Author Archive for Lucas

Touchy Feely

Published
by
Lucas
on January 22, 2012
in artist run, blogging and Relational Aesthetics
. 0 Comments

Amy Spiers is an artist from Melbourne with an interest in participation and social engagement in art. She and Pip Stafford have curated a series of events and an exhibition in Hobart, in late January 2012, called Touchy Feely.

The preamble to Touchy Feely includes a series of questions which the participants hope to address:

  • Should the “skill set” of art be instrumentalised to make a better world?
  • Is there a role for hope, compassion and optimism in art, without having to take an evangelical or moralistic position?
  • In our current situation, is it actually politically irresponsible to creatively express despair, unease and tension?
  • Is contemporary art marked by a facile cynicism, heartlessness and nihilism?
  • Or is relational and socially engaged art in Australia too sentimental, ethical and uncritical?

First of all, I want to say that it’s really great that artists are starting to draft up these kinds of questions about participatory, relational and socially-engaged art practices (or whatever else you want to call them). Hashing out the ethics and aesthetics of the work we do is an important step in “the maturing of the profession”, if you could call it that.

On the other hand, the first job of work to be done in answering these questions might be to rephrase them. For instance, “ethical” is strangely lumped in together with “sentimental” and “uncritical”; “cynicism” is likened to “nihilism”; and “hope” and “compassion” are cast as the opposites of “evangelism” and “moralism”. One of the tricky things for the participants in Touchy Feely might be to try and navigate their way through all this terminology without losing touch with the reality of actual projects. Perhaps a better way might be to dwell in the actuality of the work, and from there begin to reformulate these questions and assertions. Continue reading ‘Touchy Feely’

The Human Fax Machine

Published
by
Lucas
on December 13, 2011
in collaboration and education
. 0 Comments

The following is a set of instructions for a workshop activity I ran in Tasmania recently for the Convergence Lab. The original activity was devised by Brogan Bunt, and together with Brogan, I developed it in collaboration with Bettina Frankham at UOW Media Arts.

The instructions below are by now fairly refined… although having carried it out in Hobart with nearly 60 highly trained artists and teachers, I have some ideas how to push it even further.

The Human Fax Machine

AIM:
Collaboratively invent a sound-based code system to transmit an image through space.

HOW IT WORKS:
Your group gets one unsophisticated soundmaking device:
eg a spoon+glass, or a bell, or a jar with dried chickpeas.

As a group, develop your transmission/reception system before you play the game.

Your group splits into two sub-teams:
The “ENCODERS”, who transmit the image-message, and the “DECODERS”, who receive it.

You should write down your code, so that both the ENCODERS and the DECODERS have a working copy of it.

Test your system out with a simple graphic image (a line drawing) that you draw yourself.

Discuss how it works, and refine it by answering the following questions.

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELVES:
-is your code appropriate for the soundmaking device you are allocated?
-what if the ENCODERS make a mistake when transmitting part of the image?
-what if the DECODERS make a mistake when receiving part of the image?
-how do you deal with “noise” in your system?
-what if you need to clarify, pause, or start from scratch?

Don’t agonise over making it perfect. Make sure you leave enough time to play the game!

HOW TO PLAY THE GAME:
Your team will be allocated an image you have never seen before.
THE ENCODERS will be handed the image, but the DECODERS must not see it.

The ENCODERS sit on one side of a partition and the DECODERS sit on the other side.
The two cannot see each other. Nobody is permitted to speak.

The ENCODERS use their soundmaking device to transmit the encoded image.
On the other side of the partition, the DECODERS listen carefully & decipher the audible sound.
The DECODERS now re-draw the image according to the established code.

Once the transmission is complete, the whole team gets together, discusses what went wrong, improves the code system, and carries out a second transmission.

FINALLY, RECONVENE WITH EVERYBODY AND SHARE:
-what species of code systems you all invented;
-what processes you went through to arrive at them;
-how successful your systems were at approximating the original image
(compare original image to received image);
-what was learned in the process;
-what was frustrating or enjoyable about the process…

Convergence Lab, Hobart

Published
by
Lucas
on December 3, 2011
in education
. 0 Comments

This week, Lizzie and I will be travelling to Hobart to run a workshop for Convergence Lab.

about the lab:

Convergence Lab offers researchers, educators, artists and producers a facilitated environment for collaborative investigation into digital culture and making.

A diverse range of next generation artists will act as catalysts, offering cluster groups a hypothesis to provoke their realm of investigation for each day.

The program has two stages:

Stage 1: Provocation and play – 7, 8, 9 Dec 2011
Stage 2: Curriculum enrichment – 12, 13, 14 Dec 2011

This is a facilitated curriculum design and program development process offered to staff from the Tasmanian School of Art and College teachers undertaking the Graduate Certificate of Fine Arts and Design.

We will be presenting as part of Stage 1.

Looking forward to meeting a bunch of amazing people who are going to be taking part.

Amazing new George Maciunas Website

Published
by
Lucas
on August 16, 2011
in Fluxus
. 0 Comments

Just stumbled upon this.

George woulda LOVED the internet.

Two new projects

Published
by
Lucas
on August 16, 2011
in my projects, odds and ends, spatial politics, sustainability and walking
. 0 Comments

I’ve been working on these lately:

Green Bans Art Walk, with Big Fag Press and Cross Arts Projects.

Yeomans Project, with Ian Milliss

Learning from Experience: in League with the City of Melbourne

Published
by
Lucas
on May 18, 2011
in collaboration, Relational Aesthetics and writing by me
. 2 Comments

The following essay was commissioned in early 2011, by the League of Resonance – a Melbourne artist group comprising Jason Maling, Jess Olivieri and Sarah Rodigari. In this piece, I try to tease out an anatomy of sorts for their particular brand of socially engaged art practice. Much of the underlying information comes from an interview I did with the artists in early 2011 (thanks to Liz Pulie for the transcription yakka)…

lucas diagram screen size
[...a diagram to accompany the article. Click on the image to see it larger...]

- – -

Dinner dates with strangers; excursions to inspect chewing gum stuck on waterpipes in back alleys; groups gathered to cross the road together; chance conversations on street corners: these are among the marginal, largely invisible activities which constitute the current project of the League of Resonance. The working methods which underlie a project like this are not widely understood. This is hardly surprising – the artists of the League employ a set of processes which are still relatively novel additions to the toolbox of contemporary art.
Continue reading ‘Learning from Experience: in League with the City of Melbourne’

Place, blogging, links

Published
by
Lucas
on April 10, 2011
in Uncategorized
. 3 Comments

At the Right to the City Symposium yesterday, Jesse Adams Stein organised a panel on “Place Blogging”. I wasn’t able to make it, as SquatSpace were co-ordinating our wiki-workshop at the same time, but it certainly sounded like it could have been interesting. In the publicity material for the panel, my Bilateral Petersham project (carried out this month FIVE years ago!!) was mentioned as an example of place blogging. Strangely enough, this is the first time I’ve heard this term used to describe blogging within, and about, one’s hyper-local area – but now that I have heard it… wow, check this out!

Jesse writes a blog about her local neighbourhood, Ultimo. Also speaking on the panel was Meredith Jones from Marrickville, Matt & Polly Levinson from Darlinghurst, and Linda Carroli from Brisbane.

Here’s Jesse’s spiel about the panel discussion. I’ll be interested to hear how it went.

Also at the symposium was a panel on walking, organised by Performance Space, and expertly chaired by Bec Dean. I spoke, along with Jo Holder and Stacey Miers, about a collaborative project that Big Fag Press has begun called “Green Bans Art Walks”. (I’ll write up a description of that project soon).

Accompanying us on the panel was Karen Therese, whose wonderful project Waterloo Girls premiered this weekend; and Jennifer Hamilton, who is planning a walk in the rain along the Cooks River.

I’ve recently become a big fan of Jennifer’s blog… It seems that – contrary to my assumption that facebook (and whatever other shiny new things) had taken everybody’s minds off good old fashioned blogging – that this humble medium is still going strong, especially amongst those who want to think a bit more deeply about the place they live. Here’s another example.

The Right to the City – Diagram versus Wiki

Published
by
Lucas
on April 10, 2011
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

SquatSpace are currently involved in an exhibition at the Tin Sheds Gallery called The Right to the City. We decided to start plumbing the depths of our own history, based on the idea that, “after a decade of ratbaggery, if we don’t write our own history, who the hell will?!”

The exhibition has a large blackboard diagram beginning in 2000 (when we began) and continuing into 2012 and beyond. On the chalky diagram, we try to map a bunch of activities by protagonists from SquatSpace, as well as those in our nearby networks. I’ll put a photo up of the diagram soon – it looks a bit like a pebble dropped into a pond, or a weather map, or the circular rings of the cross-section of a tree.

The good thing about these big diagrams is that they give a kind of “world view” – in a glance, you can get the sense that “a shitload of things have gone on” in our world during the last decade. This visualisation of “a lot of things happening” is an end in itself, quite beyond the more detailed understandings about what those things actually were, that can be discovered by zooming your attention into the diagram.

But no matter how detailed, a two-dimensional diagram has limitations. First of all, the problem is that if too many connections are drawn on the diagram, the whole thing becomes a tangled mess, and ends up not communicating much at all (except the rather obvious fact that “there seem to be a lot of connections”). And as I’ve observed when making these sorts of complex diagrams in the last few years, when actually drawing up these diagrams, there’s a clear relationship between the amount of space on the page, and the flow of ideas in the brain. I’ve noticed that at the beginning, content and connections flow fast and thick, while towards the end, when the amount of “page real estate” gets more limited, my ideas start to slow down too. How could we go beyond this spatial limitation?

Well, in the case of this particular project, we decided to try out a “post-digital” method – to combine the old-skool analogue chalkboard with a new-skool digital tool of pedagogy: the wiki. The good thing about the wiki is that it is infinitely expandable: there is no end to the amount of stories, and versions of histories, that can be added, and the links that can be made between them. The limitation of the wiki is that you only ever see one detail at a time, rather than the whole world view. (And based on our experience so far, although the learning curve is not steep, it takes a surprisingly long time to craft decent wiki pages…) So the chalkboard and the wiki walk hand in hand.

SquatSpace is inviting anyone who was ever involved in our stuff (or we in yours) to contribute – as well as those whose work was influenced by us, which influenced us, or which seemed to coincide with what we were doing in a coincidental zeitgeist kinda way. The wiki is here.

Predator

Published
by
Lucas
on September 15, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

predator
[Predator: image lifted from here...]

Every now and then I remember Predator.

Today, I visited Jill.txt, a blog by Jill Walker Rettberg I’ve been following for a few years now, which explores blogging as a form of research and fiction. In this post, Jill discusses disease blogging.

She writes, “blogging about your illness is to take back control over your body and your life by owning it, by expressing it yourself, on your terms”, and she linked to a few key examples of folks blogging about their struggles with cancer.

I felt moved to reply with the following:

One of the most powerful disease blogs I have ever been priveleged to read, is by an old friend known as Predator, who died in late 2003, early 2004, which tracks the progress of his cancer.

He did not believe in fancy mysql platforms underlying blogs – he published .txt files directly via ftp.

Predator did not make it – his last blog entry is particularly poignant.

Sadly, it seems his blog is no longer hosted, but I found a copy on the internet archive, here.

For someone like Predator, who had a fiercely scientific mind, coming to grips with his own impending death was something he needed a regular, public / private forum to think through. It just did not make rational sense to him that his body would soon give up on him, and this is something he grapples with throughout the blog.

Lucas

Some years ago, I was lucky enough to download from somewhere a PDF copy of Predator’s blog, combined with a whole lot of his other writings. It’s called “pred.txt: The selected rants of Michael Carlton”.

It no longer seems to be hosted online anywhere, so I’m going to post it up again here (about 11mb).

Long Live Predator.

For me, you will forever be visiting our squat in Pyrmont late in the night, with an unfeasibly large hot water system strapped to the back of your motorbike. And installing it. And making it function. In a building without (legal) power.
Long live Pred!

- – -

I also found this: Predators manifesto on drain exploration, which is exhaustively detailed and riotously funny. It’s worth scrolling down to the end for the legal disclaimers. What a hoot.

Adelaide Traffic Island Garbage Map, now in a book!

Published
by
Lucas
on August 26, 2010
in odds and ends
. 4 Comments

From Here to There by Hand Drawn Map Association:unnatural

How exciting! Kris Harzinski, of Philadelphia, has just put together a book called From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

It contains my Adelaide Traffic Island Garbage Map, entitled simply MAP, 2007, which was printed on the Big Fag Press.

(The above photo is borrowed from Michael Surtee’s Flickr page, and his blog. I hope he doesn’t mind, as I have yet to receive a copy of the book myself.)

Here’s another blog which mentions the book (and my print!)

Oh, and! There’s an accompanying exhibition too! At Arcadia University, in Philly, from September 23 – November 7, 2010. What fun.

HDMA book
[The cover of the book...]