YANG Yi "Uprooted"

Galerie Richard (more amazing images from link) is pleased to present the New York debut solo exhibition of Chinese photographer YANG Yi (b. 1971). Yang was born in Kaixian, a small town overlooking a tributary of the Yangtze River. In 2009 Yang’s hometown was completely submerged underwater due to the Three Gorges Dam Project, which displaced over 1.2 million people and destroyed 11 cities. Using photography with digital editing techniques, Yang creates strikingly truthful portrayals of Kaixan and its inhabitants in a submarine universe. The “Uprooted” exhibition opens on Thursday, May 2nd with a public reception from 6 to 8pm.

Upon first view of Yang’s photographs, one’s eyes first adapt to the photographs’ darkness with a sepia rendering. You see a mysterious landscape with few people, adorned in masks and snorkels. The light comes from the upper part of the photographs, expanding into shadows on the walls of a submarine city. These disconcerting images question the viewer in a manner similar to Gregory Crewdson’s photographs.

YANG Yi’s digital manipulations of the photographic medium are particularly relevant because they are deeply connected with his personal life. His work raises the question, how can one build one’s life when one’s home, roots, and childhood memories have been lost forever? Yang replies by recreating the past in capturing the remaining scenery before it disappears forever. Even after the artist transformed the image by submerging the landscape, the villagers display wit and poise.

"It is about all that we have in common there: our accent, our spicy coriander, the nod we give each other, a friendly signal to say hello when we pass one another on the street, these streets that we have traveled alongside our ancestors, that have herded us along together... this series was created for all of that. It will be my personal memoir."

Yang captures and preserves the nuances that once distinguished this beloved village as an expression of defiance to imposed plight and destitution. Inspired by dreams, the visual documentation opposes the physical reality of the expropriated site. The confrontation between the past and present transforms the topology of the landscape into a place of curiosity and apprehension. Yang’s series records a haunting legacy that proves the fortitude of the human spirit.

The Uprooted series has been recently exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art, California and the Katonah Museum of Art, New York in the exhibition “Rising Dragon – Contemporary Chinese Photography.” YANG Yi has exhibited throughout Asia, Europe, Canada and Mexico. The artist currently lives and works in Chengdu China.

The Country House Revealed as Monument

"The balance of forces between monuments and buildings has shifted. Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on. What we are seeing here is a new dialectical process, but one just as vast as its predecessors. How could the contradiction between building and monument be overcome and surpassed? How might that tendency be accelerated which has destroyed monumentality but which could well re-institute it, within the sphere of buildings itself, by restoring the old unity at a higher level? So long as no such dialectical transcendence occurs, we can only expect the stagnation of crude interactions and intermixtures between 'moments' — in short, a continuing spatial chaos. Under this dispensation, buildings and dwelling-places have been dressed up in monumental signs: first their façades, and later their interiors. The homes of the moneyed classes have undergone a superficial socialization' with the introduction of reception areas, bars, nooks and furniture (divans, for instance) which bespeak some kind of erotic life. Pale echoes, in short, of the aristocratic palace or town house. The town, meanwhile, now effectively blown apart, has been 'privatized' — no less superficially — thanks to urban 'decor' and 'design', and the development of fake environments. Instead, then, of a dialectical process with three stages which resolves a contradiction and 'creatively' transcends a conflictual situation, we have a stagnant opposition whose poles at first confront one another 'face to face', then relapse into muddle and confusion"- Henri Lefebvre The Production of Space p223.

“social space is not a thing among other things" - Lefebvre

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Keijo: WHNZ:57:WAMAWA

 

The Blues as the expression of a coherent poetics, or the ‘theory’ or how one can explain the meshing of technique with ideas and images, is based on a limited set of principles. “Midnight Truth: Billie Jo relates the bitterness she feels over her Ma's death, her father's indifference and the dust”. In The Blues these principles include the reconciliation of supposed opposites; repetition and variation, improvisation and planning, dialogue and monologue and progression and stasis. These principles all meet in the music of Keijo, with a perpetual memory tuned to The Blues eternally at play.

In the music of Keijo dissonant forms communicate with each other; a wailing guitar is surrounded and given fresh meaning from a mass of insect-like pulses xylophone from deep in an imagined summertime forest. Attention to low-fi recording techniques gives a blues harp the scratchy wail of a treasured field recording, while drums and diaphragm-mic vocals bring the listener to some lonely railway siding in the mean summer of 1935. “Out of the Dust: Billie Jo sneaks out in the middle of the night with a little money and a little food.” It’s all the same in the temple of sound. It is not about either/or, it is about the balance and harmony of each part, growing and forming a single auditory space. The shadow and the shake, repeated cycles of sounds that expand outwards into improvised landscapes of color and light. “Gone West: Billie Jo has been on the train for two days. She's burned up and frozen.” There you find the moment of your own listening. It is there that time collapses and everything is true and everything is permitted. But nothing is real.

Keijo produces here seven tracks of transportation. We go beyond time, here there is but the sound and how it hits you. This is tinder dry journey folk wandering out of the woods after hard seasons to take their chances on the road or the coast. Where travel and starvation are better than hanging on to hope and having nothing change. By learning the tempo of your own foot fall the heart can be stilled to a relaxed pace and the air becomes easier to breathe. The Blues becomes the rhythm of your body and you are healed; to the earth is born a true one.

Shine on.

James Barrett (aka Nada Baba)

Stockholm Sweden April 2013.

www.soulsphincter.com

Virtual Worlds, Machinima and Cooperation over Borders (Published in 'Sans Public')

Image of the avatars of Isabelle Arvers and Jenna Ng from the upcoming publication Understanding Machinima

Cooperation over borders between individuals and groups is possible using online three-dimensional virtual worlds. This cooperation occurs in the production of art, research, teaching and learning, and performance as well as in building social, professional and personal contexts. The borders that are crossed can be geopolitical, generational, spatial and embodied. In order to maintain coherence for people to meet, talk, build, write, perform and exchange in virtual worlds, a sense and understanding of place is required. Such human activities as meeting are reliant on a shared space and place. This chapter integrates the idea of sharing places in examples of how virtual worlds can provide common spaces and places from a series of projects involving art, documentation, teaching and communication. By using examples of one artist’s project and several machinima – videos made using screen-capture software on computers, to film places and avatar actors in virtual worlds – I argue these virtual worlds can enable cooperation over a variety of borders through sharing.

FULL ARTICLE AVAILABLE HERE

Fear and Loathing in the Attention Economy

"Many are saying that it is disrespectful to do what we are planning to do. I can see the point, but while I do not wish to dishonour Thatcher as a person, I can see no other way to protest at the kind of send-off she is getting. I wish she were getting a quiet family funeral, then I would have stayed away." - Message posted on Facebook about turning away from the Thatcher Funeral cortege

The bombing of the Boston Marathon Finish Line is delivered as spectacle violence

Over the past few days two events have been represented globally that are themselves symptomatic of the attention economy developing around us. The Attention Economy is ably defined by Wikipedia:

Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention as:

Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.(Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20)

As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information. Attention economics applies insights from other areas of economic theory to enable content consumers, producers, and intermediaries to better mediate and manage the flow of information in light of the scarcity of consumer attention.

The two events I refer to are

1. The Bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon.

2. The Funeral of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Both of these events, while very different in terms of effects, are examples of what I see as a virulent attention economy which all of us are forced to participate in. The above two links are evidence of this, both leading to live news blogs updated by the minute from major media conglomerates.

What has disturbed me the most about the Boston Bombing, apart from more senseless bloodshed and suffering, is the total spectacle nature of this act of violence. Bombing the finish line of a mass sporting event (a considerable time after the 'main event' - i.e. the winner and so on - has actually finished) does little other than appropriates mediated spectatorship, turning it into a visualization of carnage, fear, panic and death. With no demands issued or responsibility taken thus far, this looks like a heinous attempt to spread fear and nothing else. Whoever is behind this violent act is using the spectacle offered by the marathon to spread fear and anguish.

Within the context of the attention economy we can see the Boston Bombing as an example of attention without a message. Central to this attention without a message is the flow-on effect of the mediated compulsory witness perspective. By 'witness perspective' I mean that the addressee is positioned by the media in a temporal and spatial perspective that is immediate and present in relation to the events depicted.

Even a cursory search online for accounts and explanation of the Boston bombing returns reconstructions, looped videos of the blasts, eye-level street views of the explosions and the scenes immediately afterwards and piece to camera from on-site witnesses. These images combined with live updates (often containing inaccurate information) and resulting in an uncritical sense of distance from the events. There is little commentary or reflection in live updates and streamed images.

Compared to the horrible events in Boston, the funeral of Margaret Thatcher is a more contentious spectacle. Here the mediation of history is being constructed through digital rhetoric and authority. An example of this contention is Prime Minister David Cameron urging the populace to participate in the perspective he supports by claiming "We are all Thatcherites now".

Many lining the streets for the Thatcher funeral cortege are expected to turn their backs on the hearse. This is an act of embodied resistance to the witness perspective as it is arranged according to authority. The above opening quote from Facebook, spoken by a woman intending to turn her back on the cortege is interesting in how the spectacle of the funeral is contrasted with Thatcher "getting a quiet family funeral". In the 'quiet family funeral' there are no witnesses outside the 'family'. The spectacle and subsequent demands made on attention are severely limited by this structure.

The implications of large scale events mediated in the ways described here for a global attention economy are dramatic and important. In the case of the Boston Bombing I feel ill at the thought of random acts of violence conducted in order to catch the attention of as many people as possible. In a grim prophetic comedy, this scenario reminds me of the bombings conducted in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil;

                         INTERVIEWER
                         Deputy minister, what do you believe 
                         is behind this recent increase in 
                         terrorist bombings?

                                     HELPMANN
                         Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless 
                         minority of people seems to have 
                         forgotten certain good old fashioned 
                         virtues. They just can't stand 
                         seeing the other fellow win. If 
                         these people would just play the 
                         game, instead of standing on the 
                         touch line heckling

                                     INTERVIEWER
                         In fact, killing people

                                     HELPMANN
                         In fact, killing people  they'd 
                         get a lot more out of life.

               We PULL AWAY from the shop to concentrate on the shoppers. 
               Helpmann's voice carries over the rest of the scene.

                         INTERVIEWER
                         Mr. Helpmann, what would you say 
                         to those critics who maintain that 
                         the Ministry Of Information has 
                         become too large and unwieldy... ?

                                     HELPMANN
                         David... in a free society 
                         information is the name of the 
                         game. You can't win the game if 
                         you're a man short.

The funeral of Margaret Thatcher stands as an attempt to establish a place in history for a political figure. As witnesses to the spectacle of her funeral people must adopt the position offered by an invisible 'Ministry of Information'.

"The Conservatives' attempt to enforce a national day of mourning for their former leader was announced so far in advance of the key event as to be macabre but at least half of the public aren't buying it" Laurie Penny, The New Statesman. 

By turning away from the funeral cortege the 'turners' (not a pun perhaps on the famous 'The lady's is not for turning' quote from Thatcher) bypass that perspective but they do not alter it. If we consider the insidious mis/use of the eye witness perspective which has already resulted from the Boston Bombing, perhaps it is all the more vital that alternatives are developed to the enforced temporal and spatial code of the mediated witness today. Whoever bombed Boston wants the kind of attention to the event that a funeral of an ex-Prime Minister is getting across the Atlantic today.

Ann Pendleton-Jullian "Design Through Gaming"

Architects and designers of buildings, cities and landscapes- or systems and institutions even- work within physical and cultural sites in which value and meaning exist as embedded entities. As embedded entities, they are manifest in matter (material and the form it takes) and energy (systems of interaction and exchange of people, things, information), both of which may already be in play or exist as potential. To realize that which is potential within a complex and changing system of meaning, material, and exchange requires the ability to approach the problem as an interconnected fabric of definitions, frames, constraints, and opportunities, and to work (or play) within this fabric, making meaningful form emerge.

About Ann: Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, educator, and writer of international standing. Her design work negotiates the overlap between architecture, landscape, culture, and technology. Her work is motivated towards internationalism as both a concept and a reality.

Occupying the Commons - Theater Valle Occupation

Occupying the Commons is a project supported by the International University College of Turin (IUC http://www.iuctorino.it/), a program dedicated to the study and practice of the Commons. The aim of the project is to explore the connection between the occupation movements of 2011 & 2012 with the paradigm of the "commons."

The first part of the series begins with an Occupation in Rome at the Teatro Valle, the oldest theater in Italy and one of the most important theaters in all of Europe: http://www.teatrovalleoccupato.it/.

Interview & Director: Saki Bailey
Filming & Production: Tommaso Dotti

Music by: Errichetta Underground and Et_

See: http://www.commonssense.it/s1/?page_id=938

Historicizing Public Space with QR-Codes

Historicizing Public Space with QR Codes from Jim Barrett

In the fall term of 2012-13 a group of museum studies students at Umeå University in Sweden were challenged as part of their course to make a museum installation in a public space using Quick Response (QR) Codes.

This is a short photo-essay of the results.  

The Open Book

THE CONTEXT // From makerspaces to data wrangling schools to archives, the digital is being remixed by the open – and it is changing society as we know it. The Open Book <http://theopenbook.org.uk> is an ambitious project to explore these emergent understandings, put together by The Finnish Institute in London as a part of the critical Reaktio series <http://bit.ly/ZvrLn8> with the help of the Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org> and a global team of contributors and mentors.

THE BOOK // Inspired by the world’s first Open Knowledge Festival <http://okfestival.org> this fall in Helsinki, The Open Book explores the social and technological manifestations of this movement for the first time, featuring over 25 in-depth thought pieces written by pioneers of openness around the world from London to São Paulo - many of whom were suggested by you! Also included is “The Evolution of Open Knowledge” <http://bit.ly/YGwj7N>, the world’s first crowdsourced timeline of openness from 1425 to the current day which we asked you to contribute to <http://bit.ly/122EuLV> earlier this year.

THE CONCLUSIONS // Due to the divisive nature of such an experimental publication, we do not attempt to present any single argument on what ‘open’ is. Instead, we hope The Open Book will serve as a platform for discussion and a launching pad for new ideas about the future of a global open knowledge movement in a time of rapid technological progress.

THE LAUNCH // As many of you already know, The Open Book was officially launched at FutureEverything in Manchester last month: <http://bit.ly/146xxwf> Many thanks to everyone who came and showed their support - it was a great event! Here's a summary by Antti Halonen, Head of Society at the Finnish Institute: <http://bit.ly/ZvqHjj>

GET YOUR COPY // Web: The Open Book is now available online for free as a PDF (CC-BY-SA license) at <http://theopenbook.org.uk>. Print: You can also grab a beautiful print copy at-cost via Amazon: <http://amzn.to/ZcZ2xn>. Please share with colleagues and friends!

Two Presentations on Gameworld Space

HUMlab will be streaming two presentations on gameworld spaces from the Connecting the Dots: Movement, Space, and the Digital Image conference held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. The session will be streamed live in HUMlab X (The Arts Campus) as part of the Lunchbox Learnings series.
This is a chance to hear two very interesting papers on game space in the popular games Minecraft and The Sims (see abstracts below) by two well-known scholars: Dr Seth Giddings, new media and game studies lecturer and Programme Leader for Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Creative Industries from the University of the West of England (co-editor of New Media: a critical introduction (2009), editor of The New Media and Technocultures Reader (2011), and author of Gameworlds: virtual media, everyday life (forthcoming)); and Dr Alan Blackwell, Senior Lecturer in neuroscience and Human Computer Interaction with The Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

We will be starting a little earlier at 11:15 am on 12th April, Friday, and we will end at about 12:30 pm. Even though this is a streamed session, there will be plenty of chances to ask questions and take part in the discussion.

All welcome!

Useful Links:
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/585271961485244/
Website for Connecting the Dots: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2069/
Digital Cultures Research Center: http://dcrc.org.uk/
Seth Giddings: http://www.sethgiddings.net/
Alan F. Blackwell: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/

ABSTRACTS:

“The Metaphysics of Minecraft”
Alan F. Blackwell
University of Cambridge

Minecraft is a popular computer game of the “sandbox” genre, where players explore and build in a virtual world. The user typically experiences this world as a “first person” view, from the point of view of a virtual avatar. The screen shows an imaginary landscape of hills, grass and trees, or when mining, dirt, gravel, coal and various ores. The player can grasp a variety of tools in his or her virtual hand, and controls these pickaxes or other implements with the computer mouse. The contents of the world may be shared with other players, via one of many Minecraft servers, each of which contains its own virtual world, with the avatars of other players on that server exploring, mining or creating around you.

This kind of virtual world sandbox game is not unusual. Much attention was paid by media and media scholars to the game “Second Life”, originally launched in 2003, 6 years earlier than Minecraft. Second Life also allowed the player to interact with the avatars of other players, explore and create houses or products. But the distinctive nature of Minecraft is the lack of realism in this virtual world. Unlike the animated fantasy world of online games such as Second Life, the graphics of Minecraft have extremely low resolution, looking intentionally crude. The virtual world is constructed of cubic blocks, nominally a metre on each side, meaning that the player can make rapid progress felling blocky trees for timber, digging blocky mines for coal, and assembling blocks into houses, farms or larger structures. Unlike the fine textures of realistic virtual worlds in multiplayer online role-playing games, the large blocks of Minecraft seem like giant digital Lego. Players can rapidly collect building materials and tools for ambitious construction projects, or even deploy an inexhaustible supply of digital blocks in a non-competitive creative mode. Lack of realism results in a system that is democratic and generative to a degree not seen in comparably popular games.

The freedom offered to players extends well beyond facility of movement in the virtual world. The Swedish creator of Minecraft, known as Notch (and his company Mojang), have intentionally allowed fans to decrypt and modify the Java language source code of Minecraft itself. A determined player can substitute new pieces of code for any part of the Minecraft system – a practice described as “modding”. Mods are shared among players, allowing individuals to choose more and more mutated versions of the game world – with different tools, materials, plants, animals or monsters, as well as magic powers for the player. For those without sufficient skill to write Java code, it is still possible to change the world by replacing the block surfaces or the appearance of their own avatars with alternative textures. And where players are inclined to tinkering, it is possible to create automated machinery and gadgets in the Minecraft world itself – using redstone (a fictional kind of semiconductor) with switches, pistons – and even virtual computers inside the computer, that can be programmed in their own simple language to make robots do the mining and building on your behalf.

These facilities reconfigure space in the virtual world of Minecraft in surprisingly profound and reflexive ways. Rather than a literalistic re-construction and re-presentation of “virtual reality”, Minecraft offers a democratised spatial poetics – an Open Work, in the sense defined by Umberto Eco. The boundaries between coal and code are permeable to an extent only previously imagined in the dream allegories of Neuromancer and the Matrix. Minecraft players not only inhabit the worlds of each other’s imaginations, and collaborate to redefine the game they are playing, but blur the bounds between the product itself and their own media culture. They share advice on recipes and mods via active support communities and wikis. But even more prolifically, they use screen recorders to make videos of their avatar playing the game, with voice-over narration explaining their constructions and adventures, or giving advice to new players. Minecraft players may spend as much time watching videos of other people playing as they do playing themselves. And the machinima affordances of the Minecraft world lead to players creating their own homages to popular films such as the Hunger Games, with the original narrative re-located into the block world of Minecraft. As with building and modding, the blocky low resolution is liberating to young creators who could never emulate professional animation standards, but probably didn’t want to. Older players gain YouTube followers by using custom mods or additional animation software to create meta-narratives – postmodern commentaries on the genre and its communities – such as the Egg’s Guide to Minecraft series.
At the time of writing, the emergent media ecology of the Minecraft community is racing ahead of critical commentary. This abstract has attempted to set out the scope of reconfiguration between space and action. But the children currently playing Minecraft seem likely to become a new generation holding radically altered expectations of digital space.

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“Sim You Later: at play across virtual and actual space”
Seth Giddings
University of Western England

Current developments in mobile and locative media, and in augmented / mixed reality media (for instance at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol) take the permeability of virtual and actual space as a given. Digital space is thought of not as the worlds within worlds of virtual reality or cyberspace as imagined in 1990s, but rather as ‘content’ or experience delivered to – for instance – a smartphone user as they navigate their everyday environments. If the separation or transcendence of the actual lived world was the technological imaginary of virtual reality, then the dissolution of media technology into an augmented everyday is the promise, or dream, of pervasive media.
However the interpenetration or layering of digital and actual space does not dissolve the specific media/technological forms of digital space. Rather we see a mixing or layering of heterogeneous domains, some the quotidian environments of streets, homes and playgrounds, some the intangible domains generated from databases, algorithms and user interfaces, some rendered in the Euclidean geometry of game engines, others in the text-constituted spaces of chat and Twitter. To understand these composite realities, I would argue, we need to pay attention both to the technological nature of digital spaces as software and hardware, and to particular events in which virtual and actual spaces are generated.

The presentation will draw on microethological studies of the play-testing of pervasive media games, and of children’s videogame play across digital and physical gameworlds. Microethology is a theoretical and empirical method of participant observation in intimate events in technoculture. The presentation will suggest key concepts for studying emergent behaviours of, and in, the mixed realities of emergent digital media cultures. It will argue that digital space should be understood in relation to three significant factors:

behaviour – both human and nonhuman;
time – particularly the speculative and iterative time of simulation;
play – both serious and phantasmagorical.