Precarious Perception: A Rapprochement of Risk & Tangibility in AHCS

SO...

While doing research for my final paper in COMS 655: Media & The Senses, I was careful to keep our theme of "The Tangible" in mind, and actually had a few ideas come to mind regarding the relationship of visibility/tangibility and risk/precarity.

My research for this paper, which seeks to examine themes of risk, trauma, and queer archive in relation to Bareback subcultures, has given me a new appreciation for the role that perception/visibility/the tangible play in structuring conceptions of risk and reward.

Essentially, deciding to take a risk is a decision that emerges out of holding the tangible and the intangible in dialogue with each other. We make a decision based on our very tangible material landscapes, yet we hold our material realities in an abstract conversation with the potential consequences, repercussions, and rewards that making a certain decision might entail.

So, how is risk negotiated within this ethereal conversation between lived reality and imagined future? How to bring the tangible and the intangible together in an imagined laboratory, within which we perpetually concoct what we believe are "rational decisions" that both take into account our immediate material realities, as well as the not-so-immediate future-reality which waits for us to decide and act before it can emerge.

It seems that by considering the ways in which our immediate, affective, material realities structure our abstract hopes, intentions, and incentives, we are able to locate the nexus of possibility within the amalgam of the tangible and the intangible. By thinking about the ways in which risk is represented and communicated, we can easily incorporate Art History and Communication Studies. That is, we can consider the ways risk is communicated or represented within visual culture, popular culture, television, film, music, literature, public discourse, and society as such, and through these various media consider the ways in which the intangibility of risk is translated into the tangibility of media and materiality.


Okay--so, that was just a ton of brainstorming, and maybe be useless, or may be incredible profound. In any case, I hope this helps, and I think that--if you guys like these ideas--Tim Dean (Unlimited Intimacy) might be an incredible presenter, and he teaches at SUNY Buffalo, so it's not far at all.

So, let me know what you think! Love y'all and be good!

- Justin Wayne Lutz

conference website

hey guys -

we should probably get a conference website going, I've told Sara to inform the person who owns (and is paying for!) the last website to just shut it down, and I've saved all the info from that so we can add it to our own. Anyone have a preference for a certain blogging platform? we can stick to blogspot, but as I understand it, wordpress is more customizeable - but I'm pretty unfamiliar with all of this stuff - i can fiddle around with blogspot to a certain extent - do any of you have a handle on how wordpress works?

look at this fancy website that the grad conference committee for Western made: http://reactivatingobjects.wordpress.com/

tangible ramblings

The Tangible – my notes

-       How can artwork involve the body in ways that are ‘tangible’? Physically registered? Embodied engagements? The materiality of artistic practice

-       artwork that facilitates multisensory experience

-       immersive/participatory installations

-       synesthesia – when different tangibilities become confused?

-       use of ephemera/waste/detritus – what objects accrue more value as ‘tangible’ than others? Could tangibility be associated (problematically or no) with a form of physical ‘authenticity’?

-       what is the function of tangibility in artistic practice? Creating embodied engagements? Physical reciprocity? Associations with memory and personal experience? Facilitating intersubjective interactions within the exhibition space? 

-       And conversely, what about the intangible? How does a lack of materiality similarly (or differently) leave impressions on our bodies, our experiences?

o   Or when tangibility is transferred from one medium/sense to another? Like video art that visually/audibly attempts to convey a sense of haptic or olfactory experience

§  Laura U. Marks – The Skin of the Film and Touch (incidentally I’d love to see her as a keynote but she’s from BC and is more of an art-focused person.. still awesome though!)

-       What happens when tangibility slowly ebbs away? Does that equate with forgetting? I’m thinking of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Candy Spills

-       Tangibility – the circulation and the accrued social life of objects – Will Straw’s work on used bookstores and yard sales, how does the tangibility of objects change as they circulate through a city, accumulating ‘use’?

-       The tangible as something fearful, disgusting, abject

-       Feelings/affects that are tangible/palpable

-       Absence/lack as a tangible feeling – the lack or loss of something (or someone) taking physical shape – like Rachel Whiteread’s House and other casting work

-       How can typically non-tangible media (digital art for instance) create its own sense of tangibility? (Again, Laura Marks has a cool chapter on the haptic materiality of web art) 

-    The tangibility of ruined spaces - I've been reading a lot of work by this cultural geographer named Tim Edensor lately, he writes (pretty romantically) about the materiality of industrial ruins, and how these liminal spaces accumulate memory, create affordances for new uncontrollable experiences, etc

-     tangibility and public memorials - transferring a cultural/historical memory or trauma into something publicly tangible?

-       Or, a methodological question – how do we reinsert tangibility back into art historical research? We spend our days with slides and photocopies and jpgs, etc – writing about work we may not have ever seen in the flesh. But what does it mean to see something ‘in the flesh’? what are the problems of privileging that sort of immediate, physical engagement with a work of art as more ‘authentic’ or more ‘tangible’? Can art historical writing accrue a materiality/tangibility on its own terms, without a reliance on the physical ‘aura’ of an object?

Reading back over all of this, I guess what I’m mainly interested in is how tangibility can become unfixed as a material experience from objects, how it circulates, how it can seem stronger at certain points in an object’s trajectory rather than others. Also, how it can be used as a way to consider sensory experience, or as a way to explore how materials considered discardable/disgusting/abject convey certain affects.

Does that make any sense?

Tangible ->Mediating Virtuality + OOO?

I've been trying to keep the CFP in mind, but it's got a lot to compete with. A crowded place, my head is these days. One auspicious thing, though, came via a Merleau-Ponty quote for my paper for Christine's class:

"We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out of the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visible existence."
- The Visible and the Invisible, 134.

NEAT. Opens the door for talking about Heidegger and Virtuality, as well as maybe some Object Oriented Ontology? Possibly together?

Haha, and as with one breath I excitedly open the door for the topic, I want to, with the next, restrict the breadth of the discussion a little too. I think the best CFPs strike a balance of defining a research theme without breaking it down into infinite many questions and possible tangents. (Tangent -> Tangible? Argh.)

What do you folks think?

Finance nonsense

Hi again everyone - it's my last frenzied post of the day, i promise!

I just had another helpful email from Sara, last year's chair, and she had this information to share:

"There is another thing that I need to let you know from the start, but that I forgot to mention in my previous email. Because we don't have our own student account, the conference committee needs to pay for EVERYTHING UPFRONT, and then apply to the various funding sources with receipts and proof of costs/payments for reimbursement. I found that to be the most stressful and tedious process of organizing the conference. The committee was wonderful last year and everyone pitched in to cover the costs, drawing from savings and credit, but the previous year, Paulina (the committee chair) fronted almost all of the conference expenses on her own, which neared $2,000. It is incredibly frustrating and somewhat daunting, I know, so I would suggest addressing the issue with the committee as soon as possible. I recall last year that the PGSS was talking about working on establishing accounts for student groups to streamline this process, but I don't know if they have gone ahead with it or not. Perhaps it is worth looking into or talking to the GSA about. "




Not going to lie, this freaks me out a fair deal. I definitely DO NOT WANT to run our finances this way, seems far too stressful for its own good, nor do I expect any of you to carry that kind of financial burden either (and do I even have $2,000 to my name at the moment? that's a whole other issue, haha). I'm happy to cover smaller costs upfront for the time being (like a CFP design honorarium or something) but anything large is an unreasonable request of any of us, really.

What I'm going to try to do, then, is meet with Jacinthe Deschenes, who is the PGSS Student Life Coordinator (she controls all the student association accounts) sometime this week. I sat in on a meeting between she and Alexandra last week re: the finances for our Graduate Student Association, just so we could meet and I could tell her that I would be organizing our conference. She's really lovely and if anyone would know how to establish an account for our committee, it would be her!

So - is anyone (1 or 2 people, tops) able to spare a bit of time this week or next come with me to meet her? It would be massively helpful, I could really use an extra set of ears on this.

I'll get some student-governmental-ish advice tomorrow at the GA as well, on how to proceed.

Let me know please and thank you!

Ugh.

D

grants and last year's files

Ok! I've received some files in my dropbox account from Sara, last year's committee chair. I'll proceed to add you all to the shared folder so you can look at the material.

(just remember, as you're accessing the files, don't pull them out of the folder on to your desktop, because then no one else will be able to access them)

Also, it looks like last year's committee applied for this funding grant through the PGSS :

http://pgss.mcgill.ca/services/24/PGSS-Grants

Looks pretty straightforward, and they accept applications once a month!

Ok, I'll keep you all posted on my mini-update at the GA meeting tomorrow (and definitely feel free to come too, there will be freeeeeeeeeee naaaaaaachos. it's at 6:30 - thompson house room 404)

THE TITLE

Hi All,

Is the theme title: THE TANGIBLE?
or is it something else? what do you think would be the most attractive theme title for potential speakers? + do you think the title matters at all (is it just the main body of text in the CFP that matters?)