[-empyre-] Furtherfield: people and communities

[Ruth Catlow]

Hi Folks,

Thanks Simon for the introduction and the invitation to talk about
Furtherfield. 

So here goes, casting my raft onto the white-water rapids of last week's
discussion; )

We have been asked to discuss how creativity can enable people and
communities through the examples of our own practices and activities. I
am  really chuffed to be invited to talk about Furtherfield and will
start with a disclaimer. Furtherfield is made up of many different
people and voices so I should make it clear that I am speaking from my
own perspective. Others have different experiences. 

In our work with Furtherfield we believe that people are inspired and
enabled to become active co-creators of their cultures and societies
through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and
technology. This connects very strongly to the ideas of agency that were
under discussion last week. 

Marc Garrett and myself started Furtherfield 1996-7 and since then we
have been working  with a community of artists, programmers, writers,
curators and hackers (mixing up experts and beginners) from around the
world. Together with this community we have developed a neighbourhood of
platforms (online and offline) for creating, viewing, discussing and
learning about practices at the intersections of art, technology and
social change. Our approach has always reflected the DIY
ethos that came from Marc's earlier work, social hacking with pirate
radio, bulletin boards (BBS) and both of our work using the streets as a
site for artistic intervention.

I would like to start by pointing to a number of artistic projects.
First with a couple of online platforms and then in a couple of days I
will highlight a number of gallery, publishing and community-based
projects.
        
In addition to www.furtherfield.org which features reviews, artists'
projects, interviews and articles, we run the Netbehaviour email list
www.netbehaviour.org for sharing and actively evolving critical
approaches, methods and ideas around contemporary networked media arts
practice. Although our list is much less structured and more informal
than Empyre it does generate rigorous debate; people post the things
that inform their thinking and artmaking, they exchange and comment on
their work and it is often used as a platform for collaborative work.

Most notably the list has hosted two iterations of DIWO (Do It With
Others) E- Mail art projects which combine email exchanges (and
therefore highspeed collaboration-with people and machines) with the
traditional snailmail correspondence of Mail Art projects
http://www.tinyurl.com/34so3kg ; the Ada Lovelace Day which gathered
together a list of inspiring women working with art and technology
http://www.furtherfield.org/ada_lovelace.php and catching my attention
at the moment is Karen Blissett, a long running contributor who has just
gone multiple by sharing her email password with people she trusts
inviting them to speak and act as her http://tinyurl.com/395fyna . The
people who contribute to this list are really fascinated by critical art
that is enabled and inspired by digital networks. 

Secondly I'd like to point you towards VisitorsStudio,
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/x.html a platform for browser-based
realtime collaborative audiovisual remix. Neil Jenkins (another core
member of the team) created it with us in 2003 as a place where people
could get their hands dirty and learn how to mix and remix media in a
social space. It uses perl and server sockets to create the realtime
interaction with a flash interface (we are working towards a FOSS
alternative).
Rather than trying to describe it I recommend that people who are
interested log in and play.

This platform is used both playfully and purposefully. The Furthernoise
crew http://furthernoise.org ran a whole series of internet radio
programmes called 'Radio You Can Watch' that featured noise explorations
accompanied by live mixes in VisitorsStudio with invited artists. It has
also been used to develop collaborative art-polemic in performance
marathons like DissensionConvention. Live mix performances can
accommodate online heckling and be screened in public spaces to provoke
discussion and general rowdiness.
http://www.furtherfield.org/dissensionconvention/

A bit later in the week I would like to talk about how we have worked to
engage different audiences at HTTP Gallery http://http.uk.net.

I will also introduce an ongoing project, that addresses art, technology
and the environment, Zero Dollar Laptop that we are developing in
partnership with Access Space as part of our Media Art Ecologies
programme. http://www.furtherfield.org/zerodollarlaptop/

Look forward to making connections with conversations that have gone
before. Also to reading about the work that Magnus is involved in.

cheers
Ruth