ryan griffis
Since 2002
Works in United States of America

ARTBASE (3)
PORTFOLIO (1)
BIO
Ryan Griffis currently teaches new media art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He often works under the name Temporary Travel Office and collaborates with many other writers, artists, activists and interesting people in the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.
The Temporary Travel Office produces a variety of services relating to tourism and technology aimed at exploring the non-rational connections existing between public and private spaces. The Travel Office has operated in a variety of locations, including Missouri, Chicago, Southern California and Norway.

Is MySpace a Place?


Networked Performance pointed me toward an interview (download in PDF)with Networked Publics speaker Henry Jenkins and Networked Publics friend danah boyd about Myspace. The site, popular with teenagers, has become increasingly controversial as parents and the press raise concerns about the openness of information on the site and the vulnerability this supposedly poses to predators (Henry points out that only .1% of abductions are by strangers) and the behavior of teens towards each other (certainly nothing new, only now in persistent form). In another essay on Identity Production in Networked Culture, danah suggests that Myspace is popular not only because the technology makes new forms of interaction possible, but because older hang-outs such as the mall and the convenience store are prohibiting teens from congregating and roller rinks and burger joints are disappearing.

This begs the question, is Myspace media or is it space? Architecture theorists have long had this thorn in their side. "This will kill that," wrote Victor Hugo with respect to the book and the building. In the early 1990s, concern about a dwindling public culture and the character of late twentieth century urban space led us to investigate Jürgen Habermas's idea of the public sphere. But the public sphere, for Habermas is a forum, something that, for the most part, emerges in media and in the institutions of the state:

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's ...

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SWITCH: Issue 22



Carlos Castellanos:

HI everyone. Just wanted to announce the new issue of SWITCH:

SWITCH : The online New Media Art Journal of the CADRE Laboratory for
New Media at San Jose State University

http://switch.sjsu.edu switch@cadre.sjsu.edu

SWITCH Journal is proud to announce the launch of Issue 22: A Special
Preview Edition to ISEA 2006/ ZeroOne San Jose.

As San Jose State University and the CADRE Laboratory are serving as
the academic host for the ZeroOne San Jose /ISEA 2006 Symposium,
SWITCH has dedicated itself to serving as an official media
correspondent of the Festival and Symposium. SWITCH has focused the
past three issues of publication prior to ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006
on publishing content reflecting on the themes of the symposium. Our
editorial staff has interviewed and reported on artists, theorists,
and practitioners interested in the intersections of Art & Technology
as related to the themes of ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. While some
of those featured in SWITCH are part of the festival and symposium,
others provide a complimentary perspective.

Issue 22 focuses on the intersections of CADRE and ZeroOne San Jose/
ISEA 2006. Over the past year, students at the CADRE Laboratory for
New Media have been working intensely with artists on two different
residency projects for the festival – “Social Networking” with Antoni
Muntadas and the City as Interface Residency, “Karaoke Ice” with
Nancy Nowacek, Marina Zurkow & Katie Salen. Carlos Castellanos,
James Morgan, Aaron Siegel, all give us a sneak preview of their
projects which will be featured at the ISEA 2006 exhibition. Alumni
Sheila Malone introduces ex_XX:: post position, an exhibition
celebrating the 20th anniversary of the CADRE Institute that will run
as a parallel exhibition to ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. LeE
Montgomery provides a preview of NPR (Neighborhood Public Radio)
presence at ...

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Art & Mapping



The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) has released a special issue of their journal, Cartographic Perspectives:
Art and Mapping Issue 53, Winter 2006 Edited by Denis Wood and and John Krygier Price: $25
The issue includes articles by kanarinka, Denis Wood, Dalia Varanka and John Krygier, and an extensive catalogue of map artists compiled by Denis Wood.

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[-empyre-] Liquid Narrative for June 2006


Christina McPhee:

hi all, I am not sure we got this message out to Rhizome!

Please join our guests this month, Dene Grigar (US), Jim Barrett
(AU/SE), Lucio Santaella (BR), and Sergio Basbaum (BR) , with
moderator Marcus Bastos (BR), for a spirited discussion of "Liquid
Narratives" ----- digital media story telling with a dash, perhaps,
of 'aura' .

Here's the intro from Marcus:

The topic of June at the - empyre - mailing list will be Liquid Narratives. The concept of 'liquid narrative' is interesting in that it allows to think about the unfoldings of contemporary languages beyond tech achievements, by relating user controlled applications with formats such as the essay (as described by Adorno in "Der Essay als Form", The essay as a form) and procedures related to the figure of the narrator (as described by Benjamin in his writings about Nikolai Leskov). Both authors are accute critics of modern culture, but a lot of his ideas can be expanded towards contemporary culture. As a matter of fact, one of the main concerns in Benjamin's essay is a description of how the rise of modernism happens on account of an increasing nprivilege of information over knowledge, which is even more intense nowadays. To understand this proposal, it is important to remember how Benjamin distinguishes between an oral oriented knowledge, that results from 'an experience that goes from person to person' and is sometimes anonymous, from the information and authoritative oriented print culture. One of the aspects of this discussion is how contemporary networked culture rescues this 'person to person' dimension, given the distributed and non-authoritative procedures that technologies such as the GPS, mobile phones and others stimulate.

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state of the planet infographics


stateoftheplanet.jpg
a small collection of beautiful information graphics documenting the current state of the planet.
see also gapminder & 3d data globe.
[seedmagazine.com]

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Discussions (909) Opportunities (8) Events (16) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Paradox of Political Art


> Well, I confess that I am no art historian, so I would take your words
> for
> it. However, as others have pointed out, I was speaking strictly about
> the
> conceptual art movement of the 60's. I do realize that there were
> artworks
> with political intentions long before that, but these historical
> tidbits of
> political art are not particularly relevant in my discussion.

Hi Dyske,
but how can they not be relevent? your grounding of political art in the chronology of conceptual art is to take the category of conceptual art out of the chronology of art in general. and i don't see how your arguments are specific to what's called conceptual art. my question is "what's the difference?"

> This was my attempt to turn political artists' own arguments on
> themselves.
> They are the ones who purify motives, not me.
> self-promotion, and invalidate their work. If self-promotion is
> inextricably
> mixed in their motives, then what is wrong with oil being mixed in the
> motives of the Bush Administration?

but your assuming these arguments in a rhetorical manner. a criticism of the war could be, maybe, that people are being killed for the profit of a few without refering to oil at all. that's not an analysis of motive but rather of events and materiality. who cares about oil or motives? it the perceived effects of either that matter, no?

> The opposition is not my own
> creation,
> but their own.

sure, but you're reproducing it.

> To elaborate further: If their desire to exist as terrorists is their
> primary concern, then they are in fact being helped by the fact that
> their
> opponents exist. That is, they should thank their enemies for letting
> them
> be what they want to be.

this seems totally tautological and binary (and potentially victim blaming). explain how someone could wish to be a terrorist without the existence of a state that labels them as such. a person is not reducible to either "terrorist" or "artist" or "rape victim" - these categories put them in opposition to something else. and where does the power to create these definitions come from?
criticizing Political art is one thing (as Adorno does), but assuming that art (and its criticism) can be apolitical is a political position not aware of itself.
with respect,
ryan

DISCUSSION

linux on iPods


hope to make a fully functional linux from the ipod that will be able
to play a greater variety of formats, have better features and even be
compatible with external hardware like flash card readers so you can
copy your camera photos directly to your Linux iPod"
http://ipodlinux.sourceforge.net/

DISCUSSION

Re: Paradox of Political Art


> Why are these comments correcting Dyske on something he never said?
> It's says very clearly 'conceptual art movement.' Delacroix, the
> mexican muralists, Ben Shahn... NOT conceptual artists friends.

what's the point in saying that political conceptual art is a phenom begun in the 60s and seventies, if conceptual art itself (as a recognized movement) wasn't there until the 60s and 70s? talk about tautological...

> Be honest in your args, you sound like Condoleeza Rice for chrissake
> ;-)

hey, there is no silver bullet that could have prevented political conceptual art from happening.
ryan

DISCUSSION

Re: Paradox of Political Art


> Political art as a conceptual art movement was born in the late 60's,
> and continued on strongly into the 90's.

seriously??? this statement lacks any kind of historical engagement, and even overlooks examples from the 20th century, the most obvious North American examples being the social realists and muralists that were active from the 20s-40s. Adorno's critique of politically engaged art was self-consciously political, and in response to the neo-classical program of socialist realism used by the Nazis. The autonomy of art was a necessary condition for art to truly be political (as opposed to Political) and emancipatory.

> political criticism. Artists cannot be exempted from the suspicion of
> having impure motives. If artists are not required to prove the
> integrity of their motives, why should anyone else be? If we were to
> speculate hidden motives of government institutions and private
> corporations, it is only fair that we also speculate the hidden
> motives of the artists who criticize them.

and this is a problem? what world are you imagining that motives would become unimportant if we just knew that they were pure? are people against the war in Iraq only validated if the Bush Administration is cynical in its motives? the arguments against the war are not merely reactionary and dependent on the "purity" of the Administration's motives. likewise, art criticism - whether about Politics or not - is not about intent (if it's of any consequence at least), but is always about politics (little p), context, and ideology (including aesthetics). just read Greenberg - his aesthetics were most certainly tied to an ideological program based on moral (secular) convictions.

> Politics is rarely motivated by a single factor. Professed motives are
> inextricably contaminated by ulterior motives, and they are further
> contaminated by the compromises forced upon them by certain
> predicaments and the powers that be. However, the general tendency of
> political art is to ignore this irreversible and unavoidable
> contamination, and to delimit the underlying moral implications in
> order to hierarchically oppose one another.

can you be more specific? what political art are you refering to as this "general tendency"?

> This operation of moral purification is rarely applied to their own
> practices as artists. When asked about the effectiveness of their
> pursuits in the real world, or their problematic position as artists
> preaching to the converted in the art world, or commodifying of
> political activism to make a living, or exploitation of moral appeals
> for self-promotion, they allow themselves the compromise that they
> criticize in others, because they realize the impossibility of purity
> in their own predicaments.

again, what political artists are you refering to?

> Another question I have with political art is its effectiveness. By
> taking positions as artists, they necessarily distance themselves from
> the real nitty-gritty of politics. To politicians, some op-ed
> columnists are like backseat drivers who have never driven a car
> before. They speak only from a theoretical and ideological point of
> view without ever having to get their hands dirty. From the position
> of politicians who cope with the difficulties of the real world
> politics, their criticism is unfair and inevitably one-dimensional. It
> is fair for the politicians to ask: If the columnists' political
> ideologies are their motives, then wouldn't it make more sense for
> them to directly participate in the political process, rather than to
> sit back and criticize those who do?

why do you assume that op-ed columns and visual culture are somehow distinct from Political culture? where are the lines drawn? this seems a dangerous proposition. do you mean to insulate Political actors from criticism except through the practice of Politics? and how can anyone not see the relationship between electoral politics and our culture of representation (it is "representative" democracy)? Why do you wish to delineate the meaning of cultural activity into artificially distinct spheres? the process of classification is one of the most political acts possible.

> in that region. In this type of environment, preservation of their
> power, status, and identity takes precedence over their ideological
> cause, which in turn will perpetuate terrorism forever. Ironically
> enough, their enemy, or the opposing ideology, becomes a necessary
> constituent of their own identities.

as opposed to those identities that exist in a vacuum?

> Naturally, this is also a matter of degree. There is no definitive
> point in a scale of fame where voicing of political opinions would be
> considered a violation of our democratic principle. However, if your
> primary motive is a political cause, being directly involved in our
> political system, rather than being an artist, would be fairer to the
> public, unless, of course, you disagree with the fundamental
> principles of our democracy.

...or your version of "our democracy"
best,
ryan

DISCUSSION