Mikhel Proulx (Dead Account)

"This catalogue gives us impetus to review the year and reflect on the programming in all three of our spaces. In this rear-cast glance we can see the year's exhibitions come together as developing conversation about who we are and what we're concerned about (...). " -- p. 5

Digital Natives and the First Wave of Online Publication
Mikhel Proulx

In the early 1990s three Montreal art students working under the moniker Nation to Nation mounted a series of renegade exhibitions. By 1997, with a handful of art shows, performances, and community projects under their belts, Nation to Nation would launch CyberPowWow (CPW), an early experiment in Internet art publication, and to date the most expansive platform for network-based art made by Indigenous artists.
CPW was operational for eight years and is now largely offline, making it difficult to assess its impact. Twenty years on, it has become a remnant of a cyberutopian experiment in Indigenous sovereignty on the early Web. This article attempts to track the networked conditions from which an experiment like CPW could surface, and also to recall its emergence from a political climate of Indigenous self-determination that came to the fore in the nation- state of Canada during the 1990s.

Department of Art History, Concordia University, 2016
Produced by Mikhel Proulx
Co-edited by Sarah Amarica and Estelle Wathieu
This edited collection of papers has emerged from undergraduate student research for Art History 358, Studies in the History of Media Arts: Queer Networks, taught at Concordia University by Mikhel Proulx in the Fall of 2015.

This text considers how online identity performance is prescribed by digital systems, and hence how the legibility of networked self-imagery is coded in relation to both technical and social structures. Digital imagery relating to the self—specifically within social media and dating networks—participates in social anxieties about passing in terms of certain sexualized, gendered identities. Thus, performance online is coded—both by ‘offline’ ideological systems as well as through ‘online’ technical systems. Despite prevalent myths that self-expression online is unbound, such restrictive ‘code’ is revealed in this essay through a study of critical artworks that transgress norms of gender and sexual expression. Such trans performance demonstrates how—contrary to the circumscribed parameters of digital networks—the self remains a nexus of shifting, contrary, and unfixed experiences. Artists discussed include 2Fik, Ianna Book, and Molly Soda.

For those of us habituated to sharing imagery of ourselves in online social media networks, we share also the particular forces that limit the flexibility of our self-image. Here, we perform ourselves along specific codes of identification, be they technical, social or aesthetic. We might look to image-making tools and tendencies to see such forces that shape how we perform online. This text collects some thoughts on how such performance represents gender and sexualities, and points to critical alternatives in recent art and design. It suggests that common practice encourages us to see ourselves reduced to the manner in which such networks makes representation possible. In other words, digital tools ultimately offer a limited and prohibitive set of protocols when purposed to represent oneself.

This paper offers a critical framework through which to appreciate contemporary queer performance online. It addresses how bodies come to be shaped in part by culture, particularly by certain techno-ideological forces in the network age, and considers how these forces structure practices of imaging the self. The paper builds to a reading of artworks by Ann Hirsch and Georges Jacotey, to argue that their queer performances work against the production of coded identities conditioned in digital culture.

Within a culture of persistent efficiency, ambiguous imagery represents a critical alternative. This thesis bridges studies in technology history, network and political theory, and art history. It attempts to account for contemporary artistic practices that critically address some of the objectionable tendencies within digital culture. These practices, this thesis proposes, may be best characterized by their radical use of ambiguity and un-certainty – qualities at clear odds with the rational, efficient nature of digital technologies. This thesis indicates a lineage of this nature in computer and Internet history, twentieth-century cybernetics, and larger philosophic histories. Rooted in symbolic logic, digital technologies carry a heritage of disambiguation—a dominancy of overdetermined, reason-based principles writ furtively in algorithms and protocols. They thus espouse ideologies via systematized calculation and centralized command, despite the commonly-perceived transparency, fluidity and egalitarianism of the Net.
Working within-but-against these surreptitious structures are radical practices that critique, undermine, leverage, and offer alternatives to ideologies of disambiguation. In opposition to a contracted, answers-fixated dominant culture, artists are advantageously positioned to point back to the realm of questions – in all of its arable uncertainty, inquisitiveness and ambiguity. This thesis is structured around case-studies of artwork made by Constant Dullaart, Rosa Menkman, Jon Rafman, Internet Surfing Clubs, Ryan Trecartin, and Oliver Laric. Their practices contest the disambiguous nature of digital technologies to open up critical fissures in the semantic structure of digital culture.

Concordia University’s Art History Graduate Student Association seeks submissions for Constellations, Clusters, Networks, the 2015 Emerging Scholars Conference.

Current and recent graduate students are invited to propose presentations of research concerning networks and networking in art and culture, as they figure in content, methodological approaches, and critical models. The conference will embrace papers, workshops, and performances by emerging scholars in any discipline.

Send 300 word abstract, CV and brief bio
<ahgsaconference@gmail.com>

More Information: <ahgsa.concordia.ca/annual-graduate-conference>

Submission Deadline December 1, 2014