By Mister McG
I had the good fortune to attend Interactive Screen 1.0 Beautiful Lives produced by the Banff New Media Institute. In my work at Leadership Development, we make use of arts- and nature-based aesthetic encounters to inform the practice of developing leaders. My attendance in the Interactive Screen sessions was intended to help see how work being done in new media might inform the practice of developing leaders.
Here is the Statement of Intent from the event. I'll be going through many of the individual contributors over the coming weeks until I eventually catch up with where I'm at and my visit to the Aichi Triennale in September of 2010.
Interactive Screen 1.0 Beautiful Lives statement of intent
Web Site
At last year’s Interactive Screen, Adam Zaretsky, parading up and down the conference hall, showered the audience with seeds he was carrying in his pockets, claiming they were mutagens. He promised that we would come out of his presentation with an intimate knowledge of the hopes and sorrows of mutants. Experiment confirmed that these were really sesame seeds. As placebos, they were potent stimulants for thought. Zaretsky’s circuitous monologue demonstrated, with curious wit, that aspirations for the good life are widely divergent and often largely incompatible. Beauty, it seems, lies not only in the eyes of the beholder, but also in his pockets.
Although the desires of mutants are not necessarily convergent with the motives of mutagen providers, their interests certainly intersect. The point where this happens, avowedly hard to locate, is one of many where the social contract is being rewritten. Zaretsky’s demonstration subtly raised the suspicion that most of us, although our agendas vastly differ, live our lives aesthetically. That is, we make our lives according to stated or unstated principles which lead us to value certain behaviours, and certain people, above others. The old drama of us and them, with its mechanics of good and bad, its moral confusions and revelatory actions, makes a tragic comeback. Aesthetics, in this purview, is not so much about the morally-loaded ideal of beauty, but about shaping states of being. These intuitions are at the heart of Beautiful Lives.
Interactive Screen 1.0 Beautiful Lives delves into the contradictions inherent, in this technosocial era, to our beautiful lives, relating them to the pursuits of new media, with their claims for community and democracy, their attempts at sustainability and transparency, and their striving after usefulness, meaning and sometimes, even, beauty.
Daniel Canty, Curator
Jean Macpherson, Program Manager, Film and Media
The week continues to encourage reflection and has deepened my suspicion that the creative products of new media represent unique opportunities to have conversations about things that matter in the modern age. Leadership, in my mind, is about creating spaces for critical conversations to happen and about crafting plausible narratives to move us forward. I saw again and again how new media artists struggles with the same questions that leaders do - questions of change, transparency, multiplicity, agency and beauty. It has taken over a month for me to begin to sort out the brilliant and sometimes disturbing messages I heard during my week with the BNMI and I look forward to using this blog as way to create a journal of my reflections on my experiences here and elsewhere.
I was fortunate to see Ken Chapman speak yesterday at the Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation at the Banff Centre. He spoke persuasively of the need for engagement, agency, and the need to use power FOR something rather than OVER someone. I saw artists struggling with the challenges of conceptualizing the beautiful life and the same conversation repeats itself in government, in not-for-profits, in communities and in companies across Alberta and the country. I am also seeking a set of values that are not embedded in the traditions of self but reflect the interconnected and communal nature of our culture. Clearly I'm not alone.
Woops. Not sure how this ended up here.
ReplyDeleteWell it's here now, so what are we gonna do about it?
ReplyDeleteYou could simply delete it, or I could delete it, or better yet, you could paste one of your articles from your other blog here and see if you get any reaction.
Or best of all, you could jot down a few thoughts, maybe about my favourite town in Alberta, or one of its native sons, like Ryan Smyth, or basically anything sports-related. Or not sports-related.
Anything. This blog is starving for content.
I would consider it a personal favour if you simply took a snapshot of the staff accomodations buildings across the street from the BSH so I could have some record of where I lived in the 90's.
Or just delete it. Whatever.