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.
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
CCID 2011 - The Second International Symposium on Culture, Creativity and Interaction Design
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
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:
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 -
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 ?
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.
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 ?
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