From: mailman-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Date: September 21, 2005 7:38:14 PM PDT
To: empyre-owner@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Content filtered message notification
The attached message matched the empyre mailing list's content
filtering rules and was prevented from being forwarded on to the list
membership. You are receiving the only remaining copy of the
discarded message.
From: Mariam Ghani <mariam@kabul-reconstructions.net>
Date: September 21, 2005 6:06:44 PM PDT
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] translation and minding the gaps
Hi all,
Your delinquent co-guest-moderator here. Have just spent the day
catching up on the discussion after spending most of the month,
rather aptly, translating an online project (http://
www.turbulence.org/works/seethedisappeared - caveat, it needs some
updating) into a physical archive installed within blocks of Ground
Zero for the anniversary of 9/11. Over the past few years, I've
been very much engaged with the question of how / whether / why to
translate online the place / site / community-responsive practice
that I've built up in work like the Disappeared, Kabul (http://
www.kabul-reconstructions.net, http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/
constitutions/map.htm), Transit (http://www.kabul-
reconstructions.net/transit) and Detroit/Dearborn (see the current
issue of http://artwurl.org) projects. That question is
complicated by the fact that the places, communities and histories
I'm interested in are almost all borderlands, liminal,
transitional, contested, and narrated themselves in translation and
counterpoint.
To jump into the thread on translation, then, I'd like to start by
responding to some points raised by Danny and Ian and then pose a
few questions of my own. I'm referring to two big chunks of your
posts which I've copied below and will now paraphrase briefly
(correct me if I get it all wrong, please!).
Danny, you brought up the "specific gaps and untranslatables"
around projects like the inSite net commissions, and characterized
those gaps as being both a subject that the net.art community is
unwilling to discuss and also, potentially, as posing the aesthetic
and political questions at the heart of contemporary art. Ian
expanded on this by connecting your gaps to the borders of class
and cultural distinction where art operates.
I find both of these posts, and the entire thread that preceded
them, really interesting because I'm nodding along with much of
what's been said, and I feel that we're edging up to the heart of
the discussion, but I think we're not quite there yet because we
haven't examined some of our basic assumptions. The most basic of
which is this puzzlingly persistent notion that the net itself is a
borderless state, a kind of endless public domain, open to
intervention from anyone, anytime, any place. I think it's
important to think through the ways in which this utopian ideal is
in fact less than true: the net is amorphous but it's not
limitless. Forgive me if all of this is extremely obvious.
First: how many web programming languages exist that are not based
in the English language? Almost every web page out there, no
matter what its surface linguistics (or how dynamic they may be in
the service of hyperconsumerism), has an understructure with some
percentage of English through which it must pass before entering
machine translation and passing its packets to the network. Its
programmer has had to learn some percentage of English in order to
master the technical skills to communicate through the network.
It's no accident that in Lebanon, for example, a once rabidly
Francophile and Francophone country has become almost totally
Anglophone (and bi- instead of tri-lingual) in one generation - the
IM generation.
Second, as we all probably know from our own experiences, as online
communities grow and build up histories, they develop their own
border policies and politics of exclusion. It's not just the
governmental and corporate web that's under watch, but also each
little group building fences and policing itself.
Third, cash limits access to domains, domain names, server space,
and so on for web producers, just as it limits access to computers,
training, high-speed service, good cable and phone lines, and so on
for web consumers. People without economic resources can
contribute to communities or collective projects like wikis or
folksonomies, but may not be able to work as individuals.
I bring all this up not to be depressing and cynical, but to
suggest that perhaps the most productive way to bring the idea of
site-specific or community-based practice online is to engage with
the places, communities and histories of the net itself - or to
make a deliberate effort to discover the gaps in the network - the
sites of absence, where voices are missing or elided, or the online
border zones, places of transition, translation and in-between,
parallel to sites like San Diego/Tijuana - and use those spaces to
launch mediations between on and offline practice.
What do you think?
Mariam
The net.art community (in particular compared to a more general
contemporary art scene), through various accidents of history and
communities of practices, seems to have strong links with classic
European political economic analysis (for better and worse), and is
much more happy talking about globalisation, class, and capital in
very general terms rather than the specific gaps and
untranslatables around projects like those at inSite (that usually
get shoehorned into questions about ethnicity or identitarianism).
From an art perspective, what seems important about the projects
Ricardo discusses is that they seem to signal experience-centred
rather than system-centred claims to truth and aesthetic value.
These seem to fit within the idea of "countercultures of modernity"
that Gilroy emphasised in The Black Atlantic. Paradoxically (for
me anyway), the political-aesthetic histories in these
countercultures (I think Chela Sandoval's grouping of the work of
anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements as "methodologies
of the oppressed" seems useful) seem to open up valuable ways of
reading the class dynamic within captialist new media art, i.e.in
Ricardo's question "Is it possible for new media artists to
activate the net for the staging of projects responsible and
responsive to communities that fall between legitimized power
sectors, and if so how?"
It strikes me that the lineage of the inSite projects is about
manifesting this rupture and these alternative, experiential
periodisations - producing this difference rather than seeking to
resolve it. It feels to me that they treat the communities of
bourgeois aesthetic practice and those outside legitimised power
sectors as quite radically separate experientially, yet linked
through various capital/media/aesthetic flows. So it is not
supposing that the typically bourgeois new media curator can
necessarily have a conversation with the typically working-class
modified car enthusiast, but that by bringing the very different
consciousnesses together the outline of the gaps between them can
be traced, and the aesthetic question in this kind of "gap" is
also, somehow, what contemporary art is all about.
My feeling is that Danny hit a spot with this comment
around gaps, inviting the coterie of gap morphology:
separated, inbetween, overlapping, connected,
disconnected and ruptured places, that induce
heterogenic, multiplicitous, stable and dynamic
consequences.
One location of contemporary art is exactly this
border. And it is paradoxical that net art can mediate
this space, particularly where class distinction can
be made more complex by cross cultural interaction.
The dissasemblage of social hierarchies, while at the
same time utilising a technological hierarchy, is one
thing the net can do.
I suppose for
me that once the facade of culture is stripped by
hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity overtake,
lines of cultural referencing are distorted (or able
to be connected, disconnected and reconnected) and an
enormous diversity in approach is authorised -
judgement seems out of place.
http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/mariam