Al
From Collectivate Course Wikis
Research
Art in the Social Context
Art in its social contexts is at the center of my research.
As artists we create meaning through a variety of forms. The musician does not just make musical vibrations which hang in the air. She manages a complex set of references which place her within (or in opposition to) various social contexts and at the same time comments on these same contexts. This is done through the creation of ordered sound vibrations (music) but also through a range of other activities ... writing, graphic, design, curating, the creation of objects, documentation, etc.
My aim is to investigate this larger contextual picture and apply this investigation to my work.
I will be looking at ways in which art communicates within broader social contexts. Related topics include: independent cultural distribution, new genre public art, "Relational Aesthetics," social justice and activist issues, interventions into public space, exchange and gift in contemporary art practice. I will be looking at blog culture and thinking about blogging as a form of performance (takes place in time), as well as how the format can potentially tie together production, commentary and audience response.
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Research Schedule
Al's Research Track and Production Outline
Week 1: In The Presence of Noise
January 14 - January 20
Reading:
"In The Presence of Noise"
Response:
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Week 2: The History of Protest Art
January 21 - January 28
Reading:
The History of Protest Art (http://www.molodiez.org/history_protest_art.pdf)
Lazzarato, Maurizio (2004) ‘Struggle, Event, Media’, trans. Aileen Derieg, MakeWorlds Paper 4 (http://www.makeworlds.org/book/view/103)
Response:
It restricts itself to announcing that »something possible has been created«, that there are new possibilities for living, and that it is a matter of realizing them; that a possible world has been expressed and that it must be brought to completion. We have entered into a different intellectual atmosphere, a different conceptual constellation. (Lazzarato)
The above passage refers to the WTO protests in Seattle. I disagree with Lazzarato's reading of the event. He is looking at the event as a media event only. It was also a real event experienced by thousands of people. It was experienced by the protestors and the inhabitants of the city (as well as those involved with the ministerial and the law enforcement personnel). Yes, the protest event cannot be read as a whole - but can be read as a mosaic of interests and desires. The event does not stand solely for the idea of possibility but encompasses the varied interests of the particpants - from environmentalism, to an increase in the minimum wage, from fair trade coffee to unionism, from to pacifism to sexual freedom.
I was in the streets of Seattle, in the Churches oragnizing the actions, walking the no-protest zones, looking in the eyes of the National Guardsmen, trying to process what it means to me to see armed soldiers posted atop buildings. A year later I saw a documentary on the event made by leftist activists. Afterwards, the presenter explained that the National Guard had switched to using a new type of tear gas which does not create the dramatic clouds of smoke. It causes chemical pain without the prospect of a dramatic video representation of citizens being gassed. I wanted to ask - does the impact of the protest actually DEPEND on protestors getting hurt?
If the event is viewed solely as a media event, then a big part of it is related to how the event can be theatricalized. Certainly, images of gassed kids and grannies is an apt image for the ruthlessness of corporations in the developing world. But there are purposes beyond the media representation. What about the effect on the particpants? There is education that happens at the protest. Also one should consider the physical memory that results from occupying streets en masse. The transformations occur on the street and in the armchair level. That is, the transformations occur as a result of firsthand experience and as a result of mediated experience.
Lazzarato, Maurizio "Struggle, Event, Media", trans. Aileen Derieg, MakeWorlds Paper 4, 4 Apr. 2004. 5 Mar, 2006 <http://www.makeworlds.org/book/view/103>.
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Week 3: Relational Aesthetics
January 29 - February 4
Reading:
Relational Aesthetics - Bourriaud
Response:
What nowadays forms the foundation of artistic experience is the joint presence of beholders in front of the work, be this work effective or symbolic. (Bourriaud 57)
I agree. Art works by forming ad hoc communities of viewers who have some response to the work. The contemprary sense of subjectivity is one of reasoning, responsiveness, opinion formulation. To qualify as art (fine art), the work must have an element of publicness which engenders discourse between viewers. This can even take the form of "no comment" - the piece in the show which everyone walks by with only a glance.
By contrast, when we encounter an art-like object which we feel we are not qualified to pass judgement on, we do not place it in the category of fine art. For instance, when we come across an interestingly-formed seashell, or cloud formation. Or when we go to a cultural museum and see items from remote or ancient cultures. Do we pass judgment on the aesthetics of Salish mask? They are relics or evidence of a separate cultural reality, not part of an ongoing contest over values embodied in aesthetics. (In the cultural museum we are more likely to take issue with and form opinions about the way the exxhibit has been curated, but not with the individual objects.)
Dave Hickey (whose focus on aesthetic beauty is dismissed by Bourriaud) lays a similar foundation for seeing all art as a social process in his book Air Guitar.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: les presses du réel, 2002.
Hickey, Dave. Air Guitar. Los Angeles: Art issues.Press, 1997.
Instructor's Response:
The question of quality in art raises to the top these days once more. In the context of a pluralistic everything goes attitude
the desire for rules for inclusion and exclusion grows. How do you reason the urge of curators for strict and reliable rules though? Greenberg was the master of that type of list creation. His list opened doors and shut them in the face of others.
Why rules? Is it a solace when we know that not everything is art? To see a work with art intent taking on social meaning is not enough? Why not?
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Week 4: From Utopia to Networks
February 5 - February 11
Reading:
Pasquinelli, Matteo (2004) ‘From Utopia to Networks’, trans. Arianna Bove, MakeWorlds Paper 4
Response:
"The most interesting aspect of the free software model is the immense cooperative network that was created by programmers on a global scale, but which other concrete examples can we refer to in proposing new forms of action in the real world and not only in the digital realm?" (Pasquinelli)
Pasquinelli is concerned with how to move beyond the call for Open Source software. I agree that there needs to be work done to take what works in codespace and applied it to resource space. What implications from this field can we bring to bear on the material world?
Network technologies can be used to organize collective projects in real space. Sites can facilitate - pledges of involvement is a project. Each person could sign up for a task or to supply a material until the pieces are in place to collectively build a play structure in the neighborhood park. MoveOn.org recruits people to host informational screenings or protests or vigils in their own neighborhoods, creating dispersed nodes of opposition in real space. The New York Times reports on Prosper which allows micro-loans to be funded by micro-investments from like-minded strangers. (Tedeschi)
I disagree, however, that the cooperative mode of production is the most interesting thing about the free software movement. At least as interesting, if not more, is the economic model. The idea that intellectual work can be publicly redisributable property certainly has radical implications. As everything from business models to DNA becomes inscribed as information subject to ownership the implications grow. The ever-growing reach of copyright law in the United States attests to the anxiety that power feels around these issues.
Pasquinelli, Matteo "Radical machines against techno-Empire. From utopia to networks" MakeWorlds Paper 4, 4 Apr. 2004. 11, Feb, 2006 <http://www.makeworlds.org/node/74>.
Tedeschi, Bob "It's Like Lending to a Friend, Except You'll Get Interest" New York Times, 13 Feb, 2006. 8 Mar, 2006 <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/technology/13ecom.html>.
Instructor's Reference:
Web Companion to "Contol and Freedom" by Wendy Chun
http://www.controlandfreedom.net//index.php
Many more references to follow up on these topics are at http://del.icio.us/trebor/cooperation/.
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Week 5: Community Pieces
February 12 - February 18
Reading:
Community Pieces - Kester response completed
Response:
"The motive behind the avant garde rhetoric of shock and disruption is complex (and even paradoxical): to make the viewer more receptive to the natural world, other beings, and other forms of experience." (Kester 27)
Kester is referring to the avant garde gesture which is meant to disturb, unsettle, bother. Part of Kester's agenda is to show that an avant garde need not be difficult. Consider Richard Serra's infamous Tilted Arc. Yes, those who had to plan their lunch breaks to navigate around it from office to restaurant may have been put into an illuminating and instructive relationship with time and space. However, it disrespects the agency of those forced to encounter the work on a daily basis. Must challenging people's perceptions also involve wasting their time?
This paradox is crucial to formulating strategies for a politically transformative art practice. The challenge is to create an art which is challenging and generous at the same time. That is, it models the world as it should be, while critiquing the world as it is. It manages a critique of the assumptions of a cultural form while negotiating the pleasure of those same forms.
Certainly we live within the world which we are critiquing. But how to build a window into the prospective world? That is, how to build a portal from the present to the (possible) future? The dialogical practices Kester describes represent a set of answers to these questions.
The avant garde provocation, if it is accepted as art, quickly becomes aestheticized, ritualized, turned into an in-joke, a gesture. John Cage's 4' 33" is revered by an audience which will likely not accept 17 minutes of stillness and DuChamp's readymades acquire the aura of artistic mastery.
Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces. Berkeley: University of Claifornia Press, 2006.
Instructor's Response:
Kester's project is a good opening argument for a debate about the term art, which is used with increased caution if not hesitance. Kesters goal is to inscribe activist projects into the realm of art. He measures them with equal attention and depth of investigation that traditional narratives would invest only in blue chip art. While that is a valuable objective it is not without problems: why is the definition and inscription into the realm of art so crucial? Can initiatives with artistic intent not be remembered and become part of history and networks of inspiration without the institutional art stamp of inclusion? Also see Elli's response.
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Week 6: Liar's Poker
February 19 - February 25
Reading:
Liar's Poker - Holmes
Response:
"How does picture politics work, when it is associated with a proper name and presented with the contemplative frame of the art institution? Invariably it produces statements like these: 'I represent the people,' or 'I repreent a social movement' or 'I represent the excluded' - which are the classic lies of representative democracy." (Holmes)
Holmes is describing art which claims to represent politcial struggle and the interests of those on the margins but does so in a way which becomes a safely aestheticized experience for the art consumer. Holmes goes on to draw a distinction between this type of represnetational political artwork and art which seeks to use the framework of art to create something in the world. He goes on to describe the negotiation between the "political" artist and the art establishment as one of subterfuge. The artist might bluff the public by delivering a non-threatening representation of struggle as if it were dangerous and relevant; or the artist might bluff the art establishment by insinuating radical practices (border crossing, passport donations) as if they are "just" art projects.
This practice of radical practice inserted into an art context invites comparisons to the so-called "relational" art described by Bourriaud. Bourriaud describes projects which exist in the gallery/museum/art fair context - situations where, for example, the sharing of food is presented as an activity, or where people can come to the factory and do their hobbies on May 1st. The "micro-utopias" are meant to open perception about the nature of the world and power relations within it but they do not actively engage with real-world politics. In terms of resource redistributrion, one meal of free curry is not a major act; the authority of the factory is not immediately threatened by staging the May 1st event within it.
Holmes throws up an interesting angle which Bourriaud does not address: the role of social and cultural capital in these "selfless" projects involving exchange and gifting. Holmes rightly puts it in a problematic context - the artist becomes involved in the creation of a generous act which also reflects well on his or her resume, notoriety, and ability to draw together the resources to mount more projects in the future. Holmes seems to be participating in this same process when he closes his essay, "So let our highest admiration go to the artists who go so far as to call their own bluffs - and dissolve, at the crisis points, into the vortex of a scoial movement." (Holmes) However, in "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms" he addresses strategies such as anonymity and collectively-used names for subverting this same process of organization of "selfless" activity toward the creation of cultural capital.
Holmes, Brian "Liar's Poker" 16 Beaver Group 5 Sept. 1994. 4 Mar. 2006 <http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000943.php>.
Instructor's Response:
Perhaps we can call this the "hierarchies of activist gift exchanges." Did you read Bordieux on cultural capital? Also check this response that I wrote to Holmes'text in 2003.
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Week 7: Flexible Personality
February 26 - March 4
Reading:
Brian Holmes: Unleashing Collective Phantoms - Flexible Personality
Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere by Gregory Sholette
Response:
"Least available for appropriation by the culture industry is not the 'slack' look of dark matter, but its semi-autonomous and do-it-yourself mode of production and exchange. Zines for example are frequently belligerent, self-published newsletters that as cultural historian Stephen Duncombe argues do not offer, '… just a message to be received, but a model of participatory cultural production and organization to be acted upon. The message you get from zines is that you should not just be getting messages, you should be producing them as well. This is not to say that the content of zines - whether anti-capitalist polemics or individual expression - is not important. But what is unique, and uniquely valuable, about the politics of zines and underground culture is their emphasis on the practice of doing it yourself.'" (Sholette)
In Conversation Pieces Grant Kester attempts to contextualize and legitimize certain dialog-based activist-related practices within the fine arts and in "Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere" Sholette also has a concern with placing related practices (including tactical media and exchange-based art) within the fine arts.
However Sholette also makes reference to a variety of other practices which veer further away from fine art such as 'zine production and prankish workplace sabotage. An expanded view of cultural practice suggests that we might be able to apply different conceptual frameworks. Instead of drawing a circle around the practices for which we might realistically make an argument for including within the definition of art, why not draw a circle around the activities which share a certain conceptual intent and work to create a theory around them. "Experimental Social Work," might be a more fruitful framing of both Suzanne Lacy's work with police and teens in Oakland and WauchenKlausur's work with drug addicts and policymakers in Zurich. "Experimental Social Poetics" might encompass this type of work and also a range of other activities, such as graffiti, culture jamming, subversions of the audience/performer mode, self-published 'zines, and even workplace sabotage.
Consider the difference between professional baseball and a regular Sunday softball game in the park. Professional baseball is a major spectacle. People keep records of what happens and argue over it and analyze it for years to come. It supports a major industry and a host of dreams. The Sunday game plays by the same formal rules but has entirely different aims. These may include good exercise, community-building, socialization. These things are all valid and perhaps more important than the spectacle that pro sports provides. Does it make sense to say, "Our Sunday game is a valid sporting event just like the World Series." Do we need validation from the sports section of the paper? Should we keep stats?
Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces. Berkeley: University of Claifornia Press, 2006.
Sholette, Gregory. " Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere." Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Aug. 2003. 26 Mar. 2006 <http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/3/sholette.htm>.
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Week 8: The Question of Technology
March 5 - March 11
Reading:
The Question of Technology by Martin Heidegger (http://www.molodiez.org/heidegger_on_tech.pdf)
Response:
"The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concea;ed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew." (Heidegger 16)
Heidegger sees industrial technology as fostering an instrumentalized view of the world in which nature becomes natural resources to be transformed or refined and then stockpiled for later use. He is looking at the industrial technologies of the first part of the 20th century but the instrumentalized view of the world he describes has resonance with the collection of data in the current age of information technology. We can re-read the quote above, substituting "information" for "energy" and "usage" for "nature."
In the same way that industrial technologies contribute to a view of the physical world as a set of exploitable resources, the networked technologies contribute to a view of behavior as exploitable data. Consider Friendster, Google, Wikipedia and other large-scale widely-used web applications. Each has its own mode of generating content and its own business model. While Google, for example, has become an extremely valuable company, its real wealth may not ultimately reside in the income stream from ad revenue but rather in the exploitation of a presumably massive storehouse of usage information. The ability to track search terms, click-throughs, usage patterns and, ultimately conduct a kind of archaeology of present-day thought-patterns may be more lucrative than strictly selling advertising.
How would this information be valuable in an election year? How could it be valuable under the present system in which the government maintains control largely through public relations initiatives?
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
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Week 9: Spring Break
March 12 - March 18
(Spring Break)
Week 10: Neo-Bohemia
March 19 - March 25
Reading:
Neo-Bohemia - Richard Lloyd
Response:
"A relatively moderate cost of living is necessary to maintain the balance of cultural offerings that neo-bohemian areas provide, which include offbeat, experimental, and 'alternative' fare; it is also necessary to ensure a reserve army of cultural workers who live in the area and are able to enter into flexible employment relations." (Lloyd 45)
In Neo-Bohemia, Richard Lloyd explores the connections between the traditionally flexible, speculative, contingent lifestyle of artists and conditions of employment in service industries under post-Fordism. He makes an argument that struggling artists typically participate in an exploitation of their cultural capital in ways that are largely invisible to them.
Nightclubs, hipster cafes and trendy restaurants hire "creative people" for (typically) part-time employment without benefits. Typically the jobs are attractive to the artists because they supposedly offer them a chance to earn money while retaining a bohemian lifestyle. The jobs (supposedly) do not require the worker to conform to a certain personal style. They are less than full time and do not have rigidly fixed schedules. Lloyd sees this employment, however, as part of a system of integrating the artist into a performative post-Fordist labor market. The personal style of the service employee becomes part of the entertainment value of the shopping, dining or drinking experience on sale at the business. In this way the employees are hired for "what they are" as much as "what they can do." However "what they are" is a condition which they are in the process of creating and keeping fresh on their own time. While being able to bus tables, serve drinks, etc is certainly central to their job, the employer is also hiring them to "perform their hipness" for the customer.
In the latter stages of gentrification, the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago becomes a locale for new media design studios. They want to locate in the hipster artist neighborhood as part of their cachet. They also benefit from the contingent labor of a pool of local "creative types." Lloyd sees these companies as playing essentially the same role in relation to the employment of artists as the style-conscious cafes and bars. They employ the local artists because they speak the language of emerging youth-oriented urban styles. This knowledge is posited as being intrinsic to the person (a hip-hop person, an indie-rock person) etc but is actually cultural knowledge created at the expense of hours of study and attending screenings, shows, and parties. The designer works on a project all morning, takes a break in a stylish lunch spot where he absorbs emerging street fashion, buys an art magazine and a new CD, returns to the office, finishes out his day and is off to a gallery opening, a loft party, etc. All of these "leisure activities" are more-or-less requirements and expenses of occupying this position as a designer with his pulse on the culture. That theses activities are "pleasurable" hides the fact that they are also, ultimately, a condition of employment. The hourly wage may be quite impressive but the costs of the lifestyle add up. The dynamic is one of hidden exploitation in which the artist/employee participates.
This is a compelling insight. However, where Lloyd misses the mark is in any attempt to actually look for succesful negotiations of post-Fordist employment dynamics. What about the negotiation of contracts favoring artist control and compensation, independent production and local cottage industries, gift economies and networks of resistance to capital? Much of Lloyd's field work revolves around bars. These recreational spaces are important, but what about other spaces within neo-bohemia? What about connections (and cross-over) between artists and activists? How do initiatives such as community gardens, independent media centers, alternative schools and organic food co-ops relate to the art communities under consideration? The "grunge explosion" in Seattle, for example, was a low-point for youth culture by anyone's standards. Yet it explored (in dramatic fashion) issues of regional cultural identity and how local media interfaces with the mainstream. In fact, it may have set the stage for the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999.
In Why are artists poor? Hans Abbing examines the economics of the arts from the angle of grants and government funding. In his view the artist is caught in a situation where he or she has the potential for subsistence-level government funding and inhabits a culture within the arts which does not address money head on. The culture of the arts, he says, privileges at the same time the idea of "the gift" and also an aversion to talking about money. A reading of this book alongside Neo-Bohemia would provide the beginnings for a very useful course for graduate students in media study.
Abbing, Hans. Why are artists poor?: The exceptional economy of the arts Amsterdam: Amsterdam Ubiversity Press, 2002.
Lloyd, Richard. Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Instructor's Response:
These texts by Abbing and Lloyd seem to offer a useful, critical counterbalance to Richard Florida's market positivism.
Perhaps you can frame the arguments in opposition to Florida's approach that encourages precisely the kind of exploitation of what he calls the creative class. Florida writes for politicians who think about urban growth and entices them to take the dynamics that you describe here as a propelling engine of urban development. In addition, you could look at The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective by Arjun Appadurai (ed.)
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Week 11: The Aesthetics of Failure
March 26 - April 1
Reading:
Light_paper_sound: http://www.grauwald.com/art/light_paper_sound/
"Glitch Aesthetics" - Iman Moradi
"The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" - Kim Cascone
Response:
Feedback Beyond the Glitch Horizon
In “The Aesthetics of Failure” Kim Cascone writes about emerging glitch-based music.
“...it is from the 'failure' of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music.” (Cascone 13)
Exploring sounds present at the boundaries of digital-analog conversion foregrounds the materiality of sound in the era of digital reproduction; the background information (noise, technological aberrations) which is normally ignored becomes the subject of examination. While a focus on the technological construction of experience remains important, a focus on glitch aesthetics is responding to what is quickly becoming an outdated idea of digital media. The salient characteristic of the new media has less and less to do with data transcoding and “remix culture.” Instead of the properties of individual media files, their limits and potential for recombination, consider the emerging systems of data collection, data mining, predictive software analysis and technologies of control.
What are the significant differences between using iTunes and a CD player? Certainly with iTunes you can have thousands of songs available to you instantly, and you can search and sort and create playlists. Automation, convenience and flexibility are indeed differences but, I would say, do not represent a conceptually huge difference. The important difference is that iTunes captures and stores usage information. It is not just a machine for decoding files and turning them into speaker cone vibrations: you listen to it, and it listens to you too. Apple's website describes the ability to use iTunes to create playlists based on such criteria as songs that you've played more than a certain number of times in the past month and reports that “...iTunes may be more obsessive about your collection than you are.” (Apple)
Through capturing usage as data, behavior becomes instrumentalized. Behavior becomes marked in data, minable and the subject of predictive algorithms. Of course, this data-capturing functionality is built into a whole range of technology, and on a case-by-case basis it's not always clear whether it serves a surveillance purpose or a marketing purpose or a helpful customization purpose.
A musical response to this modality of digital media would have less to do with the foregrounding and aestheticization of non-musical sounds present at the boundaries of digital-analog conversion but rather with issues of usage data, predictive models and behavioral feedback. So where can we start listening for the glitches at the boundaries of control?
For starters, there is the popular arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. To succeed at the game, the player must read directions from a screen and hit corresponding pads with his feet in time to the beat of the music. Advanced players attain a mastery of complex steps in the higher game levels or opt to stay at lower levels and develop a “freestyle” performative approach. In either case the user in som way surrenders his himself to a programmatic music-based control structure.
Next to that, consider the Sonic City project, a collaboration between Future Applications Lab and PLAY Studio, which uses custom software and wearable sensing devices to create an interactive musical instrument which relies on the user's mobility and environmental conditions for input. The user wears headphones and an array of sensors (a microphone, proximity detectors, motion detector, a light sensor) all connected to a laptop in her backpack. The input from these sensors is interpreted by the software on the machine to generate music using predefined algorithms. In the Sonic City documentation video, the user, though she is free to move as she wishes, finds herself modifying her movements in order to control the music. As the woman in the documentation gets closer to a busy street she says, "It gets better here..." One wonders if, under the spell of controlling the music/being controlled by the music, she would could actually walk right into traffic. (Sonic City)
Issues of surrender and control go to the center of our emotional involvement in art. But as the seductions offered by the new media become automated based on real-time feedback and data analysis of past behavior, the terms of our surrender threaten to disappear into the background. At what point does seduction become manipulation? How do we start turning up the volume on the noise floor of social control?
Instructor's Response:
Participation is indeed often rather customization. "Users" navigate within preset paths. "Users" become "optimizers" and "customizers." Wendy Chun's book Control and Freedom may help you further. Also related is the recently suggested idea of the participatory panopticon. What is your argument in this section?
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Week 12: Political Art Reloaded
April 2 - April 8
Reading:
Sholette, Gregory "Snip Snip Bang Bang - Political Art Reloaded"
Sholette, Gregory "Rise Up You Lovely Children of Saturn" Jun., 2005. 13 Apr. 2006. <http://www.art.uiuc.edu/grads/mfa_05/critic/>
Holmes, Brian (2006) ‘Coded Utopia’, MuteBeta: Culture and Politics after the Net (January) (http://www.metamute.org/en/node/7069)
Unleashing the Collective Potential by Brian Holmes (http://www.molodiez.org/holmes_unleashing.pdf)
Response:
One signifier of this detachment was the use of websites by students not merely as online art galleries for their wares, but instead as an information hub that includes critical readings, links to other sites, even blogs for ongoing discussion and feedback. (Sholette)
Gregory Sholette discusses his visit to the MFA show at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He identifies there a certain detachment from the pressures of the art market. The students he meets work across many genres and modes of production; they do not seem to be concerned with developing a marketable signature style, but rather with engaging with ideas of community and sociability which cut across high and low culture, art, craft, technology and activism.
I see this same disconnect in my approach and that of my peers and friends. However, I do not see it as a rejection of the art world so much as a feeling that it is out of reach and inaccessible. This perception does not result in a defeatist attitude but rather in an empowerment to create situations, venues and markets that do not require the acceptance of the art world.
Working this way results in a sophisticated sense of the economics of cultural production. Taxes, budgets, contracts, promotions and ongoing relationships with networks of enthusiasts who, at various moments, would be identified as artists, curators, business people, cultural gatekeepers or audience members. Self-publishing, cottage industry designer/manufacturers, independent and below-the-radar networks of touring all come into play.
What Sholette calls the “the dark matter” of the artworld does not merely prop up in the art world but exists in its own sphere to its own ends. Success in the underground does not necessarily lead to any sort of notice by the mainstream or by the established artworld, nor is success in these spheres necessarily desirable to artists working in this mode.
Occasionally these worlds will converge, for a moment or a season or perhaps a career. Daniel Johnston, Wynne Greenwood and Miranda July have all gotten the nod from the Whitney Bienniale, however each of these artists had already created a platform for their work outside of the art system.
Sholette, Gregory "Rise Up You Lovely Children of Saturn" Jun., 2005. 13 Apr. 2006. <http://www.art.uiuc.edu/grads/mfa_05/critic/>
Instructor's Response:
The non-defeatist, joyful attitude of the margin that you describe could lead to a set of elaborated examples in which cultural producers manage to create and sustain platforms thus having dialogue and excerting inspiration. Perhaps the following links can help you further: link#1 link #2 link#4
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Week 13: Technology Dependent Activism
April 9 - April 15
Reading:
Technology Dependent Activism (http://www.molodiez.org/tech-dependent-activist.pdf)
Sassen, Saskia (2004) ‘Electronic Markets & Activist Networks’, MakeWorlds Paper 4 (http://www.makeworlds.org/book/view/101)
A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark (http://www.molodiez.org/wark_hackerm.doc)
Speaking Truth to Power by Edward Said (http://www.molodiez.org/speakingtruthtopower.PDF)
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Response
In addition to picket signs and megaphones, activists protesting globalization policies at next month's meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancún will be armed with a number of new, high-tech weapons for getting their message across. These include using peer-to-peer networks to distribute video to television stations and setting up wireless access points so that activists can post updates to their weblogs. The aim is to help demonstrators make a bigger impact, even with fewer people, say protest organizers. (Asaravala)
Video footage in itself is not always so interesting or useful until it can be edited, contextualized or framed. A network of people working in other parts of the world can be involved in a protest event in a real and important way by being involved in creating the mediated reality of the event. Just as a doctor in India can be analyzing and commenting on x-rays taken in Ohio, an activist in Santa Cruz can be editing, commenting on and publicizing the mediated representation of a protest in Cancun.
I believe it is important to distinguish between the actual event and the mediated event. Each manifestation of a protest has important qualities. The mediated event reaches thousands of people, while the physical event is proof of the depth of feeling of the participants. Additionally the protest can be transformative for the participants, creating temporary communities of possibility.
With major protests there can be a feedback loop from publicity to event. Broadcast news coverage of the WTO protests in Seattle drew people to subsequent days of the action. But this sort of representation of an event by broadcast news is out of the control of the activists themselves. The evolving communication technologies bring up the possibility of managing this feedback loop by creating media objects which serve to reinforce and extend the aims of the activist group in realtime and physical space.
The indymedia news production model goes some way toward this goal. What I am describing, however, is a more structured and managed approach to media, which is immediate but, by integarting the work of geographically disparate support personnel who are outside of the physical event, can result in thoughtfully constructed and media representations.
Asaravala, Amit. "Today’s Tech-Dependent Activists" Aug. 28, 2003.
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60180,00.html>
Week 14: Brian Holmes
April 16 - April 22
Reading:
Brian Holmes' book in pdf form (http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.html)
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Week 15
Reading: April 23 - April 29
iSight critique with Warren Sack's students
Project Proposal
Warm Not Cold
Conceptual Motivation
I will be looking at ways in which art communicates within broader social contexts. Related topics include: independent cultural distribution (including self-publishing, small independent publishers, independent record labels), what has been termed "new genre public art" (including, for instance, Suzanne Lacy's collaborative performative actions), the type of projects described in Nicholas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics, social justice and activist issues, interventions into public space, exchange and gift in contemporary art practice. I will be looking at blog culture and thinking about blogging as a form of performance (takes place in time), as well as how the format can potentially tie together production, commentary and audience response.
How research relates to project development
The research is comprised of readings related to the topics as described above.
Form/Media
The form of the project is a public website in the blog format, incorporating essays, audio, video, photographs and reader commentary.
Relationship of Form to Concept
The blog format can potentially tie together production, commentary and audience response. I am also looking at the blog format as a form of performance (takes place in time): unlike most blogs, my project is set in a specific time span (January through June).
Shape of Final Project
By the end of the term my site will have been up for several weeks. It will include writing which ties together my conceptual interests with the readings and my audio, video and performance work. I will develop a model for integrating the media posted on the blog into performances, playing on the use of websites as documentation and the use of websites as resources.
Project URL
http://propertyistheft.com/warmnotcold/
Development Plan
Working Title
Warm Not Cold
Rough Concept
A "blog" with writing, audio and video. The blog becomes the publishing platform but also becomes the source/resource for performances.
Content
audio files, writing, lyrics, video clips
Structure
A "BLOG" is composed of POSTS.
A POST = writing + audio files (the writing and audio will have some conceptual resonance).
Where the audio file is a song or text piece it will be accompanied by a text file of the words.
It's possible that the site will begin to hold comments from readers as well.
I will treat the project as a performance itself with a beginning and an end. It will be a place for publishing/presenting creative work: writing, video, audio. By creating posts from audio or video with accompanying writing I attempt to create a conceptual resonance between the pieces within the post. The audio provides an expanded context for the writing, the writing puts the audio into an expanded context.
The blog entries will become the raw material for live performances (projected image, video, audio, read or summarize text).
"BLOG" -> POSTS (writing, images, video, audio) + (user comments)
^ |
_____________| |
| V
| --MATERIAL FOR PERFORMANCE
| | (projected image, video, audio, read or summarize text)
| |
| V
| DOCUMENTATION (writing, images, video, audio)
| |
|__________|
Relevant Projects/Performers
Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs ("transcoding" blog entires into song)
Universal Acid (performative elements of video, blogging and remix)
[http://www.zoilus.com/ Zoilus (sometimes has a good discussion of music distribution politics and issues)
TEAM YACHT (convergence between laptop glitch music and just jumping around)
David Antin (improvised monologue / "improvisational poetics")
Justin Kat!ko ("reading" video clip as a poem, "reading" images as sound)
Joey Casio (performing against programmed technology)
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Project Image & Video Log
also see video clip
