WRD

It’s hard now, to recollect a moment prior to the impact of pandemic and despite continuous effort to sustain the many open threads of investigation, regular publishing here stalled.

We have been writing using WordPress since 2010, first in response to rising demand for support of CMS development from subscribers and friends and ever since as a regular process.

In September, after six months development and close cooperation with play-workers at Crumbles Castle, the Digital Markers project concluded it’s prototype stage with launch of a very customised and beautifully styled WP site.

It’s a guide that describes use of low cost computers and open software sources for arrangement of co-authored installations around a public place. It’s an evolutionary pathway out of MAZI project and into a very different landscape. With covid at large much of the advocacy for offline and hyper-localised services has been kicked into long grass whilst a swarming around high profile cloud based services, Zoom etc. has drawn much of the attention that has perhaps set back great progress made there.

Now with benefit of a bit of space and time to think again of options, have had opportunity to try out contrasting approaches and lighter payloads of flat file CMS, HTML authoring environments and peer2peer exchange innovations.

The rise of SBC (single board computers) famously Raspberry Pi with it’s many clones and competitors, stimulated a soup of mongrel, experimental and specialised OS offering system solutions. Most of which have been fun to pick up on and test out from Alex’s berry server repository from which we have identified most favourably with DietPi for many reasons, best explored in a more dedicated post.

Right now my favourite quick and clean CMS option is Bludit which features WordPress post extraction plug-in, a liberation from database back-ended and security trip hazards of conventional blogging systems. Regular maintenance and occasional migration of the dozen or more titles has become a major time hog, so pull over to the cold shoulder for a gawp at http://blu.spc.org where you are welcome to continue reading about the work, review and distractions of yours truly in 2021.

If I were able to focus more intently on my peripheral vision, would perhaps prefer to be pushing on with ScuttleButt and delighting in DAT formatted blobs of hip reference and critical comment, alas life’s current distractions outweigh those better intentions. Not that there has been much time for idleness, far from it. Since April, the end of the garden at home in Deptford has drawn in all spare resources, local recycling and free energy of isolation in the construction of a ‘virus shelter’ call it SHED nth, whatever. More about that over on BLU once Christmas lunch is done.

Our environment is swamped with radio signals from a huge range of local, commercial, infrastructural and personal devices. This noise goes on unnoticed day and night but increasingly of interest as our dependence on mobile communications, IOT and remote control systems stack up around us.

SPC has been hosting regular SDRX workshops at Uniform rooms in OPS. We are making good development progress toward launch of ‘software defined radio power’ monitoring system to help visualise where different frequencies are being used.

The many months of ad-hock design and experimentation with low cost equipment are being distilled into a working recipe for building distributed monitoring networks that publish data for the public record. Great RTL resources exist to support this research which we are keen to contribute to.

Use of the entire RF spectrum is governed by Ofcom in the UK and each country has it’s own regulatory framework, to organise use of the electromagnetic spectrum for commercial and social purposes.

Back in 2006 YT travelled to Riga, Latvia for the Waves conference where Julian Priest installed a 5m Whiteboard ‘The Political Spectrum‘ presenting a hybrid mapping of worldwide radio allocations and social interactions of visitors to the show.

Our main focus of recent months has been fixed on plight of beloved droog and long term collaborator Alexei Blinov. His death just last week of organ failure followed six months of struggle with pancreas and liver cancer, chemotherapy and health services.

A fabulous circle of friends enveloped him with love and support throughout, not least in respect of his creative drive and fierce intellect, but for the huge sense of fun and selflessness he encouraged in all who knew him. A very special friend indeed.

The public Transition Celebration is planned for Sunday 15th December at one of Alexei’s favourite bars, Strongroom in Shoreditch London 3-10pm, please come early and celebrate his life and times.. together!

A sensational gathering of friends and family shared in the unique celebration of his life and times. It centred around this wonderfully apt and beautifully crafted plasma capsule which scanned and smoothed Alexei’s passing on and up to next phase of further exploration and infinite dreaming..

See the growing collection of Alexei images and video clips in this shared album.

We have worked with many artists, musicians and performers over the 20 years of regular tech workshops and studio sessions at Deckspace and most recently in the Old Police Station at Uniform room where we often have opportunity to meet new friends and exchange energy.

These posts often crash together reports of SPC studio, outreach and refurbishment activities which are pressing for time, require documentation or risk slipping away!

Babar Luck is a regular visitor and faithful student who has tuned his experience of self publishing and promotion to both offline experimentation and comprehensive web development of this mastery. His Mazi based ‘spaceship’ travels with him to live performances as Citizen Folk Band, East Trinity and solo sets, each delivered with great panache. We helped him resurrect babarluck.com which like so many domain names had slipped out of control over the years, so that now it forms an intersection of all his activities and adventures. Next Show is at the Birdsnest on 21st December (yes it reopens on 6th) so hope to see you there. Buy one of his many albums to send a friend!

On a recent visit to Ilford, YT got up to the top floor of Redbridge Town Hall where SPC are currently re-igniting the legacy network infrastructure with high speed fibre broadband and wireless access for Spacestudios.

Refurbishment work is underway throughout the building not least at ground floor level with large gallery space and refashioned entrance ramp ready for mid October. Inside there are two floors of newly available studios for local artists as well as Spacestudio artists, to secure a suitable workspace out east in this impressive building.

Loyane’s Bianchini‘s exhibition of artworks on show at The Cello Factory in Waterloo, were created during a Zsuzsi Roboz scholarship at Morley College. Throughout the year she was free to take any course to work with different materials and test new methods. This resulted in a range of print, fabrication and imaging experiments with metalwork, augmented reality and photogrammetry artefacts.

When we next meet again it will be at CSM 3D to define some ‘Digital Markers’ with Kings Cross communities.. much as we worked on together in Brazil with Reverso in 2017, more on all this later!

On Saturday 21st September it’s this years Selce AGM and 5th birthday, a Salsa Solar’bration (please!). Get your ticket now..

Each year the coop members, directors employees, volunteers and friends all meet up to discuss future plans to celebrate the progress of renewable energy work and share ideas. The seven school roof solar arrays in Lewisham and Greenwich will shortly be redoubled with a further seven community installations. Don’t miss out on this upcoming opportunity to invest in this South East London Community Energy success story.

Summer rolled right over us and despite the despair of a catastrophic euro drama looming, some great fun was had here in SE8, not least during Nestival at the Birdsnest pub. YT clipped on sports cameras to mic stands and atop teetering PA’s, capturing some of the great bands playing. To help ensure listenable audio, took the trouble to record sound separately which required a bit of post event compositing.

It all started with Harmergeddon’s great performance on stage2 and we were lucky to catch them as a cool beer had proved a distraction outside..!

Babar Luck introduced the latest World Citizen Folk Band line-up in some glorious sunshine outside in the acoustic tent.

We were very keen to catch a rare performance from Jack Blackburn and The Conformists but before setting up the stage sound Jon Le Champigon popped out for a change of environment to play flute, sing and strum guitar for us all!

Rapscallions AKA The Conformists played a great short selection of new and familiar songs, hey hey London!

These should have been uploaded to the Tallbastard channel where we have nearly 300 subscribers so perhaps we can get them listed there as well soon.

DDBC spent a string of longs days outside Cambridge Junction to help construct the exhibition of Collusion Commissions 2019, in time for a preview on 11 April.

This huge effort of will and organisation has resulted in a public spectacle of action and imagination, presenting research outcomes and rewarding creative collaborations.

The Bitcoin memorial totem stands centre square of four neo-industrial units, a ‘digital hamlet’, containing all the commissioned works, which opened for public access Friday 12th April, then each day until the end of Easter Monday, 22nd.

Each of the commissioned works articulates insight onto aspects of AI systems, augmented experience and hybrid media that’s fun to explore, rewards participation and is easy to appreciate. Local press and TV joined us for a few hours on the windswept square followed by sponsors Cambridge Consulting and ARM with invited guests for beer and cake! Over 1500 people visited over the 10 days, we recorded some of the daily footfall here.

For all involved it’s been a year long challenge to focus first on a research process that responded to the aims of the commission, then identify suitable material for public exhibition.

For DDBC this has meant some deep digging into Blockchain insertion and extraction techniques, modulation of text to speech systems for open research interaction and record keeping. Messages recovered from the Bitcoin blockchain are being sifted into 8 channels for vocalisations of Hello- World, Love, Faith, Shout-outs, Tales, Poetry, Adverts, and Memorials.

Over a 1/4 million bitcoin transactions contain text insertions, a trend started by Bitcoin originator Mr Satoshi with his message in the genesis block. Can you find it there?

Each message needs review and categorisation to be spoken at the totem, more than our modest team could achieve alone. Much as any recovered archaeological artefacts need cleaning and sorting before the origin and intent can be claimed, so we invite you to visit DDBC and support the rediscovery process.

It’s been a busy start to the year at Uniform, the latest SPC lab. This month we will conclude the MAZI EU commission with a final review in Brussels. Each of the consortium partners will meet once more to present the outcome of 3 years research and development into the MAZI toolkit. All the reports and publications relating to the work are already available at the public website where you can download a fully working operating system image (v3) to flash on to micro SD cards for Raspberry Pi 3B+. Our regular Mazi workshops resume in March so get in contact soon to schedule a session.

The momentum of the  Creeknet MAZI pilot in Deptford, the outreach initiatives at CSM and interconnections Maydayrooms flow on. A clutch of fiercely independent community action and resistance also push forward with an agenda to preserve Tidemill Gardens, promote community run library at PCL, utilise radical social spaces in Squats and DIY spaces in the area..

Meanwhile infrastructure development in Arthub continues at the Deptford studios and in Woolwich where a huge new studio floor has been added to the long established warren of well lit and facilitated spaces upstairs. Both have had Ubiquiti wireless network equipment installed to at first distribute broadband utility to all the artists. Redraw Internet provided the fast start connection to Woolwich Arthub from over the river via 5ghz link.

This month a 1GB fibre service will be installed to serve all the studios a level of connectivity to scale up to requirements over the coming 5 year lease. Meanwhile infrastructure development in Arthub continues at the Deptford studios and in Woolwich where a huge new studio floor has been added to the long established warren of well lit and facilitated spaces.

Both have had Ubiquiti wireless network equipment installed to at first distribute broadband utility to all the artists. Redraw Internet provided the fast start connection to Woolwich Arthub from over the river via 5ghz link. This month a 1GB fibre service will be installed to serve all the studios a level of connectivity to scale up to requirements over the coming 5 year lease.

Mycaene House is a community centre in Charton Village, Greenwich. SPC first extended the office broadband into 4 floors during 2014 with a set of low cost routers and this spring we will return to update the network with latest wireless broadband equipment and help with development of meeting support systems and streaming media capacity.

An educational program of workshops to help people get online is underway to help improve skills for those with little experience who may struggle with the demands of network life or whom seek to improve on their knowledge .

Brickfield Studios was opened 4 years ago after completion of refurbishment by new owners Space Studios. This month we added comprehensive infrastructure monitoring for the wireless network and updated all the equipment firmware to match.

Now any jitters of service can all be tracked and improved where possible. Already, it’s possible to see increase of connections and and variations in the scale of use. The Sandstorm server installed there before we began the MAZI project consumed us, has fallen out of use for lack of promotion but still working just fine! We hope to have the time this year to get back on to all these threads with some quality time and focus.

This years SPC home page look came about due to some rich seasonal food and rare dive into basic Java scripting!

It’s the page presenting key links to the SPC lab work in progress or which we want to remind you of!

AMP – has evolved in response to use and exploration since it’s outset in 2016 when it was clear that the combination of willing souls and appropriate tools coincided to make such a prospect realistic. Activist media is being enriched with complimentary data using timebased and subjective recording methods to improve annotation of these hidden histories.

BAK – the first and most loved of the SPC spaces this pubic access media lab set the frame for so much that followed it’s closure in 1999.

UNI – Most recent and smallest of the SPC labs is situated in the infamous of Deptford buildings the Old Police Station on Amesham Vale, some claim is in New Cross. History can’t be denied and tells us New Cross is within Deptford!

OWN – The open wireless network has been rejuvinated as part of the MAZI work along Creekside so that researchers and contributors could better stay connected and utilise local broadband network infrastructures that their Mazi toolkits could link up to.

DDBC – This Collusion commissioned work in progress is due for exhibition in Cambridge early in April 10 days between 5-15th so please visit us there. Our research into blockchain insertion and message recovery has uncovered thousands of corporate communications and personal testimonies all of which will feature as voices from the past in our installation at centre of an exhibition village outside Cambridge Junction.

Reverso – We had a great response visit from Sao Paulo workers at the end of 2018 following our trip to their favellas in 2017. Work goes on here in Central St Martins and at locations around that huge city of cities in Brazil using the MAZI toolkit to co-ordinate social action and represent community culture of distributed spaces. Roll up, roll up get your fresh zones here!