[-empyre-] Coda: Fiamma Montezemolo

[christ...@christinamcphee.net]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Fiamma Montezemolo: favorite quote:


"More recently, inspired by Susan Hiller in particular, I've moved away from 
academic anthropology which was based on my long term fieldwork in Mexico (at 
the border between TIjuana and San Diego, where I resided for 6 years). As a 
result, I have attempted to translate my work into an artistic practice with 
the aim of bypassing the questionable divide between theory and practice, 
between the conceptual and sensorial. In my research-based art, I began to 
create inter-media, inter-disciplinary and cross-genre interventions being 
particularly interested in those practices that reflect on the border as a 
mobile category of experience, of sensible AND conceptual mediations, 
disciplinary negotiations, and geopolitical articulations. My very first video 
work has been in Chiapas with the Zapatistas during the '90s: 
  
http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#faceless 

 My focus at the time was on gender and ethnicity from a 'post-feminist' 
perspective (Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Renato Rosaldo, etc.). Since then, 
of course, I moved on to other topics and themes because an 'identity-politics 
based' orientation became 'majoritarian', so to speak, borrowing from Deleuze 
and Guattari. At the moment, my major preoccupation is to visualize my 
research-based art practice through various media forms:

 1) fieldwork intimacy through apps: 

http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#fieldwork-notes

2) Ecological problematics, primarily via installation work: 
  
http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#the-3-ecologies

3) border issues, primarily via the video-essay form: 
  
http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#traces (password: fiamma) “




——

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—


















Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net

insta: naxqqsmash




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[-empyre-] Coda: Carolyn Castaño

[Christina McPhee]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

carolyn castaño: favorite quote

"My most recent bodies of work are all encounters with themes and images 
originating in our hemisphere’s narco-­‐trafficking milieu and armed conflicts, 
with a particular emphasis on how gender and ecological concerns play out 
therein. These drawings and paintings mix materiality with content
in pieces that consider how the Latin American body and the Latin American 
landscape remain inextricably linked, even as their surrounding media and 
political contexts are increasingly digitized and globalized...

 The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil explores the role of Latin American 
women in history and the media. In The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil, a 
single channel video which addresses perceptions of Latin American women in 
news and ‘infotainment’ culture through a simulated newscast exploring feminism 
and popular notions of Latina womanhood. Modeled after popular, female-anchored 
Spanish-language television news programs on Telemundo and Univision, El 
Reporte Femenil features a fictional newscaster, Silviana Godoy, “reporting” on 
the past and current status of women in Latin America. Godoy alternates between 
English and Spanish over the course of an extended, free-wheeling monologue, 
alighting on the accomplishments and downfalls of Latin American women. The 
Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil travels between English and Spanish and 
employs a tongue in cheek or comedic delivery that "reports" on the news or 
alternate history. The reporter Silvia Godoy interprets her own newscast 
switching from English to Spanish in an act that Brasilian writer Oswald De 
Andrade calls Antropofagia, she simultaneously consumes or eats her own words.

The Female Report/ El Reporte Femenil challenges or relocates the official 
feminist history ( one that is usually centered on the history makers from 
Europe and the US) by offering the names of key women in Latin American 
revolutions, art, and literature.

The Female Report/El Reporte Femenil  https://vimeo.com/41060029  “




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Christina McPhee
naxsm...@mac.com

http://christinamcphee.net






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[-empyre-] Coda: Annina Ruest

[christ...@christinamcphee.net]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Annina Ruest: favorite quote


"In 2013, I exhibited the first version of my project “A Piece of the Pie 
Chart” [1 a, b, c, etc.]. It’s a feminist food robot that visualizes the gender 
gap in art and tech workplaces on edible pies. Inspired by industrial 
production lines, the gallery installation consists of a computer workstation 
and a food robot. The food robot puts pie charts depicting the gender gap in 
ratio form onto edible, pre-baked pies. The data changes depending on where the 
project is exhibited. Visitors use the robot to create pies using an 
automatized assembly line. As part of the process, pictures of the pies are 
automatically disseminated via Twitter. Visitors can then take the pies to 
their own workplace to start a discussion with colleagues or mail the pies to 
the workplaces where the data originated to remind those in charge how 
large/small the slice of the art and tech pies women can claim for themselves.

In “A Piece of the Pie Chart”, I am combining visualization of gender data 
stemming from art and tech workplaces with action. Mapping gender data onto 
edible pies adds material representation to gender statistics. The pies are a 
multisensory symbol explaining how women fare in art and tech. They show that 
women receive a small share of what this kind of work has to offer. This data 
mapping style adds urgency to the feminist cause: It is not a data 
visualization to be passively consumed. What comes out of the machine is an 
object along with instructions to mail it to the place where the data 
originated. It asks people to take action and gives them directions for mailing 
or tweeting the pies.

To those receiving the pie tweets, it might not be obvious that the pies are 
decorated by a robot. But the robotic part is important. The robot performs for 
the audience in the exhibition. The project is inspired by by the data 
visualization language of the feminist protest movement in art. It is a 
visualization style that actively and overtly seeks social justice for women 
(artists). This visualization work often uses performance, humor, and 
collaboration as a strategy to get a point across in a disarming but 
nonetheless insistent way. This includes a critical relationship to 
quantitative data and data visualization itself. Some examples for this 
feminist visualization style are the Gallery Tally Project (directed by Micol 
Hebron) [2], the work of the Guerilla Girls [3], and the work of the Los 
Angeles Council of Women Artists and affiliated groups who were protesting 
LACMA in the 1970s [4]. and 1980s [5] with data and visualization and are still 
collecting data today. Some of these groups work within the art system. But 
they may also just show up uninvited to create visualizations. A recent example 
for this is the “Where is Ana Mendieta?” protest at the Tate [6].


[1a] This is a video of the first iteration of A Piece of the Pie Chart using 
low-cost toy robotics:  https://vimeo.com/79534316


[1b] This is a video the second iteration as it was exhibited at the Art+Tech 
lab at LACMA in 2015:  https://vimeo.com/129279879


[1c] To give exhibition visitors a chance to draw not just pre-curated gender 
data onto pies, I created a robot in 2015 that draws pie charts directly onto a 
pie using edible marker on rice paper  https://vimeo.com/121100639 .  I 
exhibited it at Haus der Elektronischen Künste (Basel) in the context of 
Critical Make, a critical Maker Faire. I was there for about a week asking 
people what kinds of data they would like to have visualized on a pie and 
encouraging them to take the pies to their workplaces to discuss economic 
inequality.

[1d] I also built an interactive website called “A Piece of (In)equality”  
http://www.anninaruest.com/pieceofinequality/  that helps me collect data and 
visualize it on pies.

[1e] Together with the awesome Micol Hebron, I organized a feminist data 
collect-a-thon at LACMA in 2015. Participants brought their own data, but we 
also worked with data from the LACMA collection. 

[1f] And last but not least, I wrote about my project in the context of data 
visualization: Data as Feminist Protest (2014)  
http://unframed.lacma.org//2014/07/10/data-as-feminist-protest  
 And feminist data visualization and robotics:  
http://anninaruest.com/papers/SiggraphPaper1.pdf
 
[2]  
http://gallerytally.tumblr.com/

[3]  
http://www.guerrillagirls.com

[4]  
http://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/archives/i143/

[5]  
http://bit.ly/29JAqLw

[6] 
http://www.huckmagazine.com/perspectives/reportage-2/ana-tate/  "



—— 


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--
Christina McPhee
v/t (01) 8058780301
http://christinamcphee.net

insta: naxqqsmash




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[-empyre-] Coda: Erin McElroy

[christ...@christinamcphee.net]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Erin McElroy: favorite quote


"Admittedly, when I co-launched the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) in 
2013, http://www.antievictiomap.com , I was far 
from versed on conversations around data visualization and critical 
cartography. Although I was trained in visual arts and anthropology, I 
approached the project as what I thought would be a temporary activist mapping 
piece aimed to amplify organizing around Bay Area gentrification. I had little 
foresight that the project would grow as it has, or that my approach to 
feminist data visualization would emerge through my situatedness in the 
project. Though of course there are always other inspirations and ghosts that 
accompany us, that diffract us perhaps.

The AEMP began as what I had thought was a simple enough idea of mapping Bay 
Area displacement amplified through and by the Tech Boom. Our first map, 
www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html 
, visualized the 
accumulation of Ellis Act evictions in San Francisco – the Ellis Act being one 
of the most notorious eviction technologies of real estate speculators in 
California rent-controlled cities. In San Francisco, they blossomed during the 
first Dot Com boom, and then again during the Tech Boom 2.0. On one hand, 
crudely, the creation of this map (and the project as a whole), offered the 
challenge of using digital technology to critique particular materializations 
of a digital technology boom. While purity has never been an aspiration of the 
project, and as I value our increasingly hybrid existence, the situatedness of 
the project as both technological and yet critical of capitalist tech economies 
has invoked numerous questions around techno-utopics/dystopics, Silicon Valley 
histories, and racial capitalism and the politics of space. 

On the other hand, the creation of the Ellis Act map posed a simple but 
nevertheless troubling problem of visually/digitally materializing loss. I 
remember being younger and mystified that the stars in the sky may no longer be 
there anymore, perhaps collapsed into a black hole, perhaps not, yet we still 
see the light speed illumination of their past. Evictions are not black holes, 
but I often think of my childhood disbelief when I think of how to visualize 
what may or may not materially remain. Additionally, to invoke some of the 
earlier ideas on this thread such as data visualization as conduit and material 
(to conjure Erin Leland’s work for instance, or Lee Mackinnon’s thoughts on 
Barad and the ontology of objects), something new coalesces through the 
visualization itself. And the substance of this materialization provides new 
fodder for thought as well.

Recently the AEMP made another map of displacement, this time visualizing 
relocation data: http://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/relocation.html 
. Of the 500 
evictions and subsequent relocations that we were able to map, 14 people ended 
up homeless, and 2 people ended up deceased. Where on the map do you place the 
relocation marker of someone no longer here, or of someone without markable 
residency? Maybe a map in insufficient and visualization is impossible. And yet 
as visual objects, our maps mobilize a form of political consciousness, one 
that many of our partner organizations and activist projects find useful. As 
digital cartographic objects, again to invoke Barad, they become agential in a 
collective movement for housing justice.

As I think these questions of data visualization and critical cartography 
through other scholars of feminist studies, critical race and ethnicity 
studies, and indigenous studies, I am admittedly always somewhat ambivalent 
about the object of the map at all. I think of Audra Simpson’s move from 
“ethnography of refusal” to “cartography of refusal” (2014) and Elizabeth 
Povinelli’s work on “the cunning of recognition” (2002), and recognize 
recognition as an instigator of settlement.”



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---
Christina McPhee

http://christinamcphee.net

insta: naxqqsmash




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[-empyre-] Coda: Lee Mackinnon

[christ...@christinamcphee.net]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Lee Mackinnon: favorite quote 

“It is interesting to consider representation as privileging the semiotic- but 
it is also useful to consider that the semiotic is a means of expressing 
thought, action and presence that begins with the body, even as perhaps, moves 
us toward more extreme forms of abstraction. And that even these forms of 
abstraction are increasingly relevant to the realm of digital materiality that 
now constitutes our everyday lives. for example, here we are, in this 
discussion, reliant on invisible systems of abstraction such as quantum 
mechanics and binary code that facilitate this conversation about bodies. This 
network/ discussion is no less reliant upon our bodies than the thought that 
can be abstracted into it! While human thought systems and the database can be 
distinguished by qualitative differences (as Hayles puts it, human thought 
systems have been developed through narrative that is not possible for 
databases), they are co-collaborators in constructing meaning here.

It is interesting to consider that computers were once human groups of 
calculators (very often women, as it was considered basic, manual labour), and 
that the digital refers to fingers used to perform calculation (why we also 
have a decimal system: 10 fingers, even though it is not necessarily the most 
effective number base for mathematics)... I might contest the idea that what 
happens in the mind or in semiotic application (whether in mathematics or 
language) could be distinguished from somatic experience. I think this is 
erroneous and disingenuous considering the context of this discussion! 

Kay O' Halloran (2009) notes that, 'The semiotic construal of thought in 
written form permitted the study of ideas and the hierarchical development of 
knowledge'. It is the hierarchical development of knowledge that has been 
problematic rather than semiotic forms per se, which are extremely effective, 
complex, and even beautiful.

For me, a feminist data visualisation is one that begins to first unearth and 
re-navigate assumed meanings- an exploration of technics that always begins and 
ends with the bodies whose presence has been overwritten, or written out of 
these hierarchies of knowledge, or forms of production.” 




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Christina McPhee


http://christinamcphee.net

insta: naxqqsmash




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