"Código de barras" (Barcodes) was part of a collective exhibition titled "The Only Bush I Trust is my Own". The use of a barcode reader (an iSight) allowed the visitor in the gallery to reveal political and poetic messages against domestic violence, imperialism, consumerism, and informatic control.
"Código de barras" forma parte de una exposición colectiva titulada "The Only Bush I Trust is My Own). La persona visitando la galería donde fue expuesta esta serie de trabajos revelaba mensajes políticos y poéticos mediante un lector de códigos de barras. El trabajo se presenta contra las "barras" del imperialismo, del consumismo, y del control informático, así como denuncia la violencia de género.
Grace Dillon, an Anishinaabe scholar of science fiction, writes that “Native slipstream,” a subgenre of speculative fiction, “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like a navigable stream.” The immense possibilities inherent to this genre, she continues, allow “authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures.”
Biidaaban (Dawn Comes) (2018), a short stop-motion film by Vancouver-based Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong, illustrates the political possibilities of Indigenous slipstream, and Indigenous science fiction more broadly, to envision liberatory futures in the face of forces that naturalize the current destructive, capitalist, and colonial order.This paper takes as its starting point a problem posed by cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who suggested that capitalism has become so naturalized that it is nearly impossible to imagine an alternative future. Concurrently, I consider the arguments made by Dené political theorist Glen Sean Coulthard that dispossession of land is the foundation of capitalism and colonialism and that the politics of recognition reinforce settler colonial structures of domination.
With these premises, I read a number of writers on Indigenous science fiction and Indigenous political resistance alongside Biidaaban in order to demonstrate how the film’s marriage of anti-colonialism and refusal of settler recognition provide an answer to Fisher’s dilemma. The concepts of biskaabiiyang (Anishinaabemowin, “returning to ourselves”), intergenerational time, grounded normativity, and resurgence are all antidotes to capitalist realism.
These related terms refer to political strategies that counter colonial power through land-based practices, experiential knowledge, and a rejection of the politics of recognition. Biidaaban and Indigenous slipstream denaturalize capitalism by placing equal emphasis on the past and the future as on the present, the primary domain of capitalism. Similarly, since the control of land, human bodies, and non-human animals are paramount for colonialism and capitalism, this form and representation of resistance counters the very foundation of domination.This paper serves as the foundation of a larger research project that investigates how the spatial and temporal practices in Strong’s film represent the aforementioned concepts of Indigenous resistance towards colonialism and Enlightenment epistemologies. Strong’s hybrid documentary/fiction films blend traditional stories, time travel, oral history, and contemporary life, drawing on both fine art and film practices.
For this reasons, this research draws on the history of art (particularly contemporary Indigenous art, performance art, feminist art, and ecological practices) and film studies (emphasizing Canadian animation) to offer a nuanced reading of Strong’s work. Methodologically, this project is guided by Indigenous feminist thought, posthumanist theory, and ecocriticism to understand the complex web of relationships between the human and non-human worlds that are integral to Biidaaban and Strong’s other work.
In the United States in 2020, face masks became a political symbol: first welcomed as part of assisting emergency workers, and later condemned as a threat to individual liberty, the face mask is an inescapable site of conflict. However, it is also a thing of labor, entwined with the domestic sphere of sewing.
At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, several news stories emerged about essential objects in the pandemic, as well as various responses to these objects. Included in these stories were so-called “hobbyists,” mainly women, who used sewing machines and even needle and thread to make Personal Protective Equipment, including gowns, hair nets, and especially face masks. Indeed, hundreds of thousands face masks have been crafted by collectives of home sewers, frequently led by and including mainly women donating their time and resources. Their example of collective labor prompts the need to think of the usually invisible forms of making that occur in socially “private” and feminized spaces of labor—such as sewing rooms, kitchens, and offices—as active forms of contribution to safe social practices, altruism, and community-based maker cultures.
In this exhibition, we center this labor, using generative graphics and texts to imagine those masks: in an endlessly cycling generator, we capture both the imagined making and brief fragments of text centering the imagined, forgotten, and invisible makers who power this collective effort.
Built using Tracery, HTML5, and Javascript, this endless interactive imagetext generates imaginary masks that represent the lives and thoughts of the fictional people who made them. The fictional crafters in this piece reflect public examples of the crafters during COVID-19 --such as collected news items, social media images, and personal reflections--that are gathered to represent the wealth of diversity, age groups, and communities that participate in collective mask making. Sharing these publicly available resources will more faithfully represent and thus uncover the faces, hands, and labor of mask making during COVID-19. This exhibition invites the viewer to contemplate not only the mask itself, but also the erasure of primarily women, whose collective labor has been ignored, mocked, and diminished even as the US faces a horrifying setback in gender labor equity. By using a format in which content is constantly being generated, Masked Making centers both the crafted object and its crafter as ephemeral and disposable. In doing so, we hope to capture the marginalization of craft at a time when such domestic labor (and indeed, the confinement to the domestic) is literally life-saving.
Masked Making is a work that keeps its origins in mind: the interactive work will be available online for participants to engage with as a form of knowledge mobilization outreach, communicating the significance of women’s contributions to public audiences as well.
(Source: Authors' abstract)
Walking and ‘haunting space’ have become means of political and aesthetic resistance to the invisibility or inhospitality that women face in the public sphere. Power imbalance in spatial habitation—‘power-geometry’ in Doreen Massey’s terms— negatively affects women, just as shown in an Iranian context in Shirin Neshat’s film Women without Men (2009) and through feminist social movements such as #mystealthyfreedom. As these women wilfully assert themselves against their exclusion from certain places, they challenge the binaries public/private, men/women, and mobility/stasis both politically and aesthetically. Ghost characters and haunting narratives disrupt the linearity between dead and alive, virtual and actual (following the works of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze respectively), and open up possibilities that challenge the status quo. Through a micro-analysis of Women without Men, this article reveals that shapes, structures and lights participate to dismantling gendered norms, expectations, and power-geometries. Both the magical realism of the film and an affirmative analytical approach invite to seeing beyond the negativity of narratives and unveil alternative conceptions of space, gender and power.
Germany
(Originally published on https://www.kampnagel.de)
Three days of intensive “digital feminism” featuring talks, video and room installations, workshops and DJ sets by international and Hamburg artists. World premieres and commissioned pieces look to pasts and futures, melding and blurring images and sounds – every bit as analogue as digital. Are we already “slaves to the algorithm” or can we find ways to escape the digital reproduction of inequalities? Representatives of the queer-feminist avant garde provide diverse approaches to and perspectives on these mediated worlds, local reference points and global echo chambers. Bots can lie but bits don’t bite!
Digifem is funded by Elbkulturfonds and within the framework of the Alliance International Production Houses supported by the Commissioner for Culture and Media.
Angelica Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY is a new three-channel video installed within an architectural setting inspired by the historical shape of the community circle and amphitheatre. ASSEMBLY establishes as an evolving set of translations from the written word to stenographic codes then music, and performance. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and Australia, the three screens of ASSEMBLY travel through the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government while performers, representing the multitude of ancestries that constitute cosmopolitan Australia, gather, disassemble and re-unite, demonstrating the strength and creativity of a plural community.
Assembly, 2019, 3-channel video installation in architectural amphitheatre High Definition video projections, colour, sound (6-channel mono) Duration: 25 minutes Variable dimensions
(originally published on the artist's website)
Angelica Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY is a three-channel video installed within an architectural setting inspired by the historical shape of the community circle and amphitheatre. ASSEMBLY establishes as an evolving set of translations from the written word to stenographic codes then music, and performance. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and Australia, the three screens of ASSEMBLY travel through the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government while performers, representing the multitude of ancestries that constitute cosmopolitan Australia, gather, disassemble and re-unite, demonstrating the strength and creativity of a plural community.
Curator Juliana Engberg said, “ASSEMBLY uses and personifies the exilic energies of those who seek belonging in the community—the young, the female, Indigenous, the newly arrived and exiled, the refugee as well as the artist. Mesiti’s performers play along to an inherited code, but through translation, improvisation, adaptation, and re-interpretation demonstrate how a new music can emerge. The abstract relations and associations within ASSEMBLY open a space of imagined possibilities arising out of strange juxtapositions and unlikely re-locations.
“Cutting a rupture into the voided place of government to ignite a next succession of communication, ASSEMBLY seeks to create a new space for those who want to speak differently, hear attentively, and act together to form a new translation of the democratic process.”
Commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts on the occasion of the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia and Galerie Allen, Paris.
Curated for the Australian Pavilion by Juliana Engberg.
CREDITS
Artist Angelica Mesiti
Producer Bridget Ikin
Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott, ACS
Composer Max Lyandvert
Michela Stenographic Advisor Paolo Michela-Zucco
Poet David Malouf
CANBERRA PRODUCTION
Sound Recordist Kimmo Vennonen
Camera Assistant Juntra Santitharangkun
Digital Imaging Technician Jamie Gray
Gaffer Russell Fewtrell
Grip David Litchfield
Steadicam Operator Pete Barta
Assistant Sound Recordist Aron Dyer
Costumes Alice Babidge
ROME PRODUCTION
Line Producer Massimiliano Navarra
Producer's Assistant Maichel Marchese
1st Camera Assistant Stefano Barabino
2nd Camera Assistant Mattia Gelain
Sound Recordist Riccardo Gaggioli
POST-PRODUCTION
Editor Angelica Mesiti
Music Mix Bob Scott
Sound Design and Mix Liam Egan
Colourist Billy Wychgel
Post-Production Supervisor Peter Lenaerts
MUSICIANS AND PERFORMERS
Michela Stenographer Michele Pigliapoco
Pianist Sonya Lifschitz
Viola James Wannan
Clarinet Aviva Endean
Sanṭūr Jamal Farokhsereshti
Dancer Deborah Brown
Drummers, C'DARZ John Afram, Christopher, Dandan, Ricky Hadchiti, Albert Khouri, Rizik Khouri, Bakhos Samrani, Nadim Sleiman, Anthony Younes
Vocalists The House that Dan Built: Elektra Blinder, Grace Campbell, Sofia Goulding, Brianna Harris, Kittu Hoyne, Kiri Jenssen, Emily Pincock, Harper Pollard, Jayden Selvakumaraswamy, Iris Simpson, Thu Tran, Sylvie Woodhouse
Vocalists’ Manager Danielle O’Keefe
Lancia Vendors of Rome
Exhibition Designer Simon de Dreuille
Produced by Felix Media, with the support of Screen Australia
Video art installation critical of the precarious, racialised, and gendered labour going on through the internet, or born-digital.
"- What are the benefits of presenting yourself as a male freelancer?
- I work in academia, I am no stranger to the wage gap and heteronormativity in our society. I am sure that women make less than their male counterparts for the same work and I am also Latin American. Being a Latino woman makes me more prone to receiving less for the same hard work
...
I have seen a difference between presenting oneself as a man in contrast with my daughter who presents herself as a woman: she does the same work and gets hired significantly less. She also has to use milder language and say 'please' and 'sorry' a lot more or she would come across as too bossy and difficult to work with." (Worker 1)
Giardina Papa portrays workers who offer digital micro-services, fetish work or emotional support online, and gives them a voice. In Technologies of Care, we meet seven digital workers: an ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) artist, a virtual boyfriend, an online dating coach, a storyteller and video performer, a social media fan, a scientist working simultaneously as fingernail designer, and a customer service representative. Papa has found these freelancers in Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Venezuela and the USA, where they offer their services anonymously via online platforms, which make a profit from them. With the exception of the virtual boyfriend, all in- terviews are interpreted by female-sounding voices. While the transcripts read like ethnographic research texts, the interviews in the video function like chamber plays on unfettered digital neoliberalism. (IA)
Technologies of Care documents new ways in which service and affective labor are being outsourced via internet platforms, exploring topics such as empathy, precarity, and immaterial labor.The video visualizes the invisible workforce of online caregivers. The workers interviewed in "Technologies of Care" include an ASMR artist, an online dating coach, a fetish video performer and fairytale author, a social media fan-for-hire, a nail wrap designer, and a customer service operator. Based in Brazil, Greece, the Philippines, Venezuela, and the United States, they work as anonymous freelancers, connected via third-party companies to customers around the globe. Through a variety of websites and apps, they provide clients with customized goods and experiences, erotic stimulation, companionship, and emotional support.The stories collected in Technologies of Care include those of non-human caregivers as well. One of its seven episodes, Worker 7 - Bot? Virtual Boyfriend/Girlfriend, documents the artist's three-month-long “affair” with an interactive chatbot.
Digital contemporary retake of Shelley Lake's eerie video 'Polly gone' (1988). 'Polly Gone' was a critique of the gendered role of the housewife. Although the music is 1980s techno, the eeriness and themes somewhat recalls Chantal Akerman's video 'Saute ma ville' (1968). In 'Polly Returns', the robot has taken a more humane physiognomy, and the relation to the screen has changed. Polly has become an integral part of the screen, and her gendered role has acquired complexity that goes beyond domestic chores. Rolling text instructs her in a very neoliberal way how to be simultaneously a perfect housewife, a politically conscious citizen, a productive worker and a caring mum, among others.
While in residence at the Internet Archive, I came across Polly Gone, a 1988 computer animation by Shelley Lake (who was then the technical director of Digital Productions, a prominent 3D animation studio). In the video, a female robot -- whose severe, mechanistic design was inspired by Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet -- zips around a futuristic dome house doing various domestic chores, all while a horror movie soundtrack with synthesized beats plays in the background. Fascinated with how dystopian and surreal the animation seems in retrospect, I attempted to address the horror of the digital sublime in a modern day version: Here, Polly returns in 2017 to find herself awash in a sea of listicle titles. My soundtrack is based on Shelley Lake's soundtrack, which in turn was inspired by the soundtrack from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Dortmunder
Germany
La Gaïté Lyrique
Paris
France
The exhibition is dedicated to Nathalie Magnan (1956-2016).
---
The exhibition Cmptr Grrrlz brings together more than 20 international artistic positions that negotiate the complex relationship between gender and technology in past and present. Computer Grlz deals with the link between women and technology from the first human computers to the current revival of technofeminist movements. An illustrated timeline with over 200 entries covers these developments from the 18th century to the present. Invited are artists, hackers, makers and researchers who are working on how to think differently about technology: by questioning the gender bias in big data and Artificial Intelligence, promoting an open and diversified Internet, and designing utopian technologies.
Computer Grrrls is an exhibition by HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), Dortmund (DE), in coproduction with La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (FR). The participating artists come from 16 countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, USA, and Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Following the exhibition at HMKV Dortmund, the project will move to La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris in the spring of 2019, and in summer 2019 to MU in Eindhoven. In all places there will be film screenings, tours with the curators, artist talks and experimental workshops.
Curators: Inke Arns (HMKV), Marie Lechner (La Gaîté Lyrique)
An exhibition by HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein), Dortmund (DE), in coproduction with La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris (FR)
Reflections on gender inequality within the cultural world. Glitch Goddess.
"#GlitchGoddess was originally born out of my #Arthack project on Instagram, which I started in 2016. In my practice I use glitch as a digital aesthetic, technological phenomenon, and as a way in which the digital is transforming and changing the physical. So “she is glitching” is defying the existing concepts of the female shape in art, as she is animated between slender, heavy, young, old, pregnant, curvy, stylized and also abstract, as a contemporary and digital approach to the representation of the female form. Her first hack appearance was in my Frieze London with Kavanaugh hack. I used her in my Art Basel Miami 2018 #arthack, with voices of artists like Joan Semel and Faith Ringgold from a documentary on inequality in the art world, and then it went viral with over 3 million views and 53k shares on my Public Facebook Page, and millions of other views on other art channels." (Marjan Moghaddam, in https://artspiel.org/marjan-moghaddam-pioneering-humanity-in-a-digital-…)
"Glitched Goddesses With Portrait of Picasso @ArtBasel Miami 2018", #Arthack by #MarjanMoghaddam, posted on 12/9/18. Videos taken from @galerievivendi and Ingrid De Granier. Music by @beatsbyleet, voices: Jillian Mayer, Todd Levin, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Joan Semel, Faith Ringgold, Barbara Zucker from From Melissa Art Basel Takeover on You Tube and Gucci Artists for Gender Equality, You Tube. #ArtBasel #ArtBaselMiami #Scope #ScopeArtFair #DesignMiami #UntitledArtFair #ArtFair #GlitchedGoddess #NetArt #DigitalArt #PostInternetArt #DigitalSculpture #ChronometricSculpture #3d #Animation #3dCG #Mocap #Glitch #Feminist #AR #MR #VR #Lightwave3d #OctaneRender #Octane Made in #brooklyn #artist