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coolsurf with harvard gsd and st xavier
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CONSTRUCTING POLITICAL
EVENTS
COLLASUSST. XAVIER HARVARD
...
A coolsurf is a book or pamphlet made up of screenshots taken throughout a search on the Internet. It can be done as a quick thinking excersize, used for research, or treated as an extended collage or montage. Coolsurf is at its foundation a methodology and can be adapted to many uses - this explains the variety of forms assumed by previous coolsurf projects, as well as those in Constucting Political Events.
This book is the result of two events coordinated by COLLASUS; a workshop at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, and a photography course in the Mass Media Depart-ment at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. Both events marked the latest collaboration in a continuous exploration of Coolsurf. Contributors in both the workshop at GSD and the course at St. Xavier’s responded to similar prompts to develop the material in Constructing Political Events.
COLLASUS would like to thank the staff and students of Harvard’s GSD and St. Xavier’s College
CONTRIBUTORS
Rishi BradooTreina CamposThomas FolchCassidy FryMaria GmucaJames MartinNishita MehtaNeelam Suresh MhaskeRonit SarkarBarkha SinghLiam TurkleHeath Valentine
Post your own coolsurfs digitally on www.issuu.com and let us know by emailing us at [email protected]. Please feel free to contact us to request information regarding COLLASUS, Coolsurf, or any of our other projects.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Sit-Ins > Start-Ups > The Political Body > Anonymous Action > Constructing Identity > Sacrifice > Economy of Excess > Prompt 2. Protester > History > Revolution > Peace > Decolonization > Civil Rights > Tiananmen > Non-violence > Self-immolation > Arab Spring > Occupy
3. 2012 Advertising > Takeover > Peaceful Protest > No Free Speech > Radical Art > Ad-busting
4. Animal Cruelty > Protest > Mutilation > Cages > Slaughter > Abuse > Prevention 5. Waste > Thermal Power > Toxicity > Protest > Impact > Recovery of Gases > New Products 6. A World Without Pets > Petting Parties > Squeeze Chairs > Human Companion > Hu-mane Protests > Animal Protests > Friends With Dogs 7. Parallax > No Straight Lines > Bubbles > Naked Man > Fluids > Therapy > Thermal Imaging
8. Mumbai > Encounter > Blast > Flash Mob > Smile 9. Zombieland > Zombieproof Your Car > Survival > Makeup
10. Egypt > Toitlet Paper > Protest > Victims
11. Desire > Anti-matter > Cell Division > Bees, Birds, Wasps, Ants > No Pathos > Hand-shake > No Touching > Eating
Conclusion
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Introduction (Retroactive notes from the editors pt. 1)
In compiling the work that makes up this book we came up against several challenges that speak to the nature of the task we set ourselves. We had to present a variety of work from both Harvard and St. Xavier’s. As the workshop at Harvard was fairly small, and the class at St. Xavier’s very large, we decided to present a selection of works from both events that gives what we hope is a cross section of the project as a whole. The entirety of the work can be seen under coolsurfv3 at www.issuu.com. Each work in the cross section reflects what we believe are exemplary approaches to both the prompt and the Coolsurf method. The various approaches employ different graphic strategies and operate on multiple registers: from abstraction to realism, tragedy to comedy, virtuality to actuality. The prompt was in itself the biggest challenge. We hoped that the exercise of responding to a limitation, so as to invent a collective solution to that limitation, would culminate in events beyond the particular coolsurf (the prompt can be seen at the end of #1, Constructing Political Events, which was used as an introduction at Harvard, and sets the stage for the rest of the book). What we are essentially asking is: how does one show the process by which we pass from a virtual (real but not actual) limit into actuality? It occurs to us that what we are asking of the work is problematic, and perhaps representative of the struggle of political thought on a larger scale. We believe that this problem can be elucidated by comparison to the general critique of structuralism and semiotics, and the response to that critique. The criticism: structuralism and se-miotics, by viewing the world as a system of signs, cannot account for the transformation of that system. In other words; why is the system today different from the one yesterday, and so on? Or, more specifically; how do these modes of analysis account for events? We find Coolsurf interesting in this respect, since it purports to create an event by means of a research/play with signs gleaned from the Internet, and to document and show how an event emerges from that process (virtual limit > actual event). A coolsurf is, at its best, instumental in the emergence of an event and a record of that process of emergence. The structuralist response: even in the most deterministic structuralist and semiological work, work that leaves little room for agency in the face of the spectacle, we encounter the limits imposed upon us and are thereby displaced with regard to a deterministic power structure - we have been reoriented in relation to forces that limit our agency and we momentarily evade subjective determina-tion. Moreover, the structuralist analysis has facilitated that constructive shift. In other words, expe-riencing the work is itself an event, and a political one at that. It is in these senses that Coolsurf can begin to be contextualized. We are not structuralists or semioticians - we merely wish to indicate how some of the problems raised by this book might be set against the landscape of (relatively) recent movements in critical thought. In order to further outline a context for this book we are inclined to consider its geneology. This book attempts to respond to a broad history of collective publications and to re-situate some their attendant aesthetic, philosophical, and political concerns in a contemporary context. We believe that some of these kinships become readable throughout the book (after skimming it we can name a few: Surrealism, Situationsim, Collage/Montage, Documentary, Architecture, Photography, Film, Protest Pamphlets, Survival Guides, et al etc.). Not all approaches in the book are evidently compat-ible, but neither are the disperate signs that comprise them. It is precisely from this playful collision of signs that events, and coolsurfs, emerge.
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For those critical of both criticism and critical art for its purely theoretical/virtual status, or for those reluctant to engage in a critical practice for fear of losing touch with the actual, Coolsurf treads a path that embraces a variety of approaches - Coolsurf is both serious and fun, and often both. It can be simultaneously concrete and abstract, and is easy to produce - a string of screen-shots from a web surf. While we do not intend to imply that this methodology works every time, we would emphasize Coolsurf’s capacity to adapt to its field of inquiry. It generally takes time and effort to develop a concept (in response to a problem) and a graphic language capable of articulat-ing that development. Occasionally, interesting things happen: a workshop and a class, a book, and more people coolsurfing.
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Sit-ins > Start-ups > The Politi-cal Body > Anonymous Actions > Constructing Identity > Sacrifice > Economy of Excess > Prompt
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CONSTRUCTING POLITICAL EVENTS
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Protester > History > Revolution > Peace > Decolonization > Civil Rights > Tiananmen > Non-violence > Self-immolation > Arab Spring > Occupy
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2012 Advertising > Takeover > Peaceful Protest > No Free Speech > Radical Art > Adbusting
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Animal Cruelty > Protest > Mutilation > Cages > Slaughter > Abuse > Prevention
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Waste > Thermal Power > Toxicity > Pro-test > Impact > Recovery of Gases >
New Products
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A World Without Pets > Petting Parties > Squeeze Chairs > Artificial Human Com-panion > Humane Protests > Animal Protests > Making Friends With Dogs
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7.
Parallax > No Straight Lines > Bubbles > Naked Man > Fluids > Therapy >
Thermal Imaging
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Mumbai > Encounter > Blast > Flash- Mob > Smile
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Neelam Suresh Mhaske
SYBMM
Roll no: 39
St.Xavier’s College
Photography Assignment
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Zombieland > Zombieproof Your Car > Survival > Makeup
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Egypt > Toilet Paper > Protest > Victims
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Desire > Anti-matter > Cell Division > Bees, Birds, Wasps, Ants > No Pathos > Handshake > No Touching > Eating
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CONCLUSION (Retroactive notes from the editors pt. 2)
As a conclusion to the book we would like to examine a figure that traversed the work from St. Xaviers. This figure is the emoticon. Many of the coolsurfs produced at St. Xavier’s contain emoticons, such as smiley faces. We at Collasus were curious about this ubiquitous phenomenon, and decided to investi-gate it in the short coolsurf that follows. We discovered, in the final skype meeting between part of our team and the students in Mumbai, a relationship between the emoticon’s function and an ancient aes-thetic philosophy described in rasa theology. The students explained that they viewed the emoticons as expressions of their attitude toward the coolsurf process itself, and that this reflexivity came from the knowledge that their work would be viewed by their peers on the school’s Facebook group - “St. Xaviers BMM Photography”. In this sense, the emoticon has an expressive and communicative func-tion in digital culture akin to certain movements and gestures in Indian dance - in western terms, we might call this something like a formal pathos, with its attendant codes of usage and etiquette. Simply put, emoticons provide a way to add emotion to the sterility of digital text and image. Whence the role of rasa - to paraphrase the coolsurf below: rasa is the ‘development of a relishable state in relation to the attendant emotional conditions of that developmental process’. As the expression of a surplus in relation to the content of a given coolsurf, the emoticon introduces a new register to the graphic lan-guage that leaves an imprint of the subject, of a socially engaged human maker. Interestingly, though, as a moment of subjective reflection in excess of the content, the emoticon simultaneously marks the movement of thought with regard to the content itself. In this way, the emoticon reveals its sig-nificance: it is both excessive, beyond what the exposition of the content requires, and integral to the functioning of the graphic language in which the content is presented. As excess it is essential: the emoticon finds its meaning in the elusive term rasa; the source of essence.
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