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Opening Screening Event: David Thorne

David Thorne lives and works in Los Angeles. He is he recipient of a 2007 Art Matters grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. He completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. In spring 2006 David was a visiting artist at The Cooper Union in New York City. He recently collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for documenta 12.

From 1999 to 2003, his projects with Julia Meltzer centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed and realized, specifically in relation to faith and global politics.  Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), the 2006 California Biennial, Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among many others.

We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass (2007) 
single-channel videotape, 47:04 minutes, color, NTSC, stereo
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne 

We will live to see these things is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005–06 in Damascus, Syria, each section of the piece—the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew—offers a different perspective on what might come to pass in a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.

Produced by Julia Meltzer
Directed by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Written by David Thorne
Edited by Catherine Hollander
Music and Sound Design by Chris Kubick
Camera by Raed Sandeed 
Winner, “Best New International Video,” 2007 Images Festival, Toronto

It’s not my memory of it: three recollected documents (2003) single-channel video, 25 minutes, color, NTSC
Produced and directed by Julia Meltzer
Written and directed by David Thorne
Sound design by Chris Kubick
Funded by The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media
Distributed by the Video Data Bank, info@vdb.org 

“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979 following the takeover of the U.S embassy. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. A single photograph pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 is the source of a reflection on the role of images in the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.

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Phaedra Pezzullo

 

Assistant Professor, Department of Communication & Culture
Indiana University

Phaedra C. Pezzullo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, as well as adjunct faculty of Cultural Studies and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A.  Her book, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (University of Alabama, 2007), won the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric/Public Address, the Christine L. Oravec Research Award in Environmental Communication, and the National Communication Association’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award–as well as inspired an Indie Rock band, The Holland Dutch, to write a song called “Toxic Tour.”  She also has published Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement (MIT Press, 2007, co-edited with Ronald Sandler), a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies (2008) on the environment, and several chapters and essays.  For more about her activism, teaching, and scholarship, see her website:  http://www.indiana.edu/~envtrhet/ .

"Resisting Environmental Disaster Fatigue through Sustainable Memory Work: The Cultural Politics of Katrina Tourism in Post-8/29 New Orleans”

Since 1998, Pezzullo’s primary research project has been a multi-sited ethnography in North America of “toxic tours,” noncommercial expeditions organized as a mode of advocacy to achieve environmental justice. This talk will expand on that research to consider Pezzullo’s ongoing fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A. in the context of what appears to be a growing sense of disaster fatigue.  Instead of focusing on nonprofit tours by grassroots advocates, Pezzullo turns her attention to the Grayline Tour Company’s for-profit “Katrina Tours: America’s Worst Catastrophe.”  These tours travel into neighborhoods previously missing from commercial tourist imaginaries of the region in order to show the people and places most impacted by what locals call “the storm.” In a relatively sophisticated era of mass media and “new” technologies, as well as increased academic publishing, it seems particularly pressing to consider when and how people are moved to believe that the spatial and material politics of witnessing disaster face-to-face bears significance to transforming public culture.  Weighing the rhetorical possibilities and limitations of commercial Katrina tours, Pezzullo reflects on tourism, environmental justice, and New Orleans to explore the possibilities for the sustainable memory work that seems necessary for the city to rebuild.  More than countering memories of Katrina as an ahistorical, isolated, and unavoidable event in the recent past, the long-term goal of the region must also be to identify ways to reaffirm and to reinvent memories for years to come.

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Cara Finnegan

 

Associate Professor, Department of Communication
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Professor Cara Finnegan (Ph.D. Northwestern) teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetorical criticism, gender and rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical theory, public sphere theory, and visual rhetoric. She is the author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Smithsonian Books, 2003), which won the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award in 2004. Finnegan is also co-editor with Lester Olson and Diane Hope of Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture (Sage, 2008).  Finnegan’s current book project explores how Americans imagined photography’s inventional possibilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

 "Speaking of Photography: Recognition and the Art of Imagining Visual Politics"

My current research is interested in the rhetorical practices of photography’s historical viewers. Focusing on the medium’s second fifty years, a period in which photography increasingly was integrated into a burgeoning mass culture of print, I explore publicly-circulated readings of photographs in order to show how photography has served as a locus of critical engagement about public questions in the United States. The viewers whose rhetoric I study are for the most part non-specialists with little investment in photography itself. That is, they are not professional photographers, art critics, or literary figures, but simply citizens who, for a variety of reasons, constructed close readings of photographs in order to make broader arguments about social and political issues. The rhetorical practices of such ordinary (though by no means marginalized or powerless) viewers are worth examining, because it is precisely in their responses to photographs that we may locate and explore crucial relationships between visual culture and questions of agency, deliberation, and judgment in public life. 

During this period, Americans did not just speak of photography; they spoke about photography as a way of speaking about politics. Indeed, Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries possessed an implicit, yet readily available, repertoire of ways of speaking about public life “photographically.” In the longer project on which this talk is based, I study several instances of publicly circulated readings of photographs in order to (1) tease out the elements of that repertoire; and (2) illustrate how viewers mobilized that repertoire in a range of public discursive encounters about issues ranging from war, eugenics, national identity, and imperialism to child labor, race, poverty, propaganda, and the New Deal. One might describe my critical approach as one that engages in “close readings of close readings” of photographs in order to understand the rhetorical work those readings performed in turn-of-the-century U.S. public culture. 

Emerging from this general framework, my talk explores specifically how the trope of "recognition" frequently framed the ways Americans imagined visual politics during this period. Across the cases I have examined, recognition emerges as a key component of Americans’ repertoire of photographic speech. But what recognition means and how it functions in each case is far from consistent or stable. Those who believed in the phenomenon of spirit photography, for example, framed the moment of recognition as the ultimate warrant in their arguments about a spirit photograph’s authenticity. Those speaking about portrait photographs of Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, were interested not in authenticity but in character: they mobilized the trope of recognition to tie their arguments about Lincoln to broader cultural practices of phrenology and physiognomy, which held that observers could “see” invisible elements of character and morality if only they learned the science of reading them in photographic portraits. In these and other cases, recognition is framed variously as alternately temporal and spatial; fallible and infallible; and activated by forces both visible and invisible. Ultimately, recognition may be understood as a complex and contingent platform from which photography’s viewers speak about photography. 

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Gregory Sholette

 

Assistant Professor of Sculpture, Department of Art and Art History
Queens College

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory, as well as co-editor of The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006) with Nato Thompson, and of Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 with Blake Stimson, (University of Minnesota, 2007). He frequently collaborates with the artist Janet Koenig and is currently working on a book about the political economy of the art world and his concept of creative dark matter for Pluto Press. 

History That Disturbs The Present: NYC, REPOhistory, and the Rise of Neoliberal Urban Amnesia

From 1989 to 2000 a group of informally organized artists, educators, and political activists known as REPOhistory installed dozens of legally-permitted, temporary street markers commemorating such unconventional historical subject matter as Nelson Mandella’s 1990 post-Apartheid victory parade up Broadway; the street corner where ACT-UP’s first AIDS-awareness demonstration took place in 1987; the site of Manhattan’s first slave market on Wall Street; the former offices of a successful 19th century abortionist whose pseudonym was Madame Restell; and a modern-day sweat shop that was employing under-aged garment workers to produce Lord and Taylor’s "petite" line of children’s sleepwear.  In 1992 Mayor David Dinkins embraced REPOhistory’s initial street-sign project. Several years later the group met with resolute opposition from the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, as well as illegal de-installations of their work by real estate interests. Presented by a founding member of the group this paper will focus on the way REPOhistory’s urban interventions briefly interrupted the erasure of the city’s little known and frequently radical past at a time of increasing privatization, demographic homogenization, and ubiquitous police surveillance.

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Patricia Zimmermann  

 

Professor, Department of Cinema and Photography
Ithaca College

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota, 2000).  She was coeditor with Erik Barnouw of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (Wide Angle, 1996). Her forthcoming book, coedited with Karen Ishizuka, is Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Histories and Memories (University of California Press). Her book on digital art, Digital Memories: Cinemas, Histories, Visualities (Temple University Press, forthcoming), explores the relationship between historiography, political trauma, and digital art practices.

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George Legrady 

 

Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology
University of California, Santa Barbara

George Legrady is Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology Doctoral program at UC Santa Barbara. George Legrady is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980’s to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning projects in the early 1990’s such as the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” (1993), “Slippery Traces” (1995), “Sensing Speaking Space” (2002), “Pockets Full of Memories” (2001-2007) and more recently data visualizations at the Seattle Public Library, with NASA, and the CEB corporation. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990’s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating new forms of aesthetic representations and socio-cultural narrative experiences.  His digital interactive installations have been exhibited internationally.

 

Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization

To activate information is to build knowledge. The aggregate processing of dynamically generated data, with resultant output through visualizations allow for a form of artistic experimentation that engages methodologies commonly associated with Computer Science, Social Sciences, Statistics and Information Sciences.  

The Experimental Visualization Lab of the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara explores this question through research and production in data visualization.  Since 2005, we have been parsing and visualizing a steady stream of data generated hourly, consisting of the titles of books, films, music, and miscellaneous items checked out by patrons at the Seattle Central Library.  We feel fortunate in having access to this flow of data as it makes visible a community’s aggregate interests without bias, in essence allowing the data to “speak for itself”.

The presentation will trace the intersection of data organization and visualization in a number of the artist’s projects such as "Pockets Full of Memories" inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou, and  "Making Visible the Invisible" a public arts commission for the Seattle Central Library, and the Cell Tango (Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive) visual archive exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. These projects consist of visualizations generated by custom designed software that dynamically organize data.

 

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Andrea Hammer

 

Senior Lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture
Cornell University

Memory Lines: The Mapping of Central New York

My presentation focuses on the very visible remains in the landscape of Simeon DeWitt’s original 1790 survey of central New York State. By geo-rectifying the original township maps and superimposing them upon current infrared satellite imagery, I reveal how lines have evolved into roads, field boundaries, edge conditions, fence and tree lines—in other words, as mnemonic traces of the past. In so doing I also take up the suggestive question posed by literary theorist Peter Brooks, who asks whether a “subterranean logic” links the disparate meanings of plot: (a) a plot of ground or land; (b) an illegal scheme; (3) the act of mapping terrain; and (4) the dramatic arc of narrative. Using New York’s New Military Tract as a case study, I propose to make this subterranean logic apparent.

for kevin, others

So, you’re going along with your life. You’re doing work, school, kids, meals, writing. Grading papers, doing laundry, agonizing about the filthy dump your house is. Running maybe, talking on the phone to your mom, IMing your husband during his lunch hour. Wiping butts. Getting glasses of water in the middle of the night. Answering student email. Buying your kids McDonald’s. Worrying about time. Passing mid-semester. Counting words and money.

And then Kevin Zoldan happens. He’s sweet, young, struggling to figure out school? Work? Live here?

Play music?

No. Figure this out, Kevin: your heart is being attacked by infection. Your blood is filled with it. Figure this out: open heart surgery. Valve replacement. Figure this out: the cardiac intensive care unit.

Kevin is B’s best friend’s brother–my sister’s brother-in-law. And in the weird way the Zoldan family and the Yonker family are essentially one, Kevin is B’s brother, and mine.

He’s 24. He’s in Richmond. If you’ve got some love, send it on.

And take a moment to love ANYONE (and really I mean *every*one). Because it’s fleeting, this being-on-earth stuff.

never been shorter, ever

Gotta love the MacBook screen flash in the glasses. Doesn’t seem like I’ve been fatter, ever, either, from the looks of this. That’s what happens when you trade running for a chair in front of a machine. And it takes more food to sustain the sitting in the chair than it does to run for the same amount of time, somehow.

Oh well. I can lose some poundage; I can’t lose time.

oswego harborfest 10K

I’ve been lazy in posting race reports this summer, probably since we’ve run so many. I completely skipped blogging the Swamp Rat in June, which was momentous in that my near-60-year-old mother ran it with my sister–a first for both of them.

And I’m about 2 weeks overdue in posting about Oswego’s Harborfest 10K, but it was such a great day that I’ll write a little anyway.

After a bit of drama in trying to pick up our packets a few days early (D trekked to the Oswego YMCA the Thursday before, as we were instructed to do so in the paperwork, and was laughed at when she asked to pick up our packets–they were experiencing a bit of technical difficulty, it seems, in putting together the race packets), we figured we would simply arrived early and hope that the race people had everything together by race morning. We worried a bit that we would not receive shirts, as the race info said that only the first 250 runners registered would get shirts. But lucky we were, and we were happy to find our packets did indeed have pleasant colorful shirts. Much to our chagrin, though, the ads on the back included one for Hell*Mart (or Wal*Hell, if you prefer).

The race did not have chip timing, a first for us. We weren’t sure how that would affect the start–would runners be super rude, pushing to the front since there would be no “net time” to offset the time-lag often mid- and back–of-the-pack runners experience? We were also worried that since D saw a big sign at the Y earlier in the week that pleaded for more volunteers for the race that the water stations would be understaffed, or worse, non-existant.

The weather was perfect: overcast. And the course, which was described as “undulating,” was darn right mountainous.

But something strange is happening to me. When I run a race these days, my old easy-going, “I’m just here for the bagels at the end” attitude is replaced with a “I wonder how fast I can go today?” and a “I wonder which of these runners I can beat?”

So when the horn went off, I took off. And the hills were bad, but none as bad as the infamous St. Albert’s hill in Council Bluffs which I spent the first week of July running. And the water stops were plentiful, the course well-marked for the most part, and I ran hard. And according to D, whose Google skillz now rival my own when it comes to tracking down race results, I ran a…dang. Now I can’t find it. It was a 56 I think, 56:58, something like that.

I was fast as, as D would say, sheeee-it. Although, D was much faster than me, but I don’t know her time, either. Under 50, I’m sure, as that was her goal and she frequently PRs.

And the great J, who ran the 5K, also PRed on the hilly course. And I would have taken an “after” pic, but my dumb camera battery died. Or I had it in backwards. Or something.

the moods! they’re killing me!

I wish I wasn’t such a moody maude. This morning I woke up and ate 3 bagel halves, each half with much butter. Then a bowl of grape nuts with a tsp of sugar and skim milk. Then a 2 oz of cream cheese + salsa with a bowl of tortilla chips.

Dinner was a turkey burger with provolone, ketchup and mayo and a large green salad (with thousand island-ugh).

So, I didn’t really eat a whole bunch, but I what I did eat was pretty much crap.

And then I ran 30 minutes, which made me feel a WHOLE LOT BETTER.

And when I got back I treated myself to some blueberry goodness. And a big glass of water. Still working on that snob thing. I’m still much too easy.

trying. again.

I have a couple of things I need to work out:

1) eating sensibly is easy until about 3 o’clock. Then I’m normally doomed and will eat whatever I can get my hands on, for about 5 straight hours… which leads to

2) the whole “no eating after 6″ thing has never worked for me.

Every day is a new day.

And yesterday was a great day, sort of. Breakfast I had an English muffin with butter (probably too much), mid-morning snack was instant oatmeal (maple and brown sugar, I think), lunch was Chris’s amazing Asian noodle salad and a ginger muffin, dinner was more Asian salad and a turkey burger.

And then I ran 7 miles! And then I came home and went to bed instead of eating more.

And I did some wimpy ab work on the bathroom floor before I got in the shower. Good stuff. I am not uncontrollable.

I CAN’T has cheezburger.

grapenuts
milk
1 tsp sugar

255

chicken breast (231)
cottage cheese (40)
olive oil (60)
balsamic vinegar (10)
raw vegetables

341

Well, this day went to shit in a can when I started eating potato chips and banana bread slathered in butter. I’ll try again. I will.

I only pretend.

I’m only pretending to be a food snob. Really, I’m not a snob at all; generally speaking, if it stays on a plate long enough to stab it with a fork, I’l eat it.

The “snob” part comes from a good friend I had in high school, who would always talk about what she “would NOT put in [her] mouth,” as though her mouth was too good for, say, cheese pizza or Hershey bars.

This blog is my attempt at that attitude. Luckily, I’m fond of vegetables and chicken breast sans skin.

welcome to parish

2007FebBlizzardLillys.jpg

Originally uploaded by mryonker.

Indeed. Just an update:

We have not broken the streak. Yes, that means we’ve run in some pretty crummy conditions. But I’ll tell you, being outside in this crap makes me really appreciate being inside, even if it is to sit in front of my computer to work on my research.

To date: we have sustained over 115 inches of snow. Over the weekend, B and I climbed up onto the garage to shovel off the snow, which I thought would be an easy task. Gravity and all. Boy was I mistaken. Snow, and the wet lake effect snow that is nearly chest-deep-to-me on my garage, is heavy. We worked for a few hours, and managed to clear 1/4 of the garage halfway. Yes, that is not a fraction problem. I mean 1/4 of the garage has half the snow gone. Bleh. The kids had fun, though; we let them climb up onto the garage with us and SLED OFF. I’m not kidding. The snow is deep enough that to go from the roof to the top of the snow (in places) was only inches.