Listening to Firefox
Title: Listening to Firefox
Location: MadLab
Description: Wider Implications of Software Culture
Start Time: 14:00
Date: 2011-05-15
End Time: 16:00
Booking: Free but limited
Listening to Firefox exists to create a space for open and engaged discussion across a spectrum of digital-art-technology practice with an emphasis on the social, cultural and political implications of this work.
Theme for this event: Open Source vs. The Big Society
Format: 5 practitioners are invited to present extremely short (<3mins) single-slide examples across a spectrum of digital-art-technology practice. From there, the emphasis moves to an open and critically aware roundtable discussion.
Rooted in practice, the event will facilitate greater peer awareness, cross-pollination and hopefully instigate conversations which need to be had!
Origins: Listening to Firefox emerged out of discussions held at the 2011 Metal/DEC Digital LAB held at Metal’s Chalkwell Hall in Southend on Sea. The LAB was facilitated by artists Graham Harwood and Simon Poulter and attended by 8 artists from a wide spectrum of disciplines.
Tags: Listening to Firefox
Sounds interesting but could you give more details? Or is the mystery part of it?
Hi Michael – I saw that you had signed up for the event – thanks for the leap of faith!
Regarding mystery – this wasn’t the intention! (however having re-read the above post now I can see how it could be a lot clearer) – I think that part of the reason for the lack of precise detail is that this is a bit of a leap into the unknown. Whilst there are great waves of creative practice working actively with technology happening across the North-West (especially focused in and around MadLab) and there are interesting opportunities for showcasing this work (such as FutureEverything) there does not seem to be a developed peer-led dialogue regarding any of the new urgent critical / social / political questions that this kind of practice raises.
This inaugural event is intended to open that discussion – and it will take shape in response to the contributions offered by individuals present – as far as I can see, we are in un-chartered territory – should be interesting!
Having said all that – we had hoped to have a list of speakers available sooner – and I will add a list of the five presenters to this page on Monday.
look forward to meeting next week
best
John O’Shea
(event organisor)
[...] Listening to Firefox [...]
Hello. I am sorry I can’t attend. I am working with John on the idea of a workshop series exploring the online-programming/creative-text relationship.
This is the idea I would bring to the workshop, if I was there:
MUTABILITY=CREDIBILITY
‘Unregulated’ forums for knowledge forced people to use their OWN JUDGEMENT, as opposed to the blind acceptance of mass media sources, which we have become used to. The METHOD of this judgment – aggregation – has become integrated into the way websites behave, with Wikipedia being the ultimate manifestation of it, but also comments pages on all media sources.
Now we are faced with a paradoxical situation where ‘written in stone’ has come to mean untrustworthy, and FACT or OPINION is only really credible when there is interactivity, making the facts and opinions themselves MUTABLE.
So CREDIBILTY=MUTABILTY and vice versa.
I would like to see how this acceptance of the mutability of fact has implications for the authority of the artist’s (particularly romantic-lyrical) ‘voice’ – and the hierarchical auteur-audience relationship.
Hey, so John sent me an email about this thing and then kind of asked me to say a little bit in relation to some thoughts on precarity that I mentioned elsewhere on the internet.
Computers have made a special sort of working environment that is sometimes referred to as the “knowledge economy”, but a flip side to this is referred to as the “attention economy”. Are they the same thing?
I’m pretty confused by a lot of digital art these days, after studying it at a post-graduate level, as it seems the level of technological engagement that artists dreamed about in the 80s and 90s has come about now. Truly, we live in an age of technological marvels, where almost everybody can have a locative-aware art project in their pocket. But I’m not seeing a lot of projects that move beyond that same “new media art”-crowd fascination with location, sound or image being manipulated by computer (although that might just be me not looking hard enough).
For me, a constant problem with using computers is pulling myself away from what I should be doing and distracting myself. The internet made this stupidly easy, but I was already fairly gifted. I’m starting to think that, as the new-ness of the internet wears off, we’re going to have cultural ways of dealing with the overstimulation that it can offer.The idea of voluntarily limiting internet access is turning up in self-help writing as a way of valuing your attention span.
What does this have to do with precarity? Well, maybe the pixel-stained peasants of the knowledge economy don’t want to be constantly shuffling between websites for both work and play. As computing becomes more portable, and we move away from the beige-computer-in-an-office as the site of internet access, to mobile-phone-in-pocket-wherever-we-are, the it’s easier to grasp the fact that an hour spent online researching (say) the muntjac population of the UK is an hour not enjoying something else, something in the real world. And when your job is a collection of part-time gigs that can take you away from real-life at short notice, thanks to a call from a temping agency, maybe it’s best to cultivate an enjoyment of the things around you when you can get at them.
I don’t know how artists, focused on using technology in their practice, can call attention to the effects of technology on people. I think it’s one of a range of areas where digital-art-technology practice breaks down, like trying to deconstruct the semiotics of operating systems. Merely by using these things you are already implicit in the system, like me, spending twenty minutes typing on a Sunday morning when I could be doing something much more fun.
[...] “Listening to Firefox” discussion event on Sunday 15th of May aimed to open up a space for new discussions specifically related to social, political and economic [...]
[...] “Listening to Firefox” discussion event on Sunday 15th of May aimed to open up a space for new discussions specifically related to social, political and economic [...]
[...] – if you missed it, here’s a little film, and held an artist salon about the “wider implications of software culture” on [...]