Artist Studios – Page 19 – VITAL CAPACITIES

Over the last two years, I’ve been developing a theoretical and critical framework titled ‘Subaltern Futurism’. Subaltern Futurism is envisioned as a speculative resource framework for artistic research, practice and the technological education of marginalised. Drawing from anti-caste literature, critical race theory, bahujan solidarity practices among other guiding experiences, it asks if artistic practice can become pedagogical tools to communities that are excluded from regular access to critical discourse around contemporary art & technology. The framework views technology through a sociological lens, as a fundamental right and shared resource. It expands upon Gramsci’s post-colonial notion of the Subaltern as ‘colonial populations who are excluded from the hierarchy of power’ to include the current state of digital colonisation, the shared sites for the digital commons and sections of technology users rendered ‘subaltern’ due to the capitalist pursuit of efficiency. Subaltern Futurism speculates that developing empathic relationships with technology through a range of critical & pragmatic actions can assist in the imagination of radical futures that are diverse, inclusive and conducted from multiple geographies especially arising from the global south and from contexts outside of euro-centric biases of inquiry. By considering a very wide scope at the outset, it is envisioned as a multi-year generative project occurring as various modular forms and widely disseminated within the ethos of open access.

05 Creating Utopia with Church bell, plaza, latitude, forest and wolf from Daniela Stubbs-Leví

https://danielastubbslevi.com/

This is a series interview with my immigrant friends. Each of each contains different content but in the meantime similar in a way. The total run time of each video is around an hour. Feel free to treat it as a podcast or background music and discover the surprise moment in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVcn5FFTP5Q

Daniela Stubbs-Levi is a Peruvian artist, poet, and musician based in New York City. She received her BA in Graphic Arts from Toulouse Lautrec in Lima Peru, and later a BFA in Visual Arts from the University Paris VIII in France. Stubbs-Leví was born in Berlin, raised in Lima, studied in Paris, and currently lives in New York. Her sense of displacement informs her work and leads her to embrace and delve into the relativism implied in the act of remembering: memory is not a fixed device but more likely an ever-changing frame with which we measure reality. She is interested in dissecting music as sound — a pivot balancing between language and meaning— and notations for their use in different contexts that explore the nature of time and its connection to emotion. She uses mediums such as video, photography, sound, drawing, and writing as individual voices that coexist giving each one space for dialogue.

During the interview, she mentioned something that’s haunted my mind. She mentioned Anne Carson’s lecture about stillness which talks about immigrants as a quote because we are the quote without context. Anne Carson references the Antigone by Sophocles, how Antigone was put in the dark cave(Tomb) and became a metic that changes her status to be an immigrant, someone in between. Antigone was pulled out of the status neither alive nor dead, she was foreign to both of them. Giorgio Agamben also said, “to cite is to pull it out of the customary meaning but refused to let it settle to the new meaning”.

I like how Daniela introduced what she did was finding or be something in between. I had a friend like that too, who’s no long in U.S. but that had me thought about the feeling of hesitation and how powerful it could be.

In my research I was looking into lies, something not real nor fake, because all the lie you told was already in the memory and they might become real during the time it was told. Talk with Daniela remind me of different aspect of my lies, but to put them back into the context of my creation will erase the unsubstituted status. In that sense, I am the King Creon and I let my project or my immigrant status dry as Antigone at the cave. I quote it all the time because I couldn’t think it through…

Many thanks.

Research

Arcadia

Award-winning director Paul Wright (For Those in Peril) explores the complex connection to the British countryside with an archival remix drawn from more than 100 years of Britain on film. With a new score by Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp), Arcadia embarks on a visceral sensory journey through the seasons, exploring the beauty, brutality, magic and madness of our changing relationship with both the land and each other. This fresh new work crafted from the past is a folk horror wrapped in an archive film.

Research

winter carnival costumes

Photos by Ramin Mazur – winter carnival in Moldova.

Archival Polish winter carnival.

Research

little clip from one of the archival films I watched

04 Installation ideas before the story

The way I create videos is straightforward. I do the video, create the story, shooting, editing then done. I deal with the installation later if there’s any. But this time I am doing this differently, I tried to picture what the installation will be.

A Installation shot of Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager at the second floor. It's dark circular space with rotating light in the middle. — Installation shot of Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager

Back in January 2020, I was working on “Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager” at Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. The space I was exhibited was very unique, a circular space with two floors. The first floor was just a black box space but the second floor has a big hole to the first floor in the middle of the space and the wall has an altar-ish look, not to mention the floor was all wooden floor.

A picture of installation shot of Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager to demonstrate what Altar-ish wall means. — Installation shot of Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager (Altar-ish wall space *I added the black curtain)

Rough sketch of how I think video's relation with time. Two drawing here, on the top left is a movie theater with indicated how time is moving. Bottom right is video work on the wall and audience walk horizontally, time move the same way. — My notes of thinking relations of video, time and space.

I was thinking about the relation between the viewer and space, when the viewer walks in it, they traveled to see each altar and what’s inside. My original idea was to install objects that related to the video on the first floor and serving as a chronological exhibition. Thus when the audience walks they will become the time.

It's a bad draft of the installation of Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager. It's just text and line to imply what audience will serve as time when they walk in it and the objects on the wall will served as events. — Notes for the installation of Hypothesis Atlas and Voyager. Audiences as time and walk through each events.

I kept this idea in mind and picked it up recently. My idea for this project was to shoot ten scenes, each scene represents a year, then it will be my past ten years. Those scenes will all be similar with two actors walking and chatting from right to left, talking about different things while they are walking. Each scene will sit around two minutes that make the total length to be 20 mins. The audience will walk with the actors from the first screen to the last scene, when the actor walks to the end of the left the screen will keep playing the scene without actors. This work will take a long space to exhibit, but it can alternatively be exhibited on one screen with ten scenes one after one, it just won’t be that cool…
I do not intend to show the notes of each scene, instead, I will just post my notes and researches that related to it. Perhaps at some point, I will have it display as a more clear story and post it as one post.

Pencil drawing of two scene on top and ten small scene below, it's an diagram to show the idea of what the installation will be. — My ugly diagram for Point Nemo

References book “Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film” by Giuliana Bruno, Publisher: Verso, 2018

03 Building Utopia on Hubs for workshop

https://youtu.be/ZpVUucBNXA0

In the past week I tune in with two live streaming, I used hubs to build a 3d space for the future workshop. The workshop is expected to be hold at the end of the residency, somewhere closer to the week of the 20th. The reason to use hubs is that it allows participants to use existing models lively. So during the workshop, they can just create things really fast. Also using the internet as the platform instead of the real world fits the idea of migrant utopia out of physical space into an idea. Although during the workshop I will still ask participants to picture utopia out of the real world. I will play some demo with some of my friends in the next live streaming. I am using this software called hubs from Mozilla, and here you can see I am using its environment building software called spoke.

02 Swaayattate (Autonomy)

The image contains a large eyeball with a pinkish cornea set against a black background.

In 2020, I was able to bring the ideas behind Subaltern Futurism as a speculative framework into my practice through my work Swaayattate (Autonomy). The work is an investigation into the complex entanglements of the synthetic and organic worlds. Taking the form of a bi-lingual trilogy, the films are set inside a computer repair marketplace in Bangalore and examines the nature of human-machine relationships through the contemporary lens of gender, caste and labour. The narrative moves between multiple timelines as the evolution of an embedded neural network references prescient concerns around language, accessibility and justice.

Portions of the script for the films were written in collaboration with a text based neural network GPT-2 Transformer (https://transformer.huggingface.co/) extracting & revealing the extent of encoded biases within this AI model. GPT-2 is essentially a text generator similar to the autocomplete functions on our phones. You can input words or sentences and the neural network generates the next word or sentence using pre trained machine-learning models. Widely hailed as being very close to human speech and syntax, my interactions with the language model has proven this to be highly misleading as they contain encoded biases brought over from the subjectivity of the programmers and its own training data. Chapter 2 ADI, speculates upon this process of transference of social biases into algorithmic ones.

Excerpt from Swaayattate (Autonomy)

Research

Folk film archives.

Stills from some films that I have watched as part of the research.

Films:

Billingham Folklore Festival 1965.

Minehead’s Obby Oss Festival.

The Sidmouth Folk Festival.

All the films are available via BFI Player.

Research

Reading list.

Here some of the books I am reading as part of my script research.

Images description:

Nine images presenting the books. First image: A pile of eight books on white / pink table, white wall at the background. Second: Book on the table. Title: Milosc Ludowa (Folk Love) by Dobroslawa Wezowicz – Ziolkowska. Cover shows illustration with a women and man in Eastern European folk costume , with moon behind them, test of cover is multi colour strips. Third: Book on a table. Yellow cover book, with blue eagle and a red symbol inside, book title ‘Turbopatriotyzm’ (Turbo Patriotism) by Marcin Napiorkowski. Fourth image: Book on a table. Old english looking, black, beige colour. Book title: ‘Old English Customs, Extant at the Present Time, an Account of Local Observances’ by Peter Hampson Ditchfield. Image five: book on a table, grey cover with yellow writing CRAFT, Edited by Tanya Harrod. Image six: Book on a table, light beige colour, black writing with book title ‘ Traditions, Superstitions and Folk – Lore by Charles Hardwick. Image on the cover show an evil looking creature beating bunch of medieval looking white people with a whip. White bigger women at the background smiling and undefined small creatures in front of her. Image seven: Book on a table, communist style monument on blue sky background. Title in red and white, ‘Turbo Folk Music and cultural representations of national identity in former Yugoslavia. Eight image: Book on a table, blue red cover, title in Polish ‘ Ludowa Historia Polski’, Folk History of Poland’ by Adam Leszczynski. Image nine: book on a table, orange cover with image of English aristocratic looking white man between two lions, male and female, who is licking his face. He is embracing them both and there are little tigers running around. British Folk Art is the book title.

01 Thoughts on Race & Technology

There are multiple strands of thought I’m following and working through my findings at the moment. I usually do this by identifying the emotions that certain research materials stir up as I engage with them and then head off on a journey to locate its companions in a way. Imaginations of ‘what else might complement this’ guide how I proceed or retreat and the connections I end up making are often circuitous and serendipitous.

I attribute this to the sense of wonder I have for technology in general and the internet in particular. I have visceral memories of being enamored by the sheer power of being able to access random streams of knowledge that had nothing to do with school work as a kid and I’ve held on to these memories quite strongly. They help me determine when I stop the process of ‘making’ my works and how I determine if I am sufficiently intrigued by the things I create.

01 Interview with Vishal Kumaraswamy

Words in white capital letters say: “They closed around my head and with a golden sword shaved it;” The background is dark blue, reminiscent of an early evening sky. An unidentifiable black shape is in the bottom right corner - it looks like the shadowy silhouette of treetops. The image is a still frame from an artist moving image work by Vishal Kumaraswamy called "your dataset must die" made in 2021. — Vishal Kumaraswamy, *your dataset must die*, 2021 (still image from video)

Jamie Wyld (videoclub & Vital Capacities’ director): Thanks for being part of the Vital Capacities residency programme! Can you say a little about yourself and your work?

Vishal Kumaraswamy: Hi, my name is Vishal Kumaraswamy I’m a Bangalore based Artist & Filmmaker. Within my practice, I work across AI, text, video, sound and performance and I look for points of convergence between Caste, Race & Technology. My works a by weaving speculative narratives & counter-mythologies in multiple Indian languages around themes of Artificial Intelligence, Gender & Labour.

02 The Beginning: Two video works in the past two years that related to this project #Utopia #Satellite #Displacement

I’ve been working on this project for the past two years, during the time I made two videos that related to the subject. As I mentioned before, I couldn’t digest the subject into one simple work.
The Journey begins at the end of 2017 after I finished a project called “The Yellow Snake Is Waiting”. As usual, I look inward to see what is that thing I want to express in the form of Art. I started to paint. I painted some sea turtles and artificial satellite

Acrylic painted three sea turtles.

Acrylic painted artificial satellite.

◐◒◑◓ 6 months past ◴ ◵ ◶ ◷

In 2018 during my 6-month residency at Trestle Art Space, I was thinking about the relationship between sea turtles and artificial satellites. 20000 miles under the sea caught my eye, one of the main character Captain Nemo, he lost his family back to his hometown now he traveled the underworld took it as his land. This reminds me of the idea of Utopia, my journey from Taiwan to the United State. My research shifted from artificial satellite to Utopia…

Research

Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke

During the residency period I will be expanding research that I undertook, while making ‘Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke’ (2016).

Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke explores potentialities of queer utopias, while looking at the relationship between history, ‘national values’ and power structures.

Through the work I revisited Eastern European folk traditions and whilst employing feminist and queer reading I questioned why queer love has never been preserved and celebrated in the folk history. I reclaimed these stories by subverting the narrative of ‘straight’ love songs to represent queer love stories instead.

My aim was to problematize how history is written and tradition is represented, often only to sustain the power structures that claim it ‘objective’. I intended to encourage the viewer to consider and experience history as a discourse made out of multiple, overlapping and contesting narratives rather than a single, fixed entity.

I questioned what the “national values” are / are claimed to be and look at the ‘fragility’ of national identity, threatened so easily by ‘otherness’ and queer subjectivities.

Niolam Ja Se Kochaneczke relocates queerness both historically and geographically. Queerness In Eastern Europe is often perceived as a contemporary phenomenon that arrived from Western Europe, rather than something that always had its presence. I want to acknowledge its historical place and reclaim histories that were repressed. As well as this I want to speak of queerness in context of rural communities, as too often it is considered only within the urban setting.

The recordings were done in a traditional rural setting in East of Poland (Roztocze and Karpaty) with folk singers singing both in Polish and Lemkov (Ukrainian dialect).

This work is currently exhibited in local_30 gallery in Warsaw, Poland – part of POGANKI | HEATHENS, a group show curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, featuring Karolina Breguła, Marta Bogdańska, Maria Kniaginin-Ciszewska, Katarzyna Górna, Kinga Michalska, Liliana Piskorska (Zeic), Aleka Polis, Karolina Sobel & myself.

The exhibition is directly inspired by The Heathen, considered the first Polish novel to address love and passion between women. Boy-Żeleński wrote: “sisterhood, that most perfect form of friendship, could lead to genuine love tragedies – and powerfully impregnate souls with suffering. Because The Heathen comes into being one year after those incidents.”

The relationships addressed in the exhibition are not always downright romantic. Close ties between women, mutual understanding and empathy have a long history and manifest themselves in women’s circles reactivated today, among other phenomena.

See the show till 5th June 2016 if in Warsaw, and also you can access it virtually via the local_30 website.

00 Intro

Three digitised figures appear from a digital background. The background waves of digital data, in pink and green, all on a black background. The figures are also waves of data, two are in electric blue and green, the other an off white colour. — Vishal Kumaraswamy, *Swaayattate*, 2020 (video still)

Hi, my name is Vishal Kumaraswamy and welcome to my Virtual Studio.

I’m a Bangalore based Artist & Filmmaker. Within my practice, I work across AI, text, video, sound and performance and I look for points of convergence between Caste, Race & Technology. My works weave speculative narratives & counter-mythologies in multiple Indian languages around themes of Artificial Intelligence, Gender & Labour.

Intro

A person lies on a bed wearing pink and black leopard skin leotard and leggings, and black fishnet top beneath, also wears black gloves and boots. They have a pink wig and cap on, their face is covered by tight dark pink curls falling from beneath the visor of the cap.
Metallic bronze and clear balloons are piled on the right side of the bed and hang in the air. Golden twisted ribbons hang from the balloons. 2 disco balls also hang from the ceiling. A red chiffon sheet covers a white bedsheet, which the person lies upon. — Katarzyna Perlak, Happily Ever After, 2019 (video still) – find out more

Hi, my name is Katarzyna Perlak, welcome to my virtual residency studio.

I am a London based artist of Polish origin. My practice centres around video, and performance. I have also expanded my work to incorporate textiles, sound, sculptural elements and modes of installation.

I engage with intersectional narratives concerning migrant, queer and women’s histories. Autobiographical experiences often form the starting point, which I then expand into inter-subjective dialogues, tapping into ideas of collective memory, shared vulnerabilities and desires.

Research

01 Some key readings of my Utopia research in the history.

Utopia- Sir Thomas More 1516

This is an image of the book cover of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. It's an island surrounded by water with several settlements in the center and a ship in the bottom. — Book cover of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia

The New Atlantis – Francis Bacon 1626

The book cover of The New Atlantis by Sir Francis Bacon. It has tiny image of an island surrounded by the sea and the settlement in the center with several human holding high tech objects (relevantly high tech for the time 1626, something like phone or so...) — Book cover of
Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis

Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe 1719

An image of first edition of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719, there's no illustration only text that introduce the book. It says The Life and Strange Suprizing adventures of Robinson Crusol of Tork, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great river of Oroonoques. Having been caft on shore by shipwreck, where in all the men perifhed but himself. With an account how he was at laft as frankly delivered by PYRATES. — First edition of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719

Around 17~19 century ppl move from Euro to USA (740m population vs 800000 population). The term immigration was coined in the 17th century.

Then, Utopia experiment in USA in the 20 century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Paolo Soleri, Acrosanti

Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (Friday) – Michel Tournier, 1967

Internet as Utopia from Expanded Education For The Paperless Society- Nam Jun Pak, 1968 *link to NJP’s future prediction

/////////// (・∀・)

Each 100 years, artists try to create work that shakes the world and reflects it’s time. Combining reality and fiction to picture something that is there and yet to be discovered or can’t be pictured.

In the seventeenth century, knowledge is power, the science and technologic jump and progress Scientific revolution change how people see the world. Then the Age of Enlightenment and Age of Reason came, they dare to know. By the end of the eighteenth century the idea of Utopia no longer restricted to space, it shifted it to time, the future, which is more accessible than the unknown territories. The distance that makes possible the critique of reality remains.

If time is the fourth dimension. If the three-dimensional space of Utopia does not exist, then perhaps how we map the future will concern its history.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯⌛⌛⌛⌛

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