Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee is an experimental visual autobiography in which she thematizes her parents’ experience of the Japanese Occupation of Korea, their immigration to the United States, as well as her own sense of being in perpetual exile and grappling with the transgenerational trauma that threatens to overwhelm her. This chapter argues that Dictee’s cinematic style arises from Cha’s work in experimental film, correspondence art, and conceptual art. It depicts Cha as a disembodied female voice struggling to visualize embodied speech on the page, all the while offering a self-reflexive commentary on the autobiographical process and her struggle to find a suitable conclusion to her narrative of trauma. Finally, the chapter discusses Dictee’s serial conclusions and Cha’s endlessly deferred return. Rather than narrate a romantic, nostalgic return, Cha visually and textually performs its impossibility in the pages of Dictee

Dictation: A Canadian Perspective on the History of Telematic Art

Canada, with its vast distances, was an early adopter of communications technologies. Starting in the 1970s, Canadian artists pursued the aesthetic strategies of correspondence art, video, telecommunications, and artist-run centers. Beginning with Bill Bartlett's Brechtian credo that real communication must be interactive, and noting Robert Filliou's influential concept of the “Eternal Network,” Hank Bull tells the story of a small group of artists who tested the potentials and implications of telecommunications art. He discusses radio, slowscan video, electronic mail and fax art, referring to specific projects produced for Ars Electronica (1983), Electra (Paris, 1983) and the Venice Biennale (1986). More recently, Shanghai Fax (1996), staged by Bull, with artists Shen Fan, Ding Yi, and Shi Yong, was one of the first international group exhibitions to take place in China since the revolution. In conclusion Bull emphasizes sympathetic listening in this new territory, where unfamiliar noises clash as new rhythms sound.

“A Trail of Drift and Debris”: Traces of Whitman in the Correspondence Art of Ray Johnson

In 1987, the artist Ray Johnson, “leader” of the so-called New York Correspondence School, filled his mouth with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and read some of Walt Whitman's musings on the nature of correspondence in a performance that Johnson dubbedSmile. An example of what Johnson termed his “nothings,”Smiletook place in an empty ATM vestibule on Long Island, the nostalgic “Paumanok” of Whitman's poetry. Johnson's performance both elevated and mocked Whitman's equally personal approach to the art and practice of correspondence. By invoking Whitman and his thoughts on correspondence, Johnson was keen to respond to descriptions of him as “Dada Daddy” to a younger generation of correspondence artists. Johnson's performance looked not so much to elevate his own ephemeral correspondence art, but to foster a reappraisal of Whitman that considered the ephemerality of his poetic method and opened up a queer line of communication and anti-teleological influence that would disrupt Johnson's own artistic reception. This article examinesSmileas an (auto)biographical performance that simultaneously clarifies and clouds the creative methodologies of Johnson and Whitman, declaring Whitman's influence on the irreverent Johnson while rejecting the restrictions of a chronological chain of influence, much as Johnson's earlier mail art had done.

English Criminal Procedure and the Human Rights Act 1998

The European Convention on Human Rights is one of the manifestations of the Council of Europe, an organisation of European states founded in 1949 with the aim of strengthening the common democratic heritage. It is an international treaty which binds the contracting States to respect the list of human rights and freedoms it proclaims. An enforcement mechanism exists in the form of the European Court of Human Rights (in this paper called ‘the Strasbourg court’).In brief, these rights and freedoms are the right to life (art. 2); freedom from torture or inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment (art. 3); freedom from slavery or forced labour (art. 4); the right to liberty (art. 5); the right to a fair trial (art. 6); freedom from retrospective criminal laws (art. 7); the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence (art. 8); freedom of thought, conscience and religion (art. 9); freedom of expression (art. 10); freedom of peaceful assembly (art. 11); and the right to marry and found a family (art. 12). Over the years, this initial list of rights has been expanded by a series of additional Protocols — not all of which have been ratified by all the Member States. The First Protocol, which Britain has ratified, guarantees the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions, education, and free elections.