Hi everyone,
I had a chat without about ten of you last Friday and want to follow up now. I think that what is clear at this point is that you want to establish a way of as many people in your cohort as possible to work together in the production of the degree show and integrated online presence without imposing any kind of rigidity or uniformity. To put this into context, I encourage all of you to take a look at this presentation on “Institutions v. Collaboration” by Clay Shirky: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html
Shirky makes a great case for strong infrastructure for COORDINATION AS OPPOSED TO PLANNING and this fits your interests and concerns so far. A way to get started is to roll out a structure for coordinating all of your efforts as quickly as possible. So, the goal for the end of the term is to put in place some tools for getting everyone working together. The quickest way to do this, given the skills and experiences of your colleagues (and supporting tutors), is to quickly fit out an installation of blogging engine word press — by the end of the term. This get you all talking to each other and shaping something in collaboration, almost anything (wordpress is very flexible), over the spring and summer terms.
So, apart from the obvious, like getting all of you tools for getting your names, contact details, documentation of your work, and a forum for discussing and experimenting, the only other thing that the group on Friday came to was that as all of you started putting work and other stuff online, it would be worth giving everything some descriptive terms, or tags, to enable different kinds of organizing and other functionality later. To get you started thinking of this, and just for interest, I can suggest a few readings on taxonomy and interesting critiques of processes of categorizing objects, forms, and knowledge.
Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia – http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html which is mentioned by Foucault in the introduction to The Order of Things or in French Les Mots et les choses. The Foucault is not for the faint of heart but very inspiring.
Find out more about tags here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata) and the difference between a folksonomy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy) and a taxonomy (scientific classification)
More concretely, we hope that everyone will contribute a few classificatory tags that might lend more interest to your work. Each time you post something on the degree show site, you’d be given the opportunity to apply these tags in any combination. Obvious ones are ‘typography’ and ‘photography’ but there have been suggestions of more formal tags such as blue or reallybig and more out there ones which I’ll leave to you all to brainstorm.
So a few of you, led by Neville Lok Lee and with the support of Max and myself, have volunteered to get this infrastructure going over the next week and a half or so. In the meantime, here are a few degree showish links to get started looking at and discussing. http://www.therewhere.com/blog/?p=31 — there are other images of this degree show all over the web, still after a couple of years
http://art.yale.edu/GDShow — this is an example of a web site collaboratively edited by a (much smaller) group.
Best Regards, Rebecca
