[-empyre-] Participatory Art: New Media and the Archival Trace

[sarah drury]

Margaretha, and all,

I am intrigued by many of your thoughts, and particularly by the ideas in
your in the last paragraph.  Regarding the control society and the
³complexities of the new social order², you point out the role of imaging
technologies and the documentation of experience in which ³we constantly
create a past for the future,² and Retort Collective¹s observation of our
flight from the ³banality of the present moment ­ the dim actuality of what
is happening² i.e., our flight from consciousness of the present, in the
service of a driving social control that drives us forward, drives us to
give up present-moment engagement, drives us ³to create a false future².
This documentary culture, with its avoidance of the present, is perhaps not
so far from Paul Virilio¹s theory that technology has created an endless
present, obliterating naturally framed notions of time: The Speed of
Politics, with acceleration assaulting our sense of the duration of that
present, which is continually wiped away and replaced.  The anxiety of
accelerated change is connected to the documentary compulsion.  There is a
fear of tracelessness in this absence of a real experience of the present.
The index in your description does not actually serve as memory, it is not
actually a connection to past experience, but just more information in an
archive of continual change.

It¹s interesting to think about a present-moment encounter ‹ experience ‹
without feedback, document, traceable trace.  What do we have without such
feedback, currency, markers of exchange?  Do the traces of participatory
presence differ from the traces of this anxious compulsion to record a
constantly-refreshed present?
Sarah



> 
> 
> dear hana, sarah & empyre folks,
> 
> i'm usually an intermittent lurker on this list, now drawn in by this rich set
> of ideas and inquiries as well as the call to "participate!"
> 
> hana, i do think that matter, "if it could be traced, would be the narrative,"
> as you said in your previous post. i think immediately of bakhtin's
> chronotopes, and of hayden white's plot points. bakhtin terms chronotopes as
> "'points where narratives are tied and untied,' and where time is bound to
> space" (rose, 37). white reminds us that the definition of plot can refer to
> positions of bodies in space, points in narrative, and the "final resting
> place," or the grave plot. i propose that it is at a plot point that one might
> experience desire, or confront it, perhaps consider its transcendence, as a
> wasp to the orchid. processes of witnessing, becoming, encountering put into
> motion or undo the fixity and finality usually associated with plots and
> points. i can see how the projects mentioned, The Neighborhood Narratives
> Project, and Sonic Interface by Akitsugu Maebayashi both employ this process
> of reorientation through a relationship with bodies and plots....
> 
> as we move from a disciplinary to a control society, i suspect the agency of
> one body, or one individual becomes less relevant; indeed, the negotiations
> between bodies becomes more of a focus, and the tension here in a
> participatory work becomes one of power relations -- or perhaps just forces --
> and how power, and certain kinds of power, are negotiated. so the agency of
> one individual becomes less important than the kinds of relationships we have
> (haughwout, 6). ie. relationships between bodies.... i am curious how it is
> possible to speak of *the body* at all and expect it to resist
> objectification... the body as always becoming helps, and is helped further
> along i believe in that bodies are always becoming because of other bodies.
> but i also think that to some degree participatory, relational, dialogic art
> disrupts the objectifying gaze by its nature, in that there is no longer a
> passive viewer/ active performance situation. ideally, all bodies in a
> participatory piece are engaged with the place and the other bodies; the gaze
> is subverted at least.
> 
> which brings me to questions around resistance and complicity more broadly; in
> a control society where participatory art seems to an art form on the rise,
> must the art still always resist? are there different kinds of resistances and
> can we outline them? are there ways complicity becomes something to work with,
> something to witness in ourselves? i confess the resistance/ complicity binary
> seems somewhat outmoded to me. i feel always complicit. i wonder if there is a
> more descriptive and useful way of talking about the social and political work
> being done in these relational arenas.
> 
> i also wanted to touch on some of the thoughts that have come up around time,
> and to draw on hana's comments around the archive, seen and unseen bodies, and
> the complexities of the new social order. image technologies can be seen as a
> partial cause of this complexification. with digital photography and video we
> constantly create a past for the future. this activity, where cameras
> "document" experience, takes away the present moment and creates a past. this
> making of a past is for an imagined future: for a Facebook audience perhaps,
> or MySpace -- for an imagined future audience. The Retort Collective asks,
> "what is the current all invasive, portable, minute-by-minute apparatus of
> mediation we have pointed to if not an attempt to expel the banality of the
> present moment - the dim actuality of what is happening from consciousness?"
> the process of documenting becomes literally all consuming of the present; the
> activity obfuscates the present, so that the presentness and physicality of
> sentient bodies is given up as energy and labor in the service of "some
> nonempty, non-fantastical vision of the future."(Retort Collective, 183) this
> is one of the ways bodies can be managed in a control society; a willing labor
> force constantly working according to a hyperlinear time -- born of
> Industrialized time, and encouraged by Taylorism -- to create a false
> future.(haughwout, 14) i too have created relational artworks that play with
> and overlap different periods of time to induce a re-orientation, but
> increasingly i am intrigued by practices that might bring people into the
> present moment, and that remain completely undocumented. it fills me with a
> sense of release and relief to even think of it - a moment in this hyper media
> saturated world, a moment without feedback, without a document, without a
> traceable trace - think of it!
> 
> xo,
> margaretha
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> cited:
> Haughwout, Margaretha. Intimacy: The aesthetics of space and time in new media
> and participatory art. 2008.
> 
> Retort Collective. Afflicted Powers.London: Verso, 2005.
> 
> Deborah Bird Rose. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation.
> Sidney: University of New South Wales Press Lrd, 2004.
> 
> White, Hayden. "Bodies and Their Plots." Choreographing History. Ed. Susan
> Leigh Foster.
> Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
> 
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 10:36 PM, Anna Munster <A.Munster at unsw.edu.au> wrote:
>> Hi Hana and all,
>> 
>> I found what you had to say interesting re the trace-body-media relation
>> generally but also specifically in relation to t