Home and Away, or How to Photograph One's Memories

My group show, Home and Away, opened at the ISE Cultural Foundation at 555 Broadway in New York on Friday 4 November.

My own project is called 'Will You Ever Go Back?'. It is probably the most personal piece I've ever done, although it also aims to raise questions for any unproblematic approximation of 'personal experience' and its potential representations in art.

Anyway, here is the project description:

Joanna Zylinska has been living in the UK for nearly fifteen years. Dwelling on the question she regularly gets asked, by Brits and Poles alike, ‘Will you ever go back?’, for the project presented here she revisits her Polish home town in search of the ghosts of the past. This memory trip leads to some further questions: What does it mean to want to return home? Or not to want to, for that matter? What do we take with us when we leave? What do we leave behind? Most importantly, is there much point in talking about returning if we have not yet established whether ‘leaving home’ is ever even an option? It is the uncertainty of the response to these questions that the series presented here attempts to capture.

British theorist of Caribbean origin Stuart Hall reflects on this vexed experience of leaving home in the following terms: ‘The classic questions which every migrant faces are twofold: “Why are you here?” and “When are you going back home?” No migrant ever knows the answer to the second question until asked. Only then does she or he know that really, in the deep sense, she/he’s never going back. Migration is a one-way trip. There is no “home” to go back to. There never was’. Zylinska’s installation is an attempt to stage this impossibility of capturing something that perhaps never was, at least not in any substantial and fixed way.

In the blurriness of the landscape images and the faded colours of the interior shots, the viewer can also perhaps see the projection of their own memories and fantasies of what is often referred to, however inaccurately, as ‘communist Poland’. Thus some may see the ugliness of the concrete block architecture, joyless repression, martial law and economic crisis, while others may be able to detect outdoor play, shared Christmas meals, traces of sunny holidays in Bulgaria and Cuban oranges.

But the project also goes against photography’s representational, indexical and eidetic ambitions. As we know both from theorists of the image such as André Bazin and Roland Barthes, and from our own experiences of living with snapshots, albums and digicams, photography is typically associated with memory: it is seen as an attempt to capture and preserve memories, to reconstitute them and to both mourn their loss and celebrate their at least partial recuperation. Yet the question that underpins the ‘Will You Ever Go Back?’ project is how one can actually photograph a memory or even a fantasy of a place. What does such a meta-photographic attempt ‘at one remove’, as it were, deliver, and what does it withdraw from us?

Open Humanities Press publishes twenty-one open access Living Books About Life

I have been involved in this project called Living Books About Life for the last 7 months. It was a lot of work, but we have just launched and are feeling quite proud about it! I have a book titled Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics in the series.

LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in its series Living Books About Life.

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access.  On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles.  On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.

These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- together with interactive maps and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing.  It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’

Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections:  Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

Contact the Living Books about Life series editors:
Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall
E: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk
E: j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk
E: c.s.birchall@kent.ac.uk
W: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.

The cut in photography

My Goldsmiths colleague Sarah Kember and I are just putting finishing touches to this chapter on photographic mediations. It is part of a book we’re currently completing for the MIT Press, titled Life after New Media. If, as Susan Sontag has it, ‘To live is to be photographed’, then, contrary to its more typical association with the passage of time and death, photography can be understood more productively in terms of vitality, as a process of differentiation and life-making. It is in its efforts to capture the flow of life -- beyond singular photographs’ success or failure at representing this or that -- that photography’s vital forces are activated.

Photography for us is therefore an active process of cutting through the flow of mediation on a number of levels: perceptive, material, technical and conceptual. The recurrent moment of the cut -- one we know not just from photography but also from film-making, sculpture, writing, etc. -- is both a technique (something that is, or something that is taking place) and an imperative (as evidenced by the command: ‘Cut!’). Yet if we must inevitably cut, and if the cut functions as a key component of any creative, artistic, and especially photographic practice, then what does it mean to cut well?

The practice of cutting is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becoming-different-from-the-world. It therefore has an ontological significance: it is a way of shaping the universe, and of shaping ourselves in it. Deleuze and Guattari claim that a concept, any concept -- which is for them an attempt to find a solution to a problem or a different way of looking at things -- is a ‘matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting’ (What Is Philosophy?, 16). The process of cutting is one of the most fundamental processes through which we emerge as ‘selves’ as we engage with matter and attempt to give it (and ourselves) form. Cutting reality into small pieces -- with our eyes, our bodily and cognitive apparatus, our language, our memory -- we enact separation and relationality as the two dominant forces of material locatedness in time.

Photography is particularly well predisposed to take on this task of incessant 'cutting and cross-cutting'. In this, it produces life forms, rather than merely recording them.

To begin with... aftermedia afterthoughts

Starting a blog in mid-2011 may seem like a case of seriously bad timing, like turning up to a party when all the cool kids have moved on to another location or joining Facebook when the media-savvy are all ready to join Google + (or a pub discussion group). Yet here I am, a media theorist whose object of study - the so called ‘new media’ - has always been somehow untimely, trying to have a go at writing my afterthoughts, or aftermedia, from the frontlines of culture, philosophy and art, in a slightly different format from my regular academic writing...

Since it is the middle of summer for us UK academics (although for those of us who have actually remained in the UK this July doesn't feel very summery at all), I thought I’d start from something that makes me feel a little warmer while also bringing up that whole issue of being 'out of time' that's currently playing on my mind: Cuba.

After my recent travels across the island, shockingly beautiful yet somewhat uncanny in its mixture of UNESCO-led renovation and what looks like irreversible dilapidation, I was reminded of Alain Badiou’s comments made to Peter Hallward in his 1998 interview, 'Politics and philosophy’ (Angelaki, 3:3,113-133):

I respect Cuba as a figure of resistance, for we should respect all the forms of resistance to the hegemony of the global market, and to its principal organiser: American imperialism. But Cuba provides singular testimony of an outmoded conception of politics. And so Cuba will have, unavoidably, very serious problems, internal problems, because it bears witness, with incontestable grandeur, to a figure of the Party-State that belongs to another political age. Everything that exists is born, develops and comes to an end. After which we move on to something else.

Here are a few images of Cuban not-so-new media:

You can view more here.