Seminar

Precarious Research

PhD workshop, as part of PRECARIOUS TIMES, including contributions from Kevin Carter, Robert Jackson, Vlad Morariu, Andrew Prior, Helen Pritchard, Kuba Szreder, and Magda Tyzlik-Carver.

Date:
01 December 2011 → 01 December 2011
Location:
Room 306, Levinsky building, Plymouth University, United Kingdom

PhD workshop, part of PRECARIOUS TIMES
Presentations of PhD research, plus discussions moderated by Anya Lewin.

14.00 - 14.30 Robert Jackson - Reclaiming Configurability: Less Critique, More Things (Plymouth University)
14.30 - 15.00 Kuba Szreder - Mapping Curatorial Apparatus in Late Capitalism (Loughborough University)
15.00 - 15.30 Magda Tyzlik-Carver - Beyond Participation: Towards Political and Aesthetic Content in Curatorial Practice (Plymouth University)
15.30 - 16.00 break
16.00 - 16.30 Helen Pritchard - The Artist in the Computer Room: An Auto-Ethnographic Account of Precarious Doings (Lancaster University)
16.30 - 17.00 Andrew Prior - Medialities of Noise (Plymouth University)
17.00 - 17.30 Kevin Carter - Towards a Digital Public Art Practice (University of Westminster)
17.30 - 18.00 Vlad Morariu - On the Precarization of Criticism and the Spectacle of Power (Loughborough University)
Discussions continue over dinner.

ABSTRACTS & BIOGRAPHIES:

Kevin Carter (University of Westminster)
Towards a Digital Public Art Practice

Arguably there is no coherent field called digital public art. Terms such as socially engaged new media art (SENMA) go some towards defining it, but I would argue they are incompatible around issues of technology, political focus and site. Landscape-Portrait (Carter, 2007) (www.landscape-portrait.com) is an example of a digital public artwork that engages critically with the production and use of demographics. Taking the work as a case study, my research explores the cross section formed by its adoption of community focused public art practices with the modalities of digital technologies, in particular social media. My research considers whether this junction might serve as the site of a symbiotic relationship, whereby public art is used to interrogate the spaces and practices of social media and vice versa? The results of which may lead us to an extended understanding of public art practice. For some this might suggest an ailing public art practice that is striving to acquire relevance by adopting the tropes of new and novel technologies, however this research is better understood as an attempt to generate a set of terms that promote a holistic public art practice, one that is inclusive of digital and non digital methods and methodologies. In this way it’s hoped that these terms will not read as authoritarian, rather they offer a starting point for a dialogical process within which technologies are constrained on an equal footing with the conceptual and critical ambitions of the public artwork.

Bio
Artist Kevin Carter is equally interested in socially engaged art interventions in the community and well as producing works for a gallery environment. With a BA Hons in Fine Art (Falmouth School of Art) and MA in Hypermedia (Westminster University, London 1998), he has worked as lead artist and produced public art works, gallery-based installations and online works both in the UK and internationally. A constant within his work is the role the audience or community play in the creation and engagement with the work, this applies equally to gallery based installations as it does to community focused public art projects. This approach has proved successful, in 2004 Kevin Carter was nominated for a BAFTA for Karaoke-me and in 2007 a series of public art proposals he, and architects civic, produced for Burnley Borough Council resulted in the council being awarded the Regional RTPI Award and short-listed for National Awards 2007 (Community Engagement Category). Currently he is touring the UK with Landscape-Portrait commissioned by the Dott Festival in Newcastle. Over the past ten years Kevin has combined art practice with a variety of teaching and research positions. He recently started a PHD post at the University of Westminster to explore the use of digital network technologies in the creation of public realm art works. In 2002 the London Arts Board awarded Kevin a grant to investigate the creative uses of wireless data. He has also worked as an external accessor for the MA Design and Digital Media course at Coventry School of Art, and Associate Researcher, Game Lab, Metropolitan University, London. In addition he has taught degree level Multi-media students are Metropolitan and East London Universities.

Robert Jackson (Plymouth University)
Reclaiming Configurability: Less Critique, more Things.

“The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.” (Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2., Winter 2004, pp.225-248, p246).
Whilst the disintegration of creative structures (the University, cuts to AHRC funding) are ever present in the collective ‘age of austerity’, I will argue that the importance of the critical Left is maintained by its sense of creativity. This might sound obvious, but self-moralistic congratulation evidently seen in the recent occupy ”X” protests supersede the creative resistance required, and instead, the majority of the Left fall back on self-managed solidarity. Resistance is in danger of becoming less imaginative than the enemy it resists. The Left needs to move past its sense of duty, and understand what it is capable of building. The problem here is that the structure of scholarly ‘critique’ itself is often conflated with ‘criticism’, and this is especially true in French, Italian and German Continental Philosophy. Critique denotes a stance endemic to Immanuel Kant where culture (the social) and nature (the inaccessible) are sealed off from one another as two independent, purified realms; where critical possibilities can only originate between their dual separation and mediation. Against this purification, contemporaryphilosophers and thinkers (Latour, Bennett, Harman, Pickering, Stengers) have attempted to plateau this distinction and allow for a flat ontology of mangled, unitary ‘things’ to reignite criticality. If artists wants to reclaim criticality, they must first reclaim configurability. The configurable retains a pragmatic methodology of arranging, testing, navigating, composing and building new real objects from already existing diverse ones to achieve a critical effect. This opposes the assumption that an anti-object, anti-subject criticality should exist as an always-already given imposition to start off with. Nowhere is this more important than in artistic production. It is only by configuring the reality of things that artists can discover new theoretical avenues, and visa-versa, discover how the reality of things are implemented for insidious ends. The backdrop for this argument is presented through my own research which attempts to reintegrate the structure of discrete, essential, necessary artworks back into an aesthetic discourse which is dominated by contingent-led, flux-based structures.

Bio
Robert Jackson is an MPhil/PhD student at the University of Plymouth, an artist and a software developer in the UK. Currently entitled ‘Algorithm and Contingency’, his research incorporates Computational Algorithmic Artworks, Art Formalism and Speculative Realist Philosophy, identifying an occluded history of computer art which operates as configurable units of necessity rather than networked systems of contingency. Furthermore, the research advances the conclusion that discrete artworks attain independent autonomy themselves which are capable experiencing a formal, non-human variance of aesthetic sophistication rather than aesthetic communication tools for human experience. Robert is an editor of the independent philosophical journal Speculations; a graduate student run, peer reviewed journal dedicated to speculative realist philosophy: he is an associate editor of the O-Zone Journal (Punctum Books) and blogs regularly at www.robertjackson.info/index

Vlad Morariu (Loughborough University)
On the Precarization of Criticism and the Spectacle of Power

Ideals of emancipation, political and cultural autonomy, transparency, equality of access and participative democracy have always been internal to the existential logic of critical art. They enhanced the belief and the hope that art has the capacity and the means to intervene in the political, social and economic reality and to alter it. My intervention in the workshop explores what we experience today as an intense disenchantment, a dismantling of the belief in the critical potential of art, and a disempowering of criticism. This takes place in a process which discloses the fact that, above all, “money talks”: for example, art fairs include in their programs lectures performed by critical thinkers, and there is a trend in producing reality shows about art conceived exactly by those art dealers and collectors who were the target of past criticisms. I will talk about a cynical and hypocritical state of the art in which precarity – meaning unwilling dependency – of art and criticism is assumed and celebrated by those who dominate the relational field of art. In the last instance, I will discuss the case of institutional critique (the object of my PhD research) which becomes dramatic: if in the past one of its preferred tactics was to disclose relations of power and to show the falsity of the discourse about the purity and innocence of art, today this manoeuvre is no longer available, exactly because relations of power become overtly visible.

Bio
Vlad Morariu is writer and art critic. Currently he is pursuing his PhD research at the Loughborough University School of the Arts where he is member of the Politicized Practice Research Group. His thesis explores the present conditions and possibilities of critical practices within art institutions, with a focus on institutional critique. In different contexts, he activated as artist, curator, translator and cultural organizer. He published texts in collective publications (Romanian Cultural Resolution, Atlas of Transformation) and in magazines and journals such as “Vector. Art and culture in context”, “Idea. Art + Society”, and “Framework. The Finnish Art Review”.

Andrew Prior (Plymouth University) Medialities of Noise

Noisy aesthetics have often underpinned have provided a mode of response to the chaotic economic, industrial and informational changes wrought over the past century or so, from Russolo’s ‘Art of Noises’, and Dada’s use of chance, through Metzger’s Autodestructive Art, up to the glitch works of Cory Arcangel and Rosa Menkman and numerous examples between. This aesthetic strategy is now highly familiar, almost to the point of cliché and yet now more than ever, noise provides a realistic representation of contemporary culture. In these precarious times, what does noise have to offer?

Bio
Andrew Prior is a digital/sound artist and musician. His research practice explores of the transformative potential of media and technology. In particular, his work is concerned with the use of noise and artefacts involved in digital mediation, as a raw material for sound works. Another key aspect of his current thinking is around the creative affordances of networked digital files. His work ranges between online works and installation, to performative pieces. He is currently a member of the Kurator / Art & Social Technologies research group at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Helen Pritchard (Lancaster University)
The artist in the computer room: an auto-ethnographic account of precarious doings

This talk explores my actions as an artist within the context of a ‘Digital Innovation’ program, as both a culture of practices and a practice of cultures. Through a situated approach I reflect on the encounter of art, technology and science. I suggest this is a precarious situation and the question is how we might continue to re/configure these assemblages to be able to intra-act responsibly with and through them. The talk explores these concepts through an ‘evocative auto ethnographical’ account, undertaken as part of my postgraduate studies at Lancaster University’s HighWire Doctoral Training Centre, an RCUK-funded initiative that focuses on innovation in the digital economy (RCUK Grant EP/G037582/1).

Bio
Helen Pritchard is an artist and researcher in Social Exchange, Digital Technology & Innovation. Her current research project explores creative collaboration between humans, databases and non-human animals/plants through public activities of making, sharing, assembly and conversation. Her work has been exhibited at galleries, festivals, and museums internationally, including Writing Machines (HK), East Street Arts (UK), Sonic Peripheries (DE), Transmodern Festival Baltimore, (USA), Teak (Fin), UKS Oslo, (N), RKS Stavanger (N), Spacex (UK), Conical Gallery (Aus), ACA Florida, (USA) and National Review of Live Art (UK). She is currently PhD student in the HighWire Doctoral Training Centre at Lancaster University.

Kuba Szreder (Loughborough University)
Mapping curatorial apparatus in late capitalism

My current research focuses on scrutinizing the position of curatorial practice inside the late capitalist’s modes of cultural production. The starting point of my reflection is Walter Benjamin’s notion of art apparatus, as introduced in his famous essay ‘Author as Producer’. In search of revolutionary technique he advises us not to ask what does artistic work say about the relations of production of its period, but rather to locate artistic apparatus in them. Following this method I’m going to cognitively map the position of curatorial apparatus inside the relations of production of late capitalism. I’ll try to sketch the structural equivalences between curating and different methods of controlling and organizing artistic production, as they are embodied in curatorial projects. I’m going to talk about problems related to structural transformation of autonomous art by following the models introduced in cultural industries. I’ll talk among other issues about: curating as popularization of managerial methods; the exposure of artistic production to neoliberal bureaucracy through the introduction of efficiency and measurable results (like audience quotas) as ways of assessing artistic production; relations between autonomous art and commercial circuits, leading to commoditization of culture; benchmarking, competition and rankings as techniques producing entrepreneurial subjectivities of artists and curators, reinforcing late capitalist governmentality; modes of attributing authorship, which allows privatizing cultural resources instead of supporting cultural commons. My presentation will refer to my practical experiences as a free lance curator.

Bio
Kuba Szreder is a graduate at the sociology department of Jagiellonian University (Krakow). He works as a curator of interdisciplinary projects actively engaging in social context and public sphere, frequently relating to critical discourses, working with public space and reshaping social practices. He is curator of Free / Slow University of Warsaw. He organizes conferences, writes and edits publications linking critical theory with analysis of contemporary art field. In Fall 2009 he’s started his PhD research in Loughborough University School of the Arts about the contemporary curatorial technique in late capitalism.

Magda Tyzlik-Carter (Plymouth University)
Beyond Participation. Towards Political and Aesthetic Content in Curatorial Practice.

It can be claimed that the participatory turn in art has been a sign of a shift which has been happening within the institution of art, from its focus on the art object to a wider interest in process, and recognition of the public as an element of it. I would argue, however, that this interest in the open-ended qualities of an artwork with participation at the core of its production limits the reception of such works to the recognition of participatory practices. Furthermore, the instrumentalisation of participation renders any creative activity a precarious endeavour according to neoliberal logic where culture can be valorised only once turned into a commodity. What then might be required in order to shift attention from the medium of participation to the aesthetic outcome, that is, to what is produced as the contingent outcome of participation? How to rethink curatorial practice so that care is given to what actually takes place within the curatorial system? In this presentation I will use my curatorial project common practice to consider the relation between participation and contingency as asymmetric. This asymmetry is a result of, on the one hand a human-centred approach that is a basis of most of participatory practices, and on the other, material configurations which include human and non-human bodies or things which enter into contingent relations with each other. An approach that considers the role of participation and contingency in curatorial practice might enable us to understand our work positively and not as locked into ever more blurring polarities between knowledge commons and souls at work.

Bio
Magda Tyżlik-Carver is a PhD researcher at KURATOR/Art and Social Technology Research Group at University of Plymouth. Magda works as a research assistant in Digital Economy research centre at University College Falmouth. She is also an independent curator currently associated with KURATOR. Projects include series of collaborative curatorial events common practice/language and common practice/code (2010) in Arnolfini/Bristol, playing practice (2009) and turning language into objects (2009). She regularly contributes to conferences and symposia and has published several texts on curatorial practice which relate to her current PhD research. http://magda.thecommonpractice.org/