Author: tim

Oceanic Horizons: Port Journeys & Liminal Cities, is a series of creative happenings that occurred in three coastal sites throughout San Diego County for three days (June 11—13, 2015). Taking place in and around STAT-US, as part of the Exploring Engagement Artist-In-Residence Program through the Oceanside Museum of Art. The happenings highlight regional artists at the creative core of San Diego’s identity, alongside the work of Yui Inoue. As a whole, Oceanic Horizons focuses on a range of contemporary topics including: globalization, urbanization, cultural transformation, ecological awareness, explorations of San Diego civic identity, dependence on natural resources, individual autonomy, and spatial politics. These projects were curated by James Enos, Director of Exploring Engagement, with Lara Bullock and Tim Schwartz. Overall these projects are a continuation of Port Journeys, which is an ongoing exchange of artists between port cities around the world.

Crossing The Line by Artists Armando de La Torre & Xareni Lizarraga – Pepper Park, Port of San Diego, National City, June 11, 2015

A collection and sound scape based on found sounds and artifacts at Pepper Park, as an investigation into the area’s ecology.

The Sakman Chamorro Project by Mario Borja & Micki Davis – De Anza Cove, Mission Bay, June 12, 2015

The Chamorro craftsman Mario Borja and his crew prepared the Sakman Chamorro for launch. Visitors participated in the sail preparation and a drawing workshop.

Roadside Tintype Photography Workshop & Processing by Shane Anderson – Carlsbad State Beach, June 13, 2015

Participants captured images with alternative analogue processes (pinhole, tintype, plastic camera) and developed those images a portable darkroom.

On May 29, 2015, the cryptotrailer was parked outside Machine Project for the evening.

Using the initial communications of Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras as our model, we learned to anonymously make initial contact with a source, verify the security of an encrypted message, and worked through ways to maintaining secure communications over time.

Cryptoparty # 4 is part of the first installment of Machine Project’s series: Data Smuggler’s 101.

On Sunday, March 8th the Crytpotrailer was parked in the back of Crash Space in Los Angeles. Six “professors” held office hours for the afternoon. About 30 individuals attended exploring and discussing ideas of encryption, radio frequency hacking, surfing the dark web, trusting others and keyrings, hacking consumables, and private virtual realities.

A big thank you to all of the professors, you know who you are!

We met near Kenneth Hahn park in Los Angeles, which is adjacent to the Inglewood Oil Field, which is the largest urban oil field. Chris Csikszentmihalyi gave a tour of the park and described the impact of the oil industry on the surrounding communities. We then returned to the trailer for a talk by Csikszentmihalyi on open systems for corporate and governmental accountability.

“After the industrial revolution, the definitive twentieth-century institution became The Corporation… The Corporation as a hub of economic activity is being challenged by The Platform.”
–Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works.

The modern corporation is rivaled in power by only a score of nation states and a few religions. Yet unlike religions or governments, corporations serve no explicit mission to better society, the environment, or to serve the public trust; indeed, some commentators have equated their “personhood” with that of a dangerous and super-powered sociopath. Activists have a limited repertoire of political opposition, like boycotts and “buycotts,” media campaigns, or shareholder activism, but few of these methods seem to have had anything like reciprocal impact. Communities in the path of powerful corporations like those in the oil/gas or logging industries fare poorly, and have faced violence and death for their resistance.

Corporations win because they are by definition organized, rich, and immortal (as if on v), and thrive off their employees: smart individuals employed full time to serve its purpose. New forms of distributed collaboration, enabled by the decreased cost of communication (aka Internets) have proven able to counter the corporation’s advantages in the free market. Microsoft, HP, and the music industry are in precipitous decline as free/libre and file-sharing techniques have repeatedly trounced their well-funded, well-lobbied incumbent efforts: might activism take a hint from these victories?

STAT-US visited San Francisco to participate in an artist book show at Needles and Pens. The show, titled Pulp Atlas, was shown inside the gallery and in the trailer, giving visitors two ways to browse and spend time with the books. Readings and a discussion of the books was held in the gallery.