nonsite » 2009

April 30, 2009 4:55 pm

April 30, 2009: communities built on adversity

I’ve been thinking about how communities are formed and how they assume an identity and in particular how communities are built on adversity. I’ve been thinking about the Photography Department at Emily Carr University and I’ve realized that they have built a strong sense of community around how they perceive themselves being treated by the administration at Emily Carr. It is an interesting, and unconscious strategy for community building. That is further complicated by the fact that photography is an industry that is in the middle of radical change. The old analogue processes, darkrooms, chemicals and other ‘heritage processes’ are commercially gone haveing been completely replaced by digital technologies.

‘We have to save the photo department.’ What does that mean? In part, it is a lament for the way photographs used to be made- with wet darkrooms and historic processes- which is how it has been taught for years at Emily Carr.

April 26, 2009 3:03 pm

April 26, 2008: GPS

This week flew by. The weather here has finally warmed up and I’ve been riding my bike to school- I don’t like to imagine that I’m a fair weather cyclist, but in reality I am. I don’t like riding in the rain.

I got a Garmin GPSmap 60Cx two weeks ago- it’s a very impressive. I have been tracking my routes to and from school following different routes. Reading up on the features and the various ways data is saved and viewed is pretty amazing. It has a lot of potential.

I’m still trying to get an idea of how small a GPS device can be. I was looking at the Forerunner 201 today which has a bicycle mount so perhaps that makes sense for the first prototype.

I’m still not clear if I should follow up on my earlier plan to plot and track a series of devices and plot their relationship to each other- relating more to my earlier ideas of how we define a community.

I have been trying to take more time to reflect on these ideas for my project over the past few weeks. To just let them sit. The beauty of having some time to reflect is that some ideas which seemed hot at the time fall away and other ideas percolate to the top.

April 26, 2009 9:55 am

April 26, 2009: community and belonging

I had a realization today. Having a sense of community is about belonging. It sounds simple- you feel that you are a part of something. One of the strengths of NSCAD in the 1970s was that I felt that I was a part of a community of artists- not just there, in Halifax, but part of a larger community of contemporary artists.

It wasn’t a big art school, but I felt like I belonged. I had a sense of place, I knew pretty much everybody in one way or another and I belonged to that community. We had a common purpose, we were making contemporary art and we felt like what were doing made sense in a larger context.

A good example would be The Fox. When Joseph Kosuth and Sarah Charlesworth were starting a new art magazine out of New York with Art and Language, and they needed a Canadian distributor it became me. I was working for the NSCAD Press, as office manager, and it was that easy. For Joseph Kosuth’s distribution network, the NSCAD Press was a place to send 20 copies to sell, but that is an example of how NSCAD functioned back then, it represented the centre of contemporary art in Canada internationally back in the mid 1970s. It was cool to have my name on the back cover as I felt like I was part of a larger community.

If I now try to reflect on my similar sense of community at Camberwell as an online MA student- I’m lost. I have no sense of a community beyond the six others in my course. I’ve done my best to make sense of the place as an international student, but I really don’t have much sense of the place. I’ve seen a few photographs f the physical space. I’m looking forward to actually seeing it in reality in July.

I think this is further complicated by the various kinds of students there are in this MA in Digital Arts. I am an online (part-time) student which is considered part-time, in that I complete my course requirements over two years. There are also some face to face part-time students now in year two. I really only am aware of one- Tim Pickup, but there are at least six others in his course. We haven’t really had any opportunity to interact.

There are some one year, full time MA students. I felt closer to last year’s full time students who graduated last summer. We haven’t had any real opportunity to interact with this group until the start of the panning of the summer MA exhibition. There course work is really out of sync with ours- the three units are compressed into one year. I’m sure it must be really confusing for the tutors and Andy our course leader to keep track of who’s doing what when. I haven’t taken the time to make sense of their work and values, but I’m stumped by what I’ve seen so far.

April 26, 2009 8:56 am

I think we long for a community of like minded friends and colleagues- that’s what is most amazing abou the artworld as I’m come to know it. The people that are a part of it, believe in it and are convinced of its importance- that’s a wonderful thing.

April 24, 2009 4:11 pm

April 24, 1975: Mira Schor, dress paintings

Mira Schor came to Halifax in the fall of 1974 to teach painting. As a New York feminist woman painter, no one knows quite what to make of her- she is tough, hip and wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. She has been making these paintings on paper that are shaped like skirts. They were wrinkled with torn edges- mostly warm greys. Very beautiful.

April 22, 2009 3:51 pm

April 22, 1975: Gerry Morehead

On the back walls of the Anna Leonowens Gallery hand-written text one side and masking tape on the other.

April 20, 2009 10:49 pm

April 20, 2008: organizing subcultures

Over the weekend I’ve been reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He has a very good understanding of how to use the internet to promote social networks, groups and people who want to organize themselves around common interests or events. He points out how the cost of doing so has evaporated and how the historical geographical boundaries no longer matter. He also helps take a step back and look at why some organizations have failed to understand the huge social changes that are taking place, in the distribution of music, for example. Organizing subcultures has never been easier. You just need a blog or a wiki.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what is central to my project. What I’m really finding interesting about this MA_DA course is that I have colleagues in Greece, Italy, Germany and England. I’d be curious to visit each of them on their home turf. You get to know someone a little through the course and their weblogs, and how we build relationships from a distance, and I’m curious how different that might be if we were to meet. I’d be most interested in meeting everyone in the city where they live.

April 20, 2009 3:48 pm

No matter how much we think we’re embracing change, we get used to what we know and change is difficult. As I get older I realize that I’m increasingly comfortable with what is familiar to me.

April 20, 2009 1:45 pm

April 20, 2009: invitations and audiences

It is interesting to consider making work for a large group exhibition that will be over filled with conceptually disparate works. Complicated by the further fact that there is no real community or comradarie biding the works- we have seen a huge gap in values as played out in the power struggle around the choosing of the invitation….so with nothing holding the work together other than the theme of digital arts. So then how do I acknowledge this dilemma while at the same time making a work with its own formal integrity?

April 19, 2009 10:18 am

April 19, 2009: large group exhibitions

It is interesting to consider making work for a large group exhibition that will be over filled with conceptually disparate works. This is complicated by the further fact that there is no real community or comradarie biding the works. We have seen a huge gap in values as played out in the power play around the choosing of the invitation for example, so with nothing holding the work together other than the theme of digital arts- how do I then acknowledge this dilemma, while at the same time making a work with its own formal integrity.

April 18, 2009 4:03 pm

At what point did I start to think of myself as an artist? What makes you an artist? Fundamentally I think it is the belief that you can make something. It is the belief that you know enough about the context- the field, that my can make something, but not just anything, but something- an artwork, that makes sense in relation to other similar things in the field.

April 17, 2009 11:25 pm

April 17, 2008: furtherfield

A friend was telling me about Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett who run furtherfield in North London. They also run furthernoise and their gallery HTTP: The House of Technology Termed Praxis- smart.

One of the links on the furtherfield site is to the Digital Arts Handbook a project supported by the Arts Council England which is an “up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art” and seems to relate directly to what we are doing in the MA_DA at Camberwell.

April 15, 2009 4:11 pm

April 15, 2009: an open ended yet specific body of knowledge

The great thing about art is that it is so open ended yet specific. We can bring research and ideas from almost any context, discipline and history to bear in our research as artists. Psycho-geography, sexuality, structuralism, post-structuralism, Freud’s notions of the uncanny, auto mechanics, gardening, and hydroponics all can easily be brought into an art context. With a field this open, how do we make sense of it? I think we need to specialize out of necessity. Otherwise how can you make sense of it all- it’s to much.

A body of knowledge and a way of knowing. An attempt to have some measure of control within the larger world that keeps moving so fast around us. Making art is an attempt to say- I am thinking about this. I experienced this. I know this- material knowledge, embodied knowledge, non academic; ways of knowing and bodies of knowledge.

April 14, 2009 4:06 pm

April 14, 2009: artists are outsiders

Artists are outsiders- we are observers. We make things. Things to help us try to make sense of the world. It is an simple as that. It is the ability to reflect, to be in a studio, to have place to go that is set aside from the daily realities of life: eating, shopping for groceries, driving. It is a quest for knowledge- we want to know more. We are curious. We make objects to thank about. We make things because they aren’t there, to try to better understand our own history and the circumstances that led to us being here. Art is about ideas.

April 12, 2009 2:38 pm

April 12, 2009: making assumptions

What really strikes me as interesting as a student from Canada, is how many assumptions there are at Camberwell about how the university does things and how things are done. These are not transparent proceedures. I can see if you have been educated in England and then you are teaching in England- it is what you know and what you’re used to. To some extent I can see how you might assume that this is how things are done elsewhere- everywhere. Obviously, that is not always the case.

Within this course, it seems like we spent a disproportionate amount of time going over what are probably obvious details to students who have grown up and been educated in the British educational system- and I’m not just talking about ‘A levels’ (I’m still trying to figure out that they are).

I have been reading Annette Kuhn’s Family Secrets and her later chapter Passing about her grammar school education in London, in the 1950s and the social class values that were so deeply ingrained in England at that time, including the many ways that she was reminded that ‘you can’t rise out of your class’. It immediately made me wonder how embedded these class values still are, within the various universities and art colleges in London.

I’m wondering how present class values are at Camberwell, how they relate to digital arts. I’m not sure who or how to ask? In Canada these questions have been far from my mind for many years.

April 11, 2009 4:55 pm

April 11, 2009: shadow student

I think a website needs to resonate psychologically to be a place you want to visit and return to. You need a reason to want to go there.

The question at the heart of this nonsite project is: what is Camberwell, for an online student like myself?. The risk of being an online student is that you are invisible. From away it is very hard to get a handle on other student values.

How is my experience of Camberwell different from when I was a student at NSCAD and what made it such a great place? I think there are two things that make a school, college or university great- first is a sense of belonging to a community and the second is believing in common values.

April 5, 2009 4:44 pm

April 5, 1976: Darcy Lange, Work Studies

Darcy Lange makes these amazing black and white videos called Work Studies, where he follows a logger into the forest with his Sony Porta-Pac and records him cutting down a tree in real time.