[-empyre-] On Lively Archives

[Claudia Costa Pederson]

I would like to begin by thanking Renate Ferro and Tim Murray for the
invitation to share my thoughts on  this month's discussion around
participatory art: new media and the Archival Trace.

My interests as Renate and Tim previously mentioned concern the engagement
of play and games for cultural critique with a particular focus on artists
developing digital games as devices of political intervention (from within
an avant-gardist line of flight that precisely attempts at exploiting
points of intersection that relate issues of representation and power).

I am therefore inclined to contribute to the discussion of participatory
art and the archival trace less from the point of view of Nicholas
Bourriaud's  relational aesthetics whose metaphysical overtones have been
addressed by Claire Bishop's well taken critiques of Bourriaud's notion of
a participatory culture as one divorced from a commitment to analyses of
how digital art and networks support, resist, problematize or create new
relationships of power. Bishop's objections are more to the point of
cultural critiques as playful interventions or dialogical exchanges that
are truly generative, but to do so it seems we must once again remind
ourselves to keep questioning 'our' notions of what art is (if not an
archival trace of cultural reproduction?). To quote Hakim Bey's notion of
"Immediatism" : "Real art is play, & play is one of the most immediate of
all experiences. Those who have cultivated the pleasure of play cannot be
expected to give it up simply to make a political point (as in an ``Art
Strike, '' or ``the suppression without the realization'' of art, etc.).
Art will go on, in somewhat the same sense that breathing, eating, or
fucking will go on."

As Sean Cubitt mentions elsewhere in this month's thread in relation to
the (im)possibilities of digital resistance: "The question is how do we
operate now: Tactically? Strategically? And how do we minimise or at least
delay the assimilation of whatever we invent into the reproduction of
capital?"

In a recent conversation with Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal the topic
of the archival trace as an active constituent of tactical resistance came
up in relation to the problem of ephemerality of his experimental media
practices in the realm of 'interventional games' if you will.  According
to him, he does see the fleeting temporality of digital interventions as
an obstacle to engage audiences.  For his three digital games, "Domestic
Tension" (2007), "Virtual Jihadi" (2008) and "Dog or Iraqi" (2008), which
deal respectively with issues around mediated representation of Iraqis and
the rise of militancy and militarism within the U.S. and in Iraq, Bilal
not only resorts to the engagement of a wide scope of media, including
live camera appearances, chat rooms, the habitual website postings, and
most recently a book about this projects, but also with ongoing archives
online. He assiduously reserved 10 mn. of each of the thirty days he
performed daily in a gallery space in which he played the target for the
paintballs of random audiences (in "Domestic Tension") to speak of his
experiences. The resulting recordings were placed on YouTube, a popular
video posting site where as he recounts they aim at reaching a wide scope
of audiences that would otherwise not likely engage with "political art." 
The thread also contains videos and commentary by the artist and others
around the controversy ensuing from the censorship of "Virtual Jihadi" by
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (where the artist was invited for a month
long residency).  Most disturbing is the short video of Bilal's
waterboarding (he stated that he finds it  equally painful to watch) which
was shot at an undisclosed location in upstate New York "with the help of
one of the Yes Man among other friends" in the aftermath of "Dog or
Iraqi," and online game that allowed audiences to vote on who would be
waterboarded, Bilal or the dog (a pug). The piece was especially contested
by animal rights activists, a fact that the artist feels is especially
telling.  The point however (beyond the piece's playful commentary on the
much touted democratic potential of digital technologies) is that the
video 'connects' to a long thread of videos on waterboarding of overall
detached tone (either as 'parodic' reenactions or as earnest short
documentary style commentaries against torture).  The digital archive here
raises the possibilities of an "associative art" (as Hugo Ball once
remarked on the relationship of Bergson's 'duration' and the cabaret
voltaire) that attracts attention precisely because of its 'misplacement'
among simulated waterboardings (such an euphemism for induced suffocation)
and sincere rationalist arguments against torture.  Amidst these
representations Bilal's is disconcerting (and twistlingly appealing to
YouTube audiences) perhaps foremost because it refutes categorization.

Bilal gauges the success of his "attempts at dialogue" by the amount of
e-mails that he receives commenting on his work.  In response to questions
relating to the reactions of audiences, he gestures in protest, "at this
point I don't see any value in engaging in discussions about the
relationship between art and politics.  In Iraq it is implied that such a
relationship is real. My shows under Saddam were censored, first because I
painted in a realistic style and the authorities did not like what they
saw, then my work was again confiscated because I painted nothing. I did a
series of white paintings and hung them at the University of Bagdad and
was arrested on suspicion of mockery.  I was charged for being a terrible
painter basically. I had been given free training as an artist (university
education was free under Saddam) and all I could come up with was these
empty canvases...  The question is for me of how to keep dialogue alive
and at this point we have nothing to lose."

To be continued...