Interview with Stephen Wilson
Stephen Wilson is a San Francisco author, artist and professor who explores the cultural implications of new technologies. His computer mediated art works probe issues such as interaction with invisible living forms, information visualization, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc. But most of all he’s interested in exploring the role of artists in research. He is Head of the Conceptual/Information Arts program at San Francisco State University.
I actually first got to know his through his writing. When i started getting interested in new media art, i was so clueless about the field that i asked people who knew (and still know) much more than me about it which books they’d recommend me. Most of them advised me to get my hands on Information Arts – intersections of art, science and technology. I did. It’s a hefty volume, a wonderful reference i usually turn to when i need some information on a particular aspect of the domain where science/technology and art meet.
You wrote “I am simultaneously awed and troubled about the course of scientific and technological research. Historically the arts kept watch on the cultural frontier. I fear that in the contemporary technology-dominated world they are failing that responsibility. Historically, the arts alerted people to emerging developments, examined the unspoken implications, and explored alternative futures. As the centers of cultural imagination and foment of our times have moved to the technology labs, the arts have not understood the challenge.” but surely there must be some artists around who are doing a good job at engaging with the advances of research, don’t you think so?
Yes, I didn’t mean to imply artists were not involved in these kind of explorations. In fact, many of the artists highlighted on WMMNA are good examples of artists willing to engage frontier areas of research. But there are some problems. One is the mainline definitions of art. Technology/science art research is still marginalized as a fringe activity. In a technoscientific culture, artistic probing the world of research is a critical, desperate need.
We need people looking at these fields of inquiry from many frames of reference, not just those sanctioned by academia or commerce.
Another is scope of artistic interest. Scientific and technological research is proceeding at breakneck speed - moving into fascinating areas of great cultural impact. Examples of areas are: genetic engineering, designer drugs, brain functioning, bionics, stem cells, materials science, alternative energy, extreme environments. There are tools now available such as microarray biology labs on a chip that enable research that used to take years to be accomplished in minutes. And these tools are becoming affordable for independent artists. There are a few artists beginning work in these areas but there should be many more. Where are the artists? It worries me to read about exciting, provocative new research areas without artists even aware of them. Also artists may need to get involved at a deeper level than they have so far.
Maybe the other problem is that even though the work of some artists comments on science and technological advances, they strive to find an audience. Where and how do you think works like yours can find an audience? Are festivals and museums the only channel to exhibit challenging projects?
Audience and support are major problems. Alternative art spaces and festivals have been a lifesaver for my practice over the years. They have been willing to show exploratory work. Mainstream museums and galleries have not been very interested. There are hopeful signs. For example WMMNA and sites like it attract not just people in the arts. In the Conceptual Information Arts here at San Francisco State University where I teach, I get students who come from outside the arts and media. They seem to have a more generalized cultural thirst for experimentation. Now the challenge will be to convert this spectator interest into a producer interest. The DIY and open source movements are other hopeful signs. They encourage people to think of themselves not only as passive consumers but potentially as producers and innovators. The web makes for a whole new venue for finding audiences but the museums need to do some catchup.
What triggered your artistic interest for scientific or technological research?
It started when I was finishing college. It was America in the 60’s so social change and justice movements were important foci in our lives. Everyone had to do a senior thesis. I was in humanities/social sciences so professors thought I would do something in those fields. I noticed, however, that electronics were critical forces in our lives. We listened to radio and music. Radio and TV were shaping the political mind of the society. It struck me that we didn’t really know how radio worked. How did this device capture sounds from far distances? For most of us it was a ‘black box’. I thought that was culturally dangerous - to have something so central be a mystery. I made self study in electronics and radio the subject of my senior thesis. My professors were not happy but I did learn how radio worked. Even more importantly I learned that things that had been mystified could be understood and that one didn’t need to be an expert in a field to do interesting work with it.
Later in 1980 when I was an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was in a program called Generative Systems run by a fascinating artist named Sonia Sheridan. She encouraged us to tear things apart to understand them. Microcomputers had just come out.Up to that time most people thought of computers as specialized devices only relevant to science and business. My gut told me they were going to have a more profound cultural impact than that. I wanted to work with them artistically.
Most of the other art students and professors thought it was a waste of time. There were few information sources in the arts. Even academic computer scientists thought the microcomputer was a toy, not worthy of their attention. I was somewhat on my own. I had to search out resources. I had to teach myself. I had to find other researchers wherever they were. I came up with ideas that people told me were impossible. I experimented. I did them anyway. It all taught me to be somewhat skeptical about common knowledge in any field. Learn what there was to learn but be willing to follow unpopular lines of inquiry. The arts have a long venerable tradition of iconoclasm that will serve them well as artists pursue frontier areas of scientific and technological research.
Does the public understand immediately what is at stake in your work? How do they react to your installations?
I try to create installations that can be appreciated at many levels. The audience can be provoked, intrigued and have fun even if they don’t understand the bigger issues. For example, children usually get involved in my installations. I’m not sure how many in the audience think about the larger issues. That’s a problem not only with general audiences but even the judges in festivals. IntroSpection and Protozoa Games got shown in a few places but mostly got rejections. Some judges felt they were too much like a ’science fair’. (Protozoa Games let people play games with protozoa - single cell animals. IntroSpection let people play games with their own cells and microorganisms.)
Many audience members dealt with Protozoa Games and IntroSpection only as unusual games. But the installations did have more critical agendas. In Protozoa Games I wanted people to think about the complexity of life even at the single cell level and the relationship of humans to other animals. In IntroSpection I realized maybe 99.999% of people had never looked at their own cells and the microorganisms living inside of them and never had experience with basic biology research processes such as taking samples and using microscopes. I felt that this level of unfamiliarity was culturally dangerous in an era where biology research was becoming so critical. I thought it was an fitting role for the arts to appropriate the tools, bring them into public media, and comment and intervene in this situation of unfamiliarity.
IntroSpection
What do scientists make of works such as Protozoa Games (video) and Introspection? Are they “awed and troubled” or do they see the pieces as complementary to their own work for example?
Mostly they ignored them. In doing research for my book Information Arts I was distressed to learn of scientist attitudes. Many are rather arrogant - they doubt that even other scientists outside their discipline can contribute to their work - let alone artists. Even though many are great supporters of classical forms of art, music, theater, ballet etc., their interest and knowledge of the art stops in the 70’s. They had little interest and familiarity with contemporary experimental conceptual, critical, and technological arts.
But there are hopeful signs also. There are several efforts around the world to involve artists in research - all based on the idea that artists can bring unique perspectives to the research process. For example there is the Artists in the Lab program in Switzerland, Interactive Institute in Sweden, SymbioticA in Australia, Hexagram in Montreal and many others. It’s not clear how they will all turn out but its a great start. Web viewers can find a more complete list at my art/research organizations page.
In creating IntroSpection I got a glimpse of the possibilities. I consulted with a Biologist at my university who is a world expert in bacteria. I wanted to learn more about the bacteria in the mouth since they might be important in my art installation. I was amazed to find out that in spite of all her knowledge, she had never taken a sample of her own mouth to see what was there. We had a good time together seeing what we could find in our mouths. We found some bacteria but they were all immobile. At that time in the development of my installation I was planning on using the movement of the bacteria in my art game so it was troubling. She pointed out that most organisms don’t move around if they have what they need in the niche where they are - it costs unnecessary energy. So we hypothesized about what could get the bacteria moving. She said she had never encountered that issue in the literature. We did several mini-experiments with coffee, alcohol, sugar, stimulants, drugs without much luck. We both learned from each other. I doubt it had any profound impact on her research, but I think it opened up some new ideas and approaches for her. I hear similar stories often repeated from artists who have worked with scientists.
Would you say that Protozoa Games and IntroSpection belong to the bioart category? What happened to bioart? It seemed that it was booming around 2003, at the time of the L’Art Biotech exhibition in Nantes (France). Is it back into marginality now?
I guess a lot of the fields in this hybrid art/science/tech world dwell in marginality. Some rise in attention and then recede. Bioarts continues to be an area where many artists are working around the world. In the last few years there are several books that have come out. As is probably clear from my work, I think it is cultural suicide for the arts not to pay attention to new developments in biology research. My hope is that gradually the importance of many of the art/science fields will be recognized and that it will become part of the mainstream expectations for artists to work in these fields. I joke with my students that the art supply store of the future will include sections for electronics and biology research supplies.
IntroSpection uses microorganisms. What is/are the biggest challenge(s) when working with tiny human cells?
There is so much to learn when working with microorganisms. I guess the biggest challenge artistically is how to bring these cells into cultural and art discourse. They are so alien at first for viewers and so easy to dismiss them as science. Also, many of the cells you can get to easily - eg on the skin are not very active. More lively stuff is more intricately involved in bodily processes - eg blood, sexual fluids, feces. You can well imagine art venues don’t want to deal with this stuff or the processes to get it.
What did you try to achieve with the work Body Surfing?
At the time of installation there was much discussion about the irrelevancy of the body. Virtual experience (eg Internet, online, games, vr, animation, etc) was seen as more important for the culture. I felt those themes were being oversold and people were ignoring the ongoing importance of the physical world. I have great interest in crossover areas where information and computational technology intersect with the physical - for example, physical computing, tangible interfaces, biology, materials science. I tried with Body Surfing to create an installation that didn’t do much unless the viewer exerted their body.
One section had digital movies that required viewers to run around the room; the speed and direction of the running directly controlled the speed and direction of the movie. Another section required people to stretch and contort their arms and legs in order to access information. Another section required people to beat on an African drum to control the digital world. I wanted people to come out of the installation sweating and thinking about the joys and limitations of the physical body.
You published Information Arts – intersections of art, science and technology. It was in 2002. Do you still keep a close eye on what’s going on in that artistic field? Have the interests and practices of artists evolved since the book was first launched? Do you think that it’s time for an Information Art, volume 2?
*** I do keep up. I love the risks artists take to work in these research areas. For example, I get such a kick out the artists that appear in WMMNA. It is a bit harder now to keep up because more work is going on. I am working on a new book for Thames & Hudson (a UK publisher famous for publishing big format art books). It will focus on artists working at the edges of scientific and technological research and will emphasize work created since 2000. It will be highly illustrated and will be aimed at the general public. I am looking forward to finding a way to explain this work that makes it understandable but preserves the integrity and complexity of the artists’ intentions. People will walk into the art section of their bookstore and there, right next to the big books on Monet and Picasso, will be this book full of fascinating artists working in this hybrid research. Perhaps that will help reduce the marginality we discussed earlier.
Thanks Stephen!
More information about Wilson’s installations, essays, books, and the Conceptual Information Arts Program at SFSU where he is teaching.
List of artists, organzizations, essays, books, and festivals related to the intersections of art, science, and technology.
Leonardo - International Journal of Art, Science and Technology (40 year history of monitoring this kind of art).
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 29, 2007, 2:37PM
“The Robots Are Coming!”
Yesterday i visited The Robots are Coming! People - Machines - Communication at the Museum for Communication in Berlin.
The exhibition traces the history of communication between humans and machines. All the types of robots you can think of are there: industrial robots, robots used in hospitals or for advertising purposes in the 1950s, made by artists, starring in music videos, toys, … New ones and ancestors: from 18th century musical automats, tea serving dolls from the Karakuri tradition, sketches by Bauhaus-related artists and designers to Tomy Omnibot, some of the robots that have grabbed the headlines over the past few years.
Three retro-future robots called Enter, Do Something and OK (my rough translation) are greeting visitors in the lobby of the museum. The first one, detects the legs of anyone approaching it and greets him or her, the second one talks like a little kid and spends its time following a big gym ball and i couldn’t understand what the third one was about (not able to grasp what the museum guards were trying to explain me.) Kind of fun but their cuteness is a bit too cliché.
The biggest stars of the show, in no particular order:
- Sabor, a big robot (237 cm high, 270 kg) made in the 50s in Switzerland and inspired by Karel Capek’s play R. U. R. (1920). It was able to smoke, move its arms and legs and speak with the help of an integrated phonograph to flirt with ladies.
A previous version of Sabor in 1945 and robot jockey
- the robot jockey KMEL, developed by Swiss company K-Team to replace its practice of using children as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates. The mechanical jockey gets orders from the instructor via a remote control system fixed on the back of the camel. The robots wear sunglasses, hats, racing silks, and they are sprayed with traditional perfumes used with human jockeys (via).
- the Novag Robot Adversary (1982) that plays chess with its mechanical arm, the first one available for sale to the public.
- a robotic arm that seems to be dancing, holding a piece of car in its hand. The robot is currently used to assemble Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicles.
- climbing robots, crab robots, domestic humanoids, kinetic marionettes, and toys (loads of those).
Assembly robot and Toys produced between 1972 and 1997
Robots from the art scene:
Screenshot from “All Is Full Of Love”
- an extremely beautiful android from the video that Chris Cunningham shot for Björk’s All Is Full Of Love (1999.)
- Maria, the sexy and cruel fembot from Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie Metropolis.
- German artist Frank Fietzek was showing two works. The Self-running shoes he created together with Sven Ehamnn. Made for the exhibition “sneakers etc.” the pair of trainers could be remote-controlled by visitors. His second piece in the show is Watschendiskurs, a pair of robots that slap each other while arguing about language theory.
I’m not sure that bathing the exhibition in blue light is such a great idea. It gives a feeling of un-reality when the robots are indeed a reality. But the show was a very nice surprise. There isn’t much coverage of it in the press so i wasn’t expecting to discover such a fantastic collection. All explanations are in german which was a bit frustrating.
The exhibition runs until September 2 but there’s only a few days left to discover Les Robots-Music. Apparently the story starts during World War II when Edouard Diomgar, a French engineer imprisoned in a German camp, was killing time by fantasizing about an orchestra made of robots playing real instruments. After the war the 3 robots he built, Oskar, Ernest and Anatole, took the stage. They can play up to 500 tunes. The current version has been improved thanks to the latest tech developments but their clunkiness and bal musette songs are most charming.
My images on flickr. Set of images of the robots in Der Spiegel. Image at the top from Galicia Hoxe.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 14, 2007, 1:04AM
Interview with Mike Davis: Part 1
Many of Davis’s conclusions will annoy you – but that’s half the point of reading his books.
A more wide-ranging book is Davis’s 2002 collection Dead Cities. While it’s one of Davis’s least cohesive books, it nonetheless ends with an invigorating bang. Its final section, called “Extreme Science,” is a perfect example of how Davis’s books remain so consistently interesting. We come across asteroid impacts, prehistoric mass extinctions, Victorian disaster fiction, planetary gravitational imbalances, and even the coming regime of human-induced climate change, all in a book ostensibly dedicated to West Coast American urbanism.
Of course, Mike Davis’s particular breed of urban sociology has found many detractors – detractors who accuse Davis of falsifying his interviews, performing selective research, deliberately amplifying LA’s dark side (whether that means plate tectonics, police brutality, or race riots), and otherwise falling prey to partisan battles in which Davis’s classically Marxist approach seems both inadequate and outdated. In fact, these criticisms are all justified in their own ways – yet I still find myself genuinely excited whenever a new book of his hits the bookshop display tables.
In any case, the following interview took place after the publication of Davis’s most recent book, Planet of Slums. Having reviewed that book for the Summer 2006 issue of David Haskell’s Urban Design Review, I won’t dwell on it at length here; but Planet of Slums states its subject matter boldy, on page one. There, Davis writes that we are now at “a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”
This “urban” population will not find its home inside cities, however, but deep within horrific mega-slums where masked riot police, raw human sewage, toxic metal-plating industries, and emerging diseases all violently co-exist with literally billions of people. Planet of Slums quickly begins to read like some Boschian catalog of our era’s most nightmarish consequences. The future, to put it non-judgmentally, will be interesting indeed.
Mike Davis and I spoke via telephone.
BLDGBLOG: First, could you tell me a bit about the actual writing process of Planet of Slums? Was there any travel involved?
Davis: This was almost entirely an armchair journey. What I tried to do was read as much of the current literature on urban poverty, in English, as I could. Having four children, two of them toddlers, I only wish I could visit some of these places. On the other hand, I write from our porch, with a clear view of Tijuana, a city I know fairly well, and that’s influenced a lot of my thinking about these issues – although I tried scrupulously to avoid putting any personal journalism into the narrative.
Really, the book is just an attempt to critically survey and synthesize the literature on global urban poverty, and to expand on this extraordinarily important report of the United Nations – The Challenge of Slums – which came out a few years ago.
BLDGBLOG: So you didn’t visit the places you describe?
Davis: Well, I was initially anticipating writing a much longer book, but when I came to what should have been the second half of Planet of Slums – which looks at the politics of the slum – it became just impossible to rely on secondary or specialist literature. I’m now collaborating on a second volume with a young guy named Forrest Hylton, who’s lived for several years in Colombia and Bolivia. I think his first-hand experience and knowledge makes up for most of my deficiencies, and he and I are now producing the second book.
BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about the vocabulary that you use to describe this new “post-urban geography” of global slums: regional corridors, polycentric webs, diffuse urbanism, etc. I’m wondering if you’ve found any consistent forms or structures now arising, as cities turn away from centralized, geographically obvious locations, becoming fractal, slum-like sprawl.
Davis: First of all, the language with which we talk about metropolitan entities and larger-scale urban systems is already eclectic because urban geographers avidly debate these issues. I think there’s little consensus at all about the morphology of what lies beyond the classical city.
The most important debates really arose through discussions of urbanization in southern China, Indonesia, and southeast Asia – and that was about the nature of peri-urbanization on the dynamic periphery of large Third World cities.
BLDGBLOG: And “peri-urbanization” means what?
Davis: It’s where the city and the countryside interpenetrate. The question is: are you, in fact, looking at a snapshot of a very dynamic or perhaps chaotic process? Or will this kind of hybrid quality be preserved over any length of time? These are really open questions.
There are several different discussions here: one on larger-order urban systems – similar to the Atlantic seaboard or Tokyo-Yokohama, where metropolitan areas are linked in continuous physical systems. But then there’s this second debate about the spill-over into the countryside, this new peri-urban reality, where you have very complex mixtures of slums – of poverty – crossed with dumping grounds for people expelled from the center – refugees. Yet amidst all this you have small, middle class enclaves, often new and often gated. You find rural laborers trapped by urban sweatshops, at the same time that urban settlers commute to work in agricultural industries.
This, in a way, is the most interesting – and least-understood – dynamic of global urbanization. As I try to explain in Planet of Slums, peri-urbanism exists in a kind of epistemological fog because it’s not well-studied. The census data and social statistics are notoriously incomplete.
BLDGBLOG: So it’s more a question of how to study the slums – who and what to ask, and how to interpret that data? Where to get your funding from?
Davis: At the very least, it’s a challenge of information. Interestingly, this has also become the terrain of a lot of Pentagon thinking about urban warfare. These non-hierarchical, labyrinthine peripheries are what many Pentagon thinkers have fastened onto as one of the most challenging terrains for future wars and other imperial projects. I mean, after a period in which the Pentagon was besotted with trendy management theory – using analogies with Wal-Mart and just-in-time inventory – it now seems to have become obsessed with urban theory – with architecture and city planning. This is happening particularly through things like the RAND Corporation’s Arroyo Center, in Santa Monica.
The U.S. has such an extraordinary ability to destroy hierarchical urban systems, to take out centralized urban structures, but it has had no success in the Sadr Cities of the world.
BLDGBLOG: I don’t know – they leveled Fallujah, using tank-mounted bulldozers and Daisy Cutter bombs –
Davis: But the city was soon re-inhabited by the same insurgents they tried to force out. I think the slum is universally recognized by military planners today as a challenge. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a great leap forward in our understanding of what’s happening on the peripheries of Third World cities because of the needs of Pentagon strategists and local military planners. For instance, Andean anthropology made a big leap forward in the 1960s and early 1970s when Che Guevara and his guerilla fighters became a problem.
I think there’s a consensus, both on the left and the right, that it’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that have become a decisive geopolitical space. That space is now a military challenge – as much as it is an epistemological challenge, both for sociologists and for military planners.
BLDGBLOG: What kind of imaginative role do you see slums playing today? On the one hand, there’s a kind of CIA-inspired vision of irrational anti-Americanism, mere breeding grounds for terrorism; on the other, you find books like The Constant Gardener, in which the Third World poor are portrayed as innocent, naive, and totally unthreatening, patiently awaiting their liberal salvation. Whose imaginination is it in which these fantasies play out?
Davis: I think, actually, that if Blade Runner was once the imaginative icon of our urban future, then the Blade Runner of this generation is Black Hawk Down – a movie I must admit I’m drawn to to see again and again. Just the choreography of it – the staging of it – is stunning. But I think that film really is the cinematic icon for this new frontier of civilization: the “white man’s burden” of the urban slum and its videogame-like menacing armies, with their RPGs in hand, battling heroic techno-warriors and Delta Force Army Rangers. It’s a profound military fantasy. I don’t think any movie since The Sands of Iwo Jima has enlisted more kids in the Marines than Black Hawk Down. In a moral sense, of course, it’s a terrifying film, because it’s an arcade game – and who could possibly count all the Somalis that are killed?
BLDGBLOG: It’s even filmed like a first-person shooter. Several times you’re actually watching from right behind the gun.
Davis: It’s by Ridley Scott, isn’t it?
BLDGBLOG: Yeah – which is interesting, because he also directed Blade Runner.
Davis: Exactly. And he did Black Rain, didn’t he?
BLDGBLOG: The cryptic threat of late-1980s Japan…
Davis: Ridley Scott – more than anyone in Hollywood – has really defined the alien Other.
Of course, in reality, it’s not white guys in the Rangers who make up most of the military presence overseas: it’s mostly slum kids themselves, from American inner cities. The new imperialism – like the old imperialism – has this advantage, that the metropolis itself is so violent, with such concentrated poverty, that it produces excellent warriors for these far-flung military campaigns. I remember reading a brilliant book once by a former professor of mine, at the University of Edinburgh, on British imperial warfare in the nineteenth century. He showed, against every expectation, that, in fact, most often for the British Army, in imperial wars, what was decisive wasn’t their possession of better weapons, or artillery, or Maxim guns: it was the ability of the British soldier to engage in personal carnage, hand-to-hand combat, up close with bayonets – and that was strictly a function of the brutality of life in British slums.
Now, if you read the literature on warfare today, this is what the Pentagon’s really capitalizing on: they’re using the American inner city as a kind of combat laboratory, in addition to these urban test ranges they’ve built to study their new technologies. The slum dwellers’ response to this, and it’s a response that has yet to be answered – and maybe it’s unanswerable – is the poor man’s Air Force: the car bomb. That’s the subject of another book I’m finishing up right now, a short history of the car bomb. That has to be one of the most decisive military innovations of the late twentieth century. If you look at what’s happening in Iraq, it may be the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are killing Americans, but what’s just ripping that country apart is these fortified car bomb attacks. The car bomb has given poor people in slums – small groups and networks – a new, extremely traumatic kind of geopolitical leverage.
What’s happened, I think, at the end of the 20th century – and at the beginning of the 21st – is that the outcasts have discovered these extraordinarily cheap and horrific weapons. That’s why I argue, in Planet of Slums, that they have “the gods of chaos” on their side.
BLDGBLOG: Beyond a turn toward violence and insurgency, do you see any intentional, organized systems of self-government emerging in the slums? Is there a slum “mayor,” for instance, or a kind of slum city hall? In other words, who would a non-military power negotiate with in the first place?
Davis: Organization in the slums is, of course, extraordinarily diverse. The subject of the second book – that I’m writing with Forrest Hylton – will be what kinds of trends and unities exist within that diversity. Because in the same city – for instance, in a large Latin American city – you’ll find everything from Pentacostal churches to the Sendero Luminoso, to reformist organizations and neoliberal NGOs. Over very short periods of time there are rapid swings in popularity from one to the other – and back. It’s very difficult to find a directionality in that, or to predict where things might go.
But what is clear, over the last decade, is that the poor – and not just the poor in classical urban neighborhoods, but the poor who, for a long time, have been organized in leftwing parties, or religious groups, or populist parties – this new poor, on the fringes of the city, have been organizing themselves massively over the last decade. You have to be struck by both the number and the political importance of some of these emerging movements, whether that’s Sadr, in Iraq, or an equivalent slum-based social movement in Buenos Aires. Clearly, in the last decade, there have been dramatic increases in the organization of the urban poor, who are making new and, in some cases, unprecedented demands for political and economic participation. And where they are totally excluded, they make their voices heard in other ways.
BLDGBLOG: Like using car bombs?
Davis: I mean taking steps toward formal democracy. Because the other part of your question concerns the politics of poor cities. I’m sure that somebody could write a book arguing that one of the great developments of the last ten or fifteen years has been increased democratization in many cities. For instance, in cities that did not have consolidated governments, or where mayors were appointed by a central administration, you now have elections, and elected mayors – like in Mexico City.
What’s so striking, in almost all of these cases, is that even where there’s increased formal democracy – where more people are voting – those votes actually have little consequence. That’s for two reasons: one is because the fiscal systems of big cities in the Third World are, with few exceptions, so regressive and corrupt, with so few resources, that it’s almost impossible to redistribute those resources to voting people. The second reason is that, in so many cities – India is a great example of this – when you have more populist or participatory elections, the real power is simply transferred into executive agencies, industrial authorities, and development authorities of all kinds, which tend to be local vehicles for World Bank investment. Those agencies are almost entirely out of the control of the local people. They may even be appointed by the state or by a provisional – sometimes national – government.
This means that the democratic path to control over cities – and, above all, control over resources for urban reform – remains incredibly elusive in most places.
(This interview continues in Part Two. For another, recent two-part interview with Mike Davis, see TomDispatch: Part 1, Part 2. All drawings used in this interview are by Leah Beeferman, who was also behind BLDGBLOG’s Helicopter Archipelago).
Originally
from BLDGBLOG
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reBlogged
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on May 23, 2006, 4:24AM
Book: Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture
Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture, edited by Michael Faulkner/ D-Fuse.
Editors’ blurb: A major change has taken place at dance clubs worldwide: the advent of the VJ. Once the term referred to the video jockey who introduced music videos on MTV, but now it defines an artist who creates and mixes video, live and synced to music, in clubs or at concerts. This book is an in-depth look at the artists at the forefront of this amazing audio-visual experience..
Let’s be honest: i bought this one because of the sleek cover. I’m not much of a clubber and i’m not a huge fan of screen-based art. Well, at least that’s what i thought before i opened the book and started to recognise the name of artists whose work i’ve enjoyed over the years, at concerts or events such as Club Transmediale.
The term VJ was used for the first time at the end of the ’70s in the Peppermint Lounge. However, the chapter dedicated to the history of VJing spans a period much longer than one might expect, tracing back the influences on the discipline to Joseph Plateau (the inventor of the phenakistiscope) and talking about the key-role that silent movies has paradoxically played in helping VJing develop its language. Silent film directors had to construct a narrative using mainly visual elements and the connection with VJing is further increased in the case of the screening of films accompanied by improvised music. Apart from cinema and videos, VJs’ work engages also with (graphic) design and interactive art.
DJ Spooky- ReBirth of a Nation
Over the pages, i’ve discovered several amazing projects that should convince anyone that VJing is not just clubland/underground entertainment, but a vivid art form. Just one example:
D-Fuse’s Small Global is a multichannel video/motion gfx installation that uses animated images and vector maps of the planet to explore environmental and immigration issues. Small Global juxtaposes visualizations of pairs of data sets to highlight relationships that often go unnoticed by mass media. For example, the mining and price of coltan (the metal used in mobile phone chips) in Congo is mapped against the human death toll and expertmination of Congo’s highland gorillas.
One of the biggest bonus of the book lies in the 150 interviews with artists at the forefront of the scene. Grouped by geographical region, each set of VJs’ portraits opens with an intro to the VJing scene in that particular location. They talk about who’s inspiring them (the usual suspects such as Bill Viola and the graffit culture but also Picasso, Burrough, the qatsi trilogy, etc.), how they deal with copyrights, their relationship with the advertising industry, how they financially sustain their work, the equipment they are working with, and the growing influence of their work on other industries and music video. Some of the interviewees are “wo/men of few words”, others have compelling stories to share.
Last chapter of the book deals with VJ’s resources: the hardware, the software, the set-up. With tips from the VJs.
I enjoyed the book a lot which came as a surprise as i’m fairly ignorant of VJing. The illustrations are amazing and the fact that the pages have been written mainly by practioners makes the reading absorbing (that’s if you like the “insider view” style.) An expert in VJ culture might be more critical (and appreciate better than i did the chapter dedicated to the tools used by VJs) but i’d say that i’m a very satisfied customer.
As you might expect, a 130 min’ DVD is hiding under the cover. It combines documentaries, videos and images from live performances by some of the most respected VJs such as The Light Surgeons, Actop, D-Fuse, UVA, 8gg, Elliott Earls, Coldcut/Hexstatic, Visual Kitchen, etc.
Pingmag recently interviewed Mike Faulkner.
Related: 8gg Big, In the mood for clubbing, Colder, Big tanks, Video printing.
Originally
from we make money not art
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 25, 2006, 9:42AM
Book: Creativity and the City
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Creativity and the City is the title of a new book, edited by Simon Franke and Evert Verhagen, on how the how the creative economy is changing the city, particularly in the Netherlands.
“The creative class and the creative city are two notions which have also recently forged a path to politicians and opinion-leaders in the field of urban society in the Netherlands.” “This development presents myriad new opportunities for cities: redevelopment of former industrial zones, new business activity in the old city centres and new jobs.” “The book describes all these opportunities and the consequences for the spatial development of the city; at the same time it also warns about the dangers of this creating a new élite of people who isolate themselves from those who miss the boat.” “The new developments are considered in a series of 15 articles, describing the political, social and societal consequence and analysing the resulting spatial developments. Lastly, the book contains many tips for practical urban policy. Creativity and the City is a book for a broad group of politicians, policy-makers, urban planners, economists and sociologists. It includes contributions from Richard Florida, Charles Landry, the independent Dutch thinktank Nederland Kennisland (Knowledgeland), Jeroen Saris, Arnold Reijndorp, Robert Kloosterman, Nachtwacht Amsterdam (Amsterdam’s ‘Night-time Mayor’), John Thackera and others.” |
Originally
from Putting people first
by
reBlogged
by michael
to
on Oct 1, 2006, 9:40PM
