Mongrel core:

Mongrel is a mixed bunch of people and machines working to celebrate the cultural methods of London street culture. We make socially engaged cultural product employing any and all technological advantage that we can lay our hands on. We have dedicated ourselves to learning technological methods of engagement, which means we pride ourselves on our ability to programme, engineer and build our own software and custom hardware. The core group is Mervin Jarman, Matsuko Yokokoji, Richard Pierre-Davis and Harwood.

Mongrel as extended network:

Mongrel attempts to open up situations and makes ways for those locked out of the mainstream to gain strength without getting locked into power structures. This means that Mongrel can get the benefit of sharing the skills and intelligence of people and scenes in similar situations, as well as dealing with other kinds of structures on our own terms. mongrel collaborations Mongrel rarely operates as the core group. We prefer to work on a range of specific collaborations individually. These can be with organisations, individuals or groups. The ability to plug into different skills, structures or ways of doing stuff means we get to stay fresh. 'Natural Selection', one of these Mongrel collaborations is going on now.

Previous Work

Natural Selection:

is a project put together by Harwood and Matthew Fuller. This project takes on the use of new communications technology for the dissemination and organisation of various forms of eugenics, nationalism and racism. The project invents cultural strategies and uses of digital technology to undermine and play with the expectations of racialisation in a manner which usurps or destroys it. Mongrel has hacked a popular internet search engine. When any searches are made on that engine for racist material the user gets dumped into a parallel network of web-sites set up by Mongrel. This parallel network has been made in collaboration with a vast global network of collaborators. It is the nightmare the whites-only internet has been waiting for.

National Heritage:

This is a international project that commits audiences, artists and collaborators to a confrontation with their interpolation within cultural, biological and technologised racisms. The project as a whole operates by means of street poster / newspaper publication, a WWW search engine 'Natural Selection', and a gallery installation. In accomplishing its aims, the project will engender interpretive methods of collaborative working between audiences, artists and project contributors that exploit the possibilities presented by new communications technology for artworking within a social context.