Conference Grant Reports: Caleb Murray-Bozeman at ASAP
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Caleb Murray-Bozeman presented “The Failure of Participation in Aram Bartholl's Dead Drops” at the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in New York. From Caleb:
With support from the Berkeley Center for New Media, I traveled to New York to participate in the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)’s 2024 conference. My talk – “The Failure of Participation in Aram Bartholl's Dead Drops” – addressed a shift away from the rhetoric of audience participation and “relational aesthetics” in contemporary art during the 2010s. I focused on Bartholl’s work Dead Drops (an ongoing project launched in 2010 which consists of USB flash drives installed in public locations across the world, and which can be used to anonymously exchange digital files) as a pivot point within a broader trajectory from a moment in which participation was celebrated for its oppositional or even liberatory qualities to one in which participation can feel like an overwhelming demand and the site of economic exploitation. I argued that Dead Drops stages a participatory experience in which most of its audience does not actually participate, and I interpreted that refusal to participate within the context of the excessive demands that our always-on media ecosystem places on its users.
During the discussion following my panel, several people voiced questions and comments that will be extremely helpful to me as I continue to work on this project. In particular, those comments encouraged me to hone in on how I historicize the already-retro type of participation that Dead Drops mobilizes; I think that this focus will help me develop my argument further. While at ASAP I also had the opportunity to attend several other panels. I found two particularly insightful and thought-provoking: one addressed conspiracy theory and paranoia as it relates to the position of the media theorist, and another asked its participants to think about formlessness and waste. Several scholars on the latter panel discussed the same theories and theorists of digital media that I referenced in my talk; their perspectives on those theories were fascinating to hear and have helped me to refine my own position.