Alfie Dennen
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
creative technologist, Artist, and founder of several prominent websites based around mobile blogging
Mobile blogging
Mobile blogging is a method of publishing to a website or blog from a mobile phone or other handheld device. A moblog helps habitual bloggers to post write-ups directly from their phones even when on the move....
.
Projects
Dennen co-founded the mobile blogging platform Moblog, formerly MoblogUK, in November 2003. Commercial users of the service have included Ronan KeatingRonan Keating
Ronan Patrick John Keating is an Irish recording artist, singer-songwriter, musician, and philanthropist. Keating debuted on the professional music scene alongside Keith Duffy, Mikey Graham, Shane Lynch and Stephen Gately, in 1994 as the lead singer of Boyzone. His solo career started in 1999, and...
, Bloc Party
Bloc Party
Bloc Party are a British Indie rock band, composed of Kele Okereke , Russell Lissack , Gordon Moakes , and Matt Tong...
, Greenpeace
Greenpeace
Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization with offices in over forty countries and with an international coordinating body in Amsterdam, The Netherlands...
, Elbow
Elbow (band)
Elbow are an English rock band. They have played together since 1990 and recorded five studio albums, the most recent of which is Build a Rocket Boys!, released in March 2011...
, Imogen Heap
Imogen Heap
Imogen Jennifer Jane Heap is a Grammy Award-winning English singer, composer and songwriter from Havering, Essex. She is known for her work as part of the musical duo Frou Frou and her solo albums, which she writes, produces, and mixes...
, Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
, Oxfam
Oxfam
Oxfam is an international confederation of 15 organizations working in 98 countries worldwide to find lasting solutions to poverty and related injustice around the world. In all Oxfam’s actions, the ultimate goal is to enable people to exercise their rights and manage their own lives...
, Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
and Comic Relief
Comic Relief
Comic Relief is an operating British charity, founded in 1985 by the comedy scriptwriter Richard Curtis and comedian Lenny Henry in response to famine in Ethiopia. The highlight of Comic Relief's appeal is Red Nose Day, a biennial telethon held in March, alternating with sister project Sport Relief...
. The service gained prominence in 2005 when Eliot Ward uploaded a photo to the site from one of the London Underground bombings
7 July 2005 London bombings
The 7 July 2005 London bombings were a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in the United Kingdom, targeting civilians using London's public transport system during the morning rush hour....
.
Dennen responded to the terrorist attacks on London's public transport system by creating the website We're Not Afraid
We're Not Afraid
We're not Afraid! is a website which was created just hours after the 7 July 2005 London bombings as a place for Internet users from around the world to state that they were not being intimidated by the actions of the terrorists....
. The site's message was one of a public uniting against terrorism by refusing to sacrifice freedom in response to fear. Within days of the bombings, around 3,500 images had been submitted to the site. The site was the subject of a BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
documentary and coverage included Sky News
Sky News
Sky News is a 24-hour British and international satellite television news broadcaster with an emphasis on UK and international news stories.The service places emphasis on rolling news, including the latest breaking news. Sky News also hosts localised versions of the channel in Australia and in New...
, Channel 5, ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
's World News Tonight and the New York Times.
Dennen's Stopped Clocks project attempts to collate images of stopped public clocks and campaign to get them working again. The campaign has featured on BBC News, London Tonight
London Tonight
London Tonight is a regional news programme broadcast on ITV London . Produced by ITN, the programme is broadcast at 6pm every weeknight, also including local sports news and local features of interest.Like all regional news programmes on ITV in England and Wales and Channel Television, it uses...
and The One Show
The One Show
The One Show is a topical magazine-style daily television programme broadcast live on BBC One and BBC One HD, hosted by Alex Jones and Matt Baker. Chris Evans joins Jones to present the programme on Friday...
.
In 2008, Dennen launched two art projects based around the creation of map-based images using mobile photography and GPS tracking
Global Positioning System
The Global Positioning System is a space-based global navigation satellite system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites...
. The first, in October 2008, was a treasure hunt
Treasure hunting
Treasure hunting is the physical search for treasure which has been a notable human activity for millennia. -In modern times:In recent times, the early stages of the development of archaeology included a significant aspect of treasure hunt; Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Troy, and later at...
around London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
to find photographs by James Nachtwey
James Nachtwey
James Nachtwey is an American photojournalist and war photographer.He grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science ....
. Run in conjunction with the think tank
Think tank
A think tank is an organization that conducts research and engages in advocacy in areas such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Most think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax...
Demos
Demos (UK think tank)
- History :Demos was founded in 1993 by former Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques, and Geoff Mulgan, who became its first director. It was formed in response to what Mulgan, Jacques and others saw as a crisis in politics in Britain, with voter engagement in decline and political institutions...
and XDRTB.org, the competition raised awareness of XDRTB
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis is a form of TB caused by bacteria that are resistant to the most effective anti-TB drugs. Some contend that XDR-TB strains have emerged from the mismanagement of multidrug-resistant TB and once created, can spread from one person to another...
.
The second project, Britglyph
Britglyph
Britglyph was a collaborative locative art and Geoglyph project created by Alfie Dennen for ShoZu which took place between December 2008 and March 2009. Participants were instructed to travel to specific locations across the United Kingdom with a rock or stone taken from near where they live...
, invited people from across the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
to build a nationwide geoglyph
Geoglyph
A geoglyph is a large design or motif produced on the ground and typically formed by clastic rocks or similarly durable elements of the geography, such as stones, stone fragments, gravel, or earth...
, placing rocks at specific locations around the country and uploading photos of themselves doing so. The image was based on John Harrison
John Harrison
John Harrison was a self-educated English clockmaker. He invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought device in solving the problem of establishing the East-West position or longitude of a ship at sea, thus revolutionising and extending the possibility of safe long distance sea travel in the Age...
's Chronometer
Marine chronometer
A marine chronometer is a clock that is precise and accurate enough to be used as a portable time standard; it can therefore be used to determine longitude by means of celestial navigation...
.
Awards
Moblog collaborated with Channel 4Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
on the Big Art Mob, which won the On The Move Award at the Royal Television Society
Royal Television Society
The Royal Television Society is a British-based educational charity for the discussion, and analysis of television in all its forms, past, present and future. It is the oldest television society in the world...
Innovation Awards 2007. It was described as "a creative project that encourages almost everyone to get involved... a large-scale example of television production in your pocket. Anyone can become a contributor or commentator, as long as they’ve got a mobile camera phone." It also won the MediaGuardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
's innovation award for community engagement in 2008. It also received 3 BAFTA nominations across the interactive and mobile categories in 2008.
Moblog also collaborated with ShoZu on Britglyph
Britglyph
Britglyph was a collaborative locative art and Geoglyph project created by Alfie Dennen for ShoZu which took place between December 2008 and March 2009. Participants were instructed to travel to specific locations across the United Kingdom with a rock or stone taken from near where they live...
, which won the Experimental and Innovation Award at the Webbys 2009.
On 14 August 2009 the Arts Council
Arts council
An arts council is a government or private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing events at home and abroad...
and LOCOG announced that Dennen's Bus.Tops project, in collaboration with Paula Le Dieu, was Shortlisted for the London award in the Artists Taking The Lead Public Art competition. The project was awarded a £5,000 development grant to further develop the project in competition with 4 other shortlisted artists for a £500,000 award to create a new work of public art in London. On the 22nd October 2009 the Arts Council
Arts council
An arts council is a government or private, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the arts mainly by funding local artists, awarding prizes, and organizing events at home and abroad...
announced that the Bus-Tops project had won the competition.
External links
- 4lfie.com
- Stopped Clocks site
- Alfie Dennen on TwitterTwitterTwitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
- the Bus.Tops website
- Interview with Alfie Dennen on mobile blogging - Intruders tv Video