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EGBG
A contribution by the Platform for (un)Solicited Research and Advice: manifestaplatform.orgEGBG is a Dutch registration research company set up by artist Martijn Engelbrecht in 1994. The company conducts market research on several levels, for his own practice and commissioned. Engelbregt deals with information and privacy issues (his company name actually stands for ‘Once Given Remains Given’ or ‘Engelbregt Information Management Group’). He was one of the people starting to look for the borders of what people voluntarily fill in on questionnaires.
At the hight of the telephone market research hype, EGBG created a guide to counter attack telephone interviewers. The one being questioned becomes the one questioning and the other way around. He also worked for the critical Dutch TV network VPRO, where he mapped the information of all the VPRO emlpoyes.
Walker Evans
Walker Evans photographed many aspects of the great depression whilst working for the Farm Security Administration. He later went on to write for Time magazine, edit Fortune Magazine and become a professor of photography at Yale. His images of everyday people, often suffering from poverty, combined the form of journalistic documentary with the aestheticization of the art image. His images have been shown and distributed in newspapers, publications and galleries, spanning a range of audiences and contexts.
- Walker Evans, ‘Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta’ 1936
- Bud Fields and His Family, Hale County, Alabama, photograph by Walker Evans, c. 1936–37; from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Evans and James Agee.
- Untitled (Subway Portrait), gelatin silver print by Walker Evans, 1938–41; in the Art Institute of Chicago
- Untitled (Subway Portrait), gelatin silver print by Walker Evans, 1938–41; in the Art Institute of Chicago
The Enlightenment
The enlightenment was a time of cultural, industrial and economic development driven by the authority of objective reason. Rather than a particular set of ideas, the enlightenment categorizes a particular value system in Europe. It was a time when the natural world could be measured, classified and categorized.
During this time artists were employed to authentically copy aspects of the surrounding world, particularly to scientifically document ‘new species’ on transcontinental expeditions to help establish a taxonomy of the natural world. These forms of representation and categorization attempt to convey an objective, scientific and rational truth, and have left their legacy in western culture. Contemporary artists such as Alberto Baraya respond specifically to the European colonialization of central and south America during the enlightenment, and particularly to the ways plants, land, animals and people were documented, renamed, and redistributed under the guise of discovery and scientific reason.
- The Enlightenment Room at the British Museum
- Alberto Baraya, Herbarium
- Alberto Baraya
A contribution by Thinking Practices http://thinkingpractices.wordpress.com/(kteh)
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason” – Immanuel Kant
Kant, who is regarded as the philosopher of Enlightenment questioned or proposed the freedom to know and understand the reasons. A man who cultivates his own mind to understand is encouraged to spread his knowledge . This branches out into the philosophy or arts, which describes aesthetic ideas are determined by experience of reasons.
Media plays an important role in expanding the realm of communication where people are able to share and exchange thoughts.
‘I value poetry only insofar as it is the ornament of reason’ – Voltaire (quoted in Furst, 1969, p. 19)
Poetry is one’s expression in awakening to the truth, understanding the reasons and one’s courage to accept it. In fact, this branch of philosophy is comparable to mind observation, which is a movement towards scientific consciousness.
