Ruth Catlow's blog


Rich Networks: enhancing artistic collaboration and sociability across high bandwidth networks

Rich Networks: enhancing artistic collaboration and sociability across high bandwidth networks In the context of climate change and wider environmental crisis this project explores the possibility of holding an international media arts conference without a single participant getting on a plane?

The Rich Networking Series aims to enable and enrich participants' many-to-many networked exchange; finding ways to enhance the sensual and social experience of exchange across digital networks. It will explore ways of replicating the pleasures of travel, encounters with the unfamiliar, interaction with foreign cultures. It will consider the professional and commercial inducements and pressures to fly to international conferences. It will also connect with contemporary research into the impact of digital culture on the environment.

Via the MARCEL network we aim to convene artists, architects, curators, technologists, musicians, scientists; interdisciplinary thinkers, researchers and agitators, across geographically distant venues to share their knowledge, experience, perspectives and approaches to sustainable international collaboration and exchange. Participants and partner organisations will explore the range of existing networking activities and frameworks that are already used to stimulate exchange and collaboration between groups of people attending international conferences, fairs and networking events.

Through ad hoc and planned events partners will develop a range of prototype network nodes and activities with different arrangements of hardware, software, bandwidth, physical space, furniture, lighting, camera placement, mics, backgrounds etc

Some initial thoughts about what form activities might take

Node and network arrangements to explore and experiment with:-

- For spacial and interation design, draw on artistic works using networked performance and telematics, such as 'Hole in Space' by Galloway and Rabinovitz, 'Telematic Dreaming' by Paul Sermon, Station Rose's 'Opera Calling', The pUblic's 'Streaming Tales' and networked performance work by Annie Abrahams. - Digital infrastructure (connecting across academic, public and domestic networks)/ including mega broadband of academic network with Access Grid, open-source video conferencing software and associated Pure Data developments as well as existing commercial but 'free' VOIP utilities. - Human to human interaction and social protocols: formal introductions, presentations, showing off, mingling, milling about, eating together, performing, improvising, going outside etc - All unexpected elements

What might happen at Rich Network events?

- Formal presentation (and open mic) to an audience – one to many - Mingling and informal exchange – one to one and many to many - Performance, dialogue, debate.

What themes could be explored?

- Infrastructures and ecologies of digital culture (connecting with research into the environmental impact of digital infrastructures and consumer technologies). - Excessive experiences of togetherness (sustenance and sensualities- eating, drinking, playing, being merry, sound, touch, taste, vision, smell), - Knowing, right action and collaboration in a network- in the context of environmental crisis.

Outcomes (all shareable with wide audience) - A series of Rich Network Events - artistic and conference events - and associated media and documentation - A network of people, organisations and resources contributing to an ad hoc Rich Network infrastructure - A better understanding of the environmental impact of digital culture - A series of guides and howtos: relating to technical, artistic and social protocols - Ability to better plan future networking

Confirmed Rich Network partners- Furtherfield.org, SCAN, MARCEL

If you are already doing work in this area we would love to know about it. To join the network, contribute activities and knowledge and share your findings. Please contact ruthDOTcatlowATfurtherfieldDOTorg

Media Art Ecologies - Furtherfield.org http://www.furtherfield.org/mediaartecologies.php

Furtherfield.org supports experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change. Many of these practices share an ecological approach - an interest in the interrelation of technological and natural processes: beings and things, individuals and multitudes, matter and patterns. They have been developing for nearly half a century, but their effects become especially compelling in the context of contemporary ecological and economic crises. They engage imaginations toward a critical view of growth economics and patterns of consumption, inspiring audiences to generate alternative visions of sustainability and prosperity through creativity and collaboration. Through this programme of work we want to increase opportunities for art making and appreciation, critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage; to engender shared visions of other possible worlds.

Submitted by Ruth Catlow on Sun, 2009-09-20 15:24


We Won't Fly For Art

We Won't Fly For Art

For 6 months we will not take an aeroplane for the sake of art. For the next 6 months we will find other ways to visit and participate in exhibitions, fairs, conferences, meetings, residencies. We will not fly for inspiration, nor to appreciate, buy or sell art.

But only if 6 others will do the same AND replicate this pledge.

This pledge is designed for exponential growth so if you persuade another 6 people to do the same, within a year you could be one of millions of people changing the way the artworld works. So sign up, create a replica pledge and share your own experiences, observations and arguments towards reducing art flights. Post a link to it in the comment box so others can find their way to it. This is a public art experiment in the de-escalation of carbon-fuelled, high altitude, high-velocity, global art careering. For six months we choose to cover less physical distance, move more slowly between destinations, to look futureward with more attention to the view from the ground and the network, for ways to connect with others around the world.

Who can sign up to this pledge? Any individual involved in the arts: artist (in the broadest sense), curator, art administrator, art appreciator, gallerist, art critic, art historian, art academic, art technician, art security, art transporter etc. Whether you currently fly for art 50 times a year or never, your engagement will change things by making your position in the artworld visible and by offering an alternative perspective. If you work with others you may need to completely revise your schedules and budgets and lobby for the right not to fly.

This is to light the blue touch paper of Gustave Metzger's Reduce Art Flights campaign using the generative and viral capabilities of social networks. We want to know more about the impact of air-flight on the artworld (and beyond). We intuit that abstaining from air flight will motivate and enable people (with more time, money, energy and attention) to relate differently to their own local cultures and to connect more imaginatively to other cultures.

Inspirations and Observations

An Artwork- Reduce Art Flights by Gustave Metzger

Sustainable Development: Social science on the environmental impact of economic growth- Why Politicians Dare Not Limit Economic Growth by Tim Jackson

Investigative Journalism: What can we do to stop climate change? Heat (2006) by George Monbiot summarised and reviewed here

Campaign to bring 'the aviation industry down to earth'- Plane Stupid

Art and Ecology Links

Submitted by Ruth Catlow on Mon, 2009-04-13 12:15