In 2021 we rolled out our new format for presenting accessible open-all-hours digital artworks in Finsbury Park called the People’s Park Plinth. In parallel, we launched our CultureStake collective cultural decision-making app.
Thousands of you showed up online and in the park to experience a set of interactive artistic proposals for larger artworks. Each one presented its own mini-experience in the park and online using web apps, free data, and AR technologies. Three times as many people got involved with our programmes and ultimately picked Based On A Tree Story for their summer 2022 art experience.
Since then we’ve been busy working with HERVISIONS and Bones Tan Jones, respectively the curator and artist behind Based on a Tree Story, to build the full digital art experience and install it in the park.
Now, we’re extremely excited to tell you that from 13th August the tree sprites of Finsbury Park will be ready for you to find them.
The trees of Finsbury Park bear witness to myriad happenings. Through deep time they wait, they watch, they grow – wiser, wilder…. In this new commission by HERVISIONS X Bones Tan Jones, the special stories of the trees are translated by three mystical sprites that live within the trees, becoming their voice. Use the map to locate clusters of trees and identify the amulet wearers among them. With the app open, scan the symbol to summon the sprite and release a cascade of tree wisdom – time travelling to the roots of their having-beens into the twiggy tips of their future-becomings. And as you crisscross the park, seeking out your next sprite, imagine the ley lines you draw onto and into the earth – and cast your own connective spell.
“We invite you to visit the tree, call forth the sprite and dance together. Let your feet connect to the soil and the movement of the sprite inspire your rhythms. Stomp on the ground and the layers of earth from years of life will reverberate with your sound! Hear their echoes!”
– Zaiba Jabbar, HERVISIONS
To celebrate this amazing news, we’ve invited you to join us for a magical sundown experience seeking out and – if they’ll let you – dancing with the tree sprites of Finsbury Park.
Furtherfield Gallery, Saturday 13th August 2022 from 5pm
HERVISIONS
Responsible for curating, commissioning, conceptualisation, and research HERVISIONS is a femme-focussed antidisciplinary curatorial agency supporting and promoting artists working across new and emergent technologies, and platforms with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture.
IG: @hervisions_
Bones Tan Jones
Responsible for conceptualisation, research, and artistic production, Bones Tan Jones’ work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Bones weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthral and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Bones sanctifies these mediums as tool’s in their craft.
IG: @yaya.bones
Studio Hyte
Responsible for the visual identity, 3D modelling and technical development, Studio Hyte is a South London-based design studio. Working between graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication. We specialise in forward-thinking, multifaceted visual identities and experiences within the arts and education sector. Our aim is to create meaningful, accessible and thought-provoking work.
IG: @studiohyte
In 2019, we celebrated 150 years of Finsbury Park being the ‘People’s Park’ – a place where we can all do things together. In 2020 protests across the UK saw public artworks toppled from plinths, while the pandemic left us separated and isolated.
With this in mind, we launched the People’s Park Plinth this summer, as a way to re-explore our public spaces by turning Furtherfield Gallery inside out and expanding its digital arts programme beyond our walls and into the life of Finsbury Park.
We collaborated with incredibly talented artists, curators and local park members to create 3 ‘taster’ digital public artworks that speak about the park’s heritage and local stories. In May, June, and July we showcased a different digital art experience each month.
In August, the park made its pick! We will be launching a larger commission of Based on a Tree Story this Autumn, and to continue celebrating the heritage, artistry and local voices from Finsbury Park, all the ‘taster’ artworks will be available until January 2022.
If you are in Finsbury Park you can use the camera on your phone to scan the QR codes on the People’s Park Plinth (presented on the exterior of our Gallery building in the centre of the park). They are all free to access, any time, with any smartphone – but you might want to have some headphones handy too.
If you are somewhere else you can click the links on the People’s Park Plinth website to find the artworks.
It’s your park so it’s your pick!
Sign up here to get involved in choosing the artwork that most belongs in the heart of Finsbury Park next year.
Breath Mark x Lisa Hall & Hannah Kemp-Welch
Live until January 2022
A site-specific, interactive sound work creating moments of connection between strangers of all species.
Follow this sound work as it leads you across the park to meeting points for animals, plants and strangers. As you listen, consider the needs of all these inhabitants and our symbiotic relationship that is increasingly under threat. Between heartbeats, vibrations and the alignment of crossing paths, this work sounds out a shared existence, putting these moments of connectivity with strangers of all species on the People’s Park’s Plinth.
The work features interviews with volunteers at Edible Landscapes, a forest gardening group based onsite at Finsbury Park: David Berrie, Imogen Simmonds, Jo Homan, Juliette Ezavin and Theo Betts. The artists were commissioned by Breath Mark, a curatorial collective formed as a part of the Royal College of Art’s MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2021 in partnership with Furtherfield’s People’s Park Plinth project.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork, one sound pathway ‘Close to the ground’ is presented.
Larger commission: If this work had been selected in the public vote in August 2021, a further two sound pathways and a trail to find them would have been revealed.
HERVISIONS x Ayesha Tan Jones
Live until January 2022
A site-specific, sonic augmented reality encounter with a digital tree sprite that tells tales of the tree’s past, present and future.
The trees of Finsbury Park are very old, and they have been witness to a lot of change and growth. If the trees had a voice, what would they share?
Based on a Tree Story brings to life Furtherfield Gallery’s nearby resident, a London plane tree dubbed the Trunk Triplets Tree, situated in Finsbury Park and the soils from which they grew, part of the now-extinct ancient woodland, Hornsey Woods. From medieval history to sci-fi futures, their stories are told through an augmented reality and audio experience, giving viewers an insight into the past, while arming them with inspiration and knowledge to help protect the trees into the future.
The project activates a digital tree sprite that shares a fable crafted through local research, site visits and discussion with Ricard Zanoli, the Park Ranger.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork one tree story is presented.
Larger commission: This work was selected in the public vote in August 2021 and further two tree stories and a trail of clues to find them will be revealed this Autumn.
Desree x Drumming School with Alex Dayo x Studio Hyte
Live until January 2022
An augmented reality (AR) sci-fi zine comprising three stories that bring together writers, musicians, and local residents to explore alternative visions of a Finsbury Park of the future.
For this first iteration of the AR zine, released in July 2021 as part of the People’s Park Plinth programme, we present The Light and Dark: an audio-visual story about a fictional character, Isa, who wakes up in a home they don’t recognize, surrounded by land that feels as foreign as the sky they sit under. Isa does not know how they made it there, but they do know they have to make it home before the host finds them. With only the wisdom of Grandwa, and the feeling in their chest, Isa discovers the power of their historical connection to what was, their land.
The Light and Dark has been written by local spoken word artist and writer Desree, and is accompanied by a unique musical composition by musician Alex Dayo and his park-based Drumming School, in collaboration with David Kemp. The visual design, AR experience and animation have been developed by Studio Hyte.
Taster: In this first iteration of the artwork the start of one future fiction is presented.
Larger commission: Had this work been selected in the public vote in August 2021, this fiction would have been completed and two more would have been revealed.
In August, after experiencing all 3 digital artworks, we asked people to pick which one they thought belonged in the heart of Finsbury Park by either:
Or
The park’s pick is Based on a Tree Story, and we are working with HERVISIONS and Ayesha Tan Jones to make a bigger and better version of their digital art experience – and then we will launch it on the People’s Park Plinth this Autumn!
We wanted everyone to express an opinion – even if visitors were far away what they felt mattered too. But if voters lived locally what they felt mattered more for the vote count – so we weighted the vote for anyone using the CultureStake app within or near the park.
If you are an arts organisation you can find out more about how you can use CultureStake to drive collective cultural decision-making at your own digital and physical events.
Breath Mark is a curatorial collective initiated as a part of the Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Projects Programme 2021, Royal College of Art. Comprising six international members, Breath Mark’s curatorial practice responds to the challenges of curating remotely and explores the interconnectivity of physical and digital site-specific experiences.
Members: Kevin Bello, Jindra Bucan, Harriet Min Zhang, Soyeon Park, Yifei Tang and Yuting Tang.
As part of extended public engagement, Breath Mark has collaborated with design studio An Endless Supply, on a digital microsite acting as a reading room allowing audiences to further engage with the artwork’s themes. We encourage visitors to extend their experiences through the texts, sounds and videos here: spaces.rca.ac.uk
Lisa Hall is a sound artist exploring how environments are built-in sound, while Hannah Kemp-Welch is a socially engaged artist concerned with listening. Hannah and Lisa met at London College of Communication while studying MA Sound Arts in 2010. They share an interest in public and private spaces, and how sound and audio technologies build networks and tell stories that often can’t be seen. They have collaborated on sound art projects for performances and installations at Tate Modern, CRiSAP, and Sound Reasons Festival: New Delhi.
https://www.sound-art-hannah.com
HERVISIONS is a femme-focussed curatorial agency supporting and promoting artists working across new and emergent technologies, and platforms with a strong focus on the intersection of art, technology and culture. HERVISIONS partner with institutes, organisations and galleries to create antidisciplinary exhibitions and innovative commissions. Select partners include, LUX, Tate, bitforms and Google Arts and Culture.
IG: @hervisions_
Ayesha Tan Jones AKA YaYa Bones work is a spiritual practice that seeks to present an alternative, queer, optimistic dystopia. They work through ritual, meditating through craft, dancing through the veil betwixt nature and the other. Ayesha weaves a mycelial web of diverse, eco-conscious narratives which aim to connect, enthral and induce audiences to think more sustainably and ethically. Traversing pop music, sculpture, alter-egos, digital image and video work, Ayesha sanctifies these mediums as tool’s in their craft. Selected recent commissions/exhibitions include: Shanghai Biennale (2021) Athens Biennale (2021) Solo Show at Underground Flower Offsite (2020) Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) IMT Gallery, London (2019) Mimosa House, London (2018), ICA, London (2018-2020) Cell Project Space, London (2018) Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018) Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2016-17). Ayesha is represented by Harlesden High Street Gallery, London.
https://www.ayeshatanjones.com/
Desree is an award-winning spoken word artist, writer and facilitator based in London and Slough. Currently Artist in Residence for poetry collective EMPOWORD, Desree explores intersectionality, justice and social commentary. Producer for both Word Up and Word Of Mouth, finalist in 2018’s Hammer & Tongue national final and TEDx speaker, she has featured at events around the UK and internationally, including Glastonbury Festival 2019, Royal Albert Hall and Bowery Poetry New York. Burning Eye Publishers republished Desree’s first pamphlet, I Find My Strength In Simple Things, in May 2021.
Alex Dayo comes from Burkina Faso where his professional musical career started in the 1980’s, accompanying the National Ballet Kouledafourou on tour as well as playing for African Royalty and globally recognised dignitaries at private and public events and the Ensemble des Radios and Televisions of Burkina Faso, based in Bobo-Dioulasso. In 1985, he founded Wountey, a collective of musicians who created a new fusion of traditional and modern music called Plenguedey, and, for fifteen years, toured across Africa and Europe, spreading Burkina Faso’s cultural fusion to a wider audience. His musical collaborations include Ali Farka Toure, Femi Kuti and Salif Keita from Africa and traditional Master Griots from Burkina Faso/Mali/Guinea/Gambia. An accomplished arranger, Alex incorporates African traditional, Fusion, Jazz, Rock, Latin and Caribbean influences. Alex moved to London in 2007, where he set up a drumming school. A highlight of Alex’s career was being chosen to play at the Opening and Closing ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics.
http://drummingschool.co.uk/zantogola
DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Studio Hyte is an award-winning design studio, working between graphic design, interaction, and emergent communication. Their work includes branding, print, website, installation, and exhibition design. Specializing in forward-thinking, multifaceted visual identities within the arts and education sector. Whether through commissioned or self-directed projects, they aim to create meaningful, accessible, and thought-provoking work.
Formed of a small group of individual practitioners, Studio Hyte is the middle ground where all of our interests and practices meet. Their collective practice and research cover a broad spectrum of topics including language, inclusion & accessibility, egalitarian politics & alternative protest, and technology & the human.
IG: @studiohyte
How do we collectively care for Finsbury Park?
Which people and which creatures?
What part would you like to play?
We invite you to join us at Furtherfield to explore these questions. Together we will make and play a game with various characters, imagining Finsbury Park in 2025 as the place where a global multispecies revolution begins – and changes the world forever.
How can you get involved?
Originally planned for the Summer of 2020, the first community meetings took place in March, however Covid-19 has paused the development of this project. If you would like to work with the game designers Cade and Ruth, and each other, from Furtherfield Commons and online email Ruth at ruthcatlow [at] gmail.com.
About The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025
At Summer Solstice a visiting delegation of artists, equipped with park blueprints, bylaws, data-sources, historical documents, and policies, will work with local envoys who present testimony from the many human and non-human lives of the park. Together, the two parties will work to mutually devise a treaty to govern the future actions of multispecies park users, turning the park itself into a “love machine”. This culminates in a public ceremonial treaty signing event.
With a bit of luck the game, final treaty, audio recordings, photographs, and resulting artistic responses are now planned for development and exhibition at Furtherfield in the Summer of 2021. Part role play game, part participatory performance, this event will be based at Furtherfield Commons and across Finsbury Park for three days at the Summer Solstice.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025: On systems, ecologies as networks, colonialism and seizing rituals of power.
Read the essay
Hear the discussion between Ruth and Cade on the Furtherfield Podcast
Illustration by Sajan Rai.
If you have any questions or would like more information email Ruth at ruthcatlow [at] gmail.com.
This project is supported by CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures. CreaTures project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870759. The content presented represents the views of the authors, and the European Commission has no liability in respect of the content.
I discovered a tiny new slice of London just a short walk away from Furtherfield. It was an unused car park tucked away on the edge of a commercial estate once host to a vibrant textile industry, transformed temporarily into a project space dubbed as Tottenham Pavilion.
For six weekends from August with its pop-up tent and rustic outdoor furniture, it hosted hands-on experiences on art-making which culminated in a public exhibition featuring an eclectic accumulation of pictures, texts, objects, and structures made on site by locals for locals.
A mixed media installation emerged as a focal point, sprawling under the marquee with bamboo sticks planted on blocks of concrete like the skeleton of a building under construction. Works on paper and textile hung like leaves on a tree: from collages of found images mixing religious iconography, mass media, and art history; to hand-stitched and woven fabrics gently combined with colourful beads; and zines with micro-stories in poetry and prose.
Elsewhere, there were sculptures made from styrofoam, wooden sticks, reflective sheets, and plaster that altogether seemed like artefacts from an ancient tribe; a figurative mural depicting a changing urban landscape with different buildings that seem to rise up and fall back unto itself; abstract paintings filled with familiar gestures of freedom laid by several hands; and a map of drawings by visitors attempting to visualise their journey to the site – altogether weaving a sense of place in an otherwise vacuous space.
It can be hard to tell where a body of work begins and ends, which may have been its strength. The works collectively function as a singular site-specific installation of disparate components tethered together by a shared conceptual and spacial approach.
Yet this idea is not a new concept as such. The Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park exists for roughly the same purposes; Peckham Levels in south London similarly transformed a seven-storey car park into a creative hub; and Furtherfield itself revitalised two spaces in Finsbury Park to decentralise art and technology. Well-known artists like Tania Bruguera and Jeremy Deller have also been known to engage with communities, often to much fanfare. All these projects are admittedly on a bigger scale in comparison, which is precisely what seems remarkable here.
Tottenham Pavilion embraced a hyperlocal focus to engage this community at their doorstep, specifically aiming its free workshops and activities to residents of its immediate vicinity encompassing Woodbury Down, Seven Sisters Road, and the Haringey warehouse of artists who led the project, all within walking distance of each other.
In doing so, it managed to not only provide local artists a platform to develop and showcase their practices conveniently within their own turf, but equally offer opportunities for local residents, their neighbours, access to creative activities that may otherwise be unavailable or even unknown to some. This ethos attracted much-needed funding from City Hall, which currently supports this agenda through a local funding stream, modest but nevertheless positive for an area that may be artistically underserved and missing out from the benefits of art.
There is always something new to explore in this city, and it is more rewarding when it involves maximising the potential of places and spaces as a conduit for accessible arts and culture. What began as an empty gazebo on a soulless patch of land ended up as a vessel for potent marks and traces between adjacent communities that for brief moments came together to make something for themselves, potentially activating new paths for connection and creativity within this locality and even beyond.
Tottenham Pavilion ran between 10 August and 15 September 2019, on Seven Sisters Road corner Eade Road. Organised by Carolina Khouri, with creative workshops led by SWG (creative writing), Surya de Wit (painting and collage), Helen Bur (murals), Nicola Woollon (embroidery), Wojciech Antoni Sobczynski (sculpture and installation), and Jenna Jardine (materials). Funded by Mayor of London’s Culture Seeds, and Spaces for Creatives.
Featured image: Tottenham Pavilion. Image credit West Creative
This family-friendly ‘Albion’ style fair for Finsbury Park’s 150th anniversary forms part of our 3-year programme Citizen Sci-Fi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
Music, storytelling, costumes, food, and all kinds of activities for exploring the future of the park and beyond!
Activities Include:
Martin Zeilinger
Should a cashless society leave us quaking in our boots? Come play our game imagining the future of money – and how we’ll get by if there’s no cash to pay for things. You’ll get given a scenario and asked to design a way to make exchanges in the future. Are you a ‘Barter Bender’ or ‘Sharey Carey’? Or will you sink the system and start again? Find out!
Times: 10.00-5.00
Mud Howard and Stephen Oram
Gather round and listen to two short stories emerging from the heady mix of sci-fi authors, scientists and the folk of Finsbury Park. Come and decide if these are the futures you want for your park?
Times: 11.30, 2.30
Idit Nathan and Helen Stratford
Take part in the launch of an entirely new app that leads you on a walk of the park that’s like no park walk you’ve ever been on before! This app was designed with local people through similarly silly strolls and we need YOU to bring it to life! Drop by and we’ll show you how to download the app (it’s very easy!) and collect a map that will help you ‘catch’ prompts all around the park. We’ll also have colourful badges for you to take home.
Times: 10.00-5.00
Jason Wilsher-Mills
Pedal Power, come meet Jason and the Argonauts – a set of wild and wacky AR-enabled characters who have come to visit you. Jason will show you how he made them and how you can help him make new ones all about the Pedal Power community. (this activity is especially for Pedal Power, but all welcome)
Times: 10.00-5.00
Alex Dayo
Drop by and join in a family-friendly Community Drumming workshop led by Alex Dayo, master drummer from Burkina Faso (West Africa), find your inner rhythm and let it out!
Times: 10.30, 4.00
Possible Bodies: The Underground Division – Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting
Join a research session with Possible Bodies: The Underground Division, a team of fiction writers, geo-techno-scientists and trans*feminist device problematizers. A hands-on collective investigation into the micro, meso and macro political consequences of earth scanning practices. Together we’ll look at what undergrounds are rendered when using techniques such as Terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging, magnetic resonance, UltraSound, and Computer Tomography.
Times: All day but limited places, book now
Feminist Internet
What have parks done for their communities? What role do they play in our lives both socially and politically? What kind of spaces could they be for us in the future? Feminist Internet launch a special episode of their podcast series and an accompanying zine for the Albion fair that unearths the history of Finsbury Park, examining the role urban parks play within their communities and speculates about their potential futures.
Times: 10.00-5.00
Larisa Blazic
It’s time to call this meeting to order! Join a special Theatre of the Oppressed inspired performance by reading aloud meeting minutes published by Finsbury Park’s many organisations and community hubs.
Times: 12.00-2.30
Sunara Begum
The ‘Who Am I?’ workshop is about reversing technology and reflecting on history through creativity. Design and create your own special crest and emblem to signify who you are. Investigate the world of sound through percussion-led music making and immerse yourself in the art of expression through movement. The workshop looks at understanding who we are, tapping into our inner self, asking questions, seeking answers and sharing personal and collective journeys.
Times: 10.00-5.00
Artist: Alistair Gentry. Curators: Hannah Redler Hawes and Julie Freeman.
Just how trusting are you? Meet the hot-pink puppet-robot who wants to tell you all about your life online! How much will you reveal and how much does the trustbot know already?
Times: 10.00-11.30, 12.00-2.00, 3.00-5.00
This work was produced as part of an ODI R&D project funded by Innovate UK.
Rachel Jacobs
How will you dress fancy for the Future Machine? Rachel Jacobs needs your help to create a stylish parade for the unveiling of the Future Machine this autumn. What will you wear?
Times: 10.00-5.00
They Are Here
There will be a vegetarian and Halal barbeque on the go, with servings inspired by recipes from the refugees They Are Here have been collaborating with. Food will be offered in exchange for a sketch reimagining the transformation of the garden, this will inform the changes taking place in the Autumn.
Times: DJ 12.00-4.30. BBQ 1.00-4.30
Kathryn Davis, Dhelia Snoussi and Zey Kussan, Museum of London
What might future archaeologist say about us in the park? How right (or wrong!) could they be? Discover the left objects found in park through the Everything project, and see what connections you can make to you, the park and 2019.
Times: 11.00-1.00
Andrew Smith, Goran Vodicka
Come and map your experiences of Finsbury Park and feed into research about urban parks and festivals.
Times: 10.00-5.00
Featured image: Image by Studio Hyte, artwork in image by Jason Wilsher-Mills
Alex Dayo
Alex Dayo is a versatile composer, arranger and musician (he primarily plays percussion instruments), who was born in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Alex recalls growing up to the sound of drumbeats all around him – music has been part of his everyday life from birth, with instruments replacing childhood toys. His professional musical career started in the 1980s, accompanying the National Ballet Kouledafourou on tour as well as playing for African Royalty and globally-recognised dignitaries at private and public events and the Ensemble des Radios and Televisions of Burkina Faso, based in Bobo-Dioulasso. In 1985, Alex founded Fusion band Wountey, and, for fifteen years, toured with his band and the Ballet across Africa and Europe, spreading Burkina Faso’s cultural fusion to a wider audience. His musical collaborations include Ali Farka Toure, Femi Kuti and Salif Keita from Africa and traditional Master Griots from Burkina Faso/Mali/Guinea/Gambia. An accomplished arranger, Alex modifies his style according to the need, incorporating African traditional, Fusion, Jazz, Rock, Latin and Caribbean influences. A highlight of Alex’s career was being chosen to play at the Opening and Closing ceremonies at the London 2012 Olympics. As well as gaining British community music teaching qualifications, Alex developed his teaching skills working throughout Europe (Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Holland) and Africa and has played at numerous festivals and events, including Notting Hill and Hackney Carnivals, where he has performed for the past ten years.
Alistair Gentry
Alistair Gentry is a science fiction artist. He likes silly costumes, museums, absurdity, visiting the uncanny valley, the Oxford comma, and making machines do things their manufacturers wouldn’t approve of. DoxBox trustbot was developed during his embedded research residency at The Open Data Institute. Other recent projects include an imaginary tourist information agency and a technological ritual with televisions and credit card shredders.
Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith is a Reader in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. His background is in urban geography and one of his main research interests is the significance of organised events in post-industrial and entrepreneurial cities.
Goran Vodicka is a Research Fellow in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster. He is an architect/urbanist and his research is broadly focused on diversity and inclusion in public spaces.
Feminist Internet
Feminist Internet is a group of artists and designers working to advance online and offline equalities for women and other marginalised groups through creative and critical practice.
Hannah Redler Hawes
Hannah is the director of the Data as Culture art programme at the ODI and an idneoendent curator. She specialises in art and technology, art and science and emerging artistic practice with an interest in participatory process. She develops interdisciplinary projects for galleries, museums, digital space and non-art contexts. Alongside her work with ODI she curates exhibitions, events and art interventions. Past projects have been with Science Gallery London, Tate Modern, Natural History Museum, FACT Liverpool, the Digital Catapult and the Institute of Physics. As an artist, Julie’s focus is the investigation of data as an art material, using it to create work that reflects the human condition through the analysis and representation of data. As a computer scientist and artist, Julie oftens works collaboratively and experimentally with scientists. Her work has been shown widely in the UK and internationally, and she has won awards from the Wellcome Trust, the Arts Council and Nesta. She holds a PhD in Media & Arts Technology from QMUL and is the founder of the Data as Culture art programme at the ODI.
http://culture.theodi.org/about/
Helen Stratford and Idit Nathan
Helen Stratford and Idit Nathan – Working collaboratively as Play Anywhere Now or Never! and combining backgrounds in theatre and architecture, Idit and Helen have worked in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre, Kettles Yard, Cambridge and METAL and in locations across the UK (Bristol, Sunderland, Peterborough, Southend and London). In 2015 they formulated Play The City Now or Never! (PCNN) working with METAL Peterborough and Southend to develop the PCNN App, a site-specific geo-locative App for mobile devices positioned at the intersection of art, play and technology. The PCNN App, like other low-tech resources they have developed, such as a compilation of games and scores as well as DIY die, solicits playful engagement with spaces and sites. Other recent and ongoing collaborative projects include developing a mobile artwork for Yorkshire Sculpture Park as well as walkshops for Cambridge Junction, Festival of Ideas Cambridge, CounterPlay ’16 Aarhus, Wellcome Trust, Live Art Development Agency and the National Theatre.
www.playanywherenowornever.com
Jason Wilsher-Mills
Jason Wilsher-Mills is a disabled digital artist who is based in the East Midlands, using iPads to create paintings which detail his disability, childhood memories, popular culture, social history/heritage, creating new biographical narratives, through theatrical artifice and humour. He initially painted traditionally, with oils, but since becoming disabled has found the iPad screen more manageable – affording him the opportunity to create large pieces of artwork, through high-resolution files, modern Giclée printing methods & projection methods. It has also given him the chance to work collaboratively, due to its connectivity and accessibility. The primary themes of his work include memory, childhood, disability and illness. In parallel to his own artistic practice Wilsher-Mills conducts public art commissions and residencies working primarily with learning disabled collaborators on wild and wacky interactive sculptures.
Larisa Blazic
Larisa Blazic is a London based digital artisan, educator and feminist hacker with practice ranging from net.art to FLOSS art and design. In her most recent work, Data Union Fork, part of Vertigo STARTS Residency, she explores collective response to personal data abuses by state and corporate sector and creates experiments based on technologies developed within the DECODE project and investigates local governance in Local&&Ledger project.
Martin Zeilinger
Martin Zeilinger is a London-based interdisciplinary researcher, curator, and media practitioner. Currently he works as Senior Lecturer in Media at Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge/UK), and also serves as curator of the Vector Festival (Toronto/CAN). His research interests include digital art, appropriation-based art practices, experimental uses of financial technologies in contemporary art, theories of cultural ownership and intellectual property, political economies of new media, live coding and creative computing, videogame culture, and experimental game art.
Mud Howard
Mud Howard (they/them) is a gender non-conforming poet, performer and activist from the states. mud creates work that explores the intimacy and isolation between queer and trans bodies. mud is a Pushcart Prize nominee. they are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer and trans memoir full of lies and magic. they were the first annual youth writing fellow for Transfaith in the summer of 2017. their poem “clearing” was selected by Eduardo C. Corral for Sundress Publication’s the Best of the Net 2017. mud is a graduate of the low-res MFA Poetry Program at the IPRC in Portland, OR and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster. you can find their work in THEM, The Lifted Brow, Foglifter, and Cleaver Magazine. they spend a lot of time scheming both how to survive and not perpetuate toxic masculinity. they love to lip sync, show up to the dance party early and paint their mustache turquoise and gold.
Possible Bodies – Femke Snelting
Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing undisciplined research at the intersection of feminisms and free software. In various constellations she explores how digital tools and cultural practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels.
www.snelting.domainepublic.net
Possible Bodies – Helen Pritchard
Helen Pritchard is an artist and researcher, whose interdisciplinary work brings together the fields of Computational Aesthetics, Geography and Feminist TechnoScience. Helen’s practice is both one of writing and making and these two modes mutually inform each other in order to consider the impact of computational practices on our engagement with environments. Helen is the head of Digital Art and a lecturer in Computational Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Possible Bodies – Jara Rocha
Jara Rocha is an independent researcher/mediator who tends to attend to the semiotic-material urgencies of present cultures with a trans*feminist sensibility. Works with infrastructural politics and aesthetics, text logistics, body inscriptions and tests non-formal ways of learning in collective situations like Euraca Seminar, Las promesas de los algos, Relearn Summerschool, or The Darmstadt Delegation.
Rachel Jacobs
Rachel Jacobs is an artist, researcher and games designer. She co-founded the artist-led collective Active Ingredient in 1996 and the commercial games company Mudlark Production Company in 2007. She completed a Doctorate in Computer Science in 2014. Rachel is a practising artist exhibiting nationally and internationally, and a Research Associate at the Horizon Digital Economy Institute, University of Nottingham. Her artworks include the award winning ‘Heartlands (Ere Be Dragons)’ one of the first mobile games that took place on city streets in Sao Paulo, Yokhama, Berlin, Paris, Cambridge, Bristol and Nottingham; ‘A Conversation Between Trees’, a touring artwork and schools exchange using environmental sensors to connect forests in the UK and Brazil; and ‘The Prediction Machine’, an interactive installation that predicts the future impacted by climate change. Rachel is currently developing a series of artists interventions ‘Creating Rituals for When The Future Comes’, alongside a mobile interactive artwork the ‘Future Machine’.
Stephen Oram
Stephen Oram writes thought provoking stories that mix science fiction with social comment, mainly in a recognisable near-future. He is one of the writers for SciFutures and, as 2016 Author in Residence at Virtual Futures – described by the Guardian as “the Glastonbury of cyberculture” – he was one of the masterminds behind the new Near-Future Fiction series and continues to be a lead curator. Oram is a member of the Clockhouse London Writers and a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. He has two published novels: Fluence and Quantum Confessions, and a collection of sci-fi shorts, Eating Robots and Other Stories. As the Author in Residence for Virtual Futures Salons he wrote stories on the new and exciting worlds of neurostimulation, bionic prosthetics and bio-art. These Salons bring together artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, technologists and fiction writers to consider the future of humanity and technology. Recently, his focus has been on collaborating with experts to understand the work that’s going on in neuroscience, artificial intelligence and deep machine learning. From this Oram writes short pieces of near-future science fiction as thought experiments and use them as a starting point for discussion between himself, scientists and the public. Oram is always interested in creating and contributing to debate about potential futures.
Sunara Begum
Originally from Bangladesh, Sunara Begum studied film and fine art in the UK and Yoga and Ayurveda in India. She lives between London and Lagos where she is the co-founder of several international arts initiatives including Chand Aftara, an artist’s collective dedicated to the exhibition and production of experimental cinema, New Horizons Africa, an annual music and arts festival and Living Legacies, Gambia’s first traditional music archive. Begum’s work has been widely exhibited in film festivals, museums, galleries and cinematheques worldwide. In 2017, her film Meditation on Stillness was selected as the Best Experimental Short at the Art Africa Film Festival and the Jury Grand Prize at the 21st Media City Film Festival. Her films are in the permanent collections of Dimbola Museum & Galleries (UK), Lionel Wendt Gallery (Sri Lanka), Centre for Contemporary Art (Nigeria), Drik Gallery (Bangladesh) as well as Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design. Sunara’s work is a highly personal expression of themes including gender, memory and migration with powerful imagery that evokes deep-rooted feelings of reflection, contemplation and stillness. Sunara has developed a visual language that is distinctly her own drawn from her unique lived experience, straddling the dialectics of east and west, cultural identity, femininity and the immutable polarities of displacement.
They Are Here
They Are Here (f. 2006) is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison. They are currently based in London and on the River Lea. Their work can be read as a series of context specific games. The entry, invitation or participation can be as significant as the game’s conditions and structure. Through these games, they seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary, micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. In parallel, they initiate multiyear socially engaged projects that become generative spaces for further works. They Are Here work across media and types of site, particularly civic spaces.
Museum of London
Curating London will change how the museum collects 21st century London. It also seeks to recruit staff from a broader range of backgrounds and professional experience and puts Londoners at the heart of our collecting practice by working in partnership with local communities. From physical objects to interviewing Londoners about their own histories and memories, Curating London will capture, collect and record contemporary London.
The project started in April 2018 and runs until March 2022.
Each year the museum will begin four projects: three area studies of particular areas and one themed study that spans the whole of London.
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/curating-london-collecting-community-contemporary-city
SEE IMAGES FROM THE PRIVATE VIEW
Octavia E Butler had a vision of time as circular, giving meaning to acts of courage and persistence. In the face of social and environmental injustice, setbacks are guaranteed, no gains are made or held without struggle, but societal woes will pass and our time will come again. In this sense, history offers solace, inspiration, and perhaps even a prediction of what to prepare for.
The Time Portals exhibition, at Furtherfield Gallery and online spaces, celebrates the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park. As one of London’s first ‘People’s Parks’, designed for free movement and thought, it is the perfect location to create a mass investigation of radical pasts and futures, circling back to the start as we move forwards.
Each artwork invites audience participation – either in its creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more imaginings of past and future urban green spaces and beyond.
Time Portals from Furtherfield on Vimeo.
An interactive wall depicting the urban green space of Finsbury Park as a machine for radical re-assemblage. The external billboard can be scanned with an Augmented Reality app to reveal the secret of realising progressive visions for the future. Scan the message in the Gallery to see the billboard image animated.
An interactive machine designed and built to respond to environmental change and inspire new rites for our troubled times. A slideshow of the machine as it is imagined and built will be presented alongside a ritualised unveiling in the Autumn.
Join the Future Machine design team at Furtherfield Commons in Finsbury Park to build a new artwork that will help us to respond to environmental change…as the future unfolds. Sign up to take part in up to 4 workshops that involve talking, thinking & making, using interactive technology and scientific sensors, helping to design and build the Future Machine itself.
Workshop times/dates and sign-ups:
In collaboration with Amanda Wilson (MARA Project/Imperial College) and Professor Daniel Polani (University of Hertfordshire). Supported by EMAP, Arts Council England, and Haringey Council
An underwater robotic installation which explores what ‘life’ might mean in a future transformed by climate change and artificial intelligence. The work is based on new research into archaea, which are single-celled, ancient microbes that can survive in hot, polluted environments, combined with the latest innovations in machine learning. Now living at Furtherfield Gallery the “ArchaeaBot” is the ‘ultimate’ species for the end of the world as we know it.
With creative team: Hugo Stanbury, Nick Lambert, Marius Matesan, Carl Smith, James E. Marks, Chris Szkoda
Through in-depth research James revisits a historical black woman who lived in the Finsbury Park area 150 years ago, embodies and reimagines her then and 150 years into the future. Produced together with Ravensbourne University PlayLabZ and Holotronica, experience time travel and holographic mixed reality at the Furtherfield Gallery throughout the summer.
Part 2 of Circle of Blackness will be revealed later in the summer.
This video work is a complete rendition of the 1960s film version of HG Wells Novella re-edited by Thomson & Craighead into alphabetical order from beginning to end. In doing this, the artists attempt to perform a kind of time travel on the movie’s original timeline through the use of a system of classification.
Future Machine Artwork Workshops:
26 Mar, 20 Apr, 11 May, 18 Jun, 13 Jul, Furtherfield Commons
Book Launch Event for Jugaad Time by Amit S. Rai:
27 Apr 14.00-16.00, Furtherfield Commons
Find a Line to Follow and Face The Future! ‘Walkshops’:
5 May 18 May, 10 Aug, Furtherfield Commons
Free, Fair, and Alive! A People’s Park Play Day:
10 Aug 10.00-17.00, Furtherfield Commons
Future of Money Workshops:
10 Aug, 10.00-17.00, Furtherfield Commons, other dates TBC,
Citizen Sci-Fi 3-Day Artworkers Lab Event:
14-15 Sept, time TBC, Furtherfield Commons
Future Machine Procession in Finsbury Park:
12 Oct, 3:00 pm – 8:00 pm, join at any point
This 3-year programme combines citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
#CitSciFi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
Anna Dumitriu is a British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics. She has an extensive international exhibition profile including ZKM, Ars Electronica, BOZAR, The Picasso Museum, The V & A Museum, Philadelphia Science Center, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, Art Laboratory Berlin, and The Museum of the History of Science Oxford. She was the 2018 President of the Science and the Arts section of the British Science Association and holds visiting research fellowships at the University of Hertfordshire, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Waag Society, as well as artist-in-residence roles with the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford, and with the National Collection of Type Cultures at Public Health England. Dumitriu is a renowned speaker and has presented her work at venues including TATE Modern, Princeton University, Imperial College, La Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature, The Mendel Museum and UCLA. Her work is featured in many books including “Bio Art: Altered Realities” published by Thames and Hudson in 2016 and many other significant publications across contemporary art and science including Artforum International Magazine, Leonardo Journal, The Art Newspaper, Art Quarterly, Nature and The Lancet. Dumitriu’s work has a strong focus on the ethical implications of emerging technologies drawing threads across time, exploring future scenarios by reflecting on the past.
Elsa James is a visual artist, activist and producer based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, who grew up in west London during the 1970s and ’80s. Her solo practice encompasses lens-based performance, language and text, and recently the use of aural and the archive to explore regionality of race; black subjectivity; and the historical, temporal and spatial dimensions of what it means to be black in Britain. She is currently developing work exploring alienation and outsiderness experienced as a black woman living in Essex since 1999. Forgotten Black Essex (2018) embodies two place-specific narratives from our national archives of two overlooked, under-researched and recognised black women in Essex. Her social practice includes advocating for the inclusion of marginalised communities in the arts sector. New Ways of Seeing, Telling and Making (2018), a visual provocation and participatory lab at the Social Art Summit, asked questions about how we can ‘genuinely’ address barriers to participation and involvement in the arts for BAME communities. In 2015 she was commissioned to research the asylum and refugee community in Southend. This culminated in a 38-page report exposing the council’s lack of provision for the needs of asylum seekers, failed asylum seekers and refugees living in Southend.
Rachel Jacobs is an artist, researcher and games designer. She co-founded the artist-led collective Active Ingredient in 1996 and the commercial games company Mudlark Production Company in 2007. She completed a Doctorate in Computer Science in 2014. Rachel is a practising artist exhibiting nationally and internationally, and a Research Associate at the Horizon Digital Economy Institute, University of Nottingham. Her artworks include the award winning ‘Heartlands (Ere Be Dragons)’ one of the first mobile games that took place on city streets in Sao Paulo, Yokhama, Berlin, Paris, Cambridge, Bristol and Nottingham; ‘A Conversation Between Trees’, a touring artwork and schools exchange using environmental sensors to connect forests in the UK and Brazil; and ‘The Prediction Machine’, an interactive installation that predicts the future impacted by climate change. Rachel is currently developing a series of artists interventions ‘Creating Rituals for When The Future Comes’, alongside a mobile interactive artwork the ‘Future Machine’.
Dr Nick Lambert is Director of Research at Ravensbourne University London, where immersive environments and mixed reality experiences are being developed. He researches the application of technology in contemporary art and visual culture. He has written on the history of computer art and engaged with artists and theorists in this field. He has also created artworks for immersive environments including fulldome, and interactive exhibits.
James E. Marks, PsychFi – A natural born new media pioneer, award winning social video, & dimensional computing arts for good maker, curator & speaker. With 4 decades of hands-on experience & experimental knowledge collaborating on Brand / Crowd / Arts Council funded “Sub & Pop Culture Mixed Up Reality Experiences”. Recent collaborations include V&A, London Design Festival, Boomtown Fair, Mobile World Congress, Ravensbourne University, Bethesda, SubPac, Modern Panic, Sci-Fi-London & BBC Click
Marius Matesan is creating narratives using real and virtual installation art, noted mostly for his work on theatre stages across Europe and more recently for his Mixed Reality experiences. Mixing reality with the imaginary, using sound, projection mapping, spatial computing and virtual reality. His work revolves around pushing the boundaries of perception, awareness and reality, creating installations that are often addressing social issues with a psychedelic twist.
Alex May is a British artist creating digital technologies to challenge and augment physical and emotional human boundaries on a personal and societal level in a hyper-connected, software mediated, politically and environmentally unstable world. He works with light, code, and time; notably algorithmic photography, robotic artworks, video projection mapping installations, interactive and generative works, video sculpture, performance, and video art. Alex has exhibited internationally including at the Francis Crick Institute (permanent collection), Eden Project (permanent collection), Tate Modern, Ars Electronica (Austria), LABoral (Spain), the Victoria & Albert Museum, Royal Academy of Art, Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, Bletchley Park, One Canada Square in Canary Wharf, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (Venezuela), the Science Gallery in Dublin, Princeton University, University of Calgary (international visiting artist 2016), Texas A&M University, and the Beall Center for Art + Technology, University of California, Irvine. Alex is a Visiting Research Fellow: Artist in Residence with the School of Computer Science of University of Hertfordshire, and a Digital Media Arts MA sessional lecturer at the University of Brighton.
http://www.alexmayarts.co.uk
Antonio Roberts is a new media artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK. He uses technology-driven processes to explore issues surrounding open source software, free culture and collaborative practices. His visual and performance work has been featured at galleries and festivals including databit.me in Arles, France (2012), Glitch Moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2013), Loud Tate: Code at Tate Britain (2014), glitChicago at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, US (2014), Permission Taken at Birmingham Open Media and University of Birmingham (2015-2016), Common Property at Jerwood Visual Arts, London (2016), Green Man Festival, Wales (2017) and Barbican, London (2018). He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), the Birmingham editions of Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), µChip 3 (2015), Stealth (2015), and No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017).
Carl H Smith is Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) and Principal Research Fellow at Ravensbourne University London. His background is in Computer Science and Architecture. He has 17 years experience conducting R+D into the application of hybrid technologies for perceptual, cognitive and creative transformation. He has worked on a number of large-scale FP7 and Leonardo Life Long Learning European projects. He is currently working on 4 EU projects including the Horizon 2020 project ‘[WEKIT] Wearable Experience for Knowledge Intensive Training’ which aims to create ‘Wearable Experience (WE)’ – an entirely new form of media. His research interests include Embodied Cognition, Spatial Literacy, Perceptual Technology and Hyperhumanism. His other projects involve Context Engineering, Umwelt Hacking, Natural Media, Sensory Augmentation, Memory Palaces, Artificial Senses and Body Hacking. He is co-founder of the London Experimental Psychonautics Club and co-founder of the Cyberdelic Society. Both organisations explore the myriad of ways it is possible to produce and examine Altered States of Consciousness. He has previously worked at the Computing departments at London Metropolitan University, Glasgow University and Sheffield University. The Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) conducts design research into the application of information and communication technologies to augment, support and transform cognition.
Hugo Stanbury has worked in the event and entertainment industry for over a decade. Inspired most by the area where cutting edge technology is used for properties rather than purpose, he works hard to balance sound technical delivery with new creative concept. He currently works as Operations Director at Holotronica – the UK company behind Hologauze. Hologauze is the world leading gauze for holographic effects with clients from BMW to Beyonce. Holotronica are specialists in a range of holographic displays, analogue holography and 3D content.
Studio Hyte is a London based multidisciplinary design studio who place research and concept above medium. Working between graphic design, interaction and emergent forms of visual communication, we aim to create meaningful and thought provoking work. Formed of a small group of individual practitioners, Studio Hyte is the middle ground where all of our interests and practices meet. As such our collective practice and research covers a broad spectrum of topics including; language, inclusion & accessibility, egalitarian politics & alternative protest and technology & the human. With an emphasis on process, we often create critical narratives through our work in order to conceptualise through making. Collectively, our visual practice is a means through which we can plot out a conceptual landscape in order to understand and explore real-world scenarios. Studio Hyte works on self-directed research projects, commissions and client-led projects for a small pool of like minded organisations and individuals.
Chris Szkoda, Kaws Infinity – Games Designer/ VFX Artist, works on designing mixed/virtual reality apps for a social mixed reality experience playground at Ravensbourne University London. Keen to support social good & diversity projects, working directly with students and helping them make their creative ideas a reality. He has expertise in immersive technology, VR modelling and painting in Google Tilt Brush and MasterpieceVR software.
Jon Thomson (b. 1969) and Alison Craighead (b. 1971) are artists living and working in London. They make artworks and installations for galleries and specific sites including online spaces. Much of their recent work looks at live networks like the web and how they are changing the way we all understand the world around us. Having both studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Jon is Reader in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, while Alison is a reader in contemporary art and visual culture at University of Westminster and lectures in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University.
http://www.thomson-craighead.net/
This 3-year programme supports our Platforming Finsbury Park initiative. Between 2019-2021 we will produce exhibitions and events that combine citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
#CitSciFi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
The Time Portals exhibition, held at Furtherfield Gallery (and across our online spaces), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the creation of Finsbury Park. As one of London’s first ‘People’s Parks’, designed to give everyone and anyone a space for free movement and thought, we regard it as the perfect location from which to create a mass investigation of radical pasts and futures, circling back to the start as we move forwards.
Each artwork in the exhibition therefore invites audience participation – either in its creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more imaginings of the past and future of urban green spaces and beyond.
For this Olympic year we will consider the health and wellbeing of humans and machines.
For this year of predicted peak heat rises we will consider how machines can work with nature.
On a blustery cold and wet Sunday in the build up to Christmas I joined a group of people at Furtherfield Commons to discuss the future of Finsbury Park. I finally arrived after prowling around their darkened Gallery in the centre of the park, only to discover the event was being hosted in their other space in the far southeastern corner of the park. This brief detour gave me a moment to breathe in one of my local parks and I experienced a familiar feeling of vulnerability as the night drew in and cold drops of rain started to make themselves felt. The few brave families and exercisers were beginning to retreat as I crossed the open stretch of field that runs parallel to the roaring Seven Sisters Road. Drawn by the welcoming light coming from the building in the small gardens behind the legendary Rowans Ten Pin Bowling and guided by the sound of the drumming, a regular feature of this corner of the park, I entered the workshop and was greeted with mince pies, tea and other goodies, and met the 11 other workshop participants.
Timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Finsbury Park, this workshop for local residents, aimed to tap into our experiences and imaginations to generate future visions of the park. The event was led by Dr Rachel Jacobs, who is a local with a special affection for the park, and she started by sharing it’s stories and describing some of the features that are no longer in existence including a bandstand and the many trees that have been removed over the years.
We started by identifying features of the park that we would like to ‘lose’ and those we wanted to ‘protect’. Answers were varied but along similar themes. Many people shared a desire to preserve the trees and if possible, have more. The lake featured prominently with many people wanting to maintain the space and the sanctuary it provides for birds. Rose, one of my fellow workshoppers, gleefully called for those people who feed bread to the ducks to be poisoned.
The underground reservoir, a cathedral-like temple to water supply was hailed as a hidden gem that could be utilised as a space during the colder months by Polly a local resident and manager of Space4. Simon, Chair of Friends of Finsbury Park, suggested we consider uses for Manor House Lodge (another building that had escaped my attention). Zeki prioritised the the rocks in the park for protection – especially at the amphitheatre space beside the play park. There were wistful expressions of personal connections to conkers, squirrels and swans. The things that people wanted to lose were more elusive: the atmosphere that the park creates at night; its association with crime and a lack of safety. Gab who overlooks the park from his 8th floor flat, feels the park can be scary and in his words, sometimes ‘sly’. Removing the fences was suggested as a possible remedy.
Next, we were introduced to an initially bemusing process based on Play Your Place, designed by artists Ruth Catlow and Mary Flanagan, to introduce playful and game-like activities to public consultation. We were each asked to select different cards with random words that we were told would help us to disrupt our conventional view of problem solving. The cards were divided into provocative statements, for example mine were: ‘London is no longer’ and ‘getaway car’. Then a spinning wheel contained words associated with game features, like ‘mission’, ‘protagonist’, ‘goal’ or ‘reward’. After drawing or writing out our scenarios based on the random words we had to pick a segment of the wheel in which to place our ideas.
I asked if London is no longer, why is that so? Perhaps the park has eaten London. I was making the park the protagonist, the hero of the story. My ‘getaway car’ card prompted me to imagine Finsbury Park criss-crossed by many roads. So what if a part of the park could move very slowly, a moving park that people could take in the rest of the park from and jump on and off.
Zeki, one of the youngest participants had the cards ‘maps‘ and ‘someone caring for the park’ they assigned it the wheel word ‘reward’. He imagined the rocks in the park could become an area where people could come and paint and draw on the rocks. People will be able to look at the drawings and climb on the rocks. He said this suited ‘reward’ because you get a nice place.
Finally we worked with lego and plasticine, felt and coloured paper, to make a representation of our scenarios. Time flew by before we were then asked to talk about what we had created.
Simon and Talal ended up using a lot of lego. They said they weren’t that confident ‘creating’ but their riotous explosion of lego pieces described the Finsbury Park Lodge with lots of tropical trees growing around them. They included a clocktower which they felt the park needed. Ominously on the edge of their diorama there was, in their words: ‘the threat of a forest fire’.
Ilenia and Gab created intricate visions of the park modelled from tiny pieces of plasticine. Ilenia created crosses to represent all the buildings that she was going to destroy. She said “All the fences will be replaced by nice trees. The lake will be larger than it is now. There will be more people using the park.” Gab described the a tree as becoming “a colourful multi-form creator. It will be very friendly and very different from normal. Everything will be very colourful and this will be linked to representing climate change.” Emma who earlier in the workshop explained her love of conkers ended up building robot conkers.
The outcomes were unexpected and realised in a wonderfully ad hoc way with a rich mix of ideas. Rachel and the Furtherfield team were on hand to support and provide more insight. Although the process of drawing cards and selecting from a wheel was initially quite perplexing, staying with the uncertainty of the process meant that we came up with ideas that were novel and unhindered by more formal or conservative notions of preserving or enhancing Finsbury Park. The two hour time limit, meant that everything moved along at pace that kept the idea generation restless. I believe I speak for all who took part in anticipating the results of the wider project.
What can possibly be made from such a kaleidoscope of raw material, I wondered on my way home in the pouring rain? Perhaps my plant car or Emma’s robot conkers will see the light of day or the darkness of the underground reservoir.
Futurescapes is an Innovate UK Audience of the Future Design Foundations project that uses Finsbury Park as a test case to examine the commercial potential for using immersive experiences as a tool for collaborative placemaking for public spaces and integrated public services. Furturescapes is a partnership project with Furtherfield, The Audience Agency and Wolf in Motion.
Recently I was approached to conceive and run an outreach project to accompany a solo show of work by Eduardo Kac at Furtherfield Gallery in North London’s Finsbury Park.
Among the works on show was one of Kac’s Lagoogleglyphs, large scale stylised representations of rabbits (something of a signature obsession for him) painted in some sort of sportsground emulsion directly onto a section of the park and allegedly of a scale which make it harvestable by the satellites Google rents for its various mapping activities.
Being completely frank, I have to say I entertained a degree of scepticism about Kac’s work—some of it falling within, in my view, one or both of two entertainment based metaphors—the ‘one-liner’ and the ‘theme park’—neither particularly positive elements of my critical lexicon.
Be that as it may, some of the work, particularly the less grandiose pieces (that delicate bunny flag flapping above the gallery!) were touched enough with real poetry to make me want to take up the challenge.
I say ‘challenge’ advisedly for I’m only ever interested in doing anything which in some sense challenges me and I also felt that my ambivalence about Kac would result in anything I ended up making containing a return element of ‘challenge’ or, perhaps more gently put, practical critique.
The word challenge also described the sense I had of wanting to counterpose collaboration, the collective, the everyday, to the artist with a capital ‘A’; of going some way to claiming art as a way of seeing and feeling and thinking together for All ( also with a capital ‘A’).
Reaching back in memory I pondered two remix/homage projects from the noughties which somehow straddled, in a pleasantly clunky fashion, practices both cutting edge digital (at least in their original moment) and time honoured too.
Apposite and practical stimuli for my 2018 purposes, they suggested elegant pathways to both honour previous work and to gently…um… stress-test it.
Both evinced rich humour, a warmth and a concomitant refusal to take themselves too seriously, qualities lacking in much contemporary art and both had a kind of performative klutziness I found entirely engaging.
Both were made in the first years of this millennium when digital and particularly online art was a wild west with a few fragile homesteads scattered here and there and not the orderly space it is today colonised almost entirely by the mainstream art world or commerce or both.
I recalled first a project by Nathaniel Stern where he hired South African billboard sign writers to paint physical representations of various, mostly art related, web pages.
The second was artist duo MTAA’s remix of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance project, an endurance piece where Hsieh had forced himself to punch a timeclock on the hour, every hour for a whole year.
Reversing the premise MTAA’s Whid and River posted a database of video clips of themselves sleeping, eating, inhabiting the space and left it to the online viewer to watch these being digitally assembled (by Flash—remember that?) into a simulacrum of the original over the assumedly continuous period of a year.
Armed, fortified, prepared thus, I set to work—but I still needed a concrete plan and methodology.
Being a keen runner and the project taking place in a London Park in which I had run a 10k not long before (and now having endurance floating near the top of my mind) I felt some kind of park related physical activity would be an element and this would be a way of coming closer to those who loved the park but for whom the art gallery might not be their first association.
But still I lacked the concrete rabbit themed activity which would offer genuine practical, meaningful and autonomous artistic engagement and creation to participants.
I did not want to control what those participants would do but give them a clearly defined (clearly defined enough that all inputs from three separate days of activity could be brought together into a final unified work) and interesting task within which they would need to deploy creativity, focus and skill.
The fad for exercise related GPS devices had previously passed me by but one day whilst running with my daughter, who uses her phone and GPS enabled software to document her running in data and map form, I had a small epiphany—here there (might) be rabbits.
Rabbits, giant GPS rabbits, first planned and sketched by participating teams in marker pen over a satellite image of the park—ears, eyes, paws, body, fluffy tails emergent within its various paths and trails and features and obstructions.
And then, using these maps, we would carefully and attentively walk-out each monster rabbit trapping and freezing it as a succession of data, a series of co-ordinates in the memory of the GPS watch I would wear, finally to be reconstitututed as a continuous line drawing in turn fed back into a fresh satellite view of the park.
But that succession of co-ordinates, actuated by the actual movements of the human body (like a giant pencil lead or nib or brush) will resolve itself into something ancient—line, preconceived and then drawn out by human beings.
Being, together, both the very oldest form of mark making and something blink-of-an-eye recent too (well, as recent as the noughties efflorescence of so-called locative media which I shamelessly pillaged here.)
Inaccuracy in some measure a feature of both ancient and modern—the error margin of even GPS and GLONASS together, two sets of four satellites working in concert; the mix of will and skill and the fallibility and triumph too of flesh and bone and sinew which is part of what thrills and moves us in the arts.
This is what I had in mind.
Repeatedly outlining then co-performing an activity which I learned to summarise simply and precisely, almost automatically, one might have thought boredom or a dozy, parroted, routine might threaten.
And how anxious I was each time as to whether and in what way each new team would engage with—buy into—adopt as theirs, as ours—the task.
But how striking the variation both in the simple, basic act of depicting in continuous line each new rabbit-of-the-imagination and the forty minutes lively sociability surrounding that initial sketching and subsequent walking-out.
Balancing the competing claims of making something serious, something with some kind of weight, some satisfying end product, whilst making space for others’ fun and dreams and and will and whimsy is neither easy nor is it trivial.
In the end people seemed to have a good time, they seemed at ease, went at it with a will and—it seems to me—something rich and affecting emerged.
Thanks to all at Furtherfield and thanks—no, not thanks, but credit—to my fellow artists: Alessandra, Anna, Candy, Chris, Elliot, Evgenia, Franc, George, Grace, Henry, Jade, Lenon, Léonie, Lucian, Luka, Martin, Matthew, Maya, Negev, Niyah, Pryle, Rémi, Rosalie, Sara, Shiri, Stefan, Thea and Tyler.
Valuing people is a core property of wealth creation, wealth creation can be positively bound into communities. We can’t afford not to be involved in digital creativity because it explores areas of social space that are entwined with intrinsic cultural and economic value.
The point of entry has become ubiquitous, we are everywhere, they are everywhere – I am over there and here too. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist gave us ‘emotional extension in electronic space’ [1]before we came up with the clumsy and often misunderstood paradigm of ‘post-digital’ – a way to describe a circularity and return to being human that accepts the intersubjectivity and convergence we feel with other people and technology.
It is this corporeal and algorithmic unification and association that Furtherfield grasps; sometimes like harsh high summer nettles on uncovered hands, gathered as ingredients for a convivial soup. Not afraid to be stung or to make the soup, even though after 22 years of foraging you are not now the only voice or flag raised at the intersections of art, technology and social change. The mission is always different and always the same. This then is my provocation to you.
The case for digital creativity has grown. Why is that? Because there is deep unrest and even malevolence in electronic spaces and at their corporeal nodes. “The creative adult is the child who has survived,” says Ursula K. Le Guin.
As creative people engaged in the field we are with agency and in turn create agency; we gladly pick up refurbished laptops, remixed maps and fragmented tweets. Our fieldwork means we are in the river, standing watching by the shore, and holding up a mirror in the lobby of the hotel. We facilitate others, not just ourselves, we do it with others. Artistic people are children and not confined or restrained by common sense orders from the immaterial elite – some are pointed, focused and ready to enter the field, others are yet to claim their agency, and even more have yet to experience due North and due South. We can provide the co-ordinates, the beginning of the map and the line of sight. Artists in the future will become agents of change and observers of truth in a familiar return to base. And so we are not given to the idea, in the field, of carrying out instrumental command and we caution ourselves against suggesting this to others.
In a hotel in Sweden we listened as the French Philosopher, Bernard Stiegler brought attention to our attention. In clipped and someway jarred English, he opened up the vast chasm and problem of attention as the fundamental commodity of our age (emotionally extended, post-digital etc). His references to ‘techne’ willfully conjured up derivations from Greek – craftsmanship, craft and art. We are crafting the digital to draw attention to ourselves and our products. We are becoming products, through a process of digital reification. Lukács describes reification ‘as a relation between people that has taken on the character of a thing’[2]. So, while humans and machines merge evermore, we understand that the end-point of creative processes is not to make attention-seeking people become products and things, it is to diversify our subjectivities and illuminate the way forward for all.
The agency of artists has been a key factor in the development of the Furtherfield’s mission in its first two decades. This agency broadly disseminates to artists networks, activism, societal change, environmentalism, localism, global affairs and more recently emerging technologies such as blockchains. Within an unfolding world political landscape, these areas of interest show greater convergence and potential as moments of reflection become more important in the reified world of products. Our role is to be that reflective space for 360 degree scanning and to hold digital time up in the chain.
Our future mission grounds us on our locus in order to do this, while maintaining our global reach. We are passionate and committed to multiple points of entry, bringing in consenting and diverging voices. The ‘commons’ to us is a real thing, worth our energy and stewardship the point at which people do touch each other and listen.
We know that technology will not save us and furthermore we propose that this is not the right question. In working in partnership with academics, businesses and other institutions we are always asking ourselves where progressive change can come from, in a series of open dialectical spaces. Finsbury Park offers us a node in which to conduct business and make new wealth – cultural, social and economic capital. The predication of wealth creation on technology alone is too simplistic when a multitude of tools are needed. Our approach to the idea of the ‘commons’ is to use old and new tools and ways of getting things done together..
As McLuhan says: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.” (from Understanding Media, 1964.)
We are not isolated from the huge pressures of the global economy, when advancements outstrip the ethics and the algorithms that come to define new normative patterns and processes. The role of digital creativity and artists is now fully emerging as one that reconnects them and us back into the critical space that Goya, Galas and others occupied. So, we can hold up time and re-enter it at a different point. Yes, Furtherfield offers time travel!
The disruptive power of technology is evident in its ability to unhinge and even eliminate existing businesses, local centres and distribution methods. This is not new, just as McLuhan defined electronic extension in the 1960s, Clayton Christensen defined ‘Disruptive Innovation’ in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. However, digitally disruptive business models such as Uber are now mainstreamed and fast-tracked into our everyday experiences. With the advance in real time data and algorithms these disruptions can have a dramatic effect in social and economic terms. We are faced with a shift in the language from the progressive and anti-establishment power of Punk and music culture; into the realms of digitally distributed start-ups, iterative technologies and remix culture.
It is time to invent another future, lest we will become the disrupted and not the disruptors.
Image credit: Museum of Contemporary Commodities by Paula Crutchlow at Furtherfield 2016
In partnership with AntiUniversity
Whether you smelt it, mine it, burn it, breathe it, or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.
Addiction is defined as a chronic, relapsing earthly disease that is characterized by compulsive seeking and use of earth products, despite harmful consequences. It is considered a brain disease because humankind changes the earth—they change its structure and how it works.
Soft Sickness is a one evening/one day workshop hosted by the research project Shift Register exploring the signs, symptoms, circulations, exchanges, consumptions, dependencies, and management implicit in the multifarious and pathological dependence on the earth which is now named by that word “Anthropocene”. Earthly addictions produce quantified-earth self-portraiture, GIS co-dependencies, and all other variants of planetary narcissism. Earth-scale sensor systems and media networks, swathing the planet in information about itself, are unveiled with media from on- and off-planet earth science field-stations and reflections thereupon. Dependencies bring anxieties about the impending doom of resource dearths to come. People manage these anxieties with new psychotropic medications, whereas artists represent and markets bet on them, against the health of the earth and its living bodies.
Soft Sickness divines the earth lines of the often contradictory ingestion of and repeating addiction to the earth and its productions, data, memory — its circulations, seasons and natures, to the plants, the mushrooms and the animals, to fossil fuels, metals, to liquid screens and smogged surfaces, to longevity and, finally, to the real. To the thing and things which we cannot help doing (things to). To compulsively consume (the earth) is to eat and subsequently to excrete ourselves, humankind, and this cycle can be termed addiction. We feed from the earth, feeding back to the earth a world and mind-changing chemistry.
During the workshop, participants and invited guests will discuss, map, extract, ingest and excrete relations of local earth manifested in Finsbury Park in North London. Plant and pharmaceutical toxicities/ psycho-pharmacologies, poison cures, geophagic gastronomics, esoteric pollution sensing and embrace, and the invention and embedding of folkloric and human to non-human ecologies constitute parts of this invitation. We will gather psycho-active dew, imagine tales for the mole people, bake bread for crows, and make the earthworlds flesh.
We wish to develop contemporary rituals articulating the polarised and overgrown junk-tions of shamanic spirit journeyings with addiction managements; cold kicking the earth habit or indulging absolutely in the (cannibal/capital) undergrounds and (fairie) overgrounds.
SHIFT REGISTER is a research project investigating how technological and infrastructural activities have made Earth into a planetary laboratory. The project maps and activates local dynamics and material shifts between human, earthly and planetary bodies and temporalities. Contemporary, mainstream science and technology are intersected with other knowledge systems to attempt a reconfiguration of relations between humans and the earth. SHIFT REGISTER is Jamie Allen, Martin Howse, Merle Ibach, Jonathan Kemp and Martin Sulzer at the Critical Media Lab, Basel.
SEE IMAGES FROM THE WORKSHOPS
Part of the Poetry for Animals, Machines and Aliens: The Art of Eduardo Kac exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery
Families and groups of all ages are invited to design their own giant rabbits and to draw them on Finsbury Park by walking your own rabbit route using GPS software.
Taking about an hour, it will be a fun and creative time for all involved as we all work together with artist Michael Szpakowski to draw the rabbit and walk it for it to be added to the Finsbury Park map. Participants will be credited on a final image of all the rabbits created in the park.
Just turn up on the day to book a place for your group – workshop places will be offered on a first-come first-served basis on each day.
Groups and families can also just turn up on each day to join in with the fun and walk some bunny routes in the park.
Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion
Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ
Visiting Information
VoiceOver Finsbury Park is a social radio project about the future of life in London. We have invited our neighbours in Park House, right across the road from Furtherfield Commons in Finsbury Park, to make short broadcasts about their lives and to express their ideas about the city’s future. Everyone in Park House shares a geographical viewpoint over London but everyone has different experiences of living in this city.
Residents are creating a temporary, hyper-local communications network by installing in their homes a series of light antennae, LED nodes and radio boxes designed by Umbrellium. These nodes create a network of light and sound that can be heard and seen all by participants.
The aim of the project is to create a temporary communal communication space that gives neighbours, who may never otherwise meet, a way to share a glimpse each other’s lives; for people to trust each other with their dreams for their global city.
VoiceOver Finsbury Park culminates in a takeover of a gallery in the Museum of London at the end of February 2018, where visitors will be able to listen to the voices, thoughts and interactions from Finsbury Park residents captured by the installation. Until then the broadcasts can only be heard by participants but you can follow the project on twitter on the #VoiceOverFinsburyPark hashtag.
VoiceOver Finsbury Park is is produced by Furtherfield & Umbrellium.
The Museum of London ran a competition looking for creative responses to An Idea for a Future London. They were looking for community projects that would imagine the London of the future. VoiceOver Finsbury Park is the winning idea from Umbrellium and Furtherfield
An Idea for a Future London is co-commissioned by the Museum of London and Thirteen Ways for City Now City Future. Supported by Arts Council England.
Umbrellium designs and builds urban technologies that support citizen empowerment and high-impact engagement in cities. www.umbrellium.co.uk
VoiceOver Finsbury Park is a development on the Umbrellium project VoiceOver East Durham, commissioned by East Durham Creates and produced by Forma. An Idea for a Future London is co-commissioned by the Museum of London and Thirteen Ways for City Now City Future, and supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Award winning writer, director and actor Christine Entwisle is working with the residents to create a final broadcast which will be recorded and exhibited in the Museum of London. Christine Entwisle won the BBC writers prize for her radio play doyouwishtocontinue in 2015 and the BBC Audio Drama Award 2017 for Secret Kebabs. She also won the Funny Women Award 2015 writers prize and co wrote and directed a new series of webisodes Extreme Fairy.
We are based in the heart of Finsbury Park, which is used by roughly 55,000 people weekly in a neighbourhood described as ‘superdiverse’ for the nearly 200 languages spoken locally. Working with park users and stakeholders, artists, techies, researchers, policy-makers, and other local arts organisations we have developed a new approach to cultural co-creation in this much loved shared public space: ‘Platforming Finsbury Park’.
Our aims are to:
An important part of this work is our 2019-21 programme, Citizen Sci-Fi, designed to engage our local community in creative imaginings of the future of Finsbury Park. We are producing a range of participatory networked art practices that respond to today’s important questions, in this unique urban park context, that empower local participants, and draw on international areas of practice.
By transforming Finsbury Park into a canvas for participatory digital arts we want to explore how insights drawn from the locality, and meaningful co-created cultural experiences can improve wellbeing for people, establishing new arts practices for Finsbury Park and other public spaces and localities.
Read more about this project in our Spring 2018 Editorial
This 3-year programme combines citizen science and citizen journalism by crowdsourcing the imagination of local park users and community groups to create new visions and models of stewardship for public, urban green space. By connecting these with international communities of artists, techies and thinkers we are co-curating labs, workshops, exhibitions and Summer Fairs as a way to grow a new breed of shared culture.
#CitSciFi – crowdsourcing creative and technological visions of our communities and public spaces, together.
The Time Portals exhibition, held at Furtherfield Gallery (and across our online spaces), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the creation of Finsbury Park. As one of London’s first ‘People’s Parks’, designed to give everyone and anyone a space for free movement and thought, we regard it as the perfect location from which to create a mass investigation of radical pasts and futures, circling back to the start as we move forwards.
Each artwork in the exhibition therefore invites audience participation – either in its creation or in the development of a parallel ‘people’s’ work – turning every idea into a portal to countless more imaginings of the past and future of urban green spaces and beyond.
For this Olympic year we will consider the health and wellbeing of humans and machines.
For this year of predicted peak heat rises we will consider how machines can work with nature.
Park visitors of all ages… Free your office scanner and get your creative juices flowing in Finsbury Park this Summer!
Join us to build a collective portrait of Finsbury Park to be shown at Furtherfield Gallery and in an online exhibition.
With Furtherfield’s artist in residence, Carlos Armendariz, you will create intriguing images of the park with hacked scanners inspired by the Rippling Images of commissioned US artist Nathaniel Stern.
All are welcome, including children with their guardians. The workshops are free but BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL. Click here to book any of these dates:
tweet your images using #wescanfinsburypark
Nathaniel Stern has been using hacked desktop scanners to create beautiful images for over a decade. As part of the exhibition Beyond the Interface – London, he hung 21 large scale prints outside of the Furtherfield Gallery and produced a complete new series of images available online: Rippling Images of Finsbury Park.
Stern hacks desktops scanners to transform them in portable image capturing devices, and uses them to “perform images into existence”. This process create interesting connections between his body, the scanned environment, and their movement at the time of capturing. Stern himself explained his process in detail in his TEDx talk: Ecological Aesthetics.
Now Furtherfield Gallery is offering a series of workshops for all ages which will allow the participants to experience Stern’s artistic process. You will learn how to hack a scanner and use one of the artist’s scanners to create your own images. The goal is to create a collective portrait of Finsbury Park and there is a chance to show your work in Furtherfield Gallery.
Furtherfield in partnership with MAT PhD programme, Queen Mary University. Pictures of the workshops by Alison Ballard.
Walkshop, making session and drop-in day
Come for one or both sessions, or just drop in for a chat about MoCC over tea and cake.
11am-1pm – Data Walkshop with data activist Dr Alison Powell (LSE)
Explore and discuss the data surveillance processes at play in Finsbury Park through a process of rapid group ethnography. Arrive from 10.30am at Furtherfield Commons for a short introduction to the project. We will leave at 11am for a 60 minute walk around the area followed by snacks and discussion. Please bring:
BOOK HERE (places limited to 12 on a first come first served basis)
2pm-4.30pm – Making session: LEGO Re-creations & Interactive Posters
Work with Cultural Geographer Dr Ian Cook to turn your commodity stories into activist LEGO re-creations. Inspired by Nathaniel Stern’s hacked scanner, artist Carlos Armendariz will help you translate your data findings into visual events. Produce arresting images for an interactive poster for public display, then track and count its impact.
You are welcome to bring your own smart phones and computers along.
BOOK HERE
This event is part of the research and development for the Museum of Contemporary Commodities, an art and social project led by artist Paula Crutchlow (Blind Ditch) and cultural geographer Ian Cook (Univeristy of Exeter).
More info: http://www.moccguide.net/
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