http://www.parkfiction.org/unlikelyencounters/index.php
http://www.parkfiction.org/index.html
After an intensive seven year process of wishing, planning and negotiating, culminating in its presentation at Documeta11, Park Fiction, a long-term planned park project in Hamburg St. Pauli, with and from a collective of its residents, is in the midst of realization.
One year after Documenta 11, Park Fiction's installation returns to Hamburg. For the first time, the installation will be shown in its place of origin, St. Pauli, on the Reeperbahn.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an international congress: Unlikely Encounters (in urban space), with groups from Delhi/India, Tijuana/Mexico, La Plata/Argentina, Milan/Italy and Berlin - Munich - Hamburg/Germany.
Urbanism and the appropriation of cities have meanwhile become central questions in art discourse. What appeared to be a marginal theme skirting the outer limits of the art system has, with increasing dominance, settled down at biennials and international exhibitions, coming into its own as a separate, vivid branch in art. Especially now, at the end of the industrial age, new methods of urban practice are developing all over the world, which broaden the idea of the possibility for artist actions and interventions in the city space.
http://aware.uiah.fi/ian/index.php
... introduction ...
As one said, “The city happens”. It happens not just for you, and the people you know, but also for the people you don’t know. Interacting in, and with, public space you and others are maintaining a relationship not just with each other, but also to the surrounding environment. The lived experience of a place, what you and others do in it, and how it is perceived, is dynamic and always changing over time. It is a spatio-temporal diary, unwritten but fluid in material.
Personal memory gathers, shifts and adapts according to activity, event and journey. It may be associated to someone, or anonymous, and it may be of importance to someone else. Ups and downs, special occasions or everyday minutia; Fantastical obsession or critical reality, loves, frustrations and desires. Sometimes these experiences spill into the collective domain as story, rumour, history and scandal, documented in the media with vested interest. But rarely can you contribute to the collective domain, even though it happens to you.
Different locations hold various levels of significance and value for different people, with few channels of opportunity to listen, adjust, reflect or cherish its significance, and its relation to the larger ‘happening’ of collective experience around it. All gather to the biography of the place – but maybe you have not yet become aware...
... aims | about ...
The aware project proposes an experimental location-based medium for mediating fluid memory, ‘story-making’, and aims to facilitate the (playful or critical) re-imagination of the lived city of Helsinki.
It explores the positive potential of widespread use of networked, mobile media devices to raise awareness of communal relationships with place, and the real-time organisation/disorganisation of spatio-temporal meaning.
The project concept is to enable participants to contribute images, sounds and text via their mobile device to a collective online database, to be rebroadcast to the public environment of their origin, either anonymously or tagged with a user-name. However the contributions may be moved around to other cell locations in the city, re-interpreting their meaning and potential relationship to other forms and place.
These website pages present the current stage of the concept production, using mock-location cells in the Kallio-Sörnainen-Hermanni-Arabia corridor of Helsinki, and has been developed by John Evans, Markus Ort, Andrew Paterson and Aki-Ville Pöykiö for the Interactive Audio-Visual Narrative Production course at the Media Lab UIAH, Helsinki, February – May 2003.
http://aware.uiah.fi/ian/links.html
This project is a reimagining of the traditional guided tour which empowers young people to engage creatively with their built environment. It involves users as co-designers, producing a tour by making use of mobile technologies to both initiate and respond to a scattering of located nodes in and around Deptford Creek. Key Stage 3 students will walk usually inaccessible and fenced off areas of Deptford, making imaginative connections between large and small scale relics that connect histories and stories embedded in the creek itself.
http://www.nestafuturelab.org/showcase/mudlarking/mudlarking.htm
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/design/research/research-bulletin/page4.php
Mapping boundaries / reading everyday urban text
www.ub.es/5ead/PDF/3/Sprake.pdf
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cd/docs_dandt/idater/database/Sprake01.html
http://www.spacing.org/index.html
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/events/conferences/conferences.htm
'Abstract Tours / The Poetics of Urban Inscription: Abstract Dérives as Rhetorical Strategy'
This paper takes as point of departure my "Abstract Tours" project, started in 1997 in Berlin, and its subsequent adaptations. My intention is to investigate the critical potential of this project as an instrument of phenomenological knowledge and a conduit for a multiplicity of urban representations - ranging from the poetical to the political. Inscribere ('Inscribe') and Describere ('Describe') point to the common origin of the act of 'writing' Scribere and 'drawing' Disegnare (the linguistic cognate of 'design'). Is drawing a line on the map and following it 'on the ground' a form of design? Is the recasting of space through the dyad walking-writing, as de Certeau suggested, a form of architecture? Can the spatial dimension of writing open up both the unconscious and historical memory of the city?
Berlin 1997
For a month, I operated a 'tour agency' from a Portakabin placed in Schlossplatz, next to the Stadtforum, where projects for the corporate reshaping of the German capital were exhibited to the public. These tours took their form from random geometric figures that participants were invited to draw on a map of Berlin with the help of Perspex stencils. Those embarking on a tour tried to "stick to the line" as far as possible, which often entailed jumping over fences, trespassing, climbing over walls, crossing railway lines etc. The gesture of drawing a geometrical pattern on the map mimicked the conceptual abstractions that inform the configuration of spatial practices, such as architecture and city planning, the design of routes, the schematic grid of property lines and ultimately, the construction of the Berlin Wall. Gordon Matta-Clark's work can be regarded as the closest reference for Abstract Tours - his cuts through buildings revealed the constructional imposition, one could actually penetrate the facades and read general schematic structures. My project evolved around the question of whether it was possible to socialize that practice by inviting people to cut through their city and read how physical and spatial contexts, socially-constructed boundaries, and architectural representations intervene in processes of production and reproduction. By following the lines traced on paper, rather than realizing them on the ground with a wrecking ball and reinforced concrete, abstract tourism aimed to expose the code, rather than imitate it, an inverse, rather than a symmetrical practice. The closing exhibition, held in the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, included all participants who had documented their urban explorations by taking photographs, making videos, audio-recordings, collecting found objects, keeping journals etc. The polyphony of voices and redistribution of representational authority raised both political and epistemological questions about 'who' is authorized to "represent the city". 'The chorus of idle steps' fragmented totalizing representations of the city, and opened up a plurality of perspectives, which in turn produced provisional, transient, partial perceptions and representations. Once these representations were assembled, the spaces of the city were incorporated into something closer to a fictional narrative than an objective record.
Hong Kong 2004
Representations are means by which the city is known, analyzed and controlled: ideology and knowledge become barely distinguishable once they are subsumed under the broader notion of representation. The languages in which the city is taken to be known - the languages of economics, sociology, statistics, surveys, case studies, demographics, cartography, photography, empirical documentation, etc. - are languages not only for describing the city, but languages embedded in the techniques and technologies of disciplinarity. Abstract Tours in Hong Kong are offered through a website. Instead of geometrical shapes, here I propose rhetorical strategies including tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, figures of speech which construct meaning by transferring or deferring it from the realm of familiar experience into the realm of the unfamiliar. Not only do they become the form in which (partial) knowledge of the city is conveyed, but also as cognitive tools, they produce fresh perceptions and insights. The fabric of the city becomes a 'material' from which a new syntax of sites is created. The resulting narrative is collective and finds its way back into the electronic forum set up for this purpose.
Biography
Laura Ruggeri, Dottore in Semiotica (University of Bologna, Italy)
MA Spatial Culture (Middlesex University, UK)
Born in Milan, since 1997 she has been living in Hong Kong where she teaches Aesthetics and Semantics of Product Design, and Research Methods for Designers in the MA Design program at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Her academic work, critical analysis and research interests converge with her art practice. For the past ten years she has been realizing videos, installations, and urban scale art projects across Europe, investigating the relationship between body and architecture and promoting attention to meaning construction and its articulations. Co-curator of a film retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark in Milan, panelist at the 1997 Film+Arch festival in Graz, and artist-in-residence at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, reviews of her projects have featured in Artforum, Flash Art, TAZ, Tema Celeste, Art Monthly, Die Presse.
She has published in Wiley Academy Architectural Design, Interni, Journal of Mundane Behavior, Circa, Nummer, Springer, Opening, Flash Art International and has contributed essays to 'Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility', London: Open Editions, 2001, 'Geografie del Lontano Vicino', Turin: Masoero, 2000, 'Hier, Da und Dort', Darmstadt: Häusser-Media, 2000, 'HK Lab', Map Book Publishers: Hong Kong 2002. She is the editor of 'HK Lab2' (forthcoming).
I have been working with the form of organised walking since 1993. I refer to these walks as manoeuvres. They exist in a region between traditions of performance art, the historical tour, loco-descriptive poetry, pilgrimage, expanded notions of sculpture, curating and plain old pedestrianism.
Manoeuvre started out as a collaborative organisation with fellow artists: Dean Brannagan and Gillian Dyson. Our initial aims and objectives being:
'to re-negotiate the given, inflexible and hierarchical institutional system which governs and commissions live activity by artists... to be an innovative, non-profit making organisation seeking to locate critical performance behaviour within the social fabric... to develop works on a bimonthly basis... to be located in its first stages in London... to evade seeking out a given 'audience' in favour of being approached by the viewer...'
Some of these have been maintained and realised, others have diminished in importance. Since 1995 I have developed Manoeuvre less as an organisation and more as a working methodology.
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/index.jhtml
Stalker: ‘I’m not sure. I think it lets those through who’ve lost all hope; not good or bad but the wretched. But even the most wretched will perish if they don’t know how to behave here.’ (Andrei Tarkosfky, 'Stalker', Mosfilm, 1979)
The manoeuvre utilises found materials and texts to assemble the possibility for a particular chronotope by which I mean a modelling organisation of time and space which engages with historical contexts. In this way sites can be defined as chronotopes (chronos meaning time, topos meaning place or topic [in discourse]). A walk of intention manoeuvres through space and time forming a web of interrelated chronotopes (websites) amounting to what might be termed heteroglossia.
My role in each of these walks is one of grammarian as opposed to conventional ‘guide’ involving me in a process of highlighting ideologically unselfconscious phenomena and ‘pointing out’ bodies of pre-existing information. Out of textual material the possibilities of a parallel intertextual work of imagination is opened to the participants. These works/walks are intellectually organic, each involving the active participation from a wide range of individuals whilst retaining a pedagogic aspect.
Within a discursive performance of this kind the production of meaning does not depend on the subjectivity of any one walker. Through the use of real space and time the engagement of the group in constructing chronotopes involves an absence of authorship and a process of construction of subjectivity which could be laid bare and examined in terms of its blockages, ironies, dissonances, collective dependencies and radical and inescapable historicality.
‘Raizl Kibel on the march westward for girls from the Union factory, later recalled: In a frost, half-barefoot, or entirely barefoot, with light rags upon their emaciated and exhausted bodies, tens of thousands of human creatures drag themselves along in the snow… Even today I still cannot understand with what sort of strength and how I was able to endure the death march and drag myself to Ravensbruck camp, and from there, after resting a week or two, to Neustadt, where I was liberated by the Red Army.’
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/page8.html
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/page6.html
TEXT > Three manoeuvres by Tim Brennan in London E1/E2
http://www.cornerhouse.org/publications/browse.asp?pid=11&p=4
TEXT > Monograph: Tim Brennan
http://www.cornerhouse.org/publications/browse.asp?pid=105
http://newton.sunderland.ac.uk/~vardygallery/timbrennan.html
http://www.pavilion.org.uk/consights/shepofarcstuff/shepofarc2.html
http://einscafe.eins.org/einscafe/angels.html
http://www.kahve-house.com/society/walking/references.html
Project Description and History
http://www.appalshop.org/kennedy/index.html
http://www.appalshop.org/kennedy/project.htm
RFK in EKY, The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project, is a series of public conversations and activities centered around the real-time, site-specific intermedia performance recreating, on September 9th and 10th 2004, Robert Kennedy's two-day, 200 mile "poverty tour" of southeastern Kentucky in 1968.
The performance provides an opportunity to revisit the essential questions raised in Kennedy's original visit (2004 being, like 1968, a pivotal election year): on the representation of marginalized populations in the national consciousness; the role of government in maintaining a quality-of-life safety net, and fostering sustainable economic development, educational and vocational advancement; ways to stem the out-migration of rural young people and the loss of natural resources; and the priorities of a government administration engaged in a protracted war. RFK in EKY, like Kennedy and those who created his tour, recognizes these questions are part of an important national dialogue for which Appalachia is only one of many possible settings.
Like the original tour, RFK in EKY focuses attention on the indigenous expertise and alternative visions of Appalachia, re-enacting, with an all-local cast (of hundreds), the most significant events of Kennedy's visit in order to hold an historical mirror to present day issues and ideas. The 48 hour performance recreates all aspects of Kennedy's tour, including two official hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty (held at Vortex and Fleming-Neon), roadside visits with individual families, walking tours of small communities and strip mine sites, stops at one-room schoolhouses, and speeches at courthouses and colleges. A series of contextualizing activities are taking place preceding, in the months following the recreation, and surround the two-day performance itself. These events range from the analytical to the deeply personal and will use art as the occasion for creating public meeting space in rural communities.
Speakers such as Peter Edelman and Loyal Jones will address the history and strategies of the "war on poverty" as it played out in central Appalachia , and the legacy of the programs' spirit and ideas. Headstart workers will focus attention on the last intact remnant of the "war on poverty" idea of "maximum feasible participation of the poor" in determining the direction of programming meant to help them. Artists from the project, including Harrell Fletcher, will present an exhibition of memorabilia and commemorative artifacts gathered during its four year development process, and artists within the project will conduct a public discussion of the integrated arts approach and the many pitfalls that led to the performance.
Initiated and led by the artist John Malpede, RFK in EKY is a project of Appalshop, Inc. Malpede, now in-residence at Appalshop, began developing the notion of recreating Kennedy's visit during the American Festival Project sponsored Artist and Community Gathering in 2000, and evolved it into its present form during extended visits over the subsequent three years.
John Malpede is a distinguished, genre-bending performance artist and theater director whose solo pieces "Inappropriate Laughing Responses" and "Get" have been performed throughout the US . Over the past three years Malpede has been featured in five video works in Bill Viola's series, "The Passion," including "Quintet of the Astonished," in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Currently, Malpede is performing a one-hour monologue as Antonin Artaud in director Peter Sellar's "Artaud/Jordan." The piece has toured six European cities and will tour the US in 2004.
In 1985 Malpede formed the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), the first performance group in the nation comprised entirely of homeless and formerly homeless people. LAPD's current touring project, "Agents and Assets," originally produced in 2001, recreates a US House of Representatives hearing on the importation of drugs into the country by Nicaraguan Contras with CIA complicity.
The creative process of "Agents and Assets" merges experiential knowledge with contextual information, allowing both performers and audience a deeper understanding of the social and political forces that shape their lives. This model, mixing lived experience and context, is the basic groundwork for RFK in EKY. Local citizens, some of whom saw Kennedy as schoolchildren in 1968, will play national figures; children will play their parents; today's political and community leaders will play their past counterparts. The construction of memory and commemoration is one context; environmental sacrifice and economic self-determination another; federal policy promises and failures yet another - the project exists to reveal both the imbalances inherent in our society and the extraordinary work and workers attempting to expose and rectify them.
RFK in EKY not only recreates an historic moment, it holds a mirror to it and asks people to join the conversations, exploring their hopes and analyzing what's true in our relationships to government, community, and each other. Like RFK himself, the project hopes to give people the opportunity and the courage to listen, speak, and act as free citizens in a true democracy.
Harrell Fletcher
http://www.appalshop.org/kennedy/artists-comm/fletcher.htm
http://www.harrellfletcher.com/
Stephen Willats / Changing Everything
South London Gallery / 01.07.1998 - 02.08.1998
This exhibition 'Changing Everything' began more than a year ago with Willats contacting people on the council estates surrounding the South London Gallery inviting them to go with him on walks through Peckham. Using photography, tape recordings and Super 8 film, participants recorded the things that struck them as vivid or poignant images in their environment. Over twenty walks later a huge amount of material has been gathered.
The resulting multimedia installation inside the South London Gallery space recreates this external walk. The viewer coming into the Gallery space makes his/her own journey as they view it, using a specially prepared guide book to consider questions raised in the collaborative process and represented in the mosaics of text and photographs before them. Local residents and visitors to the Gallery therefore share in a creative process intended to present the exhibition space as informal and unintimidating. Visitors will be encouraged to involve themselves directly in the installation by making relationships between different items in the work.
'Changing Everything' is aimed at presenting the art gallery as an accessible, dynamic arena, in which audiences can make sense of art for themselves, not an inflexible container of artefacts and cultural icons. Willats' use of the Gallery space to compile a visual model of how individuals map reality aims to break down barriers between the South London Gallery and the communities that surround it, and show a new way for artists to work in society.
http://www.southlondongallery.org/docs/exh/exhibition.jsp?id=41&view=past
Stephen Willats: Art, Ethnography and Social Change / Jane Kelly
http://www.variant.randomstate.org/4texts/Jane_Kelly.html
Following on from Common-Place which studied the area beyond the house - Fieldtrip adopts the concept of the journey as a device to explore the contemporary milieu and Scotland's eclectic identity.
Fieldtrip > Five guides lead five groups on five routes across Scotland. Find out where they went, what they saw and what they brought back.
The selected itineraries presented go beyond the moribund tourist circuit and therefore eschew the likes of Abbotsford, Royal Deeside, Culloden and Loch Lomond. In their place are little-known settlements such as Dalmel-lington, Drymen and Dunadd Fort, alongside some Orcadian relics, industrial behemoths and an occasional example of contemporary architecture.
Seminar > Speakers from across Europe will explore the themes of the exhibition in the context of their own work and practice. How do we understand Scotland's landscape and how does it reflect and shape a sense of Scottishness? Can we use the journey as a device for understanding, analysing and intervening within the landscape? Chaired by the landscape architect Eelco Hooftman, speakers include Prof. Christophe Girot (Chair of Landscape Architecture, ETH Zurich), Andre Dekker (Observatorium, Rotterdam) and Ion Sørvin (n55, Copenhagen).
http://www.scottisharchitecture.com/natprog-fieldtrip.html
http://www.fieldtripscotland.com/
In the summer of 1995 the artists Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger started their collaboration through a series of conversations in the local pub. They wanted to unite their quests and talents in creating a space which- through its specific furnishing, and acitve public use, could make reflection and contemplation possible, for a longer period of time than usual. Their common interest cummulated in a marriage of paintings, sculpture and texts. The Formbank of benedict monk and architect Dom Hans van der Laan provided the starting point for the design of the modular system which came to be known as the 'Observatorium for the observation of the inner self'. In a succession of exhibitions (Groningen, Düsseldorf, Rotterdam, Den Haag and Berlin) we investigated its different forms and uses. An Imaginary Domicile, A Studio, A Hotel Room, A Sound Space, A Writer's Workshop. These projects were our introduction into the gentle art of dwelling in seclusion.
http://www.observatorium.org/html/shows/shows01.htm
http://www.topos.de/issues/volltext.htm?acl=10::7046:::
Bas Princen (1975) Netherlands
The Dutch architect / photographer Bas Princen graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven in 1998. He joined the Berlage Institute in 1999. His photos show snippets of landscape, not as an illustration of reality but rather as images of a potential reality of this landscape. He often photographs places that we do not know about, too abandoned to be nature, places whose initial function we have long forgotten about, even if they have retained traces of it. What interests him and what he photographs is the appropriation of such places, and traces of activities reveal them in their true nature, and restore a new reality to them. These are mutations of landscape which, through new and often fleeting uses take on a different meaning. Bas Princen exhibited his work in particular in 2001 at ArchiLab, in March 2003 as part of the monographic show at the NAi in Rotterdam, and in November 2003 as part of the exhibition UFO Belgrade Urban Fog of Belgrade, in Berlin. His photos have illustrated many publications including Definite Infinite about the work of the Austrian architects Riegler and Riewe and the 2001 catalog of Mutations. Bas Princen is involved with the research project “Shrinking Cities International Research” organized by Philipp Oswalt as the photographer in the investigative team at the Ivanovo site in Russia. Bas Princen is the author of Artificial Arcadia, published in 2004. The work of Bas Princen will be shown in the 2004 Venice Biennal. He is currently involved in an Art Project, set up around the changing landscape of the new High Speed Train Line Through the Netherlands, and called Atelier HSL.
http://www.archilab.org/public/2004/en/textes/princen.htm
http://www.archilab.org/public/2004/en/ft2004.html
Starting Point /// Whether in the USA, Britain, or Belgium, Finland, Italy, Russia, Kazakhstan, or China: everywhere, cities are shrinking. The dramatic development in eastern Germany since 1989, which has led to more than a million empty apartments and to the abandoning of countless industrial parks and social and cultural facilities, has proven to be no exception, but a general pattern of our civilization. Shrunken cities contradict the image, familiar since the Industrial Revolution, of the "boomtown", a big city characterized by constant economic and demographic growth. Shrunken cities spur a reconsideration not only of traditional ideas of the European city, but also of the future development of urban worlds. The drastic changes in cities caused by shrinking thus present not only an economic and social, but also a cultural challenge. Urban shrinking can hardly be affected by city planning, and it brings numerous problems. New types of cities arise; we do not yet have ways of thinking or of using their specific character.
The Project /// Shrinking Cities, a three-year initiative project of Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, seeks to expand Germany's city-planning debate - until now concentrated on questions of demolishing surplus apartments and improving residential quarters - to address new questions and perspectives. The project also places developments in eastern Germany in an international context, involving various artistic, design, and research disciplines in the search for strategies for action. The emphases of the research and exhibition project, Shrinking Cities, are, first, an international study of processes of shrinking (first project phase) and, second, the development of strategies for action for eastern Germany (second project phase).
http://www.shrinkingcities.com/index.php?L=1
Urban Drift is a transcultural platform for new tendencies in Architecture, Design and Urbanism.
urban drift is .. a collaborative platform for contemporary urban strategies / a network initiating and supporting urban interventions / a hybrid urban praxis, opening up and communicating architecture to a wider audience / urban survival strategies / time-based architecture, temporary and ephemeral / urban transformation and the reanimation of lost, forgotten, hidden city spaces / drift-inspired by random movement / neon-inspired / trans-cultural collaboration / the city as a medium / scavenging, remapping, resampling the city in light, sound and text / urban nomadism / 24 hours nightwalking / the reinvention of spaces / intervention.....urban curating / working with the city's second skin / communicating a mobile, fluid urbanity / reading the city as text / psychogeographies the space of relationships / the creation of urban situations / stalking peripheral urban spaces / process-driven urban design / garage settlements / urban voids / urban animators / to know is to insert something into what is real and hence to distort reality / container cities / born in berlin - city in a state of flux / but modular, viral, transportable and translatable elsewhere .. / drift via text / smart materials, mobile telephone technologies and new hybrid cultures in urban design / soundscapes / reanimating the real / multiple identites
http://urbandrift.org/index.html
School of Missing Studies > The knowledge that slips through singular disciplines seems to flow freely in an unbound space and networks, however it takes a collaborative and experimental practice to excavate it, sort of scout for it, rather than wait for it. SMS is a network for experimental study of cultural issues related to the urban environment in cities marked by or currently undergoing political, social, and cultural transition. Participants in SMS explore the smooth area among established disciplines of architecture, art, sociology and cultural studies to bring to light the missing phenomena of urban transition.
http://www.schoolofmissingstudies.net/
http://www.werkleitz.de/events/biennale2004/html_en/index_e.html
Culture on the Ground: The World Perceived Through the Feet
Tim Ingold / University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Journal of Material Culture / November 1 2004, Volume 9, No. 3
Classical accounts of human evolution posit a progressive differentiation between the hands as instruments of rational intelligence and feet as integral to the mechanics of bipedal locomotion. Yet evolutionists were modelling pedestrian performance on the striding gait of boot-clad Europeans. The bias of head over heels in their accounts follows a long-standing tendency, in western thought and science, to elevate the plane of social and cultural life over the ground of nature. This tendency was already established among European elites in the practice of destination-oriented travel, the use of shoes and chairs, and the valorization of upright posture. It was further reinforced in urban societies through paving the streets. The groundlessness of metropolitan life remains embedded not only in western social structures but also in the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and biology. A more grounded approach to human movement, sensitive to embodied skills of footwork, opens up new terrain in the study of environmental perception, the history of technology, landscape formation and human anatomical evolution.
http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/short/9/3/315
http://www.westga.edu/~wgpr/news_archive/02_04/waring.html
http://www.theasa.org/asa04/panels/panel17.htm
http://tcs.ntu.ac.uk/body/abstracts/6(3-4).html
Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator who works with issues of public space and cultural geography. Her recent public artwork, "Public Green", can be seen in transit shelters all over Los Angeles. This and other work suggests the transfer of land from private to public domain, and asks the viewer to take an active role in the production of public space. For the past 3 years, she has been an active member of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Mogel is also a founding member of Nomads + Residents_LA.
http://www.publicgreen.com/projects/
Public green space is an important factor in urban life- it is a respite from the concrete and asphalt environment of the city, and functions as a place to gather, relax, play, and experience a bit of nature. The Public Green project creates new meaning for these spaces, illustrating the complex and symbiotic relationship between the development of parkland and the growth of the city.
This mapping of publicly accessible green space in the city and environs is distributed throughout the public transit system, inside city buses and in transit shelters. Cartographic and textual information shows the distribution of green space across LA, locating public parks and giving the viewer an understanding of historical and current practices of acquisition, creation and maintenance of public green space in regards to Los Angeles economics, real estate practices, and history.
Public Green poses questions about ownership of land, and suggests the transfer of property from private to public use. Viewers are asked to rethink their local landscape, and to physically transform their environment. Through tactics of information distribution along existing transportation networks, the viewer becomes an agent of mobility and change. The information in the Public Green posters can be used geographically, to find parks locally or near daily commutes; or as a basis for community advocacy. Maps can be used for wayfinding or political means- this project suggests both functions.
http://www.laforum.org/issues/more.php?id=100_0_15_0_C
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/monuments/index.html
Genius Loci Symposium
At SCI-Arc
March 17th, 2002
Co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Municipal Art Gallery, Cal Arts, and FAR
http://www.geocities.com/geniusloci_symposium/
http://www.farsited.org/features/geniusloci.html
The Genius Loci Symposium was held at Sci-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) and was co-sponsored by The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Municipal Art Gallery, Cal Arts, and FAR.
The symposium featured various takes on the idea of "genius loci" or the "spirit of place". The symposium was organized by Lize Mogul and Chris Kahle, and featured presentations by:
Denis Cosgrove is a Professor of Geography at UCLA. His research concentrates on the meaning and symbolism in landscape with specific reference to historical Italy and Western Europe.
Lize Mogul is an interdisciplinary artist whose work suggests the transfer of land from private to public domain. Her recent public artwork: "Public Green" can be seen at transit shelters all over Los Angeles.
Matt Coolidge is Director of the Center of Land Use Interpretation. See: www.clui.org
Gustavo LeClerc is a partner and founding member of Adobe LA and director of the Border Cultures Program at the Southern California Studies Center at USC.
Valerie Tevere is an artist whose work in video features structured yet spontaneous encounters with city inhabitants. Tevere has been a member of Nomads + Residents since 2000.
Glen Creason has been the map librarian for the Los Angeles Public Library for the past 13 years. Cleason is a Native Angeleno.
Morgan Yates is the Corporate Archivist for the Automobile Club of Southern California (AAA). He has presented the archive's holdings throughout Southern California.
Norman Klein is the author of the History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. Klien is a professor at Cal Arts, and also teaches at Sci Arc and elsewhere.
NOMADS+RESIDENTS_LA
While competing definitions of "the global" and "the local" are being thrown about in a myriad current political and economic debates, Los Angeles continues, like most major cities, to house a constantly fluctuating mass of natives, migrants and visitors. Even with the much heralded isolation of LA "car culture", these populations meet, exchange information, and share knowledge. Recognizing this fluid process as a resource, NOMADS+RESIDENTS_LA organizes public discussions between people who live in Los Angeles and people who visit the city. Taking its form and motivation from NOMADS + RESIDENTS in New York City, NOMADS+RESIDENTS_LA creates a network among people interested in contemporary/political/intellectual discussions in the context of cultural production.
NOMADS+RESIDENTS_LA is organized by a group of artists, writers and curators. Event locations will circulate throughout the city.
N+R_LA are:
Joyce Campbell | Rita Gonzalez | Sharon Hayes | Anna Helwing | Maria Karlsson | Annika Lundgren | Rachel Mayeri | Lize Mogel | Tone O. Nielsen | Linda Pollack | Bea Schlingelhoff | Jeannie Simms
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things
VISION > The only way to fundamentally alter our world is via the discovery and creation of infinitely small things. Before revolutions, ruptures, or radical shifts there are infinitely small things that have led to miniature reconsiderations, micro-displacements, and tiny leakages in the fabric of things.
The Institute of Infinitely Small Things is dedicated to the documentation and creation of newnesses in order that the world might be entirely transformed, radically reimagined, or simply reinvented from scratch.
MISSION > The Institute for Infinitely Small Things is a research organization dedicated to the discovery, creation, collection, construction and documentation of all of the infinitely small things in the world, past, present and future.
STRATEGY > The Institute for Infinitely Small Things involves an infinite series of maps, guidebooks, instructions, and scripts that guide public expeditions, performative interventions and collaborative investigations from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world.
http://www.ikatun.com/institute/infinitelysmallthings/
Mundane Journeys is an ongoing public artwork in San Francisco that can be accessed at www.mundanejourneys.com or by calling the Mundane Journeys hotline at 415-364-1465.
http://www.mundanejourneys.com/
http://www.stretcher.org/archives/r3_a/2004_08_22_r3_archive.php
http://www.soex.org/jan7_feb12_2005.html
http://www.silentgallery.com/pocrass/pev/index.html
http://www.speculativearchive.org/
The Speculative Archive produces video, publication, and installation projects which focus on the production of documents, their collection, circulation and reception, and their socio-political effects.
We use the word "speculative" in our project name as a qualifier for the documents produced by the Archive and in order to foreground the temporal complexities of archival and documentary practices. Our "Archive" is not a physical site in which a kind of static retention occurs or in which an historical truth is fixed, but rather exists as a set of socio-political and cultural practices in which documents, objects, and memories of documents and objects are taken up in ongoing processes of transformation.
The Archive is a collaboration of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne.
Julia Meltzer is a media artist based in Los Angeles. She is the director and founder of Clockshop a non-profit media and art organization in Los Angeles and is a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship.
David Thorne makes work addressing the conditions of so-called globalization; notions of justice shot through with revenge; and memory practices in a moment of excessive rememorations. David is a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship.
Speculative Archive projects engage specific archival materials to produce documents as possible elaborations of "the historical record." Although we work with archival materials (declassified U.S. government records on cold war interventions in Guatemala or Chile, for instance), we situate our work in a current political context. And although we situate our work in a current political context, we do not produce documents that aspire to blow the lid off some present condition or phenomenon. Nor do we produce projects that establish a series of determined or causal links between terrors present and past. Nor do we stage sequences of damning revelations ending with calls to conscience.
Our projects seek to open a space for the contemplation of violence through a revisualization of historical and contemporary documents. We approach political violence not through its most visible effects, but rather through its documentary forms and procedures.
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/public_history/newsletter/paper3.html
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/1in32.php
http://www.next5minutes.org/n5m/article.jsp?articleid=783
The Atlas Group is a project established by Walid Raad in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. One of our aims with this project is to locate, preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon. In this endeavor, we produced and found several documents including notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs and other objects. Moreover, we organized these works in an archive, The Atlas Group Archive. The project's public forms include mixed-media installations, single channel screenings, visual and literary essays, and lecture/performances.
Walid Raad is a media artist whose works to date include video, photography and literary essays. All, in one way or another, deal with the following concerns: the contemporary history of Lebanon with particular emphasis on the wars in Lebanon between 1975 to 1991; the representation of traumatic events of collective historical dimensions; and the ways film, video, and photography function as documents of physical and psychological violence.
Raad’s video works include Up to the South (Salloum/Raad, 60 min., 1993), a collection of video shorts titled The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs (Raad, 18 min., 1996-1999), and Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (Raad/Bachar), 18 min., 2000). Mixed-media projects include The Atlas Group: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive (1999 to the present), The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Documents from The Atlas Group Archive (2001 to the present), and My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair (2004). Raad’s media works have been shown at Documenta 11 (Kassel), The Venice Biennale (Venice), The Whitney Biennial (New York), The Ayloul Festival (Beirut, Lebanon) and numerous other festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. He is a member of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut/New York ~ www.fai.org.lb) and a founding member of The Atlas Group (Beirut/New York ~ www.theatlasgroup.org). Raad is represented by The Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London and by the Sfeir Semler Gallery in Hamburg.
http://www.bidoun.com/contents02.html
http://www.cooper.edu/art/bio_raad.html
http://www.freewaves.org/artists/atlas/
sans terre : a temporary institution for the investigation of urbanism : spurse
The archive is often seen to be tied to the documentation of a past event – an event that has receded far into the past so as to be only accessible through documentation housed in the archive. The archive becomes thus situated as a space for the complex and contested production of histories. In Foucault’s alternative sense the archive is the site of the spacing out of a history so as to turn history upon itself and uncover the discursive and non-discursive regimes of what is sayable or visible at a given moment. The Foucaultian archive becomes a site of ontological – or perhaps heterological – investigation/production and experimentation. Critical to this form of the archive is that there is a nascent cartographic function to the archive – where it begins to trace out weaknesses, aporias, new paradoxes, and new modes of becoming latent in the mass of housed materials (always in relation to questions of the present). This is what Foucault saw as the shift into genealogical modes of inquiry (and what Deleuze termed the cartographic). Perhaps then it is not all that much of a morphogenetic shift to see the archive as an open experiment in the production of what is in common – where this conceptualization of the “commons” is being posed as a zone of problematization.
There in the development of a temporary parallel space or event of inquiry one finds interesting resonances following the archaic root of the word archive -- “Archeia” -- the town hall, a public gathering, the space of civic engagement. “Archive” then as a space for the production of a public. The archive becomes a strategic zone of stopping mid stream to allow the unformedness of ideas, things, events, places, identities, individuations of any scale and forces to fold in upon each other as an experimental problematization of the given – a pause – a slowing down of acting to allow the givenness of a new situation to reshape one’s mode of acting and doing.
Given the global context of action and vastly distributed nature of agency there is a need for this form of situated condensation and slowing down of agents, forces, spaces, and events. A strategic temporary parallel institution -- the archive is at once a collection, a system of collecting, a series of relations (to peoples, groups, regions, terrains, events, things and other beings, etc.) and an unfolding collective space in which to experiment with these (now collective). The archive becomes a way of investigating and experimenting with the present through the collective development of a system of problematization.
A system is needed to move from the space of problematization towards the production of an archive. Here one needs to develop a methodology of tracing out immanent forces at the point of emergence. A score that directly engages outside of the structural subjectivities of scientific, aesthetic and other agendas produces an archive that can move outside of itself, making possible that the archive becomes an active force in its own reshaping. The generation of archival objects through the scores creates an open set, in which any object, image, sound, smell or agent can become an element of the set if collected from the environment using the specified methodology -- thus permitting the discovery of unanticipated elements and associations. The archive demands an engaged participation that over time must respond to the changing problematicthat the archive itself calls forward. The spatio-temporal contingency of the archive and archival process is fundamental and thereby as a process sustains a dynamic continuity, remaining open to intervention, aberration and inflection. So, the etymology of the word archive as an interaction of forces maps onto the praxis of the archive as a collection. It is a repository of motion and speeds; a collection of open agencies, sensible and prone -- the production of a people(s) and a space/spaces still to come.
http://www.spurse.org/sansterre.html
http://art232.art.utexas.edu/_la/
http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/a_ah/peo/faculty/des/taylorcv.html
http://www.unm.edu/~quantum/quantum_2003/landarts.html
Artifact Reason: Beyond Image-based Research
Chris Taylor
University of Texas, USA
http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes1/research/papers/wpades/vol3/ctfull.html
Spending two months and 10,000 miles traveling throughout the American West to visit and make work in response to contemporary and pre-contact land art is to engage the fundamental difference between learning from artifacts directly and learning from the mediated interpretations of words and images. Recent discussions of potential restoration of projects like the Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970) and Double Negative (Michael Heizer, 1969) demonstrate a gap in the relationship between intent embodied in material (artifact) and the acculturated meaning of such works. This paper will present the experience of a new academic program in relation to the question of contemporary and pre-contact restoration in order to outline a method of reasoning directly with artifacts
The City Repair Project is an organized group action that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live. We facilitate artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world.
City Repair was formed in Portland, Oregon in 1996 by citizen activists who wanted a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society. Born out of a successful grassroots neighborhood initiative that converted a residential street intersection into a neighborhood public square, City Repair began its work with the idea that localization (of culture, of economy, of decision-making) is a necessary foundation of sustainability. By reclaiming urban spaces to create community-oriented places, we plant the seeds for greater neighborhood communication, empower our communities and nurture our local culture.
- placemaking and architecture
- urban planning and design
- ecological and social sustianability
- community resource localization
- nonhierarchical decision-making
- equality, diversity and peace
- cultural identity and bioregionalism
- paradigm reconstruction
http://www.cityrepair.org/
http://www.americancity.org/article.php?id_article=64
Village Building Convergence 5
Human-Scale Community Action at the Urban Crossroads
May 20-29, 2005 - Portland, OR
The Village Building Convergence is a Cyclical Event for the Restoration of Communication and Sharing, Working Together to Rebuild our Common Culture, and to Transform the City into a Network of Ecological Village Places.
http://vbc.cityrepair.org/vbc5/index.php
Dignity Village
Dignity is a formerly mobile tent city in Portland, Oregon, well on its way to becoming a green, sustainable, urban village. It is home for people who might otherwise inhabit doorways and sidewalks, Dignity provides a peaceful community, a clean environment, a center, and safety.
http://www.outofthedoorways.org/
Center for Neighborhood Technology
The Center for Neighborhood Technology has a unique mission: To invent and implement new tools and methods that create livable urban communities for everyone.
The Urban Advantage
Urban communities and metropolitan regions are growing rapidly. At the Center for Neighborhood Technology, we believe that this combination of economic growth and accelerating urbanization holds the promise of a better life for the world's population, because cities are the key to equitable wealth creation, efficient resource use and livable communities.
We believe that urban communities can only fulfill this promise and achieve fundamental change based on a new sense of collaborative advantage. Positive change requires that communities realize their chances of succeeding are greater when they act together, rather than on their own.
Sustainable Development
There is an emerging consensus about how to achieve this fundamental change. Under the rubric of "sustainable development," more and more citizens, governments, non-profits, and businesses agree that the challenge is to achieve a steady improvement in quality of life, while simultaneously improving environmental conditions.
For more than 20 years, CNT has been working at the cutting edge of sustainable development, long before the term was coined. With our partners, we have been inventing programs and strategies that simultaneously achieve environmental goals and build strong communities.
We believe that urban communities and regions throughout the country have a unique capacity to offer a high quality of life to all of their residents, without compromising the ability of future generations to enjoy a similar quality of life, by building on existing resources and organizations.
What we have learned
Our mission flows from what we have learned over the course of more than two decades of work at the intersection of environment and economic development:
- Urban regions are rich in tangible assets that are typically "hidden" or undervalued.
- Undervaluing urban assets leads to poor public policy, including urban sprawl.
- Urban areas already have most of the networks needed for action.
- The potential of urban regions requires new civic learning processes.
- Urban regions need stronger, more inclusive coalitions.
- Citizen action requires indicators of effectiveness.
Until recently, CNT's work has focused primarily on the Chicago region and its communities. The tools and methods that help to create healthy urban communities in Chicagoland, however, are relevant to many other urban settings. At the same time we know that other regions have unique problems and that we can learn from these differences. CNT is now working in other urban areas, including South Florida, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Pittsburgh.
We are committed to testing, learning from, and refining this framework for creating sustainable communities.
http://www.resourcecenterchicago.org/index.html
RESOURCE CENTER > For over 30 years, the Resource Center, a non-profit environmental education organization, has led the way in demonstrating innovative techniques for recycling and reusing materials. Too often in the urban setting, abundant and important resources are wasted. Our recovery work aims to reverse waste and to improve the quality of life for urban dwellers. We have been devoted from the beginning to the economic and educational revitalization of city neighborhoods through recycling, urban gardening and other programs that reclaim and reuse resources.
http://www.messhall.org/wimh.html
http://www.surplusculture.net/issue4/temporary-services.php
MESS HALL is a conglomeration of shared experiences and desires. It is a resource that we are making available to others. The physical space that MESS HALL occupies comes from a surplus created by one person's explicit decision to forgo a profit. The storefront is not our initiative, but an aid; it makes room for possibilities that weren't there before. The surplus will be multiplied by our efforts setting off an exponential growth of generosity. Relationships based in mutual beneficence and sharing will flourish. A single act of generosity can have an enormous impact creating an economy of its own. It is this potential that informs the interactions and activities that develop in relation to MESS HALL.
The eight voices in this document introducing you to our hopes and plans are a conjoined mess: a multiplicity of significance not reduced for easy consumption. One has to work through the information, draw conclusions and find a personal way of assessing and getting involved. This approach insists on dealing with the complexity of being an individual and at the same time needing to be grouped with others. The ethical implications of treating persons as persons and therefore as having rights impact our efforts to build networks of individuals and groups that sprawl out horizontally through the neighborhood and across the planet.
We live in a culture of coerced economics and sociality. The machinations of market society are so deeply ingrained that most people think they are natural and beyond question. There have to be spaces where these coercions are reduced or banished altogether to open up space for our own desires to emerge and take shape.
New creative and social constellations arise when the constraints of habitual thought and coerced behavior aren't dominating us. Persons will gather at MESS HALL, share ideas, disperse, reconvene, act, build and do. A culture of sharing resources and ideas will give us respite from the competition and commodification that defines most of our daily interactions and struggles for basic survival.
We are putting in place an array of resources. You are invited to get involved: to utilize MESS HALL and what it offers, to add your own initiatives, and develop culture based on your own desires.
- Brett Bloom
http://www.temporaryservices.org/
http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/papers/temp1.html
http://www.static-ops.org/essay_13.htm
TEMPORARY SERVICES is a group of three persons: Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer, and Salem Collo-Julin. We draw on our varied backgrounds and interests to incorporate our aesthetic practice within our lived experiences. The need to create change within our daily lives translates directly to our public projects.
The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. We embed the creative work we present within thoughtful and imaginative social contexts and strive to create participatory situations.
We champion public projects that are temporary, ephemeral, or that operate outside of conventional or officially sanctioned categories of public expression. We appreciate such diverse activities as makeshift roadside memorials to accident victims, temporary housing encampments designed by homeless people, tree houses fabricated by children, and idiosyncratic public notices that get stuffed inside the display windows of free newspaper boxes. We like outdoor projects that are encountered by surprise rather than sought out with deliberation like exhibitions and special events. We especially appreciate those projects that do not have permission and challenge expected usages.
All audiences are equally valuable to us. We have found that people who keep their eyes open while walking down the street are just as perceptive of urban visual culture as those who seek it out by reading the arts section of the newspaper every day.
Temporary Services has taken an extended interest in developing non-commercial methods of inserting ideas into publicly trafficked spaces since our inception in 1998. We develop or modify strategies for working in public that can be further adapted by anyone who may have a use for them. Working in public places forces us to experiment. It forces us to name our terms and to find ways to describe our group and our projects that do not rely on the languages of art theory or academia. We constantly re-assess and re-name in an attempt to make our process and thought patterns accessible to those we encounter.
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
CUP is a nonprofit research and design office dedicated to producing pedagogical and activating work about the built environment. Since 1995, CUP has worked, by itself and with other organizations, on publications, exhibitions, design competitions, research, and public art involving issues of community and urban planning, urban studies, and the political uses of architecture.
http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/
Radical Urban Theory (RUT)
Mike Davis
House of Cards: Las Vegas: Too many people in the wrong place, celebrating waste as a way of life.
When the rivers ran dry… The drought next time
Firebugs: Build it in California's foothills, and it will burn.
Monsters and Messiahs
They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.
http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/questioning_the_frame#discuss
http://info.interactivist.net/
Mute: Mute magazine was founded in 1994 to discuss the interrelationship of art and new technologies. Together with the web platform Metamute, it now contributes more broadly to debates on culture, politics and globalisation. In 2001, Mute initiated sister projects OpenMute and YouAreHere to share the internet tools and knowledge associated with its own development (OpenMute), and to support local networking initiatives in the East End of London (YouAreHere). At this point, Mute also committed itself over the longer term to a participative working model, the principles of open organisations, and free software.
ABC No Rio is a collectively-run center for art and activism. We are known internationally as a venue for oppositional culture. ABC No Rio was founded in 1980 by artists committed to political and social engagement and we retain these values to the present.
http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1523&lang=en
Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure
By Brian Holmes
springerin 3/04 > World Provinces
Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The Situationists, with the practice of the dérive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in »complete decors« –»another city for another life«, as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide implementation of a digital media architecture – and the early signs of a move toward cinematic buildings – we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev Manovich: »In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces«. What kind of life can be lived in the media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s?
Imaginary maps Global Solidarities / Memefest 2002
http://2002.memefest.org/en/defaultnews.cfm?newsmem=15
Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/research/bholmes/
Brian Holmes is an art and cultural critic, activist and translator, living in Paris, interested primarily in the intersections of artistic and political practice. He holds a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. He was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997, was a member of the graphic arts group Ne pas plier from 1999 to 2001, and has recently worked with the French conceptual art group Bureau d'études. He is a frequent contributor to the international mailinglist Nettime, a member of the editorial committee of the art magazine "Springerin" and the political-economy journal "Multitudes", a regular contributor to the magazine Parachute, and a founder of the new journal "Autonomie Artistique". He is currently preparing a book in French, entitled "La personnalité flexible: Pour une nouvelle critique de la culture."
https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhrevcon/
The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges, Networked Resistance
Among the events of recent history, few have been as surprising, as full of enigmas, as the coordinated world demonstrations known as the Global Days of Action. Immediately upon their appearance, they overflowed the organization that had called them into being: the People's Global Action (PGA), founded in Geneva in February of 1998. (1) This transnational network of resistance had adopted a new concept of solidarity advanced by the Zapatistas, who encouraged everyone to take direct action at home, against the system of exploitation and oppression which they described as neoliberalism. As early as the month of May, 1998, the PGA helped spark demonstrations against the WTO whose effectiveness lay both in their simultaneity and in their extreme diversity: street parties in some 30 cities around the world, on May 16; four days of protest and rioting in Geneva, beginning that same day; a 50,000-strong march that reached Brasilia on May 20; protests all over India after a huge demonstration in Hyderabad against the WTO on May 2. The following year, London Reclaim the Streets launched the idea of a "carnival against capital" in financial centers across the world for the day of the G8 summit, June 18: there were actions in over 40 cities, including a ten-thousand-strong "carnival of the oppressed" by Niger Delta peoples against transnational oil companies. In the face of transnational capitalism, a networked resistance was born, local and global, tactical and strategic: a new kind of political dissidence, self-organized and anarchist, diffusely interconnected and operating only from below, yet able to strike at the greatest concentrations of power. What is the strength of such movements? The improbable and serious appeal to a "do-it-yourself geopolitics": a chance for personal involvement in the transformation of the world.
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhimaginary/
Imaginary Maps, Global Solidarities
Introduction: The Social Imaginary
Incommensurably large with respect to human perception, what we call "the world" appears first in the domain of representation – most concisely in the form of maps. For the literary mind, a map is the round earth on a flat sheet of paper, the planet at your fingertips: an invitation to dream of far-off continents and climes. In practical terms, a map is the graphic or computer-generated depiction of a clearly outlined territory, with features that are natural (mountains, oceans, rivers) or artificial (highways, cities, borders). Most people use these printed or pixellated guides to get somewhere, asking only for effectiveness in motion. Yet so-called "thematic maps" (or "information graphics") carry a far wider range of knowledge about human beings and their activities, their relations to each other and to the environment (demography, industrial production, political orientation, cultural and linguistic grouping, educational levels, infrastructure, etc.). What's more, topological figures, derived from landforms and mathematics, are now used to chart processes and relations outside any geographic frame, the most obvious example being the virtual realms of the Internet. In these representational adventures we rediscover the terra incognita of the ancient cartographers. By condensing complex information about the human world, thematic maps can have the uncanny effect of making us feel disoriented – lost amidst the flows and the conflicts. In a period of political, social, and technological upheaval like the one we're living through now, when ordinary people find themselves entangled in processes of global scale every day, maps can help us to expand our perception of ourselves, of our present situation and our closest or most far-off possibilities. The stuff of dreams then mingles with the challenge of reality. But how to meet that challenge, the way one meets another human being on common ground?
https://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhflowmaps/
Flowmaps, The Imaginaries of Global Integration
How did the globalizing world of the 1990s become visible as a unified political-economic system? And what happens, when a world becomes visible?
In 1996, the sociologist Manuel Castells took this high-angle view on global integration: "Our society is constructed around flows of capital, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of the social organization; they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political and symbolic life." (2) Castells focuses on the ways that managerial elites have constructed a world-girdling space of commercial and industrial operations, articulated by electronic signals circulating in real time. He describes the technological innovations that underlie this space of flows, as well as the social formations that uphold it. He does not claim that it is the only relevant social space on planet earth, but he does claim that it is dominant – and foresees its domination extending far into the future.
http://www.next5minutes.org/n5m/viewperson.jsp?personid=713
next 5 minutes :: festival of tactical media
http://www.republicart.net/disc/artsabotage/holmes01_en.htm
Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Flexible Personality, Networked Resistance
In the best of all capitalist worlds, the stock market is supposed to provide resources for industrial development, through a speculative game that pays off later in the "real economy." What about the Internet then? From 1995 to 2000, huge amounts of infrastructure were financed throughout the world; now the oversupply crisis is accounted a disaster. But history is cunning, and the result of the dotcom boom may have been to free up vast amounts of private money for the development of a virtual public space, where people can confront the major corporations on their home turf - that is to say, in the realm of transnational exchanges. The speculators of the late twentieth century asked: "Is there any limit to the profit we can make off the Internet?" Those who work for the virtual economy, or who suffer its effects, are tempted by a wilder speculation: "Can we really build a networked resistance to corporate capitalism?"
http://www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism/holmes1.html
The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique
http://utangente.free.fr/anewpages/cartesholmes2.html
Mapping Excess, Seeking Uses: Bureau d'études and Multiplicity
http://www.constantvzw.com/transmedia_archive/cat_further_reading.html
Transmedia Workshop > Cartography of Excess
http://slash.autonomedia.org/analysis/03/01/24/1340201.shtml
The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/001154.php
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/questioning_the_frame
Questioning the Frame: Thoughts about maps and spatial logic in the global present
By Coco Fusco
In These Times > Culture > December 16, 2004
Terms such as “ mapping,” “borders,” “hacking,” “trans-nationalism,” “identity as spatial,” and so on have been popularized in recent years by new media theories’ celebration of “the networks”—a catch-all phrase for the modes of communication and exchange facilitated by the Internet.
We should proceed with caution in using this terminology because it accords strategic primacy to space and simultaneously downplays time—i.e., history. It also evades categories of embodied difference such as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us from understanding how the historical development of those differences has shaped our contemporary worldview.
http://www.impaktonline.nl/life.html
In "Life: a User's Manual", the city of Utrecht is a game board, where every story, every piece stands on its own, but is part of an intricate jigsaw puzzle. Both public physical spaces and private interior spaces contain traces of fragmentary personal [hi]stories tied together by an invisible network of media. How people inhabit the hidden 'image spaces', discovered by a wireless surveillance camera scanner, while at the same time inhabiting physical outdoor spaces, was revealed through the daily practice of walking during the Impakt Festival 2003. The findings of Michelle Teran's walks have been arranged on a map of Utrecht's secret transmissions.
http://www.impaktonline.nl/box/life/
Michelle Teran (Canada) uses live media in performances and installations that address issues such as social networks, intimacy over distance, presence and the interplay between (media) spaces. Her work covers live installations, lectures, online performances and connected events, temporary artistic labs, telepresence, live art and video. She has presented in North America, Europe, Japan and in virtual space. In 2002-2003 she was artist-in-residence at Waag Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam.
http://www.ubermatic.org/misha/
http://www.impaktonline.nl/songlines.html
The work of GPSter uses the coordinates provided by the GPS (Global Positioning Service) network to link data to physical locations in space, which can then be discovered through the use of portable, wireless-enabled devices.
The "Songlines" work takes its inspiration from Australian aboriginal tribes, who chant a melody in time with their step while travelling which provides a cognitive map of their terrain created by their ancestors. During the Impakt Festival of 2003, the 21th century wanderers of GPSter's songlines used portable wireless devices to follow hundreds of midair messages which are geographically encoded to various locations around the Centraal Museum. For online visitors to the project, GPSter created an interactive map which allowed users to upload their own sounds, images and texts.
http://www.impaktonline.nl/box/songlines/