Proposal for a ‘table practice’ at the conference Don’t Know!, this Saturday 17 September:

The Graffiti Markup Language1 is a standard for describing graffiti practice. By making graffiti motion data freely available, GML allows anyone to transfer, compare and interrogate the work of individual writers. The standard is developed by artist Evan Roth2 with the help of a community of graffiti artists, animators, jugglers and coders. But how to capture a writers' movement outside the controlled environment of the studio or laboratory? For this reason, Evan challenged the GML-community to develop a 'Field Recorder' that "unobtrusively records graffiti motion data during a graffiti writer's normal practice in the city".

In a session inspired by the tradition of the BoF3 I propose to start from a collective close reading of the challenge itself4. From there, I would like to think through ways a body practice can be captured, it's data stored, analysed, communicated and eventually re-played.

Duration: 2.5 hours

Dominique Somers (in cooperation with Dirk Belmans): Pornographic Drawings, 2010. Drawings made by tracking the eye movements of a person while he is watching a porn movie

Evan Roth: White Glove Tracking, 2007 (on going)

Pierre Bismuth: Following the right hand of …, 2010 (ongoing)

1. http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com
2. http://evan-roth.com
3. BoFs are informal and adhoc table practices current in computing conferences. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) uses the term to describe initial meetings of members interested in a particular issue to be worked into a future standard.
4. http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/challenges/gml-field-recorder-challenge