Keep your cell phones on. The movie is about to start. (Cinema Squared position statement)

What I enjoyed the most about this project was the simple twists. As artists we are always looking for ways to create spectacle for people, but the programmer part of us either wants it to be either radically complex or subversively simple. I went with a hybrid of taking the push towards folding and geometries into a single fold and a few cuts to get my audience straight into the concept of creating a social space. What I enjoy best about the social space I've constructed is that it has layers of use. There is the makers, the users, and the audience. Social in all aspects. The makers are a part of the instructable diy community and share projects everyday, the project pretty much requires two users and can engage them into a social space that allows for more serious conversations about optical qualities, light, beauty and more -- and lastly the audience (if the users can find one) will collectively enjoy the other side of the looking glass - that is the magic portrayed on the screen.

Out of concern that it may over-construct the experience or over shape it, I have opted to avoid the original plan for the web site/blog. I will only utilize the instructables site because I feel that is the best way to not become the architect of the experience, and instead just lay the foundation for users to create their own experience with the project.

Better than a barrel full of sea monkeys! The project relies on projection but modern signifier of quality do not apply. Resolution, size, etc are all construct of consumerism in media and this project aims to put back storytelling into the picture and often takes the shape of the fire on the wall or the storyteller in the village standing by the fire weaving a good one as you sit there in a late evening haze.

Baldwin - Cocoon/Travelling Space Response

I'm really excited bout the exploration of eh space between creating work and the path it goes down - this is something Ive done in some of my own work, tracking down through a stats panel the sites that post articles on the mobile garden and checking them out to see: how it was framed; how it was viewed by their readers through comments, discussions, retweets, etc; what the overall reach was, at least electronically.

"We seek to understand spacing activities behind the travels and view the travels from a spatial
perspective focusing on the relation between transportation and transformation,
of emptiness, form and content."

This exciting role of logistics manager/coordinator/tracker is something on the nexus of new media, a conceptual new media in my opinoin - in like with what Duchamp did to traditional arts - this can do for new media and other current media work. It is not also exciting but one of teh economically viable ways of producing work. The focus isn't on the chair, if it goes well with other furniture, or if someone breaks their neck sitting on it - but the attention around and about it and what the work generates in terms of response, critical and whimsical.

The authors as "how did this happen?"

It had to happen, as many movements have democratized art production and appreciation, there is then a failure of agency. The power dynamics of exhibition and representation also drop out when this democratization happens. The artist find themselves ina strange place as maker, diacourse, historian (past, present, and future), marketing director, and the person funding the construction of the work, even if conceptual and only the time is labored.

Baldwin - Art u Need Response

Duman state clearly what I believe to be the truth in public art right now

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Indeed creating participatory and temporary works would not only be cheaper and friendly, but also leave the canvas blank for scores of artists to create multiple work upon at later times. Instead of thrusting large expensive sculptures into a public square why not choose the work of local Chicagoan Joshua Dumas, http://summerfireflies.com - work that ring in harmony with the arts, theater, that are fluid sculptures and full of abilities to have meaningful dialogue on current contexts.

Duman nicely makes all of his text safe to the standard copy and paste, making citing his work difficult. Here is a screen grab of the section quoted:


In this act Duman portrays not only the artist trying to make a public work, as in the Breaking Ground Research Papers document, but also becomes the institution and corporation trying to protect or obscure what is rightfully his - and if not he then the publisher of the document, yielding to guilt by association.

Duman's conclusion of the "current cultural climate... the amnesiac and sealed conditions into which most activity of public art seem to take place" hits the head on the nail as he might put it. While many artists would love for every detail to fall under "poetic serendipity", I have found that engaging in public works is taking on a serious shopping list of additional concerns, but also a challenge to hold tight to that serendipity with an added sense of focus that take into account real concerns worthy of my time.

week 4 baldwin

In talking about “The influence of Non-places in the Concept of Latin America” Navas starts out connecting the ideas of ‘think global, act local’ related to geographic and political differences as they relate to appropriation and technology. Navas touches onto the ideas of Augé’ on non-space. I particularly enjoy the idea of Las Vegas being the simulacra of the world -- I’d like to relate this to the book I’m reading currently Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne:

These new buildings may not be beautiful. They may not even be utoptian, as some architectural scholars and theories of modernism might have hoped, but they are cheap, functional, and they don’t remind people of anything that went before... The new generations will shrug off the weight of countless millennia and symbolically declare themselves free. (pg 79, Bicycle Diaries, Byrne)

Next Navas emails the historical idea of non-places to himself elevating the internet as a place that can also contain non-places to introduce and inform the reader on his curatorial practice and further expand upon the idea of non-place.

Navas then goes into the geopolitical differences, and glocality, and discusses the intent behind his curatorial practice -- “Transitio_MX, Maquilápolis is included to expose the production that goes behind the realization of non-places, and to reflect on how the industry of the maquiladoras supports the global economy.” Maquilapolis opens with a display of borders between Mexico and the U.S. and folding back in non place I think back to Byrne’s ideas that these kind of spaces, both the city structure and these workplaces can take on a the identity of “spaces that need not be visited, but named” as Augé describes non-place.

I feel that corporations have taken on a sense of non-place and this is to their benefit. It takes a spectacle of the yes men, or other mature hacks, to change these spaces into something new that the lens of society can then look at as something new and old as well, but able to scrutinize.
The text is strong in that it clearly lays out it’s idea of non-place juxtaposed to a curatorial practice but I feel that the segments could be tightened up some. I think the ubiquity of non places can lead to difficult space to navigate in and Navas curates works nicely out of it.

Week 3 - Response 2 - Slow & Feral

Feral robots - I find an instant personal connection to ideas of public and sharing -- this leads to the describing of proboscis, in what sounds great - with the likes of public, sharing, knowledge, memories and then it stumbles into “our” with it’s description of various devices. This at first seems almost like a proprietary claim but with further reading it feels more like the articles embracing the community that has developed a set of great tools. What I find frustrating about this text and others like it is the alienization of the public from the public, that is to say that there is anything else than public authoring. What is ever truly public and what isn’t private? The only activities that unite us under the flag of public are really the human physical and biological musts of life and everything else un-arguably falls into a private, no matter how big, realm. But let’s say that robotics does become truly public, from the CEO of financial firms to the fry cook at McDonalds -- what then? Does democratization cause no harms? Overall the publishers design and intent of the article certainly provokes comment and debate, but I don’t know if it’s any more or less useful than the public sharing of robotics and authoring.

Slow Design - What I see missing from a lot of this weeks text is a connection to the very people that activist and tactical art proposes to save from huge corporations and evil sub-governments - that is to say that it speaks to very finite audiences of technological, aesthetic, urban studies, and typically an affluent educated class and by affluent I would refer to people without the time, capacity or desire to engage in even a beginning conversation to start to understand what it means to care about “reveal” and “expand” when their hopes and desires are already crushed on a regular basis. On both of these texts I feel that they both read as clubs I have to join, another thing I would have to maintain or a password for my firefox to have to remember --

Week 3 - Response 1 - How Situated Advocacy Works

How Stuff is Made - is an hopeful exciting resource of “manufacturing processes and labor conditions involved in the production of contemporary products.” This is first exciting because it exposes both consumers and corporations to a community which will not police but observe and be informed. This will create a community of both more responsible corporations (or better at hiding injustices) and a more aware public (or more dependent upon this community to do the job for them). The site is easy enough to navigate but indistinguishable as to if it is a proposal for said site or the site itself. It does have a strength in connecting to works like yes men and similar works, but the danger is in protecting the information collectors. I think it resembles a cross of the better business bureau and wikipedia - which is a nice place to begin.

http://www.bbb.org/

Personally I would like to see this site on it’s own feet apart from a university server.

Situated Advocacy - I get an immediate vibe of what can be measured can be managed, and to tie it into the How Stuff is Made site. While it predicts a conversation it projects juxtaposition. I enjoy the images, some that read like serious examinations (the two genetically identical trees) and other that read like playful studies of the environment they arrive from (Dr. Jerimijenko examining purposefully the relevant data).

Can I Picket? Yes you can!

Please load the following url into your browser and press play before proceeding:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrlJX7DzLhI&feature=related

Images:

Unmanipulated Files: "IMGP5908-5956.jpg"
Manipulated Project Files: "MoreJobCuts.pdf, HotChic.pdf, GayGrandma.pdf"
Manipulated Files: "MoreJobCuts.jpg, HotChic1-5.jpg, GayGRandman1-5.jpg"
Location: https://www.dropbox.com/home/Photos/AD508

Videos:

File: "PhotoManip.mov, yesmenintro.mov"
Location: https://www.dropbox.com/home/Photos/AD508

PDF of Strategic/Tactical:

File: "CanIPicket.pdf"
Location: https://www.dropbox.com/home/Photos/AD508

Baldwin Response Article 2

Response to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

This response is classified and may not be shared with parties outside of the University of Illinois AD509 Spring Semester Rooster led by Professor Sabrina Raaf.

Any responses may be used for further research, quoted, and/or reprinted without permission from the authors.

The Engaging Ambivalence article immediately draws up fond memories of the film The Last Starfighter:

This is the story of a videogaming boy, named Alex Rogan who lives in a remote trailer court where his mother is manager and everyone is like a big extended family. Meanwhile, Alex becomes the top player of Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game where the player defends "the frontier" from "Xur and the Kodan armada" in a space battle. After achieving his best score, he is approached by the game's inventor, Centauri. Stepping into Centauri's vehicle, he is seemingly doomed to stay at his trailer park home all in his life, he finds himself recruited as a gunner for an alien defense force when Centauri is a disguised alien who whisks him off to another planet. Written by Anthony Pereyra {hypersonic91@yahoo.com} (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/plotsummary)

But after years of playing video games, the NRA never called me up for my Duck Hunt abilities, nor did the Association of Italian Plumbers look me up for my turtle bopping skills to seek a princess. Then again, here I sit, punching buttons over and over again...

I think the author tries to make a calm connection between military to academic and corporate research labs but fails in my eyes and the writing ends up as bait for a would be conspiracy theorist. What I feel the article succeeds at is inspiring to think of a better design. It points to the somewhat forgotten but obvious fact that someone can take what we do and make bad things happen with it (i.e. in the movie Real Genius, engineering students build a laser that is secretly being built for the government which ends up being reversed into being the worlds biggest popcorn maker).

The end goal then becomes the responsibility of the artist to find ways to protect the interest and scope of the work while making work that has little room to be adapted into military functions, or even functions the artist does no desire to be implied upon them. Or as Jasper Johns said:

Publicly a work becomes not just intention, but the way it is used. If an artist makes something — or if you make chewing gum and everybody ends up using it as glue, whoever made it is given the responsibility of making glue, even if what he really intends is chewing gum.

So in agreement with Johns it falls on the artist to make sure that what they are making is equal to their intention of what was to be made.