Notes from 9_6_2007

notes from discussion
Verina | Colm

What kinds of cultural exchange?
- social/art… Nicholas Luhmann
- diversity of public space, local Tower Hamlets community, thresholds of social and cultural space / economics / social segregation / …questions about gallery installations that purport to deal with social scenarios but become staged and attended by witnesses from within the gallery system rather than public society
- Crowds. Behaviour/Control. Witnesses. Occupants. Scale of interaction. Differences in scale altering the kinds of interaction
- working from within… what is the inside/outside of this project? the in-crowd. The outsider. The flaneur(?).

CØDEshop

Three days of staking shelves for the new economies emerging from collaborative practices in art, digital culture and local politics.

Day 1: Curatorial Processes
_ is it a time for an alternative structure of exchange?
_ who are the protagonists in the performance of cultural production?
_ how does software change our relationship to memory?

Day 2: -O-b-j-e-c-t- contemporary art practice
_ how do you want your project, artwork, be remembered?
_ can software liberate you from the white cube?
_ what gets lost between the formal structures of established practices?

What "Flat Time" isn't

[This is a transcripted original version now containing errors]

What "Flat Time" isn't.

"Flat Time" isn't a formal scientific theory resulting from an expensive and prolonged research project involving a great deal of practical experimentation in a laboratory. (An attempt was made in 2001 to obtain funding for just such an academic research project to test the proposals of "Flat Time" by practical experiment and extensive computer modelling, working with the Quantum Gravity Department of Imperial College London. However the funding application failed to focus sufficiently on the economic profits that might arise from the potential applications for "Flat Time" in the commercial world. Luckily for the rest of us, neither the Special nor General theories of Relativity, nor the theoretical process that lead to Quantum Mechanics were ever required to satisfy such an unscientific agenda. It is clear that atomic power and quantum computing which directly derived from such theoretical advances proved of massive commercial significance. However, profit potential alone is not an acceptable or feasible qualifier for the relevance of radical scientific thought, or research as it must by definition come after the fact.

SYNTAX ROOT: LOOP

OPENING NIGHT TALK BY MAXA ZOLLER
17TH JUNE 2005

Some thoughts on:
Rick Silva's 'Supercollider' and Mark Amerika's 'Codework' in the light of the historical film avant-garde.

In Rick Silva's Supercollider the quick succession of different shots of an interior create an explosion of perspectives a bit like a filmic version of a cubist painting. His non-linear editing method generates a sculptural quality: it illustrates the motto of this exhibition: from temporal montage to spatial montage. But I mean 'spatial' not in the way Lev Manovich talks about it - the digital combination of things within the image - but I am talking about the three-dimensional impression the moving images are giving us, which recalls the expanded cinema work of the late 60s and early 70s. Especially the work of the London Filmmakers' Coop were concerned with expanding the flat cinematic image into the third dimension. I am especially thinking of William Raban's Angles of Incidence from 1973 where quick shots of an interior create a dynamic sculptural spatial impression.

Notes from Workshop 24th of July 2006

ATTENDEES:
Colm Lally, Simon Gould, Chris Roast, Fiddian Warman, Matt Wade

AGENDA FOR THE WORKSHOP:
1. Recap on where the project is to date [chris]
2. Questions from attendees
3. Questions from absentees [Graham Harwood and ap]
4. Questions from researchers
// break
5. reflect on the workshop and plan next steps

============
the following notes were recorded by Jo Hamshere and edited by Colm Lally

CRITICAL QUESTIONS RELATING TO WHERE THE PROJECT IS NOW:
- the project is currently heavily angled at the environment, is the project just about reskinning the browser interface?

People's Olympics

I was Googling Olympic images today and came across this....

[extract]
The People's Olympiad or People's Olympics (Spanish: Olimpiada Popular) was planned for Barcelona, Spain as a protest event against the 1936 Summer Olympics planned for Berlin during the period of Nazi rule. The newly elected, left wing, Popular Front government in Spain decided to boycott the Berlin Olympics and host their own games after their election in February 1936. Invitations were made to the nations of the world and it was planned to use the hotels built for the 1929 World's Fair as an Olympic Village. The games were scheduled to be held from July 19 to July 26 and would have therefore ended six days prior to the start of the Berlin games. In addition to the usual sporting events, the Barcelona games would have also featured chess, folkdancing, music and theatre.

Notes from Meeting [23rd June 05]

World Fairs / Olympics - asking about:
* global media events
* TV events
* international space of global media events
* relationship with location
* site specific changes
* identity of local community
* media and architecture - the relationship with urban development / the traces left on the environment
* consequences/ intention
* security
* traffic - onsite movement / flows of information
* mediation
* control of information - who owns the rights to the event content and the use of footage?
* will the event continue to be a TV event or will control pass to the individual via technology?

Workshop

with Chris Roast, Chris Bates and Colm Lally

Throughout a day of conversation and reflection on the Liquid Interface project we arrived at a proposal for a software prototype to be developed over the coming 3 months.

Proposal:
The prototype will present a series of 'Context Planes' plus an 'Alpha Plane'. These planes will be more like an 'interface set' - a set of dynamic networked components or agents. One of the agents will be the starting point (Alpha Plane), this will most likely be a piece of software art. The emerging set of Context Planes will house content that relates to the Alpha Plane. From a curatorial point of view the initial set of planes will be constructed by E:vent Gallery curators in collaboration with the artist.

Salon 20

Salon20 represents the rebirth of an old beauty machine. In its former life it was used to burn the consum societies fat. It was found on the streets of London by one of the students and was brought to the gallery. Then we hacked the electric circuits to use the knobs and the original rythm of the electric voltage which was switched on and off to stimulate the muscles. This rythm which can still be manipulated by the salon20 user alternates between the two light/sound boxes and controls the two channel sound environment. Also there are ten knobs to control and manipulate the sounds. This sounds are recorded from the building as a basic sound footage wich was used for further sound manipulations. The installation provideas an incentive by standing between the two ligth/sound walls, playing with the knobs of salon20 and diving into the sound and light atmosphere. You can create spacy distorted feedback sounds or an sweet and chilling sound sphere.

Curatorial Perspective

I realise that I posted some information about 'Curating, Immateriality, Systems: On Curating Digital Media' without explaining my interest in this.

MODEL FROM KURATOR.ORG:

#!/bin/bash

assumption="traditional curating follows a centralised network model"
echo "$assumption"

if [ "$assumption" ]
then
echo "what is the position of the curator within a distributed network model?"
fi

Paul Baran's Model for a Distributed Network, 1964 courtesy RAND.

"kurator.org extends some of the online systems that question the role of the curator in the curatorial process of selection, presentation and distribution of immaterial artworks (most notably runme, artport or low-fi)."