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 I contrbute to Critical Practice, here is an invitation to an event we are working on.

Dear ******

Parade

We are writing to inform you of Parade, an upcoming event facilitated by Critical Practice.

Critical Practice is a cluster of artists, researchers and academics hosted by Chelsea College of Art and Design, a constituent

college of the University of the Arts London. We have a longstanding interest in public goods, spaces, services and knowledge, and a track record of producing original participatory events. For instance, in 2004 we organized Open Congress at Tate.

Chelsea College is opposite Tate Britain on Millbank, and has a large contemporary courtyard at its heart, the beautiful Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground. We have worked with our Polish partners over the last year to develop a program of events that will explore different, contested and vital conceptions of being in public. These events will unfold over Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd of May 2010. We will investigate the history of public space and the public sphere, along with differing cultural perceptions of 'being in public', the politics of public assembly, the socialization implicit in 'publicness', the architecture of public knowledge, and much more besides.

Relational Machine

A week long working session, part of the Procesos de archivo/ Archivalprocess took place at Intermediæ in Madrid.

Timeline v1.0At the planning meeting on the 23rd December we decide to move the project along and develop the first iteration of the timeline. To develop the timeline into something more playful and sophisticated. We decide to start by making two sample views of the activities of Intermediae.

One is to track a collection of themed projects longitudinally through time, and the other to cut horizontally through a range of activities by choosing a random week of activities in 2009.  We have the idea of 'zooming-in' on a particular set of documents, and experiment with their representation.

 
Monday 8th February 2010

The various work areas of Intermediae, Programming, Administration, Production, Communication an Mediation have aggregated the requested documents into appropriate folders. So, we begin to collate the documents that will be the basis of the 'zoomed' timeline. We choose one sample work area - Communication, and within that we find and print sample documents of the longitudinal project strand or 'linea de trabajo' Permaculture.

Workers Leaving

1895,  cast in period costume

1. Establishing shot:

Mid shot: Large wooden factory gates.

Fade from black

Gates swing open, and workers stream from the factory; women, men, children, dogs, a few bicycles and eventually a horse drawn carriage.

2. Floating camera pulls back and slightly-up

Extreme close-up: The scene unfolding is seen to be on-screen.

3. Floating camera continues to pull back

Close-up:  The screen is of a mobile phone.

4. Floating camera continues to pull back

Medium close-up: Mobile phone recording the workers leaving the factory.

Fade to black

Total Duration: 47sec.

Timeline 2058 - 1851

Working Session The research timeline 2058 - 1851 that I produced for Museum Futures has been reprinted in

Concept Store: #2 Possible, Probable and Preferable Futures

Concept Store: is a bi-annual journal, published by Arnolfini, focusing on critical issues of contemporary art and their relationship to wider cultural, social and political contexts.

Concept Store: reflects upon ideas explored within Arnolfini’s artistic programme, while operating as a discursive space for commissioned texts, artists’ contributions, interviews and other experimental forms.

A Prior

Working SessionCome and join me at the launch of the journal

A Prior #19: Olivia Plender

to coincide with an exhibition at Gasworks.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009
6.30 until 9pm 

Donlon Books
210 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ

I contributed a text inspired by Bouvard and Pecuchet.

The issue has been edited by Anna Colin, Kim Einarsson, Olivia Plender and Els Roelandt. Other contributors include Agnus Cameron, Rudi Laermans, Dieter Roelstraete, Frank Maes, Marina Vishmidt, Robert Storr, Goldin & Senneby, Pablo Bronstein, Runo Lagomarsino, and others.

see you there!

[...] The great long wave of financialization, in which every need and desire is reconfigured as an asset to be securitized and competitively traded, only succeeded in submerging the world in a deluge of financial technologies.

Flaubert’s 19th century satire of Bouvard and Pecuchet, has returned as tragedy. Adrift in a world of our own-making, alienated by knowledge that returns to us as failure, we the financialized middle-class are indeed the new cognitive proletariat. And all the while, distributive markets endure, even flourish. Connecting peoples’ needs and desires through material things, via mediums of exchange, interlocked to form an ecology.

To imagine the world as a competitive market was to invite our own alienation from it.

Expert 4

Working SessionThe fourth of the Procesos de archivo /Archivalprocess expert working sessions took place at Intermediæ in Madrid. The working sessions are to enable the core curatorial team to gain knowledge and experience. The sessions are closed but the raw resources will be on-line soon.

Archivist Sue Breakell lead the sessions. In the first, Sue recounted her experiences of working in different archives, and narrated the history of archiving. And in the second we refined the mapping of the knowledge ecology of intermediae, to start restructuring the server and implementing an archival practice..........

I wrote into Sue’s presentation as she spoke, following are the tweaked notes....

the object

I participated in Key Ideas one of a series of events organised by the Design Cluster at Camberwell College of Art Design. The series aims to examine issues and theories important to young designers.

Key Ideas: Object tackled the role of the object in contemporary society through multiple readings introduced by different experts via three themes:

Object as Sign

Object as Capital; the Value of Things

The Narrative of Objects

Guest speakers included: Grant Gibson, Neil Cummings, Stephen Hayward, Ralph Ball, Gareth Williams.

 

I spoke in relation to The Value of Things and tried to shift attention from objects to context; these are the notes for my presentation

Wysing

At the Wysing Arts Centre just outside Cambridge, I took part in an all-day workshop for artists and students from the Curatorial Course at the Royal College of Art.

It was organized by Kit Hammonds and included Sarah Thornton, and Francis Outred from Christies.

"The Economics of the Art System will take an in depth look at the art market, exploring the financial and cultural economies that drive the industry. From commercial galleries, collectors and art fairs, to the influence of auction houses this retreat will question the value of art as commodity and the commercial influences on artists' practices, as well as considering survival tactics for artists, curators and gallerists."

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.

Bouvard and Pecuchet

These are short extracts of a larger text comissioned by Anna Colin at Gasworks to accompany an exhibition of Olivia Plender. The full text will be online shortly, the publication was launched by A Prior

Intro

In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Fluabert distills the curse of the middle class into a deadly poison. Comfortable after a financial windfall, the two leisured bureaucrats, Bouvard and Pécuchet retire to the countryside to indulge their pleasure in knowledge. They buy, devour and study books on every subject that drifts through their attention. They read on agriculture, landscape gardening and food preservation, whereupon every animal they buy dies, crops wither, rot or burn, fruits waste and preserves are not. They read chemistry, anatomy, medicine, biology and think themselves doctors, whereupon they fail to treat or cure any patients, make themselves ill and estrange the local doctor. They read Romances, have romantic interests and quickly contract venereal disease. They study gymnastics, occultism, theology, philosophy and religion; they adopt an orphan to ‘improve’ who runs-away, they fall-out with the parish priest, argue with everyone around them, and finally contemplate suicide.

images

SylvanoCamino 2009Jze (?)GerrardLetitiaMarta Nadia Kasia