Negotiating Equity 2011/2012
Project leader: Renee Ridgway Guest lecturers: Simon Ferdinando, Nicholas Malevé & Seda Gürses, Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Tina Bastajian, Mick Wilson, Saskia van der Kroef, Brian Holmes
19 April 2012
Provocation, not Curation
In this workshop, Brian Holmes will begin by presenting all the elements of his practice: activism, essay-writing, performance lectures, the organization of public events, traveling experiments in social perception, research collectives, archiving. This practice depends on the self-organization of cooperating groups. It's not about curating representations, but provoking responses. In this way it can offer one reference-point for all of those who are pursuing a transformation of the existing cultural system. The morning session will retrace the evolution of the Continental Drift project. It began as a research proposal, inspired by artists who configure multi-layered projects involving various media and extending over long periods (http://tinyurl.com/continental-1). It evolved into a public forum organized with Claire Pentecost and the 16 Beaver group in New York, including four different events, plus a fifth in Zagreb (http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift). It morphed into a experimental travelling practice, the "Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor," which gave rise to the Compass group (http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net). A structured, month-long "Continental Drift through the Pampa" was undertaken with Claire Pentecost and the El Levante group in Rosario, Argentina (http://tinyurl.com/continental-argentina). Finally, a new public seminar project called "3 Crises: 30s-70s-Today" was organized at Mess Hall in Chicago. This can be seen as a reformulation of the previous experiments. The project has finally found a mode of archiving that makes it accessible and useful for people anywhere (http://messhall.org/?page_id=771).
The afternoon session will be devoted to a group discussion of self-organized cultural practice. The form this discussion takes, and the place or format in which it unfolds, will be provoked by the students!
22 March 2012
today's guests: Mick Wilson and Saskia van der Kroef
Saskia van der Kroef
Towards a Genealogy of Art Practice as Research 'Artistic research' and the PhD or doctorate in art are still much-debated subjects in the (European) art field, and especially at art academies – institutions in which these discussions initially started, some 10 years ago, as a result of more general reforms in European higher education. In this presentation Saskia van der Kroef will detach the subject from its current treatment, which is characterized by a certain 'present-ness' and a dominant focus on its position in art education (instead of art production), by zooming into a possible history of research in visual art. This will bring about a number of examples of how research has already been part of art practice, and can be in the future. She will also introduce some of the very recent publications on research-based art practice, to give insight into the modes in which artistic research is currently theorized.
Mick Wilson
"The Doctor is Out: The Doctor is In"
– Or –
"Research isn't everything: Everything isn't research"
– Or –
"Just Do Something That Interests You, And Shut Up Already, Why Don't You!"
The question of doctoral level studies and the question of research within art practice are situated as different but overlapping matters. The tensions around notions of "autonomy", "purity", and "alterity" – with respect to the institutional "home" and "circuit" of art practice – are indicated within the current debates on the doctorate and on artistic research. The contest for legitimacy and authority within different, but also overlapping, reputational economies is identified with reference to the competition to name, define, delimit and authorise artistic saliency and cognitive value. While acknowledging the urgent need for critique within academic practice, a problematic naturalisation of the generalised art market system as the authentic or proper or un-institutionalised home of art practice is indicated as a key uncritical moment within the "non-integral" critique of the academy (construed as a singular institutional locus dis-articulated from the larger art system.)
9 February 2012
10:00-13:00 Tina Bastajian
Contoured Topologies: Street, Archive, Database
As a media-artist, researcherand experimental documentarist, Tina Bastajian will navigate through the processes and contingencies from the project Coffee Deposits:::Topologies of Chance.* This iteration of the work is contoured into a DVD-ROM, a hybrid between interactive documentary forms and the ludic.
By tracing the adventitious technical and contextual detours, what unfolds is a topology of complex spaces: unpredictable and rapidly shifting urban patterns and disparate stories and accounts by those who inhabit, walk, dwell, witness, work and protest in the city. While GPS traces, coffee deposits, and geo-caching tactics were originally to be used as tangential offshoots (narrative, illustrative, statistical), these later resurfaced through the editing and navigational design process in unexpected ways. These emergent tropes negotiated and speculated multiple viewpoints and disorientations, sometimes via ironic and non-linear traversals within street and screen interfaces. Tina will also outline some of the processes of what she calls 'locative post-scripts' (i.e. addendums or epilogues) which formed the augmented reality tour (via smart phone/AR browser, Layar), Pera pARkours, and extended the Topologies archive into public space, in the vicinity of Galata, Istanbul. http://www.coffeedeposits.nl
*(in collaboration with visual artist Seda Manavoglu)
14:00-17:00 Prayas Abhinav
Being procedural: don’t compose, define grammars
Prayas Abhinav is a media artist living in Bangalore, India. He is interested in simulating and tinkering with systems of information exchange and perception.
With the social web, we think of and prototypes patterns of exchange which are either introverted, private or fit only for contextual consumption. With his seminar, ‘Being procedural: don’t compose, define grammars’ we will attempt to understand how compositional rules and traditions work and how generative paradigms in designing can alter them drastically. His work with gaming has dealt with the use of language, pattern recognition and regression in meaning. As a part of the seminar, Prayas will introduce nodebox and demonstrate ways to quickly start playing around the tool. During this interaction, he will talk about games and the key technical and conceptual factors behind them. Prayas will also share his recent presentation at Transmediale in Berlin ‘outResourcing’, a notation language for chasing noise in the autobiographical.
http://masking.prayas.in/shadow/syntax.html
12 January 2012
10:00-17:00 Stephen Wright all day seminar Shadowmapping
Nothing can remain in shadow if it can be mapped. Since there is little point drawing specific attention to that which is already basking in it, cartographers – like documentary filmmakers – tend to focus on the invisible or barely visible. Yet mapping rarely sees itself as antagonistic to what has escaped attention; like documentary, it fancies itself as aiding the invisible in gaining the visibility it lacks. However mapping's white dream inevitably encounters its own blind spot: for, like all refracting and occluding devices, maps, too, cast shadows. This particular dialectic of enlightenment has considerable consequences for contemporary art. Indeed the rise in cognitive-mapping practices over the past decade may be seen as contemporary art's ultimate attempt to save representation, to assert the political potential of mimesis. Increasingly, art practice appears to be moving away from representation toward a regime of redundancy, whereby art does not depict something but is actually at once that something, and a proposition of it: increasingly, art operates on a 1:1 scale. What sorts of mapping projects can be envisaged on this real-life scale – using the country itself as its own map, Lewis Carroll style? What recourse to critical cartography can be envisaged after the end of the regime of representation -- a recourse respectful of shadows?
1 december 2011
Negotiating Equity: Archive, Database, Research investigates curation as artistic practice, investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under physical as well as virtual conditions. Negotiating Equity draws upon theories of fairness in questioning divergent value systems and asserts that these terms of engagement imply rethinking the political, economic and social conditions of art, drawing upon a wide range of artistic and art-related practices, some off the radar, undocumented and under-theorized, others representative of art historical paradigms. Negotiating Equity goes to Brussels to see the exhibition ‘Riffs’ by Yto Barrada at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre and to visit Constant, Association for Art and Media an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997.
Brussels: Starting 11:00 Wiels Contemporary Art Centre: exposition ‘Riffs’ by Yto Barrada 12.30 Constant Association for Art and Media Access & Anonymity (with Nicholas Malevé & Seda Gürses) 15.18 Depart Brussel Midi - Roosendaal Arr.16.28 16.51 Depart Roosendaal - Arnhem Arr. 18.36 Wiels Contemporary Art Centre: exposition ‘Riffs’ by Yto Barrada. Riffs is the first survey exhibition of the work of Yto Barrada, whose photographs, films, publications, installations and sculptures engage with the peculiar situation of her hometown of Tangier, Morocco, situated on the Strait of Gibraltar, transformed into a dead end since the 1991 Schengen agreement.
Constant Association for Art and Media http://www.constantvzw.org/site/ A general overview of Constant, a non-profit association, an interdisciplinary arts-lab based and active in Brussels since 1997. Constant utilizes free software and free licenses, works with artists, activists, curators making experiments and organizing workshops, print-parties, walks and the yearly Verbindingen / Jonctions 13, now going on (December 1-4). Constant reflects on how this free culture is produced, how it develops, and in which context it takes place.
Nicholas Malevé will first present one of his recent projects, http://academycommons.net/ The second part will focus on ‘Access’, with a closer inspection of the rapid enclosure of the internet, IP addresses and web 2.0 ideologies.
Seda Gürses lectures on ‘Anonymity’, a powerful concept and strategy that transgresses concepts like authorship, the original, and the origin, presenting itself across important elements of our lives like songs, poems, oral histories, urban legends, conspiracy theories and chain mails. http://www.constantvzw.org/site/
20 October 2011
10:00-17:00 Special guest: Simon Ferdinando via skype: Renee Ridgway
Negotiating Equity: Archive, Database, Research investigates curation as artistic practice, investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under physical as well as virtual conditions. Negotiating Equity draws upon theories of fairness in questioning divergent value systems and asserts that these terms of engagement imply rethinking the political, economic and social conditions of art, drawing upon a wide range of artistic and art-related practices, some off the radar, undocumented and under-theorized, others representative of art historical paradigms.