Jessica Westbrook
Since 2008
jessica@jessicawestbrook.com
Works in Oak Park, Illinois United States of America

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EVENT

Plausible Artworlds : Nomoola


Dates:
Tue Aug 24, 2010 00:00 - Tue Aug 24, 2010

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma about the Hawaii-based artist collective ‘Nomoola’.

http://www.nomoola.com/

Since 2003, Nomoola has, among other projects, engaged in ‘Eating in Public’. It’s not as easy as it sounds: drawing on the example of the 17th century Diggers, the group began planting papaya seedlings on public land - ‘public’ land, not ‘common’ land. As they explain, ‘in doing so, we broke the existing laws of the state that delineate this space as “public” and thereby set the terms for its use. Our act has two major purposes: one is to grow and share food; the other is to problematize the concept of “public” within public space.’ In a scrupulously well-documented and lively narrative, the group describes the challenges to their attempts at ‘commoning’ in a society where every legal provision has been made to prevent it. The first papaya crop was eventually uprooted before the trees bore fruit, and the land fenced off. The group has subsequently shifted its strategy to another commons: the Internet, where they have set up FreeBay, an on-line service something like eBay, with the notable exception that everything is free - including papaya seedlings.

Nomoola is thus explicitly interested in promoting — and testing the plausibility of — a truly “free world”, something which Plausible Artworlds has also been examining over the past six months. “Free” as in freewheeling. Free, certainly, from asking the powers that be for ‘permission’ to develop a growing chain of free stores where anyone and everyone can leave or take goods. Free as in freedom — pointing to those common spaces tolerably free from the logic of capital, in the very midst of capitalist society itself.

See you all then!

Join us every Tuesday night - in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck chat in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
Basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa

To join this week’s Potluck Chat:

Download from skype.com if you don’t already have it
In Skype “Add a contact”: basekamp
Send a message when you want to join the chat, by selecting us from your list and clicking ‘Start chat’
We’ll add you to the text chat, and when everyone is ready we’ll start the conference call
Follow Plausible Artworlds:
http://twitter.com/basekamp
http://basekamp.com/info


EVENT

Pad.ma


Dates:
Tue Aug 17, 2010 00:00 - Tue Aug 17, 2010

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with the instigators and developers of Pad.ma.

The Pad.ma project is a result of the efforts of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organizations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.

Pad.ma, short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, is an interpretative web-based video archive, which works primarily with footage rather than “finished” films. Pad.ma provides access to material that is easily lost in the editing process as well as in the filmmaking economy, and in changes of scale brought about by digital technology. Unlike YouTube and similar video sites, the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking, downloading and the reuse of video material for research, pedagogy and reference. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.

For the past two years, Pad.ma has been operating as an online archive of digital video, in essence creating a folksonomy of “tagged” footage. During this period, the focus has been on gathering materials, annotating densely, and growing the archive. At present, Pad.ma has over 400 hours of footage, in over 600 “events”. Almost all of this material is fully transcribed and is often mapped to physical locations.

What are some ways to begin thinking about retrieving and utilizing material from Pad.ma? From the onset, pad.ma has had an API (documented at http://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/API), a programming interface that allows a user to access videos, perform searches, seek to exact time-codes, fetch transcripts, and obtain map data, all of which can be shared by any given online user. As such, Pad.ma’s General Public License (PGPL, http://pad.ma/license) is designed specifically for the reuse of the material on Pad.ma. Through the experience of running the archive, there have been various imaginations of multiple and layered forms of time-based annotation over video, including: pedagogical tools for learning and discussion; presentation tools that combine text and video in new ways, along with essays and other writing formats enabled by rich and context-specific media.

See you all then!

Join us every Tuesday night - in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck chat in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
Basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa

To join this week’s Potluck Chat:

Download from skype.com if you don’t already have it
In Skype “Add a contact”: basekamp
Send a message when you want to join the chat, by selecting us from your list and clicking ‘Start chat’
We’ll add you to the text chat, and when everyone is ready we’ll start the conference call
Follow Plausible Artworlds:
http://twitter.com/basekamp
http://basekamp.com/info


EVENT

Plausible Artworlds / E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology)


Dates:
Tue Aug 10, 2010 00:00 - Sun Aug 08, 2010

Hi Everyone,

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with Julie Martin, one of the founders — with artist Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, then a research scientist at Bell Laboratories — of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a groundbreaking initiative in the late 1960s that brought artists, engineers and scientists together in an attempt to rethink and to overcome the split between the worlds of art, science and technology that had come to characterize and warp modernity.

A series of performances organized in 1966 incorporating video projection, wireless sound transmission, and Doppler sonar — now commonplace but at the time emergent technologies, still untried in art production — laid the way for the group’s founding in 1967. Until the early 1980s (and the beginning of the Reagan era), E.A.T. promoted interdisciplinary collaborations through a program pairing artists and engineers. It also encouraged research into new means of expression at the crossroads of art and such emerging technologies as computer-generated images and sounds, satellite transmission, synthetic materials and robotics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments\_in\_Art\_and\_Technology
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=237

The whole experiment, with all its utopian energy, is somehow reminiscent of a Thomas Pynchon novel: born of a union between the anything-is-plausible outlook typical of art and science at the time and the blossoming technology industries indirectly funded by the Vietnam war, E.A.T. is undoubtedly one of the most inspiring and emblematic attempts ever undertaken to bridge the gap between the worlds of art and technique. As instructive in its measurable success as in its ultimate inability to correct for the ideological bias inherent to an industrial laboratory, E.A.T. continues to point to a horizon shared by many collectives today — as for instance in its 1969 call for PROJECTS OUTSIDE ART, dealing with such issues as “education, health, housing, concern for the natural environment, climate control, transportation, energy production and distribution, communication, food production and distribution, women’s environment, cooking entertainment, sports…”

See you all then!

Join us every Tuesday night - in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck chat in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
Basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa

To join this week’s Potluck Chat:

Download from skype.com if you don’t already have it
In Skype “Add a contact”: basekamp
Send a message when you want to join the chat, by selecting us from your list and clicking ‘Start chat’
We’ll add you to the text chat, and when everyone is ready we’ll start the conference call


EVENT

b.a.n.g. lab


Dates:
Tue Aug 03, 2010 00:00 - Tue Aug 03, 2010

Hi Everyone,

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

This week we’ll be talking with Ricardo Dominguez, “principle investigator” of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), and b.a.n.g lab, a small group of artists and activists, actively engaged in developing the theory and practice of Electronic Civil Disobedience (ECD). In the framework of their U.S./Mexico Border Disturbance Art Project, the group has recently devised what they call a “Transborder Immigrant Tool” (TBT), a code-switch device that repurposes inexpensive, discarded mobile phones that have GPSantennae to function in the hands of “the tired, the poor,” as personal safety navigation systems in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands.

http://bang.calit2.net/xborder

TBT thus seeks to have both genuine use value in a geopolitical context where thousands of lives have been needlessly lost, as well as conceptual and poetic value inasmuch as it performatively raises the question: “What constitutes sustenance?” Or suggests that “in the desert, we are all illegal aliens.” But above all, the device - like the disturbance-art project of which it is part and parcel - directly raises the question of the politics of art today. What exactly is to be gained by understanding such devices and such projects to be art and not the mere real thing? By disturbing the porous borders between artworlds and lifeworlds, considering civil disobedience decidedly within the purview of artistic practice, the group clearly wants to give art political teeth; but how does art in turn add its own specific value to the device’s usership? And what kind of artworld would make that possible?

See you all then!

Join us every Tuesday night - in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck chat in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
Basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa

To join this week’s Potluck Chat:

Download from skype.com if you don’t already have it
In Skype “Add a contact”: basekamp
Send a message when you want to join the chat, by selecting us from your list and clicking ‘Start chat’
We’ll add you to the text chat, and when everyone is ready we’ll start the conference call

Follow Plausible Artworlds:
http://twitter.com/basekamp
http://basekamp.com/info


OPPORTUNITY

Dynamic Coupling


Deadline:
Thu Sep 16, 2010 00:00

Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus: Call for submissions /
Dynamic Coupling


Dynamic Coupling / Total immersion in new media practice: What happens
when a shared life blurs with shared research?

Guest Edited by Jessica Westbrook
Assistant Professor, Department of Contemporary Practices, School of
the Art Institute of Chicago

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Thursday, September 16, 2010

DESCRIPTION:
There is a history to artists coupling domestically and collaborating professionally: John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Charles and Ray Eames, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Christo and Jean Claude, Gilbert and George, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, Annelise and Joseph Albers are just a few examples of couples sharing a life and sharing a practice. This level of commitment and collaboration brings with it not only an air of romance and intrigue, but also points out the obvious potential for collaboration (broadly speaking) and interpersonal connection to produce something substantial (dialogue, skill, intensity, ambition, outcome) that is exponentially greater than individual parts. How has this kind of "dynamic coupling" translated into current new media practice? This call for submissions asks for insight on new media couples who share a practice and share a life. How immersive can it get? What do these new media couples make, and how do they work? What happens when a shared life blurs with shared professional research? Are there philosophical motivations in the decision or inclination to work as a couple/collaboratively (e.g. feminist, open source, post-structural perspectives, etc)? How do couples present and talk about projects? Does this shared practice extend into the classroom and/or inform a teaching/co-teaching philosophy?

SUBMISSIONS:
Authors and artists are invited to submit articles, papers, case studies, interviews, and project documentation in response to the theme. Notice of acceptance and/or further requests will be made in late September 2010. Please refer to Media-N submission guidelines for formatting papers and media:
http://www.newmediacaucus.org/html/journal/index.php?f=submissions

EMAIL SUBMISSIONS TO:
Jessica Westbrook
jessica@jessicawestbrook.com