Bibliography
Command Performances (Boston Globe)Rhizome: Just Obey Your Ads
Boston Globe: All over the map
Weekly Dig on the Institute
Article @ Geoplace.com about the Institute
42 or 363 Definitions of Cartography
August 01, 2005
Command Performances (Boston Globe)
By Cate McQuaid | July 31, 2005
Advertising is so pervasive in contemporary society that many people just ignore it. Not The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a collective of artists whose "Corporate Commands" project takes to the streets in Greater Boston and beyond to throw a spotlight on the marketing ploys we've become inured to.
The artists, dressed in white lab coats and calling themselves researchers, gather once a month in front of a billboard, then enact the ad's explicit directive: Nike's "Just do it." Sovereign Bank's "Enjoy life." Cingular's "Rollover." While some members of the group roll over (in the case of Cingular), others interview passersby about what they're watching, and about the meaning of "rollover." Most recently, they've been working with Roxbury-based arts organizations the Berwick Research Institute and Arts in Progress, taking teens to the streets to decode ads.
"They're asking us, in a subversive way, to reconsider these things everywhere in our environment," says Leslie Brown, curator at the BU-based Photographic Resource Center, who receives the group's regular e-mails announcing their "microperformances."
The collective aims to take small actions in order to instigate larger ones. "A million small influences make a change," says Savic Rasovic, one of the collective's instigators. Anywhere from five to 10 artists show up at any given action.
The group follows up each performance with an "expedition" through the city, seeking out and documenting more corporate commands, which they then catalogue on their website (ikatun.org/institute/infinitelysmallthings). Anyone who takes note of a commanding ad is welcome to log on and add it to the list.
Rasovic says people respond differently according to the space where the performance takes place. "In a mall, they assume we work for (the corporation)," he says. "On the streets, it's a different story; people see wackos like us all the time."
Rasovic says the group wants to parse the messages of billboard advertising, which often tries to portray following the corporation's orders as an act of hip rebellion.
"It's not a rebellion," Rasovic observes dryly. "It's a marketing construct."
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company
Posted by Pirun at 12:48 PM
May 02, 2005
Rhizome: Just Obey Your Ads
The chipper, poignant and irksome imperatives launched from all corners of daily routine by competing companies permeate our commutes, grocery lists, and vernaculars. Current mantras like 'Laugh More. Cry More. Experience More.' (Blockbuster), 'Try Being More Of A Woman!' (Coty Perfume) and 'Get the Most Incredible Memory Ever.' (Dell) make big demands or promises to their targets!
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, based in and out of Boston, endeavors to compile authoritative research on this topic, comprising a project called The International Database of Corporate Commands. In the opinion that these commands function within society and public consciousness on a nano level that is virtual and powerful, the white-lab-coated Institute invites researchers from all over the world to upload documentation of corporate commands to their online database.
By gathering them all in one place and enacting certain slogans in real spaces--a recent flash-mob-meets-teach-in 'microperformance' at a Cingular store produced 10 minutes of literal 'Roll(ing)over'--the institute hopes to produce a better understanding of the ramifications of constant commercial programming.
Kevin McGarry
http://www.rhizome.org
Posted by Pirun at 11:50 AM
April 15, 2005
Boston Globe: All over the map
Where are you?
That question used to have a simple answer: I'm in the kitchen. But spurred by sophisticated technology, such as global positioning systems, cellphones, surveillance cameras, and the virtual world of the Internet, the definition of place, and of the body in space, has gotten more layered. Now there are many answers: I'm in the kitchen, at a particular longitude and latitude; reading a blog; on the phone with Grandma. In short -- I'm all over the place.
Artists are leaping on this new understanding of space. They're looking at a dispersal of self over wired and wireless connections. They're using the newly accessible precision of GPS technology to reinvent the landscape.
You may think of a landscape as a painting on canvas with a horizon line. Think again: The new landscape has gone three-dimensional, and you're standing in the middle of it. And it's not just what surrounds you; it's also in your head. It's a map that charts trends, emotions, and the neglected and hidden parts of society.
"We're experimenting with real life, real people, real context, real situations," says Catherine D'Ignazio, an artist who is involved in a number of mapping collectives and who has written an article about the phenomenon in Cartographic Perspectives, a scholarly journal.
Doing performances in the street, or making work that leads people through the landscape, harks directly back to the Situationists, a Parisian movement of artists and social activists that stretched from 1957 to 1972. They dubbed this kind of work "psychogeography."
Today, thanks to new locative media and a rising interest in social issues among many artists, psychogeographic works are exploding around the world. A major US instigator this time is Glowlab, a New York collaborative founded in 2002 that stages and sponsors a variety of projects. Glowlab put together an annual conference called Conflux, which next month moves to Providence to merge with a similar conference, Provflux, under the auspices of the Providence Initiative for Psychogeographic Studies. In the Boston area, several upcoming exhibitions and performances, many of them tied to the Cyberarts Festival (April 22 through May 8), highlight this kind of work.
"Boston is a hotbed of psychogeography," says Leslie Brown, who has curated "Land/Mark," a mapping show that's at the Photographic Resource Center. "You don't know where any road goes."
A recent Boston performance by PIPS member J. Gabriel Lloyd, documented on Glowlab's website (www.glowlab.com), illustrated Brown's point. He came to town to find a high school friend who lives here. Lloyd didn't know any more than that. So he wandered the streets, asking people if they knew her, following wispy leads. He didn't find her, but remarkably he did come across another friend from high school.
"Artists are at a point of re-examining the urban context in a very detailed, finite way," Lloyd says. "With technology, everyone around us is speeding up, sharing information all over the world. These works are about slowing down, finding lost places in the city."
D'Ignazio, who started out writing software, is a founding member of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things and iKatun, two Boston-based artists' collectives that are collaborating on "Corporate Command," a kind of ongoing street theater project that puts under the microscope the way advertising aims to influence society. Every Friday, D'Ignazio, in the spirit of a flash mob, sends out an e-mail to a list of 500 with the next day's plans.
Each Saturday at 2 p.m., the group dons lab coats and goes into the city to locate the billboard D'Ignazio's e-mail has specified and obey its command. At a Cingular ad, for instance, they got on the ground for a "rollover." In the ATM vestibule of a Sovereign Bank, they gathered with wine and music to "Enjoy life." Outside Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, they brought sleeves, pant legs, and more to "Build your own suit." They engage passersby and invite them to share in the fun, telling them they're doing research.
And then there's Yellow Arrow, an amorphous international group that will exhibit its work in the PRC show. Members place yellow stickers with black arrows, like road signs, throughout a city. Each is marked with a code and a cellphone number. Make the call, punch in the code, and you'll get a text message about the site marked by that arrow.
"Small things like this re-energize your personal environment," says Brown. "Yellow Arrow makes an annotated environment. You see it and think, 'I need to pay attention. Something else is going on here.' "
In the South End's "Sifting the Inner Belt," an ongoing performance and outreach project, artists work to knit together community gardens and their surroundings.
In works like these, part of the aim is to democratize art. One democratizing factor occurred in May 2000, when the Clinton administration made highly accurate GPS, previously available in the United States only to the military, open to the public.
While many might feel excluded from conceptual art, these artists are as likely to call their work research as art.
"I've been thinking about performance art as methodology for research, to use it functionally," says Hiroko Kikuchi, one of the instigators of ''Sifting the Inner Belt."
"If you identify yourself as an artist, you might be building walls," says Teri Rueb, whose GPS-based walk through Boston Common, "Itinerant," will be part of the Cyberarts Fest. "Research is one way of opening a dialogue. People understand that they are the subjects of research."
In the same vein, individual artists often remain anonymous under the umbrella of the collective. That way, they discard the identity of the auteur, which can be off-putting to people outside the art world.
By refusing to identify themselves, these artists subvert authority. "Think about maps inscribing authority on the land, political and cultural meaning," says Brown. By remaining anonymous, the artists often try to hand the map-making back to the people -- whether the people know it or not. Yellow Arrow calls its work "MAAP -- a Massively Authored Artistic Project."
Rueb's work doesn't involve a performance -- except perhaps that of her audience. At GPS coordinates around the Common, the GPS equipment an audience member carries sparks different audio recordings. Some are ambient, some are Rueb's own reflections on a nomadic life and on navigating the often confusing streets of Boston, some are texts culled from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The audience member wears headphones to hear these snippets, and so the art takes place not only on the Common but inside the audience member's head.
"Artists have turned to locative media to make people look and listen," says Rueb. "There's an increasing awareness of an invisible landscape -- like Hertzian space, invisible layers of frequencies and wavelengths. It's different than the visual construction of space. Hertzian space and sound bleed and blur those boundaries; an interior monologue becomes part of the art."
Margot Kelley's contribution to the PRC show documents a new phenomenon known as geocaching, which flared up after GPS became more accessible in 2000. Soon, people were planting little treasures in the landscape and posting their coordinates on the Internet. Today, Kelley estimates, a million people take on these scavenger hunts around the world, with 17,000 boxes, known as geocaches, out there. Her book on the subject, "Local Treasures: Geocaching Across America," is due out in the fall.
"Geocaching creates a new kind of collaborative map, not based on the needs maps are usually made by," Kelley says. "A different and potentially healthful way of making maps."
As we implement new technology, Kelley suggests, we reorient to and reinvent our world. The more objective the technology, like GPS's gridding of the entire world, the more significant our own subjective experience becomes.
"It's not just that GPS is available," she says. "A GPS is the ultimate in illusions of objectivity: We know the coordinates, so we know where we are. But where arewe?"
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.
Posted by Pirun at 12:39 PM
March 16, 2005
Weekly Dig on the Institute
Whackjobs in white coats are coming to mess you up
Chris Haire
Call it instinct, but when approached by a group of people dressed in white lab coats, the average man or woman gets uncomfortable. Visibly so. They stumble backwards like they've just received an uppercut from King Hippo. Their eyes go wide like a suburban jog zombie caught in the headlights of a careening Cadillac Escalade. I know this because I've seen it in action.
It is a cold Friday afternoon, and I am on an outing with the men and women of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, an art collective whose members are equal parts social scientists, culture jammers and street performers. They are dressed in white lab coats, and they wear latex gloves. The urban landscape is their lab, and you are their lab rats. Their mission: to seek out and document the nearly subliminal ways in which advertising affects our lives. And today that involves cataloging “corporate commands,” the vague, sometimes life-affirming self-help advertising mandates that seek to influence the behavior of the masses. Commands like “Just Do It,” “Have It Your Way,” and “Obey Your Thirst.” These commands can be found virtually anywhere-on bus stop advertisements, discarded fast food bags, store windows ...
“We've been going around collecting these commands that we find in public space,” says the Institute's Catherine D'Ignazio. “A lot of them are highly abstract, which is why they are functional so well.”
However, the group doesn't just collect corporate commands. They use the commands to guide their way through the streets of Boston. Today, the group is taking a journey from the Boston Public Library to the corporate headquarters of Citizens Bank in Providence, RI. Of course, the group won't literally be walking to Providence, although they will be using a MapQuest-style printout to guide their way. This is where the corporate commands come into play. “Instead of actually using miles, we will convert that to the amount of corporate commands we need to collect along the way,” says Savic Rosovic, an Institute member. “There are some that are just one command, but there is a route that actually takes 13 miles I think, or 16, so we'll have to collect 16 corporate commands and we'll keep walking until we do so.”
Because the members of the Institute use a map directing them from Boston to Providence to navigate Beantown streets, the group has no idea where their destination, the corporate headquarters, will be. The result: a truly spontaneous journey. “If we actually find obstacles-a business or fence, something that we can actually go through or over-we will attempt to do that. We won't just take a shortcut and take a side street unless we really have to,” Rosovic says.
After collecting all of their commands and arriving at the corporate headquarters, which in this case ends up being an intersection in Southie, the group puts the message of the corporate command in action, recording how they attempted to follow the command and how the public reacted to their actions. “What happens when you try to take them very literally and seriously?” D'Ignazio asks. Today, that command is Citizens Bank's “Pay Virtually Anyone.” For virtually anything, is implied.
But what, in this case, will the group attempt to buy? Theoretically, it needs to be something that is not commonly bought or sold. D'Ignazio says, “If [Savic] is smoking a cigarette and needs a cigarette lit, he could pay somebody to do that. Or if you're bored and you want to hear a story from somebody, you could pay them to tell you a story.”
After we arrive at the, um, corporate headquarters for Citizens Bank, D' Ignazio tries out the corporate command for the first time. Unfortunately, the lady she has approached isn't buying. Catherine has offered the lady one dollar to let us in the lobby of her apartment complex so we can get out of the cold for just a moment. The lady is iffy on the whole transaction. Maybe it's the shock value of being approached by a half-dozen people in lab coats. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Catherine initially asked the lady if we could see her apartment. It doesn't matter. She doesn't want to play along. She's freaked out.
Following a thorough explanation of the group's research activities, the woman relents, letting the members of the Institute into the lobby to warm themselves. However, she refuses to accept the dollar. It's her loss, but it's the Institute's gain. The woman's reaction is recorded, becoming another line in a growing volume of research.
Currently, the Institute is displaying its research on the web at www.corporatecommands.com. During the Boston Cyberarts Festival in April, the public will be able to see the results of the group's research at Space 200 in Fanueil Hall. The laboratory will be open April 22 to May 29, with an open house on May 18 at 7pm. The Institute will also be hosting weekly expeditions each Saturday at 2pm, which are open to the public. For more information, visit the Corporate Commands website or call 617.501.2441.
Posted by Pirun at 10:59 AM
January 16, 2005
Article @ Geoplace.com about the Institute
CRITICAL GIS: Examining the Art of Mapping
BY JEREMY W. CRAMPTON
Jeremy W. Crampton is a professor at Georgia State University.
EXCERPT:
Is cartography art or science? This is an age-old question that's undergoing
re-examination by a series of cartographically minded artists. It seems that
the swing toward science is being complemented by an emerging swing toward
art.
An example is Kanarinka, a Boston-based artist whose social activities hover
almost equally between the virtual and the physical (Kanarinka is an online
name that has become her regular name). At a recent talk to North American
Cartographic Information Society members in Portland, Maine, Kanarinka,
co-director of the nonprofit collective iKatun (www.ikatun.org), described
three interesting geo-artistic projects that challenge our way of thinking
about time and space. The projects could be called "psychogeographies."
According to geographer David Pinder, these psychogeographies...
FULL ARTICLE: http://www.geoplace.com/uploads/FeatureArticle/0501cg.asp
FULL ARTICLE
CRITICAL GIS
Examining the Art of Mapping
BY JEREMY W. CRAMPTON
Jeremy W. Crampton is a professor at Georgia State University. He can be reached via e-mail at jcrampton@gsu.edu
Is cartography art or science? This is an age-old question that's undergoing re-examination by a series of cartographically minded artists. It seems that the swing toward science is being complemented by an emerging swing toward art.
An example is Kanarinka, a Boston-based artist whose social activities hover almost equally between the virtual and the physical (Kanarinka is an online name that has become her regular name). At a recent talk to North American Cartographic Information Society members in Portland, Maine, Kanarinka, co-director of the nonprofit collective iKatun (www.ikatun.org), described three interesting geo-artistic projects that challenge our way of thinking about time and space. The projects could be called "psychogeographies."
According to geographer David Pinder, these psychogeographies are about more than the banality of not finding one's way, but are a deliberate disorientation and perhaps reorientation toward the alienating city. They owe much to the Situationists of the 1950s and 1960s.
Going Dutch
In one such project, participants were invited to explore New York City using a map of Copenhagen. The artists claimed that "the maps of central New York and Copenhagen are surprisingly identical ... if we look at the two cities as innumerable movable layers that can be imposed above or below other layers ... [it is] perfect for an investigation in the field of placement and re(dis)placement." (Perhaps not quite what the GIS manuals have in mind when they write about map overlays.)
Another project focuses on the very small. The Analysis of Infinitely Small Things (www.ikatun.org/k/infinitelysmallthings) is named after a real work on geometry. By drawing attention to the artifacts and objects that are normally below our radar screens, the artists think we might be able to refocus on the city or at least see it through fresh eyes.
The project includes a guidebook and a research kit. The guidebook is based on the geometry text but in a total reinterpretation. For example, the text "find any reflected ray" becomes an instruction to "capture" light being reflected in a sample packet. Another example was "find a table," which became all sorts of found objects sitting on tables.
Fleeting Funerals
Another project was called "funerals for a moment," which commemorates the trivial, unsung moments we experience every day, such as hearing someone sneeze or a man yell out. The idea is to hold a "funeral" for these fleeting, irrecoverable moments at the exact space they occurred.
A group of mourners visits the spot and carries out the wishes of the person who experienced the moment. This might involve a moment of reflection or yelling. We mourn the major things in life such as someone dying, but aren't these major things just comprised of many smaller things? Isn't it a question of scale?
Noticing the Unnoticeable
Many of these projects revisit themes from the humanistic geography of the 1970s. I'm reminded of Denis Wood's short essay on scale in the book Humanistic Geography. He discussed going to the store and buying a carpet. While you're in the store, the carpet seems large, perhaps too large for your room. Then when you get it home and throw it down, it seems to become all too small--until you drop your contact lens on it, and it becomes a dauntingly vast landscape as you search on hands and knees.
This kind of art is fun, and that's important, especially if you are teaching mapping and GIS to students. It gets people to establish a new relationship with the spaces and geographies around them, and perhaps notice the almost unnoticeable.
But art also can be serious--an intervention, a call to action or a protest. Picasso's Guernica is just one example of an artist finding political expression through art. The recent upsurge of "cartographic art" is indicative of some emergent need to deal with the spaces of our lives.
These mapping projects may force us to change our way of thinking about maps. Instead of a map being a document that says "this is how the world is," we see that maps are (also? instead?) documents that say "this is how the world is not ... or how it could be."
Posted by kanarinka at 11:15 PM
September 12, 2004
42 or 363 Definitions of Cartography
A book published by the Institute for Infinitely Small Things in collaboration spurse's project "MAPPING THE WORKING COASTS:
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WORKING COASTS OF MAINE".
Contents
Definitions #1 – 42: “The Limits of Cartography” compiled by Catherine D’Ignazio for The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, Summer, 2004
Definitions #43 - 363: “Definitions of the word 'map', 1649-1996” compiled by J.H. Andrews in the journal Cartographica , vol. xxxiii, 1998.
Schedule
This book will be part of a mobile library on the Vessel Sunbeam V during spurse's project "MAPPING THE WORKING COASTS:
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WORKING COASTS OF MAINE".
The vessel will be at various locations on the coast of Maine between Tuesday, Sept. 14, to Sunday, Sept. 19.
See spurse's website for details.
Excerpt from spurse's site:
mapping the working coasts: The coast of Maine is undergoing a series of paradoxical changes. People are moving to the coast because of the lure of what it represents – a lifestyle of fishing, small communities, and the immediacy of the ocean. But in doing so, the viability of a coastal life interdependent with the working water is undermined. The existence of a complex dynamic historical relation between communities, both human and otherwise, that cross from land to sea and back is at risk of being lost. What is this complex actuality? What is this space of dynamic and contested alliances between human communities, the land, marine ecosystems, the ocean itself, global economic forces, and other forces? This contested historical moment produces an opportunity to rethink and reimagine the "working coasts"
Posted by kanarinka at 09:04 AM | Comments (1)