Skap10 Para-Site Mandal Norway

Theory to Practice 2010

RANDY NAYLOR

The construction site of the Culture House was chosen as our insurgent space. We subscribed the sub-title Para-Site to our location. Para-Site can be described as something within the site, or something that is a multiple. The philosopher Michel Serres describes this situation where the Parasite ”plays the mischievous operator, the provocative participator within.” Indeed, the participants of Skap10 are entering a process through bottom-up and self-organization where social networks, participation and sharing of ideas becomes the new art form. Curtis Carlson of Silicon Valley describes it this way. ”In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.”

Our working space (para-site) is extending 12000 m2. Naylor designed an algorithm base on implanting tree poles that would become the template for our working process. Most building constructions begin with driving down piles into the foundation of the site. The Skap10 design is to reverse the process and planting 28 tree poles,8 meters apart, extending 136 meters through the site, from one end to the other. ”Self-Organizing systems organize their behavior in relation to certain focal points in their environment. According to self-organization theory, order in an interconnected system of elements arises around what are called attractors, which help to create and hold stable patterns within the system. These attractors form a kind of landscape that shape and determine patterns of interaction within the system.” (Robert Dilts) The planting of 28 tree poles across the 136 meter site created the necessary template that would trigger and attract the self-organized process.

Areas of Focus

Photoline Maritime Re-Fashion

Photoline

The Photoline was introduced as a reversed Face book social network that enables participation and problem solving. If you can self-organize on Face book, then one can use the same model and self-organize on real space. We connected our line to an on site photographers studio where we had access to computers and printers. School classes, and Mandal citizens were invited to take photographs of their favorite place, people or random and deliver their files to the photo studio. Each person decided the size and effects and received their print and found a place to hang their work on the Photoline. The prints were water proof ink and outdoor foil and could withstand harsh weather. This line constituted an assemblage that is relational and promotes an organic unity and emergent qualities among the participants, linking their photos to the city, landscape, friends and family. The photos from the fashion performance became the photos on the Photoline. The photos taken during the creation of the play space became the photos on the Face Book site. Dissemination. Upon completion of the project, the photographers were invited to claim their pictures and hang them on their walls at home, classroom or office, constituting a new graffiti.

”The mischievous operator, thus spread beyond the boundaries .” Michel Serres

Maritime

Sails and Fishing Nets

The game plan was to try to collect all of our materials within a radius of 5 kilometers. In recycled processes, usually what you need is right in front of you. We used Facebook, SMS, local newspapers and word of mouth to collect our nets and sails. This triggers the social sustainable process, self-organization and distribution process defining our field conditions.

Mandal is the birth place of one of Norwegians most significant artists. Gustav Vigeland is most famous for Oslo´s Frogner Park. Skap10 introduces the process of form generation. One can argue that sustainable process are non-anthropocentric. With the introduction of form generation and the folding of space, sails are knotted, folded, twisted in a morphogenetic topology. Our knotted reference to Vigeland signals a new social sustainable paradigm in the 21st century. Contemporary sustainable ethics is thermal, a weather map; winds, heat and waves. The Skap10 sails fold Vigelands anthropocentric bodies into form generated space. A new way to catch the wind and cast off.

Fishing nets become a mapping of a network. Local fishermen were contacted to donate their used nets. What once collected food on the table now collects social networking and serves sustainable table manners.

A quick study of playgrounds reveals that they are not designed for play. With rigid fixed parts and look alike pieces, the playground merely serves as a parking space for children and adults. The Skap10 Network is a process to create an organic play space where the players play and through play create the organic play structures in the same process. The stakeholders decide the design and the form generating dialogue creates the sculpture. The playground safety becomes an inherent feature of the group dynamics where the loose, improvised assemblage is bottom up and emergent. Play, safety and design are not abstract linear requirements, rather they merge as an integral composition.

The Network provides an assemblage where one is creating the conditions where one can think, organize and act sustainable. The sustainable playground becomes a dynamic environmental force; the dialogue, the heat, the winds and the senses are relational, sensible and pragmatic.

Work Shopping

Re-Dress Blue Jeans and it Swings Sound Garden

”The relation of parts to the whole is casual, the whole emerges from the casual interaction between component parts.” Manual DeLanda

RE-Fashion From Consumers to Producers

Skap10 becomes a navigation in contemporary philosophy. Seeking to synthesize broad perspectives, knowledge, skills, interconnections and an epistemology to resolve holistically a set of real world problems. We loosely created a workshop, which became a work station, a meeting place and a soup kitchen. Our intention is to create a fashion show as the grand final on the completion of our park. We wanted to re-dress fashion, assemble used garments and Norwegian sweaters and move from being consumers to producers. Rather than continue the habit of buying new clothes, create a process where you become a designer. Like all fashion designers, all you need is a pair of scissors; cut and paste to arrange an assemblage. From one sweater, you cut the middle to become a skirt and then you have a top, a sleeve to become a hat, a long sleeve to become a legging. You continue the same process with a dress. The ”chatter” sharing of ideas of the group produces the collection.

Blue Jeans and it Swings

One group produced a Blue Jean Sculpture. The task is to gather 200 blue jeans and weave them together to make a large hammock, where you can slip into your pair of pants that is now part of the weave. The weave becomes endless and engaging. Your play ground takes shape as you play. Blue Jeans and it Swings becomes a song, a dance, a play. Ready to Wear Sculpture.

Sound Garden

Our fashion show requires a stage and sound. Students from the local high school electronics class began to solve this task. Local musicians were contacted and arrived with samplers, drum machines and synthesizers. Sounds were sampled on the site, and the keyboards were programmed and arranged to allow anyone to create sounds and play.

Our emphasis was to create a multiplicity of sound layers, spontaneously create DJ assemblages, and again become the producers and arrangers. Students from the local high school media department made a documentary video of the entire Ska10 process.

Skap10 Resolution

More than 250 ”artists” participated in the Skap10 para-site process. There were scores of others who were indirectly involved. This includes the press, the NRK television crew, the citizens who donated the tools ,nets, sails, ropes, clothing, school teachers, construction workers from the site, museum directors, local artists, local architects, culture staff from Mandal city, the regional chamber of commerce, families and children, the town hall meeting.

We created the project in 24 hours. 8 hours for a local landscape firm to plant the trees, 16 hours for the citizens of Mandal to self-organize and create the Photoline, NetWork, Blue Jean, stage, music play shop, and fashion sequence.

Our intention was to create a new crossroad in art through social sustainable practices. To focus our attention on collaboration, dissemination, experimentation, public engagement, hybrid culture, and trust. The goal of Skap10 is to create a new model of culture where the audience becomes the producer and thereby the artist. Rather than make an exhibition in the traditional sense where there is a separation between the artist and the audience, thus in a bottom up design the audience, the producer and artist is active. This folding enhances social sustainable, skills, knowledge, dialogue, experimentation and group problem solving. To paraphrase Jane Jacobs, the real magic of the living city comes from below, conducted through a loose assemblage of improvised inventions and actions by the citizens .

We now know that the real culture is outside the architectonic. ” Among these demographic stocks is born the city of angels, the city is no longer necessarily linked to the monumental space of palaces, administration buildings, theaters, offices or industrial complexes. Each urban mass crumbles into an archipelago with islands awash in flows of messages; the cities of the planet form an immense and capricious galaxy surrounded by the ether of information.” (Marcel Henaff) The faces, the angels on the FotoLine replace the skin and bones of the building, the flow, the crossroads and the rhapsody are the nodes in this transmission.

If we are going to reach our environmental, social and economic sustainable challenges in the 21st century every citizen needs to become a knowledge player and conductor, an interdependent intelligent node. Skap10 is a stART in this direction.