Adnan Hadzi will be talking about FLOSSTV and Data Spheres at the ISEA conference.
Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International (formerly Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and technology.
The main activity of ISEA International is the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art.
During the Open Knowledge Conference (1) Richard Stallman talked about how computers can not be trusted to run voting machines. Deptford.TV organised an afternoon workshop and we discussed the notion of ‘Freedom of Art’, also part of the constitutional law of Switzerland.
Deptford.TV was exhibited at the LiWoLi festival, under the motto Art meets Radical Openness:
12th – 14th of May 2011
LiWoLi (1) is an open lab and meeting spot for artists, developers and educators using and creating FLOSS (free/libre open source software) and Open Hardware in the artistic and cultural context. LiWoLi is all about sharing skills, code and knowledge within the public domain and discussing the challenges of open practice.
This year’s event offers an exhibition, artists’ workshops and – like every year – lectures, presentations and sound-performances.
Deptford.TV’s part of the exhibition tried attempt to identify and document secret (covert) places, strategies and messages in our everyday surroundings. We will use overt, co-operative tactics and practice openness and transparency to push the covert into clearer view. The participants of the Deptford.TV workshop produced a one minute ‘Austrian Surveillance Techno’ video which was then transmitted over the local TV station DorfTV.
A series of ludic interventions in downtown Linz. The narrative is focused on generating awareness on invasive surveillance technologies. Utilising cool and awesome ring-tones sounds!
“Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you’ve got to be wise enough to know when to leave.” Richard Lamm
“A real artist never sleeps in front of new technologies but deforms them and transforms them […]” Paul Virilio
The workshop introduced participants to Surveillance and CCTV filmmaking where material and images from the Deptford.TV archive were edited to submissions from the Deptford.TV database. Footage taken from Deptford.TV was filmed during a previous TV hacking workshop where participants equipped with CCTV surveillance signal receivers were lead through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals. CCTV video signal receivers cached surveillance camera signals into public and private spaces and were made visible: surveillance became sousveillance. By making images visible which normally remain hidden, we gain access to the “surveillance from above” enabling us to use these images to create personal narratives of the city. The workshop looked at constructing a possible narrative.
Finally we did a ‘live’ hack and connected Ali’s Kebab shop ‘live’ to DorfTV under the title CC Reality TV.
We went for a CCTV sniffing tour around the Olympic Stadium during the 24hrs Olympic State event at See gallery.
All night talks, discussions, films and artist’s work + performance.
In conjunction with Jim Woodall’s Olympic State installation, ‘See’ will stay open for a full 24 hours from 6pm on the 5th May until 6pm on the 6th May.
For two weeks in December 2010, artist Jim Woodall occupied the rooftop of a building overlooking the Olympic Park construction site. Sleeping in a self-made hunter’s hide constructed from locally found materials he watched the vast site through a bank of CCTV monitors. For this exhibition, the hut is reinstalled in the gallery, acting as a monument to the legacy of the performance. The entire two weeks of recorded CCTV footage will be replayed on the interior screens. Lining the walls, screen shots of dawns, dusks and ‘events’ will show an abstracted timeline.
Artist Jim Woodall (CutUp Collective), Isaac Marrero (Birkbeck College) and Cristina Garrido Sánchez (Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths) have programmed the 24 hour event, presenting talks, discussions, films and artist’s work. A performance by Solina HiFi (CutUp Collective), barbeque and plenty of whisky coffee will keep you up all night. No beds available.
The Olympics can arguably be described as a laboratory for the neoliberal city utopia; after all, the Games represent the success of a brand and an event based on a combination of massive urban renewal, dodgy governance, hugely profitable advertising and broadcasting contracts, the corporatisation and militarisation of public space, and the criminalisation of dissent.
The Olympics depend, to a large scale, on their ability to operate on a clean, consensual space: without history, without discontents, without opposition. The Olympic Park is the fantasy of such space, Jim Woodall’s Olympic State installation is one of its disruptions.The Olympics Games is the strategic occupation of the social and economic space of the city, but they allow, or even invite, for a tactical response. The goal of this 24h marathon of activities, echoing the 24hr surveillance of the site, is to bring together artists, activists and researchers challenging the Olympic dream.
We wish to amplify Jim Woodall’s radical gesture by summoning an assemblage of talks, films, interventions, performances and concerts which are part to the myriad of militant productions taking place in the city right now. In particular, we are interested in exploring the dynamics of urban renewal brought to East London by the Olympics and the issue of surveillance and control of public space. This day-long event aims at providing a generous and welcoming space for discussion.
4th may – day against DRM
Participants from the Social Centre Plus created through Deptford.TV a 3 min. documentary about the eviction attempt, which was then published on indymedia.
Local residents who occupied the old Job Centre on Deptford High Street with the aim of “converting it into an anti-cuts space for the community” have responded to a legally binding eviction order for this Tuesday by announcing a series of events, culminating in a “mass meeting of anti-cuts activists” the night before. The collective – who go by the name of Social Centre Plus – also plan to bring the local community together against the government’s budget cuts, with spoken word concerts, children’s days, film showings and market day cafés.
Members of the Social Centre Plus collective were in Woolwich Crown Court on Wednesday 30th March to hear the Judge accept the argument of Paul Jackson from Victory Land, the owners of the site on 122 Deptford High Street, and rubber-stamped an order that allows Jackson and bailiffs to forcefully evict the occupation. “They’ve notified us that they’ll arrive this Tuesday morning,” Nasser Khan said. “So we’ve got a raft of activities to keep us busy in the meantime, and we’re calling on the local community to come down and participate. It’s your space, so we want to hear your ideas!”
When asked what the SCP Collective had planned for after the eviction, Khan replied that they hadn’t discussed the issue. “What’s important now is that we all work together to use the space as an effective space to counter the brutal cuts being implemented both by the Tories and Lib Dems in Westminster, and the Labourites running Lewisham Council,” Khan continued.
On the morning of Tuesday 12th April, SOCIAL CENTRE PLUS successfully resisted an attempted eviction. Around 60 people gathered outside the space, linking arms and blocking the front door so as to prevent High Court bailiffs and builders – backed up by a vanload of police – from entering.
photo by Transpontine
The victory was achieved following an hour-long stand-off, during which the bailiffs – from Locks Bury Services – met with Paul Jackson, the site’s landlord, were spotted outside the Deptford Project, the café opposite Social Centre Plus, whose owner also wanted the space for a high society art exhibition. There they made a series of frantic phone calls in which they spelt out their reluctance to confront the occupiers inside the anti-cuts space, some of whom were positioned on the building’s roof.
Eventually the police informed the bailiffs that they had no intention of intervening, and recommended that they come back another day. Members of the local community remained outside SCP for most of the morning, savouring the success for South East London’s anti-cuts movement.
However, the SCP Collective is well aware of the continued threat to the space. A second eviction attempt must be expected, and this time Locks Bury will come unannounced, and with the necessary tools and thugs to remove the occupiers. Despite this, SCP remains committed to hosting and facilitating the local anti-cuts movement, even if they do have to move on from 122 Deptford High Street.
From the blog http://socialcentreplus.wordpress.com
For the Pixelache Festival Deptford.TV offers now also the video editing software KdenLive. The Pixelache Wiki.
This workshop will attempt to identify and document secret (covert) places, strategies and messages in our everyday surroundings. We will use overt, co-operative tactics and practice openness and transparency to push the covert into clearer view.
Our main tool for this workshop will be easily to obtained, simple to use and perfectly legal video receivers that can intercept the data collected by small CCTV video cameras often placed covertly in shops, offices and other public/private spaces. But we will also use ordinary media-gathering devices, our own eyes and ears and our social skills to identify and record evidence of covert operations in our midst, whether this is capturing gossip and rumour about the Suomenlinna’s Island fortress or observing city planners’ attempts to ‘design out’ specific social behaviours.
The materials gathered on our main workshop day (Thursday) will be meta-data tagged and added to the Deptford TV collaborative video editing platform. During the course of Pixelache this platform will be used together with the open source video editing package kdenlive to create a series of ‘versioned’ edits of this material. We will also be inviting remote participants to contribute additional raw media and participate in editing.
On Thursday, 10 March, we are inviting participants to join a walk through Helsinki/Suomenlinna with our CCTV ‘sniffing’ equipment and senses sharpened. No specific route is currently planned. We will determine this following a short introductory meeting on the day and shape the day according to people’s specific interests.
On Friday 11 March we plan to transcode and ‘tag’ the material ready for editing, and on Saturday/Sunday, editing will take place. We hope that at least some participants will be able to see the whole process through. The post-production will take a wholly open source/free software pathway, so this should be of interest to all those media practitioners interested in open source tools. for media production. As well as a couple of pre-set up computers, we will supply ‘live’ cd’s or usb sticks with with linux distribution Puredyne, and our main toolset will be:
FFMPEG
Easytag for metadata tagging
KDEnlive for video editing
The Drupal-based custom web platform for sharing edits developed by
Deptford TV: http://edit.deptford.tv
There will be chances to learn about and use all of these quite intensively across the entire time of the festival.
Please sign up for the Thursday workshop, but also let us know your specific skills, interests and all the times you are available to work with us during Pixelache.
The Deptford TV workshop is hosted by Adnan Hadzi, Lisa Haskel and Larisa Blazic.
The Deptford.TV participants edited during the Node.L 2010 workshop a 9 min. long video on the Psychogeophysics Summit:
The London Psychogeophysics Summit proposes an intense week-long, city-wide series of walks, fieldtrips, river drifts, open workshops and discussions exploring the novel interdisciplinary frame of psychogeophysics, colliding psychogeographics with earth science measurements and study (fictions of forensics and geophysical archaeology).
Open events include practical workshops in building simple geophysical measurement devices from scrap materials, fieldtrips for study and long-term use of such devices in the city, measurement and mapping of physical and geophysical data during city-wide walks, deployment of strategic underground networks, fusion of fiction, derive and signal excursion, studies of river signal ecologies alongside short lectures and discussions of broad, interdisciplinary psychogeophysical themes.
Partners include SPACE Media Arts, openmute.org and HTTP gallery/Furtherfield.
Participants include BITNIK, Alejo Duque, Kathrin Guenter, Graham Harwood, Martin Howse, Ryan Jordan, Petr Kazil, Jonathan Kemp, Martin Kuentz, Tom McCarthy (tbc), Christian Nold, Eleonora Oreggia, Nick Papadimitriou (tbc), John Rogers (tbc), Karen Russo, Gordan Savicic, Suzanne Treister, Danja Vasiliev, Wilfried HJB Bourdin.