SFPC Week 5: Artist’s Statements
On saying something meaningful.
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Mid-point, we have arrived. At week’s end, Taeyoon hosted the first “Artist’s Toolkit” session. Unsurprisingly, the first part of the Artist’s Toolkit requires you to call yourself an artist and let people know what you’re about. An Artist’s Statement.
I almost skipped this class. The night before we had come together at 3 long tables for a lively family dinner hosted by Tega at Dark Matter, sitting amidst custom harps made for Bjork’s Biophilia album and electric wire trees that light up when you place your hand on an orb — on Friday morning, I fought the temptation to just keep snoozing.
I’m really glad I went.
Reasons why writing an artist statement makes me squirm:
- Am I an artist? Do I deserve that title?
- How do I explain myself without boxing myself in?
Taeyoon addressed these questions by bringing them out of their abstraction cloud and back down to the ground. That was a really good start.
“An artist is a creative, independent person who needs to express their ideas.”
“Don’t think of boxing yourself in, think of it as a box you step on. A platform.”
Ok, yea, I can definitely work with that.
The only point of an Artist’s Statement is to help people who don’t know you yet to navigate your world. What’s important to you? What can’t you live without?
We started just by writing out keywords — evading the daunting exercise of writing full sentences just yet. This was crucial for me (whenever I feel overwhelmed, I just write down any words that come to mind just to put them somewhere, and that’s how this felt).
The coolest part of this exercise was watching Taeyoon weave a narrative out of the keywords; clustering words with similar meanings, pulling out context for words that maybe had their own definition as my classmates were using them.
My statement is still forthcoming, but some keywords I jotted down were: investigate, rhythm, mythology, expectations, physical space, spectrums.
Taeyoon’s keywords are computation, aesthetic, politics, community, drawing. His Artist Statement is here.
I make unique computational objects, as in my Handmade Computer series and Distributed Network of Care, a new generation of secure, non-commercial and censorship-free networks. I explore the discourse of technology with a critical perspective towards ethics, agency, justice and sensitivity to minority issues. I consider technology as means of effecting power and seek to make tools and resources accessible to those excluded in consumerist technology’s concept of personhood. As a social practice artist, I’m inspired by art as a form of care. I draw from the work of Lygia Clark and Suzanne Lacy, whose social practices prompt direct action, participation and educational engagement. Through my work and teaching, I attempt to practice soft care, an implicit, nuanced form of care between people and within oneself that prioritize one’s personhood and integrity as well as their security and privacy. I investigate how technological innovation is not an inherent good for the people, because care cannot be entirely automated.
For further inspiration, I really loved Trevor Paglen’s Statement.
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.
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Beyond how an artist talks about themselves, what are the statements an artist makes with their work?
Art activism was this week’s theme for Morehshin’s Radical Outside class. What is art activism? What does it accomplish?
After reading Boris Groy’s rather insufferable essay “On Art Activism” our class agreed on a better definition — art activism makes something previously invisible, visible. Art activism shouldn’t pretend to solve a problem, but rather expose the problem in a way that isn’t yet happening; most of all, the exposition of this problem (or new information) must be accessible to the public.
A powerful example of art activism comes in the shape of “The Other Nefertiti” by Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles; they scanned the bust of Nefertiti, which currently sits in a museum in Germany, 3D printed it, and sent it to Cairo, where it is originally from. They also released the scanned data on the Creative Commons so that anyone in the public could have access to Nefertiti. This is a statement about cultural artifacts pillaged from other cultures; the inaccessibility of a country’s own history to its people. This is an action that not only brought questions of ownership to the forefront but also distributed that ownership accordingly.
So, what is bad art activism? Perhaps if it’s rooted in spectacle. One such example of this is “paraSITE” by Michael Rakowitz. These special-made tents are created to recycle hot air coming from vents outside of homes; they are large and visually imposing, making it impossible not to confront homelessness. For those of us who live in cities with homelessness, aren’t we already very viscerally aware of homelessness? What exactly is this artist exposing that wasn’t already visible? Not to mention, who is being recruited to use these tents? Are they safe? This piece makes a spectacle out of the people suffering from homelessness, rather than exposing the injustices that cause homelessness.
What is seemingly invisible today that needs to be exposed and discussed freely? Another question that will continue to bounce around my brain.
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When it comes to exposition, we cannot ignore Facebook and Cambridge Analytica this week, as the general public becomes more aware of the extent of how Facebook collects and uses their data.
My classmate Yeli shared some good tweets from Mat Johnson about his discoveries:
All of this just to say, a few companies own:
- A lot of data about people
- The internet’s infrastructure (the cloud)
Data + Infrastructure sounds kind of like a government… so there are a lot of questions here.
One of those, posed by Taeyoon at New Museum + Rhizome’s National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web this weekend was, “How can we use distributed computing in a web of care?”
Taeyoon began the workshop by reading a code of conduct; for most of our digital products, this is subbed in by a privacy policy that is obscured by length and complexity.
The workshop ended with a performance — each participant received a piece of string, representing data, which could be cut and traded with others. The strings were exchanged between people, first highlighting what data transfer looks like using a Google Doc (collaboration through a middle man) versus the distributed web (direct collaboration).
How does a web of care look different from a web of control?
This is an ongoing conversation, let me know if this is something you’re interested in investigating further.
Otherwise, if you’re interested in distributed computing, here are some things for you to check out:
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This is my weekly reflection about my experience at The School of Poetic Computation. Follow these links to read about my week zero; week one, week two; week three; week four.
