Conference

WHO'S AFRAID OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH?

Lindsay — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:02:35 +0200

WHO IS AFRAID OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH?

Thursday 22nd May 2008 10am - 4.30pm
Dundee Contemporary Arts Seminar room

One-day symposium about the epistemology and context of practice-based research

Compared with the established epistemologies of the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, the discourse surrounding practice-based research in art and design is relatively young and includes a range of diverse approaches. What practice-based research is or is not, is highly controversial. Does it mean that the researcher investigates his/her own (visual) practice, or rather, that visual practice is a means of investigation? Other questions arise in the context of 'normal science' and the knowledge economy: what are the goals of such research?, and what is the desired outcome? What are the connecting lines between art and science, between practice and theory?
And last but not least: why would an artist want to do 'research'?

Practice-based research can be understood as a process, evolving from and changing through the practice undertaken by the individual researcher. The challenge here is that research (still) can be undertaken in releative freedom. Entering the arena of ongoing discussion, negotiation and re-adjustment, and engaging in the discourse about methodology essentially contributes to constituting this freedom.

Speakers:
Laurence Rassel, artist/curator (constantvzw.org, Brussels) Simon Sheikh, curator/critic (Copenhagen, Malmö Art Academy) Dr. Dieter Lesage, philosopher (Berlin/ Erasmushogeschool Brussel) Prof. Nigel Johnson, artist/researcher (Dundee University)
Chair: Dr. Ken Neil, artist/researcher (Glasgow School of Art)

Screening:
A portrait of the artist as a worker (rmx.), Ina Wudtke, Berlin

Organised by: Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Sollfrank

For detailed information about the programme and the speakers, please visit the Visual Research Centre website at the address below.

The event is free, but advance booking is required: 01382-909900

Dundee Contemporary Arts · Nethergate 152 · Dundee DD1 4DX

Taxi-to-Praxi: Notes by Maria X

mariax — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:17:53 +0200

Notes from the last hour of the afternoon session.

Helen SCAN

curating as practice-led research

open source: working in groups (vs. working as individual)

develop software for performance artists – system develops its signature as it works with artists

notion of ownership and creator still very alive

develop software tools

develop observations in terms of how people interface

LOTTIE CHILD – Street Training

Dean of the Open University

Lottie's practice aking people into the city of London to find out how they interact with buildings, social/physical context and structures.

Producing space by behaviour, risk-taking.

About developing techniques to customise environment, amuse oneself, and stop oneself from going mad...

Kings Cross: asking people questions – how to behave on the street to be safe / how to behave to be joyful

Need to use non-proprietary online tools, avoid branding.

Again definition of open source as collaboration, (Armin: opening up space, protocols for using public space)

PETER FROM CONSTANT, BRUSSELS

interdisciplinary collective of five

fruitful interaction between disciplines

video, collaborative work

working with open source tools from a feminist and participatory perspective

working is social contexts such as neighbourhoods

participants generate content e.g. Electronic shoes with hidden cameras

monopoly of service providers – how to subvert this

as video maker only works with open source tools to reinvent own practice and also share knowledge e.g. Workshop on cinellera
re tools: 'cinelera', 'kino' video editor, activearchives: sandbox media annotation

courses for getting women involved in open source coding: is it possible to make a feminist server and what does that mean?

CEL artist from Antwerb, Belgium, doing PhD

practice evolving from installation and gallery work to documentary work /work using documentary strategies

what does this mean in terms of collaborative ideas

setting up group of peer artists with similar interests and research on common research areas

looking at nextlayer as a tool /possibility that can be implemented in the research

this as an alternative way of 'writing a thesis' and disseminating work throughout

Questions raised: who gets the PhD, issues of authorship, who produces 'original contribution to knowledge'

ALEX MCLEAN – Live Coding

language vs. tools – Alex suggests that when people talk about making tools they're mostly talking about making languages – about adding to a system of meaning rather than making a tool to do ur own work

development time vs. user time: commercial software, developers make new versions of software, users have their own timelines. In live coding there is no distinction between these two timelines, you develop the software to use it, while it's running. Synchronous

conversation vs. design: no design process, Alex in conversation with his computer. Improvising with software.

__ Np difference between practice and research.

Performs music with friends in band called slub. People dance to software=programme creative activity.

In performance people can see the code: openness.

ISMAIL MALIK – Tower Hamlets

Working with undergraduates to create apprenticeships. He suggests following model (from Mechanics Institute, Birkbeck). Very difficult to set up an academy in the UK, too many rules and requirements. Combine models of open education, wiki universities etc. Student able to take course by implementng activity s/he interested in and gain the degree as a by-product. Issue that a major institution can crash someone's personality.

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.

Knowledge Transfer Conference Scotland

Lindsay — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:57:45 +0200

Knowledge Transfer Conference Scotland
St Andrews University
Friday the 4th April 2008

Part One

Knowledge Transfer (KT) involves the two-way flow of ideas, skills and people between the research and higher education community and wider users in Society in the public and private sectors.

As a researcher at Dundee University I was able to attend this conference, which was (surprisingly) free for all Scottish University staff and researchers to attend. I had not anticipated, perhaps naively so on my part, to be in the utmost minority as an arts researcher. To my luck, I was joined by another researcher from the same university and of the same level (year two), although this student was studying as part of a funded project in Molecular Biology.

Our concerns were similar in respect to our supervisory guidance, the pressures of timescale and our aspirations for the future which both included KT in respects of education and teaching. Our differences only became apparent however when commercialism of the University came up in our conversation. My concerns were with the individual researcher and how a University can expect excellence if accruing finance is its only motivation. Being part of a science department that was a ‘stem subject’, she had commercial thinking intrinsically woven into her mindset, one pressure of which was the need to produce a certain number of papers to assure the statistics of positive production. Not so ironically, the introduction to the first talk of the day came under the banner of Research and Commercialism.

The first three talks were a broad introduction to the policies governing research in Scottish Universities. The speakers included Roger McLure the Chief Executive of the Scottish Funding Council, Prof. David Ganni the Director of Research for the Scottish Funding Council and Prof. Ian Sanderson Director of Corporate Analytical Services Directorate, from the Scottish Government. The talks at the outset were science heavy, the only mention of arts and humanities came in the form of a model of how the structure of research was split up ie. Social, Cultural and Commercial. The main crux of the talks were how Scotland could successfully translate Intellectual Property into other assets. The Scottish Government had allocated 1.7 billion to the Higher Education system which also included the college sector (to the dismay of some of the delegates). A whopping 23 million however, had been set aside for knowledge transfer.

At this point I started to wonder exactly what KT was in this commercialised notion of education. As a community arts worker KT happens naturally as part of my job. A translation occurs between my knowledge and how I pass that onto the young people or patients/residents that I work with and vice-versa. In my artistic life, audience in some form is intrinsically part of my practice that in turn informs future research; therefore KT occurs without question. In the commercial world of science and industry however, there has to be this explainable intermediary that is fundamentally accountable to the accounts, the KT coming in the form of patents and ‘interdisciplinary’ arrangements between science, engineers, universities and industry. KT in this sense then, is just another measurable asset that can justify the 23 million that is speculatively offered by the government. One way forward that was suggested in the solution to KT was the suggestion of the development of ‘effective structured networks’, something that I felt has already happened within the arts, humanities and community education sectors of institutions.

The Scottish Psyche was then quoted as having lack of ambition, the ethos of attaining excellence espoused by the ambassadors giving the talks directly in contradiction to this. The obvious route therefore was for universities to be encouraged to seek the best. To help attain this, the Scottish Executive had put aside 2.5 million for PG grant support. It was not stated in which sectors of the universities this support was given, but it was stated that this was for two students of excellence per university in Scotland. Even though Scotland’s alleged current psyche was held up as reason to push for excellence by obtaining research students useful to the economy, it was still apparent that the notion of a learned society was being touted by the resting of laurels on the Scottish Enlightenment of the 1700’s. This raised questions on the value of our education system, and how history and philosophical thought was being aligned with modern economics, an economics that ironically did not appear to take into consideration the equal supporting of the humanities in education.

At the end of the first session then, my concerns were with the future, and how far KT would start to be measured commercially. My thoughts were with basic education, hospitals and schools, and the one to one input that is sometimes necessary for the quality of life of certain individuals. This cannot be measured commercially. Does innovation always equal commercialisation and if so, where does artistic research fit into the overall business ethos of the university? The last question of the session came from a gentleman involved in the Biological Sciences, and was ‘If you espouse excellence, what concessions regarding support have you made for individual students in the research community?’. The answer was ‘Good question, we are not sure if we should put a policy into place for that, but maybe we should.’

As the fate of the individual student is now in the hands of the commercialised university, that is exactly the question that I wanted to ask.

How to Get Rich

Lindsay — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:25:54 +0200

This is the parting advice from Prof. David Miller after his talk at the Knowledge Transfer Conference held at St Andrews University on the 4th April 2008.

'David is W.M. Keek Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at the University of Stanford. He also serves as the Director of the E. L. Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford (1997-2006). Currently David is Co-Director of the Stanford Photonics Research Centre which builds strategic partnerships between the Stanford University research community and companies employing optics and photonics in their commercial activities.' KT Conference

This talk was part of parallel discussion group session C, 'University Research Commercialism - What can Scotland learn from the US?'

Knowledge Transfer Conference

Lindsay — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 13:52:19 +0100

Knowledge Transfer Scotland: Policy and Practice 2008 aims to address research-KT
questions by bringing together early stage researchers, academic staff,
university managers, research and enterprise experts, outreach
specialists, funding bodies and policy makers for a unique, one-day
conference at the University of St Andrews on Friday 4th April 2008.

Programme includes experts speakers from across the Art-Science,
innovation-outreach spectrum of KT and all of the key organisations
involved with developing KT policies and strategies in Scotland (e.g.
Scottish Government, Scottish Funding Council, Scottish Enterprise and
RCUK).

The event is free to Scottish PhD students, academic staff, research fellows and KT practitioners. Registration closes on the 18th March, 2008.

Gilberto Gil and Pontos de Cultura - teia 8

admin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:00:27 +0100

Gilberto Gil and Pontos de Cultura - teia 9

admin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:00:27 +0100

Gilberto Gil and Pontos de Cultura - teia 6

admin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:00:26 +0100

Gilberto Gil and Pontos de Cultura - teia 7

admin — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:00:26 +0100