Five Minute Presentations
From The New Everyday
Instructions: Please add your name, the title of your five-minute presentation, and a short abstract directly above the [last] presentation (Nick Mirzoeff).
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1.Raiford Guins, "Materiality and Objects"
2. John Broughton
3. Elizabeth Patton, "Your privacy is very important to us"
Privacy is generally understood as being alone, freedom from intrusion, or the right of freedom from public attention. With advances in media and telecommunications technology, privacy issues have become more pertinent and prevailing to everyday life. For example, governments since 9/11 are using biometric technology for surveillance purposes; the use of technology in digitizing medical records as a means of cost reduction in healthcare reform; the popularity of systems of consumption such as e-commerce that allow businesses to track consumers’ preferences and financial transactions; the use of work related devices such as Blackberrys and laptops to conduct work-related activities at home in the ‘private sphere’ and personal activities at work in the ‘public sphere’; the widespread use of social-networking sites to store and share personal information; and the ability to use camera phones to take photos of individuals without their consent or awareness and to circulate personal images in the public sphere. Considering these new modes of living, does the modern definition of privacy still make sense? Has the private sphere been reconstituted as the media sphere?
4. Haley Mellin, "The Everyday in Contemporary Art"
A discussion of the current Altermodern and Aftermodern movements in contemporary visual production: An emphasis on everyday practice, art that uses time, history and distribution as medium, the unfocused perpetual present, the dislocated and decentered practitioner, the lack of historical registers, heterochronic time, the formation of art’s expanded field, and the mobilized virtual gaze.
'The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution.' Marcel Broodthaers
‘Altermodern is heterochronical. Formally speaking, altermodern art privileges processes and dynamic forms to unidimensional single objects, trajectories to static masses.’ N. Bourriaud
'After much reflection I concluded that art must be defined and understood not as a totality of objects regarded as such according to a particular set of criteria, but as a quality, like, for example, the concept of size.' Charles Avery
5. David Walczyk, 'Design and the (Augmented) Everyday'
6. Amanda French, "Twitter and the Hideous Quotidian"
Although Twitter may well have played an important part in the Iranian protests over the election of Ahmadinejad, there's no doubt that a great deal of Twitter traffic is, quite simply, banal. But even a search for the word "sandwich" can turn up an amazing diversity of sandwiches and sandwich-eaters, not to mention a quietly melancholy visit to a nursing home. What, if anything, can cultural critics do with this massive and ever-increasing trove of unimportance? Is it worth preserving, is it worth exploring, is it worth critiquing?
7. Beth Coleman, X-Reality
I'd like to propose a x-reality research stream for the The New Everyday gathering. X-reality, or cross-reality, design looks at the emergent way in which we are using network capabilities to augment our everyday experiences. In the research I have done on the subject, I see a quickly emerging field that brings together new media affordances of real-time and visualization with the needed and desired interactions of daily life. Instead of keeping a boundary between the virtual and the real, the next level of network interaction works toward dissolving that distinction for better and for worse. I propose a short presentation on x-reality design as it is implemented now
8. Gabriella Coleman, "I did it for the lulz!"
The Internet is now open to the masses, an environment made more hospitable by a suite of Web 2.0 technologies. I will discuss how a relatively new class of technologist--the griefer and troll-- is, in part, a reaction to this new massification of the web. Their pranks, which are done for the lulz (aka for their own pleasure), work to remind those masses who have lapped at their shores of their “Internets” that there are still a class of geek who, as their name suggests, will cause Internet grief, hell, and misery—often through, but not always by a hack that brings into being some form of ironic and merciless mockery.
9. Hatim El-Hibri, "The New Everyday and the Weight of Culture"
What would it mean for the critique of the new everyday to not be content to confine itself to the culture part of the nature-culture binary? What kind of approach would be needed to move past the old opposition between reality versus appearance, assigned to hard material things, and social power and language games respectively? What else might we include in our study, what links would we have to be willing to follow to understand our subject?
10. Denise Ofelia Mangen,
"In the Cloud: Everyday Communication Technologies and a Human Rights Consciousness"
There has been a profuse democratization of communication fueled by a new logic of politics that is actualized in organized networks, networked organizations, and the ability to organize without organizations. This amplification of group communications has enabled a “geopolitics of knowledge” (Mignolo, 2002) in which knowledge is a commodity and information can be used as a currency of peace, just as well as a display of power.
Within this space (the datascape), our sensorium is becoming increasingly dependent upon haptics to make meaning of our internal and external selves. We still "control" the devices but, are we being tourists or are we being travelers? Are you a Luddite or a Cyborg? How truly conscious are we of technological evolution as a driving force upon our biological and sociological evolution? Further, how might the experience of engaging in the datascape and becoming cyborgian –fusing our selves with the haptic– be leveraged to inculcate a human rights consciousness?
11. Lorie Novak, Collective Visions, CollectedVisions.net
12. Carmen Oquendo-Villar, The Needle Clinic
13. Susan Murray, "Everyday media-making and the New Amateur"
Easy access to high quality tools for video and still photography along with the proliferation of sites that mix the professional with the amateur have altered the way that amateur media makers consider themselves and their work. How do we make sense of these new practices and categories? Is there a new visual culture of the everyday? Can we locate an amateur aesthetic?
14. Max Liboiron, "Paradigm shifts and Questions of Praxis"
A paradigm shift occurs when one conceptual world view is replaced by another. This shift, which can be very small or verging on the global, occurs when accepted methods, values, and applications within a community (academic, professional, regional or otherwise) cease to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created.
Such a shift is certainly happening in environmentalism and other fields such as political economy, design, health care and academic practice itself. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn states that paradigm contest and succession in a time of crisis is not based on logic and proofs but on communication, interpretation, and aesthetics. What role can we play in our own fields for supporting and advocating for a new everyday? What does it look like to challenge and provide alternatives to current values and assumptions? In short, what are the types of praxis we wish to be engaged in, and how can they support a paradigm change?
15. Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, "When Clots Focus Attention"
The everyday is what passes barely noticed. Quotidian phenomena seem to invite methodologies of durational attention. But in an era of nano-culture, Blink, and "attention deficit," is prolonged watching even possible? What is unplanned, emergent, and taken for granted is exactly what usually remains aloof from attention. My proposal draws upon Michael Hanchard’s concept of political “coagulation,” in which random actors become circumstantially linked and influence political action (differentiated from Certeau’s “poaching” in Hanchard’s 2006 book Party/Politics), to suggest an everyday form of creativity as a methodological resource for visual culture studies.
16. Allen Feldman
17. Erica Robles, "Getting Right With God in Exurbia: Visual Culture and the Megachurch"
Within the past twenty-five years the American religious landscape has undergone a remarkable transformation. "Megachurches", or spaces of worship characterized by congregations in the thousands, large post-modern architectures, and the embrace of new media technologies, have redefined the visual and material practices of Protestantism. By examining the cultural logic of the megachurch we can learn how belief works in conversations with the social and technological conditions of geographical sprawl and communication networks to produce a new architecture for making God visible in the very fabric of mediated everyday life.
18. Stephen Duncombe, "Everyday Utopias Against the Everyday"
In recent years there's been an explosion of Utopian imaginings staged by artists and activists. One of the more curious aspects of many of these imaginary Utopias is their patent impossibility. They are less places of a life desired, than places that can never be lived (the original Utopia: no-place). The result is a disruption of the everyday, not with an idealized new day, but the creation of an unstable space in which to question: why this? what if? and why not?
19. Leandro Santos, "I publish, therefore I am"
The new everyday has gotten more and more involved with the cyberspace practices. This presentation takes a look into how online social networking, made popular on the internet over the last years, arouses practices of identity self-construction by its users. Focusing on the use of Orkut website, mostly by Brazilian teenagers and young adults, the talk deals with how participation and exhibition – two factors which plot the platforms of Web 2.0 – set a tension between the notions of public and private, as well as encourage new social behaviours, values of alterity and shared practices of surveillance in the digital context.
20. Jen Heuson, "Analog Media in a Digital Era, or Analog's Revenge in the New Everyday"
The New Everyday is a hybrid of digital and analog, of new and old, of progressive and retro. Some media technologies – that old floppy disc, for example – quickly earn “outdated” labels, while others – vinyl, Polaroid, Super-8, stereoscopy – gain status as “classic” or “retro” media. On one hand, the use of such “retro” analog technologies as Super-8 film or vinyl seems tactical and subversive; it feels like a rebellious practice. On the other hand, these uses depend upon the continued accessibility and changing significance of analog media, hinting also at their role as strategies of the New Everyday. The sale of hybrid technologies (e.g. vinyl turntables with USB connections); DIY hardware (e.g. cardboard computer speakers); and analog media (e.g. stereo, lomo, and pinhole cameras) at Urban Outfitters is one of many rich examples of a New Everyday arising from analog-digital tensions and connections.
What can we, as cultural theorists, say about the birth of hybrid technologies or the persistence of analog media making? What does the fact that “dead” media are very much alive tell us about the New Everyday? What significances and uses attach to analog media in a digital era? Can we better understand the digital everyday through its analog partner?
21. Natalie Jeremijenko, Environmental Monitoring and Personal Training
22. Ami Kim, "Database Consumption and Home-Alone Lifestyle"
(abstract coming soon)
23. David Darts, "When I Hear the Word Culture, I Reach for My Source Code"
The open source and copyleft movements combined with advances in digital technology and networked communications have the potential to radically transform and improve society. They already have. In some cases profoundly. These changes are happening now in diverse ways and across multiple fields and settings. But all is not well in Web 2.0-ville. The revolutionary child of digital technologies also has an evil twin who is actively plotting a more sinister future. One of lockdown and control. One of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship. One where private business interests and state agencies assert increasing control and dominance over mass communications, digital technologies, cultural production, and democratic participation. In the New Everyday, the contest between these two systems, one open and one closed, one private and the other public, promises to be a battle of epic proportions. A fight that will define our future and become one of the most important human rights struggles of our time.
24. [last] Nick Mirzoeff "Webcasting the New Everyday"
This concluding presentation looks ahead to the web project "between a blog and a journal" that we hope to create.
