[-empyre-] Loitering Strategies (Participatory cultural Pedagogy)

[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...

In response to Julian Olivier:
"I'd love to hear from this month's contributors and others on the
list about relationships between participatory art and participatory
pedagogy":

I would recommend looking into the work of the PUKAR collective from
Mumbai. The project was on view at ISEA last year as a lonely example of a
localized activist project that focus on collaborative research and the
development of pedagogic public art works that incorporate videogames as
one of the tools in its practice.  The activities of PUKAR revolve around
examinations of the relationships between state interventions in urbanism
and the outcomes of these processes vis-a-vis their impact on the
conditioning of individual and collective subjects.

The following is an excerpt from an essay that I am writing about the work:

Gendered Strategies for Loitering (2008) is a videogame installation by
three associates of PUKAR, a non-profit Indian urban research initiative
led by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. The project was directed by Shilpa
Phadke, a social sciences graduate student, Shilpa Ranade, a practicing
architect, and Sameera Khan, a free-lance journalist and writer, in
collaboration with students at the University Scholars Programme Cyberart
Studio, at the National University of Singapore. The piece consists of two
video projections showing video footage of public spaces in Mumbai and
Singapore, interwoven with ethnographic and poetic texts, and a videogame
interface. The footage is manipulated so that audiences are able to note
the flows and patterns of human occupancy of the spaces shown. The texts
projected on screens are ethnographic observations and materials gathered
by the researchers. The design of the game interface proper is based on
drawings produced for the project as well as syntheses from interviews
with women living in Mumbai and Singapore, who provided accounts of their
everyday experiences navigating the public spaces of these cities. The
project is part of ongoing research and activities by PUKAR around issues
focused on articulating the relationships between gender norms, public
space, and official discourses, particularly in relation to the issue of
safety of Mumbai and Singapore urban spaces.

By encouraging players to experience women's inability to loiter in these
cities, the videogame ironically comments on the exclusionary premises of
official safety discourses. The game lets the player choose from four
'real' female characters (i.e., represented as photographic cut-outs of
four women). Age, class, and clothing, frame each of the characters'
access to public space. The goal of the game is to successfully transverse
a street in order to meet a particular person or reach a location.
Navigation triggers a series of text boxes asking the player to respond to
hypothetical scenarios; for instance: “you are standing in the corner
waiting for a friend, would you like to stay here, or wait at the bus
stop? A: stay, B: wait at bus stop,” or “You see a police man, would you
like to ask for directions or continue on? A: ask for directions, B:
continue on” (this particular question references the rise of reports by
women sexually assaulted by Mumbai police men). The game ends with a
birds-eye-view map of the city block showing the plotted points that the
player passed through, and a suggestion to continue play as one of the
other characters in order to further explore the various strategies
employed by the women represented.  As the designers acknowledge, these
women represent the middle-classes, and as such are judged within
restrictive moral values that equate the height of female respectability
with public absence (conversely, public female presence justifies male
verbal and physical harassment, as you are considered a 'loose' woman).

The game reflects the group's overall research and activities which are
largely informed by theoretical examinations of the relationships between
cultural constructions of space and control of individuals and
populations. The work of French sociologist Henri Lefebvre around the
relationships between spatiality and contemporary capitalism has in
particular been drawn upon and re-articulated by PUKAR's 'gender and
space' group to contest women's public regulation as exclusionary and
victimizing. Lefrebve's argument about the contingency of the 'meaning' of
space with emergent process associated with its experience in everyday
life lends support to the collective's rejection of purely functional
approaches to urban design, and demands for official urban policies that
account for gender questions in relation to urbanism.

Videogames are however but one element of the multimedia approach employed
by the Pukar collective for what they term “participatory research
pedagogy.” Though  the videogame medium has proven to be particularly
useful “to sensitize” youth in classrooms, the streets, and art festivals,
“to the issues of gender, the built environment and the city,” as one of
the members stated, the collective also takes part in public protests and
performative interventions in collaboration with women's groups, among
them sex workers and human rights organizations in India, organizes
conferences, and produces publications, films and audio documentaries, as
well as postcards and photo-exhibits. The urbanist focus of these groups
is representative of contemporary activist movements addressing the
transformations associated with globalization processes from a localized
perspective. In India, “The attention paid to the city,” according to
historian Gyan Prakash writing for the New Delhi based SARAI urban
collective, “is a product of two interlaying  processes—the erosion in the
authority of the historicist narrative of India modernity,” which he
associates with Ghandi's conceptualization of the city as a site of evil
and injustice and Nehru's city as a symbol of modernization, and  “the
emergence of a new politics of urban space,” which he sees ensuing from
counter practices and discourses of “the struggle for modern identity and
justice.”

One may conceive dance as part of "participatory research pedagogy." In
fact that sounds like a good project to explore (see the tango dances of
YOMANGO groups in Spain for instance).

Best, Claudia.











> 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...
>
>
>
>