.made.

A flyaround movie

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:32:00 +0000

I thought that while we had all the spec for the new longhill seat in a 3D app, i might as well animate it.

LongSeat-movie-desktop.m4v Watch on Posterous

Reposted from Rattlebag

Revised Design for Longhill Seating

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:15:00 +0000

This is my latest iteration of the design for Longhill School's new seating object or Longseat.
The design has been changed a lot, but now it is ready for us to start making it - although have drawn the thing so many times now I feel like I have already made it. The upside is that just like riding a bike, I now am completely at one with my 3D software, the downside is that I begin to wonder how to go about meshing, extruding, metaballing or even doing some boolean functions on most household objects - I'm sure it will wear off. Anyway here are the images.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Reposted from Rattlebag

MyGardenSchool

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 01:32:00 +0000

I have been working on producing a video tutorial on making treehouses for the new startup website out of the Oxford Garden School.

And today the site went live.

The site is called MyGardenSchool and it offers online classes on every aspect of gardening; including making treehouses.

Here's what it looks like

As a tutor for the online school I have even got my own classroom - very peculiar, but quite intriguing too.

The classes start at the end of each month and I am curious to see how many people enroll - could this be my pension?

I have relatively high hopes about this, mainly because it is the work of Duncan Heather and Elspeth Briscoe (of early Ebay and Skype development fame).

Apart from anything it has been fun re-writing the book that I made for Ivy Press some years ago (which has just been republished in New York - why didn't I go for royalties?) not to mention the 200 illustrations that I had to knock out for the 2 hours of video (it was either that or make yet another free treehouse for someone).

here are some of my illustrations.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Reposted from Rattlebag

Longhill School Gathering place

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:54:00 +0000

The Longhill School gathering place is a project that I have been working on for several months. It began life as a creative partnership project that sought to engage a group of students with the environment of their school. Last year was spent deriving designs and isolating needs. Now that the project is coming to maturity the student originated design is being honed into a workable solution that takes into account the vagaries of the site. and the need to produce a finished product quickly.

Following the last meeting for the Longhill School gathering place I have fleshed out the design a bit more:

1 found a more appropriate curve

2 looked at some workable planter options

3 considered prices

The idea of integrating the need for planters into the curve design, and the need to have no large inaccessible areas, helped to define the curve, as did the need for a planter by each column, and some larger planters in the main area for trees.
I have therefore broken the continuous line into four separate lines, each terminating in a planter.
Smaller planters by the columns, Larger planters in the main area.

At the covered walkway there is a need for planters, but the curved seat is not to extend here, therefore I have provided some ideas for simple seperate planters - based on the minimum of labour to construct them. these planters have yet to be arranged within the space adequately (issues of escape routes and crowd flow).

At the meeting it was decided to attempt a planter design that used the same tube construction as the rest of the scheme.
These involve bending the pipe to a loop then stacking the loops until the desired height is achieved.
The most common HDPE pipe is 63mm in diameter - the prefered planter height is circa 700mm
Therefore 11 loops stacked and bolted make a workable planter.

The stacked tube planter will be made rigid by filling the bottom 63mm (pipe height) with concrete.
an additional depth of vermiculite will be added - and the rest will be growing medium.

I have constructed a single loop to the minimum diameter that the pipe will follow, it is a simple, low tech process just the sort of thing that a large group of student helpers can deal with..

The preliminary cost of the planters based on 11 times loops of black HDPE pipe (63mm diameter SDR17) is as follows
a 1.6m diameter planter (4m of tube per hoop x 11 hoops) = 44m @ £4.44 per metre = £196.00
a 1.8m diameter planter (6m of tube per hoop x 11 hoops) = 66m @ £4.44 per metre = £294.00
these estimates do not include wastage, but as the entire structure uses the same material this can be offset.
nor do the costs include the bolts, concrete or vermiculite but these are minimal perhaps an additional £20 per planter.

Where these planters meet the seating structure, the rails for the seats become a continuation of one of the levels of tubing.

The estimated amount of 63mm tube for the entire track as shown in the image is 207m.

There will be costs for the 83 leg tubes which I expect to be significantly higher than the track (42m approx of 355mm pipe).

The rendered images that are attached have not yet had the variations in height added to them - the final version will undulate between 200mm high and 700mm high.

There is scope for cost savings - the height of the planters, and the average seating height, could be lowered.
The number of elements could be reduced.

Reposted from Rattlebag

Curation ~ Session two & Conclusion

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:19:00 +0000

The second session saw all of the students that missed the first session – therefore it was a very large group that bordered on problematic given the limitations of the space.

Exactly the same thing happened in the first room – a weighing up. Perhaps due to the success of the first session, we took the point were the students became relaxed enough to joke as a good sign to move on.

However in the next room it turned out that the humour was unfocused and that there was a tendency for things to get silly, without really exploring the issues.
It was the wrong dynamic for this lot, a reminder that in workshops a formula never works twice.

The third room was a surprise – although it was perhaps the least accessible set of images, the quieter students began to assert an interest in the idea of collection – because of this the group gels – ideas of collecting, and vernacular come pouring out. One student even admits to having a collection of WW2 German bank statements, an admission that a few rooms ago would have been met with laughter – quite personal unguarded stuff begins to come out – this group are much more interested in the ‘meaning’ of what is portrayed with less of an emphasis on the formal aspects of the images.
Some very deep and satisfying conceptual discussions occur amongst a group that I would have not expected it from.

During this curation exercise the ‘exhibitions were much more meaning based and literal than in the previous session – but this makes complete sense regarding the manner in which they engaged with the idea – rather than identifying formal aspects such as colour or linearity, this group organized work on the basis of gaze or ecological impact – as with the first group there was an underlying sophistication in the understanding of formal relationships between images, but these issues were not caught in the flow of discussion, instead a more journalistic concern with what was being said by the exhibition was explored.

Conclusion

Dealing with the issues surrounding the image, collection, exhibition and meaning was bound to be complex – these workshops found their own entry point into these subjects and developed them well, increasing knowledge and awareness – as well as making the link with curation as a profession that values these issues and makes them core skills on which to build a career.

Further workshops would ideally tackle the aspects of curation that didn’t arise organically from the group, so that the students would get a fuller understanding of all the associated concerns.

Reposted from Exegesis | Art, location & Culture

Curation ~ session one

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:19:00 +0000

See and download the full gallery on posterous

The first of the workshop sessions involved a smaller group than was originally expected – due to "unforeseen" exams.

In the first room of the show the discussion was extremely awkward, with everyone weighing each other up and getting an idea of what was expected – we took great pains to prove that any comment was valid and that every observation was a good one – by the time we left that room we were all laughing.

Subsequent rooms saw a very spirited banter – like when friends enjoy commenting on a corny film by adding dialogue – during this banter it was easy to emphasise when sophisticated concepts had been touched upon and turn them into features, reinforcing them and challenging the students to enlarge upon them.

During the curation exercise all of the students showed extremely sophisticated judgement and a deep consciousness of the dynamics of both images and the way they are juxtaposed.
These students grasped the formal aspects of imagery off their own back – even identifying the difference between picture plane and image.

The shows that were curated seemed to concentrate on composition. Colour as a unifying theme emerged unbidden – as did playing with the difference between looking "into" and "at" an image.

Reposted from Exegesis | Art, location & Culture

The first curation workshops - a plan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:19:00 +0000

There are many strange dynamics amongst workshop groups, it always takes a while to warm up, too rigid a plan can go horribly wrong, and the best experiences for all are to be had if everyone approaches the sessions as equals – with schoolchildren this can be tricky, they are used to being the target of directed education, it can take them a while to realise that there is no ‘right or wrong’ in this situation and that their well honed avoidance techniques aren’t going to be needed.

Structure
The structure of the initial workshops placed an emphasis on the students themselves to decide: why they thought exhibitions happened, what a collection was, how they read images and sequences of images and what aspects of the exhibition influenced their reading of the work.

To begin with a very general, open ended discussion was encouraged where any comment was valued and elaborated upon – we made it clear that the group were defining their own rules for the subject. Whenever the subject got close to a ‘traditional’ curatorial issue we would seed the discussion with tricks of the trade and watch the new information become normalised amongst the group. The discussion was very lively, and familiar – it became clear that the students were extremely sophisticated in the way that they analysed the visual, and had very clear opinions – that they were fully accustomed to critique, but had not seen it as having a constructive value. As they became aware that their familiar banter about what they are looking at was one of the main skills of the curator, the creative development of the subject took off.

We purposefully allowed a good amount of time to relax into a flowing discussion, like any family gathered around a T.V. set might, with orchestration this chat covered such complex concepts as the flow of the eye into an image, the significator in an image and the way it varies between people, the form and the content of the photograph, implied narratives across unrelated images, the idea of a conscious collection and an inadvertent collection and how significances change within a collection.

By the time the discussions ended most of the students felt sufficient ownership of the subject to curate a collection for themselves – the next part of the workshop.

The students were presented with a very large number of random unrelated images ranging from a few classic art prints, through fairly ordinary stock photos of ‘interesting items’, to the discarded snaps from old rolls of film.

In small groups they were asked to select an unspecified number of images that made some (if any) sense to them and construct a quick exhibition on blank wall spaces in the gallery – adding, removing or changing images as they saw necessary – negotiating amongst themselves for agreement on what should be placed where.

Finaly the entire group was toured around these ‘new exhibitions’ and the creators were asked to explain their reasoning, this was followed with discussion and critique in a similar way to our exploration of the original show.

I should add that throughout the process an emphasis was laid on the quality of exploration rather than the slickness of the display skills, we all understood that this was an exhibition in principal, notes for an exhibition.

Reposted from Exegesis | Art, location & Culture

Curation ~ The skill and specialism of display.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:18:00 +0000

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Now that Longhill High School has a gallery there is a clear need to develop the skills and expertise required to make the most of it.

During the course of discussions with Lisa Finch at Fabrica it was decided to form a project in collaboration with LCP (Landscape Cities People) - a project that would allow students from Longhill to gain from Fabrica’s expertise as a successful international gallery.

For me this was a defining moment, we had wandered into the field of the curator and I suddenly realised that I had never heard of the subject being dealt with in school at all.
We would all be surprised if a school didn’t do ‘Art’ but we often take it to mean ‘making’ - when you consider that potentially more people make a living from curation, in one form or another, than do through making art, it seemed amazing that this seemed so radical.

As is always the case when you can suddenly see the whole picture, the birth of curator workshops in school seems like a necessity, rather than an experiment (perhaps for staff too).

Two initial workshops were arranged at Fabrica, to test the water with the students involved in the original discovery.
We were incredibly lucky to have stumbled across the notion of exploring curatorial skills at the same time as the photo biennial here in Brighton – even more so because Fabrica, our partner was host to an exhibition curated by Martin Parr the photographer called ‘House of the Vernacular’.

The exhibition consists of seven collections of vernacular photographs housed in a constructed environment of seven theatrically themed rooms. Each of the collections has a common subject or function, such as commercial images of litter bins, men wearing hats in Bogota, or dictators private jet interiors. In addition each collection has originated from outside of the ‘Art Photograph’ industry, some are found snapshots, some studio work, others collected for publication.

Being at Fabrica the exhibition has been wonderfully supported with all sorts of investigations, discussions and related events, the staff and volunteers continually discuss aspects of the show, exploring with professional interest (it is an artist led gallery) - against this background I felt more than confident that we could approach ideas of curation with an open mind and let the students find the meat of the subject.

Reposted from Exegesis | Art, location & Culture

How the curation project was born

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 23:16:00 +0000

Longhill High school, in conjunction with Fabrica Gallery, LCP and Creative Partnerships has begun the first steps in a ground breaking initiative that will perhaps change the way we consider both school environments and the students relationship with the display of work.

Until now most schools, almost purposefully present a clinical institutionalised environment for the staff and students to operate within. In many cases it is difficult to identify the difference between a public hospital, government office or a school – except perhaps by the types of warning messages that are displayed.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Images of corridors - hospital, childrens home, 2 prisons, 2 schools (final shot is longhill)

This Spartan approach to the interiors of schools appears to have come about by default, rather than through any considered strategy, as if a puritan rejection of all things decorative will in some way by default lead to an improvement in the learning environment. This attitude is one that has been questioned and found lacking, to good effect in some more enlightened workplaces. Bearing in mind that school is where life skills are gained and attitudes are first formed, it seems even more crucial that an awareness of the effects of environment and context are considered, and acted upon for the benefit of schoolchildren in the short term, and society in general in the longer term.

At Longhill High School the students themselves identified the issue of the dismal environment in schools almost by accident, during a detour from a project to refurbish a newly covered playground. We decided to follow the detour for a while and look into the question of display throughout the school, what it brought to the learning environment and students attitudes to it.

In part, responses to the quality and content of the schools display strategy, or lack of it, were influenced by a single new occurrence in the school. A new year 11 canteen had been built, it was furnished with modern well designed and interesting furniture and fittings, the walls were painted in colours and there were several posters framed upon the walls.
Without exception the students recognised this room as one that confirmed their maturity, aesthetic intelligence and more realistically portrayed the world they occupied outside of school. Even those who were not yet old enough to enter the canteen recognised the enlightening effect it had on the school just by its presence. One student even noticed that the time seemed less oppressive on a blue faced clock, than on the standard uniform white ones.
But the factor that was to give us most food for thought were the posters, these where A0 art prints that you might find in a print gallery, and were carefully chosen to have broad appeal, yet without referring directly to anything that smacked of curriculum.

These prints triggered a student led critique of the rest of the schools imagery and displays, one that was eye-opening, if a little brutal at times.
Briefly, the key observations on the school as a whole were:

Existing display is limited to a variety of large soft-board panels fixed to the walls around the corridors.
Display panels are shoddy and untidy – some are decorated with church fete like signage and frills.
Staff attempts to ‘brighten up’ display boards are reminiscent of kindergarten (primary colours, clipart cartoons etc).
Only schoolwork is ever displayed on them – often for so long no-one remembers who did the work.
Students work, unless of an exceptional standard, never sets as high aspirational goals as professional images/displays would.
Other students work is more often annoying or embarrassing than interesting.
Essays make appallingly dull display (text in general too).
Staff seem to feel obliged to represent curriculum subjects on display boards, but are seldom creative about it (portraits of great men).
Some staff cannot produce displays that match the visual literacy of the majority of students.

Some students felt the display boards were actually aimed at parents and visitors – to demonstrate the standard of work expected by staff, rather than to inspire and stimulate students on a daily basis.

There was minimal need for active notice boards, for timetabling notices etc, what space remained was generally dealt with poorly.

Classrooms however were felt to be much better considered as environments for learning, and that many teachers created interesting and inspiring rooms.

Corridors were often treated as a sort of no-mans-land of un-adopted passageways between subjects, yet these are the spaces students inhabit between subjects.

The result of these rather unexpected discoveries is that Longhill High School is developing a strategy to address display within the schools corridors. This strategy is experimental, it approaches how display is achieved in the school from two directions:

Physical issues – the design and location of display sites. The effect on the common-ways of new display areas and strategies.
Practical issues – the skill and specialism of providing excellent displays and understanding its impact.

The Design & location of display sites.
As part of the Creative Partnerships Change Schools Project the students developed an innovative strategy for making the schools display more intriguing and professional.
All existing soft-board ‘notice-boards were removed, and during the summer refit a large number of lockable clip frames were installed.
These new frames were arranged in all corridors and stairways in sequences more like a galleries display than the old ‘scout-hut’ approach.
The frames themselves can be loaded from the front, covered with a non-reflective ‘glass’ and locked, giving the appearance of a framed work.

The school has now got its own extensive, 300 frame gallery, in what not so long ago was clinical corridor ...

Reposted from Exegesis | Art, location & Culture

Low Orbit Ion Cannon with Hivemind (LOIC)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 02:43:00 +0000

In the last few days a new phenomenon has occurred, technology has met the needs of the individual to take direct political action in a new and powerful way. Take one look at @op_payback #payback @anonops #anonops @anon_operations or any combination of them on twitter and the sheer extent of activity is amazing, better still follow it all by going to http://collecta.com/#q=%23payback
Until this week any civil society with a bone to pick, or a cause to stand for has had to march to protest, send letters or risk unpredictable direct action. Our democracies have grown up relying on the powerlessness of individuals, setting the hoops for organised opposition to jump through, ensuring that the debate is always in the dialect of the state, expressed in ways that don't disrupt the status quo too much.
The Wikileaks issue is on the face of it all about freedom of information, the response by governments has been the usual mix of denial, coercion, diplomatic negotiation and financial sanction. Whether or not this is the right course of action is debatable, as is the validity of the accusations levelled at Julian Assange himself, but these debates have almost become irrelevant compared to the big story, one that possibly rivals the Dreyfus affair or Watergate in magnitude. I use those two examples because they share common ground with the events of December 2010 'DDos Day'.
By an ironic twist we see a press that is frightened for its role amidst online competition, actually mis-reporting events that concern its most sacred mantra 'freedom of the press' (see Watergate). At the same time we have governments that have failed to grasp the changes that an online society will increasingly demand from it and we watch them seriously underestimate the sophistication of public opinion regarding the matter.
Until now governments could afford to wage a slow campaign to restore public opinion, using a discrediting strategy and eroding groundswell support until it was negligible, a lumbering technique, but a time honoured one, that ensures success provided the peeved masses have no immediate access to power. The problem governments face today is that the masses can move far, far quicker than the machines of state can handle, and they have found a unique, rich source of power, simple immediate communication.
So it is that a small group of people, familiar with the internet, made an existing online tool available, LOIC (Low Orbital Ion Cannon) is an open source software application that allows for streams of data to be focused at a chosen host. At some point a control was added (called Hivemind), that allows the choice of host, or target, to be got from an external source.
Both of these are legitimate applications, a communication tool, and a peer to peer networking tool, combined they make a basic tool for running DDos (Distributed Denial of service) attacks, that can be told its target from the internet.
The effect of this synthesis of two existing mainstream applications was that anyone capable of installing microsoft word on their computer, could use it, and the worlds first app of civil disobedience was born.
With the Wikileaks issue being such a buzz on the social networks it didn't take long for news to spread that anyone could, if they wished, protest directly by uploading and installing "LOIC with Hivemind". By December the 9th 300,000 people had done so.
At this stage The Press were still reporting that a small group of hackers were causing trouble, when in effect it was a sizeable section of the public that were responsible for the sustained attacks on Paypal, MasterCard etc. Targets that were popularly identified with exerting pressure on Wikileaks to stop.
It is useful for the villains to be a 'small' group of nasty 'hackers' because they can be marginalised and hunted, in the hope that the true extent of public dissatisfaction with their governments behaviour doesn't become widely known. However the mechanism and the tool is now out there, it will become more sophisticated as time progresses, and it will probably become a mainstream method of protest. I can see it now, version 8 of Microsoft Riot. Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain, the time when governments held the key to democratic voice is passing, the sooner they recognise that they have to put their money where their mouth is, and use the internet as a truly democratic tool, the better.
There is a certain poetic in this whole affair; the freedom of information that Wikileaks is championing, and most states are attempting to silence, is the same medium that is growing exponentially with social networks on the web, and has enabled this form of civil disobedience ~ ironically, it is data itself, that is being used as a projectile to cripple the targets.
The trusted weapon of governments, financial sanctions, is precisely the same weapon that the protesters have used, but there is one big difference, none of those protesting are financial entities, nor is Wikileaks, they have far less to lose than the businesses and governments that are facing the disapproval of the public.

My sculptures from the sky | flypast on Google Earth

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:46:00 +0000

Quite a lot of the sculptures that I have made over the years are large enough to be visible from Google earth.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

While trying to get these screengrabs of them from above I noticed that you can make flypast tours with Google Earth, so I made one, of all of my work that can be seen from Google Earth (or Google maps).

Have a lightning tour if you fancy...

Just open this file in Google Earth.

Click here to download:

David Parfitt's sculptures.kmz (4 KB)

Alternatively you can click this link to see them in Google Maps, but you won't get the flypast tour, and the images are grotty.

House of the Vernacular – Missing it already

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 01:12:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 18:34:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 23:37:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 02:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:19:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 01:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:48:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 16:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 02:18:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:47:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:49:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:08:00 +0000

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.

Nocturne

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:01:00 +0000

This is the poem made automatically by Dasher.

NOCTURNE

Axiom permaskin song is Kroovity.
For ex we'll yard a Newburu.
Eh! tu, all neverlorted yes.
Somendous, vious, or else, ah!
By Dinah! Father grin, if the Oak Groviting suddenly uIfrasung, by & by.

Theres venumequate for the smarie eh?
QED IndustiDaddy in, but it save me. Is Beccy. is Lid.
During near the cope won't Rict. For dress as if shelf dulge high?
Sin poneburk line be Bare. YOU! yeh You SLAR!
BE aeroback vymenon which , loosely et Guky Gup.
Two CA's place, Plned, space 'WorMr'.
Mozemarket already am, Vicci did.
Cat studies in No' flight skin.
A presentative Wolf. 'veh warfavoured and yet. twohose nutralZ'll criticise pherzzle.
these QED Indian dizzyan Oscars!

The Footman've ARMalious mildsmobil tachme blownup.
A note - Travelroody's can would servatinence Notasted as I get till us. Do we SundaOLeorgah?
They, WE, U, R exhibitions and the laighborhood found by & by the DucExclaps.
Appark Gritary Kanch, as all efficialieu xtc.
"usiness shrinking edullball".
remember Pc-Prator, this washore hour dareboard of ''ved?
Roke to be warmer, long turn to the triptaked regulaparals, a coy, according thanks to Kowalski.
Sekz Sixh sackrists had X.
Qwicle trouSand & tying, feed.
'Murry work out of the airs' is a mation of the great Christ and E SEZ "A rite yarday by years,'d bird peck pief animals".
But the capt R. Phil, Reified with TXLLAN' and there X.
Town've fas' firt'n. tu.

Sadly missing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 01:22:00 +0000

An old, half forgotten letter caused me to search for a lost, close friend on the internet recently. After a long search I only found one reference - It was her obituary.

Partly the shock of finding that obituary, and the strong desire to find something, anything, that showed her as she had lived, made me realise that as far as people are concerned, the internet is still not much more than a cross between an address book and a telephone. On one hand it is easy to find beaurocratic facts about someone, whilst on the other you can tell if a friend is online or throw a message out to them. It is a different matter if you want to get a glimpse of the person, at best all you can do is follow a series of clues and piece them together, if they are over a certain age this becomes scant, if they are fully subscribed to the social web, it is as trivial as a myspace wallpaper choice.

Of course none of this is surprising, we are daily reminded of the risk of being too open online, but in truth that risk is primarily economic and physical, providing that beurocratic details such as account numbers and addresses are kept separate from the biographic then where is the risk? after all we all walk and act in the real world without the need for a cloak of invisibility.
In a sense we still use the web as a glorified beurocratic portal, assuming that our national insurance and bank account details precede every transaction, yet there is obviously a place for poetry and biography here, surely that is where we should look to find our friends?

So I must pay tribute to my old friend Debbie Fogg for reminding me of the importance of people, long after she has departed. I am sure she would be pleased that I will continue to try to wave her flag (of deepest red). Although I haven't met them, I wish her friends and relatives, especially her children Rebecca, Ewan and Caitlin and partner Kenny, my deepest sympathy and hope for the future.