[spectre] *{WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT CALL}* // The Consolidator // (b.c.freeth@newcastle.ac.uk)

[Ben Freeth]

Call for Workshop Participants 

The Consolidator: 
An exploration of inscription devices, derive, sonifcation and archivization expressed through the medium of data.

Thinking Digital Arts and Culture Lab (Newcastle University) present a call for participation in The Consolidator, a two day workshop conceived and facilitated by artist and researcher Ben Freeth. The project is part of Betagrams, a group show curated by Gabi Arrigoni, as part of Thinking Digital Arts, that explores the notion of the prototype in creative art practice. 
Deadline for Expression of Interest: 7th May
Workshop Date: 17th-18th May 2014

Workshop description
“All our Philosophers are Fools, and their Transactions a parcel of empty Stuff, to the Experiments of the Royal Societies in this Country. Here I came to a Learned Tract of Winds... There you have an Account how to make Glasses of Hogs Eyes, that can see the Wind; and they give strange Accounts both of its regular and irregular Motions, its Compositions and Quantities; from whence, by a sort of Algebra, they can cast up its Duration, Violence, and Extent.”
The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705). Daniel DeFoe (1660? - 1731).

‘...the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the
future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.’
 
Archive Fever (1995), p.17, Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004).

Speculative writing from the corpus of antiquity projects the desire to know the unknowable and experience sensations beyond those currently furnished by the human sensorium. Drawing inspiration from both the DeFoe and Derrida texts, The Consolidator invites participants to engage with this two day procedural workshop and journey through layers of received meaning inherent in the sub-strata of technology whose time has already dissipated. Devices of this nature lie abandoned in several socio-technical bodies within the city. By carrying out the activities of retrieval, recombination, protoyping, making, redeployment, inscription, and analysis participants will explore the medium of data to generate a fresh archive of inscription and sonification. The workshop will take place at Culture Lab, with field trips throughout the city. The archive produced during the workshop will be presented in Betagrams at the Thinking Digital Arts Hub, New Bridge Gallery from the 21st to the 25th of May.

Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/486549881468223/?context=create&source=49

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BenCFreeth/status/461146517810606081/photo/1

How to apply
If you want to take part in the workshop please send an expression of interest (outlining your interest in the workshop and skills / qualities you will bring) to Ben Freeth via b.c.freeth at newcastle.ac.uk by 7th May.
No specific technical skills are needed to take part.
All applicants will be notified by 10th May

Useful information
The workshop will take place at Culture Lab, King's Rd, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear NE1 7RU on the 17th and 18th of May.

Workshop Cost
Free

Ben Freeth
Ben Freeth is an artist and inventor focusing on the potential of micro controllers for creative expression. Currently he is studying a PhD in Digital Media at Newcastle University, researching into the development of speculative digital musical instruments for performance and wearable computing technologies exploring collective experience and aesthetics. His research practice has been developed through work with Digital Interaction, Computing Science at Newcastle University building a hybridised network performance system inspired by Walter Benjamin's fragmented text "Das Passagenwerk". This system pushes the role of the audience in the work liberating the potential for co-authorship and performance between audience and musician. Other work for Digital Interaction has included a collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge working with musicians from a non technical background to develop Digital Musical Instruments (DMI's). He regularly lectures on micro controller formats for the Creative Arts Practice Masters Degree, Newcastle University and delivers procedural workshops for example the recent Sun Tongs series investigating the potential for incorporating solar data and energy into the design of DMI's. Previous work has been exhibited in Bergen, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, New York and Budapest. He also runs the regular #UNPITCH_ nights featuring experimental performance and contemporary music at Culture Lab, Newcastle University.    

Thinking Digital Arts
The Thinking Digital Arts programme will investigate and celebrate the emerging area of contemporary arts where the arts, technology and digital culture collide. The first annual edition of the programme developed as part of the Thinking Digital Conference takes place 19-25 May at locations across Newcastle and Gateshead. http://www.thinkingdigital.co.uk/arts/ 

Thinking Digital Conference
The Thinking Digital Conference is annual conference for innovators in a variety of fields that takes place every spring at the Sage Gateshead Music Centre in Northern England. The conference is themed around technology, new ideas and our future and attracts people from a variety of industries and functions. By bringing a large number and variety of some the brightest, most innovative and accomplished thinkers and doers from around the world, Thinking Digital creates a unique experience that provokes and inspires new insights into our businesses and organisations as well as connecting delegates into a vital community that lives on well after the conferences concludes.
For more information log on to: http://www.thinkingdigital.co.uk/

Culture Lab is the focal point for research in human-computer interaction and digital creative practice at Newcastle University and its members engage in experimental and cross-disciplinary projects in interaction design and creative digital arts in a technologically rich and custom designed environment.
Culture Lab is home to Newcastle University’s Digital Interaction and Digital Media research groups. http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/

              
Ben Freeth // PhD. Candidate
Culture Lab
Newcastle University
Grand Assembly Rooms
King's Walk
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU

Tel: +44 (0) 7581065513
Email: b.c.freeth at newcastle.ac.uk