In hindsight, my original vision of those developments depended on my gathering an army of programmers, which now seems sily given that I had spent so little time doing outreach to programmers. If I were to do keep on working on this, that's exactly what I would have done.
Yeah, actually, this explains why Carlos Celdran called the work I did "conceptual", which nearly horrified the shit out of me since I had never conceived myself as a conceptual artist, and I don't have a lot of positive associations with the notion. Then again, it only goes to show how little I know of art history.
Throughout these 8 weeks, I feel like I have better appreciation for what artists here are trying to do and why they're doing it. They're trying to find new forms, and yet the act of consciously breaking away from forms inevitably ends up summoning other, possibly forgotten, kinds of forms.
Conversations I've had: With Aya Fabros: she suggests juxtaposing headlines from newspapers against trends in, I don't know, maybe conversations held over the internet. "Because people share the same kind of space of lived experiences," she suggests, "they might be following the 'same trajectory' as the larger conditions. O baka naman, kebs lang." She pointed out something interested: Jung collaborated with Pauli. Whether or not their collaboration generated anything startling or useful, the fact that they did collaborate kind of legitimizes the connections they've seen between such disparate fields as Jungian psychology and quantum physics. Aya's poing was that there could be universal consciousness(es) that are mappable using the kinds of techniques I'm interested in developing.
I find it so incredibly difficult to articulate what I'm trying to do, and I'm not sure whether it's because I don't know what I'm doing, or whether, as Soliman puts it, I would be locking into words a kind of process that is better left untransformed into spoken, written language.
Breadth turned on its side is depth.
"create rooms to engage in art" too engaged in issues of survival
get people to value more things as art, as craft
"you don't need other people to tell you your own stories"
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On the last night of my residency, I presented to about 15 people the portion of the ASEACC paper that I co-write with Jasmine Trice. It seemed well-received, and there was a lot of critical discussion. People raised (rightly) the perennial issue of the digital divide: doesn't my project further marginalize or invisibilize filmmakers who have no web presence? I pointed out that discourses on the digital divide fall in one of two camps: either the Internet opens new spaces that allows individuals to participate in the circulative practices of information-creation and consumption, or it provides yet another new way to separate the haves from the have-nots. If anything, it's possible that visualizing the web presence of Philippine cinematic presences might be able to highlight precisely this digital divide.
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Notes from my conversation with Sol Hidalgo:
Visualizing information to make it more digestible is pedagogically problematic in that it might provide learning shortcuts. Visualizations could be jump off points, not the central tools for learning. Predigesting information: in times of urgency, where time is not a luxury, maybe predigesting information is necessary. When should you allow the "luxury" of digesting for themselves information? How does one make that leap to mash data together or create a new synthesis?
visit the invisible, visible website for the schedule of events and for more information about this residency
2 comments:
Oh really? Conceptual art is a four letter word? I'm just calling it as I see it. But trust me, at least I didn't call you a performance artist. That is the WORST thing to be called. Ever.
Yes, I somehow do agree. Its like being a social realist is this dirty word to some contemporary practitioners. As for being called a performance artist..
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