VTC2.0 update: contributions from the first week
VTC2.0 has been online for just under a week now and we've already had contributions from some amazing people. Each contribution consists of a public part (name, email address, website, message to the keeper) and a secret part (message for the future and attachment). Here is a selection from the public part of this week's entries:
Previous Art of Engagement online resident artist Tim Jeeves wrote:
Thanks for the invite Justin. Nice project.
Art of Engagement founder and queer artist Caffyn Kelley wrote:
I have a few deep, dark secrets. I have devoted much of my life’s work to giving voice to untold truths and unspeakable identities. In diverse media, I have tried to open space for others to break through suffocating silences, to speak and to share. Yet there are some crucial, shaping experiences I withhold from language, even from images. Because they are too humiliating, or too wounding, because I fear the judgments of others, because they don’t fit the identity I have put forward as my public face…. or perhaps to preserve their silence, so that they can keep working on and in me at the level of the unspoken and invisible – dis-articulated, so to speak, from my bright-lit life. Michel Foucault talks about the freedom silence makes possible, the multiple causes and meanings. He notes that in other cultures silence is “a specific form of experiencing a relationship with others”.
Since this artwork is in part a meditation on silence, I think perhaps it is a good space to give voice to one of these untold secrets. Yet why should I burden future generations with my secret? In part because I trust they won’t care. In part because I know the shame and fear that keep me from sharing all of who I am are terrible constraints – constraints that are both personal and social. My hope is that, in 100 years, they will have disappeared. If they have not, it will be in part because of my dearth of courage, my capitulations. So this is an apology, made in hope that it will be completely irrelevant. And a story, a cautionary tale...
Emerging live artist Nor wrote:
I know you well enough now to trust you with safeguarding this. What I still don't trust is the technology; that these files will still be accessible in 100 years time. I hope they are, though. I imagine a future in which open standards allow this data to be maintained and that vision gives me a little bit of hope.
Erotic artist Katie Sarra wrote:
My eyes are smarting thinking of you honouring this ceremony by having your mouth sewn up. I will be with you for this ritual in spirit.
Canadian artist Tancha Dirickson wrote:
Hi fellow artist and capsule keeper, today here in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia, Canada, we still have some beautiful fruit orchards, but they are disappearing, uprooted daily from their natural beds and "replanted" instead with houses, roads and other crops: grapes for wine. I like wine, wine is good, but if we must have both, we must have more food than wine. Perhaps it is good that you are sewing your mouth because very soon people won't have anything to eat. I congratulate your future silence and your courage. Your performance must be viewed as a true act of Critical Realism (Baskhar's notion and ideals). In my view, todays art must be an engaged one (as in a political and activist manner), critical of our socio-cultural reality, only this way we may start a societal transformation in how we regard the environment and our relationship with it. Humans must understand that they are equal to a worm, equal to a grain of soil, not better and certainly not special, just as any other elements of the cosmos. In recovering this notion, we may have a future after all, don't you think?
Legendary sex radical, writer and teacher Dossie Easton wrote:
I am convinced that in a hundred years of social evolution people will understand this poem.
Find out more and contribute to the time capsule
Previous Art of Engagement online resident artist Tim Jeeves wrote:
Thanks for the invite Justin. Nice project.
Art of Engagement founder and queer artist Caffyn Kelley wrote:
I have a few deep, dark secrets. I have devoted much of my life’s work to giving voice to untold truths and unspeakable identities. In diverse media, I have tried to open space for others to break through suffocating silences, to speak and to share. Yet there are some crucial, shaping experiences I withhold from language, even from images. Because they are too humiliating, or too wounding, because I fear the judgments of others, because they don’t fit the identity I have put forward as my public face…. or perhaps to preserve their silence, so that they can keep working on and in me at the level of the unspoken and invisible – dis-articulated, so to speak, from my bright-lit life. Michel Foucault talks about the freedom silence makes possible, the multiple causes and meanings. He notes that in other cultures silence is “a specific form of experiencing a relationship with others”.
Since this artwork is in part a meditation on silence, I think perhaps it is a good space to give voice to one of these untold secrets. Yet why should I burden future generations with my secret? In part because I trust they won’t care. In part because I know the shame and fear that keep me from sharing all of who I am are terrible constraints – constraints that are both personal and social. My hope is that, in 100 years, they will have disappeared. If they have not, it will be in part because of my dearth of courage, my capitulations. So this is an apology, made in hope that it will be completely irrelevant. And a story, a cautionary tale...
Emerging live artist Nor wrote:
I know you well enough now to trust you with safeguarding this. What I still don't trust is the technology; that these files will still be accessible in 100 years time. I hope they are, though. I imagine a future in which open standards allow this data to be maintained and that vision gives me a little bit of hope.
Erotic artist Katie Sarra wrote:
My eyes are smarting thinking of you honouring this ceremony by having your mouth sewn up. I will be with you for this ritual in spirit.
Canadian artist Tancha Dirickson wrote:
Hi fellow artist and capsule keeper, today here in the Okanagan valley of British Columbia, Canada, we still have some beautiful fruit orchards, but they are disappearing, uprooted daily from their natural beds and "replanted" instead with houses, roads and other crops: grapes for wine. I like wine, wine is good, but if we must have both, we must have more food than wine. Perhaps it is good that you are sewing your mouth because very soon people won't have anything to eat. I congratulate your future silence and your courage. Your performance must be viewed as a true act of Critical Realism (Baskhar's notion and ideals). In my view, todays art must be an engaged one (as in a political and activist manner), critical of our socio-cultural reality, only this way we may start a societal transformation in how we regard the environment and our relationship with it. Humans must understand that they are equal to a worm, equal to a grain of soil, not better and certainly not special, just as any other elements of the cosmos. In recovering this notion, we may have a future after all, don't you think?
Legendary sex radical, writer and teacher Dossie Easton wrote:
I am convinced that in a hundred years of social evolution people will understand this poem.
Find out more and contribute to the time capsule
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