Photo-mural from the Docklands Community Poster Project, © Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson 1982

Here at Solar we are very pleased to announce that a recent interview we conducted with Loraine Leeson, an artist and collaborator who took part in Not Quite Yet: On the Margins of Technology, a component of Solar’s recent collaborative project Co-Pilot.net, will be made part of an exciting exhibition in Dublin.

Art for Change: a Retrospective of Work by Loraine Leeson is an innovative exhibition of work from the mid 1970’s to the present day combining activism, politics, education and research. The exhibition will celebrate Loraine Leeson as an artist whose professional practise has influenced and supported social change for over 30 years. 

Space Station Dana accelerated off its launch pad last week, with a great quartet of guest speakers sharing their knowledge and passion for space exploration with a riveted audience. Coney, the agency of adventure with whom Solar has been working closely since the summer, distributed 'astronaut training manuals' to the crowd as they entered, achieving what they do best: finding fun ways that allow people to move beyond being passive recipients of experience, and to become active players.

Coney had attached some elegant and gentle game-play stuff to the zone of expertise of each speaker: psychological testing was twinned with a small group competition that brilliantly partitioned off group planning discussion of a physical task, from the collaborative building work that followed (actually a real test in astronaut training!). In another room, a Q+A on the history of space travel was followed by a dizzying slalom through a miniaturised solar system. Teams based on continents competed to send one of their number into orbit and win a prize.

The real reward, though, was for the whole audience – a compelling description of the experience of being in space by real life astronaut Jean-Francois Clervoy, who's clocked up over 375 hours being out of this world. One of the players said on final descent: “this has been the most fun I've had at a Dana event”, and we hope to work further with Coney as they evolve and refine this format in the future.

We don't usually share the contents of mail that hits the Solar Associates intray with the world, but some times it can be too intriguing to resist......notice the stamp? (a full screen view of the card is here) This can't be a fly-by-night prankster, there must be more too it than that. We may contact the email address and see what happens. Care to join us?

  ]]>Chocks Awayhttp://www.solarassociates.net/news/2008/10/20/chocks-away.htmlTim2008-10-20T19:06:32Z

In partnership with [space], we've launched Co-Pilot.net, a time-limited website, which includes and links to professional development resources for artists working at points where creativity, participation and technology meet. The site includes several first-outta-the-blocks contributions from Tim, our Director, including mini essays which offer some observations on the current conditions of the UK's participatory arts scene, as well as a bunch of audio interviews with artists who took part in The Not Quite Yet - a project exploring the terms of Older People's involvement in technology design processes.

Why is Co-Pilot time limited? The clue's in the title. This is a pilot project, and we want to tactically test the responses to the idea of an online conversation space for these ideas, instead of assuming there's interest out there. Equally, we're intrigued by what might emerge from a time compression - whether it encourages denser engagement - and we like the idea of archiving a snapshot of where the centre(s) of gravity are, within these complex intersections, that stands as a snapshot of how we were thinking in late 08.

We expect that Co-Pilot will fly until Christmas, maybe a little longer if we can squeeze out the resources, before we bottle up the learning. During that time there will be a diverse selection of site 'hosts' posting provocations and stirring the forum debates. As with everything we're involved in, we hope Co-Pilot will have a life beyond its initial flight. Perhaps, if there's momentum among the site's subscribers, we might organise some offline events, and more. Keep a look out - we'll post updates on the Co-Pilot site, and here, as and when we have them.

Visit our Co-Pilot project page if you want any more details: otherwise, go here to read, listen, contribute.....

burntprogress have been busy over recent weeks. Their CDR project has been surfacing at several summer UK music festivals – Rise, The Big Chill and Lewisham People's Day - that we booked them into. A healthy mix of music makers and fans gathered at each, demonstrating their ongoing support for this unique platform for emerging and existing talent – and their appreciation for the airing of great new tracks-in-the-making.

Rise provided CDR with a chance to support some young MCs.  At Lewisham, burntprogress shared stage time with Red Snapper and Ty, and offered an 'OpenCDR' opportunity to local artists who could hear their work through a festival-scale sound system. At the Big Chill, Solar Associates heard from members of CDR's evolving East Midlands network - for which we fundraised awhile back. The 3-day OpenCDR special at the Big Chill finished  to applause, and with mix requests from the Festival and from marketing agency Beatwax. We bumped into Alan James (a.k.a. AJ), former ACE Head of Contemporary Music and current producer for The Imagined Village and the Bays + the Heritage Orchestra, who was pleased to hear the burntprogress/Solar collaboration is ongoing. Check out the CDR segment of the Guardian's Big Chill podcast here.

Respect to the burntprogress team for their fine work, and thanks to each of these Festivals for hosting the project. (Image of Tony Nwachukwu/CDR taken during a session at The Big Chill House, London.)

As part of its work for the West London Story, Solar Associates has begun working with the Festivals Forum based in west London's Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Earlier this week, we convened a capacity building workshop session for this group of festival producers. A rich range of experiences were in the space, including representatives from Chelsea Festival, Earl's Court Festival, Notting Hill Carnival, Portobello Film Festival and Portobello Music Festival.

We had an animated afternoon - among the aspects we explored were how the Forum might present a collective face to the world that transcends the sum of its (already impressive) parts, and what the producers might want on the shelves of their shared 'festivals cupboard' (real or virtual). There's clear fundraising leverage and resource efficiency to be gained, and perhaps gains that will enhance artistic outputs as well.

The Forum provides an excellent (and all too rare) opportunity to explore what ongoing collaboration between these very different festivals might look and feel like, before they find themselves locked into a future partnership. It's a under-discussed common experience within the UK arts scene for all too many 'partnerships' to amount to little more than project-based agreements over how a shared money-pot will work, with scant consideration of, and preliminary discussion about, the natural compatibilities and flashpoints between partners, and how different organisational cultures will intersect.

It's great to input into something different, and potentially positive. Our personal highlight from the session was hearing about this summer's new collaboration between Notting Hill Carnival and the Ramadan Festival - right now in the UK, there's a clear need to support and invest in inter-cultural initiatives, and accessible ways to create creative platforms that allow different communities to exchange, communicate and understand each other. Oh, and the 'psychogeography' T-shirt worn by Jonathan Barnett (Director of Portobello Film Festival) was great too - showing the range of locations this much-respected Festival has reached into over its long history, and the impressive connections it's established with innovative film-makers and artists (Photo credit: Colin Gregory Palmer).

Last week, with our fundraising visors on, we helped to lead some presentations and practical exercises during a 2-day workshop convened by PRADSA. 20 delegates, each with an interest in Technology and Social Action projects,  assembled at Anglia Ruskin University to explore how to engage with, and influence, the fundraising opportunities and funding systems that relate to their ambitions. 

We offered some insights into where the money is and where it's going; how to apply research tools and filters; and, crucially, how to think - and talk – with the emphasis placed strongly on funders' objectives, and the needs that each project aims to address. It can be tough to translate the complex concepts around collaborative technologies and grass-roots social development into confident, accessibly worded, resource-raising propositions. But we made some good progress, and not without a good laugh en route. By the afternoon of day 2, image theatre techniques were in the mix, and - in recognition of strong pitching skills – Solar Associates donated a tenner to the World Film Collective - we look forward to our credit ;).

Through this lens, there's an intriguing degree of crossover between the tech + social action world, and the arts and cultural sector. We've long felt that the UK's arts sector needs to 'get viral' to replenish itself and - with many new ways of raising resources and achieving sustainability being hothoused and championed over the past few years - it's an exciting moment for us to be in the thick of these conversations, looking for links.

PRADSA aims to develop and extend the capability of social action organisations to creatively design new practices, by appropriating and adapting ICTs. Visit its website here.

Today we launch Sunspots, the Tumblelog for Solar Associates. We'll be regularly posting up content and links there that coincide with our varied range of interests. Visit Sunspots if you'd like to pick up the RSS Feed - we're finding it a very efficient and friendly way of sharing knowledge. To whet appetites, links up there already include career advice for musicians in the digital age from blogger Andrew Dubber; info on pervasive gaming and the future of public and socially engaged art; a link to Sarah Thelwall's Market Day eBooks hosted on the Proboscis website (invaluable market development tools for creative organisations) and a brilliant video of Sir Ken Robinson talking about creativity and education. We'll be continuing to hop between silos in our work across art forms and social contexts, so we anticipate Sunspots will become a reflection of our boundless interests and hopefully a useful resource for people interested in what we're doing.

(And what's a tumblelog? It's a kind of blog that's geared around short mixed-media posting  - ours is going to be largely about links, but they can also contain videos, images, text etc. Find out more here.)

In the most recent issue of ArtsProfessional magazine, we explain some of what we do at Solar Associates. This sterling fortnightly, which provides news and features to to the UK's arts managers, has a Digital Arts feature at the moment, including info about the Futuresonic and Lovebytes festivals. Our own piece, a light-hearted intro to how we think about the digital realm in relation to arts production, is called 'Getting the Bug' and can be downloaded here. It includes this gorgeous still taken from Roshini Kempadoo's Amendments, which we produced earlier this year, which we can't get enough of. (Screen image from Amendments (2007) by Roshini Kempadoo. Used courtesy of the Artist.)