Hi Annie and everyone
Thanks so much for inviting me to share some thoughts about working 'on
the ground' at Furtherfield. I've tried to answer all the questions and
give a bit of background to the project before describing what we've
been up to in Finsbury Park. So it's a bit of a long response. I hope
this is interesting to some of you, and I will respond to any questions
as promptly as possible. I've also put links to various things I've
mentioned at the bottom of the narrative.
The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is a collaboration with
human geographer Dr Ian Cook who researches in material culture at
University of Exeter, in Devon, UK. His website Followthethings.com
collates activist actions, films, events, commentaries and discussions
that attempt to shift attitudes around trade justice issues. His focus
is on making more visible the hidden lives in things through critical
pedagogy. I also live in Exeter and met Ian in 2012, as I was finishing
the performance project make-shift with Helen Varley Jamieson, which as
you described Annie, tried to unfold and discuss attitudes towards
consumption and disposal in late-capitalism through the lens of plastic
marine pollution.
When Ian and I started working together I was thinking about how
perceptual shifts happen to such an extent that peoples' behaviour
changes. Helen and I had spent two years staging conversational events
in peoples homes in different parts of the world using the UpStage
cyberformance platform. The accumulative thought processes and
discussion with so many different groups of people around what to do
about that stuff that's whirling 'out there' in the pacific gyre, and
its relation with our domestic lives and the systems we are subject to,
contributed in quite a deep shift in my own attitudes towards
consumption. Tracking back from the disposal of the stuff we don't want
anymore to the construction of the commodity as fetish and the
overwhelming subsumption of everything into a state of capitalist
realism as Mark Fisher describes, it seemed like an interesting next
step. Digital connectivity, surveillance systems, data production and
associated predictive analysis are of course essential to draw on to
consider and how we perform with/in/from contemporary commodity culture.
I make performance events for formal settings such as theatres and
galleries, and also participatory works which are heightened moments of
public dramaturgy ie. participants are very much aware they are taking
part in the making of something performative together even if it does
not occur in a formal performance space.
My work has always been group based, collaborative and
cross-disciplinary, and increasingly I am working with all kinds of
people who wouldn't usually engage in performance making to make
dramaturgies that need social participation through a combination of
place based physically sited activity and digitally networked engagement
to succeed. I also work a lot with social science methods -
questionnaires, interviews, focus group type activities and different
types of mapping and modelling as research, presentation and performance
processes.
MoCC is drawing on all of these things to facilitate a public curatorial
process that will eventually take place between an online interface and
a gallery/sited exhibition space. The work asks people to consider how
ordinary things they might buy every day are valued, and produce value
in different ways. How do the values held in these things shape the
everyday spaces we live in and our actions within them? How do our daily
actions contribute to shaping wider global processes, and how can we
intervene in global systems in empowered and sustained ways that might
contribute to different types of shapings? There is an emphasis in the
project on everyone being in the 'same boat', and being experts in their
own consumption experience. No moral high ground, no guilt. I hope that
the accumulation of materials in the process will form and archive a
discussion that anyone can contribute to, or delve into.
I think we are about halfway through this process. We began in a
residency from April this year funded by ESRC and Islington Council
where I did some ethnographic work going on accompanied shopping trips
with Finsbury Park locals to find out about how people consume, what
their priorities are and what drives their actions. This surfaced a
number of themes that are relevant beyond the immediate locale that
formed the basis of our prototype value categories for the museum:
processes of gentrification, distrust in consumer information, lack of
common space where its possible to be without consuming, a feeling of
constructing particular types of consumption spaces through just buying
stuff we like.
In addition to this we ran a series of lab type events with data
activist Dr Alison Powell that mashed up the rapid 'flash mob'
ethnography method she uses to find out more about the data culture of a
particular site, with Ian's interest in political LEGOing. We ran a two
day workshop with MA students in Narrative Environments from Central
Saint Martins that developed prototype public engagements. These were
some great events with a wide range of participants that again
contributed themes and strategies to what we are making. We felt we
needed an initial testing of a number of objects/activities that will
form part of the museum assemblage. In July we ran a three day event
called MoCC Free Market at the Furtherfield gallery where we gathered
people's responses to how our prototypes were shaping up. This included
a paper version of adding things to the museum and the possibility of
asking a 'Commodity Consultant' (Ian's former research students in
material culture) questions about the provenance or materiality of their
commodities. Participants were people who came specifically to the event
informed through digital channels, and people passing through the park
on the way to somewhere else. We worked with a number of park based
organisations to make things happen, and purposefully made the event
feel accessible to draw people into the work who might not usually
participate in gallery based or digital art. There is a slide show of
the Free Market on the Furtherfield flickr site (link below). There will
also be a short video soon giving a feel of what happened that's nearly
edited :)
We are currently waiting on a funding decision to move to the next stage
of development of an online interface for MoCC. What we are showing in
Furtherfield Gallery as part of The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies is a
series of prototype interactions: a responsive doll who acts as a guide
to the Museum of Contemporary Commodities. She is the google product My
Cayla Doll which technologist Gareth Foote and myself have re-scripted
to speak about commodity culture, the museum, socio-material
assemblages, the value of labour... and also skateboards, ponies,
shopping. There is a buzz feed type quiz that is intended to be a type
of thinking 'warm-up' to the process of adding something the museum
(www.moccguide.net/take-our-quiz) which also extends into a twitter
interaction/conversation. There is a visual documentation of what people
added to the museum in the summer in the paper prototyping session and a
paper version of the Add to the Museum interaction.
In relation to working in the physical spaces in Finsbury Park that
Furtherfield offers:
I make participatory performance and actions in everyday spaces and I
think that the increasing ubiquity of networked objects, IoT and
phone/tablet based interactions in daily life demands that they be
included as an integral part of that dramaturgy. I experience online
spaces as channelled, curated and as speedy as our increasingly
corporatised public spaces - such as city squares, leisure areas, and
parks... To engage a wide range of audiences outside of formal gallery
spaces in the kind of work I make I think requires interventions that
involve people into different types of relationships with their media -
to upset, disrupt, resist or re-channel the flow. The growing assemblage
that is MoCC will hopefully do some of that between many different types
of space and place and forms of encounter. MoCC is a collaborative
project and ideas from all of the people on the www.moccguide.net/about
page and participants in the events have been instrumental in growing
the interaction. This includes an incredibly supportive working
relationship with Furtherfield involving using the commons as a workshop
space/base for discussion, access to local networks, critical feedback
and curatorial support.
In relation to Kate Rich's project I think that Feral Trade tracks the
labour and resources involved in the mobility of things, drawing
attention to these invisible facets of trade systems and infrastructures
by finding ways to bypass or move outside them. It resists these aspects
of commodity culture by gifting logistics to people; celebrating and
personalising the effort involved in that gifting through documentation
and social events. It was really great that Kate came to the first
outing of the MoCC idea in January 2013 which took the form of
Thinkering Day to construct a manifesto for the project. So her work has
definitely informed the development of MoCC.
At the moment I think that MoCC tries to expose and question how
commodity culture is constructed by asking people to excavate and
interpret the hidden values in things in order to share what kind of
heritage they are leaving in the world. The project is a collaborative,
critical pedagogy which attempts to think through the relations between
the trade systems we live in, are subject to, and consciously or
un-consciously contribute to shaping (including those constructed
through data processes), and how they affect what we value and how we
are valued ourselves. It should in the end, be an accessible way for
anyone to think through what our stuff is and does and ask together what
we want it to do and how.
That's probably enough for now :) Links below.
Paula
Ian Cook - www.followthethings.com
make-shift - www.make-shift.net
This City's Centre - a project using networked technologies as
performance modes in Exeter City Centre made by the collective I work
with, Blind Ditch.
Dr Alison Powell -
http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/whosWho/AcademicStaff/AlisonPowell.aspx
LEGO blogpost - http://www.moccguide.net/category/blog/
Free Market Flickr link -
https://www.flickr.com/photos/http_gallery/20114684791/in/photostream/
Video of MoCC Thinkering Day and collaborators - www.moccguide.net/about
www.moccguide.net/take-our-quiz
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi all,
Some time ago we discussed the relation between furtherfield on the
"ground" and this mailinglist. Personnally I wanted to be closer, to know
more of what and how things happened in the park, so I could have a better
understanding of how ideas developped by a former mostly online community
translate in a venue in a public park.
At that moment I also volunteered to introduce someone new, someone not
familiar with this mailinglist.
I know Paula Crutchlow from Remote Encounters in Cardiff in 2013, where she
presented *Makeshift* an online performance project she did with Helen
Varley Jamieson.
Now she is participating in Furtherfield's exhibition *Art Data Money*.
With cultural geographer Ian Cook she presents *The Museum of Contemporary
Commodities* (MoCC). In this project they treat everyday purchases as if
they were our future heritage, says the website.
When I tried to get my head around the project, it made me think of Kate
Rich's *Feral Trade Cafe* exhibition shown by Furtherfield in 2009. The
projects are asking questions about where, what and when you consume and as
in Makeshift also what could be the impact of this consumption on society.
Here the artists ask the visitor, participant (?) to take the viewpoint of
a museum curator. How does this change the process of thinking about
consumption? Does it? What can "art" reveal about consumption?
Paula, can you please tell us a bit more about what you are showing in the
exhibition? (are there any photos?) Is there some archive (anything that
would make it more lively to me) of the related events : the Walkshop and
or the Commodity Consultation, you organised ?
I hope you can find some time Paula
Annie
www.moccguide.net
http://www.digicult.it/news/the-museum-of-contemporary-commodities/
www.make-shift.net
http://furtherfield.org/exhibitions/feral-trade-cafe
--
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