Welcome

Welcome to the MA Interactive Media my name is Harwood. My main interests are in the networked image and helping other people set things up for themselves. I currently live at the mouth of the Thames with Matsuko Yokokoji another member of Mongrel and our son Lani. We are their helping to set up a free media space mediashed.org for local inhabitants.

Mongrel:

Mongrel was an internationally recognised artists group specialising in digital media. Who developed an international reputation for their pioneering arts projects, including the first on-line commission from the Tate Gallery London and work in the permanent collections of the Pompidou Centre Paris and the Centre for Media Arts in Karlsruhe (ZKM).
Combined with this Mongrel usually worked with marginalised peoples who are on low incomes, socially excluded and cultural minorities. We do this buy helping people to do things for themselves, creating community software and digital arts based projects that we then promote to a state of high visibility through our international network of arts connections. The groups gain a visible voice, self reliance, self confidence and informal training allowing them to get a foot hold into mainstream training, education, culture and the economic life most of us take for granted.
Mongrel had projects running with the Congolese community in London, and have helped many groups in South African Townships, the Sarai Centre in New Delhi, the Suriname community of Amsterdam and many others.
www.mongrel.org.uk

The MediaShed:

The MediaShed is the first "free-media" space to open in the east of England. It's a place where members can come hang out, learn, propose some training, create and propose new projects using free-media or show things they have made on one of our screening nights. The MediaShed is designed to be as open and accessible as possible, welcoming all.

Free-media is best thought of as a means of doing art, making things or just saying what you want for little or no financial cost by using public domain software and recycled equipment. It is also about saying what you want "freely", using accessible media that can be taken apart and reused without unnecessary restrictions and controls - "free as in free speech".

www.mediashed.org

I am going to teach you strategies gleaned from my experience working with Mongrel and from my dialogue with many other artists – and peoples.
You are welcome to challenge any of the suggested methods – working practices but only with good reason which I expect to share with the group.

MA in interactive Media - Methods and Working Practices

Essentially my approach to media is to set up a series of ways that allow media to become strange again, to allow media to become a space of fun and experimentation, of expanded thoughts and actions. This will allow us to release the full potential of media - allowing signals, things, objects, people and actions to pass freely between each other. My approach is about opening up the implicit meaning of media itself – to mediate not by controlling and ordering what can be said, shown or heard but by providing the means to unblock channels of access, release currents of energy and reveal the margins of what people can feel, sense, reason and imagine.

I will suggest #definitions that allow us to think about problems.

#definition COMUNICATION => The exchange of information between two points.
#definition MEDIA => Any substance that allows COMUNICATION

#definition SIGNAL => incitement to action.

what is the potential of:

MEDIA (x) to COMUNICATE SIGNAL (i)

Given that: x = any substance and i = any content.

or:

Jimmy has a potato and bit of paper. It's his birthday tomorrow and he wishes to COMUNICATE he is having a party to his friends – How does he decide which MEDIA to choose. How does he evaluate which media will yield the best results.

Media-systems

By “media systems” I do not just mean methods of communication that require you to read a 500 page manual and sign a 5 year maintenance contract. To understand this approach it will first be necessary for you to decouple media systems (and especially “new media”) from new technology. A media system is simply some practice of encoding content in order to move it from one point to another. Sometimes media may mean a space at the railway station where people can exchange books or leave comments on ones they have already borrowed (“Book Crossings”). It may use readily available technological components but combine them in new ways such as to connect an international group of cultural spaces using basic streaming media to produce a collaborative music broadcast (“Skintstream” 2005/7, www.mediashed.org/?q=skintstream). Or it could piggy back onto an existing network such as the public telephone exchange but develop a new application to target a previously hard-to-reach community (“Telephone Trottoire” 2006, www.mediashed.org/?q=trottoire).

MEDIA-SYSTEM:

#definition COMUNICATION => The exchange of information between two points.

#definition MEDIA => Any substance that allows COMUNICATION

#definition SIGNAL => incitement to action.

#definition CONTENT => information that is distinct from its mode of presentation.

#definition MEDIA-SYSTEM => is a group of interrelated, interdependent, interacting elements that together provide the ability to:

1Enable the encoding of CONTENT into a SIGNAL.
2Pass the SIGNAL through MEDIA.
3Decode the SIGNAL to enable the CONTENTS reception.

*note: CONTENT can be an encoding of another SIGNAL.

My work with Mongrel has mainly taken place by means of media systems – telephone or IP networks. Despite their popular perception as being independent of place or geographical location, even media systems as pervasive as telephony can also be made site specific and targeted to certain groups - through private exchanges, area codes or closed databases (e.g. our telephony based project “ARoundhead” (2005, www.mongrel.org.uk/?q=aoundhead) which was restricted to the telephones of the staff of the Royal Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital). And despite their intangible and ephemeral appearance, media installations can be as permanent as your daily television service, and even more so when run and maintained by its users rather than subject to changing priorities of commercial providers.

The definition of media as a substance through which a signal is past between at least two points – one being the origin and media systems which add encoding of content to this model – infer a collaboration process.

APPROACH TO COLLABORATION – OPENNESS

'Openness', within this context, means being inherently amenable to change in terms of form and function in order to accommodate the cultural and social variety of groups (e.g. family groups, older individuals, youth groups, ethnically diverse groups). Technology is not inherently open in this respect. The social structure and the architectural space that house a project must actively be made available to people, whilst having specific social and technological skills on hand to inform a new initiate, maintain equipment and constantly re-think what constitutes openness in the project space.

APPROACH TO COLLABORATION – WORKING PRACTICES

When we enter into a notion of doing a collaborative project we will need to do so at both the formal organisational and the subjective levels. We will need to enter into a state of total curiosity. This curiosity will be with ourselves and others. We will use our total curiosity to think about history - both ours and theirs, the material world as well as the realm of the imaginary. It is our job in a project to unravel motivation - ours for wanting to do the project and theirs for wanting to participate. The project, if going well, should contain numerous contradictory motivations for a group to represent itself using our media systems. We have to keep ourselves open and let these representations contend with each other. After all, in an unequal world the struggles around the question of who is able to make themselves visible and who is not and for what purpose is central to any process of reflection on how we see the world and how that world presents itself to us. For us, a good project should ask all involved to look again at our capability in and reason for representing ourselves, and how these representations may come to act on the world.

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