07/11/12
Tentative Title
Participation (and antiparticipation)
General Introduction
A brief general introduction or abstract laying out the field you wish to research, possible key questions driving what you want to explore and how you will test these questions through practice.
I would like to start my research by mapping the already well analysed practice of participation in art history and theory, including the futurists, dada movement, 60's happennings and the 90's participatory art.
After the overview of its development I would like to include the most recent developments in the field of participatory practice (not necessarely participatory art) after the web 2.0. and see how the new technologies changed/are changing the notion of participation and how we approach it.
Also, would like introduce a notion of free culture, a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify creative works in the form of free content by using the Internet and other forms of media.
I am expecting to find an interesting intersection between the notions of participation and the social dimension of creativity and how our culture gets made, the proccess of how creative work builds on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with laws and technologies. At this point I am also expecting interesting questions about singular and multiple autorship and a path towards the thesis formation.
Previous practice
Inventura
Project 'Inventory' has combined two issues - forgotten topics and forgotten spaces. Forgotten topics are refearing to manipulated, ignored or neglected issues in Croatian mainstream media, while forgotten spaces are refearing to abandoned and empty spaces around the city of Zagreb, with an emphasis on once active newspaper kiosks. The project provides an alternative media through a proposal of revitalization of media issues and places where they used to be publish(now empty kiosks), through a combination of two media - the public space in virtual and physical form. Project is devided in three parts, it starts with an online form - an interactive web site, goes through a transformation of the content from online to offline media, and ends in offline media - a printed publication.
The particular kiosk is choosen for its central location (Savska 11, Zagreb), its owner - the Croatian Ministry of Culture, and the fact that it's been empty for years.
The project starts with a website (www.inventura.ws) where every month a new guest editor is invited to administrate the website and curate the topic. The guest editor is an expert in social, political or cultural field and he/she gets to choose a topic from his/her domain that he/she finds forgotten and want's to get it revived. He/she invites and encourages the users (experts, students, bloggers, forum participants and all other citizens) to upload their articles, thoughts or questions on the topic (but also images and new topic proposals), which are then collected in the website's database and edited and commented by the guest editor.
The collected articles are then transflated into a print publication and distributed through the choosen kiosk, which is used as a promotion and an announcement of the ongoing topic.
Collaborative Setting
Collaborative Setting is a system of remote exhibition setup made specifically for "D Day", a 3 day festival of design for young designers that takes place at an abandoned factory in Zagreb every year. A setup is created through a collaboration between the visitors, organizers, volunteers and other participants of the festival (in Zagreb) and me, the author (in Rotterdam). The exhibition setup (3 panels, 1 desk and 2 chairs) and the description 'posters' were also created and assembled on the spot through the instructions given to one of the volunteers. Instead of using only the 3 by 3 meters of exhibition space given to each participant, the entire space of the festival becomes potential exhibition space. In 3 days I chatted with more than 40 people, and successfully exhibited around 30 pieces.
Since this year I couldn't be present in Zagreb I decided to design an exhibition that I could manage and handle from Rotterdam. Since I didn't want to exhibit my work in a traditional manner I decided to make a site and situation specific project. The idea was to make a DIY chat programe that would enable me (us) to produce the exhibit while talking about it and in this way make pieces that would be self-explanatory - the form becomes its own explanation. The exhibition was reduced to the process of making the exhibition itself.
The communication takes place through a chat program where the setup and location of each exhibit are being discussed. While the content of each chat discussion (i.e. its printouts) becomes the actual exhibit, each piece of the exhibition is actually its own explanatione. After the completion of each chat, the content is being printed out and set on the agreed spot. After that a picture is taken for the exhibition catalog requirements.
Exhibition Factory
Since March 2012 I had been collecting and photocopying papers tossed in the recycling bin at the PZI's Karel Doormanhof building. I decided to display them in WORM in a form of a parallel or pre-exhibition in the period of PZI's final shows and exhibitions. The exhibition in WORM showed the opposite of well prepared work that is willingly exhibited, trash papers from the recycling bin show a direct or indirect process segments that were not meant to be shown. The exhibition also included exhibition catalogues that were printed out on demand.
Relation to previous practice
How does your research connect to previous projects you have done? Remember to briefly explain or describe related projects as the external is not familiar with your work.
Having in mind both my previous and current interests and working patterns, the proposal for my graduation project will be keeping some characteristics of my previous practice (methodology and form), while the content I will be dealing with is new. Since the most of my work is participatory in a form of a platform, where I'm merely a facilitator/mediator, while the autorship is less relevant, this time I would like to reflect on this kind of practice and make it a subject of my research, thesis and the project itself.
The methodology I will be using is my ususal methodology present in most of my work - a reaction to a situation / problem / task. This time the situation is an exhibition and I would like to concieve my project as a situation and site-specific project that deals with the exhibition system itself and is revealing some issues and proccesses behind it. I would like to challenge the notion of the author and most probably try to question and communicate the (im)possibility of a singular authorship.
Relation to a larger context
Meaning practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. Write briefly about other projects or theoretical material which share an affinity with your project. For example, if you are researching urban interventions, you might talk about Situationist approaches to psychogeography, urban tactical media and activist strategies of reclaiming the streets. Or, if you want to explore the way data is tracked, you might touch upon the politics of data mining by referencing concerns laid out by the Electronic Frontier or highlight theoretical questions raised by Wendy Chun or others. (Keep in mind that we are *not* expecting well formulated conclusions or persuasive arguments in the proposal phase. At this juncture, it's simply about showing an awareness of a broader context, which you will later build upon as your research progresses.)
Free Software and Open Source movements (the technical aspect/representation of the free cultural theory, and movements that inspired the Freedom and Openness as a state of mind and a way of thinking about every other aspect of our culture. Eventhough it started from a technical point a view has soon been aplied to a part of our tradition that is much more fundamental and important, the culture in general.
The legal aspects of free culture movement.
The history of participatory art and the politics of spectatorship
Practical steps
Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important to have some idea of how your project might come together as a whole.
References
A list of references (Remember that dictionaries, encyclopedias and wikipedia are not references to be listed. These are starting points which should lead to more substantial texts and practices.) As with your previous essays, the references need to be formatted according to the Harvard method.) See: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/A_Guide_to_Essay_Writing#The_Harvard_System_of_referencing
Feel free to include any visual material to substantiate, illustrate or elucidate your proposal. For example use images to reference your work or that of others.
- Free Culture (Lawrence Lessing)
- Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Claire Bishop)
- Relational Aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud)
- Participation (Claire Bishop)
- The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (Boris Groys)
- Multiple Authorship (Boris Groys)