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Civilian Art Projects & Curator’s Office, Washington DC, team up to present ‘Craigslist’. Featuring the work of Jason Horowitz, Jason Zimmerman, John & Joseph Dumbacher. From the press release:
craigslist explores how four artists utilize this renowned community website as a conceptual component in their artistic practice. The exhibition features works by the artist team Joseph Dumbacher & John Dumbacher, Jason Horowitz, and Jason Zimmerman and is co-curated by Jayme McLellan, Director of Civilian Art Projects, and Andrea Pollan, Director of Curator’s Office. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday, March 21 from 7 - 9 pm.
An essay by Andrea Pollan will accompany the exhibition. The artist team of Joseph and John Dumbacher solicit willing models on craigslist to meet them in movie theaters where they create haunting and identity-obscuring photographic portraits. Similarly, Jason Horowitz advertises for models to pose in his studio where he shoots extreme close-ups of their body parts and then explodes the scale of the image to create an unsettling nexus of anonymous portraiture and landscape. Jason Zimmerman exploits images posted by users on craigslist.org as his raw material. He creates digital photo albums of hundreds of individuals who publicize their sexual availability by uploading images of their naked bodies but with their facial identities distorted or obscured.
Civilian Art Projects, Curator’s Office, Craigslist
Image: Jason Horowitz, Liz #4, archival digital print, 42″ x63″, ed. 1/5, 2006
I am currently involved with a research project to result in site-specific artworks in the area where I live. I am finding this difficult as I’m having to confront head-on my position within the imagined polarities of rural/ urban, insider/ outsider, and art that is made for ‘here’ and ‘there’.
A week or two ago I accessed the Irish Times archive and compiled the series of articles written by Emer McNamara, about her move from Dublin to Leitrim in the late nineties (every second Thursday September 1999 – June 2000).
This series was called ‘Living on Main Street’ and contain detailed descriptions that move from observations about people and life in the town (names included), to the author’s personal life, to the sense of the broader social changes happening in the country as a whole, and the northwest in particular. They make interesting, if slightly uncomfortable reading – I can identify with her migration from the east and its economic pull, but not her decision to make such a very public diary. It feels raw to me, and I can only wonder at the social and emotional conflicts that must have played out within the micropolitics of the town.
The Ballroom of Romance:
a place (Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim, Ireland; see the above picture)
a piece of literature (short story by William Trevor)
a film (directed by Pat O’Connor).
The three ballrooms came into being in that order; the literature was inspired by the facade of the building as Trevor drove past one day on his way to Enniskillen, and the film was a rendition of the short story. Amazing that a structure known as the ‘Nissan Hut’ could inspire such diverse cultural productions.
More about The Ballroom of Romance here
The photograph above is by Gareth Kennedy, taken one day while passing on the bus to Enniskillen.
Yesterday my laptop died.
I am ashamed to say that I reacted to this news in a similar fashion to how I responded to a recent phonecall notification of a family death: shock (surprising myself at how well I was dealing with ‘the situation’), followed by immersion in attempts at practical problem-solving, followed by belated panic and an overdue sense of hopelessness and disorientation.
Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now – “We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalised in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory ‘out there’ than exists in ‘all of us’. We’ve peripheralised our essence.” *
I was haunted by the loss (of photos, music, work projects, documentation of artwork, pieces of writing, invoices, tax returns) that were embedded in this machine, not backed up. My outsourced memory was not backed up and I had no one to blame but myself. The worst part of the loss were the gaps in my inventory of the things I knew I had lost: the things I couldn’t even remember but had lost anyway. I imagined these things sitting zipped up tightly in yellow folders. These yellow folders had clearly defined edges but blurred-together names; they hovered somewhere close to the right side of my forehead but slightly above it, lost in a blind fringe.
I awoke with a headache the day my laptop died, and it has refused to recede. I’ve had a lot of reading to do and been overtaken with anxiety since I’ve been unable to take notes except in written, paper, form. My thinking has become linear and I realise I’m not entirely used to it. The pressure to internalise all of this material and remember everything now is making my headache worse.
After flatlining, the laptop actually responded to artificial resuscitation but I have been told that the medium-to-longterm prognosis is bad. So we are making the most of every day we have left together.
Today I went out and bought a monstrous backup hard drive. The muscles around my cheekbones and mouth relaxed for the first time since the emergency (I hadn’t realised they had been all pinched together). I experienced a warm, flowing sensation inside my body (not pee or other bodily fluid: something much more ethereal and life-affirming).
Your life is made up of experiences: your music, your memories, your information. As that collection grows, so does the need to save your life.**
I am disgusted with myself for buying into this.
* Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, 1995. ** Printed on the packaging of my new external hard drive.
Image held here
So there are two distinct things that are interesting here - the visual and what it represents.
(The trajectory runs from attention data > interest cloud > XXL attention profile).
This represents APML: attention profiling mark up language. (APML is a proposed standard that allows users to share their own personal attention profile and compress all forms of attention data into one portable file format that can be traded between ‘attention seekers and givers’).
The internet is coming up with some intriguing new forms of visual culture to respresent what’s been described and imagined as ‘the crowd’ or ‘the masses’. This runs from the conventional idea of the crowd as a stupid-to-dangerous social ‘blob’ and the dangers of ‘groupthink’, to optimistic ideas of collective intelligence such as James Suroweicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It comes back to the old debate of populism. That is, elitism.
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