[-empyre-] welcome and initial ruminations

Sat Nov 9 23:06:41 EST 2013

Samara and Irina have raised interesting questions about the “site-specific” and “sustainable” character of artivism.Both touch on the importance of the participants’ live experience. 

From my perspective there is a certain rootedness to a lot of artivist practices. It is often local conditions that offer the source of mobilization and participation in activist and also artivist practices.

My own interests lies in the ways in which local rootedness is mobilized within a global digital framework. That is how more or less local practices take shape in order to accommodate broader media logics. I am interested in activism that is mediatized not only when it is widely documented and circulated, but also when both the online and offline activities are adapted to symbols or mechanisms created by the media.

Irina you point out that information can be used in ways that are not intended. This is off course an important issue. But I also think that artivism (often) has two target groups/audiences. This kind of artivism is not only created as a site-specific intervention; the site-specific intervention is shaped to achieve media circulation and thus to reach a second “audience”. However, in striving to reach a dual audience – the local and the digital – the artivist practice runs the risk of loosing control of the direction or meaning. This can be a problem, but it is also the reason why these practices must be understood as part of networks in which the role of the artists, activist etc. is transformed because of a commitment to participation and co-creation both in local and digital communities.

I am not arguing that media-saavy artivism is an either emancipatory or a suppressing system, but I do find it necessary to study it as a complex network in which site-specific and participatory practices coexist with digitalization, mediatization, and various institutional and commercial relations.

I should also mention that the purposefulness of the term artivism – for me – is that it signals a commitment to strengthening the connections between social activism and artistic practice as well as academia. An interesting example of attempts to develop such connections can be found at “center for artistic activism” http://artisticactivism.org/

I will be traveling for the next 48 hours. Melbourne-Aarhus (Denmark). I am looking forward to read more interesting thoughts on documenting digital artivism when I arrive.

Camilla

On 08/11/2013, at 09.04, Irina Contreras wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello,
> 
> Thanks for the interesting subject matter for this month. It's been a minute (make that a few years since I have been on empyre, glad I didn't leave!!!). 
> 
> It's pretty late for me but a few things in regards to what I have read thus far...
> 
> I get the feeling that for a lot of people part of the approach to documentation, art, "activism" etc is within various lenses of academia. That part feels interesting to me, not because I don't think that people within academia are doing interesting work but as someone (who mostly avoids the word activist) who works within various communities I am part of, I don't think of academia as my first audience, if you will. I am an artist, true, and I am currently in school, also true. But, for example, I am working on a piece of media that is to be shared with those interested and invested in decolonization movements (grown out of the group decolonize oakland etc) and don't have any intentions of sharing it at this point (or at least not as my first intended audience) only within the framework of academia. 
> 
> It's complicated because I was "hearing" a few different things while trying to read through the threads right now. One one hand, I gleaned that people wish to consider some of these projects within a specific field that is "outside" the art market. I totally get that and often feel similarly yet right now I also find myself thinking about things within the academy. Additionally, academic settings produce a lag in my opinion that is quite noticible. Not to romanticize in any way but I am amazed sometimes about some of the conversations being had and what the lag time is because people working within those subjects (where we are of course, the "subject"/agent of our own lives), time moves very differently, I think. For instance, I noticed that the next post (I think) says stuff about the term "artivist". Artivist is a term largely coined I think by the film festival in LA, which I think is fairly disconnected with the city. The film festival (perhaps it has been updated?) collects films from all over the world. I was a panelist one year and watched lots of film made my people not from the places they were making films about in every imaginable place. It was very difficult in that sense for me to see it through the lens of work in the community or whatever term you prefer.
> 
> That said, I think there are things that exist right now that are pretty amazing that I don't see within the realm of artivism, "social practice" or otherwise. I see both of those terms as being very doctored/created to talk about "something", not coming from a place of making about one's own life etc.
> 
> A project I dearly love for example is Poor Magazine: http://www.poormagazine.org/
> 
> Poor is lots of things, a theatre, a media outlet, classes and now a place called Homefulness in east oakland/80's ish and Macarthur.
> 
> There are more but I don't want to blab too long!
> 
> Lastly, I would just say that for myself in regards to thinking about documenting lots of projects I have been a part of (because they are not documented and sometimes at this present moment I question the need to document for some of the reasons listed here), I am in a place where I want to present challenges and inquiries. This goes for whoever I am working with, whether it's a collective doing work around community violence or with my current cohort at school etc. Documentation as a material should present challenges/questions etc. I think part of this for me is due to how easy it is right now for information to fall or be used in ways not intended and for the right to share information (especially things centered around queer people of color/migrant bodies/historically poor etc) with who we want to, when we want to.
> 
> Looking forward to the rest of this month!
> 
> Irina
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, November 6, 2013 1:30 PM, Andrew Lau <andrewjlau at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings from Oakland!
> 
> I'm really encouraged by the discussion so far! I recently moved up here to the Bay Area in California, and am too looking for ways to get plugged in to the local art and academic scenes. I'm also really encouraged by the potential connections in our various interests around this topic.
> 
> I want to latch onto some questions that Patrick posed (and were alluded to by Roberta and Selmin). Patrick asked, "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...why document?"
> 
> I think there are multiple reasons why an event or experience might be documented. There is a sort of "evidentiary impulse" in which the intention behind documentation practice is merely to supply proof that something happened. In my research with LA-based artists, I found that many artists document simply because that's what they learned to do in their BFA or MFA programs (particularly if they're working with performance or events as their medium). But an alternate perspective might argue that documentation of an event can never replicate that event, that the act of viewing is itself an event that might re-present the  event as depicted in the document, but always already exists at a remove from the event. I suppose the difference between these two perspectives has something to do with how the viewer of the document is understood in relation to the event and how that event is accessed (and mediated) by the document itself. In the perspective that privileges documentation as the creation of evidence, there is an implicit assumption that the document "brings" the past event into the future. In contrast, a perspective that understands each moment of viewing a document of a past event (a rally, a workshop, a performance, etc.) as engendering a wholly new event might understand that the "past" event" as depicted in the document is co-constructed by the viewer herself, in that very moment where the document is apprehended as such. 
> 
> Now this dichotomy is quite crude, to be sure. And there are many ways that these two perspectives might be complexified (as they should). But I think that this distinction is productive for thinking through some of the questions about why an artivist might document her interventions and projects, but even further, how such documents might be created. In other words, this distinction alludes to the space in which a document performs as a document (whether understood as archival, evidentiary, etc. or not). I would argue that this "performatic context" - in which a document performs as a representation of a past event - is perhaps where some possibilities for documenting artivism might be located. 
> 
> I think it's also important to note that there are many examples in which documentation cannot be separated from the intervention. In some cases, the documentation co-constitutes the performance or event since the 1960s with Conceptualism, and later, community-based art and new genres public art in the US (see: Miwon Kwon's dated-but-still-relevant One Place After Another and Martha Buskirk's The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art). For many of these projects, documentation (whether in the form of video footage, photographs, etc.) becomes very important, even if such documentary objects are metonymically treated as the work itself because of the inability to access the originary event or performance.
> 
> I just want to end my post here with a link to an article that reviews the Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani's Index of the Disappeared: http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5j76z82c#page-1. This article does an excellent job of describing some of the complexities of documentation and activism in contemporary art, focusing on a distinction between "cold data" collected by the US Government after 9/11 about immigrants and "warm data" collected by the New York-based artists that presents a questionnaire to visitors of their website in an attempt to "personalize" the archive. That is, the intervention in the wake of 9/11 was to undermine the construction of the spoken state subject (through the cold data collected by the US Government) by creating a warm database of the personal experiences of speaking subjects.  
> 
> 
> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 5:12 AM, Patrick Keilty <p.keilty at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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> 
> -- 
> Patrick Keilty
> Assistant Professor
> Faculty of Information
> University of Toronto
> @patrickkeilty
> 
> _______________________________________________
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