17/10/12
Tentative Title
My Project
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 will be looking into the notions of free culture movement (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), and more narrowly, 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.
"All creative works—books, movies, records, software, and so on—are a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible—technologically and legally." (Free Culture, Lawrence Lessing)
I am expecting to find an intersection between the mentioned subject and the subject of an autonomous author and the social function of an exhibition as a form.
"...art today is defined by an identity between creation and selection. At least since Duchamp it has been the case that selecting an artwork is the same as creating an artwork. That, of course, does not mean that all art since then has become ready-made art. It does, however, mean that the creative act has become the act of selection: since that time producing an object is no longer sufficient for its producer to be considered an artist. One must also select the object one has made oneself and declare it an artwork. Accordingly, since Duchamp there has no longer been any difference between an object one produces oneself and one produced by someone else - both have to selected in order to be considered artworks. Today an author is someone who selects, who authorizes." (Boris Groys, Multiple Autorship)
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 (still vague) 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, although it has a lot to do with my previous practice and has evolved from it. The methodology I will be using is my ususal methodology present in most of my work which is a reaction to a situation / problem / task. This time the situation is an exhibition, a final graduation project exhibition. The work I would like to make is conceived as a project made specifically for this exhibition and all that it brings. This has its beginnings in my last two projects that were dealing with the systems of exhibition, and revealing proccesses behind them. The thing I want to reveal this time is the proccess of how creative work builds on the past and to challenge the notion of the author, weather it is a collaborative/participatory piece delegated from the artist to the audience or a "classical" piece presented as a singular authorship. I will 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)