Kapsula: Crisis, Part 3 of 3

Over the past couple of months KAPSULA has sent subscribers two separate releases dealing with CRISIS. We’ve looked at crisis in art criticism, moments of individual or personal crisis, the crisis of (re)presentation and now, for our final crisis-themed iteration, we turn to focus on our chosen domain: the digital and technological. Considering that many of the most widely publicized and discussed crises have been based in this realm, it may seem surprising that we’ve taken this long. Over the last couple of years the digital realm, and surveillance thereof, has dominated news stories: the Snowden/NSA/PRISM trinity and the Assange/Wikileaks duo chief among them. We’re not going to be investigating surveillance, though—after all, we’ve already infiltrated your inbox. Instead, the essays are more formal in their scope: exploring the shifting implications of the cyborg figure, and the ramifications of four D cinema. In early (feminist) discussions the cyborg was presented, by Donna Haraway and other theorists, as a potential figure of resistance and resilience—a marker of difference and defiance. It offered, as Tyler Morgenstern notes, “a conception of the body as negotiable and assembled.” Yet, while wearable technologies increasingly make the merging of human and machine an everyday reality, Morgenstern notes that the form of these prosthetic extensions overwhelming veers towards the invisible and the seamless. This aesthetic sensibility (or, perhaps lack of a sensibility) extends beyond wearable technologies and into broader conceptions of networks “of all sorts (financial, military, activist, terrorist).” They aim for erasure. Morgenstern hones in on this increasing reality, and seeks to understand its ramifications beyond the realm of the formal. What does this erasure entail? How can it be resisted? Similarly circling within the realm of recent expansions in corporate technology, Grant Leuning delves into the topic of four D cinemas, which aim to enhance the movie-going experience through ‘augmented reality’ à la moving viewers’ chairs, spraying them with water, blasting them with air and so on. With Leuning, as with Morgenstern, we are in Laura Mulvey’s company. But the association traced by Mulvey and other film theorists is threatened—we’ve cut the cord and been expelled from the darkened womb-like state of the theatre. Our comfortable association with the protagonist character has been disrupted, denied. Instead, our association has fragmented into each and every element of the highly manufactured environment. Leuning explains (with echoes of Oppenheimer): “I am become the punch, the robot, the seaspray, the fight as such, the substance of the film itself.” As with Morgenstern, Leuning searches for sites of plurality and alterity, even at the centre of “gratuitous capitalist innovation.” Despite their contrasting topics both authors are congruent in an emphasis on making obvious and, to a lesser extent, making physical (perhaps even material). In Leuning, the varied effects of the four D cinema make countless environmental details obvious, thereby altering the terms of the viewer’s gaze and identification. In Morgenstern, this making obvious is found in the work of the artists he champions. They use clunky, outdated technology that makes no attempt at seamless integration, thus embracing incoherence, glitch and the in-between. In this spirit, then, while reading the issue there should be a few things amiss with the document. (No need to look hard, it will be obvious.) Text will be garbled, overlaid on top of itself until it becomes incomprehensible. Be patient; we want your reading to be disrupted, your attention to be redirected and diverted. Easily achieved, clear reading might not always be the best reading. Perhaps, if you haven’t already, you will gain some appetite for the imperfect, yet impassioned

Net.cromancy: Methods for the revival of virtual exhibitions

This thesis focuses on critical issues in the curation and exhibition of networked art, and proposes a curatorial methodology (net.cromancy) for experimental, participatory models in virtual exhibitions. Since 2005, a noticeable increase in hybrid (or alchemic) models of virtual and physical display have added to the increasing institutionalization and commodification of net art. These models contribute to connotations of net art exhibitions as embodied experiences, in which the physical gallery serves as the primary site of interaction and value production. Therefore, alchemic exhibition models neglect the possibility for critical social engagement to be accomplished in uniquely virtual terms. Using an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that incorporates aspects of site-specificity, media theory, political agonism and software curation, the author outlines and analyzes methods for creating an 'open', innovative and democratic virtual exhibition model through the integration of users, and the liberating potential of virtual critique

The Curatorial Incubator [v.11]

"I am inspired by the way Buster Keaton considers performance as an idea leading to 'natural trouble'. It conjures the kind of controlled chaos that I envisioned when I put out the call for this year's Curatorial Incubator, v.11 -- Stop with the performance already! I did not expect the subtle considerations - indeed almost redefinitions -- of the idea of performance itself that emerged from the research undertaken by each of the emerging curators in this year's program." -- p. 4