[-empyre-] welcome and initial ruminations

Thu Nov 7 00:12:11 EST 2013

I was thrilled to read Roberta's post about documentary-artivist movements
in Toronto and Montreal! Selmin and I are both looking for ways to get
better plugged-in to both the artistic and academic scene here in Toronto.
(I've barely discovered all the things happening at my home institution!)
Your post highlighted some excellent resources, including artscisalon and
the Subtle Technologies Festival -- amazing! Thank you!

I certainly hope the global nature of networks doesn't prevent us from
addressing events happening across the streets in our cities. Mass arrivals
and the student protests in Montreal are great examples. I have also lately
been fascinated by the work of Jo SiMalaya Alcampo, a community-based
artist in Toronto who works with queer youth (http://www.josimalaya.com/).
I particularly love her installation "Singing Plants":
http://www.josimalaya.com/singing-plants.html. Plants, especially singing
plants, are so queer! "Singing Plants" is part of a number of installations
by Jo that address the ways to reclaim indigenous knowledge. As Mass
Arrivals reminds us, we are living on occupied land. Singing Plants aims to
reconstruct the way in which the children, grandchildren, and great
grandchildren of colonized subjects act as silent witnesses to the stories
of their families' roots of resistance. According to Jo's website, Singing
Plants "is an interactive installation in which living plants are keepers
of story, cultural history and memory.  The intent is to reconstruct what
has been lost and repressed through trauma: the unspeakable."

I want to suggest that Singing Plants, too, is a form of documentary
artivism. While the installation is video-recorded, which acts as one level
of documentation, the plants themselves serve as a form of documentation --
a non-textual, non video, but nevertheless electronic, audio-visual form of
documentation. Singing Plants also posses the same problems of
documentation that both Roberta and micha highlight -- that the document
can never fully realize the experience of a protest or, in the case of
Singing Plants, moments of resistance during colonization. But is the point
of documentation to fully actualize/ reconstruct/ realize such experiences
as they happened? Is that even possible? In fact, documentation often
involves its own aesthetic contrivances and offers a different narrative
(and narrative structure). What does it mean to capture a moment (even a
long moment)? Surely it means to re-render it and to render it anew -- with
all the benefits and problems of doing so.

I'll leave it for someone else to address how documentary practices might
sustain a movement and build alliances. I am not sure documentation itself
can do that, and I wonder if that's the reason we document. I genuinely
don't know. It's an open question. Why document?

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Selmin Kara <selminkara at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I would like to thank everyone for the initial batch of wonderful posts. I
> would like to respond to some of them at length later but let me
> immediately explain why there is no mention of Toronto-based artivism in
> our initial provocation in case that creates skepticism about our
> investments. Although Patrick and I are hailing from Toronto, I have only
> been living in Canada for 2 years (was in the US for 8 years before then)
> and Patrick arrived just last year from the US. As a Turkish scholar, I
> have been selfishly preoccupied with the social justice protests taking
> place in my home country (and the possibility of a war between Turkey and
> Syria) for the last couple of months, which will hopefully explain the
> cultural specificity of the Gezi example. Similarly, my interest in Ai
> Weiwei's hooliganism derives from the autocratic governments' common
> labelling of protesters around the world as hooligans (as in the case of
> Turkish government declaring Gezi protesters "capulcu/looters," Russian
> government prosecuting Pussy Riot as hooligans, and India's own
> gunda/goonda history). Therefore, our highlighting of Ai Weiwei in the
> provocation has nothing to do with the Art Gallery of Ontario's recent
> engagements with the artist's work against the backdrop of Toronto's own
> very powerful artivist practices. Please do not take it as a gesture of
> dismissal of what's happening in the city.
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 8:39 PM, rbuiani <rbuiani at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> hi all from the crack-smoking-mayor city,
>> I couldn't help responding to this thread. I was attracted by the topic
>> of documenting activism in the age of networks and by the fact that this
>> post comes quite explicitly from toronto but  doesn't mention, nor it
>> indicates the interest for any local practice in Toronto involved in
>> dealing with this very issue. This combination got me a bit puzzled and at
>> the same time intrigued. I have these two preliminary questions: Does the
>> global nature of networks prevent us from addressing (digitally) events and
>> movements happening literally across the street in our cities? does the
>> explosive noise of famous (Ai Weiwei), well-organized and already
>> well-documented events make them more worth of attention than other minor,
>> messier, less organized and poorly documented local and grassroots
>> movements?
>>
>> In response to documenting art activism and having to deal with --quite
>> typical-- objections: I have been working on an itinerant project (the
>> Sandbox Project) that examines and experiments with different ways to bring
>> together art and different forms of activism (in the context of social
>> justice, labor activism and in the sciences) both at the grassroots and
>> local levels, as well as in an online environment (here in Toronto). I
>> found that when dealing with a number of people coming from different
>> experiences and contexts, it is difficult to find one definition of
>> activism. you can engage in activist practice and consider yourself just a
>> concerned citizen, or a scientist who does his/her job ethically. A labor
>> activist has very specific ideas of what activism means, and so the artist.
>> needless to say, the circumstances change the way we approach anything
>> "activism". But do we really have to qualify the people involved as artist,
>> activist, scientist etc...? shoudln't we rather focus on strengthening
>> collaborative and coordinated efforts? I found it useful (sometimes) to
>> approach this diversity by focusing on the process of doing things together
>> (I think Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow have written about this). again, here
>> in Toronto, there has been quite some discussion about this. I am thinking
>> of No One is Illegal and the group behind Mass Arrivals (put together by
>> Farrah Miranda, Graciela Flores, Tings Chak, Vino Shanmuganathan, and Nadia
>> Saad) http://changeasart.org/?p=287 . Depending on your perspective, you
>> can see it as public art or as political intervention.
>>
>> This brings me to the issue of documenting this sort of work online. The
>> website showing Mass Arrivals reports a video. unless you were there at the
>> time it happened, you would  not be able to seize the surprise, the tense
>> and emotional atmosphere that this intervention created. Last year, I
>> followed and briefly participated in the massive students demonstrations in
>> Montreal. Back in Toronto, I tried to do my part and disseminate the
>> wonderful videos these passionate young militants were producing. However,
>> many people who didn't know what was happening in Quebec could not decipher
>> those videos. all they saw were...well, pretty videos (note, they did not
>> consider themselves artists, yet they used art quite often).  how do you
>> document such work without turning it into a mere sequence of pictures or a
>> simple video? how do you reproduce affect and mobilize a vivid response or
>> genuine solidarity across the world for instance? How do you eventually
>> extend an event as intense and emotional as Mass Arrivals, or so dense of
>> significance as the Carrés Rouges', encouraging dialogue with other groups
>> not necessarily located in your city, and promoting community/alliance
>> building? this is where I think that talking about documentation might not
>> be sufficient. Also, quite often, the online tools we have available tend
>> to limit this lively dialogue.
>>
>> I think this is probably the right place to ask all these questions. I am
>> sure writing about it like any good academic, but in this context I am more
>> concerned about possible tactics, actions, experiments, even solutions.
>>
>> intriguing topic, indeed
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> PhD in communication and culture,
>> Department of Communication Studies, York University
>> programmer ArtSci Salon http://artscisalon.wordpress.com/
>> program advisor Subtle Technologies Festival
>> http://subtletechnologies.com
>> http://atomarborea.net
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Nov 5, 2013, at 11:04 AM, Selmin Kara wrote:
>>
>> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> > Hello everyone from Toronto,
>> >
>> > "Documenting digital artivism" is perhaps a loaded topic, as it points
>> to an intersection among four different areas of research and practice:
>> documentary practices and documentation, digital practices and new media,
>> art, and activism. In my own experience, discussing these four things under
>> the same framework poses a challenge as people often ask for clarification
>> especially in relation to what artivism implies or how it can be
>> distinguished from other modes of activism that entail documentation and
>> mediation (which are themselves perceived as artistic activities).
>> >
>> > The resistance comes from 3 main objections.
>> >
>> > How to approach documentation, art, and activism in the age of
>> networks, then? Instead of responding to that question with a clear
>> definition, I suggest opening it up to discussion here. Hopefully, our
>> responses (criticisms and resistances) will be diverse.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Sincerely,
>> >
>> > Selmin
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > Selmin Kara
>> >
>> > Assistant Professor of Documentary and New Media
>> >
>> > OCAD University
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > empyre forum
>> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>

-- 
Patrick Keilty
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information
University of Toronto
@patrickkeilty <https://twitter.com/PatrickKeilty>
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