I'm talking about the @Platea collective and our public art projects carried out in the digital megacity of social media. Please stop by to learn more about some of our recent public art projects and my plans for future projects, including "hopes/dreams/fears", which debuts at FIGMENT NYC.
June 6th, 2009 marks the end of a glorious season of the BUSHWICK READING SERIES -- we're an official Bushwick Open Studios Site! Join us for these festive festivities, which include: 1. Special musical guest Colin Summers, 2. Readings from poetic moguls Nicole Steinberg, Dan Magers, and Parker Phillips, and 3. An extraordinary interdisciplinary panel about the topic of WILD/LIFE. What does that mean, exactly? You'll have to come find out what they have to say. The cast of characters includes:
Clara Jo, Video Artist Nathan Schneider, Writer/Blogger An Xiao, Photographer/Poet Roger Bonair-Agard, Poet
Had a great time at the opening for Whole in the Wall at Galerie Helenbeck New York. Stunning work, not all of which translated perfectly into the gallery space, but a powerful collection nonetheless, with a ton of street art all stars in attendance. I do recommend - it runs till June 27.
From the press release:
GALERIE HELENBECK PRESENTS WHOLE IN THE WALL: THE LARGEST AMERICAN & EUROPEAN STREET ART EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK - ARTISTS FROM THE 70’S TO NOW
ARTISTS: Victor Ash, Banksy, Blade, Blek le Rat, Crash, Daze, Ikon, Jonone, Nunca, Plateus, Quik, Lee Quinones, Rammellzee, Sharp, Sozyone, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Jamel Shabazz, Silvio Magaglio
Helenbeck Gallery presents the largest street art exhibition of American & European Street Art: Whole in the Wall 1970 – Now in New York. The exhibition will take place at the former Splashlight Studios at 529-535 West 35th Street located in the Chelsea-Clinton neighborhood of New York City from May 28 to June 27, 2009. Helenbeck Gallery has brought this exhibition back to where this art form began: New York.
Gallerist Chantal Helenbeck says, “The street art movement was home grown in New York. It is real, it has meaning and it has credibility. It is America’s art history and personal story, which is why I decided to hold this exhibition in its home roots of New York. Since New York in the 1970’s, this movement has become a global phenomenon. These individuals may have started on the street but they have developed into great studio artists and it is important that their talent and recognition is seen and documented within the art world. ”
Sorry for the relative silence here as of late. I've been in a consumption rather than production mood. Have a ton of posts on backlog that I just haven't completed yet. Instead, I've been reading and reading online a good deal, about random topics from Sex and the City bus tours to literary Darwinism to the rationality of irrationality in the economic crisis to Michelle Obama. It's all been very interesting and fun; the Internet is very good for people like me who have a collection of random interests.
I've been sharing these links quite a bit on Facebook, and those links port via my Friendfeed account into Twitter. You can find those links on the right-hand side of this blog, in the Twitter feed, as well as visiting my Twitter account or simply adding me on Facebook. I share quite a bit: my general rule is that if I think more than a handful of folks would find it interesting reading, and if it's substantive work, I'll go ahead and share it. I worry that it comes across as link spam, but so far, no one's really complained (to my face, at least!).
In effect, my Twitter and Facebook pages have become a bit of a self-curated space, with spatterings of my own content and conversation.
I'm interested in this idea of curated space, and how it interfaces with the iTunes Music Store and the Kindle and Google Reader, and all these technologies that allow us to control the content we receive and the content we choose to corral together as a picture of who we are. In the arts, if you know a curator for long enough, you get a sense of who she is, what she values, the art that moves her, even if the connections between individual shows can seem tenuous at best.
I imagine the same holds true for these self-curated digital spaces, whether they be Tumblr or Twitter or what-have-you. Just as a bookshelf tells you so much about a person, or a music collection gives you a hint at who they are, so can these digital spaces, curated by a person with particular tastes and passions and ideas.
If you've been following this blog for a while, you probably have a sense of who I am, a percentage of my personality and values that I project in this public space. But what about the links I share out, the collected readings of my day-to-day Web wanderings? Who do you see? Who do I project? If labels were the great identity-definers of the late 20th century, are links the identify-definers of the early 21st?
I remember watching Star Trek when I was little. It was a big deal in its day but also during re-runs not simply because it painted a picture of women and ethnic minorities in strong roles but because it painted a picture of a world where that kind of diversity is not all that remarkable. Sulu was Sulu, not Asian man. Ohura, Ohura. Chekov.. well, they did tease him about his Russian accent, but he was otherwise just another crewmember.
It seemed like a pipe dream when I was little. My friends and I, most of us children of immigrants, looked at the Powers That Be and saw a world apparently closed off to us. And amazingly, we didn't have to wait till the 23rd century to see the Star Trek dream start coming to life. No, we haven't discovered interstellar travel yet, but it's quite something to look back on those childhood memories and see the Powers That Be now, a world with not just Bidens and Kennedys but Obamas and Sotomayors.
Two movies this weekend. The first was Star Trek. It was action-packed and spectacular, the actors charismatic, and so on and so forth, but it lost something: the philosophy and physics that help define good science fiction. I'm not asking for deep thought, but at least a surface-level skimming of questions. There were so many opportunities to discuss time travel paradoxes, the role of the military, issues around genocide and cultural preservation, the physics of black holes, and so on and so forth, not to mention more backstory around the characters. I feel like something happened since Terminator 2, The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell introduced science fiction with a brain--the brain was chopped off in favor of near-constant action. Which is fine, I guess, but I feel like the best science fiction has measures of both: a feast for the eyes as well as the mind.
The second was Let the Right One In, which was simply stunning. I'm not normally a fan of vampire movies, but this one took the genre and turned it into a tale of isolation and alienation, while delivering plenty vampire lore. Set in a working class Swedish suburb that was as much a character in the movie as the people, the film contains a number of visually-sumptuous scenes, from the vampire shooting up a wall to a few death scenes that were as much poetic as they were horrifying. This is the kind of film I'm talking about above: it raises many philosophical and cultural questions while giving us plenty of scenes that linger for days and days.
How do you experience the world? What are the salient details you pay attention to, and what are the ones you ignore? We have 5 senses, but which ones do we really pay attention to? Seeing Braille on a subway stop sign got me thinking.
As a visual artist, I'm drawn to what I see, but my AudioBoo experiments have gotten me thinking about sound, and the swine flu discussions have gotten me thinking about touch. It's not like I never noticed these things before, but I did start paying more attention.
Makes me think about conversations I've had with people about the area around 11th Ave. and the mid-20's in Manhattan. If you're a club kid, it's the Meatpacking District. If you're an artist, it's Chelsea. If you're a gay male, you've gone a little too far west. It also reminds me of the time I took the subway at 5 am on a weekday. I was surprised to find it packed, but this time with service workers rather than office folk.
I often hear that this city is a small world. And in some sense it is, but it's more like a collection of small worlds. The leftist activists are all connected loosely with the leftist axtivists, the pet professionals with the pet professionals, the queer poets with the queer poets. And so on and so forth. Rarely are the borders ever crossed, except for those intrepid few at the middle of these Venn diagrams.
How do you experience the world? What do you pay attention to, what do you filter out? What's of vital significance (the Braille/the Roman letters) and what can be ignored (the Roman letters/the Braille)?
When breaking a rule, what rule do we follow instead? Stickers on blank faces suggest the importance of design/aesthetics/face recognition over civic order.
The general argument: "Here's a book you can judge by its cover." The green argument: "Go green. Buy a Kindle." The fashionista argument: "Who is your Kindle wearing?"
The problem with peddling a product to a vaguely defined demographic and the benefit of a captive audience.
How do you convince people to stand in line in the hot summer for a product that lasts no longer than an hour? Spotted at the enormously popular Shake Shack, boasting lines longer than Pink's in Los Angeles: t-shirts and products that embrace the impossibly long wait. One friend suggested, "Maybe the point is to be seen in line, not to actually get the shake." Touche.
Gets me thinking, too, about kigo (haiku season word) in Manhattan. The opening of Shake Shack is a sign that spring has arrived and summer is upon us.
In a socially-networked world, what is the new home page? Nina K. Simon's recent post got me on a train of thought:
For people who are deeply immersed in social media, social networks are already a much heavier influence on personal choices--where to visit, what concert to attend--than traditional advertising. Which means that your organization's website--a brochure out in the wilderness of the Web--is only going to remain relevant and useful as a marketing piece if it is being referenced in the social context of your users' lives. The time is coming when atomized search will take a back seat to socially networked information sources, and that is going to change what it means to have a presence on the Web.
I'm thinking about the President of the United States using Flickr, Otis College on Facebook, Brooklyn Museum commissions on Twitter. As the world becomes more and more complex, where do we turn for reliable information? Not the Information Superhighway per se, which is filled with strange onramps and offramps and intersections and merges, but our networked neighbors, the people we know and trust, and a handful of carefully-selected organizations allowed onto our feeds.
But I'm thinking, too, about physical/digital seamlessness, about cards you can pick up at Otis so you can find them on the Internet and then embed them into your online social life, alongside your friends. If you've never seen teenagers and college students using Facebook and cell phones, just watch an episode of Gossip Girl: technology is not simply a tool but an increasingly-seamless extension of our lives. Sasha Frere-Jones had a similar thought:
One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers.
As the socially-networked generation grows up and not only makes demands on the world but inherits it, how will our sense of identity evolve and change? I'm thinking about entire lives and selves not simply recorded but lived out via technology-mediated communication. A percentage of our social interactions--quips, comments, silly photos, casual flirtations, et cetera--with family, friends and acquaintances preserved in computers, cell phones and data banks floating in the Pacific Ocean.
The uproar around Facebook's Terms of Service suggests more than an issue of copyrights and content: it's about self and identity. If it were about the former, only artists, musicians and writers would be leading the charge. But I get the sense that we're intuitively aware of the fact that a part of our selves is kept somewhere by someone, and we are only comfortable with this fact insofar as we believe that we can remove it at will, that our identities remain ours and ours alone.
And that suggests that, more and more, who we are, i.e., the sense of "me" that we travel around with, is interweaved with what we do and broadcast online.
I enjoyed the Thursday night Status Update panel. I think I may be writing more for it in another venue, but panel moderator Sharon Butler of Two Coats (who posted her notes on her blog) asked where it's all going, i.e., what we see in the future for social media and art and society.
I asked if anyone in the audience had seen Gossip Girl. They said no. I then asked if anyone had seen a teenager break up over Facebook. A lot of people gave looks of recognition. I believe that the generation that's currently teenagers now, i.e., those who've only known a world driven by text messages and Facebook, are living out a future where the Internet and digital devices are seamlessly integrated with our lives in a non-self-reflective way. No one marvels anymore at the power of TV to disseminate information and influence public attention--TV just is. It's a given. It will be the same with cell phones and social networking technologies in the coming years.
But I'm also realizing that while Gen Y provides a window into the future of social media, so do developing nations. I read this great Economist article about developing countries, health, and cell phones that got me down this road:
“It’s not just about technology,” says Karl Brown of the Rockefeller Foundation, a charity with expertise in this area. “Because mobile phones enable multidirectional flows of information even in the most remote parts of the world, they have the power to transform health care.”
The most promising applications of mHealth for now are public-health messaging, stitching together smart medical grids, extending the reach of scarce health workers and establishing surveillance networks for infectious diseases. The use of the technology is spreading: a recent report funded by the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, two charities, documented more than four dozen projects across the developing world.
In Uganda, Text to Change uses an SMS-based quiz to raise awareness among phone users about HIV/AIDS that brought a 40% increase in the number of people getting tested. A study in Thailand in 2007 showed that compliance with a drug regimen to tackle TB jumped to over 90% when patients were sent daily text reminders to take their pills on time.
At the after party for Status Update, folks took notice of my phone, which is a Nokia 6016i, popular ca. 2005 but woefully outdated today alongside iPhones and Blackberry Pearls. There's a long story about why I use such an antiquated phone, but suffice to say, they were surprised. And yet, thanks to the simplicity of text messaging, I'm still able to Twitter and Facebook away. I like it too because I'm accessible enough while still being more or less unplugged.
The power of microblogging and text messaging is their simplicity, which allows for swift multi-directional communication amidst ubiquitous users. Once you understand the basic concept and how to send a message, you can participate. These tiny messages are also personal and immediate, appearing on your cell phone throughout the day, a private correspondence that only you can see and without the bells and whistles of email. This is what makes this technology ideal for broad applications, from the immediacy of teenage social interactions, to making a presidential candidate appear accessible and personable, to disseminating and collecting health information.
In other news, the New Haven Independent did a write-up about the show that I quite enjoyed:
[An Xiao] is sending dozens of post cards to the Haskins Laboratories throughout the run of the show, and she is Twittering away about their status as well. Several postcards on display have these messages; “I’m so addicted to Subway sandwiches. My gosh!” and “Can’t tell you how sleepy I am.”
During a panel discussion about the status of “status updating,” and the other technologies, Xiao and Haskins Laboratories chief Phil Rubin both said that whereas in other gatherings people are asked to turn off their cell phones, the audience of some 50 were asked not only to keep theirs on but to Twitter away.
Xiao is a serious conceptual artist. She, like Cat Balco, another of the participants, who teaches painting at the University of Hartford, doesn’t have the answers. Xiao wants to find out if the aggregate of the postcards and the Twitters will add up to a genuine portrait of herself.
Cultural transfusions - new/old media collide. They even have the most common Facebook grammatical error: "is who's in?" and "is Steve Ward is the man".
But what would take this a step further? Right now, the bus ad evokes social media but it doesn't interact with it. It's the difference between seeing a poster in Chinese and being in Chinatown. Imagine being able to press a button on the ad--or better, send a text message on your phone--to actually add VH1 as a friend. Or to open your phone in that spot and see a stream of status updates from other individuals who were waiting for the bus recently.
Strangely enough, the FBI gets it:
In the marketing tools of yesteryear, even if you offered a way to reach your brand (call this 800 number, visit this web page, subscribe to this mailing list), you had to hope people would remember to take action later. In other words, there was rarely a direct way to engage your audience now--just a variety of techniques to seep into their memory and value systems. In the 21st century, with cell phones and smartphones, new and old media are finding ways to intersect, to coexist, and to get us to pay attention and to keep us hooked.
And a reminder: I'm showing work and paneling tonight at Yale/Haskins Laboratories. If you can't come, you can follow along at this custom Twitterfall link, as we'll be crowdsourcing live tweets. Hope to see you, either in person or on Twitter. I'll be talking about how you can follow my postcard installation via text messaging. In the mean time, I do practice what I see. Try texting THATWASZEN to 50500.
Sorry for the relative silence here. Normally, I set up my blog posts to post throughout the week, regardless of how busy I am, but I was too busy this weekend to even do that. I've been in the midst of "Co-Modify", an online performance art piece for @Platea. This week (May 3-9), 42 performers and I are using our social media networks to collectively perform fictional sponsorships. It's an exploration of the commodification of social media--from contextual ads in Gmail to sponsored links in Facebook catered to the data you provide about yourself.
I'm saving my full comments to the end, which I'll be posting to the @Platea blog, but I must say that the performance has gone far beyond what I ever imagined and taken a life of its own. From Target dolls to Aussie hairspray fire to the most subtle of product placement to philosophical discussions on the nature of a commodified world, the @Platea performers have stunned me with their brilliance and creativity. Product placement has never been so thought-provoking... and downright hilarious at times.
The whole performance has me thinking about a number of topics that I'll flesh out later. Social media as a public art space. Intersections among performance, identity and social media spaces. The costs and benefits of an inescapably-commodified world. Crowdsourced art, and art in the cloud.
And last but not least I'm participating in Status Update, curated by Donna Ruff and Debbie Hesse at Yale Haskins Laboratories. I'm speaking at the panel on May 14, organized by Sharon Butler and featuring Matt Held, Paddy Johnson, Sharon Kleinman, and I am showing alongside these other fabulous artists:
Hi there. I'm An Xiao. I'm an artist, designer and writer An Xiao looking at the intersection of the digital and analog in the 21st century. I photograph, install, perform and tweet and have shown my work in publications and galleries internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, Yale/Haskins Laboratories, The New York Times and Art in America. I founded and direct @Platea, a global online public art collective, and serve as a contributing columnist for PBS-affiliate Art21 and a contributing writer for the New York Foundation of the Arts and Hyperallergic.
That Was Zen, This Is Tao is my journey in haiblog -- brief, crisp prose about everything and anything that crosses my mind (which is a lot!), as I try to make some sense of the 21st century and bring a little Zen into it. In no particular order, I enjoy writing about the contemporary art world, Web 2.0 and the Internet, Zen and poetry, modern marketing, fashion and style, GTD (Getting Things Done), American politics and anything else of interest. I lead a hectic life, and I often use my iPhone to make updates in subways and parking lots. I also regularly post my most recent photography. I do hope you enjoy your stay! Below are some news updates from my web site.
