Landscape-Portrait

#OpenDataLDN 3: Wikimedia and New Collaborations

2012-01-31T02:15:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-19T01:49:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

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 !

2012-01-10T05:04:00.000-08:00

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

Precarious times symposium - Plymouth

2011-12-05T07:34:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the British Art Show (in the day of the comet) at Plymouth where I was invited to take part in the Precarious times symposium at the art school. The conference followed a PHD workshop yesterday. Today's presenters consisted of Mel Jordan - from collaborative arts organisation FREEE, Malcolm Miles, (doyen of Public art and left wing cultural politics), UBERMORGEN (who were born out of the etoy group) Stevphen Shukaitis all rounded off be a group presentation by the members of the PHD workshop.  
The conference set about discussing possible strategies or thinking about the precarious times we live in. This was purposely contrasted with the thematic premise of the British arts show which was curated around a vision of what a comet means:

"We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future, and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how ‘the now’ might be understood." Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton, Curators of British Art Show 7."  

With exception of Hans from UBERMORGEN and Malcolm MIles the presentations were dense, in part indigestible and not particuarily engaging to a mixed audience. There is almost a badge of honour in incoherence when academics and practitioners present around difficult topics, in this case labour, the politics of refusal and the modus of revolutionary acts. This was a real failing of the conference.  That said there were lots of interesting nuggets, just that they were not linked together in a coherent manner in most of the talks. Malcolm Miles talked about the interaction of modernism and socialism, both of which allegedly died in the 80's. In response he put forward the idea that we have now entered the promise of modernism, so its not that it has disappeared, just that we are in it and cannot see it. He also talked about an early autonomy in modernism which he contrasted to its later manifestation as formalism, which occurs in high modernism and cements the gap between artwork and audience, which is much criticised by NGPA.
Generally it was quite a difficult conference, it suffered from a lack of coherent flow, each talk was like a different new iteration that was unrelated to the previous, difficult for the audience and presenters alike.

The rehabilitation of 'community' art

2011-12-02T01:55:00.000-08:00

I presented my research yesterday at PRECARIOUS TIMES workshop/symposium, which is par of the British Art Show 7 “IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET”, at Plymouth University and Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth, UK.

The presentation came at a good time, having submitted transfer docs I have been in the studio for a month actually making work.

My presentation was called 'Proposals for a Digital Public/Community Art Practice'. After the presentation I was speaking with Geof Cox, my 2nd supervisor, and he suggested dropping the words 'digital' and 'public' so:

'Proposals for a community art practice',

which is quite scary, having always been critical of and bored by the the majority of community based work, to quote Patricia Phillips: '‘many communities installed public art as a confirmation of dominant ideologies, safe platitudes, spent recolections, or user friendly aesthetics" (Patricia, P., 'Public Constructions'. ArtForum). So can community art be rehabilitated via the developments of critical community art practice (or Socially Engaged Art) and digital means and methods, can it ?

Live DBpedia

2011-11-23T08:29:00.000-08:00

this now works:

http://live.dbpedia.org/page/Landscape-Portrait

interesting ! it does not reference any media - so need to look into that -
I wonder if the ontology used has no attribute called media ? maybe this
is something that can be updated via the DBpedia community ? need to
check if this is the same for the archived/downloaded version - it seems
its mapping are not great - no media and lots of artist's names as fields,
bit confusing.

Sematic connection

2011-11-23T08:18:00.000-08:00

Is there a free site that supports SPARQL queries ? I'll ask. Just thinking thorugh the process, it si the Semantic search engine where the 'connection' between different defintions/attributes of the same entity (N19 4EH) will be made. So piece code will be the linchpin that connects the two semantically -

habeas data

2011-11-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

Came across this post from Andreas Maria on the UnlikeUs List, titled '(Almost) everything Facebook knows about me (IR3ABF)': (see below) strikes me that this relates to a static me, no the one roaming around and clicking and liking etc, and although this data is valuable, its value is increased exponentially when leveraged with network activities of this 'me', that is where the real money is.

{
"id": "732517354",
"name": "Agam Andreas",
"first_name": "Agam",
"last_name": "Andreas",
"link": "http://www.facebook.com/andreas.maria",
"username": "andreas.maria",
"bio": "http://www.nictoglobe.com\r\

nhttp://burgerwaanzin.nl",
"quotes": "\"Facebook is built by drugs using spoiled middle class hipsters\"",
"work": [
{
"employer": {
"id": "111683558933850",
"name": "CDust Creative Engineering"
},
"location": {
"id": "111777152182368",
"name": "Amsterdam, Netherlands"
},
"position": {
"id": "144223702264260",
"name": "Executive Director"
},
"description": "Perceptual Research",
"start_date": "1991-01",
"projects": [
{
"id": "190399884378846",
"name": "Burgerwaanzin",
"description": "Digital Cinema & Radioshow on Amsterdam based Free Radio Patapoe",
"start_date": "2009-01"
},
{
"id": "185692004852015",
"name": "Friction Research",
"description": "Online series on the theory and practice of New Media Art ",
"start_date": "2007-01"
},
{
"id": "241244979270027",
"name": "Opera, Arbeiten, Works",
"description": "Artworks by A. Andreas",
"start_date": "1989-01"
},
{
"id": "204950576246315",
"name": "Nictoglobe",
"description": "Online Magazine for Transmedial Arts & Acts",
"start_date": "1986-01"
}
]
}
],
"timezone": 1,
"locale": "en_GB",
"verified": true,
"updated_time": "2011-11-20T01:08:13+0000",
"type": "user"
}

JSON result using Facebook's Graph API

Audit

2011-11-22T05:31:00.000-08:00

It seems like a good idea to take stock of my recent foray into publishing landscape-Portrait data into the public realm. My first plan was to create several pages in Wikipedia, these would consist of a page about Landscape-Portrait, a page about the discipline of Digital public art and Digital Community Art and one about my own postcode N19 4EH. My plan was to link all these together, and hopefully the next time DBpedia (DBpedia is the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia) do an import of semantic data from Wikipedia, turning all the data into RDF LOD these pages would be included. Unfortunately several pages were rejected as a non remarkable concept - the only ones that survived were the LP and Digital public art page. That said I did add some of the video's about N194eh to the upper holloway page, so it will be interesting to see how ts works (there is a live SPARQL query @ http://live.dbpedia.org/page/Digital_Public_arts but it seems to be down at the moment.)

My next thought was to upload all the video content and metadata to Archive.org. Jeff from Archive has been very helpful and this seems a good solution for archiving the work, but it is not available as semantic data, it does however offer a fixed URI for the content so this could be utilised as part of RDF schema based around a postcode, also it allows batch uploads which Wikipedia does seem to offer to new users. With this in mind i have been looking at Freespace, a Google funded initiative which operates in a similar manner to Wikipedia. I created a page for my postcode N19 4eh and referenced the my own video portrait from LP using the fixed URI, however like Wikipedia the page was deleted. The plan now is to work out how to associate this resource with other URI resources which talk about the same entity - i.e. the N19 4EH postcode. I've posted various questions to OKN forums.... waiting for a replay.

I've also suggested an idea to have half hour online surgeries where practitioners, such as myself, can talk to an experienced practitioner about the ambition for a particular project and receive some guidance.

URI smilarity log

2011-11-21T07:14:00.000-08:00

Trying to find out if there is an attribute of a URI which records some type of 'SameAsValue' - so different resource stores that relate to the same entity are in some way linked. If this is the case, then it would be possible to 'connect' different attributes, such as the geographical makeup of a postcode with the experience - in video say - of living there.

Video to text transcription

2011-11-21T06:24:00.000-08:00

All the video uploaded to Archive.org will be accompanied by a spread sheet of metadata. I was thinking to add a field containing the spoken text within each video. Unfortunately most software based - automated audio to transcript convertors - are not of a good enough quality. This means that they are used in conjunction with hand made transcripts, such as commercial service SPeakertext.

Other non commercial academic software convertors come with a caveat concerning there accuracy, such as transana.

Archive V's FreeSpace

2011-11-21T03:51:00.000-08:00

By using Archive.org a permanent URL can be obtained for the video interviews from LP, these can then be referenced as attribute by RDF as part of a fixed resource for each entity (postcode) referenced by LP. The question is where to locate this resource, archive.org or some derivative of Google's such as FreeSpace.

Struggle

2011-11-18T08:32:00.000-08:00

Really straining with the structuring of the final phase of LP. If I put the video content on Archive.org that's good - the metadata could be stored as a dataset on the OKN CKAN/data hub site or http://thedatahub.org/dataset/freebase. Freebase (owned/Housed by Google) would allow me to publish all the content and the metadata in one place, it can also be queried in a language like SPARKL, mmm choices. K

Harwood

2011-11-17T08:09:00.000-08:00

Whilst working away at this technical issue of open data, data in the public realm, access and accessibility there is something at the back of my mind which I am uncomfortable with. Its sort of generated by the embrace of 'openess' within Open data at a governmental level. How it is portrayed as an inherently good thing to push all this data into the public realm, which seems like an act of disavowal, kinda 'here take it, so I don't have to be responsible for it any longer'. This unease is amplified in an essay by artist Harwood,

Government data produced under this notion of transparency can be viewed
as operating the ventricles of an enlightened power, interconnecting the
domains of government and population. The relative openness of the data
can be seen as an attempt to unfold ârationalistâ attempts to evidence
decisions. This transparency debate creates a protocol between
government and non-government Database Management System administrators
and ethical statistical analysts who summon the latent energies
contained in the new knowledge to power their differing political
factions. This is a data exchange between those who can already perceive
data from its modes of representation or to put it another way
understand the construction of the data and wish to exploit it as a form
of self-reflexive critique of government.

There is then a sense that this 'Openess' masks some other forms of systematic manipulation. In reading about Matta-Clarkes engagement with durational works, such as window blow out there seems some connection between the robust, irrefutable logic of 'Open Data' and the need to make works which are anything but, and in this way perhaps
some of this instrumental logic is exposed.

Archive.org wins

2011-11-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

Finally getting some idea of how to locate the content from Landscape-Portrait
in the public realm, and hopefully rendering it accessible via the use of RDF
Linked data markup.

Just has an email from Jeff at Archive.org. There is a way to batch upload
data and metadata to the archive, what is better still is that there is a
static URi, so this content can be included within a structured publication
of Open linked data.

With this in mind I have stopped uploading content to WIkipedia, as I no
longer think it is the right place. My plan had been to upload new pages
for each of the postcodes featured in Landscape-Portrait but this has proved
an unsuccessful approach and extremely time consuming. Far better to
create my own linked data page for each postcode and feature the video
content their.

Wikipedia V's Archive.org

2011-11-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

Finally loaded all my text video content into Wikipedia although how long they stay there is anyone's guess with my frustrating experience of having content deleted etc. What is apparent is that Wikipedia is not the place to upload this content en masse - Which is why i have uploaded the same interviews to Archive.org to think about using this as a store for the video, and then perhaps write a series of pages which locate and contextualize the video - and offer a fixed URI for it - all questions that I have posted to their forum.

Entry deleted

2011-11-10T10:21:00.000-08:00

I've submitted four articles to Wikipedia now - three have been either deleted or marked for deletion. Not sure I agree with Laurent Lanier when he calls Wikipedia 'faux authorative'. Seems very authoritarian even didactic to me.

Postcode as data object

2011-11-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

Working through the tutorials for DBpedia its interesting that DBpedia page/resource for specific postcodes do not exist yet, for example N194EH. What needs to be done then is to link a new postcode page to a number of pages within Wikipedia, for example the page about Upper Holloway and the page about postcodes and north London postcode pages. I would then add the video portraits from Landscape-Portrait that relate specifically to postcode, say N194eh, and these would then be incorporated into the next DBpedia dump.

In the process of researching this I found some nice toys/tools:

http://www.visualdataweb.org/relfinder/relfinder.php

Browsers: http://dbpedia.org/snorql/?describe=http%3A//dbpedia.org/resource/Alexander_Marcus

Query Builder: http://factforge.net/sparql

RDF linked Data

2011-11-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

Just working my way through some RDF DBpedia tutorials and there is the start of some form of structure where by the video data from Landscape-Portrait might be published into the public realm. For example if postcodes are objects within DBpedia, then the video content of LP could be assigned to that name. Then when other users make use of that postcode name, they will be able to access the video content from LP along with descriptive elements such as what was the question being answered etc. Need to draw this out to make sense of it, and maybe run a query of the postcode and see what information is already assisgned to it.

Wikipedia Video Upload

2011-11-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

Just finished uploading video from Landscape-Portrait to Wikipedia. It's a very time consuming process and prone to errors which force you to restart the process from scratch. It's taken my 2 hours to upload 18 video clips, including mark up etc. Kept getting errors for long file names, duplicate files names etc. There isn't (for newbie users like me) any batch upload facility which is annoying, anyways its done. The content I uploaded was my interview on the site so I made available within the public domain, where it does not have to be attributed and can be used in whatever manner. For other participants I'll probably use a sharealike attributable licence.

The next part of the project is to access this media through DBpedia using RDF Linked Data, now that might take a time.

Landscape-Portrait - Bournemouth - Final phase

2011-11-07T06:06:00.000-08:00

Trying to get the final phase of the Landscape-Portrait project of the ground, just written this overview of the next phase:

Landscape-Portrait. Final Phase.

The final outcome of the Bournemouth iteration of the Landscape-Portrait project will consist of the publishing, dissemination and promotion of audience generated content to the digital public realm.

The publishing of project content (video, text, data) will conform to guidelines outlined by the W3C[1] and the Open Data movement, where data and material is conceived of as ‘free to use, reuse, and redistribute’.

Specifically I will publish users video content using URI’s [2] (Uniform Resource Identifier) that locate the content in a fixed universally accessible manner. This procedure will be complimented by the publishing of related meta-data, which describes content using Open Data and W3C recommended schema - such as RDF and linked data[3] - consistent with the development of the semantic web.

Locating and describing content using a formally approved schema makes it possible to offer content to other agencies, practitioners, projects and audiences in a coherent and dependable way. This approach to data and material dissemination has been adopted at a governmental[4], public and private level. In making use of these practices within a public arts project, pertinent questions about arts engagement with use and legacy values are developed, further extending the conception of ‘durational’ public art practices.

Once elements of the Bournemouth project have been published and made available within the public realm there will be a requirement to promote this content. There are a variety of Open Data tools and services available for this purpose. It is an ambition of this phase of the project to encourage use of this content by governmental (for example local councils), public (charities, NGO’s) and personal (community activists, artist and residents) agencies and practitioners.

The final phase of the work will take approximately four days and will involve myself and other members of the original collaborative group in discussion about how to best achieve this phase of production.

The hoped for outcome of this phase will be the use of the video content produced during the Bournemouth installation by a range of entities, big and small, personal and public, cultural and civic.

[1] See here for a in depth overview of the formats: http://www.w3.org/TR/gov-data/

[2] See: http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier

[3] Tim Berners-Lee outlined four principles of Linked Data, paraphrased along the following lines:

Use URIs to identify things.

Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up ("dereferenced") by people and user agents.

Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using standard formats such as RDF/XML.

Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data to improve discovery of other related information on the Web.

[4] http://data.gov.uk/

Semantic, RDF and Linked data.

2011-11-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Just writing a description of the final phase of the Landscape-Portrait Bournemouth project. In reading about the history of RDF as a subset of XML it seems to me, materially and maybe structurally, that there is a connection between the schema of RDF and the materiality of video.

For example the portrait videos in Landscape-Portrait do not work in a statistical fashion, rather each video text is a temporal descriptor, rather than an abstract fixed piece of data. In order to access it a coherent taxonomy, such as that outlined by RDF needs to be employed.

In essence the video functions as a container, much in the same way as XML/RDF is a language for describing content in a uniform manner, video is used as a temporal container of descriptive information, which might be accessed by RDF protocols and made sense of at a machinic level by using a semantic approach.

That said the video is also a signifier of a great deal of other information not quantifiable using a descriptive language such as RDF such as might be understood by Jameson's description of video as ‘a total flow’ of imagery, words, context. Overiding the hegemony of the linguistic medium' and perhaps this quote form Jameson points towards this machinic understanding:

'“Yet the involvement of the machine in all this allows us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the rhetoric of consciousness and experience, and to confront the seemingly subjective temporality in a new and materialist way, a way which constitutes a new kind of materialism as well, one not of matter but of machinery.' (Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991).

Open Data

2011-10-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

Just spent the whole day creating and submitting an entry for Wikipedia for Landscape-Portrait. For the lay user there is a fairly steep learning curve, I had all my images rejected because I attached the wrong licence to them ! - however I did find a open source
OGG video convertor which is good. We wait and see if it is accepted. My plan is to release soem of the video content in the public realm via Wikipedia Commons, which is then accessed by DBpedia and made availible.

Landscape-Portrait OGG Format

2011-10-25T04:46:00.000-07:00

Just looking at the next phase for Landscape-Portrait. I want to create a Wikipedia page for he project, in addition upload the content to Wikipedia or Wikicommons. Either will require me to reformat the video portraits using the ogg codec. I guess I am concerned about the type of license also, 'fair use' seems appropriate but this would exclude the commons, where content is made available copyright free. There is also the question of the participants rights, and thoughts of how this content will be used.

Forma - LP -Updates

2011-09-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

Had a really good meeting with David Metcalfe and Caroline Smith from Forma yesterday. Landscape-Portrait has been engaged in a form of touring for the last seven years and we all agreed it was now time to move it to phase 3. Phase 3 involves making the data usable in other formats. This is closely linked to initiatives around Open Data. It is also perhaps concerned less with the liberal idea of 'openness' which dominated the talks at the recent conference in Berlin, but rather a concern to the methodologies used to create the data, the notion of a public art work as an engine which animates this process and a concept of the outcome of such as project as a component in a larger network; which neatly creates a tension between artwork and resource. There is also a wider issue of the semantic web, and how the video data recorded by LP might be made 'intelligible' via a robust mark up, how do you mark up video for use in Open Data projects. We talked about funding to create this next phase of the project, looking at academic, commercial and civic funds. Be interesting how this develops in the current funding crisis.

Open Proposal

2011-07-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years I have been thinking about a different way of approaching the commissioning of public art. From my perspective, as an artist, the process of open submission, shortlisting and occasional success is a really frustrating, resource consuming process. Although it could be argued that nothing is wasted in the process, ideas are recycled, there is a sense of a missed opportunity. It can feel on occasion that the commission process prevents artists from making work, because they cannot think of any other way of attracting funds to produce the work.

With the current funding position this pursuit of commissioning opportunities is a zero sum game, there is little opportunity so artists, commissioners, art professionals need to think of better ways of working together to make viable public art projects.

With this in mind I have set up DPAP Wiki, http://dpap.wikispaces.com/Proposal, where practitioners are invited to contribute to a core idea, which hopefully they will be able to incorporate into their practice.

CCID 2011 - The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity and Interaction Design

2011-07-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

Spent yesterday afternoon presenting the ideas around Landscape-Portrait at the CCID conference at Newcastle University. The event was organised by Ann Light, and my presentation was the keynote speech for the HCI cultural strand. I was interested that much of the talk was about 'experience design' instead of interaction design, and talk of third wave HCI.

OKN Conference - Berlin

2011-07-05T05:32:00.000-07:00

Spent the last week at the Open Knowledge Foundation conference in Berlin. I was interested to find some methods for taking the data from Landscape-Portrait and locating it in the public realm. The OKN has it's own tool CKAN, which allows users to publish database into their data catalogue, where public databases are listed. Of interest also was Wiki Scraper. This site customisable provides tools to scrape data from websites, and publish them in a user friendly format. Tools are also available on the Wiki Media site www.toolserver.org and freebase.org, which is a location for open data databases. Google also offers Google Fusion tables whereby users can upload their datasets. Concurrently Google is beta testing Google Public data, where they offer a set of tools to operate 'approved' governmental data, specifically in a temporal.

Several conceptual frames applied to Landscape-Portrait. The notion of digital artefacts, such as public databases, would compromise the commons. The invocation to move public data into a more usable format through exposure to the semantic web. And it is within this semantic frame whereby the provenience of the data might be included. Also URI (Universal Resource Identifier) through which each piece of data is assigned a fixed URL, and this combined with contextual data, allows the data to make that much talked about movement from data to information onto knowledge.

Richard Stallman from the FSF was in equal part interesting and slightly amusing. He talked passionately about a no compromise approach to Free - as in freedom of speech not Free beer - which involved slightly dissing Linus Torvalds and the open source movement. In particular his differentiation between proprietary and non-proprietary software. Stallmans 4 essential freedoms seem to have been taken on board by the Open Data movement, they are:

Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program, as you wish, for any purpose.

Freedom one is the freedom to study the source code and then change it so that it does what you wish.

Freedom two is the freedom to help your neighbour, which is the freedom to distribute, including publication, copies of the program to others when you wish.

Freedom three is the freedom to help build your community, which is the freedom to distribute, including publication, your modified versions, when you wish.

These four freedoms make it possible for users to live an upright, ethical life as a member of a community and enable us individually and collectively to have control over what our software does and thus to have control over our computing.

Stallmans also made the point that if Open data can only be operated on by proprietary software then your back to square one. Stallman kept returning to his mantra 'Code is not Law'.

Applications of note were Diaspora, which employed a P2P methodology to a creation of a social media platform.
Although some commentators noted that it had moved from a solely P2P structure to a situation whereby 100 central users operated as a blanket of servers, housing all the content.
Michael Bauwens talked about social media not as a means in itself, rather as representing an ideological shift in western socio-economic traditions. The movement toward peer production, the claim towards horizontal sociality, the commons. Whereby the community determines the qualities of the artefact, for example open design, GNU licence, social charters.

Mentions of Interesting texts by Douglas RushKoff -

2010. Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age Ebook ISBN 9781935928164
2009. Life, Inc.: How the World Became A Corporation and How To Take It Back ISBN 9781400066896
2005. Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out ISBN 9780060758691
2003. Open Source Democracy A Demos Essay

Professor Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton University operates as a consultant to the government upon matters of open data, and made use of the example of the south pole project Old Weather, whereby old ships logs are being uploaded through crowdsourcing, which I saw as part of Tom Corby's presentation at data landscapes symposium
My thought was that if he was interested in this he would also be interested in Landscape-Portrait.

An interesting anomaly was announced whereby open data has been released into the public realm, for example the number of bus stops in Sunderland, this data has then been cleaned up via crowd sourcing, adding all the missed or incorrect entries, so now you have an updated, clean dataset, but the government will not take this new dataset back into it's archives, as it cannot verify the agency in updating it.

This problem with write back also touches on the many areas not commented on by the conference. For example the methodology used in creating the data in the first place, its good on the means for dissemination, but poor in thinking about enabling accessing to the data. At the moment the act of publishing, particuarily by governmental agencies, is largely symbolic, the use of the data confined to niche operators as seen at this conference. Michael Gurstein from the Center for community informatics research development and training, commented on this, and talked about the 'data divide'. Making the point the literacy levels in the USA are generally at a Grade 8 level, and talked about using daisy standards of accessibility.

One thing, with the exception of Adnan Hadzi from Deptford tv, there were no artists invited to talk at this conference. At one point the Q&A turned to questions of the provenience of a particular dataset. Who had changed what, when etc. This very issue was the focus of the art work Logo_wiki, the artwork interrogated the IP address of users who had made changes to the Wikipedia, and flagged those that belonged to corporate and governmental agencies.

Jean Claude - Exeter University, Cure for Malaria - Speaker Cameron Neylon.
Check out TIM B L 'Ned' presentation in coalville.

Need to think about what type of licence Landscape-Portrait dataset is published under, CopyLeft, ODBL, art work, CC-BY-SA
Nee to think about what format the data is published in: Linked-data, RDF ? what are the pro's and con's of each.

Knowledge4all.com ?

Open formats for publishing video, Ogg and Googles WebM format, which is open source but is owned by Google, who make the choices for upgrade path etc.

Archive.org

www.papertiger.tv

Installing software of a memory stick rather than requiring users to install, as with project evidence locker.

There was lots of governmental agencies represented , legislation.gov.uk - which offers layers of tools, relating to different levels of complexity, for example data visualisation tools, SPARQL queries.

All this has led me to think about getting hold of the datasets for the Olympics, and maybe entering them into the BusTops project.
Are they available, if not why ?

Beyond Angels, Elephants, good intentions and red-nose rebellion

2011-06-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

I attended the 'Beyond Angels, Elephants, good intentions and red-nose rebellion' conference in Bristol today, as I understood it the reason for the conference was to think about the next step forward, in light of the current political climate. Some fairly well known but interesting work was presented by Sally Tallan from the Serpentine, Mark Ball from LIFT, Andrea Schlieker, chaired by Paul O'Neill. Of real interest was the work, or more importantly the ambition of projects curated by Briggitte van der Sande, who joins an elite club of curators who have designated seemingly successful projects as failures, in spite of the pristine, context free presentation aesthetic of Powerpoint.

Whilst enjoying the conference I also think that it failed to address the malaise which already existed within public arts and which will/has been exacerbated via the current economic and political climate. In fact I would argue that presenting work in this pristine manner is part of the problem, the collaborators upon whom these projects depend are all but absent, which, in part, impacts upon the discipline and rigor of public art practices, further contributing to Public Arts not being taken seriously by the mainstream art establishment; something alluded to by Louise Owen in her talk about publics.

Furthermore, in using the same methodology to present collaborative, socially engaged works, such as you would to present gallery works (yet simultaneously not showing these works in a gallery, as is the case with the Serpentine) much of the discursive nature of public arts is lost.

This position was typified by the breakout session about 'regeneration and planning', where Gillian Fearnyough listed a set of public realm bodies and agency to whom public art practitioners could appeal for funding: yet anyone who has worked in this sector for any amount of time will know, these agency in the main - developers, planners etc - were reluctant to enter into meaningful collaboration when funding was plentiful, now there isn't any funding one is minded to ask what is the point ? It strikes me that one role of a critical public art practice in these so called 'austere' times is to act as critical buffer against all this talk of 'place making' and the 'bespoke' architectural features of developers, not negate the hard won experiences of the last ten years in allowing a co-option by a conservative agenda. We don't need permission from these agencies to make work, especially when there is little being offered by these agencies.

Maybe it's time to adopt a different methodology, perhaps from digital network practices, whereby P2P or collectivism invokes a much less hierarchical model of production than one that's either in hawk to the art market, such as is exhibited at the Folkestone Triennial or one that operates, in the worst case scenario, as a creative contractor within a 'place making' team of professionals.

Pattern Tracer

2011-05-04T06:21:00.000-07:00

When the writing dies down a bit i really want to look at this:

http://www.visualanalysis.com/products/pttca.php

it relates to a work I have been thinking about for a while, to do with generating a top ten of consumer durables that are allowed to be stolen, then tracked.

research analogue

2011-05-03T04:09:00.000-07:00

I recently pushed my analogue tv out into the street, it was one of those with small wheels and shelf underneath, upon which was the old video. I left a sign on it saying free to a take, it was gone in 30 minutes, the video was left behind. The image of the video outside my house, on the street, made me think about the impending London based digital switch over, the end of analogue. I was thinking to make a work which commerated the analoque, as cultural history. The use of old media to generate a critique of digital media, how in looking at the tv on the street I was reminded by how absent digital media has made me, us in our neighbourhoods. Would it be possible to have a street of tv's outside of houses, each playing a household selected choice of content. By creating what many critics claim that social media is, but using non digital means, a critique could be developed, the discrepancies between the hype and the reaility of social connections is explored......

Supervisors -

2011-04-05T04:40:00.000-07:00

Met with my supervisors yesterday for a review of my Lit Review. It went well and lots of thoughts and ideas came out of it, most importantly NOT taking on to much, in terms of research question. In my mind its whittled down to something like this, SEA art practice involved the viewer as participant/collaborator, as a result the discipline developed a critique of 'publics' as part of its methodology; Social Media makes use of terms to describe and involve it's public - the creativity of the multitude etc - and much critique has been written about the commercial exploitation of this 'public', in defining these two bodies of practice and critique could a set of parameters and insights be generated when thinking about web 3.0 - the semantic web - as a site for cultural activity commensurate with a new media socially engaged art practice NMSEA practice.

Public Data Activities

2011-03-26T01:12:00.000-07:00

Just looking at the latest post from the OKF blog, and this having coincided with my finishing a draft of my chapter about web 2.0 - it feels very much where my research is heading. That the methodologies of Web 2.0 - as scholz has stated there is a history of social media outside of tose constituted by commercial web 2.0 apps, in part derived from OS and activist media practices, can be used to act upon the huge amount of data sets that are becoming available via initiatives such as OKF. The issue for me, as practitioner is how to interface with these datasets; in thinking of them as material I feel compelled to get my hands on them and much about, but do not have the technical ability to do this. I need therefore to learn this, and quick, but this would happen in a more informed and collective manner, borrowing from the communitarian nature of OS, rather than some lone, fiddler, artist type, trouble is I might be that type.

Landscape-Portrait OKF

2011-02-22T01:59:00.000-08:00

I submitted an outline of Landscape-Portrait to OKF, my thought was to see if there was any interest in taking the data produced so far and making it available via Open Data protocols. This has always been the objective, and hopefully with some help this will be achievable. One thing, my making it open the stories that the site contains are made public, to used in any manner, I need to think about this, and how participants of the work might feel about it.

Open Knowledge Foundation

2011-02-21T02:26:00.000-08:00

Really enjoying looking through the projects of the OKF, these two in particular really appeal to me and are inspiring many possibilities.

Open Street Map

2011-02-17T01:32:00.000-08:00

I was following a link from the Open Knowledge Foundation which linked to http://www.openstreetmap.org/ - A Wiki based map that allows account holders to author content on the map. I was thinking initially that this would be personal generated content, such as drawings etc, I had in mind this database of geo tagged line drawings, mmmm, but this was not the case, more gps route markings and transfer of different data sets. Still and interesting project when thinking of a base up on which to locate a work. What really works for me is the diary section, where the thinking and reasoning behind the mapping is contextualised, here's an extract: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/aekkarine/diary/13091

file types

2011-02-03T07:13:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about these new file types that are being released, massive database files that contain a range of media, data content. The manner of their production and the means of their distribution interest me greatly, that they might contain dynamic & static data, raster and vector operate as a meta file, database etc. My thought might be to develop a file type. '.kev' files for example, this file type might provide for a complete public art meta file dealing with some of the issues highlighted by the ReallyGoodBad public art project. Need to find more about file formats and how they gain interoperability.

Public Art DB

2011-02-03T04:28:00.000-08:00

Just came across this old posting - kinda relevant:

http://blog.okfn.org/2011/02/01/art-open-data/

Dirty vehicle writing

2011-02-03T03:39:00.000-08:00

I was sitting behind a van the other day, from memory it has some lame message written in the dirt on the back "This model also available in white" the van was white..... but the word 'model' got me thinking, more examples of low quality can be here. But there is perhaps a possibility here to create an interesting temporary public art work ?

See the work of Ben Long here:

Richard Prince set to one side - i am thinking country and western lyrics, pertinent websites links and plain old provocation.

mmmm

Geo-Spatial and stolen goods

2011-02-03T03:13:00.000-08:00

Continuing this idea of establishing narrative communities around desirable objects i came across the work on Savage, as artist based in Bristol. His work 'Stolen White Goods' performs little interventions with the space of the consumer transaction. He cites this book 'Lifting' and there is an interesting essay on his work here.

geo data communities

2011-02-03T02:49:00.000-08:00

Just noticing the hype around the goverments publishing of publicly accessible website which features geo specific crime data. The generic nature of the data, the level of abstraction it all kinda make you wonder what its for ? is it really just for people to work out if they should move to an area or not, and how much there house prices might be effected. See here for a good rant about metrics and the important stuff.

More interesting to me is the manner of crime engagement that Dutch police have used, by actually using bait bikes that have tracking sensors in them.

This correlates with an idea I had to compile a list of ten top stolen consumer item. I would aqure these ten items, tag them and allow them to be stolen, the resulting narrative would be recorded using the breadth of social media, communities might be formed around the objects unraveling narratives. This idea is further extended by the thought that there a quite a few desirable objects that have geo spatial facilities built in, i-phones, sat-nav's, computers etc, the fact that the i-phone is the most nickable and desirable phone and those that nick them, as happened to my collegue, might potentially own them seems pertinent.

Now to think to make an app, install it and see what going on with it -

ReallygoodBad

2011-01-27T07:27:00.001-08:00

#15 Frosty Weavers
Originally uploaded by eclectictrains

Been thinking alot now about the idea of an online archive detailing public art projects. The original idea was quite damning: http://www.flickr.com/groups/698722@N20/ - and only wanted to portray bad public art, now i think something more along the lines of "reallygoodbad" - public art might be in order. I've contacted a few of the people I met at the public interface conference in Aarhus, for example Brett @ http://www.temporaryservices.org and Zoran, lets see how we go from there. But if we are talking bad, this beauty never fails to hit the spot. A joyous melding of utility and artifice - see it in weaver field, east london

Public Interfaces, Aarhus, 2011

2011-01-14T06:42:00.000-08:00

Just returning from the 'Public Interface' conference @ Aarhus, Denmark. The conference quite small but really interesting. We arrived early to geometric fields of snow, rather than the pouring rain in London. I met Magda Tyzlik-Carver on the plane, who is doing her PHD @ Plymouth and teaching @ Falmouth University, it was really good to hear how my old arts school has changed to an unimaginable size, missed her talk though, which was a shame.

My presentation went ok, i didn't read from scripts but merely talked about the idea's and the work, Landscape-Portrait, afterward Geoff Cox, one of the joint organisers and my second supervisor, mentioned that the talk was more articulate than the draft text I had submitted for the conference, which made me laugh.

Anthony Iles from Mute presented a book that he and Josephine Berry Slater have just completed 'No Room to Move' about the situation in regard to culture led generation in this moment of economic collapse. Really interesting and relevant to my research as well as my experience in Burnley, where I and civc architects produced a series of public art proposals,

The following mornings presentation by Robert Jackson, a really interesting investigation of speculative realism, a subject that i have tried many times to grasp, Rob showed some good example artworks

Florian Slotawa, Hotel Europa, Prag, Zimmer 402, Nacht zum 8. Juni 1998, Gelatin silver print, Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

which helped the audience into an appreciation of the issues at play, his blog can be found here

There was also a presentation by Nina Gram concerning the use of i-phones as a staging device for our experiences of the city. I found this, with the example of Rider Spoke by Bast Theory really frustrating, a case of form over content, especially when considering Blast Theories co-option by the makers of the digital devices they used in the work, as I understand Nina she was also troubled by the work, which kinda begs the question, why use it ?

This theme of using the tools and materials in a non critical way extended to Brett Blooms work as 'Temporary Services'. Whilst being completely on board in terms of the avowed aims of the project, which related to lots of ideas i've been having about an archive of really good bad public art, including briefs, artist statements, budget etc, ;Temporary Services' means of research seem to replicate the same quality of justification that work critiqued, just from a ideologically diverse view point.

What I did appreciate though was the level of critique being located at a bureaucratic level, not just at the level of the artists, - who apparently came to hate 'temp services' this in contrast to Malcolm Miles presentation where his jouclar critique of Anthony Gormleys work, One & Other, in Trafalgar square seemed at times like a personal vendetta, surely this critique should usefully be at the level of the system that underpins Gormley, there are lots of mini Gormleys lining up to replace him, he is very much a tool in the ideological rhetoric of currently political thinking, which I guess was Miles' point, that this notion of universal nationhood is no longer possible.

4ip

2010-10-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

Just found out channel 4's 4ip fund is to be axed in a series of funding reviews. I've been talking to Forma about approaching this fund for over two years, in fact I approached them and recieved some positive feedback, but we did nothing with it and now it's no longer availble, a lesson to be learned and learned and learned.

Stretching New Boundaries

2010-10-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

I was short listed for the Strange Cargo: Stretching New Boundaries commission. I met with Lisa and Brigitte who run strange cargo, they had some really interesting ideas about using social networking to boost participation, and to some degree that is what the commission was organised around. I felt quite confident, this is after all exactly what my PHD is about, and I have a track record in producing this kind of work.

Just found out I wasn't successfull, its really not very encouraging, if I had written the brief for the commission it would not have been much different to how it actually was. On relfection I made a real point at the interview about not super-imposing and external idea, but developing a conversation around a theme, I think maybe i over played this, when does 'I don't want to parachute an idea in become', 'I haven't really got an idea, but I'm sure something will come along'. I am properly disapointed, i've asked the curators for a quick chat, but I wonder the wisdom of advocating this way of working, from the standpoint of being a relatively unknown artist with a small track record of works. Perhaps next time - if there is one - I flag up this approach but temper it with discussion of some thematic focus. Ho hummm .......

Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival

2010-09-16T03:34:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday at the Inspiring Digital Engagement festival in Sheffield, oragnised by Karen Martin and Ann Light. The theme of the conference was digital inclusion and engagement, and how the arts might assist in this. I presented Landscape-Portrait as a case study. I have to say some of the presentations was quite painful, where technology is seen as some magic salve which produces coherence and unity for a group. As I go to conferences more and more the presentation of documentation; "Here's some ladies buying some plastic tubes" really needs attention, were all talking about inclusion and the mute voices are those that participate in the projects, its ironic perhaps when everyone is talking about this social web moment mm.

Some interesting bits came out of it though, the project People Voice Media, working with two groups within the Burmese and Karen Community in Sheffield. There is apparently a feeling of mistrust between these communities that the project wished to address. The project website was hacked by someone in Thailand and made to look like the Burmese community had been involved. The real culprit apparently was the Burmese government.

Thumbprint use that most ubiquitous of new technologies, mobile phones, to engage people in place and ideas. As Andrew Wilson said, mobile phones aren't technology, their ubiquity makes them just stuff and texting is doing stuff. When we talk about technology then we are already operating along a divide.

One other thing, in this moment of funding crisis in the arts. Speaking to one of the other presenter about the curse of the Olympic Inspired logo. As I understand it no funds are made available to organisations for sporting this logo, rather its a convenient badge when the Olympics need to justify their support of grass roots organisations, in fact once you display this logo, rather than open doors for organsiations, its reduces the amount of funds you can apply for.

Ars Electronica 2010

2010-09-03T05:18:00.000-07:00

Just sitting in Linz airport returning from Ars Electronica. I am experiencing quite a mixed response to to the festival. My general feeling is that this festival has lost it relevance, it was always quite insular and novelty obsessed. It felt that in order to address this issue an external relevance has been super imposed, this year a familiar exploration of the axis of environmental concern explored through technology . This well worn path, in the hands of the Ars machine, has manifested as 'Repair', which showcased technological and cultural reworkings that actively address environmental issues. Having said that a good majority of the works, and most of those taking part in the Prix Ars Electronica, had very tenuous links to the theme of the festival. In the main the works which engaged me had very little to do with the theme.

For example: the work by Ei Wada - Braun Tube Jazz Band - used old tv as as interface, making use of their electromagnetic properties to perform stonking noisey electronic music. This performance, in the use of the old tv's underlines the point, the use of old tech isn't what this work is about for me, the aural performance is everything, the use of cathode ray tubes to do this, whilst providing some nice cinematic images, a la Cronenberg's VideoDrome, feels inconsequential to the work.

My particular interest in going to Ars was to check out the Digital Communities section. I was disappointed without ever really getting involved, which is a failing on both sides.

ARS Electronica Festival 2010: Richard Sennet - The Craftsman (english) from Ars Electronica on Vimeo.

I am the first to hold my hand up to a point made by Richard Sennet in his excellent lecture 'The Craftsman' that technologies have made us very poor at social collaboration, I can easily hide behind some tech rather than actually talk to someone. Sennet cited the example of Googles Wave service, which was set up to host social interactions that engender change online, however as Sennet claims, because of Waves linear structure the quality of the discussion, in particular its discursive nature was lost, with just the main trajectory held in focus, leading to what Sennet has termed a 'Brutal Simplification'.

I think this is what I might have experienced in the Digital Communities area. Set up as an ad hoc internet cafe, speakers corner, international tuck shop come lounge, the lack of an accessible structure, whilst sounding great on the text description, left a lot of people bewildered and intimidated. What digital communities don't seem to lack are more white boy-men, sat behind laptops deep in concentration and listening to hip hop and South Parks alternately. Everyone is obviously welcome, but come on, this surely needs to be looked at. At first I really thought it was a pastiche of some self referential hacker fest, which might have been more promising, but no, this was for real. I sat for an hour thinking that some self organising node would come along and animate the space, I even tried myself, but then south parks finished and I decided to look elsewhere.

Digital Communities, to me this might be thought about as communities who have engaged or have been engaged via digital means, for Ars obviously it means existing communities online communities who need to communicate in a public space, not sure I think that is true.

What i did find in the Future Factory section was some serious thinking about how technology can be rethought to engage specific communities of interest, rather than the other way round. Ken Banks software project Frontline SMS allows a mobile phone to be used as a one to many communication hub, in situations where web acess is limited. He cites it's use in regions of Africa where mobile phone ownership is high. I am thinking of uses in some of the environments I am asked to make work in the UK would benefit from a direct communication channel.

As with the previous Ars I have been to, there is much to criticise about this event, it felt more like a trade show this year, with its centrally located galleries at the Tobacco Factory, there were corporate sponsors stands all over the place, yet it still shows some interesting work. Honestly though I think it could be much tighter, in terms of aesthetic, intellectual and conceptual rigor, that this might result in a smaller show might be for the good of Ars, which does now have the atmosphere of a big chill music festival, as much about aspirational lifestyle as art works.

Shaftesbury Open Space Commission

2010-06-25T02:38:00.001-07:00

I spent yesterday in Shaftesbury Dorset after being shortlisted for the 'WIDE OPEN SPACE' commission. Shafestbury is famous as the backfrop for the Hovis advert !

The brief was to produce a proposal for a public art project. I would imagine we were shortlisted for a project I and architects civic completed in Burnley where Proposals were used in an iterative way, to gradually build a mandate for the projects we were developing with residents and the council.

My feeling is my presentation of the ideas behind this approach did not translate well to the Shaftesbury Civic society (who made up the interview panel), I just cant get away from the fact that what they really wanted was a stone carved monument, which is fine, but why select me for the shortlist, cabaret perhaps ?

One thing to learn, always check out who the commissioning panel will be and tailor content accordingly - I think I know that but temporarily forget. Hohum.

Cornmarket Plaza Commission, Dublin 2010 - A feeling of rejection

2010-06-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Just received a very strange thanks but no thanks email from Dublin City council. This has never happened to me before, but after shortlisting a set of candidates and commissioning them to produce comprehensive proposals, the interview panel, which consisted off:

Anne Graham, (Engineer, ex Central Area Office Manager for DCC – who initiated the commissioning process
· Frances Hegarty, Artist
· Ruairí Ó Cuív, Public Art Manager

have decided - and I quote:

"After carefully examining and assessing all the proposals we have decided that no team offered all the requirements of the commission. Therefore, Dublin City Council will not be nominating anybody for this commission at this time. " mmmm - and interesting development in the role of professional art managers, one where they have to go through with a publicly accountable procedure with little appetite for actually commissioning the work ? certainly one that is very frustrating for all the artists involved and a general waste of resources.

Cornmarket Plaz Commission, Dublin 2010

2010-05-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

On a more upbeat note I have just got back from Dublin, where I along with civic architects and curator Andrew Chetty, were shortlisted for a commission. The location of the commission, on a triangular public space in Dublin is incredibly demanding site, as it is bordered on all sides by traffic.Our proposal incorporated a community engagement strategy, partnered by Create Dublin and the Digital Hub, an architectural intervention designed by civic:

and a curatorial programme put together with partners; Forma, Transmediale (Germany), Forma Arts & Media (UK), Sonar (Spain), Radar (Mexico) and DoDig (Turkey).

We will see what happens, but either way its interesting what they decide to do as Dublin has been hit hard by the financial downturn, and the role of a public art commission such as this, is very contentious. It would be my plan to interview the council arts officer about the project as part of my PHD.

time delay

2010-05-21T04:22:00.000-07:00

Its amazing just how quickly all the connection that we strove for weeks to build, whilst doing LP in Bournemouth, can vaporise. Since the end of phase 1, the collecting of the data, i've not had much todo on the project, due to other partners and myself being weighed down with commitments. This is a real failing of the project, its incredibly important that contacts are maintained, via any means necessary. With LP this has not happened, and now we'll have to wait till the end of the month. Not good.

Bus Tops - Viziters

2010-04-26T07:00:00.000-07:00

Just updating myself with Bus-Tops, the digital public art project being produced by Artists Alfie Dennen and Paula Le Dieu. I have just selected my local bus stop as the site of one of their Viziters.
Reading through their blog entries the artists seem to imagine the screens as an organic network, with each screen having a set of intelligences:

"Each Vizitər will be a totally distinct being. Each will have an artificial intelligence which will let it filter what comes through it’s sensorium (the art people make and send to it) and make, to some extent, it’s own decisions on what it prefers, over time."

mmm not sure about that, is it no enough just to have a network of publicly accessible signs, the new digital public realm and all that ?

Census - The installation

2010-04-21T08:22:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about how all the content generated via LP could be used in a final, physical piece of work. One where audience members could move through the content, incorporating filters such as postcode area, question type.

As show that really impressed some years back was Kutlug Ataman's Kuba. There would seem some - in my head at least- correlation between the two ideas in terms of presentation.

Martha Rosler - If you lived here......

2010-04-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

This quote from Martha Roslers book "if you lived here" seems really pertinent to my thinking about Landscape-Portrait:

"Social activists, certainly, continue to recognise the importance of documentary evidence in arguing for social change. It is the necessity ot acknowledge the place- and time - from which one speaks that is an absolute requirement for meaningful social documentary”

"Naturally, this shifts the terrain of the argument from the art object - the photograph, the film, the videotape, the picture book or magazine - to the context, to the process of signification, and to social process."

The idea of documentary evidence - allowing "acknowledging historical context yet allowing 'unquantifiable sources' - LP can be seen in this light, in try to create a dataset of documentary evidence as part of a integrated practice. How this data might be used, either in gallery, planning office or locally convened online campaign is relevant to its audience.

The other thing to think of here is time:stamp. LP is ambiguous about this, the video is not dated, whilst it acknowledges place - via a Google map. Is it important for each of the video portraits to be dated.

social sites

2010-04-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

Now that nearly all the video portraits for Bournemouth are up we need to think about disseminating the content to different social sites. These will consit of sites that are locally focused; such as Bournemouth Echos forum and twitter site, as well those that maintain a wider geographical focus. More links as I find them.

meet SCAN - Planning phase 2

2010-04-14T08:23:00.001-07:00

Now the dust has settled on phase 1 of the Bournemouth project I met up with Helen from SCAN to discuss next steps. For me the important outcomes are the use of the media by the collaborators involved in the project.

Of our two main collaborators, I am hopefull that Craig will use some of the video portraits on the Townsend area on his website. Talking with Craig I understand there is a good chance that he may produce additional umbrella community websites for community groups to use. Dianne is planning an exhibition of her photographs, her work will also be incorporated into a exhibition which will travel the local libaries and Bournemouth central library.

Tony White has been working on his text works which so far consist of a blog entry and comments in the 'comments' section of the landscape-portrait website.

Social Tech

2010-03-31T04:28:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-29T11:11:00.001-07:00

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

2010-03-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-20T00:04:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-05T05:36:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-05T02:07:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-01T08:52:00.000-08:00

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.

UK DATA

2010-02-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

Essex Uni has a data store -https://www.esds.ac.uk/- which has relevant datasets from social and economic sphere's. We've just downloaded the Acorn types (with CACI's permission) but there is much more to be explored.

This ties in neatly with my PHD area of study, in that I have been making the point that public data can form the material for public artworks, and using these datasets, as part of my studio practice, allows me to be reconstitute the datasets in various ways, underpinning various interactions that might occur.

CACI The Home of Demographics

2010-02-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting conversation with CACI today about using Landscape-Portrait content within their own marketing strategy. Obviously this would require consent from participants and it does feel inappropriate and slightly unnerving. Landscape-Portrait was conceived as a critique of market driven demographics, however I always imagined the the outcome of the project, perhaps the legacy of the work, would be an online resource/artwork that would sit next to commercial services offered by companies using acorn data; such as UpMyStreet.

What is more interesting is the idea of a seperate project, which uses the sampling tools developed by Landscape-Portrait and creates a project directly for CACI. I'm thinking here of an artist in residence type of opportunity; It would be interesting to have an artist working alongside statisticians in the creation of public data, "who ever designs the data defines the public" .

Newsletters

2010-02-23T04:16:00.001-08:00

As a means of letting people know about the project we are placing adverts in local newsletters. These will include (hopefully) Heathlands primary school newsletter (West Howe) , the Rev Dick Saunders newsletter to parishioners (West Howe), not sure about Kinson, haven't as yet managed to find an equivalent there, and the funday poster in Townsend.

2010-02-23T04:03:00.000-08:00

We've just produced some promotional material for Townsend childrens centre where we plan to have the Media Bus parked for their fun day on the 20th of March. The initial design here:

The text was based on this design:

After a chat with the center manager it was agreed that this design was not appropriate for the Townsend community poster, so it's been revised here:

Community Facillitator

2010-02-20T02:26:00.000-08:00

As well as Diane Humphries we have also talked with Craig Gilbert who runs the
townsend community website.

With Craig and Diane and Richard Jeffery (who is a local education worker) we are starting to put together a decent team.

Bournemouth visit 14-18 2-10

2010-02-20T02:06:00.000-08:00

Just returned from Bournemouth after a week of meeting members of the three communities
we are working in - Kinson, Townsend and West Howe. We've got good support in all areas and met some good people who are committed to their community, and have shown good interest in the project.

On thing that comes up quite often is the thought that we are from the council, and the distrust of the council after years of being let down, and therefore there is a distrust of us as council representatives. This takes some discussion and hopefully is resolved. This has happened before, and much more deeply in Burnley.

Another thought, which is outside of the budget of this project, is the idea of visiting others towns that have the same Demographic types as the areas we are working in, in Bournemouth. So that might be parts of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee.

Spent some time walking around each neighborhood taking photos, to be reminded what a potentially loaded activity this is, obviously taking photos around children's playgrounds, but the just the idea of what you might and might not do with the image, and who and for who the images are being taken. Anyways images from Kinson, West Howe and Townsend can be viewed. These images will be used for publicity for the work. We've also engaged Diane Humphries, an local photographer to work on the project.

FIlm As Data

2010-02-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Whilst sitting through a film by Joram ten Brink, Professor of Film and Director of the AHRC Arts on Film Archive, MAD . I kept thinking of this project in terms of film as data. He was talking about his film 'The Man Who Couldn’t Feel’, which he described as as a film as essay. This leads me towards the file formats that contain data about an object, OGG, ITL etc - as well as Apples new format 'Cocktail'. The idea of hacking media files is somewhat different to seeing film as a container of data, but its related (in my head).

This also lead to a memory of microfiche, from my uncles garage, where the size of the card was related to the amount of data that could be stored.

Mmmm - is there a public art file type, that requires certain paramaeters to be filled in order to become viable (funding, engagement, legacy )

I must have a look at hacking some files, soon.

Geo Spatial video

2010-02-11T13:10:00.000-08:00

Coming back on the bus it strikes me that, as we pass through one area of the city into another we are passing through a range a demographic types for each of these postcode areas we pass through. An idea is to maybe record a piece of linear video footage (maybe on a mobile device with appropriate software), that is geo-tagged and in some way is engraved with the the demographic type for that postcode area. This would be super imposed on top of video which noses into possible demographic signifiers along the root. Shops, light fittings, pubs, betting shops, certain people on the streets who might look (from a far) a certain way, prisons etc.

This use of bus routes feels like a kind of reaction to this work http://bus-tops.com/, which I am intrigued to find out more about.

bournemouth ways of working

2010-02-10T05:29:00.000-08:00

Maybe we might use the local paper, the Bournemouth Echo's forum pages to locate the work. This might take the form of a 'Missing' campaign, where demographic types are advertised as lost and living in a particular postcode, the make up this person would be managed online, references to actual locations (pubs, bookies, etc) food stuffs, papers read, hobbies etc. The idea would be to create several forum feeds from here ( http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/sport/4993255.Confident_Jalal_backs_Cherries__quality/?ref=mc ) - and relate it back to the LP website.

Kevin Carter - Karin Coetzee, 'Landscape-Portrait', Photography, 2007. Photo: Karin Coetzee.

2010-02-09T06:10:00.001-08:00

Landscape-Portrait 2008. Postcard Campaign
Originally uploaded by Kevin Carter

Karin Coetzee was given a brief by Kevin Carter to locate certain demogrpahic types relating to postcode. These ficticous types are developed by demographic comany CACI to flesh out statistical data about person and place.

Bournemouth 2010

2010-02-09T04:49:00.000-08:00

Landscape-portrait is due to staged in Bournemouth by SCAN (http://www.scansite.org/?w=1129&h=729). The work will be staged in three locations, Kinson, West Howe and Townsend. At the same time Simon Yuill (http://www.lipparosa.org/) will be producing a project engaged with the idea of commons and common land.

Previous productions of Landscape-Portrait can be see here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11928089@N04/sets/721...