Social Tech

The first phase of the Landscape-Portrait project in Bournemouth finished last night with a sprint across Bournemouth to catch the train back to Waterloo. Tony White and myself just made the train with tony suffering mechanical issues by still making the cut.

Thinking about the project now there is a question, part of my PHD research, about the use of technology in non-art or specialist environments.

In using video and the net to disseminate the content created by LP we have lost a few participants who simply do not trust the technology, that is video or the web. With video the reaction has to with being recognisable, along the lines of 'please don't take my picture'. With the web its slightly different, but the reaction is related to an idea of what people (other net users) might use this for. This incorporates a range from pedophiles through to identity theft. Its obviously not our place to persuade people that the dangers are not real, they do happen, but that they are extremely unlikely to happen as a result of taking part in LP.

This level of mistrust - either of medium or technology - does not happen s explicitly within classic 'art' spaces, there is sometimes an unthinking acceptance - no more worrying than the suspicion - that they, as participants' know the risks and still wish take part in a cultural project.

phase 2

The landscape-Portrait project for Bournemouth has now moved into phase 2 of its production. Currently I am uploading all the interviews conducted so far.

Tonight were having a get together with all the collaborators as a sort of thank you.

The second part of the project where we seed the content into online spaces that directly relate to Bournemouth. Tony White is going to write content to sit in the comments box of various videos, the hope will be that interested parties coming to the website will view content, and be inspired to either record a portrait of leave a comment about a portrait.

work experience

Having just finished writing in my registration document about private public spaces , such as shopping centres - today I found myself in a shopping centre, Castlepoint in Bournemouth, trying to do a community art project.


In a parallel of Anne Minton's comments in the book Ground Control we had a brief moment of panic when the manager of the shopping centre, as a "representative of his employers", asked to see our indemnity insurance. The centre manager was keen for landscape-portrait to take place in the centre, but like so many private public spaces, this engagement had to follow certain procedure.

After a quick phone call the project went ahead, we had insurance, just no proof. Positioning ourselves on one of the least promising location I have experienced we did remarkably well. The spot was completely wind blown, outside Marks & Spencers and with no natural constituency. All we had were two borrowed chairs and video camera, but it worked, more to do with the quality of the collaborators than anything else.

In the afternoon we were based at the Library opposite the shopping centre. A venue i was looking forward to using with its established community reference point etc. Not surprisingly we had less success in terms of numbers, but a greater level of engagement. People were interested to talk about the ideas - less keen to commit to doing a video portrait.

In terms of the ongoing debate about technology, its divisive capabilities and this project, it was interesting to see how technological constraints, consistent to most public facing, non art environments, changed the way we explained the work. Again all interviews were recorded onto tape - when they could have been recorded on line - perhaps. The playback of the video from the website was occasionally jerky and the audio popped due to congested bandwidth. The machines themselves were fine in terms of specification but had been well used, with the result that the audio sockets were not working satisfactorily - leading a poor audience/user experience. Again I think we need to do specific test in each of these locations, on specific machines well before the work begins.

Generally lots of users were interested in the idea of demographics, especially when considering how different postcodes effected the cost of their car insurance.

Firewalls

Just talking with Helen about the issue of Firewalls in civic spaces - its proved a real issue for the project and has lead to us doing all the interviews onto tape and uploading them by hand. These institutional sites restrict access via the firewall which means that users can't upload video and in some circumstances download video, rendering the project invisible yet frustrating.

This could also been seen in terms of controlling public space, firewalls restrict access to publci spaces and data, in the name of security or perhaps under the slightly hysteric notion of safety.

More work needs to be done in preparing locations for recording, easy to say in retrospect but there has been a real compression of time, the deadline being March 31st.

A knock on of this and processing is a certain dislocation between interviewee/audience and the work. We upload the files, then we have to track down the interviewee and let them know the URL for their portrait. Not ideal.

Public Sphere

Reading about Alexander Kluge and his thoughts on the production of 'oppositional public sphere'. Kluge was a documentary film maker critical of the struggles of squatters who required him to come and live with them in order to 'join (and film) their fight' against the authorities who wished to evict them. Kluge argued that by keeping their struggle private they were replicating the structures and methods of the authorities, who were using private means to regain what they saw as private property. By refusing Kluge access unless he embedded himself within their community Kluge argued they were refusing to allow the events, over the next few days of eviction, to enter an oppositional public sphere.

There is maybe a correlation between this methodology and the production and interpretation of public data as a public art project on the ground. Talking specifically about the creation of data Kris Cohen, writing about the group show ‘Day-to-day-data’, hi-lites the role artists might play in subverting the creation of publics. He writes “because whoever makes data makes the publics that data purports merely to describe”.

Tech Issues

Landscape-Portrait has been running in Bournemouth now for a couple of weeks, with Steve, Diane and Helen having managed to capture a dozen good interviews. There have been some issues around IT. These usually consist of people not being able to record their video portrait, or view other video portraits. The IT issue is quite divisive, for while the system is working fine, if users encounter a problem they abandon. This is further complicated when we are relying on IT kit in local Libraries. Helen after much deliberation has given up on using the Libraries PC's as the IT dept cannot set up the computers to work with the website. This is a major blow, as it means we have to record all of the portraits onto tape and then edit, encode and upload them.


Today we are going to Townsend Children's center fun day, are we are taking the Media Bus . This new bus is equipped with lots of kit and hopefully a viable internet connection, i really want to record some of the portraits online, in order to build a greater cross section of responses. Just looked out the window and thankfully it's stopped raining.

First Bournemouth video post

At last the first Bournemouth post is up. Donna, who I first met in West Howe is up. This has a huge symbolic value, in terms of getting the portraits on the map.

So Donna "What's the most important thing about your home and why ?":

Tech Teething

Speaking with the curator (SCAN) of the Bournemouth instance of LP and she is having problems with the tech. People can login or easily upload there portraits, the libraries are having problems uploading. We should have checked this before hand - however its a mistake to get caught up in the tech. If the online way of recording portraits dose not work for a particular context, then we should skip it and just use video camera. The technology is not - in and of itself - important. (note to self).

Geographical site specific-ness

As the LP project roles out to more locations it will be interesting perhaps to locate geographically specific venues which would be able to show content from the site. This is my intention in Bournemouth, there are plans to show the work at the Sunday best music festival in West Howe and via a large video screen in central bournemouth.

test embed working

We've just been working on the embed code so its possible to share the video content across social networking and other sites - seems to work - here's my favourite from the project in the North East: take it away Sonia.



See the rest here: http://www.landscape-portrait.com/?Sonia

Writers Brief

We've just agreed to commission a writer to work on the LP project. His name is Tony White and some of his work can be seen here http://pieceofpaperpress.wordpress.com/.

As well as wanting other practitioners to work with the LP project I am really keen that the comments box - which is currently underused - should be engaged by the writer.

I am thinking that the comments space within the website can be used to house written texts. These texts might be a response ot the video portraits, but hopefully they will also take the project
off in another direction; perhaps linking up with other online discussions, resources and artifacts.