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No matter where you were born, where you live, what language you speak. No matter your skin colour, religion, or belief. In 2020, we are all living through a global pandemic; the future remains uncertain for all of us.

Commissioned by Interfaith Scotland and created by artist Iman Tajik, Postcards for Solidarity explores facets of shared humanity across the globe in the face of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. Responding to the theme of connecting, Tajik issued an open call for contributors from all over the world to come together as collaborators

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Postcards for Solidarity

Postcards for Solidarity
No matter where you were born, where you live, what language you speak. No matter your skin colour, religion, or belief. In 2020, we are all living through a global pandemic; the future remains uncertain for all of us.

Commissioned by Interfaith Scotland and created by artist Iman Tajik, Postcards for Solidarity explores facets of shared humanity across the globe in the face of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. Responding to the theme of connecting, Tajik issued an open call for contributors from all over the world to come together as collaborators.

Participants responded to the open call by creating a self-portrait of their hand and a short text about life in lockdown. In order to facilitate the work and connect participants virtually, Tajik and writer Loll Jung held two workshops designed to give guidance on the nature of self-portraiture and explore different ways of writing and editing personal experiences of the pandemic into poetic forms.

This online exhibition is the outcome of that collaborative artwork, in addition to the randomised posting of the postcards to participants: a small message of hope and solidarity from a stranger, exploring the community of humans across faiths, borders, and social structures, connected by one commonality: we're all human, we're all experiencing similar feelings of loss, grief, isolation, and, sometimes, hope.

See the exhibition here: http://scottishinterfaithweek.org/postcardsforsolidarity

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Postcards for SolidarityNo matter where you were born, where you live, what language you speak. No matter your skin colour, religion, or belief. In 2020, we are all living through a global pandemic; the future remains uncertain for all of us.

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Slow Marathon 2020: Under One Sky was a pan-global walk with Iman Tajik When the world was hit by Covid-19 and its communal restrictions in the summer of 2020, Tajik explored global solidarity through the reimagining of Deveron Projects' annual Slow Marathon walking event. Instead of Deveron Projects' annual place-based mass walk, this year’s Slow Marathon: Under One Sky was placed virtually, collaboratively - by myriad participants around the globe.

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بنی‌آدم اعضای یک پیکرند که در آفرينش ز یک گوهرند
Human beings are members of a whole, since in their creation they are of one essence.
Saadi Shirazi

Wherever you are in the world, we are all under one sky

Iman Tajik is a Glasgow based artist and photographer originally from Iran. Borders and the movement of freedom are his key subject matters - influenced by his personal experience of crossing borders. He was working with us over the summer on a mass worldwide border-free walking project.

The Coronavirus pandemic has adopted an increasing fear of the outsider into our lives and homes. Some of our politicians' rhetoric about Covid-19 being a 'foreign virus'; subsequent border closures - they all play into existing xenophobia. The virus however, doesn't acknowledge borders. A pandemic affected us all. So, what can we do to show that we all live under one sky?

Iman Tajik explored global solidarity through the reimagining of our annual Slow Marathon walking event. Instead of our annual place-based mass walk, this year's Slow Marathon: Under One Sky took place collaboratively - by myriad participants around the globe. Cumulatively, mile by mile, we wended our human trail across the surface of our planet and through as many borders as we could. To do this, Iman forged a digitally collaborative relationship with many walkers, exploring the ideological interplay/conflict of borders and the virus; the lines we humans create traversing the landscape when free to do so; and the plight of those being denied that freedom - by the virus or by socio-political means. For this he collected images from walkers of the sky they saw while walking, to be brought together in a massive artwork of all of us Under One Sky.

The Under One Sky project and its event, Slow Marathon 2020 supported Scottish Detainee Visitors, who provide friendship and advocacy for residents of Dungavel House, Scotland's only immigration detention centre.

In total, the Under One Sky project included 320 global walkers, who walked 41,725.46km - that's 104.12% of the way around the Earth!

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بنی‌آدم اعضای یک پیکرند که در آفرينش ز یک گوهرند Human beings are members of a whole, since in their creation they are of one essence. Saadi Shirazi Wherever you are in the world, we are all under one sky Iman Tajik is a Glasgow based artist and photographer originally from Iran.

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Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it?

In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so.

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In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this-it had to be remade for the purposes of profit maximization, through a years-long process of privatization that turned a small research network into a powerhouse of global capitalism. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today.

The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Not with an eye towards making markets work better, but towards making them less dominant. Not in order to create a more competitive or more rule-bound version of privatization, but to overturn it. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

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In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so.

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An interesting source that contains most art practitioners in Yemen

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Hi! Please let us know how we can help.

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Yemen Art Base, Sanaa, Yemen. 15,664 likes · 147 talking about this. A digital platform aiming at gathering Yemeni artists and the diaspora in one place to showcase and promote their artworks locally...

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The migratory journey of a Venezuelan mother

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"Under the Heavens": A Mother's Perilous Journey from Venezuela to Brazil

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While leaving her country, a woman's ability to breastfeed entwines her fate with a young mother and her baby in Gustavo Milan's short film, "Under the Heavens."The story behind the film.

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Tally.so - lots of free tools for making forms, 

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Tally.so - lots of free tools for making forms, 

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Forms can be a great way to send interactive letters, not just book events!

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The simplest way to create forms. Say goodbye to boring forms. Meet Tally — the free, intuitive form builder you’ve been looking for.

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https://reforestingscotland.org/portfolio/a-thousand-huts/#:~:text=Reforesting%20Scotland's%20Thousand%20Huts%20Project,of%20community%20and%20co%2Doperation.

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Reforesting Scotland's Thousand Huts Project believes that a culture of recreational hut use could benefit people in Scotland greatly. Hut life brings people closer to nature. It cultivates practical skills in low carbon living, as well as fostering a spirit of community and co-operation. The physical and mental health benefits are without doubt, especially in these days of high levels of obesity and anxiety in children and teenagers. Ultimately, hutting helps grow a sense of empowerment and dignity through the creation of a beautiful, simple, low-impact hut.

Since its launch in 2011 the campaign has successfully achieved:

New planning policy supporting low impact huts for recreational use

New building regulations supporting safe, sustainable hut construction

A 40-page guide to huts and planning permission

A 70-page technical guide to good practice in hut construction

A robust Voluntary Code of Good Conduct between hutters and landowners to help create fair leases and formal agreements protecting the rights of both parties.

Planning permission for a Pilot Hut Site of 12 huts on public forest land, plus the creation and development of Carnock Hutters Group to take the site forward

8 major hutting events, each for up to 250 people, plus countless smaller events, seminars and workshops for specialist groups such as planners, landowners and prospective hutters

Around 10,000 supporters

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Reforesting Scotland's Thousand Huts Project believes that a culture of recreational hut use could benefit people in Scotland greatly. Hut life brings people closer to nature. It cultivates practical skills in low carbon living, as well as fostering a spirit of community and co-operation.

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Love her work and it's a great inspiration

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We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in any emails.

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We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in any emails.

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Different Articles about Crypto world, Web3 and NFTs that I found interesting to learn about Crypto.

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Halabja Chemical Gas memo attach by Saddam Hussein regime 1988. 

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5000 Kurdish Civilian died and thousands injured and still are suffering from the chemical weapons.

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http://www.carbethhutters.co.uk/

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The history of Carbeth and the story of its Hutters is complex. Its beginnings were altruistic when returning soldiers from the first world war were granted camping rights by the landowner Allan Barns Graham. Important also was the health of families living along the industrial banks of the River Clyde. The City of Glasgow and its satellites at full productive capacity created everything, including pollution, on an industrial scale. The detriment to health was serious.

The lure of the countryside to provide fresh air and tranquility was an obvious choice to combat these problems. This idea of course had become well established by the 'camping and trekking' phenomenon that took place nationwide in the 1920s and 1930s.

A key figure in the Carbeth story is a remarkable man called William Ferris, a pioneer of outdoor access and activities. He served in the HLI during WW1 and wrote to Allan Barns Graham requesting access to camping rights at Carbeth. Both men had a common interest in the theatre and the arts. Their friendship flourished and Carbeth as a hutting community was born.

Carbeth's population expanded in relation to this need. Numbers peaked in 1941 as a direct result of enemy action when the nearby town of Clydebank was devastated in an air raid. The Huts filled with evacuees and homeless families. For a long time Clydebank workers 'trekked' daily across the Kilpatrick Hills to their places of employment on what is now a well worn and famous route.

Carbeth has been involved in much controversy, Land ownership issues, tenants rights and rent strikes have featured much in its recent history. Within this web site all this is well documented.

There was always however another Carbeth. The Carbeth of a thousand childhoods. Almost a century of city children grew up in its playground of fields and forests. They would all have known of the Craigallian Fire, the Fairy Ring, the Seven Sisters, tales of hauntings, ghosts and hidden treasure.

The presence of a 200 year old coaching inn, where many swear to have heard the rattle of carriages and thrashing hooves passing in a black moonless night, further enriched Carbeth's mythology. Add to this Carbeth's physical environment, ancient Pines, dark forests, the Lily Pond, the Fairy Falls, the Sweet Water Spring, its rich bird life, plants and animals, all this combined to create for many a very special place.

These are the threads that bind together five generations of Carbeth Hutters and hint at the strength, passion and driving force behind Carbeth's existence.

We hope that you will enjoy exploring this web site and the many diverse and interesting related articles.

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The history of Carbeth and the story of its Hutters is complex. Its beginnings were altruistic when returning soldiers from the first world war were granted camping rights by the landowner Allan Barns Graham. Important also was the health of families living along the industrial banks of the River Clyde.

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Great film exploring elements of the artworld. and very funny

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Great film exploring elements of the artworld. and very funny

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https://www.nature.scot/sites/default/files/2019-01/Green%20Exercise%20Case%20Studies%20-%20Royal%20Edinburgh%20Community%20Gardens.pdf

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The Handmaid's Tale is an American dystopian television series created by Bruce Miller, based on the 1985 novel

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The Handmaid's Tale: Series Trailer | Hulu

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Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable.

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UbuWeb.archive
founded 1996

Film & Video
Sound
Dance
Papers
Historical
Visual Poetry
Conceptual Comics
Conceptual Writing
Contemporary
Aspen Magazine
Outsiders
/ubu Editions
365 Days Project
Ethnopoetics
Electronic Music Resources
UbuWeb Top Tens
About
Contact

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UbuWeb .archive founded 1996 Film & Video Sound Dance Papers Historical Visual Poetry Conceptual Comics Conceptual Writing Contemporary Aspen Magazine Outsiders /ubu Editions 365 Days Project Ethnopoetics Electronic Music Resources UbuWeb Top Tens About Contact

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Sci-Hub: everyone is a pirate — even scientists

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Sci-Hub website. Get free access to academic journals. Download research papers for free from ScienceDirect, IEEE, Wiley, Springer, Nature and others

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https://www.newmandala.org/living-art-under-attack-in-timor-leste-arte-moris/

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Thursday night, hot, humid and sweaty as the sun sets over the capital of Timor-Leste. On the side of the road a large crowd gathers around a makeshift stage. Beside it are paintings thrown in a pile like junk - powerful art works depicting Timorese veterans, years of guerrilla struggle, heroes of this young nation. The first act of the eviction of Arte Moris, Timor-Leste's Free Art School.

Songs are being sung at the top of lungs, canvases painted in bursts of energy, frustration and a little bit of fear. Amidst the shock and despair, Osme, known around the country, is performing on stage bringing people to laughter in a way only he can.

This is Arte Moris Resistance. Peaceful resistance, showing both the power and value of art.

Police look on, some trying to find the power cord to cut the sound system and put a stop to it all. In the back of Arte Moris is a scene of destruction, a bulldozer has knocked over trees, sculptures and art that formed a jungle oasis for art and creativity. The main building looks like it's been ransacked, art, bookshelves and pieces of paper, are overflowing out the door.

When I first stepped foot in Timor-Leste 18 years ago, I landed and went straight from the airport to Arte Moris. I was blown away by the vibrant energy that was (and continues to be) Arte Moris. There were studios full of young people painting and attending art classes. Bibi Bulak performance and music troupe, which I had come to join, were creating powerful performance pieces looking at social change. Bands were practicing, singing songs about their new nation. A favourite was Hau la hatene Portuguese ("I don't understand Portuguese" in lingua franca Tetum)-telling of the time and peoples' view of the new national language. Trees were being planted and sculptures made out of driftwood, old UN cars and anything else that could be found were being installed around the grounds. There was a sense of endless possibility, a movement that was painting a new narrative of a nation, whilst also documenting its development, so powerfully captured in the Arte Moris permanent collection housed in the iconic Arte Moris dome building.

If you have ever been to Timor Leste, you will have most likely been touched by Arte Moris. Whether you were lucky enough to get a tour of the grounds, see the collection and the enthusiasm of studios of young people painting. Maybe you saw murals or stencils on walls around the country calling for unity and peace or critiquing handouts of 4WD luxury Pajeros for parliamentarians in a country with some of the highest levels of malnutrition in the world. On the local bus you may gotten a song stuck in your head from renowned Arte Moris bands Galaxy or Klamar, or caught a street performance by Tertil or Bibi Bulak.

Art in Timor-Leste is synonymous with Arte Moris - Living Art in Tetum. It is a free art school that was established by Swiss-German couple Gabi and Luca Gansser together with young Timorese artists in 2002. In 2003 they were given permission to move in and use the grounds of the former Indonesian museum by then-Secretary of State for Culture, Virgilio Smith. Since then, Arte Moris has spawned generations of artists including visual artists, musicians, actors, photographers, film makers, even government advisors and an architect in the government. It is a hub for youth expression and has won numerous awards and prestige, whilst also exhibiting internationally. It has become an international face of Timor-Leste, an ambassador for art, culture and expression.

Over the years Arte Moris has faced threats of eviction, but also promises of it being formalised as an art space. As recently as January 2020 the Secretary for State for Art and Culture came to measure the buildings, publicly stating they would rehabilitate it for a museum and an academy of the arts, something that is sorely missing in this young nation. But six months later that plan had evaporated with the first letter of eviction from the Ministry of Justice delivered to Arte Moris, catching the artists off guard.

The Council of Veterans, the war heroes who had fought in the jungle so that the country could gain independence, had been promised the land to build accommodation for veterans visiting Dili. When faced with this news Arte Moris took the road of peace and diplomacy. They followed requests by government, lobbied and negotiated, met with the President, the Minister of Justice, Secretary of State for Land and Property and Art and Culture and many more. They've held art exhibitions, ran workshops, made podcasts and a documentary showing the history and the value of Arte Moris to the country. They have asked for a solution in the form of a suitable alternative space that could support their work and all the groups that utilise the current space, including bands, theatre groups, visual artists, art students, as well as the only national art collection.

The government offered a dilapidated warehouse in central Dili, Amajan Bebora, that would require evicting multiple families living in it, ignoring a graveyard on the site, poor road access that the public and tourists would struggle to find, and no sanitation facilities. This space was not a viable option for Arte Moris and all of the groups that utilise the space. Arte Moris was requested to provide a list of alternative spaces to Secretary of State for Land and Property. It provided a list of five options including state buildings that are currently abandoned. Arte Moris thought these discussions were still ongoing and an option allowing art activities to continue would be found. But they were shocked when on the 1 st December 2021, only a few months before Arte Moris's 20 th anniversary, the final eviction letter was delivered to Arte Moris informing them that they only had three days to vacate. Within an hour, representatives of the Secretary of State for Land and Property, who were leading the eviction, were piling artwork into trucks, dumping them on the road in front of Arte Moris, and taking them off site.

For a young country with 46% of the population under the age of 18, one that states that it is prioritising investment in youth as the future of the nation, the eviction and treatment of Arte Moris is a kick in the guts.

Alfeo Sanches, one of the Senior Arte Moris artists said "It's like our parents (the government) have kicked us out to the street. We thought that they would look after us and at least help us move out with dignity and find a new home, but instead its heartbreaking to know that our parents don't actually care about us".

The irony of it all is that the artwork piled on the road as part of the eviction is work that pays respect and admiration to the very people who are leading Arte Moris' eviction. When the families of the veteran resistance leaders found out that the paintings had been discarded in such a way, they were outraged.

These powerful images, and the shock of Arte Moris being evicted has gone viral over print, online, TV and social media. A press conference with Arte Moris and the Land Network, Rede ba Rai, who are providing legal aid, broke viewer records when it was live streamed by the national television channel TVE. There have been public outcries both in Timor and internationally to save Arte Moris. Parliamentarians have raised the issue in Parliament. Both Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Rose Horta and National Hero Xanana Gusmao have publicly declared their support for Arte Moris and called for a dignified new space to be provided. But yet nobody has stepped in to find a viable solution.

The eviction has shown who holds the real power in Timor-Leste. It is evidence that development plans and promises to invest and build opportunities for young people are not being prioritised. It reveals that the past is more important than the future, and that art and culture is not valued.

There is currently no national gallery, no funded art school, and almost no government support for the arts. Even more concerning is that one of the few other key art organisations that exist in Timor-Leste, Gembel, is also facing eviction. While Gembel's situation is different, their eviction from a government provided space is being contested in court. In a short amount of time the two biggest and most well-known art collectives in the country could be without homes. There is an urgent need for investment and support for the arts and culture and genuine support for safe and creative spaces for youth.

On 13 December 2021 a police line was set up stopping Arte Moris from holding its daily vigil of music and painting, and on 16 December Arte Moris members were finally forced to leave. The hope for a suitable government funded space have now evaporated. Currently, options to fund or purchase land or a building to permanently house Arte Moris are being explored and the collection is being stored in a number of locations. But there is no doubt that Arte Moris will live on in a new form, a new era beginning.

The latest joke among the Arte Moris family is that when they do finally find a new space, the discarded artwork on the road will be recreated as a conceptual artwork and a symbol of Arte Moris's legacy: art speaking truth to power.

Viva Arte Moris!
All photos by Allone Twosix, who can be found at @Fuuknakdulas on Facebook and Instagram. Photos reproduced with the photographers permission.
Annie Sloman lived and worked at Arte Moris with the Bibi Bulak Performance Arts and Music Troupe from 2004-2008. She is currently the Associate Country Director (Program Director) for Oxfam in Timor-Leste. All views in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent the views of their employer.

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Living Art under attack in Timor-Leste: Arte Moris - New Mandala

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Thursday night, hot, humid and sweaty as the sun sets over the capital of Timor-Leste. On the side of the road a large crowd gathers around a makeshift stage. Beside it are paintings thrown in a pile like junk - powerful art works depicting Timorese veterans, years of guerrilla struggle, heroes of this young nation.

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English

© 2022 Instagram from Meta

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https://humanlibrary.org

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a project in progress still that talks about being diffirent through queer art

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unorthodox heretics (1)

collage and mixed media on wood board

50 x 50 cm

2019

unorthodox heretics (kiss me goodbye)

collage and mixed media on wood board

50 x 50 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (3)

collage and mixed media on wood board

120 x 120 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (shame)

collage and mixed media on glass

74 x 78 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (5)

collage and mixed media on wood board

33 x 33 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (6)

collage and mixed media on canvas

33 x 33 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (7)

collage and mixed media on canvas

25 x 25 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (8)

collage and mixed media on wood board

25 x 25 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (the finger)

collage and mixed media on wood board

25 x 25 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (10)

collage and mixed media on canvas

35 x 35 cm

2020

unorthodox heretics (11)

collage and mixed media on wood board

20 x 20 cm

2020

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syrian artist mousa glasgow painter fine art graphic designer

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Syrian born | Glasgow based | Artist | Painter | Graphic Designer

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Gives me a hope there's an alternative to more and bigger.

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Really enjoyed hearing the talk about Regenerative commons from Kit. This is a project I am developing - using photogrpahy and projections in terms of how do we show people less reflected in museums/media and also get communitites to think about re claiming spaces in the public realm.

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'On the Edge' - Exploring The Role of Key Workers in Glasgow - Visual Art/Projection Project - Phase 1

Bash Art Creative and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Fair Access department are working together on phase one to test and create a series of large-scale outdoor video installations, using creative portraiture and performance to explore the role of key workers, teachers, artists and people who have made a significant contribution to our lives and community in these testing times.

The project aims to explore what defines a key worker and we ask people to observe and nominate people in thier own communities who have made a positive impact during these times.

We are on the look-out for people in the Glasgow area who are willing to be filmed for video portraits on their doorsteps - they will be filmed from a safe distance and we require no more than 20 mins of people's time.

Phase one will start on the edge of the city and the portraits will be screened in public spaces in 4 communities around Glasgow throughout October and November. Starting in Castlemilk. Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Milton. The project will connect with local partners to develop the project. We hope to take the work around different areas of Glasgow after these initial events.

The portraits will be done in video to create living, breathing images. In a world where we see most of our content on a mobile phone and faces are the size of your thumb, we will enlarge the portraits to scales which are normally reserved for celebrities, stars, politicians and advertisements.

The aim of creating these portraits is to recognise and celebrate the real heroes of our time: NHS workers; teachers, cleaners, artists and shopkeepers - we also want to explore what defines a key worker. People from our communities who deserve to be recognised on a larger scale.

The projections of phase one will take place in Drumchapel, Castlemilk, Easterhouse and Milton.

If you have any questions about the project please contact:

Basharat Khan - Creative Director of Bash Art Creative on: bashartcreative@gmail.com ( www.bashartcreative.com)

#keyworkers #glasgowlife #bashartcreative #rcsofficial #visualarts #projections #publicrealm #scotland #sorka

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'On the Edge' - Exploring The Role of Key Workers in Glasgow - Visual Art/Projection Project - Phase 1 Bash Art Creative and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Fair Access department are working together on phase one to test and create a series of large-scale outdoor video installations, using creative portraiture and performance to explore the role of key workers, teachers, artists and people who have made a significant contribution to our lives and community in these testing times.

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http://gentleradical.org

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Academia.edu - imperfect but still a good resource for finding academic papers

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Academia.edu - imperfect but still a good resource for finding academic papers

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"I go through all the articles in the bulk download, save the ones that are clearly going to be useful and discard the remainder. This saves loads of time but also points me in directions I might not otherwise have thought of looking."

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Academia.edu is a place to share and follow research.

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Inspiring educational YouTube show in the Arab world "Al-Daheeh by Ahmed el-Ghandour

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0:00 / 15:04•Watch full video

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الدحيح | الملل

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International Music Score Library Project

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International Music Score Library Project

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Hosts thousands upon thousands of sheet music that's now in the public domain.

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Community oriented project developed during the pandemic.

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From 26th to 28th of February, the collection of objects made during the workshops will be shown in a small exhibition at the Pipe Factory, an art gallery in Glasgow.

For the exhibition, the participants want to talk about their experience living between two countries, in a liminal space between the place they left and the country they live in. The resulting collection of objects, which includes ceramics, music pieces, instruments and tapestries, will be displayed to capture this notion of the middle passage, the experience of cultural hybridization, dislocation and geographical movement.

During the opening day, the participants will also present a musical performance, using the collection of instruments they made during the workshops and playing musical rhythms that take inspiration from Iranian traditional music.

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Distanced Assemblage - Memories from Elsewhere

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From 26th to 28th of February, the collection of objects made during the workshops will be shown in a small exhibition at the Pipe Factory, an art gallery in Glasgow. For the exhibition, the participants want to talk about their experience living between two countries, in a liminal space between the place they left and the country they live in.

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https://culturalrights.net/en/documentos.php?c=14&p=161

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July 16th – July 30th 2022  Application Deadline:  13th of June 2022

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Summer school: Working on common ground Prishtina Kosovo

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Summer school: Working on common ground Prishtina Kosovo

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https://manifesta14.org/news/summer-school-working-on-common-ground/

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The summer school is open to local and international young designers, architects, artists and enthusiasts around topics and practices of commons, urbanity, de-contamination, conservation, circular and regenerative economies and climate care.

Focus on research by design the courses will have a hands-on approach, coupled with on site experimental ethnographic and performative research. The collective built interventions will stay open and actively host the public for the 100 days of the programme of Manifesta Biennial. Participants will take part in one of the courses and engage with shared programmes of lectures, discussions, screenings and other events in between.

The participation is free of charge, with on site lunch covered by the summer school. International students are asked to arrange their own travels to and from Prishtina. Local participants will be asked to possibly host their international peers in forms of distributed hospitality around the city, a precious characteristic of Kosovo, which reads Prishtina beyond the lines of its maps. We will facilitate the matchmaking prior to your arrival in Prishtina.

The courses and communication during the summer school will be in (different forms of broken) English
How to apply
If you wish to join us in Prishtina this summer, please fill in the application form within 13th of June.

For international applicants

-> For any question please contact here workingoncommonground@gmail.com

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Summer School - [Working on] Common Ground - Manifesta 14 Prishtina

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The summer school is open to local and international young designers, architects, artists and enthusiasts around topics and practices of commons, urbanity, de-contamination, conservation, circular and regenerative economies and climate care. Focus on research by design the courses will have a hands-on approach, coupled with on site experimental ethnographic and performative research.

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​Community InfoSource developed the Wellbeing Project during 2020 in response to the destitution, digital exclusion and isolation asylum seekers in Glasgow face as a result of the UK asylum system, which was exacerbated during Covid lockdown. As services went online they were inaccessible to those without smartphones, laptops and data and language barriers made this more difficult. The increased isolation contributed to declining mental health and this was particularly so for over 300 asylum seekers who were moved into cramped and inappropriate hotel accommodation without the facilities to cook their own food or meet socially.

Asylum seekers' experiences and journeys are often traumatic and affect their mental health. The Wellbeing team offer a befriending service through Buddy Volunteers that aims to support new arrivals through peer to peer support and practical support with daily lives. Buddy Volunteers, many of whom have lived experience of asylum, offer much needed friendly support that helps asylum-seekers navigate life in their new city, offering support to access much-needed services and signposting to other agencies.
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​The Wellbeing Project also offers ways in which asylum seekers can stay connected by improving digital access and increasing social connections either digitally or face to face. Our volunteers and participants help plan and organise regular activities such as cycling trips, hill walks, and city tours, improving physical and mental health.
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If you are an asylum seeker and would like to join us please email stuart@infosource.org.uk or call/text 07306 356 840

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​Community InfoSource developed the Wellbeing Project during 2020 in response to the destitution, digital exclusion and isolation asylum seekers in Glasgow face as a result of the UK asylum system, which was exacerbated during Covid lockdown. As services went online they were inaccessible to those without smartphones, laptops and data and language barriers made this more difficult.

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a great movie spotting the relation between art a creative form and as a business

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0:00 / 2:50•Watch full video

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Velvet Buzzsaw | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix

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A series of books by Ali Smith, grappling with a lot of the issues of modern society; surveillance, commons and public ownership, migration, equality, national identity etc.

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About Penguin Random House UK

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4. Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet: an oral history

Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet: an oral history

Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, Ali Smith's Booker Prize-shortlisted, bestselling Seasonal Quartet, is now complete – a unique feat of modern literature that records perhaps the strangest time in living history. Here is the untold story of its creation, in the words of Smith herself and the editors and designers closest to the project.

Alice Vincent

06 August 2020

The past five years have witnessed some of the most extraordinary news events in living history. They have also seen the release of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: four books that, in an unprecedented feat of publishing, have tracked these world-turning moments in real-time and have gone on to earn critical acclaim, a place on the Booker Prize shortlist and topped the bestseller charts.

Summer, the final instalment released this month, was re-written and re-filed as Black Lives Matter protests took to the streets, pushing publishing deadlines to their limits and becoming the first book to be entirely produced during lockdown. Here we speak individually to those involved in the series’ creation, from assistant to author, to hear the untold story of these remarkable books.

In 2014, Ali Smith proposed an idea to her agent and publisher.

Ali Smith, author: I’d had a thought way back at the start of ever writing anything (I published my first book in 1995) that one day I’d like to write four books about the seasons.  But the project was one of those things you have at the back of your mind, think one day you’ll get to, but not yet, something several mountains away on the horizon.

Simon Prosser, publisher: Ali has a great story about the fact that a long time ago, She sent a postcard to Olivia Laing, who’s her partner’s cousin, saying something like, “One day I want to write a book about the four seasons”. The idea was somewhere in her head from a long way back.

Tracy Bohan, agent: Ali had delivered a previous novel after her deadline and Simon and the team at Penguin had heroically managed to keep their publication schedule. It became a happy accident, and sparked an idea for a subsequent cycle of books. That was the first conversation we had about it.

Simon: She wanted to write a sequence of books called Seasonal and they would each deal with a season. And there was the idea of whether it would be possible to write these books on a relatively short time, so they were right up to the minute, as contemporaneous as could possibly be, and whether we could publish them as fast as was humanly possible.

Ali: I asked Simon whether he thought the project would work or be possible.

Simon: So really it was a question: “Can we do this?”

Ali: He liked the idea, and checked with the team, everyone from copy edit to distribution.

Simon: I sort of investigated and thought, well, we’ve all worked together a long time, we all trust each other. I thought, yeah, we could get it down to about six weeks, from manuscript filing to finished book. Which is super, super fast. I can’t think of a way you could publish it faster.

Tracy: What was a little bit dangerous and fun about the Seasonal pitch was that, very much by design, this very tight turnaround would be an integral part of the creative project.

Ali: Everyone said AN ENORMOUS YES.

Simon: And Ali was like, “Right, let’s do this.”

Hermione Thompson, editorial team: Everyone was immediately hugely excited about it. But I don’t think any of us could have known how pertinent and timely and formative it was going to turn out to be.

Autumn. Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

In order to meet the unprecedented deadline, the team took an unconventional decision: to design the covers before the manuscript was submitted – let alone written.

Hermione: What would normally have been a conversation we had for every book, but was instead decided very early on before any of them had been written, was the cover design.

Simon: We knew right from the word go that what we wanted were covers that would express the cycle of the seasons.

Richard Bravery, art director: Ali embraces art like very few other authors out there – from film and photography through to painting – and the works featured on her covers represent her books in a very intimate way. We first used Hockney on Ali’s books back in 2011, an iPad painting for There but for the, and the relationship between her and Hockney has been there ever since.

Simon: Richard got somebody to speak to the Hockney studio, and what came back were these four incredible images, of the same lane, through four seasons.

Richard: It was Joanna Prior (Managing Director, Penguin General) who suggested using Hockney’s seasonal paintings, which immediately felt right for the quartet. And from there we began talking to Hockney’s estate about which of the many different seasonal paintings he has produced over the years would be right for the books. “The tunnel” which depicts the same stretch of east Yorkshire road, emerged from those conversations.

Simon: They were stunning. And we were like, “yeah, those are perfect”.

Hermione: Richard came up with a series look, which uses beautiful cloth binding with a half-jacket of the artwork itself over the top.

Richard: We knew we wanted the package to feel tactile and in some small way to reflect the seasons, and cloth felt like a good articulation of that. The decision to use a half jacket followed on easily: why use cloth and then keep it all covered? The typeface used is Caslon 224, Black - I got seduced by the little chapeau on the ‘A’.

Simon: It made sense for the bindings to reflect the seasons, so Richard and I had a happy hour choosing all of the bindings to reflect the different seasons from a book of linens, and then thinking about the foils, and getting the foil to reflect the seasons.

Anna Ridley, communications director: I remember Simon coming round excitedly, dragging in Richard and being like, “Look at these! Aren’t these amazing!” They looked so fresh, it was exciting to see them emerge fully formed.

Richard: Your job as a designer is not to have your sticky fingerprints all over it but to become a conveyor of these ideas. How can you fuck up Ali Smith and David Hockney? I mean, really? It’s the easiest job in the world to be a designer on that series.

Simon: Very quickly Richard just put those covers together and we mocked up all four of them, with the covers wrapped around the linen, and I put them in a bag. I went off to meet Ali and said, “I’ve got something to show you”.

Ali: In December 2015 he showed me the four Hockney mock-ups for the covers of books that didn’t exist yet. No pressure.

Simon: I got them out of the bag and she said, “Oh!!! They're amazing. They’re perfect. We’ve got them! That’s it!” It was extraordinary, they were just perfect from the moment Richard designed them.

Ali: I felt a strange mix of that, ‘uh-oh, no pressure’ that I mentioned and of an uncanny... reassurance. It was like they already existed, though I still, eh, uh-oh, had to do the work to find them.

Richard: There was no moment that I doubted that Ali’s words would fit the vision that we’d all created.

Simon: And they existed, they were like these vessels there to be filled. So she had them, and I had them, they sat by my desk for four years, five years, whatever it’s been. It was almost like they were there to be filled. It was highly unusual, can’t really explain it, but there it is.

Annie Underwood, production control: At that point it was literally a case with the cloth on and the foil, and already they looked really beautiful together.  They’ve always looked so nice. Obviously with our job we don’t see the finished thing until it’s finished. But it was nice to have those cases as a guide to see what you’re working towards from the very start. I’ve always had those on my desk to work from and to look at and to know. So it’s been a constant companion for quite a few years.

Ali and Simon go to see Charles Dickens’s handwritten David Copperfield manuscript. Image: Simon Prosser / Twitter / Penguin

The five summers that have seen The Seasonal Quartet through from beginning to end have been rich in rite and mystery, with each new book following certain patterns and habits created by its predecessor.

Ali: Books, I’ve always believed, aren’t really written by writers, but by everything that person’s read. It’s the writing that already exists that begets the writing.

Simon: We have these rituals, and one ritual is that we would go and see a manuscript for a book that would inform the novel. So in the case of Autumn we went to go and see the manuscript for Keats’s 'Ode to Autumn' together, which was wonderful.

Ali: We went to visit Keats’s poem 'To Autumn', in his original handwriting, a talisman, at the British Library. When we were there, Rachel Foss, the Head of Modern Archives, showed us several other handwritten pieces by him, and by JG Ballard and by Angela Carter. Talismanic, and a paying of respect to the whole process and the corrected, crossed-out, rewritten fragments we leave behind, and the vitality in those fragments.

The following year we visited the few pages of what’s now thought to be 99.9% definitely Shakespeare’s handwriting in a blistering speech or two he wrote for The Book of Thomas More and then the next year we visited Katherine Mansfield’s last written letter, in which, in the middle of winter, she says she’s watching for signs of spring.

Simon: And for Summer we went to see the David Copperfield manuscript at the V&A towards the end of last year.

Lindsay Terrell, marketing manager: There were a few things that we always knew: that there would be Shakespeare, that there would be another artist, usually a writer or a painter, like Katherine Mansfield or Pauline Boty and we knew that they’d act as a kind of presiding spirit over the book. But until the books went to print, even Simon and Ali didn’t know what that story was. Had we wanted to sell those books to readers by pitching them the storyline, we couldn’t because it wasn’t an option. That was a real challenge to marketing the books.

Simon: We leave marketing copy until the last possible moment, when we’re being screamed at. Even then, it will just, literally say, “the follow-up to” whatever’s been before. You’ll notice that we never describe what’s in the book in advance, ever. Then, at the last moment, Ali will write a paragraph or two that we then use as copy which you’ll see is often quite elusive. Her strong sense is that you don’t need to do things in a conventional way and you can do things that are true the spirit of the book.

Winter. Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

Meanwhile, Ali was writing.

Simon: A lot of writers will file bits and pieces as they’re going along, and she’s not like that.

Hermione: She allows her ideas to percolate and ferment for a really long time, doing all this research and investigating all these all these directions, so that by the time she sits down to write she has a very detailed and developed sense of what she wants to do with it.

Ali: Basically, I chanced, each time, that something would come together on its own terms and I hoped I’d get it reasonably right.  Also, I like writing fast. I always have. It’s a vital thing. But I knew I was pushing my luck with these if anything in life intervened, or if I went down the wrong rabbit hole. I don’t know if they work, the books. I hope they’re okay.

Tracy: Ali does this very nice thing where she gives Simon and I a physical copy of the manuscript and she comes by. She’ll go to the Penguin Random House offices and then on her way back to Kings Cross to get the train back to Cambridge, comes to Bedford Square and it’s such a joy to kind of hold it in your hand. It really is one of the great thrills in my career.

Ali has delivered every manuscript in the same 'beautifully battered' portfolio since 1995. This was Summer. Image: Simon Prosser / Twitter / Penguin

Hannah Chukwu, editorial assistant: Every year Simon meets Ali at Kings Cross station and she literally hands over the manuscript to him.

Simon: The manuscript for Autumn arrived when I was on holiday in early August, in Frenchman’s Creek in Cornwall, a place haunted by the ghosts of Daphne du Maurier and that means something to Ali, as well. It was couriered down there, they had to knock on the door in this obscure place, and I just literally dropped everything and read it.

Hermione: I was in the office, it had come through on email, and I read it the same day, sitting at my desk long after the working day had finished. Ali has a very distinct voice so you always know when you’re reading something of hers – there’s a connection that runs through it all – but with Seasonal she was also doing something palpably different, something that she’d not done before. It felt very exciting to witness her finding the vocabulary for that and weaving these new sensibilities together.

Ali: I edit as I go along, so that the draft stops being a draft and the edit produces or reveals where what I’m writing will want to go next. It means that by first completion much of the iffing and butting of the editing’s been done. And I like a deadline. It means I know exactly when I can pay the bills.

Simon: The thing with Ali is that she’s very word-perfect. She’s one of those very unusual writers in that every word, every bit of punctuation, it all falls very firmly but lightly. In terms of conventional editing, there’s always very little. It probably wouldn’t work otherwise.

Ali: I have actual nightmares based round the stupid mistakes Lesley’s had to strip out of my manuscripts.

[Lesley Levene copyedited The Seasonal Quartet].

Hermione: The manuscripts when they come to us are as close to word-perfect already as you could get.

Winter. Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

In the months that Smith was working on Autumn, the UK had voted to leave the EU. The result left the country in unimaginable political turmoil. Upon Autumn’s release, on 20 October , 2016, it was swiftly dubbed “the first Brexit novel” by the media around the world. One passage, which starts “All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing”, seemed to sum up the country’s existential divide.

Hermione: The idea for the Quartet came about just before we hit this period of ridiculously news-heavy few years, and none of us could really have known that was coming, but it felt like Ali was picking up on something in the water.

Tracy: Obviously when the deal was done, when the Quartet was sold, none of us saw it coming. Well, certainly, I didn’t see it coming.

Simon: What I can’t do looking back is disentangle how much the looming referendum played a part in how much Ali decided this was the book she wanted to do. I suspect it did.

Ali: I always wait till the last moment anyway before I start writing anything, and with these the wait sometimes felt primed, like a curtain hadn’t quite gone up yet at a theatre – especially with the first and the last of the books, Autumn and Summer. With Autumn, I started writing, but I sensed that something was being withheld, or I was being withheld from the book. Then when the fallout round the EU ref vote started to happen I understood why I'd had to wait.

Simon: The “all across the country” passage is something that spoke, it turned out, to hundreds of thousands of people. It summed it all up in some way. She has a great ability to channel feeling in a way that’s unusual, and put it in words that are very memorable.

Lindsay: We always knew the concept which we were working with was designed to deal with immediacy and designed to be timely, but what I hadn’t seen yet was how that passage that had felt so specific to 2016 could hold a resonance that it could have as the years went by.

Hermione: It was also quite distressing: here was a response to a thing that we were all absolutely in the eye of the storm for, and it was an outpouring of grief and fear and uncertainty. It’s a very intense experience to see some of the emotions you’re in the midst of yourself and only just starting to understand or name expressed so acutely in a piece of art.

Spring. Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

While Ali was writing, Hamish Hamilton’s production, press and marketing teams were working at phenomenal speed to make sure the manuscript could become a viable book in a matter of weeks.

Hermione: The main thing we were doing in terms of publishing the book in terms of an object was making sure that the production team were comfortable with the timings of everything, which were always super tight. That’s a conversation we’d have to have long before Ali delivered the book, so she would agree with Simon when she felt she’d be able to deliver it long before she started writing.

Simon: We had to work out a schedule way ahead of time. Because one thing I felt strongly was that you should publish each book in the season of its essence, so that means some books had a slightly longer run at them and some had less.

Annie: For us we’d normally, with a new manuscript, have a minimum of two weeks but ideally up to three or four, to typeset the first proofs. I think the quickest one we did was Spring, and we did that in two days. It’s insane. And Ali has her own bespoke typeset grid, which adds another layer of complexity to it. Usually editorial would have a month to do a proof-read, but they were doing it in three days. Corrections were on a one or two-day turnaround, when you’d normally have a couple of weeks. It’s kind of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of thing. You don’t want to time your holiday for a certain week in the year when you know Ali’s coming in because you’ll miss the whole thing, basically.

Ali: As I wrote the books I felt the support, was never lonely (writing can sometimes be very lonely) given the communal making of the project, more, I felt understood, and enabled, and that I was in real expert hands with a project which, as we entered what I’ll call the interesting times we’ve been living through this last few years, was a kind of steady continuum, a lifeline in a stormy sea.

Annie Underwood sends Spring to press. Image: Simon Prosser / Twitter / Penguin

Ruppa Patel, senior inventory manager: So the first one publishes and we see this beautiful object arrive in the office, it’s got this beautiful autumnal, bronzy-brown colour, with this beautiful Hockney artwork. It’s so beautiful, and we’re like, how can this not do well?

Anna: It required a new way of doing things – and a new way of dealing with the press who hound to be able to read the manuscript and we weren’t able to do proofs.

Lindsay: Anna’s brainchild was to have a kind of early, exclusive event for every publication that would get together people who would love Ali most, which was mostly booksellers and some journalists and, of course, people in-house. They really powered the publications.

Anna: At that point when we had the manuscript finally ready to share it was like launching it with a bang. We’d invite everyone to an event where you’d get your chance to get your hands on a copy of the book and get to hear Ali do a reading from it.

Hannah: I’ve seen her speak in quite a few different contexts, and she’s an amazing speaker, and really silences the room. It’s been really interesting to see that evolution and see that it still works. It just connects with people.

Anna: The preview events have grown book on book. We had to move the one for Spring out of the office to get a space big enough to fit everyone and then for Summer, the digital preview event was attended by people from far-flung locations. That felt really exciting, a kind of fitting final instalment.

Ali Smith brings Spring to Daunt Books in 2019. Image: Simon Prosser / Twitter / Penguin

Autumn had arrived. Winter would follow in January 2018. The cycle continued with Spring, in March 2019.

Hannah: Spring was one of the first books I worked on from start to finish, and that was while I was on the traineeship, from September 2018 to March 2019, which was a unique way to get started in publishing.

Annie: I remember when Spring came in. We were in the office and you can see it on Simon’s desk. You’re keyed up, it’s almost as if you’re about to go on some really exciting adventure; you know it’s coming and you’re counting down the seconds until it comes to you and you can have your turn.

Hannah: I remember reading Spring overnight, I remember staying up late to read it. I remember feeling like I had this big exciting secret that everybody else was waiting for, and I had to myself.

Hermione: Spring, in particular, I found very, very affecting. About the resilience of nature, I guess, and the way that it persists regardless of what’s going on. Ali manages to offer the reader that consolation and that reassurance without ever disconnecting us from the ongoing moral responsibility of recognising what’s going on in the world – seeing it for what it is – which is a series of crises and atrocities. To hold those two things in balance and say, things will go on, but also we have a responsibility to change the world we live in.

Lindsay: Our ambition for Spring, three books in was to make it a Top Ten bestseller. For those two days waiting for that chart to come out, the anticipation really kept building. I remember Simon coming round to me at one point and saying, “Lindsay, I think we’re going to get Top 5,” and I said, “Well we might.” And then he came back again and he said “Lindsay, do you think we’re going get top 3?” I replied: “Maybe, we could. We’d need a spring miracle! But it’s possible to get to top 3.” And he replied, “Yes, yes, it would be a spring miracle!”

Ruppa: I didn’t have a feel for what was going to happen. I knew the ambition was there but I couldn’t tell. In terms of stock levels we probably did put similar stock levels out in the market.

Hermione: We get the results of the bestseller chart emailed every week, so if there’s a book that’s in a bestseller list we kind of all know at the same time, and go round to each other’s desks and celebrate a bit.

Lindsay: Of course, we got number one.

Simon: It felt like a miracle. Ali’s Jilly Cooper moment, as one of us joked when I called her, the instant after hearing.

Anna: I’m pretty sure there were tears. I think I probably cried, Lindsay would have cried.

Lindsay: Anna and I both cried, which sounds a little bit ridiculous but a number one feels like something beyond just a commercial success. It meant that people were reading this very important book at the kind of volume that actually can effect change, do you know?

Hermione: Ali had never charted in the Hardback Bestseller Top 10 before, and for her first entry to be number one, and for this incredibly risk-taking, brave, generous-spirited, totally sui generis piece of work felt, so joyful and special.

Ali: I don’t remember! I reckon I block this kind of thing. Fluke – not the kind of thing that happens to me, it’ll certainly never happen again.

Lindsay: I have wondered if it meant more to us than it did to her in a way. We told her and her response was just so characteristically Ali, she said, “It’s like Top of the Pops, and we’re toppling populism.”

Summer. Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

Even after a series that had taken in Brexit, political upheaval, an immigration crisis and the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, few could have anticipated the history-making events that would affect the final book in the cycle.

Ali: With Summer, I started writing at the end of January, first week of February, as news which had all been about the phrase done-and-dusted Brexit turned to news about people suffering from a strange respiratory disease and that disease crossing the seas as a doctor – who was being called a ‘whistleblower’ – himself died.

Simon: She started writing, and then the pandemic hit. The book was finished in lockdown, completely, and it was produced, from start to finish, in lockdown. It’s the first book we’ve done that way.

Hannah: She was writing just as lockdown happened and we got a draft in, and then we had a new draft in as the Black Lives Matter protest started, because it would be impossible to publish that without those things having occurred already.

Simon: So when you read Summer, it not only includes lockdown but it includes the murder of George Floyd. And the book exists now, you can read it.

Hannah: It’s been very cathartic to know that that was something we’d get to work on and be reading about together. We’re used to working in such close proximity and such a collaborative matter, it’s been very different to do that when everyone’s so separate and going through things in such a separate way. So I think that shared experience of reading it together, but also reading it together with a view to editing together, it also informed our conversations when we were talking as a team about how things were affecting us.

Simon: We’d all worked together out of lockdown, so in lockdown it went through like clockwork. I was joking with Ali that it was a book designed to be produced in lockdown.

Summer. Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

Finally, Summer is here. The final quarter has slotted into place. What’s appeared is not so much a series as a cycle: something that continues and regenerates, rather that starts and finishes.

Annie: Production are the first people to see the finished books because we have to check them and make sure nothing’s gone wrong with any of them. In the lead-up to the books coming in, I worry… what if it comes in and the cloth’s the wrong colour? But it’s such a “doo-doo-doo-doo!!” moment, to open the box and find it looks like how you want it to, and the colour is perfect, it’s just so exciting.

Ali: The four together? I still can’t quite get my head round it. They’re beautiful objects. I hope I meet the standard.

Hermione: It’s a funny one because we’ve seen images of the books for years, as digital mock-ups, long before real copies existed at all. So, it’s a little bit like that feeling when you go to a place that you’ve seen lots of film and photography of, like the first time you go to New York. It’s a bit uncanny because you feel like you’ve been seeing it for years.

Simon: It felt totally different to having the mock-ups. The kids were away, so I was in the house on my own which is very, very rare and so they just sat on the sofa and kept me company for a night. They sat there and glowed and radiated something. And I thought, what an incredible achievement that Ali has done, what an incredible achievement by my colleagues to make this happen and for these books to be there, sitting one on top of another. I was very, very moved, actually.

Anna: It feels like a really momentous occasion to come to the end of it.

Ali: It was a case, from Brexit to Covid, of watching how the narratives that get called news, by which we understand and try to assimilate what’s happening to our lives in the world, reached us, and in what form, in what mode of language, and with what purpose. And if we see what happens, however destabilising or unsteadying or steadying or impactful as a form of narrative, then we can start to read it, and reading is everything.

Image: Stuart Simpson/Penguin

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Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: an oral history

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Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, Ali Smith’s Booker Prize-shortlisted, bestselling Seasonal Quartet, is now complete – a unique feat of modern literature that records perhaps the strangest time in living history. Here is the untold story of its creation, in the words of Smith herself and the edito…

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Revisiting the Work of Black Artists in Scotland

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Revisiting the Work of Black Artists in Scotland

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Inspiring/Great work but makes me wonder about how I/We fit into certain criterias/colour/labeling

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Barby Asante, Tam Joseph, Donald Locke, Maud Sulter, Lisandro Suriel, Alberta Whittle, Aubrey Williams, Matthew Arthur Williams and Ajamu X

This exhibition brings together new acquisitions and existing works from Glasgow Museums' collection, reflecting complex dialogues around race, Empire, independence and post-colonial legacies. Co-curated with independent duo Mother Tongue, the acquisitions draw upon their research collating a chronology of Black artists living, studying, working and exhibiting in Scotland, from the 1860s onwards. These acquisitions - spanning 1963 to 2019 - were supported by an Art Fund New Collecting Award, and are presented alongside a new commission from Barby Asante.

Revisiting the Work of Black Artists in Scotland through New Collecting showcases artworks from Glasgow Museums' collection and has been co-curated with the independent curatorial duo Mother Tongue. In 2018, Mother Tongue proposed a research affiliation with Glasgow Museums to highlight existing work by Black artists in the Glasgow Museums' Collection - Timespan by Tam Joseph was a key focus for the project. As this affiliation developed Mother Tongue proposed series of new acquisitions across varied media which would address historical and contemporary gaps in the collection.

These acquisitions were supported by an Art Fund New Collecting Award with Prof Lubaina Himid CBE as mentor and brings together work post-1960s to reflect complex dialogues around race, Empire, independence and post-colonial legacies, each of which brings with them wider socio-political narratives.

Presented in partnership with Mother Tongue (Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden) through an Art Fund New Collecting Award in 2018. These awards offer 100% funding for focused collecting projects, enabling curators to expand collections into exciting new areas or deepen existing holdings in significant new ways.

Barby Asante: The Queen and the Black-Eyed Squint (2021) was supported by Art Fund.

Image: Timespan (1987), Tam Joseph. Courtesy and copyright of the artist.
Gifted by Contemporary Art Society to Glasgow Museums' collection in 1992.

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Revisiting the Work of Black Artists in Scotland through New Collecting

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Barby Asante, Tam Joseph, Donald Locke, Maud Sulter, Lisandro Suriel, Alberta Whittle, Aubrey Williams, Matthew Arthur Williams and Ajamu X This exhibition brings together new acquisitions and existing works from Glasgow Museums' collection, reflecting complex dialogues around race, Empire, independence and post-colonial legacies.

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​Community InfoSource developed the Wellbeing Project during 2020 in response to the destitution, digital exclusion and isolation asylum seekers in Glasgow face as a result of the UK asylum system, which was exacerbated during Covid lockdown. As services went online they were inaccessible to those without smartphones, laptops and data and language barriers made this more difficult. The increased isolation contributed to declining mental health and this was particularly so for over 300 asylum seekers who were moved into cramped and inappropriate hotel accommodation without the facilities to cook their own food or meet socially.

Asylum seekers' experiences and journeys are often traumatic and affect their mental health. The Wellbeing team offer a befriending service through Buddy Volunteers that aims to support new arrivals through peer to peer support and practical support with daily lives. Buddy Volunteers, many of whom have lived experience of asylum, offer much needed friendly support that helps asylum-seekers navigate life in their new city, offering support to access much-needed services and signposting to other agencies.
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​The Wellbeing Project also offers ways in which asylum seekers can stay connected by improving digital access and increasing social connections either digitally or face to face. Our volunteers and participants help plan and organise regular activities such as cycling trips, hill walks, and city tours, improving physical and mental health.
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If you are an asylum seeker and would like to join us please email stuart@infosource.org.uk or call/text 07306 356 840

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​Community InfoSource developed the Wellbeing Project during 2020 in response to the destitution, digital exclusion and isolation asylum seekers in Glasgow face as a result of the UK asylum system, which was exacerbated during Covid lockdown. As services went online they were inaccessible to those without smartphones, laptops and data and language barriers made this more difficult.

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Join in celebrating this extraordinary moment with me - this week marked 70 years of the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) - and coincidentally the launch of my transport for London, Art on the Underground night tube map cover commission

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948. Motivated by the experiences of the preceding world wars, the Universal Declaration was the first time that countries agreed on a comprehensive statement of inalienable human rights. The magnitude of the life saving articles was softly and eternally drawn as a salve to calm the flippancy with which we forget to honour these human rights, by artist Monica Ross, whose Acts of Memory I performed in with Crescent Arts at Scarborough Library. Ross's work leads much of my thinking about creating. My tube map cover attempts to honour such care for our interdependence and love and treasuring our human Rights. The work draws on my long-standing text-based series, examining individual experiences of structural racism in Britain. Entitled "hand this piece to one Jacob Aston West (b.approx. 1941-3, Montserrat)" the tube map cover is a performance score, a prod at an instruction, playing with the "piece" of paper and the weight of what it contains - also potentials for peace, for which we are all responsible. I couldn't overlook the distribution levels of the map catering to my selfish ego - a Christmas wish if you like - maybe someone out there knows Jacob Aston West, my biological father who I've never met? And his name interlinked with mine will be all over the city, the city housing Pentonville Prison, where he was during the period of my arrival into this world. Thank you to all those who have offered suggestions for finding him and hope that my earnings will one day pay to engage someone with experience of finding people, my capacity's limits. If thats you or someone you know - please get in touch. Thank you to all the many wonderful people who contributed to and supported this commission which included a wonderful research trip to Glasgow.

Accompanying the night tube map commission including this poster titled '"My anger became my motivation": Baroness Lawrence on Grenfell' In honour of the suffrage centenary, Art on the Underground's 2018 programme focuses solely on female artists, bringing creativity and feminism to London's public transport network. Art on the Underground (AotU) decided to dedicate its entire year of programming to female artists to mark the suffrage centenery . 'We felt the act of commissioning purely female artists had more impact than curating a programme about women,' says curator Kiera Blakey 'It demonstrates progress. We're an all-women team commissioning only female artists.' That this feels such a radical move though demonstrates how far the art world still needs to go in the equal representation and celebration of women artists - statistics covering 2007- 2014 showed that of solo shows at major London art galleries, only 30% were female; only 13% of the UK's most popular public artworks created since 2000 are by women. 'The spaces of our cities are not neutral, and neither is space afforded to public art,' said head of AotU Eleanor Pinfield when launching this year's programme.

Whether deliberately or not, Henry Moore's public art and his drawings of the tube stations used as air raid shelters, seared in my memory since adolescence, informed my muddy palette and rough textures as did the weather and dirt and grime. The Capital for me is a muddle of textures, a site of grief in many ways, and with grief comes celebration. This work honours our power, our potentials for renewal, healing, joy and celebrates the strength and commitment to justice Baroness Lawrence advocates for every one of us, here speaking about Grenfell. See The Guardian 2/6/18 "Doreen Lawrence: Grenfell tenants faced 'institutional indifference'" and 9/5/18 designcurial article: RECLAIMING THE TUBE

The last in the trio of works commissioned by Art on the Underground is a risograph (edition of 100) titled "In Memory of Sarah Reed". The 3 works examine individual experiences of structural racism in Britain, referencing incidents of exploitation. The police brutality #sarahreed #sayhername faced, followed by her death in prison, despite her mental health issues known to prison officers, doctors, social workers, lawyers & police, is institutional abuse writ large. Given certain circumstances we could all find ourselves subject to institutional abuses, violences, dehumanisation & this work signals the still sensed kernel "freedom will blossom": "Sarah Reed's Christmas card to her mother read: "Mum, this is just to say Merry Xmas ... PS. Get me out of jail." It was one of a number of appeals from Sarah to her family in the last weeks of her life. "She kept writing to me and other family members saying, 'Please help me to get out of here; I shouldn't be in here; I'm not being treated," her mother, Marylin Reed, says. "Her priority in every letter was: 'I need my medication.'" When Marylin visited her daughter in Holloway prison on 2 January, she was dismayed to find Sarah looking unwell, and behaving strangely. She remembers a prison guard asking her: "Have you got any idea what's wrong with her?" It was a disconcerting question, because prison staff should have known that #sarahreed had serious, long-standing mental health problems. Nine days later, Sarah, 32, was found dead in her cell. The family was told first by the prison that she was found hanging, and later that she was found lying on her bed, with a "sophisticated ligature". The precise sequence of events in the months, days and hours leading up to her death will remain unclear until an inquest is held later this year, but already the tragedy has raised important (if depressingly familiar) questions about the treatment of people with serious mental illness by the criminal justice system, &how that intersects with the institutional racism faced by black Britons." Guardian #mentalhealth #blacklivesmatter #metoo 17/2/16 print available to buy for £35 goes back to support the commissioning programme.

(image: Brian Roberts, Instituting Care, Bluecoat, Liverpool until 10 march 2019)

In an attempt to put all the work this year into context Daniella Rose King, Whitney-Lauder Curatorial fellow at ICA, Philadelphia and I have accomplished a text that I am most proud of. Because despite the pain speaking about "rural belongings" this comes closest to my sharing a truth that belongs to me. I also consider it a contribution to knowledge. We've been sitting on this all year and I am overjoyed to finally be sharing it. It would mean the world should you chose to read.

"Our research around black diasporan feminisms and geographies does not suggest that peoples emerging from the black diaspora don't belong anywhere. Rather, we are the foundation of everywhere"

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(Some Possibilities Of) Rural Belongings

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Join in celebrating this extraordinary moment with me - this week marked 70 years of the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) - and coincidentally the launch of my transport for London, Art on the Underground night tube map cover commission The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the General Assembly...

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The Govanhill Baths Resources Pool, (Airtable)

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The Govanhill Baths Resources Pool, (Airtable)

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ISEA International is pleased to present the 21st International Symposium on Electronic Art –ISEA2015– in Vancouver this year. Since 1988 ISEA has been situated at the global frontier of digital media, creating an open discourse around electronic art, science, interdisciplinarity and culture.

Discovering nature in the modern world

What science taught me about what and who we are.

The New York Botanical Garden

51 Profiles in words and art from the rare book and folio collections of the ...

Learning to fight in a world on fire

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Resources - Everything, Most Recent, Gallery

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Explore the "Everything, Most Recent, Gallery" view on Airtable.

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This is also a great independent radical political publishing house - would recommend if you like Verso!

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Independent Radical Publishing

Peter Howson join us on the show to discuss his new book 'Let Them Eat Crypto: The Blockchain Scam That's Ruining the World'.

Read full article

For decades, conservative evangelicals and Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) have worked hand-in-hand to oppose trans liberation. But how did this alliance come about?...

MORE INFO & TICKETS

M. E. O'Brien join us to discuss her new book 'Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care'.

Read full article

Rosa Luxemburg, Claudia Jones and Leila Khaled may have joined Lenin, Mao and Che in the pantheon of twentieth century revolutionaries, but the histories in which they figure...

MORE INFO & TICKETS

Read More

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Pluto Press - Independent, Radical Publishing

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Pluto Press is an anti-capitalist, internationalist and politically independent publisher. Our books make timely interventions in contemporary struggles.

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This has lot of great resource available online for free. Ranges from books, images, videos...

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Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

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Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to texts, movies & music, as well as 624 billion archived web pages.

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Lots of inspiration and ideas for placemaking projects all over the world

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Beautiful book (one of Obama's favourites ;) about finding small ways to take back control via mindful resistance in an increasingly digitised world.

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[[ Book ]] How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy

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[[ Book ]] How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy

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[Here's a review in Guardian]

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I've used this with my friends over lockdown - it looks like a game but the best part about it is that you can walk in and out of conversations like in real life.

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Gather gives distributed teams a digital space that brings everyone together.

The in-person moments you've been missing

Everything remote teams need to get work done

Premium support
(Premium Office plans only)

Why remote employees love Gather

Build a culture your remote team loves

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Work remotely side-by-side in digital Spaces that make virtual interactions more human.

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A multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art.

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Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art.

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Really looking forward to the upcoming Margaret Walker retrospective at KCAT opening on Tuesday.

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KCAT Arts Centre - Fostering and nurturing creative ambition in the arts

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Nazareno Cooperative (Italy), KCAT Arts Centre (Ireland), Studio Citadela (Czech Rep) and THEAMA - Inclusive Theatre for the Disabled (Greece) - this one of a kind collaboration was born from a theatrical work by disabled artists /artists with a disability that addressed the current migrant crisis and was written from interviews with refugees in Italy, Greece, Czech Rep.

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This might be really obvious, but the library app (BorrowBox) is great for audio books and lots of other publications - easy to use and loads on there, all free of course.

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Borrow eBooks and eAudiobooks free from your library using the BorrowBox app. Say hello to your future library, wherever you are, whenever you are free.

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I just found this one!

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One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

For more information

Join our mailing lists

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One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal. To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

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Creative Response Forums

Our member-driven Forums are monthly opportunities to communally identify and problem solve the inherent challenges we face in addressing  today’s pressing topics: Covid-19, systemic racism in arts in health, healthcare provider burnout, and more.

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National Organization for Arts in Health

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What is Arts in Health?

Arts in health is a field dedicated to using the power of the arts to enhance health and well-being in diverse institutional and community contexts.

Comprised of many subfields and affiliated fields, arts in health supports health as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
- Arts, Health, & Well-being in America, NOAH, 2017

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Home - National Organization for Arts in Health

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PF1 Urban Farm in Queens New York by Work AC

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PF1 Urban Farm in Queens New York by Work AC

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Community, Commonage, Sustainability, Inclusivity, Biodiversity, Access

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Commissioned by MoMA PS1 in Queens, P.F.1 (Public Farm 1) is about celebrating the marriage of sustainable infrastructure, innovative building materials, visionary urbanism and dancing-and declaring that architecture can bring together cities, farms, food and everyday life.

The project is a completely off-grid, biodegradable and recyclable half-acre farm made from cardboard tubes, which offered shade, seating and activities from phone-charging to vegetable cocktail-making to herb-infused cooling fans for MOMA/PS1's summer parties below.

Powered by solar energy and irrigated by a rooftop rainwater collection system, the farm produced 50 varieties of organic fruit, vegetables and herbs over the course of the summer. Produce was used by the museum's café, served at special events and harvested directly by foraging visitors.

The project is the subject of a book, Above the Pavement-the Farm!, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010.

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Commissioned by MoMA PS1 in Queens, P.F.1 (Public Farm 1) is about celebrating the marriage of sustainable infrastructure, innovative building materials, visionary urbanism and dancing-and declaring that architecture can bring together cities, farms, food and everyday life.

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Big fan of Verso books (and their frequent free e-books) and opened it up just now to see they've curated this reading list on the Internet and Digital Culture!

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How should we conceive the digital economy? All these books are 40% off until the end of September.

We all live online now. What does that mean for our understanding of politics? Does going online make us more likely to think of politics as "spreading awareness" or winning online debates as opposed to gaining actual power? Or is it all just a stew of pseudo-activity that makes us feel a false sense of agency? Is there anything to be gained, or are we just padding the pockets of tech CEOs and massive media conglomerates? Should we all just log off?

The readings below help us understand how we should conceive the digital economy more broadly, both in terms of the power of private firms within the attention economy as well as what digital technology does to our minds and our capacities to work together in the real world.

The following readings all approach the question of the politics of mass culture within capitalism, from Adorno's critique of the culture industry to Debord's society of the spectacle to Baudrillard's theory of a world where the distinction between the real and the image has been totally blurred. What can we learn from these past critiques to make sense of the rise and political function of digital culture today?

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics the key texts of the great Marxist controversies over literature and art during these years are assembled in a single volume.

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume.

First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the "integrated spectacle" was dominant.

The System of Objects is a tour de force-a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day-offering a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society.

A material analysis of the sign which deepens Marx's critique of political economy for spectacular times

In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Rancière develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Rancière there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.

How the Information Age has made the world more incomprehensible

A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media

A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history

Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche

A wide-ranging exploration of the present, and the future, of the Unconscious

A major intervention in media studies theorises the politics and aesthetics of internet video

A set of bold theoretical reflections on how the social photo has remade our world

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Should We All Log Off? Verso Student Reading on the Politics of Digital Culture

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How should we conceive the digital economy? All these books are 40% off until the end of September. We all live online now. What does that mean for our understanding of politics? Does going online make us more likely to think of politics as "spreading awareness" or winning online debates as opposed to gaining actual power?

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Article 30(3). States Parties shall take all appropriate steps, in accordance with international law, to ensure that laws protecting intellectual property rights do not constitute an unreasonable or discriminatory barrier to access by persons with disabilities to cultural materials.

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An open source resource for digital accessibility.

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Introduces the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard, including WCAG 2.0, WCAG 2.1, and WCAG 2.2. WCAG documents explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.

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Slowly helping me find my feet culturally having moved to the country, the amazing Jane McCormick/ Not Half Right Art.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Museum Of Broken Things (@janemccormick57)

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Uses open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies to investigating human rights violations.

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Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London. We undertake advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organisations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations.

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Book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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Book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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A review of a book that someone recommended to me a while ago. I have yet to take the plunge to read it. The review itself is fascinating.

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he alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. How far and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and choices of dates and mates - all recorded, rendered as data, processed, analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. The litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some dystopian imagining of the future, but the present.

While insisting their technology is too complex to be legislated, companies spend billions lobbying against oversight

Originally intent on organising all human knowledge, Google ended up controlling all access to it; we do the searching, and are searched in turn. Setting out merely to connect us, Facebook found itself in possession of our deepest secrets. And in seeking to survive commercially beyond their initial goals, these companies realised they were sitting on a new kind of asset: our "behavioural surplus", the totality of information about our every thought, word and deed, which could be traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every need - or producing it. In a move of such audacity that it bears comparison to the enclosure of the commons or colonial conquests, the tech giants unilaterally declared that these previously untapped resources were theirs for the taking, and brushed aside every objection. While insisting that their technology is too complex to be legislated, there are companies that have poured billions into lobbying against oversight, and while building empires on publicly funded data and the details of our private lives they have repeatedly rejected established norms of societal responsibility and accountability. And what is crucially different about this new form of exploitation and exceptionalism is that beyond merely strip-mining our intimate inner lives, it seeks to shape, direct and control them. Their operations transpose the total control over production pioneered by industrial capitalism to every aspect of everyday life.

The extraction is so grotesque, so creepy, that it is almost impossible to see how anyone who really thinks about it lives with it - and yet we do. There's something about its opacity, its insidiousness, that makes it hard to think about, just as it's hard to think about climate change, a process that will inevitably undo society as we currently understand it, yet is experienced by many of us as slightly better weather. Likewise the benefits of faster search results and turn-by-turn directions mask the deeper, destructive predations of what Shoshana Zuboff terms "surveillance capitalism", a force that is as profoundly undemocratic as it is exploitative, yet remains poorly understood. As she details in her important new book, ignorance of its operation is one of the central strategies of this regime, and yet the tide is turning: more and more people express their unease about the surveillance economy and, disturbed by the fractious, alienated and trustless social sphere it generates, are seeking alternatives. It will be a long, slow and difficult process to extricate ourselves from the toxic products of both industrial and surveillance capitalism, but its cause is assisted by the weighty analysis provided by books such as this. Combining in-depth technical understanding and a broad, humanistic scope, Zuboff has written what may prove to be the first definitive account of the economic - and thus social and political - condition of our age.

Zuboff is no stranger to this territory. In her 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine, she addressed at the moment of their appearance in the business world many of the issues that have come to achieve dominance in our everyday life. Embedded within a large pharmaceutical company in the 1980s, she observed first-hand how new tools for internal communication, first welcomed by employees as novel social spaces in which they could better converse, plan and access information, were gradually recognised as tools for management intrusion and control. Aspects of employees' personal experience that were implicit and private suddenly became explicit and public, were exposed to scrutiny and made the basis for evaluation, criticism and punishment. Now it is the interiors of all our lives that are exposed to invisible overseers, who do not merely profit from our actions, but increasingly control their every expression.

Players think they are playing one game - collecting Pokémon - while they are in fact pawns in an entirely different one

Consider the apparently benign game Pokémon Go, both a ridiculous and a transparent example of the link between behavioural surplus and physical control. While its initial players lauded the game for its incitement to head outside into the "real world", they in fact stumbled straight into an entirely fabricated reality, one based on years of conditioning human motivation through reward systems, and designed to herd its users towards commercial opportunities. Within days of the game's launch in 2016, its creators revealed that attractive virtual locations were for sale to the highest bidder, inking profitable deals with McDonald's, Starbucks and others to direct Pokémon hunters to their front doors. The players think they are playing one game - collecting Pokémon - while they are in fact playing an entirely different one, in which the board is invisible but they are the pawns. And Pokémon Go is but one tiny probe extending out from Google and others' vast capabilities to tune and manipulate human action at scale: a global means of behaviour modification entirely owned and operated by private enterprise.

The efficacy of Pokémon Go in impelling and directing human behaviour recalls nothing so strongly as the psychologist BF Skinner's development of operant conditioning, and Skinner is one of many figures Zuboff evokes, implicates and critiques in her narrative. Skinner developed and perfected a technology of behaviour modification in living organisms, and extrapolated from it a politics rooted in total social control. Published in 1971, his incendiary treatise Beyond Freedom and Dignity prescribed a future of behavioural modification and redirection which rejected the very idea of freedom, replacing it with guaranteed outcomes and individual conformity. But while the targets of operant conditioning in the 20th century were always construed as "them" - enemies, prisoners and social misfits - and its implications were the subject of revulsion and rejection by a public fearful of "mind control", the targets of the same logic today are all of us, and its possibilities have been embraced at the highest level, from the boardrooms of the most powerful corporations to governments seeking to both "nudge" their populations towards "better" decisions, and to surveil their inner moods and desires for any signs of deviance, dissent or radical intent.

Go with the crowd ... people play Pokémon Go at Yokohama Stadium in Japan. Photograph: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

For Zuboff, this dread force is not merely a higher expression of capitalism, but a perversion of it, and while some might regard that as special pleading, she is at pains to clarify where it differs from more equitable and mutually beneficial forms. As a consequence of placing her analysis within economic theory and a wider history of both capitalism and totalitarianism, she introduces a number of useful terms into the discussion which do much to move it forward. Much of the debate around Google, Facebook and their ilk, for example, has been framed in terms of privacy - as mere control over information about the self - and while many of these arguments are venerable and well-articulated, they've also been mostly lost. It seems people are very willing to give up their private information in return for perceived benefits such as ease of use, navigation and access to friends and information. Zuboff recasts the conversation around privacy as one over "decision rights": the agency we can actively assert over our own futures, which is fundamentally usurped by predictive, data-driven systems. Engaging with the systems of surveillance capitalism, and acquiescing to its demands for ever deeper incursions into everyday life, involves much more than the surrender of information: it is to place the entire track of one's life, the determination of ones path, under the purview and control of the market, just as Pokémon Go players are walked, lit by their glowing screens, straight through the doors of shops they didn't even know they wanted to visit.

When this logic of invisible coercion is applied to the social sphere, its implications become even more disturbing. The belief that human behaviour can be perfectly modelled, predicted and controlled entrains as a consequence the collapse of equitable relations between individuals and trust in institutions, and the substitution of algorithmic certainty for any semblance of participatory, democratic society. There is no appeal to collective, contestable decision-making or to responsible business practices under this purported perfection of human behaviour. Surveillance capitalism, run as the code for everyday life, erases both free will and free markets - an outcome as horrifying to confirmed believers in "good old" capitalism, such as Zuboff, as to those of us who weren't so sure about the original in the first place.

What is hinted at throughout the text, and made explicit in Zuboff's closing insistence that subsequent generations must face up to this epochal challenge to the future, is that such utopian schemes are destined to fail. As experience has shown, the world - life itself - is cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the surveillance capitalists' view of a totally controlled, perfectly articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of its vision, and the resultant violence - already evident in our fractured worldviews, competing fundamentalisms, weakening of social bonds, and distrust of one another - is perhaps more so. The work begins in demolishing the framework of this world order, but it continues in the establishment and enactment of new and better futures.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is published by Profile (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review - we are the pawns

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he alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly.

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I learned about this at the Create networking day 2019. The Museum of Arte Útil presents an archive of over two hundred case studies that imagine, create and implement beneficial outcomes by producing tactics that change how we act in society.

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Arte Útil roughly translates into English as 'useful art' but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device. For the past ten years the artist Tania Bruguera has been teaching and researching Arte Útil through an academy in Havana; the Arte Útil lab at Queens Museum, residencies at Immigrant Movement International, New York and most recently the Museum of Arte Útil, in the Old Building of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Whether through self-organised groups, individual initiatives or the rise of user generated content people are developing new methods and social formations to deal with issues that were once the domain of the state. Arte Útil case studies show how these initiatives are not isolated incidents, but part of a global movement shaping our contemporary world.
The notion of what constitutes Arte Útil has been arrived at via a set of criteria that was formulated by Tania Bruguera and curators at the Queens Museum, New York, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Grizedale Arts, Coniston.

The criteria of Arte Util state that initiatives should:

1- Propose new uses for art within society
2- Challenge the field within which it operates (civic, legislative, pedagogical, scientific, economic, etc), responding to current urgencies
4- Be implemented and function in real situations
5- Replace authors with initiators and spectators with users
6- Have practical, beneficial outcomes for its users
7- Pursue sustainability whilst adapting to changing conditions
8- Re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation

A1-06: Archive Room:

This is the central room of the Museum of Arte Útil, housing physical copies of the case studies. The Arte Útil archive is open and unfinished. The case studies here have been compiled over the past two years through Arte Útil researchers, an Open Call and a group of international correspondents.

What to use and how to use it : Users are invited to take placards, speak to the researchers or use the computer stations to propose new Arte Útil case studies.

A1-10: Reforming Capital:

Strategy: These case studies propose different ways in which we might engage with production, economic exchange and debt.

Initiators: Claudia FernÃ¡ndez, Carla Fernandez, Nuria Guell, Grizedale Arts, Rolling Jubilee, Jeannette Petrik, WochenKlausur and Pivot Creative.

What to use and how to use it: Propose a new way to function in economic terms without using the current capitalist system. Anyone can produce or buy products for the Honest shop. If you would like a sellers number please email a.eliens@vanabbemuseum.nl
Regular workshops on free food will be held by Jeannette Petrik. Please visit museumarteutil.net

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Arte Útil roughly translates into English as 'useful art' but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device. For the past ten years the artist Tania Bruguera has been teaching and researching Arte Útil through an academy in Havana; the Arte Útil lab at Queens Museum, residencies at Immigrant Movement International, New York and most recently the Museum of Arte Útil, in the Old Building of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

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resources for choirs used by many during the lockdown

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Sing Ireland sends a message of support and solidarity to all of the singing groups, choirs and conductors/music directors who are currently working in isolation and can't meet physically. The lives of so many have been drastically changed over the past weeks with the spread of Coronavirus (Covid 19) across the world. Our first thoughts, however, are with the family and friends of those who may be directly impacted by the virus. We know the considerable worry and upset this must be causing and our best wishes and thoughts are with all those affected.

Below there are various resources and information on research.
Useful Resources for Singing Groups and Musicians
A webinar was held looking at the future of group singing in Ireland. A recording and various resources can be found HERE

'PLANNING FOR YOUR SINGING GROUP IN UNCERTAIN TIMES' is a document by Sing Ireland to assist you in planning for a return looking at your structure and goals

'SUGGESTIONS TO IRISH CHOIRS AND SINGING GROUPS' lays out the recommendations by NPHET and the Government alongside further suggestions and recommendations from Sing Ireland.

The European Choral Association-Europa Cantat have compiled together all of their material and resources relating to COVID-19 on their website HERE. They have also compiled information on singing with masks HERE on page 13.

Sing Ireland has various useful for choirs, singers and conductors HERE including videos of warm ups.The Association of British Choral Directors have published a research paper on the impact of the COVID 19 virus on choral activity in the UK, prepared by Professor Martin Ashley, an ABCD trustee, provides a survey of research into the current thinking about how choirs and conductors might resume rehearsing and performing in the future. HERE

American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) released guidance and a statement of support for choral singing and study during the COVID-19 pandemic on June 15. HERE

Freiburg University of Music have published Risk assessment of coronavirus infection in the field of music - latest update 17 July 2020 HERE

A number of performing arts organizations have joined forces to commission a study on the effects of COVID-19 on the return to the rehearsal hall. HERE

A UK study will explore whether singing and the playing of woodwind and brass instruments produces more respiratory particles than speaking HERE

VIRTUAL REHEARSALS
Taking your Choir Rehearsals Online - Advice for getting set up and organised to host a virtual choir session by Chorus Connection Blog.

ZOOM - Online video calling software. It is free to sign up to Zooms Basic plan and is proving quite popular with virtual music lessons and virtual choir sessions due to the quality of the video call and the ability to host up to 100 people for free.

ACapella App - A useful app with basic and premium user options. Basic features allow you collaborate with up to 9 musicians, with a built in metronome and an option to record multiple users' audio and video tracks, and sync them to create one unique track.
There are many youtube videos describing how to use the app. How To Use The Acapella App - 2020 Edition

Virtual Choir 101- Shows you how to use available free software that can achieve very good results with little effort.

ONLINE RESOURCES

The Big Covid Survival Choral Doc - A comprehensive list of online resources for musicians and choral groups created by Lauren Peithmann.

MakingMusic.org - Covid19 Staying Connected - Some great ideas for keeping your music groups motivated and connected during Covid19.

CCDA Cantate (Spring 2020) The magazine of the California Choral Directors' Association - This Issue has lots of articles for choral professionals to get inspiration from during the Covid-19 crisis, from taking your virtual choir online to ideas for content it is well worth a read and up-to-date published on 27th March 2020.
ChoralClarity.com - Free Sight-Reading Factory Distance Learning Ideas
10 Things Singers can do at home AND 10 Things Conductors can do at home
5 Ideas for Keeping Your Choir connected during the pandemic
Link to guidelines for rehearsals with adult choirs (Norway) here

Zoom tutorial for conductors with Jim Daus here

dohrey.me interactive music teaching tool created by MatchMySound (a company in Estonia)
Smartmusic: Practicing Chorus Music Youtube Tutorials for Online Rehearsals: Zoom in "Music Mode" by RAMA Vocal Center / The Royal Academy of Music Zoom tutorial for choral conductors, technical session (1/2) by RAMA Vocal Center (DK) and VChN (CH) Zoom tutorial for choral conductors, musical session (2/2) by RAMA Vocal Center (DK) and VChN (CH) COVID-19: Free Zoom Tutorials and Chat Sessions for Composers by Sound and Music COPYRIGHT AND PUBLISHING DURING PANDEMIC:

GIA Publications statement on permissions during the pandemic Hal Leonard's Distance Learning FAQ for Educators JW Pepper statement on sharing music digitally
Copyright laws are still in place despite the pandemic. It is so important to know the content you're sharing online is not in breach of copyright laws.

The following publishing companies have made a statement on their copyright during the pandemic with some restrictions on distributing their material temporarily eased during the global pandemic.

Copyright can be a confusing topic for many amateur choirs. Sing Ireland have put together some resources to help you become more familiar with Irish Copyright Law and to point you in the right direction for finding out more information in relation to your performance licensing and copyright queries. SING IRELAND COPYRIGHT RESOURCES FOR GROUP SINGING

What to do when your choral concert gets cancelled - Blog by Chorus Connection
MUSICIANS' FINANCIAL RELIEF
What can you do to prepare for Covid-19- Blog by Chorus Connection

Irish and UK Festival and Event Cancellation List - Journal of Music are keeping a rolling list of cancelled events in Ireland and the UK.
COVID-19 ADVICE FOR IRISH COMMUNITY/CHARITY ORGANISATIONS
Civic Theatre Artist Emergency Relief Fund (Applications for grants of up to €500)

Covid-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment (all PAYE and Self-Employed can apply)

Create - Ireland - Updates from the national development agency for collaborative arts, Create.
For more Sing Ireland Resources for Group Singing click HERE OFFICIAL COVID-19 ADVICE
The Wheel - Practical advice for Irish voluntary, community, charitable and social enterprises.

ISACS - Irish Street Arts Circus and Spectacle Network have helpful tips on Covid-19

HSE: http://www.hse.ie

HSE Covid-19 Posters and Resources for putting up in your locality or sharing online.

NHS: http://www.nhs.uk or PHS https://www.publichealth.hscni.net/

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Sing Ireland sends a message of support and solidarity to all of the singing groups, choirs and conductors/music directors who are currently working in isolation and can't meet physically. The lives of so many have been drastically changed over the past weeks with the spread of Coronavirus (Covid 19) across the world.

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Website for the documentary about programmer and information access activist Aaron Swartz. Would highly recommend watching!

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I just came across this for the first time. We are hoping to develop and support online networking hubs for all those interested in arts and health practice

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Arts in Healthcare aims to promote, share and encourage the use of art and creativity in the healthcare environment. Our network is for all those interested in Art, creativity and how it can impact on our health and well-being. We aim to share up-to-date information on research, opportunities, resources and courses.

Arts in Healthcare aims to promote, share and encourage the use of art and creativity in the healthcare environment. Our network is for all those interested in Art, creativity and how it can impact on our health and well-being. We aim to share up-to-date information on research, opportunities, resources and courses. (less...)

Writing for Wellbeing for those in the Caring Professions - Jan 22

The themes of this set of four workshops, are designed to allow you to explore creative and enjoyable ways of exploring and enhancing your wellbeing through creative self-expression, and reflection,...

Writing for Wellbeing for those in the Caring Professions - Dec 21

The themes of this set of four workshops, are designed to allow you to explore creative and enjoyable ways of exploring and enhancing your wellbeing through creative self-expression, and reflection,...

Writing for Wellbeing for those in the Caring Professions - Nov 21

The themes of this set of four workshops, are designed to allow you to explore creative and enjoyable ways of exploring and enhancing your wellbeing through creative self-expression, and reflection,...

Writing for Wellbeing for those in Healthcare related fields

Open to those in all healthcare fields including clinicians, academics students and retired staff, these set of four themed workshops are offered for those wishing to explore creative and enjoyable...

Writing for Wellbeing for the Community

Open to all adults, these set of four themed workshops are offered for those wishing to explore creative and enjoyable ways of enhancing their self-expression, reflection and wellbeing through writing.

Backstage Nursing Stories Brought to Life

An online panel discussion with famous faces whose professional experience spans the arts and healthcare

Healing Art Happy Hour

Healing Art Happy Hour is about letting your inner creative spirit play and letting go of your critical mindset. Come play!

Creating Community Through Arts and Health

Celebrating health and thriving communities and the impact of the arts

Thank you Penny, this is really useful, and great that you encourage artists to join your mailing list. It is encouraging to see the work that you do. Amanda

Introduction to Creative and Credible

This introductory workshop will explore key principles and methodologies for evaluating arts for health and wellbeing programmes. It will examine each phase of the Creative and Credible evaluation cycle, from...

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Arts in Healthcare aims to promote, share and encourage the use of art and creativity in the healthcare environment. Our network is for all those interested in Art, creativity and how it can impact on our health and well-being. We aim to share up-to-date information on research, opportunities, resources and courses.

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In this episode, Roman talked with Asif Baki from Google and Payal Arora, digital anthropologist and author of the book The Next Billion Users. 21mins

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This bonus episode is sponsored by Google's Next Billion User Initiative.

Every week millions of people come online for the very first time. And everyone - no matter where they live, what language they speak or their level of digital literacy - deserves an internet that was made for them. Google's Next Billion Users initiative conducts research and builds products for everyone, everywhere.

In this episode, Roman talked with Asif Baki from Google and Payal Arora, digital anthropologist and author of the book The Next Billion Users.

Enjoy 99pi?
Subscribe to the podcast!

Get the latest from 99pi each week in your inbox

Enjoy 99pi? Subscribe to the podcast!

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This bonus episode is sponsored by Google's Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first time. And everyone - no matter where they live, what language they speak or their level of digital literacy - deserves an internet that was made for them.

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This is a weekly series of articles curated by Voluntary Arts and authored by cultural thinkers and doers. The series will be published between November 2017 and February 2018. It is being shaped in response to the emerging practice of cultural commoning and as a way of articulating ideas that have arisen in conversations about Our Cultural Commons over the past two years across the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Our intention is that the series will help make visible the cultural commons in action and will encourage new approaches to sustaining creative cultural activity in local places. And we hope that the articles and the conversation they stimulate will contribute to the forming of ever more enabling cultural policy.

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This is a weekly series of articles curated by Voluntary Arts and authored by cultural thinkers and doers. The series will be published between November 2017 and February 2018. It is being shaped in response to the emerging practice of cultural commoning and as a way of articulating ideas that have arisen in conversations about Our Cultural Commons over the past two years across the UK and Republic of Ireland.

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The Sita Sings the Blues Distribution Project – Question Copyright

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(NOTE: If you came here to help support Nina Paley's free distribution of Sita Sings the Blues with a donation toward her expenses in releasing her film, please see the donations section below.)
The Sita Distribution Project is a public demonstration of how an artist can flourish - economically and artistically - by letting her works circulate freely and making it easy for audiences to support the artist financially.

It's not about self-distribution, it's about audience-distribution: put the work out there, let people share it, give them the freedom to organize activities (both commercial and non-commercial) around it, and the artist will benefit, because audiences want to support artists. Our goal is a comprehensible, repeatable model that can be used by independent artists everywhere.

The test subject is artist Nina Paley (now our Artist-in-Residence), who released her award-winning, feature-length animated film Sita Sings the Blues to the world under a totally free license in early 2009. That's free as in "freedom": anyone can make copies, anyone can sell copies, anyone can hold a screening (for profit or otherwise), anyone can make related merchandise, no one needs to ask permission for anything.

The Recipe
This distribution model puts the artist squarely on the audience's side: instead of telling people they shouldn't share, the artist encourages them to share. But the key is to do more than just put the work out there and hope for the best. You have to set up infrastructure that makes the artist the focal point for economic activity around the work - not the exclusive owner of all economic activity, just the focal point. Instead of imposing a monopoly on the work itself (which pits artist against audience), let the work flow freely and take advantage of the one natural monopoly that comes from being the artist: attribution, that is, credit for having made the work. Audiences appreciate proper attribution, and will enforce it, because they want to be on the artist's side. Nina explains this all step by step in her piece, " How To Free Your Work ".

The Results So Far
So far, Nina has made more money by this method than any traditional (i.e., exclusive) distributor was offering before the film's release. Since releasing it for free distribution in February of 2009, she's received approximately $28,000 in donations and another $25,000 in sales of DVDs and other film-related merchandise from the online store. (Note that the donations are dedicated to paying back music licensing fees she had to pay to be able to release the film at all; there's more on that here.) The average donation is a bit over $10 US (but that's not counting the rare outliers, the occasional donations of $500 or $1000 - if you include those, the average donation is around $30).

Best of all, her income stream is fairly steady. This is the opposite of the traditional "burst and fade" distribution model that so many works endure, dragged out of circulation prematurely to avoid competing with new releases from the same publisher. Because Nina's film is audience-distributed, it's in circulation forever, whenever and wherever people want to see it. And all those audience members are potential customers and donors, as the financial results bear out.

Raw data: While we have to protect the privacy of donors and customers at the online store, we can release summary data and anonymized data. Please see the donations summary, store sales summary, and the store sales details. We're sharing this data in order to give other independent artists some concrete numbers about what a freedom-based distribution model can bring.

Further resources:

Nina Paley's preliminary report from five months after the free release of her film, including the talk she gave at DIY in Philadelphia.

See also The More She Shared, The More She Made by Mike Masnick at TechDirt, for a good writeup of the talk.

Getting Out Of Copyright Jail

Because Sita Sings the Blues uses some music from the 1920s that's still under copyright, Nina Paley had to pay a lot of money - approximately US $50,000.00 plus another $20,000 in transaction costs - to get it out of copyright jail (she talks about it in this interview.)

Fund-o-Meter (last updated: 2013-09-18)

QuestionCopyright.org is helping her - and you can help too. We want to see this distribution project succeed, as an example of how letting go of monopoly control can benefit everyone (including the artist), so we're using donations to this project to help pay back that loan, in a fiscal sponsorship arrangement with Nina Paley.

That means you can donate to help with the costs of getting "Sita Sings the Blues" out of copyright jail (see below), and your donation will be 100% tax-deductible in the U.S. to the extent permitted by law.

The response so far has been tremendous, and gratifying to Nina as well. But we've still got a long way to go. If you liked "Sita Sings the Blues", and liked the fact that you can make copies for all your friends, please consider donating.

Make a directed donation to the Sita Distribution Project here:

Yes, donating here is approved by Nina Paley.

You can donate to the Sita Distribution Project using our regular donations page. If you choose PayPal, remember to write "Sita Distribution Project" in the notes field ("Add special instructions to the seller") after logging in. If writing a check, make it out to "QuestionCopyright.org" and write "Sita Distribution Project" in the memo line. All directed donations to the Sita Distribution Project go to that project; they are not used for QuestionCopyright.org's general operating expenses.

"Sita Sing The Blues" has a lot of momentum right now. It's been extremely successful at screenings (you can hold a screening too, if you want), and the famous film critic Roger Ebert wrote a rave review of Sita. The time is right to show what happens when a film of that quality is released freely, in such a way that anyone can do any kind of screening anywhere. We're working with Nina Paley to use this as a platform for advocating copyright reform and freedom of information - and the bigger the audience, the more minds we can reach. Please help!

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The Sita Sings the Blues Distribution Project

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(NOTE: If you came here to help support Nina Paley's free distribution of Sita Sings the Blues with a donation toward her expenses in releasing her film, please see the donations section below.)

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A curated online journal that highlights artwork now in the public domain - free to browse and really beautifully curated. I follow their Instagram and love seeing the images pop up on my feed. They'll be publishing a book next year I believe.

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The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas - focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.

"Magnificent ... A model of digital curation"

The Guardian

"... a gold mine of fantastic images and stories."

The New York Times

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Online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas.

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A space for arts & health practitioners to connect and share practice

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A space for arts & health practitioners to connect and share practice

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We're a London based not-for-profit organisation supporting artists & cultural producers in the arts and health sector to be the best they can be.

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Free copy of an excellent book on the commons, the self-organized social systems that humans have used for millennia to meet collective needs. 

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https://www.freefairandalive.org/read-it/

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A digital community people working at the intersections to explore ecological regeneration. All welcome: http://atnc.persona.co 

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An inspiring documentary about badass female data scientists and grassroots orgs examining digital bias - available on Netflix

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"CODED BIAS isn’t just directed by and centered around a woman. The doc is dominated by women [...] particularly women of color, in a rare and welcome change." - Women and Hollywood / codedbias.com