These grants support artists, groups and organisations investigating experimental arts.

It is an open grant category for any stage of your experimental arts activity that meets the selection criteria.

Some examples of what you might apply for include investigating new emerging and experimental arts processes in a creative arts lab or through workshops; initiating innovative creative collaborations and partnerships; or creating and/or presenting new and experimental art work.

To keep this program as open as possible, Inter-Arts will consider any proposal from artists proposing to explore emerging or experimental arts.

Two questions:

1. what the hell is “experimental art”?
2. are there any examples of art which are not experimental?

…if the answer to question 2 is NO, then what is the need for this grant category?
If all art is inherently experimental, then surely the existing categories of art funding would already adequately support the experimental.

Donald Brook, bless him, has been thinking about this stuff since at least the early 1970s, when he was involved in collaboratively setting up the Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) in Adelaide.

In a conference a few years ago at the National Institute for Experimental Art (NIEA), Brook presented a cogent paper which cut to the heart of this strange idea. I’m going to quote a chunk of his paper below (you can download the whole thing here).

‘Experiment’ has two senses
[...] the word ‘experiment’ [...] unlike the word ‘evolution’—most definitely has two senses.

The more potent of them is, on the face of it, the less reputable. It is the sense in which the gesturing experimenter does not have the slightest idea what to expect, even within a range of probabilities. This is the sense of ‘experiment’ in which, as an eager child, I took my first chemistry set into the garage to perform experiments. There was an instruction book explaining the familiar memes of chemistry, but I was too impatient to read it. I simply added some blue crystals to a yellowish fluid that I extracted from a bottle with a warning label. Nothing much happened. But it might have done. I might have discovered how to make a more terrible smell or a bigger bang than I could have generated by exercising any of the familiar memes of chemistry.

This is the sense of ‘experiment’ in which the experimenter lurches optimistically around in a limbo of ignorance. It is the sense in which, in the course of doing something one does know how to do, such as boiling urine, one discovers how to do something that one did not know how to do. This malodorous example is of course drawn from Joseph Wright’s wonderful picture, The Alchemist in search of the Philosopher’s stone Discovers Phosphorus (1771). Following this epiphany alchemists everywhere became capable of making phosphorus. A new meme had emerged.

The other sense of the word ‘experiment,’ to which science has recently given more respectability, is different. This is the sense in which an experimenter purposefully deploys familiar sets of memes with the expectation of generating results that will falsify (or fail to falsify) some theory or hypothesis. I apologise to those philosophers of science who have moved on since Popper, and say no more about this because it is at least obvious that the mindset of the scientist, considered as a purposeful scientific-theory-maker, is no different from that of the artist considered as a purposeful work-of-art-maker. They both know very well how to set about making recognisable items of their respective cultural kinds.

‘Experimental art’ is a tautology
So, drawing several of these threads together, I am saying that when we use the word ‘experiment’ in its most primitive and potent sense, the expression ‘experimental art’ is a tautology. In the sense of ‘experiment’ in which the outcome of the behaviour is not anticipated, art cannot but be experimental. To say that a meme is new is to say that a behaviour or set of behaviours has unexpectedly acquired a regularly useful purpose. It has become an action that is now regularly imitable, not only by its discoverer but also by other people. Our collective powers have been extended.

[...]

The expression ‘experimental art’ does not describe a distinctive sort of art, contrasting with other sorts of art. In the relevant sense of ‘experimental’ (and using the relevant word ‘art’) there is no other sort of art.

As I understand it, Brook is arguing that experimentation in art involves a kind of muddling along with a sense of open-ness to outcome, rather than a replication of the scientific method of hypothesis – action – results – conclusion. Because I’m not a scientist (and neither, admits Brook, is he), I don’t know whether this caricature of scientific process is still relevant. Either way, the point seems to be that the ability to articulate clear goals is not a pre-requisite for experimentation.

Just a few days ago, Brook wrote an obituary for his good friend, the artist Bert Flugelman which reiterates this idea:

What animated Flugelman was that sense of the word “experimental” in which experiments are taken not as purposeful exercises of skill with statable goals. It is the sense in which experiments are taken by stumbling forward optimistically, hoping for those unpredictable and incoercible illuminations that come only occasionally.

This is Brook’s distinction – although “art” by definition is experimental, not all “works of art” are produced through this form of experimentation. In fact, most works of art are carried out as “purposeful exercises of skill with statable goals.” However, sometimes (rarely, perhaps), what emerges from experimentation is a new meme which is then (in retrospect) recognised by the artworld as a “work of art”.

If we return to the image of the young Brook and his chemistry set, blithely adding two chemicals together to see what would happen, a question arises… We cannot all start from a position of innocence and not-knowing, all the time. Like it or not, as life goes on, we learn things. We reflect on our past experiences, which leads us to produce hypotheses about what might happen in different circumstances. We cannot always blunder around blindly. We do develop a sense of the range of possible outcomes resulting from our actions.

Does this mean it gets harder to make art as time goes on?

Ok, so I want to begin by saying, I have no idea what the term “Dubstep Pigeons” could even mean.

A quick google shows that it’s the name of a live music act in northern England. I imagine that band is probably really good (and I love their logo), but apart from the “music” part, they don’t really have anything to do with this project.

It was Stacey [media arts student 2012] who came up with this term “Dubstep Pigeons” to describe the collaborative “pigeon project” which I’ve been thinking about for over a year now, and which I’ve been muttering about to anyone who will listen, and which I’ve been looking for an opportunity to carry out. But as I say, its relationship to the respected Dubstep flavour of dance music may only be coincidental…

In the blog entry which follows, I’ll outline my vision for the project. Maybe some of you want to get involved as part of your Major Project for semester 1.

It all began when we were working on the project “What Lies Beneath” in MEDA101 last year. It involved audio field recordings from the Port Kembla Steelworks, which were then transformed through editing software into digital alarm clock soundtracks.

The best student audio works from that assignment were selected to be included on an old skool LP record, which is right now in the process of being mastered, and which we’ll launch later in 2012.

At the time, I was listening, incessantly, to an album of great genius, Pet Sounds, by the Beach Boys.

Here’s a pic of those whacky Beach Boys interacting with some pet goats for their album cover shoot:

Over at http://petsounds.com, I found a great description of the album:

Recorded and released in 1966, not long after the sunny, textural experiments of California Girls, Pet Sounds, aside from its importance as Brian Wilson’s evolutionary compositional masterpiece, was the first rock record that can be considered a “concept album”; from first cut to last we were treated to an intense, linear personal vision of the vagaries of a love affair and the painful, introverted anxieties that are the wrenching precipitates of the unstable chemistry of any love relationship.

This trenchant cycle of love songs has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn’t change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain. It sure as hell changed its creator, Brian, who by 1966 had been cruising along at the forefront of American popular music for four years, doling out a constant river of hit songs and producing that tough yet mellifluous sound that was the only intelligent innovation in pop music between Chuck Berry and the Beatles.

It occurred to me that the formal structure of a piece of experimental sound (like what the students were working on for What Lies Beneath) had a lot in common with a good pop song:
Beginning→middle→end.
Introduction→complication→conclusion.
Gentle entrance→intensification→grand exit.
Convincingly making a whole new world within 2-3 minutes, and then leaving it behind.

That sort of thing.

Simultaneously, and perhaps serendipitously, while travelling on a train from Wollongong, I found a set of colour photocopies showing pigeons nosing around in their coops. Somebody had left them on the train seat. I did some (but not much) research and discovered that the Illawara Homing Pigeon Society is quite active in the region.

The photocopies I found looked a bit like this:

And so the idea emerged to combine the practice of audio field recording (of these pigeons!) with experimental editing, and with intensive research into the form of the pop song.

Here’s how it would work:

The project would start with a full listen-through (on good speakers etc) of the Pet Sounds album. Ideally this would happen in a room where we could really concentrate, relax our bodies, not be distracted etc.

This would be followed up by each student having a digital copy of the album to take home, and listen to on good headphones, on the bus, train, walking etc. To really get Pet Sounds under their skins.

Each student would be allocated one song from the album, as “their” song. There were 13 songs on the original album, so ideally 13 students would get involved. If there are fewer than 13 students, then each student might adopt more than one song. Besides listening to the whole album, the student would REALLY study his/her adopted song(s) in great detail. This may involve producing diagrams showing volume, tune, narrative, instruments used, flow, intensity, emotional tone, etc, so that the student is fully familiar with the anatomy of the song.

Meanwhile… we all go on an excursion to one of the coops maintained by a local enthusiast member of the Homing Pigeon Society. Field recordings are made of the birds, the environment, their keepers etc. These field recordings form the basis of the work-to-be. Other things may emerge in the process (carrier pigeons as message-delivery systems etc) which may inform the direction of the work.

Using the field recordings, each student “reconstitutes” their adopted song from Pet Sounds. The new version does not have to “sound like” the old version. Rather, it should follow or borrow the formal structure of the original, to make a brand new work from the pigeon recordings. The result will sit somewhere between experimental sound art and pop song.

A limited array of other field recordings will be permitted – recordings of “pet sounds” only (ie, animals!).

After an intensive period of development and collaborative critique, the new songs will be re-assembled into the original order, and we will have another listening session.

We will have re-created the entire Pet Sounds album anew.

If it’s good enough, we’d try to put it out as a CD or LP, or at the very least as an iTunes album.

In 2012, together with m’colleague Brogan Bunt, I had the pleasure of creating and teaching a new subject at UOW called “Social Intersections“:

This subject examines how creative practice can engage with social forms and processes.
The aim is to encourage conceptually informed, interdisciplinary practice that reflects upon dimensions of social space and history. Students gain a critical understanding of relevant traditions of creative practice and develop individual and collaborative projects that reconsider the relationship between art and society.

The students did some really interesting projects and we had a bunch of excellent discussions in class about this “new” form of art, which engages with social relations as a material. We had good experiences with getting the students to use blogging to track their own progress throughout the semester.

I’m in the process of archiving the class blog, and clearing the decks so that in 2013, our new batch of students can start filling it up with their work.

I figured that some of the lecture notes from the subject might be more widely useful, so I’m cross-posting them on this here blog. Below I have cut and pasted an entry I wrote under the notional title of “Modes of Engagement”, which was intended to provide a cross-section (albeit incomplete) of ways in which artists might engage with the world, by acting “as” practitioners of other (non-art) disciplines…

- – -

My lecture will focus on a number of modes which might each be introduced by the words:

“THE ARTIST AS …”

For each mode, I’ll give an example or two, and discuss briefly how it has played out in particular situations. The intention here is to give you a broad range of approaches that you might consider adopting, adapting, critiquing, mixing, matching and mashing in your own practice.

(Standard disclaimer: the list is not exhaustive; the category-modes are mutable, arbitrary, overlapping etc; the examples given are convenient and not intended to be canonical; the analysis is necessarily shallow; and so on. In other words, caveat emptor!)

1. The Artist as Special Loner or Social Outsider

In this mode, “The artist” sees him/herself as a special category separate from mainstream society, and superior to it. The artist toils in private, or within a small community of similar outsiders. He is “poorly socialised” in terms of functioning as a normal citizen. (Perhaps it could be called a mode of “disengagement”, or in extreme cases, even misanthropy).

[Deeply lonely at the time [1888], Van Gogh often visited the prostitutes at a brothel on Rue du Bout d’Aeles as his single emotional and sensuous point of contact with other people.]

This mode is partly mythologised through popular imagery of the artist starving in a garrett.

Variants:

• The artist as an outsider to the artworld itself: ie, “outsider artists“, who are, typically, untrained and unaware of the required methods of maneuvering within the artworld;
• The un-artist (Kaprow) – but this is really a counter-variant, as Kaprow argued for “un-arting” one’s practice in order to regain continuity with everyday life, rather than separation from society;

2. The Artist as Social Critic

In this mode, the artist is unsatisfied with being a content provider within a given system (the art world, his/her local community, society in general, etc), and would prefer to critique the system itself. The artwork produced by this mode of artist attempts to change the status quo. In this mode, the artist sees him/herself as part of society, but simultaneously set apart from other citizens by this capacity for critique.

In one variant, The Artist as Aesthetic Philosopher is not content to leave the task of aesthetic analysis to critics. S/he critiques the systems of communication and distribution within the artworld, by making art. This can be seen in many works of Conceptual Art from the 1960s and 1970s. Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965, for instance is a classic of the genre:

A much cited example of art as social critique is Hans Haacke’s “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971″, which uses art to trace the intersections between the art world and the world of power and property in New York. This is an early example of what has been called “institutional critique“:

Variant:

3. The Artist as Citizen

In opposition to the notion of Artist as Special Loner, the Artist as Citizen sees his/her work as continuous with the work of fellow citizens. Artists, in this instance, do not feel that they deserve special treatment, and do not aspire to be discovered at some unspecified time in the future when society (perhaps) “catches up” to their advanced ideas. Rather, the artist working in this mode desires to be a contributing member of society in the here and now.

In The Artist as Citizen, Linda Frye Burnham writes:

We have often said that art is essential to the life of the community, and if we’re right, then every community ought to have its own artist; a professional who is called on when the town plan is being laid or revised, who consults on celebrations and events of all kinds, as essential to the town as the plumber and the schoolteacher and the mayor.

Burnham gives the example of David Harding, who has practiced as a “town artist” for many years in the UK, participating as an employee of the town council in its planning division. Some of his works from the 1970s seem to be templates for participatory community art projects carried out around the world in the decades to follow:

[Children cementing their tiles to a wall. 1970]

['Path Poem', David Harding with Alan Bold. 1976]

Another example is Brian Miller, Town Artist of Cumbernauld:

[Miller was] employed in the department of town architecture and planning, effectively a civil servant with all the standard terms of contract and retirement at the age of sixty-five. His position within this department meant that he became involved in the early discussions about how to shape the new town.

More recently, the notion of the artist as citizen has been taken up more loosely, in broad social movements where the artist is not an employee of the state, but rather participates in social change actions.

Variants:

• An interesting Aussie variant of the Artist as Citizen is The Artist as Family, a group working in rural Victoria, creating projects as a family unit. Here’s an image from their project Food Forest (Sydney, 2010-onwards):

  

• The work of The Artist as Citizen often overlaps with the mode of The Artist as Activist (see below);

4. The Artist as Activist

In this mode, the artist aligns him/herself with social activists working in “the real world”. Not content to produce work consisting of social critique, within the bounds of the art world, this mode of artist ventures forth to join activists at large in social causes.

In Australia, an example of this is the Art and Working Life programme, begun in Australia in the late 1970s. Artists Ian Burn and Ian Milliss argued that artists should work within union movements – they should be seen as aesthetic workers within the movement – rather than art being a luxury activity which sits apart from class struggle.

The continuing threat of rising unemployment, the fight to maintain real wage levels and the quality of working conditions, the defence of the industrial rights of working people, the indiscriminate introduction of new technology and its impact on jobs and the economy, the erosion of welfare levels and services . . . these are issues absorbing the energies of trade unionists and the Art and Working Life programme can and should contribute to those struggles.

Artist Birgitte Hansen created numerous gorgeous banners for the Australian union movement (this one from 1983):

Clearly there is a risk that, in this way, art becomes “merely utilitarian or functional” – but doesn’t art always have a social function (even if it is not immediately evident)? This is a discussion worth having!

There are countless examples of artists working as activists, individually (rather than as part of a group), within their practice. Here are two:

Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote a manifesto in 1969 entitled Maintenance Art – her aim was to draw attention to the crucial role of domestic activities (cooking, cleaning and child-rearing) in the functioning of society. Her performances during this period often involved scrubbing or cleaning museums:

[Mierle Laderman Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Performance Series”, 1973-74]

Adrien Piper:

“Piper, a light-skinned African-American woman, had these cards printed to offer to individuals who made assumptions about her identity. One was given to individuals who, assuming she was white, did not hesitate to make racist remarks about Blacks in her presence. The other card was to be given to individuals who assumed that she was sexually available because she was unaccompanied.” (quote from here).

Variants:

• Protest Art;
• The Artist as Troublemaker;
• The Artist as Prankster;
• The Artist as Social Worker;
• The artist as Nature’s Social Worker;
• The Artist as Peacemaker;
• The Artist as Anti-Artist;
• The Artist as Anti-Anti-Artist;
• The Un-Artist;
• The Artist as Teacher / Shaman;

5. The Artist as Ethnographer

Ethnography is a discipline in the social sciences which (to paraphrase wikipedia) “studies people, ethnic groups and other ethnic formations, their ethnogenesis, composition, resettlement, social welfare characteristics, as well as their material and spiritual culture.”

So if you’re an artist wanting to explore social relations, ethnography and its methods (participant observation, field notes, interviews, surveys, etc) might seem be a good model to follow.

One artist who has been working within specific communities for many years is Stephen Willats. The following images are from his West London Social Resource Project, 1972:

Art theorist Hal Foster identified and critiqued this mode in his 1996 essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?“. For Foster, artists who work as pseudo ethnographers may have positive intentions vis-a-vis the communities they work within, but there are ethical risks involved in the process. He writes:

…the quasi-anthropological artist today may seek to work with sited communities with the best motives of political engagement and institutional transgression, only in part to have this work recoded by its sponsors as social outreach, economic development, public relations… or art.

[...and also...]

Consider this scenario, a caricature, I admit. An artist is contacted by a curator about a site-specific work. He or she is flown into town in order to engage the community targeted for collaboration by the institution. However, there is little time or money for much interaction with the community(which tends to be constructed as readymade for representation). Nevertheless, a project is designed, and an installation in the museum and/or a work in the community follows. Few of the principles of the ethnographic participant-observer are observed, let alone critiqued. And despite the best intentions of the artist, only limited engagement of the sited other is effected. Almost naturally the focus wanders from collaborative investigation to “ethnographic self-fashioning,” in which the artist is not decentered so much as the other is fashioned in artistic guise.

An important question for artists working in this mode to consider is, what unique properties/methods do they bring to the world of “social studies” as artists?

variants:

• The Artist as Documentary Maker;
• The Artist as Auto-Ethnographer;
• Artist as Archaeologist;
• The Artist as Historian / Archivist / Researcher;
• The Artist as Ecologist;

6. The Artist as Artist.

Huh? What could that possibly be?

[over and out, for now...]
-Lucas

Details are here.

—

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.