Claudia Costa Pederson and Nicholas Adrian Knouf are PhD candidates in Art History and Information Science at Cornell University respectively. Here they broach the subjects of education, representation, and organized networks through a review of works by Arzu Ozkal and My Piece of Chennai.


Persistent Iteration by Arzu Ozkal is a two-channel video from a series of video works exploring identity in relation to the artist’s body. The two juxtaposed video feeds, the first of which shows a close-up shot of Ozkal’s hands and a school notebook on which she repeatedly writes türküm (Turkish); while the second image consists of a recording at an elementary school classroom attended by Ozkal in her childhood. In the latter, a stationary image of saluting Turkish soldiers is superimposed to the left of students engaged in their morning pledge to the Republic of Turkey. The soundtrack is of the students’ voices reciting in unison lead by a senior student. Ozkal is a Turkish-born artist of Turkish and Bosnian descent. The work was generated shortly after the artist’s completion of a MFA in Computer Art at State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY), and was subsequently shown at various national and international venues.

Meena Natarajan is an interaction researcher and design specialist trained at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She joined the project My Piece of Chennai as lead coordinator upon return to her native India in 2008. My Piece of Chennai is a open-source, online project developed by a volunteer network of Chennai- and North American-based designers, artists, entrepreneurs, and community organizers in collaboration with Chennai residents. The project’s website describes the aim of the initiative as an attempt at creating, “a place and medium of collaboration for local communities in monitoring civic amenities in their area, taking joint ownership of their piece of Chennai.” My Piece of Chennai follows on the heels of a number of independently run projects situated in large urban areas of India, such as Sarai, a well known collective in New Delhi, and Pukar in Mumbai, led by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. These collectives are established as spaces and networks dedicated to research, practice, and conversation on topics related to urbanism.

Common to Ozkal’s and Natarajan’s projects is an examination of questions regarding subject formation, representation, and community. The points of intersection in these projects pertain to models of organization, an issue pertinent to both artists and activists. This essay examines the relationship between art and design practices conceived from an interventionist standpoint via generative modes of research and the development of autonomous networks.

Arzu Ozkal’s video, Persistent Iteration, evokes a paradigm of population management performed as educational ritual. Students’ bodies and psyches are brought to order through repetitive writing and vocal exercises. Persistent Iteration allows us to witness present-day, ritualized subjection to a vision of community established in Ozkal’s native Republic of Turkey by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). This designing of modern Turkish subjectivity on the model of the European nation-state has its roots in an Enlightenment ideology that valorized principles of individualism, self-interest, and utilitarianism, and extolled governance by Law, linear logic, and rationality. In practice, Atatürk had set out to design the institutional apparatus of Turkey in a series of cultural, political, social, and economic reforms upholding nationalism, modernization, democracy, and secularization guided by educational and scientific progress. This became known in Turkey as Kemalism.


Arzu Ozkal,Persistent Iteration, digital video, 2008

Following the arguments of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish on the disciplinary function of teaching handwriting and military drills in schools, Ozkal represents the classroom as an extension of the state’s disciplinary apparatus, i.e., in its new forms of punishment. The militaristic ritual of the morning drill in Ozkal’s school also recalls Atatürk’s own training as a military officer. The liberal values of honesty and hard work (indicated both in speech and in writing in the video) foreground transparency, as a political principle, and efficiency, as an economic aim, two key characteristics of Atatürk’s program of economic, political, and cultural reform.

The design of a vehicle is one of many critically needed responses to the veterans' emerging social, psychological and political needs. It responds to the veterans' need to communicate and reach the larger public, beyond the group of fellow veterans, and openly share in the public space their overwhelming war and after-war war experiences, especially these that are by themselves yet unacknowledged and not understood by the society at large.

Freedom poster, Tallinn, 2008
In the winter of 2008, two artists, whose identities must remain concealed due to investigation (their identities are known to C_M_L), postered the city of Tallinn, Estonia, with flyers reading, VABADUS (freedom, in English), with a subtitle announcing, “a contest to find the best solution.” These posters invited residents to fill in their opinions on a controversy over the proposed “War of Independence Victory Monument” in the remaining blank space. Local residents took this opportunity, opening a space for the public critique of the decision by a few politicians to build the new Victory Monument. VADABUS shows how power circumvents and marginalizes collective processes, while proclaiming "Freedom" in the name of the many (Something not unknown to the New Yorkers who experienced, and are still experiencing, urban “reconstruction” after 9/11). It also opened a temporary space in which a public could witness itself in formation, realizing, in place of a monument, a more open aesthetic form.

Still from Juxtapositions, Meena Natarajan, 2009Presented here are a collection of materials from the design and community organizing collective, My Piece of Chennai. MyPoC is a volunteer-run initiative led by designer and researcher Meena Natarajan. The project brings together a diverse range of expertise both locally and remotely to include writers, interactive designers, artists, programmers, local volunteers, and an insect biologist. Team members are located both in Chennai, India, and as far away as Boston, Massachusetts (US). Of particular interest to C_M_L is the way in which interdisciplinary teams of individuals form and interact with and for a community to develop material demands, and to make invisible constituencies seen and heard.

IR no. 21 detail, Ryan Harden BrownLucy Raven's and Ryan Harden Brown's Incident No. 21: MS Found in a Bottle installation at Incident Report in Hudson, New York took place from May 27–June 24, 2009, and is reprised here in a collection of responses to the project solicited by the Raven and Brown. This MS continues an ongoing process of revision and exegesis on the sometimes infra-thin partition separating private space and the commons. With contributions from Incident Report, Lucas Knipscher, Clifford Borress, and Robert Fitterman.

It all started on Saturday 31st of May 2008, when more than eight hundred people walked from the inner city of Copenhagen to Christianshavn, under the parole: “THEY TEAR DOWN, WE BUILD UP!”