Artists Albinomosquito DJ Jomo and Jenny (Re:con) created an incredible audiovisual installation capturing perspectives around the theme of identity ahead of the Comixed Playback: Identities event. People have been dropping by, chilling out and chatting into the installation. We were blown away at the transformation.

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1. Comixed Playback: Identities, 17h30-19.30h, 4th December 2010, Contact

Erica is an artist-academic researching patterns generated by the brain. She combines her interests in poetry, music to create and curate in virtual worlds. Erica has just come back from the Gambia where she’s been hooking up with artists working in the Gambia on the Wide Open Walls project (link) with Lawrence Williams. We were also researching and exploring around Ecotourism. We met lots of indiginous makers and people creating hi-tech stuff and street art which used eco-spray paint (biodegradeable).

Now back in Manchester, Erica is hitting the ground running to take part in the unconference at PlaySpace and recording a provocation for Comixed Playback: Identities.

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1. China Mills provocation on how drugs shape identity…

China Mills is a PhD student at the Education and Social Research Institute, at Manchester Metropolitan University. China researches alongside survivor and user-led organisations within mental health and disability, in the UK and in India. She is particularly interested in the representation of people with mental health problems within pharmaceutical advertising, and in the role of the pharmaceutical industry in regulating and medicalising personhood; setting limits on who counts as a person and what counts as a life. She is currently doing some work around the production and clinical trialling of psychiatricdrugs in India, and has previously done research exploring alternative approaches to working with children and adults who hear voices.

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1. Filming Comixed provocations at the Beeb…
2. Identity Remixed Installation capturing reflections on Identity

Steve delivering his provocation at the Beeb

This afternoon we met up with Geography Lecturer, Dr Steve Millington and PhD student, China Mills at the BBC to film their provocations for Comixed this coming Saturday. It was fun shooting in the BBC Design Den which backs onto the very busy BBC Radio Manchester studio.

China Mills delivering her provocation

As BBC staff made tea, chatted on the phone and did live radio type stuff – China and Steve – academics at Manchester Metropolitan, gave us the lowdown on how drugs shape identity and how monster christmas lights are an act of social (yes those lights that get strung up outside people’s house and on their roof tops) … we’re now busy subtitling and uploading the videos but here’s some pics from our afternoon shoot… with the lights, steve’s furry rabbit hat and the snow outside… there’s only one thing for it… Simply having a wonderful… ITSSSSSSS CHRISTMMMMMMMASSSSSSSS!!!  ….and cut…!

Possibly related to this:

1. China Mills provocation on how drugs shape identity…

Comixed Playback: Identities is part of Play Space, a free day where art & technology collide plus Unconference, Art, Music, Dance, Games and more. Play Space is organised by Contact in partnership with Manchester Digital Development Agency, Manchester City Council, BBC Connect & Create, Manchester Beacon, MadLab and G-Kut.

The day runs from at 11.30h til 23.00h. For full schedule and registration go here.

See you there… and in the meantime feel free to leave comments and tweet your thoughts using the hashtag #cmxd.

Get involved ahead of the live event at the Identity Remixed Installation led by Richard Ramchurn of Albinomosquito which kicks off 14.00h til 16.00h to have your say. Content from the Installation will feed into the live Comixed Playback performance 17.30 – 19.30h.

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1. Comixed: Enhanced. May 2010, Contact Theatre, Manchester
2. Identity Remixed Installation capturing reflections on Identity

Let the conversation begin

During the FutureEverything Festival on the 15th May 2010. Comixed: Enhanced took place at the Contact Theatre as part of the PlayEverything event.

A cyber-scientist, a cosmologist and a futurologist all put forward provocations to stimulate the audience into a conversation around issues revolving around the enhancement of our bodies. The debates where captured by a variety of means, video, photography and using social media.

We invite you to explore the debates and join in the conversation. If you would also like to produce further content, tweet, or remix what is found here feel free and tag it with the #cmxd hashtag.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Possibly related to this:

1. Comixed: Enhanced – The Remix
2. Comixed: Remixed Videos
3. Provocation: The Future is looking good – Conway Mothobi

Comixed: Enhanced – The Remix from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

Artists Richard Ramchurn and Mauro Camel ran video remix workshops with people who had been participated in Comixed: Enhanced. The object of the workshops were for people to re-interpret, mash-up and reconfigure the content that was captured through the Comixed: Enhanced event. As well as introducing people to video mashups, some of the examples can be seen in our last post, they created a mashup of their own. Enjoy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Possibly related to this:

1. Comixed: Enhanced. May 2010, Contact Theatre, Manchester
2. Comixed: Remixed Videos
3. Introduction to Comixed: Enhanced

As part of Comixed: Enhanced we ran an afternoon of video remix and mashup workshops to enable people who had been in the day?s earlier debate to create videos from the footage shot and material provided. The workshops were ably run by Comixed: Enhanced video artists Richard Ramchurn and Mauro Camel.

The views and opinions expressed within these videos are those of the workshop participants… use the comments function to tell us what you think.

The Videos

Comixed: Remixed 1 from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

Comixed: Remixed 2 from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

Comixed: Remixed 3 from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

Comixed: Remixed 4 from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

Comixed: Remixed 5 from Manchester Beacon on Vimeo.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Possibly related to this:

1. Comixed: Enhanced – The Remix
2. Comixed: Enhanced. May 2010, Contact Theatre, Manchester
3. Provocation: Could we all be implanted with technology?

Following on from Conway Mothobi’s provocation found here. We publish the transcript of Conway’s provocation looking at the future of space travel.

Transcript

Ok folks, can you all hear me?

When I was told about this I thought ‘How fantastic, this talk is about human advancement and enrichment, and that picture there is of the space shuttle launch yesterday of Atlantis.

Within in the area of space sciences etc, we know that the President Obama is cut all funding to the moon.

Does anybody know who Mike Collins is…? Just three, ok…He went to the moon – this is the guy who was sitting in the command module, just making sure everything goes ok.

Now that costs a lot of money. When two spaceships were lost, that was a lot of money lost and a lot of lives lost. Each launch we are talking about a billion dollars. So how do we move forward? The way to move forward is now to look at the existing research and say ‘Hey, how can we actually begin to enhance and enrich the human being and making sure that we can continue with space exploration – and go beyond the moon!’

We do that by saying we are going to move into stem cell research; look at what is actually happening within the nanotechnologies etc and produced astronauts who are about one inch tall (25mm), weighing about four grams each – found that each astronaut is the size of a simple land mouse.
But what kind of people are we talking about? We are talking of things happening, this happening within thirty years, where by you know dry ice, that gives you all the smoke out, that’s minus 78 degrees centigrade, i.e. Celsius and with that we can actually help these people in holding because we can actually go low temperatures.

How much heat can they handle? Boiling oil at about 300 degrees Celsius
They can handle very low pressures. That’s how to explore space exploration.
Now people might say, ‘oh well, that’s just out there thinking’, but fifty years, this week, the laser was invented. Technology can move forward.

Fifty-two years ago a fine physicist gave a lecture in Brazil and held up a pin and said the tip of this pin was what we will one day have the library of Congress contained in. And everyone laughed at him, thinking he was a madman. And nowadays people are walking around with things like iphones etc, but it is not as fanciful; the reason why we are going to have to have people that size behind those kinds of exploration is that it is cheaper because it means that we can have space craft with a size the size of a drinks can; easier to launch – it means that we can launch a dozen missions at once. The people who would lose – they’re not easy to lose – because if there is a burnout, they can handle it.

As a simple experiment, I’ll ask you a very simple question. People keep on saying, ‘Oh, people like these are an enhancement, and I say yes! People will prefer enhancement, because this is beyond Jordan, but we are talking about the enhancement of the capabilities of human beings engaged in endeavour, which can add to add to beyond where we are now. So, with these little people whom we have we are going to have a situation where by; what with space exploration what we are trying to do is understand our universe. But the Earth is one part of that thing, the whole planet and as Neil Armstrong once said as they were going round the moon – you’ve all seen the pictures picture of the blue planet – and he said, ‘ You can’t come out into space in order to discover air.’ Right now we’ve got all the various satellites etc, which are looking at the air – that’s where we are getting the data.

So my provocation to you is that yes, we need to invest in such situations; such situations are possible. A few years back, I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Rosetta, not the stone, but the spacecraft. The Rosetta is a mission, which is actually chasing a comet. This was launch about six years ago and is going to hook up with the comet in 2014, but the interesting thing about Rosetta chasing a comet around the sun is that we have got it as a robotic mission, but you have to have a test. You can’t have a mission round the sun and go how are we built that raft. That is why we need the little people to actually land out there. The current technology that we have is the mission to find out…there will be a landing craft that will shoot out of the main spacecraft and land into the ice of the comet. Then you actually can test all that data.

I’m bringing you to the whole point of miniaturization; why it is important and how we ourselves can do it. Of course what they did for this particular thing is that they went down to the chemistry lab and said we need this test this to land on a far off comet – this is the lab, this is what we want to test. And at the moment – that little lander that is going to land – anyone here a size 6 shoe, think of the shoe for that and what it is that those engineers constructed a laboratory which is the size of a kid’s shoe box. And that is what they are going to be using in 2014 to make all the tests.

So, we’ve got that technology, we are not sure that it is going to work. But, the important thing about humans is there are particular areas in which we can’t go to, where it is it is too dangerous to work, but we need other people to go out there, it is dangerous because of pressure, temperature etc. But we now have the technology to actually make and construct something like that can do that.

And to finish off – I am very confident that this is going to happen – there is a paper that came out this week. This week at the California Institute of Technology a DNA rockets – you can actually tell a robot that is so tiny and specifically what to do. This is one area of miniaturization, there are areas in medical miniaturization and – people might’ve seen small solders – they look like a plague of ants. That is it – we will get people who are one inch tall and we will get that in the next 30 years.

Thank you.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Possibly related to this:

1. Provocation: The Future is looking good – Conway Mothobi
2. Comixed: Enhanced – The Remix
3. Comixed: Enhanced. May 2010, Contact Theatre, Manchester