Codes, Tactics and Tweets
Mike Ricketts with Professor Neil Cummings, and Charlotte Webb
Date: Wednesday 1st 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 5th 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.
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.
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’.
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