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.
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
UKK has published a book for debate about conditions and potential for art in Denmark. The UKK, young artists and art mediators, work for more democracy in the danish system for support of the arts. UKK suggests less centralization, better integration for artist within the unemployment system and the schools, payment for artist’s work and participation in shows, more art as research and that the museums actually reflects what’s happening in the art scene.
In the book there’s also a section with pictures from 1970-2009 about art spaces, public space, project-process and self organizing. Virtuel walk is mentioned shortly in the book.
I have been working on a concept about Wikipedia as a space for public art. First it was my last project at the IT-university of Copenhagen. Later i got the opportunity to continue working on the concept. Im really happy for that, since it’s a really central concept of trying to work with and create new spaces at the limits of what we consider art. There’s some ethical issues around it, but after that’s been dealt with i having the opportunity to work with these issues.
First off i went to visit some of my relatives, because it turned out one of them over the years had developed a huge private archive of art. It was begun before computers were a common thing, so it’s all done in the old library way. It looks really good. So if he want’s to go to some city, mostly in Denmark, he can look it up, and see, hmm i would like to see this public art on the way. If all this information was available at Wikipedia we could all do that. So this archive is an inspiration to what information about public art can be used to. GPS coordinates would make sculptures and other work acccessible in the public, both at Wikipedia and other related networks, like Google maps and different location services. At gmaps you can toggle Wikipedia content, along with pictures and videos with GPS info from users of Panoramio and Youtube, so it’s really public.
Yesterday i finished a short report in collaboration with Nis Rømer about what we would like to do. Also we’re looking forward to Gillion Grantsaan getting back from Africa. The concept is about how art practice can work out as articles and guided walks or tours online. And it’s a series of short concepts, depending on a temporary groupwork, so it’s not just about my ideas of combining network. I’m looking forward to see how it works out if we can continue working on it.
I’m not sure, but i have the impression that some people related to the art world could consider this project a devaluation of art. Maybe so. One of the things about art that comes to the surface in my talks around Boom Pearls is that a more nuanced understanding of art is present in Berlin where i have some of the talks, than in Copenhagen and Denmark, where art online isn’t such a big thing. Off course there’s a difference between different kinds of art. The Real Shit of some people isn’t the same to others, and then suddenly value changes, and RS is worth millions. If you could take the money issue out of it, it would be more about appropriation. In The Real Shit project it’s within the art world, and about building up careers, some kind of heritance i guess. When you go out of the art world, it’s also a matter of how to get back. So i also consider these projects to be building small bridges between different areas or networks and relating different spaces to each other. It’s possible other’s don’t like it. In Denmark we’re only 5 million people speaking the same language (or is it more today). So we have less experience within the language projects of Wikipedias. Local subjects from Los Angeles with 30 years of history that’s notable in the english Wikipedia can be difficult to relate to danish art history and language. Then it can be difficult to explain some projects as important because they may be academically brilliant within one context, but to other people, there’s no codes available to understand it. So i hope our work can help to improve what’s notable. One issue could be art with political content. It may be a matter of rhetorics, to make it notable in Denmark today. Today i read a blogpost about a project that’s against the danish terror law, which makes it illegal to put up a few posters or even some stickers, if the police thinks it disturbs traffic, the projects suggests to get rid of the law. The danish terror law is somehow within political consensus. Maybe this isn’t notable at Wikipedia for other cathegorical reasons, but i hope that the governing consensus of the danish language project doesn’t rule out projects because the language is to small to provide a historical context for art outside the art world.
the catalog from the show i curated in Odense for Gæsteatelier Hollufgård is now finished. besides the curators statement Signe Schmidt made a series of talks with the artists, and Jan Falk Borup, editor at kunsten.nu, wrote a critical text about contemporary art in Denmark: Provins – selvforskyldt periferi? (The regions – a self-inflicted periphery?).
isbn 978-87-983269-0-8
