12.Jan.2010 social cost tracker research survey
please take my quick survey. Link here: Click here to take survey
18.Nov.2009 November 18th resistance to fee hikes
in protest of 32% fee hike and cuts to services and staff
27.Oct.2009 Turning the Tables take 2
Updated version of “Turning the Tables,” an installation based performance object by Lyes Belhocine and myself, at The Art of Collaboration Symposium, 10/21 and 10/22.
DESCRIPTION OF WORK
Turning the Tables begins with the premise that the production and reception of digital media is always profoundly reliant on our analog experiences of being in our bodies. Phonographs and bicycle parts, the building blocks of this sculptural collaboration, are analog technologies that our bodies have come to understand at a muscular level: 33 and 1/3 rpms is a rotational cadence inscribed into the very fiber of a DeeJay’s body. Most body types reach maximal efficiency on a bicycle at a cadence of two rotations per second. This has necessarily meant that the human organism has reshaped itself around and through these technologies. Turning the Tables invites viewer participants to cooperate and explore unusual junctures of the analog and the digital in an attempt to ask how the human organism will be reshaped by the technologies and interfaces that we construct today.
stories about working
SEEKING YOUR HELP (again): this time what I need is for you to scour your memory of experiences at work. I need your stories of your body at work. Service work is probably most applicable here. Remember all those people who you were trying to be polite to, but just didn’t fucking get it? That guy who wanted a different fork because it touched your arm? Or the lady who was freaked out about the *possibility* that the vegetables you’re selling might have been touched by a mexican? Send me brief synopsis: I’ll contact you for an interview. Results to be included (annonymously, if you like) in a website and iphone app about the history of products….
14.Oct.2009 a modest proposal
a little tri-fold pamphlet that Chris Chitty and I put together for the faculty/student walkout… it’s hard to read when it isn’t printed out and folded, which is why I hesitated to post it sooner… thousands of copies went out in advance of the walkout. Got a lot of laughs and a good number of angry rebukes…
08.Oct.2009 UC President Mark Yudof: Plutocrat, Fat Cat…
07.Oct.2009 notes on “Situated Advocacy”
As the continuation of an online dialog in 2006, the Architectural League of New York published a series of pamphlets that explore the ramifications of pervasive computing on advocacy, activism and socialities. #3 in the series, titled “Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces,” is a conversation between Benjamin Bratton and Natalie Jermijenko. Find the whole series of pamphlets as pdfs at www.situatedtechnologies.net .
In discussing the emergence of ‘data visualization’ as the dominant mode of ‘pervasive computing’ (in 2006), Bratton claims that, “In fact, parameters of facticity are further mystified by the visualization. Part of the progressive narrative for pervasive computation and ecological governance is of a world in which every square inch is in some way constantly outpouring infinitely communicable information about itself, and that this would overwhelm inherited layers of expert systems—certain people in certain circumstances that collect data from certain instrumental means—enabling the world to declare itself as a functionally open “data continent.” From this new basic infrastructure a new kind of political institutionality could emerge.” (12)
Jermijenko’s response is centered around her sense that the intent of these types of visualization strategies take as their unspoken aim the representation of the unrepresentable, or, in her words, “sensors (0n experimental trees) mak(e) explicit some of the environmental variables to which they are exposed, we would therefore somehow be able to make better sense of those trees” (12). Both scholars are on point here, but in focusing on the role of data visualization per se they may be missing their most damning critique. That is, it is true, as Bratton and Jermijenko go on to say, that the tree really doesn’t need sensors and graphic renderings of data to tell it’s story, in order that trees might participate in the political economy: trees are “active dynamical systems, and they do have these very visible growth responses” (14). Yet the notion of providing a voice for the voiceless goes much further into the problematic ideology of “advocacy” than it’s current incarnation through glossy data visualizations: indeed, the very notion of an “advocate” is that there is a subject who is permitted to speak (to power) on behalf of a non-subject (either an object–as in an object of the court, or an objective fact of science–or a subject that has lost his/her right to self-representation. Interestingly, it is questions of representation and the shifting terrain of power dynamics that are at the center of this debate about the prevalence of certain kinds of representational strategies. The question can usefully be widened: who is allowed to speak for whom? Is representation an adequate response to a data-intensive world? Mightn’t data visualization be but the death throes of the rotting system of representationalism that stifles our endeavors from the political realm to the scientific to the arts and back again? Who is a “documentary film maker” in the era of youtube? Who isn’t an electronic engineer with a $50 arduino? Do we need animal rights activists to tell us that slaughtering whales is a bad idea? No. We need a completely different set of power relations: one without power.
Jermijenko and Bratton rightly question the ethical viability of artists and designers acting as advocates for ecosystems: the very notion effaces the ecosystem’s inherent agency. This suggests to me that if the tools of pervasive computing are to be useful in constructing a world worth living in, it will not be in their facility to tell the story of an (constructed) object to an (imagined) public: rather, it must be in their capacity to shift the ground of activity amongst specific publics.
06.Oct.2009 Bicalogues: The Bicycle as Communication Technology (DANM MFA Thesis Proposal, take 3)
Kyle McKinley
DANM MFA Thesis Proposal
October 14th, 2009
Bicalogues:
The Bicycle as Communication Technology
Bicalogues will be an installation based video-art project that attempts to reproduce for viewer-participants the experience of having a conversation while on a bicycle ride. In doing so the project addresses a number of questions regarding the role of bicycles in social and ecological movements, as well as to postulate radically subjective relationships between the body-in-motion, critical thought and the lived environment. Finally, by constructing a unique format for the recording and playback of bicycle-borne dialog, the project aims to develop a new genre in the hopes that many more people might record and share their experiences of riding bicycles.
Bicalogues takes as its starting point the feeling of blood pumping in one’s head. Riding up a hill or trying to keep up with a friend, the cyclist experiences a strange mixture of being attuned to her body and the mental clarity associated with so much oxygen reaching the brain. The myth of a mind/body split melts away as the mind reaps fuller benefit of being in the body. Similarly, distinctions between place and space–between, that is, discrete locations and territorialized geography–dissolve as the cyclist begins to feel all the land forms that surround her as a continuum of intimately related undulating moments. These moments–the narrative associations laid onto places while traveling through them–become part of the geography itself through the telling and retelling of stories. “This was the site of an 18th century spanish presidio,” and “this is where I crashed and broke my collarbone,” become indelibly etched onto the landscape. Bicilogues records such stories, which take the form of dialogs between cyclists, and asks whether these stories can be meaningfully re-told in the distant space of the art gallery.
The dialogs, interviews and narratives that unfurl when two people take a bike ride together are recorded using Point-Of-View digital video cameras and bluetooth enabled microphones. This footage, minimally edited, is made available to specific publics in a variety of ways. In a gallery setting viewer-participants are invited to mount stationary bikes that control the playback rate of the interview footage; just as two cyclists on the road must cooperate to match one-another’s pace to have conversations, gallery participants are pushed to cooperate if they wish the interviews to be intelligible. The same playback mechanism will also be employed in one-night exhibitions of the work at community bicycle shops, opening up questions of how the project will be received by different audiences. Bicilogues can also be loaded onto iphones/ipods where it is complemented by GPS mapping of the route the original riders took, thus inviting individuals to listen to the interviews while traveling through the places that the narratives refer to.
The stakes of Bicalogues are as distinct as the topics of the different narratives it seeks to record, and as diverse as the various audiences it seeks to engage. Shown in an art gallery, Bicalogues appears within the context of “locative media” works which seek to activate and politicize lived environments by engaging in strategies common to “pervasive computing.” Shown in community bicycle projects, Bicalogues engages with narratives that are no doubt commonplace to these cycling communities, but also seeks to provide a format whereby cycling can convey sets of meaning that undercut the tendency to reduce the bicycle to either a commodity or a hyper-masculinized sport. Those who listen to Bicalogues while retracing the path that the dialog took are best equipped to re-interpret any claims made in the interviews while adding the narratives they hear to the palimpsest through which one experiences geography. In any venue in which Bicalogues appears the tension between how our minds “think” about a place and how our bodies move through a space will be foregrounded: watching how different folks negotiate that tension is a central interest of mine.
Motivations
A dear friend of mine often notes to me her frustration with the state of bicycle culture. As she sees it, many people who are nominally interested in bikes miss out on most everything that is wonderful about the machine. Sometimes this takes the form of an obsession with cycling as a “sport,” wherein the rider is so focused on his/her physical performance that (s)he fails to take note of the places that (s)he travels through. At other times, and increasingly in recent years, the obsession is with the bicycle itself as a hyper-fetishized commodity; in those instances, the experience of riding is entirely secondary to the cultivation of the bicycle as an art-object.
My friend’s perspective is that if she could only convey to folks how terrific it is to traverse the same landscapes week after week, through changing seasons and shifting political climates, then people would not only change their relationship to transportation, but transform their relationships to geography. Winning individuals over to this way of thinking about cycling is rewarding in its own right: the conversations I have with friends as they begin to radically reshape their conception of their lived environment—and watch as the region that constitutes the lived environment grows (as he or she becomes a stronger cyclist, with ever greater range)–are invaluable to me.
But there must be a way to communicate these experiences more broadly.
And there must be a way to etch these experiences onto the landscapes that, by passing through them, under the influence of oxygen and endorphins, we come to know and care about.
Bicalogues, in its current manifestation, is merely a preliminary foray into critical spatial practices that take the bicycle as their organizing principle and primary site of implementation.
Glossary of Terms
bicycle culture: the faintest glimmerings of an emergent conversation that promises to wipe the slate clean of the sad sack of shit that has so far passed as “bicycle culture.” Previously oriented by a shared fascination with the set of technics that are find commodity form as “the bicycle,” bicycle culture is dually cursed by the afflictions of being simultaneously whiny and macho. Bicycle culture has thus far constructed itself as a sub-altern or subcultural milieu that is oppressed by (dominant) car culture. The attempt here is to begin to envision what a vibrant bicycle culture—one that emphasizes the social and ontological experiences endemic of the bicycle–might look like, and what sorts of collective power it might be able to mobilize. This vision of bicycle culture is deeply indebted to the legacy of Critical Mass, even as it recognizes that critical mass type activity has, in recent years, become subject to the same sets of unfortunate tendencies that plague mainstream bicycling.
commodity: an abstraction of a concrete material manifestation into quantitative evaluation in terms of exchange value. Simultaneously the disguising of social and historical processes as simply an object and the naturalization of this process.
community: possibly the most frequently misapplied term in America, “community” is most often deployed to describe diverse groups of individuals that coalesce around a set of commodity forms (“the cycling community,” “the Apple Macintosh community,” “the conceptual Art community”) or a set of identifications (“the queer community,” “the Latino community,” etc.). Following Agamben, and, more recently, Irit Rogoff, every attempt will be made here to shift from identitarian conceptions of communities to ontological conceptions of communities in which affinity is expressed and produced in relation to a shared set of desires with in a particular and contingent history (“a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence” –Agamben 1993).
critical spatial practice: activities that employ the geographer’s toolbox, the conceptual artist’s sensibilities and will to radical social transformation. An intersection for the diverse trajectories that once might have fallen under the aegis “pro-Situationist.”
dialogue: the spaces between things. A methodology for substantive encounter with difference (logos in translation), but also, and inseparably, the concrete process through which individual agents engage in subjectification. The nexus of social change and the basis of love.
hyper-masculinity: systems of representation that emerged in late capitalist cultural production whereby strategies of patriarchy have been reified to such an extent as to appear as a coherent or positive identity.
locative media: sets of communication technology deployed in the investigation of place. Despite the current art-world fascination with “locative media” (a fascination which tends to trivialize and periodize strategies and tendencies), such techniques offer the promise of a sustained and indelible engagement with places in which viewer/participants can both learn about sites and articulate their own connections to places. Though the term generally implies the incorporation of technologically innovative solutions–such as GPS and PDAs–to investigation of place, my use of “locative media” focuses more on the social relations produced by participatory investigation than the fetishization of a particular set of technologies.
narrative: the (re)construction of events with the purpose of generating affect in a particular audience. Furthermore, the basis of the symbolic and imaginary processes through which the subject comes to believe that (s)he knows herself.
pervasive computing: the ubiquity of small, relatively inexpensive micro-processors has resulted in the last fifteen years in numerous techno-utopian visions of a world in which information processing is spread across the panoply of mundane activities and objects. Though such visions largely represent the conscious and unconscious fantasies of the emergent class of engineer-gurus (and the multinational corporate interests from which they are insuperable) there are distinctive elements in the notion of distributed information processing that may, yet, radically transform human social relations. Also often referred to as “ubiquitous computing,” “the internet of things,” or “everyware.”
radical subjectivity: Klamath and Modoc peoples of the southern Cascades frequently describe their struggle to regain control over the Klamath river watershed as a direct consequence of the fact of receiving their daily food and water from the river. How many people in the suburbs might dedicate their lives to the protection of the supermarket or sewage system from which they receive their daily food and water? “Radical subjectivity,” in this context, is more concerned with such connections to place and space, and the articulation of those connections, than with access to revolutionary desire in the abstract (in the pro-Situationist tradition).
space vs. place: Following Lefebvre, I am using the term space to denote area that is conceived of as material, measurable, objective, Euclidian, and empty. Place, by contrast, is characterized in this regime as mental, imagined, immaterial, a priori, and meaningful. In Lefebvre, and for many humanist geographers, this forms a sort of dialectic in which space and place appear as the two terms. But Lefebvre, a consummate Marxist, also accounts for the role of human/social agency. To that end, a sort of praxis of space appears in Lefebvre’s Production of Space, which he calls “lived spaces of representation” (pg#?), or what geographer Edward Soja has termed “Thirdspace” in the book of the same name. Soja’s notion of “Thirdspace,” borrowing heavily on Lefebvre’s theory of a space-as-container that contains gives voice to the lives of subjects, proves useful in his analysis of the theoretical works of bell hooks, Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha, Cornel West, and others. Thirdspace, then, is a way of talking about practices that encounter locations simultaneously as sites of meaning and, following Lefebvre, in their spatial ability to change as subjects of historical processes.
29.Sep.2009 Occupation at UCSC
On September 24th, some dear friends and comrades of mine decided that they’d had enough with forming permeable picket lines at the entrance to the UC, and enough with signing petitions to stop funding cuts, and began to demonstrate who the university is made of.
They took over a building in the center of campus and set to work building a social movement that might actually be able to fight back against the privatization of the UC, the end of public California, and the death throes of global capitalism.
What is particularly inspiring to me about this action is that it wasn’t about shutting down a high profile building. It didn’t prevent students from going to class, it barely inconvenienced anyone (despite howls of protest from the half-dozen Econ PhD candidates who normally play nintendo in the glorified lounge they call a ‘Graduate Student Commons’). But it showed what an occupation can look like: dance parties, teach-ins, thousands of interesting conversations in a highly politicized space in the center of a radically (and intentionally) decentralized campus. This puts “occupation” back on the menu of anyone who wants to demonstrate to the UC that their schools aren’t made up of budgets and the hallow shells of half-finished buildings. These schools are made up of students, workers, educators. These schools are made up of people. People occupy space–that’s what we do. Occupy everything.
supporting the occupation of buildings at UCSC
and a statement of purpose
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