Goings On in Beirut

Goings On is a temporary platform that encourages creative exchange between independent practitioners. The aim is to facilitate communication about site specific and locally generated knowledge in a friendly and conducive environment. Goings On brings together practitioners for critical debate and exchange, providing opportunities for participants to reflect on their own practice while staying informed by a wider context. Goings On consists of project presentations, moderated discussions and collaborative group work as well as sharing meals and hanging out together.

Participants: Pikene på Broen (Norway), Kultivator (Sweden), rum46 (Denmark), El Hervidero (Spain), All Art Now, (Syria), Samandal (Lebanon), Makan House (Jordan), Medrar (Egypt), Cura (Turkey) and more.

"Space makers Beirut"
Public presentations by invited guests from Beirut, Friday June 25 at 6pm. Ceasar Namour (Recto Verso gallery) Christine Tohme (Ashkal Alwan) and Jadmur collective

"Space as Support"
Public presentations by invited guests, Sunday June 27 at 3pm. Pikene på Broen (Norway), Kultivator (Sweden), rum46 (Denmark), El Hervidero (Spain), All Art Now, (Syria), Samandal (Lebanon), Interruptions (Jordan), Medrar (Egypt), Cura Bodrum residency (Turkey) Music performance and drinks. All welcome!

98weeks Project Space is located at Naher street (Jisr el hadid), Chalhoub building, n 22 - ground floor, facing Spoiler Center, dead end street at the corner of Anthurium flower, left side, corner bldg.
You can check out at http://98weeks.blogspot.com/

all work no play

all work no play from Iz Oztat on Vimeo.

http://www.vimeo.com/12934370

cura bodrum 2010 Exhibition and Screening at Daphnis Hotel

Please visit cura bodrum residency website for details
www.curabodrumresidency.net

Katy Moore & Burcak Bingol with their 'gleaned' food

some grapes to be gleaned

Burcak Bingol is 'gleaning'

Burak Arikan presents Network Mapping & Analysis

Katy Moore is taking notes from the presentation of Burak Arikan

Network Mapping by Burak Arikan

Here are some pictures from the network mapping introduction by burak and everyone making their own maps

tactical media

Michel Foucault. Discipline & Punish (1975), Panopticism

http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism.html

Some other performance events:

>> Alfredo Jaar - The Cloud
>> AES+F Project - Islamic Project
>> Haider Hamza - Talk to an Iraqi
>> Keith and Mendi Obedike - Blackness for Sale
>> Tanya Ostojic - Crossing Over
>> CAE - International Campaign for free Alcohol and Tobacco for the Unemployed
>> 16 Beaver Group - No Santa For Hazelton, PA
>> Center for Tactical Magic - Free Occult Services
>> Millie Chen, Andrew Johnson, Paul Vanouse - PED
>> MicroRevolt - Nike blanket
>> Tom Marioni - The act of drinking beer with friends is the highest form of art
>> Chris Barr - Bureau of Workplace Interruptions
>> The Institute for Infinitely Small Things - 57 Things to do for free in Harvard Square

Tactical Media Lecture names/links (revision1)

Links from Tactical Media: Mass Media and Technology lecture
Mass Media Examples:
Critical Art Ensemble -
RTMark -
YesMen -
Reverend Billy -
Technologically – based Tactical Artists
Shoebox Projector
Josh On- They Rule -
Graffiti Research Lab Laser Tag/Throwies-
Institute for Applied Autonomy – Little Brother/ISee -
Resources:
I will revise this soon.

Cura Bodrum, Day 4

Day 4
The opening reading was a selection from brazilian playwright and theorist Agusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, dealim mainly with the notions of “Invisible Theatre”, or specxtacle that remains invisible or until the moment of its fulfillment. The concepts were illustrated by numerous examples, but especially schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre and Chicago's Puppetbike. Coule we wind up parading through the streets???
The first sesion was Patrick's talk about examples of tactical media, including, RTMark, IAA, Critical Art Ensemble, and the Graffiti Research League. The overall idea was to consider mass media engagement in tactical media and technological solutions and potential resources. A lot of the conversation turned to the notion of Second Life as a space of engagement, and the result was that we determined that it defined an interesting context for potential engagement with larger social spaces.
Burak Arikan gave a lecture on network analysis, which is described in his syllabus earlier in the blog.
For the afternoon, Burak led a workshop in network mapping, where Iz Oztat and all the other participants described their philosophical, methodological, and social networks well into the early evening.

Cura Bodrum Day III

Day III
Today, due to the toll exacted by the experiment in psychogeographic research, we started at 6 PM, discussing the role of collaboration, cooperation, participation, tacit agreement and complicity in collective artworks. This came from multiple conversations dealing with individuals' interests and concerns regarding working with one another, and the conversation spanned nearly an hour and a hel;f.
Next, the workshop participated in a hybrid exercisethat lies betweent he “elevator pitch” (the 30 second description of a project) and “speed daing” Here, the artiss grouped up in twos, and did the following:
1:Take a minute to describe their project,
2:Get Feedback for a minute
3: The other participant piteches their project
4: Feedback is received for it.
5: Switch Partners.
Although the workshop should have gone for 17 iterations of the process, by 10, people were so engaged in talking, Patrick and Ajalea just let the conversation go, and we had dinner.
After dinner, we watched “What would Jesus Buy”, the documentary about Reverend Billy Talen and the Church of Stop Shopping's campaign against the “Shopocalypse”...

Tactical Media Presentation By Patrick Litchy

Article on Systems Aesthetics by Jack Burnham

This article came up in conversation with Burak...
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/jevbratt/readings/burnham_se.html

Introductions Day II

Irem from Sinek 8 Publication House visited us!

Irem is one of the founders of Sinek 8 Publication House, which will be printing books about permaculture, self-organized communities and sustainibility. Irem also makes hand-made books and notebooks. She is also interested in collaborating with artists to make limited addition books.

They live in Gumusluk, Bodrum and distribute their work very effectively through the internet.

To take a look at their work and life, you can visit them at:

http://sineksekiz.wordpress.com/

And here are some links she sent relating to hand-made artist books:
http://www.codexfoundation.org/
http://nieves.ch/

CuraBodrum Day II

Cura Bodrum Day II
The residency continues, and today began with a discussion of David Morely's notions of home, “Heim”, “Heimat” and the constructions of belonging in regards to identity and space. What creates a sense of home – is it place, people, attachment to objects? What also creates “other-” or “alien-ness”? Burcak Bingol mentioned that otherness is a counterpoint to the self; a reflection of subjectivity.

Following, Iz Oztat led a discussion of issues and expectations that the participants of the residency have, which was captured on paper and then mindmapped by Rebecca Weeks. The map seemed to have concrete issues in contrast (epistemologies) with qualitative ones like altruism, empathy, love and beauty (ontologies). This map was displayed for the remainder of the day.

Participants also contributed to a T-shirt design for the residency, twhich we'll produce in the next couple days.

Lastly, participants had an assignment to go to one of several spots on the Bodrum Peninsula and perform psychogeographic research to determine the terrain of social issues in the area. Guy Debord defined the term psychogeography as the set of practices that show the relations of people to the urban landscape. In this case, each participant was allowed to pick a place on the peninsula and given five hours to find their way back to Bodrum Central district. This employed the Debord's tactic of the derive, or use of wandering to interrogate the landscape. The result included participants infiltrating buildings, playing local pastimes with the population, haircuts, hitchhiking, museums, bars and much more.

We hope that the residents will add comments about their psychogrographic experiments in whatever language they wish here...

Presentations

Day 2

CuraBodrum Residency
Day II
For day I of the residency, we started by showing Agnes Varda's “The Gleaners and I “ which introduced valuable issues of ownership, the right to essential resources like food and water, especially when gleaning, even modern practices like dumpster diving, shows how much waste actually occurs, and how this excess has in the past, and can benefit so many.
For the second day of the Curabodrum workshop, we began with a brief introduction to readings on tactical media, including those by Rita Raley. Being that we are in one of the most beautiful places in the world, sometimes I wonder how much of the 2-3 readings per day we'll do. (smiles).
We'll get through it.

We have an amazing number of people (15+) from incredibly diverse backgrounds, and during the first day, we all shared our work, which is about 5-6 hours worth. Absolutely mind-bending, from archive visualization, to cultural interventionism, to institutional satire, social interventionism, and mass media satire. Arzu, Burak, and I are truly lucky to have thrown a party where: 1- people wanted to come, and 2 – such amazing people decided to come.
In addition, today is Global Protest BP day, and we're considering if and what sort of intervention we might like to do as a group to join in. Yesterday, Arzu and I were musing that in such an idyllic place, who could be angry? But this is not the only place on earth. Let's see what we come up with.
Tomorrow, we employ Debord's tools of psychogeography, mainly the derive, to explore the landscape of Bodrum in order to determine the social issues we might like to address. Stay tuned.

2 ada / 2 islands

beer and sea get people together

basliiyoooorrrrrr / it staaaarrtts!!

Screening I

Last night we watched "The Gleaners and I" by Agnes Varda and discussed issues like politics of sampling, private property, control, open source communities, collaboration, the notion of public space (kamusal alan) in Turkey, etc...

Cura Bodrum Day I

During the day

Fortress Europe Map, 2009

Frontex Europe is the European Union agency for external border security. It is responsible for co-ordinating the activities of the national border guards in ensuring the security of the EU's borders with non-member states. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontex