A long weekend, the Vancouver Film
Festival, Thanksgiving day family activities, and some much needed R&R
pushed back my Twitter round-up a few days, but better late than never. Tweets
concerning Steve Jobs topped the Twitterverse this past week and broke the
record for tweets per second—10,000 to be exact! The Occupy Wall Street
movement is also gaining steam and Twitter is playing a key role in helping to
circulate information and organize new gatherings around North America
(including Vancouver this Saturday). All in all, a very hectic and fast-moving
week. Here are some of my favourites:
Beautiful print posters from the 1968
Paris student protests
Is the world too big to fail? By Noam
Chomsky
11 best Steve Jobs quotes
Living in a Material World: Read Barbara
Pollack's feature on what China's young artists are thinking, making hoping
Pregnant performance artist plans to
give birth in an art gallery in front of an audience
When I chat with students about my blog, one of the features they seem to enjoy the most is my weekly Twitter round up, sharing a cross-section of my favourite art-related tweets and user profiles from the previous week. I have decided to start a similar weekly round up for my favourite YouTube videos that I come across via channel subscriptions from my blog's YouTube page. I hope you enjoy the variety, humour, and thought-provoking content of these and other videos I look forward to sharing. If you like what you see, you can always follow the link from the YouTube channel listed above each selection and begin subscribing to their content. Happy viewing!
Image from this past weekend of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement in NYC
(image courtesy: NY Times)
As many of you may have heard, a small
group of protesters began occupying Wall Street in NYC several weeks ago in a
bid to draw global attention to a growing resistance movement criticizing corporate
America and the growing economic crisis worldwide. What started out as a small
group of activists in New York has now spread to other U.S. cities and grown to a much larger and more organized
cross-section of participants, drawing attention from the mainstream press and
other labour groups across North America.
What specifically caught my attention this
weekend was the call for artist participation in what is officially being
called the Occupy Wall Street liberation movement. Modelled on the tactics
employed in the Arab spring resistance movements of Tunisia and Egypt, the
organizers are seeking artists to participate in an “Occupennial.” A full text
of the call for participation follows along with a YouTube video describing the
aims of the movement. The Vancouver-based anti-consumer magazine Ad Busters has already contributed to the call by
organizing a Wall Street zombie walk this past Monday and using Twitter to
circulate information using the #OCCUPYWALLSTREET hash tag. For now, I look forward to
tracking art-related developments of this growing movement.
An Open Call to Artists in Alliance with
Occupy Wall Street and Beyond
The Wall Street Occupennial is an urgent
call for artists to contribute to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement
currently centered at Liberty Plaza in the Financial District of New York City. The Occupennial is founded on the belief that artists
have a crucial role to play in helping to elaborate and sustain the democratic
public space that is currently being created by the occupation of Liberty
Plaza.
OWS is one in a chain of protest movements
unfolding across the world over the past several years concerned with
democratic empowerment and economic justice in the face of untrammelled
corporate domination of political institutions and social life more generally.
This domination has involved the legal enshrinement of “corporate personhood”
at the expense of representative government, punitive austerity
measures, rising unemployment, massive income inequality, ecological
destruction, assaults on collective bargaining rights, the dismantling of the
social safety net, and the scapegoating of public employees, working families,
people of color, and immigrants.
The Occupennial embraces the fact that the
OWS movement is not reducible to a single “message” or even a particular set of
policy prescriptions; in the most general sense, OWS and its affiliated movements
around the world are about democratization, the first manifestation of which
has often been the unauthorized occupation of nominally public streets,
buildings, and plazas ranging from Tahrir Square to the Wisconsin State House.
While it echoes the familiar art-world term
“biennial,” the Occupennial is unencumbered by any predetermined curatorial
program or institutional apparatus. It exists instead as an imaginative
umbrella-concept and pragmatic media platform (wallstreetoccupennial.tumblr.com/) through which diverse
activities might be brought into alliance around both the specific site of
Liberty Plaza and other occupation-sites throughout the United States and the
rest of the world.
While OWS has gathered political strength
and sympathetic media coverage in recent days, the occupation of Liberty Plaza
remains an inherently precarious process due in part to the ambiguous legal
status of the site: it is a privately-owned public park mandated to remain open
twenty-four hours a day; however, the immense police presence is a constant
reminder that events on the ground can change very quickly. For now at least, a
major priority is sustaining the presence of as many bodies and cameras at the
plaza as possible. The Occupennial thus encourages contributions that engage
the physical site of Liberty plaza and its occupants, and that can unfold in as
timely a manner as possible. For those contributors unable to be physically present
at the site itself, we encourage projects that are digitally-based (photos,
videos, texts, graphics), but also long-distance ideas capable of on-site
realization by interested collaborators. These might encompass sign-making,
performative gestures, tours, choreographic scores, acoustic experiments,
historical reenactments, or ephemeral architectures. In conceiving of such
projects, it is important to keep in mind that various park regulations already
constrain OWS occupation activities in terms of the marking of surfaces, the
amplification of voices, and the erection of structures found to be “blocking
the sightline of the park.” Such constraints are unfortunate, but they might
also become opportunities for artistic inspiration, response, and critique.
Finally, it is crucial to note that in
recent days, important new linkages have begun to develop between OWS and
already-existing labor unions, non-governmental organizations, community
groups, public intellectuals, and media outlets. Art projects working to
cultivate and facilitate cultivate such linkages are especially welcome under
the umbrella of the Occupennial.
We look forward to your contributions
to this initiative…Time is of the essence!
Liverpool is a dynamic place with an amazing cultural vibe. This aerial shot showcases the now completed
Liverpool One metropolitan plan that has transformed the heart of the city (image: architecture.com)
My visit to Liverpool to attend and present
a paper at Rewire: The Fourth International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology proved both eye-opening and thoroughly
enjoyable. First of all, Liverpool is an incredibly dynamic city—one that has
recently undergone an amazing transformation in its metropolitan core and is
clearly living up to its title as one of Europe’s cultural capitals (an honour
it officially held in 2008). Housing three major universities, two art schools,
and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool is also the
perfect place to host a dialogue about the current state of new media art, with
all of its challenges, opportunities, and rapidly changing parameters.
Coming from Vancouver, a city comfortable
with the idea of accepting new media forms in an art context, I was most surprised
by how many artists and art institutions represented at the conference from
other parts of the world still face serious challenges exhibiting and finding
audiences for digitally based media. Still, the conversation around the future
of new media art I heard in so many of the papers pointed to the rapid changes
that the uses of new technology are bringing about in how artists engage with
digital platforms, transforming the very definition of what “art” can be.
Rewire 2011 was a three-day conference event hosted by FACT and held at Liverpool John Moores
University Art and Design Academy.
One of the ideas I explored in my own
paper (titled "Intersecting Worlds of Commerce and
Experimentation: Creating Legitimacy for the “Art” of Media") concerned how questions of innovation are increasingly dictated by consumer
habits and end-user preferences as never before. At the level of simple
application, the speed and accessibility of ever more sophisticated software platforms
to non-specialist users has foregrounded the social dimension and speed of
dissemination of new media, but also accelerated and blurred previously
established boundaries in how the “art” of new media can be understood.
The "original" Abramovic performance
One very recent example that I shared,
first brought to my attention via a link sent by a student (thanks Andrea!),
raises these issues within a clever technological framework.Pippin Barr, an artist and media studies
professor at the University of Copenhagen, borrows from the visual language and
commercial context of gaming to reconfigure meaning around high concept art
exhibitions such as Marina Abramovic’s recent retrospective of performance art
at MOMA, “The Artist is Present”—an exhibition I attended and blogged about last year. As Barr explains on his blog, his project challenges artists to expand
the potential audience for contemporary art by rethinking how notions of
gaming, play, and interactivity operate in the conceptual underpinnings of
their projects:
“Critically,
these alternate games seem like they're not going to be fun. And it's all very
well to talk about how games don't have to be fun, they can be
"interesting" or "challenging" or "disturbing"
and so on. This is true, but it's also true that basically nobody's going to
play those games except the brave vanguard. The question then becomes whether
the vanguard can convince anyone else to play them too.”
With these unusual juxtapositions, we see
the unpredictable and unruly path that the blurring of boundaries initiates in
conversations around what can constitute the “art” of new media. What then can
be done in the face of these developments? And is there perhaps a new space for
an avant-garde sensibility to re-emerge and challenge what is shaping up around
entrenching notions of the “art” of new media?
To be sure, It becomes a question of how to
engage audiences differently, and understanding that notions of the
avant-garde, counter-cultural practice, social interaction are all elements
immanent within the technological framework of new media. How, where, and through
what means the designation of “art” is aligned to this framework is proving
today, as it has in the past with previous new media forms such as
photography and film, to be a constantly evolving discourse. As I left
Liverpool, I couldn’t help think that much of the debate and critical
discussion that took place at the conference only reinforced the productive
potential of this evolving form of art. This should serve as some comfort then that the discourse around new media can never remain fully
divorced from the potential for radicality and resistance.
So I’ve spent much of the weekend cloistered
at home putting the finishing touches on a conference paper and visual presentation I will be making in Liverpool, England at Rewire 2011, the Fourth International Conference on the Histories of Media Art. I have been looking forward to this event
for quite some time and have already made plans to visit the Tate Liverpool and
The Walker and a bunch of smaller local galleries while I am there. It is my first
trip to the city and I will be exploring and getting to know
the local cultural offerings, many of which relate to the new media art angle of the conference. John Lennon attended art school in Liverpool, so
I will be looking for traces of the urban environment that inspired him.
As for
the Twitterverse, it has been a nonstop critique-a-thon over Facebook’s “improvements”
this week. Since I use Chrome, I quickly downloaded Unannoying Facebook and
went about my day. Here are some favourite tweets from the past week—I will
make sure to take lots of pictures of Liverpool and reflect on my time there
upon my return!
ArtsBeat Blog: Thinking Cap: Delaying
Gratification: Is it possible to develop and improve one's self-control?
500 years of female portraiture in 3
minutes
How the internet created an Age of Rage
Skywriting as Graffiti:@SaberAWR Protests Mural
Moratorium
It's Banned Books Week! Learn how you
can take part in a virtual read-out
What Facebook users 'dislike' about the
new makeover
Hidden Goya discovered—Early portrait of
Spanish general found under a Rijksmuseum painting
