We have two facebook groups for those interested in semiotics, contemporary art and video games:

• The Semiotics of Video Games facebook group, created at the occasion of this project. The group is all about the production of meaning in video games: how does it work, what is the message, how does it relate to our everyday cultural reality?
• The Game Art facebook group focuses on its part on contemporary art inspired by videogames.

People who prepared the Semiotics of Video Games exhibition had the opportunity to collaborate a first time through these groups. We shared links and invited other people to exchange their ideas on the subject, which led to the following two preliminary discussions:

• “What is a game world? Doors, keys and… good legs”, by Dario Compagno
• “Question Blocks: How to make two worlds collide?”, by Gabriele Ferri

The Welcome to Finsbury Park project was co-organised with the Transition Finsbury Park association to engage the London N4 local communities with their neighbourhood. It consisted in a 2-month field investigation using videos and was concluded in March 2010 by a workshop and the co-creation of subjective maps (these two activities are documented in the following manuals). Here below is a review of the project and some conclusions, co-written by myself and James Thomson from the Transition Finsbury park association.

Transition Finsbury park, part of the Transition Towns Network, “intends to find ways of living that are based on localised food production, sustainable energy sources, lively local economies and an enlivened sense of community, rather than cheap and polluting oil”. The volunteer group is relatively new in the Finsbury Park area and was looking for new ways to engage with local communities. The Welcome to My Place project that was recently launched fit with that purpose and this is how we started to collaborate. We should also mention the great support we received from the Finsbury Park Homeless Families project, the Green Lens Studios and the Faith, Football and Falafel project.

The N4 area in London welcomes one of the most diverse set of communities in the UK: natives, Moroccans, Kurds, Somalis, Italians, artists, office workers, evangelists, Muslims, musicians and many more. Each of these communities has a different perception of what sustainability is about. Instead of hammering green vocabulary and precepts, the Transition Finsbury park association wanted to first listen to what local communities had to say about their direct environment. As they rightly pointed out, the idea of ‘sustainability’ is a pretty abstract concept – but growing vegetables in a garden speaks much more to people. The solution needs to start from them and be stated in their own words. Following the Welcome to My Place general concept, we asked people to film the places that matter to them in the N4 neighbourhood and to welcome the viewers to the places of their choice. We collected around 24 videos (visible here) that we used in a workshop held at Green Lens Studio’s. We screened the videos and draw subjective maps of the area as a way to reflect on the inhabitants’ perception of the neighbourhood.

Here are step-by-step manuals for those who would be interested in applying the same method in their area. From personal experience, this exercise gave us the opportunity to explore an urban area in a way we have never done before. Working with other people we discovered a rich and multi-layered environment which we might have struggled to imagine on our own. We would recommend anyone to take the time to go through a similar process in their vicinity.

Welcome to Finsbury Park: Review and Conclusions

By Christophe Bruchansky and James Thomson

1.     Meeting the people

It may be a nerve racking experience, but the best way to discover the places important that are important to people in the neighbourhood is to go up to them and ask them. It was not the most efficient method perhaps, in terms of the number of videos we collected, but it was the one that opened our perceptions up the most. We took a map of the N4 area and split it up into several parts for each volunteer to explore. Walking in the streets armed with leaflets, wondering who to get video contributions from – really forces you to look and explore what is around you and find out who your neighbours are.

To provide a perspective of the Finsbury Park area we have the Haringey artist community and the Florentina clothing village near Hermitage road, the Turkish restaurants on Green Lanes, the ubiquitous barber shops, the wealthy Crouch Hill streets, the Jewish community near the reservoirs, the mentally impaired centre, the schools, the churches, the Muslim community, the pubs, the Algerian café’s, library goers and so on. We tried to engage with these communities and discovered an area filled with different interests and preoccupations.

We contacted communities on the Internet too, where many forums focussing on the Finsbury Park area already exist: http://finsburypark.wordpress.com/, http://www.finsburyparkpeople.co.uk, http://www.stroudgreen.org. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Vimeo are other online hubs where we found people having an interest in the vicinity.

Using the local connections that the members of the Transition Finsbury Park association had already established turned out to be a very productive way of getting video contributions. We would like to point out however that even though most of the people we met didn’t participate in this specific project; meeting with them for the first time was one of the most valuable outcomes. Both in terms of shaping a more holistic perception of the area and in building new relationships, invaluable in the long term for different community groups hoping to work together in the future.

We have learnt how significant local community organisations can be to making projects like ours really happen.  If we wanted to convince individuals to participate, it was essential to first gain the support leaders in the community. Three of them responded enthusiastically to our call and greatly helped us throughout the project: The Finsbury Park Homeless Families project (see the Children chapter), the Faith, Football and Falafel project (see below) and Green Lens Studios (see the chapter on the mapping workshop).

When we presented our project to the North London Central Mosque, they directly thought of introducing us to the people from the Faith, Football and Falafel project; who had organized video workshops with members of the Muslim community to promote grass roots cultural dialogue. They are also behind the Vaudeville Court TV project, a socially engaged appropriation of the seemingly uncharacteristic Vaudeville Court building. The video below illustrates how much the representation of a place, and an entire neighbourhood, can be subverted and reshaped unexpectedly by its inhabitants, for example using Wi-Fi.

The same participants of the Faith, Football and Falafel project filmed cafés and restaurants in the Finsbury Park area. The videos give a true sense of the identity of these places. We were interested to hear that ‘cosmopolitan’ was included in at least two of the videos.

The N4 area is certainly cosmopolitan and highly transient in its population. Many people commute to and from The City during the week whilst at weekends a home game at the Emirates football stadium can completely change the areas dynamics. This makes the process of building a consistent identity quite a difficult one at least – but not impossible. One of us is also a ‘foreigner in transit’ and it’s quite rare to meet a person that was originally brought up in the borough.

In our interpretation the presence of this transient population has in many ways lead to a neighbourhood that is not as socially connected as it could be. In terms of identity, a number of local communities tend to stay in spaces where they can build their own references to identity. The area has its fair baggage of history though and we were fortunate to meet some of its story tellers. But there did seem to be a lack motivation or desire for staking claim to a piece of the areas identity. For an urban area loaded with identity and diversity, this attitude might not be such a bad thing for a population wanting to get on with business-as-usual in the short term. But it doesn’t help an association like Transition Finsbury Park to articulate a message based on the revalorisation of the locale. By motivating people to speak before the camera about place, there is a hope that a collective local identity can be galvanized in the near future.

2.     The many facets of Finsbury Park

In the middle of this non-negotiated facet landscape, the iconic Finsbury Park seemed to catalyse the beginnings of our dialogue. Despite its rich history (see Wikipedia), Finsbury Park may appear to lack a particular identity, and be viewed as a place of pure recreational functionality, ‘a green place in the middle of the traffic’. On the other hand, this is also a place whose identity has been shaped by the people that inhabit it and the stories and relationships which have been built upon it.

Finsbury Park inspires common feelings associated with most inner city green places: old-fashioned, made to be enjoyed with friends and family.

Timely events are organised in the park, like the Kurdish New Year celebrations in the middle of March. As suggested in this related paper, the park could be treated as a “non-place” in order to allow these types of events the expressive freedom they require.

These events play an important role in the vicinity. They offer one of the rare opportunities for interaction between local communities, and for practical discussions that are necessary in the organisation of the events. It could be said however that in their willingness to pacify space, local authorities erase the need for local communities to enter into real dialogue, which prevents any negotiation of public space.

What seems like a completely natural feature of the park, its birds for example, are taken care of by a warden officer. It is people like Les Pope who has lived in the area for over 20 years – who could take a leading role in the identity building process from within the park. However – because the service he provides is maintained by the local council, his fountain of knowledge appears lost to the local population.

3.     Children using the parks and playgrounds

It was great to have the opportunity to work with children on this project thanks to the support of the staff at the Finsbury Park Homeless Families project and the Parkwood primary school. A thorough and detailed outlay of the workshop can be found in our video workshop manual.

Children are well known for their inspiring and often pertinent contributions and so we were half expecting them to show us new and original places in the N4 area. But when asking the children which were the most important places for them, they nearly all replied saying that it was the playground and the two nearby parks: Finsbury Park and Clissold Park. While longer sessions may have lead to more original locations, green open space seemed to be the most natural answer. So, we took them to the parks and the playgrounds. We filmed what they had to show us. Afterwards we invited them to draw their places and we added the drawings in the videos

Their choice to film playgrounds and parks seems characteristic of the relationship people have with the N4 area. Beyond the numerous coffee shops, restaurants, bars and religious centres – the rest of public space is apparently perceived as purely a place of transit. Children are generally not allowed to explore the streets on by themselves and are kept in dedicated recreational spaces. These places appear to become something of a micro-neighbourhood for them. We both wondered what the result might have been if we had facilitated the same workshop in a rural environment – where children are possibly freer to explore their surroundings.

That being said, the children we worked with managed to symbolically recompose the outside, with its legends, quests and stories (read Christophe’s research here on how narrative elements play an important role in that process). The youth we worked with seemed to do this very well given the obstacles that seemed to stand between them and their local environment.

This analysis is closely related to movements that advocate the re-appropriation of public space (see this video created by the think tank Demos for example).

4.     Workshop

At the end of our call for video contributions, we organised a workshop at the Green Lens Studios, a photographic studio and project space that aims to connect creativity and sustainability. At this workshop we screened all of the films to provide local perspective and context. We then asked the eleven participants, all somehow related to the local area, to draw a series of ‘subjective maps’ of their neighbourhood. This was fun.

We used a series of techniques to facilitate the exercise – including rolling a dice to determine whose turn it was to draw a piece of the map – explained in our subjective maps workshop manual. They worked pretty well, and just like the creating the videos, the most interesting element of the process were the conversation between the participants.

We noticed quite soon into the workshop that the blank piece of paper we had provided the participants was less a source of confrontation than we had expected it to be. Instead the exercise turned out to be more about discovery and sharing of ideas. Participants didn’t know one another, nor did they recognise many of the places discussed by each other. There were some landmarks which emerged with consistency however, such as parks, streets and churches, but each seeming to tell their own subjective stories by way of graphical interpretation. It seemed useful for participants to exchange these stories, either to discover aspects of the area they didn’t know, or to confirm perceptions of places they had never had the occasion to express in a group.

Map 1: Finsbury Park Area: 23/03/2010

The resulting subjective maps look more like a mythological tale than of a contested space. A strange sense of place quickly emerged, parks populated by mythological animals contrast local shops and supermarkets – identified by their staple consumer products. A mythology made of dark secrets such as the street of the second-hand phone accessories (Blackstock Road) and the needles that once littered Finsbury Park before it’s clean up in the 90s. Looking at these maps you get the feeling that a at least a couple decades have been etched into these creations, punctuated here and there by the closing down and reopening of buildings – new and old identities overlaid.

Likewise the visual representation of ‘smell’ came as something of a shock – thick charcoal smog emanating from the underground tube network fills the park, London’s body odour. Also worthy of note is the considerable influence memorable events, specific to the area, played upon the subjective landscapes illustrated. Like the time the police heavy-handedly invaded black stock road – for better or worse – shown in Map 2. The map making process equally demonstrated our ability to define things that aren’t physically tangible. For example, the appearance of mythological labyrinths beneath the Finsbury Park Lake – perhaps representing ‘escape routes’ or gateways out of the city towards the romantic English Countryside. And while these maps are evidently effective in recording historical truths – they also show themselves to be revealing in their predictions of how the future may look in the local area. Map 1 demonstrates this well – showing the agricultural cultivation of local parks for food, and inner-city wind turbines painted purple. A tree also protrudes out of the roof of the Vaudeville Court housing terrace.

It is surprising to say that in creating the maps there were almost no disagreements within the two groups, when they did occur they were more about the geographical location of places than their actual presence or representation. Without an i-phone or ordnance survey map to hand though, our local geography did seem to suffer a little bit however – but most participants were quick to let go of their preconceived notions of accuracy. In fact this seemed to enable them to become more focused on their personal, subjective experience of the vicinity, rather than the coordinates which have attempted to define their own neighbourhoods in recent years.

Map 1: Finsbury Park Area: 23/03/2010

5.     Conclusions

Catalysing neighbourhood dialogue has remained at the heart of this project from the start, from collaborating to produce the first videos of the N4 area through to the creation of subjective maps. Commuter lifestyle, constant flux of populations, and pacification of the area by local authorities all made community dialogue almost non relevant it would seem. Cohabitation remains peaceful and everyone seems contempt to make sense of their own private space the way they want. But much of public space appears in the shape of ‘non-place’ transit functionality, that even children can’t or don’t take the time to discover. While the area is filled with pockets of rich cultural identity – it took considerable effort to open some of these doors to the rest of the community. We have the local charities and volunteer organisations in Finsbury Park to thank for the solid ground work which enabled that to happen.

As very well explained on the website of the Transition Town Network, many of the global challenges that are likely to affect us all in the near future need to be resolved locally. If cultural corridors remain as closed as they are, future strains on local resources over the next decade (such as our dependence on cheap oil for food production) may lead to insurmountable challenges. Mapping activities certainly seem to provide the individual and group alike, a sense of empowerment towards achieving these types of goals – many of which are being promoted by local grassroots organisation like Transition Finsbury Park.

Having gained a better understanding of the London N4 area after two months working on this project, we believe that in order to encourage people to think locally – you have to promote the value and cultural identity of the places in the vicinity. Perhaps the videos, drawings and maps that have been produced here could for example be exhibited publicly as part of a local celebration already planned. But crucial to this happening, it must be stressed, are the social figureheads and story tellers we have met on the way.

Mobilisation around environmental sustainability from all corners of Finsbury Park will not happen all of a sudden. Cultural corridors need to be actively prised open in due course. Creativity, play and self-expression could be the catalysts at the heart of these efforts.

This paper documents the curation of the Dreams of Progress exhibition that was held at the Westminster Reference Library in July 2009. The theme of the video art exhibition was Utopia and Progress. It included a philosophical debate and a children’s workshop. It is now available online on the Curated Matter website. The exhibition in its physical form remained confidential but was very well received by its visitors and generated exciting new thoughts on Utopia and Progress. The philosophical debate attracted around 50 people from various backgrounds including professors, philosophical students, art curators and engineers. The children’s workshop introduced the theme of progress to around twenty children. The exhibition and its satellite activities were the results of six months of research and preparation, which is detailed below.

1. Choice of the theme and selection of the videos
2. Relation to the Westminster Reference Library
3. The exhibition space
4. Legends and introduction to the exhibition
5. Philosophical debate
6. Children’s Art Day
7. Online exhibition
8. Federate around the project

Introduction to the exhibition

The theme of Dreams of Progress did not come at once. Initially, I wanted to curate video projects related to optimism. Looking at the videos on the Internet, I felt there was an optimistic movement originating from young American artists. Many of their videos depict a positive and colourful world, made of human contacts and everyday pleasures. It may  be seen as a return to simple things after the an orgy of technology and “Bling-bling”. The movement seemed related to what I imagine being the flower power years. I was interested to understand if this optimism had anything new and unique or if it was just a constant noise that can be witnessed at any time. But I struggled to nail down videos explicitly about optimism. Search terms like ‘optimism’ and ‘happiness’ were not popular on video websites. I still believe the movement exists but it isn’t defined by the artists (at least not yet?). Is it appropriate for a curator to build an exhibition on a theme that none of the artists explicitly address?  Perhaps it is, but I wasn’t willing to go down this road for the exhibition.

When I could find videos explicitly about optimism, I began to wonder, is optimism still relevant nowadays? Are we optimistic today?  What is there to be optimistic about? I considered studying our ideas about dreams for the future, immediate or distant. I found by looking at search keywords like ‘future’ and ‘dream’ that many people are thinking positively about the future,  these people are classified as utopians. The notions remains that no positive future is really possible and positive people are considered unrealistic. I also noticed that many recent videos prefer to look at past visions of the future instead of the ones of today. Some videos question the dreams from previous generations, others are cynical or complacent.

After having navigated through many videos, I defined the final theme of the exhibition (this can be found on the press release). I was ready to curate the videos and began to research within literature. I did not plan to call for submissions as I felt this would impose my own views too heavily on potential artists. As explained in details in the mission statement of the Curated Matter venture, I also wanted to curate videos without knowing who made them in order to not be biased. As a result,  I didn’t know any of the artists before contacting them. They come from many backgrounds and are from around the world.

It became obvious to me very rapidly that I could not curate this exhibition without presenting also videos from corporations. They played a central role in past decades by articulating in images the utopias of their times. Some of the corporate videos have an artistic aspect and it seemed it artificial to reject them because they have been privately founded.

Next: Relation to the Westminster Reference Library

The theme of the Dreams of Progress exhibition and most of its videos have been set before I found the hosting venue. I still wanted to arrange the exhibition so that it links to its physical context, or at least doesn’t deny it. I first looked at the history of the Westminster Reference Library, which is well known for being built on the former house of Isaac Newton, Lord Macaulay famously stating saying that the home of Sir Isaac Newton would be “well known as long as our island retains any trace of civilisation”. I was tempted first to incorporate this reference to the description of the exhibition because it fits nicely with the theme of progress. Later, I found it diminishing. I felt that it was denying the current function of the building. I was then inclined to instrument the fact that the space is a library, its mission of education for all is a dream of progress by itself.  I decided after all to not introduce any connections with the library in the theme of the exhibition. What was much more tangible was the help from the staff of the library, which was felt by every visitor.  The Dreams of Progress exhibition was in this space because of the help of its staff and their utopian vision of what a library should be; it came from their own initiative, not a mission statement.

During the exhibition, the staff of the library displayed books related to the theme of Utopia and Progress, which I found marvellous.

Next: The exhibition space

The exhibition space

Setting an exhibition space within the reading room of the Westminster Art Reference Library is a very exciting opportunity but also a big challenge. It must not disturb the daily activities of the library but still make enough of an impact and it should provide excellent conditions for the viewing of the videos. The tactic I opted for is to encourage a one-to-one experience between the viewers and videos by providing an intimate space where visitors can sit down and relax while looking at the videos. However, one of my responsibilities as a curator is to promote the art works exhibited in the space. I believe it is necessary to display physical signs of the importance that one attributes to a piece of art, in order that it is noticed and can be evaluated appropriately. The legends offered the perfect support to mark this statement. I hung them on the walls as if they were works of art themselves, they stood behind the television screens though so that were not the primary focal point. Instead, they signal, without imposing, to visitors that the videos are not randomly selected but artefacts worth careful attention.

The second decision I had to make was how to group the videos. The space and my budget did not allow one screen per work. It may not be suitable, as it would mean someone would have to change seats for each video, some of them last only a few minutes. So, how to group them? The case of the Microsoft video was simple, I got a separate dvd from Microsoft and so it had to be on a separate screen. The “Discovery of Magnetic North” video being the longer and most immersive one, I decided to play it alone on the only projector. I separated the rest of the videos in 3 groups:

• 3 utopians visions by corporations
• 2 artistic reactions to today’s ongoing progress along with a an original vision of the future. The 2 artistic reactions and the futuristic video are all colourful and entertaining.
• 3 artistic views at the past

Associating the videos this way creates a dialogue between the videos sequenced on each monitor but also between videos played at the same time on different screens, not far from each other. This dialogue purposively generates tensions and similarities.  Though the corporation videos are grouped on one side of the room, they were not isolated but well linked with other videos:  ‘Some things won’t change’ and  images of ‘Discovery of Magnetic North”  for example.

Interaction with visitors remain basic. They could add their email address to the guest book and take a program and flyer with them. I felt this was appropriate for an exhibition of this size. The philosophical debate and children’s workshop provided large enough spaces for dialogue.

Next: Legends and introduction to the exhibition

Corporate visions of the future

What to tell the visitor? Should I present him or her with my analysis of the videos or with descriptions from the artists? How much should I justify the curation of the exhibition? How much should he be free to discover his own interpretation of the videos and how much guidance does he need?

I decided for this exhibition to only display a short introduction to the theme of the exhibition and to let the artists introduce themselves their videos on short legends. The full description of the exhibition and its theme is on the internet for the visitors who want to know more.

The fact that the exhibition is advertised under the title ‘Dreams of Progress’ already modifies the perception that the visitors will have on the art works. Some of the artists didn’t even have this theme in mind when they made their video.  So, I wanted to equilibrate the exhibition by showing legends from artists themselves, so that visitors can understand the approach of the artist and have their own judgment on the connections between the videos and the theme of Progress.

I also reduced the introduction of the exhibition to an open, relatively short text in order to provide enough freedom for the public to make their own conclusions.  This came at a cost, some visitors did not recognise the connections that I thought were important between the videos. Although my studies on Utopia and Progress are implicitly used in the selection of the videos and the way I introduce the theme, it did not necessary challenge everyone’s perception on the subject. It is after all an elitist approach, giving the visitors a full description of all I intended to say would have been in a sense, more egalitarian, as everyone willing to spend time reading would have learned something. Relying on the capacity of the visitors to make their own analysis increases actually the gap between those having already ideas on the subject and those who don’t. That being said, you don’t need to know anything about Utopia and Progress to feel something looking at the videos. And again, my analysis is on the web, so anyone interested to learn more may do so.

One interesting question that emerged when writing the introduction of the exhibition was how to position the videos compared to literary masterpieces like Utopia by Thomas More or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I could have connected the videos to previous work and inscribed them in a history of thoughts on Utopia. But I was determined to put the videos at the centre of the stage, rather than any reference. Some  of the video artists have probably not read or seen the previous works on Utopia, but this doesn’t mean they haven’t been influenced indirectly by the impact that the original utopian authors had on culture. I decided thus to add some references in the introduction to acknowledge past works on Utopia but to not draw any causal connection between them and the videos displayed at the exhibition.

Next: Philosophical debate

Philosophical debate on Utopia and Progress

Usually, philosophical debates are organised around a specific question and maybe some philosophical texts. In this case, I wanted to organise a philosophical debate around some of the videos of the exhibition. I knew that the theme of Utopia and Progress was too vast to be completely discussed, so I considered the debate to be an introduction to the subject. The purpose of the debate was to introduce the main aspects around Utopia and Progress, show some great videos related to the theme, to inspire the audience and to get them thinking more about the subject.

Next: Children’s Art Day at the WRF

Everyone listening at the story of the second group.

The main challenge for the storyboarding workshop of the Children’s Art Day was to organise an activity children enjoy but to still convey what the exhibition is about. The Design for Dreaming video worked very well because it was made originally for a family audience and a lot of what is happening is accessible for kids. It remains that the video is an utopian vision on consumerism from the 60s that children don’t have much the occasion to see.

I wanted initially to include the use of the Windows Movie Player software in the workshop. But it wasn’t possible in an hour, and the main focus was to teach how to collaboratively invent a storyboard.

Next: Online exhibition

I decided for the online version of the exhibition to follow the same structure than on the physical exhibition and to make one page per screen, showing all the videos that were displayed on the screen and showing exactly the same legends. Showing one video per page would have probably deconstructed too much the exhibition and undermined the dialogue I wanted to generate between videos. Putting all videos on one page would have been too long to digest on a single web page.

I added a link on each page to my own analysis of the videos. This way, only the visitors willing to know more about my perception of the videos, at the risk of altering their own judgement, can see the information.

Next: Federate around the project