Art Bollocks

Hello conceptual art writers,

Hope your summer is going well! Would love to see your smiling faces at this party…

GALLEON TRADE: SHIP LAUNCH!
Saturday, June 30 2007 6 – 10pm
[UPDATED] Oakland, CA

Please join all manner of pirates, bootleggers and scurvy knaves for Galleon Trade: Ship Launch!, one hell of a land-locked fund-raising party and art auction.

Galleon Trade is out to make the Pacific Ocean seem smaller, by creating a sustainable template for innovative new kinds of grassroots arts exchange. We’re starting by forging new relationships between California, the Philippines and Mexico. You’re starting by coming to our party, and having some good clean fun, dancing, eating things, drinking things, enjoying and bidding on art. Cones will be even be set out for the roller-skating elite.

When and Where’s the Ship Launch?
Event: 6:00-10:00PM
Silent Auction: 6:00-9:00 PM

Location:
The former Oakland Tribune Building
12th and Franklin
Downtown Oakland, CA

What’s going to happen there?
Oh, goodness. All manner of fun, including

• Food and Drinks (featuring a number of Filipino dishes, as well as The Galleon, a brand-new East Bay cocktail!):

• DJs and plenty of other entertainment to keep you occupied on a warm, sweet East Bay summer evening! There will likely be some dancing to be done. Rollerdisco encouraged, but not expected.

• A silent art auction featuring affordable work by many of the Galleon Trade artists and their high-powered artist friends!

• The opportunity to experience the massive, historic Wonderbread Warehouse before it undergoes renovation!

How much is all of this fabulous fun?
A mere $10. More, if you’re feeling generous. Less, if you’re in a tight spot.
Food’s on the house, drinks by donation.

What if I can’t attend?
Galleon Trade accepts web donations via Paypal. Our fiscal sponsor is the Luggage Store.
For the Art auction, early bidding/proxy bidding by email/phone also welcomed:
Details and online gallery to follow shortly at http://galleontrade.org/news/

Where do my pesos go?
All proceeds support the multi-year Galleon Trade project, which is building new templates for grassroots, international, trans-pacific arts exchange. Phase 1 of the project brings 12 California artists to Manila, Philippines this July!

For details and participants, please visit:
http://www.galleontrade.org

Questions? Or would you like to help out? Please email me!

Christine Wong Yap
info (at) christinewongyap.com

Photos at the Masonic Auditorium

Journal of Aesthetics & Protest @ Southern Exposure - lots of great events.

UCIRA “State of the Arts” Conference

Hey Dan, your eeevil digital trickery to make you look like you’re 7 ft. tall won’t work on me! BWAHAHA!

Anybody who wants to come to commencement let me know, I have extra tickets…Dan

Here’s the website for the show in Manila I’ll be in this summer.

I don’t think the Luggage Store has anything set up for Paypal donations, but you can call them at 415.255.5971.

Los Cybrids, “Cybridnetics” (manifesto form used to construct playful critique of [white] cybercultures)

Bhanu Kapil, from “Incubation, a Space for Monsters” (trans-genre fiction/essay on cross-cultural, gendered & racialized cyborg body)

Amitav Kumar, from “Passport Photos” (multi-genre meditation on immigrant culture in visual/discursive fields of globalization)

And revisit the reading on “Identity” from the (canceled) 4/2 session.

WRITE:

1-2 page essay outline: IF you were to write a more conventional final seminar paper, using class readings & debates, focused on the question of how conceptual writing can serve visual criticism, how would you go about it? Abstracts, outlines, bibliographies, etc. are all sub-genres of intellectual writing that are no less important ‘frames’ for being considered preparatory or subsidiary to some “finished” product. Anyways, that’s the gambit, strap on the instruments & write accordioningly… 

SPECULATIVE CRITICISM

What can conceptualism and theoretical criticism perform in the realm of the speculative/futurist/etc.? Sci-fi and similar genres (esp. in film & the novel) certainly give up examples of the power of the speculative, though perhaps such forms are too confined within their genres to work in the ways that conceptualisms & (for example) theoretical architecture attempt. How do new technologies and media transform the ways we think about both visuality & criticism? What does writing become in a hypertextual, digitized culture? These & other questions…

READ:

Sean Cubitt, from “Digital Aesthetics” (this will be our touchstone theoretical text for the week)

McKenzie Wark, “Digital Allegories (on the Sims)” (gamespace, allegorithims, avatar identity; is the essay-form itself a gamespace?)

Madeline Gins, from “Helen Keller or Arakawa” (trans-genre work of theoretical architecture, meta-fiction, & Keller’s biography)

Lebbeus Woods, from “War & Architecture” (theoretical architecture for postwar landscapes; speculative writing as neo-manifesto?)

Ursula K LeGuin, from “Always Coming Home” (”novel” in form of mutli-disciplinary ethnography of society from far past/far future)

Subcommandante Marcos, from the Durito letters (political tract, epistolary writing, allegorical storytelling, irony as critical form?)

& these next 3 for this week and next (on identity):

Los Cybrids, “Cybridnetics” (manifesto form used to construct playful critique of [white] cybercultures)

Bhanu Kapil, from “Incubation, a Space for Monsters” (trans-genre fiction/essay on cross-cultural & racialized cyborb body)

Amitav Kumar, from “Passport Photos” (multi-genre meditation on immigrant culture in visual/discursive fields of globalization)

WRITE:

Rewrite one of your own pieces in another style/form a la Queneau.

Write up a draft/progress report on your final project.

AND:

Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto for those who haven’t read it before.

For the final class meeting on the 30th I will ask that we revisit the reading on “Identity” from the (canceled) 4/2 session, & I will be assigning a final writing assignment in the neighborhood of 3-5 single spaced pages that incorporates two or more of our readings (more on this Monday).

Again, our class ‘party’ will be on Sat May 5 from 4-7ish. Potluck/BYOB. And IF there is interest (ie you’ll actually show up), I will organize a class (de)tour/field trip for either Sat 4/28 or earlier in the day on May 5.

Details