French artists Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) and Philippe Parreno (b. 1964, Oran, Algeria) came to prominence in the 1990s, emerging within a close-knit group including Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, whose projects have incestuously overlapped and informed each other’s in loose, ongoing collaborations. In their individual practices — notably Huyghe’s Streamside Day (2003), Parreno’s Dancing Around the Bride (2012) — their works take on narrative, exploring the formation of fiction, historic and cultural revisionism, and blurring the line between reality and fantasy. In Streamside Day, Huyghe invents a new holiday for the town of Streamside, just north of New York, where the inhabitants collectively donned costumes and participated in a procession celebrating their natural environment. Dancing Around the Bride presents history as an aggressive gesture that activates the art, music and dance of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp in a retelling of their mutual influences and collaborations.
In No Ghost Just a Shell, Huyghe and Parreno continue their ongoing inquiry into collective participation, working in what artist Gordon describes as a “promiscuity of collaboration”, where they invited thirteen artists — among them Pierre Joseph, Joe Scanlan and Rirkrit Tiravanija — to create from one central premise: AnnLee, a virtual avatar. Through Kworks, a Japanese agency that develops manga personalities for use in commercial media, Huyghe and Parreno purchased the rights to a cheap model they would go on to name AnnLee, a purple-haired, elf-like girl with little in the way of personal characteristics. Intended as a throwaway, third-rate background character, AnnLee’s largely undefined base persona begins to evolve with each successive intervention, invented incrementally by the artists’ collective handling through animated videos, paintings, and performances. Under the aegis of this work, Huyghe created One Million Kingdoms, a video where AnnLee makes her way through a digitized lunar landscape reminiscent of Armstrong’s walk on the moon. The empty slate is materialized into a hyperlinked identity, formed in strings of ideas that take off, overlap and inform others; as protagonist she is imbued with competing backstories with little consideration given to continuity. AnnLee ultimately becomes a vehicle that brings to question what it means to create, own and delegate a work, where layers of copyright and production complicate each contribution.
When I was in grad school I was the class pirate and bagman--I would scour the internet for epubs, mobis, pdfs or otherwise digital copies of our reading materials, supplementary journals, or just random stuff that might seem of interest, and I would make them available to everyone in a shared Google Drive folder I maintained (and still do). At times some of these materials were easy to find with a simple Google search: the title of the publication in question with PDF tacked onto the end. But most material wasn’t so readily available. Torrenting sites also didn’t carry much academic material, and Google Books had become severely limited and obscured things like page numbers or provided only very short excerpts.
At the time I used Scribd. I came on board during the tail end of its Wild West era where, like the beginning of YouTube, there was little regulation or oversight, and users posted whatever material they wanted without consideration for copyrights.
You could pay for membership and download unlimited amounts of material, or you could do so for free with a quid quo pro system: upload one document for each you wanted to download. This mechanic is what made Scribd’s library so rich and varied, and an incredible amount of academics used the site to easily access essays and chapters, uploading their own in turn. My own advisor was on the site, and we had a serendipitous encounter--verified later in person--where he had downloaded a PDF copy of one of his early books from me; I had uploaded it to the site from another online collection, and he had never been able to track down a copy before. He was very happy to have it digitally preserved.
Scribd soon went in another direction and began aggressively fighting the piracy that had made it so popular. There were few other resources to which people like me could turn. That is until one of my friends sent me an invite to http://aaaaarg.fail/. (I know, I’m late to the party.)
Originally aaaaarg.org, http://aaaaarg.fail/ is an unparalleled digital library; much more organized than Scribd ever was, with meticulously labeled material and a much wider range of subject matter. There, you can find leaked publisher copies of books that came out in very recent years. The authors themselves are contributing, bypassing the copyright restrictions imposed by publishers even on their own works. It’s a protected collection, something Scribd never was, and only those individuals invited by already-existing members are able to join. It’s a secret, kind of, and its members are fiercely protective.
Despite this protection and covert usage, however, the website has already faced a lawsuit and shutdown, changing its domain extension in a fashion similar to thepiratebay to evade authorities. The site is still up, but who knows for how long?
There are parallels in the arguments and justifications for music piracy and that for published materials: these online repositories are simply better than the retail alternative. Oftentimes obscure materials will show up in these collections; things no longer in print that you might have a tough time finding even in a library end up scanned and posted to these collections. To that end, you can find PDFs or converted epubs of entire books that don’t have official digital versions. And you simply have much more control over your own experience of the material. You’re able to access these books outside of the proprietary DRM of Amazon or other ebook sellers; outside of the jurisdictions of these limited systems, you can convert and transfer the file between devices, or even print it in full. And these are just issues of physical access where arguments can be made for scholars and academics in developing countries without the ability to find these materials legally at all; and paywalls can at times be prohibitively expensive, and bypassing them can depend on institutional affiliations that a scholar might not have. (But the ethics of keeping these kinds of materials behind a paywall is a conversation for another day.)
Already many writers are moving outside of the confines of traditional publication and distribution channels. The Internet has made self-publishing a more viable venture, and even still other formats like blogs can edge out things like compendiums. Many of my professors kept blogs, for example, where they could more immediately respond with their thoughts to certain articles or events. But academia, with the politics and intellectual authority levied by publishing, is still very slow to embrace (or even deign to dignify) this new media landscape.
The same developments have already unraveled across other, more popular types of media--YouTube and last.fm, among others, have been fantastic tools and distribution models for alternative creators outside of traditional TV and record label models. The time of formal media is coming to an end--there have been many think pieces about this, living in the age of Netflix and the like--but I’m curious how these online libraries will fit into these new economic models. Netflix-like, all-you-can-read ebook services Oyster and Entitle shut down in 2015; Amazon only offers an unlimited service for self-published materials and lacks the authors that would draw a large population of readers; and Scribd, the only service with the backing of major publishers, no longer offers an all-you-can-read services. And all these platforms would face the same limitations already listed above, with a lack of academic materials, older books, publications without official ebooks, and would be subject to the same licensing nightmares Netflix is facing from the major studios.
Will our physical libraries scan and house the same kinds of massive online repositories? Can we pay a nominal monthly fee to access the full backlog of online material? Or will they be supported by local governments and kept free to use in the spirit of the traditional library?
The day Google Books is free to share its full collection will mark the birth of the first true online library. Their collection is a Encyclopedic Palace of sorts, a contemporary and online Library of Alexandria; everything is there, held online now, just not accessible to us due to copyright restrictions. Until that time, or until there is a different alternative, the access will have to remain illicit.
The objective of the disciplinary act—and by extension that of the panoptic apparatus—is to structure and normalize the behavior of those within a given institution to the ends of that institution, creating ideals for human behavior and rewarding and punishing the respective adherence or divergence from those norms. This exertion of power is to be exercised to its maximum capabilities while minimizing its expenditure, generating an ‘efficient’ disciplinary model. The omnipresence of the watchtower—be it a physical structure or a CCTV feed—is the minimal exertion of force that bends non-ideal behavior to the will of the institution. The adherence to this actionable normalization and self-regulation produces what Foucault calls “docile bodies”; the manipulation of the body “as object and target of power”.
The discipline of bodies tends towards the homogeneity of populations. Bodies become deindividuated to execute particular tasks, enabling them to perform within the regimental orders of new economic, political, and military organizations emergent within modernity and continuing today; a society of discipline.
The docile body is one that “may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved” through the “strict regiment of disciplinary acts”; the docile body is the exposed and battered body of an individual under firm institutional control. This notion of the “docile” self rhymes well with Sontag’s “soft murder”—the subject is marked by ‘docility’ and reduced to a body when he or she is dispossessed of his or her self. The ‘self’ dies in favor of the multitude, where the choreography of sanctioned activities and behaviors becomes the only expressive or autonomous outlet for the individual, who ceases to be. The violence of the gaze (and of representation) brings about the end of the self.
In the representative act, however, the capture/murder of this docile self has become complicated by our emergent relationships with digital imaging technologies and social networking, where we have become increasingly aware of our own images. To be photographed is no longer rare. The absolute presence of the image in society has made us accustomed to both seeing and being seen. And the possessive gaze of the camera, as discussed in the last chapter, has been both diminished and expanded in the wake of our technological development. Today, this power is leveraged not so much in the instance when the image is captured or reproduced, but in its dissemination. We exist within countless images, the majority over which we lack control; we appear in the backgrounds of strangers’ photos, in security feeds, traffic cams, our friends’ Facebook uploads. We can lose control over images shared in open networks, and those images can, in turn, proliferate in the limitlessness of the digital. Or they can sit ignored and anonymous. Power over the image can be exercised to misrepresent or expose. The photograph constitutes more than appearance; it is identity. And the consequence of the image weighs more heavily (or lightly) in a culture of mass representation.
While power remains a constant, the society of discipline can be said to have given way to one of more permeable institutional control. In his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, Gilles Deleuze argues that the rigid and enclosed institutions of Foucault’s panoptic theory—schools, factories, prisons, etc.—have given way to more multivalent and highly pervasive iterations which leverage greater power over populations while enforcing broader public docility. The body, as the tool of the Foucauldian institution, is disciplined within the confines of that institution; in moving between the school and the factory, for example, the individual becomes subject to different regimes of power limited by the very boundaries of each respective system. Deleuze proposes that these closed power orders have since been replaced in late capitalism within a ‘society of control’, where newly flexible institutions directly and continuously enforce power across individuals’ lives in less overtly regimented ways. Private corporations exercise an example of this new and diffused power where, through advertising, these entities impose and cultivate consumer desires, disciplining and conditioning individuals as buyers within global capital. Power can seep into private and protected spaces through mediums like television and the Internet; the home can become a disciplinary site where individuals are unable to escape authority or suggestion, thereby maximizing efficiency; true to the paranoiac spirit of the omniptic. Surveillance itself can disperse under this new institutional model where, as consumers, we participate within networks of representation mediated, for example, by the wide use of camera phones and CCTV technology:
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society... the societies of control operate with... computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses.
As institutions excavate deeper presences in our lives, the individual becomes more easily lost to the disciplinarian cause and effect. And the diffused and ubiquitous nature of surveillative technologies today facilitates the unencumbered enforcement of power; surveillance both mediating its own control and exercising that of greater institutional forces, interrupted only through system failure or (more unlikely) dissident actions.
References
Gilles Deleuze. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October. No. 59. 1992. Web. 4 June 2014.<https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf>.
Martin Lister. The Photographic Image in Digital Culture. London: Routledge, 2013. Print. 10- 12, 14-15.
Hrag Vartanian. “How Many Photos Do Americans Take a Year?” Hyperallergic. 21 Mar. 12. Web. 04 June 2014. <http://hyperallergic.com/48765/how-many-photos-do-americans-take-a-year/>.
Steven Warburton and Stylianos Hatzipanagos. Digital Identity and Social Media. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2013. Print. 83 - 85.
Boris Charmatz’ “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum” perhaps best outlines, in his call for a revolution of the spaces that house and stage live art, new models for the museums of the 21st century: institutions that are “eccentric”, “provocative”, “transgressive”, and wholly “permeable”, “cooperative” and “immediate,” that respond to the needs of artists and audiences in sweeping and supportive gestures. And while his Musée de la danse at MoMA largely illustrated that the body itself is the greatest museum dance will ever have, it articulated a physical call for institutions to embody those qualities outlined in his manifesto and transform alongside mediums that are themselves undergoing radical change.
The museum of modern and contemporary art is tasked as more than a repository or storehouse, more than a setting for permanent collections and docent tours and thoughtful historic meditation; it is a reflection of the status of the art of our times. And in this privilege, the institution must best articulate the invigorating momentum of the field and the diversity of practices artists have undertaken and continue to undertake today. The museum of the 21st century is a more considered space, one that reflects on itself and its role as an arbiter of what enters its exhibitions and programs, and that allows itself to be transparent and accountable to the art and publics it serves.
Xaviera Simmons’ Archive as Impetus (Not on View) was a fitting exercise in this philosophy, that the artist was able to mine the museum’s archives, correspondences and otherwise private materials to bridge a gap between institution and audience and further inform what drives administrative and curatorial decisions. Inviting artists and creating supportive spaces for inquiry and experimentation through residencies and programs furthers that spirit of accessibility, welcoming the viewer to see how art unfolds and the often disparate and unlikely materials from which it is at times composed.
Looking forward, museums must consider the popular tools artists and audiences use to communicate and consume media, extending the museum space itself beyond the physical walls of the institution and allowing audiences both local and international to engage the work therein. The Flickr account and live stream that supplemented MoMA’s Marina Abramović performance The Artist Is Present took on a life of their own and became ingenious examples of the museum cultivating a remote audience. This still and moving image documentation played on the work’s central premise and questioned what it meant to be live; to be there at all. These interactive elements were a new level of engagement and one unparalleled since, and the use of this technology illuminated the work in unforeseen ways and across physical and temporal boundaries; it was a revolution in the documentation of a form as ephemeral as performance. Considering materials such as augmented or virtual reality and the myriad apps for both publicly and privately sharing photos and video, the museum of the 21st century should strive to build itself as a platform where curators and artists can engage with audiences and narrow distances in an increasingly interconnected world.
I put this list together a few years ago after some research on Second Life’s enduring incumbency as the Internet’s oftentimes lurid and fantastical social playground. Projects such as Chris Marker’s Ouvrir, Cao Fei’s RMB City, and Jon Rafman’s Kool-Aid Man in Second Life all explored the myriad virtual environments users have imagined for themselves and the limitless possibilities for creation on the site; everything from landscapes of dragons to a recreation of Dickens’ London (with strictly enforced roleplaying stipulations); to mundane single-family homes to a nightclub made up entirely of penis-shaped paraphernalia. Second Life is a mirror, perfectly malleable and endlessly transformable, of its users’ desires.
I came upon these water birth videos and was fascinated by the level of detail and thought put into them -- their creators treated them as they would perhaps treat their own IRL (in real life) birthing plans. Props were created and transformed (sometimes poorly) to mimic the look of hospital equipment, and user avatars were retextured to give them that characteristic pregnancy bump. There is an obvious typology to them: all set in exotic locales with minimal medical intervention, all the mothers and nurses looked fit to live in the Kardashian universe and the fathers were similarly muscled and styled.
The initial post was a curatorial experiment and game, and offered a glimpse into a world that is in many ways like and unlike our own. Where many strive for the glamour of celebrity, here some have taken those desires and created virtual, choreographed memories where they can embody a lifestyle they will likely never have. Beyoncé herself didn’t have a birthing experience as manicured as this. These videos represent wish fulfillment at a hyper level, divorced from reality. But there is a silent protagonist in these productions, and that is the creator, not the avatar, whose real life catalyzed the realization of these fantasies.
Performative work has historically been commissioned rather than collected; supported at its genesis by patrons or donors contributing funds towards its production. Selling, collecting and owning performance as an artifact is a more contemporary complication of this role between the work and those who support it financially. At the institutional level, performance has traditionally been collected as the sum of its records. Photo, film and later video documentation of a performative event were a way to make them tangible; to objectify them and allow these records to serve as placeholders for the performance in museum collections. The performance exists as archive in these instances, and is often exhibited as these collected records rather than performed anew. In more recent years, artists have tended away from selling the ephemera or documentation surrounding a performance, and have begun to sell the intangible idea or essence of the work, allowing performance to exist in its inherent immateriality within museum collections. In these instances, the work must be re-performed in subsequent exhibitions, reanimated from its original conceptual guidelines. Realizing the specific artistic vision of an artist – and organizing the logistical elements like rehearsal and production – are outside of the museum’s traditional remit, and so the artist often returns to the work and re-engages with the collecting institution when a piece is to be reperformed.
In 2014 Tate completed a research initiative titled Collecting the Performative, which defined, from its outset in 2012, an important parameter for an art object’s commodification: “the ability to exist independently from the artist is considered a fundamental prerequisite for an artwork to be both collected and sold…” This definition, when extrapolated to performance art, dictates that in order for its physical ownership to change hands, the performative event must be objectified and divorced from performer specificity if it is to endure beyond its record. This is an interesting complication of a form which, particularly during its emergence within the art world in the 1960s and 70s, was deeply personal and almost intrinsically tied to the artist as performer. The delegation of performance, of the artist functioning as choreographer, director or curator of the performance rather than its performer, is a model adopted more widely by artists today.
In recent years – most notably since the emergence of the Performa biennial – the commission has re-emerged as a viable form of funding and producing performative or otherwise ephemeral work. Many contemporary ‘patrons’ have the backing of a foundation or plan their purchases as museum gifts rather than private acquisitions. Many sponsor or produce performance in much the same way donors to theatrical productions might support a work. Of this re-emergent relationship, gallerist Elizabeth Dee notes: “We’re seeing expansion of the support of the medium on a production level… When an artist wants to realize a project in the live performance realm where there isn’t a lot of material collateral, we’ve had collectors become producers. They’re excited to be a part of the cultural production on that level.”
These new terrains of performance and its collection and staging have raised complicated questions surrounding the life of performative work within collections. Questions such as what happens to the work when the artist dies and can no longer directly reengage the work? emerge in this setting.
Loose Thoughts On ‘Digital Archaeology’ and the Potential Immortality of our Online Web Presences
I grew up online - I spent a lot of my early childhood hovering over my dad’s shoulder as he worked on the computer. I was about 6 when I was first given a desktop PC of my own, where I primarily played coloring games like Crayola Art Studio, simple platformers like id Software’s Commander Keen or Moonlite Software’s Hocus Pocus, and adventure games like Sierra On-Line’s Torin’s Passage or King’s Quest VI.* And I spent much of my early adolescence online, chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, writing in my Diaryland journal, and reading comments on MySpace.
Being at the computer, and expressing myself online, was very formative for me growing up. And over the past several days, I’ve been trying to track down and piece together my early web activity.
As accounts have sat unused and become deactivated, or companies have merged or websites have gone offline, much of that information is lost to me. I can’t remember many of the usernames or passwords or even the old emails I used to set up my earliest accounts. But I do remember enough. Today I downloaded all of the journal entries I had posted to Myspace between 2005 and 2008 when, as a college freshman, I last posted to the site. I downloaded all of the images still hosted on my two Photobucket accounts, where the layout images for my old Livejourrnal were still live. I’m working to reactive and somehow archive my Diaryland journal, where I wrote poetry and shared so much of my life during middle school and early high school. And much of this has been very akin to an archaeology of sorts. There’s been a good amount of digging; requesting new passwords to old email addresses that I, in turn, had to request the password to as well. I’m surprised how much is still online and accessible after so long -- some of these accounts I’ve had for over 15 years!
And what’s interesting about this is that I can’t help but think of an essay I finished in 2012 as part of my grad school applications, where I wrote on the role of YouTube as archive and reflected on the work of Cuban-American artist Jillian Mayer as someone who has explored Youtube as a medium of sorts.
One of the works I wrote about was her viral video I Am Your Grandma, posted to YouTube in 2011, which currently has over 3 million views.
In a vlog-turned-music video addressing her future, unborn grandchildren, Mayer introduces herself as a number of macabre characters, singing along to a dance track and repeating the hook “I am your grandma” throughout the one-minute video. Reflecting on Youtube’s ability to serve as archive, I wrote:
But the video is really a testament to the potential archival longevity of digital artifacts and spaces. Returning to the idea of lineage, the online presence of individuals who participate in social media will be preserved so long as those servers remain online. Will Facebook, for example, give way to a digital graveyard fifty or a hundred years from now? Mayer has commented that she “[wouldn’t] mind the idea of living forever in social media platforms,” noting that much of her own work might even necessitate this kind of preservation. And digital artifacts can remain lossless, infinitely maintaining their data and integrity. Where the physical body will age, die, decay and be forgotten, the virtual body can continue living idly in data servers and hard drives.
Will the Internet of today abut or overlap the Internet of a hundred years from now? Will future archaeologists mine our old status updates and Tweets to paint a picture of life today, much like scouring through the artifacts of ancient civilizations? The fact that so much of our activity is recorded, preserved in photos, videos, comments, provides us with so much information that we normally wouldn’t think to record: a picture of a shirt your friend just bought, texts confirming dinner plans, email forwards from coworkers. So much throw-away material that pieces together and informs on the everyday, something we don’t necessary have when looking towards the past. I think of how little I know about my own great- or great-great-grandparents, and realize this might not be the case for our own descendants. Our angry YouTube comments or Instagram posts might live on for our future, unborn grandchildren to see.
* You can play any of the listed games through the Internet Archive DOS emulator accessible in the posted links.
Virtual Reality has always had a problem of being ‘impending’. It’s been framed as the future of gaming, art, experience, or whatever for 40 years, but no one’s really done anything substantial or practical with it. It doesn’t take. But it’s interesting to see how it’s still around today—particularly within the indie developer community—so many years after CAVE and the push towards Augmented Reality. The same basic tech keeps being re-invented in the same ways. It’s caught in this weird reverb loop that feeds into cultural narratives of what ‘the future’ is supposed to look like.
I posted this to my main Tumblr account nearly three years ago. What’s exciting, looking back on my rather pessimistic take on virtual reality and its surrounding technologies, is that the tech is finally starting to take hold. I had to revisit this in light of Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and so many other stand-alone, full system, and consumer-grade VR headsets that have emerged over the past few years. Though primarily intended for gaming, and still fairly expensive for widespread consumer use, these systems are slowly becoming more and more accessible. They’re becoming the platforms for a steadily growing stream of video game other entertainment media. And as prices drop and developers release more content for these systems, the possibilities for new uses become ever more exciting.
I am particularly interested in Google Cardboard -- a low-cost and widely accessible virtual reality system available to most smartphones running Android and iOS. At its base is a simple, free app developed by Google with a number of built-in games and videos wherein your screen is split and, with the use of stereoscopic lenses, provides a three-dimensional experience for its viewer. The Google Cardboard app was released alongside a virtual reality visor, a $15 cardboard apparatus folded into a small, binocular-like box. On one end it holds your smartphone inside, keeping it in a dark environment, and on the other end are the lenses for peering in and viewing. What the system accomplishes is an immersive and impressively realized virtual reality experience, responding to user input and movement with the phone’s own gyroscopic function. The turning of the wearer’s head, for example, is reflected in what is seen in the app as sceneries adjust to the changing perspective. Many of the built-in experiences on the official app offer 360-degree views of famous or historic landmarks, for example. And with open-source specifications and software, many other Cardboard-compatible apps and visors of various designs and materials, ranging from $3 to $120, have been developed.
Google Cardboard is very firmly grounded in the stereograph of the nineteenth century, where picture cards of exotic locales became the curiosities of middle class consumers. The stereoscope, very similar to the Cardboard visor, was the vehicle which gave those images depth and brought them to life. It’s exciting to revisit these ideas in light of the technologies we now have at our disposal, where this very fundamental and longstanding understanding of optics and vision becomes translated through our new use of digital tools. Google Cardboard isn’t new in the slightest—so many of those touristic sites popularized in stereographs are still the subjects of 360-degree 3D image spectacles—but the execution and application are wholly novel.
As an educational tool, Google Cardboard has wide-reaching potential, allowing people to step inside places or times that might otherwise be inaccessible physically. So many museums have integrated their audio tours to be used in conjunction with smartphone apps, and some allow visitors to check out iPhones at their Information Desks for use throughout the galleries as informational aids. Google Cardboard has a natural place alongside this; I imagine, for example, an exhibit in conjunction with the Temple of Dendur at the Met where you can use your phone to download a Met education app, and use the cardboard visor to step into the Egyptian site where the temple originally stood.
But beyond this I am most interested in the ways artists can use the technology to create exciting, immersive projects or worlds; the sci-fi inspired machineries and landscapes of Jacolby Satterwhite’s work, for example, would find a natural home within virtual reality; Cao Fei’s RMB City would, as well, be an interesting project to visit in a virtual space; and the disjointed narratives of someone like Ryan Trecartin would feel even more consuming and overwhelming if experienced in an immersive capacity. Artists like Yung Jake (Jake Patterson) who create art meant to be viewed and consumed on our personal, digital devices—our smartphones as in AugMented Real and computers as with e.m-bed.de/d—would be a natural choice for art on Google Cardboard. With the ability to reach such a wide-ranging audience through both institutional and informal channels, these new terrains create myriad possibilities for engaging incredibly diverse audiences and translating art across so many experiences. Beyond relational aesthetics, virtual reality can create *integrational* art.
This has inspired me to help create a platform of sorts to bring art into this new landscape. This summer, I will be working on a virtual reality exhibition using Google Cardboard. And I’ll be posting progress updates, and access to the eventual app, through this Tumblr.
I am very excited to say that Noor and I have been selected to participate in the Vtape Curatorial Incubator. Vtape, an artist-run nonprofit that archives and distributes video art from the 1970s to the present, hosts a yearly incubator where a curator or curatorial team is invited to organize a summer exhibition of works from their catalogue.
The two of us have been hard at work for several weeks now, researching possible topics and looking into works we’d like to feature and themes we’d like to explore. Though we don’t have a set title or completed checklist at this point, our exhibition explores notions of exile, displacement, and refugee or citizen statuses. Inspired by the Syrian crisis and our own personal experiences with immigration, we hope to put together a nuanced and complex portrait of displacement today.
We’ll be updating the Tumblr with our thoughts throughout the process.
Continuing a body of work where his actions within urban space and everyday life serve as mediums for social experimentation, Francis Alÿs’ two-channel video Re-enactment captures two ‘paseos’, or walks, through Mexico City, where the artist performs an encounter and then carefully recreates it based on its documentation. Purchasing a 9mm Beretta handgun, Alÿs conspicuously held the weapon as he wandered city streets, down busy sidewalks and through crowds, for 11 minutes before police apprehended him on suspicion of violence and released him shortly thereafter. With the unlikely cooperation of the same authorities, he re-enacted his purchase of the gun and eventual arrest the next day, re-creating a frame-by-frame double of the original. Exhibited side-by-side for comparative analysis, each iteration stands on its own despite differences in timing, positioning, and framing, and the random happenings along the way as bystanders lead their lives in the background. The original would be difficult to discern were it not for its re-enactment’s label. The walks present reality and fiction as unsensationalized gestures that can be one in the same, contesting the truth and authenticity of experiencing performance through its documents alone.
Known for an intriguing and contentious use of the female nude as a medium for confrontation, Vanessa Beercroft’s VB55 toys at the edges of empowerment and abjection. In April 2005, one-hundred ordinary women stood as if in military formation, still and solemn inside the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, a glass box of a building turned vitrine, allowing a curious public to peer inside and at the women. Wearing nothing but flesh-colored nylons and slathered in almond oil, the women are at once mannequins and Aphrodites, girls-next-door and Barbies inside a display case. Their nudity transforms, drawing art historical and pop cultural references from Titian to antiquity to Italian couture. Carefully documented in both video and photography for future exhibition, archiving, and selling, VB55 is an exercise in aesthetics and product, creating material for visual and cultural consumption and enticing its audience to stare.
Guy Ben-Ner weaves a theater of the everyday in the video Stealing Beauty, revealing a slice of domestic life, family, and immigration in unexpected and serendipitous interventions that repurpose IKEA’s home displays as settings. Ben-Ner, his wife and two daughters playact loosely scripted scenarios at IKEA locations spanning Germany, Israel and the United States, dissolving the boundaries between place, the scripted and the spontaneous, and performer and audience through a language of guerilla theater. Occupying these manicured, commercial spaces—ideals of modern living—the family functions as temporary tenants, pretending in much the same way as their environment. Ben-Ner borrows from vaudeville and classic American sit-coms in these scenes, filming surreptitiously and claiming ownership over spaces intruded by confused passersby, store employees, price tags signaling changing currencies, and intercom announcements in different languages, continually sweeping the viewer into and out of the home and the store, and across national borders.
Known for a spectacular and chaotic visual language that combines and reconstitutes sculpture and film into works that invent new cultures, customs, and histories, in 2002 John Bock cast his absurdist lens on boxing, overlapping violence with comedy in the video Boxer. Costumed in clownish ensembles and puffed up appendages stuffed with food, Bock and an opponent throw punches and create a peculiar and humorous spectacle from the sport. As the video unfolds across two minutes, the fighting gestures and movements grow increasingly violent, and the two costumed figures begin to come undone, collapsing, unraveling, and spilling cauliflower onto the ring and splattering red cabbage across walls; the unlikely viscera of uproarious and carnivalesque bodies.
Marina Abramović has, for over 30 years, treated her body as the primary material of her work, adapting herself to extreme circumstances, rulesets, and behaviors that ritualize everyday life and test the boundaries of physical and mental endurance. In 2002, responding to the cultural trauma reflected across New York City in the aftermath of September 11, Abramović seized upon the need to heal and used her body as a cathartic engine for spiritual and mental cleansing in the performance The House with Ocean View. For twelve days, the artist lived on three open platforms lofted five feet above the ground—one with a toilet and shower, another with a table and chair, and the last with a wooden bed—without speaking or eating, in full view of an audience that she, in turn, confronted with her presence. Each living space was outfitted with a ladder of upturned blades, creating the illusion of possible escape. The performance was a subtle yet powerful exercise in asceticism, transparency, and meditation, stripping away the world and honing in on the simple moments and gestures we all share.
Responding to the modes and means through which digital communication has transformed our expressions both online and in the world, Performa 15 inaugurates Performa Digital, an initiative that highlights and organizes projects that consider social media and the Internet as platforms for performance. As a medium so marked by embodiment and physical movement, the mediation performance undergoes when translated through digital spaces raises important questions about the very nature of performance, our connections and detachments from one another, and what it means to be present.
For this first project, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera takes over Performa’s Instagram, exploring the reinvigorated voice activism has found online in light of movements like the Arab Spring and #BlackLivesMatter.
Responding to the invigorated voice activism has found online, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (@TaniaBruguera) employs Instagram as an activist platform, exploring the connections between art, activism, and political change, and how social media bridges gaps in communication and catalyzes radical thought.
For Performa’s first Digital Commission, Bruguera engages followers as online citizens with the hashtag #InstaCitizen, using as her medium the Internet's emergent role as civic arena and the immediacy with which information travels between nodes on a network; user to user, and platform to platform. Mobilizing collective responsibility, the artist engages individual participation within these global and online spaces, lending anyone a stage and a voice to share their experiences endlessly, widely, and informally. Fueling unexpected actions and interactions where the boundaries between performer and audience are blurred by the open and rhizomatic nature of the platform, Bruguera's performance spans across social media, bridging conversations between Instagram and Twitter to implicate an ever-wider audience within image- and text-based actions. With an assigned date, time, and duration, Bruguera’s performance is firmly situated in the real and the live, where a seated audience at the Performa Hub watches her interact digitally and further shifts expectations of what it means to perform online.
Bruguera invites both her audience and social media followers to post personal moments of self-censorship regarding their gender, ethnicity, immigration status, and race, trusting them to keep the project socially-minded, political, and free from personal attacks. These contributors are encouraged to tag their responses @TaniaBruguera in addition to the hashtag #instacitizen, entering into direct dialogue with the artist, fellow contributors, and the audience online. The artist, as well, invites users to log into her own account to post these stories and thoughts, trusting her followers with her private data and transforming herself into a social platform for dialogue and exchange.
username: @TaniaBruguera password*: instacitizen3
Following the live performance, the project continues to live beyond Bruguera’s initial instigation, allowing her followers to serve as their own agitators of online activism, creating a wide-reaching and self-propelled platform towards social change.
* The password of the account will be changing following numeric order as Instagram attempts to shut it down during this project, allowing us to work just one step ahead of their censorship. If 'instacitizen3' doesn't work, try 'instacitizen4' and so on! The password will always updated be here and in the account's description.
The Internet’s near-transcendent ability to index and access all human knowledge virtually and instantly is the subject of Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, a 13-minute single-channel video presented at the 55th Venice Biennale’s curated program, “The Encyclopedic Palace.” Created from material filmed during a two-month residency at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Henrot's video weaves a delirious trajectory through the history of everything; an exploration of 'infinite' knowledge that crosses the bounds of science and technology into myth. The Smithsonian, Google, and the Internet at large serve as the settings for her investigation. And through the mining of visual and auditory material, Henrot inundates the viewer in a torrent of data.
The video contends with a digital virtuosity; or, the Internet's ability to associate key terms with desired outcomes, and do so immediately. This revolution of data retrieval and mediation, born of digital networks and search engines, competes with the old guard of the archive. Henrot approaches the Smithsonian’s vast holdings with the casual irreverence of a Google search, like browsing Wikipedia. Her cross-hatching of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources produces a bombardment of information that carries, in its grosse-ness, a greatness: a sublime particular to the Internet age.
Grosse Fatigue begins with an unpictured omniscient, an end-user who interfaces with a computer and conducts the information on-screen for our viewing. This individual, perhaps Henrot herself, breathes proverbial life into the universe (or rather, a picture of the Andromeda galaxy set as the desktop wallpaper). These heavy breaths set the tone against a top-down view of this computer—a system running Apple’s OSX Lion.
From this desktop, two icons for external hard drives are visible: one titled 'HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE' and the other ‘HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE_2’. We presume, perhaps, that all worldly information is held therein, plus a backup. Beside these icons is a video file titled 'GROSSE_FATIGUE_'. The Creator moves the cursor over and selects the file, putting things into motion. The narrator begins:
In the beginning there was nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath... The world had no time, no shape, and no life, except in the mind of the Creator. In the beginning the word already was... And there was violent relaxation. And God said, “let there be light!” And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.
Performed by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, the narration takes off in the tradition of spoken-word narratives in the proto-Hip Hop style of Gil-Scott Heron. The use of this genre harkens to the oral traditions through which myth has historically been passed down, altered, and re-mixed in the absence of writing systems.
Sound is the first of two competing levels of interaction that vie for the viewer’s attention, pitted against imagery. These narrative elements function as dense and disjointed packets of cultural reference. Occasionally the two programs are interdependent in laying claims and evidence, at other times they diverge or miss the mark. Together, they force a weaving of attention that vibrates between both conditions, only adding to the frenetic nature of the experience.
Sound is divided into two parts: language and music. Language, as in Orraca-Tetteh’s narration, follows suit in a poetic archaeology of sorts, whereby creation myths from across world religions are excavated and recombined with the contemporary scientific understandings of life’s origins. The first identifiable reference alludes to the creation myth of the Native American Muskogean tribe: “In the beginning there was a single hill called Nunne Chaha”. The video invokes the “great god Bumba” of the Boshongo from Central Africa; Pan Gu of Chinese mythology; a “dark ocean [that] washed on the shores of nothingness” from the Hindu creation myth; Amma, the creator god of the Dogon of Western Africa; the god in the form of a “man with no bones”, referring to Con, the creator god in one of three Incan creation myths; and Ra and Hathor of the Egyptian pantheon; among Judeo-Christian conventions. Together this forms a grand narrative of creation; a pastiched and globalized modernist project that collapses cultural divisions into a global village; Edward Steinchen’s “The Family of Man” for the globalized Internet generation. This is set against a pulsing beat that slowly builds, falls, and paces the activity onscreen as well as the observer’s ear and eye. There is a narrative structure—a beginning, middle, and end—that follows through the birth, proliferation, and death of the universe, and this beat follows rhythmically in turn.
The video’s imagery is sourced from Henrot’s time at the Smithsonian’s libraries and archives, among Google searches, Wikipedia articles, and social media websites. Program windows, web browsers, and video screens organize the imagery within the frame of the computer desktop, allowing for stacking and overlap to take place in a way familiar to us through our own interactions with user interfaces and computers. Henrot ignores hierarchies of information, anthropologizing Internet memes of space monkeys and funny cats alongside preserved animal specimens and tablets of early written language. The progression of imagery is largely jumbled, but at times associative: an amorphous spotted blob gives way to the splatter pattern on a pair of black jeans gives way to a picture of Jackson Pollock dripping paint onto a canvas. In her orchestration of data, Henrot leaves traces that can be revisited outside of the video: we can all readily access the Internet sources she cites—the websites the visits, the Google searches she initiates—further grounding Grosse Fatigue to our own experience of the Internet.
While there is nothing remarkable in the individual images Henrot shows us, their sheer volume gives way to the immensity and diversity of information in the Smithsonian’s archives and on the Internet; what we have chosen to preserve, archive, and share. This networked and multi-media experience imposes a curated lens on the viewer, guided wholly by Henrot’s hand: we see only the information she chooses for us to see. The top-down view implicates us in the perspective of the Creator; we get to look through the eyes of gods (any one of those from the creation myths the video calls upon), if you will, as the universe’s timeline unfolds. But the passivity of our spectatorship within this experience enforces the ultimate disruption to the quest for infinite knowledge: our own physical limitations, even within the networked landscape, to know or experience everything, particularly on our own.
Grosse Fatigue accomplishes what the physical never will: it shows us ‘everything’ at once. Henrot presents different objects from across archives and libraries spanning physical and temporal distances, flattening the experience of the Smithsonian in a way only a search engine could. The video collapses two months of research and content into 13 minutes. And its Babelization of the Smithsonian pushes forward what, in the end, Henrot might have been moving toward all along: while there exist many Encyclopedic Palaces (the Smithsonian among them), the Internet is the only one that is readily accessible and publicly our own, cultivated from many sources, passed down from hand to hand (or network to network), and compiled across myriad perspectives.
Dark Green plays on ecological terminology — to ‘go green’ — in characterizing the circulation and appropriation of images within networked media culture. An adolescent girl at the beginning of video says it best: “We recycle a lot”. This can perhaps be the tagline to the Digital Native generation, those kids raised online steeped in the ready access of pop cultural reference. The piece, which draws from YouTube videos of sources like Star Trek: The Next Generation and the 2010 Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, leads the viewer through this media landscape as Carol Anne from the 1982 horror film Poltergeist; the little girl lured by malevolent forces that called to her through television. This media saturation is likened to being caught in the muck of image culture; to ‘go green’ by way of its slime. And the video speaks to photographic theorist Susan Sontag’s call to an ‘ecology of images’, or a responsible means of viewing and reproducing visual content. Here, her ecology gives way to pollution at a nuclear scale. Despite the ‘dark’ characterization of the networked image, Dark Green is ultimately about itself; a dizzying collage of pop culture spanning thirty years, gutted and remixed from the Internet.
