The posts to the blogs on the week of Sept 14, a week my mother was born in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, a week which ends with the end of summer and the beginnings of something else, a week marked by ongoing kinds of international struggles: global warming controls, militarism and terrorism, wildlife culls, drought (Mexico, Kenya). A week in which I anticipated responses on the local: the here and now, the alleys, streets, homes, markets, encounters, relationships, altered realities, pathways, conflicts, dangers, loves, senses, and collages of a Philadelphia landscape.... I find instead, curiously and with many questions, an arts agenda on the part of my fellow bloggers that concerns worlds far away.. in some cases, worlds never visited. Whereas, in a prior generation, a mantra called for local acts and action, in the subset of another, the body is extended over global (and, in so many ways, imagined) terrains and their narratives. There is much to be considered about the poetic, rhetorical, political, and aesthetic characteristics of this sense of extended imagination, and about the senses of longing, absence, banality, and sentiment that run through the works. Some works employ textual overlays and others point to subtexts, some of which many be obscure. Some connect to videos posted by anonymous sources, to uncredited found footage, to strange sounds. In such works, the materials are removed from spatial specificity. But to what ends? And works point to power and hidden voices. What is revealed about the power dynamics of the media subjects and their makers?
As media artists engaged in practices that are powerful and impose positions or break down prejudices which of these works opens the world and which close it down? What choices are shaping your interpretation?
Then two the question of media choice and artistic decisions. What transforms the ordinary and mundane into a form that is expressive and transforming?
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