Talk: Labor für Kunst und Forschung-Cologne University, Observational Practices Lab-Parsons/New School New York. Field School: dig where you stand

28 May 2021

Situated Publishing

A talk about the politics of situated and contextual publishing practices that pays attention to the methods we develop to publish as much as to the content that is published. Radical content is not enough: What we need are radical, collective and inclusive methods and ways of publishing.

As part of
Field School: Dig where you stand

Our knowledge of cities and urban space—whether historical or current—is based less and less on direct experience, but increasingly on mediated records, e.g. images, data, documents of events. With digitalization and globalization, however, there has also been growing uncertainty about what this data means. This changed sensitivity to images and data, in turn, produces approaches that not only generate new perspectives on the past, but above all renegotiate the relevance of history to the here and now.

Inspired in part by the international movement started in the 1970s promoting active engagement with the history of a place, Field School: Dig Where You Stand is a site-based approach to interdisciplinary research investigating and reimagining the local. To what extent can artistic strategies that go beyond conventional methods of interpreting (historical) data be utilized to discover new points of view on our present by looking at contested histories beyond canonical narratives? How could the saying ‘Dig where you stand!’, used by an ‘urban history from below’, be reinterpreted against the backdrop of geography’s digital turn? What could digital derives look like as possibility for speculative stories of empowerment? Departing from these questions, Field School combines a critical inquiry into selected online archives (containing urban imageries, collective narratives and memories), digitally-mediated urban experiences, methods of critical navigation and geo-location tools with virtual field-research and self-conducted project work cross-linking Cologne, New York and other places.

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FIELD SCHOOL: DIG WHERE YOU STAND
Past Present Futures
May 24 – 29, 2021

Organised by Karina Nimmerfall and Maximiliane Baumgartner (Labor für Kunst und Forschung, Institut für Kunst und Kunsttheorie, Intermedia, Universität zu Köln) in collaboration with Selena Kimball and Pascal Glissmann (Observational Practices Lab @Parsons/The New School, School of Art, Media and Technology, New York).

With lectures, virtual walks and workshops by Doris Frohnapfel (Cologne), Peter Spillmann (Berlin / Luzern), Aurora Tang / The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles), Stefanos Tsivopoulus (New York) and Eva Weinmayr (London).

http://www.laborfuerkunstundforschung.de/#projekte