Social Telephony
Location @ Dana Center:
D-studio
Date(s):
Wed 9 6:30 PM - Wed 9 9:00 PM
Host:
Richard Wright
Detailed text:
ABOUT MONGREL
Mongrel
Mongrel is an internationally recognised artists group specialising in digital media. We have an international reputation for our pioneering arts projects, including the first online commission from the Tate Gallery, London and work in the permanent collections of the Pompidou Centre, Paris and the Musuem for Media Arts in Karlsruhe (ZKM). Mongrel is well known for the Rehearsal of Memory, National Heritage and Natural Selection projects which explored racialisation and new media. It is closely associated with the formation of social software through its development of Linker, HeritageGold, BlackLash and Nine(9).
Combined with this we usually work with marginalised peoples who are on low incomes, socially excluded and cultural minorities. We do this by helping people to do things for themselves, creating social software and digital arts based projects that we then promote to a state of high visibility through our art world connections. We currently have projects running with the Congolese community in London, the Container Project in Jamaica and have helped groups in South African townships, the Sarai Centre in New Delia and the Surinamer community of Amsterdam.
ABOUT THE MEDIASHED
Mediashed.org
The MediaShed is a Mongrel initiative arising out of their move to Southend-on-Sea. Founded at the end of 2005, it is located in the Victoria ward, one of the towns target deprivation areas. The MediaShed hosts arts projects that provide members of local community access to innovative informal ICT training, media production and distribution of local arts based activities. At the core of the MediaShed is “free-media” - using media for little or no financial cost by using Free and Open Source software and recycled equipment and also saying what you want freely – using media that can be taken apart and reused in new forms of creative expression – “free as in free speech”.
The MediaShed now has over 100 members and has run several workshops, several screenings and exhibition events including its first public project “Video Sniffin”. The MediaShed and the free-media approach is a model that can be applied to all the creative arts and exported to a variety of communities and locations.
The Southend MediaShed (popular blurb)
Mediashed.org
Free-media from the Mouth of the Thames
The MediaShed is the first ‘free-media’ space in the East of England, located in Southend-on-Sea. It’s a place for doing art, making things or just saying what you want for little or no financial cost by using public domain software, recycled equipment and enthusiasm. It’s also a place to say what you want ‘freely’, using accessible media systems that can be taken apart and reused without unnecessary restrictions and controls.
Replacing Money with Imagination
Free-media is the governing principle of the MediaShed - allowing signals, things, objects, people and actions to pass “freely” between each other. It is about opening up the implicit meaning of media itself – to mediate not by controlling and ordering what can be said, shown or heard but by providing the means to unblock channels of access, release currents of energy and reveal the margins of what people can feel, sense, reason and imagine.
Social Telephony: from Cromwell’s Head to Congolese Street Phones http://www.mediashed.org/?q=telephony
Mongrel has been developing new forms of “contagious” telephone media to engage marginalised communities that have fallen outside of mainstream media. “ARoundhead” was a pilot telephony installation at the Royal Edinburgh Psychiatric Hospital where phone calls from Oliver Cromwell’s head encouraged staff to pass around messages, songs, jokes and rude noises. “Telephone Trottoire” - made in collaboration with radio programme “Nostalgie Ya Mboka” - was named after the Congolese practice of “pavement radio” or the passing around of news and gossip between individuals on street corners. Using cheap telephony cards and free software these projects allow people to build virulent and spontaneous social networks by passing phone calls between each other.
Biography:
Richard Wright is a media artist and researcher working in the field of digital moving image and interactive techniques. Over the last twenty years his work has been exhibited and screened at numerous festivals, exhibitions and seminars and broadcast by television channels around the world.
Previous films include Heliocentrum (1995) - a cross between a political documentary and a Seventeenth century rave video and LMX Spiral (1998), a conceptual music video about the eighties. His last film was Foreplay (2004) – described as a “porn film without the sex”. In 2001 he completed the online screensaver The Bank of Time which was nominated for a BAFTA award. His most recently completed project was The Mimeticon – a “Baroque search engine” that uses image recognition to create a form of visual writing. Since 2004 he has been a core member of the artist led organisation Mongrel which hosts the MediaShed in Southend-on-Sea.
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