Response to Immigration Minister's Requirement to Refer to Refugees as 'Illegals'.

My story begins with what has become a classic Australian stereotype – the wog. ‘Worthy Oriental Gentleman’, ‘Golliwog’ or the more historically substantiated ‘Working On Government Service’ have all been used to explain the acronym, cum insult, cum term of endearment for non-white migrants to Australia, who descend from anywhere between Portugal to Pakistan. The particular brand of wog in my genetic code happens to be Italian, and at the time I became aware of it, I was also introduced to the complex phenomena of racism and stereotype construction. 

Initially it was difficult for me to understand the othering that took place between myself and children from anglo-saxon families. After all, my grandfather, the irretrievable head of my family, was Catholic, a small business owner, a liberal voter and was equal parts angry at and afraid of asylum seekers. (The irony of course being that when my grandparents emigrated to Australia in the 50s, they and everyone they knew had arrived by boat.) The only difference I could tell between him and the patriarchs of my ‘Australian’ friends’ families was a little less Alan Jones on the radio and a little more food in the fridge. 

When I have considered how stereotypes are formed, I have recurrently found an argument for their function to delineate a point of mutual understanding – some common cultural aspect with which we associate otherwise disparate entities. Stereotypes can allow us to become familiar with something foreign, gradually transforming our fear of difference into an acceptance of exceptions (my mother was often told by her Anglo school friends that she was ‘a good wog’) and eventually, hopefully arriving at a conscious decision to reject notions of alterity, in other words, to consider multiculturalism an exciting, enriching and ultimately beneficial experience for all who participate in it.

But Australia, although a highly multicultural nation, can’t help itself when it comes to electing politicians with explicitly racist motivations or who are otherwise thoughtless in their use of racist language. A picture of empathy itself, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has recently made it a requirement for public servants to refer to asylum seekers as ‘illegals’, openly ignoring the Australian laws, which protect a refugee’s right to seek asylum. Although Morrison was heavily criticised for his attempt at systematically dehumanising refugees, language is a powerful tool, often as difficult to deconstruct and rebuild as the perceptions it creates.

The authorisation of racist language into popular vernacular presents a chicken and egg scenario: Are our populations being bullied into fearing a swarthy other by politicians keen on fostering relationships only with those who dangle juicy free trade agreements while demonising everyone else? Or perhaps we give them too much credit, and the Morrisons of Australian politics are simply holding a mirror to the cloudy resentment that brews in the belly of the Australian populace. 

Cultural stereotyping is a phenomena that Australians have practiced since white settlement, and although our attitudes regarding cultural diversity and social equality are more progressive than ever, 33% of Australians still believe that refugees who arrive in Australia by boat present a real threat to the Australian way of life, whatever that may be. 

While Sydney’s inner city is dissected into Chinatown, Thaitown, Koreatown etc. integration into local areas and the establishment of flourishing enterprise has not necessarily equated to the respectful treatment of migrants. Approximately 40% of Asian (Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, China and Indonesia) emigrants to Australia have reported a consistently high level of discrimination. 

For those of us flexible enough to wrap our minds around the rather simple concept of treating all people with the dignified status of being human, we may feel at a loss for what to do when ethically vacant politicians are the mouthpieces of hateful voters. One hope we might console ourselves with is that politicians will always be ethically vacant. They will always be bought and sold, and which way they swing depends only on the interests of the voting majority. 

So in addition to publicly humiliating the next person you hear say something horrible about an Asian motorist or a woman in a hijab, I suggest that we all keep voting for whichever exhausted senator (probably Greens) is striving to improve our understanding of what it means to be a refugee and working to build community relationships not in spite of, but as a celebration of cultural difference.

100 Years of Attitude

View my showreel for the CoFA annual here.

DATABASE AND USER-GENERATED CONTENT: THE EVOLUTION OF MEANING AND THE JOY OF BELONGING

Today our lives are mediated by technologies developing more rapidly than we have time to grasp them. As we scramble to cultivate definitions and codes of ethics for living with digital media, we are at risk of overlooking critical elements of how we access, process and share information. Although our comprehension of database logic is a tentative one, it is a structure that fundamentally supports our online activity. By understanding the role of databases in online narrative construction, we begin to understand how these narratives situate web users within participatory culture. Within these communities content is often circumscribed within a subculture and yet it is globally accessible and receptive to change from users outside that community. By responding to issues surrounding narrative and interaction, as well as paradigmatic and syntagmatic methods of creating meaning, this paper will attempt to delineate the relationship between database content and the psychological need to identify as a member of a community.

A concerning oversight is the current popular notion of narrative as an informational equivalent to database. Historically competing for the opportunity to create meaning, database has presented itself in encyclopedias and photography, giving importance to categorization, while literature, art and cinema have traditionally followed a linear narrative format. While database classifies information for swift retrieval, narrative, critically, must employ the functions of the database to be able to move through its linear sequence. [1] Although an understanding of new media through paradigm and syntagm is borrowed from linguistics, an application in new media transposes these roles. Where syntagm has traditionally meant an arbitrary grouping of signs (or data), in new media, it represents the relationship between them. Similarly, new media paradigms have no association with each other, besides their ability to exist within the database and be accessed at random. While Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media derides the tendency to reduce new media concepts into binaries, here it may be useful to understand narrative as a syntagm and database as a paradigm.


The departure from linear narrative has until recently been limited to the realm of avant-garde film but as the dominant media shifts to digital, online narratives can now be constructed using the gigantic database that is the internet. The Korsakow system is one such example. Developed by Florian Thalhofer, this free, open source database-film generating software allows users to ‘create non-linear database-driven narratives’, otherwise known as K-films. The system has facilitated the production of a significant but paradoxically unquantifiable number of K-films – made so because without a beginning, middle or end, the narratives are incalculable. Thalhofer’s 2010 film Planet Galata is published on the Korsakow site as ‘a *linear film’, which he explains as ‘a film that is exactly the same every time you look at it. Every scene is glued to each other once and forever. The concept of linear film is the result of technical limitations during pre-computer times.’ In 2009, Adrian Miles began using the Korsakow system to design a project using hypertext theory to make a ‘networked, interactive video piece.’ [4] 42 Reveries from a Vog takes its name from forty two video fragments. Miles sought ‘to create a more reflective, possibly introspective, and certainly poetic work’ while avoiding traditional methods of narrative construction. The numbered titles and menu-like navigation through video fragments reflect the paradigmatic nature of the K-film and highlight the viewers’ ability to follow one of many (though finite) trajectories through the database.[5]

At this point it is important to reevaluate the common conception of interactivity. Presently it seems popular to regard interactivity in a fantastic, science fiction-like sense. The idea that one can ‘create’ a unique experience with digital media falls flat under the basic principle that once a program is written, though it may update and adapt, it cannot generate data that is not already present. Manovich insists that in new media, interaction is invariably literal. To equate ‘the psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification’ with the physical contact between a user and computer hardware is invalid. To say that the agency of authorship is stripped from us would befit a player in a game of exquisite corpse, who literally contributes to the narrative of a collaborative text, but it would be false to suggest a database user ever had such agency in the first place.[6] Though the database user may be comforted in the knowledge that although they did not write the program, it is through they, the multitude of users, that meaning is interpreted, altered and reapplied.

If abstract readings of interactivity are untenable, how then is participation possible within a database? In the year of its inception, 8 million videos were being viewed on Youtube – a figure that would increase by almost 250% in less than five years of operation.[7] The extreme popularity of the world’s largest video hosting database is largely due to its potential to form and maintain vast online communities. These communities consistently develop around shared interests, connecting through comments and user-generated video communication that can treble in exposure overnight. Jean Burgess’ attempt to demystify the viral video reveals a powerful social undercurrent, which invests itself in the sharing of videos as ‘mediating mechanisms via which cultural practices are originated, adopted and (sometimes) retained.’ For Burgess, the viral video becomes so because it behaves as a platform for novel and creative response. While Youtube has removed browsing features, its database structure is still evident in it’s ‘most popular’ category, featuring videos one might understandably call ‘overexposed’ such as Gangnam Style, with 1.8 billion hits as of October 2013.

It is not just the widely distributed videos that build communities around themselves, but those that are performative and also reflective of that performativity. It is interesting to note that although more than 70% of Youtube’s traffic comes from outside the United States, the ‘specific ethics of this internet subculture [is] oriented around absurdist and sometimes cruel frathouse humour.’[8] A combination of novelty, absurdity and humour commonly constitute potential virality. Youtube users engage by appropriating the content of their peers, resulting in an aggregate cultural mediation.[9] When viral Youtube content reaches critical mass, or has been appropriated to the point of being a ‘meme-upon-meme’, the community speedily responds with self-reflexive video content. An example of this can be found in Youtube Haiku #1. The video is a montage of video content sourced from Youtube. For 11.42 minutes the viewer is overwhelmed by an arbitrary scan through Youtube’s seemingly endless database. The rapid cutaways offer a dizzying synthesis of of the vox populi of millions, mediated in dazzling colour, frenetic movement and comprehensible but collectively meaningless auditory information.

Since being uploaded in mid 2012 by Youtube user ‘Tharpless’, the title of the montage has since been repurposed to represent a new genre: the Youtube montage. Originally a series of six videos, a search for ‘Youtube Haiku#3’, for example, will offer anywhere between ten to twenty different versions of the original, each granted as much validity as its predecessor so long as it adheres to the basic criteria (montage of Youtube-only content) exemplified by the original, in some way innovating, or at least imitating it.[10] Searching for ‘Youtube Haiku’ will also retrieve a host of other videos within the genre, but with original titles, such as GIFS with Sound#1 by JamaicanBaconify.[11]

As a member of an online community, the ability to reflect on the behavior of that community and perhaps even affectionately ridicule it indicates a rapport and ideological connection between members that is more significant than the sum of its videos. The willingness to allow ones’ intellectual property to be edited and re-presented, possibly for the amusement of others may be mere capitulation to the inescapable multi-authorship of video content, but Stefano Tardini and I believe that, particularly in the (peaceful) Western hemisphere of the internet, the experience of solidarity has become increasingly rare and sought after IRL (in real life).

The proliferation of absurdist ‘internet pollution’ is necessary if we are to establish ourselves as recognized members whose voices are heard within a community.[12] Without such a community, we may struggle to establish the limits of our identity or realize the potential of our talents. Burgess concludes that much of the content of user-generated videos ‘are deeply situated in everyday, even mundane creative traditions’. This provides the access point for such a vast and divergent group of users to exchange their perspectives on a shared understanding of the everyday. The banality of content (amateur performers, recycled broadcast material, the lengthy and uninteresting ‘how-to’ genre) aids familiarity and inclusivity, facilitating a global idiom – an in-joke between millions. An optimist (or a modernist) might suggest that this kind of global dialog lends itself to an appreciation of those experiences (however banal) that are common to us all. A postpostmodernist might draw attention the potential to celebrate difference. I would conclude that, like many Youtube genres, the Youtube montage encourages users to traverse the database as a group, collaboratively working to curate their zeitgeist in an extended dialog between themselves but in view of the world.



**Please contact me for references.




















































REFERENCES


Burgess, J. (2008) 'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?' Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture. Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube., 101- 109.

Retrieved from

http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/files/2008/10/vv_reader_small.pdf.



Chandler, D. (1994). Paradigms and Syntagms. Semiotics for Beginngers

(Original work published 1994).

Retrieved from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html.



Karir, M. (n.d.). Internet Pollution. Retrieved October 19 2013, from http://lacnic.net/documentos/presentaciones/lacnicxiv/Internet-Pollution.pdf



JamaicanBaconify, (2012). GIFS with Sound #1 Retrieved October 12 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR0EHW6IpSw




Manovich, L. (2001). Database as Symbolic Form. The Language of New Media (pp. 293-333).

Cambridge Mass, United States: MIT Press.




Miles, A (2009). 42 Reveries from A Vog . Retrieved October 12 2013, from

http://vogmae.net.au/ludicvideo/commentary/42ReveriesfromaVog.html




S Tardini & L Cantoni (2005). A Semiotic Approach to Online Communities:

Belonging, Interest and Identity in Websites' . Universita' Della Svizzera Italiana .




Thalhofer, F (2000). Official Korsavow website Retrieved October 20 2013, from http://korsakow.org/



Tharpless, (2012). Youtube Haiku#1 Retrieved October 29 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUnVLELDzzI




Zittrain, J. (2008). The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop it. Yale, United States:

Yale University Press.















[1] See ‘Database and Narrative’ Manovich, L (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, pp. 293-333


[2] Chandler, D. (1994): Semiotics for Beginners. (Chapter 4: Paradigms and Syntagms). [WWW document]. http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/


[3] See ‘FAQs’ Thalhofer, F (2000) Official Korsavow website http://korsakow.org/




[4] Miles, A (2009) 42 Reveries from A Vog

http://vogmae.net.au/ludicvideo/commentary/42ReveriesfromaVog.html Web. 1 Nov. 2013


[5] See 1.


[6] "The Exquisite Corpse". Poetry Plus. 2009.


[7] ‘2005-2010 Youtube Facts and Figures http://joaogeraldes.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/2005-2010-youtube-facts-figures-history-statistics/


[8] Burgess, J (2008) 'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?' Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture. In: UNSPECIFIED, (ed) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp. 101- 109.


[9] Zittrain, J (2008) The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It. Yale, Yale University Press.


[10] See above


[11] JamaicanBaconify, (2012) GIFS with Sound #1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR0EHW6IpSw


[12] Karir M, Internet Pollution Merit Network Inc.

http://lacnic.net/documentos/presentaciones/lacnicxiv/Internet-Pollution.pdf



http://www.corpse.org/

Where I have been since May...

For three and a half weeks, Kaleidoscope Gallery will be the home of a range of activities from diverse cultural producers.

Kicking off on opening night, the Homeland exhibition will be a mixed media collection of work that responds to the concept of homeland from a global perspective.

Cultural identity, assimilation and refugee politics will be put on the table, giving you an opportunity to meet with the artists and participate in dialogue that is so important to Australia right now.

Curated by Cassandra Toscano, artists include:

Bernardette Camenzuli
Jan Cleveringa
Ida Jaros
Mo Bot
Saffaa
Alison Ten Bohmer

There’s more to come on Sunday, 8th of September with a screening of oscar nominated Israeli-Palestinian documentary, Five Broken Cameras, followed by a lunch prepared by our wonderful artists. Guest speaker is yet to be announced!

Limited tickets to Sunday’s events are available, so please contact cassandra@kaleidoscope-gallery.com for details.

All funds go toward Kaleidoscope Gallery’s Converge Initiative – providing urban opportunities for multicultural artists from regional areas.
Home cooked meal

One thing that brings all people together, is the humble home-cooked meal.

As part of the Homeland Festival at Kaleidoscope Gallery, we have asked all participating artists to create a meal that is favoured by, or indicatve of their homeland. Something you would typically eat from a place they have thought of as 'home'.

We invite you to come along, to enjoy a beautiful banquet type meal and engaging conversation with these artists from various cultural backgrounds.

In addition to the lunch we will be holding a screening of the Oscar nominated documentary '5 Broken Cameras' by world renowned filmmaker Emad Burnat.

Entry to both the lunch and film screening by donation. All proceeds go toward Kaleidoscope Gallery's Converge Initiative - providing urban opportunities for multicultural artists from regional areas.

We may also conduct filmed interviews during the lunch, please advise if you do not wish to participate. Menu will be released Friday 6th September. (People with specific allergies please purchase with caution, we do not accept liability for reactions. NB: food will be prepared under the guidance of professional chefs)

KINDLY SUPPORTED BY CHIPPENDALE CREATIVE PRECINT, CASULA POWERHOUSE ARTS CENTRE AND LOCAL CHIPPENDALE BUSINESSES TO BE ANNOUNCED SHORTLY.

Join us at KaleidoscopeGallery HQ for a talk by Sydney-based Saudi artist, Saffaa.

As part of Homeland Festival, this talk is an exciting opportunity to find out about some of the issues at the heart of artwork being made by our exhibiting artists.

Saffaa is an MFA candidate at Sydney College of the Arts. Her art practice largely revolves around female empowerment and is aimed at dispelling myths about Saudi women and Saudi Arabia. In her talk, Saffaa discusses her ever evolving love-hate relationship with art and how her continued cultural activism has shaped and continues to shape her art practice. For more information on the artist please visit:www.saffaa.wordpress.com

Limited seats available so please RSVP only if attending. Entry by gold coin donation. All proceeds go toward Kaleidoscope Gallery’s Converge Initiative – providing urban opportunities for multicultural artists from regional areas.

The first-ever Palestinian film to be nominated for best Documentary Feature by A.M.P.A.S®, the critically-acclaimed 5 BROKEN CAMERAS is a deeply personal, first-hand account of life and non-violent resistance in Bil’in, a West Bank village surrounded by Israeli settlements.

Shot by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, Gibreel, the film was co-directed by Burnat and Guy Davidi, an Israeli filmmaker. Structured in chapters around the destruction of each one of Burnat’s cameras, the filmmakers’ collaboration follows one family’s evolution over five years of village upheaval.

As the years pass in front of the camera, we witness Gibreel grow from a newborn baby into a young boy who observes the world unfolding around him with the astute powers of perception that only children possess. Burnat watches from behind the lens as olive trees are bulldozed, protests intensify and lives are lost in this cinematic diary and unparalleled record of life in the West Bank.
5 BROKEN CAMERAS is a Palestinian-Israeli-French co-production.

In a collaboration between Kaleidoscope Gallery and the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, the film will be screened at the gallery as part of the Homeland Festival. For more information visit www.kaleidoscopegallery.com

A Narratological Investigation of the Ex-Votos of Guanajuato and Real De Catorce

"We thank the sacred heart because it gave us the opportunity to have met and find happiness as a couple. Carlos and Felipe."

Like the roosting grounds of migrating swallows, holy sites all over the world are flocked with pilgrims each day, who travel remarkable distances seeking to gain the favour of their respective godheads. Similarly, devotees of Catholicism practice the tradition of offering an ex-voto. The full Latin name of ex voto suscepto translates in English to ‘from the vow made’: it is a gift that expresses supplication or demonstrates gratitude for fortunes believed to have occurred through divine intervention.

One of the most intriguing forms the ex-voto takes is a small depiction of the miraculous event, painted on canvas or tin, which includes a representation of the saint being thanked or supplicated and a short narrative describing the event. Often commissioned by local artists, the ex-voto is taken by the pilgrim to the animita, or shrine in the sanctuary where it will remain.

Though in decline in predominantly Catholic European nations, it is a tradition fervently performed in the former Spanish colonies of Latin America and the Philippines, where the ex-voto has manifested in fascinating and unique forms. I use the word ‘performed’ here, to preface the critical discussion of the role of performance in narrative psychology, which I will come to review.

An exhibition of ex-votos took place in 2012 at the Wellcome Collection in London. Containing the work of over a hundred paintings from Guanajuato and Real de Catorce, Infinitas Gracias sought to illuminate the complexity of the votive tradition in Mexico. For the tens of thousands of pilgrims who journey each year to the Sanctuary of Atotonilco in Guanajuato and Real de Catorce’s Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception, the power of the ex-voto is as real as the faith that leads them there. That faith is rooted in a rich history of storytelling that predates Biblical narrative.

Despite centuries of Spanish colonisation, the animism of Aztec and Mayan culture in Mexico today is indivisible from the dominant Catholic culture. The colour, chaos and festivity of Mexican ceremony, so unlike the sombre Christian ritual, are evident expressions of pre-Columbian heritage, but also indicate what Spence calls the ‘narrativisation of an experience’, without which both the individual and the collective may suffer a ‘traumatic lapse of meaning’.

In Marc Auge’s Non Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity, a home-plus is described as a tool of mediation: by adding local flavour to an introduced custom, the home-plus presents an avenue through which foreign concepts can flow more readily, but more importantly gives actants the agency of reinterpreting the colonizer-culture. Over the course of three centuries, the ex-voto has quite splendidly been home-plussed by its Mexican constituents, in that it not only reimagines the local context of the religious offering but also the relationship that an individual has with the church.

The depiction of holy entities in the same room as humble worshippers, along with the candid nature with which pilgrims address them, serve to demonstrate a sense of ownership over the space that is the church and describe a relationship with the divine that is at once public and intimate. By quite literally creating one’s own narrative, partitioning allows the church to become a realm of self-authorship, sanctioning the actant to become an active agent, thereby creating the potential for them to improve their circumstances. Turner noted an association between ‘the sacred narrative corpus and ritualistic resolution of social conflict.’ Similarly, Kotre and Schafer have both argued that the role of narrative achieves a similar purpose, in assisting individuals to overcome trauma.

Campos highlights how faith in miracles and the role of religion in times of crisis is a critical coping mechanism for low-income Mexicans, whose lives are frequently interrupted by social and economic difficulty. She argues that the reason why health-related issues are such a common feature of the ex-voto is because the majority of Mexicans live without access to modern healthcare facilities.

For Campos, the pilgrims’ participation in ex-voto offering reaffirms for them the power of the images, working as a kind of group therapy that can give participants the hope they need to deal with crisis or recover from illness. Operating in both cognitive and ethogenic modes, pilgrims use the animita as a ‘home for meaning’.

The ex-votos perform yet another interesting function; by acting as records of daily life, the ailments, disturbances, domestic and social violence that would normally be muted in the bedrock of social history are made public, their resolutions openly celebrated. This unique set of conditions allows the ex-votos to become the ‘warranting voice’ that permits these dialogues to unfold.

Moving away from the highly subjective and expressive potential of narrative, an understanding of the ex-voto in paradigmatic terms indicates a noteworthy occurrence in language, involving blame and accountability. Following on from Bruner, ‘In language, the paradigmatic favors the indicative mode, describing a world of fact, whereas the narrative uses the subjunctive mode to construct a point of view which is capable of hope and fear.’ Although having fallen out of favour with contemporary English, some linguistic devices - such as the subjunctive mode - continue to flourish in Latin languages. Another such device is the linguistic structure that allows blame to be transferred from indirect objects to direct objects. In English, we may describe the event of an accident as follows:

“I (indirect object) broke (indicative preterit verb) the vase (direct object).”

Translated into Spanish, however, the phrase “Se me ha roto el jarron” literally means:

“It (direct object) me (indirect object) it broke (present perfect verb) the jar (direct object).”


In other words, placing the indirect object at the scene where the direct object was broken, but by maintaining that “it broke”, the indirect object is safeguarded from blame. The invention of a narrative structure that reinterprets events has been discussed by Schafer, who regards such ‘visions of reality’ as indications that identity is formed by the individual’s perception of events. Yet the individual’s externalized action makes them accountable in the physical (and social) world, and it is this accountability which ultimately draws the individual back to the social discourse that frames selfhood.

In conclusion, the ex-votos of the Guanajuato and Real de Catorce sanctuaries, along with many other forms of votive offering, play a critical role in the cycle that permits individuals to act upon their desires within the framework of their belief system. That belief system in turn forms a community whose shared ideology, interaction and support allows individuals to develop the identities through which they perceive themselves and others.

Auge, Marc (1995) Non Places New York: Verso
Campos, Patricia (2011) ‘The role of faith in miracles in contemporary Mexico’. Interview from the Wellcome Collection http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/infinitas-gracias/exhibition-films/professor-patricia-campos.aspx
Bruner, Jerome S. (1958) `Social psychology and perception’. In E.Maccoby, T.M.Newcombe & E.L.Hartley (eds.) Readings in Social Psychology. (3rd ed.) New York: Holt
Kotre, John (1984) Outliving the Self: Generativity and the Interpretation of Lives Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
Murray, Kevin (1995) ‘Narrative Partitioning: The ins and outs of identity construction’ in Rethinking Psychology: Volume 1 – Conceptual Foundations (ed J. Smith, R. Harre & Luk van Langenhove) Sage
Schafer, Roy (1978) Language and Insight. New Haven: Yale University Press
Spence, Donald (1986) `Narrative smoothing and clinical wisdom’ In T. S. Sarbin (ed.) Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct New York: Praeger
Turner, Victor (1980) `Social dramas and stories about them’ Critical Inquiry 7 pp. 141-68

How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eastern Disenchantment

Today as much as ever, debates rage furiously in the shared living spaces of students all over the world. The subject? The exhausted histrionics of an eternally contentious but ultimately ineffectual conversation on capitalism and communism. You may have visited, or even lived in one of these homes, and been caught in the crossfire between an Ayn Rand acolyte and a staunch Marxist. These arguments are tedious, but what is interesting is the ways in which the aggressive competition between these two very disparate ideologies have informed and constructed cultures and belief systems that are clearly still relevant today.

Without consuming precious word space on the long and tragic histories of Russian or Chinese communism, we can begin at least with the philosophy which lead these two great nations into economic, social and cultural instability. For his part, Marx devised that “class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between highly-productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and private ownership and private appropriation of the surplus product (a.k.a profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie. As the contradiction becomes apparent to the proletariat, social unrest between the two antagonistic classes intensifies, culminating in a social revolution.”

Not limited to economic, industrial and legal policy, the revolution that ensued permeated every facet of citizen life. Even would-be avant-garde designers committed their talents to the motherland, producing some of the most unforgivable utility wear ever imagined. Certainly the most interesting phenomenon (for a non-communist observer) was the revolution of artistic style.

Less a reformation than a total erasure of everything that had gone before it, the people of Russia (and later China) had invested all their creative efforts in an ideology that took political form. In such a state of radical progress, Russia (and China) could no longer truly be represented by the highly skilled, aristocratic styles of the bourgeoisie, but with the great failure of western avant-garde art to capture the heart and mind of the proletariat, Communism needed to develop its own distinct forms of cultural expression.

By the 1930s, Malevich was trying his hand socialist realism, as were many painters, depicting the simultaneous efficiency and humanity of the soviet system, (around the same time that bloody ‘collectivization’ was taking place on farmland across Russia). In sculpture, Iofan was unambiguously heroicising political figures and generally lauding socialist romanticism in the form of terrifyingly large bronze sculptures that would represent Russia at the Paris World Fair in 1937.

Just over a decade later, Mao Tse-Tung became chairman and Chinese artists were quick to begin replicating Russian exports of socialist realism and socialist romanticism with a distinctly Chinese flavor (imagine Mao’s face where Stalin’s would’ve been).

Interestingly, the Chinese had their own highly skilled style of “literati” art, in the form of Chinese brush painting, known as guó huà. Although the Cultural Revolution had, in many ways, meant a total breakdown of the infrastructure of Chinese cultural tradition, it was not obliterated by merely painting it white and then painting it black. There were somewhat unsuccessful attempts to update the guó huà with western graphic styles, but it was not until 1947, when Mao released the Manifesto of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, that the guó huà was finally beginning transform into the people’s art.

The propaganda of the time authorized the rustication of thousands of Chinese youths, and stipulated the necessity for youth to learn the knowledge of the peasants and respect physical labour. In the following years, the presence of educated youth in rural communities led to an exchange between the styles of the art schools and traditional peasant art. This was primarily evident in Yunnan province where collaborating rusticated youth and peasants became known as the Hsien painters, celebrated for the unification of Socialist realism, romanticism and guó huà. This visual unity was boasted on postage stamps and domestic imagery, and gained international following from appropriation by artists like Wu Hufan. 

Communist art continued to be produced in great quantities for almost thirty years after the rustication, and in this time, western tastes for girl-meets-tractor painting had steadily waned.

It had almost completely fallen off the Western radar until 1974 when the post-facto titled Bulldozer Exhibition took place in Moscow. Infamously named after its forcible destruction by water canons and bulldozers, the exhibition contained the work of several artists expressing seditious content. The since-exiled organizer, Oscar Rabin declared that the show was intended as an explicit protest against an oppressive regime.

The occidental art centre realized that this event highlighted what capitalist Westerners already knew but wanted to hear, that communism had failed. It also drew attention to the fact that there were subversive factions in the East – factions who were creating art like nothing being produced in the West at that time. Western audiences could now indulge in forms of modernism and pop art that had filtered through the iron curtain with a lingering, but not totally convincing, ‘you told us so’.

SOTS artists like Kabakov and Komar & Melamid soon discovered that the West was thirsting for a cocktail of socialism-in-strife meets political over-identification, and promptly generated an immensely profitable market between artists from communist states and buyers in the West. With Gorbichev in the Kremlin, these artists could more openly criticize the native government that had censored them. Moreover, they were able to mock the foreigners that had threatened to subjugate them, by enjoying astronomical fame in the art world and more importantly, by cashing the massive cheques that the West was paying for a taste of Eastern disenchantment. 

With the fiscal directives of Deng Xiaoping in from 1978 onwards, China moved to build a middle class, reinforcing a domestic market that could protect their economy against interactions with weaker economies. In 1993, after 15 years of progress towards a market economy, 14 Chinese artists were shown at the Venice Biennale that was memorably known as the ‘Chinese Biennale’. The presence of contemporary Chinese art had created a stir, exciting Western audiences once again, this time from art beyond the Great Firewall of China. In particular, Wang Guangyi’s poppy imagery offered a home plus for Western audiences in its reference to modernism, but also demonstrated an exact knowledge of the trajectory of SOTS art, launched a decade earlier.

An entire art-making precinct was constructed, known as Precinct 798, where international art buyers could travel to Beijing to purchase work directly from artist studios. The success and economy generated by the Venice Biennale and Precinct 798 led to government recognition of China’s art market, occasioning the first Shanghai Biennale in 1996.

While many consider the opening up of trade and culture in China to be a hopeful progression, political artists like Ai Weiwei revile the notion of government intervention in the arts, perhaps rightly, fearing its use as a vessel for political propaganda. It brings to mind the tragic paradox of the artist, who must choose to be avant-garde, starved and brilliant, protesting against a government that has abandoned the arts, or stifled, unable to procure an original idea, growing fat off the teat of government funding. Although I would say that Ai Weiwei is neither starved nor stifled.

It seems that after a century of communism, we in the West can finally rest assured that the threat of socialism is no more. We have the art to prove it.

New Psychedelia, Data Sweatshops and The Digital Postcolony

I would like to begin this brief consideration of digital, Internet and new media art, not with that first, terrifying suggestion of self-surveillance that Charlie Chaplin mimed into being, nor with the invention of the first Cold War super computers, but at the place where I think technology really became interesting. It would be another 14 years before the first domestic computers filled the homes of America’s privileged, but in Beverly Hills and various other desert, mountain and seaside landscapes, Robert Barry was busy emptying containers of the undetectable gases; xenon, argon and helium into the atmosphere. His series, Inert Gas Piece provokes us to interrogate what is happening when nothing can be sensed. While much of his work lies within the realm of that which is not applicable to language or image, this process of ‘knowing’ that something exists without any tangible proof, found it’s allegorical partner decades later, in the World Wide Web.



In 2011 at the University of Queensland Art Museum, a show titled New Psychedelia presented the work of new media artists exploring novel ways of understanding the term ‘psychedelic’. In a panel discussion that launched the show, Mark Penning, Kate Shaw, Sebastian Moody and Edward Collis began to draw clear parallels between psychedelic sensation and the experience of using and living with the Internet. Notable similarities included the inefficacy of explaining the machinations of both the psychedelic and the Internet to someone who has never experienced it, as well as the total conviction with which one believes that the experience (psychedelic and Internet respectively) is based in reality, despite the lack of any tangible proof beyond the interface or the ‘trip’.



Barry later produced It Has Order, 1969-70, which behaved as a sort of reference guide for much of his work. It reads, ’It has order... it is always changing... it is affected by other things... it affects other things... it is not confined... it is not in any specific place... it can be presented, but go unnoticed... to know of it is to be part of it ...’. A Frieze article from 2004 by Jorg Heiser resolves that Barry could have been talking about art, or he could have been talking about inert gases. He’d never heard of the Internet, but I would argue that it fits this description perfectly.



Andreas Muller-Polhe’s series, Digital Scores, 1995-98 translates the first known photograph into alphanumeric code. The series marks an initial foray into what, in the following decade, would become an obsession with data representation. Today, this obsession manifests in our desire to convert self into image, image into a matrix of images that forms a global society of online entities, each entity so multiple and limitless it is barely recognizable as the original self. Counterpart to this complex is the contradiction that lies in our gross lack of understanding the mechanisms that drive our identity formation. The tragedy of the 21st century could lie within the gap between the technology we consume and our comprehension of it.



We may not be interested in how technology works, but we’re certainly involved in how it can be used to reach desired outcomes. Nancy Burson uses face-mapping technology and the now-common knowledge of the human genome to insist that racism is a scientifically proven absurdity, while Second Life users attend virtual protests against censorship. Technophiles such as Ryan Trecartin will fervently agree that the digital frontier is at the vanguard of social evolution, encouraging multiplicity and collapsing previous notions of identity into freeform creativity.



Yet less noble motivations arise. With the online gaming industry predicted to be worth $83bn by 2016, the growing demand for gaming currency has established the incredible phenomenon wherein wealthy gamers (predominantly in the US) are able to purchase game credits earned by predominantly Chinese gamers, who treat the work as their primary source of income. This lucrative market echoes the more familiar model of Western exploitation of cheap Eastern labour. In the age of contingency, beyond postmodernism, where postpostmodernism would be if there was such a thing, we stretch our minds to think of anything at all that cannot be commodified. Our inquisitive and experimental nature dictates that any ‘thing’ has the potential to offer some good to us, and goods are capital, and exploitation is rarely separable from the acquisition of capital.



María Fernández would probably agree. Her paper presents a very important case for postcolonial media theory, or rather, the lack thereof. After some nebulous references to cyborgs and a fairly dichotomous explanation of the relationship between media theory and postcolonial theory, Fernández eventually arrives at a conclusion worth quoting: “The artistic activity…should function as a call for the elaboration of an electronic media theory which acknowledges contemporary political, cultural and economic complexities.”

It is clear that the postcolonial undercurrents that exist in the global realm of Internet-based art, should be more transparent, but Fernández persistently denies the ultimate potential of this art, at least at this stage, to virtually (and in reality) transform society. Without oversimplifying my argument, the unassuming idea remains in my mind, that though we may never erase the traumas of colonization, surely the ground that is traversed by digital technology; the sharing of ideas, the breaking of taboos, can only help facilitate the changes necessary to repair the psyche of both colonizer and colonized.

Effluence, Kastrationangst and the Hermeneutic Sponge: highlighting the absurdity of abject phobia.

Artwork that studies the abject is something that I have tried to form an interest in, but it seems that the more I learn about it, the less I care. While I can appreciate that there are a number of silly psychological hang-ups on our bodies that abjection in art helps to expose, I seem to be comfortable with my bodily functions and those of others, not because I am a physician or a farmer, nor because I have seen countless artists eat their own shit. I am cool with it because anything less than total indifference would limit me to a life bound by social conditioning and the incapacitating terror of farting in public.

Kristeva's argument tried to do an impossible thing, that is, to suggest the effect of a phenomenon (viz. a fear of the abject) can be traced to one particular cause (viz. leaking into the world and our mothers' leaking into us). As far as I am aware, there are very practical reasons why we have evolved to dislike the taste of piss, the smell of shit and the sight of our own blood. In the millennia before antibiotics, cholera vaccines and band-aids, early humans would do well to avoid any potential carrier of disease, be it rancid meat or a substance of our own bodies.


But I don’t want to appear so arrogant as to say there is nothing I can learn from an analysis of ‘the phobic object’. I found the concept of ‘the abjection of the maternal body’ very stimulating indeed. The ramifications in gender politics seem to correlate: men and, to a tragically similar extent, women are trained from an early age to be fearful of vaginas, acknowledging the horror of their existence only by the mark of reticence that surrounds them. I find it hilariously ironic that, for Creed, the maternal body, as interpreted through patriarchy, is the pervasive source of Kastrationangst, perhaps better known as Freud’s theory of castration anxiety.

In this way, one can see how art that deals with the abject has a particular talent for accentuating the absurdity of hegemonic morality. So long as we continue to divide conversation topics into ‘private’ and ‘personal’, or worse still, social and medical, our apprehension to discuss the human body in all its squirting glory will only serve to prolong our fears of sweat-patches, penis-loss and vaginas in general.

Feminist/queer theory has been in the common Western consciousness for over forty years, yet every facet of our culture today, from our language to the arbitrary identifiers of gender, remains structured in patriarchy. Though one cannot deny the social benefits that have come from feminist/queer ideologies, these changes are unhurried to say the least. If essays, protests and even legislation cannot alleviate us of our prejudices, perhaps an impending, inescapable reality will force us to consider just how substantiated our body-fears really are. Unfortunately it is not until the final paragraph that The Phobic Object addresses the rivalry between the body and technology.

I would like to end my response by offering a ridiculous idea. Perhaps, once we realise we are at risk of being prosthesized to the point of being almost or completely inhuman, we will begin to unconditionally cherish every limb, lobe and lactation of the bodies that make us human.

Cloaca, 2000 by Wim Delvoye

Understanding environments

For those who seek to define themselves by the things in the world which we take and transform into something which gives us pleasure, life can often seem to digress us from that point of transformation. When creativity takes a back seat, a short break quickly becomes an unending hiatus and imaginative thought, like an unpractised language, becomes strained and self conscious.

It is not always practical to be prolific. No philosophical ideal is more concrete than pragmatism. But when we can see the world as an object that has been transformed and retransformed countlessly throughout history, life can be entirely pleasurable, in the way that we might practice a kind of admiration for the enterprises of others.

In any great city, it is the achievements of the entrepreneurial mind, which make those cities resonate with palpable evidence of life. There are those great ventures which challenge the laws of physical probability, and quite often aesthetic sensibility, and those humble immigrant-owned establishments which, like some tree which springs forth from a stone wall, evokes awe of such tenacity in such incredible circumstances.

I could use this plant analogy ad nauseam to describe the ways in which people subsist between the cracks in subway stations, survive in the crumbling landscape of condemned buildings and dominate the skyline hundreds of feet above the population. But I won't.

I only mention this because I am beginning to understand now, just how important it is to be able to weave in and out of this social layering, perceiving every echelon in an attempt to grasp exactly what strangeness I am moving into. For one cannot exercise the limitlessness of imagination until one begins to understand the vast context of their situation.

Innovations may come from knowing a few ideas about many things, or many things about one particular idea, but I cannot veritably believe that they could ever come from knowing little and caring less about the world in which we live.