Knowledge Commons #4: Trees were planted roots uppermost

In my recent research around accounts of the Inclosure movement in the Bournemouth and Poole area as part of the Digital Transformations project with artists Kevin Carter and Simon Yuill (which I have written about under this same ‘Knowledge Commons’ category elsewhere on the blog) I found a passage* which describes the practical, agricultural knowledge of those who were given many of the former commons to cultivate as being so poor that, ‘many of the trees were planted roots uppermost.’
Flailing Trees

It is a great image. I was reminded of this when I learned from artist Gustav Metzger at the weekend that what I’ve been referring to as his ‘trees piece’ — in fact, Flailing Trees, a public art work first seen in Manchester as part of that city’s festival during 2009 — is to be shown in Munich. Here’s some information about Flailing Trees from the Manchester Festival website (where there is also a short video):

Flailing Trees comprises 21 inverted willows, a subversion of the natural order that brings nature and the environment into sharp focus. With flourishing branches replaced by dying roots, the sculpture is both a plea for reflection and a plaintive cry for change, and is sure to provide a catalyst for debate.

I had been thinking of Gustav Metzger, Auto-destructive Art and the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium while blogging about Anne Bean and Paul Burwell’s project for The Final Academy in 1982 in the previous post, where Anne discussed setting light to the sheets of paper bearing their/Paul’s poem ‘Adventures in the House of Memory’ during the performance of the piece.

After working with Gustav Metzger and UK director Ken McMullen on the Pioneers in Art and Science: Metzger DVD a few years ago I tracked down a second edition of Metzger’s 1965 publication AUTO-DESTRUCTIVE ART: Metzger at AA. Unlike the first edition, this 2nd printing from October 1965 is illustrated and includes a supplementary section entitled ‘Manifesto World’. The listing also mentioned that some additional papers were included.

Among these, pressed inside the back cover of the book, was the following document (below), an advanced notice of the Destruction in Art Symposium which was subsequently held in London in September 1966. This document seems to be a kind of press release or flyer, but it is expressly addressed to artists and potential participants, and constitutes an invitation from the DIAS Honorary Committee, ‘to all artists who have used actual destruction of materials as part of their technique.’ All such artists are invited to submit proposals or documentation for exhibition. It also invites ‘writers, psychologists, sociologists and others’ to propose 20-minute papers.

‘DIAS aims,’ the invitation continues, ‘to assemble the maximum amount of information on these new art forms and related topics, and to make this information freely available.’

Continuing this ethos, I am posting the document here:

DIAS flyer, from the collection of the author.

It may not be entirely clear from this scan, but the lower portion of the foolscap (I think, rather than A4) page upon which it is printed is missing. I can’t be sure what this portion of the page comprised, but the paper has been carefully torn along a dotted line. I’d be interested to know if any intact copies of this flyer/release still exist, and if so, what was beyond the dotted line?

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*The Inclosure-era text I mention above is called Farmer West and Muscliffe Farm. It was written by ‘Christopher King as reported by the son of William West, tenant of Muscliffe during 1801-1804’. It was published as an appendix to William Mate’s Then & Now in 1883. A reference copy, in the form of local studies booklet No.612, is available in the Heritage Zone of Bournemouth Library. More on the local studies booklet series here.

Photograph of Flailing Trees © Spinneyhead 2009 on Flickr, licensed with Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike Generic 2.0.

Pioneers in Art and Science: Metzger (DVD, 2004, dir. Ken McMullen), is distributed by Concord Media and available for sale from their website £15.00.

CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO archive #1

I just realised that it is about ten years since I last gave a reading in London from my novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO, which was published by former Hove-based publisher Codex in 1999. I’ll be reading from the novel this week in the event I’m doing with Malcolm Bennett of Brute.

CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO cover design Peter Pavement

The back cover blurb of the beautifully designed and published Codex edition describes CHARLIEUNCLE… (for short) as ‘a “stream-of-sentience” alien-abduction cop novel’. It grew out of a short story that I’d initially written for Stewart Home‘s Suspect Device anthology. By the time Stewart got back in touch to say that the story was a bit out of kilter with the rest of the collection, I’d written another 10 or so chapters: the story had become a novel.

From 1997 through publication and on to about 2000 or so I was reading from the novel quite regularly, often with a live, improvised musical accompaniment from keyboard player James T. Ford. A former Hammond organist to The Jam no less, Jamie would accompany the reading in the manner of a pianist at a silent movie, responding to the story on the hoof: it was great fun to do. We played various venues including Christopher Hewitt’s underground performance art venue Hollywood Leather, the ICA, Clerkenwell Literature Festival, the Zap Club in Brighton, Vox’n’Roll at Filthy McNasty’s and more. Jamie also accompanied my reading for the book launch in October 1999 at Cabinet, London.

Pre-publication, Codex had celebrated their list with an event at Sussex Arts Club, Brighton on 28 July 1999, where I was to join Steve Beard, Stewart Home and Billy Childish reading from our various forthcoming titles. The invite lists James T.Ford as my accompanist, but for some reason Jamie couldn’t make it so I did the reading with live improvised percussion from Billy Childish’s regular collaborator and Buff Medways drummer Wolf Howard.

During soundchecks Billy sat down and scribbled furiously, stopping only to chew his pencil or to ask me about replacement words used for particular letters in the radio-telephony ‘spelling alphabet’ that I’d used for the title of my novel.

During his set that evening, Billy announced a tribute to CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO, which he duly performed before presenting me with the full text. Here is a scan (click on the title above to see the post and this image full-width):

'On the Buses: Tony White Tribute' © Billy Childish, 1999

Later that year I collaborated with another percussionist on a reading from CHARLIEUNCLE… This time it was the late, great and very sadly missed Paul Burwell, a co-founder of London Musicians’ Collective and of post-industrial noisescape and pyrotechnic artists Bow Gamelan.

Arriving at the venue (the former Penny Black pub on the corner of Exmouth Market), and thinking of how it had gone with Wolf, I suggested to Paul over a pint that he might want to start the accompaniment gently with some brushes on a snare drum and then take a lead from me so he could pick up the pace as the chapter, and the reading, progressed.

That was the plan anyway.

Paul lasted about 30 seconds with his brushes, if that, before chucking them away and pulling a mallet out of one pocket and a couple of drum sticks from the other then playing the function room’s walls, floor, fixtures and fittings at such a furious pace and volume that I had no choice but to follow, raising voice and tempo until it felt as if I was chasing him around the room. It was an exhilarating ride and my ten minute reading was over in about five, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

My reading on Wednesday will be unaccompanied :-)

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‘And the book meets the table’*

Looking for some footage of Paul Burwell in action I found instead this rather beautiful live recording of ‘Hull Air’ a posthumous birthday tribute by Corona Smith et al, which sets to a new composition some archive recording of Paul’s drumming and an extract of a poem called *’Adventures in the House of Memory’ which I’ve seen credited to both Paul singly and Paul Burwell and Anne Bean jointly.

I emailed Anne to find out more about ‘Adventures in the House of Memory.’ At time of writing Anne is in Utrecht so was unable to check details, but she replies:

‘Adventures’ was a part of many improvisations Paul and I were trying out before William Burroughs Final Academy at [Brixton] Ritzy, 1982.  I improvised words and unusually for us, Paul suggested writing them down. He began from my improvisation but wrote most himself and pulled it into shape. We then wrote the words on huge pieces of paper which we burnt as they were sung. It was printed in the publication for the event.

(Screengrab taken from Brian E. Schottlaender’s fantastically comprehensive, 121 page, 2010-published Anything But Routine: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography of William S. Burroughs v.2.0)

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CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO is currently out of print but some copies are available from Abe Books.

I’m reading with Malcolm Bennett of Brute! on Wednesday 26 May, 7:00 pm, at 3 Blind Mice, Ravey Street, London EC2 (opposite the Griffin pub).

Anne Bean is currently working on a project for Matt’s Gallery, London for September 2010 which will include ‘much live work, that is neither a tribute nor a retrospective but a vibrant series of events and installations that highlight the times, ethos and context within which Paul [Burwell] worked.’

Half-naked and drunk out of their minds

I’m really pleased to see that Mark Eitzel and Simon Stephens‘ collaboration Marine Parade is having its world premiere as part of the Brighton Festival next week. Marine Parade is ‘a play with music’ set in a Brighton sea front B&B. There is more info on the Festival website here, including some free music and a concisely soapy blurb (‘…Claire needs more money than she’s ever owned. Christopher needs to see her one more time…’ etc.).

The play takes place ‘over the course of 24 hours at the edge of England at the start of its final century.’

That’s a nice line.

Another Marine Parade, this one in Seaford, East Sussex

I saw an early workshop version of Marine Parade a while ago while Mark Eitzel was in the UK and I’d just intereviewed him for the Idler. That showing was put together in a rehearsal space which was so shitty and rundown that its very survival in the heart of the west end gave me a kind of hope. I’ve been absent-mindedly following the play’s progress since then, via another batch of rehearsals and occasional catch-ups.

I’m a sucker for Mark’s music, whether with American Music Club or his solo stuff, so I could sit and watch this all night long, but Simon Stephens is also a brilliant playwright and I think that together they’ve done something really exciting.

At this point I’d love to put in a link to David Benedict’s rave review of Simon Stephens’ play Harper Regan for Variety, but their registration process is crap. If you can be bothered and you’re happy for a magazine to have all that personal data about you in return for fuck all the link is here, otherwise, google it and look at the cached version.

The title I ended up using for that Idler interview (see below) came from a nice line of Mark’s on late night Brighton and the ‘hen party girls with their matching outfits, stumbling around half-naked in the middle of the night and drunk out of their minds.’

Click the image to see the interview on Exact Editions (p.s. I'm not Idler lit ed any more).

Talking of which, a new Idler launched last week – you can buy it here or from your local bookshop. I’m really looking forward to reading it. Doubly so because I don’t have to wonder what is going to be in the next one.

As with issue 42 before it, this latest Idler takes the form of a beautifully designed and printed cloth-bound book, typeset by Christian Brett of Bracket Press, who does frankly amazing things with typesetting and print.

It’s impossible for digital editions to compete with that kind of quality, but ‘Beautiful and Anarchic and Crazy and Great’ is also online (at time of writing) as part of a free sample of Idler issue 41 offered by Exact Editions: the browser-based magazine subscription site. Or you can download a standalone PDF of the interview here: Eitzel Interview – Idler 41 May08.

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Booking info for Marine Parade here.

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Postscript – Saturday 15 May 2010

Who can see your personal data? Everyone.

Since posting this two days ago, Matt McKeon’s graphic illustration of Facebook’s gradual erosion of its users’ privacy (see screengrab and link, left) has been getting a lot of coverage. The discussion about Facebook and privacy has been going on for a while now, and it’s renewed with each new set of byzantine changes to the default settings. As McKeon’s graphics show, each change reduces the security of users’ information.

There was another good story doing the rounds yesterday, including on the Register here, about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apparently once calling its users ‘dumb fucks’ for trusting him with their data.

This reminds me that a couple of years ago Bracket Press published Idler ed. Tom Hodgkinson’s anti-Facebook pamphlet We Want Everyone: Facebook and The New American Right, an adaptation of an earlier guardian article by Tom which explored this apparent ongoing data grab and Facebook’s business models. We Want Everyone is available to buy from the Bracket Press site. It’s a great read.

Unlike Tom I still have a Facebook account. A few months ago, tired of endless Farmville updates from Facebook friends who seemed to endlessly be collecting eggs or whatever, I paraphrased Baudrillard with this gently satirical tweet:

Farmville is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that Facebook is real  http://bit.ly/biioHD

But actually of course Facebook is real and it’s most likely not grownups playing Farmville that is the valuable data on there. Like Danah Boyd I find myself alarmed by the naivety of younger Facebook users. Among the young people I know (and more importantly many that I actually don’t know, but who happen to be friends-of-friends of those I do), there are many who seem to want not only to document all their let’s say ‘recreational’ activities, but also to post those photos in order to share them with their friends. I’m for ever hitting the ‘hide’ button as yet another photo album announces itself on my wall and every saucer-eyed moment of every weekend from make-up to come-down is posted and tagged; shared, in other words, not only with friends and – duh! – parents, but also of course with absolutely anybody or any agency or business that this might be of interest or useful to or who can pay for it for ever.

You’d think they’d never read Burroughs…

Fifty-plus years ago it was only Allen Ginsberg who could watch ‘the best minds of [his] generation […] starving, hysterical, naked.’ Now from a lack of understanding or education about what the internet is, coupled with an excess of trust in Burroughs’ ‘all powerful boards and syndicates of the earth’, it seems that every ‘Angel-headed hipster’ is making their ‘ancient heavenly connection’ in public: ‘For all to see, in Times Square, in Picadilly.’

Road Rage archive #1

This is a scan of the chapter plan for my ‘avant-pulp’ novel Road Rage! which I found filed among quote sheets and other bumf when I updated the Press section of this site.

The manuscript was written over the course of a two week period in 1995. From memory I wrote this plan about halfway in (i.e. once I’d reached about Chapter 7 or 8) because I needed to organise the remaining chapters. I’m amazed that it survived.

Chapter plan for Road Rage!

It is odd to see this piece of yellowing A4 and its sparse contents; the cringe-making use of words like ‘shag’; the ‘daisy-wheel’ printer type from the Amstrad word processor I used at the time. All seem to belong to another age.

Because it was another age.

Strange too to remember the writing process, which was: do no research whatsoever, write a minimum of one chapter per day, and try to ensure there is at least one ‘transcendent act’ (as I would say when talking about this at the time) of sex or violence per chapter. The idea to write ‘a crusty novel’ along these lines, using a process that consciously explored connections between an imagined pulp productivity and automatic writing, had been reinforced in a throwaway conversation one afternoon in Endcliffe Park, Sheffield with friends Tim, Roy and Robin when I was visiting that city.

Road Rage cover – photograph ‘Fire Artist’ © David McCairley, 1997

Writing Road Rage!, getting it published, was a way of contributing to what I saw as a kind of ‘conversation’ about London, about British pulp fiction generally and the ‘Richard Allen’ skinhead novels in particular that was being conducted in print around the east London where I lived at the time. This appropriation of Allen’s novels had been anticipated in the mid-1980s by the aforementioned Roy Bayfield who incorporated the books into his rambling spoken-word-act-come-job at the Zap in Brighton. It was also prefigured by the appropriation of skinhead imagery in the work of artists including Gilbert and George, Psychic TV, and independent artist film-maker John Smith with his short film OM (1986).

In the early 1990s I was tuning in to this conversation via novels like Victor Headley‘s Yardie, which was published by the then London Fields-based X-Press and was for sale in various local newsagents, and Stewart Home‘s Red London, which was set in and around the home in Grove Road, Mile End, that would become known after it was demolished as Rachel Whiteread’s House.

I didn’t know when I started who might want to print this, but I’d wanted to make a connection, too, with Michael Moorcock’s pulpier sword-n-sorcery novels from the late 1960s and early 1970s which were written at the breakneck speed of three days per volume (putting my ‘chapter-a-day’ regime to shame of course).

Road Rage! takes some liberties with the ‘sprawling consensual hallucination that is Hackney’, chiefly by relocating a lightly-drawn (no research, remember) analogue of the then M11 Link Road protests (which centred around the proposed ‘East Cross Route’ in Leytonstone) a few miles west to Well Street, E9. Events take place in a number of expedient and/or contingent locations around Well Street and London Fields: in the Pub on the Park, on Hackney Central railway station and the trains of the North London Line, in the Hackney DSS office and a still markedly pre-gentrification Broadway Market that would be unrecognisable now. This was where I lived at the time.

Psychic cross on the door of 50 Beck Road, London, former residence of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Looking at the chapter plan again, my gaze is drawn to the blue felt-tip pen drawings at the foot of the page. I’m aware that these ‘sketches towards’ a ‘runic pictogram’ of a tree that I’d realised was needed at a particular point in the story may have taken fewer minutes to refine than there are iterations here.

Whether I realised it at the time or not, it seems obvious now that this device was almost certainly psychic cross-inspired (see left, and this blog thread on John Eden’s uncarved.org). Judging from the second sketch (counting from L-R) in particular, I effectively did little more than move a couple of the horizontal bars around (see figs.1 and 2 below). It would appear that I immediately circled and ticked the fifth attempt (where two bars are used to form an inverted chevron above the central cross-piece), as if to say, ‘That’ll do.’

John Smith, OM, film still

It’s interesting the kinds of sources that a deadline forces one to draw upon. In the case of Road Rage! this extended to more than simply adapting the psychic cross symbol that was marked out in studs on what by then was Barry and Nick‘s front door down the street. Having mentioned John Smith’s OM, above, it seems obvious that the barbershop scene which opens chapter two of Road Rage! incorporates an unconscious reference to that film. In those pre-YouTube days I had only seen OM once, when Smith came and did a talk to our year on the Fine Art course at the then Sheffield Poly in perhaps 1988. I had practically fallen out of my chair to see that the film’s central character was played by an old friend of mine at the time. After the screening I asked Smith how he’d come to cast John Harding in this role and he said something like, ‘Oh they were just some Psychic Youth art school skinhead types who lived down the road from me in Forest Gate.’

‘Runic tree’ as adapted psychic cross? fig.1 pictogram sketch (detail)

There is another surprise in this chapter plan. I had completely forgotten that at any stage I was considering Chapter 12 or 13 taking place at a ‘Julian Cope concert’, even one accompanied by that tentative question mark. I have also, unfortunately, forgotten why I changed my mind and crossed it out. Maybe there was a gig happening that week which I couldn’t get to.

I loved and still love David McCairley‘s dramatic photograph that was used (see above) for the front cover of the Low Life paperback of Road Rage! The picture was taken that same year at a demonstration outside Hackney Town Hall protesting evictions from some squatted former office buildings on the opposite side of the road. There’s another blog to be done about George Marshall’s short-lived Low Life imprint. Too much to say here, other than that I am indebted to him as ever.

‘Runic tree’ as adapted psychic cross? fig.2

Some press is collected here, but this is what Steve Beard wrote in i-D magazine when Road Rage! was published, nailing that early 1990s moment at least as far as Victor Headley and Stewart Home:

Who would have guessed that Richard Allen’s range of ’70s bootboy novels would have proved so influential? First Stewart Home samples the speed and aggression in order to turn round the political message and make the link with Burroughs and Blake; then Victor Headley steals a few riffs to draw up a map of the Black Atlantic in London. […] what subculture could be appropriated next? Tony White’s Road Rage makes it clear. Mixing psycho-social realism and techno-pagan fantasy, Tony White stakes out a position between Stewart Home and Martin Millar to offer a vision of London which is romantic, revolutionary and conservative all at the same time. […] a signpost to the fantastic worlds of a Michael Moorcock or an Alan Garner.

Knowledge Commons #3

As blogged here, Kevin Carter’s Landscape/Portrait gives participants the opportunity to post their own video portraits alongside ‘demographic portrait’ texts that are derived from national census data for every UK postcode and used to inform policy and planning decisions.

Each video portrait also features a facility for registered users to respond to other participants’ videos. Looking for a way to occupy and animate these comments boxes, or at least those that accompany portraits made during the Bournemouth and Poole phase of the project, I’ve sketched two ‘commentbot’ simulations: Daisy Botanist and Postal Coder.

I wanted these sketches to also lightly reflect Simon Yuill’s A New Kind of Commons project (blogged here) by linking out to historical information about the changing uses of the commons in the Bournemouth area and online resources about types of plants found on Turbary or Kinson Commons.

Unlike ‘real’ commentbots that (with apologies for the following demonstration of my non-geekness) send out spam comments in order to plant phishing or malware links into blogs, chat spaces on social networks etc., the messages from Daisy Botanist and Postal Coder are tailored to each location and each video portrait. Furthermore they are benign and the links they offer are genuine (now that these comments have been posted, HTML-writing capability within the comments boxes has been disabled).

Daisy Botanist and Postal Coder are each little more than a log-in and a series of simple functions. I wanted to see if it was possible to create comment generators that could contrast aspects of CACI‘s census-derived but oddly general, dated and cliché-ridden demographic portraits with the corresponding ways that Landscape/Portrait participants from these same postcode areas actually describe themselves. As would appear to be the case with the CACI portraits, these sketches are generated by a process that is at least partly-automated and then edited.

I took a cue from Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s 1959 film Pull My Daisy, with its improvised narration by Jack Kerouac, then simplified it. I wanted an excuse to watch all the portraits and a way to sample-and/or-write on the fly, in real time.

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The Daisy Botanist comments are generated in response to each video portrait by contrasting CACI‘s generalised postcode descriptions and taxonomies (which on the site are displayed to the left of the video player) with a sampled fragment of each person’s own response to the question, ‘If I were to describe myself what words would I use?’ Each comment was then attributed (or each participant ‘given’) a species of local flora, in order to create a simple kind of syntax which I initially envisaged as:

You say [self-description sample], they say [CACI description sample]: they’re pulling our [name of local flora + link].

Toadflax photograph Georg Slickers, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic

Putting that into action, here is an example of the kind of basic comment structure that Daisy Botanist produces:

Do short fat bald and ugly men only occur in seaside towns? They are extracting the Milkwort

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The Postal Coder comments are designed specifically to contrast the types of very real personal or community-based creativity that people discuss in their own video portraits with the bizzarre and affectless CACI portraits in which people are reduced to an agencyless classification or, most crassly, a ‘type’, according to certain extrapolated consumption habits.

To place participants’ creativity in a historical and geographical context, the Postal Coder simulation then combines this sample with a local field name from a database relating to the 19th century Inclosures in Canford Magna and Kinson (when most of the common land in the area was given over to private ownership), the first part of each user’s current postcode and a sample from their response to the question, ‘Where is the place that is special to me?’, giving the following approximate structure:

From [19th century fieldname + link] to [current postal shortcode] and [participant’s chosen place], still [type of creativity described].

Here is an example of the kind of basic comment structure that Postal Coder produces:

From Netherway to BH11 or the gymnasium, still meeting people out in the fresh air.

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This screengrab shows how the video portraits appear on the Landscape/Portrait site. At the bottom left of the window is the demographic portrait for the participant’s full postcode, as generated by CACI’s ACORN programme, while at the bottom right is the comments box, in this case showing a comment by the Postal Coder simulation.

DarrF's Video Portrait, detail from Landscape-Portrait http://www.landscape-portrait.com

Each simulation draws on an additional limited pallet of greetings (e.g. ‘Hi [username]’), chat clichés such as :-) and LOL, and sign-offs (e.g. ‘All best, P’), as well as variations, compressions and improvisations of other kinds. There are also one or two instances where an exchange between Daisy Botanist and Postal Coder suggested itself, but in spite of that this is not a story and neither ‘Daisy’ nor ‘P’ are characters; although in another context they might be. Here they are simply sketches; commentbot simulations.

I should add that even though this has been a more or less automated process, it has also offered the chance to respond conversationally to some very interesting video portraits that I have greatly enjoyed watching. The resulting comments are therefore posted on the Landscape/Portrait site with thanks to all the various participants.

Outlandia

Rob La Frenais of art and science agency The Arts Catalyst (a.k.a. eminencegris if you use Twitter) posted some great pictures of Outlandia, the new project by artists London Fieldworks: a treehouse artist’s studio and field station in Glen Nevis, Scotland, that will be used to host residencies.

First glimpse of the amazing Outlandia project by London Fiel... on Twitpic

As soon as I saw this I thought: ‘Wow: the best treehouse since Myst!’

Like many people in the 1990s, I had a copy of the computer game Myst because it shipped with my enormous and quickly obsolete old Macintosh Performa.  Along with various easy-to-find walkthroughs (pace Tim Etchells’ fabulous novel The Broken World), there are extensive and inevitably encylcopaedic resources about Myst online. These include primarily the MYSTlore wiki which has a great disclaimer on the front page:

This page is written from an OOC point of view. Events and elements surrounding the Myst Universe are regarded as fictional.

The explanation goes on:

In order to account for the contrast between actual, proven information and possibly fictional, made-up statements, fans generally distinguish between In Cavern/In Character (IC) — regarding everything as real and/or acting as if you are actually in the ages and really experiencing everything — and Out Of Cavern/Out Of Character (OOC) — regarding most information from within the Myst Universe as fictional, and/or that the player is not acting as if he/she is really in the ages. Since you are the main character in the games, the lines between the two can sometimes be blurred, and occasionally deliberately vague.

Looking around for an image of the game’s Channelwood (treehouse) level to post here, I see that Myst has been relaunched for the iPhone. I’d be curious-ish to see how the game actually played on a machine that didn’t have to stop for a few seconds before allowing any but the simplest action; the game’s ‘atmospheric’ sounds stuttering and looping all the while.

To play Myst one must wander around an island, exploring, finding switches of various kinds, collecting books and solving puzzles that enable the player to access some other island or realm. Lots of the theme tunes used for the games various levels and loading sequences are shared on Youtube.

There is some background info about Outlandia on the London Fieldworks site:

Outlandia, originally conceived by London Fieldworks for the Year of Highland Culture 2007 is situated within the remote highland landscape of Glen Nevis in Lochaber, Scotland. An architect designed fieldstation […] built to accommodate local, national and international artist residencies, suspended in a copse of Norwegian Spruce and Larch on Forestry Commission land. The fieldstation will have a distinctive view of Glen Nevis, a landscape of forest, river and mountains with Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, looming directly opposite. Outlandia has been inspired by legends of forest outlaws and outsiders, both an off-ground place of imagination and fantasy and a real place of inspiration.

In the summer of 1999 I was lucky enough to collaborate with London Fieldworks on Syzygy, a ‘telematic artwork’ designed by Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson and ‘made’ by a ‘temporary collective of artists’ including Bruce and Jo, composer Kaffe Matthews, programmer and pyramid enthusiast Jonny Bradley, writers Steve Beard, Mark Waddell, Jeni Walwin and myself on Sanda Island, off the southernmost tip of the Mull of Kintyre.

My unanticipated contribution to the project (I had an open brief) was to write a story called ‘Stormbringer’, an Elric homage that was subsequently authorised by Elric creator, the immensely prolific and influential Michael Moorcock.

‘Stormbringer’ which was inspired by the Moorcock novel of the same name, had its origins in something that I had discovered on the boat across from Campbelltown; that a former Laird of the island in 1969 had been legendary bass player Jack Bruce of Cream. My short story sees a first generation British R&B musician (not Bruce of course) in self-imposed exile on an island at the gateway to the Atlantic who is dressing up as Elric while waiting to come up on an LSD trip.

On the beach the day we arrived I found a skull and a long, straight, man-sized stick that had been bleached white by sun and salt. I assumed that the skull was that of a sheep, but it had no apparent eye sockets, at least none where one might expect to find them. Since then I have realised that it was most likely to have come from some species of small whale, possibly a narwhal, although like the one in this picture it had no tusk.

© Anthony Oliver, 1999

In order to explore the island IC, as it were, I lashed the skull to the stick and called it a ‘moonstaff’ (which seemed suitably Moor- cockian), then took up my notebook and walked. Unlike the world of Myst, whether IC or OOC, on this island I did not have to solve puzzles in order to proceed. Instead I was looking for moments of visual or auditory dissonance: the sound of the staff tearing through grass roots, places of sudden shelter where windnoise abated.

Occasionally I would spiral back in to the centre of the island to a fieldstation that had been set up on the smaller of Sanda’s hills. From this point, wearing harnesses that effectively bolted them to the rock, Nic Boothby, Jeremy Boyce and James Robertshaw of AirKraft were using a stack of enormous Rokaku kites to lift a meteorological data-gathering rig designed by Dr Alison Payne of Imperial College. Data from this rig was used to drive a smart material sculpture located in the ICA, London, as well being harnessed by Kaffe Matthews for her compositions and writer Steve Beard for his ‘Island Spirit Generator’; both of which are combined here. There are more of Anthony Oliver’s wonderful images here.

To the kite team, my character’s ‘moonstaff’, this possibly-narwhal-skull-on-a-stick, became the focus of a superstition that was nebulous in origin but specific in effect: when carrying it I became a wind curse. Kites would drop out of the sky.

I laughed about this at first, but quickly realised that the thrum of wind on kite-string combined with their razor sharp sensitivities to wind speed and direction, meant that Nic, Jeremy and James were in effect using the kites as prosthetic extensions to their own nervous systems, and in so doing they were gathering, processing and responding to data far richer than that being gathered by Alison Payne’s rig. This collision of mind and weather was of course part of the initial premise of the project. Bruce and Jo have since written that, ‘Syzygy sought to make metaphorical linkages between mind and weather processes, and was initially interested in the emergent features shared by both.’

On the last morning on the island, I threw both stick and skull back in to the sea. It was an act that I now regret, but it seemed appropriate, and I wasn’t sure that Nic, Jeremy and James would have let me bring it on the boat. If they’d known it was most likely a narwhal skull they almost certainly wouldn’t.

Syzygy is a term that describes planetary alignments. It was an apt title for that project on Sanda Island, not least also because Bruce and Jo are generous and visionary hosts and collaborators who have a rare skill and talent for creating incredibly generative and productive alignments of individuals. I am really looking forward to seeing what kinds of activities and artworks emerge from Outlandia. I am also ever so slightly envious, in the nicest possible way, of whoever gets to work in that extraordinary fieldstation.

Oh, p.s. one very quick afterword. Later, Michael Moorcock told me that he thought it was probably Ginger Baker rather than Jack Bruce who was the Elric fan.

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‘Stormbringer’ and other resources relating to the Syzygy project are published in the excellent book London Fieldworks: Syzygy/Polaria, Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, with co-authors Steve Beard, Oliver Bennet, Mark Waddell, Jeni Walwin, Tracey Warr and Tony White. London: Black Dog Publishing Ltd, 2001.

Syzygy/Polaria is available to buy direct from London Fieldworks. Price £10.00 +pp

Knowledge Commons #2

Back to Bournemouth and Poole where alongside Kevin Carter’s Landscape-Portait, the artist Simon Yuill organised walks around Townsend, Turbary Common and Kinson Common as part of the Digital Transformations project commissioned by SCAN. There is a wealth of information about these walks and more on Simon’s A New Kind of Commons website.

Turbary Common gate on Googlemaps Streetview

Talking about the project with Simon and with Helen Sloan of SCAN I’m reminded of a work by the pioneering British artist Stephen Willats. Since the late 1950s, via Roy Ascott’s seminal and influential early 1960s experiments at Ealing School of Art and his own Control Magazine established in 1963, Stephen Willats has (as the Control website puts it),

situated his artistic practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines, such as cybernetics, systems research, behaviourism, communications theory or computer technology. This practice has constructed and developed a language for conceptual art that is collaborative, interactive and participatory.

One of the works by Stephen Willats which resonates with what Simon is doing is called Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Club (1981-2). Like Simon’s A New Kind of Commons, it created a means to explore and document the ways people accessed and creatively used open space in their neighbourhood, in this case an area of waste land known as ‘the lurky place’ that was situated close to a series of tower blocks on the Avondale Estate, in west London.

There is illuminating discussion of Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Club in Charlotte Ginsborg’s excellent filmed interview between Stephen Willats and Andrew Wilson, which is available to view free on the Control Magazine website here.

L-R Stephen Willats, Andrew Wilson

Simon Yuill’s focus on the commons around Bournemouth and Poole, the relationships between those commons and the adjacent post-WWII social housing, and the walks he has been organising around Townsend and around Turbary and Kinson Commons echo Willats’s work of 30 years ago on the Avondale Estate. They also provide a reminder that such public spaces are often or usually at risk.

Iain Sinclair in Lights Out for the Territories (1997) writes about his and his collaborators’ experiences when filming around the City of London at the beginning of the 1990s, and discusses the way that city streets can be subject to jurisdictions and directives that supercede or override apparent freedoms and render those notionally public spaces effectively private. Security guards and police prevented Sinclair from filming near the so-called ‘ring of steel’ checkpoints, anticipating more recent and now well documented cases of beat police and Community Support officers inappropriately invoking today’s apparent terrorist threat to harrass and criminalise civilian photographers.

As with other commons elsewhere in the UK, Kinson and Turbary Commons in Bournemouth and Poole are areas of land that somehow survived successive enclosures through the centuries to remain accessible and usable by all. The historical Enclosures were far from merely neutral or titular exercises in changing the ownership of land, but impacted directly and extremely negatively upon the lives of people who had previously been dependent upon the commons for their subsistence. Historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have written extensively in their inspirational book The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic about how the Enclosures dispossessed enormous numbers of the rural poor. Linebaugh and Rediker suggest that these dispossessed peoples were criminalised to create the forced labour that was necessary for British colonial and naval expansion. In so doing however, a radical and diverse proletariat was created; an Atlantic-wide readership and distribution network for the revolutionary writings of groups such as the Diggers whose ideas about common-wealth and equal rights were then taken up and developed across what Paul Gilroy called the ‘Black Atlantic’. I’m wildly paraphrasing and compressing a very subtle and comprehensive argument that really should be read in full, but Linebaugh and Rediker trace the development of revolutionary Atlantic texts ranging from Pirate Articles to the US Constitution directly back to the work of the Diggers and those who opposed the Enclosures.

Even where some land did remain in common ownership, as here in what is now Bournemouth and Poole, the survival of such freedoms is far from guaranteed. Turbary Common (the name apparently comes from ancient rights to cut turf for fuel) has been at particular risk even in recent years. Parts of Turbary now have ‘triple-SI status’ as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), as well as a palimpsest of other jurisdictions, designations and acronyms which overlay this. The Friends of Turbary Common webpage on the Dorset Communigate site lists these as follows:

Whole site [sic.] is Local Nature Reserve ( since 1996) and Public Open Space. The main heathland areas are Sites of Special Scientific Interest (part of same SSSI as Kinson Common), these areas are also designated as Special Protection Areas ( SPA) under the European Birds Directive 1979, Special Areas of Conservation(SAC) under the Habitats Directive of 1992 and Ramsar sites. There is also a small area of Site of Nature Conservation Interest (SNCI).

Speaking to local enthusiast and activist Dot Donsworth as we walked around Turbary on a damp and misty day in March, it was cautionary to hear how precarious the survival of that area of land has been even or especially in recent years, but it was also encouraging to hear that local people had been able to mobilise and campaign to effect change in face of specific threats. Dot, who maintains and publishes accounts of wildlife sighted on Turbary, showed me newspaper clippings from the early 1970s when the Common escaped redevelopment by just one vote.

Screengrab of Turbary Common Walk slideshow at http://www.newcommons.net/walks/westhowe.html

We wandered over to Fernheath, a tiny spur of land that has been divided from the north east corner of the Common proper by Turbary Park Avenue and which remains at risk. Dot pointed out building that had encroached upon the open space in recent years. ‘You have to keep on reminding people that this isn’t just nothing, it’s Fernheath,’ Dot tells me. ‘Otherwise they conveniently forget, and it could completely disappear. This is Fernheath. You have to keep on saying it.’

Simon’s work on the commons of Bournemouth and Poole deliberately echoes and points to obviously recent understandings of the internet as a free public resource. It is not an accident that a lot of the thinking about how people use the internet and about the nature of freedom in the virtual world often specifically invokes the idea of the commons. The Creative Commons license (which allows users to specify how or whether works published online can be re-used by others) is just one example. The Creative Commons wiki describes commons in general as:

resources that are not divided into individual bits of property but rather are jointly held so that anyone may use them without special permission. Think of public streets, parks, waterways, outer space, and creative works in the public domain — all of these things are, in a way, part of the commons.

A decade before Pat Purdy and the Glue Sniffers’ Club, and in the same year that Turbary Common escaped redevelopment by that single vote, Stephen Willats’s groundbreaking 1973 Social Model Construction Project put a networked and interactive ‘portable teletype terminal’ in the streets of Edinburgh to explore and facilitate a new kind of social agency. Building upon code developed by Stuart Pound of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science the project was designed to enable ‘people resident in four areas of [the city] to articulate the way they percieve [sic] and understand conventions that determine peoples relationships to each other.’ (The project is discussed in some depth in a recentish interview between Willats and George Mallen for the Computer Arts Society newsletter here.)

Reproduced in Page Sixty: Bulletin of the Computer Arts Society, Spring 2005

To build the Social Model Construction Project Willats collaborated with computer scientists at ICL in Dalkeith, who used an acoustic coupler to, as Willats puts it, ‘scream the data’ down the wire. This may be one of the first instances, if not the first, of an networked interactive computer terminal being sited in a public space anywhere in the world. Anecdotal sources suggest that it may have been considered sufficiently radical at the time that it resulted in Willats being interviewed by the security services.

It is banal but necessary to note the direction of the flow of information through that 1973 teletype terminal. Social Model Construction Project created a site for a new kind of distributed and creative production rather than simply offering a new means of consumption.

Like the Social Model Construction Project before it, another work of Simon Yuill’s (produced with Chad McCail and others) called spring_alpha (1998-2005) explored ways that members of a defined society might effect change. Like the Social Model Construction Project, it too was built using software that had been developed by other coders and made available free to be adapted, reused and improved, with the further adaptation of this code being the means by which members of the fictional society effected changes. This social and scientific model has been formalised since the days of the Society for Ethical Responsibility in Science by organisations like the Free Software Foundation with their GNU General Public License and an ethos which they explain as follows:

‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer.’

At time of writing The Free Software Foundation‘s mission to ‘promote computer user freedom’ is relevant to more than simply the production and reuse of non-proprietory software.

Most people in the UK are ‘computer users’ now (79.8% of the UK population were internet users in 2009, according to Neilson), but computer user freedom currently seems to be threatened in the UK by a Digital Economy Bill which has been drafted by the Labour government and rushed through second and third readings in the House of Commons before the dissolution of Parliament that precedes the forthcoming general election. #debill as it is known on Twitter contains controversial measures by which copyright holders can force ISPs to produce lists of copyright infringements on demand, and so-called ‘three-strike’ measures which allow ministers or other ‘bodies corporate with the capacity to make their own rules and establish their own procedures’ (Digital Economy Bill [HL] section 142D(4)(a)) to disconnect the internet access of those deemed by any copyright holder to be persistant downloaders (‘pirates’ is still the term most-often used, even by the BBC in this report) without trial.

The contradictory messages coming from Government have been quite schizophrenic. Contrast what Wired UK in a correction (they themselves seem to have been a bit confused) call ‘the three-strikes stuff’ in clauses 4-16 of #debill with Gordon Brown in his 22 March 2010 ‘Speech on Building Britain’s Digital Future’ where he describes broadband as ‘the electricity of the digital age. And I believe,’ he continued, ‘it must be for all – not just for some.’

Like more than 20,000 others I wrote to my MP to point out amongst other things that the British Phonographic Institute and other ‘creative industries’ lobbyists don’t speak for me as a copyright holder who is dependent upon my creative work for my income and increasingly, like everyone else, upon the web for my audiences. I also said that I didn’t think copyright and human rights should be mutually exclusive. I wasn’t hopeful that my letter would actually be read, but just wanted to swell the numbers speaking out. Like Dot Donsworth down in Bournemouth and Poole and the fight to preserve Turbary Common and now what is left of Fernheath, sometimes you simply ‘have to keep saying it.’ I got a useless form letter back from my MP, of course, confirming that she would be supporting the bill.

Debate, so-called, about #debill has been scant and infuriating. The second reading on Tuesday 6 April was attended by a mere handful of MPs (40 when the chamber was most crowded out of a possible 643) of whom all but one seemed to agree to the Bill’s being made law as part of the pre-election ‘wash-up’, even in spite of numerous serious concerns.

Spurious, little-understood and uncontested statistics were bandied around to illustrate e.g. how much ‘the creative industries’ lose to illegal downloading and how many jobs would be at risk if #debill wasn’t passed. My MP Justine Greening didn’t turn up to second or third readings, choosing to speak instead at the launch of a Conservative election campaign in a neighbouring constituency.

It was clear that most of the few who were there at the second reading had little idea what they were talking about, with ‘the creative industries’ being spoken of as if it were a monolithic bloc and the internet seeming to be understood primarily as the tube down which big entertainment corporations pump stuff for everyone else to consume, which is of course one thing that it can be, rather than what it also predominantly is, like that Ur-teletype terminal in Stephen Willats’s Social Model Construction Project: a new kind of public realm that has correspondingly enabled new kinds of distributed creativity, much of which, again echoing the pioneering work of Stephen Willats and many, many, many others, is ‘collaborative, interactive and participatory.’

A typical second-reading rant saw Peter Wishart of the Scottish National Party taking it upon himself to speak for artists (thanks but no thanks, Peter) and characterising dissenting voices, even those speaking from within the creative industries, as the ‘powerful and influential internet service providers […] and their digital rights friends.’ (Hansard, 6 April 2010: column 882).

The vote on the third reading, ‘Division No.132’, came at around 11pm last night: Ayes 189, Noes 47.

It might have been nice if, like the battle to save Turbary Common back in 1973, civil society and openness had won out by a single vote over misinformation, heavy-handedness and the prospect of the unnecessary criminalisation of internet users by ministers and ‘other bodies corporate’. It is no surprise though, I suppose, when you consider that the 20,000-odd people who protested against #debill by writing to their MPs pales into insignificance beside the numbers who protested in London back in February 2003 against going to war in Iraq (estimates ranging from e.g. 750,000 to 2,000,000) and that didn’t change a thing.

But still, you have to keep saying it. Dot told me that when Turbary Common was at risk again, this time from housebuilding proposals in the 1980s, it was the dog walkers who first came out in protest. I wonder who the equivalent of those dog walkers are who will protest about the Digital Economy Bill now and in the coming months as it becomes law.

To be continued

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Creative Commons License
Knowledge Commons #2 by Tony White is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Knowledge Commons #1

I’m currently working alongside the artists Kevin Carter and Simon Yuill on a project commissioned by SCAN called Digital Transformations which is based in three locations around Bournemouth and Poole: Kinson, West Howe and Townsend. The commission pitches me as a writer somewhere between the two; between Kevin’s Landscape-Portrait and Simon’s A New Kind of Commons

© Copyright Chris Downer and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence: Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic. You are free to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work; to Remix — to adapt the work

Kevin Carter’s Landscape-Portrait is both a response in itself and a means for others to respond to the way that government census data is used, specifically in this case the way it is used to create postcode portraits (fictions, of a sort) about people and place that are designed to facilitate decision-making in business, policy and planning spheres.

Kevin has devised an interview which gently subverts the census questions used by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) to conduct the census in England and Wales and The General Register Office for Scotland (GROS). Kevin’s questions are  designed to prompt a more reflective and subjective approach. So instead of asking, as the census might, for the names and ages of everyone resident at a particular address, Landscape-Portrait asks ‘Who in my life do I value the most and why’, and ‘How do I get on living with the people in my house?’

Here is some blurb from the Landscape-Portrait site:

By comparing real life portraits with postcode stereotypes, this project asks if communities can really be reduced to such simple sets of data – data that is often used by public and private organisations to make important decisions about how our local environments and amenities are planned for and designed. Landscape/Portrait invites and encourages citizens to think about who they are, how they are and what they would like the places they live to be like.

There are two ways to participate. Users who have access to a home or work computer with web access and a webcam can record an interview online, by registering on the site, clicking the appropriate button and following the instructions. The alternative model, which is what has been happening in Bournemouth over the past couple of weeks, sees interviews being staged in targeted areas, in this case Kinson, West Howe and Townsend. After leaftleting to households and marketing through libraries and local authority adult learning services, the artist, SCAN personnel and friends made in the particular areas have been taking the Mediabus to various sites and events and recording interviews one-to-one, with results being posted in a matter of hours or days on to the project site.

This latter model has also been used in the north east of England but in theory the project is scaleable and anyone in a UK postcode area can participate by accessing the demographic portrait held about their area, and recording an interview.

Artist and video-maker Steve Lewis has been conducting and recording some of these one-to-one interviews around Bournemouth and Poole. While talking about the project to potential interviewees he has developed a nice, easy-to-relate-to shorthand for how these census-derived demographic profiles might impact on people’s everyday lives. They might, he says by way of an example, influence the decision on a car insurance quote. With a few clicks I found another example of the way such postcode portraits are used to identify and define catchments for new supermarkets. Scroll down to see this revealing note:

ACORN is the market-leading geo-demographic postcode classification that classifies the entire UK population into five categories, 17 groups and 56 types.

I wondered which of the five categories, seventeen groups and fifty-six types I might fall into, so used the Postcode Search function on Landscape-Portrait to look up the demographic portrait of the house I grew up in, to see what it says about me. The short text makes for strange reading:

These people are likely to take one main holiday a year, probably a packaged holiday to the Mediterranean or a camping or caravanning holiday in the UK. Watching TV is a popular leisure activity, as is going to the cinema and sometimes bingo. Doing the football pools, gardening and visiting the pub are also common. Tabloid newspapers are favoured reading, and many listen to Radio 2. This type [my emphasis] is found in Wolverhampton, Dudley, Darlington, Stoke, Rotherham and Mansfield.

Wow. ‘These people’? (Try it out for yourself on the Landscape-Portrait site.)

It is depressing how us-and-them it all is, and how apparently lacking in any kind of agency is ‘this type’ that is being described. But I also find it reassuring to see that this demographic portrait is also so obviously wrong. So where did it all go right for those of us who grew up in that quite pleasant street of semi-detached houses in a leafy little Surrey market town but didn’t turn into this reductive, passive and anachronistic caricature of patriarchal post-WWII working class life?

Talking to Kevin on my first project visit I said something like, ‘Thank Christ there was a big art school in the small town where I grew up.’ I posted this Youtube clip on Facebook a while ago, but I love Mercurytoons’ super-8 footage of Farnham animation students hanging out in The Coach, walking to college and gurning at the camera in one of the studios. This lot in the film weren’t my generation at what was then called the West Surrey College of Art and Design; I did the Foundation course there in 1982. Coincidentally though, I’m pretty sure that one of these dudes actually lived at our house during his first year at the college.

To be continued…

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Creative Commons License
Knowledge Commons #1 by Tony White is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.