In this final reSync session in the UK we focussed on Futures. It was a very cold day with the wind blowing around the roof perhaps put some people off however It was great to welcome Paolo Cardullo and Atau Tanaka.

Paulo is a photographer and cultural studies tutor currently working on proposals for a Deptford walking/map project with British Library Archives fund so we were able to confer on techniques for street signage with qrcodes and NFC to promote linking and syncing of pictures and maps available.

Atau is currently Professor of Media Computing at Goldsmiths leading a 5 year research project at the Embodied Audiovisual Interaction group. There are some great opportunities for the use of NFC and QRcodes in music yet to be explored as well as a wealth of new media systems now available to aid experimentation eg eMotive . In 2008 Cardiacs frontman and creative powerhouse Tim Smith suffered a catastrophic stroke which left him with impaired voice and motor function. Atau confirmed his department had research and practice commitments for just this sort of disabled support in terms of music making but which may lead to some well needed support in 2014 for Tim.

Gargi Sen from magic lantern movies arrived later in the afternoon to discuss new approaches to the distribution and presentation of documentary film archives which deserve greater development  and reward. They are in the process of applying for the NESTA R&D fund for the Arts to develop a documentary film distribution platform for cinema audiences. They are seeking a technical partner in the UK in support of the application they are making now which we can contribute to and perhaps collaborate on next year.

Adnan Hadzi wasn’t available to contribute today as he is travelling with Bitnik to attempt a parcel delivery to Nabeel Rajab in Bahrain

Our efforts to date have allowed us plenty of opportunity to re familiarise ourselves with events and productions at deckspace and we continued digging out materials today.

James Braddell joined us for the start of the session on his way out to Rome. It was a great opportunity to discuss some assumptions about the value of archive and practical issues of identifying, processing and representing moving image. Much of his work expresses a wry sense of humour and explores the structures of music with texture and imagination. His latest video work ‘CITY‘ concentrates dense HD into immersive environment compositions.

For more than two decades Exploding Cinema have held open access screenings where thousands of makers make their films public for the love of it. Their zine style show booklets and posters pepper the whole archive. In 2005 the world turned in their home movies, cat fetishes and music videos to Youtube and since then billions pour their daily lives into the stew of social media silos. Finally we have been compromised by universal self and state surveillance.

There has been some breakthrough progress on our efforts to install Interlace as Robert had a bit of time to refine his codebase and get a version working for us for now.

You can now have review some of those SPC DV archives we already spent so many hours digitising but never edited. Interlace opens in a web browser and lays out the film strips end to end down the page.. to activate the viewer click any clip and and presto, like dropping the needle on a record. Each clip is then accessible for metadata tagging, interlinking and dynamic reordering by category and context. See also Video Vortex hyprid-reader.

Rachel Baker arrived in time to find us winding up the days work and reflecting on these screens, origins and objectives and had a lot to offer from her own experiences as member of Irational.org but also as early contributor at Backspace. She is currently at booksprint and urges us to produce a printable set of these notes as part of our workshops!

Irational will also organise a workshop in Lueneburg, the week before we run the Deckspace.TV workshop, on “Archaeology and Futurology of an Artserver An exhibition and event series by art collective irational “.

This ‘Screens’ workshop marked the 10th anniversary of the ‘DMZ‘ festival…

This week we set out to explore the material archive we have at Deckspace for the print, image and online records relating to SPC origins. Backspace was open and operational throughout 1996-2000 a period which primed us for so much we have experienced in the years that followed. Independent media production and political action gained new strengths from Internet based communication and we all had an experience of dynamism in the rush of attention on some of the work we produced and the reality of re-generation in the inner cities that eventually closed the space. Before that moment passed so much flowed through, around and over us on its way to the future it was hard to capture.

Javier arrived bang on time for the start of the session at 11am so we had plenty of opportunity to discuss current work and indulge in a little nostalgia for 1999-2003 during the early days of indimedia London and our adoption of Linux. He is currently campaigner at Open-Rights group as well as helping establish a bi-lingual freeschool in Brighton demonstrating an enduring enthusiasm and commitment to a wide scope of civic and political action. The following data dump of what’s new, related and essential in the field of archivism, rights and digital activism took place in a stream of consciousness hard to account for now. (ta for the list Javi !) We certainly talked a while about DIY book and newsprint scanners and the Free Births Deaths and Marriage register projects.

The Collection Trust | Europeana | MailPile | Hub of All Things | British Newspapers | Leap

One aspect of the workshops is to dig through the accumulated archives (boxes) containing not least, posters, flyers and stickers for the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism. This crowned an golden period in Backspace when it was used as the first ever Indimedia Centre to help articulate the event and from where a coordination of videos arriving by cycle courier from the City of London actions were streamed to the worlds public via SPC servers.

Giovanni d’Angelo was one of the key backspacers and also joined us again for further excavations as we distilled the stored materials into specially cleared shelves in preparation for closer examination and processing. Before long tables already loaded with lunch debris are joined by contents of the cd racks and VHS silos. The Art for Networks boxes brought up from bitspace  featured OWN (in it’s earlier form as POD toolbox), Blink (our iteration of Frequency Clock) and Consume the Net were all featured in the exhibition alongside that of the many contributions curated by Simon Pope in 2002.

Adnan brought along newly acquired NFC/RFID tag writer  for misc cards and stickers we have yet to activate but which form the publication and promotion component of our research program. Alexei Blinov, long term collaborator at SPC and instrumental to so much technical practice and support to so many arrived reminding us of his Broom project which utilised similar RFID readers and to help us round off the days work with beer before joining us at Exploding Cinema show in Brixton.

We discussed the GCHQ/NSA big data gathering concerning the change within legislation. The Criminal Justice Act, which was introduced 10 years ago by the British government in order to prevent free parties and festival initiated a mass movement of resistance (up to j18). Mark Harrision stated in an interview by Neil Transpontine (in the last edition of datacide), that “the Criminal Justice Bill was rushed in – and this drove much of the dance music scene back into the hand of The Industry”. Might Eben Moglen’s Freedom Box be a way out?

Due to the circumstances quickly changing this week’s workshop turned into a radical real time performance. The object in question was a parcel send to Mr. Rajab, see http://rajab.bitnik.org (& http://wikileaks.org/rajab).

This radical real time performance  nicely fitted  the theme of the fellowship Life vs. Object, with the  fourth research cycle “Life versus Object. Comrade Things and Alien Life” focusing  on the flattening out of ontological hierarchies between humans, animals, machines and objects and new parametric realities brought about by networked media environments.

The parcel left the Ecuadorian Embassy on Monday the 28th of October with the Twitter status: “Sending Nabeel Rajab a parcel containing a camera. Camera documents its journey through postal system in realtime. http://rajab.bitnik.org/post/1/img/173069.jpg …”

We only received a few images, then the camera went blank, and only black images were transmitted (we speculated that the camera might have been put into a bag). Furthermore we seemed not to move at all, and were stuck in the Parcelforce Depot for over a day.

On Tuesday things moved, and finally the parcel was transported to Stansted Airport, but with not the hoped outcome of being transported out of the country, on the contrary, after another day of waiting the parcel was brought back to the Parcelforce distribution center in Camden.

After still being there for another day !Mediengruppe Bitnik started to inquire into the whereabouts of the parcel and received conflicting status messages from Parcelforce and Fedex.  Bitnik tweeted: “Fedex says parcel it’s at Parcelforce – they say it’s at Fedex. Our GPS says: http://goo.gl/maps/jbvPK“.

After this tweet, things suddenly seemed to be moving (if it was because of this tweet or not we shall never know). Wikileaks’ response to this was: “One can imagine the politics as the political hot-potato parcel is thrown between Royal Mail, Parcel Force, Fedex and UK Customs. No one wants to be left holding the parcel if a story breaks about refusing to let it through to Bahrain’s top political prisoner.”

The Parcel left the country on Thursday night, the 31st of October, on a flight to Paris. It only stayed at the Paris airport for some hours before being loaded onto a flight to Dubai, where it arrived on Friday morning.

Another day passed…

Unfortunately we lost the connection to the parcel on the 2nd of November around 9AM  (GMT) for good. FedEx changed the status of them tracking the parcel to N/A, and !Mediengruppe Bitnik tweeted: “24’010 live images | 23’626 black images | 5594 km | 6 days | 6573 GPS readings | 3 countries | 3 airports | #postdrone” & “#Postdrone from Assange to Nabeel Rajab was stopped at Dubai Airport. But our journey to Bahrain is not over yet. Stay tuned for updates.”