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aawilson@ucsd.edu
Other Activities:
:statement of purpose submitted with graduate school applications (UCSD-specific portion of statement removed):
My aim today is to continue dislodging myself from relationships of domination as best I can. To identify and investigate such relationships, I have been researching and acting in forms of cultural practice that directly engage social and political issues. From this knowledge gained and moved upon, I take flight into optimistic futures with alternative value systems and modes of human interaction. I'm currently developing a class-conscious and materialist approach to art-making and art-scholarship in order to contribute to the revision of artistic value as it is today most broadly defined by capital. I am interested in locating the terrain on which alternatives might take place, and have a strong faith in the economic power of cultural movements. These representations of and investigations into other social realms mustn't engage capitalist culture solely on its own terms; a peculiar critique must be present while exposing tactics for creative living and new societal formations. From within these social and political movements, I hope to present and develop the ontologically new determinations of the human of which these movements are composed.
These current values allow me to maintain a strong interest in video because of its interdisciplinary potential, accessibility, and cultural ubiquity. While video is one of the most effective tools for engaged cultural practice, it also allows me to reflect upon a filmic and artistic history of formally responsible critical media. I have made a habit of meticulously weighing and evaluating each individual take of my video work, where each image, sound, edit and the sequence they belong to must be analyzed with regards to what they communicate to each other, as well as to the human senses.
In my presentation of alternative perspectives and histories, I aim to engage viewers in a disorienting flurry of imagination, pedagogy, and desire. Straying from current activist/artist trends of socially engaged agit-prop documentary, I am also interested in the Deleuzian concept of images that lay bare cinematic/documentary mores – governed by supposed pre-existent, transcendent truths - as systems of judgment performing social structures. I am intellectually prepared to supersede these representational categories that have been invented, procured, and ultimately naturalized to serve imperial judgment, and am committed to visualizing and challenging the ways in which forces of media domination arrange themselves while managing command over creation and liberation.
I see films and videos as documentaries of their own making, their own making as a performance, and the performance as a potential social intervention. Well-planned documentations of the performance-actions I become involved with are an extension of the work I aim to create. My desire to create these dynamic situations may also manifest in experiments with video work in which the collaboration that writing and academic research allow is enhanced by involving subjects and communities to actively participate in the research, production, and communication. This interest in a participatory, knowledge-sharing video work, inspired by makers like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Pedro Costa, is tied to my interests in the material consequences of art, wherein real, living cultures are engaged and reinvented through a production infrastructure that counters domination and inspires dialogue.
:what these four paragraphs of a statement of purpose could be composed of today:
Artistic quality for me is not in the isolated form, but in the consciously creative approach to social arrangements real and imagined. Here my work starts with research and investigation geared towards exposing conflict and its conditions. This opens up an unpure laboratory of ideas and strategies with which I want to ask: what are the active and effective notions of the common today, in the midst of increasing migration, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the modes of production? To strategically expand the already present communicative commonalities and organize a cooperation of accountability, one must work at recognizing and thrusting upwards into curvature that which becomes flattened by the privatization of what is common and the smoothing flows of concentrated capital and information. Yet art is not simply political by representing social structures, conflicts or identities; rather, the approach involves a framing of specific space-time sensorium, as it redefines the power of speech or the coordinates of perception, shifts the places of the actor and the spectator, reengenders a critical consciousness, and other affects and effects.
As I consider my work from the past few years, I find concepts to now be applied to a more socially integrated practice wherein gestures and mobile arrangements outline new approaches to producing meaningful exchange. So I must explain where I've been to reveal what I've always been becoming. With my video work, I have aimed to engage viewers in disorienting spells of imagination, pedagogy, and desire and to develop these spells by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization. I have worked to supersede the conventional representational categories that have been invented, procured, and ultimately naturalized to serve hierarchical judgment, and maintain a strong interest in evoking multiplicities through the focus of the screen.
Though I still find the cinematic experience extremely useful, I find myself increasingly interested in the dynamic processes of production and participation. "Fieldwork", to me, is well defined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak when she describes it as working in the field to learn how not to formalize too quickly, for learning to resonate with responsibility-based mindsets, rather than a generally hasty preparation for artistic (and/or academic) transcoding. Whereas in the past my (non-artistic) responsibility-based approaches were defined by the static structures of the institutions under which I was participating in forms of aid and "community service", recent curatorial or facilitative works are directed by both myself and the collaborating individuals, organizations, establishments, etc. From here I hope to move towards more innovative creative endeavors that produce a shared process internal to the collaboration. Within a predominantly individualistic society, I find an urgent need to make free cooperation more interesting than uncooperative freedom. Here the promise of an art experience has the potential to move a person from being simply an audience member to becoming a participant, facilitating movement from passive to active.
Shifting since the age of 18 from journalism to essayistic video to my current work with emerging technologies and social practice is based on a desire for a creation of mobile arrangements. Connecting and reconnecting concepts and relationships, drawn from other systems and arrangements (economic, political, scientific, etc.), until a whole new arrangement of connection starts to form. Following new growths and leaving viewers/participants with further considerations and questions, for that is where experimentation begins. Strategic creative contagion. Strategy is itself a function of the technologically expanded human capacity to think and act together, to rediscover commonalities amongst difference. To actualize these ideas, a goal is to create dynamic public experiments that can potentially operate both online and as installations. Such experiments become most interesting to me when they also demonstrate the powerful role of technology in our contemporary environment: scripting our actions, dramatizing our lives, and altering our relationships to natural/cultural systems.
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