INVITATION TO BYO
(Bring Your Own: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center)
BYO fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening conversations.
Locating Media
Thursday, April 12, 2012
7:00 pm
Sert Seminar Space, 3rd Floor
Advanced computer generated mapping and data visualization techniques often abstract the tangible effects of the information they compile and display. Bringing together artists and scholars working in the disparate fields of cartography, musicology, and astrophysics, this panel investigates contemporary efforts to short-circuit data's sometimes distancing effects and create a more direct, participatory relationship between data, media, bodies, and environments. New York University artist Wafaa Bilal will discuss his 2010 24-hour performance …and Counting, during which he publicly tattooed his back with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for every Iraqi and American casualty of the current war near the cities in which they were killed. Columbia University musicologist Beau Bothwell will discuss his work on the circulation of popular music between the US and the Middle East, examining the shifting soundscape of state-funded radio diplomacy and propaganda in the region. Harvard Astrophysicist Alberto Pepe will discuss his work on the dual nature of airports as structures necessarily located in real time and space, yet tightly coupled with a sense of transience and mobility that threatens a coherent sense of place, with reference to airport restrictions related to contemporary counter-terrorism efforts.
Free and open to the public. Food and drinks provided.
Presenters:
Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal, an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, is known internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about global politics and internal dynamics. Bilal's work is constantly informed by the experience of fleeing his homeland and existing simultaneously in two worlds – his home in the "comfort zone" of the U.S. and his consciousness of the "conflict zone" in Iraq. Bilal suffered repression under Saddam Hussein’s regime and fled Iraq in 1991 during the first Gulf War. After two years in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, he came to the U.S. where he graduated from the University of New Mexico and then obtained an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2008 City Lights published "Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun," about Bilal's life and the Domestic Tension project. For his most recent project, the 3rdi, Bilal had a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head to spontaneously transmit images to the web 24 hours a day – a statement on surveillance, the mundane and the things we leave behind. Bilal’s 2010 work "...And Counting" similarly used his own body as a medium. His back was tattooed with a map of Iraq and dots representing Iraqi and US casualties – the Iraqis in invisible ink seen only under a black light. Bilal's 2007 installation, Domestic Tension, placed him on the receiving end of a paintball gun that was accessible online to a worldwide audience over the period of a month in a Chicago gallery.
Beau Bothwell is a doctoral candidate in the Music Department at Columbia University, where he is completing a dissertation on the use of music in American government-funded radio broadcasts to the Middle East. His research addresses the intersection between popular music, mass media, and transnational politics. Beau has lived and studied Arabic in Syria on a FLAS grant, and in Yemen on a fellowship from the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. He received his M.A. and M.Phil. from Columbia University, where he teaches courses in the Music Department and has lectured on various aspects of music, culture, and media in the Arab World and the United States. Beau also holds B.A. degrees in music history and ethnomusicology from UCLA, where he studied contrabass performance, and began his interest in Arabic music and culture playing the oud in UCLA’s Near Eastern Ensemble under Ali Jihad Racy. He has published in American Music Review, Current Musicology and the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and has a chapter in the forthcoming volume The Soundtrack of Conflict: The Role of Music in Radio Broadcasting in Wartime and in Conflict Situations.
Alberto Pepe Gentile is the in-house information scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University working at both the Center for Astrophysics and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Previously, he worked at the CERN high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Astrophysics from the University College London, UK. Pepe was born and raised in the small wine-making town of Manduria, in Puglia, Southern Italy.
BYO 2012 is made possible by a grant from the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities.
The Order of the Third Bird: Further Research on the Fascicle of E
WEDNESDAY, April 18, 2012
7:00 pm
Sert Seminar Space, 3rd Floor
The number of works of art in the world now exceeds the number of persons. If each of these human artifacts can be understood as a request for attention, the nature and scale of the problem immediately becomes apparent. The Order of the Third Bird, a small community of practitioner-friends working at the convergence of performance and aesthetic theory, has set out to address this problem. Their aim is two-fold: first, to evolve practices of sustained attention suitable to the occasion of a work of art; and second, to mobilize these shared practices in various interventions and engagements.
Making use of available documentation, D. Graham Burnett and Sal Randolph will provide a brief synopsis of The Order of the Third Bird, its principles, and preoccupations. The focus of the evening will be their ongoing efforts to sift an emerging archive that bears on the genealogy of the Order's practices. Is it possible to trace the history of the Order, and to make sense of its implicit entanglement with crucial moments in the philosophy of aesthetics? Surprising new sources are continuously coming to light, and require both public airing and critical scrutiny. Following Burnett and Randolph’s presentation, Helen Mirra will moderate an open discussion.
D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet magazine and a professor of history at Princeton University.
Sal Randolph is an artist and theorist working with issues of gift-giving, money, alternate economies, and social architecture.
Helen Mirra is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard.
Free and open to the public. Dinner and drinks will be provided.
This BYO event is made possible by a grant from the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities and the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
*
The Order of the Third Bird: Practical Aesthesis
WEDNESDAY, April 18
3:00–5:00 pm
Sackler Museum
485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
Please email otb@byoart.info if you would like to participate in this afternoon practicum.
Space limited.
The Order of the Third Bird will lead a small group of students and members of the public through a distinctive mode of aesthetic practice—a way of being with a work of art that experiments with orientations to the art-object and styles of address that are simultaneously physical (marked by a distinctive habitus) and mental (mobilizing an inner state or process). The practice is structured but elastic. It is quasi-liturgical, best practiced in groups, and tends to be silent. It is generous (not judgmental) and deemphasizes “learning” (i.e., prior knowledge of artists and works of art). Using such an approach, The Order of the Third Bird and workshop participants will make themselves available as (ludic/loving) agents of aesthetic realization.
This BYO event is made possible by a grant from the Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities and the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
(Bring Your Own: Voices of the Contemporary at the Carpenter Center)
BYO fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening conversations.