Conspiracy Dwellings:abstracts

conspiracy-dwellings-robert-knifton-(1)conspiracy-dwellings-verena-kyselkaconspiracy-dwellings-alex-hawconspiracy-dwellings-pam-skelton

Back from the Conspiracy Dwellings: Symposium on Surveillance in Contemporary Art in the Southhill Park Arts Centre and the photos can be seen in the gallery . The other speakers were Liam Kelly, Pam Skelton, Verena Kyselka, Matthew Shaul, Christine Eyene, Robert Knifton, Alex Haw. Here are the abstracts of their presentations.

Seeing You/Seeing Me: Art and the Disembodied Eye
Liam Kelly, Professor of Irish Visual Culture at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast

Many Northern Irish artists have looked upon the city as a ‘written’ text to be deconstructed. The cities of Belfast and Derry were heavily fortified and defended and as such are where the physical and psychic apparatus of the ‘political troubles’ can best be experienced. These cities have been marked, segregated and intensively surveilled. Both communities in Northern Ireland mark their respective territories by painting kerbstones with appropriate symbolic colours (those of the Union Jack or Irish Tricolour) and by the flying of bunting and flags. Political murals register their echo and call within and between communities – they give notice as communal bulletins. Temporary barricades between the two rival communities have been erected or dismantled over the years or settled into permanent acceptance as necessary ‘so-called’ peace lines. Army and police vehicles and helicopters have daily paraded or surveyed the cities, while army and police stations have become more and more designed for long-term fortification.Derry’s ancient walls have been symbolic of political and religious inclusion and exclusions for centuries. The role of the walls of Derry (built in the 1600’s) has not changed. As with strategic buildings (e.g. those in the New Lodge area of Belfast) extensive and sophisticated surveillance equipment surveill ‘hot’ areas of the city.

A number of artists have dealt with issues of surveillance and intelligence gathering, notably Willie Doherty (in his earlier work) and Locky Morris. In The Walls (photo/text work, 1987) Doherty arranges text to settle over sections of a horizontal panoramic view of the Bogside area of Derry in daylight and the elevated dark inner side of the city walls from which we/the artist the colonised/the coloniser take in the view and take up a position. The Walls lingers with the legacy of the colonised and the coloniser in its absences and presences. From the inner, walled city, captioned ‘WITHIN/FOREVER’ (in loyalist blue), we survey the outer/other, the Bogside, captioned’ ALWAYS/WITHOUT’ (in Republican green). Jean Fisher points to the fragility of the seeing/being seen relationship in The Walls:

‘As we imagine that, with powerful lenses, we could penetrate the interiors of the facing windows, so we also become aware that those eyes may see us. Indeed, were it not for the presence of this gaze of the other, we should not be able to assume the: sovereignty of power that this position affords us. The seeing/being seen dyad is a question of both position and disposition: I see you in the place I am not. However, what The Walls brings into relief is that this narcissistic relation between oneself and one’s other beyond the given boundary is inscribed with a profound uneasiness’?

This paper will examine the emotional fabric of the surveilled environment and how Northern Irish artists have represented, interrogated or engaged with surveillance and the seeing/being seen binary.

Liam Kelly is Professor of Irish Visual Culture at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, Belfast and a former member of the Visual Arts Committee of the Arts Council N. Ireland. He holds a BA (Hons.) degree in the History of European Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and a Ph.D from Trinity College, Dublin He is a writer and broadcaster on contemporary Irish and international art.

Art and the Stasi Archive – Warnings from History. The Case of the Conspiracy Dwellings
Pam Skelton, Artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, University of Arts London

This paper presents a case history of a recent international visual arts project Conspiracy Dwellings first shown in Erfurt in 2007 in 6 venues throughout the city. The project was initiated by the author of this paper (British artist Pam Skelton) and German archivist/statistician Joachim Heinrich in 2002 as multidisciplinary collaborative research on the surveillance methods of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi). Set in Erfurt (capital of Thüringen) a city in the former GDR the research focused on the Konspirative Wohnungen (conspiracy dwellings), essentially ‘safe houses’ (mainly rooms in flats and offices) where the Stasi officer instructed and received information from his informant The project had been made possible by the retrieval of dossier F78 Strassendatei found by the Stasi Records Office, Erfurt in response to an application made by the project and made available after personalized data was made anonymous. The dossier contained the files that refer to the 483 conspiracy dwellings active in Erfurt from 1980-1989.

Working with local partners in science, government and culture meant that local needs and issues relating to the project could be met as well as facilitating shared ownership to local collaborators. The project aimed to raise awareness of Stasi surveillance but also surveillance practices today, following 9/11 when the citizen may once again be considered a potential enemy of the state. Avoiding the polarization between victim and perpetrator the work drew attention to the structure of surveillance rather than the identification of individual conspiracy flats. Nevertheless, despite its intentions Conspiracy Dwellings is an example of how an art project can be hijacked by a fund holder for political gain and raises complex issues about ethical codes and practices for government bodies such as the ‘Thuringen State Commission for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR’. Events came to a head with attempts at control and censorship and the support of an on-line publication of the conspiracy dwellings addresses. These events were orchestrated to coincide with the art exhibition against the wishes of the artists and outside of the parameters agreed by the project. But the State Commission had done its homework, and the publication of this data is legal in Germany according to a law that made the Stasi an exceptional case by-passing the normally strict laws of data protection and confidentiality. These results are both a warning to art practitioners and theorists alike.

Pam Skelton is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design London. Her projects embrace both art and research practices using as resources archives, art, history, cinema and documentary to reveal and re-construct obscured narratives, principally in post world war II Europe. “In my work sites and spaces are seen as storage receptacles of past events where traces of histories are embedded”.

Pigs like Pigments: Informers Have Sharp Ears… and an Artist Becomes an Enemy
Verena Kyselka, Artist, Germany

In the 80s a strong artistic underground scene was developed in the former GDR which in difference to the socialist realism –the official and dogmatically art movement- was not only very creative, but also produced vital art works.

The State Secret Service was surely spying on this subversive art scene. Stasi informers were spread even among artists and sympathizers, who would push art actions more than other members, to ensure thus better reports for Stasi . The sequences of these activities would lead to interrogations, inquiries, investigations, court proceedings and fines imposed. The reports of observation and persecution are collected in extensive files, where many reports of the former surveillance can be found.

In the underground scene I had my first exhibitions in private flats and was under surveillance. My activities were archived in a Stasi file as Operative Control of Individual (OCI) code-named “Pigment”. On the basis of my experience and examples of my former circle of artist friends, I want to present how under an oppressive regimes, artists become enemies.

Verena Kyselka, who grew up in Erfurt, is an artist and freelance curator based in Berlin and Erfurt. Her family’s experience of the Stasi and the consequences of being under surveillance have directly informed her wall based installation ‘Pigs like Pigments’. This includes an earlier work from 1994 which used her Stasi file as a template for a series of silk screens on acrylic glass. For Conspiracy Dwellings, Kyselka has created new works using her Stasi files again to explore and present both the reality and the fiction surrounding her ‘story’ in relation to her archive. Presented as posters, this new aspect of the project includes an interview with a former informer, a series of C-print photographs and a surveillance report from her archive called Geography of Surveillance.

The Impossibility of (Socialist) Realism: Photographer Gundula Schulze Eldowy and the East German Secret Police
Matthew Shaul, Head of Programming and Operations, University of Hertfordshire Galleries

The paper deals with the work of photographer Gundula Schulze Eldowy and the East German Secret Police’s increasingly ineffectual attempts to constrain her photographic practice, her attempts to exhibit her work and debate around it in East Berlin in the mid to late 1980s. It shows numerous examples of her works and draw in the paper on both the Stasi’s observation reports on her and her work as well as interviews with her and other artists participating in the Do Not Refreeze exhibition at the University of Hertfordshire Galleries.

Matthew Shaul is the Head of Programming and Operations at the University of Hertfordshire Galleries.

Oppression and Censorship: Aesthetics and Lived Experiences in 20th Century South African Art
Christine Eyene, Birkbeck College, University of London

This paper will seek to retrace how South African artists inscribed the effects of oppression in their art, in forms as minimalist as the drawings of Dumile (1960s), to open statements like Gavin Jantjes silkscreens (1970s). It will also look at specific cases of censorship (Jantjes’ Colouring Book, 1976 and Sue Williamson’s Modderdam Postcards 1977) as well as the death of Steve Biko as an iconographical theme.

Photography will be approached as the prime medium by which arose political awareness. The journal and agency Drum (1950s) and Afrapix (1980s-90s) were heavily touched by censorship. Yet, we would also like to consider the notions of aestheticised imagery, of framed reality, the blurring the frontier between art/fiction and reality/realism.

In the 21st century South Africa is still addressing a number of social issues. With a government failing to tackle homelessness, unemployment, insecurity, HIV-AIDS, corruption etc. How do artists voice their concern or protest, if any. What is the public response to their work?

Christine Eyene is a 2nd year MPhil student in art history with Professor Annie Coombes at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her area of research is sociopolitical iconography in South African art. Eyene is also art critic and publishing director of French journal Africultures and a recent contributor to Third Text, published by Routledge.

‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’: CCTV in Two Liverpool Artworks
Robert Knifton, AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Student at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University and Tate Liverpool

On 12 February 1993 one of the most notorious crimes in recent British history occurred – the abduction and subsequent murder of James Bulger in Bootle, Liverpool. The moment of the toddler’s removal from the shopping centre by the two older children was captured on CCTV. Although the image it produced helped to enact punishment in the case, it could not prevent the crime. As Jennifer Friedlander notes, ‘The camera which recorded the image was installed to deter theft; the purpose of its presence was to protect things and not people.’ The surveillance image of the Bulger abduction became iconic, being reproduced frequently in press and television forms, initially as a marker in the search for the missing child, but later as emotive visual shorthand for the crime.

In 1994 Jamie Wagg exhibited History Painting: Shopping Mall, a work based upon this widely reproduced image, in the Whitechapel Open Exhibition. The artwork was a photograph of the CCTV image taken from a TV news broadcast, digitally manipulated and then printed out in large format. Its exhibiting led to a media furore. The press vilification of the artist for using an image the media had already globally disseminated raises a host of issues about art’s engagement with CCTV, crime and surveillance. Does artistic framing fundamentally alter the viewing dynamics of CCTV?

Move on ten years to 2004 and Liverpool has the largest CCTV network of any city in England: 242 cameras monitored by Citywatch. For the Liverpool Biennial of that year Jill Magid utilised the CCTV system to create Retrieval Room and Evidence Locker. Wearing an easily distinguishable red leather coat, Magid walked Liverpool’s streets being recorded on the CCTV network. She then requested the footage under the Data Protection Act, her subject access request forms taking the format of love letters to ‘the observer’, the CCTV operator. Over 31 days the artist developed a relationship with the Citywatch controllers, asking them to film her in particular places or poses, and in one instance guide her blindfolded through the city centre. As Ceri Hand remarks, ‘Liverpool Citywatch operators’ willingness to participate in, collaborate with and facilitate Magid’s project…enabled her to blur the line between reality and fantasy, social control and mutual trust.’ Magid’s work brings up an uneasy set of contentions about the control exerted through watching but also the desire to be viewed. In one of her access request forms she comments, ‘This place is anonymous; no one knows me; you watch me from above. I am your subject; I relate myself to the city by the way you frame me in it. I know when you see me and when you don’t. You can’t hear me or smell me or touch me. You know what I wear and where I go. When I pick up the phone, you don’t know who is speaking to me, unless I am speaking to you. I like that.’ The artist submits herself to the gaze, allows it total power over her, a level of control that was so evidently absent in the Bulger footage.

By examining these two artworks this paper will address the artistic application of CCTV images. Surveillance, voyeurism, control and subverted desire are all different angles this contrasting footage can be viewed from. Finally, I shall attempt to address these points principally from the standpoint of ‘the observed’, the watched rather than the watcher.

Robert Knifton is AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Student at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University and Tate Liverpool. He co-curated the 2007 Tate Liverpool exhibition Centre of the Creative Universe: Liverpool and the Avant-Garde and co-edited the Liverpool University Press book of the same name. His recent papers include Curating the City as Text: Contesting Art Display using Literary Narrative at Telling Stories, Loughborough School of Art, and his forthcoming publications include a chapter on Liverpool artists in Art in the City Revisited, from Liverpool University Press.

Space & Senseability
Alex Haw, Architect, Artist, Writer and Educator, London

This paper explores the emergence of a contemporary digital architecture which refutes the entire history of masonry, mass and monumentality in favour of an increasingly atomised and invisible control infrastructure. The passive, defensive role of architecture has become increasingly active as ephemeral software tracks, scans and automatically databases our wetware, turning subjects into data objects, ceaselessly archiving life in mountainous graveyards of information, but also triggering events of increasing violence, from the bioDNA stain-sprays from reweb to the US military’s employment of their remote control city amongst civilians in Baghdad.

The paper explores the way digital databases have replaced human operators, optics have been usurped by behaviours if they are not to trigger constant alarm sets. I showcase a range of radical new military and civilian technologies which have not yet been critically embraced or subverted by the artistic establishment, and briefly refer to my own artistic practice’s use of surveillant and dataveillant techniques to construct and explore public space. The paper concludes with an evaluation of our contradictory claims to both privacy and exhibitionism, our fear of exposure yet our obsession for location-based tracking services, and an analysis of the ambiguous but complicit role society plays in accepting and enjoying surveillany systems as much as it decries them.

Alex Haw is an architect, artist, writer and educator. He runs the multidisciplinary collaborative practice atmos, which explores architectural ideas across a range of media, focusing on the role of performance, interactivity and the moving image. His work frequently incorporates light, video, electronics and aspects of the climate. A slew of recent projects and writings have focused on the performative yet ambiguous role of surveillance in delineating our cities and lifestyles; a recent paper at a Cambridge conference on the evolution onwards from CCTV has been picked up for expansion into a book with the Oleander Press. Educated at the Bartlett (UCL) and Princeton, he has taught design studios focusing on ephemeral and ambient architecture at the Architectural Association, Cambridge University and the TU Vienna. He has exhibited and lectured globally and is currently a research affiliate at MIT’s SENSEable Cities Lab, exploring the digital domestic landscape.

Flat Screen, No Signal: Body and Location Under CCTV
Paula Roush, Lecturer in Digital Photography, London South Bank University

A quick glance at contemporary media reveals that the state of surveillance occupies a central place in political and entertainment discourses, with a range of ambivalent reactions emerging in reaction to its proliferation of operations and technologies. Not surprisingly, artistic projects account today for a growing interdisciplinary field of practice with a scope for imaginative speculation and critical analysis.

Artistic approaches to surveillance tend to be underpinned by two main elements. On one hand, an awareness of Foucauldian’s panopticism and the underlying emotional relationship between power apparatus, architecture, and the psychology of surveillance; on the other, the deployment of a range of strategies that are site-specific, situationist, and context-aware, emotion-driven relations to public space and the city. As a result, there is an increasing acknowledgment of the complexification of terms, with the exploration of counterveillance and sousveillance tactics and a multiplication of points of view, attitudes and emotions in response to surveillance.

In this scenario, I will be presenting two projects that focus on how people experience, negotiate, resist, comply with, and or enjoy surveillance in their everyday life and the translation of these effects into art practice.

One of these projects is Bowville, commissioned by SPACE for bow wireless, London. In August 2004 as the Home Office prepared to test the efficiency of the electronic tagging systems developed by major UK security companies, the fictional character Marian Manesta Forrester was electronically tagged and given three days to earn her citizenship to Bowville. The locative media performance used off-the -shelf purpose built equipment that simulated the official electronic tagging system to create a game during which people were allowed to vote for and follow the movements of Marian Manesta Forrester to become a citizen of Bowville.

The other project is Soundtrack for a CCTV, which is an imaginary development to current trends in urban surveillance, namely the incorporation of sound in loudspeakers fitted CCTV cameras, in which CCTV operators react to the bad behaviour caught on camera with disciplining messages directed at the unruly pedestrians.

The soundtrack for a CCTV offers a more intimate soundscape which can be heard as part of voyeur project CCTV system, outside the number 14 of Timor Street, where the camera and loudspeaker face the entry door. For one month only, a personalised broadcast for the pedestrians can be heard on location, as live stream at http://www.soundtrackforacctv.msdm.org.uk/ or alternatively subscribed to as podcast and downloaded into an mp3 player.

Paula Roush is an artist and lecturer of digital media in the Arts, Media and English department at the London South Bank University. She joined the BA (Hons) Digital Photography course in August 2006, as senior lecturer. Since 2006, she is also the module coordinator for Thinking Practices: Critical Dialogues in Art and Media in the MA in Art and Media Practices at the University of Westminster, London. Current academic projects include the LSBU funded Teaching and Learning Innovation Scheme on social media in learning. She has worked as artist and curator in a range of new media projects, with the support of Arts Council England, Gulbenkian Foundation UK, inIVA, Space Media Arts and South London Gallery. She has just published the photobook Browser Landscapes and is showing the live stream net project Soundtrack for a CCTV at the Voyeur Project View (Lisbon, PT).

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Aluminum or the 3rd Baku Biennale

Zeigam-Azizov,-Philosophy,-photo,-2007

My friend Zeigam Azizov has just sent in this review of the winter 2007 baku biennale where he participated with the work philosophy.

The Republic of Azerbaijan enjoys its 17 years of independence after thousands of years of existence under different colonial rulers. Each colony, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Russian and Soviet has left strong traces and influences over this country’s culture, which was hybrid from the very inception. After achieving independence and after the exhausting war with the neighbor country Aremenia as a result of which Azerbaijan lost Nagornyi Karabakh, the republic took the way towards the intensive growth of economy and modernization of most sectors of society.

The capital city Baku plays the role of the bridge joining together different religious, cultural and political functions by its very geographical location. Today the city is one of the most intensive building sites bringing together architectural forms of all kind. Alongside with the post-Soviet style mixed with the oriental style architecture there is super-contemporary work by Zaha Hadid’s cultural complex gives a new shape to the city moving fast towards the contemporary life. Here everything is made in order to look contemporary, despite the strong conservative traditions adopted by Azeri people.

But what is the contemporary city without the contemporary art? The Baku Biennale which is opened by the 3rd December of this year created the interesting answer to the position of contemporary art in the globalised age: if in our days Biennale’s are becoming compulsory in each capital of newly re-made geography of the global world, it is because the contemporary art is the first sign paving the way towards contemporeinity, the barometer of becoming. This aspect of contemporary art is functioning well even after the critical context is taken out. The art maybe has gone, but the contemporary is still with us! Art is the last word of contemporeinity!

The 3rd Baku Biennale is organized by Leyla Akhundzada who has also curated Azeri pavilion at the 52d Venice Biennale. The title of the Biennale is “Reality of dreams”. Perhaps it is the reference to modernity’s dream to expand the art to all aspects of reality and to all four corners of the planet. Although it is already 3rd Baku Biennale, called ‘Aluminum’, this year for the first time the Biennale received a great support from the Ministry of Culture and other major sponsors. About 50 artists from 19 countries were invited to show their work in this event. The list of participants is including Canada, France, Georgia, Germany, Russia, Italy, USA, Korea, Holland, UK, Kazakhstan among others.

The exhibition took place in two very important buildings: the Palace of Shirvansahs, the XVI century palace of the Azeri king and in the former Museum of Lenin, which is now changed its status to the Museum centre. These two sites, first traditional oriental architecture, and the second the Soviet building and work installed inside these buildings is the combination of the old and new, traditional and contemporary articulated to show how much their relationship is intertwined to create the panoramic picture of the past-present-future perspective on the line, to use Deleuzian famous idea about time and it’s function in our days. In addition to these two galleries, artists from the Georgia exhibited their work in the gallery called ‘Apsheron’ (curator Magda Guruli) located in the narrow street of Icheri-Sheher (Inner city).

Rashad Alekberov’s piece ‘Looking at Two Cities from One point of view’ is using two lamps on both sides alternately turning on and off to show different sides of the same city sometimes oriental and sometimes occidental view of China, to show the West and the East confrontation from the point of today’s concentration on this part of the planet.

The old environment of the Shirvanshah palace is combined with the work made by new technologies, using screen, light and sound. Swiss artists Isabelle Kliegs’ installation ‘Bakery’ consists of bread dried out and plugged into the sockets to look like the traditional Azeri bakery. In Brice Mathew’s (France) installation Western toys periodically ’swimming’ in the oil tank and getting dirty in the oil rich Baku.

Russian artist Natalia Mali, who divides her time between Moscow, London and Berlin in the performance, ‘The Shooting time’ dressing Azeri women and men into the traditional dress as a resistance to brand culture, which has made everyone look the same. Some women refused to dress the traditional costume, preferring ‘Burberry’ t-shirt instead; some were pleased to do so. The result of the session is photographs looking like glossy magazine images. In Mali’s words ‘I had a feeling that they knew everything about the Western image of contemporary woman and try to copy’. In Almagul Menlibaeva’s (Kazakhstan) film made in London, the Central Asian woman changes her clothes in different spots of the city. In the face of hyper-contemporary London where everyone is used to changes everyday these traditional clothes are not perceived as an exotic, but as a changing and shifting fashion.

The work of most artists shares the similar idea of the Western mosaic and Eastern ornament becoming articulated in everyday objects. But today the sharp difference between the East and West is disappeared. Global brands, the common language and media have dominated the way people live and think in different parts of the world. American artist Paul Zogrofakis’s performance ‘The shining star’ refers to the ubiquitous phenomenon of our days: to become a star. Destroying all the light around him hung on the stage for the performance Zogrofakis leads the space into the dark in order to shine himself as a star. Very interesting reference to increasing obsession for self-expression in form of images in space of proliferated means of media, which allows everyone to became a ’star’. Becoming a star is the job of media from internet’s You Tube, My space, Facebook, Google to popular TV programs such as X-Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Pop Idol, etc. While art is re-coding the image of the past as an arbitrary means for an expression, capitalism adopts their function to represent itself as an image.

Switzerland based Georgian artist Koka Ramishvilis’ video ‘Conversation’ shows Ramishvili sitting in front of the window and speaking, (about the crisis in art, perhaps!) Slowly his image doubles ad we realize that he speaks to his double, giving an impression that schizophrenia became a destiny of contemporary person. In Babi Badalov’s (Azerbaijan/UK) work similar thing happens, but this time the frustration of the person used to the Cyrillic alphabet in a society like Azerbaijan, which has recently adopted the Latin alphabet.

In the two channel video installation by the Spanish artist David Maroto, ‘Puzzle’ the couple are watching a film. To one of them the film reminds a book which she read sometimes ago, but she cannot remember the name of the book. This puzzle plays a role of the Lacanian object for David Maroto to help to find an answer in the second screen through the reading of Marcel Proust ‘In search of lost time’, the forgotton prototype in the first video.

Like in British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s mathematical paradox, making the namer and gatherer of the set stand outside, not to be defined by what he/she is defining. I must admit that my own video-installation called ‘A soft topology’ is also built around this idea. At the very point of identifying one needs to escape the identity. It is a very nature of capitalism or late global capital to move across the terrain of cultural consciousness, (in this case contemporary art), which has become schizophrenic or even, perhaps, shchizo-analitical Deleuzian device. While complex forms communicate ‘itself with itself’, the popular image allows ’subjects to work by themselves’ (Althusser). Since we don’t exist formally and art is increasingly becoming intertwined with life there is a shift towards the non-formal narrative, marked in the desire to be contemporary. Subjectivity is expressed in the action, in the practice, without the subject. Making art is pure politics, without the thinking subject the goal of which is to look contemporary.

Zeigam Azizov, Baku-London, December, 2007

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soundtrack for a cctv 071223

 
icon for podpress  rua timor: shadows 2007.12.21.18.2.14 [0:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
icon for podpress  sim sim sim [2:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

video art for ipod/iphone/nokia n73 and any other compatible m4v/mp3 player

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soundtrack for cctv 071223

 
icon for podpress  rua timor: shadows 2007.12.22.23.21.53 [0:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 
icon for podpress  sim sim sim [2:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

video art for ipod/iphone/nokia n73 and any other compatible m4v /mp3 player

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soundtrack for cctv 071223

 
icon for podpress  ip-cam jam 2007.12.21.0.51.50 : Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

video art for ipod/iphone/nokia n73 and any other compatible m4v player

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soundtrack for cctv 071222

 
icon for podpress  web browser time lapse cctv 2007.12.21.0.48.23 [0:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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soundtrack for a cctv 071221

Watching the same patch of street can be boring! Started using Manuel Schmalstieg’s max-msp Better than tv patch to import rua timor’s stream into max/jitter and jam it with streams from other webcams. You can download the patch and add rua timor’s cam url (http://voyeurprojectview.homeftp.org/jpg/image.jpg ) to the camlist.txt to create your own webcam-browser and add rua timor to your cctv-scratch movies. the worpress plugin gecko-tube enables the youtube embedding.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=z9BHoxgSyEg">http://youtube.com/watch?v=z9BHoxgSyEg</a>

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soundtrack for a cctv 071217

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voyeur view

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soundtrackforacctv

Thanks to Rodrigo Vilhena, curator of the Voyeur Project View who organised the awsome launch of soundtrack for a cctv last thursday and to all that showed up. A special hug to Tiago Gomes e Revista Biblia. I am writing my review of the experience as a voyeur behind the browser for the Conspiracy Dwellings: Symposium on Surveillance in Contemporary Art (at South Hill Park Arts Centre Friday 18 January), and want to hear from those present. I am particularly interested in how you experience, negotiate, resist, comply with, and or enjoy surveillance in your everyday life and about your translation of these effects into your art practice. You can leave your comments here, in the project’s gallery or email me directly at msdm-at-msdm-dot-org-dot-uk

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art practice dialogue facebook group

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Friday we had the Artquest Art Practice Dialogue Seminar at the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, London and one of my contributions was the creation of a facebook group to help us take our dialogue one step further, and crucially, explore social media tools like facebook and its multiple “conversational applications” for online dialogue; the reaction was split but one day after when I logged in to post my list of emerging issues and invite people to join in, surprise, there were already 5 members, 2 from the facebook network and 3 from the seminar, and surprise, surprise, one discussion topic running!

It is my first time facilitating a facebook group, there are very few guidelines, and - for the first time- I reached out for the help section- but I’m really curious and have the encouraging presence of other friends who have also started running groups recently in facebook, like the area 10 project space peckham run by dimitri.

It is an open group, so if you want to join the art practice dialogue facebook group. the first step is to simply stop by and say hello. if you dont have an account you need to get one, but that’s free. and dont worry if you find it weird, you have time to become familiar with facebook group tools :) however if you are in the mood to start posting, there are already two discussion topics: one on emerging dialogical themes; the other on people in a group who don’t contribute to the group discussion. To respond to a discussion topic you need to click the topic, and then in its window, click the button ‘reply to this topic’.

My list of emerging dialogical themes

Instead of writing a review of the the presentations and dialogues that took place during the swedenborg socity seminar, i decided to generate this list of emerging issues:

1-the instrumentalisation of dialogic practice that seems to result in measurable positive outputs for communities. but profitable to who?

2-the aestheticisation of discursive process that transforms what seem indeterminate encounters into formal art works. but why not?

3-the shifting role of artist and audience that become collaborators of conversational pieces. but on what grounds?

4-the openess of the work and working with/out a script in a performative situation. but who’s controlling who?

5-the uneasy relationship to mainstream art criticism that still can’t come to terms with the vagueness of dialogical art works. and what’s the alternative?

6-the need of rules for optimal group functioning when using dialogue within support groups. but what about the dark side?

7- the use of psychology and psychoanalysis to become familiar w/ the uncertainty and doubt underlying discursive aesthetics

8-the dialogical role of the commissioner: in order to commission dialogical pratices, and work in reaction to a challenge imposed by that dialogue

9- the performativity of the online selves and issues of socialisation in extending the dialogue via social network sites

10- self-publishing and peer to peer networks as ways to overpass curatorial gate-keeping.

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AJAXed with AWP