I’ve just spent a fascinating 3 days at Culture Lab’s Connected Communities Symposium in Newcastle. The Symposium brought together speakers from different disciplines around the world to investigate the relationship between art, digital technology and communities. Too often ostensibly ‘creative’ conferences are dry and dull. Connected Communities showed the power of bringing together great people and ideas from around the world, and giving them a structure which enables them to share their creative insights.
I’m still processing the full range of incredible ideas that were presented. Julien Dorra from OrsayCommons proposed a really interesting concept. He talked about people as ‘users’ of museums rather than visitors, and related this to the metaphor of an organisation as a technology platform: an organisation should provide a platform upon which users can build their own ‘applications’. He explored this in relation to ‘jailbreaking’ art from the Orsay Museum in Paris - through taking forbidden photos of artworks and activities and posting them live on the internet.
The power of participatory design was explored in many of the presentations - Adam Hasler, Kawandeep Virdee and Benjamin Sugar (Dorkbot Boston), Régis Lemberthe (Enable Berlin) and Giovanni Innella (Northumbria University). For me it was intriguing to see how the values and principles of Participatory Art are being transferred directly to design settings, and, in emphasizing the participatory potential of design processes, how design as a discipline is increasingly venturing into areas that would previously have been considered within a social policy framework.
There were many ideas and activities that were also simply life-affirming to hear about: stories from participants in the Arab Spring, how a great pub-idea can get rapidly out of hand, the hitherto unrecognised role of grannies in supporting the illegal punk rock scene in old East Germany and what happens when you cross embroidery with music production.
For my part, I presented some reflections on what community means as a concept, and the role of technology and art in constructing the shared narratives that make communities what they are. There were also interesting reflections in this area from Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight (University of London) and Sharon Bailey (ISIS Arts).
All of the presentations were videoed, and you can watch any of them here (although you’ll need to cross reference days/times from the agenda to pick out particular ones). And I believe that all the presenters’ slides are going to be made available soon on the Connected Communities site. There’s also a great suggestion that we continue the excellent conversation that began using the #connectedcommunities.
See you there.
