Haidy Geismar, NYU

Browsing in the British Library I came across this book, right next to Danny Miller's The Comfort of Things (2008).

D. Mackenzie's Material Markets: How Economic Agents are Constructed explores the nature of hedge funds, derivative markets, asking how abstract economic principles are brought into being and taking the assumption, drawn from STS studies, of the materiality of markets, "their physicality, corporeality, technicality" as a basic starting point (p.2). Taking this emphasis on materiality allows Mackenzie and his collaborators to inject an ethnographically inflected understanding of human agency into the economics of the finance industries: rather than disembodied agents or abstract information processors economic agents are "embodied human beings, and bodies are material entities." (p.3). The study positions people, the technology that they work with, and the abstract ideas that guide them as equal partners in forming the analysis.

Mackenzie outlines ten precepts for the social study of finance, which guide his method and which are useful to abstract for any ethnographic study of modern bureaucracy:
1. Facts Matter; 2. Actors are embodied; 3. Equipment matters; 4. Cognition and Calculatio are distributed and Material; 5. Actors are Agencements (a clunky notion drawn from Deleuze, and Callon which delineates the complex material-social nexus that makes up an social actor, here in the field of economics); 6. Classification and Rule Following are Finitist Processes; 7. Economics Does Things; 7. Innovation isn't Linear; 8. Market Design is a Political Matter; 10. Scales aren't stable.

I confess to not reading the entire volume, but enjoying what I did read (the intro and the chapter on derivatives). the chapters are short, they aren't what you might call ethnographic or anthropological, in that they provide summaries and overviews, but are clear and cogent in making this world accessible in a broad sociological framework. The material perspective could be followed up a little more, the focus is much more on the people and discourses than on a real scrutiny on equipment and technology.

Subsequent chapters examine the assemblage of economic actors in hedge funds, the production of virtuality in derivatives markets, the material sociology of arbitrage, the process of measuring profit, and the process of constructing emissions markets..

It's a good introduction to the working of financial markets and good methodological model for translating STS and Anthropological critiques of economics and finance into a workable perspective...In a similar frame to Olag Velthuis's work on the symbolic construction of price in art markets

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Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett, NYU Performance Studies and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being created in Warsaw on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto and facing the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. At the heart of this educational and cultural center is a multimedia narrative museum presenting a millenium of Jewish presence on Polish soil. While we will show original historical objects, we do not depend primarily on them to tell this rich story.

There is a general perception that if we are not basing the exhibition on objects we must be a "virtual" museum--and that is generally taken to mean a museum that lacks materiality. I offer one example here of our work as a challenge to the generally accepted dichotomy between
virtual and--take your pick--actual, digital, material.

Source: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews

I call the problem the materiality fallacy: what constitutes an "original" or "actual" or "authentic" object. The 18th-century wooden synagogue of Gwoździec that we will feature in the 18th-century gallery offers a fine case for exploring this issue. We intend to reconstruct the timber-framed roof and polychrome ceiling of this spectacular synagogue. Now we could go to a theater prop maker, give him the dimensions and some pictures, and say to him "Make it!" The result would look pretty much like the original, but it would be a theatrical prop. That is not what we want to do. What we want to do goes to the heart of the issue of actual and virtual. We want to work with a studio in Massachusetts, whose motto is "learn by building."

These beautiful 18th-century wooden synagogues no longer exist; the Germans burned to the ground those still standing in 1939. We can however recover the knowledge of how to build them by actually building one. What is actual about that artifact resides therefore not in the original 18th-century wood, not in the original painted interior, but in the knowledge that we recovered for how to build it.

It's a completely different concept of the object. This approach is related to a completely different tradition of thinking about what constitutes an object.

The best example I can think of is the Jingu Shrine in Ise, Japan. This is a shrine that is 800 years old and never older than 20 years because for 800 years they have been tearing it down every 20 years in order to rebuild it. The only way to maintain the embodied knowledge of how to build it is to build it, and to make it necessary to build it, they tear it down and then must build it again. The value is in maintaining the knowledge of how to build it, not in preserving the original materials. The result is not a replica or simulation of the Jingu shrine; it is the Jingu shrine. This is a completely different way of defining what is "actual" about such an object.

This posting is adapted from my interview with Obieg, Poland's leading online contemporary art magazine. An English translation of the complete interview appears here:
ttp://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/news_archive.php?miId=120&lang=en&nId=1744

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Read and Post Comments (1) | Posted to Announcements and Listings | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

2pm - 3.30 pm, Lecture Theatre, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Saturday, 25 July

Handmade Nation documents a movement of artists, crafters, and designers that marry historical techniques with a punk and DIY (Do It Yourself) ethos. In 2006, first-time director Faythe Levine traveled to 15 cities in the USA, interviewing 80 individual crafters. She captured a tight-knit community that exists through virtual networks and connects to the public through independent galleries and craft fairs. Featured artists include Mandy Greer, Stephanie Syjuco, the craft 'tag crew' Knitta, and many more. Her documentary of the film has just been released in the USA; this showing at the V&A is the film’s premiere in Britain.

Introduced by craft theorist and historian Glenn Adamson of the V&A, and crafter extraordinaire Rachael Matthews of the London haberdashery Prick Your Finger.

[the film is 69 minutes in length]

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Daniel Miller, UCL

Review of: Seeing Things: Deepening relations with visual artefacts. S. Pattison 2007, Canterbury: SCM Press. (292 pages). ISBN-10: 033404149X

I received this book by Stephen Pattison pretty much out of the blue. I was intrigued to see that the author was a theologian, a Professor of religion at the University of Birmingham. It is published by SCM press and since I have not seen any reviews of it, and otherwise would probably not have come across it, it seemed likely to remain fairly obscure outside of the teaching of theology. I think this would be a pity, and what I intend to do here is provide a brief summary of its contents, rather than a conventional review, just to make sure that this blog can do its own work to help bring research and ideas to people with common interests and concerns.

Actually the more one reads this book the more one sees that the author has deliberately been fairly reticent in taking any kind of theological perspective, which is largely left to the final chapter. Instead what we have is a rather clear introduction to the study of visual and material culture that certainly deserves to be considered as a good and useful introductory textbook on these subjects. It starts by reflecting on the devaluation of the material and visual in theology, and our more general tendency to treat the visual and material as merely the dead in opposition to the human. The agenda set out in the first chapter is an appeal to a much more respectful acknowledgment that our relationship to things and images are indeed relationships and the visual in particular should be rescued from cold isolation to be seen as linked to the sensual appreciation of the world more generally. He is also concerned to move from conventional theological reductions of the visual mainly to an interest in art and iconography to the much wider field of visual and material culture.

The main text starts by addressing various approaches to sight and vision and then promoting the ideal of a more haptic notion of vision embracing this wider sensory experience and particularly reconnecting seeing and touching. In chapter three he turns to various approaches to the image including writers such as Pinney and Taussig as well as more conventional religious imagery. While chapter four acknowledges the suspicion and sometimes denigration of the image in both Western philosophy and Western religion. By contrast chapter five looks at the factors which allow us to grant power to images, firstly contextual factors for example sacralisation, and then in chapter six factors thought to be inherent in the object including texture and colour but also semiotic features such as indexical qualities that create a relational bond.

Up to now the text has been dominated by visual culture and relatively conventional images, but chapter seven moves towards more general issues of material culture and the constraints on seeing relations to objects as somehow personal relations. This he sees as to some degree overcome by modern material culture theory which he reviews. Chapter eight then takes up recent approaches, such as from Latour, that question the conventional dualism between subjects and object. He considers the various ways objects could be considered to speak to us, focusing upon the case study of the photograph. Chapter nine then critiques the more obvious ways we might see objects as reanimated, including religious, magical and romantic ideals of animation. Instead he follows pretty much through to the centre of contemporary material culture theory by arguing for the need to respect the role of objects in simply making us human, and thereby recognising further the way artefacts in some measure participate in the moral community of society.

Although he doesn’t quote Simmel there is a similar sense in this work that the author hopes that the cultivation of a depth of relationship with specific objects will help lead us away from what might otherwise be the more superficial relationships we cultivate with a plethora of things. Chapter ten return us to his haptic vision of how people might enact these close and deeper relationships with visual and material culture creating what he calls joyous attachment. Finally in chapter eleven he considers the specific stance of Protestant Christianity to these issues, starting form its fear of idolatry, asceticism and disembodied spirituality. To overcome these he envisages a new positive theology of artefacts including a kind of Biblical holism that recognises our materiality and that of the world. He sees this as in the tradition of figures such as William Blake or the Shakers in their respect for the mundane things around them. He includes an intriguing metaphor of the world as God’s body and ends with an appeal to re-sight Christianity.

What struck me in reading this volume is not anything especially novel in its contribution, but rather how well it works as an introductory text book, because I can’t think of another book that covers the same ground in the same way. The stance seems entirely in accordance with contemporary approaches to visual and material culture as represented by many entries to this blog. The writing is generally clear and scholarly. I hope this brief summary is sufficient to show why I think it would be a pity to ignore a book which has very likely done us all some favours in introducing our perspective to peoples and debates few of us are likely to reach. Although in that sense it is also a complement to the journal Material Religion which is rapidly developing a very high reputation for the quality of its papers. In fact I confess that in the end my slight disappointment was actually with the author’s reticence with respect to theology itself. That for those of us already perhaps rather too comfortably settled within material and visual culture a more full throttled engagement from theology might actually have been of still greater interest - but perhaps that may come in time.

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University of Manchester, 1-4 September 2009

As contemporary social theorists continue to signal the need to reconfigure our deliberations on the social through attention to practice, to object-mediated relations, to non-human agency and to the affective dimensions of human sociality, this conference takes as its focus the objects and values which find themselves at centre stage.

And we ask, in the context of nearly two decades of diverse disciplinary approaches to these issues, what matters about objects? How are they inflecting our understandings of technology, of expertise, and of social change? How has a focus on objects reconfigured our understandings of how values inflect the ways in which people make relations, create social worlds, and construct conceptual categories? How have objects become integral to human enthusiasms and energies, to transformational ambition, or to the transmission of values across time and space? How do objects move between ordinary and extraordinary states, shade in and out of significance, manifest instability and uncertainty? How do moral and material values attach to objects as they move in space and time? What dimensions do they inhabit and/or reveal? To address these questions papers on the following themes will be presented:

The transformational work of everyday objects; Object-centered learning; Materiality, stability and the State; Radical archives – within and beyond textual assemblages; Conceptual objects and methods as objects; Immaterial objects – haunting, virtuality, traces; Financial objects; Affective objects; Ephemera, enthusiasm and excess; Spiritual and/or moral objects; Controversial and messy objects.

Plenary Speakers
Confirmed plenary speakers to date include:

Mario Biagioli (Harvard University)
Patricia Clough (City University of New York)
Graham Harman (American University Cairo)
Chandra Mukerji (University of California, San Diego)
Annemarie Mol (University of Amsterdam)
Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds)
Kathleen Stewart (University of Texas, Austin)

Conference Convenors: Penny Harvey (Manchester), Hannah Knox (Manchester), Elizabeth Silva (Open University), Nick Thoburn (Manchester) and Kath Woodward (Open University).

Conference Administrators: Bussie Awosanya and Karen Ho
Conference Manager: Josine Opmeer

Email: CRESC.AnnualConference@manchester.ac.uk

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Lucy Elder, MA Museum Studies candidate, Institute of Archaeology, UCL

Collection on bookshelf, 2009

I am currently researching personal collecting and the relationship that develops between these collections when put online and when offline in a domestic setting (Miller, 2001). This starting point will eventually become the focus of my MA dissertation, and will hopefully go a small way towards attempting to understand and explain how the internet can be utilised as a facilitating tool for personal collecting. This will be as seen from the perspective of the mass digitisation of material culture objects in the twenty-first century, and a growing interest in personal collecting (Martin 2001, Pearce 2002).

Research will provide case studies of current models of online exchange and consumerism, (e.g eHive, Collectors Weekly) and will identify the fascinating ways in which these models might often reflect the movement of collections between private and public spaces offline. This is illustrated through the observance of the auction, the garage sale and the storage facility (Cwerner, 2003; Herrman, 1997).

What I am particularly interested in at this stage of the research is getting a sense of how personal collectors collect online, that is, if they do at all. How are collecting sites used? Do they exist for formal or informal collectors? Do collectors replicate offline exchange/consumer collecting practices, or have new ones developed? (Miller 2008) Do collectors feel a motivation to put their objects online, or is this action transitory: a means to a sale or exchange?

Brush collection, 2009

I am searching for collectors to interview, both those who are extremely formal and/or entirely informal in their collecting practices. I will chat, discuss, write letters, email and receive any criticism or thoughts on the matter.

I also have an online collecting survey, which I would like to get as many responses to as possible. I would be most grateful if any readers could take five minutes to fill in the survey, or just link this page onto someone who can.

Click Here to take survey

Below is a link to my website, The Lyric Road Archive. This was a very basic attempt to represent an idea of how people’s personal collections could be transferred from a domestic setting to a single resource on the Internet.

www.lyricroadarchive.com

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Read and Post Comments (0) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses

Webb Keane, University of Michigan

An interesting book called Thinking Through Things (2007), edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastel (see earlier discussion on this site, starting on Dec. 14, 2006), proposes that we think of ethnographic otherness in terms of multiple ontologies. Thus Holbraad reports that Cuban Ifa diviners tell him a certain red powder is power. He argues that in order to take this assertion seriously, we--those of us who are not Ifa diviners--must understand that their red powder exists within a radically different ontology from ours. It’s not that there is one thing, powder, which diviners interpret in a certain way that differs from ours. Rather, in this alternative world, that’s what the powder is.

Now in certain respects this is an appealing version of a familiar, if highly unstable, ethnographic move. If Azande say witches exist, the traditional ethnographer’s first responsibility is to take them at their word (though the very act of writing tends to sabotage that epistemic stance). And certainly, against the Eurocentric self-certainties of nearly all other academic disciplines, this responsibility to alterity grounds one of anthropology’s distinctive contributions to knowledge and its ethics.

But Henare et alia would, I think, argue that the Azande example doesn’t go far enough, since at the end of the day, the usual treatment turns on reducing their statements about witches into nothing more than different interpretations of a reality the Azande share with those of us who are not Azande. In contrast, the editors assert that the claim about multiple ontologies is not just a matter of different interpretations or epistemologies. Ifa powder really is power.

Now there are various questions one might raise about this assertion. We might, for instance, ask for a more precise analysis of the semantics and pragmatics of the word the authors translate as “is,” a notoriously difficult linguistic and philosophical problem. We might also wonder how the Cuban diviners in my old neighborhood in New York managed to converse with me and otherwise handle relations among the distinct ontologies they seem to inhabit. But what I want to point to here is a consequence that seems to follow for any attempt to make sense of the temporality.

The notion of radically different ontologies, if I read the authors correctly, seems inadvertently to render the very temporality of things incomprehensible, and to confine them within static realities. In material terms, history often reflects people’s capacity to respond to the things around them in new ways. They see new possibilities in what had always been there. The world may surprise them. When people see new possibilities, it is often because they have discovered something new about their material surround. As things enter new contexts, they enter into new human purposes, afford new kinds of actions, and suggest new projects (see Keane 2003, 2008). If this is so, it seems to follow from two characteristics of material things. First, material things cannot be reduced to whatever happens to be found in concepts. Henare et al’s invitation to rethink the relationship between “concepts” and “things” is certainly full of promise. But if we simply collapse the distinction, we are likely to overlook this: at any given moment there remains something about them that is unknown or unnoticed. Second, it is because things in their very materiality exceed any particular concepts, times, and projects, that they persist across different concepts, times, and projects. They enter into quite distinct concepts, times, and projects.

From this perspective, then, the red powder of which Ifa diviners speak cannot be confined to that singular ontology in which red powder really “is” power, and “is not” whatever someone who is not an Ifa diviner thinks it is. In order to get at the historicity of people and their things, we need to understand things in ways that do not reduce them to some stable essence, to the particularity of a certain context.

If there were an essence—which I think is implicit in the idea of multiple ontologies--then things would never suggest anything new, beyond what is already known about them given the terms of any particular ontology. They would be like the US Constitution, according to Antonin Scalia: no one would ever get past the original intent of their creators. Things would have no futures, since there would, in principle, be no link between one ontology (the present) and another (the future or the past). Indeed, we might go so far as to say, people would have no futures either, to the extent they would always already be full masters of any conceptual universe they might find themselves within. There could never be any surprises, material or conceptual. But the importance of things for people lies, in part, in the ways they may contribute to new futures. They suggest new possibilities and, given certain novel conjunctions and shifts in experience, can steer people’s attention to new aspects of the world. The postulate of multiple ontologies, in its most radical form, seems to erect insuperable barriers between different parts of people’s present worlds, as well as between their pasts and possible futures.

References

Keane, Webb 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication, 23: 409-425.
__________. 2008. The Evidence of the Senses and the Materiality of Religion. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 14: 110-127.

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Diana Espirito Santo, Institute of Social Sciences, Univ. of Lisbon

On responding to a review of his edited book, written by Danny Miller on this Material Culture blog site a few months subsequent to the publication of Thinking Through Things (2007), Martin Holbraad glosses what he perceives to be the crucial difference between his ‘ontographic’ camp and material culture studies, one, as he argues, curiously motivated by ‘decency’ on both sides. “Crudely put”, he says to Miller, “I think your decency leads you to
’embrace’ your informants, and that puts you on the spot when it comes to
articulating the assumptions that might allow you to do so.

Conversely,
my concern for decency leads me to remain silent about my informants, because,
as with God, I feel I cannot presume to say anything 'about' them." While Holbraad argues that we should return to ‘analytical innocence’, where distinctions between materiality and culture, ideas and things, artefacts and imaginings, obscure more than elucidate, Miller accuses Holbraad of skirting the importance of a prior materiality upon which all anthropology should ultimately base itself. As he says, “material culture is not a subset of social anthropology but more the other way around. Material culture is a condition for anthropology itself”; we should by now be past these divisions. More importantly, he also says of Holbraad’s chapter on powder and power, the author’s emphasis on dissolving the concept/thing divide has the paradoxical result of ignoring what seems to be most important to the ethnography – the ‘being’ of the diviner. Thus, for Miller ‘silence’ here seems counter-productive to the task of anthropology.

In my view we need to be prepared to accept the premises of both approaches – an ontographic one, where we allow persons, objects, and things to be fully ‘subjects’ of their relations, and a more material culture oriented one, where we try to understand how this ‘work’ of culture, that is, the achievement of such relations through the physical and material world, creates a particular kind of thinking and feeling person. In a recent panel that Nico Tassi and myself convened at this year’s ASA conference in Bristol, we aimed to provoke and expand on some of these debates. Our contention is that in an analysis of religious objects and artefacts, we must be both radically relativist and grounded in our common understanding of humanity, allowing for a plurality of ‘worlds’, but also attempting to unwind how these ‘worlds’ can come about and be experienced through ‘things’, experiences which far from merely conceptual, have an undeniably phenomenological referent. In particular, we want to stress the importance of movement and transformation, as a means of grasping how such worlds ‘become’ and are continuously ‘reborn’ (Ingold, 2006).

In an article that re-examines the notion of ‘animism’, so typically problematic in anthropological history, Tim Ingold sets out to “recover that original openness to the world in which the people whom we (that is, western-trained ethnologists) call animist find the meaning of life” (2006:11). In such ontologies, he tells us, life is not an emanation but a generation of being, “a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual” (ibid: 11-12). Things, such as art forms, or indeed ritual or religious objects, do not represent the world, they make it visible. But in order to understand this we must also reconceive of the person, and especially, give primacy to his or her movement in the world.

We agree with Ingold that the person is not a self-contained entity that interacts with a pre-made world, but a being that actively brings this world forth via their movement in it: in short, the world becomes known to the knower through their ‘entanglement’, social and material, where being is knowing, and vice-versa. And thus, in this sense persons and things simply are their movement, their paths, their becoming. When we speak of notions of ‘agency’ and ‘materiality’, we must acknowledge that very different ontologies have the capacity not to attribute agency to inanimate matter, but to recognize that human beings are as material as they are spiritual, social and biological. As Toren has argued: “Our ideas are constituted in material relations with one another and we communicate with one another in and through the materiality of the world, its manifold objects, and awareness of our common humanity” (1999: 5). Thus, she continues, “our understanding of what is material is always mediated by our relations to others and likewise, the material stuff of the peopled world confirms our ideas of what those relations are or should be” (ibid). Our subjective and objective perspectives always guarantee eachother, she says. Mind, body, and the world of ‘things’ are not in dialectical relation to eachother. Rather, by tracing out our paths in the world, they come into being as aspects of one process.

In a project that Nico Tassi and I are currently developing together, we wish to emphasize the processual character of human religious experience, one which cannot do without materiality. Objects are not imbued with meanings or intentions as much as they enable these meanings and intentions, which, latent or emergent, are fundamental to a human relationship with the ‘divine’ or the ‘transcendent’. We thus propose a thoroughly relational approach to religious materiality which gives primacy to the achievement of these human-spirit/god/divine relations and the ‘work’ that this achivement implies. Movement, we contend, is key, indissociable to communication; not communication as a manifestation of intent predicated on reference, but as a process of creating selves, deities and things. “The problem with objectivism”, argues Alf Hornborg (2006:27), “is the notion of a ‘knowledge’ that is not situated as part of a relation”. The problem with constructivism is that in recognizing the ‘constructing subject’ (ibid: 28), it fails to acknowledge the subject’s embeddedness and relationality, assuming instead a real world ‘out there’ which the subject re-orders according to their schema.

We thus aim to merge the concerns of the ‘quiet revolution’ put in motion by anthropologists such as Viveiros de Castro and Martin Holbraad, with a focus on being-in-the-world, which enables us to understand the importance of movement and ‘becoming’ to the relationship between materiality and the divine.

References

Hornborg, A., 2006, ‘Animism, fetichism and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing)’, Ethnos, 71:1, 21-32.

Ingold, T., 2006, ‘Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought’, Ethnos, 71:1, 9-20.

Miller, D. ‘Thinking Through Things’, materialworldblog.com, posted 14 December 2006, and comments by Martin Holbraad, posted 3 March, 2007

Toren, C., 1999, Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge.

Editor's note: this topic was also recently discussed on the blog Savage Minds, by guest blogger Olumide Abimbola (http://savageminds.org/2009/05/08/towards-an-ontological-anthropology/ )

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9th - 11th July, 2009

The Royal Institute for British Architects, London

Convenors
Professor Gillian Rose (Geography, Open University)
Dr Divya P. Tolia-Kelly (Geography, Durham University)

Plenary Speakers
Professor Elizabeth Edwards, Dr Paul Frosh, Professor Jane Jacobs

Media
Paper Presentations, Visual Art, Film, Workshops, Participatory Methodologies

Visuality/Materiality attends to the relationship between the visual and the material as a way of approaching both the meaning of visual and its other aspects. The interrogation of image as sign, metaphor, and text has long dominated the realm of visual theory and analysis. But the material role of visual praxis in everyday landscapes of seeing has been an emergent area of visual research; visual design, urban visual practice, visual grammars and vocabularies of domestic spaces, including the formation and structuring of practices of living and political being, are critical to 21st century grammars of living.

The relationship between Visuality/Materiality here is about social meaning and practice; where identity, power, space, and geometries of seeing are approached here through a grounded approach to material technologies, design and visual research, everyday embodied seeing, labour, ethics and utility. This conference is aimed at providing a dialogic space where the nature and role of a contemporary visual theory and practice can be evaluated, in light of materiality, practice, the affective, performativity; and where the methodological encounter informs our intellectual critique. The organisers have encouraged contributions based on research experience and practice into specific aspects of visuality and visual critique including concern with:

What is the relationship between materiality and the visuality?

How do we develop new theoretical approaches to new visual practices?

What can we learn from everyday visualities?

How can we approach ethical practices through visual practices?

How are theories of materiality, performance, embodiment employed in research on the visual?

For full programme and registration details see this link

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Lynn Jarvis
lynn@homelessworldcup.org

For those who haven't yet been able to make it to a Homeless World Cup, the documentary Kicking IT directed by Susan Koch and Jeff Werner and narrated by Colin Farrell is now available on DVD. The documentary, which premiered in January 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival and has appeared at a number of other doco film festivals since, recounts the experience of Cape Town 2006 Homeless World Cup.

In December 2008 we held our most successful Homeless World Cup to date in the spectacular surroundings of Melbourne's Federation Square. More than 100,000 people came to cheer 56 nations of homeless people from all over the world - as Afghanistan defeated Russia to become champions.

And for the first time we also held the Women's Homeless World Cup with 8 nations, won by Zambia. The government invested in a legacy of 30 football programmes for the 100,000 homeless people across Australia.

There are life-changing effects for the players who compete at the Homeless World Cup. As we prepare for the 7th Milan 2009 Homeless World Cup 6th to 13th September, in the heart of one of the most football passionate cities on our planet, it is worth reflecting on what we have achieved to date:

- 100,000 homeless people have become football players since we started in 2003;
- 93% of players have a new motivation for life;
- Over 70% come off drugs, alcohol, get jobs, homes, education, training, become football players, coaches and social entrepreneurs;
- 71% continue to play football regularly
- Football projects have been triggered in over 70 nations, growing in effectiveness and reach, many now with national associations, homeless leagues and National Homeless Cups to select their national team.

Continue reading "Homeless World Cup" »

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This account is taken from a site hosted by Joy Garnett: http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/joywar.html.

NY artist Joy Garnett makes paintings based on found photographs gathered from the mass media [more info]. In January 2004 she had a solo exhibition of a series of paintings called "Riot," which featured the figure in extreme emotional states. One of the paintings, Molotov, was based on an uncredited image found on the web that turned out to be a fragment of a 1979 photograph by Susan Meiselas.

When Meiselas and her lawyer learned of the painting, they sent a cease-and-desist letter to Garnett accusing her of "pirating" the photo. They demanded she remove the image of Molotov from her website, and that she sign a retroactive licensing agreement that would sign over all rights to the painting to Meiselas, and to credit Meiselas on all subsequent reproductions of Molotov. Garnett offered a compromise: she agreed to give Meiselas a credit line on her website, but refused to sign a “derivative work” agreement, claiming that her painting was a transformative fair use of the Meiselas photo. Meiselas’ attorney, Barbara Hoffman, turned down the offer and instead threatened Garnett with an injunction, demanding that Garnett comply with all of the demands as well as pay $2,000 in retroactive licensing fees.

Garnett pulled the image of Molotov from her website, lest it result in the entire site being pulled down (cf: a “Take-Down order”). She never signed over the rights to her work, but she was not pursued once the image of Molotov was removed from her site.

Before Garnett removed the image from her site, fellow artists who were following her story on Rhizome.org, (a not-for-profit organization with a website and list serve dedicated to new media art), grabbed the jpeg in solidarity. First they copied the html and created mirror pages on their own websites; then they started making anti-copyright, or “copyfight” agitprop based on the painting, resulting in many derivative works including collages, animations, etc. Several media and copyright reform blogs ran the story, and soon it spread globally, along with the images. The story was translated into Italian, Czech, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Catalan.

Two years later, (April 2006), Garnett and Meiselas were invited to speak together at the COMEDIES OF FAIR U$E symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities, organized by Lawrence Weschler and hosted by New York University (click here for the podcasts). They had the opportunity to meet the day before over a cup of tea and clear up some misunderstandings. They went on the next day to present their stories in tandem at the conference. Their panel presentations were then re-edited and published in Harper’s, February ‘07 (see here).

See also this video Painting Mass Media and the Art of Fair Use - about the entire controversy.

The series of websites, artistic interventions and debates is a fascinating commentary on the politics of fair use, the appropriate use of images, the power of reproduction, the weight of context, the ethics of display, and the importance of history.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Read and Post Comments (1) | Posted to Good Links | Objects and visual analyses | Podcasts | Topics for Discussion

Greetings!

I am a New York University Graduate student in the Program of Museum Studies requesting your participation in a unique survey conducted as research for my Master’s thesis. The survey should take less than 15 minutes and is completely anonymous. Your participation could affect the understanding of public perceptions of museum collecting practices and the display of antiquities. Are you aware of the issues or hold museums accountable for their acquisition policies?

Please take your time to answer each question honestly and thoughtfully. The following link will take you to the survey.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8SsSFcghwaTf4c76EI_2bipA_3d_3d

The results will be posted on my NYU web blog (http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/clh365/antiquities/) or possibly published as an article at a later date.

If you have any questions or would like to know more, please feel free to e-mail Cherkea_Howery@yahoo.com

Thank you for your participation!

Sincerely,
Cherkea Howery, NYU Museum Studies

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Read and Post Comments (0) | Posted to Topics for Discussion