The Networked blog was created in the lead up to the conference Networked: Dialogue and Exchange in the Global Art Ecology, which was held at Bloomberg, London on the 26th and 27th of November 2011. The conference brought together different views on network and collaborative practices, which were explored through case studies and presentations from artists, curators, researchers and policy makers amongst others.

Following the conference, this blog continues to function as an open platform for debates over themes, issues, strategies and ambitions around networks and their need, role and function. Additionally, it is a platform for zooming in on projects, research, articles, videos and sound recordings relating to the different Triangle Network activities. Overall the blog maintains the spirit of Triangle, one of international dialogue and exchange, and aims to be a space to showcase the vibrancy of the Network.

Curator, editor and writer as well Director at the Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands and Research Fellow at The University of the Arts London Charles Esche speaks to Six Pillars at Resonance fm from the Triangle 2011 Conference in London. They discuss the meaning of grass roots and corporate networks in the art world.

Networked: Dialogue and Exchange in the Global Art Ecology brought together 262 artists, art managers, curators, policy makers, funders, researchers and writers from over 40 countries. Over the two days, leading art professionals debated the role of networks in supporting artists’ development, facilitating the global dissemination of contemporary art practices and discussing the role of networks in the support of artists, art projects and grass-roots organisations.

The Triangle Network blog was used to provide an online platform for discussion and debate around the questions and issues that formed the basis of the Networked conference, and allowed a dialogue to take place between speakers, Triangle Partners, artists and the public. The activity on the blog and forums also played a key role in shaping some of the panel discussions and workshops at the conference, so the event could address the most urgent to artists and cultural organisers at this time. Read the rest of this entry →

The revolution to be made in the US will require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than acquire more material things… That great transformative and humanizing experience still lies before us.  –Grace Lee Boggs

Monday, September 17^th marks the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as well as the first week of the New York City Triangle Workshop.  Therefore, I am reminded of NETWORKED: Dialogue & Exchange in the Global Art Ecology, the February 2012 Triangle conference in London.  After all, our very meeting in the Bloomberg space benefited from the largesse of the financial sector that OWS is contesting, and merely passing through the venue’s security gave us pause to take in one of London’s Occupy encampments in the public square just opposite its entryway.  During these past months, I’ve taken part in the OWS movement by helping to organize a matching system for visiting occupiers to find host families in New York City.  In fact, one of the current NYC Triangle Workshop participants, Niki Singleton, illustrated a handy Do-it-Yourself guide for the Host an Occupier (HaO) initiative.

Throughout the course of implementing this project, I oft considered abandoning the horizontal framework of the OWS movement to resituate myself into a hierarchy, thinking that I know best how to set up a hosting mechanism drawing from my experience with freeDimensional.  These urges – and their suppression – helped me to understand why a movement such as OWS is important.  The process I was going through of thinking I knew better is – at the micro level – the same process endemic to the political sphere of many countries and locales in which the Occupy movement has cropped up… there is this self-fulfilling Hobbesian notion that if someone isn’t in power that order will be disrupted, a notion so strong that the promise of a newer, more equitable order is perpetually eclipsed. Read the rest of this entry →

Preamble: Between 2007 and 2009 I worked for the Triangle Network from the Gasworks office in London as an administrator, before leaving to pursue my Masters at Goldsmiths in Art Writing. Having worked for Triangle and noticed that art writing and criticism was increasingly important to Triangle’s partners, I decided to write a ‘practice-based’ thesis that examined the developing spaces for art writing within the international contemporary art world. The thesis particularly focussed on the problematics of written analysis produced within and distributed across the ‘international contemporary art world’, along with the issues that writers face when they outstep the comfort of their own knowledge-spheres. This was an over-ambitious topic, which became even more daunting given the scope and complexity of the places I was able to visit as part of the research, and the avenues that these researches opened up. Read the rest of this entry →

Cross-pollination is normal – if not essential – for networks, especially in the culture sector where the broader (more formal) networks learn from the horizontal structure of (less formal) artist collectives and community art projects that artists create and enjoin intuitively.  While this is often an organic process, I have seen different experiments intended to instigate cross-pollination among and across networks.  In March 2009 the Institute of Network Cultures convened Winter Camp, which brought 12 networks (including freeDimensional) to Amsterdam for a week to connect the virtual with the real in order to find out how distributed social networks can collaborate more effectively.  Modeled after that experience, freeDimensional convened a meeting on Creative Resistance – An Intersecting Networks Approach in 2010 on Wasan Island for arts networks, mobility operators, and human rights groups from Latin America, Africa, Asia, North America and Europe.  One of the results of this meeting is the International Coalition of Arts, Human Rights and Social Justice, which is essentially a network of networks. Read the rest of this entry →

Global Occupy Together occupations (15th October) http://www.occupytogether.org/

Having co-founded a magazine on ‘culture and politics after the net’ nearly 17 years ago now, I was surprised to find myself feeling like something of a newcomer to the world of ‘cultural networks’, as described here. I’d initially wanted to request that the organisers offer some kind of clarification of the term Networks, since it seemed to evoke something so generalised as to lose all sense of specificity, clarity, or purpose, but, since reading many more of the blog and forum entries, I’ve come to realise that there *is* actually quite a clear subject under discussion here… Read the rest of this entry →

In a previous post, I mention issue or urgency-based networking vs. casual membership in a network.  Speaking from the perspective of starting (or instigating) the freeDimensional network, I can say that it was only through trial and error that I came to understand this dichotomy.  At first, I believed that network members would need an incentive in addition to their engagement with the typical issues and actions on which freeDimensional was founded.  Leading with that idea, I pressed forward attempting to engage the growing network with regular programs and thematic campaigns that connected to the social justice aim of the network at the intersection of community engagement.  This phase of network growth witnessed some amazing engagements – e.g. economic migration in Senegal with a manifestation at the Dakar Biennial with Atelier Moustapha Dime; support to the Tadamon Multicultural Council through partnership with the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo; and help creating a year-long livelihood residency training local youth to be citizen journalists at Casa das Caldeiras in Sao Paulo, Brazil.  However, and due to our limited administrative capacity, we were unable to maintain both regular programming and the rapid response to urgent situations (hosting culture workers in distress) that is our raison d’etre.  One reason for this is that it was not easy to extract value (get paid) for networking in a way that allowed us to build up our staff capacity.  This leads me to a generalization:  the labor expended on building trust and confidence – the essential ingredients for a network – is a front-end expenditure while financial grants and program investments usually come after this initial trust-building phase; different from corporate world, civil society and the nonprofit sector do not have the practice of retrospectively compensating or remunerating investments of time and social capital made before financial capital is received.  This means that the network administration may work with the network member to write itself into a programmatic function compensated by the grant; however, this is a new (and different) staff function from the more abstract knowledge work of networking.  Therefore, finances gained through such partnerships do not pay for the labor already invested, nor do they cover the cost of continued networking unless it is couched in a programmatic line item.

Joseph Perez performance

People’s Biennial, initiated by Independent Curators International and curated by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, presents work by artists based in five cities considered outside of the mainstream art world – Portland, Oregon; Rapid City, South Dakota; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. During a year of curatorial research, Fletcher and Hoffmann have traveled the United States with ICI, meeting with hundred of artists and participating in numerous open calls and public events. They have collaborated with curators at art institutions in each city to find the best examples of artistic expression present in these communities. One of the primary goals of the project is to question the often exclusionary and insular process of selecting art, as well as to propose an alternative to the standard contemporary art biennial, which frequently focuses on art from a few select cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami or San Francisco). Read the rest of this entry →

Following the Networked conference in November 2011, writer and educator Pippa Koszerek and artist and curator Eleonora Schinella wrote their reflection of the events and discussions that took place over the weekend, focussing on a recurrent theme of relationships between artists, activism and social justice.

‘Nowadays, Triangle Network promotes exchange and dialogue between a network of international artist-led projects. Listening to Zenzele Chulu of the Zambian Insakartists Trust, who mid-way through their gallery initiative were arrested and charged for possession of obscene material, Arterial who “empower civil society arts and culture organisations in African countries and regions”, and remembering also the Occupy Wall Street protesters that we passed as we came into the building, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves about the relationship between artists and activism, networks and social justice.’ – Pippa Koszerek & Eleonora Schinella

• Click here to read the original article on a-n’s website
• Click here to visit the International Coalition for Arts, Human Rights and Social Justice website