april 2024
e-flux Journal, Issue #144. 2024.
Robert Ashley. "Yes, But Is It Edbile?"
Glass Bead, Site 1. Logic Gate: The Politics of the Artifactual Mind. 2017.
Peli Grietzer.<
march 2024
Jennie Jieun Lee - "Marie" (2022) at Martos Gallery, NYC
Scale in ceramics! Individual and collective memory. interactivity. the sedimentary power that objects collect as they age. The kind of thing I want to be making.
Pram - "Music for your Movies" (1996)
some scrambled thoughts about technology and art making
"with silver nitrate she could make time wait, she could gather all of her hopes and her dreams and make them her destiny"
The inside cover of the booklet and the CD itself both have an image of a film projector and canister. Made me think about making art as a form of worship towards a discipline that you work in/next to. In grad school, the methodologies of art history course wasn't just meant to be training us as art historians (here's how you fold in marxism, etc.), it also acted as a meta-analysis of the kinds of art historians we were becoming. We were in the water and also trying to name it. Looking at the inside cover of this album lead me down a path of thinking about technology too. Film as a tool, projectors, etc.Thinking about the indescribable relationship an artist gets with their tools, instruments, instead of it being one using the other it can feel symbiotic. Discipline becomes ourobourian, references and inscriptions and signals. And if AI is a new tool, a new technology, will it bring the conciousness of this kind of relationship to the general population? Will people who otherwise wouldn't forge these kinds of concious collaborations with technology begin to understand the ways that tools can be as much apart of the process as you are, since AI is more acutely replicating human speech/communication than any other "tool" we've had before. Still not entirely convinced it's going to be any kind of full replacement for art-making (and anyone that thinks this I don't really trust tbh), but I do wonder if this understanding of discipline, history, and technology of a field that I learned in grad school will become something that people experience as AI seeps its way into our lives, art-making and otherwise?
e-flux Journal, Issue #143
Charles Tonderai Mudede. "Will AI Remember the Days of Slavery?"
Forgetting versus erasing. Human memory keeping versus echnological memory keeping. How to even track human forgetting? Sediments and erosions.
Luis Camnitzer "Let's Call It Art!"
Astrida Neimanis "The Sea and the Breathing". e-flux Architecture, Oceans in Transformation.
Notes: The ocean as an archive, residence time (the time it takes for something to entre and then leave the ocean) and currents/weather as the custodians of what's archived. humans as weathermakers - weather as something that leaves imprints on our bodies ("...our bodies bear the impressions of the weather-world"). Christina Sharpe (Biennale Art 2022, What Could a Vessel Be?) and anti-blackness as something as simultaneously intangible and obvious as weather. Also making and un-making of worlds (systems = worlds? colonization as a simultaneous beginning and ending of worlds - thinking about the sieve affect of art and culture through occupation and subjugation). Extremely relevant to Jennifer Gabrys for Reading Group meeting 5.
february 2024
Jeremy Shaw, Phase Shifting Index, MAC Montreal.
From MAC Montreal:"A vast, immersive, seven-channel video installation—the culmination of Shaw’s work of the last few years—Phase Shifting Index is an exhilarating, para-scientific reverie of enormous intellectual and artistic ambition. In what seems to be an anthropological assessment from a distant future, a narrator retrospectively comments on the emergence of baffling new realities on seven screens that display what appear to be archival documents of various movement-based groups dating from the 1960s to the 1990s, captured in their corresponding twentieth-century media formats, from 16-mm film to VHS and Hi 8 video. The cathartic and ritualized movements performed on each of the independent but simultaneously playing screens, which can be experienced either individually or more collectively from a raised platform, suggest unique cultures, with belief systems formed around their aspirations of inducing parallel realities through movement. Shaw subverts viewers’ trust in the truthfulness conferred by documentary strategies, transporting the audience to uncharted artistic and sensorial territory, while exploring how altered states and embodied corporeal practices also transform the perception of time. The work seems to explore the gap between the timeless notion of transcendence and the scientific attempts to explain, locate and define it. Beautifully combining staged documentary, choreography, evocations of spiritual practices, neuroscientific research, drug-induced psychedelic revelations, club subcultures, visual effects, music and alternative movement therapies, the screens conspire in an intriguing narrative that unfolds skillfully and inexorably into thrilling chaos. The artwork culminates in an inevitable, yet surprising, “transtemporal” synchronized collective ecstasy—with all the subjects on all the screens performing the same hypnotic dance. A breathtaking glimpse of rapture."