hey everyone-
I was referred to this list by Greg Sholette (the best) and i knew about
this conference, but am probably too broke to go. Anyone wanna give me a
grant? haha
Anyway.
I'm Trevor Paglen, and I'm an artist and a geographer. Right now I'm at UC
Berkeley getting a PhD in Geography, and I'm working it out in such a way
that the projects I work on go into both art projects and into geography
stuff.
As far as collaboration goes, I collaborate all the time. Not so much with
other artists, but mostly with activist groups, scientists, and alternative
spaces.
As far as the activist stuff goes, right now I do work with a
prison-abolitionist group called Critical Resistance. I think of the
arrangement as me being an artist-in-residence with them. I produce lots of
graphics, videos, etc in conjunction with their campaigns. We also do a lot
of direct-action theater-type stuff. The point of this work is not to
produce complicated, "wow, that's so critical" stuff, but more about
thinking about how to use various media/art tactics to achieve fairly
specific goals. As such, this work is fairly useless outside the nodes of
power/whatever that it is designed to intervene in. I think of Walter
Benjamin's interest in trying to produce work that was "useless to fascism"
in his "author as producer" essay, and think that art which is "useless to
fascism" is often just as useless to "art." Lately, we have been having a
lot of successes in this prison work and it's amazing to me to see how some
'tactical media' (the dreaded TM word) i've done has helped contribute to
some pretty significant political motion.
But that's not all.
I also do more "arty" art and some of that stuff is at my website:
www.paglen.com . With this kind of work, I'm more interested in
collaborating with various spaces and people in other disciplines than with
other artists. For a project called "remnants of california" i've been
collaborating with a geomorphologist, a california historian, an
anthropologist, and a woman who calls what she does "geomicrobiology" - cool
name. For another project called "recording carceral
landscapes" i'm working with Critical Resistance in a different way and am
also collaborating with an alternative space here called the Lab to figure
out how to turn all this stuff into an exhibition. I might also start
working with an architect to design alternative uses for prisons that we're
trying to close.
Looking forward to the conversation,
Trevor Paglen