as of 10/5
My project is to build a dynamic information system that attempts to visualize contingent and shifting relationships between software, urban development/destruction, and transnational flows of capital. It may be considered as an experiment in cognitive mapping, a concept offered by cultural theorist Fredric Jameson as a possible key for navigating the “debilitating logic” of late capitalism's hyperspace <1>. I like to consider it as a spatialized representation of algorithmic ecologies emerging out of our present sociopolitical conjuncture.
This work will consist of multiple series or parts to be developed over the next two years. My current proposal is one of many parts and may be produced within the next three months. Tentatively titled “Multitudes and Empires” <2>, my proposal is for a dual-channel projection that considers mobile communication networks as an ecological variable that displaces and replaces urban territories and collectivities. The pair will represent and examine double-movements: connectivities and fragmentations, abundance and scarcity, stability and vulnerability, macrocosm (global) and microcosm (body).
Content will be mined from a variety of data sets available on the internet. Sources might range from domestic governmental initiatives (e.g., data.gov or nasa.gov) to multinational reporting agencies (e.g., UN Human Development Reports, World Bank, IMF sites) to news media and social networking or content sharing sites. Resulting content will combine historical, factual, as well as fictional and potentially dubious data and images in order to locate, complicate, and propose semantic connections and uncanny disjunctures.
The dual-channel projection is intended primarily for an enclosed art venue, to create an immersive visual, temporal, and embodied experience that requires extended consideration (as opposed to casual viewing). The installation format may take one of two forms: (1) Two facing walls, with a projection on each. This would locate the viewer in the center of a dialogical piece and force the viewer to move or turn around to witness both channels, or (2) a corner, with one projection perpendicular to the second projection. This would locate the viewer along the intersecting planes and provide a more comfortable yet less active position. The final format and scale of the projections will depend heavily on the ultimate venue.
Main audiences for this work may range from art visitors, media producers and historians, to urban planners, experimental geographers, cartographers, theorists, and architects. By mapping, animating, refiguring networks and emerging sites of encounter, my project attempts to open up interstitial spaces and times within which productive re-imaginings of new sociopolitical rights and relationships might occur. Such work may be most legible to specialized audiences, although the final form should be fairly self-explanatory to more generalized or casual viewers.
<1> In “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (Verso, 1991), Jameson proposes that postmodernism is constituted by a certain type of conceptual space, that which he calls “hyperspace.” He defines it as the “incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”
<2> This title is based on two books by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, “Empire” (Harvard University Press, 2000) followed by “Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire” (Penguin, 2004).
I am interested in the phenomenon of exploding megacities (cities with populations over 10 million), majority of which are in "developing nations" with segregated infrastructure, post/neocolonial systems of governance, and insufficient or faith-based social services. As neoliberalism activates new networks and mobilities, financial instruments, and digital communication systems that re-engineer parameters of human time and physical space, we are also experiencing the rapid creation and escalation of hierarchies and antagonisms, violent displacements, and massive dispossessions. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha writes:
_The globe shrinks for those who own it. For the dispossessed or the displaced, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders._
As an artist and cultural consumer/producer today, I am particularly interested in developing projects that raise two questions: (1) How might we use contemporary technologies to compile complex, multipolar narratives about space, time, memory, and mobility? (2) And, how might these technologies be problematized to favor new equilibriums, positionalities, and agencies, vs. simply being embedded to mirror and sustain past aesthetic-political regimes?
This proposal is part of a larger project to study the role of software (scripting and code, databases and archives, algorithmic/parametric design) in generating and materializing new spatio-temporal protocols, mediated/disintermediated intimacies, and discursive environments -- as well as new forms of ubiquitous control, displacement, and dispossession. I hope my proposal makes these dialectical tensions visible -– or somehow more tangibly comprehensible -– to specialized and general audiences. By including both factual and fictional sources, I also hope that the fallibility of my projects and positions become evident, and therefore provide an opening for discourse and debate with viewers who share a commitment to the open-ended processes of democracy.
My artistic practice struggles with -- and is made legible by -- the works of critical theorists and cultural producers. Theoretical influences include Rosalyn Deutsche, David Harvey, Keller Easterling, and Saskia Sassen on uneven geographic development; Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial discourses; Jacques Ranciere’s distribution of the sensible; and Chantal Mouffe’s agonisms and counterhegemonies. Artistic influences include Hans Haacke’s social systems and Andrea Fraser’s institutional critique; Mark Lombardi and Josh On’s relational maps; Laura Kurgan and John Klima’s data visualizations, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ poetic retooling of sociopolitical engagement.
These approaches to thinking and making all share the conception that art is never neutral. In a media-driven, supersized first world, the production and distribution of images as ideological apparatuses is crucial to the success of war or peace. My work is grounded on this belief that critical art generates better ways of living in the world. I consider my individual practice as part of a collective yet decentered, global movement for counterhegemony. This is a movement that fights for the right to difference and equality, not as end goals, but as starting points for human life. It is the dominant rationale for my work and the projects I produce as an artist living in an age of endless war and segregated peace.
--posted by E Gan, 10/5/09
The project description and narrative is generally clear in its description of the piece, both in its conceptual background, timeline and physical installation. I think it would strengthen the proposal if it included specific data sets, e.g. levels of cell phone usage, levels of potable water, etc. This could present the juxtaposition of data with more impact. In an installation setting, a more oblique reference might be helpful to aid the viewer, but not be completely didactic, e.g. image of cell phone bars, ph levels in water, both unlabeled.
I think the project fits nicely with your stated interest in mega cities and the quote by Homi Bhabha is especially powerful. In terms of its relationship with other works, the way you relate the piece to cultural theorists seems clearer than your connection to the artists mentioned. Maybe a more specific detail of how this piece relates to each of the cited art pieces would be illuminating.
As a final thought I would say that it the piece seems to me to be condemnation of the excesses of capital and how technology is used as a conduit to this effect. It may be compelling to include some beneficial effects of capital/technology in context and in proportion to their representation in the issue, i.e. if there are three malevolent effects to one beneficial effect then let the data/images reflect that, and vice versa, etc. This may be contrary to your intentions but it might be interesting especially in light of the use of false data and might involve other tangential issues of partisan politics as they relate to media and technology.
Overall, I think this will be a well-stated and provocative piece and the project description does a good job of clarifying and describing it.
posted by Joe Cantrell, 10/05/09
E.'s prototype consists of mostly drawings and text, as well as images of previous work to help contextualize her current project. E. proposes different ways of mapping data about how capital flows in a Capitalist economy. Her drawings show a clarity of thought behind the concepts presented and some of the directions the project may go. She presented several ideas on how the piece could be shown visually. She proposes collecting a significant amount of data that will need to be found, interpreted and organized. It is not entirely clear yet where all this data will be obtained. Specifics of how the final work will look are not completely fleshed out, mostly because this will be dependent on interpretation of the data once it is collected. Overall this project has strong direction, but needs more focus on the specific details.
posted by Phoenix, Nov. 9, 2009
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