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- Volume 31, Issue 61, 2020
Public - Volume 31, Issue 61, 2020
Volume 31, Issue 61, 2020
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Exposed by the Mask
More LessSemantic segmentation is the process of assigning a label – vehicle, person, sidewalk, pavement etc. -- to every pixel in an image. This artificial intelligence technology was initially created for military application, Gulf War, and it is the core technology behind autonomous driving, medical imaging technologies or satellite image processing, among others. Being from Brazil, the departure point of the project is to explore my own relation to Dakar, Senegal, through the inscriptions of colonialism and post-colonialism in the leisure industry. Before visiting Dakar in the fall of 2019 for an art residency, my relationship with it was basically mediated through a game, called “Paris-Dakar 1990”, for the video-game console Atari. This game was made as a merchandise product from the Paris Dakar race. Through juxtaposition between this ‘AI’ technology and those video game ‘vignettes’ the work is a reflection of how new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future while replicating and reinforcing old forms of racialized, gendered and class ideas about the ‘good life’ through middle class ideology.
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Camping off the grid in the grid: Between hospitable space and inhospitable land
More LessWhen the last U.S. Census canvassed Slab City, a remote, self-governed community of artists, retirees, anarchists and homeless people in southern California’s desert, most of its residents claimed ownership of the plots they occupied as “free and clear.” And yet Slab City itself occupies land that is public, as firm in this designation as the resolve of those who live there. Often called the “last free place,” this square-mile plot is one of the remaining Section 36 areas, which were originally reserved for the state’s public schools when each township was laid out by the National Ordinance’s land surveys that blanketed the American West in an invisible but all-encompassing grid. Consequently, the state of California hosts an array of one-square mile pockets of land. Among these, Slab City is a camp that bears the ongoing question of how land—environmentally inhospitable yet relatively hospitable in its public status—might host practices of self-determination, self-regulated community, and national identity. Veritable blind spots of land management, Section 36 areas contrast other more regulated, though comparable, practices on public and private lands. The Bureau of Land Management oversees Long Term Visitor Areas where campers can park trailers across vast territories for extended periods of time, and Walmart plays host to cross-country travelers who overnight in its parking lots—a permutation of recreational camping known as boondocking. But what happens in the absence of oversight? In places where the campsites become permanent? In times when those living there have arrived not only by choice but also in many cases out of necessity? Legacies of a country’s organizational matrix, Section 36’s pockets of land linger as residual pieces of frontier mythologies, as testaments of the arbitrariness of the grid and its land policies, and as fertile ground for alternative practices of adapting to inhospitable environments and making home in improvised communities. This essay seeks to understand how Section 36 land hosts contemporary intersections of public space and freedom.
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Feral Hospitality: Thinking Outside the House With Kedi
By Sara SwainOur current understandings of hospitality are largely informed by the Western European philosophical tradition. This tradition, however, restricts accommodation to the proprietary space of the human house, or to its equivalent, the nation state. Both can only offer a constrained, exclusive, and temporary welcome. This has significantly limited the possibilities for imagining and practicing hospitality. In order to challenge the perceived scarcity at the heart of hospitality’s spatial imaginary, this essay turns to Kedi, Ceyda Torun’s 2016 documentary about Turkish street cats. Using the film as a guide, it explores what hospitality can look like outside the house. By tending to the relationships between cats and the people of Istanbul, the film offers a glimpse of a more capacious, creaturely, and cosmopolitan alternative I call, “feral Hospitality.” This is an itinerant and performative hospitality that produces rather than consumes space.
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HOOS: Scenes of Educational Hospitality
Authors: Claudia Ruitenberg, Karen Meyer and Cynthia NicolThrough narrative, poetry, photographs, and philosophical reflection, this essay attends to the possibilities and impossibilities of hospitality in encounters between particular Canadian teacher-educators, Somali student-teachers, and those hosting and facilitating their encounters in the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya. The scenes of educational hospitality trouble the boundaries between host and guest, teacher and student, implacement and displacement.
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Invisible Hospitalities of the Art School
More LessAcross the art school, there are explicit forms of welcoming, of hosting, and othering. From the process of admissions to the structures of critique to the hiring process of both precarious and instrumental academic labour, the art school centers values built on invisible hospitalities that actively foreclose emancipatory social and political practices and continually reasserts dominant expectations of market-based practices. This essay traces the ways in which invisible hospitalities inform curricular, infrastructural, and administrative processes, while charting a course for cultivating new forms of hospitality that can support plural, complex, and radical forms of creative self-determination and artistic practice.
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A Preliminary List of References for an Unrealized Project at the New Oslo Public Library
More LessListed references for a play in nine acts, on hospitality and its pitfalls, proposed as a public art project for the New Oslo Public Library. The project was not realized. The proposal was to run a series of participatory workshops for library users and library staff. The process would have concluded with the performance of a musical banquet where the final performances were only one aspect of the work instead of its most important part.
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Hospitality of the Anus (or When Will We Learn to Play Dirty?)
More LessIn this article I argue the potential for the anus to become a hospitable site for political resistance and symbolic reparation. In order to lay out the ways in which this hospitality can be performed, and how it can amount to an emancipatory ethics, I look to two representatives of what we could call a queer theory from the streets. That is, a queer theory that emerges from peripheral spaces, through unorthodox means, and from urgency of sexual, artistic and activist cravings. This queer theory bypasses the rules and regulations that tend to govern academic protocols and is here represented by Brazilian trans rapper Linn da Quebrada and Spanish philosopher Paco Vidarte. Both, like myself, recognize the necessity to speak in the first person if one is to stress one’s subjective position, expose the borderlessness between work and worker, and refuse to be a spokesperson for a group.
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Nights of Red and Gold
More LessThis paper considers hospitality on imagined nights in two clubs at the end of the 1970s.
The text visits New York’s Studio 54, a permissive environment but with restricted access, and le Palace in Paris, frequented by Gilles Châtelet. In le Palace the partygoers anticipate the market boom of the 80s while the hedonistic crowd at Studio 54 is unprepared for the incipient AIDS epidemic. The text asks if there were patterns of alignment in the new clubs of entitlement and illness?
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Weepers I, II, III
More LessWeepers I, II, III is a ficto-critical approach to the topic of hospitality, arising from the xacerbating conditions of academic, curatorial and institutional care. Ficto-criticism sidesteps the constraints of non-disclosure agreements and the strictures of the reputational economy, to instead posit a dreaming vision of colliding worlds and meanings.
Weepers I, II, III, considers hospitality in three related short fiction works which address the figure of the academic curator: one is an exposition of the linked codes/spheres of migration/contemporary art as it relates to asylum, emancipation and the promise of art world economies by focusing on the conditions of the security guard within a major art museum; a second examines the self-determination of a series of ‘wipers’—carers hired, groomed, academicized and ultimately fetishized, to wipe the tears of crumbling academics as a form of corporeal hospitality; to a vignette of interspecies escape and conversion, following the heart attack and subsequent cellular changes that free the academic’s father from his former life. Through these interlinking stories of grief and loss, also come the act of naming and inventing, side-stepping instrumentalized forms of academic writing to posit a dream-time, a curatorial and academic imaginary that, freed from the reputational economy and non-disclosure clauses of the career curator, dares speak its name. In form and methodology, this approach suggests an approach to an opening and a form of resistance to hospitalality and its various forms.
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Jawa El Khash, The Upper Side of the Sky: Virtual Worlds as Sites for Ecological and Cultural Resurgence
By Nina BakanDamascus-born artist, Jawa El Khash’s immersive installation, The Upper Side of the Sky (2020), combines virtual reality and Syria’s natural ecology to confront the physically devastating impacts of war. In response to ISIS’s 2015-16 occupation of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, El Khash evaluates the relationship between technology and the environment to explore the ability for virtual reality to rebuild destroyed landscapes and create sites for healing.
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Geoffrey Pugen’s Apocalyptic Utopias
More LessAt the intersection of technology and the natural world, humanity becomes a ghostly presence in “Weather Room,” Geoffrey Pugen’s 2020 solo show at MKG 127. De-centring the presence of the human figure, the exhibition becomes an investigation of the “hyper-sublime,” asking the question: who does this hyper-sublime world belong to, if not humanity?
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NIGHTSENSE
Authors: Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick
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