Our final project will be a participatory performance exploring intimacy and connection through anonymous touch. It is inspired by a durational performance that Jordan did last semester for a Design for Discomfort class. In that previous performance, he sat in Washington Square Park, blindfolded and wearing earmuffs, with his hand extended, and a sign that said “Will you hold my hand?” Strangers stopped by to hold or shake his hand. The performance explored what can or might be communicated through touch alone, and the differences in experience and connection when one removes the usual visual and conversational information by which we assess, judge, and relate to other people.

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, is a visual feast for someone like me who is obsessed with video and computational art. Nam June Paik’s "Fin de Siècle II", the huge centerpiece multichannel video installation, was one of my favorite. This massive 7 channel structure is 17 feet high, 40 feet wide, built with 207 cathode-ray tube televisions from the 80s. The second time the work has been displayed at the same museum since 1989, the Whitney is looking to resurrect the piece by bringing it back as close as possible to the sate it was, but different issues arose. Without Paiks’s presence, the reconstruction process was not an easy one. The old wiring diagrams did not match what was actually being displayed because Paik added some improvisational touch while setting it up back in the days. There were also aging problems where the museum had to acquire huge quantities of old TVs from the 80s. They were almost going to use flat screens but the piece would lose its appeal as Paik took what was available for him back then. After all, the Whitney managed to bring the original piece back to the public after two decades.

In “Original Copies” of “The contingent object of contemporary art”, Martha Buskirk discussed what it means to “copy“ the material or content of an original work. The definition of “copy” as I interpret it from Buskirk’s words, should be distinguished from that of duplication, the works that “copy” pre-existing materials cited by Buskirk, are in certain ways original, in that the act of remaking gives significance to both the copying and the copied version of the work.

In the last class discussion on body and identity, we examined a few relevant pieces that use female bodies as the subject to reveal and debate stereotypes on how female bodies should be represented: Joan Semmel’s A Necessary Elaboration, Yasumasa Morimura’s reinterpretation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia, Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S. - Starification Object Series. All these works question what it means to represent female forms, encourage breaking away from the idealized female nude and placing female bodies in broader contexts such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, science.

In the first week of the class, we re-examined the definition of new media art and looked at some of the important artists and works that represent the radical shifts in how we evaluate and appreciate art and its form, one of which was Marcel Duchamp, leader of DADA movement in the early 20th century. His use of found objects in pieces, like Fountain and Bicycle Wheel, instead of creating something on his own opened up the conversations around what is art, how is art made and perceived. And soon after that the difference between how art should be made and that everyone can make art started to collapse. Followed along Duchamp were artists who kept challenging conventional art-making practice: Robert Rauschenberg, Martha Rosler, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin.