For motiroti, I'm currently producing Streets of Gold, an installation for the Museum of London which looks at the city through the eyes of recently arrived migrant artists. It runs 20 Jan - 10 April and is well worth a look. For one of the artworks we have a call out for micro-content to people who have migrated into London - if this is you, please see the details below. I'd be really grateful if you could take a moment to respond by messaging @motiroti on Twitter or by following the link through to Facebook. Thanks!

 

Answer the question "When does London become home?" In 2-3 sentences here (motiroti on Facebook) or by posting to @motiroti on twitter.

Your contribution will form part of an artwork by Alberta Whittle, which will be on display from 20 Jan - visit the Museum and see if you can find yourself in the mix!

 

This taken from the Own-It website:

Creative Barcode has been hailed as an innovative, non-complex and spot-on low cost trust blanket, which has received a big thumbs up from the legal profession, media, large corporate brands, designers, writers, advertising, brand and marketing consultants as well as leading trade associations.

The creative community of users worldwide is building fast and you can join them from just £30 per annum (launch price) to include the App and 5 barcodes. Thereafter you can create additional barcodes from just £4 each. Launch price guaranteed to the first 200 individuals or companies (100 remaining at time of going to press). 

Why are clients, lawyers and creative people loving it?
Creative Barcode is a new and unique concept protection system designed specifically for creative individuals, creative firms and those who want to engage with them. It takes away the vulnerabilities of engaging and negotiating with co-creation partners and prospective clients and partners. It significantly lowers the risk for all parties. It's non-complex and time efficient. No forms to fill in and no fees to pay.

How it works?
Creative Barcode is an App which enables you to quickly and efficiently create project barcodes (with unique number and your contact details) which is cut and paste into all written and visual files associated to the project you wish to disclose to others confidentially. Just one barcode covers all files for each unique project. File recipients agree to one simple term of receipt. No element of your strategy, written works nor visual works may be used without your permission. Simple, fair, ethical.

 

I've resolved to read books this year. (Yeah. Not "read more books". Truth is in recent times my tome consumption has reduced to practically nil, as I've migrated to snackable content, bite-sized media and - easy tiger - the occasional PDF.)

Fortunately for me, Grant Kester has a new book out. I've raved about his earlier work Conversation Pieces elsewhere on this blog, and owe it largely to Mr Kester that I found a more coherent way to articulate my work and passions as a Producer of socially collaborative arts projects.

For those interested in such things, I'd recommend CP wholeheartedly. There's a great, calm but energetic disassemnly of the avant-garde critical tradition in contemporary art in its early section which I realised on reading was addressing many of the shortcomings of the art scene that I'd struggled with for years.

One and the Many - which seems to broaden focus and get into international practice, rural 'versus' urban, arts and regeneration, and more - looks equally promising. The intro ponders why there's been such a boom in collaborative and collective practice in the contemporary arts world, in all art forms and continents, over the past 15 years. It's the sense of the possibile - and threats - that accompany our age of radical uncertainty, apparently.

Amy Mooney, Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia College Chicago (with whom I've recently collaborated on motiroti's Potluck project) recommended Shannon Jackson's Social Works to me, and shortly I'll be absorbing Sophie Hope's Participating in the Wrong Way? and perhaps scribbling a short review here.

What other good, up-to-date books are out there on arts-and-social that you would recommend? I need to keep up my new habit, so suggestions are welcome.

Just clocked this provocation document produced by @kiefferjohn (John Kieffer) and his ongoing collaborators, John Newbigin, John Holden and Shelagh Wright: smart people all.

"What does the education and skills system need to look like in order for people to live fulfilled creative lives, and for the creative and cultural industries to thrive?" A great, urgent, and insanely under-addressed question to kick off the New Year. 

And a hearteningly upbeat Venn diagram on the cover too:

60 contributions here and an invitation to add your own. I may do so if time allows, as I've found a lot of the challenges track back to how creative people are still trained (or groomed?) to assume a professional position, lifestyle and working culture that's increasingly out of step with the times.

I came across Artplace when @Richard_Florida tweeted that it might be “a powerful new model linking arts, culture and economic regeneration.”. Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to talk to its Director, Carol Coletta, in person. Here's the audio: 31 minutes, unedited. I believe - and I don't say this often – this is essential listening for those interested in #artists #community #placemaking and #relatedfundingandpolitics.

Is Artplace a gamechanger? Very possibly. When we met, Carol was reeling (with delight) at the 2169 Letters of Inquiry they'd received the previous day, from towns across the US, proposing new ways to connect and embed artists and culture as an essential component of the local. The backers and the sums involved may look huge from a UK vantage point but I'm sure they're moderate in the US context. Nevertheless there may be movement here. From the many useful nuggets to be found in this conversation, is the importance of getting (influential) people around the table to offer their own stories and understandings of the value of art in communities. Those of us who work in the 'culture sector' can often feel we're sitting on holy grails of understandings, but with a crippling problem of translating the ideas and values we feel so passionately about to the wider world. Do we, instead, or as well, have a listening problem?

Also in here are some further great observations from Carol on:

• how Artplace feels like a startup, with an entrepreneurial mentality and approach;

• the role artists have as citizens, as well as artists;

• how the respect for (as Bill Sharpe would say) coexisting, and intersecting, economies of life – of which art is one – may be the means for artists and arts organisations to get over the supplicant mentality inculcated by decades of grant funding, and evolve new confidences alongside business approaches.

In terms of general inspiration, this is, in my view, one of the best posts to this blog so far - please let others know it's here. And I'd welcome your comments below.

<p>MARGINAL VOICES from Riposte Pictures on Vimeo.</p>

My friend Caryne Chapman Clarke has been directing a great, gutsy theatre project in London in recent years. Marginal Voices works with women who are former victims of people trafficking into the UK into forced prostitution. The classic tools for theatre and social change making are still the best ones: check out the powerful video and please share it with others. The participants have plans to make a new work, let's help them out. MV is produced by Odanadi-UK.

My company motiroti has a group exhibition on this week at The Rag Factory just off Brick Lane. 9 artists have made work on Counting and Categorisation, and it's a nice solid, varied and friendly show, well worth a visit. There's a chance to record and upload your pulse into a piece of contemporary classical music; a conversation about happiness to participate in, a great video triptych, a film lounge.....oh, you want to know more? ;) then visit the Whatcounts blog. We've been playing with how the project can exist as much in online and offline spaces. Artists have blogged about ideas and process there, there are cute 'Questions of the Day' etc.

There's a hashtag and a Twitter account, inevitably: @whatc0unts #whatc0unts (note the zero's).

If you do visit, let me know and let us know what you think - on the blog, in comments book, etc. 

There are a couple of live performance commissions satelliting the project in early July - I'll blog about them over the next few days.

Excellent to hear that JR has won this year's TED Prize. Here's his speech backed up with jaw-droppingly audacious visuals:

He's launched the Inside Out project off the back of this. Upload a photo, receive a poster, paste it up in public space, let's do it all together and so have a massive conversation about how we can change the world. Genius.

WASTE LAND Official Trailer from Almega Projects on Vimeo.

So, this looks a bit brilliant. Artist makes large-scale images of those who work in, and from, the world's largest "trash city" in Brazil, gets the works sold at arthouse auction and donates the money to transform the fortunes of those who work with him.  Strong shades of JR in here, both in the scale of the images and (I think) in the concern to economically transform communities trapped in poverty. 

With the poorest and most disadvantaged groups in English society shown to be suffering most in the recession, we need more artists working like this here in the UK. Especially now.