aharon by your question - can you quickly expand?
- gregory sholette: 19:55:37
- " these are just groupings that live in there" but this totaly defines the city and the place Aharon
- Aharon: 19:55:38
- the question is re stephs assertion that "art" makes a "difference" in beirut
- gregory sholette: 19:55:54
- can't speak for Stephen
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:56:21
- I said basically - quickly talk about the importance or unimportance of collectivism in beirut? I know that's a really large question and maybe not something you can deal with in 10 minutes. So maybe this answers Theresa's ?, it's something to write about
- Aharon: 19:56:32
- sure they do. r u saying they grouped via some art project?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:48
- we just emailed you 2 pics Greg
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:54
- to you r gmail acct
- gregory sholette: 19:56:56
- hey Salem - collectivism is here and alive - but not as fluid or informal as in Chicago - g
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:13
- well.. there's not an academy there like SAIC yet right??
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:18
- Aharon: 19:57:39
- what kind of a difference..?
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:57:39
- oh lord
- gregory sholette: 19:57:44
- saic? hardly. its still very formal and rigid according to our local friends - g
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:45
- haha
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:58:05
- lol
- gregory sholette: 19:58:08
- so we must say good night - stephen has his last beer
- gregory sholette: 19:58:24
- so much for collectivism !
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:58:27
- hahahaa
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:58:33
- thanks all -- was great to hear about this
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:58:52
- omg
- Aharon: 19:58:57
- lol
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:59:02
- thanks all
- Aharon: 19:59:02
- great!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:59:09
- good luck!
- Aharon: 19:59:09
- thanks!
- Meg Frisch: 19:59:13
- thank you!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:16
- till next time!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:41
- someone want to play some closing music?
- Meg Frisch: 19:59:56
- doo doo dooo didlly doo
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:13
- da da da
- eanstoops" title="seanstoops">Sean Stoops: 20:00:32
- oh- good night!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:57
- los
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:00
- lol even
2010-04-27
Week 8: A School of Decreative Methodologies
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
We’ll be talking with some of the instigators and founding users of A School of Decreative Methodologies, an as yet unnamed, usership-based initiative favoring decreative approaches to knowledge production. It decreative process is not classroom based, nor even linked to any site at all, but is deployed through a series of collegial moments. Its objectives and structure are perhaps best summed up by its founding Charter, according to which it is:
A collegial moment without students, without teachers, without walls, without curricula, in rupture with all notions that institute art and how it is taught. The initiative accompanies forms of usership disposed to sundering art from itself.
- The college’s goal is to activate practices whose purpose and finality is not art.
- It asserts its institutional exodus.
- It deploys and takes form through satellite propositions, which are at once extradisciplinary and depersonalized.
- It functions on the basis of users alone, impugning any binary opposition between teachers / students, experts / non-experts.
- It operates through networks with or without affinities.
The initiative emerged in 2008 as an “extension” of the the Paris Biennale (http://www.biennaledeparis.org/) — an exhibitionless biennale, lasting two years (instead of taking place every two years) comprised of practices outside the regime of spectatorship. Recently it has asserted its autonomy from the Biennale.
Transcription
Week 8: A School of Decreative Methodologies
[0:00:00]
Scott: Hi there. Okay so let me go ahead and add some other people for the chat. I’m going to try to make this as smooth as possible this week but Greg, I think I mentioned, got violently ill just a few hours ago. He was actually planning on coming to run a bunch of stuff here. So I’m going to try to both be present and add people technically.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: I’ll try to make it smooth for you but if you need anything from me maybe just—and don’t feel like letting other people know you can either give me a single or flag me in a text message or something.
Stephen: You bet.
Scott: Okay great. I’ll start adding other people now.
Stephen: Yep
Speaker 3: Can you see the chats afterwards?
Scott: Yes
Speaker 3 You can. How do you…?
Scott: Usually I save the chats and we make them available although we haven’t really made any of these available this year yet.
Speaker 3: I see
Scott: Yeah generally we’ll add it as an HTML file or whatever to our list. Then somebody can just click it and it’ll open in their browser and they can see everything just the way this looks.
Speaker 3: But eventually you’ll save a bunch…
Scott: Yeah we have them all saved it’s just they haven’t been uploaded—we have been adding the audio after it’s been cleaned up.
Speaker 3: Oh got ya, oh cool.
Scott: Really as of just this past week. There was a bug in embedding the audio. Initially we were just linking to that but anyway. Start adding people to the call and move on. Maybe we can get in a few minutes…
Hi there everyone, whoever’s on, we’re still adding other people to the chat, and it’ll take just a moment here.
Hello Jessica and the Chattanooga folks.
Jessica: Hey Scott.
Scott: Hey. Just hang tight for a second; we’re still adding people to the chat.
Jessica: Okay
Scott: Okay great. I think everyone that, besides Kathryn, who wanted to be on the call, is on now. Maybe since there are not that many people on just yet maybe we’ll wait.
Stephen: I hear a ringing sound, I don’t know.
Scott: Do you?
Stephen: That’s Kathryn Carl ringing.
Kathryn: Hi hello.
Scott: Hello Kathryn.
Kathryn: Hey how are you doing?
Scott: Excellent.
Kathryn: Great, okay I’m on, I’ll mute now too.
Scott: Okay super. So today we’re happy to welcome Stephen Wright and some of his cohorts.
Stephen: I’m not sure if my cohorts are here yet but they perhaps will join as we move along.
[0:05:00]
Scott: Great. And we’re going to be talking about A School of Decreative Methodologies. I’m pronouncing that right, right?
Stephen: Pretty much, I guess that’s how it’s pronounced.
Scott: Okay. Today, as another example of a Plausible Artworlds, one of many Plausible Artworlds that we’ll be highlighting this year during these weekly chats I just wanted to let everybody know ahead of time in case you get any terrible audio, please let us know or just let me know in the text chat or just flag me down one way or another because our audio setup is sub par this week. It’s been really great the past weeks, I think anyway, and this is not so great. So please just let me know and we’ll see what we can do about it if that happens.
Anyway, to get past the technical, welcome Stephen and I’m personally really looking forward to talking with you about this group.
Stephen: Okay. It’s being talked about tonight under the name A School of Decreative Methodologies, it’s not really the name of the organization it’s just sort of what it is, it’s a school of decreative methodologies. The name is still up in the air, it’s still being debated. It’s actually being debated whether it will have a name or whether it will have a sort of a random name generator or whether it won’t have a name at all. Its being in the world hasn’t been anchored yet to a specific name but it is definitely a school of decreative methodologies. Can you guys hear me okay, am I…?
Scott: Yeah we can hear you pretty well here even though we have very tiny speakers this week, the built-in ones on this laptop, but we can hear you just fine.
Stephen: Okay. When I presented the—when I thought of a couple of sentences to sort of contextualize this school of decreative methodologies I thought the best way to go about it was to quote the charter. Because when the group of us came together in late 2008 to think about creating a sort of alternative knowledge construction project or knowledge decreation project we were actually—the link was that we were all in one way or another linked to the Paris Biennale. The Paris Biennale which is of course a biennale that came from the biennale started by Andre Malraux in the 1950’s, but which went intellectually, artistically and financially bankrupt in the ‘80s and then was reinvigorated at the beginning of this millennium, in 2004, 2006 and 2008 had its 13th, 14th and 15th additions.
[0:10:00]
Stephen: But it’s a biennale without an exhibition, without artwork, without authorship and without spectatorship and that was kind of the common bond which we had to try and imagine what we at that time called an extension of the biennale. The biennale has different extensions and the knowledge production school was to be one of them. But we have subsequently—ah here’s one of my colleagues now; Eric Laturno.
We subsequently took our distance from the biennale and asserted the autonomy of this school of decreative methodologies but when we were establishing what it is we wanted to do we decided that rather than writing a manifesto we would write a founding charter. A sort of fundamental expression of what we wanted to do and we wanted to make it as tight, as precise but also as concise as possible. So I thought maybe one of the best ways to sort of talk about what it is we do and why would be simply to do a sort of a gloss informally on that rather precisely worded structure.
Scott can you add Eric Laturno because I hope he’s calling because I can’t…
Scott: Yes we just added him to the chat and we’ll call him in just a sec.
Stephen: Okay great, thanks.
So I don’t know if everyone has the charter…
[0:15:00]
Stephen: Mabel has also just pointed out that she is also a colleague and she’s also connected. So anytime, Eric if you’re there and Mabel, if anytime you guys want to jump in and correct me and contradict what I’ve just said please feel free to do exactly that.
Eric: Can you hear me?
Stephen: Yeah I hear you Eric. How are you doing? You can hear me?
Eric: I can hear you.
Stephen: Yeah we’re only using audio, there’s no video. If that’s okay I’ll just continue looking at this, what we call our founding charter.
Scott: There’s a charter…sorry the audio is a little bit feedbacky and I think Eric may need to mute temporarily.
Stephen: Okay. Do you want me to tell him that?
Scott: Yeah I’m trying to…but anyway I don’t want to keep going with that but it would be great Eric if you could get a sense of—you may not know where the mute button is, but in the lower left hand—actually maybe you did already. No? In the lower left-hand panel of your call window there are 2 buttons, the left-most button is the pause button and the one just to the right of that is the mute button. It looks like a little microphone with a circle and slash through it. Anyway, hope that helps.
Here’s is the link to I think the charter. Is this right Stephen, is that the most updated version, the sort of numbers 1 through 5?
Stephen: Yeah it’s the one that’s on the Basecamp website basically.
Scott: I can paste it in as well.
Stephen: Yeah let me do that that will be easier. Let me just grab that.
Eric: Are we communicating with Mabel too or are we alone?
Stephen: Who is where?
Eric: Like Stephen is in Paris and…?
Stephen: No I’m in Vancouver actually.
Eric: You’re in Vancouver and the class is in the US right?
Stephen: Yeah there’s no class exactly. Well there is a class, there’s a class in Tennessee but we’re kind of all over the world.
Eric: We’re in Tennessee, Vancouver and Madrid now. I am in Madrid.
Stephen: Okay. And Mabel is in Paris, she’s our Paris anchor here.
Eric: Who is in Paris?
Stephen: Okay so…
Scott: So I guess we should probably continue and just try to step past some of the technical stuff. But yeah Magda and David are also in the UK and I think—I’m not sure where Kathryn—oh okay.
Stephen: What I just did now was I posted the charter to everyone on the chat. So maybe I should—if that’s okay I think I’ll just comment on that and then…
Scott: Yeah Stephen I’d really be appreciative of that. I’m actually really interested in that charter. I kind of want to ask how it came about and that process but I think maybe the best thing first would be to just talk about each of these five points a little bit.
Stephen: Okay let’s do that. So basically it originally had the name, which was very stable, which was the Paris Biennale College and I think we’re very—the subtitle was A School of Decreative Methodologies.
[0:20:00]
Stephen: This is why I’m presenting it as a school of decreative methodologies because that remains constant and I’ll come back to that notion of the decreative because it’s one of the three, in my opinion, key components of the initiative. The preamble is one sentence and it reads “As this, a collegial moment without students, without teachers, without walls, without curricula in rupture with all notions that institute art and how it is taught. The initiative of company’s forms of usership disposes to sundering art from itself.” So in those two sentences I think we underscore as radically and as economically as possible the notion that we are a school which does not exist in space but exists in time which is why we emphasis this notion of a collegial moment. Because you might say a moment is like a situation except a situation tends to be linked to a sight and we wanted very clearly to separate the initiative which we had in mind from any sight, hence the notion of without walls. So it’s a school without a school house and without any anchored site of any kind. It’s a moment so it’s something which—it’s a school in time, it exists in time but the type of time we have in mind is an immeasurable amount of time, a moment. Because a moment is at once indivisible and infinitely divisible so it can be—it’s elasticity allows it to take any sort of dimension whatsoever. But the type of dimension which we’re particularly interested in is the collegial dimension. So it’s a moment which exists collegially, so in the profound sense of the college. There’s a question that I ask, is it similar to Neue Slowenische Kunst State in Time? In a sense it’s not unlinked to that because NSK was trying to create a state that wasn’t linked to territory and certainly were trying to create a school which was not linked to a territory. But we’re particularly interested in it being—it’s not so much that it’s in time because we could have said a school in time, but it’s an immeasurable kind of time, measurable only through its collegiality. In other words the fact that it’s—collegial I think is stronger, it goes beyond the notion of collaboration or of collectivity, and it’s a particular form of collaboration. And this kind of collaboration is linked specifically to what we emphasis a great deal as being based on usership.
[0:25:00]
Stephen: Because we felt that art in its 20th century variant was very largely bound up with the meda institution of spectatorship and beyond that with a form of expert culture and we wanted to break both with the regime of spectatorship and the regime of expertise. So we sort of took advantage of the emergence of a new form of political subjectivity which seems to have emerged powerfully in the last 15 years which is that of usership, which is something very much associated with the rise of the web, but not exclusively because it’s also linked to just a form of knowledge and knowledge production based on a form of use value. In other words not a kind of knowledge which is projected from without but a type of knowledge which is generated from within.
David says there’s no more audio.
Scott: The audio is here I think David actually has been dropped. It seems to happen with his connection for some reason. I’ll add him again. But real quickly I wanted to also—I have a pretty good sense of a lot of your ideas on usership Stephen, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind—I think I’m curious about this idea of collegiality. I don’t think I really fully understand what you mean yet by it.
Stephen: That’s for sure something which my colleagues would have something to comment on as well but I think it certainly is linked to the concept of usership because we wanted to get—as we point out in Article 4 of the charter this school is based on usership alone. So impugning as we say, binary opposition between teachers and students and experts and non-experts. So the type of collegiality which we have in mind is not one which is based on a cohort of specialists transmitting knowledge in a linear fashion to a group of people who don’t know yet. In fact the reason we have this charter in the first place is that anybody can take up, providing that they endorse all the points which are laid out in this very short charter, they could be considered to be colleagues within this collegial moment and are free to activate it no matter where they are in the world with no matter who. It’s a school which is—I mean there is a core group of colleagues if you like in Paris, but there is also colleagues all over the place and the idea is that these decreative methodologies, the decreative is also another thing I need to come back to, can be sort of performed or triggered, unleashed is probably a better word, basically anywhere.
[0:30:14]
Stephen: Yes, what it is. For sure that’s of course the crux of it. Well one thing—I think when we started we were wondering what we could do with art. We were wondering if it was good for something, if there was something that—if there was something specific and exclusive to it that we could use to decreate or to construct knowledge. And the college is actually made up of a series of collegial moments. So we say that the college itself is a collegial moment but in fact we have a list of collegial moments, we sometimes call them satellites because they function independently from the college itself, but in fact we think of them more as collegial moments. I can give you a list of them or let me just see here, let me just post some of them up. Mabel and Eric; maybe you want to comment while I’m looking for the list of collegial moments do you want to talk about them?
Eric: Are you talking to me?
Stephen: Yeah go ahead Eric.
Eric: Okay what was your question?
Stephen: Well for example you could talk about your collegial moment, the one that you’ve proposed and the one that you did.
Eric: Yeah well I think all the ideas that you are mentioning are so fascinating especially because we are still working on ‘how can we apply them?’ So I think working on that project which is on the, what we call in Canada an, Indian Reserve, Canadian Indian or we call it a reservation in Canada or any other communities where there is a high rate of criminality. But first nation reservation, this characteristic where the criminality rate is really high, I think 1/3, even sometimes more, 1/3 of the population in prison Canada is Canadian Indian. So on the reservation the crime rate is quite high.
[0:35:00]
Eric: So I started to work with the Museum [indiscernible] [0:35:09] which is a museum devoted to Indian art and contemporary Indian art which is in the community of [indiscernible] [0:35:24] in [indiscernible] [0:35:26], the community [indiscernible] [0:35:31]. On this collegial moment where—because I already started to the process where I worked with the healer of the village; the healer worked at a prison, this healer worked with the local police forces, the police officer is the singer for the healing ritual; so I’ve been involved with these people I started seeing about 6 months ago or a year ago. So I started to develop a collegial moment where I want to explore with the participants what specific skills and abilities are being developed by them by living within such a community where the crime rate is so high. So in other terms is the presence of high criminality in the community would be able to create for participants or for people in general live in this community some special skills that they can use. So I think the people who live in the community is I think the people have been some criminals. So the collegial moment is basically to try with the museum to make a meeting and share the specific consequences that they’ve developing in the community. So the collegial moment hasn’t happened yet, I’m still working on it. From the point where we will be able to understand these abilities, what they are. We want to use these abilities to create something different from what they use to be. So these abilities are considered as a kind of symbolic capital or symbolic force and it’s also a practical power that can be used in many ways within the community or by each individual. The idea is still abstract but that’s basically the idea of my collegial moment. I don’t know if you hear me though.
Stephen: Yeah we hear you perfectly. There’s a question Eric and that is “the collegial moment you were talking about, is that part of a project that people can find out more about or is it something which exists within the context of the college?” I’ll let you answer that.
Eric: Well it can exist in other context on the reserve, I’ve been working with them so I decided to do that there because I’m interested in the issue, but this can be done in prison.
[0:39:50]
Eric: The problem in doing this process in a prison for example would be that first you have to be approved by the directors of the prison and then the directors of the prison will want that to become a kind of [indiscernible] [0:40:20] thing for the prisoners, for the criminals as a rehabilitation thing which is not the point of my process, it’s not about rehabilitation from the offender into the society, it’s more about exploring what crime can create a creative process within the community or the individual. So yes the moment can be moved in different context, but according to the context the issues are different and it’s really easy to be manipulated or we call this in French être instrumentalisé, to be instrumentalized. So that’s the danger I think of my collegial moment, it’s also danger probably for others civilzied, when you shift them to another complex there’s always new issues appearing. These issues would be like you’ve been manipulated by institutions in power.
Stephen : Exactly.
Eric : Viola
Stephen : Okay. To continue, there are currently I think about a dozen collegial moments which are on offer, which are under discussion, which are activated. From time to time not all of them have been translated into English but I could make some of them—I could put some of them up here. Some of them are in English, here’s one just proposed by our friend Bob the Builder. Bob’s not with us tonight but we will actually be talking with him subsequently in Plausible Artworlds in a few weeks.
Scott : I’m sorry, Stephen, is he part of—in addition to context of au trovail is Bob part of the... ?
Stephen : Yeah Bob is also a founding user of the—because he was also part of that group that descented from the I guess Paris Biennale so he is one of the founding users along with Eric and I and Mabble and I don’t know if any of our other colleagues are with us right now. So basically Bob has proposed a collegial moment which is extremely open-ended.
[0:45:07]
Stephen: Which in fact doesn’t involve necessarily any kind of formalized pedagogy, which is to use ones place of work as a place of artistic residency, production and exhibition. Eric you have a question there, while I dig up another collegial moment maybe you want to look at that. Eric?
Eric: Yeah?
Stephen: Did you see that question? Do you have an idea?
Eric: I don’t see the thing…
Stephen: So the question is “Do you have an idea of those new ends to which to apply those new ways?” Or actually “Do you imagine the ways in which that might go?” Actually Magdalena it might be easier if you ask that question to Eric.
Eric: Yeah I think I’m still working on that so I don’t exactly know what will happen because it really belongs to the participant and I am not coming myself from a community where the criminality is really high. The reason I’ve been thinking of this is because one of my projects, an older project, I decided to do a PhD in criminology. So from that point I started to study crime and I started to be fascinated first by how the criminal can be so creative and so their methodology sometimes can be cool, some methodologies you can find in art in some way. I say that [indiscernible] [0:48:07] with the reserves but you know it’s controlled. But then I was thinking of visiting the Indian reserve that people have a certain way of behaving, they’re what we call in general [speaking French] and all these tools that are developed by people to protect themselves, to try to predict crime and stuff like that; how can these tools be used in other ways. So it really depends on who will be in the process or in the “workshops”. If they’re a member of the community that is closer to the cops that switches abilities; if the member of the community who is in the “workshop” is more like people that have different kinds of jobs and they’re not specializing, it will be completely different. So I think with each group the dynamic and the issues that will be raised will probably be different and I can not really answer because probably in one year when I will do this process I will have more answers.
[0:50:00]
Eric: And I try not to imagine anything to keep myself open to what will happen with the people, to not suggest or induce anything in the process but let the process by itself reveal the true essence of what will be important to this community. Viola
Stephen: Excellent. So in the meanwhile Eric I’ve been busily pasting up the short descriptions of some of the other collegial moments, to give a sense of the rather extreme heterogeneity of what could be understood by a collegial moment. Some of them are much more traditional in terms of the format; the one I proposed in terms of examining and flushing out a new terminology for artistic production in this century. The one I just put up just a moment ago and perhaps the one that’s been most active so far was proposed by Jean Baptiste [indiscernible] [0:52:10] which has to do with downsizing, downsizing not just within industry and elsewhere but downsizing in art itself. Mabel has just pointed out, yes it was a question a moment ago; the Paris Biennale College website no longer exists because the Paris Biennale College no longer exists and there will soon be a new website which reflects this new as yet unnamed entity but it’s not yet online but soon will be. Let me grab another one here. Just to give a certain, not overlook but a certain sense of a collegial moment proposed by Gina Badger on the ecological erotic’s of learning; so a certain number of collegial moments that focus on learning itself as a form of creative endeavor. In doing all that kind of what I wanted to suggest is that of course a school of decreative methodologies emerges within a context of what has been called the educational—the pedagogical turn and it’s clear that there’s a general crisis in terms of transmission and production of knowledge around art related practices and certainly we’re part of the general movement.
[0:55:00]
Stephen: But I also kind of wanted to emphasis that the objectives of our structure are linked to art practices whose finality is not art and I think that is something which we inherited from the Biennale and it’s something which we try to express in a word like decreative. The decreative is obviously…Hello?
Scott: Yeah I think we may need to have some of them turn down their volume. Eric if you can hear me if you could mute your audio when you’re not speaking that would helpful. Thanks!
Stephen: Okay. Yeah this word I talked a little bit about usership and certainly Eric’s example really shows how broad that understanding can be but the notion of the decreative on the one hand is a kind of refusal to be assimilated into that creative class, these creative types who have more or less infested our life world so it’s a refusal of that but at the same time it’s an attempt to go beyond that. The decreative is not the destructive so that’s the idea that something can both be art and something else at the same time. It can be what it is an a proposition of the same thing is basically, to put it really quickly, is one of the specificities of the stuff that we took from the Paris Biennale and the stuff that we’re working on now.
Eric: Stephen can I ask you a question?
Stephen: Yeah
Eric: When you talk about the decreativity is this about questioning the conditioning of the creative process or is it more about deconstructing the creative process, which I still think that can go together but can you maybe comment about that a little?
Stephen: Sorry Eric the two options were the deconstruction and?
Eric: Yeah the deconstruction of the creative process and/or about the conditioning of how we’re use to creating or what we think is creating.
Stephen: I think it’s absolutely both.
[1:00:00]
Stephen: As you know Eric, one of the things that I think is most urgent for us to do is to organize a symposium around the notion of the de-, of D-E-dash. I think it’s one of the major questions that has not actually been raised. We’re interested in deconstruction more than rather construction but it’s not the opposite of construction it’s the other construction and when you talk about des amon it’s not the opposite of amon but it’s the other of it. It’s the same emotion with the decreative; basically we don’t want to, to use Jean Baptiste’s example, we don’t want to add something more to the already existent. We want to take things away but we want that taking away also be a not purely negative experience but an enriching one. Enrichment through a subtraction if you like. Does that make sense Eric?
Eric: Yep
Stephen: Tell me who you think of it, I don’t know.
Eric: I think it’s—I like the idea but I’m still trying to find a way to do it because in the system we I think one of the starting points of this idea was to really try to free art from how it’s language is conditioned by the market…
Stephen: Absolutely
Eric: And the sentiment value but now we try to step further by not adding cultural value object or project but it’s very hard to do in a certain way. It’s kind of utopia because even though we create art that is absolutely without object, without anything that is marketable as you mentioned there’s still the symbolic value of the experience that’s there to sell. I not against or for that, but it’s just there, it just exists. So how can we subtract if we create situation and experiences? Kind of hard for you to solve that issue.
Stephen: For sure it’s kind of like squaring the circle but that’s why—I just think it’s part of the reason why we’ve had a hard time picking a name in a certain respect. Because of course we don’t want to find a creative name, we have to find an absolutely decreative name or no name at all.
Eric: Yeah
Stephen: Because otherwise it will end up—and even a non name could end being a name so it’s not about splitting hairs into four and then into eight it’s about imagining how to do things by undoing them.
[1:05:00]
Stephen: Did I comment enough on the Charter or do we need to look at some other specific aspects of it? I think the Charter really—I insist on that, it really does define the specificity and the heterogeneity of our undertaking. Scott am I…?
Scott: We are with you; I actually completely agree that you guys need to find an extraordinarily boring name.
Stephen: Well it has to be one which we didn’t even really find in a certain sense, it has to be a ready-made name. Because a ready-made is an excellent example of the decreative.
Scott: So what’s wrong with The School of Decreative Methodology, I mean it’s sufficiently generic isn’t it?
Stephen: Well we have some other good ones too but some of them are too creative, this is the problem. I’ll tell you one of the reasons that some of our colleagues are not comfortable with the notion of decreative methodologies is they’re not comfortable particularly with the notion of the decreative. They feel that it may have a nasty side to it which is unpleasant but it may be excessively determining us into a particular direction which hasn’t been flushed out yet which is why I just said to Eric that I feel that one of the things that we need to do most urgently is to raise the question as a collegial moment, “What is the decreative?” I mean there was talk of calling it and I think it was even posted on the Plausible Artworlds site for a moment that it was going to be The Usual College and that gained a fair amount of support. These kinds of antic dotes actually tell sort of the story about how we function. It was favored by some because the notion of the collegial was present in the title and that’s something which I think we all are very sensitive to and because the notion of the usual. So it made it at once sort of ordinary and oriented toward use and of course use value is one of the things that we’re most attentive to in terms of the types of practices we’re looking at. But then others felt that this was once again pushing it too much in one direction and not enough in another so then it became The Usual College of the Academy of Decreative Methodologies and then that became the notion of academy became very off-putting for some because even if it was used ironically it was pushing it, but anyways. I won’t go through the whole thing but we do need something extraordinarily boring and extraordinarily open.
Scott: David Goldenberg has a…
[1:10:00]
Scott: Sorry I’m just looking at some of these comments, they’re really good. Before you address them I’m curious who the ‘you’ is. I realize that there are users and I know that you’ve mentioned some of them, do you guys work through a kind of consensus process or what’s your usership structure like, how are decisions made is I guess a more straightforward way of asking this. So even the decision about the name, you brought up various points mentioned but I guess I’m just kind of curious does everyone need to go through a process where there are…
Stephen: I think I lost audio there.
Scott: Oh, hello can you hear me okay?
Stephen: I can’t hear anything anymore.
Scott: Uh oh
Stephen: Scott, you still there?
Scott: Yeah I’m here.
Stephen: Okay.
Scott: Yeah I’m here Stephen; can you hear us now, better?
Stephen: Yeah I can hear fine now.
Scott: Okay great. Do you want me to ask that again real quickly or did you catch the gist?
Stephen: Well it’s based on consensus. If there’s one thing that the college or the school is not based on its consensus. It’s absolutely based on discensus. At first it appeared to be a sort of frustrating sort of stumbling block for us but as it turns out it’s kind of what preserves us from I don’t know one-way thinking. So there’s an incredible amount of discensus and the one thing which we agree on is that Charter which was the fruit of many months of hard and very dissensual labor to get it hammered out. But basically what it’s worked as now is that everyone is autonomous within the collegial structure to manage and carry out their collegial moments as they see fit but I think the practice is everyone has a veto power about the name that we will have or not have and so far that has left us very open-ended which of course will be a challenge when we get the website finished because it will actually have to have a name. So we are working on that but it’s not the only thing and it’s probably not the most interesting. It probably takes a lot of our energy but it’s not the most interesting thing which we do. So I would say yeah the decision making structure is collegial.
Scott: So actually Anthony just made a similar comment to I think what you just said, I don’t know if you saw that or basically he’s saying it seems like the naming is in his opinion the least important of the tasks.
Stephen: Yeah it’s the least important for sure.
Scott: But interesting, especially to people who are interested in language, who are deeply suspicious of language.
[1:15:00]
Stephen: I don’t know if you guys can hear me because I hear only pings.
Scott: We hear you. I hear you there’s just Kung-Fu above our heads so I’m muting whenever not necessary that I speak.
Stephen: Randall, are you there now?
Randall: Yes
Stephen: Okay I wanted to wait until you were back before trying to answer your question. The link between decreation and slacking. Sorry?
Okay the sound is kind of weird so I’m not sure if anyone…
Scott: Is the sound really terrible on your end Stephen because it’s fine on ours?
Stephen: Okay I can continue it’s just that I hear sounds but they’re not articulated language sounds so I was kind of wondering but I can continue. I wanted to address, if I can, Randall Shot’s comment about the relationship between the decreative and slacking. Yeah of course there’s a link particularly, I mean in a certain understanding of slacking and I think to a large degree that’s where the notion or the inspiration for the notion of the decreative came from. Because I think we see that there’s a clear link between productivism and creativity, in our era of the so-called creative capitalism.
[1:20:00]
Stephen: So we wanted to think how less was more in a certain respected terms of—I think we felt that basically education is premised also on a productivist model and that we needed to rethink the roads to—which is why we talked about knowledge decreation rather than knowledge production for example. We may also use the notion of knowledge production just because we don’t…
Scott: Oh man, well our signal is great. You have got to be kidding me.
Lisa: Hello?
Scott: Oh hi there. Hello we’re still trying to reach everyone so the few people who’ve connected so far just hang tight. Geez…
Stephen: Hello?
Scott: Hey Stephen. And we’re back. I’m just going to start adding people to the conference. Can you hear us okay, I hope?
Stephen: Yeah hey Scott.
Scott: Okay great, super. Alright just adding everyone back now. For real?
Hey Lisa; are you there? I’m going to have to try calling you back, actually I’ll—maybe we’ll stay here. Okay you’re here so let’s keep the call on and I’ll try adding Stephen again and everyone else.
[1:25:00]
Scott: Hey Stephen; are you there?
Stephen: Yeah, hey.
Scott: Okay well if you can hear us we heard you for a second there can you try saying something again and see?
Stephen: Okay?
Scott: Okay great so you’re on, let me try continuing to add, maybe it’s just our Skype icon; it went nuts for a second.
By the way Stephen; where is King right now, is he…?
Hi there Stephen; are you there? We’re going to try this one more time; if we get disconnected from you again we’ll just go to text only.
[1:28:17] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$bc2fa6813d536450" title="#basekamp/$bc2fa6813d536450">A School of Decreative Methodologies (#basekamp/$bc2fa6813d536450)
Created on 2010-02-23 21:16:55.
- Jessica Westbrook: 17:54:10
- hi all
- stephen wright: 17:54:40
- Hello everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 17:54:52
- Hi Stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 17:54:56
- Hi everyone
- Elysa Lozano: 17:55:01
- hello!
- magdalenatc: 17:55:14
- hi there
- BASEKAMP team: 17:57:11
- We'll be starting in a few moments
- BASEKAMP team: 18:01:56
- hey Katherine, you said text only is fine - jsut making sure You don't wish to listen in to the audio?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:02:05
- who would like to join the audio?
- mabel: 18:02:11
- me
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:02:19
- audio in tennessee please
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:02:27
- teleseed this week
- magdalenatc: 18:02:32
- yes, audio here please
- Elysa Lozano: 18:02:51
- me too
- katherinecarl: 18:03:17
- ah yes I should listen, thx
- BASEKAMP team: 18:03:49
- ok, we'l be starting the call in a moment. If anyone feels like typing in things that are beign discussed, we won't complain
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:06
- ...for those who can't get on audio
- katherinecarl: 18:04:10
- great that's helpful
- BASEKAMP team: 18:10:59
- Nick, did you want to join the chat?
- magdalenatc: 18:11:02
- can hear you well. thank you.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:24
- i'l mute our audio for the moment, untill one of us has someting to ask or add
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:15
- Eric, if you can mte yur audio until you want to chim in , that'd be great
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:21
- maybe even lower your volume at that time
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:24
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:26
- http://basekamp.com/about/events/school-decreative-methodologies
- stephen wright: 18:16:59
- A collegial moment without students, without teachers, without walls, without curricula, in rupture with all notions that institute art and how it is taught. The initiative accompanies forms of usership disposed to sundering art from itself.
1. The college’s goal is to activate practices whose purpose and finality is not art.
2. It asserts its institutional exodus.
3. It deploys and takes form through satellite propositions, which are at once extradisciplinary and depersonalized.
4. It functions on the basis of users alone, impugning any binary opposition between teachers / students, experts / non-experts.
5. It operates through networks with or without affinities. - Jessica Westbrook: 18:17:31
- hi
- magdalenatc: 18:17:33
- i am in UK
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:17:35
- tennesseeeeee
- mabel: 18:17:38
- paris
- katherinecarl: 18:17:44
- what city in TN?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:17:52
- chattanooga
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:18:03
- 2 hours north of atl, on east side of tenn
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:57
- Stephen, is the idea similar to NSK's "State in time"?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:23:09
- I think the audio has gone
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:23:37
- audio is good here
- magdalenatc: 18:25:34
- can you say a bit more about 'what' it is that you activate?
- katherinecarl: 18:26:33
- are there certain types of knowledge or ways at getting at knowledge that you are most interested in?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:27:52
- ^^ it sounds like "getting at" might be gotten to differently through the type of usership stephen's mentioning - maybe co-producing, or another form of discovery?
- stephen wright: 18:28:41
- Here is a description of Eric Collegial Moment:
- stephen wright: 18:28:42
- We propose collegial moments between citizens for whom criminal practices are routine and familiar. These groups of 6 to 12 people (who may be non-criminals, criminals, or ex-criminals), will embark on a process of identifying the ruses, tricks, skills, and insights that each user has developed while inhabiting, visiting, and/or creating/working in a criminalized context. Users will be conceive of new ways to apply these specialized capacities to new ends, far afield from their initial contexts.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:30:42
- Is what Eric's discussing part of a project that we can find out more about? Or is this "collegial moment" something that's only understood in the context of the college?
- stephen wright: 18:30:43
- Here is a description of the collegial moment I have proposed;
- stephen wright: 18:30:48
- Open Labyrinth names the paradoxical condition of an art lost in an open field, the very openness of which prevents recognition of the loss. Art finds itself in the throes of an unprecedented ontological crisis – having lost its self-definition and its self-evident modalities of appearing in the world – while the critical lexicon inherited from the twentieth century is ill equipped to describe art-related practices indifferent to current convention. Conceived as a testing ground for developing a revamped critical terminology, each meeting draws on the presence of a guest researcher’s work on a particular term likely to usefully renew our conceptual vocabulary.
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:32:08
- sounds really fantastic
- stephen wright: 18:32:50
- the creative processes of crime!
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:33:40
- magdalenatc: 18:33:41
- sounds really great
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:23
- Eric, it's be interesting to hear what you think about Temporary Services project "prisoners inventions": http://basekamp.com/about/projects/prisoners-inventions
- stephen wright: 18:34:30
- CM proposed by Bob the Builder
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:31
- ...no rush, but at some point
- stephen wright: 18:34:32
- Au travail / At work is a collective open to all wage labourers misusing their workplace as a site for residency, repurposing the means of production, resources or information. Through examining a number of documented cases of misuse, users will be encouraged to further broaden the scope of the collective in their own line of work.
- magdalenatc: 18:35:34
- i have a question to eric: do you have an idea of those new ends to which to apply those new ways? or actually do you imagine the ways in which that might go?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:41
- do you also see criminality in craetive processes?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:51
- ^^ to eric
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:22
- Stephen, side-note: is the former paris biennial collége website still up somewhere?
- stephen wright: 18:38:46
- Here is one of the most active collegial moments, instigated by Jean Baptiste Farkas, called "The Lessons of Subtraction", basically on downsizing in art and elsewhere.
- magdalenatc: 18:38:47
- sure.
- stephen wright: 18:38:48
- The world is a tremendous plethora. We must begin to subtract as a form of productive activity.
- katherinecarl: 18:38:50
- the play on creative and productive is very interesting. Are you concerned with "output" of these knowledges or not necessarily? is it wholly process-based?
- magdalenatc: 18:39:03
- yes, thank you. eric
- BASEKAMP team: 18:39:05
- the au travail website is down
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:40:16
- hi greg!
- mabel: 18:40:16
- we are working on the site internet of the college
- Greg Scranton: 18:40:26
- hi jessica
- stephen wright: 18:41:09
- A CM proposed by Gina Badger
- stephen wright: 18:41:11
- Ecological Erotics of Learning is a study group that takes for granted that all learning comes from desire, which brings us in short order into relations with other begins, human and non-. More succinctly, learning creates ecologies. Users will begin with analysis and discussion of key texts on radical ecology, marginal education, and the pedagogical turn in contemporary art, geared towards imagining a pedagogy of decreative methodologies.
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:16
- mabel, i was just curious - it makes sense that the website should change now that the school has become autonomized
- mabel: 18:43:30
- yes, you are right
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:57
-
- mabel: 18:44:09
- Greg Scranton: 18:44:14
- scott, have you started audio?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:34
- please let me know if anyone still needs to b added 2 the audio
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:44
- De- symposium
- Nick Hanford: 18:46:00
- can i be added to the audio?
- katherinecarl: 18:46:07
- can I be added too?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:18
- yessssssssssssssss
- siu king chung: 18:46:38
- Also King from CMP
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:01
-
- Nick Hanford: 18:47:09
- thank you
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:16
- np!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:27
- we may not realize people have been booted off the audio
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:41
- everyone please mute your audio when not chiming in.... -- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:02
- squaring the circle
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:55
- hi randall!
- Randall Szott: 18:49:02
- hello
- Randall Szott: 18:49:06
- sorry i'm late
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:08
- can you put your skype status to "Online"?
- mabel: 18:49:25
- I agree
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:38
- adding you to the conference randall
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:49:45
- are you talking about removing institutional language in order to arrive at a position to determine the space to function within the cultural sphere?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:50:35
- in terms of a radical practice suggested by Deleuze and Nietzsche?
- anthony sawrey: 18:51:59
- if you are serious about taging it without getting into these quandries about 'names'...then give it a serial number ie: 2010/02
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:52:30
- nice anthony
- Randall Szott: 18:52:59
- oh audio fail
- anthony sawrey: 18:53:00
- seriously this debate sounds like some college kids sitting around trying to come up wiht band names. make the title the LEAST important of your tasks.
- anthony sawrey: 18:53:28
- audio fail here. in freefall.. trying to level out
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:33
- Randall Szott: 18:53:35
- its back
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:01
- anthony adding you again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:05
- anyone else get dropped?
- anthony sawrey: 18:54:05
- tanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:54:11
- np
- Randall Szott: 18:55:15
- hey stephen - can you say a bit about the relationship between decreation and slacking (you knew i had to ask)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:27
- Slacktivism!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:55:33
- your beginning to sound like kraftwerk
- Randall Szott: 18:55:33
- audio fail again
- magdalenatc: 18:55:46
- can't hear you, only weird sound.... should be recording it. it is quite in keeping with the de- side of things
- bojana romic: 18:55:54
- I got call dropped
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:18
- magda, bojana, randall -- re-added you
- Amanda Hills: 18:56:22
- i've been cut off too
- mabel: 18:56:28
- me too
- bojana romic: 18:56:32
- works again - thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:42
- amanda & mabel - callign again
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:45
- word
- mabel: 18:56:56
- great
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:57:20
- maybe your talking about a new history of art or the second history of art - in terms of nietzsche and deleuze suggestion of dividing history in two!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:57:34
- sounds like rats in the system
- magdalenatc: 18:57:37
- is anyone saying anything? is it only me with the silence ON... oh i can hear you
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:44
- no sound here
- mabel: 18:57:54
- it's working now
- magdalenatc: 18:58:04
- i know what you mean, stephen <ss type="smile"></ss>
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:11
- jwestbroo - adding uagain
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:31
- David G - that sounds rather avant-guardy, doesn't it?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:14
- respnding to your questions about a post- or 2nd hisory. Stephen, is this something that soem of yoru colleagues are into?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:59:27
- possibly
- Randall Szott: 18:59:34
- aaargh
- Randall Szott: 18:59:38
- very buggy tonight
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:44
- Drooooooopppppppppp
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:59:51
- reading to much klassowski & deleuze
- magdalenatc: 18:59:51
- very very
- Randall Szott: 18:59:55
- lost audio again
- bojana romic: 18:59:55
- call dropped again - sorry!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:59
- calling everyone back
- stephen wright: 19:00:00
- I think I got cut off too
- Amanda Hills: 19:00:01
- dropped again
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:00:01
- yep
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:00:03
- sound off
- mabel: 19:00:07
- yes
- stephen wright: 19:00:39
- scott can you give me a call back?
- magdalenatc: 19:00:44
- and me
- Randall Szott: 19:00:47
- and me
- Elysa Lozano: 19:00:53
- yep
- bojana romic: 19:01:02
- and me
- siu king chung: 19:01:14
- also me
- Amanda Hills: 19:01:21
- sigh
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:27
- everyone still there?
- anthony sawrey: 19:01:38
- add me again...BTW hi jessica.. you are under a pseudonym i see
- stephen wright: 19:01:45
- text only for me
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:01:51
- ya
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:01:55
- its old
- magdalenatc: 19:02:01
- yes,
- BASEKAMP team: 19:02:05
- calling EVEERYONE back. This time it was our internet. One channel failed. Moving to channel 2
- Nick Hanford: 19:02:05
- yep
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:02:22
- no worries
- anthony sawrey: 19:02:38
- hokkay
- bojana romic: 19:02:41
- thanks
- Randall Szott: 19:03:06
- dropped again
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:03:06
- we are talking slackers...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:13
- haha
- Randall Szott: 19:03:16
- i am a talking slacker
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:19
- stop downloading porn everyone
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:03:23
- ha!
- Amanda Hills: 19:03:23
- the disconnection of decreation
- bojana romic: 19:03:35
- oups...fail again
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:39
- BASEKAMP team: 19:03:41
- trying again
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:03:42
- everyone in this room denied the label
- Randall Szott: 19:04:50
- cultural production - did you know you can now get an MA in this stephen?
- Randall Szott: 19:04:50
- at Brandeis?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:04:54
- yes its old since nietzsche suggested it in 1889, but then discussed by klossowski in the 1970's, but it also appears to provide the back bone of deleuze's project
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:05:13
- i dont have audio
- stephen wright: 19:05:21
- I didn't know that, Randall, but II'm not surprised
- stephen wright: 19:05:26
- it was inevitable
- Randall Szott: 19:05:31
- the term gives me hives
- stephen wright: 19:05:37
- "creative" writing
- Randall Szott: 19:05:50
- ah yes
- Randall Szott: 19:06:09
- no one has audio yet do they?
- stephen wright: 19:06:12
- should we do text only then?
- Randall Szott: 19:06:12
- ok
- stephen wright: 19:06:15
- no
- bojana romic: 19:06:18
- no...
- Randall Szott: 19:06:38
- fine by me - if we're reaching consensus - ha
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:42
- unfortunately our skype is getting surges i think
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:06:51
- cultural production : (
- anthony sawrey: 19:06:53
- here again....
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:10
- Guys, were giong to try audio one more time -then if that doesn' t work we shoudl go test-only
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:19
- so we don't get demoralized by this process
- stephen wright: 19:08:23
- Man, this is not good
- Randall Szott: 19:08:24
- http://www.brandeis.edu/programs/culturalproduction/
- anthony sawrey: 19:08:50
- oke
- Randall Szott: 19:09:00
- only hearing typing clearly
- stephen wright: 19:09:11
- don't know why this is so bad, but...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:12
- and there it is
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:21
- Text only -- not sure what's up in skype-land tonight
- Randall Szott: 19:09:35
- dropped again - text ahead?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:09:36
- So... can we pick bck up where we left off?
- Randall Szott: 19:09:40
- hey sean!
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:10:00
- we are talking about cultural production
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:01
- oops - wil ask Sean to upgrade
- stephen wright: 19:10:01
- Let's do it this way
- mabel: 19:10:06
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:10
- ok --- so . where were we?
- stephen wright: 19:10:19
- And we want to be talking about decreation!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:10:28
- ha
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:10:35
- are you on audio?
- stephen wright: 19:10:37
- No
- stephen wright: 19:10:41
- seems not
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:11:06
- i can upgrade or whatever if you want me to... didnt know i had slippeed
- anthony sawrey: 19:11:06
- no audio. give it a try agian when you have a mo
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:11
- chuckles
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:27
- we're going to forego audio altogether, for anyone who didn't get that
- Randall Szott: 19:11:37
- so stephen was riffing on the relationship of slacking to decreation
- anthony sawrey: 19:11:39
- what do i have soup on my tie?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:11:48
- heh
- Randall Szott: 19:12:07
- and wa delving into the trickiness of escaping "productivist" language/thinking
- stephen wright: 19:12:21
- In the sense that slack is to work as the decreative is to creativity
- ariane.d.: 19:12:40
- what does slacking to decreation means stephen?
- stephen wright: 19:12:41
- slack "decreates" productivism
- stephen wright: 19:13:20
- it both undoes it and reveals it for what it is
- anthony sawrey: 19:13:44
- strangification is another description of the activity
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:46
- so Stephen, there was a question here about the status of the school ... a few Qs actually
- stephen wright: 19:14:00
- It's not only strangification
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:14:10
- i think you also mentioned desire or the drives
- stephen wright: 19:14:11
- That's a Brechtian / Russian formalist method
- stephen wright: 19:14:29
- the "status"?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:39
- * are you meeting on a regular basis?
* are there more than a handful of people involved, and
* either way, can other people get involved as users? if so what's the process? - BASEKAMP team: 19:15:22
- did the "usership" carry over from the paris bienale, which i understand has a pretty high level of visibility?
- stephen wright: 19:15:28
- well, starting with the last, there is no "process" per se, but like most forms of usership, it is not something that one has to ask permission to do, nor is there any "right" way to do it
- stephen wright: 19:16:02
- for now, the overall usership is limited for sure
- mabel: 19:16:23
- actually the status is up to now instable or instatus
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:16:42
- ?
- stephen wright: 19:17:05
- an unstable status, you mean?
- mabel: 19:17:10
- which means at the same time that we try to resist to different fomrs
- mabel: 19:17:22
- and identity
- mabel: 19:17:23
- of institutionalisation
- mabel: 19:17:51
- and that the ways of operation and activation
- mabel: 19:17:51
- changes
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:17:51
- how does that differ from what I have just said?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:18:29
- concerning Nietzsche, Klossowski and Deleuze?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:19:02
- in terms of removing instituitonalised langauge
- mabel: 19:19:08
- ah yes
- mabel: 19:19:11
- ok
- stephen wright: 19:20:03
- in my opinion, it is not so much about "removing" the language as in working to bring about a lexical shift to focus on what has already changed
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:20:22
- but what you have discussed so far stephen is really fantastic
- mabel: 19:20:23
- yes, exactly
- ariane.d.: 19:20:39
- an other way to manipulate the language
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:20:41
- ok just need to think about that a bit more
- stephen wright: 19:20:50
- meaning has been instituted, we don't want to remove it but rather minutely, yet decisevly shift it
- stephen wright: 19:21:01
- no, it's not about manipulation
- stephen wright: 19:21:20
- no one owns the monopoly on these definitions of things like... art... school... etc
- mabel: 19:21:55
- it's more about re-configuration than manipulation
- ariane.d.: 19:22:04
- of course
- stephen wright: 19:22:10
- I think, by and large, we see lanugage through a usership prism -- the use we make of it
- ariane.d.: 19:22:36
- reagencement
- stephen wright: 19:22:40
- we also want to let language do the work
- stephen wright: 19:22:51
- rather than working language
- BASEKAMP team: 19:23:30
- so we have another question here -- it's sort f been addressed, but probably not fully
- ariane.d.: 19:23:35
- i believe that gestures could be more « puissants»
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:30
- Stephen & Mabel, can you describe in a few sentanceswhat "decreative methodologies" are? what you mean by that? or can you only describe them through example proposals, liek the ones you pasted farther above?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:03
- Eric we'd answer your call, but the audio has been so horrible the last 20 mins or so
- ariane.d.: 19:25:06
- I believe thet language is and will always be a tool of manipulation and control
- stephen wright: 19:25:26
- Well, I would be hesitant to give a meta-definition of what they are
- siu king chung: 19:25:27
- Yes, I am waitng for some examples too
- eric_letourneau: 19:25:40
- ok i cannot heau you at all at this point
- eric_letourneau: 19:25:51
- the connection is problematic here in MAdrid
- stephen wright: 19:25:55
- there's no audio
- stephen wright: 19:26:01
- only text
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:02
- Eric, we intentionally stoppe dthe audio in lieu of the text
- eric_letourneau: 19:26:05
- i see
- stephen wright: 19:26:05
- we decreated the audio
- eric_letourneau: 19:26:10
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:19
- haha
- eric_letourneau: 19:26:22
- lovely
- stephen wright: 19:26:47
- but they are something like this:
- stephen wright: 19:27:45
- they both undo and redo, and in our case they do so by doing what our colleague François Deck calls the mutualising of incompetencies and competencies
- stephen wright: 19:28:25
- the mutualisation of incompetencies is one example of the decreative in action, because it is premised on the equivalency of the incompetent and the competent
- stephen wright: 19:28:57
- His collegial moment is founded on how to mutualise incompetencies
- siu king chung: 19:29:27
- Ha, if stephen says, for example, "we decreated the audio", it seems to mean we adapt to the situation... is that then, decreative is being adaptive?
- anthony sawrey: 19:30:02
- Wait. Language also locates things as much as an object locates art. Carfull when you say that ' language is and will always be a tool of manipulation and control' Tyres on a car are also ' tools of manipulation and control' but you still need them. The strangification term i used before is placed here to signal methods that can be evoked to short circuit the usual pattern that we occupy when we think and talk.
- stephen wright: 19:30:09
- Well, that was more off the cuff admittedly, but somethings things become more powerful in their absence.
- stephen wright: 19:31:10
- But of course the decreative is moment specific
- Randall Szott: 19:31:16
- decreation always faces the phantom limb
- stephen wright: 19:31:29
- you take the formerly creative and repurpose it
- mabel: 19:31:35
- bur decreative in not exactly being adaptative but it's also to proposes other mode d'opération
- mabel: 19:31:55
- colegiality is a decreative mode, par exemple
- stephen wright: 19:32:12
- I sort of think that the decreative is both de- and re-
- stephen wright: 19:32:19
- Could you expand on that Mabel?
- ariane.d.: 19:32:34
- what do you mean when you say mode d'opération?
- mabel: 19:32:52
- "ways of"
- ariane.d.: 19:33:02
- oui je comprends
- ariane.d.: 19:33:18
- what does it mean?
- ariane.d.: 19:33:50
- this is such an artist language
- stephen wright: 19:33:59
- collegiality is decreative because it is a form of mutualisation of (in)competencies
- mabel: 19:34:06
- yes
- mabel: 19:34:09
- that is
- siu king chung: 19:34:56
- what is mutualisation of (in)competences?
- stephen wright: 19:35:07
- Here is the definition of that collegial moment:
- stephen wright: 19:35:10
- Si la valeur culmine dans ce qui est sans équivalent, la convertibilité d’un bien signifie une valeur moindre. Ces biens de nature inférieure sont obtenus par la propagation de l’idée de résultat. L’émergence de richesses uniques implique au contraire un retard concerté des solutions. Dans cette optique, la mutualisation des compétences et des incompétences propose une dilatation des temps.
- stephen wright: 19:35:17
- Translation coming right up!
- stephen wright: 19:35:56
- If value culminates from what is without equivalency, goods and services can only be converted at a loss.
- stephen wright: 19:36:24
- The lesser valued goods are obtained through the propagation of the idea of a result.
- stephen wright: 19:36:51
- The emergence of unique forms of wealth implies on the contrary a concerted slowing down of solutions.
- eric_letourneau: 19:37:01
- This quote fron Francois is brillant.
- stephen wright: 19:37:10
- In this respect, the mutlaisation of competences and incompetencies offers a dilation of time.
- stephen wright: 19:37:30
- Yes it's the very essence of the decreative -- whether he agrees with that or not!!
- mabel: 19:37:45
- you are right, stephen
- stephen wright: 19:38:12
- So, one sees too the link between the decreative, active sloth and mutualising (in)competencies
- siu king chung: 19:38:22
- It just occurs to me that being decreative is to ask the most fundamental questions of the meaning of words or lexicons you are now using
- stephen wright: 19:38:42
- It is not "result" based (unlike neoliberal calculation)
- stephen wright: 19:38:49
- it slows things way down
- stephen wright: 19:39:00
- King, you're right -- but this goes beyond words
- stephen wright: 19:39:16
- If you talk to me, you get the words thing (that's my field in a sense)
- stephen wright: 19:39:40
- But it is about revaluing value altogether, not only lexical or verbal value
- ariane.d.: 19:40:26
- life values?
- stephen wright: 19:40:31
- In that way, it is Nietzschean
- ariane.d.: 19:40:33
- love values?
- Randall Szott: 19:40:41
- *value* is what capitalism and socialism leave unquestioned - their shared assumption
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:40:42
- am I still connected?
- stephen wright: 19:40:51
- Exactly
- stephen wright: 19:41:05
- There may be other shared assumptions
- Randall Szott: 19:41:11
- well yes
- Randall Szott: 19:41:30
- also the relationship between production and value
- stephen wright: 19:41:35
- but what is all too often unchallenged today is the notion of "symbolic capital"
- Randall Szott: 19:41:55
- all that is a bit turned on its head in the US consumption based economic model
- stephen wright: 19:41:56
- as if it were the only form of vlaue; as if "value" were a synonym for "capital" of some kind
- ariane.d.: 19:42:12
- i dont agree at all, stephen
- stephen wright: 19:42:14
- That is a debate which we have been involved with recently in our college
- stephen wright: 19:44:16
- someone instigates a collegial moment, appoints a time and place (or not) and it happens
- anthony sawrey: 19:44:26
- okay. You have managed to define this thing..is there any action involved? Tangible things that is..
- stephen wright: 19:44:27
- Well there are collegial moments
- stephen wright: 19:44:27
- I mean, where users as we call them come together
- mabel: 19:44:27
- eric told one of those moments
- ariane.d.: 19:44:30
- who are the users?
- stephen wright: 19:44:57
- as I said, the moment on "lessons of subtraction" was very active recently
- anthony sawrey: 19:45:01
- like swarming?
- stephen wright: 19:45:09
- it was paris-based, open to all
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:17
- Are you all interested in connecting with teh paris branch of The Public School as a way of "visibilizing" your proposals?
- stephen wright: 19:45:22
- no, much more reflective in this case
- ariane.d.: 19:45:30
- how can you become a "user"?
- stephen wright: 19:45:39
- by using
- stephen wright: 19:45:50
- it's not prescriptive
- anthony sawrey: 19:45:59
- whoops starting fade off into language and abstraction again
- mabel: 19:46:04
- by participating to one or sevral moments
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:09
- ^^ http://paris.thepublicschool.org/
- mabel: 19:46:11
- by proposing one
- ariane.d.: 19:46:19
- how? I guess you must be inevited
- stephen wright: 19:46:42
- I think that there are significant differences between the college and the Public School
- mabel: 19:47:12
- you can be invited and soon you will be able to have all the information on the internet site
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:48
- ^^ Stephen, i was curious - mainly as a way to put forth the ideas, and let other people know about them. not suggesting that the college & TPS are the same
- eric_letourneau: 19:48:12
- HEy friends, it is really late right now in MAdrid : I'll have to go
- stephen wright: 19:48:20
- I know Mabel and Eric have thoughts on the Public School
- eric_letourneau: 19:48:27
- Looking forward to meet you for real one day
- Randall Szott: 19:48:34
- but this is a difficult balancing act - the visible/invisible
- stephen wright: 19:48:37
- bye eric
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:39
- Eric -- same here
- mabel: 19:48:43
- bye
- stephen wright: 19:48:48
- We are not looking for more visibility
- eric_letourneau: 19:48:54
- ciao bello & bellas
- BASEKAMP team: 19:48:57
- will be intereting to hear what Eric has to say about TPS @ some point
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:07
- Mabel, care to share your thought on the public school?
- eric_letourneau: 19:49:10
- TPS?
- stephen wright: 19:49:16
- The public school
- eric_letourneau: 19:49:39
- ok
- eric_letourneau: 19:49:55
- well it is i think really different
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:58
- ...not to derail this discussion entirely -- but since Stephen said the college is different, then describing that thing that's different may be a way to get at what the college is.. throgh what it isn;t... or something
- eric_letourneau: 19:50:19
- a school and a collège are two different ways to built and construct (or deconstruct) knowledge
- stephen wright: 19:50:24
- good points. the question is the type of knowledge we want to decreate, the degree of institutional exodus, the way in which we do it.
- eric_letourneau: 19:50:33
- they are very dintinct from each other
- eric_letourneau: 19:50:57
- school is really more strict
- eric_letourneau: 19:51:12
- hierarchical way top treansmit knowledge
- stephen wright: 19:51:30
- not school, The Public School!
- eric_letourneau: 19:51:31
- college is more a sharing of ressources
- mabel: 19:51:51
- and actually I think that the TPS is not necesarly interested in thinking about how to construct/deconstruct knowledge
- eric_letourneau: 19:51:55
- well... Public school is still a school
- eric_letourneau: 19:52:09
- no but they are doing it anyway
- eric_letourneau: 19:52:36
- but a school obey to a form or coertion by some `higher`power i think
- stephen wright: 19:52:37
- I entirely agree that "methodologies" is not what interests TPS
- eric_letourneau: 19:52:41
- whatrever it is public or not
- eric_letourneau: 19:53:07
- college is - IN THEORY - more free from coertion than a school
- mabel: 19:53:39
- it seems so
- stephen wright: 19:53:54
- http://thepublicschool.org/
- eric_letourneau: 19:54:15
- yes i think Claire went there right?
- stephen wright: 19:54:26
- we are as interested in how we decreate as in what we decreate
- eric_letourneau: 19:54:28
- and she was quite dissapointed
- stephen wright: 19:54:33
- yes
- eric_letourneau: 19:54:37
- at an opening
- Randall Szott: 19:54:39
- for U.S. folks - I will be calling people together to continue parallel exploration of these ideas in Vermont, New Mexico, and other locations TBD - message me if you're interested - likely weekend or longer affairs, some rustic, some less so
- stephen wright: 19:54:52
- when's that?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:55:19
- I lost contact for about 5 mins so I have lost the thread of the discussion
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:20
- Randall - great
- eric_letourneau: 19:55:47
- ok i really leave no
- stephen wright: 19:55:57
- good night eric!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:58
- well, regarding TPS, because it *is* open, anyone can propose a class about anything. So one course may be more in line with A college than others
- eric_letourneau: 19:56:02
- my brain is not useful for anybody right now - including myself
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:03
- g'night Eric!
- eric_letourneau: 19:56:10
- ciao again
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:11
- mabel: 19:56:12
- good night!!!
- ariane.d.: 19:56:18
- you are all so ambitous
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:42
- ^^ ambitious slackers
- stephen wright: 19:56:53
- in the collège, anyone can instigate a collegial moment too
- ariane.d.: 19:56:54
- for sure
- BASEKAMP team: 19:56:59
- Randall -- can you add us to that list of interested US folks?
- anthony sawrey: 19:57:08
- me too!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:57:13
- Stephen - cool - can we instigate a collegial moment?
- stephen wright: 19:57:32
- of course, that would be excellent, the Charter is quite explicit
- mabel: 19:57:49
- yes, it would be great
- mabel: 19:57:51
- !!!
- stephen wright: 19:57:55
- super!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:58:59
- Stepeh & Mabel -- thank you so much for joining us tonight!
- stephen wright: 19:59:13
- since it is a college without walls, you don't even need to knock on the door
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:41
- heh, right
- BASEKAMP team: 19:59:47
- or knock down the door
- mabel: 20:00:00
- yes, that is
- stephen wright: 20:00:09
- or burning down the school. anyway thank you -- too bad about the audio
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:16
- i dont' want to kill the conversation -- but i know it's very late for people in europe --
- BASEKAMP team: 20:00:24
- yes - indeed!
- mabel: 20:00:28
- yes!! thank you
- Randall Szott: 20:00:32
- so good to "talk" with you again stephen
- stephen wright: 20:00:36
- watch for the website
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:00:44
- yes it was great
- stephen wright: 20:00:44
- hey you too randall!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:00:46
- thanks stephen and mabel sorry to miss the first part
- anthony sawrey: 20:00:48
- yeah, break dwon the walls!!!
- stephen wright: 20:00:55
- open up the moments
- bojana romic: 20:00:56
- thanks, bye
- mabel: 20:01:05
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 20:01:06
- at last a serious conversation
- Randall Szott: 20:01:17
- and maybe you can tell me via email what/if you know about Jean-Yves Jouannais,
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:22
- thanks everyone - this has ben really great
- stephen wright: 20:01:27
- will do
- Amanda Hills: 20:01:31
- stephen wright: 20:01:43
- talk to you all next week
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:44
- See you all next week
- Amanda Hills: 20:02:13
-
2010-02-23
Week 6: Teaching Artist Union and School of the Future
Hi Everyone,
This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.
This week we’ll be talking with Cassie Thronton and Chris Kennedy about two interrelated projects based in New York: Teaching Artist Union, and School of the Future.
About Teaching Artist Union
The Teaching Artist Union is composed of NYC artists for whom teaching is — or is part of — their creative practice. The Union seeks to define the role of the “teaching-artist” through developing a supportive community, drawing attention to the work produced in teaching situations, and advocating for the rights and needs of the teaching artist. The Union works in a wide range of environments, including non-profit arts organizations, schools, museums, and other agencies. Contending that art can invigorate, agitate, and reorient stale institutional habits, the Union wants to develop a lasting structure to sustain and promote the various manifestations of the Teaching Artist. The Union came into existence in the spring of 2009 as the only organization in NYC for and by Teaching Artists, undertaking projects to support and change the art and education landscapes that we live in.
About School of the Future
School of the Future is the launching pad for the art movement of education. This artist-run school focuses on teaching artists as “experts” in the study of information through performing and visual arts. Opening this July in Bushwick’s Sgt. Dougherty Park for a month of 24-hour programming, the school serves as the first site devoted to the resourcefulness and adaptability of teaching artists. Each curriculum developed for the school is an art project, making the school a group show. The projects will be designed to use art as a learning process that both takes into account and activates the site of the school.
Transcription
Week 6: Teaching Artist Union and School of the Future
[0:00:00]
Scott: Can you still prop that up because hopefully…
Speaker 2: No you can’t even hear you.
Scott: Really? Okay. Alright well we’re going to try holding this mic today, let us know if the audio gets completely out of control.
So who’s on the call right now? Are Adam and the class in Tennessee on the call?
Adam: Yes we are can you hear me?
Scott: Yeah we can hear you guys. Hello everybody in Tennessee.
Stephen: Hello…
Chris: Hello…
Scott: Hey Stephen and hi Chris and Cassie, it’s really great having you guys here.
Chris: We’re also here with Angelina in New York, she’s our intern.
Scott: Okay great and we’re here with a very small, but dedicated crowd who came out even under predictions of snow. Do you guys want to say hello…
Female Speaker: All Department of Education facilities have been closed for tomorrow because they told us that there’s going to be 18” of snow.
Scott: Nice and if I hadn’t hurt my foot last weekend I would be out sledding with you guys but instead you can just feel bad for me.
Anyway, welcome Chris and Cassie and everyone else who made it to the chat. This week we’re going to be talking about the Teaching Artist’s union and School of the Future; two projects that really should be seen as distinct but are intertwined in a way. Ultimately I’m not the best person to describe how they’re intertwined; it would be great to hear from you guys. Would you mind giving a brief introduction just to those two projects and then maybe we can talk about how they connect and how they can be seen as examples of fledgling art worlds and we can just chime in whenever. Does that sound okay? Why is that Greg?
Greg: I don’t know that’s a great question.
[0:05:00]
Scott: There we go, let’s just try one more time. By the way do you want to open the chat on the projection?
Greg: Hello? Alright hi everybody, sorry for that. We’re still working out the glitches. This is Greg I’m going to turn it over to Scott here just to give a brief intro and we’ll get started.
Scott: Oh wow. Hey Chris and Cassie. Yeah so actually you won’t believe the amazing introduction I gave to you guys and I realize that the internet had already cut out.
Cassie: I felt it.
Scott: Did you? I thought so. I actually didn’t really introduce you much except to say that the Teaching Artist Union and School of the Future are two distinct projects and that our goal tonight isn’t to really disambiguate them but it would be nice to hear about them both in and of themselves. And it would also be interesting to hear about how they’re connected. And at some point during this we’ll definitely want to talk with you guys about how they can be seen as fledgling art worlds in some way or at least can be helpful as examples in this series too for other people. First of all would you guys mind just giving a brief introduction to Teaching Artist Union and School of the Future?
Cassie: Yeah we felt that it would make sense to talk about first the Teaching Artist Union and then the School of the Future because the School of the Future is a project of the Teaching Artist Union so a lot of what has come up in the Teaching Artist Union we’re trying to address by bringing the project of School of the Future. So another piece of it is that—so Chris also is the Institute of Applied Aesthetics and he has taken on the role as sort of my other half in the School of the Future but he’s part of the Teaching Artist Union. So that’s why I feel like whenever we come into a room there are so many [inaudible] [0:09:53] I just wanted to clear that up. But yeah I’m really curious actually to ask other people some questions about Teaching Artist and to discuss what the Teaching Artist Union was and what it’s become and where it’s going to start.
[0:10:20]
Cassie: So I was curious if other people are really clear about the word Teaching Artist? I feel like in New York Teaching Artist is—there is sort of a whole world of teaching artists that supplement the whole education system and our part of museums and it’s kind of—I mean it’s pretty broad because I feel like many of us also work as adjuncts and we’re a fairly unnetworked group of people and the job itself is pretty informal. But it has a sort of a special type of meaning to us here and I’m wondering if that definition—if there is a definition in other cities that relates. I think there is one in Chicago but I don’t know about other places.
Male Speaker: I’m getting a sort of vibe that Teaching Artists Union is support for maybe—like a group of artists that support teachers in a sense and help them with whatever they need as well as universities and such.
Cassie: Yeah but I feel like there’s a special meaning to the word “teaching artist” in New York City. We have a pretty important position in the entire school system but also we are in all sorts of different sites including museums and definitely some colleges and stuff too. But anyway yeah the Teaching Artists Union is sort of this place for these people to meet and figure out what it means for us to have a union. Basically we encounter a lot of issues of being freelancers but we also have special pieces in common which are having a social practice automatically and being a part of a lot of larger institutions. I see someone saying ‘Is this a New York City thing?’ Oh this is interesting, ‘I’ve only seen the word used in New York.’ So there’s a national organization called The Association of Teaching Artists and that’s actually a national—it’s a website to support teaching artists everyone. But anyway so I guess it is sort of—I’m seeing that it’s a New York centered thing.
[0:15:00]
Cassie: But we’ve been meeting for about a year, we are a group of probably 50 people that know each other pretty well. Our meetings are about 20 people at a time in my studio and we have scribble shares every month, we have a monthly supportive meeting called Infinite Support and it’s really just they’re talking and learning about teaching and a big piece of it is we consider teaching a part of our practice, our creative practice. Just showing each other our work and talking about ways to deal with a lot of the problems we encounter as parts of institutions.
Chris: How many people are in Teaching Artist Union?
Cassie: I think it’s about—depends on how we’re talking, maybe 200 people but we know 50 well and it’s a super local community, we know each other’s faces and that’s really important to me.
Chris: When did you guys start?
Cassie: About a year ago.
Chris: What are the main goals of Teaching Artists right now?
Cassie: The main goals are to define ourselves as an intentional community who knows each other and who can sort of refine our practices as artists and educators and also to define the role of teaching artists as an important part of the education process and something that should be planned into education from the beginning.
Chris: Are most people that are teaching artists that come to the union meetings are they also among art practice?
Cassie: Often but I feel like we’ve all sort of gravitated more and more toward art teaching practices for artisan practices.
Chris: So I sent Scott a Teaching Artists Union membership cards so that you guys might see that at Base Camp on the tables, you can also find it on the website.
Scott: We totally have a whole stack here.
Chris: Amazing.
Cassie: Scott do you have your super big one?
Scott: Oh I do, let me hobble back with my cane to the back room and get it and I’ll be right back.
Greg: Yeah I printed up a bunch, we’ve even got them on different colors; goldenrod, cherry, yellow and white, so if you see any that appear to be forgeries they are just Base Camp originals.
Cassie: Yeah so the Teaching Artists Union card offers free admission wherever teacher or student discounts are given and that’s available in the Artworld newspaper too. The Teaching Artists Union is super local, it’s a group of people that know each other really well, we’re all working on the same type of work and it’s a great community of people. It’s one of the best.
[0:20:00]
Cassie: I think the interesting questions come when we start to talk about more like unionizing and what that means to us. So we can talk about that or…
George: Are you unionizing as teachers or I mean obviously this is a teacher’s union, but this is a different segment of maybe like an artist as a role of a teacher, as a role of maybe as a citizen of the community and also as a future role in everybody’s digital perspective?
Cassie: Totally. I think a good example of part of the different between a teaching artist and a person that would be invited to the teacher’s union is that we’re just invited to come for sort of like—usually in a project based way so we’re there for like three to six months and we’re not planned in from the beginning. It’s like when they have a little bit of overhead grant money at the end of the school year often it’s like ‘oh well maybe we should invite some artists in.’ So it’s a lot about we’re not planned in from the beginning so then we’re also not supported, we don’t have health insurance offered to us or even just a sense of belonging in institutions because we’re definitely invited as a supplement to what’s already there. So the idea of unionizing it’s unionizing as a super specialized group of people who are—yeah I guess just put in these situations. Often the work is—I compare it to being sort of like missionary work because you’re sent usually alone to a school, you’re the only artist in this institution and you’re kind of expected to deliver their art department. It’s pretty rigorous work and you’re never compensated for your preparation time, or very rarely, and you’re basically paid the same way somebody is paid as if they just show up with ping-pong to play with kids. So it’s pretty—I feel like it’s really important to get together as union and to show how valuable our work is and how important it is to have arts in schools with real artists. The union part is really interesting because I still don’t really know what that will be, like what our answer to that is. I really decided at one point that we could become a project based union where we can have gripes but we can respond by creating projects that relate to those as a group. So that’s where the School of the Future comes in.
George: And it works both ways too because I think the schools benefit from this entity, if I may call it, and to have it support these schools that they may have resources and different things; it could be the lesson plan and such things the union might have together. It could be many facts that the teachers always struggle with sometimes in class.
Greg: Can I interrupt just a minute. This is Greg at Base Camp, can we have when people are asking questions or discussing just remind everybody who you are, just occasionally, not every single time but that way people know who everyone is, sometimes it can get a little confusing. So who just asked the question, sorry?
George: George Johnson.
Greg: Great thanks George and when…
George: I’m a teacher and I’m really enjoying this conversation.
Greg: No that’s great, thanks George for the questions, they’ve been great. When we’re not talking we ask that people mute their microphones to keep the audio quality relatively decent. So continue, sorry you can answer that question if you remember it or maybe George can…
Cassie: Sorry George, what was your question?
George: I just completely agree to the fact of unionizing because it benefits the school and I’m adding to the fact that it’s such a great possibility that the School of the Future, that the Teaching Artists Union is going to employ so much of their resources as a group to work with the schools. I think the big question now is how is it going to be possible; through the National Teaching Association?
Cassie: How is what possible, the School of the Future or getting involved with the education system?
George: Just getting more involved, making it more of a global…
Cassie: At this point my priority is definitely dealing with the New York City Department of Education. I’m really interested in other Teaching Artists Unions sprouting up, I love watching how the public school moves like a virus and I think that can happen with Teaching Artists too but I just don’t know if there is—I honestly have no idea if there’s enough of a community of teaching artists in every other city to do that. I guess right now the dream would be that we can sort of through the value of Teaching Artists and through the School of the Future kind of create a model or something that we could potentially present to the DOE and at least begin a conversation about arts in education. I think one of the main goals of the School of the Future is through that process creating a few different publications that we can distribute to different people for different reasons. One of them would be sort of something to offer organizations so they can understand the position of the teaching artist better.
[0:30:00]
Cassie: Another publication would be for teaching artists in New York to have as sort of a manual of handouts that can help them connect with what they need to connect with to get through the job and to access the resources that they need. Then another one could potentially be to offer some advice to the Department of Education for ways that we feel like we have seen or proven that work with using art to solve problems in schools.
George: It’s very concrete. I mean it’s all possible but with as many members as you have there has to be a way to work it into the system as—you know one of the requirements to get unionized—I think I’m talking too much, I’m sorry.
Cassie: No it’s great. I hate talking to nobody; it’s really difficult to talk when nobody else is talking.
Chris: It’s like a question of [inaudible] [0:31:37] and the different between Teaching Artists Union and a Workers Union. You can talk about that a little bit.
Cassie: I definitely had my share of conversations with people who are really turned off by the idea of union because they think of factory workers rallying for healthcare. We’re not in a bad position, we have really awesome work, and we’re doing exactly what we want to do. We’re all super idealistic and I feel like we’ve found a way into the system and don’t want to become such a formal—we don’t want our careers so formalized that we have to be angry workers. I think it’s about identifying what about unionizing can work for us and what our real goals are and how to actually achieve them which I really don’t think has that much to do with participating in the systems that have already been set up or unionizing. So I think [inaudible] [0:33:23] important I don’t think that many of us really believe in the healthcare system so I don’t really know if I’m that interested in being part of a union where that goal remains. I could go on and on, there are so many tropes to unionizing that have been really important but I feel like we’ve only learned that we definitely need something different. Also as artists we have the ability to [inaudible] [0:34:02].
Chris: Kind of as a non-classic definition of a teaching artist on the science indicator by training and to see the emergence of this amazing community over the past couple of years happening has been really amazing and just inspiring to see people coming together that are artists that are also teachers and everything go smooth.
[0:34:58]
Chris: For them to have a way to exchange with each other, have a way to build a network that’s cohesive and meaningful in New York City where there are so many fractured communities, I think that’s a really great thing. That’s a deviation from the [inaudible] [0:35:12] of the union and I think that’s what makes it so beautiful and powerful.
Cassie: I see a really good question, ‘is there a difference between teaching artists and artists who teach?’ I think I’m really open, the union is really open to involving—yeah or art teacher, right—to involving people who are interested in education and art and who practice one or both and have something to offer based on that. Also really interested in the people that come to the union as just artists with social practices because they feel like they have something to gain from performance—they think their practice of performance or communication is related to teaching. But I think the definition itself of teaching artists from the Association of Teaching Artists or something would say that a teaching artist is an artist who teaches. I would say that my emphasis in teachers who teach as a part of their creative practice which I think repels some people.
Chris: Can you give us an example of a cool project you’ve done recently or what you’re doing right now with the School is Bushwick?
Cassie: Yeah I feel like my job is amazing and I don’t know if other—like I keep saying I don’t know if other people in other cities have opportunities like this, but for example I got hired to work with science teachers to produce a project for Brooklyn schools to reproduce where basically I’m creating art projects that will complement the science curriculum. It’s been pretty amazing to just get to work—I’m working as a professional developer now so I’m working both with students and with their teachers to try to figure out alternative ways to teach what they’re learning so I feel like it’s kind of the most amazing way to get into the system and have a voice and have an audience that spans outside of the people I know or the people I know who they know or their cousins or their two friends. Like dealing with all 200 second graders in one school I feel like I have access to so many parents and so many families. So for instance I taught 120 kids today about how to grow mushrooms in their house and they’re growing them inside of this huge mountain on wheels and that’s their big project this year. We’re talking about habitat and what makes them comfortable and how to use what you have and I work on making stuff that’s sustainable, it lasts for the school. I don’t know, I just feel like it’s a really, really amazing job, its amazing work. Unfortunately a lot of people really aren’t compensated or treated that well for their work but I think, not to play into the under valuing of art, but I really understand—I feel like I’m doing work that I do for free so I just happen to get paid for it.
[0:40:00]
Cassie: So Teaching Artists Union is really cool because we just spend a lot of time hanging out and talking about what’s going on in these very specific situations that we end up being in.
Chris: Do you think this is a good time to talk about School of the Future a little bit, unless people have questions?
Scott: Do you guys have any questions here?
Gerard: I was curious based on what you were talking about a second ago, what do you think artists bring to teaching that other teachers don’t? My names Gerard, I’m here in Philadelphia.
Cassie: Yeah I feel like I bring a lot of awkward silence…I ask questions that maybe don’t have answers. In New York City I witness what you see on the news about teaching to the tests and we’re just an assessment-based education system and everything boils down to…
Scott: Hmm I don’t know, on our end it looks okay. I think their connection got lost. Hey everyone I think we lost connection with Chris and Cassie but it looks like a bunch of other people are still on the line. We’ll go ahead and add them back to the same thing.
Hey guys
Cassie: Hey now.
Scott: Yeah we lost you for a second there.
Cassie: That’s what I just said.
Greg: Its okay, we’re all blushing.
Cassie: Good.
Greg: And you should know there are many faces here at Base Camp despite the potential blizzard.
Scott: Oh I think we lost Tennessee too; I’ll go ahead and add them back. Oh wait we lost Chris again. Our connection seems just fine.
Greg: Other folks can hear us okay? You don’t have to necessarily talk you can just text that you can hear us.
Scott: You could just raise your hand and nod.
Greg: Hello?
Scott: Yeah can hear, just not the ones that got dropped that’s all.
Greg: You know what I think I’m dropped because I’m not getting any…
[0:45:00]
Scott: Okay we’re going to hang up on everyone and recall.
Greg: I think we’re having troubles.
Scott: I think so too.
Greg: I think Matthew is there, hi Slats. We’re having some internet issues.
Cassie: Alright.
Greg: Are we back in business?
Scott: Alright so…
Greg: I guess we’re sort of in transition anyways so it wasn’t a terrible loss. I don’t know where you guys were, if you were opening the floor to discussion or questions or if we were transferring over to School of the Future?
Chris: Did the person that had the question get it answered? In Philadelphia?
Scott: Oh yeah, hey Gerard?
Gerard: Yeah?
Scott: Did you get an answer before we ran into a technical…
Gerard: If there are more thoughts on that I’d be really curious. Not only from our guests but from others who are typing and stuff. This is a question that I think haunts what I do. But typically parent artists to do what we do which is often far exceeding making art.
Scott: So basically you’re asking about artists’ competencies and how they can be translated into…
Gerard: Exactly, what do artists know, what are compencies about teaching?
Chris: Can you just repeat that for us?
Cassie: Yeah can we have a translation.
Gerard: Again the question was really about what it is that artists bring to teaching which is different from those other teachers in the sciences or the humanities who may have—many of us are practicing studio artists, the best we did was get an MFA which doesn’t have a teaching component at all. What is it that we as artists bring to teaching that’s unique and valuable, what kind of contributions do we make to learning?
Cassie: I think there are really practical answers and then there are more metaphysical ones. I think the practical answers are we don’t have to [inaudible] [0:49:22] standards as those teachers do so that we can explore the way that we approach subjects. I feel like we bring the ability to not have answers in school which I feel like doesn’t really happen in schools—what I was talking about before was that we teach to tests, the whole Board of Education is so wrapped up in assessment that I think they miss the part about learning.
[0:50:08]
Cassie: Where just most kids are—they’re memorizing and then regurgitating. I think in art we’re just asking questions and we’re asking big enough questions that there is not just one answer, giving kids the opportunity to just wonder and to explore. I also think we’re teaching them a process that is maybe a little bit mysterious at times but giving them the skills to follow a process through to complete something because they believe in it and because they need to complete it because we ask them to. It’s really like problem solving to get stuff done in a way that otherwise I feel like they only know how to shuffle information around, like we’re raising middle-men.
Chris: I think that’s good. The teaching artist is I think the glue of the school, it provides this access point for exploration, for creative problem-solving, for addressing questions that do not get asked. Things that overlap; science overlapping social studies, overlapping with real-world sort of stuff and the teaching artist is like the piper, they take the kids outside to explore and they ask questions about how the world works and you guys find answers.
Cassie: We go on and on, I mean schools are so set on overlapping subjects that there is no interdisciplinary…so that overlapping…is allowed to overlap subjects it kind of wreak havoc on that whole system automatically and I think it creates a lot of opportunities for questions. Also the school [inaudible – bad audio] [0:52:51] at times and we’re brining not only ourselves but our knowledge of other communities and other people and their ways of doing things that communities and cities [inaudible] [0:53:13] basically there’s not a lot of awareness of what’s going on…I think the little bit of freshness that we bring.
Chris: Yeah. I think it’s about school [inaudible] [0:53:32] about Teaching Artists Union…
Scott: Hey Chris and Cassie; can you hear us okay?
Cassie: Yeah
Scott: Diana here has a question.
Diana: Well I guess this kind of goes back to what you were talking about before, but it struck me that artists are researches inherently and that they provide new avenues and new ways of looking at the world that are not just about reading or writing but more about all five senses and maybe other senses. So I don’t know if that’s a question necessarily but…
Chris: No I think that’s really true.
Female Speaker: I was thinking of something along the same lines.
Chris: I think an artist in school helps visualize that and provide opportunities for the school to interface with that community for a teacher if everything comes from visual or [inaudible] [0:54:55] hypothesis.
[0:55:00]
Chris: So yeah seem to be challenging like the prism, the light shining through.
Female Speaker: I was thinking along the same thing of what Diana here was saying, there are a lot of people that if they get in there and they just hear a bunch of words about history or something they won’t understand it. But if they get somebody to show them and actually get them involved in seeing things and drawing pictures of stuff that’ll activate parts of their brain which will get them through things that wouldn’t get in there otherwise. There are some people that just learn better that way.
Cassie: Experiential learning. The history of School of the Future is that last year the Parks Department gave me a park that has been much overused in my neighborhood in Bushwick in Brooklyn. They gave it to me because I proposed doing some sort of summer education from there and the Parks Department does not have an education program in northern Brooklyn so they were very happy when I suggested it. They didn’t give me very much time so I pushed it back a summer when we could do it full on. So basically what we have is a park and a big group of teaching artists and now we have a building—a portable building we built there that will be there to—or the students at the Columbia Architecture built for us. So that’s what we have so far. And what the basic premise of the school is that it’s a school where the teaching artist who’s usually not based anywhere will belong and their process—the process of the school is an extension, an exhibition of their process and how to [inaudible] [0:58:30]. And the site where the school will be is in a super industrial neighborhood, next to a highway and a Staples mega-store and we’re going to be there addressing the site, addressing the people that we have to work around and doing that through what we’re calling the method of teaching artist. Now we’re pretty heavy into kind of think we went through phase 1 and now I think we got those people on board and a lot of people that have out reached right now. Another thing is we really want to research schools [inaudible] [0:59:50] through the school so we’re going to have a team of teachers led by Chris who are going to be documenting, studying what’s going on at the school and making that [inaudible] [1:00:09] researchers there from the outside just watching and participating because we really want to create some documentation that can be reusable or at least that can be useful in some way.
[1:00:28]
Chris: Yeah I’m going to be serving as head librarian for the School of the Future and I think it’s got this really great opportunity to display the idea or to display working hypothesis in a way that school can be outside of a brick building, it can be transparent, it can be outside and that art can be the mitigating factor for their gain. Kind of responding to a very situated specific site.
Cassie: Right and education does not mean a brick building.
Chris: Right, right.
Cassie: I really like this question, “In what way is this a school of the future rather than a school of the past?” I think it’s a school of the future because it’s the idea of using art as a vehicle to learn [inaudible] [1:01:56] and that our goal would be to actually create [inaudible] [1:02:07].
Male Speaker: I started to write a manifesto for my school of the future. I want to read some of it to everybody. I’ think the really cool thing is that there can be many people; education, school or teacher, with interest in a project, they all come together, a good community effort. At my school of the future is not inside, but sometimes both at the same time. My school of the future I’m the teacher and the student and we are teachers together. At my school of the future I [inaudible] [1:03:04] with my teams. At my school of the future I know all who are copied in our community. At the school of the future creating practices celebrated and explored. At my school of the future everyone fails, everyone explores and everyone asks the questions they always wanted to ask. At my school of the future my desk is my body, my pencil is my mind. This school of the future, your school of the future can happen anywhere, anytime people come together and learning can happen. This is just a start of some ideas I was putting down.
Cassie: I think we’re also really interested in the history of education and the history of art education and the history of artists and being a site that acknowledges those histories as well as a way to unite all of the artist-run [inaudible] [1:04:19] that are popping up everyone in the city, which there are many.
Chris: I think we’re really excited about the idea of how do we [inaudible] [1:04:36] the School of the Future will hopefully be a way to introduce that idea.
Cassie: I think I’m going to just get this huge block that it’ll give me the art world, the education world and then even a very specific art education world which has its own [inaudible] [1:05:10] that we’re sort of just getting involved with right now.
[1:05:15]
Cassie: [Inaudible] [1:05:15] between those worlds and even if it’s in a small way if we can start to absorb pieces of the conversation from all of those different sides we can come up with some things [inaudible] [1:05:41].
Chris: Yeah
Cassie: I think having relationships with [inaudible] [1:06:07]. I think that teaching for a few years is probably the reason why I still do art and I have an art practice that goes in and out of [inaudible] [1:06:28]
Chris: I think that the flipping [inaudible] [1:06:58] that school is like this kind of binding factor for everybody, everybody has an experience with school and I think it’s a really interesting platform in which to kind of jump off of but also come back. So recently we were giving this presentation at our friend’s project in lower Manhattan and we were kind of like reflecting on our own personal histories of education in school as a way to kind of fill up School of the Future because they were really responding to own experiences of learning and education and what it has been and what could be, what it needs to be.
Cassie: Yeah I feel like school is pretty heavy and everybody has a lot going on with that. There is so much to explore, it’s just a formative time and some that we all share. So I think for some reason there has not been a lot of art that just asks people to talk about it until recently. I think it’s a great conversation to have at the School of the Future.
Diana: This is Diana here in Philadelphia. I was wondering you mentioned divides between different—between the art world, education and art education, teaching artists. It sort of sounds like teaching artists do what progressive educators already do. I’m thinking about this group of publishers called Rethinking Schools and they do some incredible work already in all sorts of fields. So maybe there isn’t such a divide. Can you talk about maybe the ways that there are overlaps in these fields already?
Cassie: There definitely are overlaps of course I just don’t think there’s enough.
Chris: It’s a question of access.
Cassie: Yeah. I mean those overlaps aren’t happening in schools that I’m in.
[1:10:00]
Cassie: I’ve been in so many Department of Education meetings where there is no time or money left for art at all so…
Chris: Yeah I think at the end of the day every student in the United States is required to take a math and a reading exam at the 4th Grade, 8th Grade and High School level. That’s what every school that gets funding from a state or federal entity is worried about and I really think that eats away at opportunities for creative play instead of a lot of disciplines in school. I mean Waldorf Education is amazing, Montessori education is amazing and private schools are great but there is very much a lack I think of those kinds of pedagogies in public schools across the board in the United States. I was just going to bring up School of the Future, it’s an artist run school but it’s opening in July in Bushwick Brooklyn, a section in Brooklyn we are in habit called Hunt for Curriculum right now so if anybody would like to propose a project, any way that they would like to use education or learning or art as a way to interact with the community we are open to many things right now.
Cassie: We’ll be open for 24 hours programming…
Chris: 24/7
Cassie: For that month and the idea also to host a conference or an assembly or congress at the end or somewhat near the end that [inaudible] [1:12:25] for people involved in the education system with the teaching artist and so the conversation to continue and to bounce off of everybody what happened at School of the Future.
Chris: I think really [inaudible] [1:12:58] right now sitting amongst TA members is what is the future of the School of the Future.
Scott: Would this be okay time to ask another question that relates to the future of the School of the Future?
Cassie: Yeah
Michael: Hi this is Michael at Base Camp. I’m curious do you guys—I’d like to hear about sort of what you visualize the School of the Future and the Teaching Artists Union in about 10 to 15 years; 20 years maybe.
Cassie: Well the School of the Future, we’ll see what happens with the first one but I really like the building, the way it’s being constructed is that it can be taken apart into pieces and moved to other sites where it can be rebuilt. Basically what we’re making is pillars that will be able to be repositioned somewhere else and then a new School of the Future can develop from that. I’m not sure, I mean we’re going to work really hard on publishing some stuff that can be used in creating some new models of it but I feel like we have a really, really big process that is the first time that either of us, Chris or I, have [inaudible] [1:14:50] and we don’t know.
[1:15:00]
Cassie: I think that the dream would be to go out of the art world with it, to have some sort of a meeting with some boards of education. But maybe one day there will be a school district in New York that doesn’t have a location, or not a geographical district but it’s actually a school district for artist run schools or a school district for the arts. Somehow there is something, a trace lapped from the process. I really don’t know what it is. Teaching Artists Union I think it’s really important that it remains and continues to grow. I think I’m very wary of how formal the teaching artist position becomes because a lot of what’s so beautiful about it is our freedom and our ability to kind of fall through the cracks of these institutions and have access to all of these people to do all kinds of impractical/practical things that might be regulated. I think the Teaching Artists Union is beautifully underground right now and hopefully it will remain really strong but also kind of stay somewhat under the radar. For me if other Teaching Artists Unions can open around the city I think it’s really important to have a local group of supporters. I think perhaps we could help create at some point a larger network that can pull resources but I can’t really tell I can’t see what’s going to happen yet. This is a really damn good group of people right now. It’s like the moment right now is really good.
Chris: Yeah my dream is really to do some fun research like really things [inaudible] [1:17:52] what kind of learning happens at the School of the Future so that can be published in an academic journal but also can serve as an art keep in itself. Thinking about a deviation between a pre and post survey like ‘how many TAW members did you engage, what kind of things did you learn’ let’s think about a creative way so that we can measure the kinds of learning the Teaching Artists like really involving and bring to the table. That can hopefully progress a conversation about the value of Teaching Artists and art education in general. So I think that can live on indefinitely in many ways; that research and that knowledge that we collect through doing experiments. Was that Michael Bower? Hello Michael!
Michael: Hi.
Scott: That was Greg typing that in.
Greg: Doesn’t it though—it’s like ‘so the School of the Future is the school of today. Join us.’
Chris: There’s actually a really great—well a weird school division in Philadelphia, do you guys know about that?
Greg: No
Chris: It’s run by Microsoft.
Greg: Oh yeah, The Gates Foundation. We all belong to that.
Chris: Are there any questions about School of the Future?
Greg: We do have a question, I’m not sure what it’s about though, hold on.
Hankin: So this is Hankin here at Base Camp in Philly.
[1:20:00]
Hankin: I guess I was just wondering if there was ever and I apologize because I joined late here today so you might have already covered this but I was wondering if there’s a social component to the research that you’ve done or things that you discuss. The reason why…
Chris: You’re asking about social component to research?
Hankin: Yeah let me elaborate. I went to this alternative school from K-8 and there was as large component of it that was focused on the social aspects of the classroom. So there is a lot of focus on communal bonding and group exercises and just the whole structure of it was classes were taught in circles and not at desks. I don’t know I was just kind of wondering if that was a component of what you worked on.
Chris: Well I’m looking to fit in the notion of—this is like an educational term called communities of practice so a community of practice is a group of people who come together kind of like under the—they might be preexisting but somebody is brought into a community practice because they want to learn something. They want access to some sort of expertise so I’m interested in how the community practice is formed. The community practice can be anywhere, it can be a group of teachers out of school, it could be midwives that deliver babies and they talk to each other and share their skills but I think the School of the Future is going to produce a really kind of interesting and unique kind of community practice that will hopefully sustain over time. I think that’s my interest, how can this experiment bolster the teaching artist union, include more people around the community of Bushwick and then stay over time as an autonomous community that’s impactful and helpful to the people that are a part of it. So there’s a number of variables you can measure in terms of retention and formation of communities of practice. I recommend a really cool book by Etienne Wenger and I’ll type it in after I stop talking, but he’s written a lot of books about situated learning and communities of practice so I think those are things that I want to research. And they’re inherently about social dynamics.
Scott: Cool and Stephen had a question. Do you want to go ahead and ask that Stephen? Are you in a place where you can?
Stephen: Can you hear me there?
Scott: Yes
Stephen: Actually I have a bunch of questions but maybe I can kind of make them into one. It seems to me that—I already asked the question of ‘why aren’t you more skeptical about art’ because I feel that there’s a real very strong kind of belief or bias in art and it’s not that I don’t share it but it’s that I think something needs to be really profoundly questioned. So you’ve been ascribing to art this specific status; it could really do something, it could change the world, it has this perception busting capacity that needs to be unleashed on the world but the problem with that is that it kind of gives art this very special status which actually is tantamount to improve much in the world.
[1:25:10]
Stephen: So I’m kind of wondering how you can deal with that because on the other hand you’re also talking about citizenship, you’re talking about equality, so how do you kind of square that equation. Because on one hand you want to make art something which is egalitarian and at the same time you’re holding up art to be something which will never be egalitarian because it has something which has very special privileges and actually it gives artist privileges that other people don’t have in case of just symbolic rights of going to museums at half price and to sort of behave in a way that we’ve grown accustom to see artists behaving which is really quite disgusting and it’s one of the reasons why we want to rethink the whole notion of art worlds where artists wouldn’t behave that way. So have you—it’s kind of a paradox and even maybe a contradiction that I’d like you to address.
Cassie: Sure I guess I’m super skeptical of most art. I think that we’re talking about work that happens with kind of people with the intention of communicating explanations in a specific community that needs a connection to—a new way of connecting with some type of information or skill.
Chris: I think we’ve been talking a lot more about learning and education, the conflict of art which is a very different thing. I don’t think we’ve been talking about art much at all today, it’s been more about education and I think we’re trying to bring to the learning process an artist process and that [inaudible] [1:27:35] I think as necessary or community reform. I think the artist is really [inaudible] [1:27:51] for many different patronages.
Cassie: I guess I have not wanted to identify with artists for most of my life but the times that it’s come in really handy have been when I’ve been outside of art communities. So when I am at a school art kind of does have—the word ‘art’ and idea of art has the ability to melt away a lot of the sort of suffocating rules and bureaucracies. So that is a privilege I’ve been given through art. I think a lot of people use it really well in these contexts that we’re talking about.
Female Speaker: I think art is…
Stephen: It is a problem. It’s a problem to say that someone uses their privilege well, is it not?
Chris: I don’t understand that.
Cassie: I don’t know if it’s a problem.
Stephen: Well people who have privilege tend to say that they use it well. You will find this is almost a universal characteristic of privileged people, they think that they use it well. In so far as they acknowledge the privilege I mean.
[1:30:00]
Stephen: I find this particularly problematic in the case of art because it’s the one thing that seems to go unchallenged in art. Art wants to challenge everybody else’s privilege but not its own.
Cassie: I guess I think it’s a problem with language right now because I actually think that…I think that what’s going on is good. I think there’s a lot of definitively good moments happening and I’m not focusing on the way that I’m describing it because I guess I’m just not really being cautious of my language but I understand what you’re saying. I’m really not sure that I know how to respond to that.
Diana: This is Diana in Philadelphia. I have two comments; maybe one is an answer. I see current art practice, maybe an avant garde practice as being sort of parallel to education and the School of the Future and Teaching Artist Union are kind of examples of that. I mean if you define art as relational aesthetics or about dialogue then you can start to see the parallels between what artists are doing, what you’re doing and education. Then this idea also of privilege; I think can sort of be resolved when we start talking about art that is about social justice and when we bring communities into art it’s about getting at those issues of privilege and the issues of elitism in the art world.
Chris: This is Chris from Philadelphia and I was thinking part of it, from what my perspective, is that when I was younger I went to school for people with learning differences and minimal brain dysfunction. I was thinking maybe it could be possible that if they had one of these kind of schools that it could be with people, instead of having all these labels and everything and then you get to go a special school for this, it could be anybody that could go in there, it could break down barriers in that sort of way. If that will help anybody.
Chris: I think we’re really just trying to play with a lot of different interfaces; art, education, but I think we’re all just kind of all melted together so it’s hard for us to separate all of these vain, classical terminologies that maybe people associate with those words. I think that’s a really cool thing that I think we’re working to right now in terms of a process; what is art, what is education, how do they come together, what are their interceptions and what kind of possibilities do they present for a community in a lot of different context. I think the art for me is about responsibility. If you’re going to be artists I feel like you should know the community that you are [inaudible] [1:34:18], who you are impacting as being an artist and just be cognizant of that. I think we’re trying to do that with the School of the Future in a lot of ways.
Scott: I think there seems to be—in some of the questions and discussions so far there almost seems to be this kind of binary being set up between a celebratory perspective or a kind of optimistic one and a highly critical one.
[1:35:03]
Scott: I don’t know if that’s necessarily really important to thread out, I think the discussion about that is really important but I think one question that I have kind of relates a bit to the critical side. I know a lot of the work that you do Chris and I understand that a lot of what motivates these projects is highly critical of current problems, both in education and art. You guys have mainly focused on the problems in education, not so much in art. In a sense it sort of seems like, tell me if I’m right about this, but it seems like you see art as almost a loophole within education or at least that’s what you’re describing with these practices. You’re not really so much addressing the problems of art per say, you’re just kind of using some sort of status that you get as artists or that you can use as artists to apply to this potentially even more problematic or even more bureaucratic educational system. Do you think that’s true?
Cassie: Yeah I think it’s definitely become a bit of a vehicle to solve problems and I think that a lot of the paradigm of art pedagogy—pedagogy as art relies on the idea of art as a problem solver. So we’re using it but I think the School of the Future is our art project.
Scott: I think the thing is that isn’t one of the problems that artists as problem solvers is one of the primary ways that this really large talent pool gets instrumentalized by every industry in the world. We’re sort of seen as problem solvers and we take that role and generally our initiatives are self-run and low budget and DIY until the point where they actually take off and then either we cash in or someone else appropriates us. So I guess my question is about how these kinds of projects can on one hand raise critical awareness and sort of instigate more ferocious critiques. On the other hand offer some opportunities, some kind of alternatives that don’t necessarily have to kind of drag through the mud of every—critiquing every existing problem, you just kind of side-step a lot of them. I think both of those things are really interesting. What am I ultimately saying? Just that one thing that I’m always conscious of is I guess that potential to be either appropriated or to sort of willingly at some point allow the systems that we’re setting up to just ultimately not be that different from the existing ones. Or have a disillusion yeah. That’s not in the form of a question, but…
Greg: It’s alright, it’s not Jeopardy.
[1:40:02]
Scott: Right it’s not Jeopardy, but I guess I wanted to form it like a question because I was curious what you guys thought about that. Especially seeing how these two projects are both based in New York, both cultural tsunami—this giant cultural vacuum cleaner. I don’t know, this major center with so much gravitational pull and so many creative minds that are there and so many incentives for all of the intangible creative capital that you’re building. Do you know what I mean? I feel like there is a lot of not necessarily danger because—well anyway I feel like there’s a lot of danger to allow critical projects that you set up to either be appropriated or to basically in many ways resemble the things that you’re trying to side-step or overcome in the first place. I was wondering how you guys approach that danger.
Cassie: I think it’s just the mentality that is there is no danger; it’s just those systems that we might be absorbed into. We could also see it the other way and see them as a part of our project that we’re working in the art projects.
Chris: It comes down to also choosing the right people that are sincere in what they’re doing, being cognizant of I think the long term goals we’re all setting for each other, the formation of the community that I think is autonomous. If we can motivate that I think there is a way that it can be the best compilation that can be perceived like you’re saying Scott, that’s maybe not so good.
Cassie: I’m not that really [inaudible] [1:42:51] in the art world itself when it doesn’t reach that side of itself. I mean [inaudible] [1:43:03] solving communities that reach outside of the [inaudible] [1:43:22] art world.
Chris: I think New York City really needs a response right now [inaudible] [1:43:31] and it’s hard I think to break free of that. I think we’re trying to provide places where the communities form and start that are the difference in their current intention. I think that’s what it comes down to, is what is intention of the community or the individual? I think our intentions are pretty sincere and [inaudible] [1:44:08]. I trust that.
Scott: Totally. I have another question I just don’t want to keep jumping on if anybody else has other things they want to…
Chris: [Inaudible] [1:44:36]
Scott: Absolutely. Speaking of the wider community, how do you see School of the Future’s potential to engage with other existing pedagogical projects by other artists?
[1:45:10]
Scott: Can you hear me at all by the way? Sorry can you guys hear me? I think we lost them coincidentally. We’ll add Chris and Cassie again hold on a second. Hey guys. Hey we just wanted to pummel you with some more questions right as the Kung Fu is starting above our heads.
Greg: That’s not actually a joke, it’s true.
Scott: Yeah it’s totally true. But yeah, I was curious, speaking of the wider community, how you see School of the Future’s potential to engage with other existing critical pedagogy projects by other artists and groups. I know that you guys do, at least…
Chris: [inaudible] [1:47:02]
Cassie: We’re also sort of a social community. We’re kind of up to our knees in artist run schools that are happening around us so I feel like a lot of the other teachers, practitioners of participating are already engaged in their own full projects.
Chris: Yeah Cassie made this awesome school flag for other Teaching Artist schools; it’s on the Flicker account.
Scott: Okay yeah, we’ll look for that. Definitely, I know you are, I was just kind of curious if—I think it’s something interesting to discuss and thought it might be good to chat about with you guys. But I also saw your note that you guys are pretty much ready to wrap up soon so we definitely don’t want to keep you on for too long. Michael has a question.
Michael: I’m curious about strategies to bring together all these artist run pedagogical experiments or whether you guys are doing different types of outreach or anything to connect with those groups.
Chris: Michael was asking [inaudible] [1:49:09].
Cassie: The weird part is we know—those are our friends. I feel like there’s a pretty tight group of people here that are all doing projects.
Chris: Yeah we’re going to hopefully think about invitation and having some sort of like maybe big events.
[1:50:00]
Chris: I think it’s just really a question of how much [inaudible] [1:50:05] but I think we’re going to try and of course that’s something that I don’t mind, [inaudible] [1:50:20]. So if people want to add to that I think there’s a lot of [inaudible] [1:50:36] in Portland that’s coming up, there’s going to be some cool people there. We would love to have something at the School of the Future.
Male Speaker: I’m thinking about a lot of activity happening in Los Angeles too like the public school, the mountain school, ASAP. There are all these sort of really interesting experiments where I feel like they’re all sort of like, I don’t know some of them seem to be claiming their own territory but I think it would be wonderful if there is some way to sort of bring some of this activity together.
Joe: This is Joe from Philadelphia and I was just interested in this kind of bringing schools together there’s an artist, Mel Chin, who is working on this project right now that’s fundred.org with this connection with all of these schools that he’s connected with. There are many in Philadelphia, he’s coming here in the middle of April for this big pick-up of all of these fundred dollar bills. It’s like this link of trying to get the schools and education as a base to make a change or make a difference and it’s by rising—how can we raise 300 million dollars to erase the lead problem in New Orleans. It’s like is that possible, well maybe? So you can link to there and you can see all of the schools that he’s connected with and it’s also a really good model of how to get these schools involved. It’s like he’s reaching out to these teachers with the Teachers Union and saying this can happen by developing practices in a way that’s really contemporary, he’s not going to try to make any money off of this project but trying to solve a problem. Will it work? Maybe not, but maybe there’s an opportunity for people to learn in that way.
Scott: Well guys I’m really interested to see how this is going to shape up in New York. I’m wondering if there are any interests in the School of the Future, this particular project. I didn’t really quite get a good sense of how you guys were interested in working with other existing projects beyond the fact that you’re aware and you’re friends with them. I totally understand that, I don’t think it’s a really easy question to answer to be honest.
[1:54:48]
Scott: Also I don’t know that it’s necessarily assumed that you should be working with everybody just because—I was just asking because for one thing I only know you’ve for much a shorter time Cassie, but Chris I know a lot of your work you do work with existing projects and I know that we’re working on something that’s pretty massive that connects with a lot of people as well, that we’ll be talking about next month or so. But I was just curious if this particular project, if there was any real interest to overlap with other existing creative pedagogy projects. Because of their proliferation there is a kind of ground swell of this type of work, I think a lot of people are wondering is it something that will mostly benefit the people involved for the short time that it has that perceived momentum behind it or can we actually seize some of these moments and push past some of the barriers that we actually have in existing art worlds. Because Cassie I know that you guys aren’t really all that interested in working through—like specifically getting stuck in some of the problems of some of the most dominant art worlds but then again when all is said and done as soon certain moments and momentum are over and that does happen, we’re sort of left with whatever structures people put in place. I think that’s what really interests me about what you guys are doing, what a lot of other people are doing is not only are you building an art project that you can put on your resume and not only are you interested in doing some good in the world or something like that too, which is awesome, but you’re also setting up systems that other people can use and you’re co developing certain structures and systems that other people have helped to set up as well. In doing that I think you’re kind of getting beyond some of the competition that you were talking about initially that usually keeps us pretty alienated from one another and usually keeps our ability to use this incredibly massive and almost dangerous potential as a giant group of creative cultural practitioners, it kind of keeps us from doing really awesome things with it. It makes us sort of weak as a giant group and sort of allows us to get used by any interest that’s larger than any one of us, which is a lot. It would be nice, whether we address that more here tonight or whether we follow up with that it would be really awesome to follow up with you guys because I think you guys have a lot to offer and it would be nice if we could actually enter into that conversation together in addition to looking at all of the awesome things that are happening in the moment.
Cassie: Yeah I think it’s really important to show an awareness of all of these other projects and try to—there’s no real need to compete, there are so many issues to deal with, there is so much about everybody super specific location situations they can deal with and all we can do is keeping learning from what they’re already doing and hope to create something interesting enough that they want to contribute.
Chris: Yeah I think it’s something we’ve been aware of from the beginning, before we did the School of the Future. I sent a couple of links to something called the Demonstration District as a project that Cassie and I see as maybe being the future event that station of School of the Future.
[2:00:00]
Chris: And that is again school district of artist run schools. So the idea is to create school district offices around town, who knows but using it to create boards of education that unite all the different projects. So that’s very much already in the works.
Scott: We’re checking out your—the Demonstration District website right now. Thanks so much for taking the time out to join us. I happen to know you guys are involved in a lot of stuff there right now with the trade school and getting things prepared for the design of the School of the Future this Thursday. There is a lot going on so I’m glad that even though you weren’t able to come here in person this week I’m glad that we were still able to connect.
Cassie: Yeah I would love to have a Teaching Artist Union get together in Philly sometime and yeah I’d love to learn what the local situation is there.
Scott: Great. Yeah we could definitely try to connect with people here for sure. I know there are a lot of people that fit that category and I bet a certain percentage of them might be interested to have a conversation about it.
Alright guys well thanks a lot and we’ll just follow up with all of you guys online and see you next week.
Chris: Alright. Thanks Scott, appreciate it.
Scott: Bye guys.
Greg: Thanks guys, bye.
[2:02:34] End of Audio
Week 6 (PART 2?): Teaching Artist Union and School of the Future
[0:00:00]
Speaker 1: And utilized by others for various profit. Are we unwilling collaborators or uninformed collaborators in the system?
Speaker 2: I think that’s what you were touching on.
Speaker 1: Yes, technique plays into the thesis.
Scott: Absolutely and what you were talking about—well what everyone’s talking about right now is one of the main issues that we take often with artists’ social practice and so called public art. Especially when it leads toward the celebratory often it’s just a very easy and convenient way for local and governments or states to not give funding to social programs that actually need it and just sort of use the amazing low-paid or even unpaid like PR abilities of artists and just kind of say ‘hey aren’t we doing such a great job as a state?’ Or as a city or as whatever it is, ‘isn’t this so amazing’ when in fact ‘no not really.’ It’s just a very incredibly tiny amount of money and resources that are going towards this. It’s like ‘hey these artists are really going to give us a good sell and we actually can even do less.’ So I mean it seems really similar to what you said about schools. It felt like that happens with Social Services and so-called Public Works, I’m sorry…
Speaker 1: This is something George used to rant about, artists raising funds and getting perks. Healthcare issues all the time.
Scott: Yeah. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to completely be just a negative-Nancy about this and all peoples’ attempts to do something in the world are nullified because we’re actually spending our time trying to do something to change our circumstances or the world around us, but on the other hand I feel like artists have a particular responsibility—well…
Speaker 1: Artists I think differ from [inaudible] [0:03:19] that would be interesting, the difference between design thinking and art practice. Where design is inherently totalitarian, its goal is to be gratuitous and art is very often the instrumental, it’s the thing attempted to [inaudible] [0:03:42] and it’s resistant to that. I mean art is inherently resistant to usefulness.
Scott: Well I think you and Stephen should definitely have a conversation about this.
Speaker 2: That’s the real challenge, people are unaware that education is happening, art education where I’m teaching students still demand that there be skills and particle aspect to—something I stress more experimentation, they want ‘how do I make good versus bad so I can make money?’ I think that ties them to the sort of what you’re talking about, sort of creation of the creative skills.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of what Cassie was saying early on about how the education system hasn’t prepared students for varies outcomes based learning, ‘we want to learn how to do X because it’ll be on test.’
[0:05:00]
Speaker 3: Those students who wash up on your shore want to learn how to make this versus that. So I mean…
Speaker 2: The one thing I would’ve liked to have asked, but I think it was just sort of off topic, which was it seems to me that the alternative practice of being a teaching artist as she said, if in direct sort of suspicion of an artist who is a teacher had for instance a college or high school, I don’t necessarily get that sense from a public school, but from some of the sort of alternative educational models, it’s in there. I think what you were saying Scott, setting up the binary which is we are outside the institution and anybody inside the institution is corrupt, perpetuating the process which you paid $40,000 a year for education. But I feel like that’s missing a lot of the stuff working inside the system. I don’t know that sort of not being a negative-Nancy that sometimes you can do more good than necessarily hang your head against it. When you talk about all these things that you catch on, what if there’s a real tie into this? Why don’t you sort of work from the inside, read some of this material, ideas, process?
Female Speaker 1: A lot of this is also cultural, there’s an acquired need figuring out what you already do well. Like teaching to a test, that’s important for students.
Speaker 2: Yeah for some things that is very important.
Female Speaker 1: But you’re almost doing students a disservice if you don’t do that because they’ll probably study it that way. So how do we combine it to a necessity [inaudible] [0:07:57]. So I wonder when we [inaudible] [0:08:07] racially, like working outside of the system, what does that mean, who are these people working outside of the system versus the people who are in the system, how do we insert here?
Female Speaker 2: Me personally, I don’t care if [inaudible] [0:08:33], as long as they learn how to think. I don’t care if they think that everybody at the White House is paid in cream or whatever, as long as they know how to think about the whole situation.
Scott: Well one thing that we keep stressing every single week here just because we sort of started out this year with the example of the public school as the project that Michael had mentioned and a lot of what these forms are on the wall for the few of you guys who haven’t been here during the previous weeks this year yet, part of our goal is to work with the LA branch to start a Philadelphia Public School and I guess that’s already happened in the form of, I don’t know, how many—I’m thinking it’s like approximately 2 dozen class proposals.
[0:10:00]
Scott: There are more than we had initially printed up there for the Philly branch as well. One of the things that could actually be helpful for is actually following up with us and anyone else locally and also potentially people who aren’t local. It’s sort of set up on a city by city basis at this point. I think even though we’re the only people that—I think we’re the only branch that has sent them sort of multi-city classes but still I think it’s probably largely going to happen locally just because of the way it’s set up. Anyway that would be a good way to continue to connect. Some of the things that have—various questions that have come up could become course proposals. I think tonight Michael made at least one proposal I saw, maybe. Anyway, if you guys are interested in that at all it’s easy to do it online but we printed out a bunch of forms to make it a lot easier for everybody to not have to remember where to go and what to do. So if you would like them I’ll give you some of them. We can even talk about them here. I don’t know what you guys think about this but the framework of being able to propose any kind of class for anything and then being able to express interest in a class, any existing class is a kind of like open ended structure that really doesn’t exactly resemble a university in any way or even a more structured free school. It’s actually just kind of—anyway without getting into the reasons behind it, it’s really just sort of drawing from a generic idea of a class to a course to just give some kind of space to different desires that we have and interests. To just give you an example one of the courses that were proposed last week by one of the artists of residence here was how to pick locks. The reason for that is that our lock actually seized up on us, the front door and they actually had to take it apart just to get out which was pretty messed up so we got a new one. We happen to have this lock that’s laying around now that kind of periodically seizes up so Halps thought ‘I’d really like to lock pick’ so he proposed that class and a bunch of people have already signed up for it. He has no idea how to pick locks yet so he’s trying to figure it out. But then some of the courses are much more in depth with a lot of resources and that probably the people that get into them will only get into them because they’re super engaged with that subject and they’ll be much more self-selective.
[0:15:08]
Scott: Anyway I just wanted to let you guys know about that. I may not be describing it the best way.
Speaker 1: I’m going to be trying to get sort of a core group of people together to help facilitate classes. They call it DAN, which is an acronym. What is it called?
Speaker 2: I don’t know, I thought it was Distributed Artist Network but that’s not it.
Scott: I have no idea, actually I think the Philadelphia—basically the city by city committee is just called D-A-N and I don’t think it stands for anything actually.
Speaker 1: Yeah it’s just made up; it’s essentially a core group of people that are helping to make these classes happen. So next coming month or so we’re going to be trying to develop a group who would be interested in helping to facilitate some activity here.
Scott: Yeah so if any of you guys are interested let us know.
Oh that’s you Joe. Hey we had an email exchange briefly.
Joe: Yeah it would be great to get together and just sit down and talk about…
Scott: Oh cool.
Joe: Things like that.
Scott: Absolutely yeah
Joe: Just this kind of idea
[0:17:34] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$6eacdf357caaebd4" title="#basekamp/$6eacdf357caaebd4">Teaching Artist Union and School of the Future http://bit.ly/bxh0nd (#basekamp/$6eacdf357caaebd4)
Created on 2010-02-11 08:52:45.
- BASEKAMP team: 17:48:11
- http://www.skype.com/go/joinpublicchat?skypename=basekamp&topic=Teaching...
- BASEKAMP team: 17:49:24
- hello world
- BASEKAMP team: 17:56:24
- hello chris
- Christopher Kennedy: 17:56:36
- hello
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 17:56:51
- hi
- BASEKAMP team: 17:57:11
- hey hey hey
- Christopher Kennedy: 17:57:27
- hello everyone
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:24
- hey everyone we'll get started soon, just finishing up w/ tech here in the space
- BASEKAMP team: 18:04:50
- ok looking good here...
- Brett Bloom: 18:10:35
- yep
- Matthew Slaats: 18:11:48
- Did the line just drop out?
- stephen wright: 18:12:07
- 18 inches?
- Brett Bloom: 18:12:39
- audio just got dropped
- stephen wright: 18:12:42
- lost
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:17
- ugh! hang tight gang
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:20
- audio gone
- BASEKAMP team: 18:14:03
- working on reconnecting gang sorry
- stephen wright: 18:14:10
- man, it sounds like you're vomiting
- stephen wright: 18:14:22
- are you okay?
- Brett Bloom: 18:14:34
- chris and cassie are really space aliens
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:15:03
- does it sound weird on our end?
- stephen wright: 18:15:14
- it doesn't sound
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:22
- ok, internet cut
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:30
- callign back now
- atrowbri: 18:16:19
- greg, we find your voice SMOOTH
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:44
- just a friendly reminder that while Chris & Cassie are talking could you please mute your mics, many thx
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:05
- you mean smoove?
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:17:37
- www.teachingartistunion.org
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:45
- BTW, we've muted our audio --- everyone please mute until you want to speak -- thanks!
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:18:34
- teaching artist?
- stephen wright: 18:18:36
- Nope
- stephen wright: 18:18:38
- not yet
- atrowbri: 18:19:54
- I''ve never heard it
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:09
- can you identify yourself before talking, thx
- stephen wright: 18:20:23
- This is a NYC thing?
- stephen wright: 18:20:40
- Sorry, don't live there.
- Brett Bloom: 18:20:55
- there is a similar org in Chicago
- Matthew Slaats: 18:21:02
- Definitely, I've only seen the word used in NY.
- atrowbri: 18:21:23
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_artist
- atrowbri: 18:21:29
- and on wikipedia
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:21:57
- http://www.teachingartists.com/
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:22:20
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/schoolofthefuture/4341520517/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:03
- hi Aryon
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:12
- want to be added to the audio ?
- Aryon Hoselton: 18:23:14
- perfect!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:23
- i think we had the wrong skypename
- Aryon Hoselton: 18:23:26
- please! i have been so excited about this talk!
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:24:49
- http://teachingartistunion.org/Documents/PROJECTS/PRAXIS/Institute%20for...
- stephen wright: 18:25:11
- why should teachers and students get discounts?
- atrowbri: 18:25:34
- the link doesnt seem to work Chris
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:26:19
- http://www.artandwork.us/2009/11/teaching-artist-union-card/
- BASEKAMP team: 18:26:45
- again can you please identify yourselves before you talk, just so everyone knows who is who thanls
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:31:47
- nyc.thepublicschool.org
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:04
- Is there a difference between traching artists and artists who teach?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:32:11
- oops teaching
- BASEKAMP team: 18:33:46
- we're all here!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:34:17
- I seem to have lost audio connection
- atrowbri: 18:35:17
- it's cutting in and out here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:00
- or an Art Teacher?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:37:21
- david g, you're back in the call right?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:37:29
- yes thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:33
- also links to projects?
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:39:00
- http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/projects
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:39:34
- thank you
- Matthew Slaats: 18:40:55
- I kind of feel that teaching is a part of being an artist. Aren't we always trying to inform people about our practice, teaching them about ways of experiencing. Isn't that what teachers do every day in classes?
- Matthew Slaats: 18:41:30
- Good question?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:07
- uh oh...
- stephen wright: 18:42:30
- lost you
- Matthew Slaats: 18:43:31
- I'd be curious to hear about the relationship to the real teachers union? My guess is that the teaching artist union isn't beheld to standards, which gives them the freedom to pursue new ways of engagement.
- stephen wright: 18:43:33
- no sound
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 18:43:45
- yes
- Colin Hart: 18:43:46
- i can hear
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:43:57
- its ok now
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 18:44:07
- its cutting out now
- Matthew Slaats: 18:44:10
- I was bounced off the call.
- atrowbri: 18:45:00
- operator, we have been disconnected
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:45:05
- the audio has been cut off
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:45:10
- eek
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:56
- w00t!
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:24
- anyone still left out of the call?
- Brett Bloom: 18:47:32
- yep
- Colin Hart: 18:47:55
- here
- Colin Hart: 18:47:59
- as well
- Brett Bloom: 18:48:01
- thanks
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:48:17
- how would you define an artist in the first place?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:19
- brett, cassie was just answering the question that Gerard asked
- Brett Bloom: 18:48:28
- ok. thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:39
- "what do artists bring to pedagody?"
- BASEKAMP team: 18:48:42
- paraphrased
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:49:04
- what has metaphysics got to do with anything?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:12
- what are artists' competencies - what do we "know"?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:35
- and how does that translate to autonomouse knowledge production?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:50
- Diana has a Q here
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:55
- btw...
- Matthew Slaats: 18:50:27
- Do you guys know about the Institute of Play?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:50:29
- also henken has a Question here too
- atrowbri: 18:52:31
- Are you guys familiar with Albert Cullum? http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/touchofgreatness/teacher.html
- stephen wright: 18:53:13
- You guys really seem to believe in art! Like it could change the world. Isn't that pretty 20th century?
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:53:30
- www.schoolofthefuture.org
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:53:54
- Thats what i sense
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:54:35
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/schoolofthefuture/4341523373/
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:54:44
- that there is a danger of conveying the same errors and problems presented by Beuys
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:55:15
- http://schoolofthefuture.org/index.php?/site-sgt-doug/video-of-the-park/
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:55:51
- What happens if there is no such thing as the artist?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:56:11
- A Q from someone here: "How important is the process vs product of teaching artists?"
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:56:36
- process is key!
- stephen wright: 18:56:37
- In what way is it the school of the future? Rather than the school of the past? Not in terms of the status of the artist which you seem to endorse?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 18:58:30
- so art becomes even more totalising than it already is?
- stephen wright: 18:59:09
- "art as a vehicle to learn everything else." that's a pretty strong statement.
- stephen wright: 19:00:05
- Why aren't you more sceptical about art?
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 19:00:19
- Is it/how is it different than a simple "hands on" learning technique
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:00:21
- art world vs. education world vs. art education world
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:02:32
- school is the joke everyone gets
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:08:26
- http://schoolofthefuture.org/demonstrationdistrict/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:21
- So then really, the SotF is the school of today?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:10:30
- sounds like a Scientology hook
- stephen wright: 19:11:35
- how is one to acknowledge the specifity of art without implicitly according it a special status, a special privilege?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:11:52
- Isnt the idea of any teaching of art to question the very basis & foundations of art rather than perpetuate its myths?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:06
- So after Henken's question -- stephen has a question next in queue
- BASEKAMP team: 19:12:39
- then David G has a Q after that...
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:14:40
- communities of practice - etienne wegner
- stephen wright: 19:18:13
- All artists say that!
- stephen wright: 19:22:55
- More broadly, do you see that teaching-art is a new paradigm of art-doing?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:23:03
- There is a problem at the moment with the consolidation of bourgeoise culture and this conversation seems to perpetuate this dilema
- stephen wright: 19:23:18
- What some people have called the "pedagogical turn" in art doing?
- George W. Johnson: 19:23:19
- without art there is no education.!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:30:01
- Adam are you still with us? What do your students think? Any ?s from them?
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:31:27
- the sound is breaking up
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:31:43
- yes
- George W. Johnson: 19:31:43
- yes!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:45
- uh oh
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:31:52
- no
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:53
- working on it
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:32:12
- i think were ready to wrap things up here -
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:33:08
- http://schoolofthefuture.org/demonstrationdistrict/
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:34:14
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilarchitexture/4141511497/
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:34:56
- www.bhqfu.org
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:25
- we're looking @ your flag now
- BASEKAMP team: 19:35:42
- link to wiki?
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:36:07
- http://schoolofthefuture.org/index.php?/artist-run-school-database/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:12
- http://www.fundred.org/
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:49
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV71FeUgFjk
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:35
- Thanks all!!!
- stephen wright: 19:44:38
- Thanks so much!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:45
- Thanks Chris & Cassie!!!
- stephen wright: 19:44:53
- Teaching artists of the world unite!
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:45:14
- ok thank so much
- choenbc" title="schoenbc">schoenbc: 19:45:31
- thanks
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:45:37
- yep
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:46:16
- the sound is gone
- ost-autonomy" title="post-autonomy">post-autonomy: 19:46:43
- so maybe this is a good time to say good night
2010-02-09
Week 1: The Public School and AAAARG.org
Hi everyone,
This Tuesday is the first evening in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 focusing on examples of Plausible Artworlds, culminating in an online and printed publication in 2011. Let’s get started!
This week we’ll be talking with folks from The Public School and AAAARG.ORG. This is a rare opportunity to get people who have been involved in organizing, theorizing, participating in (or newly interested in) these projects to convene online for a couple hours in a public and open setting.
Accompanying this conversation will also be a hands-on public event to officially launch The Public School in Philadelphia, with a history of past “courses”, and plenty of room to propose new ones. Please come and join us!
AAAARG.ORG is an online research and education library integrated with The Public School – initiated by Sean Dockray with Fiona Whitton as a project for TELIC Arts Exchange at the end of 2007. The Public School is a school with no curriculum, located underneath TELIC Arts Exchange. The Public School is an open structure, or maybe a stage, on which ideas about school perform new realities. To put it another way, The Public School is invested in the idea of public space – not in the sense of state-controlled plots of land, but rather in the sense of spaces for the political.
Transcription
Week 1: The Public School and AAAAARG.org
[0:00:00]
[Background Noise]
Male 1: Great. So hey, Sean, so how are you guys doing? And everyone? Welcome to our little chat.
Male 2: [0:00:18] [Inaudible] and also Sarah [0:00:23] [Inaudible]from L.A. [0:00:28] [Inaudible]
Female 1: Well, I for one I’m good.
Male 2: [0:00:51] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Hey, Sean. Yeah, basically we wanted to invite you guys here to talk about the public school and AAAARG.org. So specifically I had a slightly introduction plan. Basically for and maybe Sean if you don’t mind, you could help fill in the gaps a little bit. We have – is he there? Okay. Great. We have a description of a public school and AAAARG on our website right now.
And I guess I’m not sure how this is for you. Let me know if you think that this is kind of wrong, but I’ll just describe the public school super brief and you super briefly and then maybe you can correct me where maybe I’m wrong or sort of fill in the gaps a little bit. And then we can talk a little bit more about that. Does that sound okay?
[Background Noise]
Male 2: Sure.
Male 1: Cool. I think we just first want to make sure that everybody can hear each other. You know what I mean? And actually, so we don’t have to keep repeating this over and over. –
Male 3: [0:02:04] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Oh. How’s the microphone level on our side for you guys? Can you hear us okay? Or do we sound really low volume?
Male 2: We can hear you Scott.
[Cross-talk]
Male 1: Cool. Okay. Great.
Male 2: [0:02:27] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Okay. Well, it’s a pretty sensitive mike. So shouldn’t make a huge difference whether or not …
Male 3: I’m just gonna [0:02:39] [Inaudible]. Just to make sure.
Male 1: Okay, great. Just let us know if we need to turn it down because we can’t hear ourselves ever on your side.
Male 2: You get this thing on this level. [Background Noise].
Male 1: Okay. Great. I think I was messing with that [Background Noise]
Male 2: [0:02:54] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah. So, Sean and everyone, hi. I just wanted to describe the public school briefly. If you don’t know about it, the public school is among the range of practices that we’re looking at as part of the Plausible Artworld's project.
We’re not really going to introduce the entire Plausible Artworld’s project right now. We want to jump right into a number of examples once per week for a year. And maybe over time we can talk a little bit more about the project.
But for the moment we just want to talk about each of these examples of things that we are seeing as a kind of Artworld and of itself that differs in some substantial way or in some meaningful way from dominant models of what – I guess what many people refer to as the Artworld.
And we’re trying over time to look at what these kinds of creative [0:04:06] [Inaudible] like these creative culture ecosystems are. We’re looking at each various sections or various kinds of our worlds. And the public school and AAAARG kind of fall into what we’re looking at as autonomous information production.
It’s a range of practices where people are creating there in schools. They’re questioning education, I guess various education models. And so I think like distributing information ways that are not necessarily thru mainstream channels or top-down. But really there are so many different examples that it’s very difficult to summarize. I’m almost tripping at my tongue trying to do that.
[0:05:00]
I’m gonna stop and just talk a little bit about this one example. The public school really –if I’m getting this right, Sean, I’m just gonna get from [0:05:11] [Inaudible]. It started out as a project in the basement of Telic Arts Exchange in L.A. And it was something that Sean And Fiona started as a project.
It was open for other people to be involved with and sounds like over a period of about of a few years, it grew in involvement to the point where it required project space of its won. So maybe again, Sean, stop me if I’m wrong here. Are you still there, by the way?
Male 2: Some [0:05:51] [Inaudible] it happened.. But yeah –
Male 1: Okay. Awesome. Okay. So, anyway, the project moved to its own space and Sean [0:05:59] [Inaudible] in L.A. and since been it’s actually been in the basement in a building in an alley behind Chung King Road. Basically if I’m right about that. I may be describing a kind of replay but basically people have been proposing classes or any kind, expressing interest in any existing class.
And essentially once enough people expresses enough interest in a class, then the class staff organizes. That’s how it works. Just so you know, Sean, on the walls of basekamp, we didn’t even get finished with this because we realized we’re gonna run out of space.
So, we have about half of all of the classes that proposed in L.A., probably about 250 of them on the wall. We also have all the proposals from all the other public schools for far up on the various walls of somewhere around the corner guys. And also here and there throughout tonight, it’d be real great just to kind of let anyone know in case.
I’m not sure what your schedule is if you’re going to leave early. But you might want to sort of cruise around this. I want to let you know that our goal for tonight was both to talk with these guys about how the Public School got started a little bit more about what it’s like, in a way what makes it an [0:07:29] [Inaudible]in itself.
And at the same time, launch the Public School in Philadelphia There are a number of people who have been working on this already. One of the ways we can do this is any one of us here can express interest in any of these courses that have happened in the past express interest in them happening again in affiliate.
And all you need to do is just check a little box that got interested in and write your name, phone number, you know, whatever it is and we’ll help get that started. We also have a bunch of light forms to write down new course proposal ideas over on the table. So we can do that at any point. I just want to say that right at the very beginning. So, Sean, that’s much of an intro, but I hope it gives [0:08:18] [Inaudible]. Oops. Can you hear me okay?
Male 2: Yeah. I just take in this [0:08:29] [Inaudible]
Male 1: That’s okay. Yeah, right on. So anyway, that wasn’t much of an introduction but it does give hopefully people here some sense of – that might now know what you do – some sense of what we’re gonna do here tonight. And maybe you can fill in the blanks a little bit more about how you guys got started. Again, I hope you don’t mind, how that’s leading to what you’re doing now.
[Cross-talk]
Male 2: [0:09:14] [Inaudible]
Male 1: I was just asking if you wouldn’t mind telling us how the Public School got started Sean and maybe how that kind of led to where it’s at now. I think most of us here might not be that familiar with Public School. And it would be nice to fold it at some point where AAAARG falls in.
Male 2: [0:09:42] [Inaudible]
[0:10:17]
Female 1: Yeah.
Male 1: Yep.
Male 2: [0:10:21] [Inaudible] we did a lot of observations [0:10:26] [Inaudible]. And I think the program came [0:10:38] [Inaudible]. We started Public School. [0:11:06] [Inaudible] basement. And I sort of fantasized that there’d be this like really interesting dialogue [0:11:16] [Inaudible] and the school program. And I think [0:11:21] [Inaudible].
Male 1: We’ll try to add that Sean.
Male 2: [0:13:14] [Inaudible]. We should keep up with that. So we decided [0:13:41] [Inaudible].
[0:16:28]
Male 1: Hey, man. So it’s actually really – I actually thought the Public School is a little bit older than that maybe because AAAARG is a little bit older.
Male 3: Sounds like audio’s [0:16:46] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Sean, can you hear us okay? Can you hear me okay?
Male 2: I can hear you crystal clear.
Male 1: Oh, okay. Good, good. I wasn’t sure.
Male 3: He just said no [Laughter].
Male 1: Could you tell us a little bit about how AAAARG got started? I’m going to pull that up here a little bit and maybe how that works with the Public School in particular?
Male 2: Yeah. So especially [0:17:25] [Inaudible] AAARG.org. [0:17:48] [Inaudible]. And [0:17:52] [Inaudible] [Laughter] [0:21:37] [Inaudible]
[0:21:40]
Male 1: Yeah. Are you imagining all of our shouting faces in the window shade? You got –
Male 2: [0:21:47] [Inaudible]
Male 1: I think [0:21:51] [ Allan More] just joined us.
Male 2: Cool. [0:22:03] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Oh. Yeah. By the way, if any of you guys have any thoughts or questions. I know that the technology has been a little bit of a hurdle but I hopefully that doesn’t really get in your way. Feel free to let us know or go ahead and just talk and ask and it’s totally fine.
Sean, I wonder if there a few questions that Jessica added earlier but I feel you addressed some of them [0:22:38] [Inaudible] locations? Do you want to talk a little bit more about how the locations work, about school locations? It might be a good thing to think about for us because we’re beginning to work with a public school in Philadelphia.
Male 2: Sure. [0:22:55] [Inaudible]
Male1: I don’t know if anybody is from [0:22:59] [Inaudible]right now. Lawrence was hoping to get on but we’ll see.
Male 2: Well, [0:23:09] [Inaudible]Adam can probably [0:23:12] [Inaudible] about that since he’s been a lot more L.A. involved and he spend so much time in L.A. and I was [0:23:24] [Inaudible] in New York for quite a while and also [0:23:30] [Inaudible].
Male 4: Can you hear me at all?
Male 1: Yes.
Male 2: [0:23:59] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah, we can hear you well. [Background Noise][Phone Rings]. BY the way we’re just calling an Allan Morris. Don’t let that [0:24:13] [Inaudible] people periodically.
Male 2: Actually [0:24:19] [Inaudible]the first [0:24:23] [Inaudible].
Male 4: Oh, yeah. When I was in L.A. and Michael Bowers and [0:24:32] [Philly]
[Background Noise]
Female 1: Yeah.
[Laughter]
Male 1: Awesome.
Female 1: [0:24:49] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Did Adam drop out?
Male 2: Yeah. He said something about [0:25:00] [Inaudible]
[0:25:01]
Male 1: This is a funny format. Sometimes it works more smoothly than others. Let me try it again. Yeah. Is Adam’s out there great or …?
[Background Noise]
Male 2: [0:25:31] [I’ll just tell him].
Male 1: Okay. Sure. Let’s see. Would it be helpful for you guys to have somebody tell you what has been written there? Can you help [0:25:54] [Inaudible]. I may be have to say it and say –
Male 2: [0:25:58] [Inaudible] Adam’s saying.
Male 1: Oh, thanks Sean.
Male 2: [0:26:04] [Inaudible]Oh, you really wanna be involved in my class. [0:26:37] [Inaudible] I’m kind of [0:26:43] [Inaudible]. From the beginning, [0:27:53] [Inaudible] as both setting up a framework for Los Angeles for people [0:28:03] [Inaudible]. I dunno. But anyway, I’ve been performing [0:29:26.] [Inaudible]In terms of [0:29:34] [Inaudible] [Cross-talk]
Child 1: [0:29:39] [Inaudible]
Male 2: Oh, who’s that?
Child 1: [0:29:48] [Inaudible]
Female 1: [0:29:53] [Inaudible]
[0:30:00]
[Background Noise]
Male 2: [0:30:06] [Inaudible] I can’t really [0:30:55] [Inaudible] much more than that. [0:30:58] [Inaudible] locations are really autonomous and in a sense that [0:31:06] [Inaudible] basically [0:31:07] [Inaudible]. Learn Microsoft Word. [0:31:31] [Inaudible] for $250 a session and whatever. You know, [0:31:36] [Inaudible] more locations. There is a larger conversation on board. I dunno [0:32:03] [Inaudible].
Male 1: Yeah.
Male 2: Sorry. I [0:32:29] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah did you see Adam’s –
Male 2: [0:32:39] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah, did you see Adam’s comment? I’m kind of curious what he means. Do you know?
Male 2: Ah yeah. I know exactly what he means.
Male 1: Care to share? [Laughter]. I’m just curious. I’m wondering like –
Male 2: Well …
Male 1: I’m wondering if you guys [Cross-talk]. Okay.
Male 2: So this fall, we [0:33:10] [Inaudible] at the expense of our school here in L.A. and so we sort of explained the ways of doing it and I think [0:35:19] [Inaudible]. So here she sort of the first time he proposed is a way of people who are [0:35:28] [Inaudible].
[0:35:51]
Male 1: Cool. Yeah. You heard my little starter for a second. I just wanted to ask you. I dunno if you take your [0:35:59] [Inaudible] but yeah, Valentina is still here. And also Adam’s asking , asked a question a couple of people are curious about this basically whether they become some kind of a tipping point of a breaking point or whatever in the different schools, either kind of grow their own sort of legs and can become self sufficient and stable or they just kind of implode.
Male 2: I don’t even know but one of our goals is [0:36:34] [Inaudible] self sufficient and not like and I don’t know if we really have that [0:36:41] [Inaudible]. I’m not exactly sure. I think self-sufficiency is really a different thing and in a different context in different people. So [0:37:03] [Inaudible].
Male 1: Yeah. I was curious.
Male 2: [0:37:10] [Inaudible] But I think [0:37:15] [Inaudible] the transition from the Public School for Architecture in New York [0:37:25] [Inaudible] something new and [0:37:36] [Inaudible]. Adam?
Male 4: It wasn’t so much about what individuals [0:38:04] [Inaudible] say self-sufficient even if [0:38:07] [Inaudible] organization sense or [0:38:10] [Inaudible]. But [0:38:11] [Inaudible] unnecessary complication to [0:38:44] [Inaudible]. [Background Noise]. Did that make sense or not?
Male 2: Are you asking [0:39:01] [inaudible]
Male 4: I mean it’s not something --
Male 2: [0:39:05] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Yeah, go ahead Adam.
Male 4: It’s really difficult for me. [0:39:18] [Inaudible]. I guess it’s [0:39:22] [Inaudible].
[0:40:00]
[Background Noise]
Male 1: [0:40:04] [Inaudible] That’s really a question for Shaun right?
Male 4: [0:40:06] [Inaudible] One of the question that’s come up you know, [0:40:12] [Inaudible] as the Public School in New York [0:40:17] [Inaudible] considering. It’s gonna be your transition out of this three month period [0:40:24] [Inaudible]. We also had conversations that haven’t been – the arts [0:40:36] [Inaudible].
Male 1: Yeah, we hear you. We just muted the button because I think the [0:40:41] [Inaudible] I can’t give you guys some audio trouble so we’ll just unmute when we have something.
Male 4: Okay.
Male 1: Does that sound good? It’s more like – it might sound a little loud to you while we’re talking and that –
Male 4: Yeah, that sounds fine.
Male 1: Yeah. Just let us know. You’re not cutting off. It’s just we’re just muting it temporarily.
Male 4: Okay. [Cross-talk] [0:41:00] [Inaudible] It’s another question for Sean, but it’s not specifically for Sean. One of the issues it seems to come up as [0:41:14] [Inaudible] conversation about this school in New York and also hearing from Sean [0:41:24] [Inaudible] is I guess within the opportunity for the schools to act outside of an Artworld.
If that’s an objective. seems to me to hinge on the network [0:41:45] [Inaudible]. Is the idea this operate outside of the existing Artworld? Is this for particularly a community in Philadelphia. [0:42:20] [Inaudible] to the other potential communities along this network [0:42:25] [Inaudible].
Male 1: That’s a good question. To be honest I really don’t know how to answer that. I think all we really have to go on is how the other schools have shaped up so far. I mean, honestly we really don’t even know what kind of interest there will be [0:42:54] [Inaudible] at all? I know that there are a number of – I mean, just to localize the – sorry. Just to let you guys know, we are getting like call request like almost every other few minutes the least, but yeah?
Male 2: With [0:43:16] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Honestly, we don’t really know, I mean, so far there haven’t – oh, the class proposal so far in [0:43:28] [Inaudible]. I dunno. I don’t know.
Male 3: We have five.
Male 1: I there would be five. Yeah, five class proposals so far. It’s a little bit different than L.A. for example which I think has something like 350 plus proposals. But then again, currently anybody in Philly knows about this project yet, about this opportunity or whatever it is that’s interface. So I don’t know if it’s a really good – I don’t really know if it’s any kind of measure at all.
Male 2: Well than maybe the need to question is how did people find out about the Public School in Philadelphia? Is it something that you promote [0:44:08] [Inaudible]
Male 1: To be honest, it hasn’t been publicly announced until we announced the January Pala Chats like a few weeks ago. And we only really – our plan is to send out more detailed information about each Tuesday night chat every weekend which we did this weekend the first one. And we’ll plan to keep doing that.
So anyway, my point is, people haven’t actually received any detailed information unless they happen to have browsed the events on the basekamp website until this Sunday, this weekend. So, I think only the people that are already in connection with the other public schools, and there are a few that I would say that probably maybe –
[0:45:02]
I mean people that are aware of the public school affiliate are probably people that are already aware of the public schools in other cities because there’s already the link to affiliate the website. That’s been on there for quite a while although the activity’s been low.
But the activity’s been low because we haven’t actually done any work on our end to start it. We’ve been doing other things. So now, even though we haven’t started yet, that might – yeah.
Female 1: Yeah. I think I might say it segregate nicely into maybe how – I apologize if you already covered this but kind of how you got it up and running in L.A. and how you publicized it and maybe you can speak a little bit about that.
Male 1: Yeah. Exactly that might be good because we’re really just about to start it. I think that’d probably be a quicker way to say that.
Male 3: But not to say that we haven’t done anything. We’ve got about 20 people in the space and a stack of green Philadelphia school, sorry class signup sheets over on the table there. So we might have 25 at the end of the year. That’s exponential, probably.
Male 2: [0:46:02] [Inaudible] at least25?
Female 1: [0:46:04] [but is it possible we’re not accepted to the public schools]?
Male 1: Well, yeah. Okay. Just to clarify that, I think it can be mildly confusing because what Plausible Artworld’s is really, and guys I don’t know how many of you heard that question? But, someone just asked what’s the relationship between Plausible Artworld’s and the Public School is. And I’m just gonna clarify that real quick, okay?
Male 2: Is it the Public School or Public School System were you asking? Okay.
Male 1: Yeah, the Public School.
Female 1: I think that’s really probably a question that a lot of people have right. I mean we gave a little bit of description at the very beginning but yeah, why don’t we let Scott sort of give his little feel with the Public School right now.
Male 1: To keep it simple, basically, Plausible Artworlds is really a project that it’s an [0:47:10] [Inaudible] It’s something that’s been going on for a little while. We really just get to think about it as an art project, I guess.
A project that includes that like sticks to link up with other for a lack of a better term, Alternative Artworlds that we either know about or people that we know of know about of hopefully examples of interesting diversion Artworld’s that we don’t know about yet. And the Public School is one of those examples.
So our goal for this year, this is a project that was started some years ago. There’d been a number of collaborators this year is being co organized by basekamp and the writer Steven Right who I hope is on this call, at least was on earlier who lives and works in Paris. And anyway, there’d been a number of people who have really contributed to this project though as well.
In any case, the goal for this year is to focus – you know, we’ve been doing these weekly discussions that have been very informal . And this is also relatively informal but our goal for this year is to focus the whole year of our weekly Potluck Skype chats on Plausible Artworlds. The project Plausible Artworlds but also, specific example of what we’re describing as Plausible Artworld’s.
There are Artworld’s that are in some cases flagellant Artworld’s. You know that name is really giving up and running. And we’re only calling them Artworld’s because at least the way Artworld’s are understood from a sociological perspective and from – okay [0:49:06] [Inaudible]. These various examples of cultural activity qualify as Artworld’s themselves.
And we’re really looking at – we’re calling them Plausible because we see them as having on one hand is having potentiality work plausibility that are [0:49:24] [Inaudible] . And on the other hand that we can call them Plausible because they only arguably are really viable.
And we’re really not determining the validity of them. We’re just kind of looking at the different examples of Artworld. So trying to focus on Artworld’s that are different in structure in some way.
Female 1: So Public Schools is one of these [cross-talk]
Male 1: The Public School is an example.
Female 1: [0:49:50] [Inaudible] Philadelphia as well?
Male 1: Yes –
Female: [0:49:52] [Inaudible] basekamp?
Male 1: So we’re helping facilitate. We’re also like really interested in working with anyone else who would like to help with that [0:50:01] [Inaudible]. And so basically, I hope that clarifies that the Public School and Plausible Artworlds are not the same thing.
It’s just that through our project we are trying to describe the Public School and maybe 50 or so other examples throughout this year as Plausible art, as different kinds [0:50:21] [Inaudible]
[0:50:23]
Female 1: Right. And so to [0:50:24] [Inaudible]. I mean, one of things about having basekamp has these weekly chats every Tuesday night. But the thing about Plausible Artworld is that it kind of encompasses as Scott says, these 50 kind of examples of different Artworld’s. And so , in the space today, just to say again, we have – to try to get this up and running, we have pasted on the wall examples of past classes.
So, the kind of ideas [0:50:57] [Inaudible] look and review some of the past classes to get this section over here and point to the section over that has the five Philly based classes to far. So we’re really kind of trying to use the Public School as an example of the Plausible art worlds, but also in the space today you will see kind of an installed exhibit of things that relate to that example and also trying to get it up and running. So yeah. I dunno. Yeah.
[Background Noise]
Male 1: Yeah. Cool. Just trying to add somebody but I cannot. Somebody’s at –
Female 2: [0:51:46] [Inaudible] Public Schools got started?
Female 1: Yeah. I thought that would be – yeah. [0:51:59] [Inaudible] yeah. I need to ask because I thought it might be [0:52:02] [Inaudible] for Steven I believe to –
Male 3: Or Sean.
Female 1: Sean or Steven to speak about how they got the Public School noticed or when it originally started to kind of maybe that would relate to public school that we’re trying to start in Philly.
Male 2: [0:52:26] [Inaudible] And so by the end of that we have 90 class proposals. We have like 250 people who signed up [0:55:02] [Inaudible]. it took a few weeks before [0:55:09] [Inaudible]. And so that made me realize how important the role [0:55:25] [Inaudible] people who are turning ideas into actual [0:55:31] [Inaudible] like [0:55:32] [Inaudible] people were. And how I never believed it’s going to be sort of [0:55:41] [Inaudible] or power or [0:55:44] [Inaudible] dynamics. [0:55:46] [Inaudible]
[0:56:14]
Male 1: I like it.
Male 2: [0:56:16] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Oh, I’m sorry.
Male 2: And so the structure [0:56:25] [inaudible]. Some people always choose the same types of classes. They always choose. And then eventually they [0:56:53] [Inaudible] someone to [0:56:55] [Inaudible].
And so a part of the goal is to like set something up. [0:57:04] [Inaudible] that involve and participate in a certain usual way that’s [0:57:12] [Inaudible] change the way the object works. This certainly things needed to be set up in advance. [0:57:22] [Inaudible].
Female 1: Right.
Male 2: [0:58:12] [Inaudible]
Female 1: I think so. Yeah.
[Cross-talk]
Male 2: [0:58:22] [Inaudible] this started? And so all of sudden [0:58:29] [Inaudible]
Female 1: So, I mean this might be sort of like brain freeze kind of question but I guess I feel like reiterating is always helpful. So I’m just kind of wondering if you could talk about how one might post a new idea for a class to be the actual website and talk a little bit about that again.
And then maybe you are, you have but I just feel like it will be a good segway in to kind of how this sort of database of classes is now being maintained and how people here in the room as well as anyone listening can check it out and become involved.
So maybe you could just talk about the current website and how to propose a class, how to check the listings for each local area and what not briefly. I feel like that would be helpful at least.
Male 2: Okay. Hi, Sarah [Laughter]. [0:59:51] [Inaudible] you wanna talk about this or not to … ? Sure. Can people hear me?
[1:00:02]
Male 1: Yeah, definitely.
Male 2: Okay. So, you just wanna [1:00:08] [Inaudible]. One was like what was the nature of the proposals and the actual or the technical [1:00:18] [Inaudible].
Female 1: I feel like it would be helpful just to really quickly go over how you, if someone here has an idea for a class or they are considering checking out with [1:00:35] [Inaudible] online. So the technical one first is in my opinion less – I mean anyone here can feel free to suggest an alternate question. I thought it would be good to reiterate the technical aspect of how one would actually post a question on based in Philly, based in L.A., etcetera.
Male 2: [1:01:01] [Inaudible] It’s simply like you create a user account and then you go to the city of wherever you wanna be. And you just click on [1:01:13] [Inaudible] class and [1:01:16] [Inaudible]. You describe what you want to have happened to this and [1:01:27] [Inaudible] and then you add some text.
The reason why I asked the first question was [1:01:36] [Inaudible]. it’s like a lot of different types of proposals. And so, I think there is a [1:01:44] [Inaudible] early on the Public School [1:01:46] [Inaudible] or something very short like that. [1:01:56] [Inaudible] proposals like that [1:01:58] [Inaudible].
So I think they are sort of both. You can handle 9it both ways. And I think because [1:02:14] [Inaudible] that can be really predetermined by [1:02:18] [Inaudible] about a year ago, that was a little over a year ago, there was a class proposal that was just [1:02:39] [Inaudible].
And that was a [1:02:44] [Inaudible] and so, I taught. And you know, I didn’t really [1:02:49] [Inaudible]. It created this like [1:02:55] [Inaudible]. [Cross-talk]. With a great turnout, the [1:03:05] [Inaudible].
And then another thing Sean and I both mentioned in this [1:03:27] [Inaudible] from other cities [1:03:32] [Inaudible] like see class proposals that they think are interesting and then there’s this giant [1:03:41] [Inaudible] and you can click and it will shop up in another city. So that’s also another way of [1:03:48] [Inaudible].
Female 1: Are the classes free?
Male 1: That depends, right? That depends [Cross-talk]. Some people, like the goal of it –Sean, correct me if I’m wrong and everyone, is that the people that organize the courses, literally organize everything about the courses.
So if some people are dealing something that takes an extraordinary amount of effort that oftentimes, I’ve noticed some of the courses cost a little bit of money. And I think that that might help to find the space or that person or maybe the software or something. But generally they’ve been very cheap. And most of them are free. Is that right, Sean? Oops. Still there?
Male 2: I didn’t hear your question because I was checking …
Male 1: Oh, that’s cool.
[1:05:00]
Male 2: Most of our classes are free. Yeah.
Male 3: Are not free.
Male 1: Are not free. Okay, right. But a lot of the ones I have seen are. And some of the ones I’ve seen are not. So it all depended on the people organizing the classes, right?
Male 2: Sorry. I missed your question again.
Male 1: That’s okay. I’m glad you typed it.
Male 2: I was actually looking for someone’s shoes.
[Laughter]
Male 1: For someone’s shoes? Yeah.
[Cross-talk]
Male 3: I think it’s in that question Sean that [1:05:38] [Inaudible]. So this isn’t something that like has changed actually, like even sometimes maybe since which is, I dunno, since 2008 or something? So we , like at one point you’re charging like, conducts a class at one point you’re charging five bucks a class.
At one point you’re charging five bucks a class. [1:06:00] [Inaudible] software or for teacher [1:06:02] [Inaudible]. but the whole general idea [1:06:11] [Inaudible] is that [1:06:14] [Inaudible] which is one thing Sean is [1:06:17] [Inaudible] when he said [1:06:18] [Inaudible].All those things like you don’t exchange any money for like – so when people pay for classes they’re just paying [1:06:41] [Inaudible] space.
So [1:06:44] [Inaudible] to charge us. So I think it’s really a specific thing to each city. And also [1:06:54] [Inaudible] charge a little [1:06:56] [Inaudible] for some reason [1:06:59] [Inaudible].
[Cross-talk]
Male 1: We had a discussion about that quite a while ago and not in relation to these courses but about other events and things. Like, all of our events have been free here.
But we’re really seriously considering charging a dollar or like five bucks or something for different events just because when you do, it does seem to be the case that [Laughter]. I dunno. Somehow, in some places that seems to work. And we kind of wondered what that meant …
Female1: It’s like a commitment, you know, especially what I have for a recurring class, like me giving someone money is kind of like me signing up in a way, committing, giving something that I have. And so I’ll be there because I’m invested in it.
Male 3: I think it’s an echo from the commercials our experience out of that.
Male 2: Did you say [1:08:18] [Inaudible]. Did you say that [1:08:21] [Inaudible].
Male 3: If you pay for something, you’re getting more. That’s something that people might have become accustomed to thru their experience of you know, the commercial, the fact that something might be provided for free, might reflect negatively upon its value to you in a way that’s [1:08:44] [Inaudible] subconscious –
There’s no way to really explain why [1:08:48] [Inaudible] but that’s one thing I would say might have something to do with it. People think that if they’re buying something, they’re buying something just a little more [1:08:59] [Inaudible]. I don’t know why [1:09:01] [Inaudible] case. I’m just proposing it.
Female 1: But you can also see that [Cross-talk]
Male 3: Something, we’re doing a [1:09:06] [Inaudible] on Sean’s teaching or [1:09:08] [Inaudible] teaching [1:09:09] [Inaudible] right now in L.A. Just kind of, I mean we talked a little bit about this in [1:09:14] [Inaudible] course. One thing about sort of more of crucial argument here is you actually don’t pay these [1:09:23] [Inaudible].
[1:10:03]
Female 1: Yeah. One thing I just wanna kind of encourage everyone in this space to, if they have something to say, feel free to really speak up and be loud so that people on the other end can hear it.
Also, I have another question which if we wanna continue talking about the monetary investment, we can. I was also curious about if the Public School ever had any relationship to Craig’s List. And if so, what was that relationship like and have basically the founders kind of thought about that or has it ever come up?
Male 1: I was wondering that, too.
Male 2: As a model [1:10:53] [Inaudible]?
Female 1: I mean, it seems like a very similar thing in that people can post. People make their own terms for selling items or even the misconnections section. I think it has a lot of relationships as far as features of the site. I realize they’re quite different in what they’re trying, the end goal. But I just had kind of wondered if it was ever thought about or if anyone every say post it a Public School class on Craig’s List or anything like that.
Male 2: Yeah, I mean [1:11:41] [Inaudible] advertised on Craig’s List. I don’t know if that’s what you mean but [1:11:46] [Inaudible].
[Laughter]
Male 1: That’s awesome.
Male 2: That may not be what you mean.
Male 3: Is that any better?
Female 1: I dunno. It occurred to me that it was [1:12:00] [Inaudible] and I was just wondering …
[Cross-talk]
Male 2: I think there are some u p there [1:12:05] [Inaudible] connection between the way that [1:12:11] [Inaudible] driven by demand or something. I mean a lot of [1:12:20] [Inaudible]. I don’t know. [1:12:24] [Inaudible].
Male 3: I don’t think so.
[Cross-talk]
Male 2: [1:12:33] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Adam is saying let’s promote the class on Craig’s List. Oh, see you later, Adam. Wait, is he on audio? You are right? What? Bye. See you later.
Male 3: What I was thinking is [Cross-talk]. Like there should be a section [1:13:11] [Inaudible] Craig’s list for at city’s Public School. [1:13:16] [Inaudible]
Male 2: When I use Craig’s List. I used Craig’s List exactly once I think. I don’t know. [1:13:32] [Inaudible] And then a few people called. And then I said to one of them, ìyes, you can come and pick it up.î [1:13:52] [Inaudible].
So that was my first Craig’s List experience and I [1:14:08] [Inaudible] experience I’ve had with Public School that [1:14:23] [Inaudible] So all of our classes at the least [1:14:33] [Inaudible]although I don’t think it’s happened yet. Typically [1:14:50] [Inaudible]partly formed idea or desire and other people are just gonna say ,îYeah, I think that sounds really good. I bet to see that happen.î [1:15:57] [Inaudible] necessarily wanna do it. And then [1:16:00] [Inaudible]
[1:16:52]
Female 1: I have a question.
Male 1: It does, Sean. We have another question here.
Female 1: I’m interested in learning about how the idea moved from being [1:17:01] [Inaudible] artist focused. You mentioned that you started out with network with mostly artists. And what do you think your audience really is now that you’ve shifted on like an artist piece to a more academic or even a [1:17:14] [Inaudible] and how that shift occurred if it occurred and what it is right now.
Male 1: Were you able to catch that?
Male 2: I didn’t hear what [Cross-talk].
Male 1: Get a little bit closer, Sorry.
Female 1: Yeah. Where am I?
Male 1: There’s the speaker and the mike over there.
Female 1: You mentioned that you started utilizing mostly network of artists are your kind of startup group. And I’m interested to learn if the makeup of your classes has changed all, if it’s still mostly artists and what it looks like and how that changed if that change occurred.
Male 2: [1:18:03] [Inaudible] . I think it’s. I didn’t say it’s mostly artists. I would say that it’s [1:18:14] [Inaudible] that characterizes most of the people like [1:18:20] [Inaudible] education. Like a lot of people involved have [1:18:25] [Inaudible]. practicing artists or academics or doing [1:18:36] [Inaudible].
A lot of people involved come into the room. And these [1:18:50] [Inaudible] People have 50 to 75 % of the people [1:19:02] [Inaudible]. Yes. Some people will look at it and go, ìI’m not just interested in this.î And turn [1:20:41] [Inaudible]. And other people will be like, îYeah this is for me.î And will go dive deeper into it. That was sort of the intention on a certain level of inviting [1:20:55] [Inaudible]. Artworld actually works in the same way. I probably [1:21:05] [Inaudible] like half of the first half [1:21:07] [Inaudible].
[1:21:12]
Now, we were up to 4500 text letter out there and I haven’t uploaded very much since then. So 4,000, more than 4,000 text or something have been [1:21:23] [Inaudible] other than me. Not only [1:21:26] [Inaudible]. Like people come and [1:22:06] [Inaudible] and just look at it and say, like, that’s not for or yes, I’m interested or they say something like, ah, this is really interesting I can’t [1:22:16] [Inaudible]. You know, they [1:22:20] [Inaudible] something. Did that make sense?
Male 1: Yeah. I’ve often seen like ceased and desist letters that get uploaded as well. Are those just for fun or do those text actually get taken down after somebody receives them?
Male 2: [Laughter] There’ve been ceased and desist letters. One from recently from [1:22:50] [Inaudible]and before that coming from Ren [1:22:54] [Inaudible] office.
Male 1: Right.
Male 2: And [1:22:57] [Inaudible]. I updated the letter as a text and I did review [1:23:06] [Inaudible] and I think that’s pretty much [1:23:14] [Inaudible] and you know, because it was [1:23:19] [Inaudible]. I think it’s better to [1:23:23] [Inaudible]and let the rest [1:23:26]Inaudible] of the 4,000 continue to exist rather than sort of taken [1:23:29] [Inaudible]
And because it’s really, in the case of [1:23:33] [Inaudible]simple because, you know, I’ve been posting it on the same server as [1:23:43] [Inaudible] under my name. You know, it’s not a big [1:23:48] [Inaudible]. We’re looking into how to [1:23:55] [Inaudible] that. [1:23:57] [Inaudible]
Male 1: yeah. That’s pretty strange to be honest. I wasn’t surprised about the first letter because –
Male 2: [1:24:26] [Inaudible] Is anyone from [1:24:39] [Inaudible]here?
Male 1: As far as I know, no one from Corso is here but if they are, you know, that was the reason I asked the question.
Male 4: I want to make sure you received my letter alright.
[Laughter]
Male 2: [1:24:50] [Inaudible] what I’m about to say.
Male 1: Yeah, sure no problem.
Male 2: [1:24:56] [Inaudible]. just type, you know, just text /123/ you could type [1:25:07] [Inaudible]. /123/download. [1:25:14] [Inaudible]
[1:25:16]
Male 1: Oh, good.
Male 2: [1:25:18] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Okay. OneNote, 1-2-3-4? Okay. And Intel Google actually started converting audio to text and then searching it, that will be easily searchable. [1:25:41] [Inaudible] Did you see what Steven just – by the way the kung fu is picking back up so that might be initially, just let us know if – did you see what Steven just asked a moment ago on the text chat? Do you want me to read that Sean or just –
Female 1: Read it.
Male 1: Oh, yeah. Here, I’ll read it just to make things useful for us. Steven said, I’m interested that the conversation has often moved to the issue of usership as opposed to both ownership and [1:26:14] [Inaudible]. One unique feature that I see in AAARG and the Public School that makes them different than mainstream Artworld is the sense the [1:26:22] [Inaudible] is replaced by usership.
I guess that’s not exactly a question. That’s more of a statement. But I was wondering if you ahd any thoughts about usership especially being someone who works both in the world of programming and who has been really involved in critical theory and art.
Male 2: Well, [1:26:50] [Inaudible] I think the really point that Steven made here. I guess in a way [1:27:14] [Inaudible] recently is just in sense of creating resources which I think are different eve, and certainly different than objects or tools even.
I’m not exactly sure what that is, but I think that would be something shared. [1:27:38] [Inaudible] shared use. And I [1:27:42] [Inaudible] about uses [1:27:46] [Inaudible]. That’s sort of important [1:28:03] [Inaudible] advertising or something like that [1:28:08] [Inaudible] like an important, a state to maintain. [1:28:17] [Inaudible].
And I find it the sort of arguments about the limitations of what is acceptable within this particular field can be really important [1:28:48] [Inaudible] but I think it’s great [1:28:52] [Inaudible]. And they only sort of happened because of the people having the consideration [1:29:02] [Inaudible].
Male 1: Cool. [Cross-talk]
Male 2: [1:29:09] [Inaudible] and usually I sort of look at other people when I speak. So I’ve been speaking about [1:29:18] [Inaudible] and become really [1:29:20] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Cool. Hey, Sean, this is totally awesome. I have like a dozen more questions but someone just pointed out to me that it’s 8:01 and our public chat is supposed to end at eight. So, not that we can’t keep going but one of the things we wanted to do which is kind of hang out a little bit and maybe look at some of the different proposals over here.
At least for anybody interested to stay about a while and make some new proposals. And I noticed that the conversations – I mean it’s really interesting but it kind of precludes being able to think about proposals.
[1:30:01]
So I was just thinking that we might wrap up. But I wanted to mention that at least one other thing before we do, and I’m surprised we didn’t start out with this because of the topic of this chat but one of the ideas for – I’m just gonna bring this back up again, Sean.
But like one of the ideas for how the public school can have a sustained presence throughout this year is that at the very least as a beginning point, each of these weekly potluck chat topics about different art world, Plausible Artworld examples could become a public school course for at least a course proposal, not necessarily a full course, maybe not a lot of people are interested either right now or ever in following up on it.
I would say at least half of these potluck chats in the past even before focus was sharpened, but Plausible Artworld’s, there’s been a lot of expressed interest in following up by people that are there, but it’s not always easy to know how to do that. And because we already have the public school framework set up and we have the Philadelphia branch at least on the website set up.
And we have all this ability to create courses, we were thinking we could do that. And I know we have talked about that briefly, and of course, we can propose other courses but that would b mean that tonight’s chat would become a public school course as well. I guess all in the public school in art as an example of Plausible Artworld.
And I guess I was just wondering if – well, first I just wanted to say that but also I was wondering if, I dunno, if you have any other thoughts about how that might become useful for us … how we might [Cross-talk]
Male 2: Tonight I think we responded by voice to [1:32:00] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Oh, yeah sure.
Male 2: Because I can’t type fast enough.
Male 1: Oh, wait, yep.
Male 2: Then what are the possible Artworld [Background Noise]. Can the public school know that? And I’d say I got no – I do actually relay one thing that we’re trying out right now. So [1:32:25] [Inaudible] funding, we have [1:32:27] [Inaudible] we decided that our space [1:32:32] [Inaudible] valuable thing for the people who are participating [1:32:36] [Inaudible].
The money that your raising [1:32:41] [Inaudible] came around. [1:32:44] [Inaudible] One thing would be done is you can enroll in public schools for a year and it’s 200 bucks. Really it’s just also [1:32:55] [Inaudible], not that you get a badge or a degree or anything like that. And so what I found is that I think a lot of people from educational institutions that are around here are taking classes at the public.
You know, it’s like, made up for [1:33:15] [Inaudible] something that they’re finding that [1:33:20] [Inaudible]. And so in a way, like they’re outsourcing something to us and so I think that we decided to be a little proactive about it. And we started encouraging institutions and offering them to enroll, basically to sell them these enrollments for their students.
And they basically have no say in what we do. Although the students as participants have the same say [1:33:52] [Inaudible]. And we’re working at the moment on one thing that [1:34:00] [Inaudible] enroll in the public school.
And if they did, they’ll be funding some part [1:34:16] [Inaudible]. We already had [1:35:00] [Inaudible] which are having certain faculty and some students start organizing [1:35:06] [Inaudible]. this is actually [1:35:10] [Inaudible].
[1:35:43]
Male 1: So … Question number two. Did you have any thoughts about what I just mentioned before then that Sean? That’s actually really interesting by the way about the – oops, sorry – about the alternative, the fact that you can have an alternative school for 20 bucks. I wish my student loans reflected that instead of like what they really do.
Did you have any thoughts about how – I don’t really know that there’s really that much to really talk about exactly, but did you have any specific thoughts about how a public school course for this week’s proposal, for this week’s [1:36:38] [Inaudible] proposal could be helpful for us in terms of … I think you guys already did it, a course on the public school, right?
Male 3: There’s also an idea of culminates [1:36:49] [Inaudible] for about 50 weeks.
Male 1: OH, yeah and Michael just mentioned. You just kind of frame this together, sort of similar with what you just said except I think on the basekamp side – not I think. We had already decided we’re not going to be charging for any of these public school courses but that we could see at least the Plausible Artworld’s events as being a year-long seminar so each course can be strung together in some way?
Is there a way to add them online somewhere on the public school so that you can kind of search for all the Plausible Artworld’s courses or shall we just talk about that text stuff later? [Laughter] and get on with your proposals? That was a multi part question Sean.
[Laughter]
Male 2: [1:37:44] [Inaudible] I’m listening to you.
Male 1: I figured as much.
Male 2: [1:37:49] [Inaudible]
[Laughter]
Male 1: Awesome. Yeah. Never mind.
Female 1: So …
[Cross-talk]
Male 2: [1:38:04] [Inaudible]It’s familiar question and we talked about it [1:38:19] [Inaudible]Maybe we can have it [1:38:32] [Inaudible] message for us [1:38:36] [Inaudible]. Scott?
Male 1: Oh, this discussion you mean? Or the public school course [Cross-talk]
Male 2: Yeah, yeah.
Male 1: Yeah. We –
Male 2: [1:38:49] [Inaudible]
Male 1: We haven’t actually determined exactly the text side of how we’re going to have like ongoing [1:38:57] [Inaudible] we have discussed that. Each event on the basekamp site has comments. And probably general comments will go there. What we’ll do is make a link to the public school course for each of these weeks. We’ll also add the recording of the audio to the website. Anybody that’s like interested to spend another two hours of their life listening to us again can, but we’ll have a link to the public school courses so that we can go directly there on any education. I don’t if you want to call it education but sort of research as practiced or following up on any ideas that were discussed or anything that might actually be useful as a course or if we can use a course to further reading all of our texts that people might have mentioned here but I don’t have access to that text. It seems that can all be really good on the public school course.
[1:40:03]
And you can follow up just on that. If that makes sense. We’ll try to simplify it because I get a feeling the text side of it might be overwhelming for people sometimes.
Female 1: Yeah. I was going to say and maybe Scott was already going to say this but because we are close to the end of the time, maybe it would just be good to say that this Plausible Artworld’s ongoing discussion series will be going on for, we will have 50 discussions, much like this one. And so anyone who has joined in both on Skype or here in person in Philly is welcomed to come every week.
You can find out what that week’s posting is from Plausible Artworld’s site as well as the basekamp’s site. And we would love for people to just tell anyone they know that they think might be interested as well as come back. And another thing to say is that this is a potluck discussion.
So when you come, you feel free to bring either a drink or something to eat. I just wanted to say both of those URLs and this is an ongoing discussion series and to thank everybody for coming tonight. I don’t know if that’s a premature closure but I felt that it’s important to reiterate on the I owe’s. Scott mentioned we will be uploading this online hopefully. So, yeah.
Male 1: Absolutely, yeah. And in fact, all of you guys that are joining in from time zones that are now 2AM or later, it’s really awesome to have you. Yeah. So maybe we should go ahead and just follow up on the [1:42:03] [Inaudible] course and hopefully Sean, you and some other people be able to join us on the following weeks?
Male 2: Yeah. [1:42:15] [Inaudible]
Male 1: Rock & roll, man. Alright. Have a great night and we’ll keep this Skype public chat open in case people want to keep going but otherwise we’re going to go and hit the audio. Have a great night, everybody.
[Applause]
[Background Noise]
[1:42:40] End of Audio
Backchannel
Chat History with basekamp/$369f89fa6cb8c4ad" title="#basekamp/$369f89fa6cb8c4ad">The Public School and AAAARG.org http://bit.ly/73CHyE (#basekamp/$369f89fa6cb8c4ad)
Created on 2010-01-05 23:23:59.
2010-01-05
- BASEKAMP team: 17:43:23
- Hello Stephen, i just added you to a Public chat
- BASEKAMP team: 17:43:54
- Howdy
- Robert Hooker: 17:44:06
- Hi
- Robert Hooker: 17:44:14
- Thanks
- stephen wright: 17:44:38
- Hey
- jelena guga: 17:44:51
- hey
- stephen wright: 17:45:03
- Is this text only? Or can we yack?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:45:04
- Hi --- scott here (though we may switch it up a bit tonight off & on) -- adding people to the chat
- BASEKAMP team: 17:45:16
- we can defeinitely yack it up, audio style
- BASEKAMP team: 17:45:35
-
- jelena guga: 17:46:04
- yeeeey!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:46:16
- but we'll also have people contributing to the text "live transcription" (i think), so those who can't do audio won't be left out
- atrowbri: 17:47:37
- Classes don't start until Thursday so no student transcription tonight. I'll try out transcribing and see how it goes but I have been told, and I quote, "Adam types like a drunk monkey"
- BASEKAMP team: 17:48:11
- adam, that is a shame...
- BASEKAMP team: 17:48:16
- next time!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:48:40
- personally, i think drunk monkey typing is more than anyone should expect
- BASEKAMP team: 17:48:51
- BASEKAMP team: 17:50:35
- hi Caleb - added you to the public chat
- caleb waldorf: 17:50:43
- great!
- caleb waldorf: 17:50:57
- do i need to call in?
- caleb waldorf: 17:51:03
- is that how it works?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:51:16
- "we'll call you"
- caleb waldorf: 17:51:23
- fantastic
- jelena guga: 17:51:39
- good, was just about to ask the same
- BASEKAMP team: 17:52:45
- atrowbri, can you keep tabs on IRC tonight? I know at least 1 person can only join by IRC (goldielockes)
- BASEKAMP team: 17:53:12
- ...and maybe paste some stuff in-between skype > < irc?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:54:54
- Hi Sean & everyone
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:55:16
- oh i think i was typing in the other chat
- stephen wright: 17:55:21
- Hi Sean et al
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:55:34
- hi all
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:55:37
- hi stephen!
- Valentina Desideri: 17:55:40
- hello
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:55:43
- are we doing this textually?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:55:54
- siobhan is stil asleep so i cant be loud
- BASEKAMP team: 17:55:56
- Elysa, feel free to add them to this chat
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:56:41
- hi elysa and valentina and sarah too
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:56:46
- hi
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:56:51
- how is this done?
- Elysa Lozano: 17:56:52
- hi
- Elysa Lozano: 17:56:56
- !
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:57:14
- don't think, just type
- Matthew Slaats: 17:57:19
- Hey, everyone - Looking forward to this!
- BASEKAMP team: 17:57:32
- Hi everyone -- we wrote up a short description...
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:57:48
- do i need to be added to the chat?
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:57:58
- or have i been?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:58:02
- i think you're in
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:58:07
- heh
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 17:58:18
- scott is the skype maestro, he'll know for sure
- BASEKAMP team: 17:58:29
- we'll start with a Public text-only chat, then in a few minutes start audio with whoever wants to join that
- stephen wright: 17:58:38
- ok
- ashadela" title="sashadela">S Dela: 17:58:50
- Hello Basecamp. Thanks for letting me join.
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:59:34
- ditto
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 17:59:35
- that
- Robert Hooker: 17:59:37
- I assume anything that comes up could be blogged or posted on twitter?
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:47
- Here's a short description everyone -- hope it helps answer some Qs
- BASEKAMP team: 17:59:50
- In hopes of making the Potluck more fun and making you more comfortable, we’ve described the general structure below.
Potlucks are informal talks based on mutual respect between all participants. They generally follow a loose interview style with Basekamp hosts getting the ball rolling and the floor open to questions from everyone on the call from the start. If a different format would work better, please feel free to discuss it before the chat so we can prepare.
Plausible Art Worlds Potlucks will begin at 6 PM (in the eastern time zone, “Philadelphia Time”).
Potlucks will take advantage of Skype voice chat and will generally be (loosely) transcribed into Skype text chat for those who cannot do voice chat. Basekamp will take care of initiating and maintaining the voice chat.
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:00:10
- cool
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:00:41
- quick hello to everyone
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:00:56
- voice is going to be awkward for me because i have to go into the opposite corner of the apartment as my napping daughter and keep things failry quiet
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:01:10
- we could all whisper to make you more comfortable
- Valentina Desideri: 18:01:38
- or just sing softly your answers
- jelena guga: 18:01:58
- what time is it now guys? where i am it's midnight, so...
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:02:15
- 3
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:02:17
- pm
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:02:28
- adam!
- jelena guga: 18:02:45
- thnx sarah
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:03:25
- someone from whyy in philadelphia just called now (greg gave my number) about tps philly
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:03:50
- but i had to whisper, my phone is about to die, and this is happening
- theadamkatz: 18:03:50
- hey sarah, et al
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:03:54
- hi adam!
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:04:01
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:05:12
- sean, why did the whyy person call?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:05:16
- jelena, its 3pm here and 78 degrees
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:05:53
- dunno, to ask about tps in philadelphia?
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:06:06
- why not call philly?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:06:32
- good question! i guess greg gave my number?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:07:03
- tried to get him to come to this chat but it seemed complicated
- atrowbri: 18:07:24
- Skype is hard for reporters
- atrowbri: 18:11:10
- hey Chris
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:11:14
- has it gotten less cold in philly?
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:11:27
- it was freezing the past two weeks
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:11:47
- (when in doubt, talk about the weather)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:11:55
- haha
- BASEKAMP team: 18:12:09
- Hey Sean, so are you going to whisper, or do you want to do text-only?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:12:58
- well i have no problem with whispering, but how many other people can do audio? because whenever i come on to audio chats i miss everything because i can never play sound
- BASEKAMP team: 18:13:34
- i think a bunch of us are doing audio, but we will text chat with you if that's better for you
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:13:48
- hello from new york!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:13:51
- and also does audio make it more that only one person can speak at a time? as opposed to anarchic IRC-style text
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:13:54
- hi chris
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:14:00
- hey jessica
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:14:25
- oh boy my daughter is not happy about beginning to wake up (nothing to do with this)
- theadamkatz: 18:14:26
- should we begin with some introductions?
- justyna badach: 18:14:34
- I can do audio just need a sec to figure out how to do audio chart
- Valentina Desideri: 18:14:34
- yes it would be nice to do it by chat
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:14:36
- maybe text only is the way to go
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:14:45
- yes!
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:14:50
- i mean, i prefer it
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:14:51
- sorry scott, i know you love audio
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:14:52
- ya audio would be good
- caleb waldorf: 18:15:04
- i'd like to try audio
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:15:05
- ok we seem 50/50 then
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:28
- "sorry scott, i know you love audio" (snif)
- BASEKAMP team: 18:15:38
- wait, that could be read the wrong way...
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:15:49
- yes lets please do audio
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:16:22
- ok go for it
- atrowbri: 18:16:32
- I will try to transcribe for those who are text only
- atrowbri: 18:16:43
- Anyone else who wants is welcome to assist
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:16:44
- cool, thank you
- BASEKAMP team: 18:16:50
- we can do audio with folks who ;want to, and also connect with the text chat as the main focus, since you';ll be on text Sean
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:06
- So guys, just to let you konw -- we'l call you.
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:17:08
- do i answer this phone call?
- caleb waldorf: 18:17:23
- yes
- Elysa Lozano: 18:17:24
- can i get on the audio a bit later?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:24
- not being unfriend;y, jsut that we received like 40 clls in the past 20 mins
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:17:31
- is justyna managing call?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:17:33
- echos
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:17:34
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:17:37
- Elysa, sre we can add or remo;ve people from audio any time
- atrowbri: 18:17:37
- *insane sci-fi echo* call has started
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:17:47
- im gonna start drinking
- Elysa Lozano: 18:17:48
- great!
- justyna badach: 18:17:51
- yes I am calling and it sounds like a 70's space film
- atrowbri: 18:17:59
- It's a bit scary
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:18:01
- i just muted here
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:18:07
- sounds clean now
- Valentina Desideri: 18:18:33
- maybe we should mute except when talking
- caleb waldorf: 18:18:53
- if you have headphones that will cut out the feedback
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:12
- are some of you on a conference call already -- adam?
- atrowbri: 18:19:17
- Strange liquid noises
- theadamkatz: 18:19:24
- yes, i'm here in the call
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:19:31
- so are we muting when not talking?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:19:43
- no one is talking
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:19:45
- i am muting, until i have a question
- BASEKAMP team: 18:19:46
- we're not in a call at all here
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:19:47
- eating sounds
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:19:53
- i just hear people eating cereal
- theadamkatz: 18:19:54
- it also helps to mute while typing
- atrowbri: 18:19:55
- Who is supposed to initiate the call
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:20:05
- basekamp - call in?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:20:29
- basekamp?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:41
- well, we did have hte plan to start at 6pm, but the overwhelming response is slowing it down a little... that's ok though -- we just need to hook up
- atrowbri: 18:20:55
- Scott, there's a call already...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:20:55
- jessica - where to call? are you on a conference call?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:20:56
- they are doing inroductions now
- atrowbri: 18:20:58
- No idea how it started
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:02
- hmm -- ok
- atrowbri: 18:21:06
- Yeah
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:21:07
- jutyna initated call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:23
- i see. In that case, Justyna, can you add us to the call?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:21:52
- We love skype, but interestingly in 5 years of weekly events this is the first time this has happened -- we're left out of the call
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:22:01
- craziness
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:22:24
- scott or greg usually call so the whole roster gets included
- cesare pietroiusti: 18:22:30
- me too, i'm out of the call, it seems
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:02
- ok guys, how about this. Everyone hang up, and we'll do the call. I would now, but it will get very confusing if you're all already in one
- atrowbri: 18:23:06
- YES
- caleb waldorf: 18:23:22
- OK
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:30
- Can someone who's in the call let everyone know, even if they're not reading the text?
- caleb waldorf: 18:23:30
- hung
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:36
- word
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:23:44
- up
- atrowbri: 18:23:46
- Initiate a group call, Basekamp team
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:23:50
- i said you guys were not in call
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:23:54
- no problems like this with text
- BASEKAMP team: 18:23:54
-
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:23:58
- i just hung up
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:23:59
- aws
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:24:21
- BASEKAMP team: 18:24:43
- Sean - true... but we have 20 people here so audio would be lightly helpful... but we will keep up with text chat so all will be well (sort of)
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:25:03
- and this technical fuddling is kind of an organized group chat ritual, like milling around after a lecture
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:25:08
- you can't do without it
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:18
- ^^ True Sean
- atrowbri: 18:25:20
- It's a tradition
- BASEKAMP team: 18:25:31
- so Sean, you want to do audio right? WHo; else?
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:25:36
- meee
- Valentina Desideri: 18:25:44
- isn't chat and call at the same time a bit confusing?
- stephen wright: 18:25:45
- me
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:25:50
- we can share here in tennessee
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:25:59
- audio that is
- Matthew Slaats: 18:26:06
- I'm up for audio
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:26:09
- it is totally confusing valentina, but that may be part of the charm
- Valentina Desideri: 18:26:17
- ok i'm in
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:26:25
- brb
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:26:45
- i am usualy stuck in text-only land so this is exciting for me
- BASEKAMP team: 18:27:06
- ok lovely -- we'll start with that. we can add more people to the call any time!
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:27:15
- yes
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:27:28
- call me
- Christopher Kennedy: 18:27:46
- audio for here would be good
- jelena guga: 18:30:13
- audio
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:30:23
- does anyone else want audio?
- jelena guga: 18:30:26
- if i dont fall asleep
- cesare pietroiusti: 18:30:54
- let's try audio
- atrowbri: 18:31:04
- transcribing now
- atrowbri: 18:31:12
- If you are not chatting please mute
- caleb waldorf: 18:31:20
- i'd like audo
- caleb waldorf: 18:31:25
- (audio)
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:31:30
- we are on mute. it sounds clean btw
- caleb waldorf: 18:31:44
- can someone ring me
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:31:54
- they are calling you caleb
- caleb waldorf: 18:32:03
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:33:38
- scott is describing the public school
- theadamkatz: 18:33:41
- me too?
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:33:42
- fyi
- atrowbri: 18:33:46
- audio is a mess here a bit
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:33:46
- add adam, please
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:34:02
- sounds great
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:34:03
- scott is all clear
- Valentina Desideri: 18:34:12
- clear
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:34:19
- i can hear stephen good
- BASEKAMP team: 18:34:20
- we are asking that when you are not speaking that you please mute your mic, thx
- cesare pietroiusti: 18:34:25
- i can hear very well
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:34:27
- and sarah sounds good to me
- Elysa Lozano: 18:34:32
- will be back in a bit.....
- jelena guga: 18:34:33
- stop moving the mike
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:34:35
- that's cos i'm loud
- atrowbri: 18:35:26
- Scott is intro Plausible Artworlds
- atrowbri: 18:36:07
- art worlds that differ in a meaningful way from the "dominant" art world(s)
- atrowbri: 18:36:21
- Public School is autonomous information production
- theadamkatz: 18:36:46
- thx
- atrowbri: 18:36:47
- questioning educatinal models
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:37:31
- i went on hold for alittle while so i missed the last minute or two
- Valentina Desideri: 18:37:37
- it cut
- caleb waldorf: 18:37:54
- we got kicked out of the other call
- caleb waldorf: 18:37:57
- or the main call
- atrowbri: 18:38:01
- Public School moved into it's own space in a basement, in an alley in Chinatown in LA
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:38:07
- we moved to a new space
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:38:10
- since then
- caleb waldorf: 18:38:11
- hey
- caleb waldorf: 18:38:18
- can someone reinvite us?
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:38:20
- caleb you need ring again?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:38:20
- posted file 951ckr.jpg to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="69324" index="0">951ckr.jpg</file></files>
- caleb waldorf: 18:38:25
- yes
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:38:27
- okay
- Valentina Desideri: 18:38:32
- me too
- caleb waldorf: 18:38:32
- we got invited to another call
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:38:37
- basekamp can you add caleb to teh call
- BASEKAMP team: 18:38:38
- one sec we're working on it
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:38:38
- me too
- atrowbri: 18:38:44
- Classes self organize based on interest. Classes are proposed by instructors or by people interested and seeking an instructor
- jelena guga: 18:39:00
- ring me again, please
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:39:19
- caleb, sean, jelenga need call
- caleb waldorf: 18:39:20
- thanks!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:39:23
- posted file 9417_132236016235_700901235_2438757_4268105_n.jpg to members of this chat<files alt=""><file size="49856" index="0">9417_132236016235_700901235_2438757_4268105_n.jpg</file></files>
- caleb waldorf: 18:39:24
- i'm in
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:39:38
- sorry.. was trying to send a photo of our new space
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:39:53
- dudes, adam and i need back in
- jelena guga: 18:40:00
- me too
- atrowbri: 18:40:04
- [Please mute the chat if you're not currently speaking otherwise there's feedback]
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:40:08
- http://telic.info/images/951ckr.jpg
- Valentina Desideri: 18:40:13
- and me too
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:40:24
- thanks for image
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:40:33
- uhh
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:40:36
- what's going on?
- atrowbri: 18:40:41
- Is that your daughter, Sean?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:40:45
- press the pause button
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:40:49
- yeah thats her!
- atrowbri: 18:40:52
- awesome!
- atrowbri: 18:41:09
- Sarah and Sean are beginning to talk
- theadamkatz: 18:41:22
- should i be expecting a call?
- atrowbri: 18:41:23
- Going to address how Public School started
- BASEKAMP team: 18:41:52
- adam wel'll add you now
- theadamkatz: 18:42:04
- i've heard all this before
- BASEKAMP team: 18:42:13
- haha
- atrowbri: 18:42:17
- 5 years of exhibitions, video
- atrowbri: 18:42:43
- performances, program became more interactive
- jelena guga: 18:42:56
- i havent, and would appreciate if u could ring me again
- atrowbri: 18:42:57
- end of 2005, they started public school
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:04
- jelena ok
- atrowbri: 18:43:22
- Sean hoped for dialog between exhibitions and public school
- BASEKAMP team: 18:43:33
- jelena, pleae switch your status to "available"
- atrowbri: 18:44:00
- This did not really happen beyond a single exhibition and Sean was more interested in The Public School
- jelena guga: 18:44:09
- i just did
- BASEKAMP team: 18:44:11
- hmm, interesting - we can not add you for some reason jelena?
- jelena guga: 18:44:24
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:44:25
- more interested in school than exhibitions
- Valentina Desideri: 18:44:48
- could you try to add me again?
- atrowbri: 18:44:51
- Sean found Public School to be most vibrant part of program
- jelena guga: 18:45:04
- can i call you guys instead?
- theadamkatz: 18:45:16
- i'm on. but wondering if sean sounds like HAL to everyone else...
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:26
- jelena, you can but it will no t be on the conference call, (and would be really confusing to have 2 separate calls)
- atrowbri: 18:45:32
- Is Sean *not* an AI?
- jelena guga: 18:45:44
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:45:45
- chuckles
- atrowbri: 18:45:51
- Sean thought it would be interesting to replace gallery with school
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:17
- jelena, for some reason, the option is greyed out for your user?
- atrowbri: 18:46:17
- They've moved to a third space as of Sept 09
- BASEKAMP team: 18:46:23
- maybe skype is working with the cia
- jelena guga: 18:46:45
- i really have no idea what's going on
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:46:47
- sean this is great info
- jelena guga: 18:46:53
- was in and then, out
- atrowbri: 18:47:11
- The Public School is 5 years old
- BASEKAMP team: 18:47:20
- jelena maybe try to restart?
- caleb waldorf: 18:47:24
- AAAARG is 5 years old
- atrowbri: 18:47:29
- OH
- jelena guga: 18:47:37
- ok
- caleb waldorf: 18:47:40
- TPS is like two years old
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:47:46
- ah
- atrowbri: 18:47:49
- Lots of noise in the background, hard to make out, thanks caleb
- caleb waldorf: 18:47:58
- sure thing!
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:48:48
- what is the relationship tween TPS "locations"
- theadamkatz: 18:49:05
- (impossible to hear)
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:49:07
- who manages the technology/sites/applications
- BASEKAMP team: 18:49:30
- katherine, do you want to be added to the audio chat? we are doing audio and text -- you can do either
- atrowbri: 18:49:32
- Question about where The Public School (TPS henceforth) got started
- Valentina Desideri: 18:49:58
- i'd still like to be added on the audio
- atrowbri: 18:50:33
- AAAARG sprung from a need to refer to specific texts in discussions
- atrowbri: 18:51:26
- backend went from wordpress to drupal, 3 yrs in it's current state
- jelena guga: 18:51:27
- am back in
- jelena guga: 18:51:38
- can you try adding me to audio again?
- BASEKAMP team: 18:51:58
- ok
- BASEKAMP team: 18:52:10
- jelena - it works! calling now
- stephen wright: 18:52:12
- i lost my connection too
- atrowbri: 18:52:18
- AAAARG & TPS moved in parallel, efforts to integrate the two, using AAAARG texts for TPS classes and add texts for TPS classes to AAAARG
- BASEKAMP team: 18:52:20
- stephen -- we'll re-add you
- jelena guga: 18:52:52
- thnx
- atrowbri: 18:52:55
- You can group AAAARG (ARG henceforth) texts into groups to connect them
- BASEKAMP team: 18:53:09
- stephen is in paris, jelena is in seribia - maybe there is some conection hiccups... we should be ok now i hope
- jelena guga: 18:53:33
- we are
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:53:38
- atrowbri: 18:53:39
- Perhaps he's imaging ESCAPE
- caleb waldorf: 18:53:47
- good example of a class with a ton of texts through AAAARG: http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1445
- alanwmoorenyc: 18:54:24
- skype newbie hears nothing
- atrowbri: 18:54:47
- Basekamp asking about other locations for TPS
- theadamkatz: 18:54:51
- no, i don't think so
- atrowbri: 18:54:58
- Philly is adding a PS
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:05
- alan, do you want to join audio?
- theadamkatz: 18:55:16
- i could, but the audio is terrible for me...
- alanwmoorenyc: 18:55:39
- i can listen -- can't talk much in public
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:55:42
- i can hear adam
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:55:46
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 18:55:49
- caling you now alan
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 18:55:53
- im muting myself
- theadamkatz: 18:56:35
- sorry guys.
- theadamkatz: 18:56:40
- this isn;t working for me...
- atrowbri: 18:56:52
- theadamkatz can you just type to us?
- theadamkatz: 18:57:02
- sure...
- theadamkatz: 18:57:16
- basically we had a class that was cohosted in LA and Philly
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:19
- so maybe scott can explain how the Phila Pa PS is getting started/organized
- atrowbri: 18:57:21
- The question was how TPS works in other locations, how it started, etc
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:24
- as an example
- theadamkatz: 18:57:25
- led by michael gerald bauer in Philly
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:57:27
- of how they FORM
- theadamkatz: 18:57:55
- in that class, we learned that skype was pretty difficult
- theadamkatz: 18:58:14
- and not a good replacement for people in a room together
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:28
- adam -- TRUE DAT
- BASEKAMP team: 18:58:50
- but it'sa decent replacement for flying 25 people across the planet in one night
- theadamkatz: 18:59:00
- that said, there is a great opportunity
- Jessica Westbrook: 18:59:00
- its tricky when you live someplace isolated without a local culture...
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 18:59:12
- we are about to do a skype class here in LA from one part of town to another
- atrowbri: 18:59:18
- Sean is explaining that it is difficult to make non-local (virtual) connections between two physical locations
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:30
- hi Dan
- BASEKAMP team: 18:59:40
- want to be added to the audio call?
- Dan Schimmel: 18:59:42
- hi thanks
- Dan Schimmel: 18:59:48
- ok
- theadamkatz: 18:59:49
- in parallel ativity
- theadamkatz: 19:00:00
- or synchronous classes
- katherinecarl: 19:00:02
- thanks Scott just text thanks, great to be in
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:00:10
- http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1765
- theadamkatz: 19:00:27
- ha
- atrowbri: 19:00:27
- From the beginning TPS saw what they were doing was as a model that could be exported/providing a platform
- BASEKAMP team: 19:00:28
- dan calling you now... Sean is discussing how TPS locaions work
- Christopher Kennedy: 19:00:38
- Hey all - Cassie and I need to split...happy new year. Scott see you saturday!
- Dan Schimmel: 19:00:54
- thanks we can hear now
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:01:31
- awe
- BASEKAMP team: 19:01:35
- hey Chris & Cassie -- great to have you -- see you Saturday!
- atrowbri: 19:01:38
- child says n'naynay
- Dan Schimmel: 19:01:39
- night night says evie
- theadamkatz: 19:02:25
- the public school in new york has their first committee meeting on the 9th
- theadamkatz: 19:02:34
- anyone who shows up is on the committee
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:02:39
- : )
- atrowbri: 19:03:00
- All locations are autonomous
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:03:23
- hahahaha
- theadamkatz: 19:03:33
- sean, you may want to point out that you can't actually provide support the demand for schools
- atrowbri: 19:03:38
- Shared sensibility for all the TPS
- theadamkatz: 19:04:27
- what are the implications for the network as more schools emerge?
- atrowbri: 19:04:37
- Sean is hinting that the idea of a shared sensibility is an important thing to consider in regards to Plausible Artworlds
- theadamkatz: 19:05:08
- is there a critical tipping point where the network either folds or becomes more self sufficient?
- atrowbri: 19:05:33
- ^^^^^ Scott could you bring this up to Sean?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:05:40
- yep
- atrowbri: 19:05:42
- re: critical tipping point
- theadamkatz: 19:05:56
- (like the individual schools - which have their own iverse support structures, institutions, funding, etc.)
- BASEKAMP team: 19:06:04
- just want to hear his thougths first
- theadamkatz: 19:06:09
- iverse=diverse
- Dan Schimmel: 19:06:42
- but i-verse sounds like a good Rastafari word!
- Valentina Desideri: 19:07:20
- still here
- atrowbri: 19:08:17
- Scott repeats "is there a critical tipping point where the network either folds or becomes more self sufficient?"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:08:37
- atrrowbri writes that scott repeats that ...
- atrowbri: 19:08:46
- Sean doesnt even know...one of their goals was for TPS to be self sufficient
- atrowbri: 19:09:04
- context...not a blanket way of addressing the question
- atrowbri: 19:09:19
- TPS LA is not yet self sufficient
- theadamkatz: 19:09:22
- not the individual schools (necessarily), but the network...
- atrowbri: 19:10:35
- theadamkatz asks not self-sufficient in a financal sense, asking as network of PS grows, does network as a whole lose it's character, is that valuable or is it a necessary complaication?
- atrowbri: 19:11:28
- I would re-phrase and ask how close a TPS becomes a franchise or how much it is spawned entity free to become something else
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:11:53
- feedback! if you're not talking, please hit the mute button!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:11:58
- thx!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:12:25
- yeah
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:12:40
- perfectly clear/listening
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:25
- hi Jen, want to join the audio chat?
- roctorjen" title="proctorjen">Jen: 19:13:38
- sure!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:13:58
- adding you to call Jen
- BASEKAMP team: 19:14:07
- adam is asking a question...
- stephen wright: 19:14:13
- Can I ask a question? Sean, do you see The Public School + AAAARG as a "plausible artworld" as we have conjectured, or as a knowledge production device not particularly linked to any artworld? Or as a welcome addition to an existant artworld? Or what?
- atrowbri: 19:14:53
- discussion between Scott Rigby and theadamkatz about how Philly TPS might shape up
- Dan Schimmel: 19:15:27
- I'll bet there would be huge interest in philly in TPS classes once people get it
- atrowbri: 19:15:52
- Scott says hardly anyone knows about Philly TPS
- atrowbri: 19:16:04
- theadamkatz asks how people will find out about it
- atrowbri: 19:17:17
- basically there's no promo for TPS philly so only self selcting peo
- atrowbri: 19:17:23
- ple know about it
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:17:38
- hi henken
- atrowbri: 19:17:40
- Asking Sean how people found out about Philly TPS
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:17:41
- and gregg
- theadamkatz: 19:18:20
- good question
- atrowbri: 19:18:48
- What is relationship between TPS and Plausible Artworlds (PAW henceforth, sorry Scott)
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:19:03
- hi stephen - i think i'd say that i see them as resources, which do connect to existing practices, often art ones, but not necessarily
- atrowbri: 19:19:19
- PAW is a project, an init, something that's been going on, think of it as an art project, that seeks to link up with other alternative artworlds
- atrowbri: 19:19:33
- divergent artworlds that we dont know about yet
- atrowbri: 19:19:37
- TPS is one example
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:19:47
- so i like the idea of plausible artworlds, while i wouldnt have used the term myself or thought of it, i do think of it in terms of building autonomous institutions or something like that
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:20:06
- but i think theyre sympathetic ideas, at least as far as i understand it
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:20:55
- i think "world" is a lot nicer in that it is so ambient , as opposed to institution, which sounds very structural
- theadamkatz: 19:20:57
- is it important/interesting to address TPS's inevitable association with other pedagogical projects which do function as art practices?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:21:43
- but at the same time, im kind of simple minded and institution has a form that i can wrap my head around a little bit
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:22:52
- they're not just examples either, because you can copy classes!
- caleb waldorf: 19:23:00
- Past classes can be future classes!
- caleb waldorf: 19:23:03
- whoa!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:23:07
- haha
- caleb waldorf: 19:23:09
- haha
- atrowbri: 19:24:27
- audio died from Sean
- atrowbri: 19:24:31
- anyone else?
- caleb waldorf: 19:24:36
- i hear him
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:42
- no we can hear him ok
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:24:43
- i lost all audio
- atrowbri: 19:24:48
- recall Jessica Westbrook, scott, plz
- BASEKAMP team: 19:24:53
- okay
- Dan Schimmel: 19:25:03
- is the link between TPS and PAW that both are events/processes/networks of ongoing conversation/collaboration that seek some kind of intervention in "normal" institutions and hierarchies?
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:25:11
- thanks
- BASEKAMP team: 19:25:48
- bojana, do you want to join the audio convesation?
- bojana romic: 19:26:03
- yes
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:21
- Aharon - want to join audio? looks like you're on
- bojana romic: 19:26:29
- but now I'm having another conv.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:26:35
- oop
- Aharon: 19:26:48
- I think this might be a question of the on-looker making the "world" and/or the actual perceived environment being a "world".. It is a binary relationship that, I think, is a bit of a phantom
- Dan Schimmel: 19:27:31
- worlds-in-the-making
- atrowbri: 19:29:31
- Sean: AAAARG seems to have an incredible impact that might not come through in this chat because the system of uploading hared documents is so simple. It makes available texts that are not available to everyone because (1) educational status barriers (never heard about them) (2) economic (buy books) barriers (3) academic barriers (lack of access to JSTOR, etc). I've had multiple people thank me profusely for introducing them to aaaarg.org, much more so than they would if I tried to get them to consider teaching or attending a TPS class. Can you address the status of AAAARG as a autodidactic community (individuals) vs the seemingly much less used aaaarg forums/dicussions/issues. Is aaaarg vital as an individual autodidactic source for individuals and how does that contrast with The Public School as a community?
- atrowbri: 19:29:43
- hared/shared
- atrowbri: 19:31:02
- Question on how a class comes to be on TPS
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:31:21
- guys, i've gotta head off
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:31:23
- /out
- Matthew Slaats: 19:31:24
- Question - As the interest in developing pedagogical practice outside of the institution is becoming of greater interest (am thinking about Anton Vidokle's school for Manifesta, Ernesto Pujol's school, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation) what is the objective of developing the alternative forms, in an art forum,
- Matthew Slaats: 19:31:40
- Or how does this fit into this dialogue?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:31:41
- L8R sarah
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:31:52
- loud and clear caleb
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:32:10
- wait i'm still here
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:32:15
- sean, did you just ask me a question
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:32:16
- ?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:32:22
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:32:26
- haha no i just said bye!
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:32:32
- eh, sorry
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:32:59
- it's crazy over here and i've gotta head out
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:32:59
- mathew slaats interesting question...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:05
- Stephen, you still there?
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:33:09
- i'm gonna leave the chat on so i have the transcription, tho
- arahkessler" title="sarahkessler">sarahkessler: 19:33:13
- bye guys!
- BASEKAMP team: 19:33:20
- kewl -- bi
- atrowbri: 19:33:58
- Course propsals can be very general or "well thought out"
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:34:14
- matthew - obviously the interest in education is much more pervasive than simply art (self-help, the internet, cooking shows, etc), but i think the art context does have a few things, like existing networks and people who participate in it, even though they are asking questions exactly like yours of themselves all the time...
- atrowbri: 19:34:51
- Sean taught an S&M course, did not know much about it originally
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:35:00
- caleb taught it!
- atrowbri: 19:35:01
- S&M theory and practice
- atrowbri: 19:35:03
- OH
- atrowbri: 19:35:04
- sorry
- atrowbri: 19:35:19
- Caleb is talking
- atrowbri: 19:35:26
- accents sound similar
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:35:50
- but its those networks of spaces, funds, people i think function as a means towards distributing ideas and concepts
- Aharon: 19:36:02
- Sean, when you use "in art context" - which context of art are you talking about?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:36:05
- and people, projects, classes, etc
- bojana romic: 19:37:14
- I lost you, and it's busy when I call - could you call me again?
- Matthew Slaats: 19:37:27
- Thanks - I'm really curious why there is interest in creating alternative learning spaces? Not just art ed, but generally. What is missing? Has education become to business oriented? Is this just about placing the power of education in the hands of anyone?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:37:28
- aharon, when matthew asked "what is the objective of developing the alternative forms in an art forum"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:37:29
- bojana, we'll add you again
- bojana romic: 19:37:35
- thnx
- BASEKAMP team: 19:38:04
- caleb is answering the question about whether or not or how or why the courses cost money - are they free? who decides? etc
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:38:55
- the amount of stuff that falls under the umbrella of education is interesting: career training, gardening, learning to use a coffee machine, knitting star wars characters, doing nanotech research, etc
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:38:55
- who is taking classes? what need is this meeting? info or community? or...
- Dan Schimmel: 19:39:10
- universities basically exist to make money -- the are often more interesed in having faculty generate research funding than in teaching (said as someone who works in them)
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:39:30
- so its almost meaningless to use the word, except that intuitively we have this belief in transformation of one kind or another
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 19:39:47
- i cant argue with what dan said
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:39:48
- i work at a teaching university... but the priority is getting students jjobs more and more - so its training workers
- Dan Schimmel: 19:41:39
- and education theory now talks a lot about student-centered learning, and peer-to-peer learning, and various other learner-centered pedagogies which if you take them to their logical conclusion imply that learning should be outside of the insitution - let the public generate its own learning (this is actually mimi not dan)
- theadamkatz: 19:43:52
- okay guys, sorry but i have to go...
- BASEKAMP team: 19:44:02
- theadamkatz ---- thanks!
- Matthew Slaats: 19:44:05
- As a person who works in Higher Ed, I'm loath the idea that only certain people have the expertice to teach. Or that learning has to work from the top down. My best learning experiences have come from my own desire to learn. Maybe that's why doing gen ed work in undergrad sucked. It had no relation to my own experience. I'm of the opinion that learning is about a group sharing an experience and an interest in a specific idea/subject.
- theadamkatz: 19:44:06
- (BTW - i once promoted a class on CR)
- caleb waldorf: 19:44:34
- byeee adam
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:44:46
- bye adam
- BASEKAMP team: 19:45:22
- tru dat slaats
- BASEKAMP team: 19:46:39
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edupunk
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:47:19
- slaats... i really only learn from mistakes. im broken like that.
- Matthew Slaats: 19:47:30
- Jim Groom is my friend
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:34
- messedupness
- Jessica Westbrook: 19:47:38
- i try to get students to make messes
- Valentina Desideri: 19:47:40
- isn't it also that in order to deal with a more and more complex reality (look at this chat/talk!) people need different dimentions of learning? from something as specific as knitting star wars chracters to natural hystory..
- BASEKAMP team: 19:47:56
- he's everyone's friend slaats (this is Greg
- Valentina Desideri: 19:48:51
- and 'conventional' education is organized in clear separation of fields
- Matthew Slaats: 19:49:05
- We're all broken in some way. That is what makes us interesting.
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 19:49:12
- can the question be repeated? audio in and out
- BASEKAMP team: 19:49:48
- Stephen asked a similar question earlier -- i was just about to reiterate that
- BASEKAMP team: 19:50:53
- SEAN, pasting Stephen's question again here --- "Can I ask a question? Sean, do you see The Public School + AAAARG as a "plausible artworld" as we have conjectured, or as a knowledge production device not particularly linked to any artworld? Or as a welcome addition to an existant artworld? Or what?"
- BASEKAMP team: 19:51:10
- Salem, similar to above
- Dan Schimmel: 19:51:55
- ok, but then again, there is something to be said for assembling a group of creative people in one place (physical or virtual) who are conversing with each other and with students, reading books, involved with artworlds, etc who can be a conduit for other people who may not have access to those things elsewhere in their lives -- thats what schools/colleges were supposed to do until they became so entrenched in specialities, disciplines, bureaucracies
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:27
- but earlier question you asked about salem was more about the transition from "art"-related participants to what it sounds like now is more not-necessarily-artist participation
- stephen wright: 19:52:49
- Sorry, I lost my connection.
- BASEKAMP team: 19:52:55
- hey there Stephen
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:11
- Sean posted the first 500 texts to AAAARG !!!
- Matthew Slaats: 19:53:23
- For me learning is about giving actions meaning. It's not just about providing a tool to use, but the appropriate way to use that tool or think about that tool. I feel the biggest problem with the educational system (beyond it's financial greediness) is that it doesn't take a totally inter/cross disciplinary approach. Balancing skill and theory.
- Aharon: 19:53:27
- I find the generally speaking 2 strands of conversation here curiously interesting in some crude and wide historical context.. There used to be a time when "art" was perceived as any other craft and there wasn't much different support for the artist who painted than that for the painter who painted. The support structures that came about, via patronage, through to galleries, charitable faoundations, museums, etc. developed at times when support structures for education began to pop up... Same kind of support strucures we dis in both environments, art and education.
- stephen wright: 19:53:45
- can you call me?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:53:56
- oh -- sorry -- missed that. yes
- stephen wright: 19:54:36
- cut out again... sorry
- BASEKAMP team: 19:54:44
- stephen, calling you again
- bojana romic: 19:55:16
- can you call me again please?
- BASEKAMP team: 19:55:22
- bojana, do you want to be re-added to -------yep
- Matthew Slaats: 19:55:38
- There was a great interview I once read with Sam Gould of Red76 about how artist working in social practice are finding avenues for working with museums through educational departments.
- stephen wright: 19:55:41
- I am interested that the conversation has often moved to the issue of usership -- as opposed to both ownership and spectatorship. One unique feature that I see in AAAARg and the Public School that makes them different than mainstream artworld is a sense that spectatorship is replaced by usership.
- cesare pietroiusti: 19:56:55
- very good point stephen
- Aharon: 19:57:38
- in what way, stephen, would you say that a tate modern user is very different than an aaaarg user?
- Dan Schimmel: 19:59:02
- would anyone say that artists are given more freedom to experiment with usership than educators/teachers because of a kind of societal panic around protecting children and not letting any subversives get hold of their minds, whereas artists can be disruptive?
- Elysa Lozano: 19:59:29
- also the 'institutions' in this case are vehicles or tools rather than programs
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:00:29
- disruptive
- Dan Schimmel: 20:00:55
- what if a plausible artworld were to interrupt the educational matrix, hack into it, and make it disruptive... can TPS do that?
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:02
- Dan: http://plausibleartworlds.org/node/256
- BASEKAMP team: 20:01:08
- "Parents were looking for cheap daycare. We wanted to brainwash their children."
- Aharon: 20:01:12
- personally, I think that the main difference between say something like tate modern - am using that because of the "educational" out-reach programs - and aaaarg is actually what aaaarg could be and what tate can not..
- Dan Schimmel: 20:01:52
- ha! love that
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:02:15
- dan... yes i wouldnt have thought it before, but i would say that
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:02:25
- nice
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:02:29
- the first question
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:03:02
- dan, i'd argue that AAAARG is doing that now
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:03:15
- and actually there is one thing i want to mention about that
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:03:19
- with the public school
- Dan Schimmel: 20:03:38
- yes, totally agree and admire aaarg for doing it
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:05:08
- we are using aaaarg and plausible artworlds in an institutionalized accredited course...
- Matthew Slaats: 20:05:51
- Has anyone heard about the Institute of Play? It's a school that is defined by games. You should google it to check it's prespective. The school just opened in NYC last fall.
- Greg Scranton: 20:06:07
- Photos from tonight @ Basekamp: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tactical20/sets/72157623023876761/
- Greg Scranton: 20:06:47
- before we were at max capacity that is...
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:07:03
- looks great
- Dan Schimmel: 20:07:15
- so UC is falling apart financially -- of course they are happy to have free public schools spring up to fill the gap!?
- caleb waldorf: 20:07:38
- but it wouldn't exactly be free
- Dan Schimmel: 20:07:44
- well, cheap
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:07:46
- of course they are, they are doing it whether we like it or not
- caleb waldorf: 20:07:47
- yeah
- caleb waldorf: 20:07:50
- totally
- caleb waldorf: 20:07:52
- much cheaper
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:09:13
- the question is what to do then, pretend it is not happening find ways to have UC fund its own critique
- caleb waldorf: 20:09:58
- which also moves away from "intervention" to something that is perhaps beside, or adjacent
- caleb waldorf: 20:10:11
- (which i prefer)
- Dan Schimmel: 20:10:51
- good point: beside, below, along, with...
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:11:38
- http://aaaarg.org/always-choose-the-worst-option-artistic-resistance-and...
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:12:16
- the BAVO critique of "engaged" art that actually fills in for the failures of capitalism
- caleb waldorf: 20:12:44
- artist as social worker?
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:12:48
- yeah
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:13:09
- unfortunately they propose ironic institutionalization as the answer
- caleb waldorf: 20:13:16
- great!
- caleb waldorf: 20:13:22
- (ugh)
- caleb waldorf: 20:14:04
- YES
- Valentina Desideri: 20:14:09
- yeah
- Dan Schimmel: 20:14:12
- thanks for great conversation!
- caleb waldorf: 20:14:12
- thanks everyone!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:14:16
- i think more interesting would be to consider how a project/ practice is being used
- Greg Scranton: 20:14:19
- Thanks everyone!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:14:21
- THANKS!!!!
- Matthew Slaats: 20:14:21
- Hey all - I'm going to have to check out. Was great being here. Hope to chat more and get to know everyone.
- Jessica Westbrook: 20:14:21
- thank you!
- stephen wright: 20:14:26
- Thanks Sean!
- alemcj" title="salemcj">salem collo-julin: 20:14:33
- thanks guys
- jelena guga: 20:14:34
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:14:36
- ean.patrick.dockray@gmail.com">sean.patrick.dockray@gmail.com
- bojana romic: 20:14:39
- thanks
- stephen wright: 20:14:46
- Good night all!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:14:52
- good night!
- Valentina Desideri: 20:14:53
- thanks everybody and good night!
- Aharon: 20:15:01
- nity nite every1
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:15:06
- goodnight valentina, nice to e-see you
- caleb waldorf: 20:15:06
- "i think more interesting would be to consider how a project/ practice is being used" or mobilized. but i also think it important to think about methodologies that resist certain kinds of co-option.
- Aharon: 20:15:07
- thanks!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:15:14
- we're gonna write proposals now...
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:15:17
- yeah totally
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:15:23
- thats the corollary!
- BASEKAMP team: 20:15:31
- thanks again Sean!
- Valentina Desideri: 20:16:22
- my pleasure sean, but if you keep the conversation this interesting it'll be hard to leave the chat!
- eandockray" title="seandockray">Sean Dockray: 20:16:27
- thanks scott... hope that was a helpful kickoff to plausible artworlds
- cesare pietroiusti: 20:24:10
- thanks scott and everyone. that's was very interesting. togther with other artists were thinking to do something similar in italy...
