Crowd in Italy during a strike, 2008, from the book Sono Anna Adamolo (ed. 2009)

This conference-colloquium at the Humanistic Faculty, Aarhus University, will relate to the widespread use of the concepts event and/or affect in contemporary research of media, art, philosophy, politics and culture. It is the aim to qualify, explore and investigate the scope of the terms event and affect in different analytical fields. We assume that the renewed focus on event and affect is partly due to the impact of new (electronic and digital) media and the new forms of immediacy created by real-time control and transmission.
The conference will therefore investigate two key issues: 1) How can we describe event and affect on philosophical, artistic, political and cultural levels? 2) Has a new paradigm of the signal – related to the bypassing of representation in real-time transmissions – superseded the sign? What characterizes the signal?

By combining these questions the conference wants to initiate a broader discussion on a paradigmatic transformation from sign to signal in relation to the concepts of event and affect and their use and scope in art, politics and culture.

[The text above is an extract of the Conference's call. The arrangement team consists of: Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Carsten Stage, Camilla Møhring Reestorff, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard and Jonas Fritsch].

Download the program.

Keynotes:
Nigel Thrift, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning.
Speakers:
Niels Albertsen, Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Christian Borch, Christoph Brunner, Merete Carlson, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Leila Dawney, Carsten Friberg, Jonas Fritsch, Jan Ifversen, Britta Timm Knudsen, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Christoffer Kølvrå, Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, Thomas Jellis, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Thomas Markussen, Casper Høeg Radil, Carsten Stage, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Anne Marit Waade.
Participants:
Lise Nygaard Christensen, Lise Dilling, Jette Geil, Lars Bo Løfgreen, Kirsten Marie Pedersen, Rebecca Parbo.

My paper is about networked events as political and social practices of criticism in grassroots communities. Title is: The Network Events. Networked art as a challenge for sociopolitical transformation. I will address some artistic and activist projects as an example of fertile zones of rewriting and experimentation of cultural and political codes. In particular, I will describe the Italian case of Anna Adamolo (2008-2009).

The Network Events
Networked art as a challenge for social transformation

by Tatiana Bazzichelli
In the artistic context of the past twenty years, networking art was referring to the ability of creating a map of connections in progress, and nets of relations among individuals. Since the 80s, platforms of networking have been an important tool for sharing knowledge and experience. Inspired by the early artistic practices and events of the Fluxus movement, the art of networking was based on the figure of the artist as networker: a creator of sharing platforms and of contexts for connecting and exchanging. It was not based on objects, nor solely on digital or analogical instruments, but on the relationships and processes in progress between individuals. Individuals who could in turn create other contexts of sharing.

The concept of Do-It-Yourself (self-production) was the starting point for the development of networked art, such as mail art, but also of punk culture and hacker ethic. The same Do It Yourself hands-on practice was used to describe subsequent phenomena of networking and hacktivism; from Neoism to Plagiarism, up until the 1990s, when the network dynamics were affirmed on a broader level through the use of computers and the Internet. The ‘hacktivist attitude’ referred to an acknowledgement of the net as a political space, with the possibility of decentralized, autonomous and grassroots participation. In these contexts of interaction and artistic experimentation, artists and activists worked in a critical space-in-between, a fluid territory in which to play with the structure of representation, hacking the codes of self-representation, and recombining them into something unpredictable.

In these free, active, experimental spaces, which anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983) dubbed liminal states, new cultural elements and new combined rules can be introduced. It is in these instances that technology is used with artistic, cultural and political goals, the joint action of different subjectivities which show how it is possible to create a first step in redefining powers and hierarchies, in terms of dismantling and opening social, cultural and artistic categories. In my talk I will present some artistic and activist projects in which the practice of creating “network events” might be seen as a challenge for cultural, political and social transformation. In particular, I will address the Italian case of Anna Adamolo.

Venue: Culture Lab, Space 4/5, Newcastle, UK
Time/Date: 9th March 2010 – 10th March 2010, 09:00 – 17:00
AHRC funded Collaborative Research

I am leaving for Newcastle to attend the event: Creative Digital Media Research Practice: Production Through Exhibition. It is an AHRC funded Collaborative Research Training project on digital media, art research and curating. I’ll be part of a a panel on Do It Yourself research practice (moderated by Lalya Gaye) and I am going to present the topics of my current research at Aarhus University, Networking 2.0, An aesthetic, technological and social critique of collective art. I will also share my methodological approach, which is inspired by the Ethnographic Surrealism of James Clifford, (1981) and present my current investigation, which combines a multi-semiotic approach, and an empirical “intermedia” of networking practices, hacker and activist strategies.

Here is a description of the event – my talk is scheduled on the afternoon of March 10, Culture Lab, Newcastle.

“The aim of the series is to bring together post-graduate students of digital media art practice and curating with specialists in the field in order to share research methodologies and enhance the level of cross disciplinary understanding. We seek to integrate the specialist methodologies of digital media into the wider fields of arts and design.

We bring to the table the complete lifecycle of digital media art, from education to production to dissemination, exhibition and interpretation. This holistic approach is of fundamental importance now that digital media art is increasingly accepted in a broader range of traditional cultural, institutional, and gallery contexts. Outreach will focus on bringing students, practitioners, and curators into dialogue to share methodologies, knowledge, and experience”.

Stay Tuned!

Lynn Hershmann Leeson. Photo by Tatiana Bazzichelli

I met Lynn Hershman Leeson in her studio in California Street for an interview for my PhD research during my visiting scholarship in San Francisco / Stanford. I got to know her through Henrik Bennetsen of the Stanford Humanities Lab. She invited me at the San Francisco Art Institute to attend a preview-screening of her upcoming film: Women Art Revolution, which is currently in post-production. After the screening we got a questionnaire, to give her our first impressions on the film. The film, coming out in the Fall of this year, is about the evolution of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States. I was very impressed by the comprehensive works of Lynn, by the amount of interviews with women artists she did in the course of the past thirty years,  and how, already in the Seventies, she managed to develop one of the first experiments in the  creation of multiple identities, transforming her own life in the one of her alter ego: Roberta Breitmore.

My interview with Lynn is going to be published in the upcoming summer issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Here is an excerpt of it:

“Lynn artistic work starting in the Sixties investigated the transformation of the social itself. Through her artificially constructed alter-egos, active both in real and virtual life, cultural symbols are recomposed according to unedited modalities. Gender power structures, the representation of subjectivity, or the artificial construction of identities – all these have found perfect balance in her works.
Lynn Hershman Leeson has created a critical reflection, putting her body on the performance stage through more than thirty years, starting in the seventies with the creation of the multiple personality Roberta Breitmore, and continuing through her works into this day with her upcoming film about the Women Art Revolution. They stress the cultural implication of gender in daily life, rewriting the codes of art and technology. Dynamics of interaction, dialogue and collective exchange acquire a particular relevance in her works”.

More info about Lynn’s work are here: www.lynnhershman.com

Check the film website: womenartrevolution.com ]]> http://networkingart.eu/2010/03/women-art-revolution-a-film-by-lynn-hershman-leeson/feed/ 0 http://networkingart.eu/2009/11/ahacktitude-hackers-and-artivists-in-milan/ http://networkingart.eu/2009/11/ahacktitude-hackers-and-artivists-in-milan/#comments Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:14:13 +0000 tbazz http://networkingart.eu/?p=411 AHAcktitude 2009 [27-28-29th November, Milan, Italy]
# Organised by:
aha@lists.ecn.org and AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism

AHAcktitude 2009, Milan

The community of aha@lists.ecn.org, the Italian mailing list on art and hacktivism is organizing a 3 day event in Milan at the Cantiere Social Centre. They called it AHAcktitude, as a collective development of the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project which I founded in 2001. I will contribute via Skype from San Francisco with a presentation on the topics I am researching during my visiting scholarship at Stanford University (starting August 2009).
The name of my presentation is: From Silicon Valley with Love, and it will connect art, tech and grassroots projects in the Bay Area (Saturday November 28, 9.30pm).

Here is the AHAcktitude press announcement:

In Milan on the 27, 28, and 29th of November the artivists of the AHA mailing list will meet at the “Il Cantiere” social centre.
Activist-artists, artistic hackers, social-artistic activists, call them  whatever you like. The 600 subscribers to the AHA mailing list are just a small part of all those people who, in Italy and in the world, know that the medium is not just the message, but the massage and the ‘mixage’. They know that it is not enough to complain about TV (be it mainstream, communitarian or niche), or blabber on about alternative communication, because the experience must be developed, and because communication without bodies only communicates stereotypes, and the body without intelligence only produces manipulation.

For this reason from last year the subscribers of aha@list.ecn.org meet face to face periodically, each time in a different city, to open the black boxes, to get their hands inside the technological devices for communication and imagination, to deconstruct the official knowledge and share new knowledge, to work at collective intelligence of bodies and not at capital intelligence, to broaden the resistance to globalization of multinationals.

AHAcktitude will be three days of activity and activism, of enjoyment and sharing, of study and fun. Technology, music, Internet, literature, telecommunications, marketing and social networks: everything will be targeted at open sourcing and open sharing. Methods, approaches, attitudes that are different but that communicate in order to explore, understand, and act in our condition of technologically modified beings.
Because human beings are worth more than merchandise, and we will not be satisfied while the life of someone who has more is worth more than the life of someone who has nothing.

aha@lists.ecn.org is an Italian mailing list created in 2002 within the AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism project, founded by Tatiana Bazzichelli,
aka T_Bazz. AHA wants to promote networking and critical thinking, connecting artistic practices to political and social activism. We define these practices as artivism.

(Txt from the AHAcktitude community website)

More info:

AHAcktitude 2009:
http://www.ahacktitude.org/event/2009/
Social Network:
www.ahacktitude.org

AHA mailing list:
http://lists.ecn.org/mailman/listinfo/aha

AHA – Activism-Hacking-Artivism:
www.ecn.org/aha