A glimps of the red distraction

Im@ge

Continuing blogging presence

Gill Clough - Open University
I attended the Inter@ct seminar with interest. I normally liveblog conferences and find that it gives me a different perspective on the proceedings. This time, to do something I would not normally do, I posted a comment on the first entry in this blog using my mobile phone (no mean feat considering the numeric keypad!).

Last week I attended the ALT-C 2007 Conference in Nottingham Before the conference, the organisers invited all who wished to blog the conference to subscribe to an RSS feed aggregator. This is an online tool by which you can combine feeds from various blogs and access them such that all the posts appear in chronological order (or any other order you want) as if they were all from a single blog. About 30 bloggers signed their blogs up to this. You can view the feed at:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=0DXClBNS3BGKXshsxQnzeQ

The conference had wifi in the main centre. During the keynote about 5 people were liveblogging and by the end of the keynote, you could read five accounts from the yahoo pipe. It was very interesting and quite immersive. People were commenting on each others posts, including links from their posts to other related posts. Once delegate took pictures of about 10 or so delegates sat around the conference at different times, all using laptops (and presumably blogging). He created a brilliant slideshow of all these pictures which he posted in his blog. Other bloggers linked to it so it was very easy to find. Here's the permalink to the post http://cladonia.co.uk/weblog/2007/09/#000020
(Just checked that this link works, and the post after it contains a picture of me and Rebecca giving our presentation on the use of blogs as a postgraduate research journals - I'm the short one :))

Overall, this RSS aggregator really enhanced the conference experience. It was possible to read about presentations that you may have wanted to attend but had a clash. You really felt like you were contributing to the overall event and you certainly made connections with people and places.

I wondered if this was the sort of thing that this seminar was aiming at with the encouragement to participate?

MyDistraction.com

Yesterday I sat in the Inter@ct 'seminar' and was encouraged to participate in some fashion, having had a piece of paper passed my way. 'They' said do something, anything, preferably something you don't normally do, its as open as that they said. Of course we have the means now to be 'as open as that', but do we have a reason? Do we need a reason?

Today I upload my 'contribution'. It is a testement perhaps to Walter Benjamin’s line about distraction being the mode of perception most appropriate to the technological transformation of modern (and postmodern) culture. In the our age of virtual reproducilibity its all about dissemination... all too often, perhaps, the mass dissemination of our distraction en masse...

I liked the shoes of one of the participants, so I drew them (of course, as you can see, I'm not someone who normally draws). It really was 'as open as that', but in all the freedom I just couldn't get past a pair of bright red shoes... [but then, I do have a thing about red: see 'In the Study of the Letters in Red...' in Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2005, Vol 4, no. 1, pp 19-27; also:Rodrigo Velasco's Letters in Red]

...so, maybe I missed the point of the 'seminar', or perhaps I got it precisely... either way, they were fantastic looking shoes!

I said I'd scan in my concept map from the session and post it. Shame my scanner seems to be refusing to pick up A4 images today :-(

On the left it should say 'do remnants of history remain on the body?'
At the top it should say 'production is messy'
and at the bottom right it should say 'items may appear CLOSER than they are'.

Live Blog

Alain Ayers

Hope you find it interesting

Ambient music

Drift out towards the end

Setting various things up

More specifically – website / blogs

Real emphasis is to get you involved

Reams and reams of sentences

Doodles

Something untypical

Play with us – work with us

Writing result of this

Conference

Strange narratives

Weird connections

Non-linear

Not my children but my spouse

Comments brief speculative spacious

Technologies are all new and developing

Life and creativity

Compartmentalisation

Connectivity

Screen – ubiquitous object image location

Screen incredibly dispersed – Big Chill

Sites of experiencing also sites of learning

Sites of learning potentially anywhere everywhere

Multiple spaces – the notion of simultaneity

No singular notion of where the artwork sits or what shape it takes

Not necessarily technology that drives it could be the conceptual, cultural, mythical background

Manuel Castells – movement from the centre to the periphery

Networks that are going to be continuously on the move

How do we stay in the flow

Worthiness of the process

Determination to resist centralising tendencies – might be political, institutional centralisation – we are continually trying to break these apart.

Make the work live in a sense now – participant / observation

Trying to find out what communicates

Notion of art practice as a coproduction

Notion that we’re moving from the idea of individual making the work to making the artwork collaboratively

Our intention is fixed seminar session – ongoing presence – blog through the conference

Two things I saw in the newspaper – very inspiring – close together on the page

Freud and Michelangelo – develops that onto the idea of two positions held in conflict

Not beautifully seamless – problematic

Technological domains

Flowing synthesised spaces

Incredibly messy – beautifully challenged

Jacques Ranciere – poet with a designer

Child’s guessing game – what’s the similarity / difference between this and this

This is the proper way to do it – there is no ‘proper’ way to have research based practice

Check my watch

At the point of proliferation with connectivity – odd sort of disjunture – creativity and institualised conflict.

Just in time – jetting something in just at the point of need.

In another way – the technology demands that you come in you fly in and you log in and the information is there – the point of knowledge

Co-production – art practice as collaborative – how at pg level how much more do we have to think about the individual – don’t have to feed in at the level of the individual…

Things start to slip again.

Don’t have to start drawing lines around what it is that you do

Cultural intercontext

Mic gets his paper and is ready to speed talk! It's already 2.30

Alain asks me was the timing ok ship of water

Michael Pinchbeck

What doing a lot of undertaken as an artist and a writier and now with own practice

What is it to write live

How do ideas crystalise

I will start with another project its called the long and winding road ands asks questions when the documentation of the work becomes the work

Car was packed

2008 journey ends

travel sweet?

Via the re view mirror? Memento

On the road im inhabiting the role as drived I want to miss quote

The blog is an online space and creative slip roads

A space which asks when does the documentation become the artwork

Work seases to mean and the online space the blog allows for the reconfiguration of meaning

Absense and presense
Performance in a church

Mic stokes his head he must be thinking and talking not reading

Alains foot moved up and caught my eye, a lady in front coughs and holds a pen to her face

Red shoes like mine are in front of me in the audience? Audience or participators or conference delegeats?

This paper explores the space a on line space an observatory not a laborarorty like for Rhiannon


Ifound myseklf writing about writing


Private act publiuc… must remember that one when I speak about privaste scars being made public on my notes somewhere


Alain has his phone in his hands, my hands are being cauight typing right now as you read this as I type this … Rhiannon! Hee hee name caught

Memory are key things


The chip shop round the corner the betting shop

Introduces the piece and pointed out the health and safty signs

The drama group will be playing themselves and we were not there

I think there are 12 people to my left stage left and there are 12 to my right stage right

A perfect balanced audience I wonder what they are thinking right now as I am typing as they are listening to mic and we are viewing the church the presenation the lights the lecture hall I now pass the typing over mic is reading his end line the lovely quote I like

Rhiannon Jones

In 2006 I had a question – do remnants of history exist on the body – as an artist I wanted to explore this question – I started to think about an invisible space – I set up website which initially I could set up as a means to collate data

Local narratives – hidden stories – remnats of the past

New audience

Outside inside

Two very different roles to play

Scientist / artist

Asking them to recall their scar stories

Studied wound cells and talked to people about what they found out… the cells migrate towards and away from the wound

The cells are the pink things

The cells are currently trying to migrate – touch each other – heal the skin

The way that cells move on our body are the same way people move usiong technology

Cells leave wound sites the same way people leave blogs and websites

A sense of life and a sense of loss.

I started to ask people about scars

The project reached people who told me they didn’t do art

The scar triggered a dialogue whether it was an accident

Whether family and friends were involved

Whether it was a war

People were honest

I found thatr people started to enjoy themselves by preserving their stories

I’d never made a work that was so public before

This was out live 24 – 7 – people would send emails with spelling mistakes

I decided to leave it as it was because that’s how

I had people break down on me

Very therapeutic

Because people would start emailing each other about the website I had to add a Tell a friend section. Some poople put their scar but not their image. I didn’t decide I;m going to do a website. It grew as the skin cells were growing in the laboratory. Sound bytes.

Links. Blogs. I had a gallery where people could write comments and photos of people talking to each other. Somebody had just logged on. The website satt in many spaces. It became a gallery piece. Strangers would start to talk to each other and show them their scars. Items of clothes would come off and it was interesting to see how a website was bringing people together. Recording anecdotal eveidence and personal perspectives.

Self-centred?

Philosophical?

Pick the letter f let’s see if there’s a funny scar story there.

I would document then post on the webite

I stood at a party once and was asked what do I do. I said I’m a collector. I collect scars.

I get told about the scar’s creation. It was an intimate exchange and I become a carrier of a personal history. A memory is now. An archice online is a wa y of preserving a memort in the the present.

I see a scar it was uncovered for a moment. It’s raised and when I bend my arm you can’t get rid of the bloddy thing/
When you talk of scars you’re talking about something personal to somebody.

A group of people were talking about their scars and I saw ripples of discourse. I weatched people move like scar cells. They become carriers of the story. The movement of data is updated and shifted it moves sites it makes new links. It creates new feeds.

I’m going to show you some of the people.who emailed me.

Alain looks at the screen. Rhiannon tells me she needs a pee.

You might have questions. Maybe they can go on the blog.

Anything we can pool?

Yes – I’ve got this scar!

I do a lot of live blogging so I don’t live blog. I take copious notes. I didn’t do that. I know I’ll take some pictures. I took a picture with my pda. I’ll take some video. Then I thought I’ll get my mobile phone out and I sent a comment to your blog.

Then my phone kept ringing.
I lost my pen.

I did something unusal. I decided to listen. I stayed awake.

The need for technology was superceded by the community.

It was funny havint paper. The point I wanted to raise was there is a real unease about online spaces. Has anyone been asked to be removed.
We are starting to realise whatever we put on the web is published there is an implication

They are publishing it

It is starting to have some effect

How many people on your website are real?


I was really curious do you know who the first ones were to go to your blog. Setting it up in gallery spaces. IN the gallery situation Bologna posed naked in the door in the museum. Two of my7 students wanted to do the same. They wanted to pose themselves naked in two different doors. They wanted to see which door was most popular.

It happened organically. People hit on it. Online by mistake. Tell a friend function. Interacting with it through a tell a friend function. Were you elsewhere? Bringing something else into here? Anything else you brough back in it?

From the gallery sector. I wanted to offer a couple of parallels. Photo that I’m not allowed to take out of the gallery. Shows picture before, during and after restoration. Does it change your view of the work of art knowing that so many people had touched it. We cocommissioned an exhibition by Van Gogh – one of the pictures was decredited. Absolute apogee of artistic autership was now something else.

Is there a suggestion that with some of the technological there is a

Fact or fiction. Evil blogger in the mid-West. Encyclopedia Britannica whatever that is. Photography has made a very interesting journey already. Absolute integrity of the negative. Very earnest discussions about people like Capra. Infinite shades of grey.

Emerging things we did think of very problematically we think of the web.

Is it real. It’s about context.

I’m remoinded about a little story. Paul Trevor series of photographs of a television set. He wanted to have a show there. He didn’t think much of these images.

Gravity – that’s easy.

One of the things about living in this context is the flow of information. Book of images from the television screen. Interactivity. Opens things up in a much more interesting way. There is something about copyright. Capturing images is intellectual property. That;s his property. Etchical issues. What you put into a domain for other people to capture.

You personally capture some moment of time yourself. Because you’ve seen it. Making a selection. Making a book. I’m intrigued to be of the generation whre the word is on the page.

Maybe there not very good at text. Technology versue biology. Body language about the way they use their voice. Usiong text. If we were using voice we’d get back to people.

Let’s get something ready about memory. Archiving memory. How many memory stimuli are there that aren’t in words.

I wanted to say to you – just wanted to speak to you about the value of museums.

I don’t hunt back online. Maybe the museum is more present.

We are touching the iceberg. I’m pleased you were able to participate. Thank you.

Thank you for attending this session it’s certainly a different one for this conference.

Abstr@ct

Alain Ayers, Programme Leader, MA Visual Arts, Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design, UK (soon to be Postgraduate Programme Director, Camberwell College of Arts)

The use of reflective journals in hard copy sketchbook/notebooks written texts is blending and yielding with image and interactive communication networks of eLearning spaces. We are working with MA students to consider simultaneous sites of production and reflection. Art practice as a collaboration, enlivening the process of dialogue and co-production as a method of problemitising, creating realisation rather than conclusion.

Rhiannon Jones, MA Graduate 2006, MA Visual Arts – progression to PhD, Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design, U.K

Archived Actualities is an online installation. It is an internationally driven project drawing upon biomedical research in conjunction with personal participation documenting personal accounts of scarification. The installation transcends across many spaces/sites locating itself in multiple spaces. Its materiality exists beyond the limits of the gallery space. Materiality of the page has shifted into a new paradigm. The question is no longer what you write but where you pose it.

Michael Pinchbeck, MA Graduate 2006, MA Visual Arts – progression to PhD, Nottingham Trent University, School of Art and Design, UK

I devised a performance with an Amateur Dramatics group in a church hall. The performance explored the acts of communion that take place there, weddings, funerals, christenings and plays. At the time, the blog was the solution to the problem of making visible the process. Now after the event, it becomes a posthumous record of a live performance, made more poignant by the fact that one of the members of the drama group passed away yesterday. Documentation of something or someone that was once present.