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Abstract
My thesis Everyday Practical Magic brings together my research in social media,
experience design, and anthropology, with my experience as a maker of material objects
and hence, a facilitator of intimate exchanges between people, objects and the media.
Through the work of Donna Haraway and Clay Shirky I outline the conditions of our
political identity as cyborgs. I highlight the tremendous impact networked cultures
(mobile and internet) have had on our understanding of social ritual. I describe three
projects completed over the last four years that laid the groundwork for this paper and
my thesis exhibit. Using Wittgensteins writings on meaning and use in his Philosophical
Investigations, I point to the political power of language in shaping cultural
understanding of different kinds of economies. I illustrate the work of two other like
minded collectives; Superflex and The Center for Tactical Magic, and clarify what
happens when artmaking, cultural activism, and communication technologies collide.
Through Henry Jenkins work on Participatory Culture, I elucidate the hybridity of social
media and art and describe the difference between interaction and participation.
I rely on Jerry Saltz review ofThe Generational: Younger than Jesus to explain my and
other millennial artists work as evidencing a trend towards anthropology, sociology and
ethnography. Then I summarize the simplistic process, yet complicated context of the
work I created for the Practical Everyday Objects exhibit. Finally, I point out that artitself
is a social media that emerged through use, and I discuss the power of creative agency to
shape the world around us.
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Intimacy is a universal desire. We are destined to pursue close personal physical
relationships with other people and things. While the means for achieving such intimacy
vary from culture to culture, this basic need finds fulfillment in every society. Within our
own hightech culture the opportunities for intimate, personal encounters are becoming
rarer as mediated experience supplant direct contact and public and private realmsincreasingly converge. The function of objects at the turn of the millennium should be
assessed against the backdrop of this growing depersonalization and blur of modern life.
(Ramljak 186)
Jumpropes
Color Photograph. Paige Saez 2008.
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Section 1.0 Introduction (Our Machines are Disturbingly Lively)
My work explores the politics of identity and our cyborg existence in presentday
culture. I am interested in hybrid objects, communities, and theories that emerge when
artmaking, cultural activism, and the subversion of communication technologies collide,
particularly in what we call hacking. Over the past 20 years, one of the most powerful
engines of transformation has been the internet. The internet has proved to be fertile
ground for projects that raise awareness, question authority, and inspire social cohesion.
We are a wholly changed culture. A networked culture. Donna Haraway states inA
Cyborg Manifesto that, Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly
ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, selfdeveloping
and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms
and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert
(Haraway 4). I interpret this to mean that we have trouble differentiating between the
machine and experience of machination.
Relational Aesthetics, Culture Jamming and Hacktivism (the fusion of hacking and
activism) have all helped provoke cultural and political change. With continuing velocity,
our age's technologies of social networks are evolving, and evolving us. Clay Shirky
remarks in his bookHere Comes Everybody, that Human beings are social creaturesnot
occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it
shows up in every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect (Shirky 14).
Now that there are multiple loose and tangential connections between people, what does
it mean to be connected to someone at all? Friendship occurs with the click of a button,
and community structures itself around branded experiences. When we take a closer
look at the glue that keeps our social networks from falling apart, what do we find? We
find that the stuff that aligns us to each other often is just another socially constructed
experience. Online social networking and mobile communication technologies are
changing traditional ritualized social experiences. Shirky states, When we change the
way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and
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maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life (Shirky 14). We live in a
hypermediated consumer culture. We have commodified the social.
Section 1.1Social Capital, Demystifying Technology
In art, as a response to this, we see evidence of the trend towards anthropology,
sociology and ethnography. No longer are we discussing the merits of an examplary art
(social practice, relational aesthetics) we are now diving into evidencing sincere
explorations. Much work has been put forward describing obscure economic and
utopian ideals, such as the concept of Social capital1. The concept of social capital has
arisen against a backdrop of an apparent fraying of the social fabric brought on by the
adoption and use of technologies such as the mobile phone and the internet. Personally, I
dont see technology as a negative cultural agent. In fact, Id like it if we stopped treating
new technologies as if they were special at all. I would argue that our social fabric isnt
fraying at all, but rather its reweaving in new patterns.
An example of the demystification of technology, Wired Magazine sums this up in 2004
when they decided to stop calling the series of tubes the Internet and began to call it the
internet. Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the I in
internet... In the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary
to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving
information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more
so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television. This should not be
interpreted as some kind of symbolic demotion. Think of it more as a stylistic reality
check (Long). Demystifying technology gives us access, power, and intimacy. To do this,
we must play with it, hack it, evolve it, and break it.
1 Social capital is a concept developed in sociology and also used in business, economics, organizational behavior,
political science, public health and natural resources management that refers to connections within and between social
networks as well as connections among individuals. Though there are a variety of related definitions, which have been
described as something of a cure-all for the problems of modern society, they tend to share the core idea that social
networks have value. (Social Capital. Wikipedia, 28 Apr. 2009 )
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Section 1.2 Three Studies in Practical Magic
Little Cities: Atlanta, Georgia
Cardboard, paint, glue, and imagination. Paige Saez 2007.
Little Cities: ParticipationThe Little Cities were small, organized building parties for the construction of adhoc
dream houses. Groups of people around the country would meet and build homes out of
cardboard, colored paper, glue and paint, and as a group homestead the houses
somewhere in the city. Created from salvaged cardboard from dumpsters, the parties
constructed a social environment for group work. Over the course of two years I worked
with different groups around the country building these dream houses. Little Cities were
set in place to try to investigate complicated questions through simplistic actions. When
we built the houses together, we talked about the meaning of home and place, and
together we pulled apart fantasies of community.
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M83, Corner of Shaver and N. Williams Ave. Portland, Oregon
Book. Paige Saez 2008.
The Mixed Tapes: Communication
In the Spring of 2008, I created a book about psychogeography, physical hyperlinks and
digital/analog memory. I worked with QR Codes (Quick Read codes) one of many
consumerfacing 2D barcodes available for encoding URLs, phone numbers, or text into
an image that can be read with a camera phone and translated back into what was
originally written. The codes are Physical hyperlinks, or thinglinks. Physical hyperlink is
a neologism that refers to extending the internet to objects and locations in the real
world. Currently the internet does not extend beyond the electronic world. Physical
hyperlinking aims to extend the internet to the real world by attaching tags with URLs to
tangible objects or locations. The tags are read by a wireless mobile device and
information about the objects and their location are retrieved and displayed on the
device.
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Using the codes I created a visual mix tape of experiences that had occurred in my life.
The term mixed tape is now understood to be a metaphor to denote any collection of
songs, or any collection of curated elements in a set. The original mix tape carried a
temporal and physical weight that current digital mix tapes do not convey. As we
transition back and forth between analog and digital, our music and our memories are
moving to devicedrives, cloud servers, and other seemingly obtuse, yet convenient
forms of safekeeping. What we lose in materiality we make up with ubiquity and a
seamless permanence that only digital reproduction offers.
My memories were intertwined with the cassette tapes both in music and object. For
me the simple act of holding a particular tape triggers memories of people, places and
who I used to be. I fear the loss of the emotional space these physical objects possess. By
creating a physical manifestation of my digital memory I reinterpreted what initially
appeared to be a loss of objecthood and therefore a loss of me.
Makerlab Sunday Skillshare
Color Photograph. Paige Saez 2009.
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The Makerlab: Connectivity
In 2007 I cofounded the Makerlab with Anselm Hook. The Makerlab is an arts and
technology incubator focused on civic and environmental interactive projects. We
founded the Makerlab for two reasons; one, as a way to reapproach making objects and
two, as a means of pedagogical praxis. To date the collaborative has produced two open
source mobile applications focused on evidencing and facilitating local communities;
Citybot listens to online social networks to help create a grassroots brokerage similar to
Craigslistin order to helps neighbors connect Wants with Needs. The Imagewiki, a
mobile imagerecognition tool, uses physical hyperlinks to create thinglinks, pictures
that link to physical objects in the real world. We created these projects to explore
surveillance, privacy, and culture jamming and agency in the mobile/digital realm. The
Makerlab hosts a weekly event called Sunday SkillShares. Bringing artists,
programmers, activists, and designers together for potlucks and group projects. The
point of the SkillShares is to facilitate an open Freeskool styled environment.
Section 1.3 Conclusions
In my past work I noted there were three themes that constantly reoccurred. I
expressed a constant desire to facilitate intimacy. I play at deconstructing the objects I
express intimacy with, and the role those objects play in helping sustain community. And
I see a tension in my position as an artist with respect to the former; I see myself as
slightly removed from community with a dynamic tension and longing in relation to
it but still needing to bring a critical faculty to bear on it. All of these projects explore
different aspects of social currency.
Section 2.0 What Makes Things Special?
A shuffling, silent old man lived there alone, never appearing to receive any visitors or family,
whom I only saw outside the house twice the entire time I lived there. On one occasion I watched
him replace with exquisite slowness a white plastic bucket that had been standing on a tree stump
in the yard, which I had removed to the edge of the house considering that it generally upset my
view and didn't seem to serve any purpose whatsoever, but evidently it had a purpose I couldn't
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discern, or else the old man was dearly accustomed to observing it on the stump, so I let it be after
that.
Mystical Ritz, Nathan Stueve 2007
Making Imaginary Machines
Color Photograph. Paige Saez 2009.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene RochbergHalton study what makes things special.
In their bookThe Meaning of Things, the authors researched why people are attached to
material things in the first place. The authors drew from a survey they conducted of
eighty families in Chicago interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common
household objects. In particular, they asked each person to show them the things that
they considered special and then over a series of interviews, they explored what about
the objects made them distinctive in the first place. Special objects all had one thing in
common they were connected with specific memories and associations that helped
evoke a special feeling in their owners. These particular objects held narratives within
them, and because of this they transcended their materiality. Though the object was
valuable, seldom was the focus on the materiality of the object alone. What mattered was
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the story behind the object, an occasion recalled. A crystal vase gifted from a relative
could have as much influence as a chipped coffee mug found at a thrift store if the
memory and the sentiment were on par with one another. Our attachment is not just to
the object; it is the relationship to meaning that the object represents.
Section 2.1 Our Time, A Mythic Time
Thirty years after Csikszentmihalyi & RochbergHaltons research we find ourselves in
an environment suffused with an even more evolved landscape of the object. Now our
objects have meaning and powers above and beyond our traditional understanding.
Here we find a need to scrutinize our remediation of objecthood altogether, especially
when we talk about experiential objects, such as computers, cell phones and other
technosocial devices. The situation we are facing is the radical reinterpretation of the
mediasphere (in mediology this is the study of media systems and media as a system).
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,
theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image
of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any
possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and
politicsthe tradition of racist, maledominant capitalism; the tradition of progress;
the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions ofculture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other
the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in
the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and
imagination. Thisis an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and
for responsibility in their construction (Haraway 2).
The internet and mobile communication devices are remediating2 our relationship to
traditional media, and as a consequence, the conversations we have around mediated
experiences. Today, we have increasing agency over our relationship with media, and we
are reshaping the mediasphere. We use the emerging system of Media Objects3 to
2"Remediation" is defined by Paul Levenson as the anthropotropic process bywhich new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies.
3 Cell phones, televisions, movie cameras, personal computers, gadgets, gizmos, devices, FacebookZombie Pokesthese
are all social objects as used to carry meaning and intimacy they are the fabric of community.
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reshape our relationship to media. Objects that are the most intimate and direct are
those that we construct our society with. Hence the popularity of homemade crafts and
art. What matters is the history of interaction, the memories built into the objects, and
the time and effort that the objects evoke.
A Wearable Computer for My Friend Gary
Color Photograph. 2008.
Baudrillard states that man has a profound resistance to imposing rationality upon the
purely arbitrary goals of his needs. This may well constitute a fatal turn for the modus
existendi of the object, as indeed of society as a whole. Once a certain point in technical
development has been reached, and hence primary needs have been satisfied, we may
well demand a phantasied, allegorical and subconscious edibility of the object as much
as, or even more that, an actual functionality(Baudrillard 128). I understand this to
The reason that we want objects to hold our intimacy is because they ambiently signal us to other people. Ambient
signaling is a form of communication, background awareness. When we are not around someone can hold onto our
piece of us via the object and they are reassured and reminded by this. That is what the object provides us. It has
permanence that persists beyond the boundary of our own materiality or our presence. When we talk about agency in
an object this is where embodied agency exists.
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mean that the utility of the object is subordinate to the agency of the object in a post
scarcity economy. We align ourselves with our things in a fashion that is supposed to
reflect us. Our objects have a reflexive place in our worlds, they are there to reinforce,
continue and sustain a personal ideology or sense of self. But we have come to a place
where we are demanding more from our objects to tell us stories about ourselves.
Instead, we create objects of fantasy, we demand their function to be allegorical and
mythological.
Guy Debord noticed this trend earlier than many when he wrote about the poetic and
emotional experience we have with objects in the world. Let us say that we have to
multiply poetic objects and subjects (unfortunately so rare at present that the most
trifling of them assumes an exaggerated emotional importance) and that we have to
organize games of these poetic subjects among these poetic objects. There is our entire
programme, which is essentially ephemeral. Our situations will be without a future: they
will be places where people are constantly coming and going (Debord 99).
Section 2.2Art, Craft and Hack
To draw attention to a changing language to morphing words, semiotic chimeras I
want to point out the similarities between art, craft, and hacking since they are all
different ways to describe making that have different political meanings. Art, craft, and
hack are nouns and verbs that (respectively) morph, shift and grow. Why would we have
created political divisions about making things in the first place? All describe the potency
of transformative actions that attest to the malleability of the world. Knowing that in
reality, all things, and all understanding is first built. An example of this kind of
transgression is the premise behind the movie The Matrix. In the movie, the protagonist,
Neo, realizes that the world is an elaborate, architected computer application and thateverything around him can be dismantled as a series of separate programs. When this
happens, he suddenly acquires the powers of a god. In this unveiling there is
understanding; a realization of the structure, the framework of the object, thesis, social
dynamic. Put really simply, if I know how to build a cell phone how to actually create
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the device I am learning how to build more than just a cell phone. I am learning to
understand the built environment. Nothing can expose the hypocrisy behind a thing
more than the breakdown and creation of the thing itself. Implicit in the semantics of art,
craft, and hacking is the process of learning through making or praxis. Knowing through
process, through making, through hacking is transgressive.
Wittgenstein argues that meaning emerges through use. Section Fortythree of
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations states: For a large class of cases though not
for all in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a
word is its use in the language (Wittgenstein 23). It all comes down to an exchange. Call
it an economy if you want, it is still founded on exchange. Having something to exchange,
having something to offer to one another. The exchange itself is the most important thing
not the kind of exchange but that there was an exchange and that we work towards
having something to exchange with one another. It is clear that Wittgenstein is not
offering the general theory that meaning is use as he is sometimes interpreted as doing.
The specificity is in the word emerges.
Section 2.2 Personal Artistic History
I rely on an aesthetic of bricolage, a term used in several disciplines, among them the
visual arts and literature, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a
diverse range of things that happen to be available. Borrowed from the French verb
bricoler the core meaning in French is to fiddle, tinker and, by extension, make
creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand regardless of their
original purpose. Mine is an aesthetic of the combination/ juxtaposition of materials,
practices and systems.
The word bricolage has more than just aesthetic connotations. In cultural studies
bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across
social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of
subcultures, a practice of repurposing and culture jamming. In culture jamming, objects
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that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and
given a new, often subversive meaning. Since my current research centers on structures
of participation in the production of knowledge and the distribution of information
outside of capitalism, and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of
emerging technologies I find the aesthetics and politics of bricolage fit well. Bricolage is
essentially crafting new cultures, new identities for objects. Within the adoption of a
bricolage aesthetic we find the elevation of craft. Elevating the notion of craft within and
around a postdigital culture is a challenge to both the process and context of craft itself.
Indeed, craft practitioners cannot presume that there is relevance for craft objects and
craft processes in a world where digital technologies and associated objects are
increasingly prominent in public and private lives.
Traditional objects tended to bear witness to our presence. Being static symbols of
our bodily organs, but technical objects hold a different kind of fascination in that
they evoke a virtual energy and are thus less receptacles of our presence than
vehicles of our dynamic self image (Baudrillard 117).
As Jerry Saltz stated in the New York Magazine articleJesus Saves, his review ofThe
Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, Sociology is the new black. I take
it by this he means, 'what do we (as artists) have left to rip apart in the world other than
ourselves, our culture?' Saltz outlines the premise of the show, All the artists here were
born after 1976' (and are therefore under 33, Christs age at his death). The millennial
generation. Being thirtyone I identify with the artists in the exhibit. He says, None of
these artists is trying to advance the teleological ball or invent new forms. Theyre
investigating the whole world, not just the art world. Their work is less about how we
affect time and people than about how time and people affect us (Saltz).
Saltz accurately describes my and other millennial artists outlook on their work when
he states, They simultaneously occupy conflicting positions, are more sincere than ironic
but ironic nevertheless, and see the world, not just art, as a living specimen. Better yet,
they do this by violating the idiotic academic proscriptions against visual pleasure. (The
theory folks disdain pleasure in art, all the while embracing it in their lives.) Their work
has what theorist Gayatri Spivak called radical vulnerability and is an attempt to
explore the substrata of knowledge and experience' (Saltz).
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Section 3.0Superflex, The Center for Tactical Magic and Participatory Culture
I look at my current work as tool building. Considered an invitation rather than
representation, the tools call for a participation and continuation. On the subject of tool
building as an artistic practice, the collective Superflexremarks,
The tools represent models that are being used by different persons or groups.
They are not 'alternatives' but are continuations and show real behavior patterns.
The tools are based on a specific interest in social and economic commitment. The
starting point for creating a tool is a belief in a heterogeneous, complex society. The
setup is developed in cooperation with diverse experts who, in turn, add their own
specific interests. It can then be taken over and put into operation by various users.
The tools invite people to do something: to become activeTaken in this sense,
artistic praxis means a concrete cultural intervention that mediates between
different interests or at least, makes them visible. In our tools we attempt to create
conditions for the production of new ways of thinking, acting, speaking and
imagining. (Superflex, greenmuseum.org )
Superflexs work embodies Participatory Cultures ethics and The Personal is Political
thesis put forward by the feminist movement of the 1970s. My work aligns itself with
Superflex, both are about pedagogical experiences in making tools, making culture and
participating with the media, the output being a new kind of object, a radically different
relationship.
Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture
in other words a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as
consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most
often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media but I am
using the term to apply across all media experiences, including media objects. Blogs that
feature relevant news stories when mainstream media do not are one of many examples
of prosumer, or participatory culture. Wikipedia is another example of a collaborative
resource that exists solely on the work of dedicated volunteers. Increased access to the
internet has played an integral part in participatory cultures expansion, increasingly
enabling people to work collaboratively; to generate and disseminate news, ideas, and
creative work. Most important of these things is the opportunity for people who share
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interests to connect with each other. Across all media, participatory culture becomes the
platform for civic engagement and creative expression (Jenkins 2).
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on the subject of new
media, communications, and education. He outlines the basic tenants of participatory
culture in his whitepaper on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century4
For the moment, lets define participatory culture as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing ones creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most
experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least
they care what other people think about what they have created).
The Center for Tactical Magic is a Bay Area collective founded in 2000. They engage in
research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical
Magic. 'A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and
the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the
purpose of actively addressing power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts
(Center for Tactical Magic). On their website they state that they are committed to
4 Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what theycontribute will be appropriately valued. In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still otherswill master the skills that are most valued within the community. The community itself, however, provides strongincentives for creative expression and active participation. Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes
because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable onits own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if mostwill never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth thinkabout themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others. Participatory culture shifts the focus ofliteracy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve socialskills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy,research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom (Jenkins 4-5).
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achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through communitybased projects, daily
interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation.
Known for their quirky, funny and politically charged projects The Center for Tactical
Magic is actively creating social, political work that engages audiences in pedagogical
situations that evidence power dynamics in consumer culture. And their methodologies
and practices also fit the format of participatory culture.
The Tactical Ice Cream UnitFrosty Treats & Food for Thought!
Ice Cream Truck. Center for Tactical Magic 20082009
Referencing a number of activist strategies (Food-Not-Bombs, Copwatch, Indymedia,
infoshops, etc.) the Tactical Ice Cream Unitis the Voltronlike alter ego of the copss
mobile command center (Center for Tactical Magic). Incorporating a strategy of utopian
potlatch, the Tactical Ice Cream Unitwas envisioned primarily as a mobile distribution
center for free ice cream and information produced by local community groups. As
befitting an ice cream truck, this mobile mediadisruption unit appears to be a common
vending vehicle, though it hosts a slew of hightech surveillance devices, including a 12
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camera video surveillance system, GPS with satellite internet, and a media center
capable of disseminating live audio/video. From the Center of Tactical Magics website
we discover that The TICUs surveillance suite offers up grassroots access to mobile
communications technologies that are open and free to use. From the production of
independent community news or the monitoring of corporate dumping or police activity,
the TICUattempts to investigate the limits of neutral technologies (The Center for
Tactical Magic). The TICUis an example of a tool for participatory culture.
Section 3.1 Practical Everyday Magic
Practical Everyday Magic is an exhibit comprised of various attempts at agency in an age
of mediated social interaction; at the juxtaposition between old media and new; the era
of the prosumer. These objects are simplistic in nature but complicated in what they
catalyze. They exist to spark conversation about networked cultures of social media. To
question the variety of economies that the last 10 years discussions on social media, the
internet, and the last 20 years of critique of relational aesthetics have provided us with
resources and evidence for. They provoke dialogues that reference social currency,
friendship, exchange, usevalue and the role of the object in mainstream media.
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Call me at 9712274384. We can talk about it.
Handmade Quilt. Paige Saez 2009.
The Quilts
A conversation I overheard walking home one day became the first quilt I made after adecade of talking about making quilts. 'Spend money with me' was the phrase that
caught my ear as I walked past two homeless men sitting on the sidewalk, a pleading
statement in the midst of some argument. The quilt that was made was a funny colored
thing made of old sheets, it seemed the perfect embodiment of a sentiment and
materiality, a translation of the personal to the private. The second quilt I made had my
phonenumber pieced into it in satin. The addition of the phone number doubles the
layers of intimacy worked into the quilt. Stitching my phone number onto a quilt makes
the connection between the owner of the quilt and me public open for use, or misuse.
But it feels private because the phone feels like a part of me. Because I carry my phone
with me wherever I go, because its with me when I sleep, the number written on this
quilt feels like my very identity has been etched into history.
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There are four quilts total in this exhibit, all of them gesture to sentiment, to intimacy.
The skewed hems and the wrinkled fabrics are not deficits in the fabrication of the quilts,
they are entry points into the work. A network is being built. The quilts are the
outsourced memory of the experience of making; a VPN or Virtual Private Network to
use the language of networked communications.
Parade (The Yarn)
Parade was begun about four years ago, dismantling and repurposing prior personalized
objects. Twenty afghans were purchased and unwound over the course of two months
by various female friends and coworkers at the homeless shelter where I work.
Analogous to knitting circles, my friends and I would sit over coffee and unwind the
afghans one by one. Sorted by color and then recombined into one long rope, the
unwinding of the afghans became a part of my daily social life, much as they would have
been for the women who created and then gifted them to family and friends. When
unwound and compiled the yarn stretched over 17 feet and took four people to lift.
Parade pays homage to the hours upon hours of work that went into the making and
then unmaking of these blankets.
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Also, I Made You A Wearable Computer
Twenty Cotton Tshirts. Paige Saez 2009.
Also, I Made You a Wearable Computer, Twenty Folded T-shirts
The wearable computer tshirts again came from the struggle to discuss the concept of a
cyborg. I decided that the fastest way I could have the conversation I wanted to have
with the audience would be to create an experience that had nothing to do with a
wearable computer, but still, somehow did. The tshirts are humorous and
straightforward. Subverting the concept of 'wearable,' with the generic slogan Tshirt
the equivalent of a modern day uniform fit the level of irony and selfconsciousness I
was drawing attention to in the first place. I routinely give the shirts away to people I
meet. Hopefully they will end up sparking dialogue about our symbiotic (parasitic?)
relationship with technology and fashion.
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Prototype Necklaces for Friends and Lovers
Accelorometers, Bluetooth, Microprocessors, Tin foil and Luck. Paige Saez and Donald Delmar Davis
2009.
The Necklaces: Jewelry as Computers
Exploring the boundaries of identity and agency with our media objects I decided toprototype a wearable computer. I asked myself the question, 'if artists designed
wearable computers what would they look like?' I read volumes of papers on the subject
of fashioning technology, wearable computing and identity politics. I had a hard time
explaining my emotional attachment to my cell phone, to my laptop these magical
connectivity devices are clunky and void of personality. They were not poetically
constructed. In addition to this I saw my attachment to decoration, beauty and
adornment as a social activity a means of signification. In notes to myself I would write
about the relationship between adornment and consumption, 'I adorn to identify, I losemy identity in the adornment I sublimate my identity through adornment and
fashion I reach a point where the things I adorn myself with feeling, I feel more me
than me. I am lost without my identifying things. I fear the loss of my identity. I am
consumed by this, and I am the consumer of this.
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The prototype is a fantasy object exploring the intimate spaces created between lovers.
The necklaces respond to touch. The sense of touch and being touched is perceived and
received, no more than this. When a person touches one necklace it causes the other one
to vibrate gently. The lovers can communicate with each other in this fashion privately,
reassuring one another of their presence in public space. The necklaces are ornamental
teleology.
Section 3.2 We Kiss, and Shake Hands
With these projects I question social objects and interaction, wonder at their relevance,
but note the excitement and potential of networked culture. Objects are personally
meaningful for us in our daily lives, in an emotional context. As objects materially and
technologically change, the expression of identity that they contributefragments. What
we make of the world in our minds is through our senses. Of all the senses, touch is most
linked to emotion and feeling. Our sense of touch is constantly altered via the perception
of our own bodily state as we take in what is outside of that state. Tactile perception that
we experience gives us an extended sense of living and acting in space. Touch cues are
used through out our lives to show emotion in settings of childcare, courtship and to
establish rapport. For example, we hug to console one another, we kiss and shake hands
in greeting. The work is an anthem of activity, of small social networks of nucleic power.
Art as functional experience; not just commodity, or consumable experience.
Section 3.3 Conclusion; Art Means What it Affects
As artist and designers, as makers, we actively create and reflect on the understanding of
public and private space. As people we are all born empowered to create, and through
this creation we communicate, through this communication we become a community,
these communities act like networks. The Canadian poet Lisa Robertson wrote,
This word community is a common currency right now...communitys presence or
absence, failure, responsibility, supportiveness, etceveryone is hovering around
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this wordHow much of this notion of community is an abstraction of the real
texture of friendship, with all its complicated drives and expressionserotic,
conversational, culinary, all the bodily cultures concentrated in a twisty relation
between finite, failing persons (Robertson).
The challenge in making (and exhibiting) work around social interactions within media
cultures is the need to remember that it is a systempart network, part performance,
part object. This visual meaning and language of this work is not experienced only in the
display of the object, in exhibition. Rather, the work rhizomatically grows; changes in
meaning emerging through use. Through involvement and participation. The work
materializes as a daily practice; a living thing. I apply this practice as a kind of code
switching, hacking at the visual codes around me to navigate and negotiate meaning in
daily life. Breaking down the structure of the network Robertson states plainly thatcommunity is an abstraction of friendship that, in itself, is a building up of culture.
Robertson states,
When I try to think of what a friend is, I imagine these activities we pleasurably
share with someone we love...all these exchanges and interweavings that slowlytransform to become an idea and then a culture. Or a culture first, a culture of
friends, and then an idea. Or both simultaneouslymaybe friendship is more
dangerous to think about and talk about because of its corporal erotics, mostly not
institutionalized, not abstracted into an overarching concept and structure of
collective protocols. But I dont want to call this community. I want to preserve the
dark body of friendship.
Work about networks and social connectivity is never complete or finite; the life of an
object can extends past its use value for me only to become useful again for someone
else, and conversations between friends can affect us for years after they happen.
Networks are only as strong or as valuable as their ability to morph and evolve. This is
cybernetic evolution. Jenkins describes the cybernetic ecology of technologic/media
tools with the people that use them,
'Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to takean ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these
different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up
around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of
communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic
institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Jenkins 6).
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Jenkins describes how some tasks can be performed with a range of different
technologies, and how these same technologies can work towards different ends
entirely. Yet the associated activities only become important if the culture they exist
within supports them and if they fulfill a need already present. Basically, it matters what
tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with
those tools. To this end, Jenkins focuses his statements about media systems around
participation cultures instead of interactive technologies. Interactivity he feels is 'a
property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture.'
Handpainted Colorbars (TV Test Pattern Sequence)
Acrylic paint on a wall. Paige Saez and Rebecca Steele 2009.
Participatory culture emergedas the culture absorbed and responded to the explosion of
new media technologies this is what makes it possible for average consumers to
become creators (and hence participants) in archiving, annotating, appropriating, and
recirculating media content in powerful ways. 'A focus on expanding access to new
technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural
knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends' (Jenkins 6).
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Jenkins statements about participatory culture correlate directly to Saltzs reflections on
arts progressive gestures show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the
sublime; life, not art, has become so real that its almost unreal. Art is being reanimated
by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is
breaking free (Saltz). The evolution of the object, of agency (participation) with our
objects, is personal and transformative; it is ours to transform. There is something
powerful about the possessing the faculty to create, that it is political.
Media distribution platforms have radically shifted and a paradoxical situation has
emerged; on the one hand a small group of companies own the worlds media resources,
but on the other hand, the media forms they sell have put the development and
distribution of these resources into the hands of consumers.
We have shown that all media is social media, from craft, to design, to art, to hacking; all
things made are forms of social media. These are all technologies. Our participation and
consumption of media is changing. We are physically/ virtually sculpting personal
visions of mediation. Art is social media that emerged through use.
The exhibit consists of objects gesturing toward understanding the complexity of
contemporary social relationships, or not. There is no way to define the medium, or the
message as separate from one another anymore. We are located at an unusual place in
history; watching the slow death of traditional media, and over the last ten years,
experiencing the rise of participatory culture. My practice is based on the belief that we
are social animals, and that our relationship to objects is communicative, reciprocal, and
generative.
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