We present an analysis of work completion couched in terms of an effective completion decision identified by its characteristic contents and functions. In our proposal, the artist's completion decision can take a number of distinct forms, including a procedural variety referred to as an ‘extended completion decision’. In the second part of this essay, we address ourselves to the question of whether collaborative art-making projects stand as counterexamples to the proposed analysis of work completion.

Theater production is a collaborative creative activity. Social creativity recognizes the relationships between creative groups and the contexts in which creativity emerges. It also suggests that the interactive processes between the collaborators and their work form a center, which in turn becomes a kind of creative entity itself. An evolving systems case study of production practices at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival illuminates this process and illustrates the differences between seeing an aggregate creative activity and the more holistic view, in which (...) the artwork functions like another person, a creature in dialogue with the personality of the creative system. (shrink)

Les archives municipales de Berlin ont conservé tous les documents produits par la Maison berlinoise du travail culturel, Berliner Haus für Kulturarbeit, qui a été fondée en 1953 sous le nom de Berliner Volkskunstkabinett et dissoute en 1991. Ces archives permettent de suivre en filigrane les réflexions conduites en RDA sur le thème de l’action culturelle publique, dont les deux interrogations principales peuvent se résumer ainsi : comment peut-on encourager différentes formes de participation des travailleurs et ainsi favoriser le développement (...) d’un art censé être authentiquement populaire et acquis à la cause de la révolution socialiste? Et comment l’art peut-il être le vecteur d’une identification « nationale » avec l’État de RDA? Nous proposons d’étudier ces archives sous l’angle du combat mené par le SED, le parti communiste au pouvoir en RDA, pour créer une société révolutionnaire, pour rendre possible l’utopie d’une société parfaitement égalitaire par le moyen de l’art. En effet, si les choix économiques, politiques, sociaux du SED sont bien connus aujourd’hui, les chercheurs se sont pour l’instant moins intéressés au langage du politique dans le domaine artistique, et notamment à la question centrale de savoir comment ce régime concevait son rôle et sa responsabilité à l’égard des pratiques artistiques des ouvriers. (shrink)

This project explores vaccine hesitancy through an artist–scientist collaboration. It aims to create better understanding of vaccine hesitant parents’ health beliefs and how these influence their vaccine-critical decisions. The project interviews vaccine-hesitant parents in the Netherlands and Finland and develops experimental visual-narrative means to analyse the interview data. Vaccine-hesitant parents’ health beliefs are, in this study, expressed through stories, and they are paralleled with so-called illness narratives. The study explores the following four main health beliefs originating from the parents’ (...) interviews: perceived benefits of illness, belief in the body’s intelligence and self-healing capacity, beliefs about the “inside–outside” flow of substances in the body, and view of death as a natural part of life. These beliefs are interpreted through arts-based diagrammatic representations. These diagrams, merging multiple aspects of the parents’ narratives, are subsequently used in a collaborative meaning-making dialogue between the artist and the scientist. The resulting dialogue contrasts the health beliefs behind vaccine hesitancy with scientific knowledge, as well as the authors’ personal, and differing, attitudes toward these. (shrink)

In this article I describe the development of my collaboration with the textile artist Susie Freeman in the production of the visual arts project Pharmacopoeia. Over the last 3 years we have created a body of work that aims to provide information about common medical treatments in a way that engages the public imagination. The work is dominated by the use of active pharmaceuticals, both pills and capsules, which are incorporated into dramatic fabrics by a process known as pocket (...) knitting. These fabrics are then made into clothing and accessories, making their individual messages easier to ‘read’. The work aims to encourage people to think about their own medical and pharmacological history, and to reflect on their relationship with commonly prescribed drugs. It also reveals how dependent our society is on pharmaceuticals, how ambivalent we feel about them and yet how casually we use them. (shrink)

In the present study, we combined first-, second-, and third-person levels of analysis to explore the feeling of being and acting together in the context of collaborative artistic performance. Following participation in an international competition held in Czech Republic in 2018, a team of ten artistic swimmers took part in the study. First, a self-assessment instrument was administered to rate the different aspects of togetherness emerging from their collective activity; second, interviews based on video recordings of their performance (...) were conducted individually with all team members; and third, the performance was evaluated by external artistic swimming experts. By combining these levels of analysis in different ways, we explore how changes in togetherness and lived experience in individual behavior may shape, disrupt, and stabilize joint performance. Our findings suggest that the experience of being and acting together is transient and changing, often alternating phases of decrease and increase in felt togetherness that can be consistently recognized by swimmers and external raters. (shrink)

Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today’s hybrid world of virtual mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why (...) class='Hi'>collaboration has become so integrated into a greater understanding of creative artistic practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors—from the arts, art history, sociology, political science, and philosophy—to engage directly with the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future. (shrink)

Academics from diverse disciplines are recognizing not only the procedural ethical issues involved in research, but also the complexity of everyday “micro” ethical issues that arise. While ethical guidelines are being developed for research in aboriginal populations and low-and-middle-income countries, multi-partnered research initiatives examining arts-based interventions to promote social change pose a unique set of ethical dilemmas not yet fully explored. Our research team, comprising health, education, and social scientists, critical theorists, artists and community-activists launched a five-year research partnership on (...) arts-for-social change. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada and based in six universities, including over 40 community-based collaborators, and informed by five main field projects, we set out to synthesize existing knowledge and lessons we learned. We summarized these learnings into 12 key points for reflection, grouped into three categories: community-university partnership concerns, dilemmas related to the arts, and team issues. In addition to addressing previous concerns outlined in the literature, we identified power dynamics hindering meaningful participation of community partners and university-based teams that need to be addressed within a reflective critical framework of ethical practice. We present how our team has been addressing these issues, as examples of how such concerns could be approached in community-university partnerships in arts for social change. (shrink)

In 2012, choreographer and dancer Jill Sigman of jill sigman/thinkdance and visual artist Janine Antoni collaborated to produce Wedge, a live performance at the Albright-Knox Gallery. In this essay, I describe the collaboration and the resulting work and examine the benefits and challenges of the collaboration. The discussion touches on broader issues pertaining to collaboration, co-authorship, artists' intentions, and interpretation.

We recommend that the future of religion and science involve more partnerships between scholars, amateurs, and artists. This reimagines an underdeveloped aspect of the history of religion and science. Case studies of an undergraduate course examining religious ritual and technology, seminarians reflecting on memory and identity in light of Alzheimer's disease, environmentalists responding to their guilt and shame about climate change, and Chicagoans recognizing the presence of nature in the city show how these partnerships respect insights and experiences of our (...) varied partners, identify and resolve community problems, and advance scholarship. Sourdough starter, a new metaphor, describes these collaborative, nourishing partnerships. (shrink)

This paper analyzes creative practice including virtual music composition by a human and sets of computer programs, improvisation of music and dance in human-robot ensembles, and drawings produced by a human and a robotic arm. In all of these examples, the paper argues that creativity arises from a process of human-robot collaboration. Human influences on the machines involved exist at many levels, from initial creation and programming, via processes of reprogramming and setup of underlying data and parameters, to engagement (...) throughout the process of creative production. The decision to value a machine as a creative other is supported most strongly when collaborating with the machine directly, while witnessing the creative team at work, as opposed simply to seeing the result, is more likely to bring an audience to a similar understanding. The creativity of the human-machine collaborations analyzed in this paper relies on close interaction, within which there is a continual recognition of the otherness of the machine and its nonhuman abilities. Such relations can be theorized by extending Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the face-to-face encounter within which self and other are brought into proximity, but the alterity of the other is nonetheless retained. The paper’s analysis of creative interactions between humans and robots supports the idea that machines need not be regarded as challenging human artistic practice, but rather enable new ways for creativity to arise through human-machine collaborations within which human and nonhuman creative abilities are combined. (shrink)

The seventies period in Australia is often referred to as the “anything goes” decade. It is a label that gives a sense of the profusion of antiestablishment modes that emerged in response to calls for social and political change that reverberated around the globe around that time. As a time of immense change in the Australian art scene, the seventies would influence the development of art into the contemporary era. The period‟s diversity, though, has presented difficulty for Australian art historiography. (...) Despite the flowering of arts activity during the seventies era—and probably also because of it—the period remains largely unaccounted for by the Australian canon. In retrospect, the seventies can be seen as a period of crucial importance for Australia‟s embrace of contemporary art. Many of the tendencies currently identified with the contemporary era—its preoccupation with the present moment, awareness of the plurality of existence, rejection of hierarchies, resistance to hegemonic domination, and a sense of a global community—were inaugurated during the seventies period. Art-historically, however, it appears as a “gap” in the narration of Australian art‟s development which can be explained neither by the modernism which preceded it, nor by postmodernism. In Australia, the seventies saw a rash of new art “movements” emerge almost simultaneously. Feminist, Pop, Conceptual art, Performance, Protest, Craft, and Aboriginal art as fine art are some of the forms that emerged as part of the concerted questioning and revolt that were characteristic of the period. Art practice changed radically at this time—with challenges both to the art object mounted by conceptualism, and to its hierarchical traditions prompted by feminism and other historically marginalised groups. While no style dominated the period, most of the art-making shared tendencies and concerns, and was driven by a common vision that had its roots in the era‟s politically charged milieu. The focus of this paper is the importance for many artists of working collectively and collaboratively in their pursuit of a new cultural paradigm. Often it was only through joint endeavour that recognition of the multiple valid alternatives, through which many began to define themselves, was possible. However, the embrace of the idea of collective enterprise in itself also facilitated new ways to think about art and the manner and meaning of its production. The purpose here, therefore, is to draw attention to the important ways in which organisational collectivism and collaboration contributed to the seventies as a period of revolutionary transformation in art practice that would propel Australian art into the contemporary era. (shrink)

From text to action -- Park fiction, ala plastica, and dialogue -- The risk of diversity -- Programmatic multiplicity -- Art theory and the post-structuralist canon -- Lessons in futility -- Enclosure acts -- The twelfth seat and the mirrored ceiling -- The atelier as workshop -- Labor, praxis, and representation -- The divided and incomplete subject of yesterday -- Memories of development -- The limits of ethical capitalism -- The art of the locality -- Blindness and insight -- The (...) invention of the public -- The boulevards of the inner city -- Park fiction : desire, resistance, and complicity -- A culture of needles : project row houses in Houston. (shrink)

Here I examine the potential for art-science collaborations to be the basis for deliberative discussions on research agendas and direction. Responsible Research and Innovation has become a science policy goal in synthetic biology and several other high-profile areas of scientific research. While art-science collaborations offer the potential to engage both publics and scientists and thus possess the potential to facilitate the desired “mutual responsiveness” between researchers, institutional actors, publics and various stakeholders, there are potential challenges in effectively implementing collaborations as (...) well as dangers in potentially instrumentalizing artistic work for science policy or innovation agendas when power differentials in collaborations remain unacknowledged. Art-science collaborations can be thought of as processes of exchange which require acknowledgement of and attention to artistic agendas as well as identification of and attention to aesthetic dimensions of scientific research. I suggest the advantage of specifically identifying public engagement/science communication as a distinct aspect of such projects so that aesthetic, scientific or social science/philosophical research agendas are not subsumed to the assumption that the primary or only value of art-science collaborations is as a form of public engagement or science communication to mediate biological research community public relations. Likewise, there may be potential benefits of acknowledging an art-science-RRI triangle as stepping stone to a more reflexive research agenda within the STS/science communication/science policy community. Using BrisSynBio, an EPSRC/BBSRC-funded research centre in synthetic biology, I will discuss the framing for art-science collaborations and practical implementation and make remarks on what happened there. The empirical evidence reviewed here supports the model I propose but additionally, points to the need to broaden the conception of and possible purposes, or motivations for art, for example, in the case of cross-sectoral collaboration with community engaged art. (shrink)

In Mandel'tam's writing, artistic creativity is described as based on the indispensable yet contradictory modes of compliance and deviation. The artist, by his artistic nature, must be an obedient disciple to the tradition that inspires him, and, at the same time, a violator who renders what inspires him in an individual form. Thus, art implies iterability through novelty. In the totalitarian state, this double nature of art acquires a sinister context and brings the artist to an unavoidable conflict (...) with the state. He has a choice between a servile compliance with the state's command and artistic independence. If the artist complies, he loses his ingenuity; if, on the other hand, he has the courage to break away from the established order, his fate is martyrdom. The criteria of truth and falsehood, the issue of loyalty, of compromise and collaboration or resistance become most relevant. Such words as outcast or non-contemporary acquire the meaning of non-collaborationist or enemy of the people. In the totalitarian state a genuine artist is viewed as a law-breaker, and his art leads him to crime. The notions of compliance and deviation cease being merely aesthetic terms and assume in Mandel'tam's poetry complex, subtle and tragic overtones. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 208-212. … intervals of destructuring paradoxically carry the momentum for the ongoing process by which thought and perception are brought into relation toward transformative action. —Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation 1 Facing a blank canvas or blank page is a moment of pure potential, one that can be enervating or paralyzing. It causes a pause, a hesitation, in anticipation of the moment of inception—even of one that never comes. The implication is that the (...) blank is yours in that moment, and it calls on you to act on it, to think into it, to create on it. Each blank canvas gives you time, of an undefined length, to transform that canvas’ inherent potential into a work. This two-dimensional plane of potential can be projected into a space, which the body can then occupy. When you “destructure” a space in the same way, prepare it to be a blank, much as you build a canvas, you allow your entire body to enter the space of potential, and you rest in anticipation of work, like the hand poised above the page. Artists have found that the deliberate creation of that space of potential through sealing the space and painting it white, thereby erasing details and distractions, can be such a transformative experience as to help define their whole practice. The cessation of distraction, the absence of indicator that a “blanked” workspace provides allows for a new presence of mind, it gives them the room, literally, to move into their work, and from there to move their work into the world. The workspace for the artist, the studio, is often perceived as a lab-like condensation of the gallery or museum, the traditional and idealized white cube. Similarly, with the blank page, a concrete relation between space and time comes forward as the intentional simplification of the architecture changes behavior and perception within the space. The work of “blanking” the studio space is a meditative reduction, an erasure, and in a way, an attempt at drawing away from the world beyond the studio - the sealed space is meant to recede from reality, to become abstracted by its willed lack of details and distractions. Within that space the time for a new beginning is made more present, more attainable, and the focus it fosters becomes another tool to aid creation. At the formative moment of his artistic practice, Tom Friedman used the blank of his studio, saturated in white, sealed off from the world, to fight velocity. He describes how he projected his vision of the end goal, the museum - a place he believes to be defined by slow contemplation - onto his own studio experience. He then sat and reflected on common objects, one by one, framed by the blank box he had created. The domestic objects he brought into the space to study foreshadow his mature works, where often the quotidian object has a single additional element – his intense labor. Friedman makes discrete objects through absurdly intense and focused labor, epitomized, perhaps by his 1,000 hours of Staring , made from 1992-97: Tom Friedman. 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) His labor, to use his own words, is his way to “bring all of who you are to the experience.” Friedman shares his labor, allows the slow, deliberate pace of his work born in the studio to penetrate the museum. Nothing seems effortless, or a gesture, the labor is apparent, displayed, and tangible. He gives us the labor, the personal investment in the physical that saved art for him, that divorced the work from the language he cites as a factor of alienation. When we see his work we do not see words, we see acts, we see objects. He has forced the studio as workspace into the exhibition space, as he stuffs hundreds of more hours of labor into his shows with each new piece, filling the space with material and labor, material and labor – his involvement, his investment, is his gift to us as the viewers, as he introduces the laborious and contemplative pace he feels belongs to the museum. He saves us also from the alienation of language, which first drove him into the sealed studio and away from the discourse of his school. He presents us with his real, the object which stands in stark contrast to the white slate of the studio, the sealed white box he started from, where his individual, self-contained objects begin and end, completed through the intensity of isolation, first of the individual artist, and then of the material he chooses to slowly, slowly, slowly work: Tom Friedman. Untitled (1992) In his in-depth analysis of galleries as a blank white cube, Brian O’Doherty emphasizes the religious connotations implied in the strict laws of the exhibition space and the valuation, aesthetics and elements of control he feels it imposes upon the work. Like Friedman, he recognizes the power of the restricted space – indicating the “perceptual fields of force” – that act on any object introduced into it. Going beyond Friedman’s assessment of the space as highly utilitarian for focusing his perception, O’Doherty emphasizes the rejection of the physical body of the artist or observer, saying that the cube allows for only observation - eyes and mind. He later parallels the picture frame as a psychological container for the artist with the room as the same for the observer. In both cases, this is an emphasis on the alienating nature of the relationship – just as the artist is kept out of the frame by the picture, in the gallery the art forces the body of the spectator out, calling for a self-referential purity. Patrick Ireland. White Cube (1998) O’Doherty makes a point of saying that the installation shot of the gallery without figures is “one of the icons of our visual culture.” In recent years, however, installation shots have begun to include figures, in some cases they are essential to understanding the scale and even the nature of the work, specifically with work that captures the experience of the space and the way that it varies from a white cube. The work of Olafur Eliasson is a case in point, as the Danish artist uses elements of scientific and natural phenomena to alter perception within the controlled gallery environment, tweaking and redirecting O’Doherty’s “perceptual fields of force” to make points about the act of seeing, or seeing yourself seeing, to quote the artist. This indicates a shift in the role of the artwork, not to exclude the body and stand discretely and self-sufficiently, but to include it, to manipulate it and to make the observer aware of the nature of that manipulation and the work’s ability to manipulate. Olafur Eliasson. 360º room for all colours (2002) So though in O’Doherty’s analysis, the intense blankness of the gallery pushed the observer out in favor of the artwork’s isolation, artists can replicate this inhumane sterility in their own workspace to focus their work on the influence of the gallery right from inception. This can be interpreted as an almost opposite understanding of the purpose of sealing and whitewashing the workspace as stated by Friedman. He sought a refuge from the critical language of the art school, and a space that, like the museum, gave him a protracted sense of time, and, he felt, welcomed him in, “to bring all of who you are,” as opposed to O’Doherty’s feeling that the museum was asking you, at least in body, to leave, and allow the work to take on its own life. Friedman does not seem to imply the tension with the cube and critical stance that O’Doherty prioritizes. Where Friedman finds a refuge, O’Doherty defines an opponent. In a third position, Robert Irwin describes his sealed studio space as “the world.” Though he made the same effort as Friedman to seal out all influences and distractions, he implies that he is in dialogue with the world through his own concentration and perception. This is reminiscent of the nature of the monad, as interpreted by Deleuze, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, a sealed container that contains the universe. He went through the same ritual described by Friedman, sealing up the space, painting it white, and then forcing himself to remain inside, staring at his own work, training his concentration relentlessly. But he found that the room became the distraction: …he became aware that a thin crack along the wall a few yards away from the canvas likewise exerted its presence; that when he plastered that crack over and repainted the wall, the canvas itself presented an entirely new aspect.2 The context was in a relentless dialogue with the work, and trying to neutralize that dialogue, to mute the conversation between space and object, became part of his ritual as he “fixed” his space each day in the hope of total concentration on the work. Ultimately, Irwin shaped the trajectory of his art by relinquishing the studio, establishing a post-studio practice, where the work is conceived and created out in the world, in dialogue with the world and reflective of the conditions it finds surrounding it. The white cube failed to ever achieve neutrality, his heightened concentration prevented him from ever neutralizing the space, so, instead of continuing to try to maintain the charade of a perfect blank, he acknowledged the unstoppable voice of place and turned all his efforts onto the object and the world, as a constant dialogue. Some artists push their studio space far from purity, domesticating it like a lair or a living room, and others destroy it, fill it with chaos or detritus, blacken or clutter it so as never to be starting from a blank, and thereby try to avoid the anxiety of facing that void. Similarly artists may never prepare a white canvas, a clean page, a marble block, or other form that is intentionally lacking, in order to try to escape the dialogue with emptiness. But Irwin, like O’Doherty, found an opponent in the white cube, and he learned not to fight it, rather he ended the conflict by making it an ally, an interlocutor, a collaborator. We can vainly strive to start from nothing, to find the lull, the clearing, and to always consider what we do in balance with the empty set. Somehow that intangible cloud of hazy nothingness, that softness of a lapse continually offers a place to bounce off of, to react to, to wrestle with, to rest with, in tension, or a place to begin. Robert Irwin. Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998) NOTES 1 Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. p271. 2 MOMA, NY. Eliasson, 360 ? Room for All Colours . Installation. 2002. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how the social, dialogical and collaborative strategies and practices of The Artists Village openly intervened in the public spaces of Singapore at various times in the city-state’s history from 1989 to 2015. The objective of this paper is to draw out how the artists collective used social situations to openly produce relational, participatory and socially engaged art in public spaces with specific functions, history and importance. These various forms of artistic interventions took place on a (...) farm, in shopping malls, on public transport networks and at national monuments during different moments in Singapore’s rapid urban transformation. From these examples, one is able to understand why The Artists Village openly intervened in the public spaces of Singapore and how these interventions functioned in their limited scope. Through this study we are able to assess how the varying levels of collaboration, openness and criticality present in their public art projects enabled them to grow outside the centralised system of the nation-state in inserting their practice into the public sphere and engaging the masses. (shrink)

In Mandel'štam's writing, artistic creativity is described as based on the indispensable yet contradictory modes of compliance and deviation. The artist, by his artistic nature, must be an "obedient disciple" to the tradition that inspires him, and, at the same time, a "violator" who renders what inspires him in an individual form. Thus, art implies iterability through novelty. In the totalitarian state, this double nature of art acquires a sinister context and brings the artist to an unavoidable conflict (...) with the state. He has a choice between a servile compliance with the state's command and artistic independence. If the artist complies, he loses his ingenuity; if, on the other hand, he has the courage to break away from the established order, his fate is martyrdom. The criteria of truth and falsehood, the issue of loyalty, of compromise and collaboration or resistance become most relevant. Such words as "outcast" or "non-contemporary" acquire the meaning of "non-collaborationist" or "enemy of the people". In the totalitarian state a genuine artist is viewed as a "law-breaker", and his art leads him to "crime". The notions of compliance and deviation cease being merely aesthetic terms and assume in Mandel'štam's poetry complex, subtle and tragic overtones. (shrink)

How can artists create works of computer art or Internet art in which audience members become genuine artists and collaborate with the original artists on the self-same work that they began? To answer this question, this essay will reflect on the work of philosophers who focus on questions concerning art completion and the ontology of computer art. This essay will also reflect on the artistic work of the trio LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, whose artwork can serve as a model (...) for creating collaborative, digital art. (shrink)

Photographic representations of women living with or beyond breast cancer have gained prominence in recent decades. Postmillennial visual narratives are both documentary projects and dialogic sites of self-construction and reader-viewer witness. After a brief overview of 30 years of breast cancer photography, this essay analyzes a collaborative photo-documentary by Stephanie Byram and Charlee Brodsky, Knowing Stephanie , and a memorial photographic essay by Brodsky written ten years after Byram’s death, “Remembering Stephanie” . The ethics of representing women’s postsurgical bodies and (...) opportunities for reader-viewers to engage in “productive looking” are the focal issues under consideration. (shrink)

The use of collaborative online social media applications as tools of communication is increasing in contemporary society. Correspondingly, a number of contemporary artists are exploring online interaction in their material public art practice, as a new form of documentation, promotion and creative collaboration. Mapping and analysing these new forms of interaction provide a method to determine the scope of their contribution to new artistic knowledge. This paper argues that contemporary public art practice can be cognisant of both physical (...) and virtual contributions as equally active participants in collaboration. It also identifies the convergence between artist and audience in virtual and physical space, and examines how this is affected by certain conditions and models of behaviour, which influence how a new collaborative creative discourse in public art can be constructed. (shrink)

This paper introduces a hermeneutical approach to graphic novel representations of punishments inflicted on women accused of collaboration with the German occupant during the French purge in 1944- 1945. Since the study aims to determine to establish links between graphic novels and the evolutions of the historiography of the Occupation and Liberation of France, it includes a historiographical component. Drawing on other cultural medias who have dealt with this theme (novels, movies, poems, songs), the aim is also to identify (...) the meaning given by artists to their portrayals of shorn and assaulted women. The paper eventually introduces a broader philosophical reflection on the emancipation from authoritarianism. It is the study’s contention that graphic novelists are offering a feminist discourse and are using the theme of shorn and assaulted women during the liberation as a reminder of the late emancipation of women from male domination. (shrink)

This commentary is a reflection on a collaboration with the artist Rossella Biscotti and comments on how artistic research and logico-mathematical methods can be used to contribute to the development of critical perspectives on contemporary data practices.

Fine Individuation says it is impossible for distinct people who are not collaborating on a work of art to produce one and same artwork. This is an intra-world thesis, but is necessarily true, if true at all. Author Essentialism says it is impossible for someone else to produce one and the same work of art produced by some actual artist. This is an alleged necessary truth regarding cross-world relations. Both theses have been vigorously defended. I argue here that both are (...) false, but for reasons that are entirely novel. (shrink)

Marshall McLuhan and Vilém Flusser were primarily media communication theorists and new media philosophers. Both thinkers were deeply concerned with electronic and digital technologies and the impact of technology on human society. Likewise, both thinkers were critical and probably cynical about these developments, however, they believed in the notion that one has to fully understand technology to be able to use and discuss positive models of these new technologies for a better future. Independently, McLuhan and Flusser became interested in the (...) role of the artist in this new digital society, and Flusser in particular elaborated on the means of artistic production. Both theorists delved into collaborative projects with artists; and they produced films and other artistic output over their lifetimes. In our essay we highlight this particular interest and focus on the artist and modes of artistic perception. McLuhan’s understanding of the artist as society’s safety antenna was, indeed, personified by both men. (shrink)

Thomas Hirschhorn is an artist who has maintained an engaged approach to politics. His method of working is collaborative and speculative. It has a strong emphasis on community development and intellectual reflection. In this brief introduction I focus on the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival and his ongoing relationship and response to the ideas of the philosopher Jacques Rancière.

The Process of Coming and Going in this World is a four-channel, site-specific installation by artist Ruth Burke. The work incorporates its audience, including nonhuman collaborators. While dependent on time and place, it has been preserved in audio recordings and photographs. In this interview between the artist and art historian Jessica Landau, they discuss the installation’s use of sound, time, and place to evoke interspecies relationships based on collaboration and co-constituted domestication. While using the installation and subsequent sound recording (...) of it as a starting point, the conversation looks at the ways our relationships with animals on farms involve notions of time and place, companionship, and coevolution. (shrink)

This article documents experiences of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions during COVID-19 pandemic via interviews with 29 participants. Sessions included an international, gender balanced, and cross generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3 months of twice weekly improvisation sessions, 29 interviews with participants were undertaken, recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Key themes include how the sessions provided opportunities for artistic development, (...) enhanced mood, reduced feelings of isolation, and sustained and developed community. Particular attention is placed upon how improvisation as a universal, real time, social, and collaborative process facilitates interaction, allowing the technological affordances of software and hardware to become emergent properties of artistic collaborations. The extent to which this process affects new perceptual and conceptual breakthroughs for practitioners is discussed as is the crucial and innovative relationship between audio and visual elements. Analysis of edited films of the sessions highlight artistic and theoretical and conceptual issues discussed. Emphasis is given to how the domestic environment merges with technologies to create The Theatre of Home. (shrink)

Disability arts has traditionally been understood as that which is led, created, and/or curated by disabled artists. While disability arts and culture in Canada has continued to grow and develop over the last number of decades, I have perceived a notable lack of neurodivergent artists being included at disability arts events and community gatherings. I question if this lack of representation may be due in part to this perception of disability arts as having to be led exclusively by those with (...) lived experience of disability. In this paper, I will critically engage with concepts of inter-abled artistic collaboration, interdependency and the need to re-imagine disability arts leadership structures to better include neurodivergent artists and their allies. I will further position my ideas around this topic within the context of the roundtable discussion on the future of disability arts leadership that took place at the Cripping the Arts Symposium in 2019. (shrink)

A collaboration with Cuban Artists. Poder is the first in a series of three books exploring issues confronting Cubans daily. Six meetings in Havana over 2.5 years- two weeks of very hard work.Power rules.We are born and are powerful because in our relationships and connections, communication and contacts, we exercise that special force/energy (Power) with which all of us without exception come into this world.Force is physical, Power is intellectual. By making art and putting together this book we have (...) chosen our way to relate to Power. All prints included illustrate, different aspects of The Relationships of Power in its various dimensions: the power of the mind, willpower, financial, military, economic power, the power of authority, social power, physical or mystical . . .After all Power is a natural condition.Yamilys Brito JorgeApril 2010. (shrink)

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is (...) an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tiresias ) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung ). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. (shrink)

This excerpt from Kenneth Kings essay, The Dancing Philosopher, traces its genesis from Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra that, in tandem with the emerging technology of the writing machine, camera and kinetoscope, conjoined the kinetropic and lexigraphemic to inaugurate the kinetic cogito. Maurice Merleau-Pontys phenomenological exposition of corporeality further amplified the reflexive potential of movement and the philosophical understanding of kinesthesia, and King cites as well the technosophic synergy of John Cages and Merce Cunninghams long artistic collaboration that furthered (...) the frontier of a mind-body epistemic. (shrink)

Horst Bredekamp’s subject is the astute deployment and perennial resonance of the startling image of the body politic that dominates the frontispiece to Leviathan: a treatise on the psychology of the individual and the dynamic of the multitude, published in 1651 by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Affirming the centrality of such a figural device for this pioneering theorist of the state, Bredekamp goes on to address the art-historical dimension of the mesmerising etched title-page. In his central chapters he explores (...) the extraordinary range of sources – from socio-cultural tradition to scientific advances – on which the author and his artist-collaborator may have drawn. In conclusion, he reveals Hobbes to be no less passionate than shrewd in his belief that the constraints and amenities of a tolerable life in common attest to the potency of the visual. As appendices, two essays and catalogues explore the portraits made of Hobbes as well as illustrations that appeared in his other works, thus systematically completing the exploration of the images connected with this exceptional philosopher. (shrink)

According to the subtitle of this anthology, the essays are intended to discuss and explore "the cohesive and disjunctive forces" existing between C. P. Snow's infamous "two cultures" of science and the humanities. As in all the colloquia on this subject, there tends to be a mishmash of problems in definition, with Snow's relatively simple and straightforward contrast lost in the shuffle of terms. The fact that in this volume no one agrees upon what science is tends to limit its (...) ability to solve Snow's problem, but, on the other hand, it offers many ruminations on the various meanings of science. Gyorgy Kepes, for instance, thinks of science mainly as a set of technologically sophisticated instruments and advocates that technicians and visual artists collaborate on the design of "light shows" and other flashy works of modern art, especially the design and execution of environmental art. Harry Levin, the well-known scholar of comparative literature, thinks that the division of intellectual activities into "scientific" and "cultural" might be better replaced with dividing scholars into "generalists" and "specialists," arguing that the human community needs a balanced representation of both camps. Talcott Parsons advocates the incorporation of scientific methods into traditionally humanistic considerations, proposing that social science is the logical amalgam of the two cultures. Parsons, by the way, is more commendable for practicing what he preaches than some of his colleagues in the social sciences, particularly Oscar Handlin, also represented in this volume. Altogether, sixteen points of view are included in the symposium, most filled with sonorous language and unsupported generalizations about matters of historical and current fact, but all of them literate and filled with challenging philosophical puzzles.—E. H. W. (shrink)

As one of the most influential feminist theorists in Western academic circles, Hélène Cixous is often associated with écriture feminine, a term she coined in 1977, and with a fluid, poetic style both in her essays and in her fiction. This article investigates how Hélène Cixous uses the concept of the ‘feminine’ in her plays as a container for heterogeneity, liminality and difference, mobilizing it to animate feminist strategies that interrupt male, white and/or hegemonic forms of subjectivity. If for Cixous (...) the practice of feminine writing is fundamentally characterized by the desire to create a mode of expression in which difference and otherness would retain their alterity, in dramatic writing she found an especially conducive medium for the realization of that desire. This article examines Cixous’s anti-realist postdramatic works, from her first produced play Portrait of Dora to her works for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, in the context of a feminist aesthetics of estrangement, and considers how her plays enact feminist theory’s own movement away from the psychoanalytical discourses of the 1970s and 1980s to postcolonial and materialist critiques. The article employs a range of intersectional critical methodologies for situating Cixous’s dramatic writing within a broader feminist praxis, using the work of feminist performance scholars like Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider and Jill Dolan to consider the liminal Other as a precarious feminine figure that Cixous re-inscribes into discourse. Feminine writing, the progressive movement away from realism towards postdramatic theatre, and Cixous’s artistic collaboration with Mnouchkine are each considered as feminist strategies towards a rendition of the subject that can reiterate its otherness on stage. The central argument is that it is the enactment of these strategies in live performance that makes Hélène Cixous’s concept of femininity as liminal difference so relevant for feminist politics today. (shrink)

Recent influential criticisms attack the reputation of Thomas Harriot by citing the contents of his ethnographic and economic survey, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, first published in 1588. This interpretation makes Harriot, together with Shakespeare and others, agents of a colonialist project. But profound differences are indicated in the comparison of the relatively unbiased depiction and analysis by Harriot and his artist collaborator John White with the interpretations of America and Americans by some (...) of their contemporaries. A briefe and true report conveys, and John White's drawings support, insight into particular non-European features of the cultural and economic lives of the Algonquian peoples. On the contrary, Captain Arthur Barlowe's Discourse and the illustrations by Theodore de Bry for the 1600 edition of Harriot's book instance romanticizing, stereotyping, and unanalytic condescension very unlike Harriot's and White's. These differences prove the faultiness of the recent assessment. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text (...) within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. (shrink)

A collaborative undertaking between an artist and a philosopher, this monograph attempts to deepen our understanding of "contemplative seeing" by addressing the works of Plato, Thoreau, Heidegger, and more. The authors explore what it means to "see" reality and contemplate how viewing reality philosophically and artfully is a form of spirituality. In this way, by developing a new conception of active visual engagement, the authors propose a way of seeing that unites both critical scrutiny and spiritual involvement, as opposed to (...) simple passive reception. (shrink)

For over a century, drawing from observation, at least at the introductory level, has been integral to many secondary and most post-secondary art school programs in Europe and North America. Its place in such programs is understood to develop an ability to see and interpret on a flat surface the real, three-dimensional world; this skill, in turn, provides support to related mental processes such as memory, visualization, and imagination. Where an artist looks when drawing from observation may not be arbitrary (...) and can be observed, quantified, and analyzed. Our interest in examining the first few minutes of the drawing process takes its lead from the novice’s question, "Where should I begin?" Attempting to understand these first few minutes led to a collaborative study between art educators and cognitive-perceptual psychologists: the former interested in implications for practical pedagogy, the latter in applying expertise in eye movement and scientific methodology in service of a specific real-world question. The stated purpose of the study notwithstanding, contrasting histories and practices in art and science provided contexts for discussion beyond the collection and interpretation of data. This article seeks to report upon and further that discussion. (shrink)

Today, DIY -- do-it-yourself -- describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and "critical making" that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting (...) and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on "doing" and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. _Contributors_Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from _Thought in the Act _Combining philosophy and aesthetics, _Thought in the Act_ is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a (...) wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. _Thought in the Act_ enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics. (shrink)

A specific type of collaboration has become prevalent in contemporary art: in this type of collaboration—henceforth, commissioning—an artist assigns the production of the work of art to skilled craftsmen or unskilled workers, directing their labor through instructions or blueprints. Commissioning has been accepted by the art world as a legitimate mode of artistic production—legitimate in the sense that it does not undermine the authenticity of the work as a creation of the artist, even if she has not (...) laid a hand for its production. Moreover, commissioning seems to be regarded as irrelevant to the nature of the work of art—specifically, to its artistic properties—and, thus, to its proper appreciation, as is.. (shrink)

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between creativity and the (...) perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression. (shrink)

Compromise arises in contexts where irreconcilable claims must nonetheless somehow be resolved. Ordinary people in everyday life, politicians and artists, doctors engaging in research, humanitarian workers providing aid in the midst of war – all of them will have faced situations where compromise appeared to be the only reasonable option, and yet will have felt that there was nevertheless something deeply wrong with it. The aim of this paper is to help make sense of that sentiment. The focus of this (...) paper will be on some aspects of the morality of compromise. Its lynchpin will be to construe compromise as a joint action, in particular, a joint wrongdoing – taking part in, and sharing responsibility for, the doing of things that are wrong from the point of view of those who are the parties to the compromise. The question of ‘what is wrong with compromise?’ is thus recast as a question of ‘what is my part in the wrongs being done as part of the compromise?’ It is tempting to suppose that a compromise serves to dilute personal responsibility, parsing it out among parties to the compromise. Viewing a compromise as a joint action, in contrast, will help us to see how a compromise actually increases responsibility among parties to it. They are now jointly collaborating in some action that each of them sees as wrong, at least in part (albeit in differing parts). Discussions of compromise traditionally prioritize the inter-personal aspect – compromise, in the transitive form of ‘compromising with’ someone. But I argue that the intransitive form – ‘compromise of’ – deserves pride of place. The reason for prioritizing the intransitive ‘compromise of’ is simple: that is what is involved in the intra-personal calculation that must, of necessity, go on inside one's own head in the process of deciding whether or not to agree to a 'compromise with' someone else. In this paper I shall concentrate specifically on compromises of principles, or (more precisely) on ‘matters of principled concern to the compromising parties’. Not only is that the most troubling and morally problematic sort of compromise, it is also logically the most central case. I demonstrate that that is so by shifting the focus from inter-personal compromise to the more fundamental intra-personal process underlying it – the compromise we are involved in when adjudicating among our own conflicting values, to decide whether or not to agree to a compromise of the inter-personal sort. This is the subject of the first section of the paper below. Compromise involves resolving conflicts of principles through mutual concessions that are accepted and undertaken by all parties. Doing so may be on-balance desirable, not only from some larger perspective (of social peace, or whatever) but also from each party's own perspective. Nevertheless, from each party's perspective, compromise necessarily involves interacting with, and sometimes contributing to, wrongdoing. Morally, something is lost, even if more is gained on balance. (shrink)

These words are a collaborative effort to think across different practices of knowing and sensing. They don’t pretend to compose a complete article. They are simply an assemblage that wants to open spaces for dwelling, for connecting, for dissenting. As such it gravitates around the images of Daniel Brittany Chávez’s performance: “Quisieron Enterrarnos … ”, his artist statement and Rolando’s notes on precedence, trans* and the decolonial. In this conversation, we are allies and accomplices in thinking through trans* as a (...) prefix both of non-binary transgender identity and from Rolando Vázquez’s conceptions of trans* from decolonial thought at praxis. In conversation, we offer this assemblage not from a space of tension but from a space of mutually nurturing decolonial praxis. (shrink)

_Humanesis_ critically examines central strains of posthumanism, searching out biases in the ways that human–technology coupling is explained. Specifically, it interrogates three approaches taken by posthumanist discourse: scientific, humanist, and organismic. David Cecchetto’s investigations reveal how each perspective continues to hold on to elements of the humanist tradition that it is ostensibly mobilized against. His study frontally desublimates the previously unseen presumptions that underlie each of the three thought lines and offers incisive appraisals of the work of three prominent thinkers: (...) Ollivier Dyens, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen. To materially ground the problematic of posthumanism, _Humanesis_ interweaves its theoretical chapters with discussions of artworks. These highlight the topos of sound, demonstrating how aurality might produce new insights in a field that has been dominated by visualization. Cecchetto, a media artist, scrutinizes his own collaborative artistic practice in which he elucidates the variegated causal chains that compose human–technological coupling. _Humanesis_ advances the posthumanist conversation in several important ways. It proposes the term “technological posthumanism” to focus on the discourse as it relates to technology without neglecting its other disciplinary histories. It suggests that deconstruction remains relevant to the enterprise, especially with respect to the performative dimension of language. It analyzes artworks not yet considered in the light of posthumanism, with a particular emphasis on the role of aurality. And the form of the text introduces a reflexive component that exemplifies how the dialogue of posthumanism might progress without resorting to the types of unilateral narratives that the book critiques. (shrink)

Once an artist takes on the challenge of making the invisible visible, or the inaudible audible, he/she is almost immediately thrown into the realm of energy at the edge of art and science. The established art world based on visual culture finds it difficult to place this kind of work. The scientific community, used to working in this realm in a reductionist way, finds it hard to comprehend. Yet, the public seems to be drawn to artwork residing “in between,” and (...) there seems to be a universal need for a connection to the spiritual realm beyond what established religions offer. As many speculative ideas in the West circulate around ideas of energetic approach to matter in general, particularly the body and mind, alternative medicine and other Eastern philosophies are thriving. This essay will show how, in collaboration with nanoscientist James Gimzewski, we have investigated these ideas from the sounds of cells to the concept and realization of the Blue Morph installation at the Integratron [the Integratron is the creation of George Van Tassel and is based on the design of Moses’ Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials. This one-of-a-kind building is a 38-foot-high, 55-foot-diameter, nonmetallic structure originally designed by Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine (The Integratron 2009 )]. (shrink)

Presenting fifty projects from French-born, New York-based contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe's twenty-year career, this richly illustrated book provides an overview of his work across film, installation art, and live event. Since the 1990s, Huyghe's work has challenged the status of the exhibition format. With projects like the One Year Celebration and the foundation in 1995 of the collaborative Association of Freed Time, Huyghe developed a particular interest in the relationship between time and memory--an interest that has carried through to his (...) works, Untilled and the three-part The Host and the Cloud. Most recently, his projects include an untitled piece for the Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany; Amidst Karlsaue Park's compost heap--an area detached from museums and cultural institutions and not intended to be seen--Huyghe installed common park objects from different moments in art history, as well as the Documenta in years past, from one of Joseph Beuys's uprooted oaks to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's pink bench. Published to accompany a major exhibition of Huyghe's work opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in November 2014, this book offers the first comprehensive overview of the artist's career. The structure of the book brings to light Huyghe's creative process, with each step in the creation of featured projects amply illustrated with photographs, drawings, and preparatory sketches. (shrink)

In 2015, the filmmaker, artist, and writer Penny Woolcock created an imaginary city, Utopia, at the Roundhouse, London, in collaboration with Block9. It staged a blend of miscellaneous pop-up installations featuring Londoners who were each telling their individual stories about inequality, consumerism, gentrification, education, crime, and social media.1 The narrative soundscapes set within an extraordinary design brought to light the parallel lives yet opposite experiences of people in urban environments and, at the same time, revealed their hopes and dreams.Woolcock's (...) current exhibition at the Museum for Modern Art in Oxford, England, shows a part of this project. The video, Utopia, depicts eight people... (shrink)