Here’s a short looping animation, just in time for the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – I’m taking part in a pop-up exhibition tonight at Baumhaus Berlin, organised by Jenni Ottilie Keppler, together with other illustrators, poets and sculptors. ‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ deals with cultural memory, and builds on two existing interpretations of the huia – which was one of three native New Zealand wattlebirds. The huia was driven to extinction before photography was prevalent, and before audio recordings could be made of its song. (The last confirmed sighting was in 1907.) The artist J.G Keulemans’ 1888 illustration of a huia pair appeared as a plate in Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand. His illustrations of native birds have become iconic representations, much reproduced in New Zealand and around the world. Keulemans was based in London and did not travel to New Zealand. Although he had done some work in the field, he mostly worked from stuffed skins – dead specimens, sent to him from around the world. The audible ‘bird calls’ are human imitations, recorded with Henare Hāmana in 1949. As a young man, Hāmana was familiar with the huia and had also been part of an unsuccessful search team in 1909. His whistles are created from 40-year-old memories. This animation that results is also a rather unreliable interpretation, hence the name ‘exquisite corpse‘ – its movement is based merely on videos of the Tieke, a surviving (though endangered) relative of the huia, which I’ve never seen in the wild. Further reading: Wikipedia’s Huia article is fascinating, particularly this section: “While we were looking...
On July 2nd I was invited to give a workshop at Supermarkt’s event ARTS & COMMONS: Art, Money and Self Organization in Digital Capitalism. Together with the participants of my workshop, I wanted to discuss the co-creation of artistic work, in the mold of open source collaboration or Yochai Benkler’s term ‘commons-based peer-production‘. The form was a hands-on collaborative collage workshop to get us on-topic, and give participants a taste of peer-production for themselves, followed by a discussion on how peer production of art is currently being attempted, and what might be necessary to improve and spread the process. An in-depth recipe for the collage workshop can be found here, but the general concept was for different teams to work sequentially on the same artworks, with the only method of collaboration and communication between the teams being some written documentation, which would accompany the work-in-progress as it moved from one team to another. We were building on existing work in the commons – Judith Carnaby and I had put together a collection of interesting Public Domain imagery (printable PDFs here), largely gathered from the Public Domain Review, New York Public Library, and the British Library’s Mechanical Curator. As we didn’t have enough time to put together a huge collection, this was bulked up with a few pages ripped out of magazines, where we very naughtily infringed the copyright… er, I mean, where we made a provocative artistic protest, striking at the corrupt heart of the copyright industry’s hegemony. Or something. Next time it will be 100% public domain, I promise :) To understand the process, I’ll take you through...
