Workshop
Tue 28 Mar 2023

Reading Group: Ken Chen’s “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show”

Online

Participants

Femke SneltingEva Weinmayr

Reading Group: Ken Chen’s “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show”

Starting from Kenneth Goldsmiths’ appropriation of the autopsy of police-murdered Michael Brown as a piece of conceptual poetry, Ken Chen asks challenging questions about the way this incident was not an accident.

From reading this text, we understood that an anti-colonial, feminist practice of Open Content would need to formulate “a politics of appropriation”. Without it, it risks repeating the colonial/white (?) gesture of treating the world as resource (primary, “raw” material, “dry text, pure content, pure evidence, anthropology), to render it dumbly into things, mere material to own; a site of violation; or simply something to instrumentalize”. (Chen 2015)

What is the line separating one writer as a poet of witness and another as a poet of expropriation—and what prevents either from being a producer of the kitsch of atrocity?

Conceptual Poetry has no politics of appropriation. One could say that the movement’s major theoretical texts spend significantly more time discussing, say, John Cage, Sol Le Witt, and Walter Benjamin than they do the power relations of cultural exchange. (Chen 2015)

Reading instruction

We would ask you to read the text beforehand, and then when we meet, we will read some parts together more closely.

Literature List

Ken Chen (11 June 2015). “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show”, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, https://aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/

Contributors

Femke Snelting

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, trans*feminism and Free Software. With the Brussels-based association for art and media, Constant, she experimented with Free Culture as a trans*feminist practice through performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes. Her thinking about reuse was sharpened as part of her work with the Libre Graphics Movement in dialogue with the practice of Open Source Publishing (OSP), a design collective that she co-founded in 2006.

Currently Femke works in various constellations on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists on what computational infrastructures do to collective life. With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication resulted from a collective disobedient research project, which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

Femke supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht) and contributes to Nubo, a cooperative that provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services. In the context of SoLiXG, she develops Counter Cloud Imaginaries, non-sovereign institutional infrastructures and methods for infra-resistance. With the Infrastructural Rehearsals collective, she collaborates on proposals and interventions that challenge top-down hegemonic approaches to the climate crisis, from green-washing tech capitalists to state-sponsored initiatives.

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr works at the interface of art, critical publishing and radical education. Her focus is on decolonial feminist discourses, pedagogies and practices. From 2019 until 2022 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” (with erg, Brussels) and co-initiated kritilab, an open-source platform and laboratory for Critical Diversity Literacy at the intersection of art and education. As part of “Ecologies of Dissemination”(HDK-Valand, 2022–24) with Femke Snelting, she develops decolonial feminist practices to Open Access.

Recent collaborative publication projects include “Noun to Verb”, a PhD thesis concerned with the micro-politics of publishing from an intersectional feminist perspective that was developed and published on a MediaWiki. She collaborates with Lucie Kolb on decolonial, feminist approaches to naming and cataloguing knowledge in institutional libraries in the Global North that led to an exhibition and the online publication “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021–22); Further projects include “The Piracy Project” (2010–15, with Andrea Francke), an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and modes of reproduction.

Currently, she works as Guest Professor for Critical Access at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel Academy of Art and Design (CH) and is part of the team of the MA “Critical Social Practice in Art Education” at ZHdK Zurich. Since 2024 she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK).