From the 15th till the 18th of January we participated in the Taking Care of Things Meeting at the Stadtarchiv Lüneburg Germany. This was also the closing event for the Post Media Lab Incubator project at Leuphana University and our research fellowship with them.

The visit began with a tour of the city archive during which we heard about the main activities of the institution not least the film, map and image collections. They wish to extend access to these via street access sync points in the near future.

We convened one of seven care groups Mesh Media! to look at open, collaborative systems that facilitate collective abilities to store, curate, share, edit, redistribute and re-purpose media while at the same time creating new frames of reference and practice in public. We were pleased to have presentations by Eric Kluitenberg of Tactical Media Files, Volker Grassmuck and Jan Torge of ‘InternetTV for the newMedia Generation’ Grundversorgung, open wireless network advocates Freifunk Lueneburg and Robert Ochshorn with Interlace. (See last section for more details..)

Media was selected from the respective archives and uploaded to publicly presented syncronisation points adjacent to each Freifunk node in Lueneburg city centre.

We produced a map to illustrate the locations of syncronisation points as a  data trail which was toured by a small group of Lueneburg locals. They were encouraged to scan the QRcode posters and NFC tags they found on the street first connecting to Freifunk wireless then activating the BTsync to distribute the images and films.

Please try these BTsyncs yourself 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12 – or get the set! confused ? see the howTo..

The post-medial is not tied to any particular modality of media, neither to “new” or “old”, “digital” or “analog”, nor to “connected” or “offline”. Nevertheless it relies on new medial affordances (what? affordances! :-)) and possibilities, allowing for new kinds of collective repositories and living archives. How can these new collecitve, transitory and ad-hoc repositories of ‘many media’ look like? What are their (possible) protocols of turning consumers into makers, individuals into groups, and media into structured, living and meaningful (micro-)social memory? What are possible assemblages that withstand idiosyncrasy and expert-ism, but are ‘avant-garde’ and progressive in form and function nevertheless?

During the final workshop day today we met again with Alexander the CEO of Freiraum who has been our primary contact and host these three days. He presented an account of establishment and development of Parklokal foundation and illustrated the many areas of activity and ongoing engagement with business and community that have come about since.

We heard about their beginnings at Hausbar and progression to music venue Salon Hansen leading to addition of Freiraum itself and introduction to Lunatic Festival. Please view the great presentation for your self.

Max is a student at Leuphana University and the outgoing chair of Lunatic. He talked in animated terms about his experiences working for the festival, detailing the educational aims and commitment of the university to maintain support of this very successful student run event. The recent addition of arts exhibit at the festival has opened up new opportunities for engagement and involvement of the local community of Lueneburg.

We then collated this workshop report and produced a fresh set of qrcodes and nfc stickers set to link back to this page. These were fixed to windows and walls in the district.

Here is the btsync secret AX65KPZECNZC3U37KNEVEHVPSNWVGSWXJ please use it to syncronise.

In attendance ; Alexander, Max, Adnan, Wjana, James and Nina.

Post Media Lab report summarising the fellowships 2012-2014.

Graswurzel.tv has been active since 2006 when they first got involved in filming political actions and publishing their documentaries. Founders Suze & Marco attended the Saturday workshop at Freiraum Lueneburg to present a potted history of their group activities. They showed us some of the many accounts of actions during a very busy 5 years.

More recently they have been mapping the resistance to open cast mining of lignite in the far east of Germany at the border with Poland where devastating environmental damage across a vast area is ongoing in the quest for cheap energy. Thousands of residents have already been decanted to other areas and mining has lead to the disappearance of entire villages.

We discussed how the evidence of these and other campaigns is often buried in the weight of information accumulating from often lengthy campaigns.

Later in the afternoon we turned to the second task of the day to prepare a live linux 4gb USB key for video editing uses and re purposing a small NAS unit to serve as reSync host for data here at Frieraum once we have departed on Monday.

btsync://AMXG3ZTOOSBO6CXCJYPFSRDQCQ4FEKQ2N

In attendance ; Suze, Marco, Adnan, Wjana, Jan, James and Adam.

You may have scanned this QRcode adjacent to a lueneburg.freifunk.net sticker in Lueneburg city centre in range of the open wireless network. Now you have been directed to this page where we are presenting the outcomes from recent reSync workshops in Lueneburg.

Under each Freifunk sticker is a RFID tag you can now scan with your NFC capable smart phone to open the Btsync point which holds the workshop documentation. You will need BTsync installed and internet connection to activate this link.

btsync://BGDWMQW7IJMWRBZYEBGSZ2CU3CQKC6LMH

Try connecting to Freifunk wireless which offers full fat internet, no blocked ports, access logs or regional paranoia! If you like what you see, find out more by attending one of the monthly meetings (last Wednesday of the month at Pons bar in Lueneburg). They have recently added a dynamic OLSR map.

The workshop featured a great Freifunk presentation by Hauke who lives locally and hosts an access point at his home in the centre of the city. We discussed the many aspects of free network infrastructure and how the local group collaborates to present open access. They run a flavour of Freifunk software that tunnels all the IP traffic crossing the network to a Swedish internet gateway thus navigating the Störerhaftung or ‘Secondary Liability’ otherwise limiting open hearted Germans at home.

We all considered prospects for future collaborations and infrastructure building with Freifunk,  interlinking Post Media Lab, Freiraum and Stadtarchiv which could be be attempted in time to coincide with the Taking care of Things conference in January 2014.

The workshop concluded by warwalking about the city on the hunt for Friefunk wireless which we celebrated with the QRcodes, stickers and NFC tags as described above. for more info checkout Howto reSync

Workshop attendees – Adnan, James, Hauke, Jancke, Nora, Alexander and Liene. Thanks everyone !

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…