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The Future Image of Resurrection
“I’m using the word ‘revolution’ in its most general sense, talking not only about revolutionary movements in the field of politics, but also in the arts and other socio-economic areas.” * says Masao Adachi. What is the future video/film image of resurrection? How we can search for the collective revolutionary image?
www.midnighteye.com/interviews/masao-adachi/#sthash.Pv3pCyGi.dpuf
EN ESPAÑOL: Los desafíos y los obstáculos que enfrentan los artistas y las instituciones del contexto latinoamericano en relación con el arte como una actividad crítica.
El tema que propongo para este debate es el concepto y la realización del arte como una actividad crítica que aborda, explora y reflexiona sobre cuestiones sociales. No se trata de imponer una obligación moral o de recurrir a una visión de Latinoamérica como una región que está permanentemente en crisis (aunque sea obvio que no le falten conflictos y problemas sociales); se trata del concepto que manejamos del pensamiento creativo en relación con su entorno y los factores externos que informan nuestra actitud. Me parece que hoy día los artistas y las instituciones del contexto latinoamericano enfrentan desafíos y obstáculos particulares. Estos desafíos y obstáculos podrían ser materiales, sociales, conceptuales o psicológicas. Tal vez ustedes tendrán otras maneras de caracterizar esta situación. Les invito a compartir sus reflexiones sobre este tema. 
Please consider having converage of the the Digital Labor Conference at the New School Nov. 14-16th, 2014. Or starting a channel where posts related to this conference can occur. http://digitallabor.org/ Thanks! Dorothy
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Hi Dorothy – I sent you a private message. 
There is a colloquium taking place hosted by Media@McGill in the McCord Museum in Montreal. It brings together artists and speakers of different fields of visual and sound cultures and is livestreamed on:
http://www.soundvisionaction.cc/program/
“By bringing together interdisciplinary practices in visual culture and sound studies, and situating them in relationship to fields like science and technology studies, history, literature, music, art, and media studies, Sound, Vision, Action examines the relationships between diverse technologies and techniques that shape the torrent of images and sounds that surround us, and the everyday practices of hearing and seeing through which people engage with the world.”
Video: David Lyon - “Surveillance Cultures”
David Lyon, director of the Surveillance Study Center at the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, talks about his concept of “surveillance cultures”
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Is the art wold of today following the pattern of “psychological obsolescence”?
Is this what you’re referring to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
I’m curious to hear more about your thoughts on this.
For me, “Planned” is the correct word because the works are not made with the intention of disposability.
“Phycological” is more accurate because the works do not become dysfunctional, just no longer satisfy the needs of a market driver collector.
Bridging the gap?
Whether it’s Baudrillard’s derealization of the world or Debord’s Critique of Separation – media mystifies (Rosler) our relationship with the social and political world around us. „Information devours it’s content“, imploding meaning in the media (Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation). Watching „Heidegger speak“, adds up that from his point of view, we don’t need to improve in objectively describing the world, but to interpret it better.
Art, all the more critical art, or art that wants to reflect on social and political topics, has to take the above into account. I ask myself if there can be a dialogue here about the following questions that would result in some sort of practical outcome of this theoretical insight.
- How to make a work of critical art, that spurs your audience’s participation?
- What are methods or concepts of making such an artwork – subverting, deconstructing… What can that mean exactly?
- What are examples in practice and theory (e.g. Brecht’s epic theatre)
NOTES
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„[…] The events that occur in our individual existence as it is now organized, the events that really concern us and require our distant and bored spectators. In contrast, the situations presented in artistic works are often attractive, situations that would merit our active participation. This is a paradox to reverse, to put back on its feet. This is what must be realized in practice. As for this idiotic spectacle of the filtered and fragmented past, full of sound and fury, it is not a question now of transforming or “adapting” it into another neatly ordered spectacle that would play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and participation. No. A coherent artistic expression expresses nothing but the coherence of the past, nothing but passivity.
It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To undermine the conventions of its communication. To demoralize its fans. What a task! As in a blurry drunken vision, the memory and language of the film fade out simultaneously. At the extreme, miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objectivity: a documentation of the conditions of non-communication.“
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found via “Heidegger, circa 2015”: Heidegger, circa 2015
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“[…] connectivity with the subject can act as a false assurance, a moment of contact that doesn’t spur me to further action, but absolves me of the consequences of inaction. I recognize this person as a person; therefore, I have fulfilled my duty, and I need to know nothing else about them.”
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Significantly the first example that crosses my mind is not from the field of pictorial arts.
Stealing books as an analog form of piracy, an ethically murky act done for the purpose of the redistribution of information http://arachne.cc/issues/01/nest-of-ghosts-libros-fantasma.html with Mexico City publisher Libros Fantasma