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websites

Theo Pelmus
I am interested in body functions, digestion, urination, ejaculation, blood flow, eating, smelling. A good source on the web is the anatomy of the body websites. I am fascinated by Gunther von Hagen’s approach to anatomy. When I feel dry of inspiration I visit his website or book   http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html
Being interested in experimental sound I browse on the web for free sound sites or I get inspiration for editing sound from M’Lumbo, The Nine Billion Names of God http://www.mlumbo.com/

LIDIA LEON
http://www.internazionale.it/home and  www.adbusters.org
the most I visit: www.paislibre.org/  and www.amnesty.ca/

NEW(BE)COMERS
http://www.eipcp.net/ and http://www.traficantes.net/

ALEXANDRA GELIS
Manejo mis temas de interés a través de suscripciones a listas de correos de diferentes websites que encuentro navegando en la internet al momento de hacer investigaciones, asi diariamente al revisar mis correos tengo un INDICE de posibles temas que me pueden interesar. dLa página que regularmente visito es www.mail2web.com, lugar desde donde se pueden manejar todas las cuentas electrónicas sin importar el hosting que lo hospeda ya sea privado o gratis, y lo más importante no requiere suscripción.  Al momento de investigar Google es mi buscador de preferencia y funciona perfectamente con Firefox.

JORGE LOZANO
 I don’t have favorite websites, I have encounters with sites, books and people.. It all depends of the moment. But one of my favorites right now is: www.gilbertoesparza.blogspot.com/ and http://www.unosunosyunosceros.com/
Lately I have been researching for my own work and I have visited a lot: http://in.truveo.com/US-Marines-Encounters-with-Children-in-afghanistan/id/4154436181and www.filmcommunity.com  
Because I am part of the Exquisite Corpse Project By Kika Nikolela.


ELENE TREMBLAY
Ubuweb and New media art at http://www.newmedia-art.org/ and Wikipedia. I am on the internet everyday looking for answers to technical questions (how do you do this and that) and theoretical
questions (what is such and such concept). I am on the internet to look at other artists work and I am very happy when I discover their personal web sites with video excerpts, images, and texts.

AMBEREEN SIDDIQUI
1- Two of my favorites are http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/ and www.vaslart.org  www.akimbo.biz  www.facebook.com 

PATRICIO DAVILA (AUTOTELIC)
 TVRSS.net (for downloading TV shows) and CBC.ca (for Canadian news) designobserver.com (for design issues blog) and rhizome.org (for new media art news).

PAOLO PEDERCINI
My favorite net.art web art are www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/ and www.thesheepmarket.com/
 The website I visit the most are probably boingboing.net and neural.it

ULYSSES CASTELLANOS
Favorite: thebondageportal.com, ulyssesdadabase.com
and most visited: wikipedia.org (?) facebook.com, artvibes

 

 

art &
globalization

NEW(BE)COMERS
In a context of globalization displacement became a common state. Our art intervention project is a response to this displacement, an attempt to react to a negative position looking into its potential. We are convinced that the experience of finding one's place in a new culture has a great potential, therefore we emphasize the positive changes that are possible within the new context and aim at exploring them in our project. Let’s consider the title of the project. What does New(be)comer mean? It is basically an alteration of the word newcomer. Its interpretation is left open, but what we mean to describe is a person who is willingly or unwillingly engaged in a personal reconfiguration and who becomes aware of the process and embraces it in faith of living a better life.

ALEXANDRA GELIS
Después de un afán de Negación del istmo anterior, del Avant-Garde, todo es aceptado en una carrera de Fusión global con sólo un Click. La
importancia ahora, es absorber con distancia y filtrar para no caer en los parámetros de lo homogéneo. El conservar la autonomía, el mirar hacia dentro en medio de fugaces influencias y con la memoria individual lanzarse a formar una estética personal con el VERTIGO de quedarse al BORDE.

JORGE LOZANO
Historically art has always had a globalizing effect sometimes it has been a tool for domination, appropriation, liberation, change etc. because of the speed of new digital technologies art has a more globalizing effects than ever and it has become more standardized and more diverse at the same time. Depends on side you are.  There is hope that we all can benefit from globalization, but who knows if we can know who will overcome, we have run out time and only metal and rocks will resist the heat. We are in the "globalization of the end".

ELENE TREMBLAY
In its economical sense, it is a moving stomach with no brain, the pseudo self regulating market. Fortunately, reactions are also globally coming from everywhere and empowered by the quick communication of the web. Small is beautiful and we are indeed interconnected and more and more connected. In art on the web, when sound accompanies the images it make the presence vivid, as if we were there and now. When words come to us from the screen, it is as if they were speaking to us, alone.

AMBEREEN SIDDIQUI
The ease with which artists communicate, the speed at which images travel, the collaborations, the discussions, are all counter balanced by the restricted access, the narratives that have been marginalized, the ignorance and the exclusions. Art, like all else, reaps the benefits and suffers the consequences of globalization.

For me personally, it is difficult to escape the effects of a shrinking/expanding world in my practice. Technology has informed me about practices all over the world, and it has taken my place when I couldn’t be in two (or more) places at once. Works have become eternal and ephemeral at the same time.

PATRICIO DAVILA (AUTOTELIC)
Increased globalization has become an issue that plays much into contemporary work and discourse but my feeling is that migration, identity and international power relations have always played a significant role in the work of diaspora artists.

PAOLO PEDERCINI
Globalization was the optimist, propagandistic narrative around the combined effects of global financial markets enabled by telecommunications and the triumph of free market at the end of the cold war. I think the idea that a global smooth space for capitals and goods would bring wealth and happiness to everybody is now quite out of fashion. Artists played an important role in the deconstruction of this ideology unveiling the contradictions, the inequalities and the violence that the free market was causing. With the end of this narrative (namely the economic and environmental crisis) some artists are feeling the urge to switch to a more positive critique and propose Utopian visions. But after the globalism there is the risk of a backlash toward protectionism and excessive localism that might flow into identitary revivals and some new kind of
fascisms. I think the role of the artists now it's to keep alive the strong cosmopolitan spirit that dominated the past decades and, at the same time, intervene critically in the capitalist restructuration we are about to witness.

ULYSSES CASTELLANOS
It was great while lasted.

 

 

local & global art contexts

HEO PELMUS
I will try to consider myself as a Canadian and not as a Romanian. Once one becomes part of a different culture one loses the one in which one was born. With my performance practice I am anchored to the contemporary art discourse through my interest in linguistics and perception of transformation of materials. I do not know if we can talk anymore today about an international and national context. The distances between different social and political spaces of manifestation in arts have shrunk. This is the reason why I do not believe anymore in Identify conformed to your roots. I think, today we borrow identities in an empathetic process. This is due to the globalization phenomenon. I think that Local/ International contexts are conventions that can not be anymore comprehensive, that don't really say anything about an artist place in the contemporary art. The most important thing is to be alive and have something to say and afterwards the contextualization of someone art is made
on-consensual

NEW(BE)COMERS
There are several examples of similar projects both internationally and on a local level, for example La LLeca, a project based on a practice with prisoners in Mexico City, and the Brazilian group Frente 3 de Fevereiro. We would like to point out the theoretical background that we share.

Paulo Freire’s landmark book Pedagogy of the Oppressed has provided us with a critique on conventional education, a critical pedagogy and, most importantly, with an example of practice of equality. In this book he proposes not only a different kind of education, but also different forms of relations which are possible when a teacher is willing to listen, reflect and be informed by what the students have to say and vice-versa. Jaques Rencière, in his not so famous book The Ignorant School Master deals with the question of equality by reflecting on the work of Joseph Jacotot, a French schoolmaster. Jacotot, in his pedagogical experiments, had rejected the role of the teacher as an explicator, which he claimed worked against the learning process of any individual.

In his reflection on Jacotot’s achievements Rencière imagines a “community of equals”. He writes: We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. …Such people would know that no one is born with more intelligence that his neighbor, that the superiority that someone might manifest is only the fruit of as tenacious an application to working with words as another might show to working with tools; that the inferiority of someone else is the consequence of circumstances that did not compel him to seek harder. In short, they would know that the perfection someone directs to toward his own art is no more than the particular application of the power common to all reasonable beings” (Renciére, p. 71)

We share this notion and we are aware of it in our artistic practice. We have found Freire’s and Renciere’s notion of equality reflected in Martin Heiddegger’s What Is a Thing, in which he suggests that genuine learning takes place when an individual “takes what s/he already has”. Heidegger writes: “Teaching is a giving, an offering; but what is offered in teaching is not the learnable, for the student is merely instructed to take for himself what he already has. If the student only takes over something which is offered he does not learn. He comes to learn only when he experiences what he takes as something he himself already has. True learning only occurs when the taking of what one already has is a self-giving and is experienced as such. Teaching therefore, does not mean anything else than to let the others learn, i.e., to bring one another to learning... The genuine teacher differs from the pupil only in that he can learn better and that he more genuinely wants to learn. In all teaching, the teacher learns the most.” (Heidegger, p. 73)

We frame our practice in this spirit of hope and will to learn, as an artistic process and as a verification of equality. The authors cited above do not provide us with specific methodologies to follow, but with important ideas and notions that we share and keep in mind in our practice. We identify the important role of creativity and creation which art is made of and attempt to challenge and transform vertical social relations.

Works cited:
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Heidegger, Martin. What is a thing? (1958)
Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual (1991)

ALEXANDRA GELIS
En tiempos de velocidad, fugacidad y mezcla, utilizo el documental para destacar el valor del individuo. Donde exploro el cuerpo y espacios con una mirada en primerísimo primer plano para llegar a sus historias y memorias mas intimas.

Technically, I am always compelled to draw parallel usage of different disciplines. Unquestionably new technologies for the production and exhibition of photography using video are more accessible to artist, creating a visual explosion in the use of moving images in the arts.

My interest has evolved to assembling high-resolution photography as sequences to be printed or animated using video and using a conceptual approach to the documentation of space, individuals, or self-portraits. This enactive approach of using sequential narrative or loops as symbols imply the mental ability to grasp something as an invariant under a diversity of aspects and perspectives.

JORGE LOZANO
Off site and trans-self-reflective

AMBEREEN SIDDIQUI
I work primarily with documentation, and references to a particular space, person or history usually become points of reference. I work with archives, and my research, by default, is often localized. Ideas of working with existing archives, and of creating new ones are approached by many artists all over the world.

PATRICIO DAVILA (AUTOTELIC)
I sometimes work with local groups and create projects that respond specifically to their concerns (technology, media, cultural history, etc.)

PAOLO PEDERCINI
I have no idea, I guess it's the contemporary art system that localize my work autonomously.

ULYSSES CASTELLANOS
I try to not localize my work, but I pay attention to a certain production value. If it is an object, the quality of fabrication should be good. Artists are manufacturers thanks to globalization. I want to create a good product for public consumption. my performances are about process and chaos for the most part, so they don't need to be too polished.  I want to be and do so many different things so well that people will be flabbergasted. my motto is "I cover the world with art"

 

here & there

HEO PELMUS
I try to identify more with Romanian clichés and I discovered that being Romanian means a revolution, the death of Ceausescu, orphans, prostitution, Dracula, EU, euro, and superstar artists.

NEW(BE)COMERS
When you think about potential audiences in the process of conceptualizing a piece, how does your place of origin and the place you live currently in play a role in this reflection.

We feel that our own background of immigration is helpful when working with youth at-risk and newcomer youth. Yet in considering the audience for our work, the place of origin (the countries we were born in) is just one of the possible connections we may be able to develop with a group of individuals (our audience). In fact, what we aim for is to find connections with our public. We have not so much a method but an attitude towards working with people: with every group we reconfigure the project and create new connections.

ALEXANDRA GELIS
Mis obras son documentales experimentales que surgen a partir de encuentros y vivencias diarias en diferentes espacios, paises y al acercamiento con variados tipo de personas y culturas.

Cuando trabajo autorretratos e intimo-performances o retratos de diferentes individuos, las memorias particulares, dadas especialmente por lugar de origen, son la herramienta de conexión y entendimiento para con la realidad. Me interesa que la audiencia se conecte con su propia memoria y valor particular a través de las historias del individuo documentado.

JORGE LOZANO
My place of origin has given me my internal rhythms, my aesthetic, philosophical and political perception of reality.  My place of living has given me different internal rhythms, aesthetic, philosophical and political perception of reality. I have become hybrid with two countries: a "developed" dominating egocentric country and an "underdeveloped" dominated and self-divided country my alliances are with independent and on-the margin self...who do art beyond the self.

ELENE TREMBLAY
I speak from my body to other bodies and minds.

AMBEREEN SIDDIQUI
I think that audiences for your work aren’t restricted by space and time, especially if your work is available online. For “Big Stories, Little India” I enjoyed the fact that the work was specific to a location. For two weeks in the summer of 2007 the street became our gallery and thus reflected the importance of the point of origin for the work. Since then the work is online and the audience has grown exponentially, even though it wasn’t the audience I had thought of when conceptualizing the piece. I think that the idea of a fluid
audience is exciting for the many interpretations that a work can have.

ATRICIO DAVILA (AUTOTELIC)
In solo projects the barriers between place of origin and the current place of residence tend to be reinforced and used as a creative
tension in the work. In group projects this distinction becomes more of a negotiation through the entire creative process and with the other collaborators.

PAOLO PEDERCINI
When I think about audience I generally consider the Internet crowd composed by students, teenagers, bored secretaries and white collars, nerds and occasional surfers from all over the world. But in the process of making the games the context is fundamental. I always try to connect my work with some ongoing struggles that are happening in the place I live.

ULYSSES CASTELLANOS
I never think about potential audiences. If I did, I would get nothing done, or worse, I would have hanged myself years ago. I focus on the work. I listen to what it wants to do and become. Does it want to be shocking? does it want to be insightful or clever? is it angry? is it whimsical? It could be as tender as Bambi, or as brutal as an icepick protruding from your skull. One never knows.  The truth is, I have no control over it, so if the audience loves it, that's wonderful, and if they hate it, that is something that hopefully I can live with. I find that the works that were most hated by audiences turn out to be the best and most insightful works. Stanislavsky said that a good play is the one that you leave completely content and satisfied with, but is quickly forgotten;  and a great play is the one that makes you angry, the one you don't understand, the one that you just hate, but you're still thinking about it a week, a month and several years later. That's the kind of art I want to make.

I am a lateral thinker. I make connections between concepts and sources that are light years apart, but I can put them together well. THere is a Salvadorean spice called "Relajo", this translates loosely as "a mess". That is at the center of my Canadian and Salvadorean backgrounds, and I think this "mess" comes through in the work, through osmosis.