RE: generation collaboration

Running as part of the Node London's 'Deptford TV' event cluster "Documentary Database" on Saturday was the third and final in a series of workshops, exploring audio-visual documentation of the regeneration process in Deptford.

Located at SPC media lab (previously Deckspace HQ), at Borough Hall, Greenwich, this has been host to the do-it-yourself media for over a decade, long before the Internet existed, as we know it today.

Run by Adnan Hadzi, an artist/curator and PhD student, the workshop is dedicated to the idea of bringing a community of individuals together who are interested in taking part in the democratisation of the media making process whereby we can all subvert the user/producer paradigm.

Consisting of mainly local film-makers, activists and students interested in documenting the so-called "regeneration" process, the idea behind the "Documentary Database" workshop specifically was to transfer this extensive (uncut) video documentation to a database on a server (provided by the Boundless.coop network) so that it is freely available (at watch.deptford.tv) under a Creative Commons "share-alike" license (permitting others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work).

As always not only is the project focused on user-based collaboration, but it is also enabled by collaborating with other artists and art groups. For instance the web-based software is custom built by collaborators bitnik. And of course the master of all things wireless, James Stevens is involved.

It will be interesting to see what kind of output this online material has. By the sound of things Adnan is very open to the possibilities, and not very specific about how this might work. Maybe because he's not really sure yet himself, or perhaps because it is the process of sharing and collaboration that are more important to this project than the outcome.

The Deckspace space is a phenomenon which anyone having even the remotest interest in digital arts scene should be aware of. Check the Node.L calendar to see when the next Deptford TV event cluster event takes place.