Distributed Creativities Program Schedule!

Conference Schedule

11:00 am
Breakfast

11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Welcome

Panel 1: The Collective and the Common

Nate Harrison
Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Fare Use: A Political Economy of the Digital Subject

Through an assessment of todayʼs “digital subject” this paper addresses the relationship between the historical category “authorship” and contemporary modes of cultural production. The paper postulates that the “death of the author” ushered in through post-structuralist theory decades ago, in conjunction with the current widespread use of networking technologies in art and design, could be interpreted as having yielded a liberated reader-as-producer. However, this is not entirely the case. Powerful interests who have mediated access to the means of production since the “broadcast era” (and have likewise established their own models of cultural consumption) continue to wrest control away from potential creators through intellectual property regimes and, more alarmingly, through digital rights management (DRM) at the technological level.
The paper tries to balance two theoretical approaches: a political economy model (i.e., “what do media do to audiences?”) and a text-audience model (“what do audiences do with media?”). On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that through evolving technology the creative domain and the possibilities of those within it have changed, rendering somewhat obsolete Frankfurt School-style media criticism. On the other hand, a more contemporary analysis should not come at the expense of abandoning the economic realities of production. Readers only become themselves author-producers, and thrive, when they have unfettered access to creativityʼs raw materials– to the texts made available by previous authors. And those materials are only available when egalitarian flows of information are assured, free from regulation that privileges capital. Yet these flows are often inhibited, in a preemptive manner, giving advantage to the already established captains of media industry (or robber barons, depending on your point of view) whose motives are often driven by profit rather than a consideration of healthy democratic exchange through freedom of information. It is an evaluation of the techno-legal structures that make the blurring of original/imitation, author/reader, and producer/consumer possible–in essence the structures that make new modes of creative expression possible–that the paper will put forward in order to understand what
is at stake in 21st century authorship.

Krystal Hauseur
Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine

Misreading Abstraction: "The New Sculpture" of Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu

This presentation examines the work of three Nisei women artists during the postwar period. Their work successfully negotiated the boundary separating art and craft through their innovative use of form, process, and material. Historically, their work received positive attention within craft criticism for its innovative form and technical skill, while the artworld excluded craft, women, and non-U.S. influences from its discursive narrative and market. Also, at this time, craft attempted to shed its non-art status by adopting formalism, the language of high modernism by its most renowned critic Clement Greenberg. Because the dominant mythology of masculine-artist, virile-genius veiled the reception of art during this period, it misread these artists’ work through their femininity, Asianness, and naïveté. By examining this complex history, this presentation demonstrates how Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu navigated within optic and haptic viewing theories and broke through the politics of their identities.

Faculty Response: Dr Grant Kester
Questions and Panel Discussion

1:00 pm - 2:00pm
Lunch

2:00 pm -3:30 pm
Panel 2 : Transdisciplinary Motion

David Benin
Communication, University of California, San Diego

Coding Affect: Transdisciplinary Digital Creation and the Problem of Boundaries

Hors Catégorie: An Experiment in Embodied, Affective Interactive Fiction (2007) is a work of digital media that attempts to shift the emphasis of IF works from narrative development to affective response. The work is the result of collaboration between a Communication scholar and digital artist and a Computer Science scholar and programmer. In this presentation, I, one of the authors of the digital work, discuss this process of collaboration, which was central to instilling some of the tensions we hoped would result into the final work. In particular, the project explored the challenge of expressing open-ended, undefined qualities – affects that arise from bodily interaction – through the development of a quantitative code versatile and flexible enough to engender suitably indeterminate interactions. Or, how does one do the analogic – affect – through digital code? My presentation focuses, then, on issues of translation and creation across technical and disciplinary boundaries. I explore most intently issues of language, epistemology, and design, examining the communicative strategies and a priori employed by collaborators to articulate both possibility and, more importantly, limitation, in the development of an experimental digital work. Given the project’s preoccupation with challenging the ability of digital code to generate truly new forms – the Bergsonian distinction between ‘the possible’ and ‘the potential’ – establishing, overcoming, and, indeed re-affirming epistemological, disciplinary, and technical assumptions proved the most compelling aspect of this collaboration. The aim of my presentation is to offer insight into collaboration that reaches across disciplinary divides and to suggest tools for the translation of ‘non-technical,’ humanistic theoretical salvos into discrete, technical procedures.


Christina Baker
Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, University of California, San Diego

“No Es lo Mismo” en la Ciudad de México: Exploring the Body, Repetition and Mimicry in Salsa’s Live (Re)-Performance
This paper considers how the live salsa musical performance in Mexico City serves as an example of how cultural productions transcend national boundaries to become adopted, adapted and appropriated to fit specific societal needs. Within the Mexico City context it is important to note that the primary transmission of salsa is performed by cover bands that generally do not write or perform their own original compositions. Rather, the songs that reverberate throughout the dance halls in the capital city can be heard played by almost any local band on any given night. The limited song repertoire may be indicative of how Mexico City has been exposed to commercialized, commodified salsa that inhibits complex compositional and obscures the historical development of salsa. What is at stake in evaluating the presence of cover artists are that they may provide insight into how salsa’s musical integration into Mexico City’s soundscape reflects general trends regarding salsa’s presence throughout the republic. Specifically, this paper will evaluate how the live salsa musical performance in Mexico City expresses the lack of musical training necessary to allow salsa to be originally produced and integrated into a national archive and/or repertoire, becomes a microcosm for exploring the way Mexico adopts and imitates salsa’s music devoid it cultural and historical context and demonstrates how the repetition of popular, commercialized salsa hits creates familiarity for salsa’s participants through a scripted corporal memories.
Faculty Response: Ricardo Dominguez
Questions and Panel Discussion

4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Keynote Address: Rick Lowe

Closing and Reception

Distributed Creativities Call for Papers

Distributed Creativities

University of California, San Diego Visual Arts Department
Graduate Conference
Call For Papers

Please Circulate

The Ph.D. graduate students in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD are soliciting papers for their 2009 Graduate Conference, scheduled for April 4, 2009. The conference, "Distributed Creativities," will explore the distribution of creativity and issues of collaboration. These issues have played a central role in artistic production since ancient times. From era to era and culture to culture, assigning (or taking) credit for artistic authorship has involved an ever-changing/shifting set of criteria. In the modern period, corporate involvement with and patronage of art, along with increasingly sophisticated techniques of mass production have challenged the authenticity of artistic expression as well as the notion of individual artistic genius celebrated by Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century. In this conference we hope to explore the connections between collaboration, creativity and artistic production, from the construction of ancient cities to the pervasive influence of digital media in contemporary art practice.

Possible points of questioning include, but are not limited to:

problematics of authorship
premodern guild systems
artists and artisans
Originality, copies, remix, mashup
humanism and the individual genius
locative media – place, mobility, augmented reality
the rise (and fall?) of the "creative class"? (Richard Florida)
Intellectual property issues
collective storytelling, audio narratives and sound art
open source and crowdsourcing
tactical media – performance, agency and activism
responsive architecture and relational environments
advertising and marketing strategies
digital and interactive work
mechanical reproduction (Walter Benjamin)
material labor
cognitive capitalism
free culture
digital commons and social networking
fair use of creative products in a creative society
defending ownership

We welcome all graduate students with related interests to submit abstracts (300-400 words) or full papers by January 5th, 2009. Participants will be notified in mid January, and final papers will be due in mid March. The authors of chosen papers will be asked to prepare presentations of approximately 20 minutes.

Please send all submissions to visarts-conference at ucsd dot edu . Kindly include the name of your university or home institution, department of study and degree program (MA, PhD, etc.).

We would like to open submissions to graduate students in departments such as: Art History, Visual Arts, Cultural Studies, Area Studies, Classics, Antiquities, Film Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, Communications, Urban Studies, and others, this list is by no means exhaustive.

Schedule and List of Abstracts

Conference Schedule

9:30 am
Breakfast

10:00 am
Welcome
Laura Hoeger, PhD Student, Visual Arts, UCSD

10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Panel 1 : Spaces
Moderator: Leah Cluff, PhD Student, Visual Arts, UCSD

Sarah Cluff
Anthropology, Indiana University Bloomington

The Unacknowledged Role of Government in Development: Public Service Provision in The Gambia

The Gambia’s years of independence not plagued by economic difficulties have since been lost as the country returned to dependence upon foreign entities. The development programs the nation implemented in response to economic crises have yet create sustainable growth, as is the case with much of the rest of Africa. Is this process of development a collective right of the world’s people to follow predetermined patterns of growth offered by international aid agencies; is it a collective right of developing governments to improve technologies and infrastructures in order to make their way into the world market; or is it the individuals’ right to demand development on the collective front, to utilize such organizations within the public domain to in turn affect their own private spheres?

Cara Chang
English (Cultural Studies in Asia and Pacific), University of Hawai'i, Manoa

Orality and Literacy at Kukaniloko

As Cristina Bacchilega asserts in Legendary Hawaii and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism, "In most, if not all Hawaiian mo'olelo (connected story), "place" situates events, heroes, tellers and listeners, memories and emotions in ways that connect the creation and transformation of landmarks with familial or genealogical relations", this paper explores the way in which orality and literacy have been inscribed on Kukaniloko, a sacred Hawaiian historical, cultural, and astronomical landscape found in Wahiawa, Hawaii, located in central O'ahu. Through the consultation of interviews, literature, and newspapers, in relation to the foundational scholarly works of Walter Ong, Ruth Finnegan, etc., I briefly explain the importance and history of Kukaniloko, elucidate how oral tradition is connected to the place, while uncovering some of the stories tied to the rocks, and analyze how Kukaniloko has been translated and portrayed in print in the past. Because of the impact oral tradition has played in Kukaniloko, this paper should be read in conjunction with the video I have produced. While this essay is a compilation of previous written works gathered on Kukaniloko, I also bring to light stories told from a non-Western perspective, while elevating and upholding the power and significance of the oral tradition in a society where print is hegemonic.

Faculty Response: Dr Kyong Park


Questions and Panel Discussion

12:00 pm - 1:00pm
Lunch

1:00 pm -2:30 pm
Panel 2 : Discourses
Moderator: Micha Cárdenas, MFA Candidate, Visual Arts, UCSD

Danicar Mariano
Asia Pacific Studies, University of San Francisco

Filipina Subaltern Counterpublics in Cyberspace: Analyzing Downelink as an Online Social Networking for Filipina Lesbians

To avoid the pitfall of viewing the Internet in overly optimistic or pessimistic terms, it is necessary that we demystify this vastly unexplored tool by critically studying the complex and mobile cultures found there. But although many studies have tackled the impact and use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), few discourses really deal with how they intersect with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Moreover, there is a dire lack of scholarship on new ICTs outside the west. To fill this gap, this work hopes to problematize the Eurocentric and heterosexist assumptions of this masculinist new media by looking at how Filipina lesbians, doubly discriminated for their race and sexual orientation, are claiming spaces within it as their own. It interrogates how Filipina lesbians are constructing their identity, community and sexuality in Downelink, a social networking site for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders (LGBTs). It also looks at whether Downelink is a site that enables legitimate lesbian feminist counterculture and revolt ultimately leading to the greater question of whether or not LGBTs are creating effective counterpublics online as well as how. I focus my study on Filipina lesbians since I wish to explore Ann Travers’ assertion in her essay “Parallel Subaltern Feminist Counterpublics in Cyberspace.” Travers posits that new ICTs provide women from developing countries with unique opportunities to both access and create alternative counterpublics, while feminist on-line activity also contains the potential for public spaces with more inclusive tendencies, revealing a necessary “globalization from below” to counter the hegemony of global capitalism.



Karen L. Ishizuka, Anthropology, University of California Los Angeles
and
Tadashi Nakamura, Social Documentation, University of California Santa Cruz

Can I Say One More Thing? Frames from Ethnocommunications Film Practice

The qualitative method variously called life story, oral history, life history and personal narrative seeks to capture the complexity and richness of the felt quality of the lived experience within its social, cultural, political and historical milieu. When conducted with digital video technology and in tandem with a counter-hegemonic film practice we call Ethnocommunications that, in the tradition of Third Cinema, is a liberative cinema of self-representation, the resulting visual life stories provide layered, nuanced and compelling visual evidence that mediates histories and memories, the personal and the political, hegemony and resistance, the past and the present. Illustrated with clips from a documentary film in progress that we are producing, this presentation will explore the capacity of Ethnocommunications theory and practice to document lost or endangered histories, preserve collective memories and personal meanings and present dynamic moments of being and becoming.

Faculty Response: Dr Norman Bryson

Questions and Panel Discussion


3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Panel 3: Spaces
Moderator: Eduardo Navas, PhD Candidate, Visual Arts, UCSD

Fabian Cereijido, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

From the Revolution to the Systematicity of the Signifier, the Left Goes to the Scene of Squalor

The current engagement of the public sphere by political art in Latin America feeds on revised notions of subjectivity, political agency and temporality, notions that have been greatly affected by the ongoing revision of ideology, universality and teleology and the long crisis (in the region) of the revolutionary projects of yesteryear. Two imperatives challenge these practices: One is the need to maximize and localize the specificity of the engaged population: socially inclined art is attempting to be sensitive to matters of locality so as not to reduce and ventriloquize the disenfranchised (like traditional Marxism purportedly did). A guiding principle of this tendency is performativity. The second one is to minimize specificity in terms of meaning and outcome: politically inclined art practices try to avoid closure, concrete promises and the imposition of reductive meta-narratives, calling attention to the "constructed" nature of subjectivity and the fertile versatility of language. A guiding principle of this tendency is polysemics. By comparing selected works by Ricardo Dominguez with a piece by the collective Allora and Calzadilla and a "Social Sculpture" by Tercerounquinto, I wish to address what happens to the determination, limits, affect, and finality of subjectivity when performativity and polysemics are called to keep totalization in check.



Eva J. Friedberg, Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine

Experiments in Environment: Counterculture and the West Coast Avant-garde (1966-1968)

In the summers of 1966 and 1968 Ann and Lawrence Halprin led a mixed group of dancers and environmental designers in the San Francisco Bay Area through a series of multi-sensory workshops, titled “Experiments in Environment.” The objective was to carefully explore the body’s relationship to both the natural and built environments while simultaneously seeking to engage participants with questions of collectivity and community. In a time when “the street” had become a place for civic action and public protest, the Halprins were inspired to explore the possibilities of movement, action and interaction as they related to community participation and the expanded possibilities of a public culture. This paper will address the activities of the summer workshops and their emergence out of a specifically West coast 1960s counterculture. They will be considered in relationship to the East coast avant-garde work of Allan Kaprow and John Cage, artists similarly challenging the conventional relationships of artistic practice and production. Finally, the paper will address the ways in which “Experiments in Environment” changed Lawrence Halprin’s own architectural practice and further encouraged his efforts to include public citizens in the design process of urban planning and redevelopment.

Response: Olivier Debroise, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Questions and Panel Discussion


5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Keynote Address: Susan Buck-Morss, Cornell University

6:00 pm
Closing and Reception

Press Release

First Annual UCSD Art History Graduate Student Conference
"What is Public Culture?"
Saturday, April 5, 2008
9:30 am to 6 pm
Pepper Canyon Hall Room 109, UCSD Campus
Event is Free and Open to the Public

The Art History graduate students of the Visual Arts Department of the University of California San Diego are pleased to present their first graduate student conference, entitled "What is Public Culture?" Papers by graduate students from a wide range of universities and scholarly fields will be presented interrogating the nature and occurrence of public culture. A welcome presentation will begin at 10 am, with the morning panel shortly to follow. The afternoon panels will begin at 1 pm and 3 pm. UCSD Visual Arts faculty Norman Bryson, Grant Kester and Kyong Park will serve as respondents. At 5 pm, Susan Buck-Morss, Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of Government at Cornell University, will present the keynote address. Refreshments will be served during the conference, and a reception will follow Dr. Buck-Morss' presentation.

Please contact Laura Hoeger at visarts-conference@ucsd.edu or visit http://visartsconference.blogspot.com/ for further information.

Keynote Speaker Confirmed

I am pleased to announce that Susan Buck-Morss, of Cornell University, has been confirmed as the keynote speaker for our conference. More details to follow!

Final Papers due March 17th!

Please submit your final papers to visarts-conference@ucsd.edu by March 17th, 2008 in either .doc or .pdf format. The text of the paper should correspond to a 20 to 25 minute talk.

2008 Conference CFP

What Is Public Culture?

University of California, San Diego Visual Arts Department
Graduate Conference
Call For Papers

Please Circulate

The graduate students of the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego would like to announce the call for papers for their Graduate Conference themed “What Is Public Culture?” to convene April 5, 2008.

Public Culture as an academic strategy, department or discipline has entered scholarly vernacular without a clear or concise definition. We are not claiming such a definition exists, however we aim to examine its possible vicissitudes through the work of graduate students who are interested in the public sphere in any sense. In this conference we wish to explore the possible points of intersection between seemingly unrelated disciplines and open the conversation.

Possible points of questioning include, but are not limited to:

Public/private
Natural and built environments
Public spaces such as gardens or parks
Generic exchanges among traditional discourses of art (painting, sculpture, media, etc)
Interaction between gender and culture within public and/or private space
Collaborative practice as methodology
Art as a visual language for research, representations and productions in public space

We welcome all graduate students with related interests to submit abstracts (300-400 words) or full papers by January 15th, 2008. Participants will be notified in mid January, and final papers will be due in mid March. The authors of chosen papers will be asked to prepare presentations of approximately 20 minutes.

Please send all submissions to visarts-conference@ucsd.edu . Kindly include the name of your university or home institution, department of study and degree program (MA, PhD, etc.).

We would like to open submissions to graduate students in departments such as: Art History, Visual Arts, Cultural Studies, Area Studies, Classics, Antiquities, Film Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Latin American Studies, Asian Studies, Communications, Urban Studies, and others, this list is by no means exhaustive.

More information about our department, programs and conference can be found at http://visarts.ucsd.edu.