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 ...
SWITCH: Issue 22
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 ...
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.
[-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.state of the planet infographics
a small collection of beautiful information graphics documenting the current state of the planet.
see also gapminder & 3d data globe.
[seedmagazine.com]
Roxio buys Pressplay, to relaunch Napster
powerful brand in the online music space. Now, with
our acquisition of pressplay, we have the most
complete and scaleable legal technology infrastructure
to use as a platform to relaunch Napster," said
Roxio's chairman and CEO, Chris Gorog.
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/05/19/roxio_pressplay/index.html
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Meditations on Privilege (inspired by Rent-A-Negro.com)
Rent-A-Negro.com)
We don't realize that we are playing for high stakes
even in the smallest of small talk...
Robin Lakoff, quoted in Bakewell, Liza, Image Acts,
American Anthropology, March 1998.
America is a diverse country, racially, economically,
and ethnically. And our institutions of higher
education should reflect our diversity. Yet quota
systems that use race to include or exclude people
from higher education and the opportunities it offers
are divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the
Constitution.
President Bush,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030115-7.html
This isn't some kind of metaphor... goddamn this is
real!
Steve Albini
As a person from a culturally dominant group (visibly
Anglo, male, heterosexual with no apparent
disabilities), it's always an awkward moment for me to
outwardly contemplate privilege and oppression without
resorting to rhetoric that simultaneously projects
apologetic guilt and defensive superiority. Like now -
as if I should I get credit for writing this because
it's awkward for me. It's become easy to seemingly
criticize my unequal privilege gifted through violent
histories while distancing myself from those
histories. The rejection of institutional racism and
sexism can be accomplished intellectually and
emotionally with little change in the material
practice of everyday life. It's easy to do when I'M
not part of the institution. And who really identifies
with The Institution in an Althusserian sense anyway?
Most of the spectrum encompassing the various
ideologies of the dominant culture sees itself in
opposition to The Institution - from the Right's
opposition to state-sponsored affirmative action to
the Liberal critiques of mass culture.
To be sure, I don't want to regress into
non-dialectal positions like atomistic relativity
and/or autonomous responsibility, but the terms of
institutionalization are important to consider. How is
it that both Liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and White
Supremacist Thomas Metzger can oppose the same
systems, but for completely different reasons?
Althusser's definition of ideology as the perceived
relationship between an individual and material
conditions serves as a good starting point.
(http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary\_Criticism/cultural\_studies/althusser\_ideology.htm)
I should be clear that this is not meant to be a
thorough investigation of institutional oppression,
but rather an attempt to establish a jumping-off
point, so to speak, for looking at these issues
through cultural production. Specifically, cultural
objects that can be seen to provide other ways of
interrogating privilege, with the goal of aiding in
the more equitable distribution of power.
One such cultural object that brought these issues to
bear for me is damali ayo's Rent-A-Negro.com. The work
is a visually simple web site designed with simple
bold text and table cells using flat colors, devoid of
any photographic or iconic imagery. This first
web-based work of ayo utilizes textual motifs and
emotional tones that are found in most of her other
activities as a visual and performing artist
(http://www.damaliayo.com). Here the artist
establishes a commercial service in which she provides
diversity to those lacking it in their lives -
something her Otherness as a black woman accommodates.
ayo will provide services like attending a party,
confronting racist relatives, and give a "black
opinion" to those willing to pay a fee. Personal
experiences as an African-American artist in many
predominantly white settings are blurred with the
fictional and theatrical aims of the site. The
services ayo peddles are not just satirical devices,
they come from requests she's actually received from
strangers, like *Can I touch your hair?*
A tactic that is of the utmost importance to the
project is the lack of photographic and iconic
imagery. There are no images of ayo, no iconic logo,
no stock photography of African-Americans, nothing but
text, tables, and the colors blue, red, yellow
(ochre), and black. There is a recognition of how
images work here. The specificity of ayo's personality
is denied, and the memorized images of *blackness* and
*femaleness* are fore grounded. This is the
*blackness* auctioned by keith obadike
(http://Obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html) and the
disembodied *female* of Mouchette
(http://mouchette.org/), nameless prostitutes and
service workers.
There is a refusal, in this work, of the utopian
outlook of earlier new media work, especially
Internet-based work, that saw incompatibilities
between racial and gender recognition and the
technology. The material presence of oppression is
visible, even if not in pictures. We may not see the
person's gendered, racialized body, but this
invisibility, rather than making such distinctions
unimportant, makes mediated stereotypes all the more
powerful. While illusionistic imagery and even
physical appearances can be dismissed as
*unempirical,* newer imaging techniques like genetic
mapping are said to abstractly represent reality in a
kind of mathematical purity. But as the much-debated
book The Bell Curve, and more recent discussions of
standardized testing, illustrate, such abstract data
is no less ideological than pictures.
Despite the lack of imagery, this can be read as a
deliberate *image act.* Anthropologist Liza Bakewell
and others have theorized a practice of images, not as
representation, but as actions that affect material
culture and language. This conception of images
problematizes theories of communicative action
(http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/300024/0) by
disavowing the dichotomy of material and speech in
favor of a view that sees communication as both
dependent on and transformative of material
environments. Bakewell asserts that a study of image
acts would begin with the body, not texts or objects.
While this could easily fall into traditional notions
of essentialized humanness, the body here is not a
universal one, but rather is one where the social
collides with the perceived individual in an
ideological implosion.
Read in this way, ayo's work can be seen as
participating in something other than the
representational strategies of identity politics, yet
still grounded in the coded body. We are not presented
with the artist's identity, or personality via ocular
representation. This work is not educating us about
the artist's humanness, nor that of the larger
demographic she is part of. The target of the gaze is
inverted, in a manner similar to Gomez-Pena's *reverse
anthropology* and Adrian Piper's various public
interventions (like wearing clothing reeking of fish
in the subway at rush hour). The performance, while
initiated by the artist, is actually carried out by
the audience - it is their re/actions that are up for
scrutiny. But here, not only is the identity of the
observer reflected back, the material conditions of
the gaze become the framework for the "transaction" of
looking. Multiculturalism is big business, from
ecotourist adventures with indigenous people to One
World festivals in places like Branson, MO, where the
dominant culture is not perceived as culture, but as a
vacuum that consumes differences as commodified
experience.
What is different here from the strategies of
representational identity politics, coming from a
strong humanist tradition, is that emphasis is placed
on the action of privilege rather than on the set of
symbols that we read privilege through. While not
dismissive of symbolic and semiotic analysis,
Rent-A-Negro.com focuses our attention on the manner
in which privilege is exercised in material terms. In
fact, it practices a form of exchange overdetermined
by historic and ongoing symbolic systems, but an
exchange that is contextualized economically as well
as psychologically. Scientific, popular, aesthetic,
and other systems of understanding, like the color
identification systems explored by the Obadike's in
The Interaction of Coloreds,
(http://blacknetart.com/interaction.html) are becoming
inseparable from market imperatives - biology is now
biotechnology. If it's something worth understanding,
it's something that should be exploited in the *free
market.* If multiculturalism is truly a wanted
concept, it will also be profitable, so goes the
rhetoric from the neo-cons and liberals alike. But as
is fairly obvious, exposing the contradictions of
capital does not so easily alter the order of things;
the battle between moral fundamentalism and
libertarian enterprise is a pillow fight where the
pillows are stuffed with the dead bodies of the
oppressed and the rules change to keep everyone else
out of the bedroom.
In the end, we're left with policies that reflect
sentiments like those spoken by President Bush,
decrying the *unconstitutionality* of affirmative
action policies in Universities, and I assume
anywhere. We are to celebrate diversity, including
*economic diversity.* But what does that mean,
*economic diversity?* In such Orwellian terms, we have
managed to separate poverty and lack of political
power from its material roots, as if economic
differences have no ties to other forms of diversity.
Only then can we applaud that both rich and poor
manage to exist in the US, so that the myth of the
middle as norm can be represented in the abstract
language of averages, statistics, and sitcoms.
How does one resist this? Or can one even create
alternatives from a position of privilege? Maybe as
many, including Deleuze and Guattari, have suggested,
the answer is not to attempt to restrain the further
development of globalization, but rather to push it
forward, accelerating its progress. Resisting the
global economy through global tactics different than
what I'm writing about here, but what if we took ayo
up on her offer? What would the impact of such *image
acts* be? Thinking of this not in terms of subversion,
but as moments of exchange capable of generating
normative behavior as well as disrupt it, the act of
*renting* the artist for a party does provide the
possibility for learning and transformation.
Reparations owed to the descendents of African slaves
certainly involve economic analysis, as much as the
practice of slavery itself did. Multiculturalism does
cost something - consideration of how and whom it
benefits in its current form seems important to
consider. ayo gives us at least some hints on how to
begin this line of thought by presenting racism/sexism
within the US economies of service and information,
where highly visible wage-based service work replaces
production labor rendered invisible by geography and a
lack of representation.
One thing that I keep coming back to, however, is
that escaping privilege is extremely difficult. We
remain involved in a situation dependent on
*expendable income,* the space of art, sex, and
service industries. Someone always looses when there's
*expendable income.* Isn't that one of the infamous
contradictions of capital: that profit is by
definition the difference between the money someone's
work generates via a product and what s/he actually
gets paid for the labor? Of course, the classical
argument is that access to the means of production,
which requires investments of capital, makes all the
difference. Here, ayo's body, or the idea of it, is
both the object of consumption and the site of
production, but not necessarily the means of
production. That still rests with those that have the
privilege of celebrating *economic diversity.*
Speaking of which, maybe I should be saving my
money... there's a party I'm going to that could use
some *difference.*
ryan griffis
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Re: graffiti
> Spit was the antagonist who wrote over everybody's work because he was
> no good to begin with. "Man, somebody needs to break his hands."
haven't seen this - but i just looked it up - i'll see if i can rent it. how i missed this in the 80s i don't know?
looks way more interesting than "Breakin'"...
thanks,
ryan
Re: graffiti
and you're right - m.july did narrate it.
another great thing about the video is you can get it
(along with a small compilation of mccormick's other
videos) for pretty cheap, i think it was $12 or
something.
ryan
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graffiti
this. Portland film maker Matt McCormick made a short
video called "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti
Removal" that's pretty cool (IMO). it creates a
hilarious, yet semi-serious, thesis that graffiti
removal is a subconscious expression of the aesthetic
desires of the ruling class, connecting it to abstract
expressionism and suprematism within the context of
strict anti-graffiti legislation in portland. anyway,
his other work might be of interest too.
http://www.rodeofilmco.com/rfc/graffitiremoval.php
ryan
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