Just read the most heartwarming presentation slides by Golan Levin. I’ve been saying all this for years, but not just about ad agencies. This was a DELIGHT to read from someone so high profile at such an event (thanks @HonorHarger for posting the below on twitter).
It’s all too easy to jump on the latest off-the-shelf tools or ‘recontextualise’ some other person’s smarts in a new and much more demanding age. Just yesterday I got annoyed reading a Forbes writer call someone using social media to promote his art a ‘pioneer’. Did he build the platforms? Did he create a new form of engagement that had never been seen or heard of before? No; he used a bunch of free, off-the-shelf products that have been around for years. What’s so pioneering about that?
Why does this make me so mad? Because media artists are consistently innovating the unimaginable, and then being ignored or forgotten when maybe a decade later some commercial company takes that idea as their own and makes a fortune. What’s worse is that they give nothing back to the artist or the sector that they came from, not even a Thank You. As Golan says, this is not sustainable. But more than that, it’s downright bloody RUDE.
We must consistently look back at the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. You need help knowing who some of them are? Here are two phenomenal archives of powerful geek arts minds coming together and an entire global network of smart folk. And they only just begin to scratch the surface. In looking backwards so we not only give credit where it’s due, but we could LEARN SOMETHING NEW and at a MUCH FASTER RATE than if we reinvent the wheel all over again.
Bless Golan Levin, Evan Roth and all the very many others who have been repeating this message for years. You non geeks increasingly need us now. You know how I know that? Because YOU KEEP ASKING ME FOR THAT HELP. We can help you. We want to help you. But we only want to play with nice people; people who respect what we do, and how we do it. People who recognise they’re part of an ecology, not working purely for their own sole benefits.
It’s great that these discussions are becoming so much more common now. Maybe finally media artists can stop being considered as those weird people mucking about with strange stuff in dark rooms and get some recognition for their astonishing insight.
CREDITS
Golan Levin’s presentation from FITC’s ETA Conference in Toronto, 19 October 2012.
Slides embedded from Scribd courtesy FITC/ETA Conferences.
Check out Golan’s work via Flong & follow him on twitter via @golan.
Today I delivered my first ever Keynote talk for the Regional Arts Australia conference, Kumuwuki.
Here are the slides, followed by what I said… [NB this is not a direct transcript, and I’m very likely to tangent in the live speech, but this is the general gist].
[slideshare id=14840858&doc=kumuwukicalltoarms-121022172708-phpapp01]
Ten years ago I published “The Wireless Confusion; a Call to Arms”, inviting people to observe and engage with the mobile data space creatively. Looking back at that now you could just as easily change a few words and call it “The National Broadband Network Confusion; a Call to Arms”.
So today, ten years on, I have a new challenge. It’s time for us to join in creating a vast, but personalised, distributed network.
Now, for those who aren’t aware, a distributed network is (unsurprisingly) a technical term for when programming and data are spread across more than one computer. A problem shared is a problem halved, right? But before I explain what precisely I’m imagining, let me set the scene.
Firstly I must acknowledge the incredible influence that my co-presenter Sara Diamond has had on my thinking. She first invited me to the Banff New Media Institute in 2001 for a summit called “Intimate Technologies, Dangerous Zones” (but I’ve been back several times). It changed my life.
Since 1996, based in the UK, I had begun to see this wonderful strange new internet-enabled future evolve before my eyes. Yet my peers and superiors constantly told me I was wrong. I spent an awfully long time believing them, until I met Sara and her networks. Suddenly I realised I wasn’t alone. Other people not only had their own crazy visions of a similar future, but they were interested in listening to mine… and they frequently told me they agreed!
This gave me the confidence to believe in my own ideas, and the relief to know I was part of something. It also told me that actually our ideas weren’t bad. Instead of being wrong all the time, people actually liked the work we were creating. I actually felt like I was meant to be exactly where I was. Going back to the UK and being asked “How was your holiday” then felt less of a brutally offensive insult.
The second example that frames my concept is the De La Guarda model. De La Guarda are an aerial performance art group from Argentina. They craft their show at home, then start a tour that takes them all over the world. At each site they don’t just rehearse the performance, they duplicate it. Newbies start with a casting call, if lucky move on to training sessions and the very best get brought in to the live shows as small parts and then lead roles. Once the show is perfect the core team moves on to the next tour location, leaving a complete cast, crew and rigger team behind. Over time, as new tours are called and the inevitable physical stress of such dynamic physical performance takes its toll, they have a vast network of performers and riggers to call on.
Both of these things are, to my mind, distributed networks. The people I met in Canada came from all over the world. They inspired and influenced me, they supported my dreams and ambitions, and they encouraged me to continue while they themselves fought their own battles. It was a reciprocal community. De La Guarda created a different type of distributed network, more along a franchise model. One which existed physically and could be called on at any time to become core team or stand in for any of the others.
Last year I was involved in what turned out to be the final gathering of the BNMI. Accepting, finally, that this amazing space was no longer going to be around affected me deeply. I decided that perhaps this was reason enough to consider what an Australian BNMI might look like.
Since visiting as an artist since 2003 and moving here in 2008, I’ve seen a big shift in Australian digital culture. Right now we’re in the midst of a huge transition point. For me personally, I turn 40 next year and have been progressing from being a facilitator, educator and (most recently) strategic policy developer into being an artist. At the same time, the world wide web turned 21 this year, marking its shift into adulthood (to put that in geeky context, the Internet turned 43). And, of course, we are watching the rollout of the NBN.
All this should be great. But it’s not. The “system” is failing. It probably always was, but ‘the powers that be’ managed to carry on regardless and we rarely knew or paid much attention. Today’s hyper-connected world means that we see things differently, we see things more clearly. We can observe, from closeup or far away, how many systems are broken – ethically, politically, economically and with regards culture, climate, education… The systems we are told are used to streamline society (but which inevitably are used as control infrastructures) were designed for a different time. The same conditions, contexts and rules no longer apply.
It’s time to follow our own path, to trust in ourselves and each other instead of expecting someone else to show us the way. The internet has enabled us to connect, co-create (whether over vast distances or just around the corner), and support each other whether emotionally or financially. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are now so common they have (for better or worse) become a form of marketing. Once a mainstream passive audience, the crowd is alert, active, participatory … and demanding!
Hackers, makers and tinkerers (those kooky individuals and communities once relegated to backyards and sheds) have been able to connect with other like minds. Manufacturing has come out of the warehouse and into the home.
The future is now.
All we have to do is join the dots.
There is this perception – not just in Australia, but around the world – that arts and culture is created in urban centres and gets shipped out to those poor little people in the countryside. My belief is that Australia is FULL of wonderful sheds of inventiveness. reallybigroadtrip aims to go and find them, look at what they do and how they sustain, learn from them and make new things with them, let them know they are not alone, connect them with other like minds, and share their stories with the world.
This is easy for me to say. I’m single and have no children, mortgages, venues or staff to support. This means I can experiment much more freely. I take take the necessary risks, crowdsource my life, explore the landscape – literally and figuratively – and report back.
What – I hope – will result is a vast geographic distributed network, which will help Australia recognise the incredible wealth that’s just down the road, or across the superhighway. What I hope will result is an awareness that – despite what you seem to think – this country is full of a wealth of stories, history and culture that is equally as unique and valuable as the pedestals you hold for Europe and America. And, more than anything, what I hope will result is a sustainable creative economy that neither begs for recognition or handouts.
…
UPDATE 23rd October:
There were some lovely backchannel discussions on twitter which I storified and am embedding below. You can also read Jane Howard‘s fantastically-fast-fingered live-blogging of our talks. And for the MANY people who have asked, here’s a copy of Sara Diamond’s Keynote talk (am working on getting her slides too). Don’t forget you can buy Euphoria & Dystopia (edited by Sara D & Sarah Cook) for more on the Banff New Media Institute.
aka … and now one from the “department of feeling a bit silly”…
5002 followers!
I spotted yesterday that I was nearing 5000 followers. I haven’t done any cleaning up in there for a while so it is entirely possible that a bunch of those are bots or defunct accounts (do tweet me if you’re neither and I’m not following you :). I was therefore being a bit silly when I suggested celebrating it. But 5000 is a pretty cool number, right?
Anyway, I tweeted that this was a thing and said I’d offer the 5000th follower a cup of tea on the bus. It seems twitter didn’t like that very much because I went from 4994 followers DOWN to 4989 followers over the afternoon. Sigh. But today things picked up again and I hit – and then overtook – the 5000 mark.
The 5000th follower was @prawn_gravies, who was at the This is Not Art Digital Forum last weekend (the #tinadigital that I filled my twitterfeed with). I don’t think he’d had any idea about the 5000th thingie, he was just following me back after the event. He’s actually moving to Singapore soon so this will be an interesting remote-cuppa!
During yesterday afternoon, @sayraphim (she of the ‘knit along with fee n me‘ fame) stated emphatically that rewarding the 5000th follower was silly because it neglected all the other people who had supported you for longer. She’s right. So I decided to also add a reward for a random name selected from my twitter followers.
Which is where it got even more silly.
I couldn’t bear the idea of printing and cutting up 5000 twitter names just so I could pull one out of a hat! So I tweeted that I was looking for a random follower app, and then stopped being lazy and went and googled for one. I found twitrand which allegedly scours your followers for a random person but hasn’t come back with anything yet. And by the next time I’d looked at twitter, @gritfish had made me one!
@gritfish’s twitter random follower ap
I used his system to come up with another random follower … because it’s nice to use something someone has made for you, and besides, the other one might not return any result at all.
Please therefore also ‘meet’ the second ‘winner’, randomly selected from my 5000+ followers using @gritfish‘s app *drumroll*… @AtomicBlonde37
twitter follower selected at random = @AtomicBlonde37
If the other app comes back with one as well I’ll post a third ‘winner’. Random selection winner(s) will get a bundle of goodies from the Regional Arts Australia conference and my visit to Goolwa in a couple of weeks.
… and I guess all this means that @gritfish should get a reward too, eh?!
Since July everywhere I go, every convo I have in-person or on-the-internetz, starts with “So, have you got your bus yet?”. My answer is always the same. My eyes drop as I sheepishly have to admit, “No, I haven’t, not yet”. It makes me feel sad – partly because I feel like I’m letting everyone down by not having started this thing yet, but mainly because I REALLY WANT THIS BUS AND PROJECT TO GET ON THE ROAD!
So here, for a general public announcement, is what’s going on.
The not great news :(
The ‘official launch date’ for reallybigroadtrip was set to be the Regional Arts Australia conference in Goolwa, SA, Oct 18-21. I will still be there as a Keynote speaker (and doing a few other things) but I have finally accepted that sadly the bus will not be there with me.
I originally thought $50,000 would be a great start to the project. Then I figured that was way too much to ask, so set my crowdfunding goal to $25,000. I hoped that would help me get a reasonable bus which would handle the demands of a large national tour for the next few years. As the campaign went on I thought that even $25,000 was a stupidly large amount of money to be trying to raise on my own. And then all these people blew my mind and helped turn it into a reality anyway!
Having subsequently been looking around for this dream bus, it seems I’m just not going to be able to find a decent reliable one for that price. It’s not just the bus, it’s insurance and the modifications and a few bits of kit so that it can be a reasonable living / working / screening / making / workshopping environment too.
I have never expected the bus to be perfect right from the start, but I have it on the very best authority (the CEO of Toyota CMV Group, who is now helping me find one!) that I realistically need to be spending more like $35,000 to make sure I’m not lumbered with breakdowns as I traverse this wild desert.
The much better news :)
But fear not! All is most certainly not lost! I have been busily hunting down sources to add to the crowdfunding – which has made such a great start! Thanks to the gorgeous FabLab Adelaide folk at ANAT & DFEEST who are my partners in crime with the Nomadic FabLab) I have just secured an extra $9,000 to go towards the bus, so shopping is now able to step up a notch.
This all means that I’ve had to make a few choices. For a start I had to go and earn some money to live (and go towards some bus extras) for a while … not that I’m complaining, all the gigs (see here) have been huge fun and helped spread the reallybigroadtrip word!
Secondly I have decided that since most of the bookings I had until February were self-dictated or could just as easily be done without the bus, it makes sense to give myself and the renovations team more time to beg/borrow/hack everything we need to get this going. So I shall be sticking around South Australia until some time in February next year getting all this ready. There were a few things on here anyway (which you’ll be hearing about in due course) so it makes a lot of logistical sense.
The journey is about flow, and as long as it happens in the right way with the right people I am OK about making these changes. I hope you are too.
It also means I’ve been a bit behind on some of the rewards. Bear with me, I’m knitting as fast as I can!
I’ve also not been blogging as much as I would have liked with all these behind-the-scenes production developments. This extra time will help me get back on that too. There has been so much going on, I’m so excited to tell you about the depth and partnerships that the project has been building!
Oh yeah! If any of you happens to see a Toyota Coaster or HINO around South Australia in the next couple of months that you think I should be aware of – contact me! And thanks to lovely folk like @aliak who already have been keeping an eye out around the country, it’s much appreciated.
NB: really big thanks to @zoe_annabel for the above photo which has frankly been open in my browser since she tweeted me on Sept 11th. It’s really helped me keep my spirits up as I’ve been pondering all this… living the dream will come in time, i know…
UPDATE: Nov 13th 2012. If you’ve read this post, you might also, possibly, be interested in this one: Houston, we have a bus!
I’ve been rather neglectful of the blog lately… sorry about that. Things in the physical plane have been somewhat explosive since the campaign ended. I’m certainly not complaining, but there has been an awful lot of scheming (which I can’t tell you about yet) and doing (which I’ve outlined below), and accordingly not a lot of time for reflection and writing.
I sent out a newsletter a couple of days ago that summarises some of what I’ve been up to and some of what is to come in the next few weeks. But I’m going to post a version of all that here (with extra pics!) to keep you updated.
Bear with me a couple more weeks then I’ll have a bit more brain space to blog properly again. Oh and of course in the meantime (assuming you miss my ramblings) I’m generally tweeting or facebooking so come say hi there, and there’s an a agenda page here with dates/locations etc. I’ve also become a bit obsessed with Instagram lately, so if you use that come find me under username ‘feesable’.
What’s been happening…
I started writing some summary posts to explain the campaign process (there’s more to come with these), thanking the supporters and posting out the first rewards, then had to go earn some living-money for a while.
You’ll probably know from previous posts that I have now become the nomadic FabLab and things have been busily developing there leading up to the November launch. You can now follow updates via their blog, facebook and twitter accounts.
Oh and I have been knitting the next rewards – photos coming once I have a nice selection for you to choose from. Remember you can knit with us too, if you like.
Oct 18-21st Regional Arts Australia conference Kumuwuki in Goolwa SA, where I’m officially launching reallybigroadtrip, doing my first ever Keynote & talking about crowdfunding.
