Osias Yanov - Choreographies of Salt (drawing and imprinting textures over salt)
Taking as their point of departure the concept of a fake archeological excavation of a fossilized mermaid on the shoreline of the Río de la Plata in Argentina, Yanov will transform the iconic marble floor of the exhibition space with sea salt to create a new territory for the hybrid and mythical body. From the false excavation, to the “news” of this finding which becomes viral through social media, to the recreation and deconstruction of a salt flat inside Faena Art Center, this work will be transformed by the bodies of participants and by the passage of time. The work will invite performers and the public to activate and transform it with their movements, encouraging participants and viewers to consider a bodily identity that concurrently envisions possibilities for the future and perpetuates mythology from the past.
Alan Faena said, “We have given Osías Yanov carte blanche to create a new project for the Faena Art Center’s Sala Molinos— providing them with a new platform for the development of a dream project that amplifies their practice and promising trajectory. Their work infuses disparate disciplines and different media with the same spirit that inspires the programming at Faena Art, which continuously seeks to transform, reinvent, and generate possibilities for new horizons.”
“In the context of excavations and discoveries, the skeleton can lead us to remember a dystopic past, and that is why I am using the mermaid’s bone structure as a narrative. It aids in the reconstruction of our history and enlightens our views for the future,” said Yanov. “In this installation, there will be an emphasis on performativity that stresses therapeutic and pedagogical processes. The performances and workshops open to the public will be the backbone of the finished work, which will, in turn, be guided through participants’ movements of improvisation and experimentation.”
Textures can tell stories:
Forensic Science study of textures for crime scene evidence:
GUT (2023) is a durational performance which imagines how humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out by Diane Mahín. During this experience, spectators come face to face with a man whose intestinal sounds are amplified. His thoughts, actions, communications, movements and feelings are all determined by these visceral noises. In fact, the guthuman can not move nor think without his gut sounds. The more active his guts get, the more vitality he shows. This performative world draws attention to the thin boundary between life and death, conscious reasoning and the subconscious gut, resulting in a visceral and absurd experience.
GUT (2023) is a durational performance which imagines how humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out by Diane Mahín. During this
Rewire Festival - Very interesting pieces.
It’s been three months since the 14th edition of Rewire unfolded across The Hague, but its energy still lingers. As we begin to look ahead t
A time-lapse video documenting the movement of Jonathan Schipper’s installation Slow Room in Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's State of the Art exhibition. From September 11th, 2014-January 22, 2015
Sarah Lucas - Bunny Gets Snookered #3
is one of eight “bunny girls” sculptures by artist Sarah Lucas, which originally formed the installation Bunny Gets Snookered. Since their first presentation in London on the occasion of its launch in 1997, the iconic Bunnys have moved to different institutions such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection. To create the sculptures, Lucas stuffed nude-color stockings with cushion padding, twisting them into weird hybrid body forms with features resembling human legs and arms, as well as elongated “bunny” ears. The glamorous and feminine connotations that these stockings might imply are juxtaposed with clothing as a banal everyday matter, de-mystified by their use in a different context.
Each version comes with slight alterations in color, presentation and in the choice of furniture: Bunny Gets Snookered #3 wears enticing green stockings, sits on a red cushioned office chair and has been arranged in an explicit sexual position—Lucas’s characteristic spread legs that draw focus on male or female genitalia. The mannequin is slackly positioned on the chair and turned into a humorous analogue of the human body, imitating a sexual conquest with a sort of post-coital, drained look. The object becomes the stand-in for unresponsive sexuality, bored with desire and impartial to violence. The sculpture of the bunny aligns with Lucas’s previous installations, moving around topics of gender roles, misogyny, and the objectification of the female body in popular culture. Indeed, in line with Surrealist tradition, she renders the bunny unappealing, bizarre and provocative in shape, and thereby disrupts male phantasies and the vulgarity of sexual language. (TBA21)
*1962 in London, United Kingdom | Living and working in London, United Kingdom
Sarah Lucas is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged during the 1990s. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, collage and found objects. Lucas's first solo commercial exhibition with Sadie Coles, Bunny Gets Snookered in 1997, was a great success and paved the way for her works Sod you Gits (1991), Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992) and Pauline Bunny (1997) to be included in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy later in 1997. The Journalist Lynn Barber described Luca´s work as, "not scary, exactly, because it was too witty for that - but fuelled by anger; anger against pornography and men's casual denigration of women though Lucas responded to that suggestion by saying she was more "annoyed than angry."
The biography is from tate and the art story.
Questions discussed in class:
Zooming in exercises:
Group discussion:
How do the 4 following elements exist in your personal design and artistic practice:
1) Textures, 2) Objects, 3) Body(ies), 4) Sounds.
Domestic space:
What place in your domestic space have you never seen up-close? Which one have you never touched with your skin?
What sounds do you regularly hear in your domestic space? Do you know how they are made? And who makes them? List them 5-10
What type of movements/positions do you generally make in your domestic space? What choreographs do you generally repeat?
How are objects relating amongst themselves in your domestic space. List 5-10.
WdKA - Counterfactual Histories and Speculative Futures
Course description - (collective creation from the Define Art Department and the stations):
In this term, students will work in teams of 4 max 5 students to imagine a speculative present / future or counterfactual history for a specific location/area in Rotterdam.
In their teams, students will bring that vision to life using Interaction Station and Image&Sound techniques. Using tools like video/audio edit, multichannel video installation, 3D scanning, virtual reality, and 4D sensory effects, students’ work will immerse audiences, encouraging empathy, engagement, and critical thinking.
Students will explore how changes in technology, environment, society, or global issues might reshape Rotterdam; while weighing ethical questions around representation, access, and surveillance. Together we’ll consider how your vision reflects this specific part of Rotterdam and its people, balancing positive and negative consequences to create an impactful speculative or counterfactual narrative.
Week 1
Workshop Site visit with Natalia Sorzano
Main goal: Organization, rough concept development, intro speculative futures and counterfactual histories, collect first materials, intro audio
Out in the landscape:
In the piece of paper provided by the tutor, each student will individually document and collect the following information:
10:40 – 11:00: Walk around (drift) and gather a collection of words you find in the street. These can be taken from advertisements, flyers, posters, people’s conversations, etc. You need to find at least 20 words.
11:00 – 11:30: Find one story from the location by speaking to someone who lives or works there. Write this story down in your notes and make sure you write down who told you this story.
11:30 – 11:30: Trace/draw at least 20 textures throughout your walk. 10 textures must be traced/drawn by having direct contact with the surface, the other 10 must be from surfaces you cannot touch (shadow, water, sound, height, etc)
11:30 – 12:00: Document with video (camera) the most uninteresting places/situations you find along your walk + document with your phone other-than-human beings (animals, plants, fungi, inorganic matter, ghosts, spirits, etc.)
12:00 – Back to Class
12:00 – 12:30: Map you walk
12:30 – 13:00 share your results /interests/perspectives with your group.
Week 2
Main goal: Collecting references related to the specific location of your group. Scanning scenes and objects of interest around Rotterdam. Work on DELIVERABLE = teaser reel communicating the shared fascination of the group, due end of this week 2.
Class on Collaboration with Natalia:
9:30-10:15: Discutir texto
All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art. —Dan Graham SUPERFLEX’S
Kin Arts Almanac’s tools and tips for collaboration - read together in class and do an exercise.
"Collaborative art isn't about creating by committee. It's about creating a third mind—a collective intelligence that emerges between you, containing all of your perspectives but belonging to none of you individually. Your job is to midwife that third mind into being, then serve its needs."
This approach transforms collaboration from compromise to generative expansion, where the whole becomes radically different from—and often greater than—the sum of its parts.
Working on shared fascination:
10:30 - 10:40: Write down 5 fascinations per person - things you would like to focus on.
10:40 - 11:00: Then as a group, narrow down your fascinations collectively. From 15-20, down to 4 or 3 (depending on the group size) group fascinations - focuses.
11:00 - 11:30: Based on these 4/3 fascinations, focuses, etc. each group will create an exquisit corps: each students is going to draw/sketch/collage one of these focus/fascinations as they imagine it. Then, after 10 minutes, your switch papers, and continue on what your peers have started and you give it the shape you imagine.
11:30 - 12:00 second round of EC.
12:00-12:30: Look as a group into the Kins Cslendar's tips and dicuss roles people would like to have or areas the lean to.
Constraint: You can only add to what others have done (no covering/erasing)
-Groups decide on their roles:
Ex. a script writer or story-teller; an editor; a researcher; a reader and conceptual analyst; a camarographer and soundist; a producer; costume and props makers; scenography and art department; light director; makeup and hair; etc.
Everyone must document their role and process throughout the course.
This exhibition aims to illuminate the diverse landscape of collaborative art practices and challenge the prevailing narrative of the indivi
They’re principled, they’re powerful and they make the art world jumpy. As the Turner prize is split four ways, we look at how collectives a
Week 3
Main goal: DELIVERABLE= storyboard, create a visual sketch of interactive presentation that you as a group will create.
Talk each other about the concept and collected imagery. coming to an idea of a (non –linear narrative) - create storyboard/collage/assemblage of the non-linear group narrative in class.
Class with Natalia:
9:30 - 12:30 review your sketches from the previous class, and start to give a structure to the counter-narrative you will build with your group:
Define the main idea.
Make this idea into scenes and a script. What happens when?
Unpack each scene: characters, actions, location, sound, voice, props, costumes, light, camera angles.
Collage/assamblage of story-board per scenes.
To do list and clear roles
Week 4
All tutors provide feedback on the Storyboard.
Week 5
Main goal:
Production time with support . Work on the group DELIVERABLE = prototype of the final work, this can be very basic and static, but all the elements must be there in some form or another.
Guidance on group's Production Plan and to do lists.
Students use the Class time to work on their prototypes with the support of the tutors.
Week 6:
Main goal:
Continue production; DELIVERABLE = prototype of the final work, this can be very basic and static, but all the elements must be there in some form or another.
Guidance on group's Production Plan and to do lists.
Students use the Class time to work on their prototypes with the support of the tutors.
Week 7:
Main goal:
Instructor feedback group review + Prepare their documentation and process deliverable.
DELIVERABLE: reflection on the collaboration – answer 2 questions in Brightspace in class and discuss with your tutor.
Work on your DELIVERABLE of the Brightspace assignment of documenting the visual process during class.
Audre Lorde (/ˈɔːdri ˈlɔːrd/ AW-dree LORD; born Audrey Geraldine Lorde; February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting different forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions" among "those who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children".[2][3]
As a poet, she is well known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. (from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde)
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action:
Quotes:
"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect."
"In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I be, lieved could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence (...) And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength."
"I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living."
"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at, tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -come to ask you, are you doing yours?"
"And of course I am afraid, because the transformation ofsilence into language and action is an act of self~revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger (...) In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear - fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women's movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us mas; vulnerable our Blackness."
"We can learn to work and speak when we are afr:ffd in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an at, tempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken."
Summary:
Audre Lorde reflects on her experience facing a cancer diagnosis and how the proximity of death forced her to confront the silences in her own life. She argues that silence does not protect us; it only fosters fear and isolation. The real danger, she insists, is not speaking up.
Lorde's central message is a call to action: we must overcome our fears and transform our silence into "language and action." She emphasizes that our stories are vital, and in speaking our truths, we not only liberate ourselves but also connect with and empower others. We must do this work now, she urges, because we were never meant to survive by staying silent.
The essay is a foundational text in feminist and social justice thought, championing the power of voice as a tool for personal and political survival.
Maya Angelou, Still I Rise
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American memoirist, essayist, poet, and civil rights activist.
Exercise in class:
Based on Poetry is Not a Luxury by Audre Lord.
"As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of "it feels right to me." We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what have never been before."
Write 200 word paragraph about your dreams and wishes:
What feelings would you like to evoke? In yourself and in others? What ideas would you like to realize? What meaningful actions would you like to acomplish?
As a Noun: The "other" is a person or group perceived as different from the normative self or center.
As a Verb ("Othering"): This is the active process of distinguishing, labeling, categorizing, and excluding those who do not fit the societal norm. Geographically, it means placing someone on the margins.
The Process of Othering
Othering is not a single act but a sustained process that:
Relies on Repetition: It happens through the constant reinforcement of stereotypes about a group.
Creates Binaries: It establishes simplistic dichotomies like "us vs. them," "West vs. East," "normal vs. deviant."
Homogenizes and Essentializes: It reduces diverse groups to a few, supposedly inherent, characteristics (e.g., "all people from the Orient are decadent").
Has Material Consequences: Othering is not just an idea; it justifies real-world exclusion in areas like immigration policy, healthcare access, and urban design.
Intellectual Foundations
Edward Said's Orientalism: Western powers created a homogenized, feminized, and essentialized image of "the Orient" as traditional and inferior to justify colonization and define themselves as superior.
Chandra Mohanty's Feminist Critique: Western feminists "othered" women from the Global South by portraying them as a monolithic, powerless group, rather than recognizing their diverse standpoints.
Poststructuralism: Scholars like Foucault and Derrida emphasized that categories used for othering (like race) are socially constructed through language and discourse, not based on biological truths.
Critical Race Theory: Examines how racial categories are constructed to place non-white identities outside the norm.
Postmodernism: Celebrated difference and deconstructed binaries.
Feminist Theory: Challenged the othering of women as non-normative and studied identity formation through the self/other relationship.
Queer Theory: Actively celebrates "othering" by challenging and subverting normative categories (especially heteronormativity). To "queer" something is to displace the center and move the margin to the center, exploring "queer space" and "queer time."
Case Studies
Sexuality and Gentrification: Heteronormativity "others" LGBTQ+ individuals. Queer theory challenges this by celebrating "otherness" and examining how it manifests spatially, such as in gay neighborhoods or through gentrification.
Geography and Critical Geopolitics: Spatial metaphors (center/margin, borderlands) are key. Powerful countries "other" entire regions (e.g., "the Middle East") to legitimize exploitation and military intervention, as seen in the "War on Terror."
Postmodernist In geography, it challenged the idea of a single urban center, instead celebrating a city of multiple, powerful nodes and neighborhoods, thus revaluing what was once considered "marginal."
Immigration: Immigrants and refugees are racialized and othered through legal categories, public discourse (e.g., labeling groups as "illegal"), and media representations that essentialize entire populations.
Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied, 1989.
The film blends documentary footage with personal account and poetry in an attempt to depict the specificity of black gay identity. The "sil
Filmmaker Marlon Riggs discusses the making of "Color Adjustment" (POV 1992).
Lexicons:
À lexicon is the set of words used in a certain domain. It also refers to all tools that compile said set of words. You could have a lexicon for engineering, biology, plants, cooking, etc. It would both refer to all words used in these domains and any tool compiling them.
The dictionary is the book or tool used to find words or their definitions.
Art Terms: MOMA
Learn about the materials, techniques, movements, and themes of modern and contemporary art from around the world.
Queer App based centred on text: LEX
Connecting with the queer community for the first time, whether as someone who’s newly exploring their identity or an ally, can be intimidat
The Safe Zone Project:
The Safe Zone Project (SZP) is a free online resource providing curricula, activities, and other resources for educators facilitating Safe Zone trainings (sexuality, gender, and LGBTQ+ education sessions), and learners who are hoping to explore these concepts on their own. Co-created by Meg Bolger and Sam Killermann in 2013, the SZP has become the go-to resource for anyone looking to add some Safe Zone to their life.
A constantly updating list of LGBTQ+ related terminology.
Hip Hop Unique Words:
The number of unique lyrics used within artists’ first 35,000 lyrics
Hip hop music's dictionary uses a variety of slang terms that have changed as hip hop itself has evolved and changed over the years.
Neologism:
In linguistics, a neologism (/niˈɒlədʒɪzəm/, /ˌniːoʊˈloʊ-/;[1] also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has gained popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language.[2]
Neologisms are one facet of lexical innovation, i.e., the linguistic process of new terms and meanings entering a language's lexicon. The most precise studies into language change and word formation, in fact, identify the process of a "neological continuum": a nonce word is any single-use term that may or may not grow in popularity; a protologism is such a term used exclusively within a small group; a prelogism is such a term that is gaining usage but is still not mainstream; and a neologism has become accepted or recognized by social institutions.[3][4]
Neologisms are often driven by changes in culture and technology.[5][6] Popular examples of neologisms can arise and be found in nearly all aspects of human life and culture, from science to technology, to the arts, to fiction (notably science fiction), to films, to television, to commercial branding, to literature, to jargon, to cant, to linguistics and to popular culture. (from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologism)
Anti-Language, Jargon and Cant
A cant is the jargon or language of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group.[1] It may also be called a cryptolect, argot, pseudo-language, anti-language or secret language. Each term differs slightly in meaning; their uses are inconsistent.
These are not just a handful of slang words but fully-formed lexical systems with their own rules, often used by groups that exist in some form of opposition to the mainstream society.
Here is an elaborate and extended overview of some of the world's most developed examples, categorized for clarity.
Criminal and Underworld Argots
These languages are designed for secrecy, to conceal illegal activities from authorities (the police, prison guards, etc.).
Example:
Polari (UK)
Origin & Speakers: A cant used by gay men, circus performers, merchants, and the underground subculture in the UK, particularly from the 19th century until the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967.
Extended Lexicon Examples:
Bona: Good.
Vada: To look (e.g., "Vada the bona cartes on that omee!" - Look at the good face on that man!).
Omee: Man.
Palone: Woman.
Eek: Face (from "ecaf" - backslang for "face").
Lallies: Legs (from Italian lali).
Trade: A sexual partner, often casual.
Youth, Music, and Subcultural Lexicons
These languages are primarily about creating group identity and differentiating from the older generation.
Hip Hop Slang (Global)
Origin & Speakers: Originating in African American and Latino communities in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s, it has become a global phenomenon.
Elaboration & Features: This is arguably one of the most influential and rapidly evolving lexicons in the modern world. It has its own rules for word formation, metaphor, and semantic shift. It's driven by music, social media, and street culture.
Extended Lexicon Examples:
Drip: Style, especially in fashion.
Cap / No Cap: A lie / Telling the truth.
Based: Authentic, true to oneself.
Simp: A person (usually a man) who is overly attentive to someone they are attracted to.
Slaps: Describes a song that is exceptionally good.
GOAT: Greatest Of All Time.
Legacy: It consistently injects hundreds of new words into global youth vernaculars every year.
Specialized and Professional Jargons
These are lexicons developed for precision within a field, but they can be so dense as to be impenetrable to outsiders, functioning as a kind of slang for insiders.
Military / Intelligence Jargon & Acronyms
Elaboration: An incredibly dense lexicon designed for precision, brevity, and operational security. It can sound like a completely different language.
Extended Lexicon Examples:
SNAFU: Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
BOGSAT: Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around a Table (referring to an unplanned meeting).
Alpha Charlie: Phonetic alphabet for "AC" meaning "Ass Chewing" (a reprimand).
POTUS/FLOTUS: President/First Lady of the United States.
EXFIL/INFIL: Exfiltration/Infiltration.
Corporate Jargon / "Biz Speak"
Elaboration: A lexicon often used to signal in-group membership, obscure simple concepts, or lend an air of sophistication to mundane activities.
Extended Lexicon Examples:
"Let's circle back." (Let's talk about this later.)
"Synergize our deliverables." (Work together on our projects.)
"Drill down into the granular details." (Look at the specifics.)
"Boil the ocean." (To undertake an impossible task.)
"Low-hanging fruit." (An easy target or goal.)
Category 4: In-Group and Identity-Based Lexicons
1. Lavender Linguistics / Gayle (Various)
Origin & Speakers: The unique language and speech styles used within LGBTQIA+ communities worldwide.
Elaboration & Features: Like Polari, it serves functions of secrecy, safety, and solidarity. It includes specific pronouns, reclaimed slurs ("queer," "dyke"), and a vast, ever-evolving vocabulary for describing identities, relationships, and culture.
Extended Lexicon Examples:
Reading/Dragging: To wittily criticize someone, often with exaggeration.
Spilling the Tea: Gossiping, sharing the truth.
Yas Queen!: An expression of enthusiastic support.
Dead: Overwhelmed by something's excellence (e.g., "That performance, I'm dead!").
Chosen Family: The network of friends and lovers that provides support, often replacing biological family.
Christine Sun Kim, in “Friends & Strangers”
Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and expand access to
The Edge of Legibility, Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and expand access to
Steve Lyons and Jason Jones for Not An Alternative, Issue #113 November 2020, The Language in Common. E-Flux.
1. Resonators & Vibrators (Changing the Tone and Adding Frequencies)
These objects sympathetically vibrate, adding their own characteristic tones and overtones to the sound.
Metal Objects:
Springs: The classic reverb tank! Stretch springs between two points and let the speaker's vibrations travel through them. You can "play" the springs by stretching and compressing them for sci-fi sounds.
Baking Sheets, Metal Bowls, Lids: These ring with specific, bright frequencies. Try placing the speaker inside a metal bowl or resting it against a sheet.
Tuning Forks: Perfect for adding a pure, specific pitch.
Glass & Ceramic:
Mason Jars, Wine Glasses, Vases: These create higher-pitched, delicate resonances. Fill them with different levels of water to change the pitch. A speaker placed inside a large vase can create a "megaphone" effect with a resonant color.
Glass Bottles: The classic "blow across the top" instrument. The speaker can excite the air inside, and lining up several with different water levels creates a tuned resonator set.
Wooden Objects:
Wooden Boxes, Drawers, Guitars: These produce warmer, mellower resonances. A speaker placed inside an open wooden drawer will sound much different than on a table.
Dowel Rods & Wooden Beams: Press one end against the speaker cabinet and hold the other to your ear to "hear" the vibration of the wood.
2. Waveguides & Amplifiers (Directing and Focusing Sound)
These channel and shape the sound waves, making them more directional or focused.
Tubes and Pipes:
Cardboard Tubes (from wrapping paper or fabric rolls): The simplest waveguide. Attach one end to the speaker and listen from the other. You can curve them or create branching paths with Y-connectors.
PVC Pipes: More durable. You can build elaborate "organ pipe" structures. A speaker at one end of a long pipe will create a resonant tunnel effect.
Flexible Dryer Duct Hose: Perfect for creating swooping, curving sound paths that you can move in real-time.
Horns and Cones:
Traffic Cones: The wide end over the speaker, listen from the narrow end. It focuses the sound and changes its character.
Funnels: Similar to cones, but smaller and more metallic/plastic-sounding.
Paper or Plastic Cups: Create a simple, small-scale horn. Try the "string and cup" telephone experiment, but with your speaker.
3. Diffusers & Baffles (Scattering and Breaking Up Sound)
These objects break up the direct path of sound waves, creating a more complex and diffuse soundfield.
Egg Cartons: The classic (but debated) DIY acoustic treatment. The uneven surface helps to scatter high frequencies, breaking up standing waves in a small space.
Corrugated Cardboard: Cut into various shapes and arranged in a pattern on a wall.
Books on a Shelf: The irregular edges of book spines are a natural and effective diffuser.
Geometric Shapes: Cut cardboard or foam into pyramids, hemispheres, or complex mathematical shapes (like a QRD diffuser) and arrange them on a surface facing the speaker.
4. Enclosed Spaces & Chambers (Creating Reverberation and Resonance)
The space around the speaker is the most powerful tool.
Small, Hard Spaces:
Bathtub/Shower: The ultimate DIY reverb chamber. The hard, reflective tiles create a long, bright reverberation. Place the speaker on a towel to avoid water damage.
Closets: Filled with clothes, it will be absorbent. Empty, it will be a boxy, resonant space.
Storage Totes or Coolers: A portable, small chamber. Lining the inside with different materials (foam, aluminum foil, wood) will drastically change the sound.
Kitchen Cupboards/Pots and Pans Cupboard: Open a door, place the speaker inside, and listen to the metallic, chaotic reflections.
Resonant Chambers:
Piano with the Lid Open: Place the speaker inside a piano. The strings will sympathetically vibrate, creating a stunning, chorused, and metallic resonance.
Acoustic Guitar Body: Similar to the piano, but on a smaller scale.
These materials absorb certain frequencies and let others pass, acting like an analog EQ.
Absorbers (Reduce Highs):
Pillows, Blankets, Duvets: Draping these over the speaker or the entrance to a tube will heavily dampen high frequencies, creating a muffled, lo-fi sound.
Carpet or Rugs: Placing the speaker face-down on a rug will have a similar effect.
Foam Mattress Toppers / Acoustic Foam: Excellent for killing reflections and high-end detail.
Filters/Resonators (Change Timbre):
Water: Submerging a speaker is a bad idea, but placing it in a sealed plastic bag and then putting it in water (be very careful!) creates a bizarre, low-pass filtered, and pressurized sound. Safety Note: This is risky for the electronics. A safer alternative is to play sounds about water and use the water-filled jars mentioned earlier as resonators.
Different Fabrics: Stretch different types of fabric (denim, silk, burlap) over the front of the speaker. Each will have a subtle filtering effect.
How to Experiment: A Simple Workflow
Start Simple: Take one Bluetooth speaker.
Choose Your Effect: Pick a category (e.g., "I want to make it resonant").
Build Your Contraption: Place the speaker inside a metal bowl, or attach a cardboard tube to it, or put it in a cupboard.
Listen Critically: Play a variety of sounds: spoken word, sine waves, drum beats, complex music. Move the speaker and the object. How does the sound change?
Combine and Layer: This is where the magic happens.
Put the speaker in a cooler, but run a dryer hose from a hole in the lid to a traffic cone.
Place the speaker on a guitar and drape a blanket over half of it.
Put the speaker at one end of a PVC pipe that has springs attached to its sides.
By thinking of your space and objects as a modular synthesizer for sound, you can create an infinite palette of unique, analog acoustic effects. Happy experimenting
Félix González-Torres's (cuban-american artist (b. Cuba, 1957−1996) work "Untitled" (Perfect Lovers) uses two synchronized clocks to explore themes of love, loss, and the passage of time. Initially set to the same time and touching, the clocks will inevitably fall out of sync, representing the ephemeral nature of shared moments and the eventual separation caused by mortality.
Conceived shortly after Gonzalez-Torres’s partner Ross was diagnosed with AIDS, this work uses everyday objects to track and measure the inevitable flow of time. When one of the clocks stops or breaks, they can both be reset, thereby resuming perfect synchrony. In 1991, Gonzalez-Torres reflected, “Time is something that scares me. . . or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.”
“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, the time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain TIME in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit where it is due: time. We are synchronised, now forever. I love you.”— Félix González-Torres
-During the exhibition: if the clock fall out of synchronisation with the local hour and each other, or stop, the curator can decide if they should be corrected or not.
Queer:
"Queer": History of a Word by Paul B. Preciado:
"There was a time in which the word 'queer' existed solely as an insult. In the English language, since its appearance in the eighteenth century, 'queer' served to name those whose condition of uselessness wrongdoing, falseness, or eccentricity might jeapordize the smooth functioning of the social machinery. 'Queers' were liars, thieves, drunks; the black sheep and the rotten apple, but also anyone who, due to their peculiarity or their strangeness, wouldn't be immediately recognized as man or woman. The word 'queer' doesn't seem to define a quality of the object to which it refers so much as to demonstrate the inability of the subject who speaks to locate a category in the field of representation that fits with the complexity of that which they are trying to define. Therefore, since the beginning, 'queer' is more the mark of a failure in linguistic representation than a simple adjective. Not this, nor that, neither fish nor fowl...queer. Which in some way amounts to saying: that which I call 'queer' poses a problem for my system of representation, leads to a disturbance, a strange vibration in my field of visibility that should be branded with the slur.
It was necessary to distrust the 'queer' as one distrusts a body that, by its mere presence, blurs the boundaries between the categories previously divided by rationality and dignity. In the Victorian society that defended the value of heterosexuality as the axis of the bourgeois family and foundation of the the reproduction of the nation and of the species, 'queer' would serve to name also those bodies that broke away from the heterosexual institution and its norms. The threat came, in this case, from those bodies that, through their forms of relation and production of pleasure, placed in question the differences between masculinity and femininity, but also between the organic and inorganic, the animal and the human. 'Queers' were homosexuals, the fag and the lesbian, the transvestite, the fetishist, the sadomasochist, the zoophile.
The word served to set a limit: to other.
Insult/slur condemned the "queer" to secrecy and shame.
In the mid-80s of the last century, impelled by the AIDS crisis, an assemblage of microgroups to decide to re-appropriate the insult 'queer' to make of it a place for political action and resistence to normalization. Activists from groups like Act Up (fighting against AIDS), Radical Furies, and Lesbian Avengers decided to wring the neck of the insult 'queer' and transform it into a regime of social critique and cultural intervention. What had changed was the subject of enunciation: now it was not the young hetero male who called the other 'fag'; now the sissy, the dyke, and the trans called themselves 'queer', announcing an intentional rupture with the norm.
In the 70s - Guy Hocquenghem: 'The capitalist society constructs the homosexual just as it produces the proleteriat, giving rise each moment to its own limit. Homosexuality is a construction of the the normal world".
Group Material, AIDS Timeline
Group Material was an artist collective working in New York between 1989 and 1996. The group included artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Hans Haacke, Julie Ault, Louise Lawler, Félix González-Torres, and others.
Group Material's AIDS Timeline is a 1989 mixed-media installation that reconstructs the history of the AIDS crisis through a collection of diverse materials, including art, media accounts, government documents, and personal testimonies. The timeline uses these materials to chart the epidemic's progression from a medical issue to a cultural crisis, highlighting political inaction, societal prejudice, and the impact of homophobia and racism on public policy. The project's materials were intended to create a comprehensive and didactic exhibit that showed how the crisis was shaped by both biomedical and social discourses.
Queer movement:
The 'queer' movement is post homo-sexual and post-gay. Now it does not define itself with respect to the medical notion of homosexuality, nor settle for a reduction of gay identity to a lifestyle accessible within the society of neoliberal consumption. It is, therefore, about a post-identitarian movement: 'queer' is no longer an identity in the multicultural folklore, but a position of critique attentive to the processes of exclusion and marginalization that generate every identitarian fiction. The 'queer' movement is not a movement of homosexuals nor gays, but of gender and sexuality dissidents that resist the norms imposed by the dominant heterosexual society, attentive also to the processes of normalization and exclusion internal to gay culture: marginalization of dykes, of transexual and transgender bodies, of immigrants, of workers and sex workers.
Sorry. To be a fag is not enough to be 'queer': it's necessary to subject your own identity to critique.
Zoe Leonard, I want a president
— AIDS activist and queer artist Zoe Leonard saying exactly what we’re thinking each election season. Leonard was a member of the queer/HIV civil-disobedience group ACT UP and also a founding member of the feminist collective fierce pussy, a collective of queer women artists who raise lesbian identity visibility in the streets through “wheat pasting posters on the street [and] renaming New York City streets after prominent lesbian heroines.”
Carlos Motta, We Who Feel Differently
We Who Feel Differently is a database documentary that addresses critical issues of contemporary queer culture.
Interviews features conversations with fifty queer academicians, activists, artists, radicals, researchers, and others in Colombia, Norway, South Korea and the United States about the histories and development of LGBTIQQ politics in those countries.
*In the section THEMES there are texts on resisting assimilation.
QUEER NATION AND ACT-UP:
ACT UP
ACT UP, in full AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, international organization founded in the United States in 1987 to bring attention t
Queer theory:
A critical project, heir to the feminist and anticolonial tradition that holds as its objective the analysis and deconstruction of the historical and cultural processes that have brought us to the invention of the white heterosexual body as the dominant fiction in the West and to the exclusion of difference from the scope of political representation.
Feauring amongst many thinkers: texts by Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve K. Sedwick, or Michael Warner.
The term 'Queer' has a historical memory in the English language - difficulty to find a word in other languages (such as Spanish) that interpretes or represents those to whome queer refers to in English: fags, dykes, transexuals, sadomasochists, crips, anticolonial, postporno, and sex worker.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, My Epidemic
Reynaud-Dewar’s exhibition and seminar are part of an ongoing series of print, performance and installation works titled My Epidemic, in which Reynaud-Dewar quotes and edits numerous authors and texts influenced by AIDS and the impact that the epidemic has had on individual bodies and social cultures. In this series the artist discusses the virality of artistic, intellectual and social life, by circulating between discourses of epidemiology, collective action, artistic production and identity formation.
Queer temporalities:
Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Space.
"This book makes the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as "queer time" and "queer space." Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction. They also develop according to orther logicss of location, movement, and identification. If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity and come
closer to understanding Foucault's comment in "Friendship as a Way of Life" that "homosexuality threatens people as a 'way of life' rather than as a way of having sex". In Foucault's radical formulation, queer friendships, queer networks, and the existance of these relations in space and and in relation to the use of time mark out the particularity and indeed the perceived menace of homosexual life. In this book, the queer "way of life" will encompass subcultural practices, alternative methods of alliance, forms of transgender embodiment, and those forms of representation dedicated to capturing these
willfully eccentric modes of being. Obviously not all gay, lesbian, and transgender people live their lives in radically different ways from their heterosexual counterparts, but part of what as made queerness compelling as a form of self description in the past decade or so has to do with the way it has the potenial to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space."
"Queer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gaycommunities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic. In his memoir of his lover's death from AIDS, poet Mark Doty writes: "All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes" (Doty 1996, 4). The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here,
the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment and, as Doty explores, squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand."
"Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience--namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death."
"While there is now a wealth of excellent work focused on the temporality of lives lived in direct relation to the HIV virus (Edelman 1998), we find far less work on the other part of Cunningham's equation: those lives lived in the "shadow of an epidemic," the lives of women, transgenders, and queers who partake ot this temporal shift in less obvious ways. Furthermore, the experience of HIV for heterosexual and queer people of color does not necessarily offer the same kind of hopeful reinvention of conventional understandings of time. As Cathy Cohen's work in The Boundaries of Blackness:
AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics shows, some bodies are simply considered "expendable," both in mainstream and marginal communities, and the abbreviated life spans of black queers or poor drug users, say, does not inspire the same kind ot metaphysical speculation on curtailed futures, intensified presents, or reformulated histories; rather, the premature deaths of poor people and people of color in a nation that pumps drugs into impoverished urban communities and with holds basic health care privileges, is simply businessas usual."
"The time of reproduction is ruled by a biological clock for women and by strict bourgeois rules of respectability and scheduling for married couples. Obviously, not all people who have children keep or even are able to keep reproductive time, but many and possibly most people believe that the scheduling of repro-time is natural and desirable. Family time refers to the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing. This timetable is governed by an imagined set of children's needs, and it relates to beliefs about children's health and healthful environments for child rearing. The time of inheritance refers to an overview of generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next. It also connects the family to the historical past of the nation, and glances ahead to connect the family to the future of both familial and national stability. In this category we can include the kinds of hypothetical temporality--the time of "what if"-that demands protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and wills.
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins,
Originally commissioned for the 2018 Frieze Artist Award, this performance takes place between visibility and invisibility, while the performers navigate the fluctuating dynamics of collectivity and desire.
Through sensual yet alienated gestures and the box step – a movement used in several social dances – synchronisation, pleasure and alliance coexist with disorientation, limitation and loss.
The dancers affect, and become affected by, the live mixed sound and light, while repetition and duration elicit shifting perceptions and associations. In this altered state, the box step becomes a vessel for a memory of a rave, a ghostly gathering, a celebration and mourning.
Artist and choreographer Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ practice is concerned with the mediation of queer embodiment and relationality through choreographies of affect, empathy and intimacy.
A new choreographic commission exploring queer relationality and the politics of desire, intimacy and friendship
Alex Baczyński-Jenkins is an artist and choreographer engaging with queer affect, embodiment and relationality. Through gesture, collectivity, touch, and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and the politics of desire. He is co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound as community building practices.
Watch the performances from the 2019 opening week
Queer times:
Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak?
"It has been more than six years since I renounced the legal and
political status of woman. The period may seem brief when considered in the context of the deadening comfort of normative identity, but infinitely long when everything that has been learned since childhood must be unlearned. When new administrative and political boundaries, invisible yet effective, rise up before you and everyday life becomes an obstacle course. In the life of a trans adult, consequently, six years take on the same importance they have for a newborn in the first months of life, as colours appear before their eyes, as forms take on mass, as hands grip for the first time, as the throat, until now capable only of guttural cries, and the lips, until now used only to suckle, articulate their first word. I bring up the pleasure of childhood learning because a similar pleasure exists in the appropriation of a new voice and a new name, in the exploration of
the world beyond the cage of masculinity and femininity that is part of the process of transitioning."
A new paradigm:
paradigm:
"A paradigm determines an order of the visible and the invisible, and as such brings with it an ontology and a political order, that is to say it establishes the difference between what exists and what does not exist socially and politically and establishes a hierarchy between different creatures. It establishes a specific means of experiencing reality through language, a collection of institutions that regulate the rituals of social production and reproduction. Bruno Latour reminds us that, despite the examples borrowed from Gestalt psychology, a paradigm is not a visual metaphor. A paradigm is not a simple world view. It is not an interpretation, much less a simple subjective representation. ‘It is the practice,’ Latour explains, ‘the modus operandi that allows new facts to emerge. It is more like a road that affords access to an experimental site than a filter that permanently colours the data. A paradigm acts rather like the runway of an airport. It makes it possible, in a manner of speaking, for certain facts to “land”.’ (Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak. pg 45)
New:
It is the integrated global capitalist regime, to paraphrase Félix Guattari, that we are in the process of abandoning. The economic, political and technological changes that led to the regime of sex, gender and sexual difference and colonial capitalism occurred over three centuries, but the speed of technological changes and the urgent need for political decisions in the face of the destruction of the ecosystem and the Anthropocene extinction means that we are faced with more rapid, perhaps imminent changes. Meanwhile, the internet, quantum physics, biotechnology, the robotization of work, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, new technologies for assisted reproduction and extra-terrestrial travel are hastening unprecedented changes requiring the invention of alternative
modalities of existence between organism and machine, living and nonliving, the human and the non-human, even as new hierarchies in the political sphere appear and disappear. A paradigm shift comparable to that wrought in the early twentieth century by quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity is now taking place in the techniques of procreating life and in the collective production of sexual and gender subjectivity. (Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak. pg 71)
Karol Radziszewski, The Power of Secrets
In 1989, a great political change awaited Poland: with the fall of the Berlin wall and the flourishing of capitalism, the people behind the Iron Curtain would be set free.
Karol Radziszewski was nine years old, living in Białystok, and, in a graph-paper notebook, he drew pages and pages of princesses in corrective eyewear, dogs with mermaid tails, and mysterious seductresses, whose exceptionally firm bosoms would, sooner or later, bedecked in arrows shot into a heart or a flame. Karol knows that the secrets of these notebooks were off limits to everyone.
Today these drawings reemerge as self-portraits of this adult artist: full-fledged works capping off Radziszewski’s enormous queer archive. For he himself is a man of many faces: artist, curator, film director, and avid collector, skillfully navigating between the visual and performative arts. But above all, he is the creator of the Queer Archives Institute, a never-ending performance and informal organization grappling with the suppressed, yet surprisingly beautiful queer memory of Central and Eastern Europe.
The artist’s special montage of archival materials—self-made, ready-made, or inspiration for artistic extrapolation—formulates new ways of understanding history, memory, or legislation. He blurs facts with fantasies, cobbling together documentation from scraps of memories. He leaves false trails to suggest alternative paths of remembering.
The secret performativity of Karol Radziszewski’s archive is not merely in its tales of the past, but above all, in the queer potential of the future: its revolutionary nature, its change, and its promise of freedom.
Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
“Memory is certainly constructed and, even more importantly, always political. By this, what is meant is that our memories and ritual- ized tales—whether through performance, vid- eo, writing, or visual culture—have the potenti- ality for world-making.”
"The future is the domain of the queer. The queer is a structur- ing and educated mode of desiring, which allows us to see and feel beyond the present. The here and now is a prison. (...) the queer is not yet here, the queer is an ideality.”
"Some people say that all we have is the pleasure of the present moment, but we must never settle for the minimum; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of be- ing in the world, and ultimately, dream new worlds."
"Utopian feelings are and can be regularly neglected or frustrated. However, they are indispensable in the act of imagining transfor- mation."
The queer utopian imagination signals the necessity of having and thinking futurity. (...) the essential function of utopia is to criticize the present. If we did not move beyond barriers, we would not even perceive them as barriers.
Connecting the relevance of archiving:
“To give value to the spaces and acts that have influenced our queer experience. These represent signs, ideals, or ways of living in the world that have been degraded or consid- ered abject (despicable) within heteronormativity.”
Through this, we “reclaim the terms, ideas, and memories and push them into a list that includes them as eternal values, similar to freedom and/or fraternity.”
Situating our dead:
“The dual origin of ghosts and the phantasmagorical, the way in which ghosts exist inside and outside and through categorical distinctions, seems especially useful for a queer critique that attempts to understand communal mourning, group psycholo- gies, and the need for a politics that ‘carries’ our dead with us in the battles for the present and the future.
(...) my critical tactic, one that uses themes and keywords like ‘ghosts,’ ‘memory,’ ‘long- ing,’ and ‘utopia,’ has been to decipher the networks of convergence, common points, and the structures of feeling that link the queer with different determinants of identity, including positive and negative antibody status, as well as bodies separated across differ- ent generational lines.”
From the chapter: The Future is in The Present
"Futurity can be a problem. Heterosexual culture depends on a notion of the future: as the song goes, ‘‘the children are our future.’’ But that is not the case for different cultures of sexual dissidence. Rather than invest in a deferred future, the queer citizen-subject labors to live in a present that is calibrated,through the protocols of state power, to sacrifice our liveness for what Lauren Berlant has called the ‘‘dead citizenship’’ of heterosexuality.∞ This dead citizenship is formatted, in part, through the sacrifice of the present for a fantasmatic future. On dance floors, sites of public sex, various theatrical stages,music festivals, and in arenas both subterranean and above ground, queers live, labor, and enact queer worlds in the present. But must the future and thepresent exist in this rigid binary? Can the future stop being a fantasy of heterosexual reproduction? In this essay I want to argue for the disruption of this binarized stalemate and the enactment of what I call, following C .L .R .James, a future in the present. To call for this notion of the future in thepresent is to summon a refunctioned notion of utopia in the service of sub-altern politics. Certain performances of queer citizenship contain what I will call an anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually exist-ing queer reality, a kernel of political possibility, within a stultifying heterosexual present. I will gesture to sites of embodied and performed queer politics and describe them as outposts of actually existing queer worlds. The sites I consider are sites of mass gatherings, performances that can be under-stood as defiantly public—glimpses into an ensemble of social actors performing a queer world."
"Minoritarian performance - performancxes both theatrical and quotodian - transports us across symbolic space, inserting us in a coterminous time whenn w ewitness new formations within the present and the future. The coterminous temporality of such performance existist within the future and the present, surpassing relegation to one temporality (the present) and insisting on the minoritarian's subjects status as a world historical entity. The stage and the street , like the shop floor, are venues for performances that allow the spectator access to minoritarian lifeworlds that exist, importantly and dialectically, within the future and the present... These performances are thus outposts of an actually existing queer future existing in the present."
Marlon Riggs, Tongues Untied
Tongues Untied blends documentary and performance to defy the stigmas surrounding Black gay men. Through music, dance, words, and poetry by such pathbreaking writers as Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam, and candid, humorous, and heartbreaking interviews with queer African American men, this film gives voice to what it means to live as an outsider. (Marlon Riggs, 1989, 55 minutes)
"Tongues Untied is both a documentary and a work of poetry. Riggs was a unique figure who fused his roots in journalism with an embrace of the arts in general (including dance, music, film, and poetry). Tongues Untied and (arguably) the later Black is... Black Ain't (1994) meld the qualities of reportage with an experimental esthetic form that seeks to grasp the black-queer experience. The rhythmic and repetitive structure of the chant of "brother-to-brother" that opens Tongues Untied sets the vigorous pace for Riggs's exploration of the complex dynamics of black manhood and sexuality. Significantly, his experimental visual and sonorous concepts display the range and possibilities of same-sex love between black men. The direct and polemical appeal of Tongues Untied for "brother-to-brother" love (the "revolution" as Riggs pitches it here) grapples presciently with the issues of black-on-black homophobia, the seduction offered by white gay culture (and its attendant racism and homophobia), and the particularly painful political as well as lived experience of AIDS among gay black men. But it is Riggs's personal association with these issues that impresses on the viewer the struggle involved for black gay men to articulate—indeed, live—their cultural identity. The message and the artistic enterprise Riggs undertakes here is trenchant and relevant.
Tongues Untied was originally conceived for film festivals (the film won awards in such places as Berlin and Los Angeles), but when it was broadcast on PBS's POV, it caused a national furor on the part of religious and political conservatives. Significantly, the anger did not stop with the conservatives. Many Democrats, "liberal" blacks and whites, gays and straights were outraged by what they saw and heard. Homoerotic poetry read over the images of two black men kissing, caressing, or simply dancing in the nude were/are, apparently too much to bear for all cross-sections of the political, ideological, and racial spectra. Like his queer predecessor, James Baldwin (especially in his novel Just Above My Head [1978], where the concept of black "brother-to-brother" love is sexualized), Riggs unapologetically eroticizes the black-male body with the ardent intent of claiming that love between black men is a revolutionary and, therefore, necessary act." from: https://www.cineaste.com/fall2007/tongues-untied-1989
Vaginal Davis
MoMA PS1 presents a major exhibition of Vaginal Davis, spanning five decades of her practice as a performer, visual artist, author, filmmaker, musician, educator, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and countercultural icon. The presentation spotlights Ms. Davis’s role as an underground trailblazer in culture and queer politics—as well as her uncompromising glamour. Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product is organized thematically, the exhibition includes major installations, video, paintings, zines, audio works, sculptures, and extensive archival materials, as well as and cross-disciplinary collaborations, including a new installation by the Berlin-based CHEAP Collective with photographs by Annette Frick.
She’s been around a while, but the art of Vaginal Davis is only getting recognized now.
You might know her from a famous song by Le Tigre (go listen to Hot Topic again if you don’t remember). Vaginal Davis is a performing artist, painter, independent curator, composer, writer and the owner of New York City’s Hag Gallery.
On herself, she once said: ”I’m intersex, born with both female and male genitalia, so I’m a strange hybrid creature. I’m also part German, quarter Jewish, my father was born in Mexico and my mother is French Creole. People would always stare at me, so I figured I might as well just be on stage!”
Karen Barad, TransMaterialities:Trans/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.
Monstrous Selves, Transgender Empowerment, Transgender Rage
The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the
destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities and so
we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our
own monstrosities.
—Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows
Electricity can arrest the heart. It is also capable of bringing a heart back from a state of lifelessness. It can animate its rhythmic drumbeat—the periodic pulsing of life’s electrical song—in once arrested or arrhythmic hearts. Monstrosity, like electrical jolts, cuts both ways. It can serve to demonize, dehumanize, and demoralize. It can also be a source of political agency. It can empower and radicalize. In an unforgettable, powerful, and empowering performative piece, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” Susan Stryker embraces the would-be epithet of monstrosity, harnessing its energy and power to transform despair and suffering into empowering rage, self-affirmation, theoretical inventiveness, political action, and the energizing vitality of materiality in its animating possibilities.13 Remarking on her affinity with Frankenstein’s monster, she writes:
The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the
conditions in which I must struggle to exist.14
Making political and personal alliance with Frankenstein’s monster, she intervenes in naturalizing discourses about the nature of nature, an emphasis that resonates with themes in this essay.
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate
your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine.15
This passage speaks with razor-sharp directedness to those who would position their own bodies as natural against the monstrosity of trans embodiment: examine your own nature, stretch your own body out on the examining table, do the work that needs to be done on yourself (with all this charge’s intended multiple meanings), and discover the seams and sutures that make up the matter of your own
body. Materiality in its entangled psychic and physical manifestations is always already a patchwork, a suturing of disparate parts.16
Toward the end of the piece, Stryker embraces the fecundity of the
“chaos and blackness”—the “anarchic womb”—as the matrix for generative nonheterosexual-reproductive birthing, “for we have done the hard work of constituting ourselves on our own terms, against the natural order. Though we forgo the privilege of naturalness, we are not deterred, for we ally ourselves instead with the chaos and blackness from which Nature itself spills forth.”17 This is a reference to the entangled birthing story that Stryker tells. She begins by sharing with the reader the joys and the pain of being in intimate connection with her partner while she was giving birth. This is a birth born of queer kinship relations: not the product of a heteronormative coupling, but a phenomenon rich with multiple entanglements, including a markedly nonnormative delivery room support team.
Stryker is attuned to her partner during the birth, bodily and emotionally, yet she is also painfully aware that the physicality of birthing a being from her own womb is denied to her by the specificity of her constructed enfleshment. She describes
the raw pain of being part of a process that she could not bring to fruition in the bodily way that she yearns for. This gives way to a painful birthing of transgender rage that becomes, in turn, the womb through which she rebirths herself. This radically queer configuring of spacetimemattering constitutes an uncanny topological
dynamic that arrests straight tales of birthing and kinship, and gives birth to new modes of generativity, including but not limited to the generativity of a self-birthed womb. It is nearly impossible not to feel the tug of other entanglements in this queer origin story. In particular, this story reverberates with a queer reading of
the Genesis moment when the earth emerges out of the chaos and the void, from a chaotic nothingness, an electrifying atmosphere silently crackling with thunderous possibilities. Nature emerges from a self-birthed womb fashioned out of a raging nothingness. A queer origin, an originary queerness, an originary birthing that is
always already a rebirthing. Nature is birthed out of chaos and void, tohu v’vohu, an echo, a diffracted/differentiating/différancing murmuring, an originary repetition without sameness, regeneration out of a fecund nothingness.
Queering in Ecological terms.
Mobilized by the environmental crisis, queer thought activates radical solidarity against extractivist and reproductive systems, becoming an ecopolitical proposal: “a collective quest to redefine the status of the human within the extended ecosystem of interdependencies through which humans exist.”
The human body is constructed, interconnected and in- terdependent with others.
Institute of Queer Ecology, Metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis A film series by the Institute of Queer Ecology Voiced by Mykki Blanco and Danny Orlowski Launching June 27th, 2020 | Commissi
Just in case: Sexual Difference Theories - Notes
Paul B. Preciado, Can the Monster Speak:
(...) you, like me live within the regime of sex, gender and sexual difference.
The "Universal Human": A necropolitical animal, the subject of the central statement in the discourse of the psychoanalitical institutions of colonial modernism.
The binary of men and women is a cage.
The societal binary and sexual difference paradox: demands women, subjugated, raped, murdered, should not only love, but devote themselves to men, their oppressors.
Paul B Preciado running to escape the binary system of sexual difference.
in heteropatriarchal binary circus women are offered the role of belle or victim.
Abandone the framework of sexual difference, a whole series of micro-powers that act on our bodies and model our behaviours; amongst them administrative/burocratic, medical, etc.
"When I realized that leaving the regime of sexual difference meant leaving the human sphere and entering into a subaltern space of violence and control (...) to carry on living I demanded a place within the binary gender regime" - by identifying as transexual and consequently aknowledging that he would be considered pathological."
I could accede for the first time to the privilege of universality. A peaceful and anonymous place where everyone leaves you the fuck alone. I had never felt universal. I had been a woman, I had been a lesbian, I had been a migrant. I had known otherness, not universality. If I did not publicly announce myself as ‘trans’ and accepted being acknowledged as a man, I could shrug off the burden of identity once and for all.
To begin with, the regime of sex, gender and sexual difference you
consider universal and almost metaphysical, on which rests all
psychoanalytical theory, is not an empirical reality, nor a determining symbolic order of the unconscious. It is no more than an epistemology of the living, an anatomical mapping, a political economy of the body and a collective administration of reproductive energies. A historic system of knowledge and representation constructed in accordance with a racial taxonomy during a period of European mercantile and colonial expansion that crystallized in the second half of the nineteenth century. Far from being a representation of reality, this epistemology is in fact a performative engine that produces and legitimizes a specific political and economic order: the heterocolonial patriarchy.
When I talk about the regime of sex, gender and sexual difference as
an epistemology, I am referring to a historical system of representations, a collection of discourses, institutions, conventions, practices and cultural agreements (be they symbolic, religious, scientific, technical, commercial or communicative) that make it possible for a society to decide what is true and to distinguish it from what is false, and, therefore, who should be considered human and under what conditions.
We might therefore say that the regime of sex, gender and sexual
difference is a historical epistemology, a cultural, techno-scientific
paradigm that has not always existed and which is subject, like all
epistemologies, to critique and to change. Contemporary historians of the science and society of the Renaissance now agree that until the Middle Ages and perhaps as late as the early seventeenth century, the dominant Western epistemology was the ‘one-sex model’ in which only the male body was recognized as anatomically perfect. In the texts of Hippocrates and of Galen of Pergamon and the anatomical treatises of Andreas Vesalius, the bodies of women shared the same anatomy as those of men: only the absence of internal heat indicated that, in women, genital organs remained inside the body, whereas in men, the warmer and more perfect
gender, the genital organs were externalized. People spoke of men and women, but also of angels and demons, monsters and chimeras. But in this epistemology, men and angels had greater ontological and political reality than women and chimeras. Before the nineteenth century, ‘woman’ did not exist either anatomically or politically in terms of sovereign subjectivity. The mono-sexual paradigm operated according to a ‘system of similarities’ in which the female body was represented as a hierarchically lesser variation of the male. The bodies of women were not recognized as anatomical entities, as political subjects, as possessing a full, autonomous ontological existence. Before the eighteenth century, a vagina was an inverted penis, the clitoris and the fallopian tubes did not exist, and the ovaries were internalized testicles. Gynaecology was
limited to obstetrics. There were no women. There were only potential mothers. Menstruation and the capacity for reproduction defined womanhood, not the form of the genital organs. Genitality as an anatomico-political indicator of sexual difference is a much more recent invention. In the patriarchal regime, only the male body and male sexuality were acknowledged as sovereign. The female body and female sexuality were subaltern, dependent, minor(itarian) – not in the numerical sense, obviously, but in the sense given by Deleuze and Guattari to the term, as a variable of subjugation in relations of power.
AI summary of Main Sexual Difference Theories:
Highly contested area of study that spans biology, psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences. There isn't one single "theory," but rather multiple, often conflicting, theoretical frameworks that attempt to explain the origins, nature, and significance of differences between males and females.
It's crucial to distinguish between two key terms from the outset:
Sex: Typically refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define humans as male, female, or intersex (e.g., chromosomes, hormones, reproductive anatomy).
Gender: Refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, expressions, and identities of girls, women, boys, men, and gender-diverse people. It varies across societies and over time.
Theories of sexual difference try to explain the relationship between these two concepts.
Here are the major theoretical frameworks:
1. Biological Essentialism (or Determinism)
This is one of the oldest perspectives, arguing that sexual differences are innate, natural, and primarily determined by biology.
Core Idea: Evolutionary pressures (like sexual selection and parental investment) and hormones (like testosterone and estrogen) hardwire distinct behaviors, cognitive abilities, and social roles into males and females. For example, men are naturally more aggressive and promiscuous due to higher testosterone, while women are naturally more nurturing and choosy due to their role in gestation and child-rearing.
Key Thinkers/Concepts: Evolutionary psychologists like David Buss and Steven Pinker often explore these ideas. Sociobiology, founded by E.O. Wilson, also looks for evolutionary roots of social behavior.
Critique: Critics argue this view is overly simplistic, ignores vast individual variation within sexes, and is often used to justify and naturalize oppressive social hierarchies (e.g., "women are naturally suited to be homemakers"). It often fails to account for the powerful role of culture and socialization.
2. Social Constructionism
This theory, dominant in sociology and gender studies, argues that sexual differences are not primarily biological but are constructed and learned through social processes.
Core Idea: Society creates and reinforces differences through socialization. From birth, children are treated differently ("gender socialization"), dressed in specific colors, given gendered toys, and encouraged to adopt "masculine" or "feminine" behaviors. What a society considers "natural" for men and women is actually a product of culture, language, and history.
Key Thinkers: Simone de Beauvoir's famous statement, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," is a foundational text. Later thinkers like Judith Butler argue that gender is a performance—a series of acts and repetitions that create the illusion of a natural, binary identity.
Critique: Critics argue that pure constructionism can risk ignoring the material reality of biological bodies and constraints.
3. Biosocial or Interactionist Models
This is a middle-ground, modern approach that is now widely accepted in scientific circles. It argues that biology and society interact in a continuous feedback loop.
Core Idea: Biology (e.g., hormones, brain structure) provides a potential or a predisposition, but social context determines how, and if, these predispositions are expressed. Conversely, social experiences can actually alter biology (e.g., brain plasticity, hormone levels in response to stress or dominance).
Analogy: Biology loads the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.
Example: A biological predisposition for greater average size and muscle mass in males may explain why most ancient societies developed male-dominated warrior classes (biology provides a potential). However, culture then amplifies this difference through training, myths of male superiority, and social roles (society shapes the expression). This social structure then reinforces the biological differences through nutrition and physical labor.
4. Psychoanalytic Theories
These theories, originating with Sigmund Freud and heavily revised by others, focus on the unconscious processes and early childhood development that shape sexual identity and difference.
Core Idea: Gender identity is formed through psychological processes like resolution of the Oedipus complex (Freud) or through the pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother and the entry into the "Symbolic Order" of language and law, which is governed by the "Phallus" as a signifier (Jacques Lacan).
Key Thinker: Nancy Chodorow offered a feminist revision, arguing that because women are almost always the primary caregivers, girls and boys develop different psychic structures. Girls develop a more relational sense of self, while boys must separate and define themselves as "not-female," leading to a devaluation of femininity.
Critique: These theories are often criticized for being non-falsifiable (untestable) and for centering male experience and anatomy (phallocentrism).
5. Feminist Materialism
This theory focuses on the material and economic bases of sexual difference, particularly the role of women in reproduction and how this shapes their social status.
Core Idea: The sexual division of labor is the root of women's oppression. Women's role in bearing and rearing children ("biological reproduction") historically tied them to the private sphere ("the domestic sphere"), while men dominated the public sphere of production and politics. This economic dependency created and sustains power imbalances.
Key Thinkers: Shulamith Firestone (in The Dialectic of Sex) argued that true women's liberation would require overcoming biological reproduction itself through technology. Simone de Beauvoir also analyzed how woman has been cast as the "Other" to man, the subject.
On Identity Politics:
Jack Halberstam:
"As many Marxist critics in particular seem to be fond of pointing out,
identity politics in the late twentieth century has mutated in some cases from a necessary and strategic critique of universalism into a stymied and myopic politics of self. There are few casestudies in the critiques ofidentity politics, however, and too often one particular theorist (usually a very prominent and sophisticated queer theorist) will stand in for projects that may be characterized as bound and limited to identity claims. Many important theoretical projects have been dismissed as "identity politics" because writers remain fuzzy about the meaning of this term and in many ways, identity pol-
itics has become the new "essentialism," a marker, in other words, of some combination of naivete and narrowness that supposedly blocks more expansive and sophisticated projects. Toooftenin academia"identity politics" will be used as an accusation of "interestedness," and theaccuser will seek to return discussion to a more detached project with supposedly great validity
and broader applications.
In a very useful essay on "Taking Identity Politics Seriously," anthropologistJames Clifford warns that the blanket dismissal of identity politics by intellectuals on the Left runs the risk of missing the "complex volatility, ambivalent potential, and historical necessity of contemporary social movements" (Clifford 2000, 95). Building on the work of Stuart Hall, Clifford argues that we cannot dismiss the methods used by various communities to "make 'room' for themselves in a crowded world";"
WOKE - meaning:
Wikipedia:
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American English used since the 1930s or earlier to refer to awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination, often in the construction stay woke. The term acquired political connotations by the 1970s and gained further popularity in the 2010s with the hashtag #staywoke. Over time, woke came to be used to refer to a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and denial of LGBTQ rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.[1][2][3]
During the 2014 Ferguson protests, the phrase stay woke was popularized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans. After being used on Black Twitter, the term woke was increasingly adopted by white people to signal their support for progressive causes. The term became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z. As its use spread beyond the United States, woke was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
"Anti-woke" is a term used to describe a backlash against progressive social and political movements that address issues of inequality, social justice, and systemic injustices like racism and sexism. It is a pejorative used by opponents to discredit concepts and policies they view as too focused on identity politics, and it can be used to resist diversity and inclusion efforts. This movement has been linked to political efforts to restrict or dismantle programs and educational content related to race, gender, and equity.
Origin and meaning of "woke": The term "woke" originated in African-American vernacular English and means being alert to social injustice and inequality.
"Anti-woke" movement: The anti-woke movement uses the term to criticize what it sees as an overemphasis on issues of social justice. Opponents of "woke" ideas often frame these efforts as divisive, unfair, or even harmful, claiming they can lead to reverse discrimination or a rejection of traditional values.
From: Some Notes On How To Ask A Good Question About Theory That Will Provoke Conversation And Further Discussion From Your Colleagues. By professor Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Gender and Women’s Studies/English.
Proofread your questions so that you catch grammar and spelling mistakes.
Make your questions open-ended, i.e. not answerable with fact or by direct and immediate reference to the text.
Make sure your question doesn’t rely on information the rest of the class doesn’t have, OR give the class enough information and background to be able to engage the question. Make sure the question is answerable to start with, i.e., is not vague and does not rely on facts or assumptions not addressable within the confines of our class conversation.
A good discussion question reframes some of the problems of the text and then tries to get at internal logical problems and paradoxes or to think through the consequences, implications and applications of the theory.
As such, questions about “experience” or “responses” or “feelings” tend not to be helpful questions – try to step back from personal responses and instead focus on the intellectual shape of the ideas and argument.
Often we are tempted to ask the “what about” question: e.g., what about the people who are excluded from this theory? Although not an unreasonable question, asked in this manner this is not really a sophisticated question because it doesn’t open up conversation. The only answer to “what about” is: they aren’t there. More productive is to ask: how do the exclusions at the heart of this work facilitate certain conclusions, problems or paradigms, what are these paradigms and what happens when we consider this theory in
a broader context? What would this theory look like if re-written from a different point in history, different assumptions about political economy, etc.?
It’s not the worst idea to make sure you have some thoughts about how to answer your questions before sending them on to your colleagues. However, sometimes you are just really stumped and need to work through this question with your classmates. That’s okay too.
Which brings me to: it is often smart and productive to write a preamble to a question. That preamble might be a short intellectual history of your questions, it might contextualize the text you are working with, it might scaffold the question you want to ask by referring to other texts or many points in the same text. Don’t make this preamble so long that no-one can excavate the original question, however. Also….
If you can answer your question while you are writing it, you probably need to just state your point of view and move on to another, related, question.
Sometimes the question you write is simply the jumping-off point for more developed questions on the part of the class. That is fine! The point is to catalyze inquiry, not perform mastery: good pedagogy means letting go of your ego-investments in your own ideas.
Sometimes you are stuck with an instinct, a hunch, a nagging feeling and a half-formed question and you simply can’t move forward without thinking about it out loud. Bring those seemingly half-formed thoughts to the class: we will figure the direction or shape of your question together.
Finally: when you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Ask for help from the professor or your classmates, and feel free and supported in bringing your “I Don’t Get It” questions to class. We will all profit from these acts of intellectual humility and generosity.
From: Research for People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create. By Dirk Vis.
THE ROLE OF PRELIMINARY RESEARCH
In an ideal world, you would start your research by formulating a research question that is concrete, focused, and limited to a certain time, place and/or (set of) example(s). In reality, this is the exception rather than the rule. You will most likely start with hunches, intuitions and personal fascinations – as 99% of all students find their real research question somewhere along the way, halfway during the process or even at the very end. They find it through preliminary research of a broader topic which they then gradually narrow down. Be prepared to keep formulating and reformulating your preliminary research question, changing it countless times throughout the process– continuously making it more specific. [3] Of course, most preliminary results will have to be thoroughly edited, or even discarded, later. This is one of the reasons why the process takes so long. [√]
... So instead of choosing “what is the meaning of the cloud” as your research question, start instead with a preliminary research of cloud computing, which will allow you to further specify your question. “Artistic performances done at cloud data centres in Iceland” would definitely be more specific, and would enable you to arrive at concrete conclusions. [∂]
HOW TO CHOOSE A TOPIC
Any topic you choose can lead to in-depth research and interesting findings – what matters most is thus not the topic itself, but rather how you relate to it. Don’t let anyone else decide your topic for you – but at the same time, don’t be afraid to use other people’s suggestions.
Obviously, your topic should have some relevance
for your field of work, study, department, discipline, graduation profile, community and/or institutional context. Most importantly, you will have consciously or unconsciously grappled in your earlier work with multiple design and/or research questions. Try to make your new research expand upon these.
In the words of Alison Phipps, author of the blog Resources for Researchers: “if your research is not needed, don’t do it. If you’re unsure of your motivations (or if they’re self-serving), don’t do it. If you’re a complete outsider, don’t do it.” [17] However, sometimes an outsider perspective, in combination with the right attitude and questions, can also turn into a major advantage. [∂]
Within your broader topic, keep working towards a clear research question: a short, simple sentence that ends with a question mark. Make sure it can be understood by anyone, including people such as your mother, your neighbour, or the janitor. This is not merely my opinion: several of my colleagues, including Merel Boers, Roosje Klap and Florian Cramer, have said the exact same thing, though perhaps exemplified with a different non-art-world-affiliated person. If your question does not yet fulfil this criterium, then you know you’ll have to be more specific. [μ] From there you can subdivide your research into different components.
NO TOPIC IS TOO SPECIFIC
You may be fixated on a certain broad topic, feeling that by focusing on something more limited, you would be untrue to your original motivations. This kind of attitude is unhelpful: sticking to a topic
that is too broad costs a lot of time and leads to confusion. Preliminary research will allow you to narrow down the scope of your further research.
In your research question, refrain from using generic words such as art, design, communication, etc. Instead, ask yourself what is the smallest, concrete practice or object that triggered your curiosity. Keep this tiny element (a certain sign, sound, action, etc.) in the back of your mind at all times to check whether your newest ventures are still relevant to this initial spark of curiosity.
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert compiled their Encyclopédie, consisting of texts and images intended to describe all of the Western world’s available knowledge. [∂] Ironically, the project only demonstrates how the topic at hand is in fact too broad to ever be concluded. An encyclopaedic or lexical approach is thus only suitable for shorter research with a highly specific topic (for example, “fictional user interface designs in early sci-fi series” instead of “science fiction”).
THE RELATION BETWEEN RESEARCH QUESTION AND DESIGN QUESTION
Any research document implicitly or explicitly contains one or more design questions: at the very least, the question of how to design the research document itself. Most (but not all) “how-can-I” questions are design questions, while most (but not all) “what-why-which” questions are research questions. A design question can also be considered as a specific kind of applied research question.
In most institutional settings, the design question is separate from the research question, with the latter being worked out in the research document and the former in the artistic project. Depending on the relation between research and creative project – and thereare many different relations possible [√] – the research question may itself also be a design question. Usually, the research question eventually leads to a different design question.
Examples:
By Discipline
1. Fine Arts (Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Performance)
Historical/Theoretical: How did the use of readymades by Marcel Duchamp challenge and redefine the concept of "art" in the 20th century?
Material/Technical: How can the materiality of ephemeral substances (e.g., ice, mycelium, sugar) be used to convey themes of decay and memory in sculpture?
Social/Political: In what ways can participatory performance art create a space for dialogue and collective healing around community trauma?
Perceptual: How can large-scale, immersive installation art alter a viewer's perception of their own body in space?
Speculative: What would a monument to failure look like, and how could it challenge our public celebration of only success?
2. Graphic & Communication Design
Historical/Theoretical: How did the design principles of the Bauhaus movement influence the development of modern user interface (UI) design?
Social/Cultural: How can data visualization be designed to make complex climate change statistics more emotionally resonant and compelling for a general audience?
Technical/Process: How can algorithmic/generative design principles be applied to create a dynamic visual identity that evolves based on user interaction?
Critical: In what ways does "dark pattern" UI design in social media apps manipulate user behavior, and what ethical frameworks could counter it?
Perceptual: How do cultural differences in color symbolism impact the effectiveness of global public health infographics?
3. Product & Industrial Design
Social/Cultural: How can product design for children's toys actively challenge and subvert traditional gender stereotypes?
Material/Technical: How can mycelium-based biocomposites be developed into a viable, sustainable material for mass-produced consumer packaging?
Speculative/Critical: How would the design of everyday objects (like chairs or cutlery) change if they were intended for a post-human or multi-species world?
User-Centered: How can the principles of universal design be integrated into smart home devices to better serve an aging population without stigmatizing users?
Environmental: What does a truly "circular" product lifecycle look like in practice, and how can design facilitate easy repair, disassembly, and upcycling?
4. Fashion & Textile Design
Social/Political: How is the concept of "modesty" in fashion being re-appropriated and redefined by contemporary designers in Muslim-majority countries?
Material/Technical: How can smart textiles integrated with wearable technology be designed to monitor and help manage anxiety in a non-clinical, aesthetically pleasing way?
Historical/Theoretical: How did the punk movement of the 1970s use DIY fashion and bricolage as a form of visual resistance?
Critical/Speculative: How can speculative fashion design critique the unsustainable pace of "fast fashion" by proposing garments designed to last a lifetime or biodegrade on command?
Cultural: In what ways does the design of traditional dress inform contemporary notions of national identity in a globalized world?
5. Interaction & User Experience (UX) Design
User-Centered: How can voice user interfaces (VUIs) be designed to feel more empathetic and natural for isolated elderly users?
Ethical/Critical: What are the ethical implications of using persuasive design to encourage "screen-time wellness," and does it create a conflict of interest for platform creators?
Perceptual: How does the use of haptic feedback in virtual reality environments enhance the sense of presence and realism for users?
Social: How can social media platform design be altered to foster civil discourse and reduce echo chamber effects?
Speculative: What would a "calm technology" interface for a smart city look like, one that provides necessary information without causing user overload?
6. Architecture & Spatial Design
Social/Political: How can participatory design processes transform top-down public housing projects into communities with a sense of ownership and belonging?
Historical/Theoretical: In what ways does the concept of "defensive architecture" (e.g., anti-homeless spikes) reveal societal values and priorities in urban spaces?
Environmental/Technical: How can biomimicry principles be applied to building facades to create more energy-efficient and responsive climate control systems?
Phenomenological: How do the sensory elements of light, sound, and materiality in a library's design influence the cognitive states of its users (e.g., focus, contemplation, creativity)?
Speculative: How might we design flexible living spaces that can adapt to the remote work revolution and the blending of domestic and professional life?
It is well defined/scoped out (not too narrow, not too broad).
You have verified that there is enough credible information on the topic to support your research.
Finding a topic
List your interests and connect them with your course.
Scan the textbook or other readings and explore a topic further or from a different angle.
Browse the table of contents and abstracts of scholarly journals.
Mix your course with another field you are familiar with (ex: The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries and religion).
Brainstorm and discuss with your classmates and professor.
Scoping your topic – Narrowing or broadening
You will need to narrow or broaden your research question to make sure you have enough supporting information to write an essay that fits with the requirements. Make sure you understand the assignment's guidelines and talk to your professor if you are unsure! Limit your research question by adding more context to it and visually analyzing the work(s). Ask yourself the following questions to help gather context and limit the scope of your research:
Who?
Who is represented in this artwork? Who used this object?
Who was this created for? Who created this?
Who influenced this object/artwork?
What?
What movements and art styles does this artwork or object fall into?
What materials and methods were used to create this?
What was or are the critical responses to this work?
What uses or utility does this have?
When?
When was this piece created? What is the historical context of this work?
What were the key events happening during this time? How was this art influenced by the key events of this period?
Where?
Where was this created? What is the cultural context of this artwork or object?
Is there a religion or set of beliefs that influenced this artwork or object?
Below is an example of applying these strategies to the topic of religion in medieval art and narrowing it down to something more manageable:
Historical/religious context: Christianity
Art piece: Unicorn Tapestries
Art style/movement: Gothic
Now: How do the Unicorn Tapestries reflect the entanglement of Christian and pagan beliefs in Gothic art?
How and why to test your topic right from the start?
Why? Make sure there is enough background information and that research on the broad topic has been done before.
How? Write down a few keywords and their synonyms. Conduct preliminary research in the catalogue or in a database.
Adjusting
Once you start testing your research question, you might find that you narrowed it down too much. If that’s the case, you can use opposite strategies or remove one component to broaden it.
Example of broadening the research question above:
Which elements of the Gothic art style reflected the entanglement of Christian and pagan beliefs? (Removed: art piece)
Start your research!
Let your research question evolve naturally as you research.
A Way to Leak, Lick, Leek is the outcome of Prouvost’s residency at Fahrenheit completed in the spring of 2015, and is the counterpart of the artist’s project presented last year at Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart in France. The exhibition results in a site-specific installation of films, sculptures, and drawings utilizing elemental material found within Los Angeles—flora, fauna, smells, sounds, abandoned objects, and the vertiginous light of L.A.
Laure Prouvost constructs an immersive environment in which her works become central ploys in a scenario that explores the boundaries of fantastic and urban escapism. Her series of drawings and films reflect a delineated urban experience made of driving in L.A. and breathing in petrol and plastic smells.
For her main installation, Prouvost coated the floor of the gallery space with blue resin, ornamenting its surface with shattered technological junk, abandoned tropical trees, floating pineapples, and branches of tumble weeds—an apocalyptic vision reminiscent of a private pool the morning after a wild night. In her new video, Lick in The Past, filmed last spring in Downtown Los Angeles, she employs tropes both derived from and challenging the filmic languages of cinema and art. Adolescent Angelinos and their collective performance constitute an amateur form on an improvisational level, acting in a parking lot to the sound of an original hip-hop track specially composed by L.A.-based producer WYNN for the exhibition. These stars of the outtake bring corrupt reveries to life through humor and mistranslations.
Neïl Beloufa
Neïl Beloufa (b. 1985, Paris) is one the most powerful voices of the generation of artists born in the 1980s. His artistic research focuses on contemporary society and on how it is represented and mediated by digital interaction, often with the aim of exposing the control mechanisms. In his videos, feature films, sculptures, and technologically complex installations, Beloufa plays on the viewer’s sensory experience, inviting them to reappraise their own beliefs and stereotypes. He addresses present-day issues that range from power relationships to digital surveillance, to data collection and nationalistic ideologies, to identity and a post-colonial understanding of the world.
Neïl Beloufa’s work is strongly influenced by the world of the web, by videogames, by reality TV and political propaganda, using the vocabulary of the information age to lift the lid on the value system of a society permeated with digital technology, where everything, from food choices to human relationships is established on the basis of an algorithm.
Global Agreement
23 AUGUST – 28 OCTOBER 2018
The SCHIRN presents a new work by the award-winning video and installation artist Neïl Beloufa. For “Global Agreement” (2018) Beloufa created walkable sculptural installations in the Schirn Rotunda, which is freely accessible to the public, as well as in an adjoining exhibition space. An interview collage on film will be visible on various monitors in parts of the sculptures. The interview collage is dedicated to the human body and its discursive and political importance. It shows Neïl Beloufa’s latest interest in the army, weapons, fitness, beauty, and the body cult as well as in the staging of power. Power is a central, recurring theme in his work—the social conflict between majority and minority, between dominance and oppression, as well as the power of images for our perception of reality. The video is based on interviews that the artist conducted with male and female soldiers from different countries via the video chat service Skype. The film as an artistic medium constitutes the focus and point of departure in Beloufa’s oeuvre. Fiction and reality fuse in Beloufa’s videos. Viewers become irritated by their own perception and eventually can no longer distinguish between truth and falsehood. In “Global Agreement” the artist raises questions concerning physical presentation as well as the reception and involvement and/or positioning of the viewer. Like the film narrative in “Global Agreement,” ultimately the video is not completed yet. Beloufa leaves the question regarding a continuation of the work open—it represents the beginning of an investigation instead.
Digital Mourning, 2021-2022
In this process, the artist refers to himself as an editor, an assembler, who puts together information that already exists only to break it down again and show us the outcome without making any moral judgment. The viewers thus find themselves inside immersive installations that convey a fragmented vision of reality, a universe inhabited by pop-ups and live CCTV networks that are designed to reveal both the freedom of an apparently random system and the degree of control that underpins it.
“Digital Mourning” is the first major solo exhibition devoted to Neïl Beloufa in an Italian institution, and it stems from a reflection on the current times and on the concept of life in our digital world. Right from the title, the exhibition alludes to one of the most striking paradoxes of contemporary society, which is the existence of a technological world and its disappearance. The association of the two words—“digital” and “mourning”—comes about in the encounter between an artificial world and the absence of life, in a dimension in which life itself is simulated by means of models specially created to understand its true essence.
Resembling the scenario of an “amusement” park, the space embraces a large selection of works, including the artist’s most relevant installations and walk-through sculptures. However, mimicking the current state of affairs, it is forbidden to use the “attractions” and the exhibition appears to come alive only through a series of narrative voices. In presenting the works and explaining the viewers what to see in each area, the narrators introduce and discuss different positions, from utopian aspirations to the opinions of the youngest generation.
On the occasion of the exhibition “Digital Mourning” the artist has also adapted the 2020 Screen Talk project. The project can also be accessed on an interactive online page built as a work of art of which the exhibition presents a version that can be activated by the viewer. Similarly to online videogames, it is possible to play on the website. The user is guided by a non-linear series of events generated each time by answering the quiz questions. This unlocks further levels and gives access to the different episodes of the Screen Talk mini-series.
Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg is devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world.
Using traditions of both cinema and sculpture, she seeks out locations around the world where specific systems of production and commerce are in place, such as a pearl factory in China, and a Calexico border town. Through the editing process, and with footage from sets built in her studio, Rottenberg connects seemingly disparate places and things to create elaborate and subversive visual narratives. By weaving fact and fiction together, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.
Each of Rottenberg’s video works is situated within a theatrical installation, made up of objects from the parallel worlds in her videos. Sacks of pearls, deflated pool toys, plastic flowers and sizzling frying pans seem to open a portal into the realm of the work. Her multidimensional film projects are often accompanied by standalone sculptural works, connected by allegory.
From: Palais de Tokyo.
Rottenberg’s latest feature length film, ‘REMOTE’ (2022), co-created with Mahyad Tousi, was commissioned by Artangel, United Kingdom; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and premiered at Tate Modern and the New York Film Festival in 2022.
Rottenberg earned her BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and followed this with an MFA at Columbia University in 2004. Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.
Short description: This two-day intensive workshop explores the intersection of storytelling, object, and spatial practice. Participants will translate narrative constructs into tangible, material environments, aiming to create immersive scenographic works. Students will collaboratively create a story and learn to shape it into a physical scenography, focusing on material choice, scale, and atmosphere through hands-on construction and group feedback.
Day 1
Bring to workshop: a travel bag full with materials of your liking, tools and objects you could use for making work. (i.e. wire, metal, tape, fabric, paint, brushes, found objects, old clothes, scissors, cutters, markers, random objects, broken pieces, etc)
2:00 - 2:20: Introduction of my work in connection to Scenography.
2:20 - 2:40: Introduction of students + 1 word they connect to scenography (scenography making).
2:40 - 3:00: In groups, Each student from the group creates/decides a component of a story: Student 1) A setting (s)/context(s); Student 2) main characters; Student 3) period of time: when and how it develops over time; Student 4) main event; Student 5) Theme / tone.
3:00 - 3:40: Share their ideas. Together they tweek what may be needed and define how to tell that story through space and material. – In detail (map/write/make decisions) - What to focus on? Scale? Should it be a scene of the story? Is it abstract or illustrative?
Break: 20 minutes
4:00 - 5:00: Show each other their "travel bag" of materials and props to see what works with their stories + plan what they need for next session.
5:00 - 5:30: The groups share their stories, conclusions and findings and we provide ideas and feedback as a group.
Score/map:
Scale: big or small
Actions: Are there characters? is there movement happening? or just installacion
Location -do you need a site specific locations?
Props, light, sound, film: do these happen in time?
Where is the audience?
Do we have text?
Day 2
Bring to workshop: All additional materials you may need to make your scenography happen, such as rope, hooks, lighting, sound or video equipment, etc. + your travel bag with all materials.
2:00 - 3:40: Groups work on their scenographies + feedback and assistance
Break: 20 minutes
4:00 - 5:30: The groups share their scenographies, conclusions and findings and we provide feedback as a group.
*I will gather a series of references for the students. If the process goes quicker, we can perhaps review them and discuss them together in class.
Notes on Scenography:
From: Dramaturgy through Scenography. Understanding how a dramaturgical… | by Prasanta Kumar Dutta | Diario da Pacific | Medium
Dramaturgy: The conventional understanding of the term dramaturgy is coming from the practice and theory of dramatic composition of a performance language which is often textually written by a dramaturge for a devised performance process.
Scenography: The term scenography has been used to articulate the overall visual language of a performative event that includes all the aspects of visual inputs.
... In conventional dramatic theatre, visual design has not been given the equal prominence as other components, for example written text although the experience of seeing is considered as equally important as listening. Conventionally spoken words have been considered as the intellectual base of a theatre performance and scenography has been considered as the atmosphere where the dramatic narrative can take place. In theatre of Avant- Garde this word centrism has been challenged by many theatre makers, making theatre as audio visual experience bringing scenographer as a key player in the making of the total theatrical experience.
What is Scenography?by Pamela Howard:
She examines scenography from seven perspectives — Space, Text, Research, Colour & Composition, Direction, Performance and Spectators.
"Scenography is the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and spectators that contributes to an original creation."
The term Scenography describes a holistic approach to making theatre from the visual perspective. Derived from the Greek sceno-grafika and translated in common understanding as “the writing of the stage space — l’écriture scènique”, it is an international theatre word.
The principles of scenography are the principles of Art.
Jean-Siméon Chardin:
He rejected the large, purely narrative picture in favour of focusing the viewer’s attention to seeing the familiar anew — selected for them by the artist’s eye. A teacup, a jar of apricots, a silver spoon — he makes the ordinary appear extraordinary. Objects and figures become, as in theatre, emblematic, the carriers of the myth, heightened by darkness and light, and adding value to the empty space. All the elements of scenography are contained in the geometric spaces placed within a conventional frame. Chardin is a teacher for theatre artists, for, as the painter Mark Rothko said 250 years later: “In simplifying the present, he re-invents the future.” That is scenography.
From:
The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography - Cambridge University Press By Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth:
The origins of the term ‘scenography’ are associated with both scene painting and architectural perspective drawing.
Architect and scenographer João Mendes Ribeiro says that scenography is concerned primarily with the ‘inhabitability of the space’; that is, the creation of spaces with which performing bodies can interact: ‘The scenographic concept, as currently understood by the majority of artists, is a far cry from the pictorial two-dimensional scenography and focuses much more on the three-dimensional (architectural) nature of the space or the scenic object and its close relationship with the performers.
Contemporary use of the term has also been influenced by the work of theatre designers such as Josef Svoboda. His concern with the actualisation of a play rather than the decoration of the stage underlines the need to consider scenography as a component of performance: ‘True scenography is what happens when the curtain opens and can’t be judged in any other way.’
The scenographer visually liberates the text and the story behind it, by creating a world in which the eyes see what the ears do not hear. Resonances of the text are visualised through fragments and memories that reverberate in the spectator’s subconscious, suggesting rather than illustrating the words.’ The assertion is that scenography extends and enriches audience experience of performance through images which operate in conjunction with, but in different ways from, other aspects of the stage.
In this book, scenography is defined as the manipulation and orchestration of the performance environment. The means by which this is pursued are typically through architectonic structures, light, projected images, sound, costume and performance objects or props. These elements are considered in relation to the performing bodies, the text, the space in which the performance takes place and the placement of the audience. Scenography is not simply concerned with creating and presenting images to an audience; it is concerned with audience reception and engagement. It is a sensory as well as an intellectual experience; emotional as well as rational. Operation of images opens up the range of possible responses from the audience; it extends the means and outcomes of theatrical experience through communication to an audience.
‘Mise-en-scène’ refers to the process of realising a theatrical text on stage and the particular aesthetic and conceptual frames that have been adopted as part of that process. The mise-en-scène is a means of staging the text through ‘the physical arrangements which articulate and set a frame to the activity within them’. Scenographic concerns, clearly, form a major part of the mise-en-scène. But they are not limited to this. The mise-en-scène does not refer to the performance itself... while scenography does. ... Some designers resist this rather simplistic approach. They have sought to investigate the potential of scenography as an expressive and affective agent of performance.
Ribeiro says that the ‘inhabitable spaces’ which scenography creates are ‘determined by the circumstances and purposes of the action in question and by the movement of the bodies within the space, in order to create a formally coherent and dramatically functional system’. The scenography is part of the performance.
The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography
Elements of scenography
Broadly, these include the scenic environment, objects, costumes, light and sound. However, because scenography focuses more specifically on performance, other elements become equally important. Consideration of space and time are central to scenography. Regard for the performer within the scene underlines the essential three-dimensional nature of scenography and the way this evolves over the duration of performance.
Performers, too, may from time to time be implicated in the scenography. In performance terms, it is sometimes hard to distinguish clearly between what is achieved through the performer’s body and movement of the performer’s costume. Does the performer animate the costume? Does the costume determine bodily gestures? In similar ways, settings, costume and lighting can be seen to drift between categories. Non-naturalistic costume can behave like an environment for the performer; it takes up space and receives light. Light can also be made to appear solid and can define and sculpt space as effectively as more resistant materials.
Although the visual aspect of scenography tends to dominate, it can also work with sound. There are also various ways in which aspects of space may be apprehended, such as the ‘kinaesthetic’ (sense of movement through muscular effort) and the ‘proxemic’ (pertaining to distances between people) and the ‘haptic’ (understanding through sense of touch). Scenographies may also include smell and taste as part of the audience experience.
The audience is a vital component in the completion of scenography. In some work, especially that which takes place outside a theatre building, scenography is used to shape a particular spatial relationship, a certain kind of encounter between audience and performance.
According to Peggy Phelan, once performance is recorded, documented or represented it ‘becomes something other than performance’. In recordings, the multi-sensory experience of live scenography is altered. The auditory and visual are prioritised while spatial dimensions involving depth, scale and proportion, so crucial to the reception of scenography, are adapted. Factors such as vital reference points for appreciation of the spatial, dimensions and dynamics of the performance venue, and the sensing body of the spectator are all downplayed, if not lost, as the live event is edited for the screen.
Things to keep in mind:
The frame or view point of the audience. Different forms of seeing or mediating the story with the audience: ie. a theater space, a white cube, site-specifil location, - experience IRL or mediated through video work or a window.
Relationship with the Audience, where are they throughout the performance?
What do we see that we do not hear from the text? suggesting rather than illustrating?
Time and space - when and where is the attention throughout the performance.
Relationships between text, research, space, colour and composition, style, direction, light, performance and spectators.
Multi-sensorial, what senses? smell, touch, visual, taste, hearing, intuitive energy and ambience of the space (6th sense)
Architectonic structures, light, projected images, sound, costume and performance objects or props.
Movement of the bodies in space
Not only physical arrangement, but integral to the realization and actualization of the full performance.
How does the scenography extend and enriche audience experience of performance through images which operate in conjunction with, but in different ways from, other aspects of the stage.
References
Lili Huston-Herterich
The Sack Hold You, Panter
Monster Chetwynd
A CAT IS NOT A DOG
“Monster Chetwynd is without doubt one of the most important performance and installation artists of our time. Her art invites interaction and makes use of humor as a means of social change. With her installation, Chetwynd directly involves the public by making them cross into the Schirn through the open mouths of her Heads. Her art is direct and can also be understood in this respect both as an invitation and as a democratic statement.”
Chetwynd’s performance and installation art is based on a multitude of influences from film and television, literature, antiquity, art history and philosophy, and even musicals. The artist combines elements of pop and high culture in a casual manner. Thus, the title of the Schirn exhibition “A CAT IS NOT A DOG” is a play on the popular musical Cats, but also on the eponymous film and on its critique, such as the humorous documentary Why Is Cats. With the three Heads Chetwynd is referring at the same time to a motif of the Christian pictorial tradition: the “Hellmouth” or Gateway to Hell. As a passageway or entrance, this motif was also appropriated in Sacro Bosco near Bomarzo, an Italian sculpture garden from the sixteenth century, or in the artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany, as well as in today’s amusement parks.
Sustainability and participation are essential elements for Chetwynd’s creative activity; in the Schirn, the artist makes existing sculptures tangible in a new, location-specific form. The choice of materials and the processual nature of her working method can also be understood as a critical commentary on consumer society. For Chetwynd, the changes which leave their mark on the materials during the process of dismantling and rebuilding also form an essential component of the work. This approach contradicts traditional ideas that art objects are, by definition, unique creations. Also Chetwynd’s repeated changes in name—from Spartacus Chetwynd to Marvin Gaye and finally to Monster Chetwynd—reflect a strategy of undermining the usual rules of art.
Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal.
Delaine Le Bas (b. 1965) is an artist who works within the field of media including installations, drawing, performance, film, photography and sculpture. She studied at St Martins School of Art London for her Masters Degree, and is influenced by her English Romani Gypsy background.
Her work deals with issues of exclusion, identity, stereotypes, untold histories, misrepresentation, gender and being the ‘other’. As a Romani Gypsy she approaches the notion of the body as a stolen artefact and contested space. Clothing and textiles, especially in their cultural, symbolic and identifying qualities, are strands she addresses notably in terms of the stereotypical and political ideas they convey. Costumes in particular play a major role within her performative practice, while fabrics are significantly present within her large detailed installations.
A key part of Delaine’s practice is her site-specific approach: visiting, digesting, filling and occasionally inhabiting the spaces where her work will be shown, she uses locally salvaged materials where possible. This leads to varied cross-media outcomes and frequently to situation performances outside the gallery environment. The essence of a place where a work has been created is of primary importance. Its history, contested spaces, and local materials are reflected in a “bricolage” practice across various surfaces, media, times and places.
She lives and works in various locations within the UK and across Europe.
Juan Pablo Echeverri
The Echeverri Mansion is located on the second floor of a "curved, high, Transylvanian style building" in La Magdalena neighborhood of Bogotá. This place served as the residence, study, showroom, and storage space of the visual artist Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022), who created it, and lived in it from 2017 to 2022. Inside it, Echeverri built a laboratory where he experimented with the agglomeration and superposition of objects, works of art, and collections; a manipulable and reconfigurable "house-thing" in which, as in his work, everything was thought out, but nothing had a stable identity. Private spaces would sometimes turn into spaces for the exhibition of dissimilar objects, brought together according to an unexpected criterion. The Mansion we see today is only one of many that existed in time, and that is why this tour is only one of many possible ones, a temporary door to Echeverri's world.
Mika Rottenberg
NoNoseKnows
In 2014, Rottenberg travelled to the Zhuji, China, to witness the harvesting of cultured pearls––a laborious, repetitious, and undoubtedly alienating process that belies the vision of luxury, natural beauty, and ease that they evoke. NoNoseKnows provides a documentary-like account of the process, highlighting the bleak industrial urban landscapes that have resulted from the effects of the growing pearl trade in the region. The film documents the pearl production process in its entirety: irritants are inserted into young oysters to coax them into producing the pearls that later in the film are harvested by a woman crouching in a dimly lit room: she digs a sharp knife into the plate-sized mature oysters to extract a steady stream of pearls from their viscous pink interiors. At long tables supporting a seemingly unending line of bowls, rows of women sort the pearls, a blindingly quick process that gestures to the skill of the female laborers and the unremitting demand for the commodity.
Squeeze, 2010
Tropical Breeze, 2004
What is the Connection
“Art is always political in a way, and not, at the same time. I think maybe it’s free from making clear statements."
The exceptional video artist Mika Rottenberg here presents her intriguing video installation ‘Cosmic Generator.’ Set on the U.S.-Mexico border and in a huge Chinese market, the work explores the collapse – or reinforcement – of distance. Read less ...
Rottenberg was inspired by a huge plastic commodities market in China (Yiwu Market) as well as a border town between Mexico and California (Mexicali and Calexico), which has a lot of traffic back and forth in spite of the big border wall running through it. In contrast to this, the market in China had merchandises that were unique to that place: “I was interested in, on one hand, how certain objects are allowed to circulate the world very freely, and how, on the other hand, some other objects, or products, or people, are very restricted…” The border town is also known for its underground tunnels, and rather than looking at it in a bigger political sense, Rottenberg thought of it as a sculpture that subverts the border with its divisions of space and distance.
“Art is always political in a way, and not, at the same time. I think maybe it’s free from making clear statements. I hope it’s more nuanced than a political statement.” Because she began the piece before Trump came into office, suddenly the connection she had sensed between the Chinese market and the border town became more real: “And then he started talking all about China and Mexico, and I was like, oh, I guess there was a connection.” In continuation of this, Rottenberg feels that art – “like in a good painting” – allows you to choose to focus on a detail rather than on the entire picture: “It’s a subjective reading of our world right now from a very intuitive and textural kind of place.”
Mika Rottenberg is a video artist born in 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now based in New York City. She is best known for her surreal video and installation work that often deals with the subject of female labour. Working in video, installation and sculpture, her video works often feature women with unconventional bodies in performances, who perform physical acts that reflect the human condition in post-modern times. Rottenberg’s work has been exhibited internationally.
In the video, Rottenberg talks about her video installation ‘Cosmic Generator (Loaded #1)’, 2017, which reflects on our globally connected reality. ‘Cosmic Generator’ refers to a tunnel system that establishes a trading connection between various places and actors, among them the Mexican city of Mexicali, and Calexico, the Californian town on the other side of the border fence. Rumour has it that the entrance to the tunnels can be accessed via shops and restaurants in Mexicali’s Chinatown.
Scenes from Western Culture (2015), which will be on view in Chelsea, is a series that depicts idyllic representations of Western life. The nine videos, or “cinematic paintings,” present non-narrative scenes: a couple dining at a New York restaurant, children playing in a garden in Germany, a woman swimming in a private pool. The picturesque tableaux unfold almost like advertisements, portraying tranquil, inviting moments that captivate in their beauty. Also on view in Chelsea will be Architecture and Morality (2016), a series of paintings Kjartansson completed during a two week period in the West Bank in conjunction with the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Taking his easel and paints to the contested Israeli settlements, the artist made representational oil paintings of homes en plein air from morning till dusk, finishing one painting a day. Kjartansson’s straightforward landscapes contrast with the political complexity of the region they represent.
Ragnar Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums, creating video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings that draw upon myriad historical and cultural references. An underlying pathos and irony connect his works, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater. The artist blurs the distinctions between mediums, approaching his painting practice as performance, likening his films to paintings, and his performances to sculpture. Throughout, Kjartansson conveys an interest in beauty and its banality, and he uses durational, repetitive performance as a form of exploration.
Bliss, 2020.
Figures in Landscape (Monday), 2018.
Figures in Landscape consists of seven distinct 24-hour scenes, each a silent, single-channel video work, filmed on a set hand-painted as an archetypal landscape: a forest, a desert, barren mountains, a beach, a jungle, snow-covered mountains, and a meadow. The seven scenes will be played simultaneously and repeat continuously throughout the duration of the show.
As Kjartansson describes the work: “There is no narrative, nothing happens, simply the movement of people in white lab coats walking around in the landscape. Figures in Landscape is a nod to heroic murals of science and prosperity, with a modern, mundane twist.”
When repeated continuously, however, each scene in Figures in Landscape functions as a timepiece of sorts - the figures’ familiar movements marking the fixed moments of an individual day, or if the scenes are played in sequence, an entire week.
Wael Shawky
Drama 1882
With Drama 1882, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky presents a powerful and layered work exploring themes of power, historiography, and representation. Wael Shawky's work often addresses changing societies, focusing on themes of migration, religion, and power—always with a nod to contemporary realities.
Drama 1882 centers on a pivotal moment in Egyptian history: the Urabi Revolution (1879–1882), a military-led uprising against foreign interference in Egypt. In 1882, the revolution was suppressed by the British, who subsequently maintained control over Egypt until 1956.
Who decides who is a hero, a freedom fighter—or a terrorist? Drama 1882 poses this critical question, revealing how those in power often shape the narratives that are told. Shawky’s work not only reflects on the past but also speaks directly to the present. By blending fact, speculation, and fiction, he reimagines history through a unique artistic lens—offering an alternative perspective.
Between opera and painting
Shawky composed the music and wrote the libretto himself, with the lyrics performed by professional singers in classical Arabic. The work probes the meaning of the word “drama”—suggesting not only theatre and imagination, but also struggle, loss, and doubt. What is fact, and what is fiction? The images unfold slowly, layered one over another, evoking the effect of a painting coming to life. The result is a mesmerizing visual opera.
About Wael Shawky
Wael Shawky (b. 1971, Alexandria) gained international recognition with Cabaret Crusades (2010–2015), a trilogy that retells the history of the Crusades through marionettes from an Arab perspective. His work often addresses changing societies, focusing on themes of migration, religion, and power—always with a nod to contemporary realities. Shawky has previously exhibited at MoMA (New York), the Louvre (Paris), Tate Modern (London), and MACBA (Barcelona). Drama 1882 was jointly acquired last year by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Bonnefanten Maastricht, and Centraal Museum Utrecht.
Anna Uddenberg
Through the feedback loop of consumerist culture, Anna Uddenberg investigates how body culture, spirituality, and self-staging are intertwined with the mediation and production of subjectivity by new technologies and circulation of forms. Her practice integrates approaches to gender while acting as a space for reflecting on taste and class, appropriation and sexuality, pushing these questions into new material territories. Uddenberg’s work continues to confront feminine identity in consumer culture and explores performativity by using sculpture and performance as visual platforms. The use of automobile skeletal structures and other utilitarian structures in her latest abstract and figurative works refers to the concept of comfort zone and proxies for architecture. The 'furnituresque' outlook is a result of multiple rearrangements of everyday objects and materials, which are set in a new dialogue with one another.
Anna Imhof
Anne Imhof (*1978) has emerged over the past decade as one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Today based between Berlin and New York, Imhof spent her formative years in Frankfurt am Main, where she taught herself to draw and make music while working as a bouncer at a local night club. Before eventually enrolling at the city’s academy of fine arts, Städelschule, she staged what she later designated the first entry to her catalogue raisonné: a one-night only performance in a red light district bar. She invited two boxers to take part and recruited a band. The boxers were told that the fight should last for as long as the music was playing, while the band were instructed to play for as long as the boxers were fighting. Imhof explained: “It was all pretty red—the table dance bar and the noses. Looking back on it I realized that it had been one way to create a picture.”
Doom
Anne Imhof’s scenography for her much-anticipated Park Avenue Armory commission, DOOM: House of Hope (2025), is American to the max. Inside a semi-dark Wade Thompson Drill Hall, viewers are confronted with rows of gleaming black Cadillac Escalades. The immense hall, made to resemble a high school gym, features black barriers that cordon off the space at first and are subsequently pushed around to guide the audience’s movements (Imhof’s work notoriously lacks traditional seating). To one side, a prom scene has been set up; silver balloons float above clustered chairs and tables beside a wall of mylar streamers. A glance to our right shows the entrance to a row of antechambers styled as locker rooms. Overhead, a jumbotron counts down the three-hour duration of the performance, occasionally switching to poetic excerpts and livestreams of the different scenes. The German-born artist has clearly set her mind not to repeat her 2015 experience, when her performance work DEAL at MoMA PS1, which involved live rabbits, didn’t land all that well with American audiences. A decade later, with a Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale for Faust (2017) under her belt, Imhof intends to meet New Yorkers where they’re at – and has left her most extreme ritualistic props at home. (from: https://www.frieze.com/article/anne-imhof-doom-house-of-hope-review-2025)
critique to the work: https://hyperallergic.com/994000/anne-imhofs-armory-performance-is-a-bad-balenciaga-ad/
Dean’s most totemic work is not video art at all but a monument to celluloid proper. It was prompted by the closure of the UK’s last film production lab and the international campaign she then launched to save her medium, 16mm. Created for the Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern, its shifting imagery projected on to a 13-metre vertical screen deftly explores film’s unique physicality.
FILM 2011 is a portrait of the analogue, photochemical, non-digital medium of film, made by the artist Tacita Dean. It is silent, lasts 10 minutes and 42 seconds, and is played on a continuous loop. Dean made FILM by turning a Cinemascope lens ninety degrees, upending the usual landscape format so it becomes vertical and in scale with the proportions of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, for which the work was commissioned in 2011 as part of the Unilever Series. It has been produced in an edition of four, of which Tate’s copy is number one. FILM depicts Tate Modern, however many of the scenes are overlaid with scratches and paint or oversaturated with colour. It has sprocket holes evocative of the analogue medium down the left- and right-hand sides. When the work was shown as part of the Unilever Series in 2011–12, it was projected on a specially made screen on the eastern wall of the Turbine Hall.
To produce the various visual effects in FILM Dean used both in-camera and studio techniques, such as masking, double-exposure and glass matte painting. Dean’s edit of the material, as well as her additions and manipulations, established a relationship between the artist’s hand and the mechanically produced film. The effect is playful and intimate, reminding us of the pro-filmic event – the real situation happening in front of the camera – even when projected on a monumental scale. The ad-hoc nature of the images also points to the early days of cinema, even though the film used was some of the last to be produced at the Kodak factory and so might also be seen as a lament for a nearly extinct process. In the press release for the display of FILM at Tate Modern, Dean commented that the work aimed, ‘to show film as film can be – film in its purest form’ (‘The Unilever Series 2011: Tacita Dean’, press release, Tate, 10 October 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/unilever-series-2011-tacita-dean, accessed 25 June 2018). Critic Adrian Searle, writing in the Guardian newspaper, described it as: ‘A silent movie, Film is a rejoinder to the digital noise of the modern world. It recalls early cinema and experiments with colour, cinema as art abstraction and as home movie, structuralist film and underground cinema. It is cool and passionate, lovely and weirdly old-fashioned.’ (Adrian Searle, ‘Tacita Dean: Film – Review, Guardian, 10 October 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-dean-film-review, accessed 25 June 2018.)
As FILM was projected on a screen in the Turbine Hall, the architecture of Tate Modern became an integral element of the work. The steel beams which clad the walls also structured the composition of the various montage shots, while the long and narrow series of windows on the far wall recalled the strips of film, offering the viewer a complex interweaving of film and setting, real and artificial world. (from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-film-t14273)
Omer Fast | 5000 Feet Is the Best, 2011
An interview with a US air force drone pilot, who drops bombs remotely via what he sees on a screen, unites Fast’s cinematic hall of mirrors. This source material is reimagined via docudrama and Tarantino-esque shaggy dog stories, until fact and fiction blur. Fast strikes at how film itself – from action movies to news footage – skews our perception of reality.
In his work, artist and filmmaker Omer Fast (1972, Jerusalem) explores the space and narrative form of cinema. The storylines of his films are reminiscent of those of Akira Kurosawa, such as Rashomon, a film which tells the story of a murder through the eyes of four witnesses, including the murderer. This multiplicity of perspectives, which makes it possible to present different versions of the same story, represents a break from the usual linear structure of cinema. As many of Fast’s films show, another aim of film and video in contemporary art is to redefine the relationship between reality and fiction. The artist explores the structures of the narrative and how they change at the moment that they are transferred from the screen to the viewer. He analyzes these structures by not only focusing on different perspectives in the storyline, but also by highlighting various aspects of film production in the work, such as the casting, subtitling, decor, etc. During this stedelijk|film evening, Fast’s work takes a central place. The artist will give a lecture, followed by a screening of his work 5000 Feet is the Best, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2011.
5000 FEET IS THE BEST (2011, 30 MINUTES)
5000 feet – at this distance drones can identify virtually anything. A former drone operator in the American army, who operated “Predator” drones, alleged that it was possible to identify shoes, clothes, and the color of a person’s hair. The term “operator” suggests that the soldier is more of a cameraman than a pilot in relation to the flying object. With the camera, he navigates at a different distance from the drone, which is equipped with sensors and projectiles, and is part of the reality of a war theater, like a sort of avatar. In 2010, Fast was able to make contact with a former drone operator, despite the fact that the FBI quickly removed his search on Craigslist and his producer received threatening phone calls. During two meetings at a hotel in Las Vegas, the soldier was questioned about the technology and the routines of his work. He also talked about incidents in which civilians died and about the psychological problems he suffered as a result.
Fast does not attempt to try to stage a reconstruction of the interview in the film 5000 Feet is the Best. Instead, he recreates the traumatic experience of the “drone operator” in the film experience. The story is an endless loop which is not repeated completely identically, but is constantly changing. It is a jumble of sounds and images, of visual representations and what is represented, in which fact and fiction can no longer be clearly separated from each other. Fast’s themes not only include the effects of linking arms and communication technology, but also refers to the influence of technological developments in the army and in cinema as they relate to way perception and images work.
ABOUT OMER FAST
Omer Fast was born in Jerusalem in 1972. He gained a bachelor of arts in English language and culture at Tufts University, a bachelor of fine arts at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and a master of fine arts at Hunter College, City University New York. Since Fast graduated in 2000, he has presented solo exhibitions in the Whitney Museum in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna. He has participated in group exhibitions, including at Documenta 13, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Fast was awarded the Bucksbaum prize for his work The Casting, which was screened during the Whitney Biennale in 2008. He was also awarded the National Galerie’s Prize for Young Art in Berlin in 2009 for his work Nostalgia. His works are included in various international collections, such as those of the Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou. Fast recently completed the film Remainder, which is based on Tom McCarthy’s eponymous novel. (from: https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/events/omer-fast)
Ed Atkins | Us Dead Talk Love, 2012
Two talking cadavers, digitally rendered in uncanny high-definition, discuss violence, sex, depression, narcissism and male fragility. The British artist’s video is a biting satire on the alienating nature of our media-saturated age, full of sad, dead people, in which emotions are merely performed for the algorithms that control us.
Atkins works primarily with high definition video and writing, exploring ideas of corporeality and materiality through digital and immaterial means. Using prosumer technology, he exploits the conventions of cinema and literature, attempting to materialise the body of the imagery, the equipment and the figure behind the camera.
For his exhibition at Chisenhale, Atkins has produced a new two-channel video work and surround-sound installation set against a backdrop of collaged panels. Us Dead Talk Love focuses on a dialogue between two cadavers that reflects upon immanence, representation and narcissism. Atkins describes the work as ‘a tragedy of love, intimacy, incoherence and eyelashes.’
Projected onto two angled screens, the video installation suggests the configuration of an interviewer and interviewee, in relation to one another and a gathered audience. Shifting through various moods and representational modes, the two cadavers discuss half-remembered desires, intimacy and love. Animation, keying techniques, immersive sound design, and the interdependent cutting of image and sound are all explored in order to exploit their affective potential - both emotional and physical – on the audience.
Combining physical presence and spiritual absence, the subject of the cadaver serves to parody the medium of the work itself. Atkins’s interest in High Definition and surround-sound technologies lies in their paradoxical ability to render surface and physicality, producing images that he has described as ‘at once both preposterously life-like and utterly dead.’Us Dead Talk Love continues Atkins’s precise exploration of both the material qualities of our contemporary image world and its existential resonance.
Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission by Ed Atkins in his largest solo exhibition to date, Us Dead Talk Love . Atkins works primari
Ed Atkins’ video works are fascinated by our relationship with contemporary technologies of representation and how they variously exceed or fail in their attempt to sufficiently capture us. His works employ both found and custom-made digital materials, united by music and anxiety.
As a parody of airport security displays, the multi-channel video work Safe Conduct, 2016 portrays security paranoia attempted pacified by an aesthetic of cartoon compliance and familiar cultural stock. Safe Conduct is a grimly comic dance animated to the mechanical mania of Ravel’s Bolero, an overly familiar piece of music that accompanies proceedings like a delirious theme tune.
Hito Steyerl | How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013
In the 1950s, the US military built targets in the Californian desert with which to calibrate aerial photography. So began – the narrator in this faux-instructional video tells us – our hyper-surveilled age. Mixing original footage, animation and green-screen technology, Steyerl exposes the links between tech, warfare and capitalism.
*Artist and critic Hito Steyerl's video works explore how images are produced, circulated, and shared. The artist has referred to images as a "condensation of social forces," suggesting that through them we can trace the underlying systems of the contemporary world.
In this satirical take on instructional films, Steyerl demonstrates several tongue-in-cheek strategies for remaining "unseen" in a world subject to new, sophisticated means of surveillance—pointing to the ways in which our technologies encroach on physical experience. Much of the work was shot on a desert site riddled with photo calibration targets used by the military to hone the focus of airplane cameras. Acts of war are therefore mediated by digital tools; Steyerl drives this point home by superimposing a computer desktop onto the desert landscape, underscoring the links between economies of violence, communication, and entertainment. In her words, "How do people disappear in an age of total over-visibility? . . . Are people hidden by too many images? Do they go hide amongst other images? Do they become images?” (from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/181784)
Other works:
Factory of the Sun -
Factory of the Sun is an immersive video which samples different genres of moving image including documentary film, video games, drone surveillance, advertising, news footage, and YouTube dance videos. The video tells the story of workers whose forced actions in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. The light produced serves as a metaphor for the light emitted from digital screens, and the electromagnetic frequencies used to transmit information around the globe. Steyerl uses light to point to the ambiguous relationship between individual agency, economic interests and indiscernible power in our technologically mediated age. Shifting between playful and menacing, Factory of the Sun draws viewers into a game-like world that nevertheless reflects contemporary questions.
Liquidity Inc.
is a multilayered portrait of Jacob Wood, a financial analyst who lost his job in the economic crash of 2008 and became a career mixed-martial-arts fighter. Wood’s story unfolds through real and virtual worlds that are made to overlap, combining conventions of documentary film with Internet syntax—hashtags, GIFs, and memes.
With its computer-generated waves and news footage of hurricanes and tsunamis, the work uses water and extreme
weather as metaphors for the fluidity of financial assets and digital information, and for a collective sense of instability. Conflating terms from meteorology, geopolitics, and digital culture, masked forecasters wryly suggest that weather patterns are determined by our own emotional states. You are invited to sit on the architectural structure, lined with judo mats, which the artist has compared to a raft wrecked by a raging storm.
The video installation MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE presented at Trafó Gallery reveals similar ’invasions’ of history and emphasizes their cyclical nature by turning towards the processes of economic and political realignment that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by featuring examples that target our hyper-contemporary world armed with trend analysis, data mining, political advertising and audience targeting.
Pierre Huyghe | Untitled (Human Mask), 2014
Huyghe’s deeply unsettling video confronts our century’s most pressing question mark: the post-human world. Partly shot using a drone in the Fukushima nuclear disaster zone, it features a fur-covered, masked lone survivor, slowly revealed to be a monkey, abandoned in a restaurant to navigate this new existence.
*This film was inspired by a real situation. It opens with a pan of a deserted streetscape near Fukushima, Japan, which was devastated by natural and man-made disasters in 2011. Amid the ruin, the camera enters an abandoned restaurant and finds what appears to be the only survivor: a monkey adorned with a mask and costume of a young girl. This attire is similar to that in which her owners dress her to work in their sake house. Automaton-like and alone in this dystopian setting, she continues to carry out her duties—tasks she learned by watching and mimicking the restaurant’s staff. Seemingly trapped in her repetitive role, she now works for herself alone.
Over the course of his career and across many diverse media, Huyghe has developed an artistic practice that examines the complex and often contradictory ways in which humans relate to the natural world and to its intelligent and often inscrutable systems. Huyghe has incorporated living animals, plants, and insects as components in many of his visionary projects. Throughout his various networks of objects and ideas, Huyghe explores the paradoxical rift between what we think we know about the world and what it can and cannot, in turn, tell us. Untitled (Human Mask) evokes many such themes: the monotony of work and the repetition of ritualistic behaviors, the possibility of a catastrophic future, and the power that living creatures hold over us as ciphers of ourselves. (from: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/684796)
William Kentridge | More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015
An animated death dance, in which Africa’s victims of disasters both natural and political pass by, sounds a sombre prospect. Yet surprisingly, this work, projected across floor-to-ceiling screens lined up in a 40-metre semicircle, is a joyous musical event, a monumental ode to resilience in the face of horror.
South African artist William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance encircles viewers in a seemingly endless parade of people. Featuring a dancing procession of animated drawings and videos, the 35-metre-long frieze of moving images and sound invites us to join in a danse macabre, while offering an opportunity to reflect on injustice and inhumanity.
"I am interested in political art, that is to say, an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay. The film itself...becomes part of a series of projects looking at the despair at the end of utopian projects..."
– William Kentridge
Ryan Trecartin , Site Visit , 2015
Made in collaboration with Lizzie Fitch and Rhett LaRue, Trecartin’s video parodies the well-worn scary Hollywood movie (The Blair Witch Project, 1999, the Scream franchise, 1996–, even the lampooning Scary Movie, 2000–), this genre itself comfortably out of vogue with mainstream audiences for at least ten years. It follows a band of characters inside a haunted Masonic temple in Los Angeles, who attempt to spend the night in a colony of tents inside the building while putting up with the hijinks of perturbed (potentially imaginary) ghosts. Spliced between rapid montages of footage from the Masonic temple (sets designed by Fitch) are 3D animations by artist LaRue. The video, frantic in pace, with rapidly changing camera angles, is amusing but nothing to write home about, and dangerously plays into the platitude that such frenetic camerawork somehow sheds light upon our goldfishlike attention spans, supposedly fractured by the new omnipresence of advanced technology.
Site Visit is the name of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin's recent exhibition in Berlin. The show is divided into two parts: sound and video, (Though the video part also includes sound, naturally.) The sound installation is in a green carpeted foyer area leading in to the video installation. It consists of rows of electric leather arm chairs that allow you to adjust your seating position into a laying one via an array of buttons, which also make the chairs rumble and vibrate, like those old motel beds that took a quarter. Rumble and vibrate to the rumbles and vibrations of the music being blasted quite loud by the surrounding speakers – discordant bass rhythms. Less composed music, it's more like mutant alien ghetto blaster sonicscapes. Very shit-your-pants rumbly, and with green martian lights beneath each of the armchairs shining out, turning the floor into a production.
Vibrato as a lifestyle choice. The aliens live in each of us. You remove your ass from your armchair and make your way into the video room. Along the way, further layer of sounds are discovered: before you make your way down the stairs, you are further blasted with more speakers, silver plattering out a thin slice of fuzzy and distorted beach sounds. Moving past, you reach the apex, the video room with six screens and seats aimed in all directions, including the ceiling, where one of the screens can be found.
Filmed in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles, the video work features Trecartin and Fitch’s regular ensemble, who will be familiar to anyone who has seen the duo’s past efforts like I-BE Area or Center Jenny. The essentially cultic nature of the artist's productions makes total sense transferred to the abandoned shell of the freemasons’ headquarters. Impossible, like their earlier work, to summarize, the impression one gets is of a group trapped in a cross between a reality TV show—this time, something like Ghost Hunters—and a Blair Witch-style horror flick, yet with the cameras moving too fast, the caricatures each person inhabits speaking too fast and egomaniacally to bother with the making of sense. Nonetheless, given the maximalist intensity and the all-overness of the installation’s presentation, you can readily lose yourself in it for an hour or more. For those following the path, it is a pivotal stop on Fitch and Trecartin’s ongoing exploration of presence in the digital age. WM (from: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/fitch-kw-institute-contemporary-art/3088)
Different works:
Arthur Jafa | Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, 2018
Jafa’s searing indictment of US oppression debuted shortly after Trump’s inauguration. It is a supercharged seven minutes, with footage of black icons, police brutality and the struggles ordinary black people face daily, set to Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam. Screened simultaneously by 13 art institutions this year as the BLM movement gathered pace, its power grows and grows.
*Jafa’s work is a seven-minute video made up of clips collaged from original and found footage. Distressing scenes of historic and contemporary violence inflicted on Black Americans by individuals and institutions are woven with scenes of religious ecstasy, athletic prowess, poetic and musical performance – what Jafa has called ‘a Black display of Black excellence.’
*Jafa believes that black culture music has already actualized the black community as a people with a rightful spot in the world. The challenge he is trying to crush with his art projects is for black cinema to command power.
The big question that Jafa tries to answer is how black cinema can be made to respond to prevailing political, economic and spiritual dimensions. Love is the message is a video work that capitalizes on the power of the sun to tell a story.
As someone would look up to the sun to view what and when things are happening, Jafa encourages his audience to look up (never down) to the struggles that black people deal with. (from:https://publicdelivery.org/arthur-jafa-love-is-the-message/)
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue,2013
Camille Henrot’s extensive research across a range of disciplines like philosophy, anthropology, and history often shapes her work, including Grosse Fatigue. She made the video while in residence at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., digging into its vast collections to pull together images of objects and specimens, like animal skeletons and carved figurines, with footage she shot in offices and collection storage. Henrot merges this with additional video clips and images she both made and found online.
Characterizing her structuring of Grosse Fatigue as “an experience of density itself,” she frames this material in layered pop-up windows that continually open and close against the changing background of a computer desktop. Brief pauses in the pacing stand out in Henrot’s otherwise rapid-fire sequencing. Sometimes, a woman’s hands appear in the frames, nails playfully manicured to match the colorful backgrounds. A spoken word-style voiceover, which interweaves stories of creation from across cultures, structures the visual cacophony. Henrot describes this mash-up of scientific discovery and religious myth-making as an “intuitive unfolding of knowledge,” a presentation meant to highlight our abundance of information, as well as its limits.
Laure Provoust - video installations
Language – in its broadest sense – permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that combine film and installation in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost’s work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage and wordplay and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, spoken and written phrases. The videos are often shown within immersive environments which comprise found objects, sculptures, painting and drawings, signs, furniture and architectural assemblages, that are rendered complicit within the overarching narrative of the installation.
the wet wet wanderer is a new work by Laure Prouvost developed from a sequence selected from the seven part feature-length film The Wanderer (2012). The latter mis-translates fellow artist Rory Macbeth’s mistranslation of a Kafka novella from German with no knowledge of the language or a dictionary. In the ‘wet sequence’ section of the film we follow the progress of Gregor, a tortured writer daubing paper with squid ink; a novel in the making, a mind unraveling, time stalled, distended, and looping.
Prouvost’s installation transforms the ground floor of Witte de With into a sodden sub-aqueous bar, laced with squid ink and dotted with vodka fountains. Plays of projected light cast over objects intensify intoxicatedly as day moves to night. Combining sculpture, video and sound, the form of a mundane high street commercial space is defamiliarized and shot through with a Kafkaesque narrative overlay that metamorphoses literature into space, film into sculpture. Here language is as slippery as a squid, function as deceitful as fiction.
the wet wet wanderer follows previous works in Prouvost’s oeuvre in building an immersive installation with which to frame audio and film works. These set an encompassing mood and wrong-foot interpretation, seducing and provoking the viewer to become an active part of the fictions she concocts. Here, wetness is the central theme in a melancholic and visceral space of rain, water, fish tanks and the body of the squid. In our protagonist Gregor the trope of the tortured alcoholic writer and doomed lover is absurdly magnified to melodramatic proportions. The figure of the squid, a primordial creature that simultaneously embodies both pulpy disgust and aquiline beauty; twin bodily affects engendered by the work. The squid has long been a fascination to Prouvost as a creature whose highly developed consciousness precedes our own by millions of years; here the sea as the birthplace of the mind cues the complexity of the act of creation. (From: https://www.fkawdw.nl/en/our_program/exhibitions/laure_prouvost_the_wet_wet_wanderer)
From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works
By Barbara London, Skye Sherwin & Oliver BascianoSat 17 Oct 2020 09.00 CESTShare73
Matthew Barney | The Cremaster Cycle, 1994-2002
Matthew Barney is best known as the producer and creator of the Cremaster cycle, a series of five visually extravagant films created out of sequence (Cremaster 4 began the cycle, followed by Cremaster 1, etc.). The films generally feature Barney in myriad roles, including characters as diverse as a satyr, a magician, and even the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore. The title of the cycle refers to the muscle that raises and lowers the male reproductive system according to external stimuli such as temperature or fear. The films themselves are a grand mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology—an intensely private universe in which symbols and images are densely layered and interconnected. The resulting cosmology is both beautiful and complex. Barney sees the human body as a biological instrument and a sculptural tool. His works combine obsessive athletic endeavors with his own highly personalized mythology. Crossing from sculpture to film to video, he seamlessly creates dramas that inhabit a zone that is both psychological and physical.
As the cycle evolved over eight years (1994–2002), this biological model was joined by other paradigms such as biography and mythology that have added to Barney’s fantastical narrative constructs. In Barney’s eccentric universe, nothing can be construed as simply one thing or the other. He challenges our dualistic categories (male/female, entropy/order, motion/inertia) with new possibilities.
About the Artist
Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967; at age six, he moved to Boise, Idaho. When his parents separated, Barney continued to live with his father in Idaho, while his mother, an abstract painter, moved to New York City. As a teenager Barney played football on his high-school team. His experiences as an athlete informed his earliest work. For his thesis exhibition at Yale University, he created an installation of video and sculptural objects that combined the physicality of sports, the fetishistic nature of athletic equipment, and the endurance involved in performance art. After graduating college Barney moved to New York City and entered the art world to almost instant success.
Between 1988 and 1993, Barney developed the Drawing Restraint series. He devised situations of self-imposed restriction, such as jumping on a trampoline, climbing over obstacles, or restraining himself with surgical latex hosing, through which he would produce artworks. In this series he explored the feasibility of creating something under severe physical constraints.
Ottoshaft, 1995.
Secondary, 2023. Five-channel 4K color video installation with immersive sound. Running time: 60 minutes
DRAWING RESTRAINT, Sammlung Goetz, 2008
Paul McCarthy | Painter, 1995
Performers/Participants: Paul McCarthy, Brian Butler, Sabine Hornig, Fredrik Nilsen and Barbara Smith
Originally trained as a painter, Paul McCarthy currently uses video and sculpture as his primary mediums. Coming from the context of 1960s American ‘happenings’ and performance art, McCarthy’s work seeks to destroy boundaries of taste, tradition and public morality. In ‘Painter’ the mythology of the artist as hero is attacked in a grotesquely parodic performance that unambiguously points to the abstract expressionists. McCarthy said in a 1993 interview that his work came out of kids’ television in Los Angeles. Performing as the painter, McCarthy undermines pre-packaged ideas about the creative process by turning it into an absurdist soap-opera.
Paul McCarthy is a seminal West Coast artist. He is a professor in the fine arts department at UCLA, who has influenced successive generations of artists. McCarthy is known for his raw, visceral work which has taken form in a wide variety of media (photography, painting, performance, sculpture, video, installation, drawing, painting) ranging in scale from monumental to intimate. Playing on illusions and cultural myths, the melding of human physicality with architecture, crossing boundaries and confounding expectations, McCarthy’s work often embodies obsessive activities and challenges expected physical orientation. (from: https://v2.nl/people/paul-mccarthy)
Pipilotti Rist | Ever Is Over All, 1997
This video put Rist’s lushly floral and anarchic vision on the cultural map. One screen takes us through a field of red-hot poker flowers. On the other, a woman joyfully smashes car windows with a massive bloom, sharing a smile with a female cop. Beyoncé riffs on this in her video for Hold Up.
Rist's imagery has several foundations, and invites just as many interpretations. Culled from resources as rich and varied as fairy tales, feminism, contemporary culture, and her own imagination, the artist's color-saturated, kaleidoscopic projections are a sophisticated visual amalgam of wit, humor, and irony.
Ever Is Over All is a video installation comprising two sharply contrasting projections on adjacent walls accompanied by a melancholic melody. On the right is a large field of bright-red long-stemmed flowers, filmed in close-up with a roving camera. On the left, filmed in medium- and long-shot, is a smiling young woman in a blue dress and red shoes. Walking toward the viewer in slow motion along a car-lined sidewalk, she suddenly raises what appears to be one of the blooms seen in the projection to the right, and, in a burst of inexplicable violence, uses it to smash the window of a parked vehicle. As she moves down the sidewalk and shatters another car window, a policewoman approaches from behind and offers a friendly salute in passing. The anarchic young woman gleefully carries on breaking windows.
Fiction-versus-reality is an important theme for Rist, in whose work an odd combination of nightmare and magic prevails over the logic of common sense. In Ever Is Over All, the artist juxtaposes the field and its flowers with her magically powerful wand, and transposes acts of aggression and annihilation into benevolent and creative ones.
Additional text
From her early music-video-style works to her later immersive projection environments, Rist’s unique artistic vocabulary is rooted in popular culture, technology, and historical feminist video art. Ever Is Over All is one of Rist’s first large-scale installations, giving spatial dimension to her lush visual language, which often combines imagery suggestive of female sexuality with enhanced images of nature and the everyday to create hypersaturated worlds that are part reality, part fantasy. Shot in a single take using consumer-grade video cameras, the work emphasizes the painterly qualities of standard-definition video, in which the pixels or “color noise” that compose the image are visible.
Here Rist transforms a destructive impulse into a hopeful, cathartic gesture. Accompanied by a dreamy musical soundtrack, the installation consists of two overlapping video projections. At left a woman proudly strides down a city sidewalk. She carries a tall flower of a variety that is also seen in the projection at right, which depicts a field of the large tropical blooms. Both videos have been slowed to a hypnotic pace, creating a sense of calm that is periodically disrupted when, in an inexplicable burst of violence, the protagonist forcefully swings the flower at the window of a parked car, which shatters dramatically; in a poetic use of magical realism, the flower is a weapon strong enough to break glass. Meanwhile, an approaching female police officer smiles and salutes her in approval.
Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene.
Johan Grimonprez | Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997
Vietnam veteran Raffaele Minichiello went down in history as the world’s first transatlantic airline hijacker when in 1969 he forced a TWA pilot at gunpoint to fly from California to Italy. A great many revolutionaries, adventurers and terrorists have followed his example. is a brief history of plane hijacking made by Belgian artist Johan Gimonprez. This video essay premiered in 1997 at the Documenta X arts exhibition, where it proved to be his international breakthrough. The mix of news footage, science fiction clips, found footage and home videos shows how Minichiello’s imitators became increasingly extreme, and their actions more deadly. As well as being about terrorism in the pre-9/11 era, is perhaps even more about the ever-increasing influence of the mass media. It starts with a quote from Don DeLillo’s novel , in which a writer enters into dialogue with a terrorist. The writer argues that the airplane hijacker has displaced him in his ability to exert influence. Gimonprez, in turn, argues that radio and TV have hijacked terrorism. They have transformed it into a spectacle, which the director emphasizes by packing the soundtrack with sunny pop music. is disturbing and intense – and in the light of 9/11 surely also prophetic.
Mark Leckey | Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999
Leckey crafts an alternative history from found footage of British clubbers across the decades in his seminal film. As tribes of mostly white working-class kids wig out and the timecode ticks by, a strikingly fresh anthem to the brevity of youth emerges. The pertinence of his approach has only grown with the years (and YouTube).
*Mark Leckey addresses the sense of abundance in contemporary culture. In his films, sculptures, and installations, the artist has often assumed the role of alchemist by translating objects and images into new mediums and endowing them with novel interpretations. In the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), Leckey spliced altered video footage from dance clubs with an amalgamation of sounds to examine countercultural nightlife, revealing the poignant interpersonal energy among and socio-economic aspirations of its revelers. The video is sourced from footage of British clubs that spans trends in fashion and attitude from the 1970s to the 1990s. Despite the differences among the partygoers, Leckey’s film unites the disparate cultural moments in a frenzy of youthful, euphoric ritual. Tongue in cheek, the title alludes to Italian fashion house Fiorucci, wildly popular during the artist’s youth in the late ’70s. Although dress and taste evolve through Leckey’s edited juxtapositions, brand allegiance and material symbolism are undeniable constants in an otherwise fleeting remix of three decades of dance culture. (from:https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/15753)
Shirin Neshat | Rapture, 1999
Shirin Neshat’s work addresses the social, political, and psychological dimensions of women’s experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Because Rapture was made prior to the events of September 11, 2001, and the renewed tensions between the United States and the Middle East, current viewers’ reactions are informed by associations about Islam and Iran that would likely not have affected perceptions of the work at the time of its 1999 debut in a focus exhibition at the Art Institute. Rapture is a meditation on the gender politics of Islam. These relationships, embodied by the image of the veiled woman, are often subjected to reductive caricature in the West. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives have not been explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world. (from: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/184206/rapture)
Steve McQueen | Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep, 2002
McQueen’s masterpiece follows African miners into the world’s deepest gold mine: the furthest humans have gone beneath the earth, where atmospheric pressure is 920 times the norm and the temperature can reach 70C. The machinery is deafening, but in mirroring the workers’ experience, much of the film takes place in a disorienting darkness.
British artist Steve McQueen’s projected video and film installations are rich in cinematic tradition and compelling in content. His earliest works—black-and-white silent films—are indebted to 1960s structural filmmaking, wherein the mechanics of shooting and projection become essential components of the film’s subject. His more recent work explores the relation between the medium and the spectator. At once confrontational and seductive, these colossally scaled works transform a purely visual experience into a visceral event. Presented as a single installation, Caribs’ Leap and Western Deep are linked by the theme of descent. The dual-screen projection Caribs’ Leap juxtaposes luminous scenes of the beachfront on the island of Grenada—the birthplace of McQueen’s parents—with irregular images of tiny figures falling through a vast sky. The latter pay homage to the island’s indigenous Caribs, who in 1651 leapt to their death rather than surrender to the invading French. In Western Deep, the viewer takes a nightmarish journey into the hot, noisy depths of a South African goldmine. Presented and considered together, these two films suggestively liken modern mining conditions to a historical act of genocide.
Installation views:
Pirelli HangarBicocca presents the exhibition by Steve McQueen. Find out more here.
Cao Fei | Whose Utopia, 2006
Set to a techno soundtrack, the Chinese art star’s breakout work initially documents the relentless production of machines and humans in a lightbulb factory. The tone shifts magically in its second half, as workers abandon their posts to dance ballet or play guitar, using factory rhythms to create a dream world of expression.
*Whose Utopia (2006) centers on the lives of workers at the Osram lighting factory in China’s Pearl River Delta region, an area outside Hong Kong that is a site of nationwide migration by people seeking expanded work opportunities in the country’s blossoming economy. Over the course of six months, Cao Fei filmed daily life at the factory, highlighting the mechanized tasks performed by employees, while also interviewing them about their motivations for working there. Based on their responses, she then collaborated with the workers to develop the performances that comprise the central section of the video. In costumes or street clothes, these anonymous figures dance and play music while other employees, unnoticing, continue to work around them. The poetic, dreamlike vision of individualism within the constraints of industrialization illuminates the otherwise invisible emotions, desires, and dreams that permeate the lives of an entire populace in contemporary Chinese society. (from: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/22047)
Mike Kelley | Day Is Done, 2006
Inspired by high-school yearbook photos of “extra-curricular activities”, Kelley’s magnum opus features 32 video set-pieces that form a riotous two-and-a-half-hour musical. The OTT vignettes include Halloween devils, leering barbers, the Virgin Mary riding a donkey and a lonely vampire, often in lurid encounters that send up cultural sexual anxiety and pop psychology cliches.
*Day Is Done, a major new video work by Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley, is a feature-length musical. It enunciates a career-long interest in American subcultures and folk events through the re-staging of 31 carnivalesque productions intermixed into a meandering semi-narrative. Each reconstruction is a live-action scene that has been extrapolated from photographs found in high school yearbooks. Their subjects are the kinds of institutionalized entertainments practiced within the American education system or the work place. These include such familiar diversions from the day-to-day routine as dress-up days, memorial speeches, religious spectacles, fashion shows, singles mixers, and musical follies. The actors have been cast based on their resemblance to the figures in the found photographs, and the sets eerily recreate the original locales: harshly spot-lit stages, bland institutional hallways, meeting rooms, and gymnasiums. While each chapter of Day Is Done is derived entirely from an image of a quite standardized folk ritual, Kelley disrupts the traditional structures of such events to construct a dizzying daisy chain of performances that results in an institutional landscape populated by dancing Goths, singing vampires, hick story-tellers, horse dancers, and the Virgin Mary. Originally presented as a 50 channel video/sculpture installation at the Gagosian Gallery New York, in December of 2005, this version of Day is Done has been re-edited into a single channel format for private viewing. Further Information: Satanic rituals and advertising jingles mingled with allusions to Godard, German Expressionist cinema and Stockhausen...a toxic-carnival...an amazing feat of industry and poetics." ---Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times
Christian Marclay | The Clock, 2010
*Encapsulating 100 years of moving-image history, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a 24-hour montage composed from thousands of film and television clips depicting clocks and other references to time. James Bond checks his watch at 12:20 a.m.; Meryl Streep turns off an alarm clock at 6:30 a.m.; a pocket watch ticks at 11:53 a.m. as the Titanic departs. With each clip synchronized to the local time, The Clock collapses the fictional time presented on screen with the actual time of each passing minute. The work is both a cinematic tour-de-force and a functioning timepiece.
Building on his background as a musician in Boston and New York’s underground scenes of the late 1970s and 1980s, Marclay has for five decades combined visual and sonic fragments to explore the complex relationships between image and sound. His resulting works have taken form across a wide range of mediums: sculpture, painting, photography, print, performance, and video. With the help of assistants searching for footage, Marclay spent three years meticulously editing The Clock—the culmination of his innovative approach to looking at the world anew through found material.
The Clock speaks to cinema’s rich history as both a mirror of and escape from reality, a paradox that is ever more central to daily life in today’s era of instant broadcast, streaming services, and artificial intelligence. Marclay’s assemblage of carefully selected clips takes us on a journey through the past in order to heighten our awareness of an ever-elusive and unfolding present. By editing together fragments from cinema’s vast archive to tell the current time, Marclay reframes our collective memory of movies as an uncanny confrontation with ourselves.
Video became an excitingly immediate medium for artists after its introduction in the early 1960s. The expensive technology, which had been available prior only within the corporate broadcasting arena, experienced an advent when Sony first created an economical consumer piece of equipment that allowed everyday people access to vast new possibilities in documentation. Understandably, this produced huge interest for the more experimental artists of the time, especially those involved with concurrent movements in Conceptual art, Performance and experimental film. It provided a cheap way of recording and representation through a dynamic new avenue, shattering an art world where forms such as painting, photography, and sculpture had been the long-held norm. This expanded the potential of individual creative voice and challenged artists to stretch toward new plateaus in their careers. It has also birthed an unmistakable population of artists who may never have entered the fine art field if stifled by the constraints of utilizing traditional mediums. With warp speed over the last half century, video has become accessible by the populous, spawning a continual evolution of its use; we live in an age where even your everyday smartphone has the ability to create high caliber works of art through the use of an ever increasing assortment of applications.
We now consider Video art to be a valid means of artistic creation with its own set of conventions and history. Taking a variety of forms - from gallery installations and sculptures that incorporate television sets, projectors, or computer peripherals to recordings of performance art to works created specifically to be encountered via distribution on tape, DVD or digital file - video is now considered in rank equal to other mediums. It is considered a genre rather than a movement in the traditional sense and is not to be confused with theatrical cinema, or artists' (or experimental) film. Although the mediums may sometimes appear interchangeable, their different origins cause art historians to consider them distinct from each other. So popular a medium, many art schools now offer video as a specialized art major. (taken from: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
1. Theatrical Cinema (Commercial/Narrative Film)
This is the most familiar form. Its primary purpose is to tell a story to a mass audience for entertainment and profit.
Purpose: To entertain, tell a story, and generate revenue. The narrative is paramount.
Context: Viewed in commercial movie theaters, streaming platforms (Netflix, etc.), and on television. It exists within a distribution system designed for mass consumption.
Form: Follows established conventions: linear narratives, character development, cause-and-effect plotting, and a standardized aspect ratio and runtime (typically 90-180 minutes). It uses techniques (editing, scoring, cinematography) primarily to serve the story and elicit specific emotional responses from the audience.
2. Artists' Film / Experimental Film
This is a broad category of film that uses the medium itself as an art form, prioritizing aesthetic, conceptual, or political ideas over narrative or commercial goals. It's often made by a single artist or a small collaborative team.
Purpose: To explore the material nature of film (light, emulsion, grain), to challenge narrative conventions, to express a personal vision, or to investigate a philosophical or perceptual idea.
Context: Historically screened in arthouse cinemas, museums, galleries, universities, and film festivals dedicated to avant-garde work (e.g., New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde").
Form: Often non-narrative. It may use abstraction, rapid editing, repetition, optical printing, or hand-painting directly on the film celluloid. It is concerned with time, rhythm, and vision itself. It can be any length, from a few seconds to many hours.
3. Video Art
Video art emerged with the availability of portable consumer video equipment (most famously the Sony Portapak in the mid-1960s). It is a visual art form that uses video technology as a medium, distinct from television broadcasting.
Purpose: To critique mass media (TV), to explore the relationship between the body and technology, to create installations, or to document performance art. It is inherently conceptual.
Context: Almost exclusively created for and displayed in art galleries and museums. It is often presented as a single-channel work on a monitor or, more commonly, as a large-scale installation in a darkened room.
Form: It embraces the electronic nature of video: glitch, feedback, low resolution, and real-time recording. It is deeply tied to time and presence. A key difference from film is its immediacy—it doesn't require processing. Many video artworks are loops, with no defined beginning or end.
Compilation of works taken from:
The Art Story: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/
and
From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works: By Barbara London, Skye Sherwin & Oliver Basciano
"Beginnings of Video Art
Although artists have been creating moving images in some form since the early-20th century, the first works to be widely labeled as 'Video art' are from the 1960s. The first nationalities to pick up on the Portapak as an artistic tool - and therefore those who made the earliest pieces of Video art - were, unsurprisingly, from those countries where it first became commercially available (the US and the UK were the early practitioners).
Nam June Paik - 'The Father Of Video Art'
In the same way that the 'father of conceptual art' Marcel Duchamp had declared an ordinary urinal to be a work of art when he created his first and most infamous readymade in 1917, the "father of Video Art" Nam June Paik first established video as a credible artistic medium in 1965, when he claimed his footage of the Pope's visit to New York to be a serious artwork. When Korean-American Fluxus artist Nam June Paik, glimpsed the pontiff by chance while sitting in traffic, he recorded it on his Portapak, and presented the grainy, barely edited result later that evening at a screening at the Cafe A Go Go in Greenwich Village (though some art historians have disputed Paik's claim that it was indeed the Portapak that he used, asserting that Sony did not release it until 1968.) What is not disputed is that this work, along with Paik's 1963 Fluxus exhibition at Galerie Parnass in Paris - where he showed his first reworked television sculptures - were some of the first pieces of art made using the newly accessible medium of video.
After his seminal 1965 screening, Paik wrote a short manifesto encouraging artists and activists to use video as a tool for empowerment to fight back against the establishment, especially what he called 'one-way' broadcast television companies - a utopian mission he would continue to pursue throughout his long career. He also predicted that 'as collage replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas' He would go on to pioneer the use of broadcast, video installation, live events, and artists' screenings, all of which are modes practiced by artists today.” (from: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Artworks and Artists of Video Art + 30 revolutionary works of video art
*The following selections have been modified with additional insertions from other sources.
Wolf Vostell, Sun In Your Head - Television Décollage, 1963
For Sun In Your Head - Television Décollage, German artist Wolf Vostell distorted and played with various single frames that he'd sourced from film and television of the time (such as a smiling woman; words such as "Silence Please! Genius At Work!" or an embracing couple, for example). The resulting piece is a fast-paced, flickering mish-mash of televisual images that veer from flashing, abstracted shapes to recognizable forms. The work was shown as part of Vostell's nine-part 'happening' - 9 Decollagen - which took place in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963. As no video playback technology was available at the time, Vostell recorded the images from a television set using a film camera, allowing him to edit the piece and play it back on a projector.
With its highly experimental technique and subversive form, Sun In Your Head was one of the first works to examine the possibilities of television as a medium in its own right. It employs his innovative use of the decollage technique, first associated with the French Nouveau Realisme movement who used the term to describe their ripping, erasing, and reworking of Parisian posters to create new information. Vostell used it to refer to the re-mixing and layering of image and sound he employed to create a new artistic language in his Video art. A pioneer of the European branches of the Fluxus and Happening movements, Vostell is considered one of the most influential early Video artists - he was also the first to use a television as an object in an artwork in 1958.
16mm film transferred to video - The Museum of Modern Art, New York (From: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Andy Warhol | Blow Job, 1964
Warhol did not invent video art: various formal experiments in manipulating film and video forerun his interest. As early as 1958, the German artist Wolf Vostell had incorporated a TV set into one of his avant garde Fluxus happenings, and by the following year Vostell had developed video installation as we know it today. However, Warhol took the idea and made it famous. If nothing else the artist was adept at identifying new fashions and, with his flair for self-promotion, bringing them to mass attention.
*Andy Warhol’s Blow Job, made at the Factory in New York in 1964, is a masterpiece of the complexities of voyeurism and duration. The 36-minute film shows a young man apparently receiving oral sex, though the viewer only ever sees his head and shoulders – leaving the person performing the act in our imagination. Sometimes the man looks bored, sometimes as if he is thinking, sometimes as if he is aware of the camera, sometimes as if he is not. What might have been pornographic becomes an extended examination of the passing of time and the materiality of film. The silent, black-and-white film is exemplary of Warhol’s works produced during the early 1960s, alongside such films as Sleep, Empire, Harlot and Couch. (From: https://www.afterall.org/publications/andy-warhol-blow-job/)
Sleep, 1963
In Sleep, Andy Warhol filmed his close friend and occasional lover John Giorno sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes. The piece's length means few people have watched it from beginning to end (two of the nine people who attended its premiere at The Gramercy Theater in New York left during its opening hour), and it is considered one of the first and most important works of durational art. Sleep looks at themes of intimacy, repetition, and duration, and is one of the first examples of what Warhol called his 'anti-films', in which he used hugely long, single takes to record his everyday experience and that of his friends. Although Sleep is a film rather than a video, Warhol's use of the camera, in which he just switched it on and walked away, make it stylistically much closer to art then film since he is clearly looking to bash Hollywood's conventions of narrative and the strategic manipulation of real time through editing. (from:https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Bruce Nauman | Pacing Upside Down, 1969
Bruce Nauman’s Pacing Upside Down, 1969. Photograph: Bruce Nauman; MOMA
*This video registration of a performance in his studio shows Bruce Nauman walking the perimeter of different shapes: circles, spirals and figure eights. Nauman recorded the performance on video because, unlike film, video was a medium that allowed him to make longer recordings. This videotape was recorded in a single take lasting almost one hour, which was the maximum capacity of video tape at that time. This aspect also serves to underline the time-based quality of the performance. By inverting the camera, the artist appears to be walking on the ceiling, an effect that Nauman amplified by holding his hands above his head – a physically demanding task in itself. In the video, Nauman’s arms seem to dangle at his sides. This performance gives literal expression to Nauman’s approach to art: ’art is what the artist does in his studio’. The inversion of the image suggests that the artist has defied gravity. (From https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/collection/14086-bruce-nauman-pacing-upside-down)
*Other of his works at the time:
Manipulating the T Bar, 1966
Wall Floor Positions, 1968
Contrapposto Studies, 2010
*In the 2010s, Nauman revisited Walk with Contrapposto, creating a new series based on the same repetitive movements, though, this time, aided by advances in technology. His Contrapposto Studies now projected larger than life onto walls, show the artist walking in the same straight line. In the updated version, the feed is full colour and crisp, each image split into seven sections and repeated 14 separate times, an allusion to Da Vinci’s theories of proportion. (from the youtube video source)
Art Make Up, 1967-68
Bruce Nauman was one of the first video artists to work with the single take, fixed-camera technique that's demonstrated in Art Make-Up - a method in which the scene is shot from one perspective in one sitting. This created a sense of authenticity to the work, which, in its refusal of editing or fluctuating shots, allowed for a denial of the normal cinematic fluff-and-preen convention, an important distinction to many of these artists. (from: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
More of his works here:
This is "Nauman-Bruce Wall-Floor Positions.iphone" by ubuweb on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.
Valie Export, Facing A Family, 1971
In Facing A Family, Austrian feminist performance artist Valie Export filmed a family watching the camera as if it was a television set in their living room. Labeled a 'TV action' by the artist, the footage lasts for almost five minutes, during which time the viewer becomes more aware of the piece's mirror-like quality and the passing of time - it is as if the viewer and the family are gazing at each other.
The work was originally broadcast on Austrian television in 1971, ironically viewed by a large portion of the country's TV-consuming families. Export wanted viewers to reflect on the passive role they took on while being entertained, and to think about how we construe the contents of our television screen (fantasy versus reality). It was considered especially pioneering at the time, produced just as TV was becoming ever more dominant in lives of the public and concerns were being voiced about its increasing power.
Black and White Film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Natalia LL | Consumer Art, 1972-5
*Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, or Natalia LL, is a pioneer of feminist art in Poland. LL’s photographs, drawings, moving image works and installations have from the outset addressed the female subject in a patriarchal, increasingly consumerist society, and as a result she was soon noticed by Western feminist critics, including Lucy Lippard, providing her with international exhibition opportunities from the mid-1970s onwards.
(…) Natalia LL embarked on a series of film and photographic works entitled Consumer Art 1972–5 – a critique of the commodification of women’s bodies in pornography. The sixteen-minute silent film Consumer Art 1972 features young, attractive female models provocatively eating a variety of suggestively shaped foods, emulating the style of pornographic films. The women gaze at the camera seductively as they perform the erotically charged ‘play’ with bananas, sausages, ice cream and other food filled with sexual innuendo. Unlike pornography, in Consumer Art the models are given agency, their actions teetering between seduction and humour, as they gaze back, reversing the dynamics from objects of male gaze and consumption, to being active protagonists in control of the situation. (from: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/world-goes-pop/artist-biography/natalia-lach-lachowicz)
Joan Jonas | Vertical Roll, 1972
No, the gallery monitor isn’t broken. The rolling bar, a common glitch with analogue TV, was used by the American artist to introduce the camera to her experimental performances, which went beyond mere documentation.
*Trained as a sculptor, Joan Jonas turned to performance and video art in the late 1960s. Her pioneering experiments and innovations with these relatively unexplored mediums placed her among the foremost women artists to emerge in the early 1970s. In 1972, she completed Vertical Roll, a black-and-white video centered upon a technological glitch common to television. “The reason why it’s called ‘Vertical Roll’ [is] because in the piece there’s a rolling bar of the video, which is a dysfunction of the television set,” the artist has explained. “And I made a piece which is structured by that bar…in which I perform around the rolling bar; all my actions are related to that bar….”
When Jonas made Vertical Roll, television was a widespread phenomenon, and viewers were used to consuming its images. Representations of women in the media, and notions of female identity, have long been among the artist’s chief concerns. By presenting herself in such a disjointed manner, Jonas hinders viewers’ ability to scrutinize her televised image, claiming a measure of control over how she may be perceived. (from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/110544)
Baldessari John, Teaching a plant the alphabet, 1972
Conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari made Teaching A Plant The Alphabet in direct response to Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys's innovative 1965 performance How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare. Described by Baldessari as "a perverse exercise in futility", the Portapak video consists of the artist's hand showing educational flashcards of the alphabet to a clearly unresponsive potted plant, repeating each letter slowly and deliberately, as if tutoring a small child. Like much of his work, the piece is full of irony and subtle humor, using everyday objects and a seemingly mundane task to explore broader philosophical concerns. In this case, those concerns are structuralist theories of the 1970s that presented language as a series of signs. Baldessari was also influenced by books published by members of the hippie movement, which encouraged people to communicate with their plants.
*Nam June Paik | TV Buddha, 1974
Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha, 1974. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Installation view of NAM JUNE PAIK's The More, The Better, 1988, video installation of 1,003 CRT monitors, 22.8 meters tall, at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Gwacheon. Courtesy MMCA.
The More, The Better (1988)
Paik created his largest installation, measuring 11 meters in diameter and 18.5 meters in height, in 1988 to celebrate the Seoul Olympics. Weighing 16 tons and comprising 1,003 monitors, The More, The Better attracted 50 million viewers with a broadcast of entertainment from all around the globe, from salsa rhythms in Rio to a punk concert in front of Beethoven’s house in Bonn. The event attempted to capture the artistic high points of all cultures in one space, honoring the connectivity and global fellowship brought by television. However, the title contains also a hint of irony, pointing to the installation’s roots in mass production and consumerist culture as a reflection of South Korea’s own economic ambitions.
NAM JUNE PAIK, Lion, 2005, wood lion with acrylic and permanent oil marker additions, three-channel silent color video with two plasma monitors and 26 CRT monitors, 337.8 x 276.9 x 165.1 cm. Copyright the Estate of Nam June Paik. Courtesy Gagosian, New York / Beverly Hills / London / Paris / Le Bourget / Geneva / Basel / Rome / Athens / Hong Kong.
Lion (2005)
After his stroke in 1996, there was a notable infusion of spirituality in Paik’s work. Lion is emblematic of Paik’s late style, showing a reflective spirit and nostalgia not previously seen. As one of his final television sculptures, Lion sees a wooden sculpture of the animal tattooed all over with TV pictographs and signatures in English, Japanese, and Korean, and framed by an arch of 28 monitors, each ranging from 13 to 147 centimeters wide. The screens intersperse nature videos with old clips of Paik’s friend Merce Cunningham dancing, demonstrating his lifelong interest in the melding of nature, technology, and diverse art forms. (from: https://www.artasiapacific.com/people/the-essential-works-of-nam-june-paik/)
“I come from a very poor country and I am poor. I have to entertain people every second,” Nam June Paik has said.1
The tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating nature of the quip is characteristic of Paik’s attitude toward art making. A member of the international avant-garde Fluxus movement, Paik is best known for creating massive sculptural installations dominated by television monitors. His prediction that we would one day develop international telecommunications networks has prompted scholars to dub him a visionary, while his early experiments with the emerging technology of video have earned him the oversize epithet “father of video art.”
Paik’s career began in music. Born in 1932 to a wealthy family of textile manufacturers, Paik trained as a classical pianist in Seoul before fleeing to Japan with his parents and siblings upon the outbreak of the Korean War. He enrolled at the University of Tokyo, where he wrote a thesis on the German composer Arnold Schoenberg, then moved to West Germany to pursue graduate studies at Munich University. An electrifying encounter in 1958 with the composer John Cage inspired Paik to incorporate objects, theatrical interruptions, and pre-recorded sounds into his compositions. Termed “action music,” works like Étude for Pianoforte (1960)—which concluded when Paik leapt into the audience and cut off Cage’s tie—caught the attention of artists like Karlheinz Stockhausen, who wrote a part for Paik in Originale (1961), and George Maciunas, who invited Paik to join Fluxus. In 1964, Paik moved to New York, where he met the cellist Charlotte Moorman. The pair embarked on a decades-long partnership that generated performances including Variations on a Theme by Saint-Saëns (1964) and Opera Sextronique (1967), during which they were arrested for indecent exposure.
Paik made his first foray into video in 1963 with an exhibition in Wuppertal, West Germany, that featured Zen for TV (1963/1981) and other television sets whose receptions he had altered. With the engineer Shuya Abe, Paik began to develop more advanced technical interventions, such as Robot K-456 (1964), a remote-controlled robot that “defecated” dried beans while playing snatches of John F. Kennedy speeches, and the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer (1969), which enabled anyone to distort the color and shape of video images in real time. Later experiments with the medium spawned films like Global Groove (1973) as well as installations like Fin de Siècle II (1989) and sculptures like Untitled (1993). As with his incursions into performance, many of these pieces drew on or honored Paik’s collaborative relationships with other artists. In the two-part homage Merce by Merce by Paik (1975–76, 1978), for example, Paik worked with filmmaker Charles Atlas and fellow video pioneer Shigeko Kubota (to whom Paik was married) to celebrate the artist Marcel Duchamp and the choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Until his death in 2006, Paik believed in technology’s ability to foster connections among people, between nations, and across cultures. His politics emerge in the mock documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979)—in which Paik and Moorman perform an antiwar tribute on the site of the first major World War II offensive mounted by US troops against Japan—and in the international satellite broadcast Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), a live program that aired simultaneously in the US, France, Germany, and South Korea on New Year’s Day 1984, in rebuttal to George Orwell’s dystopian projections. But Paik’s love for technology was always mediated by his commitment to humanity. “Our life is half natural and half technological,” he declared in 1986. “Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.”
2 (From: https://www.moma.org/artists/4469-nam-june-paik)
Nam June Paik (1932-2006), internationally recognized as founder of video art, created a large body of work, including video sculptures, installations, performances, videotapes and television productions. His art and ideas embodied a radical new vision for an art form that changed global visual culture.
Born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, to a wealthy industrial family, Paik and his family fled Korea in 1950 at the outset of the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, then to Japan. Paik graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956, and then traveled to Germany to pursue his interest in avant-garde music, composition and performance. There he met John Cage and George Maciunas and became a member of the Fluxus movement. In 1963, Paik had his legendary one-artist exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany, that featured his prepared television sets, which radically altered the look and content of television.
After emigrating to the United States in 1964, he settled in New York City, where he expanded his engagement with video and television, and had exhibitions of his work at the New School, Galerie Bonino, and the Howard Wise Gallery. In 1965, Paik was one of the first artists to use a portable video camcorder.
In 1969, he worked with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe to construct an early video-synthesizer that allowed Paik to combine and manipulate images from different sources. The Paik-Abe video synthesizer transformed electronic moving-image making. Paik invented a new artistic medium with television and video, creating an astonishing array of artworks, from his seminal video Global Groove (1973), to his sculptures TV Buddha (1974) and TV Cello (1971); to installations such as TV Garden (1974), Video Fish (1975) and Fin de Siecle II (1989); videotapes Living with Living Theatre (1989) and Guadalcanal Requiem (1977/1979); and global satellite television productions such as Good Morning Mr. Orwell, which broadcast from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a WNET-TV studio in New York City January 1, 1984.
Nam June Paik installing TV-Buddha in the Stedelijk Museum. Photo: Rene Block 1977
Nam June Paik, Homage to Stanley Brouwn, 1984. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Peter Tijhuis
Nam June Paik, Sistine Chapel, 1993. Exhibition copy, courtesy of the Nam June Paik Estate. Photo: Peter Tijhuis
Images from: https://www.paikstudios.com/
TV Cello, 1964
Fluxus artist Nam June Pak was one of the first artists to break the barriers between art and technology. TV Cello is a seminal example, specifically created for use in performance by the avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman. The work consisted of three television sets piled on top of each other, all showing different moving images - a film of Moorman performing live, a collaged video of other cellists and an intercepted broadcast feed. Ingeniously, the whole sculpture was also a fully operational cello, designed to be played with a bow to create a series of raw, electronic notes that reverberated through the space.
By appropriating the domestic television set as an art object in this way, Paik became one of the first artists to establish video as a serious artistic medium. By taking the television out of its normal setting and using it in such subversive performances, he wanted to question its increasingly dominant role in shaping public opinion.
Video tubes, TV Chassis, Electronics, Wiring - Walker Art Center, Minnesota (from: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975
In Semiotics of the Kitchen the artist walks into a kitchen, dons an apron, and proceeds to vocally identify kitchen objects in alphabetical order: a for apron, b for bowl, c for chopper, d for dish, etc. As she goes down the roster, she quickly demonstrates each object's use. For the last few letters u through z she simply makes the shape of the letter with broad sweeping gestures of her arms while holding a utensil in each hand. There is a violent force in the manner in which Rosler presents many of the objects, such as slamming down the meat tenderizer or jabbing violently with the ice pick, which contradicts society's image of the happy homemaker in a decidedly passive-aggressive fashion.
This work is an important example of how early Feminist artists co-opted the video medium to establish themselves as important new voices disembodied from the male art canon and its many years of more traditional artwork.
Video - Collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (from: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Lygia Pape | Eat Me, 1975
The poet Oswald de Andrade came up with a metaphor of devouring the culture of colonising powers, chewing it up and spitting it out, so that a new and truly Brazilian society might be established. Andrade’s fellow Brazilian Pape produces here a literal but powerful rendering of that act by training her camera uncomfortably close on the mouths of two artist-friends.
*Lygia Pape's Eat Me presents a very tight shot of the mouths of two men (the artists Artur Barrio and Cláudio Sampaio) filmed by a static camera. The pace of the film speeds up as the mouths swallow and spit out fragmented objects. We see the white of the teeth, along with lips, tongue, and beard hairs in images at once attractive and repulsive. The image alludes to the Brazilian cultural metaphor of anthropophagy—the idea of devouring the other to absorb its energy—which served as an allegory of the violence gripping Brazil at the time the piece was made. The work brings together ideas of the abject, contamination, and the visceral, appealing to sensorial perceptions that create knowledge of the body. (from: https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/art/art/eat-me)
Dara Birnbaum | Technology / Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79
View image in fullscreenLittle wonder ... Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978/9. Photograph: Dara Birnbaum; Electronic Arts Intermix; Marian Goodman Gallery
*American households in the late 1970s consumed, on average, over six hours of television per day. Around that time, Birnbaum began working with footage hijacked from television broadcasts. She re-edited material from the popular program Wonder Woman to emphasize how mass media alternates between heroic and trivializing depictions of women. “Where am I between the two?” Birnbaum has asked. “I’m a secretary, I’m a Wonder Woman, and there’s nothing in-between. And the in-between is the reality we need to live in.” She installed the video in the storefront of a SoHo hair salon, for all to see. (from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/114400)
*Since 1978, Dara Birnbaum’s videotapes have focused on the relationship between post-war American society and technological developments in mass media. Her best-known and most iconic work from this period is Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. The work shows typical excerpts from the American TV series of the same name. The video begins with a scene of a woman spinning around and, after a loud explosion, turning into the TV character Wonder Woman. This is followed by a series of new explosions as the woman turns into a superhero in different ways. Birnbaum herself said that in this well-known television series she identified the psychological desire of individuals to transform themselves according to a certain moral ideal. The artist also perceived the need to convert these psychological desires into a physical outward appearance. By isolating and repeating images from this commercial action series, Birnbaum created a critical commentary on the quick, flashing, edited television pictures. (from: https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/collection/10158-dara-birnbaum-technology-transformation:-wonder-woman)
*Dara Birnbaum’s pioneering video, media, and installation work has, over the past four decades, addressed the ideological and the aesthetic character of mass media imagery and has been considered fundamental to our understanding the history of media art. (from: https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/32-dara-birnbaum/)
*Dara Birnbaum’s reinvention of video art was born of frustration. In 1977 the American artist was reading Screen magazine, then full of academic essays deconstructing the language of cinema.
While she was keen on applying psychoanalysis to understand moving image, and felt a strong kinship with the burgeoning feminist discourse, Birnbaum, who has died aged 78, became exasperated by the lack of interest in the predominant mass medium of the age.
“I’m reading these things that I really care about, but no one is talking about television. At the time they weren’t. And I just made that jump,” she recalled. Her first solo exhibition, she decided, had “to be something about television and television language”.
Television would become her enduring material, using pirated and appropriated footage in work that addressed mass culture, gender, body language and semiotics.
(…)
Before the widespread advent of VCR, Birnbaum was forced to rely on friends smuggling out raw footage from local television stations. “It was like dealing drugs, you know, to take a tape out. It was illegal.” (from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/may/12/dara-birnbaum-obituary)
Bill Viola, The Reflecting Pool, 1977-1979
The first in a series of tapes with the same name, The Reflecting Pool shows a man (Viola) approaching an artificial pool in the middle of a dense forest. As we hear trees rustling, water flowing and an airplane flying overhead, the man leaps into the air as if to jump into the pool, then remains frozen in mid-air, his image gradually fading into the foliage behind him. Eventually, he emerges from the pool as if reborn - Viola has said that he was portraying "the emergence of the individual into the natural world, a kind of baptism." He also used a simple masking effect to split the frame so that the human action above the water wasn't always reflected in it, turning the pool into a metaphor for the mystic and separating its strange world from the real one in the other half of the screen, while ensuring they remained united by the televisual frame.
This work marks the beginning of Viola's innovative use of special effects to explore notions of transcendence and spirituality. He wanted to use a medium that had previously been regarded as embodying the literal to explore invisible phenomena and examine the gap between the seen and the unseen. In subject as well as technique, Viola is seen as one of the most important artists working in video from the 1970s to the present day. His works have proved hugely influential on other, younger artists working in epic and immersive film and video such as Cremaster Cycle creator Matthew Barney, and Swiss video installation artist Pipilotti Rist.
Color video - The Art Institute of Chicago (From: https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Gary Hill, Why Do Things Get In A Muddle (Come On Petunia) 1984
In Why Do Things Get In A Muddle, Gary Hill constructs his own, twisted version of the classic literary nonsense story Alice In Wonderland. Hill had become fascinated with the concept of entropy - a term that refers to gradual descent into disorder - and wanted to explore it using video and sound. Most of the piece was performed and recorded backwards, including the exchange between the two characters (a childish woman called Cathy and her father), before being reversed again in the editing process. Their resulting confusing conversation about confusion itself was inspired by theoretician Gregory Bateson's definition of a 'metalogue', as quoted in the work's opening sequence: "When a conversation between people mirrors the problems themselves."
At thirty minutes long, this was the first video piece for which Hill wrote a full screenplay. Why Do Things Get In A Muddle was considered groundbreaking in its open, experimental approach to movement, sound and words, as well as the artist's inventive use of editing techniques to make a conceptual point. Contemporary artists who stretch the medium in similarly innovative ways include British artist Ed Atkins, who uses moving image, bodies and text in his subversive video installations. The work of US multimedia artist Adam Pendleton engages with language and meaning in ways that also owe a clear debt to Hill.
Color film - The Museum of Modern Art, New York (from:https://www.theartstory.org/movement/video-art/)
Black Audio Film Collective | Handsworth Songs, 1986
More important than ever, this loose documentary surveys the aftermath of the 1985 race riots that burned for three days in the titular Birmingham neighbourhood. Commissioned by Channel 4 and directed by the artist John Akomfrah, this poetic, award-winning film is an indictment of institutional racism in the police, in the politics of Thatcherism and in the public at large.
*Rioting broke out in several cities in England in 1985—and it wasn’t for the first time. Racial tensions played a big part in triggering clashes with police, looting, and arson attacks. Handsworth Songs examines the unrest and its aftermath in Birmingham’s Handsworth district and in London, and does so in a different way than the mainstream media did. It places the riots in a broader perspective, and refrains from pronouncing a final judgment.
Social engagement and a hunger for experiment mark this associative mosaic: raw street footage, scenes of commemorations of the victims, and testimonies from witnesses and others contrast with photographs and news footage from the more hopeful years, when immigrants from the Caribbean arrived by ship and Blacks and whites mingled on the dance floor. This gives room for moments of reflection, accompanied by poetic texts and a soundtrack that is both seductive and discomforting.
This award-winning directorial debut from John Akomfrah, a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, was commissioned by Channel 4 in the UK for its Britain: The Lie of the Land series. (from: https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/5337459d-bfde-4bfb-bc11-537204cc0cb8/handsworth-songs/)
Isaac Julien | Looking for Langston, 1989
Looking for Langston, 1988. Photograph: Bfi/Sankofa Film/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
More than a tribute to the American poet Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, Julien’s film is a powerful meditation on the history of black gay desire, the intersection of queer and black politics with art and activism, poetry and prejudice. The action plays out against a soundtrack mixing 1920s jazz and anachronistic 1980s disco.
*Emerging from the United Kingdom’s vibrant film scene in the early 1980s, Julien was already a well-known figure in Black and queer independent cinema when he released Looking for Langston. Many of the film’s scenes take place in a clandestine 1920s nightclub where men drink and dance, while other vignettes focus on sexual encounters in various private and public spaces. Archival footage from the Harlem Renaissance is overlaid with voiceover narration by Julien’s peers, including British scholar Stuart Hall and American writers Essex Hemphill and Toni Morrison. Constructing an alternative history, the work brings together themes of racial identity, queer desire, artistic expression, and beauty. (from: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/434231)
Shot in sumptuous monochrome Looking for Langston is a lyrical exploration—and recreation—of the private world of poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and his fellow black artists and writers who formed the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. Directed by Julien while he was a member of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, and assisted by the film critic and curator Mark Nash, who worked on the original archival and film research, the 1989 film is a landmark in the exploration of artistic expression, the nature of desire and the reciprocity of the gaze, and would become the hallmark of what B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema. Looking for Langston is also regarded as a touchstone for African-American Studies and has been taught widely in North American art schools for nearly 30 years. (from: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/184747/isaac-julien-i-dream-a-world-looking-for-langston)
Douglas Gordon | 24 Hour Psycho, 1993
Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro, 2008, two translucent projection screens showing two 4:3 ratio film projections, viewable from all sides, 24 hours, loop.
As is the way with Brit art’s biggest hits, the premise here is disarmingly simple: Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down to a silent, 24-hour running time, projected on a monumental screen. The work’s length is excruciating but it makes its points quickly: be that cinema’s manipulation of our experience of time, or questions around authorship and creative control.
Douglas Gordon (Scottish, b. 1966) visualizes, pictures, and “sculpts” time in many of his works. In 1993, Gordon presented a version of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, projected onto a translucent screen and slowed down to a duration of twenty-four hours. Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, which is included in this exhibition, marked the beginning of the artist’s ongoing method of altering, monumentalizing, and alienating viewers’ common understandings of the moving picture. (from: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/76)
Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from About 1992 Until Now.
The work is a composite device that brings together many of Gordon's films and videos on individual monitors, displayed simultaneously to create an archive-like experience. Each presentation is renewed and expanded with new works over time, transforming the installation into a continuous remix that reflects Gordon's ongoing artistic practice and the contemporary breakdown of image hierarchy.
Websites with video art collections and archives:
The LUX collection represents many moving image works produced by artists across a range of media from analogue film and video to digital.
Discuss the Introduction of the book Noise, Water, Meat a History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn.
A brief history of the music industry:
Brief historical notes on Sound Art:
It has changed the way we listen and perceive art.
20th century:
Questions over what could art be? what it could do? and what it could sound like?
Luigi Russolo 1913 - (part of the futurist movement) Wrote the Art of Noises. Says the industrial age has introduced new sounds. Sounds ignored by traditional music.
He made the INTONARUMORI - his own instrument, a machine that mimic sound of engines, cities and factories. Noisy, raw and radical for the time.
Laid the ground work for what we know as sound art.
Around the same time, Dada movement took a different route. They made performances full of noise and chaotic sounds and anti-establishment. Not about harmony, but about challenging conventions.
Fast forward to John Cage, one of the most influential voices in experimental sound.
His piece 4'33'' where a piano player sits silently infront of a piano for that amount of time. Wasn't silent at all, the music or sounds was the ambient sound, the cough, the sounds in the room, the moving of things, the sounds of the outside, etc.
taught us something important: the act of listening it self can be the artwork.
Differences between experimental music and sound art? Line is blurry.
Unlike traditional music, which is often concerned with melody, harmony, and rhythm in a structured composition, sound art is more focused on the experience, perception, and physical properties of sound itself and how it interacts with space, time, and the listener.
Sound art:
Usually spatial, conceptual and installation based.
Not always meant to be listened from beginning to end, like a song. Instead it is, meant to be experienced.
Can be focused mainly on the voice or pure sound
Theories such as Soundscape Ecology, introduced by R Murray Schafer: Treat the environment like a musical composition. He created sound walks where people just listen - noticed things people usually ignore, such as: air conditioning humming, leaves rustluing, foot steps, etc.
Sound Art also tells stories without words.
You need attention and active listening.
Why is history important?: Sound art didnt just appear out of nowhere, it grew out of conversations that we are still having. History gives us tools and connects us to a lineage of makers, thinkers and listeners.
(taken from: Digital Sound Art Application, Faculty of Art and Design UiTMCS. Introduction to Sound Art: Theories and History of Sound in Art)
Historical References:
"Phonography, therefore, existed discursively and most evidently in the idea of all-sound, even as it abandoned any immediate technological association. In this way, at the minimum, it influenced the arts long before actual technological realization could be entertained. Most notably, it was manifested in the idea of noise and music when in 1913 the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo celebrated the entire breadth of sounds in the world in his art of noises.
Luigi Russolo
Collection of Dadaist and Futurist Sound Works
Dziga Vertov, Radio-Ear / Radio Pravda 1925.
Antonin Artaud, Theater of Cruelty, 1931 - 1936
Antonin Artaud, Dark Poet 1926
William Borroughs, Cut-Ups, 1959 (min 142.)
Musique Concrete:
The term ‘concrète’ music was coined in the 1940s by Paris-based engineer, composer and sonic experimentalist Pierre Schaeffer. Defined as music created using recorded sound as source material (ie ‘concrete’ sound sources rather than musical instruments), musique concrète grew out of an experimental environment as recording equipment slowly became more commonplace.
Until the 19th century, all music had been created by acoustic instruments or voices. The very first electrical and electronic instruments were invented in the late 19th/early 20th century, but it wasn’t until the ’50s that instruments like organs, electric guitars and synthesisers really began to dominate music.
As such, in the early 20th century, small groups of musicians, composers and technology enthusiasts began to question what we understood by music. There were various ideologies (some of which we’ll return to later in this series), from the noise music of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, to the serialist movement and avant-garde expressionism of Arnold Schoenberg.
(tonal vs atonal music)
Many of these avant-garde movements were fascinated by the potential for technology to reframe the way we approached composition. Musique concrète was a prime example, as much a challenge of technology as it was of music, overlapping with the development of broadcast technology. Schaeffer was one of many engineers to take an interest in the composition potential of recorded sounds. Rather than generating sound from conventional instruments, he explored the idea of using field recordings as instruments, eventually establishing his own Studio d’Essai in Paris with French national broadcasting organisation RTF, at which he produced his 1948 Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises), arguably the definitive musique concrète work.
In Cairo, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh was carrying out similar experiments, using a magnetic wire recorder along with echo effects to record sounds and create soundscapes. El-Dabh moved to the US in 1950, going on to have a long and influential career as a composer and academic. His 1944 Expression Of Zaar is a fascinating Arabic counterpoint to Schaeffer’s European-influenced work.
Musique concrète’s influence on contemporary music is a fascinating topic. The movement remains relatively obscure – the likes of Schaeffer and El-Dabh are not exactly household names – but despite that, their work had a quiet influence on the way we now understand music.
Peter Moore – Publicity photograph for 3rd Annual New York Avant-Garde Festival, August 26, 1965. Left to right: Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Takehisa Kosugi, Gary Harris, Dick Higgins, Judith Kuemmerle, Kenneth King, Meredith Monk, Al Kurchin, Phoebe Neville.
Founded in 1960 by the Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus began as a small but international network of artists and composers, and was characterised as a shared attitude rather than a movement. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.
The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’. This has strong echoes of dada, the early twentieth century art movement.
The first Fluxus event was staged in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York and was followed by festivals in Europe in 1962. The major centres of Fluxus activity were New York, Germany and Japan.
Fluxus played an important role in opening up the definitions of what art can be. It has profoundly influenced the nature of art production since the 1960s, which has seen a diverse range of art forms and approaches existing and flourishing side-by-side.
Fluxus had no single unifying style. Artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across artforms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works, and humour also being an important element.
Many key avant-garde artists in the 60s took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams. (from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fluxus)
George Maciunas
Many attribute the “Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik”, a three-week-long music festival in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1962 as the catalyst for the growing Fluxus- Ideology. Organised by artist George Maciunas, founder and central coordinator of the movement, the musical event became central to an emerging conceptual manifesto that would trigger a series of related Fluxus events in Europe. Fluxus would later be defined as the first transatlantic artistic movement, bringing together artists such as Joseph Beuys, Nam Jun Paik, John Cage, Ay-O, Charlotte Moorman, Daniel Spoerri, Yoko Ono and Robert Filliou. Similarly to the Dadaists and Futurists, followers and members of Fluxus intended to challenge the status quo established by museums. They did not believe in the authority of art institutions to determine the value of art, nor did they recognise art education as essential to be able to view or understand a work of art. In this way, the group’s activities had a profound influence on the nature of art production, as well as the development of a new conceptual effort to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art.” (George Maciunas).
Originating from the Latin word “flowing”, the term Fluxus, assigned by Maciunas, embodied a democratic approach to art-making. Subverting predisposed notions of art, the group explored new mediums such as music, heavily influenced by John Cage, poetry, print-making and performance. A never before seen effort to collaborate across different genres and between different nationalities explored artistic collaboration as a political statement. Fluxus became a radical force against the bourgeoisie of the art world as proclaimed in Maciunas’s 1963 Manifesto: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, — PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” (from: https://cardigallery.com/magazine/fluxus-and-the-artwork-multiple/)
John Cage
1912–1992
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.[5][6]
Cage's teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.[7] The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text and decision-making tool, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life.[8] In a 1957 lecture, "Experimental Music", he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".[9]
Cage's best known work is the 1952 composition 4′33″, a piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who perform the work do nothing but be present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[10][11] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. These include Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).[12]
Cage is largely credited with the establishment of experimentalism as a style in the 1950s, he was a great inspiration for conceptualist artists in the 1960s, and his music and pedagogical methods were central to the emergence of minimalism in the 1960s and after. Cage's importance extends beyond the field of music, and artists today working in film, literature, dance, theater, and the visual and performance art fields point to Cage as a formative figure. His impact is partially due his collaboration with influential figures in these various fields and partially due to his renown as an author, poet, and visual artist, in addition to his significance as a composer.
Life and work
Based on Sara Haefeli, John Cage: A Research and Information Guide, 2018.
Cage graduated from high school as valedictorian of his class and entered Pomona College, but he dropped out after only a year. Cage travelled to Europe and after returning to the United States started studying composition, first with Richard Buhlig, then with Adolph Weiss; finally Cage studied counterpoint with Arnold Schoenberg at USC and UCLA. Cage’s early music was shaped by his admiration for Schoenberg, but Schoenberg told him that he had no feel for harmony and that without an understanding of harmony he would run up against a wall. Cage replied that he would devote his life to “beating my head against that wall”. Cage repeated this story and a story that Schoenberg called him—not a composer—but an “inventor of genius” so often that much of his reputation and reception as a maverick outsider are based on these accounts.
In the earliest part of his career Cage collaborated with dancers and wrote primarily for percussion ensemble, often employing found objects as musical instruments. In 1940, while he was in his late twenties, he invented the prepared piano and, for his prepared piano piece Sonatas and Interludes, won awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In the early 1950s he developed means of composing using chance methods, influencing composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. In response, Stravinsky sarcastically called the sixties the “Age of Aleatory”. Cage experimented with electronic music ten years before the advent of magnetic tape, and as soon as tape technology was available he created one of the first musique concrète pieces in America, Williams Mix (1951-1953).
Cage didn’t see much distinction between the different art worlds in which he participated. His work in all media was created by the same means of production and motivated by the same creative impulses. Cage often relied on philosophy to bolster his innovations in the arts and to lend legitimacy to his work. During different periods of creativity, Cage drew from different sources for this inspiration. Some of his earliest such encounters were with Southeast Asian philosophy, Indian aesthetics, and the works of Coomaraswamy. As Cage was developing his work with chance operations in the 1950s, he was drawn to East Asian philosophy, especially Zen Buddhism and the teachings of D. T. Suzuki (...) Cage often asserted during this time that his work was meant to teach us how to live in an anarchic utopia: a world, he said, “without a conductor”.
The one word that is most often linked to Cage’s work is indeterminacy. Scholars have recently come to make a distinction between Cage’s use of indeterminacy from the term aleatoric. In aleatoric music, some element of the composition is left to chance or left open to the realization of the performer. This term is most often applied to the work of European composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, or Lutoslawski, who may indicate extensive passages of notated pitches and rhythms but may leave the coordination of the parts open to chance. Cage’s approach to indeterminacy is different. The most common understanding of the term is applied to works that are indeterminate in their composition, or, in other words, are composed using chance operations. Cage experimented with a number of chance-generating devices (rolling dice, magic squares, etc.) until Christian Wolff gave him a copy of the I Ching in 1951.
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese text that is typically used for divination purposes. Typically, one formulates a question for the I Ching and then tosses three coins a total of six times to create a hexagram, a collection of six straight and/or broken lines stacked on top of one another. There are sixty-four possible hexagrams, and when one is using the I Ching for divination purposes, the results have to be interpreted. Cage used the I Ching to produce numbers (1-64) that he then used to make choices between musical elements that were essentially potential “answers” to compositional “questions.” Cage connected this practice to the Zen Buddhist ideal of removing the ego from his creative work.
(...)
Cage started to move more and more toward openness in every aspect of performance, and in the 1960s he started to write pieces that indicate what is to be done, not necessarily how it is supposed to sound. One such work is Variations IV (1963). Cage’s score is a simple set of instructions: “for any number of players, any sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means, with or without other activities”.
(...)Cage was fortunate to have the virtuosic pianist David Tudor as his primary musical collaborator and interpreter during the 1950s and 1960s. Tudor was an exceptionally gifted keyboard player and brilliant thinker, and Cage enjoyed creating puzzles for Tudor to solve.
For works with indeterminate, open, graphic scores, Tudor was in effect co-composer with Cage, always writing out his own “realizations” to these musical puzzles.
Cage’s most notorious piece, 4‘33” (1952), requires the performer (at the premiere it was Tudor) to sit in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, playing on the well-trained audience’s expectations of high-art music conventions and challenging the boundaries of what could be considered art. But the piece has also had a pedagogical purpose as it has challenged audiences to broaden their listening capabilities and to embrace all sound as potentially musical. Many of Cage’s works continue in this pedagogical vein, challenging audiences not only to listen in new ways but, with Cage’s more anarchic, participatory pieces, to also broaden their social and political philosophies and to start living differently.
"They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
—John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4′33″
Exercise in class:
Then as an exercise we do Pauline Oliveros meditation in class:
-XXII-
Think of some familiar sound. Listen to it mentally. Try to find a metaphor for this sound. What are the real and imaginary possible contexts for this sound? How many ways does or could this sound affect you? or how do you feel about it? What is its effect upon you? How can this sound be described?
As a group meditation; sit in a circle. Find a sound common to all, then ask the above questions one by one. Allow plenty of time between each question. When all of the questions have been asked, the group shares their answers. (maybe we can do this one as a group)
Variations: Try the same meditation with
on imaginary sound
a live sound
a remembered sound
Homework:
Based on John Cage's work.
Record a selected environment alone. Place the microphone carefully in one location. Create a dialogue between the sounds of objects in that space. Record it / Document it.
Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio and music by Philip Glass
Experimental documentary directed by Godfrey Reggio that looks at the relationship between nature and humanity through stunning cinematograp
Godfrey Reggio (born 1940) is an American director of experimental documentary films.
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century.[1][2][3][4] Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers.[5][6] He described himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures",[7] which he has helped to evolve stylistically.[8][9]
"PAULINE OLIVEROS 1932-2016Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She founded "Deep Listening®," which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds."Deep Listening is my life practice," Oliveros explained, simply." From:https://www.paulineoliveros.us/about.html
In 1988, she descended 14 feet beneath the earth, into a cistern located in Washington where sounds reverberated up to 45 seconds in the dampness. She brought the trombonist Stuart Dempster and the sound artist/vocalist Panaiotis to record music that doesn’t sound of this world. The trio carried with them an accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, garden hose, conch shell and a pipe, which all became mangled by the bigness of the room.
"The mythos of Pauline Oliveros begins, in many tellings, underground.
In the fall of 1988, the Houston-born composer and accordionist crawled with her friend, composer Stuart Dempster, into a 2-million-gallon cistern below a decommissioned U.S. Army base in Washington state. What was so special about this particular cistern? It had a 45-second reverb time, which meant that it took nearly a minute for sound to fade away. Oliveros and Dempster, along with two other musicians, carried their instruments 14 feet down a manhole to play. The result was the project that was, in many ways, the culmination of her life’s work: “Deep Listening.”
Oliveros was a pioneer of experimental and electronic music, influencing artists like John Cage and Philip Glass. She died on November 24, 2016, but her legacy—something she herself was never especially concerned about—lives on, particularly through the practice she called deep listening. This practice explores the difference between hearing and listening: “learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space-time continuum of sound,” Oliveros said in a 2015 TED Talk.
Oliveros grew up in Houston surrounded by music. Her mother, Edith Gutierrez, and grandmother Pauline Gribbon gave piano lessons from their home. She got started with the practice of listening young: Riding in the car, she enjoyed listening to the motor and the way it modulated her parents’ voices. She was “fascinated with the in-between sounds of the [radio] station,” she said in the documentary Sisters With Transistors. She grew up listening to the 1930s soundscape of Houston, which at the time included “chirping, rasping crickets, frogs, and melodic mocking birds,” she wrote in Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Guide. Oliveros would go on to learn violin, piano, tuba, and French horn. At the age of 16, she decided she wanted to be a composer and got her first accordion.
She figured she’d have to leave Texas to pursue her music, according to her partner and collaborator, IONE. In the 1950s, Oliveros found herself in San Francisco. It was there that she received her first tape recorder—a birthday gift from her mother. She was fascinated by the sounds outside her apartment and started to do field recordings at her window, soon getting to work on an influential tape piece called “Time Perspectives.”
Variations on silence in the Cageian sense of the term. The composer's first piece written for magnetic tape, multichannel (4 audio signals) and Sears Roebuck Co. recorder. The sound sources (voices, kitchen instruments) are amplified by echo chambers that she finds in her studio (cardboard tube, bathtub, wooden partition) and recorded by modulating the pitch and speed of the tapes. With this first sound device, she ends up with an unstable system. The composer will devote herself entirely in the following pieces to enriching this practice of sound capture that she will call "Instability" from: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/cnynR6
Oliveros was always thinking about listening and consciousness, and she didn’t ignore the body’s role in either. She studied tai chi, “finding the coördination of breath and movement complementary to her music,” according to the New Yorker. She studied kinetic awareness, a practice that directs students to become sensitive to signals from their bodies, with dancer Elaine Summers. In the 1970s, in conjunction with the women’s liberation movement, Oliveros founded a performing group, incorporating her education in somatic practices. They called themselves the Ensemble, and their weekly sessions included a mix of text scores, journaling, discussion, and kinetic awareness exercises, according to the New Yorker.
Side notes:
Kinetic Awareness: is a system of body-mind reeducation focusing on increased ease and efficiency of movement through heightened self-awareness of physical sensations and patterns
Somatic education: It's a method of learning through direct bodily experience and sensation.
“She was a pioneering woman in electronic music, a pioneering improviser, a pioneering accordion player, a pioneering feminist, a pioneering gay woman coming out when that was daring,” classical music critic Mark Swed wrote in the Los Angeles Times after her death. Feminism was central to Oliveros’ work. In some ways, it had to be: “She’d come out in the ’50s. And here she was, a woman, gay, avant-garde,” said composer Ramon Sender. “Each thing by itself would be hard, but she had three things that were hard. And women composers were not being performed.”
As the decades passed, Oliveros further developed her ideas around listening, eventually becoming “more interested in the sounds themselves than what I could do with them,” Oliveros said. In 1989, a year after she found herself in the cistern, Oliveros coined the name “deep listening,” and soon after began hosting retreats to teach the practice. “The ear hears, the brain listens, the body senses vibrations,” Oliveros said in her TED Talk six years ago. “Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound.”
In the years before her death, Oliveros finally began to get more recognition. Her compositions have been performed across the United States in recent years, sometimes with the cistern’s effect re-created for “Deep Listening,” a piece with the same name as the practice. After her death, Oliveros went viral—aboveground, so to speak—for her so-called sonic meditations: whimsical sound exercises that instruct participants to do things like “Take a walk at night. Walk so slowly that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
Oliveros was “authentic,” IONE told me—there wasn’t a difference between her personal and private persona—and concerned less with her own legacy than the passing on of her teachings and work for the benefit of others. In 1993, Oliveros wrote: “In order for us to survive, there has to be creative action, creative expression at every level of society without exception. This feeling that one gets from realizing and expressing something of the spirit is missing. It’s not available to everyone, and it needs to be. This is what is the passion of my life and why I keep doing what I’m doing. I think it’s essential to go on.”
About Deep Listening
Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.
Inherently collaborative, the first published Deep Listening scores and activities (Sonic Meditations, 1971) were workshopped in the context of a female-identified collective, the fem-ensemble, over a period of many months. From the 1980s onwards, Deep Listening workshops, retreats, and the Deep Listening Certification Program were developed and facilitated in close partnership with playwright IONE (also Oliveors’ life partner) and movement artist Heloise Gold. Today, the philosophy and practice of Deep Listening continues to evolve through a growing international community of listeners.
Pauline Oliveros on Deep Listening
“What Is Deep Listening?
For me Deep Listening is a life long practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.
Deep Listening is a practice consisting of listening and sounding exercises and pieces I and others have composed since 1970. The results are processed by group discussions in workshops and retreats. Deep Listening is for musicians as well as participants from other disciplines and interests. Previous musical training is not required.
The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception.
We open in order to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.
Deep Listening is a birthright for all humans.”
taken from: https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/
Sonic Meditations are intended for group work over a long period of time with regular meetings. No special skills are necessary. Any persons who are
willing to commit themselves can participate. The Women Ensemble to whom these meditations are dedicated has found that non-verbal meetings intensify the results of these meditations and help provide an atmosphere which is conducive to such activity. With continuous work some of the following becomes possible with Sonic Meditations: Heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness, changes in physiology and ·psychology from known and unknown tensions to relaxations which gradually become permanent. These changes may represent a tuning of mind and body. The group may develop
positive energy which can influence others who are less experienced. Members of the Group may achieve greater awareness and sensitivity to each other.
Music is a welcome by-product of this activity.
1-Teach Yourself to Fly
Any number of persons (groups of 5) sit in a circle facing the center. Illuminate the space with dim blue light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing. Always be on observer. Gradually allow your breathing to become audible. Then gradually introduce your voice, Allow your vocal cords to vibrate In any mode which occurs naturally. Allow the intensity to increase very slowly. Continue as long as possible naturally, and until all others are quiet, always observing
your own breath cycle.
Variation: Translate voice to an instrument.
3- Pacific Tell
Find your place In a darkened indoor space or a deserted out of doors area. Mentally form a sound image. Assume that the magnitude of your concentration on, or the vividness of this
sound image wilI cause one or more of the group to receive this sound image by telepathic transmission. Visualize the person to whom you are sending. Rest after your attempted telepathic transmission by becoming mentally blank. When or If a sound Image different from your own forms in your mind assume that you are receiving it from some one else, then make that sound image audible. Rest again by becoming mentally blank or return to your own
mental sound image, Continue as long as possible or until all others are quiet.
5-Native
Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.
8-Environmental Dialogue
Each person finds a place to be, either near to or distant from the others, either indoors- or out-of-doors. Begin the meditation by observing your own breathing. As you become aware of
sounds from the environment, gradually begin to reinforce the pitch of the sound source. Reinforce either vocally, mentally or with an instrument. If you lose touch with the source, wait quietly for another. Reinforce means to strengthen or sustain. If the pitch of the sound source is out of your range, then reinforce it mentally.
10-Sit in a circle with your eyes closed, Begin by observing your own breathing. Gradually form a menta Image of one person who is sitting in the circle. Sing a long tone to that person. Then sing
the pitch that person is singing. Change your mental Image to another person and repeat until you have contacted every person in the circle one or more times.
12- One Word
Choose one word. Dwell silently on this word When you are ready, explore every sound in this work extremely slowly, repeatedly. Grad11ally, imperceptibly bring the word up to normal speed,
then continue until you are repeating the word as fast as possible. Continue at top speed until "it stops."
14-Tumbling Song
Make any vocal sound, but always go downward in pitch from the initial attack. The initial attack may begin at any pitch level. Go downward in a glissando or in discrete steps contlnuously. Go any distance in range, at any speed, dynamic or quality, but the breath determines the maximum time length of any downward gesture.
16-
Begin simultaneously with the others. Sing any pitch. The maximum length of the pitch is determined by the breath. Listen to the group. Locate the center of the group sound spectrum. Sing your pitch again and make a tiny adjustment upward or downward, but tuning toward the center of the sound spectrum. Continue to tune slowly, In tiny increments toward the center of the spectrum. Each time sing a long tone with a complete breath until the whole group Is singing the same pitch. Continue to drone on that centraI pitch far about the same length of time it took to reach the unison. Then begin adjusting or tuning away from the center pitch as the original beginning pitch.
Variation: Follow the same instructions but return to the original beginning pitch.
19- Recognition (Begin with this one)
Lie flat on your back or sit comfortably. Open your eyes widely, then let your eyelids close extremely slowly. Become aware of how your eyelids are closing. When your eyelids are closed, turn your eyes slowly from left to right, around, up and down. Let your eyes rest comfortably in their sockets. Try to be aware of the muscles behind the eyes and of the distance from these muscles to the back of the head. Cover your eyes with your palms and shut out all the light. Become aware of all the sounds in the environment. When you think you hove established contact with all of the sounds in the external environment, very gradually, introduce your fingers into your ears or cover them with your palms. Try to shut out all external sound. Listen carefully to the internal sounds of your own body working. After a long time gradually open your ears and include the sounds of the external environment.
20-Your Voice
Think of the sound of your own voice. What is its fundamental pitch? What is its range? What is its quality? What does it express no matter what you might be verbalizing or singing? What was the original sound of your voice before you learned to sound the way you sound now?
Possible additional exercises:
Read and listen to the second chapter of the sound project program:
https://yctm.e-flux.com/interplanetarymachines
or
www.triplepocketnapkinfold.com
or
Performative workshop: 1) Conversing without questions – statements; 2) Sound exercise of echo + chorus of local sounds; 3) The body and the space – words and performativity; 4) Conscious of all parts – intimate and public.
or
"Ekphrastic" Listening
Exercise: Play a piece of "program music" or a film score that tells a story (e.g., Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, a score by Hildur Guðnadóttir or Max Richter).
Task: As they listen, students must quickly sketch or jot down visual ideas, characters, scenes, or color palettes that the music evokes. They are creating the "artwork" for the sound.
Goal: To practice translating non-visual information into visual concepts, a key skill for illustrators, concept artists, and filmmakers.
While listening to:
This sonic journey written and narrated by David G. Haskell brings us to the beginning of sound and song on planet Earth.
Sarah Lucas (born 1962) is an English artist. She is part of the generation of Young British Artists who emerged in 1988. Her works frequently employ visual puns and bawdy humour by incorporating photography, sculpture, collage and found objects.
Sarah Lucas is internationally celebrated for her bold and provocative use of materials and imagery.
Using ordinary objects in unexpected ways, she has consistently challenged our understanding of sex, class and gender over the last four decades.
Do Ho Suh
Do Ho Suh: Seoul Home/Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home, 2012, silk, metal, and armature, approx. 48 by 23 by 13 feet.Photo Taegsu Jeon/Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul, and 21st Century Museum, Kanazawa, Japan
Do ho suh is a korean sculptor and installation artist. meticulously replicating the architecture of the places in which he has lived, such as his childhood home and western apartments, suh's translucent fabric structures give form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities.
Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? Suh asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us.
With immersive artworks exploring belonging, collectivity and individuality, connection and disconnection, Suh examines the intricate relationship between architecture, space, the body, and the memories and the moments that make us who we are.
He works with polyester thread, silk, cotton, metal, armature.
"Made from semi-transparent nylon mesh, Suh’s lifesize collapsible structures were patiently stitched together with the help of traditional seamstresses recruited by his mother, Min-za Chung. The results are both meticulous in their replicated detail – door knobs, light switches, even the faint traces of marks left by nails and screws – and otherworldly in their almost ghostly translucence and muted colours. Fragile and semi-transparent, they speak of belonging, displacement, identity, longing and embedded memories.
“For me, memory is central to what I do,” Suh says. “We bring our memories with us when we move and my memories inhabit the architectural pieces that I create, which are physical, but also psychological and metaphorical. What I bring is a skin, the thin skin of the bigger physical thing. The idea to use the semi-translucent fabric came about when I was trying to find a way to realise the intangible quality of memory. The material is fragile like our memories and it also has that haziness that many people associate with the past.” (Taken from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/13/do-ho-suh-walk-the-house-tate-modern-interview)
Pia Camil
Pia Camil (b. 1980) lives and works between Acatitlán, Edo. Mexico and Mexico City. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
Camil’s work is often done in a climate where kinship and the affective are proposed as a radical way of working in contrast to the highly individualized world. The subject matter of her work focuses on the rural / urban contexts with a formal yet critical dialogue with modernism.
Bluejeneando at Form Follows Energy
Lago/Algo
Mexico City, Mexico 2022
Second-hand jeans from Iztapalapa
80 Sculptures/160 Jeans
Bluejeaneando is made from stuffed second-hand jeans sewn at the waist. The title refers to a slang word used to describe the act of dry humping when making out. That simulation for desire can quickly turn into a grim experience if we interpret the jeans as a pile of dismembered bodies. The work is meant to invite the viewer to interact and play but often that later thought remains present. That tension is at the center of the work.
Todes No.2, 2022
Stuffed denim jeans
Named after the eponymous 1971 album by Nina Simone, Camil’s project Here Comes the Sun (2019) extends the artist’s use of secondhand T-shirts as a visual medium for thinking about the ways that global consumer culture, contemporary trade routes, and immigration impact society. Created through a process of exchange with largely immigrant communities in East Harlem and Corona—neighborhoods adjacent to the Guggenheim and Queens Museums—the new project incorporates donated T-shirts brought by the artist from New York to her studio in Mexico City. There Camil worked with a team of local seamstresses to transform the shirts into a large-scale fabric sculpture designed specifically for the central rotunda of the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright building. Conceived as an interactive installation, Here Comes the Sun will be activated during this special one-night event before entering the Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection.
This project has been commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum’s Latin American Circle and produced with the support of the East Harlem Culture Collective and the Queens Museum.
Bara, Bara, Bara, the first solo exhibition in Scotland by Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil. This immersive installation hosts new and existing textile sculptures which visitors are invited to inhabit and activate.
Drawing inspiration from urban forms and mechanisms of exchange, in particular her relationship to Mexico City where she lives and works, Camil’s immense sculptural installations are comprised of t-shirts and jeans acquired from the street markets of Iztapalapa. Camil deconstructs the t-shirts and then sews them together, creating large stretches of fabric reflecting the markets which are housed under patchwork awnings of stretched tarpaulin.
The billowing, suspended installation draws its name - Bara, Bara, Bara - from the pulsating cry of street vendors in Mexico City. Shortened from barato (cheap), the exclamation is aimed to draw customers' attention to a wide variety of low-cost goods on sale.
The T-shirts and jeans used in Camil's work were originally produced in Latin America, sold to retailers and organisations in the United States, and then illicitly found their way back to the bargain markets of Mexico City. Here their use brings attention to the inequities of global commerce that define daily life in Mexico City.
Pia Camil breaks the conventional form and function of a flag. Applying abstracted symbols on rectangular fabric is perhaps inadequate in representing a group of people. For AIR OUT YOUR DIRTY LAUNDRY, Camil instead makes a portrait of Marfa using residents’ laundry. The artist asked the people of Marfa to donate personal items of clothing or bedding to be hung from the flagpole in Ballroom’s courtyard to the building’s facade. Audio recordings of participants sharing the meaning of donated items accompanies the outdoor installation. In exchange, participants received a voucher for a free load of laundry at Tumbleweed, Marfa’s local laundromat.
For Camil, intimate items that live close to our bodies on a daily basis such as clothes or bed sheets contain our sweat and secrets; they bear witness to our moments of joy and sadness. Dirty laundry in this exhibition is foregrounded and celebrated rather than hidden.
Otobong Nkanga
Tied to the Other Side, 2021. Woven textile (yarns: viscose, multifilament, merino wool, elirex, superwash, monofilament and acrylic); 137 3/4 x 236 1/4 in.
Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga creates tapestries, drawings, videos, sculptures, and performances that feature narratives of wounding and healing, making metaphorical links between the landscape and the traumatized human body. Mapping new paths toward recovery, Nkanga’s work conveys the necessity of acknowledging the violence caused by exploiting natural and human resources if we are to overcome the damaging legacy of extraction under colonialism and global capitalism.
Of Cords Curling around Mountains, 2022
Drawing an unprecedented landscape, the installation includes works-carpets whose irregular shape is inspired by the shape of minerals, such as quartz and malachite, whose healing properties have been known since ancient times. The carpets extend into the space through very long hand-woven cords which in turn connect multiple concave sculptural objects that suggest manipulation by visitors. Made of wood, glass and terracotta, they host additional organic materials or convey sounds, endowing the work a performative and sensually relational component. Therefore, the artist develops at floor level her exhibition that winds through five large galleries of the third floor of the Castello, intentionally rejecting the verticality of the museum walls to embrace the horizontality, associated with the notion of geography and travel understood as transit and connection between distant points. The installation brings into dialogue the different cultural traditions that are intertwined in the biography of the artist: born in Nigeria and raised in France, currently living in Antwerp.
While the presence of objects, including minerals such as malachite and other organic materials, refers to the amulets that in some African traditions are given on the occasion of the birth of a child, or to the herbs used for their healing properties since ancient times, the carpet is also linked to the historical skill of European Flemish weaving. During her studies in Paris, Nkanga was pupil of the artist Giuseppe Penone (Garessio, 1947): in her work, attentive to materials and their transformations, in fact, the heritage of Arte Povera is highlighted at the level of the most current international developments in contemporary art world.
Teresa Margolles
At Witte de With, the exhibition A new work by Teresa Margolles consists of a simple action: the six large windows of the gallery space are smudged, rather than cleaned, using shirts stained by the soil and sweat of over one-hundred Venezuelan men that Margolles hired in Cúcuta. This performance at the gallery is staged for the first month of the exhibition; during this time period, the shirts used are each progressively encased in a series of cement blocks, made on site. The initials of the names of each hired worker are then engraved into each sculptural element. Together, these elements progressively form an installation in the space alluding to spatial dynamics set forth by the border-crossers in that region. Also included in the galleries is a portrait of one the participants of Margolles’ action in Cúcuta.
Laia Estruch
Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981). She lives and Works in Barcelona.
She studied Fine Arts at Universitat de Barcelona and The Cooper Union University in New York.
The artistic practice of Laia Estruch delves into the language of the body and the voice, on the threshold between sculpture and performance. The artist understands the voice as an extension of the body, an instrument to develop her project sand synthesize issues related to language, speech, gender or social structures. In her most recent work, the artist has investigated how urban spaces and their physical structures play an important role in everyday life. Using the ‘spoken word’, songs, objects and publications, her projects analyse the emotive possibilities of the a cappella voice and the undramatized body, opening a space of reflection in relation to the performative character of language, sound recording and its oral archive. She designs sculptural sets conceived as scenes, spaces for experimentation, which allow her to bring the body and the word to the field of action through her voice, sonorous and gestural.
"Estruch’s vocal explorations have often been paired with monumental sculptural settings —steel slides, inflatable buoys, tensile sails, and giant net traps— that function as surrogate bodies and interpretive scores for staging her “vocal rehearsals.”
In the 1960s and 1970s and with the arrival of the postmodern era, the creative urge to popular culture or so-called low art with high art—think of Pop artists being inspired by billboards, consumer culture and popular icons—and supported by Feminist Art, elevated a women’s craft to become Art with a capital A. Anni Albers (1899–1994), Fred Sandback (1943–2003), Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Judith Scott (1943–2005), among others, pioneered textile as a high-end contemporary art form.
Anni Albers
Anni Albers (born Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was a German-Jewish visual artist and printmaker. A leading textile artist of the 20th century, she is credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art. She was enrolled at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde art and architecture school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1922, where she began exploring weaving after facing restrictions in other disciplines due to gender biases at the institution.
In 1949, Albers became the first textile designer to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Relationship to Bauhaus:
"The great textile artist and abstractionist Anni Albers found her medium—weaving—by accident.
It was 1922, and Albers had just been accepted into the Bauhaus, the pioneering school in Weimar, Germany, whose lofty goal was to spread aesthetically rigorous, functional art and design across the globe and make it accessible to all, regardless of wealth or class. The Bauhaus offered courses in many different specialities, including woodworking, metal, wall painting, and glass. At the time, however, most women ended up in the weaving workshop.
While the school celebrated its commitment to gender equality in promotional pamphlets, the reality wasn’t as even-handed. In 1920, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius informed one female applicant that “it is not advisable, in our experience, that women work in the heavy craft areas such as carpentry and so forth.” He continued: “For this reason, a women’s section has been formed at the Bauhaus which works particularly with textiles; bookbinding and pottery also accept women.”
Though it was by no means Albers’s first choice—she’d have preferred glass—the ambitious young artist ended up at the loom. “Fate put into my hands limp threads!” she later recalled. “Threads to build a future?” Despite her reticence, though, she took to the medium. And through an experimental approach to material, and an inventive handling of undulating line and geometric pattern, she proceeded to advance not only textile art, but also the course of abstract art—a movement that her male contemporaries Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and her husband Josef Albers are sooner recognized for." (taken from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-bauhaus-master-anni-albers)
Cecilia Vicuña
Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread) .
Vicuña calls Quipu Womb a ‘poem in space.’ Over 50 large strands of unspun wool, dyed red, flow down from a metal ring high above our heads. Each cord has different knots spaced rhythmically along its length. The work references menstrual blood as well as the energies, flows and cycles of nature. Vicuña draws from Indigenous weaving practices, ritual, and environmental activism. Many of these works include explorations of the quipu. This is an ancient system of knotting rope used by Inca and Andean cultures, thought to be an alternative to written language. The artist says this ‘must have been a female invention.’
About Vicuñas work:
The turbulent history of South America—from the advanced civilizations of the pre-colonial era up to the ravaged present—lies at the heart of Cecilia Vicuña’s work. A poet and humanist as well as a visual artist, she engages in a multidisciplinary practice that embraces historical and literary dimensions, as well as aspects of the popular arts and religion, which have acted for centuries as sources of resistance to colonialism.
Vicuña finds conceptual fuel in the animal, vegetable, mineral, and social worlds. For her, no substance is inert, nothing is exempt from consideration or subject to hierarchical distinctions. Her work is animist in essence. All things—humans, rocks, animals, and plants—possess spiritual and supernatural natures; they are all animated, alive in some form. Using the most basic of elements, including branches, bits of wood, thread, string, paper, stones, raw wool, and words, Vicuña creates works that experiment with contingencies rather than offer assertions.
Thematically, she jumps from the elemental order of things to the complexity of social and ecological conditions. Her work makes sophisticated linkages that retain the amazement of discovery, the magic and marvel of the natural world. It is autobiographical while also subsuming multiple shared experiences—expressing what it is to be a political refugee, to experience political repression, to be female, to be a South American with deep indigenous roots. Climate change, the fragility of the environment, and the increasing precariousness of human life on the planet are at the thematic core of Vicuña’s interests. " (Taken from: https://sculpturemagazine.art/cecilia-vicuna/)
"According to art historian and textile artist Ferren Gipson, there has been a noticeable shift in the conversation surrounding textile-based art in recent years. ‘The fact that there have been multiple major international exhibitions featuring textile art, and that Cecilia Vicuña received a Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, is a clear indication of the growing embrace of mediums historically otherized in the art world,’ Gipson says. ‘It is now the responsibility of institutions to take decisive action and champion these works by adding them to their permanent collections in a thoughtful and meaningful way,’ she adds."
(taken from https://www.artbasel.com/news/social-fabrics-on-the-rise-textile-woven-art-craft-community-roots-across-generations?lang=en)
Nick Cave
The exhibition Let’s C featured one floor of Nick Cave’s iconic Soundsuits, which function simultaneously as sculptures, costumes, and extensions of the wearer’s persona. For more than two decades, Cave has constructed Soundsuits out of a trove of unique, found materials, such as throw rugs, stuffed animals, gleaming buttons, human hair, and other items from thrift stores, flea markets, and estate sales. The sculptural forms of the Soundsuits function simultaneously to display and conceal through the visual references to the exuberance of masquerade and the protection of body armor. This installation included recent works that showcased a new direction in Cave’s practice, introducing a muted palette, uniform surfaces, and dynamic relationships between multiple figures.
Olga de Amaral
"As I build surfaces, I create spaces of meditation, contemplation, and reflection. Every small unit that forms the surface is not only significant in itself, but is also deeply resonant of the whole. Likewise, the whole is deeply resonant of each individual element."
Olga de Amaral
Olga de Amaral (born 1932)[1] is a Colombian textile and visual artist known for her large-scale abstract works made with fibers and covered in gold and/or silver leaf. She was one of the few artists from South America internationally known for her work in fiber art during the 1960s and ‘70s.[2] She lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.[3]
Judith Scott
American artist Scott created over 200 cocoon-like sculptures while participating in the art program at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, the first organization to provide studio space for people with disabilities. Showing little interest in artmaking during her first two years at the center, Scott began her textile practice in 1987 after taking a course with the visiting fiber artist Sylvia Seventy.
Working at a frantic pace, Scott would wrap yarn, fabric, and other colorful fibers around found objects like broomsticks and shopping carts, often engulfing these items so thoroughly that they would become unrecognizable. Scott spent weeks—sometimes even months—on each sculpture, working up until her death in 2005. Considered to be an “outsider artist,” Scott was born with Down syndrome and became deaf during her infancy. She had lived in a state-run institution in Ohio for 35 years before moving to California.
El Anatsui
In lieu of fabric and thread, Ghanaian artist Anatsui creates monumental, shimmering tapestries out of folded liquor bottle caps and copper wire. “The amazing thing about working with these metallic ‘fabrics,’” Anatsui explains, “is that the poverty of the materials used in no way precludes the telling of rich and wonderful stories.” While abstract in composition, Anatsui’s assemblages touch upon a wide array of narratives, from the stories of the consumers who purchased the bottles, to the tale of Anatsui’s early life in Ghana watching family members weave traditional African kente cloths, to the history of alcohol distribution during the African slave trade.
Anatsui works with a team of about 30 assistants to methodically crush, link, and twist each bottle cap, eventually producing sculptures that can weave and bend like cloth. Much like Boetti a generation earlier, Anatsui embraces the element of chance in his work, encouraging exhibitors to hang, drape, and fold his textiles in whatever format they choose.
Mike Kelly
Michael Kelley (October 27, 1954 – c. January 31, 2012) was an American artist whose work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance, photography, sound and video. He also worked on curatorial projects; collaborated with many other artists and musicians; and left a formidable body of critical and creative writing.
Mike Kelley made all kinds of art. He created sculptures and installations, performances, films, drawings, music, paintings, photos, textile works – pretty much everything an artist can make! Inspired by things from everyday life and popular culture, he used found objects like stuffed toys, comic books, and school yearbooks to explore how people think and live through fictional creations, social structures and belief systems. Kelley liked to explore unusual ideas, often using humour. He didn’t follow what was popular or accepted by the art world and instead challenged what art could be and what it meant to be an artist.
In an interview with John Miller, which was published in the book ‘Mike Kelley’ ( A.R.T. Press, 1992, but an excerpt of which was also published in BOMB magazine, Kelley describes how he started to use the stuffed animals in his work:
“The first piece I did with stuffed animals, for example, wasn’t even about stuffed animals but was about gifts. That was because the primary discussion in the art world at that time had to do with commodification. There were these Utopian ideas being bandied about, “Well, we can make an art object that can’t be commodified.” What’s that? That’s a gift. If I give you this art-thing, it’s going to escape the evils of capitalism. Well, of course that’s ridiculous, because if you give this thing to junior he owes you something. It might not be money, but he owes you something. The most terrible thing is that he doesn’t know what he owes you because there’s no price on the thing. Basically, gift giving is like indentured slavery or something. There’s no price, so you don’t know how much you owe. The commodity is the emotion.”
Kelley also explains why he uses hand-crafted toys: “Dolls are designed to be projected onto as generically human. Handmade toys have a really strange presence especially when you compare them to the commercially made ones that are standardized. This is why they’re so weird, I think they are unconscious projections of the maker. The makers of the standardized things have gone through and excised anything that looks vaguely personal or idiosyncratic.”
Arabesque (Islamic Art): The Arabesque style, common in Islamic textiles and art, is characterised by its flowing, intertwining floral and geometric patterns. This design is symbolic of the infinite nature of creation, representing the unity of life and the interconnectedness of all things. Arabesque patterns are often found in textiles, architecture, and decorative arts across the Islamic world.
North America (Native American)
Navajo Blankets (United States): Navajo weaving is a highly respected craft within Native American culture, with patterns reflecting the spiritual beliefs of the Navajo people. These bold geometric designs often symbolise the connection between nature and the Navajo worldview. Navajo blankets are prized not only for their beauty but also for the deep cultural stories woven into each piece.
Quilting (United States): Quilting has been a significant part of American culture, especially during the 19th century. Many quilt patterns, such as the “Log Cabin” or “Star” held symbolic meaning within families and communities. Quilts were often used as gifts, heirlooms, or even as communication tools, with certain patterns believed to have been used as part of the Underground Railroad to guide enslaved individuals to freedom.
Mexican Embroidery - Otomi Designs : Motifs and symbols The Otomi designs are symbols based on native flora and fauna of the Otomi region. The animals and flowers in this Mexican embroidery represent the daily events of the Otomi culture in which we will appreciate animals such as deer, birds, rabbits, etc.
A Universal Language of Textiles
The patterns found in textiles are a universal language, rich with storytelling, symbolism, and cultural expression. Each region’s textiles provide a glimpse into the values, beliefs, and daily lives of the people who create them. From the colourful weavings of the Andes to the intricate arabesques of the Middle East, textile patterns connect us across time and place, offering a shared understanding of humanity’s creativity and cultural heritage.
Textiles continue to evolve, yet they remain a powerful medium through which communities preserve and celebrate their cultural identities. Whether for practical use or artistic expression, the patterns in textiles weave stories that endure, linking generations through fabric and design.
Information taken from: https://nwamiinternational-malta.org/patterns-of-the-world-textiles-culture/
Glossary of Terms - Textile:
Applique Stitchery in which a design is created by sewing pieces of fabric or other materials to a fabric background.
Batik (1) A method of applying dye to cloth which is covered in part with a dye-resistant, removable substance such as wax.
After dyeing, the wax is removed and the design appears in the original color against the newly-colored background. (2) The cloth itself.
Clamp Resist Cloth is folded, then repeatedly reverse folded until it is a neat bundle before being placed in a dye bath.
Discharge Dyeing Using a chemical agent to remove or diminish color from a previously dyed fabric.
Faille A woven cotton, rayon or silk fabric showing a slight ribbing.
Felting (1) Fabric made of unspun wool (sometimes with fur and other natural or synthetic fibers) which is matted together with moisture, heat and pressure. (2) A fabric resembling this, such as highly napped cotton.
Hand-screened Stencil-printed cloth to which one or more colors are applied by hand through stretched, fine-meshed “screens” of silk or organdy. The mesh is blocked where color is not wanted.
Harness The frame of a loom upon which the heddles are placed.
Ikat Yarn which is either tie-dyed or painted before being woven into fabric.
Loom A frame that holds the warp ends under tension so weaving can take place.
Overshot A distinct weaving pattern involving a special loom threading and the use of heavy yarn (alternating with finer yarn) in the weft or narrow direction.
Plangi Woven fabric pattern-decorated by tie dyeing; that is, by tieing or knotting parts of the fabric so that it will not absorb the dye.
Resist (Resist Dye) Patterning of yarn or textile by covering certain areas, usually with liquid wax, before dyeing.
Selvedge The side edges of the weaving around which the weft passes as it enters the open shed.
Shibori A resist technique from Japan in which areas of cloth are wrapped or bound before the fabric is dyed.
Shuttle Object that carries the weft as it interweaves with the warp.
Tapestry A weft-faced fabric in which pictures are woven with discontinuous wefts (wefts travel back and forth within each color area, not between selvedges).
Trapunto Decorative quilting in which the design is outline-stitched in two layers of fabric, then padded heavily between to form a high relief.
Warp The yarn that runs the long way in cloth made on a loom. It is under tension during weaving and is usually stronger than the “weft” or “fill” yarns which run across it.
Weft The yarns that run across the cloth, woven over the warp.
Weaving The process of making fabric by interlacing a series of warp yarns with weft yarns at right angles.
Weft-faced A tapestry weave in which the yarn running the short way is dominant in the design.
- This glossary was developed by the Southern Highland Craft Guild and is used with permission
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