eTopia (E-Journal)
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What Fighting Back Feels Like: Affect, Aesthetics, and Protest in 2012 Québec
Get PDFThis paper attempts to understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics, specifically as it pertains to the phenomenon of red square graffiti during the 2012 Québec Spring movement. e red square is an ideal example of affective responses to political art because it shows the tight interrelation of three concepts: politics, aesthetics, and affect. Affect theory argues that politics and aesthetics work together in a mutually reciprocal relationship to build and sustain affects of resistance. is is due to the nature of political art, in that this small graffiti intervenes in the public sphere in non-authorized ways which reveal a desire for politics outside of the sharply defined public sphere of electoral politics. The implication is of the need for openness to the affective force of politics and aesthetics, a fidelity to the potential of resistance.
The Artist-as-Intermediary: Musician Labour in the Digitally Networked Era
Get PDFThe advent of digital distribution platforms has removed middlemen from the musical supply chain — better known within the industry as the process of “disintermediation.” Often celebrated, disintermediation is understood to have lowered the barrier to entry into the music industry, following the sudden rise in access to marketplace and distribution platforms. However, this increased access to the means of distribution comes with increased responsibilities; musicians not only write, record and produce their own music, in the digital era, they are charged with the added responsibility of promoting, circulating and distributing their music. To understand this disruption, this essay presents the conceptual framework of the artist-as-intermediary. Suturing the artist to the intermediary, the artist-as- intermediary articulates the ways in which the responsibilities formerly held by music label executives — promoters, managers, A&R representatives — have not disappeared with disintermediation but have instead been downloaded onto the musician. To more fully illustrate this phenomenon, this essay proffers a brief case study of marketplace and distribution platform Bandcamp and indie musician Car Seat Headrest.
Key Concept: A Turn Towards Academobilities
Get PDFThis paper introduces the key concept ‘academobilities’ as an addition to the growing collection of keywords of mobility studies. Situating academobilities within
the tradition of keywords will allow scholars across disciplines to refer to it as a
tool that can be used in their own research. Academobilities is a two-fold concept. First, it calls into question the culture surrounding academia by examining the specific ways information is transported and communicated to the public, critically examining power structures, inclusions, and exclusions. The second way in which academobilities can be employed is to examine the interconnected relationship between the academy and mobility; academia is dependent upon mobility. This paper introduces academobilities as a key concept that scholars can adopt and apply
in unique ways that move beyond this two-fold understanding. Scholars across disciplines can certainly add fruitful theoretical underpinnings to academobilities, andto do so is encouraged. Understandings of key concepts change and fluctuate over
time (Williams 1976) to address our ever-changing society. The goal of writing this paper is to identify a starting point from which scholars of all disciplines can leap.
Rosy Pictures: An Installation of Photography
Get PDFRosy Pictures is a body of photographic work that considers the relationship between medium, material, and process in the formation of human memory. Found family slide archives,Kodachrome slides depicting landscapes, interior and exterior spaces, travel, gardens, and family portraiture are combined, layered, and re-photographed using light to form new spaces that rest somewhere between reality and fiction. Combining both analogue and digital technologies, material function is questioned in a culture dominated by moving image screens, and ephemeral digital data. In this way, the outdated Kodachrome slide object becomes an immaterial trace of its material existence, and a catalyst for exploring how photography frames the past within the present.
Found Polaroids (2011- on-going)
Get PDFThe Found Polaroids project started in 2011 with the finding of 484 images and has grown into a personal archival collection of over six thousand Polaroids. e concept behind the project is to breathe new life into long-forgotten images by asking creative minds to write stories about them. e project simply asks for 250-350 word flash-fiction submissions; not of who these people are, but who they could have been. e project has since become a hub of collaboration between photographers, writers and academics advocating for the cultural importance of material photography and found photography. Much of this exchange and collaboration has come about through digital pathways and is part of the material turn facilitated by online exchanges.What makes this collection unique is that most shots are entirely candid and were captured by someone who had a personal relationship with the subjects in the picture. In that sense, each comes coupled with a story that can really only be told by those in front of or behind the camera—but these stories have been lost. Initially, I was fixated on knowing the true stories, but slowly it dawned on me that the importance of stories is not always in their literal truth, but rather in the truth that is reflected in our own lives within these stories. A really great story is simply one that holds a mirror up to our own reality.
The Soundscape of Becoming Place: Rhythms and Voices of Village des Tanneries
Get PDFPlace can be understood as not a fixed geographical location, but as an event that emerges in the encounter between continually transforming materialand human elements, social relations and practices; that place is composed
of strands of human experience, memory, histories and stories in a particular material setting. This article draws on Amin and Thrift’s “ontology of encounter” and Lefebvre’s method of rhythmanalysis to explore the complex interactions of geography, social practices and city environment. An “auditory turn” offers ways of thinking about the mobilities, encounters and narratives of an urban neighbourhood that combine and merge to give rise to a soundscape. A turn toward the sensory and auditory offers new paths for analysis in urban geography, mobilities and infrastructure studies.
“Everybody has their own Dream”: Nail houses and Resistance to the Landscape of Globalization in Contemporary China
Get PDFThe transformation of the Chinese landscape is embodied by the figure of new, hyper-modern cityscapes. With the influx of hundreds of millions of people from rural to urban areas, China’s economic reform process is dominated by the production of space designed to instill a new ideal of modern economic subjects for Chinese identity. However, China’s modernization is complicated by the emergence of a recent urban phenomena: dingzihu, or nail-houses. Nail- houses are points of resistance where individuals refuse to abandon their homes when traditional urban districts are demolished for urban renewal. By examining personal testimonies of nail-house inhabitants and visual representations of traditional urban communities in contemporary Chinese cinema, it will be argued that nail-house protests’ resistance to the disappearance of traditional urban-community culture is a symptom of the logic of globalization. To this end, Frederic Jameson shall be invoked to argue that globalization forces the creation of local national worlds that are antagonistic to all others, including those within their own space. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, insofar as the collapse of the public and private sphere for the sake of economic interest in China can be understood as reducing the difference of personal identity to create national homogeneity, nail-house protests reveal a common condition of exile endemic to the process of global modernity as a whole.
Lost in the Rug: Dismantling the Conference Experience
Get PDFLost in the Rug is an ongoing project and series of workshops responding to Toronto based artist Panya Clark Espinal’s participatory artwork Lost in the Wood (2014). This project has developed from an ongoing dialogue and collaboration with the artist’s sculptural installation. The series of workshops are organized around the construction of a large-scale hooked rug and the materials and design of the rug have been recycled from Clark Espinal’s work.