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Reflecting on Urban Tapestries

July 6, 2015 by Giles Lane · 7 Comments 

Ten years ago we published Public Authoring, Place and Mobility – a report on the Urban Tapestries project (2002-04) which brought together all that we had learned, described our methodologies and activities, evaluated our achievements and presented a series of policy proposals. I have been re-reading it to see how well our ideas have held up over the past decade, and to what extent they have been borne out by the development of social media, the mass adoption of smartphones and connected devices, and by social and cultural behaviours.

Urban Tapestries was conceived in June 2002, just after we had completed another project, Private Reveries, Public Spaces (2001-02), which explored the social and cultural impact of the emerging mobile communications revolution. We started to imagine what the effects would be on how people inhabit urban space once the physical topography of the city could be overlaid with an invisible data landscape accessible via mobile devices. Such “location based services” were then only in their infancy (in places like Japan via DoCoMo’s i-mode service) and nearly all the academic and industry research projects of the time focused on their potential use as tourist guides.

Urban Tapestries set out to imagine and investigate the everyday – how might people use them in everyday life: on the way to work or school, going to the supermarket, visiting the doctor, socialising or playing in a park. Funded through an unusual public/private mix, the project set out to peer into the future ten years or so ahead. We sought to articulate a vision that was grounded in actual social situations and cultural behaviours, and not just to rely on imagined scenarios and invented personas.

The report contains a wealth of observations and insights gained from our iterative and participatory process. We combined paper prototyping with social engagement, user trials of functioning systems in public settings as well as numerous public workshops and events where we shared and discussed our ideas as the project progressed. Below are some of the policy proposals which we made back in 2005 along with some comments on how the ideas behind them fare in 2015.

We followed UT with a 5 year programme of projects called Social Tapestries (2004-09), where we sought even further to embed our research in actual communities and situations. Through a series of discrete projects we explored our concepts of public authoring and social knowledge in ways that prefigured many of today’s familiar tropes : wearable sensors and citizen science, civic engagement and participation, big urban data and environmental mapping, hybrid digital/physical interfaces, robotics and hacking, to name a few. In these we sought extend and deepen the insights, working with real communities in actual places to explore what opportunities could become realities.

Looking back I’m immensely proud of the scope and scale of our vision as well as what we achieved both in the original Urban Tapestries project, and how we carried it forward into the Social Tapestries programme. A core strength was our insistence on a social and cultural focus for the project, not placing the emphasis on the technology. It identified that the heart of these systems and services is ultimately about connecting us, enabling us to communicate in new and different ways: building and maintaining relationships to each other, to places and the things we encounter in them.

Our projects since have continued to explore these trajectories – enabling and encouraging people to have agency for themselves; to make and share their own stories, not simply to be cast in the role of the audience or consumer. Public Authoring remains a key concept that underpins our continuing work with communities as diverse as Pallion (Sunderland) and Reite (Papua New Guinea).

Download the report (PDF 2Mb)

Urban Tapestries Cuts

September 30, 2009 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Urban Tapestries Cuts from Proboscis on Vimeo.

A film made in 2006 which demonstrates several of the interfaces – PDA, mobile, web and Google Earth – that were made for various tests and trial of Urban Tapestries. Also contains footage of participants in the trials and bodystorming experiences.

Urban Tapestries

November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment 

Urban Tapestries (2002-04) was a ground-breaking project that investigated how the combination of geographic information systems (GIS) and mobile technologies (including ad-hoc WiFi) could enable people to map and share their knowledge and experience, stories and information – public authoring. The transdisciplinary team developing it wove together an action research process bridging programming, ethnography, visual arts, filmmaking, animation, product design, information architecture, concept design, rapid & paper prototyping and creative writing.

The project resulted in numerous events, publications, technologies as well as two public trials of the Urban Tapestries mobile platform for public authoring in December 2003 and June-July 2004.

Project Website

Team: Alice Angus, Daniel Angus, John Paul Bichard, Katrina Jungnickel, Giles Lane, Rachel Murphy, Roger Silverstone, Zoe Sujon and Nick West.

Partners & Collaborators: London School of Economics, Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Orange, Ordnance Survey, France Telecom R&D UK.

Funded by Department of Trade & Industry, Arts Council England, Fondation Daniel Langlois

Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring, Place & Mobility

October 15, 2006 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring, Place & Mobility (October 2006)

Download PDF 2Mb

Order Hard Copy

Urban Tapestries – Contexts

March 15, 2004 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Urban Tapestries – Contexts 

Urban Tapestries Contexts from Proboscis on Vimeo.

A film exploring the wider contexts informing the Urban Tapestries project, setting out its key aim of exploring the social and cultural implications of public authoring and mobile technologies. Devised by Alice Angus & Giles Lane. Made by Alice Angus (2003/04).

UrbanSense08 Workshop

November 6, 2008 by karenmartin · Comments Off on UrbanSense08 Workshop 

The third in a series of workshop on the theme of urban sensing, UrbanSense 08 took place in Raleigh, North Carolina in November 2008. The workshop explored ideas, prototypes and realised projects around participatory sensing. Karen Martin made a presentation of ‘Participatory Sensing for Urban Communities’ which described the Robotic Feral Public Authoring and Snout projects which Proboscis had created in collaboration with Birkbeck College, University of London.

Read the paper ‘Participatory Sensing for Urban Communities‘ (PDF 650Kb) by Demetrios Airantzis (Birkbeck College, University of London); Alice Angus (Proboscis), Giles Lane (Proboscis), Karen Martin (Proboscis), George Roussos (Birkbeck College, University of London), Jenson Taylor (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Here is the workshop abstract:
Sensing is going mobile and people-centric. Sensors for activity recognition and GPS for location are now being shipped in millions of top end mobile phones. This complements other sensors already on mobile phones such as high-quality cameras and microphones. At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking.

This workshop promotes exchange among sensing system researchers involved in areas, such as, mobile sensing, people-centric and participatory sensing, urban sensing, public health, community development, and cultural expression. It focuses on how mobile phones and other everyday devices can be employed as network- connected, location-aware, human-in-the-loop sensors that enable data collection, geo-tagged documentation, mapping, modeling, and other case-making capabilities.

http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/urbansensing/

Social Tapestries

November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment 

Social Tapestries (2004-08) was a five year research programme of projects that grew out of our original Urban Tapestries project. The focus of Social Tapestries was to create a series of experiments in public authoring in challenging environments and with local communities that could begin to reveal the potential for emerging mobile media in enabling change through the mapping and sharing of knowledge and experience in everyday settings. We developed projects with two social housing groups (a residents’ committee and a short-life co-op), schools (a secondary near Hull and a primary in North London), residents/users of London Fields and people who lived and worked in Hoxton.

Project Website

Team: Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Kevin Harris, Giles Lane, Karen Martin, Sarah Thelwall and Orlagh Woods.

Partners & Collaborators: Birkbeck College; London School of Economics; Jenny Hammond Primary School; HIRO (Havelock Independent Residents Organisation); St Marks Housing Co-op, Kingswood High; Getmapping.com;

Funded by Arts Council England, Ministry of Justice, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)

Indigenous Public Authoring in Papua New Guinea

October 2, 2013 by Giles Lane · 10 Comments 

Towards the end of October 2012 I boarded a flight to Sydney on the first leg of a journey to Papua New Guinea, where I was to give a presentation about public authoring and the Shareables we have created over the past dozen and more years. Through my friend, the anthropologist James Leach, I had been invited to participate in a symposium at the University of Goroka in PNG’s Eastern Highlands to share my thoughts and experiences of using hybrid tools and technologies with different communities to record and share their knowledge, stories and experiences – a process we have called public authoring since developing our Urban Tapestries project back in 2003.

I first got to know James at the University of Cambridge at a symposium he, Lee Wilson and Robin Boast co-organised for CRASSH where I was an invited speaker. We then began collaborating in 2009 when two Reite villagers, Porer Nombo and Pinbin Sisau, came to the UK to participate in a project at the British Museum Ethnography Department. Porer and Pinbin were invited to help identify hundreds of objects from the Rai Coast area of PNG that the BM has in its collections, but about which very little was known. In addition to the audio recording and photography of the objects, James wanted to capture something about the process of encountering and engaging with the objects; he turned to me to explore using the Diffusion Notebooks format we had previously discussed. Over the week or so of Porer and Pinbin’s visit to the BM Ethnographic Store in an east London warehouse several notebooks were made and shared online (these are also browsable on bookleteer and downloadable – Melanesia Project Notebooks). This small project was a personal turning point in several ways and when the opportunity came to visit PNG and to travel to Reite village itself with James I had no hesitation in accepting.

The Saem Majnep Memorial Symposium on Traditional Environmental Knowledge took place from October 31st to 2nd November and featured both local as well as international researchers. James and Porer Nombo presented their book, Reite Plants, as a potential model for sharing local traditional knowledge. I gave a presentation about how we have used the Diffusion eBook format and bookleteer in our work with different communities to record and share their stories, experiences and other things that they value. Prior to visiting PNG James and I had spent a few days discussing and sketching up some possible notebooks to take to Reite village. I had also researched a waterproof paper stock that could both be printed on and written on using universally available pens (such as biro and also Sharpie pens) – which was crucial in the hot and humid climate of PNG where ordinary paper is highly susceptible to mould, damp and disintegration. Taking a small amount of this paper with me, and some test printed waterproof eNotebooks, we made our way via Madang to Reite village.

Once in the village, we realised that the sketches for notebooks that we had planned before were not quite right and that there was a unique opportunity to co-design a simpler approach that reflected local sensitivities to knowledge sharing. Working with Porer and Pinbin again, we devised a new formulation for the wording of the notebooks about the kind of subject matter we would be asking participants to record and share, as well as the provenance of their knowledge. A key ingredient was the informed consent statement that appears on the front cover of each notebook below the space for the participant’s photograph, which was printed and stuck on using a Polaroid PoGo printer, and beneath which each participant wrote their name after reading and agreeing.

Having just a limited supply of materials I was able to create 16 notebooks – far less than the number of people who wanted to take part – which were all handmade and written out in the village itself. At a morning meeting, the aims of the project were explained to the participants by Porer and James whilst I took their photos and printed them out to stick on the cover of their notebooks. As a simple pilot, we asked the participants to write about just one thing in their environment about which they had specific knowledge – knowledge that was their’s to share (i.e. not taboo or magical knowledge, hap tok in Tok Pisin). It was important that everyone taking part understood exactly what we were doing and why – that this was intended and an experiment to explore new ways for their community to record what they know and to be able to pass in on to their descendants as well as to share with others.

By the end of our week in the village all 16 notebooks had been returned, filled with stories, drawings and information – the first time I have had a 100% return rate in any participation project! Disassembling each of the notebooks back into flat sheets, I used a cheap portable hand scanner to create our very first digital versions of the notebooks, which were saved as multi-page PDF files for immediate sharing. Once back in our London studio I was able to take more accurate scans on a desktop scanner, but the use of the portable scanner to capture and immediately share (via SD card) digital versions of the notebooks was another useful demonstration of the simplicity of the whole process for sharing in the field without access to mains electricity and the usual infrastructure required for file sharing.

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James provided some English translations to the notebooks, which we then incorporated into new versions made and shared on bookleteer – all of which can be browsed online or downloaded as A4 PDFs for making into handmade books in this collection – Reite and Sarangama Notebooks. We also combined the 16 notebooks into three larger bookleteer books grouped together according to subject matter accompanied by a book written by us (in both Tok Pisin and English) browsable or downloadable (as A3 PDFs) in the collection – TEK Pilot 1. Two of these books were recently printed in a small run using bookleteer’s Short Run printing service and sent out to subscribers of the Periodical – read about them here. We are sending handmade versions of all the books and notebooks back to the participants in Reite and Saragama villages, laser printed on another waterproof paper stock for durability.

Our longer terms aims are to expand this process for simple tools and techniques for recording and sharing local traditional cultural and ecological knowledge into a toolkit that could be used in different contexts and situations, and which is, as far as possible, technology agnostic. To do this we plan to return to Reite in 2014 to continue our co-design and collaboration with the villagers there, and to then devise a basic toolkit which can be shared with other people and communities in PNG, then potentially further afield. I would love to hear from others working with traditional or remote communities who’d like to share ideas and perhaps experiment with the process and tools we’ve developed so far.

On the trip to PNG I kept a diary of my experiences for my then 8 year old daughter, which I digitised using bookleteer. It is personal and written with her in mind, yet it is probably the best way to communicate some of the intense experiences I had in the village – with a culture and society that is so very different to my own yet offered so much to me in generosity of welcome, food, gifts and in spirit.

Open Studio Days & Sale of Work

June 4, 2013 by Giles Lane · 7 Comments 

On Friday 21st June and Saturday 22nd June  between 12noon and 8pm Alice and I will host two days of open studios to which we invite people to come and view work made by Proboscis in recent years – to have a chat and enjoy some tea and cake. We will have work on display from projects such as Hidden Families, StoryWeir, Pallion Ideas Exchange, Lifestreams, the Periodical, StoryCubes, bookleteer, Perception Peterborough, Snout, Feral Robots, Urban Tapestries, Mapping Perception, Social Tapestries, Fifties Fashion, As It Comes, In Good Heart and others.

Many of the works will be available for purchase (details to come), including paintings and drawings by Alice Angus, a unique Large StoryCube set made for an exhibition about cyberneticist Gordon Pask, as well as many of our publications.

For those interested in signing up to our monthly participatory publishing project, the Periodical, there will be extra special gifts to take away for subscribing on the day. To find out more about subscribing see here.

We will also have lots of freebies to give away to reward those plucky enough to ascend the infamous stairs to our 4th floor garret!

Please email us to let us know you’re planning to come.

Compendium of Public Goods

February 27, 2012 by aliceangus · 6 Comments 

One of the definitions of Public Goods in economics terms describes them as goods that are not diminished by a persons consumption of them. The air is cited as an example, sometimes the beach, street lighting, free broadcast television and so on (though in the ‘real world’ perhaps nothing really fits this description).  Are there other interactions we value that might be called public goods?  Things that people feel are precious about the places and communities they belong to – stories, skills, games, songs and so on. Maybe they are more intangible than a place, or element or thing, like the way people use local markets as places to meet, converse or share knowledge.

The notion of  Public Goods comes up often in our work; common space and ‘the commons’ as a public good for Being in Common; the role of markets and independent traders in Lancaster for As It Comes, and in Hertfordshire for With Our Ears to the Ground and the social impact of technologies for Urban Tapestries, Snout and Social Tapestries. I can’t quite pinpoint what these public goods are and I want to try and make a bit more sense of them for our Public Goods programme so I’m working with Mandy to create a Compendium of Public Goods  – a series of short animations inspired by many of the conversations and interviews we have had with people about their lives and communities. We are starting with a look back over conversations I had with the March History Group in Lancaster about jumble sales, hand me downs and knitted swimming suits… remember knitted swimming suits anyone?

 

Visual Essay – Mapping

July 14, 2011 by elenafesta · Comments Off on Visual Essay – Mapping 

“Space is a part of an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification”, this is an inspiring  quotation    drawn from Doreen Massey’s Space, Place and Gender and immediately it puts light on two  major ideas  underpinning the understanding of space: its non-neutral and non semantically univocal  essence, and its intrinsic  conflict. Space harbours a wide spectrum of semantic nuances and potential  political definitions and thus produces  continual challenges in terms of interpretation and agency. “The  map is not the territory”, even if it is thought to be  so, but an interpretation, a graphic and linguistic  exposition of a portion of territory and how ever it strains to be  scientifically irrefutable, the discursive  component shines through mainly in the very moment such codes are disrupted. The elaboration of  alternative maps make overt that “maps, like art, far from being a transparent opening to the world, are but a particular human way of looking at the world”. The idea of embracing alternative tube maps came to my mind because I was already familiar with Alex Roggero’s Underground to Everywhere map where he replaced the tube stations with the immigrants’ city according to the main ethnic minority living in a specific area. This travel book is in every aspect an homage to the author’s wanderings across the city and a sincere admiration to the vibrant, Babylonic and multicultural London. The author himself mentions several alternative tube maps which have been produced during the years. The tube map itself is not scientifically accurate but it was designed in such a way, so readable and clear, that has become hugely popular and iconic. Moreover, a recent visit to the Museum of London gave me the idea to insert in my visual essay some samples of hand-drawn maps which are displayed at the museum entrance in order to further underline the discursive, subjective aspect of the act of mapping. In partnership with Londonist, readers were encouraged to submit hand-drawn maps, focussing on their own experiences and connections with certain areas of London and obviously the aim was not to provide a factual representation of the city but to capture the different and variegated personal projections on the cityscape. The galleries themselves, which go through London’s history from when London was just a piece of desert land to the very present, are full of fascinating maps, each revealing a peculiar sphere of London according to the point of view and the intention of the composer. Booth’s poverty maps, based on his survey into life and labour in London from 1886 to 1903, assess varying levels of indigence and criminality in different districts across London, graphically accessible through a colour code, so for example, dark blue stands for ‘Very poor. Casual, chronic want’, while black stands for ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi criminal.’ The textual level of the mapping process discloses diverse perspectives on the emotional and biased degree involved in any act of representation and this leads us to think that the entity represented, in this case the city of London or at least a portion of it, is to be found where more or less codified and official discourses and a multitude of singular experiences meet. Regarding this, it is very illuminating to address Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries project which, combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems, looked at how people could actively map the environment around them and earnestly share this ever-evolving body of knowledge. This kind of collaborative mapping hints at another aspect implicit in the mapping process: its blatant lack of innocence suggests a potential political use, either as a tool of coercion and possession – unequivocal, for instance, is the case of Imperialism as Edward Said suggests – and as an instrument to reclaim and re-conquer one’s own right to the city and to build an alternative organic mutuality.

I see mapping as a central issue in Proboscis’ work not only because several projects have focussed on contemporary perceptions of the human, social and natural landscape around us – see for example the Liquid Geography ebooks series – as well as on fertile and rewarding ways to affect it, but their general conceptualization follows the mapping procedure. Proboscis’ approach simulates an unexpected plot, a thorough exploration, rich in ramifications, bends and junctions, sudden and unpredictable directions.

In Through A Dark Lens – The Proboscis Effect by Bronac Ferran

April 21, 2011 by admin · Comments Off on In Through A Dark Lens – The Proboscis Effect by Bronac Ferran 

IN THROUGH A DARK LENS – THE PROBOSCIS EFFECT

A Critical Text about Proboscis By Bronac Ferran

Creativity and innovation proceed in cycles rather than in some remorselessly forward trajectory. It is only over time that we can see the significance and importance of some projects and initiatives and particularly within the arts and cultural world, there are many different lenses and perspectives which we might take on work which we may wish to call contemporary.

 

In this text I respond to an invitation by the Proboscis Co-Directors, Alice Angus and Giles Lane to consider their work through the lens of collaboration and partnership. I approached this task aware that often the most critical developments happen below surface, in cyclical and indirect fashion. I was intrigued to explore how far one might consider this conceptually as a counterpoint to the increasingly predominant use of short-term quantitative analysis to assess value within the arts and concerned that such an approach is highly inappropriate for research-led practice (and indeed sometimes also for practice-led research) both of which activities may primarily be focussed on exploring new spaces, opening up dialogues and experimentation in form and media whose value can only become visible over time.

I have long been concerned to argue for value (and in particular symbolic value) of not for profit research-led or research-active creative organisations. John Howkins, a guru of ‘Creative Economy’ thinking, who had indirect influence on the new Labour Government‘s policies in this area from 1997, has recently shifted his focus to the term ‘Creative Ecology’ in which he outlines a more holistic approach to this area. In his book Creative Ecologies – Where Thinking is a Proper Job he argues that “attempts to use ecology to illuminate creativity has hardly begun, beyond using it as a fancy word for context”. In this essay I hope to build some layers onto this observation drawing on the work of Proboscis whose engagement with place, space and locality working with variable types of media provides the context for this text.

Proboscis describes itself as a non-profit artist-led studio “focused on creative innovation and research, socially engaged art practices and transdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration”. Since its formation in 1994 it has made many ‘journeys through layers’ as is more fully described below. One consistent aspect has been that the work has engaged with numerous different agencies and communities, spanning and bridging private and public domain; always integral to their practice has been the development of publishing and storytelling initiatives using print and networked media processes with a primary concern for combination of image, word and text.

Proboscis was first formed by Giles Lane and Damian Jacques as a partnership to develop COIL journal of the moving image which ran through to issues 9 and 10 launched as a joint issue in December 2000. Alice Angus joined the partnership in 1999 and began leading some significant projects including the seminal Topologies initiative which was formative in terms of what was then known as collaborative arts practice and funded through the Collaborative Arts Unit at Arts Council England where I then worked, interfacing successfully and in a ground-breaking way between contemporary art practice and the Museums, Libraries and Archives services in the UK. The breadth of this project which ran between 1999 and 2000 added many layers to Proboscis and as is noted below, was shaped by an ideology and set of aspirations which were fully admirable and still unfolding now, in a considerably harsher climate in terms of arts and other public funding.

Why Proboscis?
Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh rightly wrote that “naming the thing is the love-act and the pledge”. With the choice of their name the organisation certainly pledged itself to a high degree of engagement with environment and context.

As Wikipedia tells us the word Proboscis was:

First attested in English in 1609 from Latin proboscis, the latinisation of the Greek προβοσκίς (proboskis), [2] which comes from πρό (pro) “forth, forward, before” [3] + βόσκω (bosko), “to feed, to nourish”. [4] [5] The correct Greek plural is proboscides, but in English it is more common to simply add -es, forming proboscises.

& ‘In general it is an elongated appendage from the head of an animal’ and ‘the most common usage is to refer to the tubular feeding and sucking organ of certain invertebrates such as insects (e.g., moths and butterflies) worms (including proboscis worms) and gastropod molluscs.

Seeing Proboscis and its life cycle as a kind of organism is curiously appealing. I am not sure if it is predominantly elephant or butterfly – or even mosquito… perhaps all these things. Or maybe it’s the Proboscis monkey, swinging from tree to tree in the wind.

On initial encounter with their work I had felt immediately the extensive and expansive qualities of the imaginative terrain over which Proboscis sought to roam not least because of the multi-partner/multi-agency nature of the Topologies proposal. Giles himself was making a fascinating bridge between research in academia with strong commercial connections (working as he was part-time developing a publishing imprint in Computer Related Design at the Royal College of Art at time when there was an ongoing research partnership with Paul Allen’s Interval Research) as well as growing Proboscis as an independent arts agency. In terms of how and where and why they proceed in certain directions extending their range of enquiry, engagement and investigation, their presence in various contexts seeming partly intentional, partly collaborative and always based on an underlying agenda that has critical intervention at its core.

It is at perhaps at edges of collision and collusion between public and private spheres, policies and desire, that what I wish to name the Proboscis effect has been most active.

Probing Proboscis
In probing Proboscis over the past twelve months looking closely at their core ethos and expression in various permeations I have sought to do more than simply referencing the collaborations and partnerships with which they have been involved as this narrative is already substantially documented on their very useful website.

What I have sought to do is to try to decipher the underlying systems and motivations that drive the process of development behind the course of Proboscis’s work. In setting out to do this I thought I should also confront and re-evaluate my own set of perceptions and assumptions about their work in order to gain some new understanding from the process of dialogue and interaction that this project has deserved. I have therefore been developing a set of informal ‘dialogues or infusions’ with Giles and with Alice to absorb their current preoccupations and conscious that they work (as I tend to do where possible) in collaborative and reflexive ways. So it has become a critical aspect of doing the text to destabilise my own existing conception of what Proboscis is and, in so doing, I have hopefully begun to understand what they might do next.

It has of course been interesting writing this against a backdrop of Arts Council England’s major review of their regularly funded portfolio. In 2004-05 along with then colleague Tony White we had made a strong and in the end successful pitch for regular funding for the Proboscis team as part of a larger series of arguments relating to the shifting nature of cultural practice, the growth and emergence of interdiscipinarity as an innovation layer and the fact that there were arts development and production agencies (in this case, the Arts Catalyst, onedotzero, Forma Ltd) and some artist-research organisations (like Mongrel… and Proboscis) which were as significant to the emerging arts infrastructure as orchestras and ballet companies were to the established performing arts canon or galleries to local authorities and the defined visual arts. I had felt that it was the right time to make this case to help these often small-scale organisations to get funding for their core costs so that they could avoid having to make countless small project applications which drew on time and energy and also we argued successfully for the benefits of providing a core allocation that would enable these essentially innovation focussed organisations to prepare the ground for their next phase of development through periods of research and development, travel and experimentation that would inevitably result in valuable new work over the course of the following few years. Making this argument in terms of policy criteria of excellence and innovation and in the context of building multiple partnerships with arts investment (as often these agencies were being highly entrepreneurial leveraging many new kinds of partnerships with other sectors nationally and internationally, batting well above their weight) was effective and allowed for growth and adaptation over time.

It was then important we felt to consolidate an emerging sector that was in many ways ahead of the curve in terms of arts policy. One can argue for strategic (and perhaps then) symbolic value by citing the significance of arts organisation x as the key agency for xxx (e.g. disability arts or public art) but at the same time when it comes to interdisciplinary research-based practice it can limit an organisation greatly when it becomes too specifically defined by a primary funder as there to deliver something in particular – ie to be the instrumental infrastructural agency to do something that mirrors a policy… this particularly applies for organisations like Proboscis which exist on opening up challenging and redefining the spaces between categories, fields and form and indeed establishing and activating critical and significant tensions or gaps between arts funded agency and the arts funding agency itself. These significant gaps are often where the best interdisciplinary practice lies – not representing anything but heralding stuff to come, shifts that will eventually mainstream over time.

On the Act of Interpretation and Analysis
My overall sense since being invited in early 2010 to write an essay about their work particularly from the viewpoint of the range and complexity of partnerships they have made and held during the past decade and a half of their existence as an arts organisation, has felt like I have been staring at tracks in the snow, looking at something which is already formed and fully crystallised and not that much needing of further explanation. And in addition to this, in seeking to assemble some kind of overview or extract a narrative that condenses and crystallises anything definitive from their ongoing processes of enquiry I have held a burden of doubt about the ‘realness’ of what I have set out to do – a belief perhaps that ultimately the work that has lain within the Proboscis shadow speaks for itself, that the documentation of their processes has been carried out in an exemplary way that can benefit little from tacked on interpretation, exegesis or explanation.

At the same time, and with a sense of an organisation engaged in an ongoing process of ‘adaptive becoming’, I felt it could be useful to move towards a perspective on Proboscis which allows us to see their work as a whole, holistically I suppose – as opposed to a series of distinct projects, which is how often their work is discussed or perceived. I was hoping to define a pathway or journey through their layers – perhaps move further along the path in the snow. In a text they produced for the Paralelo, Unfolding Narratives in Art, Technology and Environment publication in 2009, they cite Katarina Soukip, writing in the Canadian Journal of Communication:

‘the new Inuktitut term for internet, Ikiaqqivij or ‘travelling through layers’ refers to the concept of the shamen travelling across time and space to find answers’.

For the past decade and a half they have had a central place along with other organisations that may be broadly described as working within the media art or trans-disciplinary circuit in the UK and Europe with a primary role in respect of ‘the ecology of learning’ to use Graham Harwood’s term. In another essay which I wrote in 2010 for LCACE I spoke of their unique and pivotal position in terms of art/technology/academic/commercial networks – one of the reasons they were invited by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council to become an Independent Research Organisation in 2004 which has been written about in detail – see Sarah Thelwall’s Cultivating Research – where she accounts for how “Proboscis has built its artistic practice around a research approach and in so doing has collaborated with a number of HEIs over the years including the Royal College of Art, London School of Economics, Birkbeck College, Queen Mary University of London and the Institute of Child Health“. Thelwall’s text summarises the range and nature of the Proboscis partnerships inside and outside Higher Education and the economic and other factors influencing their success in gaining Independent Research Organisation status from the EPSRC. She also reflects on the processes of layering I have mentioned above:

‘Proboscis have always developed and maintained a very wide and diverse collection of organisations and individuals they collaborate with. They purposefully bring together organisations as diverse as the Ministry of Justice, Science Museum & Ordnance Survey. This network is built around the delivery of projects but is by no means limited to the parameters and timescales of the projects themselves. It is common to see connections made in one project resurface some years later as what might appear to be a tangential connection to a new piece of work’.

This positioning within an ecosystem of connected and interdependent elements which may combine and recombine over time seems an integral aspect of ‘the Proboscis effect’. This is very much a distinguishing element of their work – a specific way of working, in porous and co-operative ways, engaging with locality and often with habitat.

The advent of Arts Council England funding changes now announced, which have swept through the ecosystem of digital media organisations in this country with desperate disregard for preserving and sustaining knowledge within a still developing sector – reminds us to suggest the importance of finding ways to recycle and re-embed these elements into a broader cultural ecology. In this sense Vilem Flusser’s words about waste come very appropriately to mind:

‘Until quite recently, one was of the opinion that the history of humankind is the process whereby the hand gradually transforms nature into culture. This opinion, this ‘belief in progress’ now has to be abandoned. …the human being is not surrounded by two worlds then, but by three: of nature, of culture and of waste. This waste is becoming ever more interesting…’

Somehow this seems appropriate in many ways to Proboscis preoccupations. They have separated themselves from dependency on ACE life rafts for floating media practices and now have set themselves new agendas, new partnerships and new horizons engaging even more closely with critical social challenges from global technological waste to employment of young people from disadvantaged contexts in London.

The Partnership Domain
As noted above many of the projects which Proboscis have generated and fostered have been formative in terms of exploring and building transformative connections between variable and separate fields, particularly between artistic research, academic research, commercial R&D and the public domain. The projects which they have worked on and generated over the seventeen years of the organisation’s existence have had an exciting range reflecting broader shifts within cultural practice. In addition to conceiving and shaping various projects Proboscis as an arts organisation has defined itself during this time as a vital critical space for understanding the emergent nature of collaborative practices, from research through to the public domain and as an agency through which documentation and discourses around these processes has been facilitated and enabled. What it has also most critically done is to provide a space for documentation and critical reflection on these processes – their significance has partly been to find a way to make the temporal or temporary processes of collaboration stable in terms of existing in accessible documentation over time. As their website now rumbles with tag-clouds and twitter-feeds it continues to grow in an organic fashion, as a responsive and collaborative space enabling expression of differences within an open and common domain.

Why does this matter?
In considering patterns of collaborative arts practices in the past fifteen years, often emergent work has been primarily time-based with documentation of the practices secondary to the event of the work itself. Simultaneously when we speak of interdisciplinarity what is commonly implied is the construction of spaces for dialogue and exchange, for things to be ‘in formation’, contingent, open and process-based.

In viewing the work of Proboscis through the lens of interdisciplinarity and collaboration across different arts and other disciplines over many years and recognising the high level of intention with respect to formation of high profile partnerships which have in a sense redefined ‘the public domain’, one recognises a consistent line of enquiry: the probing of interstices, the construction of new interfaces, the drawing of connecting lines, tracing points of relation through dialogue and through process. The process is never mechanical but somehow organic and collaborative – as traces are made, they may also be erased. Or they may be retained held in the act of publishing, drawing or commissioning critical texts. These traces gain longevity and new emphasis also by means of citation (for example the high degree to which Proboscis’s work has formed part of PhD theses and other types of reports) a fact which may carry little weight in relation to arts funding assessments but may in other important ways (particularly if viewed longitudinally) reveal value, especially intellectual or symbolic value as noted above.

In referencing a latency I am also signalling how in the nature of research based arts practice only by looking at developments over time might one truly realise the value. At times something may be in germination stages lying low in order to succeed but hard if not impossible to measure. These stages are in my mind at least the most important stages and ones most deserving of subsidy.

As noted above and looking now in hindsight at how the life cycle of the organisation we know as Proboscis has evolved we see many layers embedded over time. The projects have moved through moving image, film, locative and other mobile media, software, performance, carnival, workshops in making, storytelling and narrative, diy and open access publishing, photography and psychogeography, art and science, art and health, artists books and libraries, archives and community memory, folk-tales and archaeologies of place, open public data, art-industry, art-ecology and design/co-design and many other things. Within all the projects has been a set of disparate connections – sometimes with other artists, sometimes with scientists,sometimes with companies, sometimes with academia – and often with groups working in similar fields, as part of a set of network connections – producing an identity which is both fixed and process-led.

Somehow in these spaces between specificity and hybridity and tracing and erasing the Proboscis effect adheres.

It is vital to also consider the development of the Proboscis effect or practice within the context of recent intensive shifts with respect to how artists and arts organisations work within the spectrum of a broader creativity often, though not exclusively, technologically related. The most compelling work in this terrain has brought about a fusion of different disciplinary approaches and a combination of themes, fields and metiers into common and uncommon forms. This period of development has brought about also a shift within the nature of culture itself not just towards hybridity but towards open and collaborative works that engage directly with audiences or users transforming their position from user to co-producer, collaborator and joint agent within a process or design.

Proboscis’s work in the early 21st Century radically anticipated this layer which is now fully mainstream – of encouraging social innovation based on participatory processes.

Identity
In terms of how they approach collaborations and partnerships it is perhaps interesting to also consider the internal relationships which inevitably drive and define this kind of organisation. When one considers the identity of Proboscis, we recognise a pattern similar to the other organisations of similar scale and size. Often these organisations are indelibly connected to the personalities of their original founders. At the same time, when it comes to small-scale organisations the intensity of the human relations (the personality and behaviours within the group) often transfers to become the image of the organisation as a whole. Organisations form around and mirror the values and ideas of the people who form them. When people change the organisations inevitably change. But organisations evolve even when they have the same people involved who helped to develop the initial projects. In the case of Proboscis, its work has shifted and developed radically showing the various inputs and influences of the various people who have become involved over the years at project, administrative and consultancy level – yet it has also retained and maintained a consistency that is highly recognisable though perhaps difficult to define. Over many years they have brought in various skilled people to work on diverse projects which has provided an abundant network within which the organisation is situated and which they have in turn helped to generate and facilitate at various points and in various places. The workplace trainees who have been present in the office over the past year have been carrying and bringing a different, more youthful energy into the studio and as their voices grow louder as they are encouraged to express their views online and this has in turn shifted the pattern of perception of how and what Proboscis does. At the very heart though is the deeply creative core relationship of the two Co-Directors whose differing and complementary sensibilities suffuse all aspects of their work.

Garnering the Spaces Between
When it comes to unique organisations that are built on activating and ‘the space between differences’, in exploring commonalities and uncommonalities, in the energies that combine and force apart processes and practices – in other words, interdisciplinarity – it may well be said that change is the only constant and that inherent within the suggested Proboscis effect is the opening up of new relations from investigation of these tensions. I am suggesting this as it seems to me that implicit within any discussion about collaborations and partnerships is a belief system or set of values that informs and entwines with the nature of these connections and that what has partly distinguishes how Proboscis has been working in these interdisciplinary fields has been a set of principles or operating framework which has insisted on autonomy and independence of status within a broader assemblage or set of networks.

‘… But also, the value of dissent needs to be high enough so that dissent is not dismissed. How do you facilitate dissent so that it’s a strong value? Part of the concern in science collaborations is that there is a huge push towards consensus. So the dissent issue becomes very important’.
– Roger Malina

Achieving Effective Process within Asymmetrical Relations
The strength of the process was demonstrated most visibly in the pioneering Urban Tapestries project which Proboscis initiated and ran between 2002 and 2004 and which probably for the first time ever demonstrated the capacity of a small not for profit organisation to draw together a set of large institutional and commercial partners leveraging plural funding routes and most spectacularly to define the terms of engagement. This project not only prefigured the convergence of ubiquitous mobile computing and social media but also resulted in a series of community based activities between 2004 and 2007 – called Social Tapestries – which took R&D aspects from corporate and academic labs fully into the public domain and in turn revealed the significance of public participation in terms of any effective R&D with respect to social media – a kind of liberation strategy which displays eloquently the value sense underlying the Proboscis operation. Here is an extract about the project:

‘Urban Tapestries investigated how, by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems, people could ‘author’ the environment around them; a kind of Mass Observation for the 21st Century. Like the founders of Mass Observation in the 1930s, we were interested creating opportunities for an “anthropology of ourselves” – adopting and adapting new and emerging technologies for creating and sharing everyday knowledge and experience; building up organic, collective memories that trace and embellish different kinds of relationships across places, time and communities.The Urban Tapestries software platform enabled people to build relationships between places and to associate stories, information, pictures, sounds and videos with them. It provided the basis for a series of engagements with actual communities (in social housing, schools and with users of public spaces) to play with the emerging possibilities of public authoring in real world settings’.

On the Daniel Langlois Foundation website (who provided funding towards the project) the language outlining what happened is different again:

‘What would freedom of expression be without the means to express it ? As fundamental as this concept is, it appears empty and abstract if you don’t complement it with the freedom to choose the means of expression. Today’s wireless communication networks offer novel ways to express ourselves. For the time being, these networks escape government or corporate control, which is why they are being used by many artists and activists to give this concept more concrete meaning’.

No doubt there were different spins to the narrative again on the websites of the different project partners – as clear an illustration as one might wish for of the pluralistic capacity of Proboscis during this 2002-2007 period acting as a broker, connector, and transdisciplinary catalyst. It is interesting that on the current Proboscis website, the ‘history’ section ends at September 2007 and before this that year Alice and Giles had visited Australia, Canada and Japan as well as taking part in numerous UK based events, conferences and discussions – being greatly in demand to un-layer and share tales of the Urban Tapestries and Social Tapestries adventures and outcomes. This work was intensive and significant with respect also to the broader history of collaborative media practices in the early years of this century.

The history of the period between September 2007 and now is also now still waiting to be written – and the turn which is now happening in relation to the direction of their work more explicitly revealed

Between Tactical Extremes
Taking further forward some of the ideological strands initially outlined in the goals for Topologies as well as running through the Urban Tapestries above, Giles writes currently on the Proboscis website about their forward programme for 2011 which will focus around the over-arching theme of Public Goods,

‘In the teeth of a radical onslaught against the tangible public assets we are familiar with (libraries, forests, education etc), Public Goods seeks to celebrate and champion a re-valuation of those public assets which don’t readily fit within the budget lines of an accountant’s spreadsheet’.

Showing this long-term commitment to core ideals, when I first met him in 1998, when commencing their Topologies project, Giles had written:

‘Public libraries are seen by Proboscis to be one of the UK’s most important cultural jewels, long-underfunded and lacking in support from central government. As sites for learning and culture they are unparalleled, offering a unique user-centred experience that is different from the viewer experience of a museum or a gallery’.

It is also ironic now writing this just after one of the biggest public demonstrations that London has known in the context of planned government cuts to the public sector and recalling that whilst the aim Proboscis had thirteen years ago was to add to the experience of visiting libraries by adding artists books into their holdings, the demise of the library system itself is now the battle along with devaluation and depreciation of many aspects of the public domain. Here one has a sense again of the uncannily fore-shadowing nature of many of Proboscis’s themes. Their antennae as sensitive collaborative creatures twitching often too soon?

Sustaining Partnerships
In exploring the way in which Proboscis set out to work in collaborative ways over many years one notes a serious attuning to context, making events and initiatives which often involve deep localised engagement with those with whom they have chosen to partner whether in public or private sector contexts. Often these partnerships are sustained over many years as for example with DodoLab in Canada with whom they have a long-term relationship that manifests in different ways in different places addressing social, urban and environmental challenges through artworks, performances, interventions, events, educational projects and publishing using social media, the Proboscis bookleteer and StoryCube initiatives and others ways of involving and communicating with people.

Other relationships have been related to specific projects; almost all take place over at least two or three years following a series of research questions or over-arching line of enquiry which requires focussed time and many different manifestations. The techniques which Proboscis bring to the table in terms of collaborations have been well-honed in various scenarios – as are well outlined and documented on their capacious website. Connecting these techniques for group interaction and group authorship with technological and industrial change and a corresponding shift in the cultural and social imaginary has been a prevalent element and thread which has emerged throughout a series of interrelated activities.

Re-drawing the Map
I developed a deeper understanding at first hand of the Proboscis effect when 2009 Alice Angus, Giles Lane and Orlagh Woods from the company were among a group of UK based arts technology and design researchers and practitioners who came to an event held in Sao Paulo called Paralelo with which I was closely involved. The event brought together individuals and groups working in three countries – the Netherlands as well as UK and Brazil – on topics and themes relating to Art, Technology and the Environment. Proboscis brought a beautifully honed process of group Social Mapping to the opening session of the event. This created a way of introducing individuals and everyone to everyone else with the plus factor that it gave form to the latent network connections that lay underneath, beside and across the topology composed on paper laid out on the ground. It was in many ways a characteristic Proboscis intervention inflecting the overall event with a collaborative and open-ended fluidity of approach with participants then returning to the map at the close of the event and in a ritual of consolidated iterative expression redrawing earlier lines, shifting to new points of intensity. This effect relies on an appreciation of ritual, of the act of drawing with the hand on paper, of making marks and leaving something that over time becomes a document of something that has now passed…

‘The development of new forms of expression is not something that is bound to happen, but is a matter of the choice and preference of artists. What is possible is the programmed creation of works. The artist is then creating a process, not individual works. In the pure arts this may seem anathema, but art thrives on contradictions, and it can be yet another way of asking what is art?…’
From first page of EVENT ONE, first edition of PAGE journal of Computer Art Society, 1969.

In their contribution to the book Paralelo: Unfolding Narratives in Art, Technology and Environment which emerged after the workshop in 2009, the Proboscis team also brought a singular simplicity (that held much deeper meaning than what was visible on the surface) to the project. Their text, Travelling through Layers, available also as a Diffusion eBook – holds in a small space a series of interleaving observations, images, quotes and commentary – all of which combine to build a narrative that stands alone or as part of the larger whole in this case the wider texts that make up the publication, a small microcosm of the broader Proboscis effect.

In Conclusion – The Latency of Glass?
As we enter into 2011 and shifts in political and arts funding scenarios, it seems to me that Proboscis are once again on the turn. Adapting to constraints that have emerged from socio-environmental contexts, they are taking a slower course. expressed in the lavishly vulnerable depiction of the disappearing markets in Lancaster which Alice has recently produced and the oft expressed commitment to providing tools and resources at low cost for others to access whilst wishing to do this by way of exchange and experiment – allowing social concerns to dominate technologies and allowing the reinstatement of hand and handi-craft into the Proboscis process.

It seems to me that with the usual fore-shadowing the organisation is now pointing towards a need for deep contemplation and reflection on what is currently in danger of being lost and following the ecological theme, seeking to ensure that we devise ways to recycle material back into the system. In some extent they are going out further to those margins and extremes, wanting to fuse together some new points of tension or heightened concerns. No doubt this will slowly and surely emerge.

And most importantly how does one articulate and measure value within these processes? What kinds of measurement can apply when one is talking about ‘effect’? What distinguishes their work from others who have moved into these spaces between the arts and other sectors? What has made them so effective in these spaces? And having moved in, developed systems of exchange and parallel processes with many other agencies, what has Proboscis gained and lost – what (apart from documentation on their website) might remain? Why do they move on? What do we learn from the textures and edges that their processes effect?

Their capacity to retain an integrity and critical edge whilst being involved in processes of exchange with many different types of partner organisation has been admirable; if as outlined in the 2010 Prix Ars Electronica Hybrid Arts text we might see hybrid arts practices as being fundamentally about an ontological instability or insecurity then in many ways the work of Proboscis throughout sixteen-seventeen years may be situated in this terrain.

Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s so far the best projects (and those which become most memorable) at least in relation to the broad field of collaborative and interdisciplinary arts practice seem to me to be those which tend to fuse together layers of different processes, systems and materials to form a new, highly charged synthesis that carries within it the tensions implicit in making something disparate whole. If broken or contracted, new edges will then emerge that redefine the boundaries of the whole.

Over time what is engendered and revealed are certain qualities manifest at both surface and depth – I describe these forms as having something like the latency of glass.

The Proboscis narrative has many of the properties of glass (fused to a point of stillness, yet with inner motion and capable of breaking to form new edges). If I have managed to identify at least one angle on their work using the perspective of the dark lens it is related to something Giles said in conversation in February 2011 about his interest in “exploring extremes and the points of tension between”. The photographic negative awaiting advent of light in the darkroom is another way of seeing this. Perhaps the phantasm of ‘true collaboration’ lurks in the latency of glass.

 

Bronac Ferran, April 2011

Enabling Consequences by Fred Garnett

April 15, 2011 by admin · 1 Comment 

Enabling Consequences

A Critical Text about Proboscis by Fred Garnett

Background
This is a critical text written to comment on the work of Proboscis in Public Sector Innovation with new technology from a cultural perspective. I was invited by Giles Lane to do this in late 2010 as I have followed the work of Proboscis since 2002 when I first went to a public event of theirs and have since appreciated the qualities of what they have done.

Introduction
What I have decided to do in my Critical Text, Enabling Consequences, is to look at why Proboscis’s innovations, which from my perspective are capable of widespread adoption, have been insufficiently recognised and acted upon. I think this comes from both how they are conceptualised, through a process related to obliquity and how they might be adopted as a process of generative innovation; that is as a platform innovation that begets further innovations.

Brief History of Proboscis
Proboscis are probably best known for their work, Urban Tapestries, a breakthrough project (undertaken with collaborating partners such as Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Orange, France Telecom R&D UK Ltd, Ordnance Survey and the London School of Economics), designed to enable the interactive city to emerge based on the pull of the participative strategies of active citizenship rather than push strategies of advertising.

They appear to set themselves the question “how can you double your intellectual quality every 18 months”. In part this is a response to Moore’s Law that states that the power of computer processing doubles every 18 months, but turned into a cultural question. In practical terms Proboscis ask themselves “how can you innovate at all times in terms of process, documentation and ideas”. They see what they do as pre-competitive research, what Steven Johnson has recently entitled the ‘adjacent platform’ of innovation. That is a process that occurs before any practical innovation actually happens.

Public Sector Innovation
I am particularly interested in Proboscis because I was also previously involved in an innovation project in the Public Sector, Cybrarian, which also failed to be recognised at the time. Cybrarian was a prototype ‘Facebook for Civil Society’, for which we created the high-concept description of it being an ‘Amazon for e-gov’ as the term social network didn’t exist then (2002). Some of us subsequently formed the ‘public technology’ group lastfridaymob, which spent some time trying to analyse why. We concluded that government didn’t have the relevant interpretive criteria to understand that new technology, created to meet public needs, namely creative, interactive and participative, and that these were three factors that government found hard to recognize. I always saw these three qualities in Proboscis’ work.

There is a deeper problem that new technologies are increasingly interactive and smart, demonstrating participative affordances, and the political context into which they are pitched are representative and hierarchical. So to unpick this problem of public sector innovation a little more lets look at how innovation occurs in greater depth.

Innovation Modelling
A typical way of modelling the Innovation process is in what might be called the 4i model; Ideas, Invention, Innovation, Impact. This typically argues that someone, possibly a researcher, has a bright idea which they tinker away at until an invention can be developed. An invention is the first instantiation of a new innovation, it can be a mock-up, a model, a design, a drawing, but it has been produced as a one-off, or prototype, often to demonstrate the potential, or some expected quality. The difference between an invention and an innovation is money. Someone decides that the invention, either because they see the prototype or drawing or a description, is so compelling that it will be worth spending a lot of money setting up a production and distribution system so a version of the invention can be sold as a product on a large scale. This innovation process is also often divided into product push, where the new technology itself is compelling, or market-pull, where demand has been detected. In organisational terms this often reflects a distinction between the research and marketing functions in companies who are concerned with innovation, or a culture, like the USA, which sees social and cultural value in the process of innovation. Successful innovations need to bridge the gap between the qualities of supply-side technology-push, and the interest of demand side market-pull.

When Apple decided to launch the iPod – in technical terms a fairly simple device made on automated production lines in China – they also needed new software to control the iPod – iTunes – and new distribution arrangements with the entire music industry, for the music, songs and albums needed to populate their invention with resources. The music industry were the very people who felt that Napster, an early peer-to-peer forerunner of iTunes, threatened their entire industry, but Apple found powerful arguments for getting them on board, part of which was that Apple weren’t the first to market, so could respond to their needs. So the issue of turning a simple working invention like the iPod itself, into an innovation, is massively complex however compelling the product on display. All products have hinterlands, which can seriously affect the way an invention becomes an innovation and also how it becomes a universally recognised and used product or process, as digital music now is today. However we have been discussing product innovations being brought to market, whereas Public Sector Innovation is more concerned with processes that enable infrastructural development, and this requires a more pervasive model of innovation.

Steven Johnson’s Reef innovation v Market Innovation
Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From (2010) looks at ways in which innovation becomes adopted and contrasts the more typical 4i model discussed above, or market innovation, with what he calls reef innovation, what we might call infrastructural development. Steven Johnson is an American and writes about the US context, which is much more focused on invention overall than the UK and with a history of infrastructural developments coming through private sector activities; for example American utilities are generally private sector; gas, electricity, telephones etc. Whereas in the UK there has been a more mixed tradition of regulated private sector innovation, in the 19th Century, and state-controlled utilities, in the 20th Century. Following the privatisation policies of the 1980s and 1990s there has developed more of a regulated private-sector approach in the UK, returning somewhat to our 19th Century traditions.

Reef innovation is Johnson’s way of describing how a private sector model of development produces new infrastructure for society as a whole. This is a metaphor derived from how coral reefs accrete growth and so stay above sea level, as the volcanic rocks on which they are situated shift, in order to allow coral reef island life to flourish. He is discussing how the enabling utilities, such as communications technologies that lay beneath the functioning of everyday social life, evolve and grow. Johnson argues that society as a whole grows more through reef innovation; the slow accumulation of numerous utilities that form the infrastructure through which society functions, than through market innovation. So we need a more sophisticated view of infrastructural innovation, such as the reef model, to discuss public sector innovation.

However Johnson is writing of the American context where the accidental reef-like growth of market-tested processes of infrastructure accumulation is a useful metaphor, but it is not perhaps fully applicable in all socio-economic contexts. However with the concept of reef innovation Johnson is helpfully looking at systemic Innovation, rather than product innovation as the 4is model tends to do, and systemic innovation is particularly significant in times of systemic change, which we see now as we attempt to move to a Knowledge Economy, or the Information Society as the European Union calls it through its IST programmes for i2015 and i2020. However Systemic Innovation requires a still broader view of the transformational characteristics of systemic change.

Structural Innovation v Disruptive Innovation
Innovation that leads to transformational change is something that the economist Joseph Schumpeter (the so called “Prophet of Innovation”) writes about as he discusses the difference between Structural Innovation and Disruptive Innovation. Structural innovation is where the innovation extends existing uses of a product and should increase the numbers of users, such as lighter mobile phone handsets, whereas a disruptive innovation such as the mobile phone system itself, is one where the innovation changes how things are done, in such a way that challenges existing system processes. So transformational change, arguably a key feature of the coming Knowledge Economy in both the UK policy context and EU-IST programmes, actually requires the promotion of this disruptive innovation. At the governmental level this creates a problematic tension as governments are more interested in providing reliable infrastructure that changes little, but is increasingly used by citizens, rather than enabling systemic change through deploying new technology innovations.

Consequently government prefers to adopt disruptive technology innovations as infrastructure, such as websites, once they have attained widespread use and so can be seen as large-scale structural innovations. Thus a conundrum emerges in that technological innovation which enables often necessary social change comes in a disruptive form that is difficult for governments to deal with. However whilst governments are often interested in systemic change, say to improve social infrastructure during an age of global change and de-regulation, they are more comfortable with structural innovations which might extend their electoral support through greater use, rather than disruptive innovations which can alienate it.

Distinctive Features of the Proboscis Model of Innovation
However I think Proboscis are doing particularly interesting things in terms of innovation which don’t quite fit into any of these innovation models; reef, structural, disruptive. Firstly they are operating outside the boundaries of the 4is model, both in terms of generating ideas at the conceptual end of the process, and also in terms of offering processes of innovation at the take up end. Secondly they are developing innovations that are neither disruptive, nor structural, not least because Schumpeter’s models also emerge from an analysis of American economics. Proboscis are in the business of producing socially enabling participative innovations, which might be better described as enabling innovations, drawing their value from the degree to which they extend the affordances of the public realm.

I now want to look at three distinctive features, two intrinsic and one consequential, that can be identified in the Proboscis approach in order to examine what socially enabling participative innovations might mean in practice;

a) Applied Heutagogy; namely thinking about projects in fresh ways before they begin, based on a guiding set of values, in terms of ‘moving criteria across contexts’ which might be described as providing an ‘ideas platform’ for thinking about innovation.

b) Generative Innovations; creating innovative platforms that can then be used generatively to develop further uses by others in the public realm.

c) Extending the Public Realm through Participation; the consequence of this approach to innovation, which emerges from using their models of thinking and applying their approach to public sector innovation.

Applied Heutagogy
I asked Giles if he thought his work fitted into the Blue-Sky model of thinking, which might be characterised as a model of brainstorming about what you do by removing under-pinning values that sustain the original work. It is thinking outside the box of existing limitations that is more likely to destroy the box than think of new uses for it. I suggested that we call Proboscis work ‘Pink-Sky Thinking’, meaning it was fresh but rooted in the original values that they started with. He declined to accept this and suggested that their thinking tended to be oblique. I think this is because they see their work as being of a piece and that Proboscis have extended their original vision by learning from their projects and the ways in which they have been implemented, Social Tapestries emerging out of Urban Tapestries for example.

Giles suggested that their approach was deeply rooted in their values of ‘moving criteria across contexts,’ which is the classic art school strategy of heutagogy. But Proboscis aren’t simply artistic provocateurs, they think deeper than that as their thinking is informed by a profound understanding of the public realm in which their innovations will be situated, so they are also thinking of consequences as well as creative solutions. Steven Johnson also talks of a process of moving criteria across contexts that he calls exaptation, but this is more limited than the applied heutagogy Proboscis use as it is generally the application of one new set of criteria to one new field of practice in search of innovation. Proboscis are more flexible than this, but I think they are engaged in a broader process of multiple exaptations in their thinking. This process of thinking through a multiplicity of strategies derived from a range of contexts I would characterise as an ‘ideas platform.’ This offers a richer conceptual mulch than the ‘adjacent platform’ model described by Johnson, as it is also takes account of the consequential use states and the state changes (Giles’s term) that might be enabled. It could also be described as thinking about where good ideas go to…

Generative Innovation
Kondratieff talks of long wave economic change coming from what he terms ‘meta technologies’, technologies that are embedded in other technologies like the steam engine and the microprocessor. However long-term social change comes from behavioural adaptations to the affordances of these new technologies, such as the car or the mobile phone. But social change also needs infrastructure that supports the use of the new technologies; for example, time was standardised across Britain in 1840 to meet the needs of the railways. In many ways since 1770 this infrastructure has been in the form of networks of new technologies; canals, railways, telegraph, telephone, roads, electricity, television, the Internet. However these networks have tended to be dedicated to a single mode of use until the Internet came along. Like electricity this enables it to be a multi-use network, but the Internet is also capable of supporting and distributing multiple formats. Thus across this network an almost unpredictable range of uses can be developed; the Internet enables a range of consequential uses, limited only by the design flexibility of the digital formats themselves. The World Wide Web itself is one such multi-modal consequence of the flexibility of the Internet, but it is possible to design with it’s almost endlessly consequential nature in mind and Proboscis seem cognisant of this.

A Generative Innovation might be described as an innovation that enables further innovations, as described above, not as an embedded meta technology but as a platform of possibilities. An interesting development in Proboscis work was the shift from Urban Tapestries to Social Tapestries, from a platform to a user environment and what characterises their user environments is their participative quality.

Arguably the Knowledge Economy and the Information Society are characterised by the participative qualities of the technologies used to build them, this has been particularly clear since the ‘architecture of participation’ that is Web 2.0 became widely available as a possible infrastructure platform. Proboscis’s work has anticipated this participatory quality due to the heutagogic nature of their thinking about creating generative processes. This thinking can be described as an ideas platform, which precedes the adjacent platform model of innovation as described by Johnson. Proboscis were used to playing with form, moving criteria across contexts as they describe it, at a time when new technologies capable of creating social transformation were emerging so, for them, the flexibility of digital technologies, their arguably ‘disruptive’ qualities, were already accounted for at the thinking stage.

Extending the Public Realm through Participation
So the combination of applied heutagogy and generative innovations has the Enabling Consequence of creating the possibility of extending the public realm through participation in this age of digital networks and use affordances. This is because Proboscis are engaged in flexible thinking about future possibilities whilst being aware of how implementation might extend and change the character of the public realm. They design for the participative qualities of digital networks and so capture what makes them so attractive to people in society.

[CAVEAT: I don’t want this to read like a testimonial, after all it is a critical text and not all of Proboscis’s projects have been unqualified successes, but this has been an attempt to capture both what uniquely characterises their approach and to also try and understand how public sector innovation might be made to work effectively in the UK in an age of digital flexibility.]

Conclusions; Enabling Consequences

Proboscis’ research model
Proboscis have a concern with public sector innovation in a time of digital flexibility, but are capable of absorbing the transformative potential of the evolving digital realm into both their thinking, as social artists comfortable with the heutagogic playing with form, and as visionaries, capable of thinking of how new platforms might enable greater engagement in and with the public realm. They bring this together in an unusually broad and deep way of solving problems, what I call applied heutagogy, addressing multiple perspectives not just the artistic one of playing with form.

The participative affordances of the technology and the heutagogic quality of their thinking, what they call ‘moving criteria across contexts’, combine to offer the possibility of creating generative infrastructure; infrastructure that begets further infrastructure. They work with the grain of digital transformation both conceptually and in terms of its consequences.

Public sector Innovation
Most public sector innovation emerges from a hierarchical policy process that has originated in one part of government and has a clearly defined and departmentally owned problem it wants solving. Public sector innovation typically, for a range of historical, political and cultural reasons, wants structural innovation that extends the relevance and influence of the owner of the policy and so sees innovation concerning ‘state changes’ as disruptive and out of scope.

Ben Hammersley recently highlighted this conceptual problem at the governmental level, what he characterises as the clash between hierarchical and network thinking, in his British Council lecture in Derry on March 25 2010. The problem Hammersley highlights is hierarchical thinking about networked contexts. The public sector wants innovation to be structural in order to count as improving their policy delivery in alignment with the current construction of existing policy responsibilities; it thus ignores the ‘state change’ potential offered by new network possibilities. In terms of innovation the public sector is, at best, involved in post-hoc legitimation but not in the creation of participation platforms designed to work in the emerging network contexts.

Innovation in a Transformative context
So we have an impasse; the opportunity for the development of a digitally flexible public realm capable of supporting a range of interdisciplinary models of innovation working across open networks, and a public policy context which is incapable of recognising networked and other new technology affordances. We can describe this as a clash between possible participative and traditional representative views, both of working processes and of society (and so of policy development); or more simply a clash of values. Proboscis want to ‘establish a discourse around values’ so that we might uncover where value is created, and also what those values might be, as we try to find ways of working with the digitally flexible and transformative characteristics of the emerging of participatory culture.

Hammersley somewhat ghoulishly, suggests that we first need the older generation in power to die off if fresh thinking capable of coping with a networked society is to gain traction in government in 2011. What Proboscis show us, less dramatically, is that with some applied heutagogy, thinking practically about how we might learn from ‘moving criteria across contexts’ at the start of a problem-solving process concerning public-sector innovation, along with some consideration of how we might create a ‘platform’ that could generate further innovative ‘state changes’, constrained by considerations of the nature of the public realm, then we can indeed enable public sector thinking that is in tune with the evolving networked society we live in at the start of the 21st Century.

Fred Garnett, April 2011

Public Goods : a survey of the common wealth

February 2, 2011 by Giles Lane · 3 Comments 

This year we will begin a major new programme of projects exploring the intangible things we value most about the people, places and communities we live in : Public Goods. Through a series of projects over a 5 year period we’ll be making artworks, films, events, exhibitions and publications in places across the nation (and hopefully abroad too) working in collaboration with both other creative practitioners and local people.

In this first year we’re planning a series of smaller research projects to help us meet and engage with collaborators, identify places and communities, themes and activities. We’ll be using our City As Material format for collaborative urban exploration and zine-making as a method of investigating new places with local people, and also focused projects, like Alice’s As It Comes, in both urban and rural settings exploring other knowledges and experiences that are often overlooked or are being swept away by the fast pace of social change. We also plan to continue our research collaborations into new technologies for public authoring, play and sensing the world around us (such as Urban Tapestries, bookleteer and Sensory Threads).

Our aim is to build up an archive, or archives, of the intangible goods that people most value and want to share – transmitting hope and belief through artistic practice to others in the present and for the future. In the teeth of a radical onslaught against the tangible public assets we are familiar with (libraries, forests, education etc), Public Goods seeks to celebrate and champion a re-valuation of those public assets which don’t readily fit within the budget lines of an accountant’s spreadsheet.

We’d love to hear from communities, practitioners or organisations who’d like us to work with them around this theme – do get in touch.

Autumn 2010 Special Offer/Fundraiser

October 1, 2010 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Last weekend the Proboscis studio was burgled for the 2nd time this year. As a result we need to install a new alarm and security system (costing over £2k) so we’re hoping to raise funds for it with a special offer on some of our publications.

We’ve bundled together 100 copies of the Social Tapestries Case of Perspectives, Alice’s Endless Landscape Magnet Set & the Catalogue of Ideas from our Being In Common project – all for less than 50% of their combined usual price.

The magnets and cards make ideal gifts, while the Case of Perspectives is a limited edition artists bookwork created by Alice and me as part of the Urban Tapestries and Social Tapestries projects.

*** Buy your set here ***

Alice Angus

July 5, 2010 by aliceangus · 5 Comments 

  

Background

I am an artist and co-director of Proboscis, my work includes works on paper video and textiles. I’m interested in the social, cultural, natural histories and heritage of places, with a particular interest in landscape and environment. I often work in collaboration and create projects in response to a particular location or question. The work ranges from larger curatorial, collaborative frameworks to individual commissions, participation and research.

Current and Recent Projects

Attentive Geographies 2014 – 16, commissioned to create a new textile work in response to, and participate in, the research process for Attentive Geographies. An AHRC funded project by the Geographies of Creativity and Knowledge Research Group at Exeter University. It is exploring “What happens where you are attentive to creative processes in your research?”

The Observatory, Artist in Residence on Lymington Keyhaven Nature Reserve, New Forest National Park, 2 months in 2015, commissioned by SPUD as part of the Lookin Lookout project. Exhibition forthcoming in 2016

Artist in Residence Mixed Reality Lab (2014),  Mixed Reality Lab, School of Computing, Nottingham University on the Aestheticodes Project.

Bikes and Bloomers (2013) – a commission to create textiles for the Freedom of Movement project by Katrina Jungnickel and Goldsmiths University of London.

Hidden Families (2012 – current) – an AHRC research collaboration with Royal Holloway, NEPACS and Action for Prisoners Families.

Storyweir (2012 – current) – commissioned by Exlab2012, Bridport Arts Centre and PVA medialab, working with Cultural Geographers from Exeter University and National Trust, public artworks, live video and music events, exhibitions and engagement for Hive Beach, Dorset and Bridport Arts Centre for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Pinning our Hopes (2011) – a series of drawings and fabric designs for garments created with Mrs Jones,  for the exhibition Fifties, Fashion and Emerging Feminism.

Pallion Ideas Exchange (2012)  – project with researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London’s Information Security Group to co-design an ideas exchange with a local community in Pallion, a former shipbuilding community.

As It Comes (2010) – A project in Lancaster exploring the role of independent shops and traders commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts.

100 Views of Worthing Pier: Tall Tales, Ghosts and Imaginings ( 2010) – commissioned by artistsandmakers.comPublic Spaces:

Local Places (2010) – works on paper commissioned by the Empty Shops Network Tour to respond to Brixton and Coventry Market.

Public Spaces: Local Places (2010) – commissioned by the Empty Shops Network Tour to respond to Granville Arcade, Brixton and Coventry Indoor Market.

In Good Heart (2010) – works on paper from a collaboration with Dodolab on Prince Edward Island, Canada.

Landscapes in Dialogue (2010) – works on paper for reflecting on my residency in Ivvavik National Park in Arctic Canada.

Birmingham Total Place (2010) – Proboscis commissioned by Birmingham City Council in response to conversations with parents and early years workers.

With our Ears to the Ground (2009) – Proboscis commissioned by Green Heart Partnership with Hertfordshire County Council.

At The Waters Edge: Grand River Sketchbook (2008) –  video and work on paper commissioned by Render for the atrium of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, Ontario.

Being in Common (2008/09) – Proboscis was commissioned by Haring Woods Studio for Gunpowder Park, London for the Art of Common Space project.

Sutton Grapevine (2008/09) – Proboscis was commissioned by ADeC (Arts Development in East Cambridgeshire) to research online and offline experiences in a rural community where there is a lack of cultural spaces.

Perception Peterborough (2008) – a creative visioning project to develop solutions to the challenges Peterborough faces in the next 15-20 years. Proboscis was commissioned, with Haring Woods Studio, by Peterborough City Council, Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council East, Sport England and East of England Development Agency.

Lattice::Sydney (2008) – Proboscis led, with Information and Cultural Exchange and the British Council in Sydney, a workshop with Western Sydney creative practitioners.  Part of the British Councils Creative City project.

Social Tapestries (2004/07) – a major Proboscis research programme exploring the benefits and costs of knowledge mapping and sharing (public authoring) for everyday life.

Topographies and Tales (2004/09) –A film, a two day lab and residencies in Canada and Scotland, with Joyce Majiski.

Artist in Residence (2005) – Klondike Institute for Art and Culture,  Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.

Navigating History (2004/05) – Proboscis collaborated with curator Deborah Smith to bring to light local history collections through 11 commissions. Funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England, Creative Partnerships and local authorities.

Artist in the Park (2003) – Parks Canada Residency in Ivvavik National Park, Northern Yukon, Canada.

Urban Tapestries (2003/04) – Urban Tapestries was a major Proboscis project combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems and collaborating across industry, academic research, communities and arts.

Landscape and identity; Language and Territory (2002) a partnership with  InIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts, London).

Arteleku: My Map is Not Your Map

September 23, 2009 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Today I’m travelling to San Sebastian, Spain to take part and give a presentation at the workshop, My Map is Not Your Map. The workshop is hosted by Arteleku and coordinated by José Luis Pajares (gelo); the other presenters are Lize Mogel, Fabien Girardin and Julius von Bismarck.

My presentation (Thurs 24th at 19.00) will be an overview of Proboscis’ projects exploring place, public authoring and sensing conducted since the 2002 (e.g. Urban Tapestries, Social Tapestries, Feral Robots, Snout, Sutton Grapevine & Sensory Threads. Proboscis’ work has always focused less on the technological than on the relational nature of linking human knowledge and experience to place – why and how people tell stories and construct narratives around the places they inhabit and which hold meaning for them.

A Case of Perspectives

March 2, 2009 by Giles Lane · 3 Comments 

Proboscis is proud to announce the publication of A Case of Perspectives – a limited edition artists bookwork by Alice Angus and Giles Lane, created as part of Social Tapestries. The bookwork contains a series of designed as well as handmade artefacts inspired by and responding to our experiences in the Social Tapestries programme of projects. 63 Tapestry cards are organised into 3 groups – 21 Endless Landscapes, 21 project photos and 21 Urban Tapestries mobile phone interface screenshots – the reverse sides printed with sections from a map of Urban Tapestries threads and pockets. Also enclosed are 2 StoryCubes, 1 containing images upload by UT trial participants and the other representing 6 principles of public authoring. A copy of the Atlas of Enquiry and a handmade eBook presenting an overview of the Social Tapestries research programme complete the box.

Numbers 1-21 will be sold complete with an unframed original watercolour painting of one of the Endless Landscape panels by Alice Angus. Price – £200 + shipping. Please contact us for more details.

Numbers 22-190 are available to buy online price – £40 + shipping.

themes

November 5, 2008 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Much of our work, especially our research activities, is inspired and guided by over-arching themes. In 2020 we adopted Civic Agency as our new theme.

Civic Agency

How to we make a difference as individuals and members of local communities in shaping the increasingly interconnected world in which we live? When our means and sources of communication and information are increasingly being gathered into the hands of fewer, but bigger companies and cabals of power? Civic Agency is our new theme focused on collective and collaborative ways to resist authoritarian and top-down exercise of power – to swim against the currents and find alternatives to normalising patterns that are presented as inevitabilities. Building on our past themes and work, Civic Agency seeks to inform strategies and tactics of subversion and to challenge normative futures with other possibilities.

Read more…

Previous Themes (2001-2019)

Public Goods (2011-19)

Public Goods is our new theme focused on making and sharing tangible representations of the intangible things we feel are most precious about the places and communities we belong to, such as stories, skills, games, songs, techniques, memories, local lore and experiential knowledge of local environment and ecology.

What is most precious about the places and communities in which we live, work and play?

How can we begin to communicate the value of the intangible goods and assets that define our attachment to people, places and things?

Britain is entering what promises to be the most radical transformation of our public services and social infrastructure since the establishment of the welfare state in 1945. As many of the more recognisable tangible assets (libraries, forests, public art and culture venues, arts activities) are run down, sold off or cut back, Public Goods aims to re-invigorate our appreciation of the immense ‘common wealth’ that persists in everyday life across the diversity of cultures in our society. It is a critical moment of artistic opportunity to investigate the resilience, adaptability and future of local communities.

See the project page on Public Goods and the Public Goods Lab for more details.

Cultures of Listening (2006-2011)

Since 2002 Proboscis has been exploring and developing the concept of Public Authoring, the everyday mapping and sharing of local knowledge and experience. We believe that it is just as important to listen to the voices of others as to make our own voice heard and that this skill is, in itself, a significant aspect of understanding citizenship, toleration and participation in democracy.

The act of listening is crucial to our vision of public authoring – where public authoring offers people a space to have a voice it also needs to encourage that voice to be heard and listened to. In the noise and confusion of the modern world, where we are bombarded with ever-increasing amounts of communication, it is becoming harder to listen, or find the time to listen to those around us.

Proboscis’ Social Tapestries (2004-08) programme can be seen as a metaphor to describe interdependence (of communities and people) through its exploration of how people weave threads of knowledge and experience across the public domain – creating a public knowledge commons. The everyday experience of sound and skills of listening are largely dominated by visual culture, yet cultures of listening are crucial to cultural experience and understanding human relationships; from the intimate to the civic, local to international. Social Tapestries aims to develop these practices of public authoring that in turn engender cultures of listening – places and spaces in which we pause to reflect on what we hear, to disentangle the meaning from the babble of noise.

Species of Spaces (2001-2005)

Species of Spaces explores the relationships between the physical and the virtual – how people navigate between the phenomenological world of the human senses and the invisible, immanent world of data and communications. SoMa acts as a facilitator and developer of new networks that lead to innovative collaborations, partnerships and alliances to explore how creative interventions can inspire and influence public policy and socio-cultural trends.
Projects include: Private Reveries, Public Spaces; DIFFUSION: Species of Spaces; Peer2Peer; Urban Tapestries; Social Tapestries;

A Species of Spaces Diffusion series was commissioned and edited by Giles Lane between 2001-06

Liquid Geography (2001-2005)

Liquid Geography questions and explores contemporary perceptions of geography, territory and landscape. It encompasses our research into new and emerging forms of public art, and explores new sites for reception by investigating the relationships between audience and artwork, producer and participant, site and distribution.
Projects/experiments include: Landscape & Identity;Language & Territory; Topographies & Tales; 
Sonic Geographies; Topologies; DIFFUSION: Liquid Geography;

A Liquid Geography Diffusion series was commissioned and edited by Alice Angus between 2002-06

Feral Robots

November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Robotic Feral Public Authoring was a collaboration between Proboscis, Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab and Natalie Jeremijenko. Combining Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries public authoring platform with Natalie’s Feral Robot concept (first commissioned by Proboscis for Private Reveries, Public Spaces) to create a pollution sensing and mapping tool for local communities to discover more about their environments and correlate it with other local knowledge.

Working with local residents and users of London Fields in Hackney we built a feral robot to sense air pollution in the park, uploading the data via Mesh WiFi to the Urban Tapestries platform where it could be seen mapped against local knowledge about the park shared by residents. Space Media Arts provided a base for a bodystorming workshop and access to a local mesh wifi network.

Project website

Team: Demetrios Airantzis, Alice Angus, Camilla Brueton, Dima Diall, Natalie Jeremijenko, Giles Lane, Karen Martin, George Papamarkos, George Roussos & Orlagh Woods.

Partners: Birkbeck College (University of London), Space Media Arts.

Funded by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)

Conversations & Connections

November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment 

As part of our Social Tapestries research programme, Proboscis collaborated with Kevin Harris of Local Level and residents of the Havelock Estate in Southall, west London to explore how communication technologies (such as Urban Tapestries) and creative techniques (such as Bodystorming, StoryCubes & Diffusion eBooks) might enhance democratic engagement at local level by stimulating the habits of participation.

The project encountered significant issues in adoption and engagement due to complex and interwoven social, cultural, economic, linguistic, educational factors – and a key outcome was the ongoing evaluation of these barriers and how we tried to address them. The project’s final report to the Ministry of Justice (April 2007) quickly became Proboscis’ most downloaded publication ever.

Project Website

Team: Camilla Brueton, Kevin Harris (Local Level), Giles Lane & Orlagh Woods
Partners: Bev Carter (Partners in Change); HIRO (Havelock Independent Residents Organisation)

Funded by the Ministry of Justice (Electoral Policy Division Innovation Award)

history

November 1, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment 

2019
City of Refuge Toolkit published.
City of Refuge: Giles Lane speaks on panel at Migration & the Digital City Symposium, London School of Economics.
Giles Lane appointed “Specialist Researcher in Art-Science” (part time) at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London.
Materialising Data, Embodying Climate Change project begins with 3 years funding from AHRC.

2018
UnBias: Fairness in Pervasive Environments Workshop, Edinburgh
UnBias: publication of the UnBias Fairness Toolkit; public launch at the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Digital Design Weekend
City of Refuge: collaboration with Media@lse, London School of Economics devising & delivering workshops to explore experiences of refugees and local citizen actors in London, Berlin & Athens.
Single Digital Presence: contract with British Library to devise & deliver public workshops
Not-Equal: Proboscis is a founding partner in the EPSRC-funded Social Justice in the Digital Economy Network+
Beyond Engagement: workshop for students
TKRN Legacy Event: workshop & field trip to Reite Papua New Guinea 
Practising Creative Securities: publication for Information Security Group, Royal Holloway University of London within the Collective Securities project

2017
UnBias : development of Fairness Toolkits for young people & policymakers
Digital Mattering : collaboration initiated with British Antarctic Survey, Birkbeck UoL & Prof Tom Corby at University of Westminster
Lifestreams: inclusion in group exhibition, The New Observatory, at FACT Liverpool (June-October)
Phantom Tomes published: bookleteer & eBooks presented at British Library Labs annual conference (November)
Attentive Geographies : collaboration with Geography Dept at University of Exeter

2016
TREsPASS Exploring Risk : publication for Information Security Group, Royal Holloway University of London
UnBias begins : collaboration with Human Centred Computing at University of Oxford; Horizon DER, University of Nottingham & Informatics Dept, University of Edinburgh. EPSRC funded.
Christmas with Artcodes : collaboration with Mixed Reality Lab/Horizon
Data Manifestation Talk at Open Data Institute, London
TKRN: field trips to Vanuatu & Papua New Guinea
Data Manifestation presentation at Ethics in Data Science symposium, Alan Turing Institute, London

2015
Peeking Over the Horizon : workshop for Making London event, University of Greenwich
TKRN: field trip to Papua New Guinea
Proboscis closes St Georges Circus studio. Operates ‘virtually’ going forwards.
Magna Carta 800 : 6 bookleteer books celebrating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta
Artcodes/Aestheticodes: Alice Angus residency with Mixed Reality Lab/Horizon DER exploring artcodes and smart fabrics.
Wearable Superpowers : Snout costumes presented at Science Museum Late event
Soho Memoirs : 3 bookleteer books published for Museum of Soho
Embodying Data : workshop with MA Design students at Edinburgh College of Art

2014
Embodying Data: Giles Lane awarded Creativeworks Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Pervasive Computing Lab, Birkbeck University of London
CENTER-TBI : collaboration with Movement Science Group at Oxford Brookes University to devise patient-centred methods for developing a digital Rehabilitation Tool for survivors of Traumatic Brain Injury
Bikes And Bloomers : collaboration with Kat Jungnickel, University of Goldmsiths

2013
Visualise Making Art in Context: publication by Anglia Ruskin University
Lifestreams : exhibited at Mosaic3DX, Microsoft Research Cambridge
TEK Notebooks published : 3 bookleteer publications documenting the initial work with Reite village, Papua New Guinea in 2012
Neighbourhood Ideas Exchange published : open toolkit for community cohesion and development developed out of Pallion Ideas Exchange project
StoryMaker PlayCubes set published
Lifestreams : exhibited in This New Nostalgia show at London Design Festival
We Are All Food Critics 2 : project with children of Soho Parish Primary School as part of Soho Food Feast
Proboscis moves to new studio in St Georges Circus, Lambeth.
Climate Commons : event at Proboscis studio with Tony White, Hayley Newman & James Marriot
Hidden Families: exhibited at CHI conference, Paris
Hidden Families: exhibited at AHRC Connected Communities Showcase, London

2012
Indigenous Public Authoring : initial field trip to Reite Village, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea to co-design public authoring books using bookleteer/Diffusion eBook notebooks
Sam Majnep Symposium : Giles Lane presentation at symposium on Traditional Knowledge at University of Goroka, Papua New Guinea
StoryWeir installation at Bridport Arts Centre, Devon
the Periodical: launch of bookleteer-based printed book subscription service
bookleteer : public library & other new functionalities launched
Hidden Families : engagement project for families with relatives in prison in collaboration with NEPACS, Action for Prisoners’ Families & Information Security Group, Royal Holloway University of London
StoryWeir: site specific temporary public artwork and engagement programme commissioned for Hive Beach, Devon as pat of ExLab/Cultural Olympiad
We Are All Food Critics : project with children of Soho Parish Primary School as part of Soho Food Feast
Lifestreams: art/industry collaboration with Philips Research UK in Cambridge commissioned by Futurecity as part of Anglia Ruskin’s Visualise public art programme.
Pallion Ideas Exchange: community cohesion and development project with Pallion Action Group in Pallion Ward, Sunderland. in collaboration with Information Security Group, Royal Holloway University of London
City As Material 2: Professor Starling’s Thetford-London-Oxford Expedition: 3 bookleteer books published in collaboration with DodoLab, Canada

2011
Material Conditions : 8 bookleteer commissions by Active Ingredient, desperate optimists, London Fieldworks, Ruth Maclennan, Jane Prophet, Sarah Butler, Karla Brunet, Janet Owen Driggs & Jules Rochielle
Agencies of Engagement : collaborative research project with CARET, University of Cambridge
Fifties Fashion : commission by Day+Gluckman for exhibition at Collyer Bristow Gallery, Bloomsbury
Hot Science, Global Citizens Symposium : Giles Lane presentation, Sydney Australia
Public Goods : launch of new research programme
bookleteer: User API & web bookreader versions launched
Critical Texts : 3 essays commissioned from Bronac Ferran, Fred Garnett & Frederik Lesage

2010
As It Comes : commission by Mid Pennine Arts about independent traders in Lancaster
Broken City Lab: collaboration with DodoLab in Windsor, Ontario
City As Material : collaborative walking/publishing project using bookleteer
Graffito: online collaborative drawing app in collaboration with Big Dog Interactive, Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham & Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
100 Views of Worthing Pier : commission for Worthing Pier, Made in Worthing Festival
DodoLab Rijeka : collaboration with DodoLab’s creative intervention in the city of Rijeka, Croatia
Seven Days in Seven Dials : collaboration with partners in the Culture Quarter programme working with young people to make creative interventions in Covent Garden.
Future Jobs Fund : Proboscis supports 7 unemployed 18-25 year olds with 6-month paid placements
In Good Heart : exhibition by Alice Angus for Dig Up My Heart: Artistic Practice in the Field curated by Shauna McCabe at the Confederation Centre Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI Canada
Sensory Threads : workshop & live demonstration at CHI Atlanta, USA
Birmingham Total Place : engagement commission for Early Intervention Programme

2009
With Our Ears to the Ground : community engagement commission across Hertfordshire
bookleteer.com: self publishing platform launched
DodoLab PEI : collaboration with DodoLab in Prince Edward Island, Canada
Being in Common Catalogue of Ideas published : deck of cards bookwork
Being in Common: site specific temporary public artwork and engagement programme commissioned for Art of Common Space public art programme, Gunpowder Park, Waltham Cross.
Sensory Threads : project launches at Dana Centre, Science Museum London
DodoLab Montreal : collaboration with DodoLab at the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montreal, Canada
Paralelo : participation in UK/Brasil/Netherlands collaboration workshop in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Social Tapestries A Case of Perspectives published : limited edition artists bookwork

2008
At The Waters Edge: Grand River Sketches : exhibition by Alice Angus at Render, university of Waterloo, Canada
Digital Cities : London’s Future : Snout & Feral Robots exhibited in show curated by Sir Terry Farrell at The Building Centre London
Dislocate : creative workshop of place and sensing in Yokohama Japan at Dislocate Festival
Sensory Threads: participatory wearable/environmental sensor/generative sound art project in collaboration with Pervasive Computing Lab, Birkbeck University of London; Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham; Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London and School of management, University of Southampton
Perception Peterborough: creative visioning commission for City of Peterborough
Proboscis moves to new studio in Turnmill St, Farringdon
Lattice::Sydney : British Council Creative Cities East Asia community engagement commission with ICE in Western Sydney, Australia
Anarchaeology at Render : collaboration with Render at University of Waterloo, Canada
Art & Cartography : exhibition of work in Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria

2007
September
RESIDENCY: Giles Lane is resident at Render, University of Waterloo, Canada, for the first stage of our public authoring collaboration (10-21/09/2007).
TALK : Giles Lane gives a talk at University of Western Ontario, London Canada (19/09/2007)
SYMPOSIUM : Alice Angus & Karen Martin present Proboscis’ work at the iDesign Symposium, Royal Festival Hall, London (18/09/2007)

July/August
RESIDENCY : Proboscis Case Study Residency participants Eloise, Georgia, Ayalouwa & Vanda complete a week long residency using the DIFFUSION Generator to create eBooks and StoryCubes (23/07-01/08/2007).
SYMPOSIUM : Alice Angus attends the British Council’s Creative Cities symposium in Yokohama, Japan (23-27/07/2007).
PERFORMANCE : Loren Chasse gives a performance, Footpaths, at Proboscis’ Studio (04/07/2007)

June
WORKSHOP: Experiencing Democracy workshop with Loren Chasse at Jenny Hammond Primary School, London.

May
PUBLICATION : Proboscis published the Conversations & Connections Project Report for the Ministry of Justice (18/05/2007)
TALK : Giles Lane participates in a debate for New Media Scotland’s Poker Club series (22/05/2007)
TALK : Giles Lane presents Snout at the TakeAway Festival, Dana Centre, Science Museum London (10/05/2007).
PANEL DEBATE : Giles Lane participates in the Social Technologies Summit at Futuresonic, Manchester (11/05/2007).
WORKSHOP: Giles Lane participates as a tutor at Mediamatic’s Hybrid World Lab, Amsterdam (7-9/05/2007)

April
CONFERENCE : Proboscis creates a Public Authoring Zone at the Enter Festival, Cambridge (26-27/04/2007).
PERFORMANCE: Snout performance and public forum in Shoreditch, London (10/04/2007).

March
TALK : Giles Lane gives a talk for Design Critical Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London (20/03/2007)
TALK : Alice Angus gives an Artist’s Talk at Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney Australia (15/03/2007)
RESIDENCY: Proboscis principals Alice Angus & Giles Lane are resident at Campbelltown Arts Centre as part of dLux’s Coding Cultures Concept Labs and Symposium.

February
TALK : Giles Lane gives a talk on Social Tapestries and public authoring at CARTE, University of Westminster (15/02/2007)
TALK : Giles Lane presents ST at Uncharted Territories: The Brave New World of Mapping at the British Library (14/02/2007)
WORKSHOP : Giles Lane gives a design masterclass on storytelling techniques for the Interaction Design Lab at Duncan of Jordanstone College, University of Dundee (7/02/2007).
Proboscis moves to new studio in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell.

January
RESIDENCY: Proboscis principals, Alice Angus & Giles Lane are resident at Render at the University of Waterloo as part of the Winter Lecture series in the School of Architecture.

2006
July
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Robotic Feral Public Authoring – demo at Futuresonic Festival, Manchester.

June
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: policy seminar on
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: project exhibited at Citymined Exhibition & Conference, South London Gallery (June 16-25).
URBAN TAPESTRIES: project exhibited at Sonar Festival, Barcelona (June 15-17th).
URBAN TAPESTRIES: project exhibited at Digital Hub, Dublin (June 9th).
URBAN TAPESTRIES: launch of beta trial of new Urban Tapestries software platform

May
DIFFUSION GENERATOR: launch of private beta trial of eBook Generator platform

March
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Robotic Feral Public Authoring – demo and presentation at the Takeaway Media Festival, Dana Centre London
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Robotic Feral Public Authoring – publication of new Cultural Snapshot
DIFFUSION GENERATOR: launch of private alpha trial of eBook Generator platform
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Proboscis awarded an innovation grant by the Electoral Policy Division of the Department of Constitutional Affairs.

February

SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Robotic Feral Public Authoring – Field trial of experimental Feral Robots in London Fields.

2005
November
DIFFUSION eBooks: Proboscis publishes three new DIFFUSION eBooks in the Liquid Geography series by: Hayden Lorimer & Kate Foster, Joyce Majiski & Louise K Wilson.
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Community Collaborations: Havelock (HIRO) Open Day.
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Education Collaborations: Jenny Hammond Primary School Open Day.
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Robotic Feral Public Authoring. Bodystorming Workshop at Space Media Arts for local residents and users of London Fields.

October
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: presentation at May You Live in Interesting Times Conference Chapter Arts, Cardiff
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: presentation at Middlesex University (Lansdown Lectures Series)
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: presentation at Re:Activism Conference Central European University, Budapest, Hungary SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Keynote at Future Wireless Cybersalon, Dana Centre, London

September
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: presentation at The Matching Link Symposium Stroom, Den Haag, Holland
JOB OPPORTUNITY: Proboscis is seeking a part-time temporary assistant for the Social Tapestries Project. details here
NAVIGATING HISTORY: Neville Gabie’s project, 10th September 2001…Archive Within An Archive launched.
NAVIGATING HISTORY: Workshop at Worthing Library for Jason Bowman’s project, Untitled (Reading)

August
TOPOGRAPHIES & TALES: work-in progress film by Alice Angus & Joyce Majiski screened in the Picturing the Yukon: Yukon Films on Tour series, Canada

July
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES PUBLIC FORUM: half day event focussing on research and future direction of the programme, hosted by the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research.
TOPOGRAPHIES & TALES: Sound Scavenging Workshop at Jenny Hammond Primary School, in collaboration with Loren Chasse.

June
DIFFUSION eBooks: Proboscis publishes new DIFFUSION eBooks in the Species of Spaces series by: Raoul Bunschoten, Nina Czegledy, Scott delaHunta, & Minna Tarkka.
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Community Collaborations. Bodystorming Workshop with St Marks Housing Coop in West London.

March
TOPOGRAPHIES & TALES: Creative Lab & Public Forum at Canada House
URBAN TAPESTRIES: presentation at Whitehead Lecture Series, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Proboscis: presentation at Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford

February
TOPOGRAPHIES & TALES: talk by Alice Angus at Yukon College, Dawson City, Canada
URBAN TAPESTRIES: presentation at University of Cambridge Computer Science Dept
URBAN TAPESTRIES: presentation at PLAN, ICA, London

January
30/1/2005: Proboscis announces a new CULTURAL SNAPSHOT by Nick West.
TOPOGRAPHIES & TALES: Alice Angus & Joyce Majiksi in residence at the Klondike International Arts Centre, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada.

2004
November
URBAN TAPESTRIES: presentation at Devices of Design Colloquia, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Canada

October
URBAN TAPESTRIES: exhibition at ArchiLab, Lyons, France
URBAN TAPESTRIES: launch of UT web browser & RSS Feeds
4/10/2004: NAVIGATING HISTORY: project launches – website | events calendar

September
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: 1 day Creative Lab at the London School of Economics

August
Proboscis awarded funding by EPSRC (Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council) to host a Visiting Fellowship by Natalie Jeremijenko in 2004/05.

July
30/7/2004: Proboscis announces two new CULTURAL SNAPSHOTS by Giles Lane and Katrina Jungnickel.

June
10 Years of Proboscis: we celebrate our tenth anniversary since founding Proboscis in 1994
URBAN TAPESTRIES: field trial of mobile phone prototype, London

May
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at PsychoGeoConflux, New York

April
29/4/2004: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at Cybersalon Mobile Futures, Dana Centre at Science Museum London
26-27/4/2004: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Participation in the Crossing Project, Finnish Institute London
21/4/2004: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at DigiPlay Symposium, University of Surrey
21/4/2004: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at Critical Platform, HTBA Hull
14/4/2004: Panel Session at Life of Mobile Data Conference, University of Surrey
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Bodystorming Experience at London School of Economics
Proboscis becomes an Arts Council England RFO (Revenue Funded Organisation) 2004-2006

March
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentations at Nokia, BBCi, Middlesex University, University of Westminster
SOCIAL TAPESTRIES: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation awards funding for collaborations with civil society organisations to develop experiments using Urban Tapestries.
NAVIGATING HISTORY: Arts Council England, Creative Partnerships Kent, West Sussex County Council, Mid Kent Arts & Libraries and East Sussex County Council award funding to new series of commissions in archives in South East England.

February
14/2/2002: Proboscis launches new website
URBAN TAPESTRIES: DTI awards funding extension to UT

January
31/1/2002: Proboscis announces new CULTURAL SNAPSHOT
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at Approaching the City conference, University of Surrey

2003
December
URBAN TAPESTRIES: public trial of prototype system in Bloomsbury, London: details
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at Intelligent Media Institute Workshop, Imperial College London

November
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at DMZ Festival, London
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at CHArt Conference, London

October
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentations at Blur03 (New School University), Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU), Parsons School of Design and School of the Visual Arts, New York
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at Department of Trade & Industry Knowledge Transfer Club

September
URBAN TAPESTRIES: Participation at Place Conference, Intel Research Labs Oregon
DIFFUSION eBooks: Presentation at The Digital Hub, Dublin
Presentation at People Inspired Innovation Conference, Adastral Park Suffolk
MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at the British Council Film Festival in Berlin
2/9/2003: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Bodystorming Experience at London School of Economics

August
21/8/2003: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Bodystorming Experience at London School of Economics

July
30/7/2003: Proboscis Privacy Policy updated
18/7/2003: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Presentation at Wireless World Conference, University of Surrey
10/7/2003: DIFFUSION eBooks selected for EXHIBIT3 at The Digital Hub, Dublin (runs until 30/9/2003)

June
20/6/2003: URBAN TAPESTRIES: Bodystorming Experience at Hewlett-Packard Research Labs, Bristol
6/6/2003: P2P CREATIVE LAB 2: Creative Interventions: digital technologies & public libraries
with Lighthouse Media Centre Brighton
4 & 7/6/2003: MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at Cheltenham Festival of Science
4-9/6/2003: MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at International Short Film Festival Hamburg

May
30/5/2003: Proboscis announces 5 new DIFFUSION eBooks in the Species of Spaces series | Press Release
by: Caroline Bassett, John Foot, Melanie Jackson, Simon Pope and Anne Sobotta
1-2/5/2003: P2P CREATIVE LAB 1: Wireless Networks, Public Authoring & Social Knowledge at London School of Economics.
Daniel Langlois Foundation supports URBAN TAPESTRIES
SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION OFFER: MAPPING PERCEPTION BOOK & CD-ROM & PAL VHS VIDEO
PLUS COIL 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9/10 AND GHOST STORIES ALL FOR ONLY £25: DETAILS HERE
ONLY 14 SETS REMAINING

April
26/4/2003: MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck, Germany
25/4/2003: MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at LUX Open, Royal College of Art, London
18/4/2003: MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at Singapore International Film Festival

March
18/3/2002: Proboscis announces four new CULTURAL SNAPSHOTS

January
URBAN TAPESTRIES receives approval for DTI funding as part of the City & Buildings Research Centre
(Hewlett Packard Research Labs, Bristol) of the Next Wave Technologies & Markets programme.
Arts Council of England Collaborative Arts supports URBAN TAPESTRIES
MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM screening at the British Film Festival in Israel, January 2003

2002
November
30/11/2002: SONIC GEOGRAPHIES presentation at ULTRASOUND SYMPOSIUM, Huddersfield: details here
23/11/2002: MAPPING PERCEPTION FILM premieres in UK at Brief Encounters Film Festival,Watershed, Bristol

October
8/10/2002: MAPPING PERCEPTION BOOK & CD-ROM Published.
9/10/2002 to 3/11/2002: MAPPING PERCEPTION INSTALLATION exhibited at Cafe Gallery Projects

September
MAPPING PERCEPTION presentation at Sciart Symposium, Liverpool Biennial: 26th September 2002
12/9/2002: Dr Mark Lythgoe to present the prestigious Dorothy Hodgkin Award Lecture for the BA (British Association for the Advancement of Science) on MAPPING PERCEPTION at the University of Leicester.

July
London Arts supports further DIFFUSION eBooks for SPECIES OF SPACES series

June
25/6/2002: Proboscis and MEDIA@LSE host PRIVATE REVERIES, PUBLIC SPACES: PUBLIC FORUM
launch of prototypes and new website | Press Release
14/6/2002: Proboscis and INIVA host Liquid Geography Creative Lab 2
14/6/2002: Proboscis announces new series of DIFFUSION eBooks: Liquid Geography | Press Release
14/6/2002: Proboscis announces new DIFFUSION website
4/6/2002: SoMa presentation at New York University’s Centre for Advanced Technology: details here
Arts Council of England New Media Projects Fund supports PRIVATE REVERIES, PUBLIC SPACES

May
3/5/2002: CELEBRATING GEORGES PEREC, Architectural Association
an evening celebrating Perec and marking the publication of AA Files 45/46 & DIFFUSION eBooks series, SPECIES OF SPACES
Peer2Peer Creative Labs postponed to Autumn 2002

April
24-28/4/2002: INTIMATE TECHNOLOGIES/DANGEROUS ZONES SUMMIT, Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada: Giles Lane panel presentation

March
22/3/2002: Proboscis and INIVA host Liquid Geography Creative Lab 1
3/3/2002: Proboscis announces new series of DIFFUSION eBooks: Species of Spaces
Press Release for Species of Spaces

January
Arts Council of England supports Peer2Peer Creative Labs

2001
December
2/12/2001: SONIC GEOGRAPHIES presentation at the Architecture Foundation as part of Calling London

November
South East Arts supports P2P Creative Labs

October
Proboscis launches new online publishing series: CULTURAL SNAPSHOTS

September
PRIVATE REVERIES PUBLIC SPACES commissions for conceptual prototypes awarded to:
Natalie Jeremijenko/Bureau of Inverse Technology (Feral Robotis Sniffer Dog)
Ben Hooker & Shona Kitchen (Hard Shoulders and Soft Verges) and
Rachel Baker (Platfrom).

August
SoMa – social matrices think tank for culture: new website here.

July
Proboscis launches new website for Peer2Peer: www.peer2peer.org.uk
London Arts supports new DIFFUSION eBook series: SPECIES OF SPACES.

June
New website for MAPPING PERCEPTION launched.
Proboscis receives major award from the Fondation Daniel Langlois, Montreal for PRIVATE REVERIES PUBLIC SPACES

May
Proboscis announces new projects in development for 2001/2002:
PRIVATE REVERIES PUBLIC SPACES, SONIC GEOGRAPHIES, AUDIO HARVEST and a new series of DIFFUSION eBooks: SPECIES OF SPACES

April
Proboscis now undertaking commissions to design and produce DIFFUSION eBooks for clients.
Peer2Peer documentation available: here
SoMa – social matrices think tank for culture inaugural event: Peer2Peer one day seminar held at the Royal College of Art
Arts Council of England adopts DIFFUSION eBook format for CODE conference essays:
Stewart Home | Matt Locke | Steve Beard

March
Arts Council of England (Collaborative Arts Unit) supports SoMa: social matrices think tank

February
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation supports further research and collaboration of MAPPING PERCEPTION project.

January
SoMa – social matrices think tank for culture: aims and objectives published.

2000
December
1/12/2000: COIL final double issue 9/10 published.

September
19/9/2000: PERFORMANCE NOTATIONS, the first series in the online imprint DIFFUSION eBooks goes online at www.diffusion.org.uk
4/9/2000: Proboscis publishes TOPOLOGIES RESEARCH & FEASIBILITY REPORT

August
Ghost Stories by Pavel Büchler selected for the American Center for Design’s 23rd Design 100 Show: Not Yet the Periphery
The 23d 100 Show was chaired by Allen Hori of Bates Hori and juried by Gaye Chan of the University of Hawai’i,
Siobhan Keaney of London, and Harmine Louwe of The Hague.

July
7/7/2000 at the LUX CINEMA: evening of screenings celebrating forthcoming publication of final issue of COIL journal of the moving image

June
initial research phase for TOPOLOGIES public art for public libraries initiative completed.
Proboscis awarded major funding by National Lottery through the Film Council for MAPPING PERCEPTION film

April
Proboscis wins major Sciart Consortium Production Award for MAPPING PERCEPTION installation

March
Proboscis awarded funding by South East Arts towards MAPPING PERCEPTION film

January
Arts Council of England support initial research phase of TOPOLOGIES public art for public libraries initiative

1999
November
Arts Council of England support DIFFUSION project

September
Proboscis awarded funds by London Production Fund towards MAPPING PERCEPTION film

June
COIL issue 8 published

March
Ghost Stories: stray thoughts on photography and film by Pavel Büchler published

February
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL final double issue 9/10

1998
September
COIL issue 7 published
London Film & Video Development Agency award grant for COIL

June
Channel Four Television awards grant from Cultural Fund for COIL

May
COIL issue 6 published
New associate director appointed to the board: Brandon LaBelle of Errant Bodies Press, Los Angeles
Damian Jaques leaves Proboscis

April
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish Ghost Stories by Pavel Büchler

February
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL issues 7 & 8

1997
November
COIL screening programme at LUX Cinema: films by Brothers Quay, Walerian Borowczyk, Clio Barnard & Jayne Parker

September
COIL issue 5 published

June
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL issue 6

May
Channel Four Television awards grant from Cultural Fund for COIL

February
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL issue 5

January
COIL issue 4 published

1996
November
Proboscis incorporated in England and Wales as a company limited by guarantee (non profit)
Founding Directors: Giles Lane, Damian Jaques & Joan Johnston

October
COIL journal of the moving image featured in Life/Live exhibition at ARC – Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

June
COIL issue 3 published
Proboscis moves into shared office with MUTE Magazine in Curtain Road, Shoreditch

January
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL issues 3 & 4

1995
December
Channel Four Television awards grant from Cultural Fund for COIL

November
COIL issue 2 published & launched at Glasgow Film & Video Workshop

June
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL issue 2

March
COIL issue 1 published & launched at 152c Gallery, Brick Lane, London

1994
December
Arts Council of England awards grant to publish COIL issue 1

June
Proboscis founded by Giles Lane and Damian Jaques as a partnership to publish COIL journal of the moving image

press

October 29, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment 

Media Articles & Reviews
date	description	project
2005
August	Its the system, stupid article on BBC News by Bill Thompson	Urban Tapestries
March	Alice Angus & Joyce Majiski featured in A New Day on CBC Radio North, 1 March 2005	Topographies & Tales
February	Geo-tagging The City, New Media Knowledge, 27 February 2005	Urban Tapestries
	Imagination, perception and geographic realities in The Yukon News, 9 February 2005	Topographies & Tales
2004
October	Finding a New Path to Local History in Worthing Herald, 14 October 2004	Navigating History
	Proboscis Probes Urban Public Authoring Article by Howard Rheingold for The Feature	Urban Tapestries
	Film Reveals History of Life by the Seaside and Showman Obscura both in Folkestone Herald, 14 October 2004	Navigating History
	Navigating History: a review of Botanizing the Library in Folkestone Herald, 7 October 2004	Navigating History
	Artists Bring History to Life in Worthing Guardian, 1 October 2004	Navigating History
September	Giles Lane interviewed for NPR Radio: The World Handheld Report (17/09/2004)	Urban Tapestries
	Navigating History: Seeing By The Sea and The Past Reinterpreted by Contemporary Artists both in The Quarter Magazine, no 21	Navigating History
	UT featured in icon magazine issue 16	Urban Tapestries
July	UT featured in E-Government Bulletin focus on wireless networks	Urban Tapestries
	Navigating History: an appeal for information in The Quarter Magazine, no 19	Navigating History
	Any old films in the attic, Folkestone Herald, July 22nd 2004	Navigating History
	UT featured in Bill Thompson’s BBC Online column	Urban Tapestries
June	Mobiles build interactive cities by Helen R. Pilcher in Nature Science Update	Urban Tapestries
March	Location Services Change from Concept to Reality by Eric Lin in The Feature	Urban Tapestries
	Smart Places by Jack Schofield in The Guardian	Urban Tapestries
January	The Semantic Earth by David Weinberger in Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0	Urban Tapestries
	Walking Through Sound by David Toop in Vodafone Receiver	Urban Tapestries
2003
November	Article in 160Characters.org by Mike Grenvile	Urban Tapestries
October	Digicult Technology Watch Briefing 10 [PDF 652Kb]	Urban Tapestries
May	Article by Andrew Lee in The Engineer	Urban Tapestries
	Science and art – A new way to see our world in UCL News	Mapping Perception
February	Feature by Sophia Spencer in SCICULT	Mapping Perception
	Book Review by Gareth Evans in Artists Newsletter	Mapping Perception
	ARTSEDNEWS	Mapping Perception
2002
November	BBC RADIO 4 MAPPING PERCEPTION: Presented by Francine Stock	Mapping Perception
	MAPPING PERCEPTION: Film Review in The Guardian	Mapping Perception
October	EDEN IN THE PARK in South London Press	Mapping Perception
	MAPPING PERCEPTION: Exhibition Review in VARSITY ONLINE	Mapping Perception
	The Art& Science of Mapping Perception in ARTS HUB	Mapping Perception
	Eden in the Park in SOUTHWARK NEWS	Mapping Perception
	LFVDA / London Production Fund Newsletter MAPPING PERCEPTION Launch	Mapping Perception
August	Consciousness cinema: notes on a unique Sci-Art collaboration by Andrew Kötting in Vertigo Magazine	Mapping Perception
2001
November	e books by Stephen Bury in Art Monthly	DIFFUSION eBooks
2000
November	ICH / GOSH R&D Bulletin Mark Lythgoe wins prestigious BA Dorothy Hopkins Award Lecture	Mapping Perception
May	When Artists Meet Scientists in Disability Times	Mapping Perception
	ICH / GOSH R&D Bulletin Interview with Mark Lythgoe	Mapping Perception
Press Releases
May 2003	Press Release: DTI Funding [A4 PDF 144Kb]	Urban Tapestries

people

October 29, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment 

CORE TEAM • ASSOCIATES • INTERNS • ALUMNI

CO-DIRECTORS	Alice Angus & Giles Lane
TEAM/KEY ASSOCIATES	Jo Hughes, Joe Flintham & Paul Makepeace
SOUNDING BOARD	Bronac Ferran, Dr Myria Georgiou, Angad Kaur, Hannah Redler, Sarah Thelwall, Bill Thompson.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS	Alice Angus & Giles Lane

CORE TEAM

Proboscis was founded by Giles Lane and is directed by Alice Angus and Giles Lane.

ALICE ANGUS
Alice is co-Director of Proboscis since 1998 and an artist, her personal interests and work revolve around; an interest in using artistic practices to rethink perceptions of common space (in urban space, landscape and water) and environmental knowledge, particularly around food and water; and an interest in how artistic practice can intersect with other disciplines suggesting new models of collaboration. Over the recent years she has been creating a body of work exploring concepts of proximity and presence, against the lived experience of a place including: In Good Heart (2010) about perceptions of farming; At the Waters Edge: Grand River Sketchbook (2008) for Render at the University of Waterloo, Ontario and Topographies and Tales (2005 – 09) a collaboration and short film with Joyce Majiski. The role of food markets, independent shopkeepers and the economics of the high street is being explored in 2010 in a series of collaborations and commissions with The Empty Shops Network, with Dodolab, and with Mid Pennine Arts.

GILES LANE
Giles founded and co-directs Proboscis. He leads its research programme (SoMa) as well as directing major projects and initiatives such as bookleteer.com, Social Tapestries, Urban Tapestries and Mapping Perception. Giles founded and edited COIL journal of the moving image as well as conceiving the DIFFUSION eBook and StoryCube formats. Between 1998 and 2002 Giles worked at the Royal College of Art, first in the Computer Related Design Research Studio (1998-2001), and latterly as a Research Fellow in the School of Communications. He was a Research Associate of the Media and Communications department at the London School of Economics (2001-10) and a visiting tutor on the MA Design Course at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2008-10). Giles was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2008 for his contribution to community development through creative practice.

JO HUGHES
Jo is Proboscis’ finance manager and bookkeeper. Jo runs her own accounts management and bookkeeping business for arts organisations – Blackdot Ltd.

ASSOCIATES

YASIR ASSAM
Yasir is the senior developer of bookleteer.com and runs his own software development company, Endless Void from his base in rural Australia.

JOE FLINTHAM
Joe is a web architect, developer, research and lecturer in Interactive Media at Bournemouth University. He works with Proboscis on interface development for bookleteer – his website is stowaway.net

STEFAN KUEPPERS
Stefan is an educator, designer and technologist with a focus on creating technologies for the built environment, collaboration, knowledge management, visualisation and simulation. He has worked as a researcher at the Bartlett School (UCL) and University of the Arts and most recently has been a Design & Collaboration Technology Specialist for the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. He has been a Proboscis Associate since 2007 as a key member of bookleteer’s development team and since Autumn 2011 has been Senior Research Associate developing new R&D capabilities in electronics, 3D fabrication and other technologies.

FREDERIK LESAGE
Frederik is a sociologist and ethnographer who has worked with Proboscis on several projects including Sensory Threads and bookleteer.com. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is currently a Teaching Fellow at Kings College, University of London.

PAUL MAKEPEACE
Paul is a programmer and sys admin working for Apple in California. He host and administers Proboscis’ public webserver, lists and mail server. Paul was also a programmer on Urban Tapestries and upgraded the original system for the mobile phone trial in June 2004.

GARY STEWART
Gary is an artist and researcher working between the UK, Brazil and the Caribbean. He is Artist in Residence and Research Associate at People’s Palace Projects a creative NGO established at Queen Mary, University of London whose vision is to extend understanding of the transformative powers of art to progress social justice and human rights issues through individual, collective and institutional change. Gary’s multidisciplinary activities across different countries enables him to forge relationships and dialogues across disciplines that bring together international and UK artists, activists, academics and audiences. Gary works with Proboscis as a Senior Creative Associate on new creative projects combining youth and public engagement with experimental media practices and technologies.

HAZEM TAGIURI
Haz collaborates with Proboscis on new publishing initiatives arising from bookleteer. He originally joined Proboscis in July 2010 on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through New Deal of the Mind and was employed as a Creative Assistant on publishing and engagement projects until August 2012.

MANDY TANG
Mandy works with Proboscis as an illustrator. She originally joined Proboscis in July 2010 on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through New Deal of the Mind and was employed as a Creative Assistant using her illustration and drawing skills across a range of projects until August 2012.

SARAH THELWALL
Sarah is a business and strategy consultant whose skills combine blue chip marketing, strategy and business development (B2B and B2C). Sarah was Proboscis’ Consultant in Residence (2004-07) is collaborating with Proboscis on a series of business development and strategy consulting initiatives for the the visual arts sector. Sarah received her MBA from Imperial College London.

INTERNS & PLACEMENTS

ELENA FESTA (June 2011-October 2011)

MOIN AHMED (November 2010-May 2011)

RADHIKA PATEL (November 2010-April 2011)

HAZEM TAGIURI (July 2010-January 2011)

MANDY TANG (July 2010-January 2011)

SHALENE BARNETT (March-September 2010)

KARINE DORSET (March-August 2010)

JOHN MCCARTIN (September-October 2009)

DIA BATAL (January-July 2009)

NIHARIKA HARIHARAN (July-September 2008)

PETER TIMMS (May-June 2008)

CARMEN VELA MALDONADO (January-June 2008)

DIAB AL-KUDARI ( July-September 2003)

ALUMNI

MOIN AHMED
Moin is a Web Development Assistant on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through Islington Council.

DEMETRIOS AIRANTZIS
Demetrios is an electronics engineer and works with Proboscis on developing sensor platforms for Sensory Threads, Snout and Robotic Feral Public Authoring.

DANIEL ANGUS
Daniel is a programmer based in Ayrshire, Scotland. He specialises in network application design and implementation, and is a senior programmer at the Student Loans Company. He was previously CTO of Autonomous Software and Thought Ltd. Daniel was the original software architect of the original Urban Tapestries platform.

SHALENE BARNETT
Shalene was a Communications and Coordination Assistant on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through Islington Council. Shalene joined in March 2010 and worked both on projects related to bookleteer and studio coordination.

JOHN PAUL BICHARD
John is a games and web designer. John took part in PRPS as well as designing the project website. John led the software development on Urban Tapestries in 2003/04 and is now developing ‘Neighbourhood Games’, a research project on social gaming and mobile technologies, for Social Tapestries.

CAMILLA BRUETON
Camilla worked for Proboscis from November 2005 to June 2006 as part-time project assistant on Social Tapestries. Camilla is a practising artist and combined her role with Proboscis with that of Training Manager at SPACE Studios.

LOREN CHASSE
Loren is a sound artist and educator based in San Francisco, USA. He collaborated with Proboscis on the Sound Scavenging project as part of Topographies & Tales as well as 3 Social Tapestries workshop projects with Jenny Hammond Primary School from 2005-7 (Sound Scavenging; Everyday Archaeology & Experiencing Democracy)

DIMA DIALL
Dima has recently completed his PhD in Computer Science at University College London. He designed and built a sensor platform for the Robotic Feral Public Authoring project as part of Social Tapestries.

KARINE DORSET
Karine was a Communications Assistant on a 5 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through Islington Council. Karine joined in March 2010 and worked on bookleteer projects.

STEVE EHRLICHER
Steve acted a Proboscis’ finance consultant (2004-06), assisting with bookkeeping, managing of project budgets and reporting to funders. Steve is also a practising artist and performer.

PAUL FARRINGTON
Paul is a designer, sound artist and founder of the design agency Studio Tonne. For Proboscis Paul designed and developed the DIFFUSION eBook format. Proboscis and Studio Tonne teamed up to write, edit, design and produce a book for IDEO London about their innovative design and product development for the Prada Store in New York.

NIMA FALATOORI
Nima is a designer and principal of NMoDesign. He collaborated with Paul Farrington on the design and development of the DIFFUSION eBook format, and designed individual titles. Nima was also responsible for design and implementation of the DIFFUSION website launched in May 2002. Nima designed the CD-ROM for the Mapping Perception project.

MICHAEL GOLEMBEWSKI
Michael is an artist and interaction designer, recently graduated from the Royal College of Art MA Interaction Design programme. Michael designed some Flash animations about Urban Tapestries and created the original Flash Viewer for the UT system.

NIHARIKA HARIHARAN
Niharika is a MA student at Central St Martins College of Art & Design (Creative Practice for Narrative Environments) and received her BA and Professional Diploma from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore. Niharika was an intern during 2008 and has since worked with Proboscis as an assistant on the project Being in Common.

KEVIN HARRIS
Kevin runs the community development consultancy, Local Level, and collaborated with Proboscis on the Social Tapestries project, Conversations and Connections.

DAMIAN JAQUES
Damian co-founded Proboscis with Giles Lane in 1994 to publish COIL journal. Damian was the graphic designer of the first 6 issues of the journal and a director of the company. Damian left to develop his burgeoning freelance design practice in 1998.

NATALIE JEREMIJENKO
Natalie is a world renowned artist and engineer and a founder member of the bureau of inverse technology. Natalie was an EPSRC Visiting Fellow at Proboscis during 2004/2005 investigating the uses of her Feral Robots with Urban Tapestries. Natalie was previously commissioned by Proboscis for PRPS. Natalie runs the Experimental Design Lab at University of California San Diego (UCSD).

JOAN JOHNSTON
Joan is a freelance arts manager with experience in the independent film and video sector and a director of Supernova*, a new site for Early Childhood in East London. Recent projects include: Location Manager – a guide to East and North London’s filming locations and local services, published through her own company Lightbulb Productions. Most recently Joan has been involved in research and development for the Centre for the Cell for Queen Mary and Westfield College and Barts and the Royal London Hospitals Trust. Joan received her MA in Arts Management from City University, London in 2000.

KATRINA JUNGNICKEL
Kat is a socio-cultural researcher on business, non-profit and academic projects. Her work focuses on new technologies and social behaviour, mobility and place. She was a team member on Urban Tapestries and contributed to other projects such as Mapping Perception and LILT.

ANGAD KAUR
Angad is a curator, editor and art consultant. Her work for Proboscis included co-editing Performance Notations (DIFFUSION eBooks), and research and development on Topologies and, more recently, planning the marketing and promotion strategy for Mapping Perception. She is a Contributing Editor of Portfolio Magazine and was Managing Editor of Afterall Magazine. Angad consults widely for artists and organisations, editing several CD-ROMs for FACT, developing a contemporary commissions programme for the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (1999-2001) and working as development officer for Blast Theory.

BRANDON LABELLE
Brandon is a writer, editor and sound artist, and the founder of Errant Bodies. Brandon has performed and created installations for art and music venues and festivals in the USA, Japan, UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Holland and Denmark, such as for ISEA 98 and at NTT ICC, Tokyo. Recordings of his work have been released by labels such as: Unique Ancient Tavern , Fringes, Selektion, Ground Fault, meme, digital narcis. Brandon curated the Social Music series of experimental sound works for Kunstradio Vienna, which were broadcast from May to October 2001.

JOYCE MAJISKI
Joyce is an artist and wilderness guide based in the Yukon, Canada. Joyce is collaborating with Proboscis on the Topographies & Tales project.

KAREN MARTIN
Karen has worked for Proboscis in a variety of roles: on interface design for the Robotic Feral Public Authoring and Snout projects,  facilitating the Diffusion Case Study Residencies and developing the Diffusion website. Recently Karen has been a team member on bookleteer.com, Sensory Threads, Being in Common and Sutton Grapevine. Karen is an artist and researcher studying for an EngD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of London.

RACHEL MURPHY
Rachel is an interaction designer and principal of Rudegirl Designs. She has worked as a Usability Consultant for Motorola and a Conceptual Designer for Lego Futura and Hewlett-Packard Research Labs. Rachel was a team member on Urban Tapestries and is a commissioned artist for Navigating History.

DIKAIOS PAPADOGKONAS
Dikaios is studying for a PhD in Computer Science at Birkbeck College, University of London. Dikaios worked with Proboscis on the development of a Java client for mobile devices for the Urban Tapestries platform.

GEORGE PAPAMARKOS
George is studying for a PhD in Computer Science at Birkbeck College, University of London. George has taken over the role of software architect and system programmer for the Urban Tapestries platform and is led the development of version 2 of the system.

RADHIKA PATEL
Radhika is a Marketing Assistant on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through New Deal of the Mind. Radhika joined in November 2010 and is working across projects on marketing and promotion.

VICTORIA PECKETT
Victoria recently completed her Masters in Media and Communications at at the London School of Economics. She was a social researcher on Urban Tapestries.

DIAB AL-KUDAIRI
Diab read Computer Science and Management at Kings College, University of London. He was on a STEP Placement with Proboscis during Summer 2003, working on the DIFFUSION eBook Generator proof of concept prototype.

ZOE SUJON
Zoe is a PhD candidate in Media & Communications at the London School of Economics. She is a social researcher on Urban Tapestries and Social Tapestries.

CARMEN VELA MALDONADO
Carmen is a MA student at Central St Martins College of Art & Design and has a postgraduate Diploma in Design for Visual Communication at the University of the Arts, London (London College of Communication), and a BA in Advertising and Public Relations, at the Communication University in Seville, Spain. After completing a 4 month internship with Proboscis in 2008, Carmen has since been commissioned to design several print publications for Proboscis projects as well as contributing template designs and other graphic material for bookleteer.com.

MARCEL WEIHER
Marcel is a programmer and principal of metaobject. Marcel collaborated with Proboscis on the development of the DIFFUSION eBook Generator proof of concept prototype.

NICK WEST
Nick is an information architect and researcher, currently studying for a PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has managed research projects at New York University (with Bell Atlantic/ Nynex and Viacom), National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janiero as well as posts at Paramount Pictures and Apple. Nick worked on Urban Tapestries and Social Tapestries.

ORLAGH WOODS
Orlagh Woods is an artist whose work explores how diverse people and communities engage with each other and their environment – how they connect, communicate and are perceived both through digital and non-digital means. She worked with Proboscis from 2004 to 2010 on projects such as Social Tapestries, Snout, Everyday Archaeology, Experiencing Democracy, Render, Lattice:Sydney, Perception Peterborough, Being in Common, Sutton Grapevine & With Our Ears to the Ground. Orlagh also curates a professional development programme for British Asian theatre company, Tamasha, in London.

projects

May 9, 2008 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment 

Materializing Data, Embodying Climate Change 
Proboscis is a partner in a 3 year AHRC-funded research project in collaboration with Prof. Tom Corby (Central St Martins, UAL); Prof. George Roussos (Birkbeck UoL) & Dr Louise Sime (NERC British Antarctic Survey). Devising and exploring the potential for Empathic Encounters with complex interconnected climate data sets to make abstract data and concepts more meaningful and tangible to the general public.
Begun 2019 | Ongoing

Single Digital Presence
Proboscis was commissioned by the British Library to devise and facilitate a series of workshops with library users across the UK as part of a user-centred design engagement process for the Single Digital Presence project, exploring the needs and desires of public library users for digital services.
Begun & Completed 2018

City Of Refuge
A collaboration with the London School of Economics (Media & Communications) on a series of workshops with refugees and their local supporters in three cities: London, Athens & Berlin. The project sought to gain insights into experiences of migration in these three places and to examine the role of digital communication in the making of cities of refuge.
Begun 2018 | Completed 2019

UnBias
A collaboration with the University of Oxford (Human Centred Computing), Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute (Nottingham) & University of Edinburgh (Informatics) to devise a Fairness Toolkit exploring bias, trust & fairness in algorithms deployed in social media and other key platforms.
Begun 2016 | Completed 2018

TK Reite Notebooks
A collaboration with Professor James Leach (UWA/CNRS) working with local people in Reite village, Rai Coast Papua New Guinea to co-design new shareable ways to record and share their local environmental and cultural knowledge.
Begun 2015 | Ongoing

Creative Securities
A collaboration with Professor Lizzie Coles-Kemp (Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London) to document the grassroots-based security methods and tools the group has been developing as part of several research projects.
Begun 2016 | Completed 2018

Librarypress
Proboscis ran a series of free public “Pop Up Publishing” workshops in libraries in Brent, Islington and Hounslow for the Librarypress project (funded by ACE), introducing members of the public to bookleteer and the concept of “hybrid publishing on demand”. We also ran two one-day Professional Development Masterclasses for professional library staff from ten London Library services (Brent, Camden, Hackney, Harrow, Hounslow, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Merton & Southwark).
Begun 2014 | Completed 2015

TBI Rehabilitation Tool
Proboscis consulted on strategies for engagement and user experience design for the Movement Science Research Group at Oxford Brookes University incorporating patient perspective into the development of a “Rehabilitation Tool” for survivors of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) to share data on their ongoing experiences of rehabilitation. Part of a Europe-wide research project, CENTER_TBI.
Begun & Completed 2014

the Periodical 
A monthly selection of one or more publications that have been created and shared on bookleteer were printed and posted to subscribers. It was an eclectic and often eccentric way of building a community of writers and readers around bookleteer and the Diffusion eBook format, inspired by 17th Century pamphleteering.
Begun 2012 | Completed 2015

Indigenous Public Authoring
A collaboration with Professor James Leach (UWA/CNRS) working with local people in Reite village, Rai Coast Papua New Guinea to co-design new shareable ways to record and share their local environmental and cultural knowledge.
Begun 2012 | Completed 2013

Hidden Families
A collaboration with ISG at Royal Holloway University of London, Freya Stang, NEPACS and Action for Prisoners Families to document and share the experiences of families visiting relatives in prison.
Begun 2012 | Completed 2013

Lifestreams
An Art + Industry commission as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s Visualise programme to work with Philips Research UK exploring new ways to engage people with biosensor data to promote wellbeing and healthy life choices.
Begun & Completed 2012

Pallion Ideas Exchange
A collaborative community co-design project in partnership with the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London and Pallion Action Group in Sunderland to assist in creating a grassroots knowledge network.
Begun & Completed 2012

StoryWeir
A commission to create a site-specific artwork on Hive Beach, Dorset (on the “Jurassic Coast”) as part of the Cultural Olympiad connecting human time with geological time.
Begun 2011 | Completed 2012

Fabric Design
Experiments with drawing and digital printing of fabrics.
Begun 2010 | Ongoing

Public Goods Lab
Our in-house R&D creative technology initiative.
Begun 2011 | Completed 2012

Public Goods
Our programme of projects focusing on making and sharing tangible representations of the intangible things we value most about the places and communities we belong to, such as stories, skills, games, songs, techniques, memories, local lore and experiential knowledge of local environment and ecology.
Begun 2011 | Ongoing

Agencies of Engagement
A collaborative research project with CARET & Crucible at the University of Cambridge investigating groupwork and collaborative practices in the university community to support software development of a collaboration platform.
Begun & Completed 2011

City As Material
A series of one day events in London combining urban exploration and collaborative publishing with bookleteer. 5 collaborative eBooks published and 4 eBooks commissioned from invited guests : Tim Wright, Ben Eastop, Simon Pope & Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
View the eBooks here
Begun & Completed 2010

Safe Planet
A commission to co-design and develop the artistic identity for a major global awareness campaign about Persistent Organic Pollutants for the United Nations Environment Programme.
Begun & Completed 2010

Graffito
Proboscis is a creative partner in the Graffito project, supported by the Horizons Digital Economy Research Institute, developing a collaborative drawing platform for smartphones and tablets.
Begun & Completed 2010

As It Comes
A commission from the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce to create a series of artistic works by Alice Angus about the independent traders of Lancaster and the culture of local trade.
Begun & Completed 2010

Birmingham Total Place
A commission for the Birmingham Total Place project to document the experiences of families receiving “Early Intervention” from social services and to communicate this in a novel way to policymakers and senior management.
Begun & Completed 2010

bookleteer
Our new free web-based self-publishing service for creating & sharing Diffusion eBooks and StoryCubes.
Launched 2009 | Ongoing

With Our Ears to the Ground
A commission from Green Heart Partnership to engage with 4 different geographic communities in Hertfordshire and explore people’s ideas about community.
Begun 2009 | Completed 2010

DodoLab
Proboscis is continuing our collaboration with DodoLab (a project supported by University of Waterloo and the Musagetes Foundation) first initiated at the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montreal, Canada May 10th-14th 2009.
Begun 2009 | Completed 2012

Sensory Threads
Proboscis is developing a new mobile participatory sensing project with researchers from the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London; Pervasive Computing Lab at Birkbeck College, Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham; and the School of Management at University of Southampton.
Begun 2008 | Completed 2009

Sutton Grapevine
A commission by ADeC (Arts Development East Cambridgeshire) to create a space where local residents of Sutton-in-the-isle near Ely, new and longstanding, can have the room to explore place and identity through creative activity.
Begun 2008 | Completed 2009

Being In Common
Being in Common invites people to expand and alter their understanding of ‘common space’ and is inspired by the close connection between the histories of enclosure, surveying and gunpowder that coincide in Gunpowder Park. A commission by Haring Woods Associates / Landscape+Arts Network Services at Gunpowder Park as part of the Art of Common Space programme.
Begun 2008 | Completed 2009

Perception Peterborough
Proboscis was commissioned (with strategic consultants Haring Woods Associates) to develop the creative vision for the growth for the City of Peterborough, an ambitious £1bn development plan over the next 15-20 years. Through an anarchaeological investigation of the city, its environment and inhabitants, Proboscis devised and facilitated a series of workshops and distributable works that contributed to a major regeneration strategy.
Begun & Completed 2008

Lattice::Sydney
Proboscis was invited by the British Council to design a framework for a series of collaborations and residencies with organisations in East Asia, as part of their Creative Cities programme. Lattice is a framework for Proboscis to work collaboratively with different partners in the region to engage local communities in developing their own tools and techniques for public authoring, anarchaeology and cultures of listening. The initial project Lattice:Sydney is hosted by ICE (Information & Cultural Exchange) in Western Sydney during 2008.
Begun 2007 | Completed 2008

Experiencing Democracy
A week long Social Tapestries workshop with Year 4 students at the Jenny Hammond Primary School in Waltham Forest investigating children’s experiences of democracy and democratic behaviour. Developed and delivered with Loren Chasse.
Download the learning diary eBook (A4); final Group eBook (A4) and project report (A4)
Begun 2007 | Completed 2007

Snout
Snout was a Social Tapestries collaboration between inIVA, Proboscis and researchers from Birkbeck College exploring relationships between the body, community and the environment. It built on our previous collaboration on Feral Robots to investigate how data can be collected from environmental sensors as part of popular social and cultural activities. Two carnival costumes instrumented with environmental sensors were created and a mock carnival held in Shoreditch, east London in April 2007.
Begun 2006 | Completed 2007

Conversations and Connections
Proboscis collaborated on an 18 month Social Tapestries project with community development consultancy, Local Level and Havelock Independent Residents Organisation to explore how public authoring concepts and tools could be used by residents of a low income social housing neighbourhood (in Southall, West London) to map and share local knowledge leading to an improvement in services from the local authority and housing agency. The project was funded through an Innovations grant from the Democratic Engagement branch of the Electoral Policy Division of the Ministry of Justice.
Download the Evaluation Report
Begun 2005 | Completed 2007

Everyday Archaeology
A week long Social Tapestries workshop with Year 4 students at the Jenny Hammond Primary School in Waltham Forest exploring the local environment and the children’s relationship to it. Developed and delivered with Loren Chasse.
Download the Activity & Impact Report
Begun 2006 | Completed 2006

Robotic Feral Public Authoring
A Social Tapestries collaboration with Birkbeck College and Natalie Jeremijenko to adapt toy robots with GPS positioning, environmental sensors and wireless data upload to Urban Tapestries. The prototypes were built for and tested in London Fields with the help of local people, and presented publicly at the Science Museum London.
Download the Cultural Snapshot
Begun 2005 | Completed 2006

Topographies and Tales
Topographies & Tales is about the relationship between people, language, identity and place, revealing small local stories against the larger picture of how our concept of space and environment is shaped by “belonging” and “nationhood”, and how boundaries, barriers and borders come to be formed. Proboscis collaborated with and supported residencies in the UK for two artists to create new works with us – Joyce Majiski (Canada) & Loren Chasse (USA).
Begun 2004 | Completed 2007

Social Tapestries
Social Tapestries was a research programme developing experimental uses of public authoring to demonstrate the social and cultural benefits of local knowledge sharing enabled by new mobile technologies. These playful and challenging experiments built upon the Urban Tapestries framework and software platform developed by Proboscis and its partners. Through collaborations and partnerships with other civil society organisations we addressed education, social housing, community arts and local government. Projects include: Experiencing Democracy, Snout, Conversations and Connections, Everyday Archaeology, St Marks and Robotic Feral Public Authoring.
Begun 2004 | Completed 2009

Navigating History
A collaboration with curator Deborah Smith commissioning 11 artists’ projects in local libraries and local history collections in the South East region of England. This unique project built on the Topologies research and created dynamic new relationships between local people, the artworks and the collections.
Begun 2003 | Completed 2005

Urban Tapestries
Proboscis created and developed this groundbreaking project exploring mobile technologies, mapping and public authoring  in partnership with the London School of Economics, Hewlett Packard Research Labs and Orange with Ordnance Survey and France Telecom R&D. The initial prototype (for PDA and WiFi) had a public trial in London in December 2003, the second prototype (for Symbian mobile phone and GPRS) was given a field trial in June 2004.
Download the Report: Public Authoring, Space & Mobility
Begun 2002 | Completed 2004

StoryCubes
StoryCubes are a tactile thinking and storytelling tool for exploring relationships and narratives. Each face of the cube can illustrate or describe an idea, a thing or an action, placed together it is possible to build up multiple narratives or explore the relationships between them in a novel three-dimensional way. StoryCubes are part of the Diffusion Shareables concept and can be created using the Diffusion Generator, as well as purchased as packs for creative projects, brainstorming and workshops. Proboscis also offers a personalised StoryCube printing service.
Begun 2002 | Ongoing

Landscape and Identity; Language and Territory
Liquid Geography questioned and explored contemporary perceptions of geography, territory and landscape, at a point in time when understandings of place and space are being redefined. The initial strand of this research was Landscape & Identity; Language & Territory, a collaboration between Proboscis, MEDIA@LSE and inIVA. Two Creative Labs will be held on March 22nd and June 14th 2002 exploring how new technologies can be used in innovative ways to transform our knowledge of other societies and cultures and act as enabling tools providing a catalyst for the development of new ideas. A series of DIFFUSION eBooks were commissioned as pilots for future experiments in knowledge creation and dissemination.
Begun 2001 | Completed 2002

Sonic Geographies
Sonic Geographies takes sound as the entry point for excavating and mapping urban experience and invisible infrastructures of the city. A series of experiments and sketches were developed that operated as maps and journeys but also as highly personal renderings of sonic experience – sounds of the personal world in conversation with sounds of the city.
Begun 2002 | Completed 2003

Private Reveries, Public Spaces
Proboscis commissioned 14 proposals from leading artists and designers addressing the theme of converging media technologies (internet, radio, interactive television, wireless telecommunications etc) and their social and cultural impact on the shifting relationship between private and public spaces. Three of the proposals were selected by a panel of judges to be developed into ‘conceptual prototypes’ for presentation to the public, peers, academia and industry as online demonstrations and at an event at the London School of Economics on June 25th 2002.
Begun 2001 | Completed 2002

Peer2Peer
Peer2Peer was an informal network of people interested in developing collaborations and practical solutions for potential partnerships across the arts, industry and academia. The Network consists of individual artists and designers and people from academia, industry, public funding agencies, private foundations and government. Proboscis initiated the network and hosted a number of meetings and events in partnership with the LSE, RCA, Iniva and others.
Begun 2001 | Completed 2003

SoMa – Social Matrices
In 1999/2000 Proboscis began to re-orient itself as a creative studio with a strong emphasis on research. Over the next 18 months we developed close partnerships with Professor Roger Silverstone at the London School of Economics and the School of Communications at the Royal College of Art. Our collaborative research programme, SoMa was launched in April 2001 as a ‘think tank for culture’ – a think, make and do environment for transdisciplinary collaborations.
Begun 2001 | Completed 2006

Mapping Perception
A collaboration between Giles Lane, curator and producer, Andrew Kötting, the acclaimed director of This Filthy Earth,Gallivant and Smart Alek, and Mark Lythgoe, neurophysiologist at the Institute of Child Health, London.
The project looked at the perceptions of impaired brain function to further understand the mind and body interaction and our relationship with its abnormality. It made visible connections between scientific and artistic explorations of the human condition, probing the thin membrane between the able and the disabled.
Begun 1998 | Completed 2002.

Diffusion
Diffusion is a downloadable hybrid digital/material book format, developed by Proboscis in 1999/2000. Since the publication of the first series of Diffusion eBooks, Performance Notations, in September 2000, Proboscis has continued to use the format for commissioning new creative publications, as well as adapting and developing the format for uses in other fields and projects. The design schematics were first published in 2002, and since 2003 Proboscis has been developing the Diffusion Generator – an online application allowing people without design skills to publish Diffusion eBooks of their own.
Begun 1999 | Ongoing

Topologies
Topologies was a research and feasibility study to investigate creating an initiative which could challenge existing definitions of public art. By commissioning and disseminating public artworks through the UK Public Library system, and using visual, aural and tactile media to investigate and represent abstract spaces and concepts, the works would form part of a wider attempt to broaden the audience for contemporary conceptual artwork. Topologies aimed to change both the context and the way in which people encounter art, aiming to introduce concepts of process-based art practices (as distinct from object-based works) to diverse and new audiences, and move the experience of encountering public (or conceptual) art away from a ‘viewer’ experience to that of a user.
The Research Report is available to download as a PDF file here.
Begun 1999 | Completed 2000

COIL journal of the moving image
Proboscis’ founding project, COIL was a 10 issue experimental publication that explored the practice of, and commissioned, artists film, moving image and new media works between 1995 and 2000. Over 140 artists, writers and others were published in the journal.
Begun 1994 | Completed 2000

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