[-empyre-] more on documentary & artivism

[Zach Blas]

hi everyone--

thanks for such a fantastic discussion during the last two weeks. i’m
happy to jump in now. first off, i’d like to thank patrick, selmin,
and camilla for moderating and inviting me to participate. i was
recently a guest on empyre during the month on collaboration, so i’ll
try speak about my work differently, since i’m still working on the
same project.

just a bit about myself: i’m an artist and writer finishing up my phd
at duke, and i’m currently a resident at eyebeam in new york, which is
where i’m living at the moment.

since 2011, i’ve been working on a project called “facial
weaponization suite” that deals with biometrics, masked protest, and
tactics of opacity. in short, i lead community-based workshops and
produce “collective masks” based on the aggregated facial data of
participants. what results is a mask that is amorphous and cannot be
detected by biometric facial recognition technologies. most of this
work is dealing with larger issues of what it means to be politically
visible, represented, and legible to the state today. i see this
project as intersecting with various social movement’s refusals of
political recognition and embracing of the mask as an aesthetic
catalyst for collectivization and transformation. i consider
opacity--from the writings of edouard glissant, nicholas de villiers,
and others--as a politico-aesthetic framework for thinking and
experimenting outside the registers of informatic capture,
surveillance, and the identification standardization that is imposed
on people by these technologies.

since we’re talking about documentary and artivism this month, i’d
like to specifically address this through my work. of course,
documentation is a conception that is at the very heart of
contemporary artistic practice. it is something ingrained in one’s
head from the very start of an arts education - you must document, you
must document; fake it if you have to; the documentation is ALL that
matters. this will to document is something that i struggle with, as
someone who works between action & performance and representation &
installation.

as micha cardenas previously addressed, i am also hesitant to describe
what is left after a workshop is over as documentation. once a mask
workshop has taken place, there is, of course, a mask that has been
generated. but also photographs of the process, leading up to an
action, performance, or intervention the group carries out together.
crucially, the workshop is very much for the participants--what we do
together is about us being together. it might be about other people if
we decide to do something that invites/involves other people or the
public.

yet, at the same time, this body of work is simultaneously designed to
exist in an installation context. rather than approach the
installation context as documentation of events that have already
transpired, i work with participants to actively construct images for
the installation that will perhaps tell a story, evoke a concept,
suggest a feeling. when these images are exhibited with the masks,
they attempt to activate some speculative potential; they become
fictions that call forth more actions, more possibilities. in the
installation context, images are more about utopic desires, exceeding
their specificity, rather than documentation of a past performance.

but in the workshop context, all images generated are shared with
participants, as artifacts of our time together.

i enjoy this approach with the project because it allows for both
concrete practical experiments with a specific group of people and
more abstracted speculations.

i’m in the midst of leading a 3 part workshop at eyebeam right now.
we’re focusing on feminism’s relations to recognition and visibility
with particular attention non-western forms of female concealment,
like the veil, alongside certain western governmental drives to
“transparency,” as evidenced in recent veil and mask legislation. the
2nd session is tomorrow evening, so i’ll share some thoughts on this
after!

zach

http://www.zachblas.info/projects/facial-weaponization-suite/

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zachblas.info