Category Archives: education

aware – mobile phone workshop

eep! next week I will be participating in a [mobile phone/interactive-website etc] workshop run by Finnish artists aware.

d-lux media arts, who are co-ordinating the thing, have released the list of other participants – you can find it on their website here. it seems I am the most techno-beginnerish of the whole bunch! hope i can keep up!
details about the workshop from the d-lux website:

Aware (John Evans & Andrew Paterson, both UK/FI) will lead a 3-day master class as an intensive introduction to the collective contribution, publication and syndication of mobile media.
This master class is aimed at new media artists, designers and other creative researchers, interested in gaining skills, hands-on practical experience, and shared knowledge related to this medium for socially-engaged media art practices.
Over the 3 days there will be three aspects to the master class that will be intermingled each day. Firstly, each morning will be dedicated to skills development. It will give 'how-to-do' advice in setting up a webserver, an sms gateway and introduce techniques and approaches to publication and syndication via different methods within mobile and online networks. There will be a distinct focus on open source solutions within proprietary networks, and sustainability beyond the duration of the master class.
In the afternoon sessions, as part of the process of sharing knowledge that Aware has gained in almost 2 years of practice and development, the following themes will be introduced for discussion and elaborated, depending upon interest: Metadata and context; Usability issues; Online representations and interfaces; Public / privacy threshold issues; Experience of social networks in mobile practices; Aesthetics of mobile media. In addition to these subjects, there will be an opportunity to share thoughts on how to design workshops for other special-interest groups, and how to present mobile practices to an audience.
To complement in a hands-on manner, activities from early afternoon onwards, will be done in dispersed group exercises. All contributions by the group will gather in a collective online weblog, which will be used as a prototype environment to illustrate the concepts discussed during the master class.

networks a go go!

have been scratching my withered brains for ways to “frame” my project for possible postgraduate study next year. its due in a few days, and it’s been a really difficult process. see, it has to be “cohesive” and “achievable within the time frame”. and a lot of my activities are pretty disparate and scattered. kinda like different hats i wear when collaborating within different groups. over a few rewrites i’m getting closer, i think, to throwing an umbrella over the things i’m into by thinking about “networks”.

it could work, for (at least?) 2 reasons:
-first, the obvious connection is an extension of the network of uncollectable artists, which i helped start up last year, and which (despite the successful launch of our bubblegum cards) is yet to really take off as a “network” per se, at least not to the utopian extent i would like…
-second, it would give me the chance to immerse myself in some heavier reading about networks of all types, to find out how they work, and why, and what to expect of them. it all ties in with the web course that i’m doing at tafe too, of course…

some very funny network links have popped up from googling about…such as this one by Charles Kadushin called A Short Introduction to Social Networks:

“A and B are friends as indicated by the double arrow. C and D are also friends. E, D and F are a clique. F has a special liking for G but it is not certain that G reciprocates. Now imagine that A is a Jew and B is an Arab and d through G are also Arab. All the letters but G are men. G is a young woman with an important father. Other things being equal, what are the odds that A and B will remain friends?”

(you have to see the accompanying diagram to make sense of it!!)

another article i found which makes me feel more optimistic about my potential project is entitled Applied Network Theory by Jon Udell. He writes:

The research suggests a kind of grand unified theory: networks made out of anything (molecules, nerve cells, electrical grids, transportation systems, web links, human beings) obey the same laws of growth and arrive at similar structures. In every kind of network, a few nodes differentiate. They attract more links, become hubs or routers, and radically shorten the distance between arbitrary endpoints.”

Udell goes on to make connections between social networks, blogs, software development and the film industry…