Sustaining Collaborative Practice – Local Time

Abstract: As a collective we intend to use the platform of SCANZ to support a specific research project on interdisciplinary artistic collaboration. Artists and cultural organisers have periodically developed new collaborative initiatives to take a more active role in determining the agenda and context for their work. This has often been response to institutional and critical environments which fail to support interdisciplinary aesthetic, political and agendas for creative practice.

Whether conceived as an artistic collective, or a broader organisational platform supporting other aspects of production, such collaborations face a unique range of challenges. Institutions usually endure precisely because they are not centred around cultural production, instead they conform to an established set of expectations about their role. How do we sustain platforms for collaboration which are responsive to emerging creative practices? What are the critical issues such collaborations face and what opportunities do they have to sustain and develop practice under conditions of globalisation? In the move from individual practitioner to collective, what kinds of documentation strategies are required to enable the sharing of experience and conceptual development? These are the questions we intend to research on the residency.

Local Time based a project in Taranaki in 2008, organising an arts project for the Parihaka International Peace Festival. We see the residency as an opportunity to extend the relationships we have in that community, and to create links into the community of practitioners in SCANZ. Our project intends, firstly, to collaboratively research existing theory and practice in the field of artistic collaboration; and secondly, to interview the other interdisciplinary practitioners who are on the residency about their experiences and insights into collaborative practice. Our aim with the meeting is to provide a context to share practices and experiences, develop support networks, and strengthen underlying philosophies. We expect that this research will eventually result in the publication of a book.

Local Time are a collective of four established artists, curators, and writers who facilitate art projects and events, with a particular emphasis on issues of local and indigenous knowledge. Members of Local Time have coordinated significant international symposia and hui such as Cultural Futures: Place, Ground, and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media Arts (2005) and Cultural Provocation: Art, Activism and Social Change (2003).

Local Time – http://local-time.net

Danny Butt – http://dannybutt.net

Jon Bywater – http://jonbywater.net

Natalie Robertson – http://natalierobertson.com

Alex Monteith – http://alexmonteith.com

Danny Butt

Danny Butt lectures in Critical Studies at Elam School of Fine Arts, National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland. He has written, lectured and consulted widely on new media, culture, and development. He is on the working editorial committee for the Digital Review of Asia Pacific, and an associate member of The ORBICOM International Network of UNESCO Chairs in Communications. He is a Certified Management Consultant and a partner at Suma Media Consulting. He is on the SCANZ residency as part of the Local Time collective.

The Local Time Collective consists of Alex Monteith, Natalie Robertson, Danny Butt and Jon Bywater.

Stringer

How does forced intimacy, close proximity, random knowledge alter people and their outputs – whether that be text, exhibitions, festivals, artworks, etc – rather than how a particular audience interaction effects a discrete artwork.

The connecting metaphor of string… something which binds, yet is temporary, flexible and easily accessible, is the perfect of these residencies which impact in so many ways on people – changing their practice, instigating long term friendships, and creative and intimate partnerships.

The project will be writing on this from observations, images, questions of and with the other participants on affect. However the last thing I want this to be is evocative of Big Brother or surveillance or reality investigations. This is insightful, respectful, lyrical and non-invasive connective investigation….

Wikipedia says:

* Stringer (journalism), a type of freelance journalism.
* In geology, a stringer is an irregular filament or a narrow vein of one or more minerals traversing a rock mass.

* In metallurgy, a stringer is an elongated body of microconstituents or foreign material aligned in the direction of working (usually hot rolling) in wrought materials. In most cases, the material of the stringers is sulfide, or clot gated oxide. The presence of stringers in materials is undesirable, as the stringers cause the material to be brittle with anisotropic properties.

* In construction, a stringer is a horizontal member used to connect upright members, as in the frame of a building. Usually the stringers are long, relatively thin pieces which provide support and definition to the skin of a structure.

* At a steel mill, stringer is the name given to a coil of steel used to thread or guide material through a production line.

* In aviation and boat building, a stringer is a strip of wood or metal used in a manner similar to building construction.

* In angling, a stringer is a length of fishing line, wire, or chain, to which a fisherman will attach his catch.

* In metallic, polymeric or composite material sintering, the term stringering refers to the amount of binding contact between powdered materials.

* In stairs, a stringer is a timber (usually 2″x12″) that supports the treads and risers in a staircase.

Melinda Rackham

I regularly write and speak on the intertwining cultural issues and aesthetic, technological and conceptual shifts in networked, distributed, multi-user, game and mobile environments.

After over a decade of engagement with emergent practices and innovative technologies as a pioneering net artist, writer, curator, media consultant and cultural producer, I’m still excited by potentialities.

I was the first Curator of Networked Media at the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and in 2002 I established the -empyre- online critical theory forum.

Currently I am the Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) – Australia’s leading cultural organisation working at the intersection of art, research, science and emerging technologies to generate new creativities.

Web Sites

Walking art and a short introduction – Brett Stalbaum for C5

Walking has a long history;-) But its role and history in the arts and humanities is a bit more obscure than it is in the social sciences where the cultural/historical role of walking is better studied. (For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songlines.) In philosophy there were the peripatetics such as Aristotle, who taught philosophy while strolling in the Lyceum of ancient Athens. Others such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Søren Kierkegaard and Walter Benjamin are also known to have done a lot of their thinking while taking walks. Artists too have been interested in walking and quite a number have based their work in and around on the creation of walks. This is a terrain I have worked as well, and one that I’m looking forward to traversing with you on the Pukekura Park Demonstration/Environment and Sustainability GPS Tours project. Trudy lane suggested that I give you at least a coarse mini-history of the kind of artists and artworks for context. Of course it is very much off the top of my head as I sit in the airport in San Diego waiting to board. But here it is.

As someone who identifies myself as an artist of the American West, I first note that my cultural inheritance is unavoidably linked to the European colonization of the North American continent, much of which was very unpleasant, and some of which was shamefully genocidal. A familiar story around the world I suppose. My wife Paula Poole and I are avocational archeology nerds who spend a lot of time in remote regions of the Great Basin desert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin) visiting Native American petroglyph sites created by people who were among the first groups of people to walk into north America. We do feel an affinity for these special but now unpopulated sites, which are often difficult to visit, and which can be aesthetically breathtaking and intriguingly abstract. But it is an affinity that is also much removed from us, and we are aware of our inability understand these cultural treasures in any other context than that of archeology. In most cases the people who created them no longer exist to explain them, and their ancestors too are often left to guess.

Another influence is romantic American landscape painting of the American west. Artists such as Albert Bierstadt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bierstadt) had to walk a great deal in their relatively difficult travels across the continent in order to pursue their romantic goal of capturing the sublime in their pictorial representations, and of course we recognize that the national expansionism of the time is unavoidably embedded in the ideology of these representations. This work is of course not “walking art” per se. The point is that the intersection of walking and art still has a number of under-explored relationships, some that map to quite contemporary issues. Explorers such John C Fremont (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Fremont) were trained in both cartography and art, the latter order to perform field sketches of plants and landscape along their journeys. (1) Much of the exploration of the American west thus produced geo-referenced representations of the landscape, similar in concept to geo-tagged images you can find in Google maps and Flikr today. Of course, this kind of relationship between cartography and hand-drawn pictorial representation of the landscape is a much older story, indeed as old as cartography itself. There are also some connections between work I have been involved with and the notion of the sublime pursued by romantic era artists and explorers, but that would be an unnecessarily tumid topic for the Pukekura project. (If you want, have a look at this: http://www.paintersflat.net/ylem.html).

The above are what I perceive as my more obscure, or more personal/national influences on the kinds of walking works that interest me today. There are many current and relatively recent artists whose work more directly engages with walking as art, and art and cartography.

It is impossible to ignore the influence of Guy Debord and the Situationist movement on the current imaginary around GPS and mobile phone art practices; to a degree that I am getting a little sleepy just writing a single sentence about it. In the coarsest summary, psychogeographers like Debord were interested the concepts of derive (drifting) and detournment (to make the normal appear strange), in order to promote greater consciousness of class and economic relations, and of course to produce new, experimental art practices. For example, ad nauseam, exploring Paris with a map of London, or walking a city in a pattern of some kind: walk two blocks, walk left one block, right one more block, turn around 180 degrees and repeat. It is actually a very nice way to explore a city, and to the degree that the knowledge gained might actually impinge on social relations, so goes the use value of psychogeography. The project we will be working on, creating GPS/mobile phone guided tours of Pukekura Park, will no doubt inherit something from psychogeography’s example. But from inside of this world of artists doing this general kind of thing, Situationism’s legacy may have been claimed once too often by now, and sometimes to purposes quite different from (or even contradictory to) the radical situationist agenda.

So where I will go from here is to present a series of examples and why I think they are important. With not so much humility, I will mention some of the work I have done with C5 and paintersflat.net in the context of these influential examples. Much of the work I will discuss operates in the art world under the sign of “locative media”. You can look at locative media’s entry in wikipedia for more information, and you might notice that the “definition” has taken on not so subtle expressions of a desire to be seen as operative within the realm of the social and political. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_media) And I suppose we could talk about panoptism and surveillance while we are on the topic of mobiles and GPS (often worried over as technologies of social control), or on flash mobs and activist uses of phones (where the social control aspects of new technology are inverted, facilitating democratic or sometimes mob action.) But this little note is already getting a little long, and these issues also are well worn as topics for mobile projects, no matter how important they are.

The Pukekura Park project too, in that it is intended to create an interpretive educational layer for sustainability issues in the park, is unavoidably situated under some sign of “the social”. But when it goes to the definition of locative media, at least qua the art world, I prefer to think in more general terms so as not to disclude any locative practices merely because they don’t adhere to art world fashionability surrounding issues of urbanity, socially engaged art practices, heroic environmentalist statements, and so forth. (Not that there is any inherent flaw in these, just that definitions should not be so exclusive as to favor particular practices when other obviously similar ones are left out.) So I normally propose something like like this: locative media is computational media (often wireless, networked) that processes dynamic location data and presents the user with an interface (information, feedback and control) intended to mediate the user’s spatial behavior or experience. This definition, which is similar to the current wikipedia definition of “location aware media”, adds to the former the focus on spacial behavior. The definition has the advantage of being precise enough to give a relevant description, but abstract enough to be inclusive of more diverse practices. For example, among my interests are the cognitive consequences of locative media, its impact on human spatial reasoning, and a range of ideas from the cognitive science discipline (and computer science) regarding cognitive maps, landmarks, topological networks and path integration. A particular interest of mine related to artificial intelligence is artificial walking. More on that soon, after I present a necessarily short (and unfairly incomplete) list of artists and works that I think are useful for us to think about.

Outside of the computing in the arts sub-genre of art world that I work in, artists who matter a lot to me are Richard Long and Dominique Mazeaud. Long is one of the innovators of a certain kind of conceptual walking practice in which he walks the landscape and creates a subtle work out of found materials which are then photographed, and after which the site is returned to its natural state. (http://www.richardlong.org/) Mazeaud is best known for a related kind of environmental art work in which she performed ritual walks wherein she cleaned up the Rio Grande river in New Mexico, USA. (The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River, 1988.) Another related work that I really like is Ruth Wallen’s “Children’s Forest Nature Walk”, which involved working with children to produce interpretative etched trail panels for a nature trail in the San Bernardino national forest in California. (http://greenmuseum.org/content/work_index/work_id-12artist_id-5.html) In every sense, what we are going to work on is the same general kind of thing as my colleague Wallen’s work, except the topic, the ages of the creative young people participating, the way navigation is performed, and the manner of distributing the information in the landscape are quite different. But at some level, all stories in space are spatialized narrative, and the history of this kind of work precedes locative media.

A well known computer artist who I perceive as as very important but perhaps under-appreciated in terms of his contributions to locative media is Masaki Fujihata; particularly his seminal work Impressing Velocity (1994). Created quite early for a GPS based art project, research for the project included assembling a GPS receiver, a notebook computer, and transmission network into a large backpack. The system allowed the computer to keep track of and record/report the user’s location, and also for the tracklog of the user’s travels to be superimposed on maps and satellite images. Is anyone thinking Google Earth 1994? The performance art part of the project was the artist climbing mount Fuji with the system, from which impressions of his velocity at various times in his long ascent were convolved onto digital elevation model data of Fuji, creating a data representation of the two realities.

Steve Wilson created another project very much ahead of its time in 1997. The Telepresent was a suitcase that contained a digital camera, computer, GPS receiver and a wireless internet connection using an early regional wireless data network in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Telepresent came with instructions for those who possessed it: they were to spend a day with the suitcase pointing it at whatever they wanted, documenting aspects of their day. The pictures and coordinates were sent back to a server to be displayed/mapped on the web, and each user was responsible to pass the Telepresent on as a gift to someone else. This early geo-referenced image project is very much the predecessor to a common activity of today: taking geo-tagged photos with mobile phones and uploading them to websites such as Flickr. (http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~swilson/art/telepresent/telepresent.html)

Teri Rueb has produced a large body of work using GPS and mobile media for narrative, poetic, interpretive and installation art purposes. 1999’s Trace project situated sound art pieces dealing with memory and loss along trails in a Canadian national park. Now in a daypack smaller than Fujihata’s, the user would walk the trails, and the sound pieces would be triggered at various locations. (http://www.terirueb.net/trace/index.html)

Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman carried the locative narrative theme established by Rueb (and differently mediated projects by very many artists, such as Wallen’s narrative trail-sign project) a few steps further down the road of the creative, expressive possibilities of mobile media. Using a tablet computer, they created a navigational visual interface and sonic narrative triggered by location, that was by 2001 capable of resting comfortably in the user’s hands as they walked. 34 North 118 West explored the layers of history in downtown Los Angeles in what Hight calls a “Narrative Archeology.” (http://www.xcp.bfn.org/hight.html)

Worthy of note here are some stories of technology that we are all of course familiar with. On the one hand we have the continual miniaturization of components, and on the other the consequence of miniaturization: convergence. Fujihata’s custom backpack becomes Reub’s daypack running more ubiquitous components. Wilson adds camera and wireless network, down to suitcase size. Knowlton’s 34 North platform is for yet smaller tablet computer and small external GPS dongle. The situation today is that many of the least expensive mobiles contain real GPS devices, media playing capabilities, cameras and network connections; from backpack to handset, from expensive to $25-50 dollars. As you can see, artists have for a long time dreamed of, and actually built out this convergence in order to realize their artistic visions.The kinds of story telling or other locative hot-spot triggered media practices pioneered by many of the above – requiring tremendous amounts of work, self teaching, planning and often large grants or other deep pockets – should by now be cheap and easy things to do with our mobiles. Why isn’t it? Secondary and even primary age students should be able to create at least simple narrative based locative media. Organizations should be able to create guided tours that the public can run on their own mobile handsets just by pointing their mobile browsers at a URL. It should cost next to nothing, at least from the perspective of anyone who has access to an old PC and a few other resources like web hosting. In other words, it should work with relatively modest technological resources, of the type that many organizations around the world take for granted, or could possibly muster up. (And should it someday allow the OLPC xo platform to be used as a production studio for similar mobile phone content? Most certainly.)

In any case this is a thought that I had while working with my old friend and colleague Ricardo Dominguez on a project intended to facilitate the navigational applications of cheap mobile phones. (The Transborder Immigrant tool project, still under development.) Working on mobile phone user interface elements for land navigation and basic GPS data types for this project, it occurred to me that some of the software I was developing may be of more general use, and this is essentially where the idea of a platform consisting of both APIs and production tools for this and other kinds of work more or less emerged.

The “Pukekura Park Demonstration/Environment and Sustainability Tours” project will present state of the nascent walking tools JavaMe APIs and production tools. Walking Tools currently includes 35 JavaMe classes and interfaces, fewer server-side classes, and proof of concept applications for deploying particular features of the Walking Tools JavaMe code by adding user provided content. Suppoted by the Scanz Residency program and 60 Spring project, I am leading a demonstration or proof-of-concept that will include working with the three 60 Springs students, who will work to produce experimental content on the theme of environment and sustainability in Pukekura Park and botanical gardens in New Plymouth, New Zealand. It is an exciting thing to be involved with and I look forward to learning a lot about the prospects of such a platform and its applications in teaching and the authorship of locative interpretative environments in the process. I’m grateful for the opportunity!

There is more going on with Walking Tools than stated above. For example I am working with Cicero Silva of Sao Paulo and Geri Wittig and Steve Durie of San Jose on some related things.. And I have been talking with a lot of artists about the potential of standards that would let the same content packs work on many different kinds of devices. But those will have to be better revealed in due time, as is the case with the Transborder Immigrant Tool project.

I promised Trudy that by way of introduction I would write a little about some of my other work and collaborations in the location aware media area. But now it is late, the 747 is over the pacific with bearings toward Fiji for my connecting flight to Auckland, so I will keep it short. In 1997 I was in graduate school at CADRE and fellow C5er Bruce Gardner was showing me his GPS device and some C software that visualized the tracklog of his bicycle routes. C5 would from time to time theorize about GPS, but with interests in AI, robotics, database and the emerging contours of what today is sometimes called the Big Data problem, we had plenty to occupy us. That is, until around 2001 when it became clear to us that GIS data sets were among the largest and most interesting of data sets, and that GPS could become a way of interacting with large data in a performative, generative manner in natural environments. So C5’s engagement with locative media began in a very different way than many other projects; the big data problem was the attractor. That led to, among other projects in what is called the C5 Landscape Initiative, Geri Wittig walking and recording the GPS tracks of iconic sections of the Great Wall of China, the development of statistical methods for finding the most similar terrain in a large database of California topographical data (myself and Amul Goswamy), and the application Artificial Intelligence techniques(2) to identify paths through those California environments where the Great Wall of China would mostly likely fit best in a topographical sense if it were actually moved to or recreated in California. Needless to say, a lot of backpacking was involved in finding some of those places. Strangely to C5, many took this project (cleverly titled “The Other Path”) as a kind of data-absurdist or even psychogeographic gesture; letting voluminous GIS data and some algorithms we wrote tell us where to go. But it was anything but ironic or absurd to C5! We were and are still quite sincere about what we see as the possibilities of generative, algorithmic relations between big data and human movement across the landscape. In any case, generative walking is still a relatively underexplored territory for new work, even as generative design and architecture have become standard concerns for new media artists.

Finally, after C5s 10+ year main phase burn of productivity began to slow as members were hired into new academic positions, and/or moved around the country, or took on new responsibilities like directing the 01SJ festival in San Jose, I kept developing and utilizing much of the code work I did for C5. With the blessings of my dear comrades, my wife and life partner Paula Poole and I began to ask what else can we do with ideas like data mining the landscape for locations, and following even better artificially intelligent virtual hikers, all the while taking in to consideration their possible intersections with the pictorial arts as well. A good general idea of what some of those things are can be found here: http://www.paintersflat.net. Sometimes we are following game bots through the wilderness. Enough said about that.

So there, I’m done. Sorry about the tome, but New Zealand is far from my home in Eastern San Diego County, California. My little note to a few students turned in to five pages. Occupational hazard I suppose. So let me just say I look forward to meeting you all! (And I’m sorry I did not write or post this sooner, I found no useful internet connection in Fiji or I’d have had it up before you meet me!)

Thanks again Ian and Trudy and all for the invite:-)

Brett Stalbaum

(1) Fremont was also a poet, abolitionist and politician who tragically lost the presidential election of 1856 to James Buchanan, a president who is nominally thought of as one of our worst. Fremont was the first Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln the second. As you may have heard, our list of potentially most disastrous presidents has grown a bit recently, and our new president is left to try to clean up the mess.

(2) The AI approach was inspired, perhaps not surprisingly, by a pair of archeologists: Ralph Hartley and Anne Wolly-Vaswar. They were researching the relationships between likely walking trails and native american petroglyph art in the American West. So the connection with native Great Basin rock art with virtual hiking and artificial walking is actually rather direct, though through archeology.

A link to video of Brett’s project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvfMWyUoIoU

Brett Stalbaum

Brett Stalbaum is a full time faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he coordinates the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts Major. He is a founding member of Electronic Disturbance Theater, C5 and paintersflat.net. Current research involves generative locative algorithms, the development of mobile software platforms for walking, and their applications in art, activism and education. He lives with his partner Paula Poole in an unincorporated area of Eastern San Diego County, USA.

Read more about Brett Stalbaum.

Web Sites
Brett Stalbaum’s Stories

Taranaki Platform Ecologies – Andrew Gryf Paterson

This research process during the Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand residency (26.01-08.02.2009), conducted by Andrew Paterson, responded to, and set
 out to nourish, the online platforms surrounding Puke Ariki, and in particular Pukekura Park, by exploring,
 documenting and bridging online/offline aspects of the former regional Taranaki wiki, and soon
 to be kete.

Using the proposition that these platforms can be interpreted as ‘ecosystems’ – imagined by initiators to be sustainable, outgoing and ongoing developments – it makes conceptual connections with the natural and social ecologies in New Plymouth’s popular and historic public.

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Outgoings

Files related to ‘Education for Sustainability’ panel presentation in SCANZ Symposium 08.02.2009

Slides:

apaterson_scanz_presenation_080209 .pdf or .odp (open office) or .ppt (powerpoint)

Including images stored here

Pukekura Park-/-Kete platform ecosystem table:

pukekura-park-ecology_full-weave .html or .odt (open office) or .rtf (rich text file)

Further materials will emerge here.

They are shared as copyleft, under a Creative Commons by-sa License.

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Research Process

The residency project was made in collaboration with Puke Ariki, as part of their Education for Sustainability programme, inviting several local high-school students to join the research process.

With the case of the growing online kete platform, the aim of Andrew’s project was to identify ways to sustain its existence in Taranaki region, nourish the persons involved, and ultimately keep the local knowledge flowing between persons.

In the first week Andrew conducted conversational-interviews with key Puke Ariki staff to give insights into the social, historical and environmental relations connected with Pukekura Park. Simultaneously, he researched similar aspects of the former and future online platforms of Puke Ariki.  In the second week he had conversations with persons who bridge these ambitions and care for both spaces.

Following, he aims transfer meanings and concepts from the social-natural ecosystem of the park to the social-informational systems of the online platforms.  This means identifying the inputs and outputs to these environments, including how the organisms, actors or components within, affect each other. It also involves mapping out the exchange of forces/energies and material (such as informational) transfers involved.

Future work to be done would involve opening up the data gathered to those involved, and develop an iterative series of diagrams, which acknowledge the complex interactions between all involved in these ecosystems.

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Conversants

Ron Lambert (Puke Ariki, Exhibitions)

Pukekura Park socio-cultural history & guided tour

Alistair Stevens (Puke Ariki, IT Dept.)

Setting-up of Pukekura Park & Taranaki Kete platform

David Apimerika (IT Freelancer, Educator)

Maintanance of Taranaki Wiki platform 11.2006-2008

Amanda Hewlett (Puke Ariki, Education Dept.)

Educational direction of Taranaki Wiki platform 11.2006-2008

Nathan Hill (Puke Ariki, Environmental Educator)

Environmental Science of Pukekura Park and 60 Springs Project

Gary Bastin (Puke Ariki, Taranaki Research Centre)

Development of Kete Platform in Taranaki Region

Elise Smith (Friends of Pukekura Park)

Pukekura Park Portal Project including Pukekura Kete Plaform & G.I.S.

Walter McGuinness (Lead developer of Kete)

Historical development of Kete Platform

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References and links

Associated Institutions

http://www.pukekura.org.nz/

http://www.pukeariki.com/

Taranaki Wiki

http://www.taranakiwiki.com/

Kete platform development

http://kete.net.nz/

http://www.katipo.co.nz/solutions/kete/

http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/

Taranaki-based Kete platforms

http://kete.pukekura.org.nz/

http://ketenewplymouth.peoplesnetworknz.info/

http://kete.taranakireo.co.nz/about

Taranaki Environmental Resource: Research Analysis Information Network

http://terrain.net.nz/

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Background and ‘bridging’ stories

(Written by Andrew)

Wiki

The online ‘Taranaki Wiki’ platform was initiated by Puke Ariki [1] and funded by the Community Partnership Fund.  Freelance IT-consulant David Apimerika was commissioned in November 2006 to set up a experiemental participatory website, “to allow the people of Taranaki, and elsewhere, to share their knowledge of all things Taranaki” [2].  Due to a very short period for installation and development, the free-to-download open-source TikiWiki software was chosen, and the site ‘bootstrapped’ (i.e. filled with starter) topics, categories and institutional content, before being applied in educational projects within the region.

This type of platform allows registered users (and sometimes non-registered users) to quickly edit a webpage, add and remove content, keeping a record of edit changes within the webpages.  Some Using either short-hand syntax or WYSIWYG editor, styling of text, links and media can be placed quickly into the pages without need of direct access to the hosting server.  These features make it easier for persons who are not part of the administrative structures supporting the project, i.e. the general public, to contribute to the development of the content , the knowledge, contained on the site.  Wiki software is one of the tools which has contributed to coining of the term ‘web 2.0’, and the increased mass participation in the development and publishing of knowledge online.

Furthermore, this style of content management system often purports to lowering the threshold of participation, and adjustment for emerging content layout and design, in the collective gathering of text and other media content online.

Kete

The online ‘kete’ platform was originally developed by the Horowhenua Library [3] in collaboration with Katipo Communications Ltd. [4], as a digital cultural heritage repository – “a knowledge basket of images, audio, video and documents which are collected and catalogued by the community” – building upon the national interactive education vision of ‘Kete Ipurangi’.

A localised Taranaki kete online platform is currently being prepared and ready for open use. Others are installed by organisations and institutions around Aotearoa-New Zealand.

To be continued/developed/edited..

Notes

[1] http://www.pukeariki.com

[2] http://www.taranakiwiki.com

[3] http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz

[4] http://www.katipo.com/

Andrew Gryf Paterson

Andrew Gryf Paterson is a Scottish artist-organiser, cultural producer and doctoral candidate, based in Helsinki, Finland. His work involves variable roles of initiator, participant, author and curator, according to different collaborative and cross-disciplinary processes. Andrew works across the fields of media/ network/ environmental activism, pursuing a participatory arts practice through workshops, performative events, and storytelling.

Web Sites

Random Information Exchange – The Polytechnic

Dominic Smith collecting instruction sets from the New Plymouth public.

We are an Arts organization called the polytechnic. We are based in the North east of England and we are an arts based group with an emphasis on hand-on and distributed approaches to working with technology.

We would use this residency as an opportunity to take the Random Information Exchange from alpha 0.2 stage into a beta 0.1 development state.

The main participatory nature of this residency would be to set up a Bureau to handle the exchange of information, all of which will be based around the exchange of simple text (*.txt) files. These files can range from cooking recipes, directions for a walk, musical notation in the form of abc files, tablature or saved data for complex multimedia programming environments. The person depositing the data will also received a random piece of data in return.

A production unit will run alongside the bureau to produce derivations and modifications of the data (the text files) this can take many forms e.g. cookery, knitting and interactive media. Production tasks will be performed by mostly unskilled labor to ensure accidental modification

This project has previously ran as an alpha test for developing a participatory model that have been exploring. Bringing the Open Source philosophy that was inherent in the tools we chose to use (apache web server, mySQL Database and PHP) with us into the larger and more visible aspect of the information exchange project. The relation between the tools and end produce in this project being much like a painter deliberately leaving traces of their initial sketches on a canvas or a sculptor leaving evidence of the tools used in an objects construction. We are currently developing a set of visualization tools that will encourage participation by showing seemingly random projects developing, stalling, transforming and forking into new ideas in real time. This project is heavily reliant upon audience participation at both a local and international level.

Description: We will be developing and testing a beta version of an online tool we are developing. This tool is called the Random Information Exchange and can be found here:
UPDATED: http://www.randomexchange.info/rie03/rie03.html

In its current mode you are required to upload a basic set of instructions on a txt file and you receive a random set in return. For this residency we will take this into a much more useful area were all changes to projects can be visibly mapped and user projects begin to take on more conceptual depth.

An image from the resulting exhibition formed from the exchange of instructions submitted and received.

Throughout the duration of the residency we will set up a bureau that encourages people to upload and receive information. This set up can be a simple as a table a computer, a printer and a Polytechnic member to assist. Along side the Bureau will be a production unit that will have all equipment and materials necessary for participants to realise projects assigned by the bureau. There will be 2 polytechnic members on hand to aid with production and to advise with the re-upload of modifications to the original project.

Dominic Smith is an artist, programmer and musician, currently studying towards PhD with CRUMB at Sunderland University. In 2005- he co-founded Polytechnic: a new media arts organization in Newcastle http://ptechnic.org. His work has been shown widely across the UK and he has done many residencies.

Sneha Solanki communicates her practice through art which interrogates science and technology. Solanki often works in process-based environments; producing events and projects which utilise low-tech, open and collaborative methods. Her practice extends to sound, web, broadcast, and time-based temporal works.

Will Scrimshaw – I work with and write about sound, performance and interaction. My work often makes use of interactive technologies and is focused around theories of resonance, noise, feedback, embodiment and materialism. I am currently pursuing research into theories of sonorous individuation in relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze as part of my PhD study.

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I also had the pleasure on my final day In New Plymouth of talking to some of the most excellent staff from Witt and WelTec about Open Source models and collaborative practice in the arts. I have pasted some useful links below that relate to what I talked about. They are in no particular order and some will be of more use than others but they will hopefully be a good introduction to the subject.

Dominic

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Polytechnic: See above for info on the poly

http://ptechnic.org

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Michael Mandiberg & Xtine Burrough: I mentioned the struggles and benefits of open sourcing your content via a publisher.

http://www.mandiberg.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Foundations-Intro-Design-Creative/dp/0321555988

http://www.blog.digital-foundations.net/

http://wiki.digital-foundations.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

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OS and Hacker culture

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/technocapitalism/voluntary

http://www.nodel.org/

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Links to useful linux distributions

http://dynebolic.org/

http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/

http://ubuntustudio.org/

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How to dual boot your lovely mac so you can choose OSX or Linux when you switch it on

http://www.mactel-linux.org/wiki/HOWTO

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Composition for Taranaki Surfers – Alex Monteith

The Composition for Taranaki Surfers project is concerned with developing a relationship between Taranaki’s surf culture, video installation art, expanded documentary strategies and performance art. Surfing recently surpassed Rugby in New Zealand as the sport in which the highest number of New Zealanders participate. This project proposes to investigate surf culture in Taranaki in relationship to performativity in the geographical environment.

I would like to make a video installation that combines multiple simultaneous Digital video recordings at Taranaki’s renowned surf breaks, including at least Stent Road, Kumera Patch and Mangahume. These surf breaks are spread around the circumference of Taranaki’s “surf highway”. The work would explore sport is a form of performance that relates to both geography & weather and would be something between documentation of certain cultures of performance specific to surfers and a choreographed act designed to engage specifically with the format of multi-venue/muli-camera shooting and the geography local to the Taranaki surf scene. Both relationships of real-time and weather specifics would be explored by the project-which will be shot at various point-breaks that face between N and SW on the compass dial. The SCANZ residency is an ideal place to incubate and create this work because some of the other attendees (including Natalie Robertson) could work simultaneously at various locations with me on the project –and this presents a unique opportunity to create a video work of scale in the region.

This project would constitute the third major video installation work in a series of works investigating specialized ways of moving and navigating simultaneous video and environmental spaces and NZ agribusiness or sports leisure activities. I would like to involve some of the women’s and/or mens ex. NZ rep surfers and NZ national champions from the region. I have contacts in the NZ surfing industry from when I used to compete in the scene myself (competing at National level in NZ till 2002, and at European and World level in 2001/2002) including Heather Dent (NZ champion, and also a former USA rep surfer).

I am most interested in looking at the potential of a multi-venue (multiple surf-breaks) multi camera shoot for a video installation outcome (possibly up to 4 POV’s as with the sheep and motorcycle projects). I generally identify a performance possibility for participants (like surfers) and organize them for a singe-take (no edits) multi-camera shoot –and this project would also be produced using this stucturalist technique. I have already begun a related work in Ahipara (Northland) in which I simultaneously documented the passing utes, trucks, walking surfers, motoX riders as they accessed the three main surf spots near Ahipara (Blue house, Pines and Mukie2). Each point-break is 2kms apart. The stills below are taken from footage recorded at the 2nd point-break Muckie2. Ahipara in Northland presents a completely unique mix of word class surf and extraordinary 4×4 vehicle-culture in order for surfers to access the remote sites. This complicates reading the geographical environment in Ahipara because of the mix of mad-max vehicle culture and awe-inspiring pristine surf and surrounds. The Taranaki surf-scene on the other hand is defined by sprawling breaks with giant swell windows that catch swell from many directions that can be explored within 100kms drive of New Plymouth – and it is particular Taranaki-specific contexts for surf related performance the work sets out to explore.

Auckland based artist and academic in time-based media. Exhibits in national and international contemporary art contexts as well as film festival contexts (US awards in 2000 and 2004), with moving image work in the Wairoa Maori Film Festival 2008, International Film Festival of New Zealand five of the last eight years, feature film official selection NZIFF 2005.