User:Angeliki/Grad-Abstracts & Synopsis

Karen O`rourke. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (2013)

Abstract

The book is an approach to make a differentiated map. It is a collection of artistic practices focusing on walking. The writer combines these examples of works that he personally experienced zooming in and out the concept of walking and mapping as an artistic practice since 70s. These approaches are blurring the borders between the fields of art and others.
In the first chapter he starts by describing a contemporary walking project and then generalize the process by referring to the terms psychogeography and drifting, as explained by Debord. He describes then more walking projects till the time of 90s in which artists, and not only, are using algorithms, GPS, low-tech media technologies, political strategies, their own bodies and most importantly are interacting with the public. By walking and giving scores and instructions to themselves they reveal hidden narratives, re-claim the streets with the motivation of understanding their surroundings. Some awkwardness and playfulness characterizes these projects, that reveals the city’s underlying structure and re-appropriates the language.
In the second chapter the author emphasizes the process of walking as a fundamental biological action. She refers to examples of artists who experimented with the practice of walking as a ‘mechanic of everyday movement’. Gradually artists moved to the listening of everyday outside sounds. After this historical recall the author comes back to the present by describing her personal experience as a participant to an augmented walking created by Janet Cardiff. O’ Rourke analyses the project and relates it to art works from the past like surrealist novels and land art. According to her, these artistic experiences, in contrast to past binaural sound works, trigger the audience to move through the space while listening. She concludes that walking as an art practice may resemble to architectural practices.

Synopsis
2nd chapter:

In this chapter the author emphasizes the process of walking as a fundamental biological action that depends on the body networks as an attempt for balancing with surroundings. She refers to examples of artists and especially dancers who experimented with the practice of walking as a ‘mechanic of everyday movement’. Artists like Yvonne Rainer tended to perceive body and movement as abstract terms disconnected from their context and were exploring their mechanism by creating scores for movement. He refers then to the involvement of repetition in that process that was intensively used by many different fields in 60s. The repetitive walking explored by dancers was opening up the space and time of action. The studio was becoming a space for an eternal repetitive movement. Such activities expanded in the realm of theatre with Beckett creating a piece were actors were moving repetitively following the same pattern on stage. Gradually the author moves in the next step of these attempts which was the involvement of everyday outside sounds. The art was blending with life. After that artists started to explore movement while listening sounds outside. “(R)eceptivity is not passivity”(O’ Rourke, pg. 34) as Dewey said for the audience who was just walking and listening its surrounding. After this historical recall the author comes back to present by describing her personal experience as a participant to the project Her Long Black Hair of Janet Cardiff. The project is about an augmented walking in the streets of New York. Cardiff created an audio consisted of her spoken words while walking a path, describing events from the past, history, fiction and mythology, sound samples from the spot and music. Together with the headphones and sound device also photos of past events were given to the participants. O’ Rourke analyses the project and relates it to similar narratives created by surrealists in the past where the images, as the sounds for Cardiff, “replace verbal desrciptions” (O’ Rourke, pg. 43). She talks about the dialectical landscape and the relation of her art with land art of Robert Smithson: the multiple layers of narratives reveal the “endless maze of relations and interconnections” of the landscape. According to her even though these artistic experiences resemble binaural sound and Théâtrophone from the past, they have a big difference: the audience doesn’t stay still listening the piece.

She concludes that walking, perceived as an art form first by Richard Long, “may be a form of architecture” as “we shape space as we go”(O’ Rourke, pg. 43). She gives an example of the project Here While We Walk in which a group of participants were walking silently inside an elastic band forming a mobile architecture of individuals focusing on perceiving themselves being in the present.

My opinion is that these contemporary examples of psychogeography keep a continuous line with the attention on insignificant and daily events as artistic process, on the base of the concept of Michel de Charteau in The Practice of Everyday Life. On the other hand I am wondering what these abstract entities and events represent today as they are related to a mental perception developed by the Western art spheres. Their indirect connection with political, cultural and social connotations provoke interestingly different perspectives of the surrounding and our bodies. But how this can be translated in our multicultural and multilayered environments?

Sarah Kanouse. Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art (2011)

Abstract
The text introduces radio as an active medium of public art. Since 1920 the radio was criticized as a wasteland of commercials and state propaganda that separated the practitioners from the public. Tight regulations restricted the electromagnetic public sphere and artists didn’t engage deeply believing that it was an unrealized social space. Only pirate radio practitioners could interrogate the public, critical and political aspects of radio that public art aims to. Kanouse describes three projects that use radio and provoke a direct engagement of public bodies in space. They all transmit to the physical and electromagnetic public spaces on a way that forces a confrontation with the rules of both.

Synopsis
The text introduces radio as an active medium of public art. Since 1920 the radio was criticized as a wasteland of commercials and state propaganda. It was Bertolt Brecht that perceived it as transceiver to experiment with and questioning its use and Walter Benjamin who noticed that it will be a failure as long as the separation between practitioners and public dominates it. From early on, tight regulations restricted the electromagnetic public sphere so that artists didn’t engage deeply with its elements and it was constantly seen as “an unrealized and undertheorized social and aesthetic space” (Kanouse, pg. 87). Only pirate radio practiotioners, with their low-tech practice and self-broadcasting, could interrogate the public, critical and political aspects of radio, as Brecht and Benjamin would imagine.

But what is public art? According to Kanouse public art exists outside of galleries and museums, addressing a theoretical body of criticism on “publicness” to different groups of people, rather than searching for institutional funding and unified audiences. Rosalyn Deutsche mentions that public art differs from state sponsored art and constitutes a public through dialogue that leads to political action. This practice takes account the inevitable exclusions, conflicts, divisions and instability that may have and thus it can become a democratic sphere. Returning back to radio, Kanouse refers to the state regulations imposed on radio and specifically on FRC (Federal Radio Comission) in United States that restricted access to airwaves and permitted licensed transmissions only in low frequencies, so there will be no interferences with commercial frequencies. That had as a result the creation of a “public body” in the name of a homogenous public and the radio’s monopolization by mainstream entertainment and political commentary. The author sees the use of prohibited technologies and the confrontation with these restrictions as a political act. An act that can propose an “anti-authoritarian radical democracy” (Kanouse, pg. 89) through the formation of small groups that learn to broadcast and produce alternate media cultures. An unlicensed broadcast can challenge what public art wants to: the creation of a public sphere willing to interrogate the “democratical” public space which is part of.

After introducing public art and radio as possible extension of it, Kanouse describes three projects that exist within this realm. The first project, called Talking Homes by John Brumit, was realized under the residency of Neighborhood Public Radio (little NPR) arts collective of Detroit. The author describes two iterations, part of this project, that broadcasted personal stories of inhabitants through transmitters located in their houses and other buildings, revealing the struggle and the daily routine of these people living in degraded neighbourhoods. The interviewers were trained by the artist to use their transmitters. It seemed that the exposition of the private sphere, reflected in the localization of the media and the gossiping produced, to the public reframed clearer the struggle for the neighborhood than the big radio programmes. The engagement of the public, which was not the privileged audience of art spaces, was deep because of the use of a certified from FCC technology and it didn’t care for the more technical context about radios and frequencies. Both iterations followed the spirit of NPR characterized by the smallness, site-specificity and listener’s participation. Even though these small transmitters have not many listeners because of the smalll range, NRC sees that as a way to link people and thus negates the separation of practitioner and public mentioned before. The little NPR, in contrast to National Public Radio (big NPR), embraces amateurism on the base of “polymorphous”. In other words it embraces the instability, diversity, discomforts and the contradictions that produces.

The second project is The Public Broadcast Cart made by Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, that is a portable home-made radio broadcasting the voice of the one driving the cart in several places. The voice of the participant becomes public on site through speakers and extends to radio frequencies and the internet. The legality of the radio cart doesn’t concern the present public and the unusual object attracts even more their attention. A manual on how to make this object is published in its website, and this detailed explanation of the technology, even more than the other project, demystifies the technology. Based on the open source and pirate radio spirit, this offering of access to the technology refuses the specialization and the prohibition of the airwaves. The parallel expanses of the voice and the uncensored speech in three different public spaces occupies at the same time the physical, online and electromagnetic realm. The DIY electronic media empowers the individual and collective voice. The last project is called Radio Ballet made by the group LIGNA and is about a group-listening performance in public. The participants interrupted the urban flow by violating the social norms in public space. More specifically they were listening with headphones to movement instructions and commentaries on public behaviours broadcasted in a radio frequency. Their engagement with the environment questioned the “monotonous, functionalist and consumerist spatial code”. LIGNA’s “proliferation of identical voices in multiple places”(Kanouse, pg. 97) revealed and exploited the uncanny elements of the radio.

Kanouse concludes that although radio, in developed countries, is perceived as an old “dead”, monopolized medium, its low technology and the decreasing commercial interest in that, made it a critical tool for artists. Its materiality and restrictions of physicality turns it into a link between the “lived and the imagined” (Kanouse, pg. 97). Radio’s dispersion, or one voice in many places, even though it is subject to regulations, is open for contesting its public sphere. In all the projects she refers to, there is a direct engagement of public bodies in space. The transmission to the physical and electromagnetic public spaces forces a confrontation with the rules of both. At the end, she encourages to use radio as a tool of intervention in the diverse public spaces.

Having a small knowledge on radio medium I was also perceiving radio as an old medium, but it is inevitable to avoid its presence in public spaces and realms, especially in countries that have not access in the main communication platforms. It is my question though what makes it so special in relation to other more contemporary mediums like Internet. Is it its specificity on material or the assimilation of a medium in a society after many years of its existence that makes it a critical tool? Regarding the amount of regulations imposed on it it seems to be a powerful tool for contesting the public bodies created by the state on the name of “public good”. I am wondering if this DIY culture becomes self-referential when produces projects in the shake of technology. I believe that sometimes the less technical context is enough for declaring the statement the artist wants to make, like on the case of the first project. In other words only the curated exposition of the medium and its content in the space can provoke many thoughts on that matter.

Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy (1982)

Abstract
The selection of the parts of this book aims to highlight the importance of the methods of orality in the development of the human consciousness and culture. The dynamic of orality and literacy will favor a deeper understanding of human communication. The former is the primary and natural condition of the latter, which is developed as technology in the high- technological societies. But their relation doesn't mean that are dependent on each other. Oral cultures exist without the need of writing, texts and dictionaries. Ong describes in detail what are those methods with which oral people can organize complex thoughts. His aim is to provide a connection between the two cultures for the shake of the human awareness.

Saskia Sassen. The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition (2012)

Abstract Synopsis In this text Saskia Sassa raises questions about the making of public space and the current urban conditions. Monumental and high-tech architecture in the cities “have produced displacement and estrangement” and gradually cities turn from “civic to politicized urban spaces”. Simultaneously degraded and semi-abandoned spaces appear, called terrains vague. These areas exist outside of the utility logics of the city and are claimed from real estate agencies as a new territory for new high towers of offices. However architecture and design can propose other ways of perceiving that space through “critical artistic practices”.
To answer her questions she introduces the making of public as a way to refuse the constant privatization and weaponization of the public space. The dominant royal and state architectures are related to public access to those urban spaces and not on how to make spaces public. The small practices of people and the new network technologies though do that in weird places, terrains vague, outside of the utility logic. This possibility of “making, detecting and intervening” has being intense the last decades together with the privatization of the public spaces. The state has also weaponized the urban space through surveillance and physical restrictions that changes the landscapes together with the commercial gentrification. Those gestures refer to public access and not to the public space. The subjectivities of people can propose “diverse kinds of publicness” that make a space public. According to Sassen, several reasons facilitate such practices and imaginairies. The first is that the restriction of the public spaces in the shake of access and monumental architectures reduce the experiences of the people in the city. A second reason is the creation of modest public spaces in response to the monumentalized spaces that focuses between the private and public power. This option of making repositions the the modest spaces in potentially global networks that include multiple localities. Last, the existence of multiculturalism in the cities that affects and challenges the experiences and notions of the public. The occupy movement was one form of public-space making.

This is part of a project on Occupy movements and public gatherings. Angeliki Diakrousi Department of Architecture, University of Patras February-June 2012