— cw

Print & Demand #2 at the The NY Art Book Fair

November 7, 2010: The NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave., Long Island City, NY

The second in an ongoing series of conversations exploring how print culture is being changed by the manifold forms of online publication, and how public spaces are being constituted around those forms. Caleb Waldorf, Triple Canopy’s creative director will moderate a discussion about the role played by design in shaping digital forms of publication: How are certain tropes of print publication—and the reading and viewing experiences they have engendered—being translated for new media (while others are being jettisoned entirely)? How has the shift from graphic design to user design, with its focus on interaction and interface, changed the way publications function? Participants include James Goggin, design director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and principle of Practise; Jiminie Ha, an independent designer and founder of W/—— project space in Chinatown; and Rob Giampietro, a designer, writer, and principal at Project Projects. The conversation will be open to the audience.

2010 UCIRA STATE OF THE ARTS CONFERENCE AT UCSD

Sean Dockray, Matteo Pasquinelli, Jason E. Smith and I will kick of the conference with a panel called There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing…

Conference Description:

The last two years have witnessed an unprecedented crisis on college campuses around the world, as the social compact that governed higher  education in the United States and Europe for the past half century  has begun to collapse. Universities from London to Sussex, from Athens  to Vienna, and from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, have experienced protests, occupations, walkouts and other actions directed against the  encroaching privatization of public education. This crisis has been  particularly acute at the University of California, the flagship  public university system in the United States.  Dramatic funding  cutbacks, layoffs, furloughs, and fee hikes have been combined with an upsurge in the sort of racist and sexist attacks that often accompany  periods of economic turmoil, as the perception of dwindling resources  leads to the predictable search for scapegoats.

This complex mix of  economic, cultural and social forces places particular pressure on the  status of the arts within research universities, and the very notion  of the university itself as a haven for liberal arts education. New  tensions have opened up, between the arts and humanities and  engineering and science, and between public and private funding  sources and priorities, even as new solidarities have emerged, among  and between staff and faculty, graduates and undergraduates,  disciplines and departments. This conference seeks to address the following questions:

• How can the arts respond to this crisis?
• What new alliances can we form both within the university campus and the communities beyond its walls?
• What alternative economies exist for the support of artistic research?
• What new pedagogical models and new forms of knowledge production can the arts offer as our educational  mission is both threatened and, potentially, transformed?
• And what  forms of creative practice have been mobilized by the protests,  walkouts and occupations?
• As the campus itself becomes a field of  symbolic resistance and contestation, from swastikas at UC Davis to  Klan hoods at UC San Diego, what are the limits and the political  implications of freedom of expression?

Schedule

Embarrassment 1: Vulnerability

Liz Glynn and I are collaborating on a book (with contributions from many others) for an exhibition on the concept/theme of embarrassment at Gallery KM in Los Angeles that opens on December 4th (Part II opens on January 11th).

The Public School

On 4 December I’ll be facilitating the next Specters of Los Angeles on Echo Park Communism. The following week, on 11 December, I’ll be facilitating the final meeting of the semiotext(e) class in which will be reading the The Agony of Power by Jean Baudrillard.

Last but not least, Triple Canopy 2.0 will be relaunching this weekend with new articles from Issue 10 to be published next week!