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Meeting Minutes for May 4, 2008

Minutes/notes for Meeting held Sun. May 4, 2008 @ Get Lost Travel bookstore

Hi everyone. Here's a wiki page to start some notes on what we discussed at the Nonsite general meeting. Please see also the General Discussion List; Christy has started a thread to continue the discussion virtually: it promises to be rich!

Other attendees will be posting on this wiki page too, so watch for additions and updates! My apologies for being so incomplete; I'm on lunch break and limited time but wanted to get something out there. [Wendy]

Present: Rob Halpern, Taylor Brady, Lee Azus, Wendy Kramer, Stephen Vincent, Christy Rodgers, Elliot Anderson, Tanya Hollis, Jocelyn Saidenberg

I had made a set of notes to use as minutes, too, so I'll just go ahead and incorporate some of them into the minutes Wendy has already prepared. [Rob]

Curricula updates:

Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice:

Summer events: Thurs. July 10, 6 p.m. @ Camerawork: Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson: moving the translation curriculum towward non-text media and forms. The collective will continue its practice of organizing follow-up events so that presenters have an opportunity to facilitate a sustained discussion around their projects. Dates/locations for follow-up discussions with Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson TBA.

Sun. June 1 (location / time TBA) Talks by Tyrone Williams and Pat Clifford.

Topics that came up: possiblity/practicality of publishing a print publication: journal, reader, or other format. Led into a discussion about documenting nonsite's activities, and the primacy of that intention to the collective. Thus far, the documentation is not well-realized. We've just now got the "container" of the website, and are beginning to create content. Need more pics, sound, video, etc.!

Elliot Anderson inroduced his new project to build a greenhouse in Hunter's Point (Heron's Head?) in an industrial setting. This will be “laboratory” for thinking about landscape, waste and forms of urban/environmental “translation.” Elliot will speak on this project at the next Nonsite/Camerawork event.

Poetic Materials: Wendy previewed this upcoming Nonsite curriculum, which will explore the relation between physical and nonphysical materials, and how real material “stuff” enters into and become part of the making of poems. For more information around this curriculum, see the workbook page devoted to this.

The curriculum will launch with a joint Nonsite / Artifact reading with Mike Basinski, David Larsen, and Jeanne Heuving on Sat. 5/24 and will be followed by a more intimate salon with Mike Basinski at the home of Taylor Brady and Tanya Hollis on Sunday 5/25.This event will give us an opportunity to spend informal time with Mike Basinski and some of his paper materials. (see events)

Addressing the question of where the curriculum might go from here, it was suggested that an open discussion oriented around a few questions, might be the best way to proceed.

Discussion list thread: Wendy started it and will promote it to front page [inculdes links to related texts and materials]. Discussed how the thread might be encouraged to continue: i.e. asking May 24 readers to contribute statements.

Southern Exposure Grant status: due soon. This year's application specifies visual art over other arts. We discussed why and how to update and re-submit our application. [last year's application at http://nonsitecollective.org/node/258 ] A workbook page will be set up for collective participation in this year's grant application. Application will be finalized for submission at next meeting (June 2).

Topics of discussion that ran throughout the meeting:

--We need to document events variously and post that documentation.
--How does the collective's draft proposal help inform and guide our current activities?
--Evaluating the functions of print and online documentation and publication as it fits into the intentions of the organization.
--Instituting regular meetings, not necessarily at a standard date and time, but to keep an ongoing discussion, and a stable opportunity for people to get together in person around the collective's ongoing projects.

Next meeting Mon. June 2

Nonsite Collective general meeting notes, 7/21/08

Meeting held at Get Lost Travel Books, SF, beginning at 7pm

Present: Tanya Hollis, Elliot Anderson, Lee Azus, Thom Donovan, Stephen Vincent, Amy Trachtenberg, Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern

• Thom Donovan's proposal for a Nonsite symposium in NYC.
  • TD introduces the proposal, “Quaker-meeting” style (text of proposal appended)
  • Four “conversations”:
    • Creation of new archives
    • New forms of commons
    • Activism and aesthetic intervention/response
    • On- and off-page poetry as a nonsite
  • (Taylor Brady): Germane to this discussion: Who are "we"? I.e., who is being invited to participate? How can we design a proposal process that's fairly open and transparent, given that (I suspect) there won't be sufficient funding or time for everybody who's been involved with Nonsite over the past year to attend and present something?
    • TD: 1 year since founding document, 6 months or so since website became operative, number of events and discussions have taken place
    • TD: “we” might be anyone who has participated in this range of actions and discussions > website might be the forum to reach out initially
    • TD: some ideas re: funding
      • Individuals who could make small donations for symposium (support airfare, lodging, etc.)
      • TD could help arrange room shares, accommodation, etc.
      • January might be most convenient, given curatorial schedule at Segue Series
  • TH: could we find another descriptor than “conference” or “symposium”? (Often the temptation to default to the academic panel discussion can overwhelm these events).
  • EA: moderator present work of panelists, launches discussion
    • TH: less interested in moderator,
    • TD: how do we document this as a performance?
  • EA: “procedural” re: preparation of questions, curating participants around questions
  • TB: conversations as mutual interviews / promptings
  • RH: curricula in progress as reservoirs for promptings, preparations
    • EA: development of questions that participants want to ask each other
    • TB: discussion around disability and poetics, “finding our way in common” as model of where this might go
    • RH: emergence of a discourse rather than rehearsal of an established discourse > object hasn’t quite emerged yet
    • TB: needs to model a more distributed sense of organizational labor
    • AT: need to hear that there’s a focal point of subject / context / idea, etc.
      • Maybe we throw out 10 ideas / problems, etc. in order to focus conversation on works in common rather than individuals
    • TD: four “conversations” were intended as metadiscourses
      • Site-specific components?
      • Documentation?
  • (Rob): Opportunity to focus on redrafting the “Draft Proposal”
  • General consensus: use TD’s 4 meta-discourses as a rubric, ask people to pose questions / prompts within these areas
    • “prompts” generate discussion, attract interlocutors
    • “prompter” should be ready to take responsibility for organizing the respondents to her/his question
    • create text for initial invitation / call for participation
    • AT: might be interesting to organize each discussion around a concrete “project” or “problem”, e.g., SV’s new archive
    • Maybe the prompt is a reference to a specific project – i.e., the object poses the question
    • AT: use NYC event as the occasion for cross-project collaborations to really start taking root (RH: making submerged affinities legible)
    • TD and RH will work on draft of call, circulate to folks who attended meeting
  • Push back timeline? (maybe summer 2009, or winter 09/10)
• Website: a work in progress
  • EA: needs to be more intuitive
  • AT: “bullet pointed” or synoptic version of site / dig down into it to access more detail
  • TH: more intuitive organization
  • Online gallery: how to use this, expand image reservoir?
  • General website ideas? Suggestions?
• Collective’s mailing list (email and/or post): how to expand?
• Ongoing and emerging curricula
  • (Tanya): Archives curriculum, possible events/reading group
    • Kevin, Jocelyn, Tanya re: Spicer
    • Questions of archives as tools for legitimation (role of the state, role of the market)
    • Michelle Morton: syllabus to teach archives, could ask her to give a talk
    • AT: relation between archive and TH’s visual art practice
  • Disablement: generating traction toward curriculum from online discussion
    • TD, Wednesday night “Allegories of Disablement”
    • Robert Kocik, Patrick Durgin, Amber DiPietra have launched discussion on website
    • TD interested in transition from live art to language experiment > images of cultural and material violence, reformation of the body (works by Vito Acconci, Gins/Arakawa
    • Brenda Iijima and Kocik, Larry Eigner, Hanna Weiner > allegories
    • Potluck at 6:30, talk and discussion at 7:30
    • John Killacky
  • Amy and Elliot: discussion on 8/3 at 3pm at Elliot’s place
    • Amy will forward Robert Irwin text
    • Elliot will forward Smithson text and his own synopsis
    • Susan Schwartzenberg, Becoming Citizens

Poetic Materials wiki/workbook

To get the ball rolling on the Poetic Materials curriculum and the May 24 reading, here are a few Basinksi links:

Michael Basinski's author page on Ubuweb
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/index.html

Michael Basinski interviewed by Doug Holder, Lucid Moon Interview #5
http://www.lucidmoonpoetry.com/interviews/basinski.shtml

A couple of essays/creative statements introducing his ways of thinking @ & making poems:

The New Concrete
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/concrete.html

The Sound Pome Today Must Come to Bum Impoemivsational
http://www.ubu.com/contemp/basinski/pome.html

and some examples of hand drawn visual pomes and Sound/performance material:

Vispo Guide Image Gallery
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/basinskiimagegallery1.html

BuffFluxus performance on Radio Radio
http://15-bufffluxus-radio-radio-ny-2003-mp3-download.kohit.net/_/588174

Watch for more stuff upcoming!

Translation as Social & Aesthetic Practice

Curriculum Description:

In a world of hardening borders and contested spaces, translation means more than just the unimpeded movement from one language or another. This Nonsite Curriculum presses at the limits of what “translation” is and can do. As artists, writers, activists and citizens, we are translating all the time: between media, archives, audiences, and communities. Smooth transmission tends to be frustrated, however, often making social antagonisms legible. How do our various projects negotiate this frustration and this legibility, while activating material in the spaces between languages and cultures: not only texts, images and artifacts, but also borders, histories, documents, and even policy? And how does the translator-citizen inhabit those spaces, readying our attention, as migrating social imaginaries lead the way toward new forms of thought and action?

“Translation as Social and Aesthetic Practice” addresses these questions and the stakes they raise through presentations, plays, readings, talks and discussions.

The curriculum is open to everyone at all levels of involvement, including the planning of future events.

2008 Draft Southern Exposure grant proposal

NONSITE COLLECTIVE: Alternative Exposure Grant Proposal

Summary: Nonsite is an emerging collective of Bay Area artists, poets, activists, archivists, independent scholars and non-traditional learners whose aim is to bring a range of communities into contact and conversation across disciplines, nourishing new forms of artistic collaboration, self-organized pedagogy, and public participation. The project’s organizational framework will include exhibitions, publications, performances, colloquia, readings, archives, study groups, and hybrid events, all of which will act as points of leverage for ongoing cultural engagement and social action.

Description: The Nonsite Collective responds to a comparative lack of sustained community response to, and use of, localized aesthetic production. To remedy this gap, Nonsite works across often hardened cultural boundaries—between disciplines and communities—to nourish self-organized engagement around art, understood as a social practice. Nonsite proposes a community-based model for engaging with culture, whereby creative works and their effects are not isolated and discrete but are rather linked up, elaborated on, and archived within a web of community responses and reuses. In this model, collectively proposed “curricula” become series of art and research events and an ever-evolving archive becomes the “object.”

Forms: One main mechanism for coordination and participation in Nonsite’s activities is an on-line symposium and website, which we envision as itself an interactive collective artwork. While documenting the collective’s own activity and organizing a visual record of the project’s history, the archive also functions as a reservoir of materials for future use, and the location of further production, as well as the scene for community-building, discussion and critique. Integral to the work of growing new communities and audiences will be an open invitation to participate in this self-archiving practice. In addition to its online archive, the collective is already in the process of organizing several curricula, which include an array of activities and events. Some past events include:

1. A collaboration within the California Historical Society’s “Past Tents” exhibition, where two Nonsite Collective participants, visual artist/archivist/curator Tanya Hollis and visual artist/poet Yedda Morrison, mounted Morrison’s photography installation, Postscape #1.
2. A field trip to the local Prelinger Library to engage with another model of self-organization while participating in a convivial “drift” through the archive to assemble visual material for the collective’s “Draft Proposal” (see Support Materials and Budget).
3. An ongoing series of readings, talks, and conversations by artists and writers at Camerawork.
4. A project on the demilitarization of the Presidio that included discussions/workshops on cultural translation/transmission as well as an installation/performance of local poet Brandon Brown’s radical translation of Aeschylus’s The Persians on the Presidio’s former military bunkers.

Motivation: Nonsite’s curatorial practice of organizing its various activities as “curricula” is motivated by a desire to nourish a needed ecology for sustained socio-aesthetic engagement across projects whose relations aren’t always legible given normative divisions of cultural labor.

Impact: Nonsite’s impact will be immediate: support for local artists. Aiming to construct a missing social structure, the collective will make new interlocutors and participatory audiences available to all participants in Nonsite’s activities. In short, local outreach and community-building constitute our priorities.

Location/Timeline/Distribution: Nonsite is not anchored to any one location or venue, but rather makes use of provisional locations, both institutional (SF Camerawork), public (cafés, parks, neighborhoods,) and domestic (participants’ homes). For timeline and distribution plans, see Budget.

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BUDGET

Webhosting = $ 600.00

Currently, our website / wiki — nonsitecollective.org — is hosted ...

Publication of Nonsite Collective’s “Draft Proposal”
and “Collective Annual” = $ 1500.00

The Draft Proposal is the collective’s inaugural text. Currently, it exists on our website, and as a small xeroxed “advanced reader’s copy” (see support materials). This text is intended to undergo immediate revision as discussions around its ideas and language begin to develop. Within the year, Nonsite intends to publish a second version of its draft proposal, and a “Collective Annual” drawing on archived discussions and symposia, including visuals assembled in relation to the collective’s ongoing socio-aesthetic activity. The collective will use of a print on demand service to publish these documents, and intends to print enough copies to disseminate widely, both at its events and by US mail.

Ephemeral publications and Curricula Readers = $ 500.00

In order to make curricular readings available to all interested participants, Nonsite requires, as part of its operating costs, a budget for photocopying. This will enable the collective to produce Nonsite Collective “readers” comprised of materials related to the collective’s various researches to sustain discussion around ongoing and future collaborative projects. In addition, this budget item will fund occasional printing of event-specific materials for onsite distribution.

Calendar postcards and postage = $ 400.00

Nonsite will produce and disseminate occasional calendar postcards publicizing its events and activities. This budget item will help to fund production costs and postage.

TOTAL GRANT REQUEST = $ 3000.00

Grant History: Nonsite Collective applied for a very small grant from the Collective Foundation during the latter’s exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in May 2007, but the collective was not awarded this grant. Nonsite has received no other funding, nor has it applied for any other grants.

:Organization:DraftProposal

NONSITE COLLECTIVE: A Draft Proposal (open to revision)

“There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’”
— George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”

But what happens when the things we need to see in order to know ourselves—to know our social worlds and their interrelated environments—become “processes” accessible to us only in the most mediated ways? And what happens when the things we do see stand between ourselves and those processes as a false immediacy?

In other words, what happens when we can no longer really see these “things” at all?

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PROJECT

As the eyes
near wreck
to create
when they see
— Louis Zukofsky, “4 Other Countries”

With these general questions in mind, Nonsite Collective will work to construct a framework for community building activities and collaborative programming in an ongoing effort to locate ourselves—by way of our work—in social space where “we are first presented with an endless maze of relations and interconnections, in which nothing remains what or where it is” (Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”).

Nonsite Collective will bring a range of communities into contact and conversation across disciplines and boundaries: artists, activists, writers, scholars, and nontraditional learners. The project’s organizational framework will include performances, colloquia, readings, documentation, archives, study groups, and hybrid events, all of which will act as points of leverage for ongoing cultural engagement and social action. Coextensive with its programming, Nonsite will facilitate collective research into the relation between aesthetic practices (broadly understood as those forms of work within any situation which aim to render or alter the division between the visible and the invisible, the namable and the unnamable, the included and the excluded: public art, political activism, cartography, lyric poetry) and catastrophic forms of social organization (forms of organization which reinforce and police precisely those divisions: wage-labor, neoliberal enclosures, urban renewal, walled populations). The project will activate affinities between an array of efforts to make perceptible, apprehend, map, or narrate consequential social phenomena and occulted disasters, which otherwise remain illegible or fail to appear within dominant contexts. While the collective will engage with various forms of mapping, echo-location and narration, it will always work to stimulate direct effects apart from representation.

In a situation where resources of every sort are being expropriated, displaced or enclosed—the commons shrinking before our very eyes—the Nonsite Collective deploys its organizational and intellectual labor in an effort to make use of the world without using it. The question of use will thus remain a priority for the collective as it works to generate, activate, transform and conserve its energies and material effects within a sustainable environment of renewable resource.

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ORGANIZATION AND AIMS

The Nonsite Collective aims to nourish an ecology for collaboration within which no single activity will stand alone. No isolated objects. Specific projects will locate themselves in relation to other scenes of ongoing work. Similarly, events will function as catalyzing nodes to generate further engagement, research and discussion. Thus the potential of any particular endeavor will be nourished just as it nourishes.

Nonsite is a framework for self-organized pedagogy in which participants collaborate to create 'curricula,' or sets of inter-linked inquiries. This pedagogical dimension is explicitly affirmed and promoted in constellations of events, discussions, and documents all related, more or less loosely or determinately, to ongoing investigations.

The work of cultivating and deepening our conversations involves building a shared vocabulary and syntax for situating the links between a range of aesthetic projects, social practices, and really existing worlds. Imagine a primer, grammar or glossary that documents this evolving vocabulary, written collectively and kept in progress over time. This will be a critical part of the project’s effort to sustain an ongoing sense of social purposiveness.

Nonsite activities are not anchored to any single venue, but will be mobile, animating any number of places: public spaces, institutional settings, streets, parks and homes. These activities will reflect several forms of engagement that vary in scale, from small group research clusters to larger curated events. Moreover, Nonsite will make use of already existing social networks, programs, and series, in forms ranging from direct collaboration with other groups to ‘tagging’ various public events as part of Nonsite ‘curricula’.

Nonsite problematizes traditional divisions between artists, spectators, performers, teachers, scholars, learners, curators, writers and editors. As an endeavor that resists the disciplining of knowledges and practices, the collective is open to anyone who feels an affinity with the aims of Nonsite. In its effort to foster a range of potential projects and ideas, the collective welcomes proposals for research, events or publications with the promise to thrive in its collaborative environment.

While Nonsite situates itself in particular locations, it cultivates and nourishes exchange and collaboration with its partners in other locales. Currently, Nonsite has active affiliation in San Francisco and New York City, and is open to engaging with similar projects elsewhere.

The Nonsite Collective maintains a stance of critical autonomy toward currently available models of traditional organization. As a dynamic construction, the project actively pursues the ongoing work of theorizing itself and its concerns, and will adapt its organization and programming accordingly as it progresses, while evolving its shared languages. In this spirit, the current participants offer this document as a point of departure open for further elaboration and immediate revision.

The stakes of our engagement can only move outward from here.

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SITE AND NON-SITE AS CONCEPTS

While the collective shares varying degrees of interest in post-minimalist art, Robert Smithson’s ideas about site and 'non-site' have proved useful in our effort to build a flexible set of concepts and a syntax for relating various aesthetic projects to really existing social worlds.

Sites may appear to be immediately accessible within the grid of mediated experience and representation—they may even be thoroughly mapped there—yet 'site' remains withdrawn from active social recognition. Like the subtracted center of coherent vision in Smithson’s Enantiomorphic Chambers, sites paradoxically dis-appear. Perhaps, sites can be thought of as quasi-voids in a catastrophic situation (the catastrophe of vision “as the eyes / near wreck / to create / when they see”): while they remain fused to the structure of that situation, sites remain themselves difficult to perceive in their structures and effects. Put differently, sites might refer to events or processes whose consequences can’t be admitted to vision without threatening the coherence of everything else that appears. Sites may be scenes of occulted disaster, or the most banal forms of ongoing social erosion. In short, sites present themselves as blindspots.

Non-sites, by contrast, are invented, devised, artificial, and they bear the weight of their own visibility. In “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” Smithson refers to the non-site as “a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it //represents// an actual site […]. A ‘logical picture’ differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for.” Unlike real sites, non-sites can be abandoned at any time, whenever they cease to be useful (say, for mobilizing attention). The non-site is a formal equivalent for a real site, and as such it proposes a corrective to various forms of social invisibility. The nonsite achieves its potential to locate sites by way of formal dislocation. Non-sites are logical pictures or narrations that are abstract, even as they aim to make the concrete dimension of real sites perceptible. Non-sites are metaphors of sites that do not appear to resemble them. As metaphors, non-sites may be scenes of transport in the otherwise unnavigable space between real social disasters and our critical apprehension of them. The non-site is a model in relation to which we might get a handle on where we are, so that we can act.

Non-sites compose the strata of many forgotten events, and potentialize the transfigured memory of our future.

From non-site to site: As the negative term in a dialectic of social contradictions, non-sites exist in a process of ongoing relationships. As such, they can’t resolve themselves, just as they can’t exist in isolation. Rather, we might think of them as persisting in tension with their opposites—sites—while moving toward reintegration into living social ecologies. If the non-site is a constructed response to an illegible social process, how might we imagine or understand the conversion of non-site to site? And how would that conversion alter site’s meaning?

One aim of the Nonsite Collective is to research and activate the process of this conversion of the non-site, beginning with itself.

:Primer:Curriculum

PRIMER: Curriculum

One way to approach the question of the curriculum might be the etymological. Literally a course or path through which one runs, the word privileges a sense of movement through a spatial arrangement of experiences, inflections, way stations, etc.

That this might be a productive line of inquiry was confirmed for some Nonsite participants during the 7/14/07 visit to the Prelinger Library. The discursive dimension of spatial arrangement in their stacks, which takes shape as a poetics of adjacency and expresses a consequential development in its explicit link to experiential, counter-institutional scholarship seemed like a model worth considering as the collective works through the implications of building curricula for each other's use. One measure of this use might be the extent to which it volatilizes questions of use in our networks of social being.

The question of how we mutually organize our learning and our production(s) of knowledge(s) is thus immediately placed on the broader scale of another question: How might we imagine the produced and producing spaces of a society arranged, sequenced, made permeable to each other, so as to awaken the potential legibility of (any)one's experience of them as a knowledge and a practice?

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Other Resources

The Prelinger Library

Definitions and etymologies of 'curriculum' -- note that the word's first use in an institutional academic setting comes in Scottish universities in 1633.