In November 2003 I attended a two week training workshop in a new community network, software and resource base called Nine(9). The workshop was one in a series convened by the artist group Mongrel Inc, and was held at the Jelliedeel Shop in Southend-On-Sea, the infamous Cockneys’ Escape, sixty minutes due east of London, overlooking the slave/pirate/smuggler mud where the River Thames becomes sea.
Image: Francesca da Rimini
The technical workshops were complemented by typical local culture activities such as sampling jellied eels (scary), visiting the famous village of Essex witches in Canewdon (scarier), filming The Palace, a hotel for accommodating asylum seekers (no barbed wire or electric fences), and talking to an old man who, along with his two beautiful barn owls and stickered trolley cart, made a solitary and eloquent anti-war protest in the mall.
Since the mid 90s Mongrel have been subverting propriety softwares and search-engine tools including Director and Photoshop, making apparent the implicit value systems built into these neutral tools. As writer Armin Medosch says in London.Zip, “Information technology is not just about ‘information’ – meaningful bits of data – but also about the formation of ways of thinking and social structures. This critical approach to information tools was dubbed ‘social software’, a term which has subsequently been widely adopted, losing its original political edge. Mongrel continued to explore the possibilities of politicised technologies, creating software to enable the digital self-representation of socially marginalised groups, first with Linker, which then morphed into the mapping project Nine(9).”
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives
The workshop was facilitated by Graham Harwood, a core mongrel and developer of various social softwares including Linker and Nine(9). Harwood is Mongrel’s boffin-in-the-coding-cupboard, and his input was complemented by fellow mongrels Mervin Jarman, Developer and Director of the Container Project in Jamaica, and Matsuko Yokokoji, graphic designer and Linder/Nine(9) workshop leader.
http://www.container-project.net/C-Document/
I particularly wanted to work with Mongrel because of the way they approach art-making and history chronicling. All of their projects put into the mash a mix of code, critique, powerful aesthetics and, above all, hope – hope that worlds other than this desolate planet of holes are indeed possible.
They say of themselves, “Mongrel is a mixed bunch of people, machines and intelligence working to celebrate the methods of Street Culture (mongrelSTREET). We make socially engaged culture, which sometimes means making art, sometimes software, sometimes setting up workshops, or helping other mongrels set things up. Mongrels make art about ourselves of about the life and thinking of people we meet. Sometimes we do this in order to think and feel better for ourselves. Sometimes we are creating a space for others to inhabit that thinking and feeling. This means we rarely operate as a core group. We prefer to work on a range of activities, individually or collectively. These can be with organisations, or other Mongrels. The ability to plug into different cultures, skills, structures or ways of doing things means our art gets to stay fresh.”
Free software is integral to this group, allowing users of any Mongrel tools (which are developed in response to artistic needs) the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software to suit their own creative needs.
For example, a current Mongrel speculative software project in development involves the programming of a hive of search engine bots. They seek and deliver perl bots which are given a set of key words (for example, witches essex smugglers slaves) and then search the internet for images relating to this direction. They deliver the images to the user’s machine, and then another perl program kicks in, cropping and positioning these images on a huge layout screen, which is a dynamically updating collage. The bots can also be programmed to contact the owners of the websites where the images were captured, initiating a potential dialogue with them. The perl code that the program is written in is, in itself, quite ornate and poetic and operates as a kind of meditation on the subject matter of the search. So the project has many layers – visual, textual, code-ish, social. The complexity of such a program requires 1000s of hours in the coding cupboard before it can be released as an item of stable free software that people can use and add to for their own interests and pleasures.
But back to Nine(9). The first week of the workshop introduced Nine(9), which is a cross-platform, open source software developed by mongrel. Like all Mongrel projects, the Nine(9) program was written with its potential users and social context in mind. Nine(9) is a multimedia authoring tool which is free, easy to use, requiring no prior experience with computers. Nine(9) was developed as an online environment, enabling people from geographically distant locations who might share histories of interests to put images, audio files and short texts online, and connect specific words or images in their projects to other people’s. The Nine(9) universe is based on a series of gridded maps – there are nine big maps, each containing nine smaller maps, each of which is comprised of nine images. And each of those images has nine hot-link areas, which link to one text, one audio file, and then seven hot links to other images or text files or sounds anywhere in the Nine(9) universe. It’s a bit confusing to explain but you can see for yourself online. The project is hosted on a fast server at the Waag in Amsterdam, where is was developed by Harwood, and used by Mongrel and communities in the Bilmjer, Toronto, Johannesburg and Jamaica to document daily life.
Again this project fits in with the Mongrel ethos: encouraging people who are traditionally cut off from technological developments because of poverty and prejudice to share and “to own the code and communications that grow upon the Bit-commons and Technological Waste Lands of the Code-of-War.
I learnt Nine(9) by making my own map using images of ghost animals I had photographed in Banff, Canada, and combining them with fragments of dreams and conversations with a shape-shifter. I will build upon this first map, adding more sequences of Nine(9) maps as part of my “Seven Beauties and the Warroom” project. I also want to investigate potential interest from a specific South Australian regional community in using this software, and the international stage it is located on, as one of the ways to tell stories about culture and fragile country currently under threat from marina and wind-farm projects.
The second week of the workshop combined technical tutorials in the open source operating system Linux with a series of planning sessions for a major Mongrel community project, the Jelliedeel Initiative of Sheds on the Bit-Commons.
I have wanted to learn how to work within a Linux environment for some years now, in order to be able to use the free softwares which are available. To use GIMP rather than Photoshop, or hascicam for video streaming, to be part of a set of media communities rather than a consumer of overpriced wares. So I was introduced to the Debian flavour of Linux, and have learnt some of the basic commands for getting around the directories and files on the system using a Command Line Interface (CLI). Linux users can also customise their operating systems to resemble a traditional Windows GUI, but I like the old skool CLI as it brought back nostalgic memories of my own boffinish twin John Tonkin teaching me how to write HTML in a text editor 12 years ago, and uploading web pages of dollspace using UNIX commands 8 years ago.
I have built upon what I learnt of Linux, and am now programming some small utilities in it. I have a long way to go yet, but it’s easier than wrapping my head around the conditional tense in Italian for sure, and it’s relaxing, in that hand-coding of HTML way, or darning holes in socks.
http://tldp.org/LDP/linuxcookbook/html/
The Jelliedeel Sheds on the Bit-Commons are currently being planned by Mongrel to bring Southend-on-Sea key programmers, writers and artists to make a set of online resources to braoaden the access to free softwares. Many tools have been developed but currently it is hard to find portals to access them easily. I was invited to take part in a series of planning sessions to identify which areas of new media and social software production could be opened up via a tool-shed workshop model. These discussions have continued online via a WIKI (web-based collaborative authoring and communication tool).
A pilot program would run six sheds over an 18 month period, starting in mid-2004. Each shed is drawn up to reflect the geographically disparate networks that need to physically come together in order to progress the opening up of technologies and practices to as many peoples as possible. The aim is that the sheds will become both a repository and a focus for artists and organisations working in the field of arts-let regeneration, tactical media and media arts initiatives, using new, rejigged and recycled technologies. The cornerstone of all the sheds is a commitment to the use, propagation and development of free software and the ideas encompassed within it.
We live in a time when anyone with access to clean drinking water is attempting to make, publish and distribute meaningful media for themselves and their communities of interest. Often this activity goes on unnoticed or wilfully ignored by cultural establishments and social elites – snapshot photography, photocopied letters, websites, open publishing, texting, stickers, videos, and recorded and swapped music and film are making use of such media systems to grow cultures of minority interest and personal testimony. This content is increasingly being dynamically linked across the pathways of the digital commons. This in turn, in most people’s lives, overshadows the grand banalities of big media and big art. Even more surprising to many of us is the consistent intelligence exhibited within the use of such media systems, intelligence coming from remarkable places in that it appears more consistently in the ill, impoverished than it does in the ‘cultured’, healthy and content. (Mongrel, 2003)
Towards the end of the workshops I was able to attend DMZ in London. This was a two day event organsied by local media groups and individuals and held at The Limehouse in East London. It was a great event, with loads too much going on to see and hear it all, a bit like the Anarchist Bookfair with more bells and whistles, plus a chill out chai room hosted by Lisa Haskell which was the easiest place to catch up with people. London is a hard-edged city in many ways, yet the digi-media crews there manage to regularly make drifting spaces and events such as backspace, expo-destructo and DMZ in which the energy and generosity of a couple of hundred people shine through, inspiring others.
DMZ articulates the space where communication, exchange and experiment are seeded, grown and harvested in public. The progress of inspirational ideologies, diverse influences and convergent energies map themselves onto the city terrain, reshaping the environment, rejuvinating hope and breeding optimism. In miliary terms, a DMZ or ‘demilitarised zone’ is an area forming a buffer or boundary where military activity is forbidden. Some demilitarised zones are kept in place for decades, becoming reappropriated as wildlife reserves, public parks and markets. In computer network terms, the DMZ is an area without the Firewalls which protect more criticl systems. Typically, the DMZ is publically accessible and carries out unrestricted internet requests and responses. The event and activities at Limehouse Town Hall are offered in a DMZ. It is the public environment we most often inhabit and within which we operate on a day to day basis when we use internet, articulate community, contest authority, consume and create. (James Stevens, SPC.org)
Thank you ANAT for making my participation in the Jelliedeel Shop workshops and ancillary events possible. And special thanks to the Mongrel mudlarks for their warm hospitality, Japanese and Cockney feasts and, of course, the excellent workshops. Remember the mud!
Francesca da Rimini
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia.