Precarious times symposium - Plymouth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.