[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[Ruth Catlow]

Hi Magnus,

There are many parts of your descriptions of the way people came to work
together at ChIT and Chateau and the other places you mentioned that
feel very familiar. They remind me of Backspace, an early London
cybercafe (1996-99 http://www.bak.spc.org/ )where we hung out and put
our first webpages online; a disorientating space that combined
apparently ad-hoc activity, gatherings, open resources and anarchic
imagination to provide inspiration and great compost for a whole load of
people to come together and then go and find out what they could do to
hack around given structures. 

The sense of collective action at Furtherfield is probably most
pronounced in particular projects for particular contexts but it also
arises through our everyday processes. We approach all of this as
artists. We don't take network topologies as models or frameworks for
action but as materials and contexts for artistic intervention. We share
common motivations with lots of other people in our communities; these
might include experimentation with different ways of organising, making
decisions, sharing ideas and hacking around and into the idea of
individual genius. 

Examples include the series of co-curation projects such as DIWO at HTTP
Gallery (which I linked to in an earlier post) and our involvement in
the early NODE.London Season of Media Arts in 2006 http://nodel.org/ The
name, which stands for Networked Open Distributed Events in London,
indicates the open, lateral structure adopted to develop the project.
Through a series of events, exhibitions, conferences and projects,
NODE.London offered a context to identify shared purposes, philosophies,
resources (such as licenses and tools for knowledge sharing) and common
vocabularies between the media arts and media activist communities. 

I made this image a while back to represent the intersection of
artistic, activist and engineering cultures that NODE.London brought
together http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/node2s and to better understand the
perpetual series of controversies that we found ourselves engaged in. We
are not so closely involved these days but the third season of
NODE.London is due to kick off in September and is looking good. 

Where there is coherence in our work, this probably comes out of the
process of sustained everyday interaction between the people involved
and the ideas and contexts we share with each other. In addition to the
network of other contemporary organisations and individuals online and
offline there are also definitely some shared some common artistic roots
in Situationism, Fluxus, communication arts, system arts and work that
sits on the edge of art. 

We do have to be pretty organised to survive and sustain infrastructure.
We have a small core team of people managing this stuff and then
overlapping circles of people involved in making different aspects work.
Marc discussed how this all works as part of an interview series called
Interviewing the Crisis, by Art is Open Source...

“I am part of a larger context called Furtherfield, which is a
collaboration. This means that myself and others explore together and
share our imaginations, respecting each others’ voices and contributions
and skills accordingly. Each of us engage in pushing our interests and
passions within the loose framework of Furtherfield as a progressive
media art organisation. The way we work with each other reflects how we
feel about the world we live in, and how we want to change it. As a
group, we all agree that it is important to allow room for productive
and contemporary social values, this influences the way we work with
each other, and others. The way we function as an organisation does not
always fit well with more traditional institutions who are more used to
working in systems of hierarchy. However these days we seem to find more
like-minded individuals working in these environments who want to make
something decent happen. We do not respect hierarchy in itself, we
perceive ourselves to be working in a flexible heterarchy at
Furtherfield. Our respect and relation to each other is based on our
skills, ideas, shared values contributing to a larger set of adaptive
visions.” - Marc Garret - http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/?p=27

Having said ALL that, perhaps I could also have described Furtherfield
as "...different folk sharing different ideas in different ways in
different places, for example"; )

One of the things I'm interested to know about ChIT and Chateau is how
they connected with impacted on the local people and spaces at the time.
Also your ideas about what the longer term impact of these places has
been on the people who were involved.

Respect and best wishes,

Ruth

-- 
Ruth Catlow
Co-Director 

Furtherfield.org - for art, technology and social change

Furtherfield.org http://furtherfield.org
HTTP Gallery http://http.uk.net

Unit A2 Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1NY
T +44(0)208 802 2827
M +44(0)77 3700 2879