Hito Steyerl | Politics of Post-Representation, In conversation with Marvin Jordan,

From the militarization of social media to the corporatization of the art world, Hito Steyerl’s writings represent some of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary cultural criticism today. As a documentary filmmaker, she has created multiple works addressing the widespread proliferation of images in contemporary media, deepening her engagement with the technological conditions of globalization. Steyerl’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including documenta 12, Taipei Biennial 2010, and 7th Shanghai Biennial. She currently teaches New Media Art at Berlin University of the Arts.

Hito Steyerl, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)

Marvin Jordan I’d like to open our dialogue by acknowledging the central theme for which your work is well known — broadly speaking, the socio-technological conditions of visual culture — and move toward specific concepts that underlie your research (representation, identification, the relationship between art and capital, etc). In your essay titled “Is a Museum a Factory?” you describe a kind of ‘political economy’ of seeing that is structured in contemporary art spaces, and you emphasize that a social imbalance — an exploitation of affective labor — takes place between the projection of cinematic art and its audience. This analysis leads you to coin the term “post-representational” in service of experimenting with new modes of politics and aesthetics. What are the shortcomings of thinking in “representational” terms today, and what can we hope to gain from transitioning to a “post-representational” paradigm of art practices, if we haven’t arrived there already?

Hito Steyerl Let me give you one example. A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology ideally via indexical link. But the technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data. The link to the thing in front of the lens is still there, but there are also links to past pictures that help create the picture. You don’t really photograph the present, as the past is woven into it.

The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see. It is a bet, a gamble, some combination between repeating those things you have already seen and coming up with new versions of these, a mixture of conservatism and fabulation. The paradigm of representation stands to the present condition as traditional lens-based photography does to an algorithmic, networked photography that works with probabilities and bets on inertia. Consequently, it makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. The noise will increase and random interpretation too. We might think that the phone sees what we want, but actually we will see what the phone thinks it knows about us. A complicated relationship — like a very neurotic marriage. I haven’t even mentioned external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of applications are able to remotely shut your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled for whole regions. One could, for example, disable recording functions close to military installations, or conversely, live broadcast whatever you are up to. Similarly, the phone might be programmed to auto-pixellate secret or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW content or auto-modify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context or insert AR advertisement and pop up windows or live feeds. Now lets apply this shift to the question of representative politics or democracy. The representational paradigm assumes that you vote for someone who will represent you. Thus the interests of the population will be proportionally represented. But current democracies work rather like smartphone photography by algorithmically clearing the noise and boosting some data over other. It is a system in which the unforeseen has a hard time happening because it is not yet in the database. It is about what to define as noise — something Jacques Ranciere has defined as the crucial act in separating political subjects from domestic slaves, women and workers. Now this act is hardwired into technology, but instead of the traditional division of people and rabble, the results are post-representative militias, brands, customer loyalty schemes, open source insurgents and tumblrs.

Additionally, Ranciere’s democratic solution: there is no noise, it is all speech. Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface. Whatever there is — it’s all there to see but in the form of an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque glossiness, written in extraterrestrial code, perhaps subject to secret legislation. It certainly expresses something: a format, a protocol or executive order, but effectively obfuscates its meaning. This is a far cry from a situation in which something—an image, a person, a notion — stood in for another and presumably acted in its interest. Today it stands in, but its relation to whatever it stands in for is cryptic, shiny, unstable; the link flickers on and off. Art could relish in this shiny instability — it does already. It could also be less baffled and mesmerised and see it as what the gloss mostly is about – the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.

MJ In your insightful essay, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation”, you extend your critique of representation by focusing on an irreducible excess at the core of image spam, a residue of unattainability, or the “dark matter” of which it’s composed. It seems as though an unintelligible horizon circumscribes image spam by image spam itself, a force of un-identifiability, which you detect by saying that it is “an accurate portrayal of what humanity is actually not… a negative image.” Do you think this vacuous core of image spam — a distinctly negative property — serves as an adequate ground for a general theory of representation today? How do you see today’s visual culture affecting people’s behavior toward identification with images?

HS Think of Twitter bots for example. Bots are entities supposed to be mistaken for humans on social media web sites. But they have become formidable political armies too — in brilliant examples of how representative politics have mutated nowadays. Bot armies distort discussion on twitter hashtags by spamming them with advertisement, tourist pictures or whatever. Bot armies have been active in Mexico, Syria, Russia and Turkey, where most political parties, above all the ruling AKP are said to control 18,000 fake twitter accounts using photos of Robbie Williams, Megan Fox and gay porn stars. A recent article revealed that, “in order to appear authentic, the accounts don’t just tweet out AKP hashtags; they also quote philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and movies like PS: I Love You.” It is ever more difficult to identify bots – partly because humans are being paid to enter CAPTCHAs on their behalf (1,000 CAPTCHAs equals 50 USD cents). So what is a bot army? And how and whom does it represent if anyone? Who is an AKP bot that wears the face of a gay porn star and quotes Hobbes’ Leviathan — extolling the need of transforming the rule of militias into statehood in order to escape the war of everyone against everyone else? Bot armies are a contemporary vox pop, the voice of the people, the voice of what the people are today. It can be a Facebook militia, your low cost personalized mob, your digital mercenaries. Imagine your photo is being used for one of these bots. It is the moment when your picture becomes quite autonomous, active, even militant. Bot armies are celebrity militias, wildly jump cutting between glamour, sectarianism, porn, corruption and Post-Baath Party ideology. Think of the meaning of the word “affirmative action” after twitter bots and like farms! What does it represent?

MJ You have provided a compelling account of the depersonalization of the status of the image: a new process of de-identification that favors materialist participation in the circulation of images today.  Within the contemporary technological landscape, you write that “if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation.” How does this shift from personal identification to material circulation — that is, to cybernetic participation — affect your notion of representation? If an image is merely “a thing like you and me,” does this amount to saying that identity is no more, no less than a .jpeg file?

HS Social media makes the shift from representation to participation very clear: people participate in the launch and life span of images, and indeed their life span, spread and potential is defined by participation. Think of the image not as surface but as all the tiny light impulses running through fiber at any one point in time. Some images will look like deep sea swarms, some like cities from space, some are utter darkness. We could see the energy imparted to images by capital or quantified participation very literally, we could probably measure its popular energy in lumen. By partaking in circulation, people participate in this energy and create it.
What this means is a different question though — by now this type of circulation seems a little like the petting zoo of plutotechnocracies. It’s where kids are allowed to make a mess — but just a little one — and if anyone organizes serious dissent, the seemingly anarchic sphere of circulation quickly reveals itself as a pedantic police apparatus aggregating relational metadata. It turns out to be an almost Althusserian ISA (Internet State Apparatus), hardwired behind a surface of ‘kawaii’ apps and online malls. As to identity, Heartbleed and more deliberate governmental hacking exploits certainly showed that identity goes far beyond a relationship with images: it entails a set of private keys, passwords, etc., that can be expropriated and detourned. More generally, identity is the name of the battlefield over your code — be it genetic, informational, pictorial. It is also an option that might provide protection if you fall beyond any sort of modernist infrastructure. It might offer sustenance, food banks, medical service, where common services either fail or don’t exist. If the Hezbollah paradigm is so successful it is because it provides an infrastructure to go with the Twitter handle, and as long as there is no alternative many people need this kind of container for material survival. Huge religious and quasi-religious structures have sprung up in recent decades to take up the tasks abandoned by states, providing protection and survival in a reversal of the move described in Leviathan. Identity happens when the Leviathan falls apart and nothing is left of the commons but a set of policed relational metadata, Emoji and hijacked hashtags. This is the reason why the gay AKP pornstar bots are desperately quoting Hobbes’ book: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (Israel Defense Forces) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP) and are hoping for just any entity to organize day care and affordable dentistry.

But beyond all the portentous vocabulary relating to identity, I believe that a widespread standard of the contemporary condition is exhaustion. The interesting thing about Heartbleed — to come back to one of the current threats to identity (as privacy) — is that it is produced by exhaustion and not effort. It is a bug introduced by open source developers not being paid for something that is used by software giants worldwide. Nor were there apparently enough resources to audit the code in the big corporations that just copy-pasted it into their applications and passed on the bug, fully relying on free volunteer labour to produce their proprietary products. Heartbleed records exhaustion by trying to stay true to an ethics of commonality and exchange that has long since been exploited and privatized. So, that exhaustion found its way back into systems. For many people and for many reasons — and on many levels — identity is just that: shared exhaustion.

MJ This is an opportune moment to address the labor conditions of social media practice in the context of the art space. You write that “an art space is a factory, which is simultaneously a supermarket — a casino and a place of worship whose reproductive work is performed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video bloggers alike.” Incidentally, DIS launched a website called ArtSelfie just over a year ago, which encourages social media users to participate quite literally in “cellphone-video blogging” by aggregating their Instagram #artselfies in a separately integrated web archive. Given our uncanny coincidence, how can we grasp the relationship between social media blogging and the possibility of participatory co-curating on equal terms? Is there an irreconcilable antagonism between exploited affective labor and a genuinely networked art practice? Or can we move beyond — to use a phrase of yours — a museum crowd “struggling between passivity and overstimulation?”

HS I wrote this in relation to something my friend Carles Guerra noticed already around early 2009; big museums like the Tate were actively expanding their online marketing tools, encouraging people to basically build the museum experience for them by sharing, etc. It was clear to us that audience participation on this level was a tool of extraction and outsourcing, following a logic that has turned online consumers into involuntary data providers overall. Like in the previous example – Heartbleed – the paradigm of participation and generous contribution towards a commons tilts quickly into an asymmetrical relation, where only a minority of participants benefits from everyone’s input, the digital 1 percent reaping the attention value generated by the 99 percent rest.
Brian Kuan Wood put it very beautifully recently: Love is debt, an economy of love and sharing is what you end up with when left to your own devices. However, an economy based on love ends up being an economy of exhaustion – after all, love is utterly exhausting — of deregulation, extraction and lawlessness. And I don’t even want to mention likes, notes and shares, which are the child-friendly, sanitized versions of affect as currency.
All is fair in love and war. It doesn’t mean that love isn’t true or passionate, but just that love is usually uneven, utterly unfair and asymmetric, just as capital tends to be distributed nowadays. It would be great to have a little bit less love, a little more infrastructure.

MJ Long before Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations reshaped our discussions of mass surveillance, you wrote that “social media and cell-phone cameras have created a zone of mutual mass-surveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urban networks of control,” underscoring the voluntary, localized, and bottom-up mutuality intrinsic to contemporary systems of control. You go on to say that “hegemony is increasingly internalized, along with the pressure to conform and perform, as is the pressure to represent and be represented.” But now mass government surveillance is common knowledge on a global scale — ‘externalized’, if you will — while social media representation practices remain as revealing as they were before. Do these recent developments, as well as the lack of change in social media behavior, contradict or reinforce your previous statements? In other words, how do you react to the irony that, in the same year as the unprecedented NSA revelations, “selfie” was deemed word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries?

HS Haha — good question!
Essentially I think it makes sense to compare our moment with the end of the twenties in the Soviet Union, when euphoria about electrification, NEP (New Economic Policy), and montage gives way to bureaucracy, secret directives and paranoia. Today this corresponds to the sheer exhilaration of having a World Wide Web being replaced by the drudgery of corporate apps, waterboarding, and “normcore”. I am not trying to say that Stalinism might happen again – this would be plain silly – but trying to acknowledge emerging authoritarian paradigms, some forms of algorithmic consensual governance techniques developed within neoliberal authoritarianism, heavily relying on conformism, “family” values and positive feedback, and backed up by all-out torture and secret legislation if necessary. On the other hand things are also falling apart into uncontrollable love. One also has to remember that people did really love Stalin. People love algorithmic governance too, if it comes with watching unlimited amounts of Game of Thrones. But anyone slightly interested in digital politics and technology is by now acquiring at least basic skills in disappearance and subterfuge.

Hito Steyerl, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)

MJ In “Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy,” you point out that the contemporary art industry “sustains itself on the time and energy of unpaid interns and self-exploiting actors on pretty much every level and in almost every function,” while maintaining that “we have to face up to the fact that there is no automatically available road to resistance and organization for artistic labor.” Bourdieu theorized qualitatively different dynamics in the composition of cultural capital vs. that of economic capital, arguing that the former is constituted by the struggle for distinction, whose value is irreducible to financial compensation. This basically translates to: everyone wants a piece of the art-historical pie, and is willing to go through economic self-humiliation in the process. If striving for distinction is antithetical to solidarity, do you see a possibility of reconciling it with collective political empowerment on behalf of those economically exploited by the contemporary art industry?

HS In Art and Money, William Goetzmann, Luc Renneboog, and Christophe Spaenjers conclude that income inequality correlates to art prices. The bigger the difference between top income and no income, the higher prices are paid for some art works. This means that the art market will benefit not only if less people have more money but also if more people have no money. This also means that increasing the amount of zero incomes is likely, especially under current circumstances, to raise the price of some art works. The poorer many people are (and the richer a few), the better the art market does; the more unpaid interns, the more expensive the art. But the art market itself may be following a similar pattern of inequality, basically creating a divide between the 0,01 percent if not less of artworks that are able to concentrate the bulk of sales and the 99,99 percent rest. There is no short term solution for this feedback loop, except of course not to accept this situation, individually or preferably collectively on all levels of the industry. This also means from the point of view of employers. There is a long term benefit to this, not only to interns and artists but to everyone. Cultural industries, which are too exclusively profit oriented lose their appeal. If you want exciting things to happen you need a bunch of young and inspiring people creating a dynamics by doing risky, messy and confusing things. If they cannot afford to do this, they will do it somewhere else eventually. There needs to be space and resources for experimentation, even failure, otherwise things go stale. If these people move on to more accommodating sectors the art sector will mentally shut down even more and become somewhat North-Korean in its outlook — just like contemporary blockbuster CGI industries. Let me explain: there is a managerial sleekness and awe inspiring military perfection to every pixel in these productions, like in North Korean pixel parades, where thousands of soldiers wave color posters to form ever new pixel patterns. The result is quite something but this something is definitely not inspiring nor exciting. If the art world keeps going down the way of raising art prices via starvation of it’s workers – and there is no reason to believe it will not continue to do this – it will become the Disney version of Kim Jong Un’s pixel parades. 12K starving interns waving pixels for giant CGI renderings of Marina Abramovic! Imagine the price it will fetch!

 

 

From DIS Magazine.

Principio Potosí. ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?; Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer y Andreas Siekmann, 2010

Virgen del cerro, anónimo. S XVIII

La explicación tradicional sitúa el origen del arte moderno en las pinturas de Courbet, Manet o en las de los impresionistas. Es decir, en la ruptura con las formas tradicionales del arte, a fin de reflejar la inmediatez de la experiencia subjetiva de la realidad. El idealismo romántico, o el spleen de Baudelaire constituirían a su vez otros hitos de la percepción moderna del mundo. Atrapados en una historia de protagonistas y escenarios reconocibles -el artista que se mueve de París a Nueva York, con alguna parada en el centro de Europa- hemos creado un universo cerrado de referencias que nos hace incapaces de entender las prácticas culturales de una modernidad expandida, que desborda tales marcos y se proyecta en la sociedad global contemporánea. Sorprende la obcecación con que hemos ignorado que desde el siglo XVI la historia de Europa es inseparable de la de sus colonias, más aún, el hecho constatable de que no existe modernidad sin las relaciones centro-periferia que se inauguran con los procesos coloniales.

¿Qué sucedería si sustituyésemos el ego cogito de Descartes por el ego conquiro de Hernán Cortés, o el principio de la razón pura de Kant por lo que Marx denominó principio de acumulación originaria? ¿Qué pasaría si, en lugar de empezar el relato moderno en la Inglaterra de la Revolución Industrial o en la Francia de Napoleón III, lo hiciésemos en la América de los virreinatos? Las respuestas a estas preguntas nos ofrecen, sin duda, una perspectiva bastarda de la historia y una visión espinosa e irreconciliable de la modernidad que, sin embargo, parece dibujar una genealogía muy verosímil del globalizado mundo actual. El proyecto Principio Potosí denuncia y reivindica simultáneamente las raíces inconfesas de esta modernidad bastarda.

(…)

De un modo similar, mientras que la evangelización intensiva de los pueblos indígenas contribuyó a la toma de conciencia de sus derechos frente a modos previos de dominación, ésta servía además para la consolidación del sistema colonial. A pesar de ello, el arte es político precisamente porque su propia estructura poética tiene algo de inasimilable, convirtiéndose de hecho en un elemento activo de liberación. Las pinturas coloniales de Caquiaviri o Calamarca respondían a la doctrina eclesiástica del momento y su función era pedagógica, pero la intervención en el lenguaje pictórico, importado desde la metrópolis, permitía la inversión de las estructuras sociales. Los santos y vírgenes eran reactualizados en las fiestas y ritos indígenas, fomentando una religiosidad híbrida cuya función era de resistencia al proyecto colonizador.

La Ilustración pretendió fundar una ratio común que fuese capaz de armonizar la heterogeneidad de relaciones sociales generadas por la expansión colonial, el mercantilismo y el crecimiento de la vida urbana. Se consideraba que todo lo que no entraba en ese elemento racional no formaba parte del yo civilizado.

(...)
Texto de Manuel J. Borja-Villel. Para leerlo completo, visita la página del MNCARS.

Aprovechando que he posteado esta info en el proyecto CORRESPONDENCIA DESDE EYJAFJALLAJÖKULL (reflexiones en torno a la idea Europa) en el cual participo, también hago lo propio aquí.

Si pasáis por Madrid no dejéis de visitar esta exposición. Además de tener un intesante montaje expositivo que genera una fuerte sensación de proyecto procesual, de lectura en movimiento , y recuerda en cierta manera al del montaje de Culturas de archivo ya reseñado en este blog, lanza una revisión sobre la historia que pone en cuestión las líneas base sobre las que la modernidad se asienta ligadas a los principios de la Ilustración a través del análisis de la influencia decisiva que tuvo la irrupción del mestizaje cultural/miedo/voluntad de dominación que se introduce desde las colonias a través del concepto del otro (perdón por el apunte: es reseñable ver que en Lost los habitantes de la isla son denominados como the others) y viceversa, de la irrupción de la cultura europea en las formas y concepciones de las culturas nativas.

También resulta destacable el juego que se ha hecho para articular piezas de caracter barroco con producciones contemporáneas para, entre otras cosas, mostrar la relación entre cultura y economía localizando a través de los fenómenos geopolíticos diversas condiciones de la explotación.

Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism; Nato Thompson, 2008.

Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Cuauhtemoc Medina and Rafael Ortega, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2000-2002 (check out the video)


Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen coined the term 'experimental geography' back in 2002 and given his experience in the field who better than him could define this emerging genre?

Experimental geography means practices that take on the production of space in a self-reflexive way, practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each another, and that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice. Moreover, experimental geography means not only seeing the production of space as an ontological condition, but actively experimenting with the production of space as an integral part of one's own practice. (More in his essay Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space.)

Más sobre el proyecto en la reseña de wemakemoneynotart y en la web del mismo.

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination; Katherine Harmon, 2004

The map is a subtle and beautiful art form that is often held for its merest and most mundane of functions: to get its reader from point A to point B. But a map, deconstructed, is so much more. As graphical representations of our geographic world, maps figuratively contain within them the living and changing lives of us all. Someday, perhaps, maps will be as dynamic as the worlds they detail. As with the charmed maps of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, the symbols of the map will move and change with the movements of the objects they represent. For now, however, we must rely upon our imaginations to invoke the richness only hinted at on paper.

In You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, Katharine Harmon has shared her own love of maps by collecting a broad-ranging variety of art form. Not content to praise the intrinsic art of the geographic map, Harmon calls our attention to the labors of imaginative mapmakers who have charted regions emotional, biological, historical, culinary, and…well, you name it, it's in there.

She begins with a petroglyphic map from 2500 B.C., and launches from there into a chapter on personal geographies, all of which explore the body and mind of the human animal. These include such maps as "Main Route of Expedition Through the Alimentary Canal," acupuncture diagrams, and group dream maps. Outstanding in this collection is Adolf Wolfli's maps of the "Island Neveranger." Wolfli was a schizophrenic committed to a mental asylum in Germany at the age of 31, who, while confined, produced a startlingly rich output of imaginative work that included maps from his richly imagined world. These are highly detailed and wonderfully colored works from Wolfli's rich imaginary iconography.

The next chapter, titled, "At Home in the World," is equally diverse. A poem from Howard Horowitz typeset into the shape of Manhattan Island took the author one-and-a-half years to write. This poem-map is quite stunning, but pales next to a the intricately detailed map of Srinigar, a village in Kashmir, India, that was hand-embroidered on a wool and cloth shawl in the 19th century. Works from celebrated artists appear here also such as a map from illustrator, John Held Jr., known for his early 20th century caricatures, and William Wegman's "Vacationland," a postcard collage in oils celebrating tourist attractions.

The final chapter, "Realms of Fantasy," focuses in on geographic maps of fantastic or fictional realms. These vary from Julia Ricketts' colorfully abstract "Notations on a River," which explores the interplay of natural and man-made landforms, to Mark Bennett's highly detailed map of the Town of Mayberry. My personal favorite in this section is a map entitled "The Great Bear," in which artist, Simon Patterson, transposes the names of historical figures onto a universally recognizable map of the London Underground. Tube riders can jump on the Blue Line at Michelangelo, change to the Yellow Line and take that East to Plato. Transferring to the Red Line can take the rider to Rupert Murdoch, Louis Pasteur, or even Dick Cheney.

Years before the publication of You Are Here, I met an artist whose painted upon GIS maps of various world regions. I was thoroughly captivated then, and I still am. Perhaps, as Katharine Harmon suggests, we humans have an innate urge to map.

Today, inspired by You Are Here, I built a "map" of plastic pails, shovels, and other sandbox toys with my children. I laid the foundation, a starting point and an ending point with roads drawn into the sand to connect the two, and then invited my kids to join in. Before it was over, they had built quite a sandbox menagerie that included roads, lakes, bridges, and even an amusement park, all symbolically arranged in sand and plastic toys. I don't know if it was innately motivated, but it sure was cool.

Info desde aquí.

Street with a view, 2008;Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley

Esta imagen desde we-make-money-not-art.


Algunas escenas del proyecto:

Narrow Escape

Torn bed sheets form a ladder and suggest a narrow escape, but who is escaping? And from what?

See it in Street View!

Ham

Artist Michelle Fried donned her ham suit as proof to Doug’s claim—Meats here!

See it in Street View!

Sword Fight

Members Askarus and Twolf of the medieval battle society Angaron (Pittsburgh’s local chapter of Dagorhir Battle Games) engaged in swordsmanship and hand-to-hand combat in a grassy “battle field” at the corner of Sampsonia Way and Federal Street.

See it in Street View!

Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more...

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.

An incredible cast of real-life characters contributed their time, energy and talents to creating pseudo-street life on Sampsonia Way. Please check out the scene breakdown, the participant page and the video documentation to learn more about the artists, groups and participants that made Street With A View possible.


Más información sobre el proyecto en Street of a view.

Cartoficciones; Julian Oliver

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Cartofictions: Julian Oliver keynote, Inclusiva-Net, Madrid '08 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Desde el blog de Fernández Pello.

Get lost; Artist map downtown New York

GET LOST is a collective portrait of downtown New York. Twenty-one international artists were invited to create a personal view of the city and draw a map of downtown New York, uncovering a territory that is both real and imaginary. The maps were collected in a fanzine publication that was distributed for free at galleries, not-for-profit institutions and other sites that animate the life of downtown New York.

GET LOST brings together fictional landscapes, utopian visions, private memories, and obsessive instructions to explore Manhattan, its past, present, and future.

An exercise in emotional geography, GET LOST sketches the coordinates for an endless drift across the streets and myths of downtown New York.

GET LOST is the city as seen through the eyes of: 16beaver group; Francis Alÿs; Cory Arcangel; Jennifer Bornstein; Beth Campbell; Marcel Dzama; Isa Genzken; Inaba and Associates; Dorothy Iannone; Chris Johanson; Christopher Knowles; Terence Koh; Julie Mehretu; Jonas Mekas; Aleksandra Mir; Thurston Moore; Dave Muller; William Pope.L; Lordy Rodriguez; Rirkrit Tiravanija; Lawrence Weiner.

GET LOST is a New Museum production, edited by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions. To view copies, visit the New Museum Resource Center. To purchase, visit the New Museum Store.

Beginning Wednesday, June 6, 2007, free copies of GET LOST were made available to the public at the following markers of the downtown scene and cultural organizations around the city: Opening Ceremony (35 Howard Street), Babeland (43 Mercer Street), Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery), The Bowery Hotel (340 Bowery), Congee Village (100 Allen Street), Lost City Arts (18 Cooper Square), Freemans Restaurant (Freeman Alley at Rivington Street), Two Boots (155 East 3rd Street), Patricia Field (302 Bowery), Screaming Mimi's (382 Lafayette Street), Joe's Pub (425 Lafayette Street), Artist's Space (38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor), The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street), Sculpture Center (44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City), The Rotunda Gallery (33 Clinton Street, Brooklyn), Bronx Museum (1040 Grand Concourse at 165th Street, Bronx), and the Bedford Cheese Shop (229 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn). GET LOST was also distributed at the galleries of participating artists.

Para verlo completo, en Get Lost.

Dream of art spaces collected

En el evento genial que estuvimos invitados a participar BarraDiagonal unos días atrás, MODIFI, pudimos conocer entre otros muchos proyectos interesantes, la iniciativa Dreams of Art Spaces Collected. Desde la página de Dorothee Albrecht (una de las componentes del proyecto), una pequeña reseña:

Dreams of Art Spaces Collected investigates visions and experiences in exhibiting and mediating contemporary art starting with Europe, China and Australia, collecting various perspectives from artists, non profit project spaces and artist run initiatives. The research is based on extensive video interviews with practitioners, artists, art curators and theorists. It’s an open collection of video interviews, but also of images, publications and links.

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Un poco más desde la página del propio proyecto:

DREAMS OF ART SPACES COLLECTED emerged as an artistic research project by the artists Dorothee Albrecht, Alf Löhr, Andreas Schmid and Moira Zoitl for the Internationale Gesellschaft der Bildenden Künste (IGBK), Berlin in 2007.

Their decision to focus on a collection of video-interviews naturally led towards an extension of already existing networks and experiences, starting from Australia, as Alf Löhr was based in Melbourne at that time, starting from China, as Andreas Schmid has been concerned with Chinese contemporary art since he studied in Hangzhou during the mid-80s, and starting from Europe, but more from the margins of Europe, along the interests of Moira Zoitl and Dorothee Albrecht. This parallel beginning seems very important in highlighting the networking character of the collection starting from different nodal points around the globe. It is conceived as a setout open to affiliation with other networks; an opportunity for the emergence of new networks between artists in different parts of the world.

Investigating visions and experiences in exhibiting and mediating contemporary art, the artists collected various perspectives of artists, curators and theorists with the emphasis on non-profit project spaces and artist run initiatives.

To initiate a conversation we used the following questions:

If you imagine the art space of your dreams. What’s it like? What is it supposed to do? How would you evaluate existing setups? What are the focus and the strategy of your space? What kind of audiences is your space trying to attract?

Seguir leyendo.

Para ver las entrevistas, aquí.

J.M. Bourgery's Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery

Mapping the human body

One of the most remarkable works in the whole history of anatomy: J.M. Bourgery's Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery


A monumental work of the 19th century

Anatomical knowledge was for a long time limited to data gathered from the dissection of animals by Galen (c. 130 - c. 200), a Greek physician who practised in Pergamon and Rome, and whose influence was considerable right up until the 16th century. In the Middle Ages, the only work on anatomy truly worthy of the name was that of Mondino dei Luzzi (c. 1275-1326), written in 1319 and titled Anathomia; taking up the data of Galen, he made some interesting observations on the basis of human dissections he had undertaken in 1315. These works were disseminated in the form of manuscript copies and were very sparsely illustrated. With the invention of printing by Johann Genfleisch, alias Gutenberg (pre-1397-1468) in about 1450, the dissemination of knowledge was to increase by leaps and bounds. The so-called incunabula, in other words works printed before 1500, include the first edition of the Anathomia of dei Luzzi, printed in 1478. The anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), 228 handdrawn plates of incredible scientific quality, occupy a very marginal place, because they were never edited and were ignored by the scholars of the day. Published for the first time in 1898, they had no impact on the development of the subject. In 1543 the work by André Vésale (1514-1564), De humani corporis fabrica, was published in Basle; it is indisputably the most outstanding book in the whole history of anatomy both in respect of its concept and of its aesthetic qualities. The publication of this work represented a veritable scientific revolution, providing a new vision of Man by replacing Galen's speculative studies and his extrapolations from animal anatomy by systematic dissections of the human body. Vésale's work comprises 25 superb plates separate from the text, and numerous figures within the text, all of them woodcuts, probably the work of Jan Stephan von Calcar, who belonged to Titian's circle. This book, of which a second improved edition appeared in 1555, and which went through several more, had a considerable impact and was copied by numerous authors.

La primera imagen que nos lanzó en la busqueda de este maravilloso Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery (re-editado por Taschen) la encontramos ilustrando la portada del fabuloso libro El rival de Prometeo, Vidas de autómatas ilustres con una edición deliciosa muy cuidada a cargo de la no menos fabulosa Marta Peirano.

The Surrealist Map of the World (1929)

Just as light is not supposed to bend, so the Equator should not waver from its rectitude. The fact that it snakes across this map like a hose through a garden indicates that this is a very weird world indeed.

How weird? A first indication is the size of Alaska – way too big even if you allow for the distortion of the Mercator projection, which is also ballooning Russia to a size much bigger than its already huge actual surface, but this super-sized Russia is not out of line with accepted mercatorial deviance.

Closer inspection of the American continent reveals a gigantic Labrador, bordering on Mexico, to which is appended an atrophied version of South America. Not just atrophied, but completely missing are the United States and Canada (not to mention all other Central and South American countries, save Peru, which takes up all of its subcontinent).

Two para-American islands are affected by gigantism: Easter Island, which looks like a teddy bear pointing towards Peru, and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Americas, looking like a lizard running west… the low resolution of this image leaves much to the imagination.

Asia and Oceania are similarly blighted by gigantism (Hebrides, New Guinea and an illegible archipel, China and Afghanistan) dwarfism (Australia, India) and not-there-ism (Japan, Sri Lanka, much of the Middle East).

Africa is tiny, Europe is almost entirely covered by Germany, Ireland is looking straight at Europe across the Britain-less North Sea. Only two cities are marked on the map: Paris and Constantinople…What’s the point of this map? Well – its point is that it hasn’t any, except to bewilder and shock bourgeois viewers by presenting a bizarre alternative to the stale normality of their expectations.

Which is a neat summary of the surrealist world view – not co-incidentally, the title of this work is Surrealist Map of the World. It first appeared in 1929 in a special issue of ‘Variétés’, a Belgian magazine, dedicated to surrealism – an art form remembered for its absurdity, but less for its political views.

In discussing this map in her excellent book You Are Here, Katharine Harmon quotes a Surrealist manifesto from 1925:

“Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected.. Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”

This map was found here.

Desde el muy interesante Strangemaps.

Código Fuente: la remezcla / Zemos98

¿Qué pueden tener en común un escritor surrealista con un DJ? ¿Qué relación hay entre un wiki y la literatura de vanguardia? ¿Puede ser un libro un software re-programable? ¿Puede contarse una historia y conceder al lector el código fuente para que este la remezcle?

Código Fuente: la remezcla es un anagrama, porque todos los elementos existen en una relación simultánea, por ello en su interior nada es primero y nada es posterior, nada es futuro o pasado, nada es viejo y nada es nuevo.

Código fuente: la remezcla es un juego. Un juego como experimentación, como inmersión entre las intersecciones entre ensayo y error, como variaciones de lo imprevisto, como tropos de lo posible, como ejercicio para recordar el futuro.

Código fuente: la remezcla como aleph insuficiente. Aleph porque intenta abarcarlo todo, insuficiente porque es un imposible asumido de antemano. La remezcla y su código fuente son un bucle que tiende a infinito, nuestro libro ralentiza por momentos el scratch, lo detiene como un elástico a punto de lanzar una piedra y lo suelta como una sinapsis digital.

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Las cuestiones versan principalmente en torno a las ideas eje de los Encuentros: archivo y memoria, remezcla y palimpsesto. Cuestiones que colaboran a expandir el debate en torno a “lo nuevo” y “la cultura libre”, sobre ready-made y material encontrado, sobre apropiación y falsificación, sobre collage y montaje, sobre cita y remix, como conceptos clave en las artes audiovisuales más experimentales; sobre el montaje como palimpsesto de significados, el remontaje como operación creativa fundamental y como “instrumento susceptible de permitir la fagocitación de todo tipo de materiales” y como una búsqueda de producción de sentido como Harun Farocki apunta.

Pero también sobre cuestiones en torno a la sociedad network, en torno al uso cultural de los nuevos medios en la que algunos consideran la época post-media.

Descarga Código fuente: la remezcla en PDF.

Más en grand masters Zemos98.

The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It's expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders.

And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there.

Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

I've become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I've been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That's all. More than 50 people of all ages and levels of expertise have mapped their geography of online.


La página, el flickr .

Encuentro está información en Microsiervos:

" Kevin Kelly, uno de los fundadores de Wired, se le ocurrió que podía ser interesante pedirle a la gente que dibuje como ve Internet en su mente -a nivel conceptual, no técnico- así que ha creado un PDF que puedes descargar [28 KB], pintar en él tu mapa de Internet, y enviárselo para que lo cuelgue en el correspondiente álbum de Flickr, tal y como explica en The Internet Mapping Project."

Los resultados, asociados al concepto de "cómo tu cabeza imagina Internet", me parecen buenísimos (si se miran en Flickr, son mejores, para mí, los de la primera página que los de la segunda, menos fresca, más profesionalizada), tanto plásticamente, porque esos dibujos me encantan, como por lo que denotan: una buena parte de los dibujantes se representan a sí mismos como El Centro de La Red, una mezcla, puesta al día, del clásico renacentista "el hombre es la medida de todas las cosas", y el clásico romántico "yo soy el centro de todas las cosas". En esa misma línea, es curioso que muy pocos pongan como fuente principal de sus dibujos a una gran compañía (por ejemplo, Google, Yahoo).

Hay todo tipo de visiones: abstractas, informalistas, cartesianas, paisajísticas, propiamente técnicas (Red Potencia Inversa), fancineras, sin centro (tipo Expansión del Universo o algo así), minimalistas, tipo gag, otras que me recuerdan a la "Teoría de Bolas Abiertas" de Nocilla Experience, etc.

Súper creativas. Me he pasado horas mirándolas. Proporcionan muchas ideas de representar, no ya la Red, sino muchas otras cosas.

Desde el hombre que salió de la tarta.