Mongrel-jelliedeels - Mongrel / Harwood [UK]
Inside this cities dark gates
The tree of knowledge leads to the mansion built on misery.
Here the dress code of secrecy cloaks the flesh in fear.
This is how the proprietary city gets built,
Hidden in every proprietary street,
In every proprietary house,
In every proprietary possession we meet.
(William Blake, 1791)
As Matthew Fuller puts it: social software can provisionally be said to have two strands. Primarily it is software built by and for those of us locked out of the narrowly engineered subjectivity of mainstream software. It is software which asks itself what kind of currents, what kind of machine, numerical, social and other dynamics it feeds in and out of, and what others can be brought into being? The second current is related to this. It is software that is directly born, changed and developed as the result of an ongoing sociability between users and programmers in which demands are made on the practices of coding that exceed their easy fit into standardised social relations. These two threads interweave in most cases. It is how they do so, how their multiple elements are brought into communication and influence that determines their level of success. Nine(9) can most usefully be understood to work in these terms. It is a socio-technical pact between users of certain forms of license, language, cultures and environment. The various forms of its freeness or openness are being developed as part of the various rhythms of the life of this software; its production and critical engagement with the process of permission. In addition to this, Nine(9) requires new social machines to spawn its codes, to diffuse and manage its development and implementation.
Nine(9) exists in a world were powerful social elites live their life through exceptional fantasies - they mistakenly believe they can best safeguard their privilege, by hiding their bonsai trees of knowledge in secret societies, under the tome of law court papers, magic rituals - religions and the use of well tooled-up armies. Nine(9) on the other hand is algorithmically structured to express the inverse of this fantasy. To Mongrels; all knowledge no matter what, should be available. Nuclear arms manufacture, home anthrax breading or the environmental impact of nail-varnish remover in the tanning factories of Southend-on-Sea. We alone should decide if this or that knowledge is relevant or has consequence to our lives.
- http://9.waag.org
- http://www.mongrelx.org
- http://www.scotoma.org
- http://www.linker.org.uk
- http://www.mongrel.org.uk
- http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/mongrel/home/default.htm
Harwood
Harwood started out as an artist during the 1980s. He was involved with publishing initiatives such as the Working Press, Underground newspaper, and books such as Unnatural - techno theory for a contaminated culture. Harwood trained in new media and learned programming at the end of the 1980s. As an educationalist he worked on various new media courses at Guildhall University, and advised on numerous other academic new media initiatives. Disappointed with the state of academic education, Harwood was invited to work at Artec (London Arts Technology Centre) where he provided innovative training for the long-term unemployed. He received Arts Council funding to develop Rehearsal of Memory with Artec and ex-trainees to produce, re-author and publish the CD-ROM version of a previous installation. In 1997 Harwood formed Mongrel, with Matsuko Yokokoji and Richard Pierre-Davis. Mongrel has created collaborative, socially engaged cultural products including National Heritage and the Natural Selection search engine to international acclaim. In 1999 Harwood/Mongrel received two national awards, The Clarks Digital Bursary and the Imaginaria Award from which emerged the software Linker - exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Watershed Bristol. In 2001, Harwood was artist in residence in Artotec, Amsterdam, producing TextFM at the Waag Society working on Nine(9).