Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Introduction

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Map Open Space exhibition at FLEFF 2010, La Buena Vida/The Good Life  is a video project comprised by more than 400 interviews with pedestrians in the streets of twelve Latin American cities conducted between 2005 and 2008.

Along with several commissioned texts that respond to the question ‘What is democracy to you?’ from different social and theoretical perspectives, the video interviews can be accessed through an online archive.

The project is also a multi-channel video installation that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2008 and has been also exhibited in Aarhus, Berlin, Bogotá, Buffalo, Buenos Aires, Castelló, Florence, Gijón, Lyon, New York City, and San Francisco.

Sharon and I have received lots of requests for additional information on the project, so we asked Carlos Motta whether we could interview him for the Digital Spaces blog.  He agreed, so the text for the interview, which took place on May 6th, 2010, appears in two posts.  This one focuses on the reception of The Good Life and Motta’s other related projects; the previous post focuses on the conception and realization of The Good Life.

The Interview

Dale Hudson:  What have been the various responses to the project?  I see that the website allows for users to upload their own responses and comments.  Do these responses differ from other critical responses?

Carlos Motta:  That’s an interesting point.  In thinking about a project like The Good Life, of course, the idea of having an online forum for people to be able to upload their thoughts or questions—became very important.  However, I was always a bit skeptical because of my experience in dealing with projects like this.  In conversation with the curator at Art in General and the designers and the programmers, we decided to include this section, but it’s a section that I think has failed.

For some reason, I think that the rigor that I managed to achieve through the interviewing, the editing, the categorizing, etc. is completely outside of my control in that [online] forum.  I don’t mean that I should always be in control.  The important point here is that my mediation, in that sense, is what has made the project have a very specific point of view and a perspective, whereas I think that those spaces [online forums] often become spaces for ranting and expressing anything without considering the framework and the type of response that you are giving. It is in fact a democratic forum, but it’s a very unfocused one—and in the context of the project, it is the section that works the least.  It is the one that produces a type of knowledge that is completely biased, which is a little bit of a contradiction when you think of online participation as allegedly democratic.  Perhaps I am to blame in that sense because I haven’t figured out how to work with that space to make it be productive as opposed to negative.

But, the response to the website has been really overwhelming, I think, in a very positive way—and in a negative way as well, of course.  To speak of the positive, the video archive part of the project is a document that exists between disciplines.  It works with elements of sociological studies, and it uses resources of anthropology, but it is also an art project.  It exists in this hybrid space.  It has been used by very diverse and different academic communities, which is something that I found really gratifying.  For example, I know that it has been studied and used by sociology students at NYU and other universities.  In that sense, it is a project that has had a really wide and ample life.

Within the art community, the conversation is different.  It is one of method and application, so it’s a project that has had a wide range of responses.  The installation, of course, is different, because you have to think of it in terms of the institution and the place where it is exhibited.  I needed to consider the aesthetic devices and solutions to present the work, so that the project wouldn’t just be a whole bunch of videos on screens or monitors.  There are elements of architecture that reference the Athenian agora, where democracy was conceived.  There are other aesthetic elements that come into play, so the conversation in that context is a little different from the online archive.  In general, there has been wide support for the project, but of course there has also been a lot of criticism from different perspectives, both from the political perspective but also from the artistic perspective.

DH:  What have been the main critiques, both politically and artistically?

CM: One of the main criticisms has been the fact that I relied too heavily on the idea of U.S. intervention.  That speaking of democracy through that lens can be counterproductive because it might overlook local processes that are unrelated to U.S involvement.  My response is that my intention was to speak of the idea of democratization as it was ‘spread’ by U.S. policy.  It is not necessarily a project that wants to speak of democracy in general, but it wants to speak about that specific process, the idea of importing a democracy—and democracy as a broader concept that it is tied to economic, political and social issues.

Critics seem to think that the project may reinforce an idea of the Empire.  At the same time, if you go through the material, I think that you realize that there is much more of this local conversation taking place in the video interviews because the idea of democracy is lived in a very personalized and subjective way.  You can only reflect that based on your immediate experience.

The criticism within the world of art is whether this is art at all, which is a bit of a conservative and orthodox criticism.  It is one that is always present in comments like ‘it relies too heavily on documentary material’ or ‘the content is overriding the aesthetic’ and in question like ‘is the role of the museum to present work like this?’ and ‘what does it offer to an artistic conversation?’ and things like that.

DH: Are there any future installations of this project?

CM: Actually, the project has been on the road every since I started showing it.  For example, the project is now in Berlin and San Francisco.  Before that, it was in Gijón and Castelló in Spain.  It’s been in Lyon and Florence.  It was also in Bogotá and in Buenos Aires.

The Good Life has had a really beautiful life—it has had a good life to use the syntax [of the project’s title]—so I suspect that it will continue.  Even though I am ready to let it rest for a bit.  I think it’s time for me to concentrate on other works that I have been producing.

DH:  What are your new projects, what are the things that are interesting you?

CM:  When I began this project, The Good Life, I actually became very interested in the conversation on democracy.  The Good Life became the first in a series of works that I am producing under the title of Democracy Cycle in which I approach the question of democracy from different perspectives.

I have already produced the second part of the project, The Immigrant Files: Democracy Is Not Dead; It Just Smells Funny, in which I investigate the idea of democracy in the welfare state of Sweden from the perspective of Latin American political exiles living in that country.  That was a really interesting project.  There is some documentation on my web site <http://www.carlosmotta.com/sweden.html>.  The project confronts the Swedish model from the perspective of the margins, from the perspective of those who are not really part of that democracy even though they are part of that society.

The third part of the cycle is Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice in which I investigate democracy according to the concept of historical memory.  It is a project in which I did performances on the street of Bogotá during the recent presidential elections.  I had six actors read texts by presidential candidates who had been assassinated while campaigning in Colombia.  It is an exercise in memory, an exercise to reflect on what the role of the political left in Colombia has been.  It also reflects on what it means to limit freedom of speech and the repercussions of speaking out in a repressive political environment.

Another project that I am working on at the moment is called We Who Feel Differently, which is a similar project to The Good Life in its online form, except that it deals with issues of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and politics in four different countries.  I have been interviewing activists, theoreticians, professors, lawyers, and politicians in this context, trying to get different stories or to draft a history of the struggle for sexual and gender rights in four countries.

There is another one planned, which I haven’t begun, which will deal with the idea of religion and democracy.

DH: Thanks, Carlos.  We look forward to learning more about the fifth part of the project, as well as getting a chance to see the other parts, which have been completed.

CM:  Thank you—and thanks to the jury for the award.

Final Thoughts

This interview with Motta raises important questions about online forums and democracy.  In particular, I am struck my Motta’s characterization that the forum for user-generated comments on The Good Life was democratic but unorganized.

Let us know your thoughts on such forums, especially examples that move beyond the anonymous rants that typify user comments on commercial sites such as YouTube.




 

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Part One: Conception and Realization

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Map Open Space exhibition at FLEFF 2010, La Buena Vida/The Good Life (http://la-buena-vida.info) is a video project comprised by more than 400 interviews with pedestrians in the streets of twelve Latin American cities conducted between 2005 and 2008.

Along with several commissioned texts that respond to the question ‘What is democracy to you?’ from different social and theoretical perspectives, the video interviews can be accessed through an online archive.

The project is also a multi-channel video installation that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2008 and has been also exhibited in Aarhus, Berlin, Bogotá, Buffalo, Buenos Aires, Castelló, Florence, Gijón, Lyon, New York City, and San Francisco.

Sharon and I have received lots of requests for additional information on the project, so we asked Carlos Motta whether we could interview him for the Digital Spaces blog.  He agreed, so the text for the interview, which took place on May 6th, 2010, is published in two posts.  This one focuses on Motta’s conception of the project; the next will focus on its reception and his other projects.

The Interview

Dale Hudson:  As you might have read on the Digital Spaces blog, our jury loved La Buena Vida/The Good Life!  How did you conceive the concept for the project?

Carlos Motta:  It is a project that took a long time to complete, so it went through different phases.  Initially, I was working on a different project, the S.O.A. Cycle, which investigates the image of the Cold War in Latin American politics from a political and military perspective.  Upon finishing that work, I wanted to take all of the information that I had gathered to the streets in order to see how we [Latin Americans] perceived U.S. foreign policy and democracy as an “imported” concept.

DH:  I noticed on the web site that New Commissions/Art in General (AIG), the New York-based nonprofit organization, is credited with commissioning The Good Life.  What was the exact role on AIG?

CM:  Art in General commissioned the website itself, which is the last part of the project.  There is also an installation and a publication, parts with which they weren’t involved.   But the online archive was produced with their generous support.

DH:  How did you go about doing the earlier parts?  Were they self-funded or were there other supporting organizations?

CM:  In the beginning, I had no money or support, so my strategy was to produce the videos during my trips to other exhibitions and festivals.  For example, when I went to Mexico City, I had been invited to teach a course.  The school where I was teaching paid for my travel so I did my shooting on the side.

In the beginning, it was kind of self-funded, so I had to be as creative as I could in terms of finding the money.  Later on, when I started to look at the material and shape it, I started to apply for grants.  By the end, I think I was very fortunate: I think that I got every grant that I applied to, so it became a very well funded project, and I was able to finish it.

DH:  In what ways does The Good Life draw upon Fernando Solonas and Octavio Gettino’s concept of Third Cinema and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

CM: Solanas and Getino play an important role in the cultural reflection on class struggle and difference in Latin America [during the 1960s].  Their concept of “Third Cinema” proposed a filmmaking practice that would respond to the pressing social and political issues of that time directly and not metaphorically.  I looked closely at the ways that they thought about the issues of spectatorship and audience, for example, and how they thought of film as enabling a sense of national belonging and citizenship.  There are other filmmakers, such as [Jorge] Sanjinés in Bolivia and Marta Rodriguez and [Jorge] Silva in Colombia that are very influential to me.

Paulo Freire’s, Pedagogy of the Oppressed served more as a theoretical framework for the making of The Good Life.  Freire’s is a hugely influential ‘method’—he really didn’t like that word—it is a way of conceiving a pedagogy that is inclusive and responsive to the needs of students, as opposed to imposing an agenda that lies outside what people really need.  I drew upon Freire’s ideas as I thought about the ways that I would ask the questions and the type of work that I would create from all of this material.

DH: The Good Life engages in acts of what is sometimes called radical historiography, a re-conception of history in terms of people rather than in terms of political leaders, in terms of relationality rather than chronology.  How did you conceive the criteria (question, city, gender, age group, occupation) by which users of the internet archive can select and sort data?

CM:  There are two things about that I found interesting since, as I told you earlier, the work has two parts.  The first part was the installation: In conceiving of the way that I would treat the video for the installation, I realized that, in a way, I wanted to treat it somewhat more conventionally.  I was thinking in terms of narrative and linearity.  I was approaching this material in a way that was more filmic.

When it came to think about how this material should be organized for the online archive, however, I wanted to break away from narrative and linearity and provide a different form of viewing/editing the material, which is when these categories and the tagging came about.  Even though it would be me who was defining certain possibilities [for selecting and sorting by tags], it would be a more fragmented experience of viewing the videos for the website’s users.  With that in mind, I studied the material and, in a way, it told me what to do.  There were very specific themes that kept reoccurring all the time; so those, of course, became important categories, which are the ones listed in the subjects and themes.  Other categories were inescapable—city, gender, age, etc.—since they were practical ways for sorting through the material and they also reflected specific tendencies amongst age groups or in certain cities, for example.  You could think of this information as statistical.

Final Thoughts

Check back soon for the second part of this interview with Carlos Motta.

If you haven’t already done so, explore the video interviews and data visualization in The Good Life.  If you’ve already done so, explore further—and let us know your thoughts about the content and form of the project of considering the complexities of U.S. interventions into democratization in Latin America.

Any videos in the archive unsettle your expectations?

Blog by Sharon Lin Tay, co-curator of Map Open Space for FLEFF Open Space 2010 and author of Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

Introduction

Sharon Daniel, Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California in Santa Cruz, is the creator of Blood Sugar, a "new media documentary" that won Map Open Space's Curators' Prize for Design.

Blood Sugar http://bloodandsugar.net is an audio archive of conversations with current and former injection drug users whom Daniel met at a needle exchange in a HIV prevention programme in 2000.  Here, she engages in a conversation with one of the curators of Map Open Space about the context around, and inspiration for, Blood Sugar.

The Interview

SLT: How do you see Blood Sugar as intervening in the traditional form of the political documentary?

SD: I see myself as a “context provider,” as opposed to a “content provider and I think of the work I do as a form of “new media documentary.” When I engage with a group of participants and collect their stories – I act as both ethnographer and information architect – designing the structure of a database that both circumscribes and describes a “site” of socio-economic and political experience.

Rather than building a single road across that site to get from point A to point B (or the beginning of an argument to its resolution as a traditional political documentarian might) I attempt to map out an extensive area – say, 100 square miles – then design an interface that will set the viewer down within the boundaries of this territory.

This would allow her to find her own way, to navigate a difficult terrain, to become immersed in it, and, thus, to have a transformative experience -- the kind of transformative experience that only occurs when one steps out of context in order to experience the world from a perspective radically different than one’s own.

SLT: What inspired you to tackle this aspect of social injustice?

SD: In 2001 I lived in an artists’ live/work space in east Oakland. There was an HIV prevention program down the street that ran an open needle exchange three nights a week.

I believed in the efficacy of needle exchange. I was intrigued by the paradoxical, outsider-subject of addiction, the messy socio-political borderline between dependence on licit and illicit drugs, the mystery and violence of the needle. I volunteered at the exchange. Eventually I started to interview people who came to the tent site to swap needles.

I got to know one of the women rather well – the woman that I call A____ in Blood Sugar. The needle exchange was the last frayed layer of the social safety net for someone like A____. I learned a lot from her about the third world inside the first. I learned that the realities of poverty, racism, social isolation, trauma, abuse, and discrimination can make a person, even an extraordinarily intelligent person, vulnerable to addiction and psychosis.

I learned a lot from A_____ about desperation and about resilience. I learned that there is another public outside – a secret public that is simultaneously visible and invisible, and to most, illegible and incomprehensible.

The men and women who spoke with me at the needle exchange, and allowed me to record our conversations, are part of this secret public. They deserve to be heard and understood. The accounts they gave me were not natural, objective descriptions of an unambiguous reality. None of the addicts I met at the exchange presented the identity of the “righteous dopefiend”.

On the contrary, each began with a kind of confession of weakness or disease.  The messy details of each life history would then unfold according to the syntax and grammar of the disease-and-recovery discourse that is learned in the kind of quasi-theraputic setting where we met. But the fact that the telling is inflected by its context does not mean that the lived experience related is any less real, or powerful, or deserving of attention.

Final Thoughts

It is this innovative mode of documentary making, displacing linear and temporal storytelling in favour of organising the complexities of social justice in virtual space, that drew the Map Open Space curators to Sharon Daniel's Blood Sugar.  Please view the piece here <http://bloodandsugar.net> and let us know what you think.

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Introduction

Spectres of Liberty  is an on-going public, hybrid media project by Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee, and Dara Greenwald that examines the history of movements to abolish slavery in the United States.  The project explores ways to make the histories of anti-oppression movements visible by excavating public memory from collective amnesia.  The project also animates history by asking the public to interact with history — and reanimate other repressed histories.

The project’s first iteration, “The Ghost of the Liberty Street Church,” was staged in May 2008 at the site of a church that served as an important meeting place for organizers of the Underground Railroad, a network of anti-slavery activists who helped slaves escape to areas in the northeastern U.S. and Canada where slavery was not officially practiced.

Formed in 1840 as a black church in Troy, New York, the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church invited the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet to be the congregation’s pastor.  Earning worldwide fame for his speech “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” delivered at the 1843 Colored People’s Convention in Buffalo, New York, Garnet became an important member of a generation of abolitionists who moved from moral persuasion toward direct political action.  He preached at Liberty Street Church until 1848.  The building burned down in 1941, and its site is presently a parking lot.

Robinson, MacPhee, and Greenwald created an inflatable 1:1 scale model of the church, which they installed at the church’s former location, which is currently used as parking.  Video project animated the replica (“ghost”) of church, which served as a space for community events in Troy.

We wanted to catch up with Robinson, MacPhee, and Greenwald on this and future iterations of Spectres of Liberty, so we got them to agree to an interview.

The Interview

Dale Hudson: Is Spectres of Liberty your first collaboration, or have you worked on other projects together?

Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee, and Dara Greenwald: We had worked on one other project before about the teachers strike in Oaxaca.

DH: How did you come to the subject of the local history of the abolition movement in Central New York State?

OR, JM, and DG: There were other artists in Troy who had done projects that revealed this repressed history.  Also, the town is dominated by the identity of the “Home of Uncle Sam,” and this particular identity privileged a certain dominant history while silencing a history of resistance.  We felt it was very important to continue to reveal the history of abolition.

DH: What were some of the issues that you debated during the process of conceiving a specific type of collaborative, hybrid-media practices to engage the public in this history?

OR, JM, and DG:  All along the way, we consistently asked ourselves questions, tested out ideas, and responded to the history, each other, and the space as much as we could.  Some of our questions were: What will the imagery be on that is projected?   What parts of Henry Highland Garnet’s text to use?  Should people be invited to enter the church or remain outside?

DH: Can you tell us a little about the public responses to “The Ghost of the Liberty Street Church”?

OR, JM, and DG:  We were surprised by complaints that [the inflatable replica of the church] was up for only one evening.  Many people asked: “Why is this only up for one night?  You need to do this again.  Why didn’t you bring school children here?  Why don't you organize this with the Historical Society to make it an ongoing event for kids?”  It was nice to be appreciated, but disappointing that the response was so often, “When are you going to do this again?” instead of “oh, this is actually kind of easy and cool, and I could take part in something like this.” 

DH: How did you fund the project?

OR, JM, and DG:  The entire project was self-funded and cost us $600.  The physical structure was constructed out of plastic sheeting, packing tape, and sandbags, all things easily found at a hardware store.

DH: What else did people say?

OR, JM, and DG:  The second [most frequent] comment was basically how the event was really great, and the church really beautiful, but is it possible to translate these representations of the past into the present?  Do people seeing this church, which basically represents resistance to slavery and injustice, transition that acknowledgment of revolt into a call of action for today, against the war, or present day slavery, or other injustice?  A very good question.

DH: What did the three of you learn from this experience?

OR, JM, and DG: Firstly, that some people have never thought about the possibility that individuals can make such a project WITHOUT having had huge support — we created this [project] with hundreds of volunteer hours and $600 — or that individual would want to.  And secondly, that people want to have this history to be known and recognized.

DH: Did people know and recognize this history?

OR, JM, and DG:  Two children watching us all day set up thought we were creating a haunted house.  One woman, Ms. Jackson, who had actually attended the Liberty Street Church, was at the event for a number of hours.  She said the Liberty Street Church looked nothing like our church.  But Steve Tyson, who had done the research and work to get the historical marker placed on the [parking] lot, attended — and this was a surprise.  When invited, he also spoke at the end of the evening.

DH: In the project’s poster, which can be downloaded from your web site, you use the expression “raising of the GHOST of the Liberty Street Church.”  Could you tell us something about the ways that your project engages with notions of histories being “haunted” by repressed national trauma, such as slavery.

OR, JM, and DG:  We like the way you put that.  We used the idea of the ghost in several ways.  First, the form itself — the inflatable church — had a ghostlike quality.  Also, the ephemerality of the piece [since] we were not actually building a new church at that site.  We were enacting a kind of haunting.  The current repression that exists in our society today is evoked by our project name: Spectres of Liberty.  We are looking at moments when people really fought for human freedom.  The injustices of slavery haunt our collective history, but they also influence material conditions and the racism of today.

DH: The web site for this project contains great documentation.  Is there any thought of including specifically online iterations of Spectres of Liberty?

OR, JM, and DG:  In a way our online documentation is a specific iteration because we have mediated, edited, and re-presented the experience.  We are interested in starting from a physical site of historical conflict and reanimating it for public discussion and contemplation.  We then want to move the ideas outward from the site through the World Wide Web.  In our next iteration, we are hoping to add lectures and discussions to our website that relate to current social conditions but resonate with ideas from past struggles.

DH: What are the future iterations of Spectres of Liberty?

OR, JM, and DG: We are doing a new project called “The Great Central Depot in the Open City” in May–June 2010 in Syracuse, New York.  Please check our site [http://www.spectresofliberty.com/site/opencity] for details and ways you can get involved.

Blog written by Sharon Lin Tay, visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University and cocurator of Map Open Space

As curators of Map Digital Space, Dale and I couldn't resist JODI's submission for this year's competition, to the extent that we created a special prize to honour these two net art guerilla warriors for their commitment to disruption.

The piece submitted by JODI, GeoGoo, can be found at http://globalmove.us.

Unlike most of the works we received, GeoGoo does not use or submit to the conceptual idea of Map Digital Space. Instead, GeoGoo subverts the conventional use of Googlemap in order to make us think about the ubiquity of the Internet in our lives.

In a much earlier piece <wwwwwwwww.jodi.org>, JODI simulates computer failure that elicits panic in the viewer.

Watching the BBC World News on a loop all day on my sick bed (just a cold, but then I'm a wimp), I came across a programme called "Super Power," about how the Internet has changed our lives <http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specialreports/superpower.shtml>. One segment of the programme experiments with what happens when you connect a poor Nigerian village to the Internet and unplug two South Korean families from it.

The Nigerian village welcomed the move as a sign of development and an opportunity to be plugged into information and the rest of the world. For the South Koreans, some of the most Internet savvy people in the world, I would imagine Internet withdrawal to be a rather bad prospect!

The net-art created by JODI in many ways is about the penetration of the Internet in our lives. By disrupting the seamless functioning of applications such as Googlemap, JODI taps into our Internet addiction, simulating the heart stopping anxieties and depression that disconnection brings.

We think their subversive acts of disuption warrant a special mention.