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Sites of resistance: LA Freewaves and inSite reinvent the public sphere

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Sites of resistance: LA Freewaves and inSite reinvent the public sphere

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Content SITES OF RESISTANCE
LA FREEWAVES AND INSITE REINVENT THE PUBLIC SPHERE
by
Heidi Zeller
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
December 2006
Copyright 2006 Heidi Zeller
ii
Acknowledgements
The process of writing this paper has made me truly understand why people
write acknowledgments. An adoring thank you to Brian Azcona for being a devoted
source of love and moral support, and an extraordinarily patient listener, even from
afar. I know the minute-by-minute accounting of my writing process was excruciating
to hear. Immeasurable gratitude to Alaine Azcona for being the necessary other half
of the team, for the manic phone calls in the wee hours, for making me laugh like a
hyena. . . Thank you to Sonja Cendak for her empathetic words of wisdom and her
brilliant thesis-as-car metaphor, which honestly helped me get over this
psychological hurdle. A profound thank you to my parents, Ann and Bill, and my
brother Tony for a lifetime of believing in me. And of course a significant thank you
to my thesis committee. Caryl Levy has been a ready listener in moments of
graduate school panic, offering both professional and academic support. I am
exceptionally grateful to Anne Bray and David Sloane for advancing my thinking on
a subject so important to me. I have enormous respect and admiration for their
ambitious projects and especially for their obvious love of teaching. Their
encouragement and generosity have meant so much.
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Art + Politics in the Public Sphere 4
Freewaves and inSite 4
Crisis of the Public Sphere: Art Takes Notice 11
Art Historical Lineage 18
Dialogue as Art 22
Chapter 2: Cycles and Dimensions of the Public Sphere 30
Concept of the Public Sphere 30
Privatization of Public Space 33
Public Space, Identity and Empathy 38
Mediaspace: Internet as a quasi-public sphere 50
Conclusion: Art and Social Change in a Globalizing World 60
Bibliography 64
iv
List of Figures
Figure 1: Berry Bickle, Ginasio, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival, 8
“How Can You Resist?” (2004)
Figure 2: Gustavo Artigas, Rules of the Game (view of frontón 9
court), from inSite00-01.
Figure 3: Gustavo Artigas, Rules of the Game (view of soccer 10
match/basketball game), from inSite00-01.
Figure 4: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection (view of Centro 26
Cultural façade), from inSite00-01.
Figure 5: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection (view of participant 27
wearing transmission headset), from inSite00-01.
Figure 6: Renee Tajima-Peña, Labor Women, from Freewaves’ 9
th
41
festival, “How Can You Resist?” (2004).
Figure 7: Cameron Lowe & Lisa Strassman, Skrap: Skidrow Arts 41
Project, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival, “How Can You Resist?”
(2004).
Figure 8: Bulbo, The Clothes Shop/La Tienda Ropa (Workshop 2), 42
from inSite05.
Figure 9: Bulbo, The Clothes Shop/La Tienda Ropa (Presentation 1), 43
from inSite05.
Figure 10: Bulbo, The Clothes Shop/La Tienda Ropa (Presentation 2), 44
from inSite05.
Figure 11: Marko Peljhan, MX, Nullo, Octex and Springer, 47
Signal_Server! – Transignal 7, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival,
“How Can You Resist?” (2004).
Figure 12: Marko Peljhan, MX, Nullo, Octex and Springer, 47
Signal_Server! – Transignal 7, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival,
“How Can You Resist?” (2004).
Figure 13: Itzel Martínez del Cañizo, Recovered City/La Ciudad 48
Recuperación, from inSite05.
Figure 14: David Grey, graphics for “Too Much Freedom?” website (2006). 53
v
Abstract
The Southern California based, globally reaching contemporary art projects
LA Freewaves and inSite demonstrate, through a diverse range of creative practice,
the artist’s role at the leading edge of social change. We are in the midst of major
societal transformations and I argue that art makes powerful contributions to this
changing cultural environment. Using the concept of the public sphere as a
springboard, I explore how inSite and Freewaves navigate the blurry delineations of
public and private space to enrich and reinvent the public sphere, through their
content, form and emphasis on public process. They provide a forum for new
images and new language that provoke dialogue and contribute to the production of
critical knowledge – the preconditions and tools for democratic social change.
1
Introduction
Two Mexican soccer teams and two U.S. basketball teams play their
respective games simultaneously on one Tijuana basketball court in a state of
“harmonic confusion.” A video bus tour winds its way through iconic palm tree-lined
streets of Los Angeles, led by immigrant women who relay their experiences as
domestic workers to fellow bus riders. Residents of a Tijuana drug rehabilitation
program imagine idealized visions of their city, and act out their role within it. A
group of artists, musicians and telecommunications experts jam live via satellite
within the radio zones of the electromagnetic spectrum in LA’s Chinatown Central
Plaza. A group of Mexicans infiltrate an exclusive La Jolla boutique with their hand-
crafted clothing designs – but they are not for sale.
While conventionally we recognize that art reflects changes in society,
doesn’t art also propel such change? How do artists contribute to larger debates
about the direction of society and culture? Where, how and among whom do these
conversations take place? The contemporary art projects described above
demonstrate, through a diverse range of creative practice, the artist’s role at the
leading edge of social change. We are in the midst of major societal transformations
and I argue that art makes powerful contributions to this changing cultural
environment. Artists clear spaces - literal and symbolic - for these unscripted
conversations to take place. Using the concept of the public sphere as a
springboard, I explore how inSite and Freewaves navigate the blurry delineations of
public and private space to enrich and reinvent the public sphere, through their
content, form and emphasis on public process. They provide a forum for new
2
images and new language that provoke dialogue and contribute to the production of
critical knowledge – the preconditions and tools for democratic social change.
I will begin by sketching an overview of inSite’s and Freewaves’ respective
ambitions and broader visions. I will then trace each organization’s origins, which
will provide a framework for understanding their art historical lineage and artistic
significance, drawing on the ideas of “new genre public art”
1
and “dialogical
aesthetics.”
2
An introduction to the concept of the public sphere as defined by
Jürgen Habermas follows, after which I will situate the projects as cultural practices
that resist current threats to democracy. I will conclude by reviewing past and recent
philosophical wonderings on art and social change.
As this paper is dedicated to discovering how artists and arts organizations
have confronted challenges to democracy in recent years, I will explore how artistic
and curatorial practices are shifting to respond to these concerns.
3
How do the new
modes and outlets for presenting art reflect a heightened sensitivity to the assaults
on democratic values? How are artists and organizations taking advantage of the
traditional public space of the street, and carving out new – sometimes temporary –
public spaces adjacent to it? How are they appropriating and experimenting with
communications technology to counter private domination of mass media? Despite
attention given to the crisis of the public sphere and the alarming implications for

1
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995).
2
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004).
3
Rosalyn Deutsche points out that “public art terminology frequently promises a commitment not only
to democracy as a form of government but to a general democratic spirit of equality as well.” And “the
prevailing categories that shape public art debates allow little interrogation of the definition of public
3
democracy, this paper will emphasize how art offers possibilities to invigorate the
public sphere and promote hopeful alternatives to the current social order.

space, let alone of democracy, with which, everyone says, public space is somehow intertwined.
(Rosalyn Deutsche, “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy,” Social Text 33 (1992): 34-35.
4
Chapter 1: Art + Politics in the Public Sphere
Freewaves and inSite
At the core of both Freewaves and inSite is a commitment to collaboration,
coalition-building and cross-cultural dialogue within the framework of art. Freewaves
strives to creatively exhibit the “most innovative and culturally relevant independent
new media from around the world,” while inSite is focused on promoting “artistic
investigation and activation of urban space” through “binational collaborative arts
partnerships.” Although geographically based in Los Angeles (Freewaves) and the
Tijuana-San Diego border region (inSite), their audience-participants range from
individuals at the neighborhood level to international art enthusiasts and web users
in the digital realm.
The missions of Freewaves and inSite hint at the political dimension of their
work. For both, art is intimately connected to larger social, political and cultural
contexts, and a desire to provide alternative outlets for voices not normally heard in
the mainstream. Embodying this view, and partly for pragmatic reasons, Freewaves
and inSite both have established extensive networks of partner organizations.
Despite these similarities, Freewaves and inSite differ in how they pursue
their respective ambitions. Freewaves’ philosophy emphasizes the sharing of
knowledge and experience across social, cultural and political borders to inspire
daring art work while prompting a critical examination of our cultural values. It
facilitates dialogue by “inventing dynamic new media exhibition forms,” presented at
a diverse mix of rotating Los Angeles venues, on urban video billboards, on
television and online. Taking advantage of increasingly accessible technology, it is
5
accumulating a massive web archive of media arts that is freely available to anyone
anywhere in the world with a computer and a decent Internet connection. A central
goal of the festival is to help connect, through new media art, the fragmented
communities of Los Angeles – and online, the geographically separated
communities of the world – by presenting in publicly accessible locations that rotate
from year to year alternative or marginalized ideas and histories ignored by the
mainstream media. The underlying assumption is that video has become the
primary medium of communication, and that greater numbers of people worldwide
are fluent in the medium’s visual language. Collectively, these activities are about
claiming the airwaves for public use and expression – establishing one relatively
small corner free from corporate control.
While Freewaves is concerned with transcending invisible borders, inSite
takes a more literal approach, seeking to establish a site-specific “cultural practice of
intervention” along the U.S.-Mexico border primarily through long-term engagement
of artists with various communities and social groups. These engagements are
intended to culminate with “works sited in the public domain,” although the
commissioned projects are ultimately about experimenting with new frameworks for
collaboration within the context of the ambiguous border region. These experiments
acknowledge the imbalance of power between the two countries, as evidenced in
the contrast between the cities of Tijuana and San Diego. They attempt to address
how existing relationships between these cities favor wealthy individuals and
corporate owners of maquiladoras (factories) lining the Tijuana side, at the expense
of the everyday, human needs of those living on both sides.
6
Both organizations prioritize education, forming partnerships with schools
and developing programs aimed at stimulating curiosity and creative potential
among young people. They implicitly recognize the importance of nurturing in
younger generations not just a superficial appreciation for the arts as an alternative
to popular culture, but a critical visual literacy applicable to other disciplines and
areas of life. InSite’s educational programs are designed to make the arts “a lively,
essential, and ongoing aspect of elementary school education,” whereas Freewaves
focuses its educational outreach on mainly college-age students due to the
challenging, often graphic material they present.
4
Specific examples from each organization will help illustrate their missions,
and begin to demonstrate how they engage in the public sphere: Freewaves’ 9
th
Biennial of New Media Arts, How Can You Resist? held in 2004, and an inSite
project by one of its artists in residence, Gustavo Artigas, called Rules of the
Game/Las Reglas del Juego, 2000-2001.
Freewaves’ primary activity has been a biennial festival dedicated to
presenting all forms of media art, including video, film, animation and web-based
work.
5
Thematically conceived by Executive Director Anne Bray, the 2004 festival,
How Can You Resist? explored multiple angles on the theme of resistance,
manifesting in work about both personal and political struggles between protest and

4
Freewaves collaborated with high school students and teachers on the occasion of its 10
th
anniversary to produce a video project, TV or Not TV, completed in 2001. Since this time it has not
worked as closely with high schools as it has found that teachers are consistently overwhelmed by
other curriculum requirements. For TV or Not TV Freewaves produced three half-hour videos about the
media arts in Los Angeles, and a curriculum guide with interviews and excerpts from artists. (Anne
Bray, interview by author, Los Angeles, California, 24 October 2005)
5
According to Freewaves, media arts refer to the work of artists who use communications technology
such as film and video. Media arts are constantly changing, as artists seize and personalize new and
commercial technologies. The work in Freewaves’ festivals ranges from animation and documentaries
to installations and websites. (Anne Bray, interview)
7
desire. As with previous festivals, it was planned for November to coincide with
election time. In this case, 2004 marked the potential reelection of George W. Bush,
whose presidency has been one of the most polarizing in U.S. history. Amid this
climate of intense media scrutiny and greater political awareness, How Can You
Resist? sought responses from artists living not just in the U.S. but from throughout
the Americas, Southeast Asia, Africa, China and the Middle East.
Thirteen international and regional media curators whittled over 1,500
submissions down to 150, organizing the work into a series of programs held at
established cultural institutions in Los Angeles’s civic center like the Museum of
Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater
(REDCAT); a variety of hipster art galleries and non-art (but art-friendly) venues in
Chinatown; and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), a community
development and popular education center located in an industrial stretch of
downtown’s Figueroa Corridor.
The 16 programs covered subjects as diverse as sexuality, economics,
politics, consumerism and media itself, with the overall effect blurring the lines
between subjectivity and objectivity, journalism and art. As one example, curators
organized video art from Africa in a program called “Dare to Exist.” Its message was
that Africa is “not a statistic of human conflict, generating social instability as a
measure of civilization,” but that it “knows about paradise.”
6
One of the videos,
Ginasio, provides a glimpse into a seemingly mundane scene of young men lifting
weights in a dimly-lit gym on Mozambique Island (see Fig. 1). A viewer is likely
unaware of the island’s history as a strategic 15
th
-century Portuguese colony or as a
8
refuge for people fleeing the civil war on the mainland that overwhelmed the nation
until 1994, or even that the island’s inhabitants have creatively reinvented colonial
spaces left in ruin. The gym, a former train station, is such a space, and the tone of
the video with its focus on healthy and strong male bodies conveys a society at
peace where individual
expression and agency
exist – a stark contrast to
the sensationalistic
imagery of Africa
typically circulated in the
news. Like Ginasio, the
other media works in
How Can You Resist?
give viewers pause,
recognizing their decision-making processes and the values on which they are
based, exercises that are applicable to their roles both as citizens in a democratic
society and as individuals struggling with personal desires.
As part of the 2000-2001 presentation of inSite, the Mexican artist Gustavo
Artigas devised Rules of the Game, a project that not only epitomizes the
philosophical goals of inSite, but is symbolic of the ongoing identity crises
experienced by those whose lives are affected by the U.S.-Mexico border. The
project consisted of two parts: the first involved the installation of a frontón ball court
in the neighborhood of Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, positioned next to the border

6
Berry Bickle, “Ginasio,” http://www.freewaves.org/artists/b_bickle/.
Figure 1: Berry Bickle, Ginasio, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival,
“How Can You Resist?” (2004)
9
fence, and the second was a sports event at the Lázaro Cárdenas high school in
Tijuana (held on October 13, 2000).
Artigas described Rules of the Game as “an artistic project which reflects on
the structure of
relationships established
between the communities
of Tijuana/San Diego,
articulated through the use
of their own games and
sports.” Rather than
focusing on the divisiveness
embodied in the wall, Artigas
established, in the first part of his project, the frontón court as a surface on which to
play a game, suggesting other meanings and possibilities for the wall (see Fig. 2).
Balls were made available at shops in the area for anyone to play free of charge.
The artist’s exaggeration of the scale of the wall is a critical commentary on
contentious issues swirling around the border, like immigration and economic
policies, and is meant to provoke questions about how we define our busiest
national boundary.
Taking this principle one step further, Artigas combined the games of
basketball and soccer – representative of the United States and Mexico,
respectively – on one court at the same time (see Fig. 3). For his purposes, Artigas
gained the cooperation of two basketball teams from the San Diego Boys and Girls
Club and two soccer teams from Tijuana – one from Lázaro Cárdenas High School
Figure 2: Gustavo Artigas, Rules of the Game (view of
frontón court), from inSite00-01.
10
and one from CETYS University (El Centro de Enseñanza Técnica y Superior) – all
of whom agreed to play, without rehearsing, on a court specially adapted for the
occasion at Lázaro
Cárdenas High School.
Artigas’s essential question
was, “what happens when
they have to share the same
space?”
7
The exercise of the
game attempted to answer
that question, with players
negotiating their
circumstances in the moment. According to two accounts, there was surprisingly
little friction and in the end there were no injuries.
8
“Players flinched and ducked
their way around the congested court, staying entirely focused on their own tasks,”
and when they collided they would simply separate and continue their game.
9
Carrying forward the questions raised by his frontón court, the game humanized the
dilemmas and opportunities of coexistence symbolized by the border, for the players
and the audience.
While their approaches and scales of operation may be different, three
specific common threads exists between Freewaves and inSite, driving all of their
activities. One is political: the belief that art can and should be used politically, and
that this involves engaging with others directly in the public sphere. Another is

7
Gustavo Artigas, “Rules of the Game,” http://www.inSite05.org/legacy/artistfinal/Artigas/moretext.html.
Figure 3: Gustavo Artigas, Rules of the Game (view of
soccer match/basketball game), from inSite00-01.
11
aesthetic: the concept of dialogue as art. Finally, related to both of these points,
Freewaves’ and inSite’s audiences are viewed as participants, who can be anyone
from within a vast body of publics.
Crisis of the Public Sphere: Art Takes Notice
The ferocity of Freewaves’ and inSite’s pursuit of politically charged subjects
like resistance and borders is not coincidental. Both organizations are
simultaneously symptoms and responses to a recent erosion of the public sphere
and the interactions that unfold within it. They emerged around the same time – late
1980s/early 1990s – as this retreat from the public sphere was manifesting in
glaring, volatile ways. That said, the boundary between the public and private
spheres is rarely clear-cut; it is constantly being re-negotiated among those who
claim these spaces. Furthermore, this fragile sphere of social life is threatened in
different ways for different segments of society at any given time, making it
erroneous to argue nostalgically for a return to an idyllic time when there existed a
harmonious balance between citizens, their public institutions and civic
organizations, however tempting. Following a discussion of their art historical
context, I will explore how the public sphere is being threatened now, who is
affected and the implications for democracy.
LA Freewaves was initiated in 1989 by the artist, teacher and activist Anne
Bray, along with a coalition of regional arts and community organizations. The group
observed that Los Angeles in the late 1980s was suffering from a dysfunctional

8
Merete Kjaer, interview by author, Los Angeles, California, 13 February 2006. Leah Ollman, “Losing
Ground: Public Art at the Border,” Art in America, May 2001, 68.
12
social disconnect among its distinct cultural communities. As in other areas, people
explore unfamiliar cultures mainly through film and television, and thus the cultures
they sample are limited to the whims of entertainment companies and the fickleness
of industry trends.
10
Although ironic for the entertainment capital, this obstacle is
perhaps worse than in other cities because of its well-documented sprawl. The
Freewaves coalition seized on these realities, recognizing it could fill a niche with a
“democratically run, pluralistic festival celebrating the diversity of independent video
in Southern California,” and in late 1989 Freewaves debuted its first “Celebration of
Independent Video” with a packed menu of 35 exhibitions, 31 screenings of 185
videos at 30 sites, and eight hours of programming on 14 cable channels.
11
In
contrast to mainstream fare churned out with far more financial resources at its
disposal, the material comprising Freewaves’ first festival, produced independently
and inexpensively, portrayed greater variety and personalized nuance to the
characters traditionally represented on screen. The festival events and broadcasts
became a funnel through which art, as a culturally universal form of expression, and
video, a mainstream form of transmission, could be shared beyond the authors and
their communities to others dispersed throughout the city.
The early 1990s were a notable time for this medium of mass
communication in Los Angeles. Profound tension had been accumulating in the
segregated city, manifesting itself in the frustration- and desperation-charged riots of
April 1992 that broke out following the acquittal of four white police officers who had

9
Ollman 68.
10
Gerald Yoshitomi, LA in the Year 2000, report by the 2000 Partnership, 1991, cited in Anne Bray,
“The Community Is Watching, and Replying: Art in Public Places and Spaces,” Leonardo Vol. 35, No. 1
(2002): 19.
13
beaten African American motorist Rodney King. In 1991 the beating was captured
on home video, which was sold to TV news networks and aired relentlessly.
Compounding the frustration two weeks after the King beating, a 15-year old African
American girl, Latasha Harlins, was shot in the head and killed by a Korean shop
owner, Soon Ja Du, who mistakenly suspected the girl of stealing. The owner had
watched the girl put a bottle of orange juice in her bag over a surveillance camera,
but did not notice as she approached the counter with money in her hand.
12
Like the
King beating, another camera capturing Du shooting Harlins was broadcast
repeatedly on the news, inflaming already precarious relations between African
Americans and Koreans. In 1992, after the not-guilty announcement following the
trial in the King case (documented on cable), all the news channels broadcast live
the ensuing violence. Many believe this live coverage had the effect of intensifying
an already chaotic situation, that it “lacked the perspective that time and/or
familiarity provide.”
13
In response to the riots, Bray wanted to play with the format of Freewaves to
see how it might evolve into more than a straightforward festival. She had noticed
that many people, some of whom were not professional artists, were making videos
relating to the riots and that their perspectives were drastically different from what
was being portrayed in the mainstream media. Teachers were even encouraging
their students to make videos as a way of analyzing what was happening in the city.
Contrasting mainstream news and student perspectives revealed a pernicious social
divide, with striking – though not always overt – delineations of “us” versus “them.”

11
Anne Bray, “The Community Is Watching, and Replying: Art in Public Place and Spaces,” Leonardo
Vol. 35, No. 1 (2002): 19.
14
According to Bray, the critical difference revolved around subjectivity. Whereas we
have an expectation for objective news, in this case the press did not speak the
same vernacular language as the subjects of their reporting, and the media
censored many interviews representing different viewpoints due to the use of words
they consider indecent. In some instances reporters literally spoke different
languages than potential interviewees, eliminating those voices from the public
dialogue as well. Students were just as subjective, yet they were transparently blunt
and specific communicating about “us” and “them.” They may have been prone to
exaggeration according to their own preconceptions, but their perspectives
constituted eyewitness accounts, personal experiences and new ideas – potential
contributions to a richer understanding of the riots that devastated parts of the city.
Recognizing the urgent need for public dialogue, based on content that could
communicate more intimate knowledge of events than television, for its third
incarnation Freewaves produced two one-hour programs that aired on local cable
stations. It organized a series of screenings and discussions on the interrelated
themes of racism, power, assimilation and anger, which, in de-centralized fashion,
toured the city in venues as far-flung as Barnsdall Art Park in Hollywood, South Bay
Contemporary Museum of Art in Torrance, Artspace Gallery in Woodland Hills (San
Fernando Valley), Watts Towers Art Center in Watts (the site of earlier riots in 1965)
and Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro.
14
According to Freewaves:
This hot-off-the-presses material offered thoughtful, inside
perspectives that were desensationalized, eclectic, youthful, less
defensive, personal instead of institutional, and revealed their biases

12
L.A. Chung, “After the Riots, Lingering Anger,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 25, 1992.
13
Anne Bray, Leonardo, 20
14
This series, “Beyond the Color Line: Reflections on Race,” was commissioned by the Municipal Art
Gallery, using so-called “riot funds” earmarked by the City of Los Angeles following the unrest.
15
blatantly instead of subconsciously. They helped to render the
information comprehensible and mend the information gap that
incited so much of the telecast misinformation, omissions and
distortions.
15
Exposure to a diversity of viewpoints by professional artists and others inclined to
express themselves in the medium of video convinced Bray that “collective vision is
better than individual vision alone.” It is a means of building a more informed vision,
or an attempt to reach something closer to truth. In this vein, Marshall McLuhan
optimistically wrote in 1967: “Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old
categories – for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are
imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries
often result.”
16
Freewaves aims to do just this, from its individual programs to its
organizational relationships.
A few months after the riots in Los Angeles, the San Diego-based Installation
Gallery embarked on its first foray into the public sphere, an experiment that
became known as inSite. Founded in 1981 and focused on the practice of
installation art, the gallery wanted to energize the art scene, counteracting what was
perceived at the time as unfulfilled potential for an area so culturally rich. The
gallery decided to extend its activities outside its walls by forming partnerships with
other organizations in San Diego and introducing mostly local artists to a broader
public within a “bicultural frame of reference.” The effort was also an opportunity to
“establish a possible conceptual genealogy for installation art while validating the
potential for reflection sparked by art placed site-specifically” in both public and

15
Anne Bray, Leonardo, 20
16
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New
York: Bantam Books, 1967), 3
16
private places.
17
InSite opened in September 1992 with 49 installations presented
for two months in 22 sites throughout San Diego and Tijuana.
However, inSite became much more than an assertion of installation art’s
relevance; organizers recognized the significance of using the region’s defining
characteristic – the U.S.-Mexico border – as a “detonator for new models of art and
new cultural strategies.” While the idea of borders would resonate for people outside
of the region, locally it suggested the “possibility of collective action based on
existing cultural networks between San Diego and Tijuana.” The early 1990s
marked a politically pivotal moment for U.S.-Mexico relations, especially in the San
Diego-Tijuana border region, and the second version of inSite was being planned as
attention was converging on political, commercial and cultural “flows and exchange”
between the two countries. North America was moving towards the establishment of
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement – implementation began in January
1994), which has since created one of the largest free trade regions in the world.
The basic assumption behind the agreement was that removing most obstacles to
trade and investment among Canada, the United States and Mexico would cause all
three countries to experience economic growth, and by extension, its residents
would enjoy a higher standard of living.
18
Conflicting with the optimism of NAFTA
supporters was the passage of the California initiative, Proposition 187 in November
1994, which sought to limit social services like education and health care for illegal

17
inSite, “inSite92 History,” http://www.inSite05.org/internal.php?pid=2-49-47&doc=65.
18
United States Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service, “North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA),” USDA website, www.fas.usda.gov/itp/Policy/NAFTA/nafta.asp.
17
immigrants, of which Mexicans are the largest group.
19
While the initiative’s
implementation was immediately halted by a federal judge, and it was ultimately
deemed unconstitutional, the proposition incited fierce debate on the topics of
immigration and citizenship, and complicated the relationship between wealthy
California and its poor neighbor.
InSite94
20
reacted to the political paradox of a loosened border for trade and
a strengthened one for people. It updated its organizational structure and broadened
its scope through the formation of a binational collaboration that included institutions
in Baja California and Mexico City in addition to those in San Diego. InSite created a
forum that cut across myriad disciplines, organizations, and communities for the
purpose of investigating the local implications of NAFTA, like the growth of the
maquiladora system, and already contentious issues like illegal immigration.
Whereas the first inSite focused on mostly local artists, in 1994 it also included
national and international artists. As with the first, inSite94 commissioned work for
sites in both San Diego and Tijuana, but rather than simply providing a more visible
frame for ongoing regional arts activities, in 1994 it emphasized installations that
deliberately and directly referenced the area’s “historical, social, political and
geographical specificity.” Interestingly, as the curators began framing inSite in global
terms, artists’ projects tended to become more community-specific. Nevertheless,
inSite’s projects were placed in a range of alternative and institutional sites, and
encouraged deeper “critical participation in the discussion over the relationship
between contemporary art, public spaces, and zones of confrontation.”

19
American Civil Liberties Union, “CA’s Anti-Immigrant Proposition 187 is Voided, Ending State’s Five-
Year Battle with ACLU, Rights Groups,” ACLU website,
18
One particularly confrontational work, Century 21, was produced by the
Tijuana-born artist Marcos Ramirez (known as ERRE), who constructed a re-
creation of a shantytown shack on the immaculate, cool-toned plaza of Tijuana’s
Centro Cultural. The installation drew attention to the provisional, precarious
existence endured by many Mexicans living on the outskirts of Tijuana in a place
where people would least expect to see it. A project by the U.S.-born Terry Allen
engaged literally with the border. He positioned vans equipped with loudspeakers on
either side of the border fence so that anyone passing by could have a direct,
amplified exchange with someone on the other side.
As examples that plant themselves squarely inside variously visible “zones
of confrontation” and “mend the information gap” through transparent bias,
Freewaves and inSite privilege forms of cultural production in which artists
relinquish attempts to control experience and meaning in favor of open-ended
interpretations by audience/participants. The temptation to disregard artists who
work in such unpredictable, ambiguous circumstances as naïve and their efforts as
futile may be alleviated by a review of a certain grouping of art practices from the
past thirty years.
Art Historical Lineage
The historical trajectory of art can be sliced and diced any number of ways,
and it varies wildly depending on geography, philosophy and innumerable other
factors. Freewaves and inSite are contextualized art historically as they present

http://www.aclu.org/immigrants/gen/11652prs19990729.html.
20
Each version of inSite is titled according to the year it takes place
19
work that moves beyond solely formal aesthetic concerns, and the conventional
spaces of art presentation and methodologies. They highlight artists’ work that
gravitates toward a greater political sensitivity, process-oriented social engagement,
and is often presented in ephemeral, intangible (thus less easily commodifiable)
genres.
One way of approaching this type of work is through the pathway of “public
art.” Yet this classification is problematic because of different understandings of
“public” and what happens when “public” and “art” are merged. As Suzanne Lacy
inquires in her critically insightful collection of essays, Mapping the Terrain: New
Genre Public Art (1995):
Is “public” a qualifying description of place, ownership, or access? Is
it a subject, or a characteristic of the particular audience? Does it
explain the intentions of the artist or the interests of the audience?
The inclusion of the public connects theories of art to the broader
population: what exists in the space between the words public and art
is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a
relationship that may itself become the artwork.
21
These questions might be dismissed as irrelevant by some, as there exists in the
Modernist tradition an “underlying aversion to art that claims to ‘do’ something, that
does not subordinate function to craft. . .”
22
According to the art historian Grant
Kester, however, a common thread runs through Modernism and the kinds of
socially engaged projects that concern Lacy (more on this below).
For a more nuanced understanding of public art in the contemporary sense,
Lacy identifies two distinct groupings of public art encompassing the past three
decades in the United States: first, the art that resulted from the Art in Public Places

21
Lacy 20.
22
Ibid 20.
20
Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (established in 1967) and the
subsequent state and city percent-for-art programs, and second, what she calls
“new genre public art.” According to Lacy, Art in Public Places provides a relatively
quantifiable category that can be “tracked through commissions, distribution of
percent-for-art moneys, articles, conferences, and panel discussions.”
23
This
tradition stems from the realization that outdoor, mostly urban spaces would serve
well for the exhibition of art outside the galleries, museums and private collections.
Art’s capacity to enhance public spaces like plazas and parks was seen as a means
to “revitalize” inner cities – as a way of “reclaiming and humanizing the urban
environment.”
24
While well-intentioned in purpose, and seemingly promising
democratic participation and promoting public interests, the results often replicated
the experience of viewing art in the traditional art spaces. The work itself – usually
sculpture – generally revolved around the artists’ individual aesthetic concerns and
methodologies, rather than making an attempt to engage with the site’s context or
public values.
Lacy articulates an alternative framing of public art from the same thirty-year
period of NEA-spawned activity whose work – because of its subject matter, genre,
methodology and siting – fell outside what had become acceptable art for the public
realm. “New genre public art” accommodates the grouping of artists whose work has
been more narrowly defined as “political,” performance, or media art.” These labels
diminish the importance of the work, and thus according to Lacy, the “broader

23
Ibid 21.
24
Ibid 22.
21
implications for both art and society were unexplored by art criticism.”
25
This
alternative history of public art could be traced through the emergence of “vanguard
groups, such as feminist, ethnic, Marxist, and media artists and other activists. . .”
with common interests in “leftist politics, social activism, redefined audiences,
relevance for communities (particularly marginalized ones), and collaborative
methodology.”
26
The fundamental difference between “new genre public art” and the
Art in Public Places model is the former’s tendency for activist-oriented, grassroots
art in the public interest as opposed to interests revolving more narrowly around
artistic form.
27
Freewaves and inSite continue the practice of art in the public interest or
“new genre public art” by engaging marginalized (as well as mainstream) publics,
providing forums in which to discuss significant political issues and distributing new
ideas throughout the public spheres they influence. In other words, these projects
validate the relevance of socially engaged art practice. They indicate a persistent
urge not to simply reflect their various cultural contexts under the pretense of
objectivity, but to set culture in action, to apply the creative impulse and artistic
sensitivity to forms and practices that reach beyond the life of the artist, beyond
stylistic and technical innovations and beyond the fashions of the marketplace.
These types of exhibitions indicate a recognition, among curators and artists
alike, that artists are aware and compelled to engage with issues that extend
beyond the private realm of their studios. However, instead of viewing politically and

25
Lacy 25.
26
Lacy catalogues an extensive summary of this type of work in her book under the section titled,
“Directional Signs: A Compendium of Artists’ Works,” 189
27
While I distinguish between the philosophies and practices of the NEA’s program and “new genre”
public art, I should point out that the NEA has provided some financial support to Freewaves.
22
socially engaged exhibitions as a recent development, the Spanish artist Antoni
Muntadas suggests that “historically there is a guiding political thread, a type of
works based on commitment. These works have always existed, but at certain times
they attain visibility through certain exhibitions.”
28
At the current moment great
numbers of artists are not merely concerned with pushing the so-called envelope in
terms of technical or conceptual artistic innovation. They are tapping into larger
sociopolitical currents, and adding their voices to the critical discussion by
incorporating their observations and insight into their work, which they are able to
disseminate in ever more inventive, far-reaching ways. Just like the line between the
public and private realms of life, for many artists the division between their identities
as artists and as citizens is becoming increasingly blurred (The artist Thomas
Hirschhorn has insisted: “I don’t make political art, I make art politically.”).
29
The
same idea applies to curators, whose exhibitions, festivals and other presentations
of art increasingly overlap with larger social movements. Yet while the label “socially
engaged art practice” moves us closer to understanding what these works have in
common, a strictly sociopolitical framework may distract from its aesthetic
significance.
Dialogue as Art
Moving deeper into the implications of socially engaged work, we may
interpret the projects of Freewaves and inSite as “dialogical” artistic practices.
Whereas Lacy articulates a “new genre” of public art, Grant Kester frames this type

28
Medina, Pedro, “Conversation with Antoni Muntadas,” Arte Contexto, Winter 2006, 25.
29
Jerry Saltz, “Killing Fields,” The Village Voice, January 27, 2006.
23
of work as united by “a series of provocative assumptions about the relationship
between art and the broader social and political world and about the kinds of
knowledge that aesthetic experience is capable of producing.”
30
In his book,
Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, Kester
contextualizes this work within avant-garde art practice, focusing on works that
define “dialogue itself as fundamentally aesthetic.”
31
He draws a distinction between
dialogue-based processes and art objects produced through collaboration:
Parting from the traditions of object making, these artists have
adopted a performative, process-based approach. They are “context
providers” rather than “content providers” . . . whose work involves
the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and
conversations, well beyond the institutional confines of the gallery or
museum.
32
The significance of this approach is its redefinition of the aesthetic experience as
“durational rather than immediate.”
33
Modern art theory defines aesthetic as a negation – by distinguishing itself
from dominant cultural forms. From the early twentieth century forward, artists and
critics promoted the idea that rather than communicating with viewers, “the avant-
garde work of art should radically challenge their faith in the very possibility of
rational discourse.” They assumed that our shared systems of obtaining knowledge
– linguistic, visual – are exceedingly abstract and objectifying, and that art should
“shock us out of this perceptual complacency, to force us to see the world anew.”
Art produced with this orientation aimed to resist interpretation, and was “staged in

30
Kester 9. The author aligns his definition with Lacy’s, as well as others: U.K.-based artist/organizers
Ian Hunter and Celia Larner’s “littoral art,” French critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetic,” Homi
K. Bhabha’s “conversational art,” and Tom Finkelpearl’s “dialogue-based public art.”
31
Ibid 13.
32
Ibid 1.
33
Ibid 12.
24
opposition to a cultural form that relies on reductive or clichéd imagery to manipulate
the viewer,” such as advertising, political propaganda and kitsch. The accessibility of
a cultural form like advertising was associated with the damaging effects of
commodification; therefore, a work of art that attempted to be accessible, blatantly
inviting a viewer’s interaction, would become vulnerable to consumerist forces.
Instead, the effect of shock induced by art purified of an accessible language would
stimulate the capacity to perceive hidden power structures.
34
Freewaves and inSite build on the Modernist tradition of “challenging fixed
identities and perceptions of difference,” but they also conceive of the relationship
between the viewer and the work quite differently. Rather than the work providing
“an instantaneous, prediscursive flash of insight,” it is “a movement outside self (and
self-interest) through dialogue extended over time.”
35
However, a commitment to
dialogue by definition requires a “common system of meaning” through which
participants can speak, listen and respond – in direct opposition to the Modernist
aversion to a shared discourse.
InSite00-01 illustrates well the dialogical aesthetic articulated by Kester. It
marked the fourth installment and most radical departure in format for inSite. As an
artistic endeavor, the guest curators wanted to rethink the project’s conceptual
foundation in order to “facilitate and accommodate diverse modes of artistic
practice” in the San Diego/Tijuana region.
36
They decided to break with the traditions
of presenting site-specific artworks as finished pieces or mounting large-scale
displays of temporary works, and to move away from any traditional notion of

34
Ibid 84.
35
Ibid 85.
25
exhibition. Instead, the curators wanted to focus on facilitating a “cultural practice”
for the region. To that end, they thought about how artistic practice might engage
more fully various segments of the community on either side of the border. One
strategy was to move beyond the traditional parameters of the visual arts, weaving a
cross-disciplinary theme into the process with participants in music, film, literature,
and others. More importantly, curators wanted to focus resources less on an end
product for display within the context of an arts festival or large outdoor exhibition,
and instead emphasize the “development of processes that would engage publics
from the inception of project development,” initiated by invited artists.
37
The concept
of “city as laboratory” became the “common system of meaning” whereby “the public
shifts from audience to co-investigator. Institutions, no longer display cases, become
co-laboratories. Rather than merely entering urban space, the works of artists
reconfigure it.”
38
One of the projects commissioned for inSite00-01 provides a particularly
vivid example. The Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko was invited as an artist-in-
resident, and his resulting Tijuana Projection, which took place over two nights in
February 2001, managed to both engage a specific public and also present that
group in a collaborative manner (see Fig. 4). However, the events were only the
theatrical conclusion of a lengthy process involving two years of preparation.
Wodiczko worked with two organizations oriented towards helping women – Factor
X and Yeuani – to gain access to the participants and earn their trust.

36
Krichman, Michael and Carmen Cuenca, Directors’ Statement for Fugitive Sites, inSite 2000-01
(New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002), 14.
37
Ibid 15.
38
Ibid 22.
26
Tijuana Projection intended to provide both a literal and figurative stage on
which to expose the problem of exploitation in the maquiladoras of Mexico’s border
region. Wodiczko designed a headset device to be worn by six women who then
shared their experiences as
maquiladora workers and as
individuals at the two-night
event. Each woman
projected her face onto the
sixty-foot diameter spherical
façade of the Omnimax
Theater at the Centro
Cultural Tijuana, amplifying her
voice via the specially
designed transmission equipment (see Fig. 5). The testimonies focused on a range
of issues, including exploitation in the work place, police violence, sexual abuse,
family disintegration, alcoholism and domestic violence. These problems were
shared live by the participants – women from various generations – in a public plaza
for an audience of more than 1,500. The women expressed intimately personal
issues rarely addressed either in their culture (private and social) or in the public
media. In the words of Wodiczko, this “performative speech-act [made] the passage
from testimony to transformative public action, [becoming] an important bridge to
developing a capacity to intervene in real life.” Wodiczko hoped the event would
contribute to bringing the city of Tijuana “closer to fully acknowledging the people
who are her inhabitants and what their lives are like.”
Figure 4: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection (view
of Centro Cultural façade), from inSite00-01.
27
The argument that dialogue can be
a form of art requires a broader
understanding of this specialized kind of
communication and what qualifies it as
aesthetic. Kester points out that it is not
enough to simply say that “any collaborative
or conversational encounter constitutes a
work of art.” What is important is the “extent
to which the artist is able to catalyze
emancipatory insights through dialogue.”
39
Rather than focusing on a task that defies
measurement by any conventional means,
it may make more sense to examine what communicative forms artists are
recognizing as dialogue and in what contexts they are positioning those forms.
Unlike inSite’s artist-in-residency approach, Freewaves exemplifies
dialogical aesthetics in different ways. It is the medium of moving-image, time-based
art that is critical as a tool of dialogue, coupled with the social environment of a
festival that provides context. Kester’s definition emphasizes the interactive aspect
of dialogical projects, in which the viewer’s response has an immediate reciprocal
effect on the work. He contrasts this with the “banking” style of art (an idea he
borrows from the educational theorist Paulo Freire), “in which the artist deposits an
expressive content into a physical object, to be withdrawn later by the viewer.”
40

39
Kester 69.
40
Kester 10.
Figure 5: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana
Projection (view of participant wearing
transmission headset), from inSite00-01.
28
While the individual new media pieces that make up each Freewaves festival
provide content as one expects from an apparently finished art “object,” each
festival event itself is intended as a dialogical experience by the director, Anne Bray.
The individual artists need not be present to orchestrate an exchange with viewers
for the dialogue to be reciprocal, as the ubiquity and familiarity of communications
technology facilitates a form of dialogue rather than simply offering static content to
be passively withdrawn. According to Bray, “Even though this work is experimental,
it’s also familiar to anyone who watches TV and surfs the web. As consumer
technology becomes more sophisticated, media arts have become increasingly
accessible to the public.”
41
The underlying assumption is that visually based media
have become our contemporary language, our common system of meaning.
42
As celebrations of experimental, independently produced new media,
Freewaves screenings and other events envelop audiences in an environment of
sensory stimulation. Unlike commercial media’s goal of entertaining and
encouraging consumerist behavior, Freewaves’ events aim to spark awareness of
our preconceptions, with the media work itself juxtaposed in its own form of
dialogue. One popular program from the 2000 festival, Air Raids, was a video bus
tour. Subverting the idea of commercial bus tours of L.A. landmarks, Freewaves’
mobile screening rooms went off the beaten track, visiting the work sites of domestic
workers in well-to-do neighborhoods, places in Echo Park with buried histories and
sites significant to Los Angeles’s queer history. Stops along the Queer Star Maps
tour, led by Outfest programmer Desiree Buford, included hot nightclubs,

41
Anne Bray, “Interview: Introduction to Media Arts,” Freewaves’ “How Can You Resist?” website
http://www.freewaves.org/festival_2004/interview.htm
29
headquarters of gay and lesbian cooperatives and the Will Rogers park in Beverly
Hills where George Michael was notoriously arrested for illegal activities.
43
Six
shorts screened throughout the expedition, celebrating queer icons like Judy
Garland and Jodie Foster.
To circle around the dialogical feedback loop, Freewaves festivals ultimately
strive to inspire its audience members to pick up a camera and continue filling in the
omissions and correcting the distortions of mainstream media, which accounts for
the emphasis on new media for the festival. Bray’s approach to teaching media
literacy captures the essence of Freewaves’ dialogical spirit: first, students learn
how to deconstruct images in the media (often becoming angry and disillusioned in
the process); then she introduces them to alternative outlets and forms of media;
finally, she encourages the students to make their own work, adding to the pool of
alternative voices and narratives.
44
Freewaves’ and inSite’s various endeavors explore the question of who and
what constitutes the public sphere within a cultural practice based on dialogue.
These projects are significant for advancing our concept of “aesthetic” by extending
artistic practices into various avenues of the public sphere. However, they also offer
compelling lessons for democracy with their emphasis on optimistic, inclusive
models of social exchange in contrast to dominant, inherently unjust models and
outright violence (i.e. market systems, war) that characterize too much of the
contemporary world.

42
See Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001) for an
inquiry into digital aesthetics.
43
Jim Moran, “Air Raids: L.A. Freewaves’ Celebration of Experimental Media Arts,” The Independent,
March 2001.
44
Anne Bray, interview by author, Los Angeles, California, 24 October 2005.
30
Chapter 2: Cycles and Dimensions of the Public Sphere
Concept of the Public Sphere
To some, the public sphere may intuitively mean physical or open spaces,
such as government buildings or parks and plazas. But to others the meaning
moves beyond simply spatial concerns, contributing to a richer understanding of this
critical “space” of social life. The German critical theorist Jürgen Habermas’s
concept of the public sphere offers a useful tool to diagnose the current political
climate and to understand why the contemporary activities of publicly oriented art
within it are important. While Habermas’s concept represents an ideal based on a
specific historical moment – for which it has endured much criticism – it sketches an
alternative, perhaps more desirable, vision of social and political interaction to which
we might aspire.
45
The concept of the public sphere refers to a “space” outside the primary
domains of social life: the family, the business world and the state. Essentially it is “a
realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be
formed” through rational debate.
46
The public sphere emerges in part when private
individuals shed their professional “hat” and their identity as citizens subject to the
legal mechanisms of a state bureaucracy. They “behave as a public body when they
confer in an unrestricted fashion – that is, with the guarantee of freedom of

45
Many have criticized Habermas’s normative theory of the public sphere as inherently flawed because
it tries to universalize a mode of discourse that emerged from exclusive (male, white, bourgeois)
spaces such as the 18
th
century coffee house. (Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and
the Fight for Public Space. (New York: Guilford Press, 2003) 34. See also The Phantom Public Sphere,
edited by Bruce Robbins, 1993)
46
Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” in Critical Theory and Society: A
Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas M. Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 136-142.
31
assembly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions –
about matters of general interest.”
47
Newspapers, magazines, radio and television
are the media of the public sphere, which traditionally have provided information
used by citizens in formulating opinions. Individuals operating within a “public body”
undertake critical positions toward the state and act as a check to its power.
Habermas’s differentiation between the operational logics of the state and business
spheres and those of the family and public spheres provides some clarification on
this public mindset and social mode of engagement.
Habermas argued that the state and business spheres operate according to
an instrumental rationality, whereas the family and public spheres were activated
through a communicative rationality. The former privileges the principle of efficiency
as a means of reaching a pre-determined end, while the latter concerns the
processes of achieving mutual understanding and defining shared values.
48
Habermas recognized a need for the efficiency of instrumental rationality (public
services such as trash collection, traffic lights or vote tallying). However, he also
acknowledged that problems emerge when instrumental rationality “colonizes” the
public sphere, subordinating democratic values and processes to the imperatives of
efficient profit-making. As the case studies point out, a communicative process – or
environment – is often the goal because of its discursive quality, providing mental
space for reflection and criticism about current events or new ideas, raising
interrelated, unexpected questions and inspiring imaginative alternatives to the
status quo.

47
Ibid 136.
32
Beyond abstractions, the prospect of “conferring in an unrestricted fashion”
in any sort of public realm may lead one to wonder where such a control-free form of
social interaction might take place and how it would be organized as a means of
opinion formation. Habermas pointed to the power of mass media as a method of
informing and influencing public discourse about politics, society, culture and the
major news items of the day. In a geographically dispersed population, media
provide the opportunity for a kind of dialogue where it cannot occur face-to-face.
Unlike this mediated form of communication, the political theorist Susan Bickford
suggests we expand our understanding of the public sphere to include the built
environment as a significant “space of attention orientation, a space that shapes
citizens’ sense of what people, perspectives, and problems are present in the
democratic public.”
49
As stated earlier, the 1990s were characterized by dramatic shifts in the
public sphere, which has had both visible and less discernible manifestations
affecting how we experience our corners of the world and how we imagine our lives.
The question of why we have de-prioritized the physical dimension of the public
sphere is complicated to answer and cannot easily be reduced to simple cause and
effect. Yet part of the responsibility for the diminishing public sphere can be
attributed to societal systems outside of any one individual’s decision-making
capacity and the personal psychologies informing them. While it is beyond the
scope of this paper to fully examine the challenges to the public sphere and
democracy, I will discuss two damaging methods by which the public sphere is

48
Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” Critical Theory: The Essential Readings.
ed. David Ingram and Julia Simon-Ingram (St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1992), 117-150.
33
diminished or compromised: the privatization of public space and consolidation of
mass media under fewer and fewer corporate interests. Taken together, these
systemic trends – which generally privilege powerful private interests over the public
good – threaten the vibrancy of American democracy and attempts to establish
democratic relations outside of the U.S. However, as these trends advanced
throughout the 1990s, the Internet emerged as a dominant venue in our lives,
offering new possibilities for communication and interaction. Understanding the
public sphere as a state of mind, a mode of exchange as well as the physical
environment, Freewaves’ and inSite’s eagerness to critically engage in this sphere
of life marks them as important counterpoints to these trends.
Privatization of Public Space
The detrimental effects of privatizing public space may not be obvious at first
glance, however this trend has very real implications for democratic citizenship and
participation. One concrete example is the practice of free speech, which “protects
the circulation of dissenting ideas that can challenge orthodoxy, . . . . makes it
possible for citizens to reach informed decisions about public policy. . . [and] is
essential if the minority is to have the opportunity to convince members of the
majority of its dissenting views and build a coalition in favor of change.”
50
Unlike
government-owned spaces, privately owned properties are not obliged under the
law to protect free speech or allow political activity. And as we live more of our lives

49
Susan Bickford, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political
Theory, Vol. 28, No. 3 (June 2000): 356.
50
Margaret Kohn, Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 3.
34
in private spaces, opportunities for these activities dwindle – a cause for concern for
those who value free speech.
This shift to an increasingly private-domain existence is due partly to
changing patterns of residential living, with more people living in gated communities
or semi-private communities governed by residential community associations.
51
There also has been a pattern of “de facto privatization” as shopping malls began
replacing centralized downtown business districts. According to the architectural
historian Richard Longstreth, postwar “community shopping centers” built in
outlying, but fast-growing suburban areas away from the urban core competed with
downtown shopping districts, as opposed to earlier mall precursors that intended to
complement them.
52
Additionally, in response to competition from suburban malls,
traditional downtown areas are increasingly under the jurisdiction of downtown
business improvement districts (BIDs). These non-elected, quasi-governmental
agencies represent the interests of private property owners, not the public at large.
53
The negative, privatizing effect of malls has been compounded by corporate
homogenization in the retail environment. This trend has social and political
implications, as small and locally-owned businesses often play an important role in
supporting civic life – settings that can be called “third places.” Parallel with the
politically oriented public sphere that mediates between society and state, third

51
Kohn 116. According to the 2001 American Housing Survey, almost ten percent of Americans live in
communities surrounded by walls or fences, with entrances regulated by entry codes or security
guards. The Community Associations Institute estimates that as of 2006, 57 million Americans live in
286,000 neighborhoods governed by Residential Community Associations (“Industry Data,”
http://www.caionline.org/about/facts.cfm) - about 19% of the total U.S. population.
52
Richard Longstreth, “The Diffusion of the Community Center Concept during the Interwar Decades,”
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Vol. 56, No. 3 (Sept. 1997): 268.
53
Kohn describes two major problems with the authority of BIDs: “the governance structure of most
BIDs violates norms of democratic accountability by giving a disproportionate voice to property owners
35
places exist beyond the “first place” of home and the “second place” of work or
school.
54
These are spaces of social contact, entertainment and general enjoyment,
such as bookstores, cafes and barbershops. In contrast to the cultural position of
pubs in England, sidewalk cafés in Paris and beer gardens in Germany, third places
in U.S. cities are often corporate outposts like Starbucks, Barnes & Noble and
Borders. A comparison of two bookstores on the popular Third Street Promenade in
Santa Monica, California illustrates the fundamental difference between a locally
owned business and one that is corporately owned. The now-closed Midnight
Special bookstore used to host cultural and political events, promote the work of
local and national writers, and post political materials in their front windows, until it
was priced out of its valuable real estate. By contrast, the nearby Borders attempts
to create the ambiance of a third place with its own series of in-house programming,
but it is a deliberately de-politicized environment.
While civic-minded businesses like bookstores can clearly play a role in
nurturing civil society – a prerequisite for democracy – their vulnerability to market
forces underscores the need for permanent, physical public spaces. Highlighting the
importance of public space for participatory democracy, the geographer Don
Mitchell in The Right to the City says:
If the right to the city is a cry and a demand then it is only a cry that is
heard and a demand that has force to the degree that there is a
space from and within which this cry is visible, in public space, on
street corners or in parks. In the streets during riots and
demonstrations political organizations can represent themselves to a

over other community interests” and they “exacerbate existing inequalities in the provision of
government services in order to create marketable “Brand Zones” within a city (Kohn 88).
54
Tridib Banerjee, “The Future of Public Space: Beyond Invented Streets and Reinvented Places,”
Journal of the American Planning Association 67 (Winter 2001): 9.
36
larger population and through this representation give their cries and
demands some force.
55
David Harvey, in an inSite “Conversation” illustrates this point by asking how we
would have known about the anti-globalization movement until the World Trade
Organization demonstrations in Seattle in 1999, and that it would continue in Genoa,
Quebec City and elsewhere
56
. He argues that “by claiming space in public, by
creating public space, social groups themselves become public. . . until you find
those public spaces no one is really going to recognize who you are and what you
are doing.”
57
For example, the U.S. was seemingly caught off-guard in spring 2006
when hundreds of thousands protested immigration reform in the streets of several
major cities. These events helped refine our understanding of the issue by
witnessing the vast numbers of immigrants (legal or not) living in our cities, and
seeing their individual faces: men and women, adults and children, representing a
diversity of nationalities, ethnicities and social groups.
The street, and physical spaces in general are not the only places to
mobilize politically, as the activities of the political action committee MoveOn and
newer political blogs like Daily KOS attest. Yet while these groups have grown in
popularity, even they recognize the limitations of the virtual environment; in a
sophisticated effort to combine the wonders of technology and the human need for
social gathering, MoveOn has been organizing “Phone Parties” and Daily KOS

55
Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford
Press, 2003).
56
In addition to its core artist-in-residency program, known as “Interventions,” inSite is fleshed out by a
network of programs. “Conversations” is an ongoing series of dialogues, workshops, lectures and
publications intended to test inSite’s potential as a forum for intellectual exchange among an
interdisciplinary group of writers, researchers, artists, curators and audience members.
57
David Harvey, “Liminal Zones/Coursing Flows 2” (presentation at the inSite Conversation, The Salk
Institute, La Jolla, November 6, 2003).
37
advertises similar parties connecting groups of people through conference calls.
58
Having a place to gather may be about more than expressing values and political
goals to the powers-that-be. Physical places provide opportunities to experience
solidarity among those with similar values and goals, to reaffirm one’s own values
and goals, and possibly to strategize future mobilizations. They are also places to
encounter new or contradicting ideas and arguments, and to confront them directly.
Privatization also functions to limit the kinds of people with whom we come
into contact and therefore recognize as citizens. Refining the meaning of
privatization, the political theorist Susan Bickford contends that contemporary
practices of building cities “materialize particular versions of ‘home’ and of ‘the
public’; they work not simply to privatize formerly public spaces, but to purify both
public and private space – especially to purify them of fear, discomfort, or
uncertainty.”
59
The condition of purity, which she rightly notes is impossible to
achieve, is a dubious pursuit and can only produce expectations that are out of
touch with reality – for those who can afford to segregate themselves. Building on
this qualitative dimension of physical spaces, the privatization of public space has
another elusive effect, argues the political scientist Margaret Kohn: our ability to
define ourselves and identify with others is compromised when the opportunities to
encounter differences diminish.
60
In her book on the privatization of public space, Kohn primarily analyzes the
extent to which privatization has political consequences, particularly in light of

58
MoveOn’s gatherings take place at private homes where guests make get-out-the-vote calls with
their cell phones. www.moveon.org. Daily KOS promotes parties that help candidates fundraise, recruit
volunteers and reach voters. www.dailykos.com, www.party2win.com.
59
Susan Bickford. “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship,” Political
Theory, Vol. 28, No. 3 (June., 2000): 356.
38
specific legal precedents. She provides a set of criteria as an attempt to arrive at a
more meaningful definition of public space. This nuanced definition allows a fuller
appreciation of what is at stake when public spaces are privatized. Kohn proposes
treating public space as a “cluster concept,” meaning it has “multiple and sometimes
contradictory definitions,” and that a subset of criteria describing a place – but not
necessarily all of them – would qualify it as a public space.
61
Her definition has three
core components: ownership, accessibility, and intersubjectivity. Ownership is the
most straightforward component (at least in the legal sense) with government
owning a place that is “accessible to everyone without restriction, and/or fosters
communication and interaction.” Kohn cites the “widely shared intuition” that public
spaces “facilitate unplanned contacts” between strangers and acquaintances alike.
She acknowledges that the quality of accessibility is more difficult to gauge, as a
space like a shopping mall or café can appear inclusive while actually supporting
subtle forms of exclusion.
62
Plazas and playing fields are intersubjective places
because they “encourage interaction between people,” as opposed to places that
“foster a kind of collective isolation by focusing everyone on a central object of
attention,” like stadiums and theaters. In the latter, individuals are relatively passive
audience members, whereas in the former, they are “co-creators of a shared world.”
Public Space, Identity and Empathy
Kohn’s definition of public space hinges on the idea of a shared world in
which visibility and physical proximity are critical for engendering tolerance,

60
Kohn 201.
61
Kohn 11.
39
understanding and empathy. While government buildings may be more “public” in
the sense of legal ownership, accessibility and intersubjectivity together are
arguably more relevant in fostering a sense of public awareness and public good,
and in forming public opinion. Government buildings actually may be perceived as
quite inaccessible to some, who regard government in general with a sense of
skepticism. This sentiment is particularly acute for residents of the Southern
California region in which Freewaves and inSite are based, many of whom are
immigrants who have entered the U.S. illegally.
Illustrating how complicated it is to pin down a definition of “public space,”
and its role in materializing the public sphere, many of inSite’s artists projects and
Freewaves’ festivals actually use private spaces such as a clothes shop or a
karaoke bar, or a hybrid of the two. Intuitively, commercial private establishments
might seem like unlikely sites to stir up the public sphere. However, as social “third
places,” they can offer viable environments in which to encourage civic awareness
and cultural participation. Inverting the more familiar practice of privatizing public
spaces, Freewaves and inSite “publicize” private space as a counter-strategy, if only
temporarily.
63
More significant than the physical spaces Freewaves and inSite inhabit are
their organizing frameworks, which create public “space” in terms of accessibility
and intersubjectivity. These qualities directly confront the daunting question of who
constitutes “the public” by inventing diverse approaches to reach and engage them
– a process made easier through partnerships with nonprofit organizations and

62
Kohn 13.
63
Banerjee, 12.
40
civic-minded businesses who are familiar with their local audience/patrons. In place
of an ostensibly representative body such as government, Freewaves and inSite
provide alternative, though episodic, creative frameworks of exchange to which
residents of Southern/Baja California (and beyond) can be recognized as
contributing members of society, and in some projects, can participate in
democratically operated processes.
Along these lines, one of the underlying themes of Freewaves’ How Can You
Resist? concerned the interplay of individual versus community and national
identities in a rapidly globalizing world. Organized by Freewaves staff and presented
in collaboration with the nonprofit, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), the
program “Globalize This!” confronted this issue from the standpoint of changing
labor relationships and practices in the era of globalization, moving beyond the often
divisive clichés of multiculturalism and identity politics of the early 1990s.
64
Challenging the progression of globalization, the program advocated that we
“globalize more than sneakers, satellite dishes, Coca-Cola and ammunition; let’s
globalize labor standards, free speech, clean water and health care.”
65
The event
took place at SAJE’s Figueroa Corridor facility downtown, in the midst of the local
residents they serve.
66
As with other How Can You Resist? programs, this one was
deliberately located downtown, a highly contested terrain that has become a heated
topic of debate in recent years as a surge of high-profile developments has caused
many to question whose presence is considered desirable – and whose is not.

64
I served as an intern for Freewaves, and contributed to organizing this event in a creative capacity.
65
Alaine Azcona, “Globalize This!” in How Can You Resist? (published by Freewaves, Los Angeles,
2004).
41
The program was intended to illustrate how the forces of globalization have
played out on a local level, but also to trace how struggles in Los Angeles are
connected to those in other fast-developing areas. “Globalize This!” screened
excerpts from thirteen videos including Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride,
documenting immigrant and non-immigrant
low wage workers traveling on buses to
Washington D.C. to demand better working
conditions; Everyone Their Grain of Sand,
following a community in Tijuana as they
organize to protect their land against
industrial gentrification; Labor Women,
profiling the rise of three Asian American women activists in the new generation of
the labor movement (see Fig. 6); and Skrap: Skidrow Arts Project, documenting the
lives of homeless people in downtown Los Angeles through the Skidrow Musicians
Network, which works to integrate homeless artists into the community (see Fig. 7).
The effort to create a welcoming and accessible environment extended from
the event location and its mission-driven role in the community, to the diversity of
makers and subjects of the films – all part of Freewaves’ far-reaching network.

66
Housed in a former sweatshop, SAJE functions as a social and economic justice watch-dog for
downtown Los Angeles; they are involved in community organizing, coalition-building and grassroots
Figure 6: Renee Tajima-Peña, Labor
Women, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival,
“How Can You Resist?” (2004).
Figure 7: Cameron Lowe & Lisa
Strassman, Skrap: Skidrow Arts
Project, from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival,
“How Can You Resist?” (2004).
42
(From a practical standpoint even food and entertainment, from freestyling MCs and
breakdancers to DJ music and dancing, were not random party favors, but
deliberate offerings catering to many of the groups reflected in the films.) Perhaps
the most important message of the program was to recognize a common humanity
amid the common struggles endured daily by low-wage workers – immigrant and
otherwise – and to demonstrate the strategic advantages of collaborating towards
better alternatives.
One of inSite’s
“Interventions,” The Clothes
Shop/La Tienda de Ropa by
the Tijuana-based media
collective Bulbo, revolved
around the production and
consumption of clothing. The project used as its premise the development of a line
of clothing to explore the social implications of traditions of dress in the Tijuana-San
Diego region. The project manifested in a two month fashion workshop with
participants from various socioeconomic backgrounds, an exhibition in three
successive locations and a web-based documentary (viewable on
www.latiendaderopa.org). La Tienda launched as a series of nine workshops and
was conceptualized as an “experimental laboratory” in which participants
researched modes of working, spaces for production, marketing and consumption of
clothing (see Fig. 8). Beyond the concrete tasks of collaboratively designing and
producing a line of clothing, the workshop sessions provided an occasion for critical

policy negotiating.
Figure 8: Bulbo, The Clothes Shop/La Tienda Ropa
(Workshop 2), from inSite05.
43
discussion – on practical matters of production, and political inquiries such as the
ways in which clothing defines both personal and community identity and the
fashion industry’s role in generating stereotyped identities.
Like all inSite projects, the location of La Tienda relates to some aspect of
the border reality. For the first phase of the project, workshops were held at Bulbo’s
office in Tijuana with seven of that city’s residents (six Mexican and one U.S. born).
Participants included a relatively small but diverse group of four women and three
men ranging in age from 18 to 46: a graphic
designer, a lawyer, an interior designer, a
seamstress, a student, a business owner and
a high school teacher/musician. Following the
workshop phase, La Tienda had three
separate presentations in three very different
venues. The first was held in a boutique
called Pomegranate in La Jolla, San Diego,
where the work was exhibited for several
weeks alongside “very exclusive and
offensively high priced clothing made by
famous designers of exotic origin,” in the
words of Bulbo (see Fig. 9).
67
La Tienda clothing was not for sale at Pomegranate
but was meant to give wealthy shoppers “a surprise from the other side of the
border.” Curious shoppers could learn about the project from a video installed inside

67
Bulbo, “Pomegranate. Exclusive Boutique, La Jolla, Ca.,”
http://www.latiendaderopa.org/pdfs/ingles/pomergranate.pdf.
Figure 9: Bulbo, The Clothes Shop/
La Tienda Ropa (Presentation 1), from
inSite05.
44
the boutique that documented La Tienda’s process and humanized its participants –
hopefully breaking down stereotypes about who lives 30 miles south or creating a
portrait where none previously existed.
The second presentation took place over four days at Fundadores, the
largest swap meet and a popular gathering place in Tijuana (see Fig. 10). In
contrast to Pomegranate, the swap meet is a place where haggling for the lowest
price is part of the ritual. In this venue the work of La Tienda designer/producers
was for sale and visitors could either purchase something new or bring their own
clothing and silk-screen from
La Tienda designs. The swap
meet is populated mostly by
locals from the surrounding
neighborhoods, and on the
days La Tienda was there it
attracted the enthusiasm of kids
and teenagers who kept bringing
more of their clothes to silk-screen. Its participants were there part of the time, to
answer questions and help with the silk-screening and alterations.
The third and final presentation also took place in Tijuana, but at Mundo
Divertido, a shopping center serving mostly the middle and upper classes. La
Tienda occupied a cart near one of the entrances for a three-week period. Like the
swap meet, shoppers here had the opportunity to silk-screen their own or newly
purchased clothing, as well as learn about the project. La Tienda became especially
popular with teenagers, who screened designs onto their notebooks, backpacks,
Figure 10: Bulbo, The Clothes Shop/La Tienda
Ropa (Presentation 2), from inSite05.
45
shoes and other unexpected places. Younger kids were also fascinated, as the
screening equipment, the immediacy of designing one’s own clothing and all the
activity surrounding the cart created a “magical” atmosphere in the mall.
68
The public presentations functioned much differently than the workshops,
with the latter constituting a methodical effort to instigate meaningful dialogue
around issues that often fall just under our noses. However, the three presentations
also played out differently according to their site-specificity. In La Jolla, La Tienda
garments and a projection displaying evocative images from Tijuana contrasted
sharply with the more conservative styles sold by the boutique. This difference, and
the juxtaposition of Pomegranate’s expensive, big-name designer items with those
of La Tienda – which were not meant to be sold – helped communicate a message
to the specific clientele of this boutique, and the surrounding community by
extension: this is “clothing made by normal people, in normal work conditions and
could be sold at prices that would damage a family’s income.” Whereas the La Jolla
presentation behaved as an exhibition with a feisty point to prove, in Tijuana the
presentations were part performance, part pep rally, part audience participation. In a
city whose clothing manufacturing industry is known not for its collaborative design
and production practices, but for its maquiladoras with their exploitative and perilous
working conditions, La Tienda stood out as an occasion to feel pride in one’s city
and a unique opportunity to try one’s hand at creating their own clothing.

68
Following their initial commission through inSite, Bulbo was asked to participate in an exhibition at
the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. The resulting exhibition, “Strange New World: Art and
Design from Tijuana,” was accompanied by three events in which the public was invited to bring an
item of clothing to be transformed.
46
In part, Freewaves and inSite are concocting public spaces as new
opportunities and kinds of social interaction, but they are also making deliberate
attempts to instigate dialogue on subjects that are relevant to specific publics in the
specific places they inhabit. Some of these publics are already aware of the issues
and some are not. Part of the point of inventing new occasions for social gathering,
like “Globalize This!,” and in tweaking social rituals like shopping, is to connect
these disparate publics who likely would not otherwise encounter each other, let
alone engage with one another – if only through a television monitor.
Given prevailing levels of cynicism with regard to government and a
disconnect from democratic processes,
69
perhaps the most compelling element
about Freewaves’ and inSite’s projects is that they encourage an atmosphere of
imagination. Both organizations aim to provoke critical reflection about our own
preconceptions and dialogue among other viewers in our midst. Inspired dialogue
becomes a vehicle for transforming viewers into participants. Hearing the stories of
struggle and success in “Globalize This!” – made by independent, sometimes
amateur film/videomakers – and learning the start-to-finish process of designing,
producing and marketing clothing, Freewaves and inSite participants became aware
of humane alternatives to industrial production and exploitative working conditions.
Other examples take imagination to a more playful level. Also part of How
Can You Resist? Freewaves presented “Interactions” in Chinatown as its festival
finale. In one night it offered interactive videos, video games, music, karaoke videos
and an audio-video performance for the adventurous to sample, interspersed among
47
a handful of gallery openings. An international group of musicians, visual artists and
“high-frequency telecommunications experts” improvised live using satellites (see
Figs. 11-12). In another project, artists reinvented karaoke outside of its usual bar
format. They investigated media stereotypes and the dichotomy of national identity
versus local cultures by juxtaposing staples of American pop music with bizarre
video imagery that would be unlikely to acquire a slot on mainstream television
programming. One of the exhibitions, “Fast Track,” shared video art from China
being produced amid rapidly expanding economies, modernizing cities and cultural
exchanges. Video has become a medium of
choice for Chinese artists, who have gravitated
toward documentary, animation, appropriation
and other media arts.
70
As part of inSite05, the artist Itzel
Martínez del Cañizo pursued a similarly playful,
yet highly conceptual Intervention called La
Ciudad Recuperación/Recovered City. The final
product is a collaboratively produced video that
documents the hopes and dreams of men
participating in a voluntary rehabilitation program
for drug addiction (the center itself is called Ciudad Recuperación). Rather than

69
In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam describes a trend of civic disengagement in the U.S. since the
end of the 1960s, and its implications for democracy. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse
and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
70
This presentation was based on an exhibition, “Between Past and Future,” surveying photography
and video from China produced since the 1990s – a phase marked by experimentation rather than
Figures 11-12: Marko Peljhan,
MX, Nullo, Octex and Springer,
Signal_Server! – Transignal 7,
from Freewaves’ 9
th
festival, “How
Can You Resist?” (2004).
48
simply documenting their daily lives, the Tijuana-based artist asked patients – who
play as much of a role in front of the camera as behind it – to imagine an improved
Tijuana, and envision fictitious roles for themselves within it (see Fig. 13). In the
group setting of the rehabilitation center Martínez posed the question “what would
your ideal city be?” in the hope of “unleashing an unalienating process in which the
individual imagination is stimulated by the idea of reaching a community
consensus.” The video also intersperses reflections on the same questions by
upper- and middle-class women living in Tijuana, to provide a contrast of
perspectives between Tijuana residents of different genders, classes, educational
levels and personal interests. To share these viewpoints with a broader public
audience, inSite screened La Ciudad Recuperación at Tijuana’s “MultiKulti” theater,
Cine Bujazán.
Both events marked celebratory endings for each organization in art-friendly
spaces that owe much of their vibrancy to the arts. Chinatown has one of the few
open plazas in a non-office tower environment in Los Angeles, and its Central Plaza
and Chung King Road were enlivened as an art scene in the late 1990s with the

adherence to Communist propaganda. The exhibition traveled between mid-2004 and early 2006 to
Figure: 13: Itzel Martínez del Cañizo, Recovered City/La Ciudad Recuperación,
from inSite05.
49
arrival of several quasi-experimental galleries.
71
MultiKulti lives in a building that was
partially destroyed by fire and never rebuilt; along with dance parties that often take
over the lobby, the now-roofless main theater functions as an amphitheater for
various events. Adding another layer of meaning to La Ciudad, inSite’s screening at
the MultiKulti reconfigured a site of devastation into one of celebration. Interestingly,
just as the MultiKulti is located near Tijuana’s epicenter of tourist kitsch, Los
Angeles’s Chinatown delivers its own kind of kitsch. Freewaves’ and inSite’s events
temporarily reinterpreted these commercially oriented environments as socially
engaged art zones, but they also suggested the possibility of an enduring
transformation.
Despite the heavy subject matter, both projects were ultimately meant to be
hopeful. While Freewaves’ closing party for its festival was enlivened by
participatory art projects, inSite’s screening celebrated the culmination of a months-
long, process-oriented project. The interactive phase of inSite’s project had already
come to a close, having revolved around the rehabilitation center residents and not
an outside audience. Freewaves’ Chinatown event provided an occasion to glean
inspiration from artistic experimentation in contemporary China and in Los Angeles’s
own backyard. InSite’s creative Intervention offered its participants – patients in a
rehabilitation center – an opportunity to step outside of their current realities and
adopt the role of recovering individuals who belong and contribute to envisioning a
better city. The screening enabled public onlookers to see the patients as such,
rather than dismissing them as addicts, obstacles to improving Tijuana.

European and North American venues. (http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/china/home.html).
71
Malik Gaines, “Chinatown LA,” Contemporary Magazine, Issue 39, 2002.
50
Mediaspace: Internet as a quasi-public sphere
Freewaves and inSite draw attention to specialized forms of communication,
pursuing dialogue as an aesthetic endeavor through the interactions they facilitate.
Toward these ends they have occupied and reconfigured anew a variety of public
spaces, defined primarily in terms of their accessibility to a range of publics and
potential to encourage social exchange. As the Internet has become an increasingly
dominant presence in our lives since its emergence as a public avenue of mass
communication in the mid-1990s, it has offered new possibilities for interaction
keeping pace with constantly updating technological innovation.
72
Artists have been
at the forefront in exploring the potential of this mediaspace as both a venue for
presenting video and other time-based media work, and as a creative medium itself.
For arts organizations like Freewaves and inSite who marry art and politics in the
public sphere, the web has presented additional opportunities to experiment with
new forms of democratic participation.
In 1995, despite the euphoric sense of artistic and democratic possibility
embodied in a potentially boundless, apparently free space, government policy
changes led to a counter-trend of media consolidation the very next year. A bill
signed by President Bill Clinton updating the Telecommunications Act redirected our
media system on a radical new trajectory threatening its democratic balance. The
1996 bill lifted national ownership caps on radio, enabling corporate giants like Clear

72
The Internet has its origins in a “distributed communications” network, with its first node installed at
UCLA in 1969. Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and called ARPANET, it was
originally intended for military and educational scientists and researchers, whose unexpected uses of
the network led to its transformation into a high-speed electronic information exchange. The Internet as
we know it emerged in 1995 as a fully privatized network, without any overseeing authority, in
response to the growth of private corporate and nonprofit cooperative networks.
http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society.
51
Channel and Infinity to dominate local media markets, and gave valuable public
airwaves to television broadcasters for free. The practice of consolidation poses a
challenge to democracy in a variety of ways, and media reform advocates locate
these challenges in a lack of diverse viewpoints, a neglect of local community
concerns and increased commercialization of news and entertainment content.
73
An
epitomizing case in point: According to the national non-partisan organization Free
Press, most citizens and even some members of Congress did not know what the
significant legislation contained at the time, for “in the nine months before the [1996]
bill passed, only 12 stories — totaling just 19 minutes — were aired on all the major
networks combined. The network owners, of course, were among the bill's biggest
beneficiaries.”
74
Despite these setbacks, the new technology of the Internet launched a
period of experimentation, with artists among the vanguard. Freewaves was at the
leading edge, establishing its first website in 1996 and distributing CD-ROMs of
artists’ websites as part of the 1996 festival, Private TV Public Living Rooms. In the
spirit of sharing knowledge it also offered free Internet and web design workshops to
videomakers, visual artists, writers and musicians in 1998-1999.
75
While inSite has
emphasized video work since their first presentation in 1992, it only began exploring
the Internet as a public space in their most recent version (2005).

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol 1. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1996),
46.
73
For a deeper analysis on recent media policy changes, see Robert McChesney’s book The Problem
of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 2004). For the most up-to-date information on media reform policy and activism, see
http://www.freepress.net/issues/. For a chart outlining who owns the media, see
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/chart.php, a coalition of media advocacy and civil rights groups, workers
unions, churches and others concerned with stopping the FCC from allowing a handful of giant
corporations to dominate America's media system.
74
Freepress, “Untangling the Telecom Act,” http://www.freepress.net/telecom/.
52
In “Tijuana Calling,” inSite set out to “explore the public spaces of the net
through tactical actions,” addressing issues such as migration, flows of capital and
labor, privacy and surveillance, translation and cultural hybridity. It commissioned
five projects that engaged in “playful disruption” and took the form of multi-player
online games, commerce sites, social network sites and wireless networks. One
clever project by the Nicaraguan-American artist Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga
investigated the proliferation of dental practices in Mexican border towns from
Tijuana to Matamoros, and the corresponding phenomenon of U.S. citizens crossing
the border to obtain (mostly) high-quality dental services that are significantly more
affordable than in the U.S. Called Dentimundo, the artist produced a website
including a directory and interviews with dentists, extensively researched statistics
on health care in the U.S. and a downloadable Mexican ditty about the dental
situation, Corrido al Dentista.
76
Like the other four projects, Dentimundo maintains
the region-specific character of inSite, conceived as part of the “virtual public
domain of Tijuana-San Diego” but with the potential to “reach beyond the art world”
and into an online version of the public sphere.
77
As of 2006, we recognize the Internet as both a medium for accessing news,
information and ideas, and a venue for gathering virtually with others. The overlap of
these categories and the types of content and interaction provide more than what
can be debated here. While both organizations’ work with the web contributes to the
larger debate about the Internet as a public sphere, Freewaves’ latest project has

75
Freewaves, “History Highlights,” http://www.freewaves.org/about.htm.
76
Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, “Corrido al Dentista,” http://www.dentimundo.com.
53
roots in an earlier initiative and suggests experimentation with long-term
implications.
The progression from a website as a source of information to a space that is
experienced is reflected in Freewaves’ own website (www.freewaves.org), which
has historically mirrored the live festival, providing both logistical and thematic
information. However, the 2006 festival website is an example of a growing use of
the technology: collaborative interaction. Combined with the goal of stirring up
dialogue on an issue of universal human concern, Freewaves simultaneously offers
an innovative outlet for organizing and presenting time-based media art, and an
occasion to enrich public discourse despite omissions by other forms of mass media
(see Fig. 14).
The desire to explore the website’s interactive potential is consistent with
one of Freewaves’ long-term goals: mass distribution of the media arts. After
several years of
researching and
strategizing attempts
at television
distribution
(commercial stations
were “universally
reticent” to the idea of
experimental format

77
Mark Tribe, “Tijuana Calling,” http://www.inSite05.org/internal.php?pid=15-358-6.
Figure 14: David Grey, graphics for “Too Much Freedom?”
website (2006)
54
and content),
78
Freewaves decided to pursue the Internet as an outlet for media arts
distribution. The flexibility of the video medium and the popularity of video on the
web made the 2006 festival an ideal moment to roll out a new curatorial process and
exhibition space.
79
To initiate the process, Freewaves asked its international
network of artists to respond to the question, “Too Much Freedom?” a paraphrase of
George W. Bush.
80
It received approximately 1,800 submissions from all over the
world, which it digitized and uploaded to a private website where the curators could
review and discuss the work from their locations. In line with her mission to provide
a forum for diverse viewpoints, Bray selected the eleven curators based on their
international geographic distribution (Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cairo, Egypt; Oaxaca
City, Mexico; Seoul, Korea; Cape Town, South Africa; Almaty, Kazakhstan;
Barcelona, Spain; New York and Los Angeles), and their knowledge of media arts.
Bray established a decentralized process so as to provide a venue for international
artists whose options for exhibiting new media work are limited.
81
Propelling the work of the curators to the next step, the traditionally live
festival will be complemented by “a next-generation exhibition space” at

78
Freewaves, “History Highlights, http://www.freewaves.org/about.htm. See
http://www.freewaves.org/freewaves_TV.htm for a summary of nine panel discussions organized by
Freewaves between January 2002 and June 2003, whose goal was to strategize a “conceptual and
technical groundwork for a Culture TV Channel.” Participants included alternative media voices, arts
and culture stakeholders, technology experts and media academics.
79
I worked for Freewaves in the months leading up to “Too Much Freedom?”
80
In 1999, a group of artist-activists called the Yes Men created www.gwbush.com, satirizing Bush’s
campaign website. When a reporter asked what he thought about it at a press conference, Bush
responded: “There ought to be limits to freedom.”
http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/bush/gwbushcom.shtml and http://www.rtmark.com/legacy/bush.html.
81
As might be expected from a first-time effort, the process was not without its obstacles. For example,
viewing video work online became prohibitively expensive for the curator from Kazakhstan because of
the high cost of connecting to the Internet, set by government controls. In addition, curators’
interactions were limited because of the sheer volume of work submitted to the festival and the time
required view and rate it. (Anne Bray, interview by author, Los Angeles, California, 1 September 2006.
55
www.freewaves.org.
82
As with previous versions, the shape of the festival is
determined by the work that is selected. In this case, the curators narrowed the
submissions down to 150 works, which fall into a series of overlapping categories
relating to freedom and its opposite, control. The website interface will reflect these
categories, allowing web users to navigate according to theme. According to Bray,
two prominent ideas that emerged from artists around the world involved
questioning reality:
[There is] disbelief about the images we see relentlessly flickering
across our screens. As our culture has transitioned from verbal to
visual, we all depend on images for information. Artists know how
images function and want to expose their vulnerability to
manipulation. An image can have the full look of veracity without one
ounce of truth. . . [and] The shift from real to virtual is on artists’
minds everywhere. The Internet is more chaotic, splintered and
complicated than previous mass media. There used to be one screen
in our living room. Now we have screens in our offices, stores, buses,
streets, classrooms, gyms, everywhere, 24/7. What does that do to
our public mental space?
83
While the kinetic presentation of the website interface is intended to be visually
enticing, it will also encourage exploration of artists’ diverse interpretations of “too
much freedom.” Presenting the work along a spectrum of freedom and control will
emphasize the complexity of this political and personal ideal, prompting viewers to
evaluate their own concept of freedom, as it applies to themselves and to others.
The Too Much Freedom? website is intended to provide an ongoing
alternative venue in which to view new media art, to consider ideas from around the
world and to contribute feedback beyond the duration of the fall festival. Artists
working in new media do not have many high-profile opportunities to show their

82
Freewaves, “Freewaves Announces its 10
th
Biennial Festival of Film, Video and Experimental New
Media,” http://www.freewaves.org/2006_test_htmls/press_release.pdf.
56
work – in appearance, it falls somewhere between mass media and art. As
Freewaves’ research confirmed, new media’s experimental content and format is
considered too economically risky for the commercial mainstream formula. In
addition, new media formats are technologically challenging to display, making them
less popular with museums, galleries and collectors as other genres.
84
Freewaves
therefore fills a niche as an outlet for experimental media practices and free speech,
while enriching the aesthetic-technological possibilities of the Internet. After the live
festival comes to a close, Freewaves hopes to continue growing the website as a
free and independent gathering place and resource for media art enthusiasts to
share their art and ideas – an important counterpoint to the larger trend of media
consolidation.
One could argue that the decentralized structure and increased access to
the Internet renders any fears about consolidated corporate control over the majority
of the mediaspace irrelevant. Unfortunately, the non-commercial avenues of the
Internet – civic, social, aesthetic – are still very much in danger. Corporate mergers
constantly re-shuffle and consolidate media assets for a reason – not for the public
interest, but because these assets are extremely valuable. As of this writing
Congress is revising the Telecom Act, which regulates different services like
telephone, video and the Internet. As all of these services can be delivered through
the same Internet connection, and because the business of media production and
distribution increasingly overlap, the legislation is intended to establish more

83
Freewaves, “Interview with Anne Bray on ‘Too Much Freedom?’”
http://www.freewaves.org/2006_test_htmls/interview.pdf.
84
Media Matters Consortium, “Collaborating Towards the Care of Time-Based Media Works of Art,”
Tate Museum Online,
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/mediamatters/newarttrust.htm.
57
appropriate regulations while remaining flexible enough for future technological
advances. Up to this point telecommunication policy has preserved the open nature
of the Internet, whereby telephone companies are required to permit anyone who
wants to use their services, including Internet access, “the right to do so on a
favorable, nondiscriminatory, basis.”
85
As legislators consider the complex issues
involved in updating the Telecom Act, let us hope that they do so with democratic
public interest in mind, defending principles such as universal service and open
competition, even as they are tempted by the influence of powerful media interests
lobbying for policies limiting competition.
The contemporary condition of mass media is paradoxically symbolic of both
the loss of the public sphere and its possible expansion via the Internet. At the same
time that media corporations are consolidating their assets, there are now more
outlets to choose from than there were thirty years ago. As a venue for free speech
(among many other things) the Internet does not require the same resources as
traditional publishing, allowing anyone with a computer and an Internet connection
to (relatively) inexpensively publish information and ideas online to potentially
massive numbers of people. The explosion of personal websites and blogs attests
to this. Yet while the popularity of these sites bypasses traditional publishers and
distributors, suggesting a more democratic media environment, the Internet’s
presumed “free” character may shift so far in the commercial, institutional direction
to the point of being unrecognizable as such.

85
McChesney 219.
58
Operating as a media outlet is one thing, but social experiences online are
quite another. Many scholars and thinkers recognize the Internet as our
contemporary commons, the functional equivalent of the public squares of the past.
But as we seek intimacy with others – evident in the popularity of websites like
MySpace and Facebook – we find ourselves increasingly isolated. The indisputable
advantage of the Internet is its ability to make physical distances nearly irrelevant,
as we may “gather” in electronic forums on just about any topic from the mainstream
to the obscure. While the ability to instantaneously communicate with someone on
the opposite side of the planet is tantalizing, these “spaces” lack the significant
qualities of visibility and physical presence that only public space can provide. In his
book, The Conscience of the Eye, Richard Sennett poetically illustrates the
significance of the visual sense in understanding the complexities of life. He
articulates that we have a fear of “exposure,” that we assume differences between
people “are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating,” and we
therefore construct our cities as “bland, neutralizing spaces, spaces which remove
the threat of social contact.”
86
Sennett argues that we must reconnect to the outside
spaces of exposure to regain a more enriched sense of the world:
Through exposure to others, we might learn how to weigh what is
important and what is not. We need to see differences on the streets
or in other people neither as threats nor as sentimental invitations,
rather as necessary visions. They are necessary for us to learn how
to navigate life with balance, both individually and collectively.
87

86
Richard Sennet, introduction to The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), xi-xiv.
87
Ibid xiii.
59
He concludes that caring about what we observe around us leads to a mobilization
of creative energy: “our culture is in need of an art of exposure.”
88

88
Ibid xiv.
60
Conclusion: Art and Social Change in a Globalizing World
The phrase “art and social change” is at once benignly vague and politically
loaded. Change does not automatically assume any particular direction: good/bad,
more/less. However, the notion of art’s role in social change can be interpreted in a
number of ways, and one’s opinion as to whether or not art should be involved in
social movements is likely determined by his or her political affiliation and attitudes
about art. The intervention of art into larger social patterns has been rejected by
some, who feel that art should remain unburdened and uncompromised by politics.
89
Yet many others recognize and support the power of art to effect change. The
German artist and teacher Joseph Beuys was famous in art circles for his concept of
“social sculpture,” which he defined as “thinking forms, spoken forms – how we mold
our thoughts or how we shape our thoughts into words or how we mold and shape
the world in which we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an
artist.”
90
Framing the social order as a “living being,” Beuys asserted: “I am really
convinced that humankind will not survive without having realized the social body,

89
In a 1999 speech, “A Conceited Look at Creating Free Space for the Artist,” delivered at the Prince
Claus Awards Ceremony in Amsterdam, the writer and activist Albie Sachs half-jokingly proposed that
“we should stop saying that art is an instrument of struggle.” He was lamenting that artists in South
Africa “are not pushed to improve the quality of their work, it is enough that it be politically correct. . .
The range of themes is narrowed down so much that all that is funny or curious or genuinely tragic is
extruded.” Essentially he is worrying that art in the service of a political cause is overshadowed by that
cause, and that it loses sight of the beauty that exists in life despite the struggles. (Albie Sachs, “A
Conceited Look at Creating Free Space for the Artist: Texts, Subtexts and Contexts,” in Creating
Spaces of Freedom, ed. Els van der Plas, Malu Halasa and Marlous Willemsen (the Netherlands: The
Prince Claus Fund, 2002), 73-81. Similarly, when asked about the notion of “art and social change, the
artist Lily Yeh responded by citing her “humbleness, knowing my own limitation and how vast the
problems are. . . no matter what system you install, it is always full of loopholes. . . [referring to her
Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia] what we do is come together and work together. And
when that happens, other things change.” (Marie Cieri and Claire Peeps, Activists Speak Out:
Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 145).
90
Joseph Beuys, Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America, comp. Carin Kuoni
(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 19.
61
the social order, into an artwork. They will not survive.”
91
For Beuys the act of
communication was a creative process, and “everyone is an artist” because
everyone has the capacity for communication. However, this claim suggests a style
of communication that is at once enduring and committed to generating a synthesis
of ideas that promotes an enlarged sense of the world.
Somewhat less expansive than Beuys, the historian and activist Howard
Zinn reminds us that “in addition to creating works of art, the artist is also a citizen
and a human being.”
92
Considering the uniqueness of artists’ intellectual processes
and inclination for observation and communication, we can recognize that there are
fundamentally different qualities defining the process of art making that sets it apart
from other more bureaucratic ways of working and thinking – critical, dialectical,
social, imaginative. Zinn worries about the modern tendency to categorize people
into disciplines, that this “limits human beings to working within the confines set by
their profession.” He asks, if we are “just” artists or historians or students or
businessmen, do we “leave the most important issues of the world to the people
who run the country?”
93
Rather than relying on individuals regarded as “experts” in
matters of moral consequence, he encourages us to consider artists for their
“transcendent” capacities: “to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word
of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is
handed down by the government or what is said in the media.”
94

91
Bernice Rose, “Joseph Beuys and the Language of Drawing,” in Thinking is Form: The Drawings of
Joseph Beuys, eds. Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 114.
92
Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War (New York: Sevene Stories Press, 2003), 8. Zinn gave this talk
at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in October 2001, a month after 9/11.
93
Ibid 9.
94
Ibid 11.
62
As manifestations of the Southern and Baja California region, but with their
tentacles extending into mediaspace, inSite’s and Freewaves’ cultural practices
transcend social and political boundaries. Paradoxically, their activities create
localized sites of resistance largely in response to the homogenizing and
dehumanizing effects of corporate globalization. In some ways, inSite is reclaiming
space from the U.S. and Mexican governments, whose own shared border has
acquired a veil of tenuous authority in an era of globalization that facilitates the flow
of currency while hindering that of human beings. Freewaves has pursued other
strategies of counteracting the effects of globalization, taking advantage of the
public’s familiarity with the medium of video and increased access to the borderless
Internet. While Freewaves and inSite establish mutually beneficial collaborative
relationships with other organizations and local communities – itself a worthy goal –
their success might be better measured by the degree to which the diverse voices in
those projects are connected with a broader public. In a sense, Freewaves and
inSite are globalizing the public sphere as zones of free thought and expression –
free of corporate and institutional formulas. In these zones, citizens may critically re-
politicize themselves as they are exposed to a more diverse array of unfamiliar
people and ideas through the visual and performative language of art.
InSite and Freewaves emphasize that we all must engage in cultural
production if our societies are to move in a more inclusive, equitable direction. The
public spheres they instigate create the conditions of a shared world, allowing often
marginalized individuals to identify with one another and begin to analyze difficult
societal problems. They are occasions to come together and, through the multi-
dimensional processes of art, challenge the formal limits of democracy. Just as the
63
artists-in-residence and participants in Las Reglas del Juego, Tijuana Projection, La
Tienda de Ropa and La Ciudad Recuperación produced new images and ways of
conceptualizing the border, citizenship and labor, so too did artists and festival
attendees of Air Raids, How Can You Resist? and Too Much Freedom? who cross-
examined mainstream assumptions to create more diverse, nuanced definitions of
ideas like resistance and freedom. Whether they are artistically inclined or
otherwise, ordinary citizens must recognize their potential as culture producers and
participate in the creation of powerful new narratives. The spaces invented or
reconfigured by visionary thinkers, particularly in moments of social upheaval and in
liminal zones like borders, provide occasions to question the values we take for
granted, the conditions accepted as natural, the outcomes anticipated as inevitable
and determine who participates in these dialogues in the first place. Art both nudges
and shoves at the edge of the social imagination, inspiring an enlarged vision of
what is actually possible.
64
Bibliography
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Los Angeles, 2004.
Banerjee, Tridib, "The Future of Public Space: Beyond Invented Streets and
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Beuys, Joseph, Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America.
Compiled by Carin Kuoni. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990.
Bickford, Susan, “Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of
Citizenship.” Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 3 (June 2000): 355-376.
Bray, Anne. “The Community Is Watching, and Replying: Art in Public Places and
Spaces.” Leonardo Vol. 35, No. 1 (2002): 15-21.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy,
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Cieri, Marie and Claire Peeps, Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of
Change in America. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. “Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy.” Social Text,
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Gaines, Malik. “Chinatown LA,” Contemporary Magazine, Issue 39, 2002.
Jürgen Habermas. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.” In Critical Theory
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Kellner, 136-142. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Jürgen Habermas. “Technology and Science as Ideology.” In Critical Theory: The
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Harvey, David. “Liminal Zones/Coursing Flows 2.” Presentation at the inSite
Conversation, The Salk Institute, La Jolla, November 6, 2003.
Kester, Grant. Conversation pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Kohn, Margaret. Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space. New
York: Routledge, 2004.
65
Krichman, Michael and Carmen Cuenca. Directors’ Statement for Fugitive Sites,
inSite 2000-01, 14. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002.
Lacy, Suzanne. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press,
1995.
Longstreth, Richard. “The Diffusion of the Community Center Concept during the
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73-81. The Netherlands: The Prince Claus Fund, 2002.
Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities.
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The Drawings of Joseph Beuys, edited by Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose,
114. London: Thames & Hudson, 1993.
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Southern California based, globally reaching contemporary art projects LA Freewaves and inSite demonstrate, through a diverse range of creative practice, the artist's role at the leading edge of social change. We are in the midst of major societal transformations and I argue that art makes powerful contributions to this changing cultural environment. Using the concept of the public sphere as a springboard, I explore how inSite and Freewaves navigate the blurry delineations of public and private space to enrich and reinvent the public sphere, through their content, form and emphasis on public process. They provide a forum for new images and new language that provoke dialogue and contribute to the production of critical knowledge -- the preconditions and tools for democratic social change.

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Site, nonsite, Website: Technologies for perception

Asset Metadata

Creator Zeller, Heidi (author)

Core Title Sites of resistance: LA Freewaves and inSite reinvent the public sphere

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies / Planning

Publication Date 11/21/2006

Defense Date 05/02/2006

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art and democracy,art and politics,media art,OAI-PMH Harvest,public art,public sphere,social change

Language English

Advisor Bray, Anne (committee chair), Levy, Caryl (committee member), Sloane, David C. (committee member)

Creator Email hzeller@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m181

Unique identifier UC159434

Identifier etd-Zeller-20061121 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-36764 (legacy record id),usctheses-m181 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Zeller-20061121.pdf

Dmrecord 36764

Document Type Thesis

Rights Zeller, Heidi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu