Do It With Others - Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks
Saturday 6 August, 12-5pm

The day is devised and led by Furtherfield (Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett) with contributions from artists Gretta Louw and They Are Here (Helen Walker & Harun Morrison) and writer Tim Waterman.

Find a podcast of the event here.

For the second event in our Summercamp series we have invited Furtherfield to develop and lead the day-long symposium, Do It With Others - Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks. 

Furtherfield create online and physical spaces and places for different kinds of people to come together to get involved with contemporary arts and digital technologies. It was founded by artists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett in 1996 and is a dynamic, creative and social nerve centre where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a visionary culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas.

Do It With Others - Art and Solidarity in the Age of Networks will explore art as a commons (defined as the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society) in the age of networks and neoliberalism. It will ask how practices, circulation, appreciation and stewardship of the arts can be emancipated for all. Presentations and discussions include work drawing on the summer programme at Furtherfield's Gallery and Commons lab, exploring tensions between digital inclusion and cultural diversity in the digital global hegemony.

Schedule

12pm- Arrival. Wysing has a café onsite which will be open throughout the day for food and drink. The cafe will be open from 10am  

12.20pm - Introduction to the day by Ruth Catlow  

The first part of the day will address the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society 

12.30pm - Marc Garrett, Unblocking proprietary systems. Marc Garrett, presents his research into different types of grassroots culture and the ways in which they actively re-examine, critique, and hack their way around the controlling conditions of black boxes, proprietary systems and techno-cultural production. These cultures (their tactics and strategies)  return control to the users and remodels relationships between the individual and the institutional edifice: in academia, in the arts, technological fields of practice, and as part of everyday life.

1pm -Tim Waterman, Situating the Commons.Tim Waterman, landscape architect and theorist, will discuss how the negotiation of the commons takes place in two distinct realms that are increasingly reaching into and shaping one another: the long history of the landscape commons both in cities and in the countryside, and across digital networks. In both realms we find the continued project of the enclosures, appropriating forms of collectively-created use value and converting it, wherever possible, into exchange value. 

1.30pm - Ruth Catlow, DIWO to DAOWO - Collaborative arts and the blockchain. The DIWO (Do It With Others) campaign for emancipatory, networked art practices was instigated by Furtherfield in 2006 and it is informing an artistic engagement with new blockchain technologies; to organise, cooperate, p2p and at scale to transform approaches to contemporary economic and social challenges.

2pm - Open discussion moderated by artist and curator Gretta Louw

2.30pm - Break

This part of the day will draw on the summer programme at Furtherfield's Gallery and Commons lab, exploring tensions between digital inclusion and cultural diversity in the digital global hegemony.

3pm - Gretta Louw, Networking the Unseen. Networking the Unseen, which is currently on view at Furtherfield gallery, is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on the intersection of indigenous cultures and zeitgeist digital practices in contemporary art. Featuring art works – installations and digital media – made in collaboration with artists from the Warnayaka indigenous art centre in Central Australia. Artist and curator Gretta Louw, will discuss postcolonial digital arts practice in relation to the exhibition and event series that brings together concepts and experiences of remoteness and marginalised cultures, with art-making in contemporary society. 

3.30pm - They Are Here, Finsbury Park Network. Combining DIY digital culture with socially engaged activity, Helen Walker & Harun Morrison of They Are Here are collaborating with local residents and organisations across Finsbury Park. Working with recently published open source software, they will establish an online network independent of cellular networks and the World Wide Web. They are exploring ways of integrating this network with local community garden activity; enabling data from these microhabitats to affect the communication system.  

4pm - Open discussion moderated by Ruth Catlow  

4.45pm - Closing remarks by Marc Garrett  

5pm - End of the day

Contributor Biographies 

Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett are artists, curators, organisers and writers who works with emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. They are co-founder/directors of Furtherfield  an artist led international community hub for art shows, labs and debates around critical questions in arts, technology and society. Furtherfield's Art Data Money  programme seeks to develop new economies for arts in the network age.  

Catlow's artistic commissions include Time Is Speeding Up at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre; Sociality-machine at Tate Britain; Play the Web We Want at Southbank Centre; Rethinking Wargames- 3 Player Chess, currently on tour as part of Free Play with ICI. Catlow is named by the Foundation for P2P alternatives in their list of 100 women Co-creating the P2P society. Garrett is the curator of the upcoming exhibition Monsters of the Machine at the LABoral Centre of Art in Spain. He is in the last phase of an Art History Phd at the University of London, Birkbeck College. 

Gretta Louw is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer exploring the potential of art as a means of investigating cultural and psychological phenomena, particularly in relation to new technologies and the internet. Born in South Africa, she grew up in Western Australia and is currently based in Germany. Her work has been exhibited widely - in New York, Berlin, Jakarta, and Tel Aviv, amongst others - including in a number of public institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Stadtgalerie Mannheim, and Kunstverein Ludwigshafen.

They Are Here is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker & Harun Morrison. We are currently based in Birmingham and London. We have worked together as They Are Here since 2006, often extending our collaboration to include those from all walks of life. Our work can be read as a series of context specific games. The entry, invitation or participation can be as significant as the game's conditions and structure. Through these games, we seek to create ephemeral systems and temporary, micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history or ideology. They Are Here work across media and types of site, particularly civic spaces. Institutions we have developed or presented work include: Arnolfini, Camden Arts Centre, CCA Glasgow, Chisenhale Gallery, Grand Union, South London Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, STUK (Leuven, Belgium), VIVID and Whitechapel Gallery. www.theyarehere.net 

Tim Waterman lives in London and is Senior Lecturer and Landscape Architecture Theory Coordinator at the University of Greenwich. He is also a thesis tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is the honorary editor of Landscape: The Journal of the Landscape Institute, for which he writes the regular column ‘A Word …’.  He is also also Research Associate for Landscape and Commons at Furtherfield. He writes for Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) and The Architects’ Journal and is the author of Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture, and is currently at work on two edited collections for Routledge. Landscape and Agency, with Ed Wall (forthcoming 2016) and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Josh Zeunert (forthcoming 2017).