Perambulations, knotty problems, and other (divided) lines of enquiry

As is usual in the over-leveraged, under-resourced world that I inhabit,  I've been suffering the effects of divided time/divided attention, attempting to keep a number of projects moving simultaneously.

Last week, I went to Newcastle to witness screenings of Hugh Kelly's films as part of Remaking Society and was reminded of just how much has changed in the years since he began working in community media on Tyneside 35 years ago. The abiding image was of his footage of the massive steel frame of the Millennium Bridge moving gracefully down the Tyne before being craned into place, cut together with a soundtrack of a young woman from East Gateshead singing about 'Hollywood Dreams' in a karaoke session in a working men's club (the club has since been demolished; Newcastle-Gateshead's very own "South Bank" is now firmly established, and there are plenty of unanswered questions to explore about 'whose culture is it anyway?' - the title of the screening). In that single sequence Hugh conjured together all the complicated issues about the industrial heritage of North East England making way for a different kind of economy; of the question of what all these rhetorics of  'creativity' and cultural participation are for; of the value of skilled, craft, manual labour almost evaporating as the so-called new/knowledge/creative economy is superimposed on working class communities, with symbolic totems of an industrial past re-purposed for contemporary art and culture. And underneath that, a story about the cultural politics of Northern England, globalisation, oh-so late capitalism and shifting narratives of 'regeneration'. We're going to interview Hugh at the start of June and try to tease out some more answers.

Oddly enough, the similarly de-industrialized and re-purposed spaces of the London Docklands cropped up again at the start of the month, with a trip with my practice-based methods students that began and ended with a drift through "Newham's newest neighbourhood" (if it can be called that), the empty spaces around ExCeL, where we slept. We took the Boris-backed, airline-branded cable car, which stretches out across the Thames like a kind of aspirational gesture, from where all the hollowed, divided, over- and under- capitalised communities of London's East can be seen stretched out on both sides of the river. More to write about that too. We were down there for a spot of urban drifting and exploration as part of the Cultural Hijack exhibition/event at the AA School, which has been put together by UWS PhD student Ben Parry and Glasgow-based artist Peter McCaughey. I'm there again later this week for a big series of events which bring the month to a close, including an exciting conference that we're running at RIBA with some luminaries from the interventionist/activist art worlds.

Alongside this I've been trying to keep the time free to finish off the Remaking Society project, or at least to move it into another phase. The central idea that we've been exploring has been to investigate the ways in which participatory cultural practices are generative of social relations, particularly for communities that are suffering significant hardship/economic deprivation. Linked this to are debates which come from Jon Hawkes' 'fourth pillar of sustainability' argument - trying to examine whether we can show that cultural participation is part of the generation of social wellbeing, of engagement and conversation, of imagining - and enacting - alternative futures. This has been most developed in policy terms in south Australia but there are traces of this argument elsewhere too, most particularly in the arts and health movement and in some of the more radical bits of the community arts movement.

I talked about this a bit at the Artworks conference in Lancaster - the need to try to reclaim the politics of participation and understand that there is a need for some critical engagement with the 'big narratives' of 'participation' or 'inclusion' - ought we to be asking more awkward and fundamental questions about the purpose and value of our work? But artists are also howling with rage at the moment about the effect of funding cuts, so there is an urgency in articulating models of value which can explain why public spending on cultural activity is socially useful/productive; of how it's a form of 'invest to save'?  At the same time, as François Matarasso pointed out at the Imagining Possibilities conference, art is valuable precisely because it is use-less - it matters more than being about simple, instrumentalised social utility or about making money. So do people value the arts and culture because they provide moments of transcendence from their everyday struggles? Or because forms of cultural participation are deeply bound-up with class and other social affliations? Or because cultural participation might be generative of forms of community? I'm quite taken with Greg Sholette and Oliver Ressler's argument that we should attempt to "rescue the notion of the social...through artistic means."

The culture/economy dyad exists in a permanent arm-wrestle. As does art/design: we design to 'solve problems' but art/performance (although they are designed processes) are less about explicit problem-solving or generating 'solutions.' It's interesting to see how people have seized on 'design' as a catch-all metaphor for what the arts and humanities can do for society - whilst design is undoubtedly important, it seems to me that 'problem-posing' is at least as important as 'problem-solving' and the teleologies, the functional logics, of design (which suit our performative times) can crowd out more fuzzy or oblique ways of thinking.

So these tensions are all a bit of a struggle to think through - which my colleagues from Grays School of Art Anne Douglas, Chris Fremantle and Paul Harris did in an interesting seminar they presented on work in progress about the relationships between participatory practices in the arts and user-centred design/communities of practice that we hosted at CCA a couple of weeks ago.

Tatzu Nishi, Ascending Descending from culturalhijack on Vimeo.

In some ways, Cultural Hijack, funded by a mix of distinguished backers, catalogues these issues well, with work in the exhibition that ranges from the whimsical and playful to the almost-illegal, and all of which certainly opposes any easy consensus about the spectacularized, centrally managed consumerist city. On the other hand, when these practices find their way into centres of urban power like AA and RIBA - do they get sanitised and neutralized?  Doesn't their power come from their 'outsider' status?

Within the Remaking Society project we've been trying to resist simplistic formulas for 'measuring' cultural value or wrapping everything up in definitions which are about either economic or 'social' capital. It's not that I don't think cultural economy is important - how stuff happens matters - how projects/organizations get financed, supported, brokered and produced is crucial - but I suppose I'm most interested in the kinds of cultural practices that resist a vision of commodification, being bought and sold...and aren't these actually what generate value? Greg Sholette's "Dark Matter" thesis, about which he will be talking at RIBA next Saturday, explores this. Regimes of performativity - such as the painful REF imperatives to elicit 'impact' - that insist on constant explanation/justification - of constantly generating what Stephen Ball calls 'performative fictions' within a hyper-competitve 'neo-realist' academic identity - are pretty inimical to any sense of community or productivity.

Several people pointed out in response to my last blog, about the '80s, Thatcherism and the present state of the culture business, that I'd failed to mention Neville Brody or The Face. I should have done, and also should have made reference to this Dick Hebdige piece from Hiding in the Light. Just on cue up popped Neville Brody in the Guardian with a characteristically provocative piece on the state of the creative economy which challenges the instrumentalization of Maria Miller's recent speech and the typically anodyne "GREATBritain" (or come to that "Year of Creative Scotland") marketing campaigns that seems to want to reduce UK design and culture to a series of nonsensical branded themepark cyphers. Cultural energy comes from grit and the challenge...not from pre-programmed, set-piece spectacle.

The visible formal cultural economy - markets, institutions, what is bought and sold - rests on a more slippery, less visible informal economy of cultural exchange - which is perhaps to be found in  the combinations of formal/informal learning, apprenticeship and radical interdisciplinarity and friction of particular 'scenes' and networks. We need to resist attempts to make everything measurable, demonstrable, or about buying and selling in marketplaces. The point about arts and cultural practices is that it's their murkiness  and playfulness that opens up 'spaces of possibility', spaces of imagination, imagining other futures. It follows that perhaps a less marketised less Thatcherite definition of 'cultural industry' (and certainly of 'university') is needed.

So that brings me back to another set of reasons to value participatory approaches to making and inventing - thinking about how to build forms of knowledge construction  that span disciplinary divides and build connections between different kinds of communities of interest. People who work in learning institutions should be seeking to enable this, providing infrastructures and support mechanisms that enable connection and collaboration. This is an organisational question and therefore, partially, financial, but it is above all cultural - i.e. the culture of how resources are allocated - the kind of climate and atmosphere in which we work - is it conducive? Is there trust, permission to experiment, calculated risk taking? This is clearly a question of design - in the sense that we need to design more intelligent, reflexive, participatory learning systems - but it's also a question of improvisation and performance...

In that spirit, my colleague Diarmuid McAuliffe and I, with a bit of money from Creative Scotland,  have been leading a project that has brought together a diverse group from across the University to make use of walking and drawing methodologies and exploring sites for learning - connecting outwards and building more networked and collaborative pedagogies - thinking about how to extend projects into external settings. These are more conversational, improvisational styles of teaching and learning - we're trying to generate conversations which are more mobile than fixed. The results of some of this work will be presented at an event we've organised on the Ayr Campus on the 18th June - which is part of the aptly named 'festival of dangerous ideas'. And we're really delighted that we'll be joined for the afternoon by Professor Tim Ingold to explore these lines of enquiry together. 

From record collecting to 'music curating'

From record collecting to 'music curating': cultures of discovery and consumption in a 'post-retail' age

Commercial Music Seminar Series 2012 - 13: No 6

Tuesday 9th April 2013

UWS Space, CCA Glasgow, 5.30pm - 7pm

Graham Jeffery

Reader in Music and Performance, UWS

All welcome - to book please contact Holly.Tessler@uws.ac.uk

My first exposure to the music industry, other than as an occasional public performer, came in the form of a shop-floor job in a celebrated but slightly grubby London specialist classical record store in my year off between school and university. In this talk I will reflect on just how much has changed in how recorded music is bought, sold and consumed since the heady and profitable days of the late eighties, which were arguably a kind of zenith for the record (and CD) industry; these were pre-mass internet days but just at the dawn of the digital revolution that would bring down most of the edifice of 'physical' music retail.  In 1987 Evan Eisenberg published a landmark book, The Recording Angel, which changed the way I (and many others) thought about cultures of collection and consumption of music. He named this field ‘phonography’, and of course since then much has been written in academic work and in fiction about the pleasures and intimacies of ‘crate digging’ and the random musical find, the place of rarity/scarcity in an era of pervasive media, the ‘long tails’  and short wait times of digital sleuthing, and shifts in business models forced by globalization, digitization, peer to peer sharing and fast data transfer. 

What is the future of music consumption, and collecting, now that so much purchasing has migrated online, into the supposedly weightless world of cloud storage? How do we keep and collect our musical treasures? Is the idea of a record shop now an hopeless anachronism or can we see some persistence in the idea of specialism, scarcity and authenticity as a marker of difference within the cultural sphere?

More on the histories of participatory arts

Here are the slides for a lecture I gave a couple of weeks ago for the 3rd year Performance students at UWS taking the Community Theatre module.

Participatory arts: an introduction to histories and issues from Graham Jeffery

Place Making, Place Breaking

Lots of discussions about 'place' and 'placemaking' over the last few weeks. In Paisley and Glasgow, with my colleagues Gayle McPherson and Liz Gardiner, we've been running a short course in Cultural Planning which through a mix of walking and talking and mapping has been enabling a small committed group to explore questions about the relationships of culture to planning and community development. We visited projects in Govan and Easterhouse which in different ways are  advocating for and accelerating locally rooted cultural provision, for the rights of residents to be able to access spaces and resources for self-expression and representation. We drew on a number of approaches but focussed in on the particular school of participatory cultural planning involving mapping local cultural resources which owes a lot to Franco Bianchini and Lia Ghilardi, but also which has much in common with the school of 'asset based community cultural development' championed by people like Tom Borrup and Arlene Goldbard in the USA.

Then, the week before last, we hosted a reception at the new UWS Ayr campus for delegates to Architecture and Design Scotland's Design Skills Symposium and there was much discussion about how Ayr might become a 'university town' rather than 'a town with a university'. This raised many questions about the idea of learning towns, access to learning resources; the question I left with was 'where does learning take place anyway?' I've always been more interested in the idea of educators  developing and designing learning environments, contexts and situations rather than formally planned instruction - learning through exchange and conversation, rather than through one way transactions (a.k.a. Freire's 'banking' education).  Next Monday night I'm chairing a discussion with the Ayr Converses group  which will focus on 'adaptation' - again thinking about how places can reinvent themselves through small tactical acts of reclamation and redesign of existing spaces and buildings.

In the intervening period I've been in Mumbai, visiting Ben Parry, the artist and researcher who's doing a PhD with us at UWS and whose edited volume Cultural Hijack: rethinking intervention tells some important hidden stories about radical public art practice over the last 30 years or so. He's doing a very different kind of ambulatory practice in the hot, dry, dusty and very dirty world of Dharavi, working with families, workers and NGOs in the 13th Compound, which is the core of the recycling business. There, in intense conditions in packed makeshift factories, teams of ultra low paid workers reprocess waste bought from the brokers who buy from the ragpickers who systematically scavenge from the tips of Mumbai, and turn it into raw materials and products that can be resold by their bosses - cans, paint, glue, wood, fabrics, plastics, bottles, metal fabrication, side by side with bakeries, food shops and every conceivable item for sale. It's free market economics in an unbridled form, barely regulated, with little regard for the long-term health of the people living there, but offering plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs and advancement.
And it runs at full steam with an apparently endless supply of cheap labour to feed the machine. The dark mirror of globalisation?

During this visit, Ben has been focussing on gathering together the stories of the families who were displaced from the section of the water pipeline that runs through the western boundary of the 13th Compound, when the city authorities came to bulldoze the settlement 18 months ago.

Dharavi, as one of the largest 'informal' urban agglomerations in Asia, has been written about and researched relentlessly. As an 'urban enterprise zone' it has become globally known and regularly attracts the attention of researchers seeking to understand the dynamics of Asian megacities, models of entrepreneurship and issues in public health/development.  Prior to demolition, the section along the pipeline had become a particularly iconic location, not least because tourists and photographers could stand on the bridge on the Mahim Sion Link Road and shoot telephoto portraits of the inhabitants without having to seek permission or venture further inside. It was also used as a location to produce cover shots for National Geographic and featured in Slumdog Millionaire. Ben's project, Reversing the Gaze, seeks to interrogate "his own outsider 'gaze' and that of others who come to extract knowledge about Mumbai's informal urban practices."

There will be a small exhibition of photographs on the bridge next to the offices of Ben's current hosts, the Acorn Foundation, and some of this work will feed into more projects that Ben will develop over the next couple of years. Acorn is an NGO that does advocacy and education work with children and their families, with a particular focus on access to artistic expression. We travelled with the young people of Acorn to an air-conditioned downtown auditorium where they performed in a high energy junk percussion ensemble to a well-heeled audience of diplomats, donors and dignitaries. A collision of lives and worlds, anaethetised by emollient speeches about the need to do more for the condition of the poor, all made by people who'll never have to live anywhere like Dharavi. Ben will present a talk at CCA Glasgow about the project on the 23rd November, and a podcast/audiovisual piece of documentation is coming soon.

All of these experiences have made me reflect on how important it is to try to think beyond the simplistic binary categories/shorthands that are used to describe the different conditions in which people live, and the ways in which public political debates tend to boil down complex problems to simple slogans - an inevitablilty of policymaking and advocacy perhaps. What is at stake when heavily populated, heavily utilised, heavily productive urban areas are described as 'no-go areas' or 'slums'? The relationships between the formal/informal, the  so-called affluent and the deprived, the 'socially included' and 'socially excluded' are not easily understood as polar opposites once there's an encounter with material social worlds. A fascination with the condition of urban poor has preoccupied writers and explorers for centuries, from Henry Mayhew through Jack London through George Orwell, amongst many others, but the key question is - who gets to write/inscribe whose histories? In whose interests are these stories being told? Perhaps it suits city authorities just to write off zones of apparent poverty and extremity, and the story of the destruction of the pipeline community is a particularly potent example of an urban hotspot where these narratives of inclusion and exclusion, of formal infrastructure and informal habitation, of questions of land value and labour value, collide in explosive ways.

Now back in Scotland, I'm thrust straight into the Love Milton and Theatre Modo projects which are being undertaken as part of the Remaking Society intiative - which in some ways connect with these issues because they are also concerned with trying to articulate and demonstrate an 'asset-based' approach to community cultural development which tries to view communities as resourceful and gifted, unlocking potential rather than writing zones off as 'deprived'.

Places are designed, but they are also performed - they are the product of multiple interactions across power structures, economic flows, cultural norms etc; Designers and planners might think that they manipulate the conditions - economic, social, material - in which interactions take place but everyday performance - how places/objects are inhabited and used -  also shapes and reshapes them. This dynamic might also be used to describe the tensions between masterplanning (hierarchical) approaches and user-centred design (network/peer-to-peer); the actuality is that there is always an relationship between the two and this clash of perspectives, where grand infrastructure projects seem to be presented as 'solutions' is thrown into sharp relief in megacities like Mumbai. In this video, National Geographic seems to like the idea of using India's ingenuity and expertise in large-scale engineering to build massive bypasses: 

However, it's interesting that the solutions promoted by city planners focus on free flowing highways and arterial infrastructure, servicing the orgy of high rise development underway; there may well be other more indigenous and appropriate solutions to issues of urban improvement if the planners paid more attention to the actual patterns of inhabitation that shape the way most people survive.

Places are also the product of narratives - shaped by all the different stories that are told and retold about them. So sensitive urban development has to start with an understanding of the complexities of power and acknowledge the expertise and inside knowledge of people who live in particular situations. Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of Urbz, the organisation which facilitated Ben's passage into Dharavi, articulate this dynamic in thoughtful ways: 

           "A combination of greed, prejudice, and ideological bias prevents the authorities from    supporting the incremental, locally-driven development of Dharavi. The labeling of it as a ‘slum’ has the perverse effect of delegitimizing a neighborhood altogether and thus justifying the lack of provision of public services. This is because slum dwellers are perceived as squatters who have no rights to the city.  Thus, the label of ‘slum’ is itself the biggest obstacle in the improvement of the quality of life in Dharavi and other such settlements. This is why through actual and conceptual intervention we aim at normalizing a neighborhood that doesn’t have much to gain from being described as an exception. What we should recognize is that Dharavi is a natural urban formation, unique and banal at once. It is the tip of the iceberg. Dharavi is urban India at its best, because it is a testimony to the capacity of people to lift themselves up against all odds; and at its worst because it also has the messed up aspect of a creature that was beaten up, marginalized and oppressed by powerful forces over too many years."

Contrast this approach with the teleologies and ideologies of competitive world city discourses - the way governments and authorities talk about positioning cities so that they can be high performers/winners in the economic arms race, of branding, of 'attracting inward investment'. In recent years the language of policy makers and their corporate 'partners' seems to have focussed on making Mumbai  a 'world class city' which given the intense congestion, creaking infrastructure and spectacular income differentials, presents considerable planning paradoxes.  In one sense Mumbai could be read as a paradigmatic future city, here right now - it presents a vision of what happens when neoliberal capitalism is allowed to unfold without reference to the right to the city of all citizens - a chaotic, dense, dynamic clash of commerce, cultures, classes; a dynamic that might find some of its origins in the experience of colonial rule and in the wider economic histories of India's exposure to globalisation processes.  In the meantime, the corporate world seems to be doing its best to erase from view much of the actual condition of the majority citizens of this 'world city' and instead fetishize the immense 'wealth creation' opportunities for the winners in the economic race. It's interesting to think about to whom this clever ad is addressed: 

Such  dreamworlds of neoliberalism seem to me to be a horribly inadequate response,  given the challenges of making the most basic human rights entitlements -  a decent standard of sanitation, housing, education, healthcare etc - available to the majority of the population. But of course Mumbai is far from unique in this dynamic. The privileged and powerful always seek to shape place narratives in their own interests. And the sheer size, scale, energy and dynamism of India and its ambitious, optimistic peoples provides plenty of possibility for radical change. Here's a documentary called "Build it Bigger" about the remaking of Mumbai's main airport. 

What if the current effort to promote "global infrastructure" could be connected to a similar intensity of ambition to improve basic local infrastructure or greater equity of access to resources? A segment of contemporary India's relentless persuit of growth and 'wealth creation' appears to have become largely uncoupled from the attempts to promote social progress or economic development for the poorest half of the population. A model for David Cameron or Mitt Romney to emulate perhaps? 

The dystopian networked metropolis, gamified

I think Ubisoft's (eventually) forthcoming title, Watch Dogs, looks interesting. It taps into so many contemporary themes:

• Cultures of surveillance, hacking and control
• The hyper-networked systems on which urban life has become so dependent
• Cybercrime and terrorism
• Privacy and the blurring of public/private life
• Privatisation and enclosure of cities through corporate power

Admittedly, we've only seen a short preview so far, and much can change between design, realisation and release, but it caught my attention. The game plays on an old cinematic/narrative theme, of the lone (anti?) hero pitted against a relentless machine-run state in a pin-sharp simulation of the Chicago Loop. The demo video (above) assaults the senses with intertextualities drawn not only from game worlds (most obviously the Assassin's Creed/Grand Theft Auto open worlds) but also from contemporary cinematic and journalistic anxieties and preoccupations.

In an almost-now Chicago, the city is run by an integrated set of mainframe computers controlled by corporations, and the hero has a smartphone that allows him (and it always seems to be him, doesn't it?) to hack into his surroundings and the devices owned by the other characters, who are cyphers in a vast informational network. Despite the detailed rendering of Chicago's downtown architecture, there's something distinctly postmodern-knowing about the way in which the gameplay signals a city of sensors, networks and symbols: spaces built as much out of informational flows as from physical artefacts. This particular rendition of the city constantly, knowingly, refers back to its own digital origins. It's a virtual space of screens-within-screens, of networked avatars/citizens/bots (and can we tell the difference?) who are occupying a hyperconnected set of situations that can rapidly turn hostile. 

From what the designers have said, they're also aiming to build in interactivity that can spill over into the material world through mobile phone/tablet apps. So the game also offers some potential to cross over between the simulated world and the material world. 

We are becoming habituated to blurring the boundaries between sensory and digital impressions of places, from Google Maps to GPS. We are also becoming accustomed, through the increasing application of 'augmented reality', to look at where we are from different angles at once, or to drill down through layers of information served up at high speed on mobile devices to find clues about our surroundings in an almost Cubist reality-mashup of multiple perspectives.



The city on screen, the informational city, and the physical worlds are becoming increasingly blurred in a way first most comprehensively identified by William Mitchell in City of Bits, but, now, hyper-accelerated and with far more responsive (and potentially threatening) systems driving the energy/food/transportation/informational universes that we inhabit.

Of course we've seen plenty of this in science fiction before, of simulations within simulations, screens within screens - in the imaginary film worlds of Brazil, Minority Report, Blade Runner, The Matrix, etc. Surveillance anxiety and the consequences of uncovering private data and secret information are clearly not novel themes in fact or fiction. The ways in which technologies become taken for granted, and the ideologies that underpin our assumptions of technological progress, have been extensively explored elsewhere.  But  this game invites the player to act as a neural agent/hacker with the ability to tap into urban infrastructures, both personal and civic, and alter the way the world around us responds.  Presumably this level of interactivity might also allow users to upload clues and missions of their own into the neural net of the city.  

Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin are geographers whose work on networked, splintering infrastructures exploded the claimed neutrality/impartiality of the politics of urban planning that lie beneath the smooth surfaces and  highly engineered 'user experiences' of fast informational capitalism. More recently, the growth of what Graham calls military urbanism has revealed the extent to which dystopias and disjunctures are alive in the present, despite rhetorics of smart cities, intelligent grids, and surveillance providing security. 

We see some of the unforseen consequences of dependence on automated information management systems in the consequences of high frequency trading and disasters when power grids go down. (Another prompt for this post has been the beginning of discussions with a new doctoral student at HdM Stuttgart, Andrea Braeuning, who is examining concepts around 'smart cities').

The late Tony Scott also tapped into these themes for his fast-paced 2009 remake of 1970s film The Taking of Pelham 123, this time set in an informationalized, post-crash New York City:

Add to this sense of an edge-of-chaos informational city - only just under control - what could well be justified paranoia about the mass of data held about us by corporations, governments, the security services and informational policing - and it's not a big leap back to some of the popular concerns of the 60s and 70s about the consequences of automation and cybernetics and the alienation and anxiety that might be produced as a result. 

I'm also reminded of the short-lived QDOS online ranking service promoted by cybersecurity company garlik.com (beloved of financial services companies and those anxious about identity theft) which was promoted in this slightly odd video back in 2007. 



What is flagged here is the extent to which our physical security may well depend on data security in the future - information literally is power - and why we should be concerned about the control, governance and trading of that information. We still inhabit biological ecologies, but we are increasingly dependent on  electrical/informational ecologies for survival, a theme explored on film in Godfrey Reggio's work, which grew out of the Institute for Regional Education (sadly I can't find any of the early pre Qatsi-series IRE films online, as they illustrate these themes very well). 

Although in Watch Dogs virtual Chicago and its unfortunate virtual inhabitants have been given a bludgeoning makeover to fulfil the destructive fantasies of habitual gamers, and plenty of cinematic gloss,  I imagine that the game might also offer possibilities to work through its scenarios informationally rather than violently. However - and this is novel - a key mechanism of the game involves unleashing violence through informational control.  The player becomes the private investigator, the hacker, the vigilante, the seeker in a world of hidden threats, urban noir and whispers. It's a long way back to Fritz Lang and Weimar Germany, but I can't help thinking that there's a connection between the way in which 'M' explores how the density of urban contact amplifies narratives of fear and terror, and the way in which this post-millienial interactive fiction might unfold. 




An interview with James Morin, the creative director of the project, in the Guardian, explains the way in which the design team is approaching the notion of medium/message mashup : "...that's exactly what we are trying to pull off: the online metaphor is online! We want to talk about the internet and the way it affects our lives and we can do it in a way that no other game can. That's what lead us to the cross-platform aspect. It opens all sorts of really crazy doors for us."

There's a tradition in strategy games of simulated urban infrastructures, from SimCity and Grand Theft Auto to the various transportation/urban design applications that are out there. In this game, the infrastructure can be turned against the city's inhabitants - to devastating effect - conjuring images from disaster movies and unleashing apocalyptic terror. None of these effects are original by themselves, but it's the way the game mashes up different genres that offers some interesting representations of and insights on the world that we may be coming to inhabit, in a way that doesn't seem to distance the viewer from the imagined world, in contrast to previous generations of darkly humorous and dystopian open world games such as the Fallout series. 




So Watch Dogs presents a glittering, iridescent city of surfaces, a city of dark possibilities which, realised in the everday world would really not be pleasant, if you happened to be on the receiving end of militarized public intervention, caught up in urban guerilla warfare, or a victim of a determined lone gunman (or hacker).

Will games like Watch Dogs prompt questions about, or habituate us to the more dystopian potentials of the contemporary 'smart city'?  Will this next generation of 'smart games' perhaps stimulate a debate, within a popular cultural space, about the extent to which the contemporary world remains an iron cage - in which the apparent benefits of networked identities in a hyper-technologized world are double-edged, ambiguous, and slippery?

Gil Scott-Heron (1949 - 2011): The Message

No doubt thousands of column inches will be devoted to describing the 'legacy' of Gil Scott-Heron as a prophet, a pioneer, a genius etc. All true enough, but such words hardly do justice to the significance - and eloquence -  of his work in expressing, embodying, chronicling the struggle of African-Americans and of all those trying to stand up for human rights, social justice and liberty.





Here he is in Central Park, NYC in 2010, where despite the ravages of 61 years of personal and political struggle, his wit and his ability to mock the hypocrisy of the powerful and the contradictions of the "land of the free" in tightly constructed phrases is as strong as ever...In a perceptive profile in the Observer, written to mark the release of his first album in 16 years, Sean O'Hagan writes about the way in which "most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle." But yet he still had much to communicate. 


That voice, those words, and those eyes say more than I ever could in text.

Keith Floyd

I'm sad about the death of Keith Floyd. Not that it was particularly unexpected - it was easy to see that he'd been in a slow unravelling process for years - but because he was one of the great iconoclasts of British cookery. I grew into cooking watching his programmes with my culinary mentor, my aunt Clare Jeffery, in the late 1980s. His chaotic, passionate approach (which, despite the buffonery, was always underpinned by a rigorous attention to detail in ingredients and processes) opened up a world of possibilities. Gastronomy didn't have to be stuffy, and it didn't have to be difficult; Floyd made it popular and fun.

After Floyd, television cookery could never be the same again. The collaboration with producer and cameraman created an almost Brechtian approach which meant that all the joins, snips and tricks of the trade were laid bare. Floyd artfully and wittily mocked the pretentions and conventions of food TV. The tributes from his successors make it pretty clear that he built the foundations - the informality, the documentary approach, getting out of the studio and into the open air and 'ordinary' kitchens - on which their own towering careers rest. And he worked fast - bashing together the dishes with ebullience and humour, his confidence inspiring the same risk-taking extravagance in others. In that sense perhaps he also embodied the 'live now, pay later' ethic (if it can be called that) that has come somewhat unstuck over the last couple of years. He was flawed, he was rude and difficult, but he was also a brilliant, inspiring cook: a culinary artist.

In the '80s, food taste was changing fast, fuelled by the ever-widening availability of ingredients from across the globe, rising affluence, and the consumerism that Mrs Thatcher unleashed on UK society. Floyd stood for decent ingredients, the pleasure of cooking and good company. He changed the way food was talked about on television, and he played the bon viveur in a way that secretly perhaps many wanted to emulate, despite the destruction that it caused in his life away from the cameras. His shows and his story contain all the seeds of the media forms that have come to dominate the next two decades - he became the apotheosis of the celebrity chef, with books, personal appearances, and all the other paraphenalia of fame - without Floyd there would be no Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein, Gordon Ramsay and the rest. And to his shows he brought a postmodern wit that appealed directly to the viewer, inviting the audience to help to unpick the processes of documenting how to cook, even as it celebrated them.

Here he is, cooking with a family in France, in a clip which captures all that was great about his approach. The Keith Meets Keith documentary is pretty compulsive viewing too but I guess this is how most people will prefer to remember him.

Creative Scotland?

This is an edited version of a talk I gave last week at a half day ‘thinktank’ exploring what vision the new body Creative Scotland (formed by a merger of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen) should have for ‘learning and skills.”

Building creative capacities

How is Creative Scotland going to make a distinctive contribution in a very crowded field of policy and practice? And what should its ‘vision’ be?

There is a tendency for people to talk about creativity as if it were one thing. In fact there are many different kinds of creativity and many different Scotlands. That’s a source of social strength and cultural richness, but although glib elisions of ‘learning, skills, creativity and Scotland’ alongside photographs of kids with video cameras, crowded auditoria and enthusiastic library users might conjure up images of national success, competitiveness and innovation, it will take a lot more than the rhetoric of a knowledge economy to produce a knowledgeable and talented society. Getting the headline narrative right is important but it will be no substitute for enabling people to make real changes.

We shouldn’t just assume that learning and skills can be boiled down to one thing either – in fact you can probably be trained in ‘basic skills’ without learning very much, or at least developing the capacity to learn for yourself. But perhaps creativity and knowledge are two sides of the same coin, and ‘skills’ all the different ways in which the coin can be flipped, and if Scotland is going to be a place which develops the skills of its whole population then creativity is going to be vitally important.

Knowledge isn’t raw information, it’s the capacity to interpret, process, analyse and create new ideas from existing materials. Skills aren’t just measurable competences that can be ticked off on learner profiles; to be genuinely skilled is to possess a kind of artistry which is the capacity to go beyond the routine and everyday, and mobilise tacit knowledge, intuition and a deep sense of purpose and possibility – in whatever field you happen to be working.

Of course Creative Scotland needs to promote the value of creative and cultural learning, but there are three important caveats:

1. Not all forms of culture are necessarily experienced by audiences or participants as 'creative'. A lot of cultural and educational institutions have a lot to learn about creativity, even though aspects of their work can teach us a lot about creativity too. Moreover, different communities find different value in different kinds of cultural activities – there can be no single arbiter of quality in a complex culturally diverse society.

2. Science, technology, management and accounting can all be creative too

3. The challenge is to articulate a vision that is inclusive and inspiring, but not vague

As a colleague from the US, Mat Schwartzman, who has a talent for one liners, puts it:

“creativity is a muscle”

which can be used in lots of different ways.


Creative and cultural policy?

In policy speak there tends to be elision of creativity and culture. The official line tends to stress the economic benefits of the creative economy – and have a strong rhetoric about capacity for innovation and supporting ‘excellence’ in cultural provision – but:

• creativity and cultural questions can be uncomfortable and challenging
• culture can give rise to knowledge that doesn’t fit easily into official versions of the knowledge economy,
• truly innovative and creative work challenges consensus - curators, commissioners and customers have to cross the lines between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the traditional and the avant-garde, all the time if you want work that is going to be challenging
• a lot of the reasons why people participate in art and culture aren’t primarily economic, but artists still have to eat...

If we agree that creative and cultural learning is important then Creative Scotland needs to be a champion of a country in which everyone can experience creative learning.

For me, creative learning is fundamentally about a sense of agency, of being able to make and remake, of being able to invent – in small or large ways. Not everyone will innovate (that is to say, embed their creativity systematically and change social or technological processes) but everyone is creative – and the notion of promoting creativity as a life skill is important – a skill not just for work (although that’s important too) but a muscle that can be exercised at all stages of life, in all situations. It’s welcome that this is clearly flagged in the public thinking around Creative Scotland to date.

Creative Scotland will need to address:

• training for arts and cultural, and media professions – building and advocating for the infrastructure in Scotland for this – and addressing issues of funding, pathways, and partnerships along with all the other agencies responsible for education and training

• professional development and professional learning for practitioners in the creative industries at all stages of their career, from entrance to exit

• learning about and valuing culture across all sectors/segments of learning

• lifelong learning and community learning, experiencing and learning through different media and the arts

• the contribution that artists, cultural institutions, and storytelling through media make to placemaking, well-being and quality of life.

• how culture creates a sense of distinctiveness and identity. It’s the quality of cultural expression that gives a place its distinctive characteristics – and this cultural expression appears in architecture, in design decisions about the built and social environment, in literature and storytelling, in fashion, media, cinema, radio, television, and everyday language. Culture is the conversation that a society has with itself on a daily basis. So learning and culture are totally intertwined.

I worry about Paisley, where I live, when the most visible monuments of its incredible cultural heritage, other than a lot of great 19th century architecture in fairly poor condition, are black and white photographs of Victorian mill workers on the walls of Morrisons supermarket. The everyday disconnect with the place’s incredible cultural heritage – and potential - is evident in the lack of ambition for the place, which often seems to be limited to more supermarkets, more retail sheds, more service centres, more motorways, more low grade jobs. That’s no recipe for a cultural or creative renaissance. Other towns and cities in Scotland with a similar history have fared rather better – perhaps a job for Creative Scotland is to champion the ways in which culture and creativity can contribute to place-making in its broadest sense.

And we know that although the arts, culture and media can make an important contribution to the economy, they are also there precisely because they speak about those things that can’t be accounted for or measured.

The arts are too important just to be left to the market.

Creativity and Scotland’s cultures

Creative and cultural learning isn’t just about more entertainment, beautification and aesthetic appreciation – bread, circuses, monuments, or classic texts - but also about engaging in dialogue and debate – isn’t that what effective learning is supposed to be about? Culture is a conversation – sometimes it’s a constructive dialogue, sometimes it’s loud, vocal, dissenting, difficult, sometimes obscure and hard to understand, sometimes direct and to the point.

Scotland has a fantastic heritage of critical dissent and activism which continues to be kept alive by new generations of artists through places like Citizens Theatre in the Gorbals, the Greater Easterhouse Arts Company, Craigmillar, and in communities in the Highlands and Islands that have sustained an incredibly rich cultural life on very limited resources.

Scotland has big questions to confront and I’d suggest that the arts, film and theatre do this rather better – you get more subtle and nuanced responses - than the politicians generally do.

There will be many Creative Scotlands - the commercial and the subsidised, the classical and the vernacular, the traditional and the popular – and lots of different types of work. In fact, especially in a small country, many workers move almost seamlessly between these worlds and perhaps its better not to get too hung up on the distinctions. On the other hand it’s important to understand some of the differences. Paying for the time of some musicians and some artists to undertake some artistic experiments in a cave and make an experimental film, like the one I worked on with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Durness last year, is a very different proposition to trying to produce a No 1. single or the next big movie made in Scotland.

But without the creative soil to grow the big moneymaking trees in, they will fall over and dry up for lack of nourishment from the grassroots (to over-extend an already over-used metaphor).

We need a vibrant commercial media/culture industry, we need a strong education/training sector and we also need not for profit organisations. We need to recognise the value of informal participation and the work of the voluntary and community sector, because culture and creativity is too important to be left to the marketplace. So a learning strategy needs to acknowledge all this and ensure it provides more than the minimum for all. This is a considerable challenge/balancing act because each of these sectors speaks different languages, has different antecedents, and different expectations. There’s a translating and negotiating job to be done. But value can be found in linking together the formal and the informal and developing conversations between different communities.

A second related issue, which it’s really important not to overlook, is what I call the informal creative economy – i.e. all the activity around and on the fringes of the officially recognised cultural sector. If we’re talking about the creative economy we need to pay attention to the shadow economy – the ways in which people find ways in – not just the official economy. That includes voluntary participation, informal clubs and associations, and the role of religious, ethnic and political affiliations in making meanings through cultural activity.

The simplest way to do this is to make time and space for people to do their own thing. When I think about my students working flat out in breaks between lessons in the studio to rehearse and record, I realise that those sort of informal learning places and spaces, because they are immersive and self-organised, are often more productive for musical learning than formal instruction. Room 13, which is developing offshoots all over the world, explores similar ideas using the visual arts and a radical commitment to learner autonomy, from Fort William. But because policy money usually has to be attached to measurement of outputs, for reasons of ‘value for taxpayers’ etc, there is often a squeeze on space for informal experiment. When public funding is attached to creativity, there will always be tension between ‘delivery’ (delivery of what?) and incubation (preparing for the unknown).

I suspect that the strategic potential of arts and media activity to support cultural cohesion and sustain community development, as well as the tourism, retail and media industries, are still not fully understood by government agencies and policymakers, who sometimes confuse the ends with the means. Culture does not exist to ‘deliver’ social policy objectives, but there is plenty of evidence that participation in cultural activity can lead to social gains. However, artists are artists precisely because they don’t want to tow the line and because they can offer a different perspective to established orthodoxies. Grit and challenge are important – part of a democratic culture.

A confident and vibrant society would be one in which there are creative opportunities – in which quality of life, health, and a sense of wellbeing, engagement, and citizenship are all present.

Ideas

So, to conclude, here are four ideas for the dimensions of a possible vision to consider:

1. Infrastructure issues – the institutions and networks which provide the learning opportunities – how they work, how they are funded, how they are supported, how they can collaborate and build shared agendas. Because resources are scarce, collaboration tends to work better than competition but people in educational and cultural institutions need to learn how to make these work better...

2. Intelligence issues – helping practitioners and participants to access knowledge and skills – to advocate and publicise work, to access the learning resources that they need – given that a lot of artists and cultural practitioners have a pretty precarious existence it will be important that Creative Scotland is forward looking, strategic, helpful and a source of good information and intelligence...

3. Innovation issues – professional learning and development to make creativity sustainable, and systemic change in the cultural sector, in the education sector, in the public and private sector which embeds a vision of creative learning not just in the school curriculum but throughout all stages of life

4. Inclusion issues – how to maintain open and participatory institutions, remove barriers and obstacles to participation, enable dissent and difference and embed a sense of opportunity – I was really pleased to see the idea that formal/informal learning will be woven together in the new Curriculum for Excellence – that’s an essential ingredient of creative teaching and learning

To which perhaps we could add a fifth – internationalism – not just taking cultural products from Scotland and the UK to the global marketplace (although that’s important) but also to exchange learning – with europe, the US, the developing world, etc. and to understand that forging links and networks with like-minded people globally will be the way to build a sense of momentum and opportunity around this work.

In a difficult economic climate, advocacy and innovation will be crucial and it’s really important that we don’t just have retrenchment to the tried and tested given that public money will be tight – therein lies a failure of nerve and ultimately this will also lead to economic failure, as well as further social divisions.

Culture and creativity provide the tools to make sense of the world – to tell meaningful stories – to make sense of the present and to build and imagine possible futures.

So – let’s hope that Creative Scotland will be funding work which is catalytic, which moves the debate forward, which isn’t about duplication, and which builds capacity for creativity...so that the all the different Scotlands can train, build and flex and their creative muscles in the years to come.