Guildhall as in Shopping Centre #Exeter Any High Street

http://www.pr-works.co.uk/news/artist-in-residence-at-guildhall-shopping-centre

“Volkhardt Müller: Any High Street”  is in the Guildhall, the Guildhall Shopping Centre that is. I really did not understand this. The Guildhall staff in the High Street know nothing about it. No wonder I could not find anything.

I did find the artist in residence at the RAMM on Sunday. The video projections of Pastoral from the cells was not shown as the space was in use for printing out small sections from the woodcut as ordered by visitors. The plan is to do enough copies of each to eventually fill the display on the wall. But it needs someone to order each space.

There is a video display now showing the complete length of the High Street at three times of day. The illustrations are based on this. So far I think one is done, one mostly done, one not started. When I find the site in the Guildhall I will post again. Eventually this blog will form a sort of review, before the show closes in September.

Clip from Wild Show on YouTube, Design!? and questions for Bobby Womack

I have loaded a clip from last week's show

It starts with chat about interruptions and humour. I am interested in how much we can cross over with academic topics.

Based on the 28th Colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies. Papers include-  

Constant Connectivity: Rethinking Interruptions at Work 
By J. Wajcman and E. Rose

The Dialectical Sense of Humour: Routine Joking in a Taylorized Factory 
By M. Korczynski 

I will get the links on to YouTube later.

About 4 minutes in there is talk about Bobby Womack and whether we can re broadcast an interview with Front Row on the BBC. JD suggests I edit it as if I am asking the questions but I think this is a bit out of order. Maybe he will send us an mp3 to explain his state of health and real plans to tour.

Future shows will include tracks around Soul Sessions Vol 2 from Joss Stone and start with this as a way to play other tracks. 

Bookshops still in a growth phase at Northumbria University #uoeforum

It is reported in the Bookseller that Blackwells will open a new bookshop in September to take over from the previous bookseller at Northumbria University.

So the evidence remains strong that Blackwells is still supporting actual bookshops. It will probably be after September that students in Exeter will realise whether or not they can manage without a bookshop. There is no sign of any new retail activity at St Lukes though there is still an empty shop.

Meanwhile Exeter Central Library have started an arrangement with Overdrive for lending digital content such as e-books and audio books. They are still planning to invest in new physical buildings. But he question is still there, if a university is better with a bookshop demolished, what is the case for a library? 

Any High Street, Any Museum where Any = (Exeter, RAMM)

I made a first visit to RAMM for the Any HighStreet show by Volkhardt Muller

It is nowhere near ready yet. There is a triptych or at least the frames for such but only one section ready at the moment. I think this was done in the central library a few months ago. The origins are wood cut but there is some digital tech in the presentation. You have to do your own winding up for the animation to work. The largest projection is from Pastoral as shown in the cells of Exeter Castle a few years ago. This was when Exeter Art Spaces were based there. Transition was a show that used most of the available space including the cells. As the work was scratched on the cell walls it was not possible to remove it. In the RAMM there is also a paper record of some cell walls as found. You can walk round this but not get inside as paper is more fragile than a purpose built cell.

Volkhardt Muller will be at the RAMM on several days starting this Sunday. You can buy for quite small sums a print of a chosen section of carving to print. Obviously no photography is allowed or all the photocopiers in Exeter would be knocking out illegal versions.

But I did have permission to photograph Transition so here is a set from Flickr

I also had a chance to interview Simon Egan about his sound work called Fraud

He even agreed to answer a follow up question on another occasion

I now realise the sound recording is not very good. I will have to try to ask the same questions again, maybe in a studio.

draft design for Wild Show this Thursday and the remakes

It turns out that I may be doing the Wild Show on Phonic FM for the complete two hours both this week and next week - Thursday 10-12. Chris Norton is busy with the Isca Wheelchair Dancers though I think he may turn up at some point. He has asked me to do the first half hour most weeks but I try to concentrate on music. Over two hours there should be more scope for talk.

I started as a guest or rather at an attempt at a YouTube chatshow during Beer At The Castle organiswed by CAMRA. Carl Munson turned up and then invited me back to Phonic. The name of the show has changed, more on this another time.

I have bought three new CDs - Bobby Womack, Neil Young Americana, Beach Boys and I will buy Joss Stone Soul Sessions volume 2 when available. The summer is over or at least it has mostly rained but there will come a time to play the Beach Boys. Americana folk may fit with Sidmouth. Several Joss Stone tracks are on YouTube already so can mix with recent Bobby Womack.

The order can change. I hope my laptop will work ok as well as the CD players but sometimes what can be played depends on the equipment. Probably start with the pop aspect of the Soul Sessions, then more folk and then more dance. I want to talk to JD about 80s music and electronics.

JD also presents an 80s show on Totnes FM. Previously we have discussed the Celebration of Failure by Laura Kikauka at Spacex. Later we found an interview about "irritainment", content that is irritating enough to be entertainment. This is ok but opinions vary about what is irritating. I am a fan of Philadelphia International Records for example, mostly from the 70s. So far JD has told me that the 70s were not up to much, the 80s were a lot better. So we may reach agreement on a sort of celebration of the 80s. This would be based on sound, but also with graphics to suit the club or gallery location ( we exist in a basement studio but imagine where the sound is going) So my question for JD is what happened with electronics to make the 80s so good? Perhaps there will be some clues at the Eclectic Electric festival

Bobby Womack the Bravest Man in the Universe is onto another stage of electronics production. We may not understand this much so please send in comments.

Topics often include what is happening with copyright, CDs the high street etc. We do play directly from YouTube but also buy CDs and hope the Exeter HMV continues with at least some space for them.

Something related is happening with print publishing such as academic journals. I recently got an email about articles from Sage that are available to the public during a conference on Design in Helsinki. This is the 28th Colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies. Papers include-  

Constant Connectivity: Rethinking Interruptions at Work 
By J. Wajcman and E. Rose

The Dialectical Sense of Humour: Routine Joking in a Taylorized Factory 
By M. Korczynski 

So we may experiment with the amount of interruption we can cope with. Sometimes we answer the phone and also email. But I may turn this off. Facebook during the week is good, it gives us time to plan.

 

Testing Vimeo embed code , gallery jitters continued, Phoenix on Thursday.

<p>Topophobia: An overview from Spacex on Vimeo.</p>

Spacex have posted some video to Vimeo. Hope this shows it. If not seach Vimeo on Spacex the first two are about the current show.

I can't find the Review Group on the new site. I expect it will turn up eventually. My idea of a blog is to post stuff quite quickly in a form that could be revised. So I am just commenting here in a way that might change later.

I notice the style of video here is what I take to be fairly typical of what a gallery will allow. There is online video but posted by the gallery, not any sort of independent source. Including bloggers like myself, anyone with a camera. The public at the opening of this show were faced with a notice saying that they may be included in a video but could avoid this by asking to wear a special badge. My point of view is that I don't mind being in a video if I am allowed also to use a camera. So if there is a recipe exchange for example I would like to record the talk not just be photographed in the audience.

In this Vimeo video there is only one voice. The audience appear but they do not say anything.

What I remember most clearly is my question about whether there is anything good to be said about the internet. My impression still is that the web is seen as a place to avoid when compared to the aura of a gallery. There was some balance but I think fear of virtual spaces came up quite quickly as an approved topic.

Meanwhile I really like Sacriledge2012 and the photos etc that flow from it. Stonehenge is not curated by English Heritage, is not in a gallery, can be bounced on and there are no restrictions because of image rights etc. at least I have not found the limits yet. Search Twitter for more - #sacrilege2012  

I am looking forward to Thursday at the Phoenix, a mashup on Hanging Rock the movie. But when will fine art accept the same kind of freedoms?

Stonehenge in Totnes #sacrilege2012 @sacrilege2012

Totnesstone

This photo shows Stonehenge moved to Totnes. Already this has two likes on Facebook so it must be ok that I borrowed the sound for YouTube from Rafel Rodney. Also Clive Chilvers likes it. I am not going to borrow his photos for Demotix. There is a clear difference between Demotix and Creative Commons. And he did stay in Belmont Park during all the rain when I went home.

Continues on the Wild Show Facebook page. JD also presents an '80s show on Totnes FM so I am asking him to comment on Stonehenge in Totnes. I think there could be several made once the Olympics are over.

The original Totnes photo is on Flickr, Creative Commons, thanks to Old Fogey 1942

Animotronic Cat Ears, darr1cjsro , and comment by Diana Laurillard

The web is wonderful as a way to discover new things, the sort of jumble you used to find in bookshops. I just read the news that Animotronic Cat Ears are now available in the USA.

Not sure when these will turn up in Devon UK.  They respond to your mood as frioends will get to know.  darr1cjsro asks the question, would you wear them in public?

Anyway, the reason I found them was that Diana Laurillard left a comment on another post which I think was intended for my blog. I wrote about her new book -Teaching As A Design Science - Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. 

dianalaurillard quoted from my post-:

"What strikes me is that "design science" is an approach that can be related to by people working in quality and other forms of applied learning. As memory serves earlier writing on technology enhanced learning seemed to be working on academic theory from which design would follow. There could still be some better theory to come, but the science is in the method to loop through practice."

and responded-

Yes, good point - a design science should test and feed back into theory development as well.

So I think this is worth repeating because it opens up more space for communication with theory. See earlier posts in this Posterous will789gb blog for background on how quality assurance is regarded. The interest around "design science" could fit with how quality systems operate. So I am hoping to interest people from quality discussions such as the MoSO group on LinkedIn. Learning has always been part of quality.

There was another comment on the actual post-

"Laurillard seems to be writing for a fairly stable situation" - Yes, but the stable situation is continual technology innovation. That's why teachers must be able to act like design scientists, always exchanging ideas, always improving what they do, and given the time and responsibility to do so.

This gets into areas like system review and may even bring back quality circles to the UK. In some places they never went away.

Academic journals, B2B Publishing, cross language and social media, interruptions

Quite soon the Lancaster University LinkedIn group that is open to non graduates will close so I'm moving a topic out and it will probably continue for a while as part of Cross Media Live.

What to think about academic publishing and piracy etc. ?

this started with a Critical Management  link to Al Jazeera, see previous post

Recently I had an email from Sage about a free offer of access to Organisational Studies for five articles relating to the EGOS Conference in Helsinki July 5 -7, 2012.

This one is about interruptions

Constant Connectivity: Rethinking Interruptions at Work 
By J. Wajcman and E. Rose

So here is one example where the barrier of cost, library access etc is got round till the end of July. But for an audience beyond academics there is still the problem of language. The content could be explained in some other form. I think there is a lot of content in Business to Business magazines that might relate to a conference about Design. But there is a current gap between forms of publishing. 

Helsinki is currently a city of Design. I will try to find some magazine links for a future post. 

Social media seems to work mostly with fairly short bits of text, and an open approach. I don't know what the befefits are of a closed LinkedIn group. The #mtw3 idea is to have at least an occasional exchange of theory and practice.

(I am planning to read the complete paper but I may be interrupted)