Everyday Practical Magic

7/28/2019 Everyday Practical Magic

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Abstract

My thesis Everyday Practical Magic brings together my research in social media,

experience design, and anthropology, with my experience as a maker of material objects

and hence, a facilitator of intimate exchanges between people, objects and the media.

Through the work of Donna Haraway and Clay Shirky I outline the conditions of our

political identity as cyborgs. I highlight the tremendous impact networked cultures

(mobile and internet) have had on our understanding of social ritual. I describe three

projects completed over the last four years that laid the groundwork for this paper and

my thesis exhibit. Using Wittgensteins writings on meaning and use in his Philosophical

Investigations, I point to the political power of language in shaping cultural

understanding of different kinds of economies. I illustrate the work of two other like

minded collectives; Superflex and The Center for Tactical Magic, and clarify what

happens when artmaking, cultural activism, and communication technologies collide.

Through Henry Jenkins work on Participatory Culture, I elucidate the hybridity of social

media and art and describe the difference between interaction and participation.

I rely on Jerry Saltz review ofThe Generational: Younger than Jesus to explain my and

other millennial artists work as evidencing a trend towards anthropology, sociology and

ethnography. Then I summarize the simplistic process, yet complicated context of the

work I created for the Practical Everyday Objects exhibit. Finally, I point out that artitself

is a social media that emerged through use, and I discuss the power of creative agency to

shape the world around us.


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Intimacy is a universal desire. We are destined to pursue close personal physical

relationships with other people and things. While the means for achieving such intimacy

vary from culture to culture, this basic need finds fulfillment in every society. Within our

own hightech culture the opportunities for intimate, personal encounters are becoming

rarer as mediated experience supplant direct contact and public and private realmsincreasingly converge. The function of objects at the turn of the millennium should be

assessed against the backdrop of this growing depersonalization and blur of modern life.

(Ramljak 186)

Jumpropes

Color Photograph. Paige Saez 2008.


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Section 1.0 Introduction (Our Machines are Disturbingly Lively)

My work explores the politics of identity and our cyborg existence in presentday

culture. I am interested in hybrid objects, communities, and theories that emerge when

artmaking, cultural activism, and the subversion of communication technologies collide,

particularly in what we call hacking. Over the past 20 years, one of the most powerful

engines of transformation has been the internet. The internet has proved to be fertile

ground for projects that raise awareness, question authority, and inspire social cohesion.

We are a wholly changed culture. A networked culture. Donna Haraway states inA

Cyborg Manifesto that, Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly

ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, selfdeveloping

and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms

and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert

(Haraway 4). I interpret this to mean that we have trouble differentiating between the

machine and experience of machination.

Relational Aesthetics, Culture Jamming and Hacktivism (the fusion of hacking and

activism) have all helped provoke cultural and political change. With continuing velocity,

our age's technologies of social networks are evolving, and evolving us. Clay Shirky

remarks in his bookHere Comes Everybody, that Human beings are social creaturesnot

occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it

shows up in every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect (Shirky 14).

Now that there are multiple loose and tangential connections between people, what does

it mean to be connected to someone at all? Friendship occurs with the click of a button,

and community structures itself around branded experiences. When we take a closer

look at the glue that keeps our social networks from falling apart, what do we find? We

find that the stuff that aligns us to each other often is just another socially constructed

experience. Online social networking and mobile communication technologies are

changing traditional ritualized social experiences. Shirky states, When we change the

way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and


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maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life (Shirky 14). We live in a

hypermediated consumer culture. We have commodified the social.

Section 1.1Social Capital, Demystifying Technology

In art, as a response to this, we see evidence of the trend towards anthropology,

sociology and ethnography. No longer are we discussing the merits of an examplary art

(social practice, relational aesthetics) we are now diving into evidencing sincere

explorations. Much work has been put forward describing obscure economic and

utopian ideals, such as the concept of Social capital1. The concept of social capital has

arisen against a backdrop of an apparent fraying of the social fabric brought on by the

adoption and use of technologies such as the mobile phone and the internet. Personally, I

dont see technology as a negative cultural agent. In fact, Id like it if we stopped treating

new technologies as if they were special at all. I would argue that our social fabric isnt

fraying at all, but rather its reweaving in new patterns.

An example of the demystification of technology, Wired Magazine sums this up in 2004

when they decided to stop calling the series of tubes the Internet and began to call it the

internet. Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the I in

internet... In the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary

to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving

information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more

so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television. This should not be

interpreted as some kind of symbolic demotion. Think of it more as a stylistic reality

check (Long). Demystifying technology gives us access, power, and intimacy. To do this,

we must play with it, hack it, evolve it, and break it.

1 Social capital is a concept developed in sociology and also used in business, economics, organizational behavior,

political science, public health and natural resources management that refers to connections within and between social

networks as well as connections among individuals. Though there are a variety of related definitions, which have been

described as something of a cure-all for the problems of modern society, they tend to share the core idea that social

networks have value. (Social Capital. Wikipedia, 28 Apr. 2009 )


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Section 1.2 Three Studies in Practical Magic

Little Cities: Atlanta, Georgia

Cardboard, paint, glue, and imagination. Paige Saez 2007.

Little Cities: ParticipationThe Little Cities were small, organized building parties for the construction of adhoc

dream houses. Groups of people around the country would meet and build homes out of

cardboard, colored paper, glue and paint, and as a group homestead the houses

somewhere in the city. Created from salvaged cardboard from dumpsters, the parties

constructed a social environment for group work. Over the course of two years I worked

with different groups around the country building these dream houses. Little Cities were

set in place to try to investigate complicated questions through simplistic actions. When

we built the houses together, we talked about the meaning of home and place, and

together we pulled apart fantasies of community.


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M83, Corner of Shaver and N. Williams Ave. Portland, Oregon

Book. Paige Saez 2008.

The Mixed Tapes: Communication

In the Spring of 2008, I created a book about psychogeography, physical hyperlinks and

digital/analog memory. I worked with QR Codes (Quick Read codes) one of many

consumerfacing 2D barcodes available for encoding URLs, phone numbers, or text into

an image that can be read with a camera phone and translated back into what was

originally written. The codes are Physical hyperlinks, or thinglinks. Physical hyperlink is

a neologism that refers to extending the internet to objects and locations in the real

world. Currently the internet does not extend beyond the electronic world. Physical

hyperlinking aims to extend the internet to the real world by attaching tags with URLs to

tangible objects or locations. The tags are read by a wireless mobile device and

information about the objects and their location are retrieved and displayed on the

device.


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Using the codes I created a visual mix tape of experiences that had occurred in my life.

The term mixed tape is now understood to be a metaphor to denote any collection of

songs, or any collection of curated elements in a set. The original mix tape carried a

temporal and physical weight that current digital mix tapes do not convey. As we

transition back and forth between analog and digital, our music and our memories are

moving to devicedrives, cloud servers, and other seemingly obtuse, yet convenient

forms of safekeeping. What we lose in materiality we make up with ubiquity and a

seamless permanence that only digital reproduction offers.

My memories were intertwined with the cassette tapes both in music and object. For

me the simple act of holding a particular tape triggers memories of people, places and

who I used to be. I fear the loss of the emotional space these physical objects possess. By

creating a physical manifestation of my digital memory I reinterpreted what initially

appeared to be a loss of objecthood and therefore a loss of me.

Makerlab Sunday Skillshare



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The Makerlab: Connectivity

In 2007 I cofounded the Makerlab with Anselm Hook. The Makerlab is an arts and

technology incubator focused on civic and environmental interactive projects. We

founded the Makerlab for two reasons; one, as a way to reapproach making objects and

two, as a means of pedagogical praxis. To date the collaborative has produced two open

source mobile applications focused on evidencing and facilitating local communities;

Citybot listens to online social networks to help create a grassroots brokerage similar to

Craigslistin order to helps neighbors connect Wants with Needs. The Imagewiki, a

mobile imagerecognition tool, uses physical hyperlinks to create thinglinks, pictures

that link to physical objects in the real world. We created these projects to explore

surveillance, privacy, and culture jamming and agency in the mobile/digital realm. The

Makerlab hosts a weekly event called Sunday SkillShares. Bringing artists,

programmers, activists, and designers together for potlucks and group projects. The

point of the SkillShares is to facilitate an open Freeskool styled environment.

Section 1.3 Conclusions

In my past work I noted there were three themes that constantly reoccurred. I

expressed a constant desire to facilitate intimacy. I play at deconstructing the objects I

express intimacy with, and the role those objects play in helping sustain community. And

I see a tension in my position as an artist with respect to the former; I see myself as

slightly removed from community with a dynamic tension and longing in relation to

it but still needing to bring a critical faculty to bear on it. All of these projects explore

different aspects of social currency.

Section 2.0 What Makes Things Special?

A shuffling, silent old man lived there alone, never appearing to receive any visitors or family,

whom I only saw outside the house twice the entire time I lived there. On one occasion I watched

him replace with exquisite slowness a white plastic bucket that had been standing on a tree stump

in the yard, which I had removed to the edge of the house considering that it generally upset my

view and didn't seem to serve any purpose whatsoever, but evidently it had a purpose I couldn't


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discern, or else the old man was dearly accustomed to observing it on the stump, so I let it be after

that.

Mystical Ritz, Nathan Stueve 2007

Making Imaginary Machines


Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene RochbergHalton study what makes things special.

In their bookThe Meaning of Things, the authors researched why people are attached to

material things in the first place. The authors drew from a survey they conducted of

eighty families in Chicago interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common

household objects. In particular, they asked each person to show them the things that

they considered special and then over a series of interviews, they explored what about

the objects made them distinctive in the first place. Special objects all had one thing in

common they were connected with specific memories and associations that helped

evoke a special feeling in their owners. These particular objects held narratives within

them, and because of this they transcended their materiality. Though the object was

valuable, seldom was the focus on the materiality of the object alone. What mattered was


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the story behind the object, an occasion recalled. A crystal vase gifted from a relative

could have as much influence as a chipped coffee mug found at a thrift store if the

memory and the sentiment were on par with one another. Our attachment is not just to

the object; it is the relationship to meaning that the object represents.

Section 2.1 Our Time, A Mythic Time

Thirty years after Csikszentmihalyi & RochbergHaltons research we find ourselves in

an environment suffused with an even more evolved landscape of the object. Now our

objects have meaning and powers above and beyond our traditional understanding.

Here we find a need to scrutinize our remediation of objecthood altogether, especially

when we talk about experiential objects, such as computers, cell phones and other

technosocial devices. The situation we are facing is the radical reinterpretation of the

mediasphere (in mediology this is the study of media systems and media as a system).

By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,

theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image

of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any

possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and

politicsthe tradition of racist, maledominant capitalism; the tradition of progress;

the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions ofculture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other

the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in

the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and

imagination. Thisis an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and

for responsibility in their construction (Haraway 2).

The internet and mobile communication devices are remediating2 our relationship to

traditional media, and as a consequence, the conversations we have around mediated

experiences. Today, we have increasing agency over our relationship with media, and we

are reshaping the mediasphere. We use the emerging system of Media Objects3 to

2"Remediation" is defined by Paul Levenson as the anthropotropic process bywhich new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies.

3 Cell phones, televisions, movie cameras, personal computers, gadgets, gizmos, devices, FacebookZombie Pokesthese

are all social objects as used to carry meaning and intimacy they are the fabric of community.


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reshape our relationship to media. Objects that are the most intimate and direct are

those that we construct our society with. Hence the popularity of homemade crafts and

art. What matters is the history of interaction, the memories built into the objects, and

the time and effort that the objects evoke.

A Wearable Computer for My Friend Gary

Color Photograph. 2008.

Baudrillard states that man has a profound resistance to imposing rationality upon the

purely arbitrary goals of his needs. This may well constitute a fatal turn for the modus

existendi of the object, as indeed of society as a whole. Once a certain point in technical

development has been reached, and hence primary needs have been satisfied, we may

well demand a phantasied, allegorical and subconscious edibility of the object as much

as, or even more that, an actual functionality(Baudrillard 128). I understand this to

The reason that we want objects to hold our intimacy is because they ambiently signal us to other people. Ambient

signaling is a form of communication, background awareness. When we are not around someone can hold onto our

piece of us via the object and they are reassured and reminded by this. That is what the object provides us. It has

permanence that persists beyond the boundary of our own materiality or our presence. When we talk about agency in

an object this is where embodied agency exists.


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mean that the utility of the object is subordinate to the agency of the object in a post

scarcity economy. We align ourselves with our things in a fashion that is supposed to

reflect us. Our objects have a reflexive place in our worlds, they are there to reinforce,

continue and sustain a personal ideology or sense of self. But we have come to a place

where we are demanding more from our objects to tell us stories about ourselves.

Instead, we create objects of fantasy, we demand their function to be allegorical and

mythological.

Guy Debord noticed this trend earlier than many when he wrote about the poetic and

emotional experience we have with objects in the world. Let us say that we have to

multiply poetic objects and subjects (unfortunately so rare at present that the most

trifling of them assumes an exaggerated emotional importance) and that we have to

organize games of these poetic subjects among these poetic objects. There is our entire

programme, which is essentially ephemeral. Our situations will be without a future: they

will be places where people are constantly coming and going (Debord 99).

Section 2.2Art, Craft and Hack

To draw attention to a changing language to morphing words, semiotic chimeras I

want to point out the similarities between art, craft, and hacking since they are all

different ways to describe making that have different political meanings. Art, craft, and

hack are nouns and verbs that (respectively) morph, shift and grow. Why would we have

created political divisions about making things in the first place? All describe the potency

of transformative actions that attest to the malleability of the world. Knowing that in

reality, all things, and all understanding is first built. An example of this kind of

transgression is the premise behind the movie The Matrix. In the movie, the protagonist,

Neo, realizes that the world is an elaborate, architected computer application and thateverything around him can be dismantled as a series of separate programs. When this

happens, he suddenly acquires the powers of a god. In this unveiling there is

understanding; a realization of the structure, the framework of the object, thesis, social

dynamic. Put really simply, if I know how to build a cell phone how to actually create


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the device I am learning how to build more than just a cell phone. I am learning to

understand the built environment. Nothing can expose the hypocrisy behind a thing

more than the breakdown and creation of the thing itself. Implicit in the semantics of art,

craft, and hacking is the process of learning through making or praxis. Knowing through

process, through making, through hacking is transgressive.

Wittgenstein argues that meaning emerges through use. Section Fortythree of

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations states: For a large class of cases though not

for all in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a

word is its use in the language (Wittgenstein 23). It all comes down to an exchange. Call

it an economy if you want, it is still founded on exchange. Having something to exchange,

having something to offer to one another. The exchange itself is the most important thing

not the kind of exchange but that there was an exchange and that we work towards

having something to exchange with one another. It is clear that Wittgenstein is not

offering the general theory that meaning is use as he is sometimes interpreted as doing.

The specificity is in the word emerges.

Section 2.2 Personal Artistic History

I rely on an aesthetic of bricolage, a term used in several disciplines, among them the

visual arts and literature, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a

diverse range of things that happen to be available. Borrowed from the French verb

bricoler the core meaning in French is to fiddle, tinker and, by extension, make

creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand regardless of their

original purpose. Mine is an aesthetic of the combination/ juxtaposition of materials,

practices and systems.

The word bricolage has more than just aesthetic connotations. In cultural studies

bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across

social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of

subcultures, a practice of repurposing and culture jamming. In culture jamming, objects


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that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and

given a new, often subversive meaning. Since my current research centers on structures

of participation in the production of knowledge and the distribution of information

outside of capitalism, and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of

emerging technologies I find the aesthetics and politics of bricolage fit well. Bricolage is

essentially crafting new cultures, new identities for objects. Within the adoption of a

bricolage aesthetic we find the elevation of craft. Elevating the notion of craft within and

around a postdigital culture is a challenge to both the process and context of craft itself.

Indeed, craft practitioners cannot presume that there is relevance for craft objects and

craft processes in a world where digital technologies and associated objects are

increasingly prominent in public and private lives.

Traditional objects tended to bear witness to our presence. Being static symbols of

our bodily organs, but technical objects hold a different kind of fascination in that

they evoke a virtual energy and are thus less receptacles of our presence than

vehicles of our dynamic self image (Baudrillard 117).

As Jerry Saltz stated in the New York Magazine articleJesus Saves, his review ofThe

Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, Sociology is the new black. I take

it by this he means, 'what do we (as artists) have left to rip apart in the world other than

ourselves, our culture?' Saltz outlines the premise of the show, All the artists here were

born after 1976' (and are therefore under 33, Christs age at his death). The millennial

generation. Being thirtyone I identify with the artists in the exhibit. He says, None of

these artists is trying to advance the teleological ball or invent new forms. Theyre

investigating the whole world, not just the art world. Their work is less about how we

affect time and people than about how time and people affect us (Saltz).

Saltz accurately describes my and other millennial artists outlook on their work when

he states, They simultaneously occupy conflicting positions, are more sincere than ironic

but ironic nevertheless, and see the world, not just art, as a living specimen. Better yet,

they do this by violating the idiotic academic proscriptions against visual pleasure. (The

theory folks disdain pleasure in art, all the while embracing it in their lives.) Their work

has what theorist Gayatri Spivak called radical vulnerability and is an attempt to

explore the substrata of knowledge and experience' (Saltz).


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Section 3.0Superflex, The Center for Tactical Magic and Participatory Culture

I look at my current work as tool building. Considered an invitation rather than

representation, the tools call for a participation and continuation. On the subject of tool

building as an artistic practice, the collective Superflexremarks,

The tools represent models that are being used by different persons or groups.

They are not 'alternatives' but are continuations and show real behavior patterns.

The tools are based on a specific interest in social and economic commitment. The

starting point for creating a tool is a belief in a heterogeneous, complex society. The

setup is developed in cooperation with diverse experts who, in turn, add their own

specific interests. It can then be taken over and put into operation by various users.

The tools invite people to do something: to become activeTaken in this sense,

artistic praxis means a concrete cultural intervention that mediates between

different interests or at least, makes them visible. In our tools we attempt to create

conditions for the production of new ways of thinking, acting, speaking and

imagining. (Superflex, greenmuseum.org )

Superflexs work embodies Participatory Cultures ethics and The Personal is Political

thesis put forward by the feminist movement of the 1970s. My work aligns itself with

Superflex, both are about pedagogical experiences in making tools, making culture and

participating with the media, the output being a new kind of object, a radically different

relationship.

Participatory culture is a neologism in reference of, but opposite to a Consumer culture

in other words a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as

consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most

often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media but I am

using the term to apply across all media experiences, including media objects. Blogs that

feature relevant news stories when mainstream media do not are one of many examples

of prosumer, or participatory culture. Wikipedia is another example of a collaborative

resource that exists solely on the work of dedicated volunteers. Increased access to the

internet has played an integral part in participatory cultures expansion, increasingly

enabling people to work collaboratively; to generate and disseminate news, ideas, and

creative work. Most important of these things is the opportunity for people who share


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interests to connect with each other. Across all media, participatory culture becomes the

platform for civic engagement and creative expression (Jenkins 2).

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on the subject of new

media, communications, and education. He outlines the basic tenants of participatory

culture in his whitepaper on Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media

Education for the 21st Century4

For the moment, lets define participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement

2. With strong support for creating and sharing ones creations with others

3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most

experienced is passed along to novices

4. Where members believe that their contributions matter

5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least

they care what other people think about what they have created).

The Center for Tactical Magic is a Bay Area collective founded in 2000. They engage in

research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical

Magic. 'A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and

the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the

purpose of actively addressing power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts

(Center for Tactical Magic). On their website they state that they are committed to

4 Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what theycontribute will be appropriately valued. In such a world, many will only dabble, some will dig deeper, and still otherswill master the skills that are most valued within the community. The community itself, however, provides strongincentives for creative expression and active participation. Historically, we have valued creative writing or art classes

because they help to identify and train future writers and artists, but also because the creative process is valuable onits own; every child deserves the chance to express him- or herself through words, sounds, and images, even if mostwill never write, perform, or draw professionally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth thinkabout themselves and alters the way they look at work created by others. Participatory culture shifts the focus ofliteracy from one of individual expression to community involvement. The new literacies almost all involve socialskills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy,research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom (Jenkins 4-5).


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achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through communitybased projects, daily

interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation.

Known for their quirky, funny and politically charged projects The Center for Tactical

Magic is actively creating social, political work that engages audiences in pedagogical

situations that evidence power dynamics in consumer culture. And their methodologies

and practices also fit the format of participatory culture.

The Tactical Ice Cream UnitFrosty Treats & Food for Thought!

Ice Cream Truck. Center for Tactical Magic 20082009

Referencing a number of activist strategies (Food-Not-Bombs, Copwatch, Indymedia,

infoshops, etc.) the Tactical Ice Cream Unitis the Voltronlike alter ego of the copss

mobile command center (Center for Tactical Magic). Incorporating a strategy of utopian

potlatch, the Tactical Ice Cream Unitwas envisioned primarily as a mobile distribution

center for free ice cream and information produced by local community groups. As

befitting an ice cream truck, this mobile mediadisruption unit appears to be a common

vending vehicle, though it hosts a slew of hightech surveillance devices, including a 12


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camera video surveillance system, GPS with satellite internet, and a media center

capable of disseminating live audio/video. From the Center of Tactical Magics website

we discover that The TICUs surveillance suite offers up grassroots access to mobile

communications technologies that are open and free to use. From the production of

independent community news or the monitoring of corporate dumping or police activity,

the TICUattempts to investigate the limits of neutral technologies (The Center for

Tactical Magic). The TICUis an example of a tool for participatory culture.

Section 3.1 Practical Everyday Magic

Practical Everyday Magic is an exhibit comprised of various attempts at agency in an age

of mediated social interaction; at the juxtaposition between old media and new; the era

of the prosumer. These objects are simplistic in nature but complicated in what they

catalyze. They exist to spark conversation about networked cultures of social media. To

question the variety of economies that the last 10 years discussions on social media, the

internet, and the last 20 years of critique of relational aesthetics have provided us with

resources and evidence for. They provoke dialogues that reference social currency,

friendship, exchange, usevalue and the role of the object in mainstream media.


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Call me at 9712274384. We can talk about it.

Handmade Quilt. Paige Saez 2009.

The Quilts

A conversation I overheard walking home one day became the first quilt I made after adecade of talking about making quilts. 'Spend money with me' was the phrase that

caught my ear as I walked past two homeless men sitting on the sidewalk, a pleading

statement in the midst of some argument. The quilt that was made was a funny colored

thing made of old sheets, it seemed the perfect embodiment of a sentiment and

materiality, a translation of the personal to the private. The second quilt I made had my

phonenumber pieced into it in satin. The addition of the phone number doubles the

layers of intimacy worked into the quilt. Stitching my phone number onto a quilt makes

the connection between the owner of the quilt and me public open for use, or misuse.

But it feels private because the phone feels like a part of me. Because I carry my phone

with me wherever I go, because its with me when I sleep, the number written on this

quilt feels like my very identity has been etched into history.


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There are four quilts total in this exhibit, all of them gesture to sentiment, to intimacy.

The skewed hems and the wrinkled fabrics are not deficits in the fabrication of the quilts,

they are entry points into the work. A network is being built. The quilts are the

outsourced memory of the experience of making; a VPN or Virtual Private Network to

use the language of networked communications.

Parade (The Yarn)

Parade was begun about four years ago, dismantling and repurposing prior personalized

objects. Twenty afghans were purchased and unwound over the course of two months

by various female friends and coworkers at the homeless shelter where I work.

Analogous to knitting circles, my friends and I would sit over coffee and unwind the

afghans one by one. Sorted by color and then recombined into one long rope, the

unwinding of the afghans became a part of my daily social life, much as they would have

been for the women who created and then gifted them to family and friends. When

unwound and compiled the yarn stretched over 17 feet and took four people to lift.

Parade pays homage to the hours upon hours of work that went into the making and

then unmaking of these blankets.


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Also, I Made You A Wearable Computer

Twenty Cotton Tshirts. Paige Saez 2009.

Also, I Made You a Wearable Computer, Twenty Folded T-shirts

The wearable computer tshirts again came from the struggle to discuss the concept of a

cyborg. I decided that the fastest way I could have the conversation I wanted to have

with the audience would be to create an experience that had nothing to do with a

wearable computer, but still, somehow did. The tshirts are humorous and

straightforward. Subverting the concept of 'wearable,' with the generic slogan Tshirt

the equivalent of a modern day uniform fit the level of irony and selfconsciousness I

was drawing attention to in the first place. I routinely give the shirts away to people I

meet. Hopefully they will end up sparking dialogue about our symbiotic (parasitic?)

relationship with technology and fashion.


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Prototype Necklaces for Friends and Lovers

Accelorometers, Bluetooth, Microprocessors, Tin foil and Luck. Paige Saez and Donald Delmar Davis

2009.

The Necklaces: Jewelry as Computers

Exploring the boundaries of identity and agency with our media objects I decided toprototype a wearable computer. I asked myself the question, 'if artists designed

wearable computers what would they look like?' I read volumes of papers on the subject

of fashioning technology, wearable computing and identity politics. I had a hard time

explaining my emotional attachment to my cell phone, to my laptop these magical

connectivity devices are clunky and void of personality. They were not poetically

constructed. In addition to this I saw my attachment to decoration, beauty and

adornment as a social activity a means of signification. In notes to myself I would write

about the relationship between adornment and consumption, 'I adorn to identify, I losemy identity in the adornment I sublimate my identity through adornment and

fashion I reach a point where the things I adorn myself with feeling, I feel more me

than me. I am lost without my identifying things. I fear the loss of my identity. I am

consumed by this, and I am the consumer of this.


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The prototype is a fantasy object exploring the intimate spaces created between lovers.

The necklaces respond to touch. The sense of touch and being touched is perceived and

received, no more than this. When a person touches one necklace it causes the other one

to vibrate gently. The lovers can communicate with each other in this fashion privately,

reassuring one another of their presence in public space. The necklaces are ornamental

teleology.

Section 3.2 We Kiss, and Shake Hands

With these projects I question social objects and interaction, wonder at their relevance,

but note the excitement and potential of networked culture. Objects are personally

meaningful for us in our daily lives, in an emotional context. As objects materially and

technologically change, the expression of identity that they contributefragments. What

we make of the world in our minds is through our senses. Of all the senses, touch is most

linked to emotion and feeling. Our sense of touch is constantly altered via the perception

of our own bodily state as we take in what is outside of that state. Tactile perception that

we experience gives us an extended sense of living and acting in space. Touch cues are

used through out our lives to show emotion in settings of childcare, courtship and to

establish rapport. For example, we hug to console one another, we kiss and shake hands

in greeting. The work is an anthem of activity, of small social networks of nucleic power.

Art as functional experience; not just commodity, or consumable experience.

Section 3.3 Conclusion; Art Means What it Affects

As artist and designers, as makers, we actively create and reflect on the understanding of

public and private space. As people we are all born empowered to create, and through

this creation we communicate, through this communication we become a community,

these communities act like networks. The Canadian poet Lisa Robertson wrote,

This word community is a common currency right now...communitys presence or

absence, failure, responsibility, supportiveness, etceveryone is hovering around


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this wordHow much of this notion of community is an abstraction of the real

texture of friendship, with all its complicated drives and expressionserotic,

conversational, culinary, all the bodily cultures concentrated in a twisty relation

between finite, failing persons (Robertson).

The challenge in making (and exhibiting) work around social interactions within media

cultures is the need to remember that it is a systempart network, part performance,

part object. This visual meaning and language of this work is not experienced only in the

display of the object, in exhibition. Rather, the work rhizomatically grows; changes in

meaning emerging through use. Through involvement and participation. The work

materializes as a daily practice; a living thing. I apply this practice as a kind of code

switching, hacking at the visual codes around me to navigate and negotiate meaning in

daily life. Breaking down the structure of the network Robertson states plainly thatcommunity is an abstraction of friendship that, in itself, is a building up of culture.

Robertson states,

When I try to think of what a friend is, I imagine these activities we pleasurably

share with someone we love...all these exchanges and interweavings that slowlytransform to become an idea and then a culture. Or a culture first, a culture of

friends, and then an idea. Or both simultaneouslymaybe friendship is more

dangerous to think about and talk about because of its corporal erotics, mostly not

institutionalized, not abstracted into an overarching concept and structure of

collective protocols. But I dont want to call this community. I want to preserve the

dark body of friendship.

Work about networks and social connectivity is never complete or finite; the life of an

object can extends past its use value for me only to become useful again for someone

else, and conversations between friends can affect us for years after they happen.

Networks are only as strong or as valuable as their ability to morph and evolve. This is

cybernetic evolution. Jenkins describes the cybernetic ecology of technologic/media

tools with the people that use them,

'Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to takean ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these

different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up

around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of

communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic

institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Jenkins 6).


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Jenkins describes how some tasks can be performed with a range of different

technologies, and how these same technologies can work towards different ends

entirely. Yet the associated activities only become important if the culture they exist

within supports them and if they fulfill a need already present. Basically, it matters what

tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with

those tools. To this end, Jenkins focuses his statements about media systems around

participation cultures instead of interactive technologies. Interactivity he feels is 'a

property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture.'

Handpainted Colorbars (TV Test Pattern Sequence)

Acrylic paint on a wall. Paige Saez and Rebecca Steele 2009.

Participatory culture emergedas the culture absorbed and responded to the explosion of

new media technologies this is what makes it possible for average consumers to

become creators (and hence participants) in archiving, annotating, appropriating, and

recirculating media content in powerful ways. 'A focus on expanding access to new

technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural

knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends' (Jenkins 6).


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Jenkins statements about participatory culture correlate directly to Saltzs reflections on

arts progressive gestures show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the

sublime; life, not art, has become so real that its almost unreal. Art is being reanimated

by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is

breaking free (Saltz). The evolution of the object, of agency (participation) with our

objects, is personal and transformative; it is ours to transform. There is something

powerful about the possessing the faculty to create, that it is political.

Media distribution platforms have radically shifted and a paradoxical situation has

emerged; on the one hand a small group of companies own the worlds media resources,

but on the other hand, the media forms they sell have put the development and

distribution of these resources into the hands of consumers.

We have shown that all media is social media, from craft, to design, to art, to hacking; all

things made are forms of social media. These are all technologies. Our participation and

consumption of media is changing. We are physically/ virtually sculpting personal

visions of mediation. Art is social media that emerged through use.

The exhibit consists of objects gesturing toward understanding the complexity of

contemporary social relationships, or not. There is no way to define the medium, or the

message as separate from one another anymore. We are located at an unusual place in

history; watching the slow death of traditional media, and over the last ten years,

experiencing the rise of participatory culture. My practice is based on the belief that we

are social animals, and that our relationship to objects is communicative, reciprocal, and

generative.


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Saltz, Jerry.Jesus Saves, God blessthe New Museums

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Everyday Practical Magic

Documents

Transcript of Everyday Practical Magic