INTERFACE 2011, UCL Lightning Paper Presentation (28th July 2011)

Lightning Paper 'Redirection and Network Timeout', INTERFACE Conference at UCL, 2011

View more presentations from jennysteele.

Presentations and apologies...

If you are trying to update my website, please accept my apologies, as I am currently in the process of updating information and work from China.  More recent work are also in the Drawing and Prints and Installations pages on this blog.

My latest post on my a-n 'Redirection and Network Timeout' blog covers my presentations I have given this week on my project.  It starts like this:


I have blogger's guilt from not posting for quite a few days. I have been down in London now since Friday evening, for various events and freelance work.


Last Saturday, I gave a talk at Camden Arts Centre as part of the Artists Practice Day, about how I attempt to disseminate my practice, and my recent residency in China. The talk went very well, and we ended up focusing...........
 
To read this post please go to http://www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/1266895.
 

Speed Networking event at INTERFACE conference, UCL,

Map of campus at UCL, London

Entrance building at UCL.

New life up north...

The past few days have been filled with preparing presentations for the talks I will be giving next week, looking at flats, looking at studios and following up job leads.


The lightning paper at the INTERFACE conference is very short, so I have put together a short narrative, trying to use my drawings as illustrations to the ideas I am very quickly talking about. I have also been following up the reference that Chris Connery, the signologist I met in China, told me about - the theorist Geert Lovink. I have been reading his PhD paper which he has made available online-some very interesting ideas relating to the politics and the hierarchy of the physical city reflecting the supposed utopian libertarian space of the international internet.

I am also preparing my presentation for the Artists Practice Day at the Camden Arts Centre. The presentation is about how you document and disseminate your practice. I am trying not to make the visuals too much like a lecture, with text, bullet points (or as people say power pointless!)but I think it comes down to feeling my words feeling supported by visuals,thinking visually, and also if someone does not wholly get what your saying, they may get what they are seeing. I have also found some excellent chart making tools in power point. I would like to try and use these in my artwork.

It has been interesting thinking about how I do document and disseminate my practice - and how I can develop these approaches. Most of my dissemination is by the internet, social networking, but my physical face to face dissemination feels a lot more limited to an existing group of people, that does grow but not very quickly.
I decided this afternoon to take a studio at Rouge Studios in Manchester. It is cheap and a big space, and we will hopefully get a flat city centre near Piccadilly so the location is good. It seems like a very occupied block, with some interesting artists, and a few people I have met before are there so it is an exciting step. I am pleased also that I got past the selection committee! I need the space for upcoming exhibitions.

Next steps is a home and more paid work!

Images from the installation 'Attempts to enter the Forbidden City', 501 Other Space, Chongqing, China

INTERFACE Conference 2011

I am pleased to let you know that my lighting paper abstract 'Redirection and Network TimeOut - occupation of Internet Architecture in the Chinese Municipality of Chongqing'  has been selected for the INTERFACE 2011 Conference at UCL, held from the 27th-29th July 2011.  The 3rd International Symposium for Humanities and Technology is sponsored by Goldsmiths College, Kings College and UAL, amongst other institutions. 

Please see a revised version of the abstract below -

The People’s Republic of China is internationally renowned for censoring politically or sexually threatening sites upon the internet; monitoring and re-directing sites that are against the government’s values. Western social networking sites such as Blogger, Wordpress and Twitter, and their Chinese counterparts ‘Fanfou’ (Twitter) and Xiaonei (Facebook) – periodically go dark or flash up a ‘Network Timeout’ information message when information within the site is deemed as inappropriate. The development of Software Programmes such as Psiphon (Citizen Lab, Toronto) and Tor allow the user to potentially be anonymous and steer around filtering systems.

Navigation of the aforementioned digital architecture of the Internet is halted and redirected through a hierarchical system, where physical, or digital, mobility is controlled from the top down. Traditional Chinese architecture was built around the concept that the centre or most protected areas of the building were only for the eldest or those with highest esteem within the community – with courtyards, buildings and walls separating the majority of people from possible sites to occupy.

During a residency in Chongqing this summer, I will research into the navigation of both digital and physical architectural sites in the municipality through interview and visual studies. I will also explore the development of interface design in Chinese Internet sites, and how it still heavily interprets and relies upon print layouts to guide the viewer through the digital space. The paper will reflect on the findings of the research enquiry, discussing the government’s control of the assumed non-hierarchical terrain of the Internet.