The Next Layer

Notes from the last hour of the afternoon session.

The experimental workshop day taxi-to-praxi at Goldsmiths started off with a positive vibe as about 35 people met in the seminar room underneath the 'squiggle' whereby this group consisted of about one third of people from Goldmiths, one third from other universities and one third of unaligned individuals working as artists or curators. After Prof Janis Jeffries, convenor of the PhD in Arts and Computation opened the session, a lively and stimulating day unfolded. In this account I try to piece together from notes and memories what were some of the main issues which emerged.

Its been a very interesting day, maybe a little bit to 'techie' for me, but on the other hand very worth while due to the diversity of viewpoints in the individual presentations and talks. The Next Layer, so it seems to me, is a fantastic tool for a lot of things, social networking, exchange, artistic collaboration, dissemination of knowledge, politics, archiving and documenting... I subscribe to Lidsay’s conclusion in her recent post ‘Danger: Lest Taxi to Praxi be Forgotten’ The major theme is one of ownership and dissemination of knowledge.

Curating can be a form of practice led research and this is perhaps the most interesting approach. Having developed my own practice as a curator through the 1990s using ‘new media’, it has by necessity been a process of learning about technology through my practice and what it can do to enhance the presentation of content; in some cases of course the technology is the content in its own right. Learning on the job during the 1990s was the only way to develop given that artists were also experimenting with new forms and with it new ideas.

Novel Methodologies for Developing Medical and Scientific Animated Narrative

Joseph William Brock

Abstract

John Barker is both a novelist and an author of non-fiction essays about political, social and cultural issues. Barker's essays, published in magazines such as Variant or Mute Magazine, bristle with historic depth and accuracy of information, woven into critical narrations written in a dense prose. This evident richness of background research is maybe a result of Barker being inspired by the research methodology of a great of the 20th century, C.W.Mills. In this guest contribution, written specifically for thenextlayer.org and the taxi-to-praxi workshop, John Barker introduces us to Mills' concept of intellectual craftsmanship.