On Sunday, May 25, we led a discussion at the Biennale on “Exploring the Opportunities of Digital Tools”, moderated by LabforCulture and featuring guests Alessandro Ludovico, a media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine (based in Bari actually!), and Taylor Nuttall, Chief Executive of folly (UK). The session was attended by a wide range of artists and practitioners of many different ages and with varying amounts of experience using online and digital tools. Participants came from countries all over the wider Europe and the Mediterranean, such as Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey and Italy.

The workshop was a lively and practical session around the use of technologies by artists and cultural practitioners to collaborate, create and disseminate. Alessandro and Taylor gave participants personal and innovative examples of how they could work together and create with the help of digital tools (including free and open source software of all kinds, social networks, wikis, blogs, etc.).

Taylor Nuttall started off the discussion by describing several of folly’s main positions as an organisation, two of which were particularly relevant in the context of the day’s discussions: “championing democratic technologies” and “questioning not celebrating impact of technologies”. These statements are clearly reflected in folly’s work in projects such as Digi Club, Portable Pixel Playground and the Digital Artists Handbook. Taylor focused mainly on the last (upon our request!). This extremely useful and well-received guide (freely available online and published under a Creative Commons license) “has developed out of ongoing consultation with artists working with technology, which has shown a need for removing the barriers for artists to use digital tools”. Taylor described the extensive collaborative process behind this recently published project and gave an overview of the challenges they still face in relation to the tools mentioned in the Handbook (such as limited take up in education settings, poor support from other learning resources, low take up by some areas of business community).

Douglas Stanley (an artist, professor and researcher based in Aix-en-Provence, who also led a workshop on Monday the 26th at the Biennale on digital tools) asked Taylor about plans for translating the handbook and the possibility to have the community work on these translations via the Handbook website, which raised really crucial issues around language needs and community engagement.

This was an interesting example to address in the cultural sector in relation to edited and non-edited (user-generated) content. Indeed there is a lot of will in the sector to help and collaborate with needed initiatives such as these. The key to facilitating this collaboration could be something as simple as a good, open online interface in which people can work on, for example, translating the content of the Handbook. But then of course the question is: do we want to open up our content to the community to translate freely (meaning that we can not 100% control the quality of the translations or the pace of the translation or even what languages the material is translated into but rather depend on the good will and knowledge of those translating…)?

More on Alessandro Ludovico’s presentation and comments from the participants in part 2 of our report from the workshop.

In case you missed them, check out the rest of our reports from the Biennale here: http://www.labforculture.org/en/labforculture/blogs/27195

For photos from the Biennale, see our Flickr page.

And for more information on the Biennale, see: http://www.biennalepuglia2008.org