Making Things Happen
Six Formats: Articulation, Activation, and Circulation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ingrid Cogne
The art-based research project Six Formats analyses various formats commonly used in relation to art-based knowledge articulation and/or communication in the present day: publication, exhibition, symposium, lecture-performance, screening, and workshop. Six Formats creates situations of dialogue in, on, and between each of its formats. Six Formats facilitates collaborative processes of ongoing self-reflection and re-articulation aiming for reciprocal attentiveness to the respective needs of the project, its partners, and co-researchers.
Artivism for Social Change: A Comparative Analysis
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucía Mariño
The analysis I propose is about artivism (art + activism) like an action allowed to create new political-artistic imaginaries aimed to social change; and is based on the idea that certain artistic expressions and practices constitute forms of cultural resistance to processes of fragmentation, diaspora and concentration; all of which are common in the neoliberal city. With the review of emblematic cases of Colombia and Mexico, I will reflect on the application of participatory social methodologies and their capacity to potentiate the transforming action of art in the creation of new vindictive imaginaries of the right to the city. Theoretically, my research is grounded in Utopian Latin American thought, drawing on three analytical categories: the commercialization of space, artistic and symbolic practices, and collaborative networks / social movements. The adoption of this theoretical grounding aims to open lines of thought that allow me to reflect on the practices of artists, who are understood as agents able to contribute alternatives to the discussion around the current civilizational crisis.
Art and Social Impact of Music Videos
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robert Martin
Our youngest generation participates the least in civic life. A significant amount is judged as civically and politically disengaged. Judged by conventional measures, current levels of youth civic knowledge and participation are problematic. Some educator’s ability to address this situation productively requires increasing attention to the political and social dimensions of video and digital media. This presentation will take advantage of youth engagement with digital media to foster communal, social and political participation by recognizing the value of music video literacy as a skill to help define social justice issues. This presentation will inspire participants to understand how engaging visual and auditory issues representing race, gender, class, and sexuality in music videos produced for promotional and artistic purposes support a means for immortality and ideology, therefore addressing the racial, social and cultural context of works through global art and political movements. Visual music examples of how the increased presence of men and women of color around the world made possible, the acceptance of political mobilization of race, class and gender scholarship will be discussed. We will learn together how to bridge the digital and social divide.
Towards Non-dogmatic Togetherness: Arts without Muses
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pessi Parviainen
This paper addresses the issues that arise from disciplinary convergence. As interrelationships of art forms are explored, and connections between them emphasized, the problem of unity is highlighted. Theatre makers have long known that a theatre company is not only an arts troupe, it is a societal manifesto. The way art forms are combined is a declaration concerning how people should be combined. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk vision should be seen as a grim lesson on how a dogmatic unity yields horrible consequences. From Wagner’s Hellenist viewpoint, dogmatism was logical. As Berio and Nattiez have later pointed out, music is what we call music – therefore, the concept of music is dogma and nothing else. It is blind to ethics and practice. There are more tools than ever for creating disciplinary combinations and bridges between them. The trend is towards unification. This paper proposes that language is the most crucial point. Our conceptual framework (to use Lakoff and Johnson’s term) manifests in action. Now is a critical time to address it. With a dogmatic framework, history may well be repeated, now with 21st century tools and resources. But with different concepts, the results could be something else. A non-dogmatic direction will avoid the pitfalls that mankind has repeatedly fallen into. Resisting Bishop Berkeley’s idealist dogma, Samuel Johnson simply kicked a rock and exclaimed: “I refute it thus!” What is this language like? What does it sound like to believe in and talk about a shared reality of experience?
