London

Praxi-to-taxi: An Improvisation

Armin Medosch — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:33:28 +0200

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.

After an introduction by Adnan and me, the morning started with Jaromil prsenting the concept of solid knowledge. Describing himself as "a student for life but not subscribed to any institution" he formulated a challenge to teachers of any kind: If I learn something today, will it be useful in 20 years? Jaromil related this question to the area of software, where economic pressure drives people into dead end streets, rather than using proven tools which have been around in basic form for 40 years.

After he spoke some participants felt uneasy with the notion of 'solid' knowledge, maybe because in the digital age in which we allegedly live everything is supposed to be fluid. I thought maybe it is about knowledge which forms from the bottom-up, a type of knowledge which is connected to a skill or activity, through which an understanding of the world is gained. In the area of computing for instance I have not really learned much at all apart from two things, how to deal with problems and how to use searches and evaluate the information found. Everything else is maybe more ephemeral. Corrado added to this discussion with the keywords "sustainable, lean and robust" - as characteristics of programming languages or software. I think especially in computing some departments have used the same proven methods for years. Papers are written in Latex and reading notes are created and managed using BibTex, metadata are separated from content. However, such good practice is not found everywhere. All too often one is asked to submit a .doc, even when the topic is something open sourcy.

Lindsay Brown started out by saying that she feels that people who do practice based PhDs in fine arts are forced into directions more scientific, more commercial, whereby the university owns the copyright. She reacts to this by inventing her own tale, creating a sort of metanarration combining scientific facts and 'saucy' tales, saucy because she plans to study the wreck of the sunken ship HMS Saucy. Lindsay explained that she intended to rely on Grounded Theory, a concept which emerged in critical sociology in the 1960ies. Instead of tackling a subject through a set of existing categories, the categories emerge through the study of the subject. One of the participants from sociology pointed out that there was an existing critique of Grounded Theory, as it was impossible to have no preconceptions. I am sure we will hear more from Lindsay on this subject, who also said that she tries to weave visual ways of working into her work.

This discussion on grounded theory could be related to the discussion around hierarchical taxonomies such as those created in semantic web and the oh so popular free tagging systems used in social software applications, such as this one here. It also related to the philosophical discussion between absolut truth and total relativism, maybe. In this section I also noted down "can intuition be a methodology" and the "quagmire of opinion", both interesting phrases on which maybe someone can elaborate more.

Something else that came to my mind during this presentation is Jutta Weber's concept of situated ontology. In science studies, through the influence of poststructuralism, the universal ontologies have been dismissed. This is a good step insofar as this destroys the myth of science being about objective knowledge or laws of nature. However, the world is not just text read against other texts. Weber argues that the critique of science formulated by poststructuralism is unable to stop the juggernaut of science which is, in the 'natural' sciences still naively positivistic, mostly, from creating it's monstrosities. As a way of overcoming the shortfalls in Latour, Derrida, Luhmanm and all their apostles, Weber proposes her concept of situated ontology - an ontology nevertheless but grounded in the subject and connected to a historic reality and not timeless, universal and absolute truth.

During the lively discussion after Lindsay's presentation several voices were heard who complained about problems they encountered with their PhD. As universities try to craete additional revenue streams the notion of intellectual property seems to be widely accepted by university management. Students are encouraged to buy into IP and submit their work to professional journals which are copyrighted and whose copyright is strongly enforced. The reification of knowledge gets accepted with no further questions asked. Someone from Chelsea mentioned that only 25% of the thesis could be put online. Somebody else had experienced a ban on peer generated knowledge. This raises the question if in todays context collective epistemologies can exist -- which again raises the question of not any epistemology is collective to some degree. Other problems stemmed from a complete lack of knowledge by higher university grandes about anything digital so that one PhD candidate had to submit a definition of 'blog' to an ethics committee.

After an excellent lunch provided by a vegetarian caterer who picks his own mushrooms - very open source - Jonas Andersson talked briefly about a series of Print-on-Demand (POD) books he had created together with Adnan and published cia the OpenMute website. Last year Deptford.TV Diaries I came out, followed by a similra reader this year, which can be downloaded as a PDF, bought as a book via OpenMute or Amazon and read chapter by chapter here, with us. Lisa Haskel gave a technical presentation about combining Drupal with versioning systems such as Subversion. Mia Jankowitz talked about her experience with the Disclosures festival. What I found interesting and expected to have been researched more already but am disappointed not to see is the connection between the notion of openness as it is now adopted in the art world and the older notion of process based work which was once fashionable in the sixties and seventies which then again could be a useful link between concptual art and media art. A 'process based' art form is maybe also one which shares its methodologies and creates an 'open process'. Mia, during her work leading up to Disclosures, also encountered what she called a 'mismatch between professional organisation and the wiki way of doing things'.

Helen Sloan talked about curating as research, a notion which she has already briefly outlined here. A problem with some of those interdisciplinary collaborations between art and science which are increasingly forced on us through funding bodies such as the AHRC is that for artists it is hardly possible to maintain any level of autonomy at all. The scientists usually (maybe not always but in 99%) don't change their methodology or thinking at all. The artists can only comment on the science or, what is often expected from them, illustrate difficult to understand scientific concept - the artist as a cheap science communicator.

Lottie Child talked about her concept of street training, a way of dealing with urban spaces in a playful way and of reconquering space through behaviour. She also investigates how women navigate dangerous streets and how she deals herself with fear, by confronting it head on. Is London an 'open' city or can we open up the 'protocols' that govern behaviour in public spaces?

Peter Westenberg from Constant, Brussels, talked about the work of the group which researches ways of how open source changes their production in Graphics design, audio, video. he also mentioned the idea of having a searchable video wiki and talked about the work of the group about gender and technology. Can a server be 'feminist'?

Cel Crabeels briefly introduced his idea of 'documentary' and of using a system such as drupal to foster collaboration on art and documentary issues.

Alex McLean talked about live coding as a practice where development time and use time which are normally separated in software are folded into one. He also compared the notion of the programming language with being just a tool or a real language which has other implications.

Ismail Malik talked about his idea of howto give very talented young programmers a chance to get a university degree. In his experience young programmers are often reluctant to go to university as they already have established their practice and fear for their creativity being squashed. Some of them only years later recognise that it would be of aadvantage to them to study. Ismail also thought about the notion of the apprenticeship in this context. Could a 'free' academy combine open coursework such as provided by the MIT with an apprenticeship to get a degree?

Apologies if I have left out anyone, as my notetaking was a bit sporadic and often quite associative. We are looking still forward to other people giving their accounts and uploading images and, hopefully, the video.

workshop participants

admin — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:49:30 +0200

Image by Jonas Andersson

Subversion/Drupal distributed multisite project

lisa — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:09:27 +0200

(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
Make a designated server for subversion. Create a "master" drupal instance that is not actually used to publish anything, and from this create a subversion repository that will house the drupal "core" codebase, AND a seperate but related repository that can house the files specific to each drupal instance. Install each drupal instance that is to be maintained in this way via svn checkout on their own server, wherever it is. Lets call these drupal instances client instances.

When patches and upgrades come out, do these on the master instance and commit the changes to the repository to create a new revision. To upgrade each client instance simply run svn update on each server, possibly followed by running the drupal update.php script.

The Solution in more detail (NB. this is not a how-to yet ;)
We need to adhere to the conventions of drupal multisite installations to make this work nicely, even though the sites are most probably on different servers so this is not actually a multisite installation.

As we need to combine two code projects (the drupal core files and the files specific to each client instance) to create each instance, we make use of the svn:externals property. The master drupal files will be "external" to the domain specific files.

Basically, the drupal core repository will store all of the files, including the core modules EXCEPT anything under the sites/directory.

The sites/ directory is EXCLUDED from the drupal core repository, except for sites/all/modules, where we can keep modules that are NOT core but are used in pretty much every client.

To complete the picture we create seperate svn projects for each client instance. these projects will house the following files and directories:

sites/www.thisparticularone.com/settings.php sites/www.thisparticularone.com/files sites/www.thisparticularone.com/modules sites/www.thisparticularone.com/themes sites/www.thisparticularone.com/tmp

(where www.thisparticularone.com is the base url of each instance - this adheres to the convention of drupal multisite installations and drupal will look here for the files)

When we install a new drupal we do it like this:
(NB these commands currently untested as i've changed things a bit since last version)

#install drupal "core" svn checkout https://svn.southspace.org/subversion/drupal/thisparticularone/trunk/ .


#add the externals property

svn propedit svn:externals .
(which will launch an editor)

#add a line like this: . https://svn.southspace.org/subversion/drupal/master/trunk/

#get the new items from the external project, ie drupal mater svn update

(to update your drupal including core ie. master project files run)
svn update

an ordinary
svn commit
will NOT commit to the external files, ie. the drupal "master". this is what we want ;)

though should committ files in /sites/www.thisparticularone.com

this is the behavour we want.

What i've done already
Installed a xen virtual machine (debian etch) on mediaartprojects.org.uk specificaly for subversion and master instances
Made the repositories available via https
Apache access control only so far
Installed webSVN for viewing repositories (https)
Created master drupal repro, and some "test" projects
Done lots of tests with checking out, setting externals property updating etc using master and projects

refs:
Subversion Manual
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s04.html
http://drupal.org/node/53705
http://agaricdesign.com/note/agaric-wants-version-control-lets-drupal-co...

i'm not the only one working on this, by the way ;)

Subversion, a useful FOSS tool

lisa — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:03:02 +0200

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.

---

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.

Its a key tool for collaboration, allowing people to "checkout" a "working copy" of the shared files, modify, add and delete content and/or files on them wherever or however they wish, then "commit" them back to the "repository". If other people have been working on the same code the changes can be "merged" together, a process that would be part manual and part automated, depending on the extent of the changes.

subversion remembers every version that was ever committed, and can give you information about who submitted what revision, and even give you a line by line listing of who changed what when with the "blame" command. It uses the unix utility "diff" to generate information about the precise differences between one version and another, at the level of the file contents and/or the file system structure.

(note: terms in inverted commas are technical terms with specific meaning in subversion and indeed other version control systems )

Version control systems in general
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control_system
Subversion FAQ
http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html
Subversion Manual
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

Deptford.TV diaries II - Pirate Strategies

jonasandersson — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:10:39 +0200

Deptford.TV diaries II: Pirate Strategies

Click here for more info!

Deptford.TV is an audio-visual documentation of the urban change of Deptford (south-east London) in collaboration with SPC.org media lab, Bitnik.org, Boundless.coop, Liquid Culture and Goldsmiths College.

The unedited as well as edited media content is being made available on the Deptford.TV database and distributed over the Boundless.coop wireless network. The media is licensed through open content licenses such as Creative Commons and the GNU general public license.

This reader problematises the notion of 'tactical media'. As McKenzie Wark and others stated already in 2003: 'can tactical media anticipate, rather than be merely reactive?' By calling for a strategic approach to media production and distribution, the intention is to overcome some of the structural paradoxes inherent to 'alternative' or 'oppositional' media, especially since much of the free / open culture dissemination on the Internet has become the new "mainstream" in itself (think of the casual defiance of copyright played out relentlessly and on a mass scale with file-sharing, social networking, and everyday media consumption).

This book is a compilation of theoretical underpinnings, local narratives and written documentation not only of the local Deptford.TV project but of phenomena relating to this new situation of 'strategic media'.

Contributors: Adnan Hadzi, Jonas Andersson, Ben Gidley, Duncan Reekie, Brianne Selman, Neil Gordon-Orr, Alison Rooke, Gesche Wuerfel, the University of Openness, Jamie King, Armin Medosch, Rasmus Fleischer, andrea rota, Bitnik Mediengruppe, Sven Koenig, Jo Walsh, Rufus Pollock, Platoniq, The People Speak, Zoe Young, Mick Fuzz, Denis Jaromil Rojo, Lennaart van Oldenborgh

The Next Layer as a Medium for Practice-led Research

Armin Medosch — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:23:18 +0200

Taxi to Praxi
This text expands on some of the topics mentioned in the original call for participation for the taxi-to-praxi workshop. It explains some of the motivations and the general ideas behind the research day but is by now way a complete summary of all the topics we would like to address. Currently to this text have contributed Lindsay Brown, Adnan Hadzi and Armin Medosch. If you feel that you would like to add something, please feel free to rewrite this text or create a new one. To create a new revision, do the following: Once you are in the edit section with this article open, apply your changes and then go to the bottom and click "create new revision". You can also use the text field "Log Message" to explain your revisions.

The Next Layer

Academic or scholarly practice has always been a group as well as a singular activity. Discussion, dialogue, seminars, colloquium, meetings with one or more peers or supervisors, all shape the experience of the PhD research student. A collaborative culture underpins knowledge generation and the academic disciplines in general. thenextlayer.org has therefore been founded to create a platform to aid a more collaborative way of conducting research. Thus by a number of researchers documenting and annotating their research processes, gives rise to exciting prospects of information sharing, where overlapping interests can 'find' each other and benefit from the work of others without constituting theft, lack of ingenuity or even plagiarism, but simply by laterally noticing somebody else’s 'stream' of research.

A content management system (CMS) is a program used to create a framework for the content of a Web site. Based on the CMS Drupal with various modules (sections) contributed by others, the CMS allows the easy creation, maintenance and handling of a new type of multimedia research journal that can include text, images, audio, video, RSS feeds bibliographic references, bookmarks and taxonomies (key descriptions) used to annotate all those media. As Drupal allows the combination of content types, it can best be imagined as many-to-many relationships between different items that become 'nodes' in a database on which 'views' can be created aided by the existence of the taxonomical system. A combination of processes such as collaborative filtering and techniques known from social software sites, promise benefits for the individual as well as knowledge production in general. These benefits I call ‘lateral benefits’ as they are based on 'weak' types of collaboration. In short, the site is in the early stages of becoming a giant catalogue of files which have been put together by individual contributers. Each file is linked to a user and annotated or 'tagged' by various key words.

In addition to this, The Next Layer is increasingly optimised for handling all kinds of texts in a professional way and to support what we call 'real peer review'. This does not hold the contention that the papers in peer reviewed journals are not really read by the reviewers but simply that this has become a very formal system whose results are usually copyrighted. The real peer review which we hope to enable is not only concerned with the finished paper but starts much earlier and can concern the design of research processes, methodologies and taxonomies amongst other things. Everything can be subject to peer review if users have an interest in each others work and decide to write (respectful) criticism and comments. The software can never automate that but can support such processes by wiki-like functions such as creating versions or diffs, where only the last one is visible but previous versions are kept, enabling the posting of comments and forum discussions. While many things already work quite well, the site is in permanent transition. This growth and transition process itself is also one which is open to peer review, therefore opening the site building and function up to collective decision making.

Collaborative Culture and the Hacker Way

Collaboration had an influence on early computer and internet culture which originated from within academia and its culture of open sharing. This was the mindset which enabled the creation of the internet. Early hacker culture (working inside academia, for instance at MIT, cf. Levy 1984) and academic culture both shared values of an open access to means of learning and work and experimentation and making public the fruits of this work. Since the late 1960ies, this lead to the creation of ARPANET later renamed the Internet and services such as TCP/IP, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, listserv, Gopher and HTTP. All these applications in one or the other way support the sharing of knowledge and remote cooperation. The fact that they were created inside academia meant that they were released as open standards, many in the form of an RFC, a Request for Comment, published openly and accessibly. The existence of those open protocols and other pieces of software in the public domain allowed innovation to flourish on the edges, everybody who has the intellectual skills, a PC and an internet connection can develop applications for the internet.

The internet as a technology is highly distributed and decentralised. The character of software that exists on the basis of open standards allows innovation to happen in a decentralised way because no-one owns the internet¹. Since the early 1990ies this allowed a free and open source software revolution to happen. It's most well known achievements are amongst others the operating system Linux, the Apache webserver the Moziall/Firefox browser. Platforms such as http://sourceforge.net/ give evidence of the sometimes dazzling speed and breadth of innovation. Of course not all these projects are completely and utterly 'free'. Some are supported by academia, some by companies or Non-Governmental Organisations²

Apart from general progress in the computer science and networking through FOSS, there have also been particular movements on the intersections between art, activism, hacking culture and code, which are worth mentioning. These projects have been among the most inspirational, from the visual programming language of Pure Data to live CDs such as dynebolic, providing applications and platforms for audio, video and live streaming. An emerging next generation of artists working more or less exclusively with FOSS such as Bitnik, Constant and the scene around Piksel festival, has emphasised alliances between creative software developers (hackers) political activists and community arts that were already working in non-hierarchical ways. This is allowing the generation of new ideas which are now at the forefront of current socio-technical developments.

We still stand by the overall tendency of the initial formulation of the call:

"... other sectors of society have embraced the collaborative and participative characteristics of these technologies more strongly than the academic sector. Independent artists and creative free software developers have made more rapid advances than the more traditionally minded arts and humanities departments in academia."

The Structure of Academia: A Collaborative Answer for the Individual Researcher

Practice led PhD projects benefit from these collaborative developments. Examples of this are the PhDs of the hosts Armin Medosch and Adnan Hadzi, who are looking into FLOSS and participative art practice and the application of FLOSS methods to film-making respectively. For the reasons given, the claim can be upheld that the free and independent developers at the intersections of arts and computing have, for many institutions, created cutting edge concepts by going back to the roots of collaborative culture and lacing it with new ideals, methods, technologies and an open interdisciplinary approach that is non-hierarchical in nature.

More than looking at just concrete results it is maybe worth noting that a social transmission act has happened over the past decade. The ethical attitude behind these developments has spread far beyond the narrower geek and hacker cultures and has spawned free content movements such as Creative Commons, enabling what some commentators have constituted as a "collaborative turn". The sort of decentralising DIY hacker ethics reappears under different names and disguises. In today’s society a 'wikification' of the world has taken place. Knowledge production and information dissemination happens increasingly in decentralised as well as collaborative ways. The social software and Web 2.0 applications have led to a widespread usage of platforms which allow individuals to express themselves such as in flickr, YouTube and their many clones.³ Combined with peer to peer file-sharing (P2P) mechanisms, these developments mean that the internet has become like a gigantic multimedia library where everybody can study all the time providing new ways of exploiting collectivity in knowledge production and a new approach to intellectual property.

With this background in mind we can say that the universities are in danger of losing touch with this new cultural and ethical turn. This is ironic since at the time the internet was solely academia's creation, the roles have been somehow reversed. A neoliberal turn, marked by the Thatcher and Reagan government, and another "third way" type of continuation of their policies through the Clinton-Blair years, has led to a significant change to the arrangements within which knowledge production and learning happens in higher learning institutions. The introduction of tuition fees by a Labour Government and other changes, mean that university education has been under increasing economic pressures. Academic institutions are seeking to find ways of generating profit through outsourcing and collaboration with corporations and through a range of exploitations of intellectual property, from technological innovations to the 'enclosure' of research in protected proprietary journals which are often expensive.

Research has thus been squeezed into a narrower channel, where Arts and Humanities subjects are forced to comply with similar research frameworks and methodologies that support science⁴. This means that only specific types of study gain funding through Government Organisations such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council. These can be projects that have some financial gain as regards preservation for example, and consist in the use of archives within artistic practice and in the collection of different historical information, materials and media⁵. This development is leading to the proliferation of so-called internal markets which induce colleagues to behave as if they were working for competing organisations⁶.

In continental Europe, instead of opposing those developments, universities are restructuring themselves according to the US and UK model. The ‘Bologna Process’ as it is called, was an EU directive aimed at standardising education accross Europe. This has led to Modularisation, a sub division into internationally compatible teaching units. Along with assessing them quantitatively and qualitatively using a credit point system, it is all aimed at an ‘efficiency criteria’ that runs counter to art education aimed at individualisation and difference just as much as to the values of freedom and self-determination that this discipline conveys⁷. In turn Universities in Britain, clamber over each other in a bid to win high marks in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) , a Government funded competition that every four years, assesses the quality of research within institutions. This inevitably leads to competition, whereby one criteria of ‘quality’ is assessed by how many researchers pass successfully through the institution. Funding for individuals is thus affected. The student that is most likely to graduate quickly, is therefore the one that is most likely to gain funding from the institution.

These resulting pressures are being passed on to students who are encouraged to think about 'their' individual development and how they can use intellectual property for financial benefits. As the structure of the whole situation encourages students to be selfish, learning and open exchange is threatened by a culture of fear and anxieties. The dominant political line (not at our institutions, but on the government level) is one that fosters a climate where each one is for her or himself and is made to support an often intrinsic ideology of individual achievement. (A PhD has to give evidence of the original contribution of one person.) While in the natural sciences collaborations are possible, yet in a very structured way, in the arts and humanities group works are not really much heard of. In the end the individuals have to proof themselves as the Critical Practice group from Chelsea reported at the recent Disclosures conference. Thus, while many PhD research students in the arts and humanities collect research notes, draft papers, bookmarks and references, sketches, images, audio, video, they usually do so for themselves only.

We believe that this is not necessarily the best course of action. thenextlayer.org has been founded to create a platform for a more collaborative type of conducting research.

The taxi-to-praxi experimental research workshop invites people to join thenextlayer.org both online by becoming a user and in real space by joining the research day on 21st of April. To join online simply register an account, to announce your coming for the 21st please email

Adnan at a.hadzi (at) gold.ac.uk.

thenextlayer.org serves both as a platform to prepare taxi-to-praxi and will itself also be a topic at the workshop. Other goals remain to be discussed to make visible different practices, methodologies and communal taxonomy systems compatible to all.

cf some public writings by internet pioneer Vint Cerf on this point
Some software projects are completely "free" insofar they are only supported by the developers themselves. Pointing this out risks creating the misunderstanding that there is some sort of dogma that free software development has to be completely self supported. This is not the case, many projects exist in a mixed economy. Somebody may please add a reference that gives evidence to this claim (maybe something can be found on First Monday or some text by Stalder or someone.)
As a sort of side-thread which does not concern the flow of this argument, it could be investigated if this really constitutes empowerment or is a new form of exploitation
Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge, Busch, K., A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher, Antwerp, p.152, (2007)
Work, Projects and Art Education: Notes on Artistic Research, Von Bismark, B., A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher, Antwerp, p.152, (2007)
Ibid pg 131 See Charles Harrison’s commentary as part of: ‘Umfrage. No Guru No Method No Mater. Zur Methode und Zukunft der Lehre’. Text zur Kunst, 14 (2004), no: 53, p. 27
Ibid pg 131

developmental

admin — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:36:46 +0200

To be done (updated)

News, Bugs and Bugettes

minor bugettes

* the modules footnotes and biblio have been installed; the according tags are 'fn' and 'bib' but so far ~~I have not got the tags working yet.~~ The footnotes are working now, now you can use the fn tag to create numbered footnotes at the bottom of an article. You need to switch the 'Input format' to 'full html' to do so. The 'bib' tag probabloy also works, the biblio module as such has always been working, so you can enter bibliographic references into the text with the bib tag, which also go into a shared database. This rocks!

* The book module has been tried for the first time, it works, check it out
(left menu bar 'books' or create content books).

* the module blog api has been enabled. this makes it possible to use certain blogging tools to create research journal entries. I have not tried it, maybe acracia can tell us how it works.

* The links administration database works but this menu point weblinks is strange. It lists many catgeroies from taxonomy but does not shjow links which have been entered in those postings which belong to the categories. It shows only one link which I have entered under 'create content' --> weblinks. It would be nice to have under weblinks all the links on the site which anybody enters under the according categories.

Other news

Contributors have now rights for node management and input management; basically this means when adding a new research journal entry or other content type you have 2 new fields, one for 'input format' and one for 'publishing options'. the latter lets you decide if you want your contribution to be seen on the front page or not, published or not; 'input format' is very important; standard is 'limited html', but if you switch to 'full html' you can use basically all html tags; what is quite useful is for instance the img tag, you can now reference images how you like, they don't need to be physically on this site; the option 'php' is for experts only.

The diff module has now been installed. This will make visible the difference between versions of a document and should become very valuable when different people edit the same text.

A User Profile that makes sense

As I tried to formulate, conceptually, what i thought this site should become is to have on one hand a range of content streams -- in the manner of a multimedia online magazine -- and on the other hand an enhanced user profile which allows 'social software' type things to happen but in a really nice way which fits the needs of a research community.

I have created a few custom fields so far such as

Location
Messaging
Personal Information
Tagging
my newsletters"

but those are just a quickshot into the direction I would like things to see develop. Therefore I would like to collectively ask the question:

What would be useful to have in an enhanced and expanded / expandable user profile?

For instance I thought it might be useful to have on the profile page the delicius links, not just as one link but expanded. Also, quite an obvious ting to have would be a field for a cv and/or a short bio.

Another more important thing might be a field in the way of how we now have "what do you think about FLOSS" to put something about people's research interests so that people with matching interests could find together (I might do that in a quick and dirty way).

Has anybody more ideas in that direction?

The profile is a major issue to be tackled now. How to
really furnish that user profileso that it becomes a home, a hub, a launchpad, a point of reference where you manifest yourself, your work, your interests on your own terms as well as shared terms?

Categories, Taxonomy, Creating a Language

It has been mentioned by different people that it would be nice to 'create our own dictionary' (Lindsay) or to have a "shared taxonomy" (acracia). For me those 2 things are roughly the same. How can you invent a new language in drupal? through the taxonomx/category module. Yet this needs ot be done with sense and reason. As I understand it there are hierarchical categries where it is required to choose from drop down menues which is good for creating 'hard' content cateegories which makes it easy to display content according to categories. I have also added a field 'Topic' which allows free tagging. I have no idea what happens with those categories, in which way they could be made useful or how the two types could be made work together --> the rigid almost semantic web style hierarchic categories and fluid tagging without relationships of any logical kind.

Older Entries, some still valid

- as installed drupal offers only one author for a blog or any other entry. I tried to fix this by adding a new author field to some of the content types. but it still needs themeing using node.tpl.php to make this the main and only author field; the community on the support mailinglist was very helpful and gentle;

- headings and table of content: automatic generation of table of content from documents like in twiki

footnotes: TNL should have classical footnotes (more like comments, a second text stream, not like endnotes or bibliographic references); there should be an easy way to add foot notes when entering text; footnotes should also be searchable; in 'books' footnotes could be on third column on the right (right sidebar)

references: bibliographic references should be entered using one specific format, for instance Harvard referencing; each reference entered using the right format should then go into a shared references database; this reference data base should / could become an interesting share knowledge body of its own, linked to categories and also maybe names of researchers who entered them (you could then ask the researcher for more info on this or that book) the references should be part of a text AND part of a shared emergeing references database.

- index: if texts have indexes you should be able to browse contributions according to what appears in the index, like there would be a meta index of all indexes within which for example there is the name Adam Smith; you can then see all the texts that have something about Adam Smith

- image captions: there should be a way of entering text to appear as the caption of an image; within this text there could be different data fields relating to the image, so that thjis is actually like a more reader froiendly version of the image data base.

Navigation

a number of issues relating to the overall navigation and structural design of the site

- related texts: there should be a way of telling the system if there are other texts in the system you know of which relate to this text -- this should be in the right navigation bar (assuming that we keep the current design) it should be an easy way of doing this like just telling node numbers; (I have tried to solve this through adding the field 'node_reference', this goes into the right direction but is not perfect yet)

- more flexibility with content types which use sidebars differently
- generally more context depending design

Design

The site cries for more design work being done. In particular a new header section would be nice. Anyone bung mea logo please?

- most design of the overall site can be done with CSS and I start getting it how that works
- The top area offers itself foremost to be designed; rather than just a logo it needs to be the whole top area which gets a styleover (and of course it should still match with the rest)
- it needs a logo too, but maybe something visual which can be on the right hand side and same width as right sidebar width 48 height 55 pixels

Tha Clickster and The Beige New World

scavenger — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:37:09 +0200

We are not in London for the Frieze Art Fair as Rhizom suggests, we simply live here toiling away at the coal face of the culture industry. Our screens are colourful and our thoughts are dark. Therefore we would not dream of writing off the manipulated electronics of the Beige programming ensemble or the kinetic graphic work of the group Paper Rad as interesting but merely stylish nostalgia ¹ and neither would we doubt that over the last 10 or so years, both ensembles have made a remarkably substantive and genre-shaping contribution to electronic media-inspired art. No, we simply love that stuff, we need it. Tha Click is our kick. We are tired, we feel lousy but still we manage to drag ourselves out on a Friday night to E:vent Gallery to receive a well formed shower of pixels.

Image by the Paper Rad Collective.

Here we meet our peer group in numbers and together we are seizing upon the technological detritus spawned by advancements in computing over the last three decades, well aware of but not shocked by Beige’s inclination to tinker with the inner workings of ubiquitous platforms past and present. Just like Paper Rad we are similarly drawn to the gaudiest fixtures of pop culture, yet it remains to be seen if we are capable of transmogrifying and amplifying them into a kaleidoscopic parallel universe all of our own, as the press release of e:vent gallery suggests.

The next day we have still enough pixel in our bloodstream to make it to Max Wigram Gallery which presents more of Cory Arcangel's creative hacking There, in this newly opened branch in a warehouse on Ridley Road market of posh upmarket Max Wigram whose other branch is on Bond Street, we are slightly concerned about the gentrification issues regarding such a gallery opening here but this lasts only a few seconds and then we feel at ease with the way Arcangel's work represents a shift in how artists and consumers alike are interacting with the world around them, innit?

Though this is not to say Arcangel has a utopian view of technology, but rather, quite the opposite. At the table with information materials at the entrance the artist declares that this is a show about how artists are powerless in the face of technologies. It irks him that according to him all we are getting with a computer is a piece of plastic with a built in aesthetic that is obsolete before it's out of the box. Now are these the words of someone admitting failure quite honestly and is this a point which should be taken up by other pixel artists who have not yet come round to admitting that to themselves? And isn't flirtation with pop art cynicism itself a concept that looks a bit jaded? Is Cory selling the aesthetics of the hacker and demo scene to the gallery audience or is he creatively hacking the art circuit? Unfortunately Max Wigram does not have many further materials online from which we could quote and with this web presence we can only advise a name change to Max Viagra, maybe, which would certainly get the webpage some more hits.

Do Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstrations printed with the most advanced printing technologies rock your world or just cry 'sell out'? Does Permanent Vacation, the centrepiece of the exhibition, [...] a new multi-channel work featuring two large-scale projections of computers running Microsoft Outlook in an unending exchange of 'out of office replies," recall the sublime grandeur of Andy Warhol's Empire State Building or is it just a boring reference to the stupidity of MS Outlook users? Are two video loops from Guns 'n Roses set against each other phasing in and out of synch an affirmation of the rock culture influence on current computer art? Just at the point when such questions might have cast unnecessary clouds over my forehead the artist presented us with a CD which contains Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run album yet with some Glockenspiel added so that when ripped and file-shared the code base of Springsteen files online gets polluted with the artist's code and we recognize good old mischief and congratulate that the computer has not yet beaten the artist.

This was the first column of The Scavenger who scavenges the world for dead bits of irony provided for free;-)

(Rhizom article)

Food for Thought: Greek Lentil and Olive Oil Soup

doll_yoko — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 20:08:00 +0200

Background to the meal: A soup I am cooking tonight for Furtherfield mob. It's a soft exchange for being their house guest in their flat in Haringey, London--and for FF allowing me to interview them for my PhD research.

Furtherfield are a core of 2 - Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett - who for the past 10 or 11 years have established and nurtured networked art and cultural experimentation - via online and offline playful participatory structures.

Some of their projects are documented here:

http://furtherfield.org

Original recipe source: my Greek friend in Adelaide, Niki V.

Ingredients:
Brown lentils (1 or 2 cups), washed
Some onions, chopped
Some cloves of garlic, chopped roughly
oregano and bay leaf or 2
a stalk or 2 of celery (chopped or whole)
a carrot of 2 (chopped or quartered)
1 or 2 cups of olive oil
feta cheese (I prefer Bulgarian)

Program:
Throw all elements (except feta) in deep saucepan, cover with water, and then more water.
Cook for an hour or so.
If you have broccoli or spinach you can throw some in at the end.
Also you can add a bit of tomato paste if you like.

Serve with bread and a bowl of feta cheese, People can add their own cheese to their bowls of soup. You can present the feta by sprinkling it with oregano, and covering with a bit of olive oil.

This soup is tasty the next day, served with basmati or persian rice. It is good to freeze, and thaw/eat in those times when you are being crushed by deadlines and can't be bothered shopping and cooking.

User-Designed Software

lisa — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 14:04:17 +0200

I've been interested in the idea of user-designed software for some time, and what I've seen recently of drupal sharpens the question a bit, and maybe brings it into reality.

Actually, I consider myself to be a user who, though necessity and personal interest, can write just enough code to satisfy my personal requirements for tools.

I finally learned to write code just before my 40th year. I enjoy the process of designing and writing programs a lot. I enjoy breaking down the tasks and the concentration involved in coding. But most of all its just great to decide I want or need something and then to write it myself.

I wrote a web application a few years ago, for my MSc project, that was to help people organise workshops and events. Why? Because I had many years of experience of the task, I could break it down into little pieces, I felt I knew all of its necessities and that building them into an application would be a way to distribute my experience to others.

So: what i am interested in is this possibility of being able to create an application without writing code. Users are experts in their own areas, and it seems to me that the advanced use of a system like drupal does allow people to bring their experiences to building an online system.

Armin, for instance, has many years of writing and publishing; he understands the issues and the processes, and the gaps and shortcomings of the various platforms he has already worked on. If I understand right, The Next Layer is his first chance to really shape a platform to be what he wants.

So: never mind user-contributed content, what about user-designed platforms?

For sure the learning curve with advanced modules like "cck" and "views" is big, and you have to sort of love the detailed mindset and absorbing technical information but nevertheless I think its exciting stuff. Or will it just lead to even more big messes out there ;)

Any comments?