It was meant 2 b Gr8

It was meant 2 b gr8, or how I reneged on the participatory ethos of software-culture at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

In December 2002 I was invited to take part in Wale’s first exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art 2003, along with three other artists: Cerith Wyn-Evans, Bethan Huws, and Paul Seawright. Patricia Fleming, a Glasgow-based curator, selected artists who had complex relationships with Wales as a nation state, and I was included in the roster as an emerging artist, with English as a first language, and who was embroiled in “networked” cultures locally and internationally. My recent work had included a curatorial project that influenced both the work that I produced in Venice, and how I understood my relationship as a “new media artist” to other contemporary artists.

Art for Networks started as a co-production with BBC Wales and BBC Online in London: a series of artists’ talks at Chapter, (a contemporary art gallery in Cardiff, UK) in 2000-01 by net.artists and others associated with networked approaches to art practice were complimented by interviews by Matthew Fuller, a colleague in the net.art collective I/O/D. This was followed by a national touring exhibition, funded by Arts Council England and the Henry Moore Foundation, and organized by Chapter, who published the exhibition cataloguei—and revenue-funded by Arts Council Wales. The proposal to Arts Council England explicitly made the link between the work of net.artists – including Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, and JODI – whose work, to the uninitiated, often appeared as opaque, formal manipulations of technical networks, and other contemporary artists’ – such as Adam Chodzko and Stephen Willats, Anna Best and Ryosuke Cohen – who shared their preoccupations with social relations and social networks. This project came to fruition as Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‹ Esthétique  relationnelle  › became widely-available in Englishii; and the ‘Relational Aesthetics’ episode of the BBC arts documentary Art Safari features a comical interview with me, trying to make sense of Bourriaud’s work, (without having yet read it)—but the producer/director/interviewer of the programme clearly recognized a confluence between my efforts and Bourriaud’s more coherent and accomplished proposition.iii Beryl Graham was right when she guessed that I knew more about net.art and the legacy of conceptual art practice than ‘art where the public participates’.iv Now, I would take issue with both her idea of participation and of the public, but then, Beryl was entirely right in her criticism. Not that I was unaware of theories of participation however, but in the circles in which I moved at the time, “participation” was more thoroughly understood through design methodology,v rather than as ‘new genre-public art’vi; mine was an art practice that drew on the techniques of software engineering after all. But where Beryl was correct was when she suggested that this was a project that sought to establish a hybrid approach—that was its motivation and the trajectory that it traced, not only to suggest a wider affinities in contemporary and historical art practice, but also as a diagnostic, speculative, generative process in my own practice. However, this was not meant to be a comprehensive overview and was explicitly my attempt to think through my own ‘net.art’ practice—to move towards others. The work in Venice was a continuation of this personal project in many ways, as a means to being me closer to the discourse of contemporary art and its apparatuses. This confluence of net.art and less technically-defined contemporary art practice was a way towards what, for me, would eventually become an art practice understood in terms of the discourse of participatory, dialogic and relational art that Beryl Graham recognized as absent in my earlier work.

The Ambulant Science Studio took its title from Deleuze and Guattarivii who suggest two modes of scientific practice: the royal, and the ambulant. This latter mode, in contrast to the mathematical, geometrical and “major” science operates in a “minor” mode. A “poor” science you might say, in the sense that arte povera gives us an ‘attitude’ which distinguished it from the ‘rich art’ of Pop.viii Working as part of the artists’ collective I/O/D, I recognized that we were concerned with the same concepts as researchers working on large-scale corporate projects. The tools available to us were proprietorial (we used Macromedia Director and third-party plug-ins), pirated, and détourned from use on commercial projects, yet—through what I now consider an immense ingenuity and a sense of urgency—we were able to make software-as-art which rivalled up-scale, bank-rolled software-as-engineering. I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker was the apotheosis of this. As self-proclaimed “speculative software” it laid-bare the structural and formal qualities of the web—as a hierarchical file structure on networked servers, and as a symbolic-linking technology—left un-rendered in commercial web browser software. It cost little to produce; it was given away “for free.” With this software we restated the merits of the “poor” rather than rich; “con poco o nulla.”ix

The Web Stalker, as all the other outputs by I/O/D—which initially took the form of ‘multi-media’ publications—were freely available, and widely distributed. Initially, before we had access to electronic distribution, our work was copied to floppy-disk—those that were rejected by a magazine company, who attached them to their glossy covers, and made them available to us free-of-charge. We would copy them by hand—in batches of 100 or so—affix a laser-printer and hand-cut label—and then hand them out to people we met, or who requested them. (I can remember giving Thomas Demand a copy of I/O/D #1 for example, when we met in Brixton High Street in the summer of 1993, after Lisa Haskel’s gathering of new media artists and theorists at the ICA in London.) The ethos of copy-left, or anti-copyright was strong within the group, and by the time that I was making work in Venice, the culture of free software and even of Creative Commons licences was widely established. Between 1998 and 2001 I had also been collaborating with artist Mark Greco on Ice Cream for Everyone.x This project sought to break the proprietorial stranglehold of corporate ice cream manufacture, returning ice cream to “everyone” and anyone who wanted it. Again, ice cream was given away at art events—openings and exhibitions—and we had been invited to ‘Open Culture’ academic conferences and to CRASH!—the group exhibition at the ICA in 2000. This work, although not electronic new media, or net.art, echoed the wider concerns of artists within those art worlds and networks. These approaches to art practice, to its production and distribution and ownership as understood within the discourse of media art at the time, and in software culture, and in the attempts to understand how this culture’s influence would migrate to other disciplines and sectors, were direct influences on my work in Venice.

That the concept of the ambulant suggests a ground-level activity, a grass roots or tactical approach to media, to systems, or to living, echoed other concerns of mine at that time. In 2000, while working on a failed/abandoned social-network version of The Web Stalker with I/O/D, I write a popular (sic) technical manual, London Walkingxi. This book was published in the “manual” series by Ellipsis in London, alongside The Manual: (how to Have a Number One the Easy Way) by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the KLFxii and a reprint of Art and Social Function by Stephen Willats,xiii which, I think, accurately describes several of the practices which were neighbours to my own at the time. My concern was to be tactical, rather than strategic, and to promote the vitality of “grass roots” approaches: this was less of a Situationist-inspired overturning of the everyday through art, but perhaps a Kaprow-like transfer of everyday activity into art, though at the time I was more likely to have been thinking of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu,xiv and the urgency of invention to think- and work-through an empirical problem: such as how to sustain a search of “love”. Amora a Venezia was a collection of photographs of prismatic diffraction of light through everyday things: glasses of Campari, plate-glass doors, kids’ toy bubbles—the “rainbow” as an indication of being in love. This theme continued in Baci, which was a scanned and enlarged laser-print of a map of Venice found in the Ex birreria exhibition space in Giudecca—the venue for the Wales pavilion. Mounted on a large, 4.5 metre by 3 metre free-standing board, a sign invited visitors to “mark with a ‘x’ wherever you have kissed.” with a large stick of pink chalk. Calendario Delle Maree was a flotilla of origami gondolas made from the eponymous paper calendars available throughout the city. These were to be taken to the nearby Giudecca canal, to sense the depths of the water through watching its surface. A metaphorical exercise, Lost in the Supermarket took literally Marc Augé’s claim that branded-products orientate visitors in airports and other ‘non-places.’ Sceptical of this, I produced a model of Venice from products, familiar to me from the UK, but bought in a nearby supermarket on the Zattere, which mimicked the techniques outlined in Kevin Lynch’s influential Image of the City.xv Stones of Venice—an obvious pun—was a hoard of granite paving-setts, which were used everywhere across the city, and indeed across Europe at that time, during ‘regeneration’ projects. These were arranged in a rough approximation of Piazza San Marco, and ordered according to how far I might be able to throw them, as ammo, if called upon to do so. Again, metaphors abound. A video, never exhibited, records me weighing and placing each stone, as I’d seen workers in the street doing as they laid the new paving. In the audio-work, Whistle Test, I prepared to communicate from the shore to ships using the Venetian vernacular: a sharp whistle.

These “devices” that I produced in Venice were small-scale, hand-made, do-it-yourself attempts at making sense of the locale, for preparing for eventualities, and for calling for their deployment by other people. They drew on the instructional format of London Walking—itself heavily influenced by Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964), which was reprinted around that timexvi. And so they were idiosyncratic, of my own invention rather than developed through a participatory process—in the sense of being developed with others.

Although I had written a polemical text called Art Is Everything, Business is Not for Arts Council England in 2002,xvii in which I called for the separation of art from business, I did not fully acknowledge this in my work in Venice. As well as calling for a retreat from the more mercantile aspects of the art world—its dealers, collectors and so on—I was also preoccupied with maintaining a distance from the “discount” research & development that artists’ perform, especially in the realm of software and, at the time, for example, “enhanced reality” gaming. I was also well aware of artists’ implication in wider neo-liberal projects of deregulation through the disruption to existing markets by technological innovation; and the members of I/O/D were aware of, but addressed only subsequently, the implication of artists within a wider project—the California Ideology of Barbrook and Cameronxviii—which we now see flourishing in the “Uberisation” of everything.xix Not only were artists the shock-troops of urban regeneration/revitalization/gentrification—core constituents of Richard Florida’s “creative class”xx—they were also in-league with a new generation of de-regulators, modelling business as “tactical media” and subaltern art projects in order to break unions, break regulations and set legal precedent: Taxis now, healthcare later, to paraphrase one silicon valley venture capitalist.xxi I/O/D’s 5-word Webby-award acceptance speech in 2000 proclaimed, “Technical innovation equals class war.”xxii What we did not foresee at the time was that this war would actually be waged on us, and that we would not inevitably be the victor.

I/O/D eventually disbanded with one of its members pursing a career as commercial software coder, with the others moving towards the academy. Although we were not directly influenced by the Experiments in Art and Technology and its 9 Evenings events of 1966, ours was an art practice that followed the route, as Stuart Hobbs indicates, into ‘the university model of technical specialisation,’ typical of American avant garde art practice, and which ‘provided a better model for artistic exploration than the avant-garde model of épater le bourgeois’.xxiii

The Ambulant Science Studio was developed in the first year of a UK National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts Fellowship award which provided me with the pretext to explore extra-institutional approaches to research and development that would ordinarily be undertaken within a corporate or academic context. The work was, in that sense, an “informal” approach to research, which was learned through my attempts with I/O/D at “do-it-yourself”, grappling with technical problems that were otherwise the privileged domain of IBM or Google R&D labs. The “devices” that I invented for the project in Venice were developed rapidly and iteratively; they were distributed “for free” and retained a punk or “garage band” ethos. But this approach left me vulnerable, I think, to criticisms of not taking the project seriously, of playing around with street politics to little or no effect, and without the investment of time and the building of personal and social relationships that would make this work transformative in its effect. My attempts at bringing these software-culture-derived ways of working into a contemporary art context were perhaps ill-timed and ill-fated. I could never have spectacularised my work—no data projections, no motion-capture suits, no green screens—but I could have paid more attention to the collaborative or participatory working practices that I had grown into through my software-culture work. A retreat into idiosyncratic, and fundamentally “lone working” worked against the ethos of that culture—an ethos that I have since taken to heart, and which—again—motivates my current practice.

One of the hand-made t-shirts that I wore throughout the project—text-message adaptations of slogans from London post-Situationists, King Mob—perhaps sums up my experience of Venice most succinctly: “It was meant 2 b gr8 but it’s horrible.”xxiv Next time I will go along mob-handed.