Lottie Child
street training works on the premise that we are effecting our environment and our environment is effecting us constantly in a series of multidimensional feedback loops. the things that surround us are influencing our thoughts, the ways we move the interactions we engage in, the systems we integrate with and produce are all aspects of the environment that shape our ways of thinking and we effect them through the thoughts we have the things we say and the ways we behave. We move in ways that relate to and are dictated by the design of the urban built environment and the micro and macro cultures of any given place. This dynamic and fluid dance of actions and reactions (?) is not perceived much of the time when we see people walking shopping and interacting in streets and shopping malls.
passive alienation the population becoming increacingly appathetic and malluable.
creative movements, shouting,graffitti, talking to strangers,walking slowly, climbing trees, running, playing games,
During a season of urban interventions you are invited to notice, reflect on the dynamics of social interaction especially looking at negotiations that take place as people constantly shift and recalibrate theirs route, movements, ways of speaking, playing, opening up and closing down as you inhabit the city
. please document
. if you feel it is approariate make an intervention
deffinition we are not issuing a deffinition of urban intervention contributers will begin to deffine it as they notice document and share the things they see and experience and the things they do.
eg jacob jacobsen
space hijackers
free hugs
street maintenence workers, prostitutes, homeless people, children, dogs, skate boarders,parkour (traceurs, teenagers sometimes have street skills that are transferable.
lady sovereign " a flight indoors by the middle classes" as evidenced by the number of home improvement programs on TV.
Urban explorations involve skills transfer.
reading the street = the street can be read like a text and is equally open to personal subjective projection.

Is an artist working in London, producing and using collaborative situations such as the University of Openess to experiment with behaviors within a late capitalist urban society.

Methodology
presently developing a methodology for collaborative meaning making about political and social factors at play in a chosen locality that enables us to move through it integrating the physical with the intellectual by engaging in unfamiliure tasks requiring lawless, deviant, childish behaviour this results in deepening of engagement with the locality, one's own senses and other group members and provides insights that would be unatianable in a conference situation.

Key Elements
A training programme introducing physical movement and creative interventions with, in , through, over boundaries and structures - physical, social, psychological to develop thinking and behaviour that is embodied and responsive treating obstacles as opportunities for creative engagement.
Contributions from diverse interested participants in the form of special skill, information relevant to the particular issues of the location, personal expereince related to topic of discussion.

Insights from the training sessions are presented in a map, a framework that contextualises the insights gained socially and politically.

presently applying this methodology in Berlin on the topics of risk and freedom of movement and in North Greenwich on the topic of public green space.


The University of Openess is a self institution- which its members internalise, identify with and feel they can change, it is also a way to critically engage with other institutions.

Work often takes the form of Interventions with occasional deployment of guerrilla activity. Engaging in action research into play and risk and uses urban climbing as investigation into multiple possible modes of engaging with the built environment and other people through the Integration of intellectual and physical activities. Research into so many things including hidden agendas in higher education, educational theories, child witches in the Democratic republic of Congo and City finance with an interest in risk management and counter culture.

Projects include
Guerrilla Gardening- Investigations into the politics of green spaces in hyper urban places through trying to nurture vegetables.

Risk Conference- A recorded conference call that took place on May 1st 2005. The agenda which was texted to deligates before hand equated financial risk with physical risk, some deligates were climbing on financial institutions in the City of London, talking on their mobile phones with hands free devices during the conference.

Climbing club – Regular group outings in the City of London engaging with street furniture and architectural features. Creating a sense of multiple possible modes of engagement with the built environment.

Urban Climbing for Higher Education- skewing higher educational hierarchies by suggesting experimental teaching and learning methodologies

Building an alternate reality out of cardboard - with artists and children in a European free universities context. – Active research into collaboration between participants with wildly differing degrees of power and skill.

HI5 - Game for cyclist, played out on the streets and online. – Occasional fleeting interactions between cyclists and people hailing cabs, users of City Street inhabiting differing realities.

Critical mapping - Spatialising institutional micro politics.

Urban Street Training DVD- How to play on the streets for adults who have forgotten. Your personal trainer Callum introduces you to manoevers such as the Wall Wedgie, the swinging T and the Pig's Tail




Twenteenthcentury
Set up in 1998 as a self-supporting system and publicity machine, Twenteenth Century also produce group work that is fundamentally different in approach from any of the individual practices of it's 12 members, with an emphasis on event-based projects.

The University of Openness
The uo is a framework in which individuals and organisations can pursue their shared interest in emerging forms of cultural production and critical reflection such as UNIX, cartography, physical and collaborative research.

Any member may start a faculty to socialise their research with the Uo. For more information, see http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo∞?

Rather than focusing on artistic collaborative practice lets take inspiration from where ever we find it –lets move beyond mono dimensional categorization

Contexts of Collaboration

The University of Openness
The uo is a framework in which individuals and organisations can pursue their shared interest in emerging forms of cultural production and critical reflection such as UNIX, cartography, physical and collaborative research.
Any member may start a faculty to socialise their research with the Uo. For more information, see http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo∞?

Twenteenth Century’s
Set up in 1998 as a self-supporting system and publicity machine, Twenteenth Century also produce group work that is fundamentally different in approach from any of the individual practices of it's 12 members, with an emphasis on event-based projects. Projects include Translation Karaoke and Translation Cake for Be in Berlin London 01 at the ICA in 2002. A 20 foot cardboard squirrel on Wheels and series of photos of the 12 members in a variety of situations including floating face down in a swimming pool, dressed inn 1940's clothes on the steps of Limehouse Town Hall, with all the women Pregnant and all the men smoking pipes for Twenteenth Century at Nylon Gallery 2001.

The Urban Olympics in Bristol summer 2003 organised by Heath Bunting, Kate Rich and Kale Brandon. Was a meeting of collectives from all over Europe, participants challenged each other to events including skating in the supermarket and building stone throwing devices.

Climbing Club – Urban Climbing, a platform for analysis, discussion and investigation into group dynamics and modes of interaction with the built environment.

Examples of inspiring collaborations
Abbie Hoffman – levitating the Pentagon
The Cube Cinema Bristol – Artist run Cinema
Platform London
Bees
A2RT artists/activists, birmingham
The Bureau of Inverse Technology www.bureauit.org
Kate Rich’s Radio Whitechapel 20p
The Space Hijackers www.spacehijackers.com
The Situationists
Summer Hill -A.S Neil’s school experiment
The Copenhagen Free University
Limehouse Town Hall and Boxing Club
Backspace
Rotor
My Dad’s Strip Club
Cordao De Ouro – Capoeira group London
Fitzrovia Youth in Action – window box scheme
Jack Ass
Antz
Bureau D’Etude
Anna Lucas’s – film View
Flaxman Lodge
Wiki Software
Crane fighter - kung fu movie


In collective work/play other people can surprise me, I can experiment with behaviors that can be internalized and applied in personal, political and social situations localities and relations.

Mute Magazine
Permaculture Magazine
Bio-Tech Hobbyist Natalie Jeremejenko
Gelatin B-Thing
Inventory

Winter 2006
Current research threads
Risk taking as a means of self-education in response to creatively and intellectually unstimulating environments.
Risk taking in public spaces to ascertain the degree of control enacted there.
Play – collective non-goal oriented engagements allowing all users to dictate the agenda and direction of activities example climbing club URL

The thingness workshops on circles. (Little text)
Use of physical activities to enhance intellectual understandings/ physically engaged research.
Working class, grass roots self-educations and art
“Socialising research”
The school looks around a project for general public agency (give URL)
In the light of Inclusivity policies in arts and business, can people with wildly different degrees of skill and power contribute equally?
Pirate radio stations - the rewind,The DJ will rewind a song if the public really like it they let the DJ know they like it by texting the studio. Then He or she will take the song back to the beginning so the public hear more of a song they love. Pirate radio Djs also respond verbally to texts they are getting throughout their shows.
Constructivist theories of learning where a learner integrates what they learn into their existing framework for making sense of the world.
learning through play, Tina Bruce is a leading expert on early childhood education in the UK and abroad, professor of the University of North London and author of many early years books.

Learning Schemas, Cathy Nutbrown Author of numerous books on early years education. The concept of schemas which Cathy Nutbrown describes in her book “Threads of Thinking” as patterns of learning and thinking.


Examples of action research participatory art
Evidence that I am able to creatively reflect and communicate my research
Chisenhale workshops (that was research but leanne felt I did’t communicate the outcomes that well) esp on play and learning from children in a workshop.
“Free flow play is an idea I came across form Tina Bruce in “Childcare and Education”. I understand play as being something that consolidates our understanding of things. I understand play as a state where children are relaxed and engaged. I didn’t want to privilege learning over play. One of the things that the kids helped me to realise anew is that work and play are not at the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that one is in the other and that they are impossible to separate.”
Possibly also
When confronting contemporary art its hard to know what to think, where to begin. I took the group into the gallery and I asked them to do something simple, I sent them off to try and find things that were circles and things that were inside other things in Gary Webb’s work. I then brought the group together so the children could show what they had found, this meant they were leading the interaction with the work. I organised it that way on the advice of the teacher, he spotted that I was having difficulty getting the kids to look at the sculpture, walk around, engage with it and also to talk as a group, to listen an behave in an ordered way. I was concerned they might touch the sculpture. The teacher said let them do both they can roam around and then show what they found, it worked brilliantly.

Climbing Club and the fact that Dougie blogs it, any participant documents it.
Lottie Child MA.doc (describes UO and my research details schemas,climbing,street training)

How I will further creatively communicate my research
I will develop my WIKI so that the work I have done is accessible and I will research the possibility for making use of its interactivity, but bringing people to the site and asking them to contribute their ideas. One possible project would be (reclassification of book titles???) based on learning styles.
I want to look into the possibility of making the BL a wireless node providing free internet access and file sharing capabilities to local residents. Launched with some kind of project about how we sharer information. (maybe too many aims?)
A guidebook to urban climbing action research methodology and risk. The method and the method applied.

Grand Overarching Themes
Learning styles/multiple intelligences
Play as a means of interacting and producing understandings
The value of different kinds of Knowledge and how valuing particular forms of knowledge over others contributes to heirachies which impact on indiviluals rights/ablity to live in a society which reflects their own experience. Ideally we integrate multiple personal view points – something the internet has revolutionised and which now enables a plethora of devices for sharing and collaborative construction of meaning. Eg community networks such as sarai.net, conatainer-project.net, consume.net, dlp.net antisystemic and the UO among many many others.
In contexts of how institutions create and value knowledge – by working from the starting point of the UO – a “self institution” ( subjective deff UO)
The risk inherent in everything in contemporary society and our impulse to turn everything into capital.

From evaluation of the Thingness
I understand the idea of schemas to mean that there are patterns that exist on many levels in many contexts . I’m interested in this as a way to unite various experiences and contexts rather than reinforcing artificial divides and fragmentation between areas or disciplines. For example traditional educational frameworks make it is hard to make meaning from direct personal experiences. The mind is divided from the body, between disciplines lines are drawn fragmenting our experience and making it hard to create a unified understanding of ourselves in the world.
You can start to see connections between experiences, make sense of them beyond the traditional subject areas. We learn that geography is not history which is not maths and they are all abstracted and not motivated by wanting to make sense of direct expereince. Separtaing areas like that make sit harder for us to apply.if we can think about our own experiences and ,make meaning


As a group ELSA is undertaking research into archiving techniques: how to preserve and present their paper archives, as well as how to collaborate on electronic archiving, using Semantic Web techniques without having to create a single system to which all the archives will have to conform.

ELSA is also an open template for other libraries and groups, actively collaborating with and learning from other independent archives around the world, from Belgrade to Brazil in refining and sharing our research.

Looked on BL website at freedom of information and then diversity pages

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database."
Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999



Perhaps we need to be “as radical as reality itself” from the platform website – who said it?


Berlin Plans
Gather together people to work with
Look up
Geography and gender
A history of walking Rebecca solnit
Current Transponder show the archive of artists the artist who does that sounds
interesting, anyone else interesting involved?
Find a kung fu school
A Capoeira – cordoa de ouro in berlin?
Futurology
Neuro economics
Reclaim the night
Freedom of movement
Everyone is an expert
The voice refugee forum
Laban dance notation
Francis Alys
Subcomandante marcos
Lady sovriegn - "there's a flight indoors by the middle classes" (note home improvement craze)
Bruno Latour politics of nature - especially the role of economists
Risk analysts as soothsayers
The right conditions for a future that’s trying to happen
Turnbull matrix
Graphs printed in the FT and statistics and graphs for social justice issues.

Email
Transponder to ask about the financial district, children and teens, explore local community networks
Local Capoeira school, kung fu school, who do Transponder want to make links with?
Tomaso if he knows any RA’s in Berlin and the district.
Tony Lloyd Jones about visualising routes
Meet that friend of Johns who read Lefebvre
Risk analysts to ask if thye’ll read FT with me and document the exchange – keep the emails.

Phone
Christine for potential participants somewhere to stay

Write
A list of walking games
Begin the introduction
Set of questions, things to think about as we walk.
Plan for meet with gaston
Some thoughts on Risk
I will use this as an opportunity to learn more about risk, especially in how we take risks in our thoughts and our actions. I will be asking about and observing the risks involved with talking to strangers, entertaining ideas that challenge current beliefs and other risks that present themselves throughout the process. I will reflect on the idea of risk as something that expands our sense of self and our world view, we extend ourselves into a place of which we are not very sure. When taking a risk we weighs up the possible dangers and benefits of an action based on incomplete evidence. I would like to work a risk analysis into the tour, this means we discuss the possible future scenarios that may be about to play themselves out, and wonder to what extent these might be self fulfilling prophecies.
When taking a risk you try something in an awareness of what the perameters might be, you asses the situation and let loose control.

Budget
Need £2000 per month to live
Travel, note books, video documentation, drawings, prints, hostpiality microphone, work time £180 per day, research, editing, writing, compiling, walking talking drawing workshops, installing.



Aims
To change the city by living passionately and behaving freely examples of when this has worked
Dougie cycling the wrong way in Old Street leading to the council changing the direction of the traffic flow.
W
Aims ?
Shell to leave the Niger Delta area
De Beers not to spend a third of its 2006 budget prospecting in the DR congo
British Gas to bring down its prices
To educate myself so as to make real insightful, political work that comes from knowledge of myself and the conditions of the urban environment in terms of social control and self actualisation.

A guide book with text contextualising it – suggestions for thriving through risk?
Examples and critiques walking games routes moves interventions.
Maybe a wide variety of activities or some way of framing the different risks, there for lives there for experiences that different people have of the city.
Ie a risk for so and so is this – if you tried to do that would It teach you something extend your world?
Link with finance and financial district is through roles – the role of the economist in determining people’s life experiences?? Of his ability to reduce risk to numbers as a virtue and skill that can be positive ref latour re read.

Draw
Intersecting graphs and charts in blood around midnight.

drawings completed:
- FT article on copper mining in the Congo intersected with a graph showing which family member said vows for sick children in 16th century england.
- FT article on british gas increacing prices intersected with graph showing the number of winter deaths in four european countries illustrating that the UK is the highes.
- FT share prices intersected with a map of all those involved in the abolishion of slavery. (this is the best one the map looks like roots of veins)

Questions
What part does documentation play? Images allow me to transfer an idea further than my immediate context, ie telling my friends about things and doing things with friends and doing things in order to make friends.



Video
Mobile phone videos of people doing innovative movement all over Berlin
Headings
(fill up then make a new page as they get more info inn them.)

Publication
Dates Deadlines
Text


That the self is constituted through a state of perpetual dynamic exchange with our environment, our beliefs and behaviours create us and our environment.

An event where a group of people walk around the streets of Berlin together moving in playful experimental ways. The members of the group will be people I have spent time getting to know. I will seek them out through community networks and by chatting to people I meet ( the man I met working in the shop next door to transponder for example – find out his name)

The purpose of the event is to bring people together who would not normally meet and to nurture a culture where each person’s personal way of being and moving is valued.

Climbing Club Urban climbing in this context means: a group activity where people walk around the streets interacting with various structures in creative ways ie walking with one foot on the pavement and one in the road, jumping on a park bench, trying to get onto a railing traversing the front of a building.
Climbing Club encourages creative movement over scaling buildings.

Climbing Club goes to Berlin seeks out new members and makes a route for an area in Berlin.

The aim of climbing club berlin is that people learn from each other in a situation where the usual value hierarchy of people’s knowledges and skills are reorganised through focus on an unfamiliure activity, creating group dynamics

In order to see a world view that includes multiple personal view points I gather together a group of people some of whom are from the ruling class and some not from the dominant culture, people who might not normally meet. We walk the streets and move in creative ways in order to have a unifying task through which to relate to each other. Climbing Club expands participant’s own sense of what is possible, by transgressing the expected behaviour of the street a fraction. The domain is public space – created through planning policy the aim of which is economic stability.


people come to realise that our behaviour is constrained and that there are multiple possible modes of interaction with structures both physical and social.


From lisa’s mail
we are close the
> the Bernauer Strasse, the former border to West Berlin. We are on the
> East side, close to the border strip. There are remnants of tunnels in
> the strip, where people actually tunneled through to the sewer, I
> believe, to get to the Western side of Berlin. We are literally 100
> meters from where people jumped from their houses as the wall was being
built


Precepts
(Secret and public)
Public - Research can be putting one’s body in space to find out what happens.

This may be a secret Precept - This is a test of my skills in enabling others and an opportunity for me to move beyond ego. The aim of Risk in Berlin is to institute climbing club Berlin, is this proprietry? I provide certain tools and initiate –Getting someone/people really passionate about it may work.

Secret – freedom of movement might be a good name for the show.
Secret – do I want to keep risk as a topic? How to work with it? Is it one too many concepts?

Secret – perhaps risk is a secret precept that means risk as a way of expanding our lives and experience.

Public – development of a network of local interesting people connecting them with the gallery

Secret – this is not aiming to be art just using its the infrastructure (even this gallery has an agenda that prioritises education) To value events, moments, ideas - rather than focus on the art economy’s spheres of exchange.

Public – formulise the process and make it available as a ‘how to’ or if this information is too specific to this situation explain how I got people together, what we did. Discuss this how far can a process be repeated in different context?

Personal – Can I develop a format that can be repeated in a variety of contexts?

Secret – xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Public – this work is aspiring to be the news i.e what people think and say not what the media says people think and say.

secret – I’m being very ambitious because I’m using this as an opportunity to develop I already have 2 videos I can show and will harvest the best of the process.



Event
Dates Deadlines

Development
Dates Deadlines
I will seek people out through local community networks, friends and random meetings.


<sum> Research outings
A research outing is a group walk in the choosen area for playful movement and discussion of risk. ( I will refer to previous conversations and record the post outing discussion.
With participants to designate the route
<sum> Research meetings
A research meeting is in order to introduce the person to urban climbing, ask them about their associations with the location and identify specific risks they have taken in their lives, especially in the street.
<sum> Call Christine and ask her who she knows in Berlin
<sum> Email Tomaso and ask him for anyone he knows
<sum> Ask, Olly, Nav, Giuseppe, violette, saul, everyone.
<sum> Call mum and get Geogis’s number/email
<sum> Workshops
With participants to draw graphic reps of the route.
Outcomes
Dates Deadlines
A wall mounted graphic representation of the climbing route
A map of the route annotated with ideas, text observations and photos from the participants.
Urban street training video
Climbing club docu.

Questions for Transponder
I would like to talk to the boy who made the model of the toilette cubicle.

In order for me to develop a world view in relation to a variety of other's personal view points I gather together a group of people some of whom are not from the dominant culture and including people who I wouldn’t normally meet. We walk the streets and move in creative ways in order to have a unifying task through which to relate to each other. Climbing Club expands participant’s own sense of what is possible, by transgressing the expected behaviour of the street a fraction people come to realise that our behaviour is constrained and that there are multiple possible modes of interaction with structures both physical and social.
I will do research outings to find participants through talking to the people in the shop next door to Art Transponder, Contact with the Voice Refugee Forum, I will seek out disabled contemporary dancers, kung fu and Capoeira experts, architecture students and people who work in financial institutions.
<sum> Climbing Club Berlin will explore the city and designate an urban climbing route.
<sum> Participants will innovate certain movements and modes of interaction with the built environment.
<sum> A

DiaryMarch06