Suburban Station Slashers

April 5, 2010 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

Two things I notice about this group of posters at Epsom station:

1. The common use of Black, Red & White both between the dark fiction titles but also with an exhibition about Victoria & Albert – does this tell us anything about our attitude to Victorian times?

2. Why are these books so popular with suburban rail passengers? Or at least why are suburban rail passengers routinely targeted by the publishers of these books? What does it mean that large numbers of people pouring into London every morning have just spent half an hour immersed in blood, slashing, and psychopathic torture?

What I think

Cloud Culture: any new threats?

February 3, 2010 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

I’m yet to be convinced that the internet can’t look after itself. We may need some forms of organisation to help make sure we’ve thought through the risks and continue to do the next right thing but that organisation isn’t anything that should be modelled on governments or corporations. It needs to be native to the net and it will emerge in the same way that organisations have emerged on the net before. That’s how the net looks after itself, it adapts.

In 1997 or so, I remember talking to my then boss about what an intranet might look like for our team and how it differed from the internet and how it might be useful to us. If you were around in those days, you’ll be familiar with that conversation with someone who kind of got some elements of what the web was about it but wasn’t rooted in the culture like us. It’s pretty much the same one that people have been having about social media for the last few years.

We then drifted onto the idea of .com and what commerical entities on the web (we were part of government and so could sit and theorize about such things) might do with this new thing and how they might behave. I was very bullish about this. I’d just come from the Computing Department of the University of Surrey where I’d been immersed (probably to the detriment of my degree class, but hugely to my personal benefit) in usenet and the nascent web-culture.

I was quite sure that there’d be a fight. A fight between the cold commercial forces of capitalism and the warm, fuzzy, hippy-dippy types committed to openness and co-operation and collaboration for the greater good. And naturally “we” would win.

And how did it turn out? What actually happened? Well I don’t think there was a big battle – both sides lost something, both won something – we all adapted and the web became something that had a more commercial heart, but wasn’t just another channel for business as usual.

Is the web now full of people wanting to make a quick buck, pushing advertisements and 20th Century mass production business models in our faces? Well yes and no. Is the web full of anarcho-hippies, knitting their own yoghurt and urging us all to wear sandals? Well yes and no. Both extremes exist but can be ignored if you wish. Where the really interesting stuff is, is in the middle where social entrepreneurs are creating new value in many forms, giving stuff away, being open about their processes, sharing but still making enough money to enjoy a comfortable standard of living. More than that we’re finding new ways of working together, organising and making stuff happens that benefits us and the whole community.

My personal experience with Tuttle has been that the network is much stronger and more robust than we imagine. Whenever it get’s a push against it, it either repels invaders or morphs into something similar enough to still be Tuttle, but different enough to survive.

So yes, I remain to be convinced that the accelarant properties of the cloud are any more of a risk to the cultural effects that we value than any other infrastructure changes we’ve seen.

Counterpoint will publish Charles Leadbeater’s report Cloud Culture on 8th February with a debate and conversations at the ICA featuring Catherine Fieschi, Charles Leadbeater, Ekow Eshun, Paul Hilder and me. If you haven’t booked a ticket yet, there are still some left here

What I'm doing

My take on Cloud Culture

February 1, 2010 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

Next Monday I’ll be taking part in an event hosted by Counterpoint at the ICA to discuss Charlie Leadbeater’s pamphlet on Cloud Culture which is being published on that day, but has already been trailed here and here. In that pre-publication writing Charlie has focused on ownership and control of the cloud as the big issues. While I agree that these are important questions, I’m more interested in the effects of cloud computing on the things we make and do and how we use them to understand each other and our world.

Something came clearer for me before Christmas when I was watching archive film from the British Council as part of our work with Counterpoint.

It was that in tandem with the abstraction of work away from the personal creation of physical objects, through mass production to stuff that’s all about thinking and using our brains, there has been a parallel abstraction of our cultural artefacts away from intimate cultural exchanges, through analogue representations and now digital representations.

The film archive work we did (and, I hope, we’ll continue to do) centres, for me, on how to deal with these analogue artefacts in a digital age. Yes, we can translate some of the experience – we can digitise the film and make it available on the web. The British Council has tried sharing stuff like that. Many other institutions are making their collections available online too. But it’s not the same as sitting in a little screening room at the BFI, handling the film, watching the soundtrack oscillate, seeing the richness of the monochrome. And watching these things on a computer screen on your own can’t compare to sitting in a cinema, watching them projected at the scale they were designed to be watched and with friends with whom you can chat about them immediately afterwards.

Are these experiences really important or are they just romantic nostalgia pieces for those born in the middle of the 20th Century? Can the web and a cloud-powered internet replicate these experiences? Should we be asking it to?

Counterpoint will publish Charles Leadbeater’s report Cloud Culture on 8th February with a debate and conversations at the ICA featuring Catherine Fieschi, Charles Leadbeater, Ekow Eshun, Paul Hilder and me. If you haven’t received an invitation but you think you should be there, please let me know.

What I'm doing

Help wanted – Apprentice Social Artist – apply within

January 27, 2010 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

I’m looking for a part-time helper, assistant, apprentice social artist, to start as soon as possible.

What I need

An articulate and energetic intern to provide 3 days per week assistance for 3 months, working with me on my portfolio of social art projects including:

The Tuttle Club
tuttle2texas
Centre for Creative Collaboration
Tuttle Consulting

I need help with research, administrative and project management tasks.

Whoever works with me will need to be comfortable writing for the web, expressing themselves in their own voice on blogs and social networking sites but also speaking to people face to face and on the phone.

What I can offer

An opportunity to expand your thinking about the social applications of the web, social enterprise and the use of social technologies in organisations.

Exposure to my network of social media professionals, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, artists, academics, etc.

Experience of organising without an organisation, exploring the boundaries of how organisations need to function in a networked world.

This is an unpaid position, although a zone 1-2 oystercard will be provided and I’ll buy you lunch. There’ll also be the occasional beer if you like that sort of thing…

You should also know that I don’t work out of a single office, though I expect to be spending quite a lot of my time around the Centre for Creative Collaboration during this period.

What to do next
Write to me by e-mail – see if you can find the address oh, somewhere hereabouts and tell me why you’d like to work with me and what in particular you think you can offer to the projects listed above.

london, What I've Seen

Winter

January 13, 2010 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

Woke this morning to another sprinkling of snow in London. Probably more outside of town, but haven’t checked yet. Not much but clearly it came down through the early morning when there were fewest people about so it’s thicker than it would have been if it had come down at 4pm.

But my first reaction was “Blimey, this is going on for a long time.” (the current weather pattern of cold and snow)

And then I thought “Hang on, isn’t this what winter’s *supposed* to be like?” We’ve become so accustomed to having only a few individual days of snow that having a prolonged cold snap with associated precipitation feels out of the ordinary. It’s the corollary of “Oh, we had a sunny day, that’ll be our summer then!”.

But didn’t it used to be like this all the time? Why shouldn’t winter have a fortnight or so of snow and ice? Has anything actually changed here? Why is this so important? And so, yet again, I’m left wondering whether it’s the world that changed or that my dislocation is a result of warped perception. Is it them or is it me? Usually the answer to that question is… errrr… yes it’s me so forget it, ignore what I just said and let’s get on.

What I think, What I've Been Doing

The Social Artist I

January 7, 2010 Lloyd Davis 1 Comment

This came out of a conversation with Mike Radcliffe at the BFI this morning – part of my Human Scale Conversations. There were a few points and it was going to be one mega post, but I think I’ll break it up a bit.

We got talking about being artists (go back and click on that link to Mike’s site if you don’t know his work – go back and preferably buy something from his gallery!) and being blocked and what we need to do to keep relatively sane and solvent and working and happy and stuff and it seemed worth exploring them a bit – especially how they relate to my experience as a nascent Social Artist.

First of all we talked about the need for artists to be with other artists.

Artists need to spend time with other artists.

The rider to this is that we need to spend time with people who are in their flow, who are looking after themselves and doing their work. If we are blocked, it’s these people who will feed us and help us through – it’s far too easy to find other blocked artists to hang out with, who reinforce and rationalise our own blocks – then we just all get depressed together!

And even if we’re not blocked, it’s great to spend time with people who understand the creative process, who get what it’s like so we can all remember that this is normal and it’s the people who don’t do it who are weird…

Signs that you’re with the right people are: they’re encouraging you; you and they are smiling and laughing together, preferably at yourselves rather than others; you’re both talking more about the work that you’re doing now, rather than the work you used to do once or the work you’d really really like to do one day if only someone else would give you a chance.

Signs that you need to find some new friends are: the person talking to you is only talking about reasons why it’s hard; you’re feeling low and so are they; you hear yourself whining; you find yourself thinking about that project, you know the one, and how it’s never, just never going to get done.

So get out, and find some shiny friends instead!

That’s why I keep going back to Tuttle. It’s a place that attracts all sorts of creative people in large numbers. Creativity and different ways of thinking thrive among these people. It’s where I get my fix every week. I know you all think I’m doing it for you, and that’s true, but I’m doing it for me too.

events, What I'm doing

SXSWi in 2010 via oh I don’t know loads of places

December 30, 2009 Lloyd Davis 11 Comments

So here’s my poorly thought-out, unplanned, half-baked, undetailed, but totally awesome idea for the Spring of 2010.

I’ll be attending SXSWi in Austin, Texas again. My panel was not picked, but emotion aside all that means is that I’ll have to pay $blah or so for a ticket. So I’m definitely still going to go – it’s just well, you know, too lovely and awesome not to.

Last year we flew over a few days before and had some holiday time hanging out and getting acclimatimed and then flew back the day after interactive closed.

This time I want to take it a bit more gently. Here are the bare bones of the evil plan, which I’d prefer to do with a gang of tuttle-istas if we can find ways of funding it:

1. Find the shortest flight to North America possible (does that mean least-polluting? I don’t know but that seems like a good aim to bear in mind) and fly at least a week before SXSWi opens ie arrive March 5th at the latest.

2. Devise a series of train journeys from wherever I land, down to Austin, preferably going via New Orleans to visit that good friend of Tuttle, Mr Taylor Davidson and see how his Crescent City adventure is panning out. Yes, you read that right, train journeys. I understand that the US train system is not quite as beautiful or efficient as its European sisters. However, train travel rocks, it just does.

3. At stopping places throughout the journey hold Human-scale Conversation sessions with local people talking about differences between US and British culture – not trying to solve anything particularly, just getting the subject out on the table and seeing what comes of it. There will be heavy-duty social reporting of these conversations. Note that the format has been refined since July with some extra flourishes – this is how I introduced something like it at the Tuttle/Counterpoint event in December.

4. Once in Austin, continue to hold Human-scale Conversation sessions on the same subject and present #kebab-style what we heard, found, learned, saw along the way.

5. Make our way back to the east coast overland again, putting together a documentary film from the footage shot during the first part of the trip, so that we have something ready to show when we get back to London.

Howzat grab ya?

Here’s 8 ways you can help (and I’m sure you’ll come up with more)

1. Tell me how you’d improve on the plans and make them even more exciting.
2. Tell me why this is oh so very wrong-headed, misguided and stupid (I won’t listen very much, but I’d rather ask you for this than you just provide it out of the blue!).
3. Help me work out rough costings for each variation.
4. Provide money (just loads of it, regardless of the costs!)
5. Suggest routes and interesting stopover points, tell me why you think it’s interesting.
6. Volunteer to tag along and tell me how we’d pay for that.
7. Find other supporters with more money than time who’d like to see this happen.
8. Introduce me to sponsors who might provide help in terms of cash, food, shelter, transport as well as social reporting equipment.

UPDATE (18/01/10): The planning for this trip is now going on over here Come see!

What I'm doing

#leweb makes the whale fail

December 9, 2009 Lloyd Davis

I can only imagine that everyone is trying to say “have got out of the shower, am having breakfast before #leweb”

that’s what I really really needed to say anyway but the whale of fail is the only response I can get out of twitter this morning.

Obviously now Loic has invested so much in making the wifi work, some other bit of the infrastructure has to fall over. First up on stage this morning? Jack Dorsey 🙂

Ah well. Allons-y!

What I'm doing

Spending some time with me

December 6, 2009 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

I’m in Tenby in South West Wales for the weekend. ‘m doing a bit of work tomorrow in Carmarthen and so i thought I’d take advantage of being over here and have a couple of nights by the sea. I love Tenby. My parents honeymooned here and we had at least one holiday here when I was little – happy days.

It’s the first time I’ve been away on my own for a while. My main holiday this year was of course interrailing with Ewan which was great fun, but we were in each other’s pockets all the time.

And I realised today that whenever I’ve gone away like this, I’ve always been thinking about how great it is to get away from the madness of #thatlondon or whatever. I’ve been trying to get away from it all, with no real understanding of what it was I was actually trying to get. This weekend for the first time, I’ve been enjoying the positive side – having time with me.

And having spent some time with me, I’ve found that I really like:
listening to the rain;
staring out of steamed up windows, watching condensation dribble down;
walking by myself on the beach;
walking into very strong winds;
watching the sand being blown over the beach;
saying “good morning” to people I don’t know in the street;
saying “good morning” to people ‘cos they’re in the same hotel as you;
having a picnic lunch by myself;
running downhill and not knowing how I’m going to stop myself;
taking photographs;
learning about a new bit of kit – today the Canon 5D Mk II;
learning to check the settings on my camera after I’ve given it to someone else to look at;
having a cup of tea in my hotel room;
having someone else make my breakfast;
reading the Sunday Times magazine with my breakfast;
deciding what I want to do next;
smiling;
yeah, smiling a lot;
singing very loudly on the beach because nobody can hear me;
not caring when I turn round and find that someone *can* hear me;
hiding by the rocks and talking to myself;
being aware of the amazing amount of life that the sea supports;
seeing the sun break through the clouds onto the sea;
finding gulls sitting on my window ledge when I drew the curtains;
suddenly seeing a rainbow appear, right in front of me.

y’know that sort of stuff.

The other thing is that I realise I have all sorts of negative expectations about coming here. When I was a kid, Wales was very definitely another country. Everything was shut on Sunday. The telly was different. All the shops were different, so you couldn’t get the things you got at home. I’ve kind of expected that to still be the same, to feel a bit deprived and thwarted – but of course, there’s wifi in my hotel so I can blog and keep an eye on twitter if I really want to (in between all the other things I’m doing – see above). There’s cable telly in my room but I seem to have grown out of watching telly altogether – I tried last night but I got bored after 10 minutes. And I have had a perfectly good phone signal in most parts of town and have been able to chat with people when I’ve wanted too. Aren’t we funny, the way we hold onto how things usesd to be?

What I'm doing