Alternative Accounts

Curated by UC San Diego students, Plains Indian ledger art exhibition
at San Diego Museum of Art shares Native vision of American history

By Inga Kiderra for the UC San Diego News Center on January 31, 2013

”...As their ancestral way of life disappeared, Indian artists turned from traditional painting on buffalo hide to other media, including paper...Plentiful and pretty easy to come by were ledgers, or lined accounting books of the sort that shopkeepers used to keep track of their finances. Indian artists filled these ledgers with their stories. At first, continuing in the tradition of buffalo-hide painting, the ledger drawings were representations of war heroism and sacred visions and other public status-building narratives. With time, the books began also to include more private accounts and memories – of ceremonial grandeur, of displacement and reservation life, of courtship and daily doings. Some of the depictions were somber. Some were humorous, almost slapstick...A small portion of this art and history is now on view at the San Diego Museum of Art, in an exhibition curated by 15 UC San Diego students, under the guidance of Ross Frank, associate professor of ethnic studies in the Division of Social Sciences and director of the Plains Indian Ledger Art project, or PILA...The exhibit grew out of a two-quarter course sequence taught by Frank and visual arts lecturer Terri Sowell, “Representing Native America” ...”

Read more at:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/alternative_accounts?utm_campaign=thisw...

January, 2013

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker present their Top Ten for ARTFORUM, which includes Professor Ricardo Dominguez and Chair Jordan Crandall.

Arthur and Marilouise Kroker are writers and lecturers in the areas of technology and culture and together edit the influential electronic journal CTheory. Arthur’s most recent book, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway, was published last year by the University of Minnesota Press.

1. TETHERED TO MOBILITY
In the regime of computation, only the opposite is ever true. Here, “mobility” really means that bodies are tethered to their devices; Google Glass may artificially amplify sight, but it also represents a loss of peripheral vision; cloud computing, contrary to its name, wipes away drifts of earthly clouds in favor of the machinic hum of massive data farms; and for all the powerful extensiveness of the net—breaking geospatial boundaries, metabolizing information flows in the form of data analytics—what is really being intensified is the microscopic surveillance of individual subjects.

2. NEURODIVERSITY
The proliferation of insecurity and anxiety so emblematic of the twenty-first century seems to have been accompanied by a parallel strengthening of scientific determinism. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in genomic biology, with its pronouncements in favor of the “moral gene,” or in computational strategies that privilege big data and attendant concepts such as distant reading. Indeed, contemporary digital enthusiasts like to remark that more data has been collected in the past two years than in the entire history of humanity. Interestingly, this positivist surge has been challenged in turn by critical movements promoting the concept of neurodiversity. Here, images of the code-challenged brain fade away in favor of forms of creative thought that occupy the splice, the fracture, the boundary, sometimes among animals, plants, and machines, and, at other times, in that deeply intimate, necessarily autobiographical space in which individual consciousness meets the full diversity of human circumstance.

3. LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON
is the ultimate code breaker. The San Francisco–based filmmaker and video artist argues that we are witnessing the “birth of the anti-body”—our Net identities as fictional personae. The Paradise Lost of cinematic stories she has created traces the bodies, anti-bodies, and nonbodies we thought we had finally left behind via electronic operations moving at escape velocity. Reflecting on the Faustian bargain involved in the question of technology, she asks: “If humans have become the interface to the larger communicative body, can soulful automatons be far behind?” Hershman Leeson’s most recent filmic project—!Women Art Revolution, 2010—is that most inspiring of all the great counternarratives, namely a retelling of the story of the unsettled present by rehearsing the still unfulfilled struggles of the feminist art movement(s) of the late twentieth century.

4. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ AND D. FOX HARRELL
have created brilliant counter-strategies within and through the culture of simulation. Cocreator of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2008, Dominguez, an artist and University of California, San Diego, professor, has retrofitted basic flip phones with mobile technology that helps migrants find water and shelter in austere border zones. Likewise, D. Fox Harrell, an MIT research professor working at the interface of the humanities and artificial intelligence, has rewritten the codes of computer gaming to combat social stigma, bias, and prejudice, as well as to reveal biographies yet untold—those still unwritten stories about the disappearance of identity in the digital haze of network culture.

5. ALEX RIVERA, SLEEP DEALER (2008)
A New York–based filmmaker and digital-media artist, Rivera brings together drone technology and migrant cultural and political experience in this compelling visual narrative that speaks to the future of the colonized body. Here, laborers no longer cross the Mexican-American border in desperate search of work but have their bodies slaved to “augmented reality” machines, making possible a new future of outsourced labor by means of remote sensing and enhanced vision. A dystopian chronicle of abjected flesh, humiliated subjectivity, and eerily dangling bodies, Sleep Dealer reveals what happens “when the border is closed . . . but the network is open.”

6. OFF-GRID BODIES
Outside the mainstream media, beyond the discourse that privileges the bodies of the wealthy, the powerful, and the famous, the history of the twenty- first century will be increasingly written by other bodily presences—those of refugees, migrants, the homeless, the helpless, and torture victims who are always off-grid—disappeared, nomadic, prohibited, unlamented, undocumented, unseen.

7. DRONE CULTURE
If those images of Reaper and Predator drones circling the empty skies do not seem truly ominous, perhaps it is because we long ago drifted into the first symptoms of the coming of drone culture: thinking in algorithms, seeing computationally, our bodies and brains packed with technology, energized by the kinetic flows of connectivity. Has human adaptive capacity allowed us to become a data haven for drone technology? Are we a drone called freedom?

8. UNMANNED PERCEPTION
Developed by Jordan Crandall, an LA-based artist whose work explores the massive impact of digital devices and social media on the human senses, this key concept positions us as subjects literally performed by technology, our perception pirated by what Paul Virilio has called “sight machines.” These devices are increasingly populating a human landscape charred by the information blast.

9. POSTHUMANISM
Media artists are the astronomers of the posthuman realm, that region beyond the point at which distributed consciousness becomes asteroids drifting ever farther from the orbits of our own bodies. Here, all boundaries have been broken; the lines demarcating humans, animals, objects, nature, and devices are unclear. Lost in the cage of measurability, the open clusters that our digital bodies have become swirl away into nebulae of gas and dust.

10. 3-D ORGANS
The fantastic proliferation of 3-D printing in areas ranging from manufacturing plants to hospital operating rooms is potentially ushering in a new world of made-to-order organs. Our future bodies will be instantly reanimated with viscera perfectly sculpted to our individual biological histories. However, as Jean Baudrillard once asked: What if we forget to die?

Read more at: http://artforum.com/

Related Links

Jordan Crandall | Professor and Visual Arts Dept. Chair
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/~gd2/faculty/jordan-crandall

Ricardo Dominguez | Associate Professor
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/~gd2/faculty/ricardo-dominguez

MFA Alum Kip Fulbeck mentioned in

What Are You, Anyway? Photograph exhibit offers answers at Asia Society Texas

By Promoted Series Correspondent for Culture Map November 30, 2012

”...What are you?” If you’ve never been asked that, you are probably not “hapa,” that formerly derogatory, now friendly Hawaiian term meaning “half” that describes people of mixed heritage, including some part Asian or Pacific Islander. Fulbeck asked that question of several thousand people over a period of three years, then published photos and answers in the book part asian, 100% hapa in 2006. Now 36 photos are part of a traveling exhibit that is on display at Asia Society Texas Center...“What are you?” is the question that comes up with many mixed-race people, which, as Fulbeck points out, is most people. But the book and the widely applauded photographic exhibit will challenge your expectations...”

Read more at:
http://houston.culturemap.com/newsdetail/11-30-12-16-33-what-are-you-any...

For more on Kip Fulbeck’s work, please visit his website at:
http://seaweedproductions.com/

MFA Alumna Yvonne Venegas featured in

Mexican Photographer Yvonne Venegas Is Searching for the Perfect Mistake

abc News Video on November 21, 2012

”...From her pop star twin sister to the gritty streets of Tijuana, Yvonne Venegas Captures What's Behind the Perfect Image...”

Read more at:
http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/video/mexican-photographer-yvonne-ve...

Related Link:
http://yvonnevenegas.com/