After a workshop Nis Rømer and Gillion Grantsaan improves the concept for writing and organizing articles on Wikipedia as art in public and private spaces.
Nis Rømer & Gillion Grantsaan gave a workshop at KUA, Copenhagen university Amager on Open Source and collaborative historywriting. The discussion from the participating art history student was on power structures. Who are administrators, why was this article on the garden in Peder Lykke Centeret suggested deleted or moved. Why do we do this, do we get anything out of it?
After discussing the outcome of our work, we realized it gave a lot of opportunities we didn’t expect a year ago. An article on public art at in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, had been broken up into what is notable on an online free encyklopedia. Some of that left out was more about publict art. So the local art in public (article written in danish) should make sense to art in public in general (article written in english). It means we can start working on a detail, which might be considered notable.
Also we decided to write a bit more about Kai Nielsens Blågårdsplads, and some playgrounds Gillion showed us at Nørrebro. Find available media and get legal permission to publish it under the local license at Wikimedia. Later on we will work on how it is part of public and private spaces. I imagine it is specially through workshops and guided tours we can develop the project from this point. We dont use private and public spaces as functions, but rather as meeting places where we meet other interests, where we don’t know what will happen.
There was one thing we didnt clear out. The workshop was aimed at art historians, mediators in danish. It could be a priority to work with an aim towards the institutional. However art can also be about anything else, and appear in public space. Do we only aim for renegotiations of some consensus within the art sphere? I am afraid it’s not precise to identify the project in opposition to everything outside the imagined white room. The opportunity we got to think of a difference to the idea of art in public came from a wikipedian admin. Im not sure if we ought to deal with mediated reality as either consensus or agonistic.
I participate in this about 180 pages a5 pdf from DAYS OF ART & LOVE in danish. Its a collection of different kinds of maps, guides, essays and topographies. I was invited by Mikkel Larris who among other stuff also does walks and occasionally publish them on maps. My contribution is maps and walks one of them around Odense.
in september Andrew Paterson presented some thoughts on creative actions in online spaces. We began to meet over skype and visit a few places later on, to see the posibilities for critical self organizing. One of them is habbo hotel. Andrew suggested our talks could develop into a club about public and private spaces.
And now i’m working on a spreadsheet for inviting people to come and join. Here’s a rss feed for the planning site. Join the club by using the spreadsheet, post ideas for spaces to explore. You can be a member by listening and talking.
Some of our other projects also deals with these matters. Andrews work with public and private online spaces, and gave a course, on among other things how these places and platforms can work as boundary objects for activism. My agenda comes from recent and ongoing projects, Wikipedia as meeting place for the institution of art, wikipedians and public space, flash 7 games also playable for the Wii browser, available in public and private spaces, and also Call for EULA’s, where everybody can make their own end user license. The meeting between different types of users and inhabitants as platform for art at Wikipedia is a group project being developed with Nis Rømer and Gillion Grantsaan at the moment. We arrange walks, workshops and research for new articles. The focus so far has been on public art, we also need to take care of the meeting between wikipedians, readers, appropriation artists and one timers. The projects uses geo information, gmaps, gdocs and wave to organize and link to videos and photos, here from a tour in southern Ørestad. In relation to the club, one of my colleagues may be interested in talking about transition towns at skype, while we write an article about it, for a different language, and see if it’s notable for a public encyclopedia. Metaplace.com closes in january (Metaplace Inc. goes on). It was really good to see how a MMO could work as flash 10 browser gameworlds created by the players(sign the petition). Unfortunately this kind of creativity didn’t work out. Inworld value drives the economics, and the small world i made was not much of a game, just navigating. Game mechanics is perhaps more interesting in places like Kongregate, or the iphone App store. From our point of view as newbies, creativity in casual games or Free-to-play/ Play for free is maybe played in a browser, in a sort of more public place? People who are not into participation in games or other social online places, could maybe be interested in these temporary groups. The mobile server could be fun to play with. Almost ten year old software for an old windows ce can work as a temporary server and playground. Similarly I hope we can open for suggestions for spaces to learn about.
I participate at New Berlin Art Festival with a black box, when clicked it links to Call for EULA’s.
It’s an open show in Second Life, set up by Jan Northoff. Art in virtual worlds’s is a bit like art in Denmark, where art in the last decade have been politicized as nationalist norm. In the series of talks under Boom Pearls Northoff talked about his work as building. He sort of stopped making art after leaving the american desert and began working in 3D simulations. Now he understands art as context. I think it’s a point that you can see practice in a vw as something particular but it is still part of reality.
The Boom Pearls talks about art online didn’t create a real dialogue with other digital artists who thinks presence online as participation in these places leave less space for critical work. The different points of view are nuanced and related to different art projects. Maybe it’s not the time to make a dialogue between these types of work, it’s different categories sometimes.
My initiative with Boom Pearls was intended to point to how virtual worlds can be a platform for art, also for artists new to social real time simulations in 3D. It seems to be crucial that geographic limits can be even harder to deal with in virtual worlds. It’s is simply too hard for someone to make it into a virtual place. Their computer or the network infrastructure might not live up to the standards. Still, artists who do not stay in a vw can use it as a temporary play ground, and play with the new possibilities, based on their artworld experience. My work is then sort of supporting link’s between different contexts and the inworld driven economy of these server park playgrounds.
This casual simulation game offers you the possibility to experiment with the idea of visualizing yourself as a mountain, and through that gain calm awareness of yourself in the world. It’s partly inspired by mindfullness, described shortly at Wikipedia. Try to close your eyes. Then visualize yourself as a mountain. The weather changes. The sun shines, a bit rain, wind, snow, storm, maybe some lightning, then calm weather, a few skies. A few sheeps go up, then dissappear. A tourist bus comes up the road. The tourists get out. Go up the mountain. Disappear. Seasons change but the mountain stays the same.
The game helps to think of how a mountain is placed in the world. It is a procedural rhetoric in the sense that by playing you momentarily accept to experiment with the interface of the simulated model which you wouldn’t do otherwise. This way you accept to learn the offered rhetorics. iMountain lets you play with the reason of immersion, and hereby think of which context it is within. The challenge is to translate a casual game as more than a geeky experience within the context of an online singleplayer game.
This fall i will present a series of casual online games, which will be accessible in private and public spaces, playable on the Wii browser and in most other regular browsers.
The first ones are
PANCAKES
September 12th, 14 – 1530, you are welcome to come and make pancakes. We will also try to fry a fish and maybe make some coffee. Please remember to brush your teeth, and also to do the dishes before you leave. If you feel like it you are welcome to vacuum the floor or even take a nap
In the next games play will move to the mountains, online play will be considered as part of the world, and then play move to the jungle.
Casual games are short fun moments. On the Wii they are available through a downloadable browser or as bought games. Homemade games are often smaller productions, however that means they also provide a different take on what is fun, than games made by large teams. I hope you will join me in this grinding experimentation with simulation games and casual play in public accessible online spaces, in your private browser and also presented in a private flat in Berlin.
Have fun
The project is supported by the Danish Art Council
