Moving house
this blog has moved: find me here
Better late than never – My Sydney Biennale top ten-ish.
1. John Bock Fischgratenmelkstand kippt ins Hohlengleichnis Refugium (2008)
The restraint of the contrivance. On my first visit, a man beside me got extremely agitated and started shouting at the screen, swearing in German, “it is all nonsense”.
2. Mikala Dwyer An Apparition of a Subtraction (2010)
Exquisite secrets told through the sound of labour and the silence of a circle. A rehabilitation of the space of an island that conflates affective histories.
3. Salla Tykka Victoria (2008) Airs Above The Ground (2010)
Beauty is gathered and controlled and managed, but only when we are looking, and only sustained for a temporary moment. Gravity and death become forces of containment.
4. Fiona Pardington Ahua: A Beautiful Hesitation (2010)
A breath of time captured.
5. Slave Pianos Penalogical Pianology: The Timbers of Justice (2010)
The body of the king has been threatened and must be publicly punished. An alternative violence to the penal colony, only the most visible and most exuberant execution at the scaffold will pay the debt.
6. Shen Shaomin Bonsai (2007-2009)
Nature removed from its mandate to the sublime. Domesticated, and contrived, a different kind of body is formed.
7. Folkert de Jong The Balance (2010)
A cybernetic system, of commerce, where the bodies that form the transaction cut slices off themselves in order to continue playing the game.
8. Jake and Dinos Chapman Shitrospective (2009)
Beauty formed from the absurd (and a fair amount of cardboard).
9. Rodney Graham City Self/ Country Self (2000)
A moment frozen in time caused by the syncopation of the footsteps, the hoof-steps and the anticipation of repetition. Noone can escape the confines of the loop.
10. AES +F The Feast of Trimalchio (2009)
The hybrid worlds of the Gods are all about control and contrivance. The Wagnerian opulence supposedly transports but somehow remains a pseudo-affect echoed in our bodies that attempt to gather the whole of the image.
11. Adel Abidin Green Mouse (2008)
Abject horror made worse by the need to clean up.
12. Daniel Crooks Static no. 12 (seek stillness in movement) (2009-2010)
Opening up spaces for other ways of being. The video becomes an illustration of motion, rather than a transportation.
13. Isaac Julian Ten Thousand Waves (2010)
I remain unconvinced by Orientalism.
14. Kutlug Ataman Journey to the Moon (2009)
The intensity of documentary fiction revealed through authoritative truth.
15. Yvonne Todd
Disquiet of the image matching the location.
16. Miguel Angel Rios Crudo (2008)
Interesting to see this again after the DPAG installation. The inhabitation of the circular space shifts the power relation more to the dogs. In the restraint of the gallery the dancer was dominant.
17. Louise Bourgeios Echo (2007)
Echos of bodies – doing the same as Daniel Crooks but the frozen space becomes more powerful. The sculptures hold time.
Week of the seminars
This week I’m giving two public seminars in Dunedin. (Thankfully on related themes!).
On Thursday I’m talking at the Dunedin School of Art on Erewhon: Nowhere. This is a new working through of research I have been doing over the past three years into the different ways that Erewhon (in mid-Canterbury and home to Samual Butler’s dystopic fable of machinic control) has been framed by contemporary artists including Jane and Mary Louise Wilson, Aaron and Hannah Beehre, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. I connect their various journeys and interpretations with Pierre Huyghe’s “The Journey That Wasn’t”: a journey undertaken by a group of European artists to discover an albino penguin on an unmarked island in Antarctica. I’m interested in continuing to think through what it means to travel to an elsewhere space, and what kinds of expectations still inform our understandings of the kinds of ecological intensities that Butler described over 150 years ago.
Su_Ballard_seminar
On Sunday I’m giving a lecture at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery to celebrate the final day of the CaoFei: Utopia. exhibition. My lecture “Communism is our Utopia: Traces of the Past in Utopian Futures” will contextualise Cao Fei’s work in the ongoing tradition of art’s engagements with utopia. I have rather over ambitious plans for this. Departing from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights the talk examines the ecological, economic, political, and technological history of utopian dreams. The paper continues via a series of Deluzian platforms that operate as a visual accumulation of speculative visual data. This is the last day of the exhibition. Cao Fei: Utopia is a joint project by ARTSPACE Auckland and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
junctures unseen – call
I have recently taken over as the editor of Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue
http://www.junctures.org
The new call for papers is out now:
Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue.
call for papers: “Unseen”
Art and science are both problem-solving activities. The kinds of problems and their potential answers spread far beyond what may appear to be logical disciplinary divisions. This issue of Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue (the first under the new editorship of Susan Ballard) will focus on the simultaneous disjunction and resonance of different ways of imagining, measuring, describing and knowing what might be unseen.
For this issue we seek empirical studies, practical descriptions, and theoretical fascinations that push these questions beyond those traditionally asked by art and science. Papers are invited that address aspects of what it means to see the unseen in an age when scale, time and measurement have become indeterminant, and bodies and spaces have entered the terrain of the virtual.
Full paper deadline: 30 June 2010.
The editor is happy to review drafts or abstract before this date. Recommended paper length 3000-5000 words. Shorter focus essays will also be considered. Please address all correspondence to junctures@tekotago.ac.nz or contact the editor on sballard@tekotago.ac.nz
About Junctures.
Junctures is a multidisciplinary academic journal founded by Otago Polytechnic te Kura Matatini ki Otago in 2003 as a forum for trans-disciplinary discussion, analysis, and critique. Junctures aims to engage discussion across boundaries, whether these be disciplinary, geographic, cultural, social or economic. It seeks to articulate issues of location, wonder, the marvellous, anxiety, ecology, materials, pixels, and the power of curiosity. With New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region as a backdrop, but not its only stage, Junctures seeks to address the matters which concern us all as we negotiate the contemporary environment. Junctures is fully blind peer-reviewed and is catalogued on Ulrich’s and EBSCO databases. Each issue of Junctures is organised around a single thematic focus. Full instructions on manuscript preparation are available in our online submissions section.
Access, grids, networks and diaspora
As part of the Electosmog Festival of Sustainable Immobility, http://www.electrosmogfestival.net/ Zita Joyce, James Charlton and I hosted a session on the New Zealand University’s Access Grid network. Access Grid is a multi screen video conferencing system, we had about 6 nodes and 9 screens (cameras) working and asked a group of people (scientists and social scientists, historians and artists) familiar with working through access grid and making use of the KAREN high speed network. We asked questions about the perfect network, the kinds of relationships that networks can enable but also the kinds of experiences that are determined by the networks. There was an interesting twist between the network as an enabler of knowledge and thought that would not have been made possible without the network. This work was often dependant on pre-existent personal networks, but that most importantly these sessions were dependant on a desire, or a willingness to collaborate. We discussed what it might mean to truely collaborate and the different methodologies necessary. The technology was not apparent as a kind of abstract logic as we listened to descriptions of projects with very real and physical aims and outcomes. I remain fascinated with the ability of technologies to determine different kinds of behaviours.
Central to my accessgrid experience was a sensation of disconnection because of the difficulty to make eye contact with anyone. The frontality of the multiple screens means that it is easier to focus forward onto the screen rather than towards the people at the same table. Also there is a spatiality that is controlled by the cameras themselves and the positioning of the screens. These things may seem minor events that over time as one gets used to the set up, one can look through. But I would argue that it is impossible to fully look past the technologies. We never stop inhabiting these systems. In line with the notions of immediacy and remediation described by Bolter and Grusin the technology continued to assert its own role within the room.
The session certainly bought up some important ideas regarding networked research, most importantly that it is based in real life exchange and must be supplimented by other kinds of interaction. Furthermore these real life exchanges do not always need to be in ‘real time’ and the distinction between a real time and a real life exchange was certainly bought to the fore for me.
I’m now listening to someone from Madrid present to the electrosmog festival through the live stream http://www.coolmediators.net/websites/electrosmoglive.jsp# and combined with my real life experiences today I’m starting to feel a part of this festival.
Interestingly, in our access grid session, we made a very real effort to work through and across all the screens. I am watching people in debalie talk about themselves in the real space and those in Madrid and New York inhabiting additional virtual spaces, there is a definite hierarchy to this in terms of location and the kinds of discussion that are occuring. People in Amsterdam are talking around their table. Our table did not allow this, which seems to be a good thing.
Also in our session there was an attempt to connect one network with another. Julian Priest was in Whanganui in an EVO room (something to do with a platapus) but unfortunately Accessgrid denied access, Lloyd (the OU technician) explained to me that to allow Julian’s presence would have slowed us all down and dragged us down to his speed. Julian succeeded at one level. The system was pressured and did not respond favourably. It seems that the network is open but only to a proliferation of its own style and kind of nodal way of working. One rhizome cannot easily interbreed with another.
Reading log: Education actualised
I’m working my way carefully through the most recent e-flux journal, (and wishing it was on paper and not the screen).
E-flux issue is here: http://e-flux.com/journal/issue/14
In the editorial the editors write:
“… at a time when even the status quo of many educational institutions is threatened by budget cuts, tuition hikes, and measures taken to standardize and regiment learning (see for instance the recent protests throughout the University of California system or the Bologna Process in general), and the art world increasingly seems to absorb an “educational turn” as a mannerist curiosity, it becomes all the more important to consider how forms of learning and exchange, of thinking and making, can take place within flexible, temporary, unstable configurations—which may or may not be educational or instructive—unrestricted by measurable outcomes or predetermined expectations.”
The Bologna Accord has had a huge impact on the way we do things at the Dunedin School of Art and in this issue of e-flux I’m finding a series of different voices, from Europe and North America, that grapple with what it means to work within models of standardised art education. And of course, how every day we subvert these with little actions, on the ground, in partnership with the students who will never be standardised. What would ‘unframed knowledge’ (as Irit Rogoff calls it ) look like? Is this a chance to move away from ‘outcomes’? I’m also thinking about this as I guide a small group of students towards a group exhibition, opening tomorrow night. Much of the knowledge gained is not outcomes based, nor even is it in the activity of installing a show, but in the observation of how things might be done and the openness to each other and the respect for each other’s practice that is necessary as the space of the exhibition is constructed somewhere between the works. It might not work, but that is as it should be.
Error on the way
Very happy today to receive confirmation that the manuscript of the Error book has been submitted to Continuum. Mark Nunes has done steller work getting this together, and I’m excited to be in such good company.
Continuum’s Description:
Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures
Divided into three sections, the collection brings together established critics and emerging voices in the field of media and cultural studies. In first section, “Glitches, Errors, and the Aesthetics of Noise,” the contributors explore the ways in which error and noise provide an opening for creative redirection. In Section Two: “Error and Noise in a Network Society,” they explore error as both intentional and accidental misdirection within the public sphere, with consequences that both reveal and challenge dominant social paradigms. Section Three, “Hacks and Jams” explores the intersection of the aesthetic and the social in modes of resistance to informatic control through both intentional and unintended misdirections of this cybernetic imperative.
Check out the announcement here:
http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=136643&SearchType=Basic
Publication date November 2010.
Listening Log: so how do you define noise?
Today Gilbert May gave a seminar at the Dunedin School of Art. Beginning from his title: “Noise Control and the Paraontologies of Capital” Gilbert detailed examples of how noise has been put out to play within a history of engagements with capital power. Drawing on analysis that engaged Attali, Verno and with a nod towards a Foucauldian dynamics of power Gilbert suggested that noise could not actually disrupt capitalist structures particularly within a post-Fordist economics of cultural exchange. There were some great moments as disturbance was revealed to be a counter to orderly communication and when we began to head towards the nineteenth century (pre-Futurist) definition of noise as a productive by-product of industrialisation. An analysis of Sony’s noise-cancelling headphones was dependant on this kind of understanding of the spatiality of sound but also the historical context of networked cultures. And here is where I think Gilbert and I begin to differ.
This is not the advert that was analysed but it begins to unpack some of my problems with this particular employment/ deployment of noise. (Let alone the rather exceptional gender identification here!)
Networked culture is the result of a complex of relations between producer and user where content has become a set of commodities separate to pre-existent structural forms. Furthermore the construction and use of the commodity are now so closely entwinned that a very different kind of labour relation is emerging. This is a field that I often approach with some uncertainty, but in this context the structures of digital work are crucial to the understanding of an environment where incremental changes can go viral overnight. Where, or what then is noise within this digital context – where everything is discretely packaged, and where continuity is redundant? I think that noise in digital contexts is still right where Claude Shannon put it. It is in two places. It is the very structures through which we communicate. It is there for the ‘listening.’ Errors happen, messages never get through, we talk past one another at the same time as talking to one another’s face, a piece of dust enters the system, a glitch becomes encoded, random intrusions from the street outside become the focus of our experience.
So my responses to Gilbert’s talk today:
1. Noise is not sound.
When Shannon constructed his models of information transmission they were that – models – not rules, and they were specific to the technical solutions of one way analogue communication. Within this model though, Shannon was at pains to describe all the different formations that noise could take. Both external and internal to the channel, noise could encompass anything from unexpected interruptions to events (mis)encoded within the channel. In Shannon’s definition noise is a modulation or a facilitator of communication. In this, noise is not a thing but a relationship. In Gilbert’s discussion noise was reified into a THING. This lead to the argument that a practice of noise can’t resist contemporary capitalism.
2. Noise is not volume.
My favourite noise is red noise, also known as random walk noise. It can be added to a space to make it quieter. Noise can get louder and quieter, it can get higher and lower in fidelity, but in itself it is very very different to volume. The same conflation happens with radio and sound. Radio is not sound or volume either. It is broadcast and on its waves sounds and noises travel.
3. Noise is not oppositional.
If noise is relational this means that it cannot be oppositional. Historically within Western musical discourse sound had been defined as what was heard and understood or deemed meaningful: it was signal. This meant that noise was not seen as a discrete signal nor even marked a disturbance to signal (as it does with Shannon) but was understood to be signal’s opposite – indiscrete and non-periodic. In 1929 composer Henry Cowell began to question this distinction and defined noise as something embedded within sound. Speaking in 1937 John Cage further introduced a consideration of noise back into the realm of sound and image, famously declaring that: “Wherever we are what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it we find it fascinating.” Cage defined noise as incidental, unheard, chance elements. In suggesting that we could listen to noise, Cage removed any meaningful opposition between noise and sound and bought their definitions side by side.
4. Noise is not the opposite of capitalism.
In his book Art Power Boris Groys writes that:
“the criteria we use to distinguish works of art from other things are … not dissimilar from the criteria we apply to distinguish the human from the inhuman. … This concept of the human being is the basis of all humanistic utopias, all of which understand individual human beings, and ultimately the community, the state as works of art. So the question arises: what are we ready to accept as art, and what criteria do we have for accepting certain things as such?” (176)
Embedded within a culture of capitalism is a culture of opposition. More pervasive than simple relationships of capital, these oppositional strategies make it impossible to articulate alternatives that might undermine the politics of power and cross channels and exist in the inbetween spaces. Silent spaces. Noisy spaces. However, I would argue that within contemporary informational contexts these oppositional strategies of capitalism are rendered redundant. We don’t always play the game anymore. In my head I keep replaying Miguel Angel Rios’s terrifying “White Suit” (2008) video which has been installed at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Viewers are caught within a shifting flow as we see dogs that are noise, and a dancing figure that is at once mesmerizing and terrifyingly orchestrated. We begin to grasp a picture of what noise might look like. The camera shifts as quickly as the dancer and the dogs seem too real amidst the infinite black of a staged studio. Who is in control? As the figure and ground merge (no longer retaining the form and content distinctions of a modernist frame) who, where and how we are positioned amidst the noise becomes increasingly problematic. The repetitive and intensely determined tapping of the dancer’s shoes amidst the fearful barking of the dogs is the sonic aspect of the work, but the noise of this work is in the disjunction within the image. This work demonstrates for me the power of the image-becoming-noise to disrupt the very structures that seek to deny its existence.
5. noise is not utopia.
The failure of noise to undermine capitalism does not equate to the failure of art. This is because noise is not utopia, and art does not always occupy utopian formations. Noise though can function to draw together microcommunities. (Here again noise is a facilitator rather than a thing). Gatherings of like-minded individuals who celebrate a Cage-ian experience where sound and noise are no longer distinct and where immersion within frequency and resonance can shift some thresholds of culture and control occur regularly around the world. So is this form of sonic immersion utopian? There are definite flaws in the kinds of manifestos such as those recently published by Bruce Russell, and to a lesser extent included within Caleb Kelly’s book, that claim to establish a kind of environment where noise embraces and constructs sound and community. And where freedom is somehow equated with a liberatory exclusion of capital. These communities do not form around noise but around a shifting definition of ‘music’, nor do they always exclude capital (why else do CDs get sold and books published?).
6. noise is not always random.
As Virilio emphasises again and again, the accident is embedded within the car and the airplane; the two crucial machines of a post-Fordist economics of power. Accidents are one manifestation of noise. However, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent ‘perfect storm’ of financial crisis, was not an accident in this sense but rather, the result of a series of decisions that were to have disastrous consequences. Why? Because we did not pay enough attention to the noise in the channels. This is why noise is essential to capitalism. It prevents erasure.
I still find it a very difficult exercise to define noise, and am thankful for the distraction and gaps today that meant I have returned to these thoughts again. That is what seminars are for.
Watching Log: breaking the waves
Lars Von Trier 1996 offers another answer to love in a cold climate. 
and took me back to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon.
Reading Log: The fraud
Barbara Ewing. The only way to manage as an artist is to copy another.
Rembrandt: THE ABDUCTION OF EUROPA (1632, Getty Museum, 61 x 78 cm)
