House of the Vernacular – Missing it already

The people that work behind the scenes making an exhibition seldom get to say anything about the experience, so with Fabrica’s new emphasis on giving all aspects of its operations a voice, I thought it would be worth marking the deconstruction of the show with a post. 

I am often involved with the installation of exhibitions at Fabrica and am accustomed to the amazingly friendly, family-like atmosphere of the place. So much so that I sometimes wonder if the work done before and after a show opens plays a major part in the close knit nature of the place.

The design of the exhibition House of Vernacular, from the beginning was a collaborative work in its own right, Martin Parr and the directors of Fabrica fleshed out the look and feel of the ‘environment’ as though it were an installation. Colin Holden Associates were brought on-board at an early stage to allow the practicalities of the build to influence the design constructively, and the many elements of each room and location were the result of playful experimentation that everyone felt they had an opportunity to influence. 

This approach requires trust and a certainty that the broad experience of those involved is pulling together – luckily Fabrica, Colin Holden and the many freelancers working on the show have a collective expertise that is formidable, add to this the sheer optimistic enthusiasm of the volunteers and it was never in doubt that this exhibition would be something special.

It was really gratifying to notice that the public felt the need to compliment the setting for the exhibition as much as the images that were exhibited. At the opening I got a bit concerned, from all the comments that I heard, that the setting was slightly overshadowing the show, but openings are strange things, and it was good to walk around the exhibition the next day and realise that the show and its environment worked brilliantly.

And so it became time to remove Bogota, Brazil, Germany and all the other places that had become integral parts of Fabrica, it had all fitted so well, I was not sure that I could even imagine what Fabrica’s single massive space looked like anymore.  I felt a bit sad about taking away the spaces that I had come to associate with a particular group of people at a particular time – A really enjoyable 2 months.

I wonder how many other galleries can say that their process is so well integrated across all levels of involvement, that a volunteer invigilator can also have been involved in the design, construction, and removal of the actual work, not as a special experiment in worker relations but as a matter of course? In my experience, many galleries waste this opportunity by simply ‘getting in the builders’ and for a few days everyone stays out of the way.

It took 3 days to dissolve the thing, and just like the build, it was a delightful bonding experience with lots of laughter and one memorable quote that just about sums it up

“Creativity is alright but it’s not as much fun as demolition”.

Many thanks to everyone involved.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Digital culture, monetisation and value « Culture, learning & innovation

Digital culture, monetisation and value

December 2, 2010 powerparties Leave a comment Go to comments

This post is a response to a lively thread on the Museums Computer Group e-list about the Cost of Sales, which was sparked by a Twitter chat about whether museums should fully assess the cost of running an image sales operation. When it transferred to an email discussion it became much more philosophical and political, especially after Nick Poole raised a challenge from an international financier about the lack of clear monetary value  in digitising cultural heritage. Now, my thoughts on the discussion may seem so philosophical and political that I’m not even posting it on the MCG list but on my blog.
I agree with Nick on the need to talk with financiers, to appreciate their perspective and learn from business. This may seem very unlike me, but I have partly been stirred to say this by his rousing keynote at the UK Museums and the Web conference last Friday. My take is that we need to proceed towards a more business-like mode in a way that is profoundly ethical and ecological, to the extent that we need to lead bankers and business to see value very differently, and that by doing so we can help change the world.
I’m not an economist or a business specialist, but an educationalist above all, so I maybe have no right to contribute to a debate about monetisation but I want to raise the issue of rapidly changing relevances and the importance of shifting our frames of reference. The key to advocating and generating value is establishing, and stretching, contextual relevance. I think digital culture & heritage people must shift from being technologists who are servicing the dominant modes of value, into leaders capable of transforming their organisations. As a sector we can then join the vanguard alongside the Commons and Social Enterprise movements, where technology enables an opening of access to  culture, for widespread change.  (I say ‘vanguard’ but it’s worth remembering that the earliest dated printed book, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, was marked as for free universal distribution nearly 1200 years ago.)

via bridgetmckenzie.wordpress.com

Never have I heard this subject broached so well - a great deal of food for thought.
Thanks to Bridget McKenzie for telling me about it.

Curated

I am currently working on a project with Longhill School in Brighton that seeks to explore concepts of curatorship and presentation within schools. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, what underlies this project is a realisation of institutions as unconsidered psycho-geographies, where assumptions of environment have gone unquestioned for a very long time, and conditions appear to be based on old, punitive moralities.

Watch this space for a fuller explanation, and an ongoing documentation.

To kick things off we have converted all the common ways in the school into a gallery space - now we are running a limited curation exercise (intriguing in itself as a subject that is not normally found in schools). The Image above is one of hundreds that have been trawled for critique and possible inclusion in the project.

The Project runs in partnership with: L.C.P. Europe ~ Fabrica Gallery ~ Creative Partnerships, and of course Longhill High School.

Real time search

On Collecta, Wowd and OneRiot.
I began using Google while it was a research project at Stanford in 97, and It was obvious then that it was the best thing; considering that 'Ask Jeeves and the ad-ridden 'Yahoo' was the opposition, there was no contest. It is now bigger than god, and about as annoying.
These days I have a new prefered search engine - one that is as appropriate to the social web as google was to web1. It is likely to become the next best thing.
Collecta is a real time search engine, it takes search phrases and tells you who has just posted something about those phrases. notice the plural, it works like a ticker updating in real time several different phrases (that you have entered) in tabs. It can be set to search blogs, twitter, facebook, video streams and most web2 platforms.
You'd better start using it. Collecta is here: http://collecta.com/

There is a competitor to Collecta, called Wowd - it does pretty much the same thing, but makes what is in my opinion a foolish mistake, it tries to categorise your interests under headings like "gaming", "health" and "entertainment". built in obsolescence I'd call it, when one persons entertainment is another persons annoyance - I'd put the arts in most of those headings, so lets make our own minds up.
Wowd is here: http://www.wowd.com/



The reason that I wrote this post wasn't so much to advocate these new search tools, but to comment on something that the third realtime initiative OneRiot has made me realise. The web seems to have reached a break-point. The static web as we have known it has been becoming more and more social, active and immediate - It seems to be reaching a critical mass, a point where articles, lists and galleries are becoming archaic, in favour of fluid content, conversation and response.
OneRiot is an indicator of this change, it is an advertising trending system that allows its clients to pitch to realtime trends - If I read that right it spells a whole new approach to the traditional role of the advertising marketeer - it marks a crisis in advertising that is similar to the one that newspapers have met within journalism - the web is no longer a place where you can get a return from shoving a flashing image in someones face, advertisers have got to be as active in realtime engagement as the punters are becoming. The web is now more of a conversation than a library.
OneRiot can be reached here: http://www.oneriot.com/
but the Blog is where the real story is - here: http://blog.oneriot.com/

Want to know more? try wading through this dry tome : http://searchenginewatch.com/3641282

Cork Shop, Brighton. 1982

In 1982 I asked if I could photograph the interior of Beall & Co, the cork shop in Gardner Street, Brighton. The woman running the shop (who I have since found out was called Doris Abrahams) agreed, so I photographed every room (and the back yard) of the place.

These Images are the result. They are scanned from negatives - three rolls of 35mm Ilford XP1 - Taken with a Pentax MEsuper - Higher definition versions are available, or the negs for re-scanning. The Shop was opened in 1883 and it closed for the last time in 1983, one hundred years later. The facade of the shop was removed and is preserved and on view to the public in Brighton Museum.

A Transatlantic Conjouration

One sweet idea amongst many, William Pohida's Ars Magica  re-purposes Cornelius Agrippa, or is it Albertus Magnus. I think the most telling thing about it is the insight it gives into a NY gallery-fly and the very singular way U.S. Americans have of viewing the world.

See the full gallery on posterous

To be fair though, his horror story 'Work of art rant' could well happen here too. The first comment to his post is a gem.

White Night at Fabrica

oA gothic horror. Drawing blind, Cameras obscura like bats, hanging, worn over the face.

Another extreme drawing event by Jane Sybilla Fordham. 

At Fabrica Gallery, Brighton. 

For La Nuit Blanche (White Night) Brighton, Halloween 2010

Funded by Brighton & Hove City Council

Photographs David Parfitt.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

99.9% minority

The visual arts can appear nonsensical to many lay people, and painfully self referential and vacuous even to those who speak the language. It is a problem that, as an artist, I have developed strategies to deal with, most involve being precise about exactly which aspect of the arts I admit to being involved with.

But, truth is, over the years I have developed a genuine loathing for the 'ivory tower' school and many of the academics and institutions that support it. On a bad day this includes anyone who lazily uses words such as 'modern' 'post modern' 'avant guarde' or any mention of 'talent'. 

Don't get me wrong, I am among the first to wade in to a meaty abstract discussion about aesthetics or an attempted deconstruction of an artwork, we are after all a specialised industry, and as such we require a language for internal dialogue, plus a range of paradigms to work within, just like any other.

But the art world so often shoots itself in the foot by pandering to the worst forms of tabloid sensation mongering, often for no more than a brazen attempt to make money, at the expense of its own reputation.

As you can see, this is one of those subjects that gets my goat - So imagine my surprise when by chance I ended up at a series of talks given by two artists and a writer this evening, the speakers inadvertently gave me a bit more insight what I think is wrong with the art establishment.

Each of the three speakers attempted to define the word 'Vernacular', a word that I have always taken to imply a local expression of some kind that is rooted in a specific place, time and context.

So a vernacular architecture might describe building forms that are identifiable as responding to some local condition, tradition or limitation, forms that vary from others found elsewhere.  

If something is dubbed vernacular, I would assume that it is in a highly evolved state, that takes real conditions into account, just as a hand tailored suit (vernacular) is more fitting to the individual than a mass produced one based on some nominal average human ideal. Our vernacular is deeply tied to every aspect of our own local cultural expression

As the evening progressed, and 'vernacular' was struggled with, I realised that there was another more troublesome view of the vernacular, another scheme, that gives a rare insight into just how autistic visual arts thinking can become. 

In this scheme of things you must first assume that 'Art' is at the top of a highly stratified cultural hierarchy, every strata below it must aspire to the values that the 'Arts' have codified, and everyone must look to the arts for cultural guidance.

From this 'Arts' centric perspective the vernacular is nothing but an annoying incongruity in the scheme, an unofficial outbreak of un-sanctioned cultural expression that assaults the 'arts' from outside. 

But the vernacular also presents a dilemma to the 'Arts', which is after all a system that values the unusual, the vernacular is the greatest, perhaps the only, source of refreshing new ideas. 

Think about it for a second, The Renaissance, El Greco, Picasso, Emin, who hasn't imported from the vernacular? 

The vernacular has value precisely because it comes from outside, the 'Arts' needs the vernacular to grow.

For the 'Arts' to maintain its superiority, the Vernacular must be seen to be a quirky minority that has been rehabilitated into the mainstream. Once assimilated, it can be allowed to exist in it's original context to impart authenticity, but unfortunately its new found ubiquity will mark the end of its local relevance, and another local identity will disappear.

This version of events is surprisingly well adhered to, even by some arts professionals who really ought to know better but have avoided questioning the system that gives them kudos and wealth. These same people, like the rest of us, live in a 99.9 percent vernacular world, yet when it appears before them as professionals, they throw up their arms in surprised delight, like a king discovering mud. 

Is the Arts involved in a project that seeks to normalise and homogenise culture?

As a system the arts operates in a similar way to many multinational corporations, seeking to smooth over inconvenient local conditions and ensure we all receive a uniform global product, that will not vary in quality, regardless of where it is encountered.

Not only does this homogenisation produce art that is global, geographically and contextually uniform, but it also produces art that speaks with a uniform voice, to everyone, whether it makes sense to them or not. It sells a single product line in a voice that is aimed solely at those who can subscribe to its current values, the 'art educated'.

While 'Art' lays claim to being the arbitor of ideas, the precursor of popular taste, the cultural prophet - its often incomprehensible reasoning disenfranchises whole swathes of society from the culture that they actually nourish - the 'arts ignorant' masses, who are well capable of producing their own intelligent vernacular, and were long before art existed.

Of course art is not a centralised organism, there is no 'project', it is composed of the combined self interests of its commentators and practitioners, from which I must admit to have made a living. I have written this because I am increasingly aware that for anybody wishing to be involved in the arts, there is little option but to tow a line that most other industries have identified as unsustainable. The only way to be an artist and to be opposed to globalisation is to become concerned with the local, to become vernacular, to become insignificant. Now I relish that.

-- In the Vernacular Style --

Touching on the aesthetics, status, and politics of the vernacular style, artist, writer, curator and lecturer Stephen Bull, writer and consultant Ted Polhemus, and artist Jonathan Swain explore the significance of this particular aspect of cultural expression from their various perspectives of photography, fashion, and activism as art. 

A new leaf gets turned... Tumblr & Posterous

Tomorrow I start a three day 'writing for the web' course.
So today I have decided to prepare the ground.
Having been online pretty much since the www began, I have lost count of the number of blogs, boards and websites that I have abandoned to their fate. Some, I know still exist, but I have long since lost the ability to access the backend to kill them (shame on you Bianca, and Geocities for that matter too) - I have even tried serving copyright infringement notices to get some of the more ancient, and image damaging, sites removed by hosts that must think I am a troll.
For me it really feels like the perfect time to draw a line under all that has gone before and start with a coherent scheme to organise my content on the web, one that will last for a while at least.
Apart from the unsettling feeling of chaos that all of my subscriptions and memberships leave me with, I have noticed that my attitude to the web has changed recently, thanks largely to facebook.
Before facebook, it was almost unthinkable to be too open about your identity on the web, even though Tim Berners Lee was espousing the semantic web, years ago, for some reason anonymity was seen as being the place to start - perhaps because of the slow uptake of decent spam algorithms.
But now, despite the best efforts of a cautious media, it makes far more sense to be up-front about who you are, in fact with the social web, it is virtually impossible not to be (for dubious exploitative reasons I'm sure). Whats more I have no employer or such like who may disapprove of anything that I care to say or do.
So it seems like a good time to consider an approach that somehow glues together all of the various uses that I have for the web, under a traceable trail of breadcrumbs.
Apart from private spaces like ftp accounts, server spaces, and even business and collaborative sites - I find that I use three main spaces:
A showcase - my static website that acts like a trade brochure.
A sandbox - a place to put thoughts and works in progress and to try stuff out.
A playground - somewhere to explore stuff and make unconsidered off the cuff statements.
The first one is sorted - it is served via Modx from my own server, and is updated manually every now and then.
The difference between the other two is basically the difference between the long form of a blog and a short form, perhaps more like twitter - although twitter has an overhead of involvement that I'm too busy to maintain.
I thought that I had found the perfect answer for the short form in Tumblr - which is an endlessly fascinating, cumulative experience. what it does it does so well - sharing, crossposting, following, being followed - it is the ideal playground and whats more it is a community, so you don't play alone.
So how to make some kind of meaningful link between the playground of Tumblr and the long form of a blog? I had an intuitive feeling that Tumblr must have a way of interacting with a more considered blog, after all it is all about making connections, right? You would have thought, but I have yet to find it, Tumblr is about being eclectic, it encourages you to bring content into it, and then watch it get re-circulated within it's own confines - it is not a two way street, try reposting something to a blog and things get very manual.
And then along came Posterous. when I first noticed it, Posterous was always mentioned as a rival to Tumblr, much like Facebook is to Myspace, it was as if you had to pledge allegiance to one or the other.
Although they may seem to cover similar ground, there is a huge difference in the basic architecture of the two systems - Tumblr is a posting and browsing forum, while Posterous is a tool to post with.
Posterous makes it simple to gather any sort of content and input it, BUT, and here is the difference, it also makes it simple to deliver that content, even repurpose it and deliver it to almost any other site, network, blog, aggregator, you name it.
Here then is the answer, for me at least.
Use tumblr to play, discover and explore.
Use a blog for more considered lengthy stuff
Use Posterous to capture the stuff you want to focus on - and deliver it - to either Tumblr or the blog (maybe even re-work it there) and while you are at it use Tumblr to deliver feeds, content and notices to Fb, flickr, youtube, picassa, the list is endless.
Now all I have to do is tidy up my rather crotchety, confused old blog and find a voice that people want to read.

A bit about blogs.

I have written so many blogs now that I can't remember them all. This one, as with most began with something akin to resolve, hoping to finally make a single repository of the things that I feel moved enough to write about. The reason that this has been a problem for me is that my interests shift like crazy, even though I know that there is a solid thread linking all these things, I am damned if I could pre-empt it enough to make a coherent blog-like body, let alone find a reasonable voice.

I admire many blog keepers, those that write a diary style, with voices so reasonable that you could invite them home, and those who plumb the fast flowing stream of technology to present weird and wonderful novelty. The diarists always seem to be giving generously of their personality and wit, while the diggers appear to be beurocrats, representing the efforts of others. There are many modes of blogging between these poles, the posters of their products who see the web as a shop window, the socialites who regard it as a huge cafe, the outright obscure and the comedians, but as yet I have not found any that resonate with me.

Perhaps, I say to myself, this is a matter of training, those constant voices are essentially writers, the diggers, shopkeepers - whereas my training is all to do with finding an appropriate expression for a given subject or situation. I am happy shifting from film, to print, prose, performance or construction within environments that range from academic to industrial, conceptual, virtual and purely physical. Perhaps I should just get on with it and see what happens. So I will.

If you have written a blog you probably understand the strange impulse to justify yourself in advance. I wonder how many of those paragraphs survive the first year?
Nevertheless it is a strong impulse and one that seems to me to be about confidence and self critique, both things that oddly enough take care of themselves as you go along.

The Sound of Silence

This sculpture has haunted me, and not just for its content.
I have made this sculpture twice now, for the New York based Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. Once at Fabrica in Brighton, and once at the South London Gallery. Both times it has been slightly different, the version that you see here is the smaller of the two and it was made using pre-cut sheets of anodised aluminium. The earlier Fabrica version was made using zinc plated steel sheet.

Why was it so problematic? The sculpture was never designed, instead the only instructions that the artist gives to any gallery hoping to stage the work is a cartoon like line drawing of its sides. The result of this lack of specification is that each gallery has to invent a structure to support the precise outer shell, the people that undertake that task are usually the same ones who build temporary walls and hang pictures, so of course they go about the task as though it were a small room. Starting with a wooden studwork frame that easily accomodates the inevitable undulations in the gallery floor, all seems well until the ceiling structure is attempted. It is then that the spans involved make the need for rigidity painfully apparent - mistakenly solved by adding more wood. When the metal cladding is added the folly of using a wooden frame that is straining under its own self-weight becomes clear, they no longer fit square. The work takes on a new dimension, one of cladding an essentially undulating wooden frame in a manner that resembles building a boat half of wood half of metal.

A lighter touch is required - next time I will make sure that I am involved from the start - to ensure that the sheet metal is framed, allowed to be as square and dimensionaly stable as it does best. then construct the outer walls by connecting the individual rectilinear frames to make the walls true and uniform. The ceiling can then be stretched with lightweight, blackout cloth and strutted where neccesary (could use polystyrene sheet).

Oh yes I haven't mentioned the hundred flourescent light fittings yet have I.

Dasher

This Program, application, whatever you want to call it, managed to catch my imagination. It is called: Dasher and it looks like this;

It is hard to classify, except that it is a viable replacement for the keyboard. It consists of a white text winow and a rather dull control window with an alphabet down the right hand side. A click in the control window and things start to get interesting.

Rather than tapping keys you simply aim your cursor towards an onward rushing wall of letters - like this;

You can see that I wrote this text using Dasher.
What happens when you navigate (just using one finger on the trackpad - the black square is the cursor) towards the wall of letters, is that they begin to accelerate towards you, while jostling for position to make meaningful words.

Yep it is predictive text, but not as you know it, unlike the crass versions that exist on mobile phones, this text actually seems to present words that you were likely to want - and the way the words appear very quickly becomes intuitive. Even better, you can feed the program with an example document that you have written and it begins to gat a feeling for the type of words that you use. I tried feeding it some James Joyce, in the form of a few pages of Finnegans Wake, and it began to offer me words like wikawade world - I felt sufficiently Joycified.

The first few minutes of Dasher can be a bit perplexing, but provided that you start off slowly, it is amazing just how quickly the thing becomes completely intuitive, far quicker than any keyboard.
I have been using it for 2 days now and am seriously considering using it in preference to the keyboard for writing.
One consideration is that you really do need to be able to spell, mainly because the predictive text engine uses all of its resources to feed you probable words, rather than reading what you have written and correcting it - a very pleasant change from the condescending microsoft paperclip and its inherent distrust of you as a stupid 'user' - Dasher instead seems to credit you with intelligence and offer viable suggestions and creative diversions.

There are many settings that can be changed to suit your preference, almost every conceivable language is supported, even french / english dual language and music? you can opt for simple lower case or full punctuation, both cases and obscure symbols, and a few between.
Most intriguing is the speed setting, turn it up and writing suddenly becomes reminiscent of a good playstation racing game.

I couldn't resist trying 2 experiments:
First I tried setting out and following the most prominent suggestions to see what got written. The result was fairly diverse but strangely unsatisfying. although I now know that once it was a bit better trained it might have been more fun.
Secondly I set the speed to full, carefully positioned the cursor so that the letters where hurtling towards it, and went to make a cup of coffee. Ten minutes later I had a vast tract of text, very intriguing, inspiring, amusing and in some cases vaguely prophetic text. A bit of puctuation and editing and there was a long poem, thoughtfully entitled NOCTURNE by Dasher itself.

This IS software with a future, if you have RSI it could save your aching wrists (It was developed for RSI victims I believe), TRY IT. If you don't yet have RSI try it anyway. Oh why not just give it a go, you might like it as much as I do.

P.S. Dasher has been developed for most operating systems, it works well on the mac, although it could do with being integrated into the heart of the system so that you could use it directly in other applications (at the moment all text must be written in the white box and then cut/pasted into the program of your choice). I will be trying the windows mobile version as soon as I've finished this post. Unix and that other OS are also catered for.