[-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology

[magnus lawrie]

Hi Ruth,

Thanks for this. Your email touches on quite a few things that I
think are important. Let me try to respond:

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 01:53:40AM +0100, Ruth Catlow wrote:
> 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. 

Ah yes, I was aware of such places during time spent in Germany, when
I also, shall I say, 'toured' such spaces as CBase
(http://www.c-base.org/) ...somehow I was always crossing over into
these kind of cultures, but until I got active with ChIT I wasn't too
conscious of this. It seems to me there was some special coming
together of individuals that allowed me to build on all my previous
experience at that time. As a consequence I attended things such as
FreeBitFlows (http://freebitflows.t0.or.at/) and (perhaps somewhat
ludicrously) stumbled into other conferences and workcamps, without
knowing exactly what my purpose was (e.g.
http://third.oekonux-conference.org/,
http://www.freifunknet.dk/djurslandsnet.htm). But this seemed to be
more or less ok with the people. People were very accepting and I
observed and learnt a lot about different ways of organizing, of
hacking structures, during this time. This came further into focus
recently as I read essays collected in Geert Lovink's 'My First
Recession', which includes analysis of Nettime and Oekonux in the
context of a European 'digital culture' that I begin to recognize. I'm
quite interested in the comparison between 'benevolent dictatorship'
present in Oekonux and the less maintained Nettime.
> 
> 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. 

Yes, this was sometimes controversial at The Chateau: whether we were
a community at all or just "...different folk sharing different spaces
at different times, for example" ;)

I personally felt strongly influenced by the time spent in The
Chateau, a building I often perceived as more a body on the point
of death (or execution), complete with bare wiring and windows that
were bent or broken inwards; in a sense the architecture/structure had
a great effect on the identity of ChIT - this is a framework that we
weren't independent of and it's condition seemed to make maintaining
the computer network all the more labour intensive; I know others in
hacklabs have remarked on the unreasonable overhead of maintaining
just a few machines in ad-hoc situations. But that's only one take on
being the medium, the network. You mention also compost and that
really touches a chord with me. There is a often a flourishing of
identity and shared purpose that comes out of such conditions...the
phrase 'network ecologies' has become commonly used, right?
> 
> 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. 

I think we had a sense of this in ChIT, mostly by the kind of
associations that we sought out or came our way. My own conception of
these interactions was certainly not as resolved as in your image, but
I do recognize those component parts.
> 
> 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.

Yes, I am coming to realize this. At the time we ran the ChIT machines
I was always very aware of doing something outside the main flow of
activity. Initially I wasn't sure that we weren't just supporting the
work of the real artists and I remember, after I made a sculpture one
time a colleague congratulated me on making work again.
> 
> 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
> 
I agree, hierarchies may emerge, status may be conferred (by
consensus) and neither must be assumed.

> 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.

That's important too and I'll write about this in a further email.

Very best wishes,

Magnus