Panel Abstract: In the famous 1964 Jacobelis v. Ohio case, Justice Potter Stewart famously claimed to know obscenity “when I see it.” Like obscenity and pornography, transgression is often taken for granted as a cultural “given.” As we become increasingly surrounded by cultural productions that blur any sense of coherent mainstream, alternative, corporate, state, or independent images, videos, music, and writing, it seems harder and harder to understand what transgression really means. In an age of online communities based on a free exchange of personally videotaped, exhibitionist pornography, websites that post embarrassing or illegal acts by powerful corporate interests, networks of political blogs that rival even the best print journalism, and the circulation of incredibly popular short films that range from the horrific to the banal, by what means do we measure how and when something transgresses what used to be known as the “dominant” culture? Breaking away from discussions of the internet, digital culture, and networks as either positive or negative characteristics of the contemporary public sphere, Transgression 2.0 brings together a variety of perspectives and case studies to find contemporary locations of cultural opposition, both on and offline. It suggests that the “prurient interest” of a culture, to borrow Justice Brennan’s terminology from another obscenity trial, is in fact to seek out those places in which it is forced to evolve. Far from an easy process, in the digital age transgression becomes increasingly essential even as it becomes harder to define, discover, and protect.Panel Rationale:Despite the constant attention paid to defining and redefining the field of Communications, and in particular the “keywords” that form the focus of this process, the concept of “transgression” has been largely avoided.  There are many reasons for this; the term is often associated with particular movements (e.g. battles for recognition in gay rights movements), specific theories (e.g. Bakhtin), and an ambivalent politics centered more on opposition than on what is commonly considered to be a progressive agenda.  This panel will attempt to bypass these issues, as they ultimately limit the usefulness of the concept of transgression.  More importantly, it will question whether or not transgression can exist in the contemporary moment, defined by increased information flow, increasingly shifting terms of personal and social identification, and political and economic systems that seem to co-opt and reappropriate areas of what would formerly be considered to be transgressive even before they are fully formed.  Focusing on transgression not as a personal act, therefore, but as a social act mediated in large part by technology, the panelists will discuss the (im)possibilities of transgression and its place in communication theory.David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University (Chair and Respondent)Ted Gournelos, Maryville University of St Louis”Hacking the News: Transgressing Performative Control Systems”Rather than presuppose the desirability of sincere, cohesive, or “positive” communication, this paper will examine how ironic and dissonant cultural productions can redefine the limits of the public sphere.  In a conflict-based view of what Henry Jenkins has called “convergence culture,” I argue that, in the search for new areas of exploitation, systems of control within late capitalism often internalize transgressive culture.  Informed by new media scholarship, the paper analyzes three primary case studies, each a performance within U.S. news productions.  In The Yes Men’s “pranks,” news organizations are forced to operate outside of existing control parameters; in faux articles and internet broadcasts by The Onion, the process of news appropriation (and thus consolidating journalism in massive conglomerates) becomes an absurd spiral of self-referentiality; finally, the judicial furor over the wikileaks project exposes the difficulty in controlling iterative discourse, particularly when it has “real world” implications and consequences.  I contrast Couldry’s “media rituals” and McNair’s “cultural chaos” to demonstrate the need for alternative methods through which we might understand transgression, departing from Habermasian fantasies of an open, power-free public sphere in favor of multiple, conflicting, and nomadic communities.  The paper argues that a model in which community and social change are embodied in a series of ontological “hacks” allows a space for a new, productive ethos of change even while operating within oppressive or stagnant system.  It culminates by trying to answer whether or not performance disrupts the everyday conceptual stasis of the news, or whether it simply acts to spice up an otherwise incestuous regime.Peter Krapp, University of California Irvine”Attention will be paid. Social media and economy of distraction”"Social media,” heralded as web 2.0, pivot on rampant monetization of attention and distraction. It depends on persuading a mass audience that participation in that dual market is not merely serving them up to advertisers, but empowers them individually to become content generators. This paper will argue that this is the most serious transgression in new media culture; it has become “the only division possible in a world now emptied of objects, beings, and spaces to desecrate.” From the vantage point of a dialectic of attention and distraction, the bundling of otherwise splintered audiences into advertising categories is an ill-concealed attempt to divert your attention from something and onto something else - or inversely, to distract you into thinking what I want you to think about. If we live in an attention economy, it is paramount to protect our freedom of decision on how attention is “paid”, and to observe closely how manipulations of the parameters of memory aid a “culture” industry.Grant Kien, California State University East Bay”Global Capitalism as Art: The case of Brendan Lott’s non-memory”This chapter explores several case studies in which conventional transgressions serve as the starting point for an entirely new common-sense understanding of agency and self-identification. Recent online phenomena such as Wretch.com and Stickcam.com circulate self-exploitative images and videos that reestablish traditional notions of transgression in a consumer base, evacuating them of any self-conscious opposition. How then to identify transgression in a world rooted in the self-management of one’s own exploitation? The work of Brendan Lott’s installation  Memories I’ll Never Have born out of online images reveals the transgressive juncture, the point at which unequal relations of global capitalism are revealed for what they are. This critical analysis of online/offline behavior is rooted in ethnography informed by Actor-Network Theory, taking web sites and Lott’s installation as sources of found data treated as narrative texts.Richard L. Edwards”Breaking Conventions: Political Video Mashups as Transgressive Texts”Political video mashups are an increasingly important part of transgressive political discourse in a digital age. Video mashups combine pop cultural knowledge, avant-garde techniques, the latest digital DIY tools and remix aesthetics into a media practice that is also increasingly driven by Web 2.0 logics and user-generated content. Using key examples of popular video mashups, this paper will examine how political video mashups are being used to affect contemporary politics and how they can play a subversive role in political discourse.As opposed to earlier modes of video activism that sought to signal their difference from mainstream, dominant media forms, a political video mashup embraces popular culture as its starting point. The formal properties of a political video mashup—frequently in line with larger trends in remix culture—are inherently transgressive. Mashups take existing media texts (many of them copyrighted and used without permission) and re-edit them and recombine them into new texts. A political video mashup can subvert official campaign media, attack mainstream news reports, reconfigure or decode the meaning of a candidate’s speech, or extend unofficial meanings latent in a video clip.But key questions remain about their transgressive potential. Can any practice that firmly embraces popular culture, even if it is subverting it on some level, operate as an oppositional practice for real-world political change? Do mashups use of certain cultural texts undercut claims of alterity or political resistance? In this paper, several case studies—including examples from mainstream shows and user-generated content—will be explored in an attempt to answer those questions.presented at the annual Popular Culture Association conference, New Orleans, April 2009

In the twenty-first century it is increasingly difficult to separate the fine arts from elitist and capitalist social systems, as festivals like the Venice Biennale make abundantly clear. However, recent examples in visual media point us to cultural activities that operate outside of the binary constructions of low/high, public/private, local/global, individual/community, and mass/popular. Using the 2005 Biennale as a metaphor and entry point, this paper examines Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of suburbia, Temporary Services’ “Prisoners’ Inventions” project, and viral internet phenomena in order to draw conclusions about where the arts lie in contemporary society and where they might be headed, both visually and politically.

Presented at the annual National Communications Association, San Antonio, November 2006

At a time when American politics has reached an almost uncanny level of absurdity in its self-contradictions, nationalistic appeals, and stunning disregard for large majorities of the population, it becomes increasingly necessary to look for clues as to why various forms of America speak and exist and how those interested in change can locate and infiltrate nodes of instability or change. Rhetoric surrounding the suburbs in high and popular culture provides such a framework, as it maps out areas of creation and consumption that have great appeal but are either logically incoherent or dangerously multiple. This article enters the discussion through Gregory Crewdson’s famous staged photographs before turning to traumatic identity in the films Pleasantville, American Beauty, and True Lies. The resulting dissonant political ambiguity in daily life suggests a new, flexible line of postmodern discourse in the post-9/11 public sphere.Presented at the annual Popular Culture Association Conference, April 2006Presented at the annual National Communications Association Conference, November 2006 

The time when art was thought able to intervene in the public sphere has gone.  Whether because of the visual arts’ reification or commodification in the so-called “art world,” because of the rise of self-aware visual noise in everyday life, or simply because of the fragmenting or dissolution of what could be called the “public,” the end result is the same:  for the visual arts to be relevant or powerful in modern society, they must become dialogic devices that interact with and are guided by their intended audience.  Self-reflexivity or aggressive posturing are not enough; they must place both themselves and their participants in situations that blur all boundaries between public and private, expressed and discovered, authored and quoted.  By charting influential public art practices and their failures, as well as public art that avoids or successfully navigates the most common pitfalls of visual art, we can begin to get an idea of how the arts can begin to play a more fluid, adaptable, and critical counterpoint to contemporary society.  The impact of such pieces as Temporary Services’ Public Sculpture Opinion Poll and Prisoner’s Inventions can best be seen by first examining the successes and failures of modern artists (Richard Serra’s Titled Arc), performance artists (Fluxus in its various forms), and community artists (Suzanne Lacy).  By understanding the intricacies of Temporary Services’ projects within a larger context of public interaction, it is possible to formulate an idea of the public based not on data or ideology, but on processes of communication themselves.

Presented at Crossroads in Cultural Studies, Champaign IL, June 2004 

Libraries conjure up images of kindly old librarians, rows of books, and quiet rows of people thirsty for knowledge.  Made for and within communities, they are made to categorize knowledge, to allow efficient and specialized research.  They are also rarely thought of as institutions of control.  Even the Patriot Acts looked at libraries as hotbeds of subversion rather than as the friendly face of power.  In 2001, Temporary Services, an artist collective based in Chicago, decided to point out the ideological structure of the traditional library.  They inserted one of a kind or limited edition art books into the library system without the knowledge of the administration.  The works were placed in sections chosen by the artists, not the staff (which would have placed them in an art section), and were therefore returned to both context and the possibility for contact with a wide variety of people that would normally never have thought to access the work.  Temporary Services asked questions that need to be asked more often:  does an artist’s work on the police, for instance, belong in an artificially created and decontextualized art section, or does it belong with the other books on the police?  Is subversive work destroyed by removing it from context, and if so, isn’t that an ideological act intended to protect existing power structures?  Treated as a sort of combination of museum and science laboratory, libraries have an aura of holiness that doesn’t allow one to question its methods of control, even though they are such a vital resource for the absorption of knowledge.  By subverting the system within a community of artists, in a way that slowly unraveled within the other communities of patrons and staff (many of the books were actually checked out, and some have been placed in permanent circulation), Temporary Services managed to address the flaws in the institution in a way that revitalized the possibilities for artwork within any ideological apparatus while simultaneously avoiding many of the problems inherent to what we know of as contemporary art practice.  This paper will examine The Library Project through its interaction with various audiences/authors, locate the piece within the larger context of critical theory and political struggle, and then attempt to chart the ways in which it creates a space within which other artists can work outside of the marginalized venues relegated to the arts.

 Presented at the (Re)imagining Power conference, Brandeis University,  March 2005

 As of January, 2009 my exhibition “Popping the Bubble: 2008 Unemployment Statistics” at the Springer Cultural Center in Champaign, IL has been cancelled. The piece, a massive installation (approximately 1000 square feet of space), would have covered the floor with multiple layers of bubble wrap. Each bubble was to have represented one job lost in 2008 (for a total of 2.6 million bubbles/jobs), in what economists and politicians glibly call a “popped bubble” of economic prosperity. As viewers walked through the installation, they would have popped these bubbles themselves, making a visceral connection between them and the millions of newly-unemployed.Although the Springer was excited about the piece, it was censored twice. The first time, it was censored by Tim Cronin, the safety inspector, who said that I could not place anything on the floor where people might walk. However, even after I compromised by removing the wrapping from a central walkway (leading to a locked set of glass emergency doors, no less), he was unwilling to allow the piece to appear. He was also unable to demonstrate how and why the bubble wrap was any more dangerous than any of the other materials on the floor at the Springer, including several rugs and, most significantly, other artwork from previous shows that were placed in walking areas. After the Springer’s Board of Directors overturned his decision for its sheer incoherence, he called the Champaign Fire Marshall to get the piece censored yet again. The Fire Marshall dutifully complied, and forced the Springer to halt the exhibition. He was unable to give any justification other than the materials needed to be rated as fireproof, again disregarding the flammable materials of all other art exhibitions in the building. A statement that the bubble wrap actually required a very high heat to result in a flame (in my own experiments, it took a blow torch) rather than to simply melt was ineffective.Hopefully I’ll be able to find another venue for this piece, although it will of course have to be updated with contemporary statistics. As the economy is going to be pretty bad for a while, I don’t see us losing the poignancy of the “popped bubble” any time soon. Public art or no, I can’t say I’m happy about that.

“Sudan, 2002″
4.5 ft x 45 ft
acrylic paint, plastic

This piece, a walkway installed for approximately a month on the main floor of a University of Illinois building, was our first major public intervention. Intended to highlight not just the ongoing genocide in Sudan but the complicity we have had in all the genocides over the past century, it forced viewers to walk on images, enlarged photographs painted onto clear plastic, depicting the atrocities of war. Over the course of its installation many people were profoundly impacted, especially those with personal connections to genocide, and several classes met in the hallway to discuss the piece.

2 4 ft cubes
acrylic paint, paper, ink, foam

This piece, installed for several months in front of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, is now being rebuilt for an installation in a residential neighborhood in Urbana, IL.  The dice are covered with AIDS statistics, everything from deaths to infection rates to the impact of orphans and economic ruin on world security and terrorist threats.  They are only visible in the dots.  The piece is also a reference to Einstein’s quote, “God does not play dice with the universe.”  But if he doesn’t, then how do we account for our luck and others’ misfortune?  And how do we do anything to change things?   This piece was our most interactive to date, with viewers constantly moving and playing with the incredibly light dice.  It is also what inspired, to some extent, our apparel line, and is similar to where we hope to go in the future with our work.

10 ft x 20 ft x 10 ft
aluminum, copper, wood

Shown here in its 2 month installation between the Law Building and the Art and Design Building at the University of Illinois, this piece was later moved to a six month international sculpture show in Galena, Illinois. It used statistical information to represent the wealth and populations of countries around the world, placed in their positions on a map. The USA was 9.5 ft tall (GDP) and 20″ in diameter, ethiopia was 12″ in diameter and a single sheet of metal, and China was 14 ” tall and 40″ in diameter, to give you an idea of the differences. Iraq and Afghanistan, very close to one another, were less than half an inch tall.

18 boxes, 6 ft x 2 ft
paint, grass, wood, aluminum

Installed first at the 2003 Artists Against AIDS exhibition and then for 3 months between the Art and Design and Law buildings at the University of Illinois, this piece had a profound impact on many of its viewers.  A complete life cycle, from low grass to high to death to reseeding, it represented the approximate number of children under 12 to die of AIDS in 2002 (over 60,000).  Each blade of grass stood for a child, and the statistics were created using a method of sqare footage, approximately 3000 blades per square foot.  This is, unfortunately, a little too similar to the ways in which we estimate AIDS deaths.  Regions, places, times, but no concrete information.  A little too ironic, perhaps, but tragic nonetheless.