I did live tweeting for the first time this afternoon at #publicamp and it was not toooooo difficult. The iphone battery lasted well beyond the expected 2 hour span coping with constant tweeting and twitpicting. I quickly gave up on any sense of narrative and adopted a more fluid mash up hip hop web 2.o sort of narrative, trying to key in some remarkable words independently from any attempt to catch fully finished sentences

I am participating with friends in Publicamp, an afternoon event in Kennington Park, London that considers notions of ‘publicness’ through a barcamp structure comprised of short presentations and discussion. To contribute, visit the Critical Practice wiki and register your presentation. Sunday 5th of July, 2-5 pm, Kennington Park, London SE11. Your invite here: publicamp_invite.doc.

The annual symposium of the Journal of Media Practice  focuses this year on the uses and
construction of memory in contemporary media practice. It is hosted by the Centre for Material Digital Culture at the Sussex University in  Falmer, Brighton, and it takes place Monday 13th of July 2009,  9.30 am - 6.00pm.

I am in the panel Archives: creation and interpretation
Paul Long & Jez Collins, Mary Kathleen Smith & Rachel Graham , Olivia Lory Kay, Paula Roush
Other Panels and Speakers are:

Memory, spaces, communities
Sarah Bennett, Inga Burrows, Ian Wiblin, Anne Robinson

Documentary/narrative/fiction
Steven Eastwood, Wilma de Jong, Johannes Sjöberg

Sounds and voices of history
David Malcolm Chapman, Tahera Aziz, Jem Kelly

Auto/biographies and family
Melanie Friend, Tony Steyger, Michael Chanan

Performances of memory
Gillian Gordon, Anya Lewin, Simon Ellis

Access the full program and register here.

Back in March, I met with Ines Amado  and Susana Mendes Silva in skype to chat about our use of electronic media in life, art  and performance. This was for a section on the portuguese feminist magazine Faces de Eva on letter writing. As we don’t write letters anymore, we decided to skype instead. That skype exchange is now part of the edition 21 of Faces de Eva being launched in the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian May 27th at 6pm. The letters/’skypes’ /cartas (in portuguese) can be downloaded cartas21.pdf.

friday club in the cover and  double spread in portuguese culture/politix magazine CAIS, may 2009

I am taking part in the  Takeaway Talks, in  Day 2 of the Takeaway Festival Thursday May 21 7.00-8.30. The title of the evening talks/discussion is Knowledge Unlimited. We are looking at how knowledge is now being disseminated in unusual ways and the impact of this on traditional structures for learning.

My presentation is about open education networks. Open learning communities  inspired by the free culture movement, offer alternatives  to the bricks and mortars  model of universities as knowledge factories. I will be presenting a sample  of these emerging hybrid-flexible online learning models that are being developed with the help of social technologies, both  within and at the margins of the academia.

Two of the London South Bank University emerging researchers I am working with-Christopher Kamper and Anita Lasocka- have done their work placement at the School of Everything and I am presenting some of this work and our interpretation of the artists placement group philosophy in the context of the “classroom of the read/write web.” To follow the placement’s tweets, search for messages tagged with the hashtag #pha09.

This is my plan

The full programme is available in the learning & teaching unit site.

This weekend, Friday Club participates in the Encontros de Arte exhibition with The Unvanquished City (the war machine, 1809-2009). Comemorações do Bicentenário do Regimento de Artilharia Nº5 e  da Retirada das Tropas Francesas. Quartel do Regimento de Artilharia Nº 5 Serra do Pilar R. Rodrigues Freitas 1
V. N. GAIA,  10 to 23 de Maio, 10:00-19:00.

The Friday Club is a group of emerging  academic researchers whose practices focus on performance for the camera,  youth cultures  and the media contexs in which events and their representations take place.

The name Friday Club derives from the day the group members convene to work and the playful attitude to the re-enactment of images found in the media. Relying on performance-based practices to improvise images of the world, the group acts as collective bodies (bodies without organs)  to explore the rhizomatic flows  of artistic research.

The series of photographs The Unvanquished City (2009) was developed using strategies of the newspaper theatre. Readings of the global war, the  european student movement and urban crime, amongst other topics, are crossed to develop dissonant perspectives. Through processes of defamiliarisation and desidentification, emerge uncanny  images that reveal the presentation of the self in everyday life.

The Friday Club explores the visual gaps that occur in mediated histories,  to interrogate the ontology of performance: What happens to reality and  liveness when actions are performed solely for the photographic camera?  When the photograph is the only evidence  upon which we base our collective memory  and our position as eye witnesses?

I would have called it ‘deterritories’ or ‘towards  deterritorialisation’ but the show has been titled: ‘new territories/novos territorios’ , looks great and opens this week at Pavilhao 28. The project’s publication designed by pr (ie, myself) has been published with issuu and is now the project’s online presence. Enjoy it and stop by on the 23rd of april (check google map below).

Pavilhão 28 Espaço Expositivo do Centro Hospitalar Psiquiátrico de Lisboa Hospital Júlio de Matos Avenida do Brasil, 53 1700 Lisboa

Private View: Thursday 23rd of April 20:00. Exhibition runs from the 24th of April to the 9th of June, Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 18:00.

Artists: Inês Amado, Paula Roush, Mónica de Miranda, José Ferreira, Luisa Menano, Sandro Resende, Ansuman Biswas, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Maria Kheirkhah, Marie Ange Bordas, Malgorzata Markiewicz, Dani Sotter, Kostana Banovic

Photography Education Symposium

Friday 13th March 2009 1200-17:00) London South Bank University, Keyworth St Building, Keyworth St, London SE1 0AA
Participants include: Anne Williams (course director, MA/Postgraduate Diploma Photography at London College of Communication),  Anna Fox (Head of the BA and MA Photography Course at the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham), Geraint Cunnick (Head of Art and Photography, European Centre for Photographic Research at Newport School of Art, Media and Design) and paula roush (lecturer and researcher, Digital Photography at London South Bank University).

Journal Photographies

Issue four of the journal Photographies (editorial group led by Martin Lister and Andrew Dewdney) will focus upon the topic of photography and education. The issue, to be published in September 2009, aims to consider the current state of the teaching of photography as a subject in the context of recent changes in education, culture and technology: changes in the economies of knowledge, the modes of photographic production, circulation and use and the technologies of image engineering.

Symposium
Alongside this issue  the one day symposium at London South Bank University on Friday 13th March 2009 addresses three themes which provide a guide to the interests this issue is seeking responses to.

1. Recent Changes in the Economies of Knowledge
The question here might be ‘what is it to have a knowledge of photography now?’ and what then, given this question, constitutes teaching and learning about photography? We are interested in answers to and speculation around this question which reference and recognize changes in the nature of knowledge and its organization. We are equally interested in approaches which tackle the philosophy, history, and politics of education and photography.

2. Changes in the Production, Circulation and Use of Photographic Images
There has been much interest and speculation in academic, research and teaching contexts about the significance of Web 2.0 and its corresponding forms of social networking, the social and cultural uses of mobile image/text devices, ONLINE image banks archives. It has been suggested that new networked media have reshaped as well as extended the production, circulation and use of photography. We are interested in examples of educational engagement in this area as well as cultural and ethnographic understandings of the lived experience and the contexts of such photographic exchanges.

3. New Developments in Image Engineering Technologies
For some, photography has a history and tradition which is not dependent upon, nor can be reduced to, its mechanical and digital technics. For others, teaching photography on the basis of digital technologies is accompanied by a desire to move beyond photographic tradition, to cross subject boundaries and to chart a new course. Digitally based technologies have been practically taken up across the spectrum of teaching photography, but how are they understood? Whilst the post-photography moment has come and gone as a mainly theoretical challenge, how in practice, pedagogy and curricula is the widespread use of digital technology understood to be different from the analogue, if at all?