What breastfeeding has to do with art?

“Families in the US currently must choose between nursing their babies and paying their rent.”

Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon is a good example of how collaborative contemporary art is finding new progressive ways to be a welcome partner of post-contemporary societies.

Catherine D’Ignazio, a.k.a. kanarinka is a scholar, artist/designer and software developer whose work focuses on data literacy and feminist technology. She is also one of the driving forces of a case for breastfeeding innovation.

As the website of this peculiar Hackathon states, “The US is one of only three nations worldwide without paid parental leave. The other countries in this club are Papua New Guinea and Lesotho. Women’s return to work outside the home is the leading factor for early weaning. Most US work environments do not provide material or policy-based support for breastfeeding women, including parental leave, flexible schedules, on-site daycare, breaks and spaces for nursing and pumping.”




“The 2018 MIT Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon and Paid Family Leave Policy Summit convened 250+ collaborators from diverse backgrounds to create better products, programs, policies, and systems to support breastfeeding and pumping with a focus on equity. The dynamic event featured a multimedia art exhibit, a Baby Village to support young children at the event, and an Innovator’s Gallery with start-ups and big businesses.

Watch the documentary by Elizabeth Gray Bayne below to learn more about our values, approach, and the community. Share the video with #breastfeedinginnovation.”

Make the Breast Pump Not Suck 2018 - Official Documentary from Engagement Lab on Vimeo.

Community Innovation Program

“Leading up to the 2018 Hackathon at the MIT Media Lab, we are supporting four Community Innovation teams from Boston, Detroit, New Mexico, and Tupelo. Each team, consisting of talented innovators and passionate advocates for low-income families in their communities, will work to articulate problems in their communities and to kickstart local innovations.”

Speaking Our Truths

27 Stories of What It’s Really Like to Breastfeed and Pump in the United States—download a PDF of the book.

Make the Breast Pump Not Suck: 2019 Update

A vida é bela!

“...working with photography’s weaknesses alongside its subjective descriptive strengths is a challenge I enjoy.” Stephen Gill

A melhor maneira de hoje organizarmos o nosso conhecimento artístico e prazer estético passa por sabermos organizar as redes sociais de que mais gostamos. Por exemplo, o Instagram. Seguir, por fascínio e prazer, os autores que descobrimos em cada manhã que passa, e que febrilmente exploramos ao fim do dia, seguindo as suas obras, mas também os seus gostos e escolhas, é uma nova forma de amar a arte e de crescer ao seu lado.

Seguimos obviamente alguns museus, galerias e publicações que admiramos, as quais, por sua vez, retribuem, com a ajuda da inteligência artificial, sugestões e informações sintonizadas com as nossas preferências. A árvore do conhecimento online cresce rapidamente. Quando menos esperamos (na verdade estamos sempre à espera destes momentos!) surgem as surpresas, a descoberta, o amor à primeira vista. Foi o caso esta manhã, quando vi, pela primeira vez, as fotografias de Stephen Gill no Instagram.

Há muito que não encontrava um autor tão livre de estereotipos, tão naturalista, ou, o que o mesmo, tão capaz de nos devolver uma visão espontânea, inteligente e viva das coisas simples e eternas que nos rodeiam e fazem felizes. Num tempo tão marcado pela incerteza e pela paranóia narcisista, arejarmos a vista diante das histórias contadas por este fotógrafo inglês, é uma bênção.

António Cerveira Pinto

Stephen Gill (born 1971) is a British experimental, conceptual and documentary photographer. Books are a key aspect to Gill’s practice. 

Gill is a British photographer, who mainly draws inspiration from his immediate surroundings of inner city life in East London and more recently Sweden with an attempt to make work that reflects, responds and describes the times we live in.
His work is often made up of long-term photo studies exploring and responding to the subjects in great depth. 

[...] 

In January 2003 Gill bought a Bakelite 1960s box camera made by Coronet for 50 pence at Hackney Wick Sunday market, near where he lived. The camera had a plastic lens, and it lacked focus and exposure controls. 

Over the next four years he had used the camera to photograph within the extremely varied environment of Hackney Wick, including waterways and allotments; and to make portraits of people at the Sunday market and who lived and worked in the area. 

The subject parameters to this long-term obsession were geographical rather than conceptual. 

The lack of image clarity that the plastic camera offered aligned very much with Gill’s frame of mind at the time. As such images seemed to deny information, but somehow managed to retain a heightened sense of place and allow the images to breath without forcing a point. 

Wikipedia

Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to his father and interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope. 

“Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…” 

Iain Sinclair

Stephen Gill homepage

Maker Art 2019 - manifesto

André Sier, performance espontânea interativa

Maker Art é simultaneamente um fablab de arte e tecnologia digital (A&T), e uma feira de obras de "new media art" em fase de projeto, ou já realizadas. O new media art é, por outro lado, um novo capítulo, muito diversificado e por vezes complexo, da arte atual, ao qual falta todavia o reconhecimento institucional devido, a museologia apropriada, os incentivos públicos imprescindíveis, e um mercado essencialmente dirigido a colecionadores.

Maker Art é provavelmente a primeira feira de ideias e obras de arte centrada nas relações entre arte e tecnologia. Os chamados nativos digitais têm hoje entre 20 e 26 anos, quer dizer, boa parte dos mesmos é licenciada ou frequenta estudos superiores. O seu perfil cultural e estético foi portanto marcado por uma espécie de pós-contemporaneidade cultural e artística, cujo traço dominante é a fragmentação das noções e experiências do espaço e do tempo.

Faz, pois, todo o sentido ir ao encontro de uma geração para quem cultura e tecnologia formam uma evidente simbiose. Desconsiderar esta hipótese só poderá agravar a crise de públicos culturais, nomeadamente no setor das artes plásticas, numa economia da atenção cada vez mais competitiva e sofisticada.

Aos principais atores culturais—museus e outras instituições artísticas, governos, poderes municipais, colecionadores e mercado—propomos, pois, que aceitem o desafio de proteger e potenciar o futuro do binómio A&T na tecnosfera em plena aceleração, que é a de todos nós.

António Cerveira Pinto
30 de abril de 2019