How might queer theory and practices inflect/torture/distort or otherwise improve ‘relational aesthetics’? Is the relational aesthetics meme often complicit, if accidentally, with heteronormativity? How does queer practice and theory politically develop the space of the democratic ‘violence of
participation”? A paranoid concern launches our topic — may cliches of relationality mitiigate against excess, ephemera, and the variable and uncontrollable power of the engaged artist/writer? Asking what is a queer space of participation, the list itself enacts its own making for an intersubjective ‘queer’ text. A hypertext and linear edit of the conversation will be published in 2010 and presented in the Queer Caucus for Art panel at College Art Association, Chicago 2010.

July 11: 1:00 pm — Aram Bartholl’s WoW workshop will be held the day before his lecture. Bartholl will extend the project shown in the exhibition out onto the streets of Laguna Beach. Everyone is welcome to participate and enjoy an afternoon of art making and have the opportunity to be involved in a collaborative performance. The workshop and performance will be documented on video, and the edited version will be shown in the exhibition.

Space for this workshop is limited! Contact Jackie at jbunge@lagunaartmuseum.com or 949.494.8971 x 207 to reserve your spot in the workshop!

July 12; 1:00 pm :: Aram Bartholl, based in Berlin, is interested in the way network data manifests into the everyday world. Bartholl investigates this in the physical space through performance, installation, and video. With World of Warcraft, Bartholl investigates this manifestation through the one of the most popular online role-playing games.

WoW from aram bartholl on Vimeo.

Be part of the cast in an interactive film epic where expectations are challenged and realities are remade. Wondermare is based on the notion that much of the behavioral conditioning programmed in our subconscious is the unhealthy byproduct of a world out of balance, a “house of cards” on the brink of catastrophe; the truth of which is obscured from us by our own myopic pursuits and illusions.

The exhibition uses as its setting the story of Alice in Wonderland precisely because it contains anecdotes about the rites of passage into adulthood. The tale consistently resists an easily defined linear structure and at the same time confronts the confusing and often nonsensical rituals that we must travel through in order to obtain a civilized or adult persona in the world we see through our looking glass.

Wondermare will seek to unravel these narrative notions by asking you, the gallery visitor, to become a participant in your own story. We ask you to “pick a card,” and answer a question against a live camera in front of a green screen. The green screen will allow us, in a final edit, to place you anywhere and against any backdrop. The narrative of the story will no longer stay fixed and instead a new plot will be enabled as you become the star and a new film emerges from each interaction.

As you become part of this video installation, Wondermare will ask you to reexamine and redefine your relationship to the world and the stories you have spun, internally and externally. Immersed in an eight-screen video landscape, you will feel compelled to address the parts of yourself that are hidden, repressed and denied. As an interactive exhibition, the show creates the opportunity for a psychological rebooting or do over, where you will have another chance at addressing your own rights of cultural passage that you may or may not have gotten right the first time around.

It is time to fall down a rabbit hole, to play a new role and forge a commitment to a different reality.

Welcome to Wondermare.

Participating Artists: Sophy Bot, Ken Cypert, Sean Dineen, Tegan Flanders, Mimi Fontana & Manhattan Tribal, Adrian Harpham, The Highline Erotic Arts Gallery & their beautiful team, Natali Jones, SH Lace, Vivien Lewit, Kelly Lincoln, Ian Phillips, Alberto Pinto, Charlie Reis, Joseph Teichman, Ronny Wasserstrom, Martha Williams (The Movement Movement), Dred Williams.

Curated by Susan McIntosh and Albert Wilking

Special thank you to Rick Raguso who put countless hours into making Wondermare a reality, and Phyllis Bickham, for her tireless camera work and enthusiasm.

Nadav Assor: “I am greatly interested in theories and explorations of urban architectural, emotional and ideological sub-structures. One tactic I use in exposing and reshaping the structures around me is digitization, in the sense of reduction to a primal, reconfigurable matter. The transformed digital matter is recast into its original context, physically manipulated in an ongoing live process that ranges from the absurd to the violent. The outcome often presents various transgressions or inversions of the technological, socio-political structures that served as a starting point. Many of the mechanisms inherent in my work require palpable, physical effort or struggle to manipulate, thus exposing the constant friction between body and media. I do not want my devices to ‘run smoothly’.

My work has been shown in Berlin, Chicago, and in many Israeli venues, including several showings at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the C.Sides International electronic media festival, the Laptopia festival, the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv, The Haifa and Bat Yam Museums and more. I have received a 2006 Leumi (the Israeli national bank) award for excellence in the arts.
I am currently pursuing my MFA with full fellowship in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”

Maria Bolivar was born in Caracas, Venezuela. She was significantly influenced by her father, Cesar Bolivar, who is a well-known film director in Latin America. After attending the most important design academy in Venezuela: El Instituto de Diseño de Caracas, Maria spent three years as a professional designer. Due to the violence and her involvement in the 2002 National Strike in Venezuela, Maria was forced to come to Milwaukee where she received her BFA in communication design from the Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) in 2006. Maria is currently pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee with an intermedia focus.

CUP’s office is now located in a potential SUPERFUND SITE. Superfund is a federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites in the country. There are over 1,331 final and proposed sites on the National Priorities List (NPL), and thousands more wait for approval. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed adding the Gowanus Canal to this list.

Please join CUP, and Urban Omnibus for a different kind of Superfund discussion. Artist Brooke Singer, advocate Anne Rabe, and historian Sarah Vogel will discuss the history of the Superfund program, the politics of designation, and the changing legal definitions of toxins, risk, and responsibility. Local experts will also give updates on the status of the Gowanus’ designation.

Anne Rabe is the BE SAFE campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice. Anne has 25 years of organizing experience on environmental and social justice issues. From 1990 to 2003, she was director and co-founder of Citizens’ Environmental Coalition, a statewide grassroots organization in New York State helping communities harmed by toxic pollution and organizing campaigns on State Superfund, radioactive waste disposal, Kodak’s dioxin pollution, and other issues. She has received eight state and national awards for her work.

Brooke Singer is a media artist who lives in New York City. Her work blurs the borders between science, technology, politics, and arts practices. She works across media to provide entry into important social issues that are often characterized as specialized or opaque to the general public. She is currently Assistant Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and co-founder of the art, technology, and activist group Preemptive Media. She recently created Superfund365, an online data visualization and communication tool that highlights 365 of the worst toxic sites across the U.S..

Sarah Vogel is currently the Program Officer for the Environmental Health program at the Johnson Family Foundation. She received her PhD from Columbia University’s Department of Sociomedical Sciences. Her dissertation, The Politics of Plastics: The Molecular Biography of Bisphenol A, tells the history of the science and politics of this chemical, used in plastics production since the 1950s, known to have estrogen-like properties, and now found in the vast majority of American bodies. Her research and writing considers the question of how we all became a little plastic and the changing meaning of chemical risks and safety over time.

The People and Buildings series is made possible with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and by the New York Council on the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I am performing a durational/relational piece about Social Media asking, “What is Love?” After seeing an ad campaign by Macy’s with pure-looking hippie girls selling the “Summer of Love”, and the YouTube video talking about 2.0, I’ve come to wonder about what love has become since 1967. Has it merely become a marketing tool for collectivized individuality, or can we still love one another? The concept of togetherness in the age of networked society is complex, but perhaps we can derive meaning from looking at the differences between 1967 and 2009.

For seven days, I am going to make my life transparent to the Social Nets, in the loving (?) sense of Marina Abramovic’s The House with the Ocean View or Hasan Elahi’s sousveillance work. During this time, I will try to have a channel open at all times, inviting people to have a “virtual be-in” with me, and stage small happenings in the gallery.

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? Why on earth would anybody do piece rate jobs over the Internet for a nickel a pop? Are the results of AMT work any good? Isn’t it true that distributed labor markets will bring about the end of civilization as we know it? How can I use Mechanical Turk to acquire friends, riches, and wisdom?

Amazon Mechnical Turk (or AMT) presents an especially dynamic and controversial example of Crowdsourcing. An online labor market that makes it possible for employers to offer micro-payments to a geographically distributed pool of “Turkers” in exchange for work on “Human Intelligence Tasks” (called HITs), AMT has successfully created possibilities for distributed labor of all kinds. At the same time, AMT raises tough questions about the ethics of “human computing,” outsourcing, information workers’ rights, and the value of human intelligence.

In this week’s installment of the Berkman Center luncheon series Aaron Shaw will discuss who’s using AMT, its implications for social scientists, the future of labor markets, and life on the Internet as we know it. Along the way, he’ll present research-in-progress from the Berkman Center’s own Online Cooperation Research and their ongoing study of cooperative human systems.

Aaron Shaw is a Research Fellow with the Cooperation Research Group at the Berkman Center and a Ph.D student in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkman, Aaron has helped design, implement, and manage the online cooperation studies project. His ongoing dissertation examines the institutional foundations of collaborative communities online. In previous research, Aaron has written about the politics of development and Free and Open Source Software in Brazil, where he has conducted fieldwork and interviews during the past two years. His other interests include the networked public sphere, global governance and development, the knowledge-based economy, distributed research methods, and social theory.

The word ‘nula’ means ‘zero’ or ‘nothing’ in several languages; notably Czech, which I point out only because I am based in Prague. The esthetic impulse behind Nula emphasizes “showing” or “alluding” rather than “expressing”.

Nula resists using copious wordage to describe or explain the items you will find. We prefer that these items speak for themselves as much as possible, and that the audience will arrive at their own understanding of them, should they choose to give their attention.

We intend to explore different conceptions of the publicness — historical, cultural, political, social, architectural and digital. We aim to develop a shared ethic towards the notion of public goods and will not be deterred by the disagreeable, contentious, messy, inefficient, live, improvisatory and provisional nature of Being in Public. Public, common or shared resources are like muscles, they become stronger with exercise.

PubliCamp will use a barcamp structure, something we have experimented with before. BarCamps are an international network of user generated unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

They work like this: presentations (which might aggregate into themed sessions) are proposed in advance (see sign-up sheet below) or on on-the-day by attendees. We then try and build themed ’sessions’ or groups of related presentations using white/flip boards, and mostly on-site. All attendees are encouraged to present and share their expertise. At the moment we are thinking of 10 minute presentations, with 10 minutes for questions/discussion. We try and keep lots of notes and everyone is encouraged to share information and experiences of the event, both live and after the fact, via blogging, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wiki-ing, twitter, etc.

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new.media.art: .Amy Franceschini / Futurefarmers interview .Beatriz da Costa interview .HeHe interview .Transmediale report. news: X-Train, Dead Pixel in Google Earth, TimeStopper . Suffering Machine, Thumbarumba. reviews. books/dvds/floppys: White Heat Cold Logic, Optical Vacuum, New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, Synthetic Times: Media Art China, nkdlunch.mp4, tapetrff.mp4 .centerfold: ‘Common Flowers’ by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel.

e.music: .Jacob Kirkegaard interview .The Owl Project interview news: MusMusopen, Decryptopattern, Sound Chaser, Strobovj, Felix’s Machines. reviews: books/dvds/floppys: The Movement of People Working, Nocturne, Trax Rednight/Notterossa, Explicit Content Only, Harmonic Ratio. cd: AtomTM, Shinkei / Luigi Turra, Pioneers-The Beginning Electronic Music, Domenico Sciajno, Yaco, Monoton, DNE, Phroq, Rhythm, Muslimgauze, Ibitsu, Michael Peters, Israel M, Mikhail, Source Records 1-6 Music Of The Avant Garde 1968-1971, Pato Thanos Chrysakis, The Smiling Buddhas, Frank Rothkamm, Nicolas Bernier).

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