What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren
Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.
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What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren
Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.
Reading Laura Marks (The Secret Ingredient – 13/05/15)
The Secret Ingredient
57 minutes 20 seconds
10 years ago
Reading Laura Marks (The Secret Ingredient – 13/05/15)
In the age of the selfie, where we make private moments public through an image or video, what does it mean to think through video’s own body in relation to the bodies that it presents? Using Laura U. Marks’s text Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, we talk about the material nature of analog vs. digital video and consider the specific sort of physical mediation offered by each. Might analog formats contain a more direct relationship between content and form? Has digital video given up its body in the sequence of 1s and 0s? Think about how early video artists interfered with tape in order to accentuate its body, digital rot and disappearance, the definition of affect, FHITP, ASMR videos, and protecting ourselves from the digital body by tuning off our screens an hour before bedtime.
Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (May 14, 2015)
The Secret Ingredient
What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren
Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.