The relativity of boundaries: art, technology, and visual culture in the work of Pat Badani.

Pat Badani is an intermedia artist, educator, and researcher who studied at the University of Alberta (Canada) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now resides. Her Web-work has received a Canada Council Media Arts Research Grant and has been exhibited and discussed in international new media festivals, notably at File 2005 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and at the New Forms Festival in 2004 in Vancouver, Canada. Her latest project, "Where are you from?_Stories" (2002-2005), has developed across multiple platforms--both digital and physical. (1) Inscribed at the juncture between net.art, documentary video, and visual culture, it draws upon live events and dialogue, culminating in an on-line video database about nomadism and migration, one of today's issues of global relevance.

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"Where are you from?" is a universal question exchanged when people meet for the first time so they may contextualize each other within territory, nation, or family relations--an exercise in coming to grips with the strangeness of others. There were times in human history when that question was addressed to someone coming from a nearby village or from another valley. Today, the question is commonly directed toward travelers from foreign countries such as migrants and tourists--a phenomenon that signals a renewed perception of time and space; a new understanding of the larger formations of culture today; (2) and the relativity of boundaries. Using this question, Badani set out to explore how the complex relations between centers and peripheries, as well as between people and the places to which they belong, are found in both local and global environments.

Globalization is a new word describing an old process that began at the dawn of man when the first migrants walked out of Africa. The wish to leave the place from where one originates to seek a better future elsewhere has always been a central motivation for migration in an increasingly interconnected world. But, if a German professional interviewed for Badani's Internet platform describes himself as a nomad who lives in the same location for only two to four years, the inevitable questions follow: "Where are you going?" and "What for?" Is this type of nomadism a sign of escape--a means to sustain the illusion of improvement by perpetually moving forward or the result of an imperative to seek a better life elsewhere politically and financially? The latter was certainly the case for a Bosnian refugee whose answer to Badani's queries was: "The war started in my country, and we had to make a decision, not for us because our lives were already messed up, but a good decision for our daughter, so we escaped."

These are but two examples from fifty-five interviews archived in the on-line video database. Badani's aim was to bring together a plurality of views about displacement from citizens in today's globally interconnected world: tourists, nomads, refugees, immigrants, local migrants, and sedentary locals. Her multifocal vantage point reflects the open notion of the term "migration" used in contemporary theories and artworks today. What is at play in the work is the migration of people and languages and the hybrid, rather than the single, perspective of the Nation looking at the others--a perspective similarly found in the European project Projekt Migration from 2002-2006 where migration is seen as a main force for social change. (3) Also at play is the migration of images in motion, brought about by the digital revolution and art practices that intersect with live spectacle, where images migrate from film theaters to video screening rooms, exhibition spaces, and Web spaces.

CHALLENGING POSITION

"Where are you from?_Stories" was filmed as Badani retraced her personal nomadic history in six cities: Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Paris. After creating live events in carefully selected public locations, Badani invited citizens to share personal stories integrating images of self- and trans-local experiences. By 2006, Badani had filmed over 130 stories during live events in city parks, coffee shops, community centers, motels, and artist-run-spaces. The starting point of the interviews was the simple question accessible across cultures: "Where are you from?" Participants were then prompted into discussions about their lives, homes, territories, and displacements. The videotaped conversations "mapped" their movements and reasons for shifting from one place to another.

Careful not to reproduce the images of migrants and refugees that have made their way into public consciousness through mass media presentations of war-torn nations, Badani chose fifty-five representative video clips in English, Spanish, and French and gathered them in a Web archive. The videos are hyperlinked to a vocabulary of frequently used words (e.g., foreigner, accepted, familiarity, money, security) extracted from these transnational, vernacular testimonies collected since 2002. Spectators selecting the on-line videos can draw their imaginary lines and construct meaning by navigating through the database in a labyrinthine way, an aesthetic experience that is durational rather than immediate.

Certain aspects of the project cannot be grasped as relevant by critical methodologies used in conventional art--such as the formal appearance of physical objects. Not reducible to the visual and contextual in nature, the work unfolds through a process of performative interaction with the aim of facilitating dialogue, a type of exchange during which conversation becomes an integral part of the work. This type of art departs from accepted models in art practice in that the work's content is dependent upon the participation of members of the public. Non-art participants needed to feel comfortable about making comments regarding private issues in a public forum to a perfect stranger. They were involved in the process of sense-making and art-making, and in so doing challenged hitherto traditional boundaries between art-artist-audience-viewer. Badani sought to establish cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, making sure not to sacrifice the unique identities of individual speakers--a strategy that implied surrendering artistic control in favor of intersubjective engagement.

LIVE EVENTS

Each live event to film the stories involved developing networks with local businesses, government agencies, and professionals outside the cultural realm who facilitated and made possible the creation of communicational spaces where Badani could videotape conversations with local inhabitants. This method requires the artist to work outside an "artist network," with decision makers and with the public at large in local communities across the globe.

One example is the live event conducted in Chicago's Metropolis Coffee Company, a neighborhood coffeehouse with an independent and communal spirit. Badani chose this particular coffeehouse after exercising extensive location sampling throughout city neighborhoods. Metropolis Coffee seemed faithful to its name in that its diverse customers reflected a true "metropolitan" variety of age, gender, ethnic and national origin, occupation, and sexual orientation. After developing the necessary complicity with the coffeehouse owners, Badani set out to organize the day-long event. The artist trained two local assistants, charged with working with the public, organizing a timeline for the interviews, and having participants sign "model release forms" giving permission for the use of their videotaped stories in the artist's online database. Project identifiers such as cards, posters, and t-shirts with the "Where are you from?" logo were printed and distributed. Badani also worked with the formal qualities of the site in order to create what she likes to refer to as a "communicational space"--a space that calls for and facilitates dialogue. A small area of the coffeehouse was converted into a private interviewing booth where two cameras captured the interviews. One camera streamed a live, large-scale projection of the interviewee onto a screen hung in the main area of the coffeehouse.

The live projection succeeded in its double function of attracting the attention of customers to the "Where are you from?_Stories" project while equally reinforcing its conceptual grounding on the unstable boundary between private and public realms. People ranging from twenty to eighty years of age, from a variety of origins and walks of life, told stories about the location of "home" (be it physical, mental, cultural, linguistic, or ideological), about displacement, and their search to enhance their quality of life.

A young woman from Bulgaria who, after immigrating to Canada with her mother, is now studying in Chicago claims:

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A better life is living in better communities. I come from a communist

background and people [in Bulgaria] are much closer, they help each

other more, nobody is left behind that much ... people have a sense of

belonging and people care for each other much more than in western

societies where it's all about the money.

A young woman born in Israel to African American parents, and who has lived in Chicago since the age of seven, believes it is important to know her own history, and by taking that history with her, any location can become "home." She stated, "Home is acknowledging your present and past, combining those two and making something comfortable for yourself." A Catholic priest from New Zealand on a residency in Chicago said, "It's not about 'home' later: the big pill in the future. I don't work on the principle of 'no matter how tough it is here it's going to be better over there.' Ultimately, the journey of life is to find happiness by changing from being selfish to being totally otherish."

BETWEEN ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICES AND NET.ART

The method Badani has used is similar to collaborative approaches in "community videos" made in the late 1970s and 1980s in the United States, Australia, and Europe such as "Headwaters TV" at Appalshop Media Center in Kentucky. These works emerged from the initiative of a community or a political group. In such collective works the film crew is usually comprised of a fairly large number of people. Today, digital media productions also often comprise a large number of collaborators who come together from different specialities and locations to work on these time-based pieces that give rise to the notion of multiple (or even dissolved or distributed) authorship; a type of practice that has gained new currency. Collaborative works aspire to egalitarian conditions and multiple opportunities for interaction--an extension of geographical spaces for action and reflection. Here, too, as in Badani's experiments, various positions of responsibility and power still remain, such as the continuation of the projects through long periods contingent upon the commitment and persistence of the initiator.

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Another aspect of the project is its affinity to "oral culture" as a means of acquiring knowledge and possibly creating and representing "other" meanings. The artist's aim was to create a democratic context for how knowledge is produced, exchanged, and stored so information may be reused and recombined to create the world in a different light. The heterogenous character of the samples in Badani's digital platform and the presentation of the documentary material in an on-line, non-linear environment prevent us from taking her "talking heads" for granted. New meanings are gleaned as each user/visitor selects different samples in the database.

Lastly, the work is inscribed within net.art projects, an emerging practice in the late 1990s where on-line visitors, or "users," have the possibility to interact and participate by changing or adding material. One part of the project often takes place outside of the internet where interaction is placed at the service of communication experiments aimed at engaging reflection and dialogue, as in the case of Badani's project.

RELATIVITY OF BOUNDARIES?

Badani's project holds up a mirror to technologically mediated modes of communication today and to their impact on issues of identity. "Where are you from?_Stories" is not only a question addressing the relativity of physical national boundaries or of the virtual Web-world (understood since the 1990s as a space with no national boundaries). It is also a question addressing how identity is expressed in recent young user platforms like myspace.com or mypix.ch. In the latter instances, it seems important that users manifest their virtual identity and that they position themselves within a distinct location, building an identity through body and nation--a complete self-branding. (4) What appears here reflects a "double bind" phenomenon, observable also in the movement of people within the European community, because the concept of boundaries has become relative in a geopolitical and ideological sense, thanks to the Schengen contracts allowing free movement of people across Europe. (5) However, on the one hand there is an attempt to make boundaries between countries more open, while on the other hand, border control has elaborated stricter measures through so-called "early controls" or biometrical controls. Further, a "double bind" is also evidenced in a vision of openness and interconnectedness counterbalanced with the fear of identity loss and a wish to reaffirm "local" individuality--a pull in the opposite direction of post-national citizenship visions that hinders its development while circumstances continue to change through and around us.

FLAVIA CAVIEZEL studied (visual) anthropology, film, and constitutional law at the Universities of Berne and Zurich. She is a video artist, researcher, and lecturer, and lives in Switzerland.

NOTES 1. Pat Badani's "Where are you from?_Stories" can be experienced at www.hometransfer.org/where/stories.html. 2. For a discussion on culture see Arjun Appadurai's "Concept of Difference, A Contrastive Rather than a Substantive Property of Certain Things," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1996), 11-16. 3. See www.koelnischerkunstverein.de/migration/english/content/projekt.html and the associated exhibition catalog Projekt Migration. 4. For details about the (self-) representation of young people on Internet communities and generally on the notion of body identity, see the research project at www.ith-z.ch/brands/index/home and the magazine gepflegt krass (planned for Spring 2008). 5. For details about Schengen and the Free Movement of People Across Europe see www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?id=333.