Carlos Llerena Aguirre. Filosofía, Sketchbook drawing in situ, 2022
LOCATING METHODOLOGIES WITH MARC HERBST & MICHELLE TERAN
Selected readings
On Being Human as Praxis. By Sylvia Wynter.
Katherine McKittrick, Editor. Duke University Press Durham. London. 2015
Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species?
By Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick
Sylvia Wynter is concerned about the figure of the human being and how he is tied to epistemological histories. She developed two concepts of men, one on Man 1, invented in the renaissance homo political. And Man2 appeared based on western bourgeoisie models of human beings, a homo economicus. This man 2one is better for Darwinism Malthusianism and macro-origins stories.
Wynter also sees a different man in contemporary developed biological and intellectually grown. This makes Man2 into a new humankind is this is studied by home economicus. In today’s world
Katherinne McKitrick sees a different man, contemporary developed in biological sciences. He underwrites our contemporary epistemological order and has been further developed.
Sylvia Wynter discusses the new man under homo politicus. Copernicus discoveries were possible during the renaissance with his new astronomy. He challenged religion, science and politics. making it possible for men to change further this man to change with the economic and political as well.
We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones
By Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. Pluto Press. 2021
Introduction by Mark Herbst. ZAD a zone to defend, in French confronted the French invaded nazis. Its located in Notre Dame das Landess in Brittany. We are nature defending itself, is a echo feminist book work by Isabelle and Jay. Herbst writes that the idea behind the book can be explained with a quote by Josefina Barry: “Art as a conspiracy of reason.” Therefore, art is able to make changes.
Isa and Jay founded it LABOFII utilizing the portal as a transformational portal.
The two authors left the city of London after living there for many years as academics researchers and activists. They moved to Brittney and they lost themselves in the Marshland. Isa never organized activist projects outside of London. In the city she was surrounded by groups, politics, events, and many people. In large cities it ‘s easy to work but in small towns it’s very hard to organize. She quotes that if in your CV you’re OK if you have gallery, live in large cities an exhibit between Berlin and New York. But if you are a local artists, and your bio says that you work in the Village where you have always lived all your life, getting to know humans as more than humans in your territory that you work in local life your career is fucked. All organized activism takes place with large groups to protest using, uniforms, artifacts and installations. When LABOFII was founded the authors printed a pamphlet that brought artist and activists together to co-design tools of disobedience. Artists would bring inspiration and poetics. and activities will bring courage and context.
This is a list of activist activities during those first years:
Distributing pirate maps to indicate the location of buried boats with bottles of rum. To provoque a mass rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station in Climate Camp in Kent.
The scandal from Tate Modern museum censorship of our workshop that dared to do more than ‘reflect’ on the relationship between art and activism, and instead acted against the museum’s fossil-fuel sponsors.
In the Kampnagel summer festival in Hamburg, we turned a stage into an assembly space to decide on the ethics of leaving the theater. We also injected ants that sabotage computers into the city’s fossil-fuel financing banks.
In the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, we transformed hundreds of abandoned bikes into tools of disobedience. This way protecting a public assembly of Indigenous and Global South climate justice activists from police violence.
In the The Climate Games we coordinated with 120 teams participating in Paris. We defied the State of Emergency and ban on demonstrations, with the slogan: We are not fighting for nature, we are nature defending itself.
These activist events were based on “direct action.” We weren’t begging, we were taking life back into our collective hands. it legitimizes their power. “Protest is begging the powers-that-be to dig a well”
In the years to follow ZAD fought with French authorities to stop the construction of an international airport in Brittany. Through their occupation and demonstrations of activism they stop the construction of the airport.
I found an interesting PODCAST of this book here:
Andreas Petrossiants discusses We Are “Nature” Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones (Pluto Press/Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 2021) with authors Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan. An excerpt from the book was published in e-flux journal issue 124.
“Since 2004, through the work of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, we have questioned how to radically transform and entangle art, activism, and everyday life amidst the horrors of the Capitalocene. A decade ago, we deserted our metropolitan London lives, rooting our art activism in a place that French politicians had declared “lost to the republic,” known by those who inhabited it as la ZAD (the “zone to defend”). On these four thousand acres of wetlands, turned into a messy but extraordinary canvas of commoning, an international airport project was defeated through disobedience and occupation. This is an extract from our latest book, where an art of life is populated by rebel farmers and salamanders, barricades and bakeries, riots and rituals.”
—Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan
Isabelle Fremeaux is an educator and action researcher. She was formerly Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College London.
Jay Jordan is an art activist and author, cofounder of Reclaim the Streets and the Clandestine Insurgent Clown Army.
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Princetown University Press, 2004
Friction- Anna Tsing.
Chapter I
Indonesia is an exciting exotic country but in the last years it has decayed and have much of a crisis. In 1986-1988 General Suharto was an abusive leader and he became a predator for Indonesia. After he resigned the rural areas revolted and were filled with violence and aggression. This book researches the events in the country throughout social projects, political events, local empowerment culture and diversity and global conversion. The topic of this book is “friction” Tsing’s research started in the mountains of south Kaliman there she saw timber environmental conversions and deforestation, separate villages of the elders and the environmental national activists. Tsing used testimonials and interviews in the realm of ethnographic fieldwork. She concentrated on zones of cultural friction as they became transient. This is not classical ethnographic research, but it adds depth into the discovery and investigation.
The southern mountains have a social forest landscape. People planted different trees and attracted bees, made gardens, planted rice and brought other wildlife for the community. But after the 90’s logging companies moved into the area and mining coal was also a problem, the plantation blooms, the small commerce. Tsing wanted to follow the 1980- 1990’s Indonesian activist movements.
Several people helped to write this book, kids, friends and professors. She finished several book chapters while in Princeton University and Stanford University.
The development of Indonesia was not helpful in preserving the mountains of Kaliman. During President Suharto, he brought slashing and burning of the woods, and the station killings violence. Prosperity is formed within friction and the level of activation that Tsing found in Kaliman was very low. The government started to bring logging and villages planted Palm oil, acacia plantations, rice farms. The crisis of 1997- 1998 affected all the mountains and the rest of the country. Many farmers lost their land because it burned. in the forest a lot of the rice farmland did not developed, it did not flower, there was also in the rice fields a rat invasion. Tsing also researched the study of smell in ritual.
A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a “clash” of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world.
She focuses on one particular “zone of awkward engagement” — the rainforests of Indonesia — where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others — all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.
Providing a portfolio of methods to study global interconnections, Tsing shows how curious and creative cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter, and how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.
She focuses on one particular “zone of awkward engagement” — the rainforests of Indonesia — where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others — all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.
Providing a portfolio of methods to study global interconnections, Tsing shows how curious and creative cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter, and how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.
Princeton University Press
The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society
Lucy Lippard, 1997
Chaper II
This chapter begins with Joe Carson who is a storyteller that talked in Appalachian eye “I am of, and from, a single place and most people don’t have the privilege . Her stories start with the Mundane around us, and and then she develops different kinds of stories. Lippard uses an example of another artist, a deaf photographer, Maggie Lee Sayre, In 1936 she took pictures in Kentucky with a box camera, and sign them “deaf Maggie”
We tend to map out quickly the environment around us. We do it instinctually in an indigenous society’s way. The “sense of place” that emerge from our senses in a form of regionalism. This “bioregionalism” according to Lippard it’s the way of looking at the world. She uses as an example, the work of Pedro Romero, El Torreon del Torreon, 1993. where the images around the tower are stones and freezes wth storytelling of old Spanish settlers and Native Americans. Regionalism is applied to painting and printmaking but maybe nowadays there is no regionalism anymore. Everybody comes from someplace and that affects their work.
Lippard ends the chapter with an example of the Brass Plant of Waterbury, 1979. A art and art history project created by Lombardi, Stackhouse in Connecticut. They organized the entire community in this old factory. They created a book, education classes and an exhibition space.
Lippard uses the work of Dan Higgins, who collects discarded photos from the 50s and 60s from pharmacies and made collages of all of them in Winooski, Vermont
The phrase, coined by Lippard, in this study refers to a sense of place that an individual can have about where she lives, or where he lived in his childhood. Lippard's work discusses a diverse array of topics including historic preservation, landscape photography, public art, and environmental pollution. The book's layout is unusual, encouraging readers to think locally, globally, and esthetically simultaneously. She is critical of the public art movement, and the lack of connection between the artists and the places their art is installed.
The New York Times calls the book a "wide-ranging survey"
“ETHICAL APPROVAL? BUT I’M AN ARTIST!” - DEMYSTIFYING RESEARCH ETHICS FOR ARTS-BASED RESEARCH WITH MARK ROUGHLEY
Required readings
Suzannah Biernoff, S. Medical Archives and Digital Culture,
Photographies, 5 (2), pp.179-202,
Taylor and Francis Group (2012)
This article describes the liaison between medicine and art. Ludmila Jordanova writes about an exhibit and a book; The Quick and the Dead, Artist and Anatomy. At the Hayward gallery in London, 1987. Artists have started to use these kinds of photographs to appropriate them and create new art works.
Biernoff researches first world war pictures and also in video games designed by Ken Levine. Hedesigned BioShock II. In this video game, genetic mutants called “splicers” and Tonks, are arch enemies who attack humans throughout the game.
In the Guillian archives at Queen Mary hospital. Patient’sphotographs were being exhibited everywhere; the photos appeared to be and mediated but any aesthetic concerns physically and psychologically were naked medical images for us. There was a a certain “frontier” because it confronted the curious viewer with a lunatic problematic nature of Specter and empathy to use several illustrations of pre-operation and after operations.
Susan Sontag’s work “Regarding the Pain of Others” she says that we have desensitized the suffering of others and this moral anesthesia is due to the proliferation of images showing appalling suffering:
No “we” should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain. (6)
Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience. (16)`
The problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs. (79)
Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand. (80)
Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. (91)
Susan Sontag says that photographs deepened the sense of reality.
N Joanna Burke’s book called “Dismembering the Male Men’s Bodies Britain and the Great Wa. She researches the wounded body of the suffering and the iconographic tradition of Christian art. in this publication there are images that confront us into a stigmatization and censorship of body injuries and disfigurement.
In an online discussion between project façade versus BioShock II, they describe the differences they have with themselves and show they view a world full of corpses. dead unmutilated citizens,
Suzannah Biernoff wonders if they are inspired in real life photographs in the studies of BioShock and other computer games. She studies if a person playing the games is a good person or a bad person, whether the person has good ethics, morals and good judgment.
In the studio of Francis Bacon, they discovered negatives, photos inbox that show the inside of human esophagus shows that they were used as inspiration for his paintings.
Allan Sekula referred to the photographic archive as a “‘clearing house’ of meaning” He was thinking of the photographic archive (as institution and aspiration) as surveillance, and social control.
At the end of the article the original question appears: What do we gain from looking at images like these, and what would constitute their proper (or improper) use?
Talking about photography and film, including clinical images discussed in this article, and images of humans suffering remains. If BioShock is unethical, it is because it violates a feeling that photographs of suffering humans, embody their subjects; and they carry a burden of care and empathy.
Abstract
When BioShock was released in 2007, reviewers praised the moral complexities of the narrative and the game’s dystopian vision of what Ayn Rand dubbed the “virtue of selfishness”. What critics overlooked was the extent to which the disturbingly realistic artwork and musical score relied on found images and sound, including a recording of distressed breathing from a physician’s website, and digitized First World War medical photographs of soldiers with facial injuries. This article examines the implications of these acts of appropriation from a range of critical perspectives including Susan Sontag’s commentary on the representation of suffering; recent literature on the ethics of computer games; and an online discussion forum in which players of BioShock discuss the moral “grey areas” of the game.
Dauphinée, Elizabeth (2007). The Politics of the Body in Pain: Reading the Ethics of Imagery. Security Dialogue, 38(2) ,pp.139–155.
Images of the body in pain are the primary medium through which
we come to know war, torture and other pain-producing activities.
The Cartesian paradigm of subjectivity suggests that pain is an interior
event that can only be imperfectly expressed through language or
visuality. This creates a significant disjuncture between the body that
experiences pain and the one who observes this body through the
technologies of visual culture. The imperative to make pain visible is
driven by the desire to access the pain of the other; but, in the context
of the Cartesian subject, this access is simultaneously impossible. This
article explores the ethics of using such imagery for projects that seek
to resist or oppose war and torture, and suggests alternative ways of
understanding and responding to bodies in pain.
In a culture where is clear that to exhibit pain one must see the photograph.
There is an apparent disconnect between the ‘objective’ visual and the ‘subjective’ or the image of the body in pain. The body in pain is produced as a visual image. It becomes an icon of the pain or suffering of others. The Cartesian idea of the self and the other is relevant in exhibiting terror by posing visual images that describes the events.
Through an exploration of the images of prisoners’ bodies at Abu Ghraib in
2004, this article will argue that the inscription of pain through torture and
war has been followed by a fetishization of pain through the recirculation of
imagery.
This article will explore ethical consequences associated with the imaging of
Pain. Elaine Scarry (1985) argues that “to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about
another’s pain is to have doubt.”
This article researches the iconography of symbols that stand in for pain which becomes the representational alibis for actual pain: images of starvation, of concentration-camps, hooded prisoners, bleeding skins, blood-stained floors. At the end the questions remains the question of response and responsibility. “Political and ethical hopelessness” (Sontag)
The Ethics of Imaging Pain
Sliwinsky proposes that the elaboration of a photographic image with pain has a profound effect on the viewer, who must resolve, analyze and deduct the meaning and visual symbolics of pain.
Feldman (2005) studies the media manipulation of the tower’s destruction through video and film. With slow motion stp animation enlargement and close ups the video is re-edited into something else. Also, Abu Ghraib’s photos and images, of all the atrocities committed there become a testament of visual pain. It becomes a “pornography” of photos of terror.
Henry Giroux (2004) argues that photography should have an ethically and socio-politically representation, because they are involved in history. And to inhibit – suppress further abuse and pain.
In the case of Abu Ghraib all prisoners recalls the use of orography and film constant to film young men masturbating on top of each other naked or with a wire inside their ass. All instances were recorded by the guards equal to a porn movie.
Walter Shapiro (2006) of Salon.com comments that the decision to publish because a number of reasons. Most important, he argues, is the ‘haunting’ brutal, nature of the photographs. Susan Sontag (2004) echoes this notion of ‘haunting’ in her essay on Abu
Ghraib. Also Steven Winn (2004) in his article entitled ‘Photos That Will Haunt Us More Than Words Ever Could’. San Francisco Chronicle. Several authors use the images other decide against it for ethical reasons.
the hooded figure, a reminder of U.S. domination, has been appropriated by artistsand
protestors for antiwar demonstrations around the world: An Iraqi artist painted a mural
on a street in Baghdad based on the U.S. Statue of Liberty and the photograph of the
hooded detainee, highlighting the conjoining of executioner and victim. In Barcelona, on
the eve of the first anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs,
members of Amnesty International dressed in hoods and shackles staged a protest
against the mistreatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners by the U.S. military.
“Ludwig Wittgenstein (1992: 29–33) argues that the expression of pain is not an imperfect attempt to convey the interiority of one’s sentient state, but rather is part of the experience of pain itself.” This means that photographs or films that are about terror brutality or violence carry a feeling of total pain to the viewer. The interiority of the self comes out once the viewer experiences images of terror abuse and violence. Further in this article there is an interesting philosophical question: What is the difference between the one that inflicts pain? The one who experiences the pain? and the person who sees the photograph of pain?
In the conclusion Elizabeth Dauphinée points out the dilemma this photographs and films bring to us. In one hand we need to experience history, on another the pain is insurmountable. The questions of ethics bring the relevant concern of abusing twice the victims by exposing their shameful situations. And others experienced too m uch pain when viewing the pain photographs.
Kirkman, Maggie. (1999). I didn’t interview myself: The researcher as participant in narrative research.
Annual Review of Health Social Science, 9(1), pp.32-41.
I have attempted to justify participating in the research on theoretical, feminist, and ethical
grounds. The reflexivity entailed in participation was implicated in my choice of topic; my
insistence on the significance of individual autobiographical narratives; concern for my
influence on the conduct and analysis of the research; and awareness of the influence of my
public narrative on the participants in and readers of my research.
Maggie Kirkman
As a graduate student, Maggie Kirkman was not fertile and through complications, she had a hysterectomy. This article is the story behind the research she conducted with groups of women in similar situations to be able to help them and understand the issues. Conventional research on infertility tells the stories of patients using medicine, psychology and sociology. But personal meaning is lost here in this process. Caroline Steadman says that “personal interpretations of past time” make infertile patients are in conflict and they hide their stories within themselves. Maggie Kirkman decided to have her child with her sister using a procedure gestational surrogacy. When she was born feminist groups made negative comments about her procedure. She continued to use feminism theory in her research. The research was based in the context of narrative theory. The stories constructed by women were an auto biographical narrative and they had explicit intention. They constructed by explaining the past and plan or predict the future.
Implications of Narrative Theory for Research
Maggie Kirkman sets herself to investigate the narrative construction of self and
experience and it leads her to ask questions concerned with explanation and understanding rather than with prediction. She discovers four different ways to do theory of research including methods used by feminist theory:
1. The recognition of the individual person.
'Understanding individual lives or individual
stories is central to the research processes and
products of life history and narrative' (Hatch &
Wisniewski, 1995: 116).
2. The recognition of the subjective dimension of
lives and the importance of meaning.
Life story research 'aims to investigate the
subjective meaning of lives as they are told in the
narratives of participants' (Plummer, 1995: 50).
3. The recognition of the contribution of context
to meaning. The notion of context is multi-layered, including
the historical, cultural, and social context within
which a life has been lived, and in interaction with
which the narratives told about that life have been
constructed.
4. The recognition of the collaborative
construction of autobiographical narratives.
Culture, society, and other individuals collaborate
in the construction of personal accounts.
In conducting the actual research Kirkman found infertile patients willing to discuss their life experiences. She advertised herself as infertile, and as a result she attracted. many patients who were willing to share with her their life problems. Kirkman used several feminist authors with their methods. She did not get involved directly in the interviews but simply collected the information from them. In the article Kirkman details the several clusters of people interviewed from different places and sources. The next step is after having many of these interviews she produced a narrative of each one.
And at the end printed a booklet of all the narratives to distribute the to all participants.
Reflexibility and the Research as participant.
Reflexibility in research means the person understands the meaning behind all the narratives of each infertile woman. And the inevitable influence of the researcher on the research.
Conclusion
I have attempted to justify participating in the research on theoretical, feminist, and ethical
grounds. The reflexivity entailed in participation was implicated in my choice of topic; my
insistence on the significance of individual autobiographical narratives; concern for my
influence on the conduct and analysis of the research; and awareness of the influence of my
public narrative on the participants in and readers of my research.
Maggie Kirkman
Zurr, I. and Catts, C. (2004) The Ethical Claims of Bio-Art: Killing The Other Or Self-Cannibalism,
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 5(1), pp.167-188,
In the last decades artists and biologists worked side by side. As illustrators of plants and drawing inside bodies and digital renderings. This new engagement is called Bio-art, encountering biology, biology-technology and life.
It's now reality artists are in the labs. They are intentionally transgressing procedures of representation and metaphor, going beyond them to manipulate life itself. Biotechnology is no longer just a topic, but a tool, generating green, fluorescent animals, wings for pigs, and sculptures molded in bioreactors or under the microscope, and using DNA itself as an artistic medium.
Ethical Frameworks
Bio artists challenge ethical and political issues. This presents an obvious question. When do Bio artist can experiment with living matter? Deontological ethics developed by several researchers propose that the value or moral decision of an objective is more important than the process involved. Consequential ethics looks at the results of the actions, the consequences. Peter singer studies the actual consequences for example on stem human cells. Singer and Tom Reagan, a deontological atheist, proposed that animals and defective humans have rights when treatments are conducted:
(1) it is wrong to treat human morons in the ways in question.
(2) we would not (and should not) change this judgment, in the ways utilitarianism,
egoism, or Kantianism would require, if the future happened to change in the ways described earlier
(3) if, in our search for the most adequate moral theory on which to ground this belief, we are driven to postulating that human morons (even) have certain rights; and
(4) if the grounds underlying their possessing the rights they posses are common
grounds, as it were, between them and many other animals. If all this is
correct, then I think the case of animal rights is very strong indeed.
Instrumentalization of Life
There are many ethical and political issues that exist in doing research and bio-art with living things. It is an open panel of discussion and argument. The issus change form country to country and from project to project. For example, artist “Nature” by Marta de Menezes. She modifies the butterfly at the pupa stage to manipulate the design and coloration of the wings. A researcher before Menendez manipulated the nervous system of a cockroach in order to make it turn into a living surveillance. People in a capitalist society thought this was more utilitarian than looking at colorful butterfly wings.
The article notes that in Australia some Universities created groups to do scientific and Bio-art research. For example, Symbiotic A at the University of Western Australia.
From semi-living steak to Cannibalism and from “stupid” tissue to sentient semi-living?
The experiment was to take tissue from an animal and making the tissue grow and reproduce to become a full steak to then eating the steak. Which in the future can reduce killing animals for meat. “Disembodied Cuisine”, 2000. Other projects involved skeletal fogs and rats’ neurons to move an arm. And a more complicated venture was to grow a look alike ear part from human cartilage. Extra Ear- ¼ Scale. This work was the most controversial one since it confronted the judeo-christian idea of God as the sole creator of living things. In their collusion they note that they are working with a paradox, but they want humanity and other Bio-artists to continue in their creations.
This project is intended to make the viewers rethink their perception of life. This will undoubtedly cause uneasiness to some of the viewers. We feel that forcing people out of their comfort zone is one of the major roles of contemporary artistic practice dealing with the implications of the introduction of new technologies, and in particular when these technologies
are dealing with new modes of manipulation of living systems.
Ionat Zurr Artist in Residence, SymbioticA-The Art and Science Collaborative Research
Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia. PhD
Candidate, School if Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, UWA