The highlights of attending the conference for me were hearing Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloch and Harry Cooper speak at the CAA Distinguished Scholar Session Honoring Rosalind Krauss.

Another very engaging session for me was Doing Art/Criticism After Representation chaired by Renee Carine Hoogland with panelists; Sarah Ruddy, Christopher Tradowsky, Christa Noel Robbins and Charissa Terranova. There were some interesting re-engagments with theories of affect and phenomenology.
Forthcoming publications by Hoogland ( Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics After Representation) and Terranova (Automotive Prosthetic: The Car, Technological Mediation, and the Conceptual Turn, 1951-Present) sound interesting.

I took part in the panel discussion:
What is What? Time-based media and African Art

Skype portrait session with Willem Boshoff_21.02.12

There were some interesting issues raised by Karen Milbourne and Jeffrey Martin regarding the practical challenges of conserving time-based media within a museum context. John Peffer discussed the work of the duo Mendi and Keith Obadike. The work that resonated with me was Automatic 1 (2000) in which Obadike created a “sound” reading of Jean-mIchel Basquiat’s painting, Undiscovered Genius(1983). I find the oral “reading” of the visual an interesting way to create an experience that in a way attempts embodies their experience of the painting while also alluding to the realms of perception beyond the visual. Hearing the sound piece feels as if one is experiencing the spirit of the painting. Amy Powell used the film Waiting (2007) by Zarina Bhimji to discuss how time-based media can be used effectively to express multiple layers of the experience of time past, present and future in the expanded filming of the process of production within a sisal factory in Kenya.

In my presentation I focused on my data capture: a muse (2008) exhibition while giving context to my work through examples of work by; William Kentridge, Robin Rhode, Dineo Bopape, Willem Boshof, Candice Breitz,James Webb & Josh Ginsberg. I chose examples in which performative interaction with time-based media by the artist opens up a potential space that transcends performance of the self and challenges linear perceptions of time. An agency by which the embodied technology echoes the technology of the hyper-senses. (something akin to that of intuition or ESP). I spoke about how the convergence of the physical body of the artist with time-based can create an inversion where the body appears to de-materialized and the time-based media becomes embodied. This has the potential to allude to a third space outside of time and place.

As part of my presentation I showed an excerpt from a Skype portrait session I recorded on 21st February between.

*Skype portrait . watercolour . 21.02.12*