Looking back to the Perverse Library, and ahead to a residency at the Whitechapel Gallery

Greville Worthington's 'Black Library' containing carbonised books, on display at Shandy Hall as part of The Perverse Library exhibition.Back in October 2010 I worked with the Laurence Sterne Trust and a York-based artists' publishing collective, information as material, on an exhibition of 'conceptual writing' at Shandy Hall in Coxwold. The Perverse Library (previous blog posts can be found here and here) was a success for all involved with good coverage in the press, including a review in the Independent and a feature in the Guardian Guide, inspiring lots of people to make the journey up to North Yorkshire.

Visitors to The Perverse Library gather around 'Invisible Bookshelves', now on display at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of information as material's yearlong residency.True to the spirit of Laurence Sterne, an opening party (the 'Grand Vernissage) was held on the final day of the exhibition. With the aid of a double decker, red Route Master bus (lent to us by a friend of the museum - thank you!) more than 50 people descended on Sterne's former home for a day of viewings, guided tours and conversation, followed by an evening of local cider and home-made curry at the village hall where a new documentary film, Making Nothing Happen, was premiered in the presence of its subject, the expatriate Czech artist and winner of the 2009 Northern Art Prize, Pavel Buchler. Two new information as material publications (The Perverse Library, by Prof. Craig Dworkin and Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head, by Simon Morris) were also launched on the night.

A view through the 'Invisible Bookshelves' onto John Baldessari’s 'Learn to Read' poster (2003)I could spend the next five minutes listing all the fascinating people I met at the event, but I won't. Instead, I will say that looking around throughout the day and seeing major artists, curators, collectors and the directors of national art institutions sharing cider and conversation with exhibition visitors, students and local people made me proud to be involved in a project that, despite the challenging and conceptual nature of its content, managed to remain totally welcoming to a truly diverse audience.

One name I will mention is Clive Phillpot, former director of the MoMa library, with whom I talked about a truly amazing project he co-curated at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. For Voids: A Retrospective, Phillot and his colleagues managed to make a successful case to the Pompidou to empty their galleries, in order to make space for the recreation of nine historic ‘empty’ art exhibitions, including Yves Klein’s legendary ‘The Void’. An epic achievement by any standards and totally relevant to The Perverse Library, an exhibition curated by a team interested in "works by artists who use extant material – selecting and reframing it in order to generate new meanings – and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things."

Simon Morris and Nick Thurston unloading at the Whitechapel ready to install 'Invisible Bookshelves' in the Foyle Reading Room.Shortly after the exhibition I was invited by information as material to join their editorial board (to which I said YES PLEASE!), and shortly after that we were offered a yearlong residency at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (yes, it really is all down to my joining the board... honest!?). The programme for information as material's time as Writers in Residence will be announced at a launch event in London, on 28 April 2010. Tickets for the launch event can be booked online now.

The sign at Aldgate East, something I hope to see lots over the year or so.I'll be posting the odd update about the residency, as well as the odd interview with the artists involved. So, as they say, watch this space...

All information as material publications, along with the new documentary film about Pavel Buchler are avaliable to buy from www.informationasmaterial.com

The Stag and Hound: Dutton & Swindells at Project Space Leeds

The Hebe Media team are spending two days filling a large and empty room with ideas and plans for the next few months. Exciting but exhausting times, and I've escaped for five minutes to post this insightful video.

Dutton & Swindells took part in the Writing Encounters event I helped to organise back in 2009, at York St. John University, where they talked about their residency in Korea and the formation of the Institute of Beasts. I've been down to PSL a few times since their residency began in January 2011, and had intended to post something about the way the exhibition has evolved. However, courtesy of the wonderful Axis, you get to hear about the monkey nuts straight from the organ grinder... you will get that if you watch the video!

Art and social media, or art and the social medium? Some thoughts on #artconvo

Screen shot from www.ivy4evr.co.uk, Blast Theory's SMS based collaboration with novelist Tony White

Yesterday I attended one in a series of Cultural Conversations, organised by Emma Bearman (@culturevultures) of Culture Vulture fame, wonderfully facilitated by Mike Chitty (@mikechitty) and bringing together a real range of people from artists, curators and producers, to writers and teachers, to technologists and marketeers.

The day used Open Space methods to get a number of small, participant driven, conversations going about the possibilities for using social media within a contemporary art context.

Due to the unforeseen I only managed to participate in two conversations on the day, both very strongly connected by a question about the possibilities for social media as the medium. Interestingly, this idea seemed to divide the room and draw out some strong voices on either side. On the one hand, there were some who felt that social media platforms, as platforms for something, could only be thought of as a means to an end. On the other hand there were those who seemed excited by the idea that social media could be employed as the context for making valid aesthetic experiences, which engage audiences as the end in themselves.

It is this division, or disjunction, between action (how we use it) and idea (what we use it for), that I have taken away with me; along with a question about how we might begin to reconcile these two positions. Put another way, is the value of social media, in a contemporary art context, only in its use as a communication channel or knowledge sharing tool, or do we want to push it further? Whilst it was clear (and you can see this from a quick review of #artconvo activity) that yesterday's event was a helpful one for many of the folk who attended, I felt the conversation was lacking a dimension because it failed to pursue this line of enquiry.

I should point out immediately that this is not meant as criticism, nor aimed at the organisers or any of the lovely people I spoke to. Rather, this reflection is about trying to understand why us 'arts lot' are so very far behind in our thinking about digital in general.

Before the event @culturevultures tweeted the following: "[w]hich artists (living) would you really like to see on Twitter and why?". My nee-jerk response to this question is that I don't really care which artists are online as long as they have something interesting to say or, even better, something important to show us that will alter the way we think about social media, if only for an instant.

I had attended the event with high hopes that I would hear people speaking about ideas and projects that challenged, pushed or just had fun with social media, as well as hearing from those who champion platforms like Twitter as a valuable tool for communication, promotion, occasional activism, and shameless self-promotion. I wanted to leave feeling a sense of expanded possibility, as well as learning something of the 'how-to-do'. I wanted to think about Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare, and so on, as the means of engaging audiences with art, as art, not just as a means of promoting physical works in physical spaces. In a way, I want social media to help art and ideas find people, not the other way around.

I left last year's Shift Happens event with a similar sense of disappointment about how far we have yet to travel across the digital desert. That event has been going for a number of years now, and it still needed a speaker to spend 20 minutes telling attendees what Creative Commons is. Again, this is not a criticism of an important and well organised event, just a reflection on the distance between our creative community, and others in the design, media and communication industries.

One inspiring thing that sticks with me from Shift Happens 2010, is a provocation made by Andy Field, a director of the Forrest Fringe, who said: "it may be true that no one person can break the internet, but we should all be trying". Field's call wasn't a destructive one; it was a call for us to find the limits, to get radical, in the hope that we might find new and wonder-full ways of making stuff happen. I want the same for all social media.

Perhaps a future Cultural Conversation could learn from Watershed's Theatre Sandbox, we could bring some technology into the space, generate some ideas, and play our part in the conversation about how we take part in the rapid change taking place all around us. Otherwise my fear is that we will miss our chance to be co-creators and innovators, destined only to be users of a system created elsewhere, and for purposes we might one day start to question, seriously.

In the meantime, and as a way of sharing some inspiration, links to a few 'social medium' projects I have found on my travels are included below. Please do send feedback on this post via the comments at the bottom, and if you have other links to projects we should know about please post them there too. Many thanks for reading:

In Now We Are Friends, Robert Fitterman takes on some of the prime features of our intensively-networked present--the broad, continual scatter of personal information thru blogs, databases, and social networking sites. You can find a full synopsis for, or buy a copy of Now We Are Friends here: http://truckbooks.org/cata-fitterman.html. An excerpt from the piece can be found here: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~rmf1/newworks/new_works_now_we_are_friends_37.pdf

Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head "is an idea that is a concept that is a blog that is a book that is an object." (Constant Critic) A performative retyping of the recently published original scroll edition of Jack Kerouac’s beat classic, On the Road, Morris’ project first appeared as an ongoing journey through the book, read and re-typed on a Wordpress blog one page per day. The online archive of Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head can be found here: http://gettinginsidejackkerouacshead.blogspot.com/. Copies of codex publication of the blog can be purchased here: http://informationasmaterial.com/iam/.

Ivy4Evr is an SMS drama for teenagers created by Blast Theory, written by Tony White, author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber), and commissioned by Channel 4 Education. Find out more here: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_ivy4evr.html. After registering your mobile number and email address on the Ivy4Evr website, participants begin to receive SMS messages from Ivy – ranging from quick updates about the minutiae of her life right at that moment, to pleas for help with her dilemmas about friends versus family, college and band commitments. You can reply to Ivy as often as you like, and the more you do, the more you will hear back from her.

Post note: I found this article by Ben Davis, and thought I should include a link as part of the article: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/davis/art-and-social-media8-4-10.asp

Creative spaces are key to creative culture...

The view from the reception at Amaze. The first stop on our tour of creative offices in Manchester and London.

Lee and I hit the road last week, visiting Manchester and London to interview some of the folk involved in a new project with Hyper Island (more on this soon). In the course of three days we visited the offices of Amaze, Channel 4, Code Computerlove, Dare, McCann-Erickson, MTV and Wieden + Kennedy. For us it was an opportunity to have loads of fascinating conversations, some fun with our new video camera (again, more on this soon), and time to reflect on why offices in the world of digital are so very cool.

In the final days of 2010 (it seems a million years away to us now) the team here at Hebe Media spent a few hours dreaming about the kind of 'work space' we want be in. Don't get us wrong, it's not that we don't like our existing office (it's been a good friend since we opened for business last year), but the fact that it is "an office" is precisely the challenge we need to overcome.

The view as you leave the lift in the DARE officesWalking into somewhere like Dare, with all its unfinished ply and exposed concrete, and employees sharing lunch over a ping pong tournament; or the Eastend offices of Wieden + Kennedy, with their cycle filled reception and air of independence; or Code's canal side dwelling that hosts a sizzling BBQ whenever the Manchester weather allows, you definitely don't get the sense that this is just another office. Furthermore, you get a distinct impression that the space isn't just a part of a clever branding exercise: these spaces seem to embody, and simultaneously make possible, the particular culture of each organisation.

A little out of focus, sorry, but this image gives you a view on the entrance to Wieden + Kennedy's office.Lee has written about our work with Hyper Island on a number of occasions. One of the many reasons we enjoy our work with the Swedish-born school of all things digital is that we 'get' their methods. Post-it packed walls, working through 1,000's of ideas (even when they are terrible... mostly mine, I think) to find the few that fit, and using noise and energy as a lubricant for getting to great solutions. Adopting these methods requires a culture of openness, where mess and discontinuity are a part of the furniture. In turn we need a space that matches up to that culture. A space that is a fundamental part of our culture.

Hebe team member, Shang Ting showing putting some thoughts about our office down on paper before XmasWe think the Hebe office needs to be bigger and brighter, one space that is made of many kinds of different spaces. Make it happen space, relax space, reflect space, test space, mess space, retail space, gallery space, meeting space, drinking coffee space, play space, social space, party space, and so on. We also think that this is a space that we would want to share with others, so that our culture can cross fertilise. We want to start when we start, finish when we finish, and hang out when our brains can't take any more. In short, we want a creative space.

This is our dream. We hope to realise it in 2011, and we want anyone who shares this dream to join us. You know where to find us!

Oki-Ni 2011 collections is announced in epic style

We love Oki-Ni. Indeed, hardly a week goes by where someone in the team isn't caught slacking in order to scan their online gallery / store in order to find an addition to the weekend's wardrobe.

Last week Oki-Ni released this video as a way of introducing the spring-summer 2011 collection. Stunning film work and a gorgeous slab of CFCF's new EP The River makes this, for my money, one of the best bits of video released online during 2010... not that I've seen it all!?

Oki-Ni, which Shang Ting informs me is Japanese for "with appreciation", made its name producing limited edition fashion items born from collaborations between established brands and up-and-coming designers. It all began in 2001, and since then the brand has stayed firm to a set of values that have seen it evolve into an online destination for connoisseurs of style.

This year Oki-Ni also launched the Mix Series, which has allowed the brand to collaborate with musicians and DJs, and to showcase the outcome via a free monthly podcast. They commission sleeve art for each edition, and the artwork is used for a limited edition run of t-shirts.