Spring 2010 Neighborhood Narratives

Who is John Cage?

2010-09-28T09:02:00.001-07:00

And why do I care?

Check out this link.

Who is John Cage?

2010-09-28T09:00:00.001-07:00

And why do I care?

Check out this link.

Final Projects

2010-05-02T16:35:00.001-07:00

Final Projects - Elements

2010-04-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

Things that can be included in your projects. Using many elements and integrating them into an organic whole is the challenge.

Maps, charts, printed guides
Sound
Instructions
More than one location
Mobility as (non)location
Physical activity
Virtual activity
Physical + Virtual activity at the same time
Hand-crafted elements - sewing, drawing, rubbings
Digital Material - video, web sites, radio, GPS
Cell phones
Elimination of one sense (blind-folds, head-phones)
The archeology and/or psycho-geography of the area

Final Projects - more about them

2010-04-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

All of you have picked a place for your final projects. The creative part of the assignment is to design a project/event/happening/performance/encounter in that place that activates the space. To do that, you have to bring together three things: some aspect of the history or dynamic of the place that you have researched, some aspect of your own experience and some experience of the interrelationship of the buildings, events and interactions that make up that space.

Final Projects

2010-04-04T09:57:00.001-07:00

What I would say is most important is the sense of web 2.0 politics - open source, ground up authorship, networked, distributed. So, the integration of the social softwares such as blogger, twitter, Facebook or Ning, de.li.ci.ous, Flickr, Hipcast (or moblogging, podcasting etc.), Google Maps are core to the concepts of the class. If your projects can integrate with any of these applications, you get extra points. If you are doing something outside, but can include a web element, a map, a feature of some kind, extra points. If you can work on the idea of a MIXED REALITY experience - either a mixture of physical and networked experience, or mixed through sensory scrambling, or spatial re-organization etc.

The most effective projects have created experiences that start in one condition and end in another condition. Walking somewhere, putting something(s) somewhere and leaving them there, and that combine several of these concepts into one overall experience.

The idea of permanence vs. mutability, the ephemeral quality of technology as public art.

The idea that art and creativity can collapse multiple meanings into one experience.

Having the public or the class create the content for the project. You create the structure for gathering that content, asking for it, soliciting it, provoking it, creating it.

Semantics

2010-04-04T09:48:00.001-07:00

The linguistic branch of semiotics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics

A partial description here:

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word derives from Greek σημαντικός (semantikous), "significant",[1] from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that from σήμα (sema), "sign, mark, token".[2] In linguistics it is the study of interpretation of signs as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.[3] It has related meanings in several other fields.
Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning in an expression. For example, in the sentence, "John loves a bagel", the word bagel may refer to the object itself, which is its literal meaning or denotation, but it may also refer to many other figurative associations, such as how it meets John's hunger, etc., which may be its connotation. Traditionally, the formal semantic view restricts semantics to its literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics, but this distinction is difficult to defend.[4] The degree to which a theorist subscribes to the literal-figurative distinction decreases as one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.
The word semantic in its modern sense is considered to have first appeared in French as sémantique in Michel Bréal's 1897 book, Essai de sémantique'. In International Scientific Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The discipline of Semantics is distinct from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which is a system for looking at non-immediate, or abstract meanings.

Semiotics

2010-04-04T09:47:00.001-07:00

The full description from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

A partial description here:

Semiotics, semiotic studies, or semiology is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. One of the attempts to formalize the field was most notably led by the Vienna Circle and presented in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in which the authors agreed on breaking out the field, which they called "semiotic", into three branches:

Semantics: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.

Syntactics: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.

Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them. (Also known as General Semantics)

These branches are clearly inspired by Charles W. Morris, especially his Writings on the general theory of signs (The Hague, The Netherlands, Mouton, 1971, orig. 1938).

Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions, for example Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences - such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.

Manifestos

2010-04-04T09:45:00.001-07:00

Some examples, far out and not:

Joseph Beuys, German conceptual artist: http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/jbeuys-manifesto.html

Fluxus manifesto: http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index.html

White Manifesto by Lucio Fontana, "We are continuing the evolution of art."

The Italian Futurists wrote many manifestos. They wrote manifestos on everything from art to clothing. http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/

This show in Chelsea (Oct. 23 - Dec. 20) has some beautiful work which translates Zapatista manifestos into musical scores (each letter of the alphabet which is also a note, becomes that note, and everything else is a pause/silence.) Kent Gallery, 541 West 25th Street http://www.kentgallery.com/index.html

The Dogme95 film-making manifesto that I mentioned in class http://www.dogme95.dk/the_vow/index.htm

You'll love this one: The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, Thomas Marinetti 1905 http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html

The Situationist Manifesto http://www.infopool.org.uk/6003.html

And this is the manifesto that will help you with the entire assignment and final project The Manifesto of Possibilities http://wiki.bbk.ac.uk/Buildingcultures/index.php/Manifesto_of_Possibilities

Final Project Teams

2010-04-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

Variation I - April 19

James + Allan
Steve + Truman
Tawn + Lauren
Briana + Mike
solo: Z

Variation II - April 26

James + Z
all the same
solo: Allan

Henri Lefebvre on space

2010-03-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

Space as a whole enters into the modernized mode of capitalist production: it is utilized to produce surplus value... The urban fabric, with its multiple networks of communication and exchange, is part of a means of production... Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced an abstract space that is a reflection of the world of business on both a national and international level as well as the power of money and the "politique" of the state.

Society of Extras

2010-03-28T19:15:00.000-07:00

again by Bourriaud:

"The society of the spectacle has been defined by Guy Deborg as the historical moment when merchandise achieved "the total occupation of social life," capital having reached "such a degree of accumulation" that it was turned into imagery. Today, we are in the further stage of the spectacular development: the individual has shifted from a passive and purely repetitive status to the minimum activity dictated to him by market forces. So, television consumption is shrinking in favor of video games; thus the spectacular hierarchy encourages "empty monads", i.e programmeless models and politicians; thus everyone sees themselves summoned to be famous for 15 minutes, using TV, game, street poll or news item as a go-between. This is the reign of the "Infamous Man", whom Michel Foucault defined as the anymous and "ordinary" individual suddenly put in the glare of the media spotlights. Here we are summoned to turn into extras of the spectacle, having been regarded as its consumers. This switch can be historically explained; since the surrender of the Soviet bloc, there are no obstacles on capitalism's path to empire. It has a total hold of the social arena, so it can permit itself to stir individuals to frolic about in the free and open spaces that it has staked out. So, after the consumer society, we can see the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place.

Definition of Art according to Nicholas Bourriaud

2010-03-28T19:09:00.001-07:00

Art

1. General term describing a set of objects presented as part of a narative known as art history. This narrative draws up the critical geneology and discusses the issues raised by these objects, by way of three sub-sets: painting, sculpture, architecture.

2. Nowadays, the word "art" seems ot be mo more than a semantic leftover of this narrative, whose more accurate definition would read as follows: Art is an activity consisting in producing relationships with the world with the help of signs, forms, actions and objects.

More from Relational Aesthetics

2010-03-28T18:56:00.001-07:00

The work we are doing in this class "is not about paintings, sculptures or installations, all terms corresponding with cateogories of mastery and types of products, but simple surfaces, volumes and devices, which are dovetailed within strategies of existence." (Bourriaud, 1998, p.100)

The ecosophic fact consists in the ethical-cum-political articulation between the environmentm the social and subjectivity. It is a question of re-forming a lost political territory, lost by being riven by the de-territorializing violence of 'Integrated World Capitalism.'"(Bourriaud, 1998, p.101)

Ecosophy = ecological philosophy

For WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31

2010-03-28T18:51:00.000-07:00

I am expecting to see all the Following and Put Something Here projects. To those who are lagging behind, please catch up. Please have all your projects documented on your blog.

Schedule for the rest of the semester

2010-03-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

March 22

Review Put Something Here
David Gordon presents John Cage
Assignment: John Cage reading

Assigned Reading: Locative Arts
Assignment: Following

March 24

Review Put Something Here for those who have not presented
Sophie Calle/Jean Baudrillard - Please Follow Me
Janet Cardiff - Walks
Review John Cage - live sound and reverse engineering
surveillance, voyeurism
GPS devices available for anyone who wants to use one...
Assignment: Following, Read Jean Baudrillard

March 29

Review Put Something Here: Variation II for those who are doing a second version
Review Following
Assignment: Read Locative Arts

March 31

Filming the class??
Liminal Spaces, Interstice, Creativity and the Public Commons, what have we been doing? Review/discussion/presentation of several Locative Media projects
Maybe outside, weather depending...

April 5

The final project, presentation of ideas; the manifesto

April 7

Maybe no class - Final Project meeting

April 12

Final Project - location confirmation, project development

April 14

Haven't decided yet

April 19

Final Projects: Variation I

April 21

All manifestos due
Assignment: read each other's manifestos and see how they relate to Variation I

April 26

Final Projects: Variation II

April 28

Final Critique and wrap up.

Text "Dolphin"

2010-03-09T05:23:00.001-08:00

NO CLASS MARCH 10

2010-03-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

Next class on Monday March 22. Please be on time and be there!

John Stewart takes on Chatroulette

2010-03-07T21:12:00.000-08:00

John Stewart and Chatroulette

The New York Times Review

2010-03-07T21:10:00.000-08:00

In the naked museum: talking, thinking, encountering.

Considering the void

2010-03-07T21:06:00.000-08:00

Architects and designers were invited to consider the empty space of the Guggenheim as a void and submit variations on projects that could be realized in relationship to the space.

Don't take pictures; No phones

2010-03-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

So, I headed down the ramp and ran into the friend who I texted as she was heading up the ramp. Not realizing what the piece was about, she had blown off the little girl and didn't follow her. So, we went back down and met the little girl and started again. I took more pictures and the guard saw me and was not pleased.

As you head up the ramp, please follow me

2010-03-07T20:17:00.000-08:00

You are greated by a 12 year old girl who says "Please follow me." Following her into a side alcove, she asks, "What does progress mean to you?" Then she talks with you a bit about that while she walks with you and then introduces you to a teen ager, who picks up the conversation. He talks and walks with you as you continue up the ramp and then introduces you to a slightly older adult. Each time (so far) the "interpreter" gives a synopsis of what you have discussed to the next person so that the conversation has some continuity. This interpreter asks you questions and tries to draw you out. Suddenly they disappear behind a post in mid-conversation and you are immediately collected by an older adult, who will then relay a story about something that they are thinking about related to "progress." You are asked to listen and then they introduce you to a much older adult who engages you in a conversation about "progress" and questions your values. By the end of the conversation, you have reached the top of the museum. You can look down and see the couple kissing, and the perspective of the museum. Photography is not allowed. Nor are cell phones. I txted a friend not to miss this and shot some pictures.

The museum is empty of all art objects

2010-03-07T20:13:00.000-08:00

For the first time in its history.

As you enter the museum...

2010-03-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

The first thing you encounter is a couple in a slow motion choreography of kissing. The entire museum has been emptied of all art objects so that all the interaction is in conversation with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. One or the other of the actors sometimes break their focus on each other and gaze off or to the audience and then are brought back into the continous engagement of their bodies.

Speaking of Relational Aesthetics

2010-03-07T19:02:00.000-08:00

A fabulous exhibition at the Guggenheim in NY, Tino Sehgal (b. 1976, London) "constructs situations that defy the traditional context of museum and gallery environments, focusing on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of lived experience rather than on material objects. Sehgal's works nevertheless fulfill all the parameters of a traditional artwork with the exception of inanimate materiality. They are presented continuously during the operating hours of the museum, they can be bought and sold, and by virtue of being repeatable, they can persist over time." (Guggenheim catalogue 2010)

Sehgal's practice has been shaped by his studies in dance and economics, while using the museum and related institutions - galleries, art fairs, private collections - as its arena. He considers visual art to be a microcosm of our social reality, as both center on identical economic conditions: the production of goods and their subsequent circulation. Sehgal seeks to reconfigure these conditions by producing meaning and value through a transformation of actions rather than solid materials.

...a visitor is no longer a passive spectator but one who bears a responsibilty in shaping and even contributing to the actual realization of the piece.

Audio Moblog

2010-02-28T20:46:00.001-08:00

Feb. 17

2010-02-28T19:46:00.001-08:00

Audio Moblog

2010-02-22T09:55:00.001-08:00

Monday Talk at 2:15 - 3:35 Women and Gender Studies

2010-02-20T13:06:00.000-08:00

First floor conference room of the Ruth Dill Johnson Crockett building.

Dr. Marina Grzinic is a philosopher, artist and theoretician. She lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia and works in Ljubljana and Vienna. Marina Grzinic is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. She is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She also works as freelance media theorist, art critic and curator. Marina Grzinic has been involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Smid, Grzinic produced more than 40 video art projects, short films, numerous video and media installations, several websites and an interactive CD-ROM (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany). Her publications include: Une fiction reconstruite. Europe de l'Est, post-socialisme et rÈtro-avant-garde [Fiction Reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Postsocialism and Retro avantgarde] (2004), Situated Contemporary Art Practices, Art, Theory and Activism from (the East of) Europe (2005) Aesthetics of Cyberspace and the Effects of De-realization (2005) as well as the co- edited volumes: New-Media Technology, Science, and Politics: The Video Art of Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid (2009), and New Feminism: Worlds of Feminism, Queer and Networking Conditions (2008).

NO CLASS FEB. 15!!!

2010-02-14T22:30:00.000-08:00

Group projects are due on Feb. 17. Hidden Histories. Please see post below...

Any questions, email me hanaiver@gmail.com

Thanks.

Some sample projects

2010-02-10T13:51:00.000-08:00

Teri Rueb - Core Sample

Teri is a very interesting artist, working in the field of locative media. It is worth it to look at her entire site.

Janet Cardiff - Ghost Machine particularly excerpt #2. Janet Cardiff and her husband Georges Beurres Miller, are Canadian artists who work with sound, video, installation and the notion of creating audio landscapes... Look at all of her walks. This is just one example of how she uses sound to amplify and layer space.

Hidden Histories for Feb. 17

2010-02-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

Each team has to pick a location from the Historic Walking Tour map. You are to research and develop a way to reveal the hidden history of the location (meaning past, present, maybe future) of the site and surrounding area... using Hipcase, podcasts, blogs, on-site tags, signs, installations - whatever. In addition, each team has to create a "map" or something to give to each student (or "user") to help them wayfind their way to/from/through the site.

Trees by Joyce Kilmer

2010-02-03T18:44:00.001-08:00

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Google MyMaps + Assignment

2010-02-03T18:35:00.000-08:00

Due Monday, Feb. 8 and either linked or embedded in your blog:

The autobiography of your life in Google MyMaps.

For the complete MyMaps How To - it is a topic with all the information and pictures in the Oct. 2009 archive of this blog. Follow the link.

Audio Moblog

2010-02-03T09:15:00.001-08:00

Audio Moblog

2010-02-02T21:34:00.001-08:00

Cool, free text service recommended by Steve

2010-02-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

Textmarks http://www.textmarks.com/

I haven't looked at the full potential of this service yet, but it looks interesting.

Yet another blog address for the sidebar

2010-02-02T19:34:00.000-08:00

James Morantus http://justgotintothis.blogsot.com

How to embed Twitter in your blog and other great stuff

2010-02-02T19:32:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Allan for this great link!! It is also a very useful site for blogger tutorials...

http://www.blogspottutorial.com/2009/01/how-to-install-twitter-widget-in.html

Hipcast

2010-02-02T19:22:00.000-08:00

Hipcast is an audio blogging service where you can easily make podcasts, add video, audio and mobile posts to the class blog. I have a membership (it costs a small amount of money) that I keep alive for this class. I will share the username and password and then you can make use of all the features.

How to record from your phone:

To record from your telephone, which is called Moblogging (Mobile Blogging),
you can call (512) 827-0431.
When prompted, enter your PIN: 181-197-551 #
Your options will be: Record and Publish, or Record and Not Publish. If you select Record and Publish, you will be prompted for your Blog Number or Podcast Number.

The blog number is 1072.

Try it to test it!

GET YOUR WORK DONE ON TIME!

2010-01-31T21:17:00.001-08:00

One more blog to add to the sidebar

2010-01-31T21:03:00.001-08:00

Z Jay http://zs-neighborhood-narative.blogspot.com/

Blogs to add to your sidebar

2010-01-27T19:19:00.000-08:00

Go to layout/gadgets/link list

Add: Students

Sort alphabetically

Briana Gaydo brianagaydo.blogspot.com
Allan Schwade softcitycitizen.blogspot.com
Mike Kerslake mikekerslakesblog.blogspot.com
Truman Lahr trewmin.blogspot.com
Lauren Reed laurenreedsblog.blogspot.com
Tawn Bradley tawnbrad.blogspot.com

Schedule of Classes and Assignments

2010-01-24T21:04:00.000-08:00

Jan 20

Introduction: What is Neighborhood Narratives?
The history of the class, case studies. Equipment check out. Overview.

Assigned Reading: PDF of The Neighborhood Narratives Project from http://hanaiverson.com/publications.html

Assignment: Leave a trail of your path and have partner find/follow it.

Jan 25

Overview review for students who are new.
Review of Projects
Review of reading
Integration of Blogs

What I carry with me. The bag exercise. The archeology of everyday life. Create your blog. Daniel Spoerri – An Anecdoted Topography of Chance. History of the Avante-garde.

Psychogeography: One Block Radius (GlowLab)

Reading: Links on the blog to avante-garde, Daniel Spoerri et all. Look for more links posted.
Assignment: Collect an archeological trail of Tuesday. Photograph.

Jan 27

Lab: Create a Flickr account and load the photos into Flickr. Link Flickr to your blog.

Assignment for Feb. 1 - catch up on all exercises and the reading so far.

Feb. 1

Guest speaker - Steve Bull. Cell phones and their creative possibilities.
Review of assignments. Presentation of Locative projects.
Assigned reading: Ambient Findability, chapter 2

Feb. 3

In class discussion about all readings
Walking in New Brunswick.
Creative Assignment - autobiography into google MyMaps

Feb. 8

Review of Assignment
Break up into teams
Large team assignment for Feb. 17
Reading assignment (handouts in class)
Relational Aesthetics, Nicholas Bourriaud
The Critique of the Everyday, Henri Lefebvre

Feb. 17

Presentation of projects on site.

Feb. 22

Critique of projects
Readings due, 3 discussion prompt questions posted to your blog.

Evaluation and Assessment

2010-01-24T21:00:00.000-08:00

Grading

Research, attendance and participation 35%
In class assignments 30%
Final project 35%

Deadlines

Late assignments and exercises will not be tolerated. Failure to hand in an assignment by the due date and time will result in a zero grade for that assignment.

Research, Attendance and Participation

Group work, communicating and sharing knowledge through discussions, posting to the class blog, in-class presentations, and overall student participation are an essential part of the process of understanding course material.

Readings and blog postings are mandatory.

Readings
Prior to each class you will be required to complete a short reading and make notes of relevant points to bring up in class discussion.

Blog postings
Each week you will be required to a) make one post to your NEIGHBORHOOD NARRATIVES blog and b) to comment on at least one other student’s blog. Your post can be on: 1) a locative media project and your reaction to it or 2) a new media technology and how it relates to former ideas about photography (e.g. Spellbinder) or 3) if applicable, one of the required assignments.

Assignments and Final Project

The remit for the final project is to create an urban, on-site, locative (cell phone, GPS, mapping, sensory altering) media art project that engages visual as well as embodied (spatial + body) ideas, and document the final project on your blog.

The assignments will provide you with the skills and knowledge required to realize your final project.

Course Requirements and Class Business

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Format:

The class is 3 hours long twice a week. For the most part, we will meet once a week and you will have a group project on the alternate day. The class will introduce methods of collecting data and artifacts, internet and field observation, mapping and scoring, "show and tell" and the examination of project presentations with rigorous discussion. Mobile city-wide exploration (public transportation, on foot) will include the presentation of the final project on location in the city. The class will also engage in peer dialogue and interdisciplinary teamwork, to extend the breadth of a project through collaboration. Students will keep semester long blogs including observations, photos, video and audio recordings (where equipment and resources allow) - a personal diary of the Neighborhood Narrative experience.

Internet Access

All students are expected to have frequent, dependable access to the internet. It is essential that you have an active email account that you ACCESS FREQUENTLY, for email with faculty and with each other. IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU CREATE AND ACTIVELY MAINTAIN A BLOG. If you have any difficulties with either Internet access, your email account or your blog, please see the instructor after the first class.

Technology Requirements

You will need some form of memory stick to save and transport your work. Access to a mobile phone and digital camera is recommended.

Readings

Readings will be handed out in each class.

Course Costs

As expected with production courses, you may need to purchase supplies to produce your final project. Also, while it is not required, I would like to encourage you to use the communications features of your mobile phone: costs for voice calls and text messaging will depend on your phone plan.

Instructor Contact

The best way to reach me is by email. I am on campus once a week and am available to set up individual appointments, if requested.

Attendance and Lateness Policy

Attending the sessions outlined in the schedule is a requirement of this course. More than two unexcused absences will decrease the overall grade by one unit for each additional missed class. Five absences will result in a failing grade for the course. If you are going to be absent, please inform me by email at least 24 hours in advance. If you are absent, it is your responsibility to make up any work in a timely fashion. Three times arriving late will be considered as one unexcused absence. Being more than 10 minutes late will be counted as an absence.

Course Themes

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The course is divided into three themes:

Theme one: Place and Space. The course begins with an examination of the concept of place. We explore questions such as: What is place? What is the difference between place and space? How are places mapped? What is the relationship of place to location?

Theme two: Embodied Practice. We investigate how a constantly changing environment affects the ways in which we physically stabilize our sense of orientation. We consider ways to ask strategic questions about encounter, gathering, and location; exploring our sensory alignment of the world, and how it is synthesized by the social mix of influences that affect both physical and virtual environments.

Theme three: Merger of Mixed reality and Mobility. Mobile media are tools that connect the physical to the virtual, by handheld connectivity to networks and webs. New public sites are emerging as a result of this mix - situated storysites, community mapping, environmental installations that incorporate technology, to name a few - that create a new form of experience and authorship.

Course Information

2010-01-24T20:52:00.001-08:00

Spring 2010, Rutgers University
081: 213: 01
CSB – 326 Downtown
Monday and Wednesdays, 11:30 – 2:30
Instructor: Hana Iverson
Guest Instructor: David Gordon
Email: hiverson@rci.rtugers.edu; hanaiver@gmail.com
Office Hours: After class, by appointment.

Push/Pull

2009-10-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

Orientation: Push/Pull
The Push/Pull exercise we have adopted is used in treatment for vertigo. Two people walk together, one pushing, and the other pulling by holding each other’s arms. The person being pushed closes their eyes. The person pushing narrates what they observe around them in a continual stream of association, while the person pulling allows themselves to be “steered” by the other. Not only does one have to rely on the other person for their visual sense of the world, but they start to separate the senses within themselves. Balance is no longer achieved through visual orientation; it shifts to the legs, the sense of sound, and importantly, the physical proximity of one person to another. The exercise immediately disassociates all these elements and forces the sensory system to reorient itself in real time.
This has led to several projects where the students employ some kind of presence and absence by eliminating or displacing one sense – whether it be sight, or sound. Pairs of students were asked to walk around a block. One partner would lead another who wore a blindfold. They were taken to specific locations on the block, where the student with vision would describe the location in detail. The blindfolded student used their cell phone to call a phone number in order to narrate what they imagined would be in that location in ten years. The result was an audio repository of the imagined block in ten years, mapped to location.
In another exercise, called Body, Movement, Environment, two students set out to explore how the body correlates to the physical landscape and everyday places and objects in unexpected ways. Related to the French game of Parkour, an activity that is based on moving from one point to another as directly as possible - overcoming the obstacles of fences, walls, or gaps - these students encountered all the physical obstacles in a block radius. They sought to discover how their bodies created a new spatial experience, which they mapped to place via photographic documentation and video displayed in a monitor. The students here are asked to explore their relationship to the everyday environment, their sensory orientation, and embodied sense of place.
The work of the artist Akitsugu Mayebayashi, in his project Sonic Interface, suggests some of the sensory alteration we may yet encounter in the future. Sonic Interface is a portable hearing device that is made from headphones, microphones, and a laptop computer. The participant is invited to walk around the city, and experiences modified sonic environments processed real time from the sounds it picks up. Mayebayashi has focused on the auditory sense as an interface between the body and the environment. By uncoupling sound from vision, his project questions what we assume as "real". "Presence" requires the constant stabilizing and synchronizing of vision and sound; an uncoupling of the two opens up the possibility for other presences, other experiences of "self." This separation also importantly has the effect of destabilizing the experience of "place."

Mobile Audience

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Great blog by Martin Rieser, Artist, Theorist and Educator

http://mobileaudience.blogspot.com/

Teri Rueb

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Her work here.

Four Questions on the Mobile Audience Blog

Site Specifics

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The philosopher Michel de Certeau, wrote a book called "The Practice of Everyday Life" which is on the Locative Media Bibiligraphy that was published by the Leonardo (MIT) eJournal.

In this book, he says that "space is a practiced place." What he means by that, is that urban planning writes a specific meaning onto place. The direction of roadways, the areas of division in economic strata (where rich people live, where poverty lives etc), the location of the city functions (post office, hospital, train station, etc). So, what de Certeau is saying is that place becomes space when it becomes active, when it becomes inhabited. The daily action of everyday life, in all its detail, shifts the meaning of place from its monolithic, static meanings, to those that are human, social, fluid, always changing. Even our experience of place is determined by how long we are in a location. "Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into space by walkers." "Space as a practiced place, admits of unpredictability." "If space is like the word when it is spoken, then a single place will be realized in successive, multiple and even irreconcilable spaces." Think of Patrick's score..."In comparing 'pedestrian processes to linguistic formations" de Certeau states that.. to walk is to lack a place." Think of Patrick's score done again as a walking score in the city...

The anthropological understanding of place, is "formed by the individual identities, through complicities of language. local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how" (Auge/reading p.9), where one's location or position is known. Non-place is produced by passing-over place. Non-place designates two complementary but distinct realities formed in relation to certain, say, mobile or transitory ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and relations that individuals have with these places. For example, the train station: all the people who pass through it, sometimes regularly, as in commuters, and those people who work there - selling tickets, working at the coffee shop, cleaning up, etc.

On page 11 of the reading is an important point:

Place and non-place re rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsets on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. But non-places are the real measure of our time. (Auge 1995)

A palimpset is a paper that has been written on twice, the original having been wiped out.

One Neighborhood Narratives project by a student at NYU addressed the Palimpset:

The project, titled Palimpsest FM, consisted of a device that houses a hidden speaker which plays back the sounds of the same spot from an earlier time, anywhere from thirty seconds to a day before. The replayed recording serves as an audio version of a palimpsest, a proof of what had been there before. Using sound as her medium, the student created a nearly seamless overlapping of past and present where the sounds of today cannot be discerned from the sounds of the past. Like a palimpsest, it will be unclear where the past ends and the present begins.

Gaston Bachelard (in his book, Poetics of Space) speaks of centering oneself in stable surroundings, but if your surroundings are constantly in flux (and also incidentally not just your surroundings) like they are in New York, it is no wonder a sense of ontological anxiety can result. New York City has often been described as a place where the physical environment changes so quickly that rebuilding without being able to erase what came before it becomes very obvious to anyone who has lived there
long enough to call New York their home. “You’ve become a New Yorker once you have the urge to point out a place and say, “that used to be . . .” The “that used to be . . .” that every New Yorker expresses is part of the inerasable past that is being built over, it is an expression of memory of a piece of their home and consequently a piece of their identities that is gone but not forgotten. It is embodied in the senses. The urge to tell others what used to be is an attempt to reassert one’s identity and the home they had carved out of the city. This project serves as another means of describing the “that used to be.” But instead of
subjectively telling the narrative of one person’s New York, it objectively captures what the place witnessed. The audio palimpsest played back in this project serves as a kind of memorial of what used to be in the immediate past. It stands to
commemorate the same everyday New York that its citizens quietly mourn when it is torn down and built over. It memorializes the trivial happenings that many may overlook, but still plays an important role in a place’s narrative and consequently a
person’s identity. By placing Palimpsest FM in Washington Square Park under the shadow of the statue of Garibaldi and the Washington Arch, a comparison can be drawn between the monuments that commemorate the selective history of the
victors to one that records and replays all voices of the city equally. The neighborhood narrative can then become more complete as it plays back everything it hears.

The original prototype for this project was made with a recording device in one of those "record your own message" talking greeting cards.

The last mention from the Site-Specific reading is the last paragraph where it says, "It is in such contexts that site-specific art frequently works to "touble" the opposition between the site and the work. Trouble is meant as critique, question, or to even create a problem, but all with the aim of heightening the exchange between the site and the work.

Following

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The Following exercise was inspired by both Janet Cardiff’s audio walks (Two of which are Walk Münster by Janet Cardiff with Georges Bures Miller, 1997. Skulpture Project Münster 97, curated by Kasper König, Münster, Germany and The Missing Voice (Case Study B) byJanet Cardiff with Georges Bures Miller, 1999. Whitechapel Library organized by Artangel, London, England, June 17 – Nov. 27, 1999.) an example of the expressive, generative version of ambulant geo-notative locative art practice; and Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, where she used a conceptual strategy to create a document with photos providing evidence of her search to Venice to look for a stranger she met at a party. One student chose to follow five different people at his usual stop on the subway. Three of these people were “intimate strangers”, people he had observed frequently on his route, but
whom he did not know. Two people he followed, as a first encounter. He documented the experience of each trajectory, the time and distance traveled the fantasies and assumptions of each life, housing them all in a web-based map project.

Jean Baudrillard writes,
“To follow the other is to take charge of his itinerary; it is to watch over his life without him knowing it. It is to play the mythical role of the shadow, which, traditionally follows you and protects you from the sun – the man without a shadow is exposed to the violence of life without mediation – it is to relieve him of that existential burden, the responsibility of his own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of another. Again, a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject’s tenuous position as a subject” (1983 p.82).

Somewhat similarly, the responses of past students to the assignment ranged from one student’s realization that in her heart she loved to follow people – in fact, she realized that she had quite an “affinity for following people.” A city where walking is the main mode of transportation constantly puts people face to face, often the same people over and over. Since she moved to New York, it had frustrated her to find herself constantly surrounded by people she recognized but had never met. This assignment was her chance to figure out who these people really are. Yet, once she was asked to turn her curiosity into an exercise, the idea of following turned sour. She said, “I felt like I was invading not only their physical space, but their mental space too.”

A different reaction was elicited from another student, who was extremely threatened by the idea of following someone and allowing someone else’s physical itinerary to determine her movement in the city. Her sense of territory had distinct
racial and economic boundaries that determined her awareness of safety. Following another route was deeply disturbing. Her solution was to solicit the help of a friend to go with her. However, throughout the experience of following someone on an unfamiliar route, she commented that she had to “watch her back,” which became the next exercise for the class.

The Following exercise is similar to the Loca (Location Oriented Critical Arts) project. According to Evans et.al. Loca was initiated out of an interest in how surveillance and social control emerge as a residue or unforeseen effect of virtuous information systems and network technologies. Loca observes people's movements by tracking the position of the Bluetooth enabled devices that they carry. Over seven days more than two thousand five hundred people were detected enabling the team to build up a detailed picture of their movements. People were sent messages from a stranger with intimate knowledge of their motion. Over the course of the week the messages became gradually more sinister, the would-be friend mutating into stalker, "coffee later?" changing to "r u ignoring me?" For participants the experience of Loca is intangible, it unearths
what is not seen. The aim is subtle affect. As the developers note, “Loca is like a picture glanced at sideways, a message caught in the corner of the eye, or a mosquito swatted on the arm (http://www.loca-lab.org/).” It makes apparent the
kind of peer to peer observations that become possible as a result of the discomforts and dislocations associated with everyday surveillance.

Critical Vehicles

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Krzyysztof Wodiczko, in his book Critical Vehicles, discusses his art work over the span of his career, all of it highly political in nature. What Wodiczko focuses on is designing for human interaction, and human relationship. What he higlights is the binary of power: victor/vanquished. This type of binary analysis of social space can easily be understood in relation to race and gender. What is interesting about his Prophet's Prothesis, is the idea of a doubling - the real person and the media double, both simultaneously walking through the city. Here we have the Derive or Drift retranslated through the integration of media. Inside/outside, real/virtual. These types of binaries fuse together so that the doubled experience creates a whole. Conceptually very interesting. One could even conceive of the doubled self - the real and virtual as a ying/yang.

On p. 13, his design summary could be considered a manifesto. He has articulated a social problem that he is trying to solve through design.

What we have said in this class, is that design solves problems. One must first identify the problem and then create the design to solve it.

After Photography by Fred Ritchin

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...with information about Spellbbinder and Photosynth

http://www.afterphotography.org/

A Brief History of Maps

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A brief history of maps with some great map links!

http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm

An explanation of the Cartesian Co-ordinate system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system

Book: Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and other Spatial Practices

Google MyMaps - How to

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Go to Google – Maps.

You will see the options for Get Directions or MyMaps.

Go to Google – Maps.

Click on MyMaps

Click on Create New Map

You will be able to give a title to your map and a description. You will also have a complete set of tools available in the Map area (see hand, balloon, line or shaded area). You can drip a balloon on any location and you can use the lines to connect the balloons or to create a route or radius. And you can move everything with the hand.

You can also select your privacy settings for public or private.

If you move a balloon icon to a location that you choose, a little menu will present itself. You can give the location a name and description. If you click on RICH TEXT on top of the text box, you will get a full blog toolbar. If you would like to add a photo, you can link it from Flickr by clicking on the Picture Icon and adding the url from the Flickr picture (Click on the image in Flcikr and then All Sizes, and url will be on the bottom of the page).

So, in other words, if this is going to be a photo story, you have to upload your images to Flickr..

World Trade Center Sonic Memorial

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Ephemeral Place

http://www.sonicmemorial.org/sonic/public/index.html

Janet Cardiff - Walks

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Here is the link for Janet Cardiff and her husband Georges Bures Miller. If you look at the site and listen to some of the audio, I think you will find it interesting. It may give you some ideas for your own projects.

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/

Sound Maps - Tenement Museum Folk songs

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Check this out as a sound map of New York

Folk Songs for the Five Points

Richard Long

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artist/walker

http://www.richardlong.org/index.html

Psychogeography

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The Situationist International and Guy Debord experimented in the 1950s by wandering around urban cities, recording the emotional pulse emitting from the metropolis. Known as drifting, these artists would chart human experience to a geographic map to create psychogeography.

Emotional Maps - Assignment

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1) Map your... somehow...
2) Gogglemap your....
3) Using technological tools, map your... without using Goggle Maps or any Google product.

Tool Kit

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Blog
Flickr
Ning (or group)
Hipcast
Twitter
GPS (if available)
Cell phones
anything else?

Yi Fu Tuan - Space and Place

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From the paper "Neighborhood Narratives, New Dialogues With/in the Mediated City", by Hana Iverson and Rickie Sanders. 2008.

Place, according to Yi Fu Tuan (1977) combines a sense of position within society and a sense of identity with a spatial location. Places have historically been viewed as physical sites, with natural and emotional endowments that speak to the limits of human freedom. Not only are our human identities bound up with the hills and valleys in which we live but our very humanness and humanity is bound in this way. It is place that gives rise to humanness – in the form of feelings, attachments, longing, nostalgia, desire, melancholy, and fear.

... Space is perhaps best thought of as a three dimensional void where things are held to exist only if they occupy volume. Location based technologies negate the consideration of volume and view space along the lines of abstract Cartesianism.

...Similarly, beginning with the 16th century, the conception of space which relied on the Cartesian coordinate system set in motion a marginalization of place. Space with its numerical properties was regarded as absolute and infinite. Thus it was perceived as scientific and crucial to the goal of imperialism.

...Certain activities are accorded special spatial status, while others are not. Driving a truck is spatial (hence, work), talking on the phone is less spatial (hence, bureaucratic), and pondering an idea is simply ethereal (Sack, 1980, p. 17) hence, indolent.

Yi Fu Tuan refers to the kind of properties that create a sense of place. He also questions, what is space, and how does one have a sense of spaciousness? In what ways do people attach meaning to space and place? The answer goes beyond the cultural; there are certain "animal" relationships to space and place... one could say, embodied senses of how we orient ourselves to space and place. We are interested in how space and place are understood, so that we can question how technology disorients our sense of space and place, or amplifies our sense of space and place.

Three themes run through Yi Fu Tuans book:

1) The biological facts

2) The relations of space and place

3) The range of experience or knowledge.

He amplifies these themes on page 6 of the Introduction.

Chapter 2 focuses on the Experiential Perspective. Experience is made up of sensation, perception and conception. These influence on a continuum, emotion and thought.

Experience is directed to the external world. Seeing and thinking clearly reach out beyond the self. Feeling however, reflects the way in which the self is inwardly affected. (p. 9).

This is important to think about because as you come to define your own experiences, it helps you think about how to design experiences for other people. The final project will be the result of a complex experience design.

tactile perception is at the extreme opposite of visual perception. The skin is able to convey certain spatial ideas and can do so without the support of other senses, depending on the structure of the body and the ability to move. (p. 14)

Sounds, though vaguely located, can convey a strong sense of size (volume) and of distance. For example, in an empty cathedral the sound of footsteps tapping sharply on the stone floor creates an impression of cavernous vastness. (p15)

(which makes me think of the creative possibilities of sound to create, record or alter space.)

Three principal types of space (p. 17), with large areas of overlap, exist - the mythical, the pragmatic, and the abstract or theoretical. Mythical space is a conceptual schema, but it is also pragmatic space in the sense that within that schema a large number of practical activities, such as planting and harvesting of crops, are ordered. A difference between mythical and pragmatic space is that the latter is defined by a more limited set of economic activities.... When an ingenious person tries to describe the soil pattern cartographically, by means of symbols, a further move toward the conceptual mode occurs. In the Western world systems of geometry - that is highly abstract spaces - have been created out of primal experiences. Thus sensorimotor and tactile experiences would seem to lie at the root of Euclid's theorems concerning shape congruence and the parallelism of distant lines; and visual perception is the basis for projective geometry. (p.17)

(so how would you design an experience that would separate the senses, and give a single sense experience of space. )

An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind. (p. 18)

(How can you deconstruct a place to recreate it as a new, whole, concrete experience?)

Spatial Ability, Knowledge and Place

P. 68 - Walking is a skill, but if I can "see" myself walking and if I hold that picture in mind sp that I can analyze how I move and what path I am following, then I also have knowledge. That knowledge is transferable to another person through EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION IN WORDS, WITH DIAGRAMS, AND IN GENERAL BY SHOWING HOW COMPLEX MOTION consists of parts that can be analyzed or imitated.

P. 73 - When space feels thoroughly familiar to us, it has become place. Kinesthetic and perceptual experience as well as the ability to form concepts are required for the change if the space is large.

How well do you relate to small or large spaces? Do you become disoriented in large spaces? How would you design an experience that relates small and large spaces so that the viewer/user has to orient through some kind of maze like experience to orient themselves.

What are the spaces that have become places for you?

Leonardo Locative Media Issue

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can be found here.

and the bibliography here.

C++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William J. Mitchell

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A wonderful review of the book is here.

Guglielomo Marconi invented the radio. That transmission has now exploded into a dense, global web of wireless infrastructure; "if you counted all of its terrestial, satelite and spacecraft linkage, it is now humankind's most extensive construction." (Mitchell, p.2) Simultaneously, the reception devise has scaled down to a fashion accessory.

"My natural skin is just layer zero of a nested boundary structure." (p.7) In the early years of the Cold War, outer defensive casements re-emerged, in extreme form, as domestic nuclear bunkers. The destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of that edgy era...

"All of my boundaries depend for their effectiveness, upon sufficient capacity to attenuate flow with sufficient thickness." (p.8)

Georg Simmel was a German social scientist who observed that "a connecting creature who must always separate and who cannot connect without separating."

"To create and maintain differences between interiors and exteriors of enclosures... I seek to control these networked flows." (p.9)

The discontinuities produced by networks result from the drive for efficiency, safety and security....

"You can pause wherever you want when you are strolling along a dirt track (DRIFT), but you must use stations for trains, entry and exit ramps for freeways, and airports for airline networks - and your experience of the terrain between these points is very limited. You experience the architectural transitions between floors when you climb the stairs, but you go into architectural limbo between the opening and closing of the doors when you use an elevator."

"Now the body/city metaphors have turned concrete and literal. Embedded within a vast structure of nested boundaries and ramifying networks, my muscular and skeletal, physiiological, and nervous systems have been artificially augmented and expanded." (p.19)

"Telephones... are yet another network of infrastructure - one that now stretches my speech production and reception system around the globe and multiplied its points of presence...

You were never quite sure who would pick up on the other end, and the relationship to our bodies as neither continuous or intimate." (p.24, 25)

I am both a surveying subject at the center of my electronic web and the object of multi-modal electronic surveillance. All of these constructions of the gaze that the post-Foucaultians have alerted us to - the gaze of desire, the gendered gaze, the consumer's gaze, the critical gaze, the reflexive gaze, and certainly the gaze of power - are extended, reorganized, and reconstructed electronically." (p28)

The Bag Exercise

2009-10-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

Dump all of your stuff that is in your bag on the floor. Take a snapshot. Narrate the topography of "what you carry with you." The mobile version of Pockets Full of Memories, an interactive exhibit by George Legrady.

A later project that refers to the idea of everyday archeology and streets full of memories is
One Block Radius by a group of artists in Brooklyn, NY called Glow Lab.

The Archeology of Everyday Life

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Daniel Spoerri and The Anecdoted Topography of Chance

are a prime example of Fluxus aesthetic - chance, happening, do-it-yourself.

The 20th century avante-garde art movements such as Fluxus influenced the Situationists, who are the precursors and spiritual inspiration for Locative Media.

Neighborhood Narratives

2009-10-05T19:20:00.000-07:00

Overview

In Neighborhood Narratives, the urban landscape is a canvas where analogue and digital media, text, sound, and image are applied to real places in order to document the definable aspects of place that simultaneously reveal and construct their essence and trigger authentic engagement. The goal is to create a set of site specific annotations; such as sound maps, community histories augmented by websites, audio interviews authored and distributed over the cell phone, site specific installations that integrate radio and other communications technology, scavenger hunts along with many other types of combinations that when connected would produce a neighborhood narrative. This process encourages participants to combine the skills of the storyteller (the grounded expert with detailed everyday knowledge) with the flaneur (the mobile observer of the city with a broad overview).

Neighborhood Narratives uses alternative technologies, basic mobile recording devices, on-line open-source tools such as blogging, and Google Maps along with analog resources such as sketch maps to produce context rich stories that portray the world, city, or neighborhood. In Neighborhood Narratives we explore the real and metaphorical potentialities of mapping, walking, and wayfinding as methods of developing attachments, connecting, and constructing narratives in a virtual and spatial locality (neighborhood).

The final assignments are presented on location in the city.