FacTaxInfrequentlyAskedQuestions
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[edit] For Isis' publication documenting their CR-ISIS commissions and residencies, we are working on some Infrequently Asked Questions.
[edit] The questions are:
1. what are, in retrospect, the main outputs of the founding of the fac tax a) in relation to the office: here describe the summer at isis, and
subsequent fac tax offices
b) in relation to the wiki: here describe the role of the wiki and
remote participation - anne / steve / etc., bibliographies / softwares i.e. delicious and being on the web
c) in relation to the world: here describe the exhibition outputs - the
libraries / the node london stuff?
2. how have taxonomies (or how has being a faculty member of the fac tax)
changed your life
a) in relation to how you play games: here describe the games and gaming
systems, the ikea notepad
b) in relation to how you work: here describe the socialising of
research, or being an artist in residence! or me making curatorial method more public
c) in relation to how you make your work more like a game (i.e.
social/fun)
[edit] Sarah's comments are:
tagging, folksonomies and other peoples' bookmarks.
in retrospect our joint residency was for me a lesson in social softwares. when we started establishing the office and its activities i had read encyclopedias, dictionaries and lexicons and knew the differences between them; i had worked ina a library and knew how to catalogue and assign subjects to books; i had used databases and built simple filemaker ones; i had attempted blogging and had an online photo blog which i used to store photos from my mobile phone.
the first lesson for me was the wiki. i have used other wikis since, setting up one on omweb and curating two shows with steve using socialtext. they have changed my life - making me more efficient, more collaborative, and less dependent on (exclusive) paper versions of whatever it is i'm working on. this is a significant change given my role as an academic and sometime institutional curator (where exclusive papers in files are nearly sacrosanct).
the second lesson was in shared bookmarking and tagging. delicious i am still struggling to use, but find it super handy when i have to give a lecture or talk somewhere without my own computer - it structures my web browsing but hasn't replaced my own personal bookmark bar (do i need the world to see my job searches, blind dating profiles and sleazyblog reading lists?)
i was a reblogger at eyebeam a year after our residency and that brought together my knowledge of tagging with rss feeds. i'd like to be a reblogger permanently and institute clever tagging to share what i'm looking at with the world in an intelligent fashion. i don't know what is stopping me frankly.
i was a phlog user before, but thought that to be strictly about my mobile phone diary (letting friends and family know where in the world i am)... now i use flickr and struggle with the interface, assigning the right tags and re-filing things into photo sets. part of giving up phlog and using flickr was about trying to be less personal and more professional on the web, i don't think i've found a solution to that yet. people i don't know still seem to find the personal me on the web.
essentially, when i read about 'tagging - the latest way to search the web http://www.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,1676391,00.html (or some such) in the technology pages of the guardian, i feel ahead of the game, and that seems to be one of the most significant outcomes of all, my own self-empowerment to learn which tools and which softwares have and can change the way i work (and play).
did founding the fac tax change how i co-curated the exhibition Database Imaginary? not really. and i can't quite put my finger on why that is. well, actually i do know - because the show was curated by three of us, two who are happy using social softwares like wikis and one who isn't. it's a question of interoperability. in fact i think i should do a curatorial project on that very 'issue'. if we're all tagging the same things differently (cool / awesome / great), in different open but not interoperable 'resources', then what good are we doing in terms of future research/scholarship or past archiving? does it matter? it feels like it should.
[edit] Saul's comments are:
1. what are, in retrospect, the main outputs of the founding of the fac tax
a) in relation to the office: here describe the summer at isis, and subsequent fac tax offices
The activities of the Faculty as it developed at Isis Arts are described fairly comprehensively in the 'Newcastle Activities Report', filed in August '04: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/FacultyTaxonomyNewcastleActivitiesReport quite soon after the residency.
Perhaps a better first question, looking at things that had not yet become clear when the summary above was written would be 'What did the Founding of the Faculty and the ISIS residency mean for the University of Openess'?
As ever, I can only speak for myself - not for the many who have used the UofO for their own purposes.
In April 2004 the University of Openess Faculty of Taxonomy was founded in preparation for this residency at ISIS, and the 'Database Imaginary' show planned for Banff in late '04/'05. The Faculty of Taxonomy was a progression of some ideas about knowledge representation, abstract cartography and the potentials of online collaborative 'tools' that had been developing in various faculties of the University of Openess (UofO) since it started as a weekly Unix boot-camp in 2002. I think it was Anne Laforet who first suggested the name and purpose of the faculty. The Faculty became a context for a set of discussions between a group of people that nominated themselves as the faculty staff: Sarah Cook and myself discussing remit, context, agendas, and setting up the office in the vacant office spaces above ISIS Arts. We then made invitations to Anne Laforet, Steve Dietz and Mikey Wienkove as occasional researchers/staff and collaborators with each of us on other projects. This group then undertook a series of socialized research micro-projects: quick social / visual / performative experiments in which the results were shared prior to any final, authored academic or artistic outcome - an unusual methodology in the economies of most of those participating (principally Art and academia).
Until this residency, I had not been aware of any University of Openess researcher (a self-appointed role) taking on any professional funded art activities as part of founding a Faculty, although it has happened since. I did mention in the activities report that there had been some complaints immediately after the founding of the Faculty due to the way I had taken discussions and casual information exchanges that took place amongst a dispersed group of social researchers, and recontextualised them as part of a conference paper entitled 'On the Founding of the Faculty of Taxonomy' at the 'Free Cooperation' conference in Buffalo in April '04. (http://www.freecooperation.org/) (http://mailman.twenteenthcentury.com/pipermail/uo/2004-April/000495.html).
Looking through the archives of the UofO mailing list, I also notice that I had contested a very early contextualising of the UofO as art and myself as an author associated with it in the low-fi locator publication: http://mailman.twenteenthcentury.com/pipermail/uo/2003-January/000024.html This reticence to identifying and promoting a collaborative and unbounded process as art now seems both naive and innately wise (or cunning) - as the UofO had barely begun as a documented or recognized organisation at that point. Immediately fencing it off as an authored art project would probably have warned off most people with a sensitivity to the mercurial states and transfers of authorship in collaborative practices.
For me, this residency and later the exhibition of some of the artifacts generated by its formation at 'The Database Imaginary' in Banff marked a turning point in how I perceived and understood the UofO: I lost the sense of semi-anonymous collectivity, found it less contexually experimental in the sense that (and I stress, this is my perception only) it stopped being 'not just art'. The term 'not just art' was coined by Matthew Fuller when talking about the WebStalker (an early piece of Software Art) in his 1998 text: 'A Means of Mutation' (http://bak.spc.org/iod/mutation.html). He was referring to the way a cultural practice or product can preserve a diversity of interpretations
- utside of the one all-accommodating context of Art. I should mention that
this perception was also shaped by the continued activities and knowledge-politics research of the Copenhagen Free University (http://copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk), and a series of very illuminating seminars and texts at the newly formed Flaxman Lodge (http://flaxmanlodge.omweb.org) in central London - a project/research space which began a much-needed pragmatic socio-economic analysis of non-pecuniary exchange in 'collective' art practices, with a particular focus on a set of participatory didactic practices that had come to be called 'self-institutions', following an earlier research project by Josie Berry and Howard Slater: the 'Self-Institution Research Unit' (http://ourganization.org),
I should point out that the process I'm describing observing in the UofO was not necessarily as shared perception, or a Bad Thing as such, or anything other than an inevitable part of a dispersedly collaborative process becoming formalised around certain people and specialisations. It's also an example of how a taxonomical designation (it's Art!) can profoundly transform perceptions of relationships between people, knowledge, and communications.
b) in relation to the wiki: [here describe the role of the wiki and remote participation - anne / steve / etc., bibliographies / softwares i.e. delicious and being on the web]
After actually studying the functioning of the UofO wiki and various 'tagging' tools and strategies such as del.icio.us during the residency, I became very skeptical about their 'collaborative' function, possibly also in reaction to the contextual formalising process I described above. As the use of these 'collaboration' tools became more widely adopted and wikis, blogs, voice over IP and web-services such as http://del.icio.us (now designated Web 2.0) became widespread, the false impression that a small community of early-adopters had of suddenly finding a high signal-to-noise ratio, faded. This is inevitable as smaller, coherent communities of facilitated exchange become subsumed by more diffuse groups with fewer common interests.
This was always an unresolved point of discussion on the del.icio.us users mailing list. This (and other) communities of interest who were developing 'social software' tools were dogged by issues of privacy,
- wnership of collaboratively produced data and policies of inclusion and
exclusion. One of the key questions at the time, was 'how are people going to make money out of this?' Entry into a marketplace of venture capital, marketing and speculative value flows was not yet assured or
- bvious, but it started to happen in earnest at around that time. I aired
my views on these subjects to the del.icio.us community mailing list several times, first in a tail-wagging burst of enthusiasm in which I announced the activities of the Faculty of Taxonomy:
http://lists.del.icio.us/pipermail/discuss/2005-January/001669.html
To which Joshua's dryly humorous answer was 'don't be such a librarian'.
Then, after flickr.com, a very popular social software photo-sharing site was sold to web megacorp Yahoo, I brought up this subject again more cautiously, worried about the sudden accumulation of value around the data-set that made up del.icio.us-like communities and the value of the participation of its aggregate user-base. I proposed that if a sale was ever made, that the community would be consulted about it and have a stake in it:
http://lists.del.icio.us/pipermail/discuss/2005-February/001961.html
One month later Joshua Shachter unilaterally (as was his right) decided to take some venture capital for del.icio.us, which I think was mostly yahoo-driven, although I hear it's a bit less evil than that, but who knows. I'm not a subscriber to the list anymore.
http://lists.del.icio.us/pipermail/discuss/2005-March/002554.html
Having returned from my paid artist's residency at ISIS arts, and watching, at a distance, Sarah and Steve hang a show of internationally recognized Famous Artists in the Banff Centre, I didn't fail to see the hippocracy of my critical position on issue of the redistribution of shared cultural capital. As has been shown many times, the modus operandi
- f art practices that use these 'collaborative' tools and practices is to
use fast-flowing, emerging reputation markets to establish an advantageous position for re-entering more traditional and remunerative economies. This process mirrored the movement of the Free Software hacker scene and corporate technology markets in their development of from 'social software' into 'Web 2.0'.
With Jo Walsh's help, I also began to recognize the technical and semantic futility of these superficial approaches to knowledge management which essentially entail the use of apparently common-sense strings of alphanumeric characters functioning as adjectives to add another layer of keywording to everything. Once enough keywords crowd in, back we go to square one of having to come up with a way of categorizing all those damn keywords. This can be observed in del.icio.us by the adoption of further levels of categorization on top of the simple but powerful 'tags' system it began with. 'Bundles' now allow you to group your tags. It makes sense, but following the same simplistic approach, it's not going to be long before we need bundles of bundles - this is a semantic arms race in which the tortoise of popularity will always triumph over the hare of meaning, especially when the tortoise writes the cheques.
c) in relation to the world: here describe the exhibition outputs - the libraries / the node London stuff?
Immediately after returning from the residency, I took on two major projects that completely consumed my attention in 2005, both of which were directly influenced by the experiences and insights gained during the Faculty of Taxonomy project that I've mentioned above. Both these projects were funded by Arts Council England with a lot of help and initiative from Rachel Baker, the media arts officer for London, who really took pains supporting them in the extremely reductive and structurally conservative context of cultural funding in the UK.
One was my early and mid-term involvement with what has now become NODE.London - a Season of Media arts initiated by Luci Eyers, Peter Ride, Sarah Cook and myself that will take place in London in March 2006, which is extremely exciting (and the terrifying bit I was alluding to earlier, because it's actually happening!). NODE.London is now being driven into life by a thriving community of voluntary organisers, artists, projects, initiatives and events (see http://nodel.org for more about that). I should mention that although I helped to initiate this project, and I'm going to talk about it, I'm in no way claiming credit for the awesome effort it has become - which belongs to the many voluntary organisers, and the amazing people who were found to professionally coordinate different parts of the project.
After a long initial phase of fund-raising and carving out a sufficiently non-defined funding arrangement with the Arts Council of England, (meaning that at least not all the outcomes of the project were predefined before the project was funded), 70k was committed to the project and the Season of Media Arts (S.M.A.L. as it was called at the time) began as a bureaucratic process of self-definition. S.M.A.L. http://smal.omweb.org tried to learn from many of the pitfalls of
- stensibly collective practices and processes, as well as the
difficulties of reconciling that collectivity with the fame-based economies of cultural funding, curation, festivalism and instrumentalisation of 'socially engaged' art practice.
The outcomes of NODE.London are still unclear, but since it was re-named NODE.London, and adopted by a group of committed and energetic organisers and artists in mid 2005, it has grown into a very promising and engaging process that should yield some very interesting research and a great burst of activity in March '06.
The other project, which was very interrelated with NODE.London, was my part in Wireless London http://wirelesslondon.info , a project initiated by myself, Jo Walsh, Julian Priest and Pete Gomez, it was an attempt to bring London's pioneering DIY wireless community networks scene together, and into mainstream use, while simultaneously sketching out what it's possible to actually do with such networks once we've built them.
There were many parts to this process, some of which turned into blind alleys. For example, lobbying local government and the London Development Agency, (albeit in a somewhat psychedelic frenzy of powerpoint absurdity), to adopt community wireless networks as part of their broadband roll-out strategy for London 2016. This turned out to be a complete and total waste of time: we'd overlooked a basic ideological and structural opposition that governments generally have to self-provision
- f communications systems, evinced by the restrictive and absurd
- ver-regulation of most of the radio spectrum. After facing that
- bstacle, it became clear that the only way to proceed was to take a
gung-ho approach to these kinds of obstacles and to seek out people who were solving these problems in pragmatic, direct ways.
This involved participation in the development of a whole landscape of Free Software and public domain information resources. There were many parts to this process, each of which formed part of our focus, and the focus of a wide network of collaborating developers, thinkers and
- rganisers over the course of 2005, which can be broadly divided into six
major themes:
1. Free Geodata: the self-provision of a geospatial data infrastructure
to underpin the development of non-corporate, non-military 'locative media' and most of the other practices below:
2. Free Wifi/Networks: self-provision of a telecommunication
infrastructure.
3. Open Money/LETS systems: self-provision of models of non-pecuniary
investment and finance.
4. Open Civic Information: access to planning data, political and
governmental information necessary for democratic participation.
5. Open Hardware: self-provision and construction of non-patented device
designs, and access to the brains and guts of consumer technology devices
6. Free/Open Culture: Continuing debates and struggles over intellectual
property, authorship and ownership of all kinds of information.
Alongside all these infrastructural concerns, or binding them all together was a strategy (largely concocted and envisioned by Jo Walsh) to begin implementing a kind semantic meta-framework that could begin to deal with some of the problems of meaning-making thrown up for me during the Faculty Taxonomy residency.
This became a large and hubris-laden software development project, that attempted to use the best-of-breed of existing software that addressed some of the areas above, and to develop software to fill the gaps and bind together all the various parts of these infrastrucutres into a Semantic Web framework. Rather than go into detail about that, it would probably be best to simply point to the still-in-development documentation of the nodel application framework which also explains more
- f the terminology and context.
Of course software was only a small part of the process, One major
- utcome of our activities was organising, along with Rufus Pollock and
the Open Knowledge Foundation (http://okfn.org), the preparatory meeting for the World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures (http://wsfii.org) which brought together, over two days, people from each of these areas of interest from all over the world and sparked an
- ngoing process that is now iterating WSFIIs all over India through
2006-7.
This meeting, was greatly facilitated through NODE.London, and became part
- f a preparatory 'Open Season' of meetings, exhibitions, conferences and
events forming a conceptual backbone for the March '06 Season of Media arts that brought Wireless London and NODE.London together in practice. (see http://nodel.org/october.php for more on that). A forthcoming book 'Media Mutandis' edited by Marina Vishmidt is forthcoming that will hopefully document this process.
The intention was to use the landscape of software and infrastructure brought together by Jo's 'nodel' semantic web application framework to underpin the activities of NODE.London, embedding information generated by activities, documentation, research, collaboration and conversation in a public domain of re-usable, accessible information. Conceptually, the focus on providing a 'Free Infrastructure' for NODE.London was an attempt to decouple the forms of exchange that contribute to the generation of meaning in the collaborative art practices and media arts 'scenes' of London and it's many dispersed and connected hubs of activity from its many captive or reductive mechanisms and markets.
It might be a trite summary, but my engagement with both these projects became, sometimes messily, a way of dealing with the apparent contradictions of collaboration, representation, autonomy and the contingency of taxonomy in art practice, although it's probably beyond the remit of an answer to your question to try to describe exactly how. These projects are also still very much in progress, so it's not yet possible to evaluate how, if at all, they impacted on 'the world'.
2. how have taxonomies (or how has being a faculty member of the fac tax)
changed your life
a) in relation to how you play games: here describe the games and gaming systems, the ikea notepad
Did my earlier answers to your questions sound embittered and disillusioned? I hope not, although those emotions have been part of a process of trying to take things less seriously and adopting game playing as my primary strategy for all involvement in cultural activities of any sort. Mikey Wienkove, with whom I am now collaborating full-time as a member of The People Speak network (http://theps.net) has condensed this attitude into a motto which we apply to all our projects: 'Everybody has fun, nobody gets killed'.
As the game 'Categories' revealed through the sometimes vicious competition that emerged between Michelle Hirschorn, Sarah Cook, Beryl Graham, Anne Laforet and myself, along with other visiting players, taxonomy is about manipulation and control, and success in that game has as much to do with Machiavellian strategizing as linguistic skill. As long as Mikey's motto is adhered to, and the infrastructure of the game (or read 'art activity' in the place of 'game') is open to modification and challenge by all, then there's nothing wrong with this kind of sneaky approach.
b) in relation to how you work: here describe the socialising of research, or being an artist in residence! or me making curatorial method more public
I was never particularly comfortable calling myself an artist before this residency but would launch, when asked, into a long and confusing set of descriptions of the kinds of strange activities I involve myself in, inevitably alienating whomever I was talking to and irritating my grandmother. I now use that term to categorize myself without qualification unless asked for more detail. The processes and projects I've talked about above, which began, for me, in the Faculty Office, helped me to make more sense of that job description.
c) in relation to how you make your work more like a game (i.e. social/fun)
See answer to question 2.a.
