Trabajo Social y los Problemas Conductuales

Fig. 5-1. First TV hacking workshop. Photo by James Stevens. Free Art License 1.3

In the Deptford.TV project, the groups engaging with a film project together often share a similar political and/or aesthetic approach to the film but different levels of technological know-how. I borrow the term ‘cell’ from the Critical Art Ensemble (2000) to describe the organisation of such a collectively working group. In these cells, solidarity is thought to be achieved through difference. Because the individuals bring different knowledge to a cell, working groups are ideally organically created and constituted by participants specialising in different professional areas, such as directing, editing, producing, operating the camera and so on. When a cell decides how to produce the film or project, those members with the most know-how in their special fields become authoritative in the sense of deciding how to film, direct, edit etc. “Solidarity based on difference” (2000) creates functional and more powerful groups, compared to the dominant approach of solidarity based on equality and consent democracy, which has been adopted by many tactical media groups such as the Ant Farm collective. Those groups had a fear that hierarchy would lead to stronger members becoming dominant over the weaker members within the collective (D. Boyle 1997), and thus leading to a 'community' stifling of projects. The Deptford.TV project follows Foucault’s principle (1980) that hierarchical power can be productive.

Participants, from different backgrounds (Hadzi & X 2007), choose to document or experimentally work on specific topics that fall within their shared interests. The Critical Art Ensemble explain that this kind of alliance, “created for purposes of large scale cultural production and/or for the visible consolidation of economic and political power, is known as a coalition” (2000). Those who take responsibility within a Deptford.TV cell are also those who are most involved in the decision-making. In short, this is a demonstration of 'online video- making' being “part of a much larger process in which the people formerly known as audiences of mass media or consumers of popular culture are asserting themselves as participants in culture-making” (Aufderheide & Jaszi 2008).

Theorists like Howard Rheingold increasingly acknowledge that notions of ‘community' with all its connotations (1999), are often overstated. Steve Jones (1995) notes how ‘community’ is generally conceptualised as (1) solidarity institutions, (2) primary interaction or (3) institutionally distinct groups. Only really the third of these, Jones argues, community as institutionally distinct groups, makes sense in the context of computer-mediated- communications. While I would diverge from Jones’s argument in that this mode of communication is not only socially produced, but equally technically constituted, it is notable how it still challenges the idea of community as being based on geographic proximity to the extent that one could, like Jones, talk about computer-mediated communities as ‘pseudo- communities’. 'Virtual communities' (Bacon 2009) are defined “as incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both 'meet' and 'face'” (1995, p.19). “If we really start to focus on creating an open – and open source – infrastructure ... the only way ... is to start locally“ (Van Kranenburg 2008, p.54). Deptford.TV does this by collaborating with the above mentioned mesh-network OWN, a network with no 'top', “where each node on the network is connected to a number of neighbours offering many possible routes across it” (Priest 2004).

Fig. 5-2. Video still of Symphony of Deptford. Filmed by Lennaart van Oldenborgh. Creative Commons SA-BY 3.0

The first TV hacking session was organised and delivered in collaboration with the artist collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik. It was held during the Node.London Festival in 2006, (see figure 5-1). Within the TV hacking series I organised a walk through Deptford with the help of Peter Pope, a local community activist, and Ben Gidley from the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Goldsmiths. The walk allowed the participants to get an inside view of the urban change happening in south-east London. Andrew Orford, one of the participants, noted on his blog:

After a visit to a participant's home in Stowage, where the very personal story of how legacy film and video footage has been digitized into a legacy for local-social historians and The Creative Commons, we went to Deckspace inside the old Greenwich Borough Hall building for our last tea and cake, a nice sit down and a chat. In summary the walk was very much a clarion call for how culture at the edge (which I term edgital) is actually at the centre of what’s really happening now. It was like looking into a crystal ball to see how digital technologies in combination with Free Software and Copyleft are transforming the social and historical landscape. (Orford 2006)

This TV hacking series ended with a remix performance of the Deptford.TV database. I re-edited the performance entitled A Symphony of Deptford (Hadzi 2006a; Andel 2006) (see figure 5-2) in homage to the film Berlin, Symphony of a City (Ruttmann 1927; Schadt 2002a).

A Symphony of Deptford was later screened at the Made in Deptford festival (Hadzi 2006a).

The film Symphony of Deptford (Hadzi 2006a) (figure 5-2) is to be found on DVD ONE. This film documents a live performance held on a boat in Deptford during the

Node.London (2006) festival in spring 2006. For this project, the video artist NRSZ (Andel

2006) remixed the Deptford.TV database using the software Pure Data (Puckette 1996; F. Zimmer 2006) to manipulate the video material from the Deptford.TV database in real time, to the live music of the band Ampersand (2001). The outcome was a VJ performance that created “coherence from distinct visual samples” (Menotti 2009). The whole performance happened on a boat, the Mindsweeper (McDonald 1998), situated opposite the Laban Dance Centre. The

Pure Data patches, used for the VJ-ing session, can be found on DVD TWO. The Mindsweeper

itself has been the subject of some short Deptford.TV documentary films about the boating community around Deptford Creek, a community in danger of being evicted. Symphony of

Deptford II (Canning 2009) (see figure 5-3) represents a collaboration with the composer

Canning, who works with computer generated compositions (2011), from the GOTO10 collective, using the Deptford.TV database in order to create a remix of the material according to the meta-data added to the clips. This video shows an example of an art work envisaged as a

video installation. I like to call it the DaDaBase edit. The code written for this project can be found in the Appendix on DVD TWO.

Fig. 5-3. Video still from Symphony of Deptford II by Rob Canning & Barbara Kukovec. Free Art License 1.3

The first projects initiated on the Deptford.TV database looked into the documentation of the urban change of the Deptford, South-East London area, extending also to fictional, experimental and media art elements, still under the idea of a Symphony of Deptford. I was very fortunate that I could work together with the MA Urban Photography students from the CUCR Department, and the MA Screen Documentary students. Both sides showed great interest in taking part in the research on the collaborative approach to establish an audiovisual database for Deptford.TV, reflecting on Deptford itself; the project created a spatial documentary practice as an intervention into public space, through putting content into the public domain.

The topic of urban regeneration is, in itself, a contested one, and one that contains the clash of conflicting interests. In the case of Deptford.TV this allows for discussion and reflection, especially with regards to whether the application of these “technologies create a new (virtual) public space”? (Segers 2004, p.12). In this context I refer to Paolo Cardullo, one of the first TV hacking workshop participants, who completed his MA in Urban Photography and then went on to undertake a practice-based PhD. Reflecting on regeneration in his latest publication Walking on the Rim (see a selection of pictures in figure 5-4), with respect to urban change in Deptford he states:

a) The symbolic scenario built by urban planners, architects, and agencies has been increasingly hinting at the achievement of a long-standing goal of revitalizing inner cities, via innovative design and master planning, so as to attract and retain middle-class families.

b) In order to achieve this, a symbolic landscape of corporate culture and 'sustainable' community has been created, in contrast to the pre-existing territory, defined as highly polluted, derelict and unsafe.

c) There is a sense in which the new visual order and planning discourse reflect middle-class cultural assumptions, whose retention and well-being seemed to prevail in the official discourses. (2009a)

The regeneration of the Deptford area is a controversial process (Evans 1997), as documented by the Goldsmiths, University of London, Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) (1998a; 1998b; 1998c). Local communities argue that big sums of money are currently being invested into highly privatised projects that are not concerned with supporting the community (Keith 1997) or safeguarding public spaces. Several people living in Deptford thought that one of the first outcomes of of the regeneration process (Risner 2009), the new building that hosts the Laban Dance Centre (Mallory 2002), 'landed' in Deptford like a 'space-ship', an architecturally alienating building (Glancey 1997; Glancey 1999). The Laban Dance Center is set in an industrial landscape surrounded by a council housing environment (Marchant 1997), where many buildings are not that well looked after.

In 1999 the South London Gallery in Peckham, south-east London, held a series of events entitled Non-Place Urban Realm, which aimed to "explore urban renewal in the city through art and cultural practices in the form of an Exhibition, Open Forum and reading Room" (SLG 1999) with a focus on south London, the very area that Deptford.TV is documenting. Pseudo-public spaces or 'non-places' (Auge 1995) are the spaces that economic interests produce in order to maximise profits rather than for social or public benefit. Oppositional groups like the Reclaim the Streets movement (J18 1999) support the production

of meaningful spaces (Lefebvre 1974) within these pseudo-public arenas and thus disrupt the control that private investors attempt to gain and sustain over the profit-maximising pseudo- public spaces. The generic discourse on issues of regeneration used by local councils, advisory boards and PR campaigns mostly approaches regeneration initiatives as aiming to turn public spaces into a “unitary public sphere, characterised by its inclusiveness and openness, even though it is structured more by exclusions and attempts to erase the traces of these exclusions” (Iles et al. 2000). Through utilising the FLOSSTV method as an intervention into online public space, data spheres and the physical public space, the Deptford.TV participants have been engaging in a re-editing, or re-thinking of those spaces, in the spirit of “an oppositional utopianism that seeks to trace alternative possibilities for what cities might become” (Pinder 2002, p.236).

One highlight of these TV hacking workshops, on the topic of 'urban change', was the collaboration with The People Speak (Hadzi 2008a) where we focused on two themes: The renovation and closing of local shops around the Deptford Town Hall, and the 30th anniversary of the Lewisham 77 protests, in the form of an alternative epistemology of walking. The main significance of the Lewisham 77 protests (Knowles 2009, p.1), was that the far-right National Front march through Lewisham on the 13th of August 1977 was faced with a big local resistance which resulted in riots and many claim a 'defeat' of the National Front. This is today often referred to as the Battle of Lewisham (Lewisham '77 2007). The Deptford.TV documentaries around the Battle of Lewisham focused on the history of this event but also on the relationship migrant communities have with urban change. The participants documented the needs for developers to take into account that “black and immigrant communities have contributed much” (Goodwin 2007, p.3) to the development of cities.

What will New Cross be? (Hadzi 2008b) (see figure 5-5) was a collaboration between

the participants of Deptford.TV and the Talkaoke project of The People Speak. This video is an edit of the highlights of the TV show event around the topic of the future of New Cross, in South-East London, focusing on the discussion around a block of houses, next to Deptford Town Hall, owned by Goldsmiths College, and squatted by fashion designers, a coffee shop owner and people living in the buildings. I invited The People Speak to hold their talk show

Talkaoke (1997), alongside a screening of produced documentary films as part of the Black History month programme under the title What will New Cross be? (Hadzi 2008b) in Deptford

Town Hall. Deptford Town Hall is part of the history of racism and the slave trade. Paul Hendrich, an anthropologist and participant in the Deptford.TV workshops (who sadly was

killed in a traffic accident a year later, which led to the termination of the Lewisham 77 collaboration) proposed a progressive reconsideration of Deptford Town Hall, questioning the “appropriateness of Goldsmiths possessing and occupying this building which in some way embodies a celebration of the slave trade” (A. Shah 2008, p.4).

Fig. 5-5. Video still from What will New Cross be? by The People Speak. Free Art License 1.3

Hosting a TV talk show around the future of New Cross in Deptford Town Hall created a special atmosphere, with the audience members discussing the future of the very place in which they sat. Talkaoke is a TV talk show around a host sitting in the middle of a UFO shaped table (see figure 5-5) passing around a microphone and facilitating a discussion around a topic, in our case about the future of New Cross. During the talk show, The People Speak creates visualisations of the discussion and shows them in real time as projections, highlighting certain moments within the conversation. All the raw material was uploaded to the Deptford.TV database and short clips were edited out of it. The focus of the talk show was the Cafe Crema coffee shop, which is neighbouring Deptford Town Hall. Cafe Crema is located in a house owned by Goldsmiths – but not for rent, rather it is a squat. At the time of the talk show, Goldsmiths had issued an eviction warning to the squatters. Thus, the eventual eviction of Cafe

Crema and the surrounding fashion shops became the central discussion. Cafe Crema has still

not been evicted, but there is no solution, so far, for what will happen to the buildings around

tell. Nevertheless, it engaged many community members, students, as well as Goldsmiths staff members who followed the Lewisham 77 events as well as the Cafe Crema discussions.

Fig. 5-6. Video still from Voice for the Voiceless. Filmed by Flavia Guerra. Creative Commons SA-BY 3.0

Voice for the Voiceless (figure 5-6) and Lewisham77 – The Battle of Lewisham,

(Lewisham '77 2007; Gidley 2008) were produced for the Black History Month 2008, by students from two different departments of Goldsmiths, undertaking the MA Urban

Photography and the MA Screen Documentary, who worked together for those projects. The

same year the BBC developed an interest in Deptford (Flett 2007), when Lewisham Council sold the Aragon Tower (Mangan 2007) to real estate developers Berkeley Homes. The BBC produced a documentary series The Tower: a Tale of two Cities (Wonke 2007) on the clash between the 'rich' entrepreneurs moving into the tower and the neighbourhood of residents living in council flats. The series received the BAFTA Best Factual Award (2008). The Tower:

a Tale of two Cities was, however, criticised by locals (Chandler 2007; Siany 2007; Freeman

2007; Storm 2007) as portraying a very negative picture of Deptford and thus justifying the actions undertaken by developers to 'regenerate' (Potts 2008) the area. Andrew Orford, a local Deptford blogger and Deptford.TV participant, noted:

Deptford needs to take back control of its own image and I appeal to readers to continue to blog about this complex and fascinating confluence. The Deptford.TV project was an extraordinary intervention in this sense and perhaps one day for this reason we will no longer need the trickery of big budget TV. (2007)