Call for Workshop Participants
The Consolidator:
An exploration of inscription devices, derive, sonifcation and archivization
expressed through the medium of data.
Thinking Digital Arts and Culture Lab (Newcastle University) present a call for
participation in The Consolidator, a two day workshop conceived and facilitated
by artist and researcher Ben Freeth. The project is part of Betagrams, a group
show curated by Gabi Arrigoni, as part of Thinking Digital Arts, that explores
the notion of the prototype in creative art practice.
Deadline for Expression of Interest: 7th May
Workshop Date: 17th-18th May 2014
Workshop description
“All our Philosophers are Fools, and their Transactions a parcel of empty
Stuff, to the Experiments of the Royal Societies in this Country. Here I came
to a Learned Tract of Winds... There you have an Account how to make Glasses of
Hogs Eyes, that can see the Wind; and they give strange Accounts both of its
regular and irregular Motions, its Compositions and Quantities; from whence, by
a sort of Algebra, they can cast up its Duration, Violence, and Extent.”
The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon
(1705). Daniel DeFoe (1660? - 1731).
‘...the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the
structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into existence and
in its relationship to the
future. The archivization produces as much as it
records the event.’
Archive Fever (1995), p.17, Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004).
Speculative writing from the corpus of antiquity projects the desire to know
the unknowable and experience sensations beyond those currently furnished by
the human sensorium. Drawing inspiration from both the DeFoe and Derrida texts,
The Consolidator invites participants to engage with this two day procedural
workshop and journey through layers of received meaning inherent in the
sub-strata of technology whose time has already dissipated. Devices of this
nature lie abandoned in several socio-technical bodies within the city. By
carrying out the activities of retrieval, recombination, protoyping, making,
redeployment, inscription, and analysis participants will explore the medium of
data to generate a fresh archive of inscription and sonification. The workshop
will take place at Culture Lab, with field trips throughout the city. The
archive produced during the workshop will be presented in Betagrams at the
Thinking Digital Arts Hub, New Bridge Gallery from the 21st to the 25th of May.
Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/486549881468223/?context=create&source=49
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BenCFreeth/status/461146517810606081/photo/1
How to apply
If you want to take part in the workshop please send an expression of interest
(outlining your interest in the workshop and skills / qualities you will bring)
to Ben Freeth via [email protected] by 7th May.
No specific technical skills are needed to take part.
All applicants will be notified by 10th May
Useful information
The workshop will take place at Culture Lab, King's Rd, Newcastle upon Tyne,
Tyne and Wear NE1 7RU on the 17th and 18th of May.
Workshop Cost
Free
Ben Freeth
Ben Freeth is an artist and inventor focusing on the potential of micro
controllers for creative expression. Currently he is studying a PhD in Digital
Media at Newcastle University, researching into the development of speculative
digital musical instruments for performance and wearable computing technologies
exploring collective experience and aesthetics. His research practice has been
developed through work with Digital Interaction, Computing Science at Newcastle
University building a hybridised network performance system inspired by Walter
Benjamin's fragmented text "Das Passagenwerk". This system pushes the role of
the audience in the work liberating the potential for co-authorship and
performance between audience and musician. Other work for Digital Interaction
has included a collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge working with
musicians from a non technical background to develop Digital Musical
Instruments (DMI's). He regularly lectures on micro controller formats for the
Creative Arts Practice Masters Degree, Newcastle University and delivers
procedural workshops for example the recent Sun Tongs series investigating the
potential for incorporating solar data and energy into the design of DMI's.
Previous work has been exhibited in Bergen, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, New York and
Budapest. He also runs the regular #UNPITCH_ nights featuring experimental
performance and contemporary music at Culture Lab, Newcastle University.
Thinking Digital Arts
The Thinking Digital Arts programme will investigate and celebrate the emerging
area of contemporary arts where the arts, technology and digital culture
collide. The first annual edition of the programme developed as part of the
Thinking Digital Conference takes place 19-25 May at locations across Newcastle
and Gateshead. http://www.thinkingdigital.co.uk/arts/
Thinking Digital Conference
The Thinking Digital Conference is annual conference for innovators in a
variety of fields that takes place every spring at the Sage Gateshead Music
Centre in Northern England. The conference is themed around technology, new
ideas and our future and attracts people from a variety of industries and
functions. By bringing a large number and variety of some the brightest, most
innovative and accomplished thinkers and doers from around the world, Thinking
Digital creates a unique experience that provokes and inspires new insights
into our businesses and organisations as well as connecting delegates into a
vital community that lives on well after the conferences concludes.
For more information log on to: http://www.thinkingdigital.co.uk/
Culture Lab is the focal point for research in human-computer interaction and
digital creative practice at Newcastle University and its members engage in
experimental and cross-disciplinary projects in interaction design and creative
digital arts in a technologically rich and custom designed environment.
Culture
Lab is home to Newcastle University’s Digital Interaction and Digital Media
research groups. http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/
Ben Freeth // PhD. Candidate
Culture Lab
Newcastle University
Grand Assembly Rooms
King's Walk
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
Tel: +44 (0) 7581065513
Email: [email protected]______________________________________________
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