November 22, 2009 at 12:34 pm · Filed under Events, Thoughts
PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN FROM MY PHONE
After spending a good deal of Friday participation in protests at UC Berkeley I wrote the following letter to contribute to the conversation on viral networks happening on the -empyre- list this month. I wrote this letter soon after Friday’s events without much time for reflection. It has since become clear in comparing stories with friends and reviewing video footage of the event that we can always continue to strengthen networks. Where the networks felt strong on Friday there were other places where those networks were weakened by police brutality and a lack of communication between University Administration, law enforcement officials, faculty, and students. I hope to hold onto my words below and my immediate feelings of strength in community as we continue to think about potential weakness in and between certain networks and how to strengthen forces.
Letter written at 10:30am on Saturday, November 21, 2009:
Good morning from Berkeley,
I wasn’t participating in yesterday’s discussion about viral networks/UC protests because I was standing in the rain with close to 2,000 Berkeley protesters while we waited outside of Wheeler Hall as friends and colleagues occupied the building. So, please forgive me if I am returning to an already closed conversation, but allow me to indulge in a reflection on yesterday’s successful and widespread strike activities.
At Berkeley there are four groups representing different populations of the campus. As far as I know, there are two faculty groups, one graduate student group and one undergraduate group. With representatives from each group serving on all other committees, these four groups are in close communication and have used what is being referred to here as “grassroots” activism to successfully hold a 5,000 person walk-out in September, several events in October and a three day strike this week. Starting from the four groups email is used to communicate with departmental representatives who then communicate with departments. Whether organization is departmental, building wide, or committee based, the word hasn’t stopped there.
The fact that the students involved in yesterday’s building occupation were communicating with fellow organizers and activists via email, twitter and facebook seems significant. Of course there are debates regarding whether or not viral networks and online activism have replaced the need for physical protest. It is, after all, easier to sign an online petition (of which there have been many connected to the UC Strikes) than it is steer clear of office resources for three days, or stand in the rain for hours on end. I am sure that we are all well aware of examples supporting both sides of that argument. Still, twitter and facebook updates kept a good deal of protesters mobilized yesterday. Consistent updates from the inside of Wheeler assured a wet crowd that their support was indeed necessary, building occupiers’ view from the top floors of Wheeler Hall were shared through twitter accounts to help students spread evenly around the building to block police movement, and facebook updates alerted crowds immediately when arrests were taking place and how to best continue supporting the occupation efforts.
Just like anything else it seems that they way a viral network is organized and implemented corresponds directly to its efficacy. I think here of artist
Zach Blas’ proposed GRID project. The movement from one GRID to the next produces new GRIDs. It is the movement between networks that produces the change. It seems that in the case of the UC protests the efficacy of the system depends on successful movements between different networks. It is the movements between online networks such as email lists to online petitions, between different physical networks such as departmental meetings to banners hanging outside of buildings, and between online and physical networks such as buildings occupiers to their twitter followers. This is what has felt like the viral aspect of the system.
In solidarity,
Ashley
May 25, 2009 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Artworks, Events, Link
I’m beginning to think in choreographic experiences again. Journaling and allowing my experiences to materializes in creative impulse. I’m currently trying to decide whether or not I want to use interactive technologies like wearable sensors in my composition, which I will show at Oakland’s The Milk Bar this August 14th. I am thinking of using this composition to explore interaction that is virtual in the physical sense of the word. Friends recently made a video that deals with analogue/digital conversion, the physical choreography that comes with drawing, and mechanical construction as performance. I think I am going to “interact” with these different artistic processes. I have gained so much inspiration from learning how to program. I am interested in how much of this has to do with the technical aspects of live interaction, and how much with having the opportunity to exercise my intellectual/creative abilities in new and interdisciplinary ways. Nonetheless, I will also continue learning more about microcontrollers this summer. I’ll be learning how to use the Arduino Lilypad, a textile based microcontroller and will continue exploring Jitter!
April 10, 2009 at 1:28 pm · Filed under Link, Theory, Thoughts
I have been thinking a lot lately about archiving digital artwork and why we could have an interest in obsolescence, failure and frustration. Also, how do we differentiate between what is new and trendy and what is valuable theoretical example.
A conversation with an architect friend of mine drew me to question dance notation in a very practical way. As she designs a performance space (a hypothetical performance space), she wonders how dancers write their work. Or, do they? She shares her architectural diagrams with me and we think about how she documents architectural movements in space. Can she animate her structure? Or, is it a static picture of potential movement.
With this in mind, I come to consider Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual. He talks about movement, virtuality and affect in space and time. He draws upon Spinoza, Deleuze and Bergson. Massumi introduces his book by talking about thinking the body and understanding how this thoughts interacts with his ideas about movement and culture. Is movement possible? Or, is movement, rather, an in-between space. Our movements are mapped by static positions that we only move between. From a dance perspective, I would clearly disagree. We aren’t only moving between static places. We are moving spaces. Of course Massumi’s argument is more complicated than this and in a way can not even be summarized or quoted. Massumi says himself that his text is comprised of many terms that come in and out to work with and challenge each other. The argument itself is a choreography and the circularity makes it resistant to summation or quotation without decontextualization. Massumi doesn’t move from one static point to another in his text. Rather, he embodies what moving spaces as opposed to moving between places would be.
This makes me question any time of static dance notation or mapping. I recognize that scholars have questioned this very notion of notation for decades, but I think we are in a new age where the questions reemerge with contemporary examples…just like Massumi uses pre articulated theories and explains through his book how new media examples further enlighten pre articulated theories. The recent launch of Synchronous Objects is a great place to question new media examples of dance notation. The Synchronous Objects team doesn’t claim that their project notates every aspect of a dance. They also recognize how this is one way to explore a dance experience. Revealing how different camera angles along uncover different interpretations of what a live dance experience was, the project accounts for several modes and forms of documentation in a digital age. I must admit that I was initially incredibly resistant to this project. I had several questions about what the site could actually give a viewer and how the site ignored a lot of different qualities that a dance could potentially exhibit.
These questions, I realized, were hypocritical. Just like I think that exploring digital virtuality is just one way that we can experience and explore the body in contemporary space and time, this project attempts to do similar things. I would call Synchronous Objects a choreographic project in its own right as opposed to a notation project. Each time I experience One Flat Thing Revisited with a different feature of the Synchronous Objects site the project becomes something new. One thing that I am particularly interested in, for example, are the different digital visualizers.
I was recently asked how working with live interactive performance technologies was aesthetically interesting. This question was followed with an inquiry about what we actually get from the visualizations that come from the interaction. Can we really see what the dance is from the visualization? This, though, isn’t the point. The point for me has to do with what we can’t see from this visualization. How does it not work? Dance is ephemeral. This we know. Digital technologies, too, are quite ephemeral. Digital visualizations of dance are merely new ways to explore and inspire spatio-temporal exercises.
Once I approached Synchronous Objects from this standpoint the project came alive for me. What I find interesting about Massumi’s project is that he takes spatio-temporal exercises from a time before the developed digital virtualities that we have today and engages them with new media examples. We can use projects like Massumi’s to begin to realize how physical and digital virtualities can exist together and enable each other. They aren’t necessarily dichotomous and they aren’t necessarily complimentary. Rather, they are two qualities that exist in our contemporary reality. As artists, we explore these situations.
April 4, 2009 at 2:17 pm · Filed under Events, Link, Theory
I will be leading this week’s New Media Working Group! Check out the invite/description below and share your thoughts! Join us if you’re in the area.
The New Media Working Group will hold its next meeting on Thursday, April 9, from 2:30-3:30 pm in the Berkeley Center for New Media Commons (340 Moffit). Please join us to discuss Brian Massumi’s latest book, Parables for the Virtual, where he considers virtuality as it relates to movement. Paying particular attention to “The Bleed: Where Body Meets Image” and Massumi’s description of virtual affect in relation to Ronald Reagan’s account of watching himself move on television, we will discuss virtualities of movement.
Copies of the reading are available at
http://nmwg.notlong.com/
Photographs courtesy of Daniel Bruggemeyer