This is the link to our final project:
http://www.ecuad.ca/~breaume/game_v7.swf
Go ahead and play!
And this is the link to a .zip of my sounds (there are a lot, you probably won’t want to listen to them all, but just so you can see):
http://www.ecuad.ca/~breaume/Sounds.zip
I recorded and mixed all the sounds myself using the studios and programs at school.
http://www.ecuad.ca/~breaume/VancouverPlaces.kmz
Here you will find my contribution to the final piece.
As you will see each neighborhood has a description (this was not seen in the tour shown in class) and every spot marked has corresponding media or writing in the bubble.
Some edits were made by myself and Martin as we combined our work and created our tour that will not be reflected here.
Things I found interesting in this article:
-the possibility for locative (and other new) media to change the way we see and understand the daily lives of ourselves and others and furthermore the possibility for this media to break our ideologies about life in our society and the “everyman”
-the idea of the ubiquitous and how technology that is always on, always updating, connects to the idea of the second (online) self (much like the amber case discusses in the ted talk i posted earlier in the year about her studies of “cyborg anthropology”)
-seeing old harmful patterns of socialized prejudice and institutionalized racism and classism reemerging in a more focused way using new technology, such as the comparison of traditional redlining and the new locative-media-based housing and crime maps. The potential to use locative media to enforce the status quo is very worrisome to me.
-the term and the idea of annotating space, which even google maps uses, and is something I did in my project. also, narratives in a space, embedded media, and mediated space.
-creating alternative histories using “counter-archives.” I like the idea that the majority of people will one day be more fully in charge of their place in history, and the history will be made up of the accounts of the many, not the few.
Things I want to remember to investigate later:
-read “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life” by Martha Rosler
-”MILK” (2005)
Quotes to save:
-the last paragraph: “Technology may further mediate power and control, and in many senses physically embody them, but does technology replace ideology? Does perspective collapse under the weight of 24 satellites? Michael Curry suggests that the “view from nowhere” always and already occupies a position of interest, but the interest becomes located further and further from the place of power – in this case, literally in space (p. 52). If the tendency of the control society is to embed ideology into mechanisms of domination, essentially black-boxing oppression, how can the black box be opened and its contents documented?”
I took this while I was weeding my cutout. There are 7 signs altogether. 3 they say yield, 4 that don’t (which are shown here). A few I placed upside down. I ended up placing them in the following locations some :
-floor at the top of the stairs next to the media gallery
-wall adjacent to the fvim area (at a crossroads)
-wall outside of library
-a locker near the photo department
-on the concrete “bench” out side the north building (where smokers can often be found)
-in the outside elevator in the south building
-outside of the large lecture hall SB 301
I am not sure exactly what I want to do yet. This is one of many ideas. I chose to turn it into a mock up because it is the most straight forward but would also be interesting to critique and discuss, I think. As you can see, it is a before and after.
I was hoping though, to come up with something more subtle, that doesn’t have a blatant meaning, that people can take from it what they will. I was thinking possibly about doing a piece about apathy, merit, and questioning through the use of flippant phrases like ‘”whatever” and “and?” and “who cares?” which I think would have more power in an art university setting.
Version 2 of my panorama.
I agree with the idea that history is made by more than the few heroes to which we attribute great deeds. Small personal histories and stories can be just as important to the mosaic of our cultural memory (though often they are not). The problem is that the stories that form our history get retold so many times without questioning their origins and biases that they become cemented in our minds and rooted in our own identities. Yet, there is hardly such a thing as an unbiased history, especially considering the power structures in our society (then and now).
I disagree, though, that art historians and artists are no longer class conscious, questioning, radical, and so forth. I agree that there is bureaucracy and elitism in the art world, but I think that comes most strongly from the financial side. I think artists are concerned with many things but they may not be expressing in a black and white way. I personally prefer art that does not force it’s intended meaning on me, but let’s me come to my own understanding. I believe the best way to make art accessible is through improved education.
I do like the points that the author makes about privilege, access, and networking. I think it is always important in all situations to examine privilege and ask ourselves who’s voices are being heard and who’s are not. I think that is the best thing I took away from this piece.
References in the text I connected with:
-Heresies. I once stumbled upon an internet archive of every issue of this journal (http://helios.hampshire.edu/nomorenicegirls/heretics/#archive1) and had forgotten about it until reading seeing one of the covers at the beginning of this article. When I went back to look for it and bookmark it for later I found that there was a documentary that had been produced about the Heretics (http://helios.hampshire.edu/nomorenicegirls/heretics/#overview)!
-T.W. Adorno. I recently gave a presentation on Adorno’s essay “Valery Proust Museum” in my Ethics of Representation class. The subject of the week was the ethics of curation.
-collectivism and other radical terminology. I took a sociology special topics course two summers ago called “revolution and radical social change” and some of the words and phrasing in this piece reminded me of the readings and discussions in that class.
I think that the author is holding on too tightly to the old concept of interactive art. There are so many types of interaction that are possible. I see no reason why those people participating in the piece must be aware that they are doing so or that interactions must be in a very tangible, physical way. I think restricting the definition of interactive art cheapens it to be not much more than a game. It’s almost like discussing “what is art?” It just runs you in circles. The wide-spread use of the internet has changed these ideas of virtuality, interactivity, and digital art completely. So, I find it hard to talk about interactive art in terms of how it was viewed at the beginning of these technologies. I wonder how the author would react to the idea of second self and being connected to the internet passively. In this day and I for the majority of us who are privileged to have constant connection to the internet are participating in social and interactive media without even being conscious of it as others are interacting with your online self.
