Abstracts

Jasmine Alinder

The Right to Representation: Toyo Miyatake's Camera as a Symbol of Japanese American Resistance to Incarceration

This paper will use a 1940s government proscription and a 1990s sculpture as starting points for a discussion about self-representation as a human right in the context of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government denied the most essential rights of citizenship to Japanese Americans. From caricatures in magazines to photographs in official reports, images that portrayed Japanese Americans as the enemy certainly helped to justify the curtailment of those rights. But the control of the representation of Japanese Americans was not limited to the manufacture of convincing propaganda; government and military officials were just as interested in impeding the creation of oppositional visions of incarceration. This marshalling of representational forms during the war included the search and confiscation of family photographs by the FBI and the prohibition of cameras in the concentration camps.

While images in the popular press dehumanized people of Japanese descent, the government exclusion of cameras and photographs owned by Japanese Americans curtailed the possibility of alternative portrayals of Japanese American life. According to Bulletin no. 126 from the Japanese American Citizens League dated 24 March 1942, “After March 31, 1942, no person of Japanese ancestry shall have in his possession or use or operate at any time or place within any of the Military Areas 1 to 6 inclusive, as established and defined in Public Proclamations Nos. 1 and 2, above mentioned any of the following items a. firearms b. weapons c. ammunition d. bombs e. explosives f. short wave radio g. radio transmitting sets h. signal devices i. Codes or ciphers j. cameras.” By seizing cameras, and classifying them in the same category as weapons, government officials believed that they were discouraging sabotage, and at the same time they also took away the right of Japanese Americans to represent themselves photographically. During the years in the camps, Japanese Americans were denied the ability to employ a technology that could be used to verify mistreatment, harsh conditions, or to counter propaganda. In addition, significant rites of passage escaped photographic memorialization. The government’s regulation of control over who clicked the shutter was a demonstration of power over the right to self-representation—a continuation of the legal efforts to control the Japanese American body that had their origins in nineteenth-century immigration legislation.

Recently, the technologies of photography and the camera in particular have come to figure importantly in public representations of the history of incarceration as symbols of resistance and the struggle to preserve personal dignity. A bronze sculpture representing a large, weathered view camera stands on the sidewalk outside of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Its lens focuses not on the street but the museum; poised to photograph the building in which Japanese American history is made public. Installed in 1993 by artist Nobaho Nagasawa, the sculpture is an enlarged replica of the camera used by Toyo Miyatake inside Manzanar, the concentration camp where he was imprisoned with his family and 10,000 other Japanese Americans. A slide projector placed inside the cast metal box is meant to display Miyatake’s wartime photographs against the window of the museum every evening. The text panel accompanying this piece explains Toyo Miyatake’s significance to the Japanese American community of Los Angeles:

First-generation Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895) opened his photography studio in Little Tokyo in 1923 and spent the rest of his life documenting his community’s life on film. When Miyatake, his family and 120,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated by the United States government during World War II, Miyatake bravely smuggled . . . lens and film plate, considered contraband, into the Manzanar concentration camp in California. Using a secretly-constructed camera, he captured everyday life in Manzanar.

In addition to a strong presence in Los Angeles, Miyatake and his camera are also featured in the newly finished museum at the Manzanar historic site. This paper will examine how Miyatake’s Manzanar camera has come to symbolize a kind of protest against the politics of incarceration that rests in the power to represent the self.

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A. Aneesh

Data Double: representing the unknown in global communication

Modes of existence have multiplied over the years. Apart from physical and virtual forms of togetherness, one also exists in the form of data, including credit history, buying habits and such demographic variables as age, gender, region and education. One's data doubles have not only attained a degree of objectivity, they have also become more effective in predicting one's life chances. This conversion of life into a data form enables a field of global communication that otherwise would not be possible. As software dialers in India's international call centers connect customer service agents with their western clients on the basis of clients' data doubles, this study points out how life is re-adjusted to fit its data forms.

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Marin Blažević

THEATRE OF / ON TERROR – spectator between oppression and expression

This paper starts from the assumption that some of the questions of the conference can be approached and discussed by means of comparative analysis of particular, local, multimedia theatrical performances, namely the Chinese Roulette by D. B. Indoš, Fifth Gospel by Branko Brezovec and Deleted Messages by BADco.

The analysis will be carried through two interwoven flows of performance, which might be termed textual or discursive, and performative flow. My first task will be to present, contextualize, comment and of course compare the (dramatic) discourses of the three performances, their narratives, motives, subjects and different ways in which they are executed. In their own fashion, the recent works of Indoš, Brezovec and BADco. deal with pressing issues such as cultural imperialism, social and political surveillance and repression, biopolitical power, security regimes, terrorism, war crimes, human rights, civil liberties, resistance and individual freedom.

However, the main challenge of my presentation would be to investigate in what way these issues are reflected in the performative flows of the three performances. Relyingon the, arguably, still vital concept of theatre as a metaphor of the life/world, I will try toidentify some processes, matrices, constellations and struggles characteristic of our present-day (global) society in themechanisms and effects of functioning of the representational situationwhich theatrical performance establishes through the complexframeworks of the relations between the performer/actor and the spectators/observer.

The focus of the analysis will be precisely the spectator-actor relationship andthe strategies of performative/representational inversion which are implemented by the three performances. All of them (in their own way) are placing the spectator in the position of the one who is notonlycaptured by thegazefrom the stage and monitored by the actors/performers, or literally manipulated and intimidated by their physical acts, or videotaped and transformed/frozen into another (visual) media, or imprisoned into a scenery which represents a concentration camp barrack, or exposed to the aggression of extreme sounds and images, but is also (at some point) brought face to face with the freedom of expression, verbal and physical communication, i.e. with the call for actual participation in the performance, with the challengeto perform in the relatively secure environment (aesthetical frame) of the theatre, or else – agree to repression.

Obviously, the three performances are embedded in local (Croatian) histories, for example the war trauma (World War Two and its relapses in the recent wars on the territory of the Former Yugoslavia), the experience of various totalitarian regimes through most of the 20th century, but also the history of struggles for performing rights of the alternative, experimental, innovative theatrical practices. Although the analysis and its presentation will attempt to overcome the limitations (interpretative, communicational, contextual, political ...) of the local case study, it will nevertheless lay stress upon the significance of the particular, specific, local perspective (a kind of local rights) in the discussion on global troubles. Even more, it will raise a question: could it be that in the niches of the local (issues, histories, communities, differences, politics, aesthetic traditions, etc.) we can look for the shelters (at least symbolic) against the terror of the global security agenda and its technologies?

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James Der Derian

Global Media Interventions

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Ricardo Dominguez

Visibility and the New MESH: The History and Future of Tactical Media, Strategic Simulations, and Counter Surveillance Post 9/11

To what degree has the use of tactical media, strategic simulations and counter-surveillance gestures developed by the alter-globalization movement(s), since the emergence of the Zapatistas in 1994, disturbed the growth of the post 9/11 MESH? The new MESH can be defined as a trans-national medial drive to spot, name and control individuals, groups and networks on a daily basis via an integrated and interoperable digital, genetic and particle global security matrix.

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Rina Ghose

Complexities of Citizen Participation through Participatory GIS

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Nan Kim-Paik

Spectacle of Transparency: Media Rituals and the Reunions of North-South Korean Separated Families

In August 2000, the South-North Family Meetings in Seoul unfolded as a series of brief and heart-wrenching "reunions" among family members from opposite sides of the Korean divide. One hundred Korean separated families met for the first time in fifty years after they had been separated and cut off from all contact since the 1950-53 Korean War. These state-sponsored meetings, while intensely fraught personal events in the lives of the participating family members, were organized to facilitate saturation coverage by South Korea's freewheeling broadcast and print media. In light of the unexpected national media exposure, these family members suddenly found their public identities transformed, as they came to embody the hopes and aspirations of inter-Korean reconciliation. Yet, their newfound celebrity posed a sharp and ironic contrast with their previous status as "silent" or "invisible" families, subject to the social taboo that had prevailed in South Korea for decades toward those who were suspected to have relatives in North Korea. For decades under past authoritarian anti-Communist regimes, many such South Koreans anxiously hid their family histories to avoid becoming the objects of police surveillance, employment discrimination, and severe social stigmatization. This paper considers the mediatized reversals of fortune experienced by these families and explores the tensions between intimacy and mass mediation surrounding the August 2000 reunions. It takes as its primary heuristic the idiom of transparency, which reflects the contradictions of a period when South Korea was undergoing massive economic restructuring to comply with the neoliberal imperatives of global capital while simultaneously pursuing economic cooperation with one of the most isolated and secretive states in the world.

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Caroline Levine

Propaganda for Democracy: The Avant-Garde Goes to War

Waging fierce battles against oppressive regimes for the past century, from the Nazis and the Soviets to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, democratic governments have wanted to persuade the world that they stand for a better way of life: not only economic vigor and material well-being, but also that more crucial and more intangible value—freedom. And this task hasn’t been easy: democracies in wartime have been particularly inhospitable to dissenting voices. From the witch hunts of Joe McCarthy to the blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks, democratic states at war have threatened to become dangerously hypocritical, claiming to fight for freedom abroad while being perfectly willing to stifle civil liberties at home. This paper shows that in an attempt to win over hesitant citizens and wavering allies, democracies have repeatedly—and covertly—produced a propaganda of the avant-garde, sponsoring challenging, shocking, and unpopular art to demonstrate their societies’ commitment to freedom. It seems counterintuitive, of course, to claim that artists reviled by the public and dismissive of the majority could come to prop up democracy. But in their relentless desire to proclaim their freedom from mainstream tastes and values, avant-garde artists offer democratic states a surprising opportunity: the chance to display their hospitality to marginal and dissenting views. Thusdemocratic societies have used dissenting and unpopular visual and performance artists—from Jackson Pollock to Bertolt Brecht—to demonstrate their commitments to freedom. And I argue that today, with democracy on the line, rebellious outsider-art might again prove a surprisingly effective force around the globe.

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Melanie Mariño

Borderlands

This paper will explore the question of physical insecurity through the structuring tension between visibility and invisibility in the recent projects of Ann Hamilton. Shadowing the claims of security over liberty that organize current legal, ethical, and political debates on national states of emergency, this project will consider the ways that Hamilton’s projects rescind these antinomies to perform the place of vulnerability. I will reframe that space as a borderland, following Saskia Sassen’s geographic formulation of global discontinuities as a terrain rather than a punctual dividing line. Hamilton’s work, as I will argue, does not picture so much as perform those thresholds by seeking the edge where one sense becomes another (as in face to face, where the mouth becomes an eye through the placement of a pinhole camera in a cavity associated with the production of speech rather than vision) or where corporeal function bleeds into architectural membrane to produce an invisible history that questions the representation of nation and empire in an international context. For example, as the American representative to the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, Hamilton created a site-specific installation, myein, which liquefied the American pavilion’s Neo-Classical architecture of liberal democracy through the installation of a ninety-foot glass wall in front of the building. Inside, Hamilton’s voice filled the rooms with a reading of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in phonetic code, while the walls, lined with a Braille translation of Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony: The United States 1885–1915, were exposed by fuschia powder that rolled off the text through the room’s perimeters. If myein’s etymology alludes both to near-sightedness and dumbness, this work renders visible those things that are unspoken within history, specifically, the constitution of American democracy in slavery. That information, however, is not presented directly, but accessed through a multiple sensorial experience that bespeaks the plurality of the singular. In this paper, I will probe the implications of that paradoxical singular for the visual representation of the body politic. How might we see and read the borderlands that persistently haunt and dislocate public memory? How might such sites of insecurity reframe the problem of autonomy?

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John E. McGrath

I Love the Smell of Data in the Morning

In my book Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space, I suggested that our response to constant capture should be to generate multiple selves, new codes, hybrid bodies, appearing and disappearing in surveillance space.   In this paper I will explore the subversive role of sensuality, location and the group in the new spaces of digital performance. 

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Lisa Parks

Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening

In this essay I discuss the formation of the Transportation Security Agency in the US and the transitioning of private sector airport screeners into federal employees. The project moves between analyses of federal legislation, agency reports, trade publications, screening simulations, and onsite observations to delineate the new culture and economy of airport screening. I use the term "points of departure" to refer to the thresholds or carefully monitored corridors where the state, the airlines, workers, audiovisual technologies, and travelers converge to reproduce a set of protocols designed to ensure what the TSA describes as "freedom of movement." The essay details the labor of airport screening, delineates the model of citizenship constructed by the TSA, and describes new regimes of scrutiny and inspection.

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Gregory Sholette

Interventionist Art in the Age of Enterprise Culture

Many key assumptions held by an earlier generation of politically engaged artists and activists about what oppositional culture is and what it is not, are being challenged today by a new wave of interventionist practitioners who are less concerned with demystifying ideology than with 'creatively disrupting' it. Unlike most of the critical art practices of the 1970s and1980s in which dominant representational forms were systematically analyzed through a variety of methods ranging from Semiotics to Marxism to Psychoanalysis, the new approach plows directly, some would say even gleefully, into what Guy Debord described as the Society of the Spectacle. Groups such as RTmark, The Yes Men, Yomango, and the Critical Art Ensemble take full advantage of increasingly widespread and affordable digital technologies in order to practice what they call Tactical Media, a concept inspired as much by the Zapatista rebellion as it is by the Situationists. What is unique to these more recent, antagonistic practices is the way they mobilize flexible organizational structures, communicative networks, and economies of giving in order to produce a critical disruption of everyday life.  At the same time, the new interventionist art reveals some definite similarities to the entrepreneurial spirit of the neo-liberal economy, including a highly plastic sense of collective identity, and a romantic distrust of comprehensive administrative structures. In the late 1970s Adorno cautioned that culture was becoming increasingly similar to the realm of administration. Ironically, in the 1990s it was the world of administration that moved closer to that of culture as private business interests extolled the non-linear thinking and flexible working habits of creative laborers. The aim of this presentation is to trace the effects of neo-liberalization upon politically committed artists in the United States by focusing on the shift from a post-war culture of administration to that of a post cold-war culture entrepreneurship. It concludes by asking what type of critical, artistic response is possible under the conditions of the new, homeland security state apparatus that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 2001?

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Agnese Trocchi

A NET BEYOND: Visual Media and Communication Technologies in the Next World

In the last ten years we have witnessed a process of diffusion of communication technology along with greater access to media tools. A proliferation of camcorders in the hands of people multiplies points of view on reality and allows the narration of other stories.

At the same time the new frontiers of streaming media and sharing technologies unleash the viewer from time/contents obligations: the viewer is free to watch almost everything in every moment; she is no longer caged by the choices of the broadcasters, and instead owns the tools of production.  These are the premises to actualize a society where every singularity has the chance to express and share its own visions; a society where the meeting of manifold perspectives on the world may change the perception of the world itself.  But tools alone won't make the difference.  Focused strategies and efforts are needed towards a new world.

In this paper I will explore the experiences of several communities and their strategies of sharing and decentralizing, especially in the field of visual media: from the audiovisual alphabetization to the creation of small pirate terrestrial TV stations; from P2P TV Chinese software to decentralized networks of resistant communication.

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Marianne Weems

SUPER VISION: dataveillance and crossmedia performance

Marianne Weems, director of the New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders Association, will discuss and show video excerpts from the company's most recent production, SUPER VISION, a crossmedia performance about dataveillance.

SUPER VISION explores the changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information is constantly collected and distributed. Our data bodies carry stains that are harder to clean than mud or sin; from birth certificates to bad credit, every moment of activity contributes to the construction of one's own data body. These bodies, separate from our physical bodies and infinitely more accessible, exist in the datasphere which, because it is inherently more complex than the visual, remains mostly invisible. SUPER VISION seeks to make that space visible. It poses a multi-faceted, multi-layered narrative using the language and technologies of surveillance itself.

SUPER VISION is a collaboration between The Builders Association (www.thebuildersassociation.org), a company which exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater, and dbox (www.dbox.com), a multidisciplinary studio whose work explores the intersection of visual arts and architecture through 3D digital media.

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Faith Wilding

The New Gold Standard: SmartMoms and Immortal Cells 

In the past few years, human embryonic stem (hES) cell lines have become the “gold standard” of biotechnology. hES cells are derived from female tissues such as eggs, embryos, placentas, umbilical cord blood and fetuses which have become immensely valuable in local-global biopolitical commodity flows. These flows represent networked international relations of bodies and information based on genetic engineering and reproductive (cloning) biotechnologies. With the rapid advances in repro-genetic technologies, it seems that the tools are at hand to fully utilize women’s bodies in the pioneering project of genetically engineered and human-assisted biological evolution of new species of cyborgian and transgenic organisms. Control of women’s bodies via repro-genetic technologies and telepresent medical monitoring and surveillance is crucial for a global flesh commodities market of female body tissues This paper discusses the marriage of biological research and digital information technologies that produce new ways of “making” and “performing” social, intellectual, and political bodies, and impose new concepts of paternity, maternity, and ownership (through intellectual property agreements) of the bodies and cells of individual women. The presentation will include examples from subRosa projects Smart Mom, and Cell Track: The Appropriation of Life Materials.

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Mark Williams

Closely Belated?  Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report

In my paper, I will consider issues of citizenship, temporality, and media culture via an address to particular configurations of the techno-future in the film *Minority Report* (Spielberg, 2003).  My analysis deploys methods and terms from television studies to help unpack the film's engagement of the digital dispositif, focusing on configurations of what I call "real-time" and PVR desire, especially in relation to configurations of personal and political trauma.

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