..v wo.j. cieows lives & works in Ohròn:wakon/Tkaronto.
a multi-discplinary artist, they are studying political science & multimedia at mcmaster university. while in their mortal coil, they are interested in the poetic form and its role in struggle, and how it can be stretched in medium and beyond conventional narrative. a winter tangerine alum, their work can be found as part of the SFPL readers' series and hayden's ferry review.
frederic jameson writes, “utopia is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world (except in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe).”
---------------------------- is a living consideration of mutiny, information, interrelation and their ties to technology and the cyber/self.
with the emergence of near-totalizing global capitalism, it grows increasingly difficult to imagine a different world outside of autonomous pockets or certain nation-projects. simultaneously, state power stretches into every facet of our lives, 'cyber' and 'real' to surveill and suppress. the cyber-self wrests w itself. the pandemic decidedly made dominant the virtual aspect of this contradiction. the stretch to imagine a self w/o its digital shadow feels a lot like the stretch to imagine the world beyond capitalism.
'utopia' is also emergence: that which we refuse, that which we cannot yet name (except by what we refuse?), the new gestating in the old. in pointing to what harms and how is at least half an intimation of what could be. simultaneously, "to see things as they really are, you must imagine them for what they might be" (derrick a. bell) - it is that grasping which unfolds here.
this work was made possible by my time at factory media centre thru young canada works.
can we wrest ownership from systems that own? in the broad nets of ownership, is the creation of sustinable autonomous networks necessary? or even possible?
1a. hi! give me a few minutes to load!
best viewed on a laptop full screen at 100% zoom :~)
1b. many elements are interactive --> click thru to access source information, resources, and more!
to watch from below -
i. ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), grandmother of the contemporary 'Internet,' has also gone by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) - an arm of the US Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
--> mass produced technologies resisting the surveillance hierarchy; "bringing cameras from the lamp posts and ceilings, down to eye-level, for human-centered recordings of personal experience"
"the weaponization of time as an instrument of social control...historian Alex Lichenstein writes that prison life in the late 19th century and early 20th century was characterized by hard labour, while modern prison life is best described as hard time. while the use of temporal punishment may appear to be more human than physical punishment, "this regime of control is just as cruel insofar as it is a total attack on the subjectivity and psyche of the prisoner. furthermore, the supplanting of a corporeal regime of punishment with a temporal one enables prisons to maintain their moral legitimacy because the damage done by temporal punishment is not legibile in our current framework for understanding harm and pain. this is partly due to the fact that no visible wound is left on the body of the prisoner when time is used as an instrument of torture" - jackie wang
known for its DIY style, to this day its arrchives contain one of the most comprehensive alternative media collections, "including critical components of the coinciding technological and artistics evolution of public access television, video art, video activism, and media reform.
--> Patrick Esmond-White examines how the media's manipulation has deflated the power and influence of mass demonstrations. Filmed in Washington DC in front of the Lincoln Memorial, in the same spot that hosted one of most influential and inspiring mass demonstrations for peace and civil rights in 1963, Esmond-White compares the march of 1963 to marches of the present. He believes that the power of the demonstration as a political and social weapon has been defused through police regulation and media’s portrayal the events; journalist frame demonstrations in a way that simplifies or leaves out the issues they’re based on and portray demonstrators as unmotivated or unfocused. With the issues unspoken and the participants pacified, this media domestication creates an inaccurate and un-empowered viewpoint of American history and activism.