The week’s theme turned out to be the ‘Material environmental awareness’, and awareness of the systems or resources available within it..
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01.22.2008: Seed_02: Field-trip to ‘Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York’ exhibit at MAS
It began on Tuesday with a visit to the Municipal Art Society of New York exhibition about the life-work and ideas of urban planning activist Jane Jacobs. This introduced ideas of how to engage in one’s own neighbourhood, how to give attention to one’s local urban environment, and what one can do to get involved, and make some change.
Seed_02
http://www.futureofny.org/
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01.23.2008: Leech_A: ‘The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard’ [2007; 21 mins]
The next day we watched the hard-and-fast hitting short documentary ‘The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard’, which was a last minute replacement for ‘Nicht Mehr – Nocht Nicht’, which was sadly dvd+Deutsch lingustically-challanged and didnt make it to the projector with English subtitles. However ‘The Story of Stuff’ proved to be an excellent example of narrating and illustrating complex environmental interrelations, and the absurdity of linear production-consumption processes.
Leech_A
http://storyofstuff.org/
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01.24.2008: Seed_03: Environmental Awareness (with Jerry Juarez)
This thursday session connected with the work of Eyebeam Fellow Jerry Juarez, and the process she is working in collaboration with student-in-residents Tahj and Glen, preparing for the MediaShed exchange-visit. They have been making maps of subjectively-important areas in their own lived experience/neighbourhood. We spoke about making urban art interventions, and in particular ‘hacking’ sites, to include self-made play-object/infrastructures, such as swings, slides and basketball hoops. This work will continue over the next following weeks. To be documented as temporary autonomous zones of action and play.
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The week’s theme focused upon introducing P2P file-sharing and the Bittorrent protocol, including how to get files via installed software. As a complement, we looked at the politics and controversy surrounding file-sharing, i.e. Intellectual property and digital piracy.
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01.29.2008: Seed_04: Using Azureus/Vuze Bittorrent Software
01.29.2008: Leech_B: ‘Steal This Film Part II [2007; 45 mins]
This Tuesday we collapsed the Seed and the Leech together into one session, due to unavailability of meeting on Wednesday. So as a practical introduction to file-sharing Bittorrent-style, we familarised ourselves with Azeurus, using recent FLOSS manual on this P2P software, and proceeded to leech the .mov file of ‘Steal This Film Part II’ by The League of Noble Peers.
This documentary film is full of interviews and historical references in ‘copy culture’. As we all should know already cultural production has always been about copying, producing new ideas and exciting/interesting mutations of form. The students particularly liked the look and sound of Grime (latest music scene from London) which was featured at the end of ‘Steal This Film’. Recommended viewing!
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://flossmanuals.net/
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01.31.2008: Seed_05: Copyleft, Copyright/wrongs and Fair-use
On Thursday we met up again to look at more clips related to Intellectual Property issues and Piracy. We started by watching a few self-selected examples of clips which triggered questions of how they related to copyright issues. Not surprisingly, everyone was relevant.
Next up, we watched clips including different sides of the debate: Creative Commons promotional materials, music remix-culture, anti-piracy TV advertisements, pro-piracy activist clips, fair-use and concerned documentarians. You can find these resources below.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=73S8BypdlxU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
http://apaterso.info/projects/sl/seed_05/
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The week’s theme focused upon online media platforms, and what people post there. Now we are starting to get into the nitty-gritty of making screening events. This involved searching, watching and discussing, including the consequences of sharing your mediated life.
02.05.2008: Seed_06: Clip genres and aesthetics
After last week introducing Bittorrent methods of getting files, this Tuesday session we paid attention to the most populous sources for clips, the online media platforms. We started to list different types of genres, that are available there and subjectively interesting for our group. As part of the process we gathered together the ‘curatorial’ details of each clip in the wiki, making up categories to bundle them together.
Seed_06
Example: “Internet People! – The Meth Minute 39 [Sept 05 2007; 03.06 mins]” from ‘ChannelFrederator’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pPCkhYMQgY
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02.06.2008: Leech_C: The Future is Not What It Used To Be [2002; 52 mins]
Mika Taanila’s documentary film, provided in the ‘hard’ DVD version by Eyebeam resident artist Jamie Allen, was about the Finnish electronic musician Erkki Kurenneimi, technologist/pioneer, who was instrumental in the Finnish electronic arts and technology scene since the 1960s.
Particularly relevant for our theme of the week was the obsessive documenting of his personal life experiences in video. His logic for this process was so that, if desired in the future, his consciousness could be rebooted, many years after he had died. Does anyone else think about their digital immortality online?
http://notyetbe.stikipad.com/seedersnleechersrus/leech_C
http://www.frif.com/new2004/fut.html
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02.07.2008: Seed_07: Inspiration from Taeyoon Choi
On the Thursday, Eyebeam commissioned artist Taeyoon Choi joined us, and spoke about a few of his projects. He introduced the gameplay of various projects in urban space, involving networked media, fun (for example ‘Shoot Me If you Can’). He also shared critical perspectives and advice to the students related to their involvement in ‘Seeders N Leechers..’: Most important, make sure what ever one does, it is based personal interests and perspectives; and try to have fun!
The discussion developed later into an awareness of the commercial appropriation of good ideas that are posted online.
We also noted, with shared anecdotes, the difficulty of removing media or content from popular (-proprietary) online platforms, such as MySpace.
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