Tech Twists
Asynchronous Session
The Photographic Paper-print: Shape-shifter, Form-maker View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rebecca Howard
Drawing on examples of my photographic practice, in particular a series of site-specific installations produced in Manchester and Salford (UK) since 2019, this paper reflects upon the spatial, visual and dimensional qualities of the photographic paper-print and its form-making potential. Using somewhat characterless or ‘banal’ spaces, including a retail unit, a projection room, a foyer, and a white-wall gallery as sites for transformation, I challenge the representational and depictive capabilities of the photograph. Printed onto standard A-sized paper, I use sculpture and installation to explore ‘non-standard’, dynamic spaces/places, allowing the photographs to become extensions and permeations of the building, simultaneously continuing and modifying form. This paper concludes with recommendations about how this approach could inform other media and disciplines, including the built environment, architecture, and design.
Distributing and Promoting Audiovisual Works with Blockchain View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Inês Rebanda Coelho
The purpose of this paper is to update information about research, with its first publication in 2018, named “Blockchain: A new way of distribution, promotion and improvement of the artistic, economic and cultural situation of a film in the EU”. The article covers the first phase of a study about blockchain technology used in audiovisual distribution platforms which started in 2017. This research included a study case about 14 decentralized blockchain platforms. Only eight are still workings: White Rabbit, JBOX, Ethereum Movie Venture, DECENT (Nahmii), Flixxo, Hubii Network, Singular DTV (Breaker), LBRY. This new paper updates information about the pros and cons of using decentralized blockchain platforms in audiovisual distribution by reporting the analysis made about the existing literature within Computer Science together with the observational study case of the mentioned platforms. It will also bring new information about smart contracts and NFTs, and highlight the main legal differences from the traditional way of distribution, in terms of efficiency and complexity of the processes. The latest was made through the examination of legal practices, codes, acts, directives and conventions of EU countries, since its need of being updated regarding digital exploitation of works and other questions seen as inadequate for this age. This study discusses the ways this new technology can contribute to a more adequate form of the legal approach to works protection and exploitation during the present digital era.
Scattered in Existence: Community Building through an Online User-content-Generated Artistic Archive View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christine D'onofrio
Fusing the potentials of online democracy and community building, Intuition Commons visualizes overlooked and underrepresented stories of mentorship, influence, and reciprocal generosity through user-generated creative contributions. The coded ‘scatter’ of the site avoids a central author, as community “is not the space of the egos-subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal-but of the I’s who are always others” (Jean-Luc Nancy, 1990). The work was created in reaction to hosting “Wikipedia” edit-a-thons wherein the collaborative spirit was exciting -but the perpetuation of legitimizing references was antithetical to ways a community offers, inspires, contributes, communicates and produces. Intuition Commons (2019) is a pedagogical work that enacts hooks’ performative and relational coming to know oneself via knowledge accessed through deep networks of human relationships (2003). Users are encouraged to contribute their own perspectives and accounts, creating a rhizomatic web of nuance and overlapping stories. Demonstrating complexity of Agamben’s inaccessible and radically unknowable communication of “singularities as an attribute that does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence” (1990), the site emphasizes effects granted by other perspectives showing a process of difference differing (Haraway 2008) and facilitate Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to understand agency as a “dynamism of forces”(2007) rather than belonging to a sole element.
Taxidermy, Animal Fur in Contemporary Art in Japan: The Relationship between Humans and Non-human Animals in Terms of Food Culture and Folk Beliefs View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Midori Moriyama
This research considers works of art created from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. It focuses on the new use of ‘taxidermy’, ‘fur’, and ‘skin’ by artists in works of visual art. More recently, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, this phenomenon of using ‘taxidermy’ in works of visual art has also become visible in Japan. Unlike the work of artists from the western world, we can see elements that are uniquely Japanese. This difference may be due to the food culture and folk beliefs of Japan, which for a long time was a society based on agriculture and not on cattle breeding. We examine the significance of taxidermy art for the Japanese, who have historically had a very diverse relationship with animals: deer as messengers of the gods, deer and wild boar as sacrifices to protect crops, and bears for the Matagi people. I focus on ‘taxidermy art’ from an art historical perspective, while, at the same time, drawing on further disciplines, such as, anthropology, the natural sciences, folk studies, and ethics. Through this essential research, I interrogate how works of ‘taxidermy art’ relate to society.
Bioart Coven: Surveying and Creating at the Intersection of Contemporary Witchcraft and Biotechnologies View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session WhiteFeather Hunter
Bioart Coven is an international collective of artists, activists and hackers; witches, witchcraft enthusiasts and feminists; scientists, researchers and healthcare workers—all of whom gather around a powerful, niche set of sociopolitical interests best described as technofemininst witchcraft. Bioart Coven evolved through a recurring five-week online course offered by the author through the School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe (Berlin) in 2021. The course explored alternative witchcraft histories presented by feminist social scientists, along with contemporary recontextualizations by artists whose practices are rooted in posthuman ecofeminism. Participants were led in hands-on activities such as fermentation, microbiology protocols and DIY labware-making in their own kitchens. The course(s) culminated with collaboratively designed, co-performed closing rituals. The Bioart Coven name gives a nod to Bioart Kitchen; Art, Feminism and Technoscience by Lindsay Kelley (2016, IB Tauris). In her book, Kelley touches on the history of domestic labour and its role in sci-tech development, revisited through a feminist lens. However, Kelley doesn’t mention or allude to witches, though so many of us have worked from our kitchens. The figure of the witch, intimately linked with the birth, development, and socioeconomic expansion of industrial technologies necessitates a chapter in the full story. Bioart Coven members have engaged as a collective to co-author a living Manifesto, shaped using an adapted ‘exquisite corpse’ technique. The manifesto allows for the enduring development of a diverse, shared vision and call to action. This paper shares the most recent version of the manifesto, and the story of Bioart Coven’s co-evolution.
Doing Virtual Feminist Participatory Arts Research during COVID-19 with Women across Canada View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Saara Greene, Mary Elizabeth Vaccaro
During the COVID-19 pandemic, research ethics boards at academic institutions across Canada put limitations and restrictions on in-person research. Social science researchers who work with marginalized communities using arts-based methods faced significant barriers to continuing their programs of research during this time. This paper offers critical reflection and suggestions for best practices for engaging in ethical feminist participatory virtual arts-based research. We draw on examples from our program of study including two virtual Photovoice studies: Wading through the Weeds: A public health response to mothers who consume cannabis during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and Women Growing Older: older women’s experiences of accessing and consuming cannabis.During the pandemic, we engaged forty participants in virtual arts-based research through Photovoice workshops. Photovoice centres around taking photographs, sharing photographs with other participants, and engaging in collective dialogue about shared experience and necessary social change and lends itself well to a virtual platform through relying on digital photography and Zoom video conferencing. Participants included people who have traditionally faced barriers to participating in in-person research as a result of social inequities including but not limited to: mobility, place, isolation, poverty, racism, and child welfare involvement. During this presentation, we will share our methodological approach to engaging in Photovoice workshops as a tool for addressing the exclusion of women who have traditionally faced barriers to participating in research. We will offer some reflections on the potential for merging technology and the arts in research and share some of the methodological complexities that have emerged through our work.
