Artspeak

• David Buuck

  David Buuck lives in Oakland, California, where he teaches and is a freelance editor and critic. He is the founder of BARGE (The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-Aesthetics), and the co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. BARGE investigates regional sites and spaces that are underrepresented and overlooked in more conventional touristic, commercial, and socio-political notions of place and public space. BARGE delves into how vernacular landscapes — from highways and billboards to waterfronts and public utilities, from industrial lots and server farms to military bases and surveillance zones — are constructed and inhabited, while also exploring the ways in which engaged psychogeography can provide new modes of counter-tourism and activism. In addition to walks, tours, installations, and performances, BARGE has developed guidebooks and performative slide lectures, some of which have been presented in San Francisco, New York, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Washington, D.C., Vancouver, Portland, London, and elsewhere. Buuck’s publications includeTHE SHUNT (Palm Press, 2009), 17 Reasons Why (Mission17 Gallery, 2009), Buried Treasure Island: a detour of the future (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2008), among others. More materials available at davidbuuck.com.

• Jeff Derksen

  Jeff Derksen, (b. 1958), is a cultural critic and a poet who works at Simon Fraser University. Derksen graduated with distinction from the David Thompson University Center in 1984 with a bachelor in Arts and Science. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Springerin, Hunch, C magazine, Open Letter, Poetics Journal, XCP, amongst others. He has two books of critical essays forthcoming: After Euphoria: art / space / neoliberalism (EC Press/JPR Ringier), and Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (Talonbooks). Derksen was a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics (CUNY Graduate Center) and is a founding member of the Kootenay School of Writing. Under the name Urban Subjects, he collaborates with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber on curatorial projects and visual research.