Some Troubles with Internet Time

In Spring 2019, I re-booted my course, Feminist Online Spaces. This time I taught it with Masters students in Liberal Studies (MALS) at the CUNY Graduate Center and it was called Contemporary Feminist Theories: The Nowheres & Everywhere of Online Feminism. Some quick research established that the last time I had used this site was six years previously in August 2013. At that time it was serving as a research and teaching site for me as well as the temporary internet home for the then still-forming FemTechnet. The last post from that use was called “Ramping Up: Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.” It held some of our collective work as a small number of us began to nourish the roots of what would become FemTechNet’s signature and multiple enterprises including our DOCC, Feminist Wikistorming, and many other projects. We were meeting at my house in Highland Park, CA and in IRL inventing digital worlds, classes, tool kits, community and more. This post features a photo of Adrianne Wadewitz, the feminist Wikipedian and FemTechNet early stalwart, who died tragically about a year later.

Adrianne Wadewitz, ’13

See the rest on Online Feminist Spaces.

Caring.Sharing: ethics and concepts for saving and using VHS Archives

The VHS Archives Working Group at the CUNY GC (2018-2019) is engaging in sustained conversations as we are tool-building a lightweight app that can sit on top of a small stack of digitized VHS tapes so as to attend thoughtfully and ethically to the buzzing interplay of feelings, intimate community, video, and tech in relation to tape. We think hard about the connections between the digital migration of tape—its saving or loss—and also, then, safety. Although we start with tape, we attend primarily to people and their things:

• the needs for the privacy of public things.
• the needs for publicity of things that have been forced into privacy.
• the needs for the privacy of vulnerable people and communities as some of their things become public.
• the needs for vulnerable people and communities to have access to representation, and its salvage, in ways that empower and do not endanger them.

Carol Leigh, “Safe Sex Slut” 1987.

We are committed to the safety and care of vulnerable people and their objects. For our group this has primarily meant queers and trans people/of color, women and feminists, people affected by HIV/AIDS, and those with non-hegemonic sexualities and its representation. Attending to our people, and their practices and things, raises concerns that we understand as ethical, conceptual, and technological. This is what our group calls “caring.sharing.” We insist you shouldn’t share (digital media) without care (of those whose it is and was and will be). Attending to the experiences and wants of people, in community, at every technological step, is an act of ethical obligation and its technological formatting.

We believe that frames for thinking about and taking action on caring.sharing should be written into all encounters (personal, technological, interfacial) when the already fragile materials of vulnerable others become available online, including:

• the ethics of reuse: “Can we develop queer archival practices that engage subtle questions of power and access, the strangeness of the past, the tension between the individual and collective, and the changing historical contexts that have shaped viewership, authorship, and privacy? Can we somehow account for both the delights and the troubles that our digital technologies facilitate? In short: Can we enact community-engaged, ethically informed, queer approaches to the conundrums that lie at the center of our documentary and archival impulses? Maybe some stories shouldn’t be told in public. Maybe some archival materials should remain hard to find. Maybe it matters who tells which stories. And maybe just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” (Rachel Mattson, Queer Histories, Videotape, and the Ethics of Reuse)
• nostalgia and intellectual feelings:  Things matter to those who own, save, made and share them. How do we make sure to honor “the feelings attached to desire and sexuality, whether in a peep show booth or a backyard in the shadows of East Los Angeles.” (Juan Fernández, Nostalgia and “Intellectual Feelings”)
• working from unmade, lost, or hidden archives: Sometimes there isn’t a record to be found because people chose to remain unrecorded because documentation can bring in the state, the family, or other outside forces of potential discipline or punishment. “Is it possible to reintroduce the cultural work of our archival subjects when there aren’t many video materials available?” (Jaime Shearn Coan,” Crucial Circulations: VHS and Queer AIDS Archives“)
• finding and working from material that is too personal, graphic or painful to be shared, or was never made for curious, potentially violent others.
• finding and working from personal archives of loss: can we be technologically tender?
• attending to accessibility: so that saved things can be used by all who need them.
• context-building: how to understand, preserve, and honor where work came from while enriching our understanding of past times, places, and people. This is critical, because it insures that things (and their peoples) aren’t and can’t be ripped from their original home, place, people, use, and values.
• staying small; resisting scale: at some point, the number of objects, tags, people, or connections can get too large for the community that salvaged things to insure and protect them.
• rules of engagement: objects online should be engaged with using agreed upon rules written by the community that made/saved them: community-specific, community-produced, iterative, and adaptive.
• preservation with purpose: communities should know why they are saving and for what and whom.
• activation as safety: easy to lose things can gain a toe-hold in memory, history, and advocacy when they are saved and used. Once known, procedures for safety can be written onto them.
• acknowledging communal knowledge and other types of ownership within and beyond the tech.

From Bebashi AIDS educational trigger tape, late 1980s. See more: “Stacked on Her Office Shelf: Stewardship and AIDS Archives,” Theodore Kerr and Alexandra Juhasz

At previous meetings, we have come up with some tactics we want to build into the use of our tool. Scale, time, presence, and collectivity are key.

1. We recommend using our tool in a group:

• the tapes should be a project of a community.
• playing with your stack should be embedded in the world somehow, and fun.
• it should be used by people who understand, need, want the tapes, or a/the community, or the tech.
• different types of users could bring and learn different skills to the stack: to set it up, to add videos, to comment/annotate videos, to curate, to show them, to learn and share skills from/with each other.

2. Our tool should ideally be used locally and in shared time (online or off):

• there’s a materiality and embodiedness to working in-person, in real time

3. Caring.sharing happens best with and for and by a small group of people:

• a known group, already known or getting known via tapey engagement.
• with shared interests: already known or getting known via tapey engagement.
• a groups with their own, known, self-developed, adaptable rules of engagement.
• to be helped along, facilitated, by the tool, the tech, the instructions.

4. Ownership and access:

• who holds the rights to the material?
• do we respect the system that grants that? if not, what rights systems do we honor and why?

FOR OUR NEXT MEETING: TACTICS TO ENGAGE/OR WRITE INTO THE TECH:

• write instructions and/or questions that move people through a set of issues with associated writing before they can touch the tool, or before each in a series of steps that follow one after the other in the tool
• do this in short steps
• allow users of the tool to answer, and thus to be “ethical” in any way they choose, but choose they must, first
• create fields, pages, areas on the tool for users to fill in their answers (including none) to the concerns above; step by step, information would be built by the users to surround their now-digital always-vulnerable objects
• step by step builders/users indicate their own degrees of comfort and concern, including none
• create activities, engagements with the tool that build out user interaction and connection with others, with the material, with the material’s initial owners or makers and/or new users (what we call “party games’)
• being alone with a tape found in a box is only a beginning of its/our care!

From “Compulsive Practice,” (Jean Carlomusto, Hugh Ryan, and Alexandra Juhasz, 2016)

After Post Truth, I share my Radical Digital Media Literacy website

I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd International Conference on Interface Politics, “After Post-Truth,” in Barcelona, Spain, November 28-30, 2018. Scores of speakers, hours of intensity, dark findings about seamless interfaces—even so, the experience was deeply replenishing for no reason more central than that there I was, in Spain no less, and in community with many many others, from around the world, all of us, paying attention. This, the conference co-organizer, Jorge Luis Marzo (with Bani Brusadin) described at our introductory sessions as “an urgent abandonment from the real being replaced by our desire and will to freedom.”

While I can not cover all that I learned, or even all that moved me there (people and their ideas and actions), I will use this brief recap of the highlights of the proceedings to help me to better understand critical frameworks that link to the work I have been doing towards the completion and release of my new website (thanks Ethel Moore and Partner and Partners), fakenews-poetry.org: a useful and pretty container holding the media, ephemera, and yes, the poems, that I have been producing with so many others by initiating, in 2018, something like fifteen Fake News Poetry Workshops, around the world, as Radical Digital Media Literacy given the Fact of Fake News. For some, this post might serve as an introduction to the larger #100hardtruths-#fakenews project (initiated during the first 100 days of the Trump administration, thanks to Craig Dietrich for that website), while for others, it might be a recap of the concerns and practices the project engages or a chance to see your own work held alongside that of others who engaged in different places and communities.

But most importantly, this post and the site serves as an invitation to mount and run your own Workshop, in your community, with your own poets, theorists, and participants (feel free to reach out to me! Stage 2 of the website will build out more how-to documents.)

But the project is always, also about sharing what we do and know about fake news and related travesties. In Barcelona, I learned about a number of exciting sister projects, all seeking, as do I, to break through the transparency of interfaces, and to reveal, understand, undermine, or remake all that might be algorithmically, ideologically, financially, and psychically hidden behind the ever more huge and inapproachable back-end, our frothy frozen impenetrable cloud:

• bellingcat: the home of online investigations.
• HyperNormalization by Adam Curtis.
• Safebook by Ben Grosser. Facebook without the content!
• Algorithms Allowed, and much more charting the real costs of “free” interfaces (see image below), by Joana Moll,
• Digital Dietetics, by Javier Lopes, Pedro Fernandez de Castro, and Victor Sampedro. Their project uses a dietary model to facilitate a critical digital citizenship where limiting consumption, setting collective goals for media interaction, and being with others who know more are steps towards better digital health.
• the films of Metahaven, emphasizing our simultaneous time-scales, each a version of competing or even co-exiting realities: real for people in parallel, these versions  are incompatible and also all “true.”

Joana Moll, DEFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOREST

As critically for my own heart, mind, and practice, I heard presentations that named dynamics that help focus or nuance some of my own perhaps more inchoate motives for the fakenews-poetry project:

• Doro Wiese‘s explanation that information does not not allow us to feel in time, and then many related pleas for slowness.
• a shared response by many of the speakers to begin research into the (very recent) past of the internet to understand how earlier cycles of sudden technological, corporate, and digital change have been reacted to by humans.
• careful attention to delineate between the precise terms and functions of a variety of truth vocabularies—veracity, sincerity, frankness, persuasion, evidence, proof—both in regards to how information is produced, packaged, and sold but also for our (changing) sense of selves as political, psychoanalytic, and human subjects, sometimes embodied.
• an understanding of truth in a time of post-facts as that which produces a sense of coherence, even if it is false, and despite any evidence, thus a new kind of “partisan knowledge” (Emillie V. De Keulenaar)
• a related set of attempts to understand how algorithms and computational propaganda have been used to “dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay” (Berke Alikasifoglu and Gabriele Cosentino)
• several returns to Hito Steyerl’s idea of the “poor image” (what I have called “bad video” in my perhaps old but still too-valid YouTube work), and its links to veracity, and more so addiction, and its sustaining but false forms of intimacy (one click away, so close, just nearby, an immediacy [do see Pooja Rangan here!])
• significant work on new and consolidating interface realisms (what Christian Andersen and Soren Polk call the “metainterface,” one that both represents and produces our new [fake, post-truth] realities, all the while obscuring the labor, networks, and other resources that produce it).
• a continuing keen attention to collectives, commons, publics, and lived networks, including the work by Marco Deseriis on “Condividual” activities: “sharing as ‘dividing’ together.”

Then, some useful questions and tactics:

• do people even want to be truthful (anymore)?
• strive for trust over truth: create invitations to engage with evidence rather than statements of truth which only lead to suspicion (Enrico Beccari)
• Pay Attention to What I do Not Say

With this last tactic as a directive and method, I will conclude by nodding briefly at what was impossible not to notice as being invisible and unsaid at this wonderful event: the many approaches, politics, people, and theories whose names and terms and needs were never (or rarely) uttered over hours and days of astute and informative analysis: that is, just about anything to do with race, ethnicity, sexuality, sex, indigeneity, ability, age and as often as not gender or feminism. These body- and place-based, situated politics, theories, lived experiences and methods with their own regal, lengthy, powerful ideas, movements, and actions that have been so central to our experiences, analyses, critiques and movements about the internet and its world (from #Blacklivesmatter to #metoo, from Donna Haraway to my/our own femtechnet and in particular our “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Workbook“) were, oddly, invisibilized. A cultural and intellectual outsider, I am not sure why these movements and their core theories and practices of justice, epistemology, creativity, and sustainability were not go-to reservoirs of inspiration and power for most of my fellow panelists. Certainly, a significant amount of the evil, despair, violence, and injustice that has been enacted in and by corporate and political regimes of post-truth have been against others seemingly marked by difference of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and otherwise. And, responsive movements have been mounted digitally, and otherwise, in response. Perhaps the connection of these movements and methods to “identity” or the “body” or “community” or “care” or the “individual” make these vital traditions seem inadequate in the face of the immensity of our data and its infrastructure that enclouds us? I really don’t understand … But, I will not testify to the definitive necessity of these traditions, because that’s been done everywhere by my allies and colleagues for decades (you can find many links to such research and action in the #100hardtruths primer), but I will end by repeating what I said in my own presentation:

I want to engage in alternative formats for the generation and movement of meaningful fragments, post truth but gentle, not easily spreadable or digestable, not expendable, but rather demanding your attention and care—so perhaps for this moment at least, made for and consumed by small local groups that will listen together in time. With diverse participants in unique places, I am exploring truth and authentication systems that veer away from cameras, and indexical “truth,” thus mobilizing other systems outside of journalistic evidence or slick socials. I want to engage in alternative formats for the generation and movement of meaningful fragments that can mobilize and save honest expressions about our lived experiences of the internet’s deceptions in ways that might momentarily liberate us, or at least partially remove us from the logics of capitalist and governmental watching and lying that have underwritten this dangerous dishonest flow.

What if we aimed for gentle truths? For now.

From Toronto Fake News Poetry Workshop

 

My VHS Archives: confessions from the field of queer feminist media praxis

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. Our labor in queer cinema studies might result in institutional anthologies, retrospectives, or canons, but for me it needs smaller, stranger sites, activities, and outcomes that honor how it’s done: its moods, weather, learning and loving.

Alex, Carolyn, Jazzy and Deborah at Union Square Park, as part of the event, “Dear J,” revisiting “Homosexuals: One Child’s Point of View,” featuring Jazzy and directed by her mother, Juanita Mohammed (1990)

In this talk, I introduce a multi-sited project (three websites: a graduate class, an in-process web app for vulnerable video, and a working group sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, at the CUNY Graduate Center) where I engage in inter-disciplinary, community-based, activist queer film scholarship: VHS Archives. In the talk, I will show some attempts to work with and use some of my own queer media archives, initially held on VHS tape. How I do and did this, often with others in and outside the academy, taking up many art forms and as well as adaptive platforms, and now making use of my own and other’s soon to be lost video fragments, is what I have longed called my committed media praxis. Theory adjacent and conversant, sexual and political proclivities in flux, responsive to communities and collaborators, primarily and definitively process-oriented and often production-based, my committed media praxis in queer media and its archives is about using media as one part of a beloved community’s efforts at doing our best at living queer feminist lives.

Please find here, my power point, script, and three screenshots of me reading (pretty poorly) from my computer: “My VHS Archives: confessions from the field of queer feminist media praxis,” for The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry Conference, held at Concordia University, November 17, 2018. Do take a look at the three sites linked above. There’s much to see and explore by colleagues, students, technologists, archivists, friends, and loved ones.

Snow kept me from physically attending.

 

The class of 1982: on woodsies, frat parties, throwing up, making out, and bad sex

I went to a fine public high school in Boulder Colorado. 1000 students per grade, we were the class of 1982.

I was a good girl, a strong student, an over-achiever, a budding feminist. A girl who wanted a boyfriend, desperately. My friends were like me: college-bound AP-takers when these were few, fine athletes and empowered student leaders. I briefly had a boyfriend as driven as I. But mostly I was well-loved by my best girlfriends. I planned to fall in love and maybe have sex too, later, with a wonderful boy who I would meet in college where being smart (and Jewish) wouldn’t matter quite so much. Sex was not really a part of what I wanted, although affection and attention were. Luckily, I was cherished by a co-ed group of friends made up of our school’s best and brightest, all en route to Stanford, Brown, Swarthmore, and the like. I’d go to Amherst, the class of 1986. More on that soon.

We danced to DEVO, the B52s, the Clash, Elvis Costello, and Madness at parties we threw on our own. We wanted a way to be together that was different: more fun and more safe than what was the normal night of revelry in our small Western town. At our intimate parties, we saw and loved each other. Held at someone’s house, we drank beer pretty safely that we bought with fake IDs. Sometimes our parents bought it for us. We played quarters. One or two of the most devoted romantic couples, built from our tight friendship circle, chose together to have sex. But mostly, we drank, flirted, and danced. We were sweet and naive, experimenting with being older, carefully, oddly, together, in fits and starts. Or perhaps we were exactly what you’d expect: just young and hungry and full of want.

Every once and awhile we chose to go to the parties the “popular kids” threw (football players and cheerleaders, kids from wealthy homes). There kids drank way more beer, stood in sticky stinky hallways, acted dumb, got too drunk, and nobody knew what to say. I didn’t think any of this was attractive or even fun really, and I certainly was not attractive in this context given that I was smart. Once I did make out briefly with a boy from a rival school under the bleachers at a football game. I remember his name was Reggie and that he put his tongue in my mouth. I thought that was awful, but I did relish the adventure, the possibility, the fact of being chosen, and the taste of something new. Occasionally we decided to attend huge parties that were open to all the students, hundreds and hundreds of us. These were called “woodsies,” although they mostly took place in the plains outside of Boulder—just grass—we all had to drive there following some strange mimeographed map. At woodsies, in marauding clusters lit by car headlights, people drank unimaginable quantities of beer from kegs set up in the dark. At one, I ended up with an older boy, in a group where another one of my friends was similarly coupled. We all made out. It was dark and maybe we were around a fire. I was much more drunk than I’d ever been. I didn’t really like it; I didn’t even know the guy’s name. This was not what I wanted at all. I was a good girl and all of it felt scary: the drinking, the not knowing. I wormed my way out of that embrace. One of my friends drove us home; she was also pretty drunk, just less so (this was before the concept of designated drivers really took). I made it home and threw up on the front porch of my house before I rang the door bell. Then my dad let me in. I told him how drunk I was but not about the yucky kissing. He took me to my room and helped me into bed. The room spun. I rarely drank that much again (in my life). I cannot say the same for the kissing.

This was not my me-too moment. But I did learn something about alcohol, boys, parties, and sex.

At Amherst from 1982-1986, frat parties dominated the social scene: fueled by alcohol. These dangerous spaces were pretty much the only social game in town. I remember ending up in a dorm room with a man I only barely knew after some frat party, doing something I didn’t like. I’m not sure what. I was drunk. He was more drunk. I wormed out of it and got home somehow. I forget how. I forgot it right away. I still forget it. Because it was gross. Frats were banned at Amherst during my sophomore year for this very reason: known as they were as havens for drunken misogyny, bigoted admissions, and as hold-outs of the patriarchal boys-club soul of the place. In the 1980s, my school was beginning or pretending to change, given that women had been only recently admitted (against the good-ole boys’ best efforts; they fought, too, for their frats, which immediately popped up again, illegal bastions of just the kinds of male comaraderie that was built upon hatred of women [and themselves, most likely] that still fire these elite institutions and their all-male hold-outs).

During my junior year, I lost my virginity at something like a frat party in my own dorm where I was actually the RA. I had long had a crush from afar on this boy because he was one of the smartest people in my constitutional law class (as was I). He was a star of the baseball team: gorgeous, verbal, and very suave. We flirted on the dance floor. I thought we were going to have a relationship, based on our shared intellect and hunger for more, and fooling around in my dorm room would be the beginning. He had no idea I was a virgin. He was drunk. Thing moved fast. I had most likely had something to drink, too. But mostly I was operating via naivete, and want, and his lead. It turns out he had a girlfriend at another school. That was that. I took a morning after pill. He told all to his suite mates. I was heart-broken and very embarrassed.

This was not my me-too moment. But I did learn something more about alcohol, boys, parties, and sex.

Outside of the sweet boyfriend I did meet during my freshman year—the very one I had yearned for … we weren’t ready for intercourse yet, although we tried many other things including sharing a whole bottle of expensive champagne … wowza!—my youthful sexuality was pretty horrid. Nothing like what I wanted. Instead it was organized by a series of potentially dangerous encounters that I skirted with desire in my heart and body, and fear there as well. I was not date raped, or molested, or violated … ish. Who can say, really? I mostly forget the details of these many sordid misfires.

Yes, I thought I had mostly forgotten, until testimony about Brett Kavanaugh’s past behavior and that of his friends, frat mates, and teammates arrived, as familiar to me as the air I still breathe. With (and against) such men, I learned to be a young woman and now a grown one. I have done everything in my power (including teaching feminist and queer studies, being an activist, making art, and striving for healthy adult relationships with men and women) to grow into a version of womanhood that lets me (and others) live sex, love, and romance outside the frameworks that dudes like Kavanaugh, especially the “elite” ones, inherit and own. I have worked to forget what I learned of alcohol, boys, parties, and sex during high school and college, and to find love and sex in places organized outside of sexism, inebriation, and men’s uncontrolled and dangerous potent desire and (self)hatred and anger. I wish I could say that I always succeeded. Rather, I’d say I’m working at it. Forgetting has been part of that; and not talking about it; and doing better. The remembering doesn’t feel helpful, just sad: for the society, for those men I can barely name, for myself.

As a queer feminist, I understand that these violent encounters, these sorry missed opportunities for connection, these experiences where girls are hurt physically, emotionally, and sexually are actually bad for all humans, and are driven by sexist understandings of sex and gender which give boys (and the girls who love and want them) few chances or opportunities to be decent. As a grown woman, I seek experiences with men (and women) who want to engage differently with me, even though we all came from this place, the 1980s: woodsies, frat parties, throwing up, making out, taking and losing virginity, but not as anyone would really want.

The classes of 1982 and 1986 are all in our mid-50s. We hear these lurid tales of our peers—as common as are our hopes for change, as core as are our attempts to heal, as definitive as were our homes and towns of origin and colleges of choice—and each episode takes us right back to all that we (hope we) have buried. Not just the violent me-too moments where lines were fully crossed (some of us escaped these, just luck really; many or most did not) but the mundane, addled, disequalibriums of power and desire, love, lust, and hurt that turned us into the men and women we are today.

This week, it became apparent that some of us are more stuck in the 1980s then others. For my peers from the class of 1982 and 1986 (including the boys, now men), those who have tried to do better for ourselves and our towns, schools, society and kids—given this, our ugly shared past—I invoke my stories with strained fondness and some hope. But mostly I write because it feels necessary. It turns out, this is not so much to remember, but instead to draw out, in other terms and for other ends, our sexist, violent youth. We need better forms and fora where we might make sense of our woodsies and frat parties. And better yet, we need better conversations, held outside the patriarchal places where we started and where the old rules still hold. Given that bad sex is one of our generation’s worst shared secrets and current public legacies, I know that we must continue our work to make love and connection better.

 

Feminist Artist Carolee Schneeman Looks Backward and Forward

I interview Carolee Schneeman on the MS. Blog Q&A. Here’s a taste.

Alex: So you are saying that even though your work was eventually, if perhaps belatedly canonized within art and film history, it was appreciated for only a small prism of your feminist activity, that which focuses upon the representation of your own sexuality and body.

Carolee: Yes, a very narrow prism: the ghetto of feminism. You can have this erotic, even prurient dynamic in your work that we are going to pay attention to, but the rest of it is too astonishing, complex, and beyond our need to control how we characterize women’s work.

This is such an important insight about your feminist work and legacy; and a very painful one. Is it possible to not diminish or simplify that part of the project, the body work, the representation of femal sexuality, which is so essential to your work and so essential to the needs of women?

It is as variable as women’s experience. There are aspects of sexuality that I’ve always had to fight for that are not available erotic experiences for lots of women. There’s just so much variation that I cannot represent more than the area that I know well.

But in the show, I saw for the first time your Sexuality Perameters Survey (1967-1971 + 1975) where you you “attempt to note main parameters of lovemaking. Only from a woman’s point of view” by interviewing scores of women and documenting their detailed, intimate answers about sex and sexuality on handmade typewritten grids. I love those charts! The PS1 show highlights work you made that catalogs your relationship to other people’s sexual and relational experience as well as your own sexual and domestic intimacy with male lovers and companions, and with your cats as well.

In film I was able to most clarify this area of contradiction. The films are constantly talking to each other. The ideality of Fuses (1965) gets impinged next with Viet-Flakes (1965; a compilation of Vietnam War-era horrors garnered from magazine and newspaper clippings) and the surround of that morbid suppression of life. I still get very upset when I look at it. Then, the destruction of Palestinian culture overwhelmed all my considerations of the mid 80s into the 90s and that has no resolution. No formal political clarification. Actually it’s more repressive than ever. Now, Palestinians have no right to represent themselves in any aspect of the U.S. government. That’s just been put through as a law.

In conversation with Barbara Hammer

Over tea and croissants at her Westbeth Studio, filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer met feminist film scholar and filmmaker Dr. Alexandra Juhasz for a lively back and forth about Hammer’s New York city-wide retrospective. Hammer’s vast, fifty-plus year oeuvre of film, performance, and never-before-seen art and ephemera is currently on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (“Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies,” through January 28, 2018), and was recently on view at Company Gallery (“Truant: Photographs, 1970 – 1979,” October 22 through November 26). Performances, readings, and film programs are being staged at participating venues (including Queer|Art|Film at the IFC on December 4, and a screening of Sisters! [1974] at the Metrograph on December 17). Barbara and Alex had engaged in another lively interview twenty years earlier as part of Dr. Juhasz’s 1998 documentary and book Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (viewable for free at snagfilms.com). Their decades-long intergenerational conversation focuses on the changing, growing powers of female, queer, and feminist artists. You can read it on The Brooklyn Rail. Our conclusion is below.

Women I Love, Barbara Hammer, 1976

Alex: Twenty years ago I asked you what is your place in feminist film history, and you were around fifty-five, and you said, “I hope that work will be seen as a progression of sophistication and development as it traces one lesbian’s life in the second half of the twentieth century. This is a space now filled, where before there was a lack, a void. Now I have sisters and brothers around me in queer cinema. I want to keep working with my eyes open, learning from others, going to see new work, trying to do the best I can to develop further my visual language.” What have you done since then to further your visual language?

Barbara: My retrospective brings in all the different branches of my work, from performance to photography to installations to journal keeping to writing, and of course to 16mm film, super 8 film, digital film and video. That’s the language: a diverse one that can move in any direction according to the idea or emotional motivation. I think many youth currently in art school are brought up with that language. They don’t define themselves as filmmakers as we were taught to do. So maybe we’ve arrived at the place where a young artist in art school begins from a place where everything is available.

#37, size matters; we have to be minimalist

“We have to be minimalist. A small event, if we can understand it, reconciles us a little bit with the world.” Agnès Varda

In my conversation with Agnès Varda about her current exhibition of video installation, photography, and sculpture showing at Blum & Poe (the full interview will run next month in The Brooklyn Rail), she emphasized that expanded vision occurs through close, returning attention to all that is caught in images of daily life: the complex and sustaining drama of living in time.

See more:

• Agnès Varda, Kelly Conway
• “The Beaches of Agnès,” Agnès Varda
• Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video, Alexandra Juhasz
• “Women of Vision” (documentary), Alexandra Juhasz
• “Five essential books on feminist film,” Sophie Mayer
• Agnès Films: Supporting women and feminist filmmakers

 

#16: practice strategic contemplation

Practicing strategic contemplation—what Rosylyn Rhee explains as having “to be comfortable being uncomfortable [because] so much of making documentary films is embracing the unknown”—is one of six “principles of feminist filmmaking” represented in Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition by Alexandra Hidalgo. The principles she elaborates point to one ethical media tradition that contemplates and thereby unmakes the frameworks that support fake news—truth/fiction, power and ownership within mediamaking and consumption—by engaging media logics outside of capital, including diversity, inter-dependence, mentorship, contemplation, and a primary commitment to social justice.

Contemplate Some More:

• Cámara Retórica: A Feminist Filmmaking Methodology for Rhetoric and Composition
• #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy

100 Hard Truths About Fake News: A primer on digital media literacy

Shortly after November’s tumultuous election, I wrote an article for JStor Daily, “Four Hard Truths About Fake News.” It began with a preamble that actually had three more truths embedded and then quickly followed with four more: “the real internet is a fake, the fake news is very real, and thus Trump is indeed our rightful internet president.”

1. Today’s internet is built on, with, and through an unruly sea of lies, deceptions, and distortions, as well as a few certainties, cables, and algorithms.
2. This week’s viral-wonder—the crisis of “fake news” in the wake of the 2016 presidential election—is a logical and necessary outgrowth of the web’s sordid infrastructure, prurient daily pleasures, and neoliberal political economy.
3. Today’s saccharine hand-wringing and the too-late fixes erupting from the mouthpieces for the corporate, media, and political interests responsible for this mess are as bogus as Lonelygirl15.
4. Today’s media consumer cannot trust the internet, its news, or networks—fake or otherwise. Given the wretched state of today’s internet, skeptical, self-aware interaction with digital data is the critical foundation upon which democracy may be maintained.

Only 93 more to go to meet my vow …

I hereby pledge:

• To disrupt the new President’s First 100 days by posting #100hardtruths-#fakenews with linked actions, analyses and organizations committed to digital media literacy.
• In so doing, I will produce a 100 point digital primer to counter the purposeful confusion, lack of trust, and disorientation of the current administration’s relation to media, offering instead a steady, reasoned set of resources seeking clarity and justice.

Let me begin by here offering #100truths-fakenews #8: FAKE! by DOVEMAN + TOM KALIN + CRAIG PAULL, January 22, 2017, one of several video projects these activist-artists are making to counter the administration’s wile media moves.

Yes, producing 100 points by Day 100, April 29, 2017, seems a little daunting, but I will be counting on my reasoned, practiced, committed, talented colleagues, across the media spectrum, to ease the burden (just see above!). While this administration may seek to addle us with media misinformation, disruption, and lunacy, I put full trust in our clear-headed community of conscience. Please do share possible contributions—in the form of writings, links, images, or actions—to the #100truths-fakenews primer via email, comments on this blog, or on my twitter feed, where I’ll be building a paired-down version of the project @mediapraxisme. The full-version will build here over the next 70 days.

See More:

• #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy