MapsDrifts&Inquiries

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Maps, Drifts,

Interventions and Inquiries:

What (Else) Can Independent Media Do?

Julie Perini & Kevin Van Meter (of Team Colors Collective)

13 September 2008 as part of the Portland Grassroots Media Camp

This workshop will introduce the participants to a number of

techniques forproducing knowledge about our communities and

struggles, as well as opening pathways for dialog andcommunication. Workshop participants will learn about

techniques gleaned from community organizing, militant / co-

research and interventionist art traditions and will be involved in

producing their own maps, surveys, drifts, and inquiries with the

intent of creating participatory and dialogical media.


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Maps, Drifts,

Interventions and InquiriesEvent Outline

Introduction to the Workshop & Activities

PRESENTATION

Maps, Drifts, Interventions and Inquiries: What (Else) Can Independent MediaDo? (5 minutes)

- How can media be use to produce knowledge and create dialog?

What is Militant & Co-Research? Kevins Remarks (10 minutes)

- How do we breakdown the divide between the subject of research and the researcher?

What is Interventionist Art? Julies Remarks (10 minutes)

- How can art and activist media function together?


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Event Outline

ACTIVITIES

5. Mapping: Using Portland as a Political Space (25 minutes)

6. Inquiry & Encounter: A Survey of the Grassroots Media Camp (40 minutes)

7. Drift, Art Interventions & Discussion (25 minutes)

RESULTS

All of the materials resulting from the workshop will be displayed for the remainder ofthe Grassroots Media Camp. The maps of Portland we produce, the findings from theinquiry and the notes from the drift will be available for review to workshop and other

conference participants.

Maps, Drifts,

Interventions and Inquiries


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Q: What (Else) Can Independent Media Do?

R: Media can: be dialogical, produce knowledge, create

affects, amplify voices & experiences, facilitate

emergences, and mobilize flows of activity.

Here we will draw on a number of traditions: community

organizing, militant research & interventionist art. We find

these ideas usefulas methods of inquiry (into everyday life,

into radical movements, into larger struggles) and as

additions to existing grassroots and independent media

practices.

Presentation


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Q: How can grassroots and independent media beuse to produce knowledge and create dialog?

R: By utilizing existing media outlets and

practices, then adding research components tothem - activists and artists can inquire into

movements, struggles and everyday life. Inquiry

provides both the opportunity to produce

knowledge and foster dialog. Inquiries result in

not just data for struggles and campaigns, butrelationships, contacts, and new perspectives.

Presentation


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Q: How can media create situations, affects,

moments and encounters?

R: Militant Research and Interventionist Art

practices provide the opportunity to break down

barriers between: researcher / subject, activist /non-activist, producer / spectator; and create

active participants in creating dialog, producing

knowledge, and engaging in struggle. In breaking

down these barriers new subjectivities findthemselves, moments and situations outside of the

flow of everyday life are formed and important

emotions responses and desires are elicited.

Presentation


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Q: How can we use media to document art

interventions and how can artistic practicethemselves become part of campaigns and

movements?

R: Art practices themselves provide the

opportunity for the participants to think openly

about an idea or action, documenting both the

practice and the response allows the activity to

carry on beyond the time and space it takes place

in and shares ideas and practices with a wideraudience.

R: Artistic practice provides a creative outlet and a

engaging way to spread messages, elicit

responses, and communicate with the community.

Presentation


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What is Militant &

Co-Research?

Presentation by

Kevin Van Meter | Team Colors


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Defining Inquiry, Militant & Co-Research

Militant research is that

process of re-

appropriation of our own

capacity ofworlds-

making, which questions,

problematizes and pushes

the real through a series of

concrete procedures.- Precarias a la Deriva (Madrid, Spain)

What does knowledge become when itrenounces the comfort of criticaldistance with regards to the object,when it refuses each and every evenlybalanced evaluation and adopts a point

of view based in struggles? How is theability to research experienced when itbecomes part of the experience of life,when it becomes potential to create?What happens when the discussion is nolonger about who is who: who is on theinside and who on the outside; who

blinks and who acts; who has the rightto speak and who is better off lettingothers speak on their behalf? When thequestion who is who is no longerpoliced, a new possibility emerges: thatof producing together.

- Situaciones - Colectivo de investigacion(Argentina)


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A Genealogy of Militant Research

Precarity & Co-Research

Situationist International Operisti, Autonomia & Autonomist Marxism

Karl Marx

A Workers Inquiry (1880)


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What Does Militant Research Provide

Grassroots Media? a set of tools that is concepts, techniques and mechanisms that contribution

to grassroots and independent medias existing frameworks by adding researchcomponents and by taking a direct role in producing knowledge and strategiesin resonance with movement campaigns, organizations, and initiatives.

a focus on struggle from the perspective of struggle. Hence in seeking toidentify the development of new subjectivities and new emergences, as well asunderstand current class and movement composition these research toolsproduce strategies and insights for strategic thinking.

the opportunities for communication, a widening of the field of struggle, anddialog around important struggles in everyday life.

Grassroots and independent media when they resonate with militant and co-research practices and discourses begin to address the important project of

documenting movements and developing movement strategy.


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In the Middle of a Whirlwind:

An Example of Militant Research in the US Whirlwinds is a one-off online

journal that inquires intocurrent organizing in the UnitedStates, and through that process

the collection aims to provide astrategic analysis of current

political composition as a toolfor building political power.

We begin and end the Whirlwindscollection with the question: Willyou join us in the Middle of a

Whirlwind?


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Additional Examples of Militant &

Co-Research Projects Act Up

Coalition of Immokalee Workers

AREA Chicago (US)

Counter CartographiesCollective (US)

Colectivo Situaciones(Argentina)

Edu-Factory Collective (Global)

Precarias a la Dervia (Madrid)

Turbulence: Ideas for Movement(UK)

An Atlas of Radical

Cartography (Book)


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What is Interventionist Art

Presention by

Julie Perini


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Why are artists changing their

practices? Co-optation of all forms of counterculture

Increasing privatization of public space

Reduction in the number of non-marketdriven spaces for art production andexhibition

Reduction in number of community media

centers Frustrated by political irrelevance


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Where do artists intervene?

Politics

Cultural institutions

Everyday life

Science / technology

Other fields


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What are some strategies of

resistance?

Psycho-geography / Derive

Detournement / Culture Jamming

Interventions

Relational Art


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PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHY

The study of the precise laws and

specific effects of the geographical

environment, consciously organized ornot, on the emotions and behavior of

individuals


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The Portland Tour of Tilburg

by Khris Soden


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The Portland Tour of Tilburg


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Re-bar - Parking Day


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Adrian Piper


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Adrian Piper


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Julie Perini

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Center for Urban Pedagogy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_RnpqeuwNk&feature=user


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CULTURE JAMMING /

DETOURNEMENT /

INTERVENTIONS Culture jamming = has been characterized as a form of public

activism which is generally in opposition to commercialism, and

the vectors of corporate image.

Detournement = Re-using elements of well-known media to

create a new work with a different message, often one opposed

to the original

To reawaken a sense of wonder and fascination about one's

surrounding environment, inspired by the frequent intentionalambiguity of a specific culture jamming technique, which

stimulates personal interpretation and independent thinking.


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Martha Rosler


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The Yes Men


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The Yes Men


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Critical Art Ensemble


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Microrevolt


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Artists Against the War


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Artists Against the War


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RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

The artwork creates a social environment in which people cometogether to participate in a shared activity.

The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities,but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existingreal, whatever scale chosen by the artist.

The audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artworkbeing an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art

produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters,meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individualconsumption.


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Group Material


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The Black Factory


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The Black Factory


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The Black Factory


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16 Beaver Group


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Activities: Mapping

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Activities: Mapping


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Activities: Mapping


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Activities:Mapping

Mapping:


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Mapping:

Using Portland as a Political Space

Sleep, rest &

reproduce

Obtain income

Socialize

Find knowledge

Do politics

Create, activate

& self-care.


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Activities: Inquiry & Encounter

A Survey of the Grassroots Media CampA Workers Inquiry

Sample Survey Questions

1. What is your trade?

13. State details as to the division of

labor in your factory. 20. Are safety measures to prevent

accidents applied to the engine,transmission and machinery?

30. State the number of hours you workdaily, and the number of working daysduring the week.

31. State the number of holidays in thecourse of a year.

32. What breaks are there during theworking day?

53. Are you paid time or piece rate?

70. Try and draw up a weekly andyearly budget of your income andexpenditure for self and family.

Hotlines: Call CentreInquiry|Communism

Sample Survey Questions

1. Which company do you work for?

25. How many people work in the callcentre?

26. How many are female, how manyare male?

27. How many immigrants work there?

51. When working on the telephone,which actions do you perform?

52. Who is giving you direct orders?

66. What kind of problems come upfrequently concerning the organisationof work?

79. How or what is determining thepace of work?

95. How much do you earn?

Activities: Inquiry & Encounter


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Activities: Inquiry & EncounterA Survey of the Grassroots Media Camp

In seeing the Grassroots Media Camp as a political spaceand space of inquiry, what do we want to know about those

participating in the Camp?

Tasks:

Facilitated Discussion

What should the Survey

Accomplish?

Creating Survey Questions

Distribute Surveys


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Activities: Drive (Drift)

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Activities: Drive (Drift)One of the basic situationist practices is the drive, a technique of rapid

passage through varied ambiences. Drives involve playful-constructive

behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quitedifferent from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a drive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations,

their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement

and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and

the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity

than one might think: from a drive point of view cities have

psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and

vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

- Guy Debord, Theory of the Drive (1958)

Looking for a procedure that would be able to capture their mobile and

contingent everyday lives, they found inspiration in the Situationist technique

of drifting. Situationist researchers wander in the city, allowing for encounters,

interactions and micro-events to be the guide of their urban itineraries. The

result was a psycho-geography based on haphazard coincidences. This

version though is seen as appropriate for a bourgeois male individual without

commitments, and not satisfactory for aprecaria. Instead of an exotic itinerary,

theprecarias version of drifting consists of a situated and directed trajectory

through everyday life settings

- Precarias a la Deriva (2004)


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Concluding Remarks &

Discussion

Maps, Drifts,Interventions and Inquiries:

What (Else) Can Independent Media Do?

Julie Perini & Kevin Van Meter (of Team Colors Collective)

13 September 2008 as part of the Portland Grassroots Media Camp

MapsDrifts&Inquiries

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Transcript of MapsDrifts&Inquiries