Call for Abstracts: MutaMorphosis: Tribute to Uncertainty

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MutaMorphosis: Tribute to Uncertainty conference
December 6-8, 2012, Prague, Czech Republic.

Call for Abstracts
Deadline: July 1, 2012

Examining Networks of Power
By Owen Mundy

This thread intends to examine representations of contemporary control structures and discuss whether or not an image, particularly network graphs depicting power relationships, information flows, economic activity, etc. have the ability to reverse trends of concentrated power. Does depicting power lead to greater democratization of said power or are we merely creating beautiful images that detract from their original intent—to reveal, examine, and act. To what effect does mapping complex data depicting influential actors, institutions, moments in time, finance systems, mapped onto a two-dimensional surface unravel the power they represent by distributing that power?

Methodology: We’ll begin the discussion by looking at historical examples of communication that intend to affect power structures. We’ll examine works by artists and cultural practitioners such as Hans Haacke, Mark Lombardi, Josh On (theyrule.net), Bureau d’études, and more. We’ll consider Manual Castells‘ “Network Theory of Power” within these context(s). Then we’ll discuss visual components of network graphs, asking in particular; what data and representational forms help make a graph speak to as many people as possible. Finally we’ll work in groups to extend the discussion into possible solutions and various statements and recommendations for such representations.

Keywords: Networks; Power; Data; Politics

We invite you to respond to the Tribute to Uncertainty theme and/or to address one of the 21 streams of interest led by 28 conference Attractors.

Do you have something original to say about our world that is increasingly fuzzy, unstable and chaotic? Are you interested in how crisis, uncertainty and complexity can come together in order to question the known as well as predict and/or model yet unknown? Do you want to share projects intrinsically linking domains of scientific, artistic and technological research and creativity that can be introduced as relevant tools for better understanding of our common future?

The aim of this Call for Abstracts is to provide opportunity for community of interdisciplinary practitioners to get engaged in a transformative conversation on mutant futures.

Feel free to address conference Attractors and respond to a specific stream of interest in order to get involved with other interested individuals and collectives in structured collaborative efforts before, during, and hopefully also after the conference. Research groups formed by the Attractors -who serve as the Reviewers- will be expected to elaborate on the general theme Tribute to Uncertainty while turning attention to concrete research objectives as defined by the streams.

The results should be curated panels, roundtables, workshops as well as publications.

For more information about MutaMorphosis conference (planned publications, preparatory committee, partnerships) please visit mutamorphosis.org.

Drones at Home: Phase 1 – Gallery@Calit2

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I’m collaborating with The Periscope Project (TPP) on version 2 of their “Drone Ready-Made: Fine Military Detritus” project in conjunction with the Drones at Home exhibition at Calit2 (see below). In the gallery and online, an interface I programmed, “The Drone War Did Not Take Place,” tracks a Predator drone shipping container, found on Craigslist and retrofitted by The Periscope Project as a camping apparatus, as TPP members guide it through the city of San Diego.

Their path will take them from UC San Diego, past various defense contractors and government agencies including The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), to finally rest at TPP’s downtown location. By (re)mapping data from my Camp La Jolla Military Park project, the tracking interface reveals the connections between the physicality of TPP’s laborious gesture, and the economic and political ties between the object they push and the sites and corporations where everyone employed is implicated in the destructive impact of a permanent arms economy.

The interface will be made public during the upcoming three-day performance by The Periscope Project. It will display their location in real-time, along with images from their journey, and a twitter feed displaying news and unfiltered dialog (hashtag: #dronebox) as they treck through “the largest concentration of military facilities and defense industries in the world.”(1)

1. “San Diego Military Economic Impact Study,” San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, January 2007, http://www.sddt.com/files/2007_Military_Economic_Impact_Study.pdf

Drones at Home
March 7–September 14, 2012

Drones at Home explores the strange allure of drones and the push for their domestication —by governments, corporations, and everyday citizens.

Phase 1
Opening Reception March 7, 2012 gallery@calit2, 5pm-7pm

Phase 2
Symposium May 11 & 12, 2012 Calit2 Auditorium, 9am-8pm

Phase 3
Opening Reception June 6, 2012 gallery@calit2, 5pm-7pm
Closing Reception September 14, 2012 gallery@calit2, 5pm-7pm

“Home” is understood at multiple scales-at the level of the individual, backyard, community, border region, and homeland. The San Diego region is featured prominently and regional issues are explored as exemplars of global phenomena. The exhibition also departs from any strict interpretation of the form that a drone must take; the project expands on the “unmanned” nature of the drone as symbolic of a larger condition–ecologies where the status of the human is called into question, distributed and embedded in a wider field of shared intelligence.

Drones at Home will be presented in three phases. Phase 1 includes an exhibition; Phase 2 consists of panels and a workshop; and Phase 3, which continues through the summer, will include the creation of new drone projects in collaboration with invited artists and research groups at Calit2. Co-curated by Sheldon Brown, Jordan Crandall, and Ricardo Dominguez, this first phase will feature the work of Matthew Battles, Trevor Paglen, The Periscope Project, Alex Rivera and Angel Nevarez, along with additional work drawn from research in the field.

Matthew Battles is a poet, writer, and co-founder of HiLobrow.com. His forthcoming books include Letter by Letter (W. W. Norton), a sentimental and natural history of writing, and a short story collection, The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade). He is a research fellow with metaLAB, an academic and creative collaborative devoted to the exploration of technology in the arts and humanities, hosted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker. His first feature film, SLEEP DEALER premiered at Sundance 2008, and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has also been screened at The Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, The Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other international venues.

Angel Nevarez is an artist, musician, and DJ. He has produced works which investigate contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song. His interests lie in the formation of mobile, performative, and discursive-based social spaces, along with the re-articulation of communicatory systems within such locales. Nevarez is also a faculty member of MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology Program.

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. Paglen’s visual work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the Istanbul Biennial 2009, and numerous other solo and group exhibitions.

The Periscope Project is a space and co-operative based in downtown San Diego committed to the transdisciplinary nexus of art, architecture, and regional urban issues. Operating by the efforts of its resident practitioners; Drone Readymade represents the first discreet project (outside of The Periscope Project itself) undertaken collaboratively. The project’s primary authors are James Enos (M.Arch, NSAD, MFA UCSD, Visiting Assistant Professor, FSU), Molly Enos (M.Arch NSAD, AIA), Charles G. Miller (MFA UCSD), Keith Muller, Andrea Ngan, David Kim, Jon Barth, Jason Durr and Jay Ojeda; with key contributions from Jon Zuppan. For Drones at Home, The Periscope Project is collaborating with Owen Mundy (MFA UCSD, Assistant Professor FSU).

All gallery events are FREE and open to the public.
Please RSVP to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, tstone@ucsd.edu
Media Contact: Tiffany Fox, tfox@ucsd.edu

“Disrupt this Session”: Rebellion in Art Practices Today (today at CAA Los Angeles)

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I’m participating a panel today at the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles. Sounds like it might be lively.

“Disrupt this Session”: Rebellion in Art Practices Today
Saturday, February 25, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 403B, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Chair: Wendy DesChene, Auburn University

WTF: It’s Only a Sticker
Catherine Tedford, St. Lawrence University

Strategies of Resistance in Contemporary Art
Selene Preciado, Museum of Latin American Art

Unauthorized Autonomy, Invisible Venue
Christian L. Frock, Invisible Venue

Monsantra: A New Agricultural Revolution
Jeff Schmuki, Plantbot Genetics

Your Art Here, Camp La Jolla Military Park, and Give Me My Data
Owen Mundy, Florida State University

“Google” one-week performance at Transmediale

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I am tele-participating in a one-week online performance of Google queries at Transmediale 2012 in Berlin. The project, plainly titled, “Google,” is organized by Johannes P. Osterhoff and will run from Jan 30 to Feb 5, 2012. Each participant edits the search method for their browser search bar so that everything they type in this box, from the personal to the mundane, becomes instantly visible at google-performance.org.

The project (“manifesto” below) makes public what Facebook, Google, and any online search engine, crowdsourcing website, or social network already does by harvesting searches from users, and re-representing that data in a new context. While Google uses these queries to build and sell condensed user demographic data to advertisers, Osterhoff’s project asks, who actually owns your search data?

We shall do an one-week performance piece.

The piece is called “Google” and documents all searches we perform withthe search engine of the same name.

The performance shall take place during transmediale 2012 and shall start on Monday, January 30 and shall end on Sunday, February 5, 2012.

We shall not use undocumented ways to use the search engine Google during this time.

Each of our search queries shall create a web page that is indexed by this search engine and thus makes our searches publicly available as search results for everybody.

 

Freedom for Our Files: Canvas starter (Facebook) app

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I’m happy to share the code from a Facebook app I created for a workshop earlier this year.

This simple Facebook canvas application was originally demoed during the Freedom for Our Files workshop at the 2011 Art Meets Radical Openness festival in Linz, Austria. You can view and download the source code on github

The application is very simple; it creates a Facebook object, performs calls to get data belonging to the current user, then prints the data exactly as it is returned. It has examples of basic Facebook Graph API calls as well as an example of FQL (Facebook Query Language).

Stop SOPA Blackout

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You might notice my site and blog looks a little, well, opaque this week. Here’s a screenshot.

I’m running a script on my site that censors all the content in order to bring attention to a law being pushed through congress right now. The SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) is a terrible piece of legislation that gives broad powers for the courts to take down sites by claims from “infringed” users. If SOPA passes as-is, it could devastate the artistic expression and livelihood of many artists, hackers, and entrepreneurs.

More information at fightforthefuture.org

You can protest the SOPA bill and install the blackout code on your site to let your visitors know what they could miss out if SOPA does pass.

Paste this code into your Tumblr themes, website, and more…

<script type="text/javascript">
  var FATLAB_Stop_SOPA = {
    color : '#000000',
    promote : true
  };

  document.write('<scr'+'ipt src="http://fffff.at/stop_sopa/blackout.js?v=1&e83a2c"></scr'+'ipt>');
</script>
-->