Session 2 – Carrying History Forward

This session examines experimental media as inscriptions of history. How do art works express, reflect, document or intervene in the aesthetics, ideas, politics–the critical elements–of an historical conjuncture? How might they serve to keep histories alive and help shape public perceptions and memories? What are the pedagogies of knowing and remembering?



Abstract:

Wafaa Bilal: My experience between two worlds has been mediated by conflict and comfort. I remain linked to the tragedy of a past blanketed in disaster and the present where my geographical position buffers the immediacy of such adversity. Within my past and present histories, I create works that engage the space occupied between longing and destruction. I avoid translating or distributing history; instead, I initiate dynamic platforms to generate an active history. This approach encourages the participants to become active history creators from passive history viewers. By reflecting back society back onto itself, my role evolves into the invisible mirror. In this presentation, I examine the artist’s role as the initiator of platforms to engage people with critical issues connecting past and present. Furthermore, I am exploring the ideas of Aesthetic pleasure vs. Aesthetic pain and of comfort zone vs. conflict zone as dynamic platform strategies.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle: Indigenous worldviews are land-based. Yet we know there is also a parallel spirit world we traverse. The inner workings of computers and cyberspace have been linked to this dreamscape – referred to in Cree (nêhiyawin) as ‘mamâhtâwi-apacihcikan’ (useful and spiritually gifted) and ‘mamâhtâwisiwin’ (gifted with spirit power). Increasingly many Indigenous worldviews and languages continue to be eroded to the point of extinction. Contemporary Aboriginal artists, academics, cultural workers and technologists are becoming the translators and mediators by creating experimental media for the benefit of future generations. Can our languages and narratives exist in a constructed technologically mediated realm? What will be the signposts that help guide our movement? Will the mnemonics created by contemporary artists interfere with traditional knowledge transfer or can they enhance and serve as meaningful clues to assist future generations in tracing their connection to our ancestors and original territories?

Dont Rhine: “Pedagogy Of The Ear - Part Two: Political Practice and Cultural Action”

In its nearly fifteen years of collaborative art practice, Ultra-red have drawn on the political commitments and experiences of its nine members. For many in Ultra-red, an understanding of the relationship between cultural practice and political action comes from those experience in social movements and not from the conventional institutions of art education or art history. This is not to say that Ultra-red eschews a relationship to art discourse. The collective has drawn heavily on the problematics of Cagean aesthetics, Conceptual Art, and musique concrète. And yet, rarely does arts discourse explore the praxis of cultural action as articulated within social movements. There are good reasons for that lack of interest. But for Ultra-red, as artists and activists, such a line of inquiry raises unique and urgent questions that shape both our practice and our investments in bringing together art and political action. In my comments today, I will present a few proposals for the art and organizing problematic taken from my own experience with political movements both outside of and within my fifteen years in Ultra-red. These political movements, all based in Los Angeles, include ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the harm reduction and needle exchange organization Clean Needle Now, and Ultra-red's collaboration with the just-housing movement Union de Vecinos. This presentation is part of the collective's current work in articulating its own practice as a critical pedagogy of the ear.

David Teh: “A moving image that can remember its past lives…”

This paper is part of a wider body of research on contemporary visual art and film in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Thailand. I’m interested in the use of digital video technology, especially in artistic, experimental and otherwise non-industrial filmmaking. And I am seeking theoretical approaches to this material that would not lead directly into the familiar epistemological, political and aesthetic problematics of Western discourse on the moving image (‘national cinema’; veracity and realism; plot, genre, etc). Instead, I look to anthropological and cultural histories, including art and media histories – some yet to be written – that could deepen and localize our perspective on contemporary media practices. I am particularly interested in video’s apparent capacity for reengaging and channeling older (often oral) cultural forms that the cinema has tended to overlook. The goal is to assess, or at least recognize, the moving image’s amplitude as a social historical or even ethnographic channel – a form of recording or archiving – but a channel whose epistemological status is locally informed rather than universally assumed/assumed to be universal. The practice of Thai artist-filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is exemplary here, both for its rich portraits of the contemporary Thai socius, and for its thoughtful engagements with older media. Yet the discussion of his work (mostly cinéphile commentary) has been resoundingly ahistorical, aestheticising rather than contextualizing it. He thus presents a good test-case for what I will call an animate cinema, three characteristics of which will be outlined in this paper: historicity, permeability and itinerancy. Animate cinema, I will argue, calls for a radical dilation of the concept of the medium, an expanded ‘mediumship’ (Rosalind Morris) that plainly exceeds the epistemic paradigm of the cinema; and a form of archiving that is performative rather than documentary, more about channeling than recording. With reference to some of Apichatpong’s experimental works – and those of other Asian and Southeast Asian artists – I will consider what this channeling might mean for the historiographic capacities of the moving image.

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