Rational Rec presents its second Open Dialogue

Matt Roberts Arts OpenFORUM
MRA Project Space, 25 Vyner Street, London E2 9DG
Friday 14 May 2010, from 6.30-9pm

At this second Rational Rec Open Dialogue event, artists Paul B Davis, Charlie Fox and Emma Hart, working together on the first Rational Rec collaborative commission, will discuss their plans for the project and its final presentation.

The artists propose that the outcome of the commission will be to create a publication setting out ideal rules and philosophies for collaboration, with concrete tasks that can be followed by anyone.

The artists will test around 20 rules and tasks live during the event. The rules will be presented to the audience, who will judge their efficacy, and initiate the process of editorial change that will continue throughout the project.

You are invited to this event to get involved with this process, to challenge the artists’ ideas and make your mark on their evolving rule book.

Background

What can artists do together that they can’t do on their own, and how does the idea of help and exchange inherent in collaboration feed into working processes and outcomes? How could these facets become visible, exposing the hidden costs of collaboration: compromise, plagiarism, antagonism, frustration, misunderstanding and mistranslation?

Paul B Davis, Charlie Fox and Emma Hart have each worked on so-called ‘organic’ collaborations in the past – where artists find each other and fuse their practices based on mutual interests, personal or professional. The current Rational Rec commission provides a more structured space for them to reflect on the methodologies they have used in the past, a pause to reconsider how they have collaborated in the past and how they intend to collaborate in the future. Inspired by commercial music and fine art collaborations – such as Snoop Dogg ‘featuring’ on the tracks of rival rappers, or Damien Hirst’s work with Louis Vuitton – and bringing these lessons into a non-commercial project, as well as being influenced by art movements such as the OuLiPo literary group; religious laws from the Methodist Book of Discipline; the ancient Greek Axiomatic system and their own experiences, the artists will consider what happens when artists work together and why is this often deemed “better” (is it more creative? more exciting?).

Attending the event

To take part in the event please email bookings@rationalrec.org.uk by Wednesday 12 May 2010 with ‘MRA’ as the subject header. This event has limited capacity.

Online presence

For those who cannot make it to East London, this discussion event will be streamed live on Ustream. To view, simply click on the link on 14 May 2010, 6.30pm-9pm and you will be able to view the discussion for up to 7 days after the event. We will send a reminder on the day of the discussion event.

Rational Rec’s Louisa Martin (our Digital Marketing and Development Assistant) will also be tweeting from the event and we would welcome your questions and comments. Follow Rational Rec on Twitter, or get more updates on ourFacebook profile.

This Open Dialogue event is part of Matt Roberts Arts OpenFORUM - An Art Festival Supporting Artists' Professional Development.

Link to Rational Rec

We Feel Fine

by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

At the core of We Feel Fine is a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Once a sentence containing "I feel" or "I am feeling" is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.

Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified "feelings". This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling, is here.

If a valid feeling is found, the sentence is said to represent one person who feels that way.

If an image is found in the post, the image is saved along with the sentence, and the image is said to represent one person who feels the feeling expressed in the sentence.

Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.

This process is repeated automatically every ten minutes, generally identifying and saving between 15,000 and 20,000 feelings per day.

Solar beat

A simple ambient musicbox, with sounds generated using the orbital frequencies of our solar system.
by Whithevinyl
link