• Artists Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich, Michael Pinsky and puppet doctor Professor Hilary presented The Panacea Casebook at the Baltic.

• Ben Goldacre visited the Centre for Life to talk about Bad Science and how journalists can kill.
• Adinda van ‘t Klooster talked about and demonstrated her emotion light protoype at Lunch Bytes Culture Lab Newcastle University(you can see her lecture at STEIM here.

What is the connection?  Panacea Casebook uses many of the methods of clinical trials, for treating a number of modern maladies. For  the sci fi hottub trial that therewas a small but significant changein peoples wellbeing after the hottub experience. Of course for there to be any prof that art was the cause of this, there would have to be an exact copy of the hottub (see left) that wasnt touched with the idea of being art.

Only by comparing in a double blind trial these two treatments, the art and the art placebo, could the hypothesis that “art has a beniicial effect” be tested.

Ben Goldacre talks about how clinical trials can be misused, using the Durham Fish Oil ‘trials’ as an example of  the effect of placebo, and  the problems of expectation on performance. They havent met, but it would have been interesting.  The Panacea Casebook and the Emotion Lights have connections around the way ‘art’ might be good, and engagement with new media art might be benificial to cure a social ill.

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It was the culmination of their research, illustrated through how known artists create a revenue stream for themselves, such as those in the Recording or Design areas. The audience had artists from the recording, DJing, Vjing and writing areas. I think I was the only one representing New Media or Fine Art(correct me if I am wrong). Reason for the underrepresentation I think is this gritty friction around fine art and money. Professor Feng Li’s(the primary investigator) standard phrase is “Imagine that you could be successful as an artist and incredibly rich”. At previous workshops, some of the participants had a visceral reaction to this, and I can understand it. However, the interviews have brought about some understanding of each side, the suit and the tshirt.

David Parrish was there to explain how they are not so incongruous. You can buy his book Tshirts and Suits, or download for free. One of the main take home points, was that a smart entrepreneur makes a device that makes money even when the inventer is asleep. The problem with the arts, is that it doesn’t make itself, and if something happens to you, the artist, the work stops.

A lot of the ideas explained in the taxonomy made by Danielly Netto could be described as making communitiy, making limited eddtions and merchandising your one offs. Radiohead’s strategies were discussed and the use of creative commons was also brought up (great!). The idea is to control your IP, and give away what you want.

This ties in nicely with something that was sent to me recently, about ideas, and whether they should be pursued. (from http://coudal.com/newsletter/recent.php)

Here are the questions, all equally important:

1. Will we be able to make money? We’re a business. We have mortgages and tuitions to pay. Plus, if we don’t make some cash once in a while, how will we feed our habit of continually screwing around?

2. When we’re done, will we be proud of the work we’ve done? Slaving for months on a project only to not want to show it to anyone when you’re finished just plain sucks. No amount of money can make that feel better.

3. Can we learn a little something new along the way? Executing the project has to make us smarter and help satisfy our curiosity, which we think is our greatest asset.

For an artist, not all of these are as important, we are not used to a work making money so concentrate more on being proud of the work and learning along the way, at least for the time being.

Which probably leads me back to Hans Abbing, and his book on Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2002)….but I will leave it there today.

Image by eggenbergurbock23 via Flickr

It Bloomsday tomorrow and I am celebrating with a walk in Newcastle UK . I have generated a walk based upon the lotus eaters section of James Joyce ‘s Ulysses. This is made possible by Conor McGarrigle Joycewalks interface which uses the googlemaps api. This is part of the 1000 Joyce walks event.

Image via Wikipedia

Last weekend I went down to London to see Area10 in Peckham. They were having an event called re booted, as part of the node.London (http://www.nodel.org/) series of events.

Area 10 http://www.area10medialab.co.uk/
Area 10 Project space is pleased to launch the new media lab
platform. The medialab is being introduced to facilitate the
development of research and art practices using open source new
technologies in the media arts. <AREA 10: MEDIALAB /> will focus on
engaging cross-disciplinary collaborations between various arts and
science based practices, encouraging open and critical discussion in
addition to sharing knowledge and skills transfer.

It was two days of talks, with a launch night on saturday full of electronic music using the platforms described during the days. Eg Jackbytes, Fluxus, PD, MaxMSP etc.

Area10 is a huge warehouse which was a great space for some large video artworks. The most fun was the peace mobile cinema from the Netherlands. It had seating for up to nine people, and was a group experience, where the audience became part of the movie.

The next major event Area10 are planning is a summer streaming event. With their linkages to goto10, constant, openlabs, it should be great. They are looking at more than just presentations through it, but doing live art.