Hasta La Creative!

It’s not everyday that Dick Cheney gives its title to an art exhibition.

In the weeks following September 11, the U.S. Vice President justified a steep increase of surveillance measures by explaining that “Many of the steps we have now been forced to take will become permanent in American life. They represent an understanding of the world as it is, and dangers we must guard against perhaps for decades to come. I think of it as the new normalcy.” Almost 7 years later, the collection and sharing of personal data by governments, luggage searches, Internet monitoring, and wiretaps have indeed become part of a “new normal” in American life.

View of the exhibition space

The New Normal brings together thirteen artworks which explore private information. All the works have been developed after 2001, the year that ctrl[space] : Rhetorics of Surveillance, a major exhibition on privacy and surveillance opened at the ZKM center in Karlsruhe, Germany. It’s not a redux of the exhibition: new factors have changed the surveillance panorama since the ZKM exhibition opened. There’s President Bush signing the Patriot Act on October 26, 2001, the number and efficiency of technologies of surveillance have skyrocketed and we have come to accept the new state of “normality”.

The New Normal reveals how difficult it is to set clear boundaries around the concept of privacy. The private sphere encompasses domestic spaces, personal data, the content of your pocket, bodies, thoughts, communication, and behaviors–contexts that are usually rendered inaccessible to the public eye by legal, social, and physical boundaries.

What is most remarkable about the show is the subtle way it engages with the complex concept of privacy. The videos and installations do not hammer their messages on your head, you’re not told what to think and what to be very afraid about. Instead, the exhibition argues that today’s society is indeed living Cheney’s new normal life but this doesn’t meant that the new condition of public disclosure cannot be harnessed in the service of artistic endeavours and the creation of “tactics for political critique.”

Videostill

Submitting oneself to security measures can be turned upside down by adopting what Hassan Elahi calls an “aggressive compliance”. Elahi daily points a mocking finger to absurd security measures with the real-time self-tracking website he set up in a bid to demonstrate to the FBI investigator that he’s not spending his time traveling to the Middle East and plotting some attack in the U.S. The models features in Sharif Waked‘s Chic Point Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints video seem to have adopted a similar strategy.

Videostill

Sharif Waked’s video features male models catwalking in clothes designed to expose the flesh of body parts such as chests and abdomens. It would be hilarious and cheeky were the images not juxtaposed with stills taken from recent years displaying Palestinian men having to lift their shirts, take off their pants and kneel shirtless in order to be authorized to cross Israeli checkpoints. The absurd pieces of clothing evoke the bodily humiliation experienced by Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints.

Six CIA Officers Wanted in Connection with the Abduction of Abu Omar from Milan, Italy. Courtesy the artist and Bellwether Gallery, New York

Equally politically-loaded is the series of badly photocopies of passports of CIA agents researched by Italian authorities in connection with the abduction of radical Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. On February 17, 2003, Abu Omar disappeared off the streets of Milan. The man had been kidnapped by the CIA, transferred to Cairo, where he was secluded, interrogated and allegedly tortured and abused. He was released 4 years later. The Imam Rapito (or “kidnapped Imam”) affair prompted a series of investigations in Italy.

Twenty-six Americans were submitted to a trial in absentia along with several former Italian intelligence officials for their role in this case of extraordinary rendition. Trevor Paglen managed to get a copy of the photocopy of the fake passports that the agents had to deliver while they were checking in posh hotels in Italy in preparation for the kidnapping. The documents were released by Italian prosecutors in 2005. Although every element appearing on the identity document is fake, the picture had to be authentic. This ensured that the cover of the agents was blown and that the surveillance tools used by a government to achieve questionable goals can also become an instrument of justice.

James Thomas Harbison (CIA Officer Wanted in Connection with the Abduction of Abu Omar from Milan, Italy). Courtesy the artist and Bellwether Gallery, New York

Relationships feed on bits of private information, it’s a currency we exchange with other people. Jill Magid‘s performance, photos and video Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy not only illustrates this concept but it also put a human face on the surveillance we are submitted to every day.

Jill Magid, His Shirt, Cropped (from Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy), 2007. Courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York.

Back to New York City after five years spent in The Netherlands, Magid kept hearing this announcement in the subway “You may be a subject to searches “for security reasons”.” She approached a police officer and asked him to search her. He refused because only women officer had the right to search a woman but she managed to convince him to call her and tell her each night where he was on shift. She’d join him to be “trained” and kept record of the meetings in different forms: diary (read excerpts), photos, objects, etc. He would lend her his duty shirt, she’d give him a picture of her wearing it in return. She makes him tuna sandwiches, one day he allowed her to hold his gun. The relationship they build bit by bit is both intimate and somehow doomed: they are so different, the officer has never been to an art museum, Magid is “one of those liberals”.

Several works show that the intrusion into the private sphere is not just made of CCTV systems and biometric apparatus, it can also be voluntarily self-inflicted now that new online platforms called blogs, Facebook and image sharing call for self-disclosure.

As curator Michael Connor writes, Private information has never been less private.

The best example of this is probably the collection of videos that Guthrie Lonergan archived on you tube under the title MySpace Intro Playlist. Although they were made to be viewed by others, they convey an embarrassingly intimate echo once they have been decontextualized and exhibited in an art exhibition.

Developed by Michael Frumin during the 2004 Campaign in the U.S., FundRace is back. The website maps donation made to the candidates of the Presidential Election in the U.S. and enables you to search by name or address to see who your friends, co-workers, and neighbors are supporting. You can also search by profession and discover who celebs and museum curators are donating to.

The revelation of famous people’s private requests almost makes you say thank you for a society which is so obsessed by the mundane facets of celebrities. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy‘s contribution to the exhibition is part of a series of sculptural displays of the products that musicians contractually require to be present in their dressing rooms after a performance. That’s where the loop closes and we get to cross path with Dick Cheney again. Band Rider Series (Dick Cheney) gives a glimpse into the very lack of spectacularity of Vice President’s desires when he travels to a new venue to give a talk: all tv sets have to be turned on FOX news, the hotel restaurant menu must be in his room along with bottles of water, etc.

THE NEW NORMAL is a traveling exhibition co-organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and Artists Space, New York. It is on view at Artists Space until June 21, 2008.

Hasan Elahi at The Colbert Report:

Related: Sousveillance culture, Orwellian Projects, Book review – ctrl[space] : Rhetorics of Surveillance, Transmediale exhibition: Conspire, Trevor Paglen’s talk at Transmediale, etc.

The documentary i was dying to see at the Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition at LABoral in Gijon was Gold Farmers, by Ge Jin.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire (“farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.

They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.

World of Warcraft, image gameslander

Many companies have attempted to block the use of gold-farming services by specifically stating in their End User License Agreements and Terms of Service that any and all game assets (from the player’s characters themselves, to any items that they may be carrying) remain the sole property of the company itself, and taking aggressive action to close the accounts of any that are found to be using gold-farming (or similar) services.

Although there are gold farmers or gold farms in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico, Chinese are by far the most dynamic. There, young players typically work twelve hour shifts, with just a lunch break somewhere in the middle.

There are gold farmers or gold farms in other countries as well, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Mexico. However, they do not approach the scope and scale of the Chinese farm industry.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

Ge Jin, a 30-year-old Shanghai native and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, San Diego, has shot a Gold Farmers, a documentary that delve into the background and lives of Chinese gold farmers.

Gold farming puts down the mechanisms that govern a universe in which everyone starts at the same level, no matter how rich their parents are, no matter how many degrees they’ve collected at the university. Players trying to work their way up according to the rules and in all fairness are the ones who get hit hardest by the practice of gold farming.

Watching the documentary, you can’t help but feel some compassion for the gold farmers: they have very little free time, they are paid quite poorly to feed the whims of the Western consumer, they have to deal with the ire of a family who doesn’t approve of what they do for a living, they must face the hostility of other players as soon as these realize that gold farmers are on their turf, their english is not good enough to enable them to communicate with other players, and they work hard. Don’t be fooled, they don’t sit there for hours just for the fun, most of their activity is extremely repetitive. In fact they would sometimes end their day at the “factory” by playing a real game in WoW. Just for the fun.

Chinese Gold Farmers Preview video (Ge Jin has uploaded more video previews):

I asked Ge Jin to discuss his documentary for the blog:

First of all, is the video on show at laboral only part of the documentary you are making or is it the full version of it?

I have another 40 min. long version, but this one is complete in itself as a short version.

Gold farmers have the challenging task of constantly navigating between clandestinity and the need to advertise their service. i suspect that finding and getting the “gold farmers” to talk must have been difficult. how did you locate the players and how did you gain their trust?

It is indeed difficult to get into the exclusive “gold farming” circle. But I was lucky to have an old friend in Shanghai who was running gold farms from 2003 to 2005. This friend introduced me to some gold farm owners. But the reason that the gaming workers/gold farmers trusted me was mainly because I treated them with respect. They face discriminations from non-gamers who see them as game addicts who are losers in real life as well as discriminations from gamers who think they care about more about money than gaming itself. I tried to be a good listener for them and they can see I didn’t approach them with many assumptions.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

How much has the phenomenon evolved since you started working on this documentary in 2005 (it think)?

Yes I started following this phenomenon since 2005. I think the market become much more competitive and the profit margin for gold farmers are much smaller now. Meanwhile, more sophisticated services like power-leveling have become the mainstream of real money trade. Also, the domestic demand for in-game goods in China has risen so much that Chinese gold farmers no longer just work in foreign games.

In your documentary, you are neither pointing the fingers to gold farmers and saying “look this is evil!”, neither are you saying that this is kind of labor embodied in play is the best thing that happened to the gaming scene. I had the feeling that you are not taking a stand. Am i right?

You are right that I’m not taking a stand. And I try to let the people involved in real money trade to tell their own stories in my documentary. But I think some of my “biases” do make their way into the documentary. For example, I don’t really care if real money trade changes the regular gaming experience, I’m more concerned with how people’s virtual life and real life affect each other, so you don’t hardly hear the game industry’s point of view in my documentary.

Image courtesy of Ge Jin

Is gold farming regarded differently in China than it is in the USA, Europe or Japan for example? Is the practice seen as more acceptable by the public and the government? How much does China try to tax and regulate the business?

Culturally, real money trade is indeed more accepted in China than in other countries. For example, the successful game Legend from Giant. Ltc thrives on incorporating real money trade in game design. Western game companies dare not do so blatantly because many gamers may think the game is not a level playing ground that way. But the Chinese gamers seem to accept this inherent unfairness, as if they see so much injustice in real life that they don’t expect the virtual world to be better. The government doesn’t seem to have any problem with the gold farming business. It has not figure out a good way to tax virtual trade yet, in some rare cases, some gold farms pay a fixed amount of tax based on very rough estimation of trade volume. There is currently no policy directly regulating this industry. Though there are regulations generally aiming to purify content of games and limit how long people can play online games.

Did your research on gold farming sparkle the interest of Western commercial gaming companies? Asking your help to crack down on farmers? Or asking for your opinion on how to make the most of this new form of economy?

To my surprise, I was contacted by gold selling websites who want to use my website to advertise themselves, by gold buyers who are looking for a steady supplier, and by market researchers who want to measure the supply and demand of gold trade. I wish I could seize such opportunities to make some money for myself. But unfortunately I was occupied by exploring the social implications of this economy.

Thanks Ge Jin!

Another documentary part of Homo Ludens Ludens is the fantastic 8 bit movie.

More WoW stories: The Avatar Machine, Joichi Ito on WoW, Life at the gamers’ farm.

Before meeting her, i had always imagined Marisa Olson to be an hyperactive blond girl running around the internet playground. She seemed to have so much fun online… surely that girl was made of pixels. And even now that we’ve met several times, i’m not totally sure that Marisa is real.

Marisa’s work combines performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation to address intersections of pop culture and the cultural history of technology, as they effect the voice, power, and persona.

Marisa lives between California and New York, where she shows one of her (half) serious faces: she is a “Curator at Large” at Rhizome. You can find her on her whatamidoingwithmylife blog, on the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club, on her website and 3 years ago she was writing about her preparation to audition for the popular reality TV show, American Idol on yet another blog

How does one become Marisa Olson? What is your background and how did you get involved in technology-based art making, reviewing and curating?

Hmm… That could be hard to answer quickly. I was always a geek. I programmed the heck out of my C64! I was also always obsessed with mediated communication in the form of pop culture (radio and tv) transmissions. Add to this the fact that my dad worked in intelligence, growing up (I grew up in Germany, where he worked until I was 10) and I was surrounded by scary military technologies all the time (isn’t the gun one of the most significant inventions ever?) and that all spells a strange fascination with technology. I always wanted to make art, but I’m actually related to one of the most famous French impressionists and I was raised thinking that’s what “real art” was. It turns out I wasn’t very good at that kind of art. So I stopped worrying about what was and wasn’t art and just focused on what I found interesting. I spent most of my undergrad and grad school years in the SF bay area, and lived through the surreal waxing and waning of the dot-com. I wrote for Wired, consulted a few start-ups, and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, the area was overflowing with artists expressing themselves in work that engaged technology. And I really related. After that, the progression was natural and rapid. I threw myself into new media–as an artist and in terms of supporting the field, not entirely distinguishing between my writing, teaching, or curating. The more peculiar thing, for me, has been switching gears from being a musician (I’ve been a singer and lyricist in a few bands and grew up in choirs) to making work about music (most recently my Oh.Yeah.I.Love.You.Baby. remix album). There’s definitely an interest in the DIY there, but I guess this is also why I often organize my projects as “albums” (like my Break-Up Album (Demo) video project) and I tend to think of curating like making a mixtape.

In Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs, an online project for which the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned an Artport Gatepage, you and Abe Linkoln sing posts from your favorite blogs. What was the impetus for that project? There’s been several discussions of trying to turn blogs into an art form or an art project. What is you take on this issue? Could you name us other examples of successful “blogs-turned-art” projects?

Abe and I are both compulsive web surfers and love unusual blogs. We decided to pick our favorite posts from our favorite blogs and sing them, in a sort of concept album mixtape. His and mine are pretty different. They are all really funny. In our official description of the project, we say that blogs, like the blues, have been credited with channeling the “voice of the people” and we wondered if we could identify specific genre conventions on blogs. We were kind of interested in the blog as a stage for “site-specific” performance, which also carried over into our Universal Acid project. We’d both done blog-based projects before, which was how we met, online. We sent each other fan letters about his conversion of net artist Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War and my American Idol Audition Training Blog. I also loved Screenfull.net, Abe’s old blog with Jimpunk.

Our first collaboration was actually a blog called Blog Art, which was a curated blog listing blogs that are art projects. At the moment, I’m really into group blogs that ride the line between art practice and some other sort of internet fan culture. For instance, some friends and I founded an “internet surfing club” called Nasty Nets–in which we sort of simultaneously celebrated and critiqued the internet–and I love other group surf blogs like Supercentral, Spirit Surfers, Double Happiness, and Loshadka.

When you blogged your efforts to audition for “American Idol.” How did people around you react to that decision? What did the whole training teach you (i’m not only talking about sun beds and stilettos boot camps of course)?

Well, my family and grad school professors at the time certainly thought I was crazy. I made what was probably the mistake of announcing it by emailing people out of the blue with the subject line “I need your help” and inside I asked for help in picking what song I should sing. Even though I linked to a New York Times article about the blog, a lot of people told me later that they really thought I was seriously delusional about trying to get on the show! They didn’t recognize it as a parody, which is kind of awesome. I started the project wanting to critique the show (which I admittedly also loved) and the gender normative stereotypes it pushes. I was concerned about how artists rights to their own work & identity were violated by the producers, in my opinion. But the project took on a life of its own. The lead-up to my audition (in 2004) was the same as the build-up to the presidential election between Bush & Kerry. I started thinking of how the show is predicated on a model of democracy and voting but I kept hearing how my generation (the main demographic for the show) wasn’t showing up to polls. They would stand in line for 8 hours to audition, but not 15 minutes to vote. So the project became all about voting. I told readers how to register to vote, brought registration forms to the auditions, and I had readers vote on what I should wear & sing. Ultimately, I collected over 10,000 votes in the course of trying to get young people to think about the many ways in which they could use their “voice.”

You are also a curator, both independently and as part of your activities at Rhizome. Your curating often deals with new media art pieces. What are the challenges of curating and exhibiting works of new media art today?

I think that there is presently a very exciting turn happening in new media, with respect to both the art world and the context of “traditional media.” It used to be very important to carve out a separate space in which to show, discuss, and teach new media. Nowadays these spaces are sometimes seen as ghettos, but at the time, they were safe havens championing under-recognized forms. Things are more co-mingled now. Not everyone will agree with me about this, but I think it’s great that some people no longer even know new media when they see it. I know curators who turn their nose up at that phrase, but they love Cory Arcangel or Paul Pfeiffer. There doesn’t seem to be a need to distinguish, any more, whether technology was used in making the work–afterall, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything. What is even more interesting is the way in which people are starting to make what I’ve called “Post-Internet” art in my own work (such as my Monitor Tracings), or what Guthrie Lonergan recently called “Internet Aware Art.” I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be done well on networks but can and should also exist offline. Of course, it’s an exciting challenge to explain to someone how this is still internet art… If that really matters…

Your Media Change course at ITP/ NYU explored the “evolution” of technology. How does your teaching explore an area which is well… evolving so fast?

I feel like this is a great opportunity and a perfect class to teach at an amazing place like ITP, which evolves daily, with the technology. But I think the way to do it is to try to see media change as having a longer-tem trajectory. I have a background in media theory. I studied History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and am PhD Candidate in film studies and new media in the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley, where my dissertation is on The Art of Protest in Network Culture. So I’ve read, loved, and taught the classic McLuhan, Benjamin, Kittler, Flusser, Baudrillard, Jameson, etc over and over again. The aim of this class was to consider the cultural and political forces behind the evolution of technology and the broader concept of “change” (which most certainly also incorporates social/ political change). So we read these classic historiographies but tried to read them from the present context as well as the original one. And we read them beside Alex Galloway, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, and other great contemporary writers. I mean, this stuff can never be pinned down long enough to be considered in an isolated temporal context, but it’s still important to consider the personal and political forces that compel media change–the desires and impetuses.

In your recent Golden Oldies performance/ video, you seem to give a very hard time to a bunch of electronic devices. What is your own relationship with technology?

Ha, well… It occurs to me now that you could probably say that my relationship to technology is a bit sado-masochistic. I don’t mean for that to sound weird or sensational. I think, in the true classical psychoanalytic sense, many people’s relationship with technology is very wrapped up in both their libidinal and death drives, as Freud would call them. I guess this video demonstrates that I enjoying abusing technology as much as I enjoy observing its abuse of me. I’ve always been a fetishist and could never try to hide that. My studio is littered with blinged-out headphones, radios, and cassette tapes. But the tapes I’ve been calling Time Capsules. I mean, they are moments of time that are disappearing but not really going away, so instead I try to prevent their burial (in a landfill) by taking them out of circulation and painting them gold, much like the symbolic bricks in Fort Knox. InGolden Oldies, I try unsuccessfully to instigate communication between media of various generations–tapes, vhs cassettes, records, cds…. And after drilling, hammering, and chiseling each one, I give up and wipe the garbage to the floor–where is becomes “out of sight, out of mind,” as we say in the US. I feel like this is what’s happening with all of our tv’s, walkmen, air hockey tables, nintendos, etc as we follow our drives to upgrade. They just get pushed into dumpsters and disregarded. And I’ve been trying to think about my own role in this cycle, because I certainly love my ipod as much as the next gal.

Any upcoming projects you could share with us?

Well, we just released a DVD of Nasty Nets members’ work (there are 25 of us, including some of my very favorite net artists), and that was generously funded by Rhizome. It includes videos as well as loads of data files and a type-in website by fellow Nasty Michael Bell-Smith. People can get the DVD online, and if they are in New York, they should definitely attend our premiere screening at the New York Underground Film Festival this Friday, April 4th, called Nasty As U Wanna Be.

Otherwise, as you can see, I’m really obsessed with the future, at the moment, which is kind of funny for someone who tends to say that her work is about the cultural history of technology. I’m just starting to work on a project called “Martha Stewart Assisted Living” and it’s a near-future version of Martha’s show (guess who I play!) aimed at an aging audience whose lives have been lengthened by new technologies, but who are also suffering side effects, like head goiters from their cell phones or Global Warming-Related Illnesses (GWI’s). I’m devising special recipes and craft projects for those 130-year-olds!

Thanks Marisa!

Previously: Sousveillance culture, a panel curated and moderated by Marisa Olson.