Hello Stranger

Workshop with Kio Stark.

Mission:

• Approach a stranger.
• Ask if they will help you with a project and answer a question on camera.
• Ask them what they are afraid of.
• [interact]

Responses:

(Of course the most intimate and revealing was off-camera.)

What are you afraid of? #1 from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Collated results from all of the stranger-finders

Resonances:

• City as potential interactions and potential for interactions.
• Rules are unwritten …but can be bent.
• Interactions with strangers as a mechanism for connecting to place.
• Strangers are good for your brain. New people; new ideas.
• The importance of interesting things (points for conversation) happening in public places.
• The importance of providing spaces for strangers to interact.
• How the rules are relaxed in transitional spaces (train stations, elevators etc).
• The unexpected works!
• The value of conversation.
• The value of making interactions where there was none before.

Questions:

• How does it change things if we go about the city knowing we are somebody else’s stranger-in-waiting?
• Can we lower the barrier to interesting interactions?
• What would a signalling system look like to enable others to see if we were open to new encounters or not. (update 03/10/2011: This question’s been bugging me as being too obvious, so I’d like to use it as a starting point Signtific style to get somewhere else.)
• Thinking there’s an empathy barrier analogous to an enthalpy barrier. What novel catalysts can we provide to lower the barrier?

The relationship between activation energy (Ea) and enthalpy of formation (ΔH) with and without a catalyst, plotted against the reaction coordinate. The highest energy position (peak position) represents the transition state. With the catalyst, the energy required to enter transition state decreases, thereby decreasing the energy required to initiate the reaction

~~~

After the workshop I stopped to help a man measure a bit of sidewalk that was longer than his tape measure.

Open Hardware Summit

Selected extracts from my notes from the Open Hardware Summit that could just have easily have come from the Guggenheim Lab workshop the day before.

• Change is painful.
• Expect resistance.
• Mistakes will get institutionalised.
• Even your friends might become a competitor.
• Things will get used differently to how you intended.
• Ideas spread and change.
• Interesting things happen at the edges, with systems that are porous and when you move between different fields.
• What you think of as being possible is dictated by your past experience.
• As time progresses, so should your tools.
• People will use the technology in ways you cannot predict, so you need to build it to be open and flexible.

When the earthworm hits, the consequences are massive

On my first day in New York I was wandering around Downtown when I happened to catch a glimpse of a flyer taped to a lamp post. Something about it made me stop, walk back a few paces and take a closer look. I didn’t take that close a look: seeing the words “Guggenheim”, “lab” and something to do with your local area was enough to make sure I Googled it when I got back home that evening.

Glad I did.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Led by international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents in the areas of urbanism, architecture, art, design, science, technology, education, and sustainability, the Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Its goal is the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions for city life.http://www.bmwguggenheimlab.org

My kind of people!

I’m signed up for various things on the programme of events and workshops with the first of them having been today: Mapping Movements and Power.

First Park | Houston at 2nd Ave

lab + urban

The lab is situated in a small city park. Well, the cafe and the loos are; the main structure itself slots into the gap where I assume a building once stood, so that the gaffiti’ed outer walls of the two remaining buildings stood either side form part of the walls of the lab.

It felt good to be in this void space so close to large, busy roads but reclaimed for discussion, debate and thinking.

And we did a lot of thinking this afternoon.

50 brains thinking about movement and power

After an introduction to the migrant earthworm – stowaways from Europe transported in the ballast of ships – four groups were each given a task. Not the usual starting point, but one to make us “start somewhere else to get somewhere else”.

• What makes a species invasive?
• How does your identity produce rights?
• Describe 3 basic types of movement.
• What should the setting of democracy look like? (ie the space it should happen in)

I was in the first group and it turns out that trying to define what an invasive species is is quite tricky! After chewing over the semantics and accompanying baggage of negative and/or conquering connotations, my understanding of a possible definition of an invasive species got distilled down to something like “agents of change (within a specific temporal and spatial frame) that transform one equilibrium to another”.

Teenage fish with legs. Just hanging out. Trying to survive with the body it has.

This definition and our other initial thoughts were then to be challenged as we applied them to fish with legs and rampant zebra mussels.

I’m not going to try and reproduce those lines of thought here, just note down a few things that seemed to resonate.

A teenage fish with legs leaves fish world, enters land world and radically changes both worlds as a result.

When tools developed for one situation (ie for being a better fish in water) are applied to a new environment (ie land), new possibilities open up. When tools are applied to a new system they can induce radical changes, rather than the changes-by-degrees they can affect in their originating system.

You don’t know you are catalysing the change of worlds when you do it.

We can’t see the future beyond the change.

Equilibrium is an illusion – there is no fixed state of “before” that we can go back to.

When the change comes about, not only can you not foresee your wants and needs in the new world, but your measures of value will be out-dated too.

Zones of transition are where the evolution happens. Should we be preserving the forest fringes in order to preserve the sites where innovation happens? Can we take that a step further and promote conditions for forest fringes to form?

When the earthworm hits, the consequences are massive.

Start spreadin’ the news*…

This blog post is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England

I’ve been sucessful in my Grants for the Arts application for funding to support a programme of professional development activities: a research trip to New York; a visit to V2_ in Rotterdam; Interesting Things I Can’t Talk About Yet in Den Haag; and attendance at Maker Faire UK and Future Everything.

Other than doing the official announcement, I also want to thank everyone who was kind enough to spare some time to contribute a testimonial back when I was preparing the application – they were all very much appreciated on a number of different levels. Thank you!

* it’s the first line of a quite famous song rather than an actual request

Circuit Bending 101: the SoundNetwork edition

It’s with great pleasure that I’m now able to announce the third in the series of Circuit Bending 101 workshops.

11-6 on Saturday 9th of July.

This time, with much support from Adrian McEwen, Cheapjack and SoundNetwork, the bleepy noises will be emanating from the STATIC Trading Co. studios in Liverpool.

A dozen people, three projects to introduce you to the basics of circuit bending, all the tools and components you’ll need, a possible guest furby and definite cake. SoundNetwork have been kind enough to subsidise the ticket price, so all this for only £25. Quite frankly, that’s a bargain!

Full details are over on the Eventbrite page. And to whet your appetite there’s a bunch of photos and videos from the last workshop in this Flickr Set.

Tickets will be available from 11am next Friday (24th of June).

Modes of Practice in [and out of] an Age of Austerity

Yesterday I went up to Stoke-on-Trent to take part in the Modes of Practice in an Age of Austerity event being run by New Generation Space, where 20 or so artists of different types met and discussed the issues important to them.

SURVIVAL

I was particularly attracted by the prospect of some interesting brain fodder from artists Emily Speed (‘Getting Paid’) and Rich White (“how a practitioner whose work is not saleable in the traditional sense survives in these difficult times”) as well as a chance to check out The Exchange, which seems to have been popping up on my radar a bit recently. Really though, it’s always good to get the chance to find out about the nuts and bolts of how others function as artists, so it was nice to just be in a room with other people talking about this sort of stuff and galvanising my own practice.

Rich's checklist for deciding what opportunities to pursue

The presentations from Emily and Rich were both very thought-provoking – naturally there were references to money, but there were also strong themes around questions of when we should say no to offered opportunities and assessing different types of value.

The five prompts for discussion

After the presentations we split up into smaller groups and spent some time responding to prompts for sharing our thoughts and experiences:

• What impact have the cuts had on your practice or the practice of other artists you know?
• What are your main concerns for the coming years?
• Have you started to employ any strategies for surviving the cuts, and how could artists help and support each other during these difficult times?
• What are the best and worst traits in an artist?

The Wall

Our fifth prompt was to decide on five rules to ensure good practice. These were then pooled and voted on until we had a mini manifesto of sorts.

Participants vote for the items they think are most important

I didn’t make a copy of the final list per se, although it was interesting to note that the rules all seemed to me to be independent of the current economic climate. The issues of prime concern to us were to keep making work of high quality; to be rewarded (financially or otherwise) fairly for our work; and to be part of wider, mutually and innovatively generous networks.

The blocks we are encountering to these come from perceptions and expectations from society as a whole and we have not always been guilt free of perpetuating them ourselves. If I have one hope for what might result from activism catalysed by the cuts, it is that we may do something towards addressing these attitudes.

If you would like to receive a copy of the manifesto that was produced during this session – or can think of people, institutions, organisations that you think should receive a copy – I suggest you add your request to the comments on the event’s page.

Update: Anna Francis’ post here: http://annafrancis.blogspot.com/2011/03/modes-of-practice-in-age-of-austerity.html

Colony prototype, in Holly’s words

http://www.hideandseek.net/nikki-pughs-colony-prototype/

It’s been deadline central around here for the last couple of weeks, so various things have slipped through the blogging net. Fortunately, Holly Gramazio has written a lovely insightful post outlining precisely what what going on last Tuesday:

We went out in a group of four, and wandered around, occasionally passing the bundle between us – just to see what it was like, how the vibrations felt, whether people looked at us oddly or didn’t notice, whether we felt friendly and warm towards the bundle or annoyed by it. In the end we wandered arond for an hour or so, everyone taking a couple of turns with the bundle.

The first thing we noticed was that was that holding the bundle gives you an immense feeling of entitlement. Only you can tell when it’s vibrating; only you can interpret its whims. Is it happy? Which way does it want to go? Does it have a name, and if so, what is it? Holding the bundle makes you feel like these are your decisions to make, even when you know perfectly well that the vibrations are random and you’re interpreting them pretty much as you like. It invests you with power.

Please go and read the whole thing!

Colony prototyping #1

I’ve been developing a project that investigates taking the phenomena I use to generate work such as Uncertain Eastside and 19,264 seconds of qualitative and quantitative data (Curzon Street, 2010) and turning it into a real-time experience as you move through the landscape.

The early stages of this are supported by Fierce’s Platinum development programme and yesterday was a sharing event to which guests were invited to sample the nascent work from the 6 artists taking part and offer constructive criticism and feedback.

Many thanks to all those who walked the streets of Digbeth with me and my bubblewrap-encased GPS receivers and vibration motors sharing ideas and exploring possibilities. Here are a few photos from the day:

Would you like me to work for you?

For the last couple of months I’ve been doing OfficeJobThatPaysTheBills on a temporary contract 3 days a week. They’ve just offered to extend this to a year’s contract so I’m just checking what my options are before I say yea or nay…

Is there anyone out there thinking “we’d love to work with Nikki from the end of March”?

My basic threshold is that I need to earn a regular £600/£700 a month to pay my rent and main bills, so I can consider anything that brings that in (so long as it still leaves me at least 3 or 4 days a week to work on my art practice). A couple of days a week doing something not-particularly-exciting 9-5? A handful of days a month as an artist doing creative stuff? Something in between?

Got something interesting coming up but it doesn’t meet that threshold? Get in touch anyway – someone else may have something else we can double it up with…

Head on over to the home page for an overview of the territory I work in as an artist (interactions, place, playfulness, applications of technology…). Obviously I’d love it if you offered me a creative something that I simply couldn’t not get involved in, but things being what they are with the economic situation there’s also something to be said for hum-drum-but-secure. Day job stylee I have good project management skills and am comfortable with problem solving, customer service and core wordprocessing/spreadsheet stuff etc. I’ll almost certainly politely decline anything sales/retail, but have done several years front line in libraries and really quite enjoyed that!

Send me an email and let’s talk!

Total bizarre wonderfulness

I’ve always struggled with the “hacker” terminology, finding it quite limiting and a hurdle to explaining what hackspaces/hackerspaces are about to the various people I find myself having to explain what hackspaces/hackerspaces are about to. However, I’ve long been a fan of how Noisebridge presents itself. This extract from their wiki:

Noisebridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning. Noisebridge is also more than a physical space, it’s a community with roots extending around the world. […] We make stuff. So can you.

The definition is in terms of the verbs, not the tools that are used to realise the projects.

I’ve just come across this short introductory video to Noisebridge which I also find presses a lot of my buttons – loving the emphasis on creativity of all sorts: expressed in the space via the craft area, the darkroom, the kitchen, the gas cylinders in the background as Mitch talks, and the massive library! Check out the video below:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Note the importance of community. We always took this as our starting point for fizzPOP, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to get a cohesive group together last time. As you can probably tell, I would absolutely love it if Birmingham could support a Noisebridge equivalent, but ultimately it’s down to the community as to what happens.

Head on over to this recent thread on the fizzPOP discussion group where it seems momentum is gathering around fizzPOP 2.0. If you want to contribute, now would be a good time to do so.