In a shift of interest, I’ve been developing a new voice over at uncollapse.com, a blog exploring attitudes about social technology and virtual space in contemporary art.
Recent posts:
Cattelan at Guggenheim: It’s Not All Bad, a review that considers how the installation reacts to digital culture
Uncovering a History in Conflux Exile, an article about Christina Ray’s Conflux Festival from 2003-2011
Click through above to check it out. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
A security guard wanders the crowd of the market, vaguely keeping watch, while her two-way radio broadcasts a mysterious voice spouting sound bites about solitude and alienation from the novel, Brave New World (Huxley, 1932). In Huxley’s world, solitude is socially devalued as an unproductive discomfort, but John the Savage reveals solitude as the condition in which grows his faith and individuality.
The guard, a sentry of private space apparently lost in the public market, occasionally speaks back to the voice with reports from the field. The content of the conversation, in effect, is an improvised juxtaposition of past and present, vision and observation, solitude and immersion. It is also a dialog between man and machine, as the voice is a recording set to play spontaneously through a hacked walkie talkie. For passersby, the performance is almost undetectable, save for the notably odd philosophical and personal tone of the guard and the voice resonating from her 2-way radio.
Revisitation Rights was performed at the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival in Preston, U.K., and was supported by Folly and FACT.
Hacked 2-way radio built by Jamie O’Shea.
[ Abandon Normal Devices ]
[ Preston Saturday Market ]
I met with Media and Communication PhD fellow Taina Bucher for an interview last spring while she served as visiting scholar at NYU Department of Media, Culture and Communication. Our conversation is currently featured on London-based networked publication Furtherfield.org.
Check it out:
http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/anxieties-social-networking-interview-liz-filardi
Also see Taina’s media and culture blog:
http://tainabucher.com/
A ritual performance of rehabilitating oiled wildlife draws inspiration from media imagery of the effort during the BP gulf oil spill this summer. The piece is as much about gleaming the stark devoutness of wildlife rehabilitation, as it is about faith in imagery.
Photography by Jamie O’Shea.
The performance was supported by the Chashama Windows Program.
[chashama.org]
Anxious about the lack of ownership and access to my personal history, I explore how the structure of Facebook provides a literal construct of identity, framing the tension between the opacity of image and the multiplicity of being. For several weeks, I clear my Facebook profile of public information only to spontaneously repopulate the fields and clear them again, each time leaving a single link in my “About Me” section. Facebook users who select the link will open a flattened “archive” version of the previously visible profile.
Facetbook is part of a project called I’m Not Stalking You; I’m Socializing, an exploration of how social networking changes the ways in which we relate to one another and enrich our lives. It is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) created for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.
[ become my friend on Facebook ]
[ go to Facetbook ]
[ go to I'm Not Stalking You; I'm Socializing ]
Give and Take represents the process of destabilizing the threat of unsolicited advertisements, extrapolating on the work There is Still Time to Change Things (2010). The installation consists of two podiums labeled “Give” and “Take” with found paper advertisements, accompanied by a two-part audio track in which a voice facilitates a cleansing meditation practice.
Thank you to Jamie O’Shea and Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology.
For a few years, my two older brothers were active in Boy Scouts and my father would help them win various badges by engaging in self-esteem and skill-building traditions like starting fires and building bird houses. I was regretfully excluded from these rituals on the basis of gender. But I convinced my father to let me accompany them to the highly competitive Pinewood Derby. I was unprepared for the long and boring afternoon.
Last weekend, I awarded five little girls with the Patient Sister Award at the Boy Scouts Pinewood Derby. Misha Jenkins photographed the event.
[ visit Misha Jenkins' website ]
One of the original cases of criminal stalking in America is retold within the framework of a social network called Black&White, which consists of two mirrored profiles, those of Laura Black and Richard Farley. The website extrapolates on the tongue-and-cheek usage of the term “stalking” to describe the accepted social protocol, a far cry from the original behavior that, in this case, lead to a massacre at a booming Silicon Valley company in 1988.
Black&White is part of a project called I’m Not Stalking You; I’m Socializing, an exploration of how social networking changes the ways in which we relate to one another and enrich our lives. It is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) created for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.
[ Go to Black & White ]
[ Go to I'm Not Stalking You; I'm Socializing ]
Last summer, I was unemployed and it was a very alienating experience. I became disproportionately resentful toward restaurant solicitation in the form of menus slipped under my door and handed to me on the street. The more angry I became, the more guilty I felt about shaming the people distributing menus. I wanted to be happy for anyone working, so I began to transform my experience by gratefully collecting solicited items.
I started thinking about my process of acceptance and the following instruction set came to me:
1. Continue to collect menus.
2. Accept menu drop-offs from participants.
3. Meditate on slogans loosely describing the interaction between solicitor and solicited.
4. Ask solicitors what they would truthfully like to say to passersby.
5. Cut slogans into the menus and distribute on the street.
6. Invite passersby to help distribute.I will continue to work through my experience and post updates.
A record of telephone interactions is gathered under the pretense of a social networking service called Status Grabber, in which a representative makes personal phone calls to request very short “status updates” from strangers. Call recipients are told that someone they know has anonymously requested a “status update” about them, and that they should provide the representative with an open statement about their career, family, social life, or literal whereabouts. Visitors to the Status Grabber website can directly request status updates through the satirical service, listen to phone records, and view rolling, one-line status updates.
Status Grabber is part of a project called I’m Not Stalking You; I’m Socializing, an exploration of how social networking changes the ways in which we relate to one another and enrich our lives. It is a 2009 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) created for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.
[ Go to Status Grabber ]
[ Go to I'm Not Stalking You; I'm Socializing ]
