Posted on June 13th, 2011 in project news and tagged action mill, art, curating, manifesta8
Friends and collaborators Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk) recently asked me to contribute a short text for their publication project, The Exorcist, a journal that was created for Play Van Abbe, a multi-year exhibition series at Van Abbemuseum in The Netherlands. I was asked to write a reflection on Backbench, which was one of the projects that Bassam El Baroni and I initiated for our part of Manifesta 8. In the end, the project called Backbench that was presented in our exhibition was quite different from how we originally conceived it—and the beautifully designed and captured dramatization (film by Ergin Cavusoglu, set architecture by nOffice) of the actual interactions that comprised Backbench do not convey the full intensity and rawness of the experience. It still stings quite a bit to remember what happened a year ago. My short narrative included in The Exorcist (themed around “Negotiation”) is the only, and thus oblique, response I could manage.
A PDF of the journal is available for download here.
Image courtesy of Metahaven
Posted on May 22nd, 2010 in musings and tagged action mill, anthropology, research, theory, value
‘Value’ is one of those terms—like ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’—that I feel I hear more and more in our contemporary lexicon, and as a term that is used often enough and in several different contexts, its invocation is somewhat vague and its meaning even less clear. But like ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’ and any number of other fashionable terms we might come across in political speeches or keynote addresses or advertisements, it is this lack of definition that makes the word ‘value’ and its attendant concept all the more compelling as a subject for consideration. For example (drawn from my experience), we in The Action Mill, the design studio I work with, describe earnestly the value that we provide to our clients and partners (and even the more amorphous public good) through the work that we do. This comes in part from the general feeling that 1) we are doing important work that pushes progressive social change and promotes nonviolent strategy, and 2) our work can be measured in terms of things like maximization of existing resources, earned (that is, free) media from compelling public actions, and the production of knowledge and social capital. Of course, there is also a point at which all of this ‘value’ has to be reified in monetary terms: we are a business and we charge fees for our services. It is in this last point—the price tag, to be gauche—where the questions around value arise. What determines value? Who determines value? How is value mediated or transferred? What do we talk about when we talk about value?
We won’t be so surprised to discover that there is no aspect of life that is not touched by such questions about value. What I mean is that once the urgency of such questions about value was pointed out to me, then the only surprise I felt was that of the “no shit” variety. In reading David Graeber‘s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2004), I’ve begun to understand how a solid theory of value is essential to penetrating so many pressing sociopolitical, cultural, and economical conditions. As Graeber notes, anthropologists have not been very successful in developing such a theory of value—which is why he takes up the task here—but they do seem best equipped to do so. (We certainly can’t allow the economists to have the final say about value!) Anthropology is a curious field with a curious history filled with curious people studying even more curious peoples doing very curious things. The theory and the jargon are dense, but what comes through with a bit of laborious study are many incredible insights that are obviously about the practices of traditional peoples but also importantly about how we might both understand ourselves (first world westerners) and subsequently imagine other ways of being in the world that deviate from our dominant ideologies and paradigms. Hence, Graeber reviews the literature on how key anthropologists and social theorists have discussed value in order to work toward his own theory.
I’m working my way through the text. I’ve got a ways to go. I’m doubling back and rereading a lot. So this brief post is a placeholder for more focused future writing where I can dig in and make more salient connections to other issues and projects I’m working on (e.g. what is the value in producing a large, expensive international biennial exhibition of contemporary art?!). The most basic definition the book begins with is that social theory has dealt with three different conceptions of value that converge in our present understanding:
1. “values” in the sociological sense: conceptions of what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life
2. “value” in the economic sense: the degree to which objects are desired, particularly, as measured by how much others are willing to give up to get them
3. “value” in the linguistic sense, which goes back to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), and might most simply be glossed as “meaningful difference” (pp. 1-2)
When we talk about value, as in my example above, generally all of these conceptions factor into the meaning of the term. It is Graeber’s task to chart these conceptions and their convergence in what ultimately is a very politically engaged project. (His commitment to theorizing and practicing a radical politics from an anarchist perspective is clear.) There are some real lucid gems in Greaber’s writing. In closing, I’ll drop two adjacent passages here:
The ultimate stakes of politics, according to Turner, is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is. Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that make life worth living. In the end, then, politics is about the meaning of life. Any such project of constructing meanings necessarily involves imagining totalities (since this is the stuff of meaning), even if no such project can ever be completely translated into reality — reality being, by definition, what which is always more complicated than any construction we can put on it.
Any notion of freedom, whether it’s the more individualistic vision of creative consumption, or the notion of free cultural creativity and decentering I have been trying to develop here, demands both resistance against the imposition of any totalizing view of what society or value must be like, but also recognition that some kind of regulating mechanism will have to exist, and therefore, calls for serious thought about what sort will best ensure people are, in fact, free to conceive of value in whatever form they wish. If one does not, at least in the present day and age, one is simply going to end up reproducing the logic of the market without acknowledging it. And if we are going to try to think seriously about alternatives to the vision of “freedom” currently being presented to us—one in which nation-states serve primarily as protectors of corporate property, unelected international institutions regulate an otherwise unbridled “free market” mainly to protect the interests of financiers, and personal freedom becomes limited to personal consumption choices—we had best stop thinking that these matters are going to take care of themselves and start thinking of what a more viable and hopefully less coercive regulating mechanism might actually be like. (pp. 88-89)
Posted on May 15th, 2010 in musings and tagged action, action mill, design, strategy, theory
Strat(egy) to action and vice versa. Meaning that you can craft strategy in order to shape long-term goals and actions, but taking action makes strategy manifest and allows for iteration of that strategy. Action fleshes out nascent meaning! Learning with The Action Mill.
Posted on December 9th, 2009 in collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, art, curating, design, manifesta8
For the last several months, I have been working intensely with Bassam el Baroni of Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum as one of three curatorial collectives developing Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opens in October 2010. As a nomadic event that changes locations, the 2010 biennial will be hosted by the region of Murcia in southeastern Spain, in the cities of Murcia and Cartagena. Our other colleagues are the curatorial teams of Tranzit.org, a networked contemporary art space based in several cities in central Europe, and Chamber of Public Secrets, a media-focused art collaboration based in Denmark. I first worked with Bassam as an artist-in-residence at ACAF in early 2008—see the Place In Place Of: Alexandria project—and it was based on this first interaction with him and other wonderful people at ACAF that he decided to invite me to collaborate on the Manifesta project. With limited conventional curatorial experience, it’s a most curious thing to find myself in the role of curator (whatever that is) for a major international art event. I stress the “conventional” qualifier here to make the point that I am quite well-equipped to deal with the conceptual and organizational challenges of curating our project, and I am fortunate enough to be working with an experienced colleague who more than compensates for my inexperience and shortcomings.
Increasingly, I’ve been drawn into large-scale, complex organizational projects, whether through my own volition or at the invitation of others; and working on Manifesta is probably one of the most elaborate, complicated, complex, and layered projects I’ve yet encountered. My interest in such organizational conundrums began in earnest with community activism around urban planning issues with NABR and Casino Free Philadelphia. Learning the structure of and how to navigate the bureaucratic minefields of community power dynamics and city/state politics has been invaluable, as has observing and managing the organization of people and groups. As a faculty member at the University of the Arts, I’ve also been drafted into a potentially historic strategic planning process determined to envision new models for arts education stretching well into the 21st century (the jury is still out). Again, the complexity in terms of conceptualizing the strategic plan across a diverse institution with literally hundreds of moving parts is daunting but a welcome challenge and learning opportunity. In all cases, I am thrilled to have worked—and continue to work—with a host of very smart and capable colleagues.
With the Manifesta project well underway, I find some interesting parallels between three areas of practice: design, organizing, curating. It remains for me to more fully flesh out the relationships between these, but the similarities between design and organizing (particularly sytems design or tranformational design a la the RED project by the UK’s Design Council) have been on my mind over the past few months based on conversations started in the university and continued with my partners at The Action Mill. This summer in a collaborative, cross-disciplinary design studio, Professor Jonas Milder (Industrial Design grad program) and I worked with several students to develop the outlines of an experimental, post-disciplinary design studio that ran for 6 weeks this fall semester. What I was introduced to through that experience (again, another exercise in complexity) was recent thinking about design that addresses complex problems through participatory processes and intense collaboration across multiple disciplines. In our work at The Action Mill, we’ve been developing our design processes and tools from this model as we work with organizational partners who are rethinking their strategy and the role that direct or symbolic action can play in bringing about social change.
As I stated above, I’m only just realizing how design thinking and organizing intersect with curating—but this notion is evolving as I attempt to apply the former in how we think about and engage with the curatorial process. I plan to deal with this more directly as the project continues and we feel more comfortable discussing the specific details of our work in a public forum.
For now, I’m off to Spain again for the first official preliminary event of Manifesta 8, the Manifesta Coffee Break, which is a sort of symposium during which each curatorial team invites a few theorists, critics, and/or artists to present work and ideas as we begin to establish the conceptual terrain for Manifesta. For our part:
ACAF will concentrate on the recent borrowing of methodologies and discourses from the field of human geography within contemporary art production and theorization. ACAF curators Bassam El Baroni and Jeremy Beaudry will publicly auction off a number of generic prototypical projects that deal with notions of human geography and cultural dialogue in order to expose what the various concepts embedded in human geography offer to artists and curators. Additionally, ACAF presents two lectures by Sherif El Azma and Nida Ghouse on behalf of the Take to the Sea Research Collective (Lina Attalah, Laura Cugusi, Nida Ghouse). The auction, lectures and discussion (moderated by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez) pave the way for an introduction to ACAF’s evolving ‘Theory of Applied Enigmatics’, the philosophical core of their curatorial approach within Manifesta 8.
For the full program announcement, click here.
Posted on August 23rd, 2009 in collaboration, project news and tagged action mill, activism, design, game theory, presentation, social media, uarts
I will be traveling to Belfast on Tuesday to attend ISEA2009, the International Symposium on Electronic Art. I will also be giving a short presentation on the Social Media for Social Change project. As a refresher, SMSC is a design research collaboration between me, three undergraduate students, and members of the Action Mill that is funded by the Philadelphia Applied Research Lab at the University of the Arts. The fundamental question we are asking is: how can we reimagine civil discourse in the context of social media and networked communication? Our objectives are: 1) to learn more about human interaction (online and offline); 2) to create structural changes (as opposed to merely tweaking existing tools); and 3) to build environments that accommodate divergent perspectives, mediate disagreement, and encourage civil debate.
Quite unexpectedly, the deliverable we have produced at the close of this first phase is a haptic board game called The NIMBY Game. Using real-world land use and zoning dilemmas often faced in cities, players must negotiate these in order to collectively plan their city while balancing the pressures of self-inerest and common good. We think it’s quite useful for understanding better structures for civil discourse — and it’s also pretty fun to play. We’d like to release the game as a limited edition multiple once the final glitches are worked out. (As Rob from the Action Mill says, “Board games are the new indy film.” Works for us!)
Anyway, if you’re going to be in Belfast for ISEA and trying to determine which of the myriad presentations and panels to attend, please do come. I present on Saturday, August 29 at 14:30 in a location called “Waterfront Hall Bar I and II” at the University of Ulster. See you then.
UPDATE: Here are the slides of the presentation I gave:
