1. Collaborative and Collective
[Artistic] Research
Winnie Soon | PIT, Aarhus University
Nov 2014 | AVA, Baptist University, HK
1

2. .about me
• role: artist-researcher
• interest: network culture and
computational process
www.siusoon.com

3. .readme.spampoem (2014)
• In collaboration with Poet
Susan Scarlata (US)
• more than 30 spam poems
• email platform as an art
medium
• questions: what is spam? how
does it appeal using various
rhetorical devices to engage
with others? and how is it
filtered, generated, received,
and can that reception be
altered?
http://www.siusoon.com/home/?p=1184
write an email to: readme.spampoem@gmail.com.

4. .animated gif
• How to get the Mao
experience through Internet….
(2014)
• collective work: I collect
internet mao images and try to
contact each of the author one
by one to get their permission.
• question: how does this digital
format reconfigure the
experience of a public space
and public figure?
http://www.siusoon.com/home/?p=1155

5. . collective vs collaborative?
• how do you see the difference between the two
terms?

6. . collective vs collaborative?
!
"Collaboration and collective efforts are often
confused by those not familiar with both terms…
Collaboration is people working together (often with a
common goal) to build one thing. Collective efforts
are the aggregation of people's individual efforts,
sometimes in the same service, but do not have
common goal or common effort"
Thomas Vanderwahl
http://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1949

7. . SPEED SHOW [2.0]
http://www.siusoon.com/home/?p=1122

8. . SPEED SHOW [2.0]

9. . Summer (2013)
• Work by Olia Lialina (RU/DE)
• http://art.teleportacia.org/olia/summer/

10. . co-author
• collaborative writing - reflective writing
• google doc
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e62r4hJ9Wyqx6opscca8sDPiyMS9eUHhoXniO8ERtiw/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rCsAQKcFLbq_gbpIQB_IRq307fsanxJAP8Y9XLawkXk/edit

11. Transmediale Festival
• http://www.transmediale.de/
• Berlin-based festival -> art, culture and technology
• Theme: Capture all

12. .Datafied research workshop
http://www.transmediale.de/content/datafied-research
• peer-review

13. .Datafied research workshop
• Jul 2014 - Open call: http://
www.transmediale.de/content/
datafied-research
• Aug 2014 - notification
• Sep 2014 - 2000 words by
everyone (http://datafied-research.
projects.cavi.au.dk/)
• Oct 2014 - post responses
• end Oct 2014 - face to face
presentation and critique + 1000
words

14. .banner in hk context

15. .approach
• What is reflexivity?
• “Reflexivity requires an awareness of the researcher’s
contribution to the construction of meanings throughout
the research process, and an acknowledgement of the
impossibility of remaining ‘outside of' one’s subject
matter while conducting research. Reflexivity then,
urges us to explore the ways in which a researcher’s
involvement with a particular study influences, acts
upon and informs such research.”
(Nightingale and Cromby, 1999, p.228)

16. . reflexive practice
• self-reflexive
• reflective
• dialogic
• questioning
(Sullivan, 2010, p.110-111)

17. .theory-practice
http://www.siusoon.com/home/?p=1273
http://datafied-research.projects.cavi.au.dk/?p=178
http://hellozombies.net/

18. .zombies
Spam come with peculiar email
addresses that appear everywhere
on the Internet as a quantified
phenomenon. They are living in
the network but many of them are
faked like the zombies of the living
dead. This article discusses the
notion of the living dead in the
context of spam culture, in
particular the computational and
network process of spam
production. It investigates the role
of code plays and the material
aspect of code interacts in the
process of datafication.
“We are with you everyday, we live in the Internet
with peculiar addresses and enticing titbits, but
you call us “spam”. We wander around the
network, mindlessly, and you wanted to trash us,
but we are still everywhere. We are just the
children of your economic and social system, but
you ignore and avoid us. We are not dead, we
write, we create.”
!
—This artwork examines these nonhuman
zombies as a cultural phenomenon that
produces quantified data and network identities.
Through running the automated living machines,
the artwork intervenes the network by writing
spam poems to zombies and reading networked
replies continuously. This project explores
zombies of the living dead that bring forward
social, technical, capitalistic and aesthetic
relations in everyday lives.
http://generativeaesthetics.blogspot.dk/
http://generativeaesthetics.blogspot.dk/2014_07_01_archive.html

19. thank you