Weekly Twitter Round-Up

Mad Men Inspired Design. Image courtesy of design-milk.

William S. Burroughs, 1997 documentary by the BBC.

Ten tips for presenting at an academic conference

The Julian Assange Show starts with his guest appearance on The Simpsons tonight

5-Minute History of Valentine’s Day...What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Canada/Australia (two of the best university systems in the world), universities 

Sotheby's Contemporary Sale Soars to $80 Million in London, Driven by Gerhard Richter Fever

Found small Chinese person inside my iPhone. Apple needs to address working conditions

Design Via Skype: Ai Weiwei and New Media Tactics

Ai Weiwei in the shadows on site at the building of Beijing's Olympic Stadium in 2008.

Following a twitter link this morning, I read with interest a Village Voice article that presents a debate between three art critics about art and politics in the age of Occupy.  While the article itself seemed a bit behind the ball in terms of obvious sentiments that raise the importance of a topic very much in public discourse (perhaps one by-product of living and working in the elite world of New York art institutions) I was struck by the concise summary that critic Martha Schwendener made about artist Ai Weiwei’s role within contemporary social and political movements that question repressive power structures. In her estimation, Ai’s approach centers on the use of traditional social media practices reconceptualised through new media platforms:  “The principal thing to consider with Ai Weiwei is his blog. In the Western world, we think artist and activist. Over in China, they think: What's the difference? If you're an artist, you're an activist. It has been that way for hundreds of years. Ai Weiwei has pushed his activism to the limit. When his blog got shut down, he went to Twitter and critiqued the government in 140-character messages, which is how long most of Mao's pronouncements were.”

Jacques Herzog, Ai Weiwei, and Pierre de Meuron. Image courtesy: archdaily.com

Even now, despite being barred from leaving China, Ai Weiwei has continued to push his activism to the limit and find innovative ways to continue producing and disseminating his art projects through the use of new media communication. This past week, the BBC reported that Ai will unite forces again with the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron to design the Serpentine pavilion for the 2012 Olympics in London. Ai had famously collaborated with the duo to create the design for the now iconic “Bird’s Nest” stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but then later fell into disfavour with the Chinese government when he criticized aspects of how the games were being used to cover up human rights abuses within the country. Since then, Ai has been the target of increasing government surveillance and now faces charges stemming from alleged “economic crimes” tied to his 81 day detainment in a Chinese prison last spring (a subject I have blogged about a great deal).  

As a condition of his current situation in China, Ai explains in the BBC interview that he is restricted from speaking with foreigners and cannot leave the country freely. Yet, as the video also reveals— itself evidence of his continued communication beyond these restrictions—the collaboration he is undertaking will be conducted via Skype. As a software application allowing users to make voice calls over the Internet, Skype is just the latest new media technology that the artist is deploying in his attempts to reach a broad global audience. As Ai explains in the interview “I [am] always interested in communication, so architecture, so media, so Internet or art activities.. if there is right content and right moment. When they offered me this opportunity, I feel very happy.” At this point it is doubtful that Ai will ever physically see the finished building, but it is also very clear that the means through which the design reaches the Olympic games is of primary importance to the form of art activism Ai is now deploying. It is also interesting to note that the design for the Serpentine pavilion itself is rooted in an attempt to get audiences to look beneath the surface of the building. Returning to the Village Voice article, it is the kind of art making that those in North America are watching closely. As critic R.C. Baker suggests at the conclusion of the debate, “Art should ring in new directions in the culture.”

Weekly Twitter Round-Up

Andy Warhol, Candy Box (1983). Source: warholprints.com

The week's events have unfolded like some kind of surreal dream. Watching the Twitter feeds of rioting in Greece and the chaotic and violent situation shaping up in Syria intermixed with reactions to the death of Whitney Houston and wishes for a Happy Valentine's Day was quite disorienting. Such is the world of new media news and the unruly paths that stories take to get to audiences. Here are some of my favourite tweets from this past week-- let's hope that heart day spreads some momentary peace to us all.

Why don't we teach kids how to use CTRL+F? 

Marshall McLuhan: The World is a Global Village. Predicts the social web in 1960s. Video: 

In case you missed it this week: "The End of Wall Street As They Knew It" 

See the art fair of the future

How Hollywood’s most influential movies were made—from The Godfather to The Graduate to Cleopatra

Forget flowers and chocolate -- nothing says love more than a unique work of art 

Whitney Houston: Five great performances 

Digital Archive Round-Up: Situationist International

Guy Debord, "Psychogeographic Guide of Paris" (1955). Source: imaginarymuseum.org

The question of the contemporary artist's role in social and political protest movements is a topic that I have been discussing and thinking about a great deal in recent months both inside and outside the classroom. This is of course an area that is already an important component of much of modern and contemporary art history, but the past year's global events have brought the spotlight back to this issue with a new urgency. Most recently, I facilitated an SFU Philosophers Cafe with a group of interested participants drawn from a cross-section of the public where the discussion centered on how artists have faced challenges in recent decades with defining an activist role within new public arenas increasingly defined by digital and social media. And last weekend, more of these questions were addressed when I took part in a Peace Symposium and also helped facilitate a tour of an exhibition of Goya's Disasters of War prints organized by the National Gallery of Canada, and now on display at the Reach Gallery in Abbotsford.

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle remains a key text associated with the S.I. movement.

An important aspect of these conversations relates to the legacy of artist's participation in previous social and political movements, and it became clear to me at these events and through discussion with people interested in the topic that it might be useful to create mini archival round-ups of key art movements/artists from existing materials on the web to help inform and educate individuals on the topic. Coincidentally enough, Ubu Web (the largest web-based educational resource for all things avant-garde related) began tweeting this past week on links related to the Situationist International-- one of the core art movements involved with the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris. I'd like to think Ubu Web was simply on the same wave-length of so many of us thinking about the state of global affairs and the role of artist activism. It remains both inspiring and critically valuable to learn what we can from these previous movements to relate to our present circumstances. In the coming weeks, I will put together a number of these mini digital archive round-ups to help continue the conversations started at these events, and as a way to keep the spirit of open learning activated beyond the face to face meetings.

The Situationist International

Guy Debord's Biography

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Documentary on the Situationist International, 1956-72

Collection of Guy Debord's Soundworks

Collection of Situationist Films

Situationist International Text Library

Cinematic Zeitgeist: Foregrounding the Visual in The Artist, Tree of Life, and Hugo

Film still from The Tree of Life (2011). Source: Cineffectpodcast

The world of cinema-- its inner workings, contentious history, and visual imperative-- is having quite the moment this year as a subject of filmmaking. Perhaps this is not so surprising considering just how many vital connections exist between the cultures uniting the history of early cinema as a new and emerging technology and the dynamic culture of new media that we inhabit today. These are also the questions fueling much of my own research, so I am always amazed at just how well the cinematic zeitgeist reflects this connection. At its core, film is a visual medium, and the visual turn so instrumental to so much of today's screen culture is finding its way into the conceptual underpinnings of many award-winning films. Looking over the roster of films nominated for a wide cross-section of this past year's awards, three stand out as directly engaged with conversations around the visual drive of cinema: Terence Malick's Tree of Life (2011), Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), and Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011).

It is a shame that the first time I saw Tree of Life I was sitting on a plane and experiencing the unique world of Terence Malick's film on an 8" screen. Still, I was thrilled to get the chance to view the film that had won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes in May 2011 (kudos to Lufthansa for featuring foreign and independent films on their personal movie viewing devices!). Coming back on that long flight from Frankfurt to Vancouver, I settled in for what I was told by others would be a film that has no clear narrative but attempts to convey the origins and meaning of life through the memories of the main character. As the film unfolded before me, I was taken with the sheer visual thrust of the opening sequence in the film-- a movie that has virtually no dialogue for 10-20 minute stretches, but somehow succeeded in moving me into an altered state where my own thoughts intermingled with the pictures taking shape before my eyes. I can only imagine how much more visceral that response would have been seeing the film on a gigantic screen, but the film has since stayed with me and I find it difficult to describe to others, simply saying: "Just go see it." Geoffrey O'Brien's brilliant review of the film sums it up best, describing The Tree of Life as a moving representation of memory and experience itself: "As in all that follows, the effect is of seeing a memory staged, indelible in the realism of its details but edited and compressed over time, the relevant bits run together and the dross filtered out: the world as processed by the mind, with finally only the bright bits magnetized by emotion remaining to flash against darkness."

My experience of The Artist was perhaps less profound, but it did capture so much of what I try to describe to students about the radical transition from silent to sound motion pictures. So often people approach silent cinema, and black and white picture-making, as a kind of retrograde or outmoded form of the medium, but it is exactly the history of that transition which remains so misunderstood and poorly represented in the canon of film history. Instead of a progression and a revolution in filmmaking, sound in particular was met with much resistance, especially among avant-garde and art-focused film directors who asked important questions of what would be lost with the intrusion of dialogue and the subverting of the visual techniques so important to the art and early experimentation of motion pictures. The Artist does an amazing job of raising these questions and providing the audience with a glimpse of the tensions felt and experienced at the time. But even better, Hazanavicius trusts that the contemporary audience can think through these ideas via a black and white silent film-- a radical move in itself, but one that has paid off and captivated audiences from across a broad spectrum of the viewing public (even for those who didn't "get it" that the film was mostly silent). The NYT film review does a good job at examining just how vital the "wordless" film actually is.

And finally, the film Hugo completely caught me off guard. I found myself going to see it after being convinced that this was possibly the best use of 3D as a conceptual tool in filmmaking this year (something that Werner Herzog, for example, executes brilliantly in Cave of Forgotten Dreams), and also after hearing Scorsese's lovely acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, where he saluted the many unknown filmmakers and experimental artists of the early cinema after winning the award for best director. To use the world "magical" may seem a bit cliche, but I walked away from Hugo convinced that Scorsese had recreated the wonder and newness that the first audiences of film probably experienced. Utilizing the immersive 3D technology to its maximum effect, the film brilliantly reveals the illusionary aspects of both the technological and visual elements of early filmmaking through the latest forms of those same technologies. I literally caught myself several times removing and playing with my 3D glasses to try and figure out how the effects were shaping up in front of my eyes. As Richard Brody aptly argues in his review of the film in the New Yorker-- a movie he categorizes as "cybercinema"-- Hugo is a "reminder that realism and artifice aren’t opponents or opposites but the very systole and diastole of cinematic life."

Further Reading:

Alcolea -Banegas, Jesus. "Visual Arguments in Film." Argumentation 31.2 (2009).

Marchessault, Janine ed. Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema. University of Toronto, 2007.