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

[sarah drury]

> Hi Hana,
> sorry I fell off the map yesterday and today.  I didn¹t even check my email
> until 9:30 tonight.  I think I had to just let go completely, after the two
> weeks (or more) in the grips of [-empyre-].  I had to finally attend to some
> domestic affairs that had been on hold for weeks, so I went to the dentist to
> have my teeth cleaned and did a lot of shopping errands (a new mop, a kiddie
> pool, some other cleaning supplies, tomato cages and stakes, sprinklers, a new
> miniature broom for Sollie, some new pajamas and shorts for Sollie, Sollie¹s
> first crayons, paper and finger paints ((can you believe we are such horrible
> slackers that we haven¹t gotten him art materials until now??? I am so
> depressed about this, but at least we finally did)), some lopping shears for
> our overgrown trees and shrubs, etc.)  I really needed to just ³be² today, and
> I felt kind of primally resistant to the thought of empyre.  I just needed a
> day.
> 
> Your post is fabulous, really framing in precise detail a non-binary framework
> as a feminist inquiry.  It looks like the list is perking up.  I will be
> interested in continuing to post here and there, when I feel moved.  I like
> this Œpresence¹ discussion and may chime in.  However, I¹m glad to be done
> with the stress of daily posting, even though it was fun and productive
> posting to/with you.  I just needed not to have daily homework for a day or
> two.
> 
> I hope you are feeling better, and hope we can talk tomorrow,
> S
> 
> 
>  
> Hi, Marguerithe et all,
>  
>  
>  
> You raise very pertinent questions ³around 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 week¹s forum on the Politics of Motion.
> Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies elucidates that ³the 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).  Derrida¹s position differs markedly from Jay¹s, 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).²
>  
>  
>  
> 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, ³archives 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 it² 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  ³a
> moment in this hyper media saturated world, a moment without feedback, without
> a document, without a traceable trace.²
>  
>  
>  
> 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 Maebayashi¹s 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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>>>  http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>> 
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>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>>>  
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
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