Download textbook Collaborative Art In The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Sondra Bacharach ebook all chapter pdf

Collaborative Art in the Twenty First
Century 1st Edition Sondra Bacharach

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/collaborative-art-in-the-twenty-first-century-1st-edition
-sondra-bacharach/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Militant Aesthetics - Art Activism in the Twenty-First

Century First Edition Martin Lang
https://textbookfull.com/product/militant-aesthetics-art-
activism-in-the-twenty-first-century-first-edition-martin-lang/
Dark side of the boom the excesses of the art market in

the twenty first century Adam
https://textbookfull.com/product/dark-side-of-the-boom-the-
excesses-of-the-art-market-in-the-twenty-first-century-adam/
Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century Saul

Dubow
https://textbookfull.com/product/commonwealth-history-in-the-
twenty-first-century-saul-dubow/
Nomadland Surviving America in the Twenty First Century

Jessica Bruder
https://textbookfull.com/product/nomadland-surviving-america-in-
the-twenty-first-century-jessica-bruder/
Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction 1st
Edition Kristian Shaw (Auth.)
https://textbookfull.com/product/cosmopolitanism-in-twenty-first-
century-fiction-1st-edition-kristian-shaw-auth/
Global intelligence oversight : governing security in

the twenty-first century 1st Edition Goldman
https://textbookfull.com/product/global-intelligence-oversight-
governing-security-in-the-twenty-first-century-1st-edition-
goldman/
Rebooting Clausewitz: 'On War' in the Twenty-First

Century 1st Edition Christopher Coker
https://textbookfull.com/product/rebooting-clausewitz-on-war-in-
the-twenty-first-century-1st-edition-christopher-coker/
Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century

Avi Brisman
https://textbookfull.com/product/water-crime-and-security-in-the-
twenty-first-century-avi-brisman/
Child Development and Education in the Twenty First

Century Priti Joshi
https://textbookfull.com/product/child-development-and-education-
in-the-twenty-first-century-priti-joshi/
Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century
Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic

statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today’s hybrid world of virtual
mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new
territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated
art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of
cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why
collaboration has become so integrated into a greater understanding of creative artistic
practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors – from the arts, art history,
sociology, political science, and philosophy – to engage directly with the diverse and
interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future.
Sondra Bacharach is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New

Zealand.
Jeremy Neil Booth is an artist, writer, and publisher currently based in Germany. He holds an
MFA from Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, Germany.
Siv B. Fjærestad is a Norwegian-born artist and curator, living in New Zealand. She holds an
MA in Visual Arts from Goldsmiths College in London.
Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies
1 Ethics and Images of Pain

Edited by Asbjørn Grønstad & Henrik Gustafsson
2 Meanings of Abstract Art

Between Nature and Theory
Edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche
3 Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and its Digital Future
John Lechte
4 Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture

Edited by Maria Pia Di Bella and James Elkins
5 Manga’s Cultural Crossroads

Edited by Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Edited by Lewis Johnson
7 Spiritual Art and Art Education

Janis Lander
8 Art in the Asia-Pacific

Intimate Publics
Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Natalie King, and Mami Kataoka
9 Performing Beauty in Participatory Art and Culture

Falk Heinrich
10 The Uses of Art in Public Space

Edited by Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens
11 On Not Looking
The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture
Edited by Frances Guerin
12 Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices

Tim Stott
13 Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art

Meiqin Wang
14 Photography and Place
Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945
Donna West Brett
15 How Folklore Shaped Modern Art

A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics
Wes Hill
16 Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

David Houston Jones
17 Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth, and Siv B. Fjærestad
Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth, and Siv B. Fjærestad

First published 2016
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bacharach, Sondra, editor.

Title: Collaborative art in the twenty-first century / Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil
Booth and Siv B. Fjærestad.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2016. |
Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies; 17 | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015050119
Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern—21st century. | Artistic collaboration. | Group work in art.
Classification: LCC N6497 .C65 2016 | DDC 709.04—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050119
ISBN: 978-1-138-93574-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-67719-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
This book is dedicated to Stephen and Samantha Eng, Florian and Felix Fjærestad-Jones, and
Rafael Schroth: the five human babies who emerged, influenced (slowed down, fast-
forwarded), and reflected our growing awareness of the profound and meaningful tangle of art,
life, and technology in collaborative practice. It is also dedicated to the cultural and natural
resources accessible to all members of a society, including air, water, gardens, information,
open source software, and the internet. Long may these resources be held in common, not
privately owned.
Contents
List of Table and Figures

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century

SONDRA BACHARACH, JEREMY NEIL BOOTH AND SIV B. FJÆRESTAD
SECTION I
Collaboration in the Age of Technological Innovation
1 Pirate Film Societies: Rearranging Traditional Apparatus with Inappropriate Technology

GABRIEL MENOTTI
2 Digital Street Art

GEMMA ARGÜELLO MANRESA AND SONDRA BACHARACH
3 Hybrid Modes of Collaborations in the Post-Socialist Context: The Socio-Politically

Engaged Art Practices of Big Hope and Matei Bejenaru
IZABEL GALLIERA
4 Turkish Contemporary Art and the Emergent Off-Space Artist Collectives

TIJEN TUNALI
SECTION II
Collaboration and the Identity Crisis
5 The Solitary Author as Collective Fiction

K. E. GOVER
6 Collaboration’s Gesture at the Impossible

TIM CORBALLIS
7 Technological Impacts on Musical Collaboration: Can the Postal Service Survive?

HENRY JOHN PRATT
8 Empathy, Surviving, Collective Reflexivity

LEGWORK (TIMOTHY MURRAY, TOBEY ALBRIGHT, AND EGLE OBCARSKAITE)
9 Collective Action and the Reciprocity of Friendship

KATERINA REED-TSOCHA
SECTION III
Rethinking Collaborations
10 Sisterly Love
LOUISE R. MAYHEW
11 Future Calls the Dawn

JENNY GILLAM AND EUGENE HANSEN
12 Unsettling Action and Text

BARTRAM O’NEILL
13 The Politics of Collaboration: Robin Rhode and the Drowned Piano

LEORA MALT Z-LECA
14 Wedge: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration by Janine Antoni and Jill Sigman

SHERRI IRVIN
15 Combination, Collaboration, and Creation: The Case of Jasper Johns

PETER MURPHY
16 Gathering: Artistic Collaborations in Glass

DANIELLA RAMOS BARROQUEIRO
List of Contributors
Index
List of Table and Figures
Table
7.1 Collaborative model
Figures
1.1 One of Cine Falcatrua’s early, outdoor screenings.
1.2 Assembling the cinematographic apparatus with everyday technology.
3.1 Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop (Big Hope), Re:route, web archive detail:
Mahmoud’s mental map, 2002, Turin, Italy. Image copyright and courtesy of the artists.
3.2 Matei Bejenaru, Impreuna/Together, photograph documenting performance outside Tate
Modern, London, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist.
3.3 Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, detail, 2005–2007. Image courtesy of the artist.
3.4 Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop (Big Hope), Re:route, installation view, Turin
Biennale, 2002. Image courtesy of the artists.
8.1 Legwork adopts an artwork (Basso Berlin 2010).
8.2 Legwork as app (steirischer herbst 2012).
10.1 The Strutt Sisters, Forest Home, 2012. Mixed media assemblage.
10.2 Soda_Jerk, After the Rainbow, 2009. 2-channel digital video, duration: 5.30, looped.
10.3 Match Box Projects (Leanne Shedlezki and Naomi Shedlezki), Walking Window Series,
2007–8, Shinkansen Journey, Japan, 2008. Features Walking Window, perspex, mirror,
nails.
10.4 The Sisters Hayes, Shadowland, 2011. Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of Anna
Pappas Gallery.
11.1 Marie Shannon, ‘Portrait of Julian Dashper’, 1991.
11.2 Julian Dashper ‘Future Call’, Topolò, 1994.
11.3 Future Call, Minus Space, Brooklyn, 2010.
12.1 ‘She Works, She Writes’, performed at Grace Exhibition Space New York, Bartram
O’Neill, 2012.
O’Neill, 2012.
12.3 and 12.4 ‘I, I am, I am here, I am speaking here’, performed at Performa 1: Art Basel
Miami, Bartram O’Neill, 2013.
O’Neill, 2012.
13.1 Robin Rhode, still from “Gnomus,” Pictures Reframed, performance at Lincoln Center,
New York, NY, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong
Kong.
13.2 Rhode, still from “Drowned Piano,” Pictures Reframed. Courtesy of the artist and
Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
13.3 William Kentridge, drawing from Stereoscope, 1998/99, charcoal and pastel on paper.
Courtesy of William Kentridge studio.
13.4 Rhode, still from “Baba Yaga,” Pictures Reframed. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann
Maupin, New York and Hong Kong.
13.5 Rhode, film still from “Old Station,” Pictures Reframed. Courtesy of the artist and
13.6 Rhode, still from “Medieval Castle,” Pictures Reframed. Courtesy of the artist and
14.1 Janine Antoni and Jill Sigman Wedge (2012). Photodocumentation of performance. Photo
T. Loonan © Janine Antoni and Jill Sigman. Courtesy of the artists and Luhring Augustine,
New York.
New York.
New York.
New York.
New York.
New York.
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of an extended collaboration between Sondra Bacharach at Victoria
University of Wellington’s Philosophy Programme and artists and writers Siv Fjærestad and
Jeremy Booth, at the time working together at Enjoy Public Art Gallery. Along the way, we
benefited from generous funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund
(collaborating with Deborah Tollefsen of the University of Memphis), Victoria University of
Wellington, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, the Public Art Project Fund, and Creative New Zealand.
We also benefited intellectually from artist Gregory Sholette during his Artist-in-Residence at
Enjoy Public Art Gallery, a selection of the 20 international artists, writers, and critics who
collaborated to create the Wellington Collaboratorium: An Imaginary Archive in June 2010,
and arts practitioners and scholars who participated in the related public seminar on the topic.
We would also like to acknowledge the hard work and wonderful insights of our contributors,
to thank philosophy student Chrissy Van Hulst for all her hard work, and to remember Katerina
Reed-Tsocha, who passed before this book came to print.
Introduction
Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth, Siv B. Fjærestad
Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century presents an international cross section of

contemporary collaborative art practice. It explores what it means for artists to work together,
here and now. What we find is an extraordinary richness and variety of significant, new trends
that respond specifically to an increasingly dynamic climate. A sign of the times, collaboration
today requires a strategic engagement across the arts, social media, networking and
technological innovation, as well as economic, business, and community-based spheres.
Collaboration has become as much a way of life as it has an essential artistic approach.
The central argument of this collection is that collaborative practice in the twenty-first
century is profoundly new: collaboration used to be driven by financial and artistic interests.
Not everyone had all the materials, skills, and background to engage in art-making, or specific
projects, so they decided to work together. The solo artist couldn’t always afford the
equipment or the training. Collaborating was a practical and strategic response to pursuing
new artistic and political objectives in art, or a necessary means to responding to a
compromising position, where working alone significantly reduced your artistic potential.
But, the rise of technological innovations revolutionizes how artists work. The past decade
has seen a boom of internet-based art, both in the form of production tools and as a malleable,
non-regulated international arena through which artists operate independently from mainstream
galleries and institutions. Perhaps most significant is the accelerated expansion and
acclimatization to internet-based communication, file-sharing platforms and strategies, online
networking, social media, gaming, and virtual worlds.
With these technological innovations, a single artist really can do it all – new technology
eliminates the need to buy specialized equipment, it renders specialized skills and training
obsolete, and makes it financially possible for an individual artist to remain within budget.
If technology makes going it alone a viable option for artists, then it also makes
collaboration, for the very first time, a choice for any individual artist, at any time, under
any circumstances. No longer a mere means to an end, and not necessarily influenced by
political or philosophical convictions or status quo, the choice to collaborate is a deliberate
artistic choice. Collaboration, in other words, is now part of the medium of art-making, an
artistic end in itself.
Informed by a rich background of case studies and perspectives, Collaborative Art in the
Twenty-First Century explores the central factors of change in contemporary society that have
transformed the development of collaborative practices, including the unprecedented
technological advances, the commercialization of art and its institutions, and the ever-
expanding fields of artistic practice.
The collection is structured around exploring the ramifications of this paradigm shift in three
different domains: (1) how technological innovations expand the kinds of collaborations that
are possible, (2) how art historians and critics theorize the new forms of collaborations, and
(3) how art practices themselves are transformed by the new forms of collaborations.
The first section of this book examines the dramatic impact that technological innovations
have had on the nature of collaboration and collaborative practices across several domains in
art. The essays in this section explore the unexpected ways that high-tech technological
innovations promote low-tech, grassroots collaborative art practices. Technology makes
possible new forms of artistic collaboration that were not possible before. For one, artists
exploit computer-based technology for socio-political ends: to empower and enfranchise
heretofore silenced groups of people (pirate film societies, off-space artist collectives,
geographically isolated artists, street art). Bringing the voice of the people into art is made
possible with technological innovations, and transforms both how artists engage with their
artistic medium, and the role that the audience plays in the creation of these works. Both of
these changes have profound implications for the socio-political power of both artists and the
voices of those represented and expressed in their artworks. In an ironic shift, technology
brings people together who would otherwise have remained powerless in their isolation. The
technological advances, in other words, make possible collaborations among people who
could not otherwise find their voice; as a result, these technological innovations give these
collaborations a unique socio-political force that has not been seen before.
The explosion of web-based and internet-based collaborations makes possible communities
not bound by political, cultural, and economic regulations. This opportunity provides a type of
collaboration that is governed as much by availability of technology as by chance encounters in
cyberspace. The first two papers in this section explore the implications of such encounters.
Gabriel Menotti, in his “Pirate Film Societies: Rearranging Traditional Apparatus with
Inappropriate Technology,” explores how technology can be used to blur boundaries between
cutting edge, underground new media art and more traditional art institutions, thereby
undermining the political force of the mainstream art culture within the Brazilian artworld. He
credits technology as the key factor enabling Cine Falcatrua to subvert the specificities of
cinema within the emerging media culture in Brazil. Argüello and Bacharach also tackle the
influence of chance encounters in cyberspace on new communities that operate outside of
traditional boundaries. Their paper argues that digital street art uses collaborative, locative
media technology to actively construct, mediate, and disseminate the experiential knowledge of
inhabitants of different places. Like Gabriel Menotti, they argue that digital street art can
empower heretofore silenced groups, by making possible collaborations among people who
would not otherwise come together to find a voice.
In these two papers, technology redefines the social politics of collaborative art-making in
our global environment, by allowing artists to construct communities that fall outside of the
traditional political, cultural, and economic institutions. Practitioners aim to dissolve
boundaries, reinterpret long-standing divisions, and challenge traditional methods for
evaluating art and generating social value. As a result, socially engaged work is a direct fallout
of collaborative practices. Our next two papers examine in more detail the particular ways that
collaborative practice generates social and political engagement with marginalized groups.
Galliera’s paper, “Hybrid Modes of Collaborations in the Post-Socialist Context: The
Socio-Politically Engaged Art Practices of Big Hope and Matei Bejenaru,” explores how
collaborative art practices in the CEE actively subvert traditional geographical boundaries,
thereby redefining what it means to belong to a community. She critically examines two
collaborative art projects that rely on grassroots community engagement to challenge our
traditional notions of community and belonging. Tunali’s contribution, “Turkish Contemporary
Art and the Emergent Off-Space Artist Collectives,” like Galliera’s, explores the way in which
these participatory forms of collaboration make possible socially engaged projects whose
aims and goals are at odds with the increasing institutional and governmental exclusionary
tactics – around immigrants in Galliera’s case, and around class distinctions in Tunali’s case.
In an environment with less and less government support for the arts, and with the increasing
marginalization of artists, Tunali argues that collaborative art practices are first and foremost
designed to produce new forms of social relations, specifically, interclass and trans-class
encounters that subvert traditional socio-economic divisions. These two contributions
underscore how a new generation of artists is actively expanding the notions of community and
experience, changing the very perception of where and for whom art exists, and challenging the
form that art takes and what art is capable of accomplishing. These are all instances of
collaborative artists placing themselves and their work at the very forefront of innovative
media and technological practices, resulting in the successful infiltration and eventual
subversion of mainstream social and political institutions. Collaboration allows artists to
establish more viable practices and launch projects that strategically employ, and even
surpass, the unspoken controls of today’s globalized and commercialized art world.
Technological, social, and political challenges are as provoking for artists as they are for
critics. Critics find it difficult to interpret the aesthetic value and criticality of socially engaged
collaborative art – because the collaborative art practice rarely strives for a commercial
outcome; because these new collaborations involve non-artistic media, agents, and outputs;
because the works resulting from the collaborations challenge the perceived limits of artistic
production.
Theories of collaborative arts, like the practices themselves, move into new art critical
territories: critics must develop new theories that make sense of the collaborative artist and
her practices. The second section of Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century examines
the implications of this collaborative shift in art practices for the art critic and art historian, as
well as for the art practitioner qua individual and qua collective entity above and beyond its
individual members.
The twenty-first century’s collaborative shift in artistic practice is not new: historically, the
acceptance of the Romantic myth of the solitary genius, celebrating the brilliance of an
individual artist’s original creative act, as a myth was perhaps the first collaborative shift. Our
first trio of papers situates the impact of this myth for collective art-making practices today.
Gover’s paper, “The Solitary Author as Collective Fiction,” explores why so many advocates
of the collectivity thesis, which acknowledges all art-making to be inherently social,
continually hark back to this myth, given that this myth was ostensibly dismantled so long ago.
This myth seems to have a modern reincarnation, in which an artist’s status is ironically
mythologized and aggrandized for being the creator of supersized works that ostensibly hide
the individual artist’s role in art-making. Except, those artists are not hidden behind their
massive works; they parade around them, taking on a new artistic role: we have traded the
myth of the solitary genius for the myth of the super-star artistic producer.
Corballis’ “Collaboration’s Gesture at the Impossible” also begins with a paradox around
the Romantic myth of the solitary genius: if we have long given up the myth of the solitary
genius, then we have already always been collaborating; and yet, if we have all already always
been collaborating, then why is there the sudden urge to construct some theoretical model
around the collaborative impulse as we are experiencing it today? Corballis offers a way out
of this dilemma; a new model of collaborative practice – instead of clarifying and working
through the meaning of “working together” as collaborative practice is typically assumed to
embody – Corballis explores what it means to collaborate while working apart, while working
separately, and perhaps in a state of tension.
Artists, critics, and philosophers alike are rethinking the contemporary impetus to
collaborate. If we are correct that the modern collaborative shift is centered around
technological innovations, then it comes as no surprise that these collaborations can still make
room for superstars of the kind Gover imagines in the highest realms of the art world. But,
technology allows for the forms of anti-collaborative collaborations that Corballis examines.
Also, Pratt’s paper illustrates this in a very direct way in “Technological Impacts on Musical
Collaboration: Can the Postal Service Survive?”. Pratt argues that technological innovations
simplify the music-making process to such an extent that contemporary musicians lose any
motivation to engage in collaborations. Like Corballis and Gover, Pratt worries that technical
innovations have empowered, rather than dismantled, the solitary artist who willingly eschews
the social turn. While technological innovation broadens the musical horizons of any individual
musician, it narrows the music’s scope as a whole – swapping out the old, collaborative model
of music-making for a solitary one. Pratt may lament losing the conviviality of the older, more
social, ways of music-making, but this only strengthens the more general claim that
technological innovation radically impacts the artistic playing field, both literally and
metaphorically.
Gover, Corballis, and Pratt all highlight key theoretical challenges unique to collaborating
with the technological innovations of the twenty-first century. As collaboration becomes a
choice, rather than a necessity, this choice calls for artistic justification and theoretical
explanation. Suddenly, it is a legitimate question to ask why choose to collaborate. It is a
meaningful question to ask what collaboration brings to the work and the practice that informs
the work. When collaboration is a necessity, these questions have no meaning. It is only when
collaboration becomes a choice that collaborators can reflect on that choice and engage in
collaboration with a self-awareness of its implications for their practice. Legwork and Reed-
Tsoscha both explore the meaning of collaboration for artists in very personal and first-hand
ways.
Legwork, in their “Empathy, Surviving, Collective Reflexivity,” reflects on their own
existential challenge of collaborating in the contemporary art world. Legwork themself is
keenly aware of the challenges of being both an individual in a group, as well as a group, an
entity over and above any of the individuals that constitute that group. This phenomenologically
dual existence heightens their criticality, their reflexivity, and their sense of belonging.
Legwork identifies three key concepts in their collaborative practice as “unbelonging,”
“survival,” and “collective reflexivity” as necessary strategies that enable its collective
members to exist on a number of different levels, including contemporary life and networking
arenas. Embedded within these comments is a kind of existential crisis for collaborators
concerning their true identity and individuality – an uneasiness about how groups function
differently from individual artists and how this impacts their works’ reception.
Reed-Tsocha also explores how collaborations impact the true identity and individuality of
the members that constitute them. But where others express scepticism, worry, and negativity,
Reed-Tsocha seizes this as an opportunity to consider some of the more meaningful, fruitful,
and positive ways that collaborative processes can enrich not just our artistic practices, but
also enhance our human lives. Against the cynical backdrop of cut-throat art-markets, isolating
technology, and the existential angst of not finding one’s place in the increasingly divided
world, Reed-Tsocha invites us to get back to basics, philosophically speaking. She offers an
Aristotelian model of friendship as the foundation for collaborative models that foster human
flourishing. When collaborators ask what collaborations offer over and above the individuals
that constitute them, for Reed-Tsocha the answer is simple: friendship is the value that groups
like Legwork and the Postal Service seek to foster in their collaborations that are grounded in
a conception not just of shared art-making practices, but also of a shared life.
The third, and final, section of Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century continues this
existential strand, exploring more intimate responses to understanding one’s identity as an artist
within the age of collaborative arts. These are artists whose practices remain untouched and
unaffected by technological changes – and yet, their practices look different against the
backdrop of these new collaborative practices that have emerged from and alongside of
technological innovations of the twenty-first century. The decision to collaborate, and the role
that collaboration plays in artistic practice, are understood differently in light of the expanded
set of collaborative practices now in play. We have already appreciated the unique features of
collaborative practice resulting from technologically driven concerns, from changes in the art
world, and from perceived necessity; now it’s time to reconsider the impact of this expanded
realm on traditional collaborations.
We see the terrain of collaborative practice dichotomized – at one end of the spectrum are
collaborations featuring the peaceful, perhaps even harmonious, co-existence of art and life,
and the need to turn inward, to explore the complexities of one’s relationships with oneself and
those closely connected to us. Withdrawing from the external world overflowing with ever-
increasing pressures from without, collaborative artists retreat to those closest to them. Those
closest to us are our immediate family. Louise Mayhew’s essay examines how artist-sister
pairs’ special familial relationships encourage an intuitive and adaptable way of collaborating.
Mayhew’s work underscores the fluidity of these relationships – their very close personal
relations spill into their artistic practice, resulting in a shared visual language and artistic style
that is perhaps unique to sisters-artists working collaboratively. In a similar vein, Gillam and
Hansen draw attention to an equally personal and public form of collaboration between life
partners Julian Daspher and Marie Shannon. In the various iterations of Future Call, realized
at times by Daspher, others by Shannon (when Dashper was unavailable), and finally, re-
created by Shannon posthumously as a memorial work, Gillam and Hansen explore the fine
line between the roles of artist and partner, and between one’s professional world and one’s
personal life. Bartram O’Neill provides our final case of artists whose collaborative practices
have resulted in blurred boundaries between artists as individuals and artists as collaborative
group. Adopting a single name to reflect their fused identity as a collective entity, Bartram
O’Neill’s practice rejects the standardized, individual-based work-load models for
productivity measurement within academia. Their collaborations embody their joint actions,
and reflect meaning that goes beyond the sum of their individual contributions. These
collaborative practices illustrate how some artists, in their everyday practices, realize in
different ways the rather lofty ideal of Aristotelian friendship as grounded in shared lives that
foster human flourishing.
A second response to the identity crisis in collaborative arts is a rethinking of artists
working together in pairs, where the idealistic notions of shared practices and collective
identity are perceived as just that – idealistic. Modeled on Corballis’ alternative, these
collaborations thrive on differences – sometimes artists fight to retain their separate identities,
sometimes they use the collaboration to explore the divides between different practices and art
media. Maltz-Leca and Irvin both consider collaborative practices with pairs of artists
working across different artistic media.
Maltz-Leca considers the unlikely collaboration between Robin Rhode, South African, post-
Apartheid, ‘street’ artist and Leif Ove Andsnes, Norwegian classical pianist. Here, the
collaboration highlights the oppositions between them – northern and southern points of the
world, aural and visual artistic media, colonial past and cultural oppression. These
collaborative explorations push the limits of an artist’s agency under the weight of politically
and socially charged histories, and the boundaries of authentic cross-cultural aesthetics.
This collaboration, like that of Bertram O’Neill and Corballis, involves unexpected
combinations of media, cultures, and references, thanks to innovative practices across different
artistic media. Straddling these differences, while producing a unified work, the artists
challenge and redefine what it means for artists to work together across media, across
differences, and across oppositions. Irvin’s paper, however, explores a case of cross-media
collaboration that goes beyond simply what results from combining two divergent artistic
practices. Irvin examines the collaboration between dancer and choreographer Jill Sigman,
with visual artist Janine Antoni, in their work Wedge, a performance piece that’s designed to
embody themes common to their respective bodies of work, while locating an artistic approach
where their artistic traditions can come together in something new. But, what is unusual and
distinctive about their collaboration is that, like Corballis and Rhode and Andsnes, their work
Wedge directly exploits the artistic gulf between their respective media in the art-making
process. Focusing on those differences – creating meaning visually and through movement,
differences in the nature of the work (a physical object to look at, a temporal performance to
experience) – their work explores the literal and figurative divide between their practices.
They construct an artwork that literally represents the wedge between them, a work that
highlights how cross-disciplinary collaborations involving clashes and oppositional strategies
are often fruitfully explored and resolved through and in collaborative art.
A final response to the rise of these new collaborative models in contemporary art is to
retroactively look backward and reassess how certain seemingly individually focused art
forms are in fact much more infused with collaborative activity than we previously appreciated
or noticed. Murphy argues that Jasper Johns’ solo paintings – the paradigmatically non-
collaborative art form, if ever there is one – are ultimately derived from earlier collaborative
experiences. Similarly, Barroqueiro highlights the way in which glass sculpting can evolve
from a lead artist working with a team of helpers, into a new model where John Miller invited
various artists to sculpt collaboratively with him, resulting in reciprocal interpretations of each
others’ works and hybridized objects reflecting their collaborative process of art-making.
Although this final section considers what might appear to be traditional art-making
practices, these contributions illustrate the radical re-thinking around what counts as
collaboration, and reflect how even seemingly traditional collaborations call for reassessment
against the background of the expanding conception of collaboration. In this respect,
collaboration in traditional art practices is redefined through the development of the more
radical collaborative art forms considered in the first half of Collaborative Art in the Twenty
First Century.
In conclusion, the very ideas of collaboration as concept and as method are intricately
linked in the development of contemporary collaborative art practices. Collectives and
collaborating artists have become smarter and more efficient. Whereas their application of the
division of labor has made room for a range of new, and often non-artist members, skill-sets,
networks, and technologies, there is a growing trend of relinquishing their activist strategies to
focus on project-specific inclusions of strategic collaborators.
The papers in this collection are grounded in the assumption that collaboration today
explores its new identity as a vehicle through which to mediate social knowledge; a discursive
method whose strategies are responding to the current issues in the broader socio-political
environment. They envision the technological innovations and direct interventions within the
socio-political culture to represent one kind of response to the existential crisis of identity
facing artists today. This should come as no surprise to anyone following the exponential rise
in the number of artists, producing an immense surplus of market labor, falling willingly or not
outside of the mainstream, marketed elite of the art world. Existential angst is a key feature of
the contemporary art world, compelling art school graduates to take the route of other creative
industries such as design, printing, teaching, and so forth, to be able to survive both financially
and creatively.
What is clear is that collective practices today are increasingly multi-layered,
interdisciplinary, and strategically in tune with societal developments as a means to enhance
their practices, to question important current issues, and to increase and maximize their
networks, thus gaining a new sense of momentum independent from the mainstream art world.
Our collection here explores these collaborative traditions and circumstances, uncovering the
intricate framework and structure of collaborative methods and strategies that drive art in the
twenty-first century.
Section I
Collaboration in the Age of Technological Innovation
1
Pirate Film Societies
Rearranging Traditional Apparatus with Inappropriate Technology
Gabriel Menotti
It was a movie screening that I was organizing with some friends, but I cannot remember the
exact date. Perhaps I should be able to check this information on one of the many photocopied
posters we used to promote the event, if it wasn’t so difficult to get hold of this material
nowadays. Most of it was destroyed once it became incriminating evidence. Even online
banners about the event were deleted. All that I am sure is that it was early 2004, and it was
probably a Wednesday, because that is the day of the week in which the Cine Falcatrua film
sessions were normally held.
The lack of references is expected. When there were almost no digital cinemas in Brazil,
Cine Falcatrua was a local group that organized free movie screenings using domestic
computers, employing desktop PCs as film projectors and peer-to-peer networks as curatorial
sources. Because of the ways in which such a practice could be associated with piracy, the
group had to be very conscious about the information it left behind. Nonetheless, its main
interest was not to start outlaw warfare against copyright, nor even to render moviegoing more
democratic. Rather, Cine Falcatrua was committed to challenging the specificities of cinema.
In this paper, I mean to go through personal recollections in order to confront the elusiveness
of such an object that erases its own traces. By doing so, I hope to account for the unauthorized
screenings of Cine Falcatrua, in an attempt to understand what role these and similar ‘pirate’
activities might play in the development of media practices. To some extent, it should be
already clear the effect they have in the dynamics of movie circulation, which seems to be their
primary goal. In a culturally impoverished market like Brazil’s, where even the access to
digital distribution platforms is restricted, piracy is employed to make up for the shortcomings
of business models unable to supply the goods in demand.1 As such, it may give body to a ‘new
model of cinephilia,’ as identified by Jasmine Trice in the context of the Quiapo district, in the
Philippines, where the trade of pirate DVDs provides “a resource for world cinema that was
previously unavailable in the country,” fuelling local movie-going culture.2
However, despite this primary productivity, it seems fundamental to underscore other
consequences that piracy may have in the organization of emerging media circuits by
considering what Ramon Lobato calls its ‘material foundation,’ thus observing how it “opens
up a space for whole new economies, new forms of cultural production, new possibilities.”3
This more progressive dimension could be summarized in the idea of ‘pirate modernity,’ which
Ravi Sundaram uses to describe the role of arrangements existing outside the legal structures of
the city, particularly informal technological markets, in the development of postcolonial Delhi.
For him, piracy creates “radical conditions of possibility for subaltern populations in the city”
by providing “a key interface between media technologies and larger urban infrastructures.”4
One could see this logic operating in the realm of cinema by examining the thriving Nigerian
film industry, whose distribution networks were established upon pirate operations. Brian
Larkin, who did extensive research on this case, urges us to think about piracy beyond legal
terms, understanding it as a mode of infrastructure that “imposes particular conditions on the
recording, transmission, and retrieval of data.”5 Such a technological approach seems able to
show how unauthorized practices might affect not only the medium’s underpinnings, but also its
aesthetics and sensorial experience. In order to detect such repercussions in the case of Cine
Falcatrua, this analysis will delve into the philosophy of technique, profiting from the ideas of
Gilbert Simondon – particularly his notion of technical entities not as a given, but rather as “a
unit of becoming.”6
The becoming is the process of evolution that an entity undergoes in order to turn into “a
system that is entirely coherent with itself and entirely unified.”7 Under that light,
infrastructures of cinema appear not as fixed wholes, but rather as complex arrangements of
diverse socio-technical elements. A system such as movie screenings should be seen as an
ensemble that is rendered concrete as the elements involved converge into unity.8 Retracing
Cine Falcatrua’s activities, one may underscore how it contributed to processes of
concretization of media technology by the means of detouring already existing apparatus and
producing new synergies between them. Thus, one should also be able to devise the
transformations implied by pirate practices in the modes of engagement of the public with the
surrounding technical milieu.
Everyday Practices and Emerging Technical Conditions

In its early days, Cine Falcatrua was no more than a film society of the Federal University of
Espírito Santo (UFES), located in the southeast region of Brazil. Although it was officially
registered as a community project convened by the Social Communications Department, it in
fact operated in an almost completely autonomous way. The support of the department was
mostly pro forma: an institutional clearance that authorized the use of college equipment (such
as video projectors) and spaces (such as auditoriums). Apart from that, the screenings were
planned and organized by the students themselves – a group that was loosely formed by half a
dozen people from the Journalism, Psychology and Visual Arts BAs.
It is impossible to be precise about the participants because they fluctuated a lot over time.
As in a typical grassroots activity, the very division of roles between the organizers and the
audience of the screenings was very fluid; it was not unusual for people unrelated to the core
group to bring their own films to be screened and to help set up the equipment. Sometimes,
these new people would stick around for the film society’s next planning meeting, whereas old
participants would tend to disappear completely, drawn away by course deadlines and the
other perils of student life. Altogether, it was a very dynamic and heterogeneous group, and
perhaps its only remarkable particularity is that it did not include anyone directly involved
with audiovisual production, study, or criticism, because the University did not have any such
courses. So, in the matters of actual cinema, the participants could all be considered amateurs,
uneducated laymen, consumers.
In that sense, one can find in the emergence of Cine Falcatrua a realization of what Michel
de Certeau termed as the consumer’s everyday practices – models of action characteristic of
users who retain “status as the dominated element in society.”9 These models, understood “as
particular ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order.”10 are defined
by “poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”11 The film society, indeed, resulted
from the confluent exploit of available property: of space, of equipment, of media. In the
second half of 2003, there was a student occupation in the old theatre of UFES, which the
rectory was planning to convert into a classroom building. If that were to happen, the academic
community would lose not only one of its cultural spaces, but also a part of its living history: in
the 70s, the theatre had been home to Cineclube Metrópolis, a film society that was central to
the articulation of the national cineclubist movement and to the cultural resistance against
dictatorship. During the occupation, students were trying to keep the theatre up and running as
much as possible, in order to call attention to the rectory’s decision and provoke public debate
about it. This opened up the space for all sorts of activities.
Not long before the occupation, different University departments had received brand new
DLP video projectors. This equipment, which was moderately expensive back then, was
basically being used for slideshow presentations during classes. Some teachers and students
from the Journalism course saw this as a waste of the device’s potential; they believed that the
projectors could be better employed in the exhibition of films, fostering cinema studies and
giving body to a discipline that was virtually nonexistent on the course. The projectors were
certainly meant for this sort of activity; as in any Brazilian federal institution, all that was
necessary to satisfy the bureaucracy was for a project formally to request the equipment from
the Communications Department.
To these two local ‘opportunities,’ a third, a global one, must be added to the list of Cine
Falcatrua’s causes: the popularization of peer-to-peer networks. In 2003, with the increase in
domestic bandwidth and more efficient video codecs,12 online file sharing had already broken
the barrier of DVD-quality feature films. Thus, although Brazil was not greatly favored by the
international schemes of film distribution (both mainstream and alternative), media-savvy
computer users could access countless movies by the means of the Internet – from unreleased
blockbusters to long-forgotten video art pieces and independent documentaries from foreign
lands.
The university students can be certainly counted among those savvy p2p users. Not
surprisingly, file sharing was something they were actively doing during the theatre occupation.
Camped in the college building, the students had brought their own personal desktop computers
along, and were using the University connection – considerably faster than their domestic ones
– to download movies around the clock. Because their PCs had no composite video output or
DVD recorder, which made it impossible to watch the movies on a normal TV, the students
would from time to time gather in front of the machines’ standard 15″ CRT monitor for
improvised home cinema sessions.
Figure 1.1 One of Cine Falcatrua’s early, outdoor screenings.
For all the reasons above, the appearance of a film society seemed to be, if not natural, at
least favored. Such a group was able to respond local demands as (1) a regular activity during
the theatre occupation that (2) put the University’s projectors to what the students considered a
better use. Moreover, it gave body to a geographically situated, face-to-face dimension of file
sharing culture, by providing the students with a platform to show one another the movies they
downloaded individually, in a theatrical context closer to the traditional cinematographic one.
Thus, the students were able to ‘share’ movies not only with anonymous peers but also with
their close colleagues and the local community. In doing so, they were certainly adopting a
model of action that “[did] not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space
through which they move[d],”13 detouring both the logics of p2p networks and of the University
campus with their everyday practices. Nevertheless, as I intend to show, the film society
produced new technical coherences within those spaces, raising the students from the role of
mere media consumers to that of projectionists and curators.
Makeshift Movie Theaters

The film society was initially baptized Videoclube Digital Metrópolis, in homage to its
predecessor. Although there was no direct relation between the two film societies and their
objectives, the name should suggest a similarity of methods and a continuity of the 1970s
debate about the politics of culture into contemporary discussions about the culture of
technology. The Videoclube Digital simply envisaged free, weekly screenings of audiovisual
works from different genres. In the first, the movie shown was Matou a Família e foi ao
Cinema (Júlio Bressane, 1969), a classic Brazilian underground title. This session was
attended by a very modest audience – about twenty people. In the second, it showed Kill Bill:
Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003), which had just hit the Internet, and would not be officially
released in Brazil for two months. This popular title attracted more people; most of the seats of
the theatre were filled. By word-of-mouth, the film society was building a reputation and
becoming part of University life.
However, when people came back the following week for a third screening, they could not
find it. The theatre was shut down; its auditorium had been stripped and was already on the
way to be reformed. The student occupation was over. What had happened to the film society?
Perhaps its application had taken too long to be approved by the Communications Department
– because when it finally was, the theatre was no longer available. Having barely staked out its
territory, the Videoclube Digital had already lost it.
Nevertheless, it still existed, but now in a completely different form. From that point on, the
film society had to look for a new place to use every week, adapting its screenings to the most
diverse situations – even outdoors. This required some technical improvisation and unexpected
changes that could not be communicated to the audience in advance. Thus, with a semi-
nomadic condition, the film society acquired a public nickname that exposed the apparent
disorganization in which it thrived: ‘Cine Falcatrua,’ from a word that in Portuguese means
hoax or scam, and is normally used to address forms of political corruption.
The new alias also reflected the ambiguous character of the material shown by the film
society: on the one hand, ‘Frankenstein’ personal computers, digital video projectors, old
mono speakers and makeshift screens instead of the normal projection apparatus. These sorts
of equipment could not be incorporated seamlessly into the architecture of the exhibition space,
as was to be expected in a standard movie theatre. They had to be put in place and assembled
together at the time of each screening, normally in front of the arriving audience. After
everything was set, the projector would inevitably be found in a vulnerable position in the
middle of the auditorium; sound and power cables would be spread all over the floor.
Someone had to keep an eye on the equipment during the whole session, to prevent people from
tripping over it. Even so, problems occurred every now and then. A personal computer was a
very instable movie player back in these days.
Figure 1.2 Assembling the cinematographic apparatus with everyday technology.
Similar improvisations were going on the screen: as mentioned above, the film society’s
program was mostly constituted by movies found on the Internet, from disputed or illegal
sources – who could assure their legitimacy? Although most of the copies screened in Cine
Falcatrua were simply like a movie’s final cut translated to digital format, some were very
different from a standard means of circulation that tries to efface traces of projection from the
image. This was especially common if the movie was brand new and still didn’t have an
official domestic release from which a proper digital file could be ripped.
Among these ‘bootleg’ copies, two types frequently presented in the Cine Falcatrua’s
sessions were cams and screeners. The first are illegally recorded from the movie theatre by
someone in the audience; the second are made from promotional VHS or DVD copies
distributed to the press and to video stores, sometimes even before the movie’s theatrical
première.14 Both kinds can be usually found on file sharing networks. One particular thing
about them is the way they expose their extraordinary process of circulation in the movie itself.
Cams usually present an organic image, characteristic of film reprocessed through digital
video without any care, so that its colors, framing and speed are altered. Their sound is often
muffled and overlaid by extraneous noises. In fact, they are little more than movies of a movie,
made in precarious conditions – conditions that come to the surface when the image goes out of
focus or is interrupted by the outline of some spectator who was present at the original
screening. Screener copies, on the other hand, have perfect technical quality. However, the
movie’s content is almost never the definitive one. Some have not yet gone through all of the
stages of post-production, and so are lacking in color correction, image filtering or even
special effects. Others have specific marks that identify their extra-commercial condition, like
on-screen warnings or gaps during which the image goes black and white. By and large, the
(otherwise suppressed) circulation leaves irreversible traces in these copies; self-
biographical, cams and screeners tell a story that is not only the movie’s, but also their own.
Therefore, one could say that the Cine Falcatrua screening sessions denied their own
medial nature by assuming their technical reality – a reality not only of movie production, but
of all individual processes that brought together each particular projection. Every film session
demanded an active effort to arrange structures that were a given in a normal cinematographic
situation. The audience could thus witness – and often collaborate with – the constitution of the
cinematographic apparatus. In such scenario, this device seems to be reduced to its most
primitive form, as an abstract organization of elements: “each theoretical and material unity is
treated as an absolute that has an intrinsic perfection of its own that needs to be constituted as a
closed system in order to function.”15 At this stage of becoming, the coherence of the technical
object still depends on processes seemingly external to it. On the one hand, for the organizers,
it involved finding a power source, installing the projector and the screen, connecting the
appropriate cables, and preventing people from sitting in front of the projection light. On the
other, for the audience, it meant ignoring all these distractions in order to be able to simply
watch the movie. In the following section, I hope to show how the specialization of such
activities would lead to an increasing technical coherence, resulting in an apparatus more
adapted to its improper environment.
From Cinematographic Experience to Technological Engagement

Lately, activities such as those of Cine Falcatrua have become rather common and earned a
proper name: pirate cinema. In general terms, it consists of downloading movies from the
Internet and screening them publicly. Yet, one remarkable thing about the film society’s activity
was the pedagogical stand it undertook. It urged the audience to replicate its practice, not only
by performing the set-up of projection in front of them, but also by making photocopied
brochures that taught how to do so. These consisted of half A4 page, folded and printed on both
sides, which were distributed during the screenings. They normally contained short DIY
tutorials addressing themes such as ‘assembling your own movie theatre.’ Other examples
include: obtaining audiovisual material (comparing the availability of titles in a video store
with that in p2p networks), making subtitles, and organizing film exhibitions in a collective
space, using whatever ‘projector’ was available (even a TV).
By advertising these seemingly alternative technologies among the public, Cine Falcatrua
challenged commonsensical approaches to cinema. Consider for instance how the issue of
online file sharing was framed in a text published in the brochure of the first week of July
2004: “it is not a dispute between copyright and piracy; between majors and indies; between
liberalism and communism. It is just the [cinematographic] industry going through an internal
conflict, a sort of latent puberty.” Thus, what was normally taken as a self-evident legal,
economic or political conflict was inscribed within the process of transformation of the
medium’s underpinnings. Upholding such perspective, the group promoted unauthorized
structures as a proper means for movie circulation.
In that sense, the pirate cinéphile seems less as the tactical consumer praised by De Certeau
than as a conductor of new interactions between technical media. According to Simondon, “it
is through him that the members of the orchestra affect each other’s interpretation.”16 Such
connections between disparate systems may produce operational synergies, possibly leading to
a more specialized – and hence more concrete – means of projection. In that sense, I would
like to compare piracy to the practice of circuit bending, conceived by the artist Reed
Ghazala: a method for the design of musical instruments based on the “found-by-chance
creative short circuit” of cheap electronic toys bought in second hand shops.17 Circuit bending
is characterized as being a largely immediate, intuitive and exploratory way of getting more
attractive flows of energy by the means of rewiring available elements.18 Similarly, I would
argue that, more than providing open access to cultural goods, Cine Falcatrua meant to
reorganize the structure of the movie circuit, bridging the gap between unauthorized media
consumption and the cinematographic institution.
Not surprisingly, the group of students soon became more efficient than the regular means of
film distribution. Employing the terms of Vilém Flusser, one could say that, from mere
functionaries of apparatus, they literally became their programmers, able to define how
apparatus operate.19 More than once, Cine Falcatrua had been able to exhibit a movie to an
audience of hundreds, months before its official release in Brazil. Particular examples are the
aforementioned Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004).
Likewise, the film society managed to take to its screen dozens of independent and/or
alternative works which have been censored or forgotten, or that were simply not sufficiently
interesting (that is, profitable) to be accepted for distribution in the area in which it operated.
This was more or less the case on the particular day I am trying to recall. We had found a
digital copy of Amor Estranho Amor (Walter Hugo Khouri, 1982) – which, given its quality,
was probably ripped from a VHS tape. This movie is rather polemical because it features
Xuxa, a famous Brazilian celebrity, playing the role of a prostitute who sleeps with a 12-year-
old boy. It was made in 1979, when Xuxa herself was 16, at the beginning of her career. By the
time of its release, she had already become a popular children’s show host. On the premise that
she had never authorized the use of her image, she took out an injunction that completely
prohibited distribution of the movie across the national territory. Hence, Amor Estranho Amor
acquired a legendary status: even though a lot of people had heard about it, few were able
actually to get a glimpse of the movie.
We expected the film session to be completely crowded, and took special preparations. We
booked a 200-seat auditorium and started to set up the equipment well in advance.
Nevertheless, half an hour before the screening was supposed to start, all the places were
already taken, and more people kept coming, occupying the aisles. As far as I remember, to
present two consecutive screenings was out of question, because the auditorium would have to
be closed at a certain hour. So, to accommodate all of the people who had come, we decided
to transfer the session to the yard outside.
This last-minute change is exemplary of the technical flexibility of Cine Falcatrua in
comparison with normal cinematographic systems. Dislocating the equipment, the group was
able to arrange the screening in a way that would have been impossible in a conventional
movie theatre. One must bear in mind that what restricts the movie theatre is not its commercial
bias; any multiplex manager would be more than happy to accommodate more public than a
screening session allowed if she could afford to do so. However, this is not viable because the
normal apparatus are fixed, integrated to a certain architecture, bounded by certain rules
(maximum space capacity, fire safety, etc.). Technological change alone is not able to
overcome this operational inertia. For instance, the normal movie theatre incorporates a
technology such as digital projection in a way that complies with its historical premises,
integrating the screenings to online networks of distributions, which are thus able to control
them.20 Instead of making movie exhibition more dynamic, this makes it even more streamlined
and restricted.
Initially, the fact that the University was not prepared to support a film society seemed like a
disadvantage, which turned cinema into a vulnerable and laborious task. As described before,
even a simple auditorium screening involved a sort of calculated effort. Nevertheless, such
precarious conditions also set precedents for new organizations of elements, more coherent
with the technology at hand. Disconnected from regular film distribution, from institutional
facilities, and even from the local buildings, Cine Falcatrua was free to exploit all the
possibilities of digital technologies. For the group, deploying projection outdoors was no more
extraordinary than organizing a normal screening.
In that sense, I would like to suggest that the pirate activity of Cine Falcatrua gestures
towards a discontinuous but major improvement of cinematographic apparatus – one which,
by modifying the way elements such as domestic projectors, p2p networks and the University
environment interact, increases ‘in an essential manner the synergy of functioning’ of this
technical entity.21 In other words, the film society had found a working solution for digital
movie exhibition, its circuit bending allowing a form of early adoption. As improvised as it
seems, this solution proved to be much better suited for its particular situation, achieving
enough operational coherence to sustain regular screenings for months, in a time when digital
movie theatres were a reality distant from most Brazilian cities.
Legal Mediation of the Medium’s Ontology

Up to this point, the saga of Cine Falcatrua may have suggested accomplishments in
mimicking cinema’s particular operations. It seems that the group was able to challenge and
maybe even affect the medium’s specificity. However, after all said and done, this is not what
happened. When the cinematographic circuit finally acknowledged Cine Falcatrua as part of
it, the group was made illegal. This ultimate outcome of the film society’s adventure illustrates
how strongly the arrangement of the cinematographic apparatus can be imposed by the means
of the seemingly secondary structures that bind them together.
After its initial months of activity, Cine Falcatrua had become part of the city’s cultural life.
The popularity it attained can be somewhat justified by the movies it screened, some of which
were unreleased blockbusters that generated a lot of media buzz and audience interest. This
readymade marketing was supplemented by a pioneering use of social networks for
advertisement, particularly Orkut and Fotolog, which were big in Brazil at that time. Special
scripts and the goodwill of user communities allowed the film society to spam its program far
and wide, reaching a large public outside the University campus. The weekly screenings were
gathering an average of 150 attendants, and started to be regularly covered by the local media.
In July 2004, this press coverage reached national levels: Cine Falcatrua had attracted the
attention of Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest newspapers. The first contact was
made online. A reporter, looking for someone to interview for a feature about Video CDs,
stumbled upon the film society’s community at Orkut and decided to make a short article about
it. He interviewed the participants of the film society by phone and sent a photographer to
document one of its screenings. Used to giving interviews, the group answered the journalist’s
request by explaining how the project worked, stressing the fact that it allowed students to
have their own cinema and experiment with practices of movie exhibition within the
University. Used to working in accordance to the habitus of news journalism, the reporter felt
obliged to listen to the ‘other side’ of the story, and asked for the opinion of the Brazilian
Association for the Defence of Intellectual Property (ADEPI) about Cine Falcatrua’s
practice.
One could consider how the reporter’s choice for a complementary source already reveals
the bias that informed the localization of Cine Falcatrua within the established
cinematographic circuit. By calling upon the views of a juridical institution, the reporter
presumed that the film society was not primarily involved in a dispute between different
medial paradigms, but rather playing an obvious part in the war between copyright holders and
‘free culture’ advocates that was sweeping across the nation ever since the escalation of music
piracy. Thus, the article published in the Folha de São Paulo issue from 29 July 2004 brought
declarations by an ADEPI spokesperson condemning the activities of Cine Falcatrua as
criminal.22
As the news spread across the country, it attracted the attention of two film-distributing
companies – Lumière and Europa Filmes – whose works had been exhibited by the group.
Less than two weeks later, the University (taken as the official responsible for the film society)
received a writ filled by these companies, along with a criminal complaint made by ADEPI
against the participants of the project. The writ accused the University of engaging in ‘unfair
competition.’23
As ludicrous as this claim might sound, it could be understood as a certificate of authenticity
for Cine Falcatrua. In a way, it was an acknowledgment that the film society was doing the job
of proper film distributors. However, not through a film distributor’s traditional means, but
rather more efficient ones – means efficient enough to be qualified as economically unfair.
Therefore, just as the writ legitimized the film society’s activity as cinema, it disauthorized it
within the cinematographic circuit.
Hence, the writ did not elevate the practice of Cine Falcatrua to a new form of cinema. On
the contrary, it reduced it to mere ‘illegal exhibitions of copyrighted material,’ and so gained a
hold over it. From this point on, the challenge of the film society was not to propose a different
perspective about the specificity of the medium – stating, for example, that a movie was
secondary to its exhibition – but to uphold these perspectives in a law court. The established
logic of the cinematographic institution had brought the negotiation of medium specificities
back into its traditional territory, where law was acting as the final arbiter of cinema’s
ontology.
But the prosecution had some productive outcomes, however collateral they may seem. After
it became nationally known, the controversy about Cine Falcatrua became a pivotal influence
on the reorganization of the Brazilian Confederation of Film Societies, which had been
virtually inactive since the 1980s. The public defense of Cine Falcatrua was one of the first
causes to bring the new members of the Confederation together: they released an open letter
supporting the group, and published it in the first number of their newly created magazine. The
affair was one of the most debated topics at their 2004 national conference.
The consequent political articulation of film societies led the Ministry of Culture to create in
2006 a funding program for ‘Digital Diffusion Hotspots’ (Pontos de Difusão Digital), which
intended to provide groups from all over the country with both equipment for screenings and
audiovisual content. All of the selected groups became associated to Programadora Brasil, a
state company that periodically released packages of Brazilian movies in DVD, cleared for
nonprofit exhibitions. These collections intended to provide a broad perspective of the
country’s film history, in the guise of a canon, including works from a multiplicity of
filmmakers, regions, ages and formats.
Therefore, whereas UFES was being convicted for allowing the activity of Cine Falcatrua,
one could say that the film society’s practice was finally being localized within the
cinematographic circuit, by the means of the creation of policies for its institutional
maintenance and propagation. With such structures, the usual restrictions came. For instance, in
order to qualify as a proper film society, any group had to meet specific parameters defined by
the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry also standardized the equipment to be used and the films
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
a water-closet; by some horrid drain; by proximity to a pig-sty; by an
overflowing privy, especially if vegetable matter be rotting at the
same time in it; by bad ventilation, or by contagion. Diphtheria may
generally be traced either to the one or to the other of the above
causes; therefore let me urgently entreat you to look well into all
these matters, and thus to stay the pestilence! Diphtheria might long
remain in a neighborhood if active measures be not used to
exterminate it.
210. Have the goodness to describe the symptoms of Measles?
Measles commences with symptoms of a common cold; the patient
is at first chilly, then hot and feverish; he has a running at the nose,
sneezing, watering and redness of the eyes, headache, drowsiness, a
hoarse and peculiar ringing cough, which nurses call “measle-
cough,” and difficulty of breathing. These symptoms usually last
three days before the eruption appears; on the fourth it (the
eruption) generally makes its appearance, and continues for four
days and then disappears, lasting altogether, from the
commencement of the symptoms of cold to the decline of the
eruption, seven days. It is important to bear in mind that the
eruption consists of crescent-shaped—half-moon-shaped—patches;
that they usually appear first about the face and the neck, in which
places they are the best marked; then on the body and on the arms;
and, lastly, on the legs, and that they are slightly raised above the
surface of the skin. The face is swollen, more especially the eyelids,
which are sometimes for a few days closed.
Well, then, remember, the running at the nose, the sneezing, the
peculiar hoarse cough, and the half-moon-shaped patches, are the
leading features of the disease, and point out for a certainty that it is
measles.
211. What constitutes the principal danger in Measles?
The affection of the chest. The mucous or lining membrane of the
bronchial tubes is always more or less inflamed, and the lungs
themselves are sometimes affected.
212. Do you recommend “surfeit water” and saffron tea to throw
out the eruption in Measles?
Certainly not. The only way to throw out the eruption, as it is
called, is to keep the body comfortably warm, and to give the
beverages ordered by the medical man, with the chill off. “Surfeit
water,” saffron tea, and remedies of that class, are hot and
stimulating. The only effect they can have, will be to increase the
fever and the inflammation—to add fuel to the fire.
213. What is the treatment of Measles?
What to do.—The child ought to be confined both to his room and
to his bed, the room being kept comfortably warm; therefore, if it be
winter time, there should be a small fire in the grate; in the summer
time, a fire would be improper. The child must not be exposed to
draughts; notwithstanding, from time to time, the door ought to be
left a little ajar in order to change the air of the apartment; for proper
ventilation, let the disease be what it may, is absolutely necessary.
Let the child, for the first few days, be kept on a low diet, such as
on milk and water, arrow-root, bread and butter, etc.
If the attack be mild, that is to say, if the breathing be not much
affected (for in measles it always is more or less affected), and if
there be not much wheezing, the acidulated infusion of roses’
mixture[228] will be all that is necessary.
But suppose that the breathing is short, and that there is a great
wheezing, then, instead of giving him the mixture just advised, give
him a teaspoonful of a mixture composed of ipecacuanha wine,
syrup, and water,[229] every four hours. And if, on the following day,
the breathing and the wheezing be not relieved, in addition to the
ipecacuanha mixture, apply a tela vesicatoria, as advised under the
head of inflammation of the lungs.
When the child is convalescing, batter puddings, rice, and sago
puddings, in addition to the milk, bread and butter, etc., should be
given; and, a few days later, chicken, mutton-chops, etc.
The child ought not, even in a mild case of measles, and in
favorable weather, to be allowed to leave the house under a fortnight,
or it might bring on an attack of bronchitis.
What NOT to do.—Do not give either “surfeit water” or wine. Do not
apply leeches to the chest. Do not expose the child to the cold air. Do
not keep the bedroom very hot, but comfortably warm. Do not let the
child leave the house, even under favorable circumstances, under a
fortnight. Do not, while the eruption is out, give aperients. Do not,
“to ease the cough,” administer either emetic tartar or paregoric—the
former drug is awfully depressing; the latter will stop the cough, and
will thus prevent the expulsion of the phlegm.
214. What is the difference between Scarlatina and Scarlet Fever?
They are, indeed, one and the same disease, scarlatina being the
Latin for scarlet fever. But, in a popular sense, when the disease is
mild, it is usually called scarlatina. The latter term does not sound so
formidable to the ears either of patients or of parents.
215. Will you describe the symptoms of Scarlet Fever?
The patient is generally chilly, languid, drowsy, feverish, and
poorly for two days before the eruption appears. At the end of the
second day, the characteristic, bright scarlet efflorescence, somewhat
similar to the color of a boiled lobster, usually first shows itself. The
scarlet appearance is not confined to the skin; but the tongue, the
throat, and the whites of the eyes put on the same appearance; with
this only difference, that on the tongue and on the throat the scarlet
is much darker; and, as Dr. Elliotson accurately describes it,—“the
tongue looks as if it had been slightly sprinkled with Cayenne
pepper.” The eruption usually declines on the fifth, and is generally
indistinct on the sixth day; on the seventh it has completely faded
away. There is usually, after the first few days, great itching on the
surface of the body. The skin, at the end of the week, begins to peel
and to dust off, making it look as though meal had been sprinkled
upon it.
There are three forms of scarlet fever,—the one where the throat is
little, if at all affected, and this is a mild form of the disease; the
second, which is generally, especially at night, attended with
delirium, where the throat is much affected, being often greatly
inflamed and ulcerated; and the third (which is, except in certain
unhealthy districts, comparatively rare, and which is VERY
dangerous), the malignant form.
216. Would it be well to give a little cooling, opening physic as
soon as a child begins to sicken for Scarlet Fever?
On no account whatever. Aperient medicines are, in my opinion,
highly improper and dangerous both before and during the period of
the eruption. It is my firm conviction that the administration of
opening medicine, at such times, is one of the principal causes of
scarlet fever being so frequently fatal. This is, of course, more
applicable to the poor, and to those who are unable to procure a
skillful medical man.
217. What constitutes the principal danger in Scarlet Fever?
The affection of the throat, the administration of opening medicine
during the first ten days, and a peculiar disease of the kidneys ending
in anasarca (dropsy), on which account, the medical man ought,
when practicable, to be sent for at the onset, that no time may be lost
in applying proper remedies.
218. How would you distinguish between Scarlet Fever and
Measles?
Measles commences with symptoms of a common cold; scarlet
fever does not. Measles has a peculiar hoarse cough; scarlet fever has
not. The eruption of measles is in patches of a half-moon shape, and
is slightly raised above the skin; the eruption of scarlet fever is not
raised above the skin at all, and is one continued mass. The color of
the eruption is much more vivid in scarlet fever than in measles. The
chest is the part principally affected in measles, and the throat in
scarlet fever.
There is an excellent method of determining, for a certainty,
whether the eruption be that of scarlatina or otherwise. I myself
have, in several instances, ascertained the truth of it: “For several
years M. Bouchut has remarked in the eruption of scarlatina a
curious phenomenon, which serves to distinguish this eruption from
that of measles, erythema, erysipelas, etc., a phenomenon essentially
vital, and which is connected with the excessive contractability of the
capillaries. The phenomenon in question is a white line, which can
be produced at pleasure by drawing the back of the nail along the
skin where the eruption is situated. On drawing the nail, or the
extremity of a hard body (such as a pen-holder), along the eruption,
the skin is observed to grow pale, and to present a white trace, which
remains for one or two minutes, or longer, and then disappears. In
this way the diagnosis of the disease may be very distinctly written
on the skin; the word ‘Scarlatina’ disappears as the eruption regains
its uniform tint.”[230]
219. Is it of so much importance, then, to distinguish between
Scarlet Fever and Measles?
It is of great importance, as in measles the patient ought to be kept
moderately warm, and the drinks should be given with the chill off;
while in scarlet fever the patient ought to be kept cool—indeed, for
the first few days, cold; and the beverages, such as spring water, toast
and water, etc., should be administered quite cold.
220. What is the treatment of Scarlet Fever?[231]
What to do.—Pray pay particular attention to my rules, and carry
out my directions to the very letter—as I can then promise you that if
the scarlet fever be not malignant, the plan I am about to
recommend will, with God’s blessing, be generally successful.
What is the first thing to be done? Send the child to bed; throw
open the windows, be it winter or summer, and have a thorough
ventilation; for the bedroom must be kept cool, I may say cold. Do
not be afraid of fresh air, for fresh air, for the first few days, is
essential to recovery. Fresh air, and plenty of it, in scarlet fever, is
the best doctor a child can have: let these words be written legibly on
your mind.[232]
Take down the curtains of the bed; remove the valances. If it be
summer time, let the child be only covered with a sheet: if it be
winter time, in addition to the sheet, he should have one blanket over
him.
Now for the throat.—The best external application is a barm and
oatmeal poultice. How ought it to be made, and how applied? Put
half a teacupful of barm into a saucepan, put it on the fire to boil; as
soon as it boils take it off the fire, and stir oatmeal into it, until it is of
the consistence of a nice soft poultice; then place it on a rag, and
apply it to the throat; carefully fasten it on with bandage, two or
three turns of the bandage going round the throat, and two or three
over the crown of the head, so as nicely to apply the poultice where it
is wanted—that is to say, to cover the tonsils. Tack the bandage: do
not pin it. Let the poultice be changed three times a day. The best
medicine is the acidulated infusion of roses, sweetened with syrup.
[233]
It is grateful and refreshing, it is pleasant to take, it abates fever
and thirst, it cleans the throat and tongue of mucus, and is peculiarly
efficacious in scarlet fever; as soon as the fever is abated it gives an
appetite. My belief is that the sulphuric acid in the mixture is a
specific in scarlet fever, as much as quinine is in ague, and sulphur in
itch. I have reason to say so, for, in numerous cases, I have seen its
immense value.
Now, with regard to food.—If the child be at the breast, keep him
entirely to it. If he be weaned, and under two years old, give him milk
and water, and cold water to drink. If he be older, give him toast and
water, and plain water from the pump, as much as he chooses; let it
be quite cold—the colder the better. Weak black tea, or thin gruel,
may be given, but not caring, unless he be an infant at the breast, if
he take nothing but cold water. If the child be two years old and
upwards, roasted apples with sugar, and grapes will be very
refreshing, and will tend to cleanse both the mouth and the throat.
Avoid broths and stimulants of every kind.
When the appetite returns, you may consider the patient to be
safe. The diet ought now to be gradually improved. Bread and butter,
milk and water, and arrow-root made with equal parts of new milk
and water, should for the first two or three days be given. Then a
light batter or rice pudding may be added, and in a few days
afterward, either a little chicken or a mutton-chop.
The essential remedies, then, in scarlet fever, are, for the first few
days—(1) plenty of fresh air and ventilation, (2) plenty of cold water
to drink, (3) barm poultices to the throat, and (4) the acidulated
infusion of roses’ mixture as a medicine.
Now, then, comes very important advice. After the first few days,
probably five or six, sometimes as early as the fourth day, watch
carefully and warily, and note the time, the skin will suddenly
become cool, the child will say that he feels chilly; then is the time
you must now change your tactics—instantly close the windows, and
put extra clothing, a blanket or two, on his bed. A flannel night-gown
should, until the dead skin has peeled off, be now worn next to the
skin, when the flannel night-gown should be discontinued. The
patient ought ever after to wear, in the daytime, a flannel waistcoat.
[234]
His drinks must now be given with the chill off; he ought to have
a warm cup of tea, and gradually his diet should, as I have previously
recommended be improved.
There is one important caution I wish to impress upon you,—do
not give opening medicine during the time the eruption is out. In all
probability the bowels will be opened: if so, all well and good; but do
not, on any account, for the first ten days, use artificial means to
open them. It is my firm conviction that the administration of
purgatives in scarlet fever is a fruitful source of dropsy, of disease,
and death. When we take into consideration the sympathy there is
between the skin and the mucous membrane, I think that we should
pause before giving irritating medicines, such as purgatives. The
irritation of aperients on the mucous membrane may cause the
poison of the skin disease (for scarlet fever is a blood poison) to be
driven internally to the kidneys, to the throat, to the pericardium
(bag of the heart), or to the brain. You may say, Do you not purge if
the bowels be not open for a week? I say emphatically, No!
I consider my great success in the treatment of scarlet fever to be
partly owing to my avoidance of aperients during the first ten days of
the child’s illness.
If the bowels, after the ten days, are not properly opened, a dose or
two of the following mixture should be given:
Take of—Simple Syrup, three drachms;
Essence of Senna, nine drachms:
To make a Mixture. Two teaspoonfuls to be given early in the morning

occasionally, and to be repeated in four hours, if the first dose should not
operate.
In a subsequent Conversation, I shall strongly urge you not to
allow your child, when convalescent, to leave the house under at least
a month from the commencement of the illness; I therefore beg to
refer you to that Conversation, and hope that you will give it your
best and earnest consideration! During the last seventeen years I
have never had dropsy from scarlet fever, and I attribute it entirely to
the plan I have just recommended, and in not allowing my patients
to leave the house under the month—until, in fact, the skin that has
peeled off has been renewed.
Let us now sum up the plan I adopt:
1. Thorough ventilation, a cool room, and scant clothes on the bed,
for the first five or six days.
2. A change of temperature of the skin to be carefully regarded. As
soon as the skin is cool, closing the windows, and putting additional
clothing on the bed.
3. The acidulated infusion of roses with syrup is the medicine for
scarlet fever.
4. Purgatives to be religiously avoided for the first ten days at least,
and even afterward, unless there be absolute necessity.
5. Leeches, blisters, emetics, cold and tepid spongings, and
painting the tonsils with caustic, inadmissible in scarlet fever.
6. A strict antiphlogistic (low) diet for the first few days, during
which time cold water to be given ad libitum.
7. The patient not to leave the house in the summer under the
month; in the winter, under six weeks.
What NOT to do.—Do not, then, apply either leeches or blisters to
the throat; do not paint the tonsils with caustic; do not give
aperients; do not, on any account, give either calomel or emetic
tartar; do not, for the first few days of the illness, be afraid of cold air
to the skin, and of cold water as a beverage; do not, emphatically let
me say, do not let the child leave the house for at least a month from
the commencement of the illness.
My firm conviction is, that purgatives, emetics, and blisters, by
depressing the patient, sometimes cause ordinary scarlet fever to
degenerate into malignant scarlet fever.
I am aware that some of our first authorities advocate a different
plan to mine. They recommend purgatives, which I may say, in
scarlet fever, are my dread and abhorrence. They advise cold and
tepid spongings—a plan which I think dangerous, as it will probably
drive the disease internally. Blisters, too, have been prescribed; these
I consider weakening, injurious, and barbarous, and likely still more
to inflame the already inflamed skin. They recommend leeches to the
throat, which I am convinced, by depressing the patient, will lessen
the chance of his battling against the disease, and will increase the
ulceration of the tonsils. Again, the patient has not too much blood;
the blood is only poisoned. I look upon scarlet fever as a specific
poison of the blood, and one which will be eliminated from the
system, not by bleeding, not by purgatives, not by emetics, but by a
constant supply of fresh and cool air, by the acid treatment, by cold
water as a beverage, and for the first few days by a strict
antiphlogistic (low) diet.
Sydenham says that scarlet fever is oftentimes “fatal through the
officiousness of the doctor.” I conscientiously believe that a truer
remark was never made; and that under a different system to the
usual one adopted, scarlet fever would not be so much dreaded.[235]
221. How soon ought a child to be allowed to leave the house after
an attack of Scarlet Fever?
He must not be allowed to go out for at least a month from the
commencement of the attack, in the summer, and six weeks in the
winter; and not even then with out the express permission of a
medical man. It might be said that this is an unreasonable
recommendation but when it is considered that the whole of the skin
generally desquamates, or peels off, and consequently leaves the
surface of the body exposed to cold, which cold flies to the kidneys,
producing a peculiar and serious disease in them, ending in dropsy,
this warning will not be deemed unreasonable.
Scarlet fever dropsy, which is really a formidable disease,
generally arises from the carelessness, the ignorance, and the
thoughtlessness of parents in allowing a child to leave the house
before the new skin is properly formed and hardened. Prevention is
always better than cure.
Thus far with regard to the danger to the child himself. Now, if you
please, let me show you the risk of contagion that you inflict upon
families, in allowing your child to mix with others before a month at
least has elapsed. Bear in mind, a case is quite as contagious, if not
more so, while the skin is peeling off, as it was before. Thus, in ten
days or a fortnight, there is as much risk of contagion as at the
beginning of the disease, and when the fever is at its height. At the
conclusion of the month the old skin has generally all peeled off, and
the new skin has taken its place; consequently there will then be less
fear of contagion to others. But the contagion of scarlet fever is so
subtle and so uncertain in its duration, that it is impossible to fix the
exact time when it ceases.
Let me most earnestly implore you to ponder well on the above
important facts. If these remarks should be the means of saving only
one child from death, or from broken health, my labor will not have
been in vain.
222. What means do you advise to purify a house from the
contagion of Scarlet Fever?
Let every room be lime-washed and then be white washed;[236] if
the contagion has been virulent, let every bedroom be freshly
papered (the walls having been previously stripped of the old paper
and then lime-washed); let the bed, the bolsters, the pillows, and the
mattresses be cleansed and purified; let the blankets and coverlids be
thoroughly washed, and then let them be exposed to the open air—if
taken into a field so much the better; let the rooms be well scoured;
let the windows, top and bottom, be thrown wide open; let the drains
be carefully examined; let the pump-water be scrutinized, to see that
it be not contaminated by fecal matter, either from the water-closet
or from the privy; let privies be emptied of their contents—
remember this is most important advice—then put into the empty
places lime and powdered charcoal, for it is a well-ascertained fact
that it is frequently impossible to rid a house of the infection of
scarlet fever without adopting such a course. “In St. George’s,
Southwark, the medical officer reports that scarlatina ‘has raged
fatally, almost exclusively where privy or drain smells are to be
perceived in the houses.’”[237] Let the children who have not had, or
who do not appear to be sickening for scarlet fever, be sent away
from home—if to a farm-house so much the better. Indeed, leave no
stone unturned, no means untried, to exterminate the disease from
the house and from the neighborhood.
223. Will you describe the symptoms of Chicken-pox?
It is occasionally, but not always, ushered in with a slight shivering
fit; the eruption shows itself in about twenty-four hours from the
child first appearing poorly. It is a vesicular[238] disease. The eruption
comes out in the form of small pimples, and principally attacks the
scalp, the neck, the back, the chest, and the shoulders, but rarely the
face; while in small-pox the face is generally the part most affected.
The next day these pimples fill with water, and thus become vesicles;
on the third day they are at maturity. The vesicles are quite separate
and distinct from each other. There is a slight redness around each of
them. Fresh ones, while the others are dying away, make their
appearance. Chicken-pox is usually attended with a slight itching of
the skin; when the vesicles are scratched the fluid escapes, and leaves
hard pearl-like substances, which, in a few days, disappear. Chicken-
pox never leaves pit-marks behind. It is a child’s complaint; adults
scarcely, if ever, have it.
224. Is there any danger in Chicken-pox; and what treatment do
you advise?
It is not at all a dangerous, but, on the contrary, a trivial
complaint. It lasts only a few days, and requires but little medicine.
The patient ought, for three or four days, to keep the house, and
should abstain from animal food. On the sixth day, but not until
then, a dose or two of a mild aperient is all that will be required.
225. Is Chicken-pox infectious?
There is a diversity of opinion on this head, but one thing is certain
—it cannot be communicated by inoculation.
226. What are the symptoms of Modified Small-pox?
The modified small-pox—that is to say, small-pox that has been
robbed of its virulence by the patient having been either already
vaccinated, or by his having had a previous attack of small-pox—is
ushered in with severe symptoms, with symptoms almost as severe
as though the patient had not been already somewhat protected
either by vaccination or by the previous attack of small-pox—that is
to say, he has a shivering fit, great depression of spirits and debility,
malaise, sickness, headache, and occasionally delirium. After the
above symptoms have lasted about three days, the eruption shows
itself. The immense value of the previous vaccination, or the previous
attack of small-pox, now comes into play. In a case of unprotected
small-pox, the appearance of the eruption aggravates all the above
symptoms, and the danger begins; while in the modified small-pox,
the moment the eruption shows itself, the patient feels better, and, as
a rule, rapidly recovers. The eruption of modified small-pox varies
materially from the eruption of the unprotected small-pox. The
former eruption assumes a varied character, and is composed, first of
vesicles (containing water), and secondly of pustules (containing
matter), each of which pustules has a depression in the center, and
thirdly of several red pimples without either water or matter in them,
and which sometimes assume a livid appearance. These “breakings-
out” generally show themselves more upon the wrist, and sometimes
up one or both of the nostrils. While in the latter disease—the
unprotected small-pox—the “breaking-out” is composed entirely of
pustules containing matter, and which pustules are more on the face
than on any other part of the body. There is generally a peculiar
smell in both diseases—an odor once smelt never to be forgotten.
Now, there is one most important remark I have to make,—the
modified small-pox is contagious. This ought to be borne in mind, as
a person laboring under the disease must, if there be children in the
house, either be sent away himself, or else the children ought to be
banished both the house and the neighborhood. Another important
piece of advice is, let all in the house—children and adults, one and
all—be vaccinated, even if any or all have been previously vaccinated.
Treatment.—Let the patient keep his room, and if he be very ill, his
bed. Let the chamber be well ventilated. If it be winter time, a small
fire in the grate will encourage ventilation. If it be summer, a fire is
out of the question; indeed, in such a case, the window-sash ought to
be opened, as thorough ventilation is an important requisite of cure,
both in small-pox and in modified small-pox. While the eruption is
out, do not on any account give aperient medicine. In ten days from
the commencement of the illness a mild aperient may be given. The
best medicine in these cases is, the sweetened acidulated infusion of
roses,[239] which ought to be given from the commencement of the
disease, and should be continued until the fever be abated. For the
first few days, as long as the fever lasts, the patient ought not to be
allowed either meat or broth, but should be kept on a low diet, such
as on gruel, arrow-root, milk puddings, etc. As soon as the fever is
abated he ought gradually to resume his usual diet. When he is
convalescent, it is well, where practicable, that he should have
change of air for a month.
227. How would you distinguish between Modified Small-pox and
Chicken-pox?
Modified small-pox may readily be distinguished from chicken-
pox, by the former disease being, notwithstanding its modification,
much more severe and the fever much more intense before the
eruption shows itself than chicken-pox; indeed, in chicken-pox there
is little or no fever either before or after the eruption; by the former
disease, the modified small-pox, consisting partly of pustules
(containing matter), each pustule having a depression in the center,
and the favorite localities of the pustules being the wrists and the
inside of the nostrils: while, in the chicken-pox, the eruption consists
of vesicles (containing water), and not pustules (containing matter),
and the vesicles having neither a depression in the center, nor having
any particular partiality to attack either the wrists or the wings of the
nose. In modified small-pox each pustule is, as in unprotected small-
pox, inflamed at the base; while in chicken-pox there is only very
slight redness around each vesicle. The vesicles, too, in chicken-pox
are small—much smaller than the pustules are in modified small-
pox.
228. Is Hooping-cough an inflammatory disease?
Hooping-cough in itself is not inflammatory, it is purely
spasmodic; but it is generally accompanied with more or less of
bronchitis—inflammation of the mucous membrane of the bronchial
tubes—on which account it is necessary, in all cases of hooping-
cough, to consult a medical man, that he may watch the progress of
the disease and nip inflammation in the bud.
229. Will you have the goodness to give the symptoms, and a brief
history, of Hooping-cough?
Hooping-cough is emphatically a disease of the young; it is rare for
adults to have it; if they do, they usually suffer more severely than
children. A child seldom has it but once in his life. It is highly
contagious, and therefore frequently runs through a whole family of
children, giving much annoyance, anxiety, and trouble to the mother
and the nurses; hence hooping-cough is much dreaded by them. It is
amenable to treatment. Spring and summer are the best seasons of
the year for the disease to occur. This complaint usually lasts from
six to twelve weeks—sometimes for a much longer period, more
especially if proper means are not employed to relieve it.
Hooping-cough commences as a common cold and cough. The
cough, for ten days or a fortnight, increases in intensity; at about
which time it puts on the characteristic “hoop.” The attack of cough
comes on in paroxysms.
In a paroxysm the child coughs so long and so violently, and
expires so much air from the lungs without inspiring any, that at
times he appears nearly suffocated and exhausted; the veins of his
neck swell; his face is nearly purple; his eyes, with the tremendous
exertion, seem almost to start from their sockets; at length there is a
sudden inspiration of air through the contracted chink of the upper
part of the windpipe—the glottis—causing the peculiar “hoop; and,
after a little more coughing, he brings up some glairy mucus from the
chest; and sometimes, by vomiting, food from the stomach; he is at
once relieved until the next paroxysm occurs, when the same process
is repeated, the child during the intervals, in a favorable case,
appearing quite well, and after the cough is over, instantly returning
either to his play or to his food. Generally, after a paroxysm he is
hungry, unless, indeed, there be severe inflammation either of the
chest or of the lungs. Sickness, as I before remarked, frequently
accompanies hooping-cough; when it does, it might be looked upon
as a good sign. The child usually knows when an attack is coming on;
he dreads it, and therefore tries to prevent it; he sometimes partially
succeeds; but if he does, it only makes the attack, when it does come,
more severe. All causes of irritation and excitement ought, as much
as possible, to be avoided, as passion is apt to bring on a severe
paroxysm.
A new-born babe, an infant of one or two months old, commonly
escapes the infection; but if at that tender age he unfortunately catch
hooping-cough, it is likely to fare harder with him than if he were
older—the younger the child the greater the risk. But still, in such a
case, do not despair, as I have known numerous instances of new-
born infants, with judicious care, recover perfectly from the attack,
and thrive after it as though nothing of the kind had ever happened.
A new-born babe laboring under hooping-cough is liable to
convulsions, which is, in this disease, one, indeed the great, source of
danger. A child, too, who is teething, and laboring under the disease,
is also liable to convulsions. When the patient is convalescing, care
ought to be taken that he does not catch cold, or the “hoop” might
return. Hooping-cough may either precede, attend, or follow an
attack of measles.
230. What is the treatment of Hooping-cough?
We will divide the hooping-cough into three stages, and treat each
stage separately.
What to do.—In the first stage, the commencement of hooping-
cough: For the first ten days give the ipecacuanha wine mixture,[240] a
teaspoonful three times a day. If the child be not weaned, keep him
entirely to the breast; if he be weaned, to a milk and farinaceous diet.
Confine him for the first ten days to the house, more especially if the
hooping-cough be attended, as it usually is, with more or less of
bronchitis. But take care that the rooms be well ventilated, for good
air is essential to the cure. If the bronchitis attending the hooping-
cough be severe, confine him to his bed, and treat him as though it
were simply a case of bronchitis.[241]
In the second stage, discontinue the ipecacuanha mixture, and
give Dr. Gibb’s remedy—namely, nitric acid—which I have found to
be an efficacious and valuable one in hooping-cough:
Take of—Diluted Nitric Acid, two drachms;
Compound Tincture of Cardamoms, half a drachm;
Simple Syrup, three ounces;
Water, two ounces and a half:
Make a Mixture. One or two teaspoonfuls, or a tablespoonful, according to the

age of the child—one teaspoonful for an infant of six months, and two
teaspoonfuls for a child of twelve months, and one tablespoonful for a child of
two years, every four hours, first shaking the bottle.
Let the spine and the chest be well rubbed every night and
morning either with Roche’s Embrocation, or with the following
stimulating liniment (first shaking the bottle):
Take of—Oil of Cloves, one drachm;
Oil of Amber, two drachms;
Camphorated Oil, nine drachms:
Make a Liniment.
Let him wear a broad band of new flannel, which should extend
round from his chest to his back, and which ought to be changed
every night and morning, in order that it may be dried before putting
on again. To keep it in its place it should be fastened by means of
tapes and with shoulder-straps.
The diet ought now to be improved—he should gradually return to
his usual food; and, weather permitting, should almost live in the
open air—fresh air being, in such a case, one of the finest medicines.
In the third stage, that is to say, when the complaint has lasted a
month, if by that time the child is not well, there is nothing like
change of air to a high, dry, healthy, country place. Continue the
nitric acid mixture, and either the embrocation or the liniment to the
back and the chest, and let him continue to almost live in the open
air, and be sure that he does not discontinue wearing the flannel
until he be quite cured, and then let it be left off by degrees.
If the hooping-cough have caused debility, give him cod-liver oil, a
teaspoonful twice or three times a day, giving it him on a full
stomach after his meals.
But, remember, after the first three or four weeks, change of air,
and plenty of it, is for hooping-cough the grand remedy.
What NOT to do.—Do not apply leeches to the chest, for I would
rather put blood into a child laboring under hooping-cough than take
it out of him—hooping-cough is quite weakening enough to the
system of itself without robbing him of his life’s blood; do not, on any
account whatever, administer either emetic tartar or antimonial
wine; do not give either paregoric or syrup of white poppies; do not
drug him either with calomel or with gray powder; do not dose him
with quack medicine; do not give him stimulants, but rather give him
plenty of nourishment, such as milk and farinaceous food, but no
stimulants; do not be afraid, after the first week or two, of his having
fresh air, and plenty of it—for fresh, pure air is the grand remedy,
after all that can be said and done, in hooping-cough. Although
occasionally we find that if the child be laboring under hooping-
cough and is breathing a pure country air, and is not getting well so
rapidly as we could wish, change of air to a smoky, gas-laden town
will sometimes quickly effect a cure; indeed, some persons go so far
as to say that the best remedy for an obstinate case of hooping-cough
is for the child to live the great part of every day in gas-works!
231. What is to be done during a paroxysm of Hooping-cough?
If the child be old enough, let him stand up; but if he be either too
young or too feeble, raise his head, and bend his body a little
forward; then support his back with one hand, and the forehead with
the other. Let the mucus, the moment it is within reach, be wiped
with a soft handkerchief out of his mouth.
232. In an obstinate case of Hooping-cough, what is the best
remedy?
Change of air, provided there be no active inflammation, to any
healthy spot. A farm-house, in a high, dry, and salubrious
neighborhood, is as good a place as can be chosen. If, in a short time,
he be not quite well, take him to the sea-side: the sea breezes will
often, as if by magic, drive away the disease.
233. Suppose my child should have a shivering fit, is it to be
looked upon as an important symptom?
Certainly. Nearly all serious illnesses commence with a shivering
fit: severe colds, influenza, inflammations of different organs, scarlet
fever, measles, small-pox, and very many other diseases, begin in
this way. If, therefore, your child should ever have a shivering fit,
instantly send for a medical man, as delay might be dangerous. A few
hours of judicious treatment, at the commencement of an illness, is
frequently of more avail than days and weeks, nay months, of
treatment, when disease has gained a firm footing. A serious disease
often steals on insidiously, and we have, perhaps, only the shivering
fit, which might be but a slight one, to tell us of its approach.
A trifling ailment, too, by neglecting the premonitory symptom,
which, at first, might only be indicated by a slight shivering fit, will
sometimes become a mortal disorder:
“The little rift within the lute,
That by-and-by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all.”[242]
234. In case of a shivering fit, perhaps you will tell me what to

do?
Instantly have the bed warmed, and put the child to bed. Apply
either a hot bottle or a hot brick, wrapped in flannel, to the soles of
his feet. Put an extra blanket on his bed, and give him a hot cup of
tea.
As soon as the shivering fit is over, and he has become hot,
gradually lessen the extra quantity of clothes on his bed, and take
away the hot bottle or the hot brick from his feet.
What NOT to do.—Do not give either brandy or wine, as
inflammation of some organ might be about taking place. Do not
administer opening medicine, as there might be some “breaking-out”
coming out on the skin, and an aperient might check it.
235. My child, apparently otherwise healthy, screams out in the
night violently in his sleep, and nothing for a time will pacify him:
what is likely to be the cause, and what is the treatment?
The causes of these violent screamings in the night are various. At
one time, they proceed from teething; at another, from worms;
sometimes, from night-mare; occasionally, from either disordered
stomach or bowels.
Each of the above causes will, of course, require a different plan of
procedure; it will, therefore, be necessary to consult a medical man
on the subject, who will soon, with appropriate treatment, be able to
relieve him.
236. Have the goodness to describe the complaint of children
called Mumps.
The mumps, inflammation of the “parotid” gland, is commonly
ushered in with a slight feverish attack. After a short time, a swelling,
of stony hardness, is noticed before and under the ear, which
swelling extends along the neck toward the chin. This lump is
exceedingly painful, and continues painful and swollen for four or
five days. At the end of which time it gradually disappears, leaving
not a trace behind. The swelling of mumps never gathers. It may
affect one or both sides of the face. It seldom occurs but once in a
lifetime. It is contagious, and has been known to run through a whole
family or school; but it is not dangerous, unless, which is rarely the
case, it leaves the “parotid” gland, and migrates either to the head, to
the breast, or to the testicle.
237. What is the treatment of Mumps?
Foment the swelling, four or five times a day, with a flannel wrung
out of hot chamomile and poppy-head decoction;[243] and apply,
every night, a barm and oatmeal poultice to the swollen gland or
glands. Debar, for a few days, the little patient from taking meat and
broth, and let him live on bread and milk, light puddings, and arrow-
root. Keep him in a well-ventilated room, and shut him out from the
company of his brothers, his sisters, and young companions. Give
him a little mild, aperient medicine. Of course, if there be the
slightest symptom of migration to any other part or parts, instantly
call in a medical man.
238. What is the treatment of a Boil?
One of the best applications is a Burgundy pitch plaster spread on
a soft piece of wash-leather. Let a chemist spread a plaster, about the
size of the hand; and, from this piece, cut small plasters, the size of a
shilling or a florin (according to the dimensions of the boil), which
snip around and apply to the part. Put a fresh one on daily. This
plaster will soon cause the boil to break; when it does break, squeeze
out the contents, the core, and the matter, and then apply one of the
plasters as before, which, until the boil be well, renew every day.
The old-fashioned remedy for a boil—namely, common yellow
soap and brown sugar, is a capital one for the purposes; it should be
made into a paste, and spread on a piece of coarse linen, the size
either of a shilling or of a florin (according to the size of the boil); it
eases the pain and causes the boil soon to break, and draws it when it
is broken; it should be renewed daily.
If the boils should arise from the child being in a delicate state of
health, give him cod-liver oil, meat once a day, and an abundance of
milk and farinaceous food. Let him have plenty of fresh air, exercise,
and play.
If the boils should arise from gross and improper feeding, then
keep him for a time from meat, and let him live principally on a milk
and farinaceous diet.
If the child be fat and gross, cod-liver oil would be improper; a
mild aperient, such as rhubarb and magnesia, would then be the best
medicine.
239. What are the symptoms of Earache?
A young child screaming shrilly, violently, and continuously, is
oftentimes owing to earache; carefully, therefore, examine each ear,
and ascertain if there be any discharge; if there be, the mystery is
explained.
Screaming from earache may be distinguished from the screaming
from bowelache by the former (earache) being more continuous—
indeed, being one continued scream, and from the child putting his
hand to his head; while, in the latter (bowelache), the pain is more of
a coming and of a going character, and he draws up his legs to his
bowels. Again, in the former (earache), the secretions from the
bowels are natural; while, in the latter (bowelache), the secretions
from the bowels are usually depraved, and probably offensive. But a
careful examination of the ear will generally at once decide the
nature of the case.
240. What is the best remedy for Earache?
Apply to the ear a small flannel bag, filled with hot salt—as hot as
can be comfortably borne, or foment the ear with a flannel wrung out
of hot chamomile and poppy-head decoction. A roasted onion,
inclosed in muslin, applied to the ear, is an old-fashioned and
favorite remedy, and may, if the bag of hot salt, or if the hot
fomentation do not relieve, be tried. Put into the ear, but not very far,
a small piece of cotton wool, moistened with warm olive oil. Taking
care that the wool is always removed before a fresh piece be
substituted, as if it be allowed to remain in any length of time, it may
produce a discharge from the ear. Avoid all cold applications. If the
earache be severe, keep the little fellow at home, in a room of equal
temperature, but well ventilated, and give him, for a day or two, no
meat.
If a discharge from the ear should either accompany or follow the
earache, more especially if the discharge be offensive, instantly call
in a medical man, or deafness for life may be the result.
A knitted or crocheted hat, with woolen rosettes over the ears, is,
in the winter time, an excellent hat for a child subject to earache. The
hat may be procured at any baby-linen warehouse.
241. What are the causes and the treatment of discharges from
the Ear?
Cold, measles, scarlet fever, healing up of “breakings-out” behind
the ear; pellets of cotton wool, which had been put in the ear, and
had been forgotten to be removed, are the usual causes of discharges
from the ear. It generally commences with earache.
The treatment consists in keeping the parts clean, by syringing the
ear every morning with warm water, by attention to food, keeping
the child principally upon a milk and a farinaceous diet, and by
change of air, more especially to the coast. If change of air be not
practicable, great attention ought to be paid to ventilation. As I have
before advised, in all cases of discharge from the ear, call in a
medical man, as a little judicious medicine is advisable—indeed,
essential; and it may be necessary to syringe the ear with lotions,
instead of with warm water; and, of course, it is only a doctor who
has actually seen the patient who can decide these matters, and what
is best to be done in each individual case.
242. What is the treatment of a “sty” in the eyelid?

Download textbook Collaborative Art In The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Sondra Bacharach ebook all chapter pdf

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Download textbook Collaborative Art In The Twenty First Century 1St Edition Sondra Bacharach ebook all chapter pdf

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Collaborative Art in the Twenty First

Century 1st Edition Sondra Bacharach

Militant Aesthetics - Art Activism in the Twenty-First

Dark side of the boom the excesses of the art market in

Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century Saul

Nomadland Surviving America in the Twenty First Century

Global intelligence oversight : governing security in

Rebooting Clausewitz: 'On War' in the Twenty-First

Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century

Child Development and Education in the Twenty First

Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic

Sondra Bacharach is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, New

1 Ethics and Images of Pain

2 Meanings of Abstract Art

4 Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture

5 Manga’s Cultural Crossroads

6 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

7 Spiritual Art and Art Education

8 Art in the Asia-Pacific

9 Performing Beauty in Participatory Art and Culture

10 The Uses of Art in Public Space

12 Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices

13 Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art

15 How Folklore Shaped Modern Art

16 Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism

17 Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth, and Siv B. Fjærestad

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2016 Taylor & Francis

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bacharach, Sondra, editor.

ISBN: 978-1-138-93574-7 (hbk)

List of Table and Figures

Introduction: Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century

1 Pirate Film Societies: Rearranging Traditional Apparatus with Inappropriate Technology

2 Digital Street Art

3 Hybrid Modes of Collaborations in the Post-Socialist Context: The Socio-Politically

4 Turkish Contemporary Art and the Emergent Off-Space Artist Collectives

5 The Solitary Author as Collective Fiction

6 Collaboration’s Gesture at the Impossible

7 Technological Impacts on Musical Collaboration: Can the Postal Service Survive?

8 Empathy, Surviving, Collective Reflexivity

9 Collective Action and the Reciprocity of Friendship

11 Future Calls the Dawn

12 Unsettling Action and Text

13 The Politics of Collaboration: Robin Rhode and the Drowned Piano

14 Wedge: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration by Janine Antoni and Jill Sigman

15 Combination, Collaboration, and Creation: The Case of Jasper Johns

16 Gathering: Artistic Collaborations in Glass

Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth, Siv B. Fjærestad

Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century presents an international cross section of

Everyday Practices and Emerging Technical Conditions

Makeshift Movie Theaters

Figure 1.2 Assembling the cinematographic apparatus with everyday technology.

From Cinematographic Experience to Technological Engagement

Legal Mediation of the Medium’s Ontology

To make a Mixture. Two teaspoonfuls to be given early in the morning

Make a Mixture. One or two teaspoonfuls, or a tablespoonful, according to the

234. In case of a shivering fit, perhaps you will tell me what to

You might also like