WHIRLING SKIRMISH

Dear All,

Please find below the minutes of our last meeting.... ALL THINGS GO

Cristobal DRAWS THE TIME LINE
Our presentation everyone is 17th MArch
WE have the following thursdays to complete

THURS 28th FEB
THurs 6th MARCH
Thurs 13th MArch

between the last two dates we need to create THE STATEMENT

Cristobal begins the meeting with a quick summary of the miniature feedback we received from Pe and He.
They introduced the notion that maybe we are using the concept of NETWORK as a FORM OF CONTROL (I still think this is worth exploring and could be very interesting)

David suggests that this is because we are the only group that are looking inwards rather than outwards.

Liliana says that what we are about is introspection rather than extrospection but why is that about control?

Orianna reminds us that initially there were personalities within the group resistant to the idea of Network in the firstplace and so we began with the notion of network as a negative anyway. She then also suggests we are an ideological network rather than an a group investigating actual networks.

Liliana says that the way we work is very fre flowing one action to another and is very confused about why and how 'control' fits into what we are doing because it was all spontaneous...

Flavia suggests that maybe what they mean by control is that we are creating some kind of border around ourselves...

Andrea comments on how other groups showed a very finished end product not revealing how they came to be at this point. This illusion of a united front presenting an idea or concept related to networks without showing us how they came to this point is a defining feature of all the other groups. We have been discussing what a group/network means and trying to illustrate it in our presentation. (side point that came to mind while writing this: actually i think one other group is exposing their procces too... the one that is not really working as a group but as sub groups)

David said that other groups' presentations were annotated bibliographies, we went in a different direction...

Cristobal said how he was somewhat confused by the other groups... they allseemed to have an object of study and work together as a group. We dont work like that... the others all decided to present adn research on a field. we are different. There are blurred boundaries between our OBJET (A) OF RESEARCH and THE GROUP

He then drew the amazing diagram and I cannot recreate it here on the blog but it was 3 circles tha overlap, he called them The SYMBOLIC (CONCEPTS- community of the group, gift, intimacy etc) The REAL (ARCHIVE-dinner parties, videos, blog, ephemera, postcards) and THE IMAGINARY (PRESENTATION) asking HOW? Which Way?????

He then used the example of the suggested BOAT idea by Sophia as a way of illustrating a possible final presentation.... THE BOAT idea is an example of how we could maybe use one idea or one symbol that EMBODIES ALL THE THREE FIELDS OF Symbolic-real-imaginary / concept-archive-presentazione

He said we need to MAKE A STATEMENT
THE statement will reference the presentation itself as well as referencing the previous concepts and archive.
BUT to arrive at a simple thing it is like mathematics...
complexity arrives to simplicity...............
(then i made lots of drawings of boats and circles with Lacanian terminology on them)
(as a side note while writing i have to say publicly HOW IMPRESSED I AM BY CRISTOBAL--- isnt he great everyone??!! )

Lili and Sophia explain in detail the concept of the Boat for those who need more info please READ THE BLOG and previous posts...

Orianna voiced worries of us Pushing a Concept rather than GROUP INTERACTION

Cristobal stresses the need to decide to be PRACTICAL .... and for that we need one or two concepts...the boat for example is not enough by itself we need a conceptual thing to allow us to be free in relation to boat.
We cannot avoid the proccess, the conceptual.
Idea of Boat as crossing borders together, taking journeys and the interaction that the boat has on us.

Then we split into groups and came up with ideas.....

Group one:
How the group came to be a community....
moments of the community, dynamics, functions of the community
BOAT as already filled with meaning
maybe doing a workshop on the boat?

GRoup two:
Sleep-OVer
Gift
Our group as a love story: arguments, exchange, love letters, intimacy, dinner party as first date
Andrea: A romantic date between 13 people
David: Our first night together

Then my notes turn into something else and I guess I was too involved in the reality to continue documentation.........
There were some key words (by that i mean big scrawled out words) written at the end of my last page though:
NOTION OF COMMUNITY, NOTION OF GIFT
HOW can we show the group without being therapeutic
country walks
SElf-portrait, arrow self-portrait

not sure what that all means.

LOVE TO ALL MY PEEPS
especially BARNABY ADMAS. M. Barnaby ou-est vous???? Je besoin du vin et l'inspration.... Tu me MANQUES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

See y'all later,

Amal

(which by the way means hope for all you nonarab speakers out there and I would like to spread some esperanza, sprinkiling it like glitter dust on all your heads this fine morning so you all to have a little Hope and faith that we will make it through these difficult times TRIUMPHANT.... and more info on the namegame: "for fun and games, type my name in predictive text on your mobile phones and be in for a dirty surprise (please do this later on, not first thing in the morning, and only if you are not offended by horrible words)

Why dont we invite our audience to THIS LECTURE!! Actually I was thining we go but its too little too late.... anyway for anyone interested... amal

Clay Shirky + Brian Eno on the Power of Networks

17 March 2008
Everywhere we look, it seems, companies and organisations are trying to harness the alleged wisdom of crowds – the power of groups of people to come together through the internet and share with one another, work together, or take some kind of collective public action. One of the world’s leading experts on social and technological networking, Clay Shirky, Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising without Organisations, comes to the ICA to talk about how the idea of networks, and particularly online social networks, is changing everything around us.
Clay Shirky will be in conversation with Brian Eno, musician, artist and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation.
£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

And Here is some info from the publisher on Clare Shirky's book...

A revelatory examination of how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'être swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger socialimpact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.