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The current crisis has had the effect of making even wider the divide between people who think that they should stay low and eat frugally until merrier times finally come back and those who believe that the recession is just another sign that the system our economy relies on is fucked up and that time has come to look for alternative. More ethical alternatives. Resist, is bringing you the live webcast of a debate that will try to bring some answers to the question: How will decentralised communications networks shift the way we understand poverty and our power to resist its causes?
The event, supported by Amnesty International UK, takes place online on October 16th - New York: 10am / London: 3pm / Mumbai: 7.30pm. From the press release: Global media conglomerates no longer monopolise the ability to transmit messages both locally and internationally. The use of the internet, mobile phones, satellite radio and the declining cost of media technologies have transformed the way individuals and communities voice their concerns. Many have argued that these decentralised communications networks have lead to an increasingly democratic and accessible media culture. Yet there has been little discussion around how these networks might impact our understanding of poverty as well as serve as a means to resist its causes. This event will ask how we can harness the power of these networks in order to more effectively depict and understand the complex web of reasons behind the existence of poverty. And can these networks in the long run open up a space for people who live in poverty to participate in the culture of political life? Panelists participating to the Debate - Web of Dissent
Colm Ó Cuanacháin is Senior Director of Campaigns with Amnesty International. He has held a number of other roles in Amnesty, including Secretary General of the organisation's Irish Section. He worked formerly as Head of Campaigns with ActionAid International. Roland Harwood is Director of Open Innovation at NESTA. He heads up NESTA's Connect programme, which supports innovation through extreme collaboration. Wai Mun Yoon is a digital strategist and consultant who has over a decade of experience of using innovative technologies and emerging media platforms to communicate with global audiences. |
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But on Thursday i took the train to Utrecht to see the solo exhibition of the Polish artist at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst. The exhibition presents "social studios," social experiments of sorts documented on film in an openly confrontational way. Think reality shows for art galleries. The artist confronts individuals to uncomfortable situations that explore complex moral issues. He then waits and films as the scenes unfold.
In Repetition, 2005, Żmijewski revisits the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a two-week investigation to respond to the following question: "What happens when you put good people in an evil place?" At the time, 24 undergraduates were selected to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison. After six days, Philip Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment. The guards took great pleasure in exercising violence, humiliating and torturing the prisoners; the prisoners, too, lost their ability to distinguish what was real and what was simulated.
Żmijewski recreated the experiment despite the fact that contemporary science would regard it too dangerous--and effective--to carry out again. Whether you catch the film right from the beginning or arrive in the middle of it, the scenes of sadism, frustration, humiliation, anger, and especially fear look way too real and instinctual, to be just a game.
Repetition is more than just a mechanical representation of the 1971 undertaking. The artist removes the experiment from its scientific context and the conditions of the time and places it in today's world, to transform it into a "universal manifestation of weakness and moral failure." Besides the 7 inmates and 9 guards (all of them unemployed people without), participants included psychologists responsible of stopping everything if it turned dangerous, a former prison inmate, and a sociologist involved in prison system reforms. The experiment collapsed after only few days as the participants collectively decided to leave the prison. As Maria Hlavajova wrote in her essay for the exhibition, Can this moment of resistance be seen--in a time in which the world struggles to come to terms with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the like--as a humble indication that violence, cruelty, brutality, and terror can be expunged as accepted options for creating the conditions for how to live together after all? What is sure is that the artwork raised much controversy and discussion at the time in Poland. Żmijewski believes that in order for art to regain its value in society, it has to expose societal conflict and disclose the conditions in which social antagonisms are cultivated and maintained by the powers that be. Convinced that the hard-won autonomy of art--in which art is considered independent from the "real" world--has actually disempowered it from acting as an accountable public voice, Żmijewski insistently requires of art that it take responsibility and engage in a dialog with the current social and political reality around us.
Apart from Repetition, several other videos can be viewed at BAK. The one i found most moving is 80064. Its title is the camp number of a 92 years old Auschwitz survivor, Jozef Tarnawa. The tattoo has faded with the years and Zmijewski meets the old man in a tattoo parlor and tries to persuade him to have it 'refreshed'.
The old man is not to be convinced easily. He wants to be left in peace. He is worried that the renewed tattoo will not be 'original.' In the end, Zmijweski gets his way and the poor man submits his arm unwillingly to the tattoo artist. In Zmijweski's own words: 'When I undertook this film experiment with memory, I expected that under the effect of the tattooing the 'doors of memory' would open, that there would be an eruption of remembrance of that time, a stream of images or words describing the painful past. Yet that didn't happen. But another interesting thing happened. Asked whether, while in the camp, he had felt an impulse to revolt, to protest against the way he was treated, Tarnawa replied: 'Protest? What do you mean, protest? Adapt - try and survive.' In the film, suffering, power relationships, and subordination are repeated.
Artur Żmijewski: The Social Studio is on view from 28 September until 16 November 2008. n view until 16 November 2008 at BAK, Lange Nieuwstraat 4, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Related: History will repeat itself (part 1) and (part 2). |
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's been a long Summer and i spent it with the usual heap of magazines. Here's some of the best that fell into my hands:
In a nutshell and in the words of the editors: Our society seems to be locked into a position in which the user's and voter's choices determine how we shall live in the future. A disturbing collective urban life in a giant Big Brother House looms, a material and social world in which sensationalistic media and its commercial translation dominate. Our sense of what is real and what is quality is on the verge of collapse. The practice and education of the engineers of this society is determined by short-term effect instead of long-term social responsibility. Culture becomes little more than a market, politics its façade and the city its stage. Instead of reviving old school high modernist social engineering or claiming the need for an intellectual junta, we solicit new forms of social engineering. Where shall this lead? The wide variety of articles in Volume is brilliant: the potential of gaming to affect architecture with the particular case of SimCity and how it has changed urban planning; a nice essay details a campaign by the Zimbabwean government to forcibly clear slum areas across the country; another shows that the French government is not necessarily much more clever when it comes to dealing with problems arising in 'slums and slabs' areas; a photo gallery about 20th century utopian architecture (with many images that evoke Dubai btw); the obligatory article about Chinese cities adorned with never-gonna-be-tired-of-those spectacular images, etc. Forecast: Nozone X, edited by Nicholas Blechman, principal of Knickerbocker Design in New York City and art director of the New York Times Book Review (Amazon USA and UK.)
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: UN reports and newspaper articles are illustrated with dry charts and graphs predicting technological, economic, and ecological transformations that are already dramatically altering the way we live. Forecast revisualizes these abstractions about everything from our environment to our waistlines, from the stock market to the Middle East through the eyes of cartoonists and graphic designers who have made comics with a conscience: Ward Sutton imagines a nation divided into a red and a blue zone; Paula Scher maps out the Northern Hemisphere of 2100; Elizabeth Amon interviews New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert on global warming; and Tom Tomorrow looks back on the legacy of Bush-Cheney. Ultimately, Forecast is an optimistic book: using humor, it encourages all of us to take responsibility for predictions of the future and to take action to affect change. Forecast is the 10th installment of Nozone, a politically-engaged graphic design and comics zine, founded by Blechman in 1990. Published as an independent and zero-profit venture, Nozone features the work of talented graphic designers and cartoonists, spot-on themes, and an abrasive take on contemporary events. The theme of this edition is our increasingly unsteady and uncertain future. The one of the first edition, back in 1990, was pollution and on its cover was a man wearing a gas mask too. There's another gas mask guy on the current cover. The message is clear: 20 years on, the state of our blue planet is still a cause of concern. The Morning News has a gallery of some of the drawings (not the best ones i'm afraid) you'll find in the magazine.
a minima is a great compact mag about contemporary art and in particular new media art, the magazine follows a methodology which resembles that of scientific magazines: the artists themselves write about their work, the editors leave the text untouched and add photos and graphics. Issue number 24 features a few pearls: Jose Luis de Vicente and Irma Vila discuss their Atlas of Electromagnetic Space, Marta de Menezes shares her experience of bringing artistic creation inside scientific research laboratories, like she did with Decon, a project for which she used biotechnology to create Mondrian-like paintings, Diane Gromala gives the gore details but also the motivation behind The Meatbook, Ulla Taipale from Capsula presents Curated Expeditions, an invitation to experience earthly phenomena through artistic exploration, Geert Lovink writes about blogging as a 'nihilist impulse', there's also a text about Íñigo Bilbao's artistic experiments with biomedical images and an essay by Jonah Lehrer who advocates that science should find a place for art. There are many more articles. A few of them are only available in spanish but most are publish both in english and spanish. You can order the bi-monthly magazine by contacting aminima at aminima dot net. But the best would be to subscribe, right?
The current issue of Neural paper mag is devoted to games. There's even colours inside and a new design. Exhibition reports, DVD, music, book reviews, artists interviews, all the usual crunchy media snacks. I guess i could do a lengthier paragraph about the magazine but that would be an insult to you, dear readers, cuz you are already subscribed, aren't you?
The latest issue of Cluster is called Transmitting Architecture, it's been created in collaboration with the World Congress of Architecture 2008 and it is very very good. Take my word for it (sorry, too tired to keep on blogging) or check out the online version of a few articles published in the magazine. Published both in english and italian. |
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On Sunday September 14, i had the great pleasure to host a panel on Cartography of Protest and Social Changes with 3 artists and activists i admire a lot: Brooke Singer, John Emerson and Lize Mogel. I usually avoid writing about the events i'm so closely involved in, either because i don't have the opportunity to take notes or because there's some video of it about to broadcast the ridiculousness of my accent on the world wide web.
When Christina Ray, the director of Conflux, asked me if i'd like to host a panel i said i'd like to moderate one inspired by An Atlas. Lize Mogel is one of the editors of the book (together with Alexis Bhagat ), Brooke Singer and John Emerson contributed to the volume with maps. Just like the book, the panel was an attempt to demonstrate that maps have the potential to bring about social changes. I am not going to write down everything that was say, i'll just share with you tiny bits from the presentations: Lize's presentation focused on the maps of An Atlas, you can find information about them online but her intro contained some fascinating facts. Here's just one of them: One of the world's most famous maps can be seen on the flag of the United Nations.
The first version was drawn in 1946 by someone from the US department and had North America at the center of the emblem. The design was changed after some complains from other countries. But one question remained: how do you design a map of the world that has to be fair and display equality between the nations? There is always something on the top, something in the middle (and thus the center of the attention), even being on the left side is not innocent as our eyes are used to read from left to right, the right is also meaningful as advertisers have discovered that the eyes always seem to fall on that side of an image. The solution adopted represents an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole. But that area which one would believe is blank and neutral is in fact a space for debate: the area is owned by Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway and the US and it's unclear how it should be divided up exactly.
An Atlas of Radical Cartography exhibition opens on September 23 at the Global Education Center, UNC campus. Upcoming venues for the exhibition include New Jersey (October), New York City, Utrecht (2009), etc. John Emerson has a very impressive portfolio and a blog i'd recommend anyone to subscribe to. He often collaborates with grass-root, independent, non-profit associations dealing with human rights, from California Coalition for Women Prisoners, to the Office of The Tibetan Government in Exile, or Injection Drug Use, Syringe Exchange Programs and AIDS in California. His belief is that maps can be useful tools that visualize power and are able to create social change, influence opinions and alter relationships between powers. By making abstraction visible, maps help us navigate through complex concepts.
One of the projects he highlighted are the compelling and revealing maps of Gold Trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo he created for the Human Rights Watch report The Curse of Gold. The gold trade is fueling conflicts and atrocities for the last 20 years in northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The maps makes clearer the relationship between gold concessions, paramilitary groups in the country and gold companies from all over the world. The art crowd will probably have heard about a project he developed together with Trevor Paglen.
Paglen's project 'CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006' explores the practice of extraordinary rendition. Emerson designed the map that visualizes the movements of aircraft owned or operated by known CIA front companies in order to reveal the relationships that have been forged between the United States and other countries in the name of the 'war on terror.' Back in 2006, Paglen and Emerson installed a huge billboard displaying the map of the rendition flights on 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles. The billboard, part of the The Clockshop Billboard Series. The reaction of the drivers passing by was not an unanimous feeling of revolt in front of the CIA activities, some felt proud and satisfied to see that the government was doing a good job.
Another great project Emerson discussed is the NYC Guide to War Profiteers. First published in March 2003, the map located precisely government and military agencies, weapon makers, corporations, media benefiting from the war, etc. The map was available at progressive bookstores around town, and was distributed at organizing meetings for various protest events. It also listed a series of like-minded websites. You can find a scan of the hard copy online.
Brooke Singer discussed briefly her contribution to An Atlas: the Map of U.S. Oil Fix as well as her fantastic project Superfund365, a website that chronicles 365 of the worst Superfund sites where Americans live at risk of exposure to toxins.
In her introduction about map, Singer reminded the audience of a few relevant facts: - mapping is more about representation than truthfulness,
She showed also two thought-provoking maps that illustrate this idea of maps as representation: McArthur Universal Corrective Map of the World, designed in the '70s by an Australian man who was upset by the idea that he came from the "bottom of the world". The second one is Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map, the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion. The map highlights the fact that the earth is essentially one big island over one ocean. |
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Johannes Gees action Salat won a Honorary Mention in the Hybrid Art category of the Prix Ars Electonica 2008. In the summer of 2007, Gees sneaked automated speakers into famous church towers in various Swiss cities and in one mountain village. At the times of Islamic prayer the call of the muezzin could be heared. The context for this action is the heated debate in Switzerland that ensued after right-wing conservative politicians demanded the ban of minarets.
On show at the OK Center are photos, a video showing the reactions of passer-bys, legal letters from city administrations, that followed the action, and one of the speakers, shown in the snapshot, that always on the full hour plays the sound that was used in the action. |
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As i blogged the other day, the Bolzano segment of Manifesta 7 exhibition is located in a disused aluminium factory by the Dolomites mountains. The show is called The Rest of Now and words fail me to express how consistent, intelligent and thought-provoking it is.
The curators, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Raqs Media Collective, took as a point of departure for their reflection the abandoned industrial site and the questions its 'after-life' raises, they then enlarged the scope of the discussion: What gets left behind when everything is taken away? What can be retrieved, and what can be remembered? How can the residual become the engine of meaning? They invited artists but also a few practitioners whose work wouldn't be defined as art to participate to the conversation. I'll focus on a couple of them in this post. David Adjaye is one of the most famous and oh! so talented architects from England. One who, although he collaborated with Olafur Eliasson to create the Your Black Horizon installation at the Venice Biennale in 2005, has never tried to confuse his work with one of an artist (like some architects like to do these days)
His contribution to the Manifesta biennial is Europolis, a beautifully crafted glass and metal foil panel that raises questions such as 'What if Europe was condensed into one piece and combined as one cell? What would be left behind as residue?'
Adjaye extracted information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. The sum of many European cities doesn't make a European city. These have not been planned; they have evolved over time, through history and war, development, destruction, mixing, migration and changing populations. Adjaye's work evokes the idea of the city as phenomenon. Its organic form contains all the information about those cities from which it is drawn: material texture, population, time, scale and occupation.
The other rabbit in Manifesta's magic hat is Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) who came all the way down from Stockholm to Italy in an old bus. Piratbyrån is best known as the initiator of The Pirate Bay, the world's largest bit torrent tracker and the subject of a controversial court case.
The journey doubled as a workshop whose aim was the formulation of a new, collaborative statement based on the group's experiences of the recent Scandinavian conflicts over copyright. The bus was left behind as part of the exhibition, along with the documentation of Piratbyrån's work. I admire the Biennale for having the guts to support the project in a country whose government has recently decided to censor The Pirate Bay. So far the move has been unsuccessful. I guess that among the worries of the head of State is also the suspicion that we'll use the file-sharing website to enthusiastically download his upcoming CD of Christmas songs.
Unfortunately (for me cuz it means i can't download the Commissario Montalbano), Colombo-BT is still blocked due to the same measure. Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak: "It kinda shows that we're more than just a site, that we're an idea, and that we're art in ourselves. As I've said many times before, we see The Pirate Bay as some sort of ongoing art project/performance."
There's of course a torrent of TPB's road movie. Manifesta, the itinerant European Biennial of Contemporary Art is hosted this year by the Trentino - South Tyrol Region. It runs until November 2, 2008. |
