Kontekst Archive 06/07/08 (2008) [English/Serbian]
Filed under brochure | Tags: · contemporary art, critique, kosovo, nationalism, politics, roma, serbia, sex work, society, surveillance, war
Gallery Kontekst represents one of the politically most important initiatives in Belgrade in the field of contemporary art. Through critical approach to the social reality and persistence to initiate
discussion on topics that are rarely discussed and thus take part in struggles against most conservative social processes, the team of *Kontekst Gallery *created unique space in the cultural-artistic scene in Belgrade. Some of the issues that Kontekst and people involved in its work dealt with (in collaboration with other artists, theorists, cultural workers and activists) are sex work (“Sex, Work and Society” project), Serbian nationalism and wars in Yugoslavia (especially through censored exhibition “Exception, contemporary art scene of Prishtina”), racism in Serbia (especially in relation to Roma community through actions against demolition and fencing of a Roma slum during the international sport event Universiade), contemporary mechanisms of surveillance (“Control and Resistance on the Street” project), privatization and illegal appropriation of public space (“Fifth Park-Struggle for the Everyday” project), homophobia (collaboration with QueerBelgrade festival), critical approach toward the process of the expansion of the European Union and its mechanisms of exclusion (Without Borders? project), etc.
The publication features interviews and program selection from 2006 to 2008.
Editors: Vida Knežević, Ivana Marjanović
Translation Novica Petrović, Vida Knežević, Ivana Marjanović
Publisher: Kontekst, Belgrade, 2008
ISBN 978-86-87291-01-0
208 pages
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Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji: The Social Telephony Files (2010)
Filed under brochure, catalogue | Tags: · communication, industry, media history, mobile technology, technology, telephone
Over the last twenty years the role of the telephone has been steadily reduced to that of an “interface” – for taking photos, bluetoothing business cards or connecting to an online service to find the nearest late night chemist. Sometimes people make phone calls. It is this rush to keep up with the latest augmentations of the mobile that has obscured the fact that the basic principle of person-to-person calling has still not reached its full potential after over 100 years. So in the first instance, social telephony is a historical project, returning to the handset, the voice, dialling and dialogue to re-imagine the phone call, to see where else it can go now that open source telephony allows us to build our own phone services.
Social telephony is thinking in terms of an “aesthetics of connectivity”, finding ways to build social networks between people that allow them to communicate in unexpected patterns and reveal different kinds of relationship. By taking advantage of the widespread use of phones we have developed arts projects that do not rely on unfamiliar computer systems and only require phone connectivity to take part. We have experimented with the use of auto-dialling to seek out potential participants, building the means of dissemination into the activity itself. We can allow people to pass content amongst themselves through their phones and across all national boundaries. By literally putting these abilities into the hands of our audience we have achieved more proactive forms of collaborative media.
This approach has also benefited from other kinds of connection. Our close collaboration with the Congolese community, especially Nostalgie Ya Mboka, has taught us that communication is not just about increasing the amount of information communicated. Their experience of exile from authoritarian regimes replaces a desire for quantity with a desire for channels, borderlessness and autonomy. The Coltan Wars, the most devastating yet least publicised conflict in the African continent, has shown us that an ordinary device such as a mobile phone connects us not only by wireless transmissions but also through a process of globalisation that includes historical currents, technological proliferation and the traffic of refugees.
How to make these myriad relationships tractable? Not to understand them as such, that is too naïve, but how to gain a purchase on them, a way into Congolese conversations, transnational trading routes and the Victorian inventions that spawned the modern global media empires. It was with this in mind that we developed the workshops and gallery based artworks, to bring into touch communities of migrants, young mobile phone users, critics and cultural audiences in spaces designed for more open ended reflection. This later work is designed not to communicate anything as such, but to reveal the shape of communication itself and a little about our place within it, so that when we perform something as simple as making a phone call we take part in a process that is continuing to shade its own particular cultural, historical and political outlines.
Special Edition for the exhibition of Tantalum Memorial, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK. September 25th to November 21st 2010
Contributing authors: Matthew Fuller, Anaclet Koffi, Vince Luttman, David Mandl, Yumika Tanaka and Yvonne Volkart
Publisher YoHa Limited, Southend-on-Sea, 2010
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license
ISBN 9781907379000
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
Comment (0)YoHa: Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers – 318,000 Black Lungs) (2010)
Filed under brochure, catalogue | Tags: · coal, computing, critique, history of technology, industry, technology
A one-hundred year old, 35-ton showman’s steam engine powers a computer with 1.5 tons of coal. Black lungs inflate every time a database record of miners’ lung disease is shown on the computer monitors. It feels like you’ve been invited into a fun fair, but one where the rides log their own accidents – a fun fair run by people who long ago became indistinct from the machines they maintain.
Over three days at the Discovery Museum, with groups of miner activists, Coal Fired Computers articulates relations between Power, Art and Media. A new work by leading UK media artists Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa), in collaboration with Jean Demars, it responds to the displacement of coal production to distant lands like India and China after the UK miners’ strike in 1984/85.
Coal Fired Computers reflects on the complexities of our global fossil fuel reliance and especially on how coal transforms our health as we have transformed it. Today coal produces 42% of the world’s electricity, and in many countries this rate is much higher (more than 70% in India and China). This power is produced by descendants of Charles Parson’s 1884 steam turbines, also on display in the Discovery Museum.
It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them, displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap and apparently clean goods we consume.
Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81% of the energy used in a computer’s life cycle is expended in the manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons of coal dust into unknown lungs.
Coal Fired Computers brings together these disparate elements into an artwork, allowing us to reflect on the complexities that have created and maintained power, the crisis of fuelling that power and its subsequent health residues.
Authors: Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji
Commissioned by AV Festival 2010
Produced in partnership with Discovery Museum.
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
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