A culture of possibility: Amber Hansen & Reyna Hernandez on Community Murals

In this audio essay Sophie Hope inquires into the digital while thinking about processes of evaluation.
She addresses two questions. Firstly, how and why do people in the arts understand what they do? Secondly, who speaks and who listens?
There are 5 parts to this audio essay:
Part 1: Intro;
Part 2: Key terms;
Part 3: Data is king;
Part 4: Data discrimination;
Part 5: Big data and Cultural democracy.

The last few weeks have seen shares in Gamestop, a bricks and mortar games store that has seen declining sales over recent years, suddenly and dramatically increase in price. Initially puzzling, it quickly became clear that a sub-reddit had banded together to deliberately push the share price up in order to cause pain to professional investors who had begun to short the stock.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the way that this has unfolded to date, and its resemblance to the first economic bubble: the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. They ask whether this amounts to the empowerment of the ordinary person or an invitation to reckless stupidity.

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse went on holiday on August 28, 2020, when Episode 50 went live. Our intention was to take a short break to rethink our long term strategy. For various reasons, including the covid-19 inspired lockdowns and the consequences of moving all professional activity online, the holiday lasted four months rather than the intended four weeks.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at 2020 and where they have got to so far. They discuss the differences that the pandemic has made to their professional and personal lives. They look at what they have learned from lecturing or running workshops with groups of students over Teams or Zoom for the last nine months.
They explain their plans for Miaaw in 2021. These include expanding the website, introducing a monthly newsletter, and expanding the podcasts from every other week to weekly. They will form a foundation for creating ways of building the audience into an active community.
Every month will have now four separate but related podcasts: each with a clear mission, and all connected directly to conversations about cultural democracy and the commons. Next week we begin Episode 1 of Genuine Inquiry...

With this episode Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse reaches its fiftieth episode, and its final episode in its current form. Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at what started them on this journey, their original goals, and the ways in which these developed as the series progressed.
They explain how the podcasts get made, and the recording and editing processes that they use to achieve this with little time and no money.
Finally they outline their plans for the future, which involve splitting the twice-monthly podcast into three, and (before the end of this year) four separate but linked weekly podcasts, and expanding the website into a community forum.

In Episode 40 we looked at a variety of pop, rock and folk music licensed through a creative commons licence, or made freely available.
In this episode we look at four other, quite different, musics made available in this way.
Karine Gilanyan plays the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata number 15 in D Major. Jahzzar plays the self-composed Fibonacci from his album kontra-punkte. Bob Ostertag performs Arms and Legs. Julie Licata presents her work resound.
Together these illustrate the wide variety of people who choose to present their music and sounds to the world using Creative Commons licences. All the artists chosen stand as an illustration of the fact that many talented, well known, and well respected artists have chosen, for their own reasons, to use this method to present some or all of their work.
Each of these represents a gift to the world. If you look in the references on the website you will find links to both the artists and the specific musical pieces in this episode.
We should also point out that Bob Ostertag has also just published a Home Yoga Companion book that you can download free from his website.
Please have a listen and PASS IT ON!

In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Loraine Leeson about her work, and begin by discussing her latest book: Art : Process : Change, which Routledge published in September 2019. They have recently published a paperback edition.
Loraine discusses her work from the 1970s onwards, including her work with Peter Dunn in the 1980s in London Docklands, and her subsequent work online and with a wider variety of face to face groups. She talks in particular about the twelve year Active Energy project she worked on with The Geezers, and the organic ways in which it grew.
As well as her own work, she talks about her experiences in administering and lobbying for funding, and her current role with a reinvigorated Arts for Labour.

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue their discussion with David Teevan, who has worked for 25 years as a cultural producer in the professional arts sector in Ireland.
In this episode David discusses some of the people and places that helped to shape the development of participatory arts in Ireland.
He also looks at how this relates to ideas of cultural democracy, and how these ideas have been discussed in Ireland.

David Teevan has worked for 25 years as a cultural producer in the professional arts sector in Ireland. He has recently completed a doctorate that examines the complex history of collaborative and participatory arts in Ireland.
In this episode he looks at some aspects of that history, as he experienced and witnessed it. He also talks about the research that he undertook and the underlying issues that his findings revealed.
David discusses all this with Sophie Hope, who took part in the examination of his thesis, and Owen Kelly, who didn’t.