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Parade

Public Body

I will be participating in a Public Body Barcamp. 

On Saturday 17th October at 14:00 at the Nowy Wspanialy Świat, Ul. Nowy Świat 63, Warsaw, Poland.

Jointly facilitated by Critical Practice - a cluster of artists, researchers, academics and others hosted by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London - and Free/Slow University Warsaw -  a nomadic centre of interdisciplinary studies, critical reflection, and independent thinking about art and society - the Public Body Barcamp is an extension of Publicamp. The assembly will be concerned with notions of being-in-public, and aims to explore ideas about the public body.

The Public Body Barcamp aims to examine the relationships among singular and assembled bodies, what infrastructures are necessary to facilitate a public body, public knowledge, art, social practice and fields of action in public space.

PubliCamp

I'll be in  Kennington Park London, on Sunday 5th July

To refine and generate some of the intellectual content, and perhaps some of the participants for Parade, Critical Practice are planning to convene a PubliCamp in Kennington Park – a former common, scene of a huge public Chartist gathering, enclosed (with Royal sponsorship), and now a ‘public’ park.

We intend to explore different conceptions of the publicness - historical, cultural, political, social, architectural and digital. We aim to develop a shared ethic towards the notion of public goods and will not be deterred by the disagreeable, contentious, messy, inefficient, live, improvisatory and provisional nature of Being in Public. Public, common or shared resources are like muscles, they become stronger with exercise.

Markets and Morals

Political philosopher Professor Michael Sandel delivered the first of the BBC's 2009 Reith Lectures.

A New Citizenship builds on a lifetime’s work exploring issues around democracy, ethics and ‘politics of the common good’. Many of the themes we are developing within Critical Practice, especially for publicness

The first lecture called for a new politics of the common good.

I wrote into the lecture as I listened, and then ammended those notes

First Sandel suggested we have to recognise the limits, the moral limits of the idea of a competitive market. Clearly, markets are not the best technology for achieving a public good. So, to enable markets to contribute - to a public good, we need to reconnect them to different structures of evaluation; moral, ethical, environmental, etc. And to drives for social justice. Collective integrity and shared values have to triumph over individual greed. But how?

For Sandel, self interest is a personal need; like self respect, self-worth, and self love. And like greed or profit, these drives animate markets. Markets are connected to welbeing, therefore we need markets. They are also very good at distributing resources, but we have to recognise thay are a limited technology. There are some things that money, at work in markets cannot buy - like  friendship, and some things money should not buy - like a child.

Publicness

Archivalprocess

I contribute to Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, researchers, academics and others, supported by Chelsea College of Art & Design, London.

We are collaborating with Kuba Szreder, a freelance curator from Warsaw,  on an international conference exploring the contested, and increasingly relevant to topic of ‘publicness’ or 'being-in-public'. We are working towards Parade (working title) a conference and series of events in the beautiful Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground at Chelsea, opposite Tate Britain in central London – 4 minutes from the Houses of Parliament. Parade is scheduled for May 2010.

We intend to explore different conceptions of publicness - historical, cultural, architectural  and digital, as represented in Eastern and Western Europe through the contrasting experiences of Poland and Britain.

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