Structural Patterns

“Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin,” by Carolyn Kane (May 27th, 2009) presents a thoughtful perspective on private performance for public consumption. The interview revolves around Bookchin’s latest installation consisting of edited YouTube footage of people dancing in their homes.  As Bookchin puts it:

…the YouTube dance, with its emphasis on the individual, the home, and individuated and internalized production, embodies key characteristics of our economic situation of post-Fordism. If Fordism once described a social and economic system that focused on large-scale factory production, post-Fordism describes a shift away from the masses of workers in the same space, to smaller scale production by workers scattered around the world. These workers are linked by technology rather than an assembly line, and there are more temporary or contract workers, often working from home, producing more specialized, less standardized goods.

Ideas that Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg’s virtual sweatshop piece “Double Happiness Jeans”.  An installation and performative work that has real people using their Second Life avatars making jeans for gallery visitors.

Today’s NY Times presents a bright future starting July 4th, 2009:

http://nytimes-se.com/

Change is upon us!

VOTEMOS.US the site that questions what the 2008 U.S. presidential elections would look like if all residents in the U.S. could vote will now feature weekly video interviews with U.S. immigrants and Mexico City residents concerning the presidential elections and general relations between the United States and Latin America.

Although VOTEMOS.US is a Spanish-language site, the videos have English language subtitles so that U.S. citizens may have an insight into the views of their Spanish speaking neighbors within the country as well as those south of the border. The weekly video interviews are available on the site, as a podcast or rss feed:

This week Argentine Jose Antonio Lazzari relaxing in the park Alameda Central located in the historical center of Mexico City states that he would not vote for Obama, Hillary or McCain and he questions who the leftist candidates are in the U.S… Jose Antonio goes on to point out that the United States is controlled by the transnational companies that are making a fortune in Iraq.

We had a lengthy conversation with Jose Antonio Lazzari, a theater actor and educator who runs a free school in Argentina. Sections of this conversation will be published over the next few weeks. Past interviews with NYC undocumented resident Raymundo are also available and all videos will be archived on the site.

Thursday, January 3 is the Iowa Caucus and the 2008 U.S. presidential election year begins! With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a dropping dollar, increasing foreclosures of homes, fear of a recession and an incredibly negative international view of the United States, it is time for a change! And in a country built by immigrants who better to bring change than the country’s immigrant population, legal and illegal.

We live in a multi-millionare two party republic with a gigantic near slave-wage labor population that helps keep this country going, the United States should give all its hard working residents a vote! Votems.us – Mexico Decide does so by presenting a Spanish language portal to the US presidential elections and allowing users to register, vote and give their opinion on the US elections.

“In 2005 the percent of U.S. population that are migrants is 12.86%” the highest in the history of the country.” – Farhana Hossain, “Snapshot: Global Migration”, The New York Times

“The U.S. Social Security Administration has estimated that undocumented immigrants contribute approximately $8.5 billion in Social Security and Medicare funds each year.” — National Immigration Law Center, “Paying Their Way and Then Some”

“The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has determined that undocumented immigrants paid almost $50 billion in federal taxes from 1996 to 2003.” — National Immigration Law Center, “Paying Their Way and Then Some”

Votemos.us also features parts of an interview with Raymundo, a Mexican immigrant who left his home in Puebla in 1984 to come to the United States. He discusses the pointlessness of the border fence, that it is merely a political act that will not slow illegal immigration, after all most people pass through the border entries. He also recollects his own crossing of the border and the reality that although he has been living and working in the United States since 1984, he remains without his resident papers since he never had his birth certificate nor the means to acquire his residency because he doesn’t speak English or have money.

Votemos.us goes on to propose that Mexico have a vote in the U.S. elections. The United States has had a powerful influence in the Mexican national elections, now it’s time to turn that around. Between Mexico and the United States exists a constant circulation of people, product and capital so there is plenty of reason to give Mexico a say in who will be the next U.S. President! Mexico should be part of Super Tuesday, February 5th when California and New Mexico, two states that were once Mexican territories go to the caucus.

I originally planned this web site for Transitio, the video and new media festival in Mexico City that happened this past October. With the help of John Kuiphoff, votemos.us has a content management system that allows visitors to register with the site, vote and write an opinion on the elections; anyone may view other’s opinions and write their own reaction. The goal of the project is not only to point to the fact that within the US border lives a very active Mexican population that contributes to the national economy and is not allowed to vote, but also to present a repository of information and links to the Latin American community (within and beyond the U.S.) concerning the US national elections and to establish a public space to share their views.

High numbers of children with asthma? Adults afflicted with cancer? What was previously buried in the land near a small town? What pollutants flow in the tap water of a given region? Are you living near a Superfund Site? In 1980, Reagan reluctantly implemented the Superfund Act, initially written by the Carter administration due to civic demand for the government’s acknowledgment and action to clean up hazardous sites.

Today the Superfund is broke, there is little money to clean up past sites of waste and environmental disasters, but people still have a right to know and to learn about the environments we live in, however the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t make this easy. Concerned citizens may request Superfund data from the EPA, but the data tends to be dirty – missing information or out dated information, so it’s a good thing that Brooke Singer (full disclaimer – she’s my wife) with the support of turbulence.org has launched Superfund365.

Each day from September 1st 2007 through August 2008, Singer will post a data visualization of a Superfund site. Superfund365 presents a wealth of information on the United States environmental reality. As there are thousands of Superfund sites in the United States of America, Superfund365 only paints a partial picture of the damage to this region of the world, however it is enough to get an insight into the environmental disasters heaped by industrialization and commerce. The project is an incredible exercise of environmental data visualization at a time when people are becoming increasingly conscious of the changes that we have inflicted upon our planet.

I once did an artist residency in Poland where I got to know the artists Piotr Parda who now lives in Boston. Over the years we’ve kept in touch and I’ve become a bigger and bigger fan of his work for its humor, ingenuity and wit.

Upon first arriving to the states, Piotr made his living as a children’s book illustrator and he recently used his gift of illustration to create new Google icons that reflect ongoing conflicts and disasters. The piece titled “ON OCCASION” takes the usual Google icon manipulations to celebrate major US holidays a provoking step further. Piotr transforms perhaps the most pervasive online icon into a momentary reflection of the world we live in with illustrations that allude to Darfur, Neo-Nazis, KKK and AIDS. Piotr’s site archives his work over the years.

In 2007, Rhizome will commission eleven new art works with fees ranging from $1000-3000. You can submit a proposal below, or read more about our submission and voting procedures.

New works of Internet-based art, Ten commissions will be awarded in this category. Submit at http://rhizome.org/commissions/2007/artist_proposal.php

Community project, Submit at http://rhizome.org/commissions/2007/community_proposal.php

All of the commissioned works will be exhibited on Rhizome.org and at a one-night event at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as archived in the ArtBase.

November 11, 2005

Artist John Jota Leaños recontextualizes our good’ol ABC song to today’s dark realities. In a time when it’s hard for anyone to live in ignorant bliss of the amount of conflict and death that humanity has brought upon itself, a recontextualization of one of the first songs that we learn as children in the United States is all too appropriate. Afterall, the learning of language should be linked to a global consciousness embedded in historical realities.

Leaños employs Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration along with sardonic humor to reconsider recent and historical deaths, so many unnecessary deaths:

http://leanos.net/ABC.html

September 15, 2005
A new experiment by Sal Randolph – “Whereyouare is an experiment in the collective documentation of neighborhoods… Everyone is invited to participate by documenting any neighborhood they love… The project harnesses the power of folksonomy tags from a range of sites that host and organize content of different kinds (flickr for photos, vimeo for video, delicious for links, etc.).”

I love the concept of this experiment and it’s use of current popular web tools too establish an open documentation of neighborhoods that anyone who is willing to establish an account with flickr or vimeo or delicious or opsound… can participate in.

At the moment, Williamsburg seems to have the most stuff, since it is the neighborhood that Sal lives in and can facilitate getting initial contributors to join.

If people contribute worthwhile content and build an engaging representation or documentation, it could be a really great use of folksonomy. However at the moment, Williamsburg includes a couple of videos of an awning flapping against wind and some pigeons hanging out on a street – the sort of content that leads me to question whether or not this is just more unnecessary stuff online, time will tell.

It will also be interesting to see how widely the site is passed along and if neighborhoods of non-Western or underdeveloped countries are added to the site.

August 24, 2005

Dentimundo is a new online directory of Mexican dentists on the border with the United States.

El Progresso, Ojinaga, Juarez, Nogales, Mexicali, Tijuana, are all Mexican towns or cities that sit on the edge of the United States. These are border sites that have established a direct simbiotic relationship with the U.S. economy by providing a variety of services to U.S. citizenry and attracting U.S. dollars. Dentist clinics are as prominent as three for a dollar tacos, margarita specials and Mexican panchos.

What deficits in the U.S. health system is causing this outflow to Mexico? How do the dentists on each side of the border view one another? Where do U.S. citizens prefer to have their teeth cleaned and why? These are just a few of the questions that come to mind when considering the immense quantity of Mexican dentists along the Mexico/United States border.

Dentimundo.com is a multimedia documentary of this micro-economy between the U.S. and Mexico that investigates border dentistry while also presenting users with a directory of dentist clinics along the border.

Get your teeth cared for now!