Ana Valdés (caravia):
I am interested in literature, activism, grassroots movements, culture, arts, new technologies, cultural criticism, history, community, media_art, Internet, social networks, social software, debate, discussion, philanthropy, anarchism, autogestion, theory, media, alternative news, ecology, green lifestyle, Latin America, testimony, queer_studies, cyberculture, feminism, cybereminism, writing, film, theater.

Ana Valdés' Blog

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Struggling home along the trolley-wobbling pavement of Green Lanes in North London. Dank, gray skies and chaotic, always-divergent, multicultural masses are in sharp contrast to the rarefied air of the mountains of Banff. Where friendly participants clustered around shared interests, to learn, exchange and muck about together. This rare pleasure is very sweet but probably has to be temporary, because the point is to make connections with difference, across distance and then to maintain and explore the creative potentials of those connections...No?

Calls for support have been circulating around various related mailing lists for several weeks now, and I hope that many, many people will sign the online petitions calling for the suspension of §129a proceedings and the release of those imprisoned in Germany: open letter
The charges against Andrej H. are especially outrageous and clearly pose a threat to the freedom of academic research and political engagement, and a wave of protests has responded accordingly. I wholeheartedly support these efforts on the basis of my own political convictions, but also for personal reasons.

I don't know what the netiquette is surrounding reblogging from email lists but Ryan Griffis just posted this to the CRUMB list...I'm posting it here partly because the points he makes resonate with me and also as an enriched bookmark to some very interesting links.

Subject: Re: Books about participation

One other point regarding reflexivity and "media art"/"contemporary art"... i haven't read Bishop's edited book yet, but if the general position is anything like her article on collaboration and "relational aesthetics" in Artforum a while back, it should seem problematic, to say the least, for people involved in the discussions here. Not because of it's lack of attention to people working in "media" or "networks" per se, but because it so obviously stakes out a conservative politics through conflicting notions of ethics and aesthetics. How does one write a text on "collaboration" that seeks to be a critical analysis, and manage to move from Oda Projesi and R. Tiravanija to Thomas Hirschorn as exemplary of a challenging aesthetic and political practice?

This is not a book review* - I haven't read the whole book yet, but I am excited by what I have read of At The Edge of Art by Joline Blaise and John Ippolito. It is truly an artists' book; by artists about art and its function in the contemporary world. The authors identify where art is being made in strange places by established artists who refuse to be called artists any more and by technologists, architects, and entrepreneurs who claim to be artists; hence 'The Edge'. They set out an experimental framework, inspired by a biological process and catalysed by McLuhan's question about art as "information about how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties" .

To my friends from Mexico who have come to New Orleans for opportunities in reconstruction, let me tell you that from my experience with New Orleans hegemony, you are now the new Blacks (to put it gently), and you are in for a world of oppression. Welcome to the US amigos, and I am sorry that you will have to endure. Enough said.

For all this rambling, telling you about my time in the Big Easy, there is one thing that is obvious. There is a travesty in the United States, far more important than the Iraq War, and that is epitomized by a mise en scene I experienced this morning. I was driving down devastated Rampart Avenue past the old Sanger Theatre, and there was a lone empty beer bottle in the median. New Orleans is America’s whore; the first one you’d love to party with, and the last to call when she’s pregnant or in jail. And even though she is in a slow revival, understand that her underclasses are not rebuilding as fast as the other parts…

And then, on Sunday morning, the French Quarter, while not completely restored, was still alive with street jazz musicans, bohemian guitarists on the corner, and revelers getting their Sabbath long-necks in before the Saints/49-er’s game. Walking down Royal Street, there were an inordinate number of decorative fine art and antique galleries openm with opulent kitsch and French Art Nouveau trinkets for sale, and I wondered wy there would be a market for any of this in such a ravaged city? Of course, there is the requisite number of rich tourists and antique buyers, but what I find more disturbing is the idea that there might be a market for these things amongst the natives. This is a rhetorical statement, because there is certainly a market in New Orleans, because despite the disaster, the disparate third-world culture of gluttony vs. poverty has just shifted to include new throngs of oppressed. I find this unconscionable; as having diamonds and baubles in New Orleans while people are still living under leaky sheets of plastic is like going to a funeral in a sexy little red cocktail dress. It’s just rude.

I spent the weekend mounting a show in one of my adopted homes, New Orleans. For anyone who has not kept up on world events, this was the site that was decimated by derivative effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The gallery I show at in New Orleans, Barristers’, is having to close it’s current location because it is being converted to luxury condominiums. Fortunately, they are going to reopen in the Bywater, but their closing is indicative of the reconfiguration of New Orleans, and the social structure that remains should leave anyone with a conscience frothing at the mouth.

Here’s the problem – while the United States continues to pump billions into a failed war adventure in the Middle East, ruins still cover many of the affected areas of New Orleans. Furthermore, what rebuilding that has been done exhibits the traditional agendas of an oppressive hegemonic “good ol’ boys” network. By and large, the under classes have been woefully underserved, with reconstruction efforts being siphoned off my contractors, Federal agencies demanding payment for services not rendered, and so on. For example, a woman I shared an evening with related her experience of frequently not being able to sleep for sixty hours at a time, living with her husband, dog and four children ina federal trailer, and returning from work to put the four panels of plywood they were able to afford on the house at the crack of dawn.

Latour suggests using four notebooks when carrying out an ANT (actor-network theory) study. They are listed in his chapter on the Fifth source of uncertainty:writing down risky accounts. The principle is to keep track of every move because "everything is data". This separation of different types of data (related to different kinds of research activity) will also aid retrieval and shuffling data.

The Four Notebooks
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1) To log the enquiry.
Appointments, reactions, meetings, times, dates, locations, technologies used.

2) For gathering information.
To be arranged simultaneously chronologically and by category. He suggests the use of digital file managing software for this notebook, to allow a shuffling between different arrangements of data.