Influencr is an exploration of the images that inspire people and they ways they might be used to build purposeful online communities. It consists of two parts - a experiment to see how people respond to certain types of images and suggestions for incorporating their responses into websites in lieu of advertisements.

Contribute a thought or two here and read some more about the background.

Jason Rockwood
Sight Unseen / Invisibilitees.com

Sight Unseen is a blog dedicated to exploring the problem of prison invisibility and vulnerability. It is a place to view links, images, and quotations as well as autobiographical tidbits as I process my thesis for MIT.

Invisibilitees.com, not currently up, is a vision for a t-shirt venture that would raise money for media reform in prison settings. It is a social venture.

Relational Tree is a sculpture experiment that will take place during the exhibition opening. Mimicking the packet switching method of computer networks, the sculpture consists of many individual containers. These will be distributed beforehand in public space in Cambridge. If a person sees the object, picks it up, and brings it to the opening of X-Topia Y-Topia at the MIT Visual Arts Program she completes one part of the piece.
The relational sculpture will create a network of people who interact with the piece, by seeing a container, destroying it or bringing it home, or by attending the opening, seeing the exhibition and meeting other agents who contributed to it. Hopefully it will invite people to the opening that would otherwise not attend.

“The Manhattan National Wildlife Habitat, known as Decentral Park, is a critical national resource that provides habitat for a diverse array of flora and fauna. These are now being studied by citizen park rangers, including you.

“All citizens are empowered with the rights and responsibilities of official Deputy Park Rangers, and are invited to participate in gathering information about the ecosystems which make up this beautiful park.

“WHOOZ is actively engaged in mapping animal populations in Manhattan, and anyone with a cellphone can participate in mapping. WHOOZ is particularly interested in BATS, INSECTS, PIGEONS, and PEOPLE.”

Read more about WHOOZ.org and Decentral Park here: WHOOZ.org

Download a flyer, foldable into a paper bat, here: FLYER (includes map of Decentral Park)

The sixth lecture in this Fall’s series began with a surprising choice for a speaker: Nicholas Makris, a professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering. Rather than coming from a career in visual arts or architecture as most of the other speakers have, Makris works with very technical material involving long-distance sensing in the ocean and on other planets. However, I was left with the impression that the overall message of his lecture was just as relevant to the series’ theme of “Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia” as that of anyone else. In the first part of his talk, he described his engineering work. One of the more interesting examples was about sensing technology that has helped oceanographers understand how large shoals of fish move during the course of a day. After this, he began talking about his interest in the lute, a medieval stringed instrument. The lute practically went extinct for some time when it fell out of favor with musicians and composers. Around the beginning of the 20th century, people began to become interested in the archaic instrument but there were no master musicians to study under and no luthiers who knew how to build one. Eventually, by studying remaining examples of the instrument as well as paintings of lute players, both the lute’s construction and, incredibly, the proper playing technique were discerned. Thus, while the lute is not a “habitat” in the sense of a geographic place where people or animals live, it represents a certain body of knowledge and experience that were allowed to live on through documents from a remote era.

Maybe that’s stretching the definition of “remote habitats” a little too far, but I was glad to see an “outsider” to the visual arts world brought in to speak in this context and provide some relevant thoughts. Shouldn’t scientists have a lot to say about the concepts of Utopia, Dystopia, and Heterotopia? For example, Makris’ thoughts on reconstructing something lost via “remote sensing” can readily be adapted to thinking about how the “re-design” attitude of many Utopias can quickly lead to the sterilization of traditions and the ways they might be preserved in a new future. I felt that Makris’ lucid explanation of his approach to his work was a useful tool for understanding more than his work itself. At times, I have felt that some of the artists who speak do not have a clear message they want to communicate and therefore are difficult to place into the context of anything I’m working on or interested in. Their talks become merely showcases of their work, lacking anything much more useful than what could be printed in a book about their most recent exhibition. In a way, this is the feeling I was left with after Lucy Orta’s talk.

Lucy Orta showed a lot of images of her work. She has done a lot of work. She mentioned how she used to be a fashion designer but has exclusively worked in the visual arts industry for many years. Almost all of her work involves clothing (in many different sense of the word), and it all has the very consistent aesthetic of sharp patchworks of bright colors. But it seemed (either in reality, or in the way she presented) to lack consistency in concepts between projects. Any motivation behind working with the ideas she did was spoken of with a great sense of distance. Yes, an image of children all wearing the same mega-garment that forces them to stand in a uniform array expresses something about connecting people, but why did she choose children, those children, that kind of situation that only can exist for a brief photograph? Installing tents in Antarctica made up of every nation’s flags does communicate something about a desire for openness and understanding, but why is the the way to ask, as Orta did, “Here at the end of the world, is another world possible?” I recognize that good art shouldn’t make the meaning of a work completely explicit, but when you present such a diverse range of subject matter yet maintain such consistency in style, I want a little more insight into the thought that went into such things, especially in the context of a lecture series. I would like to walk away feeling like there are many nuances of Orta’s work to be unraveled for generations to come, but I’m not so sure it doesn’t just look good. Really good. And perhaps that’s the most artistically useful part of her work; its level of perfection in fabrication expresses values of quality, craftsmanship, and appeal that anyone can understand. I certainly understood that part, to the point where it inspired me to spend my Thanksgiving break at home brushing up on my sewing skills with my mother and grandmother.

Orta showed a lot of pictures, but the evening’s final speaker, Armin Linke, had her beat. The bulk of his presentation consisted of 524 photographs shown on screen for two seconds each. He attempted to narrate, but predictably, the images flashed by faster than he could speak. I read this as a deliberate statement about his work as a photographer in places he considers to be remote. It was almost as if he were performing and recreating his experience of over stimulation, an expression of the ease of capturing images and the difficulty of capturing meaning. I appreciated this almost self-critical approach. Since my work in the Online Participatory Media class deals heavily with images (more on this in a not-too-distant post), I found the contrast between the way Linke and Orta respectively used images very interesting. And in the context of Makris’ talk, what function will their visual representations serve for people of the future?

Here is a description of my project, which will be a part of the X-topia/Y-topia exhibition

Murmur Choir is a performance that uses sound and voice to explore the rituals of harmony and dissonance within communication — specifically, through the phenomena of missed connections (http://boston.craigslist.org/mis/).  I am gathering a group of people who have posted missed connections in Boston and before the performance, I will record each individual reading his or her missed connection. 
During the Performance, each person will have a horn-like instrument that he or she will hum into, which is connected to a speaker through a tube.  When the person hums, the speaker will play a recorded loop of the individual’’s own voice reading his or her missed connection.  The volume of the recorded voice is in direct relation to the volume of the individual’’s hum (no humming = no recorded voice heard), making the instrument a voice-powered voice.  For the performance, these individuals will form a choir that emanates a melodic hum and the corresponding collective chatter of missed connections. Those viewing this performance may move about the space and listen to the different comments. As one moves closer to a specific speaker, they will hear the individual voice more clearly about the collective noise.

For more information on the project: http://www.jesswheelock.com/networks

Next Monday, December 8 at 7pm, we will host an opening for “X-topia and Y-topia”, a collaborative exhibition project exploring the notions of urban utopia, dystopia and heterotopia at the MIT Visual Arts Program at N51.

X-topia
Graduate students from MIT’s Department of Architecture display their investigations and the way these terms are represented in visual, audio and literary media. Following the principles of heterotopian spaces the way the French philosopher Michel Foucault defines them in his 1967 lecture ‘Of Other Spaces‘, this project seeks to delineate the complexity of fictional narratives, virtual designs and existing realities. X-topia is a spatial collage where the viewer is invited to enter and to wander through islands of excerpts and citations, illuminated by film fragments and surrounded by sound bites. The elements of this exhibition – juxtaposed quotations gathered into a spatial narration offset by montages of film and documentary footage – portray the interrelation of these urban imaginaries from the 20th century. X-topia questions the overarching social constructs that lead to the pursuit of the utopian ideal society by mirroring it through its inherent dystopian aspects and conclusions.

X-topia is an exhibition project of student participants in MIT’s Visual Arts Program course ‘This is Tomorrow? Urban Utopia, Dystopia, Heterotopia,’ taught by Ute Meta Bauer and Yvonne P. Doderer. The course was inspired by ‘This is Tomorrow,’ a ground breaking, trans-disciplinary exhibition by the Independent Group at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. X-topia is the result of reviewing and reflecting on selected texts and a wide range of 20th century fiction and documentary films supplemented by a weekly transdisciplinary lecture series with guest speakers from all over the world. Students were assisted by Mary Hale and Morgan Pinney.

Contributions by Gabriel Chan, Lee M. Dykxhoorn, Adam B. Galletly, Mishayla T. Greist, Natsuki Maeda, Robert J. Mastro, Timothy R. Olson, Lisa M. Pauli, Mais M. Sartawi, Gerhard J. Van Der Linde.

Y-topia
Students of ‘Radical Networks, Tactics, Breakdowns,’ taught at the MIT Visual Arts Program by Amber Frid-Jimenez, will present research projects on participatory online and mobile platforms that explores how computational media has altered communication and collective action. Revisiting notions of utopia, dystopia and heterotopia in 20th century urban theory and art practice, the work explores the utopian assumptions implied by a teleological approach to technological innovation. Students were assisted by Jaekyung Jung and Doug Fritz.

Contributions by Yannick Assogba, Sam Kronick, Jason Rockwood, Richard The, Jeffrey Warren, Jess Wheelock.

Image credit: Amber Frid-Jimenez.

Military Landscapes by Ingrid Book & Carina Hedén

Questions by Tim Olson

Your art making practice demonstrates an interest in a type of journalism, and
an emphasis on archive. Can you talk about ways in which your practice is able
to subvert normative means to construct a specific story about the present?

Is bias critical to your work?

When ‘public art’ enters the museum or becomes an exhibition, how is it
transformed? What is the potential of Art (not art) to effect public
perception?

The work of Oslo-based artists Ingrid Book & Carina Heden constitutes a space in which social practices usually considered in terms of their separate institutional affiliations - art museums, urbanism, cultivation, gardening and landscape traditions, and finance - are offered as components of a larger discursive network.

Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén have shared a collective artistic practice for more than a decade. Their project Military Landscapes has been commissioned by the Bergen Kunsthall to be part of the annual Bergen Festival exhibition in 2008. Their solo show was entitled Stories for Empty Shop Windows and was shown at the Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2007). The artist duo presented News from the Field/Ocampo as the official Norwegian Representation at the 26th Bienal de Sao Paulo, the same year they participated at the 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2004.) In 2003, the artist duo presented Temporary Utopias, a large scale exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. Hong Kong Press is the publishing entity of Book and Héden.

For the 26th Bienal di Sao Paulo Book & Heden edited a newspaper News from the Field / Noticias do Campo, printed in a high print run of 52,000 copies for free distribution, as an integral part of their installation “The Field / O Campo” constituting a meeting place between farming in cities today and the collective memory, the archive. This show brought together a multitude of voices by sociologists, biologists, architects, writers, NGOs and artists addressing issues of urban agriculture and the politics of land ownership, outlined in categories such as “World”, “Regional Brazil”, “Society”, “Science”, “Business”, “Cartoons”, “Sport”.

News from the Field / Noticias do Campo includes texts by Ina Blom, Ingrid Book & Carina Heden, Tjeerd Deelstra / Herbert Girardet, ETC group, Boris Groys, Helge Hiram Jensen, David Loffler, Hettie Pisters, Matteo Poli, Charlotte Pruth, Michael Wilkens ea.

The Field / O Campo, a multilayered installation, involved different media as well as a trans-disciplinary approach introducing artistic practice as a method of knowledge production matching the complexity of the questions raised. The artists here are making a shift from the museum as the former archive to urban agriculture as one form of a potential future archive.

Image Caption: Quilombos nr. 16, News from the field, Copyright Book & Heden, 2004

Tomorrow night (11/17), Lucy Orta, Nicholas Makris, and Armin Linke will join us at “This Is Tomorrow.” The evening will focus on fashion, filmmaking, and scientific research associated with remote habitats including Antarctica, deep oceans, and the ice layers of Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Lucy Orta is an artist, fashion designer, and Professor for Art, Fashion and the Environment at the London College of Fashion; Paris, France. Nicholas Makris is a Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering and the Director of the Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing at MIT. Armin Linke is a filmmaker and Guest Professor for Photography at the HFG Karlsruhe, Germany; Milan (Italy). Image: Lucy + Jorge Orta | Antarctic Village - No Borders, 2007, courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano - Beijing. Photo: JJ Crance.