[-empyre-] week two | transnational collaboration research/practice

[Dale Hudson]

10–16 November 2015: 
TRANSNATIONAL COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH/PRACTICE 


We continue the discussion of potentials and limitations of thinking through digital media into the area of transnational collaboration in research/practice with a few examples of projects that we discuss in our book. 

These projects foreground collaboration — not in the sense of “interaction” or “participation” that are promoted by corporations and increasingly by states, all of which have well-publicized links to data collection and surveillance — but collaboration in ways that foregrounds ethical and political considerations.

CAMP’s From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf is a collaborative project that Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran developed in collaboration with migrant sailers who transport goods between India and Pakistan, Iran and the Arabian Gulf, and East Africa. The film is compiled from videos that the sailers make and exchange with one another, mostly set to music that evokes their experience of months at sea away from family and friends. The videos are not made with us in mind as an audience. With the increased attention to the history of the Indian Ocean World, FGtGtG helps us visualize the continuum of cultural and economic exchanges that predate the violent interruption of European colonialism that carved the region into strategic areas of study/control that have encouraged sectarian violence. Unlike conventional documentary, FGtGtG foregrounds emotion and unknowability over facts and evidence; it does not pretend to interpret the lives of the sailers for us.

Two projects by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse facilitate opportunities for us to think about the ways that we might be (and most likely are) complicit with the exploitation of labor. They do as much, however, with a sense of humor, which is often necessary to get us to drop our defenses and pretenses. Invisible Threads is a locative media project that makes the invisible power structures of just-in-time production visible and wearable. It moves from the virtual world of social networking and role-playing in Second Life to the physical world in live performance. Comparably, Laborers of Love (LOL) prompts us to think about the outsourcing to (relatively) anonymous workers through Amazon’s MTurk as well as the fetishization of glitch art. The project’s online platform allows us to commission adult video with settings for customized content and glitches, as a means to reflect upon the immodest ways that neoliberalism’s flexible systems are promoted (sometimes even erotically) as simulating economic growth.

Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s Intermediate Hikes (IH+) is a mobile-phone app that creates occasions for planned and unplanned collaboration between human participants and the nonhuman world. The project is an application of critical theory into media practice that prompts us to think about a number of interrelated issues concerning urbanism, environmentalism, eco-tourism, and anthropocentrism. Some of the task cards ask us to move outside our comfort zones in order to approximate, if not inhabit, the perspectives of others. The project thus facilitates a variety of self-conscious experiences (and maybe some unconscious ones) that open interactions not only with other participants but also with the nonhuman world as vital and agentive rather than as “wilderness." The project gets us to engage in a critical mode rather than lapsing into a touristic mode when confronting difference as well as uses of land. IH+ allows us to engage in research through practice.

We invite our guests to write more about these projects as well as their current and other previous ones.

Best,
Dale and Patty

Guest biographies


Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukaran, CAMP (From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf), India

CAMP is a collaborative studio founded in 2007. It combines film, video, installation, software, open-access archives with broad interests in technology, film and theory. From their home base in Chuim village, CAMP are co-initiators of the online footage archive http://pad.ma, the new cinema archive http://indiancine.ma, and a new project on cultural histories of Bombay. CAMP's work has shown extensively including at the MoMA and New Museum, the BFI London Film Festival, the Viennale, at dOCUMENTA 13, Sharjah Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Kochi-Muziris Biennial, and museums and film festivals around the world. In 2015, they presented a major survey of their works across five solo exhibitions titled As If I- V in Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai.

Stephanie Rothenberg (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United States

Stephanie Rothenberg is an interdisciplinary artist using performance, installation and networked media to create provocative public interactions. Mixing real and virtual spaces, her work explores the power dynamics between contemporary visions of utopian urbanization and real world economic, political and environmental factors. She has exhibited throughout the US and internationally in venues including Eyebeam, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), the Sundance Film Festival, House of Electronic Arts (HeK), LABoral, Transmediale and ZKM Center for Art & Media. She is a recipient of numerous awards, most recently from the Harpo Foundation and Creative Capital. Residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace, Eyebeam Art and Technology and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at SUNY Buffalo where she teaches courses in design and emerging technologies. 

Jeff Crouse (Invisible Threads, Laborers of Love LOL), United States

Jeff Crouse creates software and installations using generative graphics, crowdsourcing, computer vision, physical computing, projection, popular web platforms, parody, and satire. His projects range from absurd critical commentary on technology to commercial immersive experiences using new technologies. His work has been shown at The Sundance Film Festival, Laboral Art Center in Gíjon, Spain, The Performa biennial, The Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, the storytelling series, StoryCollider, The Obie Awards, and featured in the Berkeley Art Museum Net Art. He has received grants from Rhizome and Turbulence, and has completed residencies at Eyebeam and Minneapolis Art on Wheels. His clients have included companies such as Samsung, IBM, and Intel, and institutions such as the National Building Museum, Moogfest, and the Barbican Museum. He has pieces on permanent display in Dayton, Ohio, and Beirut, Lebanon. Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a fellow from 2007-2010. He is currently a partner and creative technology director at the experience lab, Odd Division, and founder of experimental software studio, See-through Lab.

Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint (Indeterminate Hikes IH+), United States

Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint have been working together for over a decade to investigate contemporary experiences of food, ecology, media, and memory. Working simultaneously as artists, teachers, and critics, and sometimes known as EcoArtTech, they create participatory situations and social sculptures that facilitate recovery from a cultural memory disorder that they call “industrial amnesia.” Through open-ended, experimental collaborations with the public, their projects bring endangered food and environmental practices into poetic visibility, feeling-perception, and the simple acts of everyday life and have taken form as architectural interventions and urban wilderness tours, net art and public performances, scholarly articles and poetic essays. Leila and Cary have earned support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Center for Land Use Interpretation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, K2 Family Foundation, Culture Push, Franklin Furnace Fund, and numerous academic fellowships. Their performances, exhibitions, and lectures have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Postmasters Gallery, New York University, 319 Scholes, Smackmellon Gallery, Exit Art, U.C.L.A., M.I.T. Media Lab, ISEA 2012, Banff New Media Institute, European Media Art Festival, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Neuberger Museum of Art, and their work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org, Turbulence.org of New Radio & Performing Arts, and Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.


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