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From the SF Cameraworks Improbable Monuments Online Exhibition:
Sharon Daniel, in collaboration with Justice Now offers A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex , a collection of contributions from incarcerated women living within the Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA, the largest women's prison in the United States.
Conventional commemoratives often flatten history, losing the details of events, lives and circumstances that have contributed to movements, shifts in time and ideological changes. A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex is a monument-cum-vault containing recorded conversations with women within the prison. The monument-vault contains their personal stories and histories along with their political insights, analysis and critiques, told in the womens' own voices and from their own points of view. In addition, Daniel and Justice Now work collaboratively with the women to draw up plans based on their ideas for renovating CCWF -- as a monument to the end of the prison industrial complex, and as a monument to the many women who have died in the prison, as the result of substandard medical care. Daniel and Justice Now also solicit other artists or architects to participate in the project.
"Traditionally," Daniel writes, "public architecture, memorials, and monuments articulate narratives of power in an attempt to produce histories and foster historical consciousness. Ideally, a monument has the potential to stand against forgetfulness or ignorance and act upon the world with a view to reshaping it."
As a vault, A Proposal for an Improbable Monument to the end of the Prison Industrial Complex ensures future visibility and historical viability through collecting, protecting and affording accessibility to perspectives, histories and critical views of women within the prison complex. As monument, Daniel, Justice Now and the women within CCWF bring together imagination and critical discourse as the most essential and powerful forces by which to forge public memory.
http://sfcamerawork.org/improbable_monuments.html
http://www.improbablevoices.net/
Biography
Sharon Daniel is an artist who is developing and exploiting new information and communications technologies as sites for public art. Daniel designs systems that turn spectators into collaborators. These systems and their interfaces are both social and technological. Daniel's goal is to avoid representation - not to attempt to speak for others but to allow them to speak for themselves. Her role as an artist is that of "context provider," --assisting communities, collecting their stories, soliciting their opinions on politics and social justice, and building the online archives and interfaces that make this data available across social, cultural and economic boundaries. Daniel's work has been exhibited internationally at museums, festivals and on the Internet. Her essays have been published in books and professional journals. Her current research is supported by grants from the Daniel Langlois Foundation and the Creative Work Fund. She is an Associate Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice.
Daniel's, "Subtract the Sky" <http://subtractthesky.net> extends the context of public art by allowing individuals and communities to evolve an aesthetically, intellectually, and politically expressive, collaborative environment on-line. Subtract the Sky was exhibited at DEAF03 (the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival/V2) in Rotterdam, February 03 , salle Michel Journiac, Université Paris 1, Unité de Formation et de Recherche des Arts Plastiques et des Sciences de L'Art. Paris, November 2002 and recently published in Leonardo, volume 27 number 4 . Her net-based Collaborative System, NARRATIVE CONTINGENCIES, <http://narrativecontingencies.ucsc.edu> is an interactive, non-linear narrative, which allows participants to contribute texts and images to a continuously evolving story. An installation or "community site" for Narrative Contingencies was open to the public as part of the CORCORAN 46th BIENNIAL - Media and Metaphor, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Dec. 2000-March 2001. Narrative Contingencies website is currently on exhibition via the Mediateca of the Fundació "la Caixa", Barcelona and was presented in the Korean Biennial exhibition "2000 Kwangju Biennial Media Art Project." The Portugese version, has been exhibited in in the South American Biennial 1999 - Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Daniel's current research includes "Improbablevoices.net," <http://improbablevoices.net> "JustVoice: women prisoners' oral histories," "Bordertechnologies.org," <http://bordertechnologies.org> and "Need_X_Change," <http://needxchange.org> a project designed to help the staff and clients of Casa Segura, an HIV prevention and needle exchange clinic in Oakland, California attain social and political "voice", through communication with their local community and participation in the global information culture. Daniel's work is based on the belief that advanced information and communications technologies can be made accessible, useful, and empowering, especially for under-served and marginalized communities, through public art. |
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