 I'll just point out where Harry Harry is, for those of you who are not familiar with it, it's the west coast of the South Island. Actually, the person that built Upstage is with us here, Douglas, built it for us. When Upstage was built, I was on a dial-up internet connection, so there were really stretch parameters and what we wanted it to do. I just wanted to start a little bit, Harry Harry is where I grew up. I did a lot of travelling and then came back there. I think of myself as an artist visually for most, but I use a lot of digital things. I wanted to start with a bit of a whakapapa of, I guess I'm introducing myself, but also of Ada as a network, because it kind of leads into how we intersect and the kind of coming back to as we alluded to in our little bit that we wrote when we were filling it in. So Ada, it was born in 2003. It is a network. I initially had global in there, but network always means to me global anyway. So it started as an idea and a list and the list still exists. I've got a page that I'll show you later. You can join it. You become a member of Ada basically by joining the list. It's self-selecting. It is curated in that I get a whole lot of emails that I often or primarily, a lot of them currently have to delete. This is where it all began as a research project. The idea then was that, particularly for me, starting to join this list, I was in Harihari, the population, around about 300. I was working in network performance. I was having to describe everything about what I was doing and suddenly through Ada, I found a language and a culture that a whole lot of the stuff that I was doing I didn't have to describe. I had to describe why I was doing it, but I didn't have to describe how and things like that. So this was the first symposium that I actually attended from Harihari. The next one I was lucky enough to go to and we performed at and so the thing about Ada is a national network. So we have these kind of rhizomic activities around the country. I have been doing this for a while now. And it's about actually how the people that are coming to the symposium are interacting with each other. So this was a work called RGB where the delegates all went out and took images of what they thought reflected red, green or blue and it was compiled into a video. It was a really interesting outcome. Ada always gathers around food because it is a really nice way of networking and there's something really good about food. We intersect a lot with other networks. This is Ada at Scans. Upstage and the Avatar body collision, which is a collective I'm part of, was we were resident at Scans and also this is another artist that was resident there, Becca Wood, who's an Ada member. So we're looking at place a lot always in our work, I guess. And again this conglomeration of people where the digital was actually, I don't know if you could actually see it. Ian's on his phone. It's very much around the network, the weaving thing, the connection of the people. So it's Ada's about people coming to New Zealand as well as what New Zealanders are doing and sharing practice. So this is just a quick tour around the country and where Ada has been here in 2009. Ada has been trying to have these reasonably annually and in 2008 Ada formed a trust. So I guess they're starting to talk more about these art practices and the people coming together and really starting to push back out and the artists in the community and setting these discourses for them, particularly around things like the travel and for that one in particular. So Ada is a website, these are some of the projects that Ada's been involved in and unfortunately I don't have a copy of the Ada media reader to show you which was kind of like this amazing snapshot of Aotearoa Digital Artist in 2008 which was launched as part of an exhibition that I see here in Singapore. The touring artist, the Kotawiki, which I'll point that out because it comes up a little bit later on, was a way and it was a piece of software that was a way for people to start to self-select into this archive of Aotearoa Digital Art Works and artists and it was set up in a kind of template way in order for people to start to put their projects in there. Ada takes a kind of a curatorial stance on that I guess in a way but it was a chance for all these people to go, we're here, this is what we're doing. Net Walking was a project that Ada ran bringing the UK artist Simon Pope out and he ran masterclasses all around the country getting people within this network and people who came along to the projects to engage with each other in what he called shoulder-to-shoulder networking so actually walking and talking. The digital is really important but actually the network Aotearoa Digital Artists Network is a really prime driver as well. So a whole lot of the Kotawiki brought together a whole lot of material which was launched in this new website and also the Ada Trust had come about and in 2012 we put together an application for a more organisational focus and looked at the theme of the transitional city in the post earthquake Christchurch. For those of you who are not from New Zealand you should be aware that there's a huge amount of art being created in and around Christchurch for and by Christchurch people but where the media art or art in public space is fitted in there but also thinking about how what was happening there was resonating around the rest of the country as well. So we started off with this round table event that's at the top of the physics room the Heard Street Post Office, Remain Standing, was built in the 30s post the Napier Earthquake and so it had incredible foundations but the rest of Heard Street is gone and at that stage we were looking into the red zone that hadn't been opened then and we brought together a whole lot of Christchurch artist agencies and also the people from the Ada Network to start to talk about how we approached this and so we were talking about the role and the importance and we came up with this sort of concept of space, network and memory that really fitted a lot of the things that people were doing and the kind of work that we knew of the people that might be involved in this and because we as Ada have symposia in North Island and South Island we headed off down to Dunedin to have our first symposia and we had artists creating work specifically for this and talking about works that they were creating in Christchurch or elsewhere and again we engaged in the Ada practice which is a lot around this kind of third space of a whole lot of people together in a room. We had people creating artworks that they made for and engaged with from outside of New Zealand and we had a couple of people coming over who were using very, there was one that is called Long Time No See and they called it a Futuring Tool and it has a paper booklet as a field guide but it also has an app. We also had an artist that did a walk through absent memory so she actually used the internet to research around Dunedin and create this walk that people went on and then she talked about and she wasn't there. She came back this year. All of this is incredibly documented and this is where the... this is where the I Am Sexed Hour really comes in. We've been touring artists as well so Janine Randerson did a work around Christchurch. She does a work based on equality data and she started to try and create a work that looked at Christchurch based on this idea of hope and responding to images. This is a touring artist this year and this is a legacy project which those of you who'd heard James Smithy's talking about seismic he was one of the people that came to the round table. So this is a geolocated auditory work that sits across Christchurch so you can only actually impot into it if you're in Christchurch. You can't impot from outside of Christchurch even if you're a Christchurch person but you can listen to it outside of Christchurch and the idea is that you turn it on and put it in your pocket and walk around and you engage in these levels of Christchurch. It's Christchurch as it was. Christchurch in a snapshot and present and also Christchurch in this speculative future the hopes of people who are in Christchurch or their responses or the children at the moment growing up in Christchurch what they see for the city the ability for people to leave messages for themselves or to play games with this idea of putting bits of audio into space. This was our symposium in Auckland this year so we're trying to build on this idea of space network and memory where it originally created this three-year project that would go around New Zealand and come back to Christchurch. This particular project actually ends this year because we were funded to do it for two years and we did the same thing again in Auckland of getting people out into the Auckland space and we started to look at the social spaces and so the art and public space was a really focus for Dunedin and in Auckland we were starting to look more around architectural and social spaces. We partnered with Digital Outlive to create a work that was shown in the Aotea Square Dan untitled for the Wellingtonians you might know him and he made a robot that saw in 3D and played with the superimposing that images of people in front of it over classic horror genre movies and Auckland scenery. This is Ada currently. We are a website. This is the Wall of Fame. There's a little snapshot of the book that I don't have to show you here but there's a current Ada trustees and the people that have been instrumental in setting it up and have been trustees and we wanted to talk to you about when we wrote our presentation idea we didn't know that we were in the current position we are in now with Ada as an organisation. We had these two speculative projects that we wanted to do and so I'm going to talk about one of it and then Bea gets going to take over and talk about the other. These are really speculative at the moment but one of the things for me I've been interested in community how far to community on a really broad sense in terms of coming from a very small and remote community and looking at this idea of mesh I'm really into the idea of nets and weaving and that connection is really important in good weaving and in good nets and I'm really interested in New Zealand as part of the wider Pacific and so part of the thing I was interested in doing is taking that idea, that space that's created between artists and scientists and researchers and thinkers when they're put together in an environment and for me the most exciting environment is the sea so that was one project that is a watch the space I guess these were the organisations that we were talking to about this and with this and we went Vickie Sarri from ANET and I presented at the USP at a Talanoa for sustainable sailing technology this year in which we started to form some relationships that will hopefully end up being something out of that and now we are over to Bea again. Cool, so I joined ADA last year during the Dunedin Conference and immediately jumped on board because I was so thankful for being a foreigner that has kind of a quirky art practice kind of in the digital analogue programmer designer and coming from Europe to New Zealand I felt really kind of welcomed by the presence of such a network that's in one way open to people like me who are looking for a kind of critical feedback on what I'm doing but also just knowing some people that are around that speak more or less the same language or you don't have to have this 10 minute introduction of I'm doing stuff with computers and hardware hacking but what does it mean what does it have to do with art so that's when I jumped on board and we had like we keep presenting lots of the history and there's kind of a rich amount of works that has been produced in this particular time and the project we were thinking about and that's my more or less the glam question here how can we preserve these works for the future and that's kind of the common question on how to preserve anything and especially digital art and maybe digital art that doesn't even fit into the contemporary frame really well how do you preserve that for future generation if it maybe becomes more relevant later than now so maybe some of my works maybe now are completely weirdly understood by the people which has happened but perhaps there's a way of preserving them or archiving them that in maybe 10 or 20 years someone could look back and understand the contemporary issues with meter and technology better so yeah, with the art base we actually want to reach out not being like this kind of 300 sort of members and member means actually you just subscribe to the mailing list and Vicky accepted you as a non-spam bot so that is already the small threshold of getting into the like Aida network so we were thinking we have this amount of people that are kind of willing to open up share their works, share their ideas and thoughts and discuss and give critical feedback so we have kind of the links and that's how our talk is called links and cables, bricks and mortar because when we were discussing that whole glam sector we were thinking we are kind of with the art base where we want to actually preserve and present all these works to maybe even international audience that they are like, yeah, we are both a gallery we're a library in one sense because we have like lots of written text lots of discourse also in the mailing list archives archive and museum but the only thing we don't have is like a building, like a library with a signage saying Aida network we are kind of more ephemeral on top of that whole construct so all the conferences that Vicky showed were kind of in collaboration with some sort of either academic institution or with some sort of archive or museum so we have these connections somehow that flow between the buildings and we think that we have the network that could be kind of creating more discourse in these buildings that seem to maybe gotten a bit empty and lonely since the internet took over and people don't really have to literally walk somewhere to get information but Aida generation who didn't use the internet to actually only like reach out and find people and see okay there is someone else on the same time on the other side of the planet and we could technically talk to this person that kind of magic of the internet has kind of faded and we felt that now being more in this fringy art scene it's more important to have this connection to like local artists and use the internet more to say like hey we're having a thing going on and I'm able to contact Vicky with Nelson come to Wellington let's do it and that's kind of the thing that we're more interested in like hanging out in the meat space is like way more productive and way more social space where really things can happen so I think like one day spending at the symposium is much better than trying to kind of do some Skype things. We have board meetings over Skype and like the technology always takes over in the moment so yeah that's how we see ourselves fit into the glam sector but not really being one or the other and totally not being buildings we were thinking about how the art base could actually like technologically work and what actually should we present and how again this metadata and taking question and curating content and censoring content yes no so we're thinking that we want a certain open space but curated in the other way so not everyone should kind of declare any piece part of the digital art archive of New Zealand so there should be some kind of human judgement put on top of that to maybe create collections and ask for certain contributions also from people who might be not in the network yet and there is funnily enough the archive of digital art I think people from Austria did that and they're also called ADA so they already have a really nice archive of general the digital arts and they have like a whole collection of bibliographies and documentation so it's really broad and huge but we really want to focus on the more local aspect and then there's also the Marcel Network I don't know if anyone knows it that's like from a French old academic dude called Don Forester and he's really great he's been thinking about this for I think longer than I live and how to really connect artists on a global level and he found his whole ontology and I think ANET is also part of it the organisation can be part of it and I've having Skype discussions with him and he's really interested in using the internet as a non-commercial space so everyone knows every click you do and every step you take online on the most like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn will all be kind of commodified and he's really one of the persons who has the capability and kind of academic background to be able to really build a network from scratch that's really for artists and not kind of only on the superficial part creating some creative discourse and in the back end there's all this ad tracking surveillance and free speech problems and one other project from like one of my ex teachers in Rotterdam it's called Lurk so they're kind of the sketching the post mailing list scenario and we have a mailing list which is great but probably it's not the newest thing that you can sell to the kids they don't really like email that much and it's actually kind of even the kind of threshold of having to define a subject to communicate to a crowd seems to be the biggest issue because on Facebook you can just say law and everyone is with you but you can't really write law to the mailing list so you really think okay I have to really focus myself and to spell checks twice and three times and really think really hard that don't come across like more like too banal or non-academic so we're thinking that the mailing list is a good thing because it is hosted by the university not by Facebook so all the information is sort of safe and it's free speech, non-sensor that sort of things but still it's not on top medium at the moment so I also found this really interesting article in RISOM where Mark Zuckerberg says law somehow became chief archivist for a body of contemporary art criticism and in the later post he says made the data I don't care and he's kind of making fun that there was this post by Michael Hebron that kind of sparked a really critical discussion about the artwork and I think racism come up and feminism like all these really issues and there are more than 500 or 800 comments, 850 comments and it got really like deep on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg was kind of making fun of it so like look even the artists are kind of creating discourse on my stupid website and I'm not interested in it so we're thinking how can you create an interface that invites people to pop out their opinions and feel kind of invited to just say lol or whatever but still have it in our hands not in Facebook's hands so dragon Espinciaid who is a partner of Oly Li Elina and he's also responsible for archiving all the geocities or deconstructing the whole geocities archive he calls himself I think a digital preserver or archivist or something but he had the idea of making like a sort of proxy service that you could connect to Facebook like use Facebook, the whole interface make use of it but connect via proxy so that the proxy actually kind of catches the whole documentation or the whole communication between you and Facebook and then you actually have to control to match the dag and however you want to do document and archive this whole discussion so we think that's great but I haven't seen any working product it should be a Firefox plugin so I don't have a day about it so we also have a Facebook page but as I said that's not the ideal situation so we were thinking there are lots of great open source software projects like Koho because we were the last night discussing maybe we're even more kind of could act the archive more like a library because archive sounds like a box that's put down and close the door and that's it and a library sounds more like people come and engage with it maybe we could make a system where artists could propose to put their artworks into the system and galleries and curators and museums and whoever could look into the archive and actually rent the artworks and display them and then you could actually use the system to say okay Bronwyn's work is in there but you could say it's on loan by some great library that you found and then you could actually see can I acquire the artwork and how so maybe creating more like a dialogue aesthetic thing like this is an archive done but kind of more like how can you get it and if there's digital work maybe you could directly download it and the system keeps kind of track how often has it been downloaded but not like tracking you and then saying people who downloaded this artwork also would like that artwork sort of stuff so in the end that's a picture from Aida Symposium in Auckland and that they know that we keep a text that is friendly, weirdos so I think that just wants to show like that's kind of a cool picture of the symposium two minutes I'm more sort of down, I mean that's kind of the overview of a few people who are trying to geek out on a laptop with a, this was a strange workshop someone like the data sets and put them into wallpapers yeah but it was fun so yeah we are kind of open I don't know where is the, is there a slide with sign up? yeah but there's the website and you can click on whatever and then you can sign up to the mailing list so we are really kind of trying to use the mailing list as the backbone for the system but trying to develop in different directions and also being more accessible to the glam sector to see how great people we are and how we could contribute to your culture thanks so much I think we've got a couple of minutes so does anybody have any questions at all for the Ada Ada Fook Jay so thank you very much for that very interesting journey through Ada and where you guys are what do you want in your network that is an artist, are you looking for other resources what do you need well you know in our resource like one of the things we were thinking about was you know these like physical sites for hosting these kind of events and more you know the effort that goes into a symposia and the gathering together of people that are vitally important and all the thinking that goes on before it is you know huge and great but also actually able to have these kind of faster smaller you know more I guess exhibition focused but also like you know real workshopping hackerspace and both the Dunedin and the Auckland one we had these maker sessions, skill shares and you know that kind of aspect we have really resisted the bricks and mortar having a place where we exist because it you know things automatically start to centralise north and really you know just to keep that real national global network but you know money is another good one, affiliate programs we do have a really really exciting and broad range of people who are involved in AIDA so people that are you know within institutions like you know actually the kind of the aid in this for one of other way to describe it you know being able to take that out and actually within institutions as well just other ways to you know to I guess think from different perspectives you know letting go of institutional structures and plugging in a few kind of friendly weirdos and seeing what will come out of these institutions you know brought in your slide to the other night where you said when you let things go strange things haven't good things surprisingly good strange things can happen but you know the thing of you know because there's all these amazing skill sets in the room here but also you know I guess sometimes a different approach as well yeah but money infrastructure infrastructure not so much money no, not so much money I'm on the at this point I'd like to say that we have been massively supported by CNZ and institutions who have hosted us and galleries who have hosted us so we are you know we are really lucky in that respect yeah OK I think we might wrap it up because afternoon tea time but thanks so much for coming everyone and thank you for our presenters