—

Starting from this:

http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/07/understanding-and-cleaning-the-pharma-hack-on-wordpress.html

- —

1. back up the database and uploads folder, and your theme folder, and scrap everything else (wordpress core files and plugins).

(copy whole wordpress folder to “mywordpressfolder.pharma” for example – you can always retrieve files you need from this folder later)

(backup database via myphpadmin to desktop)

delete original wordpress install folder.

- – -

2. run those SQL commands on the infected database:

delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘class_generic_support’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘widget_generic_support’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘fwp’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘wp_check_hash’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘ftp_credentials’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘rss_7988287cd8f4f531c6b94fbdbc4e1caf’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘rss_d77ee8bfba87fa91cd91469a5ba5abea’;
delete from wp_options where option_name = ‘rss_552afe0001e673901a9f2caebdd3141d’;

(make sure the quotation marks are “raw” quote marks (unformatted, not “smart”)

when inside phpmyadmin, hit the “SQL” tab and cut and paste the above code within the “run SQL query on database”

- – -

3. check the uploads folder for bad files

using the terminal (ssh shell)

cd wp-content
find uploads/ -name *php -delete

- – -

4. reinstall latest wordpress and plugins from scratch

using dreamhost one click installer, put new wordpress install where the old one used to be
point the database to your old database

however, dreamhost thinks you’re making a brand new blog, so gives a new database table prefix to this new install. it also makes the new wp-config.php file point to these new database tables.

so, you need to edit your wp-config file to set the database prefix to be wp_ (ie, the old database tables prefix)

now in phpmyadmin, delete the new database tables which dreamhost created:
(select them and then click “with selected” and then “drop” (in sql, drop means delete table)

- – -

5. Move the cleaned uploads, and theme folders to their normal place

(move them from mywordpress.pharma to the clean mywordpress folder)

in terminal:

cd ~/mydomain.com

mv mywordpress.pharma/wp-content/themes mywordpress/wp-content/

and also:

mv mywordpress.pharma/wp-content/uploads mywordpress/wp-content/

6. check it all works! If so, then move to next step…

7. Delete the mywordpress.pharma folder:

rm -rf ~/mydomain.com/mywordpress.pharma

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.

In an earlier essay, I tried to sketch a framework for collaborative art practice which involves artists being commissioned (by, for example, local councils) to engage with the public in problematic social situations. To some extent, this is “art at the service of the community”. You could argue (if you were feeling particularly cynical) that in this model, artists are employed as aesthetic social workers to create a set of positive public-relations stories.

The artists of the League of Resonance ran into some challenges, when it became evident that each action they planned to carry out needed to be discussed and approved in advance by the City of Melbourne Council (the commissioning body). How can an artist maintain aesthetic autonomy, and operate in an improvisational or intuitive manner, when paperwork of this sort slows things down – when everything needs to be rationalised and authorised? It’s not easy, and this is one of the aspects which needs to be carefully considered when deciding to tackle such a project.

While The League of Resonance occupies one end of the spectrum (funded, council-commissioned, and somewhat beaurocratically-bound), at the other end you might find a myriad of tiny self-devised and un(der)-funded projects which might be characterised as “small interactions between consenting individuals”. There were a range of such projects presented for the 2011 Tiny Stadiums Festival in Sydney. Dan Koop’s local message delivery service, and Amy Spiers’ Meeting Point are fairly typical of the sorts of art, post-Bourriaud, which has popped up all around the world. You could call it “micro-services art”, where art is used as a means of connecting up people within a very local geographical area, and within the run of the everyday.

This conversational-interaction work represents one of the branches shooting off from mid-20th Century avant-garde performance art. Nicolas Bourriaud describes the function of this sort of thing, in his book Relational Aesthetics, as “patiently re-stitch[ing] the social fabric”. “Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the cracks in the social bond,” he says. (See also this essay by the Radical Culture Research Collective, a careful consideration of the politics of Relational Aesthetics).

Bourriaud’s assertion that artists are trying to make a better here-and-now (micro-utopia), rather than overturn the social order (revolution) has proved an empowering idea for many of us, disdainful and weary of the overblown (often empty) radical gestures of “Political Art”. But this scaled-back ambition for the social function of art is possibly what prompts Spiers and Stafford to ask the questions which they hope will be answered by Touchy Feely. Divorced from the need to responsibly account for my actions as an artist in society, is my work reduced to a sentimental gesture, a stylistic shell of social interaction? Relationality as style?

My contention is that relational art is nothing more than a name-box for a particular sort of practice. Just as with other name-boxes for art, like “painting”, “sculpture”, “video art” etc, there will be good examples, there will be bad examples. Those who dismiss the whole relational box as a frivolous “arty party” for an in-crowd (following Hal Foster’s coinage) are just as wrong as those who hold up relationality as the long-awaited democratic antidote to capitalist, market driven object-art. In other words, you have to look at the particularity of each individual project to discover what sorts of social transformations it makes possible, how you can conceive of its aesthetics, and so on.

With relational art, this focus on the particular is easier said than done. This is partly due to its ephemerality (if you weren’t there, how can you make any judgement at all?) and to its inherently experiential nature (even if you were there, your experience will differ from mine). This means that most of the time, we have to take the artist’s word for it (invariably, artist’s statements are about how it was a success, great time was had by all, the photos look terrific, etc). But we have all been participants or audience members in such projects which, although well-meaning, fall short of their micro-topian manifestos.

One way to deal with this gap might be to amass many individual stories from the participants/audience (as well as by the artists) to create a kind of experiential archive document. By studying such a document, you could then begin to compare actual people’s experiences of a work to the claims made by artists and commissioning bodies.

There are various ways to gather these stories. My partner Lizzie Muller interviews folks about their experiences of art. But you don’t need to wait around til somebody sticks a microphone under your nose. Blogs are a pretty good way to generate your own experiential stories. For example, Amy Spiers’ critique of The League of Resonance project provides a participant’s insight – a point of view complementary (if not 100% complimentary) to the League’s own accounts of the project. And her earlier article documenting her experience of works by The Vorticist and Charlie Sofo (see page 25 of UN Magazine issue 4.2) was a valuable contribution too.

When I first encountered a re-do of Allan Kaprow’s Push and Pull, in New York in 2007, I was moved to document my experience of it in some detail. Two years later, this led to a full-blown, hyper-documented version in Sydney (in collaboration with Nick Keys and Astrid L’Orange).

I’ll be interested to hear what new questions emerge from Touchy Feely. My own query, at the moment, lies with the first of Spiers and Stafford’s points – on instrumentality. What methods of artmaking have been successful in enabling artists to connect with, and contribute to, movements of social transformation without being entirely consumed (or seduced) by the rhetoric of “social utility”?

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…

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.

George woulda LOVED the internet.

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

Yeomans Project, with Ian Milliss

[...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.

Artists have worked in this way before. In the 1970s, conceptual and performance artists pushed against the constraints of gallery and theatre architecture, creating situations which paralleled everyday life, or wove themselves within it. In the late 1990s, Nicolas Bourriaud described the rise of “relational” art practices which utilise “meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people” as the material and medium (and not just the byproduct) of art. ((Bourriaud, N., 2002, Relational Aesthetics, Les presses du réel, Dijon, p.27)) Others prefer the terms “new genre public art”, “dialogical art” and “collaborative artistic praxis” for projects which attempt to operate within, or create new versions of, the public sphere. ((“New genre public art”: Lacy, S., 1995, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Bay Press, Seattle; “dialogical art”: Kester, G., 2004, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles; “collaborative artistic praxis”: Kwon, M., One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002.)) Politically progressive artists and institutions are often drawn to such approaches, as they seem to offer a softer alternative to the authoritarian tradition of heavy-object public “plop” art. For those interested in shifting art’s role towards ethical social transformation (rather than merely operating as a realm of high cultural prestige-enhancement) this new set of “socially engaged” aesthetic processes might suggest a grassroots, democratic way of intervening in the life of a city.

It’s perhaps such quasi-utopian ideals that have emboldened the City of Melbourne to initiate this strange project on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets. For this project the Arts and Participation program have departed from a more traditional method of arms length ‘commissioning’ and explored an approach where the production of the work is a collaborative exchange between the artists, the site and the public institution. The city council should be congratulated for taking this risk, when they could easily have chosen a more conventional approach with predictable outcomes. In speculative endeavours like the League’s, the unknown is never far away. But for a council-sized organisation, risks need to be mitigated; plans known in advance; outcomes predicted. Progressive policy and artistic ideals must be balanced with a responsibility to produce safe, quality projects within legislative requirements. This complex interplay of freedoms and restraints often characterises public projects as they flow along. How should such dilemmas be navigated?

In this essay, I’d like to describe, as best I understand it, the way that a project like this unfolds over time. The League’s processes stand as a case study in situated, process-based art – and since my motivation is to encourage councils and other organisations to continue commissioning such work, I want to try and sketch out the methods which they have used, and the underlying rationale for working in such a way. I will attempt to get at some of the challenges that this way of working throws up – including the thorny questions of aesthetic autonomy, and the evaluation of outcomes. I hope that this methodological inspection of the processes of the League of Resonance will help outline the beginnings of a framework so that artists and commissioning bodies might have a more nuanced understanding of each other in future collaborations.

Because of the complexity of the process, I’ve tried to lay it out in a diagram, which begins long before the project is initiated, and ends… well, perhaps never. Here’s the basic sequence: First, a “problem situation” is defined by the city council. In this case, it’s the particular piece of land at the junction of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets. The site’s “problems” include its perceived visual unattractiveness, as well as an unacceptably high number of pedestrian accidents and nocturnal anti-social activity, largely due to excess alcohol consumption. (The members of the League, putting this into their own terms, describe it as the site’s “bad vibes”). The location is thus earmarked for further study. Funding is secured, and diverse approaches are mooted. These include a traffic survey (undertaken by Vic Roads); ethnographic research to discover the prevailing uses and perceptions of the site; and a proposal to develop an art project. The City of Melbourne’s Art and Participation Program argues that an artistic, collaborative approach might offer a depth of research not available to the more conventional methods described above.

The process of engaging artists takes some time. Through a limited ‘expression of interest’ process, a collection of project proposals is reviewed and one is selected in keeping with a published set of evaluation criteria. The Art and Participation Program “values excellence and innovation in art making” and “high artistic integrity”. However, criteria for evaluating excellence, innovation and integrity are difficult to explicitly describe — I will return to these issues later on. The brief accompanying the call for expressions of interest is quite complex: “The City of Melbourne’s Art and Participation Program uses art to engage with communities and influence the development of the city’s culture.” It involves appointing artists “as an alternative method for Council to engage with the city at night and explore and interpret perceptions and realities of the night experience.” These statements evoke the instrumental use of art as a tool of social change, and from an artistic point of view, this raises doubts about the potential ‘autonomy’ of any resulting project.

The initial proposal that the Arts and Participation Program selected for the intersection was based around an interactive sound installation that later evolved into The League of Resonance. The project was selected on the strength of its proposal to “develop and deliver a work that is informed by the community and stakeholders of the site […] activating the space with positivity, romance and humour”. How will it do this? Precisely by the three core members of the League of Resonance spending many long hours on site, engaging in chance encounters with passersby, residents and workers, and allowing whatever happens to evolve from these encounters. The sorts of social skills which are deployed in this method of relational art include wit, patience, and conversation, accompanied by the careful crafting of body language and attentive listening. In the case of Jess Olivieri, Sarah Rodigari, and Jason Maling, such competencies have been acquired over many years of performative art practice. Appropriate to the carrying out of the project brief, these now take the place of more traditional artmaking methods such as painting and drawing.

By the time the artists actually begin work on site, many months have passed in negotiations with council. One challenge, when contracting a process-based artwork, is in the clear representation of the aims of all parties involved. A ‘contract’ provides a framework for the negotiations, and attempts to mediate a common ground between expectations, adaptability and outcomes. From the council’s perspective, the contract needs to reflect its aspirations, and ensure that the resources being provided are allocated and utilised in line with its institutional obligations. The artists, for their part, must ensure that the contract reflects a realistic degree of creative ‘capacity’ or room to move – however, the nature of responsive art practices can make it impossible to guarantee specific outcomes. The ‘work’ has yet to reveal itself, and at the contract stage it is often only a set of proposed strategies. The way that the Art and Participation Program have chosen to work in this case, is by collaborating with the artists, rather than operating at arm’s length. This unique contractual stipulation does not mean that each activity the League wishes to incorporate into the project needs to be discussed and approved in advance – but nor does it mean that the council simply rubber-stamps every idea the League proposes. The process is more difficult – working towards shared goals through discussion and negotiation. While this is a laudable approach, consensus is by no means a guaranteed outcome – and for the artists, this deliberative process can be a challenge to long-held ideas about “creative autonomy”.

Once on site, how do the artists work? First, an initial idea (perhaps generated by a preliminary visit) is tentatively tried out. The social and material “field” within which the idea is executed includes at least three entities: the area’s local folks; the council as project stakeholders; and of course the geographical location itself. ((The field in which the project emerges breaks down into many more entities. For example, the local population cannot be so easily grouped into one single category – nor can the council, which consists of many employees and departments, each with its own agenda and interests. The artists themselves constitute a part of the field – increasingly so as the project evolves.)) The impact of this first attempt is noticed, discussed amongst the artists, and reported back to council. Further ideas arise as a result of the situation feeding back into itself, and as the artists reflect upon what has occurred. New ideas for actions are then attempted within the field (which has now shifted as a result of the first action) … and so the process goes. It is emergent, in the sense that the overall “shape” of the project cannot be known in advance, and only becomes evident after many iterations of this process. ((My characterisation of this spiralling feedback system is indebted to the influential research of Donald Schön. In particular, Schön’s observations on “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action” offer a useful model for understanding the (usually unacknowledged) process of learning during collaborative problem-solving. See Schön, D., 1983, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Temple Smith, London.))

What, then, could be the eventual shape that the project takes? At the very least, what emerges is a changed perspective of the original problem situation. The “bad vibes” of the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders are seen in a new light, (or, to use the language of the League of Resonance, these vibes are heard and felt in a new way.) Whatever this new perspective might be (and at the time of writing, the project is still too much in progress to know) it is only intelligible by understanding the processes that have gone into its generation. In other words, the “findings” of the project cannot be separated from its idiosyncratic “research methods”.

For this reason, I want to suggest that, as indicated by my diagram, the “project” does not begin at the finalising of the contract, but rather, at the very origins of the council’s identification of the problem situation. Establishing the artistic brief includes liasing and fostering internal relationships with many key departments. The list of stakeholders is not limited to artists, local residents and workers. The keen involvement of the council and its employees at every stage in the decision making and execution of the project must be acknowledged. In this way, the project can be seen to be not only an investigation of the “vibes” on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders, but also, crucially, an exploration of the process of bureaucratic negotiation between artists and council. This, I believe, has not been sufficiently foregrounded in the project so far – at least insofar as it has been presented to the public. As Miwon Kwon argues of such projects in her book One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity:

[W]ithin the community-based art context, the interaction between an artist and a given community group is not based on a direct, unmediated relationship. Instead it is circumscribed within a more complex network of motivations, expectations and projections among all involved. […] critiques of community artists need to be qualified by the recognition of the central role that institutions and exhibition programs play not only in delimiting the identities of those involved, but in determining the nature of the collaborative relationship between them. Moreover, all these identities – artist, curator, institution and community group – are in the process of continuous negotiation. At the very least, their respective roles and actions need to be understood in relation to one another. ((Kwon, op. cit., pp.141-142.))

If it’s true that the “behind-the-scenes” collaboration with the council forms a large part of the project, then I could perhaps expand the League’s list of artistic competencies to include: the ability to communicate at a bureaucratic or “professional” level; the negotiation of satisfactory deals, and the focus of mind to read and write lengthy contracts. As I’ve already suggested, such a multi-headed approach to artmaking – art by committee, if you like – throws into doubt the much prized romantic idea that artists are creative practitioners who operate with unfettered “freedom”.

Is this a problem? Only if the myth of unmediated artistic autonomy is perpetuated in relation to the activities being carried out in the streets, and in the City of Melbourne offices – and only if these actual methods of production are swept under the carpet. To me this obfuscation would represent a significant missed opportunity. For the artists, the project has provided the chance to participate, at a high level, in the complex processes of deliberative decision-making that our system of representational democracy has yet to exceed. For employees of the council, collaborating with artists offers the means to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of its own processes – to really feel the friction that is generated when spontaneous ideas and legal regulations rub against each other. These challenges are not irritations or blockages to the process of artmaking – they are a vital part of it.

The question of evaluation remains. How can we judge the success of such a project? I’ve come up with four suggestions, but there are bound to be many others:

First, by the quality of experiences generated near the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets. Are they delightful? Horrid? Irksome? Do they shift my consciousness of the ordinary? And how can I know the answer to these questions, except via direct experience?

Second, via the documents left behind (or fabricated) from these experiences. Do they evoke (what we imagine to be) the “vibe” of the original project? Do they have aesthetic (formal, material) qualities in their own right which make them an integral part of the project? Do they bring the project to life again, even long after (or far away from) where it began?

Third, we might judge the quality of the project by the transformations it has made “in the field”. What sorts of new relationships have been formed? What new habits created? Do locals, artists and council employees have a new perspective on the original problem situation?

Finally, from the point of view of relational art practices, I think it’s important to appraise the project based on the potential, upon reflection, for a deeper understanding of the processes essential to the work itself. Do artists, council employees and locals have a new grasp on how these kinds of projects operate? Can they identify the anatomy of interaction which goes into its making? How would the players embark on another, similar venture in the future? In other words: what has been learned from this experience?

* * *

Lucas Ihlein is an artist who has for over a decade initiated and collaborated in socially engaged art projects. His Ph.D, entitled Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art, deals with the ethics and aesthetics of locally-situated relational art practice. For his research in this area, he was awarded the 2010 Alfred Deakin Medal for best doctoral thesis in the humanities, by Deakin University, Melbourne. He lives in Sydney and lectures in Media Arts at the University of Wollongong.

For those wishing to explore this subject further, related texts by Ihlein include: “Complexity, Aesthetics and Gentrification: The Redfern/Waterloo Tour of Beauty”, in There Goes The Neighbourhood, edited by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg, You are Here, Sydney, 2009; and “Public Art as Public Conversations”, in Harmonic Tremors: Aesthetic Interventions in the Public Sphere, edited by Sarah Rainbird, Gasworks, Melbourne, 2009.

I’ve just begun a new project, in collaboration with my keen Media Arts 101 students from University of Wollongong.
It’s over here.

It will run from today til May 15, 2011. Enjoy it!

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 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.