Creative Commons and the Arts

The Creative Commons within the Arts, round table discussion with Ele Carpenter (Embroidered Digital Commons), and Eileen Simpson & Ben White (Open Music Archive).

9 November | 5-7pm | Free to attend RVSP
 
Women’s Art Library
Women's Art Library/Make  Special Collections Reading Room,
Goldsmiths Library,
Goldsmiths University of London
New Cross, London, SE14 6AF 
 
A roundtable discussion about the creative commons and the arts based on the projects Open Music Archive, initiated by artists Ben White & Eileen Simpson and the Embroidered Digital Commons (2007-2013).

Ele Carpenter is a curator, artist and writer, and lecturer in the MFA Curating program at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the facilitator of the 'Embroidered Digital Commons' an internationally distributed embroidery of the text 'A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons' written by the Raqs Media Collective (2003).

Eileen Simpson and Ben White work at the intersection of art, music and information networks, and seek to challenge conventional mechanisms for the authorship, ownership and distribution of culture. Their ongoing project Open Music Archive is an initiative to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings and is a vehicle for collaborative projects exploring the material’s potential for reuse. Recent projects include include The Brilliant and the Dark at VBKÖ Vienna (2012) and The Women's Library London (2010), Song Division at Camden Arts Centre (2011), Struggle in Jerash at Gasworks London / Makan Amman (2010), Parallel Anthology at the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), Free-to-air at ICA London (2008) and Cornerhouse Manchester (2007). www.openmusicarchive.org/projects


ALL MY INDEPENDENT WOMEN 2012
Interested in understanding and supporting feminist modes of production and circulation of artists’ practices that deal with issues around gender, this project marks the coming together of three important archives: the Women’s Art Library/Make, the Open Music Archive, and the AMIW Video Lounge. The programme combines a series of talks, workshops, round table discussions, and viewings hosted at Goldsmiths University of London over a three months period, and two music commissions to be premiered on the 16 November at Cafe OTO.

With: Miguel Bonneville, Genève Brossard, Ele Carpenter, Catarina Carneiro de Sousa, Hyun Jin Cho, Carla Cruz, Beatrice Dillon, Mónica Faria, Althea Greenan, Karen Gwyer, Mika Hayashi Ebbesen, Risk Hazekamp, Nina Hoechtl, Anna Jonsson, Alex Martinis Roe, Cristina Mateus, Susana Mendes Silva, Sameiro Oliveira Martins, Lara Perry, Rita Rainho, Flávio Rodrigues, Eileen Simpson, Evelin Stermitz, Francesco Ventrella, Lenka Vráblíková, Ben White.

Exploring the different forms of distribution, promotion, and preservation performed by these archives that were once living networks, All My Independent Women 2012 searches for new modes of accountability and circulation within the arts that are based on dialogue with a potential for re-invention.

FULL PROGRAMME 
At Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University of London

27 September – 14 December | AMIW Video Lounge | Collection of video art by feminist artists belonging to All My Independent Women’s network

28 September 5-7pm | Practicing Sexual Difference | Workshop by Alex Martinis Roe

10 October 5-7pm | Archival Materials, Practices, Politics and Poetics | Workshop by Hyun Jin Cho and Nina Hoechtl

2 November 5-7pm | Feminist Curatorial Practices | Talk by Lara Perry and Francesco Ventrella

9 November 5-7pm | The Creative Commons within the Arts | Round table discussion with Ele Carpenter (Embroider Digital Commons), and Eileen Simpson & Ben White (Open Music Archive)

5 December 5-7pm | Re-engaging Archived Art Practices | Guided exploration of the Women’s Art Library and the Women’s Revolutions Per Minute archives by Althea Greenan and Mika Hayashi Ebbesen

Women’s Art Library/Make
Goldsmiths University of London
Special Collections Reading Room – Rutherford Building (Library)
New Cross, London, SE14 6AF
www.gold.ac.uk/make
a.greenan@gold.ac.uk
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm (Wednesdays until 7pm)

 
Cafe OTO
16 November 8pm | The Brilliant and the Dark – B Side Samples for Remix | An Open Music Archive Project | Performances by Karen Gwyer, Beatrice Dillon, and the Open Music Archive
Cafe OTO, 18 - 22 Ashwin Street, London E8 3DL
Advance tickets available via http://www.cafeoto.co.uk

More information can be found at http://amiw2012.blogspot.co.uk

All My Independent Women 2012 is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.



http://www.carlacruz.net
http://allmyindependentwomen.blogspot.com
http://ic-28.blogspot.com

Completing the Embroidered Digital Commons

After four years of over 1,000 people stitching approx 4,500 words The Embroidered Digital Commons is nearly complete! We started with 'Yarn' in 2008, and it looks as if the whole text will be completed by the end of 2013.

Each of the 26 terms of the 'Concise Lexicon of/for The Digital Commons' are being sewn by different groups and networks around the world. We now we have the task of digitising the project, taking photographs of the embroideries and designing a website for the whole work.

However many of the terms have one or two phrases which need to be embroidered to complete the paragraph. And there are still 3 terms which have not yet been claimed: Bandwidth, Data, and Orbit.

Please contact Ele through this blog if you would like to stitch a single patch to help complete a term for the lexicon, or if you would like to run a workshop or co-ordinate one of the remaining terms.

If you are interested in exhibiting part or a whole of the 'Embroidered Digital Commons' different configurations of digital films and physical embroideries can be tailored to specific architecture. The physical work will be an installation of fabric and digital image-text. There will be 26 short films, and a high resolution film of the whole lexicon. Each term carries its own metaphors and has developed it's own distinct style. This is reflected in the way that the textiles are being constructed in many different formats: framed as a collection of objects to be gifted, appliqued to a door curtain to provide access, pinned to a wall forming a rescension of a text, orbiting a space, or beautifully completed as a quotidian patchwork quilt.

Access>Code>Kernal

The exhibition of the completed terms Access, Code and Kernal went on display at Access Space in Sheffield on July 6th, and can be seen there until the end of the month. What surprised me was the different character of each term. The Access patches were stitched onto a curtain which either allows or prevents access to a space, by Abi Nielsen. Whilst the Access Space group pinned their patches onto a long stretch of black fabric, looking more like temporary flags in a public space than a permanent fixture. On the right, the Code quilt stitched at Bletchley Park hangs in formal splendour.

Ubiquity in Barcelona

Today I’m at the FadFest ‘Open Design / Shared Creativity’ Conference at the CCCB in Barcelona. And it’s great to be back in such a hot and energetic city, despite a 7 hour delay to my flight! A couple of years ago I came to give a paper at the CCCB which has since been published in the ‘Textile Reader’ (ed J. Hemmings). I discussed the ‘Embroidered Digital Commons’ in my paper, but we never got round to running a workshop. So when FadFest invited me to this conference it seemed the perfect opportunity to add Barcelona to the international ‘Embroidered Digital Commons’ network. During the next 2 days conference participants, with help from students at the BAU School of Design are invited to stitch the term ‘Ubiquity’as follows:

"Ubiquity:  Everywhere-ness. The capacity to be in more than one site. The simple fact of heterogeneous situation, a feature of the way in which clusters of memes, packets of data, orbit and remain extant in several nodal points within a system. The propensity of a meme towards ubiquity increases with every iteration, for once spoken, it always already exists again and elsewhere. It begins to exist and be active in the person spoken to, as well as in the speaker. Stories, and the kernels of ideas travel in this way. A rescension, when in orbit, crosses the paths of its variants. The zone where two orbits intersect is usually the site of an active transaction and transfer of meanings. Each rescension, carries into its own trajectory memes from its companion. In this way, through the encounters between rescensions, ideas spread, travel and tend towards ubiquity. That which is everywhere is difficult to censor, that which is everywhere has no lack of allies. To be ubiquitous is to be present and dispersed in 'no-des'. Sometimes, ubiquity is the only effective answer to censorship and isolation." (Raqs Media Collective, 2003).

Here's a picture of me with Sara and Isobel who co-ordinated the embroidery of Ubiquity throughout the conference.

Interestingly, the term ‘ubiquity’ has a high frequency of other terms from the Lexicon such as ‘data’, ‘heterogeneous’, ‘iteration’, ‘meme’, ‘orbit’, ‘rescension’, ‘site’, and ‘zone’. But it is the term ‘rescension’ which causes the most confusion because it’s not a commonly used word, and it doesn’t seem to appear in many dictionaries. However, when I facilitated a workshop at the Digital Humanities Conference in 2010, many academics explained their understanding of the term to me. A ‘rescension’ is a version or an iteration of a text or code script that can continually change, evolve or be updated. This results in the provisional nature of the ‘original’ challenging traditional forms of linear knowledge and history. For example, the academic researcher gives up the quest for the ‘true’ document, and gathers together the various rescensions to compare and contrast their different ideas and positions. In this way knowledge is formed not by knowing a so-called ‘truth’, but by understanding the relationship between different ideas and approaches.  Here knowledge becomes a form of enquiry and questioning about the nature of something, rather than an exercise in rote-learning or a search for a singular idea of truth.

In the context of curating contemporary visual art, there are many ways in which ideas and concepts can be explored visually, aurally and textually. The role of the curator is not simply to mix and match texts with artworks, but to map objects and ideas that can be reconfigured in a number of different constellations. In this way objects are not simply positioned in a space, but bring a network of histories and future possibilities to the discussion. An artwork could be described as one rescension of an approach to ideas and materials, so to understand an artists’ practice it’s necessary to view the different rescensions of their work. From a different perspective, we can only understand rescensions of ideas at large if we include a range of works by different artists. In both scenarios, the contextual and material processes involved in the work are part of the object of study.

I’ve just got back from Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, where the politics of objects and materials seemed to flow poetically through the exhibitions. Here ceramics, computing, drawing, film, plants, sculpture, textiles, and electronics all came into play, and the distinctions between art, craft, design and new media finally seem redundant as categories for art. One exhibition that I found pertinent and beautiful was by Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer’s. The artists reconfigured a series of objects throughout a number of rooms in the North side of the Railway Station. Here a metal bar propped against the wall in the first room became a perpendicular sculpture in another room, standing proud as any Giacometti. But a floor or two up, the bar formed a barrier to the viewer, dividing the room in two. A simple gesture, but one that explores the aesthetics of rescension perfectly. The metal bar along with it’s companion photographs and ceramic bottles existed in several places at once, increasing in familiarity as you climbed the floors of the building, rediscovering them at every turn; checking to see if the images in the room were the same or slightly different to the room below. The colour of the petite ceramics repeating through different shapes from the room before. Partly proving that objects as well as ideas are everywhere, ubiquitous even, you just have to be looking for them.