Opening the Field: Jon Ippolito & Tools for a Healthy Commons

By Colin Kloecker

To help kick-off Walker Open Field, five guests from across the spectrum of art and ideas have been invited to share thoughts and pose questions on the cultural commons, framing a conversation that will continue throughout the summer. We’ll be posting our notes on each of these presenters over the next two weeks, and encouraging [...]

A disastrous attempt to connect via video chat led us to a good old fashioned phone call with Jon Ippolito, who lives and works in Maine. Jon is an artist, writer and curator who speaks broadly about the commons, but also has deep experience in creating digital tools that facilitate collaboration across the web, and a networked approach to collective creativity and knowledge-sharing.

Working out of Still Water, a New Media lab at the University of Maine at Orono that he founded in 2002 with Joline Blais, Jon has had his hands in numerous projects that often work to promote network art and culture. Two of the projects he is conceptual architect behind are The Pool and ThoughtMesh.

The Pool

The Pool is a “collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts.” Diving right into The Pool can be a bit confusing at first, but with the aid of this walkthrough, you’ll quickly learn your way around.

Projects are visualized on a chart with an X and Y axis. The vertical position of a project signifies its current approval within The Pool community. Once added, projects literally sink or swim depending on how they are rated. The horizontal position of a project tells you how many times it’s been reviewed. A project in the upper right of The Pool has been rated highly by a comparatively large amount of people. As you scroll over titles in The Pool, a short blurb about each will pop up, telling you the intent. Clicking a project brings up a dashboard where you can interact with the project’s authors and others in the community in a number of ways.

Jon has found that The Pool is most successful when there is a built-in community making use of it. At the moment, students from both the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California are using The Pool to track class projects. Students from different schools have the opportunity to collaborate, review each others projects, and participate in the community as a whole.

“It’s interesting when you see these two different communities co-existing in the same virtual space. It became clear that students from the two coasts had some concerns in common, like Maine’s and California’s mixed records on same-sex marriage. At the same time, they had very different cultures; for example, the Californians misread satirical projects from Maine as serious proposals. Letting both student bodies interact in The Pool brought those differences and similarities into relief.”

ThoughtMesh

ThoughtMesh is a tool for publishing online that began to materialize when Jon and Craig Dietrich started thinking about what their ideal publishing software would look like, if they could build it from the ground up. What they came up with is a tool that allows published articles to live socially on the web, articles can be distributed and published on any website online. At the same time, every essay, article, and document are connected to each other. And of course, it’s easy to use, easy to share, and works as a non-linear presentation tool to boot!

We thought it appropriate to take some of Jon’s work for a spin and create a ThoughtMesh document for this event. I’ve aggregated the five blog posts that introduce the five presenters for Thursday’s event here:

Opening the Field: A ThoughtMesh Introduction

Once you click the link you’ll see document navigation on the left, the ThoughtMesh tag cloud on top of the main column, and below that an abstract of the event. You can click through the navigation and read any of the introduction posts in their entirety, or you can use the tag cloud to search all 5 posts by keyword. Click on one of the keywords in the tag cloud to see which blog posts have been tagged similarly. If you click on “excerpts out,” you’re still searching with the same keywords, but now you’re searching through every single document in the ThoughtMesh database. This is a great way to connect to other articles and essays you might be interested in. Jon thought this might prove a fun way to get acquainted with ThoughtMesh, so check it out and leave us a comment with your thoughts – he might even call out for feedback at the event!

A healthy commons needs tools that facilitate, connect, and nurture its inhabitants. Jon will be presenting these ideas, and more, on Thursday evening.

AN ASIDE: LEARNING TO SHOW OUR UNDERWEAR

When we talked with Jon, we also did a fair bit of shop-talk, which we really appreciated but I’ll try not to bore you too much with here. Our conversation basically boiled down to Marshall McLuhan’s mantra: The medium is the message. To what extent should an event like Opening the Field embody the values and beliefs that inspired the project in the first place? If Open Field is about opening up an institution, sharing knowledge, and creating a reinvigorated cultural commons in the Twin Cities, what kinds of tools do we use to talk about these ideas?

“Don’t show your underwear” is a saying that I’ve picked up from local projection art group Minneapolis Art on Wheels. While this is generally pretty solid advice all around, it has a special meaning in the world of projection art: don’t let your audience see your desktop, dashboard, or software interface.

When Works Progress co-produces large scale events like Opening the Field or 2008‘s Solutions for the Other 90%, we try very hard not to let our underwear show. We go to great lengths to aggregate the media content of all of our presenters into one seamless master presentation. We set it all up and we hit “full screen” and we cross your fingers that it stays in full screen mode all night long. In talking with Jon, it became increasingly clear that this strategy was neither appropriate or advantageous for this situation. Providing panelists with interactive tools like a Web browser might help them better respond to participation from the audience, as befits a program on sharing and the commons.

On Thursday night, we’re going to show you our underwear and you have Jon Ippolito to thank for that!

Opening the Field: Caroline Woolard & Exchange in the Cultural Commons

By Colin Kloecker

“The law locks up the man or woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common.
But leaves the greater villain loose,
Who steals the common from off the goose.”

- An English protest chant, circa 1600, to object against the British Monarchy’s habit of building fences around and on common land.

The idea of the commons has long been tied to ideas of exchange and livelihood. Who has control over resources? How are these resources shared, maintained, and valued? In the 1600′s, talk about the commons generally referenced physical resources: open land for grazing livestock or the forest where firewood could be collected. Today, our definition of the commons has opened up considerably, but the ties to exchange and livelihood are still at the forefront of the discussion.

Caroline's Work Dress, an Ourgoods.org pilot project.

We asked Caroline Woolard to speak at Opening the Field because her work is a significant part of a movement advancing that discussion for makers, doers, and thinkers who have traditionally found it hard to monetize their skills and resources in our existing economy. Caroline is one of the founders of OurGoods.org, an online community of artists that facilitates barters of skills, space, labor, and art objects. The site matches barter partners, provides accountability tools, and tracks projects.

One morning a couple of weeks ago, Shanai and I spent about an hour Skyping with Caroline, who lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC. Before talking specifically about OurGoods, we talked about how she got to where she is today, about the nature of collaborative work, and about the difficulties and rewards of trying to keep an artist-run art space afloat (work we can certainly relate to).

Caroline really began thinking about exchange when she wanted to barter a dress she’d made for help designing and coding a website. The Work Dress is now an OurGoods pilot project, and a great example of the network in action. The garment is a hybrid tool belt/wrap dress, and is only available by bartering skills or resources with Caroline. To date, she has exchanged one for unlimited access to laundry facilities, a chapbook of poetry, lifestyle consultation, and expert help designing Work Dress 2.0.

Ultimately, OurGoods is an open-ended platform for the organization, support, and completion of creative projects. Beyond just facilitating person-to-person exchange, the site “offers a dynamic online environment in which artists can follow each other’s creative development; organize “under the radar” artistic activity of their community; develop mutually supportive relationships offline; and learn new skills to enable their own work and the work of others.” All without the need for cash funding from outside of the community.

The website is currently in an invite-only testing phase that is focused on the NYC area. Caroline talked about how this initial prototyping phase has been formative for troubleshooting everything from the user-interface to the way that actual exchanges are facilitated through the network. When bartering skills and resources, it’s likely that at some point you’re going to actually have to meet somebody in real world.

“Barter can be a really awkward thing. How do you find someone who has what you need and also wants what you have to offer? OurGoods.org is a diverse network of people, so it can play barter match-maker. But will everyone trust the site without meeting in person? To build trust and mutual respect for each-other, the best things is to combine the barter tool we’ve created online with face-to-face time.”

A Portrait Drawing class at Trade School.

It was this face-to-face necessity that led to the creation of Trade School. From January 25th to February 28th, 2010, they hosted 35 days of co-working and classes for barter at a small storefront in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Trade School offered over 70 different classes with topics ranging from grant writing and feltmaking to a three-day workshop called “Baudrillard Camp” that offered students that opportunity to “review, clarify, and immerse ourselves in Baudrillard’s dystopian prognosis of the deterrence of the real by the virtual, information’s profound function of deception, and spectacle as the terminal condition of late capitalist society.” (Whew!)

Rather then collect a pay check, or even offer their knowledge for free, teachers asked students for skills and resources in return for class time. Volunteer hours, fresh produce, vegetarian recipes, and personal stories on the class topic to share with the group were some of the things commonly exchanged.

OurGoods itself is a collaboration. Caroline is working with Carl Tashian, a developer and engineer who was the senior site engineer at Zip Car; designers Louise Ma and Rich Watts to create the site’s user interface; and dancer/choreographer Jen Abrams is a long time member of WOW Cafe Theater (run by barter for nearly 3 decades) who is offering guidance and support.

Both OurGoods and Trade School are creating functioning models of exchange in the cultural commons. What lessons can be learned from these projects as we embark on the creation of a commons in our own backyard? How will conflicts be handled in the Open Field? What kinds of networks will we create to accomplish our new projects there?

These are all questions that Caroline will bring her insight to on Thursday evening at Opening the Field. But don’t expect her to have all the answers! Ultimately, we can’t help but think it’s all going to come back to putting in some good old fashioned time with each other, face-to-face. (Which you can do, over beers, before and after the program!)

Opening the Field: Laura Musacchio & Making Space for Commons

By Shanai Matteson

Much of the conversation that abounds about the cultural commons seems to focus on digital culture, which makes sense given the profound changes that have happened in technology over a relatively short time span. There’s simply a lot that we still need to sort out.

Urban landscape ecologist and ecological designer Laura Musacchio is concerned about how well people are adapting to the stresses of urban living in high-density cities and metropolitan regions, and how the proliferation of technology in their lives is transforming their urban experiences of nature – including what urbanites like, know, feel, and appreciate about the natural world, other people, and non-human wildlife. This situation has raised a few questions for her about the physical commons as interactive spaces.

“Social interactions are really the foundation for creating a civil society. We certainly see social interactions happening all the time online, but these are mediated through computers or mobile devices. What happens when this becomes the norm? When we have fewer and fewer reasons or opportunities to practice face-to-face interaction?”

Laura pointed to some articles she had read recently about the impacts of social technology on the social skills of teenagers. When so much of the interactions that help people to build trust and understand human nature are done in the abbreviated world of text, what happens to our collective creative culture?

Naturally Laura thinks about the spaces where this interaction can continue to happen.

“In addition to some of the more obvious examples, like parks and plazas, cities have all sorts of leftover and unused space. How can we use it? How can we activate those spaces so that they become spaces for civic engagement? For a kind of cultural commons?”

Laura sees the Walker’s Open Field project as an experiment with exactly this question, and is excited to see what will happen when the public is invited to use the large open field for recreation, social interaction, education, or simply to gather.

“It’s like a giant lawn, and lawns can really act as a canvas for people.”

While chatting with Laura about her background, which combines design with ecology, I learned that she doesn’t only think of people when she is considering the elements needed for a healthy cultural commons.

“Practice with face-to-face social interaction, which is really what play is, that’s important. So is connection to nature, to natural cycles that are present in cities, but often invisible to most people who live in these places. Understanding how they work is as important as understanding people and how they work.”

Many of us have probably heard of this idea of the Tragedy of the Commons, whereby individuals chip away at our shared limited resources. Laura is interested in the places where the physical and natural resources of space overlap with our cultural and civic lives.

“Healthy civic spaces give us a sense of trust, and they inspire rather than hinder creativity. We know what the norms are, but we also believe that we can push the limits in new ways.”

This is what I find most exciting about the summer’s Open Field project. In many ways it’s a chance for us all to consider these questions, and also to test out some of ways that they might be addressed through creative public engagement.

“I spend a lot of time on my computer, and when I do, I start to feel a distance from the physical spaces I share with others. I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming technology, but I do worry that a lot of us are spending so much time immersed in digital social spaces that we are starting to put individual choice above the give and take of collective culture. I am not sure that’s a good thing.”

Laura will share some examples from her own research and work at next Thursday’s Open Field kick-off event.

Family Reads in the Open Field

By Ashley Duffalo

Beginning next week, I’ll be posting contributed summer reading lists for families every week until Labor Day. A month ago I invited artists, artist-parents and families to send me their top 10 suggestions for great summer reads, and I’ve got a fantastic collection started. One book from every list will be stocked in the Open [...]

Walker Art Lab Coordinator, Ilene Krug Mojsilov reads to participants in the studio class, Once Upon a Garden.

Developing Electronic Educational Content for Museums

By Robin Dowden

In February 2010, the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts convened a one-day think tank of museum education technology professionals to discuss the practice of educational content development for technology applications. Think tank participants represented a range of experience in developing and managing both museum and community generated educational content, primarily surrounding the [...]

Invited participants included:
Willamarie Moore – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Tina Olson – Portland Museum of Art
Tim Svenonious – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Marc Mayer – Art21

Local participants included:
Sarah Schultz – Walker Art Center
Susan Rotilie – Walker Art Center
Robin Dowden – Walker Art Center
Abbie Anderson – Walker Art Center
Sheila McGuire – Minneapolis Institute of Art
Treden Wagoner – Minneapolis Institute of Art
Kris Wetterlund – Sandbox Studios
Scott Sayre – Sandbox Studios

The following is the product of those discussions. Think tank participants invite community comment, additions and refinements to these recommendations.

OBSERVATIONS: What’s different in developing educational content to be delivered via technology?
• Creator needs to understand the capabilities and limitations of the technology
• Creator needs to understand what is possible and what is not – controlling and expanding expectations
• Creator needs to select the most appropriate technology for the problem being addressed/content being presented
• Creator needs to understand the context(s) for use by the target audience
• The [changing] role of teacher as facilitator, mediator and catalyst
• Audiences ability to utilize and engage constantly varies by generation
• Information can be conveyed in multiple layers of non-linear, digestible chunks controlled by user interaction
• Content creation for technology applications allows for learning both by a specified path or serendipitously
• Informal connections and narratives can be dynamically generated through aggregation and query
• Flexibility of content can be thought of as being infinite
• Media-based storytelling can humanize content and make it more engaging
• Captured audio/video documentation to be delivered to a wide audience as a potential learning resource
• Platforms can be varied to adjust to learning style – read-it, watch-it, listen to-it, interact with-it
• Content and technology need to be addressed/attended to simultaneously

OBSERVATIONS: What does educational content via technology do well?
• Provides models that can be customized
• Provide a platform to illuminate and connect disparate teaching practices
• Sharing process, product and revision while integrating community feedback
• Breaking down physical and geographic barriers
• Providing dynamic and malleable content, not frozen as in print – nothing is ever “done”
• Providing an opportunity to blur between the “official” and unofficial – craft vs. capture, expert vs. amateur
• Involves a range of “people” as voices, characters, collaborators, contributors, evaluators
• Captures content (people, processes and events) with unscripted spontaneity
• A single product (e.g. a Web project like ArtsConnectEd’s Artist’s Toolkit), can support the learning styles and interests of multiple audiences
• Time is less of a barrier. When content creators are empowered to publish content directly to the Web they can serve audiences faster than other publishing models (see ArtsConnectEd and MFA Educators Online). The needs of audiences can be served shortly after those needs have been identified

OBSERVATIONS: What are some of the greatest challenges in working with educational technology?
• Hard to manage massive amounts of fragmented static content
• Greater distribution vs. loss of control
• Very difficult to classify and describe many multimedia programs because there are no widely shared definitions of modes of learning
• Generates new issues related use and reuse of resources
• Opens a much greater range of legal responsibilities
• No content is ever “set in stone” and technology is ever-changing
• Sustainability of technological platforms, resources and hardware
• Persistence – users expectations that products will live on forever
• Engaging educators in iterative, technology-based work processes
• Content and technology need to be considered simultaneously during the development process
• User expectations that content creators use state-of-the-art, intuitive methods and technologies

RECOMMENDATIONS:
• Consider new models outside of your own discipline – successful elements of reality television, and documentary film strategies that present multiple perspectives
• Provide context for how material is designed to be used (learning, audience, timeliness)
• Exploit the dynamic nature of electronic content to update, refine, improve and expand it over time
• Strengthen bonds and relationships that are made in person
• Pursue projects in time to capitalize on a passion or interest that addresses a real need or opportunity expressed by the visitor/user.
• Involvement of multiple stakeholders in the beginning – collaboration and buy-in from target audience
• Adopt more formal, professional work practices and protocols surrounding the development and support of technology-based products
• Museum educators need to create a stronger relationship with production of critical content
• Foster awareness for the resource(s) through marketing
• Incorporate end-user training on the related program and technology into a projects implementation plan
• Cultivate a community of learners
• Develop trust and respect for users as producers – foster and invest in crowd-sourcing
• Develop a soft criteria with guidelines and models for user created content
• Provide a context for the content being delivered
• Integration of other external supporting media – beyond your own, using any other tools/media the audience may have at their disposal
• Develop standards that better describe museum generated multi-media resources
• Design content to be sustainable and commit to maintenance with the needs of the end-user in mind
• Collaborate with internal and external partners and stakeholders
• Invest in technologies your institution can support, i.e. off-the-shelf or low-tech. Think of what you develop as an ongoing program not a one-time project, and build in ongoing resources (staff, money, support) accordingly

RECOMMENDATIONS: What roles can museums play in supporting the development of educational content?
• Adopt a broader definition of what our content is, embrace a more informal voice
• Recognize and value our role as a public content provider
• Provide a system for rapidly responding to opportunities to capture media (documentation)
• Develop standards for the craft of capturing content – interview processes, content and production standards
• Develop systems and processes for facilitating production, work flow, integration and access
• Develop technical knowledge within in-house staff to guide development, even if it is performed by external contractors
• Value the importance of collecting and archiving electronic media and documentation as much as accessioned items
• Build knowledge of best practices and uses of educational technology through staff, director, and board training

List compiled by Scott Sayre. The think tank outcomes were presented at the AAM 2010 Annual Meeting.

Everybody is Open: Notes from Open Engagement in Portland, Oregon

By Colin Kloecker

Hit Factorie jumps rope with Amish children in Havre, Montana. | Photo by Kate Strathman

“Open” is the key word this spring and summer. Shanai and I recently attended Open Engagement, a conference in Portland, Oregon about art and engagement. Hosted by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA and organized by Jen Delos Reyes, this four-day annual event has grown over the past three years into a national gathering place for artists, arts administrators, and cultural programmers who share an interest in engaging their colleagues, audiences, and communities in cultural production. The parallels to the Walker Art Center’s summer-long experiment on the cultural commons here in Minneapolis were obvious and Sarah Schultz asked if we might report our experience at the conference back to the Walker blog.

“Art and life have finally merged. The only problem is… life sucks.” - Gregory Sholette (As quoted by Nato Thompson at Open Engagement)

The quote above, my favorite from the conference, has special relevance for Shanai and I. Allow me to explain: A couple of months ago, we began brainstorming travel plans to Open Engagement with our friend Jeff Hnilicka. We already knew a handful of people across the East Coast and Midwest were making similar plans so we decided to consolidate our efforts and organize a group trip on Amtrak’s Empire Builder line. Call it a pre-conference conference on wheels.

Fast forward to last week and we’re hurdling west with a fifteen person posse from across the country. Amongst them are independent arts administrators Bryce, Abigail, and Matthew from InCUBATE in Chicago, artists Jeff, Jen, and Sarah from Hit Factorie in Brooklyn, George who helped found the Division Avenue Arts Collective in Grand Rapids, artist Kate Strathman, and many more. The two-day trip gave us plenty of time to connect about where we were coming from and where we were going, both literally and figuratively and usually over whiskey in the lounge car. Hit Factorie used infrequent smoke breaks to organize mini PE sessions and practice their dance chops (they performed “100 Dance Moves for Portland” on the last day of the conference).

If you haven’t been lucky enough to ride the Empire Builder, you can glean a bit of the the experience from a group blog chronicling our exploits (click here). Please note: our blurry phone pics don’t do the scenery justice. Impassioned conversations about collaborative work, social practice, and the difficulties of running DIY art spaces were punctuated by extended moments of silence. The enormity of the great plains and the striking beauty of Glacier National Park will quiet even the most social group.

On the last full day of travel we decided our Amtrak experience wouldn’t be complete without a meal in the dining car. Vegetarian lasagna seemed like the safest bet but within thirty-six hours, after having already arrived in Portland, seven of the ten that ate that fateful meal had become violently ill. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say, Shanai and I found ourselves unexpectedly preoccupied and ended up missing about 60% of the conference. Take note readers, your Amtrak experience will be just fine without a meal in the dining car. We were able to make the keynote panel discussion on the last night. Featured speakers were Nils Norman, Mark Dion, and Amy Franceschini (whose collective, Futurefarmers, is coordinating one of the Walker Open Field artist projects). Nato Thompson from Creative Time moderated the panel. The following is a summary of the Q&A portion of that event.

The keynote speaker panel discussion at Open Engagement. | Photo by Colin Kloecker

ON MAKING A LIVING : The age old question: How do you support yourself as an artist? Amy, Mark, and Nils all had similar answers: a mish-mash of things. Commonly in the mix: teaching, gallery work, public projects, graphic design, grants, and residencies. Everybody is keeping busy! Amy was once told “At the rate you’re going, you’re going to be sick and dead by the time you’re 65.” She stressed the importance of slowing down, drawing boundaries around your life and work, and learning to say no to projects that aren’t a good use of her time.

ON COMMUNITY : Mark talked about the importance of practicing your art within a small community of colleagues and that the only way to sustain this community is to share your successes with this community. Nils said that his work is often for a very small and trusted audience, sometimes just a handful of people.

ON ETHICS : Nils talked about honesty in authorship and talked about the difficulty of this when work is collaborative. His closing comment: “Don’t @!#$ each other over.” Mark stressed transparency and talked about how the economic and academic art worlds favor the “genius of the individual artist”.

ON MAKING AND ON OBJECTS : Amy talked about the trance-like state you can enter when making something that involves repetitive action. She talked about the positive social aspects of sharing this type of work with with friends and collaborators. Mark stressed that objects are inherently political and cautioned against taking them out of the equation completely.

ON SOCIAL PRACTICE : All three wanted to be very clear about one thing: they’ve never considered themselves social practice artists. Amy summed things up nicely: “When your whole life becomes a project, you lose something in the experience of it.”

A conference of this type offers opportunity to make new friends while connecting with old ones in a new context. Minneapolis had an especially strong presence in the Open Engagement audience. A list of artists and organizers from MPLS that Shanai and I ran into over our 4 days in PDX: Marcus Young, Christine Baeumler, Peter Haakon Thompson (the only Minneapolitan to be featured in the Open Engagement program), Andy Sturdevant, Sergio Vucci, and Broc Blegan. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there are some that we missed!

Though bedridden for much of it, Shanai and I return to Minneapolis inspired by all of the work being done around this country. If you’d like to hear more about the conference from other perspectives, we are hosting a brunch for conversation and reflections on Open Engagement at West Bank Social Center on Saturday, May 29 at 11AM. Email me at colin [at] worksprogress [dot] org for details.

Opening the Field: Sumanth Gopinath | Mobile Music, Ringtones & Cultural Commons

By Shanai Matteson

According to Sumanth Gopinath, the ringtone is a remarkable cultural phenomenon that is demonstrating a high degree of popularity and is undergoing rapid transformation. It’s a powerful lens through which to view the dynamics of cultural production. He’ll help us do this at the Open Field kick-off on June 3rd!

We met Sumanth Gopinath just a few minutes after he’d left an experimental music concert at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches music theory with a focus on globalization. From his emphatic description of the performance it seemed a wildly creative and moving experience, one that flew completely under the radar of most Twin Cities music fans.

“The University has one of the best experimental composers in the world, James Dillon, working right here in town. He’s absolutely amazing! And the School of Music brings some of the world’s most creative performers to the Twin Cities. They host wonderful concerts that are open to the public and totally free.”

Although Sumanth is on temporary leave from the University while finishing a book project, he regularly attends the School of Music’s concert series, just one of many untapped cultural resources he hopes more people will utilize.

While talking with Sumanth about Open Field and the cultural commons, we learned that his interests and knowledge are wide-ranging. He sees myriad connections between digital technology, politics, culture and the everyday. He’s critical of notions of cultural commons that don’t take these connections into account.

“Ours is a capitalist world-economy. One could argue that various forms of unpaid labor have always made capital accumulation possible, making practices like creative commons nothing more or less than part of a longer history of common repositories for cultural forms.”

Over the course of an hour our conversation meandered between the concept of commons in the writings of Karl Marx, Sumanth’s own philosophical views on the production and dissemination of creative work, his passion for experimental music and art, and his interest in the global ringtone industry.

“The ringtone is a remarkable cultural phenomenon that is demonstrating a high degree of popularity and is undergoing rapid transformation. It’s a powerful lens through which to view the dynamics of cultural production.”

When it comes to questions of music production and the cultural commons, we often hear the familiar outcry that file-sharing and a laissez-faire attitude toward intellectual property, especially among those under 30, is killing the music industry. In fact, it’s an argument that’s been taken up again recently in the Atlantic (nice response here). Sumanth pointed out that the proliferation of ringtone versions of popular songs happened in tandem with the proliferation of pirated music.

“Ringtone providers’ increasing use of copyrighted popular music meant that music publishers were licensing material for ringtones and receiving royalties — thus planting the seed for the music industry’s plan to make up for financial losses due to file sharing.”

Sumanth will be discussing these often overlooked connections at the Open Field kick-off, asking us all to consider the technological as well as the political histories of the creative tools we use, as well as the bits and bites of information that make them work and that provide access to art and culture. In many cases our mobile devices, small as they are, contain extensive libraries of music. Some of them even allow us to compose new works.

In the case of ringtones, this music doesn’t just play through our home stereos or headphones, it blasts unexpectedly in all kinds of private and public spaces, becoming part of the fabric of our physical commons, as well as our amorphous digital one. These questions of intellectual property, common ownership and the politics of cultural production will undoubtedly be raised again and again over the summer.

For now, one thing Sumanth is interested in learning which ringtones visitors to the Open Field have chosen for themselves, and why. Anyone? I’ll start by confessing that much to the annoyance of everyone around me my ringtone is set to an obnoxious Girl Talk mashup, which I am pretty sure I got from a free file sharing website. Because I am a freeloader.

READ MORE & LISTEN

A Brief History of the Ringtone

Standford Mobile Phone Orchestra

Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album

A tree grows in the Open Field…

By Sarah Peters

Actually, many trees grow in the Open Field. Eight of the 14 honey locusts were transplanted into the ground today in the space that will soon be the Walker’s outdoor lounge/beer garden/classroom and social space for the summer. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilx5Ex5bknM[/youtube] Here is a panoramic shot of the action, complete with landscape workers, gigantic trucks and gawking staff. Go here for [...]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilx5Ex5bknM[/youtube]

Here is a panoramic shot of the action, complete with landscape workers, gigantic trucks and gawking staff. Go here for more pictures.

Opening the Field: Michael Edson & Museum Commons

By Shanai Matteson

For a very long time museums have focused on buildings and galleries, revered physical spaces built to keep and display collections of stuff. In the digital age, how should museum content be created, shared and managed? What is the role of a museum in the digital commons? Web and new media strategist Michael Edson will take up these questions and others at the Open Field kick-off event on June 3rd.

BAR Photography | CC BY-ND 2.0

For a very long time museums have focused on buildings and galleries, revered physical spaces built to keep and display collections of stuff. Around all of this stuff museums have created content, the explanations and interpretations that help us make sense of our cultural past, present and future.

Michael Edson is the web and new media strategist for the world’s largest museum complex, the Smithsonian, which holds over 137 million objects in the public trust. A person could spend a lifetime walking through the Smithsonian’s museums and research centers and still not see everything there is to see, let alone read all of the labels. This sheer volume of objects and information is just one of the challenges the Smithsonian faces when considering how to make their resources accessible to audiences via the web and new media. Another more formidable challenge comes from the nature of the the web itself. While physical museums have traditionally been about hoarding stuff and authoring expert knowledge for public consumption, our new media tools encourage free and open sharing of creative works and ideas, valuing crowd-sourced knowledge over individual expertise.

In this environment, how should museum content be created, shared and managed? What is the role of a museum in the digital commons?

Michael will take up these questions and others at the Open Field kick-off event. He has a unique perspective from which to contemplate the vast cultural resources that museums represent. A painter and printmaker, he understands the importance of objects and their ability to teach and inspire. His first job at the Smithsonian was cleaning display cases, so he also knows the invisible dimensions of museum work that are so critical to how these institutions function.

As a new media strategist, Michael has made it his goal to break down the display cases and walls that institutions historically place around their collections, and around themselves. Using web-based tools to encourage content-creation at all levels of museum staff and public, he hopes to redefine the role museums play in our society, looking to the old idea of the commons for inspiration.

According to Michael, “Commons have historically been created when a property owner decides that a resource—be it grass for grazing sheep, land for parks or even intellectual property—will create more value if freely shared. A museum commons functions much in this same way. Ideas and creative works are shared freely, creating more value for society.”

The result of Michael’s exploration of these ideas has been the creation of a new strategy for online engagement called The Smithsonian Commons. A new digital presence for the museum, the Smithsonian Commons “is dedicated to free and unrestricted sharing, and encourages new kinds of learning and creation through interaction with Smithsonian researchers, collections and communities.” While on stage at the Walker Michael will share a few ideas that led him to this project, as well as how it has fundamentally changed the institution. He’s hoping others will come with thoughts and ideas about the future possibilities of museum as commons.

In our conversation, Michael pointed out that “Museums right now are asking themselves, how will we survive in the digital age?”

It’s a good question. It seems the days are long gone when people were satisfied with museums that act simply as knowledge creation and dissemination engines, or worse, as tombs for creative culture. Today’s museums perform real, meaningful work in our society – and artists and individuals are equipped to participate.

Michael and others see the Walker’s Open Field project as an opportunity to test out a museum commons in real time and space.

Read More

The Smithsonian Commons

A recent profile of Michael’s work

A slideshow Michael recently gave on the Museum Commons

Designing Play, One Letter at a Time

By Ashley Duffalo

Guest blogger, Kindra Murphy talks about Type Face, a workshop she led on April 15th as part of the Walker’s Designing Play series. Murphy is a graphic designer and employs many levels of technology in her work, from InDesign to letterpress. As an instructor at MCAD, she encourages her students to experiment broadly with their approaches to design, utilizing simple as well as complex tools to create new possibilities. She was assisted by her partner Tim Tozer — a painter and instructor at UWSout — and daughter Hazel.

The Type Face workshop gave participants a chance to use Letraset typefaces to create portraits and self-portraits, combining letters, numerals and symbols to make a unique community of faces. Letraset is a dry transfer lettering system (much like stickers), used before the advent of digital technology to provide artists and designers with a wide range of mechanical type; applied by rubbing onto a surface, it’s easy to use all or part of a letter form, rotate and overlap shapes and improvise with several different fonts, weights and sizes on the same image. Good news, Letraset can be still found at many local art supply stores and on ebay! Participants were invited to experiment with as many approaches as they could invent; it was evident from the quiet concentration in the room, the hours spent working and the incredible range of responses that many got lost in exploring the tactile possibilities of this flexible medium.

Each participant left with a handout outlining typographic ‘anatomy’, ie. letters are made of various components, such as arm, ear, shoulder, spine, tail, beaks and feet (serifs). For an interactive experience, try this great site.

Completed portraits were xeroxed and hung on our display wall; some generous artists donated their work, eager for others to see accents of color lost in the photocopying process.

We also created a typographic map of the Twin Cities as an additional surface to work on — many adding faces, animals and messages to create an imaginary portrait of the metropolitan area. Surrounded by the individual portraits, the wall represented a spontaneous creative community.