Posts filed under 'Uncategorized'
It’s been a while between posts (here and my own research blog). Excuse No. 1: I blame the phd. I have simply been too stuck in my phd to do much else. There is a certain style of thesis writing that just doesn’t translate to blogging, for me anyway, and although I like to think of myself as being able to communicate with a variety of audiences in a variety of ways, simultaneously (cue picture of spinning plates) (no, on seconds thoughts, don’t)….. and please, the thought of not being able to speak in anything but thesis at the pub is too depressing for words (not that I go to the pub anymore)…… i’ve been a bit too distracted to come up with witty, interesting, bloggy things to post here, which seems ironic, considering my thesis is finally taking interesting shape. Excuse No.2: I also haven’t been doing much outside of school work. But i miss the blog and it misses me, so i’m back and I will twist other people’s arms to join me.
May 20th, 2008
27/11/07
I am back in Helsinki. This visit is mainly dedicated to the following exhibition of Hanna Haaslahti’s, Tuomo Tammenpää’s and Heidi Tikka‘s work, at the FORUMBOX Gallery, opening on the 29th of November and on until the 29th of December.
After a preliminary visit only two weeks ago – which had been packed full with interviews and events – this visit is much more channeled and concentrated. I spend my days within the walls of the gallery, trying to juggle between being a visual researcher: documenting sounds and images; that of the classic ethnographer: noting down observations, asking questions and recording conversations; trying to come up with a concept to creatively find a way of capturing visitors’ feedback, while, above all, wanting to be a helping hand in the setting up of the exhibition.
An intense period filled with physical construction, potential hick ups, delicate situations and some long winding crucial decision-making process stretches over three whole days. I spend the first two days recording, thinking carefully about relevance, discovering interesting moments, capturing dialogue (if not in Finnish..) between the three artists , between both Heidi and Hanna and their technical collaborators, and between the artists and their work that slowly takes shape within the huge space. It feels like a constant ebb and flow. All three have times of thinking, starring, observing, building and tweaking (the most significant of all it seems – working with unstable, complex and unpredictable technologies…)
Heidi – Hanna – Tuomo
29/11/07
The day of the opening I spend setting up a corner by the entrance to the gallery with a few ‘tools’ I brought with me. Despite initial doubt on part of the gallery director Tanja Saarto – saying that visitors (Finns) might be too reserved or shy to engage – the response, to her own surprise, is rather good. Visitors (in total probably about one hundred) are invited to take a disposable camera (to capture their own details of interest) and maps (to be marked with colour coded impressions/experiences, in response to the individual pieces in the gallery) as they explore the space.
A brief conversation with Tanja Saarto gives me the impression that the opening is definitely a success. She is surprised at how many people within the art scene are positively intrigued and complementary towards this fairly new adventure for the gallery into new media art. I myself am so involved in visually capturing the atmosphere of the opening and engaging with visitors gathering around the ‘feedback corner’, that I miss the opportunity to speak to a seemingly important art critic – whom I later briefly see curiously wondering around Tuomo’s piece with a pen and paper.
The opening happens to coincide with the opening of another New Media exhibition at MUU gallery of Andy Best & Merja Puustinen’s work. Both parties strangely end up in the same restaurant a few blocks down for dinner, which I guess is not surprising considering the after all rather small New Media Art scene in Helsinki.
(During dinner, someone pulls out his Nokia phone – a rather old model - to show us the noise level in the restaurant – what a great but strange thing to be able to measure, making sure you don’t spend too much time sound-polluting your ears) 
I meet Andy Best the next day at the gallery, adjusting, repairing and ‘tweaking’ his robots. We spend a few hours talking about the theoretical context of their installation and the way both, him and his partner Merja, are managing to juggle between producing new work, teaching and the family. Merja seems to be the one mainly involved in the funding side of things, so I later find out that this exhibition is supported by AVEK (one of the main funding bodies of New Media Art in Finland – whose funds curiously mostly originate from a special tax deriving from blank videos/DVD’s ) and the Finnish Arts Council.
1/12/07
I take part in Tuomo’s workshop organized by Pixelache University at FORUMBOX Gallery. Well prepared and patient, Tuomo shows a group of 6 how to mount and weld a simple ‘electronic music circuit board’ (the gallery attendants probably called them ‘noise tools’). With great enthusiasm I manage to make one myself, only to drop out once it comes to the final tweaking – making sure it actually keeps on working..
As I start taking down my bits in the gallery, looking through some of the ‘experience maps’, I see that a lot of dots marked ‘sad’ have ended up at Tuomo’s installation on the map. Only then do I notice a little sign next to two or three of his toys reading ‘they did not survive’. It reminds me of our initial conversation about whether, or what kind of media art ‘works’ in a gallery space, and what happens if not. Openly declaring a failure with this little sign seems to perfectly communicate the risk and instability involved in using complex technology in this context – but this then being ‘sad’ – not frustrating.
Frustration seems to undermine some of the thoughts Heidi has about her installation when I speak to her briefly that afternoon. The ideal scenario in terms of visitors’ engagement with the two wearable jackets (sewn in CCTV cameras and screens are placed in relation to each other) is for several people to be present at the same time, or of course for her to be there in person. The atmosphere at the opening encouraged a form of interaction with the piece that maybe is impossible to achieve outside some kind of ‘event’ structure? Audience instead of visitor? Does it need a different kind of public scenario? The question of context, audience and interactivity hovers above me as I sadly say goodbye to Helsinki the next day.
December 11th, 2007
Oh, I’m also going to be in Philadelphia in early October at the American Studies Association annual conference, doing something like this. Anyone else going to be there? Anyone want to come? America was once British.
I hate the genre of the paper abstract. When am I going to figure out how to write one that I like?
September 10th, 2007
I ran into this the other day (thanks Lauren): Josephine Berry Slater’s Phd thesis on net art. It’s good. One of the best things I’ve read on media arts. She frames her discussion with the concept of site-specificity. And if you want to know what else is going on these days with that concept, look here. Kwon’s book, and Slater’s thesis, do the brick by brick historical and conceptual work you want them to do, but then open the concept up to address new work and new conditions. Useful. I didn’t mean that to come out sounding like a book review.
September 10th, 2007
Say what you will about our fast food and fast justice…we do our PhDs slow here in the U.S. Which is why, three years in, I’ve just now written my very first attempt to semi-formally describe my dissertation. It’s the product of a morning’s blurt, and has all sorts of boundary issues; you’ll see. I wrote it for my dissertation proposal writing seminar. Now THERE’S a measure of how slow we are: it’s an entire quarter-long course NOT for helping us write our dissertations, BUT for helping us write the proposals for our dissertations. You can’t see tectonic plates shifting…but you can feel them. Anyway, here it is, fully and polymorphously provisional:
Kris Cohen
Dissertation Proposal Draft
4.6.07
If images provoke conviction, disgust, outrage, melancholy, or, oppositely, numbness and apathy, then we can say that they are spaces of belonging: imagined, virtual, and actual spaces to which we feel that we belong or are excluded from belonging. Belonging, here, names the affect of being drawn in or being repulsed by what we find in the image. It is a kind of encounter, even if it’s a missed encounter. For instance, we encounter other viewers through the image; viewer becomes viewers becomes audience, and possibly, over the time of dispersed and unpredictable meetings, we can say that a political or intimate or counter public has been constituted: a relation among strangers. Recent aesthetic and vernacular practices seem to literalize these potentials, as evidenced by new critical work on “relational aesthetics” (N. Bourriaud), “the media public sphere” (D. Joselit), “participation” (C. Bishop), “conversation pieces” (G. Kester), “new genre public art” (S. Lacy), “the logic of the lure” (J.P. Ricco), or “un-sited community” (M. Kwon). These formulations, like much that seems new, also resonate with older art historical and art critical concepts like absorption (M. Fried), the third meaning (R. Barthes), the broken calligram (M. Foucault), perspective as symbolic form (Panofsky), and kunstwollen (A. Riegl). I signal this continuity—the way that it is possible to imagine a continuous, if polymorphous, history of images as spaces of belonging—through the figure of the caption, where a caption is understood as a slender space of potential opened up next to an image. In this sense, captions can be understood conventionally (that which explains or is explained by the image), but also figuratively, more like what Benjamin registered when he said that in the 20th century “[f]or the first time, captions have become obligatory.” Benjamin meant that all images in the age of technological reproducibility require instructions for use, but to say so does not restrict who can write captions, what they might be made to say, or what might happen in the wake of their inscription. Working through cases which connect the late 19th c. to the early 21st (from The Voiceless Speech, a 19th c. Suffragist contrivance, to www.flickr.com and networked art) this dissertation aims to write a short history of the politics of belonging to images, where the caption is the concept given to a space of potential which can be opened up next to images, and where the horizon of analysis is the affective and political life of images in the present.
April 7th, 2007
Previous Posts