[-empyre-] freshly utopian moments: shedding [+/or] revisiting

[jonCates <joncates@criticalartware.net>]

JWL + all
yes, these 3 txts + their developers have [been/are] 
[in/trans]formative to criticalartware:

>  >MR = Martha Rosler, Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment
> > RBF = R. Buckminster Fuller with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, I 
> > Seem To Be A Verb
>  >MM = Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Message

in reply to your invocation of Martha Rosler's Video: Shedding the 
Utopian Moment, here are sum related excerpts/quotes from Video 
Journey Through Utopia by Paul Ryan.

"The founder of the Raindance video collective, artist Frank 
Gillette, distinguishes between the Fluxus current in video history 
and the utopian current."

<---CUT-N-PASTE--->

"One "sociological" way of describing this "victory" of the European 
Fluxus current over the indigenous American utopian current is to say 
that the institutionalization of video as art came at a price. The 
anonymous collectives (once the Videofreex collective refused to 
given out any name to an interviewer, except the name of the house 
cat) gave way to "name" artists. To become validated as "art" the 
collective desire to radically change society with video, triggered 
by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, had to mutate into 
celebrity status for selected individuals willing and able to 
structure their ego's in compliance with the star system for solo 
artists."

<---CUT-N-PASTE--->

"...this presentation reports on my own effort to start a video 
utopian community between 1971 and 1976, after having participated in 
the Raindance video collective from 1969 to 1971. Through this 
report, I want to suggest that the utopian current in video history 
can be reinterpreted as a fecund virtuality"

<---CUT-N-PASTE--->

"The idea was to configure an intentional community of thirty-six 
videomakers. Each videomaker was to be part of three different 
triads. The first triad was to care for its members, the second to 
take care of the business of supporting a community, and the third to 
produce video interpretations of ecological systems. My intuition was 
that if self-correcting teams of three people could be stabilized, a 
leaderless, thriving community could be stabilized. Of course, my own 
attempt to start a leaderless community involved a personal 
contradiction that I became keenly aware of over the next few years."

in this txt, Paul Ryan describes the formation of the group described 
above, Earthscore, + the way in which Earthscore functioned (through 
support from NYSCA [New York State Council on the Arts] + as a 
nonhierarchical platform). Ryan describes the eventual dormancy of 
the Earthscore Foundation + the way in which this could be 
[positioned/understood] as a failure of a utopian project. Ryan 
continues, repositioning this potential failure as a success in that 
Earthscore was then translated into an application, an instruction 
set + a system by which other [works/projects] could be realized.

as Ryan concludes the txt, he states:

"I submit that these iterations demonstrate that Earthscore as a 
notational system can cultivate differences that make differences. I 
think that the notational system itself is a kind of virtual code for 
organizing differences that can help actualize a rich and healthy 
pluralism of differences in society. I consider this notational 
system more valuable than any videotapes I've produced. I doubt, 
however, if the notational system itself could have been generated 
without a video journey through utopia."

data.src:
Video Journey Through Utopia - Paul Ryan
as hosted [in/on] Davidson Gigliotti's The Early Video Project
http://davidsonsfiles.org/VideoJourneyThroughUtopia.html

this text wonderfully [articulates/repositions] a 
[chronological/code-based] transition [+/or] transformation [+/or] 
transcode from Video Art to artware.

criticalartware hopes to function as an [application/platform] for 
personalized writings + hystorical documents of this kind in order to 
facilitate developing discourses + as Paul Ryan suggests, revisit + 
converse with early moments + those that formed them.
--
//jonCates
 ---> criticalartware coreDeveloper
http://www.criticalartware.net