https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/gateway/plugin/WebFeedGatewayPlugin/atomMedia-N2024-02-03T17:58:00-06:00Johanna Gossejohannagosse@gmail.comOpen Journal Systems<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Founded in 2005, </span><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus</span></em><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN 1942-017X) dedicated to scholarly research and critical dialogue on new media art. We accept proposals for themed issues encompassing scholarly articles, critical essays, artists' projects, and reviews.</span></p>https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1455Introduction: Trans New Media Art as Embodied Practice2024-02-09T16:41:55-06:00Chelsea ThomptoAce Lehner
<p>Guest edited by Ace Lehner (University of Vermont) and Chelsea Thompto (Virginia Tech) this special issue of <em>Media-N</em> titled <em>Trans New Media as Embodied Practice</em> asks: How do trans artists engage generatively with new media? In what ways does lived trans experience inform artistic practices? How do trans new media practices diverge and intersect with queer practices? The articles, artist projects, interview, and review in this issue engage with the political and embodied experience of making and engaging with new media as a trans person.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Chelsea Thompto, Ace Lehnerhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1454Just Happy Flesh?2024-02-09T16:41:55-06:00Kemi Adeyemi
<p>A review of McKenzie Wark’s 2023 book, <em>Raving</em>.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Kemi Adeyemihttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1202Tactics of Virtual Memory and Trans Inscrutability in the Works of Wu Tsang2024-02-09T16:41:56-06:00Stephanie Kang
<p>In her art and research, the artist Wu Tsang poses the question: “Whose voices are heard, whose are silenced?” By incorporating her own perspective as a trans person into her works, Tsang utilizes virtual media to reveal alternative interpretations of the past, and in turn, create new trajectories for the future. Her film <em>Duilian </em>specifically rewrites the story of Qiu Jin—a renowned Chinese feminist poet and revolutionary hero of the Qing dynasty—as a trans narrative. Set in a world that blurs global, temporal, and linguistic boundaries, the film merges historical research with imaginative thinking to uncover the trans stories that have been lost or hidden through time. Through an in-depth analysis of Duilian, this article will situate the film within Tsang’s larger oeuvre to demonstrate how the artist embodies Homay King’s concept of “virtual memory” and Vivian L. Huang’s notion of “inscrutability” to traverse the past, present, and future, continually implementing trans tactics as a means of re-historicization, safety, and survival.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Stephanie Kanghttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1207Glitch as a Trans Representational Mode in Video Games2024-02-09T16:41:56-06:00Arianna (Ari) Gass
<p>Following recent work by transgender studies scholars that has questioned the relationship between queer theory and trans studies, this essay considers how glitch video games, which have previously been considered to be part of the “queer games movement,” use the glitch as a way of representing transgender life. I survey three glitch games, <em>Problem Attic</em> (2013, Liz Ryerson), <em>Strawberry Cubes</em> (2015, Loren Schmidt), and <em>Anatomy </em>(2016, Kitty Horrorshow)—each of which uses the glitch as an expressive visual aesthetic, remediating the analog artifacts of signal noise or error as a sonic and visual quality, as well as a game design principle. These games place an emphasis on the body as that which glitches, exploring the bad feelings of trans embodiment, including dissociation and dysphoria, as well as demonstrating how the glitched body can be both desired and transformative. In the final section, this essay considers how transgender artists and the ways their work foregrounds glitch as an operation of the body are integral not only to glitch art history, but also to video game development more widely, exploring the influence of glitch aesthetics and game design in <em>Pony Island</em> (2016), a glitch video game by cisgender designer, Daniel Mullins.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Arianna (Ari) Gasshttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1212Trans/Locatability: Performing Public Appearance in Locative Media2024-02-09T16:41:56-06:00Wesleigh Gates
<p>The promises and perils of visibility dominate many contemporary conversations about transgender life; this essay considers the ways in which locatability works alongside visibility to regulate the sphere of public appearance, informing who can safely appear and in what spaces they can or cannot do so. The locative performance <em>Appear to Me</em> (2020), written by gender-expansive artist eppchez yo-sí yes for the Philadelphia company Swim Pony, shows how such performance can challenge dominant constructions of location that involve the violent displacement of marginalized populations, as well as locative technologies—such as the Global Positioning System—that help create and sustain these constructions. Through a smartphone app that uses GPS to trigger audio cues, <em>Appear to Me</em> guides listeners along the Delaware River Trail in South Philadelphia, where they encounter the voices of people displaced from the waterfront, including street queens, houseless queers, and the land’s Indigenous Lenape inhabitants. I discuss how the performance both engages the politics of appearance on the textual level and performs new possibilities for appearance through its appropriation of GPS technology. In doing so, it enacts a trans epistemology of location I name trans/locatability: a multiply-emplaced, gender-expansive position of safety and solidarity that asserts the right of all bodies to appear in public without harm.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Wesleigh Gateshttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1206Nightmares and Dreams on Progesterone: Trans* Embodiment and Intermedia2024-02-09T16:41:56-06:00Lorelei d'Andriole
<p>This essay theorizes the connection between trans* embodiment and intermedia, using historical intermedia practice and score-based creative practices by artists such as Yoko Ono, CA Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, and Allan Kaprow, as precedent. This paper describes foundational thought to my work as a trans* intermedia artist and serves as an introduction to <em>Nightmare and Dreams on Progesterone: Action Art Scores for Trans Becoming</em>; a text work of 150 poetic action art scores designed for, and birthed from, trans* becoming. Each score is generated from dream journal entries translated into instructions that complicate the art/life divide. As I began taking progesterone as part of my hormone replacement therapy, I started experiencing vivid dreaming as a side effect. As my body changed, so did my dreams. These dreams, from my own trans* subconscious and altered by transsexual action, often directly engage with my identity or arts practice as subject matter. When translated, the scores are written poetically and have a diverse range of abstraction, for example:</p> <p><em>Score #77: Fellowship</em></p> <p>Three queer people talk about visibility <br>The most beautiful woman in costume makeup <br>Takes several ladders to climb towards</p> <p> </p> <p><em>Score #58: Insane Clown Posse</em></p> <p>Come out to your family</p> <p> </p> <p><em>Score #69: Huge</em></p> <p>A trans woman <br>Surrounded by other trans women <br>All bathing</p> <p>I believe avant-garde art practices can be liberatory for trans* bodies and that this methodology and these performances have the potential to be instructional for other trans* people for coming into their identity. This introduction provides an intimate portrait of myself as an artist, including biographical information on my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) journey and how it has affected my creative practice.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Lorelei d'Andriolehttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1214gender.network2024-02-09T16:41:55-06:00Sky Syzygy
<p><em>Gender.network</em> is an artist project, a growing digital archive of flyers, photos, artwork, cartoons, letters, poems, ephemera, and other visual culture from the 1960s-90s, created by trans*, two-spirit, nonbinary, and trans-adjacent activists, organizers, and artists. The curation of this archive has been guided by hundreds of conversations and interviews with trans and queer elders, community members, archivists, and scholars. This essay reflects on the tension between the competing needs of the archive of “things” that this project is identifying and organizing, and the living communities that this project seeks to serve. As an attempt to bridge these two poles, this essay listens to some of the voices and strategies of the history of trans* visual and print culture.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Sky Syzygyhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1213// May your rage inform your actions: Embodying the monster and trans nonbinary praxis in creative coding2024-02-09T16:41:55-06:00alejandro t. aciertoKT Duffy
<p>This project is presented as a critical call and response developed from texts initially written and assembled by KT Duffy, seen here as italicized portions of this project. In what follows, we consider Susan Stryker’s formation of the monster as the impulse for a set of theorizations around the assemblage of non-binary trans processes and methods. Advocating the release of the monstrous to actualize collective liberation, we situate the glitch as an essential animating element, utilizing this “visual monstrosity of error and interruption” in solidarity with Abolition Feminism to scope out the ways technology is counter revolutionary. Reflecting on the objective portrayal of technology, we examine how its destruction does not cease for communities made marginalized, even as the field is diversified. Mining the spaces between lines of code, we illustrate that coding is no longer an esoteric field and that coding and coding education can no longer exist in a vacuum. Instead, it must be grounded in examining how histories of capitalism and racialized hierarchies continue to cause harm. Here, we map out a praxis of trans-coding that activates the monster and its inherited glitches as a tool of disruption spawned in the spaces between binaries. Finally, we situate trans-coding in solidarity with Abolition feminism, where, from this in-between space, it propels the explosion of normative mediations in service of not only speculation but as an actualization of an Abolition Feminism imaginary.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 alejandro t. acierto, KT Duffyhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1205Here Comes the Hurricane2024-02-09T16:41:56-06:00Jose Luis Benavides
<p>This two-section article and interview with Jesús Hilario-Reyes, a queer, non-binary, Afro-Caribbean artist, explores their artwork to connect trans new media histories to contemporary trans Chicanx scholarship via recent notions on “glitch” and “stitch.” The introduction connects Hilario-Reyes’s uprootedness to trans thoughts on “the cut” and trans Chicanx scholar Francisco Galarte’s concept of “Brown transfiguration.” In Section One, Hilario-Reyes discusses their new media practices in relation to land, water, displacement, and diasporic disembodiment. The interview in Section One reveals their experiences with migration, as they reflect on their 3D animated work about Puerto Rico's post-Hurricane Maria flooding, and their role as a DJ creating queer Black space. Section Two delves deeper into their 3D art and music as a healing response to displacement, mourning, and “destierro” (being ripped from one's homeland). Hilario-Reyes’s creativity, expressed through 3D animations, performance, and sound, becomes an embodied and world-building practice infused with resistance and queer Black sovereignty. Their perspectives on "glitch, love, and storms" offer adjacent strategies to resistance optics, addressing the visibility/invisibility dynamics inherent in transphobia and white supremacy. Their understanding of climate change's white supremacist root cause affecting Puerto Rico leads to a transformation of the disembodying effects of systemic violence through trans and Black-informed gestures. Through Hilario-Reyes’s 3D animations and video games, the article connects their work to larger trans scholarship, new media, and trans video game histories. Embodying non-binary and Afro-Caribbean thought, Hilario-Reyes re-engages the body, love, humanness, and their multiple possible selves, turning systemic violence's cataclysmic failures into trans and Afro-Caribbean liberation.</p>
2024-02-09T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2024 Jose Luis Benavideshttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1177Hoverboards in the Metaverse: A Conversation with Asad J. Malik2023-02-06T13:06:09-06:00Brian Michael MurphyAsad J. Malik
<p>This interview, which took place in September 2021, explores the history of projects carried out by Jadu and the possibilities of Web3, NFTs, and the futures of data in the metaverse.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Brian Michael Murphy, Asad J. Malikhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1176Introduction: The Afterlives of Data2023-02-06T22:28:47-06:00Brian Michael MurphyKris Paulsen
<p><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Guest edited by scholars Brian Michael Murphy (Bennington College) and Kris Paulsen (The Ohio State University), this special issue entitled <em>Afterlives of Data</em> features articles, interview, artist projects, and reviews that address the ways the material conditions of </span>data and art are shifting, and how thinkers, artists, and scholars can offer crucial scaffolding for understanding how we arrived here. The issue presents prehistories of data models we take for granted and provides historical contexts that clarify what is new and what is not, helping us to see where we now might be headed. NFTs, DNA data, the sensuous traces of e-waste, facial recognition software trained on marginalized subjects, and the institutionalized processes of dispossessing human subjects from their colonial contexts all present ways in which data comes to have an afterlife that haunts our present and potential futures.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Brian Michael Murphy, Kris Paulsenhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1174The Medium is the Data Set: Art and AI2023-02-06T18:32:09-06:00Jaleh Mansoor
<p>A review of the exhibition, <em>The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence</em>, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Jaleh Mansoorhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/1113Can Art Save Crypto? Domenico Quaranta’s Surfing with Satoshi: Art, Blockchain and NFTs2023-02-06T18:29:19-06:00Kaitlin Forcier
<p>Review of Domenico Quaranta, <em>Surfing with Satoshi: Art, Blockchain and NFTs</em>. Translated by Anna Carruthers (Ljubljana: Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, 2022).</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Kaitlin Forcierhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/941Unburning: Technics of Opacity, Oversight, and the Police Surveillance State2023-02-06T11:23:03-06:00Abram Stern
<p>The subject of this paper is a collection of 18½ hours of FBI aerial surveillance video documenting the Baltimore Uprising of 2015. Working from the premise that the video footage reproduces a criminalizing and racialized gaze, my analysis centers on what remains in the media if the video is absent (or abstracted): video metadata embedded within the media’s “.mp4” container during its redaction, but also “burned” onto the video image by the infrared sensor that captured it.</p> <p>Even as it works to decode what these documents “speak” about the anti-Black apparatus that produced them, this paper argues beyond a forensic reading, through the lens of expertise: metadata is more than a tool for establishing evidentiary authenticity; it is also a site for creative intervention and contestation.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Abram Sternhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/943Smellscaping Guiyu2023-02-06T12:48:29-06:00Tinghao Zhou
<p>Once the largest e-waste recycling and processing town in the world, Guiyu, China, was characterized by a pungent, penetrating smell of burning chemicals and plastics, commonly referred to as <em>Guiyu Wei </em>by both locals and officials. Shrouded in the environmental terror of unidentified toxins and chemicals, breathing had become a precarious bodily (re)action that constantly put people’s lives at risk. Taking Guiyu as its center case, this essay documents two “smell walks” in Guiyu conducted by the local community and me, respectively. It presents a prolonged material afterlife of data that is intimately intertwined with the life and livelihood of the local workforce and community and tracks the production of desensitized subjects. How do we represent a particular kind of smell or a specific form of olfactory experience? How can we communicate this message with a larger public that has little knowledge of what life is like within a chemically polluted environment? This project seeks to think about these questions in artistic terms, conceiving research-creation as an integral methodology. Through the Guiyu-inspired art series, “Synesthesia (unfinished),” I explore various possibilities of olfactory representation and the emergent relationships among smell, the environment, and our sensorium. As the centerpiece of this project, I envision “Smellscaping Guiyu” as an immersive installation that takes visitors beyond their intimate sensory knowledge and immerses them in the unfamiliar olfactory milieu fabricated by chemicals and elements from Guiyu, one of the “shadow places” at the corner of the world.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Tinghao Zhouhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/953Ghosts in the Machine2023-02-05T18:50:25-06:00Nina Toft Djanegara
<p style="font-weight: 400;">The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST’s) Facial Recognition Vendor Test is considered the gold standard for assessing the performance of facial recognition models. Since the test series began in 1994, it has been regarded as an objective benchmark for corporations and academic research groups to compare their models against one another. To evaluate the accuracy of facial recognition models, NIST draws upon a database of millions of photos of US visa applicants and border crossers. Without their knowledge or consent, immigrants’ photos have become raw material for the refinement of facial recognition software. This essay discusses the afterlife of these images, photos of immigrants and non-citizens that have been repurposed for a function that goes far beyond their original intent.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Nina Toft Djanegarahttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/947The "Situation" in Micronesia: The Rise of Behavioral Dispossession2023-02-10T20:04:52-06:00Brett Zehner
<p style="font-weight: 400;">In one of the largest ethnographies ever produced, American anthropologists subjected nearly the entire population of Micronesia to psychological testing. This battery of tests created databases to universalize patterns of economic behavior by collecting “aberrations” in rational thought. Perhaps ironically, the methods developed through Micronesian data experiments provided the formal tools to model corporate decision-making. In the process, economists created a new space of racialized capitalist expansion by producing raw behavioral data. I theorize these early forms of data dispossession as a violent procedure that creates a rift between old modes of subjective identity and new modes of production. My analysis of the weaponization of behavioral modeling—both bypassing the individual as a locus of economic value and dividing the common—sheds new light on the development of so-called data mining on contemporary online platforms.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Brett Zehnerhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/946The [Dissipative] Joy of Accounting: Desiring, Imagining, and Talking about NFTs While the Planet Burns2023-02-06T13:25:39-06:00Ricky D. Crano
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Promoters of art-oriented non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and online NFT auction houses like Foundation, OpenSea, and SuperRare claim to be “revolutionizing” and “democratizing” the worlds of art and art collecting by deploying blockchain technology to track sales and purchases and thereby eliminating the threats of transactional opacity and fraud that have long plagued art markets. This article complicates such claims by arguing that with NFTs, the usual clamoring for authenticity in art becomes so abstract that only code remains, as the aesthetic object becomes effectively indistinct from the account of its provenance and transaction history. An NFT, like a financial derivative, has no necessary or representational relationship with any actual underlying object. The artwork associated with the token is, rather, prised apart from its existence as property and finds its use not in being seen or felt, but in the truth of its copyability. Looking beyond the NFTs themselves, this article interrogates the discourses promulgating this trend. Comment threads in Reddit and Discord groups, for example, do much to channel the libidinal energy elicited by an artwork, while the digital token itself generates an acquisitive enthusiasm wholly apart from the sensation of seeing or hearing the associated work. Despite fronting radical social change, NFTs ultimately reinforce traditional forms of property and ownership, exhibit reactionary aesthetic and cultural values, and anticipate increasingly authoritarian modes of social control. Taking a wider view, I consider ours an age of <em>post-information</em>, wherein, contrary to Bateson’s classic definition of information in terms of a doubled difference, we find data-based artifacts like NFTs (following cryptocurrency) to be increasingly productive of widespread social and political <em>in</em>difference, a perpetuation of sameness, and an augmentation of the narcissistic ego. In this case: data as the afterlife of art.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Ricky D. Cranohttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/938Extending Beyond the Ultimate Display in Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics2023-02-06T22:34:45-06:00April Riddle
<p>This essay reviews the book <em>Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics</em> by Jacob Gaboury (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021). In this book, Gaboury explores the materiality of computer graphics by deconstructing rendered images and tracing the history of their development and impact on contemporary computing.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 April Riddlehttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/936Archiving for Extinction2023-02-07T13:50:35-06:00Mél HoganSarah T. Roberts
<p style="font-weight: 400;">Anjali Arondekar, Wendy H. K. Chun, Verne Harris, N. Katherine Hayles, Shannon Mattern, Saidiya Hartman, and Kate Eichhorn, among other scholars of the archives, have questioned the presumption of the archive as complete, whole, legitimate, authoritative, and ultimately in any way “total,” by looking beyond the contents that the physical repository hosts and guards, as well as how, what, and who goes under-, mis- and altogether unrepresented. In their tradition, we find that the contemporary moment provides exemplars of where an archival (re)making is being uncritically taken up, increasingly envisioned, and subsequently reliant upon present-day technological capacities and the technological imaginaries of the future near and far. Under the guise of scientifically vetted global betterment, and drawing on a long legacy of publicly funded innovation that is then recaptured and taken up by private industry, Big Tech takes profit and credit for these particular future-oriented deployments, but takes on little to none of the social, political, and environmental responsibility. In this article we explore specifically what users can do when their abstracted data production or consumption is based not only on deeply flawed science and technology that is pervasive, powerful, and compelling, but also invariably presented as the only solution to climate catastrophe and the end of human existence. The three archival projects explored in this article—ordered by scale—are Alphabet’s “The Selfish Ledger,” Big Tech’s “Genomics in the Cloud,” and Arch Mission’s launch of a “Solar, Earth, Lunar, and Mars Library.” By exploring the sociotechnological imaginaries of Big Tech, we reposition the archive in terms of its legitimation and framing of humanity’s past, present, and future. We demonstrate that the ledger is a political frame, cloud-based genomics is a biological and terrestrial fix, and the space library is a speculative implementation of the total—and final—archive for extinction.</p>
2023-02-03T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2023 Mél Hogan, Sarah T. Robertshttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/930Be the Glitch2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Hank Gerba
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>This essay reviews Legacy Russell’s <em>Glitch Feminism</em> (Brooklyn: Verso, 2020).</p> </div> </div> </div>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Hank Gerbahttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/928Introduction to "No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race"2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Megan Driscoll
<p>Guest editor Megan Driscoll's introduction to the special issue, "No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race."</p>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Megan Driscollhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/892A Note to Introduce Joanna Walsh’s 9 1/2 EXEMPLARY THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS2022-10-31T17:36:44-05:00Sarah Cook
<p>Sarah Cook introduces Joanna Walsh's experimental text, <em><span style="font-size: 0.875rem;">9 1/2 EXEMPLARY THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS</span></em><span style="font-size: 0.875rem;">.</span></p>
2021-10-26T00:00:00-05:00Copyright (c) 2021 Sarah Cookhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/891A Note to Introduce Steve Lambert’s Art and Fear of Propaganda2022-10-31T17:36:44-05:00Sarah Cook
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>Sarah Cook introduces Steve Lambert’s experimental text, <em>Art and Fear of Propaganda</em>.</p> </div> </div> </div>
2021-10-26T00:00:00-05:00Copyright (c) 2021 Sarah Cookhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/882Watching Me, Watching You: Reflections Upon Surveillance, Gare Loch Duality and the #UndesiredLine2022-10-31T17:36:44-05:00B.D. Owens
<div> <p class="Default"><span lang="EN-US">From my local observations, the everyday military </span><span lang="FR">surveillance</span><span lang="EN-US">, an ever-present panopticon, perpetuates both conscious and unconscious stress in the lives of those who endure it</span>. <span lang="EN-US">In this paper I will reflect upon my experiences of a 224 mile pilgrimage that I undertook in 2018, over a period of 50 days. It was a daily </span><span lang="EN-US">walk</span><span lang="EN-US"> from the front door of my house to the front door of the Faslane Nuclear Submarine Base, on the Gare Loch in Scotland</span>. <span lang="EN-US">A walking performance, through which I drew an Undesired Line on the grass verge in parallel to an existing "undesired line" - the perimeter fence of the Base. </span></p> </div> <div> <p class="Default"><span lang="EN-US">Throughout the time the performance was in progress, I made an online text artwork using the Twitter hashtag </span><em>#</em><em><span lang="EN-US">UndesiredL</span></em><em>ine</em>. <span lang="EN-US">One year later, I reactivated the </span><em>#</em><em><span lang="EN-US">UndesiredL</span></em><em>ine</em> <span lang="EN-US">text-work in order to </span>analyse<span lang="EN-US"> subsequent observations and to establish a platform (and outlet) to examine the complex reality of Gare Loch ‘duality’. I will look at the potential </span>legacy <span lang="EN-US">for</span> <em><span lang="EN-US">The Undesired Line, </span></em><span lang="EN-US">and how I can use the</span><span lang="FR"> documentation</span><span lang="EN-US">: video, photos, daily journal writings, field recordings, t</span><span lang="NL">weets</span><span lang="EN-US"> and maps.</span></p> </div> <div> <p class="Default"><span lang="EN-US">In addition to appraising my own work, I will discuss surveillance focused artworks by David Rokeby, Janet Cardiff and The Surveillance Camera Players. I will also consider some of the ethical challenges of interactive art, as well as the implications and limitations of "</span><span lang="EN-US">piggy-backing" </span>an <span lang="EN-US">online artwork onto existing online platforms such as Twitter and Google Maps.</span></p> </div>
2021-10-26T00:00:00-05:00Copyright (c) 2021 B.D. Owenshttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/877High-Tech Orientalism and Science Fiction Futures in Astria Suparak’s "Virtually Asian" (2021)2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Kaitlin Forcier
<div class="page" title="Page 1"> <div class="section"> <div class="section"> <div class="layoutArea"> <div class="column"> <p>Multimedia artist Astria Suparak’s short video essay, <em>Virtually Asian</em> (2021) presents an astute critique of the racism embedded in pop-culture imaginings of the future. Weaving together footage culled from forty years of science fiction blockbusters, the supercut reveals not only how Asian actors have been used as an orientalist backdrop for white characters in these films, but that these Asian bodies are often dematerialized, represented as projections, holograms, and digital images. The piece comprises a trenchant follow-up to scholar Wendy Chun’s observations about “High-tech Orientalism,” a trope which represents a technologically-advanced future as an exotic Asian landscape. Commissioned by the Berkeley Art Center as part of an online exhibition launched while the gallery was closed by the pandemic, <em>Virtually Asian</em> is part of Suparak's ongoing project, “Asian futures, without Asians.” Despite its sharp critique, <em>Virtually Asian</em> ultimately strikes a hopeful tone. These are after all collective visions of the future: we have the capacity to imagine futures that are less racist, less sexist, more accurate reflections of the world we hope to <span style="font-size: 0.875rem;">inhabit.</span></p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Kaitlin Forcierhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/876Is My DNA Mine?2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Yuxiang Dong
<p>A review of the online exhibition <em>Forking PiraGene</em>, co-presented by Rhizome and C-Lab Taiwan.</p>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Yuxiang Donghttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/870A Review of "Media Primitivism"2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Alexandra Thomas
<p>This is a review of Delinda Collier’s 2020 book, <em>Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa, </em>that examines its importance to the fields of art history and media studies. Collier raises fundamental concerns about racist allegories that are often left unquestioned in foundational media theory texts. In so doing, she engages the role of mediation in African art history without relying on primitivizing rhetoric.</p>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Alexandra Thomashttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/865Review of Ho Tzu Nyen, "The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia," 2017–ongoing 2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Ying Sze Pek
<p>A review of Ho Tzu Nyen’s ongoing online project <em>The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia.</em></p>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Ying Sze Pekhttps://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/859Surrogate Humanity: Resistant Art Practices under Technoliberalism2022-10-31T17:41:20-05:00Stephanie Kang
<p>This essay reviews the book <em>Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures</em>, co-written by Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora. In this critical text, Atanasoski and Vora consider the ways in which liberal structures of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and capitalist exploitation have been ingrained into robotic technologies. By revealing the interwoven relationship between technological development and racial dispossession, <em>Surrogate Humanity</em> searches for alternative models of human-machine interactions that can destabilize social inequalities and their reproductions.</p>
2022-02-01T00:00:00-06:00Copyright (c) 2022 Stephanie Kang