Blog written by Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and professor of cinema, Ithaca College

“Gossip moves faster than the internet,” observed Gustaff Harriman Iskandar, arts, writer, curator and founder of Common Room and the Bandung Center for New Media Arts in Indonesia.

Gustaff was presenting about the new media practices of Common Room on the Open Space Panel “ The Contingent Spaces of Performance, Performativity and Soundscapes" at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference last week in Singapore.

“Gossip is important,” Gustaff observes.  “It is part of oral culture, and oral culture is very important in Indonesia.”

Common Room is an initiative and a civil society practice in Bandung, Indonesia, designed to convene people, new media technologies, and conversations to make public space and interactive conversation accessible.  It produces exhibitions, discussions, workshops, screenings, operating within what Gustaff called “contingent spaces and contested realities.”  A central concern of Common Room is how to make networks—both virtual and real—work. 

Founded in 2003, Common Room contends that conversations matter. Gustaff identified this practice as “the politics of listening":  to facilitate space to recognize different situations and different realities through discussion.  “In Common Room, we try to be invisible to facilitate the needs of people who enter conversations.  Small interventions make everything happen by itself,” Gustaff said. As a result, Common Room floats in between institutions and communities, a forum for oral histories.

Resolutely locally situated, Common Room works in mapping practices, projects that make connections between civic empowerment, environmental sustainability, and urban ecology.  The members of Common Room see themselves as artists initiating ideas and activities as political gestures based on dialogue and listening to people to facilitate their needs. 

Against what Gustaff called “historical dementia,”  urban distress, gentrification, and “wild capitalism” in Indonesia, Common Room advocates for open commons, smart mobs, gift economies, knowledge, creativity and freedom. Gustaff contends that “wild capitalism” is rampant in Indonesia, where transnational corporations in the oil, logging and mineral extraction businesses operate without rules and regulations.

Although the democratic reforms and social revolution of reformasi in 1998  loosened up censorship, many Indonesian activists and artists have noted the enactment of a systematic process of forgetting and state-sponsored amnesia, where the nation erases history by changing names of buildings, streets, places.  For example, in 2008, 11 people were killed in a concert hall in Bandung. The building was renamed. 

At ICA,  Common Room created a live installation based on the web 2.0 notion of the “meet up”  in the Suntec Conference Center to bring the academics assembled into a collaborative Indonesian space. With mats, computers, microphones and live streaming, their site-specific live, interactive performance functioned as a meet up in the middle of the conference.  Common Room activated direct audience engagement, encouraging connections across national borders and arts/scholarly practices.

Flanked by the conference rooms and then new media art installations, Common Room put straw mats on risers in the hallway.  One of the mats was white and shiny—it was woven out of recycled toothpaste tubes.  Laptops adorned with stickers sat on low teak tables.  

Common Room members Reina Wulansari, an arts exhibitor, Addy Handy, a writer and death metal band vocalist, and Gustaff sat cross legged on the risers throughout the conference.  They interviewed the academics who ambled by to rest on the platform, and then streamed the interviews over the internet.

I asked Gustaff what the academics were chatting about with him.  “Ghosts,” he said.  “And a lot of introspection about spirituality.”  I was struck by the contrast between these interviews and the social science-oriented, quantitative methodology, power points on media research that dominated the conference.

“Practitioners are switching from working as artists to functioning more as facilitators,”  explained Gustaff.  Common Room energizes public engagements. It’s not designed for personal work, but positioned as an institution that creates open platforms in real space. 

“In Indonesia at the moment, arts culture is very contingent” Gustaff  said.  “Because there is an absence of state power in the arts and an absence of an institutional apparatus for the arts, artists and facilitators must make their own way.”  Working commercially to make a living, Gustaff, Addy and Reina collaborate on Common Room initiatives to convene people around ideas.  Common Room is actually located in a house in Bandung. “Creativity is a sign of poverty and not wealth,” asserted Gustaff.

During the three days of ICA, many academics—mostly from the so-called west--sat on the Common Room risers, fixated on their laptops with their presentation powerpoints, their backs facing Gustaff, Reina and Addy. The hallway offered no place to sit as conferees waited for panels to end. As a result, the academics used the risers as a sort of academic lounge. 

On Thursday, I noticed that a white American woman in a brown suit (rather hot for the tropics) and a  white European man in a blue sport coat and khaki pants (also heavy for the tropics) closed up their laptops and turned their bodies into the risers.  Open Space interns and other Open Space artists sprawled across the risers, reclining into conversations.

Reina sat cross legged across from them, holding a microphone and recording their conversation for live streaming.  I heard numerous papers on cross cultural communication and I read many power points on differences in media systems.  But none of these papers stayed with me as long as this image of Common Room members from Indonesia sharing conversation with academics.

This interaction evoked  the power of moving away from the professionalized solipsism of obsessive laptop usage  and edging towards re- positioning new technologies as contingent public spaces and open platforms.  This performative gesture of collaborative conversations across differences recalibrates new technologies like live streaming as necessary and urgent open spaces. 

And for me, this image of  "western" academics suited up in professional outfits that were out of sync with the climate here chatting with Reina and Gustaff materialized Common Room’s politics of listening. Gradually, the powerpoints and the netbooks are closed, and unofficial conversations open up.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

We seek submissions for a curated online and on-site exhibition exploring the theme of Open Space.  This exhibition will be showcased at the International Communication Association (ICA) Conference in Singapore from June 22-26, 2010. Open Space is mounted as the digital arts exploration of the conference theme Im/Material.

WHAT IS OPEN SPACE?

Open Space imagines a zone of horizontality mobilizing collaboration, participation, complex interactive dialogues, process, permeability, and community.  The term open space originates in landscape design, where space is privileged over mass to stage meaningful  and often surprising encounters and interactions. It has also emerged as a key environmental concept in the greening of global cities, in architecture, and in international organizational design. Indeterminancy, flexibility, and contingency  constitute  key strategies in open space.  

Open Space proposes a relational mode rather than a fixed object. Open Space suggests work that mobilizes an ethics of convenings and encounters in a sustainable zone.  Open Space spurs collaborative knowledges and produces new provisional microterritories through engagement. Open Space is where technologies meet people meet spaces.

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We seek works and makers exploring the concepts and practice of Open Space in Singapore and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, and Indonesia).  We are particularly interested in makers, artists, collectives, and collaborative projects from these regions.  Works that are transnational and translational with a central concern of  Southeast Asia  as nexus will also be considered.

The Open Space/Singapore/Southeast Asia exhibition is looking for digital arts  and design projects in any of the following forms/interfaces: online art projects, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), social gaming, creative robotics and digital devices, locative media, mobile applications, ambient screens, user-generated community narratives and maps,  innovative digitally-based  cartography projects, web-based archival projects, social media interfaces and projects, installation, live DJ/VJ remixes.

Additionally, any other digital and analog forms that engage a collaborative aesthetic and participatory ethics are eligible for inclusion.

PRACTICAL DETAILS FOR PARTICIPATING PROJECTS

Deadline:  March 3, 2010

To submit  work:  Please send a short, one paragraph description of your project, a short bio, and a link to your project or documentation of your project  in an email inquiry to Patricia Zimmermann, Shaw Foundation Professor, Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, at tpatricia@ntu.edu.sg  no later than March 3, 2010

Exhibition:  Projects will be featured on the ICA/WKWSCI website as the Open Space Exhibition.  A limited number of artists/makers/collaborative teams will be selected from the overall exhibition to present at sessions and venues at ICA in Singapore June 22-26, with airfare and accommodation provided.

CURATORIAL TEAM

Patricia R. Zimmerman, Nikki Draper, and Sharon Lin Tay, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore with Wenjie Zhang.

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATION

The International Communications Association (ICA) (http://www.ica2010.sg) is the largest international academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application aspects of human and mediated communication.  ICA has over 4,500 members from 76 countries. Over 2,000 scholars, writers, and communications practitioners from around the world attend the conference.  ICA 2010 is the first time in seven years that the annual conference will be held in Asia.
 
ICA 2010 CONFERENCE THEME:  IM/MATERIAL

Communication is in many respects im/material because it constitutes the very nexus where the material and immaterial dimensions of our world meet each other.  Communication is indeed spectral or ghostal because our interactions consist of making present what could have remained absent from a debate, a discussion, a conversation and so on. (from the conference website: http://www.ica2010.sg/conference.html)

WEE KIM WEE SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND  INFORMATION
NANYANG TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY, SINGAPORE

The host for ICA 2010 is the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI)(http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/sci),  at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)in Singapore.  Ranked as one of the world’s top 100 universities, NTU(http://www.ntu.edu.sg)  is a research-intensive university with globally acknowledged strengths in science and engineering. WKWSCI is one of the premiere institutions for research and teaching in communication and information in Asia. It houses the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre , the Asian Communication Resource Centre, and the Singapore Internet Research Centre.

Blog written by Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and codirector, National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, and Patricia Zimmermann, professor, Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts

We’ve decided to roll out Part II of our working papers on our open space documentary project so that folks at the Sepancine Film Theory Conference and Morelia International Film Festival in Morelia, Mexico—and readers of this blog-- can have access. We’ve included the Spanish translation as well in the document on the sidebar.

We wanted to share a bit more about our new research initiative, The Open Space Documentary Project.

We also decided  to open up the conversation further before we arrive in Morelia in central Mexico  this week. The comments on our previous posting have been really provocative. They have pushed us into some new thinking. We’ll be writing more from Morelia, Mexico, so stay tuned…Join the conversation and share your thoughts.

A WORK-IN-PROGRESS:

SPECULATIONS AND PRINCIPLES FOR OPEN SPACE DOCUMENTARY

1. If technology is now the primary shaper of human identity in a world of increasingly seductive illusions, how can we re-envision those illusions as a step to dreaming them in a new and different way?

2. Open Space documentary stimulates creative inquiry into how we practice empathetic dialogue: within ourselves, with other individuals, in a larger community, and across our broader society.

3. In this model, rapidly evolving technological interfaces liberate artists to explore new ways to frame community activities as creative practice, and weave them into a larger social fabric of history and memory rather than as simply products for purchase and consumption.

4. For Open Space documentary to be successful, a project team must agree with a group of commonly shared values that organize the project. They must also constantly articulate and test how much they can tolerate a horizontal process that allows inputs from a variety of different participants.

5. This model holds the promise to help in the building of strong local infrastructures by developing living archives of public memory and history that resist control by consumer and corporate agendas.

6. Open Space projects embrace a spirit of "amplitude" including:

* the intention to view a subject from every possible perspective;

* a curiosity about and compassion for the thinking of other people and other eras (i.e. holding deep historical perspectives and transmitting values across generations);

* the assumption that collaborations and interactions are reciprocally beneficial and open-ended.

7. Open Space documentary reanimates the processes and outcomes of co-creation among individuals and groups. These processes can be:

* Playful, reflective and capable of endless variety;

* Always moving between self-awareness and the external world of public interaction;

* Permissive of competing theories and systems;

* Protective of the capacity to learn and grow beyond original conceptions or storylines.

8. Open Space documentary equals a networked game structure with many potential outcomes that cannot always be planned for.

9. This model offers an environment for dialogue around a topic or issue that is not based on opinion or argument; but rather catalyzes possible next steps needed to connect, communicate and collaborate on human-scaled local actions.

10. Open Space documentary intentionally reclaims media technologies in order to re-envision interactive public, democratic and social relationships in all their subtle and complicated interactions.

Blog post by Helen De Michiel, filmmaker and co-director, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture and Patricia Zimmermann, codirector of FLEFF and professor of cinema, Ithaca College

In the old world order, writing entered  public space like a piece of fine artisanal pottery, all the edges smoothed, the colors subtle, the shape pleasing and proportioned, the surface  carefully etched with perfectly balanced markings.  Precious, perfect, poised.

In the new world of “open space,” writing, we think, enters other worlds as an incomplete text inviting context and collaboration. It’s a space where ideas need other people and their insights to breathe, expand, get pushed.  It’s a process of letting go, in order to go somewhere else.

So we’d like to invite you to comment and respond to some of our arguments about Open Space Documentary below. We need you.  And we need to put these ideas into a larger conversation.

We’ll be presenting our ongoing research project, “The Open Space Project: Towards a Collaborative and Relational Documentary Practice” as one of the keynotes at the Sepancine 5th International Conference on Film Theory and Analysis in Morelia, Mexico, October 1-3, 2009. Sponsored by the Mexican Society of Film Theory and Analysis of the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Cuajimalpa (UAM-C), the conference is also part of the Morelia International Film Festival, one of the premiere film festivals in Mexico and Latin America. The festival runs October 3-11, 2009.

Oh…almost forgot…if you are a reader of Indiewire.com and Variety, you might be wondering what a film theory conference has to do with major world class film festival. The answer is simple:  in the exciting, explosive, and expanding space that is Mexican film, video and new media at the moment, practice needs theory and theory needs practice because the stakes are high, the politics intense, and the questions large.

We hope you will comment on some of our opening arguments, posted below.

WHY “OPEN SPACE” FOR DOCUMENTARY?

1.  It can restore social, human-scaled and local agency in new and unimagined ways. It invites new conversations and behaviors while connecting people.  It fights fear with pleasure and fun.

2.  It can convene people intentionally around and in real community spaces, offering an experience that reclaims patches of the social media environment from global corporatism.

3. It lives in and evolves through expansive networks, communities and clusters beyond traditional media distribution channels by experimenting with multiple versions and reaching out to contributors across disciplines and generations.

4.   It invites media makers and exhibitors to become “context providers” rather than “content providers,” reframing the more fluid movement and interconnections across disciplinary, epistemological and political boundaries.

5. It encourages attention to micro-territorial media ecologies where different discourses, practices and dynamically shifting elements will engage both convener and participants in unanticipated ways.

6. It acknowledges and works within a permeable space in which collaboration, contingency, horizontality, adaptability, decentralization and the migration across media platforms occurs frequently and with force.