CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

CHARADE: The Peer-To-Peer Distribution of Media Assets Into the Public at Large
Simon Pope, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK

A presentation of CHARADE, Simon Pope's distributed, participatory artwork, recently commissioned by the BBC and Arts Council England. This will be an opportunity for critical reflection on the project, including its relationship to broadcast media strategies, interaction with audience and the sharing, ownership and distribution of media assets.

CHARADE itself draws on the final scene of François Truffaut's film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's ‘Fahrenheit 451’ where figures read to themselves as they walk, deep in concentration, intent on committing to memory key texts from the literary canon. Threatened by a screen-based culture, intent on the destruction of written forms of knowledge, literature takes flight – read, memorised, remembered- walked into the body. CHARADE also inverts a key premise of Fahrenheit 451: rather than providing stable conditions for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, our computer networks become troubled, precarious: the fear - of data-corruption, of system-crash, of network-infiltration - forces data to take flight, out of electronic systems, back towards the body. Through a series of workshops, video-diaries, online communities, media campaign and a large-scale live event, volunteers became guardians of this data, invited to walk, read, remember and recite, becoming a living embodiment of the network's media assets. (see <http://www.charade.org.uk>)

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