BEYOND THE CLOUDS: PUBLICS/ARCHIVESWith Jason Simon

What are the fundamentals that underlie the decision to preserve a certain artistic object? This question is specially essential when that choice is made by institutions - museums, art centers - whose function is to retain the memory of an epoch.

When we speak specifically of video art, this is also a problem in need of a growing reflection: What to file? Where? In what way? If the choices made involve an ethical awareness, aesthetic and even political context of where they occur, it is necessary to consider how to give access to the information, mainly in this time where new information storage devices appear, such as "public clouds".

During the two-day seminar, Jason Simon and Óscar Faria talked not only about these issues, but also others related to the artist's career, included through examples from his work. Another goal was to bring the participants closer to "In and Around the Ohio Pen", the exhibition which opens at May 29, at Sismógrafo.

The structure of the seminar had as guide a conversation that was be punctuated by topics — file, labor, prison/imprisonment, institutional critique (Wednesday) and yesterday, today, tomorrow (Thursday) — intending to draw a picture of Jason Simon, mainly based on the material collected by him for the occasion (author’s films and documentary exhibition records).

There was also proposed text support either directly related to the artist's work, whether arising during the seminar preparation process, emphasising in this particular instance names such as Derrida, Foucault, Pasolini and Benedict Singleton, authors who in some way, can be called to this task of building a thought around Jason Simon's work.

Biographies

Jason Simon (Boston, 1961) is a professor at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, where he was founding faculty of the Department of Media Culture. Simon worked as an assistant curator of film and video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where he established the museum’s Art & Tech lab for artist residencies in filmmaking, and was represented by the Pat Hearn Gallery from 1994-1999. His work has exhibited widely, including the Whitney Museum Biennial; Neue Gallerie, Graz; ICA London; the Tang Museum; The New Museum and The Kitchen. In 2013, ten years of the One Minute Film Festival he co-hosted with Moyra Davey became an exhibition at Mass MoCA. In New York, Simon co-founded the cooperative Orchard gallery, 2005-2008; he co-curated the traveling exhibition Macho Man, Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault, and is represented by the Callicoon Fine Arts gallery. His videos are distributed by The Video Data Bank and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Purple, Parkett andAfterimage.

Óscar Faria (Porto, 1966), curator and art critic, is one of the members of Sismógrafo's team.