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Essay: ‘”Where Is The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information”: Speculative Research and Digital Methodologies’ (Sternberg Press, 2020)

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How creative practices are modifying the ways we think about knowledge production and research in the cultural sector and in academia.

Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research explores new curatorial and artistic practices that contribute to the expansion of institutional, practice-based, and collaborative research methods. Offering an overview of how creative practices are modifying the ways we think about both knowledge production and research in the cultural sector and in academia, this publication outlines new research methodologies and strategies for de-universalizing and de-neutralizing the rigid epistemic schemata of inherited disciplines.

Designed as a platform of aesthetic and intellectual exchange, the speculative interface of cultural practices has radically changed the way we consider how research qualities in curatorial and artistic practices have developed. Institution as Praxis aims to identify and advocate for a multiplicity of practices taking place across the cultural sector that not only engage with the quest to deliver cultural activities (e.g. exhibitions, events), but generate new modes of knowledge production and research in the field of visual culture, art, and the curatorial.

Contributors
Bill Balaskas, Michael Birchall, Mélanie Bouteloup, Carolina Cerón, Anthony Downey, Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum, Joasia Krysa, Vali Mahlouji, Je Yun Moon, Andrea Phillips, Emily Pringle, Carolina Rito, ruangrupa (farid rakun and Leonhard Bartolomeus), Nora Sternfeld, Sian Vaughan

To read full essay, please click here

To purchase a copy of Institution as Praxis, click here

2020/02/20: Algorithmic Anxieties: Trevor Paglen in conversation with Anthony Downey, Digital War, Vol. 1, No. 1.

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In September 2019, I met with Trevor Paglen as he prepared to present a new project at the Barbican Curve in London. “From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’” explored the images—so-called datasets—that are used to train algorithms. In a subsequent far-reaching conversation, recorded at the Barbican Centre on 26 September 2019, Paglen presented an extended overview of the ideas behind this work, observing how artificial intelligence and “machine learning” utilise datasets to recognise different objects and, more problematically, produce classificatory systems for “recognising” individuals. For full interview, see here.

Cite this article: Paglen, T., Downey, A. Algorithmic anxieties: Trevor Paglen in conversation with Anthony Downey. Digital War (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42984-020-00001-2

Download full interview here: PDF

Download edited extract of Trevor’s presentation and the interview: PDF

2019/15/11: Book Launch: Research/Practice 03: Larissa Sansour: Heirloom, Copenhagen Contemporary, December 12, 2019

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12.12.2019

Copenhagen Contemporary is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition Heirloom by the Danish-Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour. On the occasion of the opening, there will be free admission, and CC will be serving a glass of wine when the exhibition opens.

The evening starts with an Art Talk, where you can experience the artist in conversation with curator Nat Muller. We will also present the book Larissa Sansour: Heirloom edited by Anthony Downey, which focuses on the research and preparations for the exhibition.

Afterwards, the director of CC, Marie Nipper and chair of the Project Support Committee for Visual Arts, Lisette Vind Ebbesen, will give their welcome speeches, before we open the doors to the exhibition and DJ’s Atusa and Angel Wei will create the soundtrack of the evening. Vinhanen will serve you at the bar.

We look forward to welcoming you!

Program

17.00: Art Talk with Larissa Sansour and Nat Muller along with the book launch of Larissa Sansour: Heirloom
18.15: Welcome greeting by director of CC, Marie Nipper and chair of the Project Support Committee for Visual Arts, Lisette Vind Ebbesen
18.30: The exhibition opens & DJ’s Atusa and Angel Wei
21.00: Thank you for a great evening

For full details of show and book launch go to here.

For further details fo book, see here.

2019/10/30: Book Publication: Research/Practice 01: Michael Rakowitz: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)

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Research/Practice 01: Michael Rakowitz: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)

Editor: Anthony Downey

Michael Rakowitz’s project I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (2009–ongoing) charts the historical context and aftermath of a concert that never happened. In 2009 Leonard Cohen was scheduled to perform in Israel. Because of increasing pressure from pro-Palestinian voices to dissuade Cohen from performing in Israel, a twin event in Palestine was organized. Amid protests and claims that the latter concert was a token show of solidarity and a hollow attempt to appease demonstrators, a cultural boycott of Israel was put in place and the concert was canceled. But the story, as Rakowitz’s work demonstrates, did not end there. Conjoining the cultural histories of Palestine and Israel with the ethical dilemmas faced by performers under the conditions of a boycott, this volume, the first in the Research/Practice series, brings to light the research that went into this multifaceted work and plots the future arc of its trajectory.

Edited by Anthony Downey, Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts of projects, the series examines the interdisciplinary methods that artists employ in their practices. Each volume endeavors to ask: In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to research, what forms of innovative knowledge do artists produce?

For full details of the volume see here: MIT Press: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze

 

2019/10/30: Book Publication: Research/Practice 03: Larissa Sansour Heirloom (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)

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Larissa Sonsour Heirloom Cover
Research/Practice 03: Larissa Sansour Heirloom (Sternberg Press: Berlin and New York, 2019)
Editor: Anthony Downey
This volume includes an essay by Nat Muller and an in-depth interview between Sansour and Lindsey Moore.

 

Heirloom documents the development of the artistic research for Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s project for the Danish Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. It explores how recurrent notions in Sansour’s oeuvre, such as memory, trauma, identity, epigenetics, and belonging, intertwine with the discourses of science fiction and environmental disaster narratives. The volume also examines what it means to produce work from within contested geographies, specifically considering how, through research and the process of production, the artist grapples with complex issues of national representation. In keeping with the focus in this series on the research that informs the elaboration of an artist’s work over time, the material for this publication has been collated in parallel with its development over the past year.

Edited by Anthony Downey, Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of experimental knowledge systems. Drawing on preliminary material such as diaries, notebooks, audiovisual content, digital and social media, informal communications, and abandoned drafts of projects, the series examines the interdisciplinary methods that artists employ in their practices. Each volume endeavors to ask: In their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to research, what forms of innovative knowledge do artists produce?

For full details of the volume see here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/heirloom

For full details of the book launch see here: https://copenhagencontemporary.org/en/event/cc-opening-larissa-sansour/

 

2019/10/23: Book Publication: Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Sternberg Press, 2020)

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Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (Sternberg Press, 2020)
Editor: Anthony Downey
Associate Editor: Els Roelandt
 
Investigating the economic value of one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most lucrative exports (namely, poverty), Renzo Martens’ provocative film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) remains a landmark intervention into debates about contemporary art’s relationship to exploitative economies. Throughout Critique in Practice, contributors explore the work’s legacy and how it relates to the politics of representation, uses of the documentary form, art criticism, the deployment of humanitarian aid, the impact of extractive forms of globalized capital, and the neoliberal politics of decolonization. The unconventional representation of acute immiseration throughout Enjoy Poverty generated far-from-resolved disputes about how deprivation is portrayed within Western mainstream media and through global cultural institutions. Using a range of approaches, this volume reconsiders that portrayal and how the film’s reception led Martens to found a long term program, Human Activities.
 
Contributors: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Pieter Van Bogaert, Jelle Bouwhuis, JJ Charlesworth, T.J. Demos, Angela Dimitrakaki, Anthony Downey, Charles Esche, Dan Fox, Matthias De Groof, Xander Karskens, J.A. Koster, Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, Suhail Malik, Renzo Martens, Nina Möntmann, René Ngongo, Paul O’Kane, Laurens Otto, Nikolaus Perneczky, Kolja Reichert, Els Roelandt, Ruben De Roo, ka˛rî’ka˛chä seid’ou, Gregory Sholette, Sanne Sinnige, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Emilia Terracciano, Nato Thompson, Niels Van Tomme, Frank Vande Veire, Eyal Weizman, Vivian Ziherl, and Artur Zmijewski, among others.
 
This volume is co-published by Human Activities, KASK / School of Arts (Ghent), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), and Sternberg Press (Berlin). It is supported by Galerie Fons Welters, KASK / School of Arts, Mondriaan Fund, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.
 
For full details of the volume see here

To read Anthony Downey’s introduction to this volume, see here

To read Anthony Downey’s essay, “Is There a Right Way to Do Wrong: Enjoy Poverty and the Case Against Ethics”, see here

 
 

2019/09/30: Public Talk: “Performing Rights”, Institute for Global Prosperity, UCL, London, 14 November, 2019

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Performing Rights: Contemporary Art, the Refugee Condition, and the Alibi of Engagement  

Professor Anthony Downey

Contemporary artists  are increasingly engaging with some of the most pressing issues facing our world today, from globalisation, migration and citizenship to conflict, sustainability, gentrification, and social activism. Anthony Downey will discuss the implications of this engagement in relation to human rights and conditions of displacement. If the disavowal or absence of legal and political representation is a feature of being a refugee, then what happens, he will ask, when artistic representation is inserted into this already compromised regime of visibility?  In an all too amenable substitution that can often reconfirm the absence of legal accountability, is it possible that cultural forms of representation are compensating for—if not replacing—the very systems and procedures of political and legal responsibility that are being denied refugees in the first place? Who, we need to ask thereafter, really benefits from the work of art?

To book tickets, see here.

 

Date And Time

Thu, 14 November 2019

16:00 – 18:00 GMT

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Location

Roberts Building, G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming LT

UCL Engineering Front Building, Torrington Place

London

WC13 7JE

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2019/08/22: Public Talk: Trevor Paglen in conversation with Anthony Downey, Barbican Centre, London, 26 September, 2019

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To coincide with the new Curve commission From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’, artist Trevor Paglen will be in conversation with writer and academic Anthony Downey.

Touching on themes of secrecy, surveillance and state, Paglen’s new installation of some 30,000 photographs invites a critical consideration of how we teach artificial intelligence to “see” and perceive the world, revealing the powerful, and often hidden, forces at play.

To book tickets, see here.

 

2019/05/10: New Book Series: Research/Practice, ed. Anthony Downey (Sternberg Press/MIT, 2019)

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What is meant by artistic research and how does it contribute to the formation of experimental knowledge systems? Drawing on material not usually given precedence in relation to the finished artwork, including diaries, notebooks, digital and social media, informal communications, and other miscellany, Research/Practice examines the inter- and cross-disciplinary research methodologies that artists employ in the development of their practices. Expanding on the formal and informal components that were involved in the evolution of diverse methods and strategies, as this series develops it will offer an accessible and timely enquiry into a core question: in their often speculative and yet purposeful approach to generating research, what forms of critical knowledge do artists produce?

Published by Sternberg Press

ISBN: 9783956794766160

pp. | 4.75 in x 7 in

90 color illus., 30 b&w illus.

Volume 01: Michael Rakowitz: I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze

Editor: Anthony Downey

Essay: Anthony Downey

Volume 02: Heba Y. Amin: The General’s Stork

Editor: Anthony Downey

Interview: Laura Poitras and Heba Y Amin

Volume 03: Larissa Sansour: Heirloom (Published on the occasion of the 58th Venice Biennale)

Editor: Anthony Downey

Essay: Nat Muller

For more information on upcoming titles, see here.

2019/04/10: Keynote: “The Future of the Networked Image: Digital Archives in a ‘Post Truth’ Age”, IMMA Summer School, Dublin, June 11, 2019

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IMMA’s Summer School 2019 will feature talks and workshops by a range of national and international artists, theorists and critics who will focus on the connections between art and politics. Applications are invited from students of all ages and disciplines enrolled in an educational institution in Ireland in 2019. This week-long intensive programme, featuring talks and workshops by a range of national and international artists, theorists and critics, will focus on the connections between art and politics. Applications are invited from students of all ages and disciplines enrolled in an educational institution in Ireland in 2019.

Keynote 11 June, 2pm, IMMA

The Future of the Networked Image: Digital Archives in a “Post Truth” Age

Professor Anthony Downey

The extent to which the visual arts reflected upon and promoted social and political change during and after the Arab Spring increasingly gives rise to decisive questions regarding the future relationship between digital images and cultural activism. Throughout this time, digital archives — produced through video- and film-making, performances, and numerous media platforms — and their evidentiary contexts became closely associated with activist practices, leading to a number of prevailing assumptions about both cultural production in the region and the effectiveness of digital and social media as tools for enabling international political transformation. Taking into consideration recent revelations concerning the role of social media in surveillance technologies, political repression, and the proliferation of targeted disinformation, alongside the anxieties being expressed about the opaque power of algorithms, this keynote will explore critical frameworks for understanding the relationship between digitized media and cultural activism. The broader issue here concerns a perennial, indeed global, issue: how do cultural practices — through digital means — realign how we engage with the politics of historical events and images of revolutionary conflict?

For full details see here.

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