Semiotext(s)'s new publication by Simone Weil inspired Sunday's SlofemistS. We wondered if the entrenched economic inequity based on gender, from stories in our families' histories, could be understood as what Weil describes as an unexamined and highly desired "truth" --the stuff of religions, and adherents to political parties. In "Note on the Abolition of All Political Parties" (first published in French in 1957, and now available in English as part of the Semiotext(e) Whitney Series), Weil decides that political parties, like religious groups, are incapable of critically examining the truth... "how can one desire truth without knowing anything about it?" (20). We wondered if her logic could be applied like this: how can one desire some "truth" (like inequitable distribution of family assets based on gender, for example) when one does not thoroughly examine the justice of this truth on all of the people involved?

Weil's essay ends: "Almost everywhere --and often for purely technical problems--the operation of taking sides, of taking position for or against, has replaced the obligation to think." (30)

 Other SolfemistS highlights from Sunday:

Lexie Owen is continuing her deconstruction / reconstruction project called For All The Boys I've Loved Before, that was featured in the graduate exhibition at Emily Carr University of Art + Design at the beginning of this month.

Kriss Boggild dug into her archive and brought along three issues of Makara: The Canadian Magazine by Women for People circa 1975-78. Coming out of an office on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, Makara's editorial policy was "'Canadian general interest alternative magazine by women for people.'... some art, some fiction/poetry, some politics, some humour, some health news, some children's features, some book reviews... We want to reflect the growing, moving, changing times, without making things appear impossibly dismal, because we believe in possibilities, and people who are working for new ideas, new approaches, new lifestyles. Do we sound fussy? We are!" (Vol 2, #4, page 10)

Jem Nobel brought a family story about the important but unacknowledged economic contribution that his mother had made in his extended family. He used the SlofemistS time and supplies to do his mending.

Margaret Dragu was completely delighted by the hazards the heavy weather had presented to her en route... I was so glad she made it!

• 
• 
• 

Lisa Anne Auerbach - Video

In this video Lisa Anne Auerbach explains how her art works in the 2014 Whitney Biennial are meant to be examples of alternative publishing. By this, I think she means that her knitted items can carry around and display a legible narrative, by way of text and symbol. Using a knitting machine, she makes garments that record her chants & rants ("keep abortion legal"), her past times (food and drink are represented with readable symbols), her collections (an archive of psychics' predictions makes up a large banner). Also, to make the publishing theme unavoidable, she has included in the show a "megazine" -- an oversize publication that documents her research into psychics at work.

In the video she comments on her self-sufficiency in the works' production. Really, it is her use of studio-sized industrial machines that makes her self sufficient. The oversize colour printer is pictured, and the knitting machine cannot be too far away. I find this intriguing: her work refers to DIY culture (yarn bombing and 'zine culture), but through the works' materials and processes, she has forced this aesthetic through industrial processing. Is she claiming a creative territory in the rapidly expanding world of rapid prototyping? What does the "maker" culture think of her work? What is retained from the DIY in her large-scale, quick-copy publishing?

Her work is well placed in this iteration of the Whitney Biennial since so much of the selected work concerns the "complex relationships between linguistic and visual forms," in the words of her curator, Stuart Comer. I thought the exhibition in its enormity displayed the complex relationships between visual forms and just about everything else. Much of the work situated art practices in other worlds, and situated other worlds (publishing, archiving, narrative film...) inside the world of art.

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial

Here is a new zine published by the alumni, students, and faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts. In their introduction, the editors suggest that each issue will be featuring a geographical as well as thematic focus. To start, the region featured is "La Frontera," the Mexican north / the US southwest; and the theme is "slow." Pam Calore, an alumni of VCFA who lives and works in San Deigo, sent me a link to this zine because her contribution to it features a photo that she took of one of the blankets made by way of my project Comforter Art Action. Pam delivered that blanket to a shelter for deported migrants in Tijuana. She fittingly paired the blanket photo with one she took of a protest sign at the Mexican/US border: "No Militariza[...] La Frontera" | "Angeles Sin Fronteras". The sign is partially obscured by drying clothes, evidence of the daily and personal costs of the militarized border. This edition of here ends with a manifesto by Faith Wilding that works by chronicling a day well spent in mindful attention to its pleasures, including its delays.

"Don't let speed control you. The slow body's pleasures and pains are part of your radical subjectivity." Faith Wilding, "Manifesto for the Slow Body-Mind," Here, VCFA (2014)

Kate Fletcher, a UK researcher of fashion and sustainability gave a public lecture at Emily Carr University this week. She is a proponent, and analyst, of alternative fashion systems. In particular, she advocates for something she calls “craft of use.” Fletcher believes that if we consider the properties of clothing –what we find necessary and beloved, as well as the skills that we need to make, re-make or maintain clothing, as well as the impact of our clothing decisions on others and the environment, we might be able to mitigate the fearsome global impact of the fashion industry.

Her story telling about the clothing trade in the UK (echoed around the middle class world, one assumes) is shocking. Over the last 10 years there has been a 26% reduction in the cost of clothes in the UK. This doesn’t mean that people have redirected their saved consumer dollars into other things (education, health, community development, arts & culture??) --instead, they have bought a greater quantity of –lesser quality—clothes! It is estimated that about 2 million tons of clothing are purchased annually in the UK; but only about 1 million tons are discarded. Which leads one to wonder, what kind of hoarders have people become? As one of the oldest industries, second only to food, clothing/fashion has one of the longest supply chains. The environmental and social impact of production is felt all along the way: from the production of the resources needed to make the fibers; to the transport of the materials in and out of textile and clothing processing facilities; to the garments’ appearance inside a complicated marketing system; to your closet; and eventually into your garbage bin or into yet another supply chain of clothing recycling processes (thrift stores, and eventually recycling facilities which turn the fibers into other textile products – such as shoddy). The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) estimates that in order to avoid a tripling of resource extraction by 2050, the developed world needs to cut consumption by a factor of 5 – about 80%. Fletcher made a convincing argument for the dire environmental implications of fashion and the urgent need to take on dramatic changes in how we cloth ourselves.

Unfortunately Kate Fletcher’s concept of “craft of use” is a complicated proposition that seems hard to pin down to concrete or realizable solutions. But, the outcomes of the concept can be very simple, and very beautiful. Her current research project called Local Wisdom is one such manifestation. It is a growing web archive of the experiences that people already possess for making individual pieces of clothing enduring and endearing. In this project, she asks participants to attend a photo shoot, in which they are asked to discuss and demonstrate the way their craft of use makes their objects more useable. The website is becoming populated with photos and stories that quote people who have modified out-of-shape items; or who share with other wearers wardrobe pieces that only get used ‘once in a blue moon’; or who have such commitment to a garment’s fit and function that they continually have replicas made each time the item becomes worn out.

By coincidence, the Vancouver-based performance artist, Margaret Dragu – none other than the Mending Aktion persona, just this week completed the video How To Be Old – Chapter 3: get thrifty !!! If you need a few practical “craft of use” lessons that anyone can take up, see Margaret Dragu on Vimeo.

Last week I was asked by the new Canadian Creative Commons Affiliate to be part of a salon on how artists are using the creative commons. This call sent me straight for the boxes of Mail Art that I accumulating during the final decade of the last millenium. From the top of one of the Renegade Library  archive boxes, I found an "Add & Pass On" book that today is a perfect example of how  marginalized artists in the 1990s were motivated to work collaboratively and in an international context. They were situating their early "scoial media" in the context of Fluxus and Ray Johnson. They were saying over, and over again: I make art in a social and open context.

Flux, September, 1996 (approx.), various contributors. From the Renegade Library archive (L. Klassen 1998- present).

At the salon, I also quoted a text that was written for the Creative Commons by Glen Lowry, Marina Roy, and Joomi Seo, Rob Stone, and Robert Sweeny during QR_U (an open school) at Emily Carr University Concourse Gallery last year. The entire text was written collaboratively over 24 hours using a shared google doc. It can be found in its entirety here: http://qruopenschool.ca/

This is the portion that I read at Creative Commons Salon:

Artists are amongst the most dedicated to the commons, as they do the most in funding the production of creative works that are freely shared with the public. In terms of the amount spent on promotion of the arts, this pales in comparison to the sheer number of talented artist who support their own practice through working in various capacities and making work “in supplement” to their daily labour in other forms of work. The remarkable commitment of artists and artist collectives is tempered by the extremes of a global art market and the “star making machinery” of certain art schools or programs. Within a creative economy, the work of art is highly ambivalent. On the upper edges, the creative output, cultural products of contemporary art stars might approach the returns on investment (ROIs) of more lucrative creative enterprises, such as the gaming industry; in the main, artists who can not be promoted and marketed as top flight entertainers are paid as artisans or more often than not, end up teaching applied skills. In this way, the ideals of the commons are difficult to separate from the necessities of sustainable creative practice.

(Glen Lowry, Marina Roy, and Joomi Seo, Rob Stone, Robert Sweeny, "What is the Open School of the Arts?", Collaobrative Text, QR_U (open school), 2011, page 5.)

I am trying to get a handle on materialism.

In the midst of QR_U (an open school) which is essentially a virtual and event-driven --a no-thing-- project, I keep thinking about the relationship of art and things. It's a bit like an irrepresible itch. Big things and little things. My things and other things that I can't seem not to notice. Even things that are not present. Maybe the absent things are the most interesting, come to think of it.

QR_U is a collaborative project that began when Emily Carr University MAA Candidate Elisa Yon asked Heidi May, Adam Stenhouse, and me to help her to launch something that would reflect the Emily Carr community of students and faculty during the upcoming W/HERE Symposium. Early in the design of this project that aimed to produce  an open school within (and without) a school, we looked to QR code technology as a way to invite exhibition participants to actively use the virtual school from the gallery, and for the gallery to be marked by the activity on line.

The QR code has some appeal as a printed thing. The tools needed to create it are free and easy (http://qrcode.kaywa.com/) but the tools to use it are far less so. To access the meaning behind the symbol, you need an internet-enabled smart phone or ipod upon which to load the free QR code reader app. Like the bar code scanners at retail check-out, the scanner on the phone will work to focus on the ancoring black squares until it registers about 60% of the image at which point it will bleep and begin to process the link to the url or other message hidden within the arrangement of tiny squares.

Is the QR code a thing? does it signify a thing? does it make things happen? Those are the questions that the wall-sized QR codes that we hand painted into the QR_U exhibition space might be asking. The codes simply are a link between data and the material world. At QR_U their over-sized reproductions become the stage for an accumulation of ideas in the form of questions, responses and unofficial conversations that are enbaled through the events (open classes) in the exhibition and through the pages of running dialogue in the virtual school at qruopenschool.ca.

Adam Rothstein, in "City of QR Codes," Rhizome, September 15 2011, lets the appearance of QR codes on the streeetscape seduce him into a more and more attentive awareness of the marks and scars that the city wears in its undersurfaces and crevices. He is disappointed by our lack of imagination for the potential of this technology to hold enormous quantities of data, when all we use it for is to direct the user to a URL that could have just as easily been typed into the toolbar. He asks, why do things need to re-declare themselves? Why do we continually use technology to brand, re-brand and re-iterate? He is much more intrigued by the possiblity of becoming the scanner --what would it be like to decode everything, every scar on the surface of the street?

In class at QR_U today, we scanned and drew things. Dr Monique Fouquet and Heidi May's class reviewed how Emily Carr students have been taught creative processes and colour theory through various means like correspondence courses, TV and video education, and now internet-based courses. After that discussion, Matthew Isherwood (UBC Curriculum Studies MA Student) led us through a learning experiment: two still life drawings - first, we drew from a 'digital surrogate' then the actual thing was set in front of us to do again. I have not had many drawing classes, so it all seemed to be a lot of attention put onto a simple concept. Clearly, the two dimentional surrogate was much easier to draw, since it had already been compressed into a flat thing. When the actual thing--a chipped and stained hippie bean pot--came out of Matthew's bag it looked very strange -- much smaller and more irregular than our eyes and minds had formulated it, after the predictability of the digital photo.

With the second phase of the experiment, I can assure you that I really sweated to make that strange thing into a flat image... Thinking back on it now, it was something like Rothstein's experience of scanning not just the QR code markers but the neglected cracks and surfaces of the city. I started feeling a stirring --a love for that strange thing in front of me. An untranslatable bean pot -- frustrating and desirable, in the way it makes obvious my lack of technology to store it with a scan and a bleep.

Thank you Dr. Cartiere (Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Emily Carr University of Art + Design)

Distinguished and honoured guests,
my fellow 2011 graduates,
faculty and staff,
and all of the loved ones who are here to celebrate with us
and those who are not able to be here today.

I want to personally acknowledge the support of my own family, who are far away from Vancouver and also my relations who have come before. During a recent project at Emily Carr, I was led to discover photos from my grandmother’s college graduation in 1938. Until finding the photos I did not know that any of my grandparents had attended, let alone graduated from, a post secondary institution.

Found in the midst of course work that dealt with a materialist sense of time, those photos made me aware of how we live concurrently in the past, present and future - through the things and stories that we encounter.

Even the place of our studies is permeated with the legacy of those who have gone before us.  I acknowledge that in this place to which most of us have arrived from someplace else, we are guests.

Vancouver is indeed a very old gathering place, and it is recognized as the unceeded traditional territory of the Coast Salish people. This is the source of confusion for international students and even Canadians from outside of British Columbia since, unlike the rest of the country, the aboriginal claim to most of BC has not yet been relinquished through treaties.

So owing to these gracious and hospitable people, histories and places, my task here is to speak a farewell to Emily Carr University on behalf of the graduating masters students.

Do you remember just over a year ago, during our Seminar in Research, we decided to host a group exhibition and a writing symposium under the title Killer Texts?

Leading up to the somewhat unlikely quote that inspired our exhibition, Avital Ronell in the book Crack Wars describes a moment in Flaubert’s Madam Bovary as the first declaration of war on unregulated drugs. In the book the apothecary wants to write the names of everyone who has been drunk on the door of the town hall.

Ronell writes:
“The drunk, like the adulterous Emma, liberates uncontrolled signs into a public sphere... Like the work which contains them, they become killer texts, triggering a chain reaction of uncontrolled mimetic caliber. Thus even translators of such a text are endangered by the effects of contagion.” (98)

In our exhibition we were considering the integration of art and text. Art and design are maybe like the public drunk or the adulterous Emma --they get circulated in public, as texts. People who read or encounter our ideas risk becoming infected by them.

In some ways, Avital Ronell uses drug addiction to capture our morbid attention, so that we think about public-ness. Does the liberation of radical and dangerous “signs” or unanticipated new ideas indicate a public sphere?

Much of these graduate studies have been an education in the production of unanticipated ideas, and in how to place them in public. From Dr. Burnett’s challenge in one of our first classes, to make something go viral, to the thesis project which challenged us to produce new knowledges within existing discourses, we were given the assignment to put ideas into the world.

And so, we took the first steps.

Besides Killer Texts, we presented at most of Emily Carr’s conferences.

We showed our work in Emily Carr exhibition spaces, on its exterior surfaces, and in a new exhibition venue, 1612 Gallery, where thanks to Helgi Kristiansson’s research project, solo and group experiments by us as well as and other graduate students from Vancouver and Europe were shown.

Our work was also seen throughout the lower mainland at:
the surrey art gallery’s e-mixers
Elissa Cristall Gallery
UBCs Norm Theatre
on Translink
the PNE Container Art Exhibition
and more

Further within Canada, we distributed our ideas to:
Banff Centre Residencies
Pecha Kucha Victoria
Nuit Blanch in Toronto
and the Western Canada Communication Graduate Student’s Conference in Nelson, BC with SFU and University of Calgary

Internationally, we presented Emily Carr-generated ideas at:
the Cross Border Relations Conference at the University of Washington
the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas
Raleigh First Night in North Carolina
Society of Photographic Education in Atlanta, Georgia
Hub M3 at the University of Salford, UK
Lancaster University
Spike Island in Bristol, UK
the WAAG Society in Amsterdam
Kei University in Tokyo
and the Saudi Aramco Future Centre in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Originating from Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Iceland, the United States, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and BC - we are a group of people who have already begun to make art and design projects go viral in subtle and persuasive ways.

On behalf of the 4th graduating masters class, I want to end with a message to the relatively young faculty of graduate studies:
may this program be infused with a sense of simultaneous time - in which the histories and experiences of the region, the university, the instructors and most importantly the students are treasured and integrated within current practice and future planning
and, may the production of new and unexpected ideas, designs, artworks and texts through the people who study and teach in the MAA program, become viral within local and global publics.

With enormous pride, I say thank you and farewell to the MAA program at Emily Carr.

To my fellow students, may this be both a well remembered past and the beginning of a long and satisfying life work as artists, film makers, designers, writers, dancers, performers, and more. I will miss you all.

Congratulations on our collective achievements - now and in the future!

Lois Klassen
Emily Carr University of Art + Design Convocation
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
May 7 2011

I'm really proud to be a part of this student writing symposium at Emily Carr.

Download Liminal Positions Schedule