Talkoo is the Finnish tradition of people coming together from a community to do unpaid work, usually in the upkeep or construction of buildings. It is based on a system of relationships and shared goals, in the same way that barn raising and gotong-royong rely on community structures of reciprocal exchange to achieve group objectives.

The Talkoo proposes to use the act of working together as a platform for building non-hierarchical relationships between participants as a base for dialogue and collaborative projects. The aim is to create an environment where all Talkoo contributors act productively in generating knowledge from their personal art practice. The discoveries and findings of these projects will inform the development of the programme.

In this way Talkoo will be an educational network that builds engagements and responsibilities through WORK. These work related exchanges will create a geographically dispersed VILLAGE through the layering of successive participants. The project is CHAMBERED which means that it will exist through different sites and projects with their own approaches and ethoi, to engage with multiple local situations and approaches.

Work will be structured around a core cell of resident artists on to which different actors are added creating the team. This transformer-like partial modularity is directed towards a wide range of artistic social interactions, gifting and symbolic exchanges that build up infrastructures of reciprocal obligations. Talkoo will promote high Betweenness* and can be understood as founding a geographically dispersed Village through which information, skills and support can travel. The bias towards a sustainable approach to living closely responds to a rejection of hierarchically structured organisations and their inability to adequately understand or generate solutions to environmental issues.

The village is engaged in an international knowledge economy situated locally. By providing education, research and debate underscored with shared WORK, Talkoo creates a network of obligations between the functioning of the site and those who participate in it. The responsibility of the guardians of the site is to provide a PROGRAMME that continues to inform the activities of the participants and their findings.

The WORK done at the Talkoo is centred around the construction of the building that will house future exhibitions and events. This building will be a modular meeting and exhibition space that is designed to be built by an unskilled workforce with the help and guidance of local crafts people.

Vernacular infrastructure disruption,

Direct Action in Wales 1962-1993

Saturday 23rd October – 12:00 at Tryweryn, moving onto other locations in North Wales

Open call to participate in a field-trip discussion. As part of the development of our investigation into the potential of low density areas, we would like to invite you to join us on a field-trip research project to look into the civil actions taken in Wales against property and infrastructure.

By treating recent history as a research resource we hope to develop new approaches to controlling your environment through unsolicited architectural interventions.

The trip is open to all interested persons and we hope that you will be able to car pool.

For more information please contact us at thiswebsiteisfake[a]gmail.com or visit www.madamewang.com

You can also follow our progress on twitter @acidmist and #acidmistroadtrip

Patio will be hosted by the Treignac Project and will develop the concept of HOSTING in isolated rural locations. We will host a diverse range of projects and showcases from music, sound and film to architecture and design. This will help to develop our strategy for sustainable low density living in an age when the trend has been towards catering for increasingly high density city living.

It will provide a platform for cross-discipline creatives to meet in a relaxed and informal but artistically stimulating location with the aim of developing connections and initiating new projects and ideas.

The festival will also operate as a public AGM for Acid Mist to promote an open and public discussion of the projects we have completed and how they can evolve, it should also provide a starting point of inquiry to help develop and identify future projects.

If you would like to get involved or attend, contact us

The aim of the project is to establish a programme of activities that will auto direct the evolution of the museum. Therefore the building elements need to be flexible and movable, and need to be able to be integrated into a variety of different structures.

Inspired by the gramophone record horn, these Pentagon cones are light and can be assembled into a variety of shapes and have the added benefit of amplifying sound so that very low sound output can be used without creating noise pollution or using excessive energy.

Transportation is a key issue in considering any sparsely urbanised area and the bus stop network joins many sections of society together whilst performing its vital infrastructure service. Starting a collection of oral history from these points gives the project visibility, it catches people at a moment when they have time to listen and to join in and bus stop structures are already in place. Listening and recording devices can be easily installed in to bus stops, with the distinctive cones making it easy to see that something is going on. This will give us a museum infrastructure that is spread out over a network of links.

Volunteers will engage people, asking questions and starting discussions and the resulting data can be played back through the bus stop network, as well as being useful to researchers and sociologists. It will also be entertaining to tourists and educating for children, these bus stops can act as a focal point for sharing information about different districts and events occurring in the Department.

The data collected will also be used to start the next stage of the museum.

Unsolicited proposal for an ‘Oral History Museum’ developed with nõde, exhibited at Treignac Projet ( April 2010)

‘Ohm’ installed at the Ligne de partage festival with sound work by Tessa Joose (June 2011)

‘Ohm’ constructed and installed during PATIO with sound work by Nicholas Carr (August 2011)