Re: [-empyre-] escape Artist

[cingraha@pratt.edu]

>
Dear Hugh:  I am interested in your mapping project which had resonances,
also, of the way public "memory sites" and shrines now seem to assemble
themselves--the 9-11 shrines of flowers, notes, candles etc. or Diana
shrines or Vietnam memorial "hyperlinks" by means of notes and messages.
Is this true of the Analogue Art Map project?  Also, I would like to know
more about what you mean in your comments about pervasive gaming and
architecture.  Thanks, Catherine

I've been a spectator here for awhile and I guess now is as good a
> time as any time to weigh in.
> Although much of my time is spent negotiating the digital spaces, I
> have become a bit of an activist towards real space interaction
> through collaborative performance/ installation.
>
> Partly as an educator but mostly as an artist, a few years ago I began
> an arts group Analogue Art Map. Analogue Art Map was a response to
> what I saw as 'keywording' within media arts and also what Milli
> accurately describes as arts "hermetic state". By creating user
> friendly social art in public areas Analogue Art Map seeks to use non
> digital media to discuss digital culture and technologies with a
> particular lean towards mapping spaces.
>
> Map-Me is a work that I have presented several times with Analogue Art
> Map that invites participants to create a physical Myspace or
> Facebook. Participants can create a personal presence by sticking a
> business card, a photo or any bit of pocket debris that they choose to
> represent them to an assigned wall. I provide wool or yarn (depending
> where you come from) for people to hyperlink to friend's presences on
> the wall. The face to face nature of Map Me means that people make new
> friends pretty quickly and the hyperlinks become rampant.
>
> Ultimately this time based work allows for a socially networked space
> to form that is both physical and metaphorical.
>
> Those that are familiar with online social networking tools
> immediately understand the metaphor while those few who have no
> experience of the mysfacebook phenomenon begin to recognise the
> attraction. But unlike the digital world, no-ones personal info is
> data mined.
>
> What is interesting to me about Map Me is the social negotiation and
> creativity that it cultures. I organise the space and materials but
> the installation is user generated and the participants make all the
> creative decisions as the webby architecture forms. It's heart warming
> to see people rationalising their own creativity to allow room for
> future participants to be equally involved.
>
> As a sculptor and as a physical being, I find that these indescribable
> social sensations and interactions that are experienced in physical
> space very important to me, and while I love the idea of digital
> social spaces such as SL, so far I have found these spaces to lack
> emotional resonance or any significant genus loci.
>
> Moving on, my own interest in spatial practice has been reinvigorated
> by involvement in pervasive gaming which brings me to my final note, I
> am hearing the term suspension of disbelief a lot here in reference to
> architectural interaction. While it might not be a tight in the
> context of this thread, I have found performance of belief as
> introduced by Jane McGonigal in her discussion of pervasive games to
> be a useful term and concept when applied to architecture interaction.
>
> http://www.avantgame.com/MCGONIGAL%20A%20Real%20Little%20Game%20DiGRA%202003.pdf
>
> Cheers
> Hugh Davies
>
> http://analogueartmap.blogspot.com/
> Map Me pictures at:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/7728398@N08/
>
>
>
> On 9/13/07, Ryan Griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sep 12, 2007, at 5:58 PM, empyre-request@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Firstly, given how thoroughly I tend to agree with them usually, I am
>> > a little surprised at Ryan and Kevin's concerns with escaping art as
>> > context in the service of art as process (to be a bit ham-fisted
>> > about the summary, please correct me if I have this wrong), as if
>> > interdisciplinarity and the refusal to locate practice allows flight
>> > from the power relations of assimilating cultural institutions. It
>> > reminds me of a certain repetition of Conceptualism in the new media
>> > arts sector; and also (as Brett perhaps suggests) a new media studies
>> > repetition of "criticality" which seems not-well-enough-connected to
>> > previous debates on the limits and exclusions inherent in the
>> > critical enterprise's attempts to find distance from power.
>>
>> Danny,
>> Firstly, i would challenge your assertion of not saying "anything
>> useful"! The gender critique, especially bringing up WACK is totally
>> useful... while i didn't see the show, i did hear from many about its
>> challenges and pitfalls. And one only has to look at the chosen cover
>> of the exhibition catalog (from Rosler's "Body Beautiful" series) to
>> see how much institutional reframing can really screw with context.
>> But anyway, to get to your question of my (i'll speak for myself, not
>> Kevin) attempt at escaping Art, you may have me on that... but i
>> think i also did a poor job of stating my questions. It's not so much
>> a matter of "escaping" Art, as it is reframing the field that Art is
>> situated within, perhaps. In other words, the "not just Art"
>> signifies that Art operates in a field occupied by more than Art, as
>> much as it does a practice of Art that also wants to "be" something
>> else. Is there anything that is "just Art"?
>> This is why i wanted to point to that article by the RCRC, as i think
>> this is what it is trying to analyze.
>> The question only seems to matter if the field of Art is less fenced
>> in than such critiques suggest. Is Art even an adequate context?
>> WJT Mitchell wrote in his "What do pictures want" : "In short, I
>> think it may be time to rein in our notions of the political stakes
>> in a critique of visual culture and to scale down the rhetoric of the
>> "power of images." Images are certainly not powerless, but they may
>> be a lot weaker than we think."
>> Maybe we could say the same about Art, as it is perceived to be an
>> auto-reproducing entity, with an internal logic and set of concerns.
>> This is what i find interesting and useful about "spatial"
>> practice... the boundaries of space are defined through negotiation
>> and those negotiations require more responsibility than Art (or its
>> critical language) can take on its own.
>> best,
>> ryan
>> _______________________________________________
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