The exhibition Waves has been opened on Friday 9th of May. Some first press coverage from:

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

please follow this link for the video documentation of the first next layer conference, april 08

http://www.archive.org/details/the-next-layer-april-08

Notes from the last hour of the afternoon session.

We have been reviewed by neural it
http://www.neural.it/art/2008/04/street_radio_oral_tradition_di.phtml

I particularly like the last part of the article where it says:

"The Street Radio project can then be interpreted as the nth disproof of the short-sighted forecast stating that oral tradition would have been wiped out by the computer society. Today we can notice an emergent new form of orality that should be defined as a "tertiary", in the School of Toronto tradition, that taught us to consider the electronic-era orality as a secondary one."

The experimental workshop day taxi-to-praxi at Goldsmiths started off with a positive vibe as about 35 people met in the seminar room underneath the 'squiggle' whereby this group consisted of about one third of people from Goldmiths, one third from other universities and one third of unaligned individuals working as artists or curators. After Prof Janis Jeffries, convenor of the PhD in Arts and Computation opened the session, a lively and stimulating day unfolded. In this account I try to piece together from notes and memories what were some of the main issues which emerged.

Its been a very interesting day, maybe a little bit to 'techie' for me, but on the other hand very worth while due to the diversity of viewpoints in the individual presentations and talks. The Next Layer, so it seems to me, is a fantastic tool for a lot of things, social networking, exchange, artistic collaboration, dissemination of knowledge, politics, archiving and documenting... I subscribe to Lidsay’s conclusion in her recent post ‘Danger: Lest Taxi to Praxi be Forgotten’ The major theme is one of ownership and dissemination of knowledge.

Curating can be a form of practice led research and this is perhaps the most interesting approach. Having developed my own practice as a curator through the 1990s using ‘new media’, it has by necessity been a process of learning about technology through my practice and what it can do to enhance the presentation of content; in some cases of course the technology is the content in its own right. Learning on the job during the 1990s was the only way to develop given that artists were also experimenting with new forms and with it new ideas.

Novel Methodologies for Developing Medical and Scientific Animated Narrative

Joseph William Brock

Abstract

John Barker is both a novelist and an author of non-fiction essays about political, social and cultural issues. Barker's essays, published in magazines such as Variant or Mute Magazine, bristle with historic depth and accuracy of information, woven into critical narrations written in a dense prose. This evident richness of background research is maybe a result of Barker being inspired by the research methodology of a great of the 20th century, C.W.Mills. In this guest contribution, written specifically for thenextlayer.org and the taxi-to-praxi workshop, John Barker introduces us to Mills' concept of intellectual craftsmanship.

(please excuse the note form of this article)

Background
I am involved in a number of drupal projects, both new and legacy, some as paid projects, some volunteer.
I am involved or want to help with the maintainence of the code base (security patching, upgrades etc). However not all of the projects are on my own server. And as I am not a hosting company that is how things should be.
However, patching and upgrading is a pain, especially over many sites. How could this be managed efficiently and cooperatively?

The Solution in general

I have had to use subversion recently for a job, which is great as i've been meaning to start using it for ages! Here is an intro to subversion, and following a suggestion of how it could help next layer and related projects in a very practical way.

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Subversion is a "versioning system" that is used most often by coders and documentors to store text files, but can actually be used for any kind of data.

The Copenhagen Free University (CFU), together with other "self-institutions" such as the Universite Tangente http://utangente.free.fr/ in Paris and the University of Openness, London, successfully promoted the notion of the need to create ones own institutions and hijack the meaning of the established institutions. The free university exists outside the hierarchical and commercialised model into which Europe's universities have been turned. The CFU promoted a more egalitarian system where everybody could use the tag 'university' to their own ends. The CFU ceased its activities by the end of 2007 and in connection with the abolition of the institution its founders, Henriette Heise & Jakob Jakobsen have written the following statement: