* Ann Maria Healy (Ireland)

Questioning Christian Hansen

Bi- binoculars

Yes it could be presented in various ways; it could be hung, on a plinth, on the ground or in relation to another object.

Yes you can touch it; it’s a sculptural object.

It refers to perceptions, binaries and multi – dimensionality.

It was influenced by it’s context in that the artist takes into consideration where the objects originally came from and these contexts form part of the conceptual basis for the piece. However this is no directly evident in the object itself.

Yes it exists in more than one place. It exists as the two original objects in two different contexts. It exists in its current form and the cut away forms also exist in our minds in a context outside our realm of knowledge.

Crop

Yes it can be presented in numerous contexts.

Yes you can touch it; it’s a sculptural object.

It refers to colour, temporality and perception.

It is not influenced by any specific context, it is influenced by site as it was found at a specific site and was later arranged in the same way that it was found, but it does not speak directly about this site.

It also exists in the site that it was taken from.

Synopsis of Tracing new media in everyday life bu Jos de Mul

Jos de Muls “Tracing new media in everyday life and technology” discusses digital databases and their position as the new art object. De Mul feels that Walter Benjamin’s worries about human alienation through machines may soon become a thing of the past, as recent artworks that he highlights prove to us that we are now more than ever further along the line of becoming redundant. Using Benjamin’s essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ as a premise Mul maps how exhibition value has now become manipulation value. That this manipulation value has in fact given digital database’s the ‘aura’ that art objects lost through mechanical reproduction. Careful not to simply replace mechanical reproduction with digital reproduction, Mul explains how what he has termed as digital recombination has grown from the fact that digital databases are so incredibly dynamic which is what gives them this ‘aura’. He explains that due to the high uses of digital databases that now everything is being seen as a database, “ in the age of digital databases everything, nature and culture alike becomes an object for recombination and manipulation” As a work of art that deals with the politics of manipulation he highlights Geert Muls “Match of the day”, a digital database artwork that he claims puts us in a place of vulnerability and awareness of technologies ever decreasing dependency.

Synopsis of Remixing and remixability by Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich’s ‘Remixing and remixability’ is an exploration of the remixing and modularization of culture. Manovich believes that while culture has always partaken in remixing but that it has never been modular. However, remixing and modularization can be seen as one in the same. Manovich maps how culture has always used remixing right from ancient Rome up until disco music, but that computers have introduced modularization through applications such as Flickr, which allows for cultural images to be broken down into building blocks the same way a jpeg is broken down into pixels. He describes how this can be further implicated by freeing up the accessibility of information on the Internet in order that users can sample cultural objects less restrictively. He makes a comparison to the modularization of industry, which began when Ford introduced assembly lines, which led to mass production of products. However, culture has never been a modern industry as even though it used remixing and now modularization, individuality as an ideology has always reigned supreme.

Synopsis of Reclaiming Animism by Isabelle Stenger

Isabelle Stengers begins her essay on reclaiming animism by conceptualizing bridges and divides. Placing herself firmly on the non-believer side of that divide, she moves on to discuss the decolonization of thought in relation to the hierarchy of science, comparing the hierarchy of science to a tree trunk in relation to Deluze’s rhizome. In thinking about the social milieu she reflects that everything is related and cannot act independently of each other, drawing many comparisons between objective; subjective, natural; supernatural, hierarchy and the milieu she maps the degradation of belief in contemporary society. Infected by our own objectivity she urges us to transform through reclaiming words such as ‘magic’ and ‘animism’ through reclamation of the poisoned milieu. She explores the idea that science and writing, actions that can be seen as acts of objectivity, can also function as acts of transformation and urges us to question our aversion to mystification. In thinking about witchcraft she ponders how it could be possible to be ‘compromised by magic’ and explore ‘change as a creation’ By the end of the text, Stengers herself has gone through a transformation, acting as a bridge maker as she does in her own career. She maps the road from non-belief to belief and back again to somewhere in the center ground of that rhizome where perhaps our milieus ‘compulsion to categorize and judge’ can begin to be eroded.

Parapraxis

It’s a freestanding screen, leaned up against a concrete block, wider in width than it is in height. There’s a projection of a figure on the screen, roughly one third of the height of the viewer. The image is over exposed and the figure is partially covered by a bright yellow Selfridges bag. The figure stands in the pose that Tyra Banks uses to promote America’s next top model, it is held for the course of an hour. Glitches begin to occur in the video, the figure begins to dance the choreography from Beyoncé’s, ‘Run the World’ It’s danced in the same position by the same figure but it’s cut into the first shot of the figure holding the pose. Initially the choreography appears as glitches but as time passes the cuts lengthen and more of the choreography is visible. The video is looped; no beginning or end is visible.

Pink Haze

It's a looped video on a monitor at eye level. Flowers; darkened tulips, move back and fourth rhythmically. There is flesh also, the shot is close up so the entirety of the form cannot be seen. Pink bars; the shot is shaky and blurry, moving in and out of focus also close up so that the entirety of the form cannot be seen. Bog; seen from the ground, a hand enters the shot then enters the ground. Two hands dig and pull at the earth. Blurry pink bars come back into focus and hands dig deeper. Rhythmical flowers are being shoved to and fro into the camera by the flesh. Harsher more frantic movements prevail, shot from above; the hands are digging into solid ground to produce a rhythmical pounding of the earth.

I do not feel ashamed

A rectangular length of cream material is spread out on the floor. There is a conical pile of wheat on the material. Two stones rest near the wheat, one smaller than the other. A female figure wearing an orange dress kneels on the material next to the wheat and stones. She grinds the stones together whilst singing the 1990's pop song ‘bitch’ by Meredith Brooks. She never grinds the wheat just the stones. At stages she pulls the wheat behind her and balances from the material. She lies on the floor with the stone resting on her chest, singing. At intervals she sings, she breaks the song down, changing the rhythm and the structure of the song, she speaks it, and then whispers it. The performance lasts for eight hours.