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?

Tidying up and keeping track...

Archiving and capturing information when you're so highly reliant on an ever-changing swarm/web infrastructure can be a challenge. There's something satisfying and tactile about a physical book or artefact, and fires, plagues or floods permitting, they are reasonably secure stores of information. Not the case with the web, where resources and infrastructures which were once heavily trafficked can vanish into nothing overnight as corporations, governments or skint organisations switch the servers off.

There are several tasks I need to accomplish over the next few months. One is to digitise and store analogue material from my archive of projects and outputs from the last 20 years: not too many are worth salvaging but those that are, I intend to put online and back up to hard drive; and also I need to check back through the various blogs I've built, download and archive the important bits, and try to make sure the links are current.

This relates to another project I'm just beginning to compile on the various histories of what have been called, at different times, community and participatory, and more recently "socially-engaged" arts (as if art could ever not be social...although some practitioners and connoisseurs would prefer to keep the arts liberal-individual). More about that at another point, although it clearly links to the work that we're doing on the Remaking Society project, as the same thing seems to come up again and again - the point I've repeatedly made about the need to be a bit clearer about the genealogies, histories and typologies of the various strands of participatory arts practice.  In one sense it could be argued that we are moving towards a much more participatory culture, in which the tools and resources to produce and communicate are cheap and almost ubiquitous, but the problem remains that there's no way it is possible to describe the world as democratically organised, not least when the symbolic violence of giant corporate spectacles so dominates public discourse, and wealth of all kinds is so unevenly distributed. So deconstructing and reconstructing terms like 'participation', 'community' and 'collaboration' becomes incredibly important, especially if we want to reclaim them as valid tactical approaches to cultural production. There are some good recent bits of work that have done just this -  for example in some of the scoping studies for the AHRC's Connected Communities programme, and of course the Kester vs Bishop barney about 'socially engaged' art is worth a look too.

Anyway, it might just be worth re-capping where the various bits of information about my various obsessions are to be found. This blog chronicles a fair bit of my work over the last five years, and to go earlier you'd need to read the Creative College book, which captures what we were up to in East London before that, and then fled the scene before the Olympic tsunami hit. The UWS blogs have information about my current workplace and the research and development agendas being pursued there. The 'museum of..." series is a repository for what I think is interesting ephemera from the 1970s, '80s and '90s. I guess I should also start a 'museum of the 00s' but in some ways I'm more interested in thinking about how we got here than doing lots of recent digging through the dirty world of neoliberal fast capitalism. I've also been thinking a lot about 'network pedagogies' and how digital/distributed learning combined with face-to-face might open up possibilities for much more porous forms of learning organisation and learning architectures.

I guess the other thing to consider is that in the liquid, digital world approaches and strategies constantly melt and change. But this just makes it even more important to be aware of how and why we do what we do...

Chicago

An old panhandler on the corner reads Rumi.

basketball player on hotel carpet signs autographs

crew cut man in shades barks instructions in his iPhone

the city of broad shoulders breaks easy

Black wallet left on a coffee shop table

Colorado driver's license and cards inside

For a split second I switch identities

Then hand in the case at the desk

Sunlight beats down on the buildings

Sidewalks heavy with concrete & steel shadows

In the city of broad shoulders

what will be left when the winners leave town?

5 mins after, man in shorts sweeps the shop

Did you see my wallet?

he asks, I tell.

three sixty dollars cash gone since he left it

a sharper thief emptied it first

City of fast bucks for some

for others, broke luck

About Time

My 43rd birthday arrives, and finds me in a somewhat introspective mood.

I've spent most of the last four years juggling projects. Far too many projects, with not enough of them reaching a satisfactory conclusion. A lot of stuff that previously I thought was at the centre of my work has been pushed out to the edges. It's been a strange time - up until around 2006/7, my work felt much more coherent, with a trajectory built up from more than a decade of solid, well supported collaborations with great colleagues in east London that brought together lots of my interests, and culminated in some decent publications and a reasonably coherent professional narrative. The last few years, particularly since 2008, have felt a lot more fragmented and fractious.

I've always had a magpie-like approach to disciplines and lacked the personal 'discipline' to do anything in massive depth - I have preferred breadth and connectivity to the microscopic focus on the particular that many academics settle for. That makes me useful for organisations that want people who are able to work 'between' and 'across' disciplines, which has become a bit of a speciality for me.

So I've been working on strategy, planning and collaboration in the School of Creative and Cultural Industries at UWS, which is now beginning to bear some fruit; the new Ayr campus offers massive opportunities and we've also refurbished some rooms in Paisley to bring together researchers in spaces that try to promote collaboration. We're also pushing forward with projects and collaborations in Glasgow, through Film City, the CCA and GI, and in Ayr, with the refurbishment of the Gaiety Theatre, and have been successful in beginning to get some funding for projects through our Skillset Media Academy. We've been working on very many fronts at once to try to create a networked academic infrastructure that promotes pathways into meaningful work for students and also levers the power and resources of the university in support of regeneration and social/economic development. 

We've established some research centres - in particular Creative Futures and our Creative Practice/Research Group, which are trying to draw together a disparate group of colleagues to work in support of this agenda, and pull out common threads for discussion and action. A lot of this kind of work, rooted in an awareness of the potential of the university as a public service provider and a catalyst for change, is about relationship building - but, as so often happens, individuals get caught in the gaps and inconsistencies between the rhetoric and the reality, where the rhetoric often runs far ahead of the reality and where a sense of trust, confidence and the capacity to make things happen needs a lot of development. In a sense, as Bourdieu wrote, we have to mediate between the spotlit 'front room' and the back rooms of change-making:  "among the tasks of a politics of morality [is] to work incessantly toward unveiling hidden differences between official theory and actual progress, between the limelight and the backrooms of political life."

If creativity is about agency - the capacity to make and do - then we need to build a climate which enables people to understand 'the art of the possible', which designs in opportunities for growth, and which, given that we are "publicly funded and publicly accountable" (the mantra of obsessive accountants everywhere) still meets regulatory requirements. We need creative systems, generative systems, not just bureaucratic systems. It's not simply systems-versus-creativity; there are no magic formulae; but we know a creative climate and a creative organisation when we experience one - we build the culture as we go. Systems AND creativity not either-or.

Within all this maelstrom of change I've been very excited by working with @UWScreative doctoral researchers - great people like Ben Parry, Jennifer Jones, Chris Dooks, Alison Bell and Gail Sneddon, and I have many good colleagues who successfully navigate between the academic and artistic domains. There is loads of potential for UWS to support cultural practice-as-research which also has societal impact (a kind of holy grail in current higher education jargon...) But it's also a struggle to have this kind of work understood, especially when there's a constant, nagging, focus on the empty buzzwords of 'entrepreneurship, employability, enhancement' etc. Thus requiring yet more translation, explanation, and mediation to try to build an academic agenda that is critical, reflective and actually generates work with significance. It's exhausting for everyone. There are far too many 'empty signifiers' to contend with, and not enough time for the thinking/doing that would actually generate new insights. 

The point is that achieving change - something, for example, that the dreadful, self-obsessed, lacklustre UK government has no conception of  - is far less about constantly banging on about outputs, performance or 'difficult choices' and much more about lived values and qualities. Working in the porous and pressurised postmodern university necessitates constant mediation between the tyrannies of planning grids, learning outcomes charts, metrics etc and the messy and turbulent world of everyday social interaction. However, planning grids, no matter how demanding they might be, can't lock down sociality - it's in the conversations and the encounters that people learn - so the question needs to be - what kinds of conversations do our systems promote? Are the conversations good enough? Are we doing enough to facilitate good conversations? In education, and organisations more generally - rather than constantly exhorting people to 'perform', perhaps we should spend more time thinking about whether we've got the conditions right that enable them to perform?  Climate, circumstances, context. "Quality" resides in the quality of interaction between members of the community, not in abstract measures of value. 

Money (that useful symbolic token which enables the purchase of time) remains scarce and seems likely to be so into the future. And I'm pretty exhausted with all this negotiation, particularly while my personal circumstances continue to be far more precarious than I would like. In such circumstances, the smart use of time is essential - we shouldn't be wasting money on ineffective meetings or pointless procedures. The question leaders should be asking is - what will it cost us NOT to change? (Of course, it suits élites just fine to maintain the status quo, but that's another story).

A few mantras that I keep repeating:

- saying or writing something is not the same as doing something: just because you've written something needs to happen doesn't mean it will happen
- we need to avoid 'fantasy management' where we paper over cracks and don't address issues
- and I'm back to 'hacking the organisation' as a founding metaphor for making things happen.

I have continued to be preoccupied with

-  questions of culture and value, in particular how cultural participation 'works'

-  network pedagogies and ways of fostering collaborative learning architectures

-  how to make good use of increasingly scarce time and resources

We can't go on, we must go on, we go on.

Remaking Society

Just heard that the Connected Communities 'pilot demonstrator' bid to AHRC submitted jointly with Tom Wakeford and Kerrie Schaefer has been successful. We'll set up a separate project blog in due course, but here's the summary of the project. Some fantastic partners for this project, including Mission Models Money, Cadispa Trust, NHSGGC, Theatre Modo, Bradford Community Broadcasting, Swingbridge Media, Love Milton and the inestimable Jon Hawkes. All very exciting. 

Remaking Society
Realising the potential of cultural activities in contexts of deprivation

Remaking Society will exemplify the central themes of the Connected Communities Programme via three inter-dependent routes:

i) Working with local partners in demonstrating and assessing participatory cultural
activities in four contrasting contexts of deprivation – Bradford, Glasgow,
Fraserburgh and Newcastle.
ii) Using these four pilots to generate new forms of evidence about the lived
experience of poverty and exclusion.
iii) Creating opportunities for marginalised and less visible sections of society to
communicate with wider audiences, including policy-makers.

Research context and rationale
Cultural dimensions of regeneration – making, creating, performing and celebrating – are
often neglected. Yet these aspects can be vital to the sense of shared wellbeing, belonging
and aspiration for community members. Hawkes calls the integration of a cultural
perspective into the planning of change the “fourth pillar” of sustainability, alongside
economic, social and environmental dimensions. He suggests that cultural projects provide “avenues for the expression of community values…[that can]…directly affect the directions society takes” (Hawkes 2001).

Recent Government-commissioned research has added to a growing body of evidence
suggesting that participatory arts and media processes can act as portals to wider processes of social development, by offering for example access to further learning, training or social networks (Scottish Government 2006). Activities which promote imaginative engagement through creative practice can offer additional opportunities to conceive and enact alternatives. Members of a community experience processes allowing them to imagine different possible futures. Collaborative participatory arts have been shown to make a significant contribution to both the confidence of individuals, their trust of others participating in the process and in overall quality of life and wellbeing (Jeffery 2005).

Remaking Society is to collaborate with four experienced partner organisations that work
intensively, through participatory arts and media practices, with communities in four
neighbourhoods – Bradford, West Yorkshire (community radio), Milton, Glasgow (visual
art), Benwell, Newcastle (film) and Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire (theatre). With much of the
population in each area are currently experiencing high levels of economic and social
deprivation, we will explore the socio-cultural dimensions of ‘living with/in poverty’.
The practice of community and cultural development (CCD) in North American cities, such
as that led in Chicago by John Kretzman and John McKnight from Northwestern University,
exemplifies the model demonstrated in Remaking Society. Traditionally the communities
that were identified as deprived had been provided with services and programmes designed and delivered by outside experts.

The effect of this now discredited cultural deficit model was to position people as passive
recipients dependent on service providers (including university researchers) to address
their deficiencies and their needs. Yet the model still persists in most deprived areas of the
UK. By contrast, our assets-based approach recognises such communities as resourceful and gifted (Goldbard 2006). We draw upon and harness the capacities and creativities of local people to address issues and solve problems.

Outside assistance and resources from government agencies, institutions and other
organisations are still going to be required to address issues of deprivation. But, in our
model, the agenda of such interventions is to be set more by the community of people most directly affected. Using performance and digital media, the Remaking Society research collaboration will thus demonstrate ways in which communities conventionally regarded as excluded can negotiate either their own inclusion in - or their continued exclusion from - society.

In this project, the concept of community is not restricted to communitarian accounts of 'a
group of people in a given place', or as a site of consensus and constructed oneness based on social categories such as race, class, gender or location. Ours is a dynamic model in which community formation is seen as a continual re-negotiation of co-existence and
interdependence, not confined by place, as illustrated by the thirty years of pioneering work
by Southall Black Sisters (Gupta 2003). Questions about how communities conduct these
negotiations become particularly important now, at a time of economic crisis, when
resources are scarce and stress levels among vulnerable individuals are high.

The study will make critical connections between our understanding of community
performance and participatory process across academic fields - including conflict resolution, cultural geography, public health, social psychology and sociology. It will allow a reexamination of inter-disciplinary concepts of community through arts and media practices. Belonging to a community is critical to a sense of wellbeing for individuals and families, particularly significant for those who live on the breadline. The second element of Remaking Society is the generation of narrative evidence on the cultural dimensions of poverty and social exclusion. It will add a unique inter-disciplinary arts and humanities perspective to the ESRC’s national study, Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE). Running until 2013, it is the UK’s largest ever research project on the impact of poverty.

Academic research and 'creative industries'

Here are the slides from a lecture I gave last week to students on the MA Music: Innovation and Entrepreneurship programme at UWS about the how the relationship between what universities do and the creative industries has developed. Rather long, and very fast and dirty but it's an attempt to introduce the range of debates, theories and discourses that inform our contemporary understanding of what are now called, vaguely but frequently, the 'creative industries" and the forces that shape how universities/researchers and the creative industries interact. Or should we just see the further/higher education sector as a kind of bedrock of a lot of contemporary cultural industry?  Of course other people including Justin O'Connor have done this rather better than me on previous occasions but for what it's worth, I thought it might be useful to share. 

Academic research and creative industries: a brief and partial genealogy

View more presentations from Graham Jeffery

Reinventing higher education for a networked age

Here is part one of some notes to accompany a talk I gave this afternoon at the UWS learning and teaching conference. All that follows, the presentation and the notes, is  'work in progress' thinking, feeding into a wider project on 'network pedagogies' that I hope will see the light of day as a book within the next 18 months. It may also make a more practical appearance as an interactive project in cyberspace.

Reinventing higher education for a networked age

View more presentations from generalpraxis

The debate about the value, purpose and function of higher education is old. It's as old as the idea of a university itself, which has always been contested and politicised. As individual academics and students working in and around these institutions, we are caught in the cross-currents of long historical and philosophical debates. A wonderfully informative In Our Time programme about the formation of the medieval university describes the ways in which approximately ‘self governing’ communities of scholars set about negotiating a role for what was to become ‘higher education’ between church, state, guilds, city authorities and other rich and powerful patrons. Towards the end of the programme Miri Rubin draws attention to the  relevance of the 'early modern' synthesis that some Italian universities managed to achieve in curriculum development that balanced ‘classical’ and more contemporary, applied knowledge, informed by a particular set of civic traditions: "The Italians, in the late 14^th century, because of this connection between the universities, scholarship, and the utility of the city state, ...[developed]... a more applied and sensible way of getting the teaching to match the needs of the polity." 

In this mangled, compressed and partial history of the university (which jumped over the humanist revolutions that led to the Renaissance, glossed over the Enlightenment, and which ignored the world outside western Europe) I particularly tried to emphasise these negotiations between universities and the communities that they live amongst - how they play out and how teaching and research is informed by different discourses of knowledge, of power, policy and economy. It’s also worth thinking about the etymology of the word  ‘universitas’ –  Latin for 'a whole',  a self-governing corporate body that, according to the participants of the In Our Time programme, was originally applied to the craft guilds. The term 'universitas' was then adopted by itinerant and fractious communities of scholars to define the project of creating the early centres of learning that have evolved into today's famous and iconic institutions. 

Somewhat perversely, I deliberately didn't make explicit reference in the talk to three key things that are happening in UK higher education right now:

i) The changing relationship between government and higher education, and the differences between the nations of the UK in how this is playing out

ii) The crisis of governance in higher education, the problems of ‘managerialism’ and how the current generation of argumentative academics respond to the advent of the corporate, competitive, globally ambitious university. Are they to be “communities of scholars” or  “knowledge entrepreneurs’? (or both/neither?)

iii) The wave of resistance/protest that opposes the assault on public funding for the arts and humanities, in which we are seeing a wholesale privatization of undergraduate programmes in the non-STEM subjects in England, stripping out direct public investment and support for arts and humanities from the fabric of the publicly funded university.  

Paradoxically, perhaps, as Francis Mckee recently remarked in a conversation about the arts, the less interest the government takes in the universities, the less the universities are likely to be interested in what the government thinks, particularly as funding is withdrawn. The less money on offer, the less relevant government (and other funders, such as research councils) become. Institutions will be forced to look elsewhere, which is clearly the intent of the English government – a policy that is likely to have bad consequences for democratizing access to higher education and social mobility. 


Current policy in England seems to represent the worst of both worlds. We have heavy-handed, restrictive, ideologically driven regulation and a ramping up of the rhetoric of markets/choice/performative league tables.  We have strict caps on home student numbers, a squeeze on the availability of public cash to support the work of the sector, and restrictions on how many international students can be recruited to make up losses. Tuition costs are entirely pushed onto the individual student, as a kind of mortgage on their future life prospects, although the state guarantees the debts (which, perversely pushes up the public deficit which the government claims to want to reduce: it would be cheaper just to give the universities the money). The idea of higher education in the arts/humanities as a public good, which has benefits for the wider polity/community/society, as well as the individual, is virtually abandoned.

In a sense this approach just takes market values to their logical conclusion - education is utterly commoditised, offered as a product for sale. The humanities are sent to the province of those who can afford to participate, which has profound consequences for democracy, identity and community. And the false hierarchy of the science/art divide (and to an extent the vocational/academic divide) is enshrined in public policy. This radically differential treatment of science and the arts represents an attack on the independence of universities and their ability to design and deliver a curriculum that is responsive, relevant and accessible. It's an approach which suggests a profound indifference in public policy to the nature of knowledge and innovation, the foundations of critical thinking, and the value and worth of the arts and humanities for all disciplines.  The aspiration to become a popular, comprehensive, democratic university  is replaced by a dogmatic insistence on strict hierarchies of status, 'mission groups' and 'research excellence', expressed through the separation of the critical from the vocational, the reflective from the practical, research from teaching, etc.


And what scarce public funds that remain are concentrated mainly on centres that are already well resourced, with no thought for the consequences for the sector as a whole, or the wider implications of rationing access to higher learning. Even in narrow 'economic competitiveness' terms this policy will be a disaster.

In Scotland the picture is somewhat different. We have little idea what the future funding framework for Scottish higher education will look like, but we do have a commitment from government to the maintenance of public funding for arts, humanities and science/technology, the acceptance of some principles of public value and access to HE regardless of 'ability to pay'. Nonetheless we have plenty of local tussles, demand for student places outstripping supply, and two high profile disputes at Glasgow and Strathclyde over proposals to remodel/reduce/remove aspects of arts and humanities education from institutions which have very particular and distinguished relationships to the traditions of arts and humanities scholarship: programmes which apparently appear arcane and alien to technocrats and businesspeople.

The other issue that I left out of my talk was any serious discussion about the dissolution of ‘knowledge hierarchies’ in education – of which there are at least two dimensions:

Firstly, there has been an explosion in the everyday and ubiquitous availability of learning resources, through search engines, web and pervasive media portals of all kinds – part of what Manuel Castells calls the informational society.  So the question for higher education becomes not so much how to teach students to gather information, or even to test ‘what’ they know, but more to develop their ability to select, judge, curate, control, transform – to do things, to act, to make -  with information and knowledge. In the convergent multimedia revolution driven by web technologies we can combine image, audio, text on screens and in spaces to generate new ways of communicating in hybrid digital/face-to-face forms.

This is why ‘creativity’ is such a persistent totem for the transformation of the educational environment in these early years of the 21^st century, and the turn towards practice-based research is so significant.

Secondly, there has been a ‘performative turn’ in the way in which knowledge is conceptualized and applied and validated. To (lazily) quote (and adapt) an earlier blog:  What is  ‘performativity’? The phrase originates with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1979 report The Postmodern Condition: a report on knowledge. He argued that, with the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, the collapse of 19th century ‘grand narratives’, and the ending of a consensus that a cadre of elite, expert professionals could determine what counts as valid knowledge, (in part driven by the challenge to ‘normative’ knowledge mounted by the new social movements and by radical politics), instead the extent to which  knowledge valued depends upon it performs a function. In other words, the Strathclyde test of “useful learning” is brought to bear on all sorts of discourses and practices that sit within the academy. But there remains the question – useful to who? Under what circumstances? In what ways? There is a tendency for the test for utility to be framed by normalizing assumptions that reflect the desires of powerful interest groups and patrons, which push the idea of critical reflection – the desire to examine and change the status quo ante – out of the picture altogether.

On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that universities have to make strategic choices about what their priorities should be, in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, recruitment, research etc. And the speed with which ideas/initiatives circulate and complex concepts get packaged up as simplistic slogans like 'engagement', 'employability' and 'excellence' makes time for reflection and debate scarce and precious.

So, a number of variants of utilitarianism and functionalism drive many of the prevailing ideologies/discourses in higher education, and the friction seems to be most acute in places where strong ‘liberal arts’ traditions of philosophical/critical enquiry comes into conflict with a more applied, technologic and deterministic approach to educational outcomes.  This is also paradoxical, because as Stanley Fish points out in a recent New York Times article, the interdisciplinary space that much serious, cutting edge research now occupies represents a radical synthesis of the arts/sciences in which the humanities play a crucial role. There are hundreds of important (trans)disciplines such as cultural geography, bioethics, acoustic ecology, urban planning and so on. And it is these transdisciplinary conversations that are more likely to generate sustainable solutions to some of the intractable problems that face the world.

I am always amazed at the institutional persistence of static, reified, bounded understandings of knowledge construction, which as Nigel Thrift points out in Afterwords,  completely fail to account for the ‘becoming’ and ‘emergent’ state of the world…”the world is a making, it is processual, it is in action, it is ‘all that is present and moving. There is no last word, only infinite becoming and constant reactivation.” Examined from a Foucauldian perspective, institutions exist in order to erect boundaries, to discipline, police and control knowledge and behaviour. But they remain negotiated spaces, particularly in the liquid, slippery, porous spaces of the ‘cloud’.

 

And there is a powerful countercultural tradition of autonomous protest, dissent, projects, demonstrations and occupations to challenge the hierarchical, static, bureaucratic conception of the world that the university-as-factory metaphor represents. Two well documented examples that I particularly like (but plenty of others could be chosen and represented) are the Hornsey College of Art occupations of 1968 and the Copenhagen Free University (2001 - 2007). Add to this the playful and constructive approach of the 'hacker ethic', the open source movement and (dis)organised, networked sociality and there is a potent mix to push institutions towards a paradigm shift.

The slippery cloud world of porous institutions also generates and constructs new forms of social identity and professional subjectivity. Our main communities of practice don't principally reside within the institutions that we work in - they are broader and wider. The internationalization of the university and the ways in which we can collaborate across time and space (assuming we have time and space…which is often not a given...) offer massive opportunities. But they can also create precarious and unsettling, risky situations in terms of economic survival and integrity. In working across networks of practices – constructing particular kinds of subjectivities in different situations -  students are learning about how to manage their public profile and learning intercultural/dialogical skills, which is particularly important in an informational economy. The growth of blogging academic communities offers the chance of putting work out there for scrutiny and feedback (that is, if anyone’s watching/listening/reading/paying attention….) without necessarily engaging in the formality of a 'peer review' process and high-stakes publication. The blogosphere can also give lazy thinking and provisional/unverified knowledge (and shameless self-promotion, and easy plagiarism) more amplification than perhaps it deserves, but that's another story...

I could go on (and on…), but that’s (more than) enough for now: in another post I’ll write a bit more about emerging tools, platforms, projects, and communities that respond to some of these issues. And I ought to tackle those questions of power, money, markets and hierarchies a bit more thoroughly too. 

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.

On Translation (part one...)

A number of conversations have been converging over the last month or two, partly because I've been working with Diarmuid McAuliffe at UWS' MEd Artist Teacher programme.  My colleague Katarzyna Kosmala and I contributed a short interactive exercise to a symposium on Pedagogy and Play at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art a couple of weekends ago, and I'm writing this back in Chicago where I'll be joining a 'Town Hall' meeting on 'teaching artists' at Columbia College this evening. We'll be conducting a live experiment in synchronised communication with colleagues in Scotland (UWS) and Minneapolis/St Paul (the Perpich Center for Arts Education). 


We had a 'warm-up' conversation for tonight's meeting last Friday, which was fruitful: a few key ideas surfaced, one of which was the role of artist-educators in crossing boundaries, translating between institutional and artistic cultures,  and enabling a more critical kind of pedagogy through arts processes, and the second which was about the roles and responsibilities of leadership in these kind of experimental arts projects.  I've written extensively about these kinds of things before, in The Creative College and also in the Teacher-Artist Partnership resource pack, and there's a blog post from a couple of years ago that summarizes some of the issues here. Giroux's Border Crossings still remains a key text: other more recent works have a tendency to marginalize the cultural politics of this sort of work, although Shakuntala Banaji and Andrew Burn's useful report on Rhetorics of Creativity for the Tory-vandalized Creative Partnerships programme in England foregrounds the cultural politics more than most. 


All of this has been making me reflect on my formative educational experiences in developing this kind of partnership-based critical pedagogy at Newham Sixth Form College - there's a nice video here that reflects some of the energy and dynamism of the place. NewVIc has managed to go further and faster than many other schools and colleges in integrating arts education partnership - but in the context of being a comprehensive intake post-16 institution with specialised arts education programmes. 


Since leaving there, I've been working on these kinds of issues and questions in a whole range of settings. Most recently, my attention has been very focussed on the University of the West of Scotland, where we are rapidly developing a School of Creative and Cultural Industries that embeds partnerships and collaborations at all levels, and coming up against the same problems of translation, explanation, and boundary crossing that educational innovators struggle with in institutions, large and small. Part of the issue has been to begin to build a coherent educational narrative that a diversity of practitioner-academics, with a deep commitment to university-industry partnerships, can sign up to. Another problem has been to secure the resources to enable the partnerships to work. A third has been the complexity of 'managing change' in a  bureaucratic and somewhat opaque institution. Fourthly, there is a need to engage people in more reflective practice, which is very difficult in a pressurized environment where it is a struggle to find the time and space to look after students properly. 


All of this is very much a work-in-progress, and not helped by the geopolitical situation: scarcity and anxiety are everywhere. Working in an institution which, broadly, still sees higher education as a publicly-funded service, we are having to cope with cuts to funding and maintain 'quality' of provision in the face of massive resource pressures. This leads to a kind of retrenchment: people may dig themselves in and fight their corner for resources but there's also a need to maintain a 'big picture' vision of hope and optimism in the face of difficulty. Plus 'entrepreneurialism' is needed to continuously seek out and attract cash to support this kind of work. 


More later, but all this is making me reflect further on the incredible ethical responsibility that leadership under these circumstances demands. Most of our current crop of political 'leaders' have no concept of this: just look at the spectacle of David Cameron hawking British-made weapons round the Middle East even as protestors circle the citadels of the plutocrats. Everywhere you turn,  this is a complex and confusing situation - but anchoring actions in some basic principles of care, of compassion and of critical engagement might be a good start. I'll write some more about this, together with some reflections on urban change, the role of universities,  and the corporate land-grab that seems to be happening as the public sector gets kicked around, in the next post. 

MashingUp: Art+Labour, 9th November

CCA 5
Tue 9th Nov 2010
12.30-6pm

Art+Labour is a public conversation exploring the conditions and experiences of creative labour in the cultural industries – working conditions, pay, working hours; freedom and autonomy, pleasure and obligation; insecurity and uncertainty; social reproduction, networking and isolation – and artists’ organising within it – unions, artists’ associations, or self-organised studio/exhibition spaces.

What diverse forms of employment do artists undertake? Who are their employees? How secure and how flexible are these forms of employment? What are the conditions of employment and how are these changing? What can we say of artists’ autonomy in relation to contemporary labour practices? How do cultural workers effectively organise around labour issues? What would it mean for artists to withdraw their labour in defence of conditions in one’s primary or secondary employment? With successive governments’ emphasis on arts’ social function, how does communality express itself in competitive Creative Industries? What is industrial about the Creative Industries; where do ‘Cultural’ producers sit within the policy frame of the ‘Creative’ Industries? How do we as cultural producers recognise our own positions and dependency on/within/alongside the public sector? With the entrepreneurial restructuring of the arts in Scotland and in the face of selective public sector cuts throughout the UK, how constructive are artists’ isolated appeals for a state of exception? What is so unique about artists in the social factory?

These are some of the questions to be addressed during this public conversation. The discussion is open to anyone – cultural workers, artists, students, interns, precarious and self-organised labour affiliated to academia – concerned with issues of art, labour and economics. The event will begin with a series of short position statements from invited speakers followed by discussion among panelists and audience.

Panelists include:

Angela McRobbie
Professor of Communications, Dept. of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths

Scottish Artists Union
The representative voice for artists in Scotland

Graham Jeffery
Reader: Music and Performance, The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, UWS

Katarzyna Kosmala
Reader, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, UWS

Gesa Helms
Researcher & artist

Brett Bloom
Member of Chicago-based art collective Temporary Services who recently produced ‘Art Work : A national conversation about art, labour, and economics’

Owen Logan
Researcher, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen

Facilitated by Gordon Asher
Effective Learning Tutor, UWS Centre for Academic & Professional Development

Event is free but ticketed, tickets available from CCA Box Office:
CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD
tel : +44 (0)141 352 4900

http://www.cca-glasgow.com

“MASHING UP” : Art+Labour is organised by Leigh French, co-editor of Variant, and Sophie Hope, member of Making A Living, in co-operation with Graham Jeffery of The School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of the West of Scotland, and supported by CCA, Glasgow.

“MASHING-UP…”

A Public Lecture Series presented by UWS and CCA
This ongoing lecture series stimulates critical, transdisciplinary research communities to discuss advanced knowledge and to build networks of excellence among producer communities.

‘Mashing up’ [definition]
“a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. The term mashup implies easy, fast integration…to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data” (Wikipedia, 2009).

The lecture series
exhibits the values of new media culture to explore synergies between institutions, ideas and disciplines. This aspiration originates with the UWS and CCA partnership, which extends to the specific areas of inquiry that we pursue. It advances the core mission of each organization to initiate applied, international research opportunities through experimental, local dialogue to foster collaborative, bottom-up, sustainable practices of development.

#mashingup
We want attendees to blog, photograph, film, tweet and do all they can to share the content of these talks to democratize access to knowledge.

LINKS

http://uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com

http://www.sau.org.uk

http://www.temporaryservices.org

http://www.artandwork.us