Peter Ride is the arts coordinator for Artec - London's Art and Technology centre. Artec is an incredibly influential organisation which has a very clear understanding of how its practices relate to the various communities (both digital and real-life). Peter talked about Artec and some of his recent projects in a presentation at the Moving Image Centre <http://www.mic.org.nz> in November.

Artec was set up about 6 or 7 years ago to work with artists and organisations using new technology. Its history is unusual in that it hasn't come out of video or performance practice and it's got a very strong social agenda in that it aims to make technology accessible to people and we run a lot of courses for people that don't normally have access to technology and vocational training courses. It's about giving people opportunities to develop skills which enhance their lives through ways of working with new technologies. We develop projects with a range of local organisations. These projects might be on-line governments, which might be about getting communities working together. Other times, a black organisation in London will get together with a black organisation in Jamaica and a black group in Glasgow and do something together. It might be working on-line with e-mail, it can be video-conferencing, it can be performance, it can be people story telling, whatever. It's about giving people the opportunities to operate as communities. I also work a lot with arts organisations and artists. It can be to give people a chance to do things they mightn't have done before or just imagining things in different ways. It can be about reaching new audiences and I think one of the more important things about new technology is that we are dealing with completely unparalleled and unprecedented ways of working with audiences.I don't want to do the internet brings you a 'global audience' spiel, but working with new technology gives you access to get work to people outside of the gallery structure, outside publishing structures Ð it means you can work outside of the old hierarchies and I think the question is: how do you bring work to people in a situation where it actually makes sense to them? The work which might come to them over the net, through an automatic teller machine, through windows in shops. How do you provide a work which actually communicates in that situation? Doing a film doesn't. Doing work for a publication or a gallery doesn't. Doing a work which involves a sense of consensus on a historical approach to artwork doesn't work. We're asking all of these questions, asking how/when people get engaged, when they don't get engaged. These are in a sense the cultural groundings of how you make digital artwork. Then there is the practical problem of helping people to make work, because for artists the issues are really ones of access. They have the skills because they've been through the university multimedia courses, but how do they get access to equipment? Or, if they have the equipment, they may need higher levels of skill.
We often discover that as soon as people think 'Yeah, got it, I'm there', they've reached that skill area which lets them see exactly what they want to do and they can't do it unless they can do more advanced programming. How do you, either match them to a good programmer, or help them to get the skills that they actually need? These sorts of issues come up. So the organisation tries very hard to do that. We give artists residencies, we organise commissions for artists so they can develop projects, and we organise as much as we can in the way of individual tuition for artists working in projects so they can develop stuff.

So what projects have you been doing recently?

The work I particularly want to mention comes out of two different kinds of art networks: one is an organisation called ArtAIDS which I have been involved with since 1993, when people first started talking about the web as a viable place to operate with art projects. The other is a loose network called Channel which the Arts Council of England set up, thinking that it would be a kind of really cosy web bureau where we could organise websites for galleries around the country and that we'd basically make their home pages and maybe do some little projects that could go from one to the other.
We said: Thanks but no thanks, but we will help facilitate communication. What we wanted to do was to see what happens when you get artists networking together and create a ‘federation' of organisations working on the internet, asking all those tricky questions about putting your work on the net for an audience, asking what we consider an art object to be, where the audience might be, and finding ways to promote this work. We're also trying to push to the forefront of the debate around what digital art is, and get some money in for it as well, so that the artists working on the web aren't in the usual situation that people are that they're doing other work while doing their art for the net on the side. We wanted to see artists doing internet artworks getting commissioned like a painter would or a sculptor would, a serious commission of three or four thousand pounds instead of giving you fifty dollars and expecting you to bleed to death for it. We're trying to put into place a strategy where we're saying to artists: We believe in you, and we're giving you money so you can develop the work properly, you've got time to develop things conceptually, and time to develop it technically to a level you think is necessary. We're sending a very strong message out to curators and to arts organisations, saying that there has been a lot of money put into this so you've got to take it seriously and not just say it's something different happening on the side. One of the things we try very hard to do is to say to new technology organisations: If you want people to show you what you can do which is really interesting about new technology, get artists to do it, don't just leave it in the developmental labs, in the industrial sections.
So the people I've had working on this have been doing some really interesting experimental work, taking apart software, seeing what they can do with it. One of the things I think is kind of fascinating about the internet at the moment is the way in which people have the access now to play with it in a way that there hasn't been the opportunity to before. What I think will probably happen is that there'll still be large amounts of money in new technology but the commercial sector and the industrial sector will wise up to the fact that these maverick artists are scoring money, and do a pincer movement so that stuff goes into industrial Research and Development. One of the things that I'm in the middle of doing now is with a number of policy papers being written at a governmental level. We're quite heavily advocating that industrial R & D that is being supported by the government has to have a component which is creative R & D, so we can find a space which is not traditional arts. We've had problems with the traditional arts community trying to draw digital arts and new media into it, so that we can conform to their standards, and so we are trying to avoid being squashed between arts and industry. The ArtAIDS site is an interesting one, in that it is almost a cross-section of the ways in which people work with the web, because in web-terms, it's almost prehistoric.
The site is ‘a creative website commemorating and celebrating the fight against AIDS'. It's a collaborative project put together by a group of people in 1993, and it's an artistic expression of what I would describe as Artec's politics of access. On A Day Without Art which is World Aids Day on December 1st, various cultural bodies recognise and commemorate AIDS. It was quite traditional at first for organisations to have acts of mourning, they closed galleries, they did their performances, they shrouded work in black, etc.. Cultural organisations don't do that sort of thing in England because it's terribly ‘vulgar' and it upsets your programming and your publicity, so it was very hard for people who were involved with AIDS issues to actually get cultural organisations to get involved. But there was a group of people who were interested in AIDS as a cultural issue and were interested in doing a project which went beyond the idea of a gallery as a cultural organisation and in a way recognised how problematic that is - that for lots of artists clustered in a project, as soon as you place something in a cultural organisation you get a hierarchy which is about prominence of artists, recognisable skills, bodies of work, curatorial excellence, who you know, who you fuck, that sort of thing. What we wanted to do was create a forum where people could contribute work and could get a sense that they were contributing towards a large, ongoing project, that could be accessed by people. All the issues around resources to health, resources to care, to support Ð these issues around AIDS are a cultural agenda Ð it seemed no point doing something if they could only be accessed by people who are going to central London. There are plenty of places outside of central London, places well outside the cities, where people have an interest in the project. So ArtAIDS was born out of this when the web first started being used, when it was first possible to basically have images and text, and hypertext in its simplest form could be developed. What we decided on constructing was an image exchange project. We invited a number of artists to contribute single image works, and these became part of a repository of images which ArtAIDS had and people were invited to treat these as basic images which they could download, modify and place back. It is in lots of ways a simple Photoshop exercise, the simplest of exercises which you develop in a kind of snowball fashion, a Chinese Whispers fashion. But of course what it was trying to do was take on the viral model, the viral analogy, saying that you can use and subvert the virus notion. At the same time it underpins the idea that artwork is never owned by a single person, never a finished object, everything is in the process of completion. And the way of dealing with AIDS on the cultural, political agenda is a collective activity. It sounds like old ‘70s politics but it's true: collective activity makes you strong, and that is the way in which the fight for funding and AIDS care was really won. The idea was that the project should create a visual model of that. It's changed a bit since then.
Every year we've brought in new pieces of work, and the project has gone from people working on single artworks to an exchange project where people could send in stuff, which had its very good points and its crappy points, like not knowing why people send the stuff in and you end up with an extending database that you're not sure what to do with. There is a thesis behind this that runs through a lot of work on the site that we wanted work to be available to a range of people. We wanted people with slow modem connections, with outgraded access to technology to be able to see work, and we wanted people who had greater access to technology to be able to see work and not be pissed off that it was too simple. The project has structured into it ways in which it could be accessed simply or more complexly. One of the things that we wrote into this project, which was kind of hard to do, was that there was no copyright control of the work, which some people assumed there was, while others didn't. And we asked all of our artists in a sort of contractual section in here that they willed their work to be given in perpetuity for open access. A lot of these images are being used by organisations involved in AIDS care or campaigning and that sort of thing. So it worked well as an art project, that had really simple, really straight forward objectives, but it also works internationally. A lot of the mail we get is from countries which are outside of Western Europe and America. After that we also organised workshops with artists, sometimes with care communities. Sometimes we had artists who may not have had any particular association with AIDS projects before, where we gave people the skills so they could actually work on the projects. One of the things that we felt that we ought to be able to do was to make sure that the skills remained with people, people felt very empowered by working on a project like this and it wasn't just that work could be seen, but they got the sense that they could develop.

What's your funding situation?

We're lucky because at this moment in time, people are throwing stupid amounts of money at new technology. It is astonishing really when someone says: This grant application has come through and we'd like you to be a part of it, we've just put your name down and it's a million pounds over a two year period, can you work with it? There are two strategies. Huge amounts of money come in for retraining, based around taking people off the dole, giving them skills and they will then go back into the work force. The amazing thing about working with new technology is that this actually works. We have something like a 90% success rate. People who do our courses end up either self employed or working for organisations, doing fucking incredible stuff, usually because we've preferenced people who haven't been through higher education. We particularly give access to people who haven't had the opportunities before - single parents, black people, queer people, people with disabilities, the homeless, for whatever reason they may have felt excluded. And it also means that through this we really support the idea of a cultural practice and a cultural economy, supporting people who have a really interesting life experience and want to go off and do stuff. Now sometimes these people cross immediately into doing creative projects, they're not going to want to go off and work for Mobil or Shell, they want to go to and do interesting work. It might be setting up their own business, or it might be a record label that wants to get into multimedia, it may be working with artists on projects, or people becoming artists. Some artists who have been involved in our projects have come through our training programmes. I use the term ‘artist' but at the same time I want to diminish the notion of ‘the artist', and I'm kind of glad that everyone is asking if digital art is ‘art'. It's like: No, fuck off, it''s just work, let's completely ignore the notion of the artist. I tried to get money from the various forms of the arts council in Britain, through their labyrinthine systems, and at the moment I'm pretty successful because people are desperate to support new technology and see something happen. So what I'll try and do is have an artist like Dave from the Ubiquity project working through one of the programs for training programmers to develop a project, and it has a double payoff where he gets skills from other people in the project. They work on something which is really extraordinary, and develop their skill base at the same time and he gets sucked up into a community. One of the things about Artec is that people never seem to get away, which can be a problem, you know, they stay around and sometimes find different training schemes to be involved in, but it also means that we forever have this kind of network operating, where art becomes seamless. People doing a business project on one hand end up doing a creative project. Artists who come in saying that they want to do something because they are artists often end up as community educators.

How is your relationship with the organisations that set educational standards?

Well, we do that! We are on the board of several qualifications authorities. We have been commissioned by an organisation called Skillset which is responsible for skills, learning and standards in the media industry, to develop course material and set standards. We avoid being put in the position where people are given a certificate at the end of the time they are with us, it's not that kind of standard. We try and encourage industries to say: Well, multimedia skills shouldn't depend on how you can use Photoshop, but actually in the way that people work with something. So people can come out of our course and be completely illiterate. A couple of people have been so damn dyslexic that they found keyboard use really problematic. But they can still work very effectively with a multimedia project as a leader, as managers, as facilitators - so that people can work with them. You can get through without having a tech degree.

The New Zealand Qualifications Authority would probably reject what you're doing out of hand.

When we started up there was a degree of pressure for us to conform to higher education standards. We argued that that wasn't workable and the results were the really important thing. The way that we trained, we got very skilled people who were really good at working within the industry or really good at working with ideas, yet they didn't go through a tech system or a university system. We didn't have a nationally recognised qualification. But because of the effectiveness of that training we became recognised and we got a lot of funding from the skills recognising bodies. Basically it turned on its head, so that we are the ones that are saying what standards are, one of the crucial ones in the multimedia training industry, because we proved that the higher education model doesn't operate very effectively in developing skills. I think it is actually getting money through into training projects which is a really important thing to do and it can be expensive sometimes but it does mean that you get skills developing, creative skills, which is absolutely crucial, because otherwise you're always dealing with people who are either teaching themselves or their going through higher education, through formal means, to get their training. Art school graduates are fine, but they're other kinds of people out there as well, who are extremely effective in creating multimedia.