Time as a public good

On October 28, 2019, Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope attended a seminar in Newcastle in which every participant had to bring a memento from their community art practice. Sophie brought a copy of What a Way to Run a Railroad, a book published by Comedia in 1985.
This sparked a lengthy discussion which resulted in us talking to Russell Southwood, one of the authors of the book. In this episode we look at how the book came to get written, and what effects it had.

In late November Owen Kelly spent two days at Slush, the annual technology event in Helsinki, aimed primarily at startups and young entrepreneurs. He noticed that the atmosphere had changed noticeably this year, and that the culture which has developed around startups appears to have discovered social responsibility.
In this episode he discusses a few of his experiences at Slush with Sophie Hope, whose scepticism about these kinds of things knows no bounds.

Sofia Bustamante works as a trainer in conflict resolution. She has a black belt in Aikido and bases her many of her workshop exercises and techniques on insights she has gained from this. She grounds her practice in an approach based on living systems, peacework, martial arts, neuroscience and work in therapeutic fields.
Her current work involves developing a systematic Conflict Resolution Pattern Language.
In this episode we talk about the relationships between her work, traditional fears of naming, and General Semantics.

In November 2019, Sophie Hope attended The Age of Cultural Participation seminar at Kultura Nova in Zagreb. Sarah Feinstein and Lucy Wright also attended. After the event ended they sat in a hotel room and discussed what they had learned, including what they had learned about how to organise conferences in keeping with principles of cultural democracy.

Stephen Pritchard has practised as a community artist, a researcher, writer, art historian, academic, activist and film maker for many years. A few months ago we learned that he had begun the process of establishing Field Community Art, which he intended to operate as an international collective.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Stephen Pritchard about his intentions.
Stephen talks about the challenges of working both locally and internationally through the lens of a decentralised collective. He promises that all will become clear by the end of the year.

On October 28, Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly met in Newcastle, in the north east of England, to attend a symposium called Community Arts: Practice and Processes of Production. Everyone who attended had received a request to bring an artifact with them - something that stemmed from, or reminded them of, their practice as a community artist.
Owen brought a copy of a manual for the Contagious Tapes collective: a project that Mediumwave established to enable musicians to record and distribute their own music outside the music business.
In this episode he explains Sophie’s absence, discusses the symposium, and looks at the aims, objectives, and practical outcomes of the Contagious Tape experiment.

During the previous episode Sophie Hope raised the concept of structures of feeling that Raymond Williams developed in the context of a discussion about the possible meanings of cultural democracy.
In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there in considerably more detail. They reflect on Williams’ insistence on keeping in mind that we live our lives as processes, and that cultural theory needs to avoid turning these into finished products that we can dissect at our leisure.
We examine some of the things that this might mean in practice, and what all this might mean for anyone interested in exploring ideas like cultural democracy.

George Fleming is a film maker and lecturer who has worked as a participatory artist.
During his doctoral studies he began exploring the concept of cultural democracy and produced a short film on aspects of the history of the idea for a conference. Sophie Hope attended the conference and persuaded George to join us to discuss what he learned while making the film.
He discusses the relationship between community art, participatory arts, cultural democracy and cultural diversity. He introduces us to the work of Rachel Davis Dubois, an American cultural activist who developed plans for intercultural education in the 1930s.