creativity/machine

Some readers might be interested in this Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (NSW) Conference:

Art and the real: Documentary, Ethnography, Enactment

12-14 July 2007
Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Australia
Presented by AGNSW and Artspace Sydney

With keynote speakers: Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art, The City University of New York, and Anne Rorimer, Chicago based independent scholar and freelance curator and author of New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (Thames & Hudson, 2001).

In the last decade or so, it has been witnessed an escalation of artistic production drawn to ethnographic protocols, and documentary media and methods. Artists framed in this way include: Lisa Roberts, Sharon Lockhart, Kutlug Ataman, Nan Goldin, Atelier von Lieshout, Mark Dion and Gillian Wearing, amongst many others. This conference aims to critically interrogate this current situation and art which combines the human sciences and documentary means, as well as art that attempts to intervene in social or cultural situations. The precedents for the latter form of art might include situationism and neo-concretism.

The conference would provide the opportunity to critically examine both historical precedents and contemporary incarnations of both the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and the forms of art practice characterised as either interventionist or participatory.

Wonderful to see the tentative program for MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age has now been posted - it looks jam-packed with very good stuff, actually. Our panel, Produsing Culture (not ‘producing’ as Axel was very, very quick to point out to the organisers!) has been scheduled for 9.00 Saturday morning…not usually my most scholarly time of the week but I’ll see what I can do. Early to bed, early to rise and all that. Which is not my usual conference behaviour, either…

Our original panel proposal had an abstract which won’t appear on the website, so I thought it might be useful to post it here:

Produsing Culture: Implications of User-Led Content Creation
The proposed panel draws on the work of the User-Led Research Group based at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. The panel explores the practices and politics of cultural production in a range of contemporary new media contexts that are structured by collaborative user-led content creation, dissemination and evaluation. The shared approach of the papers is one that rejects both dystopian or utopian discourses in favour of a critical, grounded exploration of the complex and emergent ways in which cultural and media power relations are being reshaped or reconfigured in specific contexts, and the broader social implications of these shifts for democracy, cultural work and cultural participation.

My abstract:

Vernacular Photography 2.0: Flickr, Aesthetics and the Relations of Cultural Production
The photo-sharing network Flickr is one of the better-known examples of the participatory turn in web business models commonly referred to as ‘Web 2.0.’ This paper demonstrates that Flickr can be viewed as the site of a vernacular ‘relational aesthetics,’ focused not on discrete art objects, but on the modes of social connection that are both made possible by and flow through images within the network. At the same time, those social connections are used to collaboratively construct, negotiate and learn visual aesthetics and techniques. Rather than representing a revolutionary takeover of photography by untrained amateurs, Flickr is a highly heterogeneous ‘architecture of participation’ where the social worlds, technologies and aesthetics of ‘professional’ photography, art and everyday life collide, compete and coexist to produce new forms of intensely social and playful cultural production.

The abstract definitely shows signs of being written 3 weeks before PhD submission (and what was I on, buzzword pills??), but luckily allows me to move forward into some of the stuff I’m actually doing now. Should be fun.

Kodak-au-go-go!

Some everyday cosmopolitanism at a project called normal room.

Normal Room shows you interior design and home furniture from all around the globe. Search our image database and explore the differences and similarities in architecture and home decoration between people in different countries.

via boing boing.

I’ve just caught up with the 2006 Australian Snapshots exhibition:

The Australian Snapshots initiative began in August 2004, when 150 disposable cameras were sent to Local Radio listeners across regional Australia with a request to photograph sports, leisure and daily activities that connected their communities.

The rationale behind using disposable cameras was to create an equal playing field for all - no-one could crop, filter or manipulate their photos to achieve more dramatic results. I

There’s a weird politics of Australianness that reflects the idea that regional and rural Australia are the locus of genteel, folksy creativity (as opposed to the rawness or digital sophistication of urban Australia) but I like the imposition of technological constraints by using disposable film cameras a _lot_. And I love this year’s theme of course:

We’re hoping to once again capture the essence of life in Australia - this time through the variety of creative endeavours undertaken in regional Australia.

This could vary from hobbies and leisure activities like art, theatre groups, craft, cooking etc, to unique work environments - gardens, nurseries, teaching, fund raising etc. How you interpret the theme is up to you

If you get the chance, use your photos to tell us a story of your chosen creative pursuit.

And of course, there are quilts. Woo!

Yay! A showcase of work from three members of the Brisbanites Flickr group:

Manfreds Bar, The Valley
Thursday 20th July, 7:00pm

A collection of photographs will be on display which seek to explore Brisbane and some of it’s lesser-known areas both above and below the city streets. These may be the things you walk past everyday unnoticed or the areas which only a few brave souls would dare travel.

What’s on Show: Architecture, Tunnels, Abandoned Buildings, Cemeteries, Cityscapes, Rail Yards, etc. Various styles, B&W, Color, Night, Day, Abstract, Still life.

The exhibition will be held at Manfreds Bar in the Valley, Thursday 20th July from 7pm onwards showcasing the works of three local photographers. Entry is free and all canvas prints displayed will be available for purchase on the night.

Manfreds Bar
Thursday 20th July, 7:00 pm
293 Brunswick Street
Fortitude Valley, 4006
Tel: 07 3854 1881

A couple of years back (how time flies!), I got very interested in urban exploration photography, and even published an interview with the then-anonymous local artist known as dsankt who is behind Sleepy City, a project that has yielded some quite beautiful photographs of subterranean Brisbane. Recently Sleepy City joined forces with other like-minded artists to mount an urban photography exhibition in Fortitude Valley. Unfortunately, it was on the 22nd of June so I blinked and missed it, but it’s great to see these photographers getting the attention they deserve, and I thought it was worth a mention - there are plenty of photos on the website if you’re interested.

Update: More Brisbane urban exploration photography at Mr. Magoo ICU’s Flickr page.

I especially like this stark and beautiful shot of the Tennyson Power Station’s last days - it wasn’t accorded the same love and attention as the New Farm one, that’s for sure.

I’ve just uploaded some of the images from my very first rolls of medium format film, which I butchered in a Holga ‘toy’ camera and a Lubitel (a bit less of a toy, but still plastic). I shot off the first few rolls pretty much just as I wandered around the house. I love the sometimes beautiful mistakes (double exposures, lack of focus), the risk involved with choosing settings and then pressing the shutter when you don’t know an F stop from a bus stop, and the anxious wait to see what (if anything) the images look like when you get them back from the lab. There’s just something about all of it that I can’t help but be seduced by.

And, yes, to all those who have heard my several rants about how much I’m irritated by ‘the recuperation of the banality of everyday life as both extraordinary and resistant through knowing tactics of aestheticisation’ etcetera, I am definitely reviewing my former holier-than-thou attitude towards the practice, if not the institutionalised wankery, of ‘lomography’. After all, it’s just so fun and easy and, well, pretty.

Geoffrey Batchen defines vernacular photography like this:

The term ‘vernacular’ literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word ‘photography’ allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography’s history that can incorporate all its many manifestations and functions. A vernacular history of photography will have to be able to deal with the kind of hybrid objects I describe above, but also with, for example, photographies from outside Europe and the U.S. It may mean having to adopt non-traditional voices and narrative structures. It will certainly mean abandoning art history’s evaluation system (based on masterpieces and masters, originality and innovation, and so on). In short, the term ‘vernacular photography’ is intended as a provocation and a challenge.

There’s also this post on the subject from juniorbonner.

A lot of the time the term ‘vernacular photography’ also seems to be synonymous with ‘found‘ photographs - particularly old, faded, crumpled photographs found lost or abandoned in a shoebox at a garage sale - someone else’s memories, with their technical and aesthetic ‘flaws’ left bare, their subjects left unidentified, and their narratives subject to the inventions of imaginative or curious viewers.

From Tom Lubbock’s review of last year’s exhibition Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, which discusses the politics of determining which forms of folk culture get to be art (among other things), and actually uses the term ‘vernacular creativity’, this is a great list:

I write about things that appear in art galleries, and other bona fide art contexts. I do not write about crop circles. I do not write about the kind of sculptures that people make from junk and put in their front gardens. I do not write about painted eggs, decorated cakes, floral arrangements, sandcastles, snowmen, guys, scarecrows, fairground signs, trade-union banners, demonstrators’ placards, houses covered in Christmas decorations, shop displays, roadside memorials to car victims, carnival floats, community murals, drawings on the backs of dirty vans, graffiti, tattoos, ornamented crash helmets, home-made shrines to Elvis and Di, topiary, bottle-top mosaics, or lost-cat notices pinned to trees. I do not write about these things, however well they are done. But now, for one week only, I will.

[update 15/05]

In photography, see also Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography:

In 1998, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition Snapshots: The Photography of Everyday Life, 1888 to the Present, and in 2000 the Metropolitan Museum presented Other Pictures: Anonymous Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection. Both exhibitions featured a myriad of photographs that, through some technical error—a tilted horizon, an amputated head, a looming shadow, or inadvertent double-exposure—achieved a strange and unexpected visual charm. Removed from their original context in the family album, these anonymous vernacular photographs take on new meanings, inviting interpretation as a uniquely modern form of folk art.