Audacity to Vote

single channel video

Language: German

Following the American Presidential campaign of 2008, where issues of race, gender, age and class have all converged, ‘Audacity to Vote’ begins by asking residents of the Berlin Gropiusstadt community a simple question: “If you could vote, who would you vote for and why?” With diverse responses the citizen’s enter another dialectic- questioning political engagement, knowledge of international affairs and interpreting mass media. How does this affect our personal lives and how is it
disseminated to infiltrate our perception of political power in the public sphere?

‘Audacity to Vote’ (Part I) will be screened at midnight on election day, November 4, 2008 at the Bablyon Theater, Rosa Luxembourgplatz, Berlin.

But first a special screening of ‘Audacity to Vote’ (Part I & II) as a work in progress at Art Claims Impulse at 21:00.

Image translation: In a globalised world shouldn’t all of us be allowed to vote in the US presidential elections?

n.e.w.s. at Basekamp

While I was in Philadelphia doing research at the Library Company for upcoming projects in 2009, I also was working on my residency at Basekamp, a space for collaboration in contemporary practice. On September 16, 2008 I presented n.e.w.s. Three of the contributors to ‘n.e.w.s.’  joined the presentation live on Skype: Prayas  Abhinav from Bangalore, Stephen Wright from Paris and Mia Jankowicz from London.

Prayas, Stephen, Mia and I gave feedback on how we use n.e.w.s. while Aharon, Scott and Basekampers joined in with some critical and insightful feedback about not only using Drupal, but in general how n.e.w.s. can be more negotiable. We tried to answer the questions from other contributors as well. We might have to wait for either time or money to get everything done that was suggested but it was productive. Here is my summary on the n.e.w.s. site.

Also, we are developing the ‘Plausible (Art) Worlds’ project, n.e.w.s. and Basekamp and we will be discussing this collaboration in the near future. In the meantime here is a beginning with Stephen’s text.

Please check out the n.e.w.s. website as it is growing - if  you feel so inclined you’re welcome to leave comments there  (commenting requires registering on the site) but you just need to sign up as a user with a valid email address.

I was also fortunate in my timing to see the ‘Black Founders’ exhibition at the Library Company. The ‘Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic’ exhibition included manuscripts, books, prints, etc. and organised the archives through these headings: Slavery and Revolution in the Atlantic world, Emerging Slavery Movements, Emanicipation in Pennsylvania, Independent Black Churches the Christianity of Freedom, The Struggle for Equality and Citizenship, Abolition Day, The Enterprising and Talented, Colonization, Emigration and Identity. Curated by Phil Lapsansky.

The Library Company of Philadelphia is an independent research library specializing in American history and culture from the 17th through the 19th centuries and has one of the most comprehensive collections on African- American history. The Library Company is America’s first successful lending library and oldest cultural institution. It was founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin as a subscription library supported by its shareholders, as it is to this day.

n.e.w.s. launches on July 28th

from 19:00 to 22:00
@ The Substation
45 Armenian Street
Singapore

n.e.w.s. is a horizontally-organised, cumulative knowledge-based website for contemporary art and new media framed by curatorial contributions from around the globe, bringing together voices and images from North, East, West and South. n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change outside the normal parameters of the established art world networks.

Launch at ISEA 2008

Contributing curators and n.e.w.s. representatives will talk about building the platform, the way content is determined through curatorial positionings, and further collaborative tactics.

Contributors: Ade Darmawan/Ruangrupa, Ingrid Commandeur, Thomas Berghuis, Inti Guerrero, Mia Jankowicz, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Mustafa Maluka, Stephen Wright, Yuliya Sorokina, and Branka Ćurčić/Kuda.

Moderators: Lee Weng Choy/The Substation, Renée Ridgway/n.e.w.s.

More about n.e.w.s.

A tool for distributing immaterial resources and intellectual goods in an era of diversification, n.e.w.s. attempts to initiate, build and foster relations and provide a valuable portal dedicated to cultural bricolage, enabling less seen artistic endeavors worldwide visibility.

n.e.w.s. structures contributions in the form of Web 2.0 technology: a blog/archive (images and text), along with a wiki-like ‘books’ (collaborative writing), tagging (shared vocabulary) and polling. Content is curatorially determined: images, texts, podcasts and links provide information in the form of documentation of previous works or new media online.

Open-sourced, collaborative action and authoring are not only encouraged but also are integral to n.e.w.s. along with a community developed event calendar and database. Building upon shared knowledge and past references, contributors engage with each others’ practices. Multilingual translation, tagging and commentary will eventually contextualise the contributions and open up new possibilities, collaboration in the form of further projects as well as producing printed multilingual publications.

Comments and user feedback welcome! Please add your events to our calendar or subscribe to our mailing for further projects and announcements.

n.e.w.s.: Tiong Ang, Sannetje van Haarst, Renée Ridgway

n.e.w.s. is supported by: Mondriaan Foundation

The Cultural Analysis of Globalisation

April 2, 2008

University of Amsterdam

Ridgway presented her work and conducted a workshop for students of the Research Master in Cultural Analysis programme.

Alternative spaces, web spaces, artists associations, and networks have thrived in recent years, encouraging and enabling resistant forms of art, political and social positions. What are the means to determine value and is there any general standard with which to work? If ‘money tends to be represented as an invisible potency because of its capacity to turn into many other things… its hidden capacity for action.’ (Graeber, 2001, p. 114), how are cultural currencies cultivated? This presentation considered the production of art and its use value in the twenty-first century, along with its relationship between new media and the Internet, cultural translation witihin the art world and wealth distribution models.

Politics of the contemporary: Globalisation and Interculturality
Research Master in Cultural Analysis Programme

Professors: Sophie Berrebi and Deborah Cherry

Course guidelines: Key concepts will be explored in relation to a range of cultural instances such as museums and international art exhibitions, documentary, installation, contemporary art and the globalization of culture and politics. The inherently interdisciplinary nature of the subject requires the use of a diversified range of theoretical sources. While the presentations by tutors and seminar discussions will predominantly deal with case-studies from the visual domain, students are invited to research other areas of contemporary culture in which relations between the local and the global are seen to be at work.

Holding an Angle

Videoscreening of works by international artists

Saturday, February 9, 2008

at the Cacao Fabriek Helmond, the Netherlands

This site-specific context of a former chocolate factory was the place of a series of screenings by various artists.

Curated by Lieke Snelling and Ruth Legg

Skin Deep
single channel projection
12 minutes
2008

In this video the topics addressed deal with land and sovereignty. The value of the currency, in this case embodied by the possession of land, is continuously increased and decreased over time. Land here is currency as well as the material salt and is determined by gains and losses. In this case, time is the length of the video, reflected here through the action/ritual by a performer replacing an area of the projection (light) with salt. This crystalizes the image, so to speak, allowing it to be seen; the video becomes visible. The video is Native New Yorkers, a one-minute loop showing a time-lapse of an entire piece of deerskin (as a metaphor for land) being cut up, unravelling.

Be(com)ing Dutch: The Gate Foundation, it’s past, present and future

November 19, 2007 at the Van Abbemuseum

Part of the caucus programme of Be(com)ing Dutch

Guest speakers: Sebastian Lopez (Director Iniva London) Shaheen Merali (Head of Art, Film, New Media, exhibitions at Haus der Kulturen der Welt ) Diana Franssen (Head librarian, Van Abbemuseum) Renée Ridgway (former Board member, Gate Foundation, artist, curator)

This workshop which addressed the acquisition of the Gate Foundation within the Van Abbe Museum and its present state and use value by exploring the cultural significance of its history, its accomplishment and ambition of its collection. Taking the Gate as a case study, as an ‘interpretative field of material’, we further contextualised this within the framework of alternative ‘autonomous insitutions’ (Iniva, Haus der Kulturen der Welt) whose mission is to reinstate internationalism, world culture, while working towards inclusion.

Part of the workshop was devoted to attempting to unpack some of the terminology associated with ‘cultural diversity’ used in policymaking over the years within the cultural sector, to question the autonomy of these institutions in relationship to areas of ‘positive discrimination’ as well as the ‘top down’ financing that supports such cultural initiatives. These questions were conceived together with Sarat Maharaj and are being further discussed and disseminated via a wiki. More soon.

A Short History of Dutch Video Art

224 pages, 340 illustrations, English/Spanish
design: Sander Boon
publisher: episode Rotterdam
ISBN: 9059730313
Price: € 27,50

This is the last publication of the Gate Foundation.

The publication catalogues the exhibition A Short History of Dutch Video Art, which was curated by Sebastian Lopez and organized by the Gate Foundation. With its 224 pages, this bilingual (English and Spanish) publication has already been shown in 7 museums around the world. It contains 340 colour illustrations and descriptions of the works as well as comprehensive videographies, thereby providing the most complete overview of the artist’s achievements. The publication also includes an essay by Sebastian Lopez, reflecting on Dutch artistic and cultural dynamics around the new medium of video introduced in the 1970s.

Another Publication
You can’t judge a book by its cover

Official launch and symposium at Casco Projects in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

October 6th, 2007, 14:00-18:00

guest speakers:

Jan Verwoert, Frans-Willem Korsten, Marina Grzinic.

Moderators:
Katarina Zdjelar & Renée Ridgway

in cooperation with Piet Zwart Institute and Revolver Books

Another Publication is a book project around the manifold perspectives on otherness. Twelve writers were invited to contribute a text on this subject, each writing a preface to a possible book around the ‘other.’ Together, these prefaces trace different identifications and applications of the term, such as collaboration, love, aesthetics, institutional critique and globalisation. In addition, 82 artists were invited to submit a cover for this book and they, in turn, invited another to contribute an image for a cover. Each compilation of texts is framed by one single cover image, each in an edition of seven.

Editors: Katarina Zdjelar and Renée Ridgway

With text contributions by: Mieke Bal, Dieter Lesage, Bojana Kunst, Steve Rushton, Hito Steyerl, Nato Thompson, Thomas Michelon, Frans-Willem Korsten, Jelena Vesic, Boris Buden, Jan Verwoert, Rosi Braidotti
Graphic designer: Sander Boon

Website: http://anotherpublication.net/

Order a publication at Revolver Books

Once again, many thanks to the writers and all of the 164 image contributors for their images!

Oliver Ressler, Mieke Bal, Christoph Keller, Peter Piller, Erzen Shkololli, LIGNA, Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid, Zoran Todorović, David Maljković, Chris Sullivan, Paul Khera, Christina Erman Widerberg, Karl Persson, Raqs Media Collective, Inder Salim, Ivan Grubanov, Predrag Pajdić, Siniša Ilić, Bojan Djordjev, Ivan Moudov, Michael Hofstetter, Carey Young, Ine Lamers, Robert Suermondt, Bert Sissingh, Nalini Malani, Nourit Masson-Sékiné, Diego Ferrari, Mr. Chankyong Park, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Diego Bruno, Craig Coulthard, Philip Provily, Chad McCail, Biljana Djurdjević, Jos van der Pol, Maurice Bogaert, Melvin Moti, David Maroto, Antoine Prum, Holger Nickisch, Liesbeth Bik, Stefan Saffer, Monali Meher, Renzo Martens, Banu Cennetoglu, David Kellner& Ivan Jurica, Frank J.M.A. Castelyns, Roland van den Berghe, Kara Hamilton, Johan Waerndt, Sanjeev Sinha, Hans Bernhard, Nancy Bleck, Odili Donald Odita, Tere Recarens, Durga Kainthola, Servullo Mendez Rey, Hinrich Sachs, Olaf Probst, Tamuna Chabashvili, Betsy Green, Anneke A. de Boer, Sandra Semchuk and James Nicholas, Christiaan Bastiaans, Carlos Aires, Joseph Semah, Duba Sambolec, Delphine Bedel, Caecilia Tripp, Natasja Straat, Melanie Carvalho, Alireza Rasoulinezhad, Ni Haifeng, Caterina Pecchioli, Matthijs de Bruine, Margret Wibmer, Peggy Buth, IRWIN, Group OHO (1966 – 1971), Katrin Plavcak, Marieken Verheyen, Eduardo Molinari / Archivo Caminante, Simon Ferdinando, Susan Kendzulak, Abrie Fourie, Shaheen Merali, Basekamp, Thomas Buxó, Mark Zirpel, Klaas van Gorkum & Iratxe Jaio, Tina Aufiero, Mounir Fatmi, Sylvia de Swaan, Kenneth R. Vick, Masist Gül, Hung-Chih Peng, Els Vanden Meersch, Sonia Balassanian, Anita Di Bianco, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Maria Dumlao, Tiong Ang, Stefan Bohenberger, Charlie Citron, Ella Klaschka, Cecilia Mandrile, Sandra Stephens, Stephanie Benzaquen, Judi Werthein, Remy Jungerman, Arthur Neve, Mary Ellen Carroll, Sharmila Samant, Raul Marroquin, Risk Hazekamp, Tushar Joag, Dawn Woolley, Radcliffe Bailey, Marietheres Finkeldei, Berend Strik, Desiree Palmen, Albert Weis, Thomas Lenden, Mark Brogan, Franco Angeloni, Karolina Freino, Marisa Jahn & Steve Shada, Shunji Hori, Serkan Ozkaya, Stani Michiels, Lisa Holden, Ayreen Anastas, Luisa Kasalicky, Rene Gabri, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Rob Birza, Guerilla Girls, Mohamed Abdulla, Rachel Wilberforce, Steve Lambert, Isabel Cordeiro, Sal Randolph, Kathe Izzo, Orgacom, Bert de Muynck, Naomi Tereza Salmon, Lucia Zegada, Atone Niane, Manon de Boer, Paul Carter&Paul Gray, Rodrìguez foundation, Birgit Knoechl, Mark Booth, Fendry Ekel, Joachim Stein, Nasrin Tabatabai, Miloš Lolić, Naro Snackey, Josiah McElheny, Adi Hollander, Eitan Ben Moshe, Ana Dzokic, Corinne Gambi

Borders, Boundaries & Liminal Spaces was originally conceived to be an extension of our concept of the new media center. It also seemed logical to have a conference about liminal spaces inside of one. Truly, the conference afforded us an opportunity to interrogate the space more thoroughly. Aside from the specifics of the topics covered (remains, the body from within and without, present and future, and the manipulation of the system) the conference was particularly enlightening with respect to the engine of Second Life and communication within that medium.

Conference in Second Life at Ars Virtua

Panelists:
Laura Jones (J0E Languish for this presentation only)
Renée Ridgway (Chloe Mahfouz)
Brad Kligerman (Kliger Dinkin)

Moderator
James Morgan (Rubaiyat Shatner)

The session was intended to look at the nature of what is left behind by a culture, people or civilization through the lens of an archaeologist, architect and artist. Laura manages to find a new discipline in the archaeology of the virtual, but one that is different in its essential character but not in its essence. Archaeology will still be about putting together incomplete pieces but the pieces will now be recorded bits of data. Brad focuses on the crossing of the threshold into the synthetic environment. He chooses to consider what is left behind in the transition. Renée considers history through visualization and story telling. She reconstructs the metaphoric narrative based on the bits and bobbs of text that refer to events. She also shows us a cultural perspective based entirely within a familar land.

The CADRE Laboratory for New Media, an interdisciplinary academic and research program dedicated to the experimental use of information technology and art will publish Switch 23, ‘Function//Border//Dysfunction’, featuring the ‘Borders, Boundaries & Liminal Spaces’ conference.

More info about ArsVirtua

Bags and more bags? any extras?

We still need your help
Temporary Services
Do you have a section of your kitchen or home that is dedicated to stowing these excess plastic shopping bags as they accumulate? We do, and many of our friends do as well. We have begun to collect photos of people’s bag collections in their homes which we will turn into a public archive. We have some photos of bag accumulations found so far posted on our blog’s photo gallery.

Please send us a photograph of your storage recepticle or collection of excess plastic shopping bags. 300 dpi photos are required for print quality. 3″ X 5″ would be fine. If the file is too large to attach, feel free to send us files using free services like YouSendit.

We’ll also take donations of unwanted plastic bags that we can use for these projects. If you have a bunch of bags and are located in Berlin or Chicago, let us know and we can get them from you.
Photos should be emailed to: servers@temporaryservices.org

 

 Beavers [0:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Panel Discussion
November 18, 2006, 13:30
Practical History

Ridgway presented her visual work along with sound tracks from her archive of interviews of people with Dutch surnames.

St. Mark’s Church Sanctuary, 2nd Ave and 10th Street

Short presentations, some featuring audio-visual and performance elements, addressing questions including: How can we interpret the landscape of the past through the environment of the present? What was the catalyst for panelists’ involvement with the project? What are the reasons to pursue cross-disciplinary work, and how does promoting dialogue among artists, scientists, and historians enhance professional investigations or creative endeavors?

press contact: Felicia Mayo, 212-228-2781 or info@smhlf.org http://smhlf.org
Thanks to The Netherland-America Foundation, Mondriaan Foundation