Codes, Tactics and Tweets

Mike Ricketts with Professor Neil Cummings, and Charlotte Webb
Date: Wednesday 1^st February 2012, 2-4pm
Venue: Room A208, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

TPE5 – Wednesday 1st February 2012

Present: Deniz Akca, Marsha Bradfield, Sam Burford, Lee Campbell, Angus Carlyle, Andrew Chesher, Neil Cummings, Koichi Enomoto, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Vicki Kerr, Maria Kheirkhah, Ope Lori, Iris Luk, Elizabeth Manchester, Idit Nathan, Kathy O’Brien, Mike Ricketts, Scott Schwager, Charlotte Webb + 3 others (identities unknown).

Charlotte Webb introduced the stage she is at in her internet-based work as Pancake research after a term coined by the playwright Richard Foreman, who says that internet users read widely but without depth, resulting in pancake-thin knowledge. This is how she feels at this stage in her research, covering a lot of territory but not going in depth – it is making her feel thin. But this is a wider social issue – it is not just her.

Looking at her immediate context - other internet artists – she sees an emerging theoretical context. In a recent practice review, she found that her original research questions have collapsed, accounting for the shifts away from where she started her research. Her original terms/topics were generative art, micro-blogging, crowdsourced art and artistic collaboration. She is struggling with the phrase collaboration, and prefers ‘working with others’ especially as this implies others that are 'other' than humans, ie. computers and networks.

In the first year of her PhD she was looking at the field of generative art – an autonomous system of language, computer programmes, mathematical operations, etc. Her first work was the Topic Generator, a computer programme that generates PhD topics which became unexpectedly useful. She also made a programme based on William Blake’s poem Little Fly using a similar text-based process to experiment with different modes of sources. She was interested in the poetic nature of what is generated by chance combinations of words. She found another similar principle operating in blog posts on her tumbler account in variations on a quote from A Beautiful Mind.

Charlotte’s most recent piece of work is based on the song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, for which she made a karaoke version for people to sing along to. She found it much easier to work with text than image in this way. She wants to understand why she finds it difficult to work with images.

For the code she looks to Florian Cramer who speaks of imaginative computation and ‘words made flesh’ – the idea of meta-making, ie. making something that makes, a second order authorship. The main question is not who is the author. It is the slippages and tension between people and technology creating more than the sum of the parts. The materials of the code – symbols – have cultural connotations. There is a connection with Bourriaud’s notion of the artwork as generator of activity in work with the public or working collaboratively in some way.

Charlotte’s questions are: what codes are making her artwork? What code should write her PhD, that will in turn write her?

She is fascinated by the overwhelming multiplicity of images that are circulated, exchanged and commented on globally, by the many channels of circulation and the ways that people are ascribing value to images. She is making contact with people on tumbler, using the blog as a visual research aggregate, a place for people to publish art and/or research. She asks how does tumbler disrupt normal commercial channels of art?

The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined by Jeff Howe in 2006, combining 'crowd' and 'outsourcing' – the area is an ethical hot potato. Examples are Bicycle Built for 2,000 and Ten Thousand Cents by Aaron Koblin. Are their quasi-pedagogical approaches a displacement of the curatorial role? What are the ethical implications of crowd-sourcing? Can we call crowd-sourcing collaborative?

Elizabeth Manchester asked about the limitations of the parameters of the internet.

Angela Hodgson-Teall picked up on Charlotte’s use of the term ‘cheesy’ in relation to her Puff the Magic Dragon image, commenting that the lack of an existing human voice inhibited her from singing to the tune. By contrast Charlotte had called brain cells and viruses ‘cool’. This seems to raise questions about value-judgments, reflecting the complexity of the area that CW is working in. Charlotte replied that in tumbler the community decides what gets proliferated, as things get ‘liked’, which gives them value, and then they get appropriated.

Neil Cummings commented that the more popular something is, the more valuable it becomes. The values in a material world are not the same as in a world that has become code.

Mike Ricketts asked CW about her interest in the complex mechanisms behind things – is she interested in the processes that enable these enigmatic things that have a ‘wow’ factor? CW replied that there is a mechanism in tumbler describing how an image has circulated and what it is, a pragmatic description inscribed onto the project itself, which seems like a new way of accounting for art. This would normally be in an adjacent territory/place but here the explanation is part of the fascination, raising the questions: does this add to the work? Is it aesthetically important? Could it be a useful resource for others? Do the FAQs that reveal the code undermine the work by explaining it away?

Marsha Bradfield asked what is Charlotte giving back when she is taking all these resources? CW replied that generosity is important. There are many different ways of administering your generosity/constructing your references.

Mike Ricketts presented ‘The Vessel’, the story of his attempts to access and photograph Britain’s only prison ship, The Weare, that opened in 1997 and closed in 2005, and is now somewhere in Nigeria’s troubled oil delta. When he first encountered it, it was moored in a private port near Portland off the Dorset coast. He saw it from the back windows of his brother’s house in Weymouth, looking out over the Portland Harbour. At this time it had 450 prisoners on board. He was immediately fascinated by the boat – its notoriety and incongruity – and wanted to photograph it. But it was very hard to get to see it as it was moored at the foot of a cliff. He requested permission from the Portland Port authorities, but Portland Harbour had been chosen as a site for sailing events during the 2012 Olympics and the boat had been sold to an African company who were refitting it as living quarters for oil workers, so he was not given permission. But he tried in any case. It was moored just outside a land-based prison. He rang Barclays Bank free helpline for legal advice, who advised him that it was technically not illegal for him to photograph the ship but that he should contact the prison authorities in any case. Then he discovered that the ship had already left and was on its way to Nigeria. He found a photograph of it on the website of Sea Trucks Group who had bought it, renamed it Jascon 27, and refitted it to house 500 oil workers. As a prison ship it had been controversial in the news. Google Earth was still showing it as HMP Weare, moored in Portland Harbour.

Mike’s search for the ship’s origins took him to the blog of an Argentine group of Falklands War veterans and a Facebook group ‘Falklands 1983’. Here he found photographs of the ship moored in the Falklands where it had housed British troops. According to stories from the veterans it had a covered and heated pool on board where Falklands children had learned to swim. In fact the editor of the islands’ only paper, Penguin News, had learned to swim on it. It had also been commemorated on a stamp.

At Lloyds Shipping Register in London, Mike learned of the vessel’s early life. It was built in Stockholm in 1979 at a time of global recession. By 1982 it had had three different owners and three different names. It is a flotel – basically welded together containers that can only move by piggy-backing on another boat. It has no bow and no engine, but once it is moored it is totally self-sufficient with electricity, plumbing, etc.

After the Falklands War, the ship was chartered by the department of crime in New York where it had its first job as a prison ship, triggering a controversy amongst Lower East Side residents. It was used as a rehabilitation centre for prisoners (up to 85% of inmates were HIV positive). After three years as a prison ship here, the Hudson River authorities forced it to be moved.

One of the ship’s long-term inhabitants, a Barge Master, Mr Connell, had an obsession with the musical The Phantom of the Opera.

Mike showed images of the ship that suddenly appeared online after it had left Portland for Nigeria. He was puzzled by this until he discovered that the boat had hit bad weather in the Atlantic and had been forced to dock at La Coruña, where many Spanish people took photographs and commented online.

Mike concluded his presentation with reference to The Man without a Country – a short story of a man sentenced to spend his life on large naval ships traveling the world. Without contact with his home country, he becomes increasingly reclusive and desperate for news.

Elizabeth Manchester asked about Mike’s poetic nostalgia – how is he personally invested in the story of the Weare, in relation to works by Tacita Dean which always have some kind of personal history connection with the artist? Mike responded that although it might seem ironic to think of nostalgia in relation to such a vessel and such recent history, the way the story begins with visits to his brother’s house and concludes with an historical tale of longing, separation and loss probably allows for this. Mike was interested in this suggested connection – especially to Dean’s works ‘Disappearance at Sea’ and ‘Teignmouth Electron’.

Deniz Akca asked what the ship looks like inside. Mike responded that he didn’t want to show pictures of the inside. The company who now own it had sent him all sorts of images of the interior but they were too generic. Others taken by Royal Engineers seemed too personal.

Sam Burford commented on the distance that the boat was always at from MR and that in the end he had had to let it go – travelling to Nigeria it was going too far away for MR to follow. He suggested a comparison might be made with narrative performances by Tris Vonna Mitchell whose narratives emerge and then peter out leaving the audience in a confused state.

Charlotte Webb said that for her it was not distanced – she admires the fact that MR followed it through in such a committed way, comparing it to Tim O’Reilly’s moon project in which he embraced serendipity. Mike said that maybe the form of the work came from trying to overcome problems or barriers as he came across them.

Marsha Bradfield identified a punctum moment in the relationship between the images and the narrative when the Phantom of the Opera image was shown, pointing out that the actors in the projected image were the first people to be shown. She asked how that works in relation to the poetic method. Mike responded that although he had selected the images with care, he hadn’t consciously omitted images of people. He was interested that this seemed such a key moment.

Maria Kheirkhah commented on the relationship between the outer shell, the journey, being distanced and the life within the vessel. Is MR building desire through distance? Mike replied that for him the ship gradually comes alive through people’s stories of their experiences.

Scott Schwager commented that there are several parallel stories: the story of the vessel, the global story in different locations, the story of Mike chasing the ship all the way to Nigeria. The ship has become an imaginary object that has carried Mike – it is his voyage over a period of time (his research). Mike replied that he is very interested in this - he has recently read ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, an essay by Igor Kopytoff which explores how tracing an object means intersecting with multiple divergent stories (contexts, value systems etc). Mike also mentioned the work of Simon Starling.

Lee Campbell asked if Mike could have done the presentation without images, commenting on the visual role of the audience and the performative nature of the presentation; a discussion about the role of the images and the relation of different types of image to narrative ensued. The writing of W.G. Sebald was one key reference point for Mike.

Lee commented that the politics of surprise are relevant to both presentations – blips, chance, incongruity are all part of the work.

Mike Ricketts is in his 5^th year of a part-time PhD based at Chelsea College of Art & Design.His practice involves engaging with rules and codes that are intended to determine access to particular spaces. His method involves an exploration of certain spaces, and his attempts to access them or work in them in particular ways. Encounters with specific regulatory structures have stimulated various projects.

Mike has wrangled with the regulations of governmentorganisations, companies, public-private partnerships and community groups, but also codes that are more individually defined and enforced. Most of these rules have been somewhat inaccessible, subject to mutation and/or reinterpretation.

His methods involve noting, challenging, and getting embroiled in the enforcement, contestation or appropriation of certain rules, participating in and tracking social dynamics, and presenting (re-framing) the results of this research in the form of art works and projects.

In examining structures through practice (rather than through a detached ‘analysis’, for example), Mike contacts people, makes applications, follows trails and responds to opportunities - discovering certain regulations by coming up against them.

The form of his work has ranged from narrative performance to strategic distributions of sculptural objects in social contexts such as planning consultation meetings and a farmer’s market.

For TPE 5 Mike will deliver a short illustrated lecture: a first outing for a new project. The subject will be his attempts to access and photograph the UK’s only prison ship of modern times, Her Majesty’s Prison ‘The Weare'.

Decommissioned in 2005, and until recently located in Portland Harbour in Dorset, this vessel is now somewhere in Nigeria’s troubled oil fields. The story of this barge is often quite extraordinary: it takes us from Sweden to the Falkland Islands, the Netherlands to Manhattan, and involves engineers, ship spotters, soldiers, and his Chris…

The presentation will combine a first person narrative with still and moving images gleaned from a very wide variety of sources. Mike is also working on a film version of this project, so will be filming this lecture for possible footage, and as documentation.

For the second part of the session, Professor Neil Cummings, an artist whose projects also involve extensive tactical research of various kinds (most recently in the commission, ‘Self-Portrait: Arnolfini’, Bristol ) will enable a discussion. Mike will talk briefly about how this new work fits into his wider practice, and there will be discussion about some of the implications of the art/research methods he is using.

Likely topics include what sociologist Bruno Latour has called ‘feeding off controversies’; ‘space’ and how it can be understood, constituted and re-presented; tracking and tracing elusive and encoded kinds of evidence; and uses of narration in art and research.

Charlotte Webb is in the second year of a part-time PhD at Chelsea College of Art. Her research is a practice-led investigation into artistic collaboration and human agency.

One of her key creative strategies has been to use computer programmes to generate artworks. The early stages of the research has included a series of experiments set up to investigate how different kinds of agency can be accounted for in computer generated artworks. Entering into a relationships of interaction with a programme (an alternative ‘other’ to collaborate with) has prompted questions about where the creative agency in such an interaction resides, and to question how digital technologies are re-conceptualising current understandings of ‘collaboration’.

She is increasingly interested in the ways that web technologies and social media nuance artistic practice and create new possibilities for collaboration, and uses web based strategies of appropriation and distribution. She is currently designing a Karaoke website through which the public will be able to upload versions of the classic 1963 song ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’.

http://otheragents.net

www.otheragents.tumblr.com

Narrating Practice

Date: Wednesday 11th January 2012, 2-5pm

Venue: Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank

Present: Deniz Akca, Elena Artigas, Dalia Baassiri, SE Barnet, Helen Couchman, Maria Christoforatou, Karl Cresser, Nerma Cridge, Cristina Figueroapalau, Rebecca Hackemann, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Maria Kheirkhah, Catherine Long, Ope Lori, Elizabeth Manchester, Aaron McPeake, Elle Reynolds, Robert, Scott Schwager, Su, Joel Yuen.

Susan Edith Barnet is in the final year of a practice based PhD at Kingston University, and is an Associate Lecturer on the Fine Art Foundation course at Central St. Martin’s. Her research looks at the experience of disorientation. In it she attempts to go somewhere else as a way of accessing the unfamiliar. She turns to the experiences of others as they are relayed to her through storytelling. As these are not her own experiences they maintain a degree of strangeness, otherness.

Recounting an experience lies in a convergence of the unconscious with memory. Telling one’s story relies on remembered experience, whether of that which has been lived and is in the moment being remembered, or which is being remembered from moments of previous telling, or of a combination of these things and others as well. There are influences that range from childhood recollections to cultural histories to the particulars of the physical body. The connection to another’s experience traverses a wide gap of both conscious and unconscious activity.

SE Barnet presented a talk given on her work at the Royal College of Art’s Edge of Our Thinking conference by the artist Anne-Marie Creamer, referring to herself in the third person. She showed transcriptions of mobile phone messages that she had exchanged with Anne-Marie Creamer before the talk, a form of narration of the various arrangements that had to be negotiated. She presented photographs taken from aeroplanes showing the landscape below, over which she had drawn in green snaking lines – a series entitled You can’t walk on water you can’t sleep on clouds. In making these and other works she was thinking about what it is to make the familiar unfamiliar.

SE Barnet always presents herself in the third person – the emails she displays are presented as part of an exchange.

In the Landmark videos, she presents open-ended scenarios around collaboration with members of the public – a form of documentation of dislocation and displacement, a movement between what is same and familiar, and what is strange.

Story of Elsewhere, which she created for her thesis exhibition, is set in public spaces. We see individuals speaking in a multi-screen video projection, in which it is not possible to see all the screens at the same time. The viewing experience is one of constant disruption as the speakers talk over one another. It is a performative act of remembering and relaying as the people describe their impressions of public monuments in another place. At the same time she presented a video showing the Eiffel tower being photographed, alongside two artist’s books.

In Story of Elsewhere there is a constant negotiation between first and third person narratives, as the subtitles translate the words of the speakers in the third person, although the words were originally spoken in the first.

Elizabeth Manchester asked about SE Barnet’s different selves – the split between SE Barnet as first and third person. How conscious, and how explicit does she feel it to be? How much is in the written part of her thesis? SE replied that the abstract of her thesis suggests a navigational approach to reading through the three written and two visual parts of her thesis, in which she uses substitute/interchangeable identities. One part is fictional – it narrates the journey of a traveler.

Scott Schwager asked about the dialogic aspects of SE’s practice. She responded that the narrative/story-telling comes from her training in film-making. Unfolding a dialogue or narrating a story come naturally to her – everything goes back to story-telling – and expresses the pleasure of engaging with narrative.

Maria Kheirkhah asked whether anything is fixed in SE’s work. SE responded that that question had been asked in her viva – her work represents a definite challenge to fixity…

Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about the notion of having a fixed artist’s identity and SE responded that in her case it comes from having had two different identities all her life – she has two birth certificates and two different names – a double identity.

Aaron McPeake brought up the issue of gender – femininity has come to be associated with multiple identities. This stimulated a general discussion around multiple identities and the notion of fluidity. SE had used Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a way to access this slipperiness in her early research – it had been an early starting point for approaching the notion of destabilization. She likes the idea of the disembodied voice of the psychoanalyst. She would like to be speaking from a hole in the ground.

http://www.sebarnet.net

http://sebarnet.wordpress.com/

Rebecca Hackemann is a second year part time PhD candidate at CCW. She received her MFA in 1996 from Stanford University, California. Her practice spans a variety of media and is inspired by theoretical concerns surrounding the position of the spectator and the structure of vision and language, both written and photographic. It consists of photo-based image text work, anamorphic drawings and most recently optical devices on pavements in neighborhoods of New York. Her recent research studies engagements with a viewing device on two pavements in New York, where they are presently anchored for the next year. Thus the work is not finished when it is installed, it consists of a process, despite having a physical form. The Urban Field Glass Project both analyses the surrounding physical location using historical photographs, and tests itself as an art/research object – it collects its own feedback.

Rebecca’s theoretical aim is to use psychoanalysis as a methodology in her thesis and furthermore bring the complicated nexus of disciplines that converge in the public and the contested definitions concerning place/space/site in the public realm into a new focus through psychoanalytic theory. Rebecca would also like to discuss the relationship between practice and research for her upcoming presentation at CAA in Los Angeles in February www.rebeccahackemann.com http://tinyurl.com/7fn2hae

Rebecca Hackemann presented very briefly her trajectory from her early training as a photographer, to what she is doing now in her practice-led research. She presented stereoscopic viewing boxes in which she controlled the viewer, forcing him or her to look through two peep-holes to see close-up photographs of parts of the body. This work was influenced by theoretical concerns, texts such as Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin that she had encountered on her BA at. In 2007/8 she showed anamorphic drawings on the walls of Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta and Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York. To see these the viewer had to stand on an ‘x’. The Looking Glass House shows an anamorphic house with Alice coming out.

Rebecca’s PhD is concerned with new role public art might play– focusing on permanent public art in places where you don’t normally expect to see it. She unexpectedly got a grant and had to act quickly – there was a deadline by which she had to spend the money and execute her project. Her starting point was to challenge the public art cliché – enlarged studio art, extended, made more durable and then put outside without consideration of place or any attempt to engage with the community around it. A theorist Miwon Kwon, analyses projects that claim to be engaging with the community. Rebecca wanted to put up work that is not finished, which attracts respondents after it is installed. She spent a few months working with people, asking them what they would like to see in the two spots that she had selected. She chose two spots in areas that were not visited by tourists, dead spaces, places where there is not much to see. For example a street next to a fly-over, with a long stretch of metal fence, behind which is a triangle shaped left over urban space. On these pavements she installed metal viewing boxes on poles that invited the viewer to look inside through peepholes like the ones on her stereoscopic boxes from previously. The viewer sees a rotation of images selected by the public – as well as two historical images of the sites that appear in 3-d. At the same time as rotating images, the boxes solicit data from the viewers who can respond/give feedback through an app accessible using a ] QR code on the back of the box and a weblink. She also sent out a questionnaire online. The questionnaire asks them how they have found the experience of seeing something in a non-tourist area, and then whether they have ever visited a piece of public art – for example the Anish Kapoor piece at the Rockefeller Centre a tourist spot. Everyone answers no to this – they are all non art-world people.

This is art that creates data – an alternative to grafitti. It has a fluidity – through Rebecca’s taking herself out as an image-maker and decision-maker. Rebecca did not create any of the images that play in the slide-show; she described the process of soliciting images from the public, before asking a panel of people to make a selection. She transferred these to slide by photographing them in order to create the final work.

Maria Kheirkhah asked about the physical object – the viewing mechanism – what is the place of the documentation of the process of making it in Rebecca’s thesis. Rebecca answered that the process is irrelevant. For her, the piece takes the place of an analyst - it is the one who asks questions. It reveals the context that it sits within. The data will be original research in her thesis. This installation in New York is the pilot work for a bigger piece of work, as yet undetermined. With this project she has been investigating how people really react to public art – it is a model for engaging afterwards – to use the information in future work. She wants to ask: what new roles can public art play in the public realm? How do people react to it? Can the methodology of psychoanalysis open the whole picture?

Scott Schwager asked a technical question about using the QR code app – only younger people have this generally, so would this not be problematic in terms of data? Perhaps there is a need for multiple ways to gather data – through surveys in documents/questionnaires?

What about the sculptural aspects of the piece? What about the work as a piece of sculpture?

Rebecca answered that the questionnaire was also asked as an e-mail and using SurveyMonkey. She is going to conduct interviews as well. Scott asked if this was not too much data, or data from too many sources to manage, to which Rebecca asked – is this not what we are supposed to be able to do well in a PhD – synthesise data. To her the object is not designed to read as an aesthetic object.

As Rebecca’s psychoanalytical methodology is Lacanian, Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about Lacan’s notions of power and the worker in relation to Rebecca’s project. Rebecca says that she is thinking about architecture as subject – the real, the imaginary, the symbolic are all intertwined in it – also many disciplines are involved, such as sociology, urban planning and social geography. She is working as a sounding board, reactivating existing work – public sculptures that people walk past without noticing at the same time as finding out what part public works can play in people’s lives.

Maria mentioned that the topic of (permanent) public art and audience seems very broad and so did Scott. Rebecca agreed, but feels she is narrowing down particular areas of concern (gaps!) and that psychoanalysis is not a seperate discipline to bring into the research (making it bigger), but is rather a method and research position that can bring all these disciplines that impinge on public art together to unlock new paradigms for public art theory and practice.

Rebecca passed out a questionnaire to everyone. It asks us about our own practice and what role it plays within our research. It is for her talk at the impending College Art Association Conference. The questionnaire is available here www.rebeccahackemann.com/Research/CAATalkHackemann.pdf