Aleksandra Kaminska | Université de Montréal (original) (raw)
Papers by Aleksandra Kaminska
Theory, Culture & Society, 2020
Authentication devices transform cheap paper into legitimate documents. They are the sensory, inf... more Authentication devices transform cheap paper into legitimate documents. They are the sensory, informational, and computational features that make up valuable papers like banknotes and passports, and they provide the confidence required in moments of exchange and passage. These devices-which include techniques like watermarks and specialized threads, proprietary substrates and inks, or RFID chips-are the product of security printing, an industry that continuously reinvents the possibilities of paper. Importantly, these components protect paper from counterfeiting, allowing it to function as original and authentic copy and to do the logistical work of connecting quotidian materials to global networks. The value of valuable papers is therefore not purely extrinsic, socially or discursively established, but is also performed through its intrinsic material qualities. These are the authentication devices that are read, assessed, and trusted as paper things are circulated, and they are what securely connects paper to infrastructures of mobility.
Convergence, 2019
Printing is not a new media technology, but it is continuously being renewed. In this sense, it i... more Printing is not a new media technology, but it is continuously being renewed. In this sense, it is an example of novelty going largely unnoticed, woven into the quotidian and ordinary in unassuming ways. One reason for this is the incomplete way we tell the story of printed paper, which privileges narratives of readings, access, and dissemination. To complicate the way media scholars think printing, this article turns to the case of security printing, which produces objects like banknotes and passports that circulate with trust and authority. Here, printing emerges through the specific need to print securely, offering a narrative based on the need for order and protection. The work of security printing, always straddling between art and science, produces artefacts understood as authentic copies. Such a transformation of paper into valuable object relies on the technical artistry of the security printer, who sets the aesthetic and material standards of authenticity through physical features like watermarks, engravings, holographs, special substrates, threads, or inks. Drawing on a close reading of informational materials produced by the major actors of today's security printing industry, this article explains how the need to print better than the (counter-feiting) competition fuels the need for novelty in the how of printing. It expands on three guiding principles that work in unison to keep printing on paper new: printing as material science, as complex composition, and as the display of matchless quality. Ultimately, this material quality of securely printed papers helps us think about the new in a way that is not tied up to the digital, so that security printing both complicates the way media scholars engage with printing and offers a reconsideration of the ways we categorize and theorize the differences between media 'old' and 'new'.
Intermediality/Intérmédialités, 2018
This article examines the media technologies that mark paper as authentic. Using the examples of ... more This article examines the media technologies that mark paper as authentic. Using the examples of passports and paper banknotes, it considers the security features (e.g. graphic marks, holographs, chips) that do the work of reliably storing, protecting, and communicating authenticity across both space and time. These overt and covert authentication devices are examined in two interconnected ways: 1) as technologies with specific temporal conditions, constrained both by technical longevity and functional lifespan; and 2) as technologies that must be continuously reinvented to outpace counterfeiters and forgers. Together, these attributes have led to strategies of concealment that shift authentication from a human-legible activity at the perceptible surface to one that is concealed in the depths of machine readability. While this adds a level of security, it is also an example of how the material environment becomes rich in information that is inaccessible to human processing.
Leonardo, 2018
This article provides a technical overview of nano-optical image-making produced between the auth... more This article provides a technical overview of nano-optical image-making produced between the author, engineering scientists at the Ciber Lab in Vancouver, and the artists Christine Davis and Scott Lyall. It situates the work in relation to other optical technologies like holographs, to the primary application of nano-optical images as authentication devices, and to other artistic practices interested in nanoscale interactions of light and matter. The paper articulates the convergence of visual technologies and designed materials by explaining how the principles of structural color can be used for the production of images. Building a discussion on the shift from device to medium that is anchored around questions of remediation and reproducibility, it concludes with a speculation on informatic matters, or the convergence of mediating functions at the surface of things.
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2015
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2015
Introduction to special section from the College Art Association Conference Edition, 2015. Won... more Introduction to special section from the College Art Association Conference Edition, 2015.
Wonder does not reside in a singular domain but rather emerges in the ongoing and changing relationship between human-material entanglements. Technologies of wonder create conversations outside of the habitual rhetorics of techno euphoria, skepticism, or dread, and instead restore and nurture the affective dimensions of techno-encounters, creating situations, moments, and experiences that allow for a kind of contemplation that may renew our relationship to our matters and ecologies, natural and artificial, and provide an opening not only to new knowledge but to new modes of being in, and with, the world.
ISEA 2015 Conference Proceedings
This paper draws on a collaboration between scientists, an artist, and a media researcher to prod... more This paper draws on a collaboration between scientists, an artist, and a media researcher to produce ‘nano-media,’ a media surface designed at the nanoscale, to examine the interdisciplinary methodologies and circular genealogies of emerging media. Based on nano-optical structures and optical variable devices, the scientifically innovative technology uses many analog techniques to construct a new kind of material that can produce striking iridescent images and simultaneously store covert information. The first goal of this research was to use these novel optical nanostructures to create a cover for the periodical PUBLIC. This paper details the project as it moved from conceptual exploration to the prototype and manufacturing stages, considering the specific hurdles of translation between fields, the production challenges, and the points of intersection that brought the team together. By situating nano-media in ‘retro’ techniques of image production – including analog cinema and photography – the paper also provides a point of entry for artists and humanists to engage and participate in the imagination and innovation of media built at the nanoscale. Finally, through the lens of nano research, the paper challenges the ‘art-sci’ moniker to reflect a more fluid and multiple cross-pollination of fields as we design the media of the future.
Land|Slide: Possible Futures - A Public Art Intervention, 2015
Kapsula, Dec 2014
Introduction to a section on Precarious Theory in the journal Kapsula.
PUBLIC: Art Culture Ideas, Nov 2014
A short overview of an art-sci collaboration that resulted in a nano-media insert in an issue of ... more A short overview of an art-sci collaboration that resulted in a nano-media insert in an issue of PUBLIC.
The Capilano Review, Nov 2014
A short text on the 50th issue of the journal PUBLIC: Art Culture Ideas, on the theme "The Retreat."
Transformations Journal, Nov 2014
This paper considers the immaterial aspects of the history of land as way to reimagine heritage. ... more This paper considers the immaterial aspects of the history of land as way to reimagine heritage. Through the heritage village—that imagined, artificial, and curated representation of history with very particular kinds of material iterations and legacies of the past—we consider the immaterial memories and histories that have becomes absent from the staging and design of heritage as collective history. We consider the way that these omissions function in the imagination of the present and future by turning to the site-specific contemporary art exhibition Land/Slide Possible Futures (2013). Located on the site of Markham Museum heritage village in Ontario, Canada, this expansive project reveals the imbricated histories of the rise of the heritage village and that of the suburb. Turning in particular to Duke & Battesby’s Always Popular, Never Cool and Terrance Houle’s There’s Things That Even a Drunk Will Never Forget, we argue for the heritage village as a lieu de mémoire, where memories are continuously unearthed, revealed, and imagined, and where artists transform archival collections and historical architectures into surreal and uncanny encounters with those pasts that are immaterial and absent from the facades of heritage.
Space and Culture, 2013
Increased transnational and cross-cultural exchanges raise questions about the enduring meaning o... more Increased transnational and cross-cultural exchanges raise questions about the enduring meaning of site, locality, and rootedness. Media art's ability to animate architecture offers provocative ways of reclaiming urban narratives and site-specificity. In Poland, such interventions into the urban landscape pluralize history and challenge the institutionalized narratives of cultural memory in order to rebuild the civic identity needed for a democratic politics. Aleksandra Polisiewicz's (aka Aleka Polis) Wartopia and Rafał Jakubowicz's Swimming Pool and Es Beginnt in Breslau use different media to explore forgotten or repressed local urban histories in attempts to resist the "collective amnesia" that has marked postsocialist attitudes toward the recent past. The ephemeral nature of these projects creates piercing mediations and juxtapositions between past and present, revealing the continuing importance of memory and history in processes of Polish self-enfranchisement. These are not nostalgic historical markers but rather meaningful assertions of locality in the face of cultural globalization and the isolation and alienation of ahistorical and placeless communities.
Material Culture Review (71), 2010
International Journal of Arts and Technology , 2009
The idea of ephemerality is often used to describe digital art and digital artefacts. The impulse... more The idea of ephemerality is often used to describe digital art and digital artefacts. The impulse behind this paper is to try to understand what exactly we mean when we refer to ephemerality and suggests how we can locate the ephemeral moment in the material construction of the digital artefact. The problematic division between material/immaterial and software/hardware is revisited through the languages and codes that constitute the basis of software. This paper suggests that we can trace ephemerality to moments of translation, the disjunctures of rhythms between various languages and to the reusability of digital materials. The ephemeral is not just a consequence of an immaterial nature ascribed to digital objects or problems of storage. Rather, it emerges from the very material nature of the digital and occurs in the minutiae of its hidden processes that make transmission and communication possible.
Books by Aleksandra Kaminska
From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in tra... more From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in transnational networks, Poland has experienced a dramatic transformation in the last century. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field uses the lens—and mirror—of media art to think through the politics of a postsocialist “New Europe,” where artists are negotiating the tension between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement. Situating Polish media art practices in the context of Poland’s aesthetic traditions and political history, the book provides a contribution to site-specific histories of media art. Polish Media Art demonstrates how artists are using and reflecting upon technology as a way of entering into larger civic conversations around the politics of identity, place, citizenship, memory, and heritage. Building on close readings of artworks that serve as case studies, as well as interviews with leading artists, scholars, and curators, this is the first full-length study of Polish media art.
Exhibition catalogue of the Land|Slide: Possible Futures exhibition, which took place at the Mark... more Exhibition catalogue of the Land|Slide: Possible Futures exhibition, which took place at the Markham Museum and Heritage Village in Markham, Ontario in 2013. The catalogue includes a curatorial statement by Janine Marchessault, essays, and documentation of the over 30+ artist projects, including artist statements.
Edited Collections by Aleksandra Kaminska
PUBLIC Art/Culture/Ideas, 2020
Introduction and TOC for edited collection on Biometrics.
PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas (37), 2008
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2015
Technologies are often remembered for the sense of fear they originally provoked: photography, ci... more Technologies are often remembered for the sense of fear they originally provoked: photography, cinema, and the history of media technologies on the whole is filled with accusations of magic and wizardry, while inventions such as the hot air balloon and telescopy prompted reactions of both wonder and terror. Discovery and innovation continue to spur both hope and dread, but a prevailing sense of disenchantment has to a large degree stifled our ability to value wonder as a constructive mode of engagement with or attachment to the world. The contributions in this special section question to what extent wonder continues to be possible and useful. They draw on the work of artists and filmmakers who provide wondrous encounters of, with, and through the technological to examine how we comprehend, represent, manipulate, imagine, and question the ‘wondrous.’ Where does wonder belong in relation to knowledge? And can it still generate something outside of itself to provide entry points towards a critique beyond skepticism?
Theory, Culture & Society, 2020
Authentication devices transform cheap paper into legitimate documents. They are the sensory, inf... more Authentication devices transform cheap paper into legitimate documents. They are the sensory, informational, and computational features that make up valuable papers like banknotes and passports, and they provide the confidence required in moments of exchange and passage. These devices-which include techniques like watermarks and specialized threads, proprietary substrates and inks, or RFID chips-are the product of security printing, an industry that continuously reinvents the possibilities of paper. Importantly, these components protect paper from counterfeiting, allowing it to function as original and authentic copy and to do the logistical work of connecting quotidian materials to global networks. The value of valuable papers is therefore not purely extrinsic, socially or discursively established, but is also performed through its intrinsic material qualities. These are the authentication devices that are read, assessed, and trusted as paper things are circulated, and they are what securely connects paper to infrastructures of mobility.
Convergence, 2019
Printing is not a new media technology, but it is continuously being renewed. In this sense, it i... more Printing is not a new media technology, but it is continuously being renewed. In this sense, it is an example of novelty going largely unnoticed, woven into the quotidian and ordinary in unassuming ways. One reason for this is the incomplete way we tell the story of printed paper, which privileges narratives of readings, access, and dissemination. To complicate the way media scholars think printing, this article turns to the case of security printing, which produces objects like banknotes and passports that circulate with trust and authority. Here, printing emerges through the specific need to print securely, offering a narrative based on the need for order and protection. The work of security printing, always straddling between art and science, produces artefacts understood as authentic copies. Such a transformation of paper into valuable object relies on the technical artistry of the security printer, who sets the aesthetic and material standards of authenticity through physical features like watermarks, engravings, holographs, special substrates, threads, or inks. Drawing on a close reading of informational materials produced by the major actors of today's security printing industry, this article explains how the need to print better than the (counter-feiting) competition fuels the need for novelty in the how of printing. It expands on three guiding principles that work in unison to keep printing on paper new: printing as material science, as complex composition, and as the display of matchless quality. Ultimately, this material quality of securely printed papers helps us think about the new in a way that is not tied up to the digital, so that security printing both complicates the way media scholars engage with printing and offers a reconsideration of the ways we categorize and theorize the differences between media 'old' and 'new'.
Intermediality/Intérmédialités, 2018
This article examines the media technologies that mark paper as authentic. Using the examples of ... more This article examines the media technologies that mark paper as authentic. Using the examples of passports and paper banknotes, it considers the security features (e.g. graphic marks, holographs, chips) that do the work of reliably storing, protecting, and communicating authenticity across both space and time. These overt and covert authentication devices are examined in two interconnected ways: 1) as technologies with specific temporal conditions, constrained both by technical longevity and functional lifespan; and 2) as technologies that must be continuously reinvented to outpace counterfeiters and forgers. Together, these attributes have led to strategies of concealment that shift authentication from a human-legible activity at the perceptible surface to one that is concealed in the depths of machine readability. While this adds a level of security, it is also an example of how the material environment becomes rich in information that is inaccessible to human processing.
Leonardo, 2018
This article provides a technical overview of nano-optical image-making produced between the auth... more This article provides a technical overview of nano-optical image-making produced between the author, engineering scientists at the Ciber Lab in Vancouver, and the artists Christine Davis and Scott Lyall. It situates the work in relation to other optical technologies like holographs, to the primary application of nano-optical images as authentication devices, and to other artistic practices interested in nanoscale interactions of light and matter. The paper articulates the convergence of visual technologies and designed materials by explaining how the principles of structural color can be used for the production of images. Building a discussion on the shift from device to medium that is anchored around questions of remediation and reproducibility, it concludes with a speculation on informatic matters, or the convergence of mediating functions at the surface of things.
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2015
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2015
Introduction to special section from the College Art Association Conference Edition, 2015. Won... more Introduction to special section from the College Art Association Conference Edition, 2015.
Wonder does not reside in a singular domain but rather emerges in the ongoing and changing relationship between human-material entanglements. Technologies of wonder create conversations outside of the habitual rhetorics of techno euphoria, skepticism, or dread, and instead restore and nurture the affective dimensions of techno-encounters, creating situations, moments, and experiences that allow for a kind of contemplation that may renew our relationship to our matters and ecologies, natural and artificial, and provide an opening not only to new knowledge but to new modes of being in, and with, the world.
ISEA 2015 Conference Proceedings
This paper draws on a collaboration between scientists, an artist, and a media researcher to prod... more This paper draws on a collaboration between scientists, an artist, and a media researcher to produce ‘nano-media,’ a media surface designed at the nanoscale, to examine the interdisciplinary methodologies and circular genealogies of emerging media. Based on nano-optical structures and optical variable devices, the scientifically innovative technology uses many analog techniques to construct a new kind of material that can produce striking iridescent images and simultaneously store covert information. The first goal of this research was to use these novel optical nanostructures to create a cover for the periodical PUBLIC. This paper details the project as it moved from conceptual exploration to the prototype and manufacturing stages, considering the specific hurdles of translation between fields, the production challenges, and the points of intersection that brought the team together. By situating nano-media in ‘retro’ techniques of image production – including analog cinema and photography – the paper also provides a point of entry for artists and humanists to engage and participate in the imagination and innovation of media built at the nanoscale. Finally, through the lens of nano research, the paper challenges the ‘art-sci’ moniker to reflect a more fluid and multiple cross-pollination of fields as we design the media of the future.
Land|Slide: Possible Futures - A Public Art Intervention, 2015
Kapsula, Dec 2014
Introduction to a section on Precarious Theory in the journal Kapsula.
PUBLIC: Art Culture Ideas, Nov 2014
A short overview of an art-sci collaboration that resulted in a nano-media insert in an issue of ... more A short overview of an art-sci collaboration that resulted in a nano-media insert in an issue of PUBLIC.
The Capilano Review, Nov 2014
A short text on the 50th issue of the journal PUBLIC: Art Culture Ideas, on the theme "The Retreat."
Transformations Journal, Nov 2014
This paper considers the immaterial aspects of the history of land as way to reimagine heritage. ... more This paper considers the immaterial aspects of the history of land as way to reimagine heritage. Through the heritage village—that imagined, artificial, and curated representation of history with very particular kinds of material iterations and legacies of the past—we consider the immaterial memories and histories that have becomes absent from the staging and design of heritage as collective history. We consider the way that these omissions function in the imagination of the present and future by turning to the site-specific contemporary art exhibition Land/Slide Possible Futures (2013). Located on the site of Markham Museum heritage village in Ontario, Canada, this expansive project reveals the imbricated histories of the rise of the heritage village and that of the suburb. Turning in particular to Duke & Battesby’s Always Popular, Never Cool and Terrance Houle’s There’s Things That Even a Drunk Will Never Forget, we argue for the heritage village as a lieu de mémoire, where memories are continuously unearthed, revealed, and imagined, and where artists transform archival collections and historical architectures into surreal and uncanny encounters with those pasts that are immaterial and absent from the facades of heritage.
Space and Culture, 2013
Increased transnational and cross-cultural exchanges raise questions about the enduring meaning o... more Increased transnational and cross-cultural exchanges raise questions about the enduring meaning of site, locality, and rootedness. Media art's ability to animate architecture offers provocative ways of reclaiming urban narratives and site-specificity. In Poland, such interventions into the urban landscape pluralize history and challenge the institutionalized narratives of cultural memory in order to rebuild the civic identity needed for a democratic politics. Aleksandra Polisiewicz's (aka Aleka Polis) Wartopia and Rafał Jakubowicz's Swimming Pool and Es Beginnt in Breslau use different media to explore forgotten or repressed local urban histories in attempts to resist the "collective amnesia" that has marked postsocialist attitudes toward the recent past. The ephemeral nature of these projects creates piercing mediations and juxtapositions between past and present, revealing the continuing importance of memory and history in processes of Polish self-enfranchisement. These are not nostalgic historical markers but rather meaningful assertions of locality in the face of cultural globalization and the isolation and alienation of ahistorical and placeless communities.
Material Culture Review (71), 2010
International Journal of Arts and Technology , 2009
The idea of ephemerality is often used to describe digital art and digital artefacts. The impulse... more The idea of ephemerality is often used to describe digital art and digital artefacts. The impulse behind this paper is to try to understand what exactly we mean when we refer to ephemerality and suggests how we can locate the ephemeral moment in the material construction of the digital artefact. The problematic division between material/immaterial and software/hardware is revisited through the languages and codes that constitute the basis of software. This paper suggests that we can trace ephemerality to moments of translation, the disjunctures of rhythms between various languages and to the reusability of digital materials. The ephemeral is not just a consequence of an immaterial nature ascribed to digital objects or problems of storage. Rather, it emerges from the very material nature of the digital and occurs in the minutiae of its hidden processes that make transmission and communication possible.
From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in tra... more From an Eastern nation on the global periphery to a European neoliberal democracy enmeshed in transnational networks, Poland has experienced a dramatic transformation in the last century. Polish Media Art in an Expanded Field uses the lens—and mirror—of media art to think through the politics of a postsocialist “New Europe,” where artists are negotiating the tension between global cosmopolitanism and national self-enfranchisement. Situating Polish media art practices in the context of Poland’s aesthetic traditions and political history, the book provides a contribution to site-specific histories of media art. Polish Media Art demonstrates how artists are using and reflecting upon technology as a way of entering into larger civic conversations around the politics of identity, place, citizenship, memory, and heritage. Building on close readings of artworks that serve as case studies, as well as interviews with leading artists, scholars, and curators, this is the first full-length study of Polish media art.
Exhibition catalogue of the Land|Slide: Possible Futures exhibition, which took place at the Mark... more Exhibition catalogue of the Land|Slide: Possible Futures exhibition, which took place at the Markham Museum and Heritage Village in Markham, Ontario in 2013. The catalogue includes a curatorial statement by Janine Marchessault, essays, and documentation of the over 30+ artist projects, including artist statements.
PUBLIC Art/Culture/Ideas, 2020
Introduction and TOC for edited collection on Biometrics.
PUBLIC Journal: Art Culture Ideas (37), 2008
Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 2015
Technologies are often remembered for the sense of fear they originally provoked: photography, ci... more Technologies are often remembered for the sense of fear they originally provoked: photography, cinema, and the history of media technologies on the whole is filled with accusations of magic and wizardry, while inventions such as the hot air balloon and telescopy prompted reactions of both wonder and terror. Discovery and innovation continue to spur both hope and dread, but a prevailing sense of disenchantment has to a large degree stifled our ability to value wonder as a constructive mode of engagement with or attachment to the world. The contributions in this special section question to what extent wonder continues to be possible and useful. They draw on the work of artists and filmmakers who provide wondrous encounters of, with, and through the technological to examine how we comprehend, represent, manipulate, imagine, and question the ‘wondrous.’ Where does wonder belong in relation to knowledge? And can it still generate something outside of itself to provide entry points towards a critique beyond skepticism?
Issue 37, Co-edited with Janine Marchessault and Jason Rovito.
Reviews in Cultural Theory, Jan 1, 2015
Book review of Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, by Alexander R. Galloway,... more Book review of Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, by Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark. University of Chicago Press, 2014
Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: The central problematic of this course is the publ... more Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: The central problematic of this course is the public domain as a zone of contestation, transformation, exchange, and participation. We will begin by examining the relationship between public art and the elusive concepts of " the public " and the public sphere. We will consider the role of public art as a prism through which to understand wider cultural, societal, and political issues and trends. Public implies more than moving outside the gallery, and entails new forms of interaction between artists, audiences, and communities. Some themes we will address include art in virtual and physical space; site-specificity, and expanded notions of site; monumentality and ephemerality; performance, intervention, and activism; and interactive strategies such as dialogue, relationality, and participation. The semester is organized broadly into three parts: examining conceptions of the public(s), interrogating ideas of place and site, and considering select curatorial and artistic strategies. The course will engage with examples of artistic projects, exhibitions, and events, and include screenings of documentaries as well as guest speakers. Students will contribute to a class blog and develop a curatorial proposal as a final project.
Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: This intensive summer course is devoted to thinkin... more Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: This intensive summer course is devoted to thinking about light in relation to our visual cultures and material practices, continuously exploring the relationship between optics and vision. Derrida described light as the " founding metaphor of Western philosophy " ; it is the medium that allows us to see, but that also transforms the way that we see by compelling us to develop practices and technologies that extend our vision. This course explores different epistemological and phenomenological dimensions of light and how they have historically shaped our vision, perception, and knowledge, transformed our landscapes, formed our media technologies, and engaged the arts in myriad ways. The analytical framework developed in the course draws upon an interdisciplinary selection of writings from media studies, visual culture, philosophy, science and technology studies, and film and photography. Throughout the course we investigate light as a medium that is both " pure information, " as McLuhan argued, and invested with numerous other qualities: symbolic, aesthetic, therapeutic. To do so, we first turn to material and representational practices of light in the arts and sciences. This includes considerations of optical technologies like photography, cinema, projection, and virtual light, as well as those like telescopes or x-rays that illuminate that which was previously invisible and unknown, transforming our understanding of nature, bodies, and universe. We also engage with the social and cultural ordering that occurs as we have become increasingly able to produce and control light artificially in ways that reveals and connects our spaces while reshaping our ideas about time and the rhythms of life. Finally we consider what happens when the lights go out, and we encounter darkness, shadows, and the night.
Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: This is a course about making. We will be thinking... more Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: This is a course about making. We will be thinking about making, but also making in order to think. We consider current trends around what has been described as " maker culture " or the " Maker Movement. " These communities of " makers " are reviving traditions of craft, the handmade, the open source, and the DIY through practices like knitting, weaving, or woodworking, but also 3D printing, hardware tinkering, and physical or digital hacking. But what is making? We will work through this question first by situating making in the broader history and philosophy of tools and technologies. Why do we make? The concept of critical making will provide us with a way to think about hands-on practice as a form of reflection and analysis, before we consider in particular craft, DIY, and hacking in the context of a renewed attention to materials, objects, and things. The question of community is woven throughout, as it propels the maker " movement " away from the myth of lone inventors. We also consider issues such as the politics of making and the democratization of technology through this " re-skilling " of labour. Finally, as we move from Etsy and Maker Faires to Maker Labs and Digital Humanities, we are faced with the energies of this revival in doing and making as it spills into the university and pedagogical approaches. While making provides the rewards of hands-on experience, it also poses a challenge to the humanities and the creativity and thinking that comes from the contemplation of the mind and the distance provided by not making. We will consider making in the context of disciplines: across the humanities, arts, crafts and the " practical " fields of science and engineering—(how) does making help us think, know…and be? This is a theoretical course with a hint of making. It also includes guest speakers, a making workshop, and screenings.
Proceedings from EVA Copenhagen 2018 (Politics of the Machine: Art and After), Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC), 2018
Biometric technologies have transformed recognition into an empirical and automated activity. But... more Biometric technologies have transformed recognition into an empirical and automated activity. But recognition is not just a matter of identification or surveillance. As computer systems become capable of detecting human emotion, we are reminded of philosophical approaches to recognition that place it as central activity of human self-realization and social existence. Bringing together these dual notions of recognition, this paper considers how artists are taking hold of the technical possibilities of recognition to make political the media artwork. Specifically, it turns to Karen Palmer's interactive film RIOT (protoype) (2016), in which the narrative depends on the recognition of the participant's emotive facial expressions, and Erin Gee's Project H.E.A.R.T. (2017), a virtual reality artwork in which the participant's "enthusiasm" is harnessed via a biosensor. Through these examples, the paper proposes a way to think the politics of media art by pivoting on the technologies, practices and philosophies of recognition.