I have been re-reading some of my posts here on this blog. I have realized that I have committed a sin of omission, as the self-regarding focus of my posts to date suggest that I am working in some kind of a vacuum. In fact, despite the fact that I am only working one day per week on my project my thinking has been actively informed by my colleagues here at the University of Bedfordshire. I have been made welcome and become involved in a number of interesting projects in a very short time. For example, the creative writing team invited me to participate ( a key word in the context of this post)in their reading to the students earlier in the semester. This was particularly nice for me because the staff chose to read from their current work which provided me with a real sense of being around working writers again. In fact, I relished their introductions and the insights into their working practices as much as the pieces themselves. There were also some interesting links with the issues I have been thinking about for this project. Marc Lavelle, for example, read a section from a longer prose work which deals with surveillance culture.

I have also been asked to be a visiting lecturer next semester. This has been interesting challenge for me because it has allowed me to re-think my way into publishing and the public sphere at a time that the industry (industries?) appears to be moving through another re-structuring (for example – the changes facilitated by print-on-demand, blogging, google ad sense and the changing landscape of advertising). It has also been a chance to re-visit some authors that I did not have time for during my PhD (the reading list for this course includes Pierre Bourdieu and Gerard Genette) which is nice for me because (strange though it may sound) I am rather fond of theory (I wonder whether my students will share my passion).

Perhaps the most influential contact with my colleagues so far has come through the New Media Reading Group. My colleagues in this group have been working on a text which has the provisional title of ‘Architectures of Participation’. This project began before I joined the group; however, the work done by the group has been quite helpful for me because it has brought together a number of strands that point to the importance of the concept of participation to current thinking. For example, I had observed (and experienced) an historical trend over the last thirty years or so to encourage ‘participation’ in art. I am thinking, in particular, of claims for conceptual art, mail art and net.art (to lay out a problematic pathway through the maze of recent art histories). I find the contemporary claims for these practices particularly interesting because they provide some interesting insights into the relationship between art, activism and communities. However, I am also interested in the role played by the concept of participation in the aesthetics of video games (and other ‘new media’ art forms). Espen Aarseth, for example, makes a number of interesting claims for games in his notion of the ergodic. The term ‘participation’ is also hot at the moment because it is an important ‘selling’ feature for the appropriation of user-generated content by companies such as YouTube. Arguably, the most extreme position in this ‘interested in participation’ spectrum goes to Jonathan Schwartz, the COO of Sun Systems, who has claimed that we are now living in the ‘Age of Participation’. Maybe, he is right to flag up the importance of the concept even though he does not really explain how the current use of participation is different form the past!

I freely admit that the concept of participation also makes a guest appearance in my PhD work; mainly through my appropriation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the reader’s participation in the act of meaning-making.

I can’t help feeling that the notion of participation is rather under-theorized at present (by me as well as by everyone else). It might help to try and take a systematic approach to our understanding of its aesthetic, cultural and political meanings; to try and get pass the claim that it is something obvious, inherently desirable or unique to the current generation of web services; and to think further about its relationship to similar terms such as collaboration and hegemony.

Participation might well turn out to be a multiple concept as I find it hard, at present, to relate Bakhtin’s notion of ubiquitous participation in all acts of meaning-making with the use of participation as a ‘call to action’, by both activist artists and corporations keen to get us off our cultural backsides.

This work on participation is, of course, a much wider project than the one that I am currently embarked upon, so it will have to wait. However, I believe that it might make an interesting study in its own right. For the present, however, I am hoping to contribute a chapter to the book that re-evaluates some of the experiences described by artists adopting ‘participation’ into their practices in order to provide an insight into some of the issues of power and control surrounding participation and the promotion of user-generated content by corporations.

It sounds to me that I might well be busy over the coming year!

Milton Keynes Shopping Centre

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I have been experiencing the practice equivalent of the butterfly’s wing over the last two weeks. I made what I thought was a relatively minor change in my practice when I began my current engagement with ‘writings: not for wimps’ back in September. However, I have found that this shift has altered significantly the cultural context of my current work. I have found myself dealing with issues of the artwork in space (configuration, usage, public access, ownership and institution influence). This is an intellectual landscape that is traditionally framed by the discourse of fine art (and public art in particular) rather than literary aesthetics. This is not a landscape with which I am familiar if I am honest. However, I have decided to embrace this unexpected turn of events (even though it has added an extra dozen texts to my reading list) as it has given me chance to embrace some welcome pieces of serendipity.

Firstly, I have been digging into the narratives of digital art. For example, I have been reading Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age by Margot Lovejoy and Digital Art by Christiane Paul. However, despite finding both these texts valuable (mainly because they introduce a galaxy of practice examples) I found that I needed to broaden my approach, to think through the relationship between the addressivity of the art and its space(s). One text that I found useful was ‘Public: Art: Space A Decade of Public Art Commissions Agency 1987-1997’. This brief history of the UK’s Public Art Commissions Agency contains some excellent descriptions of proposals by artists working with the agency. Most of these works are not ‘digital’ per se. However, I found that a number of them informed my growing concern with placing surveillance technology in an art space. For example the description of Moonlight (by Permisison) by Pierre Vivant in the early 1990s was very illuminating. I found the description’s of artist response to space particularly valuable. In Mel Gooding’s introduction he notes that Vivant was working in/with the University of Warwick’s Sculpture Court - "a space the artist had found prison-like and oppressive, and had noticed to be under constant surveillance by its own cameras”. Vivant responded to this situation by redeploying the offending surveillance equipment in his work about a single lunar cycle. He notes:

“As the natural moon passed through its eternal phases, lunar images were projected by lights aligned within the University campus surveillance cameras, visible in their entirety only by the cameras themselves, and seen by viewers at ground level only as fragments of light. These images were recomposed into a representation of the moon's cycle on six telemonitors"

This work was only available for a month so it is not possible to go and experience its particular affect. I wonder how visitors to the sculpture garden perceived it? How did it relate to the sculpture garden as a space with a preconceived role? Similarly, I can’t help wondering what the ‘authorities’ of the university made of this appropriation of the equipment? I think it important to experience this kind of work. Theory is fine (in theory, in fact) but theory/experience is better way to understand this kind of work.

Last year, for example, I had the privilege of being invited to the launch of Underscan by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in the East Midlands of England. When I had first read about this work I was very excited by what was proposed. I was also somewhat in awe of the budget for this piece. I have to say that I was impressed with what was accomplished technologically. I was also impressed by the scale and location of the work- in a series of large, somewhat windy civic spaces. However, I was underwelmed artistically. It did not do enough or address me in/with that space.

Similarly, I had a serendipitous engagement with a piece at Milton Keynes Shopping Centre yesterday that left me wanting more. As you can see from the images I took (taken today in daylight so the electronic gubbins were visible), this piece comprised of a detector and projector array hung overhead that detect the movements of the shoppers across the white display space on the floor. My daughter had a great time chasing down fairies (unsuccessfully), jumping on projected snow drifts and having fun. Other shoppers also came by and hopped, skipped and jumped in response to the addressivity of the piece. It was great fun and an unexpected find in a shopping centre; however, I can’t help feeling that it did not push its own boundaries much.

I feel like Scrooge saying bah humbug to these technological marvels. I also feel a bit like the Emperor with no clothes on because both of these pieces are technological in advance of anything that I have produced. However, I feel that I want to move beyond the ‘neatness’, the responsiveness of surveillance art. I want to question what that surveillance does (in its many faceted appreciations) to civic spaces such as the shopping centre or the windy town square.