concluding the future:
TITLE:
The future: not just a walk in the desert:
ABSTRACT:
“Not just a walk in the desert” is an interactive intervention art (1) experience – A travel experience, a tour, that engages with cell phones, video documentation. Edited versions of the videos will be posted onto the internet and then sent back to the travelers and to those with acccess to cell phone pods, for all to consume. I propose that this interactive, travel event, that traipses over existing, illegal immigrant trails, can promote an alternate linkage to the words ‘illegal alien’. An awareness wil be highlighted, where the public tourist has a private experience. Redefining the symbolic representations of the words illegal alien through a immersive experience. The use of video and pods cycles back into the experience, becoming a public document a new avatar to represent the illegal alien.
This very private, real act, of an illegal alien crossing the border is a private experience but a public problem. The illegal alien has become an avatar that is defined and mediated by new media and technology.
“Crime, murder, illegal drugs, missing kids, illegal aliens”
http://www.foxnews.com/national/crime/index.html
Illegal aliens 'not illegal'
www.worldnetdaily.com/weekinreview.asp
``The only reason a lot of employers want to hire a large number of illegal aliens is so they can exploit them.''
www.commondreams.org/headlines/021700-02.htm
A travel experience as art, is probing that provides “ the conditions to mobilize the signifier in the service of an alternative production” (12) The traveler, the internet viewers and cellphone users become modest witnesses. (Harraway) (wortex 2)
Introduction:
Extreme travel, reality TV, video documenting and their posting on the internet, is a preoccupation of today’s American culture. The American People have a history with the illegal alien, from The Sedition Act of 1798 (see wortex 4) through to the LA protest about immigration reform in 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_United_States_immigration_reform_protests) The words illegal alien are a derogatory term, that applies to over 10 million people in the States today. My art project, is about using the very tools that exploit the ‘other’ to redefine the illegal alien. These are the everyday items that combine to inform and manipulate our public perceptions about who the illegal alien (wortex 4) Through interactivity disguised as a travel event, the participant creates a space where they can revitalize and recreate the identity of the illegal immigrant. By using the performative, engaging with everyday and networking technology I will create a rupture. A folding over of information, where the system that informs, informs on its self, exposing its own bias.
Imagine the ultimate travel destination. A real travel experience, that is dangerous, unpredictable, physically and environmentally extreme. An experience that is technologically savy, exciting, informed and allows the participant to be politically active. Not just a walk in the dessert.
For my future work as an artist, I propose a travel adventure that will take the adventurer on the illegal, desert, border crossings from Mexico into America Crossing the border from Mexico into America by illegal aliens is the norm in the eyes of the American public. We hear about the issue from politicians like Bush who in his 2007 State of the Nation speech stated that [he] “Will Call On Congress To Pass Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” It was recorded that the “President believes that America can simultaneously be a lawful, economically dynamic, and welcoming society. We must address the problem of illegal immigration and deliver a system that is secure, productive, orderly, and fair. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/2007/initiatives/immigration.html)
Arnold Schwarzenegger the Californian Governor was quoted on Monday that he proposed an extending health care coverage to all of California's 36 million residents as part of a sweeping package of changes to the state's huge, troubled health care system.
A total of 6.5 million people, one-fifth of the state's population, do not have health insurance, far more than in any other state. At least one million of the uninsured are illegal immigrants, state officials say. “there is even a debate about what he said with regards to immigrants on YouTube). Wednesday, 29 August 2007
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9A0CE6D61530F93AA35752C0A9619C8B63
Media is all pervasive. On television the illegal alien is seen through the form of the documentary. ‘Crossing the line’: The documentary shows the minutemen squarely in the white power circles
The People Confront Racist Minutemen in Sacramento
http://santacruz.indymedia.org/mod/comments/display/22389/index.php
Web sites have been set up for personal and professional reasons about the illegal alien: http://www.illegalaliens.us/nationalsites.htm . This site, besides mocking the term undocumented, is an illegal immigration primer whose goal is to provide information on illegal immigration prevention, enforcement, and attrition.
Or http://www.humaneborders.org/
Humane Borders, motivated by faith, offers humanitarian assistance to those in need through more than 70 emergency water stations on and near the U.S.-Mexican border.
Utube post illegal alien videos such as Illegal Aliens Caught At Border http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn9nlyJaGC8&mode=related&search=
This is a video response to Border Cameras and High Tech Failure to Capture Illegal Aliens
Or Dangerous crossing at the border originally screened on Current TV gives small snippets of information like crossing arizona: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfCaIdJa6fE&mode=related&search=
Books have been written: – Enrique’s journey by Sonia Nazario
http://www.enriquesjourney.com/
Movies distributed such A Day Without a Mexican (2004)
One day California wakes up and not a single Latino is left in the state. They have all inexplicably dissappeared, chaos, tragedy, and comedy quickly ensue.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377744/,
Babel, 2006 where the nanny Amelia is in a bit of a bind, because she expected the parents home so she could attend the wedding of her son in Mexico. With Richard and Susan not returning soon, and with no one else available to watch the children, she takes them with her to the wedding across the border.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449467/)
Newspapers describe the illegal alien through headlines, images and footage of illegal immigration border crossings.
(http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/01/24/borderguards060124.html)
But they are disconnected, representations of the actual journey and the people, The illegal alien is a commodity and I am interested in using the way it is mediated into a productive real art experience.
The illegal alien is a terrorist.
The illegal alien is a father
The illegal alien is a young child
The illegal alien is a worker
The illegal alien a drug runner or coyote
The illegal alien is a wife, mother or girl
The illegal alien is a political refugee
The illegal alien is a person
The illegal alien was me
The illegal alien described by the dictionary –noun
1. a foreigner who has entered or resides in a country unlawfully or without the country's authorization.
2. a foreigner who enters the U.S. without an entry or immigrant visa, esp. a person who crosses the border by avoiding inspection or who overstays the period of time allowed as a visitor, tourist, or businessperson.
The illegal immigrant is an extension of technology. The illegal immigrant is tracked, counted, documented and digitalized. This forming of the illegal immigrant through and by technology has created an avatar that is reuseable, and can be reimagined whenever the machinations of power need to push an agenda.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060515-8.html
THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. I've asked for a few minutes of your time to discuss a matter of national importance -- the reform of America's immigration system.
The issue of immigration stirs intense emotions, and in recent weeks, Americans have seen those emotions on display. On the streets of major cities, crowds have rallied in support of those in our country illegally. At our southern border, others have organized to stop illegal immigrants from coming in. Across the country, Americans are trying to reconcile these contrasting images. And in Washington, the debate over immigration reform has reached a time of decision. Tonight, I will make it clear where I stand, and where I want to lead our country on this vital issue.
For my future research I propose that by using travel as an interactive art process, we can inform and redirect discourse. Through the event, the technology of streaming video, cell phones, internet and pods the illegal alien can be reimagined. Not as a threat, not as a problem, not as an avatar to be used, but as a human being. I intend to redefine the space of the Illegal alien by using everyday contemporary technology such as cell phones, e-mail, video editing, pods and the internet.
Travel and the internet are voyeuristic devices that enable us to look at things and spaces from a distance. We can make up you own stories, narratives and memories. They are built up through the distancing that technology imposses. But that distance is what I want to facilitate communication and discourse. Like the Art Historica in Chile (wortex 5) or the video mediation in Italy (2) My art uses the video as a less confrontational form of communication. Technology as a mediator can be used positively. The distancing from reality is less confrontational, yet the travel over the desert is a real interactive experience that informs reality.
NOTES:
Productive forms of video mediation are popping up everywhere:
Daily Texan
9/22/05
Groups watch Minutemen documentary
By Kathy Adams
People on both sides of the issue sat together and watched a documentary about the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, a group of volunteers who patrol the border for illegal immigrants.
http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2005/09/22/University/Groups.Watch.Minutemen.Documentary-994511.shtml
Today Utube is creating a space where you can see people posting videos in response to other videos
Coco Fusco uses the immersive nature of the real experience in her piece Operation “A piece that explored similiar issues of torture was Operation Atropos.In July 2005, I took a course led by former US military interrogators designed for people in the private sector who want to learn their techniques for extracting information. I took a group of six women with me and filmed our workshop.”
http://www.wenited.org/read/index.php?catid=12
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/arts/design/30fusc.html?ex=1306641600&en=c5fff6f1c4084a36&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
bibliography:
1. There are works, that is objects or actions, that are emblematic of the social problem or make a political statement.
Supportive works that are conceived of and created by the artist that, upon presentation, are designed to be linked to others, ultimately feed back into an actual social system.
http://hybrid.concordia.ca/~dart_projects/publicart/artinterv.html
http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/illegalimm.html
2. Pelizza, Annalisa 2007 Qua_SI Quality of Life in the Information Society Ph.D. Program University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy
Technology was used to mediated co..... were videoed about their ideas on the urban space. A video was then beamed over a video wall placed in one of the same contested squares, thus making the terms of the disputes among space users accessible by communities and individuals involved in the struggle as well as passers-by. The boundaries-generating discourse was thus made visible and audible and was embedded in the same contested space by means of the digital layer provided by the video screen. deeply imbricated in an image of the city made of multiple spatial- temporal layers. On the one hand, the process of accumulation of traces of ‘dirtiness’ – through direct or mediated experience – could be seen as acting as a temporal link, similarly to a back- forward technique, and as a mechanism recalling other spatial orders.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Revised my opening page to my Wortex
So here we go again
Day 1
TITLE:
Knowledge production; an institutionalized practice or a practice in the resistance of Art
ABSTRACT:
The Production of knowledge is historically based on the gaining and producing of information that is ‘situated’. (Latour) Situated in a discipline. Situated in the era of production. Situated in its politics and practices. The knowledge gained and opinions formed are then solidified in the form of a formatted document called the academic Paper (thesis, article, book). The writing and publishing of the document, is a tool, an intellectual practice perceived as subjective, yet often elitist in language, function and availability. (Gibbons) Today, the academic paper seems to work both as a metaphor for the institutionalization of the University System in the West, and as an artifact that displays ones knowledge and opinions. The writing of the paper is a type of apprentices’ document. Used to prove knowledge. Used as a way to canonize and solidify ideas. And used to reproduce the hierarchical nature embedded in the University system. I agree the Paper is an important tool; it is the culminating product of research, used in qualifying and quantifies information and ideas. But is it really subjective? Today universities engage with technology, using new methods of communication that facilitate the flow of information and the production of knowledge. But as Donna Haraway, (http://humwww.ucsc.edu/FMST/facHaraway.html) Bruno Latour (www.bruno-latour.fr/ ) and other intellectuals have argued this knowledge and the way it is produced is biased.
As a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) student in the Arts Computation and Engineering (ACE) program at the University of California, Irvine, I must qualify, quantify and visualize evidence of my production of knowledge, through the authorship of a paper and the production of a project. ACE is a multidisciplinary program where technology is a foundation. I believe that by engaging with technology we can produce a better representation of what knowledge we have gained and used throughout our years of study. I am not claiming that I need to create all the software, hardware or even research existing methodologies of scholarship. Collections of people are collaborating, creating, testing and trying that now in Universities around the world. But what I am interested in is the opening up of a multi-faceted approach to my thesis that addresses the way academic information is represented.
Each process of documentation that I have used throughout my ACE course was utilized for specific purposes. The Web Wortex concept is about giving the general public access to my academic process and information gathering. There will be only five parts and they will take the reader through my intellectual justifications. Each piece builds an argument that qualifies historically, conceptually and intellectually why I created the projects. In the Wortex I am not only trying to give people access by reading but access to articles, media, pictures and information that has influenced me in my knowledge gaining process. NOTE1 The Blog ( http://www.awillcocks.blogspot.com) traces the final days of my practical work at ACE. This venue gives the user a glimpse into the way I think, how my projects worked and what others thought about the project Precocious puberty. I have also used:
Myspace, ( http://www. myspace.com/fatsothedidileo
Facebook, a personal web site, (http://www.awillcocks.com/PP.html)
a hyperlinked narrative ( http://www.awillcocks.com/myprojects/html) Utube, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juTYTwOXZrU )
uber (http://www.uber.com/awillcocks ) and
current TV (http://www.current.tv)
all are different ways of disseminating information. By using these many everyday techniques, posting, responding and writing, I am essentially exposing the problems inherent in my own work. The multiple forms have created a kind of Modest_Witness.
INTRODUCTION: Why do we need more than a paper?
The history of the institutionally produced written document goes back before the creation of the first university. As a system to form education. (approx 1167 Oxford University was founded in England – http//www.ox.ac.uk/aboutoxford/history.shtml.)
Pharaohs, Kings and Governments, from Roman Times to the present, have used the written document to carry orders. Illuminated manuscripts spread religious doctrine. With the creation of the printing press (Guttenberg) the written document gained the power to influence entire segments of population. (books, manuscripts, journals, articles, catalogues, brochures, comic books, newspapers and magazines)
Up until the end of the 19th Century, little changed around the dissemination and collection of information. The written document, being the most important and widely used form of communication. But over the last century, the technological revolution has radically changed the way we communicate. We are now communicating globally via the computer, TV, radio and cell phones. (http://english.aljazeera.net/English/) Photographs, video, text and music are distributed dynamically into most households in America.( http://www.limewire.com/) RFID tags, GPS and satellite systems can track and identify on the fly. (http://earth.google.com/) Technology like the industrial revolution is changing the world.
Similarly technology has changed the how and what we research. Take for example the unraveling of the human genome. Through our understanding of DNA we can now track and target hereditary problems, in people who show no symptoms of the disease. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genome/heredity.html ) Today the multiple uses of technology are describing who we are through databases, nanotechnology and micro chips. (http://www.afd.co.uk/censation.asp ) Connecting information via optic fiber, wireless and satellites. (http://www.calit2.net/) Technology and the information highways have changed the way we communicate locally and globally.
Over time, the written document has remained a dominant method, for recording, authenticating and producing information. Within the University system, it is still used as the primary qualifying evidence of research and knowledge production. But, can the Paper stand alone as sole evidence of authentic scholarship? Can technology be utilized in a way that benefits universities and their knowledge production? The paper is a necessary institutional practice. It provides evidence of learned material, a space to declare research and share opinions.
At the University of Irvine, I was a part of and saw many benefits from using technology in research and knowledge production. The internet was a place where web sites, google jockeying, forums and wikkis facilitated the flow of information. People were collaborating, dynamically, editing, discussing, informing and reforming ideas. As you read this, hardware and software is being created that will make the flow of information even more dynamic. But despite the open flow of information there was a biasing. Knowledge production is still a situated practice. Knowledge production is a practice with a history that influences the way and what we produced. (Prakash)
The practice of authorship in the form of a Paper is an intellectual ritual traditional in most university disciplines;
Science: http://www.emory.edu/GSOAS/PDF/prismpressrelease.pdf. Medicine: http://edrv.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/er.2003-0038v1
Law: www.law.wisc.edu/fjr/innocence/
Arts: www.collegeart.org/caa/publications/AJ/artjournal.html
Architecture: http://people.bath.ac.uk/pnr20/Publications/rich06a.pdf
On the one hand, the paper is a way to gauge whether a student or professor has developed critical skills in their area of expertise. But on the other side, it facilitates the flow of the control of research. Organizes and directs the development of technology, managing the making of culture and the systems of the capital market (Bourdieu 1988) (Biagologi & Galison) (Haraway p7) (Foucault)
Using various forms of Web based apparatuses ( Blog, wortex web, etc.) as part of my paper I am challenging the way evidence of university scholarship is practice is deployed. It does not have to be just an addendum. The implementation of technology into the practice of paper writing gives the reader a more reflective space to interpret information. As Malcolm Ashmore proposes in his Reflexive Thesis book: (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/depstaff/staff/ashmore.htm )
“history (which) is continually in the process of being written, unwritten and rewritten by it’s various practitioners, commentators and critics, all of whom tend to claim for it different origins, precursor and lines of development as well as differing problematics, achievements and findings. “
Agreeing with Ashmore, and using that as the impetus behind my knowledge production, I question the place where just one piece is enough evidence. The various forms of Blog, ( http://www.awillcocks.blogspot.com) web pages, (http://www.awillcocks.com/PP.html) narrative and artwork (http://www.awillcocks.com )that I use, gives me the space to explore different avenues that represent my knowledge. These different modes of informing and reinforming have benefited my research, my knowledge and my projects. As I have used these different forms of evidence, my process has become more reflexive. Others using technology to benefit scholarship are popping up on the Internet everywhere;
free103poiint9web site: http://www.free103point9.org/
a web site that provides information about radio with manuals, history pdf’s, events and forums.
the new Online journal: on art and culture: http://www.theartsection.com/
this challenges the position of the Art critic having to be attached to a large media conglomerate.
Simply other students describing their work and displaying their thesis www.mslima.com/mfadt/thesis/thesisblog.html, http://www.blogthesis.com/mfadt/thesis/thesisblog.html
The make_it_technology on your time: http://www.makezine.com
has volumes of information on how to make and create things that you can also learn at university
Or even Ellen Luptons website: http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/
that provides all the necessary information to teach a student how to use type.
They are not just addendums but scholarly products and processes.
The paper alone is not big enough to allow for the dramatic changes that have occurred because of technology. Technology has created huge changes in content accessibility, like video, sound or data gathering and generation. Technology has caused changes in the dynamic flow of information from wireless and fiber optic cables through to satellite tracking. We can access information from around the world almost instantaneously. These rapid changes are affecting how we interpret the world and need to be included as evidence of scholarship. The paper alone can provide rigid proof of a subjects understanding. It can be a space for questions and answers as well as being an historical and technical indictor of scholarship. But the way research and information is disseminated today is in a myriad of ways. Through multimedia, collaborative, networked and ‘open source’ processes that engage many senses..
The internet not only enables global research but access to research should be global. Take for example the networked amateur astronomers, who through the use of Internet are observing, gathering, documenting and sharing their findings. How do we include their accumulated knowledge as a resource in a paper? Alternate forms of media could make their findings more useful to the student or other academic. If we had dynamic access to their various accumulated links and images in the article perhaps we might have a better understanding.
It is also important to note that it is not only the professional that creates knowledge. Amateurs in many fields are using technology and its interconnectedness to create their own knowledge. Amateur astronomers are being taken far more seriously by their professional counterparts, who rely on them more frequently to track variable stars, like U Scorpii, or collect data on meteors, which scientists at NASA Ames in Mountain View are particularly interested in.
``With the Internet, we are in kind of a golden age of amateur astronomy,'' said Mike Koop, an electrical engineer for Lockheed Martin and a member of the San Jose Astronomical Association. ``We can link together and get the word out instantly.'' ****
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2000/01/17/MN77698.DTL
What is the best form of scholarly authorship? There are many forms of emerging authorship, challenging the system, such as the open_source network, mySpace, wikkipedia, blogs (www.blogthesis.com) or even utube. The open_ source movement being the most written and identified by academics in papers, has forged ahead in the digital realm. Creating new software, using forums that assist in the sharing and recycling of information collaboratively and destabilizing existing protocols in software production. The Open source policy is used and conceived as collaborative and inclusive. Because of its open editing process people from all over the world, network through the internet using existing code that is open and public building new technologies that not only challenge the power structures but build on top of them to form new and alternate solutions. (Lakhani)
http://www.opensource.org/
– Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.
–
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
– New NGO communities are starting to use the open source technology as a tool. One example is the Open Source Youth Network started in 2007 in Lisboa by ISCA members[11].
http://isca-web.org/english/youth/yource/theconcept
Networking for Social Change
“YOURCE” is an open source youth network that aims to develop an international community of people interested in youth work and volunteerism. This community connects its members on a web-based level while interacting through real-life activities and cooperation between members
http://www.cactuscode.org/
Cactus is an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. Its modular structure easily enables parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. Cactus originated in the academic research community, where it was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists.
Wikkidepia and other dynamic editing sites have created entire encyclopedias of information. Overlay this explosion of technological innovation, which dynamically alters the way we research and formulate knowledge and research becomes integrated and dynamic. In labs throughout the world we see different institutions working on different parts of interconnected solutions, microscopically in a macroscopic world. Scientists and anthropologists, engineers and doctors now collaborate to create and translate together. The realm of producing information, facilitated by technology is already being created, tested and implemented into most university systems. But let us still presume, that technology does not change the fact, that theory and practice is biased. Haraway in her Modest_Witness book suggests that production of knowledge has never really been an individual objective practice. Perhaps we can never produce knowledge that is impartial. But by implementing technology into the knowledge making process it can provide a space to inform ourselves and others about our biases. Whilst increasing accessibility to elite information?
How do we declare our prejudices? Gaytari Spivak gives us an example in her writing. In her paper Megacity, she declares herself as an autodidact. situating herself from the start. Robert Nideffer (http://www.acad.carleton.edu/curricular/MEDA/daf/robert.html ) a professor at UCI published the first interactive multimedia dissertation on a CDrom offering information from different points of view. There is also the MFA students who produces work providing alternate forms of document to back up their ideas. (http://a.parsons.edu/~bacon/soundspade/media.php)
http://www.art.ucla.edu/graduate/mfa.html
Each degree is granted on the basis of the quality of the student's work as demonstrated in the exhibition that accompanies the final comprehensive examination. A review of work precedes the final comprehensive examination. The examination, usually oral, includes a formal exhibition of work and a document that includes vita, photo records of works, and an artist's statement.
Any one solution standing alone is debatable. But what is obvious is that the way knowledge is represented in different practices of intellectual scholarship suggests the need to include more technology . “Knowledge has become a “socially constructed process of negotiation among the disciplines, practioneers, commentators and critics” (5) _where does this quote come from?
http://www.gridtoday.com/02/0805/100192.html
Bill Gates
"Collaboration between industry and academia is crucial to deliver on our shared vision for the future of technology and education," Gates said. "Microsoft remains committed to deepening its relationship with academia, because only by working together can we create the next generation of computing technology." ****
The way we produce knowledge has become more diverse and dynamic. But as technology, education, commerce and politics merge, that knowledge becomes mediated. Mediated for different agendas. My projects are an attempt at disclosing some of these mediated representations: Is the recent interest in PP due to the increase in funding for obesity? Who is providing the money for obesity research? Are the children being misdiagnosed because culture defines girls as reproductive units and media reinforces these ideas? Does technology – the way information is gathered and collated bias where research funding is applied? Who decides what is important?
By researching information on the causes of Precocious Puberty I constantly found many conflicting ideas and research. What is true? What makes one bitof information more important than another?
August 4, 2007 Run Date: 03/30/07 By Molly M. Ginty
WeNews correspondent Health & Environment
U.S. Girls' Early Puberty Attracts Research Flurry
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3113
Scientists say girls are eating more food and putting on pounds, which is causing their bodies to boost production of the hormone leptin.
* "Leptin is made in fat cells and is necessary for normal reproductive function," says Paul Kaplowitz, chief of endocrinology at the Children's National Medical Center in Washington and author of "Early Puberty in Girls," published in 2004 by Random House. "There's an evolutionary benefit to this. You don't want to get pregnant if there isn't enough food for you to carry a pregnancy successfully. You would risk the baby's life and your own."
* According to the recent Pediatrics study, obese girls are twice as likely as normal-weight girls to sprout breasts early. Overweight girls are 50 percent more likely to do so. Being overweight as early as age 3 was found to be a marker for premature breast development.
* Like genetics, home environment can also play a role. Research shows that girls raised in households without their father present are likely to hit puberty young and that having an unrelated male such as a stepfather present speeds the process even more.
* Pollutants can also hasten maturity. In separate studies, Michigan girls accidentally exposed to polybrominated biphenals (chemicals used in flame retardants) started their periods a year younger than average; Puerto Rican girls exposed to phthalates (chemicals that soften plastic) had breast buds as early as age 2; and African American girls who used hair products containing human placenta also developed breasts at age 2.
Environmental Factors
* "Exposure to DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, a pesticide) and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals used in manufacturing) may lead to early puberty," says Walter Rogan, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C. "But research on environmental factors has so far been inconsistent."
* Other factors that may be linked to early puberty include low birth weight (under 5.5 pounds); eating dairy and meat products treated with hormones; and eating soy and other foods with high levels of "phytoestrogens," plant substances that mimic human estrogen.
* Sociologists also point to the "hypersexualization" of U.S. culture, where mainstream magazines flaunt near-nudity, where girls' dolls are voluptuous and where girls' bodies may in response be preparing for sexual intercourse earlier than ever before. ****
The fact is, there is a tension that fluctuates between alternate and institutionally recognized forms in the production of knowledge. Between the professional and the amateur. Between research and funding. Between subjective or objective knowledge, culture and technology. And these affect research, analysis and the formulating of ideas. Knowledge production is complicated and institutionalized. New methods of scholarship are being addressed about producing knowledge, but how do we represent it impartially?. Perhaps an eclectic array of documentation, that is more inclusive, overlapping and inclusive of the processes. My thesis is a post, postmodern project. As an Artist I am trying to relinquish the authority of the artifact by replacing it with the process NOTE2This project starts the process of disclosing my prejudices as Jeffery Shaw already wisely demonstrates in his ‘Web of Life’ installation
J. SHAW:
The audio-visual environment “Web of Life” is formed by an immersive conjunction of projected three-dimensional computer graphic and video images, together with a fully spatialized acoustic experience and a specially conceived architectural surrounding. The visitor interactively influences the performance of the audio-visual environment by imparting to it the unique patterns of his individual hand lines, thus giving symbolic and experiential expression to the action of connecting oneself to an emergent network of relations. ***
My Blog, wortex, web sites and paper provide different angles to view and understand what I am trying to communicate. The recycling, remaking and creating of my knowledge, is a multifaceted approach. Opening up my artwork to a disclosure of my prejudices. As well as giving others access to elite, intellectual information. Like the sign on the wall of an art gallery, that describes an artists work. These forms of media are the scribbles and notes on the paper, that are representative of my knowledge production .
NOTES:
1 It is very difficult for those not in the industry of knowledge production to get access to quality research and papers. Even when published the results are not necessarily true. Or you have to be members of universities, societies, attend conferences of subscribe to endless magazines to find the relevant articles)
2. Post post modern – a kind of post deconstruction. Not only deconstructing the past but by using a blogs or wikkis or forums or web one can dynamically deconstruct on the fly. Disclosing. Also making availabe new forms of media that can inform.
“According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex may be said to "deconstruct" gender identity, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance and the reality of the person's gender.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism
Good analogy of the post modern artist
http://www.lkart.com/Cpm.html
3. The ACE program is a marriage of three disciplines each having different goals, research methods and scholarly production, where the process of building, sorting and the recycling of information in one uniform methodology is complicated and problematic
COMMENTS:
8/15/2007
Things to consider when assaulting paper...
To be blunt, I see paper as superior to pretty much all other media yet produced, for one simple reason: it persists. If a thing cannot be found, or 'read' when it IS found, it might as well not exist. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and as shitty as they are, reveal information (if not exactly knowledge, eg. revealed idiotic Essene washing rituals).
> you might need firefox to see it
Case in point. Which version?
Can I read it in 2017? 2027? 2047?
Can you today read many things produced electronically in 1997? 1987? 1967?
NASA has lost the entirety of data collected from many early space probes because the media rotted away, and only a handful of archival technology companies still have operable machines that can read "universal" 800bpi and 1600bpi reel tape that was in use for decades, once...
In a large view, today's stuff isn't really much different than how 100, 500, 1000 year old plays, performances, song, etc are "lost", even when we recover some recorded record of it. There's a lot of contextual subtlety (some of it subtle as a train wreck) that's simply not recorded.
WWW? This too will pass.
Of course for school purposes new media is assumed up front to be
automatically good, but it's pretty much ephemeral, so it's good for
momentary communication, cultural stuff like organizing, but inherently lousy for things to persist. Tom
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Latour, Bruno 1993 We have never been modern, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., USA.
“The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology, and phrenology, never made. But alongside this purifying practice that defines modernity, there exists another seemingly contrary one: the construction of systems that mix politics, science, technology, and nature. The ozone debate is such a hybrid, in Latour's analysis, as are global warming, deforestation, even the idea of black holes. As these hybrids proliferate, the prospect of keeping nature and culture in their separate mental chambers becomes overwhelming”
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html
Haraway, Donna Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemakeMan_Meeta_OncoMouse Published 1997, Routledge ISBN 0415912458
“The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact.” http://books.google.com/books?id=ftO4jLQ2RM8C&dq=&prev=
Prakash, Gyan, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999) Princeton University Press $32.95
Prakash writes about the way we interpret the history and relationships of modernity, science and colonialism in India. What the West declares as the affects of colonialism on India is very different to the way Indians have understood this intergration
http://his.princeton.edu/people/e59/prakash/profile.html
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6705.html
Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Translated by Peter Collier published in the United States by Stanford University Press, 1988.
“Bourdieu identifies a more or less direct correspondence between disciplinary prestige and original social class of member faculty. This observation is the start of a thread which he develops concerning the linkage between academia and social class. Academic systems of classification (grading and ranking performance of students) tend to reproduce social class strata. [Bourdieu, 1988:207] Academic careers therefore tend to follow social origins. [Bourdieu, 1988: 215] Bourdieu characterizes academia as a fundamentally conservative institution that reproduces and reinforces social class distinctions as a result of internalized faculty outlooks and expectations.”
http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~mhalber/Research/Paper/pci-bourdieu.html
Biagioli & Galison Scientific Authorship 2003 Routledge
Foucault, Michael, History of sexuality, Published 1990, Vintage Books
ISBN 0679724699
Michael Foucault discusses the history of documenting and monitoring the child at the beginning of modernity. He state that it was a way of building a set of institutions that organize and control us today.
Ashmore, Malcolm – A reflexive thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. With a Foreword by Steve Woolgar. 318 p. 1989 The Chicago University Press. SBN-10: 0-226-02968-9 Cloth $50.00
“This unusually innovative book treats reflexivity, not as a philosophical conundrum, but as a practical issue that arises in the course of scholarly research and argument. In order to demonstrate the concrete and consequential nature of reflexivity, Malcolm Ashmore concentrates on an area in which reflexive "problems" are acute: the sociology of scientific knowledge. At the forefront of recent radical changes in our understanding of science, this increasingly influential mode of analysis specializes in rigorous deconstructions of the research practices and textual products of the scientific enterprise. Through a series of detailed examinations of the practices and products of the sociology of scientific knowledge, Ashmore turns its own claims and findings back onto itself and opens up a whole new era of exploration beyond the common fear of reflexive self-destruction.”
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/3246.ctl
Lakhani Karim: Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2005
Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School with an extensive research background in open source software communities and their innovation and product development strategies. His latest research analyzes how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists. What he and his coauthors discovered: "broadcasting" or introducing problems to outsiders yields effective solutions. Indeed, it was outsiders—those with expertise at the periphery of a problem's field—who were most likely to find answers and do so quickly”
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5544.html Martha Lagace
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Megacity
Grey Room, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000),
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1526-3819(200023)1%3C8%3AM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23 http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Spivak.html
Gayatri Chakravorty was born in Calcutta, West Bengal, 24 February 1942 to "solidly metropolitan middle class" parents (PCC). She thus belonged to the "first generation of Indian intellectuals after independence,"
“Spivak's work explores "the margins at which disciplinary discourses break down and enter the world of political agency" (SR). She interrogates the politics of culture from a marginal perspective ("outside") while maintaining the prerogatives of a professional position within the hegemony. Through deconstruction she turns hegemonic narratives inside out, and as a third world woman in a position of privilege in the American academy, she brings the outside in. (Hence Outside in the Teaching Machine [1993]). These contradictory positions have led her to develop the notion that the center is also a margin, more like the center line on a road than the center of town. "This is the classic deconstructive position, in the middle, but not on either side" (de Kock interview). This reconfiguring of the "center" (or re-centering, perhaps) also changes the position and status of the margins: no longer outside looking in, but an integral, if minor, language.”
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Glossary.html
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
http://www.awillcocks.com/wortex3.html
is up ...sort of.....
Having had several responses to my Wortex web page, the rather static nature of the way it comes across and the fact that it does not really take advantage of the way the internet is set up today is a problem. - for example the Wikkis is a place where where information can be edited by others, the self and information generated dynamically around the world of those connected. Basically all the Wortex is is a Photoshop document was the main reponse - so why use the internet instead of paper?
Looking at Wortex 1 and the way I defined my first page of the Wortex does not really explain what I am attempting to do. Content does not match function. Having done a Blog in Kavita Phillips class I found it a useful way of using the internet to show the public my art and research processes. This process opened me up to judgment and comments that not only affected the way I understood my work but perhaps helped others to see my biased flaws. It gave me and others a small insight into how I am influenced by other forms of media not only professional intellectual readings, but news, media or even a conversation with a friend. The information diverged as peopled responded. But what was also interesting and has been highlighted again with my use of the web page Wortex is the fact that even if you put it out there, information is only as good as the network that connects you.
I have had more responses about Wortex visually by people who would not normally read academic papers or even have access to them. It was suggested that they might start to understand what I done. They now have limited access, even if it was a simple visual skimming to what I had done and could revisit it in their own time. By posting on the web, I am allowing for some interesting conversations on the way I traced by intellectual processes that can not always be contained on paper- Perhaps like the statement on the wall that describes an artists work. In that sense the Wortex is my intellectual statement on the global wall in Academia?
So I know I have to redefine my argument about what I am attempting to do. I am not going to change the world of academia, (perhaps I could do that if I had another couple of years doing a PHD). I am not claiming that I need to create all the software, hardware or even research existing avenues of internet authorship need to facilitate the collaborative nature of the process of academia today. Collections of people are creating, testing and trying that now. But what I am interested in is opening up a multifacted approach to interdisciplinary studies and the research paper A paper that not only makes conclusions but is exposed in process. What I am trying to be a sort of modest witness kind of referencing. The Wortex concept is really about giving the general public access to the academic process and information. Not only access through writing but access to articles and information that can be better referenced or discerned. It is very difficult for those not in the industry of knowledge production to get access to quality research and papers. Even when published the results are not necessarily true. Or you have to be members of universities, societies, attend conferences of subscribe to endless magazines to find the relevent articles. So the Wortex was not about setting up a Wikki. I have seen work well, in the process of research and argument formation in several of Kavita Phillip's classes. But my several attempts at different web formats is a way of putting my process up onto the global market of the internet. Perhaps making it available to others.
I know my English is of a pretty insufficient in standard but I am working to produce more legible arguments with less run on sentences. I intend to use my blog as an ongoing daily documentation even for the final days up to defending my paper and the printing of the paper. The Wortex will end after 5 entries. They are the 5 arguments that support intellectually why I did the research and presented my projects in certain formats. There will be PDF's and other connections as well as language refinements, lots of pictures and hyperlinks.
As for the actual documentation of my art process - about how I created my projects - my discussion about the projects I have already set up a web site that connects you to some of the information. I will also be revisiting the projects by creating a hyperlinked story - like a diary linked so you can make your own narrative about how I went about each projects process.
I don't know if anyone realized but the wortex was also a pun. I essentially wrote a paper by referring to Foucault and the manufacture of authority through knowledge production, yet that was exactly what I was doing writing a paper about not only writing a paper but by posting it I am essentially exposing the problems inherent in my own work. Opening up to the public not just keeping it inside the intellectual industry that produce knowledge.
SOME COMMENTS
ange, i think what you are doing is fantastic, its the perfect format
for my 'visual' brain to access information, and the embedded pop-ups
are mirror actions of how information comes into my head - other
thoughts pop in while im reading about something else. I read the
whole thing and I find it interesting that the issues of authorship
are still up there as priority for University. As to your
frequent question in the second wortex re: is it ART - growing
chickens, maybe i could put my two kids in the gallery - they are the
best works ive made yet and it has to be ART because i am an ARTIST.
ha. catching up with tim this weekend and i look forward to hearing
all of what you two got up to. talk soon. keep sending, al
Things to consider when assaulting paper...
To be blunt, I see paper as superior to pretty much all other media yet
produced, for one simple reason: it persists. If a thing cannot be found,
or 'read' when it IS found, it might as well not exist. The Dead Sea Scrolls
were found, and as shitty as they are, reveal information (if not exactly
knowledge, eg. revealed idiotic Essene washing rituals).
> you might need firefox to see it
Case in point. Which version?
Can I read it in 2017? 2027? 2047?
Can you today read many things produced electronically in 1997? 1987? 1967?
NASA has lost the entirety of data collected from many early space probes
because the media rotted away, and only a handful of archival technology
companies still have operable machines that can read "universal" 800bpi and
1600bpi reel tape that was in use for decades, once...
In a large view, today's stuff isn't really much different than how 100, 500,
1000 year old plays, performances, song, etc are "lost", even when we recover
some recorded record of it. There's a lot of contextual subtlety (some of it
subtle as a train wreck) that's simply not recorded.
WWW? This too will pass.
Of course for school purposes new media is assumed up front to be
automatically good, but it's pretty much ephemeral, so it's good for
momentary communication, cultural stuff like organizing, but inherently lousy
for things to persist. Tom