#hackthebarbican

[getdialogue]

James Bridle: Unmoored

I’ve put off from writing about Unmoored for a number of reasons, the initial being that it is an anchor project for Hack the Barbican and deserves a fair critical text as an accompaniment. This introduction seeks to unpack some ideas surrounding the work and the resultant text is a set of notes to be developed further by myself or others. This is an open discussion. The point of where the critical framework begins here is most problematic and it must be stated that this position is not the fault of the work. A work with a variety of probable positions is more interesting to explore in the critical sense than work, which promotes soliloquy. The most problematic ideas arising from Unmoored are James Bridle’s own theories on aesthetics, specifically the New Aesthetic. It is hard to determine whether divorcing these ideas, of which he is very well known, will benefit the understanding of Unmoored. There are a number of reasons for wanting to do this, regardless of how dismissed this may be. For one, there is still validity in reading a work in relation to historical visual culture and the subsequent cultural contexts. There is also integrity in reading a work as it presents itself to you, to prevent an arm reach into the bag of convenient discourse. The purpose of using both these methodologies is of course to widen the scope of how the work is received and to donate new narratives. Despite stating this, there will be links back to ideas that have been formed through the New Aesthetic, although it won’t be pointedly referenced to prevent convolution (see: drones).

One of the hypotheses that lingers relates to the New Objectivity movement around the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany. In brief, the New Objectivity sought to explore photography as a medium separate from the simulacrum of painting. There was also a desire to explore mechanical production and its relationship to repetitious forms in nature - Alfred Renger-Patzsch is most acclaimed for establishing this visual relationship. Why in particular this area is of interest in this context, are the parallels in trying to articulate and explore new cultures that have grown due to the development of technology. There was also the spectre of war, ailing economic systems and technological developments in military hardware hanging over the Weimar which, it could be argued are also suspended over us now albeit manifesting in different ways. There are further parallels with the New Objectivity and the present technological society hinted at here but, these notions are perhaps best elucidated on in a subsequent, more considered, well referenced text.

There are loops here to run in relationship to Unmoored, which admittedly will take sometime to enunciate. Unmoored is an adaptation of  A Ship Adrift, originally commissioned and produced for Artangel’s A Room for London in 2012.  A Ship Adrift is a virtual craft blown across the world by a weather station positioned in London. For Unmoored at Hack the Barbican, Bridle has utilised the same process to blow an untethered Barbican across the globe. Using weather data gathered from the Barbican, visitors could watch the vast concrete complex float across a virtual landscape.  A Ship Adrift and Unmoored both appear to subtly narrate a new type of military hardware as both can be linked to Bridle’s interest in drones. Free of pilots and anonymously mapping a landscape, these virtual drones roam without any invitation or discernment for sovereign territory or culture. This could sound utopian, free and liberating. The virtual landscape allows for a world without borders. It is utopian to a point, until real drones are considered. The drones of the US military are technically pilotless but, they are programmed with political rhetoric, histories of world power and foreign policy. Assuming a recognisable colonial position, they are anonymous to territory and culture in order to fulfil their programmed objectives. The fact that Bridle uses Google Maps as space for the drones to navigate, speaks again about US global dominance - the drones don’t track over alternative mapping systems or make suggestions towards any other virtual global mapping.

This is where New Objectivity photographer August Sander comes in at a complete right angle. Sander wasn’t overtly interested in military hardware or objectives. He was engaged with the supposed objectivity that technology / photography brought to representing society. Using the photograph, he began to document German farmers by their trade prior to WW1 and in the run up to WW2. This project slowly expanded to all of German society. He had a photographic catalogue of German archetypes, defined by job or by social class, even by disability. This activity and the resultant visual output in retrospect becomes an omen of the machinations of genocide that would later be enacted by the Nazis. It is worth stating that Sander did not have political sympathies with the party, his interests were with a whole society, not with the vision of a society destroyed by the action of eugenic thought. This assumed digression now needs to link back to Unmoored. Unmoored and A Ship Adrift could similarly be sinister omens of a future world landscape. Like Sander, Bridle is picking up on a precursor of something. A socio-political landscape that we can’t yet articulate but, is likely to be formed by world powers positioning unmanned ships across the world, programmed with foreign policy objectives that are operative regardless of cultural space or territories.

Continuing with Germany and the upheaval between WW1 and WW2, there is another visual trope that Unmoored ties into. There is a difficult foundation in aerial footage that can always be traced to the opening sequence of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. If Unmoored is as militaristic as assumed, then there is a relationship. There are crossovers, the pilot of the plane carrying Hitler is not visible, the real interest lies in staging omnipresence over landscape. Maybe, just possibly, Triumph of the Will is not only the first film to feature aerial footage but, also the first to visually suggest a drone concept. The visual narration of the opening sequence has a resonance when one elects to look out of the window from Unmoored. This omnipresence over landscape was replayed in real time to all visitors at Hack the Barbican during August. The viewer could watch Unmoored’s journey from the point of view of the craft / object. All those encountering the work are implicated in the omnipresent position and are transformed from being the surveyed to the surveyor. In an age where the viewer is often aware of and comfortable being in either position - social media has turned us into surveyors who expect to be surveyed ourselves, it is hard to discern a true critical distance from this voyeuristic mechanism, other than to say it feels somehow natural. Once making this realisation, this assumed ease becomes sinister and questionable. We know we can take on either role, we just aren’t sure why we need this skill yet. It’s a concept that at times seems intangible but, is a definition of the contemporary age. For A Ship Adrift and Unmoored the greatest challenge for both works is trying to discern the intention of either. When work takes on mechanisations that mimic socio-political atmospheres, it is hard to make a decision if the work is critical of, sympathetic to or merely observant of these atmospheres.

barbican.shipadrift.com

shipadrift.com

[getdialogue]

In Dialogue | Tim Murray-Browne / Cave of Sounds

Can you give an overview of your project?

TMB: The Cave of Sounds is an interactive sound installation formed of a circle of eight original musical instruments, inspired by ideas of prehistoric people using music as a means to form a sense of collective identity. The instruments were all created to exist together as an ensemble, but were each made an individual over a period of ten months with regular meetings and jam sessions forming a key part of this process. As an exhibition, audience members are invited to experiment and play with the instruments and connect with others around them through making music.

I was really intrigued with how Cave of Sounds is something without structures yet is aware of community? That is at least the sense I had when observing and playing in the installation.

TMB: Yes, one of the ideas behind the Cave of Sounds is to dismantle the distinction between performer and audience to some extent. Like many things in our society, music has become a specialised activity performed by professionals and consumed by the masses. But for many (perhaps most) cultures throughout history, creating music is something a group does together rather than for the benefit of spectators.

Following on from this, I was intrigued by the remarks you made in the film for Cave of Sounds about prehistoric music making. Could you expand on this briefly and are there any references for the project?

TMB: A big inspiration behind the project was Werner Herzog's film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams that documents 30,000 year old paintings in the Chauvet cave, as well as the remains of ancient stone circles across the UK. I was also influenced by Christopher Small's ideas in Musicking, where he considers music as an activity rather than an artefact and the social consequences of this. These ideas resonated when we were first getting to know each other as a group, as well as theories about the evolution of birdsong - how bird species evolved to sing in different areas of the spectrum to make it easier for those within a single species to hear each other.

Additionally, I was interested in how individual sound artists / composers (if that is the correct terminology?) produce new instruments to be used within an environment that could be orchestral but, is obviously lacking in that formality. How do discussions work around how they blend together or is that even important? Are you a composer or a facilitator?

TMB: Creating instruments that fitted together was one of the biggest challenges of the project - particularly given the diversity of different sounds everyone in the group works with. It formed a big part of the process - every few weeks we would meet and listen to each other's work and different sound references people wanted to share. Any kind of musical collaboration involves a process of finding the balance between individual ideas and the sound of the ensemble, and seeing if we could do this with a set of original instruments was a key question we were exploring with the project. Even so, the final third or so of its development was mostly focused on improving the collective sound, both by modifying individual instruments and by increasing the scope of the networked component to keep them more in sync with regards to rhythm and harmony.

How do you define the word hack and how do you relate that back to Cave of Sounds?

TMB: I'm actually not that keen on the word myself as it's used to mean so many different things, although I'm composer in residence at the Music Hackspace so obviously I can't avoid it. However, I would say a key part of the stuff going on with the Music Hackspace is creating new music by using existing technology in original and personal ways. So perhaps, I would go with that. I think the personal element is key though.

Early on with the Cave of Sounds, it was occasionally referred to as the Hacked Ensemble which captures the fact that each instrument is an original personal technological artefact from a different musician or artist. But calling them 'hacked instruments' also seems to imply that they were hobbled together last weekend which is definitely not true! Fundamental to the Cave of Sounds has been the gradual co-evolution of the different instruments that form it and the formation of a single unified work out of many individual's personal practice.

How did you find the process of working within / with the Barbican Centre?

TMB: Architecturally, the Barbican remains one of my favourite buildings in London and it's been amazing to be there. I was really happy to get the cavernous lower ground floor with the stairs leading down to the installation. It doesn't look like a cave but the lighting, concrete multitude of surrounding passageways creates much of the same essence.

caveofsounds.com

[getdialogue]

In Dialogue | Geoff Howse from Thickear / Ministry of Measurement

Can you give a quick overview of your project?

GH: The Ministry of Measurement was an installation/performance, transforming the Barbican’s giant cloakroom area into a sinister bureaucratic data collection centre. Through sound, visual cues, performance and an eye for the Barbican’s Brutalist aesthetic, members of the public were coerced into collecting bizarre measurement data, which was duly fed into the eleven enormous databanks, printed and hung up as lengthy data sheets.

A study of the subjectivity of data readings, the intricacies of measurement and our inherent suspicions about data exchange, The Ministry of Measurement was also an homage to classic sci-fi and dystopian film and literature, visual echoes of which are abundant within the Barbican’s architecture and interior design.

As the work developed we consulted with Ulrich Atz from the Open Data Institute and Michael de Podesta from the National Physical Laboratory on the subjectivity of data readings and the intricacies of measurement and the idea to present a fictional bureaucratic organisation grew from the setting and our research. We also collaborated with Anthony Evans to provide programming for our receipt printer and Daniel Lopez to build and support a MoM website.

How did you find the process of working within or with the Barbican Centre?

GH: Inspirational on many levels, tiring and occasionally poignant. Firstly, we felt honoured to have the opportunity to present work in an wonderful institution, wonderful both as a cultural centre and aesthetically. We wanted to present work that was sympathetic to both aspects, as well as to Thickear as a collective.

We thoroughly enjoyed working with the Barbican staff who helped greatly to facilitate the work and who did everything they could to aid us, personally I can't thank them enough, yet the irony of pushing a work concerned with bureaucracy through all the necessary levels of bureaucracy was not lost on us.

Finally, the experience of 'working' at the ministry day to day, in the dim cathedral of the lower level, was often as tedious and tiring as any administrative job. Interacting with the public was often deeply enjoyable yet observing from afar the lives of some who through necessity find the Barbican their daytime sanctuary, was very sad.

How would you define the word or concept ‘hack’?

GH: An intervention. A re purposing for some use other than that which intended. Unofficial, tacked-on, crude yet effective.

What are your main influences or references for the project that visitors would be interested in?

GH: Before we heard about Hack the Barbican we had become interested in data sonification and how information can be processed to produce supposedly representational sound. Our research had revealed how subjective that transfer can be; essentially any data can produce any output. As we initially walked around the Barbican building we were conscious that we wanted to create work that was sympathetic to the buildings aesthetic but was also a re-purposing of the space in the spirit of the HTB festival. When we looked at the cloakroom space, we were struck by its symmetrical beauty and epic proportions. It was pertinent to us that was here was a space where another type of transfer usually took place, an exchange of item for code, with eleven gargantuan banks of data storage.

As mentioned The Ministry of Measurement was also an homage to classic sci-fi and dystopian film and literature - 1984, Brazil, THX 1138, Kubrick etc. We didn't read, watch or research any of these any further than the residues they have already left in our cultural consciences, yet the references I think were clear.

  If you could re-imagine the structure of Hack the Barbican in your chosen medium, how would it manifest? Is it possible to articulate this?

GH: In many ways Hack the Barbican follows a modern mode of thought reflected in open data and open source networks. Here the Barbican is the code that has been ‘opened’ and all comers have been allowed access. Participants do not need to have already had successful careers to be involved and they do not need to stick to the usual designated ‘art’ or ‘performance’ stages within the Barbican. They only need the drive and ability to make their vision happen. This is a very interesting direction for an organisation such as the Barbican to take.

In our collective we both do and don't follow this structure. We believe in collaboration, the free flow of ideas and talents, and we open our doors to others. Yet we decide when those doors open and to whom. So we could be much more open -  but do we want this? Well, if we follow the HtB model, I guess it it isn't up to us to decide.

About Thickear:

Thickear (Andy Davidson, Geoff Howse, Jack James, Kevin Logan, Tadeo Sendon) are a collective of sound artists working together to produce group exhibitions and events focused on the exploration of sound through conceptual art and performance. Formed in London at the beginning of 2012 from Sound Art M.A. graduates, they have presented exhibitions and performances at the LCC, Arbeit Gallery, Troyganic and Music Tech Fest and The Barbican. The Thickear manifesto is centred around the power of collaboration, fusing individual talents to create original and otherwise unachievable work.

[getdialogue]

Ian Willey: Barbicoin

"When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions the term he used was symbolon - from which our own word “symbol” is derived. Symbolon was originally the Greek word for “tally” - and object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt. So our word “symbol” traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another.”

David Graeber Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Ian Willey has run a series of workshops at Hack the Barbican where the public were invited to change the surface of 2 pence coins with tomato ketchup. A variety of designs were temporarily etched onto the surfaces, personalising the currency. The coins can go back into circulation or preserved with clear nail varnish and turned into a keepsake. The workshops were borne out of an interest Willey has had in alternative currencies. Originally trained as in Fine Art, Willey now works in the gaming industry and is currently developing an App. According to Willey within the gaming realm, a lot of resources and discussions can be centred around virtual currencies: how they will look, how they will work and how they will ultimately influence the narrative of the game. In terms of real virtual currency, Willey discussed Bitcoin and the disruptive waves it is passing through our current financial systems. Bitcoin is the evolution of money as a symbolic token to just pure numbers. In recent years the world has been preoccupied with alternative and sustainable currency systems; Barbicoin taps into the current interest in local currencies such as the Brixton Pound and skills exchanges.

In relationship to hacking, Willey offered some useful references from The Heretic’s Guide to Finance by Brett Scott:

“Many hacker approaches attempt to blend three categories of action:

Exploring: Empathetically getting to know the nuances of systems, and gaining access.

Jamming: Rebelliously and mischievously seeking out the systems’ vulnerabilities and exposing them.

Building: Creatively seeking to recombine the elements of systems to create something new.”

These categories are particularly useful in unpacking the projects at Hack the Barbican. The majority of projects would probably come under exploring and jamming, there is an element of rebellion but, only within defined parameters. In terms of Barbicoin there are elements of  allowing the public to explore and build personalised currency, rather than a viewing currency as a system of enforced symbols. Perhaps categories one and three have to occur in order to open space for individuals and communities to become more rebellious towards their environment. An exploratory action becomes research into potential new knowledges and what one then does with these new discoveries depends on how limited a community could feel. Therefore, Barbicoin has the potential to seed thought about local currency after the public have explored and built monetary symbols of their own.

Further Reading:

The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money by Brett Scott

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Bitcoin.org

Barbicoin Tumblr

[getdialogue]

Matthew Lee Knowles : 3 Discourses

I recall being in Japan in the run up to a general election, everywhere I went there were smartly dressed people speaking into megaphones. Being unable to understand the language removed the effect of their rhetoric, instead the megaphone functioned as a device to imbue their words with authority. I had a sense what they were saying was profound and important, I just wasn’t sure why. There was a similar disconnect in Matthew Lee Knowles’ performance at Hack the Barbican on Thursday the 22nd of August. Wrapping Penthouse 4C in thin paper ribbons of text, Knowles proceeded to read the words through a megaphone. He is a composer, a writer and poet and the essays read navigated the realms of physics, mathematics, cosmology and the universe. Meaningless, written by Knowles himself and Black Holes of the Mind, written by Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis were both relayed to Barbican visitors lingering around the lobby area. The performance was an act of endurance and according to Knowles partly inspired by American composer Morton Feldman. Feldman would attempt to play a piano as quietly as possible requiring yogic balance and concentration. Whilst Knowles’ performance differed from this, moving around the strands of text in the space and talking consistently for a prolonged period of time requires a similar physical dedication to executing the work.

Knowles has an enduring relationship with, unsurprisingly, John Cage. 3 Discourses was very much in the style of a happening from Cage’s golden era in the 1960s and had traces of the Fluxus movement in its inception. There was also a visual element to the piece that dealt with the relationship Cage had with notation. The strings of text on paper added a structure to the performance. Knowles himself considers writing poetry to be something very similar to writing music, as words have a rhythm - so in a sense an alternative score is formed to be performed and interpreted. The open nature of this in 3 Discourses extends to Knowles using a text ‘composed’ by a collaborator. In terms of definitions of hacking, Knowles offered that interventions at HTB move the term towards something new and improved instead of indicating something with sinister motives.

The public nature of the performance became a point of controversy. There wasn’t an invited audience, its acknowledgement relied on passersby. Penthouse 4C is located next to the Barbican Library. Some regular users of the library were finding the unusual sound emanating from the lobby distracting and annoying. Whilst this is a misfortune of architecture - the library is not sealed from the lobby so sound can leak over its balcony, the blame often lied with the performer. When Knowles was performing a woman interrupted him to register her disapproval. Although not an intended effect of the performance, it raised interesting issues about how the public may view such an intervention in an institutional space. There was an element in her argument that suggested Knowles had no integrity to carry out what he was doing. She may have changed her mind if she had been introduced to him performing at Wigmore Hall (which Knowles has done), I did wonder if this would somehow change the validity of his performance in the eyes of this woman.

Matthew Lee Knowles: matthewleeknowles.com

Laonikos Psimikakis-Chalkokondylis: laonikos.com

[getdialogue]

But Where Is It?

By post 12 I suppose I should have some additional commentary that may somehow contextualise Hack the Barbican. However, I don’t actually know where to begin. Not knowing where to begin is a Hack the Barbican beginning. Minimal parameters are Hack the Barbican parameters. The decision for no central curatorial policy has meant my own commentary has been given these seemingly limitless boundaries. I have been proactive in seeking the HTB community out but, more than anything I’ve let the anarchic nature of the event dictate how I encounter projects to write about. At first I thought this was professional laziness but, in retrospect I had no choice. Sometimes I feel more like a visitor than I do a participant. Being in this position, where the writer has chosen to provide discourse, is an odd place of decided interloper. I need to engage but, not too much. This is hard when there are scant curatorial guidelines. There is no edge to Hack the Barbican where I can dip my toes or even hit my head. Instead, I’ve come up with the strategy of residing in a fixed place (Penthouse 4C, this may now change). I wait for conversations and work to appear organically. I’ve relied on other people for introductions. I’ve been alerted to interesting projects on Twitter. I’ve followed up some preemptive research on participants to guide who I contact. I’ve looked at Lanyrd and chased up. In the beginning I started out with a question for participants about the reimagination of HTB as a another system or space. Somehow that question has been lost in amongst discussions about work and the meaning of hacking, so I want to resurrect it now. For me, if HTB was a structure it would be Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi building in Rome. A space with different pockets or views depending on how you encounter it, a whole that you can never perceive in its entirety. The dissolution of overview is both at once fascinating and frustrating. This labyrinth space is the essence of Hack the Barbican.

As an art writer, Hack the Barbican has revealed how I overwhelming receive cultural events within London’s most prominent cultural institutions as a formula. An obvious curatorial formula and an institutional spatial formula. This is not a revelatory observation but, it is a feeling that has been agitated over the past 3 weeks. If I go to see a temporary exhibition at Tate Modern, I could probably shut my eyes from the moment I leave Southwark tube and walk to, around, within and out of the institution without misplacing a step. There are loose defined spaces for occurrences during the Hack the Barbican but, not in the same way that there is in either Tate for temporary exhibits and performances. As a cultural nerd that strikes sheer pulling-the-sheets-over-head terror in me. Hack the Barbican is perhaps like any platform for sharing on the web (maybe that is a too reductive or an obvious remark). It’s anarchic and wide ranging like YouTube or Reddit or Gawker. There are popular posts, there are posts that are private, there are propositions for learning, there are posts that refer to themselves and forget about the platform they are viewed from, there are unvisited posts, there are posts belonging to structured channels, there are posts that serve no discernable purpose, there are posts looking for monetary investment. The intention of content on these platforms goes on forever, as does the intention of projects at HTB. True neverending intention is kryptonite for art critics. As art begins to take on these structures prevalent in the rest of society, navigating this particular brand of chaos has to become our forte in this era.

[getdialogue]

In Dialogue | shelf_story

shelf_story is a collaboration between Ariane Schick currently studying at the Royal Academy, Leonore Schick author and teacher, Thomas Beesley of Resonance FM and furniture designer Romain Pascal.

 Visitors to Hack the Barbican are invited to tweet an image of an object to alter the story. As the weeks have passed, the shelf_story shelves have become filled with these images. Each week the new objects further the narrative and result in a podcast available here: soundcloud.com/cheeseandchalk/shelf-story-1.

How do you define the word hack and how do you relate that back to shelf_story and literature?

AS: I took the word hack in the sense that came to me first, and that was perhaps suggested by the logo Hack the Barbican had chosen, that is to say it might indicate a breaking into or an infiltration of, rather than other understandings of hack that might have pointed me more in the direction of cutting something up for example.

The projects primary relationship to literature, is quite pop or low brow as well as having quite a direct relationship to the idea of infiltration. This would be any writing along the lines of the story books where you are referred to this or that page depending if you decide to open a door or take the stairs... But of course I think that lurking in a more distant background you might be brought to think about people like Burroughs and co. and his/their cut up texts.

What are your main references for the project?

AS: The project was done as such – a collaborative project – rather than a piece. So by this I mean, firstly that it might not need to be read as much more than the sum of its parts, and secondly as a project that brought together quite a few people, they all came with their own sets of references. For these reasons the references are quite pragmatic - on my end at least as I can’t speak for the others - I was thinking about transmedia storytelling, online or otherwise (books like Masquerade), places where there are points of overlap between fiction and reality.

As for the choice to have a physical structure that “houses” the project - I think we all see it as no more than a signage to make passersby aware that the story is happening. It is a supporting structure for the story to exist and communicate itself.

Would you consider shelf_story to be crowdsourced?

AS: I think the project comes very close to crowdsourcing without actually ever frankly sitting within it. If perhaps the project had involved asking the crowd to tweet sentence upon sentence to build the rest of the story, creating a sort of online narrative exquisite corpse then we might have been closer to the realm of crowdsourcing. But as it stands it's more of a platform for a writer, Leonore to tell a story in parts. Its closer to a game as might be suggested by the references I mentioned.

I guess I am coming at this question from what Jonathan Jones recently said here about art sourced via social media being “boring”. I would really like to know your counter response to that ...

AS: Concerning the Jonathan Jones article, I see where he is coming from but I think that a large part of what he expresses in the article comes from that fact that in order to communicate a clear opinion he was obliged to set up some binaries that don’t correspond to the complexities of art making. He generates a kind of opposition between Elizabeth Price and Gillian Wearing that seems artificial.

He seems to say so himself in his introduction. The dichotomy he bases his article on is, on one hand that of a “romantic idea” of the artist, which is just that, a romantic idea, a sort of over simplification that does not allow itself to consider the spectrum of different practices that exist and on the other hand of that spectrum he places creative crowd sourcing managers – whereas I can imagine that that is a whole field of expertise that actually exists, in businesses and other areas. It seems that for the sake of argument he is building a simplified image of certain practices. I think its a complicated job to talk about the process that goes into making work, and that job can be even harder when the task at hand has been so radically summarised.

I think that Gillian Wearing’s work is resolutely outside or elsewhere than in that “voice” she offers the people she features in her work, that just seems to me to be part of the material she uses. Whether or not the end result is “boring” seems to be a separate question from how she goes about making, and is surely a question for which the answer would vary from work to work.

...If you find his remarks relevant to shelf_story?

AS: I do think that shelf_story is interactive in the specific way that Jonathan Jones refers to in his article, even though as I said it does fall short of being what might be called crowdsourced. That said, as I mentioned before I don't consider it as a piece so much as a collaborative project, where quite a few people pitched in to various degrees, as I mentioned Leonore did all the writing, the lions share of the work. And on my end, even if I did oversee the project, I don't consider that because I have a practice that everything I put out is art or should be read in those terms. When the project was devised the intention was not artistic so I think it would be a dead end to think of it in that way. So to answer the question, in relation to the Jonathan Jones article that speaks specifically about crowdsourcing in the context of art making, I think that in the case of shelf_story, we are dealing with a different context so the project can't really be considered on those terms.

@shelf_story

[getdialogue]

IF: This Paper World

Interactive Film (IF) are a partnership between visual artist Karen Palmer and programmer Richard Baffoe Djan. To define them as a just a visual artist and programmer does a disservice to the immersive narratives they create. Using film as a starting point, Karen and Richard work collaboratively to develop a screen based environment that is part gamification and part viewer participation. Recognising a desire in the collective consciousness, they have brought interactive narratives to audiences who are fluent in determining the outcome of the media they consume. They have worked on four previous projects, which have been physical installations. At Hack the Barbican IF are working in collaboration with producer, director and scriptwriter Aaron Thomas to develop a interactive trailer that will only be available as an App. For IF, Hack the Barbican is a two week lab to intensely work towards a finished article. 

The tale of This Paper World and how IF and Thomas came to work together are both as significant as IF’s approach to storytelling. This Paper World is the title of a novel by American writer Jeff Lane, which IF and Thomas will be turning into a feature film.  Lane started writing in his spare time and distributed his work for free via podcast and eBook. He began to gain fans worldwide, one of whom was Thomas. He spoke to Lane via online forums and developed a relationship based on shared interests and discovered that they bizarrely share the same birthday. This Paper World is considered a tale of our modern times but, similarly is the story of the adaption of the novel into film. It is hard to imagine Thomas or Lane coming into contact like this at any other time in history. Thomas encouraged Palmer to listen to Lane’s podcasts and she too became entranced with the world Lane had created. Around this time Thomas began managing Lane’s career and with Palmer onboard started discussing the possibilities of a film based on This Paper World with IF. Their time spent at HTB is creating an interactive trailer for the film that will be available as an iPhone App. The feature film will be financed by Kickstarter, in keeping with the style of how Lane interacts with his fanbase. This will allow the script to develop inline with the author and the original novel. When adapting for film Thomas has cast the film to reflect Lane’s diverse audience and to complement the multicultural landscape of London, which forms the backdrop for the film adaptation. For fans of Lane, there are some interesting character developments in store for the film adaptation. 

In comparison with the other projects documented as part of getDialogue This Paper World differs in approach in terms of how HTB is utilised as a space for creative endeavour. Working on a project in this manner is reminiscent to how developers may use a hackday to take existing ideas or rough mark-ups and turn them into a tangible finished article. 

Interactive Film: i-films.co.uk

Aaron Thomas: fruitdistrictgroup.com

Jeff Lane: jefflaneaudiobooks.com