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

[margaretha haughwout]

dear hana, sarah, & all,

thanks so much for engaging my humble ideas and furthering them as well as
introducing more works, etc. to chew on. i'm sorry it has been a few days
since i've written. this time of year in maine is so absorbing, i was away
this weekend & also have multiple garden plots to tend to...

here i'll touch on a few questions centered on temporal constructions that
come from

sarah introduces paul virilio's notion of "an endless present obliterating
naturally framed notions of time." (although i'm not quite sure what
naturally framed notion of time are -- do you, or does he, mean temporality
that comes about through the motions of the sun, moon, stars, seasons,
weather, etc.? is there technology associated with the measuring of these,
that is more "natural"?) i can see the orientation towards an "accelerated
change" and "documentary compulsion" as being similar to the retort
collective's critique, yes. it's interesting that virilio calls it an
endless present, while retort calls it the obliteration of a present, but
both these conceptions come together as being the result of rampant
modernist consumerism. "Once upon a time," retort collective writes, "what
commodities promised was the future, above all. Now a whole (dominant) class
of them exists to invent a history, a lost togetherness and stability, that
everyone claims to remember but no one quite had. It is a short step from
this omni-present pseudo-memory to a 'nostalgia for the present' - the
stylized display of the latest fashions and accesories as if they already
possessed the glamor of the outdated. And so on. The wheel of false
temporality spins faster and faster" (Retort Collective, 182).

sarah asks, in terms of my call for a present moment without documentation
or feedback (which, i must say was rather fanciful, and not a dismissal of
projects that do work with different kinds of archival traces etc.), "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?" in reponse to the
first question, perhaps we have nothing. or we do have a memory, a feeling
or a story that we tell, but have no document to prove that it happened....
not a very good way to bolster an art career ;)

here i'll narrate a story that centers around a piece i experimented with a
few years ago called .d.a.t.a.l.o.v.e.r. . .d.a.t.a.l.o.v.e.r. is
participatory theater framed as a game between two people. players are each
given a "scenario" with an objective: a piece of knowledge or advice, a
reassurance, or emotional connection the player should strive for, and some
kind of possession that the other player might be after. each player is
unknowingly given a scenario that has nothing to do with the other's. in the
first stage of the piece, they are to engage in a dialogue for four minutes
around the scenario they are given. in the second stage, the players are to
fill out a sort of questionaire that requests user input regarding their
role-played or real feelings about the other player. the text that they
enter goes nowhere; there is no storage of this information. my intent here
is multifold; in an age of documention, where every piece of data is stored
and fed back, the lack of feedback here creates a kind of mystery, and
reveals the extreme to which digital culture has gone in terms of feedback,
data storage and documentation. and then, especially in love, we are often
desperate for some kind of feedback or assurance which we never really get.

i played this with all kinds of people when this was shown. because of the
different scenarios in the first stage, a lot of engaging dialogue would
arise (a basic principle of writing good dialogue in novels is to have the
characters speaking at cross purposes), and because the scenarios were
mostly written around themes of loss, longing, war, and death, the
conversations sounded romantic (people will often talk about the thing they
really want to talk about if they don't know that's what they are doing!).
one person i played with i saw a couple years later at the cinema. we both
recognized each other; he was with his partner and i was with mine, and we
did not say hello. this was exactly the kind of awkward moment i was going
for. we were complete strangers, yet had shared this accidental intimacy
that was made all the more intimate, i think because there was no archive of
it. what went on during the 4-8 minutes of exchange was just ours; there was
no audience or storage, and it was made all the more subjective due to the
fact he thought we were talking about something completely different from
what i thought we were talking about. so of course, there are traces and
non-digital feedbacks between us, but there is also much slippage and
collapse due to the absence of certain mechanisms of documentation, allowing
for strange moments of intimacy, presence and exposure.

in response to sara's second question around participatory presence and a
progress-oriented , linear temporality, my response is to say, that they
can, yes yes. there must be differences. i think some (not all) new media
participatory art works make too much of documentation simply because it is
so hyped in consumer culture, and because it serves a future purpose. it is
a technique of progress-oriented consumerism to reassemble the temporal
through the creation of a past which seems forever "over." it is a matter of
fleshing out the ways archival traces construct certain temporalities. hana
does this in her most recent post, where she notes the difference between a
"static archive" and a living one. this seems key. a static archive suggests
a past that is "over." this fits neatly into a temporal construction that
emphasizes a moving forward, a progress narrative, and also an inability to
mourn the ever growing wreckage and violence. it is the angel of history's
dilemna. whereas a living changing archive allows for mourning and other
behaviors that do not sever relations with the past (for me, this means
engaging bodies and spaces using both immersion and witnessing techniques in
tandem. a brief look at UNTIED AND SEVERED by diekman seems to do this - i
am wondering if the moderators &/or other participatory/relational artists
see their practices this way, or what kinds of practices facilitate this,
particularly in virtual spaces). i suppose it is a question of tactics. in
some instances, we want to untie the place from time, in others, we want to
re-tie. or it is a process of untying and re-tying.... this is a thought i
will need to pick up at some other point, but i'm thinking of bodies, place,
trace and temporality in a way that does not keep us trapped in progress...

it is key that information stays embodied. the Neighborhood Narratives
project and others mentioned utilizes this kind of practice indeed. when
"information loses it's body" to use katherine hayles' phrase, or when it
seems to, it is much easier to make the past ever "over," thus sending us
ever "forward" in search of salvation, or in search of the creation of a
utopic past. the iphone app Anna mentions, RJDJ, does appear to have the
potential to work between the past and the present in a way that can keep
the past alive and in the process do important political work... yes?

i look forward to looking more deeply at the artworks mentioned this weekend
and to consider them in this light. -- material for another contribution to
this list i'm sure. so much more to discuss and respond to. i'd love to hear
incorporate more of the debate between bishop and bourriaud as well as to
continue to consider place.... but i'll leave it here for now.

xo,
/margaretha

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Hana Iverson <hanaiver at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, Marguerithe et all,
>
> You raise very pertinent questions “around resistance and complicity more
> broadly; in a control society where participatory art seems to be an art
> form on the rise, must the art still always resist?
>
> First, I have to say that all relational works are not necessarily based on
> a resistance/complicity binary.  Some are made of haptic interfaces that
> function intuitively and provide entry into  variety of experiences such
> as submersion in a virtually mediated experience. I think of Char Davies
> Osmose, as one example, of this kind of immersive experience, where the
> control is based on the breath of the participant.  The relation in that
> work is between a single user and its immersion in a spatialized event.
>
> I think recent femiist theory refutes the continual binary construct.. I
> point to the text Sarah referred to in last week’s forum on the Politics of
> Motion. Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies elucidates that “the problem of
> dichotomous thought is not the dominance of the pair (some sort of inherent
> problem with number tow); rather, it is the one which makes it
> problematic, the fact that the one can allow itself no independent,
> autonomous other.  All otherness is cast in the mold of sameness, with the
> primary term acting as the only autonomous or pseudo-autonomous term.  The
> one allows no tows, threes, fours.  It cannot tolerate any other.  The
> one, in order to be one, must draw a barrier or boundary around itself, in
> which case it is necessarily implicated in the establishment of a binary –
> inside/outside, presence/absence.
>
> On the question of the inherent violence of binary polarizations [ and
> therefore its complicit usefulness in defining the control society ] see
> Nancy Jay (1981), Jaques Derrida (1972, 176, 1981a and 1981b), and Elizabeth
> Gross (1986b).  Derrida’s position differs markedly from Jay’s, insofar as
> Jay posits the possibility of a third term or a middle ground between binary
> pairs, a point that is somehow outside the polarizing structure, a point or
> term that can resolve or clarify the tensions that comose the dyadic
> structure, a kind of Hegelian synthesis of the opposed terms.  Derrida is
> explicit inhis denial of this reconstitiution of the binary through its
> supersession. The sublimation or relie of the binary pair obliterates the
> interval between them, which both Derrida and Iridaray insist on being
> recognized (p211).”
>
> It seems that understanding the body and space as processes that are always
> becoming (Soja (1985) refers to spaciality as socially produced) is a
> complex system that defies the static relationship of a polarized structure.
> The binary is undermined by motion that bleeds, distributes, inverts the
> people, places and spaces constantly (re)constructing themselves - opening
> to the two, three and four more levels of interpretation that Elizabeth
> Grosz refers to. I think many of the new projects (such as Mixed Body and
> United and Severed that Sarah pointed out) refer to these other
> spaces/places/bodies.
>
> Now just to draw the relationship to the archive for a moment, there was a
> recent notice on the Art and Education list about the
> Archive/Counter-Archive project at Monash Centre and associated conference
> coming up in July.  The announcement states, “archives are the
> repositories of materials and records reflecting the imperial processes of
> invasion and dispossession, as well as narratives of resilience and
> resistance.  Open to new excavations and readings of the material it
> contains, the archive might be seen as ambivalent to the histories drawn
> from it” and the question posed is whether this might drive the emergence of
> various counter-archives.
>
> So, perhaps the archive as static entity (repository of the past) lends
> itself to this binary definition.  As a public site (controlled by whoever
> has established it), the only resistance to its complicity in a power
> structure is in how it is read.  Reading then, becomes the active, present
> time experience, an action that produces an opening to other spaces of
> interpretation and presence.
>
> It seems to me that in all the present time producing of these second,
> third and fourth spaces, there are opportunities for experiences that open
> “a moment in this hyper media saturated world, a moment without feedback,
> without a document, without a traceable trace.”
>
> Hana
>
>
>  Hana Iverson
> Media Artist,
> Neighborhood Narratives Project,
> Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
> New Brunswick, NJ
> hiverson at rci.rutgers.edu; hanaiver at gmail.com
> http://www.neighborhoodnarratives.net
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 4, 2009, at 8:10 AM, margaretha haughwout wrote:
>
> 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 the Sonic Interface piece you
>> mentioned below:
>>
>>
>> A project that I think very specifically engages both sets of body
>> functions in very interesting ways is Akitsugu Maebayashi’s Sonic Interface,
>> a portable hearing device that is made from headphones, microphones, and a
>> laptop computer. The participant is invited to walk around the city, and
>> experiences modified sonic environments processed real time (with a 3 second
>> delay) from the sounds it picks up. The experience of the altered
>> environment generated by the software program influences and questions the
>> sense of space and time. Mayebayashi has focused on the auditory sense as an
>> interface between the body and the environment, in a different way than an
>> audio walk of any kind – locative or pre-recorded.
>>
>>
>> what I think is really interesting in the context of participatory art
>> right now, is the way in which this is moving into a much broader sphere of
>> newer forms of participatory culture. So, for example, see the new iPhone
>> app RJDJ (http://more.rjdj.me/what/) <http://more.rjdj.me/what/%29> where
>> you can use incoming sensorially activated data (movement/ environmental
>> sound) to affect pre-recorded sonic data and tracks. Essentially what you
>> are doing is in/remixing environmental data with prerecorded data on an
>> iPhone/IPod device and listening to it as it gets in/remixed. The app is
>> free and being used to generate RJ/DJ events in the same way people were
>> using iPods for live podcasting events a few years ago.
>>
>> The RJ stands for 'real jockey' with an overt reference to 'realtime'
>> processing and mixing. But what is really interesting here is if we start
>> inflecting this with a Bergsonian-Deleuzian understanding then we come up
>> with a kind of music-memory-machine that is about generating sonic
>> space-time in-between the present-processed (realtime) and the
>> past-retensive (prerecorded) such that one is continually producing a kind
>> of sonic rendering of the temporal that cannot settle between the present
>> and the past (or the 'to come' - protentive)...
>>
>> This has implications for your below comment:
>>
>> By uncoupling sound from vision, this project questions what we assume as
>> "real".  "Presence" requires the constant stabilizing and synchronizing of
>> vision and sound; an uncoupling of the two opens up the possibility for
>> other presences, other experiences of "self." This separation also
>> importantly has the effect of destabilizing the experience of "place."
>>
>>
>> the trace, then, of both the machine and of matter (sonic, environment,
>> participant) in the RJDJ app is really an inmixing rather than a
>> remixing...I think this has consequences for all the fairly boring and banal
>> notions of remix/participatory culture around (Shirkey, jenkins et al) and
>> opens up, instead, something much more novel about how one creates a
>> platform for participating in a temporality that is both occurring but  has
>> not yet happened or only partly happened and that part will be open to
>> re-happening (TOL so don't hold me to this ;-)...
>>
>> cheers
>> Anna
>>
>>
>>  A/Prof. Anna Munster
>> Assistant Dean, Grant Support
>> Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
>> School of Art History and Art Education
>> College of Fine Arts
>> UNSW
>> P.O. Box 259
>> Paddington
>> NSW 2021
>> 612 9385 0741 (tel)
>> 612 9385 0615(fax)
>> a.munster at unsw.edu.au
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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