alt.SPACE Meeting (June 16): Initial intro to collaborators

Posted June 16th, 2007 by Sammetria Goodson

Notes from the Alt Space Meeting:

- Observations
- Suggestions
- Thoughts

This forum topic is to capture thoughts from the Alt Space Meeting held @ Basekamp on June 16th.
Please add your comments below....

Thanks!

Sammetria

Alt Space Meeting notes

On June 19th, 2007 Sammetria Goodson says:

Just some notes from the Alt Space Meeting:

Scott pretty much summed up the meeting with his subsiquent email, but I just wanted to add some thoughts.

I think that Basekamp should come up with about 4 major events to happen each week in July up to the final Skype Dinner Party. If we limit the number of events, we can focus more on intent/planning, getting the word out and finally the execution of our events. We could alternate weeks and have two events @ Basekamp (to draw people to our space) and two events at some "alt space" around Philly. We discussed some secret underground world below Philly's streets - it would be cool to have an event here!
as described in the Alt Space flyer - or we can pick one of them and then plan around it. Personally, the Dissemination topic seemed very interesting - I immediately thought about how information travels from person to person - perhaps we could garble that and communication as a topic together and develop something in line with the Alt Space vision...more development is needed, of course, but this is just to get the comments going.

Also - for the final skype dinner party, I had the idea of doing a short presentation on how virtual, international meetings are held within corporations. There is some pretty specific rules of engagement - we could kick off the skype party with these rules...and then break them all - the exercise would be to see if we could still accomplish the goal of the meeting without using any of the common business practices for virtual meetings.

Thoughts?

I apoligize in advance for any sp mistakes....I'm really terrible!

Corporate Technologies, etc.

On June 20th, 2007 Anna Pellecchia says:

Sammetria, I love the suggestion about breaking the specific corporate rules of engagement and seeing if things are still accomplished -- it really goes well with the "illegalities" theme and generally just seems really interesting. I think it would provoke a lot of thoughts/questions on group interaction and collective processes, highlighting what may or may not be necessary for "successful" group interaction, what happens (good, bad, or neutral) when certain "rules" are broken, and how contexts may or may not shift when cooperate strategies are applied to other realms of group communication.

This is kind of off-topic, but when we were discussing the different pieces of technology that corporations use to make the virtual aspects of meetings and presentations more realistic (like the extended table thing Erica mentioned) it made me think of this crazy new thing, the Microsoft Surface, that I saw in the following video:

Again, my apologies for this being mostly unrelated to what we'll be doing with alt.SPACE... I just thought it was kind of mind-blowing, and it made me think about the ways in which the newest, biggest things in technology are going towards making the transfer and alteration of information more tangibly real -- there seems to be something really important or at least striking and enjoyable to people about making the communicative ease that technology provides more and more like the "old-fashioned," "hands-on" approaches where you physically shape an object and physically give it to someone. I'm sure there are a lot of other things all of this says, but I already feel sort of weird for talking about this and straying some from the main conversation.

I'll respond again soon with more on-topic thoughts.

--Anna

P.S. I just saw that the tagline for the Microsoft Surface is "A new way that feels likes us, a new way that acts like us."

observations

On June 19th, 2007 Erica Prince says:

These are just some notes that I wrote down later, that stuck with me while we were discussing things:

-The Ben Franklin quote was a high point:
"Originality is the art of concealing your sources"

-The desire to be original/ be credited as an individual vs group credit --- HUGE issue pertaining to the way artists/people in today's world seek success and recognition.

-Gentrification: being aware that you are apart of it is the first
step, realizing it is inevitable
-grafitti, stickers have multiple roles- can be to make a statement,
individual mark, directional/instructional, surface treatment
-Scott said about Philly: Big city with a mass inferiority complex...brings people together because of the lack of ego. It is possible to go out into the city, do something, and make an immediate impact that people will notice.

I really want to play soccer in the empty underground space. (I'll even screenprint basekamp uniforms).
-alternative uses of public spaces- make people reconsider urban
landscape, rules and laws concerning behavior in public, how to take
advantage of public space, disturbance vs. community event, finding
new and better ways to use overlooked city spaces

-skype dinner parties:

-lining up the tables would be amazing and really make a solid visual connection to what is going on.
-interesting miscommunication of talking with mouthful
-I'm all about some skype pictionary/chirades....
I also like the idea of online pictionary
with people that speak a different language, because drawings/visuals
are the universal language...although you'd have to translate their
guesses to see if they were right. hmmmmm...just an idea.

-how artists are taking advantage of corporate
presentation/communication technology to communicate on a way more
conceptual level

research groups:

-How research doesnt have to be written, or academic in nature, it can
be more abstract, experiential, experimental- maybe just a collection
of something (info/object/image/sound/opinion/fact)?
-interesting to develop new ways of collecting information and sharing
it with others (like the beach ball notebook)