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Digital Culture : three events and a video
A busy couple of weeks ahead. Here are details of three (imminent) media arts events and a video about Furtherfield…
Ruth CV 2015
Artist and Co-founder, Co-director of Furtherfield
http://furtherfield.org
http://ruthcatlow.net/
Education
1990 BA(Hons) Fine Art Sculpture, Falmouth School of Art
2004 MA Networked Media Environments, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication
Employment
Since 1997 Co-founder and artistic director of Furtherfield
Founded in 1997 by artists Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield is the UK’s leading organisation for art, labs, & debates around critical questions in art, technology and social change. Its thriving international, online community and programmes make network cultures more feelable and accessible to more diverse people. Exhibitions and labs tour nationally and internationally, strengthening the expressive and emancipatory potential of digital technology. Furtherfield is a non profit organisation and has been part of the Arts Council England National Portfolio of Organisation since 2005.
2011-2014 Head of School, Writtle School of Design (WSD)
2009-11 Course Scheme Manager, Digital Art and Design, WSD
1995-2008 Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication
1991-2001 Violinst with Midas Touch, Traditional Greek Wedding Band.
Selected Artistic Projects and Exhibitions
2014 Play the Web We Want, commissioned by Southbank Centre as part of the Web We Want Festival; Play Peer2Peer Futures, Alt_Cph Assemble, Copenhagen;
Play South Westminster, commissioned by, Tate Britain & Peabody Housing Trust exhibited as part of The British Folk Art Exhibition
Since 2012- 2015 Play Your Place
co-devised by Ruth Catlow and Dr Mary Flanagan (Tiltfactor, US), this open, online artwork enables people to collaborate to draw, make and play multi-level platform games, that express their shared values and aspirations for the future.
2003 – 2015 Rethinking Wargames, Lo-fi Net Art Commission (2003) exhibited and played at The Baltic, Gateshead & Limehouse Town Hall, London; part of The Making of Balkan Wars- group exhibition by Personal Cinema, Athens & Madrid 2004. RISK, CCA, Glasgow 2005; now touring 10 USA venues alongside artworks by Yoko Ono and Cory Arcangel, as part of Free Play, an international touring exhibition organized by Independent Curators International (ICI).
2010 At Winter Equinox we burn The Sun, & Festival of Money short films created by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, screened at Show Room Cinema, Sheffield, and at The Zone, The Hundred Years Gallery, Brighton, 2010 and Givon Gallery, Tel Aviv 2012
2009-10 Connecting Across Difference. Artistic director for an inclusive multimedia performance at V&A Museum of Childhood working with 6 artists and musicians alongside 70 children. Commissioned by Drake Music
2009 We Won’t Fly For Art, pyramid pledge and artworld intervention by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, as part of Furtherfield Media Art Ecologies programme. Shortlisted and exhibited for the BASH, RSA and Ecology Sustainable Art Awards, London
2008 Driven- a Dilemma of Co-existence, net artwork by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, Banff New Media Institute, Canada
2003 -09 VisitorsStudio, a realtime, online platform for audiovisual remix, for which Furtherfield was awarded the 2009 Grand Net Art Prize by Machido Museum, JA. Creative directors, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Neil Jenkins. Dissension Convention. VisitorsStudio performance by Ruth Catlow and Michael Szpakowski, Postmasters Gallery, New York 2004
Selected Curatorial and Commissioning Activity
2015 WWW TV, at Southbank Centre; Beyond the Interface installation for the Web We Want Festival, with Museum of Computing History, Cambridge
2015 The Netartizens Project and open online exhibition as part of The Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium, presented by the School of Art, Design & Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
2014 Digital Zoo: Life from the world wild web, a touring exhibition to 5 UK shopping centres, in partnership with Land Securities and Culture Code.
2014 Do It With Others (DIWO), CLICK Festival, Culture Yard, Helsingor, Denmark
2011 Collaboration and Freedom – The World of Free and Open Source Art, online collection commissioned by Arts Council England Knowledge Bank, mirrored by the Foundation for Peer To Peer Alternatives
Furtherfield exhibitions include:
2015 The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies as part of Art Data Money
2015 Beyond the Interface
2014 Piratbyrån and Friends curated with Rachel Falconer
2013 Shu Lea Cheang and Mark Amerika; Glitch Moment/ums curated with Rosa Menkman
2012 WWW: World Wild Web; Being Social; Invisible Forces with Class Wargames
2011 Made Real by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern; Art is Open Source, 2011
2010 If Not You Not Me by Annie Abrahams
2009 Feral Trade Cafe by Kate Rich
2008 The Jeremy Bailey Show; Open Source Embroidery with Ele Carpenter
2007 Zero Gamer: Sometimes We Just Like To Watch, as part of London Games Fringe Festival (also exhibited at Zero One)
2007 Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art
2006 GAME / PLAY a national touring exhibition, curated with Giles Askham, also exhibited at London Trocadero as part of London Games Festival Fringe; Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context by Andy Deck
2005 Abuse of the Public Domain by Stanza; Theatre of Restless Automata by Boredom Research;
2004 The Future Is Not What It Used To Be by Erkki Kurenniemi
Recent Conferences and Public Speaking
2015 Back to the Future, Closing panel discussion chaired by Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of Southbank Centre Web We Want Festival, Southbank Centre – May 29-30
2015 Hackathons: Grassroots Activism or Digital Sweatshops? Digital Shoreditch. Panel participant, hosted by Queen Mary University chaired by Becky Stewart Codasign 11 May
2015 Art, Technology, Human Existence, CLICK Festival seminars, Culture Yard, Helsingor, Denmark: Co-hosted and co-curated with Richard Stallman, Cory Doctorow, Jennifer Lynn Morone, Francesca Da Rimiini, Virginia Barrett, Shulea Cheang & Stelarc
2015 Play as a Commons: Practical Utopias & P2P Futures. Panel speaker, Transmediale, Berlin, January 2015
2015 PLAY: Respondent to McKenzie Wark Keynote, Transmediale, Berlin, January 2015
2015 Creating, Commissioning, Exhibiting and Collecting Art in the Digital Age. Panel convened by Ruth Catlow, with Steve Fletcher, Lindsay Taylor. London Art Fair, London, January 2015
2015 Activating the Public Space, Digital Utopias, Hull Truck Theatre, January
Recent participation on Boards, Peer Review
2014 Named by Foundation for Peer2Peer Alternatives in their list of 100 Women Co-creating the P2P Society
2014 Moderator for the Practice panel, Understanding Post-digital Cultural Forms – A Review Summit, organized by Transmediale in cooperation with the German Federal Foreign Office and hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, November 10th, 2014
Since 2008 Advisory board, Tiltfactor, critical games lab, Dartmouth College, USA
Selected professional Development & Training
June 2014 – January 2015 7 month Fellowship with the CultureHive Digital Marketing Academy for leading cultural practitioners. An experimental, evidence-based programme for digital marketing developed through a ‘lean’ methodology
June 2014 Creating Innovation from Collaboration. One day workshop by Creative Works London, Somerset House
2013 Multi Platform Business School (Scholarship). 6-day project-based, tutorial and consultation driven course, which focuses on the business aspects of creating cross-platform content. Ronda, Spain
2013 Pixel Lab (Scholarship). 6-day intensive development workshop for participants across film, TV, games, online, advertising, visual arts, publishing and mobile. Belgium
Since 2009 Ongoing professional development in teaching and learning in Higher Education, through participation in annual training sessions run by Writtle College.
Play the Web We Want – 4 new games!
More than 150 people made drawings to generate a collective vision for a better networked society View images of people…
Web We Want Festival – Play the Web We Want!
Reblogged from an original post for the Southbank Centre, in advance of the November 2014 Web We Want Festival about…
Jeanette Winterson on why art matters now more than ever
Written before the 21st century had really demonstrated its commitment to war and the interests of the 1%. It’s surprising how little the questions have changed.
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An American lady travelling to Paris in 1913 – the kind of American lady who will still be travelling to Paris in 2013 – asked Ezra Pound what he thought art was for. Pound replied: “Ask me what a rose bush is for.”
Europe was on the edge of war. Do rose bushes matter in a war? What can art do for us now, in the likelihood of another war?
I know there is a sneaking feeling, even among art lovers, that art is a luxury. While pictures, books, music and theatre are not quite handmade luggage or perfume, most people would not admit that art is essential. The endless rows over funding centre on an insecurity about the role of art in society. Nobody doubts that hospitals and schools must be paid for by all of us. Mention art, and the answer seems to be that it should rely on the marketplace; let those who want it pay for it.
Read on http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2002/nov/25/art.artsfeatures1
where in mythology are there stories of collective endeavour that turn out well?
Train to London – through Westcliff
A golden bright morning
I remember I can make a decision
…decisions and the way we make them…
I remember because I have made this decision before
I can’t remember how well it stuck before
it is a choice
it requires me to let go a little of stories, reasons, anxieties, rightness, justification
in order to travel the beam of light, the golden current
life invites me
my 16 bits of consciousness are too narrow to carry counter conversations
the still waters
the coordinated flights of flocks of birds across the sands
the man in the seat in front from a victorian gothic novel
it’s not only to attend to the gold, to the feelings of elation but also to just what is
I have to write my public statement for the Web We Want
I am terrified
by the responsibility
that I will speak from the wrong part of myself with strangulated voice
rather than in polyphonic mode
there are oddnesses
to invite people to join me is to invite people to invest their energy and time in something for me
What is the story of the making of the web
is it the making of Babylon (for which we will all be punished)
where in mythology are there stories of collective endeavour that turn out well?
Cultural Geographies of Play your Place
We are preparing for a series of gaming events at a new location (to be announced) for Play Your Place…
On admitting to being an artist
when it comes up
i brace myself
take a deep breath
and call myself an artist.
as a way of being FOR art
FOR a tradition of willful (rather than submissive) practices – that I am not ready to give up on.
being the most artist that I can be
which is to be free and connected and alert and part of a conscious shaping force of the whole ecology of ideas, beings and things.
re-claiming art now
and using my elbows the best I can to make some space for future art freedoms
i see the encroaching marketization of everything and I refuse to run
and risk loosing touch with the values and process that have shaped me, enriched my world
art continues to generate more ways to be and see myself together with others
i want to keep collaborating with others to create and artify the world.
corporations are running out of land and mineral and energy resources to exploit
now they are moving into us, inside us, mining our insides
“creativity” (as an alternative to art) does not provide a safe haven from corporatisation.
so i am for art that is critical, indigestible, eloquent, indescribable, shapeshifting, cross-realmish, inter-connected, awkward, lumpy, unmanageable, critical- and networks give us a great way to do this together.
– 2012 – as part of a discussion on the Netbehaviour email discussion list about the difficulties of admitting to be being an artist in the current context. http://www.furtherfield.org/netbehaviour/worries-about-blacklists
blogging again
With the recent acquisition of my own “domain name” and publication of a portfolio (pulling together a collection of works that are in some way “mine” – in that they either would not exist without my existence – or they would be different without my existence) – and with due respect to the squally social, economic and environmental conditions- I write this first blog post after a long time.
Though I am a prolific (if undisciplined) muser and maker – private writer, doodler and maker of film, games, artworks- there are many reasons why I haven’t blogged for a long time.
The trickiest of these is negotiating the tensions between public speech and my responsibilities within the various positions I hold in the middle of artistic and educational bureaucratic systems.
I have the feeling that that most public speech that is not couched in academic format, or made on issues other than lifestyle preference or sentiment, or within given frameworks of cultural commentary is regarded as distastefully political or promotional.
It is both political and personally risky to speak one’s private, (difficult, oddly shaped, incongruous, independent and irresponsible) mind in public.
Also, vanity demands that if I am going to negotiate difficult territory in public I should do it well- but on my own terms. So I say that ‘well’ means, playfully and with close attention. I will allow many anomalies and contradictions. The purpose is to move from an unreflective condition of amusement and attention seeker to rigorous grappler with experience- which is currently made up of everyday personal and socially constructed cinches, delights, and melodramas, that may be of interest to others because of the common treacherous grounds upon which we tread.
This is also an act of self- emancipation.
By forcing myself to communicate the relationship between the many complex strands of daily life I may force myself to integrate and simplify the mesh of forces in my head.
Of course there is a tension between sanitization and incontinent oversharing. Some experiences are only half born, others (especially those concerning experiences of others) are not mine to reveal, and because any shared word constructs something new in the world- one has to be circumspect.
However I will need some method for describing the many things that I just cannot talk about- the dark matter- that makes up the bulk of life. Marc and Charlotte have both written and thought about the significance of Gregory Sholette’s insights into dark matter and its articulation of the relationship between the few constellations of bright stars in culture and the ground, the bulk of life experience and action, that remains hidden from view for eternity.
Life is made of dark matter – I am daily engaged in dismantling conversations (conversations that dismantle me) with friends and colleagues effected by the impacts of the politics of neoliberalism and austerity. Our individual identities are dismantled along with valuable working relationships and methods in a chaotic and barbaric way by the daily assaults launched by current political contexts.
Also in stage conversations and negotiations with possible commissioners and partners on new projects- as we circle each other sniffing for affinities and mutually agreeable paths for collaboration.
So when ‘private’ moments occur I will describe them in terms of terrain (boggy, rocky, bleak), smell (sour, floral, shitty), feeling (whimpering, sweating, glowing) sound (barking, splatt!), materials (a ball of wall, slime covered chocolate) etc etc. So when suddenly a strange glumphing creature appears in the middle of a blog post – smell it, listen to it and perhaps you will recognize bits of it.
The other trouble is that I am given to endless scene setting.
I am initially driven to write something by an uncomfortable situation or jubilant moment and then never get to the point.
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