David Barrie

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

...is a pretty good track title for 2009, a year full of this kind of terror:

But hey, as ever, there's a French philosopher to hand, with three parts depression, six parts hope (and a cupboard full of Commes des Garçons, if my encounter with BHL several years ago is anything to go by). 

Here's Alain Badiou with a big thought on small victories, slavery and making change - via Roman gladiator Spartacus - from a recent review of Inifinitely Demanding by English philosopher Simon Critchley:

I think that we can have negative feelings, negative experience concerning injustice, the horrors of the world, terrible wars and so on. But all great movements in the political and historical field have been created, have been provoked not by that sort of negative feeling but always by a local victory. If we appreciate, for example, why we have during two years the great revolt of the slaves in the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Spartacus, it is not because slaves have the feeling of injustice...Because they always have that, it is their experience day after day. It is rather because in one small place, a small group of slaves finds new means, finally to create a victory. A small victory, a local victory. 

Images courtesy of Yvan Rodic and Showoff-Films.com. 

Declare Interdependence

From Berlin-based creatives Lars Schmidt , Stefa Roth and their organization Arts-Ecology-Education comes a 'Declaration of Interdependence' - an 'open experiment' - call it a 'manifesto'.

The Declaration sets down a list of shared principals, of hyper-tolerant, anti-indulgent, eco-aware values that the authors suggest will or should frame our lives post-Crisis.

Is this visionary?

Yes.

(but be aware of the poverty and some of the woozy, manic, at times desperate atmosphere of some squats in London in the late 1970s/early 1980s that once shared some similar values.)

If you like the Declaration, spread it. You'll find it here, at culturalrevolutionaries.org, on Facebook and with images at Social Design. Arts-Ecology-Education can also be followed on Twitter - @aeeproject.  

Should I stay or should I go?

Procrastination is evil.

It works in a Surrealist painting but sucks in real life.

The annoying bit is that just when you start to believe in the mantra of those who tell you to jump first - and in theory watch everyone else follow - Nelson Mandela tips up in Time magazine telling you to lead from behind.

The danger is that you end up in an exquisite universe of Mick Jones and The Clash:

Darling you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
Ill be here til the end of time
So you got to let know
Should I stay or should I go?

Over at Doors of Perception, design writer John Thackara comes clean with a fetish for digital dashboards.

So I guess I should come clean and confess to a thing for flow charts.

Here's a brilliant one that's all about Procrastination:

And for those can be bothered to commit, here are nine tips on fighting procrastination that I've had stuck on the inside of my diary since the dawn of time from a back-issue of the London Financial Times:

• Select a balance of thinkers and doers for the project team
• Expect/demand regular and tangible updates of progress
• Provide sufficient budget for project to be feasible
• Agree a deadline for preliminary discussions to convert into positive action
• Satisfy the WIIFM (what's in it for me?) factor
• Encourage 'ownership' of project by a team or individual
• Prioritise desired outcomes
• Create a sense of urgency
• Allow the team the space to fail

Great, smashing, super....but I'm not quite sure where to start.

Procrastination flow chart courtesy of Ehdom 07.

An Intellectual Property

For those who struggle with assigning

all copyright and all neighbouring and database rights and moral rights, registered designs, registered and unregistered design rights, or any rights or property similar to the foregoing in any part of the world whether registered or unregistered together with the right to apply...etc. etc.

and others who try to make an argument for a site becoming a hive of cultural activity...

enjoy the joke that someone once had at somebody else's expense on a billboard in Vancouver :

Image courtesy of thorbak.

I can see through you

All day, every day, people are telling us what we should think.

And loads of things that are labelled 'empowerment' are fairly (and sadly) obvious exercises in pushing people around.

From John Riedl and Joseph Konstan's brilliant book on collaborative filtering, comes a pious thought from mathematician Blaise Pascal that's worth remembering in an age of super-smart messaging and fairly loose use (and abuse) of the 'E' word:

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Image from Danske via Flickr.

A useful first base

For all of those people out there sick and tired of looking at stuff and itching to get stuck in to making new realities comes a very simple statement from curator Nicolas Bourriaud, writing about the art of Philippe Parreno:

Interpreting the world does not suffice; it must be transformed.

Image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Optimism, Carlyle Group and Dante

According to Alex at Worldchanging

Optimism, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary.

I'm certain of this but just now nothing beats private equity investor David Rubenstein, CEO of the €1.1bn Carlyle Group, and his recent comment on the financial markets.

According to the London Financial Times,

Mr Rubenstein said that if 2007 was private equity's golden era, then 2008 marked the start of a new "purgatory age".

Thank your lucky stars that in Catholicism, Purgatory is a temporary punishment.

But remember that according to Dante, there's a problem...it's just one step up from Hell...and for a moment just check out who else is on the beach:

:-o

Despair image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Public management needs to 'aggregate'

One of the key business technology trends of 2008, according to The McKinsey Quarterly [registration required], is making businesses from capturing information.

As we know from shopping sites and business-to-business product directories on the net, there's money to be made from accumulated pools of data.

But something we're failing to do in parallel is understand and exploit the value of accumulation and - more importantly - aggregation to social and economic progress.

A huge amount of information and relationships accumulate in national local government.

Extensive networks of diverse social, economic and physical assets aggregate around the commercial redevelopment and regeneration of towns and cities.

A vast diaspora of hopes and interests sit in devolved off and online groups of people, be it 5-a-side soccer leagues, Facebook groups, community gardeners or moderators of Wikipedia.

There's a vast amount of dispersed energy, enthusiasm, activity and innovation out there. And it's brilliant.

But a key challenge has to be how public managers - not just designers of online entertainment platforms - public initiatives - not just pressure groups - and central and local government - not just eccentric entrepreneurs or innovators - can aggregate this activity.

Why bother?

Because new value might be captured for the benefit of all.

So, here's a message for Lent:

Go forth and aggregate.

And start trading and packaging social, not just physical assets.

 

What's the point of citizen involvement?

...as scribbled on a stickie at a recent event I ran in Chongqing, South-West China.

But it's something more.

An architecture of social relations, brilliantly expressed in a story told by Barack Obama in a speech inAtlanta on the eve of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday [Video here/transcript here]:

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

Citizen participation: transforming society spud-by-spud

This is a photo of artist Kathryn Johnson's giant and very weird potato presentation at the Really Super Market art fair earlier this year in Middlesbrough, North East England.

Johnson's latex and polyester sculptures were a high point in an event curated by Bob and Roberta Smith and the culmination of a design project on food systems in the town.

Here's artist Bob and Roberta taking it easy during the event - and yes he's one person...

...and here's a dish served up at the event that was created from fresh produce cultivated by a thousand new 'urban farmers' in containers across the town.

Over 6000 people attended the Super Market event; and the food project - Dott07 Urban Farming - was a great success.

On one level, it fostered new enthusiasm for growing produce in the town. The town's new 'urban farmers' plan to run the process again in 2008. Local government is planning to release vacant lots across the town for new urban food production. And plans are moving forward to create a new restaurant in the town that will be organized as a co-operative social enterprise and supplied by the town's new farmers in the future.

But the initiative wasn't just a success because it offered people an opportunity to grow stuff. It worked because it created a new opportunity for people to communicate - and it now seems no accident that the culminating event was framed by an artist.

In his book on relational aesthetics, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud writes of

the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place.

In discussing the work of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Carsten Holler, Bourriaud celebrates the end of modernity's regressive fantasy of sacredness and singularity.

He sees in their art a reintroduction of the idea of plurality

...inventing ways of being together, forms of interaction that go beyond the inevitability of families, ghettos of technological user-friendliness, and collective institutions on offer.

In Bourriard's  mind, this is an urge towards creating new models of sociability.

In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.

More often than not, urban renewal and public involvement projects keep their creative and intellectual thrust hush-hush.

The sociability of public art also often plays second fiddle to imaging and market.

But it's interesting to start to see participatory design, art, social and economic renewal projects in the same frame as, say, Carsten Holler's metal slides at the Tate.

And be reminded that these projects are not just confirmation of how great it is to be alive, kicking and sociable. They are also microscopic opportunities to transform society step-by-step, spud-by-spud. 

Potato image courtesy of earth2potato.