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sex (idiot) booth

Illuminati/witchcraft/paranoia

My Illuminati/witchcraft/paranoia "audio walk" (Download WAV file via Mediafire) project is meant to bring the domain of occult conspiracy theory (normally confined to a self-selected audience frequenting web sites such as Vigilant Citizen) into a public sphere. The audio track is meant to draw the listener into a state of paranoia in relation to the larger environment (the U.S. government, pop culture, etc.).

Participants on this "audio walk" would be equipped with a listening device (iPod, etc.) and closed-ear headphones (to minimize external sound), and placed within a public space - particularly one associated with some sort of consumer pop-culture spectacle. As suggested in class last week, a site associated with the holiday-shopping craze would be a particularly interesting location for this project; for this purpose, the ideal location in Philadelphia would be the Macy's (formerly Lord and Taylor and, before that, Wanamaker's) annual Christmas light show (c. 1955).



I hope that the contrast between these elements (occult- and mind-control-related recordings, holiday shopping spectacle) will help induce a confused or paranoiac state in participants, as well as creating something of a humorous counterpoint to these ideas. This contradiction will also serve to draw attention to the very real occult-conspiracy theorist/crypto-conservative/Fundamentalist subculture - which, in it's own way, is similarly fascinating, laughable and frightening.

A Diary Scattered in Time and Space.

That's what I am going to do on Wednesday...let you into selections from my diary from the time I came to the US. It does go to times before and beyond that. I am working with the notion of the dairy as a fragmented way of writing and experiencing. It is a place for my many little obsessions and the question I incessantly ask is why did those little things become obsessions?
The idea in many ways is similar to the one I shared with all of you in class.
Only that formally it has a different face than the one I imagined in class.
It is the idea of certain episodes from the diary embodying time, space, smell, touch, texture and color. What kind of presence those episodes have?
How does your body and mine suspend in a past made present.

Pop/Satanism/Masons/Illuminati/Whatever

For an introduction to the bizarre/hilarious/terrifying world of occult pop media conspiracies and Illuminati mind control programs, check out Vigilant Citizen, Pseudo-Occult Media, and Marco Ponce. John Todd's lectures on witchcraft, the Illuminati and rock'n'roll ("the Devil's music!") are available online as well. Apparently, the New World Order is coming - and Britney Spears is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Janet Cardiff's work seems to be so much about structure. It is really interesting, the way in which she talks about shifting structures, using and subverting them in different ways. I particularly enjoyed the way she talked about lines at the Disney World and using that structure at the Venice Biennial to talk about hierarchy in the structure of movie going or of waiting in line for entertainment. The structure involved in going to a movie is one that has become subconscious at this point, but it is a tradition that has its origin somewhere, like any other tradition. I suppose it is impossible for anyone to address all of these things in a work, every piece needs some structure to support itself. It seems a very interesting and complex problem to work through. It is hard for me to think of another artist who uses or calls into question a structure as basic as standing in line. I remember Mariko Mori highlighting a waiting period in her venice biennial piece Sharing a Brainwave in 2005. I waited in line for an hour to go inside this space that allowed three people in at a time. Unfortunately, the waiting outside was more memorable than the inside of the piece. This would have been incredibly interesting if she had taken a page from Janet Cardiff and the waiting itself had been considered, so that the outside became just as important as the inside of the piece.

Utopias and Heterotopias

I am trying to think why the place of nostalgia in my head and heart is so essentially a Utopia. And by that virtue, is nostalgia good or bad..I wonder.

It is this reminiscence of growing up in a 'Muslim ghetto' in New Delhi, India.

I for one am trying to find another word for this and don't get one.

For the function of words, in the traditional sense, is to make meaning.

So how do I make meaning of a place that is a ghetto and a cosmopolitan place in the same moment?

For whom do I make this meaning?

Between the word and the utterance is a sea of different words, images and meanings.

So how do I make sure that the one you pick is the one I mean.

I know there will be an endless remembrance of that place I grew up in.

It sights, sounds, smells and the face of that lovely woman refuse to go away.

As long as I lived there, I was witness to the ways and means by which the ghetto was allowed to be a ghetto.

No school buses to pick up children, no civic amenities, no government water supply, no language by which the inhabitants of that place were anything more than 'meat eating Mohammedans', no images by which the place was anything more than chaotic, no images of women as anything more than a black robe of cloth, no images of what they call is 'normal'...not that I care.

As long as I inhabited that space, as long as that space physically enveloped me, it was a Heterotopia in the sense that it was demarcated as a space where only certain kind of people lived. There was a border at the edges where the place merged with the wider city. People from the outside would never want to come in. A gardner I met on the 'outside' refused to come in because he feared that people on the inside roam about with knives. Now, when I look back with all the nostalgia that it evokes, I cannot figure out my sense of simultaneous comfort and discomfort as I negotiated that space. There was the comfort of not being alienated but there was the discomfort of restricted mobility.

The overarching Heterotopia had micro utopias and heterotopias of its own making.

There were places I could never go to-like the mosque just two steps beyond where I lived.

but there was the Beauty Saloon right in front of the mosque where those who went to the mosque could not go.

I would meet women there who would narrate the experience of being in a Utopia as long as they were there.

I like to think of spaces as also defined by spatial practices much like the spatial organization of the ant colony that challenges the City structure as defined by notions of planning and hygiene.

Spatial practices could provide the sites at which the Utopia-Heterotopia dyad is effectively ruptured-the moment of holding the mirror.

deceive me

The idea of a redesign of the on-screen/around-screen space interaction is probably then most stimulating point of the lovely Egoyan vs Cardiff conversation (and maybe Foucault hidden behind a plant as an interested voyeur). Two things struck me in this long exchange.
The first is that is no surprise that a director like Atom Egoyan could be excited and so intimately close to Janet Cardiff's work, and "The Paradise Institute" in particular, for he always tried to deal with deceptive perception and the forcing of the screen, in his movies. His idea of deception, of hidden truths, is the same drive (digging deeply into human nature and behaviors) that moves Cardiff's work, in the sense of fooling the spectator, making him/her feel the presence of other fake selves around him/her. Thoe presences alter, move, develop a narrative that revolves around impulses, reactions, noise (in its widest meaning).
Here, the identity Egoyan-Cardiff reaches its highest peak.
If we had to encapsulate this as a foucaultian scheme, we would end up seeing "The Paradise Institute" room as a real heterotopia, because of its being a deceptive rectangle, with its two-dimensional screen, on which we watch a three-dimensional story (projected), surrounded and broken by a three-dimensional sound that keeps grabbing us back into our former reality.
Many sites, here, are in conjunction; a big mirror (auditive mirror) challenges us to an exhausting confrontation made of whispers and ringtones and laughters.
But, another layer of this work is maybe subtler but still extremely curious.
What happens onto the visual apparatus of this work?
Which story has been told to us, on screen?
If the focus is, as we might imagine, on the deception of perception (and the test of its endurance), the idea of filmmaking, of lighting, of cinematography/videography as a secondary means kicks in. What are the composition, the framing, the drama of the images telling us, if not the very story of their creation?
If they've been conceived, planned, and shot as a second layer (and still be effective), what is all this telling us about imagemaking?

Layered spaces, layered meanings

The "Headmap Manifesto" proposes a new sense of space, a space of layered meanings - one in which, through the assistance of digital technologies, we can work to create our on "Temporary Autonomous Zones," areas freed from conventional power structures, ideologies and meanings. Technological measures all us to "respond" to these offical meanings with layered, alternative texts - a sort of (irreverent, oppositional) gloss on the world itself. In short, "location-aware devices" can serve to transform any place into one of Focault's heterotopias - spaces that re-define the ways we think about our place in society on a daily basis, and how that society is constructed.

Atom Egoyan, on Janet Cardiff's Whispering Room: "I was completely overwhelmed by the collision of technological artifacts — speakers, projectors, lights, wires — and narrative abstraction. I found myself drifting through the emotional residue of a personal trauma that was both immediate and distant, visceral yet disembodied. Whispering Room was an experience of installation art as a forum for dramatic storytelling. It made me feel inspired, and at the same time frustrated by the constrictions of traditional film practice... [her] characters occupy our physical space. The degree of interaction is profoundly respectful, yet extremely invasive."

Egoyan, in his conversation with Cardiff, sees this same idea (layering space with alternative meaning, through media) moving in a narrative direction in Cardiff's work. As she says, "the audience can’t just forget about their bodies for the duration of their involvement like we do in a film" - her work (as well as almost all experimental and installation work) does not allow the spectator to remain passive, instead inciting and active, questioning spectatorial mode. The spectator, in other words, moves through the film - not just passively sitting in front of it; this provokes a radical re-orientation of the spectator to the image, prompting these alternative meanings.

In this sense, Cardiff effectively combines cinematic (narrative) and installation (experimental) ideas in her work, with installations that can erase the boundary between the viewers and the film itself. In developing our own public installation and "relational" art projects - especially in the larger context of the "film school" environment - we would do well to consider this as a potential goal for our work.

HeadDown Focaultropism

I and I:Post-it Man

I live in a land of brief mirages.
In this land everything needs to be named, classified and attended according to my own forgetfulness.
Since I forget everything I must label everything in order to remember what it is.
Labels get worn out and sticky notes and post-its loose their glue.
Some stay in place but the sun makes the contents vanish.
As a result some are banished; people or things without a label disappear and others take the right to talk about them.

No label = NO voice.

In this land of mirages and funny mirrors those who remain are distorted, stretched or neglected.
It is romantic but I wish I could have a long strip of paper to document all I see before it disappears.
Like the romantics I would love to leave my stain of blood on the snow.
Everybody would know where to follow it
...unless I am not there when you get there.

booth

it was a lovely time

Manhattan as a heterotopia

I was trying to think of other examples of heterotopia and the first thing I thought of was art school. Then I went to New York for a few days and decided that Manhattan is (in a sense) a heterotopia. It fits the criteria that Foucault lists.

Foucault’s sixth principle is that heterotopias have to “function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles.” I was thinking particularly of the way in which Manhattan exists physically inside America but has become symbolic of something else. From the inner depths of the continent, it is viewed as an “other” space. In the town I grew up in, Ames Iowa, New York was this place that a person could go to pursue another type of life. If one did not want to get married at a young age and raise a family, if one was slightly strange or different or exciting or weird, one could go to New York. If a person could manage to divorce his or herself from the landscape and nature so integral to Iowa, he or she could move to the city.

Foucault mentions that heterotopias “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.” And that “in general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place.” I think the same could be said of Manhattan, an island city where the sheer cost of living and even visiting is enough to keep one out. I remember when I lived in New York feeling that every person in the city was fighting to stay in as the city was trying to spit him or her out.

“The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several places” This is certainly true of Manhattan where one often has the feeling of walking through a gigantic shopping mall as every street is crowded with ads of utopia for sale. On the streets of New York, there is an illusion (believed by many) that happiness can be purchased. There is something distinctly unreal about Manhattan, a city that has recently begun to hide its problems dangerously well.

Heterotopias are also “linked to slices in time”, which is certainly true in Manhattan. Manhattan is a city of trends, the most modern city in the country in terms of fashion and technology, cell phones were everywhere in New York before my parents had one in Iowa. I am not sure if it is a heterotopia of illusion or of compensation, but perhaps it is both.

a voice of a generation

cool website

http://performa-arts.org/blog/

Optional Final Project Assignment AND Readings

Optional FINAL PROJECT ASSIGNMENT (you can choose to do this assignment, or build upon one you have started previously in the semester):

Media in Place

Use projected, transmitted, live feed, situated media to create a ritual for public space.

Ideally, you will actually do the project in the location you have selected, and the class will attend. If this is not possible, you will create a “demo” version of the project to show in class, along with a diagrammatic explanation for how the project will function in public space. Blog everything.


READING and BLOGGING
During the Thanksgiving Break, we will not have class. So we will not meet again until Dec. 2. During this two week period, please post your position papers, incorporating your responses to:
readings for 11/18 :
Foucault’s Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias. And
Ben Russell’s Headmap Manifesto

Readings for 11/25-12/2:
Interview with Janet Cardiff by Atom Egoyan, from Bomb Magazine, 2002
Another reading to be announced.

Sexo Idiota Booth

antecedent

this is my previous experience on the building of a poetic text using interview like fragments for a final montage. This piece was called babylon and is centered only in the sound of different languages.

This is also a sign of how the project will look.




THE PROJECT

This project will be performed during the Sexo Idiota poetic recital in the Book Fair in Quito. It will happen on the 28th of November from 16:30 to 18:00. We will have some kind of sex-booth like the ones found in Times Square. People that attend the recital will be able to pay one dollar to get a poem of theirs filmed in a Bolex shot. Which means 24 seconds. The poems will be part of the mockumentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad, a film that will try to prove that there is no space for poets in today’s cities in general, but in Quito in particular. The people will be asked to give permission for using their poems in the film in the same way that Warner Bros. Studios was "notifying" the people walking in front of the MET museum in NY on monday the 13th of November of this year, that if they "were there" they were automatically granting permission for Warner Bros to have them in the "program pilot" they were shooting.

What the project dwells on is the idea of creating from the space that is given to one. There is this psychological theory that says that people are not inherently "good" or "bad" but that it is the "system" that shapes their behavior. From what I understand it has to do with behaviorism but revised. Behaviorism is sometimes considered harmful. The person that explained this theory to me, a psychology grad student said that this theory was developed as the digital revolution was happening, the silicon valley, the internet boom. The question that we want to arise is how to own our homes again, our cities, the cities we live in. It is a matter of property, it is a matter of class, it is a matter of education, it is something that is happening now and that is affecting a big part of the population.

Finding a spot in the city when one can “be heard” (be filmed) expressing oneself in such a free a powerful way as poetry will hopefully produce a catharsis in the citizen. Nonetheless, It is important to mention that the booth is modeled after the sex booths in which people can watch pornography (if you may, express oneself in such a powerful way as masturbating, would be the equivalent) which implies a certain mood to it that we will try to attain by: a curtain, the fact that the filmmaker who is shooting will be dressed as a male pornstar of the seventies, money being part of the citizen’s right idea (the more money you have the more you can express yourself) and the time constrain (24 seconds)

A nasty curtain
B male pornstar
C money
D time


The Sexo Idiota booth deals with the idea of the possibility of a public intimacy, which also links this project to the dynamics of today’s social networks as means of making business as well as spaces one can use (when actually one has no space in the real city).



filming the context-the city


The sexo idiota booth will be first installed in Quito. We will present this project, the 24 24-second films it will produce, as part of the documentary Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad. It is key for the project then to be able to establish a point of view of the city from the perspective of the poets, the artists. For this matter there will be two strategies to make the city part of the film.

a) We will follow 3 artists in Quito, filming each one of them in a 100 feet roll of film.
b) To shape Quito we will do the same process with 3 artists in NY, taking New York as the "model" for what a cultural city is expected to be.


Quito

We will divide the city in North, Center and South. Following one artist of each area.


The North: The project of mapping la delicia "new ways en la delicia" will be used as a scouting guide for the north part shooting. The artist to follow will be Jorge Gomez, one of the poets from the collective Sexo Idiota.

>I decided not to film¨"la delicia" as I had already made such map and document with the places I wanted to remember. Instead I decided to shoot a scene with Jorge Gómez and include Diego Ortuño, both being poets of the poetic colective¨"sexo idiota".

The Center We will follow Juan Carlos Donoso, or let him guide us through the center part of the city. He is an upcoming filmmaker that has worked with the spaces of his area in a critical way.

>Instead of following Juan Carlos I ended up articulating a proposal (filming) of his to document a avenue called "10 de Agosto", which is the main artery of the city. He shot a videoclip of one of the songs of my band "queen size bed" using us as a pretext to put the camera on the obscured buildings and businesses of this used-to-be-prosperous place. We were almost badly mugged.

The South For this area we will follow Susana with who I periodically shoot "domingos con susana" a photographic project of a portrait of the south. She will be the one handling the film camera and choosing the places to photograph (in film) as I drive.

>here some pictures of our sunday (there is the film coming up):







NY


The shooting of NY has already started as one weekend in October and a weekend in November have already been shot. This coming weekend of November and last one will also be shot.

The Characters we are following are:


a) Andres Noboa, a musician that lives in Queens and that is going to grad school with who we made this piece while shooting him.



-Last weekend we shot the final scene of the NY part in the Chelsea Hotel.



b) Maria Jose Viteri, an actress that lives in Brooklyn that is also going to grad school.

c) We will try to follow Danielle Bernstein, a documentary filmmaker that has worked in Ecuador and Gabriel Roldos, an organizer, a relational artist.



this is a call for poems i did. i have to make a new one now because there are new conditions in terms of dates. but i wanted to share the process.



this is the new one


LIST

so far by talking to people
we have appointed new facts for the project

1) the filmmaker that is inside the booth filming the people reading the 24 second poems after paying one dollar should resemble a male porn star of the seventies
2) it is really important that there is a curtain, in that it resembles the nastiness of the shower curtain
3) the idea we are working on is the possibility of public intimacy
4) the idea of making money part of the process adds to the nastiness feeling of attending a real sex booth
5) we are getting ourselves into somewhat of a greater poem dynamic as if it were an exquisit corpse exercise
6) we are still wondering how to make this poems fit the title of the documentary: Sexo Idiota vs. La Ciudad
7) the customers should be required to get a formal jacket on to resemble some of the customers of the real booths.

the morality of cleanliness

I

rad nationalistic kids
shit
mexican
pride

II

scarlet colored cheeks
on red colored roses

III

elemento
latino
spit
despojo

semi-erotic
love
for workers


Truly Gómez + mtap
11/11/09

Reading for Nov. 18


Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias by Michel Foucault

Headmap Manifesto, by Ben Russell

As you read, please think about possibilities for mediated interventions in public spaces.

poem for the performance

hi

i am going to shoot myself with my cellphone
reading a poem about the workers bodies
i am going to do so after washing my mouth

i would like to know if you would like to contribute to this open poem
with a sentence
it can be in any language, but you have to write how it should be pronounced (doris, amarien specially)


the poem:



"el cuerpo de los trabajadores/the workers bodies"

red colored cheeks
red colored rush
red colored iron
ironing

sweet mermelade casquets
great american/british/german/spanish pride

blue colored chips
red national kids
mexican
shit
mexican

piece

sour chili gone bad
spanish speaking/cuban/colombian/ecuadorian pride

elemento latino
coronel
despojo
piel



Truly Gómez (my image de corps)
11/10/09

pull ups (pending written response to last week readings+thoughts on the body)

"I know how it is where you come from
you might have been brought up where bad things happen
when we find something like this (unas barras)
we feel it is paradise
see
all these things are taken away from us
so
if we want to get what you can get out of them
we have to use
our imagination
if you want to go rob
or shoot people
you can do it
but if you want to get a better life
you go out to the world and do what you got to do
do what you got to do
when you go back to Ecuador
you are going to get all the girls go crazy
touch you
say thing like
uh
you got bigger
i know you can judge one from the cover
see the scar in my face
i might have gone through some stuff
do you have a friend that can give you do some pull ups?
you want the model body type
I know what you want
and see
you are thin
that is good
you just need to work
every day
little by little
you might see some guys that are doing it by themselves
you might try
and say
i can't get none done
but they have just been doing it
when you go back to Ecuador
you can get the Ecuadorian ladies
you are not going to stay here are you?
you are going back aren't you?
are you here here?
you have to take advantage of everything that is open to you
the pool
the gym
some other guys might not be friendly and talk to you
but you can see what they do
and try it yourself
you work every day
five days a week
or three days
if you see it hurts
monday wednesday friday
see?
I am trying to loose some weight
I am two hundred and fifty now
you can just start working
I run, I do push ups, pull ups, sit ups
that is all you need
you see those guys that lift weights?
when you stop doing that you get fat
see
I know where you come from there is nothing like that
you don't judge a book by its cover
I could have judge you
and said
M13
but I didn't
you see the scar in my face?
you could have said I'm a bad guy
see how I pull
you need to get some gloves to improve your grip
feel it
I can help you
try
come one
I can help you
pull
see?
I let you pull
you just have to tell your friend to help you but to let you still pull
it is just through the bump that you need help
these help you form this muscles
this
on your back
I read
I never got into professional boxing
amateur
I ripped my Achilles tendon
I work
I own three properties
I am 25
I work out 5 days a week
I don't smoke
don't drink
Once you star working your body you don't want to poison it
you are fit
you are thin
you are going to pull in the stomach
get some chest frame
shoulders
back
you just want to fit your clothes
friday night you can go out
work out
freshen up
take a shower
get your clothes on
and
go out
a little social drinking it is ok
I am not going to run my extra miles now
because I have been here talking to you
but that is ok
I help you
I taught you something
Good Luck"


Truly Gomez
transcribed conversation
11/09/09

an updated version of the rod coover google map

la delicia


View new ways en la delicia in a larger map


for a stange reason you have to zoom in or zoom out until you can make sense of the image


;)

Animation Test - Body as Interface

Body Language

In 2004, Physical theatre, DV8, made a film based on their one stage production named “the cost of living.” When I was reading about holism and fragmentation of body, subjectivity and objectivity, I couldn’t help think about some moments in this film.

If A body is a intermediary in-between the subject and the world, the legless dancer saw himself as a holistic existence through his mirror of unconsciousness. But the world he perceived (or we perceived) reflects merely a fragmentation of his body. As Merleau-Ponty said, the dancer linked his subjectivity and the objects of the world by weaving them into his flesh.

There is another more interesting phenomenon. If we agree Heidegger’s linguistic theory: Language is the house of being, then how about body language? For me, I firmly believe that the dancer spoke to others through his physical movement. Which means he dwells in his own thoughts of the body, the interface he communicated to other beings through. Moreover, it may across the boundary Heidegger set for differentiating human beings and nonhuman animals. It is not only about dance, we could even see the dancer standing out side of his embodiment of body image and transforming into his own essence.

 

At least, we may admit that we all have some redundancy of our bodies after witnessing his lightness of movement. 

Wegenstein writes on page 32 that, "The medium that signifies the body, its representation, no longer is any different from the 'raw material' of the body itself. Without mediation the body is nothing." This relationship of the representation to the raw material of the body is crucial to our bodies' relationship to technology. Much like Lacan's idea of the infant staring into the mirror to find a body-in-pieces, only to form a mental misrecognition of its body based on this, the pervasiveness of internet-based identities in society fuels this acceptance of misrecognition through fragmentation. The internet provides us with a medium to willingly fragment ourselves, disperse our bodies and our identities into many little fragments which are spread amongst the myriad of ways to represent oneself online: Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Flickr, on and on. Increasingly, this seems to be the definition of presence that people accept for themselves and others. "The recognition of one's self in a deceptive image that is framed by somebody else's gaze, a mirror, a screen" helps form this experienced embodiment. We encourage this deceptiveness through the distance of the stranger's gaze upon the screen into our embodiment. When these fragments are projected back onto ourselves by the outside world, into some new composite that doesn't seem to be what the body is in real life, we begin to accept this as our embodiment. This representation of the body seems very distant from the raw material of the body itself.

I have a great deal of trouble writing about psychoanalysis, because so much of it to me seems as though it were made up in a dream, placed on top of reality. Sexism is such an integral part of Freud's theories that I have trouble dissecting parts that can hold up without it. That said, one fragment that was interesting to me in the Wegenstein involves the alienation that occurs when we see ourselves in a mirror in a photo framed by someone else’s gaze. This seems to me an accurate perception of a kind of alienation and projection onto the body that is particularly prevalent in mass media. This could relate quite easily to Jack Berger’s theories in his book Ways of Seeing, in which self satisfaction is stolen from oneself through the image of the body with a piece of merchandise and offered back for the price of the item for sale. The Persona also deals with the way in which we project onto the body or onto an actor while watching a film.

L'image du corps

At the basis of Bernadette Wegenstein's conception, is the idea of the body as mediation. A body that is both aware of its own characteristics/shape/image, and of its being 'focusing screen' of the world. Both conditions, though, require the idea of a lived body, a dynamic structure we actually inhabit like a world. A world that is also the idea of our world as perceived by somebody's screen/gaze.
But if certainly mediation is done through an Outside-in/Inside-out structure, it is as well a random oscillation between a unifying, holistic perspective and a shattered, focused and fragmented idea of the body.
How this duality affects image-making? What's the tension within the realm of holistic/fragmented imagemaking? Is it also an analog vs digital tension?

In a medium such as film, images just appear. Light impresses, and processing makes bodies emerge from film. Is it a whole? Can we dismantle and find coherent units in it? It's hard to do, because the film is impressed by bodies that never get close. Once we try to focus, separate, enlarge, the body just fades, becomes unintelligible. We cannot physically go beyond it and see/experience a world that lies behind it, because it's just there, final.

The zoom of the material analysis doesn't show us a body behind the body. It just blurs the analog body, while shatters the digital one.

If we go deep into the digital body, we found it sliced under a grid, and every portion carries its own value, and potential.
This potential is the idea of reconstructing a whole through the harmony of an ensemble, the single parts. Every pixel is just a value, into a bigger array/system/choir.
In this sense, digital body goes beyond and perhaps is more surprising than analog body; it appears, too but it's a synthesis, a real choir, in which we have the chance of distinguish each voice. Its embodiment is then a manifestation. As the analog body, it talks to the world and through it, it carries preconceived meanings and determined values, but without actually being there.
Should these considerations affect the way we use a certain idea of body (analog/digital), and make aesthetic decisions?

A tangent, extemporary, example/consideration (still trying to know why it came in to my mind, probably because winter's approaching...): could now the good old Hilltop commercial be considered a conceptual hybridation between digital (everyone singing with his/her/its own value) and analog?

Holistic and fragmented bodies

Throughout history, Wegenstein argues, the perception of the body has evolved and changed - passing from a fragmented, detached perspective to one of "holism," considering the body as a single system. From the pre-modern to the modern eras, these perceptions passed through numerous different stages. For example, psychoanalysis viewed disorders of the body as a resulting from a lack of a "unified" body image (anorexia, for example, derives from a "mourning for a pre-Oedpial body," i.e. a younger, sexless self). As the perception of the body moved toward a more holistic state, it became increasingly clear (in Wegenstein's terms) that the body functioned as a mediating agent, the site at which the individual (constantly and necessarily) comes into contact with his or her surroundings. From a phenomenological perspective, this is how the "body extends into the world" - through the sensory apparatus (as media artists, we must ask, how does this "extension" process work in the other way - the world mediating the body?).

The current postmodern era is one of fluid, customizable bodies. This can happen in the virtual (online personas, Photoshopped celebrities, etc.) or physical (plastic surgery, etc.) realms; even though it is clear that these changes break the unity of the body (and are often patently false), they have become socially accepted, standard practices. What does this say for the concept of "holism"? Are we moving away from holism yet again - a concept Wegenstein ties to the rise of technologies intimately associated with or merged into the body (as we discussed in class last week, our cell phones can be deeply personal items that also "extend" us into the world). Is the extension of the body into the world - pushed forth by technological advancements - necessarily a process of continuing fragmentation?

The Body and Being: A Response to Reading 'Getting Under the Skin' by Bernadette Wegenstein

The starting point for Bernadette Weigenstien’s ‘Getting Under the Skin’ was her research into the representation of AIDS in European media. In this interface between the body, medical technology and media technology, the body opens up as site for meaning making not in a way that it stands for ‘meaning’ but rather in a way that it ‘become’ it. Her research gave way to study body discourse with an awareness that it had ‘literally and obviously gotten under the surface of the skin’.

‘Making Room for the Body’ introduces body criticism through some of the key concepts that emerged in movement from modernity to high modernity and the concurrent ideas that emerged in the fields of cognitive sciences, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, feminist theory media and medical technologies. Central to this was how the body became an object of anatomical practices during early modernity. Contemporary medical technologies of imaging that specifically ‘intervene’ into the female body; new reproductive technologies and the ultrasounds; provide a whole new way to imagine the body as a mediated space that opens up through skin, orifices, incisions, nips, cuts and tuck. Meaning making in that sense cannot be a process of situating the body within these processes but rather in the moment of the body’s embodying of processes, time, technologies and the world.

Holism, an interrelation of all body parts-in- pieces as defined by Wegenstein, incorporates the discourse of fragmentation initiated during early modernity. It becomes a celebratory moment in terms of the practices that define the body and its being-ness. It is moving beyond fragmentation and articulating the body as a space with no end. The skin becomes the vulnerable, fragile boundary between the inside and the outside; a surface that is intravenous and can be mediated upon.

In his suggestion of Philosophy being an interpretation of illness, Wegenstein suggests Nietzsche as one of the forerunners of the holistic body concepts. As Blondel suggests, images are metaphors of the body for Nietzsche. Philology, the act of interpretation can be the only way of attaching meaning to the body. The body is priori because “ there is no order or relation or text’ prior to it. It becomes as Blondel suggests the intermediary space between the absolute plural of the world’s chaos and the absolute simplification of the intellect. The body becomes a metaphor for an interpretative space within which the actual creation of meaning is an act of the will to power.

The idea of the body as an interpretative space is further developed through Psychoanalysis that looks at the body as a psychological entity. The idea of auto-perception –the image of the body produced by the body itself, the perception of the world through one’s own skin-moi-peau. This also brings forth one of the most fundamental ways of understanding subjectivities in the 20^th century: the idea of representation as a construction that depends on how the body/self is apprehended in its social relations, an image that is created by the subject’s perception of the outer world and the world’s perception of it. Basing his theory on Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis, Lacan suggests that the only way we can perceive our bodily selves is through a deceptive image that is somebody’s gaze. The frame, the screen, the interface or mirror becomes ways of intervening in the construction of that deceptive image.

The stable concept of the body is replaces by what Lacan calls the fractal body, one that is dispersed and whose identity depends on the process of inscription and semanticization through the outer world. This fractal body, not aware of the images that it is producing becomes one of the key ways of repositioning subjectivities in the 20^th century. Freud talks about the body ego as a border surface, a skin sack or skin fold. As post Lacan psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu suggests that the skin is more like an interface between me and the other, something that envelopes the ego and divides the self from the other.

An engagement with the idea of fragility of the skin, notions of disease and illness become metaphors through which the boundary between the inside and the outside becomes significantly de-stabilized. The idea of placing the body at the center of the experiential world as a way of experiencing it was prompted by Bergson who proposed that the body image has two interrelated sides- L’image du corps is a way in which the subject perceives his or her own body; the image one has of oneself is therefore the center of ones being and perception, an interface to the world. The second is L’image de corps indicates the body itself as a perceptive apparatus through which the world is being processed. This implies the body the body as simultaneously a mirror or screen for the images from the outside and the perceptive center thorough which the world is to be experienced. This proposes the thinking of consciousness only in terms of embodiment.

The phenomenological approach to the body always proposes the consciousness as consciousness of something. Reality then has no independent status but it exists only as an intentionality or intentional appearance. In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the body becomes inseparable from the worlds it inhabits. The ‘pragmatic turn’ proposes the body’s presence as impossible without embodiment. Geil Weiss signals a departure in her analysis of the body image leading her to develop her theory of embodiment as incorporeality. She suggests that the experience of being embodied is never a private experience. It is always mediated through processes of interaction with the human and non human bodies in the world outside.

A phenomenological approach of the body most interestingly for me, proposes the body as a site of inscription and semanticization. It becomes a way of being in its own and being in the world with both experiences constantly blurred. Also, the body becomes something more than its physicality-it is something that can be performed. Performativity in itself becoming the means to address the struggle between holism and fragmentation. The idea brings a whole new meaning to transitional, migrational and marginalized identities much in the way we begin to understand gender as a construct and drag as a performative subversion of notions around biological determinism. The opening up of the body and its interface with meditative technology proposes the scattering and dispersion of the body in multiple ways and forms; much like the proliferation of meditative technologies themselves. Opening up that space could lead to all new utterances of the body and the many ways in which it breathes, sighs, gestures and lives on.

One does not HAVE a body but rather IS a body

Performative embodiments and corporealities

The notion of the body as either an interface through which we perceive the world, or a mirror/producer of perceptions are definitely interrelated. It would be very difficult to prove it philosophically but we can prove it phenomenologically, that is, by observing the use/notion of the body occurring in contemporary daily life and art.

Why is this easier to observe this way? Because when we study these manifestations we actually receive a mediated body and it is that mediation which reveals the notion of body that is being addressed.

The defense mechanisms established through mediation allow us to perceive the body as cleansed and infinite. It is possible to understand the body better through mediation thanks of this notion of augmented or hyperbolic reality. In that sense it constitutes an hermeneutic exercise: it consists of putting the images of reality in front of the viewer and carefully going through its description to -through the careful description- see what remained vague or blurred.

A dermatological idea, that of the skin as "ultimate frontier", might prove very efficient in encapsulating the perceptive elements of the being such as: mind, heart, spirit (differentiated from soul), body and soul. Ultimately it will be these elements who are responsible for creativity, and in such sense establishing a difference between the body as interface or the body as mirror/antenna might prove efficient for philosophy for the purpose of categorizing cognitive processes; but our reality proves that the ways in which we embody the world do not differ much from the ways in which the body embodies our collective experience.

It makes us all responsible and capable of realizing that what we see in the world is there because the human body has produced it. Mediations, like glasses, allow us to see this better.

Watch: Geoffrey Alan Rhodes – Mirror (2006, 6:09) and also his amazing Mirror Series

Assignment for the 5th Project:

Project #5
The Body As Interface

Working with Bergson’s ideas of “l’image du corps” and “l’image de corps”, your second project will work with these two different ideas of the the relationship between the body and the image: 1) in l’image du corps, the body organizes the self as a kind of interface to the world; and 2) in l’image de corps, the body is the perceptive center, the locus where the world is perceived, and where images of the world are formed.

Please plan a simple performance that builds on the relationship between a body (yours or someone else’s) and a media image (an on-screen image or a projection). Choose to work with either the “l’image du corps” or “l’image de corps”—please be very clear which one you are working with.

1)how does your installation/performance frame the body as a Bergsonian “interface”

a) how is the body “produced by” the media image?
Or
b) how does the body “produce” the media image?

On the subject of technology

An interesting article by the artists AIDS 3D (David Keller and Nik Kosmas) on technology, art, fear, Luddites, utopianisms and the end of the world: IMG MGMT: Hubris/Nemesis/Whatever.

project -

Reading for Nov. 4

For next Wednesday, please read the excerpt from Getting Under the Skin, by Bernadette Wegenstein, provided in the DOCUMENTS section of Blackboard as two pdf files:

Wegenstein Preface
and
Wegenstein Phenomenology

Please concentrate most specifically on the last seven pages of the reading, "Phenomenology". All other pages are provided to give context.

Please post a "position paper" on this reading by next class.

Some criteria for thinking about relational projects:

What is the work being freed from? Formally? Aesthetically? In terms of process?
What is the work being freed to do? "

How is "environment" established?

How are participants engaged?

How does the work relate to other/older artistic traditions?
how does the work situate itself outside of "art"?

How can it be judged? By what criteria?

waking up is hard to do

So, this is the result of the collaboration with some of you guys.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

01. Alessandro/Alexis




That's what I heard
That's what she heard
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

02. Alessandro/Marcelo




That's what I'm hearing
That's what he's hearing somewhere
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

03. Alessandro/Doris



That's what I kept hearing all the time
She was looking like she heard nothing. She was somewhere, but not there.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

04. Alessandro/Joseph


Hey, listen. He said.
To what?
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

05. Alessandro/Sarah



....
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

06. Alessandro/Ambarien




....

Bilingual communication

With this project, I would like to experiment different ways of communication between various language. For example, Chinese and English is two separated linguistic systems. The origin of Chinese came from pictures. Ancient Chinese then simplified those pictures and developed a series characters to use in reading and writing. Unlike western languages using combination of sounds and letters to create words, Chinese uses combination of images to create words. Visually, an English word doesn’t show any meaning in itself (here I mean the image of the letter combination.), but every Chinese character would express the its original meaning by its structure. Thus, you “read” an English word (with sound) you know the meaning of it, but in Chinese you may just “see” a character, then you get the meaning.

 

According to above, we could get a conclusion that sound and images are the most basic way for communication. (Try to think about those ancient uncivilized people.)  The interesting thing is people usually generate different feelings towards to the same images. When they use “an images”(A Characters) to express their thoughts about “the image” (the character), how could we tell the grey zone? Especially, for people who are never trained by this “characterical” system, (People who don’t know Chinese.) they use a intuitional way to use the language without knowing it.  

 

I was inspired when I am reading Chinese and English books. When I am reading English one, I need to real read it (or say it) more than recognizing them as a image. But in Chinese, even I just flip pages not  read it, I still could “see”  some character which could give some images. Maybe it is because of the different mother tongue. Maybe we could find out together?

 

Anyway, guys, we’ll have a Chinese class tomorrow! 

NEWSFEED

This video was created entirely from clips of cable news programs (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc.), to comment on our TV news coverage and viewing habits; like many of my other short non-narrative/abstract videos, it uses this appropriated footage for a hypnotic (or simply overwhelming) effect.



It is now common for many institutions (offices, schools, cafes, etc.) to contain screens (of one kind or another) set to a constant live feed from a cable news channel. To use a particularly salient example, these screens can be found (typically broadcasting CNN) throughout the Temple campus, including the Annenberg Hall Atrium.

I would like to install this video piece on one of these kinds of screens, in the place of the usual (CNN, Fox News, etc.) content. In the most simple variant of this installation, this video would simply replace the content of one out of many of these screens, or be added amongst the already existing screens. For example, I could place a third screen, playing this video (on a loop), between the two that already exist in the Atrium.

Preferably, this piece could also be installed on a single screen or monitor in a somewhat isolated location (to continue the earlier example, a hallway somewhere in Annenberg Hall). This screen would be playing the commonly found feed from CNN or another network; however, the screen would be equipped with a motion sensor, and switch to the above video whenever a person came within a certain distance (say, 10 feet of the screen on either side of the hallway).

The Onion Project

The Onion Project

For me, a kitchen represents the tension between the technological and a-technological in interesting ways. It is a space where notions of desire and technology come together- inhabitated as it is by a projection towards a certain way of life where technology can boost efficiency and so there is that extra bit of leisure. It is usually located in the interior of the house, and so, can be understood as an ‘interiorized’ space.

Unlike a western kitchen, that will be equipped with a mixer-dishwasher-electric chimney-oven unit, an Indian Kitchen will be empty to begin with. Then there will be a microwave brought in. It will be kept on that particular shelf from where it is most visible to people moving in and out of the living room. A mixer unit, a blender, vacuum cleaner a grill oven, an electric chimney, modular designs shall happily follow.

But there will be things that will be insistently done manually, by hands. Chopping onions would be one them. Onions are used world over as a primary flavoring ingredient. Indian food is particularly heavy on its use and at times cooking a meal would involve chopping atleast more than two pounds. But this would be insistently done by hands. By the end of it, you would have wept a bucket. But then, you will forget and redo the ritual once again. You will talk about how pleasurable and tactile, how some things are just better done that way.

I conceive this project as a kitchen slab set up in front of a camera. Much like the kind of interface that exists in the way a small built in camera is placed in a laptop screen. Unobtrusive and yet there. Women will have the choice to walk in and begin by thinking aloud to one question: how many pounds of onion do they think or remember they would have chopped. This, they will do while chopping onions placed on the side with an assortment of knives. This everyday, banal activity will slip into a way of recounting and remembering, the kind that happens when one is aware of being trapped and free at the same time. There will be oral histories, vignettes from time past, projections into the future, whims, fancies, desires, sighs and whispers.

Situating the project within the kitchen helps me critically engage with the notions around the idea of women and work in capitalist, global economies; where work within home means no work. This creates a series of ironies with the way work is understood, tied to notions of material exchange and economics in global economies. I think combining it with video projections of many women doing many different things in the kitchen, counter building it with the place of women in monumental spaces and corporate workcultures, is relational as an idea and can be explored further. It also helps me thinking around the idea of a south Asian Kitchen as an installation.

Relational: KIOSK, SURFACE, BOOTH

This installation involves the participation of three persons simultaneously. We will take turns and everybody will have a turn.

I will do it in the classroom we use on the third floor because I intend to use the digital visual presenter and the overhead projector present in that room. I suppose that means I will not present until after 3pm?! OK?

Sketches and everything will be shown that day.

The university provides most of the toys. I will bring some more. YOU will provide the fun.

In the meantime watch Bill Viola.

Short Reading for This Week

Here is a short reading by Guy Debord, Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, that may be helpful to keep in mind as you "construct your situations" this week:
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/313

For further reading/viewing on Guy Debord, here is his film, The Society of the Spectacle, on YouTube, in nine 10-minute segments. Bad quality, of course, but you will get the idea/ideology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g34XVscFkIs

cell phone puppet show

Hey!

for my project i want volunteers,
that means

you
and
you
and
you
and
especially
you!

to bring your cellphones with cameras
in which

YOU HAVE TO HAVE RECORDED A VERTICAL SALUTATION LIKE

hello
this is mr zangilolammi's cellphone
and i like to meet people that enjoy tattoos
an italian food!
i am from the city of milan
where people think they are really tredy
but they are not,
HOW ABOUT YOU?

***it is important that you keep the "how about you part?" since we are going to make a puppet show in which we are going to make our cellphones talk to each other.

I will bring a little theater for our puppets
and of course
my cellphone camera to record the show.

we can also have a little enriched show

IF

you guys comment to this entry and propose DIALOGS

i'm just introducing the method


WE SHALL BE THE FIRST CELLPHONES ACTORS OF THE YOUTUBE AND VIMEO

HOORAY FOR relationship artwork (i dont remember very well the name of this artform we are using)

:)

lots of hapiness

Yours truly gomez

PD: I will post a cell phone diagram in a second!
PD2: make your cellphone a costume!

For my project, I wanted to deal with issues of representation (not the representation vs abstraction "representation", but closer to the taxation without representation type of "representation". Mainly, I wanted to address a few of the problems and frustrations that occur when the person representing oneself has a limited understanding of one's own interests or agenda. I am not sure just yet which aspect of this I want to focus on, but I wanted to create an interview session where questions are asked to two people. One person writes down their answer without speaking, the other person is the "voice of the people" and must try to answer in a way that he or she feels would best represent the other person's opinion. As I am writing this down it sounds a little like some sort of dating gameshow, how well do you know your husband or something. I would like to preferably have two people interviewing who don't know one another well, as this is generally what happens in governments and even smaller scale clubs with leaders. I think the person will be selected and then the class should vote on who will be representing whom. There will be a live feed video projection of the written answer while the person is talking. I am still working the kinks out I think. I am not sure, it would be preferable if the person answering had their own sort of agenda, different from the seated person, but I am not sure how this would be incorporated yet. Hopefully it will be sort of silly.

subscribe to this!! :)

The fma and the mfaprogram lists are the most important ones! the other two are extra

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Assignment for Project #4, due Oct. 28

1. Create a design for a relational piece that engages social relationships, either in its creation or its presentation

2. You don’t have to create the whole piece, but your design should include:
— “situation” that engages at least one social relationship in the class and/or makes a commentary on social relationships in the class.
— representation of the piece (sketch, verbal description, diagram, etc.) that indicates how the piece works in its situation
—A video clip that you have created for the piece, or that has been created by your process/design
3. Be prepared to demonstrate the piece in class on Oct. 27, using projected video or video playing on a laptop screen.

programas de television espontanea

I want to propose the creation of programas de television espontanea, in which people will gather and shoot something with their video cameras. They can use their cell phone cameras. Long shots are advised. The people gathered will concentrate on making a tv show of their own or a movie or a video installation, with the particularity that they have to see it afterward, together. It is also advised to be relaxed. They can drink alcohol or do drugs (at their own risk) or have sex. The content of their programa de television espontanea doesn't have to be explicit. It has to be smart, smart enough for them to want to see it right as they finish it. It resembles the moment in which one takes a picture with a digital camera and sees it right after for the sake of some self gratification. Cell phones with cameras can be provided for programas de television esponanea enthusiasts and children can play too.

This idea came from the unplanned practice of this and was found as it was occuring to the artist and his friends/enemies.

The programas de television espontanea do not have to be stored or kept. They can be deleted if their is not enough space in the cellphone or if the group or individual wants to make a new one. There is also no particular time of day for the p. d. t. e. to be performed. This format can also work well for a gallery setup.



Here,
an example






Truly Gomez

the idea of suddenly having a sense of displacement, when you see something unexpected at any level, and especially in the urban perception, reveals something and basically finally gives a meaning to a determinist walk.
But the same could be said of the act of viewing, too. How the off-screen becomes relevant in this relational aesthetics?
Is it just a matter of surprising the viewer? It's a too easy answer.
The trick quickly dissipates and leaves nothing behind itself, no real experience, no scars.
The consistency of what turns a piece inside out relates more, I think, to the idea of how sincerely and "naturally" a known element inside a world, decides to deal with our knowledge of it, and present itself back in a different (slower, faster, negative, positive, brighter, darker, but ultimately "known") fashion.
Instead of an off-screen, we're in the middle of a flickering screen, where the flicker reveals many other screens we might already know.
How, or when, the maker "puts" the screen onto an order, and "plays" (musically) this order, is what counts. But this screen is a hook that, as Micheal Tom wisely noticed, speaks of the relationship between personal making and the mainstream (either as language or icons).
Speed and repetition are side or later values, that reveal the syntax of our experience, not the kind of space we go through.
Space and materials are declared. We're apparently in a familiar, recognizable field. We are at home. But asleep and making our way through memory and dreams.

and...

Dance with Camera

September 11, 2009 - March 21, 2010

Dance with Camera is an exhibition and a screening program that explores a crossover between artists and dancers who make choreography for the camera. The exhibition features art works in film, video, and still photography that exemplify the ways dance has compelled visual artists to record bodies moving in time and space. Screenings elaborate the show’s theme with iconic dance films, ranging from Busby Berkeley’s Hollywood musicals to Maya Deren’s avant-garde films. Dance with Camera, spans seventy years of art and film, and features over thirty artists and filmmakers between its exhibition and screening program.

VIDEO AS A SOURCE OF LIGHT

LIGHT ATTACK!

‘uses a custom mobile projection setup installed in a car
to project an animated virtual character onto the cityscape.
Short pre-recorded video loops are arranged into seamless motion
patterns by the computer software, allowing interaction with the
architecture and passers-by in real-time.’

More from Studio Daniel Sauter.

We must desperately seek this next step where all arts will combine skills and crafts towards the creation of events. Whenever we see this happen it is very satisfactory; like in the videos there have been lately where a few people begin to dance and then all the people in the video end up being part of a choreography too!

For me the main thing about contemporary art is that it is defined by the quest for a new form; and in doing that many artists have made use of video in various ways. This in fact is creating a new way to see but also a new way to participate in the artistic event. I think participation is the key so that the audience does not feel like in a museum seeing objects on a pedestal and the artist does not feel like being the object on the pedestal.

Audience participation and involvement is the key to communal construction of sense and sense memory. In terms of video installation or better, the use of video for the purpose of the communicative purposes of the contemporary artist, I must say that we must remember that primarily projected video is light and as such it should be treated.

Video might contain very interesting images but I would like to use it in my own work mainly as a source of light to generate a different kind of narrative when projected onto an architectural or organic (human?) surface...or by creating an architecture with light with which the human performer can interact and also invite a viewer to participate in it.

Relational art, incorporation and the cinema

The emergence of "relational art" roughly concurrently with the emergence of video (and video installation) art is not a coincidence; both represent a radical departure from earlier artistic traditions. Taking cues from Pop Art, media theory and DIY/counterculture movements, these newer forms of art emphasized audience interaction, deconstructed popular forms and further de-mystified the vaunted qualities of the traditional "art object" (Benjamin's "aura"). These forms of art are, as Oppenheimer suggests, essentially fluid - "fluidity" is their essential defining aspect. Both video art and relational forms suggest systems of incorporation - as videos make use of older aesthetic traditions or are placed within larger artistic contexts (dance, theater, installation, etc.), while relational forms draw in (sometimes unwitting or even unwilling) persons into the social environments they create.


Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho

What implications does this have for us - studying the production of experimental/alternative media and art within the context of a program grounded in documentary and fiction filmmaking ("the cinema") - and for media arts in general? The natural progression of the ideas of "incorporation" and "relational art" leads to dialogue. While Bourriaud's conception of "relational" work stresses the involvement of a social context, media artworks embracing this same concept often form dialogues with the mainstream cinema. Past generations of media artists (in particular, the artists of the 1960s and earlier that Bourriaud's work attempts to break with) avoided the subject entirely, placing themselves in radical opposition to the mainstream; artists of the "relational" generation (such as Douglas Gordon, above) are much more willing to interact with, borrow from or make use of Hollywood and the like. How can we, as emerging media-makers, make use of this same concept in our works? Do we still exist in a period of "relational" art-making - or are we moving on to a next step?

The place for Video...

You walk into a humongous, white lobby in a gallery. It reminds you of a drawing room you visited sometime back with sounds of crystals, chinaware and spotless linen. The colours are pastels and gold. You see an artwork and find it closed in terms of how you are trying to read it. This inability humbles you down even more. The gallery space in that moment asserts a kind of territoriality that fixes you as a viewer and just that. It also crystallizes ideas of High Culture, Intelligentsia and Elitism; all in one.

The world was a very different place post the Second World War. Rapid urbanization meant an increase in the speed and stimuli of human interactions across territories and topographies. Isolated places opened up in minds and maps. It was a world of Leopold Bloom, the shell-shocked character from Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. In an era of overarching fragmented- ness, what were the key ideas through which art making was to be redefined? How were art works not to look like ‘lordly luxury items’ in this new urban context?  Baurriaud proposes the idea of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ as a key concept that defined practice for many artists who emerged in Europe through the 1990s. Relational Art, as he points out, took as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and social contexts rather than an assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space. In that sense, it meant an ‘urbanization of artistic experience’. It also meant a breakdown of the traditional ways in which art was to be exhibited, seen and displayed. To be taken around an artwork, in many ways is to be taken around that big house of whose drawing room you were reminded in the beginning.

Contemporary Art resembles a period of time that has to be experienced, or the opening of a dialogue that never ends, suggests Borriaud. The City, in contrast to Nature, becomes the ‘tangible symbol and historical framework of the state of encounters imposed on people’. More so because of possibilities of lasting encounters. This gave rise to a form of ‘art with intersubjectivity as its substratum’. The position of the viewer and the viewed interchanging, mirroring and being mirrored, like a kaleidoscope. The moment of the encounter between the viewer and artwork becoming as much a part of art making because now there is an engagement with the process. There has to be a ‘collective elaboration of meaning’. In that sense an art exhibition becomes a site of an encounter, very much like the City, where waking around can lead to utterances, whims, fancies and trigger memories. In that sense, an art work represents a ‘social interstice: a free space and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organize everyday life and they encourage an inter-human intercourse which is different to the ‘zones of communication’ that are forced upon us’. With ATMs, automated systems, computerized helplines, the overall shrinking of the relational sphere, contemporary art becomes political in its engagement with ways of problematising it.

1960s also saw the emergence of what John Hanhardt calls the emergence of the Video Art. In an increasingly hyper-meditated world, the almost instantaneous quality of video to be shot and transmitted became a way ‘to reject the notion of the heroic, existential artist self portrayed in abstract expressionism’. In this, Video became one of the primary modes of work and expression for Contemporary artists characterized by a quality of ‘liveness’.  There was a way in which Video was undeniably ‘real’ and yet it was possible to alter real time and create a spatial and conceptual distance from the televisual or cinematic experience.

For contemporary artists of the time, who were trying to situate art practice in the everyday and work with perceptual dimensions, Video became a means of working with notions of intersubjectivity; almost simultaneous, fragmentary and ever changing. Video installations became spatial –temporal art forms that cold include the vast heterogeneity of making and viewing artwork. As Chrissie Lies notes that an installation as a hybrid work of art demands a critical distance and physical presence of the viewer to complete the work. Critical distance enables viewers to move between immersion and contemplation, so that she can both experience and analyze the work’s intention and content. The viewer’s physical presence is crucial because the elements of video installations are arranged by the artist as part of a gestalt in a complex cybernetic loop of technology and mid/body that form a conversational communication system between the artist and her viewer. As an ‘expanded art form’ to use Hanhardt’s term, Video made it possible for the ‘representational’ to extend into the ‘spatial’. The ‘collage’ and ‘de-collage’ that the placement of monitors in 3D spaces created, there emerged a possibility of an intertextual dialogue of the viewer with the material and herself.

As Bourriad notes, Gabriel Orozco’s opening of the ‘social infra-thin’ (inframince); that tiny space of everyday gestures that is determined by the superstructure; Braco Dimitrijevic’s Casual Passer-by series and Sophie Calle’s engagement with strangers point to a larger trend that emerged at the time: the formalization if convivial relationships has been a historical constant since the 1960s. the generation of the 1980s picked up the same problematic, but as against the 1960s emphasis on relationships internal to the world of art that called for linguistic subversion and privileged the ‘new’ , the emphasis was on external relationships in contexts of eclectic cultures. All of this was to be eventually directed towards what Guattari suggests-aesthetics must above all accompany societal mutations and inflect them. The poetic function, which consists in reconstructing world of subjectivation might therefore be meaningless unless it too can help us to overcome the ordeals by barbarism, by mental implosion and chaosmic spasm that loom on the horizon and to transform them into unforeseeable riches and jouissances.

And if the live quality of video could transform the landscape of contemporary art so tremendously, my current engagement remains what could be the newer modes of artistic articulation in times where technology is more omnipresent than ever. The Sony Portapacks and the Bolex are now replaced with Cellphone Cameras with which we shoot and archive almost instantaneously. In the same moment, we encounter thousands of mega bytes of data and ton loads of image pixels on youtube that for me potentially alters the notion of found material. And everyday, we meet so many more strangers.