Forma - LP -Updates

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

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.

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

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.

meet SCAN - Planning phase 2

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.

CACI The Home of Demographics

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

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.

Bournemouth visit 14-18 2-10

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.