Hello, theres a discussion on the empyre list just now about relational aesthetics and its consequences/roots in diverse practices. Not as dry as it sounds.
regards from gair you can use these addresses to mail your messages. [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] to subscribe and receive postoings go to http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre, [EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=subscribe> here's what's been up/on so far Message: 1 From: "-empyre-admin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 14:47:50 -0700 Subject: [-empyre-] Introducing E-lounge Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -empyre- takes pleasure in presenting E-lounge coordinated by by Lea Deschamps. Lea is a new media artist who holds a diploma in computer animation from Sheridan College and an M.A. in Art History from the Universit� du Qu�bec � Montr�al. She coordinated and curated the e-lounge in situ dialogical space incorporating on-line and new media events at the Atlantic Cultural Space Conference Moncton, N.B. Canada in May 2002. For the October forum on -empyre- Lea has invited some of the artists form the e-lounge event to present their current research and projects. Presenters are Gair (Scotland); Randy Knott and Ron Gervais - I am static (Canada); Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas -Wireless technology (Canada); Saoirse Higgins currently doing research in the computing culture group of MIT media lab, (Ireland-USA); and Clemente Padin - Mail art, Poetry and artivism (Uruguay). Although distinct in their respective processes and mediation of technology and physicality, they converge in their exploration of social interstices and nodes evocative of 'relational esthetics' (Bourriaud). These artists will help implode binarisms such as periphery-center, proximity-distance,authorship-spectatorship, original-mimetic. -empyre- http://www.subtle.net/empyre Adrain Miles | Christina McPhee | Melinda Rackham **************************************************************** Atlantic Cultural Space Conference http://www.artsnb.ca/acsc/ Gair http://www.gairspace.org.uk Randy Knott and Ron Gervais http://www.iamstatic.com Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas http://www.wearegettingcloser.com Saoirse Higgins http://www.stunned.org/arthouse/Artistic/webshows.asp.htm Clemente Padin http://www.eale.hpg.ig.com.br/ppi/001.htm --__--__-- Message: 2 Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 09:03:49 -0500 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( =?iso-8859-1?Q?L=E9a?= Deschamps) Subject: [-empyre-] empyre intro. Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --============_-1178641461==_ma============ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable The Atlantic Cultural Space: New Directions in Heritage and the Arts was organized by the New Brunswick Arts Board in conjunction with the arts councils of the other Atlantic Provinces. From May 21 to 24, 2002 artists, curators, architects, academics, officials and private sector representatives gathered in Moncton, N.B., for an interdisciplinary conference charting new directions for Atlantic cultural development. In the context of this conference, I curated and coordinated the e-lounge, an event comprising web screenings and presentations, a panel discussion regarding the web and curatorial processes, and a round table about Canadian content on-line programs. Artists were invited to discuss their research in digital and new media, present their work or engage in interactive performances in situ or on line. Artists and theorists from the Atlantic perimeter (the Maritimes and from abroad) gathered to share their perspectives and their views on technology with respect to traditional art practices, the dynamics of proximity and distance, periphery and center, as posited from a geographical location in/on the Atlantic. The Atlantic Cultural Space Conference provided an apparatus for the translation of all texts and presentations delivered in English and French, the proceedings of which are to be published later this Fall. Central to the e-lounge was the idea of a collective viewing of (and listening to) web-based art. As opposed to individuating the participants at stand- alone terminals we sought to create a more fully dialogical space. By dialogical we mean 'presencing' in real-time. The notion of geographical periphery often connotes isolation, being outside of. The positioning of (or the location of) a periphery, while displaced and fleeting within virtual maps, remains anchored in the physical process of individuation. Although the ergonomics of the web apparatus appears to collapse space-time scales, in reality it engages with the user from where and when s\he remains. As a dialogical in situ event, the e-lounge at once redefined the physiological frame of reception and presentation of works-from the individual to the collective. It did so by means of two large screens, and the collective apprehension of visual and aural documentation. The space allowed the presenters to interact in real-time, on line and/ or in situ, with their own work and with the other presenters. Dialogical space and relational esthetics: These terms help describe the oscillating paradigm that emerged from the e-lounge, located as it was in the midst of an interdisciplinary conference. They loosely trace lines or concentric circles from well-known concepts such as Bakhtin's 'dialogism' to contemporary notions such as Nicolas Bourriaud's 'relational aesthetics.' These offer a ground that may be further explored in the forthcoming exchanges: As Bakhtin writes: The idea lives not in one person's isolated individual consciousness-if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else's voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousness the idea is born and lives. Nicolas Bourriaud, in this translation from French, takes this idea as the site of negotiation: So reality is what I talk about with a third party. It can only be defined as a product of negotiation. Escaping from reality is "mad". Somebody sees an orange rabbit on my shoulder, but I can't see it. So discussion weakens and shrinks. To find a negotiating space, I must pretend to see the orange rabbit on my shoulder. Imagination seems like a prosthesis affixed to the real so as to produce more intercourse between interlocutors. (Bourriaud, p. 80, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du R=E9el, 2002.) The e-lounge continues to be a dialogical space in retrospect of the event itself. The forthcoming discussions will include Gair, I-am-static (Ron and Randy), Saoirse Higgins and Clemente Padin, I suggest that what may appear to be monologic (i.e. one voice bound to each text) in their respective performance, prose, poetry and texts-on the screen-is (was) in effect dialogical. What I am getting at is that time-based poetry rendered through flash or other on-line animation is processed in the manner of the spoken word, retaining something of orality expressed in real time. There is something here of Bakhtin's notion of personification, or the "ascription of agency to inanimate ideas and objects." =46rom the tradition of the oral originates the potentiality of the voice as plural or as of the acousm=E8tre (Michel Chion). Valerie LeBlanc and Daniel Dugas, equipped with wireless technological gear, touched base with the e-lounge from undisclosed locations in cities. They engaged in unrehearsed dialogue with flaneurs and scheduled e-lounge presenters and artists. So the goal of art is to reduce the mechanical share in us. Its aim is to destroy any a priori agreement about what is perceived (Bourriaud p. 80) And This is where we start. . . . Gair, I was mostly thinking of the writing on the prisons' walls. Could you elaborate on this? ---------------------------- Message: 3 Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 22:39:21 +0100 From: Gair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [-empyre-] relational arts Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hello, the piece which lea mentions at www.gairspace.org.uk/htm/thoreau.htm is an attempt to bring different discourses into sharp collision.The seeming isolation of web-receivers of information/image is something I am concerned about, and I attempted in this brief flash animation to parallel the style of official/poetic discourse on solitude - as embodied in the Thoreau tradition- with another stream of texts from solitary experience; in this case, writings found in a series of abandoned police cells in the Calton, a district in the East End of Glasgow. A measured and highly self-conscious sense of self flows from the former, and from the latter a series of self- assertions, territorial markings, anxieties and non-sequiturs which embody the different senses of control from these very different ways of being alone and faced with oncoming fate. Having recently come across Bourriaud's writings, I'm interested in the idea of the relational, the making sense not only of the juxtaposition of objects, but the other factor which is then added to that from the position of the viewer. That is, the individual viewer/experiencers' relation to the demotic, to slang, to minority knowledges becomes a live factor in the reception and the unknowability of result in the artists mind.In computer based work,another important factor is the way in which the differing functional capabilities of different machines can inflect the experience of different works. I'm thinking particularly here of Dan Nortons' www.ablab.org where the different sonic and processor speed capabilities of different machines produce radically different results. A few years ago i went to a small cinema in Spain. I can't remember what the film was, but what i remember about that night wasn't a narrative but a social feature. No rows of tip-up seats but a dozen or so large couches, small tables, cushions and other assorted fire hazards dotted about randomly. A bar at the rear, casual conversations, a socially interactive relation to what was unfolding on the screen.(Immaculate sound and projection, incidentally.) The e-lounge way of proceeding and sharing ideas has something in common with this I think. Artist to artist information exchange, with input and curators etc looking in if they like also has some interesting parallels to PVA events. Based in Bridport UK, they are a centre for creativity who also run Labculture at assorted arts centres across the uk. (www.pva.org.uk) labculture events are intense one-week encounter sessions where there are technical experts present, but the emphasis is on project-based creation. Each event is therefore very different, and the non-hierarchic means of exchange leads to new ways of communicating ideas in a remarkably short time. One problem I feel is the way in which artists are willing to let themselves be classified as "new media" or "digital" artists. Once this deceptively simple step is taken, we suddenly find that there are "new media Curators" to patrol the boundaries and validate what they feel to be theoretically correct.We run a risk of re-running the debates and issues which surrounded photgraphic media in the 70s and 80s, when the playful nature of structuralist techniques was often overlooked. Instead, an orthodoxy arose based on psychoanalytic texts and a puritanical refusal of visual pleasure. It didn't think through the consequences of its renunciations, and still priveledged the role of the creator while paying a lip service to a diminishing audience. The idea of relational aesthetics allows us a bit more freedom from the neo-Clement Greenbergs. What matters is not necessarily the form but the ways in which we bring them together, and the ways in which audience and makers shared (or not shared) experience comes into the mix. We can escape from the prison of media-specificity... "Artists are abandoning the notion of a creative vision, becoming more like great inventors in their chosen fields.Artists are importing, changing, interpreting and positioning everything they find. The danger is that artists, kept busy learning and digging up information, can no longer get around to developing new media, raising funds, forming artists groups and so on." Pipilotti Rist in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist International gatherings, the micro-cinema movement(such as the Cube Cinema in Bristol, UK) , and artists curating and teaching themselves in an open ended dialogue seems to me a logical consequence of relational aesthetics. I must admnit I'm curious as to how Bourriaud can apply some of his own ideas now he's head of a large institution. The Palais de Tokio's website doesn't work too well on my machine... www.gairspace.org.uk ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
