guzzardo workshop: a hackerspace for myth making
When and Where
PLACE 40 Fountain Street, Belfast, Monday - Thursday 19-22 March
ULSTER FESTIVAL OF ART AND DESIGN
the workshop goal:
Generate “on the street prototypes” that intersect with web based social media applications. The product will also include design protocols for prototype operation.
some background, and questions:
The ubiquity and torrent of social media applications is apparent; facebook, twitter, tumblr, instagram, pinterest. But there’s not much thought given to what effect this “social media ecology” is having on the city. Are we we going to be stranded in a public sphere smeared with social media detritus, piled high? Can we still come up with some strategies (prototypes and protocols) before a “social media brownfield” clamps down the street?
a workshop map (of sorts):
“a hackerspace for myth-making” is obviously open-ended, and certainly an outlier on the usual place-making check list. But here’s another list that should be helpful in getting started.
- street theater / public arena is a good frame. Interactive staging and performative street installations is central, and is key to my praxis. Links to my work are below. Lewis Mumford’s epilogue in The Myth of the Machine is the quintessential text on the city “as a theater for heroic reform”. His prescience stuns. I’ve uploaded the epilogue as a pdf. Epilogue, Mumford's Myth of Machine.
- in terms of the Applications, all of us have a varying baseline in place. But how theses Apps might be used/ played with/ grafted onto a site specific projects; now that’s more of a creative leap. Photo-sharing Apps like Pinterest or Instagram are a good place to start. We will look at some of the weirdly evocative social media instructional video you-tube links. They offer 1) a “roux/code” to generate designs for street interface into this new blended social space 2) a critique pad into this liminal public-private sphere.
- there's a desperate need to grab onto to a hard site’s embedded histories, traditions, myths. It’s important to use the street’s past to anchor any prototype. We need “palimpsest processors” on the street to stand up to this social media tsunami.
- hardware / widget things; certainly the reason that this workshop is happening is that there’s cheap portable kit out there, and more every day. The web is fount for this gear.
workshop end game, OR what are you going to get out of this:
maybe a new tool set? some things you can use to refit the street as stage for reflectivity, so the city (and you and me) are still players in the face of what’s coming.
Links: Much of my web presence is smeared over a batch of sites. So it is somewhat of a pick and choose.
http://www.secretbaker.com/recursive-urbanism.html
http://www.rudi.net/node/22049
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