[-empyre-] Week 2: art, instincts and technology

[m r]

Hi xtine, Margaretha, and everyone,

Thanks as always to Renate for the invitation and curating a fantastic
month of empyre! I'm excited to hear more about Margaretha's contribution,
and xtine's anthology. It's great to see Dalida Maria Bennefield's work
included and others I've engaged with over the years.

I just taught a Participatory Media Art course last semester here at SUNY,
and we focused on social practice, collaborative art, and community engaged
art, oscillating around those terms. I've worked for about a decade on
feminist jail based digital storytelling drawn from participatory research
methods and settled on participatory as a term to help describe the
methods. I wonder if you could talk more about social practice as a term,
and if the artists utilize that to describe their work, or how it may shift
when centralizing media and technology? The book sounds fantastic and I'm
looking forward to reading it. I wish it was available to teach last
semester for the course I taught and hope to teach it in the future.

Thanks everyone, and look forward to the conversation.

my best,

Margaret



On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 1:27 PM xtine burrough <xtineburrough at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi Renate, All,
>
> Yes—thank you for your prompt. I enjoyed reading the list during the first
> week and do see (joyful!) parallels between interventionist tactics and the
> works I will mention here. There are projects throughout the book Judy and
> I are working on that creatively reimagine, undo, or expand technologies
> through social engagement and participation. I’ll share a few of them here:
>
> In the Magical Machines section, Lauren Elder showcases The Art Bank, "a
> repurposed, ‘trickster' ATM machine [which] served as a media kiosk
> showcasing a collection of creative work by teens, their college mentors,
> and an animated short. The animation pairs Lauren Elder, the project
> director, with a Hopi youth who submitted his artwork by mail from Arizona
> State Prison, where he was incarcerated for hitting a cash dispenser when
> it failed to return his card.”
>
> Dalida Maria Benfield writes about a VR project for the Expansion section:
> "VR Utopia is an iterative, experimental virtual reality space for
> knowledge exchange and collaboration for the global community of artists,
> designers, and transdisciplinary researchers of the Center for Arts,
> Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR), co-designed with design researchers
> M. Eifler and Evelyn Eastmond (Microsoft) and a focus group of CAD+SR.”
>
> Joseph DeLappe shares a body of work in the Re-imagination section: "Woven
> through all of the works described is a keen sensibility of engaging issues
> surrounding memory, violence, peace, and social justice. Such projects have
> involved either the creation of temporary, large scale low polygon
> sculptures and installations created on site with local
> communities/collaborators; internet based engagements including an early
> experimental global sing-a-long; and a series of crowdsourced rubber
> stamping projects to intervene with political symbols on cash.”
>
> I know Margaretha has either just written or is about to write to the
> list, so I will leave this short(er) in anticipation of her post.
>
> My best,
> xtine
>
>
> > On Mar 11, 2021, at 11:56 AM, Renate Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Dear xtine and our -Empyre- guests and subscribers,
> > The book sounds fascinating and actually resonates with last month’s
> feature of artists who use the code of Social Media code as a tool against
> itself.  In fact artists Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki will join us
> once again this month.
> >
> > These artists use code, data and other technological tactics to turn
> social media in on itself through obfuscation, education, and other
> critical means.  I expect there are artists in the Expansion section of
> your text that do like-minded interventions.
> >
> > Where does your own artistic work fit?  The juxtaposition of practice
> and theory have been seminal in my own work, perhaps you would share with
> us how you see the influences of both on one another especially when it
> comes to socially engaged work?
> > Sent from my iPhone
> > Renate Ferro
> >
> >> On Mar 8, 2021, at 12:35 PM, xtine burrough <xtineburrough at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >> Thank you, Renate, for your introduction. Hello Empyre—long time
> reader, first time contributor :)
> >>
> >> Judy and I are artist/academics collaborating on an anthology, Social
> Practice Art: Technologies for Change to be published by Routledge near the
> end of this year.
> >>
> >> This book centers on the voice and works of artist-author contributors
> across six sections (listed below), which we are pairing with section
> introductions written by art historians and critical scholars.
> >>
> >> Social Practice Art: Technologies for Change demonstrates how artists
> use their creative practices to raise consciousness, form communities,
> create change, and bring forth social impact through technologies, from ATM
> machines to artificial intelligence. This book, a collection of case
> studies, is envisioned as a resource for artists, faculty, and students who
> engage with technology as a conduit for creative expression, and who want
> to explore social practices, such as cultural commentary and criticism,
> participatory art, and community engagement.
> >>
> >> The book begins with “Seeds and Tools,” a section that includes
> chapters grounded in digital investigations of ecosystems then traverses
> the digital wild. In “Windows and Mirrors,” we highlight the wisdom of
> powerful artists who consistently create socially-engaged art that employs
> technological practices then reflect their processes back to the readers.
> Moving on to Section III, “Magical Machines,” we focus on the supernatural,
> including magic, science fiction and time travel; themes that many are
> craving during these unprecedented times. In the “Expansions” section, we
> include artists who discuss art as social practice that forefront the
> affordance of digital forms, virtual spaces, and algorithmic
> experimentation as part of the creative process and expand consciousness
> across networks and in virtual spaces. Embedded in Section V,
> artist-authors draw on “Reimagination,” to confront, change, or rethink
> humanity using emerging platforms and on-demand processes. And finally,
> artist-authors create entirely new platforms for social exchange in
> “Radical Matrices,” which we felt was a fitting theme to end the journey.
> >>
> >> We imagine that intuition, perhaps through improvisation, is greatly at
> play in the works featured throughout this book. Digital media projects
> with collaborative lifeforms (mushrooms and artificial intelligence, for
> instance, in Cesar and Lois’ work) require agile and flexible approaches to
> artistic projects centered on participation.
> >>
> >> We would like to invite some of the contributing artist/authors to this
> conversation, including Kim Abeles, Dalida Maria Benfield, Christopher
> Blay, Margaretha Haughwout, Praba Pilar, Lucy HG Solomon, and Victoria
> Vesna (tag, you’re it!).
> >>
> >> Warmly,
> >> xtine and Judy
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu



-- 



Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of Media Study
SUNY Buffalo
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