holidays...

Coming to the end of a long summer holiday, finalisation of my PHD looming and beyond that a thought of what I might do beyond the PHD submission. I really want to go to the Open Knowledge Foundations Helsinki conference to ask those awkward question about crictical and creative uses of open data, something that once again is missing from the agenda. Also must have a sit down with DM, see if there are any forthcoming projects I might get involved in - using open data. All seems miles away, and it all depends on how the current PHD submission is recieved. mmmmmm 

Assembly - Re-thinking the Digital

Tonight I went to a talk by Charlie Gere, called Assembly - Re-thinking the Digital within which he was promoting his forthcoming book "Community without Community in Digital Culture" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). Not really sure what to think about it, his point was something that i agree with completely, that the digital should not be separated out from the 'hand crafted', technos and the body develop in sync, not as separate and unrelated entities, we have always been digital, technology is part of our 'culture', and plurality, or difference is essential to the functioning of self. He plotted this argument via a host of premier league thinkers, Derrida, Nancy, Aristotle, Steigler.

And whilst I agree with all this, particularly notions of difference and violence as essential to maintaining self against the techno fantasy of the mind melding type, I am not sure what more he adds to the argument. He cited live coder Alex Mclean, and Jodi, but again I am not sure to what end, beside a reference to plasticity and destruction, as in Mcleans 'fork' code and Jodi's encoded 'instructions' to make a bomb.

There does seem to be - with academics who are embedded in institutions - a desire to use images in powerpoint presentations which 'look' like what they are talking about. The source material is often adverts etc, but from this audience members pov this is a really silly distraction, especially when, as was the case tonight, the image is the Apple Mac logo, yes its got a bite out of it, yes its the fall of man, yes its religious in connotation and yes its a bit lame, cliched and redundant. 

I have been a fan of Charlie Gere's writing but have to say I was really disappointed by the talk, its seemed really unfocused, with lots of irreverent jokes about hating contemporary art etc, his work is much better than this  - be interesting to see the reaction when his book comes out. 

Vocabulary or Ontology ?

I was wondering what the difference between an ontology, thesuari and a vocabulary within the parameters of LOD might be:

A vocabulary is a set of terms (words, codes, etc.) that are used in a specific community. Vocabularies provide a mechanism for communication- be it written, oral or electronic- because the meaning of the terms are known and agreed upon by the community members.

 An ontology is a representation of knowledge, generally of a particular domain, written with a standardized, structured syntax that describes the relationship between concepts, also called resources, that serve to characterize the domain.

Thesauri are similar to ontologies in that they can describe hierarchical and associative relationships between terms. However, they are generally used to facilitate indexing and retrieval of written and recorded items. (source)


Which got me thinking whilst I was in the pub waiting for a friend:

Might be interesting to build an app which just displayed the 'description data' for different concepts and ideas, for example public art, community art etc. This ties in with the idea of publishing the outcome of my PHD, the speculations, as LOD data, via a carefully crafted ontology.

Overall i may also be an idea to published an ontology that lists all the modifications to a particular term, for example community art, each update would be listed and would feature a disjoint with the previous version. So Kwon's  definition would relate to previous definitions, other classes  would also be defined such as collaborator, participant, public. Each would feature a revision history. There might also be a description of methods and properties.

This process of building an vocabulary has also presented the idea of producing a vocabulary for single concepts, for example 'happiness' 'ecstasy' 'epiphany' and listing existing and invited descriptions. It would be easy to build these using something like protege and using ontology search engines such as Swoggle.

Which leads onto the thought of data modelling as a kind of creative practice. And the possibility that data modelling should not conform to some inherent 'logic' rather that it might not be constrained in this way, and the production of vocabularies and ontologies might allow some other  subjectivities to come to influence production. In this way the passage from data to information and onto knowledge maybe rendered across a range of forms, rather than just that indicated by formal data models, for data modeling is if nothing else, spatial; i fact I cannot believe there have not been examples of artists and theorists design ontologies and vocabularies, perhaps there are and i haven't found them.

RDF files and ontologies

All the files for Landscape-Portrait as well as the cultural projects ontology have been uploaded to here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0244jlz3ds3f64x/C19BAgnL0V/LOD

Back to the writing next week.

Submitting and registering.

Today is spent registering and submitting the ontology to several sites and search engines. Seems there is no really obvious registry ? so i put it here:

http://mmisw.org/orr/#http://mmisw.org/ont/culproj/owl

although it seems a little flaky.

I've also uploaded the rdf description of some of the Landscape-Portrait elements here:

http://thedatahub.org/dataset/landscape-portrait/resource/0d66d9c9-bc7c-4de3-8279-aa58df881748

after making sure they passed the syntax test here:


http://demo.semantic-web.at:8080/SkosServices/check/82

I've also submitted the URL of the Landscape-Portrait RDF files to Swoggle:

http://swoogle.umbc.edu/index.php?option=com_swoogle_service&service=submit

And submitted the vocabulary to:


http://labs.mondeca.com

Ontology Up

Finally the first version of my 'cultural projects' ontology is live:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/cultural-project.rdf

I've used the ontology to describe Landscape-portrait using this rdf file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/lp-rbl.rdf

the participants:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/participant.rdf

and the videos the participants created:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/video_1.rdf

So far I have only included one participant and one set of videos, but I'll update this over the next weeks to include a selection of participants from Bournemouth. Within the ontology as well as a 'participant' class or concept there is also class's of collaborators, which are defined differently to participants, or to use LOD semantic are a disjoint with 'participant', that is one person cannot be both. I'll add the collaborators over the next few weeks.

It was really important that the concepts or classes tally with the written research, so we have a class 'project' of which 'Community_Art_Project' is a subclass, and each project has a property of 'hasResource' and participant and collaborator class has the property of 'IsParticipantIn' and 'IsCollaboratorIn' respectively.

In terms of tools I have been using Protege which was recommended by Richard Light, who has been a massive help in guiding me in this work. Also been using http://swoogle.umbc.edu/
to locate existing ontologies.

Unpredicatable - ness

Wasted a whole morning trying to work out why the Quicktime here (which worked fine yesterday) dropped the audio today when encoding from .flv to .ogg files. After hours of scouting about I then discovered that Archive.org accepts .flv files, its only  WikiMedia commons that do not allow upload of video files that use proprietary codecs. After that I prepared a .csv file with all the metadata, got the python script to upload it Archive.org from here's:

http://archive.org/help/abouts3.txt

https://github.com/kngenie/ias3upload

this worked quite well for one file, but trying to batch from terminal gave this error:

298 file(s) to upload in Landscape-Portrait
Sent 4096 bytes (0%)
500 Can't read entity body: Connection reset by peer
500 Can't read entity body: Connection reset by peer

hopefully Jeff @ Archive might be able to help out. 

Encode, rename, upload, tag

Spent all putting together a workflow so I can encode, rename, upload and tag the video files from Bournemouth. First up the files are archived as flv's and Archive.org, and the WikiMedia commons do not allow proprietary codecs, therefore they only allow .ogv or .ogg files. I managed to find a ogg binaries for Quicktime here, meaning I could batch export the flv's. Then needed to rename the files from the native upload names using this. After that each file needs a csv of all the metadata, which can then be linked to via a RDF dump. Usefully Archive.org makes this metadata available as xml for both the parent project and the video files, so w should be able to use this in the RDF ?

Archive Org

The plan this week then is to upload a set of video's to Archive.Org - using this URI format:

www.archive.org/download/Landscape-portrait2010/Kevin_Carter/v10heora.ogv

from this I can develop the RDF - it's really important that I get a working version of this before plunging back into the writing.

Then need to publicise the content by uploading the RDF file to CKAN's datahub and notifying the semantic search engines via this:

semantic search engine notification URL and Software here.

http://pingthesemanticweb.com/api.php#1

RDF schema

Spent the day trying to visualise the schema that would be required to describe the Landscape-Portrait project overall as well as some of its video elements, from this I can hopefully develop a template which can be produced by Paul as part of a script.


Here is the schema:


Red is the entity, green properties, yellow classes etc, from this I was able to map different vocabularies for most of the entities, properties and classes; see here:

Interestingly I couldn't find a entity of either a 'question' or an 'answer' - I thought these might be sub properties or classes of a entity but could
not find it.

Found some interesting art related ontology's here:

http://dlib.york.ac.uk/ontologies/Openart/index.html
http://linkedevents.org/ontology#sec-namespace

Which were taken from here:

http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-12/FebMar12_Allinson.html


What is interesting is the degree of sophistication that is permissible in some spaces and not others, think we'll need to create 'community art' as a ontological term as none that I can see come near to it - Fro instance when looking at the FOAF ontology I was interested to see this property

http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_myersBriggs

Which has 16 personality classifications which can be used to describe a person -

RDF/RDFa/DataDump/Ontologies

Working through the different options I am now thinking to make either a RDF file, or include a RDFa snippet into the web page. Problem is that the Landscape-Portrait site is dynamically generated and there is not page that explicitly contains the video elements. Therefore we might create RDF pages for each postcode, an include all the portraits that relate to the postcode. What is also of interest is the idea that I might create (how do you create) a ontology to describe community artworks, this might include all differences of method and methodology.

Alongside all of this will be a data-dump of the metadata of Landscape-Portrait, so other users can download and make use of it.

I am not a programmer

Ever since deciding that if the rhetoric of Open Data is meaningful then i should be able to publish the Landscape/Portrait data fairly easily I have been bashing my head against a wall trying to think of a way this would work easily. Basically I have an ASP database with all the metadata that I need to translate into a RDF formatted LOD. Been messing about with Kasabi allday and whilst I like its point and shoot interface i can't see how to load large datasets into it. I think that maybe RDFa is the way forward, so a semantic snippet might be included on each page, but I need to work this through via a tutorial.

Open Data Art.

Read some interesting, if slightly optimistic things about the relationship of Open Data and art. I am now into the process of transferring the dataset created during the making of Landscape-Portrait into the public realm, ideally as linked open data (LOD) or/and as a Open licensed data dump. The problem with making available as LOD is I need to services of a programmer and this is not cheap. Also part of me thinks that their should be freely available tools so that a fairly technically adept person, such as myself, should be able  to do this, otherwise the rhetoric of Open Data is, as I have stated before, is severely constrained around technical ability and economics. So the option at moment is to output the data from LP in a CSV file and load that to various free platforms, such as OKF's Datahub, Kasabi (a commercial platforms currently free as its in Beta), Talis (who are commercial but offer free hosting for not for profits) as well as data sharing sites such as Googles Fusion Tables. The data will also be uploaded to Archive.org as well, to allow it to be used and viewed in the future. Another idea is to give the dataset to a hackday and allow it to be processed in that way.
It would be interesting to find a site that specialises in publishing art datasets, not data about art as Rob Myers has described, but the dataset as art object. Not found that yet ?

Consumer Focus: From broadcast to conversation – making open data work for you workshop

Spent this morning at the consumer Focus "From broadcast to conversation – making open data work for you" workshop aimed primarily at the voluntary sector making use of Open Data. First speaker Mark O'Neil from the cabinet office and part of the recently formed Government Digital Service (DGS) - he talked about the 'single domain' which is the governments replacement of direct.gov. The website is built around a API allowing data to be shared, however it is currently a beta and provides services. He also talked about 'agile delivery' methods, which equates to the wisdom of doing things quickly in a focused manner, rather than spending years building a massive system that is either inappropriate for use or no longer relevant. (Which is a bit similar to James Wallbank's promotion of 'good enough ICT') Mark stressed that he spent a lot of time talking to users, which seemed primarily to mean business users who provided services to what I would call the 'general public'. Within government he identified four areas of operation, at the level of citizen, business, inside government and specialist area of operation. He was then asked about the issues of read /write access and admitted we are a long way of that yet. He was up for email conversations though, contact mark.oneil@digital.cabinet.office.gov.uk.

Next up was Ed Parks who also worked for the cabinet office (is there a theme developing ?), in the transparency team. He talked a bit about the process which promoted Open Data to its current position as an explicit part of Open Government project (this came about as a result of a request from the PM), and although a project of transparency and citizenship, was mostly justified against business metrics. As he stated "Open Data as an engine for growth". Someone in the audience queried the method for deciding which datasets are released, as his company had come into direct competition with another government agency. The point was that the decision to publish particular datasets is driven by financial and political agendas, and that Open Data was used, as the last speaker said, 'as a Trojan horse'. Ed mentioned the the public data group was recently set up to offer the possibility to query the governments policy, and we should all take part (address here) He also mentioned a recent Guardian article (here is a response to it) that addressed some of these concerns, other initiatives included the setting up of the Open Data Initiative in Shoreditch, to help small business take advantage of Open Data, the Open Data/Privacy white paper and the Open Business forum and the government consultation group that featured the stars of Open Data promotion in this country (Rufus Pollock (OKFN) , Tim Berners-Lee W3C and Nigel Shadbolt. Cynically Harwood's  "people who are awaiting power'  springs to mind.

Next up was Dan ? from Nominetrust ?. He consulted with charities in their possible use of Open Data. These included wheelmap.org, RSPB and Barnsley hospital. He gave the example of the toilet map whereby a service (http://toiletfinder.org/about)  (there is also one built by  a charity around incontinence issues) also acted as a campaign tool, as in 'Why are their no toilets here". Dan cited the Indigo Trust as an organisation that had done considerable work in making use of and talking about the difficulties of implementing Open Data practices in charities.

Javier Ruiz Diaz from the Open Rights Group talked about the realities of Open Data publishing. He talked about three basic types of government data, PSI (Public Service Industry) this is core data - geotagged public data, this is where the money is (OS, Census etc). The second Policy/Accountability and the third public services. He also made reference to the use of Open Data as a Trojan Horse under which government ministers (Francis Maude) could include plans to share welfare data with private company Experian to reduce welfare fraud. He cited a recent UK based survey that the majority of the public want public data to Open and available. And again referring to the usability of Open Goverment data he cited the example of the publishing of a central government data set which contained all the expenditure for a particular year which was largely unusable due to the lack of metadata to contextualise it. So the metric used for volumes was not detailed 300 what ? the frequency per year/month/week ? etc, rendering much of the data unusable. He also pointed to some non commercial projects which have made use of Open Data, the Europeana has published Open Data about may of the cultural archives held across Europe, and on speaking about broken data cylces (i.e. the government not allowing read/write privileges of open government data) he invoked a distributed methodology whereby the dataset with the most users would be the one that was used, and would be default by the one that was most uptodate. Some interesting companies were mentioned most prominently Swirrl who provide consultancy to large public entities, in this case Hampshire County Council.

Show Case

The early afternoon session featured a showcase of projects: Crabgrass an alternative social media platforms for protest groups, Briar, a secure news and discussion system, more can be found here. Of interest to me was the presenter of Lorea's reference to the mindset of programmers who would prefer to make software from scratch rather than make use of what is available, which tied into a slightly macho - mines better that yours attitude. She also mentioned the book "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by American feminist Jo Freeman, which might worth looking at. The classification of a distributed system as federated servers - or Disapora as a federated social network, and from Elijah Sparrow (Crabgrass) that Disapora was once a P2P network but the programmers could not make it work, so they went to a federated network solution.

Harry Halpin

Harry Halpin - UnlikeUS 2012

Harry Halpin woke everyone up from their late morning slumper by shouting into the mike alot - it worked. He is a member of the W3C web consortium which tries to lobby on web policy. He sort of presented a history of the 'like' button, but included lots of other tasty net historical elements. These included the fact that the 'Like' button includes RDF code. So when your browsing choices are being logged it using the structure of RDF, the only problem is the 'who' of who is looking at a particular piece of content is being saved back to FB closed database. Halpin also pointed to a interesting document which outlined the vision for social media in terms of the social graph from 2007, all of which has been implemented by FB with a few pertinent changes (one of the documents collaborators David Recordon now works for FB). He also stated that "Facebook is capturing your ontology - your Life world" which provoked a few chuckles. 

Software Matters

The mid morning session concerned the various modalities of Facebook operation. I had at the start of the conference tried to count the number of times "Facebook" was mentioned, but after a frequency of 3 a minute I gave it up as fruitless. Points of note were the consideration of different CSMP characteristics, FB is about intimacy, Google search about expansion. The various economies that have informed the expansion of the web - The 'hit' economy, the 'link' economy and what we have now - the 'like' economy' which sees an expansion of FB outside of its traditional walled garden through an externalisation via the 'like' button (which previously only appeared inside the platform (Anne Helmond & Caroline Gerlitz) -this has externalised the open graph turning it into a social graph, which is impossible to opt out of because of the passive interactivity of social plugins such as the 'Like' button. David Berry author of 'The philosophy of software' made some points of note: he talked of 'nudge behaviour' as being promoted by web bugs (social plugins), he cited a Pew statistic 73% of Americans did not want to be tracked online". He mentioned a project by Mark Merino called 'Scaler'  His books include, the forthcoming Critical Theory and the Digital (due 2012), The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (2011), and Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (2008). He is co-author of Libre Culture (2008), and editor of Understanding Digital Humanities (2012).

UnlikeUs Morning Meeting

I attended the UnlikeUs morning meeting - I felt like a sneak sitting at the back making notes. I wasn't though, just interested how they planned on moving forwards etc. Two things of note, Geert Lovink compared social media to pop culture, which is why it was not taken seriously, or was perhaps easy to dismiss. This relates to a point I have made in my research about artist taking leave from it as it doesn't constitute a serious platform, or location of inquiry. Whilst I understand both sides I just do not feel comfortable to remove myself from it. The other notable point was that the Netherlands was as equally fucked financially as the UK academic scene.

Public-Private

The afternoon session was divided up into a discussion of public - private affects of social media. The first speakers Nusta Nina talked about different CSMP user catgorisations and practices including the digital narcissism or vulnerable narcissism of  'The Nexters' (young people). I.e young people do not at this moment in their lives, care about privacy. The idea of a 'distributed identity' and how concepts of OpenID had still to take hold. Another point that I have mentioned in my research is the idea of terms & conditions creep. In that the terms and conditions you sign up to in 2005 change over the years, and generally you are not required to resign up or are given the option to leave (with all your data which related to your initial sign up), which ties in to a call for a greater media literacy amongst users. Arnold Roosendaal made the point that the 'Like' button works in a passive manner, and does not need to be clicked to record data (something that is now illegal in parts of Germany). He then went on to talk about ID construction, in particular mentioned the Gary Walker experiment which exposes the ease of ID forgery, and also the reliance that third party platforms, such as Spotify have on Facebook Connect, which during a recent server collapse meant that Spotify was down as well.

Missing Projects (UnlikeUs)

Some of the artist showcase were missing from the afternoon session. Tobias Leingruber's project did (until it was taken down as part of a cease and desist order from Facebook) engages with the idea of global identity management, whereby he issues real world ID cards which approximate those the FB offers using Facebook Connect, and devalues those produced by countries in the form of passports. Other projects can be viewed here  and a discussion here.
What is of note is that the critique of Facebook as global identity manager is happening from inside Facebook, not as a result of an exodus, and this marks it out as different from the norm.

Artists Use, misuse or dissertion of social media

The afternoon session featured a collection of artists who in some manner had engage in social media through their practice. Walter Langelaar spoke about his group moddr who made the popular Web Suicide Machine artwork (which was actually preceded by a burger King advert). The next piece they are working on is the GIve Me My Data plugin that allows users to download all their data from the walled garden of platforms such as Facebook. Speaking afterwards to Walter we talked about his exodus from CSMP commercial social media platforms, and the fact he will not be returning, as well as the difficulty of working with communities with FLOSS, as a way of staging an alternative rendering of social media practice.

Dimitry Kleiner - UnLikeUs 2012

Other practitioners of note were Dmytri Kleiner who presented various projects made with in association with telekommunisten. Of particular note was the project thimbl a micro-blogging application that relies on the finger protocol , which was developed in the 1970's, and is included in all current server releases. A case of certain communitarian principles being in place early on and then being included, but not used as these principles were realigned. As Kleiner stated ' capitalism will never fund P2P networks as there is not place for the cash booths'.

Reification 2.0

In the second part of the morning session of the UnlikeUs conference Dylan Wittkower gave is presentation. His research focuses on the sociological appraisal of the social graph invoked by social media. He noted several phenomena ranging from the marketing of products to friends within social media (in order to win a prize) to the real focus of his talk, the methods that are used to construct and expose identity see:

"Wittkower also discusses four main strategies of identity construction on the spectrum of proactive, reactive, unitary and divergent. An untidy identity – found at the corner of proactive and divergent – relies on the actions of others, such as tagging, in the making of an individual’s online preseence. A spectacular identity – proactive and unitary- draws on Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle. It is an experience of the Self as a thing, protecting itself outwardly and ridden with interpassivity and simulacrazation. A distributed identity – reactive and divergent – is constructed on the walls of others, on group pages or on fan pages. A lurking identity – reactive and unitary – does just that: lurks aroud the Web and takes no further action. Wittkower believes that some of these strategies will resolve into more meaningful forms of interaction. Whereas friendertainment might lead to teleboredom, asking the network may very likely lead to fruitful conversation."

Bits of Freedom

The police picking up their Big Brother Award 2011

On arriving at the UnlikeUs conference we popped into the last session of the Thursday, bits of freedom were talking about various projects - particularly where they had influenced legal precedent in respect to Facebook and privacy laws in Europe. All of this points towards the campaign Europe versus Facebook, where the incompatibilities between FB and European law are played out, for example in requesting your data from FB, see here. Bits of Freedom also host the big brother awards which celebrate those agencies and players most culpable in abuses of freedom and privacy.

unlikeus conference amsterdam day one [tmorning]

Todays conference was really good, and the venue was the upstairs from the subterrarian pit where yesterdays presentations took place. after a great breakfast Gert lovink gave a really good intro calling for a form of web sociology.

Jodi Dean (usa) spoke very interestingly about the constitution of the social in social media critique. she gave three definition of the contention that society does not exist. Her first the neo-liberal version as espoused by thatcher, the second a rendering provided by ANT/Object theory and third the version provided by Lacau & Mouffe. Her point was that social media is a mirror each of these contentions and the motif of the network, as the representative of the social, is a simulacra of these relationships. her claim was that if society did exist then there would not be a need for social media platforms.

She consistently problematicised social media critique for always talking of dispersion, privacy and identity concerns (a position she stated it shared with the neo liberal dismissing of society) what she asked would their version of social media look like ? was not more a fact that these critics had - from a psychoanalytic viewpoint - had issues with trust, that they did not trust these vast conglomerations.

So for dean it was not the issues of the vast numbers of users, the bottleneck, but rather that these were concentrated into the hands of one person/company. And that dispersion is more likely to produce the 'one' of neo liberal politics, as she said, 'no long tail without the strong one' - and there is in fact an underlying desire that people want to be part of a whole. for instance in the claim that twitter enabled the recent arab spring protests was dismissed as confusing the form, which allows for collectivity, and focusing on the content. FB then is the private ownership of this form of collectivity and that is the problem with FB.

Topology: Spaces of Transformation Topology: Secrets of Space Topology: Embodying Transformation 5 November 2011–16 June 2012 Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium Bankside London SE1 9TG

I went to this on saturday @ Tate Modern: Artist Olafur Eliasson in conversation with Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Chaired by Catherine Malabou. It was good, and in part quite funny. Latour and Weibel completely disagreed about the construction of space, for Latour space is inscribed, which he related to art history, Weibel made use  of graph theory, after Weibel had explained his position Latour said 'I disagree with everything you have said'. Somewhere in the middle was Eliasson, who has worked and made work with both Weibel and Latour. The discussion was pretty stunted as a result of their intransigence, although Eliasson acted as a good glue between the two, the chair was pretty poor.

OKF Helsinki

Just posted up some initial ideas for a panel discussion for artists using open data. In Berlin last year there was only one artist featured and he was not explicitly engaged with open data. In response i pitched the idea of curating and afternoon session featuring artists who explicitly and critically engage with open data, initial posting here http://okfestival.okfnpad.org/helsinki?.

#OpenDataLDN 3: Wikimedia and New Collaborations

I presented Landscape-Portrait at the bi-monthly meet up of the Open Knowledge Foundation last night. The night of lightning talks featured various talks including the National Archive at Kew, who are having a hack day in the near future, which could be interesting. The night went well, lots of interest from various sources, charities producing personal narratives of those they help, other students. But as yet no programmer, which was the main aim of the evening, interestingly I was not the only one requesting technical help, seems like a bit of a bottle neck.

Asier Mendizabal - Raven Row

Last night i went to a talk by Asier Mendizabal at Raven Row, the gallery owned and run by Alex Sainsbury. I am quite perplexed by the whole evening, it kinda makes me wonder if a gallery, even one as accommodating as RR - is the right place for Mendizabal's work. The works seem like props for a narrative that can only be told by the artist, or a select group 'who are in the know'.
Perversely I think this performative, story telling approach would work quite well within the confines of community based work. Whereby a working group develop a set of props and
a narrative, and the performance on this becomes is the work, the story would then (ideally) be retold and mistold, making its transition from object to symbol mmmmm
sort of - It also struck me that most of his works come from a world which might considered - analogue - the punk movement, 50's abstract expressionism. Its like a music fan who refuses to listen to music after 1973, the narratives that Mendizabal develops are not complicated by the confusion and multiplicity caused by domestic access to computing and digital networks, the references he uses seem, in comparison to the contemporary moment, quite fixed.

LOD - Programmer

I've been searching for a LOD programmer to both advise and probably do some of the programming for the next stage of LP. Kat from the OKF has been helpful but as yet nothing has materialized. As a result I am going to present the work at LDN 3, the monthly meet up of the OKF, hopefully from that something will occur.....

LOD Landscape-Portrait - Programmer/ Open Data advisor Needed !

Overview.

Landscape-Portrait is public art project which collects video portraits of person and place which act as a critique of those produced by demographics. The work tours around the country inviting collaboration between local artists, community professionals and participants within each locale. The work has been running now in its data gathering phase for five years and has collected an extensive archive of video portraits.

The plan now is to release this video content as open data, with the aim of offering an alternative view of person and place to that which is derived from statistical information. In order to do this I need the services of a programmer conversant with Open Data practices (RDF etc), who might be willing to work with me on this next phase.

The project is not a commercial exercise, it has been funded primarily by the Arts Council of England, therefore there is not an extensive budget, however we do has some funding. In addition the project is the focus of my PHD, and therefore I can devote considerable time to it.

If you think you may have some time to help move the project onto the next phase please drop me a line @: kevin@co-lab.org.

Phase one of the project itself can be viewed here: www.landscape-portrait.com