Did we 'Do It With Others'?

A few of the Street Trainers (Lottie, Emily & Aileen) will be in London this weekend at Furtherfield taking part in the event titled 'Doing It With Others'. http://www.furtherfield.org/furtherprojects.php. This event invites a range of collaborative practitioners to make presentations and look at the methods they use to 'do it with others'.

I'd like to take this oportunity to think about how we did or did not do it with others during Street Training, Linz. To think about how this project might be important as a collaborative practice and how we might develop it to include others more. I am curious to find out how you, as an onlooker, participant or organiser of Street Training felt about how we were 'doing it with others'.

At any point during the project did you get a feeling of doing it with othersness?

What was it that encouraged that feeling?

At any point did you feel like you worked collaboratively with the project?

Did you at feel like you were involved with the co-production of the project / artwork?

Did you feel like your contribution was a central part of the practice?

I'd like to think about what what Mark Garrett ment by the term Soft Groups and how this might help a playful development of Street Training.

THOUGHTS ON THE NIGHT WALK IN LINZ FOR ARS ELECTRONICA

is this too public a place for my thoughts and evaluation of street training in Linz?

POSTED BY LOTTIE CHILD - THOUGHTS ON THE NIGHT WALK
why do any particular intervention? one answer might be - just because we can - there seems value in the confidence building that playful deviation from dictated, conditioned behaviour creates. It is for each person to judge if their desired activity is the right thing to do. what i'm keen to develop and i think we did it well during the May street training sessions/workshops - is a group dynamic that can contain experimentation, allow for challenge of codes and self and at the same time be a positive intervention in space and have a positive effect on the person doing it.

Impressions

Gathering on the roof of the parking garage, shouting into the street, drinking warm coffee, walking through the city to the bridge, leaving traces, in and out of a tall building, making music with a fountain ...

Then

Doing nothing ...

What impressions are left? What kind of thoughts and reflections were evoked?

What did it feel like?

A Night Walk and a Day of Doing Nothing

Join us during the Ars Electronica Festival for a night walk and a day of doing nothing:

Street Training - Night walk followed by Doing Nothing
Lottie Child/UK + Street trainers
Friday, 7 september 2007, 10:30 p.m.
Meeting place: roofdeck of the City-Parkhaus Linz
Saturday, 8 september 2007. 7 a.m. 2 p.m.
Meeting place: Volksgarten/Linz
Street Training at Kunstraum Goethestraße
Street Training Blog
Lottie Child's web site


For the Ars Electronica Festival 2007 two training sessions will lead into each other: a night walk and Doing Nothing Day. They will be led by street trainers who have been developing their skills since the first sessions in May. The agenda for the night walk will be dictated by the people who show up and include activities pre-planned by street trainers.
Doing Nothing Day will take place in the Volksgarten/Linz, where we will teach others our own personal techniques for Doing Nothing and try out each others'.
Street Training Linz is a project of KunstRaum Goethestrasse xtd developed by the artist Lottie Child/GB with the curator Emily Druiff/GB in cooperation with Radio FRO and Aileen Derieg.

What is Street Training?

Street Training is the art of constantly transforming ourselves and our streets both collectively and individually. It's commonly understood that our surroundings have a powerful effect on us. Street Training teaches us that we can have an equally powerful effect on our surroundings with our thoughts and behaviour. Increased awareness and engagement are developed through the regular practice of exploring ourselves and our localities safely and joyfully. Many street training activities only take a few seconds, but the effects they have are accumulative and confidence building, and perhaps any behaviour practiced for long enough becomes instinct.


We produced a street training manual which contains a wide variety of people's knowledge, and just like different ways of using public space, the ideas are sometimes conflicting. The manual contains techniques passed on to you from people of Linz, Austria, and London. Street training has two aspects, action and inaction; the Path of Safety and the Path of Joy suggest consciously engaged action in the streets, and Doing Nothing suggests techniques for doing as little as possible, thereby enabling effective action.
Everyone who uses the street considers safety, but joy and doing nothing are usually overlooked. It is vitally important that you study all three aspects. Too much focus on action and your calmness will diminish, too much focus on inaction may result in indifference.

Find out where we are during Ars Electronica

We are using Twitter for continuous updates on where we are and what we are doing during the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz: http://twitter.com/streettraining

You can follow us online at: http://twitter.com/streettraining/with_friends

If you have a Twitter account you can receive updates on your mobile phone by sending "follow streettraining" as a text message to Twitter: +44 7624 801423 (check the Twitter FAQ for international numbers). You can receive updates via IM by sending "follow streettraining" as a chat message to Twitter.

For more detailed instructions, please see the Twitter help page.
Twitter updates are also automatically posted to this blog in the upper right hand corner.

Open Doors

Behind the mostly closed and uninviting facades of the buildings in the Neustadtviertel, there are a multitude of gardens enclosed by the surrounding buildings. If the front door is open to the street, so that you can catch a glimpse of the garden behind it, is it all right to go in? Is an open door an invitation?

In some ways this kind of invitation is more clearly defined in online space than in urban space. Photos, journal entries (i.e. blog posts), bookmarks can not only be defined as private, but it is also possible to set various degrees of public and private accessibility in most of the free services offered online (like this one).

If it is all right to walk through an open door to look around at the garden behind the building, is it all right to leave a tag on the white wall of the hallway there? Will the owner and the residents of the building see the tag as a greeting, a sign of appreciation, or as an act of vandalism, evidence of an intruder?

If someone automatically makes all their photos online publicly accessible, is it all right to look at all the pictures of their baby, family gatherings, exuberant parties and private holidays? If it is all right to look at the pictures, is it all right to comment on them, link to them, use them somewhere else? Will that be understood as an expression of appreciation or an act of intrusion?

And now a blog too

Continuing our exploration of public, private and in-between spaces online as well as in Neustadtviertel, now we have a blog as well.