#59, silicon valley’s entrepreneurial capitalism leaves rubble in its wake

This #100hardtruth was shared with me by the artist, Natalie Bookchin:

“Silicon Valley has their cake and wants to eat it too. The tools they create, promote, and that enrich them have been instrumental in creating the mess we are now in. These faux-populists claim that they and their tools are anti-institutional and countercultural, giving the people a voice and a choice and challenging the hegemony of mainstream institutions. But entrepreneurial capitalism is their only true religion and the only agent of change. As they congratulate themselves on changing the world, and on their hard work and entrepreneurial rigor, and as they dream of space travel, moon walks, eternal life, and superintelligence, they are blind and deaf to the rubble left in their wake: from rampant sexism in their companies, the autocratic rule of the white elite, increasing inequality, loss of jobs, to a bolstered and strengthened surveillance state and market. Deep in their hearts they know it is not likely to end well, and they have prepared their escape – from bunkers in New Zealand, to the sea and intergalactic travel.”

See More:

• “Doomsday Prep for the Superrich,” Evan Osnos
• Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek
• “Who owns the future? How the prophets of Silicon Valley took control,” Yuval Harari
• From counterculture to cyberculture, Fred Turner
• Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown
• “The Wealth of Dividuals,” Arjun Appadurai (in Derivatives and the Wealth of Societies, Lee Martin)
• “What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong,” Jill Lepore
• “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” Jia Tolentino
• #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy

 

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Tiny Screens/Power Scenes: Viral Video Big & Small

Over its hundred-plus year history, cinema (and its offshoots television and video) has offered up uncountable contributions to civilization that are unimaginably beautiful, powerful, and profound and that are delivered in endless varieties.

And yet, adherents of medium specificity, like myself, suggest that these endlessly variable works of film, video and television have been built from only a small set of fundamental components. Moving image recording technologies package and deliver nothing more than light, sound, space and time. What artists do with these elements is the magic of these media. And sure, technology helps. Over the course of its short history, there have been abundant changes, improvements, and shifts within the tools that focus, record and deliver artists’ renderings of media’s core elements. Within the last ten or so years, developments within digital media technologies have allowed for substantial breaks from the possibilities previously available within media history, including but not limited to the expanded access to and ease of use of nearly professional grade tools for the recording, editing, saving and distribution of moving images. For little cost and effort, nearly everyone can now shoot, edit, save and share images that look and sound great. These new producers using newly available tools introduce, mix, and remediate new (and old) media content and forms, only the most recent of which is socially mediated livefeed video. This new format has caught and demands our attention given that its viral uses have been closely connected to current conversations about and witnessing of violence, justice, and race in America and around the world.

In recent writing, I tried to understand some of the implications of seeing and sharing livefeed video of black death. This proved to be a rumination about the ethics and responsibilities—associated with media records of cruelty and punishment—as video and its viewers encounter refigured relations to recorded time. But the capacity to record, save, see and share (real) time must, by definition, be met with alterations in configurations and understandings of space. To continue to better see and understand how technological developments in temporal and spatial recording are met with social, artistic and political ones, I will briefly consider—alongside livefeed viral video—a related technological adaptation and the associated practices of looking encountered therein: how we now seem to be looking at both ever more-tiny and over-sized screens.

Looking more closely, I can’t help but notice what seems to be an uncanny correlative between the growing number of capable producers and the shrinking size of the screens that carry their videos. Moving viral images seen on tiny screens like phones, watches, or even windows within a larger screen, certainly suffer in regards to viewers’ focus, clarity, and attention—even as they enjoy access to larger audiences. Cinephiles (and others) then suffer the quickly compounding loss of norms and systems for viewing cinema as it is “supposed” to be done: in large formats projected into dark rooms with quality sound systems peopled by others and enjoyed from beginning to end without interruption. Today, most people watch moving images attending to none of these norms: on increasingly pint-sized screens, alone in any possible place, at their own speed, direction and duration, surrounded by other images and distractions and sounds. Of course, we can and do turn to the linked and increasing possibilities for nostalgic viewing—like Tarantino‘s commitment to 70mm or the growing subculture of pop-up, outdoor, or micro-cinemas—or to technologies, practices, and institutions that are dedicated to a kind of reverse-viewing, one that delivers larger and larger images in more specialized and costly formats and venues to smaller and more refined audiences.

To better see the connections between increasingly small and large screens, I will look briefly at one iteration of such blending practices: namely the projection of artist-produced, museum-located, large, multi-screen videos made entirely from once tiny-screen offerings. At the International Center of Photography‘s inaugural Public, Private, Secret show, four artists’ videos (by Natalie Bookchin, Jon Rafman, Martine Syms, Doug Rickard), made entirely from everyday users’ YouTube videos, are the highlight of (or at least entry to) the museum’s first show in its new location. While all of these featured artists’ efforts participate in making (more) public everyday video that itself made public the private experiences of everyday people, what seems as noteworthy to me is the effects and implications of making and showing large images from videos that had been made to be seen small.

A movement from piddling to grand helps to bring into focus what any serious student of media history understands already, and what the four featured artists are often highlighting in their similar but diverse offerings: viewing practices are never merely technological; rather they are historically, institutionally and culturally determined. By making small videos big, we can see more clearly what goes undetected in the common sense viewing practices of viral video. Another way to put this is: what don’t or can’t we see in our current viewing practices of the ever-present videos and views of social media?

First off, given that these four works were created by artists’ selection (in both senses of the word: all of the featured video artists chose their constituative materials entirely from the YouTube videos of unnamed others, and they, in turn, were selected for this show by its curators, Charlotte Cotton, Marina Chao, and Pauline Vermare), the museum’s and art world’s institutional privilege and sanction brings with it multiple and improved technologies different from those typically associated with viral video. We find that the largeness of the screen is linked to any number of related escalations: of stature (for the presenting artists), of viewing platform and spaces (from YouTube-at-home to the spare but sacious screening rooms of the museum), of machines necessary for display, projection and sound (from consumer to professional grade). But perhaps most critically, these augmentations carry with them social and sociological advancement as well.

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/100324610″>Mainsqueeze, 2014</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/jonrafman”>jonrafman</a&gt; on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Artist-made video of YouTube video can’t help but show the everyday scenes, things, and preoccupations of regular people (as was also true of the amazing trove of Americana, the home movie). Given the demographics of our culture, the vast majority of what we see on YouTube (outside of the corporate video that makes up something like 50% of what we see there, give or take) is made by and shows the worlds of poor, working- and middle-class people. Americans’ class is registered on their YouTube videos in any number of ways, including but not limited to what is made visible of their living spaces, social spaces, and associated possessions, their use of spoken and written English, how they carry, use, and inhabit their bodies, and the cultural, political, and social issues that their videomaking considers. Given the demographics of America, the viewers of said videos are also most likely to come from the 99%’s poor, working-class and middle-classes and homes (albeit with all the variations of region, race, gender, sexuality, and ideology that is writ large across our class spectrum.)

However, at the big screens of America’s museums, art galleries, art fairs, and auction houses that increasingly show video in jumps that seem to match its broader social appeal, one finds oneself in the discomfiting position of watching people made video but not doing so with the peeps (who are undeniably watching loads of video on small screens at home, on the bus, at the library, in their bedrooms, in parking lots; actually, in all the places one sees in these videos). Letting my viewing of the ICP YouTube art videos serve as a barometer, the large videos of small videos were seen by attentive, serious, white-haired white-women (myself included), as well as one Jewish young man (who left quickly, I read his Yarmulke as a register of his religious affiliation), and one brown skinned and also middle-aged woman. This small and attentive audience (who each paid $14 for admission, $12 for seniors; you can not get in for free) all, surprisingly, sat through the four approximately ten-minute videos, interacted socially with each other throughout, and in general viewed these images through the norms associated with (high) art. Videos that would have otherwise be seen (or not, see my work on NicheTube) as expendable, forgettable, interchangeable, if also funny, excessive, spectacular or demonstrative—that is small—enjoyed big viewing privilege: that is to say they were afforded the advantage of duration, attention to form and content, and some significant possibility for context, although of course, this had been largely provided by the secondary (or primary?) artists through their skilled overlay of music, through their selection and then editing of videos, through their connection to the other artists’ works on display in the carefully curated space of an art show.

Now some would argue that with viral video many of these covet-worthy assets of the big are afforded not by their size of screens but by the number of viewers and viewings they spawn. There is certainly something to this argument, although I have been quick to note that with scale and spreadability comes a necessary simplification of argument and a loosening of context and value. But here I am working hard to keep attentive to how the size of images (i.e. one of the technology’s current preoccupation in regards to newly possible renderings of space) is related to viewing practices that are themselves always imbricated in culture, history, and therefore, power. For as I’ve been arguing throughout, big videos demand not just space but also time. Shockingly for me, sitting through the many clips from YouTube videos that made up the artists’ videos, itself seemed sort of nostalgic in this moment, defined as it is by Vine videos, tweets (with videos) and Snap chats: each of these current social media forms, and formats demanding an ever greater waning of video’s hold on time. And just look! Livefeed video seems to extend that out into duration and the spatial and temporal context associated with the entitlements of the long durée.

https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?411624-1/democratic-sitin-continues-despite-house-adjournment-july-5

Speedy internet criticism (including my own) is rife with writing that celebrates the slow and bemoans the loss of persistence. While this blog post certainly does that too, I am more interested in trying to see and name the uses and stakes for new technologies for looking, like livefeed video, as they are being introduced, and perhaps before their norms of use are calcified (and commodified). Given that goal, I would suggest that a powerful way to view viral livefeed video of black death, and other images of violence, might be not on our small private screens but as if each viral video was art, as if it mattered that much, as if it deserved that level of privilege: to be viewed in groups, on large screens, from beginning, middle to end, and with context. That is to be seen within the rich world it records, and with the background, discussion, and analysis that artists and viewers can and do use media to initiate.

 

 

On Live Feed Video of Viral Black Death

I recently received an unexpected but timely invitation (from editor Catherine Halley) to write an article for JSTOR Daily.  Her email request arrived when indeed I had something pressing I wanted to say. I was not sure I could say it, or that the time was right, or what the ramifications of my writing it would be, but I did very much want to think critically (and in public) about why I wasn’t watching the viral live feed videos of black death that began circulating and multiplying last week.

With Halley’s close help, and that of many friends and colleagues, that article was published today: How Do I (Not) Look: Live Feed Video and Viral Black Death. My writing, and thinking, occurred in conversation, actual and in my head, with a great many friends and scholars who I’d like to point to here, in no particular order and most likely forgetting some, less for reasons of intellectual property and more to name that my/our understanding of momentous social, technological, personal mayhem and change occurs in communities of care and practice and thought: Natalie Bookchin, Gabrielle Foreman, Robert Reid-Pharr, Cheryl Dunye, Kemi Ilenanmi, Alisa Lebow, Jenny Terry, Roopali Mukherjee, Marta Zarzycka, Jen Malkowski, Lisa Cartwright, Marita Sturken, Nick Mirzoeff, Patty Zimmermann, Sam Gregory,  Deirdre Boyle, Safiya Noble, LaCharles Ward, Ellen Scott, bell hooks, Paola Bacchetta, Tina Campt,  Inderpal Grewal,  Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, Susan Sontag, Henry Jenkins, Sherri Williams, Jodi Dean, Michael Gillespie, Stephen Winter, Theodore Kerr and Diamond Reynolds.

I write in honor of Reynold’s work and in the name of our shared witnessing of the death of Philando Castile and so many others.

I am sure my friends and colleagues above will not agree with all of my thoughts on this volatile and horrible matter, nor would I want them to, but I do hope they will understand how critical their voices (and long term work on issues of violence, visibility, video and racial injustice) have been for me during this time.

Ev-Ent-Anglement 3: One current shape for Internet feminism and its many discontents

I recently performed the third iteration of my experimental, affective scholarly talk cum “event” at Console-ing Passions 2015: “Ev-ent-anglement 3: Dublin.” The project has a nearly-completed year-long shelf-life as it and I travel the globe while transforming on the Internet (the sustaining relations between my physical bodily mobility through space and my grounded Internet presence, based as it is on assumptions that at last people can stay put, is one of the contradictions at the heart of this project: I need to be multiply physically placed-based to learn about digital place and community; the longer we have the Internet the more we travel physically because we know so many more people and place seems suddenly as available to us as products). Opening in Utrecht in August 2014, the Ev-ent-anglement went next to Dehli and Dublin. In August 2015 it will surface one final time in Montreal as part of a small symposium, “Affective Encounters.” A live collaborative art-event with Laila Shereen Sakr in Los Angeles at PAM in September will conclude the run. The Ev-ent-anglement changes and grows as does my thinking about feminist Internet culture because of the interactions, objects and collaborators it brings into its fold from the places it and I go. In Dublin Orphan Black and Kara Keeling tangled in (with other objects).

Kara Keeling, one member of my panel on “New Materialism” at Console-ing Passions 2015, Dublin

No longer exactly where it started (it has had two websites and three discreet performances to date), this process- and interaction-rich project morphs yet continues as something akin to this: a living experiment that demonstrates in the doing the affordances of contemporary corporate (feminist) Internet culture and its potential alternatives. The ev-ent-anglement (perhaps poorly) enacts a feminist collective critical digital practice thereby telling us more about the corporate Internet and digital feminism.

Tara McPherson, Kara Keeling, and Alex Juhasz. The panelists at C-P 2015.

Let me explain. I built the ev-ent-anglement to consider how we might do better with the uncountable fragments of ourselves that we willingly, massively and generatively give to the man with every tweet, click, and photo. I cobbled together a theoretical armature suited to scaffold my unique intellectual and practical pursuit: how to cut and paste our fragments together making use of feminist principles towards anti-corporate ends. Collaboration, blended live and digital space, co-production of time/space/knowledge (events), the linked value of the situated and the mobile, the entangled nature of things, people, and ideas, a hunger for experiences and communities outside the corporate, an openness to complex and radical political and theoretical critique, a commitment to learning in the doing: these are some of the many feminist and activist principles underlying the project. From them, I concocted a strange place-based practice and performance (an event) where I presented the ideas of the project—montage, new materialism, affect theory, critical Internet studies, feminist and queer theory—while simultaneously asking the audience in the room (and always also online) to entangle fragments of themselves onto the event’s online record thereby marking and saving their part within the event while growing and changing its form within the ev-ent-anglement.

Some of the audience in Dublin.

Because I performed the event at academic conferences (and because the ev-ent-anglement also reaches my online community), its participants are feminist activists, academics and artists interested in gender and queer studies, documentary, feminist media and their linked disciplines and foci. Because I performed the event in Utrecht, Dehli, and Dublin (and always online) fragments of these places, and their people and objects, entangle in. Because I showed certain images and quoted certain theorists, the ev-ent-anglement holds generative fragments concerned with the complex ideas and images of editing, cutting, bleeding, events, and entanglements. Because my community interacted, the project grew to include their linked interests: the Arab spring, disability studies, Trinh T. Minh-ha, AIDS, black queer representation and much more. Because VJ_Um_Amel first donated some fragments online, then got more invested, and ultimately began to collaborate with me, she led the production of a new website to hold the ever-morphing collection of ev-ent-anglements fragments. The new site has structuring principles related to ideas of shared-ownership, community, multi-authorship, fragmentation, bodies and their affects, collectivity, and feminism that reflect the larger project.

Entangled in Utrecht by Alanna Thain

As of now, the second website cells.ev-ent-anglement.com, looks and even acts a lot like a hybrid (cut/paste+bleed) of two (feminist?) Internet stalwarts, Facebook and Pinterest (thanks to Natalie Bookchin for this comparison, and to the presenters on the Pinterest panel at Console-ing Passions): it automatically generates a seam-filled mosaic produced first from an author, and then from some algorithms that arrange her community’s fragments that have been crowd-sourced, willfully gifted, carefully curated, and linked. And yet …

Here’s where the differences bleed in, allowing us to see and perhaps name the current shape of Internet feminism and its many many discontents:

• Pinterest, Facebook (and other social media platforms) are corporate spaces that are free to use at great cost to users’ privacy and autonomy; I pay for ev-ent-anglement with surprisingly limited personal and institutional resources.
• Corporate spaces market in and mobilize corporate goods and user-generated content (often itself about corporate goods) arranged and calibrated with some very careful measure; while there is almost no outside to the market economy, a rather significant portion of the fragments on the ev-ent-anglement are not (fully) entangled with corporate culture.
• Facebook, Pinterest (and other social media platforms) only work if things and people are bought and sold to each other; ev-ent-anglement buys and sells nothing other than platform space, the infrastructures on which it runs, and its users’ time and expertise (mostly given “for free,” as is so much on the Internet).
• Facebook, Pinterest (and other social media platforms) are fun and easy to use; ev-ent-anglement is intense, difficult, and convoluted in comparison. Interestingly, off-the-shelf platforms bake in more and more ease-of-use but the corporations are always simplicity-steps ahead. The role of ease can not be overstated (see my work on slogans on YouTube).
• YouTube, Vine, Snapchat and their ilk produce a sense of community organized around the self; ev-ent-anglement organizes its community primarily through my invitation (and then that of others) to a dispersed but highly limited group of people linked by ideas, commitments, and proximity.
• Corporate spaces are built and prosper within the growth and scale logics of neo-liberalism: things are best when they get larger and hold unimaginable quantities of data; the ev-ent-anglement treasures and relies upon the close-knit, intimate, specialist interests and commitments of its tiny community and limited data pool. There is depth and connection in the focused, but corporate spaces have other kinds of magnetism.
• Users’ compulsion to engage and stay within Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like is high, a result of many of the features listed above: their ease of use, abundance of content, sense of community, and refined admixture of corporate and user-generated content; very few people want to engage with the ev-ent-anglement in any sustained way (or at all) mostly because it retains my signature (even as it expands), and because it is complicated and demanding of time and intellectual attention. Also, “scholars” have a hesitation to make publicly (although not on Facebook!)
• The collections of fragments that are any individual’s Facebook or YouTube feed are at once satisfyingly tailored around the self, while also being fleeting, abundant, diverse and easy; the ev-ent-anglement is co-authored and multiply-focused; it is time and space bound.
• Twitter, Facebook and the like are founded upon flow, speed, quantity, and brevity; much of the ev-ent-anglement sticks, taking time and space to enjoy its complexity and depth.
• Scholars and users of corporate Internet culture perform the obligatory work of jamming “feminist” intention, activity, community, and values into spaces and practices organized primarily towards neoliberal, hegemonic and sometimes even anti-feminist aims; the ev-ent-anglement, like other “alternative,” “counter-cultural,” or anti-hegemonic spaces asks its scholars and users to name and refine the feminist values and practices that feed us and structure the space; we often disagree, which is useful when done respectfully. Of course, no space is pure, so our movement between and among and within them informs all we might know and do.

The ev-ent-anglement is produced in relation to, conversation with, and defiance against corporate ownership and neoliberal aims within the Internet and every other place we go. It values feminist complexity, community, and collaboration outside the logic of capital, when possible. It tells us that the corporate Internet is expensive, commodity-driven, fun, easy, self-centered, addictive yet feeding, and malleable within these constraints. This tells me something I’ve known for quite awhile: the corporate Internet is the place we are, it is not the place we want or need, we can do better.

Out in Public

I was driving home from the opening of Natalie Bookchin‘s amazing multi channel video installation, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see with fellow “video artists” Rachel Mayeri and Anne Bray and we were commenting on how hard it must be to make something that eloquent and prescient and beautiful—the result of two years of hard thinking and feverish work—and to live with the knowledge that the only people who will ever really see it are those lucky enough to walk through the doors of Hollywood’s LACE Gallery between the dates of March 8-April 15, 2012. Just look where YouTube has taken us to …

We want to believe that (like “video art” but so much more) all of our work can and should  last forever, move where it must, and be seen by all who need it. This promise—that each and every one of our words, opinions, and voices will play a part of the cultural dialogue—is also (one of) the sad stories of Bookchin’s piece: a minimalist, refined statement upon the current and changing power of place and placenessless, circulation and stagnancy, video and sculpture, and voice and agency via YouTube. Eighteen monitors seem to float, hanging elegantly as they do from cables and hooks, suspended across a large blackened and muffled gallery in a dumbfounding materilazation of circuitry, a compelling literalization of cyberspace, freeing visitors to walk into and through the multiple competing screens that usually sit so flat in front of us. While her other recent work (seen most recently at LACMA) begins to disperse one story across a sea of embodied voices—none of them her own, all of them eerily in synch, mouthing one way of being and knowing, even as each one of us retains our autonomy or not, lost as we are in a sea of undifferentiated testimony

the new project fractures and sprays these “scatter-shot online voices” across the room, forcing the viewer’s body (not the computer screen) to hold all this variation, and pain, anger, desire, and loneliness. By forcing the work to be and stay room-, place- and time-bound, known as it will be only in and through our bodies (and sometimes those bodies dancing together across the room), Bookchin reminds us that speaking into the void (and being saved by the Internet) is no replacement for the beauties of ineffable place.

Voice as Structure

Yesterday afternoon, I had the decided pleasure of partaking in a conversation with Natalie Bookchin, the amazing new media artist who is my friend and even sometimes collaborator. We spoke together with the Critical Digital Humanities group at UC Riverside about space, quotation, and community in relation to our critical media practices.

A highlight in our conversation addressed how we both conscientiously move and link our work between “real” and “cyber” spaces always anticipating how they are co-constitutive (thanks to April Durham for this clarification) while trying to maintain a shared, and admitted commitment to the “real” in the last instance (what I called a complex three-way). But I was most inspired by our interactions about the voice, body and structure: how Natalie explains the ways that her voice is visible in the system, tensions, arguments, and connections she draws from the indexical images of faces and words of others from YouTube, while my online feminist mantrafesto didactically insists that the (feminist, raced) body of the user must be seen. Bookchin’s unseen but anchored presence as artist may be the out I’ve been looking for, as participants at my road show have consistently been critical of these lines:

All voices want a body. A body needs to be visible
Visibility allows for warranting

Share Your Depth

We opened PerpiTube with Natalie Bookchin‘s brilliant piece about isolation within community and the public nature of private pain:

Pitzer Galleries curator, Ciara Ennis, noted how the depth of this pain was best articulated through the video’s formal distractions. Then, twelve gallery visitors from Italy responded:

Video Art(ists) of the YouTube Archive

“The many types of video art have been made with a variety of intentions, ideas, working styles, and structures. Some address pure aesthetic concerns, where others prioritize content in less formal but still original and more deeply personal ways.” Kate Horsfield, “Introduction to the Video Data Bank Collections,” Feedback, 2006.

(Here you should see Kate Horsfield interviewed in the 1970s about video, but Google video won’t let me embed. You can also see my interview with her for the 1990s Women of Vision, here.)

If everything on YouTube is video art (at least the stuff made by individuals and not corporations), but very little of this art can be ever finally understood as such because it wasn’t really made to be art and won’t be recognized as such either, even if it was (unless it goes off YouTube gaining sanction, context, and community along the way), then it is the archivist (the curator, the choreographer, the tour guide) who becomes the final, visible, verifiable YouTube artist by herself making visible the links (to other forms, communities, ideas) that the artist alone might once have made (off-line in a place on a box for an audience). See the work of Natalie Bookchin, for example:

Resolutions 3: Thinking Context, Place, and Gender

I had the pleasure of attending 2/3 days of this impressively large and diverse symposium organized by my friends and colleagues, Ming-Yuen Ma and Carol Stakenas from LACE. This post is not a review, but rather an attempt to crystalize connections between some of the work and conversation that I found most provocative. After this word, I couldn’t help but begin where the conference did, with the work of Wafaa Bilal who has created several interactive media projects based upon a shared logic and structure of first-person shooter games and our current war in Iraq.

Waafa’s work inspired fruitful dialogue at the symposium about the significance of context and other authorial controls within the field of contemporary video art or video art within a new media environment, (here meaning video practices that are networked, mobile, and viewable across platforms rather than stand-alone in a museum or monitor). Whereas some “old-school” video artists might have been done when they crafted the discrete piece, new media conditions have forced focused artistry around extra-textual questions–about building (and managing) audience and supporting information, as well as systems of interaction and engagement–that might have only once been on the map of “activist” videomakers. Waafa explained that he made “dynamic” not “didactic” work that created a new public forum, mirroring life, where critical questions could be played out and with. While many of us were concerned that this allowed participants to primarily publicly restage their already strongly held positions, desires, and commitments Waafa seemed satisfied with this outcome (that, for instance, a large portion of the players on his piece, Shoot an Iraqi, came to it–and him–as paint ball enthusiasts rather than through an engagement with  war, zenophobia, or racism).

I continued to think about these questions contextual in relation to seeing Natalie Bookchin’s Trip (2008), a 63 minute video installation composed of moving landscapes shot from cars, often with music accompanying, and culled from Youtube. Bookchin told us that after many years of highly successful tactical media work with the groups @rtMark and Yes Men, she’s needed to move things OFF of mainstream media platforms, to restage them in the real world, where there is less noise, and in counter-distinction to Waafa’s work, more room for authorial and spectatorial structure (and perhaps contemplation and even dialogue). Later, we also spoke together about the waning power of satire (a staple for tactical media) as it becomes the dominant tonality, and my recent concern (expressed in posts below) that YouTube media, specifically, has to strive to say what it means, rather than relying on smug reference and repetitive asides.

Finally, along this vein of context, place and tone, I watched a productive encounter between video artists Maria Diaz and Alex Villar.

Both artists videotape the placement of their own bodies into difficult spaces. However, where Alex’s are the hidden in-betweens of generic offices and city spaces, where he uncomfortably but artfully wedges his body, Maria’s are entirely personal and local sites: a field in Guatemala where she walks and carries her pre-adolescent daughter, a central town square where she produces poetry for passers-by. The project of inserting oneself tactically into the ubiquitous flow of daily media military corporate life is quite distinct from the intervention (Jennifer Doyle’s term) of a specific body, with an overt position, into a particular place.

It seems critical, but also a little difficult, for me to note how highly gendered these divergent (but related) practices played out for me at the symposium: women artists insisting upon the specificity of their bodies and beliefs (ho hum), and male ones making larger more open-ended claims about the gendered and raced but mediated body (we’ve been here before!). Men using humor, women getting serious. I am the first to acknowledge that none of these strategies are in and of themselves gendered, but I will also affirm that for the three days of Resolutions3 they played out for me, fruitfully, in these terms.