I am studying an MA in Interactive Media- Critical Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths College, London and the original impetus for my role as coordinator was to satisfy one of the demands of the course- the completion of a minor project.

The following documentation in italics is the Self-Directed Learning Form, a requirement of the course where the student is encouraged to plot their own learning intentions and aspirations alongside descriptions of the project and resources to be used etc. I revised the SDL myself to account for changes in the development of my work and in an effort to write in a more succinct style suitable for such a document. The next section section is a self-evaluation of my role in relation to the motivations and intentions laid out in the SDL. This is a revision of a talk that i presented to my fellow students and tutors in May 2008.

Self-Directed Learning: Minor Project

To act as project coordinator/ information hub within an expansive range of social telephony media art activities. Up to the hand-in date of this project, these include:

• Telephone Trottoire with Nostalgie Ya Mboka and Londres Na Biso (a 2 month live interactive phone project in Lingala focussed on the exiled Congolese community sharing information about exile and the Coltan Wars).
• Tantalum Memorial in San Jose (an abstract installation of now-redundant Strowger switches acting as a memorial to the war which interacts with the software specially constructed for the Trottoire)
• Further exhibitions, installations and events (currently) across San Paolo, London and Southend and a book publication in January 2009. These are not the immediate concern of the minor project but are important in constructing a documentary platform for my continued involvement.

My objectives within the project:
• To gain a complete understanding of the mechanics and logistics in staging and organising a range of media events.
• To gain a complete understanding of the aesthetics AND mechanics of the work(s) to be exhibited or operated.
• To understand and consider the paradoxes involved in bringing together Congolese refugees through the very technology that is the cause of their dislocation from their homeland.
• To explore the dynamics of the software being created by Richard Wright and Felix Dragan for use in the Telephone Trottoire project and how this is constructed to allow the passage of communication whilst providing the privacy that is so vital to the participants in the project.
• To learn how to operate blog, wiki and web structures to find a way of adequately document the project.
• To explore the different motivations involved by the many participants within the projects and how these can coalesce in to a final construction.
• To seek ways of documentation other than through writing- a fundamental goal of this project.

My Role/s within the project are:
• To act as project co-ordinator between parties in Italy, USA and the UK until two of the projects (London and San Jose) go live in May. Role to then be re-evaluated for the remaining projects in Italy, London and Southend.
• To open up communication channels between parties that need to be connected.
• To facilite new connections that can extend beyond the temporal limits of the projects. Particularly, to encourage parallel working between Goldsmiths and the students at CADRE in San Jose.
• To help construct a temporary website for Telephone Trottoire.
• To research and investigate potential light sources for the San Jose install.
• To monitor the deadlines and insure that all tasks are completed on time.
• To be consistently aware of what is required of all parties and to assist when possible so as to minimise the work of others.
• To understand all aspects of the staging of the work and of the workings of the install so that this assistance may be realised.
• To liaise and assist Vince, Koffi and Estha in realising the audio recordings for the project and to liaise between themselves and the software authors so that the Trottoire team are satisfied that their ethical concerns are accounted for.
• To render all audio content suitable for transmission via mobile phone.

The resources and strategies I will use to achieve the project or my role within it are:
• Assessing the best AND MOST EFFCTIVE communication medium to use between myself and another (be it phone, email, in-person etc.)
• To build bridges and links between people who need to be connected and to facilitate potentially beneficial new connections between parties.
• To find my own ‘place’ within the projects
• Encourage parallel working between the students in San Jose and London through transfer of information and recognition of shared interests.
• Research the mechanics of Strowger switches to gain a thorough understanding of the workings of the installations.
• To work with the memebers of Nostalgie Ya Mboka to gain a critical understanding of the content and conceptualisation of the Trottoire project and to understand the ethics, concerns and ambitions of those who have the most ‘personal’ connection to the work.
• To build on my own research into pirate radio and potential configurations of community and the social through media technology. How does the success of the Trottoire project relate to current theoretical investigations into ‘connected’ culture? Does it offer new challenges and can it offer new potentialities?
• To remain focussed but flexible as the demands of the projects and roles unfold and change.
• To find a way of balancing the requirements of the project with my other work as a student and as a part-time worker. This is a particular concern when considering the ‘always-on’ nature of the project (Trans-Atlantic time differences not withstanding) when it is not possible for myself to be so.

The proof of accomplishing this project will be:
• During the project, the ability to present comprehensively to different parties the current situation of all projects with a thorough understanding of all concepts and technical workings.
• For every party involved to know what is required of them at any given time and to be able to connect with their respective colleagues with the minimum of problems.
• To have an understanding of the boundaries between ethics and exploitation and to grasp how a project can be realised through a multitude of different motivations.
• To be able to articulate critically my experience as an information hub.
• Clear and articulate documentation charting the progression of the projects in technical and organisational terms.
• Documentation charting the progress of my own thinking- how I have changed and how has my awareness of media changed.

Evaluation criteria and means of validating the project and my role within will be:
• How efficient I will have been in facilitating a smooth flow of information and communication between all parties.
• What I have contributed outside of my own requirements in moving the project forward.
• My ability to work well within a complex assemblage of participants and technologies.
• What technical skills I have or will be learning based on the processes that I have put into operation (and what it is necessary that I feel I should learn relevant to the project).

These are my project key stages and the dates for completing them:
• For everyone involved in the projects to be made aware of my role by 12/03/2008.
• To ensure that San Jose has all necessary installation information by 15/03/2008.
• To constantly re-prioritise deadlines as new tasks become assigned- with this being an ongoing project, tasks will be assigned spontaneously as needed.
• Begin re-assembling blog into academic format on 28/04/08.
• To ensure that Telephone Trottoire website is operational for project launch.
• Project hand-in 06/05/08.

Minor Project Self-Evaluation

The Tantalum Project seemed to offer me the perfect opportunity for me to evolve as a student in a wholly new direction and this was of vital importance to me- the very reason I found myself on this course at this institution was the opportunity to develop in a practical and conceptual way.

The Project itself was ideal- a complex fusion of analogue and digital, metal and plastic, symbolism and realism and a paradoxical collision of social and global ethics and technological futurism. Of major importance to me was the opportunity to work alongside others- this would help me to gain the confidence to explore the many technological and ethical issues with which I was inexperienced but were increasingly appealing to something inside me- for whatever reason, I simply felt inextricably drawn to the problematics involved both ‘professionally’ and personally.

“Are we connected because we are collective or are we collective because we are connected?”

The quote above comes from Eugene Thacker’s 2-part essay Networks, Swarms, Multitudes. In this paper, Thacker explores the politics of network cultures and examines the ‘commitment’ of online activism (the connected) to the ‘actual’ mobilisation engendered in action (the collective). Ironically, the Trottoire project slightly unstitches some of Thacker’s arguments and this will be explored elsewhere in the site in the very near future. But, the tension between the connected and the collective is a perfect analogy of my experience as project coordinator…

No matter how many emails I had to decipher, reorganise and re-route, I soon began to find that I couldn’t really DO anything. I couldn’t make any decisions as this was not my work and I had no area of expertise in which to establish myself as a useful part of any of the overall process. This is not to say that I was entirely useless but I couldn’t see just what I was doing that was truly of any benefit. Individuals on either side of the Atlantic would either have specialist problems that were to complex to gain any real understanding of through simply reading and allowing the communication to come through me. I would occasionally attempt to complete various forms and contracts but this also threw up interesting problems. If I did not have the expertise to answer a question and I sought the answer form someone who did, I found that even though I now had that answer, it actually was meaningless. I simply had become aware of a fact, some words, that had no context in any kind of reality. It was knowledge without understanding or experience and was therefore slightly hollow. Then occasionally, to make matters worse, the necessity for everybody to communicate through me actually slowed processes down. I would receive an email to action but, since I was a part-time student with allegedly set-hours I would have to ignore this or move outside of my timetable. These complexities were heightened by time differences leading to delays and confusion. Struggling to assert any kind of a ‘voice’ within the machinery made me wonder what some of my colleagues in San Jose thought when they saw my name or if they even saw it at all.

According to Thacker, being connected simply carries a charge- it becomes a zone of potentiality if carried further. Despite his concern with politics and activism, my situation was frustratingly parallel- I couldn’t be MORE connected. Everything to do with Museum logistics, install design and software construction and so many other matters were flowing right through me and in an inverse of Shannon’s theory, the meaninglessness of the information became the noise itself.

Over the year, across the course of the MA I had begun to lose my passion for writing as I felt I had somehow pigeonholed myself within a particular style, and now over-familiar concerns. Development for me in this project was all about finding modes of expression or communication other than through writing. I had started a blog to document the project that had lapsed into a frustrated diary. In a project as expansive as this one, actual information is easy to come by and it is almost never-ending so the project turned round for me- WHAT do I document and HOW?

Strowger

The Strowger switch, the electro-mechanical device that was the vital component of telephone exchanges globally for over a hundred years provided the solution to the problematics of being project coordinator. The switches were the focal point of the abstract installation sprung from the Trottoire project. The definitions I’m about to unravel are obviously not entirely strict and of course there is a bleed-through in desires, motivations and aspirations but it is still possible to make these slight generalisations.

To Thomas Asmuth and others in San Jose, the switches were a technical challenge with so many complexities- mixing the mechanical with complex computer software and placing it all within a frame.
For the men at the Telephony Museum in Milton Keynes, the switch carried a weight of heritage, history and lifestyle. One of the volunteers had worked his entire life in telephone exchanges and wore a hearing aid due to being surrounded by the clacking of thousands of these switches all day every day. As cyborg, this man had an intrinsic, inseparable and intimate relationship with these switches.
To Harwood Wright Yokokoji the switches crossed every boundary- metaphorically representing death (Strowger in his undertaker role, as a memorial to the dead of the Congo and as a memorial to the death of analogue communication systems). The switches carried a weight of social and class politics and of national heritage. The switches were also a technical problem to be solved; they were a sound device; they were a frame to hang a concept on. And much more.
To Vince, Koffi and Estha, the team behind Nostalgie Ya Mboka and Londres Na Biso, the masterminds behind Telephone Trottoire which was the springboard for all the artistic activity, the switches meant… nothing.

Assemblage Theory (realised by Deleuze and Guattari and further encouraged by Manuela De Landa) allows for the recognition of dynamic networks and becoming collectives. The ability for A & B & C to join together and be one thing, for B & C & D to be another thing and for all to be something else individually. It allows the multiplicity its mutations on its own terms, as open systems alive to transformation and not static. In just these two projects, the Strowger switch is a device entering into multiple relationships and forging connections.

As coordinator, since I had no relationship with any particular part, since I was connected but not collective, I stood back from the various assemblages and relationships and, suitably inspired, created my own.

Reflection Prompts Reaction

I deleted the blog and rebuilt it as ‘live archive’. I looked at all the different aspects of all the different projects and sought to illuminate them in this new context- as an overview of the whole virally proliferating and expansive project.

The Strowger switch had alerted me to the multiplicities so I exploited that. I began to explore the individual personalities and ask them to reflect on their part in this huge endeavour and what it meant to them and what they wanted from it. Solving my distrust of writing, I let them speak through microphones and cameras and diagrams. If I conducted an interview I did my best to remove my voice altogether. The leap from Koffi who is Congolese, living in London and endlessly strategising with Vince and Estha on ways of building a community with their own voice to Steve Dietz, new media curator in San Jose is so extremely vast and yet that network, that rhizomatic line is apparent.

My frustrated creativity became released through the complexities of structuring a blog to adequately document my project. I built it but it took on a life of its own. It doesn’t work and so the energy is suddenly there to learn how to build a website from scratch. Not because I think it would be useful because now the work demands it of me. And this demand has wiped out the part of me that feared dealing with practicalities, as I no longer see it this way. The work demands representation and this is the only way it will work and this is something I therefore need to learn to do.

Our MA finds its culmination in an Expo in July (although not for me as I’m part-time). At the Expo, I have decided that the only thing that would be right for me to do is to build my own version of the install. Like the website, this is no longer a practicality to be feared as it is essential to the project. Alex Harris, a fine art student, will be creating abstract paintings of the switches on to aluminium backing. The switch again will find itself in a new context.

I am have started the process of constructing an audio documentary and in the middle of this narrative will be a discussion between the Trottoire team and Harwood Wright Yokokoji being chaired by media theorist Matt Fuller. I will soon be beginning voluntary work at Resonance FM so that I can begin to engineer such sessions.

Further Becomings

When I started to work on building the blog and thinking about how to structure the documentation, all those emails that had passed through me had actually infected me much more than I realised. Through total confusion, inexperience and a frustration to make sense, just being part of the process has left indelible marks on me. The huge task of setting these events up on a global scale, the minutiae of detail required to get everything right, for these things to work both technically and metaphorically, I really feel like I have a grasp of it.

This has been a truly world-changing experience and over such a short period of time- my attitude towards the practical and any separations I might have made from writing or theory have been completely erased. Theory and practice are ridiculously arbitrary words that mean nothing and should never be conceived as distinct entities.

I have found a voice by removing a voice and I am approaching media and technology with a entirely different approach than I have in the past. I can no longer conceive of such separations and this is how I will proceed with my role. Open-minded, connected AND collective.