Furtherfield are looking for curators for collaboration in a short-term project based at their Gallery in London’s Finsbury Park
Connect for Creativity is an 18-month project led by the British Council, in partnership with Abdullah Gül University in Turkey and three creative hubs – ATÖLYE in Turkey, BİOS in Greece, Nova Iskra in Serbia. The project is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Turkey, through the Intercultural Dialogue programme.
The project features art and technology residencies which will bring artists, creatives and technologists from Turkey, the UK, Greece and Serbia together at each location to explore uses of creative technology to build bridges and empathy within and across societies.
“The residencies will result in immersive and multimedia-rich artwork, powered by techniques of design research, human-centered design and speculative design. The artists will be asked to question what hopes and fears are associated with rapidly changing work and life environments in contemporary society, how a networked culture can develop cohesion and how to deal with uncertainty and change.”
To work for a maximum of 6 days each, between 1st November 2019 and 28th February 2020 at €200 per day. Must be available to attend event at Furtherfield Commons between 5.00 and 9.00pm on 6th November.
If you are a curator with Turkish, Greek or Serbian heritage born or based in London we would love to hear from you. To apply please send a 1 page CV and 1 page covering letter explaining why the project interests you to info@furtherfield.org by 12.00pm Friday 18th October. Final candidates will be notified by Friday 25th October.
From the self-made celebrity of the Instafamous to the personal live-streaming of gamers, online sites of spectatorship are the emerging factories and playgrounds of the 21st century. We shop, share, and produce online, 24/7. As we do we alter the processes of how we work, what is viewed as a product, and our sense of self: work is like play and labour is seemingly without work. Playbour– Work, Pleasure, Survival, is dedicated to the study of the worker as they are asked to draw on internal resources and self-made networks to develop new avenues of work, pleasure and survival.
Over the three days we will form a community-led action research lab that brings together artists, researchers, data scientists, and activists, as well as community participants in an ambitious and intensive programme of experiments, interventions and performances. Led by a diverse community, and working towards a group exhibition at Furtherfield in July 2018, we will explore the converging spaces of work, play and well-being, as well as examine the role of the worker in the age of the Internet.
Playbour– Work, Pleasure, Survival, is an art and research platform dedicated to the study of the worker in an age of data technologies. Our first event is a three-day lab at Furtherfield Commons and we are currently welcoming submissions for people to join us!
We are looking for applications from a range of applicants artists, designers, researchers, curators, and activists, with an interest in the relationship between arts, technology, and design, and who are working on an art or research project relating to shifting realities of work, the worker, and the self, via cognitive capital, digital labour, play and entertainment spaces.
We will explore the contours and value systems we place on work, play, and well-being, and use this to work towards an exhibition at Furtherfield opening mid-July, 2018.
Each day will consist of three sessions DISCUSS, TEST, and PLAY, convened and co-led by artists, academics, designers, and activists. Participants will critically analyze and thoughtfully engage in conversations, conduct research with “workers”, test out ideas through hands-on making activities, and engage in play-driven interventions and performances. Then working in groups, develop the foundation for newly commissioned works for the upcoming exhibition at Furtherfield gallery in July 2018.
Friday 25 May, Playbour, will examine shifting realities of work and professionalism in play and entertainment spaces. Participants will DISCUSS with sociologist Dr. Jamie Woodcock (Oxford Internet Institute) and explore the concepts of playbour, digital labour, immaterial labour, and cognitive capitalism – linking these explicitly to work and play through the example of video games. We will then CONNECT with live streamers. In the afternoon, we will PLAY in a “collective empathy” session with artist Steven Ounanian looking into how pain and suffering are experienced in online contexts.
Saturday 26 May, Body/Machine/Capital, investigates data-driven decision making and the colonisation of body and machine via capital systems. The first half of the day will DISCUSS and TEST with special guests. Later that day participants will begin to develop their “game installation” projects.
Sunday 27 May, Unwitting Extraction, participants will DISCUSS and develop their “game installation” with architect Dr. Itai Palti. Using behavioural science and data technology participants will TEST ideas and thinking for game-based installations through a scientific lens in anticipation of the Furtherfield exhibition. This will be followed by a group lunch and feedback session with Dani Admiss and illustrator, Maz Hemming. To apply for a place please submit your application by midnight GMT Sunday 25 April 2018, to info@workpleasuresurvival.org
A complete application must include the following:
The lab has been organised with its partner Furtherfield Gallery as a pre-event to the Playbour– Work, Pleasure, Survival, exhibition opening in Friday 13 July 2018.Curated by Dani AdmissConcept development Dani Admiss and Cecilia Wee
Playbour – Work, Pleasure, Survival, is realized in the framework of State Machines, a joint project by Aksioma (SI), Drugo more (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL) and NeMe (CY).
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
State Machines is a programme of activities devoted to the investigation of new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies. Focussing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance, the project joins five experienced partners – Aksioma (Slovenia), Drugo more (Croatia), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands) and NeMe (Cyprus) together with a range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences.
www.statemachines.eu
Every time a smartphone powers up, their user is tied inextricably into data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. Their every personal expression is framed and mediated by digital platforms which now include those operating new kinds of currencies, financial exchange, and labour relations that bypass corporations and governments.
Meanwhile these same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements, and, although seemingly the epitome of globalization, they do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders.
We ask how might the digital subjects of today become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow?
State Machines now launches an open call for a new commissioned artistic project.
We are interested in works that explore shifts in agency towards individuals, groups and commons from nation states and private companies. We invite proposals that draw on first-hand experiences in:
The call is open to artists, technologists, activists, inventors and individuals, groups and hybrid human- artificial intelligence collaborations.
We are interested in all art forms and actions that can be encountered and experienced across networks, online and in physical exhibition. We welcome diverse viewpoints, experimental and playful approaches.
Applications must be received by 23:59 (CET) on Wednesday 31 January 2018.
Complete application must include the following:
Please send ONE .pdf format including materials 1-4 above to marcela@aksioma.org.
For >5MB attachments, please use file transfer services like Wetransfer or provide a link to your own server space.
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
While archaeology has often understood cultures through excavations of hoards and coins, what will today’s digital currencies tell future archaeologists about the way we live and trade?
This co-commission with NEoN Digital Arts Festival forms part of Furtherfield’s ongoing investigations into the politics of the blockchain, smart contracts, and cryptocurrency systems like Ethereum. It invites artists to imagine themselves as future media archaeologists, as recorders of our current information-based society, and as time-travelers highlighting the continued relevance of our long past. Will you dig for the digital, brush the dirt off the non-material, or excavate the internet?
In an era that threatens to be a digital dark age for future historians [1], blockchains may prove to be rare digital artefacts valuable enough to preserve into the future. There are already dozens of dead chains from abandoned cryptocurrencies [2], but with billions of dollars of value tied up in Bitcoin, Ethereum and other leading coins, the incentives to maintain their public ledgers are strong. Culture and knowledge have already been hidden in the blockchain – from images of Nelson Mandela to WikiLeaks cables [3] – but it is the blockchain as a record of our economic activity that concerns us here. This already has its history; on these public digital ledgers we can find everything from the ten thousand Bitcoins that were used to buy two pizzas [4] to the fifty million dollars of Ether that were stolen [5] in a hack on code running on the Ethereum blockchain. We just don’t have the best tools to visualise them yet.
We invite proposals for a new artistic online commission that takes the blockchain as the site of its manifestation. For example, artworks that are:
Whatever it is, it should work as a future media archeological artefact of blockchain finance and it has to be exhibitable online.
Hailed as both emancipatory opportunity for creative autonomy, and a driver of inequality and corporate opacity, the blockchain [10] is widely described as the Internet of Money. The blockchain is overtaking the WWW as the next big network technology for speculation and disruption. Investors recognise its potential in numerous ways: for high level authentication of identity [11] and matter [12]; for more efficient and secure financial transactions and distribution of digital assets; for communications so secure as to facilitate voting; and as a coordinating technology for the billions of devices connected to the Internet [13]
50 years ago this year, the world’s first ATM was designed, built and shipped from Dundee and installed in Enfield, less than 10 miles from Furtherfield. With this commission Furtherfield and NEoN recognise the role that the city of Dundee has played in the history of the development of smart technologies for financial transactions, through it being home to the R&D wing of The National Cash Register Corporation – NCR. [14]
NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2017 will expand on it being Scotland’s Year of History, Heritage and Archaeology, and seek to use its arts programme to unveil hidden histories through the practice of ‘media archaeology’. Media archaeologists uncover and reconsider the obsolete, persistent, and hidden material cultures of the technological age – from big data software algorithms to tiny silicon chips. With support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland’s Open Project Fund, and Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, NEoN and Furtherfield invite artists to consider how the blockchain is the new ATM of the future.
The commission will be launched online and at NEoN Digital Arts Festival, and presented at the Digital Futures programme at V&A Museum and MoneyLab both in London in Spring 2018 as part of the European collaboration, State Machines which investigates the new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies.
Open Call announced 11th August
Deadline 4th September
6-9 September – follow up conversations where necessary (by email/phone)
13th September – decision made, artists informed and announced
19th September – public debate about cryptocurrencies in Dundee (organised by Scotcoin https://www.meetup.com/scotland-and-digital-currency/events/242087813/)
9th October – selected artist give progress report
9th November – Work installed for opening of NEoN Festival, Dundee. Artist presents work
Spring 2018 – Work re-presented with MoneyLab and V&A Digital Futures
(Note an additional £500 is available for accommodation and expenses for attendance at events in Dundee and London)
Submissions must include a proposal:
Documents should be submitted as PDFs or as links to a Google Doc, a GitHub Repo, or another easily read and easily accessed format.
If you have questions or enquiries about this commission please email alison.furtherfield[AT]Gmail.com
Notice of submissions via the Bitcoin blockchain should be sent via an OP_RETURN message starting with the word FField followed by a single space and the url of the proposal. E.g.:
FField https://docs.google.com/document/d/2oGsmli7Mlm-M_CZkL8WTKM3oUU3a
OP_RETURN messages can be created using the Crypto Grafitti service:
http://www.cryptograffiti.info/
Notice of submissions via Keybase messaging, or submissions of documents via KeybaseFS should be sent to:
(Note: Keybase does require registration but is free to join.)
Notice of submissions, or submissions of documents via email can be sent to ruth.catlow[AT]furtherfield.org
Please use the subject line “Furtherfield NEoN Proposal”.
Furtherfield
Through artworks, labs and debate around arts and technology, people from all walks of life explore today’s important questions. The urban green space of London’s Finsbury Park, where Furtherfield’s Gallery and Lab are located, is now a platform for fieldwork in human and machine imagination – addressing the value of public realm in our fast-changing, globally connected and uniquely superdiverse context. An international network of associates use artistic methods to interrogate emerging technologies to extend access and grasp their wider potential. In this way new cultural, social and economic value is developed in partnership with arts, research, business and public sectors.
NEoN
NEoN (North East of North) based in Dundee, Scotland aims to advance the understanding and accessibility of digital and technology driven art forms and to encourage high quality within the production of this medium. NEoN has organised 7 annual festivals to date including exhibitions, workshops, talks, conferences, live performances and public discussions. It is a platform to showcase national and international digital art forms. By bringing together emerging talent and well-established artists, NEoN aims to influence and reshape the genre. We are committed to helping our fabulous city of Dundee, well known for its digital culture and innovation, to become better connected through experiencing great art, networking and celebrating what our wee corner of Scotland has to offer in the field of digital arts.
State Machines: Art, Work and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale Computation
Focusing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance, the project joins five experienced partners Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK),Institute of Network Cultures (NL) and NeMe (CY) together with a range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.
V&A Digital Futures: Digital Futures
V&A Digital Futures: Digital Futures is a monthly meetup and open platform for displaying and discussing of work by professionals working with art, technology, design, science and beyond. It is also a networking event, bringing together people from different backgrounds and disciplines with a view to generating future collaborations.
Creative Scotland
Creative Scotland is the public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across all parts of Scotland on behalf of everyone who lives, works or visits here. It enables people and organisations to work in and experience the arts, screen and creative industries in Scotland by helping others to develop great ideas and bring them to life. It distributes funding from the Scottish Government and The National Lottery.
This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Date:NOW
Venue:HERE Links:http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/artists-rethinking-the-blockchain?tk=208334da9b174c..
WE WANT your submissions to this landmark publication marking and augmenting the arrival of a new technology on the cultural landscape.
THE BLOCKCHAIN is widely heralded as the new internet – another dimension in the ever-faster ever-more-powerful interlocking of ideas, actions and values. [1]
It’s nothing more than a ledger distributed across a large array of machines. An apparatus that enables digital ownership and exchange without a central administering body. But from these simple premises, it has been credited with the potential to transform everything, from trade, to cultural production, to the way we’re governed.
Among other things, we are suspicious of cultural production being brought under the same regime as finance.
Even as we write, this “new dawn” for transactions is being re-imagined as the next sleep-cycle taking us deeper into the neoliberal dream of complete financialisation. In this dream, Finance and Technology quicken their demented mining of value tokens from phenomena, while the grammars of culture, family, nature, politics and spacetime itself evaporate into a flurry of question and exclamation marks in their wake.
“It’s going to change everything!” (The Guardian)
The permanence and irrevocable automation of blockchain systems wedded to the irrationality and sweep of techno-financial hybrids has led to forecasts ranging from ‘fully automated luxury communism’, to our ultimate cryptological enslavement to machines, or the collapse of time itself, as the feature of algorithms to make-happen overtakes the temporal concerns of flesh and earth.
Artists Re:thinking The Blockchain
This book is not a site for a ludic cynicism or uncritical valorisation, though it celebrates the energies of these excessive forms of thinking. We welcome the potentials for ever more nuanced democratic apparatus, and the decentralization of power from state-corporation cabals, while rejecting the notion that any single technology would automatically enact these ideological transformations. We seek also to register and amplify the leakages, weirdness and side-effects that this new technology inaugurates.
Imagined as a future-artefact of a time before the blockchain changed the world, and a protocol by which a community of thinkers can transform what that future might be, Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain acts as a gathering and focusing of contemporary ideas surrounding this still largely mythical technology.
The book will include examples and discussions of current artistic projects making use of and illustrating the potentials of the blockchain, theorisation from some of the leading figures in the global blockchain conversation, and practical discussions which artists can use to guide their first steps towards this new technology.
We welcome submissions of
· book-based artworks which reflect on blockchain themes
· science fictions and theorisations, particularly in their hybrid form
· proposals for documentation of online and irl artworks
· poems, particularly based on the ‘new book’ and formal constraint txtblock [2]
The publication is a collaboration between Torque and Furtherfield, connecting Furtherfield’s Art Data Money project with Torque’s experimental publishing programme.
Alongside an illustrated print edition, the project includes a range of public-participation and debating sessions in towns and cities up and down the UK, and the first-ever book launch taking place on the blockchain itself.
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS 15th August
– up to 500-word abstract, description or sample of your proposed submission
– a short bio
– website link (optional)
mail to: mail@torquetorque.net
DEADLINE FOR FINAL SUBMISSIONS will be 1st October
torquetorque.net || furtherfield.org
https://www.facebook.com/torquebooks
#artblockbook
Contact: mail@torquetorque.net
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